Security Of People Research Articles

From People's Security Surveys to a Decent Work Index

From People's Security Surveys to a Decent Work Index

The Cold War and post-Cold War dynamics of Taiwan and East Asia in people's security perspective

This paper was originally written as a keynote speech for a specific occasion, an international forum that was held by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) in Taipei in February 2001, to discuss Taiwan's international status in the post-Cold War era. The PCT is known as a strong advocate of Taiwan independence and democratization, and I had this specific audience in mind in organizing this paper. My concern was that the independence advocacy that had aptly expressed people's aspirations in the democratization movement under the iron-fist rule of KMT was being subsumed, as Taiwan polity was Taiwanized and democratized, into a banal statist discourse. This discourse, I am afraid, has distanced itself from its original popular source and become the elite politicians' discourse, indifferent to the everyday life and security of the people in Taiwan. I approached this problematic from the perspective of 'people's security', which I discussed in my previous essay on the topic in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , vol. 2, no. 1. As the mutual relationships between East Asian countries had to be shaped overwhelming by the US Cold War rhetoric and material influences, discussing Taiwan with regard to the transition to the post-Cold War era required me to go, albeit in outline, into the basics of these relationships as well as the modes of US hegemony in this region both in the Cold War and post-Cold War settings. I felt that characterization of these diverse elements, if sketchy, was indispensable to discussing the topic, Taiwan today. At my friends' suggestion, I tried to revise the original paper to fit into the concerns of the general readership, with the different aspects mentioned more fully explained. However, I have found this difficult as it would require me to write a completely new article, or maybe a whole book. So I present this paper almost as it was written for the original PCT audience.

Aporias of Security

Maybe [task] nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to...get rid of political double-bind, which is simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.... political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of days is not to try to liberate individual from state and from state's institutions, but to liberate us both from state and from type of individualisation which is linked to state. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power ********** What does it mean to be secure? Should we even need to ask? Surely we know. We know that security is one of most fundamental human needs: an irrefutable guarantee of safety and wellbeing, economic assurance and possibility, sociability and order; of a life lived freely without fear or hardship. That security is a universal good available to all, and a solemn pledge between citizens and their political leaders, to whom their people's security is the first duty, overriding goal of domestic and international policy making. As such it has been able to trace a powerful path between subject and world, state and citizen, to promise simultaneously a solution to inchoate fears and insecurities of everyday life and enormous spatial, cultural, economic, and geopolitical complexities of government. In short, security remains one of modernity's most stubborn and enduring dreams. However, I believe that, more than ever, we do need to ask what it is to be secure. Surely we no longer know what security is--in that Platonic sense. Surely more than ten years after end of Gold War, after Clinton Doctrine and destruction of Twin Towers, after humanitarian and policy disasters in Indochina, Africa, East Timor, Middle East, and Central America, and after a growing body of humanist and critical scholarship has questioned security's unity, discursive structure, and political implications, security no longer possesses a credible wholeness. (1) This article begins from premise that security's claims to universality and wholeness founder on a destructive series of aporias, which derive firstly from growing sense that security no longer has a stable referent object, nor names a common set of needs, means, or ways of being, and secondly, from moral relativism that lies at center of dominant (realist) discourses of security that pretend to universality but insi st that our security always rests on insecurity and suffering of an-other. While this article argues strongly that security has no essential ontological integrity, it also argues that if power and sweep of security are to be understood and challenged, its claims to universality must be taken seriously. They underpin and animate sweeping forms of power, subjectivity, force, and economic circulation and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor, in hands of some humanist writers--who have sought to think human and gender security in radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international security--are such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force that undermines, perhaps unwittingly, logocentric presuppositions of realist discourses they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be ontologically completed and secured does present a hurdle for kind of ontopolitical critique that we really need. (2) answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new humanist ideal--however laudable--we need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its meaning aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of political, social, and economic power, which reaches from most private spaces of being to vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. …

George C. Tilyou

George Tilyou developed or perfected many of the managerial practices for amusement parks that are still in use today. In developing and operating Coney Island's Steeplechase Park, Tilyou had to solve the problems of attracting and holding people's attention, maintaining decorum and security, and keeping the crowd moving from attraction to attraction. While he did not invent the concept of an enclosed park, he used that concept to full advantage, for example, by offering a ticket that allowed customers to take each ride once (and thus keep them moving along) and by giving free tickets to off-duty policemen (thus effectively retaining a security force). A natural-born promoter, Tilyou knew the importance of constantly updating his park with ever-more-spectacular rides. Moreover, he implicitly understood such service-management concepts as giving tangible status to the intangible. For example, to set the tone of his park, he required his employees to wear uniforms, and he identified his park as an amusement park, rather than just a place for rides. Thus, people thought of it as a place to go for the day for fun, even if they weren't going on many rides.

Human security from a Filipino perspective*

The Annual Conference on Alternative Security in the Asia‐Pacific puts on the front burner the real issues facing the people of this region—food and freedom, jobs and justice. From these issues flow the basic need to maintain not “national security” but “people's security” or human security. It is on this theme that I wish to expound briefly from the Philippine perspective. My main thesis: human security cannot be achieved as long as economic and political sovereignty are curtailed and undermined. Two obstacles stand mightily in the way of human security in the Philippines: the current economic crisis and the Visiting Forces Agreement.

‘something happened’: the relevance of the risk society for describing the siting process for a municipal landfill

This paper investigates reactions to a proposed municipal solid waste facility in Southern Ontario supposed to be a low‐level, low probability risk using the risk society framework, developed independently by Beck (1992a, 1992b) and Giddens (1990, 1991). Residents often view risk from environmental hazards as high despite expert assurances that risks are low. The appeal of risk society as a general framework is that it connects quantitative risk assessment (QRA) and the social construction of risk (SCR) to show how individuals and social structures reflexively alter and are altered by conflicts over (actual/potential) technological hazards. The analysis involves 30 in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with residents in Caledon, Ontario, contextualized by interviews with proponent experts (n=4) from the government organization responsible for conducting the siting process. The risk society framework, although developed primarily to describe the effects of high‐consequence global hazards, seems well suited to describing local level, low‐consequence hazards. The siting process involved a series of fateful moments which upset people's security in particular ways of life. The proposed landfill and the process itself threatened the very nature of what people valued and expected from their community. However, this study raises a concern that the risk society played out at the local/regional level may exacerbate inequalities in the distribution of risks relative to benefits from technological environmental hazards. This stands in contrast with Beck's (1992a) notion that the risks from hazards are equitably distributed within the risk society.

Toward an Alternative Security System: Moving beyond the Balance of Power in the Search for World Security

Technological changes and their military consequences have outpaced the capacity of the international system to protect people's security and to meet basic needs. The balance of power system cannot prevent war for long, nor can it reduce to an acceptable level the prospect of nuclear catastrophe. Yet policy makers have excluded from their agendas policies that question this anachronistic system or the basic direction of time-honored diplomacy. Fundamental changes are needed but encounter psychological as well as political and economic resistance, including the belief that the present international order is more or less permanent. Building a more durable peace therefore requires identifying policies that will not jeopardize security in the short run but that will lead to a more effective security system in the long run. Examination of seven policy models—based respectively on a nuclear war-fighting capability, mutual assured destruction, minimum deterrence, conventional defensive weapons, a world peacekeeping federation, civilian resistance, and a global security system—demonstrates that U.S. and Soviet policies are leading to greater insecurity, and that more prudent policy options are available. Scientific studies of war as well as diplomatic history suggest that if a policy is to contribute to security in the long run, it must help demilitarize, depolarize, denationalize, and transnationalize the world system. Policies that will contribute to the establishment of a new international security order and that can be undertaken now include: an international satellite monitoring agency; a ban on all nuclear tests; a freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of all nuclear warheads and delivery systems; a no-first-use pledge; the establishment of a non-intervention regime; and demilitarizing initiatives by the small powers, such as a Nordic nuclear weapons free zone.

Image of Limited Good, or Expectation of Reciprocity? [and Comments and Reply

Foster's limited-good model has been both widely accepted and roundly criticized. Upon superficial examination, certain behavior patterns among the Mopan Maya of southern Belize seem to reflect the presence of a limited-good cognition. With closer scrutiny, however, much contrary evidence emerges, and the behavior patterns in question appear, instead, to stem from what is tentatively termed the expectation of circumstantially balanced reciprocity (ECBR), a deep seated expectation that those who have more should share with those who have less. The zero-sum game implicit in the limited-good model is not involved; it is understood that "goods" may be increased in absolute quantity. However, it is felt that all should share equally in the increase. In the traditional Mopan system, ECBR was expressed primarily through pressuring men with greater means to become fiesta sponsors and to come to the aid of other members of the community who were in need. Traditionally, the primary function of the expectation was to underwrite the people's security. In doing so, it acted as an economic leveler and also served to integrate the community. In recent years, ECBR has come to be extended beyond the traditional system: to members of the community who have recently become "big men" through involvement with the larger society, to the national government, and even to members of certain other societies. It is noted that it would be easy to confuse ECBR with behavior in terms of a limited-good cognition and that there is suggestive evidence that other instances of ECBR may have been mistakenly interpreted as limited-good behavior. ECBR is offered as an alternative to the limited-good model.

Arab League

The heads of state of three members of the Arab League, Premier Nasser of Egypt, King Saud of Saudi Arabia and King Ahmed of Yemen, met in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, on April 20 and 21, 1956, to form a military alliance. At the meeting the three leaders also exchanged views on plans to insure the development of economic, cultural and technical cooperation among their countries. According to a communique issued at the end of the meeting, the three leaders had reached agreement “in the light of the Arab people's aspirations, freedom, dignity, peace and security”. Some press observers stated that the Egyptian-Syrian-Saudi Arabian military alliance formed in March 1956 had as its primary aim the forging of a strong Arab defense around Israel, while the new Saudi Arabian-Egyptian-Yemen pact appeared to be aimed chiefly at the United Kingdom and its claims in the area.