Whose Knowledge on Security Matters?

Introduction

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has brought security back on the political agenda of most Europeans. Of course, Estonians have been permanently aware of this threat and tried to warn their Western allies for decades. Still, even in the light of the invasion, Western powers did not listen to their Eastern allies to understand what lies at the bottom of it but defaulted to acontextual and simplified explanations such as violent renegotiations of zones of interest. It is this “Westsplaining” that Tallinn University’s new Central Eastern European Security Hub (CEEShub) is trying to combat.

It aims at amplifying the voices of Central and Eastern Europeans especially when it comes to their security. However, much too often the region is only concerned with traditional or military security threats. Also here, Russian aggression has helped in widening the concept of security which now also firmly includes hybrid threats such as energy and misinformation. But this is not where the widening should stop. We need to also consider human – e.g., environmental, societal and economic –  security issues to comprehensively understand what is at stake.

Lastly, the CEEShub stresses the need for pluriversal perspectives on peace and security. Rather than making a case for one single conceptualisation of security we are making a case for both contextual and connected conceptualisations of security. Additionally, we are strongly arguing against the substitution of the hegemonic Western security conceptualization with an Eastern one. Instead, we are arguing for a much more complex setting in which regional and historical contextualization creates a plurality of approaches to peace and security.

Centering CEE voices

One key lesson that the Russian war in Ukraine has taught us is that local and regional voices matter in knowing security. In this sense, two central questions that will guide our research are whose security matters and who can speak security in world politics. Or in other words we are interested in questions about the politics of knowledge production – whose security expertise has currency and whose is ignored. For instance, Tereza Hendl, Olga Burlyuk, Mila O’Sullivan and Aizda Arystanbek^[1] argue that the binary approach to the world – “the West and Russia” or alternatively “NATO and Russia” denies agency to actors outside of these binaries, and/or sitting at the peripheries of them like Ukraine. Their observations are pointing to the influence of  eurocentrism in the region and the effects of this in the context of the war in Ukraine.

This dominance of one worldview is best captured by relying on the phenomenon of epistemic injustice^[2]. This notion has been most comprehensively developed by postcolonial authors, such as Edward Said^[3] and many others, to understand the silencing and systematic exclusion of knowledge and voices from the global south. From scholars who centre on epistemic justice, we can learn that epistemic agency is not equally distributed in the world, and we can see that CEE voices and knowledge suffer from similar injustices. Similarly to why Global South voices have been ignored, CEE scholars note that CEE voices are muted, silenced or spoken over due to “the ongoing peripheralization and racialization of the ‘East’ Europe” (O’Sullivan and Krulišová 2023). Decolonial scholars^[4] have been saying for a while, that epistemic silencing goes hand in hand with a denial of common humanity. One strategy to combat this is to deprovincialize CEE knowledge, legitimize their knowledge systems and expertise and make them a legitimate place from which to interpret the world.

Centring CEE security expertise would mean a critical appraisal of how we learn about security issues in the region, thus we should make an effort to listen to diverse security expertise on/from the region. With the start of the war, it became apparent how diverse pundits drowned out Ukrainian and/or CEE voices and offered rationales for what went wrong. As many have noted^[5] the countries in the CEE region are often related to as “problematic children of Europe”. On the other hand, we see that the most dominant frames of reference for conceptualizing security are theories focused on great powers and their interests (e.g. realism and its variants) which explicitly state that small states (and their expertise) do not matter in world politics.

Widening CEE security concepts

This is not to romanticise knowledge from the East, as many CEE voices have a narrow understanding of security. This is well displayed in the present political discourse of the region on security, which stresses the need for tanks and bullets and subsequently sees defense budgets balloon. This narrow interpretation sees security as a simple problem that has clear answers, but in reality, the notion is much more complex and messy.

In our work, we are engaged in widening this security conceptualization via concepts of human and critical security. Again, human security reminds us that threats not only come in the form of competing militaries but can also be of an economic, societal, political or environmental nature. Critical security studies start from the questions of how we ended up with a particular understanding of security, which purposes that serves and whose security we value. Where narrow interventions view the world in essentialist terms, meaning that they do not have nuanced understandings of states and societies, we are stressing the need for intersectional engagement that lays open power (and security) imbalances that impact people very differently.

A more critical understanding of security threats reveals the interconnections of security threats that we usually do not connect. For example, the War in Ukraine is not only a military security threat to the Ukrainian people but also impacts their economic and environmental security when we consider the wide-ranging destruction of infrastructure and nature. Moreover, the war impacts the environmental security of all of us as Russia’s imperialist endeavour results in enormous CO2 emissions both on the battlefield but also in the military-industrial complex. Even more complex – and important to Estonia – the War in Ukraine has halted the Russian gas supply to Europe, but it also significantly lowered the wood imports from Russia into Estonia. This in turn led to an increase in Estonia’s felling volumes and threatens ecosystems, long-term resource-planning, and exacerbates the environmental crisis on many levels.

Thinking of security in much more complex and relational ways can also illustrate deep connections between security threats. For example, the tepid reactions to Russia’s military conduct in both Chechnya (2nd Russian-Chechen War 1999-2009) and Syria (Russia launched a still on-going military intervention in 2015) have created the grounds for impunity. In both cases Russia committed (and still commits) manifold crimes against humanity and war crimes ranging from intentionally targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and scorched earth tactics – both of which we observe now in Russia’s war in Ukraine. These actions were enabled by an international order that did not heed to scientists’ calls^[6] for demilitarising world politics.

Therefore the impunity of Russia’s actions in the past, and the connected permissive rampant militarism of the present, have made the war crimes of today possible.^[7] In light of this we are arguing that our security understandings need to relate to wider regional and global understandings of security. We cannot imagine our security in a disconnected and limited way. Of course that does not entail that everything is centered all the time, but we need to understand that our security is connected to various other contexts and issues.

Pluriversal CEE Security

Thus, as we argue, the security expertise needs to be plural: we need to listen to diverse security experts from/on the CEE. This means that we go beyond the policymakers and policy elite and also center civil society perspectives in the plural. The label critically relational becomes especially relevant here, when we detail who in CEE we listen to and, furthermore, which worlds become possible.^[8] This is needed so we carefully consider whose security is centered and whose insecurities remain out of our conceptualisation.

The concepts pluriverse and pluriversal are best described, as Arturo Escobar suggests^[9], by Zapatistas’ understanding of a world in which many worlds might fit. In fact, they carry the idea that universality and, more harmfully, eurocentrism have greatly narrowed our understanding of the world and given epistemic agency to a select few. Whereas the idea of pluriversal is to create space for a multiplicity of understandings. Further, the reason why pluriversality goes further than other onto-epistemological perspectives is that it makes our environment part of the conversation and fosters a view on security that is always multiple rather than singular. In this way, as we started this article, the point is not to substitute one imaginary with another but to theorize and think from multiple places and to make visible the politics in doing so.^[10]

This means that we need to stay attentive to security experiences of a wider set of people that goes well beyond the established actors. We need to center more marginalised voices but in a way that does not homogenize and/or diminish the complexity of their roles (e.g. the use of the category “women and children” as solely referring to victims and/or valorising or platforming only those women’s stories who take part of the traditional defence apparatus).

Further, we cannot allow one crisis event (such as the War in Ukraine) to erode past knowledge and experience of how we have been discussing security. There are always many contextual layers present, rich with invaluable knowledge, that we have learned from in the past. But what we see is that with each rupture of violence, conflict and war, there is a tendency to turn to hawkish conceptualisations of security that valorise brute force, and thus, more traditional conceptualizations of security and forget about what else also matters. Yet, the growing evidence in policy spheres (e.g. UN reports^[11]) and academic literature tends to suggest that to avoid conflicts and wars and the deepening of the climate crisis, we need to focus on preventing violence rather than reacting to violence. This matches with what many feminist and other critical security scholars have underlined for a long time now that we need to deal with militarism and other similarly violent structures (racial capitalism, patriarchy) in peace-time so that we can actually start building the ground for less wars and conflicts by creating societies and an international system that supports dignified life rather than destroy it.^[12]

This article appeared in a shortened version and in Estonian in SIRP.