http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i42/42b00801.htm
From the issue dated June 27, 2008
Beyond Borders and Bullets
'Human security' advocates call for a different approach to global problems
By PETER MONAGHAN
Every day human cataclysms vie for headline space: Hunger and disease plague the war-riven Congo; the Sudanese government stonewalls United Nations peacekeepers; Myanmar's oppressive regime blocks aid for cyclone victims. Increasingly, it seems, the world's trouble spots are afflicted by both man-made miseries — civil wars, terrorism, genocide — and natural disasters. And the two are often linked: Poverty and scarce resources can trigger armed conflict, while politically unstable or oppressed regions suffer more from the effects of drought and other calamities.
Roughly two decades ago, some political strategists began arguing that traditional approaches to international relations and national security were no match for such complex combinations of strife. Calling their framework "human security," these strategists took as their starting point the notion that, just as states should be protected from outside threats, their people were not truly secure unless they were protected from disease, hunger, and fear. The notion simmered quietly in development and diplomatic circles but was largely disregarded by academic scholars.
In the past dozen years, however, the human-security paradigm has established a presence in academe. "Part of the reason is that we have more instability and threats due to the rapid growth of globalization," says Lincoln C. Chen, director of the Global Equity Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. And "part of it is due to the holistic nature of the concept, which gives it intellectual agility."
While scholars in disciplines like medicine, public health, and meteorology have examined aspects of health emergencies, for example, until recently few scholars had studied how those emergencies are affected by politics. (Geographers have been one exception.) But events in China and Myanmar have demonstrated that "you can't look at an earthquake or a cyclone as only a weather phenomenon," Chen says. "The politics that plays out is unbelievable, and then there's the health crisis that comes with that."
Current events notwithstanding, the majority of political scientists and international-relations scholars remain indifferent, sometimes even hostile, to the human-security paradigm. In part, that is because of the "intellectual agility" that Chen describes: Even the proponents of human security disagree about just what they mean by the term.
When the cold war ended, the resurgence of ethnic and civil conflicts and the collapse of regional and national governments prompted some scholars to shift their attention away from the established approaches to international and security studies, which had long focused on "borders, bullets, and bombs," as one popular shorthand put it. But the human-security framework made little headway until 1994, when the United Nations Development Programme focused on the new approach in one of its series of Human Development Reports. Its perspective was reinforced in 2003 by a report, "Human Security Now," from the international Commission on Human Security.
Both reports called for nations to reorder their priorities, to put the post-cold-war "peace dividend" to work in troubled parts of the world, like postcolonial Africa, with less emphasis on arms and more on human development and humanitarian aid.
Although two members of the commission were academics, Lincoln Chen and Amartya Sen, who is now a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, the provenance of both reports gave human security "an overtly political dimension versus something that came primarily from analytical academic types," says Geoffrey D. Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
But Sen, who was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in economics, was a key influence. His ideas about judging states not just by their gross national product and the freedoms they allowed their citizens, but by their citizens' economic well-being and ability to exercise those freedoms, suffused the human-security reports, says Michael J. Watts, a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley.
Citing such events as mass migrations driven by the AIDS crisis in Africa, attacks on refugee camps in many parts of the world, and the withholding of humanitarian aid to needy populations as a bargaining tool in weapons negotiations with countries like North Korea, the reports confirmed what development officials and some scholars had long known, Watts says: "Being the poorest of the poor, who are falling off the map, means you don't have certain types of security."
Human security has established itself more successfully in universities outside the United States: in Australia, Canada, Japan, Britain, and Scandinavia. In those "mid-level powers," the political culture emphasizes negotiation over deterrence, and in many cases the traditions of left-leaning scholarship are better established. At Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, for example, the Human Security Report Project undertakes research on the causes and consequences of political violence. It issues annual reports on the effects of conflicts around the world, as well as studies of particular trouble spots, such as Afghanistan. It also organizes conferences on such topics as the role of democratic institutions in nations' recovery from civil war.
The approach is gaining ground in the United States, though, at universities including Harvard and Tufts, and the Universities of California at Irvine, Maryland at College Park, and Pittsburgh.
But human-security focus is not always explicit, such as at Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
That reflects a common phenomenon in the field, says Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project. Several public-policy think tanks — the International Peace Institute, the Center on International Cooperation, the RAND Corporation, and even the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan institution set up and financed by Congress — "are working on what are clearly human-security-related issues but don't use the term," he says.
The approach can be most useful, Mack says, when it eschews strict boundaries. "The best people working in the field are focusing on the interrelationships between security, narrowly defined, and economic-development, environmental, and demographic issues," he says. "This necessarily means transcending disciplinary boundaries and looking at issues holistically, which is why human security is not a discipline but a field of studies — like peace studies and peace research, women's studies, and black studies."
The contrast between conventional security and human-security approaches can be stark when viewed in the context of a particular trouble spot such as Nigeria, America's fifth-largest supplier of oil. During more than a decade of simmering "petroviolence," insurgents have killed thousands of Nigerians while blowing up pipelines and wreaking other havoc to further their political ends, says Watts, the Berkeley political geographer. The Nigerian government has sent in troops; attacks have died down, then surged again; consumers in the West have adjusted to increases in gas prices, and the cycle has continued.
What would happen, asks Watts, if oil-price hikes were to skyrocket, Iran was to threaten to withhold oil supplies to the West, and insurgents in Nigeria were to destroy the tankers of multinational oil companies, as they claim they could? No doubt, he says, U.S. and NATO military planners have contingency plans for such crises, but their interventions, reflecting the conventional security approach, would be to put out fires. "It's a crisis-management approach," he says.
By contrast, the human-security approach would include acknowledging the vulnerability of all players, including current victims of the insurgencies, and the corruption of some, including Nigerian authorities, and then intervening in ways that would not ratchet up the violence, he says. That might mean embarking on a range of humanitarian, diplomatic, and even military operations by international bodies like the United Nations, as well as developing energy resources that were less vulnerable.
Some disciplines have long embraced human-security approaches without necessarily naming them as such. Political geographers, for example, have analyzed relationships among national borders, competition for food and other resources, and changes in the environment. Many scholars looking at the effects of globalization on local economies — including people's access to food and energy — could also be said to be taking a "human security" approach.
Human-security concepts are gradually getting an airing in U.S. military circles, too. Military forces increasingly are being asked to keep local populations safe and provide them with humanitarian aid and essential services, concepts that have entered into U.S. diplomatic considerations.
Such activities will increase, predict human-security proponents, including many within the active subfield of environmental security. They say that some military planners realize that rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten to displace populations, greatly increasing political instability, or to set off resource wars. Testifying last year at a Congressional hearing, Kent H. Butts, a professor of political military strategy and director of the National Security Issues Group at the U.S. Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, outlined a surprising front of concern: the Arctic. There, he said, rapid warming is melting ice sheets, portending "an era of intense state activity" to control territories and resources.
But the Wilson Center's Geoffrey Dabelko says the field of human security remains peripheral in the overall scope of military planning. Although more than a dozen faculty members from military colleges attended a Wilson Center seminar on human security last year, "it's not replacing the other stuff," Dabelko says. He is not discouraged. "The argument is not that it should replace [traditional approaches]," he says, "but that we have to diversify."
That spirit of collegiality has its limits. Even while the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, the stronghold of conventional security studies, include many dozens of papers related to human security, most academics in security studies ignore or even disparage the approach. Human security's advocates are, after all, mounting a challenge to neoliberal claims that democracy and free markets will solve most political problems. They ask: How prepared is the international community to secure the conditions that will permit such institutions to work?
Thomas G. Weiss, incoming president of the International Studies Association, says scholars can certainly be criticized for giving short shrift to questions of nonmilitary threats. As human security emerged academically, in the mid-1980s, the cold war still was being waged, and his field naturally gave "primacy over everything" to such considerations as the security of borders, says Weiss, who directs the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Still, he is impatient with human security. He grants that its proponents have scored a few coups, such as successfully pushing for international treaties on "conflict diamonds" and land mines. But the idea that such issues would be considered with the same intensity as those of conventional national-security studies, he says, "seems far-fetched."
The real problem with human security, Weiss argues, is that, "like a lot of other useful insights, it was pushed to outré limits, until nothing was not included. And the further you push it, the less intellectual traction it has." In fact, he says, it devolved into a dogfight over particular causes, including women's rights and indigenous peoples' rights.
When human security's proponents argue "that individuals and empowerment should get the same emphasis as military security, … it's there that you lose a lot of people," says Weiss.
"Some of us think you ought to start with what is possible and doable," he says, and, if resources remain after national security has been secured, only then deal with the most acute problems of human security.
Take the idea of incorporating climate change into security planning. If rising seas lead down the line to large-scale riots in key countries, Weiss says, "that, too, will be seen with the same acuteness as refugees are today."
Some scholars, while sympathetic to the goals of human security, are also critical of its approach. David A. Welch, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who directs the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies there, echoes Weiss's concern that the concept is not specific enough. In the formulations of the United Nations and the Canadian government, especially, human security is defined as "freedom from fear."
"That is so expansive as to reduce the concept to a synonym for 'any bad thing,'" says Welch.
Even some intended beneficiaries of the approach are skeptical of it. The Group of 77 — the coalition of developing countries at the United Nations — "tend to be deeply suspicious of human security, seeing it as part of a 'West against the rest' ideological push by the countries of the North to impose alien values on the developing world," says Andrew Mack, who teaches in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. That is, of course, precisely how Myanmar's rulers defend their hesitation to allow aid to flow freely to cyclone victims there.
Some proponents of human security worry that merely using the word "security" may taint humanitarianism with militarization. Many recipients of aid are aware of two related dangers, says Dabelko. One is that aid will make matters worse. Humanitarian-aid groups, like governments of recipient nations, sometimes believe that the military knows "how to break things, not build things up," as he puts it. The second fear is that linking the concepts of human cataclysm and security will backfire. "If in places like the more remote parts of sub-Saharan Africa there is no traditional security rationale," he says, the danger is that "the humanitarian part slides away."
Others worry that to the degree that human security and its subfields, such as environmental security, enter the political mainstream, they lose their "revolutionary potential." Daniel H. Deudney, an associate professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University, says, "We need paradigm shifts of a fundamental sort. But there are a lot of other, much more potentially powerful ways to do that than through talking about security."
In any case, he says, when researchers use the word "security" metaphorically or as a mobilizing slogan, "I'm not sure who is going to be fooled by that."
For all those reservations, proponents of human security press on. One measure of the concept's acceptance, in fact, is that when many scholars write about such trouble spots as Colombia, Namibia, Angola, and Nigeria, they no longer fret about whether the human-security framework is unwieldy or vague.
"I don't care much when people say that the concept of human security doesn't add much. We hear this with lots of terms," including the term "security" itself, says Richard A. Matthew, who directs the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California at Irvine. The concept of human security is important as a lens that sharpens interdisciplinary work, he argues. "It's about how to bring together, say, economic and ethical and environmental and governance elements to bring people dignity when things fall apart."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
