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 This
page is intended to provide information that is useful not only to interested
government agencies and NGOs but also to students, community groups and
interested members of the public.
If you have a question or a contribution to make
to the discussions and debates that will appear
on this website, you can forward it on-line.
What is Human Security?
Do we want a ‘Global Truth and Reconciliation Commission’?
What Is Human Security?
The concept of human security emerged in mainstream
political debate through the United Nations Development
Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report.
Here, human security was defined as having two
main aspects: safety from chronic threats such
as hunger, disease and repression; and protection
from sudden and harmful disruptions in the pattern
of daily life.
The rationale for the elaboration of the concept of human security
in the UNDP’s report, and a concern which continues to underpin
a range of critical approaches to the way security is understood and
practiced, was the need to contest traditional approaches to security
that seemed to be marginal to the daily threats facing people around
the world. As the UNDP (1994:22) notes, ‘Human security is a
child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job that was
not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident
who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons—it
is a concern with human life and dignity’. It is in this light
that the concept of human security should be viewed: as an
attempt to focus more directly on the myriad factors and processes
that render individuals insecure, and to contest the necessary equation
of security with the territorial inviolability of states. Such an
approach reflects a concern with extending boundaries of ethical responsibility
beyond the state; with moving away from viewing those outside state
boundaries as ‘others’; with de-legitimising military
force as the central tool for achieving security; and with focusing
more fundamentally on the structural causes of insecurity: accepted
political, social and economic arrangements and forms of organisation
that undermine individual welfare (whether it be the structure of
the international economy that creates or furthers poverty or the
denial of full citizenship rights to minority groups in particular
states) or retard the potential to which individual insecurity can
be fundamentally redressed.
Clearly, this conception of security (as human
security) widens the ambit of what factors should
be considered to be security threats, and what
agents are capable of redressing these threats.
For its part, the UNDP identifies a range of human
security ‘sectors’: economic, food,
health, environmental, personal, community and
political security. Importantly, these sectors
or components are seen as fundamentally inter-dependent,
again pointing to the role of the structural bases
of security threats. The structural nature of these
concerns provides some conceptual clarity to the
concept of human security, whilst allowing for
a range of actions and actors to be considered.
The study of security and the sources of insecurity must, for proponents
of human security, extend beyond the study of the threat
or use of force between states in international relations. It must
investigate and interrogate the role of a range of (often accepted)
forms of organisation and practice that serve to undermine individual
well-being throughout the world every day. This conception of security
both reflects the reality of what security means for the vast majority
of individuals throughout the world (who are usually more at risk
through hunger, disease and environmental change than armed conflict)
and serves as a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of, and
approaches to, security that ignore these sources of insecurity at
best, and contribute to them at worst. This approach does not seek
to ignore military conflict as a fundamental basis for insecurity,
but does seek to point to the various other ways in which we might
begin to think about, and practice, security: one requiring an alteration
in our ethical assumptions to consider, more fully, the nature of
obligations beyond the borders of the nation-state and towards the
most vulnerable both domestically and internationally.
Matt McDonald, University of Birmingham
For discussions of the concept of 'human
security' see for example:
•
Human Security Center at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Human Security Report,
http://www.humansecurityreport.info
•
Human Security Program of the Canadian government,
http://www.humansecurity.gc.ca/menu-en.asp
• UNICEF'S Use of the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (2002-2004) – An InternalAssessment, United Nations Children's Fund, New York, 2005.
• HUMAN SECURITY NOW: Commission on Human Security, Commission on Human Security 2003, New York, 2003.
• HUMAN SECURITY UNIT: OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES, Human Security Unit, OCHA, New York, 2003.
Do we want a ‘Global Truth and Reconciliation Commission’?
Despite developments such as the International Criminal Court, the connection between grass roots security and global governance has gone backwards. Even the most optimist current prognoses for post-war countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina suggest that the hopes for reconstructing the new war-zones—in particularly, Iraq and Afghanistan that have been devastated by the global War on Terror—are deeply black, at least in the short-to-immediate term.
In regions that years ago left their wars behind, the processes of reconciliation and reconstruction are still hindered by numerous problems: global and local inequalities; attempts by the governments to paint over the problems; lack of systematic connection between the different government bureaucracies, non-government agencies, and international interventions; attempts at quick fixes; and by the disjointed, self-serving and limited support from the rest of the world. All of this suggests that we need to learn from our past failures and successes at reconciliation and reconstruction. In this context it is worth considering the development of a Global Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Such a Commission might be set up with the following aims:
1. To provide the conditions for a global learning process about the effects and consequences of conduct during past international crises. The objective here would be to learn from the past by investigations of the causes of crises, conduct during those episodes and the consequences of the particular way in which the international community responded. In this process the aim would not be individual criminal prosecution or bring particular nation-states to task, but rather to provide an institutional base for thinking through how international practice might have been conducted otherwise.
In other words, a Global Truth and Reconciliation Commission could be asked to conduct a series of enquiries into past breaches of the principles of good international citizenship, particularly in relation to massacres, genocide, the death of civilians in military conflict, the state-sanctioned or institutionally perpetrated use of terror including torture, violent regime-change including coups, and invasions of national sovereignty. This could include acts of intentional harm, acts that unintentionally contributed to harm others, and inaction that allowed harm to escalate in dangerous ways.
Working on the basis that most nation-states do not release sensitive state documents for a thirty-year period, the Commission could investigate those events with ongoing, unresolved, and intense international symbolic importance that occurred more than thirty years ago. For example: the fire-bombing of Germany, the timing of the D-Day invasion, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1965 massacre in Indonesia; 1972 coup in Chile; the systematic killings in Kampuchea, and so on.
2. To provide a clearinghouse for collecting material on current international crises. This would entail an ongoing research department with the task of documenting and setting up the conditions for seeking the ‘truth’ on what actually happens during contemporary or recent crises that involve extended violence or systematic harm to a significant population.
3. To provide information, considered social and legal frameworks, critical reflections on past tribunals, and moral support for local and national Truth and Reconciliation tribunals currently in process, or being set up or discussed, in many places around the world. This dimension would have to include critical reflection on its own long-term effects. This dimension would be very helpful for new commissions being set up.
4. To provide for an institutionalization of ethical authority about the need for deep consideration of international practice.
Paul James, Globalism Institute, RMIT
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