Class 12 Political Science Chapter 5 Security in the Contemporary World Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What does security mean at its most basic?

Answer: At its most basic, security implies freedom from threats.

Q. Under which two groups does the chapter put the various notions of security?

Answer: Traditional and non-traditional conceptions of security.

Q. What is deterrence?

Answer: Deterrence is the part of security policy that is concerned with preventing war.

Q. What is defence?

Answer: Defence is the part of security policy that is concerned with limiting or ending war.

Q. When did India first test a nuclear device, and when did it conduct the tests that the government justified in terms of national security?

Answer: India first tested a nuclear device in 1974. The tests of 1998 were the ones the Indian government justified in terms of safeguarding national security.

Q. What do students of security mean by the referent?

Answer: The referent answers the question ‘Security for who?’ In the traditional conception the referent is the state with its territory and governing institutions.

Q. Who are internally displaced people? Give the chapter’s example.

Answer: People who have fled their homes but remain within national borders. The Kashmiri Pandits who fled the violence in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s are the chapter’s example.

Q. Name the two conventions that banned the production and possession of biological and chemical weapons, with their years.

Answer: The Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.

Q. What share of the wars of the post-Second World War period was the Cold War responsible for, and where were most of them fought?

Answer: Approximately one-third of all wars in that period, and most of them were fought in the Third World.

Q. State what the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report said about the way the concept of security had been interpreted.

Answer: It contends, “the concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly… It has been more related to nation states than people… Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives.”

Q. Why do students of security count only threats to ‘core values’ as security threats?

Answer: Because human existence and the life of a country are full of threats, and if every single one of them counted, our world would be saturated with security issues and we would be paralysed. So the field is narrowed twice over: only threats to core values count, and only extremely dangerous ones, threats that could so endanger those values that they would be damaged beyond repair if nothing were done about the situation.

Q. Distinguish between deterrence and defence.

Answer: Deterrence is about preventing war: a country promises to raise the costs of war to an unacceptable level so that the other side does not attack in the first place. Defence is about limiting or ending a war once it has actually broken out, so as to deny the attacking country its objectives and to turn back or defeat the attacking forces altogether.

Q. What is an alliance, and why do countries form one?

Answer: An alliance is a coalition of states that coordinate their actions to deter or defend against military attack. Countries form alliances to increase their effective power relative to another country or alliance. Most alliances are formalised in written treaties and rest on a fairly clear identification of who constitutes the threat.

Q. What is disarmament? Give the chapter’s two examples with their figures.

Answer: Disarmament requires all states to give up certain kinds of weapons. The chapter’s examples are the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which banned the production and possession of these weapons. More than 155 states acceded to the BWC and 193 states acceded to the CWC, and both conventions included all the great powers.

Q. What is arms control, and in what sense is the NPT an arms control treaty?

Answer: Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 is an arms control treaty in the sense that it regulated the acquisition of nuclear weapons: countries that had tested and manufactured them before 1967 were allowed to keep their weapons, and those that had not done so were to give up the right to acquire them. It did not abolish nuclear weapons; it limited the number of countries that could have them.

Q. What is confidence building, and what is it meant to achieve?

Answer: Confidence building is a process in which countries share ideas and information with their rivals. They tell each other about their military intentions and, up to a point, their military plans, about the kind of forces they possess, and they may share information on where those forces are deployed. It is a way of demonstrating that they are not planning a surprise attack, and it is designed to ensure that rivals do not go to war through misunderstanding or misperception.

Q. Distinguish between a migrant and a refugee.

Answer: International law and norms make the distinction. Migrants are those who voluntarily leave their home countries; refugees are those who flee from war, natural disaster or political persecution. The practical difference follows: states are generally supposed to accept refugees, but they do not have to accept migrants.

Q. What is meant by ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’?

Answer: They are the two halves of the broadest formulation of human security. That formulation adds economic security and ‘threats to human dignity’ to the agenda, and the chapter sums up the two sides of it as ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’ respectively: economic security is ‘freedom from want’, and freedom from ‘threats to human dignity’ is ‘freedom from fear’.

Q. Under the traditional security perspective, what can a government do when another country threatens it with war?

Answer: 1. Surrender. A government may choose to surrender when actually confronted by war. The chapter adds the important qualification that governments will not advertise this as the policy of the country.
2. Deter the attack. It can prevent the other side from attacking by promising to raise the costs of war to an unacceptable level. This is deterrence.
3. Defend itself. When war actually breaks out it can defend itself, so as to deny the attacking country its objectives and to turn back or defeat the attacking forces altogether. This is defence.
4. Why only two of the three are called security policy. Because surrender is never announced as policy, security policy is understood as being concerned with preventing war, which is called deterrence, and with limiting or ending war, which is called defence.

Q. What does ‘balance of power’ mean, and what does a country actually do to maintain a favourable balance?

Answer: What it is. When countries look around them, they see that some countries are bigger and stronger. That is a clue to who might be a threat in the future. A neighbouring country may not say it is preparing for attack and there may be no obvious reason for attack, but the fact that this country is very powerful is a sign that at some point in the future it may choose to be aggressive.
Who it is watched against. Governments work hard to maintain a favourable balance of power with other countries, especially those close by, those with whom they have differences, and those they have had conflicts with in the past.
How it is done. A good part of maintaining a balance of power is to build up one’s military power.
What else it rests on. Economic and technological power are also important, since they are the basis for military power.

Q. Set out the components of traditional security policy.

Answer: 1. Deterrence. Preventing war by promising to raise the costs of war to an unacceptable level for the attacker.
2. Defence. Limiting or ending a war once it has broken out, so that the attacking country does not achieve its objectives.
3. Balance of power. A third component. Governments are very sensitive to the balance of power between their country and other countries, and work to keep it favourable, especially with neighbours, with countries they differ with, and with countries they have fought before. It is built mainly on military power, though economic and technological power matter too because they are its basis.
4. Alliance building. A fourth and related component. An alliance is a coalition of states that coordinate their actions to deter or defend against military attack, usually formalised in written treaties, and formed to increase a country’s effective power relative to another country or alliance. Alliances are based on national interests and can change when national interests change.

Q. How were the security challenges facing the newly-independent countries of Asia and Africa different from the challenges in Europe?

Answer: They were different in two ways.
1. Conflict with neighbours. The new countries faced the prospect of military conflict with neighbouring countries. Many of them came to fear their neighbours even more than they feared the US or the Soviet Union or the former colonial powers, and they quarrelled over borders and territories, or control of people and populations, or all of these simultaneously.
2. Internal military conflict. They also had to worry about internal military conflict. Internally, the new states worried about threats from separatist movements which wanted to form independent countries.
Where the two merged. Sometimes the external and the internal threats merged: a neighbour might help or instigate an internal separatist movement, which then led to tensions between the two neighbouring countries.
The scale of the internal problem. Internal wars now make up more than 95 per cent of all armed conflicts fought anywhere in the world, and between 1946 and 1991 there was a twelve-fold rise in the number of civil wars, the greatest jump in 200 years.

Q. Explain the narrow, the broad and the broadest concepts of human security.

Answer: What they share. All proponents of human security agree that its primary goal is the protection of individuals. They differ about precisely what threats individuals should be protected from.
The narrow concept. It focuses on violent threats to individuals, or in the words of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ‘the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence’.
The broad concept. It argues that the threat agenda should also include hunger, disease and natural disasters, because these kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined. Human security policy, on this view, should protect people from these threats as well as from violence.
The broadest formulation. It further encompasses economic security and ‘threats to human dignity’. Put differently, the broadest formulation stresses ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’ respectively.

Q. What is terrorism, and why are civilians chosen as its targets?

Answer: The definition. Terrorism refers to political violence that targets civilians deliberately and indiscriminately. International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country.
The aim. Terrorist groups seek to change a political context or condition that they do not like by force or threat of force.
Why civilians. Civilian targets are usually chosen to terrorise the public and to use the unhappiness of the public as a weapon against national governments or other parties in conflict.
The classic forms. The classic cases involve hijacking planes or planting bombs in trains, cafes, markets and other crowded places.
Old, not new. Since 11 September 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre in America, other governments and the public have paid more attention to terrorism, though terrorism itself is not new. In the past, most of the terror attacks had occurred in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and South Asia.

Q. Why did the idea of global security emerge in the 1990s? Illustrate with the chapter’s own example.

Answer: The reason. It emerged in response to the global nature of threats such as global warming, international terrorism, and health epidemics like AIDS and bird flu.
Why it had to be global. No country can resolve these problems alone.
The unfairness inside the problem. In some situations one country may have to disproportionately bear the brunt of a global problem such as environmental degradation.
The chapter’s example. Due to global warming, a sea level rise of 1.5 to 2.0 metres would flood 20 percent of Bangladesh, inundate most of the Maldives, and threaten nearly half the population of Thailand.
The conclusion. Since these problems are global in nature, international cooperation is vital, even though it is difficult to achieve.

Q. Compare the traditional and the non-traditional conceptions of security, and say where alliance building belongs.

Answer: 1. The referent. The referent answers the question ‘Security for who?’ In the traditional conception the referent is the state with its territory and governing institutions. In the non-traditional conceptions the referent is expanded: ‘Not just the state but also individuals or communities or indeed all of humankind’.
2. The threat. Traditional security treats military threats as the greatest danger, coming from another country that endangers the core values of sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Non-traditional notions go beyond military threats to include a wide range of threats and dangers affecting the conditions of human existence, such as terrorism, human rights violations, global poverty, migration and refugee flows, and health epidemics.
3. The method. In traditional security, force is both the principal threat to security and the principal means of achieving security, and the instruments are deterrence, defence, balance of power and alliance building. Non-traditional security depends on cooperation rather than military confrontation, because it is difficult to see what force would do to help alleviate poverty, manage migration and refugee movements, and control epidemics.
4. The other two elements. Along with the referent, non-traditional notions also question what is being secured, from what kind of threats, and the approach to security.
5. Where they do meet. Human security and state security should be, and often are, the same thing, but secure states do not automatically mean secure peoples. Protecting citizens from foreign attack may be a necessary condition for the security of individuals, but it is certainly not a sufficient one, and during the last 100 years more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies.
6. Where alliance building belongs. The creation and sustenance of alliances belongs to traditional security. An alliance is a coalition of states that coordinate their actions to deter or defend against military attack, which is a military response to a military threat.

Q. Traditional views of security do not rule out cooperation. Explain the forms of cooperation the chapter describes.

Answer: 1. Limits on the ends of war. It is now an almost universally-accepted view that countries should only go to war for the right reasons, primarily self-defence or to protect other people from genocide.
2. Limits on the means of war. Armies must avoid killing or hurting non-combatants as well as unarmed and surrendering combatants. They should not be excessively violent, and force must in any case be used only after all the alternatives have failed.
3. Disarmament. Disarmament requires all states to give up certain kinds of weapons. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention banned the production and possession of these weapons. More than 155 states acceded to the BWC and 193 states acceded to the CWC, and both conventions included all the great powers.
4. Why the superpowers stopped short of it. The US and the Soviet Union did not want to give up the third type of weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear weapons, so they pursued arms control instead.
5. Arms control. Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons. The Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 tried to stop the two from using ballistic missiles as a defensive shield to launch a nuclear attack; it allowed a very limited number of defensive systems but stopped large-scale production of them. Other treaties included SALT II and START. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 regulated the acquisition of nuclear weapons through its 1967 cut-off, and limited the number of countries that could have them rather than abolishing the weapons.
6. Confidence building. Countries share ideas and information with their rivals, telling each other about their military intentions and, up to a point, their military plans, about the forces they possess and sometimes where those forces are deployed. It demonstrates that they are not planning a surprise attack, and ensures that rivals do not go to war through misunderstanding or misperception.

Q. Describe the new sources of threats to security that the chapter discusses.

Answer: 1. Terrorism. Political violence that targets civilians deliberately and indiscriminately. International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country. Since the attack on the World Trade Centre in America on 11 September 2001, governments and the public have paid it more attention, though terrorism itself is not new.
2. Human rights. Classified into three types: political rights such as freedom of speech and assembly; economic and social rights; and the rights of colonised people or ethnic and indigenous minorities. There is broad agreement on the classification but none on which rights are universal, nor on what the international community should do when rights are violated. Since the 1990s, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the Indonesian military’s killing of people in East Timor have fed that debate.
3. Global poverty. World population, now at 760 crore, will grow to nearly 1000 crore by the middle of the 21st century, and half the growth occurs in just six countries: India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia. High per capita income with low population growth makes the rich richer, while low incomes with high population growth make the poor poorer. Most of the world’s armed conflicts now take place in sub-Saharan Africa, which is also the poorest region of the world.
4. Migration and refugees. Poverty in the South has led to large-scale migration to the North, creating international political frictions. Migrants leave voluntarily; refugees flee war, natural disaster or political persecution; internally displaced people flee their homes but remain within national borders, as the Kashmiri Pandits did in the early 1990s. From 1990 to 1995, 70 states were involved in 93 wars which killed about 55 lakh people, and in the 1990s all but three of the 60 refugee flows coincided with an internal armed conflict.
5. Health epidemics. HIV-AIDS, bird flu and SARS have spread rapidly through migration, business, tourism and military operations. By 2003 an estimated 4 crore people were infected with HIV-AIDS worldwide, two-thirds of them in Africa. New diseases such as Corona, ebola virus, hantavirus and hepatitis C have emerged, while old ones like tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever and cholera have mutated into drug resistant forms.
6. The limit on the list. Expansion of the concept does not mean any kind of disease or distress can be included, or the concept would lose its coherence. To qualify, an issue must share a minimum common criterion, of threatening the very existence of the referent, a state or a group of people.

Q. Explain the four components of India’s security strategy.

Answer: The setting. India has faced traditional (military) and non-traditional threats to its security that have emerged from within as well as outside its borders. Its security strategy has four broad components, which have been used in a varying combination from time to time.
1. Strengthening its military capabilities. India has been involved in conflicts with its neighbours: Pakistan in 1947-48, 1965, 1971 and 1999, and China in 1962. Since it is surrounded by nuclear-armed countries in the South Asian region, India’s decision to conduct nuclear tests in 1998 was justified by the Indian government in terms of safeguarding national security. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974.
2. Strengthening international norms and institutions. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, supported the cause of Asian solidarity, decolonisation, disarmament, and the UN as a forum in which international conflicts could be settled. India took initiatives to bring about a universal and non-discriminatory non-proliferation regime in which all countries would have the same rights and obligations with respect to weapons of mass destruction. It argued for an equitable New International Economic Order (NIEO), and most importantly it used non-alignment to help carve out an area of peace outside the bloc politics of the two superpowers. It joined 160 countries in signing and ratifying the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and Indian troops have been sent abroad on UN peacekeeping missions.
3. Meeting security challenges within the country. Several militant groups from areas such as the Nagaland, Mizoram, the Punjab and Kashmir among others have, from time to time, sought to break away from India. India has tried to preserve national unity by adopting a democratic political system, which allows different communities and groups of people to freely articulate their grievances and share political power.
4. Developing the economy. There has been an attempt to develop the economy in a way that the vast mass of citizens are lifted out of poverty and misery and huge economic inequalities are not allowed to exist. The attempt has partially succeeded.
The conclusion. Democratic politics allows spaces for articulating the voice of the poor and the deprived citizens, and there is pressure on democratically elected governments to combine economic growth with human development. Thus democracy is not just a political ideal; a democratic government is also a way to provide greater security.

Q. What is cooperative security? Who takes part in it, and when may force be used?

Answer: 1. Why cooperation rather than force. Dealing with many non-traditional threats to security requires cooperation rather than military confrontation. Military force may have a role to play in combating terrorism or in enforcing human rights, and even here there is a limit to what force can achieve. It is difficult to see what force would do to help alleviate poverty, manage migration and refugee movements, and control epidemics, and in most cases the use of military force would only make matters worse.
2. The levels of cooperation. Cooperation may be bilateral, that is between any two countries, or regional, continental, or global.
3. What decides the level. It all depends on the nature of the threat and the willingness and ability of countries to respond.
4. The other players. Cooperative security may also involve a variety of other players, both international and national: international organisations such as the UN, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF; non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International, the Red Cross, private foundations and charities, religious organisations, trade unions, associations, and social and development organisations; businesses and corporations; and great personalities, for example Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.
5. Force as a last resort. Cooperative security may involve the use of force as a last resort. The international community may have to sanction the use of force to deal with governments that kill their own people or ignore the misery of their populations who are devastated by poverty, disease and catastrophe. It may also have to agree to the use of violence against international terrorists and those who harbour them.
6. The condition on that force. Non-traditional security is much better when the use of force is sanctioned and applied collectively by the international community rather than when an individual country decides to use force on its own.

Q. Explain how global poverty becomes a source of insecurity.

Answer: 1. The population picture. World population, now at 760 crore, will grow to nearly 1000 crore by the middle of the 21st century. Currently, half the world’s population growth occurs in just six countries: India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
2. The gap widens by itself. Among the world’s poorest countries, population is expected to triple in the next 50 years, whereas many rich countries will see population shrinkage in that period. High per capita income and low population growth make rich states or rich social groups get richer, whereas low incomes and high population growth reinforce each other to make poor states and poor groups get poorer.
3. North and South. Globally, this disparity contributes to the gap between the Northern and the Southern countries of the world. Within the South, disparities have also sharpened, as a few countries have managed to slow down population growth and raise incomes while others have failed to do so.
4. Poverty and war together. Most of the world’s armed conflicts now take place in sub-Saharan Africa, which is also the poorest region of the world. At the turn of the 21st century, more people were being killed in wars in this region than in the rest of the world combined.
5. Migration and friction. Poverty in the South has also led to large-scale migration to seek a better life, especially better economic opportunities, in the North. This has created international political frictions, and it is why the law’s distinction between migrants and refugees matters: states are generally supposed to accept refugees, but they do not have to accept migrants.
6. Refugees follow conflict. The world refugee map tallies almost perfectly with the world conflicts map, because wars and armed conflicts in the South have generated millions of refugees seeking safe haven. From 1990 to 1995, 70 states were involved in 93 wars which killed about 55 lakh people, and whole communities have been forced to migrate because of generalised fear of violence or due to the destruction of livelihoods, identities and living environments.