Pakistani Perspectives on International Security

Abstract

Security perceptions of most nations are directly linked with the real or perceived threats confronting them. Threat is a geopolitical environmental condition for which the price and penalty will have to be paid by the target state if it fails to build its own effective warding-off mechanism. To obviate real or perceived threats, nations seek power (economic, political and military). Power can lead to prosperity, and prosperity may generate more power. This process is continuous under the operative international political system, primarily because it breeds insecurities and is unable to enhance security for all. Given its inability to evolve an effective collective security arrangement, coupled with operative economic and power disparities and inequalities, the system has left nations with no option but to rely upon the age-old principle of self-help. Thus, One witnesses the phenomenon in which almost all nations are constantly striving to create that kind of power equilibrium-disequilibrium which affords them maximum security. Periodic changes in equilibrium-disequilibrium directly affect the security perceptions of nations.