Metrics that Matter: A Prototype “Comprehensive Security Index” for the OSCE Community

Abstract

The emergence of transnational challenges with impacts on states and populations has necessitated a measurement of not merely state-centric security, but holistic human security. As a liberal international organization (IO) created during the Cold War and intended to bridge the Soviet-led East and the U.S.-led West, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), through the signing of the Helsinki Final Act (1975) rooted itself in the concept of “comprehensive security.” There exists, however, a dearth of academic analysis on this avowed specialty of the OSCE. And, despite normative and institutional expansions, the OSCE has not set quantitative benchmarks to evaluate its participating States’ (pS) progress on comprehensive security. Using the post-positivist critical approaches of “human security” and the Copenhagen School’s “systemic” and “sectoral” security, this study has two key objectives: First, it aims to construct and validate a prototype security and vulnerability assessment tool, the “Index of Comprehensive Security” (CSI), capable of appraising or rating and comparing or ranking OSCE pS by quantitatively fleshing out the OSCE’s security dimensions via the CSI indicator; and second, it seeks to study the results produced by the CSI architecture and elucidate security variances on states and communities in the OSCE region, particularly in the OSCE’s Eurasian postcommunist space. Data analysis for this Thesis confirmed, among other things, the significance of geopolitics, in that the location of a state strongly correlates with the CSI score. Using 2016 data, the study also determined that the highest CSI scoring OSCE pS is Iceland, while the lowest scoring state is Turkmenistan. The results of this Thesis demonstrate that the novel indicator of the CSI can assist in understanding the nuances of security and insecurity among the OSCE pS and potentially serve as a useful starting point for early warning efforts and preventive action.