Description
The envisioning of ‘collective security’ has periodically informed debates about how to best preserve peace and security since at least the First World War, and still provides the normative justification for the operation of the UN Security Council. Those defending that vision by now, however, are few and far between. This calls for a deep rethink. Rarely have discussions of ‘collective security’ engaged with pacifism and anarchism, yet doing so helps question core assumptions about the efficacy of violence, about Westphalian models of politics, and about the ‘domestic analogy’ upon which mainstream visions of ‘collective security’ have been built. Three criticisms emerge about the conceptualisation and operation of ‘collective security’ to date: the mismatch between ethical pretence and who actually gets what, when and how; the warism and militarism that it institutionalises; and the limitations of the statist imaginaries that underpin it. An anarcho-pacifist counterproposal instead makes two ingredients central for its radically alternative reboot: a preference for nonviolent security methods; and an embrace of political methodologies that look beyond statist models. Radical though such a rethink is, it might provide the revised theoretical compass needed for communities across the world to build a real sense of ‘collective’ ‘security’.
