The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the International System

by Mohammed Ayoob

This book is a much-needed exploration of the multifaceted security problems facing the Third World in the aftermath of the Cold War. Ayoob addresses what he perceives to be the major underlying cause of conflict and insecurity in the Third World - i.e., the early stage of state making at which postcolonial states find themselves - drawing comparisons with the West European experience. He argues that this approach provides richer comparative data and less ephemeral conclusions than approaches that adopt development or dependency as their basic organizing concepts. Subsequent chapters analyze the dynamics of interstate conflict in the Third World, the role of Third World countries in the international system, and, especially, the critical impact of the end of the Cold War on the Third World security problematic. Ayoob concludes with a set of explanations intended to help students, scholars, and policymakers decipher the continuing profusion of conflicts in the Third World and the trends and problems that will likely dominate well into the twenty-first century.

Genres: International Relations

216 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very useful conceptual models, but it is dry and unnecessarily dense academic writing, and it is already somewhat dated.
(The reason for my relatively low rating is mostly because the book also seems aggressively non-applicable to, and dismissive of, policy application of the ideas, or prediction on their basis, which I'm personally annoyed about.)

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is a rehash of the western discourse for ”security”, in reality just a redistribution of money from the poor to the rich.

[Very]

Regardless of the book's merits, I'm not sold on Ayoob's classification. To group countries who have very little in common as 'Third World' and say "meh they're all pretty much the same" when clearly their cultural, social, economic histories differ significantly in a meaningful way just seems crude and ill-conceived.

Take my own country of Qatar for example. Qatar was never "colonised", it was a protectorate, and the British never really treaded much there, it was mostly the Ottomans. In fact, the Qataris preferred the British to stay as a protectorate. Yet we come to learn that it is a Third World country according to Ayoob's broadly conceived categorisation.

Second, Qatar has the highest GDP per capital in the world, so the economic part doesn't apply either. It's also not clear that Qatar has suffered economic development as a result of being a British protectorate, the contrary argument could be more plausible; British companies are the ones that discovered oil!

But for "social dislocation", then, Qatar would be, on Ayoob's classification, a first world country. Much like current day Bulgaria.

He might have said something about political freedom but again that would also lump in some countries in Europe and even China who we don't usually consider part of the "third world". At this point we should just admit that categorising countries in this way is not pragmatic nor accurate.

The only possible justification one can make for classifying those countries in such a way is them occupying the Southern Hemisphere (even then not all do) but at this point we are just trivially demarcating them by geographical location without any further relevant distinguishing factors that encompasses them all. And we already have these classifications anyway: continents. So I don't see the reason why we ought to add a new classification if it's just as arbitrary.

I can understand a meaningful classification during the Cold War era in which these countries were 'neutral' and not part of communists or capitalists camps (even that dichotomy is problematic), but that era has passed so what relevance does it have for this era? I don't know