Human and Environmental Security

An Agenda for Change

Felix Dodds, Tim Pippard, Felix Dodds, Tim Pippard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136563782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Regierung

Security has tended to be seen as based on military force, yet this illusion is crumbling, literally and figuratively, before our eyes in the conflict zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa. It is now clear that real human security, defined by the Commission on Human Security as 'protecting vital freedoms', can only be achieved if the full range of issues that underpin human security - including environmental integrity - are addressed. This ground-breaking book, authored by prominent international decision makers, tackles the global human security problem across the range of core issues including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, access to water, food security, loss of biodiversity and climate change. The authors identify the causes of insecurity, articulate the linkages between the different elements of human security and outline an agenda for engaging stakeholders from across the globe in building the foundations of genuine and lasting human security for all nations and all people.This is powerful, necessary, solution-focused reading in these times of peril, global conflict, mass inequity and rampant environmental degradation.

Part 1

Peace and Security

1

‘A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility’ – Report of the
UN Secretary-General's
High Level Panel on Threats,
Challenges and Change

David Hannay

Introduction

In November 2003, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (the Panel) to report to him on security threats facing the world in the 21st century and how to respond to them. The background to the commissioning of this report is well known. Throughout the Cold War, the UN remained at least partially paralysed. In most cases, notably any circumstances that involved confrontation between the superpowers, the UN had no prospect of playing a useful or effective role, less still of fulfilling its mandate of ridding the world of the scourge of war.

With the end of the Cold War, however, all that changed. For the UN a whole range of things, previously unthinkable or impossible, suddenly became politically possible: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was reversed, with full UN authority; and a considerable number of regional and proxy wars were brought to an end through UN peacekeeping operations – in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique.

However, no systemic attempt was made to rethink the UN mission or consider what the main threats to international peace and security were in the post-Cold War era. Despite an attempt in 1992 to undertake a serious critique of the way ahead, with former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali's Agenda for Peace (UN, 1992), the UN's main stakeholders opted for muddling through. Soon this approach brought its own nemesis, and two main weaknesses emerged. One was the lack of execution and effectiveness. Even when the Security Council voted ambitious, if often ambiguous, mandates, it failed to muster the resources or the determination when the going got rough. The proportion of successes to failures dropped sharply, as appalling events such as the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre occurred under the noses of UN peacekeepers. The other weakness arose from disputes over the use of force under UN authority: in recent years, the organization became paralysed in deadlock, first in 1999 over Kosovo, and then in 2003 over Iraq, even though Security Council resolutions were being flouted.

Surely then, Kofi Annan was right when he told the General Assembly in September 2003 that the UN had reached a fork in the road, that it could not simply go on as before, that it was time to take a hard look at the threats and challenges that now and prospectively face us, and to see if we could build a new consensus on an effective collective response to them (UN, 2003). That was the task the Secretary-General set the Panel.

The report itself, which we delivered to Kofi Annan in December 2004, is now squarely in the public domain, its 101 recommendations the subject of vibrant and wide-ranging discussion (UN, 2004). The first thought I would like to emphasize is that the Panel, composed as it was of 16 individuals drawn from every region of the world, submitted a report that represents the views of all of us. Of course there were differences of analysis and perspective amongst us – there still are, no doubt – but we were able to reach a broad measure of agreement on what needed to be done if the UN was to become more effective and more able to respond to the demands for peace and security that reach it from so many different quarters.

And we firmly agreed with the Secretary-General that it is the touchstones of effectiveness, efficiency and equity that need to be applied to every aspect of the reform agenda. It was that view that led us to ensure that our approach was a policy-driven one, and not one dominated by institutional tinkering; one that started from an examination of the policies needed to enable the UN to respond to the threats and challenges of the 21st century, and which then moved on to look at the changes in policies and institutions needed to deliver the objectives set out so eloquently in the UN Charter – and as valid today as they were in 1945.

I will not provide a synopsis of the report, which is the outcome of a year's hard work – six three-day sessions of the Panel itself, a large number of regional and other seminars and symposia designed to reach out to national politicians, academics, journalists, commentators on international relations, a mass of written submissions were sent in to us, and briefings from experts in the fields we were studying – firstly because the report has its own synopsis, and secondly, because I would urge that it be read in full and at leisure. It is densely argued and its recommendations are far-reaching – indeed I would venture to suggest that it is the single most far-reaching official review of the UN's role, particularly in the fields of peace and security, since the founding fathers met in San Francisco in 1945 and signed the UN Charter. It takes an overall approach to this enormously complex subject that needs to be looked at in the round, even if the individual recommendations need to be followed up on a number of different tracks. So I will focus on a number of the underlying themes that came to dominate our work and to shape our conclusions; and on some thoughts about the follow-up.

The threat agenda

We began, naturally, with the threats the world faces. Clearly, these have changed quite fundamentally since the end of that long Cold War period when the world lived on the brink of annihilation from a clash between two nuclear-armed superpowers and when many regional wars fought by the proxies of these two superpowers were simply off-limits to the UN. The Panel concluded relatively quickly that the threat agenda we faced was not a narrow one limited to international terrorism and to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, real though these threats certainly are; but a much wider one, including also the phenomenon of the failure of states often leading to major regional instability and conflicts, and a whole range of issues that have not traditionally been considered as part of the peace and security nexus at all – poverty, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases and the spread of organized crime, to mention the most prominent.

We reached this conclusion not simply because in many parts of the world – in Africa, in Latin America – these so-called ‘soft’ threats are often seen as even more menacing and imminent than the ‘hard’ threats of the narrower agenda, but also because we became increasingly aware of the interconnections and overlap between the different categories of threat that rendered the whole ‘hard/soft’ categorization misleading and inadequate. After all, the greatest terrorist outrage in recent times was launched from a failed state, Afghanistan, and the greatest genocide in another, Rwanda. Organized crime has frequently undermined international efforts at post-conflict peacebuilding. Pandemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS threaten the stability of many states, in Africa in particular. The correlation between poverty and insecurity leaps at you from the charts in the Panel's report. A third consideration was also prominent: every one of these threats required a collective response if it was to be effectively combated. So only a broad, common agenda provided any hope of mustering such a response.

When we came to examine responses to these threats and challenges we rapidly found ourselves at risk of being drawn into something of an ideological, almost a theological, battle – between those who believed in unilateral responses and those who believed in multilateral ones. I have to say that we found rather more true believers in these two opposing areas among commentators and polemicists than we did amongst practitioners in foreign ministries and defence and interior ministries around the world. The latter category contained few people who seriously thought that any single country, even the world's current single superpower, could on its own mount an adequate response to all the threats it faces; and few too were those in this category who believed that multilateral organizations possessed the philosopher's stone that could cope with them all.

So, while there are clearly genuine and difficult policy choices to be made between the two approaches, it became clear that the crude juxtaposition of them conceals more than it reveals – and that in many cases, the most effective response is a ‘both/and’ approach, not an ‘either/or’ one. For instance, in dealing with terrorism or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it is fairly obvious that states, and their intelligence and law-enforcement capabilities, are essential to any effective action and cannot be replaced by multilateral institutions. But it is just as obvious that the normative capacity of international organizations and their scope for organizing cooperation on a wide-ranging basis are essential for dealing with a range of threats and challenges that do not respect national boundaries, and which have often seized on globalization as an ally in the pursuit of their objectives.

From this we concluded that a collective response was needed to every one of these challenges, but that dealing with each effectively would require a judicious blend between the national and the international when it came to action.

The use of force

No issue troubles the international community more (and has divided it twice recently when a decision point was reached – over Kosovo and Iraq) than the use of force, whether that be decided collectively at the UN or unilaterally. We have attempted to chart a way forward, navigating through a minefield of conflicting pressures. We concluded that Article 51 of the UN Charter, which recognizes the legitimacy of the unilateral use of force for self-defence and for pre-emptive action when a threat is genuinely imminent, should be neither expanded nor constrained. But we did not consider that that provision of the Charter extended to preventive coercive action where a threat was not imminent; and we suggested that such action, if it is to achieve legitimacy, needs to be decided collectively in the Security Council.

We set out certain guidelines for reaching such decisions on the use of force – seriousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means, balance of consequences – and have proposed that the Security Council and individual states endorse these. They will provide no push-button certainty; decisions will still have to be taken on a case-by-case basis. But they may offer a greater degree of predictability, and, I would add, some deterrent effect, to decision making in this matter. The same may be said of our endorsement of the emerging international norm of the duty to protect individuals from harm or abuse, a duty that falls initially on the state in which they reside but ultimately, if that state is unwilling or unable too provide such protection, on the international community.

We have no illusions that our ideas in this respect will gain easy or instant acceptance. Nor do we harbour the fantasy that endorsement of them will bring certainty to the making of decisions in individual cases. Here, as elsewhere, no doubt, hard cases will continue to make bad law. But we do regard this part of our report as an important plank in the building of a new consensus.

Failing or failed states

The failure of states under stress is a phenomenon with which the world has become all too wearily familiar over the last 15 years. It has affected every continent: from the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, through Afghanistan and Cambodia in Asia, to a whole raft of countries in Africa – Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire and the Congo, to mention the most prominent – to the former Yugoslavia in Europe and Haiti in the Americas. These failures have facilitated terrorism, made genocide possible, inflicted untold suffering and loss of life on the citizens of the states in question, and created regional instability and mayhem affecting many neighbouring countries. And yet the response of the international community has on the whole been hesitant, tardy and inadequate. One only has to look at Darfur to see that process in being.

We believe it is necessary for the Security Council to treat this phenomenon in future as a single continuum, running the whole way from early warning, which should trigger preventative action, through a whole range of non-military preventative measures, leading only to the use of force when alternative methods have failed and ending in durable and sustained post-conflict peacebuilding.

To assist it in carrying out these complex functions, we recommended the establishment, as a subsidiary organ of the Security Council, of a Peacebuilding Commission. Such a body will, we believe, only be able to work effectively if it reaches out beyond the restricted membership of the Security Council to involve also the International Financial Institutions (IFI) (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank) the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the main donors and troop contributors, and relevant regional and subregional organizations.

International terrorism

The members of the Panel never doubted that they would have to address the issue of international terrorism. This was not just because the events of 11 September 2001 had transformed the way we all looked at threats to international peace and security, although the ripples from that appalling disaster are still spreading out across the murky pond of international politics. But 9/11 did change the dimensions of the threat: it revealed the extent to which the threat had become a global one, against which global responses would be needed.

As we analysed the phenomenon of international terrorism, we became aware that a purely coercive response – one based on intelligence and police work, and, in some cases, on military force by a coalition of a limited number of like-minded countries – was not on its own sufficient, essential though it was. It is extremely important to attack the causes as well as the symptoms of terrorism, and they were extremely complex. That led us to the conclusion that the use of military force in this field was likely to be an exception rather than the norm. The circumstances that had occurred in Afghanistan, when the Taliban had given a safe haven and full cooperation to Al-Qaeda, were unlikely to be replicated very often, if only because of the consequences that then befell that regime. It really was a travesty to think that we were faced with a stark choice between a unilateral and a multilateral approach. It made no sense at all to believe that international organizations could, on their own, conduct the fight against terrorism; but equally it made no sense to believe that the kind of global response required could be mustered without the involvement of international organizations, in particular the UN.

So we put forward proposals as to the basis on which that could be done. We recommended a global approach, one that outlaws the targeting of non-combatants wherever it occurs and whatever the plea of extenuating circumstances; that provides assistance to developing countries to build the panoply of prevention needed to ensure that terrorists cannot find safe havens for their money, their weapons or themselves; and one that develops a broad strategy for dealing not only with acts of terrorism, but also with the causes of it that enable terrorists to find support and shelter.

Weapons proliferation

We recognized that the various international regimes to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological – were under great strain. A world in which those regimes had further eroded or had even collapsed would be an infinitely more insecure one; and would be closer to the nightmare of such weapons falling into the hands of terrorists who might have no compunction about using them and would be open to no effective deterrent measures.

To avoid such developments, we recommended a range of urgent actions –to encourage acceptance of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Additional Protocol providing for snap inspections, to promote the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), to increase cooperation between the IAEA and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Security Council on the basis of regular reports, to resume negotiations on an intrusive regime of inspection for biological installations, to prepare for a biological incident or attack.

While we recognized and firmly endorsed the balance in the nuclear non-proliferation reg...