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.
