During the past decade, Asian countries have witnessed the rise of non-traditional security challenges, while also being confronted by traditional security issues. Up till the present, it has been difficult to resolve non-traditional security issues by any single individual state's unilateral action, with negative effects reaching far beyond Asia. However, policy practices in Asia fail to address this situation. Due to their limited communication and different security concerns, many Asian countries still prioritize traditional security issues (e.g. territorial disputes) rather than the non-traditional ones.
New Security Challenges in Asia is one of the best works on non-traditional security issues in Asia. It analyses the most critical of these (water security, food security, pandemic disease, transnational crime and terrorism), and highlights the extent to which proper solutions could help Asian countries to address these issues.
After the editors' introduction, this volume features four thematic parts: chapters two to four, on water security, analyse the Himalayan water crisis (Kenneth Pomeranz), water scarcity in China (David Pietz) and Indus Basin water supply (Eric A. Strahorn); chapters five and eight are case studies on food security in Asia, namely the overfishing and overcapacity of Southeast Asian fisheries (Robert S. Pomeroy) and food insecurity in China (Elizabeth Wishnick); chapters six and seven focus on pandemic diseases, with Yanzhong Huang writing on H1N1 Flu and Jonathon Schwartz and Rachel D. Schwartz providing applicable policy recommendations for the US and China. The final two chapters discuss terrorist cells in Southeast Asian border regions (Justin V. Hastings) and explore the dynamics of cyber crimes and cyber conflicts in Asia (Adam Segal).
In my view, the most significant chapters are those by David Pietz and Elizabeth Wishnick, which focus on the water–food insecurity nexus in China, and suggest solutions for China-US security cooperation in the future.
In his chapter, entitled “Domestic, regional, and global implications of water scarcity in China,” David Pietz questions the existing policy practice regarding water scarcity in China. As Pietz explains, the increasing production of ethanol fuel (for instance, from corn) will consume huge amounts of water. In the long run, the current solution will prove unfeasible. China invests in farmland in Africa and Southeast Asia in order to deal with the domestic agricultural bottlenecks caused by its own water shortage. However, the countries receiving China's agricultural investment might themselves be poor in water, and this problem remains mostly unaddressed.
In Pietz's opinion, the most pressing issue for China is to manage “degraded water quality and poorly managed water resources” (p. 63), which are closely interconnected with global food security. To do so, Pietz believes that it's essential to improve communications among all the stakeholders, and ultimately establish a structured exchange of information in risk management. This could be a minimalist solution, which addresses the acute needs and vulnerabilities of all the stakeholders. For example, China recently exchanged runoff data and other related information about the Mekong River with Southeast Asian countries; this reassures other stakeholders that China does not seek large-scale water diversion, but shows that there is good faith available to promote cooperation.
In chapter eight entitled, “Safe harbor in a risky world? China's approach to managing food safety risk,” Elizabeth Wishnick offers a profound case study of the 2008 melamine crisis in China. As Wishnick argues, no single stakeholder has the capacity to deal with food security issues in China alone. Public–private relations and interagency processes in China have seriously constrained stakeholders' capabilities of managing non-traditional security issues. For instance, though international society did play an essential role in efforts to reduce food insecurity, it is still insufficient to “obtain needed advance warnings” (p. 190). This implies the necessity of establishing public–private partnership among stakeholders; that is, partnering nation governments, non-governmental organizations, civil society, international society and the private sector. In contrast with the minimalist solution of improved communications suggested by Pietz, public–private partnership is a maximalist solution, because it builds mechanisms to ensure more practical and sustainable responses while giving consideration the immediate needs of the stakeholders.
It's noteworthy that the solutions mentioned above are both context-sensitive ways of responding to non-traditional security issues. As Robert M. Hathaway and Michael Wills say in the Introduction, no two states are likely to prioritize the same threats in the same manner (p. 3).
Based on insightful arguments in national, regional and international dimensions, this edited volume reveals the challenges and opportunities of non-traditional security governance in Asia, and offers appropriate solutions for the stakeholders. This volume is thus valuable reading for scholars, students, policy makers and activists who are concerned about non-traditional security issues in Asia and China-US cooperation in security governance. I look forward to the publication of the second version of this volume, which will hopefully address more emerging non-traditional security issues in Asia and suggest more solutions for security governance.
