How to Think Like a Human Security Analyst

I've been realizing that though I often say I look at global issues through a "human security perspective" it's unclear to many people what that actually means. As Roland Paris pointed out years ago,  the term means different things to different people; in fact my own empirical research on what the concept means to global elites suggests as much. (The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has a set of tools for doing human security analysis that are primarily development-oriented, for example, whereas many UN member governments continue to associate the concept with the responsibility to protect as well.) This ongoing debate about the term's meaning may explain why people are sometimes bewildered when I make arguments "from a human security perspective" that don't jibe with their conception of what human security practitioners are supposed to believe in.

So as I think ahead to teaching a course on this subject in the Fall, I thought it might be useful to nail down what the term generally means to me when I use it. Here's my first best stab and I welcome feedback.

To me, a "human security perspective" is a set of propositions and analytical assumptions about the relationship between the security sector and the protection of fundamental human rights. It thus overlaps with and is distinct from both conventional national security thinking and conventional human rights thinking. I reserve the right to amend my views as they evolve in conversations with students this Fall. But as of now, I think a human security lens boils down to three propositions that can be applied to any policy situation, with a corresponding set of analytical questions to ask:

Proposition #1) "Human Security Is Global Security As If People Rather than States Mattered." My colleague Simon Reich, who directed the Ford Institute of Human Security while I was at University of Pittsburgh, used to introduce the major to the incoming class of MPIA students by saying, "We study the things that really kill people." (Like crimes against humanity, and poverty, and small arms. As opposed to, he meant, the stuff that kept the Security and Intelligence folks occupied, like weapons of mass destruction and interstate war.) What Reich mean is that security understood from a people-oriented perspective is less about threats from foreigners and more about threats to everyday life - often from citizen's own governments, whether through acts of commission like torture or acts of omission like providing inadequate health care.

For individuals, security is about freedom from fear (of arbitrary bodily integrity violations by powerful Others) and freedom from want (in other words, the right to have one’s basic needs met). These two concepts often get too little play in our foreign policy debates, which are more typically about “national security” – the protection of borders and state institutions, or the promotion of some state elite’s conception of the “national” interest, rather than security for individuals on both sides of an international border. For example, when tensions rise in the Caucasus or Gaza or the Korean peninsula, the discussion is much likelier to be dominated by consideration of state interests rather than individual interests and how to convince states to prioritize them. And we’re much likelier to talk about whether such tensions will result in loss of life in some future hypothetical skirmish among state armies than to confront the ongoing, everyday threats to life – such as the 20,000 children dead of preventable diseases daily – also caused by the structure of the global system. So part of what a “human security perspective” does is invite questions about how individuals are affected by policy changes - as well as the status quo, with an eye to proposing courses of action in which the human interest takes precedence over elite power-mongering. A human security perspective means taking non-military threats to people seriously, and being ready to ask of any global policy problem: how does this situation look from the perspective of people, as opposed to states?

Proposition #2) “The Security Sector Is Both a Threat and an Indispensable Tool For the Protection of Human Security.” If a human security approach differs from a national security approach in putting individuals at the center of equation, it also differs from a purely human rights approach in taking the security establishment seriously as a means – and often the best means – to protect human beings and provide for their general welfare. By “security establishment” I am most often referring to those organizations authorized to use force (such as military, police, intelligence, border and custom agents) although the UNDP's definition is broader and includes the justice and oversight sectors as well as non-statutory security forces (eg. private military companies) and civil society institutions concerned with security issues (see pg. 87 of the 2002 Human Development Report).

In short, you might think of “human security” analysis as, in part, a set of tools for mainstreaming human rights principles into the security sector – ensuring that security policy is carried out with individuals in mind, and according to rules of conduct designed to minimize the costs to those individuals and promote a more humane and democratic society.

Of course these very institutions associated with “security” are often the source of human insecurity. This is why, from a human security perspective, one must be just as concerned with the threats posed to a population by its own government and security forces as by outside forces. In my view, it is also perfectly consistent with a human security perspective to argue that an armed response might be the solution in cases where a specific government is preying upon its own population – assuming the total expected civilian costs of that intervention don’t outweigh the overall gains to civilians of shifting the status quo. War always weighs hard on civilians, but it is utopian to ignore the fact that a tyrannical peace can weigh even harder. As RJ Rummel has demonstrated, the number of human beings killed by their own governments in the 20th century alone is four times greater than the number of people killed in both international and domestic wars between 1900-1999: war is not always the biggest threat to people and can in some cases yields benefits that outweigh the costs.

Questions a human security analyst would ask about security policy: what is the configuration of interests, identities and norms that would generate a security sector most poised to protect, rather than prey upon, civilians? To what extent can this be achieved non-violently? If force is necessary, what tactics and strategies would minimize the human costs?

Proposition #3)"The Key Goal Should Be To Promote the Protection of Civilians Within the Rule of Law." This means all civilians, not just "my country's civilians" in terms of the analysis, though typically governments don’t think this way. And since the civilian population is the point of departure, this also means prioritizing another country's civilians ahead of one’s own combatants. This is why I have argued that General McChrystal’s reduction in air power was the right policy in Afghanistan even though it has cost US troops’ lives. From a human security perspective this is better than losing Afghan civilian lives – not only because it is right to weigh the lives of the innocent and vulnerable more heavily than those of men and women who have signed up to risk their lives to serve – but also because the effect of such a policy will ultimately be to sow greater respect for the US abroad which in turn, protects US civilians.

This formula can be applied to nearly any policy problem: strategies for engaging Iran on nuclear weapons, whether or not it makes sense to allow warlords to siphon off aid shipments, how to address maritime piracy. In each scenario, a human security perspective as I define it would incline the analyst to ask: what are the likely costs of any action or inaction in terms of civilian lives and security on all sides?

Open Questions:

1. What about situations in which two elements of the propositions above conflict? For example, when there is a tradeoff between following the rule of law and protecting civilians, as in the case of the illegal yet arguably just Kosovo war? Or when ensuring the civilian control over the security sector means making policy changes that might undermine efforts to protect civilians? Does “human security analysis” offer a solution to such conundrums? I am not saying it does. But I do think it provides a framework for thinking through them, one which would treat the rule of law not as an end in itself but as a means to protect civilians in the future, against which the short-term gains in the present must be weighed; and one in which unjust laws would be questioned and amended by those concerned that the law work in the interests of ordinary people.

2. Isn’t this just “neo-conservativism” in more humane cloth? Human security is more akin to a foreign policy position I would call “progressive realism.” It puts humans and humanity at the center of the equation, but it does so pragmatically rather than naively. It promotes thinking outside the box while assuming that the wider good may sometimes require uncomfortable tradeoffs. It borrows from just war thinking a prioritization of the most vulnerable groups in society, and a willingness to resort to force only within certain narrow guidelines and with a great degree of restraint. It borrows from globalism a sense that the protection of vulnerable groups everywhere should be the concern of those with the power to assist and protect them – because it is right and also because it is ultimately in our interest. Yet it borrows from political realism an understanding of what it takes to get from here to there, a willingness to see the forest despite the trees, and an understanding of the unavoidable relationship between ethics and power.