Human Security: A Shotgun Approach to Alleviating Human Misery?

Abstract

Lloyd Axworthy penned an eloquent and thought-provoking essay in these pages about the necessity and utility of extending the concept of beyond the level of the state and toward individual human [1] Axworthy is not alone in making this plea: scholars have been pushing the conceptual frontiers of the term ever since the Brandt Commission's report Common Security was published in 1981. [2] Since the 1980s, foundations have poured millions into supporting works that broaden the notion of security. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been appropriating the discourse to advance their humanitarian activities. However, when such a plea comes from an activist former minister of foreign affairs, who presumably acted on these premises while in office, it deserves special attention and reflection. Before the 1980s, the notion of national was thought to be the preserve of states. It referred to the ability of states to defend themselves against encroachments on their territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Issues of military power, strategy, and deterrence therefore loomed large. Since then, the notion of has been progressively broadened to incorporate such areas as economic privation, environmental degradation, and gender discrimination. In other words, scholars and policymakers have anointed such issues as security issues. In the parlance of the new studies, when issue areas are so anointed they become securitized. The purpose of securitizing certain issues, while leaving others alone, is obvious. Once an issue like drug trafficking is securitized, its status in the policy hierarchy changes. It becomes an urgent issue, worthy of special attention, resources, and fast-track or immediate amelioration or resolution, perhaps even by military means. By the 1990s, the broadeners had won: analysts who wanted to limit the notion of studies to military issues basically surrendered and retreated to strategic studies as the branch of international relations devoted to the analysis of military security. Having securitized all the likely nonmilitary candidates, the next step seemed almost natural and inevitable: Why not the individual human being? After all, the reason for labeling the environment as a issue is based on the threat its destruction poses to human beings. In the final analysis, it is the safety and well-being of individuals--their security--that is the object of our concern. It is natural to carry the extension of the notion of to its logical conclusion: human beings are indeed the ultimate referent of security. The good intentions behind this move to human beings cannot be gainsaid, and the potential benefits have been mentioned above. However, it is also necessary to point out the potential pitfalls of this methodological and conceptual reorientation. International relations theorists are concerned about theoretical incoherence and the impossibility of generating rigorous hypotheses about the world when the referents are individuals instead of states. Security studies theorizing was difficult enough with 200 states--what of 6 billion people, and counting? The objective here is not to address this objection, which is about the misfit between the human approach and theory building in mainstream studies. Instead, I try to sketch out the three major pitfalls of well-intentioned attempts to securitize the individual human being: generating false priorities, generating false hopes, and proceeding on false causal assumptions. False Priorities and Hopes The policy rationale for securitizing any given issue--the environment and individuals, for example--is to inform relevant audiences (one's own bureaucrats and citizens, the so-called international community, as well as the victims of environmental degradation) that an issue has priority and that it is high on the policymakers' agenda. …