Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health

A New Theoretical Perspective

Joao Nunes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134578504
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of security issues and applies this to the case of health.

Building on the work of the 'Welsh School' of Security Studies, and drawing on contributions from the wider critical security literature, the book provides an emancipatory perspective on the health-security nexus – one which simultaneously teases out its underlying political assumptions, assesses its political effects and identifies potential for transformation.

Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health challenges conventional wisdom in the field of health and international politics by conceiving of health as a fundamentally political issue, and not merely as a medical problem demanding 'technical' solutions and arrangements. The book shows how political processes of representation underpin notions of health and disease through an examination of three key areas: the linkages between immigration and the fear of disease; colonial medicine; and the 'health as a bridge for peace' literature. In order to successfully carry out this political investigation of health, the book develops an innovative theoretical framework inspired by the idea of 'security as emancipation', which goes beyond the existing emancipatory literature in security studies.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, health politics, sociology and IR in general.

Part I

A new theoretical perspective

1 The reality of security

In recent years, some contributions to the security studies literature have challenged the idea that security and threat are something objective that can be observed in the real world. For those drawing on the idea of securitization (Wæver, 1995), a ‘threat’ is not a simple description of reality; rather, it is part of the process through which the reality of security is constructed. Threats are not something ‘out there’, but rather the result of a securitizing process that installs a specific modality for dealing with issues.

These insights have been helpful in allowing scholars to highlight the dangerous effects of certain securitization processes. There is, however, a downside to this questioning of the reality of security. The risk of focusing too much on the negative aspects of securitization is that, in some cases, its possible benefits may be too easily overlooked. Assuming, as securitization scholars overwhelmingly do, that security is about the legitimization of forceful measures and the empowerment of elites may foreclose an engagement with claims that seek different ends. Legitimate grievances put forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being dismissed if analysis only focuses on the socially constructed nature of threat, while overlooking the context of real insecurity in which certain claims originate.

This points to the importance of a more context-specific analysis.¹ It also signals the usefulness of clinging to some notion of reality. The fact that security is enveloped in processes of social construction does not mean that there is nothing to it besides exclusionary and violent practices. Certain actors may indeed instrumentalize security to achieve control over others and justify violence; but insecurity claims may also be connected to legitimate aspirations to a life less determined by vulnerabilities. Security studies must not give up on the task of identifying the actual threats people are faced with, and what security might mean in relation to these threats.

The security-as-emancipation approach is particularly suited to this task: it has insisted on bringing analysis back to the reality of threat by calling attention to the insecurities of ‘real people in real places’ (Wyn Jones, 1996: 214). This concern with the reality of security is used here as the starting point for the definition of a new, emancipation-inspired theoretical framework. Such a framework requires that existing versions of security as emancipation are challenged and pushed forward. In fact, if security as emancipation is right in emphasizing the importance of the condition of insecurity as an analytical and normative guideline, its own conceptualization of this condition has been so far insufficient. This approach still tends to see threats as self-evident and to limit its analysis of threat to the enumeration of dangers. A more developed account of the condition of insecurity is needed in order to unlock the potentialities in security as emancipation.

With the objective of providing a more consistent approach to the condition of insecurity, this chapter elucidates the role that politics plays in the reality of security. This entails a shift in focus: from the factual, ‘material’ layer of reality to the processes through which issues ‘materialize’. Incorporating materialization into the security-as-emancipation approach holds great potential for a political reading of security issues.

Security as emancipation and the condition of insecurity

The reality of security issues is central to the idea of security as emancipation. This approach chastises realism for being an escape from the real and seeks to ‘challenge realism’s conceptualizations of the world not by rejecting the idea of the real but by claiming access to a more sophisticated realism’ (Booth, 2005a: 10, emphasis in the original). In other words, rather than casting doubt upon the reality of security, security as emancipation wishes to reaffirm it by calling attention to the ‘corporeal, material existence and experiences of individual human beings’ (Wyn Jones, 2005: 227).

For security as emancipation, insecurity exists regardless of any statements made about it. In other words, it consists of a layer of reality that should be seen as primarily material. Indeed, for Ken Booth (1995: 105), the ‘subject-matter’ of security studies ‘consists of flesh (which is fed or famished) and blood (which is wet and messy, and hot or cold), and people living lives comfortably and securely, or enduring them against the wall, like a dog’. This material layer of reality is a reference point for analysis but also a normative category: it provides research with a context, a purpose and a sense of direction. In order to be able to grasp the reality of security and identify what is wrong with it, the researcher must begin, not from some predetermined notion of what being secure is, but rather from actual insecurity as a ‘life-determining condition’ (Booth, 2007: 101).

But, what does it mean to see insecurity as a ‘condition’? Given the crucial role that the condition of insecurity plays in the security-as-emancipation framework, one would expect an in-depth discussion. However, existing statements take this condition as self-evident. They claim that the details of the condition of insecurity can be ascertained by engaging in a ‘comprehensive’ way with reality; in this context, Booth (2005a: 1–2) describes a global historical crisis characterized by:

the combustible interplay of interstate conflict, globalization, population growth, extremist ideologies, apparently unstoppable technological momentum, terrorism, consumerism, tyranny, massive disparities of wealth, rage, imperialism, nuclear-biological-chemical weapons, and brute capitalism – as well as more traditional cultural threats to peoples’ security as a result of patriarchy and religious bigotry.

It seems that, for security as emancipation, conceptualizing the condition of insecurity amounts to the enumeration of a set of contemporary dangers or threats. These threats are treated as a material given: they are ‘ways of describing the conditions of existence’ (Booth, 2007: 107).

This is clearly insufficient, and the case can be made that current versions of security as emancipation have not yet adequately conceptualized what it is that individuals and groups are being threatened by, and what they are to emancipate themselves from. A thorough understanding of the condition of insecurity requires that we go beyond simple enumeration – as extensive as it might be. How exactly are these situations a threat? How do they constitute impediments upon life? How do they translate into claims for security and emancipation? Looking at the claims themselves does not solve the problem, particularly when one is faced with conflicting claims, or when one begins to question the ways in which the ‘victims of insecurity’ are defined.² In order to provide a convincing account of the need for emancipation and devise practical steps to achieve it, an emancipation-inspired framework needs to include a sophisticated account of what the problem is. The condition of insecurity upon which visions of security and emancipation are to be predicated must not be taken for granted.

One is not suggesting here that existing accounts of security as emancipation are falling back on objectivist notions of reality. For Booth (2007: 246), ideas are important in the definition of reality, and he has portrayed his approach as being ‘empirical without being empiricist’. At the same time, faithful to its roots in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, this approach has been predicated upon an idea of knowledge as a social product and process, which derives from political interests, reflects existing opportunities and constraints, results from power struggles and is oriented towards political goals. Thus, understandings of security are seen as embedded in a social setting in which ‘facts’ are established by political negotiation and struggle. As Booth (2007: 184) has put it:

[p]olitically speaking, the power to decide what is real (and what should be forgotten) is crucial. To be able to dominate the defining of reality is a step towards dominating politics. … In the context of the politics of security, the question ‘what is real?’ must begin with ideas.

Security as emancipation thus espouses the primordial character of the material layer of reality (the ‘bodies’ of ‘real people’ suffering insecurity in the ‘flesh’) while at the same time acknowledging that this reality is to be framed within a political process. This approach conceives normative claims and transformative efforts as naturally flowing from the acknowledgement of a material dimension. However, a convincing explanation of how politics can be derived from the material layer is not offered. How exactly is a particular situation deemed to be a problem requiring attention and transformation? What is the basis for the normative judgement of a material situation? How can a policy be deemed emancipatory on the basis of that judgement? What is lacking is a cohesive account of how the two dimensions (material and political) interact with each other. It is not enough to affirm the centrality of the material dimension and recognize that knowledge about security must be seen as social and political. The relation between (material) ontology and (political) knowledge must be specified further.³

The example of torture helps to illustrate what is at stake here. When explaining his criteria for making a normative judgement in a situation of insecurity, Booth (2007: 234) cites Geoffrey Warnock thus:

[t]hat it is a bad thing to be tortured and starved, humiliated or hurt is not an opinion: it is a fact. That it is better to be loved and attended to, rather than hated or neglected, is again a plain fact, not a matter of opinion.

Torture is bad and therefore one must condemn it and do something about it. This is as far as security as emancipation has gone – and it is arguably not far enough if this approach is to provide a comprehensive political analysis of security.

Indeed, the condition of insecurity is seldom as simple as the presence of a ‘starved’ or ‘tortured’ body. A brief look at the literature on torture reveals that the presence of ‘tortured bodies’ must always be framed within the wider context in which individuals come to be treated in this way. Put differently, a ‘tortured body’ is more than a material reality. As David Sussman (2005) has argued, torture is a multifaceted phenomenon that goes beyond the experience of pain and fear. For Sussman, the problematic character of torture also resides in the fact that it is more than a body being physically harmed; rather, it involves a complex web of power relationships involving guilt, complicity and the uneven distribution of agency. On another level, the definition of what counts as torture never flows seamlessly from a material reality that can be observed. As is demonstrated by debates about ‘highly coercive interrogation’ techniques like waterboarding (Heymann and Kayyem, 2005), this definition involves dealing with categories that are highly contested.

Genocide provides another example of the shortcomings of focusing exclusively on the material dimension of security issues. There are several reasons to suggest that the reality of genocide goes beyond ‘dead bodies’. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the term ‘genocide’ after a debate over the types of groups that were seen as susceptible to being considered ‘victims of genocide’.⁴ Countries like the Soviet Union and Poland wanted to exclude political groups; the resulting ‘consensus’ did exclude these groups, and debates over the definition of the concept have lasted until the present day (Shaw, 2007; Jonassohn, 2008 [1992]; Charny, 2009; Fein, 2009). These debates show that bodies can have different meanings, depending on the superimposition (or lack thereof) of a political category like genocide.

The limitations of the material layer of reality when it comes to dealing with complex categories such as genocide can be also seen in disputes over the status of the Holocaust as a ‘unique’ genocide. Some authors invoke dead bodies as a self-evident proof of the exceptionality of the Holocaust: Steven Katz (2008 [2001]), for example, provided a body count to argue that the Nazi genocide of the Jews should be considered a unique event in human history. However, for others a moral judgement of the Holocaust in relation to other situations of genocide cannot be based on a body count. In fact, for David Stannard (2008 [2001]: 259), the use of dead bodies in this context serves to effectively ‘deny the sufferings of others’ and is complicit with ‘past and present genocidal regimes’. Stannard’s argument suggests that scholarship about genocide is not just dealing with the bodies that were killed. Genocide is a complex moral phenomenon that goes beyond that material layer.

These examples show that when approaching a security issue one needs to go beyond acknowledgement and moral condemnation – arguably the two avenues that current versions of security as emancipation offer. Relying upon a material ontology has important limitations when it comes to grasping the political dimension of security issues. The presence of ‘tortured bodies’ or ‘dead bodies’ never tells the whole story, and can sometimes obscure the wider context in which this material layer is located and becomes intelligible.

By failing to explain how the political and material dimensions of reality are connected, current versions of security as emancipation end up offering a thin account of the condition of insecurity. The potential of security as emancipation can only be fulfilled once its picture of the reality of security is revised. Specifically, a more precise elaboration of the place of politics in the condition of insecurity is needed.

The politics of insecurity

Given the preponderance of the material layer of reality in current versions of security as emancipation, a good way to reconsider the condition of insecurity is to shift the focus towards the political dimension. This entails theoretical work at three levels: the politics of the referent of security; the politics of the ‘insecure body’; and the politics of materialization.

The politics of the referent of security

A political approach to the condition of insecurity must begin by unpacking and challenging the claims about the primordial nature of the material layer of the reality of security. This can be achieved by investigating the referent of security, that is, who/what is to be secured.

Security as emancipation claims that the individual must be seen as the ultimate referent of security because it constitutes the irreducible unit of life: in Booth’s (2007: 225) words, ‘individual human beings are primordial in a manner that groupings such as nations and sovereign states are not’. This approach claims to shed false understandings about security by getting closer to a truthful depiction of reality. However, a wider historical perspective on the category of the referent object shows that, rather than simply a matter of a theory moving in the direction of a closer correspondence to reality, the shift towards the individual must be understood in the light of decisions that are intrinsically political.

In fact, the conceptual history of security shows that the idea of the state as referent of security – against which security as emancipation is reacting – is actually relatively recent (the second half of the twentieth century), while the conception of security as an individual property, feeling or achievement goes back many centuries. For Jean Delumeau (1989), the ‘feeling of security’ in Western thought is more often connected with individual self-assurance and faith than with the protection of the state from military aggression. The idea of the state as connected to security is actually subsidiary to the original meaning of the term. Just as Christianity showed that individual assuredness could only be achieved by surrendering to God, so modern theorists, like Thomas Hobbes, argued that individual security could only be achieved by surrendering some freedom in return for the protection offered by the state. Similarly, for Emma Rothschild (1995: 61) the idea of security as ‘an objective of states, to be achieved by diplomatic or military policies’ was an historical innovation introduced during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Even then, and since the security of the individual could only be achieved in the context of the society or the nation, the term ‘security’ still denoted a ‘condition, or an objective, that constituted a relationship between individuals and states or societies’ (Rothschild, 1995: 61, emphasis in the original). Thus, for Rothschild, the referent object of security fluctuates according to the shifting articulations in the relationship between the individual and collective spheres.

The political character of the referent of security can also be witnessed by looking at the post-war development of the idea of ‘national security’. Arnold Wolfers (1952) was one of the first to conceive the latter as a ‘symbol’ that, more than representing a theoretical adjustment to reality, denoted an intention that was essentially political and normative. Ole Wæver (2004b) argued that the understanding of the state as the privileged referent to be secured was a Cold War foreign policy tool wielded by the United States in its geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet Union. In his words: ‘the US needed a concept to express an effort with both military and non-military ends and justify a policy above normal political vacillation’ (Wæver, 2004b: 56). More than the description of a shift in US policy, ‘national security’ was an organizing frame of meaning, supporting certain policy options.

Politics is an intrinsic part, not only of the choice of the referent of security, but also of the material character that the latter is deemed to have. Michael C. Williams (1998a) has argued that current understandings of security are predicated upon the theoretical construction, during the modern liberal period, of the material individual as the primary focus of security concerns. Williams drew on the work of Hobbes to show that the security understandings that constitute the modern state were based upon a transformation of the way in which the individual was conceived. Writing in a context of great violence and unrest, Hobbes saw the state as underpinned and legitimized by the ‘historical construction of the liberal individual’ (Williams, 2007a: 18). Importantly, this construction was undertaken along materialist lines; in fact, the construction of a ‘material self’ was part of a more general project of ‘limitation of knowledge claims to the material realm’ (Williams, 2005: 39, 34). Hobbes hoped to relegate faith-based judgements to the private realm, thereby helping to develop a public arena of discussion and toleration that would contain violence. Williams (1998b: 438) thus suggests that ideas of the individual as a material reality ‘need to be seen genealogically as elements of the modern attempt to recast the politics of security’. He demonstrates the importance of keeping in mind the processes through which the referent of security came to be understood as ‘abstract, individual persons, rendered as atomistic, material bodies’ (Williams, 1998b: 438).

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Health, security and politics
• PART I A new theoretical perspective
• PART II Security, emancipation and the politics of health
• Bibliography
• Index