Critical Approaches to International Security

Critical Approaches to
International Security

K. M. Fierke

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1
Politics and security 4

PART I CONTEXT 11
1 Definitions and Redefinitions 13
Realism and the Cold War 16
The methodological debate 22
Return to the military definition? 28
2 The Proliferation of Concepts 33
Essentially contested concepts 33
An ethnocentric concept 35
Proliferation of concepts 42
Conclusion 51

PART II CONSTRUCTION 53
3 Change 55
Human nature and social construction 56
Structures and agents 60
Cause versus reasons 68
Conclusion 74
4 Identity 75
Aspects of identity 75
Identity and discourse analysis 81
Identity and the ‘clash of civilizations’ 87
Conclusion 97
5 The Production of Danger 99
The representation of danger 100
The politics of danger 108
The production of insecurity 112
What is at stake? 118

V
vi Contents

PART III PRACTICE 121

6 Trauma 123
Psychologizing trauma 124
The securitization of trauma 132
The politicization of trauma 137
Conclusion 143
7 Human Insecurity 144
Human security 145
Development and security 150
A critical analysis 155
Conclusion 155
8 Immanent Critique 167
Revisiting the themes 159
Questioning assumptions 170
Immanent critique 184
9 Emancipation 186
Emancipation 187
The state is a provider of protection 190
Military strength is the core of security 193
Vulnerability must be avoided at all costs 199
Conclusion 204

Notes 206
References 210
Index 231
 Human Insecurity

he last chapter examined trauma as a form of human insecurity

T that reproduces the experience of war, as well as therapeutic possi­
bilities for dealing with a violent past. One further shadow of the past
that continues to influence global security is the gross inequalities
that are the legacy of imperialism and which have been exacerbated by
processes of globalization. In the 1990s, ‘failed states’, many of which
were a product of decolonization, multiplied. Bloody intra-state
conflict did as well. The old concept of security, focusing on conflict
between states, is of minimal use for understanding this phenomenon.
Two developments in the mid-1990s provided an alternative point of
departure. The first was a concept of human security, articulated in
the 1994 UN Human Development Report. Human security shifts atten­
tion away from states to individuals, emphasizing human rights,
safety from violence and sustainable development. The second was a
rethinking of the relationship between security and development,
previously two separate areas of analysis. This rethinking gave rise to a
conclusion that underdevelopment is dangerous in so far as it corre­
lates and coexists with violent conflict (Duffield 2001; Hampson 2001).
Achieving human security, in this framework, requires the transfor­
mation of entire societies into liberal democracies.
These developments have reinforced the idea that the international
community, or the United States more specifically, has a responsibility
to spread democracy to other areas of the world. This chapter will
explore these themes and the complex questions they raise. The first
section will develop the concept of human security. The second will
examine the convergence of development and security discourses in
the 1990s. The third section undertakes a critical analysis, examining
the conceptual apparatus surrounding the human security issue. 1
argue that greater attention needs to be directed to analysis of the
processes and power by which human insecurity is produced in practice
rather than focusing on efforts to fix the definition of concepts. The
latter is often implicated in the very historical and contemporary
structures that have given rise to widespread insecurity.

144
 Human Insecurity 145

Human security

Human security was first popularized by the UN Development

Programme and was a response to an observation after the end of the
Cold War that in today’s conflicts civilians are often the victims and
even the primary targets of violence. Human security builds on an
idea, which had been gaining momentum since the end of World
War 11, that people’s rights are at least as important as those of states.
It has relevance in a context where, since the end of the Cold War, the
majority of casualties in war have been civilian, where more than 30
million people have been displaced from their homes, where large
numbers of child soldiers have been recruited or forced into violent
conflict, and where rape has become a standard practice of warfare.
The human security agenda is an attempt to respond to a new global
reality of failed states. As McRae (in McRae and Hubert 2001:15) notes:
When states fail, civilians suffer foremost. Because the international
system that grew up in the twentieth century was designed to protect
states and state sovereignty and to enhance security between states, the
international system is struggling to protect civilians within states. The
tools are not there, though some are now being developed in the face
of staggering challenges.

The concept of human security emerged from the fusion of several

concepts (Hampson 2001:152). The first, which was introduced by the
Brundtland Commission in 1987, was sustainable development. The
commission’s report argued that environmental protection was a
necessary condition for the long-term survival of humanity and,
subsequently, of any long-term development strategy (World
Commission on the Environment and Development 1987). The
second, introduced by the first human development report of the
United Nations Development Programme in 1990, was human devel­
opment. The report stated that ‘people must be at the center of all
development [and] . . . that while growth in national production
(GDP) is absolutely necessary to meet all essential human objectives,
what is important is to study how this growth translates - or fails to
translate - into human development’ (UNDP 1990: iii). In the fifth
Human Development Report in 1994, human development was merged
with a significantly broadened security agenda to produce human
security (Hampson 2001:153).
The core concern underpinning the human security concept is the
inextricable interrelationship between freedom from want and free­
dom from fear (Thomas 2004: 353). This rests on a holistic under­
standing in which the vulnerability of individuals poses a threat to -
and thus the safety of individuals is key to - global security (Hampson
146 PRACTICE

2004: 350). Beyond this basic underlying agreement, advocates of

human security have emphasized three different themes. The first is
human rights and the rule of law, focusing in particular on personal,
legal, political and civil rights and anchored in the fundamental
liberal assumption that individuals have a basic right to ‘life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness’ (Hampson 2001: 5). The hope is to alter
the political calculations of governments so as to deepen and
entrench human rights norms by means of strategies that involve
sanctions, shaming, prosecution and tribunals, as well as the new
International Criminal Court. The second is the safety of peoples,
which includes basic personal rights, among them subsistence. The
intention is to provide protection and assistance to vulnerable popu­
lations during war, in the form of emergency assistance and human­
itarian relief, secure the moral and legal rights of non-combatants in
war, assist in building the peace and preventing future conflict, and
improve the basic living conditions of refugees. The third theme is
sustainable development, including economic, social and environ­
mental rights. This strand focuses on multiple threats related to
underdevelopment in a global context, including unchecked popula­
tion growth, migrations, disparities in economic opportunity, and
other problems rooted in socio-economic inequalities or social injus­
tice. The strategic objective is to alleviate poverty, to redistribute
wealth and to encourage participatory governance. This is the most
controversial of the three in so far as it isolates the state of the global
economy, the forces of ‘globalization’ and the health of the environ­
ment as legitimate subjects of concern given their impact on the
‘security’ of the individual (ibid.).
One major focus of the human security agenda was a treaty that
banned landmines. Landmines are often left scattered around a land­
scape after war. People, and particularly women and children, can
become victims just by going about their daily business. Other issues
on the agenda include protecting civilians in armed conflict; reform­
ing sanction regimes to mitigate some of the more negative effects on
civilians - as in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of children died as
a result of economic sanctions: the rights of women, for instance, in
Afghanistan, where women were severely oppressed by the Taliban
regime: humanitarian intervention to protect against future Rwandas
or Srebrenicas or to prevent ethnic cleansing; and the demobilization
and rehabilitation of combatants, and particularly child soldiers. The
International Criminal Court, which opens the possibility of punish­
ing war crimes and crimes against humanity, has also been an import­
ant item on the human security agenda.
Middle-range powers, such as Canada and Norway, have played a key
role in the development of this agenda, linking it in the 1990s to
 Human Insecurity 147

human rights, international law, equitable socio-economic develop­

ment and the promotion of a humanitarian agenda. While holding the
UN Security Council presidency in February 1999, Canada put human
security on the agenda and initiated a larger discussion of the effects
of violent conflict on civilians. This opened up the possibility of
expanding the jurisdiction of the Security Council beyond the conven­
tional emphasis on states, as it relates to international peace and secu­
rity, to include the security of individuals as well (Suhrke 1999: 266).
The initiative was part of a general Canadian strategy in the 1990s,
motivated by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, to make humanitarian
issues into ‘high politics’. The hope was that the UN might function
more proactively to prevent humanitarian crises, establish mecha­
nisms for more rapid intervention, and strengthen socio-economic
structures in an effort to prevent conflict and rebuild societies after
war (ibid.).
Since then, the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (ICISS) has proposed shifting the terms of debate away
from the ‘right to intervene’ towards the ‘responsibility to protect’.
The latter rests on an interpretation of sovereignty that assumes the
responsibility of a given state to protect its citizens. This perspective
incorporates a concept of ‘human security’ over more narrow
definitions of national security. While the ICISS recognized the poten­
tial difficulty of getting states to embrace the responsibility to protect,
it saw the challenge as a necessary one:
Nothing has done more harm to our shared ideal that we are all equal
in worth and dignity and that the earth is our common home, than the
inability of the community of states to prevent genocide, massacre and
ethnic cleansing. If we believe that all human beings are equally enti­
tled to be protected from acts that shock the conscience of us all, then
we must match rhetoric with reality, principle with practice. We
cannot be content with reports and declarations. We must be prepared
to act. (ICISS 2001)
By 2005, a shift towards broader acceptance of this concept was visible
on the part of the international community. The one positive develop­
ment, in an otherwise disappointing UN summit in September 2005,
was an agreement by leaders that ‘each individual state has the
responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes,
ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (MacAskill 2005).
Despite blocking attempts by Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Russia,
Cuba, Iran and Syria, a majority of states, including many in Africa, the
EU and Japan, backed this Canadian initiative, which was viewed as a
significant advance in international humanitarian law and a break
with the UN’s tradition of non-intervention (‘To Protect and Defend’
2005).
148 PRACTICE

A critical concept?
Human security emphasizes meeting basic material needs as well as
preserving human dignity, which includes meaningful participation
in a community. Caroline Thomas (2000; xi) argues that in this respect
the concept creates distance from the neo-liberal conception of the
individual as competitive and possessive. Although states are not the
focus, they are not unimportant. They should play a crucial role in
creating and maintaining structures of authority and responsibility
that contribute to human security. However, in a globalizing world,
states often don’t possess the means to deliver the goods. They can’t
always implement international obligations because they lack control
within their borders and have inadequate institutional capacity and
resources. 'The breakdown of order is often accompanied not only by
conflict, but also by economic and social collapse, which can lead to
famine and mass migration. In these circumstances, traumatic inse­
curity is the daily lot of civilians. This is exacerbated by the prolifera­
tion of non-state actors, such as international arms dealers, non-state
paramilitaries, international crime and terrorism. A central underly­
ing assumption of the human security paradigm is that sustainable
economic development requires a minimal level of security.
One of the pioneers in rethinking security, Barry Buzan (2004), has
criticized the human security concept. He argues first that it is already
encompassed by the Copenhagen School’s concept ‘societal security’.
Second, it is reductionist in so far as it makes the individual, or
humanity as a whole, the referent object of security. As a result, the
concept is not sufficiently differentiated from human rights and elim­
inates the distinctiveness of international security. Buzan recognizes
that the state is ‘a necessary condition for individual security because
without the state it is not clear what other agency is to act on behalf of
individuals’ (Buzan 2000: 6). He states that, because it bypasses the
state, human security takes away what seems to be the necessary agent
through which individual security might be achieved.
Arguably, this misses the point. As Williams (2003) points out, socie­
tal security refers to the process by which society is securitized and
acquires an identity, which, as discussed in chapter 5, may be linked to
processes of state securitization. Human security, by contrast, begins
with a recognition that the greatest contemporary security problems
relate to human displacement, to the inability of many ‘failed states’
to protect their populations, and to the violation by states of the
human rights of their citizens. As Hoogensen and Rottem (2004: 158)
note, it is precisely because ‘state security has often been inadequate
that discussions of reorienting the referent have arisen in the first
place.’ Both societal and state security, and for that matter the concept
 Human Insecurity 149

of international security, presume an environment defined by cohe­

sive communities who interact with each other in a diplomatic
system. Within ‘failed states’ this cohesiveness has broken down - if it
in fact existed at all - and with it any possibility of normal politics.
Within a ‘securitized’ society or state, ‘security’ may be constructed at
the expense of the civil or human rights of individuals, in so far as this
corresponds with a suspension of normal politics. If, as Buzan recog­
nizes, ‘international security’ transfers the problem of individual secu­
rity to the state, then human insecurity must be understood as a prob­
lem arising from a recognition that this relationship has broken down,
either because the state is unable to provide security, or because it has
become a source of insecurity. As Bellamy and McDonald (2002: 374)
note, ‘if states are often agents of human insecurity rather than secu­
rity, then the cooptation of human security into a static policy frame­
work risks limiting the emancipatory potential of this discourse.’
Human security is a critical concept in so far as it raises questions
about the focus and assumptions of realist security studies. It also has
critical potential on a methodological level. Scholars have complained
about the existence of over thirty definitions of human security (Alkire
2004: 359). The lack of clear boundaries has been useful for political
actors who seek to organize as broad a coalition as possible behind the
concept, and for anthropologists who seek to uncover how it is used in
different contexts (Winslow and Eriksen 2004:361). Scholars of human
security have, on the one hand, sought a more precise category in
order to improve its analytic strength (Thomas and Tow 2002; Newman
2004), and, on the other, have been troubled by the difficulty of fixing
the definition of human security (Paris 2004: 370). Kyle Grayson (2004)
raises a concern about the politics of conceptualizing human security.
He asks who, what and where is marginalized when ‘experts’ provide
a precise/scientific definition that is of practical use, and argues that
the focus of attention should be the power-knowledge nexus that the
concept constitutes. Further, he claims, the ‘pathological obsession
with achieving definitional universality avoids the ethical dimensions
of politics as an enterprise concerned with the legitimacy of dominant
relations of power.’
Like the concept of securitization, human security needs to be
analysed in context, to see how its use contributes to the definition of
threats and practical solutions. Unlike the concept of securitization,
which emphasizes the construction and consolidation of referent
objects, human security is a reaction to the production of human inse­
curity. As such, it is less important to find the essential definition of
the concept than to analyse the conceptual underpinnings of the
practices that make genocide, famine or environmental destruction
possible.
150 PRACTICE

The methodological issue points to questions about its critical poten­

tial in practice. On the one hand, despite its distance from liberal
notions of possessive individualism, as noted by Thomas, the concept
does have links to a liberal model of development. In this respect, many
of its assumptions are in conflict with more critical theories of develop­
ment. On the other hand, the concept has been used to present a criti­
cal challenge to current practice. Human security has been a key
concept of NGOs and others who are interested in actually transforming
global economic structures. For instance, the Jubilee 2000 campaign
called for a cancellation of the poorest countries’ debt. This call involved
a rejection of structural adjustment programmes as contributing to the
debt burden and to the erosion of human security in recipient coun­
tries.’ NGOs regard the transformation of social and economic struc­
tures as essential to human security, arguing that basic economic and
social rights cannot be delivered within current structures.
As Thomas (2000: 9) notes, the ‘shift to human security . . . high­
lights the importance of scrutinising global processes that may impact
on, even jeopardise security and the global governance structures
which drive these processes.’ Whether human security is understood
to be part of a new regime of power or a challenge to existing regimes,
the concept rests on a recognition that the traditional means of
providing safety and security to civilians, that is, the nation-state, is no
longer - if it ever was - effective in many parts of the world.

Development and security

The first section pointed to a tension between the liberal assumptions
underlying the human security concept and its critical potential. This
section will further develop this tension by exploring the roots of the
concept in the convergence of development and security discourses
since the end of the Cold War. The human security concept was
conceived in the coupling of development and security discourses,
which reflect the combined concern about freedom from want and
fear. Development and security used to be largely separate areas of
study and practice. Development studies addressed questions of global
inequality and poverty. Security studies focused on conflict and war. It
is the purpose of this section to analyse the historical context and the
significance of this convergence.
Development, as conventionally used, refers to the process of transi­
tion from a subsistence to a modern industrial economy. This process
has been understood to be elite driven and reliant on modern science
and technology (Thomas 2000: 34). Development studies and practice
rested on an assumption that societies in the South could replicate the
 Human Insecurity 151

social and economic changes experienced by the North since the eigh­
teenth and nineteenth centuries. This model assumed the possibility
of unlimited economic growth, and that it would be possible to sustain
a global economy where everyone had living standards comparable to
Europeans or North Americans.
The liberal development model can be contrasted with one of the
oldest traditions of critical thinking in international relations. The
critical Marxist literature on development is premised on the idea that
globalization is not a new phenomenon. The underdevelopment of the
South has gone hand in hand with the development of the North in a
capitalist world economy. Critics of European imperialism in the early
part of the twentieth century, and not least Lenin ([1939] 1988), argued
that capitalism was fuelled by the need to expand in search of profit.
Imperialism was a manifestation of this global expansion in pursuit of
wealth. In the period following decolonization, these arguments were
adapted to explain less formal structures of control. Immanuel
Wallerstein’s (1974) World Systems Theory provided a framework for
understanding the relationship between the development of the
industrial core, the underdevelopment of a periphery, which provided
raw materials, and a semi-periphery, which produced luxury goods
and provided a buffer against revolutionary transformation.
Dependency theorists further examined how links between elites in
North and South reproduced a relationship of Southern dependency
and underdevelopment (Cardoso and Faletto 1979).
From the 1950s to the 1970s, a critical discourse of development
became popular in areas of the periphery that had been historically
exploited. This critical framework, like the theory, placed the back­
wardness of the economies of the former colonies in a larger global
context, in which the formal imperial relationship had since decolo­
nization been replaced by less formal processes of exploitation. For
instance. Northern companies purchased raw materials and labour
power in the South below their true cost. Cheap labour and cheap
Southern raw materials were transformed into manufactured goods in
the North. This exploitative relationship was simply a new expression
of the hierarchy that had constituted the capitalist world economy for
centuries. It wasn’t that the South was undeveloped, but rather that it
had been deliberately underdeveloped within a global relationship.
Poverty was a direct consequence of how wealth was produced. This
provided a global structural argument about the cause of poverty and
legitimized practices on the part of Southern governments to inter­
vene in the economy in order to lead the development process. At the
time, many Third World states joined together in calling for a
New International Economic Order, or a reorganization of the global
economy so that they would no longer be structurally disadvantaged.
152 PRACTICE

This discourse of underdevelopment has largely disappeared since

the 1980s, and particularly since the end of the Cold War. In its place,
a neo-liberal agenda, which promotes the free market, the universal
legitimacy of private economic power and individual choice within
the marketplace, has emerged. The International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the
majority of governments have adopted these norms. They have
promoted globalization through the liberalization of trade, invest­
ment and finance, which in many cases has required the reform of
national economies. Privatization and deregulation have been
required as a condition of loan packages.
The debt crisis that shook Latin America and Africa in the 1980s
provided an opportunity for the IMF and World Bank to institutional­
ize structural adjustment programmes as a strategy for managing debt
(Thomas 2000: 56). In the 1990s, attention shifted to the economies in
transition and then to East Asia. The transition from government
intervention in the economy to a free market was most dramatic in
Central and Eastern Europe with the end of the Cold War. The former
socialist economies, where almost everything had been publicly
owned, were dramatically opened up to the global economy after the
fall of communism, propelling many states into the ranks of the Third
World and making them extremely vulnerable to the workings of the
global market. Liberal policies, imposed by international institutions,
have often had a detrimental effect on the populations of these soci­
eties, bringing greater hardship that has undermined the consolida­
tion of democracy.
At the start of the twenty-first century, endemic and deep poverty
affected over a billion people, and the gap between the rich minority
of the world’s population (located mostly, but not exclusively, in North
America, Western Europe and Japan) and most of the rest of the world
was steadily widening. In contrast to economic assumptions that glob­
alization is delivering economic growth for all, free market liberaliza­
tion since the 1980s had accelerated the widening of this gap. The
combination of a widening rich-poor gap and an increasingly know­
ledgeable poor has contributed to a ‘revolution of unfulfilled expect­
ations’ and fuelled revolt from the margins, not least in the form of
terrorist or paramilitary activity (Rogers 2000).

Security
Accelerating globalization, on the basis of liberal economic principles,
was one post-Cold War development. Another was the outbreak
of ‘new wars’, such as those in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia or
Rwanda, which posed a significantly different kind of security
 Human Insecurity 153

problem than the Cold War. First of all, these were hot wars, primarily
outside of Europe, as distinct from the nuclear stand-off between the
superpowers. It is not that hot wars were new, but rather that they
tended, during the Cold War, to be subsumed by the larger superpower
conflict. With the end of the Cold War, the new wars become a focus of
international concern in themselves (Kaldor 1999).
The conflicts related in some cases to the failure of states to consoli­
date their authority over an area, which may have been exacerbated by
the loss of superpower funding as the Cold War ended. Failed states
and, along with them, conflict proliferated in the 1990s. The frame­
work of international security assumes the centrality of diplomacy,
states and state security. The new wars of the twenty-first century have
involved a wide range of actors, both state and non-state, both as
protagonists and as interveners, who are as likely to be defined by some
form of suprastate or intra-state identity. The victims in these conflicts
are overwhelmingly citizens, rather than the representatives of recog­
nizable state armies, and the protagonists likewise often lack any
identification with a state. Processes of militarization are not closely
monitored by the state, but have formed out of official and non-official
global networks of the arms trade, drug trafficking, etc. The global
downsizing of armies following the end of the Cold War created a large
pool of private mercenaries and an expanding role for them, and for
the privatization of security, under the auspices of corporate actors or
Western states (Musah in Milliken 2003:166-9).
The outbreak of new wars has corresponded with an increasing
emphasis in the academic literature and in political discourse on the
idea that liberal democracies don’t fight with one another. This idea
has been said to be the closest thing to a Taw’ in the study of interna­
tional relations. The Economist (1 April: 17) noted in 1995 that ‘the belief
that democratic states don’t go to war with one another has become a
commonplace of Western policy.’ Like the liberal discourses of
modernization, democratic peace theory rests on an assumption that
the experience of Western states, in this case the development of
peaceful relations between them, can be reproduced in other parts of
the world. As in the liberal discourse of modernization, emphasis is
placed on the internal composition of the state rather than the larger
global context. The internal development of democracy is the precon­
dition for common norms and peaceful relations with other demo­
cratic states. Subsequently, when internal politics are non-democratic,
or when relations exist between democratic and non-democratic
states, inter-state relations will continue to be governed by anarchy.
Critical scholars such as Barkawi and Laffey (1999) historicize these
relationships, situating the development of‘zones of peace’ and ‘zones
of war’ within global processes of social change. Globalization, in this
154 PRACTICE

type of argument, is not a recent phenomenon. Rather relations

between contemporary zones of peace and war are inseparable from a
history of Western imperialism and the internationalization of capi­
tal. In this respect, the context of the democratic peace includes not
only states in the core but transnational processes of domination and
subordination in the periphery, which have given rise to practices of
both accommodation and resistance. Far from being independent of
the state, as in contemporary discourses of globalization, these
processes depend on state power and have transformed the state.
Barkawi and Laffey (1999) argue that patterns of global social change
impact directly on the nature and meaning of democracy and war and
on the conditions under which states can and do use force. For
instance, democracy became one of the major organizing principles of
core states during the creation of a global system of empires, which
was forged and maintained by colonial wars. During the process of
colonization, and subsequent decolonization, states in both core and
periphery were mutually constituted. The emergence in former
colonies of modern forms of political and social organization, such as
the territorial state - and its subsequent failure - has to be understood
in terms of these historical processes within a global environment.
Empires and imperial states have repeatedly deployed force against
states and populations in the periphery in the service of the project of
extending European rule and institutions to the rest of the world. It is
not sufficient, in the analysis of states that are or have been both impe­
rial and liberal democratic, such as Belgium, Britain, France, the
Netherlands and the United States, to focus solely on the role of domes­
tic politics in their inter-state relations. Attention is needed to the
transnational constitution and international organization of force, as
well as the ordering of an internally differentiated and territorially
dispersed population (Barkawi and Laffey 1999:414).

Liberal governance as a solution

Liberal discourses of development and democracy have focused on
individual states, ignoring the embeddedness of these states in histor­
ical relations that are global. This focus has been maintained in the
merging of development and security discourses. Mark Duffield (2001)
provides a critical analysis of the relationship between security and
development, which, he argues, has increasingly been addressed
within a liberal governance model. Duffield argues that the disap­
pearance of critical analyses of development and underdevelopment is
part of a move from an inclusionary to an exclusionary economic and
political logic. Arguments about underdevelopment described a cap­
italist world economy driven by expansion and inclusion, that is,
 Human Insecurity 155

Southern economies were included as providers of cheap labour and

raw materials. As Manuel Castells (1996, 1998) argues, global capital­
ism has shifted to a new logic of consolidation and exclusion, which
has resulted in lower levels of commercial investment, except in fields
such as energy and a few valuable raw materials. Robert Cox (1995:41)
identifies a shift from attempts to promote economic development in
the South to ‘what can be called global poor relief and riot control’.
The logic of exclusion rests on efforts to restrict immigration from the
South, a hardening of the international refugee regime (UNHCR 1995)
and, thus, encouraging populations from war zones to remain within
conflict areas and avoid crossing international borders. The result of
these trends, among others, is the increasing isolation and exclusion
of the South from the dominant networks of the global information
economy (Duffield 2001: 5).
Along with this new logic, development discourse has changed from
an emphasis on supporting proWestern Southern elites through aid to
the transformation of entire societies. In the first half of the 1990s, the
international community was very focused on humanitarian inter­
vention in different conflict areas. This represented a shift of focus
away from Cold War deterrence between the superpowers to interven­
tion by multilateral organizations in hot wars that were more locally
defined. Peace support missions often brought a combination of civil­
ian NGOs and international peacekeepers, who were involved in the
distribution of aid to victims of war, in helping to keep transport lines
open for aid, or assisting in the management of refugees. The missions
sometimes involved a more explicit military component and military
intervention. These operations have given international organiza­
tions, both non-governmental and governmental, unprecedented
access to regions of the globe that had been far less accessible during
the Cold War (Duffield 2001: 31).
The change, since the mid-1990s, is, Duffield (2001:11) argues, one of
policy rather than in the nature of the conflict. The reason for the
change of policy is the conclusion that underdevelopment is danger­
ous and is a source of conflict. In this respect, ‘want’ perpetuates ‘fear’.
This conclusion, which is an extension of the liberal model, does not
locate underdevelopment or ‘failed states’ in an unjust global system
which has emerged along with a capitalist world economy and a
history of imperialism. The liberal governance model internalizes the
causes of conflict and political instability. Conflict is a result of an
undeveloped and a dysfunctional, war-torn society. The solution to
underdevelopment is to be found in the transformation of individual
societies rather than the global system. 'The policy of international
organizations has thus shifted from humanitarian assistance and aid,
per se, to the process of reconstructing post-conflict societies along
156 PRACTICE

liberal lines (ibid.). As a result, an increasingly complex array of UN

agencies, donor governments, NGOs and military establishments
worked together to bring about a change in societies so that problems
of the past don’t re-emerge. Their practice rests on an argument that
development is impossible without stability and that security isn’t
sustainable without development (ibid.: 16).
The logic of exclusion has been accompanied by criteria for inclu­
sion by which governments or populations have to show that they are
fit for consideration. Duffield examines human security as part of a
Foucauldian strategy of biopolitics, whereby a strategic complex of
global actors and governing agencies, through a newly formed
public-private relationship, shape and control civil populations
(Thomas 2004: 353). Duffield argues that the nature of power and
authority has changed radically. This new power, expressed in the glob­
alized structures of liberal peace, differs from old imperial structures.
Rather than the brute imposition of power, or the direct control of
territory, we see partnership and participation, which implies a
mutual acceptance of shared normative understandings. Inclusion in
global structures means buying into the norms that underpin these
structures. This development is a response to the demise of political
alternatives in the South, since the end of the Cold War, and the
demise of the socialist project. On the part of the West, it is an attempt
to stem refugee fiows and to transform entire societies, replacing
indigenous values and modes of organization with liberal ones.

A critical analysis
In the convergence of development and security discourses, critical
arguments about development have been replaced by liberal ones. The
marriage reinforced a liberal agenda of transforming entire societies
into liberal democracies. This agenda is problematic for two reasons.
First, as discussed in the last section, it represents a new regime of
power, albeit ‘softer’ than the old imperialist regime. Marxists view
human security as a repackaging of liberal humanitarianism, with its
routine failure to address underlying social causes (’Thomas 2004:353).
Second, to be explored in this section, the discourse failed to prob-
lematize the role of historical global relations in the production of
‘failed states’ and, subsequently, in the production of fear and want.
The discourse localizes agency in the ‘international community’ and
some Western states, which have taken on the role of‘fixing’ the prob­
lem of human insecurity. The US and NATO, in particular, become
agents of humanitarian intervention who will bring order to war-torn
regions. In fact, the resulting practice has the potential to reproduce
 Human Insecurity 157

historical relationships of power. A more effective approach to build­

ing democracy and, subsequently, human security needs to identify
and analyse the processes by which human insecurity is reproduced.
At the core of a more critical analysis is a methodological question.
In the first section of this chapter the critical potential of the human
security concept was presented as, in part, a question of the assump­
tions brought to the analysis of human security/insecurity and the
implications for practice. There are two dimensions to this claim. The
first regards the two models of development. The liberal model locates
the problem of human insecurity in the failure of individual states to
proceed along the pathway to successful statehood. The dependency
model, by contrast, locates the problem in historical and global rela­
tions that continue to constrain or underdevelop large parts of the
world. The two models represent different theoretical assumptions
about why some states are successful and others fail.
The second dimension, more explicitly methodological, regards the
consequence of these assumptions. In the liberal model, democracy is
an ideal type, towards which all states should want to progress. Failure
and success are measured against this ideal type. The failure of certain
states establishes the problem of human insecurity as arising from the
lack of stateness and prescribes a response, that is, reconstructing
the state as a liberal democracy. This is sound reasoning but rests on
the faulty assumption that there is an ideal form of democracy to
which all states could or should aspire. As Williams (2001:529) argues,
we don’t immediately recognize a democracy when we see one.
Democracies can be composed of different political institutions (e.g.
parliamentary or republican), different economic systems (social
democracy vs. market capitalism) and different cultural values (France
and the United States).
The liberal model fails to historicize processes of state-making or to
recognize local and global processes that have contributed to the
construction of different types of state. Milliken and Krause (Milliken
2003: 6) highlight the wide variety of institutional forms of represen­
tative rule that have emerged, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
fact that many of these institutional forms remained incomplete or
contested in many Western states until the latter part of the twentieth
century. The modern state has always been a work in progress that
relies on two implicit benchmarks. One benchmark is ‘stateness’,
against which any given state should be measured as having succeeded
or failed, which is the institutional dimension of state collapse. The other
is the normal and practical implications of such failure, or the func­
tional dimension of state failure. Full-blown collapse remains relatively
rare, while state maintenance (in a weakened or decayed capacity)
remains the norm. After Westphalia, the sovereign state was a legal
158 PRACTICE

fiction that fitted in only a loose way with the political reality. The
political reality required gaining and keeping de facto control. From
the outset, the modem state was an ideal of sovereign territoriality to
which rulers aspired, but which they seldom achieved.
Milliken and Krause (Milliken 2003: 7) argue that state-making has
been presented as a solution to the problem of political order, and has
involved three interconnected core functions, relating to security (the
process by which state elites consolidated their hold on power), repre­
sentation (the process of social contracting by which individuals
surrendered their unlimited freedoms) and welfare (the modern state
as an efficient mechanism for ensuring property rights and security
markets). They conclude that the ‘relationship between state and
nation, and between national identity and representative rule, are
dynamic products of political struggle, which have rarely been success­
fully imposed from outside or above’ (ibid.). Attempts to pin down the
essential nature of the state only end up reifying or idealizing it, strip­
ping what is, after all, a human (social and political) construct of its
historicity.
The pursuit of statehood has rested on ingrained assumptions about
appropriate forms of political organization and order, also adopted by
scholars and policy-makers in the post-colonial world. These assump­
tions incorporate the three narratives of security, representation and
welfare. The idea that legitimate nations, providing guarantees of
wealth and security, could be constructed within a few decades of
formal independence, was, argue Milliken and Krause, naïve. It
required taking the state out of its historical context and treating it as
an institutional form owing little or nothing to the historical forces
that created it. Many states emerging from decolonization didn’t qual­
ify for statehood by the criteria of international law in use at the time,
that is, ‘the existence of effective government with a centralized
administration and legislative organs’ (Brownlie 1979: 4). They were
granted independence but were, in fact, what Jackson (1990:177) refers
to as ‘quasi-states’:

Independence hardly changed the material conditions of the Third

World: it was a continuation of imperialism and colonialism under a
different name . . . The term ‘quasi-states’ therefore merely reiterates
what is already well known: that most Third World states are not yet
beneficial to the masses of ordinary people who inhabit them and
whose living conditions have improved little if at all as a result of inde­
pendence. After decolonization the levers of power and control
remained exactly where they were before: in the hands of the major
capitalist powers who were prepared to transfer sovereignty if that was
all that was necessary to satisfy Third World elites clamouring for ‘inde­
pendence’.
 Human Insecurity 159

This quasi-sovereignty reproduces the conditions for a form of neo­

colonial relationship where more powerful states, vis-à-vis inter­
national institutions and legal mechanisms, have been able to
maintain a dependent relationship (Grovogui 1996).
Once it is recognized that these states never really were states, the
question becomes not why they fail, but how or why they persist at all
(Milliken 2003:11). Once state failure and collapse are situated as possi­
ble outcomes of the process of state formation (and decay), it becomes
possible to rehistoricize the state system and to break out of the
constraints imposed by the idealized notion of state, presenting a
more dynamic vision of state and sovereignty. This vision rests on an
acknowledgement that the forces that produce strong, legitimate
states in one context may generate weak and collapsed states in
another, marked by different local and historical conditions. In this
respect, the assumption of idealized liberal states, to which all must
strive, becomes a factor in the construction and reproduction of failed
states.

Failed states
The critical methodological potential of human security lies not in
bringing an ideal model of democracy and political order to the ‘prob­
lem’ of failed states, but in an analysis of these processes of construc­
tion at different levels and how they intersect. As suggested in the last
chapter, the ‘sickness’ resides in our language, in the lack of clarity
regarding the role of assumed categories in constructing or reproduc­
ing particular forms of practice. The language of‘failed’ states, and the
conceptual apparatus surrounding it, is bound up in the construction
process. This conceptual apparatus is evident in the formulation of the
new ‘transformational diplomacy’ of the Bush administration in the
context of the War on Terrorism.
Transformational diplomacy is described in a document titled:
‘Conflict Transformation: The Nexus between State Weakness and the
Global War on Terror’ (Wong 2006). The author builds on the conclu­
sion of the National Security Strategy of the United States that ‘we are
threatened less by conquering states than failing ones’. These failed
states can ‘become a haven for terrorism’. The latter is interesting in
light of the state department’s acknowledgement in 2006 that Iraq was
at risk of becoming a safe haven for terrorists, three years after the US
invasion (MacAskill 2006). While state weakness is not new, the docu­
ment claims the present situation is different because there is a better
understanding of the interaction ‘between state failure, humanitarian
crises and our own security’. The paper calls for a more ‘reactive
response to crisis’ and a ‘strategic shift’ in thought processes, which
160 PRACTICE

involves a ‘mandate to improve coordination, planning, and imple­

mentation for reconstruction and stabilization assistance for coun­
tries and regions that are at risk of conflict, are in a conflict situation
or making the difficult transition from it.’ While emphasizing the
importance of‘local ownership’, the plan calls for ‘integrated, multi­
national interagency efforts’, civilian experts to grapple with the root
causes of conflict that often drive the use of terror, and ‘a reserve of
personnel that would be deployed overseas and would fill key immedi­
ate roles from police to judges to city planners’. In conclusion, the
document states that ‘the stakes are too high to not better address
state failure - indeed the entire spectrum of state weakness.’ It calls on
‘every part of our government’, as well as the non-governmental and
academic community, to be a part of the effort to transform societies
to be more stable and peaceful. The document reflects the extension of
the logic of state transformation, articulated by Duffield (2001), to the
post 9/11 context.
Pinar Bilgin and Adam Morton (2002) analyse contemporary repre­
sentations of post-colonial states that frequently revolve around
elements of deficiency or failure. They argue that the political devel­
opment literature, particularly in the United States, as exemplified by
scholars such as Lucian Pye and Sydney Verba (1965), relied on a model
of the state that presumed its ability to maintain political order,
thereby distinguishing ‘successful’ post-colonial states, which did have
effective control over societal forces, from ‘weak’ states that were
unable to pacify recalcitrant societal forces. State strength and success
is thus, in this literature, a function of the ability to manipulate coer­
cive resources (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 63).
More contemporary analyses of failed states also rely on classical
Weberian criteria of statehood. Jean-Germain Gros (1996), for instance,
has gauged degrees of ‘stateness’ along a continuum based on these
criteria, creating a taxonomy of‘failed states’, ranging from ‘anarchic
states’, such as Somalia and Liberia: to phantom or mirage states, such
as Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of the Congo): anaemic states,
such as Haiti: captured states, such as Rwanda: and absent states, such
as Mozambique. A similar logic is evident in the literature on democ­
ratization, where a universal model, predicated on a separation
between the political and economic spheres, is formalized and insti­
tutionalized, resulting in a depoliticization of the economic sphere
which removes it from political control (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 64).
This is reflected in aid and neo-liberal structural adjustment
programmes by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, who are
engaged in ‘democracy promotion’. The shift from the modernization
and development theories of the 1950s and 1960s to the democratiza­
tion theories of the 1980s and 1990s is one of emphasis, from the state
 Human Insecurity 161

as the centre of social control to ‘advocating and supporting the

construction of conformist civil societies as supposedly autonomous
spaces of individual freedom and association’ (ibid.: 65). What is miss­
ing from these logics, Bilgin and Morton argue, is any question about
the processes by which these states become ‘weak’ while others
become strong. They never ask the question of who has failed the
‘failed state’? The question is important because the representations
imply that the failure is down to the intrinsic characteristics of these
states, without reflecting on the colonial background or their periph­
eral position in a global political economy. In this respect, claims
about ‘failed states’ do not reflect on the power-knowledge relation­
ship (ibid.: 66).
These analyses point to a different type of question than liberal
approaches to human security, thereby highlighting the tension
contained within the concept. On the one hand, human security
embodies a number of liberal assumptions and has reinforced a liberal
agenda. On the other hand, it contains a potential for questioning and
rethinking these assumptions. Liberal approaches ask how security is
to be provided to individuals given the failure of states. More critical
analyses look to the global historical context, and the assumptions
underpinning it, to the processes by which ‘failed’ states, and subse­
quently human insecurity, are produced or reproduced. In what
follows I briefly present analyses of the local production of two forms
of human insecurity, that is, famine and genocide.

The construction of famine and genocide

Thus far a methodological theme has been emphasized. Fixing the
meaning of concepts goes hand in hand with the attempt by the inter­
national community to fix the problem of human insecurity. Both rely
on problem-solving theories which rest on scientific assumptions.
These theories take the world as it is and seek repairs within it. They
assume Western definitions while failing to recognize or acknowledge
the complicity of historical structures of power, dominated by Western
states, in producing (and defining) ‘problems’. Barkawi and Laffey
examine these processes in global terms. Milliken and Krause empha­
size the local particularity of these processes. In both cases, the prob­
lem relates to a lack of clarity regarding the language employed and a
failure to recognize the relationship between the use of categories and
the practices that emerge as a result. Since human insecurity is, given
its focus on the individual, generated at a local level, albeit linked to
the global, it is useful in conclusion to explore the dynamics of this
language-practice nexus in the production of particular forms of
insecurity.
162 PRACTICE

Famine and genocide appear on the surface to be quite distinct

phenomena, as the former is assumed to occur naturally while the
latter is a product of human intention. Famine is most often conceived
as a natural disaster, resulting from food shortages, agricultural fail­
ure, drought or overpopulation. Questions of agency most often relate
to the mobilization of aid on the part of the international community
or the failure of this mobilization, that is, how ‘successful’ states or the
international community can come to the aid of starving individuals
in ‘failed’ states. Amartya Sen (1981), the 1998 Nobel Laureate in
Economics, first revealed the political dimensions of famine, arguing
that it arises from a problem of distribution rather than scarcity.
Jenny Edkins (2000, 2005) problematizes the conceptualization of
famine as a natural disaster for which no one is to blame, and asks a
question about ‘who might be responsible for a famine, rather than
what caused it’. An important precedent for this alternative approach
is the 31 March 2005 UN Security Council resolution (1593) which
referred ‘the situation prevailing in the Darfur region’ of Sudan to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which is the first
time that those responsible for a famine have been faced with the
prospect of being held accountable and being brought to justice. What
is usually passed off as a natural disaster had, in this case, become an
indictment for a crime against humanity. Acts that suggested wide­
spread attacks against civilians included ‘extensive destruction and
displacement [that] resulted in a loss of livelihood and means of
survival for countless women, men and children’ (International
Commission of Inquiry on Darfur 2005: 3).
Once mass starvation is placed in the category of a crime, Edkins
(2005) argues, the vocabulary changes, from one of causes and solu­
tions to one of responsibility, criminal liability, perpetrators,
bystanders, victims and survivors. Crimes don’t just happen - they are
committed. Further, once mass starvation is considered a crime, there
is a consequence that those responsible should be prosecuted (Edkins
2005: 7). The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002)
includes mass starvation under three headings: as a war crime, when
used as a weapon of war; as a crime against humanity, if used in the
deliberate extermination of a civilian population by the deprivation of
food; and as genocide, if carried out with the intention of destroying
in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Edkins’s intent, in placing mass starvation in the category of a
crime, is to politicize a process that has been technologized. The
conventional Malthusian depiction of famine as a shortage of food,
and a failure with a scientific cause, detaches it from a set of histor­
ically specific and locally based economic and political processes
(Edkins 2000: 53). Famine as a natural disaster produces victims who
 Human Insecurity 163

need welfare provision or aid, rather than agents with a political voice.
These victims then become subject to administrative mechanisms of
food distribution and aid (ibid.: 54). This process depoliticizes famine
and constitutes it as a site for intervention and control. The technical
problem of shortages is to be prevented through reliance on expert
knowledge and expensive and profitable technological solutions. In
this respect, the starving subject is produced as a subject of know­
ledge, which is part of a regime of truth produced by the institutions
and practices of development studies. Her analysis, which relies on a
Foucauldian framework, demonstrates how these techniques of discip­
line fail to produce their apparent aim, that is, development. They do,
however, succeed in reproducing a vulnerable group, dependent on
help and assistance, rather than constituting agents in search of
justice or political representation.
Edkins argues that in the development literature famine is
presented as a failure or a breakdown in a system that requires repair.
Rather than attending to the politics of mass starvation, responses
begin with the search for a ‘cause’ and, subsequently, seek a technical
‘fix’ for the problem. Edkins maintains that nothing ‘causes’ famine;
rather people commit the crime of mass starvation. Starvation is no
more ‘natural’ than suffocation: it is no more a shortage of food than
the latter is a shortage of air (Edkins 2005: 3). Mass starvation is the
result of a ‘series of small acts’, some of them deliberate and some
carried out with the intention of producing famines. This raises a
question about responsibility and who benefits.
By demonstrating the parallels between mass starvation and geno­
cide, Edkins politicizes the former, showing that it is often a product
of human intentionality, through a series of small acts, rather than a
natural disaster. This introduces an element of human responsibility
and agency in the construction of human insecurity. Genocide, by its
very definition, assumes human intentionality (Schabas 2000: 154-5)
and thus, once named as such, is implicated in the production of
human insecurity. Nonetheless, practices of genocide can also be
depoliticized. In the former Yugoslavia, images of mayhem were cast
in terms of the re-emergence of hatreds that were destined to resurface
after the demise of Tito, who had kept the lid on nationalist tensions.
A similar story was told in Rwanda. 'The conclusion of this type of story
was that the perpetrators were mad (and the observers, by contrast,
were sane), so there is really nothing much that could be done. In the
case of Rwanda, which had been part of a colonial empire, this
message also reinforced the idea that the inhabitants couldn’t govern
themselves, the implication being that decolonization had been a
mistake (McNulty 1999:270). The role of government-sponsored media
in fanning the conflict in Rwanda has been recognized. However, far
164 PRACTICE

more attention has been directed at the failure of the international

community to use the word genocide, and thus to act. or its inability
to ‘fix’ the problem.
Arguably, both famine and genocide involve two levels of intention­
ality. The first is the intentionality of the political groups that produce
the catastrophe. The second is the intentionality of the international
community in responding - or not responding - to the human catas­
trophe. There is often a failure to historicize the practices of both.
Media images of human catastrophe, flooding Western living rooms,
provide a snapshot that is detached from history and constitutes the
meaning of the events. As Anne Orford (2003) argues, narratives of
humanitarian intervention often constitute the need to protect people
in failed states . and rely on earlier colonial narratives about the
benevolence of international governance over an uncivilized people
who are unable to govern themselves. These images of widespread
suffering give rise to demands that the international community ‘do
something . and the choice is presented in terms of either intervention
or genocide, that is. either action or inaction.
However, as Orford argues, inactivity is not the alternative to inter­
vention in so far as the international community is already profoundly
engaged in shaping the structure of political, social, economic and
cultural life in many states, through the activities of. among others,
international economic institutions. The emphasis on the use of force
to respond to security and humanitarian crises diverts attention away
from questions about the extent to which policies of international
institutions themselves, or the longer history of imperialism, have
contributed to the conditions that gave rise to the crisis. Further inter­
vention in the name of humanitarianism all too often provides an alibi
for the continued involvement of those interested in exploiting and
controlling the resources and people of target states, frequently repli­
cating the colonial practices of an earlier period.
An alternative to this either/or choice is to make the ordering prin­
ciples of the current world order, and the historical processes which
gave rise to it. a site of critical scrutiny. Mahmood Mamdani (2001)
undertakes an analysis of this kind in relation to the genocide in
Rwanda, examining how earlier categories constructed out of the
experience of colonialism set a particular politics in motion. As geno­
cide has not shaken every past colony, he argues the need to historicize
the process of state construction in order to isolate how this particular
outcome became possible in Rwanda. Not all states follow the same
path towards the ideal, as suggested in the development literature,
and, likewise, not all failed states follow the same path to failure.
The thrust of Mamdani’s argument is that Western legal categories,
set down in distinct phases of the ‘civilizing project’, established the
 Human Insecurity 165

conceptual world in which genocide in Rwanda became possible.

Direct rule, during the colonial period, established a single legal order
which naturalized political difference by mapping it onto a ‘civiliza­
tional ladder’ (Mamdani 2001: 25). This ladder was composed of a civi­
lized minority of Europeans and a majority that was yet to be civilized,
which enfranchised and empowered the former as citizens while
disenfranchising the yet to be civilized majority.
The unintended consequence of this categorization of colonizer and
colonized was a crisis in so far as it created the conditions for the
excluded to organize resistance along racial lines, thereby submerging
their differences. This set the stage for a new policy of indirect rule
that would dismantle and fragment racial categories, and thus the
majority, into several political minorities. The result was a three-tiered
structure of civilized (settlers, Europeans), to be civilized (racially
defined, non-indigenous) and uncivilized (indigenous, ethnically
defined). The race/ethnicity distinction highlighted the political
differences between the non-indigenous and the indigenous.
Unlike elsewhere in Africa, the Hutus were made into a single mass,
rather than fragmented into multiple ethnically diverse identities,
each with its own ‘customary’ law. The Hutu mass was ruled by the
Tutsi (Hamites), who were constructed as racially different and super­
ior. Thus, the Belgian colonial state in Rwanda produced bipolar racial
identities rather than plural ethnic identities among the colonized. It
was only in Rwanda and Burundi that Tutsi were fixed as a race in rela­
tion to the colonial state (Mamdani 2001:35). Later developments rein­
forced rather than transcended this polarizing logic, and later
reversed the power relationship, such that the Tutsis became the
victims of the Hutu masses.
Mamdani’s point is to problematize the genocide by identifying the
historical construction of Tutsi and Hutu as political identities. These
identities were enforced by the state, and were transformed along with
state institutions into bipolar identities, based on race, which served
to freeze the categories and the privilege, or lack of privilege, attached
to them. This distinguished Rwanda from other states in the region,
which were organized on a model of cultural pluralism and multiple
ethnicities.

Conclusion
This chapter has examined the concept of human security as a
response to the increasing problem of human insecurity in war.
Human security is critical in so far as it raises questions about the
conventional emphasis of security studies on the state. However, the
166 PRACTICE

liberal assumptions underlying the concept, and the development and

security discourses from which it emerged, have not been critically
scrutinized. The argument was developed through an examination of
the conceptual apparatus surrounding human security, including
that of ‘failed states’. The brief narratives of famine and genocide
demonstrated the role of assumed categories in constructing insecu­
rity and in shaping the definition of problems to be solved.
Formulating ‘problems’ in a scientific language of cause and seeking
technical solutions serves to naturalize processes that have their
origin in political struggles and/or human intention. A more critical
approach to the concept of human security would place less emphasis
on ‘fixing’ the meaning of categories and instead explore the concep­
tual worlds that have given rise to various forms of insecurity. This
requires problematizing the liberal assumptions underlying the
concept, in order to prise open a more critical space for asking ques­
tions about the meaning of political community and the processes by
which human security might more effectively be constructed.