Student Network for Human Security (SNHS) Blog

Brain drain has been one of many puzzling issues inside developmental struggle around the world. And, besides, as foreign students from developing countries in Japan, one question that frequently comes to your mind. Am I part of the solution or part of the problem? This may not be an answer, but following links can help you to further analyze the problem.

Brain drain is principally related with the migration of hardly and costly educated people from poor countries to developed ones, where their skills are better remunerated. It has been specially renowned the case of medical workers in Africa, although engineers from India in the US, nurses from Philippines and many other technical professionals fall into this classification.

The blame has been usually placed in rich countries, though it is far more complex. Just from the start, the freedom of movement is one of human rights, so measures proposed to restrict visas to certain professionals is highly controversial, and probably not a solution. Anyway, in many cases, no matter how many unemployed medical staff is in the capital of a fragile state, means and conditions are far from being enough for them to work there, without mentioning salary issues.

There is also the issue of remittances, which for some of this countries have become an important - if not the most - source of income for their economy and, thus, support for development. The benefits from remittances are relative, since they are not stable and there is always the risk that professionals end bringing to their new home most of the family and end the link in some generations. Also, perceptions of internal affairs from abroad always tend to be biased, and as brain-drained are also fond to disregard the system of their countries, the allocation they do of money can be conflictive or destabilizing. In any case, instead of drive a taxi at home, it is bluntly true that earning a good income abroad is far better.

However, the problem is still there: children dying because nobody can give them the minimum treatment, people sleeping outside hospitals to get an examination, as presented in this article of Reuters. By the end of it, an official of the WHO gives some interesting hints about a rapid solution and a long-run reflection. Complications derived from ailments as diarrhea and fever, or even starting malaria and pregnancy, could be managed by housewives or communities themselves. That may not solution the problem but alleviates the burden of the already weak system of developing countries. But then, are developing countries' education systems over dimensioned?

Empowerment, many times - if not all of them - related to education, has to be carefully thought whenever tried in the field. Economists as Paul Collier defend the formation of elites in LDCs in order to have some one to guide them through the complex path out of poverty traps, but there should be a country left to govern after twenty years of formation. If not, education is nothing but an exit door. And that is exactly the edge where many of us stand nowadays.

What do you think?

OAGS

Critics of human security usually deem it ambiguous, while those of us who see in the concept some potential consider it flexible, integrative. What is the difference? The former sustain that the plurality of issues under the umbrella of human security has no use when priorities are to be decided. We the supporters believe that to gather the emerging challenges and introducing them into the security agenda would enable the appropriate actors to have the resources and the power to take the best-possible decisions. The problem of priorities will be better solved once the system includes and empowers the most suitable stakeholders.

Such a position implies that at least one of the problems of human security is that of establishing relations or cooperation among people. Accepting this is a good start to build the theoretical scaffolding of human security as a field of study, taking into account that several disciplines have pointed that way. My intention here is to mention a couple - different from the expected sociology, which would require another space to be examined.

First, there is institutional economics, where the Nobel prize Dr. North in his seminal work called "Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance" took the focus to the problem of human cooperation, and how do humans manage with the uncertainty they have to face by the sole fact of being alive.

There is also the theory of sheafs in mathematics - which I hardly understand in practice, but was metaphorically presented to my by a professor in my country, when talking about my research. The idea here is how to find relative structures in open spaces; these to help us find orientation in a seemingly chaotic world of endless information. This same professor expresses in a book, award-winner in Spain, that research in our times should be less about going more in deep on specific branches of knowledge, and more on binding the right things.

All of them to say that when we find practitioners, researchers and local leaders all around arguing that they have always been working about human security, the challenge is to work out the way to "make them understand each other". I bring this words from another area explicitly calling for interconnection, Transdisciplinarity,and the work of professor Max-Neef (sorry, I cannot find an open source to access the text).

So, if you happen to come across with a discipline that looks to find

how to achieve sustainable improvements in living standards in poor countries

And in fact, it is a paper suggesting that we are in the dawn of a new life for that discipline, where the center of the discussion is about a paper

which evaluates an experiment in Western Kenya on distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets to pregnant women.

Won't you agree it is kind of a sign?

Well, you were wrong if you thought that was a journal of public health. It is actually development economics, and the author is one famous economist of Harvard, Dan Rodrik. The paper is titled "The New Development Economics: We Shall Experiment, But How Shall We Learn?", and it would be incredibly enlightening for those of you that have taken the human security question to the ground, specially regarding methodological issues.

So, shall it be better called "human security economics"? Well, let's talk about it other time.

Have a nice day,

OAGS

Hopefully, we would be there!

The Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project is pleased to announce:

CALL FOR PAPERS AND POSTERS

To the GECHS Synthesis Conference: “HUMAN SECURITY IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL CHANGE” June 22-24, 2009, University of Oslo, Norway

Please see attachment to view the call for papers and posters. The deadline for submitting
abstracts is January 15, 2009.

For submission instructions please visit the Conference web page: www.iss.uio.no/gechs

We apologies for cross-postings.

Kind regards,

Linda Sygna
Executive Officer

Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project
Department of Sociology and Human Geography
University of Oslo
PO Box 1096 Blindern
0317 Oslo, Norway

Tel: + 47 228 44 386
Fax: + 47 228 55 253
Email: linda.sygna@sgeo.uio.no
GECHS Synthesis Conference email: gechs-conference@sosgeo.uio.no
GECHS Synthesis Conference web page: www.iss.uio.no/gechs
GECHS homepage: www.gechs.org

_______________________________________________
The Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project is a core project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Change (IHDP). Our research focuses on the way diverse social processes such as globalization, poverty, disease, and conflict, combine with environmental change to affect human well-being.

This article is a very interesting reflection on the challenge the emerging terrorist menace imposes to the social equilibrium between liberty and security. Observe that the security conception used in the article is clearly the traditional one, while freedom is quickly equated to human rights. In this situation, human security concept could bring the opportunity to break the dilemma - given the new perspectives it offers both on security and human rights - and help reaching better solutions.

(Any option for empowerment out there?)

I will like to emphasize this example as the crux of the article:

"Despite the [Basque separatist group] ETA threat and the Madrid bombings, Spain has in many ways proved to be a model among governments because it has prosecuted in the usual way," said Mr Roth [Human Rights Watch].

This, he said, supported his argument that security and human rights are not at opposite ends of the spectrum: Maintenance of human rights is a better way of improving security.

"Abuses are a boon to terrorist recruiters," said Mr Roth. "There has been a recognition that the breaking of terrorist conspiracies depends less on interrogation than on the cooperation of the public.

"If the public sees itself as complicit in a dirty war, especially if a community identifies itself with the suspects, that makes it harder."

This recognition maybe the first of several steps for a larger security.

See you around,

OAGS

Fantastic news from one of the top important means for empowerment: information and, thus, the access to Internet. Many of you may have been aware of the restrictions imposed by certain countries to its citizens in order to block sensible contents on the web. Well, this week Google, Yahoo and Microsoft compromised themselves to stop playing that game.

Issues on information were included in the "Human Security Now" report, but it has been documented elsewhere - especially by economists - so you may be aware of the vulnerability imposed to populations lacking access to different sources of information. Distortions in the flow of knowledge may perpetuate inequity, deny opportunities to the less advantaged and perpetuate poverty traps. It may not be overlooked that most of the vulnerable people have not access to Internet, so this has not immediate changes, but the benefits for the system would probably spill over for their sake.

So, check the news and bring your comments.