Global Challenges

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En provenance du cours de Universiteit Leiden

Security & Safety Challenges in a Globalized World

140 notes

Universiteit Leiden

Security & Safety Challenges in a Globalized World

140 notes

Security and safety challenges rank among the most pressing issues of modern times. Challenges such as, cyber-crime, terrorism, and environmental disasters impact the lives of millions across the globe. These issues also rank high on the agenda of politicians, international organizations and businesses. They also feature prominently in the public conscience and in governmental policies. In the current, interconnected world, security challenges are becoming increasingly complex. Facilitated by developments as globalization and the spread of networked and hyper-connected technologies, new safety and security challenges arise and impact local, national, regional and international levels, which dramatically increases their complexity and scale. As such, solutions to contemporary security challenges require a wide array of actors operating on multiple levels of governance. The course will introduce you to the broad theme of security and safety in an increasingly complex world. Together we will search for answers to important questions: what is security and safety? How can we understand complex modern-day security and safety challenges? And how do we deal with such challenges? This course combines scholarly inquiry from multiple disciplines (ranging from terrorism studies, to crisis management, to medical science) with real-life cases to explore and understand complex modern-day safety and security challenges.

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Global Challenges and Wicked Problems

In this module you will learn about global challenges. In the modern, interconnected world, security and safety challenges are increasingly complex, impacting local, national, regional and international levels. You will also learn why many of these challenges can be labeled as 'wicked problems'; they are challenges which are difficult or impossible to solve because they have many different causes, are difficult to describe, and don’t have a single 'right' answer.

Global Challenges6:15

Wicked Problems7:17

Crowdsourcing Exercise5:18

Rencontrer les enseignants

Bibi van den Berg
Prof. dr.
Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University
Ruth Prins
Dr.
Institute of Security and Global Affairs

Hi there.

In this video we will look at the landscape we're talking about.

As you've heard in the first video of this course, security challenges are complex

and oftentimes relate to global topics in our current times.

So, what are we talking about when we say this?

Which challenges and topics do we mean?

This video provides you with a number of examples of such

challenges just to give you an idea of what we're talking about in this course.

So, I mentioned in the first video that security challenges in our

modern world often have a global impact or occur on a global scale.

Actually, these are two different things.

Let's look at some examples to give you a feeling for how they differ.

When a security challenge has a global impact, it means that it may affect

countries around the globe, but the source of the risk may be local.

One example of a complex security challenge that has a global impact

is when a nuclear power plant somewhere on the globe has a serious meltdown.

This is an issue that starts locally in a specific physical location

in some country, somewhere.

But as we all know, a nuclear meltdown can lead to the release of radio active

materials into the environment.

Depending on the severity of the meltdown,

the amount of materials that enters the environment can be such that a large or

even very large area surrounding the plant is affected.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for instance, which originated in modern day

Ukraine in 1986, resulted in a plume with radioactive material

which drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe.

It led to contamination of parts of the Alps between Italy and Switzerland and

even the Scottish Highlands in the UK.

What this example shows is that incidents that have a local origin

can have an impact on a large or even very large area of the globe.

A second example of a complex security challenge

with a global impact is that of refugees, that flee regions of conflict.

When two countries engage in war with one another,

this is a local conflict, taking place in a specific geographical location.

Countries far removed from the battlefield,

in principle are not directly affected by such a war.

However, as we've seen throughout the 20th century

when war breaks out in a country this generates mass migration patterns.

Citizens seeks to leave their home countries fleeing the violence and

seek to build a life elsewhere.

These refugees, thus create an influx of people in other countries,

which leads to variety of challenges in these host countries.

Hence, what starts as a local challenge, a conflict between two countries, spills

over into challenges that have a much larger sometimes even global impact.

Okay, so we've seen that complex security challenges can start locally and

yet have a global or near global impact.

However, complex security challenges can also have a global scale.

This means that they do not occur locally but

rather manifest themselves in all or almost all countries of the world.

One key example of such a challenge is global warming.

Greenhouse gases are generated all over the world,

although some countries produce considerably more than others.

These gases radiate in all directions and once they're in the atmosphere,

they will therefore also radiate back towards the earth's surface.

This leads to a gradual increase in temperature,

which is commonly known as global warming.

Global warming does not have a singular, local cause.

It doesn't start in one physical location somewhere on the globe,

like a nuclear meltdown or an international conflict.

Global warming is global in its scale and its impact.

It is the result of worldwide use of fossil fuels and

it leads to a worldwide increase in temperature

which in turn leads to many other consequences such as a rising sea level.

Here we have a complex security challenge that is not only global in its impact, but

also in its scale.

So, we've seen that there is a distinction between complex security challenges

that are global in scale and global in impact.

What these examples also show is that modern days security challenges

are actually truly complex.

They often involve large systemic threats, affect large amount of people and

have multiple dynamically constituted consequences.

Moreover, these complex challenges are really varied.

They range from environmental issues to technology related topics

to concerns over international affairs and many, many more.

Grasping the domain of these complex challenges and

the effects they may have on safety and security is difficult.

What’s more, untangling the causes and

effects of such complex challenges is no easy feat.

We’ve seen that global security challenges can have local impacts, and

that issues that start locally can have a global or near global reach.

That is why we can label many modern day challenges as glocal.

They may reach from the local level all the way to the global level and

vice versa.

Or to phrase it differently,

glocality is a key element of modern day global security challenges.

In this video we presented you with examples of modern day global security

challenges and we explained that they can be labelled as glocal.

But what of the complexity of such challenges?

To shed more light on this, in the next video, we will explain why

modern day global security challenges are so called wicked problems.

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