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Overview
David Roberts claims that by facing up to this relationship between social structures and massive avoidable human suffering we can create another system less prone to global violence. This book is a powerful intervention in the debate on human security and an urgent call to face up to our responsibilities to the millions killed needlessly each year.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 857 KB |
About the Author
David Roberts is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Ulster. He is the Convenor and Chair of the British International Studies Association Human Security Working Group, external examiner with the Royal University of Phnom Penh and the University of Coventry, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Governance and International Affairs, University of Bristol. He has published a previous monograph on Human Insecurity (Zed 2008) and another on postconflict democratization in Cambodia, and will publish in 2010 a monograph critiquing Liberal peacebuilding in developing societies that proposes an alternative 'everyday lives' approach to the postconflict challenge which invigorates positive peace through structural and institutional reforms to the Liberal Project. He has published more than 30 other chapters and articles in peer reviewed outlets on human security and peacebuilding.
Read an Excerpt
Human Insecurity
Global Structures of Violence
By David Roberts
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 David RobertsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-260-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Watching the disastrous and unequal impact of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina brought back to mind the origins of this book. The earliest inspiration had come from the slow-to-dawn but impossible-to-deny realization that people drowning in typhoons on the flood plains of South Asia rarely choose to live in such life-threatening environments if other accessible options are available. It became ever clearer that people who are routinely vulnerable are so because other people with greater power control safer land, and governments and political institutions determine where poor and vulnerable people live by denying access to better land through a range of means and justifications. Caroline Thomas suggested that such vulnerability and insecurity result 'directly from existing power structures that determine who enjoys the entitlement to security and who does not' (2000: 4). In other words, it became harder and harder to understand why such views as Thomas's and my own were not more commonplace. Thereafter, specific incidents served to move my intellect and heart, and reinforced my desire to understand why such social travesties remained so far off the political agenda when notions of power so clearly defined their cause.
One such travesty moved me particularly, in part because of the very human, very personal and very sad dimension; but also because of the enormous range of causative factors that it shared with so many other situations of human insecurity that could be changed. The Observer reported on 25 September 2005 that a twelve-year-old Indian girl killed herself because she could not face the 'shame' of not being able to afford the one-penny cost of her school lunch (see also Reuters India, 25 September 2005; Mazzadri, 2 May 2007). She lived with her mother 'under a tarpaulin' in West Bengal. Her name was Sonia Khatun. She lost the will to live as a consequence of structural forces ranged against her existence which were responsible for her precarious living conditions in the first instance, and which simultaneously maintained her violent oppression and led to her fatal and final despair.
Sonia Khatun died for many reasons; her passing is instructive because it demonstrates how the crushing deprivation faced by her and her mother is human made. Nearly two years later, in a decade of globalization and prosperity for many, including in India, human-made conditions led to the suicides of 25,000 Indian farmers, 'trapped by debt and falling prices ... since 1997' (Mishra 2006). Again, their avoidable deaths demonstrate the human components of the political and economic contradictions that force ever increasing exports, which increase competition and consequently lower income, in order to service misdirected external debts. Global society is human engineered and human directed. Its component parts and their precise roles are not invisible, if we care to look closely.
A year into my research, I was again reminded of the brutality of another of our self-made human structures in another small and barely reported death, equally sad, but also equally preventable in the future. Navjeet Sidhu threw herself and her two children under an express train near London as a result of a terrible depression (The Times, 27 September 2006). The depression was brought on because her first baby was a girl, and her Sikh husband left her because he and his society demanded a boy child. Navjeet Sidhu felt she had failed her family, herself and the wider expectations of a brutally patriarchal order. She died because of value systems that have been learned and which find ultimate expression in the concept of female infanticide. Six months later, her mother returned to the site at which her daughter died and killed herself. Everyone lost, from the children whose lives were wrenched from them, through Mrs Sidhu and the Sikh family she was part of, through the grieving grandmother, to the male-dominated capitalist economy that loses a worker. None of this violence needs to be sustained.
Thousands of miles away, another South Asian woman died but in quite different circumstances. A female Pakistani minister, Zilla Huma Usman, was murdered by a male stranger because she refused to wear a full veil (The Times, 21 February 2007: 7). There are many Pakistani women who do not wear the veil; the killer could have attacked elsewhere. What brought about the rage of the murderer, a Mr Sarwar, was that his victim was a politician and that she promoted women's rights in a society known for its alienation and deeply repressive treatment of women. Mr Sarwar was threatened, as many men feel they are, by female emancipation. 'I have no regrets,' he told the press. 'I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path.' 'His' path was laid down by social rulings that differentiate men from women on the grounds of sex, and which are in turn determined by global ideational structures. What they have in common is that they are constructed actions and consequences and thus malleable and subject to transformation. That these women need not have died is obvious; but perhaps less apparently, their lives and deaths offer an opportunity, if we have the courage and wit to confront the complexities of their man-made causes.
This skewed distribution of power and resources pervades the global system. In 2006 a 'tycoon' spent £85,000 ($170,000) on a truffle at an auction in Italy (Guardian, 15 November 2006). Just after Christmas that year, it was reported that a US chairman had been awarded £108 million ($210 million) 'on exit' from his employer (Washington Post, 16 January 2007: D02). A Long Island businessman 'spent $10 million on his 13-year-old daughter's [birthday] party, which included performances by the rock group Aerosmith and the rapper 50 Cent together with $10,000 party bags for the teenage guests' (Forbes, 31 January 2007). In India, the wedding of two film stars, Miss Aishwarya Rai and Mr Abhishek Bachchan, was projected as likely to cost more than £30 million ($60 million) in The Times (18 March 2007).
Nor is it solely private individuals who expose the inequity of the market. Public politicians like the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il exemplify the disparity between exorbitantly rich and crushingly poor: he was reported as spending £350,000 ($700,000) on Hennessey cognac while millions of his country folk starved in famines (Guardian, 30 November 2006: 16). During the cold war, such excesses in 'Third World dictator chic' were routine and justified by their support for capitalist states against the Soviet Union (Hancock 1989; Blum 1998). Such excesses are no less evident in the 'New World Order'. In 2006, it was noted that 'Europeans spend more on perfume each year than the £7 billion needed to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean water' (Massey 2006: 65).
The skewed distribution of resources and the systems that underpin it kill millions of humans per year, in both the developed and developing worlds. The wealth gap between people in these two worlds has widened continuously (Greig et al. 2007). Rapley writes that 'although absolute prosperity [has risen], relative prosperity [has] declined for a growing part of the world's population ... Immiseration has declined, but marginalization has increased' (2004: 7). Galeano filtered through a maze of statistics and recorded the following consequences of distribution and access issues: 'ten people, the ten richest men on the planet, own wealth equivalent to the value of the total production of fifty countries, and 447 multimillionaires own a greater fortune than the annual income of half of humanity' (2005: 391). This situation, he continues, 'shows no sign of becoming any less ugly' (ibid.: 88–9) For Greig et al., the 'gap between "unprecedented opulence" and "remarkable deprivation"' confirms a 'sharpening of inequality' which 'represents one of the distinguishing features of contemporary life' (2007: 5). In French, this process is known as 'capitalisme sauvage'.
While we are all aware of such ranges of reward and deprivation, we are also aware that such extremes have long been a part of the experience of humans throughout history; the argument has been that they are as rare as they are disparate. But such distortions are no longer rare. They have become commonplace, raising profound questions regarding the efficacy of neoliberalism as an 'efficient' distributor of scarce goods, and concerning the reasons why it remains so effectively entrenched in the face of such incontrovertible opprobrium. These enormous ranges of wealth distribution and the inequalities that lead to millions of deaths when there are more than enough essential resources to go round is more than a simple, scientific question of economics. It involves asymmetries of power that are routinely fixed against weaker groupings by powerful states that prioritize electoral self-preservation and inefficient and often corrupt arms industries. It involves fundamental questions of humanism and enforced ignorance through selective education. But it is not immutable.
As I watched with increasing concern reports of the millions dying because of human decision-making, so my intellectual inquiry expanded too. It became clear that most security studies were at once preoccupied with 'global terrorism' and nuclear proliferation and simultaneously blind to or uncaring of a global catastrophe of human suffering that, most felt, had no context for 'security'. Their research and policy agendas largely missed the scale of avoidable human misery and avoidable death; what Thomas (2000: 4) referred to as 'the ancient and enduring concerns of humanity'. I became increasingly perplexed by the absence of serious mainstream debate on the part of research bodies and government representatives about this clearly avoidable suffering with its roots in human choice and actions, or human agency. This prompted me to critically examine the 'alternative' security literature, and the result, this book, is a contribution born from intellectual inquiry but originating from private concern.
Belatedly reading the work of scholar Johan Galtung also expanded my intellectual inquiry. It became clear that realism, the field of studies concerned mainly with the state, weapons and a largely unchangeable international system, and related liberal schools of thought persistently missed a key area that had already been enunciated by the UNDP and by a range of independent researchers, scholars and activists who were concerned by the same phenomena I had observed myself. As realism underwent a series of attacks from the Critical Security Studies approach, so too emerged from the literature a growing consensus relating to a relationship between development and security, especially when security was defined in terms of the environment, natural resources and poverty. Few connections were made initially between human agency and human security outcomes, but an alternative field began to develop and refined an approach that became known as human security studies. The central difference that crystallized from this school, if it should be so called, is a conceptual one. It urges focus not on the conventional icons of security, such as the state, the economy and armaments, but on human beings who are not engaged in conventional security issues, but whose deaths far exceed anything experienced and recorded in the more traditional approaches. Thus, the new research 'referent', or 'object', was to be the human being itself, and how to render that vulnerable object less exposed to conditions that threatened its security.
The problem had become how to define human security, a challenge discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 of this work. The debate had become stalled between a very wide-ranging and indefinable conceptualization, at one end, and one that failed to capture the gravity of the human condition at the other. One of the key contributions I hope this book makes is to direct the debate by differentiating between what constitutes human security (which no one could agree on), on the one hand, and what might comprise human insecurity, on the other. Refocusing the debate allowed me to respond to one of realism's most touted complaints about the human security school. What vexed both realists and human security proponents was that if 'human security' as a concept couldn't be defined, then it couldn't be identified and it couldn't be counted or analysed. There was no case to answer. Defining the concept in terms of human insecurity allowed me to propose that there were conditions of insecurity that allowed conventional methodologies to be applied that might satisfy, or at least arouse the curiosity of, some realists who might be convinced that it should be taken more seriously and debated in a wider and more influential literature.
Defining human insecurity in terms of avoidable civilian deaths enables a quantitative assessment of the extent of the issue, but it would be meaningless if the deaths were naturally occurring, or if they were already the subject matter of security research. For this reason, I chose to focus on deaths that could have been avoided and which were not caused by guns, bombs or machetes. Such deaths are both unintentional and intentional and, crucially, avoidable for the most part. By the former, I refer to the problem of good intentions having lethal unintended consequences which are then ignored or denied. It is not the same as omission of action; it is recognizing ignorance and denial in the causative chain connecting a perceived good intention to a destructive outcome that is not reversed or halted. What remained then was to identify the extent and scale of these deaths in order that they might be compared with deaths from conventional causes already identified and addressed by the 'regular' security research agendas and bodies. If, as I suspected, human insecurity as I had defined it exceeded by a significant order of magnitude the mortality caused as a result of the security phenomena addressed by the majority of security schools, then there was a case to answer. The figures suggest there is a strong case indeed.
These statistics, gathered from sources like the World Health Organization (WHO) and various agencies of the United Nations (UN), are mostly not new. They are compiled in order to demonstrate the enormous discrepancy in human mortality in what is studied and supported with millions of dollars of research grants in well-funded international institutions and disseminated through literally thousands of journals and books (conventional security studies), on the one hand; and that which is the subject matter of the human security debate, still struggling with its own language, concepts and methodologies. Demonstrating this discrepancy is the first element of this work's approach to human insecurity. It is the evidential foundation stone on which the second rationale rests. That second stage is to offer a more sophisticated, meaningful and comprehensive explanation for why this should be the case; why it should persist; and why it doesn't have to.
The arguments that this book presents differ significantly from realist wisdom, which prefers the state and the international state of anarchy as its main subject matter. Rather than considering global human insecurity in terms of states whose behaviour reflects a fixed and disruptive human nature which in turn creates the anarchy of international disorder, severing human acts from consequences, this work is concerned with cause and effect. The second rationale of this work, then, is the identification of mainly benign and ignorant or misunderstood human activities that lead to the human insecurity catastrophe that impacts upon millions of women, children and men unnecessarily and, for the most part, as we shall see, quite avoidably. In other words, it is the contention of this work that the global scale of terminal insecurity is, for the most part, caused by humans, in our many private, institutional and structural guises. It is not necessarily an intentional series of acts for the most part; although it is in some. But, nonetheless, the actions or omissions of responses to lethal outcomes by people in government policy-making, or through greed and corruption, in international financial policy or dogmatic foreign policy, all contribute to human insecurity. Furthermore, international institutions derive from larger global structures of human organization and beliefs that determine the lives and deaths of millions upon millions of people around the world, without a shot being fired or a machete being drawn.
This work has a yet broader purpose. Demonstrating the role of human built and operated global financial institutions and the ideological structures that project and command them speaks to a deeper debate on the wider global system. How much is it fluidly structured and dynamic, rather than randomly fixed in a static conception of irreducible power? Critical feminist theories demonstrate and explain the masculine domination of both the disciplinary field and the policy process world. Social constructivist approaches, in turn, show how these processes of power and domination operate in international relations theory and practice. This body of understanding of the world, or ontology, claims international and national behaviour is not, and cannot be, permanent or fixed because it has been designed and constructed by human beings over lengthy periods of time. It is this, rather than an impersonal, anonymous 'international system', which has led to the evolution of the ideational constructions that define, direct and order the power that shapes a persistently unequal world. Payne suggests that this type of approach and the challenge it represents to established orthodoxies of the realisms in international relations shows that 'people are not just bearers of structures, they create them ... Historical structures mean no more but no less than persistent social practices, made by collective human activity and transformed through collective human activity' (2005: 17). If this can be shown to bear on human insecurity, it has substantial critical ramifications for the broader security and realism debates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Human Insecurity by David Roberts. Copyright © 2008 David Roberts. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
AbbreviationsList of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Thinking about Security and Violence
2. Global Human Insecurity
3. Institutions, Infanticide and Mortality
4. Institutions and Intimate Murder
5. Human and Realist Security
6. International Institutions
7. Andrarchy and Neoliberalism
8. The Social Construction of Global Structures
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index