Test: Class 12 Contemporary World Politics NCERT Based-3 - UPSC MCQ

The security challenges facing the newly-independent countries of Asia and Africa were different from the challenges in Europe in two ways. For one thing, the new countries faced the prospect of military conflict with neighbouring countries. For another, they had to worry about internal military conflict.

These countries faced threats not only from outside their borders, mostly from neighbours, but also from within. Many newly independent countries came to fear their neighbours even more than they feared the US or Soviet Union or the former colonial powers. They quarrelled over borders and territories or control of people and populations or all of these simultaneously.

Internal wars now make up more than 95 per cent of all armed conflicts fought anywhere in the world.

Between 1946 and 1991, there was a twelve-fold rise in the number of civil wars—the greatest jump in 200 years. So, for the new states, external wars with neighbours and internal wars posed a serious challenge to their security.

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) banned the production and possession of these weapons. More than 155nstates acceded to the BWC and 181 states acceded to the CWC.

Both conventions included all the great powers. But the superpowers — the US and Soviet Union — did not want to give up the third type of weapons of mass destruction, namely, nuclear weapons, so they pursued arms control.

Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons. The Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972 tried to stop the United States and Soviet Union from using ballistic missiles as a defensive shield to launch a nuclear attack.

While it did allow both countries to deploy a very limited number of defensive systems, it stopped them from large-scale production of those systems.

Traditional security also accepts confidence building as a means of avoiding violence. Confidence building is a process in which countries share ideas and information with their rivals. They tell each other about their military intentions and, up to a point, their military plans.

This is a way of demonstrating that they are not planning a surprise attack. They also tell each other about the kind of forces they possess, and they may share information on where those forces are deployed. In short, confidence building is a process designed to ensure that rivals do not go to war through misunderstanding or misperception.

Poverty in the South has also led to large-scale migration to seek a better life, especially better economic opportunities, in the North. This has created international political friction. International law and norms make a distinction between migrants (those who voluntarily leave their home countries) and refugees (those who flee from war, natural disaster or political persecution).

States are generally supposed to accept refugees, but they do not have to accept migrants. While refugees leave their country of origin, people who have fled their homes but remain within national borders are called ‘internally displaced people’. Kashmiri Pandits that fled the violence in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s are an example of an internally displaced community

This was also called the Earth Summit. The summit was countries of the First World, generally referred to as the ‘global North’ were pursuing a different environmental agenda than the poor and developing countries of the Third World, called the ‘global South’.

Whereas the Northern states were concerned with ozone depletion and global warming, the Southern states were anxious to address the relationship between economic development and environmental management.

The Rio Summit produced conventions dealing with climate change, biodiversity, forestry, and recommended a list of development practices called ‘Agenda 21’. But it left unresolved considerable differences and difficulties. There was a consensus on combining economic growth with ecological responsibility. This approach to development is commonly known as ‘sustainable development’.

The problem however was how exactly this was to be achieved. Some critics have pointed out that Agenda 21 was biased in favour of economic growth rather than ensuring ecological conservation.

The Antarctic continental region extends over 14 million square kilometres and comprises 26 per cent of the world’s wilderness area, representing 90 per cent of all terrestrial ice and 70 per cent of planetary fresh water.

The Antarctic also extends to a further 36 million square kilometres of ocean. It has a limited terrestrial life and a highly productive marine ecosystem, comprising a few plants (e.g. microscopic algae, fungi and lichen), marine mammals, fish and hordes of birds to harsh conditions, as well as the krill, which is central to marine food chain and upon which other animals are dependent.

The Antarctic plays an important role in maintaining climatic equilibrium, and deep ice cores provide an important source of information about greenhouse gas concentrations and atmospheric temperatures of hundreds and thousands of years ago.

‘Commons’ are those resources which are not owned by anyone but rather shared by a community. This could be a ‘common room’, a ‘community centre’, a park or a river.

Similarly, there are some areas or regions of the world which are located outside the sovereign of any one state, and therefore require common governance by the international community.

These are known as res communis humanitatis or global commons.They include the earth’s atmosphere, Antarctica , the ocean floor, and outer space.

The developed countries of the North want to discuss the environmental issue as it stands now and want everyone to be equally responsible for ecological conservation.

The developing countries of the South feel that much of the ecological degradation in the world is the product of industrial development undertaken by the developed countries.

If they have caused more degradation, they must also take more responsibility for undoing the damage now.

Moreover, the developing countries are in the process of industrialisation and they must not be subjected to the same restrictions, which apply to the developed countries. Thus the special needs of the developing countries must be taken into account in the development, application, and interpretation of rules of inter- national environmental law.

This argument was accepted in the Rio Declaration at the Earth Summit in 1992 and is called the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.