Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Mary Kaldor: How Human Security Makes People Safe in a Global Era
The day's first speaker was Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics Mary Kaldor, who proposed the creation of a "global emergency services". During an exercise with the army (discussing the optimal way to retake a block of flats in Southampton that were occupied by a fictitious insurgent group), Kaldor discovered that although most present supported the use of soft tactics of conflict resolution - political and economic measures - those present felt that their business was fighting wars.
The trouble, Kaldor opines, is that these tactics are poorly suited to so-called "new wars", where battle is the decisive encounter. More and more, conflict is perpetrated by actors with vague state ties and is perpetrated against civilian populations, and resembles violent crime and disorder on a national scale. The solution was to build a taskforce whose role was not to defeat enemies, but to protect civilians, from both internal and external threats.
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