This chapter introduces two ways of thinking about security. Traditional security is mostly about military threats to a country. Non-traditional security widens the lens to dangers like terrorism, poverty, disease, migration and climate change that put ordinary people at risk. The notes below also cover how states cooperate through arms control and treaties, and how India handles both kinds of threat. They are part of our wider study notes library for Classes 9 to 12.
Introduction
What is security?
In simple terms, security means the absence of threats. Both individual life and the life of a country carry risks. Every time a person steps out of their home, their life and way of living can be threatened in some way.
Security debates focus only on the threats that endanger our core values. It refers to extremely dangerous threats that could damage those core values so badly that things could not be repaired if we did nothing about them.
There are two broad ideas of security: traditional and non-traditional.
Traditional notions of security
What are the external threats?
Traditional security thinking holds that military threats are the greatest danger to a country. One country threatens another with military action and, in doing so, puts at risk the core values of sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.
In a war, it is not only soldiers who are hurt or killed. Ordinary men and women are often deliberately targeted to break a population's will to support the conflict.
When faced with a threat of war, a government usually has three choices:
- to surrender,
- to raise the likely cost of war so much that the other side is deterred from attacking, or
- to defend itself and deny the attacking country an easy victory if war does break out.
A government may choose to surrender, but no country openly advertises surrender as its policy. So security policy is built mainly around two ideas: deterrence, which is about preventing war, and defence, which is about limiting or ending a war once it starts.
A third element of traditional security is the balance of power. Governments watch the power equation between themselves and other states very closely. They work hard to keep a favourable balance, especially with neighbours, with rivals, or with countries they have clashed with before.
Alliance building
Military power is central to keeping a balance of power, but economic and technological strength matter too, because they are the foundation on which military power is built.
A fourth element of traditional security is alliance building. An alliance is a group of states that agree to work together to deter or defend against military attacks. Most alliances are written down in formal treaties and rest on a fairly clear idea of who the threat is.
Why are alliances formed?
Countries form alliances to increase their effective power against another country or alliance. Alliances are based on national interests, and those interests can change over time.
For example, in the 1980s the United States backed Islamic militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Later it attacked them after Al Qaeda, an Islamic militant group led by Osama bin Laden, carried out the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001.
Most security threats in traditional thinking come from outside a country's borders. This is because the international system has no central authority above all states to regulate behaviour. Inside a country, violence is controlled by a recognised central authority, the government. In world politics there is no such recognised authority standing above everyone else.
It is tempting to think the United Nations is, or could be, such a power. But the UN is a member-driven body. Its authority lasts only as far as its members allow and obey it. In international politics, each country is finally responsible for its own security.
Internal security
Traditional security is also concerned with internal security, though after the Second World War this was given less weight. It seemed that the internal security of the world's most powerful countries was more or less assured.
After 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union both looked settled within their own borders, and most powerful Western European states faced no serious threat from groups inside their borders. These countries focused mainly on threats from outside.
This was the era of the Cold War, when the Western alliance led by the United States faced the Soviet-led communist alliance, each wary of the other's military strength. Some European powers also worried about violence in their colonies as colonised people fought for independence. In the 1950s, for instance, the French were in Vietnam and the British were in Kenya.
Security challenges for the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa were different from Europe's in two ways. First, these new states faced the threat of war with their neighbours. Second, they had to worry about internal military conflict too.
Many newly independent countries came to fear their neighbours more than they feared the superpowers or their former colonial rulers. They fought over borders and territory, over people and populations, or over all of these at once. Internally, the new states worried about separatist movements trying to break away and form their own countries. At times, external and internal threats merged, and both put the security of these new states in serious danger.
Non-traditional notions of security
Non-traditional security goes beyond military threats. It covers a much wider range of dangers to human life. Here the focus shifts from the state to the individual, so it is often called human security. It includes insecurities such as hunger, poverty and civil war.
Supporters point out that, over the last century, governments have killed more of their own people than foreign armies have. Everyone agrees that the main aim of human security is to protect individuals, but they differ on how wide the idea should be.
Supporters of the narrow view focus on violent threats to individuals. In the words of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, human security means:
the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence.
Supporters of the broad view argue that hunger, disease and natural disasters kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined. On this view, people should be protected from these dangers as well as from violence. The broad human security agenda includes economic security and threats to human dignity. Put simply, it stresses freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Global security emerged in the 1990s in response to threats that cross all borders, such as global warming, international terrorism and health epidemics like AIDS, bird flu and COVID-19. No single country can solve these problems alone, and sometimes one country may be forced to carry an unfair share of the burden, for example with environmental damage.
New sources of threats
Both human security and global security highlight how the nature of security threats is changing. The main new sources are described below.
Terrorism
Terrorism is political violence that deliberately and indiscriminately targets civilians. International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country. Terrorist groups use force, or the threat of force, to change a political situation they do not accept.
Civilians are often targeted to spread fear among the public and to turn that fear into a weapon against national governments or rival groups. Terrorists have hijacked planes and planted bombs in trains, cafes, markets and other crowded places. Terrorism is not new, but governments and the public paid far more attention to it after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. Before that, most attacks had taken place in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and South Asia.
Human rights
Human rights are usually grouped into three kinds:
- Political rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly.
- Economic and social rights.
- The rights of colonised peoples, and of ethnic and indigenous minorities.
Events like Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the killings by the Indonesian military in East Timor have sparked debate over whether the UN should step in to stop human rights violations. Some argue the UN Charter allows the use of force to defend human rights. Others reply that the national interests of powerful states will decide which violations the UN actually acts on.
Poverty, migration and disease
Poverty deepens insecurity. Population is expected to keep rising fastest in the poorest countries, while many rich countries will see their populations shrink. Low population growth tends to benefit wealthier states and groups, while poorer states struggle to raise income per person. This has created a global divide between the richer North and the poorer South.
For example, most armed conflicts today take place in Sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region. In the early twenty-first century, more people were killed in wars there than anywhere else. Poverty in the South has also driven large-scale migration to the North in search of a better life and economic opportunity, which has raised political tensions.
International law separates migrants, who leave their homes voluntarily, from refugees, who are forced to flee war, natural disaster or political persecution. In general, states are expected to accept refugees but not migrants. Internally displaced people are those who have fled their homes but stayed inside their own country's borders. The Kashmiri Pandits who fled the violence in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s are an example. One 1990s study found that all but three of sixty refugee flows happened alongside an internal armed conflict.
Movement of people through migration, business, tourism and military operations has also sped up the spread of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, bird flu and SARS. How well one country controls a disease affects infections in others. Older diseases like cholera, tuberculosis and malaria have developed drug-resistant forms that are hard to treat, and animal epidemics carry heavy economic costs, as Britain found during the mad cow disease outbreak and as several Asian countries found when bird flu hit their poultry exports.
Widening the meaning of security cannot stretch to every illness or hardship, or the idea would lose all shape. To count as a security threat, a danger must at least endanger the very existence of the referent, whether that is a state or a group of people. Rising sea levels from global warming, for example, threaten to submerge large parts of the Maldives, while HIV/AIDS has threatened several southern African countries. Like traditional security, non-traditional security always depends on the context.
Cooperative security
Many of these non-traditional threats call for cooperation rather than military confrontation. Force may have some role in fighting terrorism or protecting human rights, and even there its limits are clear. But it is hard to see how force could reduce poverty, manage migration and refugees, or control epidemics. Using the military for such problems would usually make things worse.
A far better approach is to build strategies based on international cooperation. This cooperation can be bilateral, that is between any two countries, or regional, continental or global. It all depends on the nature of the threat and on how willing and able countries are to respond.
Cooperative security can also involve non-governmental players such as Amnesty International, the Red Cross, private foundations and charities, religious organisations, trade unions, businesses and well-known individuals like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela. As a last resort, the international community may sanction the use of force against governments that murder their own citizens or ignore people suffering from poverty, disease and disaster. Such force works far better when it is sanctioned and used collectively than when a single country acts on its own.
How is India dealing with these security threats?
India faces both traditional (military) and non-traditional threats, from within and beyond its borders. Its security strategy has four main strands, used in different combinations over time.
Strengthening military power. India has fought wars with its neighbours, including Pakistan in 1947 to 48, 1965, 1971 and 1999, and China in 1962. The government justified India's 1998 nuclear tests as necessary for national security, since India is surrounded by nuclear-armed states in South Asia. India had already conducted its first nuclear test in 1974.
Strengthening international norms and institutions. India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, supported Asian unity, decolonisation, disarmament and the United Nations as a forum for settling disputes. India has pressed for a universal and non-discriminatory approach to weapons of mass destruction, in which all countries have the same rights and duties, and it argued for a fairer New International Economic Order (NIEO). It used non-alignment to help carve out a zone of peace outside the two superpower blocs.
Meeting non-traditional threats through cooperation. India has supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and has sent troops to UN peacekeeping missions around the world.
Meeting internal security challenges and building the nation. Several militant groups, from Nagaland, Mizoram, Punjab and Kashmir, have at times tried to break away from India. India has tried to hold the country together through a democratic system that lets different communities voice their grievances and share power, and it has tried to develop the economy so that the poor are lifted out of poverty and huge inequalities are reduced. Democratic politics gives the poor and disadvantaged a voice, and elected governments are under pressure to combine economic growth with human development.
What is the Kyoto Protocol?
The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty that extends the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific view that global warming is happening and that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are a major cause.
The Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and came into force on 16 February 2005. It had 192 parties (Canada withdrew in December 2012).
Why it still matters
The two ideas in this chapter, traditional and non-traditional security, are not just exam theory. They describe the world right now.
On the traditional side, the arms race and the balance of power are very much alive. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military spending reached a record 2,718 billion US dollars in 2024, a 9.4 per cent jump on the previous year and the steepest rise since 1988. The five biggest spenders were the United States, China, Russia, Germany and India, and together they accounted for about 60 per cent of the world total. When you read about deterrence, alliances and the balance of power in these notes, this is the real-world behaviour those ideas are trying to explain.
On the non-traditional side, human security is under record strain too. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports that 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced by the end of 2024, roughly one in every 67 people on Earth, up 6 per cent in a single year. More than a third came from just four countries: Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. This is exactly the story of refugees, migration and human security that the chapter describes, but happening today. The same non-traditional lens now frames climate threats to low-lying nations and the risk of new pandemics.
To connect these notes to live world affairs, you can explore current explainers in the Learnacy Hub, and for more pieces on conflict, terrorism, defence and displacement you can browse the Security topics on our resources hub.
Sources
- SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2024.
- UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2024.
Key takeaways
- Security refers to the absence of threats, particularly those that endanger core values.
- Traditional security focuses on military threats to a country, while non-traditional security considers broader dangers like terrorism and climate change.
- Traditional security policy is built around deterrence, defense, and the balance of power.
- Alliances are formed by countries to increase their effective power against other countries or alliances, based on national interests.
- In international politics, each country is finally responsible for its own security, as there is no central authority above all states to regulate behavior.
Test yourself
What does security mean in simple terms?
Security means the absence of threats, particularly those that endanger core values.
What is the main focus of traditional security thinking?
Traditional security thinking holds that military threats are the greatest danger to a country.
What are the three main elements of traditional security policy?
The three main elements of traditional security policy are deterrence, defense, and the balance of power.
Why do countries form alliances?
Countries form alliances to increase their effective power against other countries or alliances, based on national interests.
Who is finally responsible for a country's security in international politics?
In international politics, each country is finally responsible for its own security, as there is no central authority above all states to regulate behavior.
