Shapes of Threats in the Global South: An Exploration of Social Imagery

Introduction

Threat in the world is ever-present. At the micro level, people may conceptualize natural disasters as fire, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes, storms, germ-based diseases, and attacks by wildlife. They may see human-created disasters as including social strife and related violence (attacks, rioting, and others), chemical spills or releases, cyber attacks, biohazards, nuclear leaks, poor decision making and poor planning, accidents, conflict, and warfare, among others. Certainly, there are various combinations of challenges. In terms of potentials for worldwide harm, Jared Diamond suggests that there are four sets of problems: “explosions of nuclear weapons, global climate change, global resource depletion, and global inequalities of living standards” (2019, p. 383). He points to threats that others may also name, including “Islamic fundamentalism, emerging infectious diseases, an asteroid collision, and mass biological extinctions” (2019, p. 383). These challenges exist within and across borders, in the Global North and the Global South, and all points in-between.

The dimensions of homeland security are manifold and complex. The former U.S. secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano described her transition into the role with stacks of binders with “playbooks, memos, and intelligence” about “terrorists to tornadoes, plagues and pandemics, planes, trains, and automobiles, to immigration and border security, cyberweapons, an attack on the power grid or water system, and biological and chemical warfare and nuclear dirty bombs” (Napolitano & Breslau, 2019, p. 3). Later, she writes about potential combinations of occurrences and risks, such as coordinated multi-pronged terror attacks or multiple hurricane landfalls simultaneously and other potentials (p. 45). To address such complexities, the empowered populace serves as “key partners” in the defense effort (Napolitano & Breslau, 2019, p. 50) through vigilance and knowledge and preparedness. Outreach to the public is a critical aspect of homeland security, including empowering them as “potential partners” and not as “potential victims” (Napolitano & Breslau, 2019, p. 58).

A central role of government is to optimize the lives of their citizens, and that requires, in part, anticipating threats and working to head them off, and mitigating harms as they arise. Government agencies take on a critical role in the so-called “emergency preparedness cycle”: planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, (and) taking corrective action. Simpler versions of the preparedness cycle have fewer steps: preparedness, response, recovery, and prevention-mitigation. Government cannot work alone. They require the cooperation of the private sectors (corporations, nonprofit groups) and the general public.

A society’s resilience depends in part on how well its infrastructure is maintained, its housing stocks, its medical establishment, its markets, its transportation, its technologies, its cultures, and its peoples. How much trust is there in government? How aware is the public of threats and their roles in trying to prepare and mitigate potential threats? How adherent is a general population to professional guidance? There are direct and indirect ways to understand how aware a public may be to the challenges and threats to a region.

The conventional wisdom suggests that the Global South (GS) may be somewhat more fragile and less resilient than the Global North (GN) because of the fewer resources, perhaps less stable government, simpler technologies, and other aspects. Social imagery related to these countries may shed light on how “threat” in the Global South may be perceived.

More specifically, five seeding phrases may be used to elicit different imagesets from Google Images: ‘Global South’ and dangers; ‘Global South’ and hazards; ‘Global South’ and perils; ‘Global South’ and risks, and ‘Global South’ and threats. Respectively, “dangers, hazards, perils, risks, and threats” as synonyms may collectively capture a more comprehensive set of threats and may individually showcase different “folk” tag-senses of the shared imagery. These images may be coded to answer three essential and interrelated question sets: