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Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict Studies, Security, grade: 1,3, James Cook University (College of Arts, Society and Education), course: International Relations and Foreign Policy, language: English, abstract: The essay is an examination of the security dilemma and its impact on contemporary global politics. This is done by using the example of the South China Sea dispute and by outlining the lasting impacts of this conflicts on international relations.

The term security dilemma was first described by the German-American scholar of international relations and law John Herz in his 1951 book “Political Realism and Political Idealism”; however, the idea can be found already in the work of Immanuel Kant. The security dilemma is a model used in international relations to understand and explain the behaviour of states. Herz defined it as “a structural notion in which the self-help attempts of states to look after their security needs tend, regardless of intention, to lead to rising insecurity for others as each interprets its own measures as defensive and measures of others as potentially threatening” (Herz, 1951, p. 7).