Positive Security

Collective Life in an Uncertain World

Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Ali Bilgic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780415482790
• eBook ISBN: 9781000599589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically conceptualises positive security and explores multiple areas in global politics where positive security can be studied as an alternative to the existing understandings and practices of security.

Structured through a framework on the practice and ethics of everyday security, the book defines positive security as a focal point of contextual and spatiotemporal moments that emerge through encounters with 'the other' in everyday politics. In these moments, an actor can show attentiveness and humility towards 'the other'. In this book, the authors present their own understandings of positive security, offering an in-depth discussion and analysis of the Global North and South divides, delving into many aspects such as human security, migration, gender, Indigenous issues and perceptions of security in the Arctic, and challenges and tensions for and within NATO. The book concludes by reflecting on the significance of positive security, looking at its application for other current issues, including how to understand and manage new (in)security challenges including hybrid threats and warfare.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, critical security, and peace studies.

1 IntroductionWhy positive security?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003296430-1

The world is in the third decade of the new millennium and has already witnessed mass terror attacks in New York, Mumbai, Cairo, Istanbul, and Baghdad; the so-called Islamic State and Boko Haram and the humanitarian and political disaster unfolding in Afghanistan following the chaotic withdrawal of the US-led allies have demonstrated examples of violence that had not been seen before; the Mediterranean Sea and the British Channel have become deep blue graveyards; the walls in Palestine or the United States–Mexico border, as well as the refugee camps in Manus Island reveal the extent states could go in the name of ‘security’. Women and peoples of colour have taken the lead all over the world protesting against the systemic violence they have to endure in their everyday lives. Patriarchy, sexism, racism, militarism, and nationalism, more recently cloaked under the name ‘populism’, have taken hold of the capitals and minds of peoples. For Indigenous peoples and ethnic and religious minorities, racism is still part of daily life. Failed denuclearisation attempts have brought nuclear weapons back to international relations (IR), while the sky is now inundated with unmanned vehicles of surveillance and warfare. Global environmental emergencies continue to threaten and worsen the lives of millions. While the world is struggling with all these issues and trying to make sense of them, a global pandemic has deepened fears and anxieties globally. Make no mistake: the pandemic has revealed multiple violence people have to face everyday both in the Global South and in the Global North. Death from COVID-19 is political. The security landscape today leaves little room for holding any hope in the future.

Over 20 years ago (1999), Bob McSweeney introduced the idea of ‘positive’ security. Since that time, the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ have been periodically employed to characterise the concept of security, albeit in different ways. Some authors chose to explore specifically what the term ‘positive’ could connotate in the context of security, and further why this was important to understanding security. The notion of ‘positive’ security has fostered a conversation amongst some security scholars who want to more fully explore the relationships across the spectrum of definitions and understandings about how the concept of security is used, and how this further impacts the potential value of the concept. This conversation has in its own way been very important, where different scholars experiment with how we have, could, and even should understand the concept of security. In that sense, this is one of the defining features of the idea of positive security – it is a conversation, revealing diverse perspectives about the unfolding of security at a given place and moment in time. Exploring positive security through the everyday practice ‘supplies a particularly fertile “focal point” making interparadigmatic conversations possible’ (Adler & Pouliot, 2011, p. 3). In this book, we push this conversation forward, providing a broad but distinct framework of analysis that is employed within different contexts in each chapter.

The authors of this book are of the conviction that security studies in international relations has a responsibility not only to call out violence conducted in the name of security but also to think about security differently in the face of violence and global power inequalities. The main objective of this book is to conceptualise more ethical and attentive ways of thinking and practising security in global politics whether it is between states, within communities, as well as between states and their communities. As both scholars of security studies, we engage this conversation through our own distinct lenses and conceptualisations, which manifest themselves as ‘multiactor approach’ in Chapter 2 or radical human security in Chapter 4, explore contextuality, spatiotemporality, and relationality of security, as well as the importance of the ‘everyday’ in practising security. Within our distinct approaches, we find opportunity in positive security. Positive security finds its meanings in its unfolding. It is about myriad ways of practising security in multiple daily encounters with the other(s). It is not predetermined or a certainty, but a possibility. Its positivity is not an a priori moral position such as the one regarding ‘good’ or ‘bad’ security; it originates from reflectivity on the other(s). It may involve military tools as well as state-level actors. It might appear in the meeting rooms in Brussels, the homes or countryside in Afghanistan, or in the city squares. Positive security is a focal point where ‘other-regarding’ security practices in the daily course of life meet.

In this introductory chapter, firstly, conceptualisations of security in security studies, which can potentially be useful to articulate positive security, will be unpacked. By situating it within the existing accounts of security, particularly in critical security studies, the necessity of formulating positive security will be explained. Following this discussion, the theoretical foundations that have informed our conceptualisation of positive security will be discussed: the everyday international relations, practice approaches in international relations, and ethics of relationality.

An arrested concept: security

It is often said that the definition of security is ‘contested’ (Baldwin, 1997; McSweeney, 1999). This is hardly surprising. The concept of security is related to power (Hoogensen Gjørv & Goloviznina, 2014) that makes a claim for, and about, what we most value in life. Security engages values (what), as well as actors (who), practices (how), survival (why), and time (when) (Hoogensen Gjørv, 2017a). Contestation arises around who decides what is valuable, and how this value is protected into the future. Contestation gives rise to qualifications about what security is – or more importantly, should be – from being an exclusive term reserved for the use of force (military) to protect state interests and boundaries, to valuing and protecting the environment and climate over the long term (Græger, 1996; Sanford, 2015), to ‘human’ security that focuses on individual experiences or ‘everyday’ security (Stevens & Vaughan-Williams, 2016) rather than emancipation and democratic values (Aradau, 2004).

The notion of ‘positive’ security can play a role in these political contestations. Framing a concept within the adjective ‘positive’, however one chooses to define positive, takes the conversation away from claims of neutrality or objectivity about the concept of security. As will be discussed below, we do not have such a claim in our articulations of different practices of positive security. However, by framing security as ‘positive’, we do make an analytical, political, and ethical claim about the concept under discussion.

Framing a concept as positive or negative has a well-established history. The term ‘positive’ is often understood as a qualitative judgement equivalent to ‘good’, as opposed to ‘bad’, the latter of which is often understood as negative. These characterisations of positive and negative are not always framed in a good–bad dichotomy, however. Isaiah Berlin referred to ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty (Berlin, 1969), but the terms negative and positive had less to do with notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than about a characterisation about the amount of freewill and agency an individual has in making decisions. Negative liberty refers to an absence of hindrances or obstructions, allowing an individual to make choices about their life with little restriction. Positive liberty acknowledges the role of factors that can guide or control an individual to make certain choices over others (which could include social norms, religion, laws, etc.). The descriptors of positive and negative describe the condition of the concept in question. Johan Galtung (1969) has used the notions of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ peace to illustrate the absence of both physical violence (which demands the removal of such violence) and structural violence (which demands the inclusion of social justice). More recently we have seen the advent of another strand of peace research examining ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ hybridity, within the notion of building hybrid peace (Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2016). Positive and negative in this case characterise the quality of hybrid peace, where a negative hybrid peace is a top-down, institutional, external/international actor imposed peace with a relatively token representation of local participation compared to a positive hybrid peace which reflects a greater balance between local and international/institutional perspectives, allowing for a more organic articulation of local interests and values to inform peacebuilding. To a degree, this later use of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ generates connotations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in addition to differentiating perspectives of the concept of hybrid peace.

As will be discussed in Chapter 2 in detail, positive security has been defined in a variety of ways, including in relation and corresponding to the dichotomy between ‘security from’ and ‘security to’. The former, similar to ‘freedom from’, concerns identification of threats, risks, and dangers to a security referent with the objective of elimination or mitigation of them. This ‘negative’ conceptualisation is conventionally associated with the state and militarised approach to the pursuit of security. Affectively, fears and anxieties underline it. On the other hand, ‘security to’ refers to the notions and practices of security that realise justice, freedom, and rights. Often capitalised upon to include non-state actors in the politics of security as referents and agents of security, it enables, rather than disables, various political actors and their interests to be articulated under the framework of security. Though providing an early and initial characterisation of positive security, this dichotomy is not a sufficient nor operational formulation of a positive security conceptualisation for the following reasons.

Primarily, understanding the concept of security as ‘security from’ and ‘security to’ individually and in duality do not adequately reflect how politics of security is practised, how discourses of security are generated and reproduced, and what practising security does politically. Both ‘security from’ and ‘security to’ are foundationalist in the sense that security is achievable, for example, if the ‘threat’ is eliminated in the case of the former, or certain social conditions are met in the case of the latter. However, the relationship captured within the processes or practices of security is much more complicated and security is more ephemeral than these conceptualisations assume.

Critical approaches in security studies have convincingly argued and demonstrated that fear (largely associated with ‘security from’) is integral to liberal governmentality of freedoms and rights and security and insecurity can be two sides of the same coin (Neocleous, 2000) as top-down iterations of security practised from ‘above’. The promise of freedom inside (the state or, often culturally bounded, society) is conditioned upon and (re)produced through othering and exclusion on the outside(r). The threatening ‘other’ makes a liberal, free, threatened ‘self’ possible (Bigo, 2002; Evans, 2010; Lemke, 2014). Security and insecurity become mutually productive to each other removing the hypothetical dichotomy between the two, which is often instrumentalised politically to govern life. (In)security becomes a discursive and practical plane where power relations, political communities, identities, and subjectivities are (re)produced. It can be enabling, liberating, and empowering for some, depending on their position in the power hierarchies. Building positive security on the foundation of ‘security to’ and ‘security from’ dichotomy, while prioritising the former, overlooks the deeply political reproductive interactions between the two.

Secondly, both concepts assume that security as an endpoint can be achieved as long as predefined policies are employed and practised. The dichotomy between security and insecurity has long been problematised by the aforementioned literature on security governmentality. In addition, this dichotomy is problematic because it often privileges some political actors as the main agents of security as they have the experience, established procedures, and personnel for it. In other words, it legitimates mainly states, albeit not exclusively, as the agents of security (Bilgic, 2014). Furthermore, the linearity between security and insecurity erases complex contextual factors, which defy this very linearity regarding security/insecurity. As discussed in various chapters in this book, once multiple actors encounter and interact with each other in the security game, their affective, corporeal, or discursive practices can change not only actors’ self-perceptions but also what they understand from security and insecurity. Encounters, in other words, destabilise the established ‘self’s and can give rise to different types of (in)securities.

If security as a discourse can be constitutive to insecurity, if it can be employed to reproducing gendered and racialised hierarchies in global politics (Stern, 2006; Howell & Richter-Montpetit, 2019), and to discipline populations (Wichum, 2013), can we or should we talk about security at all? Should we abandon it as it can’t be saved from its violent and disciplinary logics closely associated with sovereignty? (Neocleous, 2008). If we do not abandon it, do we risk contributing to the violent processes of (in)security epistemologically? Some voices in critical security studies, including emancipatory security theory, human security, and some feminist approaches, argue that it is not only possible to reconceptualise the concept freed from violence and in association with freedoms and rights, but it is also politically necessary to pursue such an analytical goal (Booth, 2007; Robinson, 2011; Tickner, 2011; Hoogensen Gjørv 2012). These conceptualisations, loosely aligned with ‘security to’, have contributed to the endeavours to move beyond the state-centric and militarised paradigm of security. Introduction of non-state groups to the security analysis, promotion of individuals and societies and their rights and freedoms as a way to ‘true’ security, detecting and problematising structural forces such as nationalism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy as obstacles to global security are significant contributions and challenges to the monopoly of violent and oppressive security practices in security studies. Most importantly, they encourage us to move beyond the existing paradigms and imagine alternative worlds of security.

While these studies prompted these authors to think about security in a different way, risks associated with reconceptualising security differently cannot be ignore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Why positive security?
• 2 Positive security: Encounters as a multiactor security approach
• 3 Human security, gender security, and positive security: Sharing perspectives from the North
• 4 Encounters and positive security: Radical human security as a research agenda
• 5 Civilian agency, identity, and the power to define security
• 6 Power and positive security: Emancipatory security through Arendt and Butler
• 7 Social orders and positive security: Greece–Turkey relations as a failed pursuit of positive security
• 8 Positive, multiactor security and the comprehensive approach
• 9 Conclusion: Looking forward to positive security
• Index