The Security Dilemma

Résumé du livre

All human societies have to live with uncertainty, the challenge of which is particularly significant in world politics. Governments face dilemmas of interpretation and response about the motives and intentions of others, such that the accumulation of weapons can be understood by one set of decision-makers as a reasonable act of self-protection, but by others as threatening attack or coercion. From this security dilemma flows the pervasiveness of fear, the fragility of cooperation and the elusiveness of trust. While a clear assessment of the difficulties of cooperation and trust is essential to thinking realistically about security issues, this major new work shows that fatalism serves only to reproduce the fears and dynamics of an already dangerous world and points the way to more promising alternatives.