Human Security in Turkey

Challenges for the 21st century

Alpaslan Özerdem, Füsun Özerdem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136658174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

This edited volume explores human security challenges in the context of Turkey.

Turkey occupies a critical geopolitical position between Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus. It is an important peace-broker in regional conflicts and a leading country in peacekeeping operations, and has been a generous donor for disaster response around the world. However, Turkey is also facing a number of fundamental sociocultural and development challenges and its internal stability is affected by a protracted armed conflict based on Kurdish separatism. In other words, Turkey is at a crossroads in its transformation from a state-centred security perspective to one based on human security.

To explore selected human security challenges within a wider context of peace and development, this volume focuses on a number of key issues in relation to democratization and social cohesion, before going on to investigate the role of Turkey as an agent of peace in the international context. Written by academics from the fields of peace studies, international relations, politics and development studies, the discussions examine and highlight the issues that Turkey must overcome if it is to successfully strengthen its human security trajectories in the near future.

This book will be of much interest to students of human security, Turkish politics, conflict management, peace studies and IR in general.

1 Human(secur)ity and its subjects

Oliver P. Richmond

Introduction

It is clearly the case that the UN has changed the world. The battle over the centrality of human security (HS) in various shapes or forms to its agendas has been central to its impact, in a normative and legal sense, and in many peacekeeping and peacebuilding environments around the world. The UN has challenged older conceptions of sovereignty and security.¹ The old state-centric and elitist concepts of security have been reshaped and a wider version incorporating people, the human and humanity in general has become commonly debated as modernist notions of sovereignty and power have softened. The process has not been straightforward of course, and it is still commonplace for international actors and scholars to assume that state security is necessary for human security, but clearly the latter has entered the lexicon of international relations (IR) even so.

Insecurity is a disruption of ‘humanity’, while human security represents the tidal turn of general interest in redressing insecurity. Thus it has a firm philosophical basis, which has been translated into something far more than what Newman has called an ‘analytically weak but normatively attractive concept’, what Chandler has called the ‘dog that didn't bark’ and Paris and others have argued is a concept unable to resist or mitigate naked interests or its own limited resources (Newman 2004; Chandler 2008; Paris 2001). It is normatively attractive, it has been vital to the understanding and development of a peace and security architecture in the post-Cold War era and it has slowly amassed material capacity.

But more than this, it represents the powerful interests of subaltern security in its cultural, social, economic, political, local and global settings. Thus it is neither analytically weak nor impossible to implement (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2006), having amassed a range of instruments, resources and institutions, and a legal footing. Nor does it ‘not bark’, given that subaltern security is now a measure of general humanity. Nor is it disabled by limited resources, because much of its legitimacy has stemmed from its conceptual empowerment of the subjects of security, which in turn has driven elite, state and international policy. This means that subject engagements with HS, from the very people it is meant to secure, have played a crucial role in legitimating it and providing it with a practical basis beyond that which internationals might envision with their pragmatic views on humanity.

This is also partly why, in the early 1990s, HS emerged as a post-colonial modification of the realist and liberal dimensions of an international system just emerging from the Cold War. Humanity itself was on the agenda, both for internationals and through a growing awareness of a range of local agencies, hitherto ignored, not least in terms of legitimacy. This argument runs counter to some in which the developing world is seen to be opposed to HS, and to the responsibility to protect (R2P), because of their perceived dilution of sovereignty.² This may be the case at the state level, but at the individual and community level, HS is a post-colonial critique of the selfish interests that state-centric notions of security enable, and the way in which they protect state and global elite actors and rich countries from responsibilities to share, engage and enable. Yet at the same time it is also embedded in Northern understandings of peace, order, security and development, thus often leading to resistance from the global South where elites want to protect state sovereignty.

HS appeared as part of the framework of humanitarianism, development and humanitarian intervention, within an underlying critical, not to say radical, thrust (UNDP 1994; Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2006; Newman 2010). Even to offer normative policies was radical at this point. It was to be part of a major reform of the philosophy, interests, material capacities and institutions of international relations, particularly in a move towards consolidating a liberal peace constructed by international actors according to their normative view, embedded in liberal institutions, globalization and state structures. To this end peace, development and security agendas were to be merged (UNDP 1994: 24; Newman and Richmond 2002). This was seen as the most advanced form of peace and politics ever conceptualized. HS is represented by three possible models: a broad institutionalist model, a narrow security-oriented model and a possible post-colonial and emancipatory model.

Yet no sooner had HS emerged as an international policy prescription in the mid-1990s than critical voices began to argue that it was too broad a concept and impractical in what remained an essentially realist international environment (Paris 2001). Such conservative voices were very influential, but even so its logic was extended throughout the 1990s until the concept of the ‘responsibility to protect’ emerged as an extension of the liberal peace agenda by the early twenty-first century (Hehir 2011). By the 2000s, it became clear that HS had partially collapsed because, like many concepts and theories associated with conflict management and resolution, peacebuilding, development, political stabilization and reconciliation (and indeed orthodox IR itself ), it had been captured by the conservative wing of liberalism (which itself was partially co-opted by political realism) (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2006; Richmond 2009b). Or it was being seen from the perspective of political elites in the global South as too interventionary. These perspectives saw it deployed as a cover for social engineering, institutionalization and statebuilding as well as military/humanitarian intervention since the mid-1990s, in order to provide a veneer of legitimacy for interventionary projects. These are often more focused on regional order and state institutions than they are on HS as it was critically envisaged. This has been damaging for the concept's local and international legitimacy (Chandler 2008). Indeed, the concept is not even mentioned in the UN Secretary-General's more recent report Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict (UN Secretary-General 2009b: 5).

Even so, the long shadow HS has cast over strategic and reductive policy-making driven by international prescriptions is a result of its legitimacy with the post-colonial, post-conflict and post-development ‘subjects’ of international relations. Some may claim that HS has the capacity for neocolonialism, as its narrow institutional version may, and many civil society actors around the world may be concerned about its broader, emancipatory, version's liberal framing, but they are also drawn by its empowerment of potentially autonomous local political subjects, that is, citizens. Subjects of HS require and influence the broader construction of their security in local, state, regional and international contexts. This implies security's subjects are now post-colonial actors. They have realized their rights, needs and positionality in their state and local context, and in the international system. Similarly, so have institutions, agencies and NGOs that have been charged with peace and development matters and have subsequently been exposed to the dynamics and requirements of an everyday peace (Richmond 2009a) beyond so-called high politics, strategic interests and ungrounded international prescriptions.

In what follows, I argue that the intellectual and policy evolution of HS over the last 20 years has echoed a tension between interests, pragmatism and a norm of humanity. The following sections discuss HS as a policy-driven or subject-driven concept and process, which requires enablement resting on ‘peace formation’ capacity as much as it rests on international norms and capacity. Despite externalized and policy-driven constraints, its connection with a grass-roots and transnational will for humanity means its contestation is far from a simple matter of interests and capacity, and subject responses in everyday settings of peacemaking and peacebuilding mean it is difficult for internationals to do other than keep reinventing it.

Human security as a policy-driven framework

It was in the post-Cold War development setting that HS was first articulated as an alternative to Cold War territorial and military security. It was in this tradition that Roosevelt introduced the concept after the Second World War (part of ‘four freedoms’) as a top-down contribution to the emerging international architecture in which individuals and societies were embedded (Roosevelt 1941b; Roosevelt 1941a). HS's later policy adoption was seen partly as a post-Cold War and a post-colonial shift, whereby states and ideologies would be replaced as the subject of IR. This was through a focus on individual security and sustainable development, and drew together a range of antecedents that had long been critical of mainstream orthodoxies (UNDP 1994: 24). In particular, HS was an attempt to revitalize the broader concerns of social-justice-oriented approaches – freedom from fear and want – and later generations of human rights, providing the UN with a new agenda after its torrid Cold War experiences. This culminated in documents like The Responsibility to Protect and the High-level Panel report, which were essentially conceptualizations of security according to dominant liberal-international, liberal-institutional and neoliberal strands of international policy-making, driven by elite international actors who saw themselves as the architects and guardians of the liberal peace, democracy and human rights (Canadian International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2003; UN 2004). But many within this consensus also harbour humanitarian views related to the well-being of the subject. Such concepts are complicated at the international level, where some jealously guard sovereignty and others demand more assistance for security, peace and development.

In the 1990s, HS became a validating concept of the overall liberal peace project's goals of democratization, the rule of law, human rights, free trade, globalized markets and neoliberal economic development. Because of this role, it was most strongly characterized by an institutional approach that was rather more conservative than many of those civil society actors attracted by its implications of social justice and emancipation might have wanted. Of course, this was not as conservative as the security-oriented and pragmatic approach, which ultimately was more focused on preserving sovereignty and the state, and which came to the fore again in the 2000s. In practice, by the latter part of the 1990s, HS had become a contradictory framework of basic security needs constructed within a neoliberal state, whereby the need for limited government, basic services and free markets undermined HS's key local aims of social justice and equality. This was not satisfactory for more ambitious civil-society-based subjects.

Through the connection between HS and R2P, HS also offered an interventionary agenda for internationals concerned with supporting basic or more sophisticated versions of security in post-conflict states as a basis for a transformed international system. The social justice aims of HS were seen in the context of supporting civil society, but without any real engagement with ‘local’ issues, needs, sources of identity or authority, but rather a reliance on international understandings of what this may be in the framework of universal human rights and liberal conceptions of order. Nor did this social justice agenda receive the material support it would require from donors, or any real engagement with the issue of whether international inequality should be addressed by international organizations, or whether inequality was acceptable inside states.

Thus the main implication of the HS agenda – the rights of subjects to define their own required version of security with all of its material, political and social rights issues – was sidestepped by a focus on the institutionalist versions of HS, and its external provision, and the swing back to a more conservative version with its focus on sovereignty. These earlier versions of HS were donor- and state-driven, rather than subject-driven. The ‘war on terror’ of the 2000s was indicative of this setback, as many states hurried to secure their borders according to more traditional conceptions of security, as might have been recognized by Wolfers and many others before him (Wolfers 1952: 483). It also seemed to be commensurate with attacks on the concept of HS as being too broad to be useful in a policy setting (MacFarlane and Khong 2006: 10). Indeed some states such as Canada – long a supporter of the broader version of HS – took the opportunity to drop HS as a policy goal (Davis 2009).

Such a retrogressive development was of course never going to be practical in the contemporary globalized setting of what is essentially complex interdependence, where both the benefits of cooperation and its negative potential need to be mitigated by common efforts (Keohane and Nye 1987; Keohane and Nye 1998: 81). It was more a product of insular Western interests framed by a return of realpolitik, which had conveniently forgotten that even the insecure have politics, interests and agency, and humanity itself carries an influential legitimacy that can hardly be ignored.

From policy-driven to subject-driven understandings of HS

After a hiatus during the retrogressive ‘war on terror’, the question has now arisen as to how human security and the responsibility to protect are being reconceptualized in a new international environment in which context, local ownership, alterity, rights and needs are growing in related conceptual and policy significance. It might be asked what, after the apparent collapse of liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding, should replace it? The response so far appears to have been a turn to the local, the social contract, and by implication the provision of HS. The realization of the subject's agency (from various forms of resistance to the liberal or neoliberal peace and development models over the last 20 years or so, to the current ‘Arab Spring’) has brought a more emancipatory version of peace and HS into sharp focus, especially if the current international peacebuilding architecture is to rescue its legitimacy.³

This also leads to another issue: who is conceptualizing and enacting HS as a discursive framework in IR and amongst its subjects (meaning individuals, communities, societies and populations who have been involved in the broader deployment of human security discourses, instruments and practices)? Clearly, in the 1990s the discourse was being written by donors and officials mainly from the global North, but strongly supported by many elite counterparts and civil society in the global South. When the 2000s saw a turn away from HS in the global North, it remained a viable discourse in many Southern institutions, civil society organizations and research centres.⁴ Thus it has not merely remained within the international or elite sphere of discourse, institutions and donors (where some major actors have rejected it, suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series: Security and Conflict Management
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: human security – a practitioner's perspective
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Human(secur)ity and its subjects
• Part I Democratization and social cohesion
• Part II Turkey as an agent of peace and security
• Conclusion
• Index