What is the difference between ‘international’ and ‘global’ security?
The difference between ‘international’ and ‘global’ security rests on the way these two words are defined. The online version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines international as “involving two or more countries: occurring between countries,” while it defines global as “involving the entire world”. Even though both of these are delineated by their scope, the former being narrower than the latter, I think that it is more productive to treat them as overlapping in their scope. One cannot speak of international security without invoking its relationship to global security and vice versa.
For global security, we can use various examples relating to nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional warfare. One can think about this global-international overlap in the way hypothetical inter-state warfare develops. For example, one can start with the international arms trade which is a global threat to security. One country may wish to stockpile weapons to advance its raison d’état — national interests. If seen from the perspective of the security dilemma, this increasingly militarily secured country could lead its neighbours to also stockpile weapons to augment the threat. This dynamic could then lead to an arms race and the increasingly escalating prospect of inter-state warfare, which is an international security threat, a national security threat, and a human security threat.
Furthermore, one must not assume that an inter-state war could be contained within a bordered geographical area. Civilians affected by warfare are going to move out of these troubled states and into other relatively more stable and peaceful ones. These refugees, if extremely numerous, could then become a burden to the host countries’ financial capacity and they may even become a threat to their national security. From a strictly regional threat, the increasing number of refugees could then pose an international humanitarian crisis.
This domino effect, which began as a global security threat (international arms trade), which then turns into an international security threat, and again, into a regional security threat, demonstrates the complexity of delineating which threats concern only the international level and which ones concern only the global level.
This process of security threats moving to different levels of scope applies to pandemics as well. Ebola, for example, was just a national threat when it first began, but it then became an international threat as it was passed on from one person to another over a limited geographical area in West Africa. Over time, if this strain of Ebola continues to spread, there is a very real possibility that this could pose a global threat.
The key thing to keep in mind is the notion of “possibility” coupled with informed assumptions. Thus, it is possible that Iran’s development of nuclear technology could pose a global threat, but this assumes that Iran has the capacity to deliver its nuclear weapons across the world, and this also assumes that Iran’s government is irrational enough to even proceed with the use of the nuclear weapon for the very purpose of killing its “enemies”. The same thing applies to North Korea’s nuclear threat. Indeed, North Korea does have nuclear weapons but it currently only possess a regional threat (to the Asia-Pacific region) because it still has no effective nuclear delivery capability for targets beyond this region. However, what it could do is trade its nuclear technology with other aspiring countries which could, in turn, lead to a global security threat of nuclear war.
The last example would be the quintessential terrorist threat posed by an aspiring extremist Islamist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). ISIS poses an existential threat to the national security and survival of both Iraq and Syria. This alone constitutes a regional security threat since they are within a limited geographic area. However, the number of civilians that they’ve displaced (notwithstanding the devastating effects of the still on-going Syrian Civil War), it is clear that the group poses an international security threat to the peace and stability of the region. The refugees streaming into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and some into Europe and other countries, are straining the national budgets of those countries. The Syrian and Iraqi refugees are competing for limited resources. Nevertheless, the thing that makes ISIS a global threat is the real possibility of the violent extremist group becoming entrenched in the region endangering Western interests (e.g., oil interests) in the region as a whole. Global security has to do with the prospect of increased transnational terrorism, particularly in strategically important oil-producing regions which are vulnerable to attacks. If attacked by ISIS, the effects of oil supply disruption to the global market could be immense (whose effects to the economic security of people across the globe one could only imagine).
In a way, global security could be seen as encompassing threats that do not exactly pose a global threat to security if analyzed by themselves. It is only when these threats are mixed in with the increasing economic interconnectedness of the world (and other globalizing factors) do national and international threats to security develop into a global one. The direction of the development of a threat (from global security to human security or vice versa) is also important as they present the course of action that should be taken to root out the cause of the insecurity. The global arms trade (both legal and illegal) is a global security threat that could develop into a national/human security threat. Ebola was a national/human security threat that morphed into an international (and could eventually become a global one) if left untreated. Iran’s development of nuclear technology poses a regional threat that could become a global one (since horizontal proliferation could increase the prospect of nuclear war. Although it could be argued that its proliferation could lead to more peace through nuclear deterrence). Likewise, North Korea’s nuclear technology remains a regional threat until it can develop a better nuclear delivery system. As for the threat of ISIS, it developed from a national security threat (to the Assad regime) to an international security threat (following its rapid territorial expansion), and it quickly became a global one as the group continued its cancerous spread across Syria and Iraq.