Najam Speaks on Rethinking Security and Reconceptualizing Nature at Oxford
Professor Adil Najam, Dean Emeritus and Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School, who also serves at the Mahatir Mohammad Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, spent a month at the University of Oxford engaging in multiple research activities and events. He was invited by the Oxford Department of International Development for Oxford Martin School’s new program on ‘Rethinking Security in an Interconnected Age’ to lead the discussion at a workshop dialogue with the same title.
Najam was joined by Oxford Professor Stefan Dercon, former chief economist at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Department, and Achim Steiner, former head of the United Nations Development programme (UNDP) and now a Fellow at the Oxford Martin School and Balliol College. His comments focused on what security means – and will mean – in our rapidly changing world.
Based on his earlier research and his book ‘Environment, Development, and Human Security’ (2003), Najam argued that for conceptual, as well as policy, clarity, we cannot truly grasp the security challenges unless we first begin with understanding insecurity and where that comes from. The primacy of security concerns, he suggested, emerge mostly from its absence: we think most seriously of security when it is threatened (such as war in the Persian Gulf, the COVID-19 pandemic, and financial crises). When that happens, many standard rules of how policy ‘works’ are suspended. Such moments, when the old rules crumble or become dysfunctional, are also opportunities to devise and create new consensus around new, and hopefully better, rules. Najam suggested that we are now living in such a moment.
While at Oxford, Najam also spoke at a conference at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies celebrating the creation of the Emir Abdelkader Chair. His talk focused on the Islamic Sufi conceptualization of Nature and its relationship to humans: not simply as a utilitarian space for resource extraction, but rather the arena of awe and splendor in which the Divine is made manifest.
He argued, that as climate change becomes a current, and not future, crisis in what he has coined ‘Age of Adaptation’, and many of the frameworks of global cooperation on environmental issues are squandered as the governments and populations of developed economies remain uninterested in paying their ecological debts, it is imperative on the frontline vulnerable countries of the South to devise their own indigenous approaches to tackling the coming crises. He suggested that this will require, amongst many other things, for them also to offer new and fresh approaches to reconceptualizing nature and its relationship with humans.
Adil Najam is Dean Emeritus and Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He served as the Inaugural Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies from 2014-2022. He is also a former Vice-Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Read more about Najam on his Pardee School faculty profile.