Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1698754312801.pdf (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines)
GLOBAL INSECURITY [Type the document title] by Dr.

The Hon.

Ralph E. Gonsalves Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines [Lecture presented to the University College of Cayman Islands as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series on Thursday, June 16, 2016 at ] CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY Office of the Prime Minister Kingstown St. Vincent and the Grenadines June 16, 2016 GLOBAL INSECURITY BY DR.

THE HON.

RALPH E. GONSALVES PRIME MINISTER OF ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES [FORMAL GREETINGS!]
INTRODUCTION Global insecurity is a subject which demands a realistic, not fanciful or normative, assessment.

Realism on this matter requires a sober assemblage of the facts; truth emerges from a scientific analysis of the facts which contain many complexities and contradictions.

Our enquiry necessarily must be historical, contemporary, and comparative.
Global insecurity affecting the international community or significant parts thereof is a condition of disorder ranging from episodic disruptions of established constitutional or legal arrangements and socio-economic upheavals to a vortex of socio-political mayhem and normlessness.

Global insecurity often coexists 2 with a measured global orderliness; obvious manifestations of lawlessness and disorder in particular geographic locales often ride in tandem with global order generally.
Indeed, some occurrences or initiatives in the political economy, including technological changes, may at one and the same time create insecurity and set the platform for a more secure condition in the evolving social formation.

A realism on this subject leads me to conclude that global insecurity is normal; an absence of global insecurity is abnormal.
The critical question therefore is what is the level of global insecurity that is tolerable, and consistent with a level of living which accords with the accepted standards of human civilisation, globally.

That very query gives rise to other salient considerations.

Indeed, some forms of global insecurity may be necessary, even though not immediately recognized as desirable, by the relevant populations, in order to achieve security and progress.

It is part of a complicated historical process.


3 This issue becomes germane particularly in respect of technological alterations or innovations.

The self-styled maverick in the field of information technology, Kevin Kelly, makes the point well in his recent book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape our Future (2016): “I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that technology brings----.
This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth----.When we imagine a better future, we should factor in this constant discomfort----.

“A world without discomfort is utopia.

But it is also stagnant.

A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others.

A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.” 4 So, neither “utopia” nor its opposite “dystopia”, are to be seriously entertained as the realised condition for human civilisation.
Kelly suggests the alternative “protopia” which is not so much a destination but “a state of becoming”, a process in quest of that which is better than what has existed heretofore.

“Protopia” signifies a progressive process awash with complications and contradictions.

It is well-nigh impossible to predict accurately, for the future, the precise contours of global insecurity.
Still, though, one can be certain that global insecurity will continue so long as the inevitable constant of conflicts or altered/altering relationships within and between groups, classes, and nations, exist.

It does not mean, of course, that a veritable Hobbesian state of nature will prevail or evolve in which life generally is nasty, brutish, and short.
Indeed, amidst the host of contradictions and challenges, real possibilities exist for the meeting or resolution of any disruptions, conflicts and difficulties, over time.

Civilized men and women cannot hold otherwise since the choice is simply between an uplift for 5 civilisation or a descent into barbarism.
Regional and international cooperation and the effective rollout of elemental forms of democratic global governance are modalities to be pursued in the practical embrace of civilisation instead of barbarism.

Underpinning this possible architecture of global governance is a requisite of economic advance, social equity, appropriately applied science and technology, and economic democracy for the populations as a whole.
THE CONTEXT OF INSECURITY: THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Global insecurity arises from multiple sources.
Among the principal sources are: Contradictions and crises of global capitalism and other extant economic arrangements; economic dominance and resistance; inequality and poverty; adverse climate change and its consequences; the spread of nuclear weapons and the arms race generally; the pursuit of power grounded in ideology; the quest for hegemony based on religion; the turmoil in governance arrangements in several countries, including the clash between “the old order” and 6 rising insurgents as evidenced for example in the so-called “Arab Spring”; the push for territorial aggrandizement; the defence of sovereignty, independence, or territorial integrity; the battle between localism and regionalism, on the one hand, and the forces of globalisation, on the other; problematic demographic trends, including the alterations in the internal composition of populations; the discontents attendant upon the use, misuse, and abuse of modern technology, including information technology; large scale migration, including the upsure of refugees and asylum seekers; the spread of infectious diseases globally; the perpetration of crimes such as trafficking in illegal drugs and arms, corruption on a grand scale, human trafficking, serious crimes and violence, and money-laundering; and terrorism, domestic and international.
In my conversation with you this evening I shall address these issues in a composite manner while emphasising matters touching on the global economy, inequality, terrorism, technology especially information technology, automation and 7 the workforce, climate change and connected social considerations which fuel global insecurity.
Twenty-five years or so ago, the received wisdom in the citadels of academia and governments in Europe and North America was that the collapse of centrally-planned regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe would usher in an era of peace and shared prosperity presided over by a Pax Americana with support from allies in Europe and elsewhere.
The celebrated American social scientist, Francis Fukuyama, even proclaimed the much-trumpeted triumph of Western liberal democracy and “free enterprise” system over Soviet totalitarianism and “socialism” as “the end of history”.
Within a short time the very arrogance of such a proclamation ran headlong into the real world in which the presumptive hegemony of a sole superpower, the United States of America, was challenged on several fronts by multi-polar power centres around which clusters of economic and political activities of growing significance were made manifest.
8 At the level of the global economy, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey and Indonesia, along with an expanding European Union, placed severe limits on America’s economic pre-eminence within the context of a rampaging globalization which benefitted American corporations and their shareholders but not necessarily the American people as a whole.
In the process, China became the world’s second largest economy, within a touching distance of overtaking that of the USA in aggregate terms.

By 2012, Brazil had gone past the United Kingdom as the world’s sixth largest economy, even though that country has suffered some economic setbacks recently.

And India, with its one billion people was racking up rates of economic growth way in excess of the mature developed economies of the USA and Europe.
The evolution of the USA in the early 1970s from the status of a substantial creditor nation to that of a hugely debtor economy has prompted economic, monetary, and financial instability on a global scale.

The financial crises of September 2008 centred on Wall Street, the financialisation of casino capitalism, and the sub-prime mortgage adventures, 9 swiftly metamorphosed into a global economic depression, the worst for some 80 years since the last catastrophic capitalist implosion of 1929.
Meanwhile, most of the formerly centrally-planned economies in Eastern Europe and Russia are yet to arrive at a settled economic sustainability.
Contributing immensely to this multi-faceted economic meltdown, and its continuance, have been the rise of international terrorism, especially that of Islamic extremism, as manifested in New York City on September 11, 2001; the ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya by the USA and its allies; the overall political instability in the Middle East (Iran, Israel-Palestine, Syria, religious strife); the territorial land grabs in several regions of the world including in the former European satellite countries of Russia; the unprecedented rise in fuel prices from US $20 per barrel at the turn of the 21st century to US $147 per barrel in July 2008; the relative scarcity of food and consumable water for large 10 sections of the world’s population; and the uncertainties attendant upon adverse weather patterns and climate change.
GLOBAL INEQUALITY Globally, socio-economic inequality has fuelled immense discontent in developed, developing, and emerging economies.
The Nobel Prize Winner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, focused on this subject in respect of the USA in an article in The Washington Post [June 22, 2012; republished in his book the Great Divide (2016)], in the following terms: “The seriousness of America’s growing problem of inequality was highlighted by Federal Reserve data released this month showing the recession’s devastating effect on the wealth and income of those at the bottom and in the middle.
The decline in median wealth, down almost 40 percent in just three years, wiped out decades of wealth accumulation for most Americans.

If the average American had 11 actually shared in the country’s seeming prosperity the past two decades, his wealth, instead of stagnating, would have increased by some three- fourths.” Clearly, globalization has produced winners and losers in the income and wealth stakes the world over.

There has been an amazing rise in incomes and wealth of the top one percent globally.
In many developing and emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil, several other countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, there have been a spurt in the growth of the middle class and a significant reduction in the level of “dirt-poor” poverty.

To be sure, this growth in the middle class and the decline of indigence still reflect relatively low incomes compared to those of the average person in the developed world.
Still, the globalised economy has left millions of working people in developed countries and sections of the farmers and workers in developing and emerging economies worse off than before.

All these shifts in wealth and income have occasioned global instability, conflicts, and protests.

12 The turmoil in much of America and Europe is connected to this issue of socio-economic equality which is frequently twinned with the influx of refugees and migrants.
In a recent book, entitled Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation, the Yogoslav intellectual, Branko Milanovic, trenchantly observed: “Politicians in the West who pushed for greater reliance on markets in their own economies and the world after the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution could hardly have expected that the much-vaunted globalization would fail to deliver palpable benefits to the majority of their citizens ___ that is, precisely those whom they were trying to convince of the advantages of neo-liberal policies compared with more protectionist regimes.” The increased concentration of banking and finance capital globally, the financialisation of a veritable “casino capitalism” 13 divorced from real production of goods and essential services, the deregulation and liberalization of money markets, the extraordinarily swift movement of money facilitated by the revolution in information technology, the financing of the global war machine, and self-imposed austerity in public financing by governments under the diktat of the International Monetary Fund and central bankers, have all conspired to establish a troublesome and unhelpful context in the engendering of global instability.
These and related issues were recently addressed in a magnificent book entitled And The Weak Suffer What They Must?

Europe, Austerity, and the Threat to Global Stability (2016), authored by the celebrated political economist and former Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis.
Varoufakis has traced the sources of Europe’s economic difficulties to policy decisions from as far back as the American President Richard Nixon’s decision in 1971 essentially to dismantle the 1944 Bretton Woods Accords to monopoly capitalism’s evolution through financialisation and 14 the bubbles of derivatives, and to the dominant European governments’ pursuit of dangerous policies of fiscal austerity in the wrong circumstances thereby disadvantaging the majority of people, and the said governments’ embrace of monetary policies to the advantage of the banks.
Varoufakis’ diagnosis is sharp and persuasive.

His language is robust in describing the extant condition but his faith in a possible redemption is strong, though not perfect.

He concludes, in part: “During the five months in which I took a front-row crash course in Europe’s political feuds, I confirmed one thing: a titanic battle is being waged for Europe’s integrity and soul, with the forces of reason and humanism losing out, so far, to growing irrationality, authoritarianism, and malice -----.
“-----False dogmas are condemned; to be found out eventually, in Europe as they were in the Soviet 15 Union and elsewhere.

What matters here and now is that they should be found out quickly.

For the human toll of this crisis in Europe is too high and has the capacity to reach parts of the planet that do not deserve to suffer as a result of yet another European debacle----- “I think we can pull it off.
But not without a break from Europe’s past and a large democratic stimulus that the fathers of the European Union might have disapproved of.” The range, depth and pace of globalization signal that this process is entering a veritable new age, to which the global strategist Parag Khanna has labelled “hyper-globalisation”.
This heightened phase of globalisation is “driven by the confluence of strategic ambitions, new technologies, cheap money, and global migration.” [See, Parag Khanna: Connectography: Mapping to Failure of Global Civilisation (2010].

16 This enhanced pace of globalisation provides, at one and the same time, opportunities for human advancement and threats with a potential to destabilise national and global communities.
GLOBAL INTER-CONNECTEDNESS The spread, ease and penetration, globally, of air and sea transport, telecommunications, banking and financial services, automation and robotics, biotechnology, and other assorted forms of applied technology in production, life, and living, have contributed massively to wealth creation and social transformation.
In the process the very human existence, society’s networks, the social organisation of labour, the institutions of family, school and the church, politics and governance, have been profoundly altered.

Much of this has been for the better but marked dislocations and instability have occurred.

17 The very technology that has created wealth and enhanced production has also caused retrenchment in jobs in certain areas and closure of particular enterprises and industries.
The very technology which has facilitated legitimate businesses and civilised governance has also greased the explosion of money-laundering and terrorism.

The spread of information technology has contributed to better informed citizens but at the same time has also made the governance more challenging due to the extensive publication of falsehoods on a continuous basis.
Serious dislocations, and even global instability, have been engendered through the phenomenal advances in technological shifts or alterations have been universally welcomed.

As Kevin Kelly informs us: “Established industries will topple because the old business models no longer work.

Entire occupations will disappear, together with some people’s livelihoods.

New occupations will be born and they 18 will prosper unequally, causing envy and inequality.
The continuation and extension of the trends --- will challenge current legal assumptions and tread on the edge of the outlaw ___ a hurdle for law-abiding citizens.

By its nature digital network technology rattles international borders because it is borderless.
There will be heartbreak, conflict, and confusion in addition to incredible benefits.” In a fascinating book entitled People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (2016), the authors, Robert W. Mc Chesney and John Nichols, address this bundle of considerations aptly: “It is ironic that the digital revolution is central to the jobs crisis, because these same technologies have been roundly heralded heretofore as democratizing agents that shift power from the few to the many.
Although we believe it is difficult to exaggerate the value that digital communication has brought to 19 society as a whole, we also believe the evidence is clear that these technologies are not magical; how they are developed owes largely to the political- economic context.

They can be forces for surveillance, propaganda, and immiseration as much as tools of liberation.” This process is already quite evident not only in developed and emerging economies but also in developing countries.
In the production process itself and in the organisation of economic enterprises broadly, we see the transformation at work.

Let us take two examples in the USA, Kodak and American Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (known as AT&T).

Kodak was founded in 1888 and in the pre-digital age became synonymous with affordable cameras and family photography.

In due course, it became a company with global reach.

In 1988, Kodak employed 145,000.


It had a great history; it was innovative in its field and it treated its workers well.

But then came the new age of cell-phones and instant photo-sharing 20 devices such as Instagram.

Kodak became anachronistic.

In 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter II bankruptcy protection; it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange on a day when its share value fell to US $0.36 per share.
It lost almost its entire workforce; it reorganised, and by 2015 Kodak employed less than five percent of the workers it had 25 years ago.

Meanwhile, as Kodak went into bankruptcy, Instagram, launched in 2010 as a free mobile app, had some 300 million users by 2014, who do all the work of snapping, editing and sharing photos.

Instagram has an employed work force of less than twenty persons only.

Facebook, founded in 2004, purchased Instagram for US $1 billion in 2012.
Facebook itself, a huge entity worth some US $350 billion with a current share value of US $116 per share, a global penetration of massive proportions, and growing as a veritable state without borders, employed as of March 2015, only 10,080 persons, or some 7 percent of the Kodak’s employment figure of the 1960s.
21 In the case of the global telecommunications company, American Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (AT&T), it was in 1964, the USA’s most valuable company and was worth then US $267 million in 2015 dollars.

In the 1960s, AT&T employed nearly a million persons world-wide.

In 2005, AT&T was purchased by Baby Bell SBC Corporation for US $16 billion.

In 2015, Google was the USA’s second-most valuable company doing much of what AT&T did fifty years earlier, and much, much more.
In 2015, Google had a market value in excess of US $430 billion, but employed 55,000 persons or some 7 percent of AT&T’s paid workforce in 1964.

No wonder, several insightful commentators refer to the current evolution of monopoly capitalism as “capitalism on steroids”.

Its destabilizing effect on society is real but its possibilities for civilisation’s advance are enormous if properly harnessed and subjected to humanity’s collective will and benefit.
22 AUTOMATION, THE WORK FORCE AND SOCIAL ORGANISATIONS The future of the workforce is likely to undergo immense changes over the next thirty years with profound implications for people’s livelihoods, security, and stability.
The Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom government recently published, in 2014, its fifth edition of a document entitled Strategic Trends Programme: Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045: In addressing “Automation and Work”, the document states: “Robots or “unmanned systems” ___ machines capable of carrying out complex tasks without directly involving a human operator ___ are likely to be ubiquitous in 2045 as computers are today.
Unmanned systems are increasingly likely to replace people in the workplace, carrying out tasks with increased effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing risk to humans.

This could ultimately lead to mass unemployment and social unrest.

As robots 23 become more lifelike, perhaps capable of appearing to express emotion, interactions with people are likely to become more sophisticated.
The increased capability of robots is likely to change the face of warfare, with the possibility that some countries may replace potentially large numbers of soldiers, sailors and airmen with robots by 2045.” More generally, beyond automation of work, society has a social challenge on its hand to adopt to the rapid-changing technologies Kevin Kelly makes the point well: “We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilise them.
These days it takes us a decade after a technology appears to develop a social consensus on what it means and what etiquette we need to tame it.” Technological developments indeed prompt the alteration of authority structures and the establishment of multiple 24 connections in such a way as to limit or undercut the State and its formal institutions.
Thus, competing though unequal, and shifting, points or centres of authority, power or influence are already emerging in, and between, the formal state apparatuses, international and regional organisations or entities, localised communities and cities, corporations of a national, global, and even “stateless” kind, and networked communities in cyberspace.
In the process, the internal democratic systems of nation-state are frequently compromised or even undermined by insufficiently democratic governance arrangements in regional and international organisations and trans-national companies, and the relatively unregulated normlessness of the networked communities in cyberspace.

So, too, also are the states which lack democratic governance, being undermined by the other competing points or centres of power, authority, or influence.
An ongoing reality of instability thus exists and will intensify; correctives are made in waves but without an arrival of stability, only a to- and-fro, a flux, a composite of enduring, tolerable instability and stability, at best.

Clearly the role and functioning of the 25 nation-state is being altered before our very eyes and those alterations will intensify.
The old Westphalian nature of a pristine, sovereign state is undergoing fundamental change, but the altered arrangements are yet to be fully fashioned or framed in relation to other centres of authority or power nationally, regionally or globally.

The multiple dimensions of globalisation has made it imperative that alternative modes of organisation and governance must emerge to accommodate the changes in the society, economy, and polity.
Karl Marx famously elaborated the thesis that whenever the level of development of the productive forces (labour, the means of labour, the objects of labour, technology, etc.)

in a society outgrows existing production relations of classes or groups in a particular mode of production, the objective situation arises for a fundamental alteration of that mode of production.
Clearly, Marx underestimated the extent of capitalism to mutate into diverse forms so as to accommodate or mute, though not necessarily resolve, the contradictions which arise from the developing 26 productive forces and existing production relations; capitalism has changed its form and mode of expression, and this capacity has caused it to avoid the transformation of the capitalist mode of production into a predicted socialist one.
But Marx was on to something profound relating to the necessity and desirability of altered production relations to match appropriately the level of the development of the productive forces.

Thus, the ongoing quest, in practice, for global capitalism, as manifested in particular countries, to reorganize its production and work apparatuses, including its production relations, so as to sustain itself optimally.
Of course, some real flesh-and-blood people are favoured in that reorganization process while others lose out at the work place, in the mode of production itself, and in the social formation, broadly.

Great issues are ahead of us to be addressed coordinately, globally, even if their resolution is neither swift nor easy.

27 TERRORISM AND GLOBAL INSTABILITY It is accepted by all persons who are possessed of “right reason” that terrorism is both a manifestation and a catalyst of modern global instability.
Interestingly, the difficulties experienced by the international community to agree upon an accepted definition of terrorism, indicate the very contentious nature of “terrorism” and its effect in fuelling severe global instability.
The most common definition of terrorism includes four basic elements: (i) the use of violence or threat of violence in order to engender a political, religious or ideological change; (ii) its commission by non-state actors or by undercover agents or personnel of one or more of the apparatuses of a State; (iii) its targets in any society are either narrowly or broadly defined; and (iv) it is a crime and a moral wrong.

The terrorism can be either of an international or domestic variety.
It is to be noted that it is widely accepted as a 28 principle that violence or threat of violence falls outside the ambit of a defined terrorism in several active scenarios: (i) if there is a declaration of war; (ii) if peace time acts of violence are carried out by a nation-state against another state by established armed units of the State; and (iii) if the acts of violence are in reasonable self-defence.

The difficulty is to ground this general principle in agreed factual situations when they arise.
Different nations and groups take different stances on the factual matrices.

What is “terrorism” for some, is “national liberation” for others!

Still, the international community outlaws certain specific “terrorist acts”.

And countries the world over have their own definitions of terrorism.

In the case of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in 2002, I piloted a statute through Parliament entitled The United Nations (Anti-Terrorism) Act [Chapter 183 of the Laws of St. Vincent and the Grenadines].
This Act implemented the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and to provide for 29 measures to combat terrorism.
Section 2 of the Act defines “terrorist act” as meaning: (a) the use or threat of action which constituted an offence, under several named international conventions or protocols touching and concerning aircraft, civil aviation, internationally protected persons, hostages, maritime navigation, and the safety of fixed platforms on the Continental Shelf; and (b) “any other act intended to cause death a serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act.” On the basis of this definition, and other widely-accepted definitions globally, the reprehensible al Queada, ISIL, and other such groups are clearly terrorist.
Their barbaric campaigns are major threats to global stability.

30 On June 09, 2016, the 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) was issued by an international think tank, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) which established this widely- recognised index in 2007.

The 2016 GPI Report highlighted a “historic ten-year deterioration in peace”.
It assessed that 81 of the countries analysed were more peaceful in 2015 than in 2014, but declines in peacefulness were found in 79 other countries which outweighed the high levels of peacefulness found in most of the world.
The IEP found that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as “the least peaceful region in the world”, due in part, to the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, Libya, and South Sudan, the ongoing international campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group, and a continued rise in terrorism and violent crimes.

In the MENA, countries like Kuwait and Qatar were ranked at a high state of peace.

European nations maintained high peace grades; American, Caribbean and Asia Pacific states showed some improvement.
Much of Africa, South Asia, Eurasia, and MENA saw deteriorating peace levels in 2015.

Iceland, Denmark, and 31 Austria scored the highest peace levels; and Iraq, South Sudan, and Syria had the lowest peace scores.

The USA ranked 103rd out of the 163 countries included in the GPI.

The recent senseless massacre in Orlando, Florida, is unlikely to improve the USA’s ranking!
The IEP Report found that: “The largest drivers of the international peace decline were political instability and the increase in terrorism across 77 countries.

Rising levels of displaced peoples and refugees also reached a 60-year high, and those individuals now account for nearly 1 percent of the global production.” The refugee camps in Kenya, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and in parts of Europe (with refugees from Africa and the Middle East) are examples of continuing global instability.
32 The Caribbean has long been hailed as a Zone of Peace and of Political Stability despite occasional dissonance or rupture.
It is indeed ironic that the Caribbean nation, Cuba, which has suffered most from terrorist attacks in our region, was blacklisted, for purely ideological reasons, by the USA as a state-sponsor of terrorism until April 2015, when the Obama administration removed it from such a dastardly list and hailed Cuba’s positive contribution to the peace process between the government of Colombia and the insurgent guerillas in that country.
It is encouraging to note that only last week the Cuban and American governments held a constructive dialogue on joint collaboration in fighting terrorism.

It is to be recalled that on October 06, 1976, a Cubana Aircraft, owned by the government of Cuba, was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados by two bombs planted by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in league with fellow anti-Castro terrorists from Venezuela and that country’s intelligence agency.
All 73 passengers on board the aircraft perished; they 33 were mainly Cuban nationals but also nationals from Guyana and North Korea.

Not all the perpetrators of this monstrous act of terrorism ___ the first in our modern Caribbean ___ have been brought to justice.
The threats to peace and stability in our region flow from money-laundering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, the trafficking in small arms, violent crimes including an increasing number of homicides, and the recruitment of Caribbean nationals to fight battles globally for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other religious-based terrorist groups.
In the latter regard, it was reported last year that approximately 100 Muslims from Trinidad and Tobago had been recruited by ISIL as fighters in Syria.

Clearly, our region has to coordinate its anti-terrorist security activities far more tightly than hitherto, given the global reach of ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other such terrorist networks.
Already our state security agencies work in tandem on security issues with the governments of the USA, Canada, Britain, France, 34 and Holland and through a host of international security arrangements.

Regionally, security is one of the five pillars of the integration movement in CARICOM which coordinates its security initiatives through several agencies.
Further, the member-states of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Barbados have a well-functioning regional security mechanism known as the Regional Security System (RSS).

Similarly, regional coordination on strategic and tactical initiatives against money-laundering and the financing of terrorism take place through the Financial Action Task Force and the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force and other entities.
The Caribbean needs to strengthen its focused efforts on the safety and security of travel documents (including their source documents); the potential threats to security arising from some “economic citizenship” arrangements; the movement of criminals and suspected terrorists; the security of its sea ports, cruise ship ports, and airports; the fight against money- 35 laundering, drug trafficking; and the monitoring of recruitment for international terrorism among its nationals.
THE ENVIORNMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL INSTABILITY Among the major threats to global stability, now and in the future, is the real possibility of a reduction in the quality of the environment for life and living, and the adverse effects of climate change.
Indeed, together they constitute existential challenges to human civilisation particularly to small island developing countries threatened by global warming, coastal erosion, rising sea levels and highly unstable weather systems, and other especially affected countries subject to droughts and desertification.

The global population is likely to grow over the next thirty years from the current 7 billion people to between 8.3 billion and 10.4 billion.
Increasing life expectancy, declining levels of child mortality, and continuing elevated birth rates in many developing countries are likely to see the global population 36 increase to some 10 billion by 2045.

Clearly, the growth in population would not be evenly spread; it is expected that population growth would be slower in developed countries to the extent of a decline in some.
In developing countries rapid population increase and urbanisation are likely to challenge socio-economic and political stability.

The internal composition of the populations, with an increase in numbers of the elderly is likely to cause demographic shifts with potentially harsh consequences.

Increasingly, more elderly persons remain in employment, narrowing the extent of job opportunities for younger persons unless economic growth and job creation pick up correspondingly.
Over the next 30 years, a growing population will require more food, water, and energy, thus placing a greater pressure on the environment.

Conflicts, and wars, over food, water, and energy are likely; global instability is likely to increase unless ameliorative and even transformational measures are taken.
I am not in the grip of a Malthusian doomsday prognosis since it is likely, too, that the increased population, if properly 37 harnessed, and more equitably served could create or make available, more wealth, food, and energy; technological improvements in concert with a disciplined and smart workforce are likely to bring benefits for life, living, and production.
Still, a huge challenge is ahead of us which demands global coordination, including, all things being equal, the facilitation of migration from more highly populated areas to countries with declining productive populations.

The overwhelming consensus among the relevant scientists is that climate change is mainly driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide [CO2] from generating power.
The developed countries in North America and Europe and emerging economies such as India and China are the major emitters absolutely and on a per- capita basis.

It is estimated that average global temperatures by 2045 are likely to increase by approximately 1.4oc above levels recorded at the end of the 20th century, if all things remain equal.
The 38 experts predict that without concerted mitigation efforts, it is unlikely that it will be possible to prevent global average temperatures rising more than 2oC above pre-industrial levels.

Such a rise in average global temperatures would possibly trigger abrupt, tipping point weather events, including the failure of the Indian monsoons, changes in large-scale ocean circulation, substantial melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the release of large quantities of methane from the ocean floor.
Heat waves would intensify and instances of severe drought would increase; at the same time increased rainfall and more frequent and intense storms are likely in some geographic areas; extra-tropical storms will thus move pole- ward.

Already much of this has started to occur.

Global sea-levels are likely to rise by between 0.32 and 0.38 metres by 2050, and larger increases are distinctly possible.

Currently, between 270 and 310 million people are at risk of coastal flooding.
Without urgent mitigation and adaptation measures, it is estimated that another 100 million or so 39 persons could additionally be at risk to rising sea levels and flooding, three-quarters of them in Asia.

Already, severe coastal erosion is severely affecting small island-developing economies and societies, including those in the Caribbean.
A tragedy awaits us in the Caribbean and globally if concerted international efforts to reduce harmful climate change and its adverse effects, do not take place urgently and at the level required.

At the same time, the process of desertification marches on.

Currently, arid and semi-arid areas cover about 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface and are home to over 2 billion people, almost one-third of the world’s population.
A 2009 study on this matter by Global Humanitarian Forum suggests that another 135 million people are at risk of being displaced by desertification over the next twenty or so years due to water shortages and reduced agricultural output.

It is forecast that by 2020, within four years’ time, some 60 million people from Sub-Saharan Africa alone are expected to migrate to North Africa and Europe so as to avoid desertification.
This number 40 will continue to rise if drastic climate change measures are not taken to mitigate and adapt.

Recently, in December 2015, at the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 in Paris, within the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community agreed on a way forward to take initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and for resources to be made available for appropriate adaptation and mitigation measures.
Progress on these initiatives and measures are urgent and necessary to be pursued, led particularly by the major emitters who possess the resources for the requisite adaptation and mitigation globally.

Still, climate change deniers abound in these countries which may hold up vital progress.

I note, in passing that St. Vincent and the Grenadines has signed and ratified the recent Paris Accord.
Several major emitters, including the USA, are yet to ratify this international climate compact; it is unlikely that the current Congress of the USA would do so.

41 All the adverse climate occurrences, if left unattended, would affect negatively water supply, marine life, biodiversity, and agriculture.

Humanitarian disasters await us with all the attendant human suffering, conflicts, and wars.

Vitally, these matters are of the highest security concern.

Global stability is at real risk.


SOCIAL SECTORS AND GLOBAL INSECURITY: A BRIEF SUMMATION Globalisation, in all its manifestations, has, I reiterate, profound effects on every dimension of life, living, and production.

This is very much so in the social sectors including the areas of health, education, urbanisation, transport, information, automation and work, refugees, migration, the crass “financialisation” of citizenship and passports, corruption and money, the role of the state, and citizen security.
As always globalisation is a force for good from which we cannot retreat but if it is not subject to democratic regulation and global governance cooperation and coordination it can endanger global and citizen security.

42 I highlight here for additional commentary two salient issues from the bundle of social sector concerns.

The first relates to health; the second concerns refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons.
Over the past 15 years the world has witnessed the threats to global security and stability arising from infectious diseases moving swiftly across national boundaries.

Examples of these diseases include: SARS (a respiratory disease), swine flu, avian flu, zika, and ebola which stirred global panic recently.

The dangerous spread of HIV/AIDS from the 1980s into early 21 st century indicates the threat to global health and security and the necessity for coordinated responses of an urgent and scientific kind.
It has been authoritatively estimated that 70 percent of emerging infections which have occasioned pandemics have originated in animals.

This trend is likely to continue over the next 30 years.

Given the fact that the time and location of the 43 new infectious or re-emergence of “dormant” infections cannot be accurately forecast, intensified global preparedness and cooperation are required, more and more, to be effected.
Other destabilising health concerns globally include: Chronic non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and cardiovascular ailments; mental health and dementia; and public health issues relating to climate change, aging, and obesity.
The ravages of wars, home-grown and violent sectarianism or political conflicts, the adverse consequences of climate change, and shortages of vital material resources such as food and water, have in recent years caused an unprecedented upsurge in refugees, asylum seekers, and internally-displaced persons within their own countries.

This upsurge has sparked terrible humanitarian disasters, and untold human suffering, and has occasioned growing global insecurity.
44 The recent publication Global Trends 2015, published through the auspices of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has highlighted the extent of this expanding human and security tragedy.

Over 65 million people, the largest number for over 100 years, were displaced at the end of 2015, some five million more than in 2014.

The details are heart-rending.


Out of a current world population of 7.4 billion persons, one in every 113 persons is thus now either a refugee, or an asylum seeker or internally displaced.

In total globally, there are 21.3 million refugees, 3.2 million asylum seekers, and 40.8 million persons internally displaced.

Most of the refugees flow from Syria (4.9 million persons), followed by Afghanistan (2.7 million), and Somalia (1.1 million).
Colombia is the locale for the most internally-displaced persons (6.9 million), followed by Syria (6.6 million), and Iraq (4.4 million).

More than one million refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean into Europe in 2015, fleeing from wars, sectarian fighting, and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa.

45 The data show that 86 percent of the refugees hail from low- and-middle-income countries close to situations of extreme conflict and socio-economic deprivation.
Turkey is the largest host country with 2.5 million refugees.

And Lebanon has the highest number of refugees-to-population ratio, nearly one refugee for every five citizens.

Painfully, children make up 51 percent of refugees globally, frequently separated from their parents.

How can we better cope with the manifold changes and threats to stability?
The broad perspective of Robert W. Mc Chesney and John Nichols in People Get Ready is instructive: “If we the people are going to make the future, that is now, our own then we must begin a knowing, conscious fight for shared prosperity, genuine opportunity, and the full realization of the promise of new technologies.

That full promise is being denied us at this point in our history.

Through that denial, 46 the promise of technology is being turned against us.
The oppressive prospects of technology ___ to spy on us, to profit off our desperation and misery, to make us work harder for less, to control rather than to free us ___ are only beginning to be realized ___.” But this oppression is not inevitable.

As Mc Chesney and Nichols further hopefully and persuasively lays out: “The future that is next can be good, and it can get better.

Dramatically better ---- for people around the world.
Technology can help us to be happier, healthier, freer, and more connected to ourselves, our families, and our communities.

We can work less and enjoy our lives more.

The tech utopian promise is real.

“But there is no gadget that can get society from here to there.

There is no app that will achieve the better and more humane life that is possible.

There is no 47 master plan from a CEO or Silicon Valley visionary.

There is only us.
There is only us.

We the people are the only force that can make a future worthy of our hopes and our humanity.

And our only tool is that which has ever taken the power to define the future away from the elites and given it to the whole of humanity: democracy.” This democracy, I aver, is both political and economic in nature.

Optimal governance and material bases of democracy are requisites for a full realization of the best in organized human civilisation.
This is an historic venture for all peoples globally.

It is not a call for global governance.

It is for political and economic democracy in nation-states (the people, communities, companies, etc.)

and their interconnectedness globally through regional and international organisations, and a proper productive and democratic relationship between those elements which are local, national, regional, and global.
The global challenges which give rise to instability cannot be tackled only locally or nationally, but the local and the 48 national cannot be sacrificed upon the altar of regional and international behemoths which lack the requisite responsiveness and responsibility.

There has to be a dialectical, and uplifting, connection between the local, national, regional, and international dimensions of our human civilisation.
Admittedly, it is a complex governance and managerial architecture to devise for the altered circumstances of the brave, new world.

But, as always, divine inspiration, human intelligence, and the people will lead us to success.

We cannot and must not succumb to pessimism and learned helplessness; we must own our present and our future!

Thank you!

49