Collective security with a human face: an international legal framework for coordinated action to alleviate violence and poverty.

• Author: Moore, Jennifer

INTRODUCTION

The inter-dependence of strategic security, human rights, and social security has been recognized on a theoretical or rhetorical level since the founding of the United Nations. Nevertheless, in the current counter-insurgency campaigns being waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the potentially negative impacts of armed intervention on socio-economic stability and human security are often obscured by popular perceptions and rationalizations of the so-called "War against Terrorism." In fact, current military interventions are compounding recent setbacks in the global struggle against poverty and underdevelopment. Moreover, disproportionate reliance on military force to combat terrorism potentially feeds ongoing conflicts rather than repressing them. This article suggests an integrated vision for fighting terrorism and poverty, by exploring the theoretical, historical, and legal relationships between strategic and human security, with a particular focus on recent developments in Western Asia and Central Africa.

Part I of this article will explore some of the diverse theoretical and cultural roots of the human security concept set forth in the U.N. Charter, as well as the limited historical impact of the human security concept in global affairs since the United Nation's birth. Part II confronts the negative impact of the "War against Terrorism" on the war against poverty by linking recent developments in Iraq and the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Finally, Part III analyzes the international law arguments supporting a legal obligation to promote human security in the U.N. Charter, various human rights instruments, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

The article ends with the conclusion that a commitment to human security is not merely linked philosophically and pragmatically to a strategic vision of peace and security; rather, an obligation to promote human security can be legally derived from the texts of international instruments themselves. In the final analysis, knitting aspirational, practical, and legal arguments together demonstrates most powerfully that establishing security in strategic terms is dependent upon protecting civil and political liberties and satisfying basic social and economic needs.

1. HUMAN SECURITY IN A COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

   1. Theoretical and Multicultural Roots of Human Security

      The symbiosis between security defined in Machiavellian or strategic terms, and security defined in Ghandian or humanistic terms is enshrined in the provisions of the U.N. Charter. President Roosevelt's close advisor Harry Hopkins and Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov no doubt practiced the fine art of realpolitik as well as friendly persuasion in negotiating the final text of that treaty with their fellow drafters. (1) The fruit of their labors, Article 1, articulates the ambitious mandate of the organization, by integrating the maintenance of peace and security with both the promotion of human rights and the resolution of global economic and social problems. (2)

      While progressive for its time, the Charter's integrated vision for the United Nations' work resonates with both previous and subsequent political and social movements around the world. Indeed, politicians, social activists and philosophers from Lao Tzu in the sixth century B.C. to Dorothy Day in the twentieth century, and from John F. Kennedy in the United States to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, have recognized the connections between respecting human rights, alleviating poverty, and attaining enduring peace.

      The political philosopher Lao Tzu, writing in China during the sixth century B.C., suggested that government repression and corruption were principal causes of hunger among the masses, and that such poverty unavoidably led to civil strife. (3) For her part, social philosopher Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City in 1932, integrated her faith-based social activism with her conscientious objection to war, as well as her commitment to racial and economic justice. (4)

      President Kennedy, in founding the U.S. Peace Corps in 1961, stressed that satisfying the basic socio-economic needs of the world's people was a precondition to enduring peace. (5) In a kindred vein, President Mandela, upon his 1994 inauguration as the first democratically elected leader of post-apartheid South Africa, heralded the end of institutionalized racial discrimination in his country as the birth of a peaceful and just social order founded on human dignity. (6)

      Viewed within this comparative and historical global perspective, President Roosevelt's 1944 "Four Freedoms Speech" resonates powerfully. (7) In fact, it is not accidental that the President's address linking the freedoms of speech and religion with the freedoms from fear and want occurred during the years immediately preceding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) draft. (8) Almost twenty years later, two international human rights treaties followed the U.N. General Assembly's unanimous adoption of the UDHR. (9) However, these two treaties separated civil and political rights on the one hand, from economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. Contrastingly, the UDHR is notable for linking civil and socio-economic rights in one instrument. Articles 3 through 21 of the UDHR deal with civil and political rights, including prohibitions against slavery and torture, and rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and participation in government, (10) Articles 22 through 29, on the other hand, involve economic, social, and cultural rights, including basic needs like social security, food, and education. (11) The extent to which the UDHR, the two human rights covenants and humanitarian treaties together recognize an obligation upon states to promote human security will be further explored in section III of this article.

   2. Recent Historical Impact of Human Security in U.N. Practice

      Despite the early recognition that strategic and material security are two faces of the human condition, rarely during the United Nations' first sixty years has history shown a positive correlation between military intervention and poverty alleviation around the world. This lack of significant progress in the socioeconomic realm is demonstrated by countries still emerging from conflicts initiated during the Cold War, during which the Security Council had difficulty acting as a result of ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union and China. (12) However, the same lack of a strong correlation between military intervention and social progress can be seen in the 1990s, when the break-up of the Soviet Union heralded a New World Order (13) of global cooperation and collective action. The year 2000 inspired the U.N. Millennium Goals, which include dramatic reductions in levels of poverty and hunger around the world. Nevertheless, hunger rates have increased and continue to grow in the first decade of the new millennium, and United States led military interventions of the past three years appear only likely to exacerbate this trend. (14) This section will examine each of these three periods in closer detail.

      1. The Cold War

         The so-called Cold War decades were marked not only by the Security Council's pronounced failure to lead in the realm of collective security, but also by proxy military interventions, regional conflicts, and civil wars that have only recently given way to all too modest progress on the human security front. Three countries that experienced protracted civil wars with U.S. and Soviet military assistance on either side were Vietnam, (15) El Salvador (16) and Angola. (17) All three have achieved final peace settlements, and Angola and Vietnam have resumed normal diplomatic relations with the United States. (18) Nevertheless, despite important political and economic reforms in all three countries, nearly half the citizens in all three countries continue to subsist on one or two dollars per day (19) and the figures for gross domestic profit (GDP) per capita for each country are a fraction of those for neighboring countries in each respective region. (20) Despite low GDP per capita rates in all three countries, between the early and late 1990s, the percentage of under-nourished people decreased in Vietnam and in Angola. (21) Contrastingly, the level of hunger in El Salvador increased in the 1990. (22)

      2. Post Cold War

         The 1990s brought the renewed hope of Security Council collective action. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, presiding over the Security Council on November 29, 1990, heralded the end of the Cold War and the "chance to build the world which was envisioned ... by the founders of the United Nations ... [as well as] the chance to make the Security Council and this United Nations true instruments for peace and for justice across the globe." (23) Both Baker's and the senior President Bush's proclamations of a "New World Order" in the early 1990s were criticized by some as overly ambitious or inappropriately linked to U.S. military intervention in Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War. (24)

         Despite skepticism, the early 1990s were indeed marked by the Security Council's increased capacity and willingness to pass resolutions under its Chapter VII mandate. (25) Not coincidentally, early initiatives responding to genocide in Northern Iraq, (26) the former Yugoslavia, (27) and Rwanda (28) explicitly defined massive human rights emergencies as threats to international peace and security. (29) Nevertheless, deep-rooted structural changes in these countries have yet to instill long-term socioeconomic gains. Notably, GDP per capita rates are low in Bosnia and very low in Rwanda, in comparison to other countries in their respective regions. Furthermore, while the Bosnian undernourishment rate is relatively low, 85 percent of the Rwandan population lives on two dollars a day or less, and the undernourishment rate is...