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Relatively high standards of human security can be anticipated in most Western jurisdictions. However, differentials between such standards and those prevailing elsewhere (including in Middle Eastern and North African jurisdictions) encourage a form of arbitrage whereby terrorism suspects together with their human security attributes are exported to the countries with lesser standards. This traffic in terrorism suspects can be achieved by an ever-expanding list of mechanisms, including (1) the choice of jurisdiction, most starkly illustrated by the creation of the Guantanamo regime; (2) rendition, including regular deportation and extradition (perhaps with assurances) or irregular and often illegal formats; (3) denial of nationality and even deprivation of conferred citizenship; and (4) exclusion from territory not only of foreigners who seek asylum or a more temporary safe site from which to voice opinions but also of citizens. Analysis of these measures suggests a number of themes to be explored, such as the centrality of place and movement within counter-terrorism and the continued prevalence of executive measures within counter-terrorism, despite a rhetorical emphasis upon criminalisation. The adaptation of immigration-type measures to aliens and citizens has had many implications for human security and has often traduced its universality as a value regardless of geographical place or personal profile.

Echoing the call recently made by Ed and Dana Luck and building on a research project triggered several years ago by Siba Grovogui’s postcolonial critique of the concept of responsibility to protect (R2P), this article explores the significance of what may be labeled individual R2P. It argues that acknowledging individual R2P as part of the doctrine not only highlights the role that a heretofore underappreciated layer of actors can and does play to protect individuals from some of the worst crimes. At the theoretical level, it also has the potential to mitigate some of the R2P doctrine’s main ambiguities, while in real life, acknowledging individual R2P does, without exonerating institutional actors from their obvious responsibilities, recognize at the very least the right of people of conscience, worldwide, to take matters in their own hands even in the worst cases of international paralysis.

Any collective effort to address the globalisation of insecurity requires a new theory of how insecurity arises and proliferates, which in turn should influence the design of new systems of prevention, justice, and global governance designed to mitigate grave insecurities and violations of rights. This chapter connects a distinctive analytical and normative approach, informed by cosmopolitan theory, to a broad account of how global security should be governed and reformed. Analytically, Security Cosmopolitanism argues that serious insecurities – whether they be around armed conflict, proliferation, climate change, environmental degradation, human rights violations, human displacement, or terrorism – are less the product of specific actors or events than systems and processes. Given their complex and often anonymous nature, this challenges efforts to attribute responsibility and organise coordinated collective responses. Normatively, Security Cosmopolitanism argues that every state, community, and person has an equal right to security and sets out a global ethics that is committed to deep human security and the repair and preservation of global ecosystems, that considers the global and future consequences of security actions, and that assumes a profound responsibility for the security of future generations. The chapter concludes by setting out cosmopolitan ends and practices for a more integrated, holistic, and just system of global security governance.

Cosmopolitans often argue that the international community has a humanitarian responsibility to intervene militarily in order to protect vulnerable individuals from violent threats and to pursue the establishment of a condition of cosmopolitan justice based on the notion of a ‘global rule of law’. The purpose of this article is to argue that many of these cosmopolitan claims are incomplete and untenable on cosmopolitan grounds because they ignore the systemic and chronic structural factors that underwrite the root causes of these humanitarian threats. By way of examining cosmopolitan arguments for humanitarian military intervention and how systemic problems are further ignored in iterations of the Responsibility to Protect, this article suggests that many contemporary cosmopolitan arguments are guilty of focusing too narrowly on justifying a responsibility to respond to the symptoms of crisis versus demanding a similarly robust justification for a responsibility to alleviate persistent structural causes. Although this article recognizes that immediate principles of humanitarian intervention will, at times, be necessary, the article seeks to draw attention to what we are calling principles of Jus ante Bellum (right before war) and to stress that current cosmopolitan arguments about humanitarian intervention will remain insufficient without the incorporation of robust principles of distributive global justice that can provide secure foundations for a more thoroughgoing cosmopolitan condition of public right.

Introduction: Imagining Ethical Security Studies, Jonna Nyman and Anthony Burke Part I: Foundations of Ethical Security 1. Security: Critique, Analysis and Ethics, Vivienne Jabri 2. Whose Security? Ethics and the Referent, Matt McDonald 3. World Security: Toward a 'Local' Research Agenda, Ali Bilgic 4. Posthuman Security/Ethics, Audra Mitchell Part II: Visions and Debate 5. The Promise of Theories of Just Securitization, Rita Floyd 6. Security, Emancipation and the Ethics of Vulnerability, Joao Nunes 7. The Promise and Dangers of Human Security, Annick Wibben 8. Feminist Care Ethics and Everyday Insecurities, Fiona Robinson 9. Pragmatism, Practice and the Value of Security, Jonna Nyman 10. The Ethical Sources of Security Cosmopolitanism, Anthony Burke 11. Ethics and Ontological Security, Christopher Browning 12. War, Ethics and the Individual, Helen Dexter 13. The Decolonial Option: Toward an Ethic of Self-Securing, Priya Chacko 14. Ethical Security Studies: Activism, Resistance and Security, Chris Rossdale Conclusion: Security as Ethics: An Orthogonal Rotation from Egoism to Compassion

This chapter surveys the political and intellectual landscape within which this book’s exploration of the cosmopolitan military is situated. The post-Cold War period and the continued advance of globalisation have provided significant openings for a rethinking of political community, the boundaries of moral responsibility and the ways in which the world’s most vulnerable human beings might be protected from harm. The chapter argues that these openings have led to the development of new ideas about community, security, moral responsibility and the role of the military, but also pose some challenging questions. Intellectually, a plethora of different conceptualisations of cosmopolitanism have emerged, alongside debates on ethical commitments in foreign policy and on how security is conceptualised and for whom. Corresponding policy developments have also reflected these reconsiderations of moral community and an increasingly human-centred diplomatic discourse. The concept of human security has sought to reframe security debates with individual human beings, rather than states, as key security referents. In doing so, a more complex security environment is revealed, highlighting the latent threats overlooked in traditional security discourse. Similarly, debates on humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) opened up a discussion on whether we have responsibilities to protect vulnerable non-citizens from large-scale human rights violations.

As the previous chapter argues, despite considerable apparent concern for the wellbeing of vulnerable non-citizens and distant strangers in Western foreign policy, far too little attention has been dedicated to the techniques by which militaries might protect civilians and promote human security. In particular, there remains an implicit assumption within the debate on humanitarian intervention that warfighting skills might usefully support these activities. This chapter addresses this impasse, outlining a possible mode of military action more in keeping with cosmopolitan ethics. One of the principal difficulties revealed during the War on Terror was a distinct lack of reflection on how commitments to the wellbeing of the Iraqi and Afghan populations could be reconciled with the use of warfighting and therapeutic intervention. A lack of reflection on the congruence of warfighting with cosmopolitan-like claims resulted in both a breakdown in the moral solidarity required in cosmopolitan-minded operations and a failure to consider the day-to-day experience of military operations on local populations, the intended beneficiaries of the intervention.

As Chapter One suggests, the last two decades have been an important period for the translation of cosmopolitan ethical commitments into the practice of foreign policy. Debates on humanitarian intervention, the R2P and human security have provided openings for practical expressions of transborder moral solidarity. Despite this apparent cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan ethics and ideas about human security have experienced a difficult encounter with liberal interventionism and the War on Terror in the early 21st century. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2011 Libya Intervention, illustrated the ways in which ethical discourses, similar in tone to cosmopolitanism, were deployed to support a trend of armed intervention by Western states. Cosmopolitanism, offensive liberalism and the War on Terror project are not a ‘joint enterprise’. However, emancipation, transborder moral solidarity, human rights protection and the language of human security, which are all significant concerns for cosmopolitans, have been invoked repeatedly as justification for warfighting operations and counterinsur-gency programmes. Both practices sit awkwardly with cosmopolitan security commitments.

This book has so far explored the increasingly close, and sometimes problematic, connections between military practice and the language of cosmopolitanism in the post-Cold War world. The question the book has sought to address is how cosmopolitanism might translate into the ways militaries perform civilian protection and human security-related roles. The final section of this book moves on to explore the possible locations of a future cosmopolitan military. This chapter examines the UN as one such possible location. Since its creation, the UN has been instrumental in collective efforts to prevent political violence and protect human rights. More recently, the vision of the organisation has moved beyond the prevention of inter-state aggression, to focus on the protection of civilians (see United Nations, 2004). The first section of this chapter examines the presence of cosmopolitan ethics within the ethos of the UN. Although an organisation of states, the UN is also linked to an explicitly cosmopolitan vision, reflected initially in the reference to ‘we the peoples of the United Nations’ in its Charter and perhaps best manifested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Major contributions to international development, the creation of the human security concept and the endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), continue to place the UN at the forefront of a nascent cosmopolitan imagination.