Gwyn Prins

Gwyn Prins

Gwyn Prins, described as "the adventurous thinker on international security" is the director of the Mackinder Centre for Long Wave Events at the London School of Economics. He is fluent in French and also speaks Dutch.

According to the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs:

Dr Gwyn Prins was for 20 years a Fellow and the Director of Studies in History at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. His earliest research was in African history and anthropology. He was later Founder and Director of the Global Security Programme at the University of Cambridge (1989-97), and Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London (1997-2000). He is now the Professorial Research Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK), the first Visiting Senior Fellow at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency of the Ministry of Defence (Farnborough, UK) and the Senior Fellow in the Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of NATO (Brussels, Belgium). He is a UK member of the P-5 study group on improving the operations of the UN Security Council. Recent writings include European Horizons of Diplomatic/Military Operations (1999) and Coalition Aspects of Operations (forthcoming), and edited books on Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations (2000), and (with Hylke Tromp) The Future of War (2000). He is currently working on questions of European security capacity and the command of armed forces.

Books

He is the author of several books including Heart of War, Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations, Global Security, Top Guns and Toxic Whales, Threats without Enemies, Environmental Security, Hidden Hippopotamus, Defended to Death, Choice and Strategy, Force Planning and Diplomatic/Military Operations (DMOs).

In The Heart of War 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.

'Risk, Threat and Security'

Prins co-authored an article published in the RUSI Journal called 'Risk, Threat and Security: The Case of the United Kingdom' with Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. The article expressed concerns that the 'politicisation' of defence policy and a national 'lack of confidence' made the UK vulnerable to security threats. It suggested therefore the partial removal of defence policy from democratic control. In assessing the supposed security threats to the UK, the article expressed a concern that the country was ‘soft’ and lacked a cohesive identity which made it vulnerable to enemies. It complained of a ‘lack of leadership from the majority which in misplaced deference to ‘multiculturalism’ [has] failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities’.