I'm in Prague speaking at a NATO conference on what they call in the business 'open standards for resilience'. For those of us not up to speed with the jargon, that's all about the need for non-state actors to do their bit for national resilience (private sector, ngos, communities, citizens, and the like). As I pointed out in my presentation this afternoon, though, it's exactly this kind of jargon that hampers the involvement of non-state actors who haven't grown up in the closeted surroundings of the security community.

Anyway, that's a mere detail....

One of the really interesting questions on which I've been pondering relates to trust, which is so key to building effective relationships between state and non-state actors on security. There's a whole lot of trust within the security community, largely because people share a similar world view and set of values.

But will trust be so easy to forge as we try to bring together actors with different sets of interests and values? And what will the impact be of increasingly diverse societies?

The answer being posited by some participants is that we must search for common values which will see us through. But I'm not so sure - either that this is possible, or in fact desirable. Perhaps there will be more and more things that we agree to disagree on, while we forge pragmatic partnerships on specific issues.

There is certainly much more to ponder, and these are certainly questions that we need to keep asking through our work on identity.

New Comment

Your Name

Your Email

Comment

Please type the word 'human'