The YCISS SDF mandate is to help fill critical gaps in knowledge in the security and defence field. Its primary focus will be on generating scholarship and analytic capacity regarding new security environments, contexts, and practices. This includes, on the one hand, building knowledge and expertise regarding the factors and forces that have not traditionally been considered relevant to understanding military security and war, including migration, economic change, social disintegration, local political dynamics, crime, and gender. In a conflict zone such as Afghanistan it has become apparent that factors from the dynamics of village politics to the perceived treatment of women by NATO forces can rapidly alter the balance of violent reaction in a locale. On the other hand, new security environments includes exploring nontraditional security and defence concerns of relevance to policymakers, such as:

• the movement of refugees: which is contributing to conflict in regions of the world to which Canadian forces are deployed, and is even raising issues of direct national defence among closely allied governments in Europe and Australia;
• the global drug trade: which has been a target of military action in the recent past, and which is presently contributing to the conditions within which Canada is operating in Afghanistan;
• prostitution and other criminal activities as a resource for militias: as conflict is increasingly conducted by irregular, non-state controlled forces, it becomes imperative to understand the resources that are mobilized to support the fighting.

The new security environments also include new types of security and defence practices such as environmental monitoring in the Arctic Circle and elsewhere: exploring the potential contexts in which defence capabilities will be deployed in non-traditional roles, and gender diplomacy in Islamic societies: a specific instance of the more general concern for diplomatic and social interaction Canadian forces find themselves engaging in in contemporary peace support operations, such as that in Bosnia.

YCISS’s secondary focus is on the politics of security and defence, which encompasses the social and political issues and contestations faced by DND and the CF regarding their policies and missions. Examples include:

• differences in popular opinion about intervention and DND deployments overseas;
• tensions between Canadian values and defence practices inside Canada and outside in zones of conflict;
• the public evaluation of DND policies and actions;
• the social dynamics associated with Canadian Forces and their training (gender, race, and ethnicity); and
• popular visions of social justice and the role of the military.

As DND faces the challenges of new security environments, contexts, and practices it has to contend with the politics of security in new and unanticipated ways. It also has to confront groups democratically challenging its policies and actions that it has not confronted in the past, from Latin American women’s groups to anti-globalization environmentalists.

These two foci will allow YCISS to address, innovatively, the seven issues of concern to DND expressed in the SDF statement of interest:

• terrorism and Canadian society (rights, surveillance, and anti-terrorism);
• the local and transnational dynamics of regional flashpoints (the social, economic, and cultural foundations of conflict);
• the social dimensions of WMD (their social, political, and symbolic functions);
• critical approaches to the international role of Canadian Forces (the domestic and international politics of missions);
• rethinking the logics of “whole of government” [3D] (the complex social and political dimensions of intervening in zones of conflict);
• the culture and transformation of US-Canadian relations (the cultural and social underpinnings); and
• Canadian defence policy in global perspective (limits and capacities in rapidly changing international environments).