EA - Nathan A. Sears (1988-2023) by HaydnBelfield

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Nathan A. Sears (1988-2023), published by HaydnBelfield on March 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Nathan Sears was one of seven to die in a fire in Montreal on the 16 March 2023. He was 35.Nathan was becoming a leading figure at the intersection of existential risk and international relations (IR).Indeed, he was in Montreal to attend the 2023 International Studies Association (ISA) conference, the leading conference on international relations (IR). The day before on March 15th, he presented a paper on "Great Power Rivalry and Human Survival: Why States Fail to “Securitize” Existential Threats to Humanity" at a panel on 'Catastrophic-Existential Risks and World Orders'After his undergrad at Western University and his Masters in IR at Carleton University Nathan moved to Quito, Ecuador. For four years he taught IR at the Universidad de Las Américas. He then came back to Canada in 2016 to earn his PhD.During that time he was a 2017-2018 Trudeau Centre Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs. He also took a year out to serve his country as a 2019-2020 Cadieux-Léger Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research and Foresight Division of Global Affairs Canada.Nathan was already an important scholar in the field of existential risk, making groundbreaking & much-discussed contributions at the intersection with international relations. He was also a really friendly, supportive and engaging guy. I was so excited about what he was going to accomplish.Five of his most important papers are:International Politics in the Age of Existential ThreatsHumans in the twenty-first century live under the specter of anthropogenic existential threats to human civilization and survival. What is the significance of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction to the meaning of “security” and “survival” in international politics? The argument is that it constitutes a material “revolution” in international politics—that is, the growing spectrum of anthropogenic existential threats represents a radical transformation in the material context of international politics that turns established truths about security and survival on their heads. The paper develops a theoretical framework based in historical security materialism, especially the theoretical proposition that the material circumstances of the “forces of destruction” determine the security viability of different “modes of protection”, political “units” and “structures”, and “security ideologies” in international politics.The argument seeks to demonstrate the growing disjuncture (or "contradiction") between the material context of anthropogenic existential threats ("forces of destruction"); and the security practices of war, the use of military force, and the balance-of-power ("modes of protection"); the political units of nation-states and structure of international anarchy ("political superstructure"); and the primacy of "national security" and doctrines of "self-help" and "power politics" in international politics ("security ideologies"). Specifically, humanity's survival interdependence with respect to an-thropogenic existential threats calls into question the centrality of national security and survival in international politics. In an age of existential threats, "security" is better understood as about the survival of humanity.Existential Security: Towards a Security Framework for the Survival of HumanityHumankind faces a growing spectrum of anthropogenic existential threats to human civilization and survival. This article therefore aims to develop a new framework for security policy – ‘existential security’ – that puts the survival of humanity at its core. It begins with a discussion of the definition and spectrum of ‘anthropogenic existential threats’, or those threats that have their origins i...