As geopolitical tensions rise alongside climate shocks, AI disruption and pandemic risk, former UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner has returned to the Oxford Martin School to rethink what national security really means in the 21st century. In this interview, he outlines why security must now integrate climate change, emerging technologies, health and cooperation – and how a new global initiative aims to help governments, institutions and societies prepare for systemic risk.
Achim Steiner has come back to Oxford at a moment of profound global uncertainty. Why now?
Achim Steiner: Having just concluded eight years leading the UN Development Programme and serving as Vice Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Group, this felt like a natural moment to step back and reflect. We are living through an extraordinary convergence of crises: geopolitical polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, accelerating technological change, and intensifying climate impacts.
Oxford brings together extraordinary expertise – from international relations and cybersecurity to biology, medicine, economics and ethics – alongside global networks of practitioners. The Oxford Martin School was designed not just as an academic space, but as a public facing, policy oriented platform. Returning here now offers something rare: the intellectual depth of a world class university combined with a mandate to engage with real world decision making.
For someone who has worked across continents, that combination of academic rigor and international reach makes this an ideal place to interrogate how we think about security today, and how we might need to rethink it for the decades ahead.
What, in your view, is missing from today’s national security debates?
Over the past two decades, there has been a gradual broadening of how security risks are understood. Climate change, pandemics, cyber threats, biosecurity and technological disruption are now widely recognized as relevant to national security. Defence establishments were discussing climate risk twenty five years ago.
Yet in recent years we have seen a sharp narrowing of the dominant response. Faced with geopolitical shocks, many countries are reverting to a security narrative centred almost exclusively on defence and deterrence. In some cases, military threat is real and immediate. But for most societies, the greatest risks to stability and wellbeing do not come from a neighbouring army.
They come from systemic forces: a technological revolution reshaping economies and politics; climate change destabilising livelihoods and infrastructure; health systems still exposed after COVID 19; digital and algorithmic systems that can amplify fear, polarisation and misinformation at scale. These are risks that cannot be mitigated by military capability alone – and, crucially, they cannot be managed by any country acting in isolation.
Is there a single risk that concerns you most?
I’m wary of ranking risks, because what feels existential in one place may feel very different in another. In the Sahel, a small change in rainfall can force communities to abandon land they have called home for centuries. In the UK, the greater threat comes from extreme rainfall concentrated into short periods, damaging infrastructure and livelihoods.
What has changed most fundamentally is not the existence of individual risks, but their systemic nature. We are far more interconnected than in the past. A pandemic that once might have remained local can now circle the globe in days. A cyber incident in one country can ripple instantly through financial or energy systems elsewhere.
The real challenge, then, is preparedness and institutional capacity: do we have the platforms, cooperation mechanisms and public understanding needed to manage interconnected risks before they cascade into crisis? Resilience today depends on cooperation.
How does your new programme at Oxford aim to respond to this challenge?
The ambition is not to present a single grand theory of security, but to create an inquiry based platform that learns from how different countries are already responding to risk. National security strategies vary enormously across regions and political systems. Some rely almost entirely on military approaches; others emphasise resilience, diplomacy or social cohesion, some recognise the broader and systemic nature of 21st century risks, while others focus largely on territorial threats. The answers to future security lie partly in understanding why those differences exist.
A core part of the work will therefore be a comparative analysis of national security strategies across the world, identifying gaps, innovations and blind spots. Alongside this, we will use futures and scenario approaches to move the debate beyond geopolitically polarised positions. Scenarios allow us to explore alternative pathways – recognising that security looks different in Africa, Europe, the Americas or Asia – without framing the discussion as zero sum confrontation.
Equally important is broadening who gets to participate in the security conversation. Security decisions shape every aspect of society, yet debate is often confined to small circles of experts. As people feel more insecure, they tend to retreat from engagement and defer to elites. That is dangerous for democracies and for effective policy.
This work therefore aims to democratise the security debate: giving citizens, particularly younger generations, the tools and confidence to engage with questions of risk, trade offs and cooperation. Public agency is not a distraction from security; it is a prerequisite for it.
You’ve identified three areas for deeper focus. Why these?
The three deep dives – climate security, digital and emerging technologies, and health security – are not exhaustive. They are illustrative. Each shows how traditional security frameworks struggle to cope with systemic risk.
Climate change is no longer an environmental issue alone. It reshapes economies, migration patterns, borders, infrastructure and even navigation routes. It touches almost every dimension of human security.
Digital and algorithmic systems present extraordinary new frontiers and opportunity, but also new forms of vulnerability. Social media business models can amplify polarisation; AI systems raise questions about governance, accountability and control; cyber attacks can disable critical infrastructure. These dynamics now shape security as profoundly as conventional military threats.
Health security remains a striking blind spot. COVID 19 demonstrated how quickly a biological risk can overwhelm societies and economies, yet collective preparedness has arguably weakened since. Institutions designed to enable cooperation are under strain precisely when the next pandemic is not a question of if, but when taken together, these domains show why security can no longer be understood as a narrow sector. It is woven into how societies and our economies function.
What do you see as the greatest obstacle to progress?
Fear and paralysis. Across many countries, public anxiety about the future is deepening. When insecurity is framed as inevitable, people disengage. At the international level, the absence of cooperation tends to produce escalation by default.
History shows that diplomacy and security are most effective when they recognise shared interests, even between adversaries. Cooperation is not naïve idealism; it is often the most rational response to risks that cannot be contained or mitigated within borders. Yet we currently see a collapse of a compelling public narrative for international cooperation.
One of the aims of this work is to help societies look beyond the immediate thunderstorm – not to deny the danger, but to recover perspective and agency. Security can be framed not only as defence against threats, but as a forward looking project: investing in resilience, governance and cooperation to reduce the likelihood of catastrophe.
At Oxford, anchored in the Martin School and connected through a global network of partners, there is a unique opportunity to help rebuild that perspective – and to contribute to a security narrative that is both realistic about risk and confident about humanity’s capacity to respond.
This opinion piece reflects the views of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the position of the Oxford Martin School or the University of Oxford. Any errors or omissions are those of the author.