Gwyn Prins

Gwyn Prins

Gwyn Prins, described as "the adventurous thinker on international security" is the director of the Mackinder Centre at the London School of Economics and is involved in long and short term consultancy. He is fluent in French and also speaks Dutch. He is the author of The Heart of War in which he:

argues that the risks run during the cold war remain after the conflict itself has ended. There is a physical legacy of nuclear waste and unsecured weapons and weapons materials, of materials and techniques related to other weapons of mass destruction and of pollution and environmental damage. There is also a psychological and political legacy of supposedly realistic thinking about security that constricts the future. Such thinking needs not so much to be discarded, since it still prepares us for some problems, but absorbed into a larger vision of the good future which Prins finds in Immanuel Kant's vision of perpetual peace.

This bad past, one which we do not fully recognise as yet, constrains us. But the future, he argues, is not as frightening, or as non-existent, as we think in darker moments. Careful analysis suggests that terrorism will increase in quantity but that deadly unconditional terrorism of the al-Qaida variety may not. It may also suggest, even, that the world could absorb a nuclear use or accident. The real danger lies not in particular actions or events but in what he calls "risk cascades", in which one bad event triggers others in a vicious sequence. Hope lies in exploiting the cascade effect in reverse, and in creating such effects, what Prins labels "virtuous intervention" and others liberal imperialism, has an important part.

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