Human Security

Mary Kaldor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745638546, 9780745638539
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There is a real security gap in the world today. Millions of people in regions like the Middle East or East and Central Africa or Central Asia where new wars are taking place live in daily fear of violence. Moreover new wars are increasingly intertwined with other global risks the spread of disease, vulnerability to natural disasters, poverty and homelessness. Yet our security conceptions, drawn from the dominant experience of World War II and based on the use of conventional military force, do not reduce that insecurity; rather they make it worse.

This book is an exploration of this security gap. It makes the case for a new approach to security based on a global conversation- a public debate among civil society groups and individuals as well as states and international institutions. The chapters follow on from Kaldors path breaking analysis of the character of new wars in places like the Balkans or Africa during the 1990s.

The first four chapters provide a context; they cover the experience of humanitarian intervention, the nature of American power, the new nationalist and religious movements that are associated with globalization, and how these various aspects of current security dilemmas have played out in the Balkans. The last three chapters are more normative, dealing with the evolution of the idea of global civil society, the relevance of just war theory in a global era, and the concept of human security and what it might mean to implement such a concept.

This book will appeal to all those interested in issues of peace and conflict, in particular to students of politics and international relations.

1

A Decade of Humanitarian Intervention, 1991–2000

This developing international norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community.

Any such evolution in our understanding of state sovereignty and individual sovereignty will, in some quarters, be met with distrust, scepticism, even hostility. But it is an evolution we should welcome.

Why? Because despite its limitations and imperfections, it is testimony to a humanity that cares more, not less, for the suffering in its midst, and a humanity that will do more, and not less, to end it.

It is a hopeful sign at the end of the twentieth century.

Kofi Annan, Report to the United Nations General Assembly, 20 Sept. 1999

The progress made … in standing up to crimes against humanity represents more than a doctrinal qualification of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Behind the advances in international justice and the increased deployment of troops to stop atrocities lies an evolution in public morality. More than at any time in recent history, the people of the world today are unwilling to tolerate severe human rights abuses and insistent that something be done to stop them. This growing intolerance of inhumanity can hardly promise an end to the atrocities that have plagued so much of the twentieth century. Some situations will be too complex or difficult for easy outside influence. But this reinforced public morality does erect an obstacle that, at least in some cases, can prevent or stop these crimes and save lives.

Human Rights Watch¹

It was a French idea … We came over the border … The appeal must not come from the government but from the voice of the victims … The right to interfere has now been written into 150 resolutions of the United Nations. Victims are now a category of international law. So we succeeded … This is the revolution … The victim, not the government, speaking in the name of the victim – for the first time … We are coming back to ’68. We want to change the world. We want no more Auschwitz, no more Cambodia, no more Rwanda, no more Biafra.

Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins sans Frontières²

Humanitarian intervention can be defined as military intervention in a state, with or without the approval of that state, to prevent genocide, large-scale violations of human rights (including mass starvation), or grave violations of international humanitarian law (the ‘laws of war’). During the 1990s there was a fundamental change in the norms governing the behaviour of states and international organizations. Throughout the Cold War and the anti-colonial period, the principle of non-intervention expressed in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter was the dominant norm in international affairs. Starting with the establishment of a safe haven in northern Iraq in 1991, and culminating in the NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia in 1999, the presumption that there is a right to use armed force in support of humanitarian objectives has become much more widely accepted. It is now enshrined in the ‘responsibility to protect’ adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2005.

This evolution is demonstrated by the increase in, and the changing character of, peace-monitoring, peacekeeping, and peace-enforcement operations. At the start of the 1990s there were only eight United Nations peacekeeping operations, involving some 10,000 troops. As of the end of 2000, there were some fifteen United Nations operations involving some 38,000 military troops.³ And a number of regional organizations were also involved in various missions concerned with conflict prevention or management. In Europe the most significant were the three NATO deployments in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia) authorized by the United Nations, now taken over by the European Union (EU). There were also four Russian peacekeeping operations, under the umbrella of the Commonwealth of Independent States, in Tajikistan, Transdnestr, Abhazia and South Ossetia. In addition, the European Union had three missions, now many more, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) had some eleven missions, all of which involved small numbers of military personnel. In Africa, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was heavily involved in Sierra Leone and conducted operations in Liberia and Guinea-Bissau. The Organization for African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), also had three mainly civilian missions in Burundi, Comoros and the Democratic Republic of Congo.⁴ Only a few of these missions can be defined under the rubric of ‘humanitarian intervention’. But their number is evidence of the growing acceptance of the use of military force for humanitarian purposes during this period. Table 1.1 summarizes the most significant interventions of the decade of the 1990s in terms of the evolution of a humanitarian norm.

Table 1.1 The evolution of humanitarian intervention

The changing international norms concerning humanitarian intervention can be considered an expression of an emerging global civil society. The changing norms do reflect a growing global consensus about the equality of human beings and the responsibility to prevent suffering wherever it takes place, which necessarily has to underpin a global civil society. Moreover, this consensus, in turn, is the outcome of a global public debate on these issues. It should be stressed that a growing global consensus about the need to prevent suffering does not imply a consensus about military intervention. On the contrary, the actual experience of intervention has been disappointing and in some cases shameful. The failure to intervene to prevent the genocide in Rwanda and the failure to protect the UN-declared safe haven of Srebrenica are two moments of particular opprobrium in the history of international action. Indeed, it is hard to find a single example of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s that can be unequivocally declared a success. Especially after Kosovo, the debate about whether human rights can be enforced through military means is ever more intense. Moreover, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been justified in humanitarian terms, have further called into question the case for intervention.

This chapter is about the role that civil society actors played in bringing about the changing international norms and about the character of the public debate. The first section describes the actors who participate in the debate. The second section describes the evolution of humanitarian intervention, with particular emphasis on the role of civil society groups, up to the end of the 1990s. The third section summarizes the character of the global public debate. The final section is about developments in 2000, in particular the military intervention(s) in Sierra Leone.

Global Civil Society Actors

The actors who have put pressure on governments and on international organizations for or against humanitarian intervention can be divided into three groups. One group comprises what are normally considered the classic actors of civil society, who often claim to speak on behalf of the victims: NGOs, social movements and networks. The second group comprises those who tend to be closer to the elite and make use primarily of the power of words: think tanks and commissions. The third group consists of forms of communication, in particular the media: radio, television, print media and websites.

It should be stressed that in the debate about humanitarian intervention a key role has been played by dynamic individuals. Names like Bernard Kouchner or Fred Cuny (see box 1.1) have resonance throughout the field of humanitarianism and undoubtedly directly or indirectly influenced government action. In the US, where there has been little in the way of a grass-roots movement, individuals like George Soros, Morton Abramowitz of the Carnegie Endowment, and Aryeh Neier of Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Foundation have been very influential in the debates about various interventions. In France and in Central Europe, individual intellectuals have been heavily engaged in the debate. In France, for example, Bernard Henri Levy had a powerful impact with his film about the siege of Sarajevo; and in Central Europe many of the well-known former dissidents became deeply involved in the debate about intervention in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

Box 1.1 The role of individuals: Fred Cuny and Bernard Kouchner

The lives of two individuals – one American, Fred Cuny, and one Frenchman, Bernard Kouchner – could be said to encapsulate the story of the evolution of humanitarian intervention over the last three decades.

Both were born during the Second World War. Both were influenced by the student movement of the 1960s. Cuny, who had been a Republican, became active in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. Kouchner was involved in the French événements of 1968. Cuny was training to be an engineer and Kouchner was training to be a doctor.

Both went to Biafra in 1969 and were involved in the airlift that was undertaken without the permission of the Nigerian government. Kouchner, who was working for the International Red Cross, was shocked by the unwillingness of the ICRC to speak out about what was happening. ‘By keeping silent, we doctors were accomplices in the systematic massacre of a population.’¹ Kouchner started the International Committee against Genocide in Biafra and started to use the media to publicize what was happening. ‘We were using the media before it became fashionable … We refused to allow sick people and doctors to be massacred in silence and submission.’²

Biafra, according to Cuny, was the ‘mother’ of all humanitarian operations. ‘We still use the yardstick of Biafra to measure our performance in other disasters. It’s the defining moment.’³ Cuny was shocked by the lack of planning and the amateurishness of the relief effort. In 1970, he left Biafra convinced that the airlift was prolonging the war.

In 1971, Kouchner founded the NGO Médecins sans Frontières (MSF). The aim was the rapid deployment of doctors to disaster areas, with or without official permission, with heavy reliance on the use of the media both to secure funding and to provide immunity from hostile governments. The same year Cuny founded a company, Intertect Relief and Reconstruction, which specialized in giving technical assistance and training in disaster relief to UN and volunteer agencies. Unlike MSF, which raised money from the public, the company depended on contracts from governments and international institutions.

Both MSF and Intertect were involved in numerous disasters in the 1970s and 1980s – earthquakes, wars, floods, massacres, hurricanes – and gained their practical and political experiences from these events. Disaster areas included Nicaragua, Honduras, Peru, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, El Salvador, and the Lebanon, among others. Both published books. In Disasters and Development,⁴ Cuny says that it was during this period that he began to understand the connection between the military and humanitarianism. ‘More than anything else, the images of those planes delivering everything from food to coal fostered acceptance of the link between armed forces and humanitarian assistance and, more importantly, acceptance of the costs involved.’⁵

Kouchner’s book Charité Business is about the relationship between the media, NGOs, and policy-makers.⁶ Indeed, it was Kouchner’s emphasis on dramatic media events which led to the split in 1979, when Kouchner went on to found Médecins du Monde.

The turning point for both men was the Gulf War of 1991. Kouchner had begun to promote the concept of a droit d’ingérence (right of interference) in the late 1980s. In 1988 he was appointed Minister for Health and Humanitarian Action in the French government led by Michel Rocard. He was able to promote his ideas in the United Nations, and after the Gulf War pushed for the droit d’ingérence to help the Kurds in northern Iraq. The haven in northern Iraq did provide an important precedent in humanitarian intervention. Cuny was also there; he had convinced the US ambassador to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz, that it was possible to bring the Kurdish refugees back to their homes in a two-month period and was given an opportunity to carry our his ideas. Subsequently, through Morton Abramowitz, Cuny was able to influence policy in Washington.

Both Cuny and Kouchner advocated military intervention in Somalia, and their voices were influential in both the US and France. Cuny favoured the creation of armed relief enclaves. Both were critical of the way the intervention was carried out. Cuny thought it was inefficient from the point of view of delivering aid. Kouchner considered the intervention to have been a success, although he was critical of the American use of overwhelming force. ‘There are no humanitarian catastrophes only political catastrophes … No! What was catastrophic was the American attitude … A war without prisoners, a war without dead people … this is just crazy.’⁷

During the Bosnian war Cuny was recruited by George Soros to provide $50 million of humanitarian assistance to Bosnia. He focused on the restoration of basic utilities in Sarajevo, building a protected water purification plant and providing access to gas for heating. Kouchner was a staunch advocate of an international air offensive and became known as the proponent of ‘war to end war’.

Thereafter, their careers diverged. Cuny was sent by Soros to Chechnya. After his first visit in December 1994 he said that the destruction of Grozny made Sarajevo seem like a picnic. He was convinced that he could arrange a ceasefire but he disappeared when on a trip to try to meet the Chechen leader. He was probably executed on 14 April 1995.

Kouchner was appointed UN Special Representative in Kosovo and became head of the new UN administration in Kosovo established after the NATO bombing. He left after a year and became French Minister of Health again in the government of Lionel Jospin. His record in Kosovo has been criticized but he enjoyed the full support of Kosovar Albanians. After the election of President Sarkogy in France in 2007, he was appointed French Foreign Minister.

The differences between the two men reflected their cultural backgrounds. Cuny focused on practical solutions to humanitarian crises; Kouchner focused on political solutions. Kouchner tried to develop a new language and a new ethics of humanitarianism. Cuny tried to develop new methodologies and procedures. But their differences were complementary; Kouchner’s approach necessarily involved practical implementation and Cuny’s search for common-sense solutions led him to politics. Both contributed in important ways, for good or for ill, to the emerging consensus about humanitarian intervention by the late 1990s.

Notes

1 Quoted in T. Allen and D. Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism’, Journal of International Development 12, no. 6 (2000): 830.

2 Quoted in ibid.

3 Quoted in William Shawcross, ‘A Hero of our Time’, New York Review of Books, 30 Nov. 1995.

4 Frederick C. Cuny, Disasters and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

5 Quoted in T.G. Weiss, Military–Civilian Interactions: Intervening in Humanitarian Crises (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 17.

6 Bernard Kouchner, Charité Business (Paris: Le Pré aux Clercs, 1986).

7 Quoted in Allen and Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere?’, p. 838.

As well as intellectuals, public personalities from the world of popular culture have added their voices to concerns about victims of war and/or starvation, thus helping to popularize humanitarian consciousness. Examples include Bob Geldof and Band Aid, and Bono of U2. During the siege of Sarajevo, a number of these figures travelled to Sarajevo to support secular culture.

Many of these individuals are, of course, linked to civil society organizations described below.

NGOs, social movements...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A Decade of Humanitarian Intervention, 1991–2000
• 2 American Power: From Compellance to Cosmopolitanism?
• 3 Nationalism and Globalization
• 4 Intervention in the Balkans: An Unfinished Learning Process
• 5 The Idea of Global Civil Society
• 6 Just War and Just Peace
• 7 Human Security
• Index