Power and agency in the human security framework

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Power and agency in the human security framework

Tara McCormack ^a

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Power and agency in the human security framework

Tara McCormack

University of Westminster

Abstract The concept of human security is arguably a progressive move away from the narrow conceptions of military and territorial security that have traditionally dominated international relations. The human security framework is argued to have the potential to empower and emancipate individuals by putting them at the centre of policy, analysis and debate and addressing the problems they face in their daily lives. In this paper I will argue that the human security framework cannot live up to its promises to empower the citizens of poor and developing countries. Whilst the human security framework problematizes the relationship between the state and its citizens, the framework replaces this relationship with relationships with other states or international agencies that lack accountability, effectively further disempowering citizens in weak or unstable states. The human security framework serves to reinforce international power inequalities and renders criteria for intervention by powerful states and international institutions less transparent and less accountable.

Introduction

The concept of human security is arguably one of the most important and serious challenges to the way in which international security has been both theorized and practised for much of the last century. Contrary to the state- centric security framework, which both endangers people and ignores the real threats to individuals, the human security approach is considered to have the potential to be an emancipatory and empowering security framework for individuals. In this article I will critically engage with these central claims of the human security framework and argue that it cannot live up to its promises.

The next section highlights the central arguments of the human security framework and considers its different conceptions and critiques. I argue that despite differences of definition—such as ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’—or different ways of measuring human security, within the human security framework both conceptions of human security are critical of the Cold War pluralist security framework. Both these conceptions suggest that human security offers an emancipatory and empowering framework that challenges existing power relations.

In the second part I focus on the problematic aspects of the human security framework that undermine its promises to be radical, emancipatory and Volume 21, Number 1, March 2008

ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/08/010113–16q2008 Centre of International Studies DOI: 10.1080/09557570701828618

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challenging to existing power relations. I argue that the merging of development and security presents an inversion of existing international power inequalities, presenting the weakest and most powerless states as existential threats to the most powerful ones. This serves to entrench existing power inequalities rather than challenge them. Furthermore, the re- characterization of sovereignty as responsibility—whilst problematizing the formal pluralist norms of non-intervention and sovereign equality—potentially allows powerful states or international institutions greater freedom to intervene in and regulate weaker states in a number of different ways. This serves to disempower the citizens of weak or impoverished states. Whilst their own state is held up to greater scrutiny and regulation by the international community—

purportedly on their behalf—the citizens of those states do not have the means by which to control or hold to account major international institutions or powerful states. Finally, the human security framework also serves to de-politicize intervention and regulation as they are reinterpreted as a moral obligation for the powerful.

Most critiques engaging with human security tend to either focus on how to render it workable or criticize it for not being sufficiently distanced from the pluralist security framework. A smaller number of more radical critics have argued that human security represents a new form of control and management of the developing world by the West (Duffield and Waddell 2004; Dillon 2006). My critique aims neither to contribute towards a ‘better’ version of human security nor to show that human security is part of a new strategy of liberal governance.

Although I argue that human security is ultimately a conservative security framework, this is not because it is a new technique of liberal governance, but because it serves to entrench existing international power inequalities through pathologizing weak or underdeveloped states and rendering intervention by powerful states and international institutions less transparent and less accountable. I conclude that the human security framework does not ultimately offer a challenge to contemporary power inequalities or give power to the powerless.

Human security as a challenge to contemporary power inequalities

For much of the last century, major international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), and individual states remained formally committed to a pluralist security framework. In the context of a strongly polarized and politicized international realm in which the most powerful states had ideologically opposed social, economic and political systems, the limited area of agreement reached between states created the underlying norms of the pluralist framework eventually codified in the UN Charter. This entailed the prioritization of order, stability and the limitation of conflict in the international sphere over and above matters that states with very differing conceptions of social organization could not agree upon, such as justice, equality and freedom of individuals (Bull 2002, 74–94).

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Even in cases of severe human rights abuses, most states formally rejected the idea that states could intervene in other states to protect or emancipate suffering individuals.¹

Advocates of human security argue that this state-centric pluralist security framework—with its formal commitment to non-intervention, sovereign immunity and state equality—is anachronistic in the face of a myriad of new security challenges (Simpson 2004, 231; Debiel and Werthes 2006, 8; Jolly and Ray 2006, 3– 4).²

However, the human security framework promises to be more than merely an updated security framework. Supporters of human security regard the pluralist prioritization of state security as immoral. The pluralist security framework has a conservative or ‘problem-solving’ function that prioritizes order over justice and human emancipation (Grayson 2004). The traditional security framework simply ignores the fact that for the vast majority of humanity the real threats are not from military invasion by neighbouring states, but are from hunger, crime, disease, political repression and environmental hazards (UN 1994, 22). Advocates of the human security framework furthermore argue that, under the cover of sovereign immunity, governments have been able to commit crimes against their own people with impunity.

The pluralist security framework simply ignores the fact that ‘states are more often part of the problem than the source of the solution’ (Bellamy and McDonald 2002, 373).

Human security is considered a paradigm shift in thinking and doing security from a state-centric approach to one that takes the individual to be its point of reference:

Human security is perhaps best understood as a shift in perspective or orientation.

It is an alternative way of seeing the world, taking people as its point of reference, rather than focusing exclusively on the security of territory or governments.

(Axworthy 1999)

Ethical concerns about the freedom and emancipation of the individual are at the heart of the human security framework. Rejecting the narrow confines of the pluralist security perspective of national or territorial security focused on the state, it adopts a global commitment to human life. Human security ‘puts the individual at the centre of debate, analysis and policy’ (Thakur 2004, 347 –348;

Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 13).

Due to this explicitly normative dimension focused on the individual, the human security framework purports to offer an emancipatory and radical challenge to the status quo and existing power relations (Grayson 2004, 357), questions contemporary power structures and economic, social and political frameworks that lead to human insecurity (Newman 2001, 247) and claims the potential to give voice and power to the most vulnerable and powerless, particularly women or other ‘voiceless’ communities (Suhrke 1999, 271 –272;

Macfarlane 2004, 368).

1For examples of statements and discussions to this effect in the UN during humanitarian crises and subsequent interventions, see ICISS (2001b, 54 – 63) and Chesterman (2002, 46–87).

2For an early exposition, see UN (1995, 41–42)

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The framework has been developed and debated in university institutes³by both academics and policy practitioners (Kaldor and Glasius 2005; Jolly and Ray 2006; MacLean et al. 2007), in inter-state policy networks⁴ and in major UN reports⁵and other reports sponsored by states (Commission on Human Security [CHS] 2003; International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty [ICISS] 2001a). Furthermore, many of the main themes of human security have been central to other security reports (Solana 2003; Department for International Development [DFID] 2005).

Although human security is not a monolithic concept, there is some disagreement among states that have adopted the framework as part of their foreign policy about what human security might actually mean and how to best make the concept workable in terms of policy. Japan, for example, adopted what is often termed the ‘broad’ definition of human security. This is exemplified in the 2003 report of the CHS which advocates a definition of human security that encompasses ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’—that individuals should be both protected from harm and empowered to live the life that they wish to lead (CHS 2003, 2 –4). Canada, on the other hand, has formally adopted a ‘narrow’ definition of human security in which the focus is on the ‘freedom from fear’ aspect.⁶This ostensibly means that the focus in Canadian policy is aimed at a more limited ‘protection’ agenda rather than on empowerment.

Much critical engagement with human security has tended to focus on the lack of conceptual and analytical clarity of the concept, suggesting that it adds little to the understanding of human insecurity and leads to difficulties in policymaking (Paris 2001; Buzan 2004). Acknowledging these problems, theorists and academics have attempted to reach measurable definitions (King and Murray 2002). Sympathetic critics have suggested that the ‘freedom from fear’ or ‘narrow’ agenda is the best in terms of coherent policymaking (Krause 2004, 367; Thomas and William 2002). They have also suggested ways to overcome these apparent problems. Taylor Owen, for example, suggests a definition that focuses on the level of threats rather than on their origins (Owen 2004).

Others have argued that, rather than a lack of policy potential, the broadness of the concept offers both a holistic approach to the numerous post-Cold-War security problems and an essential flexibility, because the sources of insecurity vary hugely between and within countries (Jolly and Ray 2006, 13 – 14;

Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 10). Grayson, for example, stresses that it is precisely this refusal to play the ‘problem-solving’ game of definition that gives human security its radical-critical potential by enabling it to engage with the broader social and economic structures that give rise to human insecurity (Grayson 2004).

3For example the Human Security Institute at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

4See the Human Security Network established by Canada and Norway, now with 13 members:,http://www.humansecuritynetwork.org.

5For the first full exposition of the human security framework see UN (1994). See also UN 2000b; 2004; 2005.

6,http://geo.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/library/humansecurity-en.aspx.

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Whichever definition of human security one adopts, within both the ‘narrow’

and ‘broad’ conceptions, there is a belief that the human security framework offers a serious emancipatory challenge to the traditional security approach. Perhaps not many policymakers or theorists would go as far as Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy, who suggest that individual empowerment is both the means and ends of human security (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 238), but the shift to the individual is widely considered representative of a transformation in security and a paradigm shift towards protecting and empowering the individual, protecting human life and promoting social progress (UN 2005, 9).

An example of what this shift means in terms of policies and financial support can be found in the recent report of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Human Security Unit.⁷The report focuses on nine initiatives in various countries which purportedly protect and empower people. These include efforts focusing on the sexual health of women and girls in three Central American countries, setting up a regional programme in Africa which donates small engines to local communities (to be run by the local women’s groups), launching a project to raise awareness about ‘human trafficking’ in Cambodia and Vietnam and establishing a radio network in Africa and Afghanistan that seeks to give a ‘voice to the voiceless’ by broadcasting interviews with impoverished and marginalized members of society such as street vendors (UN 2006).

In a major post-Cold-War security report sponsored by the Canadian government, The responsibility to protect, it is argued from a ‘narrow’ human security perspective that human security must consider both development and the social and economic sources of insecurity. The report explicitly aims at modifying the pluralist security framework (ICISS 2001a, 14 –15). The Canadian government also gives examples of the means to achieve a people-centred approach to security: the Kimberly process, the Ottawa Convention on the prohibition of the use of land mines, the Kosovo War and the establishment of the International Criminal Court, intervention and peace-building in Haiti and Sierra Leone and the international agreement on terrorism (McRae and Hubert 2001).

Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) Human Security Program funds projects and programmes regarding democratization, governance and accountability, gender inequality, corporate responsibility and justice and security sector reform.⁸ Clearly, even the ‘narrow’ focus entails an expansive agenda that goes far beyond conflict prevention. All in all, even the narrow perspective offers a potentially ‘vast and ambitious’ agenda (Black 2007, 56).

Human security’s radical challenge or entrenching power inequalities?

In the introductory section I argued that one of the main claims made on behalf of the human security framework, whether narrow or broad, is that it offers a new paradigm for thinking about and doing security in the form of an emancipatory

7See CHS (2003) for the definition of human security adopted by the OCHA Human Security Unit.

8,http://geo.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/library/humansecurity-en.aspx.

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and empowering challenge to the old state-centric security framework. In this section, I examine several aspects of the human security framework that lead to an alternative conclusion. I will argue that rather than offering a radical challenge to contemporary power inequalities and putting the powerless individual at the centre of policy and debate, the human security framework has the opposite effect. It does not challenge contemporary power inequalities but in fact it reinforces them. This is because whilst problematizing the Third World or developing state, the human security framework replaces it with opaque relationships with international institutions and powerful states that lack accountability. This ultimately undermines the only existing institutional framework in which people have some chance of taking control of their lives and society.

This critique remains at the level of a theoretical and analytical critique.

I do not present empirical work to investigate the emancipatory or empowering effect of, for example, specific programmes sponsored by the UN’s Human Security Unit or DFAIT. Indeed, in itself, a positive outcome for certain individuals or groups resulting from government-sponsored programmes would not in any way prove the broader transformational and emancipatory claims of human security. It is also of note that some recent empirical research done in Haiti comparing two UN missions (one from the mid-1990s and one mid-2000s) suggests that the human security agenda has little actual policy effect and remains largely in the rhetorical realm (Muggah and Krause 2007).

Inverting existing power relations: pathologizing the non-Western state and the merging of security and development

Within the human security framework there is an explicit merging of security and development (UN 2004, viii) and an erosion of the division between domestic and international security.⁹The 1994 UN Human Development Report (UNHDR), New dimensions of human security, highlighted most of the major themes in the merging of development and security which have been developed in major reports from the UN and other international institutions over the last two decades: the links between poverty, underdevelopment, violence and security and the global interconnectedness of security (UN 1994, 1 – 3; 1995, 41–

42; 2000a; 2005; Carnegie Commission 1997, xviii; ICISS 2001a, 4 –5):

Human security is indeed indivisible. There is no longer such a thing as a humanitarian catastrophe occurring ‘in a faraway country of which we know little’. . . In an interdependent world, in which security depends on a framework of stable sovereign entities, the existence of fragile states, failing states, states who through weakness or ill-will harbour those dangerous to others, or states that can only maintain internal order by means of gross human rights violations, can constitute a risk to people everywhere. (ICISS 2001a, 5)

The merging of development and security represents a shift away from the formal separation between these two areas that pertain to the pluralist security

9For a critique of the merging of security and development within human security, see Duffield (2001) and Duffield and Waddell (2006).

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framework. Underdevelopment within a state was not regarded as a threat to international peace and security. Poverty and associated social, economic and political problems were not held to affect the rights of a state to international legal equality, non-intervention and the other formal norms associated with the pluralist international system (Simpson 2004, 231; Duffield and Waddell 2004, 18).¹⁰ Within the human security framework, however, this indifference to the internal content of a state is one of the major limitations of the pluralist security framework.

Few would dispute the argument that for individuals living in situations of dire poverty and underdevelopment there is little chance of leading any kind of fulfilled life, even if formal political freedoms exist (UN 2005, 5). However, the merging of development and security has implications that contradict the stated empowering and emancipatory goals of human security. Rather than offering a radical challenge to the contemporary international order and the power inequalities that exist, the merging of development and security reinforces the contemporary order and power inequalities. The biggest threats to global insecurity and instability are located in the very weakest and least developed states; at the same time, the purported interconnectedness of security threats in the post-Cold-War world means that this instability and underdevelopment directly affects all states.

In major reports written after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 (hereafter ‘9/11’) it has been argued that 9/11 ‘proves’ both the way in which poverty and underdevelopment lead to violent extremism against the West and the way in which there is no longer a division between the domestic and international (UN 2004, 12– 14).¹¹The 2004Report of the High Level Panel on threats, challenges and changeuses almost gothic imagery in its portrayal of the threat from underdeveloped states:

International terrorist groups prey on weak States for sanctuary. Their recruitment is aided by grievances nurtured by poverty, foreign occupation and the absence of human rights and democracy; by religious and other intolerance; and by civil violence—a witch’s brew common to those areas where civil war and regional conflict intersect . . . Poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation and war feed one another in a deadly cycle (UN 2004, 14–15).

10For examples of international statements on the subject during the Cold War, see the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and Protection of their Independence and Sovereignty (Resolution 2131) and the 1970 Declaration on the Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Between States (Resolution 2625). In this specific historical context of the division of the world into ideological blocs and the need to ensure that the newly independent nations were not tempted into the Soviet bloc, the West adopted policies that stressed the promotion of independent development (understood as material development and to be achieved through state-led industrialization) for the newly independent states.

For the West, then, its security was to be achieved through the independent development, and ultimately modernization, of the newly independent states (Pupavac 2005).

11This idea that poverty and underdevelopment would lead to violent extremism against the West remains entirely unsubstantiated. It is of note that one of the few empirical investigations into the background of recent terrorists groups has found the opposite.

Sageman (2004) has shown in his study of 400 al Qaeda members that three-quarters had backgrounds from the upper or middle classes and had studied abroad.

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In this framework, not only are the least developed states held to be the most unstable, but social, economic and political instability in the least developed and weakest states is seen to be a serious threat to world stability. The effect of this framework is to pathologize the non-Western or developing state. The human security framework presents a strange inversion of the existing power relationships in international relations, whereby the world’s most powerful states and military alliances are threatened by the very weakest. Here, the weakest states—whose populations are in daily peril from want of the most basic necessities of life, such that their only thoughts must be how to stay alive, and whose governments have little control over their own development—are turned into existential threats for the most powerful and developed states. These themes are also central to other major security reports (Solana 2003; DFID 2005).

Some analysts have argued that the ‘war on terror’ has twisted the human security agenda, leading to a focus on terrorism and ‘hard security’ issues (Jolly and Ray 2006, 15; Duffield and Waddell 2006, 10– 13). Yet such analyses simply ignore that the purported links between poverty and terrorism and the global threats emerging from the poorest and weakest nations have always been an integral part of the human security agenda. One could simply reverse the argument and suggest that perhaps part of the reason for the ease with which the ‘war on terror’ has been incorporated into international institutions and the security doctrines of major states is because it fits easily into the framework that has already been established by human security. The United States’ 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), for example, adopts many of the themes of the human security framework. The NSS pinpoints major threats in the very weakest states,

‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’

(National Security Council 2002, 1). Reiterating the themes of previous UN reports, it warns of the dangers from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.

Even the declaration of the right to act pre-emptively against such threats was hardly out of keeping with the articulation of the necessity for pre-emptive intervention in previous reports that focused on human security (ICISS 2001a, 27).

The NSS goes on to promise assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan to preclude the country from providing a haven for terrorists and stresses the need to engage in development and overcome poverty (National Security Council 2002).

Moreover, the argument that the ‘war on terror’ imparts a malignant influence on the human security framework ignores the fact that human security has always been an initiative emerging from the major international institutions and powerful Western states. There is no ‘golden age’ of human security policy in which the

‘voiceless’ and most vulnerable set international and national security policy priorities. Even before the ‘war on terror’, the human security agenda was set according to Western priorities—albeit in the name of the poor and disempowered.¹²

If, as claimed, the human security framework offers a critical perspective on the very sources of global inequality and poverty and underdevelopment (Grayson 2004; Newman 2001, 247), then it does not seem logical that the focus is entirely upon the weakest and least powerful of states. Edward Newman points

12See Schittecatte (2007) and O’Manique’s (2007) critical engagement with the securitization of AIDS.

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out that one of the problems with the idea of the ‘empowered’ individual is that much human insecurity results from structural factors and the distribution of power in society; however these things are beyond the control of individuals (Newman 2004, 358). This critique can be equally applied to the focus on the weakest and least developed states. In the contemporary international context, these states not only have the least amount of control of their own internal development and security, but are the most vulnerable to external circumstances such as fluctuating terms of trade. Here, international inequality, unfair trading regimes, and the lack of autonomy allowed to the poorer states under World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes such as ‘Poverty Reduction Strategies’ are all excluded from the human security framework.¹³

Thus broader international factors, such as international power inequalities and the contemporary international economic system, are excluded from any analysis of why a state remains underdeveloped. The focus is placed squarely on internal factors within these poor and underdeveloped states. Yet the internal focus of human security also excludes the context that gives rise to societal instability.

Rather than understanding social, economic and political problems and the resulting insecurity of daily life as aconsequenceof poverty and underdevelopment, poverty and underdevelopment are taken to becausedby these social, economic and political problems and the resulting lack of security. Thus human security programmes do not understand development in terms of, for example, expanding the industrial resources of the state. Instead these programmes focus on how to overcome underdevelopment, for example through ‘empowering’ women.¹⁴

Some advocates of human security seem not dissimilar to the Victorian landowners and industrialists who blamed the poverty of the working classes on the fecklessness and idleness of the workers rather than on the latter’s systemic exploitation in the economic order. Unsurprisingly, today’s powerful states and international institutions close their eyes to international inequality—in the area of trade for example—and sometimes argue that the lack of development within a country is due to instability or lack of women’s rights. Ironically, the weaker a state is, the more likely it is to be held hostage to international trading regimes and regulations (which are controlled by multinational bodies) and to be ultimately far less in control of its own development. Rather than challenging contemporary international power inequalities, the human security framework seems to simply ignore them as irrelevant—a stance that can hardly be seen as posing a challenge to those international power inequalities.

From state sovereignty to no sovereignty?

The human security framework purports to radically challenge the state-centric security approach by placing the individual at the centre of its inquiry. According to the Commission on Global Governance (CGG), ‘too often in the past . . . preserving the security of the state has been used as an excuse for policies that undermined the security of people’ (CGG 1995, 81). While few would dispute the

13See Pender (2007) for a critical discussion of these strategies.

14See DFAIT’s Human Security Programme and UN (2006) for examples of the ways in which these assumptions direct funding. For a critique of the human security approach to development, see Pupavac (2005).

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argument that states have often been the source of great insecurity and danger to their own citizens, the claims of human security must be investigated on their own terms. To what extent does this shift in emphasis from state sovereignty to the individual live up to its claims?

In the following section I will argue that the shift from state sovereignty has implications that contradict the claims to empower people and to give the citizens of weak or impoverished states ‘real’ sovereignty. Rather than empowerment—

understood as giving political power and control to the citizens and establishing clear lines of accountability and responsibility—the relocation of sovereignty of the human security framework has the potential to disempower citizens in weak states as it allows for the rehabilitation of intervention and regulation by either the international community or powerful states.

The human security framework is posed as a challenge to state security.

However, it is not the state in its entirety that is problematic, but state sovereignty as it was understood in the old security framework. Within the human security framework, the pluralist norms of formal sovereign equality and non-intervention are understood to be barriers to human security. Human security therefore challenges these aspects of state sovereignty. Therefore, in the human security framework, state sovereignty is not abandoned—‘sovereignty does still matter’ (ICISS 2001a, 7)—but modified. Within the human security framework, state sovereignty is redefined in a way that places human security at its centre (ICISS 2001a, 15). State sovereignty is purportedly substantiated through prioritizing human security. Advocates of the human security framework suggest that the modification of sovereignty gives sovereignty substantive content, showing that the ‘irreducible locus of sovereignty is in the individual human being’ (Macfarlane 2004, 368). The security of states is no longer an end in itself.

Instead ‘states are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their people, and not vice versa’ (Annan 1999, 81).

The state, therefore, still has a role to play in the protection of human security.

As the 2004 UN High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change argued, ‘the frontline actors in dealing with all the threats we face, new and old, continue to be individual sovereign states’ (UN 2004, 1). However, through the modification of state sovereignty, sovereignty becomes less of an inherent political right or juridical fact of a state. Instead, the state’s sovereignty becomes dependent on the extent to which the state upholds its responsibilities to its citizens and its role in the international realm (UN 1995, 44). This argument—that the formal norms of the pluralist framework of sovereign equality and non-intervention are modified—is developed in most major UN reports and reports from other organizations, and is also found in academic writing from both the ‘narrow’

(Thomas and Tow 2002, 189– 190) and ‘broad’ perspectives (Bellamy and McDonald 2002, 376). This aspect of the human security framework has been comprehensively explored in the ICISS report, in which the Commission argued that sovereignty must be re-characterized in terms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ (ICISS 2001a, 13; UN 2004, 17). When the state fails in terms of this responsibility towards its citizens, the international community may hold that state accountable (ICISS 2001a, 8 – 14).

The re-characterization of sovereignty and the overturning of the pluralist formal norms of non-intervention and sovereignty equality entail rehabilitating a wide range of potential interventionist strategies. For example, this

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re-characterization of sovereignty recommends preventing conflict through pre- emptive intervention. The ICISS argues that the international community needs to move from a ‘culture of reaction’ to a ‘culture of prevention’ (ICISS 2001a, 27).

There is also much greater scope for post-conflict intervention. Whilst the pluralist security framework aims at achieving a settlement between parties in a conflict, the human security framework seeks to transform the societies from within through extensive intervention in their internal structures (UN 1995, 62).

The Brahimi Report argues for an extensive strategy of post-conflict intervention in order to ensure human security, which entails:

reintegrating former combatants into civilian society, strengthening the rule of law (for example, through training and restructuring of local police, and judicial and penal reform); improving respect for human rights through the monitoring, education and investigation of past and existing abuses; providing technical assistance for democratic development (including electoral assistance and support for free media); and promoting conflict resolution and reconciliation techniques.

(UN 2000a, 3)

The re-characterization of sovereignty challenges the formal pluralist norms of sovereignty equality and non-intervention and potentially allows for a wide range of intervention or regulation of states that are failing to live up to their responsibilities. In this context, the next question posed focuses on which states or institutions are to have the role of upholding the state’s responsibilities and intervening to ensure that the state does live up to its responsibilities. The ICISS argues that, although ideally this would be the role of the UN Security Council, in the absence of the political will to take action other bodies such as regional organizations or coalitions of willing states or even individual states should step in to fill this role (ICISS 2001a, 53 – 55). Human security ‘brings together states, international organizations . . . NGOs [non-governmental organizations], and individuals in radically new combinations’ (McRae 2001, 20).

For the supporters of human security, this is precisely the point. They argue that many states are not fit to rule themselves. However, the re-characterization of sovereignty contradicts the claims of human security to be an emancipatory and empowering framework that gives sovereignty to people and challenges existing power frameworks. As has been shown, human security does not challenge the sovereign state framework in its entirety. Rather, it holds certain states to account, particularly the poor and underdeveloped states that are seen to be failing in their

‘responsibility to protect’. Human security therefore introduces a division between those states which can provide human security for their citizens and those which cannot (Duffield and Waddell 2004, 18). This implies a shift towards a more hierarchical order in which international institutions or major states have greater freedom to act on behalf of the citizens of other states. A more hierarchical order weakens formal inhibitions on intervention and allows major states or institutions potentially more freedom to intervene, regulate and decide if a state is being a ‘good international citizen’.

This distinction and division between states is problematic in terms of the purported emancipatory and empowering goals of human security, for several reasons. Firstly, we must ask who is empowered with agency in the re-characterization of sovereignty. It is difficult to see how this could be the citizen of the weak or impoverished state. Weak and developing states have the potential

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to be subjected to greater international scrutiny, regulation and possibly intervention by any number of international agencies, or states, or coalitions of the willing. Whilst the relationship between a state and its citizen is de-privileged, a weak or unstable state may become subjected to greater international scrutiny.

Other states will potentially have greater freedom to intervene in the name of the state’s own citizens, yet those citizens will have little control or influence over the supposed agents of their own emancipation and empowerment. These institutions or states are not accountable to or representative of those on whose behalf they are intervening. In fact, however bad a state is, there is at least a possibility that the citizens of that state can gain power or change the political system. This is an impossibility in terms of international institutions or powerful states. Clearly, the citizens of Afghanistan, for example, have no possibility of gaining political control of America or Britain or deciding on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) policy.

The relationship between the intervening agents and those on whose behalf action is being taken is not a political relationship in which there is a formal relationship of representation and control. In this instance, there is a divorce between the exercise of power and the control or accountability of that power.

Any agent that intervenes to empower and emancipate the individual tends to be one that has no reciprocal relationship of obligation and control. Rather than empowering individuals, the shift away from the pluralist security framework endows external institutions—such as NGOs, other states and international organizations—with agency. A direct relationship with an unaccountable international institution or foreign state replaces a political relationship (or potential political relationship) between the state and its citizens.

In an international realm marked by vast power inequalities, the problematization of the poor or underdeveloped state and the re-characterization of sovereignty as responsibility does not challenge the international status quo and international power inequalities. In the contemporary context, it is argued that only certain states and international institutions will decide who is a good international citizen. In the foreseeable future, Moldova or Botswana will not measure human insecurity in deprived areas of the US, Britain, Japan or Canada and decide on the course of action. This shift can be seen to actually reinforce international power inequalities whereby the weakest and poorest states lose even the formal protection of the pluralist norms of sovereign equality and non- intervention. International institutions and powerful states are allowed a potentially far freer role in terms of intervention in and the regulation of weaker states, while at the same time the ad hoc nature of the potential intervening parties (whether single states, ‘coalitions of the willing’ or international or regional institutions and organizations) can only decrease the potential for control by the citizens of weak and impoverished states.

From political interference to moral imperative: de-politicizing Western intervention and regulation

The final point to be made in conclusion to this section is that the human security framework has the effect of de-politicizing and idealizing Western intervention and regulation. Intervention is no longer understood politically or challenged on such grounds, but is understood in terms of a moral-ethical framework in which

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powerful states and international institutions have a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of citizens of other states. For example, the ICISS argues that states and international institutions have a responsibility to react to problems within states (ICISS 2001a). International intervention is no longer a matter for political contestation, but is seen as a moral duty of the powerful to help the weak (Blair 1999). Indeed de-politicizing the way in which intervention is understood is explicitly part of the rationale of the ICISS (ICISS 2001a, 16 –17). Intervention therefore becomes more difficult to contest and understand.

Whatever political position one might take regarding intervention, this framing simply evades the substantive issues at stake in any intervention. It is of little surprise that the organization of developing states, the G77, has expressed its reservations about the concept and potential policy based upon human security (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 35 –37). Moreover, intervention and regulation become idealized by the way in which the human security framework focuses on internal factors within an underdeveloped state and excludes broader questions of the existing international economy, unequal power relations and the weak position that poor and underdeveloped states occupy in terms of their ability to control or influence their own economic development. The material consequences of intervention become excluded from analysis and debate and problems emerging from interventionist policies are simply understood as a consequence of existing social or economic problems. This renders powerful states or international institutions less accountable for their actions. Rather than challenging existing power inequalities and empowering the citizens of weak and impoverished states, this shift can only serve to further disempower them.

Conclusion

The aim of this article is not to call for a return to some ‘golden age’ of state security.

One should have no illusions about the pluralist security framework. It is highly ideological and allows formal equality to mask substantive inequality with often brutal consequences. However, the inequities of the pluralist security framework do not mean that we ought not take a critical approach to human security and interrogate some of its central claims. The aim of this article has been to draw out some of the inherent problems with the human security framework in its own terms.

The central claims of the human security framework are that it represents an emancipatory and empowering security framework for individuals in poor and developing countries and a progressive step away from the narrow conceptions of military and territorial security that have traditionally dominated international relations. However, the human security framework does not live up to its promises to empower the citizens of poor and developing countries. In the contemporary international context (which is marked by great power inequalities between states), the rejection of the pluralist security framework by major international institutions and the adoption of ostensibly emancipatory and empowering policies and policy rhetoric have the consequence of problematizing weak or unstable states and allowing international institutions or powerful states a far more interventionist role.

Through pathologizing the weak or underdeveloped state and recasting sovereignty in terms of responsibility, the formal links between the state and its citizens are problematized and international institutions and states have

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potentially greater freedom to intervene in or regulate weak or failing states.

However, there are no mechanisms by which the citizens of states being intervened in might have any control over the purported agents of their emancipation. The human security framework does not ultimately offer a challenge to contemporary power inequalities or give power to the powerless.

Rather, the human security framework serves to entrench international power inequalities and allows for a shift towards a hierarchical international order in which the citizens in weak or unstable states may arguably have even less freedom or power than under the old pluralist security framework.

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