Human Security Studies

Theories, Methods and Themes

Sorpong Peou

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9789814440479
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

Human Security Studies: Theories, Methods and Themes examines the concept of human security from different theoretical and methodological perspectives and shows how they help shed light on the different themes of global intervention. Liberal perspectives, represented by global legalism and developmentalism, share the optimism that human security can be ensured and enhanced through strengthening global governance. Realists remain skeptical about this liberal vision. While also critical of the liberal promise, critical theorists and feminists offer radical perspectives on human security. All these perspectives help explain the challenges of military intervention for human protection, micro-disarmament, international criminal justice, smart sanctions, human rights and democracy promotion, and human development.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Part I: Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Issues:
  • What Human Security Is and What It Is Not
  • Liberal Globalists' Optimistic Perspectives
  • Political Realists' Skeptical Perspectives
  • Critical Theorists' Radical Perspectives
  • Feminists' Critical Perspectives
  • Methodological Perspectives
• Part II: Themes and Theoretical Perspectives:
  • Military Intervention for Human Protection
  • Micro-Arms Regulation and Micro-Disarmament
  • ‘Smart’ Sanctions: Still ‘Dumb’
  • Global Criminal Justice
  • Human Rights and Democracy Promotion
  • Human Development and Empowerment
• Conclusions: Toward a More Realistic World Order for Humanity

Readership: Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science and international relations; policy makers in the defence and foreign affairs ministries; legal professionals.

Part I

Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Issues

CHAPTER 1

What Human Security Is and What It Is Not

The concept of security is essentially contested.¹ National security remains the best-known position on the matter, but has been subject to empirical scrutiny and normative judgment. Until the end of the Cold War, the literature on national security was still expanding. As one scholar writes in a 1990 article, “Every year scores of books and hundreds of articles appear on the topic of national security.”² This does not mean that the concept of national security is now universally accepted as the policy framework guiding all national leaders. In fact, the concept is understood in different ways and has evolved in terms of space and time. Policymakers and scholars have used the concept, but their interpretations, too, are subjective. Proponents of collective security were silent between the 1930s and the 1980s (except during the Korean War), because this concept (advocated by liberal internationalists after World War I) was not resurrected until after the Cold War. Other concepts of security have also been proposed. Beginning in the early 1980s, some state leaders advocated new versions of security, most notably those of comprehensive security and common security. Neither of these concepts has been universally accepted either. Cooperative, transnational, and global security then gained momentum in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the concept of human security also emerged and it has since evolved. Human security is distinct from the other concepts of security in that it places emphasis on the need to secure humanity, not just states or their national citizens, through reliance on both military and nonmilitary means used to promote freedom from fear and want. These concepts are distinct in terms of how advocates answer the questions of what is being secured, what is being secured against, who provides for security, and how.

National and Societal Security

National security has been the dominant concept in contemporary security studies, especially during the Cold War.³ This concept is closely related to that of national interest, which implies that states as political actors have their own interests and that the most important of these is national survival. Nation-states are treated as the basic unit of analysis in theories of international relations, most notably in political realism, because there is no world government and as such, states and their citizens are insecure.

For proponents of national security, the focus of their thinking is not about how to secure humanity, but how to secure the state and its people against war or the threat of war. For realists in general, the study of national security is about how to ensure national survival through the protection of core national interests and values. Walter Lippmann provides a useful prescription of how this is usually done: “A nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such a war.”⁴ Emphasis is placed on military means and strategies.

Nation-states are assumed to care most about their own survival. Foreign threats to national survival are central to national security, which comes under threat when the state’s physical safety is endangered. Under the most basic form of threat, national security is ensured when nation-states can preserve their territorial integrity, defend their political independence in a predatory world and deter external attacks, when their populations are not slaughtered or enslaved or subject to colonial rule. Loss of political independence means that states lose their sovereignty and can no longer exercise authority over their territory. They are therefore known to no longer exist politically or diplomatically and can no longer make their own decisions and implement them as they see fit. Colonies are an example of how states lose their sovereignty and with it, direct control over territories and populations. They become subject to the dictates of other states, such as those within Europe. Colonies fight to emancipate themselves from imperial powers, and become politically independent only when they are freed from imperial control or domination. Physical threats to American national survival, for example, include the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Soviet nuclear weapons that could, during the Cold War, physically destroy the United States as a sovereign state, and the potential strategic challenge from a rising China in the coming decades.⁵ Such external threats are both real and perceived; perceptions of threat also vary. Leaders of a state may perceive another state as a threat to their national security at one particular time but not at another. Germany and Japan, for instance, were considered military threats to the United States up until the end of World War II, but subsequently became security allies during the Cold War and remain so to the present time.

National security was also redefined in the 1970s to mean something broader than the state’s ability to ensure its survival against the war of conquest. The concept came to include the defense of vital interests and core values against dangerous foreign threats. As Klaus Knorr puts it, “national security concerns arise when vital or core values are threatened by external actions or events.”⁶ Vital interests are generally defined in material terms and core values in nonmaterial terms, but these two elements underpinning national security are often merged or fused.

Material sources of threats to vital interests include the military capabilities of other states. Strategic advances by one state may be interpreted as threats to another state’s vital interests, such as the potential loss of its territory or military allies, or loss of its access to strategic raw materials (such as energy), technology, and overseas markets for the national products that enrich, empower, and secure the state within the anarchic international system. Sources of energy, for example, have been treated as a national security issue of vital interest to the United States. In contrast with the time prior to World War II, when the country enjoyed adequate supplies of energy that could be extracted domestically, it has since become dependent on foreign sources of energy, principally petroleum from the Persian Gulf. Scarcity of natural resources may lead to or intensify geopolitical competition among states, aggravating the problem of security, and may thus become a growing source of threat to national security.

Dangerous foreign threats to core national values include those that threaten a state’s organizing ideology, such as capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, and religious fundamentalism. The defense of core values may involve the protection of capitalist institutions such as the market, political institutions such as democracy and religious institutions such as the Church.

Following the end of the Cold War, non-communist states began to see the remains of the Soviet Empire in a more positive light. Russia still holds thousands of nuclear weapons with the potential to destroy the United States and others physically, but the end of Soviet communism has transformed Russia into a less threatening power, especially when it formally espoused liberal capitalism. Threats to American values, however, remain if China continues to rise and challenge the liberal democratic capitalism of the western world by defending undemocratic regimes. Threats to Chinese values, on the other hand, remain if the West seeks to transform China into a liberal democracy no longer under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

In more recent decades, threats to national security are also defined in unconventional and nonmilitary terms. The threat of global terrorism from non-state actors (such as Al-Qaida since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil) has become a nonconventional menace to national security. As Donald M. Snow puts it, “Since the tragic event of September 11, 2001, American concern for national security has been almost totally focused on — some might argue transfixed by — the problem of international terrorism and its likely recurrence on American soil.”⁷ The terrorists did not use nuclear weapons or military aircraft to bring down the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon; they used unconventional and nonmilitary tools such as box cutters and civilian planes to accomplish their political mission. Other nontraditional sources of threat to national security include border security, climate change (particularly global warming), population growth, piracy, illegal immigration and pandemics.

Still, other realist scholars have broadened the concept of security to include societal security, thus moving their thinking a bit away from national security. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver in particular advanced the concept of societal security rooted in the notion of identity while maintaining the concept’s state-centricity and the military, and elitist dimensions of security.⁸ From this realist perspective, there are two referent objects of security. States or state leaders remain the primary security actors because it is security elites who securitize their everyday living and who are the institutional voice articulating security, and not ordinary people. Security is not something that can or should be articulated by non-elite actors wishing to define it as they see fit.

This top-down structuralist thinking on security allows room for change and adaptation, although established structures are solid and cannot easily be transformed. Overall, national security still takes precedence over societal security defined in terms of legitimacy. The concepts of national and societal security are similar in one major respect: their state-centric focus on security. But they remain different: Proponents of national security see state security behavior in competitive or conflictual terms, whereas societal security rests more on the notion of communal identity.

Collective and Common Security

Collective security and collective self-defense are similar to the extent that both concepts allow for recourse to force against aggression by states that are not the immediate and direct victims.⁹ Both systems of security are allowed in the United Nations (UN) Charter, but a major difference between them lies in the fact that collective self-defence can be exercised at the discretion of a single state or a group of states, whereas collective security rests on the principle that only an organ of the international community, such as the UN Security Council, can make authoritative decisions. The way in which collective security has been exercised also depends heavily on how the UN Security Council sees ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Issues
• Part II: Themes and Theoretical Perspectives
• Conclusions: Toward a More Realistic World Order for Humanity
• Bibliography
• Index