Launching her book, Global Security Cultures, renowned scholar of war and human security Mary Kaldor introduces the concept of global security cultures in order to explain why we get stuck in particular pathways to security. 

Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere has made things worse? Why do some conflicts never end? And how is it that practices like beheadings, the bombing of hospitals or sexual slavery are becoming increasingly common?

A global security culture, she explains, involves different combinations of ideas, narratives, rules, people, tools, practices and infrastructure embedded in a specific form of political authority, a set of power relations, that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. In contrast to the Cold War period, when there was one dominant culture based on military forces and nation-states, nowadays there are competing global security cultures. Defining four main types, she investigates how we might identify contradictions, dilemmas and experiments in contemporary security cultures that might ultimately open up new pathways to rescue and safeguard civility in the future.

Mary Kaldor (@LSE_CCS) is the Director of The Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at LSE and Professor of Global Governance. Professor Kaldor pioneered the concept of new wars and global civil society and her work on the practical implementation of human security has directly influenced European and national politics.

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the LSE, and Director of IDEAS, LSE's foreign policy think tank.  He is a former twice serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at Defence Colleges in the UK, US. Rome, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Sabine Selchow is a Research Fellow in the ARC-Laureate Program in International History at the University of Sydney, where she is in charge of the 'Planetary Pasts and Futures'-research theme. She is also Research Associate at the Centre for International Security Studies (CISS) at Sydney University and the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Chairman of the Executive Board of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade and Co-Chair of the London Transitional Justice Network.

Lyse Doucet is chief international correspondent at the BBC. Lyse has been reporting for the BBC for nearly 30 years, with posts in Abidjan, Kabul, Islamabad, Tehran, Amman and Jerusalem.