Student Network for Human Security (SNHS) Blog

Agrawal, A. (1996). "Indigenous and scientific knowledge: some critical comments",
Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 3(3): 33-41.

When it comes to talk about Human Security (HS), "people" would quickly appear in the center of the discussion. However, most of the times "people" looks just like an empty word, a rhetoric must but a mystery in its interpretation. In order to advance the understanding and reaches of the HS approach, it will be meaningful to review some of the elements that lurk inside that huge black box.

One of the first issues that jump to sight once community is studied from a developmental perspective is "Indigenous Knowledge". That is to say, the knowledge held by the communities of the addressed territory. In this short and neat article, Professor Agrawal identifies three ways in which academics differentiate indigenous from Western knowledge, and poses a critique to their validity and consequences. In Summary, the arguments are as follow:

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

Hi! Tons of work around here and, consequently, few time for blogging. Hope this to change any time soon. Here, a book edited by a friend of the house. Looks nice...

Edited by: Modjtaba Sadria
Is there any such thing as modernity in Islamic societies and, if so, what are the identifiable elements of this modernity? Here, a leading group of thinkers and practitioners from diverse theoretical backgrounds pose the question of what it means to be modern - exploring notions of myriad 'multiple modernities' that operate beyond the Western singular definition of modern civilisation.
This volume represents a major new contribution to the debate about modernity; this volume offers new perspectives and ways of considering experiences of modernity in non-Western societies. Questions about which aspects of civilisation might be identified as the tangible elements of modernity are discussed, both within the built environment - the cities, architecture, the material cultural heritage - and within the lived environment - in culture, politics and economics. The interplay between modernism, secularism and religion is explored and the view of the religious state and modernity as mutually exclusive is challenged.

While Muslim societies are chosen as the primary focus, the subject of the discussion has clear relevance to other cultural contexts and contributes to the wider debate on modernity. Rather than pose final solutions to the ‘problem’ of modernity within Muslim societies, the contributors instead create a space for the opening, questioning and recasting of the debate. This is an important contribution to the fields of Architecture, Cultural Studies, and Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Hi, there!

Hope that the news section on the right had somehow filled the absence of posts.

Next month, I plan to concentrate in the theoretical section of my research while I exchange ideas some where in Europe - if volcanoes allow us. Thus, there are tons of papers I must read before leaving, so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to use this space. Here is the first try:

+ Gasper & Truong (2008) "Development Ethics through the lenses of Caring, Gender, and Human Security" And Gasper & Truong (2005) "Deepening Development Ethics: From Economism to Human Development to Human Security"

Both papers attempt to establish a common ground to enhance human security through development ethics, partly based in the latter characteristics, and partly in the holes on human development theory that human security has the opportunity to cover. From this composed view, the authors provide the following description of the concept:

‘human security’ is a return to the substantive agenda of basic human needs, but better grounded in an ethnography of the risks and pressures, hopes and fears, of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities.

There are two elements to comment about in this depiction. First, the contextual sense entailed by human security is given top importance. Through the paper, the authors underscore this characteristic under the light of its substantive content, opposed to a reductionist understanding of the human, and the consequent necessity of deep understanding of the populations studies. This characteristic helps the authors to bridge feminist theory and the ethics of care, a branch of ethics that also supports situated ethics, and situated knowledge, as necessary to reference the principles of caring. Some values derived from the ethics of care cited in the article are attentiveness, responsiveness and responsibility, which authors relate to citizenship, though it would be interesting to explore how those transform security in a positive endeavor.

The other element that is key in the description of the concept is the importance conferred to "hopes and fears", which I associate to the subjective side of security and perception. This element is present in many sections of the paper, supporting criticisms to human development as "the danger that thinking can be displaced by counting", or them importance of highlight ethics and perceptions as well as objectives in initiatives as the MDGs. Authors affirm that human security requires an methodological broadening, in order to include emotive dimensions, and propose the arts and the humanities as possible sources. In this sense, it will be interesting to explore the recent advances in perception that have been discussed in economics, or the experience of criminology addressing fear.

There are several references in the works about identity that are still to be threaded together in a more harmonic way. Concepts as ontological security, the conception of self, belonging are part of the complements that ethics has to offer to an over protective vision of security. However, it has not being considered how do the threats define the individual or the community, and the possible positive or negative consequences of this definition, something already observed by some authors from security studies (Civilizing, Booth). An additional question that emerges with the issue of identity is the boundary of what should be considered security. Some concern is express about the problem of co-option of human security by the psychic insecurities of the rich, but not discussed whether the psychic insecurities are relevant at all. This problem of levels is somehow considered while explaining how feminist bridge from the personal to the political, but a critical appreciation of this transition is well deserved.

It is not very clear the authors' position regarding democracy. On the one hand they straightly criticize Sen's maxim about famines and democracies, noting that the latter does not increase sympathy nor willingness to help, elements that the authors regard as important as the information flow behind Sen's stand. Nonetheless, on the other hand, the authors keep supporting democracy in the rest of the paper. Most probably, their position is one of "necessary but not sufficient", though it will be interesting to contrast the position with views as the one of Kaldor (2008), who does not conceive democracy as a requisite for human security as long as there is political stability.

Finally, I have some concerns about the tensions among academic disciplines that emerge through the analysis proposed from the development ethics perspective. As it is expected, the authors have to deal with the broad range of expertise that contributes to development studies: economics, international relations, politics, sociology, and so. Research in the field does not even fix in just one discipline, and mixed theories are common - and appreciated. However, when issues like the people-centeredness or context specificity of human security are at stake, I think it is vital to leave clear the deep ontological differences that condition the knowledge produced. In other words, I have problems to lambaste distorted visions of the "human" derived from theories that have as referent "the state", or other entities, without pointing out the initial limitations the starting point ensues. For example, it is somehow problematic when the argumentation jumps from the contextual requirements of caring - i.e. personal encounters - to care as a moral orientation for global social justice, without a more elaborated quilting in the middle. again an issue of level, now from the outer realms to the micro-politics of the population of the selected context. More elaboration in this boundaries will be of help to better understand the positive side of (human) security.

I forgot to tell you las time the objective of my upcoming academic excursion: a more concrete idea about what the positive side of security is - if such a thing does in fat exist. As a keen reader of this blog would have noted - is there any? - a good part of the news posted here has to be with either the changing role of traditional security, or the nature challenge of new threats and old security apparatuses. However, there are some scholars that maintain that security is more than just "the absence of threats," or, in other commonly used words, living more than just surviving.

My first encounters with that idea have not get me convinced, but I admit that reaching to the bottom of this matter is key to give the concept more robustness. The "human" side of the concept well deserves it. I found an insightful introduction to the issue in this paper by a Rhonda Powell, but I have several doubts about her position - wait for them in the paper I plan to submit this term. So, then, lets keep the review going on:

+ Truong (2009) "Feminist Knowledge and Human Security"

The author offers this time a deeper insight on the work of feminists about care, further elaborating on the links to human security. There is an especial emphasis on epistemology, and the kind of knowledge that is considered when studying the proposed problems. From the feminist side, there is a constant plea for a more inclusive construction of knowledge. Truong says "[T]he assumption that a standard of impartiality (strong objectivity) enables one to judge some perspectives as better than others contradicts the situated knowledge claim - which purports that all knowledge is partial." Therefore, the author links the context to subjective views of it, granting an importance that is not observed by the orthodoxy of social sciences.

There are at least to implications from this posture: first, methodologically, it is argued that human security is due to go beyond objective analysis and inform indexes with qualitative views of the situation. This view, shared by many other authors, may not totally forbid attempts to measure the concept, but it will restrict any idea of stand-alone factor as those of the HDI.

Second, a less considered consequence of the insertion of subjectivity is how it hinders the possible quality of the concept as a policy tool. Following the dictum, there is no reason to consider human security less partial than other analyses, and so any recommendation on any issue - poverty, conflict, any - product of a human security study can be as wrong as any other analysis. This a fact that has been already observed in the field of vulnerability studies, close to human security, where the same situation occurs. If we add serous doubts about the methodological improvements in the assessment of causalities brought by the concept, one wonders if the focus should not be reoriented.

The ethics of care also have some implications about identity that are well-worth examining. Close to more traditional - may I say Aristotelean - ideas of identity, Engster brings forward a 'rational theory of obligation' that bases provision of security to someone that is not from one's immediate group out of interdependence. Accounts grounded in more emotive principles give more importance to affinity or sympathy as engines of care. The author uses the umbrella term of "relational ontology". Let me observe that care seems to be more related to protection than empowerment or fear, so the kind of identity here serves as a boundary element to move from the threat to its absence, but does it relate to a security community? It seems to me that the model so far proposed is too focused on protection and less on empowerment, and somehow disconnected of the nature of the threats.