1. Components of Traditional Security 

• Military Threats: In the traditional conception of security, the greatest danger to a country is from military threats. The source of this danger is another country which by threatening military action endangers the core values of sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.
• Deterrance Defence: In responding to the threat of war, a government has three basic choices: to surrender; to prevent the other side from attacking by promising to raise the costs of war to an unacceptable level; and to defend itself when war breaks out to deny the attacking country its objectives and to turn back or defeat the attacking forces altogether. Governments may choose to surrender when confronted by war, but they will not advertise this as the policy of the country. Therefore, security policy is concerned with preventing war, which is called deterrence, and with limiting or ending war, which is called defence
• Balance of Power: Traditional security policy has a third component called the balance of power. When countries look around them, they see that some countries are bigger and stronger. This is a clue to who might be a threat in the future. For instance, a neighbouring country may not say it is preparing for an attack. There may be no obvious reason for the attack. But the fact that this country is very powerful is a sign that at some point in the future, it may choose to be aggressive. Governments are, therefore, very sensitive to the balance of power between their country and other countries A good part of maintaining a balance of power is to build up one’s military power, although economic and technological power are also important since they are the basis for military power.
• Alliance Building: The fourth and related component of traditional security policy is alliance building. An alliance is a coalition of states that coordinate their actions to deter or defend against military attack. Most alliances are formalised in written treaties and are based on a fairly clear identification of who constitutes the threat. Countries form alliances to increase their effective power relative to another country or alliance. Alliances are based on national interests and can change when national interests change. For example, the US backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s but later attacked them when Al Qaeda a group of Islamic militants led by Osama bin Laden launched terrorist strikes against America on 11 September 2001. In the traditional view of security, most threats to a country’s security come from outside its borders

2. Traditional Notions Internal

• The reason it is not given so much importance is that after the Second World War it seemed that, for the most powerful countries on earth, internal security was more or less assured.
• We said earlier that it was after 1945, that the US and the Soviet Union appeared to be united and could expect peace within their borders. Most of the European countries, particularly the powerful Western European countries, faced no serious threats from groups or communities living within those borders. Therefore, these countries focused primarily on threats from outside their borders.
• What were the external threats facing these powerful countries As the colonies became free from the late 1940s onwards, their security concerns were often similar to that of the European powers. Some of the newly independent countries, like the European powers, became members of the Cold War alliances. They, therefore, had to worry about the Cold War becoming a hot war and dragging them into hostilities — against neighbours who might have joined the other side in the Cold War, against the leaders of the alliances (the United States or the Soviet Union), or any of the other partners of the US and Soviet Union.
• The new countries faced the prospect of military conflict with neighbouring countries. For another, they had to worry about internal military conflict. These countries faced threats not only from outside their borders, mostly from neighbours, but also from within. Many newly independent countries came to fear their neighbours even more than they feared the US-Soviet Union or the former colonial powers.
• They quarrelled over borders and territories or control of people and populations or all of them internally, the new states worried about threats from separatist movements which wanted to form independent countries. Sometimes, the external and internal threats merge. A neighbour might help or instigate an internal separatist.

3. Traditional Security and Cooperation 

• It is now an almost universally accepted view that countries should only go to war for the right reasons, primarily self-defence or to protect other people from genocide. War must also be limited in terms of the means that are used. Armies must avoid killing or hurting noncombatants as well as unarmed and surrendering combatants
• Overall, traditional conceptions of security are principally concerned with the use, or threat of use, of military force. In traditional security, force is both the principal threat to security and the principal means of achieving security.
• Traditional views of security do not rule out other forms of cooperation as well. The most important of these are disarmament, arms control, and confidence building.
• Disarmament requires all states to give up certain kinds of weapons. For example, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) banned the production and possession of these weapons. More than 155 states acceded to the BWC and 181 states acceded to the CWC.
• Both conventions included all the great powers.
• Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons. The Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972 tried to stop the United States and Soviet Union from using ballistic missiles as a defensive shield to launch a nuclear attack.
• The US and Soviet Union signed several other arms control treaties including the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty II or SALT II and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
• The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 was an arms control treaty in the sense that it regulated the acquisition of nuclear weapons: those countries that had tested and manufactured nuclear weapons before 1967 were allowed to keep their weapons; and those that had not done so were to give up the right to acquire them. The NPT did not abolish nuclear weapons; rather, it limited the number of countries that could have them.
• Confidence Building:  Traditional security also accepts confidence building as a means of avoiding violence. Confidence building is a process in which countries share ideas and information with their rivals. They tell each other about their military intentions and, up to a point, their military plans. This is a way of demonstrating that they are not planning a surprise attack. They also tell each other about the kind of forces they possess, and they may share information on where those forces are deployed. In short, confidence building is a process designed to ensure that rivals do not go to war through misunderstanding or misperception.

4. Non-Traditional Notions

• They question the other three elements of security what is being secured, from what kind of threats and the approach to security.
• When we say referent we mean ‘Security for who?’ In the traditional security conception, the referent is the state with its territory and governing institutions. In the non-traditional conceptions, the referent is expanded. When we ask ‘Security for who?’ proponents of nontraditional security reply ‘Not just the state but also individuals or communities or indeed all of humankind’. Non-traditional views of security have been called ‘human security’ or ‘global Security
• Human security is about the protection of people more than the protection of states All proponents of human security agree that its primary goal is the protection of individuals. However, there are differences about precisely what threats individuals should be protected from. Proponents of the ‘narrow’ concept of human security focus on violent threats to individuals or, as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan puts it, “the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence”. Proponents of the ‘broad’ concept of human security argue that the threat agenda should include hunger, disease and natural disasters because these kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined. Human security policy, they argue, should protect people from these threats as well as from violence. In its broadest formulation, the human security agenda also encompasses economic security and ‘threats to human dignity’. Put differently, the broadest formulation stresses what has been called ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’, respectively.
• The idea of global security emerged in the 1990s in response to the global nature of threats such as global warming, international terrorism, and health epidemics like AIDS bird flu and so on. No country can resolve these problems alone. And, in some situations, one country may have to disproportionately bear the brunt of a global problem such as environmental degradation. For example, due to global warming, a sea level rise of 1.5–2.0 meters would flood 20 per cent of Bangladesh, inundate most of the Maldives, and threaten nearly half the population of Thailand. Since these problems are global, international cooperation is vital, even though it is difficult to achieve.

5. New Sources of Threats

Terrorism refers to political violence that targets civilians deliberately and indiscriminately. International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country.

• Terrorist groups seek to change a political context or condition that they do not like by force or threat of force.
• Civilian targets are usually chosen to terrorise the public and to use the unhappiness of the public as a weapon against national governments or other parties in conflict. The classic cases of terrorism involve hijacking planes or planting bombs in trains, cafes, and markets.

Human rights have come to be classified into three types.

• The first type is political rights such as freedom of speech and assembly.
• The second type is economic and social rights.
• The third type is the rights of colonised people or ethnic and indigenous minorities.
• While there is broad agreement on this classification, there is no agreement on which set of rights should be considered as universal human rights, nor what the international community should do when rights are being violated.
• Since the 1990s, developments such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda, and the Indonesian military’s killing of people in East Timor have led to a debate on whether or not the UN should intervene to stop human rights abuses.
• some argue that the UN Charter empowers the international community to take up arms in defence of human rights. Others argue that the national interests of the powerful states will determine which instances of human rights violations the human rights violations the UN will act upon. 

Global poverty is another source of insecurity population growth occurs in just six countries—India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia

• Among the world’s poorest countries, population is expected to triple in the next 50 years, whereas many rich countries will see population shrinkage in that period.
• High per capita income and low population growth make rich states or rich social groups get richer, whereas low incomes and high population growth reinforce each other to make poor states and poor groups get poorer.
• Poverty in the South has also led to large-scale migration to seek a better life, especially better economic opportunities, in the North. This has created international political friction. International law and norms make a distinction between migrants (those who voluntarily leave their home countries) and refugees (those who flee from war, natural disaster or political persecution).
• States are generally supposed to accept refugees, but they do not have to accept migrants. While refugees leave their country of origin, people who have fled their homes but remain within national borders are called ‘internally displaced people’. Kashmiri Pandits who fled the violence in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s are an example of an internally displaced community

Health epidemics such as HIV-AIDS, bird flu, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have rapidly spread across countries through migration, business, tourism and military operations.

• In North America and other industrialised countries, new drug therapies dramatically lowered the death rate from AIDS in the late 1990s. But these treatments were too expensive to help poor regions like Africa where it has proved to be a major factor in driving the region backward into deeper poverty.
• Other new and poorly understood diseases such as ebola virus, hantavirus, and hepatitis C have emerged, while old diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever and cholera have mutated into drug-resistant forms that are difficult to treat. Epidemics among animals have major economic effects. Since the late 1990s, Britain has lost billions of dollars.
• Expansion of the concept of security does not mean that we can include any kind of disease or distress in the ambit of security. If we do that, the concept of security stands to lose its coherence
• Everything could become a security issue. To qualify for income during an outbreak of the mad cow disease, and bird flu shut down supplies of poultry shut down supplies of poultry exports from several Asian countries as a security problem, therefore, an issue must share a minimum common criterion, say, of threatening the very existence of the referent (a state or group of people) though the precise nature of this threat may be different. For example, the Maldives may feel threatened by global warming because a big part of its territory may be submerged by the rising sea level, whereas for countries in Southern Africa, HIV-AIDS poses a serious threat as one in six adults has the disease (one in three for Botswana, the worst case).
• In 1994, the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda faced a threat to its existence as nearly five lakh of its people were killed by the rival Hutu tribe in a matter of weeks. This shows that non-traditional conceptions of security, like traditional conceptions of security, vary according to local contexts.

6. Cooperative Security

• Dealing with many of these nontraditional threats to security requires cooperation rather than military confrontation. Far more effective is to devise strategies that involve international cooperation.
• Cooperation may be bilateral (i.e. between any two countries), regional, continental, or global. It would all depend on the nature of the threat and the willingness and ability of countries to respond.
• Cooperative security may also involve a variety of other players, both international and national—international organisations (the UN, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the IMF etc.), nongovernmental organizations (Amnesty International, the Red Cross, private foundations and charities, churches and religious organisations, trade unions, associations, social and development organisations), businesses and corporations, and great personalities (e.g. Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela Cooperative.
• security may involve the use of force as a last resort.

7. India's Security Strategy

• India has faced traditional (military) and non-traditional threats to its security that have emerged from within as well as outside its borders. Its security strategy has four broad components, which have been used in a varying combination from time to time.
• The first component was strengthening its military capabilities because India has been involved in conflicts with its neighbours — Pakistan in 1947–48, 1965, 1971 and 1999; and China in 1962. Since it is surrounded by nuclear-armed countries in the South Asian region, India’s decision to conduct nuclear tests in 1998 was justified by the Indian government in terms of safeguarding national security. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974.
• The second component of India’s security strategy has been to strengthen international norms and international institutions to protect its security interests. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, supported the cause of Asian solidarity, decolonisation, disarmament, and the UN as a forum in which international conflicts could be settled. India also took initiatives, to bring about a universal and non-discriminatory non-proliferation regime in which all countries would have the same rights and obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical).
• It argued for an equitable New International Economic Order (NIEO). Most importantly, it used non-alignment to help carve out an area of peace outside the bloc politics of the two superpowers. India joined 160 countries that have signed and ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which provides a roadmap for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases to check global warming. Indian troops have been sent abroad on UN peacekeeping missions in support of cooperative security initiatives.
• The third component of the Indian security strategy is geared toward challenges within the country. Several militant groups from areas such as Nagaland, Mizoram, Punjab, and Kashmir among others have, from time to time, sought to break away from India. India has tried to preserve national unity by adopting a democratic political system, which allows different communities and groups of people to freely articulate their grievances and share political power towards meeting security.
• Finally, there has been an attempt in India to develop its economy in a way that the vast mass of citizens are lifted out of poverty and misery and huge economic inequalities are not allowed to exist
• There is pressure on the democratically elected governments to combine economic growth with human development. Thus democracy is not just a political ideal; a democratic government is also a way to provide greater security.