In the wake of the cold war, a host of issues loosely termed “new security challenges” have become the focus of growing concern worldwide. Typically comprising international terrorism, ethnic strife, environmental degradation, food and energy scarcities, drug trafficking, unchecked population growth, uncontrolled migration, and organized crime, these can hardly be considered especially new problems. The explicit characterization and treatment of them as security issues, however, is a relatively recent development.

Whether such problems are appropriate subjects for security policy and what priority they should be afforded relative to traditional military-related concerns are questions that have ignited an intense and contentious debate in many countries. In an important contribution to this debate, The New Security Agenda takes stock of how attitudes toward the meaning of security are changing around the world and in particular how the principal “new” security issues are perceived in key countries and regions. With individual chapters on the ASEAN region, China, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, South Asia, South Korea, the countries of the Southwest Pacific, the former Soviet Union, and Western Europe, this book is the first truly global survey of its kind.

The volume, published by the Japan Center for International Exchange, is edited by Paul B. Stares, author of Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World. Dr. Stares is currently a senior research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo and a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. This research was conducted under the “New Security Agenda” project as part of the Asia Pacific Agenda Project (APAP).