Track your comments!
[x]


When you register, comments on your articles and replies to your comments appear here. Register Now!

Sign in to your account
[x]

Not a Scientific Blogging member yet?

Register Now for a Free Scientificblogging.com Account

  • Customize your profile with pictures, banner, a blogroll and more.
  • Leave comments on articles, add other members to your friend lists, chat with people on the site.
  • Write blog posts that can be seen by hundreds of thousands of readers.

It's free and it only takes a minute!

Already a Scientific Blogging member?

Sign In Now

Banner
By Randy Borum | May 9th 2009 12:00 AM | 2 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
.

More Social/Behavioral Science & Security articles

All

About Randy Borum

Dr. Randy Borum is Professor in the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences at the University of South Florida, where he holds a joint appointment the College of Public Health.

He recently... Full Bio

Throughout the post-industrial era, science and technology have been central  to understanding both global security threats and possible solutions. Within the US and across the globe, major scientific organizations have developed Committees and working groups to integrate science with security policy, however, those efforts have focused almost exclusively on physical/life sciences and been applied predominantly to WMD-related threats.

Although high-tech and catastrophic issues maintain their relevance, the contemporary global security environment has increasingly diffused, evolved in complexity, and become more “human.”

The concept of “national security” for the US and of “global security” for the international community have necessarily broadened to adapt to the demands of this new environment.  Security no longer centers on a static tension between two large state superpowers.  

It must now concern itself with weak and corrupt governments, not just strong ones. trendsviolentconflict-20081

It must contend with non-state actors and violent extremists who pose a more grave and present danger than any single nation.

It must struggle with the fact that genocide and insurgencies are more prominent and more likely than conventional military standoffs, and that transnational criminal enterprises – from drugs to human trafficking – are deeply interconnected with social, economic and political conflicts.

It must confront and account for the reality that  global climate change, energy crises, shortages of potable water, poverty and hunger threaten lives and challenge development. And it must appreciate that this diverse array of threats is dynamic and transactive.

The social and behavioral sciences offer theories and findings that might enhance our understanding of security issues, but they also offer a method of systematic inquiry to develop new knowledge. 

A Report from the National Research Council (2002) suggests, for example, :

With regard to security concerns, the social sciences could focus on the precise nature of current “threats” to national and global security, including investigations of the culture of terrorist groups and the structure of terrorist networks. In addition, the social sciences could inform us about the difference between Cold War approaches and strategies for coping with biological threats, terrorist attacks, and stateless violence.

There are many ways in which the study of human behavior – at individual and collective levels – can inform policy and provide a platform for a more empirically-informed multidisicplinary science of national and global security. 

It is in the long-term interest of the U.S. and the international community to encourage social/behavioral scientists to engage with each other around global security issues and to connect them with the security enterprise. 

Accordingly, this blog is designed to serve as a resource for social/behavioral scientists interested in security issues and for security professionals interested in what science has to say about human behavior.



Comments

Hank's picture
How will you take what is known and extrapolate it out to what might happen (people being part random in their actions) with some real accuracy (so it isn't like economics, where everyone claims to have anticipated what was going to happen after it did)?  Is there a Taguchi method where you are doing an impact analysis and assigning probabilities?

This sounds like interesting stuff.  I have certainly never seen it anywhere.

On your crises - "climate change, energy crises, shortages of potable water, poverty and hunger" - there's actually only one; energy.   98% of the world's water is not potable but we can provide as much as we want with clean energy.  Ditto with food.   We can't do much about solving poverty, since that is subjective, but eliminating energy issues is a start.

rborum's picture

Hank - Thank you for your thoughtful comments and questions.  Specifically, you posed how one might take what is known and extrapolate it out to what might happen with some real accuracy.  I certainly appreciate the philosophical differences between social/ behavioral sciences and life and physical sciences.  Behavioral forecasts are certainly one application of social science, though certainly not the only one.  How best to extrapolate from the known to the unknown in social science is, of course a matter of some debate.  I would say that most of the current government research resources to understand and predict human behavior (at least for security and defense purpose) are invested in computational modeling.  I am not a computer scientist, and I have some reservations about he degree of positivism embedded in tools that are to be used for applied purposes or for knowledge development, but the modeling certainly has a role.  But I also believe there is plenty of room for systematic social scientific inquiry in the broad  interstitial space between single case studies and quantified algorithms.  While I do not believe that social/behavioral sciences have the answers to all the world's security challenges (if only the governments would listen), I do think they offer theories that might guide policy-related thinking, possibly some relevant empirical observations, and most certainly a systematic approach to knowledge development moving forward.  It seems that often the unexamined assumptions that "seemed like a good idea at the time" are the ones that lead us astray.  I am hopeful that social science might help us to narrow our trial and error approach to managing the human elements of armed conflict and threats to global security.  


Add a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <sup> <sub> <a> <em> <strong> <center> <cite> <code> <TH><ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <br> <p> <blockquote> <strike> <object> <param> <embed> <del> <pre> <b> <i> <table> <tbody> <div> <tr> <td> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr> <iframe>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA
If you register, you will never be bothered to prove you are human again. And you get a real editor toolbar to use instead of this HTML thing that wards off spam bots.