Developing global security market: challenges of the neo-Hobbesian security environment

After the Cold War, security is increasingly becoming a marketing issue, illustrated more by intensive campaigns to psychologically influence the target audience than by military confrontations on the battlefield, which has fostered the evolvement of a neo-Hobbesian security environment, characterized by greater mistrust and hostility towards others, where the use of force is considered inevitable, necessary, and appropriate (Frederking 2003). The contemporary world is not a chessboard of few European powers as it was just a few centuries ago, or a scripted game between ideologically opposing superpowers as it was during the Cold War. There are no fixed allegiances and polarities, but the borderlines between potential adversaries are always changing and moving, which makes long-term policy developments hardly predictable (Buzan, 1999). The new security environment has been guided by revisionist powers that do not recognize the legitimacy of the post-Cold War Kantian international system and seek to alter or to overthrow it by enforcing the Hobbesian logic of international relations. Hollywoodization, diversionary politics and psychological warfare have had an increasing impact on turning the modern security environment into a global security market. In the global security market, the strategic contender has to blueprint new strategies, the opponent is not prepared to resist, and there is a large arsenal of strategic tools to engage target societies with ideological and psychological offensives, which intend to convince the audience that there is a permanent war raging and they should be prepared for physical violence, which will break out soon. In the neo-Hobbesian environment, conventional clashes been armed forces have often been replaced by other forms of warfare with new strategic objectives of making potential adversaries more vulnerable and insecure. By efficient marketing, the Hobbesian conflict can be successfully sold in the imaginative security market, where strategically shaped and disseminated narratives, aimed at increasing political influence of status seekers, will replace guns and tanks. The intentions of some influential powers to strategically challenge the cultural patterns of the Kantian international system can be hardly successfully addressed if they have not been supported by the ongoing populist wave and the evolutionary trends of Hollywoodization and diversionary politics, which strongly affected social processes in the entire global community during the last decades. By Hollywoodization, I mean the introduction of business strategies, similar to those that are set up by the Hollywood motion-picture industry, into international politics, which has significantly helped in building a global security market instead of an institutionally (e.g. by the United Nations) controlled international security governance. The revolution in communication technologies encouraged the introduction of Hollywoodized popular culture and infotainment to various social processes, which more often appear in contemporary political and security discourses that rely on Hobbesian patterns. Infotainment has a significant impact on political discourses, where the public debate appeals mainly to manipulating public emotions, and to ignoring factual objections, in particular by the repetition of narratives the audience is expected to accept without criticism.