The globalization of insecurity: how the international economic order undermines human and national security on a world scale

National and human security has been fundamentally undermined by policies promoted by the key institutions of globalization. Adopting a state-centred conceptualization of security demonstrates how globalization at once weakens and fragments the state, while militarizing both the state and sub-state actors, contributing systematically to the emergence of intra- and inter-state conflicts. A human-centred framework, however, focusing on the impact of globalization on individuals and communities, shows that this process is further linked to the generation of structural violence across national boundaries. Both these national -and human- level processes are mutually interdependent and impact on one another reciprocally. Hence, the world capitalist economy has created a phenomenon that can be accurately described as the globalization of insecurity, by firstly generating conflict thus destabilizing nations and communities, and secondly escalating impoverishment, disease and deprivation.