“Talk of human security helps frame power relations”

JMP - There is a general consensus around
the belief that human security has meant a
small revolution in the academic field. But
what about concrete public policies? Namely
in aid for development policies, what has
been the actual impact of assuming human
security as a goal?

DS - As a way of talking about problems and
policies, human security has indeed gained
a lot of attention. Many claims are made
about its impact. It is said to have helped
promote treaties to outlaw landmines and
cluster bombs and to establish the
International Criminal Court. There’s been a
suggestion that it inspired international
activism that helped reduce the number of
civil wars. They may not be wholly false, but
these kinds of claims look exaggerated.
They bring to mind the theme of the Angolan
novel, “O Vendedor de Passados”, about a
clever story-teller who composed fictional
biographies and genealogies that flattered
his status-seeking clients.

While it is true that aid spending in troubled
places like Pakistan, Sudan and Congo (and
of course Iraq and Afghanistan) has shot up
in recent years, these are mainly crisisdriven
things. There is little evidence that
they, or similar episodes, have been policydriven
-– let alone that they were driven by
policies based on human security.

The paradigm’s chief effects up to now have
been institutional, promoting policy
coalitions. Human security talk has helped
Western policy elites, namely in the military,
diplomatic and foreign aid branches, to
regain legitimacy in domestic and in
international fora, to forge pacts for mutual
benefit and to bolster their budgets.

JMP - How can we measure human
security? What kind of indicators are most
adequate?

DS - Some of the best indicators may be
developed just by asking what people
themselves think is important. Of course
local, subjective views aren’t always
reliable; people on Asian shorelines on the
morning of 26 December 2004, before the
tsunami hit, probably thought themselves
secure. But meaningful indicators can
often be found, and misleading ones
avoided, by staying close to the ground.
Official guardians of security can be poor
sources. Official crime data usually reflect
current priorities of politicians and the
police, whereas victimization surveys
provide much more realistic insight.

Today’s huge indicator industry has drawn
attention to important matters. But might
our submersion in these kinds of data,
which are mainly descriptors of the poor
and insecure, be a hindrance to
understanding? The indicator industry
produces very little about the structural
relationships that continually reproduce
poverty and insecurity. In the Millennium
Development Goals for example, you will
not find anything about inequality, either
vertical or ‘horizontal’ (among cultural,
ethnic or regional groupings), or about
‘winners’ and ‘losers’ over time. The MDGs
and similar frameworks tell us nothing
about domestic or international
mechanisms that redistribute income and
other resources. Subjective views, namely
collective feelings of humiliation, are the
combustible material fueling conflict and
insecurity in many settings, yet very little
work has been done to frame and to gauge
them.

JMP - Is human security working, in
concrete terms, as a basis for
empowerment of local communities in the
global south? Are those communities heard
in the identification of their demands of
human security? Or is it usually an exogenous definition
process?

DS - Hundreds of studies and testimonies
have now accumulated about claims of
“participation” and of “ownership” in all kinds
of programmes and policies, especially those
most relevant to human security. But these
claims are seldom valid. Empowerment,
certainly at local level, isn’t happening.
Powerful outsiders or their national proxies
continue to call the shots, and call them badly.
They have given them new names and poured
a participatory sauce over them, but they
continue serving up the same policy formulas.

These are the same old Washington
Consensus formulas that have weakened
public services, public order and the
legitimacy of public politics.
For example, Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers (PRSPs) –- the flagship of the new,
listening, responsive style of the foreign aid
industry –- almost never address the issue of
decent employment. Yet “participatory”
processes used to formulate PRSPs
somehow never detected what public opinion
surveys in Africa and Latin America have
confirmed over many years, namely that
people regard jobs as by far their most
important priority. Similarly, studies of security
sector reform –- an excellent opportunity to
narrow gaps between police and citizens and
to improve human rights observance –- show
that citizen voice is usually neglected. Instead,
new agents such as private security
companies (the preference of many Western
interests) are gaining priority.

JMP - Do you agree that there is a risk of
perversion in using the concept of human
security and therefore bring security to the
forefront of the world's priorities? Isn't this a
way of securitizing, in traditional terms, the aid
for development field?

DS - Imperatives in the West to frame ideas
and slogans about how to deal with non-
Western peoples are of course an old
challenge, especially for elites. The aid-anddevelopment
industry has tackled this with
enthusiasm, producing a rising stream of
and approaches. Today this stream seems
to have reached a point of over-production.
There are now surpluses that can’t be sold
and are being passed on to second-hand
outlets and recycling industries.

Since first emerging in UN circles about 15
years ago, human security “talk” has
become part of a common idiom. We hear
that idiom spoken, in public anyway, by
members of a powerful new policy coalition
including both the aid industry and the
military. Yet it is far from enjoying primacy.
Rather its role is that of an auxiliary team
player alongside two paradigms with far
heavier political backing: “national security”
and “collective security”.

JMP - Human security or human rights --
this seems to be the question. Don't you
think that the use of the expression 'human
security' means a lower level of demand of
social transformation than the one included
in a human rights --centred approach?

DS - Yes, those pressures for social
transformation will be lower, certainly if the
narrow version of the human security
paradigm (‘freedom from fear’, focused on
individuals and open violence) continues to
eclipse the broader version, which
embraces whole social categories and their
social and economic rights (‘freedom from
want’). The latter, with their redistributive
implications, are not on the agenda of major
western powers. That can be seen for
example in the US State Department’s
annual reports on human rights in non-
Western countries.

Talk of human security, like talk about
human rights in their restricted sense, helps
frame power relations. It asserts a
prerogative of the powerful to say whose
rights are to be respected, whose not
respected, and to say who shall be
system of domination now in place -– a risky
thing, given that “stabilisation” practices have
a way of triggering a lot of instability. Look at
Afghanistan and Pakistan today.

JMP - With the so-called 'war on terrorism', it
seems to have occurred a return to traditional
security concepts and policies. Did human
security lose intensity within the framework
of the global war on terror?

DS - Certainly. In European, and now even
US military doctrine, we are witnessing
‘mission creep’ toward socio-economic
engineering and ‘nation-building’. New rules
of engagement are today both hard and ‘soft’.
An announcement by the Pentagon two years
ago seems to have escaped the notice of
many: it proclaimed that “stability operations
are a core US Military mission” that will
henceforth enjoy “priority comparable to
combat operations”. In Iraq, this has been
translated into sub-doctrines like “Employ
money as a weapons system”. The Obama
administration is going to apply such
“stabilisation” doctrines with greater intensity
in places like Afghanistan . In Africa , where
Western publics are told that both “energy
security” and “terrorism” are at stake, the
Pentagon is quietly assuming supreme
command over American foreign aid and
development designs. Given such trends, it is
hard to imagine human security in its broad
definition gaining any intensity, except for
advertising and public relations purposes.
Centre for Social Research, University of Coimbra