International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (10 page)

Invocations of human security usually take one of two forms. Conservative definitions adopt a narrow approach focusing on the implications and consequences of war on people’s lives, with the aim of alleviating these effects, such as by providing emergency assistance and humanitarian support to refugees. The emphasis of conservative approaches is therefore on what the UN terms ‘freedom from fear’, and is manifest in a concern with prioritizing conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction. Tangible results have been achieved by people advocating human security in this form. Most celebrated has been the Ottawa Treaty banning the use of anti-personnel landmines. The treaty was the culmination of a high-profile campaign sponsored by NGOs, personalities like the Princess of Wales (
Figure 6
), and the Canadian government, as a result of outrage felt at the indiscriminate and distressing casualty figures caused by such weapons. Deployed with the immediate aim of targeting enemy personnel, such weapons remain buried and active long after such conflicts end (some estimates suggest as many as 100 million may still be buried and active), the result being that the majority of casualties are civilians injured or killed in the aftermath of conflicts. Since being opened for signature in 1997 the Ottawa Treaty has been signed and ratified by 156 states, although it is yet to be signed or ratified by major powers like the USA, China, and Russia. The Ottawa Treaty’s success, however, has encouraged other campaigns. Most notable is an ongoing attempt, sponsored by NGOs, the UN, and various states, to formalize a treaty regulating the arms trade, with the specific aim of banning the sale of arms to countries where there is a substantial risk of their being used to violate human rights. The concern is that such arms facilitate and foster armed conflicts, kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, and contribute to creating unstable environments that undermine prospects for development.

In contrast, more expansive definitions of human security suggest that this focus on conflict results in a problematically narrow understanding of the threats that cause human insecurity and suffering. Although violent conflicts and their effects are important, far more people’s lives are blighted by poverty, hunger, disease, and natural disasters. The figures can be startling. For example, more than three and a half billion people live on less than $2 a day, while according to UNICEF 22,000 children die of poverty daily and around a quarter of all children in developing countries are underweight. Meanwhile, infectious diseases continue to devastate vulnerable populations. For instance, in 2007 UNAIDS estimated two million people were dying from HIV/AIDS annually, with a further two and a half million being infected. The figures point to vast swathes of the global population whose lives are characterized by vulnerability. More expansive definitions therefore emphasize that human security is not just about ‘freedom from fear’, but also ‘freedom from want’.

This approach to human security was most notably outlined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 1994
Human Development Report
quoted at the start of the chapter. For the UNDP human security was related to all those things that contribute to human dignity. To this extent, the UNDP suggested human security was affected by a broad range of economic, environmental, political, social, health, and personal factors. From this perspective human security concerns things like having a secure and stable income, the ability to access educational and health services, and living in an unpolluted environment. This understanding of human security therefore entails a strong concern with questions of social justice, the need for a fairer distribution of resources, and the structural processes (Galtung’s ‘structural violence’—see
Chapter 2
) that allow such conditions of widespread poverty and disadvantage to prevail.

Importantly the international community has responded to this wider conception of human security. With much fanfare, in 2000
the UN established eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comprising a set of commitments designed to help rectify the condition of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged. These included commitments to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development. Under each of these headings were a range of more specified goals, such as halving the number of people whose income is less than $1 a day, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, and reducing by three-quarters the maternal morbidity ratio. In most cases 1990 provided the base line figure with most of the goals targeted to be met by 2015.

According to a UN report released in 2012 progress has been mixed, varying between both issue and region. For instance, the goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 seems to be on target for Eastern Asia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, whereas progress is deemed either insufficient, non-existent, or with the situation actually deteriorating in respect of other areas like Sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia, and Oceania. Likewise, while progress on halting and reversing the spread of tuberculosis has been generally positive, progress on providing universal primary education, maternal health, and gender equality is much less encouraging. We shall return to the reasons for this mixed situation later.

For critics expansive understandings of human security are beset with problems. Where, for example, should the boundaries of human security be drawn, how should we prioritize between different dimensions and commitments, and who should make these decisions and on what grounds? A more general criticism, however, is that human security, however defined, is easily co-opted by states and reoriented to their particular national security concerns. This can be illustrated by highlighting how
poverty and underdevelopment impact on individuals and states in slightly different ways, and can therefore generate different policy options depending on which is prioritized.

For individuals, the effects of poverty and underdevelopment have already been indicated. Poverty often translates into poor diets and health, lack of access to education and medicines, limited employment and social opportunities, and increased chances of being subject to violence, crime, and arbitrary treatment by the state. Moreover, these elements often feed off each other. For example, the scourge of HIV/AIDS in Africa is not just felt by those infected with the virus, but by their families who might lose the main income earner and who, given the lack of sufficient or accessible public health provision, are saddled with extra financial burdens. Vulnerability to disease can also highlight the structural violence inherent in problems of global poverty and underdevelopment. In 2010, for example, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that malaria, a preventable and curable disease, killed approximately 655,000 people, the majority African children. In contrast, armed with vaccinations and insurance policies Western travellers to the developing world are generally protected from such potentially deadly outcomes. Seen from the perspective of individual suffering a public policy approach to human security should therefore start by identifying and targeting those who are most vulnerable and whose needs are greatest.

Seen through a state lens, however, problems of human security are often translated into broader threats of political, social, economic, and even military instability. Indeed, concerns about human security are often translated into concerns about the stability and security of existing political structures and ruling regimes, sometimes for good reason. Statistically speaking poorer countries are more susceptible to internal conflict. One reason is because poverty is rarely evenly spread across populations and often follows ethnic, social, or religious divides. Such disparities can easily breed resentments and competition between different
groups for control of the state and its resources (see
Chapter 7
). Of course, when such conflicts turn violent they can further entrench poverty by diverting people and resources into unproductive fighting roles and destroying essential infrastructures.

Aside from concerns about regime security and political stability, however, poverty can affect national security in other ways. Infectious diseases, for example, can wreak havoc on prospects for economic development by decimating workers’ productivity and creating additional healthcare burdens for limited state finances. For example, according to CIA figures, in 2009 nine African countries had adult population HIV/AIDS infection rates of over 10 per cent, including three countries (Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana) where the rate exceeded 20 per cent. HIV/AIDS is a particular scourge because it disproportionately affects younger adults who would normally comprise the more productive part of the workforce. As it progresses HIV/AIDS increasingly incapacitates sufferers and creates significant economic and social welfare burdens. However, the spread of HIV/AIDS has also raised questions for military security, especially because of its potential impact on military effectiveness. The reason is that infection rates amongst soldiers are typically higher than amongst the rest of the population, with infection rate estimates for some African militaries topping 50 per cent. Unable to carry out their duties to full effectiveness infected soldiers arguably pose a risk to national security by limiting the overall capabilities of military units. When seen through the perspective of national rather than individual vulnerabilities, significant temptations therefore exist for policy makers to interpret human security concerns as requiring resources to be targeted on key economic and social sectors and key personnel (e.g. soldiers), with other sufferers liable to be overlooked.

Aside from this tendency to view human security problems through a national security framework, debates about human
security also often end up prioritizing the concerns of the developed over those of the developing world. One example is the vast international attention and mobilization that has occurred in recent years to prevent the spread of potentially deadly infectious diseases, initially sparked by the outbreak of SARS (Severe Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003 and later by H1N1 (swine flu) in 2009, which both took advantage of modern global transport networks to disperse swiftly to multiple countries. The concern is that such viruses could potentially kill many people, but might also impact on global trade and even undermine political stability. They are therefore seen as posing potentially serious threats to lives and welfare in the developed world, such that in 2010 the UK government listed an influenza pandemic a Tier One priority in its National Security Strategy. The same level of international attention, mobilization, and urgency, however, is only notable by its absence in respect of other diseases which already kill millions worldwide; diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, polio, cholera, West Nile virus, etc. For critics the disjuncture reflects the fact that these diseases are largely afflictions of poverty localized to the developing world and therefore of little concern to more prosperous countries.

At times, however, the tendency to frame issues of poverty, health, and development in terms of their potential impact on the security of the developed world has had a more pernicious edge to it, with the global poor being construed, not as those in need, but as those threatening security and stability in the prosperous global north. A stark example was provided by a highly influential essay written by Robert Kaplan in 1994, in which he evocatively depicted the future as ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Kaplan’s essay painted a bleak picture of poverty, underdevelopment, and environmental degradation in the developing world. This toxic cocktail, he argued, was likely to fuel the breakdown of already weak states, particularly in Africa, with failed states unable to provide for their populations’ basic needs becoming the norm. In Kaplan’s vision these societies were likely to fracture into violence and crime, with
a widespread return to the law of the jungle—the coming anarchy—to be expected. One result, he suggested would be an age of mass migrations, as poor, frightened, hungry, desperate, and diseased populations in the global south sought sanctuary in the developed world.

This last point became the crux of how Kaplan’s essay was received in the West and America in particular, where its influence was evident in its distribution to US embassies around the world. Poverty, underdevelopment, conflict, and associated mass migrations of diseased populations were ultimately interpreted in terms of what threats this posed to the developed world. What needed protecting from this perspective was the stability, security, and prosperity of the global north faced with an incipient unconventional onslaught from the global south.

Variations on Kaplan’s image of the coming anarchy have reappeared subsequently, perhaps most notably in the label of ‘failed states’ to describe countries seen to lack the capacity to meet the basic criteria of sovereignty (e.g. stable government, control over territory, providing for people’s basic needs) and where such states are seen as breeding grounds of various ills threatening global stability. For critics the failed state label is problematic as it sets up the European form of statehood as the norm and depicts all who fail to meet this standard as inferior. Not only does this share similarities with colonial mindsets of superior and inferior peoples, but states so identified are therefore more easily justified as targets for intervention in the name of promoting good governance. A key point, however, is that whether we are talking about a ‘coming anarchy’ or ‘failed states’ a common contention is that the perceived failures of governance across the developing world are primarily the result of internal problems and weaknesses within those societies, with endemic corruption, poor education, and an absence of entrepreneurial values often identified as key causes. This emphasis on internal causes, to the exclusion of any consideration that important systemic factors
might also be at play, in turn exonerates the developed world from direct responsibility for the causes of human insecurity and state failure in the developing world. It also facilitates the inversion of human security from a concern with the conditions of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable to their identification as central threats to the security and continued prosperity of the developed world.