Routledge Handbook of Human Security

Mary Martin, Taylor Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134619801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Handbook will serve as a standard reference guide to the subject of human security, which has grown greatly in importance over the past twenty years.

Human security has been part of academic and policy discourses since it was first promoted by the UNDP in its 1994 Human Development Report. Filling a clear gap in the current literature, this volume brings together some of the key scholars and policy-makers who have contributed to its emergence as a mainstream concept, including Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen and Sadako Ogata, who jointly chaired the 2001 Commission on Human Security. Drawing upon a range of theoretical and empirical analyses, the Handbook provides examples of the use of human security in policies as diverse as disaster management, arms control and counter-terrorism, and in different geographic and institutional settings from Asia to Africa, and the UN. It also raises important questions about how the concept might be adapted and operationalised in future.

Over the course of the book, the authors draw on three key aspects of human security thinking:

• Theoretical issues to do with defining human security as a specific discourse

• Human security from a policy and institutional perspective, and how it is operationalised in different policy and geographic contexts

• Case studies and empirical work

Featuring some of the leading scholars in the field, the Routledge Handbook of Human Security will be essential reading for all students of human security, critical security, conflict and development, peace and conflict studies, and of great interest to students of international security and IR in general.

PART I

Concepts of human security

1

BIRTH OF A DISCOURSE

Amartya Sen

Editors’ note: This chapter includes excerpts of articles, presentations and an interview recorded between 2000 and 2008. Taken together they trace the emergence of human security as a concept in public communication and discourse, and its growing acceptance as a policy tool and paradigm of security.

It begins with Sen’s ideas on how rights and security are linked to development in which education occupies a central place and includes comments following publication of the Commission for Human Security’s report ‘Human Security Now’.

Theoretical underpinnings¹

Human security is not a new idea, but it has had a remarkable revival. It is invoked astonishingly often in recent discussions. As a new ‘buzz’ expression, it is in some danger of being summoned too often and too loosely, as is the fate of many such newly favoured terms, like ‘social exclusion’ which (in Else Oyen’s unflattering portrayal) has been ‘picked up’ by people who ‘are now running all over the place arranging seminars and conferences to find a researchable content in an umbrella concept for which there is limited theoretical underpinning.’²

Since that restless fate would be worth escaping, we might as well get straight to the ‘theoretical underpinning’ of the concept of human security.

In initiating the discussion on ‘human security’ in Japan and elsewhere, Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo described it as the key idea in ‘comprehensively seizing all of the menaces that threaten the survival, daily life, and dignity of human beings and to strengthening the efforts to confront these threats.’³ He saw this focus as reflecting the ‘belief that human beings should be able to lead lives of creativity, without having their survival threatened or their dignity impaired.’ Thus seen, human security can be understood as the protection and preservation of human ‘survival’ and ‘daily life’ (presumably against premature death, avoidable ill-health, the massive handicap of illiteracy etc.) and also the avoidance of various indignities that can shower injury, insult and contempt on our lives (related, for example, to destitution, penury, incarceration, exclusion, or – again – illiteracy or innumeracy).

Pursuing this line of analysis, it can be argued that the ‘underpinning’ of the concept of human security must include at least the following distinct elements:

1 a clear focus on individual human lives (this would contrast, for example, with the aggregately technocratic notion of ‘national security’ – the favoured interpretation of ‘security’ in the military context)

2 an appreciation of the role of society and of social arrangements in making human lives more secure in a constructive way (avoiding a socially detached view of individual human predicament and redemption, emphasized in some – but not all – religious contexts)

3 a reasoned concentration on the downside risks of human lives, rather than on the overall expansion of effective freedom in general (contrasting with the broader objective of the promotion of ‘human development’)

4 a chosen focus, again, on the ‘downside’ in emphasizing the more elementary human rights (rather than the entire range of human rights).

Human security is important but not exclusively so. The idea of human security identifies one class of objectives among many others which too may have legitimate claim on our attention. There is a good deal of complementarity with other foundational notions that have found their place in global social dialogue: for example, ‘human development’ (brilliantly championed by the late Mahbub ul Haq), or ‘human rights’ (revived in a new conceptual setting that draws indirectly on the classic championing of the ‘rights of man’ by Tom Paine, or the ‘vindication of the rights of women’ by Mary Wollstonecraft more than two hundred years ago).

Human security does relate to ‘human development’ and ‘human rights,’ and even to ‘national security’ and to ‘individual dedication,’ but it is not the same as any of them. It is as important to be clear about the distinctions involved as it is to see the interdependence and interlinkages of human security with other important concerns pursued in contemporary global discussion.

The majority of people are concerned with the security of their own lives and of the lives of other people like them. This general concern has to be directly addressed, and any understanding of security in more remote terms (such as military security or so-called national security) can be integrated with it to the extent that this makes human life more secure.

A broader understanding of human security is extremely important precisely because it affects human lives. The idea of what is called ‘national security’ is somewhat more remote from human lives, in the sense that it is often defined in terms of military preparedness and other features of national policy. Defence can, of course, be important for the lives of people within a nation, and to the extent that this is so, that consideration can be fully covered within the idea of human security itself.

The idea behind development as freedom and, by extension, the relationship between human security and freedom is that freedom is the principal end of development as well as its primary means. The basic understanding here is that freedoms of different kinds (such as political liberty, social facilities, economic opportunity, etc.) are each individually important, but they also complement each other. Each kind of freedom serves as an end in itself and also as a means to the other freedoms.

The idea of freedom is very broad and deals with freedom from insecurity as well as freedom to enhance general living conditions and people’s ability to do what they value doing and have reason to pursue. Human security is, thus, connected with one part of human freedom, and it is that part with which the report of the Commission on Human Security is specifically connected (CHS 2003). In the context of human security we are especially concerned with ‘downside risks’.

Indeed, even when overall progress is very positive, the threat of insecurity may still be present and serious. For example, even though South Korea had two decades of extremely rapid economic growth with much equity in the distribution of economic gains, when the East Asian economic crisis came in 1997, it turned out that a proportion of the population had remained extremely vulnerable, despite their having participated in the general aggregative progress in the economy as a whole. The trouble is that when things go up and up, people often move up together, but when the downfall comes, they tend to fall extremely divided.

Thus, the old idea of growth with equity does not provide an adequate guarantee of security when there are inescapable downturns. By focusing specifically on human security, supporters of the concept such as the Commission on Human Security extended the more ‘upbeat’ pursuit of development, by paying specific attention to dangers of downturns and unanticipated declines. The idea of human security, thus, fits in well with the broader notion of human freedom, but focuses particularly on the question of vulnerability.

However, all this also built on a notion of human development pioneered by Mahbub ul Haq, who contrasted a GNP-centred understanding of the process of development with a concept of human development which drew on the need to focus on enhancing human freedom and capability in general.

The first decade: human capabilities and vulnerabilities⁴

Mahbub ul Haq could not really have had any complaint that the world took a long time to appreciate the remarkable merits of his brainchild, the Human Development Report, as a vehicle of communication, nor to accept the pre-eminence of the idea of ‘human development’ as an illuminating concept that serves to integrate a variety of concerns about the lives of people and their well-being and freedom. Mahbub’s creation received remarkable notice and acclaim in less than a decade. When I recall the telephone calls that came repeatedly from Mahbub in summer 1989, I have a sense of proximity in time that is in some tension with the way the idea of human development and the commanding presence of the Human Development Reports have become solid parts of the contemporary landscape of social thinking in the international community. What must have appeared to many in the United Nations system as a rather eccentric plan of an independent-minded Pakistani economist has become a central component of critical attention in the world of communication and public discourse.

Pluralist conception

Why did the Human Development Report receive so much attention with such speed in a world where new ideas often take decades, sometimes centuries, to receive the recognition they deserve? Why is the idea of human development such a success in the contemporary world? This is not a question about the profundity of Mahbub ul Haq’s creative ideas, which is, of course, absolutely clear and not in any way in dispute. At a very basic level of social understanding, the Human Development Reports had – and have had – much to offer to the discerning public. But the value of new knowledge and understanding is not always – indeed, not often quickly – recognized, and the swift success of the approach of human development has to be judged in that context. For one thing, the Human Development Reports have experienced a much more rapid appreciation and general acceptance than any of us (involved in helping Mahbub) had expected. We must ask, why has this happened?

This raises a more elementary question. What does the human development accounting, in fact, do? What is its special feature, its identifying characteristic? This is, at one level, an easy question to answer. Rather than concentrating only on some solitary and traditional measure of economic progress (such as the gross national product per head), ‘human development’ accounting involves a systematic examination of a wealth of information about how human beings in each society live (including their state of education and health care, among other variables). It brings an inescapably pluralist conception of progress to the exercise of development evaluation. Human lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways, and the first task, seen in this perspective, is to acknowledge that deprivations of very different kinds have to be accommodated within a general overarching framework. The framework must be cogent and coherent, but must not try to overlook the pluralities that are crucially involved (in the diverse nature of deprivations) in a misguided search for some one measure of success and failure, some single clue to all the other disparate concerns. The issue of plurality and openness to multiple concerns is quite central to the success of the exercise.

It is important to distinguish the general idea of a pluralist conception from the more specific proposals on which human development accounting has tended to rely, involving the integration of particular criteria such as life expectancy, literacy and indicators of economic affluence. Mahbub’s innovation was, in an important sense, a philosophical departure.

Utilitarianism and single-mindedness

To understand what is involved in Mahbub’s innovative departure in the world of traditional development evaluation, it is useful to consider an analogy, involving the hold of utilitarian philosophy over rivals as the dominant form of ethical reasoning, especially in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. The utilitarian calculus involves a quintessentially singleminded approach to ethical accounting. The one variable on which it concentrates, namely utility, has some plausibility if, for some obligatory reason, we have to choose only one variable – exactly one and no other – for our ultimate focus. Indeed, it cannot be denied that avoiding pain and suffering must be a good thing, or that happiness is an important reward of living. No ethical accounting can really ignore this elementary understanding. But even those who concede this readily may easily identify many other features of human life and social events that are also significant. Why not take note of them, in addition to utilities (in the form of happiness, desire fulfilment or whatever metric the utilitarians advocate)?

There is, in fact, the rub. In the intellectual victory that utilitarian accounting achieved in mainstream moral philosophy, quite a bit of the work was done, often implicitly, by the trumped-up belief that it would be somehow analytically mistaken, or at least ferociously clumsy, to have many different things as being simultaneously valuable.

The victory of utilitarianism not only suppressed the claims of rival theories, it also corrupted and deformed the intellectual basis of the claims underlying these theories by making their advocates opt for a subsidiary route to influence via their effects on utilities.

The utilitarian emperor offered small native kingdoms, under strict viceregal supervision, to advocates of freedom, rights, equal treatment and many other putative claimants to ethical authority.

The rejuvenation of ethics and political philosophy in recent decades, led particularly by John Rawls (certainly the greatest moral philosopher of this century), involved, among many other things, a rebellion against the formulaic and reductionist programme established by the dominance of utilitarianism. Rawls brought many more concerns and a wealth of ideas into the analysis, beginning with his radical insistence on the ‘fairness’ of processes, and proceeding to the priority of liberty, on the one hand, to resistance to arbitrary privileges, on the other, and finally to an irreducible concern with both efficiency and equity in the distribution of basic resources, as the final part of this complex claim. On the way to a different system, Rawls had to brush off, in effect, the utilitarian special pleading in favour of a monoconcentrationist playing field. Once Rawls opened the door out of the reductionist prison, many rival theories have flourished in contemporary moral and political philosophy, without having to pay homage to the centrality of utility as the one great thing that overshadows all other individual claimants to that pre-eminence.

Development and monoconcentration

What has happened in the field of development evaluation can be better understood in terms of this analogy. Riding initially as a kind of younger brother of utility, the concept of real income had managed to get a very special status in applied work in development economics. The basis of real income evaluation in pure economic theory has almost always been utility (as any serious student of real income evaluation would know). But, in the rugged world of measurement, the concentration shifted from the foundational concern with utilities (often very difficult to reach with measurable data) to a practical involvement with income statistics and evaluations based on this.

It was thus not unnatural that the world of economic evaluation was dominated by concepts such as the Gross National Product (GNP), or perhaps some distribution-adjusted version of aggregate income. If interest was expressed by some sceptic on the possibility that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Sadako Ogata
• List of abbreviations
• Contributors
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I Concepts of human security
• PART II Human security applications
• PART III Human security actors
• PART IV Human security tools
• Conclusion
• Index