Human Security

Felicia Whatley

Human Security

The opening sentence of Ben Saul’s article, “Dangers of the United Nations’ New Security Agenda in the Asia—Pacific Region” states: “The basic concept of human security is now well known.” Is this statement accurate? What evidence is there to support and/ or challenge this statement? Does the validity of this statement affect the utility of the concept of human security as a principle of international relations?

I will argue that human security is well known around the world, but its usage, definition and applicability may differ. I will also demonstrate how there is much evidence to support this ideal. Human security is a principle that applies to political science and international relations. It may be coded as human rights or lack there of.  The history emerged after the Cold war and really became a hot topic in the ‘90s with the atrocities in the Balkans. The United Nations used the term as a basis to act on behalf of humanity. I will do my best to incorporate more global interpretations and examples of this terminology and the components of, but as an American student it is more accessible to research and define how human security has affected study and policy for the U.S. in dealing with the international community and international relations.

At the political level the concept of human security was launched in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP in 1994). According to this report, human security was to encompass seven dimensions: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. The UNDP used a broad definition that included both the security dimension (Freedom from Fear) and the development aspect (Freedom from Want). It was rapidly accepted in 1994 and spread. It was accepted by the UN and put in place into many countries foreign policies like that of Norway, Canada, Japan and Switzerland. Yet there has always been much debate and controversy around the topic human security.

From Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh and Anuradha M. Chenoy’s Human Security: Concepts and Implications of 2007 “Simply put, human security debunks the question of ‘security’ from its traditional conception of the safety of states from military threats to concentrate on the safety of people and communities. Once the referent object of security is changed to individuals, it then proposes to extend the notion of ‘safety’ to a condition beyond mere existence (survival) to life worth living, hense, well-being and dignity of human beings.” Human security is an emerging term for understanding global vulnerabilities that challenge the traditional notion of national security and argue for the individual verses the state. Human security holds that a people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability, (www.ciafactbook.com). The concept came from post Cold War, multi-disciplinary understanding of security involving development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Program’s 1994 Human Development Report laid the ground work for human security arguing that “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” for all people was the best approach to take on global insecurity. I think what is meant by global insecurity is that often there isn’t a terminology of action needed unless an atrocity or something negative happens like extreme poverty or eminent danger. Who it affects and how I will get into as the paper goes forward. Often now, human security is a concept that is taught in colleges and universities in international relations, globalization, or human rights programs.

UNDP describes the “Freedom from Fear” as the school that seeks to limit the practice of human security to “protecting individuals from violent conflicts while recognizing that these violent threats are strongly associated with poverty, lack of state capacity and other forms of inequities” (1994 Human Development Report).  Freedom from Fear is a concept approach that limits the focus of violence as a realistic and manageable approach for human security. This would also involve emergency assistance, conflict prevention and conflict resolution, and peace-building. Canada used Freedom from Fear in their policies to ban landmines as a primary component for their own foreign policy. Also, perhaps it is thought that the mission in Darfur, with the “Responsibility to Protect” campaign may have fell under the Freedom from Fear agenda.

UNDP describes the “Freedom from Want” as a school of thought that “advocates a holistic approach in achieving human security and argues the threat agenda should be broadened to include hunger, disease, and natural disasters in addressing the root of human insecurity, because they kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined.” It is different from the Freedom from Fear in that it spans its focus beyond violence and instead focuses on development and security goals.  Japan’s government incorporates both Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want as equally important for development for their foreign policy (1994 UNDP). The speech delivered by President Roosevelt in 1941incorporated the Freedom from Want and the Freedom from Fear. “ In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny, which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941)

“The concepts of security and insecurity have relative connotations in different contexts. For some, insecurity comes from sudden loss of guarantee of access to jobs, health care, social welfare, education, etc. For others insecurity stems from violation of human rights, extremism, domestic violence, spread of conflicts, displacement etc.”(Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007). How we define human security affects how we judge it as a concept. Though there is no single definition of human security the European Union, Canadians, Japanese, UNDP and various scholars have composed various viewpoints that build a framework for its application. Yes, human security is a true concept however it is defined or enacted in policy or study in academia and can differ depending on the environment that the concept is used. For example, security for a farmer in Kashmir may mean his ability to sell his crops verses a very different idea of security for Pakistan and India and their ability to have and use nuclear weapons.

The UNDP’s 1994’s Human Development Report defines human security as having expanded global security to include threats in these seven areas: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. Economic security is described as requiring an assured basic income for individuals, from productive and remunerative work or from a publicly financed safety net. Food security is seen as all people at all times having both physical and economic access to basic food. The United Nations puts it as “the overall availability of food is not a problem, rather the problem often is the poor distribution of food and a lack of purchasing power.” Food security could either be a national or a global problem but the UN says it can be handled by taking care of the access to assets and work and assured incomes to help food as well as economic security.

Health security on the other hand deals with guaranteeing the least amount of disease infection and promotion of healthy lifestyles. In many developing countries the main cause of death is infectious or parasitic diseases verses industrialized nations who deal with circulatory diseases being their biggest killer. So to remedy one of the seven global security threats there is a push for healthy lifestyles, which believe it or not does fall under human security. A large percentage of the people who suffer from these types of deaths are from low to middle incomes.  It would make sense that getting so called “good health care” is something thought to be for the wealthy upper-class and is definitely a Freedom from Want and getting diseases like cancer, coronary heart disease, and very realistically and frightfully AIDs would also fall under Freedom from Fear.

“Environmental security aims to protect people from the short and long term ravages of nature, man-made threats in nature and deterioration of the natural environment. In developing countries, lack of access to clean water resources is one of the greatest environmental threats. In industrial countries, one of the major threats is air pollution. Global warming, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, is another environmental security issue,” (UNDP 1994).  In the last year we have seen the Gulf coast deal with the impact of an enormous oil spill. I had an internship with the Coast Guard at the time and did a mock drill six weeks before this happened in Maine and when the catastrophe struck the exercise did not make us any more well prepared to handle the disaster. Koreans worked alongside the Coasties to learn because they had been through a similar event a few years prior. What they learned was that safety measurements needed to be taken before civilians just marched onto the beach and started cleaning up the debris. Much of that is toxic to humans, not just the animals of the sea.  Now in the news is Japan and its awful earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown. These are examples of environmental security disasters where aid is needed from all over the world to clean up the disaster and bring relief to its victims. There is much discussion on what can be done to lessen the damage as much of these environmental events are likely unpreventable. Governments want to minimize the damage and with the nuclear reactor scares, many debate if it is a source of energy that people want in their countries. Energy sources are a hot topic for debate as oil prices soar.  And clean water is a necessity and a commodity that many people around the world can only dream of having. Lack of infrastructure and poverty are symptom for many Fear of Want and Fear of Need.

The last three of the seven threats are personal security, community security, and political security. “Personal security aims to protect people from physical violence, whether from the state or external states, from violent individuals and sub-state actors, from domestic abuse, or from predatory adults,”(UNDP 1994). This includes crime especially violent crimes.  It is interesting because this is fundamentally what we think of when we think of human security as the protection of human life. But it varies in so many degrees and there are so many levels of government who enforce this from local, to city, to state, to federal, to perhaps worldwide. Laws and punishments vary all the same and policies and international laws in what humanity decides is right and what is wrong comes from the inhuman acts of our pasts. The acts of the Holocaust shall never happen again. The Nuremburg trials were epic and a conformation that such cruel horrible acts should not go unpunished.  Policies were put forth in the United Nations to react if suspected cases of genocide were happening worldwide, like in Rwanda. It became a responsibility for society to not allow this to go unchecked; there must be intervention. “It was while atrocities were taking place in Rwanda for example that the UN organized a major international conference on human rights and appointed an international high commissioner for human rights. Both these steps had their uses, but they needed to be reinforced by more vigorous action,” wrote Sydney D. Bailey in The UN Security Council and Human Rights 1994.

Community security also falls under human security and I think it is a little less clear cut. The UNDP, which laid the groundwork for human security defines it as a means to protect people from the loss of traditional relationships, values, and sectarian and ethnic violence. This would include when a minority group would be targeted, like perhaps the racism that Muslims dealt with in the U.S. in the wake of 9/11 as well as the Japanese-Americans who were sent to the camps during WWII. This would probably include racially motivated crimes, otherwise known as hate-crimes. The last of the seven threats of human security is political security, which is concerned with whether people live in a society that honors their basic human rights. According to a recent Amnesty International survey: political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearances are still practiced in 110 countries,(www.amnestyinternational.com). Human rights violations are still common and often during periods of political dissidence or unrest. Still many dictatorships repress individuals or groups of people as well as having control over ideas and information. The revolts in the Middle East and Africa are perfect examples of this. Citizens of Tanzania, Egypt, Libya, and Syria want democratically elected governments. The cries for human rights are heard around the world and in the case of Libya there was international intervention. And the people of Egypt ousted their leader.

The human security approach responds to the need to address the major changes in international relations and, above all, to the increased inter-dependency of nations and individuals. The end of the Cold War did not result in the expected peace dividend. While conflicts continued unabated, new insecurities confronted states and individuals. Security in this sense the sustainability of development in itself was questioned, because of poverty, lack of entitlement and gender oppression in which societies and individuals were exposed to (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007). “When it comes to security challenges, fortunately, we do not see any conventional military threats to the United States developing in the Latin American region, nor do we foresee any major military conflict between nations…However, public security threats—such as crime, gangs, drug trafficking and use—pose the principal near-term security challenges to the region…In many cases, the underlying conditions of poverty and inequality provide fertile soil for the principal security challenges in the region…Nearly 80 percent of the entire region lives on less than $10 per day. When you add these poverty figures—which represent millions of people trying to provide for their families—to the world’s most unequal distribution of wealth and a high level of corruption, you have a strong catalyst for insecurity and instability,”(U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Southern Command 2008 Posture Statement). Kofi Annan wrote in 2005 about how the world had changed dramatically since 1945 when the United Nations was created. “Geopolitical patterns, economic trends, technological change and other developments are severely straining the system of collective security that has been in place for the past 60 years. Today’s threats—familiar ones with added potency, and some entirely new dangers—are borderless, highly connected, and capable of crippling, and even destroying societies everywhere.”

Human security focuses on the protection of individuals, rather than defending the physical and political integrity of states from external military threats –the traditional goal of national security. Ideally, national security and human security should be mutually reinforcing, but that isn’t always the case. Supposedly in the last 100 years more people have died either directly or indirectly from the actions of their own governments or rebel forces in wars verses having been killed by invasions from another country. Take the U.S. for example; over 620,000 died in the Civil War (more than any other war America has been involved in) and no more than 10,000 died in the Revolutionary War. Acting in the name of national security, governments have caused more harm as a threat to human security. The Human Security Gateway focuses its attention on threats coming from violence to individuals and societies at risk. “The underlying conviction was that poverty, lack of economic prospects, and underdevelopment were drivers of conflict. Therefore, it was argued, new prevention and peace support measures were required to prevent and resolve intra-state conflicts. Thus, human security offered an ideal hinge linking the security and development agendas,” (http://www.humansecuritygateway.com).

Criticism and debates 

One criticism is that the concept of human security is too comprehensive and too diffuse. Some argue that it can’t serve as an academic analytical tool because of its insufficient precision, and it is unsuitable to formulate policy because of its broad topical range. Also it is not reliable because it fails to establish a system of goals, which diminishes its usefulness. There is also much debate over how comprehensive the definition of human security should be and if the focus should be on the broad development dimension or on the narrow aspect of violence. While the broad approach is favored by the UN and Japan, other countries find the focus should be on mainly combating non-military threats such as poverty, underdevelopment, diseases or environmental degradation, (UNDP, 2004). Whereas instead, a more narrow approach is favored by Western governments who want to concentrate on protecting the individual from war and violence. The emphasis here is mainly on combating the misuse of small arms and light weapons or deployment of child soldiers. Many fans of the Freedom from Fear argue that a narrow definition can be better applied and put to use to warn against the tendency to denote every threat to human well-being as a security risk.  If that happens, the concept of security will lose its analytical substance.

What is also controversial is the relationship between human and state security and the role of the government in the context of human security. The core definition deals with how the individual is affected and what his or her human rights are as well as what is the sovereignty of the state. It has been argued by critics that those who violated the norms of human security and basic human rights would not be able to hide the notion of state sovereignty. This served as a means to legitimize intervention for protecting individuals and humanitarian intervention to use military for the reasons of the responsibility to protect. But this gave interests for others that feared human security may be misused in the context for state sovereignty.

References

www.amnestyinternational.com

UNDP, Human Development Report 1994 www.hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1994

Human Security Gateway

http://www.humansecuritygateway.com

Stavridis, James. U.S. Navy Admiral Southern Command 2008 Posture Statement

Commission on Human Security “Report” www.humansecurity-chs.org/finalreport/English/FinalReport.pdf

Paris, Roland. “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air? International Security, vol. 26, no. 2 (Fall 2001):, pp 87-102

King, Gary and Murray, Christopher J. L., “Rethinking Human Security,” Political Science Quarterly vol. 116, no. 4 (Winter 2001-2002): 585-610.

Slaughter, Anne-Marie. “Security, Solidarity, and Sovereignty: The Grand Themes of UN Reform,” The American Journal of International Law. Vol. 1, no. 1 (2006): 1-35.

Saul, Ben. “The Dangers of the United Nations’ New Security Agenda: Human Security in the Asia-Pacific Region,” Asian Journal of Comparative Law vol. 1, no. 1 (2006): 1-35.

Roosevelt, Franklin D. State of the Union Address 1941 “Four Freedoms”

Thomas, Caroline. Global Governance, Development and Human Security. Pluto Press: London (2000).

Reveron, Derek S. and Mahoney-Norris, Kathleen. Human Security in Borderless World. Westview Press: Boulder (2011).

Tadjbakhsh, Shahrbanou and Chenoy, Anuradha M. Human Security Concepts and Implications. Routledge: New York (2007).

Battersby, Paul and Siracus, Joseph M. Globalization and Human Security. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc: New York (2009).

Bakker, Isabella and Gill, Stephen. Power, Production and Social Reproduction. Macmillan:Toronto (2003).

Bailey, Sydney D. The UN Security Council and Human Rights. St Martin’s Press: Great Britain (1994).