The WAGE Governing Global Insecurities Collaborative focuses on new insecurities the process of globalization has created for states and societies, with special emphasis on the globalization of violence and ecological risk, and offers concrete proposals for institutional and policy reforms to address these concerns.

Principal Investigators:

Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Population Health Sciences
Jeremi Suri, Professor of History

Project Overview:

The end of the Cold War witnessed the passing of many conceptual and institutional anchors in the international system. Most significant, assumptions about “national security” encountered a powerful set of new challenges. The expanding range of transnational flows in people, capital, and knowledge seriously undermined the ability of any single state policy-making body to manage its nation’s interactions with the wider world. Globalization contributed to a growing contradiction between the path dependent institutional structures of state authority and the proliferating sources of power that diminish the leverage of the state.

Governing Global Insecurities is an interdisciplinary collaborative project that will analyze the sources and implications of this contradiction, and offer concrete proposals for institutional and policy reform. The group will examine central issues of security in light of the new vulnerabilities created by globalization. Specifically the project will interrogate two prime areas where globalization undermines the dominant paradigm of “national security.” These two areas are the globalization of violence and the globalization of ecological risk. The project will also investigate the normative concerns for democratic theory that arise with globalization and various policy responses. In the end, the project will lay out an agenda for replacing assumptions about “national security” with a more effective notion of “global governance.”