Emancipatory Forms of Human Security and Liberal Peacebuilding

Abstract

Peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and reconstruction are activities now closely associated with state-building, and in this context human security has become a validating concept of the overall project's goals, even though many international actors working in non-civil-society -oriented areas would not use this term to describe their work. Indeed, many orthodox thinkers argue that that this concept is too broad or ambitious to be acted upon. Yet at the same time, human security underpins the state in its orthodox politically and economically form. There are also more emancipatory forms of human security, associated with individual emancipation and social values, that offer a significant opportunity to enhance the process of building in postconflict states. They are rarely a policy objective for anyone other than civil society actors because conservative policymakers and orthodox thinkers regard them as impractical.Yet it is clear that peacebuilding cannot succeed unless it achieves broad consensus among its target population. Creating institutions without legitimacy or local participation has - so far - not succeeded anywhere since the end of the Cold War. Human security is a crucial concept here because it links to the question of local legitimacy for peacebuilding and, in a more advanced and emancipatory form, reflects closely the indigenous facilities of local communities within polities that are committed to a form of peace. Problems arise, of course, when this local version of does not match the international sponsored peace. Effectively, human security should contribute to the creation of the and emancipatory social contract if we are to take citizenship and the state as a given in any peacebuilding process.This article investigates the relationship between the and human security, and in particular outlines discourses that illustrate the linkages developing between human security, governance, and the interventionist practices and assumptions more normally associated with the victor's peace. It argues for a need to move towards an understanding of an emancipatory version of human security and of the if it is to contribute to the creation of a self-sustaining in postconflict environments.TWO VERSIONS OF HUMAN SECURITYThere are two key versions of human security - the institutional approach and the emancipatory approach - and while one sees the creation of institutions to protect human security as paramount, the other aims at the empowerment of individuals and the removal of unnecessary constraints over their lives. Indeed, human security is designed and constructed with the notion of others in mind, and its provision is dependent upon an external act of definition as well as the capacity of human security actors to act. The institutionalist approach is derived from the intersection between realist and thinking in IR and in policy more recently, and in particular is associated with a peacebuilding consensus on the liberal peace (though this may now be more accurately called a neoliberal peace).1 This certainly aspires to human security in its broader forms, but in fact focuses narrowly and, in positivist terms, on basic security plus the construction of effective institutions of governance through which human security can be imported into postconflict development settings. This top-down perspective takes human security to be dependent upon security and strong states and international intervention driven by hegemonic states that establish the necessary institutions in order to provide for very basic forms of HS - mainly physical security.The second approach derives from the critical impulse in IR, and offers a focus on emancipation as the aim of human security. This bottom-up approach means that individuals are empowered to negotiate and develop a form of human security that is fitted to their needs - political, economic, and social, but also provides them with the necessary tools to do so. …