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.