Strategic Challenges

Security, Conflict and Justice

Conflicts between states have become less frequent, however threats to the security of individuals, communities and states remain. Territorial and ideological conflicts are overlain by struggles about identity and justice which have led to the break up of states and violence between and across countries and regions.

Competition over resources, coupled with the recession and increasing scarcity of water, energy and food, has the potential to trigger new forms of conflict. New technologies offer the promise of preventing and mitigating insecurity, but can also enable criminal activity. There is nothing predetermined about these multi-dimensional and multi-level threats to security. To understand how and why potential security threats result in real harm, and what interventions are most likely to improve threat prediction and avoid, reduce and manage risks, is an urgent task for the social sciences.

Under the New Security Challenges programme, the ESRC has been examining the changing nature of security and risk, for example funding research on understanding the causes and processes of radicalisation and violence in contemporary society. We will build upon this to seek a greater understanding of the nature and causes of insecurity, the origins and dynamics of conflict, and the role of social justice, allowing us to develop better strategies for resolving conflicts and promoting security.

Security, conflict and justice are inherently linked. Security is a broad concept, operating at multiple levels from the individual to global, and requires coherent action across a wide range of issues. The challenge is about understanding the causes of insecurity, including criminal and terrorist activity, and developing effective means for promoting security, addressing vulnerabilities and encouraging resilience. Research will explore the contemporary drivers of insecurity; why competition sometimes develops into violent conflict; the nature of contemporary conflicts, how they might be resolved and the effects mitigated; and how social injustice perpetuates insecurities. It explores how notions of self, community rights, ethics and competing ideas of justice can be incorporated into new ways of predicting, managing and avoiding insecurity. These are demanding research challenges which will require novel interdisciplinary approaches, complementing traditional security studies with new perspectives on issues such as the ethics and the engineering of new security technologies. The research should generate quantitative and qualitative data as well as outputs of scholarly, economic, social and policy value. The challenges include:

• How significant challenges such as poverty, environmental change, technological and demographic trends, and the economic downturn affect security
• Understanding how personal and group behaviours affect security and conflict responses, and how local conflicts in particular communities can spread and have broader consequences
• Understanding why social injustice triggers largely non-violent responses in some settings and more violent responses in others
• How, why and when security and justice strategies are likely to succeed or fail
• Reducing insecurity through improved resilience in communities and in the public and private sectors, including protection of critical infrastructure
• Exploration of the changing patterns of conflicts and how they might be prevented and resolved and their effects contained.

We will address this agenda through the funding of high quality, high impact, independent research with development of theory, data and methods. Through the cross-council Global Uncertainties: Security for All in a Changing World programme, which is led by the ESRC, we will take this work forward in partnership with all other Research Councils, government departments, and the TSB. This effort will be underpinned by investments to build a new generation of researchers with interdisciplinary skills, as well as exploiting the skills and knowledge of existing scholars to engage with policymakers and other users of research. We are engaging in close collaboration between ESRC challenges for social science, other RCUK programmes, such as the Living with Environmental Change programme, and international research.

This challenge has links with all six of the other challenges, for example with and in terms of understanding emerging economic and environmental threats to security, and with and in terms of developing and achieving acceptable social and technological solutions to improve security for all.

Achievements 2005-2008

• Funded research with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office to better understand radicalisation and violence 
• Supported research into new security challenges covering a wide range of areas, from conflict in cities, the globalisation of private security, the role of military force in the security of civil society through to the media and psychological dimensions of human security.

Priorities for 2009-2014

By 2014 the ESRC will have:

• Developed and funded in partnership with other stakeholders a portfolio of high impact, interdisciplinary research contributing to UK security objectives, including new initiatives on food, water and energy security
• Helped to build a stronger, more integrated interdisciplinary security research community, and accelerated the co-ordinated pull-through of research outputs into policy, practice and commercialisation through its leadership of the RCUK Global Uncertainties programme
• Funded research with national and international partners on potential reforms of international institutions, and how new, or radically reformed, arrangements for multi-level governance can address the competing demands from states, religious, ideological or national movements, and other actors
• Identified and addressed key gaps in social science data resources and capacity to underpin work on security, conflict and justice.