The Insecurity Trap – A Short Guide to Transformation
By Paul Rogers with Judith Large, Hawthorn Press, £11.99

IN this slim volume, Paul Rogers offers a succinct summary of the chief crises threatening our world today: a rapidly approaching climate catastrophe, a severe decline in UN legitimacy and global multilateral co-operation, with an increasing resort to armed response rather than diplomacy. Together, this is leading to widespread social breakdown and despair. 

The author argues, though, that to give way to despair in the face of such seemingly intractable problems would be to admit defeat. There are, he argues, effective ways in which we as individuals can respond and fight to change the trajectory of our world. 

OK, we recognise the problem, and we can propose solutions, but how do we get from here to there? That is the nub of the issue. Rogers does set out a series of steps required for meaningful transformation to take place, but despite the best of intentions, listing several organisations one can join to help bring about change hardly provides an adequate answer.

As he himself admits: “The whole approach to thinking about security [something we all want] is to state the obvious.” He appeals to the reader to rethink “security as freedom, security as a common right and as a shared responsibility.”

“Don’t forget that the world’s military complexes need arms races and war in order to thrive and that most such complexes are rooted in shareholder capitalist systems,” he writes. 

Very true, but the “shareholder capitalist system” we have today is far removed from the system that existed in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. That profound transformation also needs addressing. Today we see an unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and power in the hands of a minuscule but supremely powerful and secretive oligarchy.

While the challenges do seem overwhelming, the language at our disposal also seems to be inadequate for describing the situation in which we find ourselves.

Take the word “neoliberalism,” which means in practice the exact opposite of liberal; it is simply ruthless capitalism. “Climate change” and even “global warming” don’t really encompass the sort of inferno we are facing. “Democracy” has become a meaningless cliche in the face of the faceless, global hegemony of finance capital. 

Is positive transformation possible? Rogers and Large argue that we have to look at the possible, to examine what can be done rather than what can’t. We have to look at alternatives to the insecurity trap and recommend policies for structural change. The possibilities for reaching out and taking individual action are manifold, they argue. 

As indeed they are, but we urgently need to find the means of forging better co-operation and collective action in order to counter the splintering of forces-for-change into tiny and ineffective groups.

The Insecurity Trap is ideal introductory reading for students and those interested in understanding exactly what the existential issues are that we are facing today and what we can do about them.