Security and Development in Global Politics

A Critical Comparison

Joanna Spear,Paul D. Williams

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781589018907
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Security and development matter: they often involve issues of life and death and they determine the allocation of truly staggering amounts of the world's resources. Particularly since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been momentum in policy circles to merge the issues of security and development to attempt to end conflicts, create durable peace, strengthen failing states, and promote the conditions necessary for people to lead healthier and more prosperous lives.

In many ways this blending of security and development agendas seems admirable and designed to produce positive outcomes all around. However, it is often the case that the two concepts in combination do not receive equal weight, with security issues getting priority over development concerns. This is not desirable and actually undermines security in the longer term. Moreover, there are major challenges in practice when security practitioners and development practitioners are asked to agree on priorities and work together.

Security and Development in Global Politics illuminates the common points of interest but also the significant differences between security and development agendas and approaches to problem solving. With insightful chapter pairings—each written by a development expert and a security analyst—the book explores seven core international issues: aid, humanitarian assistance, governance, health, poverty, trade and resources, and demography. Using this comparative structure, the book effectively assesses the extent to which there really is a nexus between security and development and, most importantly, whether the link should be encouraged or resisted.

Chapter 1
CONCEPTUALIZING THE SECURITY–DEVELOPMENT RELATIONSHIP: AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEBATE

Joanna Spear and Paul D. Williams

The “nexus” between security and development has become a hot topic for policy-makers and analysts keen to solve the problems associated with “failed,” “fragile,” and “at risk” states; postconflict reconstruction and peacebuilding; and waging effective counterinsurgency campaigns. The 2006 US National Security Strategy, for example, argued that “development reinforces diplomacy and defense, reducing long-term threats to our national security by helping to build stable, prosperous, and peaceful societies.”¹ In the 2010 version, development was conceived as “a strategic, economic, and moral imperative” in US national security.² In similar fashion, the United Kingdom’s first-ever National Security Strategy stated that “it is wrong to talk of a choice between security and economic development, or security and good governance.”³ At the African Union, heads of state and government declared that one of the principles underlying their proposed Common African Defence and Security Policy was “the fundamental link and symbiotic relationship that exists between security, stability, human security, development and cooperation.”⁴ At the United Nations (UN), Secretary-General Kofi Annan concluded that “in an increasingly interconnected world, progress in the areas of development, security and human rights must go hand in hand. There will be no development without security and no security without development. And both development and security also depend on respect for human rights and the rule of law.”⁵ This policy concern with bringing the two arenas together is also found in the writing on human security, which encompasses concepts that were traditionally development concerns, such as poverty and access to food and water. Thus, the relationship between security and development is a priority for policymakers in a number of ways.

These approaches, and many others like them from around the world, assume that fusing security and development is desirable and will produce positive outcomes. This book challenges these easy assumptions by examining the varied and complex relationships between the arenas of security and development in the core areas of aid, humanitarian assistance, governance, health, poverty, trade and resources, and demographics. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to highlight some of the significant characteristics and political functions of the concepts of security and development, and second, to provide an overview of the different strands of literature that have explored the security–development relationship.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF TWO CONTESTED CONCEPTS

As concepts, security and development display several important characteristics; as political practices, they serve a range of functions for a variety of different actors. This section briefly elaborates on these functions and characteristics because, although often forgotten or ignored, they are the essential context, and they help explain the content of much of the existing literature on the so-called security–development nexus.

Functions: Political Values

Security and development are important political values. That is, they play significant roles in determining who gets what, when, and how (to borrow Harold Lass-well’s famous definition of politics).⁶ But as values they also have an aspirational quality that goes beyond mere physical survival. To be secure or developed, people need to feel that they are able to fulfill their cherished values. These may be hard to define and may differ across individuals and groups, but the attempt to promote them preoccupies a great deal of every society’s political processes. They may also be in conflict with those values held by other individuals or groups; hence, much of the conceptual and practical debate is about how to resolve competing security and development agendas.

Functions: Justificatory Devices

As political values, security and development are both regularly used to legitimize action and are deployed instrumentally as justificatory devices. In the security realm, for example, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks saw many countries place constraints upon civil liberties and justify them in the name of national security. Similarly, the push for further liberalization of world trade through the current round of World Trade Organization negotiations has been justified as a stimulus to economic development for all when it will clearly generate new winners and losers. The two values are also used to justify spending.

Functions: Allocation of Resources

Both security and development represent political choices; money spent on one cannot be spent elsewhere. Moreover, within each arena numerous issues compete for attention and funding, with different issues gaining prominence at different times. These concerns are reflected in the flows of international development assistance. In geographic terms, after the Cold War, much of the aid that had routinely flowed to Africa and Asia was diverted into the transition states of the former Soviet bloc. Moreover, in thematic terms, as the development agenda grew to encompass a wider range of issues (governance, education, migration, security sector reform, etc.) so the competition between issues to secure funding intensified, just as official development assistance levels were declining.

Although in most states the security “pie” is generally much larger, such zero-sum thinking has also prevailed at times. For example, in the last five years a debate has occurred within the Pentagon over what types of weapons systems to procure, advanced fighter aircraft such as the F-22 (vital for fighting a major war against a peer competitor) or additional armored land systems for use in environments such as Afghanistan and Iraq. After several years of internal sparring, the Department of Defense decided against the extremely impressive—but extremely expensive—F-22.⁷

A concern evident in the development arena is that increasing convergence with the security arena will lead to development resources remaining static or diminishing as security actors gain a greater slice of the budget.⁸ This applies especially in countries where there is a deep reluctance to cut national security budgets but where politicians view cutting back on development aid as a soft target. Indeed, in many parts of the world there is generally much less dispute over military budgets and other clearly security-related spending than there is over monies for international development assistance. This is ironic given that it is difficult to draw a causal connection between monies spent on troops and weapons and security outcomes. This mindset is partly attributable to the way in which security is perceived as a necessity whereas enhancing the development of foreigners is often regarded as more of a political choice or even luxury. Simply put, security is about “us” but development is about “them.” This perception appears particularly entrenched within successive US administrations, which continue to spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined yet have often been among the least generous donors within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the percentage of gross national income (GNI) devoted to official development assistance.⁹

Functions: The Theory–Praxis Relationship

Security and development are not merely intellectual pursuits; these salient issues affect real people, often in matters of life and death. This has encouraged a tendency within both arenas to generate fast conversions of theory into practice (and vice versa). Thus, while the academic discipline might be in the early stages of debating a new theory or idea, the policy community may already be trying to implement it. Similarly, academics who observe novel practices and techniques in the field are quick to try and refine theories accordingly. This is one of the reasons for contestation in both arenas—academia critiquing ideas that have already been turned into policy by practitioners. In the security arena, for example, although the idea that “democracies do not fight one another” has a long lineage going back to Immanuel Kant, it received renewed attention when written about by Michael Doyle in the 1980s.¹⁰ The idea was subsequently taken up by the Clinton administration even as security and democracy specialists were picking apart the very roots of the idea.¹¹ In development, the case of postwar theory creation is illustrative of another aspect of the theory–praxis relationship. In the aftermath of World War II, the swift success of the US-funded Marshall Plan in rebuilding European economies caught the attention of a number of economists who wished to bring that success to development in other regions. Many of these early development economists worked in policy institutions such as the United Nations and World Bank and sought to replicate the success of the Marshall Plan.¹² This, then, was a case of theory following practice and influencing further practice. Unfortunately, the model proved harder to replicate elsewhere than they had anticipated, which led to others positing different theories on how to spur and sustain development.

Characteristics: Essentially Contested Concepts

Security and development are good examples of what social scientists call “essentially contested concepts.”¹³ Like other important concepts such as justice, freedom, and peace, the ideological element within them generates unsolvable debates over their specific meaning and application because it “renders empirical evidence irrelevant as a means of resolving the dispute.”¹⁴ Essentially contested concepts are thus understood to delineate an area of concern rather than a particular condition. They can be defined precisely only in relation to specific cases. This explains why security and development are often defined in general, negative terms as being about the alleviation of threat and the alleviation of need, respectively. But what these concepts mean in more positive terms is contingent: the concepts can be defined only with reference to real people and places at particular points in history. Blanket statements about the relationship between these two arenas and the consequences of combining them can thus be dangerously misleading.

Characteristics: Stovepipes and Tunnel Vision

Part of the problem with the contemporary debate about the security–development relationship is that these fundamental points about contestation and contingency are often forgotten. Those in the development arena understand the disputes in their own arena but not those of the security arena, and vice versa. Although security and development experts sometimes use the same vocabulary, work on the same issues, and increasingly work in the same geographical spaces, they often continue to speak past each other because each often assumes that the other arena is unproblematic; that the other is working with clearly understood agents, priorities, referents, causal relationships, and effective bureaucracies; and that the other has a track record of practical success. Indeed, specialists in each area sometimes see the other as possessing new and improved tools to adapt to tackle the problems that they face without necessarily understanding the difficulties that need to be overcome or understanding the mixed records of each approach. On close inspection, security and development experts often begin from different starting points, see different worlds and different problems, want different sorts of outcomes, and, hence, use different approaches and tools to overcome challenges. Unless these differences are understood, faced, and in some sense dealt with, policies cannot possibly achieve what is expected of them and may have unexpected (and undesirable) consequences.

Characteristics: Derivative and Relative Concepts

Security and development are also what social s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing the Security–Development Relationship: An Overview of the Debate
• Part I: Aid
• Part II: Humanitarian Assistance
• Part III: Governance
• Part IV: Health
• Part V: Poverty
• Part VI: Trade and Resources
• Part VII: Demography
• Contributors
• Index