From State to Non-State Actors: The Emergence of Security Governance

Non-state threats and actors have become key factors in contemporary security. However, little research has been conducted on the relationship between the two. The aim of this book is to address this gap by examining the growing role of non-state actors both as the cause of new security threats, such as civil war, transnational crime, terrorism, infectious diseases, and the proliferation of small arms, and as security providers, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private security companies, and international regimes. Since the end of the Cold War the notion that the state is the primary unit of interest in security studies has increasingly been challenged. Statistics show that today many more people are killed by ethnic conflicts, HIV/AIDS, or the proliferation of small arms than by interstate wars. Moreover, non-state actors are progressively complementing states in the provision of security. This chapter suggests that both developments can be understood as part of a shift from “government” to “governance” in security. This shift is characterized by the changing nature of threats in contemporary world politics and the ways in which they are addressed. In particular, the following seeks to illustrate the emergence of a system of security governance in which the making and implementation of security policies is shared among overlapping networks of state and non-state actors at the national, regional, and global levels. The concept of security governance can thus serve as an overarching theoretical framework for the contributions to this volume that brings together experts on new threats and new actors. It seeks to examine how private actors have become one of the main sources of insecurity in the contemporary world, but also how non-state actors play a growing role in combating these threats.