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KM Fierke, 'Human Insecurity', Critical Approaches to International Security (London: Polity, 2007) 144-166.

Human security

- notion that underdevelopment is dangerous in so far as it correlates and coexists with violent conflict. (144)

Human security was first popularized by the UN Development Programme and was a response to an observation after the end of the Cold War that in today's conflicts civilians are often the victims and even the primary targets of violence.

- e.g. child soldiers, refugees, rape (145)

The concept of human security and its themes

- sustainable development (environmental protection)

- human development

--- the safety of individuals is key to global security (145)

other three different themes:

- human rights and the rule of law -> individuals have a basic right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

- the safety of peoples -> secure the moral and legal rights of non-combatants in war, assist in building the peace and preventing future conflict, and improve the basic living conditions of refugees.

- sustainable development, including economic, social and environmental rights -> the strategic objective is to alleviate poverty to redistribute wealth and to encourage participatory governance. (146)

A Critical Concept?

Human security emphasizes meeting basic material needs as well as preserving human dignity, which includes meaningful participation in a community.

Although states are not the focus, they are not unimportant. They should play a crucial role in creating and maintaining structures of authority and responsibility that contribute to human security. However, in a globalising world, they can't always implement international obligations because they lack control within their borders and have inadequate institutional capacity and resources.

This is exacerbated by the proliferation of non-state actors, such as international arms dealers, non-state paramilitaries, international crime and terrorism.

Buzan recognizes that the state is 'a necessary condition for individual security because without the state it is not clear what other agency is o act on behalf individuals. (Top-Down approach)

Arguably, this misses the point. As Williams point out, societal security refers to the process by which society is securitized and acquires an identity, which may be linked to processes of state securitization. (Bottom-Up approach) (148)

Human security has been a key concept of NGOs and others who are interested in actually transforming global economic structures. (150)

Development and security

Development and security used to be largely separate areas of study and practice. Development studies addressed questions of global inequality and poverty. Security studies focused on conflict and war. (150)

The critical Marxist literature on development is premised on the idea that globalization is not a new phenomenon. The underdevelopment of the South has gone hand in hand with the development of the North in a capitalist world economy.

Critics of European imperialism in the early part of the twentieth century, and not least Lenin, argued that capitalism was fuelled by the need to expand in search of profit. Imperialism was a manifestation of this global expansion in pursuit of wealth. (151)

Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974) World System Theory provided a framework for understanding the relationship between the development of the industrial core, the underdevelopment of a periphery, which provided raw materials, and a semi-periphery, which produced luxury goods and provided a buffer against revolutionary transformation. (151)

It wasn't that the South was undeveloped, but rather that it had been deliberately underdeveloped within a global relationship. (151)

This discourse of underdevelopment has largely disappeared since the 1980s and particularly since the end of the Cold War. In its place, a neo-liberal agenda, which promotes the free market, the universal legitimacy of private economic power and individual choice within the marketplace, has emerged. (152)

In contrast to economic assumptions that globalization is delivering economic growth for all, free market liberalization since the 1980s had accelerated the widening of this gap. (152)

Security

The conflicts related in some cases to the failure of states to consolidate their authority over an area which may have been exacerbated by the loss of superpower funding as the Cold War ended. Failed states and, along with them, conflict proliferated in the 1990s. (153)

The victims in these conflicts are overwhelmingly citizens, rather than the representatives of recognizable state armies.

The global downsizing of armies following the end of the Cold War created a large pool of private mercenaries and an expanding role for them, and the privatisation of security, under the auspices of corporate actors or Western states (Musah in Milliken 2003:166-9)

The outbreak of new wars has corresponded with an increasing emphasis in the academic literature and in political discourse on the idea that liberal democracies don't fight with one another. (153)

Empires and imperial states have repeatedly deployed force against states and populations in the periphery in the service of the project of extending European rule and institutions to the rest of the world. (154)

Liberal governance as a solution

Liberal discourses of development and democracy have focused on individual states, ignoring the embeddedness of these states in historical relations that are global.

Mark Duffield (2001) provides a critical analysis of the relationship between security and development, which has increasingly been addressed within a liberal governance model. (154)

Development discourse has changed from an emphasis on supporting pro-Western Southern elites through aid to the transformation of entire societies. In the first half of the 1990s, the international community was very focused on humanitarian intervention in different conflict areas. (155)

The change, since the mid-1990s, is Duffield (2001:11) argues, one of policy rather than in the nature of the conflict. The reason for the change of policy is the conclusion that underdevelopment is dangerous and is a source of conflict. This conclusion, which is an extension of the liberal model, does not locate underdevelopment or 'failed states' in an unjust global system which has emerged along with a capitalist world economy and a history of imperialism. The liberal governance model internalizes the causes of conflict and political instability. (155)

Duffield examines human security as part of a Foucauldian strategy of biopolitics, whereby a strategic complex of global actors and governing agencies, through a newly formed public-private relationship, shape and control civil population. (156)

A Critical analysis

Development and security discourses reinforced a liberal agenda of transforming entire societies into liberal democracies. This agenda is problematic for two reasons.

1^st: as it represents a new regime of power, albeit ‘softer’ than the old imperialist regime, Marxists view human security as a repackaging of liberal humanitarianism, with its routine failure to address underlying social causes.

2^nd: the discourse failed to problematize the role of historical global relations in the production of ‘failed states’.  (156)

The liberal model locates the problem of human insecurity in the failure of individual states to proceed along the pathway to successful statehood.

The dependency model locates the problem in historical and global relations that continue to constrain or underdevelop large parts of the world. (157)

In the liberal model, democracy is an ideal type, towards which all states should want to progress. The failure of certain states establishes the problem of human insecurity as arising from the lack of stateness and prescribes a response, that is, reconstructing the state as a liberal democracy.

The liberal model fails to hitoricize processes of state-making or to recognize local and global processes that have contributed to the construction of different types of state. (157)

The critical methodological potential of human security lies not in bringing an ideal model of democracy and political order to the ‘problem’ of failed states, but in an analysis of these processes of construction at different levels and how they intersect. (159)

The shift from the modernization and development theories of the 1950s and 1960s to the democratization theories of the 1980s and 1990s is one of emphasis, from the state as the centre of social control to ‘advocating and supporting the construction of conformist civil societies as supposedly autonomous spaces of individual freedom and association’. (160-161)

What is missing from these logics, Bilgin and Morton argue, is any question about the processes by which these states become ‘weak’ while others become strong. They never ask the question of who has failed the ‘failed state’?

Claims about ‘failed states’ do not reflect on the power-knowledge relationship. (161)

The problem relates to a lack of clarity regarding the language employed and a failure to recognize the relationship between the use of categories and the practices that emerge as a result. (161)

Jenny Edkins (2000, 2005) problematizes the conceptualization of famine as a natural disaster for which no one is to blame, and asks a question about ‘who might be responsible for a famine, rather than what caused it’. (162)

Famine as a natural disaster produces victims who need welfare provision or aid, rather than agents with a political voice. These victims then become subject to administrative mechanisms of food distribution and aid. This process depoliticizes famine and constitutes it as a site for intervention and control. (163)

Edkins: Starvation is no more ‘natural’ than suffocation: it is no more a shortage of food than the latter is a shortage of air. (163)

By demonstrating the parallels between mass starvation and genocide, Edkins politicizes the former, showing that it is often a product of human intentionality, through a series of small acts, rather than a natural disaster. This introduces an element of human responsibility and agency in the construction of human insecurity. (163)

Arguably, both famine and genocide involve two levels of intentionality. The first is the intentionality of the political groups that produce the catastrophe. The second is the intentionality of the international community in responding – or not responding 0 to the human catastrophe. (164)

A more critical approach to the concept of human security would place less emphasis on ‘fixing’ the meaning of categories and instead explore the conceptual worlds that have given rise to various forms of insecurity. This requires problematizing the liberal assumptions underlying the concept, in order to prise open a more critical space for asking questions about the meaning of political community and the processes by which human security might more effectively be constructed. (166)