Understanding Security
Each time that I teach a course on security or a segment on security
in a course, I ask my students to open their notebooks and draw 'security'.
No words are allowed, except to those who nurse grave doubts about
their ability to draw something recognizable. Each semester yields
a predictable crop of guns, fences and locks. In addition, the scales
of justice or doves or law books will occasionally show up, and usually
there is at least one security blanket in the group. The drawings
make their way around the room, and we try and tease out all the ways
in which we understand the term. Students are usually struck by the
range of images, and by images they have not thought of. This, of
course, is the point of the exercise. You are supposed to come away
thinking, "Oh, I suppose you could look at it in all these ways!"
What I am struck by, as I reflect on the number of times I have done
this, is the fact that none of them protests, "But how can it
be a gun and a dove, or how is a pile of law books 'security'?"
They accept, almost intuitively, that all of the above are correct.
I am not sure when the term 'security' first began being used to
describe the politics of war and peace within and among states. However,
in the post-World War II era at least, 'security studies' and 'security
policy' both referred to the war and peace, but particularly war,
decisions, actions and considerations of the nation-state. That is,
the referent of the term 'security' or the answer to the question
'whose security?', was the nation-state itself. Focusing on the nation-state
and its security would, as a corollary, secure the international system-the
system of nation-states that had been evolving since the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648. This, in turn, would prevent the dramatic overturning
of those regimes and norms that had slowly been evolving over the
centuries to govern the behaviour of states in the system. Thus, by
definition, security studies was a conservative area of study and
security policy, the policy field to which more conservative thinkers
gravitated.
The purpose of security policy and security research in these decades
was to find ways in which to protect and preserve and even perpetuate
the state. This meant in particular, the protection of its land and
frontiers, its natural resources and its people. In other words, the
scope of security policy and analysis was narrowly limited to military
decisions and their political appurtenances. The overlap between foreign
policy and security policy could be marked by Clausewitz's famous
definition of war as foreign policy by other means. From the national
viewpoint, security was understood, to borrow from Morgenthau, as
'national interest defined as power.' What would be examples of this?
The Monroe Doctrine, which warned extra-regional powers from interfering
in the politics of the Americas, is a case in point. The United States,
as newly independent then as the states of South Asia are now, was
concerned first about the presence of foreign militaries in its neighbourhood
and second to secure its sphere of influence in this hemisphere. The
two were and are not unrelated objectives. Under this doctrine, it
arrogated to itself the right to object or worse, take action should
its will thus expressed be flouted.
Another feature of security thinking in this phase was that one thought
of security policy essentially in the context of the relationship
between states. Thus, one was assuming that all the threats to the
state came from outside. Given the Cold War context of this thinking,
it also yielded the convenient corollary that those states that had
to secure themselves within their boundaries were 'other', and in
fact posed a threat. Of course, the flaw to this reasoning was that
several of the allies of the US in this quest were in fact, states
whose governments had to secure themselves constantly against internal
dissent. But that is not our main point here. We are simply trying
to understand what the term 'security' has meant to us in the past.
Given that: (1) security always referred to the state; and (2) it
always referred to threats emanating outside the state, what were
the threats that were grist to this mill and what was left out?
If the objective was to secure the state, then one must start by
looking at its elements. We are taught in introductory political science
classes that four elements make up the legal entity we call the state:
territory, population, government and sovereignty. Defending the state
from outside threats must mean threats to these elements from outside
the state. Territorial disputes with neighbouring states, whether
stemming from contentious borders, irredenta, ethnic enclaves outside
the territory or simply the expansionist ambitions of one state. Invasion
and conquest, rather uncommon now, threaten the sovereignty of the
state. But beyond these, even when analytically, scholars and policy-makers
limited the scope of 'security' discussions, there were real palpable
threats out there to these very elements.
It is a commonplace that after the Cold War, ethnic and other internal
conflicts have become widespread. This is not true. The Cambodian
genocide dates back to the Cold War, from one point of view, Vietnam
was an internal conflict in which outside powers got involved, the
civil wars in East Pakistan, in Lebanon, in Sudan and in Central America,
all were fought when apparently nothing much was going on. Further,
while the large states of Asia won their independence in the late
1940s, elsewhere in the world, struggles for independence, several
of them violent, were being waged and rather bitterly. Acquiring proxies,
and not just because of the Cold War, some of these waged long after
independence had nominally been granted-think Angola, Namibia, Mozambique.
The internal and the international, kept artificially separate even
today in scholarship and in diplomatic rhetoric, were all the time
fuzzy. In most of these contexts, problems arising from within the
state snowballed into interstate issues as kin states (that is, states
that share ethnic communities), meddling neighbours and distant states
with proximate interests all acted as stakeholders-training, arming
and sometimes even fighting in the resulting conflicts. These conflicts
would seek to determine external limits (Kashmir), secure self-determination
(Bangladesh), avert secession (Bangladesh, Punjab, Biafra, Congo)
or define the nature of the regime to be established through the conflict
(Vietnam, Korea). No matter how they ended, each possible outcome
would alter the existing state, the inter-state system, the regional
strategic environment and the global balance of power.
We have to ask ourselves: did this now-traditional idea of security
capture the gamut of threats faced even by states alone in the real
world? The answer is no, and it was evident to political elites in
other parts of the world.
Step outside the Cold War framework whereby we regard the middle
decades of the last century. With the emergence of large Asian states
from imperial dominion, there emerged also an alternate way of viewing
and positioning oneself in the world. Leaders of several new states,
especially Nasser from Egypt, Nehru from India and Tito from Yugoslavia,
followed regional solidarity initiatives with the founding of the
non-aligned movement. The non-aligned states would belong in neither
camp, but would take positions on issues on a case-by-case basis.
Over the next three decades, they would also seek repeatedly to front-stage
issues that were important to them in the world institutions that
they supported, namely the United Nations system. If you study international
relations outside this country, as I did, then the history of the
post-World War Two period is often told in terms of these issues,
rather than the Cold War.
In the first decade, the issue of decolonization was the first to
animate these new states. The emerging political order recognized
the principle of national self-determination, as was evident in the
Trusteeship Council's objective of helping states placed under its
jurisdiction (former German and Italian then mandated to the British
and French) move towards self-determination. Banding together to oppose
imperial subordination, the non-aligned states also took on two other
manifestations of the same phenomenon. The first was apartheid the
white minority regime in Rhodesia and in South Africa. Over the decades,
they lent moral and material support to the African resistance movements,
through boycotts and sanctions and as their material conditions improved,
institutionalized assistance.
As one country after another gained independence, it was evident
that no enslaved peoples step out from bondage into a glorious perfect
dawn. Rather, they must in some cases then clean up the ravages of
war, and everywhere, redress decades of outside resource exploitation,
generate enough capital to build modern industries and play a game
of economic and technological catch-up in which they have no hope.
In most cases, political freedom has not come with freedom from hunger,
homelessness and disease. Further, the attempt to raise the capital
necessary to deal with these problems was neither easy to come by
nor available without a heavy price in the form of economic and/or
political concessions. Rivalries elsewhere easily transferred to a
competition to provide the necessary assistance, but accepting this
assistance meant alignment of some sort-a price that some countries
did pay. As scholarship responded to this by developing theories about
the relationship between center and periphery, so did the diplomatic
arena respond with the rhetoric about the 'New International Economic
Order.'
Now, you might ask, what has all this got to do with security? Plenty.
In the experience of these new states, which were now being variously
labeled as the 'Third World', 'LDCs or least developed countries',
'underdeveloped countries,' 'developing countries' and most of whom
were members of the non-aligned movement… in the experience of
these countries, which constitute the major part of the world's population,
all the assumptions about 'security' were wrong. First, the idea that
the state was the primary, if not only, referent of 'security' seemed
an incomplete conceptualization. Second, the notion that threats emanate
from outside the state simply did not apply to most conflicts and
crises worldwide.
Take colonialism and apartheid… Colonialism is easier to imagine
as a security problem given the wars that were fought in the late
nineteenth century between colonizing powers. Further, if you grant
to traditional polities the same sovereign rights as contemporary
ones enjoy (or the colonizing powers did), then their loss of the
same must count as a security violation. However, think for a minute
of all the other consequences colonialism brought:
· Thousands of 'natives' were captured and shipped off as slaves
or as indentured plantation labour. This was a grievous loss of personal
freedom, but also apparently, those thus captured were simply not
safe in their homes.
· Colonialism/imperialism tied local producers to global production
processes that rendered their traditional crafts obsolete. Thus, people
who had been able to subsist and also sustain social and cultural
activity were suddenly dispossessed and had to fight for survival.
· The introduction of European ways of looking at property
created landed classes where land had previously been communally held,
left thousands landless-a condition that persists into this millennium.
Furthermore, where the creation of new landed gentries required also
that they collect taxes on behalf of the colonial authority, new forms
of oppression were born.
· Colonial administrations repatriated the profits of the colonial
enterprise to the metropolis. The resulting 'drain of wealth' ensured
that the ravages of colonialism would not be easily fixed in the post-independence
era. My country, India, went in less than two hundred years from being
a wealthy society with a surplus of capital to an underdeveloped society
requiring multilateral assistance.
· The valorization of some groups, some languages, some customs
over others divided those societies, eroding their cohesion forever.
· Some colonizing powers were more arbitrary and cruel, we
sometimes say, but at the end of the day, all colonial administration
was arbitrary. In each instance, arrest and torture without trial,
massacres and other measures of coercion were a central part of the
colonial political arsenal.
I will stop here and ask you: if I was to consider the colonial experience
salient to the consideration of security only from the state's point
of view, what would I miss? For the newly independent states of the
world, none of this was news, and the thought that such systems could
persist was intolerable. In a variation of the collective security
theme that was part and parcel of other post-World War II enterprises,
they were simply saying: none of us is free and safe as long as even
one of us is in bondage and unsafe.
One way to define security is in terms of the values that a society
holds dear. Walter Lippmann said, "… a nation is secure
to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice
core values if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged,
to maintain them by victory in such a war." And Arnold Wolfers
wrote, "Security, in any objective sense, measures the absence
of threats to acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence
of fear that such values will be attacked." From the point of
view of colonized societies, the very fibre of their value-systems
was undermined by the imposition of foreign rule.
Likewise, if we were to think in traditional terms, unjust as it
is, apartheid would be simply an internal policy matter and pose no
threat to any state. But apartheid was a system of great structural
violence. Hundreds, thousands were beaten, jailed, tortured or killed
over the decades that the system prevailed. If this was not a security
problem, then I must ask: who was safe in this time? Blacks whom the
system effaced as far as possible? Coloureds, who were neither Black
nor White, but caught in the crossfire? Whites, who were victims of
violent dissenters against the system? Who was safe? And if anybody
wasn't, then how could this not be a security problem? Furthermore,
the South African state showed itself very willing to intervene and
enforce its will on its borders. Several of the states in this neighbourhood
depend on South Africa for access to the outside world-think Lesotho,
completely surrounded by South Africa or Swaziland, Botswana or Zimbabwe,
which are landlocked. South Africa also trained and supported opposition
movements in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. So, even in those narrow
traditional terms, apartheid posed a threat to international security.
And what about development? For the countries of the 'Third World,'
on many levels development was a security issue. It was about being
secure in food supply so you were not dependent on, and vulnerable
to, any other state. It was about producing enough of your necessities
so your debt would not rise to the point you could not pay it, or
that your scarce stocks of convertible currencies was not depleted.
A focus on the one hand on security in terms of the state's survival
and free market politics on the other meant that the rhetoric of the
non-aligned movement that talked itself hoarse about a new international
economic order which would ultimately facilitate the betterment of
people stuck in less fortunate conditions not only fell on deaf ears,
but in the Cold War context, sounded a great deal like socialism.
Thus, even simple things like the need to irrigate fields left a state
vulnerable to the vagaries of the international situation. But the
state's own economic and political vulnerabilities are minor compared
to those of its 'poor, huddled masses'.
Is development a security problem? For families dispossessed of their
land and displaced by poverty, for young village girls sold into prostitution
in distant brothels and young boys rented out to sex tourists by their
starving families, for homeless migrant workers in the crowded cities
of the developing world targeted in every passing riot, for villagers
who face floods one year and famine the next… this is a no-brainer.
Yes, it is. The lack of development is, and so is development itself.
Two examples of the latter:
· Power-generating projects, which symbolize a certain dream
or vision of development, have been great offenders in this respect.
Hindsight being 20/20, let us see how:
o Large hydro-electric projects that were located on seismic fault
lines have precipitated earthquakes and mudslides, destroying settlements
and livelihoods, displacing people, sometimes exposing them to severe
weather conditions. Thousands die.
o When dams are built, some adjacent settlements are flooded and people
are displaced from their homes. They lose the means of livelihood
and are resettled in unfamiliar environments where their skills do
not translate easily. Their lives have changed irrevocably and for
the worse.
· In order to redress traditional disadvantages and colonial
inequities, many new states introduce policies that have affirmative
action-like effects. For instance, they might choose to favour one
language over others for administrative purposes. This has the consequence
of denying non-native speakers of that language access to educational
and employment opportunities. Thus dispossessed, they face economic
insecurities in the short run, but in the long run their increasing
alienation threatens the cohesion of the polity.
In the late 1980s, as decolonisation was more or less complete and
apartheid being dismantled, there were renewed attempts by coalitions
outside the two blocs to influence the disarmament agenda. However,
these were overshadowed by the fall of the Soviet Union and the end
of the Cold War.
Beyond the jubilation and the pronouncements of the 'end of history,'
now, scholarship in the west was faced with two questions:
1. Why had no one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union?
2. What threats and insecurities would this new era bring?
Attempts to answer the first question demolished the first shibboleth
of what I will now call traditional security studies: that the sole
salient referent of security was the state. As people pointed to the
struggles for self-determination in the Baltic and Caucasian republics,
the economic stagnation and disproportionate defence spending of the
Soviet Union, the denial of cultural rights to non-Russian speakers
and the violation of others' civil rights… all of the reasons
they came up with pointed to two things: (1) that security had other
referents which were significant enough to have such a large historical
impact, and (2) securing the state was meaningless in the face of
these other insecurities experienced by individuals and groups within
the state.
The second question laid to rest the notion that threats to the state
emanated outside its borders. Clearly, in the case of the Soviet Union,
which might be said to have imploded, this was not true. If security
threats emanated from within and without, then the scope of security
research needed to expand other sources of insecurity as well, within
and without the state. The reality here is that the policy world did
not wait for the Cold War to end before identifying and responding
to threat perceptions within state borders. The totalitarian systems
were famous for this: from Hitler's racist sweeps through the German
population to Stalin's purges. However, no society has been entirely
immune to acting on perceived internal security threats: not the US
in the McCarthy era, not India during the Indira years and then in
response to insurgencies, not Britain in its response to the IRA.
The list is endless, but scholarship was finally catching up with
the real world.
Now that the old, narrow, rigid understandings of security no longer
seemed adequate to describe, leave alone explain the world, how was
'security' to be understood? Accepting multiple referents and threats
brought its own problems. What are the borders, the limits of this
field of policy or analysis?
Let me explicate by referring to the work of two scholars that I
admire. The first, Edward Kolodziej, reads history to identify three
objectives that a state (or government) must meet: order, welfare,
legitimacy. The primary purpose of government, according to Hobbes
for instance, is order. But our expectations go beyond government
acting as a policeman, stopping us from beating each other to pulp.
We also expect government to enforce the sanctity of contracts we
make. In some historical and philosophical contexts, this pertains
to the right to property. But over time, the state has also been seen
as the engine of economic and technological change-think about Germany
after its unification and Japan in the Meiji Era. In the newly decolonized
states, this mandate has expanded to include socio-economic development-from
the eradication of poverty, to making the initial, loss-making investments
in the infrastructural sector, to setting particular paths of agricultural,
industrial and financial growth. This, in day-to-day terms, this meant
that making sure that people had enough to eat, a place to stay, clothes
on their person, a source of livelihood and access to education and
healthcare. A tall order, but Kolodziej argues, one that must be met
and which there can no longer be any compromises on. Moreover, beyond
order and welfare, he says that in this day and age, people demand
accountability. That is, governments have to be seen as legitimate
in the eyes of their subject-populations-while this does not mean
they have to be elected, his point is that today, there appears to
be some consensus that some amount of popular consent, tacit or overt,
seems necessary. This is why military rulers and other non-democratic
governments find it necessary to demonstrate that they do enjoy some
modicum of popular support. Thus, order, welfare and legitimacy become
the bedrocks of a successful, sustainable polity, and insofar as the
polity does not deliver on these three counts, it is insecure. This
opens a whole range of political issues beyond the conventional scope
of the field, from minority rights to sustainable development, for
instance.
The other scholar whose work I admire, Barry Buzan, categorizes five
dimensions of security and insecurity: military, political, economic,
societal and ecological. Military insecurity comprises the back and
forth of arms races, escalation and de-escalation, between two armed
adversaries, usually states. Political insecurity arises from the
structural violence in a polity and from the failure of state mechanisms
to deliver on their mandate (which Kolodziej defines as order, welfare
and legitimacy). Economic insecurity is the easiest for many of us
to imagine: poverty, starvation, unemployment, indebtedness at the
micro and macro levels and at the macro, imbalance in trade, low reserves
of gold or foreign exchange, lack of access to critical natural resources,
and sometimes, natural disasters. Ecological insecurity is the consequence
of overuse of non-renewable resources, scarcities like those of water,
pollution and climate change. For countries like Bangladesh and the
Maldives, global warming is not about milder winters but flooding
and the prospect of being submerged. Finally, societal insecurity
includes threats to the survival of languages and customs, and national
identity.
Both Buzan and Kolodziej have no argument with the state being the
central referent of security studies. And they have a point. When
you expand the range of issues as they have done, there is no end
to what can be counted under the rubric of 'security' and that leaves
us theoretically with a field which might include anything from bad
mortgage rates that cause a family to experience financial problems
to 'Othello' because it concerns an inter-racial relationship that
ends badly. Seriously, restricting the scope of security policy, politics
and studies by concerning oneself primarily with the state and its
survival helps place some reasonable limits on the field.
This has three unfortunate political corollaries. The first is that
it prioritizes the state's security over all others in policy terms.
That is, in order to secure the state, other insecurities may be created.
This is a logic that accepts rape by soldiers as the spoils of war,
the destruction of villages as collateral damage and childhoods spent
in refugee camps as temporary phases. The second is that it obscures
the insecurities inherent in each of these situations, exacerbating
them in further defence of the state. Finally, and perhaps, most dangerously,
it obscures the relationship between the security of other referents,
whether individuals or groups or other states, and that of the state
itself.
On the 9th of September, 2001, as many of us were in our classrooms
and going about our daily routines, life imitated bad art. We have
all tried to make sense of what happened, why it happened and how
our lives have changed as a consequence thereof.
What happened? In a coordinated undertaking, terrorists walked through
airport security, boarded four planes in perfect coordination and
hijacked three of them to their horrible end. Before long, the assailants
were identified as members of Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization which
was based in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, or what remained of it after
the end of the Soviet occupation American-sponsored resistance and
subsequent civil war, was accused of harbouring terrorists and when
it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, became a natural target of
the new 'war against terrorism.'
In these almost five months, Americans have experienced threats they
only ever encountered in Tom Clancy movies-the fear of that first
couple of hours on 9/11, not knowing what was going to happen next
and anthrax scare, most immediately. Going on a trip, boarding a plane,
opening a letter all seemed to make ordinary Americans vulnerable
in a way one associates with soldiers on the battle-front. Trying
to understand why has brought the rest of the world into American
living-rooms in an unprecedented way.
The avalanche of commentary that followed these events, the teach-ins,
the public lectures all seemed to underline linkages that had not
been as apparent before this date: that alienation in one society
can lead to destruction in another, that small acts of discrimination
sow the seeds of great and terrible hatreds, that the simple pursuit
of national interest in one part of the world could cause so much
havoc in so many places, that for every act of inclusion one commits
one act of exclusion. In order to understand an attack on three American
buildings, it was necessary to understand displacement and police
action in Palestine, unemployment in Egypt, life in the refugee camps
of Peshawar, self-determination in Kashmir, the ways in which we all
distort the very faiths that can bring out the best in each of us.
For many Americans, 9/11 was shocking and traumatizing, unimaginable.
For people like me who study conflict and insecurity, the knowledge
that there are places in the world where everyday is 9/11 never leaves
us. For us, educators, educated people engaged with issues in our
society, in this room, 9/11 and its consequences have provided a unique
teaching moment.
And a moment to consider the meaning of the term I have spoken about,
but intentionally not defined: security. This is intentional. I want
to leave you with this question: what is security?
No matter what political affiliations each of us holds, we need to
ask with each policy, each action: who is this rendering secure and
who is it rendering insecure? Because the politics of the security
dilemma, when each advance in your security causes in an increase
in my insecurity, is dangerous ultimately to all of us. And modelling
security as a zero-sum game stifles our ability to arrive at creative
and sustainable compromises. Security is indivisible. Either we are
all safe, or none of us. This is the lesson of history that must inform
the way in which we define our own security and the way in which we
define security in our analyses and in our policies.
Thank you.
(Talk given at the Capitol Forum teachers workshop,
Hartford, CT, 2-7-2002)
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