Human Security
Fen Osler Hampson
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CHAPTER19
CONTENTS
z Introduction 279
z Understanding
the scope of
human
security 280
z Setting the
boundaries
of human
security 283
z Ongoing
debates and
unresolved
issues 285
z Human security
and ‘failed’
states 285
z The dilemmas of
humanitarian
intervention 286
z Human
security risk
assessment 289
z Governance
and human
security 291
z Towards
a theory of
human
security 292
z Conclusion 293
z Abstract
In this chapter, students will learn about recent academic and policy
research on human security. It first summarizes the various definitions
and conceptions of human security informing current academic research
and thinking. It then offers a brief overview of some recent contributions
to the human security literature. The final section identifies some of
the key debates and issues now at the centre of human security research.
z Introduction
There is little doubt that human security studies have attracted growing
attention in the wider International Relations and social science literatures.
The expanding UN agenda of human security concerns (among them: waraffected
children, racial discrimination, women’s rights, human trafficking,
transnational crime, and refugees), coupled with former UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan’s personal commitment to human security activism, catapulted
these questions to the forefront of the scholarly and policy research agenda
in the 1990s (see MacFarlane and Khong 2006). This agenda accompanied
the longstanding human security concerns of students and practitioners of
international development – an agenda that has generally tended to focus on
the ways that globalization dynamics have damaged the prospects for human
development and the provision of basic human needs.
In second decade of the twentieth century there has been renewed focus
on human security in the context of the so-called Arab Spring. On 17 March
2011, UN Security Council resolution 1973 demanded an immediate ceasefire
in Libya, including an end to attacks against civilians, which it said might
constitute ‘crimes against humanity’, imposed a ban on all flights in the
country’s airspace – a no-fly zone – and tightened sanctions on the Qaddafi
regime and its supporters. Additionally, the Council authorized member
states, ‘acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements,
to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in the
country, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of
any form on any part of Libyan territory’.
The rationale for the imposition of a no-fly-zone (NFZ) over Libya was
ostensibly to avert a blood bath by Qaddafi’s forces, specifically in the cities
of Benghazi and Tobruk. Champions of the responsibility to protect (R2P)
doctrine applauded the NFZ as an invocation of key R2P principles (see
Chapter 32, this volume). In this case, they had a relatively easy target – a
ruthless, bloody dictator who had shown repeatedly that he was prepared to
murder his own citizens to stay in power. In the eyes of some, however, the
West was hypocritical for not intervening in Bahrain, Syria, or Yemen where
there were similar outbreaks of protest and bloody repression by autocratic
leaders in 2011. Nor was this apparent double standard lost on the streets of
Syria and Yemen where many lives have been lost in continuing struggles to
throw off autocratic rule.
This chapter reviews some of the ideas which facilitated these events,
specifically recent academic and policy research on human security. It first
summarizes the various definitions and conceptions of human security
informing current academic research and thinking. It then offers a brief
overview of some recent contributions to the human security literature. The
final section identifies some of the key debates and issues now at the centre
of human security research.
z Understanding the scope of human security
Despite the major investment of research and interest in human security in
the past two decades there is no real consensus on what can or should
constitute the focus of what are still loosely termed human security studies
(Kaldor 2007a, Reveron and Mahoney-Norris 2009, Matthew et al. 2009,
Kent 2005, Hampson et al. 2002). There continues to be considerable
methodological, definitional and conceptual disquiet about the real meaning
of human security, and about its implications for the study or the practice of
international relations. This should come as no surprise, given the nature of
the academic enterprise and the different disciplinary and methodological
backgrounds informing the work of scholars engaged in human security
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research. (Even so, the evident inability of scholars to advance beyond
theoretical debates over definitions toward practical policy recommendations
understandably frustrates practitioners in the policy community.)
There is also a great unevenness in the depth (and breadth) of research on
particular themes. Some issues, such as anti-personnel landmines or small arms,
are well ploughed; the literature on these subjects is rich not only in analysis
of particular problems and causes, but also in implications for public policy.
Other problems, such as gender-directed violence, have received the sort of
attention they deserve as evils in their own right and as sources and symptoms
of human insecurity.
There are arguably three distinct conceptions of human security that shape
current debates. The first is what might be termed the natural rights/rule of law
conception of human security, anchored in the fundamental liberal assumption
of basic individual rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, and
of the international obligation of states to protect and promote these rights
(Claude and Weston 2006, Morsink 1998, Lauren 1998, Alston 1992). A
second view of human security is humanitarian. This is this view of human
security that, for example, informs international efforts to deepen and
strengthen international law, particularly regarding genocide and war crimes,
and to abolish weapons that are especially harmful to civilians and noncombatants
(Kaldor 2007a, Beebe and Kaldor 2010, Power 2003, BoutrosGhali
1992, Moore 1996). This view lies at the heart of humanitarian interventions
directed at improving the basic living conditions of refugees, and anyone
uprooted by conflict from their homes and communities. On those rare occasions
when military force has been used ostensibly to avert genocide or ethnic
cleansing, it has also been justified usually on rather specific humanitarian
grounds such as the need to restore basic human rights and dignity.
These two views of human security, which focus on basic human rights
and their deprivation, stand in sharp contrast to a broader view, which suggests
that human security should be widely constructed to include economic,
environmental, social, and other forms of harm to the overall livelihood and
wellbeing of individuals. There is a strong social justice component in this
broader conception of human security, as well as a wider consideration of
threats (real and potential) to the survival and health of individuals. According
to this third and probably most controversial perspective, the state of the
global economy, the forces of globalization, and the health of the environment,
including the world’s atmosphere and oceans, are all legitimate subjects of
concern in terms of how they affect the ‘security’ of the individual (Battersby
and Siracusa 2009, Friman and Reich 2007, Kent 2005, Matthew et al. 2009,
UN 1995, 1999, UNDP 1994, 1997, Nef 2002).
These ‘broadeners’ have attracted sharp criticism. Yuen Foong Khong
(2001) warns that making everything a priority renders nothing a priority –
raising false hopes in the policy realm and obscuring real trade-offs between
rival human security objectives. Similarly, Andrew Mack (2001, 2005) makes
the sound methodological point that overly broad definitions of human
security can block investigation of the very phenomena that need to be
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understood. Examining the relationship between poverty and violence, for
example, requires us to treat them as separate variables. A definition that
conflates dependent and independent variables will confound analysis of
causal connections between them.
As a practical matter, many human security initiatives, such as the
international campaign to ban trafficking in small and light weapons, generally,
fall between the narrower and the broader definitions of human security. But,
there is a lively debate among scholars and practitioners as to what legitimately
should be the scope of efforts to promote and advance human security at the
international level, and as to whether we should define human security in
more restrictive or broader terms (Hampson et al. 2002, Paris 2001, Khong
2001, MacFarlane and Khong 2006).
How should human security be defined? One way is to define it negatively,
i.e. as the absence of threats to various core human values, including the most
basic human value, the physical safety of the individual. Alkire (2002: 2) offers
a more positive definition of human security: ‘The objective of human security
is to safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats,
and to do so without impeding long-term human flourishing’.
The definition offered by the Report of the Commission on Human
Security (2003: 2) is even more expansive: ‘to protect the vital core of all
human freedoms and human fulfilment’. What is this vital core? Does it
represent all human freedoms? And should personal fulfilment be placed
alongside freedom as a basic right and public responsibility? The same
paragraph goes on to embrace almost every desirable condition of a happy
life in its description of human security:
Underlying much of the human security literature is a common belief that
it is critical to international security, and that international order cannot rest
solely on the sovereignty and viability of states – that order depends as well
on individuals and their own sense of security. This is clearly a departure from
traditional liberal internationalism, which sees international order as resting
on institutional arrangements which, in varying degrees, help secure the
integrity of the liberal, democratic state by reducing threats in the state’s
external environment (see Chapter 3 this volume). Placing the individual as
the key point of reference, the human security paradigm assumes that the
safety of the individual is the key to global security; by implication, when the
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‘Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms . . . It means
protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats
and situations. It means using processes that build on people’s strengths and
aspirations. It means creating political, social, environmental, economic,
military, and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks
of survival’.
safety of individuals is threatened so too in a fundamental sense is international
security. In this view, global challenges have to be assessed in terms of how
they affect the safety of people, and not just of states. Proponents of the
enlarged or maximalist conception of human security also argue that these
threats arise not only from military sources; non-military causes, such as
worsening environmental conditions and economic inequalities can, in some
instances, exacerbate conflict processes (Mathew et al. 2009, UNDP 1994,
Nef 2002, Paris 2001).
z Setting the boundaries of human security
Not surprisingly, problems of definition and boundary-setting have dominated
much of the literature in human security research. To some degree, these
uncertainties simply reflect the state of the art; these are, after all, relatively
new approaches. But it is also fair to say that these definitional and conceptual
arguments echo turmoil experienced since the Cold War in schools of both
development and national security – two important sources of human security
scholars and scholarship (King and Murray 2001/2).
King and Murray define human security as ‘the number of years of future
life spent outside the state of “generalized poverty”’ (2001/2). Generalized
poverty, in this definition, occurs when the individual falls below a specified
threshold ‘in any key domain of human well-being’. Operating the definition
therefore requires choosing domains of wellbeing, constructing practical
indicators, and specifying threshold values for each. King and Murray find
their domains mainly in the UNDP’s Human Development Index (per-capita
income, health, education), and add ‘political freedom’ and ‘democracy’ (for
example, by applying Freedom House measures of voting and legislative
conduct).
Human security in this scheme is thus expressed as a probability – the
expected number of years of life spent outside ‘generalized poverty’, whether
for an individual or aggregated across an entire population. Leaving aside other
questions of domain choice and threshold selection, the King–Murray equation
(they frame it mathematically) raises provocative issues for methodology and
policy. Mack (2005), on the other hand, measures human security in terms
of the costs of war on human suffering. The Liu Institute’s Report on Human
Security documents in vivid detail the impact that war – measured in terms
of civilian casualties – has had on different countries and regions of the world.
Some of the literature has attempted to define human security by integrating
its disparate dimensions. Hazem Ghobarah (with Huth and Russett 2001)
explored long-term health effects of civil wars with a cross-national analysis
of World Health Organization (WHO) statistics on death and disability. The
immediate harms done to health by specific wars are familiar; in contrast,
Russett and his colleagues tracked the delayed after-effects and their
mechanisms: rising crime rates; property destruction, economic disruption,
diversion of health-care resources, and the like.
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In Madness in the Multitude (2002) Fen Hampson and others situated
human security approaches in the long history of liberal democratic theory,
but concentrated on the distinguishing features of human security as a global
public good. Among other advantages, the lens of public goods analysis
focuses attention on some recurring issues in the human security discourse –
namely, problems of under-provision, collective governance, and operational
delivery.
The 1994 UN Human Development Report identified inter alia drug and
human trafficking, transnational crime, migration, and terrorism as major
threats to human security – issues that were highlighted more recently in the
World Bank’s 2011 Development Report. Interestingly, these threats were
largely omitted from the mandate of the Independent Commission on Human
Security (2003), which chose to focus on a narrower set of issues, i.e., the
ways internal conflicts threaten the physical security of non-combatants;
human insecurities stemming from preventable diseases, injury, or chronic ill
health; insecurities flowing from a lack of basic literacy, access to education,
and innumeracy; and the insecurities of poverty and economic, social and
gender inequalities.
The Human Security Gateway, a useful online source, provides a wealth
of information on the current state of human security studies (Human Security
Report Project, 2011). Topics now covered range from the impact of conflict
on human rights, children and armed conflict, the role of paramilitary and
non-state armed groups, the relationship between climate change and armed
conflict, conflict resolution and prevention, natural resources and armed
conflict, to name but a few. As the Zurich-based Center for Security Policy
notes:
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Two decades after it was introduced in political debate, the concept of human
security still remains a controversial matter. On the one hand, it has met with
great resonance in many countries and in international organisations such as
the UN. New issues were introduced to the security policy agenda, such as
the ban on anti-personnel mines, efforts to curb the misuse of small arms
and light weapons, or security sector reform (SSR). On the other hand,
numerous questions remain unanswered. The definitory arguments between
the proponents of a broad approach (‘freedom from want’) and the advocates
of a narrow interpretation (‘freedom from fear’) remain unresolved. There
is no general agreement on the role of the state, which can both ensure and
threaten the safety of its citizens. It is in this context that one must view the
occasional charge that the concept of human security is founded on an
interventionist logic and attempts to undermine state sovereignty based on
a ‘responsibility to protect’.
(CSS 2011)
z Ongoing debates and unresolved issues
A number of key debates and/or unresolved issues are reflected in the scholarly
and the policy-oriented human security literature. One of the burgeoning areas
of research, especially among students of international development, involves
the relationship between globalization (in its various meanings) and human
security – or insecurity (Battersby and Siracusa 2009, Reveron and MahoneyNorris
2011). There is widespread agreement that the forces of globalization
are intensifying economic connections and the pace of social change and
thus transforming international politics and recasting relationships between
states and peoples with important implications for human security. Further,
it is not just goods and capital that are exchanged across borders, but ideas,
information, and people.
On one side of this argument, globalization enthusiasts argue that the
breakdown of national barriers to trade and the spread of global markets are
processes that help to raise world incomes and contribute to the spread of
wealth. Although there are clear winners and losers in the globalizing economy,
the old divisions between the advanced Northern economies and ‘peripheral’
South are breaking down and making way for an increasingly complex
architecture of economic power (Held et al. 1999: 4). On the other side,
globalization’s critics argue that although some countries in the South have
gained from globalization, many have not and income inequalities between
the world’s richest and poorest countries are widening.
Globalization also presents new dangers to human security, particularly in
the area of public health where the spread of diseases like AIDS, which ravage
many developing countries, are partially rooted in the workings of the global
economy, and in externally imposed structural adjustment policies that have
directly contributed to deterioration in public health delivery and in overall
living standards (Leon and Walt 2001).
Much work remains to be done on the positive and negative consequences
of globalization for human security, and on how globalization affects the
capacity of various international, national and sub-national actors and
institutions to provide for human security.
z Human security and ‘failed’ states
The relationship between conflict and development processes in affecting
human security in the struggling states and societies of the South is also the
focus of recent studies and discussion in key policy circles. The World Bank’s
2011 Development Report argues that insecurity is the ‘primary development
challenge of our time’. This is because ‘[o]ne-and-a-half billion people live in
areas affected by fragility, conflict, or large-scale, organized criminal violence,
and no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a
single United Nations Millennium Development Goal (UN MDG)’. These
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so-called ‘new threats’ include ‘organized crime and trafficking, civil unrest
due to global economic shocks’, and ‘terrorism’ (World Bank 2011: 5). The
populations most affected by such ‘insecurities’ are to be found in sub-Saharan
Africa, Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia) and
North Korea (Fund for Peace 2011).
Of special interest to scholars and practitioners is the relationship between
so-called ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ states and human security. Typically, the poorest,
most conflict-wracked ‘states’ like Somalia, where there is an absence of
effective governance and government institutions, have been classified as failed
states where large swathes of the local population live in abject poverty
compounded by violence and other threats to their existence such as drought
and famine. However, state failure should not be construed too narrowly or
simply in terms of countries that are in total collapse like Somalia (Gertz and
Chandy 2011). There are many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia, like Pakistan, Cameroon, or Djibouti, which are classified as
‘middle income’ by the World Bank but which nonetheless contain a large
and growing sector of people who are desperately poor. In many of these
countries, state institutions also have a tenuous hold on their territory and
maintaining local law and order. The number of these so-called middle-income
failed or fragile states (MIFFs) is growing. They may require development
assistance and other kinds of support to maintain stability and alleviate local
poverty, but they may not be eligible for the kinds of assistance that poorer
and more stable countries, such as Tanzania, currently receive.
z The dilemmas of humanitarian intervention
Normative concerns typically surface when the imperative of human security
is invoked in cases of humanitarian intervention (Kaldor 2007a, Beebe and
Kaldor 2010, Holzgrefe and Keohane 2003, ICISS 2001, Power 2003, Chapter
32 this volume). There is obviously a continuing debate on whether force
should be used in support of particular human security objectives, one that
has only intensified with the NATO bombing of Libya in a barely disguised
attempt to unseat Qaddafi. At one level, the dispute is about the proper
hierarchy of humanitarian goals and international norms of state sovereignty
and non-intervention. But it is also a debate about whether or when it is right
to do violence against individuals – especially non-combatants who find
themselves in harm’s way – when force is exercised for human security purposes.
Where human security concepts challenge traditional notions of what
constitutes a ‘just war’ or a just cause, and test our sense of what are tolerable
degrees of ‘collateral damage’ – is fertile terrain for ethicists and others
concerned with the deeper ramifications of evolving human security norms.
Cultural differences figure prominently in different regional perceptions
on human rights and evolving humanitarian intervention norms (Claude and
Weston 2006, Mayer 2006). In the Arab world, attitudes towards intervention
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have been shaped by the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. As
Kodmani (2012) argues, ‘Arab states (just like many other countries of the
South) consider that only the UN Security Council is entitled to decide on
intervention and must do so under strict conditions and that if the members
of the council fail to come to an agreement, humanitarian intervention should
simply not take place, whatever the human cost of not intervening’. Furthermore,
she states, ‘humanitarian intervention is seen as being applied selectively:
Arab states and publics claim that the West only invokes human rights
violations in the cases of small states or unfriendly regimes, just as the West
chooses to punish “rogue states” in order to bring them in line with its strategy.
Whether it is out of nationalism, a desire to keep society under control, or a
fear of disintegration of the state, the Arab world remains averse to recognizing
the diversity of most societies of the region and granting specific rights to
their minorities’ (Kodmani 2012: 243).
These debates underscore the tensions between diverse conceptions and
priorities in the human security agenda. Exploring these tensions within
explicit ethical and normative frames of reference can itself yield new
knowledge and understanding – if not always agreement. Not only will such
analysis render explicit the kinds of value trade-offs involved, but it might
also help societies make more ethically informed choices as they respond to
the human security threats they face.
The concept of human security also poses an interesting challenge to
traditional notions of democratization, civil society development, and
peacebuilding. Some scholars, citing familiar post-colonial history, hold that
liberal democracy and economic liberalization by themselves will not suffice
to ensure human security – especially not the security of vulnerable
communities. The argument is that historical patterns of human settlement
and lingering colonial legacies have too often marginalized large numbers
of peoples from social, economic, and political development processes. As
Swatuk and Vale report, the people of the South African homelands and
townships still suffer the insecurity of poverty and pains of incorporation
into the political economy of South Africa. The power of ‘vested interests
and established social relations in support of neocolonial political economies’,
along with ‘fissures of identity’ reflected in ‘race, class, state, nation, and tribe’
pose a major if not insurmountable barrier to the advancement of human
security – not just in South Africa but the whole region (Swatuk and Vale
1999: 384).
There are clearly different understandings of human security particular to
different social, political, and economic contexts – details that raise important
questions about the limitations of traditional liberal assumptions about
democratization and political development. Increasingly, scholars and the
practitioners are beginning to ask difficult but essential questions about the
proper sequence and priorities to be adopted in peacebuilding and democratic
development, and how to ensure that these processes are informed by
indigenous perspectives of what human security requires in their own lives.
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Negotiated political transitions (from communist dictatorship, or from
apartheid, from oppressive military or one-man rule, or in the aftermath of
Western-led interventions in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan) impose a sharp
focus on the significance of these issues. Given the predominant role of
Western governments and publics and Western-oriented intergovernmental
and nongovernmental organizations in the peacemaking and peacebuilding
field – and the reality that colonial legacies are seldom erased easily in
developing countries – there is considerable potential for a collision between
opposed human security values and priorities.
The literature also reveals telling differences in national and regional
perspectives – different assessments of the subject, and different judgments
on policy and political performance. Khong (2001) (with others) has
speculated that the human security agenda grew out of the particulars of
Canada’s own history and circumstances – if not as a ‘fireproof house’, at least
as relatively safe from the world’s troubles and decently governed.
Asian perspectives get considerable attention in the literature on human
security (e.g. Tow et al. 2000). More than one observer has remarked on the
policy divergence between Canada and Japan on human security. Acharya
(2001) has outlined a more expansive (but less intrusive) view of human
security that goes beyond conventional issues of violence to matters of politics,
culture, dignity and freedom – a definition expressed most comprehensively,
of course, by the late Mahbub ul Haq at UNDP. Furtado (2000) looked to
specific Asian states and reports on their particular responses to the 1997
financial shocks. Applying yet another perspective, Cocklin and Keen (2000)
have described threats to human security (or wellbeing) characteristic of
urbanization on South Pacific islands. These examples suggest how human
security takes on different attributes in micro-level examinations.
Geisler and de Sousa (2001) have raised an awkward case of human security
endeavours working disastrously at cross-purposes in Africa. They examine
so-called ‘ecological expropriation’, the creation of millions of refugees by the
closure of lands for purposes of environmental protection and repair. ‘Human
security and environmental security, often reinforcing, can be at odds’, they
note. Human security can no doubt be enhanced by environmental protection
– or imperilled by it.
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In a world consisting primarily of Canadas, human security might command
a consensus; and the kind of intrusiveness associated with implementing such
an agenda might be acceptable. . . . However, too many individuals in the
twenty-first century reside in makeshift shelters and thatched homes. What
difference will it make to their lives for us to insist that they have become
the referents of security? Not very much.
z Human security risk assessment
Much of the human security literature uses the language of ‘threats’ to
characterize a wide – and, it would seem, always growing – list of challenges.
To group all of these problems – from pandemic diseases to human-induced
environmental catastrophes, from population displacements to terrorism, to
the proliferation of nuclear or small arms – on the same long list, as if the
costs (immediate as well as long-term) and probabilities (present and future)
of each were the same, is unhelpful. They should be disaggregated and the
costs and probabilities associated with each of these distinct problem areas
specified. Changing rates of infection and mortality rates only tell us the direct,
human costs of diseases such as AIDS, for instance; as some scholars now
argue, there are profound, longer-term social, economic, and potential political
consequences of these diseases as well. Once these costs are identified, it will
be important to consider their longer-term implications for public policy and
for preventive and mitigation strategies, especially if long-term social and
economic costs are significant and widespread.
Mortality rates or poverty ‘thresholds’ are only one benchmark of human
security. Although some ‘threats’ have major human security costs attached
to them (the terrorist detonation of a nuclear bomb in a city, for example),
the actual probability associated with these events may be quite low (Mueller
2006a, 2006b), especially when compared to the array of human security risks
that most people confront in their daily lives. Nor do probabilities remain
constant; on the contrary, some can rise suddenly, and others will fall.
Resources and policy attention need to be re-allocated to those human security
risks that are increasing, but only after undertaking a serious comparative
assessment of relative risks (importantly including an identification of which
population groups face the most risk).
The report on Global Risks (2007: 4) argues that ‘there has been a major
improvement in the understanding of the interdependencies between global
risks, the importance of taking an integrated risk management approach to
major global challenges and the necessity of attempting to deal with root causes
of global risks rather than reacting to the consequences’. The report documents
23 core global risks which include energy supply disruptions, climate change,
natural catastrophes, international terrorism, interstate and civil wars,
pandemics and infectious diseases, and the breakdown of critical information
infrastructures. The report measures the probabilities and costs associated with
these risks on the basis of qualitative and quantitative data. In assessing
severity, two indices – ‘destruction of assets/economic damage and, where
applicable, human lives lost’ – were considered. It also offers a number of
institutional recommendations on how businesses and governments can best
mobilize resources and attention in order to ‘engage in the forward action
needed to begin managing global risks rather than coping with them’.
The relationships between political and economic variables, and their
impact on conflict processes and so-called ‘state failure’, have also been
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examined in risk-assessment frameworks. The ‘failed state index’ developed
by the Fund For Peace and Foreign Policy (2011) magazine, finds that nearly
60 countries in the world are dysfunctional because the government does not
effectively control its territory, provide basic services to its citizens, or the
country is experiencing some kind of internal unrest.
There is also now a great deal of work on organized violence and its causes
(Collier 2007, Sambanis, et al. 2002, Stewart and Brown 2007, Duffield 2001).
Three explanations dominate this literature:
1 those that stress the importance of group-based inequalities as a source of
conflict, i.e. conflicts are based on ‘creed’;
2 those that focus on private gains – i.e. conflicts are driven by ‘greed’;
3 explanations which stress the failed social contract thesis, i.e. conflicts are
really about ‘needs’.
Those who have looked at these explanations closely find that it is not absolute
poverty, but relative poverty that matters most. In other words, poor countries
where some groups are, relatively speaking, much better off than others
because of caste or creed are much more predisposed to experience violent
conflict.
The policy implication of this research is that development strategies must
be tied not simply to alleviating poverty in the poorest countries, but also to
addressing the horizontal inequalities that divide those societies through, for
example, redistribution of land, privatization schemes, credit allocation
preferences, educational quotas, employment policies that stress balanced
employment, and public sector infrastructure investment that advantages the
disadvantaged (Stewart and Brown 2007). Research also shows that economic
development is critical to sustaining the peace in states that have just ended
a civil war (Paris 2004). Economic development is necessary to restore a state’s
human capital and infrastructure, raise the opportunity costs of conflict, and
get buy-in from the local populace by raising their standard of living.
The subjective aspects of risk are another potentially promising research
venue. We now know that most people tend to discount risks that they
consider controllable, while exaggerating risks they think are uncontrollable.
(This might explain why some people have a fear of flying.) People also tend
to discount – and usually quite heavily – future risks (even though the
probabilities associated with them are high), as against imminent risks that
are relatively low. This is all to say there is a substantial literature in psychology
on the cognitive biases that come into play as individuals confront the ordinary
risks of daily life (Tversky and Kahneman 2000, Tversky, Slovic and
Kahneman 1982). But there has been little direct application of this research
to human security concerns. Do individuals in different societies perceive
common human security threats through similar or different cognitive frames
of reference? Are there significant cross-cultural barriers that stand in the way
of coordinated policy responses to shared human security risks? To what extent
are perceptions about different kinds of risks to human security at variance
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with more ‘objective’ assessments of those risks? Are there cultural taboos that
stand in the way of efforts to reduce certain kinds of human security risks
(family violence, violence against women, infanticide, etc.), and what kinds
of strategies are appropriate to changing social attitudes? Are some social
institutions better able to manage certain kinds of risks? And are there lessons
to be learned about ways to reduce risk exposure for the most vulnerable groups
in society? These are some questions that warrant further study.
z Governance and human security
Tension remains between still-new human security concerns and still-standing
institutions and categories that continue to shape academic and political
assumptions. There is an extensive consensus that prevailing institutions –
state, interstate, nonstate – are performing inadequately (Thomas 2001,
Reveron and Mahoney-Norris 2011, Friman and Reich 2007). But there is
noisy disagreement over explanations and remedies.
Hampson et al. (2002) explored adaptations by international financial
institutions (IFIs) to the human security agenda, and found them partial and
unreliable: constrained by bureaucratic divisions or inertia, and by conflicts
among their own (state) donors, IFIs ‘have tended to adopt those elements
among the different conceptions of human security that are most compatible
with existing organizational mandates’.
Again, in the development discourse, there has been an early and fundamental
dispute about the place of the state in the human security universe.
Griffin (1995) had concluded by the mid-1990s that it was essential ‘to
construct new, post-cold war structures for global governance and cooperation
among peoples’, and to ‘shift the emphasis from national sovereignty and state
security to individual rights and human security’. In response, Bienefeld
(1995) held that states themselves are a precondition to successful global
governance – and to the achievement by any society of democracy, human
security and sustainable development: ‘Therefore we cannot abandon the
sovereign state and strive for global governance. Instead, we must seek to
protect the sovereign state in order to use it to fashion a system of global
governance’.
Former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy (2001) found it possible
to resolve this polarity in the imagery of interdependence-driven coalitionbuilding
among states, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, businesses
and others. The Landmines Convention and the Rome Statute demonstrated
the possibilities of diplomacy to advance human security (McRae and Hubert
2001). But even Axworthy acknowledged the present operational inadequacies
of governance in some critical human security activities – which is perhaps
most dramatic in the realm of coercive intervention, where norms remain
inchoate or contradictory and institutions weak.
Several authors have applied human security analysis to the governance of
refugee problems. Adelman (2001) detected a shift in emphasis at UNHCR,
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away from legal asylum issues and toward the protection of refugees and refugee
operations (including protection of internally displaced people). But he does
not diagnose this as a radical departure: ‘It was built into the possibilities of
the UNHCR from the beginning’. Again on refugees, Schmeidl (2002) found
confirming evidence that refugee flows themselves can constitute a menace to
human security – but especially when states encourage the transformation of
refugee populations into ‘refugee warrior communities’. Her assessment of
the Afghan refugee experience in South Asia leads to the conclusion that ‘the
way local, regional and international actors responded to the refugee crisis
seems to have contributed equally, or more to the security dilemma, than the
migration itself’.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (2011) finds that since 1998
‘the number of internally displaced persons (IDP) has steadily risen from
around 17 million to 27.5 million in 2010’. Although displacement ‘continues
to rise in the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East’, there has been ‘a
steady decline in IDP numbers in Africa, dating back from 2004’. Arguably,
this positive development is because ‘the African continent remains at the
forefront of policy development in support of IDP rights. In 2009, the African
Union adopted the Kampala Convention – the first ever instrument for the
protection and assistance of IDPs to bind countries across a whole continent’.
When the Convention is ratified by 15 African Union members it will go
into effect. Globally the causes of much of this displacement are continuing
patterns of armed violence and criminality which have forced peoples and
communities from their homes. This trend is also accompanied by an
increasing pattern of urban displacement, which poses its own unique challenge
for international humanitarian and development responders.
z Towards a theory of human security
Running through the human security literature is a recognition – not always
explicit – of the difficulty in grounding these subjects in cohesive theory or
methodology. Indeed, conventional realist frameworks of International
Relations theory prove quite inhospitable to human security approaches – one
reason, no doubt, why the treatment of human security in the prominent
journals of security studies has so far seemed brief and dismissive (Mack 2001).
Systematic attempts to develop theory and methodology helpful to understanding
humans’ security ultimately appear to involve the abandonment, if
not outright repudiation, of the various realist schools of International
Relations theorizing (see Chapter 2, this volume). Some scholars have turned
instead to feminist critiques to address human security questions, and more
generally to constructivism (see Chapters 5 and 8, this volume).
Constructivism shares fundamental assumptions with human security
approaches – the assumption, for example, that threats are constructed, not
inevitable, and that they can be altered or mitigated. Furthermore, the
acknowledgement by states that certain forms of economic and political
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organization facilitate domestic peace and stability, and that domestic
conditions affect the international system, are characteristically constructivist
insights (see Neuman 2001).
Similarly, some feminist approaches explicitly call for political action and
focus on familiar human security issues: shifting scales, from household to
substate to global; breaking down dichotomies, as between public and personal,
national and international; and acknowledging mobility, whether of refugees
or fugitives from human rights law (e.g. Hyndman 2001). Throughout, there
is in feminist analysis a sharp and careful attention to unequal and violent
relationships in families, communities, or transnational systems – the kinds
of relationships that often define human insecurity.
Taken together, constructivist and feminist analyses offer promising
methodologies for examining exactly the phenomena that concern human
security scholars. By reorienting the research focus to life as it is lived by the
most insecure in any society (women, the poor, minorities, aboriginal
communities), these methodologies can advance research and make for more
productive human security policy.
z Conclusion
For all their inconsistencies and uncertainties, human security studies are
growing demonstrably stronger and more abundant. In fact, the diversity of
disciplinary foundations accounts for some of the strength in human security
scholarship: there is a kind of evolutionary advantage in drawing from a wide
variety of intellectual methods and traditions. That same variety goes some
way to explain a profusion of research activities that can sometimes look like
incoherence.
Some scholars are still busy trying to define the boundaries of human
security, organizing a discipline, arranging typologies. Meanwhile, others are
exploring human security issues on the ground – and beginning a serious
scholarly contribution to the design and execution of human security policy.
In all of this, policy-makers and scholars are bound to find each other at
odds from time to time. Practitioners, hard-pressed to prevent the crises not
already exploding on CNN and the internet, and to cope with crises underway,
show understandable impatience with scholarship that renders any problem
more complicated – or worse, that does not evidently address any recognizable
problem at all. Policy-makers (some of them scholars manqués themselves)
would do well to remind themselves that scholars honour their own obligations
and professional standards; they are neither desk officers at the call of foreign
ministries nor cheering spectators at the policy sidelines. Equally, scholars
ambitious to affect policy are wise to understand the constraints of politics
and resources that act on policy in every phase. They should also respect the
dictatorship of deadlines that practitioners face – and the low tolerance among
practitioners for elegant definitional argument. When a theory collides
with reality, busy practitioners might want to know why; they will show
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no detectable excitement when a theory collides with another theory. In the
best sort of dialogue – frank, timely, and open-minded – academic and policy
communities can collaborate to their lasting and shared advantage. More to
the point, together they might advance the progress of human security.
z Further reading
Mary Kaldor, Human Security (Polity, 2007). A broad-ranging discussion of
human security by one of its principal European intellectual champions
that is written in an accessible and provocative style.
Fen Osler Hampson et al., Madness in the Multitude (Oxford University Press,
2002). Provides an overview of the history and evolution of different
conceptions of human security and key policy initiatives.
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The
Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research
Centre, 2001). A key policy document that discusses the challenges of
humanitarian intervention and offers major recommendations to strengthen
the capacity and will of international institutions to intervene when there
are major violations of human rights.
Neil S. MacFarlane and Yuen Foon Khong, Human Security and the UN:
A Critical History (Indiana University Press, 2006). Discusses the history
and evolution of the contribution of the United Nations to human security.
Jorge Nef, Human Security and Mutual Vulnerability (Ottawa: International
Development Research Centre, 2002). One of the earliest and most
definitive discussions of the meaning of human security and its importance
in international development.
Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide
(Harper Perennial, 2003). A Putlizer prize-winning discussion of the moral
dilemmas associated with humanitarian intervention by one of President
Obama’s key policy advisers.
Derek S. Reveron and Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris, Human Security in a
Borderless World (Westview Press, 2011). A useful, up-to-date text on the
broader conception and approaches to the study of human security that is
a good introduction to the subject for students.
Report of the Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now:
Protecting and Empowering People (UN, 2003). A key report of an
international commission that discusses the different aspects of human
security and the ways to address different human security challenges.
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