SIGNIFICANCE OF NON-TRADITIONAL DIMENSIONS OF SECURITY: UNDERSTANDING PAKISTAN’S PREDICAMENTS

Abstract

While the territorial integrity of any sovereign state forms part of the core national interest for which it can go to war with any adversary, non-traditional security dimensions have also gained equal importance in the changed paradigm. Thus, human security and the development of any state become dependent on each other in the manner that neither would be viable without the other. This implied that the state could not ensure individual or societal security until it had developed itself and achieved self-sufficiency in food, health, environment, and employment for its citizens and residents. However, the same could not be achieved particularly by the developing countries for various reasons, and Pakistan is no exception. Be it for the religious hate crimes against minorities or the child abuse, be it for the criminal acts of violence against women or murders of the minors after rape and torture; there is no respite and relief for the society in general and parents of the victims in particular. Moreover, uncontrolled population growth, lack of national integration, increased intolerance in society giving rise to extremism and terrorism, lawlessness, corruption, air pollution, cyber security, and perhaps above all political instability, also form part of the long list of non-traditional security concerns for Pakistan. Therefore, this paper aims to carry out a critical appraisal of the non-traditional dimensions of national security and understand the priorities adopted by Pakistan in the last seventy-five years, to suggest a way forward. This would be carried out through the lens of domestic politics through deductive reasoning, however, an inductive approach would be adopted while applying the Possibility-Probability (P-2) model to develop a framework viable for a better outcome in the domain of non-traditional national security dimensions in the future.