Experiences and Lessons from Agri-Food System Transformation for Sustainable Food Security: A Review of China’s Practices

Food system transformation has been a widely discussed topic in international society over time. For the last few decades, China has made remarkable achievements in food production and has contributed greatly to the reduction in global hunger and poverty. Examining experiences and lessons from China’s food security practices over the years is helpful to promote a national food system transformation for China, as well as other developing countries. This study systematically reviews the literature on Chinese food security studies, with the aim of assessing China’s food security achievements and examining the remaining and emerging issues in the pursuit of food system transformation. The results show that China has continuously promoted food system transformation in land consolidation, agri-food production technologies, management and organization modes, food reserves, trade governance, and food consumption. These transformations ensure not only food availability, timeliness, and nutrition, but also in terms of the ecological, social, and economic sustainability, feasibility, and justice of food security. However, China is also confronting new challenges in food security, for example, malnutrition, environmental unsustainability, and reductions in diversified agri-food. In the future, China is expected to be committed to promoting healthy diets, sustainable agricultural production, climate change mitigation, and the reduction of food waste and loss to enhance its agri-food system’s resilience.

African experiences and alternativity in International Relations theorizing about security

Deconstructing International Relations (IR) episteme acknowledges its generation of power imbalances in security knowledge that relegate African experiences to the margins of global politics. Central to this process of relegation is a pervasive ‘methodological whiteness’, which, while eliding coloniality and racism, projects white experience as a universal perspective. Accompanying this Eurocentric bias has been the intrusive projection of the Weberian state as the most effective site for security governance and conflict prevention on a continent with states that are characterized by a hybridity of political orders, which deviate substantially from the ideal-type state that they seek to mimic. Not only has this resulted in disastrous policies in many parts of Africa, but critical questions arise as to the relevance of conventional IR and security studies as neutral sites for dispassionate knowledge production and policy-making on African security, thereby necessitating alternative perspectives. This article reflects on the ways in which IR and security studies have been responsible, in part, for the production of a racialized mode of security knowledge generation that obfuscates the security policies and experiences of people in African locales. It draws on insights from post-colonial discourses and the episteme of alternativity to explore how the study of events and processes in Africa in a theoretically conscious manner could advance IR scholarship as a whole. It contends that incorporating African experiences as they manifest through hybrid security orders can broaden the empirical base for IR theorizing about security since they offer another perspective outside the conventional western assumptions and experiences.

Securitization Theory or a Well Overlooked Old: On the Philosophical and Theoretical Premises and Origins of the Theory

More than 20 years have passed since B. Buzan, O. Wver and J. de Wilde published their Security: A New Framework for Analysis, which has become a classic in the discipline of security studies. Although Russian scholars increasingly attempt to use the securitization theorys conceptual apparatus in their research, the knowledge of the theory itself remains rather fragmentary. The overwhelming majority of existing papers refer to the so-called Copenhagen Schools (CS) intellectual heritage, while more comprehensive approaches and recent studies remain almost unknown among Russian scholars. The author attempts to fill this gap. This article is first in line of a series of studies, entirely devoted to the phenomenon of securitization: from the earliest milestones to the modern stage of development of the theory. The paper examines the theoretical and philosophical premises, as well as the ideas and assumptions of the securitization theory, first formulated by O. Wver in the late 1980s. The author refers to the original texts of the main figures of the CS: O. Wver and B. Buzan, conceptualizing the history of the concept of securitization and immersing the reader into the atmosphere of security studies field at the end of the 20th century. As a result, it becomes possible to determine the key elements of the early theory of securitization: security as a speech act, national security as a main focus of study, post-structural realism as a research agenda of O. Wver, and the idea of security as a negative meaning. The article concludes that despite the shortcomings of the early theory of securitization noted by many critics, it was based on a valuable and fruitful idea - an attempt to go beyond the notion of security as an absolute good or a metaphysical entity, which was typical of traditional and many alternative approaches to the definition of security.

Rozmyte mapy kognitywne jako technika prowadzenia ustrukturyzowanej analizy systemowej w obszarze nauk o bezpieczeństwie

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps as a Technique for Conducting Structured Systems Analysis in the Area of Security Sciences The article aims to present and introduce the main assumptions and procedures for creating fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) in the field of security studies. FCM are a tool for conducting a systematic analysis of phenomena with a complex structure and consisting of many interrelated elements. The text was divided into three main parts devoted accordingly to theoretical premises of the FCM (the system analysis, mental and cognitive maps), the FCM itself, and the procedure for creating and using RMK for analytical purposes.

Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle

Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle (`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.

Economic Security in Post-Soviet Countries: Level of Ensuring and Development Trends

At the national level of economic security studies, a special place has alway s b e lon ged t o t he estimating side of the issue. Estimations of state economic security serve as input data for the determinat ion of directions and ways of further security provision. At the same time, such estimations should be considered not only as a result of a certain methodology application in a certain co un try b ut a lso i n t h e c o nte xt o f comparing the economic security estimations across a set of countries. The aim of the article is to determin e the level of ensuring economic security in post-Soviet countries and recognize patterns, ri sk s, a n d t h rea ts that affect the future development of state economic security. For comparative analysis of economic security, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Georgia, and period 2016-2020 have been selected. The methodological basis of the study included the followingmethods: comparative economic studies, methods of summation, arithmetic mean, weighted arithmetic, geometric mean, rating; international index systems we re used as a basis for comparative analysis. Using the suggested methodology of estimation allowed obta ini ng results that characterize level real economic security, is lower than average. None of the analyzed countri es has managed to maintain an acceptable level of economic security. The determined levels allow u s t o st a te that the economic systems of the analyzed post-Soviet countries demonstrat e h i gh p erc ep ti ve ne ss t o t h e actualization of various threats. And this perceptiveness, in its turn, leads to various negative changes in t h e economic systems of these countries. The high perceptiveness of the economic systems in the analyze d p o st-Soviet countries to the actualization of various threats can be explained by the c h an gin g q u ali ty o f t he ir economic potential, low levels of their innovativeness, and also the lack of proper condi ti ons t o a p ply t h e innovations

Zanieczyszczenie powietrza jako zagrożenie bezpieczeństwa zdrowotnego w Polsce – w świetle teorii sekurytyzacji

Nowadays, air pollution constitutes one of the most serious threats to human health and life. Poland belongs to the group of countries with the highest level of air pollution in the EU and OECD. The scale of the threat posed by air pollution shows its importance when it comes to the health security of the Polish citizens. However, the ongoing (political and scientific) debate on health security in Poland often ignores the problem of air pollution. The aim of the article is to 1) assess the threat currently posed by air pollution to health security in Poland, 2) locate the threat in the area of health security, and 3) analyse the process of transferring the problem of air pollution from the sphere of politics to the area of security, in accordance with the theory of securitization, developed by the Copenhagen School of Security Studies. Qualitative analysis of documents together with the application of the theory of securitization show that, in Poland, the state has started to play the role of an actor securitizing air pollution as an existential threat. Nevertheless, this process is at an early stage, and its further success depends, inter alia, on decisions and possibilities related to taking extraordinary measures to eliminate the threat posed by air pollution.

Zmiana technologiczna jako wymiar bezpieczeństwa ekonomicznego państw Grupy Wyszehradzkiej

The contemporary economic security of states depends more and more heavily on technological factors. The paper provides a comparative study covering the trade of the Visegrád Group with a primary purpose to explore directions of technological change, revealed in the structure of their exports, their likely causes, and consequences. The research problem was positioned in an interdisciplinary methodological perspective, merging critical security studies, international political economy, international economics, and new public governance. The obtained results prove characteristics of V4 economies typical of dependent capitalism and confirm the structural challenge of foreign technological guidance.

Rethinking Security: An Analytical Study to Explore the Correlation Between Military Expenditure and Human Security in Arms Importing (Developing) States

ABSTRACT The following research seeks to identify a correlation between increasing military expenditure and the simultaneous changes observed in the levels of human security in arms importing states under the world military order. Identification of such trends is needed because leaders use the narrow understanding of security in terms of military strength to justify the higher global military expenditure. However, it is also understood that growing military expenditure increases insecurity amongst states. This paradox excludes consideration of other factors that impact human lives and need to be secured. The research uses case studies analyzed with quantitative data and analysis to determine any correlation between the two variables - military expenditure and human security. It is found that in arms importing states, there is generally an inverse proportionality, causing a negative correlation between military expenditure and human security. Therefore, higher military expenditure causes a drop in human security in importing states due to various structural factors of the global arms hierarchy. This illustrates a need to rethink the understanding of security to include other factors of human security: economic, political, personal, community, health, food, and environmental security for a holistic security approach to human lives in contemporary security studies. KEYWORDS: arms control, security studies, military expenditure, international order, global arms trade, human security, humanitarianism, neo-imperialism, militarism, world military order