Human security, humanitarian intervention, and third world concerns.

• Author: Upadhyaya, Priyankar

Concepts come and go; they do not stay around forever. "Human security" is in, "Humanitarian intervention" is on its way out. (1)

The attenuation of global rivalries in the nineties raised new hopes and paved the way for realizing the dream of building a sustainable peace through global consensus and humanitarian law. It evoked expectations that the international community, led by the United Nations, would go beyond inter-state military threats and focus on the developmental and human rights issues which were sidelined during the long decades of the Cold War. Innovative notions like human security, peace-building, and global governance enriched the lexicon of international relations.

However, the initial optimism has been short lived. The decade following the end of Cold War has seen an unprecedented spurt of violent conflicts and other non-traditional security threats; the international community is divided as never before. Although the hotbeds of most of these conflicts are in the developing South or the Third World, (2) their ramifications are directly felt all the way into the Northern heartland in the form of refugee outflows, drug trafficking, organized crime, and health epidemics. The scourge of terrorism along with the rising scale of structural and cultural violence, have discounted the initial euphoria that the world would be a safer place after the end of the Cold War. Moreover, the unbridled sweep of globalized commerce, often to the detriment of the poverty-stricken Third World, the unabashed pursuance of unilateralism by the world's sole superpower, and an increasingly feeble role of the United Nations has demoralized a large chunk of democratic opinion the world over. (3) The Agenda for Peace, which signaled a new era of international peace and security not long ago, no longer serves as a blueprint for security in the new millennium. (4) The acrimony and contentions over "so-called" humanitarian interventions have led the scholars to doubt its continuing relevance. There is also a growing skepticism about the notion of human security in the Third World. How do we account for these paradoxical developments?

The paper explores the ramifications of human security as an alternative security discourse and the problem of evolving a universally accepted framework to implement it. It also analyzes the convergent and divergent perspectives on humanitarian intervention, particularly the fault lines between humanitarianism and realpolitik. The focus is on the Third World concerns and prospects of forging a truly global consensus on these critical issues.

From State Security to People's Security

It has never been easy to conceptualize the notion of security around some universally agreed parameters as, "it involves not only the capabilities, desires and fears of individuals and states but also the capabilities, desires and fears of other individuals and states with which they interact." (5) It has meant different things for policy makers and analysts in different times and involves such subjective questions as: Security for whom? Security from what? And, by what means? Moreover, the dominant political and strategic community invariably has the upper hand in molding the discourse on security, both in national and international society. "Security is an empowering word" remarks Navnita C. Behera, "[i]t both sets political priorities and justifies the use of force. The way security is understood and used profoundly affects the way political life is conducted." (6) It is therefore critical to unravel the political and intellectual lineage of the traditional security discourse before delineating the concept of human security.

The traditional notion of security has derived typically from the growth of nation-states in Europe. Having resolved their internal security challenges through a long and arduous process of state building, the European nation-states understandably defined security exclusively in the context of a state's ability to counter external threats to its state's vital interests and core values. The state, as the exclusive referent object of security, was to guarantee the security of "citizens." (7) The two World Wars, followed by the intense bipolar jostling, schematized the state-centric notion of security and reinforced its militaristic trappings. The western politico-military constellations were quick to define the international security in terms of the East-West confrontation (8) and viewed any policy of abstaining from the Cold War with suspicion. As Peter Willets remarked, "[t]he Cold War belligerents, with their 'those who are not with us are against us' do not recognize any policy and decision to abstain from the Cold War. (9) The oft-quoted description of nonalignment by the U.S. Secretary of State's John Foster Dulles as "an immoral and shortsighted conception," (10) is a case in point. It is suggested that the deliberate conflation of the U.S. national security with global security "rendered U.S. imperial interests justifiable, to make it the normal and desirable state of affairs." (11) The western sponsored strategic schema was globalized by the realist paradigm, and its modified version--the neorealist school of thought, emphasized the importance of power in enhancing security in the international anarchy of world politics. (12)

The protests from thinkers and philosophers in different cultures, seeking a broader and transnational vision of security embodying development and social justice issues have been mostly on the sidelines of the academic discourse. (13) The pacifist traditions such as Peace Research and Conflict Resolution, despite their perceptive criticism of realism and an alternate vision of security (almost identical to the human security), were mostly ignored. (14) The overwhelming salience of bipolar politics never allowed the focus to shift from the security of national boundaries, territorial integrity, and the integrity of state institutions.

However, the political transference of the past two decades, particularly the lifting of the cold war overlay, dramatically unraveled the inadequacies of state-centric security in meeting the challenges of the 21st Century. (15) The changed "global landscape ... was marked by pervasive poverty and deepening inequality within and between states." (16) Unchecked population growth, unbridled globalization and inequitable distribution of wealth are now provoking political strife in many countries, sometimes leading to social disintegration and armed conflict. (17) The gravest threats to security today come from within nations, not from invading armies. "Of the 20 countries with the lowest scores on the human development index in 2002, 16 were in conflict or just out of it." (18) As population pressures build, and local resources collapse, people often resort to ethnic, religious, or other group-based identities for protection. Among the most vulnerable are the poor people that comprise two-thirds of the population in the so-called Third World, whose living on ecologically fragile lands are increasingly marginalized. (19) These societal threats arising in any part of the world have portents for threatening global security in today's integrated and globalized world.

Evidently the challenges of the twenty-first century necessitate an expanded notion of security which is not restricted to the well being of the state but takes care of basic security needs of the citizens residing therein. However, the realist paradigm has no theoretical tools to capture the complexity of identity-based conflicts or to produce effective policies toward conflict resolution. As aptly remarks E. Fuat Keyman: "[r]ealism falls short insofar as it privileges the state as the main actor and limits its focus toward interstate relations. By neglecting economic and cultural factors, it reduces casual potential to the level of the anarchical international system. (20) Johan Galtung puts it even more squarely: "[w]hen rape and ethnic cleansing is used as an instrument of war, when thousands are killed by floods resulting from ravaged countryside and when citizens are killed by their own security forces, then it is just insufficient to think of security in terms of national or territorial security alone." (21)

No wonder the end of the Cold War inaugurated a renaissance in security studies. Ranging from critical theories, which draw on postmodernism and feminism and pose fundamental disagreements with the core categories of traditional security studies, we also have "new thinking" within the mainstream security discourse which seeks to widen the security debate by incorporating societal threats that affect not only states but also groups and individuals and other non state actors. (22)

However, it is the construction of human security discourse, which has attracted the widest interest among the policy makers, scholars, and civil society actors. It makes a fundamental transference in the security analysis by bringing people and society within the template of security. Indeed the construct of human security has become a catchphrase employed not only with the United Nations and its allied agencies but also, lately, by various states. Still there are divergent expositions offered by academia, state policies, and NGO sectors about what it entails, what should be its focus, and how it is to be operationalized.

Interpreting Human Security

The earliest traces of human security concern could be discerned in the 1970s when the human rights and development activists conceptualized an umbilical link between disarmament and development. During this phase, an influential group of peace researchers also came out with an alternate paradigm based on basic human needs, which soon caught attention of the members of the U.N. family. It tried to aggregate the basic human rights with such basic needs as food, clothing, housing, health, and education. (23) These impulses led to...