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Political science: international security


A little more than a year and a half ago I offered on this blog a precis of a book by two political scientists, Buzan and Waever, that offered a round-the-world tour of security issues on a region by region basis as of 2003. Indeed, I wrote several posts on the subject through January and February of 2025.

Today, I would like to quote from something that appears early in that work that seems to me to have held up well in 2026, twenty-three years after the Buzan and Waever publication.

The issue is why "premodern states" are under pressure to conform to "international standards". 

"For premodern states, the threat from globalisation is broadly defined by an inability to measure up to international standards of good governance. The danger is either that they will be demoted in the ranks of international society to some sort of trusteeship status, no longer recognised as legally equal and capable of self-government, or that they will simply be neglected and allowed to fall into chaos." 

I have to say that the United States is looking more and more pre-modern in the sense that Buzan and Waever had in mind, and that if we continue along the present route, there is a real prospect we will face the same dilemma. We are falling way out of contact with the "international standards of good governance" of which we were not too long ago a paradigm, and we may end up demoted into "some sort of trusteeship status" akin to Palestine in the days of the British mandate.  Or we may fall into such chaos that, as the end of the above passage indicates, trusteeship will be the lesser of the two evils. 


 

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  1. HenrySeptember 10, 2026 at 8:02 AM

    What would trusteeship status be as a practical matter? Who would manage the U.S.?

    ReplyDelete

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