SECURITY FOR ALL, DEVELOPMENT FOR SOME? THE INCORPORATION OF SECURITY IN UK'S DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Abstract

AbstractThis paper builds on existing research on the merging of development and security following 9/11. Whilst much of the current literature focuses on the development policy of the US, this paper examines the UK. Investigating arguments that the UK's coordination of security and development policy is concerned with security at home rather than in the developing world, the policy discourse of UK's Department for International Development (DfID), Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Ministry of Defence is examined through its major policy documents for the period from the late 1990s to 2011. Two levels of analysis are used: a content analysis and a discourse analysis. In addition, this research draws on interviews with key informants within the DfID. This paper argues that since 9/11 and the War on Terror, the UK has increasingly coordinated its foreign policy, development and security actors. As a result, the DfID has given progressively greater attention to issues of national security in its policy. This action is justified through a series of claims of common interest between actors across government and between the interests of developing countries and the UK. This merging of interests opens up space for development to be focused on ensuring UK's national security. Whilst drawing on a paradigm of broader security, this instead reverses the principal of human security where national security is now a development problem. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.