Photo courtesy of Onodera san
Two presentations closed 2007 meetings. Mr Yoshida, student from Law department, make a brief presentation about legal questions behind the terrorist menace: the "Right of Self Defense" under traditional theory and the prohibition of preemtive attacks.
The second presentor, Mr. Gomez, second year master student from the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, exposed a short reflection made by himself about Transdisciplinarity for an event of international exchange with Taiwan universities, held in December in Sendai city. Hereby the text of his intervention:
Environmental Studies and Human Security: Challenges of Ethical TransdisciplinarityAbstract
The modern history of human security started with the Human Development Report 2004 by UNDP, where the agency called to pursue this shift on the conception of security as mandatory for the success of developmental efforts. The plea is to bring back the focus to individuals and communities, and basic goals are summarized as freedom from want and freedom from fear, addressing deprivation of any kind and violence, respectively. The concept gradually has been gaining leverage in the international arena, not without skepticism because of its broadness; recognized by United Nations, objective of academic analysis and support of international cooperation efforts. Further research has stressed two ways of application, protection from above and empowerment from bellow and thus warned all the stakeholders their cooperative work is indispensable.
When human security meets environmental studies, it reminds us the origin of such a study area, both almost the same age, when twentieth century witnessed the worst health tragedies around those days’ paradigms of development. Step by step, scientific community all around the world worked out the menacing byproducts of industrialization, from the visible to the invisible, and reached in the nineties a turning point to dream into the future through the eyes of sustainability. However, optimism quickly faint when the world realized that half of the world dwell in poverty, that solutions were incomplete and that advances unavoidably bring new problems. Asia is paradigmatic on this: the biggest share of world population, thus in poverty, exposed to an accelerated developmental pressure and affected by new generations of menaces, as SARS and Bird flu, not to mention its fragility to natural disasters. These are not at all discouragements for work, but a realistic vision of the magnitude of the task.
Human security pursued through environmental studies entails additional principles: (i) environment is much more than biophysical properties; (ii) research is part of a web of vulnerability and to ignore its actual position makes it prone to become source rather than solution; (iii) as active as the researcher is people object of the research, therefore their agency must be included; and (iv) citizens before scientists. Necessary consequence of such complexity, transdisciplinarity, which is not to put several academic traditions in one building, but to team and network as it is the intention of this meeting.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year