The openSecurity section of openDemocracy was established in 2012 with the support of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (RNMFA). Norway has embraced a peace policy in international relations, as with the 1995 Oslo accords on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And its government reacted to the most lethal politically-motivated attack in Europe in the last decade, the Utøya massacre of 2011, not with ‘war on terror’ rhetoric but—as famously encapsulated by its then prime minister (and now NATO head), Jens Stoltenberg—a commitment to ‘more democracy, more openness and more humanity’.
But this has, sadly, been the exception which has proved the rule. On the wider canvas, the end of the cold war, which promised a world without dividing lines, has instead seen Islamism replace Stalinism as the ‘other’ to US-led imperial might in an increasingly Manichean struggle, in which the events of ‘September 11’ look more like a landmark than a beginning or an end. And the parallel snowballing crisis of globalised neoliberalism, which could yet issue in a more self-managed, networked society, has so far been matched only by a ratcheting up of the surveillance of the citizen and the suppression of NGO-led dissent, most dramatically in the bouleversement in the Arab world between democratic ‘spring’ and dictatorial ‘winter’.
Marx used the analogy of the camera obscura to describe how the world as observed could appear to be on its head. And if there is one thing openSecurity has done it has been to show that ‘common sense’ understandings of ‘security’ are often upside-down. Keynes explained the ‘paradox of thrift’ by which fiscal policies reducing demand, while apparently obvious reactions to economic shocks, could simply exacerbate them. And the hundreds of articles published by openSecurity over the years have demonstrated a ‘paradox of security’, whereby purportedly self-evident authoritarian reactions to threats to the state have merely fostered a spiral of violent regression.
