Search Results

This chapter examines the role of existential threat in responses to (historical) collective victimization. The literature on collective victimhood developed from an intergroup relations and conflict resolution perspective. Consequently, individual and intragroup responses to collective victimhood have been understudied. This limitation can be addressed by shifting to a focus on threat and group survival as the primary motivations driving responses to collective victimization. The chapter presents a multidimensional model and definition of existential threat and discusses how each component of threat (individual, future-oriented physical threat; collective, future-oriented physical threat; collective, future-oriented symbolic threat; and a collective, past-oriented threat) is present in collective, historical victimization. What may seem problematic and biased from the perspective of intergroup relations can, in fact, be adaptive for the group’s survival.

This chapter describes the intense debate on the concept of security. The concept has been widened to include new types of threats, new referent objects and, in some cases, new rationales and normative content. Security studies have taken a constructivist turn. The chapter uses Michael Freeden’s framework for analysing political concepts. Political concepts are socially constructed, embedded in particular cultures and ideologies. As such, they change, but slowly. The chapter argues that the concept of security is not essentially contested, but its evolution is constrained by common usage. It has a minimal core on which all security schools of IR agree, explicitly or implicitly. From this minimal common ground different schools of thought have set about widening the meaning of the concept of security. The chapter argues that the concept of security retains in all its manifestations notions of existential threat, urgency and justification of exceptional measures.

With its moral commitment to the individual, cosmopolitanism has often downplayed the role of the state in cosmopolitan commitments and their practices. There is, however, emerging concern to put the state back into cosmopolitan concerns. This chapter argues that two outstanding reasons for this intellectual move are of an institutional and political nature. First, despite the recent pluralization of global actors, states remain the major agents of change within a (post-Western) system of states; both the moral and political purpose of the state should therefore be aligned with global imperatives. Second, a clearly formulated “marriage” between the global and the national is required to line up institutional motivation for enlightened global policy. This chapter argues, accordingly, for cosmopolitan state responsibilities toward the provision of global public goods (examples include nuclear disarmament, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable development).

This chapter explores the exterminationist form of dehumanization—the form of dehumanization that often leads to genocide. One of its most striking features is how repetitive its themes are. With small, local variations, each example seems to be cut from more or less the same cloth. Almost always, the dehumanized group is regarded as an inferior race, and described as resembling predatory or unclean animals. No matter how tiny and vulnerable the persecuted population is, their dehumanizers perceive them as posing an existential threat from which they urgently need to defend themselves. Often, the dehumanizers regard those whom they dehumanize as part of a powerful, shadowy conspiracy that controls world governments and the mass media. And sex is an ever-present element. The dehumanized group is seen as hypersexual and therefore bestial. They are rapists and pedophiles, and they reproduce so rapidly that they will soon replace the dominant group as the majority.

This chapter evaluates the moral threat of suicide terrorism. Political and psychological resilience to the threat of suicide bombing requires understanding the difference between suicide bombers and true martyrs. A martyr’s political power comes from the indisputable evidence—the martyr’s own suffering at the hands of the powerful—that the powerful are corrupt and unjust. This evidence is tainted if the would-be martyr indulges in provocation, aggression, or retaliation. The authors offer three directions that can help boost Western political resilience in facing suicide bombers, emphasizing the importance of clearly understanding the definitions of martyr, victim, suicide bomber, and terrorist and how perceptions can be changed in the immediate aftermath of an attack or an uprising.

Today, swollen numbers of humanity are now intensively interactive and interdependent through vast networks of complex machines and built infrastructures that span the planet, whose unintended consequences and spillovers have grown to species significance. The practical context for all human activities has become a densely occupied and tightly coupled neighborhood. While the content of cosmopolitanism, in its ancient, Enlightenment, and current phases, reflects shrinking geographical spaces, it presumes an Earth composed of different places, rather than a more accurate “terrapolitan” view of Earth as a single place. In the terrapolitan situation, the central problem is not that humans are insufficiently attentive to the needs of distant others. Rather, it is that they are insufficiently attentive to their collective self-interest in survival in the face of existential threats. In part, these limitations stem from the utter novelty of the threats to basic interests that have arisen with such historical rapidity.