International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Christopher S. Browning Page B

with infection rate estimates for some African militaries topping 50 per cent. Unable to carry out their duties to full effectiveness infected soldiers arguably pose a risk to national security by limiting the overall capabilities of military units. When seen through the perspective of national rather than individual vulnerabilities, significant temptations therefore exist for policy makers to interpret human security concerns as requiring resources to be targeted on key economic and social sectors and key personnel (e.g. soldiers), with other sufferers liable to be overlooked.
The coming anarchy?
    Aside from this tendency to view human security problems through a national security framework, debates about humansecurity also often end up prioritizing the concerns of the developed over those of the developing world. One example is the vast international attention and mobilization that has occurred in recent years to prevent the spread of potentially deadly infectious diseases, initially sparked by the outbreak of SARS (Severe Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003 and later by H1N1 (swine flu) in 2009, which both took advantage of modern global transport networks to disperse swiftly to multiple countries. The concern is that such viruses could potentially kill many people, but might also impact on global trade and even undermine political stability. They are therefore seen as posing potentially serious threats to lives and welfare in the developed world, such that in 2010 the UK government listed an influenza pandemic a Tier One priority in its National Security Strategy. The same level of international attention, mobilization, and urgency, however, is only notable by its absence in respect of other diseases which already kill millions worldwide; diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, polio, cholera, West Nile virus, etc. For critics the disjuncture reflects the fact that these diseases are largely afflictions of poverty localized to the developing world and therefore of little concern to more prosperous countries.
    At times, however, the tendency to frame issues of poverty, health, and development in terms of their potential impact on the security of the developed world has had a more pernicious edge to it, with the global poor being construed, not as those in need, but as those threatening security and stability in the prosperous global north. A stark example was provided by a highly influential essay written by Robert Kaplan in 1994, in which he evocatively depicted the future as ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Kaplan’s essay painted a bleak picture of poverty, underdevelopment, and environmental degradation in the developing world. This toxic cocktail, he argued, was likely to fuel the breakdown of already weak states, particularly in Africa, with failed states unable to provide for their populations’ basic needs becoming the norm. In Kaplan’s vision these societies were likely to fracture into violence and crime, witha widespread return to the law of the jungle—the coming anarchy—to be expected. One result, he suggested would be an age of mass migrations, as poor, frightened, hungry, desperate, and diseased populations in the global south sought sanctuary in the developed world.
    This last point became the crux of how Kaplan’s essay was received in the West and America in particular, where its influence was evident in its distribution to US embassies around the world. Poverty, underdevelopment, conflict, and associated mass migrations of diseased populations were ultimately interpreted in terms of what threats this posed to the developed world. What needed protecting from this perspective was the stability, security, and prosperity of the global north faced with an incipient unconventional onslaught from the global south.
    Variations on Kaplan’s image of the coming anarchy have reappeared subsequently, perhaps most notably in the label of ‘failed states’ to describe countries seen to lack the capacity to meet