Student Network for Human Security (SNHS) Blog

This made a lot of sense to me. Via Owen abroad

Sunset in Manila, Philippines (Thanks to Eric)

Best wishes for you all in the new year.

あけましておめでとう！
今年もよろしく！

There have been plenty of criticisms to Obama's Nobel Price of Peace, but I was not totally convinced. Something in his attitude seemed to deserve it, somehow. But his remarks on the award ceremony finally dissuaded me. Call me sensitive, but I did not expect a discussion about the existence of evil.

In a seemingly more benevolent analysis, Brooks from the NYT call him a "Christian Realist". Please, judge yourselves.

Although APEC has been including drug trafficking inside its human security agenda, I haven't heard of any researcher on human security dealing with this hot issue. Besides, if it is difficult to do so in the countries where the problem is a daily reality, much more here in Japan where a pop star with milligrams of a forbidden substance has been in the news for months.

Anyway, in what I personally believe would be the better possible human-security outcome, the argument seems to be is leaning towards some form of decriminalization. Much has been heard about U.S. administration stance in this respect, but there are many other changes going on around the globe. If you want to read a little bit more about the trend, here are some links:

+ Portugal's experience

+ Final Report of the Latin American Comission on Drugs and Democracy

+ Virtually legal - special from the Economist

It seems that some of the contents from the Economist are going to be blocked after some time... Hurry up!

Something that is clear from the discussions behind any of the issues treated through human security is that a reconsideration of what is external and what is domestic is necessary. Some of today's challenges do not distinguish among borders, and thus solutions of individual nations would not be enough to face them. In a sense, what it is required to us, citizens of the third millennium, is to be able to take and enforce global domestic decisions.

This formulation may seem either paradoxical or trivial, but I want to remark is that human security urge us to think in a domestic way, even if it is at planetary scale, with the unavoidable problem of finding a way to make political units weaken their restraints. These two issues, taken separately, have different academic traditions behind, but to be faced together requires new approaches.

An interesting example we would see in the coming weeks is the Australian proposal for the design of a future agreement on CO2 emissions. International agreement are usually toothless, and those supposed to be binding take ages to be punished. So the delegation proposed that agreements should consist of regulations to be approved by each country congress, and thus to be designed globally but enforced locally.

A similar debate was going on around financial institutions during the peak of the crisis. Pundits were discussing whether it would be better to have a central regulation to prevent future devastating bubbles, or if it was better to trust on the different strategies design by each country. So far, the latter has been favored, not only for the difficulty of coordination, but also because, thinking in an evolutionary way, many strategies guarantee that someone would find the best answer when it becomes necessary.

Nevertheless, domestic decisions entail their own problems, which are easy to envision by following the internal debates of any country. That is why I found last Monday column of David Brooks in the NYT very appealing. In reviewing the discussion about the health system in the U.S., he emphasizes the dilemma between "vitality or security". He goes further to describe the situation as a "brutal choice", the choice of whether we prefer to care about the most vulnerable or economic progress. The domestic question is heavily influenced by values, which finally decide what we admit as a threat for us.

Those of us who work on security believe that such discussion will not affect us. In any case, we are by the side of threats, aren't we? But you can see that even with all the evidence, the question of value would have to be sorted - either at the local or the global scale. And certainly that is something human security experts have asked themselves less about.

Have you?

Hi there!

The summer vacation was over a month ago but, fortunately, I had the opportunity to go to Philippines during October for fieldwork. So, please wait for some news about human security in the rim of fire.

By now, there may be many of you wondering about the changes going on in Japan, so here is an interesting comment from our friends of the AJISS: The End of LDP Rule and its Meaning.

Also, one of our professors just mailed me the following group in Zotero, maybe some of you would like to join - New Approaches to Human Security in the Asia-Pacific.

See you soon,

From the NYT

Do you remember the weirdest reaction to the swine flu pandemic? A hint, it was not Afghanistan decision to isolate the only pig in the country that lived in the zoo. But you are hot: it was Egypt decision to kill all the pigs in the country to avoid the spread of the disease. A draconian measure of religious discriminatory nuance - pigs in the Muslim country belong to Christians - had some unintended consequences: tons of organic waste that pigs were fed of are now filling the streets.

I wonder if I am being impious...

Following the trend on climate change from a previous post, some additional info about the trending topic and its effects. The BBC published in its web page an interesting article about the way Climate Change is displacing other environmental problems out of the agenda. Fortunately, water issues are still as relevant as Climate for the green hooligans, but is a shame that issues as desertification or fisheries receive less attention. Although, to be honest, it is possible that pop-altruism concentrated in their new apocalypse, gives time to less passionate discussions on the other problems that, sooner or later, would re-emerge.

But, why apocalypse? Climate change is so pressing that it justifies any available mean of persuasion. If not, just ask the editorialist of the NYT:

One can only hope that these arguments turn the tide in the Senate. Mr. Kerry, Mr. Warner and like- minded military leaders must keep pressing their case, with help from the Pentagon and the White House. National security is hardly the only reason to address global warming, but at this point anything that advances the cause is welcome.

Trying to be optimistic, climate change can bring along a longly deserved change in the profile of world armies. Just last week, under the stress of the flooding that affected Taiwan, President Ma publicly said that

“now our enemy is not necessarily the people across the Taiwan Strait but nature,” Then, an order for 60 American-made Blackhawk helicopters was cut by 15, and the savings used to buy disaster relief aircraft.(from the NYT)

45 instead of 60 may seem a minimum digression from the previous plan but, if we add this gesture to the document published in America two weeks ago, it could be speculated about the seeds of a trend.

Human security is about how to change the mentality of the guys with guns too.

See you,

Tons of work lately, and not much time for the blog but, for your entertainment, two sort of counter-intuitive emergent menaces to humanity in the news (both from the Economist):

First, the ban of smoking in public buildings enacted in... Iraq! Well, yes, why not? The authorities say that an average of 55 Iraqis die every day, which is larger than terrorism toll - though I feel a little concerned about the method to come up with that number. But as you may suppose, people is not quite happy about this, specially because perception on the priority of threats is quite different - and I think yours too. So, has this something to do with human security? Sure, it tells us a lot about hidden threats and the effects of fear: uncertainty pushes people to risky behaviors that can make them more insecure than what the perceived threat actually does.

Second, a story from one of those places where the "absence of threats" claims for some new. What else can you think when you read the Danish Prime Minister saying: “We don’t want a society where you cannot go walking with your child or your poodle without risking an attack.” Maybe this is not so uncommon in the first world, but I think this politician goes too far with his idea: not only banning certain breeds, but killing all the mongrels. “We will surely see lots of press photos of sweet little puppies being put down but we must be determined.” It should be hard to make politics out of no threats but, you know, you even have Copenhagen meeting in two months...

See you!

So, finally, it seems that the government of the United States is one step from recognizing Climate Change as a National Security threat. I read first this (uncritical) article from the New York Times. The highlighted comment came from a retired general, and goes as follows:

“We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms... And that will involve human lives.”

The expected reaction appeared in the Foreign Policy blog of Stephen Walt. After reading the whole report that originated the news, and reviewing some other interesting opinions, he closes with:

But the more closely you look at the report, the clearer it is that the actual national security implications of climate change are modest, at least for the United States. The likely demands on U.S. military forces will be for humanitarian relief, not for the protection of vital U.S. interests. I have no problem with humanitarian relief, by the way, but let's call it what it is -- a form of global philanthropy -- and not try to sell it as a defense of the American people.

I just want to add that, if you follow the quote carefully, this whole case may be an interesting start for a new paper, since it turns upside-down the conspiracy arguments behind securitization: it is not the case of the human security zombies rushing after the Department of Defense money but, on the contrary, the soldiers behind their share for that big new thing.

I may come up with an abstract soon...