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Human Security
Fen Osler Hampson
CHAPTER 19
C ONTENTS 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: war- affected 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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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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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 Mahoney- Norris 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 pur- poses. 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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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
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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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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 funda- mental 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 coalition- building 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 under- standing 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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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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