Happy New Year, readers one and all!
My chief hope for 2008 is that we can persuade a decisive proportion of people around the world– but especially here in the United States– that looking at security as something that militaries can bring about is to fundamentally misunderstand the age we live in.
If the experiences of the US’s technologically bloated military in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 4-6 years, and the experience of Israel’s military in Lebanon in 2006 can teach us anything it is that military superiority and prowess is no longer on its own a guarantor that a state can win and significant strategic gains in other countries. There are a number of reasons why this is so; we can discuss them all at some point. But one of the main reasons why military power does not suffice is that it neglects– and indeed, it also directly undercuts– the main component of security in the 21st century, that is, the security of actual human persons.
Back in the 1990s many theorists around the world ( though sadly few in the United States) started to sketch out a whole new theory of security that went by the name of “human security”. At that point, the US military was still training and planning according to a slightly updated variant of the doctrine it had followed for the 45 years of the Cold War, and indeed for many decades prior to that, too. Rumsfeld tried to “reform” or even “revolutionize” that doctrine– and according to all the accounts he was eager to use the invasion of Iraq to “prove” the effectiveness of the relatively light and mobile hi-tech forces he favored.
But he was still operating according to the idea that guns and steel were what would be decisive– either directly or through the completely debilitating “shock and awe” they were able to induce in the targeted populations. That was Dan Halutz’s idea in Lebanon in 2006, too.
It didn’t work, for any of them. (And nor, in Lebanon, had that approach worked for the Israelis when they tried earlier variants of it in 1982, 1993, or 1996, either.)
So in 2008, let’s all of us come back to this powerful idea of human security. It is the idea that my country will be more secure if the citizens of other countries near and far also feel secure– secure, that is, in what counts to us all, as humans. And conversely, that if citizens of other countries feel insecure, that will make my country more insecure, too.
Here, from the UNDP’s Human Development Report of 1994 is a pretty good introduction to the idea of human security:
- The idea of human security, though simple, is likely to revolutionize society in the 21st century. A consideration of the basic concept of human security must focus on four of its essential characteristics:
• Human security is a universal concern. It is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and poor…
• The components of human security are interdependent. When the security of people is endangered anywhere in the world, all nations are likely to get involved…
• Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention. It is less costly to meet these needs upstream rather than downstream…
• Human security is people-centred. It is concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their many choices, how much access they have to market and social opportunities—and whether they live in conflict or in peace…
I could write quite a lot about why I judge that being attentive to, for example, the human security and wellbeing of the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan would do more to contain and finally incapacitate the threat from Al-Qaeda than the present, highly militarized US policies in those two countries… Or why, for Israelis, being attentive to the human security and wellbeing of all of their neighbors would do more to build the real security of Israelis inside Israel than the present policies of quite inhumane collective punishment, oppression, and territorial aggrandizement… Or why, for Americans, pulling our troops out of Iraq and being attentive to the human security and wellbeing of Iraq’s sorely war-shattered citizens is the best way to serve everyone’s longterm security interests… In fact, I am sure that over the year ahead I will (continue to) make all these arguments!
But for now, since it is almost midnight here in Virginia, I shall simply leave you all with the idea that human security is a concept whose power and relevance are surely evident to more people today than ever before.
So Happy New Year! May 2008 be a year in which all human communities can become more secure– and also one in which more of us than ever before can come to understand that human interdependence really is at the foundation of everyone’s security.