International Security Dersi 8. Ünite Özet

Introduction

A common meaning of security in IR theory studies is the military security in the narrow sense dominated by the realist perspective. The discussion on national, international, and collective security focused on military threats during the Cold War. In the 1970s, with the effect of the softening the Cold War, an extended security perspective, as well as non-military issues in the security discourse, have emerged.

The UN’s Human Development Report of 1994 highlighted the need for a shift from the exclusive stress on territorial security to focusing on people’s security, and instead of seeking security through armaments to gaining security through sustainable development.

The Concept of Human Security

The concept of human security was first used in the 1994 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as “safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease and repression, and protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes, in jobs, or in communities ”.

Despite the brief description of human security in the UNDP report, its full definition is still a controversial issue in International Relations. The different conceptions of human security are classified under three distinct groups: the natural rights-rule of law, the humanitarian view, and the broader view.

Natural Rights-Rule of Law Conception

The natural rights conception of human security involves the protection of basic human values such as individuals’ right to life and liberty as well as the security of the human person, as articulated in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Humanitarian Conception

The humanitarian conception is an extension of the state responsibility approach to protect citizens based on the natural rights conception of human rights because it depends on “the right to intervene” or “duty to intervene” of the international community in countries with gross human rights violations. The rise in the number of civil wars and failed states after the end of the Cold War made it necessary for the international community to take action to prevent human-rights violations in various countries such as Somalia, Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, and Kosovo.

According to this broader conception of security, globalization, global economy, and the environment are current threats to human security. The soil degradation, pollution, poverty, climate change, illegal immigration, refugee problem, and terrorism are among the prominent threats to human security.

There are some general characteristics of human security. First, human security has become a concern of everyone; thus, it is universal. Second, the interdependent character of human security threats necessitates the cooperation of states in security issues. Third, the human security approach attaches greater importance to early prevention than intervention because the cost of late intervention may be very high.

The Historical Evolution of Human Security

The end of the Cold War changed the threat perception in international relations. The threat perception now encompasses non-military threats. Thus, the referent object of security is now not the state, but human beings. One can provide different reasons for this transformation; however, almost all scholars agree that since the end of Cold War, the state-centered threats lost their relative importance in the international system.

The Cold War and the Humanitarian Conception

The dominant traditional security approach during the Cold War years was based on the national security or the state security. As we mentioned above, the core principles of international relations have been the territorial integrity, the sovereign equality of states, and non-interference in internal matters.

Generally, peace studies were based on an understanding of the absence of war and violence in the 1950’s. However, with the initiative of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and especially with the academic work of Johan Galtung , the international society started to debate new kinds of violence (besides the physical violence) such as indirect violence or structural violence.

This expanded conceptualization of violence led to an expansion in the meaning of peace. Galtung (1964:2) underlined this expansion through the concepts of “positive peace” and “negative peace.”

Moreover, the Group of Seventy Seven (Group of 77), which was established in 1984 in the framework of the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development, fought for economic and development security.

The Post-Cold War Era

Post-Cold War developments paved the way for the increasing interest of the international society in human security. Bilgin (2003:207) underlines all dimensions of human security and lists Post-Cold War developments as follows:

• growing disparities in economic opportunities both within and between states;
• increasing hardships faced by peoples in the developing world who found themselves on the margins of a globalizing world economy;
• diminishing non-renewable resources leading families and groups to become refugees;
• rising anti-foreigner feelings and violence in reaction to migration pressures from the developing to the developed world;
• proliferating intrastate conflicts increasing public interest in, and pressure for, humanitarian intervention.”

Newman assesses the increasing interest of the international society in human security following the end of the bipolar system of the Cold War as well as in such issues as globalization and normative changes related to the systemic change.

The shift towards human security after the Cold War led to various political efforts by the initiatives of global commissions, international organizations, and states. Even if the concept of human security was first mentioned in the 1994 UNDP Development Report, the Palme Commission (1982), the Brandt Commission (Brandt et al. 1980-1983), the Brundtland Commission (1988), and the Commission on Global Governance (1995) incorporated similar concepts into their reports.

In 1996, Canada integrated the idea of human security in its foreign policy formulation.

Moreover, Canada took the initiative of forming the Human Security Network in 1998 together with some other countries including Austria, Chile, Costa Rica, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Mali, Norway, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Thailand.

After the publication of this report, the UN requested a final report for human security from the Commission on Human Security . The Commission specified the priorities of human security as follows:

• “Protecting people in violent conflict;
• Protecting people from the proliferation of arms;
• Supporting the human security of people on the move;
• Establishing human security transition funds for post-conflict situations;
• Encouraging fair trade and markets to benefit the extreme poor;
• Providing minimum living standards everywhere;
• According high priority to universal access to basic health care;
• Developing an efficient and equitable global system for patent rights;
• Empowering all people with universal basic education, through much stronger global and national efforts;
• Clarifying the need for a global human identity while respecting the freedom of individuals to have diverse identities and affiliations.”

The priorities of human security cover not only the military threats but also issues of non-military security such as health and economic development.

The institutionalization efforts in the framework of the UN continued after the end of the Cold War. The UN Trust Fund for Human Security was established in 1999.

Later, the Advisory Board on Human Security was formed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2003 with a Human Security Branch in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. The Human Security Unit was established in 2004 for managing the UN Trust Fund for Human Security. The first report of the UN on human security was published in March 2010.

Environmental Security

The 21st century presents a new approach to security threats. Today scholars and politicians alike have been debating non-traditional security (NTS) threats, which are also known as non-military threats, to better understand world politics and take the necessary measures to sustain and promote the international order. Among the critical NTS are environmental security, economic security, the security of food and water resources. Other NTS include migration, climate change, diseases and pandemics, social issues, human trafficking and drugs.

The Development of the Concept of Environmental Security

The concept of environmental security seeks to explain the dangers arising from the ecosystem change, ecosystem loss, and global warming (Scheffran, 1993). Although the main reason of such security threats is not environmentally-related in many cases, the environmental degradation shares a substantial role in the rise of a conflict in world politics.

Although in one way or another environmental politics has been with us for a long time now, the idea of systematically protecting the environment is the product of the 20th century. Green politics or ecology became a significant national and international issue in the 1960s.

In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report, Limits of Growth , in which it was suggested that if the then economic patterns continued, the world would soon experience an ecological disaster. Limits of Growth was the first report that has warned that humanity is on the verge of a global economic and ecological destruction.

The early environmentalists such as Lester Brown sought to affect world politics by labeling environmental changes as new risks to national security.

One of the most ardent supporters of the environmental security approach has been Thomas Homer-Dixon . Homer-Dixon (1991, 1994) and others have shown a strong correlation between environmental conditions and inter-state warfare. According to them, environmental pressures may lead to four major problems: the beginning of these effects is a decline in agricultural production. In this sense, food security is assumed to be a serious problem for nation states. The economic collapse, the displacement of the population, and the deterioration of social relations are other probable effects of environmental problems.

Environmental changes might lead to a conflict and possibly to an international war as a result of “1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production; 2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts; 3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess”.

International Initiatives on Environmental Issues

An international environmental regime was developed over the last thirty years. Interest in the environment has grown steadily since the first Earth Day organized by environmental activists in 1970. The first UN conference on the environment, which was accepted as the beginning of the international environmental policy, took place in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. This conference led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme , which is responsible for coordinating the environmental activities of states and international organizations to promote better regional and global environmental protection.

The World Commission on Environment and Development , chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, published the report entitled Our Common Future in 1987. The report acknowledged the relationship between the environment and development, with a special emphasis on sustainable development. Because of the echoes created by the Brundtland Report, the United Nations has decided to organize a new conference in Rio on the environment and development in 1992. The argument that environmental change was a security issue pointed out for the first time in 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development , which became popularly known as the Rio Earth Summit .

At this conference, The US and more than 150 other nations also signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In 1997, nations adopted the Kyoto Protocol , which required the signatory developed countries to reduce their production of greenhouse gases by the year 2012 by 5.2 percent.

In 2012, at the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development was held in Rio/Brazil. Members agreed to establish a high-level political forum for sustainable development.

Current Environmental Issues

Most global environmental problems involve the common good for all states and people on the planet. Today major environmental issues such as ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, biodiversity decline, the destruction of habitats, population rise, and water scarcity all contribute, directly or indirectly, to human insecurity.

The Atmosphere

Two problems of the atmosphere, namely the global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer, had long been debated among scientists. The ozone layer has two basic functions for filtering the ultraviolet rays of the sun and dissipating the atmosphere. The depletion of the ozone layer allows more harmful rays to reach Earth, resulting in more skin cancer, weakened immune systems, reduced plant yields, damage to ocean ecosystems, and climate change.

In the early 1970s, researchers suggested that nitrogen oxides from fertilizers and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were breaking apart in the atmosphere and releasing chlorine atoms that were causing the ozone depletion.

The global warming presents states with a triple dilemma. First, there is the dilemma of short-term (and predictable) costs to gain long-term (and less predictable) benefits. Second, specific constituencies such as oil companies and industrial workers pay the costs. Third, there is the collective goods dilemma among states: benefits are shared globally but costs must be extracted from each state individually.

Unlike the ozone layer problem, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, climate change has become the most prominent cause of concern.

The main function of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) is to monitor environmental conditions. It works with the World Meteorological Organization to measure changes in global climate from year to year.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity refers to the tremendous diversity of plant and animal species making up the earth’s (global, regional, and local) ecosystems. The extent of the loss of biodiversity is calculated against what is termed the natural rate of extinction. Unfortunately, the loss of biodiversity is many times higher due to land conversion, climate change, pollution, and the harvesting of natural resources.

Two types of habitat (tropical rain forests and oceans) are especially important to biodiversity and the atmosphere.

Population Growth

Although we have noted that a number of factors place stress on the global environment, the key-underlying factor is the growing world population. Some demographers project that within three decades or so world population will have passed nine billion.

“The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report.

The population growth contributes to environmental destruction.

Water Disputes

The world water use is 35 times higher than that of a few centuries ago. It has grown twice as fast as the world population in the 20th century. By the mid-1990s, eighty countries, constituting 40 percent of the world’s population, suffered from serious water shortages.

Yet water supplies are relatively unchanging and are becoming depleted in many places. One-fifth of the world’s population lacks safe drinking water, and 80 countries suffer water shortages.

Water problems are especially important in the Middle East. Water scarcity is potentially a very stressful issue in the Middle East, the most water-contested region in the worldThe Ministerial Declaration from the World Water Council (2000) stated that water security refers to a situation where “fresh-water, coastal and related ecosystems are protected and improved; sustainable development and political stability are promoted; every person has access to enough safe water at an affordable cost to lead a healthy and productive life; and the vulnerable are protected from the risks of water-related hazards.”

Economic Security

Defining the Concept of Economic Security

The narrow military conception of security has largely excluded the consideration of potential non-military threats and non-military means for providing security. Economic and ecological developments in an increasingly interdependent world present potential threats for actors at all levels of analysis. The causes, effects, and solutions of these economic and environmental challenges ignore national boundaries, calling into question many assumptions of statist definitions of security.

Economic security is a basis of the national security of the state. Ensuring the national security is the primary responsibility of the State. This responsibility is being carried out in close collaboration with the economic agents of the state.

Economic security refers to the entitlement of any individual to have a minimum regular income that comes from a lucrative activity or, as a last resort, from a social security trust fund.

Despite the problems in economic security as a concept, it is undeniable that economic insecurity can trigger survival issues in the societal and political sectors.

Poverty as a Multidimensional Concept

Global political changes in the post-Cold War era, the shift in conflicts mainly to poorer regions of the world (particularly Africa), the scale of humanitarian emergencies, the perceived threat of global terrorism, and deepening global economic integration with its attendant inequalities and political protests created space for the exploration of the relationship between poverty and security within mainstream analysis. Poverty has often been portrayed as a case for economic security.

Nowadays, mainstream academics, diplomats and politicians speak openly of the need to integrate approaches to poverty and security. Leaders of the G8, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, for example, have spoken about a possible link between poverty and conflict. Globally, the political and economic challenge is defined in limited terms of ‘poverty reduction’ via quantitative targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Food Security

Describing the Concept of Food Security

In 2017, an estimated of nearly 821 million people faced persistent hunger and chronic food deprivation (FAO, 2018). Meanwhile, due to conflict-induced emergencies as well as rising natural disasters, demand for food assistance has continued to grow.

Two hundred years ago, the British scholar Thomas Malthus warned that population tends to increase faster than food supply and predicted that population growth would limit itself through famine and disease.

Global food crisis can be considered as an essential part of human security. Bryan McDonald highlights that “the guarantee of food security can be recognized as a key component of human security.” He also thought that governments and international agencies can play a significant role in ensuring food security.

In the early 1980s, following the seminal work of Amartya Sen on entitlement analysis, the definition of food security used by FAO was expanded to include both physical and economic access. According to the Nobel Prize laureate and economist Amartya Sen, food insecurity is not a problem of food production or availability but of people’s limited ability to mobilize resources.

During the 1990s, the food security literature has broadened to address market-oriented economic growth, agricultural development, poverty reduction, demographic trends, rising incomes, changing food consumption patterns, gender issues, and the environment. The most commonly used definition of food security is the one developed at the World Food Summit of 1996.

Dimensions of Food Security

In this context, there are four main components of food security. These are availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. The first dimension is the availability. Availability refers to whether food is physically available. In other words, it is related to the question of whether enough food is produced to meet the needs. The second dimension of food security is accessibility, which is the key issue when discussing food security. The concept of access to food was first presented by Amartya Sen in the early 1980s. Amartya Sen contributed to the literature on food security in pointing out that famines often arise not from a lack of food, but from a complex of social, economic, and political factors such as rising food prices, poor food distribution systems, and government inefficiency.

Utilization refers to food quality and nutritional content. For food security objectives to be realized, all four dimensions must be fulfilled simultaneously. Moreover, each of these components needs to be considered at the level of individuals, households, and global.

One of the purposes of The World Food Summit at 1996 was to halve the number of undernourished by 2015, while the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set in 2000, aspired to reduce by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger.

The high food prices have pushed 44 million people into severe poverty and hunger between June 2010 and February 2011 alone. Surely, there are a number of structural factors driving food insecurity. The recent rise in food prices is one the main causes exacerbating the state of global food insecurity, driving millions of people into poverty, worsening the state of the world’s most foodinsecure regions and threatening long-term human security.