Why Human Security Matters: Rethinking Australian foreign policy 9781743312025, 9781003118398

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WHY

HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS

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WHY

HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS

Rethinking Australian foreign policy Edited by Dennis Altman, Joseph A Camilleri, Robyn Eckersley and Gerhard Hoffstaedter

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First published 2012 by Allen & Unwin Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Editorial arrangement copyright © Dennis Altman, Joseph A Camilleri, Robyn Eckersley and Gerhard Hoffstaedter 2012 Copyright © individual chapters remain with authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au Index by Stephen James Set in 11/13 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia ISBN-13: 9781743312025 (pbk)

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Contents Contributors

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1

Introduction: Why human security matters Dennis Altman

2

Human security: From theory to practice Joseph A Camilleri

3

In defence of breadth: The broad approach to human security Stephen James

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Human security and national security: The Australian context Joseph A Camilleri

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Australia’s global security: A model national strategy for a more secure world Anthony Burke

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Human security and the politics of security Matt McDonald

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Australia’s ‘new engagement’ with Africa: What role for human security? David Mickler

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Security from below: An alternative perspective on human security Gerhard Hoffstaedter & Chris Roche

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9 The prevention of mass atrocities: From principle to Australian foreign policy Alex J Bellamy

167

10 Conclusion: The political virtues of human security Robyn Eckersley

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Index

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Contributors Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics and Director of the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. He was President of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific (2001–5), and since 2004 has been a member of the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society. He is the author of eleven books exploring sexuality, politics and their inter-relationship in Australia, the United States and now globally. In 2005 he was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, and has been a board member of Oxfam Australia. He was listed by The Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians ever (4 July 2006), and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in June 2008. Alex J Bellamy is Professor of International Security at Griffith University. From 2007 to 2010 he was Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Recent books include Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect (Routledge 2011), Understanding Peacekeeping (with PD Williams, 2nd edition, Polity 2010) and Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities (Polity 2009). Anthony Burke is Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is the author of Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Cambridge University Press 2008), Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other (Routledge 2007) and co-editor of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester University Press 2007). Joseph A Camilleri is Professor of International Relations and Director, Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University. Professor Camilleri is one of Australia’s leading International Relations scholars. With over 30 years’ experience, Professor Camilleri has pursued a wide range of research interests covering almost the entire gamut of the International Relations discipline. These include regional and global governance, the political economy of Asia Pacific, the role of religion and culture in international affairs, the politics of oil and the Middle vii

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East, and security policy (including weapons non-proliferation). He has supervised more than 30 PhD and MA candidates; published over fifteen books, several of which have been translated into Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin; has produced over twenty chapters in books since 1993; and has had twenty refereed articles published in academic journals. Robyn Eckersley is Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and Coordinator of the Master of International Relations Program at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely in the fields of environmental politics and international relations, with a special focus on climate change. Her books include Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992), The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (2004), The State and the Global Ecological Crisis (2005) (co-editor), Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge (2006) (co-editor), and Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power (2012) (co-author). Stephen James studied Arts and Law at the University of Melbourne before completing a PhD in Politics at Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He has also taught politics, law, history and philosophy at various Australian universities. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins and development (2007), is a former editor of Global Change, Peace & Security and is on the editorial board of Human Rights & Human Welfare. In 2009, he was an ARC-funded Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. Gerhard Hoffstaedter is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. Previously he was a research fellow at the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. He is the author of Religion and Development: Australian Faith-based Development Organisations (ACFID 2011) and Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia (NIAS Press 2011). Matt McDonald is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Queensland. His research interests are in the area of critical theoretical approaches to security and their application to environmental change, the ‘war on terrorism’ and Australian foreign and security policy. He has published on these themes in leading journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Relations, Security viii

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dialogue, Australian Journal of Political Science, and Australian Journal of International Affairs. He is the author of Security, the Environment and Emancipation (Routledge 2011) and co-editor (with Anthony Burke) of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester UP 2007) David Mickler is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches subjects on international security and Australian foreign policy. His research interests include the international responses to the ongoing insecurity and humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and Australia’s engagement with global governance. Chris Roche is Director of Development Effectiveness at Oxfam Australia. He is the author of Impact Assessment for Development Agencies (Oxfam 1999), Promoting Voice and Choice: Exploring Innovations in Australian NGO Accountability for Development Effectiveness (ACFID 2010) and co-editor of Ethical Questions and International NGOs: An Exchange Between Philosophers and NGOs (Springer 2010).

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1 introduCtion: Why human seCurity matters dennis altman

If one were to ask most Australians whether a threat to our security would be more likely to result from a conventional military attack, a terrorist movement, or a rapid increase in global warming leading to large numbers of displaced persons seeking refuge elsewhere, most would probably select the third alternative. The annual Lowy Institute Poll that reports Australians’ views on a number of security issues has found a number of issues are considered very important, including some that are largely domestic such as protecting Australian jobs and strengthening the economy. Among issues that might be conceived of as included under the rubric of ‘human security’, and that rate highly, are stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, combating international terrorism and ‘improving relations with immediate neighbours in the Pacific’. Tackling climate change has declined as a priority issue over the past few years, and support for foreign aid is reasonably high. Most interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which ‘foreign policy goals’ are conceived of as cutting across the normal divide between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ (Hansen 2011). In a common sense way, then, most of us understand that our security is dependent on much more than conventional military defence against invasion, and that many of the most vexed issues threatening global and regional stability are those related to ‘economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security’, the seven themes identified by the United Nations Development 1

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Programme (UNDP) in introducing the concept of human security into mainstream discourse in the 1990s (UNDP 1994). We live in a world in which the old assumptions of a clear division between the domestic and the international spheres no longer make sense. Writing of the greater Mekong area and the spread of HIV in the late 1990s the economist Doug Porter (1997:213–214) pointed out: The nexus of HIV transmission across this territory is a metaphor for the globalization of investment, trade and cultural identity. Although the dominant realist tradition in international relations conceives national territorial spaces as homogenous and exclusive, what is referred to as ‘the new global cultural economy’ has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order which cannot be adequately understood in terms of centre-periphery, inner-outer, state border models of the past.

Why Human Security Matters asks how this understanding might be better integrated into debates about the future directions of Australian foreign policy, and our interactions with the rest of the world. This book grew out of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. Our original proposal stated: The purpose of this project is to interrogate the concept of human security and the potential to apply the concept to key aspects of Australia’s foreign policy and external relations, both in the AsiaPacific region and globally. The project will investigate the usefulness of this concept, placing particular emphasis on emerging security issues such as identity based conflicts; terrorism; the drug trade; human trafficking; new epidemic diseases; climate change and food security. It will examine how such issues might be more efficiently connected with more traditional concerns of interstate armed conflict.

Human security has become a portmanteau term capable of being stretched to encompass almost every issue of momentary concern. As Joseph Camilleri points out in his theoretical chapter, the term is often used so broadly as to be meaningless. In 2006 the then Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock defended strengthened government anti-terrorism provisions, bitterly criticised by civil 2

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INTRODUCTION: WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS

liberties groups, as contributing to ‘human security’. This is probably not consistent with how most of our contributors would define the term. One of the primary aims of this book is to give a coherent account of ‘human security’ as a way of thinking about the real threats that exist in an increasingly interconnected world. Australia is unlikely to face a military invasion, of the sort we might have experienced in World War II, but its security is threatened by a series of global upheavals around food, water, new epidemics, transnational crime and climate change. As a small rich country in a region undergoing very major economic and political transformations, Australia faces an almost unique challenge. Our immediate region—which is usually understood to encompass the South Pacific and Southeast Asia— contains a vast range of economic, social and political circumstances, and Australia’s relations with the diverse countries of the region inevitably means engaging with the full gamut of challenges summed up in the phrase ‘human security’ (see, regarding Southeast Asia, Kaur and Gong 2010). Even without using the term, the issues summed up in the term ‘human security’ are of increasing concern to both government and publics, which is challenging the traditional ways of thinking about foreign policy. Thus while Cotton and Ravenhill’s edited survey of Australia foreign policy in the past five years does not even index the term it does include considerable reflection on the importance of climate change and lesser attention to a number of non-traditional security concerns (see, particularly, Elliott 2011). Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in that book is the analysis of the now largely forgotten Australia 2020 Summit organised in the first flush of Rudd’s government, where concerns about ‘emerging security challenges’, particularly around food and climate, received considerable attention (Tyler and White 2011). One of the strange features of contemporary Australian politics is that at a time of rapidly shifting global political and economic power our political leaders seem less interested in the larger world than at any time in the past forty years. Only under the pressure of a series of international gatherings in late 2011 did Julia Gillard start to articulate a vision of Australia’s role in the world, and, other than Kevin Rudd, whose passion to give Australia a larger role on the world stage has become entwined with his own personal ambitions, it is hard to think of a leading frontbencher on either side who seems to spend much time or energy reflecting on world affairs. 3

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As political debate appears to be becoming more polarised and uncivil, relations with the larger world remain one of the few areas of apparent bipartisanship, though more through disinterest than thought through conviction. One of the demands of the Greens after winning considerable political clout at the 2010 elections was that the first full parliamentary debate on Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan be held, ten years after the first troops were committed. In that debate (in October 2010) government and opposition seemed largely united, even if their support for what appears an open-ended commitment is regarded with scepticism by much of the electorate. Politicians tend to fight current battles through perceptions formed in their youth, a tendency which becomes very problematic when the world changes rapidly. Common to the speeches and performance of both Julia Gillard as prime minister and Tony Abbott as opposition leader is a view of the world that reveals their political formation during the Cold War, and their uncritical acceptance of the dominant American construction of international affairs. Thus Tony Abbott still talks unselfconsciously of the United States as ‘the leader of the free world’, while Gillard, in her address to the United States Congress, made clear her admiration for the United States as the country that ‘can do anything’. President Obama’s visit late in 2011 produced bipartisan support for further strengthening of the American alliance without, it seemed, any questioning of how our eagerness to further blend into US defence structures might be perceived by regional neighbours. The prime minister did move to reassure countries such as China and Indonesia in the immediate aftermath of the Obama visit, but she has also commissioned a review of Australia’s relations with Asia to be directed by that indefatigable purveyor of advice to government, former Treasury head Ken Henry. Not necessarily a bad move, but Gillard’s comments in commissioning the White Paper made clear her concerns were essentially economic. Of course the alliance with the United States has been the cornerstone of Australian foreign policy for the past sixty years, and successive prime ministers have sought to prove their closeness to American administrations. But while some of us might have preferred Gillard to have echoed some of the independence of, say, Gorton, Whitlam or Keating, the real point is that neither she nor her opponents seem to recognise the extent to which the Cold War framework no longer serves as an overall framework for understanding the world. The last decade has seen a rapid shift in how the world works, 4

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symbolised by the rising importance of states such as China, India and Brazil, and Australia can no longer assume that any of the old certainties will persist. A more imaginative request from the government would be one that recognises the changing shape of global relations and challenges which extend far beyond trade, investment and tourism. Governments, of course, are often more sophisticated than their public rhetoric might suggest, and it would be a mistake to assume there is not a far more complex set of views that in practice means Australia is engaged at a number of levels in multilateral discussions on a variety of issues that rarely are publicly noticed. As Alex Bellamy points out in his chapter, there has been essentially bipartisan support for interventions to protect, where Australia has played a leading role. Taking office means that politicians are more subject to the cooler passions of public servants and international obligations than to the grandstanding of talkback radio; Julia Gillard no longer talks of how she would prefer reading to school kids than attending international meetings, and Howard’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, was in practice far more thoughtful and engaged with our region than his public persona might have suggested. The case for reassessing the role of major Asian powers has been made powerfully in the last couple of years by a number of commentators, most particularly Michael Wesley and Hugh White, and White in particular points to the increasing need for Australia to recalibrate its relationship with the United States as China becomes more and more significant (White 2010). As Wesley (2011:123–124) wrote: ‘Never has there been a greater gap between Australian society’s enmeshment with the world and its levels of interest in the world beyond its shores . . . A nation that has become profoundly cosmopolitan and well-travelled over the space of two decades has, at the same time, become more belligerently self assertive and inflexible in the face of a globalised world’s challenges.’ These sort of arguments are often attacked in deeply emotional terms as betraying our historic ties to ‘great and powerful friends’. On both sides of politics there is a deep emotional attachment to the view that Australia’s future depends upon ever closer ties to the United States, even as successive governments do their best to increase trade and investment with Asia. I have the dubious honour of having been attacked by one current cabinet minister for ‘moral equivalence’ when I suggested that we should assess our relations with the United States exactly as we would those with any other state. Apparently 5

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he heard what should be an uncontroversial (indeed old-fashioned) argument for national interest as an attack on the United States. For a realist it would be sufficient to demonstrate that there is an ongoing contradiction arising from shifting power relations that at some point Australian foreign policy will have to address. But this is to assume a one-dimensional view of global changes which overlooks the increasing interdependence of states and the rising significance of concerns that go beyond traditional notions of state security. This interdependence of a global economy and society has been dramatically underlined by the successive economic crises of the early twenty-first century, and the effective replacement of the G8 by the G20 as the forum in which major economic powers seek to establish financial stability (Beeson and Bell 2009). Peter Costello and Kevin Rudd played a major role in helping shape these new forms of global architecture, and could justifiably claim that their success in promoting Australia’s role has not been fully appreciated. Like economic crises, the problems of climate change underline the ways in which we are inextricably affected by global developments. Interestingly this is recognised by both proponents and opponents of Australian action: those who demand meaningful action to reduce carbon emissions do so by reference to Australia’s per capita contributions to global warming, perhaps the highest in the world, while those who disagree argue that whatever we do is irrelevant in the face of the rapid growth of emissions in very much larger economies such as China and India. Kevin Rudd of course made climate change a central issue of his leadership, and both his failure to implement a trading emissions scheme and declining commitment from significant polluters has meant declining emphasis on climate change within foreign policy. There is a deep tension within Australia between a cosmopolitan and a parochial view of the world, which results from the ways a settler society planted so far from its historical roots has engaged with the larger world. ‘Cosmopolitan’ is a much contested term, and I use it here to convey a sense of ‘focusing on the world as a whole rather than on a particular locality or group within it. It also means being at home with diversity’ (Calhoun 2008:428). In the current world it means a positive interest in Australia’s geographic situation in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as distinct from a deep attachment to its North Atlantic antecedents. A cosmopolitan would see in the almost unique features of Australian history and geography a remarkable opportunity to develop a particular vision of the 6

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world, rather akin to Robyn Eckersley’s (2007:689) argument for a ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’: ‘If the shape of foreign policy includes a concern with responsibility to others and not just co-nationals, with alleviating injustices beyond the nation, then such a nation may be characterised as cosmopolitan’. Certainly huge changes in our perceptions of the outside world have occurred in the past few decades, in part as a response to the increasing diversity of our population and the economic rise of many of our neighbours. But the anxieties and paranoia that surface every time an Australian is arrested for drug offences in Indonesia suggest that there remains a deep discomfort among many Australians, fed by the media, about those countries to which we are closest geographically. As Matt McDonald indicates, many Australians are engaged with the world in ways that are far more complex and interesting than an examination of public debate or mainstream media might suggest. Our public rhetoric may not be cosmopolitan—and the spectre of asylum seekers seems to have created a very nasty parochialism— but there are many strands to global engagement. Large numbers of Australians are volunteers and supporters of international development agencies, and there is considerable interest in public forums across the country, of the sort run by World Vision over the past few years, in questions of international development. (Figures from the Council for International Development suggest Australians give almost one billion dollars a year for international development.) Australians travel overseas in remarkably large numbers, and increasingly are spending considerable periods of time living and working in Asia. Rudd, as both prime minister and foreign minister, has stressed the need for multilateralism to respond to a series of interconnected threats to security. While still opposition leader, Rudd (2007) stated: ‘Beyond these long-term security policy drivers across our wider region, our future national security policy will need to be sufficiently nimble to deal with the full array of human security challenges as well—people smuggling, money laundering, drug trafficking as well as communicable diseases such as Avian Influenza.’ In his capacity as the minister responsible for overseas development assistance as well as foreign affairs Rudd continued his commitment to these issues. The current opposition pays lip service to this commitment, but other than a few frontbenchers—for example, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull—the support seems skin deep. 7

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‘Realism’ remains the dominant trope in Australian discussions of international affairs, and realists are not very interested in the ‘soft’ issues that are associated with the human security paradigm. Yet the chapters in this book demonstrate that the real threats to the security of Australia are increasingly bound up with non-traditional concerns of the sort Rudd spoke about. The Director of the Lowy Institute once told me that no-one there believed in human security, but they still take the issues it encompasses seriously. Given the realist dominance it is encouraging that as we were editing this book a new text appeared that acknowledged ‘human security’ as a major concept in thinking about foreign policy. Contemporary Challenges to Australian Security (Baldino et al. 2011) seeks to reframe dominant security discourses to include many of the issues with which we are concerned. As Camilleri points out there is no overall strategic approach within government to ‘human security’, though much of what AusAID supports could well be regarded as falling within its scope. (Anthony Bourke develops this point in his chapter.) This may help explain the bipartisan commitment to increasing Australian development assistance, much of which goes to states that are fragile and unable to guarantee minimal standards of personal security and governance. While it is easy to criticise Australian development assistance as too committed to economic growth at the expense of developing human potential (see Roche and Hoffstaedter’s chapter) it is also true that we are among the few countries whose assistance is expanding. Some of the special ambassadors appointed by Australia to represent our concerns in areas such as HIV/AIDS, people smuggling and, most recently, women and girls, are an indication of a growing commitment by government to moving beyond an entirely state-centric view of diplomacy. It is revealing that while Australia has a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade there are separate cabinet ministers for the two areas while development assistance is part of the foreign minister’s portfolio. Indeed the budget of AusAID is far larger than that of foreign affairs, which is both a reason foreign ministers have kept it under their control and an indication that at some level there is a recognition that the issues it deals with are central to foreign policy (see David Mickler’s chapter on Africa). More analysis is required of how the growth of Australian development assistance interacts with the broader security and foreign policy agenda, which was implicit in much of Rudd’s tenure as prime minister and foreign minister. 8

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Indeed the false dichotomy between ‘international relations’ and ‘development’ means there has been relatively little academic analysis of Australia’s aid programs (but see Rosser 2008), although there is a considerable amount of sophisticated analysis available from within the development sector. It is not a question of playing off one against the other, although it is important to note that Australia’s diplomatic presence does not match its ambitions to be a significant middle power (Lowy Institute 2009). The lack of resources devoted to Australian representation overseas is mirrored in the small number of overseas correspondents maintained abroad, especially by commercial television networks, and even by the clearly cheap productions of the ABC’s overseas television programming. In compiling this book there were limits to our ability to probe the ways in which a human security perspective might affect how we think about Australia’s place in the world. While a number of senior women contributed to our workshops they are badly underrepresented in this book, and there is a pressing need for a gendered analysis of human security and Australian foreign policy. Such an analysis would both recognise the extent to which women are disadvantaged in most societies and the more complex ways in which men too are repressed through prevailing gender norms which promote particular ways of responding to security issues.1 As both gender and sexual rights become more prominent internationally, and as fundamentalist moves to impose rigid norms of hegemonic masculinity are growing in many parts of the world, this dimension of human security demands more attention. Equally there is insufficient attention paid to climate change, although several of our contributors are working on this issue and publishing elsewhere. In her conclusion Robyn Eckersley takes up some of the most recent developments in thinking about climate change and security, a central issue for anyone concerned with ‘human security’. Each contributor brings a particular approach to the vexed concept of ‘human security’, providing a complex and multilayered analysis of how we might approach this term. As both Joseph Camilleri and Stephen James stress in their opening chapters there is a significant debate around how broadly or narrowly to define the concept. While there is some advantage to a narrow definition it is important to note, as James writes, that: ‘Broad human insecurities can be measured as accurately as narrow ones.’ Anthony Bourke develops this theme through the device of a possible government statement which might 9

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meet Camilleri’s request for an overarching national commitment to human security. Alex Bellamy further homes in on one crucial area in his discussion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ and Matt McDonald develops the argument in relation to the shaping of Australian foreign policy. By examining Australia’s relations with Africa, David Mickler draws attention to the role of aid and development within a human security framework, while Chris Roche and Gerhard Hoffstaedter offer a very different view of foreign policy that begins with citizens and people-to-people contact rather than concentrating exclusively on states. Their chapter suggests one way in which we might radically rethink the relationship between citizens and foreign policy in ways that take up some of the challenges thrown out by Camilleri, Bourke and McDonald. Thanks to the support of the ARC and the Academy we have been able to involve a considerable number of colleagues across Australia in the development of our thinking. It would be invidious to single out too many individuals, but I would note the participation in our workshops of the former Parliamentary Secretary for Development, Bob McMullan, and two distinguished overseas guests, Andrew Mack from Simon Fraser University and Bill Durodié from Nanyang University. The three of us who have directed this project are particularly grateful for the support of Will Douglas, Tracy Lee, Stephen James, and, above all, Gerhard Hoffstaedter who has cajoled, prodded, and guided us towards the production of this book. Melbourne, January 2012 notes 1 There is of course an extensive literature on gender and international relations, though far less specifically on gendered views of human security (but see Hudson 2005; Hudson et al. 2008/09).

referenCes Baldino, D, J Pietsch, D Lundberg and J Rees 2011 Contemporary Challenges to Australian Security, Palgrave Macmillan, South Yarra, Vic. Beeson, M and S Bell 2009 ‘The G20 and International Economic Governance’, Global Governance 15:67–89. 10

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Calhoun, C 2008 ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 14(3):427–448. Eckersley, R 2007 ‘From Cosmopolitan Nationalism to Cosmopolitan Democracy’, Review of International Studies 33:675–692. Elliott, L 2011 ‘Plus ça change? The Coalition, Labor and the Challenges of Environmental Foreign Policy’ in J Cotton and J Ravenhill eds Middle Power Dreaming: Australia in World Affairs 2006–2010, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Hansen, F 2011 Australia and the World, Lowy Institute, Sydney. Hudson, H 2005 ‘“Doing Security” as though Humans Matter: A Feminist Perspective on Gender and the Politics of Human Security’, Security Dialogue 36(2):155–174. Hudson, VM, M Caprioli, B Ballif-Spanvill, R McDermott and CF Emmett 2008/09 ‘The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Society of States’, International Security 33(3):7–45. Kaur, M and L Gong 2010 ‘Misdirected Development a Threat to Security’, NTS Insight (RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security, NTS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), September, http://www.rsis.edu. sg/nts/HTML-Newsletter/Insight/NTS_Insight_Sep_10o1.pdf. Lowy Institute 2009 Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Blue Ribbon Panel Report, Lowy Institute, Sydney. Porter, D 1997 ‘A Plague on the Borders’ in L Manderson and M Jolley eds Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rosser, A 2008 ‘Neo-liberalism and the Politics of Australian Aid Policymaking’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 62(3):372–385. Rudd, K 2007 ‘National Security Policy under a Labor Government’, an address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute at Parliament House in Canberra, 8 August. Tyler, M and E White 2011 ‘The Australia 2020 Summit as an Experiment in Foreign Policy Making’ in Cotton and Ravenhill, Middle Power Dreaming. UNDP 1994 Human Development Report: New Dimensions of Human Security, UNDP, New York. Wesley, M 2011 There Goes the Neighbourhood, New South, Sydney. White, H 2010 ‘Power Shift’, Quarterly Essay 39.

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2 human seCurity: from theory to praCtiCe Joseph a Camilleri

Over the last two decades human security has gained grudging but increasing acceptance in both the scholarly and policy-making communities. The concept, however, remains highly contested and international practice leaves much to be desired. For theorists and practitioners alike, one of the major challenges has been to arrive at a definition of human security that is intellectually coherent and operationally useful, one which allows human security to avoid the pitfalls of amorphous comprehensiveness on the one hand and stifling restrictiveness on the other. Ultimately the test for human security as both explanatory concept and policy instrument will revolve around the use that is made of it by communities, states and international organisations. This dual perspective—the interconnection of the theoretical and the practical—constitutes the integrating focus of this chapter. Given that human security seeks to shift the focus of security away from the state as the principal actor to be secured, definitional questions arise which have far-reaching implications for both theory and practice. With this as our point of departure we need to consider whether and how it may be possible to place ‘people’ at the core of the security discourse. To concretise this exploration, we propose to survey, however briefly, the extent to which governments and international organisations have recently used the notion of human security in the formulation and execution of policy. The underlying aim of this exercise is identify the conceptual and practical difficulties 12

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which need to be overcome if the human security perspective is to make a useful contribution to the management of the complex and interdependent insecurities in what is an unprecedented period of transition in human affairs. human seCurity: an analytiC tool in need of refinement The UN Human Security Unit, charged with the ambitious mission of integrating the notion of ‘human security’ in all UN activities, has defined the concept as: protecting fundamental freedoms—freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means using processes that build on people’s strengths and aspirations. It means creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity (OCHA 2009:1–2).

Such a definition, though helpful in conveying something of the ethical underpinnings of the concept, is nevertheless too diffuse to provide a basis for either coherent analysis or effective operationalisation. The difficulty here has much to do with the origins of the concept, which can be traced back to a number of normative impulses and policy imperatives on the part of international institutions, in particular UN agencies, and a number of small to middle powers, notably Canada, Norway and Japan. A critical milestone in this journey was the gradual reconceptualisation of the prevailing economic development discourse which culminated in the early 1990s with a concerted attempt to place ‘human development’ at the core of the development strategies of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other international development organisations. Human development was meant to contrast with and replace the largely discredited Gross National Product (GNP) growth-centred models of development and to align more closely with the increasingly widespread recognition of the limits to state sovereignty and the international community’s consequent responsibility to intervene in situations of humanitarian emergency, often provoked by the ill-advised security policies of states (see Amouyel 2006:10–11; UN General Assembly 2005:31; UNDP 2010). 13

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Human security has nevertheless remained a highly contested idea. Debate has centred largely on two disputes: one between advocates and critics of the concept, and the other, located within the human security family, between the proponents of broad and narrow definitions of the concept (for a useful review of these disputes, see the contributions from Ramesh Thakur, Lloyd Axworthy, Amitav Acharya, Andrew Mack, Keith Krause, Barry Buzan, among others, in Security Dialogue 2004). Here it may be useful to explore these disagreements and the continuing difficulties that have stood in the way of a widely accepted definition of human security. the meaning of ‘human’ in human security Supporters of the concept have generally argued that the distinguishing feature (and value) of human security is that it places the spotlight on the security of people as distinct from the security of states. At one level this is an unexceptionable proposition since the state’s ultimate justification is its capacity to deliver security to the people. The difficulty here lies in the meaning to be attached to the word ‘people’. In much of the human security literature, ‘people’ is understood to refer to ‘individuals’. Ramesh Thakur (2004:347) argues that ‘human security puts the individual at the centre of debate, analysis and policy’. Similarly, for Lloyd Axworthy (2004b:348): ‘The shift of security concerns from those focused on national interests to those affecting the individual offers a different lens through which to understand and implement policy.’ Though the intent is laudable, the choice of language is nonetheless unfortunate. An individual-centred notion of human security is problematic on several counts. First, the word itself carries otherwise avoidable connotations of Western liberal notions of individualism, and of the implicit attempt to impose such notions on non-Western societies and cultures, the overwhelming majority of which are still endeavouring to reassert themselves in the wake of the colonial experience. To this extent it would be preferable to make ‘persons’ the referent of human security, not least because ‘person’ implies an identity that refers not just to a unique, self-contained moral agent but also to a network of loyalties and affinities that structure the convictions and inclinations of the person and life more generally. Some writers attempt to overcome this difficulty by referring to ‘individuals and communities’ (Prezelj 2008; Yale Journal of International Affairs 2010). This is a step in the right direction, but one that can still lead to confusion. 14

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Are individuals and communities to be understood as separate or interconnected referents? If they are separate, are they periodically in tension with each other? If so, how is the human security concept to deal with that tension? If connected, what exactly is the nature of the connection, and how is it to be incorporated into the conceptualisation of human security? Though an in-depth exploration of these questions is outside the scope of this chapter, they are raised in order to suggest the importance of identity and culture in any discussion of personal fulfilment on the one hand and the management of conflict and violence on the other, both of which are central to the concerns of human security. The argument here is that in a post-Westphalian world identity can no longer be conceptualised as purely national in origin or scope. More often than not, nationality now coexists with—and at times conflicts with—ethnicity, religion, culture, race, civilisation, ideology, or cosmology and the deep-seated and enduring attachments which they reflect and seek to mobilise. While some have viewed this trend as a delayed reaction to the marginalisation of religion and the sacred, others have pointed to the rejection of rationalised and individualised structures of consciousness fostered by the Enlightenment, and reinforced by modernisation and Westernisation (Nelson 1973:80). Others still have referred to the intensification of transnational security threats (Keppel 1994:192) and the pressures of globalisation (Barber 1996; Bauman 1998; Karner and Aldridge 2004). An important contributing factor to the ‘deterritorialisation’ of identity has been the diasporic phenomenon, that is, the dispersal of peoples who, as a result of either voluntary or forced migration, permanently reside as minorities in host countries, yet maintain a deep sense of belonging to the homeland by virtue of a common ancestry, a collective history, or shared social and cultural mores, values and traditions (Sheffer 2003:9–12). If ‘human security’ is to address the challenge posed by contemporary pluralism, then it has to come to terms with hybrid and interacting identities and solidarities. Simply put, human security must necessarily entail a complex reconciliation of the security needs of persons understood not as atomised individuals but as members of diverse and interacting communities, including the international community—a category that has steadily grown in importance as a consequence of globalising currents that show no sign of abating. The attempt thus far to give meaning and content to the notion of ‘people’ is still incomplete, for it is not enough to consider the referent 15

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of human security as consisting simply of the agents in need of protection. The question remains: who has responsibility for delivering such protection? The analytical strength of the state-centric view is that it offers a parsimonious answer to both sides of the equation. What is to be protected is the state, and it is the state that is to do the protecting. More starkly put, each state is ultimately responsible for its own protection. If human security proponents wish to advance an alternative worldview which places people centre stage, then they need to address the question: which people (persons and/or communities) are responsible for whose security? Some may wish to answer that each person is responsible for the security of all human beings. Ethically laudable though it is, such a proposition is analytically weak because it does not tell us how this principle is to be made institutionally meaningful. A more useful response is to say that all kinds of authoritative actors (national, municipal, provincial, regional, and global institutions that comprise the overall architecture of governance) and influential actors (operating in two different domains, the market and civil society) bear some responsibility (see further Camilleri and Falk 2009:165–168). Doubtless, these actors include persons but importantly also national communities—in large part but not exclusively through the agency of the state—and the international community as a whole—through a range of international organisations of which the United Nations is paramount—as well as a great many sub-national, transnational and regional communities and organisations. One thing is clear: the locus of responsibility will vary depending on the geographical scope, the sociopolitical context, the capabilities of relevant actors and, importantly, on the provisions of international law. The seemingly simple, uniform answer that the application of the sovereignty principle has hitherto given to the question of which people are responsible for whose security has lost whatever resonance it may have once had. Clearly, the question of responsibility merits more rigorous treatment than it has so far received from either theorists or practitioners. Once it is accepted that the responsibility for human security lies with many different actors, two steps must logically follow if the concept is to be effectively translated into policy. The first is to develop at least general rules of thumb which can help determine which responsibilities are to be exercised by which actors and in what circumstances. A second step is needed where two or more actors are said to exercise joint—which is not to say equal—responsibility in any given situation. In other words, criteria must be elaborated to 16

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guide the division and coordination of functions and responsibilities. National governments and civil society organisations (including the Academy) as well as the UN system that are sympathetically disposed to human security have important roles to play in this complex and ongoing task of elucidation. The widespread support for the emerging norm of the ‘responsibility to protect’ is an important step in the right direction (UN General Assembly 2005:31, paragraphs 138 and 139), but even here much work remains to be done both conceptually and operationally. If force is be used in the name of the international community, a more rigorously elaborated set of principles is needed to ensure that force is used sparingly, with greater transparency of purpose, objectives and methods, and with appropriate reporting and monitoring procedures. When it comes to military intervention, the United Nations, notwithstanding the delegation of functions to a regional or other organisation, must at all times and for the entire duration of the operation remain in full control of what is done and how it is done. It remains to say a few words about the broad versus narrow conceptualisation of human security. On one side are those who favour a relatively narrow definition, usually in the interests of analytical rigour, and focus on ‘freedom from fear’, that is, on the threats posed by physical violence. This is usually identified with the position of the Canadian and Norwegian governments, two principal state proponents of human security (Yale Journal of International Affairs 2010). On the other side are those who argue for a more encompassing definition of human security because they wish to give due emphasis to a range of other threats which they regard as no less serious and generally more pervasive. This wider definition usually includes threats posed by poverty and famine, disease, environmental degradation, humanitarian disasters of various kinds, state collapse, and gross violations of human rights. This position is identified with such agencies such as the UNDP, which find a close and fruitful parallel between the concepts of ‘human security’ and ‘human development’ (UNDP 2010:17). While the disagreement is clear enough, there is reason to think that it is less stark than is often made out. To illustrate, while the Canadian government is usually identified as a proponent of the ‘freedom from violence’ approach in its understanding of human security, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has described the objective of its ‘human security program’ as enhancing ‘people’s safety and freedom from violent and nonviolent threats to their rights, safety or 17

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lives [emphasis added]’ (DFAIT Canada 2004:iii). The inclusion of non-violent threats to rights, safety and lives, insofar as it allows for, perhaps encourages, consideration of economic and environmental threats, brings us much closer to the wider conception of human security (UNDP 2010). Taylor Owen (2004:373–387) offers perhaps the most helpful attempt to date to reconcile the two positions. He argues that human security can be ‘both analytically useful and policy relevant’, provided that the threats to be addressed are selected on the grounds of severity rather than cause. Using severity as the benchmark, and in line with the original exposition advanced in the 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP 1994), Owen suggests that human security is required to address two types of vulnerability: the first derives from chronic threats (such as hunger and disease) and the second from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of daily life (specifically war). This formulation, which has been integrated into the UN Human Security Unit’s definition of the concept (OCHA 2009:1–2), has much to commend it. Yet it is not entirely persuasive, for it does not explain the connection between chronic and sudden threats, nor does it provide criteria for making judgments about severity. towards a definition of human security We may get a little closer to the mark if we were to say that human security is concerned with two kinds of threat: direct threats posed by the use or threatened use of physical violence to persons and communities; and indirect threats posed by social, economic, environmental and political conditions which, if allowed to persist, can be reasonably expected within a foreseeable time frame to give rise to the use or threatened use of force. Three aspects of the proposed definition are worth noting. First, it implicitly acknowledges that the primary concern of human security is to identify and remedy vulnerabilities which, if neglected, are likely to result in violence and significant loss of life. Simply put, the job of security policy is to provide protection in the face of high and ultimately unsustainable levels of insecurity, remembering that prevention is integral to the task of protection. Second, it highlights the close connection that exists between socioeconomic and environmental conditions on the one hand and the recourse to violence on the other. The important policy implication of this premise is that 18

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security policy should deal with safety in a much wider sense than has been customary in the past, since armed conflict often has its source in socioeconomic, environmental and political conditions. On the other hand, care must be taken not to define safety so broadly as to make it all-encompassing, for this would be to bring within its purview all facets of human welfare—a proposition that has little theoretical or practical utility. Rather, the proposition advanced here is that security-related institutions (not just defence departments) must be intellectually and organisationally equipped to analyse the multiple sources of conflict and to fully integrate them into the decision-making process. Third, the definitional approach outlined above remains within the widely accepted intellectual framework that security policy is about maintaining a stable social and political order that can deliver safety to persons and communities. The proposed reading of human security adopts this framework but adds the crucial caveat that such an order must work to the benefit of all and not just elites or sectional interests. In other words, the state is not the ultimate arbiter of the wisdom of its security policies. Its authority is not unlimited. Its actions and pronouncements can and must be subjected to the scrutiny of its own citizenry, the communities that make it up, and a number of international and transnational actors (e.g. UN agencies, other international and regional institutions, and humanitarian organisations) that have legitimate responsibilities in particular regions and contexts. It should be noted that this perspective is by no means limited to the human security discourse. The recent international relations literature is replete with attempts to limit or qualify state sovereignty as traditionally understood by attaching to the concept such adjectives as ‘relational’, ‘constitutional’, ‘earned’, ‘shared’, ‘suspended’ or ‘transitional’, ‘divisible’, and ‘post-statist’ (see, e.g. Hooper and Williams 2004:355–375; Ilgen 2003:6–35; Keene 2002:1037–1052; Radon 2004:195–209; Shinoda 2000; Yannis 2002; and, for a review of this literature, Camilleri 2008:33–50). In reviewing the analytical rigour and practical utility of the human security concept the aim has been to do no more than advance a few key propositions that might shed useful light on an otherwise elusive and at times confusing field of inquiry. These propositions have been expressed at a relatively high level of abstraction. Their implications for the twin processes of policy formulation and policy implementation will become more readily apparent as we explore, somewhat selectively, how the concept has thus far impacted on national and international governance. 19

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the international experienCe As already noted, notions of human security have intruded with increasing frequency into the policy-making process, especially in Europe, Japan and Canada. In Norway’s case, the emphasis has been on the ‘freedom from fear’ dimension of human security, in particular peace-building (e.g. mediation or reconciliation efforts in the Sri Lanka, Middle East, Ethiopia–Eritrea, Sudan and Colombia conflicts), humanitarian efforts (usually in support of UN operations, the Red Cross and humanitarian agencies), and disarmament and arms control initiatives (from small arms to nuclear weapons). In support of this approach, Norwegian Minister for Foreign Affairs Jan Petersen (2005) described such activities as integral to the security agenda, arguing that in a globalising world ‘home affairs and foreign affairs can rarely be separated. Threats know no borders. Security is indivisible.’ In Petersen’s view, rising levels of interconnectedness had direct application to the threat of terrorism, which, though it poses a direct physical threat, nevertheless has its roots in the ‘breeding grounds’ of ‘poverty, injustice and lack of political freedom’ in different parts of the world. Though less formally and with less intensity, many of the same premises govern the security policies of other Scandinavian countries (see Behringer 2005; Danish Ministry of Defence 2008). Japan represents a particularly instructive case in that it has devoted considerable attention to the ‘freedom from want’ dimension of human security. In 1998, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi (1998) proclaimed human security to be ‘the key which comprehensively covers all the menaces that threaten the survival, daily life, and dignity of human beings’. Although formed largely within the framework of Japan’s development assistance policies, Obuchi went on to describe the following transnational challenges as integral to the human security agenda: environmental threats (in particular global warming), transnational crimes (including the narcotics trade and trafficking), refugee flows, human rights violations, infectious diseases, terrorism and anti-personnel landmines. Japan subsequently helped to establish the UN Trust Fund for Human Security, to which it became the principal contributor, and strongly supported the establishment of the UN sponsored Human Security Commission. Human security has continued to be a key plank of Tokyo’s diplomacy, which is not to say that it has been adequately integrated into the core of Japan’s regional and global security policies. Nor has the commitment been 20

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consistently reflected in the conduct of its domestic policies, notably with respect to refugees or human rights more generally (Ho 2008: 101–112; Nasu 2010). Much the same trend is evident in the development of the European Union’s approach to security. The European Security Strategy (ESS) agreed to by the European Council in December 2003 made responsibility for global security its centrepiece. Acknowledging that ‘the post Cold War environment is one of increasingly open borders in which the internal and external aspects of security are indissolubly linked’, the ESS argued for preventive engagement, a strategy of effective multilateralism and the extension of the international rule of law (EU 2003). Though the European Union has yet to develop an integrated human security program (EU 2004), a revised version of the ESS adopted in December 2008 took into account a new range of security threats and listed the following key policies as forming part of its commitment to human security: ‘reducing poverty and inequality, promoting good governance and human rights, assisting development, and addressing the root causes of conflict and insecurity’ (EU 2008:2). The human security approach was not in any case confined to the international domain. EU policies over the last thirty years, and most strikingly in the Lisbon Strategy first adopted in 2000, have reflected a strong emphasis on three pillars: developing a competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based economy; modernising the European social model by investing in human resources and combating social exclusion; and decoupling economic growth from the use of natural resources. The Lisbon Treaty which came into force in December 2009 envisaged a consolidated security model, based on the principles and values of the Union: respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, democracy, dialogue, tolerance. This said, the EU’s internal security strategy, in its operational as distinct from its declaratory manifestations, reflects the preoccupations that have come to dominate the post–September 11 political environment, namely terrorism, cyber-crime, cross-border crime, youth violence, natural and man-made disasters, energy shortages, major information and communication technologies (ICT) breakdowns, and road traffic accidents (EU 2010). The EU experience is instructive because it expresses in tentative yet clearly discernible ways the applicability of human security to regional governance. Other regional organisations, while they lack comparable levels of institutionalisation, have also highlighted the relevance of human security policies and mechanisms, especially 21

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in situations of prolonged conflict and violence. Especially noteworthy is the African Union’s African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) which incorporates provisions for mediation, conflict prevention and peacemaking, an early warning system and an African standby force, though several of these elements have yet to be fully operationalised. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has also moved incrementally in this direction at least at the declaratory level with the adoption of the ASEAN vision 2020 in 1997, and the ASEAN Charter in 2007. ASEAN has also given rise to a number of other regional initiatives, notably ASEAN+3 (ASEAN plus China, Japan and South Korea), which has become the vehicle for a number of human security initiatives, notably in relation to the management of major pandemics, including SARS (ASEAN+3 2003). Finally, mention should be made of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping (APEC) whose brief centres on the facilitation and liberalisation of trade but which has also given increasing prominence to security issues. The Declaration issued by the 15th APEC leaders Meeting held in Sydney in 2007, devoted an entire section to ‘enhancing human security’ (APEC 2007). Even the American military has, perhaps cosmetically, adopted human security principles in pursuit of complex missions in Afghanistan and Iraq (Yale Journal of International Affairs 2010), as evidenced by its purported objective to place the focus on ‘the population, its needs, and its security’—an objective that appears in the US Army’s list of successful counterinsurgency practices (US Department of the Army 2006: section 1.29). The extent to which this operational practice aligns with wider US military practices—including targeted assassinations, application of torture in interrogation of prisoners and suspects, and use of unmanned aerial vehicles as part of its warfighting doctrine—is, as Mary Kaldor has observed, at best unclear, and at worst completely contradictory (Yale Journal of International Affairs 2010). It does nevertheless demonstrate the rising level of respectability which human security principles have now acquired. On the other hand, the attempt to integrate a ‘population security’ approach into US military doctrine highlights the risks associated with acceptance by the state of human security language, when in practice the overriding consideration is the defence of state-centric strategic security interests. While the adoption of human security by a great power as a guiding principle of its foreign policy needs to be approached with reasonable scepticism, it does offer useful evidence of the increasing 22

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legitimacy which the concept now enjoys in international diplomacy. In this context it is worth noting the more prominent place which human security discourse has come to occupy in US foreign policy pronouncements. The US State Department’s fact sheet on international water policy had as its heading ‘Water Security is Human Security’ (US Department of State 2011). The US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration addressed the challenge of refugee policy in a recent speech entitled ‘Human Security is National Security’ (Schwartz 2011). The Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs went somewhat further and referred to an ‘array of global issues that address human security’, including ‘political and economic security . . . [and] water, health and environmental security’ (US Department of State 2010). Notwithstanding these forays into public diplomacy, the fact remains that human security has not yet achieved much penetration when it comes to the practice and even discourse of US ‘national security’ policy. Useful lessons may be drawn from these diverse attempts to elaborate and apply notions of human security. However, viewed specifically from an Australian vantage point (to which we will turn in a later chapter), it is perhaps the Canadian experiment which is most suggestive of the scope and limitations of government attempts to translate the concept into practice. Australia and Canada, notwithstanding important differences, share a number of key characteristics: geography (the size of territory and relative isolation from major zones of conflict); demography (size of population); economy (a rich resource endowment and high per capita Gross Domestic Product); politics (a federal structure); geopolitics (limited military capabilities and an alliance with the United States); diplomacy (longstanding though uneven support for global multilateralism); and social fabric (increasing levels of ethnic and religious diversity coupled with varying experiments in ‘multiculturalism’). Though Canada has a longstanding interest in the diplomacy of ‘international good citizenship’, not least during the long years of Liberal government under Pearson in the 1960s and Trudeau in the 1970s and 1980s, it is during the most recent period of Liberal rule, in particular during the Chrétien years (1993–2003), that the notion of human security was adopted as a key pillar of Canadian foreign policy. In many respects, the initiative involved the repackaging and rebranding of pre-existing policies. However, it is arguable that under Canadian foreign minister (1996–2000) Lloyd Axworthy’s direction its foreign policy endowed human security with greater intellectual 23

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sophistication and coherence (see Axworthy 1997:183–208; Axworthy 2003; Axworthy 2004a:245–259). In pursuit of a policy of human security activism, usually in a multilateral context, Canada: • played a pivotal role in the campaign that culminated in 1997 in the signing of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (Cottrell 2009); • co-sponsored with Norway a conference of middle powers to raise international awareness of the principles of human security and to formulate a human security action plan. It gave rise to the Human Security Network comprised of thirteen small and middle powers: Austria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Mali, Norway, Switzerland, Thailand, the Netherlands (which left in 2007) and Slovenia (Greek Foreign Ministry 2009); • used its presidency of the UN Security Council in 2000 to give prominence to human security issues, including protection of civilians in armed conflict and reform of the sanctions regime (UN Department of Public Information 2000); • hosted the International Conference on War Affected Children in 2000 (Canadian International Development Agency 2000); • actively supported developing strategies assisting internally displaced persons in international humanitarian operations (DFAIT Canada 2011a); • improved training and deployment of Canadian forces in UN peace operations, with particular emphasis on strengthening the contribution of UN police personnel in establishing law and order (Department of National Defence Canada 1997; Department of National Defence Canada 2010; Dorn 2005); • contributed to the strengthening of UN conflict prevention mechanisms, especially in building indigenous capacities in early warning, negotiation, mediation and post-conflict peacebuilding in Bosnia, Haiti and East Timor (Department of National Defence Canada, 2010); • supported the establishment of the International Criminal Court (Barnett 2008); • contributed to more effective international instruments and expertise in countering the rise of transnational organised crime (drug trafficking and terrorism) (DFAIT Canada 2011c); 24

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• helped to establish, in December 2001, the Canadian Consortium on Human Security (CCHS), an academic-based network supporting policy-relevant research on human security, which it funded through the Human Security program of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT Canada 2007). Underlying these and other Canadian initiatives were two interacting strands of thought: transformationalism and liberalism. Transformationalism focused on systemic change in international relations, especially the problematisation of state sovereignty and the reconstitution of political power with the steady rise of private power as one of its defining characteristics. Liberalism emphasised the centrality of the individual in the international system, the potential harmonisation of state interests, and the role of global civil society in advancing an international liberal democratic order conducive to international cooperation and protection of the rights of the individual. In such a rapidly globalising world, leadership could be exercised efficaciously only in concert with other like-minded state and non-state actors, and legitimately only within an appropriate multilateral framework. For Axworthy, the decisive shift in international relations had come with the idea that the international community had a responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of citizens everywhere, especially where governments were unwilling or unable to exercise such responsibility. Human security, which by definition knows no boundaries, offered the basis for a transformational policy framework capable of giving effect to this normative shift. Not surprisingly, Axworthy appeared to favour, at least implicitly, the broad definition of security although it was often couched in terms of ‘freedom from fear’ (for an analysis of Axworthy’s conceptualisation of human security see Bernard 2006:233–263, Donaghy 2003:39–58 and Hampson et al. 2001). In 2002, DFAIT explained that human security meant ‘freedom from pervasive threats to people’s rights, safety or lives’ (DFAIT Canada 2002:3). But in subsequent official documents, the emphasis was placed more sharply on ‘freedom from violent threats to people’s rights, safety and lives’ (DFAIT Canada 2006). The Canadian commitment to human security would be severely tested under Harper’s prime ministership, which lost little time in distancing itself from the policy direction of previous Liberal governments. Soon the language of human security was purged from official texts. Within three years it had entirely disappeared from the DFAIT lexicon. Yet, notwithstanding the change in vocabulary and 25

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the strong preference for such terms as ‘human rights’, ‘rule of law’ and ‘democratic development’, it soon emerged that the new administration had in practice embraced key tenets of the human security paradigm (Davis 2009). The Harper government chose to build upon DFAIT’s Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force (START), with the emphasis on supporting conflict prevention, crisis response, peace operations and civilian protection initiatives in countries in or at risk of crisis. It supported greater ‘whole-of-government’ coherence through cooperation with other Canadian government departments, multilateral and bilateral partners, as well as with Canadian and international civil society organisations. Specifically, Canada now latched on to UNSC (UN Security Council) Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security and related resolutions in 2008 and 2009. It sought to give effect to them by developing an Action Plan aimed at increasing the ‘active participation of women, including indigenous and local women, in peace operations and peace processes and in the management of conflict situations’, and improving the capacity of Canadian personnel to help prevent violence and protect women and girls in the context of humanitarian crises and peace operations (DFAIT Canada 2011b). The spirit of the human security agenda was still alive. Political change coexisted with diplomatic continuity. Indicative of this new ambiguity in Canadian discourse was the statement delivered by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in June 2010 following Canada’s failure to secure a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In an attempt to present a distinctive Liberal approach to foreign policy, he accused the Conservative government of blocking progress on climate change, freezing foreign aid, abandoning Africa and largely ignoring the UN itself—in short of negating human security. Tellingly, however, the 24-page statement setting out a blueprint for ‘Canada in the World: A Global Networks Strategy’ covered every facet of Canada’s place in the world, yet did not once mention ‘human security’. On the other hand, the statement referred twelve times to ‘human rights’ and eleven times to ‘human development’, with eight references to ‘human’ relationships, connections and networks (Liberal Party of Canada 2010). From this brief survey a number of predictable but instructive observations emerge. In almost every instance, though to different degrees, attempts to introduce the human security model into national or regional security frameworks have been accompanied by periodic tensions between declaratory and operational policy, as well as 26

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between change and continuity. To a very large extent these tensions reflect the often sharply conflicting values and interests which human security inevitably exposes. To deal creatively with such tensions it is necessary to ground human security concepts and processes in the local political culture, and to make policy innovation the subject of wide ranging public debate and participation. However, even with the best preparation in the world, success is likely to prove elusive unless the human security project is carefully embedded in a favourable conjuncture of international challenges and domestic opportunities. Here it is worth noting the increasingly important role that civil society is now playing in the intellectual and practical elaboration of the human security concept. In Canada’s case, the university and community sectors have been especially influential in persuading the Canadian government to develop a number of human security projects, including the multilateral Human Security Network, and to foster closer collaboration with international civil society organisations, notably the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). But the more cooperative relationship between state and civil society is at best a mixed blessing, as recent experience in the field of peacekeeping, peace building and post-conflict reconstruction has often shown. On the one hand, the greater willingness of some states to incorporate broader development and humanitarian concerns into traditional areas of military security may be regarded as a positive trend. On the other hand, the tendency on the part of a number of development and humanitarian organisations to be drawn into broader operations concerned with military and physical security often has highly adverse consequences. Though these operations may be justified as facilitating a more holistic approach to security, in practice they are likely to blur the distinction between combatants and civilians, and in the process produce two effects antithetical to the very notion of human security. In Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, to name a few instances, personnel engaged in development and humanitarian programs have become the targets of militant groups who suspect them of working closely with or serving the interests of foreign military forces (Franke 2006). Even where civil society organisations are acting in good faith, the net effect of their efforts may nevertheless be to assist or legitimise military occupation. The intersection of the human security agenda with military operations, especially when these are under the direct control of one state or a coalition of states, is on balance likely to prove a source of widespread confusion and even disillusionment. 27

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ConClusion There is no simple or single path that leads from ‘national’ to ‘human’ security. The term ‘security’ or even ‘human security’ is in some respects misleading if it is understood as some kind of blissful end state that communities can achieve and somehow preserve indefinitely into the future. What the human security paradigm more usefully conveys is the need to rethink the profound insecurities and vulnerabilities that are integral to the contemporary human condition. The question then is: what are the most effective forms of protection that can be devised in response to these perceived insecurities? In addressing this question the human security paradigm is helpful in two important respects. First, it elucidates the complex nature of these insecurities and vulnerabilities, their interconnections, and their implications for policy. Simply put, it places the accent not just on direct military threats but also on the social and economic conditions which, if ignored, are likely to result in high levels of political instability and violence. Second, it highlights the fact that the task of providing adequate levels of protection must be seen as a shared responsibility. To this end, the human security agenda brings into the decision-making process not just the national state, important though its contribution is and will remain, but a diverse range of other authoritative actors which we associate with the local, provincial, regional and global tiers of governance. It also acknowledges the important normative and organisational input of civil society, broadly defined to include not only development, humanitarian, human rights and environmental organisations but a great many other philanthropic, professional and educational networks and resources. In years to come, a serious effort will also be needed to integrate with some rigour the simultaneously obstructive and facilitating role of the market, and the conditions that might shift the balance from obstruction to facilitation. How these two insights are to be translated into practical policy must necessarily be the subject of intense and sustained dialogue within and across national communities. aCknoWledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the research assistance of Amon Varon and Aran Martin. 28

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referenCes Amouyel, Alexandra 2006 ‘What is Human Security’, Human Security Journal 1(April):10–23. APEC 2007 ‘Strengthening Our Community, Building a Sustainable Future’, Fifteenth APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, Sydney, 9 September, http://203.127.220.112/Apec/Leaders__Declarations/2007.Html# (accessed 19 November 2009). ASEAN+3 2003 Special ASEAN+3 Health Ministers Meeting on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 10–11 June 2003, http://www. Aseansec.Org/Health+3_Sars.Htm On 12 November 2010) (accessed 12 November 2010). Axworthy, L 1997 ‘Canada and Human Security: The Need for Leadership’, International Journal 52(2):183–208. Axworthy, L 2003 Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future, Alfred A Knopf, Toronto. Axworthy, L 2004a ‘Human Security: An Opening for UN Reform’ in Richard Price and Mark Zacher, eds The United Nations and Global Security, Palgrave, New York. Axworthy, L 2004b ‘A New Scientific Field and Policy Lens’, Security Dialogue 35 (3):348–349. Barber, Benjamin R 1996 Jihad Vs. McWorld, Ballantine Books, New York. Barnett, Laura 2008 Legal and Legislative Affairs Division, Parliament of Canada, The International Criminal Court: History and Role, PRB 02-11E, 4 November, www.parl.gc.ca (accessed 30 September 2011). Bauman, Zygmunt 1998 Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, Cambridge. Behringer, Ronald M 2005 ‘Middle Power Leadership on the Human Security Agenda’, Cooperation and Conflict 40(3):305–342. Bernard, Prosper Jr 2006 ‘Canada and Human Security: From the Axworthy Doctrine to Middle Power Internationalism’, The American Review of Canadian Studies 36(2). Camilleri, Joseph A 2008 ‘Sovereignty Discourse and Practice—Past and Future’ in Trudy Jacobsen, Charles Sampford and Ramesh Thakur eds Re-envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia?, Ashgate, Aldershot. Camilleri, Joseph A and Jim Falk 2009 Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Canadian International Development Agency 2000 From Words to Action: Final Conference Report, The International Conference on War-affected 29

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Children, Winnipeg, Canada, 10–17 September 2000, Canadian International Development Agency, Gatineau, Quebec: Canadian International Development Agency, http://www.unicef.org/emerg/files/icwac_report. pdf (accessed 30 September 2011). Cottrell, M Patrick 2009 ‘Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty’, International Organization 63(2):217–248. Danish Ministry of Defence 2008 Denmark’s National Action Plan for Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security 2008–2013, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence, Danish National Police, Copenhagen. Davis, Jeff 2009 ‘Liberal-era Diplomatic Language Killed Off’, Embassy, 1 July, http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/diplomatic_ language-7-1-2009 (accessed 15 December 2010). Department of National Defence Canada 1997 Report of the Somalia Commission of Inquiry, Canada, Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Department of National Defence Canada 2010, National Defence and the Canadian Forces, ‘Peacekeeping Policy: Canada & Peace Support Operation’, http://www.forces.gc.ca/admpol/peacekeepingp-eng.html (accessed 30 September 2011). DFAIT Canada 2002 Freedom from Fear: Canada’s Foreign Policy for Human Security, DFAIT, Ottawa. DFAIT Canada 2004 ‘Summative Evaluation of the Human Security Program’, November, http://www.international.gc.ca/about-a_propos/ oig-big/2004/evaluation/human_security-securite_humaine.aspx? lang=eng&view=d (accessed 29 September 2011). DFAIT Canada 2006 ‘Human Security Cities: Freedom from Fear in Urban Spaces’, Leaflet, DFAIT, Ottawa. DFAIT Canada 2007 Canadian Consortium on Human Security, July, http://www.international.gc.ca/about-a_propos/oig-big/2007/evaluation/ cchs-ccsh07.aspx?lang=eng&view=d (accessed 30 September 2011). DFAIT Canada 2011a ‘Internally Displaced Persons’, http://www. international.gc.ca/humanitarian-humanitaire/displaced-deplacees. aspx?lang=eng&view=d (accessed 30 September 2011). DFAIT Canada 2011b ‘Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force (START)’, http://www.international.gc.ca/START-GTSR/index.aspx (accessed 31 October 2011). DFAIT Canada 2011c ‘Transnational Organized Crime Overview’, 18 August, http://www.international.gc.ca/crime/index.aspx?view=d (accessed 30 September 2011). 30

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Donaghy, Greg 2003 ‘All God’s Children: Lloyd Axworthy, Human Security and Canadian Foreign Policy 1996–2000’, Canadian Foreign Policy 10(2). Dorn, A Walter 2005 ‘Canadian Peacekeeping: Proud Tradition, Strong Future?’, Canadian Foreign Policy 12(2):7–32. EU 2003 ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World’, European Security Strategy, Brussels, 12 December, www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/ 78367.pdf (accessed 18 December 2010). EU 2004 ‘A Human Security Doctrine for Europe: The Barcelona Report of the Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities’, presented to EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/2securitypub.htm (accessed 22 September 2009). EU 2008 ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy—Providing Security in a Changing World’, Brussels, S407/08, http:// www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=266&lang=EN (accessed 18 November 2010). EU 2010 ‘Draft Internal Security Strategy for the European Union: Towards a European Security Model’, Brussels, 23 February, 5842/2/10 REV 2, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=266&lang=EN (accessed 25 November 2010). Franke, Volker 2006 ‘The Peacebuilding Dilemma: Civil–Military Cooperation in Stability Operations’, International Journal of Peace Studies 11(2):5–25. Greek Foreign Ministry 2009 ‘Greece Assumes the Chairmanship of the Human Security Network’, http://www.mfa.gr/www.mfa.gr/Articles/ en-US/ts18052007_KL2115.htm, (accessed 22 November 2009). Hampson, Fen Osler, Norman Hillmer and Maureen Appel Molot eds 2001 Canada among Nations: The Axworthy Legacy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ho, Satomi 2008 ‘Japan’s Human Security Policy: A Critical Review of its Limits and Failures’, Japanese Studies 28(1). Hooper, James R, and Paul R Williams 2004 ‘Earned Sovereignty: The Political Dimension’, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 31(3). Ilgen, Thomas L 2003 ‘Reconfiguring Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization’ in Reconfigured Sovereignty: Multi-layered Governance in the Global Age ed Thomas L Ilgen, Ashgate, Aldershot. Karner, Christian, and Alan Aldridge 2004 ‘Theorizing Religion in a Globalizing World’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 18(1–2):5–32. 31

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Keene, Edward 2002 Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Keppel, G 1994 The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (translated by Alan Braley), Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. Liberal Party of Canada 2010 ‘Canada in the World: A Global Networks Strategy’, 15 June, can150.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/canada_ world_jun2010.pdf (accessed 1 October 2008). Nasu, Hitoshi 2010 ‘Refugee Law and Practice in Japan’, Asian Studies Review 34(1):125–126. Nelson, B 1973 ‘Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters’, Sociological Analysis 34(2):79–105. Obuchi, Keizo 1998 ‘The Asian Crisis: Meeting the Challenges to Human Security’, Opening Remarks by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi to ‘An Intellectual Dialogue on Building Asia’s Tomorrow’, Tokyo, 2–3 December 1998, http://www.jcie.or.jp/thinknet/tomorrow/1obuchi.html (accessed 22 November 2010). OCHA 2009 United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Human Security Unit, Human Security Unit: Overview and Objectives, Human Security Unit, OCHA, New York, http://ochaonline. un.org/humansecurity/tabid/2212/default.aspx (29 September 2011). Owen, Taylor 2004 ‘Human Security—Conflict, Critique and Consensus: Colloquium Remarks and a Proposal for a Threshold-based Definition’, Security Dialogue 35(3). Petersen, Jan 2005 Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, ‘Perspectives on International Peace and Security’, Speech, First Annual Canada– Norway Peace Prize Symposium, ‘Prospects for Human Security in the 21st Century’, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 4 February, http://www.regjeringen.no/en/archive/Bondeviks-2nd-Government/ ministry-of-foreign-affairs/Taler-og-artikler-arkivert-individuelt/2005/ perspectives_on_international_peace.html?id=269746 (accessed 29 September 2011). Prezelj, Iztok 2008 ‘Challenges in Conceptualizing and Providing Human Security’, HUMSEC Journal 2 (April):1–22. Radon, Jenik 2004 ‘Sovereignty: A Political Emotion, Not a Concept’, Stanford Journal of International Law 40(2). Schwartz, Eric 2011 Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, ‘Human Security is National Security: Reflections from Liberia on Budget Battles and Saving Lives’, 17 February, http://www. state.gov/g/prm/rls/news/156839.htm (accessed 29 September 2011). Security Dialogue 2004 ‘What is Human Security?’, Security Dialogue, Special Section, 35(3):347–371. 32

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Sheffer, Gabriel 2003 Diaspora Politics: At Home and Abroad, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Shinoda, Hideaki 2000 Re-examining Sovereignty: From Classical Theory to the Global Age, Macmillan, Houndmills. Thakur, Ramesh 2004 ‘A Political Worldview’, Security Dialogue 35(3): 347–348. UN Department of Public Information 2000 ‘Press Conference on Sanctions by Security Council President’, 17 April, http://reliefweb.int/sites/ reliefweb.int/files/reliefweb_pdf/node-62774.pdf (accessed 30 September 2011). UNDP 1994 1994 Human Development Report, UNDP, New York. UNDP 2010 Human Development Report 2010, UNDP, New York. UN General Assembly 2005 2005 World Summit Outcome, A/60/L.1, 15 September. US Department of the Army 2006 Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, December. US Department of State 2010 ‘Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero Visits East Africa to Address Human Security Issues’, Media Note, Washington, DC, 25 January, http://www.state. gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/01/135716.htm, (accessed 29 September 2011). US Department of State 2011 Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Water Policy: Water Security is Human Security, 18 March, www.state.gov (accessed 29 September 2011). Yale Journal of International Affairs 2010 ‘Putting People First: The Growing Influence of “Human Security”: An interview with Mary Kaldor’, Yale Journal of International Affairs 5(2):17–22. Yannis, Alexandros 2002 ‘The Concept of Suspended Sovereignty in International Law and Its Implications in International Politics’, European Journal of International Law 13(5):1037–1052.

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3 in defenCe of breadth: the broad approaCh to human seCurity stephen James

introduCtion In recent years, earthquakes in Haiti and Turkey, floods in Australia and Thailand, a devastating tsunami causing radioactive pollution in Japan and the continuing shocks of the global financial crisis have highlighted the continued relevance of non-traditional threats to state and non-state security, and of human security as a lens through which to understand them better (James 2010, 2011). Here I elucidate and defend the broad approach to human security. In the 1994 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report (UNDP HDR) human security was defined as the security of people, as their freedom from fear and want in the midst of threats in economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political domains. Thus, the UNDP takes a broad approach to human security (Von Tigerstrom 2007; UNDP 1994; Ewan 2007). The phrases ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’, popularised by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in the 1940s, have in the literature become metonyms for, respectively, the narrower violence-oriented and broader socioeconomic conceptions of human security (Owen 2004b:15–24; Martin and Owen 2010:213; Owen 2008a:115). The UNDP, however, insists that both the broader and narrower dimensions of human security are essential and interdependent. The 1994 HDR, as well as a number 34

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of scholars, itemises various specific threats to the seven domains of human security (Owen 2004b:18). Similarly, influenced by the capabilities approach of Nobel Prize– winning economist Amartya Sen, the independent Commission on Human Security (CHS), in its impressive 2003 report, defined human security in the following terms: Human security is concerned with safeguarding and expanding people’s vital freedoms. It requires both shielding people from acute threats and empowering people to take charge of their own lives . . . Human security complements state security, enhances human rights and strengthens human development . . . It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and institutions. (CHS 2003:iv, 2, 4)

The CHS thus synthesises the freedom from fear and want and emphasises that human security is ‘people-centred’ and must respond to a wide range of ‘menaces’ by making use of many different actors beyond the nation-state, a point also recognised by Joseph Camilleri in this collection. The CHS’s report is notable for distinguishing the nevertheless overlapping phenomena of human security and human development on the basis that the former is more concerned with downturns with security (for example, social security safety nets) whereas the latter involves economic expansions with equity (for example, wealth-sharing principles and schemes). The CHS thus also takes a broad approach to security, examining not only conflict prevention but also personal violence and other crimes, economic and health security, the needs of refugees, the vulnerability of internally displaced persons and migrants, the importance of public welfare systems (‘social protection’) and the pivotal role of education (CHS 2003:6, 9, 12 and passim). Even the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) that crystallised the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) principle, and which has often been associated with the narrower approach to human security favoured by Canada, defined human security broadly. It defined human security as ‘the security of people—their physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their dignity and worth as human beings, and the protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms’. According to the Commission, human security requires attention to the security of ‘ordinary people’ in their everyday lives. In a tone in places 35

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reminiscent of FDR’s wartime speeches, the commission criticises states that invest heavily in the military sector while letting their citizens suffer the ‘chronic insecurities of hunger, disease, inadequate shelter, crime, unemployment, social conflict and environmental hazard’. The ICISS thus adopted a very broad understanding of human security despite its defence of a place for state sovereignty, an adoption missed by those who continue to suggest that the commission was preoccupied with freedom from fear (ICISS 2001:15; Evans 2008:34–35). Clearly, then, the three main international reports relevant to human security endorse the broad over the narrow conception of human security. But this fact alone does not mean that we should follow their lead; there are, however, other sound reasons why we ought to reject the narrow view and embrace the broad. defending the broad approaCh The internal debate between subscribers to the broad and narrow approaches to human security is reminiscent of a similar, not quite resolved, one between, on the one hand, those who regard civil and political rights as the real (that is, analytically rigorous, realistic, justifiable and justiciable) human rights and social and economic ones as suspect, and, on the other hand, those happy to admit both general kinds as valid human rights. The case in favour of economic and social rights (including rights to security and subsistence) as human rights was superbly made by Henry Shue in Basic Rights (1980, 1996) and, in my view, it provides equally good reasons why we must accept the broad approach to human security. In this chapter I do not pursue the relevance of Shue’s argument for a basic (human) right to subsistence to the moral defensibility of the broad approach, and here merely note that I am persuaded by it. While security is not the only important value for human beings (for example, individual freedom is important too) it has both intrinsic and instrumental significance. Securing subsistence, for example, protects intrinsically important human interests (an interest-based justification) and dignity (a deontological account), enables autonomy, facilitates citizenship and provides opportunities for political participation (Pogge 2007; Griffin 2008:30–31, 176–181, 206, 304–306). In this defence of the broad approach to human security, I concentrate on its analytic usefulness, its measurability and how it can meet anxieties about ‘securitisation’ (that is, how an issue becomes a matter of security). 36

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analytic usefulness A refrain of debates in the literature is the concern that human security—and certainly the broad approach to it—will undermine the analytical usefulness, rigour and causal parsimony that orthodox security studies give us to explore various insecurities (Kerr 2003; Ewan 2007; Von Tigerstrom 2007; Mack 2004; Krause 2004; Roberts 2008; Paris 2004; Newman 2004; MacFarlane 2004; Buzan 2004). Not only has it been recited by realist critics but also by proponents of narrow and, more defensively, broad human security. To be taken seriously, even defenders of the broad approach to human security must ventriloquise, to use University of Melbourne linguist Tim McNamara’s term, this concern. But, ironically, it is less common for theorists to pause and patiently analyse what they mean by analytic utility and rigour as well as by causal parsimony. To paraphrase Paris’ (2001:88) words, ones aimed at a different target, ‘everyone is for it’ but few seem to know what it means. Through these repetitions, the onus of proof has shifted to defenders of human security, with the assumption that at least the broad approaches to human security are analytically weak, methodologically undisciplined and lacking in explanatory power. But despite the supposedly bewildering landscape of human security—for example, how to define it, who it applies to, what threatens it and who is responsible for ensuring it—most critics of human security, or of broad approaches to it, actually navigate through it quite happily. While they often disagree on the analytic value and normative desirability of human security, they readily address the issues of what it means, what its referents are, who threatens it and who is responsible for guaranteeing it. So, as Owen (2004a:385) has noted, there is in fact more agreement among scholars about what human security means than is often recognised in the literature. For example, international law scholar Barbara Von Tigerstrom (2007:27) begins her book by referring to the ‘ongoing uncertainty about the meaning and functions of the concept of human security’. She concedes that there seems to be ‘no universally accepted definition of the concept’ and that it might be too difficult to define human security, leaving it ‘too vague or broad to be practically or analytically useful’. Is it a novel concept? Is it useful (and in what ways)? What do we risk by adding yet another term to International Relations (IR) discourse? These are some of the questions Von Tigerstrom asks. But even by the end of the early chapters of the book, she has suggested some 37

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quite satisfactory answers to them, belying the rather more pessimistic account of human security in the early pages. Moreover, when theorists assume that human security is analytically weak, often their thinking is distorted in a number of ways: they wrongly idealise the clarity of state or national security; they stubbornly cling to traditional security studies; and they miss, ignore or marginalise other ways of exploring security. As Von Tigerstrom (2007:35–38) notes, critics of human security forget that state or national security are hardly straightforward concepts: debates among traditional security studies scholars about the meaning of security have kept their heat for decades, similar to others in the social sciences over the meaning of consent, freedom, rights, democracy, the state and the individual (Von Tigerstrom 2007:35; Sheehan 2005; Collins 2010; Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde 1998; Wæver and Buzan 2010). There is and will remain great contention and uncertainty about what realists for example mean by such notions as the state, nation-state, security and sovereignty (James 2010, 2011; Camilleri 1994; Von Tigerstrom 2007:35–36; Walker 1993; Camilleri and Falk 1992, 2009). In 1952, Yale professor of International Relations Arnold Wolfers (1952:481) observed that when political formulas such as ‘national interest’ or ‘national security’ gain popularity they need to be scrutinized with particular care. They may not mean the same thing to different people. They may not have any precise meaning at all. Thus, while appearing to offer guidance and a basis for broad consensus they may be permitting everyone to label whatever policy he favors with an attractive and possibly deceptive name . . . In a very vague and general way ‘national interest’ . . . emphasizes that the policy subordinates other interests to those of the nation. But beyond this, it has very little meaning.

As this extract demonstrates, human security is not the only security formulation that has been accused of imprecision or even vacuity. Indeed, contention, complexity and difficulty come with the territory of security studies and the social sciences generally (Von Tigerstrom 2007:35). The assumed consensus among IR scholars about the terms and methodologies of traditional security studies, to which human security is then unfavourably compared, does not exist. Nor is there any agreement about their plausibility or desirability; the rich variety of IR theories attests to that. So before 38

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it is subjected to critique, the deck is already stacked against human security. The idea that human security messes up the tidy sub-discipline of security studies is also unpersuasive. Undeniably these studies can produce useful, if limited, results. But advocates of human security should not be deterred by the (assumed) fact that their theories make security studies more difficult, more ambitious and messier. Perhaps, security studies needs to adapt to the realities of a complex world in which intentional, interstate, military violence in the name of the nation is not the only form of harm, human suffering and insecurities; adapting their theory to practice rather than the other way around. Regardless, making a discipline more difficult to undertake, or even extinguishing it, is not, prima facie, an argument against the alternative perspectives that human security offers. While the analytical standards that traditional IR and security scholars are attached to are valuable in some respects, they come from only one tradition and discipline: the modernist’s analytical approach to philosophy and the social sciences that emulates the positivistic, ‘hard’ natural sciences (for example, the empirical, quantitative and explanatory aspirations of hard political ‘science’). There are, however—even putting aside alternative post-structuralist and broadly critical theoretical perspectives—many more interpretive (but also empirical) ways of understanding security that this approach discounts; for example, historical, literary, anthropological, and psychoanalytic understandings. Having laid out these criticisms and cautions, it is nevertheless important to emphasise that human security can have analytical utility and explanatory power, even in conventional terms. As noted by Joseph Camilleri in this collection, Taylor Owen has developed a threshold test to address the risk of human security being excessively broad (Owen 2004a, 2004b). He accepts that scholars engaged in causal analysis need to keep dependent and independent variables separate from each other to avoid the ‘problem of endogeneity’ in which the way that a phenomenon is explained is built into the theories and methodologies used to explain it (Owen 2004a:380; Menaldo 2010). Rather than exclude certain types of threats—typically, for subscribers to narrow human security, economic and social threats like famines, pandemics and natural disasters—from the domain of security, Owen proposes that we assess all threats in terms of their severity. Any sufficiently severe threat—narrow or broad, anthropogenic or natural, economic or military, for example—will be 39

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treated as a matter of human security. But we must then determine what severe means. Owen produces a hybrid from the definitions of the CHS and the UNDP HDR. Human security protects people against ‘the most urgent threats’ to their lives or other vital interests. It requires responses to all ‘serious harms’, including ‘preventable disease, starvation, civil conflict and terrorism’. In sum, human security concerns the ‘protection of the vital core of all human lives from critical and pervasive environmental, economic, food, health, personal and political threats’ (Owen 2004a:381; Owen 2004b: 21–23). I am largely in agreement with Owen’s synthesis, though, as I have noted, I think it is better to see the severity of threat in terms of prioritisation rather than as an isolated trigger to exclude it from the realm of human security (James 2010:13). The threshold test is no doubt useful to scholars trying to keep their research programs manageable, for policy-makers and activists trying to define (jurisdictional) boundaries for their work and to keep the hope of some success alive, and for governments and a range of organisations committed to addressing the worst human insecurities. Given the appalling state of the world in terms of severe poverty and radical inequality, and the premature death and disease they bring to millions of people every year—what, to use Henry Shue’s phrase, might be called a ‘Holocaust of Neglect’—addressing these insecurities first is surely no bad thing (Shue 1980:201). However, when scholars use this threshold test to prioritise responses to insecurities they ought not forget that human security is not exhausted by these severe cases any more than a hospital consists only of an emergency department. There are different types and degrees of security: we can be (objectively) or feel (subjectively) more or less secure. In this connection, it is intriguing that while for most people feeling secure, calm and confident (as opposed to afraid, anxious and pessimistic) about one’s present circumstances and prospects is a natural and important part of being secure, for many critics of the broad approach to human security a focus on these subjective dimensions is emblematic of the overreach of human security. This is a baffling conclusion given their commitment to freedom from fear. As a number of studies have noted, when we analyse human security we must not neglect the psychological dimensions of insecurity, whether felt by a parent trying to stave off eviction, a girl fearing sexual assault, or a member of an ethnic minority terrorised by a pogrom. By attending to the psychological, and specifically emotional, dimensions of security we can humanise it to some extent. This orientation also facilitates 40

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analysis of security threats—which might or might not result in nonpsychic harm—including how people perceive and experience them (Camilleri 1994; Camilleri and Falk 2009:117, 445–448, 511–512; CHS 2003:73; Leaning 2004). In giving attention to these dimensions the scholar connects with classical notions of securitas, to a person’s inward ‘composure, tranquility of spirit, freedom from care’ (Rothschild 1995:60–63). While the threshold test performs a useful function, we must always keep in mind the preventive and progressive characteristics of the UNDP’s broad understanding of human security. That is, one should attend to human security without waiting for crises to emerge, and be committed to enhancing human security beyond the minimally decent conditions that are its foundations. Another danger of the threshold test, though not a fatal one, is the connotation that matters of security, as even this phrase seems to imply, are mysterious phenomena born of ‘high politics’, statecraft, intelligence, secrecy, crisis, militarism and the exceptional (the kinds of depictions that are standard fare in Hollywood). That is, those using this threshold test need to resist the reinforcement of traditional notions of national security, to resist being enchanted by an Air Force One (1997) aura. To do so, they must remember that security is a part of everyday politics, not just the politics of the exceptional. Critical security scholars and those from the Copenhagen School in particular are attuned to the risks of securitisation in this regard. But, as I will argue, there are fewer risks to securitisation if you take a broad approach to human security that challenges the traditional national security paradigm. The broad approach to human security I endorse recognises that security is a matter of degree, that human security is not divorced from human wellbeing, that it is threatened as much by poverty as by war, that we must attend as much to the domestic as to the international domain, and that—while, in accord with a social democratic ethos, the humane state remains a key player—there are, as Camilleri recognises in this work, a wide range of state and non-state actors and layers of governance (global, international, transnational, regional, provincial and local) responsible for ensuring it. measurability Taylor Owen (2004b:21) argues that often research into human security has been delimited by the mandate of the institution where 41

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the researchers are based (for example, the Human Security Report Project, HSRP, based at Simon Fraser University in Canada). This delimitation takes the researcher away from the normative imperative that how we respond to threats to human security should be driven by the embodied realities of insecurity in the world. While critics often condemn the broad approach to human security for having a disparate list of topics on its agenda, the narrow approach is also open to this flaw (Owen 2004b:21). Indeed, ironically, it has partly been the relatively modest and discrete items on the agenda of states and organisations supporting the narrow approach (for example, Canada and the Human Security Network)—and their parasitic connections with already existing laws, institutions, frameworks, regimes, norms and movements—that has contributed to some of the successes achieved in relation to the issues of landmines, civilians in wartime, child soldiers, small arms proliferation and the International Criminal Court (Ewan 2007:184–185; James 2010:2–5; MacFarlane and Khong 2006:Chs 5, 6; Bellamy and Wheeler 2008). The list can also be strongly influenced by the ‘political, institutional and cultural biases’ of researchers when they design their projects (Owen 2004b:21). For example, Simon Fraser University’s Human Security Brief 2007 claimed that the effects of violent conflict on human security—the freedom from fear approach—can be sufficiently accurately measured whereas human rights and economic and social insecurities cannot. Thus, the HSRP (HSRP 2007:41, 6–7, 25, 28–31, 4–46, 56 [n 143]) limits itself to deaths caused by military or criminal violence (Owen 2008b:43). But the argument that these deaths are more easily measured in isolation from economic and social insecurities is belied by the Brief’s identification of strong causal relationships between poverty (low per capita income, ‘group inequality’, national wealth, underdevelopment and other so-called ‘structural risk factors’) and the incidence of wars, coup d’états and human rights violations; variables that clearly come within the ambit of the freedom from want approach (HSRP 2007:41, 6–7, 25, 28–31, 4–46, 56 [n 143]). The Brief also improperly limits ‘core human rights abuses’ to violence against the person, transgressions of the rule of law and the violation of political liberties (‘torture, and extrajudicial executions . . . imprisonment without trial and political censorship’), leaving out economic and social claims such as human rights to food, water and medical care. While the Brief seems to recognise the possibility of acute poverty as a cause of war, it misses the point that such 42

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impoverishment is in itself a human rights violation. And it misses this despite, for example, referring to key drivers of so-called ‘indirect deaths’ in Africa, including malnutrition, disease, displacement and the lack of access to humanitarian assistance and good quality health care. For example, in a footnote relating to the measurement of freedom from fear human security, the Brief (HSRP 2007:41, 44–46, 25, 56 [n 143]) notes that [m]ost of the 200,000 people estimated to have died in Darfur have perished as a result of conflict-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. These deaths are not counted in one-sided violence [for example, state-sponsored genocides against unarmed civilians]—or indeed any other—dataset.

The failure of the report to include these deaths highlights the limitations of the narrow approach to human security. The Brief suggests that the gap could be addressed if ‘a scale or index’ were created that could measure ‘different levels of human rights violations’ (HSRP 2007:44). But, despite their imperfections, there are already many quantitative and qualitative measures of human rights violations that the researcher can draw upon, especially regarding economic and social rights. They have been used by international organisations like the UNDP, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, International Labour Organization, World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development; by regional and national institutions; and by NGOs like Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch. It is implausible to suggest that economic, health and social insecurities are any more difficult to measure than violence against the person or violations of civil and political liberties. It is of course perfectly legitimate for institutions like the HSRP to concentrate on the harms they do provided they acknowledge that the picture of human security they produce is incomplete. As Owen (2004b:21) notes, ‘Methodologies using this approach will inevitably leave out numerous causes of insecurity. For example, a violencebased measurement methodology doesn’t account for the 18,000,000 annual deaths from communicable disease’. How, then, might we measure broad human security? Taylor Owen (2004a, 2004b) provides one promising model. In addition to the application of a threshold test, he argues that more relevant data and higher resolution impressions of human security can be obtained 43

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if researchers pay particular attention to ‘regional relevance’. He notes that while the ‘list of all possible threats to human security is vast, the list of relevant harms for a particular region or country . . . is considerably more refined’. In order to better capture intra-state variations, Owen also recommends that researchers use data at local not national levels: ‘Diseases, poverty, violence levels or the location of landmines vary dramatically throughout countries’. If the researcher’s measures do not accommodate this variation they can produce only a fuzzy image of human security (Owen 2004b:21–22) As a geographer and statistician, it is unsurprising that Owen further urges researchers to make use of layered spatial analysis through a Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping approach (Owen 2008b:22). This approach enables researchers to identify places where there are aggregations of diverse threats to human security (‘hotspots’), and thereby to better grasp how threats are spatially related to each other. By using spatial statistics, scholars can, specifically, find correlations between measured threats and a great variety of socioeconomic variables. For example, Owen used this method in a spatial statistical analysis of postwar (2002–2004) Cambodia. He identified thirteen threats (for example, flooding, landmines, domestic violence and HIV/AIDS) and definite ‘hotspots’ of human insecurity with strongly correlated threats (Owen, 2004b:22; Owen and Slaymaker 2005). This form of measurement encourages interdisciplinarity, identifies and locates patterns in human insecurity—especially causal relationships between, and cumulative effects of, various threats—that enhance policy-making and practical responses to a range of important harms (Owen 2004a:380, 2008b:38, 62; Ewan 2007:184). anxieties over securitisation Like realists, neorealists and other defenders of traditional security studies—but for partly different reasons—the so-called Copenhagen School does not accept the positive and emancipatory contributions attributed to the human security concept. The school, which developed from the late 1980s onwards, is a rather strange theoretical hybrid that draws on realism, pragmatism, constructivism, rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics and even postmodernism and post-structuralism (for example, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and discourse analysis). In its pessimism about power politics and humankind it is realist, but in its vigilance about the militarising, coercive, paranoid, 44

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manipulative and elitist machinations of securitisation it appears critical, or at least left-leaning. From this perspective, Copenhagen theorists such as Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan condemn advocates of human security for being too trusting, and thus insufficiently reflexive, about the implications of the securitisation of issues and referents associated with migration, health, the environment and other sectors (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998; Sheehan 2005; Booth 2005; Collins 2010; Krause and Williams 1996; Aradau 2004; Hoogensen and Rottem 2004; Williams 2003; Gad and Petersen 2011; Wæver 2011). Before discussing how defenders of broad human security might alleviate some of the Copenhagen School’s anxieties over securitisation, it is useful to list some of the main features of their understanding of it: • Security in the international sphere primarily concerns power politics and survival; it is negative, not (per Critical Security Studies) ‘a kind of universal good thing’. • Security threats neither exist objectively out there in the world nor are defined a priori, but are, rather, intersubjective phenomena that actors create linguistically and rhetorically through the performance of ‘speech acts’. • Successful securitisation of an issue occurs when an actor performs a speech act (also known as a ‘securitizing move’) that persuades an audience that there is an ‘existential threat’ to a specified ‘referent object’. • A successful securitisation prioritises an issue by taking it out of the domain of ‘normal’ politics and putting it into a security domain in which urgent, extraordinary or emergency measures; rule-breaking or rule transcendence; hierarchical and coercive power; secrecy; and the threat or use of military force are justified and employed by the state or other agents. • Securitisation can be ad hoc or institutionalised. • While securitisation is sometimes necessary, it is always a politicised choice that can have unforeseen negative ramifications. • Given the dangers of securitisation, societies should desecuritise as much as they can, returning sectors and issues to ‘the normal bargaining processes of the political sphere’ (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde 1998:1–47 passim, and especially 21, 4, 31, 19, 26, 24, 33, 46–47). 45

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While we should heed the Copenhagen School’s points about how securitisation can undermine the rule of law, accountability, transparency, participation, debate and bargaining that it assumes (less than convincingly) characterise so-called normal politics, we can reasonably reduce anxieties about it in the context of human security. The school’s main arguments against securitisation, and thus in favour of desecuritisation, depend upon an overwhelmingly negative portrayal of security. In its view, making something a matter of security will mean that elites and governments will suspend the usual rules, that executive power will be concentrated, that secrecy and suppression of dissent will be the order of the day, that ‘friend–enemy’ distinctions will be sharpened and that military force will be used more readily. These are powerful warnings. But these risks are not all there is to security. Security can be positive as well as negative. What starts out as the school’s proper vigilance regarding nation-states’ Machiavellian use of security rhetoric (propaganda, hypernationalism, cynical national interest, ‘othering’ of enemies and emergency or martial rule) ends up reinforcing the worst reductionist aspects of traditional, militaristic, national security mindsets; the very ones that the human security ethos challenges. Thus, we need both to recall longstanding positive traditions of security and to imagine future experiments in non-traditional (that is, non-realist) security. For example, there is the long history of economic and social rights that can be found in many diverse religions, cultures and laws, and that together support a basic right of subsistence. If I may be allowed a broad-brush portrait, peace, World Order, feminist, Critical Security, Subaltern and postcolonial scholars have also imagined how humans’ basic security needs such as bodily integrity, food, health care, clothing and shelter might be met in non-traditional ways, at all times conscious of the realities (not just the constructions) of insecurities caused by violence, deprivation, exploitation and inequality. Here one recognises the experiences, perspectives and agency of the severely impoverished and insecure and the ‘counter-hegemonic’ potential that might be found there. Security might in this sense be non-violent, grassroots, centred on people, empathic, dialogical and ultimately subversive of an indefensible status quo in which most people suffer serious insecurities (Ewan 2007:186–187; Camilleri and Falk 2009:514–520, 549–550; Booth 2005; Falk 1999, 1992; Peterson 2010; Rai 2011; Tickner 2011; Hoogensen and Rottem 2004). 46

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We can continue this recollection and re-imagination by remembering the long tradition of security as social security, one connected with the emergence and development of economic and social rights in the welfare state. After all, the prominence of the phrases ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ lay in the domestic politics of FDR’s New Deal response to the Great Depression (James 2009, 2007; Kloppenberg 2006). While often neglected in debates over human security (but see Neocleous 2006; Neufeld 2004; Burke 2001), there is nothing heterodox or impractical about emphasising the domestic roots of economic and social security; a point brought home during the 1997 Asian financial crisis (Burke 2001), and as relevant as ever given the austerity measures of the global financial crisis. But my reference to the welfare state does raise the issue of how far the broad approach to human security is compatible with the nation-state as a guarantor and trustee of security. In my view, the state remains a key actor. As Taylor Owen concludes, ‘The first opportunity and primary responsibility for ensuring human security should fall on national governments’ (2004a:384). This does not of course mean that it need exercise that responsibility alone; it can take a whole-of-society approach (Camilleri, this collection) that engages with civil society and local organisations, the private and non-profit sectors, regions and international institutions. It can pool sovereignty, create regimes, delegate authority and coordinate and fund various projects that enhance human security. If it fails to do its duty, however, then that responsibility becomes an acute international concern, as embodied in the RtoP doctrine (Owen 2004a:384). While this doctrine is presently focused on the narrow freedom from fear understanding of human security, there is merit in extending it in the spirit of the broad approach. Although I cannot pursue the argument here, RtoP could come to mean not just a responsibility to protect but also a responsibility to provide; triggered for example, when a government is a key cause of famine and/or is unable or unwilling to respond adequately to save human lives (James 2010; Shue 1996, 1980; Howard-Hassmann 2011). I hasten to add that an RtoP response in this sense is unlikely to involve military intervention. Alex Bellamy and Matt McDonald are right that the state can do great harm to humans, but I reject their view that ‘states are more often part of the problem than the source of the solution’ (2002:373). First, the truth of this proposition will depend on the nature of the state, the problem and the solution. Second, this view underestimates 47

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the imperfect but important roles that states can play, for example, in providing goods such as education, health care, income support, pensions and housing. More generally, there is a dialectic between human and state security (Kerr 2003; Dunne and Wheeler 2004). What is required is a reorientation of the state and its sovereignty so that it fulfils its proper purpose: to secure the human security of its citizens under a much broader social (democratic) contract than the classical liberals ever envisioned. bringing human seCurity baCk home? the australian Welfare system and inseCurities In this book, Joseph Camilleri argues that human security is not neatly cordoned off by any theoretical division between the international and the national, and concludes that we need to examine how human security is conceptualised and experienced in Australia. In this spirit, and reiterating the overlap between social security and human security, I very briefly diagnose some insecurities that the Australian welfare system addresses only inadequately. the australian welfare system Australia is a wealthy country with a generally high standard of living. Over the past decade, it has had strong economic growth based on two mining booms (due mainly to China’s continuing rise), relatively low national debt levels, low unemployment and low inflation (Castles 2002). In 2007, Australia was ranked third in the world according to the UN Human Development Index (Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009:73). Poverty in Australia is often described as relative rather than absolute but this does not mean that there are not any people living in absolute poverty (for example, a significant proportion of Indigenous people) or that relative poverty does not have serious human security impacts (Goodin, Headey, Muffels and Dirven 1999; Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009; Castles 2002; Murphy et al. 2011). While around four million Australians, half as age pensioners, receive some benefit from its liberal, as opposed to social democractic, welfare system, John Murphy and his colleagues have described it as ‘robust’ but quite often ‘stigmatising’, and its benefits regime as ‘punitive, suspicious and degrading’. The system provides the following main allowances and pensions: the Age Pension (AP), 48

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Disability Support Pension (DSP), Newstart Allowance (NA) for the unemployed, Parenting Payment Single (PPS), Carer Payment (CP) and Youth Allowance (YA) (Murphy et al. 2011:5–6, 191; Goodin, Headey, Muffels and Dirven 1999:39). A 2008 study by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research demonstrated that all but the PPS basic ‘weekly income support payments’ fell below the ‘after-housing poverty line’ (PPS payments were only slightly above it). For example, as at June 2008 the poverty line had the weekly income for a single person at A$380 whereas the NA was only A$219. Making matters worse, between 1998 and 2008 the NA and YA were adjusted for inflation but otherwise did not increase (Murphy et al. 2011:6, 9, 23–24). patterns of insecurities I would like to legislate compassion but you can’t do that. And I would like people to adopt an attitude of: ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ . . —Chloe, a DSP recipient (Murphy et al. 2011:178)

But regrettably Australia’s welfare system has become meaner, particularly in relation to recipients of the NA. In 1996, the Howard government introduced a ‘mutual obligation’ approach that made staying on benefits dependent on recipient efforts to participate in a crowded job market. In 1999, young unemployed people were required to work for the ‘dole’, a stigmatising term given a place in official language. In 2002, the program was extended to older unemployed people. The system became more punitive too, with a new ‘breaching’ regime introduced in the middle of 2006. NA recipients who failed to accept the offer of a job, who left a position or who did not participate in the full-time Work for the Dole scheme could be, in an ugly Orwellian term, ‘breached’, that is, taken off their welfare income for eight weeks (Murphy et al. 2011:10–12, 140, 154–155; Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009:80–81). Given that, as I have noted, the regular payments are below the poverty line, suspensions of this kind can leave recipients with severe economic and social insecurities. Worse still, this breaching system disproportionately affects people with literacy difficulties (who might, for example, make mistakes when filling out forms or when corresponding with Centrelink), the homeless, non-English-speaking migrants and, 49

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given longstanding structural disadvantage, Indigenous Australians (Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009:80–81, 85–88; Murphy et al. 2011:154–155 and passim). Anxiety about being breached can also be damaging to people suffering from mental illnesses, and any suspension of their benefits compounds issues such as affordability of prescribed medications and other treatments (Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009; Murphy et al. 2011:118–123 and passim). A 2005 VicHealth study has also found that access to economic resources is a ‘key determinant of mental ill-health’ (Murphy et al. 2011:120). The insecurities experienced by welfare recipients, not to mention by those who do not meet eligibility requirements, affect economic, food, health and personal domains. Food and housing insecurity (including exposure to violence in boarding houses) and poor general as well as mental and dental health are common. Importantly, the data and thick descriptions highlight the interaction of objective and subjective aspects of insecurity. They also bring into relief how different threats and vulnerabilities interact in compounding and cumulative ways to undermine the human security in people’s lives, something Taylor Owen (2008b, 2004b; Owen and Slaymaker 2005) has emphasised in his spatial analysis. Marian Sawer and her colleagues (2009:83) point to a 2007 report by social worker Tony Vinson of the University of Sydney that describes what Owen (2004b:22) would call ‘hotspots’ of severe disadvantage in various remote, rural and suburban regions in Australia where there is low income, high unemployment, low school retention rates, poor health, higher levels of violence and child abuse, and more criminal convictions and imprisonments. Certainly, these insecurities meet the threshold he identifies. Lack of treatment for dental infections, malnutrition, alcoholism, drug addiction and other physical and mental maladies—and a lack of refuge from sexual and other forms of violence—can result in serious harm, even premature death, for those afflicted (Sawer, Abjorensen and Larkin 2009:73–98; Murphy et al. 2011; Richardson and Richardson 2011; Bond 2010). ConClusion Deference to the assumption that the broad approach to human security is vacuous, or at best imprecise, platitudinous and unmeasurable is unwarranted. Such deference depends significantly on both a romanticised view of ‘national security’ and a stubborn 50

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fundamentalism about what the objects and methodologies of security studies should be. Broad human insecurities can be measured as accurately as narrow ones. The virtues of the various ways they may be measured include the following: interdisciplinarity; attention to the subjective as well as objective experiences of people suffering serious insecurities; location of compounding, cumulative and differentiated (for example, along class, race, gender, religious, ethnic, rural/urban and regional lines) interactions between people and threats (and between threats themselves); and recognition of the preventive and progressive aspects of human security—the threshold test is a triage measure not a way to dismiss serious threats. Regarding the Copenhagen School’s anxieties over securitisation, I have argued that while they are associated with legitimate concerns about the power of discourse to construct matters of security as dangerous exceptions to ordinary politics, ironically their view depends on an unjustifiably bleak view about security and about the possibility of a humane state. This view reinforces conventional notions of security that they are invested in criticising. I argued that securitisation is less of a problem if we can recall the more positive, social democratic and egalitarian traditions of social security in a broad sense, reconnecting the domestic and international realms that have often been separated by disciplinary preoccupations (for example, social workers and social historians compared with IR theorists) and governance demarcations. I also illustrated the broad approach to human security in the context of Australia’s welfare state. When institutionalising and operationalising human security, it is important to think of it as a guiding normative ethos. It does not mean that we have to replace all that has been thought and done in the spheres of peace, development and human rights (James 2010). Human security practitioners can help to coordinate activities in these spheres by different actors (states, interstate organisations, NGOs, civil societies) at different levels (international, national, regional, provincial, local), always paying attention to people’s own perceptions of security and their experiences of insecurity (Roche and Hoffstaedter, this collection). aCknoWledgements I thank Robyn Eckersley for useful feedback on this chapter. 51

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4 human seCurity and national seCurity: the australian Context Joseph a Camilleri

As noted in previous chapters, the last two decades have seen a steadily growing number of references to the human security concept in official and ministerial pronouncements, competing interpretations of human security in both academic and political discourse and a striking failure to operationalise the concept in either the domestic or external dimensions of security policy. This characterisation largely describes the trend in Australia, where periodic well-intentioned statements and a handful of promising initiatives have thus far failed to lift Australia’s security policies from the longstanding conceptual morass of military alignment and forward defence. There are nevertheless grounds for thinking that recent regional and global trends coupled with the significant demographic and cultural shift within Australia are beginning to create a new policy environment that governments, regardless of political persuasion, will be unable to ignore. seCurity disCourse in australia Australian governments have generally shied away from the discourse of human security, if one is to judge by major policy pronouncements. Unlike Norway, Japan or Canada, no major ministerial statement in the post–Cold War period has set out a foreign policy vision for Australia with human security as one of its distinguishing 57

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features. However, human security concerns have not been entirely absent from declaratory and even operational policy. As one surveys the evolution of security policy under the Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, a number of human security principles and initiatives are readily discernible. But they are usually embedded in the pre-existing state-centric security paradigm, with its emphasis on the paramount role of the state in providing protection against threats, and on the role of security forces in countering such threats. As a consequence, welcome as they might be, the tentative steps taken along the path to human security have generally suffered from inadequate conceptual integration and limited or easily reversible institutionalisation. This is not to suggest that these initial steps are purely cosmetic or that they may not in due course provide a platform on which to build a more coherent and durable framework. In this brief survey the emphasis is on declaratory policy. We begin by examining the inroads that the human security lexicon has made into government formulations of security policy. The first tangible steps towards a human security orientation were taken during the Keating years. In a major ministerial statement on regional security in December 1989, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans described the government’s approach as multidimensional, and listed as key components: military and politico-military capability; diplomacy; economic links; assistance with development and ‘so-called “non-military” threats’, and the exchange of people and ideas (Evans 1989:1). In a later and conceptually more sophisticated exposition, he placed the emphasis on ‘emergent threats’, which he defined as ‘developments, either within or between countries, which do not in themselves yet involve a dispute, armed conflict, or other major security crisis . . . but may be seen as having the potential to become so’ (Evans 1993:9). The definition is notable for its explicit blurring of the line which has traditionally divided domestic and external security and for connecting military and non-military security. He went on to list the following emergent threats: accumulation of large arsenals of sophisticated conventional weapons, capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, unrestrained population growth combined with environmental degradation and emerging food shortages, unregulated population flows, gross human rights violations, state collapse and various forms of ethno-nationalism. Three developments—the end of the Cold War, economic globalisation, and transnational challenges that exceeded the nation-state’s problemsolving capacities—had provided a unique opportunity to generate 58

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new ideas, reassess old fears and foster new relationships, thereby widening the policy space within which human security perspectives could be nurtured and applied (Keating 2000:80). Australia’s regional security policy was now conceived as having three defining features: cooperative security, engagement with Asia and a strong commitment to regional and global multilateralism. The cooperative security model was generally advanced by the foreign minister and his department with the support of the prime minister. On the other hand the defence minister, and more importantly the influential sections of the defence establishment, remained wedded to the importance of the US alliance and the requirements of military collaboration with the senior ally. The cooperative security model favoured by Gareth Evans had two important dimensions: economic cooperation in trade, investment and aid policies (which itself reduced the incentive for armed conflict); and politico-military cooperation (including strategic dialogues, defence collaboration, confidence building measures and arms control agreements) (Evans 1995b). Complementary forms of cooperation were envisaged, especially in education, academic interaction, tourism and other people-to-people contacts. Engagement with Asia led to the notion of an emerging Asia-Pacific community ‘with shared interests and aspirations and a commitment to achieving them through cooperative machinery’ (Evans 1994:6). Principal among these shared interests was said to be ‘sustained and broadly distributed economic growth, open economies, and the best use of comparative economic advantages’ (Evans 1995a). For the Keating government, participation in the emerging Asia-Pacific community held the key to both security and prosperity, but this could be done only by following the multilateral route. As a consequence, institutional innovation became the order of the day; hence the APEC initiative and the proposal to establish a regional security framework, which eventually led to the creation of the ASEAN Regional Forum. While the Keating government had not directly addressed the concept of human security, several of its constituent elements, namely cooperative security, common security and comprehensive security, had been clearly acknowledged. At first sight, the advent of the Howard government substantially altered the direction of Australia’s security discourse. Australia’s first foreign policy White Paper released in August 1997 went out of its way to reinforce the priority accorded to the US alliance and bilateral as opposed to multilateral diplomacy (DFAT 1997). The centrality of the state was, if anything, reinforced. In the words of the White 59

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Paper, ‘the actions of nation states and their governments still have the greatest bearing on the world’s security and economic environment’ (DFAT 1997:6). The defence White Paper Defence 2000: Australia’s Future Defence Force placed renewed emphasis on the utility of military power, in particular on enhancing the combat and power projection capabilities of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), revitalising alliance relationships and strengthening regional military cooperation (Cheeseman 2001:11–25; Department of Defence 2001:vii–xvi). The decisions to support US military intervention in Afghanistan and later in Iraq accorded with this world view.1 Significantly, the return to a threat-centred mindset in security discourse was energised by perceived threats of transnational rather than national provenance. Paradoxically, two transnational ‘threats’, in particular unregulated population movements (specifically asylum seekers arriving by boat) and international terrorism/Islamist extremism intruded with considerable force into the domestic political arena and gave new resonance to notions of ‘border protection’ and ‘homeland security’. Yet, security discourse was characterised as much by continuity as by change. In December 1996 Foreign Minister Alexander Downer described the core goal of Australia’s regional policies as ‘building a sense of trust, a sense of common interests and of shared responsibility for the region’s future’—which meant helping to create a security environment that would ‘forestall resort to force in international disputes, prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and encourage cooperation to enhance the security of the region as a whole’ (Downer 1996). Human security notions introduced into the security lexicon during the Keating years were retained, though with linguistic changes along the way. The net effect, already evident during the Keating years, was to produce a hybrid security discourse, in which the state-centric prism and its corollary the stress on military power and military alliances coexisted uneasily with acknowledgement of the need for cooperative responses to the rise of transnational challenges. In language scarcely distinguishable from the earlier Keating period, In the National Interest viewed Australia’s security interests as served by ‘strengthening regional institutions, pursuing outwardlooking and growth-creating trade and investment policies, encouraging habits of dialogue, expanding institutional linkages, and facilitating people-to-people links within the region’ (DFAT 1997:93). If anything, the transnational challenges to security were 60

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now given greater prominence. Apart from the intense preoccupation with the dangers posed by terrorism and boat arrivals, the second foreign policy White Paper Advancing the National Interest highlighted such issues as drug trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and transnational resource threats, in particular fish stocks and water resources. The government declared its commitment to negotiating ‘multilateral outcomes that tackle root causes and offer robust solutions for those environmental problems that require international cooperation’, even though it qualified that commitment by signalling that, where these outcomes were not in keeping with Australia’s ‘national interests’, it ‘might choose to stand aside from particular multilateral environmental agreements’ (DFAT 2003:67). During the Howard years the human security perspective made its most prominent appearance in one policy domain, namely development assistance. A report on Australian aid to Indonesia during 2003–2006 pointed to the achievement of ‘peace-building objectives’ through reconstruction and peace education in Aceh, and support for schools, clinics, food aid, youth empowerment and community reconciliation in conflict-affected areas (Office of Development Effectiveness 2007:28). In spelling out how the government would approach the doubling of its aid budget to around $4 billion annually by 2010 (Howard 2005), the 2006 White Paper, the first on Australia’s aid program, underlined the government’s commitment to poverty reduction, sustainable development and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), all of which were described as forming ‘an integral part of Australia’s foreign policy and security agenda’ (AusAID 2006: ix). In this context five features of the AusAID program, especially during the latter part of the Howard period, are worth noting: 1 the inevitable priority given to various counterterrorism projects in the aftermath of the September 11 and Bali attacks (AusAID 2003); 2 increased focus on the needs of fragile states, which spawned a wide range of initiatives from capacity building to forceful intervention (Pavanello and Darcy 2008); 3 the establishment of a Peace and Security Fund (AusAID 2003); 4 the investing in people concept, with its emphasis on strengthening national health and education systems, tackling major diseases (in particular AIDS and other pandemics) and supporting higher education through scholarships and linkages (AusAID 2011); 61

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5 promotion of regional stability and cooperation; in particular, greater attention to regional management of transboundary challenges and to the fostering of the institutional and personal networks now deemed to play an important role in averting or responding to crises (AusAID 2003). Put simply, the Howard years did not take full advantage of the momentum created by the Labor governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet despite discursive shifts, human security perspectives had not been entirely abandoned. Just as the Howard government had produced the first two white papers on foreign policy and the first on overseas aid, so the Rudd government sought to distinguish itself by producing the first ‘National Security Statement’ in December 2008. The prime minister acknowledged that ‘national security encompasses more than just traditional statecraft and classical military capabilities’ and that security policy has to contend with an increasingly complex and interconnected global environment in which ‘classical distinctions between foreign and domestic, national and international, internal and external have become blurred’ (Rudd 2008b:5). Earlier statements by the Rudd administration had emphasised other familiar themes: the need for cooperative approaches to security, comprehensive engagement with Asia, and the construction of an Asia-Pacific Community. All three elements were said to be integral to the task of managing transnational challenges, including national disasters and disease, which by their nature transcended national boundaries (Rudd 2008a). Engagement with Asia would be pursued through both bilateral and multilateral channels. The Asia-Pacific Community, a theme that gained considerable traction during the Keating years, was revived but with scant detail on the nature of the community, its function or organisational structure. In any case, the proposal for a streamlined regional architecture did not imply that Australia was about to demote the importance attached to existing regional forums, notably the East Asian Summit. Apart from the minor shifts of emphasis alluded to above, the general direction of Australia’s security discourse remained unchanged. The few new elements that were introduced into the security equation remained poorly developed and did not set out a clear pathway from theory to practice. In an attempt to clarify the Asia-Pacific community concept, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith described its underlying objective as advancing regional economic and financial integration, security 62

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cooperation and joint responses to transnational challenges. Tellingly, however, he made it clear that this was to be ‘a leaders’ level dialogue’ (Smith 2010). Climate change was one element of security policy which distinguished the Rudd and Gillard governments from the Howard era. Prior to the 2007 election, the Labor Party had promised to introduce an emissions trading scheme by 2010, ratify the Kyoto Protocol, invest $500 million in renewable energy and clean coal, and increase the contribution of renewable energy to electricity production to 20 per cent by 2020, although short- to medium-term mitigation targets were a notable omission (Macintosh et al. 2010:201). Following its election, the Rudd government acted quickly to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and used the Bali Climate Change Conference in December 2007 to proclaim its intention to help shape a global solution. In his 2008 National Security Statement, Rudd described climate change as a ‘fundamental national security challenge’ for Australia. He went on to connect climate change with ‘unregulated population movements, declining food production, reductions in arable land, violent weather patterns and resulting catastrophic events’. He concluded that the severity of these consequences made it necessary for climate change to be formally incorporated ‘within Australia’s national security policy and analysis process’ (Rudd 2008b:25). How this was to be done, by whom, with what resources and in what institutional setting remained unspecified. In other words climate change policy, notwithstanding good intentions, lacked the conceptual clarity and institutional coherence needed to overcome the powerful domestic and international pressures that would inevitably stand in its path. Faced with domestic political resistance and complex, protracted and contentious international negotiations, the Rudd government would predictably falter in its discursive commitment to place climate change at the core of security policy. Even though the Gillard government subsequently resurrected the commitment to action on climate change via the introduction of a carbon tax, the policy shift was presented largely as a structural reform designed to maximise economic competitiveness and much less as part of a holistic response to the security challenges posed by environmental degradation (Gillard 2011b). The picture that emerges from this overview of Australia’s post– Cold War official security discourse is of a policy-making elite that intuitively grasps something of the radical changes unfolding in the international security environment, but is unable to articulate 63

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table 1: number of official statements with references to human security sourCe

keating period (1991–6)

howard (1996–2007)

rudd (2007–10)

Ministers

5

8

16

PM & Cabinet DFAT

1 6

6

AusAID

9

8

Defence

1

3

Attorney-General

1

AFP

1

HEROC

1

2

Parliament

2

2

29

38

total

1

6

a coherent and sustained response to these changes. During this twenty-year period governments of different political complexion conceded that security could no longer be conceived exclusively in zero-sum terms or achieved solely by reliance on military power. Principles congruent or at least compatible with the wider notion of human security—cooperative security, transnational threats to security, non-military responses to security threats, and people-to-people links, to name a few—now intruded more often and with greater emphasis. The term itself, ‘human security’, appeared in official statements (speeches, policy statements, media releases) with increasing regularity. A preliminary analysis shows that during 1991–2010 the term was used in seventy-three official statements, with increasing frequency and diversification of sources over time. But not once did a senior minister or major policy document seek to provide an integrated human security framework within which Australia’s security objectives could be formulated let alone implemented. the operational dimension Limited as it was, the space that human security came to occupy in Australian declaratory policy was even more severely circumscribed when it came to operational policy and institutional arrangements. 64

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The limitations were most clearly visible in the area of defence planning. In the early 1990s the analysis of Australia’s security outlook excluded the likelihood of a direct military threat to Australia in the foreseeable future, but this apparent demotion of the need for military preparedness was offset by the proposition that military capabilities were nevertheless needed to protect other security interests, including offshore resources and sea lines of communication as well as support for peacekeeping operations and disaster relief (Department of Defence 1992). Though the profile of the US alliance was less prominent during these years, close defence relations with the United States were still justified as the necessary condition for the policy of defence self-reliance (Department of Defence 1992:44–45). A decade later the Howard government’s first Defence White Paper committed the ADF to developing an integrated joint force capable of denying air and sea approaches to ‘credible hostile forces’, controlling land approaches to Australia, and responding to armed incursions on Australia soil. These capabilities would also ‘support the security of our immediate neighbourhood and contribute to coalition operations’ (Department of Defence 2000:xii). Substantial enhancements to intelligence, surveillance and communications capabilities would bring security budgets in these areas to around $1.3 billion per year over the coming decade. Following the September 11 attacks, the government increased the size of the Special Forces, established a Special Operations Command, and enhanced counter-terrorist capabilities including, through a new Tactical Assault Group, acceleration of intelligence projects and acquisition of more capable troop lift helicopters. With a view to likely participation in coalition operations, further improvements were foreshadowed in communications systems with allies; enhanced Electronic Warfare Self Protection measures; improved landmine protection, clearance and detection; and improved ballistic protection for some assets (Australian Government 2003:24). In a major speech on security delivered in June 2004, Howard spoke of an ‘integrated national security strategy’ that combined ‘strengthened defence and counter-terrorism capacities, upgraded infrastructure and transport security, tightened border protection and enhanced international cooperation’ (Howard 2004:5). In relation to this last function, much has been made of the ADF’s contribution to peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions made possible by additional infantry battalions. The ADF prided itself on its stabilisation operations in East Timor and the Solomon Islands, increased aerial mobility 65

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facilitating medical evacuation of casualties, and development of such other capabilities as desalination equipment and logistics stores.2 Perhaps the most important element of the Howard government’s security policy was its response to the perceived terrorist threat, which was the principal justification given for Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan. The White Paper on terrorism released in July 2004 focused primarily on the international dimension of the threat and the need for regional responses (DFAT 2004). In outlining a whole-of-government approach, the White Paper highlighted the role of the ADF (in particular, military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), the role of the United Nations in strengthening the international legal framework to counter the terrorist threat, the upgrading of counter-terrorist capabilities of Australia’s neighbours (including bilateral arrangements with the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and East Timor), and law enforcement and institutional arrangements at home. Notwithstanding the DFAT provenance of the White Paper, it was the domestic dimensions of the response and the influence of the prime ministerial office which were decisive in shaping Australia’s counter-terrorist policy. More effective cooperation between agencies of all government jurisdictions, upgraded intelligence systems, increased powers invested in law enforcement agencies, an intensive ‘public information’ campaign about threats at home and abroad, and tighter border and transport security constituted the centrepiece of the government’s approach (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet 2004). The legislative package enacted by Parliament3 included a new definition of ‘terrorist acts’ in the Crimes Act; legislation targeted against the funding of terrorist activity; technologically more sophisticated means of intercepting information about terrorist groups; and increased powers for police officers and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to facilitate detention, search and questioning of individuals in relation to terrorist threats (Wyndham 2003). Ironically these and other measures, widely criticised because of the serious risks they posed to the civil liberties regime in Australia, were justified by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock on the grounds that they represented a legislative contribution to ‘human security’ (Ruddock 2004:113).4 By and large the Rudd government’s counter-terrorism blueprint followed in its predecessor’s footsteps, with only minor changes to the intelligence infrastructure or the legislative and regulatory 66

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framework shaped and expanded over the preceding few years. Having abandoned the idea of a department of homeland security, the Labor government accepted the Homeland and Border Security Review recommendations. The position of National Security Adviser (NSA) was created within the Prime Minister’s Department to advise him on overall security policy and to coordinate policy implementation. An annual ‘national security statement’ and a whole-of-government evaluation mechanism overseen by the NSA were introduced to better integrate national security architecture (Rudd 2008b). These revised institutional arrangements reflected a deeper grasp of the interconnectedness of seemingly discrete security concerns and of the need for greater coherence across the different arms of government. They were not, however, infused by the overarching principles of the human security paradigm. It remains to say a word about the international dimension of Australian security policy, as reflected in a series of bilateral, regional and global arrangements. Though here we do no more than highlight a few of these, they merit careful consideration because they reveal both the scope and limitations of the emerging security infrastructure when viewed from the vantage point of human security. It is fair to say that all Australian governments have pursued with increasing vigour bilateral security cooperation in Asia; including security dialogues (involving foreign and defence ministers) and exchanges of military personnel, joint military exercise and other defence related activities, in particular with Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. In the last few years, attention has also turned to China and India (DFAT 2010). The 2007 Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation is indicative of the main thrust of such efforts. The Declaration listed the following areas: cooperation on transnational crime (including people smuggling and trafficking), border security, counter-terrorism; disarmament and counter-proliferation; peace operations, maritime and aviation security; and humanitarian relief operations, including disaster relief and contingency planning (including for pandemics) (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2007). The Japan–Australia Joint Communiqué issued on the occasion of Gillard’s visit to Japan in April 2011 listed a string of security concerns (earthquakes, nuclear safety, energy and resources, disaster response) without attaching the security label to any of them, reserved the security label for defence cooperation, and concluded by reaffirming the commitment ‘to work together to combat climate change, to alleviate poverty, to enhance human 67

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security and to advance nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation’ (Prime Minister of Australia 2011). Here again we see human security concerns intruding, though gently and with no acknowledgement of the periodic tensions that inevitably arise between soft and hard security priorities, let alone of the mechanisms needed to resolve such tensions. As noted, Australian governments have also actively pursued multilateral avenues of security cooperation. ASEAN has been the principal focus of Australian interest because of its obvious importance in the Southeast Asian context and its initiating and stabilising function within the wider framework of Asia-Pacific regionalism. In 2007, Australia and ASEAN signed the Joint Declaration on the ASEAN–Australia Comprehensive Partnership, and agreed on a Plan of Action (2008–2013) covering political and security, economic, socio-cultural and development cooperation (DFAT 2011). In addition to Australia’s participation in annual ASEAN meetings as a Dialogue Partner, and in the biennial ASEAN–Australia Forum, the ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA) was signed on 27 February 2009, and entered into force on 1 January 2010. In 2009, two-way trade in goods and services with ASEAN totalled $76.5 billion and accounted for 15.1 per cent of Australia’s total trade. Australia is now a leading provider of onshore and offshore education services to the region—in 2009 more than one hundred and six thousand students from ASEAN countries studied in Australia and 984 scholarships were awarded to citizens of ASEAN countries under the Australia Leadership Awards. In 2010, Australia provided $945 million in development assistance to ASEAN countries, and co-sponsored—together with Indonesia, the Philippines and New Zealand—the Regional Interfaith Dialogue (DFAT 2011). In the ASEAN Regional Forum, Australia focused on strengthening its capacity building and preventive diplomacy program for counterterrorism and transnational crime, and to a lesser extent for disaster relief, non-proliferation and disarmament, maritime security, and peacekeeping. Similar priorities are evident in Australia’s participation in a number of ad hoc regional mechanisms, including the Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime (Bali Process on People Smuggling) established in February 2002 (Governments of Japan, New Zealand and Australia 2011); the ASEAN Chiefs of Police forum (in which the Australian Federal Police, the AFP, is a dialogue partner) (Australian Federal Police 2003); the Multi-national Operations Support Team 68

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(a hub of regional law enforcement agencies, in which the AFP has played an influential role) (DFAT 2007); and the ASEAN–Australia Profile Alert Working Group (through which the Department of Immigration and Citizenship has been instrumental in developing regional capacity in impostor detection and in profiling of migrants of concern) (DIAC 2009). No analysis of Australia’s multilateral connection to the human security agenda can neglect Australia’s participation in the UN system. It is within the UN framework that the human security concept has been most forcefully expressed and at least partially applied. Australian participation in the multifaceted structure that is the UN has visibly fluctuated over the last twenty years from relative enthusiasm in the Keating years to undisguised scepticism during the Howard period, and strong rhetorical but generally unimaginative support during Rudd’s prime ministership. Australian governments have continued to make their allotted contributions to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets, and to the budgets of key UN agencies, in particular the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. However, when it comes to specific peace and security functions the picture is an ambiguous one. A few examples may help to clarify the nature and extent of the ambiguity. The Keating government, it is true, initiated the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (1996), and more recently the Rudd government instigated with Japan the Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament 2011). Yet, for different reasons, the election loss by the Keating government in 1996 and the lack of follow through by the Rudd and Gillard governments in 2010–2011, no substantive initiative has resulted, and no coherent strategy has been formulated to take forward the recommendations of the two commissions. Under all three governments Australia has committed personnel to UN peacekeeping—it played a leading role in the Cambodia and East Timor operations—but its efforts in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction, notwithstanding its decision to join the UN Peacebuilding Commission in 2010 (Smith 2009), have been modest, and its contribution to major UN debates on the future of peace operations and humanitarian intervention can best be described as subdued. It has, for example, supported 69

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but not played a distinguished role either in elaborating the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle or in exploring its possible application to the Asia-Pacific context. It strongly advocated UN intervention in the Libyan crisis and sanctions against the Syrian regime, but it has generally remained silent on many of the more contentious aspects of the principle. Though all three Australian governments have been strong advocates of regional cooperation, they have not been particularly industrious or imaginative in seeking to integrate major UN priorities and commitments into the regional security agenda. Almost invariably, regional and global multilateralism was constrained by the priority accorded to the US alliance and by the perceived need to harmonise both diplomacy and defence policy with US objectives and preferences. The return of a Labor government in 2007 may have brought with it a more favourable disposition to the language and psychology of human security, but the tensions within and between declaratory and operational policy were no closer to resolution. learning from the past, planning for the future The foregoing sketch points to certain constants in the way Australian governments have traditionally formulated and applied security priorities. The most important among these is the overarching conception of the security of state and nation—the two are normally conflated as if they were more or less synonymous—and its corollary, the need to defend the state/nation against actual or potential military threats. It is this view of ‘national security’ which has continued to guide defence planning and defence budgets, with one crucial qualification, namely that ultimate protection against external military threats was said to rest on the alliance with the United States. As a consequence Australia’s defence capabilities have been designed for the most part to support US military engagements or at least to dovetail—for purposes of training, defence procurement and intelligence gathering—with the much superior capabilities of the United States. The announcement in November 2011 that US marines would be deployed in the Northern Territory for six months each year, starting with 250 in 2012 and building to 2500 in 2016–2017, simply confirmed the longstanding rationale underlying Australia’s commitment to the US alliance. Australian governments, it seems, remained wedded to the idea that the US alliance constituted the only insurance policy capable of delivering protection in 70

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the event of military accident. To this end, the decision to station US troops on Australian soil—tantamount to the establishment of a US military base—was part of the ever-increasing premium Australia had to pay to preserve the alliance. Supporters of this latest decision argued that the US military presence would be largely symbolic in its impact. The hosting of more US troops, it was argued, was simply meant to convey a signal. Such an argument, however, begs the question: what kind of signal and to whom? It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the deployment of US marines was part of a larger US strategy aimed at the containment of Chinese power and influence. The question now as before was whether Australia’s insurance policy might not precipitate the very threat it was meant to counter. This said, all governments in the period under review understood to a greater or lesser extent that old conceptions of national security and military alignment had somehow to accommodate notions of regional and global security and the multilateral arrangements needed to give effect to them. They came to realise that the international security environment had acquired characteristics which did not easily sit with the strictures of the old ‘national security’ paradigm. Threats were more often than not transnational in origin and reach, did not necessarily involve physical violence, and, even where force was used or threatened, as in the case of terrorist attacks, a military response was riddled with difficulty and uncertainty. However, this modified understanding of the security landscape was at best uneven, vulnerable to the exigencies of electoral politics, given to improvisation, seldom the subject of a sustained national conversation and always vulnerable to the imperatives of the US alliance. The result was a series of unresolved tensions both within and between the rhetorical and operational frameworks of security policy. The discursive and policy innovations of the last twenty years did not amount to a coherent diagnosis of the emerging security dilemma, much less to an integrated policy framework. The human security paradigm is no panacea for these ills, but it does offer a useful set of analytical tools and a normative compass which can be put to far better use than has hitherto been the case. Before proceeding to an overall exposition of future options, it may be helpful to illustrate this proposition, by placing it first in the context of humanitarian intervention which has become a prominent feature of post–Cold War security thinking and practice. While Australia has participated in a number of UN-led (e.g. Somalia, Timor-Leste) and regional (e.g. Solomon Islands, 71

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Bougainville) ‘peace operations’, and AusAID has contributed to humanitarian programs in diverse settings, such involvement has yet to benefit from an overarching statement of principles that would govern all facets of Australian involvement: the criteria by which Australia decides whether or not to intervene; the purposes of intervention; and the modalities of intervention, including the mechanisms and processes of coordination across government departments and agencies. A human security approach to the formulation of such principles would help remedy a debilitating intellectual and institutional deficit. First, all forms and phases of intervention (before, during and after hostilities) must be approached with high levels of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. As Smith and Whelan have observed, Australia’s ‘track record in places like Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste suggests that a deeper understanding of culture and language will be required’ (Smith and Whelan 2008:10). The attempt to analyse, justify and guide involvement in conflict situations by reference to the notion of ‘fragile states’ has been especially unhelpful in that it has privileged Western concepts of governance with the emphasis on the rule of law and the strengthening of the legislative, judiciary and security infrastructure of the state, with less attention to tribal, ethnic and religious fault-lines and to social, economic and environmental disorders which are invariably the prime ingredients of conflict. In this context, the building or rebuilding of well armed security forces should be seen for what it is: a double-edged sword that can for a time restore order but can also in the longer term accentuate existing divisions or even generate new ones. Second, as intimated above, a human-centric approach to postconflict reconstruction would be predicated on detailed knowledge of and connection with civil society, its grievances and aspirations. It would seek to incorporate culturally-grounded concepts of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, and place humanitarian assistance and reconstruction efforts within a development model informed by clearly articulated local needs and aspirations rather than donorbased notions of conditionality. In the formulation and delivery of such development programs the ‘national security’ and commercial interests of intervening powers, Australia included, would play at best a secondary role. Third, once the principles of humanitarian protection have been clearly enunciated, it should then be possible to spell out how those principles will be applied, what institutional mechanisms will be 72

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used to implement and coordinate policy and evaluate performance, and what multilateral arrangements (regional or global) are likely to provide the humanitarian objective with enhanced levels of legitimacy and efficacy. As noted in previous chapters, human security places the accent on the protection of persons and communities (not just national communities), on reconciling communities with divergent histories, interests and grievances, and on integrating the insights, skills and resources available in different policy domains. Here we do no more than outline a few key propositions that might underpin an Australian policy framework attuned to the requirements of human security.5 The first proposition restates what is now a widely accepted notion: old and new security threats are closely interrelated, and this interrelationship increasingly assumes a transnational character. A security policy framework must therefore be both comprehensive and carefully integrated. It is not enough for Australian governments to set out a long list of threats (e.g. terrorism, transnational crime, drug trafficking, nuclear proliferation, failing or collapsing states, piracy, refugee flows, climate change) which need to be addressed, or even to devise strategies and measures that discretely address each of these threats. An integrated approach is one which is based on a detailed and ongoing examination of the relationship (often indirect but nonetheless crucial) between different threats, in particular the relationship between physical violence on the one hand and a range of cultural, social, economic and environmental disorders on the other. Here it should be remembered that widespread violence is invariably both symptom and cause of such disorders. An integrated approach is therefore needed which effectively combines prevention as well as peacekeeping, peace enforcement, peacemaking and postconflict reconstruction strategies. Nowhere is the imperative for an integrated security policy more compelling than in interventions that involve the use of force, whether in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste or the Solomon Islands. Only such an integrated strategy can give reason for confidence that the decision to intervene is, in the first place, well based, that it is legitimate in terms of the ends and means of intervention and that it is likely to prove efficacious in the achievement of clearly stated objectives. In the absence of a human security approach, the process of withdrawal is likely to prove a messy, potentially destructive affair and to stoke the fires of resentment and mutual recrimination. Simply put, linkages and interdependencies 73

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must inform not only diagnosis of the ailment in question but also formulation of preventive strategies and prescription of short and longer term remedies. The second proposition simply serves as a reminder of the risks associated with zero-sum calculations. In devising security strategies and remedies, Australian policies must take care not to pursue the security of one community or nation at the expense of another community or nation. Instead they must actively seek to achieve complementarities and where necessary to accommodate differences of interest and outlook. The principle of reconciling the competing security interests of different actors is relevant to the handling of humanitarian emergencies, but equally to framing security policies in relation to the Korean conflict, Sino-Japanese tensions, rivalries in the South China Sea, or energy security for key actors in the AsiaPacific region. In short, the underlying objective is to achieve the ‘common security’ of all stakeholders. Common security, it must be readily admitted, is an elusive concept, especially when it comes to investing the abstract formulation with specific practical content—which brings us to the third proposition. What constitutes a security interest is ultimately a subjective notion. Australians cannot tell Indonesians what their legitimate security interests are any more than Indonesians can determine Australian interests. In other words, arriving at an understanding of common security is an inter-subjective exercise, made all the more difficult by the fact that no single voice or authority (even the Australian or Indonesian government) can realistically claim to represent the diversity of security interests of their respective populations. It is difficult to see how the ‘official’ Indonesian view can be taken as a faithful representation of the security aspirations of the people of Aceh or Papua, or the ‘official’ Australian view can be accepted as the final word on the security interests either of Indigenous communities or of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. A case in point is the controversy that surrounded the Gillard government’s attempt to devise an offshore processing scheme that would distinguish it from the Howard government’s ‘Pacific solution’. Significantly, the 2011 Australian–Malaysian agreement, which provided for a ‘refugee swap’ deal—Malaysia agreed to receive 800 asylum seekers from Australia in return for the latter accepting 4000 refugees from Malaysia (Government of Australia and Government of Malaysia 2011)—floundered precisely because of a failure on the part of government to engage the wider community 74

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in a dialogue capable of generating the necessary consensus. The subsequent ruling by the High Court of Australia invalidating the agreement was but the legal expression of this political failure (High Court of Australia 2011). Simply expressed, common security is more a process than an end state—a process which has ‘sustained and inclusive dialogue’ as its defining characteristic. The fourth proposition logically follows from the preceding three. Human security cannot be pursued unless it is done in partnership between governments (acting on behalf of states) on the one hand and civil society on the other. To illustrate, if Australia (or any other Western government) has an interest in advancing human security prospects in Iraq or Afghanistan or the wider Middle East, it cannot afford to limit its dialogue to the governments of the region. It must somehow also identify important civil society actors and include them in the dialogue—a task which political repression makes immeasurably more difficult yet indispensable. Without an understanding of societal perceptions and aspirations it is difficult to see how policies can foster the political processes conducive to conflict resolution or mitigation. The need to involve civil society is not limited to parties in conflict; it applies with equal force to third parties. If an Australian government is to make a substantial and lasting contribution to the security situation of East Timor, Papua New Guinea or Afghanistan it must involve civil society in Australia. It needs to engage not just development agencies with a presence in those countries, but also religious and humanitarian organisations as well as professional bodies (e.g. medical, legal, educational) with relevant expertise, resources and contacts, and beyond this media groups and the public more widely, without whose moral and political support the policy will tend to falter in the longer term. In the absence of extensive and ongoing civil society participation, sporadic people-to-people links are likely to have little enduring value. One final proposition: the role to be accorded to civil society in human security inevitably places the spotlight on Australia’s social fabric. It is not just a case of rethinking Australia’s handling of major humanitarian crises and conflicts. Consideration must be given to the way security policy is analysed, developed and applied within Australia. To illustrate, human security principles relate to the way the ‘terrorist’ threat is understood, as well as to the legislative and administrative regime that is adopted in response to the threat. The same can be said of policies developed in relation to energy security and climate change, ‘border protection’ and the treatment of refugees 75

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and asylum seekers, as well as obligations arising from ratification of international legal instruments in such areas as the laws of armed conflict, nuclear non-proliferation, international human rights and environment. Human security cannot advance if the people in whose name it is pursued are not active participants in the development and execution of policy. Though many of the foregoing propositions have general applicability, they apply with particular force to Australia’s circumstances and to its continuing efforts to reconcile the imperatives of history and geography (Camilleri 2007:155–168). A human security framework of the kind outlined above promises to provide a useful bridge between the country’s past reliance on great and powerful friends and the need to accommodate and benefit from the current shift in the geopolitical and geoeconomic centre of gravity—a trend clearly recognised in Prime Minister Gillard’s speech announcing the commissioning of a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century: ‘Asia has never been of greater global significance and as global economic and strategic weight shifts from west to east, global institutional frameworks reflect this in turn’ (Gillard 2011a). However, if engagement with Asia is to be more than a slogan or a codeword for expanding trade links, then that engagement needs to be invested with content that resonates with the security interests of regional partners (both governments and civil society). Moreover, such engagement needs to be liberated from the strictures of the US alliance; become more attuned to cultural, religious and political sensitivities than is presently the case (Camilleri 2007:159–160); and respond to the transnational challenge with an integrated policy framework that straddles development, defence, homeland security, environment, immigration and foreign policy. Enough has been said to indicate that the ends and means of human security are inextricably interwoven; policies cannot be divorced from process. These interconnections, to be credible and viable, must be regarded as ‘authoritative’. In the Australian national context, a human security blueprint would gain considerably if it were the subject of a rigorously crafted statement that carried the imprimatur of the prime minister and was faithfully reflected in a number of detailed ministerial statements to the parliament, and a number of related documents. Over a ten-year time frame it may be feasible to entertain a White Paper setting out the main principles and strategic directions of an Australian ‘human security’ policy. By definition, a human security framework, precisely because it rests 76

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on notions of interconnectedness, requires a ‘whole-of-government’, ‘whole-of-governance’ and ‘whole-of-society’ approach. The ‘whole-of-government’ notion, though widely accepted as crucial to effective policy formulation and execution, is seldom given the theoretical and practical attention it deserves (Camilleri and Falk 2009:334). The notion itself is normally understood to refer to interdepartmental coordination, but to be efficacious it also requires sustained ministerial and parliamentary input. Such an outcome will not be achieved overnight. What is called for is an incremental process that begins with rigorous examination of options and modalities. A useful first step might be for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to make a preliminary announcement of the government’s intention to move in this direction, and to set in motion a parliamentary inquiry (probably to be convened by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade). The inquiry’s terms of reference would be to explore the applicability of the human security framework to Australia’s circumstances, and to make recommendations on how a whole-of-government approach might be developed. Once submitted to the government, the inquiry’s findings and recommendations should be widely disseminated. Following a period of parliamentary and public discussion, the government would issue a major Statement on Human Security Policy. The parliamentary inquiry and ensuing discussion would consider a number of important institutional mechanisms capable of advancing the implementation of human security principles across all relevant areas of government. Foremost among these is the need to review the National Security Committee of Cabinet, its terms of reference, composition and method of operation. Provision should be made to include, in addition to the existing portfolios, the ministers with responsibility for AusAID and the environment (including climate change) as regular members of the Committee. Inter-ministerial coordination would need to be mirrored at the departmental level. Chaired by the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) a Human Security Inter-departmental Committee (HSIDC) would be established which could replace the existing Secretaries’ Committee on National Security (SCNS). Its membership would retain the present membership of SCNS: National Security Adviser (as Deputy Chair); the Secretaries of DFAT, Defence, DIAC, Attorney-General’s and Treasury; the Chief of the Defence Force; the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police; the Chief Executive Officers of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service and the Australian 77

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Crime Commission; and the Directors-General of ONA, ASIO and ASIS. To this would be added the Secretary of Environment and the Director-General of AusAID. Given the proposed changes, it may be appropriate to rename the National Security Adviser as the Human Security Adviser and for the position’s brief to be accordingly redefined. Consideration should be given to reviewing the objectives and modalities of the National Intelligence Coordination Committee (NICC) which is presently responsible for coordinating Australia’s foreign, security and law enforcement intelligence activities. The entire intelligence infrastructure would need to be reviewed and so bring it over time more closely into line with human security principles and methodologies. Finally, the establishment of a National Security and International Policy Group6 within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, as foreshadowed in the 2008 National Security Statement, could, with a number of adjustments to its brief and membership, prove a useful instrument for advancing an integrated human security policy framework. If the objective is to make ‘human security’ a foundation stone of security policy-making in Australia, then a whole-of-government approach must be complemented by a whole-of-governance approach. This is a large yet generally unexplored area of study (Camilleri and Falk 2009:334). Here we can do no more than outline a few key propositions. The general tendency has been for security discussion to confine itself to the national tier of governance, but in most national polities (micro states are only a partial exception) security policy, if it is to reach the society as a whole, has to work in tandem with the provincial and municipal tiers of governance (nowhere more so than in federal systems). The view that security policy is about ‘external’ relations and that the conduct of these relations is the exclusive prerogative and responsibility of national government, though commonly held, is simplistic and unhelpful. In Australia’s case the whole-of-governance imperative is strikingly evident in relation to terrorism and the ‘war on terror’. Given that actual or threatened terrorist attacks are aimed primarily at civilian targets, there is little option but to involve the tiers of government (state and local) that are closest to the civilian population. Such involvement is needed on at least three fronts: 1 Measures needed to protect civilian populations against such attacks cannot be devised, much less implemented, without the active participation of state law enforcement agencies and 78

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emergency services—to a lesser extent the same holds for local government infrastructure (VAGO 2009). 2 Because terrorist and counter-terrorist strategies are essentially a psychological contest, a human security response to the problem must of necessity direct attention to the functioning of educational institutions, the media and other instruments that help disseminate knowledge and shape public attitudes and perceptions (Aly 2007), and here both state and local governments have an important role to play. 3 As recent events have shown, actual or potential terrorist activity can originate as much from within as from outside the society. To the extent that religiously or ethnically based grievances and animosities can lead to ‘violent extremism’ (Stevens 2011), it is local and state governments that are best placed to initiate the necessary preventive and remedial programs. It follows therefore that in relation to the terrorist threat as well as to a number of other threats (e.g. transnational crime, refugee and asylum seeker arrivals, energy security, food security) a human security response requires the closest possible integration in policy formulation and implementation between the federal, state and local governments. To this end, thought should be given to the utility of establishing a standing inter-governmental security committee (whose membership and terms of reference are periodically reviewed) linked to a series of subcommittees (some of which may be created on an ad hoc basis to deal with time and place specific challenges as they arise). The state ministries that are likely to be involved, some permanently and others intermittently, include: police and emergency services, justice and law enforcement, education, multicultural affairs, energy and resources, local government, environment and climate change, water, agriculture and food security. The whole-of-governance approach also requires that attention be given to the regional and global tiers of governance. Australia actively participates in the work of numerous global and regional organisations that bear upon security policy. This participation, we have already noted, can be more vigorously harnessed to support human security principles and methodologies. One important element in this process is the need to develop more effective coordination between the regional and global tiers of governance. In the interests of efficiency it is likely that Australian efforts in this direction will be channelled largely through national government. 79

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However, the inter-governmental security committee referred to above and subsidiary coordinating committees could be used to conduct a sustained two-way flow of communication enabling state and local governments to have an input into regional and global policy-making. It is also possible to envisage state and local government representatives taking part in international negotiations either as members of or advisers to the official Australian negotiating team, or alternatively by holding their own international forums in tandem with international conferences, as was the case in the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on climate change.7 It remains to say a word about the need for a ‘whole-of-society’ approach. Much has already been said about the significant contribution that civil society can make to redefining security objectives and decision-making processes. In Australia a number of organisations engage in public advocacy and promote public debate on a range of security-related questions. The most visible among these are development, human rights, disarmament and environmental NGOs; elements of the legal, health and media professions; and the security studies community (broadly defined), including research centres, institutes and thinktanks. Mention here should be made of the Australian Member Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (Aus-CSCAP), a second track network that brings together officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the Department of Defence, academics from a dozen university and other research centres, members of parliament, journalists, and senior executives from Australian industry (Aus-CSCAP 2011). To these should be added ethnic and religious communities whose interests periodically impinge on foreign and security policy, and which can at times exert significant pressure on government policy. Presently, then, there is a small but knowledgeable circle of Australians engaged in the security dialogue. But they are yet to achieve the critical mass or cohesion needed to command the attention of the major political parties or government bureaucracies. Over time several factors are likely to enhance the thickness of the public conversation: • the changing fabric of Australian society resulting from steadily rising levels of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity (Camilleri 2007:161), which bring with them considerable intellectual and emotional insights associated with firsthand experience and 80

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knowledge of a wide range of security situations in some of the most troubled regions of the world; • the dramatic increase over the last twenty years in the number of university students who have enrolled in programs focusing on international relations, security, development, health, human rights and related fields of study (DEEWR 2011); • the rapidly increasing number of Australians who are pursuing professional opportunities in non-governmental and inter-governmental international organisations—from UN agencies and programs, to other governmental and private multilateral agencies, to independent development, health, human rights and humanitarian organisations—and have as a result acquired considerable interest, expertise and contacts in matters relating to security policy (Hugo et al. 2003:36–37); • the exponentially increasing access to electronic sources of information and analysis. By taking advantage of these trends much could be done to create a social and political environment that helps to broaden what until now has been a terribly restricted conversation, a state of affairs which the bureaucratic and political elites have favoured in the interests of minimising the prospects of debate and dissension. But there is more to achieving the desired security dialogue than widening the circle of participants. A concerted effort will be needed to enhance the quality and intensity of that dialogue. Such an outcome will in part depend on government at all levels, especially at the federal level, performing key functions with greater skill and diligence than has usually been the case: encouraging a more robust parliamentary and public debate of human security principles and options; providing forums and channels of communication whereby diverse segments of civil society can interact and make effective input into the decisionmaking process; and adequately resourcing civil society organisations to develop competencies and to engage in sustained interaction with each other and with government. Giving effect to these measures may seem an unusually daunting task, especially in the context of minority government and heightened electoral polarisation in Australia. Indeed, regardless of the modalities of the electoral cycle, such a project, to have any chance of success, must proceed in stages and by small but progressively larger steps. A carefully conceived program of public education and community consultation will be an indispensable first step. 81

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aCknoWledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the research assistance of Amnon Varon and Aran Martin. notes 1 The centrality of the alliance relationship with the United States (and the implicit importance attached to military power) is examined in Camilleri 2003:431–453). 2 Bruce Billson (2007), the Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence, devoted an entire address to make the case that ADF capabilities played a pivotal role in discharging human security responsibilities, including the ‘responsibility to protect’. 3 The principal pieces of legislation were: Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 2002 Cth; Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism Act 2002 Cth; Criminal Code Amendment (Suppression of Terrorist Bombings) Act 2002 Cth; Telecommunications Interception Legislation Amendment Act 2002 Cth; Border Security Legislation Amendment Act 2002 Cth. 4 Much of the address was devoted to explaining how the government’s anti-terrorist laws accorded with the principles of human security. 5 Some of these propositions are in accord with the UN’s most recent report on the subject (see OCHA 2009). However, the text, though it contains a number of useful ideas, lacks conceptual coherence or the specificity that comes from placing the human security paradigm in the context of particular conflicts or regions. 6 The Group as presently constituted provides advice on Australia’s foreign, trade and treaty matters, defence, intelligence, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, law enforcement, border security and emergency management matters; coordinates security-related science and technology research matters; and plays a coordinating leadership role in the development of integrated, whole-of-government national security policy. The Group comprises three divisions: International Division; Homeland and Border Security Division; Defence, Intelligence and Research Coordination Division. 7 More than eleven hundred local government representatives from different parts of the world were present at COP 15 in Copenhagen to press for a strong and comprehensive post-2012 global climate agreement and recognition of the role of local and sub-national governments in giving effect to such an agreement. Local government advocacy 82

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entailed meetings with national delegations, local government interventions in UNFCCC plenaries, and submissions to the official negotiation text (see Local Government Climate Lounge 2011).

referenCes Aly, Anne 2007 ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Media Discourse on Terrorism: Pursuing Public Spheres in a Secular State’, Australian Journal of Social Issues 42(1):27–40. AusAID 2003 Counter-Terrorism and Australian Aid, Australian Government, AusAID, Canberra, August. AusAID 2006 Australian Aid—Promoting Growth and Stability: A White Paper on the Australian Government’s Overseas Aid Program, Australian Government, AusAID, Canberra, April. AusAID 2011 ‘Investing in People’, http://www.ausaid.gov.au/keyaid/ people.cfm (accessed 3 October 2011). Aus-CSCAP 2011 ‘Aus-CSCAP’, http://aus-cscap.anu.edu.au/ (accessed 4 October 2011). Australian Federal Police 2003 ‘Reinforcing Links with Our Regional Law Enforcement Partners’, 8 September, http://www.afp.gov.au/mediacentre/news/afp/2003/September/reinforcing-links-with-our-regionallaw-enforcement-partners.aspx (accessed 4 October 2011). Australian Government 2003 Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2003, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Billson, Bruce 2007 ‘Human Security’, Minister’s Speech to ASPI Lunch, 26 March, http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display. w3p;query=Enrichment%3A%22Human%20security%22;rec=6 (accessed 11 January 2011). Camilleri, Joseph A 2003 ‘A Leap into the Past—in the Name of the National Interest’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 57(3): 431–453. Camilleri, Joseph A 2007 ‘Australia’s Unique Future: Reconciling Place, History and Culture’, Futures 39(2–3). Camilleri, Joseph and Jim Falk 2009 Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (1996) Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, August. Cheeseman, Graeme 2001 ‘Policy, Process and Politics, the Howard Government’s Defence White Paper’, The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs 2(1). 83

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DEEWR 2011 Student 2010 Full Year: Selected Higher Education Statistics, Award course completions 2010: selected higher education statistics tables, Table 3: Award Course Completions for All Students by Citizenship and Broad Field of Education, 1999 to 2010, http://www.deewr. gov.au/HigherEducation/Publications/HEStatistics/Publications/Pages/ Students.aspx (accessed 4 October 2011). Department of Defence 1992 Australia’s Strategic Planning in the 1990s (endorsed by Government on 27 November 1989 but not released in its declassified version until November 1992). Department of Defence 2000 Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Department of Defence 2001 Defence 2000: Australia’s Future Defence Force, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet 2004 Protecting Australia Against Terrorism: Australia’s National Counter-terrorism Policy and Arrangements, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. DFAT 1997 In the National Interest: Australia’s Foreign and Trade Policy: White Paper (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. DFAT 2003 Advancing the National Interest: Australia’s Foreign and Trade Policy White Paper, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. DFAT 2004 Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. DFAT 2007 ‘International Counter-Terrorism: Sub-Regional Ministerial Conference on Counter-terrorism: Co-chairs’ Statement’, 6 March, http://www.dfat.gov.au/globalissues/terrorism/Co_Chairs_Statement. htm (accessed 4 October 2011). DFAT 2010 Australian Government, Annual Report 09/10, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. DFAT 2011 ‘Plan of Action to Implement the Joint Declaration on ASEAN– Australia Comprehensive Partnership’, http://www.dfat.gov.au/asean/plan_ of_action.html (accessed 24 January 2011). DIAC 2009 ‘Output Group 1.2 Refugee and Humanitarian Entry and Stay’, Annual Report 2008–09, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2009. http://www.immi.gov.au/about/reports/annual/2008-09/html/outcome1/ output1-2.htm (accessed 4 October 2011). Downer, Alexander 1996 ‘Regional Cooperation and Security’, Address to the Australian College of Defence and Strategic Studies, Canberra, 6 December. Evans, Gareth 1989 Ministerial Statement on Australia’s Regional Security, The Senate, 6 December. 84

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Evans, Gareth 1993 Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Evans, Gareth 1994 ‘The Emerging Asia Pacific Community’, Speech to the Council for Foreign Relations, New York, 5 October. Evans, Gareth 1995a ‘Australia’s Role in East Asia’s Future’, Speech to the CEDA Asian Region International Association of Cooperating Organisations (ARIACO), Melbourne, 11 September. Evans, Gareth 1995b ‘The Asia Pacific in the 21st Century: Conflict or Cooperation?’, Address to the 1995 Pacific Rim Forum, Bangkok, 1 December. Flitton, Daniel and Michelle Grattan 2011 ‘Obama: We’re Here to Stay’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 2011, http://www.smh.com. au/national/obama-were-here-to-stay-20111116-1njea.html (accessed 19 November 2011). Gillard, Julia 2011a Prime Minister Gillard’s Speech to Asialink and Asia Society, 28 September 2011, http://www.pm.gov.au/press-office/speechasialink-and-asia-society-lunch-melbourne (accessed 9 October 2011). Gillard, Julia 2011b Speech to the National Press Club, 14 July, http:// australianpolitics.com/2011/07/14/gillard-carbon-tax-speech-nationalpress-club.html (accessed 9 October 2011). Government of Australia and the Government of Malaysia 2011 Arrangement between the Government of Australia and the Government of Malaysia on Transfer and Resettlement, Kuala Lumpur, 25 July, http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media/media-releases/_pdf/20110725arrangement-malaysia-aust.pdf (accessed 4 October 2011). Governments of Japan, New Zealand and Australia 2011 ‘About the Bali Process’, www.baliprocess.net (accessed 3 October 2011). High Court of Australia 2011 Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship [2011] HCA 32, 31 August, http://www.hcourt. gov.au/assets/publications/judgment-summaries/2011/hca32-2011-0831.pdf (accessed 4 October 2011). Howard, John 2004 ‘National Security in an Uncertain World’, Address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Sydney, 18 June. Howard, John 2005, Increases in Overseas Aid, Press Release, 13 September. Hugo, Graeme John, Dianne M Rudd and KR Harris 2003 Australia’s Diaspora: Its Size Nature and Policy Implications, Committee for Economic Development of Australia, CEDA information paper; No. 80, July. International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament 2011 ‘International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament’, http://www.icnnd.org/Pages/default.aspx (accessed 4 October 2011). 85

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Keating, Paul 2000 Engagement: Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific, Macmillan, Sydney. Local Government Climate Lounge 2011, http://www.worldmayorsagreement. com/index.php?id=10858 (accessed 11 January 2011). Macintosh, Andrew, Deb Wilkinson and Richard Denniss 2010 ‘Climate Change’ in Chris Aulich and Mark Evans eds The Rudd Government: Australian Commonwealth Administration 2007–2010, ANU E Press, Canberra. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2007 ‘Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation’, 13 March, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/ asia-paci/australia/joint0703.html (accessed 3 October 2011). OCHA 2009 Human Security Unit, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Human Security in Theory and Practice, United Nations, New York, 2009. Office of Development Effectiveness 2007 AusAID, Assessment of the Indonesia Program Strategy 2003–2006, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Pavanello, Sara, and James Darcy 2008 Humanitarian Policy Group, Improving the Provision of Basic Services for the Poor in Fragile Environments: International Literature Review: Synthesis Paper, Prepared for the AusAID Office of Development Effectiveness (OED), Overseas Development Institute, London, December. Prime Minister of Australia 2011 ‘Japan–Australia Joint Communiqué’, 21 April 2011, http://www.pm.gov.au/press-office/japan-australia-jointcommunique-tokyo on (accessed 10 October 2011). Rudd, Kevin 2008a ‘It’s Time to Build an Asia Pacific Community’, Address to the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre, Sydney, 4 June. Rudd, Kevin 2008b ‘The First National Security Statement to the Parliament’, Address by the Prime Minister of Australia The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP, 4 December. Ruddock, Philip 2004 ‘A New Framework: Counter-terrorism and the Rule of Law’, Address to the Sydney Institute, 20 April, Sydney Papers, 16(2), Autumn: 112–121. Smith, Michael G and Jacqueline Whelan 2008 ‘Advancing Human Security: New Strategic Thinking for Australia’, Security Challenges 4(2): 1–22. Smith, Stephen 2009, ‘Australia Elected to United Nations Peacebuilding Commission’, Media release, 18 December 2009, http://www.foreign minister.gov.au/releases/2009/fa-s091218.html (accessed 4 October 2011). Smith, Stephen 2010 ‘Australia and the Asia-Pacific Century’, paper presented to the South Australian Branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 12 April. 86

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Stevens, David 2011 ‘Reasons to be Fearful, One, Two, Three: The “Preventing Violent Extremism” Agenda’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 13(2):165–188. VAGO (Victorian Auditor-General’s Office) 2009 Preparedness to Respond to Terrorism Incidents: Essential Services and Critical Infrastructure, VAGO, Melbourne. Wyndham, Jessica 2003 ‘Commonwealth Anti-terrorism Legislation’, Briefing Paper prepared for the Human Rights Council of Australia, March, http://www.hrca.org.au/terrorism.htm (accessed 7 January 2011).

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5 australia’s global seCurity: a model national strategy for a more seCure World anthony burke

prefaCe The following model national strategy outlines a realistic, prudent and responsible framework for Australian security and defence policy across multiple portfolios in a globally interdependent world. It is written in the form of an ‘Introduction and Framework’ (a long executive summary, or a first chapter) to an overarching national security strategy. The text is neither an academic argument, nor one that bears the distinctive voice of its author (e.g. Burke 2008). By reproducing the form of a government policy statement, it is written in the ‘voice’ of government and has numerous imaginary authors and prior texts reflecting a collective judgement of linked Australian and global interests. Extended argument for some of its propositions is, by necessity, abbreviated. For some readers this approach will result in a loss of critical edge, or, potentially, a ceding of critical themes in security studies to elite agendas. However, this strategy aims to show how the normative commitments to human rights, dignity, justice and emancipation in critical security studies can in fact be made central to national policy in a form that is relevant to policy-makers, and that illustrates an understanding of the challenges they face. 88

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The document’s aims reflect Joseph Camilleri’s concern that Australia develop an ‘integrated approach . . . which is based on a detailed and on-going examination of the relationship . . . between different threats, in particular the relationship between physical violence on the one hand and a range of cultural, social, economic and environmental disorders on the other’ (2011:17). It also reflects an effort to build upon then Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 ‘National Security Statement’ to the Parliament, which recognised the ‘increasing complexity and inter-connectedness’ in ‘the modern, global environment’ and a greater diversity of security challenges, and sought to reform policy machinery to create greater functional integration along lines set out in the Smith Review of Homeland and Border Security (Smith 2008; see also Ungerer 2011 and Bergin 2009). This strategy seeks to enhance and build on those reforms. This national strategy provides guidance to Australian policymakers, regional neighbours, allies and the international community regarding Australia’s national security priorities, its understanding of the global context, and its integrated intelligence, policy and response machinery and plans. It anchors Australian policy in a commitment to human security, human rights, and international law—a commitment that underpins a holistic national approach to a global system of security and insecurity in which nations are no longer autonomous actors and must cooperate to survive. It is by no means the last word or an entirely comprehensive statement of legitimate Australian interests, but it is offered as a potential resource and stimulant to debate. The strategy does not supersede more detailed guidance about Australia’s defence priorities and planning (such as that included in Australia’s 2009 defence White Paper, Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century (DOD 2009), a document with which this text has both synergies and tensions), but it does provide a broad, overarching analytical and policy framework for such guidance, and for Australian Defence Force mission sets and priorities. AustrAliA’s GlobAl security: A nAtionAl strAteGy for A more secure world introduction: the framework for Australia’s security Australia’s size and distinctive maritime location on the globe have ensured that it is one of the most secure countries in the world (Dibb 1986:1). However the rapid globalisation of insecurity, changing relativities of power, and its 89

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own active participation in global affairs, have created a rapidly changing and potentially threatening landscape for Australia’s international policy. Australia must now seek its national security within a global frame and discharge collective global responsibilities to promote international security and stability (United Nations 2004; Rudd 2008). Australia has long been an engaged and creative international actor, and its security is increasingly bound to the security of its wider region and the world as a whole. This requires the Australian government to strike a responsible balance between national priorities and international responsibilities, and between limited capacities and global cooperative action. This strategy outlines Australia’s plans to ensure its own security while discharging its responsibility to Australians and its global neighbours. The strategy integrates homeland security, defence policy, and international security diplomacy into a working whole, and anchors them in a core commitment to human security. It outlines a restructuring of Australia’s policy machinery to achieve that integration, to meet threats and crises when they occur and to look ahead to emerging challenges and to address and prevent them now (UK Cabinet Office 2008:7). Against this background, national security is defined in this document as the determination and pursuit of Australia’s national priorities within an interconnected regional and global security environment where the securing of human beings is a fundamental goal. It includes a broad range of potential military and non-military threats of a largely (but not exclusively) international character. It prioritises government and community efforts to protect the human security of Australians at a time when such security depends on the cooperative extension of security to other states and peoples in our region and around the world. Human security is a priority because it is a basic global good and is of growing strategic importance (Burke 2006, 2001). High levels of human security reduce the vulnerability of communities to serious shocks and crises and increase their resilience. Likewise if states and non-state actors make human security a priority, there is likely to be less conflict, less injustice and less violence in the international system (Commission on Human Security 2003). Too many conflicts and crises have shown that where human security does not exist, threats and dangers proliferate. Human security is a goal that can promote greater security and stability across a range of problems, from economics, to refugees, climate change, interstate conflict, insurgency and terrorism. Underscoring our commitment to human security is a view that no state or community can achieve enduring security by depriving others of it (Booth 1991). Placing human security at the centre of our international policy provides useful guidance. It ensures that we do not make choices that cause harm or insecurity to others; that we choose and support policies that reduce harm 90

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and create security; and that we seek cooperative solutions that create structural building blocks for enduring security across different communities and regions (Linklater 2002). A core commitment to human security does not mean that Australia cannot set out national priorities and objectives that take account of its distinctive situation and capacities. The spread of human security, in our region and around the world, enhances our national security (Human Security Commission 2003:4). While we retain a sophisticated capability for national defence of our homeland and core interests, we do not seek national security in competition with—or at the expense of—other states and peoples. Aware of our limited capacities and our interest in structural stability, we seek national security in cooperation with others and in a global context.

A national strategy: our core principles and objectives A national strategy for global security policy must fulfil three basic tasks. It must identify national priorities and outline ways of meeting them. It must provide a compelling analysis of the international security environment and the ways in which it generates threats, challenges and responsibilities for Australia. And it must define its terms so as to generate moral, analytical and policy clarity and consistency. This security strategy is based on five core strategic facts that determine Australia’s broad security environment, and that direct major lines of policy commitment: 1 Global security interdependence. The globalisation of information, travel, communications, trade and human–environmental interactions at increasing levels of speed, volume and intensity—and with the demonstrated and future potential for non-linear shocks—has produced a situation of global risk and security interdependence. This interdependence requires holistic strategies and intensive cooperation among states and civil societies (Beck 2010). 2 Priority of human security. The widespread promotion and realisation of human security undergirds Australian national security interests in reducing potential threats, managing destructive processes that create insecurity, and creating a more just and stable world. 3 International cooperation. Regional and global cooperation to create international norms, law and institutions to promote systemic security across a range of threat agendas has immeasurably strengthened Australia’s own security, but also presents challenges and complexities that require active and creative involvement. 91

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4 Persistence of conflict and competition. Many state policy-makers continue to perceive their state’s interests in ‘zero-sum’ terms: they see their national interests in direct competition with other states and with accepted global norms about the use of force, terrorism, proliferation and human rights. Likewise severe social tensions and violent conflict pervade many societies and relationships. Australia must retain appropriate military capabilities as a last resort, maintain a reassuring strategic posture and develop nuanced military, aid and diplomatic strategies to manage, reduce and eliminate such tensions (Booth and Wheeler 2007). 5 Security as a structure and process. Insecurities and threats often present themselves in the form of discrete or sudden events but their roots will lie in longer-range social, economic, political and environmental structures and processes. These must be analysed, tracked and managed through preventive and holistic strategies. The national and international security agenda is undergoing rapid change to meet evolving—and often surprising—new challenges. Few policy-makers at the end of the Cold War would have predicted repeated economic crisis and upheaval, East Timor’s violent passage to independence, the rise of al-Qaeda and a global war on terror, civil war and insurgency in Iraq, the Arab spring, or human-induced climate change as an international security threat. The rise of new regional powers such as China or India was foreseen but continues to present new twists, such as the complex system of dangers posed by India–Pakistan competition, or the threat of cyber warfare to crucial national infrastructures. One of the enduring lessons of this period is that national policy must do more to look into the future and guard against strategic shock (Krepinevich 2009; see also O’Neil 2011). Against the background of such events security policy has been widening its range of concerns. National security policies around the world now recognise a range of threats and challenges beyond those posed by other states and their armed forces: transnational and domestic terrorism, natural disasters, environmental crises and degradation, unregulated people movements, transnational criminal activity, piracy, disease and pandemics, weapons proliferation, economic instability, civil war and conflict and grave human rights abuses and crimes against humanity (United Nations 2004; Department of Defence 2000:viii; UK Cabinet Office 2008: Dupont 2001). However understanding such processes primarily as threats to national security has at times produced domestic and international tensions and policy contradictions. It has also undermined the international rule of law and a common interest in cooperative solutions to transnational challenges (Burke and McDonald 2007). 92

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This strategy aims to resolve such contradictions by harmonising a structural commitment to the human security of people and communities internationally, with the government’s responsibility to set national security priorities that reflect Australia’s capacities and circumstances. Human security This national strategy prioritises the provision of human security. This we see as both a central goal of Australian policy, and a crucial superstructure for a more stable and secure world. Following the United Nations 2003 Commission on Human Security, this strategy understands human security as incorporating both ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ for human beings and their communities, including states. The Commission explained that the aim of security policy is to protect ‘people’s vital freedoms from critical and pervasive threats, in ways that empower them’, by ‘creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity’ (Commission on Human Security 2003:4). Whether one considers an environmental trauma, a natural disaster, an armed conflict, or economic upheaval, insecurity is experienced most concretely by individuals and communities. Likewise, security is most meaningful when its benefits are felt and enjoyed directly by communities. Placing human security at the centre of policy analysis helps to improve the understanding both of how insecurity occurs, and how security can be promoted, across the individual, national, regional and global levels. National security interests will be activated when a threat or challenge to human security reaches a scale or severity that requires the attention and response of government; international, regional, or global security interests are activated when insecurities cross borders and require the cooperation of multiple states, communities and organisations. The provision of human security to citizens has long been seen as a fundamental domestic task of government in Australia and around the world. Within Australia human security provision has been underpinned by a comprehensive, responsive and affordable health system; universal access to high quality education from preschool to university; a high quality policing and justice system that is accountable and open to reform; effective disaster relief and efforts to promote increased community resilience; the promotion of environmentally sustainable industry, land and water use; and a fair and progressive taxation system that draws resources from all productive sectors of the economy, rewards effort, shares wealth, supports households and contributes to economic stability. These structures—and the human security objective that drives them—underpin our national prosperity and liberal freedoms, 93

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while balancing individual and market freedoms with community needs and the public interest. Human security is thus seen as a routine and widely expected responsibility of government and states, and can be extended naturally to the international level. Its strategic importance has also become increasingly evident since the end of the Cold War, if not well before. The government’s Past and Future Contingencies Study found that almost all of the major crises and operations that have involved Australian defence forces, diplomats, aid agencies and government over the past few decades have had their roots in the denial of—or serious threats to—the human security of people and communities. These included:

• The Asian financial and political crisis of 1997–1998, which drove millions

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into extreme poverty, caused widespread economic and political instability, rioting and civil violence, and—through a series of flow-on events—led to the resignation of Indonesia’s President Soeharto and the crisis in East Timor. This crisis demonstrated how structural effects from domestic corruption, inadequate global financial governance and international currency market volatility had grave impacts on human and regional security. The 1999 crimes against humanity and international intervention in East Timor, which had a background in twenty-five years of foreign occupation, guerrilla war and systemic human rights abuses, a UN-sponsored referendum with flawed security arrangements, and severe poverty and human underdevelopment. The war in Afghanistan, where a pattern of ‘warlordism’, civil war and insurgency was in part driven by enormous poverty, displacement and human insecurity; where the provision of broad-based human security has been a primary goal of the counterinsurgency strategy; and where failures to provide responsible and honest government, justice and security have undermined state-building efforts. The Iraq war of 2003–2010, in which bitterness about foreign invasion and occupation, widespread unemployment and poverty, ethnic anxiety, and freely available weapons, all fuelled a brutal insurgency and civil war. The uneven development, governance problems, and ethnic violence in the Solomon Islands that led to the 2003 regional intervention Operation Helpem Fren. The war on Bougainville, which began with violent protests about the social and environmental impact of mining but rapidly descended into a brutal civil war that resulted in the destruction of infrastructure, widespread mortality and the destabilisation of the PNG state. Peacekeeping and intervention missions in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans,

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Timor-Leste and Somalia that aimed to deal with the legacies of genocide, civil conflict and humanitarian crisis. • Disaster relief and support missions to deal with the aftermath of cyclones, flooding, famine, tsunamis, and bushfires in Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Somalia. These contingencies demonstrated the intersection between emergency management, homeland security, and external defence and security, and the need for integrated responses, plans and capabilities. Another significant role for Australia’s air and naval forces has been the surveillance of Australia’s northern seas, with the aim of disrupting flows of asylum seekers and detaining them. This approach, however, neglected the insecurity that drove such people to flee their home countries, and degraded their human security and mental health, even as it was aimed legitimately at curtailing a transnational criminal activity—people smuggling. Harmonising the need to maintain the integrity of Australia’s immigration system with a broad-based commitment to human security and Australia’s obligations under international law is a significant challenge that has required a nuanced resetting of national policy in this area.

Australian policy objectives and commitments Defence, interstate conflict, proliferation and strategic stability Since the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967, Australia’s Southeast Asian neighbours have been constructing a security community that has dramatically reduced the threat of interstate armed conflict and prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The keys to this have been the Treaty on Amity and Cooperation, the Bangkok Treaty creating a Southeast Asian nuclear weapons free zone, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) security dialogue and the declaration of an ASEAN security community (Acharya 2001). While it has been less successful in preventing intrastate conflict, this normative and legal architecture has been of immeasurable benefit to Australia’s security and remains one of its core underpinnings. Australia, through its membership of a range of treaties and initiatives—the South Pacific Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Canberra Commission, and the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament—has actively contributed to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. We continue to work actively amongst alliance partners and in international forums to promote nuclear security and to further disarmament consistent with strategic stability. 95

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Other than low-level tensions between Thailand and Cambodia, and competing claims over the maritime and oil resources of the South China Sea, Southeast Asia presents no significant long-term concerns about major interstate conflict. Australia is committed to working with its Asian partners, both bilaterally and through multilateral forums like the ARF, to maintain and strengthen the regional security community. South Asia and North East Asia present greater concerns. The rise to strategic prominence of India and China presents challenges that require careful management. China’s growing power and assertiveness threaten to bring it into conflict with the United States, with Taiwan, or its ASEAN neighbours. Tensions between China and Japan have remained confined to the diplomatic level, but the possibility of military conflict over the longer term cannot be dismissed. Strategic stability between the United States and China, especially in regards to naval power and nuclear weapons, is an ongoing concern that will become more acute in coming years. Australia continues to urge China and Taiwan to resolve their differences peacefully and promote greater functional integration, and for China to take up longstanding US offers of ongoing strategic dialogue. We have also been encouraging the US and China to negotiate a bilateral treaty on strategic reassurance that could cover areas such as regular dialogues, negative security assurances, non-use of nuclear weapons in conventional conflict and controls on cyber attacks. North Korea’s stability, its nuclear weapons program and hostile relations with Japan and South Korea remain at the top of Australian concerns in North East Asia. While improving non-provocative strategic cooperation with Japan, China and South Korea, we have also supported multilateral efforts to restrain and reverse North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and have them rejoin the NPT. We have also supported dialogue between the two Koreas, and the extension of the Six-Party Talks into a permanent strategic dialogue body for the countries of North East Asia and their great power interlocutors. Competition and hostility between India and Pakistan—which intersect with concerns about nuclear proliferation and stability, terrorism, insurgency, and Afghanistan—also present significant short- and long-term dangers. The security and stability of the entire region, and far further afield, hinge on how their relationship is managed and on how internal challenges to Pakistan’s security and sovereignty are addressed. Australia, while strengthening its bilateral ties with both countries, is urging them to improve their relationship and negotiate a bilateral treaty to reduce strategic tensions, proliferation drivers and terrorist threats. It has also urged them to join the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and, prior to that, to accede to IAEA safeguards agreements, and to conclude agreements that promote 96

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nuclear security and strategic stability. It has also been advocating a regional diplomatic conference committed to reducing threats to the stability of Afghanistan, to resolving its conflicts and to ensuring the human security of its people. Australia’s treaty alliance with the United States has been of long-term strategic benefit to Australia, providing us with access to intelligence cooperation, defence technology and training opportunities, and providing Australia and much of the Asia Pacific with a further umbrella of deterrence that enhances our security. The benefits of our alliance and broader friendship with the United States must be viewed realistically, however. Australia does not interpret the ANZUS treaty as assuring automatic US assistance in the event of a major contingency affecting Australia’s security, although past experience indicates that we can rely on a valuable level of support—diplomatic, military, or intelligence—being available. The US will make an independent assessment of its own interests in a crisis, including its alliance interests, and its response may be affected by its commitments elsewhere. As a result Australia maintains an independent deterrence capability and a balanced range of civilian and military assets, and makes an independent assessment of its security environment and strategic priorities. When we deploy with US forces within a coalition or alliance framework, we will do so in ways that are consistent with international law and broader global and human security objectives. A further factor is added by the United States’ global reach and strategic weight. Dramatic US policy shifts can alter both the regional and global security environments and the calculations of multiple actors, whether they are friends or adversaries. Australia maintains a strategic partnership that encourages the US to remain constructively engaged in the Asia-Pacific region and to maintain a strategic posture that promotes strategic stability, the international rule of law and sustained improvement in the global security environment. Australia remains a strong advocate of the international rule of law regarding the resort to and use of armed force—from UN Charter rules about the resort to force to the adherence to international humanitarian law by all parties during conflict. We support the continued evolution of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to improve its relevance and further protect combatants and civilians in situations of armed conflict. In this way IHL makes a significant contribution to human security. Australian actions in this regard have included the ratification without reservation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the drafting of a new War Crimes Act that closely maps into Australian law our obligations under the conventions, thus providing greater legal and operational certainty to the Australian Defence Force and creating a fair and effective framework for the prosecution of breaches by ADF personnel or those of other countries. 97

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The principle of distinction between civilian and military targets in IHL provides a basis for Australia’s advocacy of treaties to outlaw cyber and space warfare, both of which are significant future threats to international security. Cyber warfare is a major threat to civilian infrastructure, human security and economic life that cannot be justified by any military or strategic necessity. Its targets and effects are generally indiscriminate, costly and damaging and they have the potential to gravely poison relations between states and trigger physical war. The weaponisation of space threatens to undermine strategic stability and the shared and peaceful management of a crucial global commons. The regulation of space and cyber warfare is required to preserve the principle of distinction as well as a range of other compelling international peace and security interests. Civil conflict and peace Australian defence force personnel, diplomats and federal police have deployed into numerous conflict zones in recent decades, from Rwanda to East Timor, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan. All such cases have had complex causes and caused enormous upheaval and human suffering (Camilleri 2011). Australia has strongly felt its responsibility to contribute to peacemaking and stabilisation in such cases, especially in its own region. Such missions have also been major contributions to regional stability and Australia’s long-term security. Australia maintains appropriate response capacities—military, aid, policing, and judicial—to make a contribution to such crises. It has also developed dedicated civil-military doctrine to guide peace-enforcement and stabilisation missions, which present unique operational challenges—from the tactics required to suppress crimes against humanity, insurgency or terrorism in populated and culturally complex settings, to the integrated security, economic and political challenges of state-building and stabilisation. The Australian Defence Force has adopted such operations as a core mission set and has joined a broader whole-of-government effort to build capacity and expertise, and to generate rapid learning about the challenges of operating in the civil-military field and about the requirements of success. Australia has also supported the adoption and promotion of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, under which, at the United Nations World Summit of 2005, all UN member states acknowledged the responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, to prevent them, and to respond in a timely and appropriate manner—if necessary under Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter (United Nations 2005: paras 138–9). Australia has also supported efforts to educate and research these challenges through funding support for the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. 98

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Australia’s adoption of an overarching human security goal provides a useful framework for guiding such ongoing work, from developing military tactics to an appreciation of the outcomes required for enduring conflict suppression, stabilisation, and recovery. Structural security Complex conflicts where human security and governance are crucial factors, demonstrate how structures of governance, accountability, legitimacy, and economic stability and opportunity, are crucial to the maintenance of domestic and international security. Stable, fair, equitable and efficient domestic and international economies—paired with clean and responsive governance—are crucial superstructures for global and human security, and are thus crucial to Australia’s national security interests. Whether concerning post-conflict stabilisation and recovery, conflict prevention, the suppression of terrorism, prevention of population displacement and refugee flows, efforts to increase the resilience of governments and community during and after adverse events and disasters—or the general creation of human security around the world—fair, stable and good economic and political governance are crucial. We have tasked the Future Scenarios Agency, AusAid and Treasury to maintain a permanent watching brief on these questions and are actively promoting international cooperation and engagement to institutionalise fair and effective economic governance both within states and at the international level. Australia has also initiated a review of its international aid program to ensure that its efforts promote broad-based human development and security at a structural level, so that gains are reflected in enduring local capacities, capital creation and improved governance, and work to promote international prosperity and security. Unregulated people movements and refugees Since at least 2000, unregulated migration has had a prominent place on an expanded national security agenda in Australia, being included within a ‘border protection’ agenda that includes more general customs and quarantine enforcement against the cross-border traffic in illegal drugs and other products, or proscribed animals, plants and disease-carrying materials (Department of Defence 2000). Australia deals with a relatively small number of asylum seekers travelling to Australia by boat, in numbers that generally rise and fall in accordance with patterns in regional conflict and the aggregate population of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Australia regards the smuggling of people as a transnational criminal activity and is committed to investigating and prosecuting people smugglers 99

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in cooperation with its regional neighbours. However, Australia does not regard the movement of asylum seekers into its territory as a security threat or a threat to our borders. International law clearly states that people facing violence and persecution have the right to seek political asylum and refugee status, and stateless people often suffer severe and chronic insecurity. Australia has firm legal obligations under the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol on Refugees, to accept claims for asylum, to provide due process, and not to return people to situations of danger (non-refoulement) even if they cannot fully satisfy the criteria for refugee status. It also has obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to respect the human rights of asylum seekers. At the same time, as a sovereign state Australia has the right to determine its immigration policy and to maintain the integrity of its immigration system and its wider border control regime. Flows of asylum seekers can sometimes challenge the administration of that system, but they are not a threat to the nation. We are committed to the onshore processing of boat arrivals, with minimum periods of community-based detention to enable health, identity and security checks. In order to further discourage asylum seekers from using people smugglers we have been accepting asylum applications at selected Australian missions in countries of first refuge, increased the speed with which we make assessments and doubled our annual intake. We have also strengthened procedural and legal protections for asylum seekers, and reformed our wider immigration enforcement system to ensure its compliance with international human rights law. Australia is committed to upholding its values as a liberal, multicultural society, and to upholding the international rule of law. We believe this policy to be a legitimate balance between our sovereignty and our international responsibilities, one that reflects the core Australian values of fairness and egalitarianism. Climate and the environment The threat to human life and security posed by unchecked human-induced climate change cannot be overstated. It has, since at least 2007 when the issue was debated by the United Nations Security Council, been seen as a significant international security challenge on a par with nuclear war (IISS 2007:46–48). Major potential security impacts include more intense storms, flooding and cyclones, aggravated drought with stresses on food security and income, more widely spread disease vectors, sea-level rise and storm surges, and the displacement of millions from low-lying coastal areas creating climate refugees, and additional stresses on overcrowded cities, health and infrastructure. 100

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Other non-linear impacts may include climate conflicts and civil wars (IPCC 2007:45–54; Dupont and Pearman 2006). While climate events and environmental stresses will have national impact, Australia considers that they cannot be viewed or addressed solely through a national security lens. The atmosphere has no borders, and neither do solutions to limit harmful climate change and to protect human communities against their impacts. Australia is committed to working closely, cooperatively and energetically with its regional neighbours and the international community to address the threat of climate change. We have adopted robust greenhouse emissions reduction targets domestically, and engaged in energetic diplomacy to convince the global community as a whole to agree to binding reductions that limit dangerous climate change to less than two degrees. Human and community vulnerability to extreme weather events or other dangers associated with climate change highlight the relevance of human security. National security policy becomes engaged because state attention is required, but other areas of national policy are also likely to be engaged. Our approach to climate change is threefold: 1 Ongoing study and analysis. We have tasked the Future Scenarios Agency with ongoing studies into potential climate change developments and their implications for human, national, regional and global security, and in turn for Australia’s defence, foreign and security policy. These will be fed into our short- and long-range planning process across the whole of government. 2 Prevention and mitigation. Central to this goal are international efforts to promote practical and sustained greenhouse emissions reductions and the transition of all states and industrial activities to carbon-neutral energy use and impact. These include: treaty negotiations on binding emissions targets; technology, regulatory and investment cooperation to assist green technology adoption and business transition; and bilateral and mini-lateral partnerships across regional economies—and partner institutions such as militaries and government—to achieve green growth and emissions reduction. 3 Adaptation and strengthening resilience. These efforts remain central to our homeland security strategy, our international aid strategy and our global security strategy. Here we work with state and local government at home, and neighbouring governments abroad, to identify vulnerabilities, and to promote resilience to deal with possible impacts. Homeland resilience efforts will include integrated strategies in the area of insurance, flood mitigation, infrastructure protection, land-use planning, community support and resettlement, investments in health, and emergency response. 101

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Abroad, we will work with regional governments, international aid agencies and NGOs to build government capacity, health and other support infrastructures, and better disaster prevention and mitigation. We will work to build capacity to absorb and support climate change refugees internally, along with cooperative international responses to deal with overflows. These efforts will be guided by human rights principles and broad-based human security objectives. Homeland security and resilience Homeland security takes in a range of related domestic security concerns, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters and pandemics. All these events have the potential to cause widespread injury and loss of life, damage infrastructure, bring about economic losses (that can affect families, industries and the national economy), and strain the health and emergency response system. They require coordinated response from every level of government, across multiple portfolios and agencies, with a special burden of responsibility on defence and police forces (Bergin 2009). Australia is committed, wherever possible, to prevent such crises, to strengthen national resilience in communities, services, and infrastructure, to mitigate crisis effects and to enable rapid recovery (Parker 2010). We are promoting a whole-of-nation approach to this effort. The whole-of-nation approach links all levels of government, local communities, the media, businesses, health providers and infrastructure authorities in the creation and refinement of a range of integrated prevention, anticipation, mitigation and response strategies and capabilities. The new Homeland Security Agency has been tasked with managing and overseeing this integrated approach, which will be implemented by existing intelligence, police, defence, emergency management and other organisations with long experience in the area. Counter-terrorism remains focused on intelligence, policing and community efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on our soil and to prevent the radicalisation of Australian residents. We have also improved legal protections and accountability in our legislative framework, and ensured that Australia’s international cooperative efforts are consistent with international human rights and humanitarian law. These we see as important both to ensure the legitimacy of our policy efforts and to reduce radicalisation internationally.

integrated policy machinery Having set out a comprehensive strategy for Australian security policy that links defence, homeland security, and international security policy across multiple portfolios, Australia must integrate its response, planning and 102

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analytical capabilities into a working whole (see Camilleri 2011:18). Our aim is threefold: to be able to rapidly respond to the complexity and integration of threats and crises, to develop holistic preventive strategies that will undergird our future security, and to guard against strategic shock. This work has been underway for some time, and has been given added momentum by the development and publication of this strategy. Our core approach includes: 1 Institutionalising cooperation and information-sharing across government, and with key civil institutions. To further institutionalise this whole-ofgovernment process we will create:

• a National Security Council, which will be chaired by the National Security Adviser and incorporate the membership of the government’s National Security Committee of Cabinet, all relevant agency, intelligence and department heads, and three parliamentary representatives from nongovernment parties. It will be an advisory committee to the Prime Minister and Cabinet on matters of security. It refines the integrated approach developed through the earlier appointment of the National Security Adviser, the creation of the Office of National Security within PM&C, and the Secretaries Committee on National Security.

• Standing cross-agency committees on key issue areas, such as homeland security, terrorism, proliferation, North East Asia, the South Pacific, and more. Membership will be made up of key personnel responsible for the issue area as nominated by their agency. Issue plans will be drawn up with rosters of expert personnel, contingency plans and strategies that can be mobilised quickly in a crisis. 2 New agencies, nested within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to oversee integrated strategies on core issue areas and enhance our capacity to avoid strategic shock. These agencies do not have command or operational responsibilities, and are not departments. Rather they have the role of enhancing information-sharing, planning and coordination across issue areas.

• The Future Scenarios Agency. This small but significant body will include some of the best analysts and staff from Defence, the intelligence community, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Treasury, AusAID, and elsewhere. It will be tasked to consider a range of potential scenarios from relatively short timelines (twelve months) to decades. Department representatives—working where necessary through the cross-agency committees and the NSC—will then coordinate and advise 103

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on likely response requirements and mitigation strategies so they can be incorporated into Australian diplomacy and strategic planning. An emphasis here will be on building general resilience amongst vulnerable communities, infrastructure and organisations, on anticipating future threats and contingencies, and on making structural change to prevent or mitigate adverse consequences.

• Homeland Security Agency. This agency will be a coordinating body responsible for integrating intelligence, prevention, resilience and response strategies in the areas of emergency management, disaster prevention and response, pandemics, and terrorism. It will incorporate staff from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Attorneys-General, Health, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and others, and will also work closely with the Council of Australian Governments, state and local governments, and emergency services in developing holistic prevention and response strategies that promote community and infrastructure resilience and save lives. The Customs and Border Protection Service has been renamed the Australian Customs Service, but its integrated machinery for coordinating the range of state and federal agencies interested in cross-border criminal activity and managing biological threats will be retained. An inquiry is underway into the benefits of establishing a national coastguard that might integrate fisheries, drugs, and people smuggling enforcement, but the jurisdictional and operational issues raise considerable complexities that the government will examine carefully. These small but significant changes are aimed not at creating new fiefdoms, but at ensuring ongoing and improved information-sharing and coordination among existing departments and organisations that make policy, gather intelligence, and carry out practical operations. To succeed, a dynamic, responsive and creative whole-of-government approach will require a new culture of cooperation and joint problem-solving as a core mode of operation.

conclusion Australia must now seek its security in a global context, and appreciate that its security is dependent on the security of other regions and peoples. Human security, understood as both freedom from violence and fear, and freedom to pursue improved life chances within a structural framework of stability and sustainability, is a core principle for success in such an interconnected system. Australia must understand its security across a range of threat agendas and 104

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levels, and promote forward-looking and holistic strategies to address the complexity of their sources and processes. It must cooperate internationally to promote a common interest in greater levels of human security and dignity around the world. This strategy outlines today’s plans for meeting such challenges in an inherently dynamic environment. Our commitment, along with our global partners, is to ensure as much as possible that future change leads to a progressively more peaceful, stable and decent world for its inhabitants.

referenCes Acharya. A 2001 Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order, Routledge, London. Beck, U 2010 Cosmopolitan Vision, Polity, Oxford. Bergin, A 2009 ‘A Safer Australia: Meeting the Challenges of Homeland Security’, ASPI Policy Analysis 36(30 January 2009), Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra. Booth, K 1991 ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies 17(4):313–326. Booth, K. and NJ Wheeler 2007 The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, Palgrave, London and New York. Burke, A 2001 ‘Caught Between National and Human Security: Knowledge and Power in Post-crisis Asia’, Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change 13(3):215–39. Burke, A 2006 ‘Critical Approaches to Security and Strategy’ in Robert Ayson and Desmond Ball eds Strategy and Security in the Asia-Pacific, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW. Burke, A and M McDonald 2007 ‘Introduction: Asia-Pacific Security Legacies and Futures’ in Burke and McDonald eds. Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Burke, A 2008 Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne and Cambridge. Camilleri, JA 2011 ‘Human Security and National Security: The Australian Context’, paper presented to the workshop on The Role of Human Security in Shaping Australian Foreign Policy, La Trobe University, 18 February 2011. Commission on Human Security 2003 Human Security Now CHS, New York. Department of Defence 2000 Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force, Department of Defence, Canberra. Dibb, P 1986 Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities: Report to the Minister for Defence, AGPS, Canberra. 105

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DOD 2009 Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Dupont, A 2001 East Asia Imperilled: Transnational Challenges to Security, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dupont, A and G Pearman 2006 Heating Up the Planet: Climate Change and Security, Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney. Commission on Human Security 2003 Human Security Now, United Nations, New York. IISS 2007 ‘Climate Change: Security Implications and Regional Impacts’, Strategic Survey 2007, IISS and Routledge, London. IPCC 2007 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva. Krepinevich, A 2009 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century, Bantam, New York. Linklater, A 2002 ‘Cosmopolitan Political Communities in International Relations’, International Relations 16(1):135–150. O’Neil, A 2011 ‘Conceptualising Future Threats to Australia’s Security’, Australian Journal of Political Science 46(1):19–34. Parker, R 2010 ‘Security Challenges Beyond 2010: Building Resilience’, The Journal of Defence and Security 1(2):145–153. Rudd, K 2008 ‘First National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament’, http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5424 (accessed 15 September 2011). Smith, R 2008 ‘Summary and Conclusions—Report of the Review of Homeland and Border Security’, http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/ node/5424 (accessed 15 September 2011). United Nations 2004 A More Secure World: Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, UNGA A/59/565, United Nations, New York. United Nations 2005 World Summit Outcome, A/60/L.1. 20 September 2005. UK Cabinet Office 2008 The National Security Strategy for the United Kingdom: Security in an interdependent world, presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister, by command of Her Majesty, March 2008. Ungerer, C 2011 ‘The Case for an Australian National Security Strategy’, ASPI Policy Analysis 84 (28 July 2011), Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra.

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6 human seCurity and the politiCs of seCurity matt mcdonald

Human security has for a long time been caught between a rock and a hard place. In the academic world, the attempts that human security proponents have made to reorient security have been heavily criticised by both traditional and critical security theorists. For the former, human security constitutes an unwieldy and unwarranted challenge to the established discipline of security studies, concerned as it is with ‘the study of the threat and use of force’ (Walt 1991: 212). For the latter, human security advocates’ goal of engaging with the practices of policy-makers fundamentally compromises its critique of the pathologies of state security. In this sense, Ken Booth (2007:326) has argued that ‘human security’ risks endorsing state security practice as ‘business-as-usual, with an admixture of progressive rhetoric’. Other critical scholars in the post-structural tradition perceive human security as an unreconstructed liberal project imposing Western values (masquerading as universal ones) in the name of liberating the poor and marginalised subjects of the Third World (e.g. Duffield 2007; Chandler and Hynek 2011). The determination of human security advocates to speak to policymakers and to reorient state political practices has also seen them fall foul of critics who view the human security project as failing to provide a policy framework that might be readily implemented by states. In a wideranging critique of the human security concept, Roland Paris (2001:87) argued that ‘it remains unclear whether the 107

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concept of human security can serve as a practical guide for academic research or governmental policymaking’. Advocates of human security have forged ahead in the space between these various positions, despite the apparent damage to their social capital in both the academic and policy worlds. Certainly, their critique of the national security paradigm—with its exclusion of structural factors that threaten a significant proportion of the world’s population (i.e. poverty) and its continued privileging of the state (even at the expense of people)—is no less compelling now than when these ideas found their way into the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report of 1994. And the willingness of human security advocates to engage directly with the practices and institutions of states—for better or worse clearly the most powerful actors in the international system— opens up the possibility of reforming state behaviour and promoting human security concerns through the considerable means of state practice. This does not mean, however, that the challenges associated with the theoretical development and practical institutionalisation of human security have been successfully resolved. Considerable questions remain about how human security might be institutionalised in state security practice. There are significant challenges here, not least because the mature Western liberal democratic states expected to champion or adopt the concept (Canada, Norway, Japan and possibly Australia) have bureaucratic divisions that speak against the simple incorporation of human security. In Canada’s experiment with the concept under Lloyd Axworthy, for example, human security was understood exclusively in terms of ‘freedom from fear’, and was quarantined within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. This allowed the continuation of a series of practices contributing to global human insecurity more broadly defined (contribution to environmental change, for example), practices outside the purview of the Canadian government’s human security agenda. There is no easy answer to the challenge of effectively incorporating a holistic concept into a discrete set of state practices and institutions. Indeed Joseph Camilleri’s attempt to make a case for the incorporation of the human security agenda within Australian political institutions constitutes one of the very few—and most thoughtful—interventions on this difficult question. Rather than explore this issue in more detail, however, this chapter takes a 108

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different tack. While questions regarding the institutionalisation of human security are critical, so too are questions regarding the possibilities for developing broader societal support for the human security agenda and the practices associated with it. And while we should recognise the limits of traditional approaches to security and the need to reorient practices away from the militarised protection or advancement of a narrow conception of the nation-state, we should also recognise that the invocation of security and threat can have potentially dangerous or illiberal political effects. These concerns about the existence of societal support for security and the potentially dangerous implications of ‘security-speak’ are the focus of this chapter. I suggest that engaging with these questions, with the politics of security, is important for those interested in the possibility of human security genuinely informing or framing Australian security policy and practice. The first part of my discussion outlines the broad goals of the human security project. It identifies unifying themes across the relevant literature while noting the failure of its advocates to sufficiently engage with the socially constructed and political nature of security. The sections that follow engage with these points directly. In particular, the second section points to the need to acknowledge security as a site of negotiation and contestation within particular political communities over the scope of—and threats to—security, and the means through which it might be realised or advanced. This suggests the need to ensure that human security discourse resonates with domestic constituents. The third section points to the need to acknowledge the performative effects of security-speak and the dangers associated with it. While human security advocates see the possibility of reorienting the concept of security away from the territorial preservation of the nation-state, insufficient attention is given to the possibility that the language and logic of security may in some contexts be illiberal, statist and militaristic. The final section draws these points together with a focus on Australia. Specifically, I examine the extent to which a progressive notion of human security sensitive to the dangers of securitisation might come to enjoy social and political support in the Australian context. the human seCurity proJeCt Discussing the central themes of a human security project is not a straightforward exercise. Any discussion of a ‘project’ would seem 109

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to belie extensive disagreement about the scope and definition of human security, and whether it should be employed as a broad mobilising strategy or in the direct service of reforming state practice. These distinctions have been well documented in existing analyses of human security (e.g. McDonald 2002; Hampson 2008). Rather than discussing the central differences within or strands of human security scholarship, for the purposes of this chapter it is more useful to identify shared commitments of human security advocates. The first of these shared commitments is a belief in the profoundly negative implications of a dominant discourse of security that privileges the territorial preservation of the nation-state from (largely) external threat. Such a discourse—understood here as a framework of meaning that constitutes the ways in which security and threats to it are conceptualised and approached—has achieved a position of dominance within both the academic discipline of security studies and the practices of world politics. This discourse is premised upon the idea of the strong state as the best provider for individual welfare in an anarchic international system. For human security advocates, however, the focus on states and their physical security has ultimately legitimated a militarised approach to world politics that conceives of those outside the borders of the state as a (potential) threat. Human security proponents view such an approach to security as perverse: it fails to address the sources of insecurity for most people in the world (access to food, shelter, health services); it enables threats to the lives of individuals (through war and displacement); and it is increasingly anathema in a globalised world in which transnational problems point to a shared (rather than nationally exclusive) security agenda. The second shared commitment follows directly from the first. If human security advocates have profound concerns with the negative implications of traditional security discourses that privilege the state as the referent object of security, they also argue directly for an approach to security that privileges the welfare and concerns of people. Even those human security advocates who address themselves directly to the policy practitioners of states argue that while the state may retain an important role as a means or agent of security, the referent object of security must be people (see McSweeney 1999). This relatively straightforward concern with people rather than states raises other complex issues about how we can operationalise a concern with seven billion different security agendas, or account for group identities without descending into the same pathologies of exclusion that apply to traditional security discourses. Again, 110

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such concerns are not easily resolved. For human security advocates, however, the fact that operationalising human security is difficult to do hardly constitutes a sophisticated or convincing moral defence for retaining the state as the referent object of security. Finally, human security proponents share a commitment to the idea that there are benefits associated with reforming security to take account of the concerns and welfare of people. Such a concern enables the focus of security to shift to those challenges that most undermine individual welfare (whether poverty, environmental change, disease, political oppression or indeed war). While superficially an obvious follow-on from the above points, it is this concern with the possibility of progressively reformulating security that separates the human security project from much critical scholarship on security. While a number of critical security scholars would share a profound concern with the assumptions and implications of a traditional security discourse, it does not follow that these theorists would necessarily embrace the idea of reformulating security, or at least not in the ways human security advocates would suggest. First, for some critical approaches, the project of outlining a new universal analytic or discourse of security—as ‘freedom from fear and freedom from want’ (UNDP 1995) or the protection of the ‘vital core of all human freedoms and human fulfillment’ (Commission on Human Security 2003:2)—to replace the existing dominant security discourse fails to come to terms with the fact that security is understood in different ways by different communities at different times. For these critics, the failure of human security advocates to locate security within particular political and social contexts—and processes of negotiation and contestation within those contexts— makes the universal project of human security potentially inconsistent with lived experience and insufficiently embedded within resonant conceptions of a community’s history, culture and identity. Endorsing a notion of progress through human security, then, requires more sustained engagement with how particular political communities understand the values in need of being preserved as well as the appropriate means of their preservation (McDonald 2002). Second, a range of critical theorists would object to the notion that security can be effectively reformed to enable progressive practices to flow from the linkage of security and human rights, peacebuilding or environmental preservation, for example. Human security advocates suggest that these hitherto marginalised issues would benefit substantially if defined as security issues and (subsequently) afforded 111

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the same political priority and resources as military considerations receive in the ‘high politics’ realm of security. Some critical theorists of security, however, would point out by contrast that the effects of ‘securitisation’ are not universally benign. In particular, theorists of securitisation argue that there are profound dangers associated with defining an issue as a security issue because of a relatively sedimented meaning of security attached to defence and the state, and a powerful logic of security associated with exceptionalism. For Ole Wæver (1995), the language and logic of security can have illiberal political effects, taking issues outside the normal context of political discussion and deliberation and into the realm of ‘panic politics’ (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde 1998:34). Such theorists suggest that rather than reform security, therefore, those interested in more progressive practices in world politics may need to escape the language and logic of it altogether. These objections are the focus of the following two sections. The first deals with security as a site of negotiation and contestation, the latter with the performative effects and logics of security-speak. If we are to come to terms with the possibilities for developing and institutionalising human security in the Australian political context, these issues need to be confronted and addressed by advocates of human security. seCurity, negotiation and Contestation While human security advocates make a strong normative case for the reorientation of security away from the territorial preservation of the nation-state, their project is ultimately one that suggests the possibility of a universal security discourse that can be applied to a range of different contexts. In more sophisticated variants there is certainly recognition of the need to come to terms with the role of people in the process of security definition and practice. The Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project, for example, has defined human security as something that is achieved when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate, or adapt to threats to their human, environmental, and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options (Barnett, Matthew and O’Brien 2009:18). 112

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This brings us some way towards recognising security as a social construction: as a framework of meaning brought into being through social interaction, with the meaning of security changing for particular political communities in particular places at particular times. Yet even here (human) security is a material condition, and the capacity to participate in the process through which security is given political expression occurs at the level of responses to this material insecurity. A focus on the recovery of agency potentially redresses concerns that human security is simply something to be imposed on ‘the vulnerable’ by outsiders (Duffield 2007), but it fails to come to terms with the ways in which security itself—and threats to it—are socially and intersubjectively brought into being in particular social and historical circumstances. While some might suggest that this constructivist move is not a concern of human security research, I suggest that it should be. Ultimately, if we cannot reconcile the normative move to human security with the social and political contexts in which it is to be conceived and practised, then the human security project is ultimately doomed before it begins. What is needed, I would argue, is an understanding of the extent to which such a conception of security might come to resonate with particular political communities and therefore find what we might call social purchase. This in turn requires some attention to dynamics of negotiation and contestation that ultimately characterise the process through which security— and threats to it—are given meaning in particular contexts. So what does it mean to define security as a social construction and to conceive of it as a site of negotiation and contestation? Why should it matter for the human security project? Security is a social construction in the sense that security discourses are frameworks of meaning that are ultimately brought into being through social interaction, with dominant understandings of security changing for different political communities in different places at different times. This does not mean that security is devoid of universal analytical content. We can recognise, for example, that security can be defined as ‘the preservation of a group’s core values’ or as ‘freedom from harm’. Yet in moving beyond these broad commitments to provide more details about the composition of the group, the definition of their core values and the ways in which these values might be challenged, we move away from a conception of security that can be universalised and towards the endorsement of a particular security discourse. We might imagine responses to these questions 113

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identifying the sovereignty of the state as in need of protection from military invasion in a manner consistent with traditional realist approaches to security, or we might imagine responses that focus on the access to basic needs for vulnerable populations throughout the world in a manner consistent with the human security discourse. Different understandings or discourses of security might therefore encourage security approaches ranging from militarised vigilance to a commitment to humanitarianism. Similarly, they might encourage an expansive definition of political community or a definition of community in narrow spatial, ethnic or religious terms. And crucially, these different discourses of security—or more accurately the actors promoting them—are ultimately in competition to advance a compelling vision of what threatens us, of what ‘our’ values are that need to be secured and of how we might protect or advance them. This competition within political communities takes place in a social realm between actors attempting to articulate a compelling vision of security that will find broader social support. This requires attention to the strategic capacity of actors to ‘sell’ a vision of security that is consistent with a community’s conception of its values and role in the world. And while this contest takes place in a social context, it is also one characterised by wideranging differences in the capacity of actors to articulate their visions and to have their voices heard. In these senses, security can be understood as a site of negotiation and contestation. Different actors, with varying degrees of power, compete to define security on behalf of a particular political community, in the process hoping to mobilise the resources of that community to advance their preferred political ends. The lead-up to Australian participation in the Iraq war of 2003 provides a useful illustration of this process in action. In making a case for military intervention, the Howard government attempted to link such intervention, and the security discourse of which it was a part, to resonant narratives of national identity. These narratives included Australians’ willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies (particularly the United States) on the battlefield, Australia as a nation forged through war and willing to fight to defend progressive values, and Australia (and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) as participants in the broader ‘war on terror’. The government also used the resources at its disposal to limit access to intelligence, constrain debate about the commitment to conflict in parliament and coerce opponents in various ways (evident in the claim that opponents either supported intervention or the regime of Saddam Hussein, for example). A range of actors challenged this 114

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position, but failed to fundamentally undermine the legitimacy of the government or its decision to go to war. In large part, this was due to the efficacy of the Howard government’s rhetorical strategies and its capacity to wield its material and institutional power in effective ways (see McDonald and Merefield 2010). This brief example of the processes through which security is contested and negotiated reminds us that we need to come to terms with the specific contexts in which security and the practices associated with it are constructed and enabled. But does recognition of security as a social construction—or a site of negotiation and contestation—ultimately matter for the human security project and its advocates? Proponents of human security have tended to ignore questions regarding the construction of security, seeing their role as articulating a progressive vision of security rather than examining the (sociological) processes through which security is given meaning in different settings. In a sense, their role could be conceived as protagonists in the competition over the way communities understand and practice security. Ultimately, I would argue that if human security is to be successfully institutionalised in the Australian context, more attention needs to be given to the political challenges associated with embedding such a security discourse in the Australian social and cultural context. This is not simply a question of how a Department of Human Security might be established, or how a concern with human security might map on to existing institutional arrangements within the Australian foreign policy and defence establishment. Rather, key questions here concern the extent to which the values and ethical commitments underpinning the human security discourse find social purchase in the Australian context; whether there are narratives of Australian history, culture and identity to which such a discourse might be effectively linked; whether there are key constituents who might be mobilised in support of this agenda; and whether there are alternative security discourses that need to be challenged and marginalised. Human security proponents have generally shied away from these concerns at the heart of the politics of security, preferring instead to speak ‘truth to power’ regarding the pressing normative claims associated with shifting security concerns from states to people. Yet to be effective, I would argue that their claims in this ‘war of position’ over security must resonate with the Australian community. Indeed the failure of the Rudd government’s experiment 115

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with internationalism in its foreign policy—on questions of asylum and climate change in particular—suggest that progressive claims and commitments enjoying immediate support might still be built on shaky ground. The failure of the Rudd government to genuinely embed policy shifts in these areas within a compelling narrative of Australian identity rendered it vulnerable to political challenge, and showed progressive policy gains and progressive shifts in public attitudes to be partial and, in some cases, illusory. The lesson for proponents of human security in the Australian context is clear. If human security is to enjoy genuine and sustained social support, its proponents need to take account of the socially constructed nature of security and the role of security as a site of negotiation and contestation. Such a recognition should be the basis on which proponents are able to make and sustain an effective case for genuine policy change. seCuritisation and the logiC of seCurity If security should be understood as socially constructed, it should also be understood as political. In simple terms, security is not a value-neutral analytical term, but is a ‘principle of formation that does things’ (Dillon 1996). At a basic level, security is political—it ‘does things’—in two key senses. First, the promise of providing security is central to the raison d’être of the key institutions of global politics, most obviously states. The capacity to provide for the protection of individuals in an anarchic (international) environment has been central to the way political communities and their leaders have defined their legitimacy for centuries. This is an image conjured by Hobbes’ conception of the Leviathan, but even in a significantly changed and rapidly changing world, it is one regularly reaffirmed by contemporary political leaders. The first line of then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 National Security Statement (Rudd 2008), for example, noted that ‘the first priority of government is the nation’s security’. Security is thus political in the sense that the promise of providing security underpins the existence and continued centrality of the key institutions of global politics. The second key political function of security follows from the above. If security is understood as the ‘first priority of government’, then issues defined as security issues attain a level of primacy and priority above those of other political concerns. In this sense, security can be seen as ‘high politics’, suggesting prioritisation and funding 116

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that other political considerations—less central to the existence and continued operation of states—cannot claim. Arguably such a recognition of the politics of security encouraged advocates of action on environmental change to position such change as a security threat, for example. For them, doing so would ensure these issues attained the primacy and funding they deserved. It is striking here that several of the most prominent early calls in international relations literature to link security with environmental change were from analysts with links to environmental organisations and thinktanks such as the World Watch Institute and the World Resources Institute (e.g. Brown 1977; Matthews 1989; Renner 1996). Proponents of human security seem only too aware of the mobilising power of security and security-speak. Indeed the then radical suggestion by the UNDP that development be viewed as a security issue of the first order can be interpreted as an attempt to mobilise funding and political priority in response to crippling poverty in the Third World. At a time when political leaders seemed happy to spend far more on preparedness for war than aid or poverty reduction programs, for example, such a reorientation of security was seen as a mobilising strategy for action on poverty and underdevelopment. Furthermore, human security proponents seem more aware of the dangers of simply tacking ‘security’ on to a pressing concern in order to mobilise a political response to it than advocates of the environment–security link. Indeed what was striking about early attempts to position environmental change as a security issue, and in the process to ‘redefine’ security, was the lack of engagement with the meaning of security itself, or with the core question of ‘security for whom?’ This allowed defence establishments to colonise new political areas or find new threats to justify their budgets, while potentially encouraging perverse responses to manifestations of environmental change. In a Pentagon report on abrupt climate change scenarios as a threat to security, for example, Schwartz and Randall (2003) argued that some more self-sufficient states could consider erecting more effective border protection to prevent environmental refugees from reaching their shores. This is certainly a feasible response to the (national) security implications of climate change, but is hardly consistent with redressing the problem. Nor, crucially, is it consistent with the intentions of those who sought to define the environment as a security issue. But does a focus on the referent object of security (rather than on just the scope of threats) do enough to overcome the dangers 117

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associated with the politics of security? Here a range of authors have suggested that while positioning issues as security issues is central to the legitimacy of core actors, and is potentially mobilising, it can also entail a problematic logic of militarism, exclusion and exceptionalism. This was particularly advanced by theorists of ‘securitisation’, principally Ole Wæver. For Wæver (1995), at the heart of the concept of security was something to do with defence and the state, while the logic of security entailed secrecy, urgency and a lack of genuine political discussion. In a similar vein, Mark Neocleous (2008:5) suggests that security has become the master narrative through which the state shapes our lives and imaginations . . . producing and organizing subjects in a way that is always already predisposed towards the exercise of violence in defence of the established order.

For Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde (1998), the tendency for moves towards ‘securitisation’ (the positioning of issues as security threats) to lead to illiberal processes and practices ultimately means that the realm of security can be understood as one of ‘panic politics’. This exceptionalism entails the suspension of ‘normal’ political debate and the usual rules of the liberal political arena more broadly. This relatively dark picture of security and its associated logic is central to Wæver’s (1995) claim that normative progress can best be achieved not through redefining security, but through escaping it altogether. The Howard government’s depiction of asylum seekers arriving by boat as a ‘security’ threat, for example, seemed to endorse these normative concerns. From 2001, asylum seekers were presented as threats to the sovereignty of Australia and values of Australians; these representations seemed to enable the suspension of normal rules of the game—the deployment of military personnel and rejection of international legal provisions, for example—and they certainly had negative implications for asylum seekers themselves. Human security proponents are right not to allow such concerns to cause them to give up on security as a political category, particularly if it does have the mobilising capacity the above accounts suggest. And the example of Australia’s approach to asylum illuminates the dangers of security logics, but more directly illustrates the dangers of a particular conception or discourse of security: one linked to a narrow definition of political community and tied to the territorial preservation of the nation-state. 118

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But human security proponents also need to give more attention to the dangers associated with the politics of security, not simply the opportunities for mobilisation the language of security seems to provide. There is a danger here that the language of human security will be embraced by traditional agents of security looking to expand their jurisdiction or better compete for government funding. Related to this, there is also a danger that the discourse of human security will be coopted for exclusionary or militaristic practices, for example. Arguably, the Bush administration’s language of liberation in making a case for intervention in both Afghanistan and Iraq drew on liberal notions of humanitarian intervention and a concern with the rights and needs of the most vulnerable, with uncomfortable parallels to the human security discourse (see Bain 2001; Neufeld 2004). The answer to these dilemmas is not to abandon this language or the human security project altogether. Rather, the answer lies in a commitment to constantly consider and reflect upon the limits of universal claims made and the practices to which they are attached; a recognition of the possibilities for, and limits to, universalism in a world of communities and varied identities; and awareness that best laid plans for the promotion of human security internationally can come unstuck in the realities of global politics, especially in the midst of conflict. To this end, there should be no single voice articulating how human security is to be interpreted and applied. Rather, the commitment to human security should encourage an expanded realm of decision-making and deliberation to consider the imperatives of human security commitments and the implications of actions carried out in its name. The meaning and logics of security need not inevitably be linked to strategy, defence, the state, exceptionalism and a suspension of the normal (liberal) rules of the game. But human security proponents will need to ensure that theirs is a project sufficiently aware of existing (and sedimented) security logics and practices, and that is committed to processes and institutional frameworks that subvert and reorient these dominant logics and discourses. australia, the politiCs of seCurity and the human seCurity proJeCt What does the above discussion of the politics of security actually mean for the question of whether and how Australia might embrace the human security project? Ultimately, it suggests simultaneously—and 119

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perhaps paradoxically—a plan of attack and a note of caution for proponents of human security. In the first instance, recognition of security as a site of negotiation and contestation suggests that proponents of human security need to engage in a ‘war of position’ to challenge and displace dominant security discourses and the practices to which they are tied. Even within contemporary practices, institutions and security logics, there are nascent possibilities for the shift away from national security to human security as a guiding set of principles. But human security advocates need to do more to point to the dangers, pathologies and increasing irrelevance of narrow, state-based conceptions of security in a globalised world. The example of the securitised approach to asylum seekers arriving by boat is a case in point. Proponents of human security could do more to point to the ways in which a dominant discourse of border security has encouraged practices of interception and detention with significant economic cost to Australians; with implications for Australia’s international reputation; and in a manner that is ultimately inconsistent with our own values and the historical circumstances of settlement of the Australian state. It also has implications for Australian society itself, with increasing marginalisation of ethnic minority groups a logical extension of the assault on ‘difference’ characteristic of Australia’s approach to asylum seekers that masquerades as a concern with Australia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Aside from suggesting the need to fundamentally challenge existing (dominant) security discourses, recognition of security as a site of negotiation and contestation also encourages us to consider how human security might be enabled. There are certainly strong rational or material grounds for making this case. Human security might be presented as the best way a middle power state can exercise influence and actively contribute to the normative fabric of an international society; as a natural response to the increasingly transnational nature of threats and interconnectedness of the international system; and as building on existing commitment to multilateralism in Australian foreign policy. This case is well made in other contributions to this volume: in Joseph Camilleri’s eloquent articulation of the need to recognise the globalisation of threats and their management; and in Tony Burke’s more detailed analysis of the specific strategic realities that confront Australia and necessitate a policy sea change. But this case is insufficient. As the failure of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s internationalist agenda regarding asylum and climate 120

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change should make clear, policy shifts cannot simply be responsive to (transitory) public concerns, or operate within frameworks of meaning inherited from preceding governments. To be sustainable and sustained, genuine policy shift requires social support through being embedded in key narratives of national history, culture and identity. If security is understood as the preservation or advancement of a group’s core values, then what is needed is a concerted project to demonstrate the consistency of human security with core narratives of who Australians are and what they value. Here, proponents could emphasise the resonant narratives of egalitarianism as compelling Australians to commit themselves to a global equality of opportunity and a ‘fair go’ for the less fortunate. The history of Australian settlement and the benefits of multiculturalism could be emphasised to better promote an expansive rather than limited vision of the boundaries of Australian nation and the scope of Australian identity. In foreign policy terms, narratives of good international citizenship could be employed to emphasise Australia’s role as a committed internationalist state and an honest broker in world affairs. And the ANZAC tradition, centred around the willingness of Australians to exercise bravery in fighting for just causes (see McDonald 2010), might be invoked to underscore and sell the importance of the use of force for progressive political ends, from humanitarian intervention to peacekeeping, for example. Within the Australian context there are signs that an effectively communicated shift towards human security might find broader community support. In their analysis of 2007 election survey data, for example, Pietsch and McAllister (2010) note that Australian attitudes were shifting towards prioritising ‘post-materialist’ concerns with environmental and health security over physical or economic security. Indeed the 2007 election seemed to raise the possibility that a significant re-orientation of foreign and security policy was possible. As noted, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s failure to articulate a vision for such change and link it to core Australian values showed genuine policy shifts and incursions into public attitudes to be partial and in some cases illusory. This was of course evidenced in the collapse of support for strong action on climate change from 2007–2011. The Lowy survey on public opinion and foreign policy indicated that Australians identifying action on climate change as a very important dimension of Australian foreign policy dropped from 75 per cent to under 50 per cent in this period (Hanson 2011). And while the 2007 election saw every major political party 121

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committing to a price on carbon emissions, the eventual passage of a carbon tax in 2011 was seen as one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in recent Australian political history. Of course this is cause for concern for those interested in progressive policy oriented towards the most vulnerable, whether those in the developing world, future generations or other living beings. This example does suggest two important sources of optimism for proponents of a shift towards human security in the Australian context, however. First, support for such an agenda in 2007 illustrates that in some circumstances Australians are indeed receptive to the principles underpinning a human security discourse. This is important for proponents to recall, particularly when the forces lined up in opposition to progressive policy shifts might seem insurmountable. Second, and related to this, it illustrates that public support and attitudes are not intractable limits on policy, but rather can be shifted when faced with effective forms of communicative strategy. The ‘war of position’ on climate change was badly lost by the Rudd government, but there are lessons from the ways in which their political opponents (in the legislature and in the media, for example) have fought this war and communicated their message. And while in some areas we have seen divisive debate over practices that might be seen as part of a human security agenda (climate change as well as asylum policy), we have also seen bipartisan support developing around an unprecedented increase in Australia’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget. Proponents of human security need to reflect on these examples in considering the ways in which they might pursue and embed a progressive vision of security in the Australian social and political context. Perhaps most importantly, we can find hope for the development of societal support for a shift to a human security discourse in the Australian context in the practices of Australians themselves. In 2011 alone, Australians illustrated their willingness to contribute generously and with genuine empathy to alleviate the suffering of others in times of need, from the New Zealand earthquake to the Japanese tsunami and the famine in the Horn of Africa. Closer to home, the Queensland floods of early 2011 were met with everyday, mundane celebrations of humanity through those who gave their time, money and energy to help out neighbours and strangers alike. Consistently, flood victims noted that the support given went beyond what they could reasonably expect to receive; while those volunteering noted consistently that their assistance to others was 122

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an obligation borne out of being a witness to suffering and having the capacity to help redress it. Communitarian conceptions of ethics would suggest that such practices arise precisely within rather than beyond communities such as nation-states. Yet nothing in the way that assistance was given, received, or (crucially) defined by volunteers suggested that it was limited to members of particular ethnic, religious or national communities. This example thus suggests that there are possibilities for expanding conceptions of political community in Australia in a manner consistent with a human security discourse, and in a manner consistent with the best practices and versions of ourselves. Human security is clearly not a silver bullet for redressing the unprecedented global threats we face or for re-orienting Australian values towards an inclusive, expansive or ‘other regarding’ conception of political community. It has possibilities but it also has limits and dangers. The example noted above of the potentially enabling benefits of linking a tradition of fighting the ‘good war’ to humanitarian and peace operations is also, however, an example of the dangers of endorsing human security. Proponents need to be reflexive in their commitment to human security and avoid endorsing principles that can be used and abused in the services of traditional state security practice. Further, a concern with the rights and needs of the most vulnerable should encourage a commitment to dialogue and deliberation with outsiders, rather than proselytising to them or judging the practices of states from a position of presumed moral superiority. In part, this notion of ‘human security with self-restraint’ could be enabled through expansion of decision-making capacity and deliberation regarding security to a wider range of political parties and actors. But it also requires an ethos of reflection on the central normative claims being made and the practices—particularly violent ones—engaged in the name of human security. Security is certainly too important to be left to military strategists. But it is also too dangerous to be concentrated in an unreflective universal discourse that is insufficiently engaged with the complexities and contingencies of world politics, the problematic global politics of identity and community and the limits of its own claims and practices. ConClusion Ted Newman (2010:82) has argued that ‘human security is normatively attractive, but analytically weak’. This is perhaps inevitable 123

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for an approach that orients towards reconfiguring political practice rather than deepening our understanding of the politics of security and the process of its construction. Yet in failing to address such questions, proponents of human security arguably fail to engage sufficiently with the likelihood of human security being elaborated, finding social purchase and becoming institutionalised. They also risk ignoring the real dangers of perverse security logics that might work to undermine the realisation of their normative goals. In the Australian context, those interested in the promotion and institutionalisation of human security need to recognise the benefits of engagement with the politics of security. Recognising the social construction of security should encourage proponents to consider the manner in which the human security project might be sold politically, particularly through linking the discourse to key narratives of Australian history, culture and identity. And recognising the power and logics of security-speak should encourage proponents to be ever aware of the dangers of providing justifications for illiberal practices in the name of ‘human security’. The need for fundamentally reconsidering what we mean by—and how we practice—security in the Australian context has never been more pressing. The challenge for human security advocates is to craft a sophisticated and socially persuasive case for just such a re-orientation. referenCes Bain, William 2001 ‘The Tyranny of Benevolence: National Security, Human Security and the Practice of Statecraft’, Global Society 15(3):277–294. Barnett, Jon, Richard Matthew and Karen O’Brien 2009 ‘Global Environmental Change and Human Security: An Introduction’. In Matthew, Richard et al. eds Global Environmental Change and Human Security, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Booth, Ken 2007 Theory of World Security, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brown, Lester 1977 Redefining National Security, Worldwatch Paper 14, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap De Wilde 1998 Security: A New Framework for Analysis Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO. Chandler, David and Nik Hynek eds 2011 Critical Perspectives on Human Security, Routledge, London. Commission on Human Security 2003 Human Security Now, Commission on Human Security, Washington, DC. 124

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Dillon, Michael 1996 The Politics of Security, Routledge, London. Duffield, Mark 2007 Development, Security and Unending War, Polity, Cambridge. Hampson, Fen 2008 ‘Human Security’ in Paul Williams ed Security Studies: An Introduction London: Routledge, London. Hanson, Fergus 2011 Australia and the World: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, 2011, Lowy Institute, Sydney. Mathews, Jessica 1989 ‘Redefining Security’, Foreign Affairs 68(2):162–177. McDonald, Matt 2010 ‘Lest We Forget: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention’, International Political Sociology 4(3):287–302. McDonald, Matt 2002 ‘Human Security and the Construction of Security’, Global Society 16(3):277–295. McDonald, Matt and Matt Merefield 2010 ‘How was Howard’s War Possible? Winning the War of Position over Iraq’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 64(2):186–204. McSweeney, Bill 1999 Security, Identity and Interests, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Neocleous, Mark 2008 Critique of Security, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Neufeld, Mark 2004 ‘Pitfalls of Emancipation and Discourses of Security: Reflections on Canada’s “security with a human face”’, International Relations 18(1):109–123. Newman, Edward 2010 ‘Critical Human Security Studies’, Review of International Studies 36(1):77–94. Paris, Roland 2001 ‘Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?’, International Security 26(2):87–102. Pietsch, Juliet and Ian McAllister 2010 ‘Human Security in Australia: Public Interest and Political Consequences’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 64(2):225–44. Renner, Michael 1996 Fighting for Survival: Environmental Decline, Social Conflict and the New Age of Insecurity, WW Norton, New York. Rudd, Kevin 2008 ‘The First National Security Statement to Parliament’, 4 December, http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5424 (accessed 12 March 2010). Schwartz, Peter and Doug Randall 2003 ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for US National Security’, Global Business Network, www.gbn.com/articles/pdfs/Abrupt%20Climate%20 Change%20February%202004.pdf. UNDP 1994 United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report, 1994, UNDP, New York. 125

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Walt, Stephen (1991) ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 35(2):211–239. Wæver, Ole 1995 ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’ in Ronnie D Lipschutz ed On Security Columbia University Press, New York.

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7 australia’s ‘neW engagement’ With afriCa: What role for human seCurity? david mickler

introduCtion Should it want to promote human security globally, Australia or any other state would first need to be engaged globally, particularly with regions in which various forms of human insecurity remain prominent. One such region, Africa, has previously been marginal to the Australian foreign policy agenda, with Canberra’s attention in recent decades focused largely upon achieving greater economic and political enmeshment with Asia while maintaining its traditional national security alliance with the US and its historical ties with Europe. Since winning office in late 2007, the Rudd/Gillard Labor government1 has promoted and pursued a more prominent role for Australia in the multilateral governance of key global security and economic challenges, evidenced by claiming membership of the expanded G20 and by bidding for an elected seat on the UN Security Council for the 2013–2014 term. As one component of the government’s more expansive view of Australian national interests in a globalised world, it is increasingly ‘looking west’ to seek enhanced relationships with the emerging regions—such as Africa—with which Australia shares the Indian Ocean. This chapter delineates the Australian government’s claim to be both pursuing and ‘committed to a new engagement with Africa’ 127

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(Rudd 2011a), a claim which has been articulated by senior ministers since 2008 but has also been given some policy effect. Because there remain acute and complex human security challenges in Africa, the chapter then argues that Australia has an opportunity to mitigate human insecurity on the continent in important ways—in particular, by supporting transparent and accountable national and resources sector governance, by enhancing its official aid programs, by contributing more to multilateral peace operations, and by further assisting vulnerable displaced populations. To do this, Canberra could use ‘human security’ to drive, frame and give substance to its emerging foreign policy towards Africa. Doing so would not only benefit the lives of those in Africa who continue to experience acute human insecurity, including that which is a product of various self-interested forms of external engagement with the continent, but would also simultaneously contribute to advancing Australia’s material and reputational interests. australia’s ‘neW engagement’ With afriCa Despite some important Australian diplomatic involvements, largely via the Commonwealth in South Africa and Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, Africa has not been a priority for Australian foreign policy (see Lyons 2011; Ford 2003). A review of relevant statements and policy initiatives by the Rudd/Gillard government, however, indicates that Canberra has more recently been promoting and pursuing ‘new engagement’ with Africa alongside Australia’s traditional foreign policy objectives. Most visibly, Canberra has increased high-level political exchanges with many African governments and has enhanced Australia’s diplomatic representation on the continent. A new Australian Embassy was opened in January 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, home of Africa’s most important intergovernmental organisation, the African Union (AU). Stephen Smith addressed the AU Executive Council in 2009—a first for an Australian foreign minister, then repeated in 2011 by his successor Kevin Rudd (see Smith 2009b; Rudd 2011b). Australia’s relationship with the AU was formalised in September 2010 when each signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a ‘framework of close cooperation’ between the two parties across a broad range of areas including trade and investment, peace and security, development, agriculture and food security, human rights, democracy, governance, and climate change. Such cooperation was ‘warmly 128

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welcomed’ by AU Chairperson Jean Ping (Joint Press Statement 2010). By 2011, Canberra had established formal diplomatic relations with all fifty-four African countries (including South Sudan), up from forty-one when the Rudd government entered office in 2007. Despite this, however, Australia still has a limited number of actual diplomatic posts (eight Embassies/High Commissions) on the continent, which notably is fewer than Australia has had previously in Africa and also fewer than Australia’s major trading partners now operate there (CoA 2011a:21–23). Additional posts in Africa would further facilitate Australian engagement. Nevertheless, specific additional regional diplomatic appointments have included Bob McMullan as Special Envoy to Africa and Bill Fisher as Special Envoy to La Francophonie and the Francophone States of Africa. An increasing number of high-level exchanges and visits between government and parliamentary delegations from both Australia and African states have also taken place, and Canberra has been represented more prominently at events such as Africa Day, International Forum on Africa, and the natural resources–themed Mining Indaba and Africa Down Under conferences (see Smith 2008a; 2009a; 2009c; 2009d, 2010b; 2010c; Rudd 2011c). Furthermore, as part of its enhanced interest in Africa, in October 2009 the government referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (JFADT) the Inquiry into Australia’s Relationship with the Countries of Africa. In June 2011, the committee tabled its report and seventeen recommendations to guide the further development of the Australia–Africa relationship (see CoA 2011a), and the government is expected to formally respond in 2012. It is clear, then, that Canberra has invested additional political and diplomatic resources to enhance its individual relationships with African governments, and its collective relationship through the AU. But what is the government’s rationale for its increased attention towards a region which has previously been marginal to Australia’s foreign policy agenda? Three main rationales can be discerned. The first is a product of Labor’s stated desire that Australia play a more prominent and proactive role in broader global politics, both inside multilateral organisations as well as by increasing its engagement with key emerging regions. For example, Smith outlined how Australia was ‘a country with global interests, positive values and virtues, and a deep interest in the wellbeing of others’ and hence that it should ‘make the most of these characteristics’ through a 129

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more globally-oriented foreign policy (Smith 2008a). This included ‘working with major powers, globally, regionally, bilaterally and, importantly, taking a much greater advantage of international institutions to make a positive contribution to international security and increasing the wealth and prosperity of nations’ (Smith 2008a). He added that in the twenty-first century, ‘a globalised world demands more than ever a committed and active bilateral, regional and multilateral diplomacy’ and indicated a desire ‘to see Australia speak and act on the world stage as a good international citizen’ and to place it ‘on a new international footing, engaging with the world in a new era’ (Smith 2008c). The foreign minister further suggested that as a ‘good international citizen’: Australia can and should do more in the world. While we are only the 50th or so largest country in terms of population, we are in the top 15 largest economies. In terms of living standards measured by income per capita, we are among the top 20 countries and we are also among the top dozen military or peacekeeping spenders. We are a significant and considerable nation (Smith 2008a).

Taking over from Smith, Rudd similarly proclaimed that ‘the business of Australian foreign policy is to make a difference in shaping the international events that in turn shape our nation’s future. This, in essence, is the difference between a passive and an active foreign policy’ (Rudd 2011e). He suggested that Australia was a ‘middle power with both regional and global interests’, which would be pursued through the use of ‘creative, middle-power diplomacy’ (Rudd 2011e).2 As a component of this expanded view of Australia’s national interests and broader approach to its role in global politics, then, the government has indicated its intention to increasingly ‘look west’ towards the emerging regions with which it shares the Indian Ocean—South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—where Canberra could see ‘many of the challenges and opportunities we face for the future’ (Rudd 2010). Hence, in addition to its traditional US security alliance, and its more recent engagement with Asia to the north, Australia must now ‘equally . . . look west, to the great challenges and opportunities that now present themselves across the Indian Ocean’ (Rudd 2010), a zone containing forty per cent of the world’s population, generating ten per cent of global GDP and with enormous emerging markets. It also encompasses key strategic 130

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sea lanes, particularly for the transportation of oil, alongside the presence of various national security concerns including transnational terrorism, weapons proliferation, and piracy. Rudd concluded that in order to ‘secure its future, Australia must look West as well as East. The profound changes in this region demand that we do so. This will require a new dynamic policy agenda from government to rise to these challenges’ (Rudd 2010). Greater engagement with Africa, therefore, is a key part of this foreign policy orientation. Within these broader global and regional contexts for Australian foreign policy, the second and more specific rationale for ‘new engagement’ with Africa is that Canberra has identified particular economic and political opportunities there. In terms of the former, Canberra is motivated primarily to advance the significant interests of the expanding number of Australian-based private resources companies currently active in Africa—a continent which, according to Rudd, accounts for forty per cent of Australian companies’ overseas mining projects. There are approximately two hundred and thirty active Australian companies and around six hundred and fifty individual projects across forty-two African countries, with a total investment of $24 billion (Rudd 2011f; see also CoA 2011a:146–47). The government sees its role here as one of both promotion and regulation: promoting Australian-based companies in the region and using Australian experience, expertise and official influence to contribute to the better regulation and governance of the emerging resources sectors of African countries in order to mitigate corruption, to provide certainty for Australian companies operating there, and, more generally, to facilitate a more favourable investment climate (see, for example, Rudd 2011f). Indeed, Canberra has recognised the great potential for trade and investment in the current African ‘resources boom’ since, while Africa contains an estimated thirty per cent of global mineral resources, it has so far only attracted five per cent of total global expenditure on resources exploration (Rudd 2011c; Rudd 2011f). Rudd hence indicated that Africa’s ‘economic potential is a big story that spells opportunity for both Australia and Africa . . . Australian companies and business people are investing in Africa because they see potential and opportunity’ (Rudd 2011a). Smith had earlier noted that while Canberra had been slow to engage with Africa, the ‘same criticism cannot be made of the Australian companies in the mineral and petroleum resources industries, who have for many years been active on the continent’ and who have as a result ‘been leading Australia’s 131

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engagement with Africa’ (Smith 2009c). Their strong continuing interest in African resources was ‘testament to the confidence that Australians have in Africa’s future’ (Smith 2009d). The government, for its part, was ‘committed to supporting the efforts’ of Australian companies there (Smith 2009c) and suggested that they ‘have an important impact to make on Australia’s strategy to enhance our engagement with Africa’ (2009d). More fundamentally, ‘supporting [such] commercial investment is core to Australia’s interests in Africa’ (Rudd 2011c). In terms of political interests, there is a recognition that African countries are playing an increasingly influential role in international institutions. In particular, the government sees winning sufficient votes of African states in the United Nations as being crucial to the success of Australia’s bid for an elected seat on the prestigious and powerful UN Security Council during the upcoming 2013–2014 term. Canberra has openly noted this: ‘[o]f course, in Africa, as in all regions of the world, Australia seeks to build support for its candidacy’ (Smith 2010b). The fifty-four votes of African states will be key for any candidate—including Australia, which is directly competing for two available seats with Finland and Luxembourg— to reach the required two-thirds majority of the 193 UN member states’ votes in the October 2012 secret ballot. Material incentives, enhanced bilateral and regional diplomatic relationships, high-level acts of political symbolism and positive national reputation are important means by which candidates might secure the votes of other states. As such, there are significant emerging economic and political interests and opportunities for Australia in Africa, and these have been key drivers of the government’s new engagement with the continent. The third key rationale for greater Australian engagement with Africa stems from the recognition that there remain significant challenges of security, development and governance for many countries and peoples on the continent (see, for example, Parke 2011; Rudd 2011a). Drawing upon a Labor concept of ‘good international citizenship’, proactively addressing these interrelated challenges is a key component of the global and more activist foreign policy that the current government claims to be aspiring to. For example, Labor has committed to increase Australia’s overall Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget to 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) by 2015–2016 (budgeted at 0.35 per cent for 2011–2012), even though this falls short of the agreed Millennium Development 132

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Goals (MDG) target of 0.7 per cent GNI by 2015. This general increase in the Australian aid budget is substantial policy and material evidence of the government’s enhanced engagement with Africa, seen specifically in the trebling of Australian ODA to Africa during the term of the present Labor government to an estimated $291.3 million for 2011–2012. Finally, Canberra has consciously emphasised that its enhanced relationship with Africa should be pursued in ways that achieve mutual benefits for Australia and Africa. For example, Smith (2009b), addressing the AU Executive Council in 2009, suggested that Australia ‘wants to be part of Africa’s future in ways where our expertise and experience can make a unique and positive contribution’. The government has elsewhere argued that the Australia–Africa relationship was a ‘shared endeavour’ across a range of issues and sectors and was ‘one that will deliver benefits for Australia’s future and increased economic development and growth to Africa, but it is not undertaken on that basis alone; because these efforts we make together will also enhance this vitally important relationship between our continents’ (Parke 2011). Could this engagement enhanCe human seCurity in afriCa? Human security is a ‘non-traditional’ approach to security which makes individual human beings, or sub-state groupings of people, rather than states per se, the referent objects for security. In this sense, it seeks to ‘deepen’ security beyond traditional state-centric conceptions, while also ‘broadening’ our understanding and appreciation (and potentially mitigation) of the vast array of threats to security, both military and non-military, that individuals and peoples actually face on a daily basis. The human security approach has in turn become somewhat divided between advocates of, respectively, a ‘narrower’ or ‘broader’ set of threats—the former emphasising political violence towards individuals (or ‘freedom from fear’) and the latter more holistically including underdevelopment (‘freedom from want’) and in some cases cultural or psychological insecurities (such as ‘freedom to live in dignity’, and ‘wellbeing’). Camilleri (2011:4) usefully defines human security as being ‘concerned with two kinds of threat: direct threats posed by the use or threatened use of physical violence to persons and communities; and indirect threats posed by social, economic, environmental and 133

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political conditions which, if allowed to persist, can be reasonably expected within a foreseeable timeframe to give rise to the use or threatened use of force’. This provides coherence to our understanding of human security and, importantly, links underdevelopment and political violence (which is pertinent in the African context). It also suggests that those seeking to mitigate human insecurity need to first engage with and understand the complex and interrelated environments and relationships in which human security can be threatened before they intervene and attempt to mitigate threats to human security. Under the influence of realist thinking, and given their basic mandate to maintain and enhance national security, governments have traditionally viewed ‘security’ as the absence of military threats from other states. However, due to the nature of the contemporary globalised world, and as a product of new thinking on security, governments now include many non-traditional threats— such as transnational terrorism and organised crime, global health pandemics, civil wars, state failure, refugee flows and climate change—on their national security agendas. For policy-makers, these types of threats are often relatively uncontroversially incorporated into the conventional national security framework, particularly when human insecurity in a globalised world is viewed instrumentally as a potential source of national insecurity. A human security approach, however, also challenges the conventional national security framework because it suggests that the security of the state and the security of individual people are not necessarily synonymous, and that in many instances ‘national security’ can in fact undermine or at the very least marginalise human security. While more critical approaches to security critique human security approaches for remaining too firmly wedded to the state-based ‘problem-solving’ security agenda, states—often individually and certainly collectively—do have the political and material resources to actually mitigate (as well as cause) human insecurity. As such, there is great but under-utilised potential for states, including Australia, to incorporate human security thinking into foreign policy and to make a real difference to the lives of insecure people around the globe. According to Camilleri (2011:8), Australian governments in particular have traditionally ‘shied away from the discourse of human security’, or, when they have incorporated the concept into their thinking, it is ‘usually embedded in the pre-existing state-centric 134

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security paradigm’. As a result, the ‘tentative steps taken along the path to human security have generally suffered from inadequate conceptual integration and limited or easily reversible institutionalization’. Camilleri (2011:8) has also noted that there is often a gap or ‘tensions between declaratory and operational policy’ when attempts are made to incorporate human security into national security thinking and practice. Furthermore, the ‘picture that emerges from [an] overview of Australia’s post–Cold War security discourse is of a policy making elite that intuitively grasps something of the radical changes unfolding in the international security environment, but is unable to articulate a coherent and sustained response to these changes’ (Camilleri 2011:12). Indeed, the current Labor government has not explicitly used ‘human security’ as a conceptual framework to articulate its new engagement with Africa, despite human insecurity remaining acute and deep in parts of that region. human inseCurity in Contemporary afriCa Despite important recent achievements in conflict resolution, transitions to democratic governance, and economic development across the continent, these gains have been uneven, and against a number of key indicators Africa remains the region most in need of greater human security. For example, according to the UN Development Programme, sub-Saharan Africa ranked lowest of all regional groupings in the Human Development Index (HDI), despite having the largest percentage increase during the 2000–2010 period (starting from the lowest base) (UNDP 2010:151). Of the 169 countries ranked in the HDI for 2010, the fourteen lowest-ranked countries were in sub-Saharan Africa, while thirty-five out of the forty-two countries ranked in the least developed category, ‘low human development’, are African (UNDP 2010:145–46). The UNDP notes that while some African countries, such as Burkina Faso, have made progress according to HDI rankings, others have had ‘setbacks’—most notably, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Zambia and Zimbabwe, which are the only three countries in the world to have had a lower HDI in 2010 than in 1970 (UNDP 2010:30). Furthermore, in the UNDP’s index of ‘human security’, African countries including DRC, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia, and Republic of Congo, have scored very poorly on indicators of prevalence of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and of fatalities from and intensity of civil war occurring inside their borders (UNDP 2010:174–175). 135

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Indeed, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in 2008 that, on current trends, no African country would meet all of the MDGs by 2015; to do so would cost around US$72 billion per year in external financing; even though this was within existing aid commitments, meeting it was a significant challenge (UNSG 2008). The SecretaryGeneral indicated that, despite significant international engagement with Africa’s developmental needs: multiple challenges continue to take a terrible toll: the impact of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis; the millions of school-age children deprived of basic education; the widespread violence against women; and the suffering of innocent people in Darfur and Somalia. Extreme poverty is still causing needless deaths and stopping millions of promising young Africans from fulfilling their potentials (UNSG 2008).

The UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA), in seeking to explain the serious and ongoing human security challenges faced in Africa, identified colonial legacies of undemocratic rule and arbitrary national borders, poverty, competition over access to and control of natural resources, and external involvement in civil wars as sources, exacerbated by food insecurity, an unregulated arms trade, and mass population displacement (OSAA 2005:8). In its 2007 study of trends in the prevalence and human cost of conflict in Africa, the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) found that the number of state-based armed conflicts (that is, in which a government is one of the parties to the conflict) in sub-Saharan Africa had in fact decreased from sixteen to seven conflicts between 1999 and 2006, that the number of non-state armed conflicts had also reduced by 50 per cent between 2002 and 2006, and that ‘onesided violence’ (organised violence against civilian populations) had also been reduced by two-thirds in that period. These trends were reflected in the decrease in ‘battle deaths’ from each type of violence over a similar period (HSRP 2007:22–24). The HSRP also suggested that, while it was difficult to measure, the indirect costs of conflict in Africa—particularly deaths from conflict-induced malnutrition and disease—were likely to have also declined over the same period due to the overall decline in number and intensity of conflicts, a decline in refugee numbers in the region and a doubling of global humanitarian assistance going to Africa between 1999 and 2006 (HSRP 2007:25). Importantly, the HSRP argues that a significant cause of the ending 136

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of conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa was the ‘extraordinary upsurge in international activism in the region directed towards stopping ongoing wars and seeking to prevent them from starting again’ (HSRP 2007:30). It thus argues that ‘the international community, working with regional organizations and national governments, can make a major contribution to human security in Africa’ (HSRP 2007:31). Furthermore, the authors of the African Development Report 2008/09 (ADR 2008:xi) suggest that while this decline in African conflict is welcome, ‘it poses challenges of consolidating the peace, rebuilding state institutions, and relaunching economic activity’. The report cites how post-conflict societies can often slide back into conflict due to weak institutional capacity and a lack of adequate public funds to resource societal rebuilding, while old grievances can re-emerge in combination with new sources of tension and risks (ADR 2008:xi). Because of this, the ADR suggests that the ‘legacy of conflicts in Africa and their devastating economic effects call for concerted efforts on the part of African governments and their development partners to design strategies for preventing conflicts, resolving ongoing conflicts, and consolidating peace’. In particular, the report calls for ‘increased and targeted assistance to fragile states, the majority of which are post-conflict countries’ (ADR 2008:xxiii). Linking underdevelopment and violent conflict as causes of human insecurity in Africa, Poku, Renwick and Porto (2007:1156) argue that the four greatest obstacles to Africa achieving the MDG targets are ‘ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; tackling the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other diseases; and achieving gender equality and empowering women’ and suggest that ‘only by formulating and executing policies that explicitly address the mutuality of developmental security challenges will the human potential of Africa be released.’ The authors highlight how, at US$528, the average GNP per capita in Africa for 2005 was about fifty times less than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. Furthermore, Africa is home to 30 per cent of the world’s poor, and that extreme poverty is, with 300 million people, twice the global rate (Poku, Renwick and Porto 2007:1160). As such, in Africa and elsewhere: human security requires positive peace: that is, the active creation of structures and agencies to address the developmental sources of injustice that promote conflict and focus security back onto issues 137

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of state failure and the political economies of conflict. Hence, stimulating economic growth, and thereby expanding opportunities for Africans to move out of poverty, is essential for sustaining peace on the continent. This will depend in turn on improving governance, attracting overseas development assistance . . . addressing the debt burden and overcoming HIV/AIDS (Poku, Renwick and Porto 2007:1165).

Indeed, the Australian government itself has cited such mixed trends regarding security, development and governance in Africa as both a reason for Australia and Australian companies to invest in the region with greater certainty (due to a reduction in conflict and an increase in political stability) as well as a reason for it to provide greater aid and other assistance to the continent (particularly due to the continuing prevalence of underdevelopment). For example, Rudd has argued that Australian companies already engaged in commercial activity in Africa ‘see opportunity where many others still have an outdated view of a continent totally in the grip of poverty, conflict and despair’ (Rudd 2010). He suggests that Africa’s large working population, number of middle-class income households, and consumer market ‘spells opportunity for Australia’. While Africa ‘is a more stable, peaceful and prosperous continent than a decade ago’, recognising areas of improvement in Africa is not to overlook or be naïve about the ‘continuing difficulties and challenges’ (Rudd 2010). Accordingly, Rudd claimed that Australia recognised Africa’s ‘potential and its recent progress without ignoring its considerable security and development challenges’. For Rudd, Africa is a ‘more complex modern reality with a greater range of opportunities than some of the stereotypes of the past would suggest’ (Rudd 2010). an australian Contribution to enhanCing human seCurity in afriCa From the above discussion we can discern that Canberra is pursuing greater engagement with Africa because it perceives Australia to have direct political and economic interests on the continent and wants it to help to mitigate the acute forms of human insecurity still prevalent in parts of that region as part of its desire to be, and to be seen to be, both an important global player and a good international citizen. For Africa, where there has been uneven progress in the last decade, there is a need for continuing, substantive and genuine engagement by external actors to assist in achieving more sustainable development, 138

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improving governance and enhancing human security. Australia, however, remains and is often perceived as a new and relatively minor player in African engagement3, as European ex-colonial powers—alongside the United States and the emerging developing powers China, India and Brazil—all vie for influence and access in what some commentators have claimed to be the ‘new scramble for Africa’ (and which US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, taking aim at growing Chinese influence and engagement in the region in particular, has somewhat ironically warned could resemble a ‘new colonialism’) (see Leigh and Pallister 2005; Parris 2008; Kasozi 2009; Clinton 2011). Indeed, Williams more critically observes that: While outsiders clearly have only limited ability to dictate outcomes in Africa, they have the potential to create an international environment that is supportive of local struggles to promote justice and security. Of course, outsiders do not have a good track record of promoting security in Africa; so the relationship must be built on a foundation of genuine dialogue aimed at discerning what constructive engagement might entail (Williams 2007:1036).

If Australia remains sensitive to both the troubled history of external involvement in Africa (in which Australia is not directly implicated in the way that the Europeans are) and takes measures to mitigate the potential for an equally damaging wave of neo-colonialism on the continent, it can make limited but important contributions to human security in Africa in at least the following four areas: 1 support responsible governance in africa Australia can advocate and support democratic, transparent and accountable governance in Africa based upon the principle of responsible sovereignty at the national level (see Deng et al. 1996; CoA 2011a:197). Canberra should make clear that it will not engage or do business with African governments that actively threaten the human security of their populations—particularly those who kill, threaten or repress civilians. In this sense, a commitment to human security requires Australia to privilege the security of African people over the security of regime elites in instances in which there is a tension between the two. Australia can take this position directly in its bilateral relations with African countries now that it has formal diplomatic relations with them all, and it can also continue to promote 139

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the Responsibility to Protect doctrine more broadly, as, for example, Kevin Rudd did prior to the 2011 international intervention in Libya. Such efforts will further advance the normative argument that sovereignty resides with the people, not with regimes, and this is central to creating sustainable and genuine human security. This would also ally the Australian government with African people, enhancing its regional and broader reputation as a good international citizen. At a second level, Australia can, where invited, contribute expertise and experience to the transparent, equitable, and responsible development, regulation and broader governance of emerging resource sectors in African countries. The resources boom in Africa presents both significant opportunities for African countries to use resource trade and investment for genuine economic development, and hence to advance ‘freedom from want’ for their populations, but also significant potential for foreign exploitation, local corruption and inequitable distribution of resource wealth. Not only would the latter further hamper development, but poor governance of natural resources has great potential to foster violent conflict and hence human insecurity. Australia, for example, should support the resource sector regulatory mechanism Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) at home and promote it in Africa as a way to mitigate resource corruption. It should, moreover, ensure that Australian-based resource companies practise genuine corporate social and environmental responsibility in their African operations and ensure that African people benefit from the wealth generated from their natural resources. Australian institutions can also continue to provide opportunities to train African students and officials in transparent mining governance practices, including through AusAID scholarship programs. These measures would contribute to the mitigation of resource sector-induced human insecurity in Africa, and foster a positive reputation for Australia in that sector. 2 Contribute more australian oda to targeted programs in africa Using a human security framework to engage with Africa, the government can emphasise the links between underdevelopment and poverty, violent conflict, and human insecurity in the region. While Australia has been increasing its overall ODA budget, and within this trebled its ODA budget for Africa specifically, the latter still represents only a small proportion of Australia’s total ODA (about 140

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5 per cent); the ODA budget flows predominantly to the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, and no African country is in the top ten recipients of Australian aid, despite many ranking very low on key combined development indicators. Furthermore, Australia still contributes only a small proportion of total global ODA to Africa (less than 1 per cent) (CoA 2011a:46). As such, Australia should continue to increase its overall ODA budget in line with MDG targets but within this it could devote a greater proportion of its aid budget to Africa—the continent with the greatest level of underdevelopment—despite arguments that Canberra should for strategic and regional responsibility reasons continue to focus most of its aid program on Australia’s immediate region. The government will need to get this balance right, but by directing only 5 per cent of its total aid to Africa, Canberra clearly has spare capacity to engage with Africa in this way. Within a general ODA increase to Africa, the government should continue to target particular development programs with which it can contribute specific expertise and hence maximise its impact. Canberra has identified these programs as being in the areas of agriculture and food security (particularly in agricultural research initiatives), water and sanitation, and maternal and child health (see CoA 2011a:46). 3 Contribute more to peacekeeping and conflict resolution As noted by the HSRP and others, international engagement with and intervention in conflicts in Africa since the end of the Cold War have had a significant, positive impact on ending violent conflicts and on protecting the human security of civilian populations, who are increasingly the victims of civil wars. Yet, obtaining quality military personnel to staff these missions and adequate financial resources to fund them is a persistent challenge for the UN. Australia now has considerable experience in multilateral peacekeeping. It has also participated in fourteen UN peacekeeping missions in Africa since 1960, contributing a total of 2458 troops, and between 2007 and 2009 increased its financial contribution to UN peacebuilding operations in Africa from A$83 to $111 million (Lyons 2011:202–203). While these are important contributions, there is great scope for Australia to contribute further and more directly in this field to mitigate human insecurity in Africa. For example, Australia only contributed seventeen personnel to the UN Mission 141

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in Sudan (UNMIS), which was attempting to manage the resolution of Africa’s longest-running civil war, and eight personnel to the UN–AU hybrid mission in the Darfur region of Sudan (UNAMID) (CoA 2011c). Australia could therefore offer additional military and financial contributions and its accumulated expertise to existing and future multilateral peace operations in Africa. This would further enhance Australia’s claim to be a good international citizen and its reputation as a significant contributor to and leader of international peace operations. Furthermore, should Australia be elected to the UN Security Council for 2013–2014, it could use its seat to advocate a greater and more genuine Council focus on human security, and for greater attention to and action on mitigating the human insecurities in Africa in particular. In this sense, as a Council member Australia would be in a position regarding Africa to make a direct contribution to conflict resolution, to the deployment of UN peace operations, and to sanctioning regimes that threaten the human security of their own citizens. Given the significant challenges of human security in Africa, this should be a priority of a human security–framed Australian foreign policy, whether it wins a Council seat or not. 4 Contribute further to the security of displaced populations A fourth key area is in the provision of greater assistance to the significant displaced populations in and from Africa, which are largely a result of violent conflicts. Globally, almost forty-four million people are displaced from their normal homes, including those who have crossed international borders and those who remain displaced inside their own states. In Africa, there were over two million refugees and over six million IDPs in 2010. In that year, four African countries— Somalia (770,200 refugees), the DRC (476,700), Sudan (387,200) and Eritrea (222,500)—ranked in the top ten globally as source countries for refugees. Kenya (402,900 refugees) and Chad (347,900) ranked in the top ten globally as refugee-hosting countries. Moreover, the DRC, Kenya, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania were all ranked in the top ten globally for number of refugees hosted per GDP per capita, which gives an indication of the impact of refugees on a host society’s capacity to absorb and manage them. Compounding this problem, many of these countries also ranked in the top ten globally for number of IDPs (all figures in this section from UNHCR 142

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2010a). While vulnerable IDPs remain the responsibility of their own sovereign governments (although monitored closely by international actors), resettlement of refugees in third countries is one way to mitigate the immediate human insecurities that are inherent to their displacement. The UNHCR estimated that, globally, over one hundred and seventy-two thousand refugees needed resettlement in third countries in 2011, yet the gap between resettlement needs and capacity was about forty thousand (UNHCR 2010b:1). In Africa, the submissions for resettlement had increased from 20,000 to over 30,000 during 2007–2009 (UNHCR 2011b:54). Australia is one of the few, and most generous, countries that provide for resettlement of refugees, ranking second globally only to the United States (and just ahead of Canada) in 2009. Yet in absolute terms, Australia’s humanitarian program in total admits only between thirteen and fourteen thousand refugees, asylum seekers and other displaced or insecure persons annually. In 2010–2011, offshore visa grants to enter Australia under this program included, in the top ten by birth, the following African countries: the DRC (565 persons), Ethiopia (381), Sudan (243) and Somalia (190). Given the significant displaced populations in Africa and the great capacity that Australia has to accept and manage refugees for resettlement, the Australian government could increase its rate of resettlement acceptance for African refugees in order to enhance their human security. If done in significant numbers, this could in turn go some way to repairing Australia’s damaged international reputation regarding its policies on asylum seekers. ConClusion Despite recent if uneven progress, Africa remains a site of many acute, persistent and complex human security challenges. External actors can play an important role in mitigating these challenges, but to do so they must first be genuinely engaged with the continent. Canberra should position the enhancement of human security at the centre of its new engagement with Africa. This would mean ensuring that the emerging African resources boom—and the important role of Australian companies in it—contributes to transparent governance and to equitable national economic development rather than to corruption, exploitation and violent conflict over control of resources. This would also mean providing increased aid to mitigate 143

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immediate deaths from disease and malnutrition while targeting programs towards areas of need and longer term sustainable local development. This would also mean contributing greater material and political support to multilateral peace operations in Africa in which conflict resolution and civilian protection are core elements, and which are underpinned by the concept of responsible sovereignty. And Australia can do more to assist with the significant displaced populations in Africa—often those who experience the greatest human insecurity. These are important objectives in their own right. But a commitment to enhancing human security in Africa should in turn also enable Australia to pursue its own political and economic objectives in the region with an enhanced reputation as a good international citizen. This could help Australia to distinguish itself from its ‘powerful friends’, ex-colonialists, and developing powers who are all already engaged more deeply and broadly in Africa than Australia is. It could also, pragmatically, secure the African votes Australia needs to be elected to the Security Council. Greater political stability could, further, stimulate and reassure enhanced Australian and other investment in Africa. Therefore, a genuine commitment to enhancing human security could help to realise the mutual interests of Australia and Africa. notes 1 The term ‘Rudd/Gillard government’ is used in this chapter to indicate the continuity in foreign policy between the separate Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard Labor governments from 2007, due in large part to Rudd becoming an influential foreign minister in the Gillard government. 2 Interestingly, although the place and label of human security is not explicit in Canberra’s rhetoric here, such an approach is broadly consistent with other ‘middle powers’—such as Canada, Norway and Japan—who have at times sought specifically to use ‘human security’ to frame and articulate foreign policy (see, for example, McRae and Hubert 2001), even if this use has not always been consistent or effective in practice. 3 Senior DFAT official, off the record interview with the author, July 2011.

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referenCes ADR (African Development Report) 2008 African Development Report 2008/09: Conflict Resolution, Peace and Reconstruction in Africa, Oxford University Press and African Development Bank, Oxford. Camilleri, JA 2011 ‘Human Security and National Security: The Australian Context’, draft paper presented at workshop on ‘The Role of Human Security in Shaping Australian Foreign Policy’, La Trobe University, 18 February. Clinton, HR 2011 US Secretary of State, Interview on Africa 360, Lusaka, Zambia, 11 June, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/06/165941.htm (accessed 29 June 2011). CoA (Commonwealth of Australia) 2011a Parliament of Australia, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Inquiry into Australia’s Relationship with the Countries of Africa, Report, Canberra, 24 June. CoA 2011b ‘Australia: Candidate for the United Nations Security Council 2013–14’, http://www.dfat.gov.au:80/un/unsc_candidature_brochure. pdf (accessed 15 July 2011). CoA 2011c, Department of Defence, ‘Global Operations’, http://www. defence.gov.au/op/index.htm (accessed 21 September 2011). Deng, FM, S Kimaro, T Lyons, D Rothchild and IW Zartman 1996 Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC. Ford, J 2003 ‘Australian–African Relations 2002: Another Look’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 57(1):17–33. Joint Press Statement 2010 African Union Commission and Commonwealth of Australia, New York, 23 September. HSRP (Human Security Report Project) 2007 Human Security Brief 2007, HSRP, Vancouver, Chapter 2: ‘Towards a New Peace in Africa?’, http:// www.hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/2007/text.aspx (accessed 21 September 2011). Kasozi, ABK 2009 ‘The New Scramble for Africa’, allAfrica.com, 7 October, http://allafrica.com/stories/200910080090.html. Leigh, D and D Pallister 2005 ‘Revealed: The New Scramble for Africa’, The Guardian (UK), 1 June, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jun/01/ g8.development (accessed 25 June 2011). Lyons, T 2011 ‘Australian Foreign Policy Towards Africa’ in J Cotton and J Ravenhill eds Middle Power Dreaming: Australia in World Affairs 2006–2010, Oxford University Press and Australian Institute of International Affairs, Melbourne. 145

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McRae, R and D Hubert eds 2001 Human Security and the New Diplomacy: Protecting People, Promoting Peace, MacGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, Québec and Kingston, Ontario. OSAA (United Nations Office for the Special Adviser on Africa) 2005 ‘Human Security in Africa’, December, http://www.un.org/africa/osaa/ reports/Human%20Security%20in%20Africa%20FINAL.pdf (accessed 21 September 2011). Parris, M 2008 ‘The New Scramble for Africa Begins’, The Times (UK), 18 April, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ matthew_parris/article3775299.ece (accessed 25 June 2011). Parke, M 2011 ‘Speech to Australia–Africa Business Council’ (on behalf of Kevin Rudd), Canberra, 24 February. Poku, NK, N Renwick and JG Porto 2007 ‘Human Security and Development in Africa’, International Affairs 83(6):1155–1170. Rudd, K 2010 ‘Australia’s Foreign Policy Looking West’, speech, University of Western Australia, Perth, 12 November. Rudd, K 2011a ‘Speech to Mark the Opening of Australia’s Embassy in Addis Ababa’, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 26 January. Rudd, K 2011b ‘Executive Council Speech, African Union’, speech, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 27 January. Rudd, K 2011c ‘Building Bridges between Africa and Australia’, speech, International Forum on Africa, University of Sydney, Sydney, 13 May. Rudd K 2011d Aid Budget Statement 2011–12, ‘An Effective Aid Plan for Australia: Reducing Poverty, Saving Lives and Advancing Australia’s National Interests’, Australia’s International Development Assistance Program 2011–12, Canberra, 10 May. Rudd, K 2011e ‘Australia’s Foreign Policy Priorities and Our Candidature for the UN Security Council’, speech, National Press Club, Canberra, 1 June. Rudd, K 2011f ‘Africa Provides a Rich Seam for Resources Sector’, The Australian, 24 October. Smith, S 2008a ‘A Modern Australia for a New Era’, speech, Australian Strategic Policy Institute National Security Dinner, Sydney, 9 April. Smith, S 2008b ‘Africa Day’, speech, Canberra, 26 May. Smith, S 2008c ‘A New Era of Engagement with the World’, speech, The Sydney Institute, 19 August. Smith, S 2009a ‘Africa Day’, speech, 25 May. Smith, S 2009b ‘Presentation to the Executive Council of the African Union’, speech Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 29 January. Smith, S 2009c ‘Africa Down Under Conference Dinner’, speech, Perth, 2 September. 146

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Smith, S 2009d ‘Africa Down Under Conference’, speech, Perth, 3 September. Smith, S 2010a ‘Multilateral Engagement: Priorities for Australia and South Africa’, speech, South African Institute for International Affairs, Pretoria, South Africa, 26 January. Smith, S 2010b ‘Australia and Africa: Looking to the Future’, speech, University of Sydney International Forum on Africa, Sydney, 19 March. Smith, S 2010c ‘Africa Day 2010’, speech, High Commission of the Republic of Botswana, Canberra, 25 May. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 2010 ‘The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development’, Human Development Report 2010, United Nations Development Programme, New York. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) 2010a Global Trends 2010, UNHCR, Geneva. UNHCR 2010b ‘UNHCR Projected Resettlement Needs 2011’. 16th Annual Tripartite Consultation on Resettlement, UNHCR, Geneva. UNSG (United Nations, Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General) 2008 ‘Secretary-General’s Remarks at the High-level Meeting on Africa’s Development Needs’, United Nations, New York, 22 September, http:// www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=3411. Williams, P 2007 ‘Thinking About Security in Africa’, International Affairs 83(6):1021–1038.

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8 seCurity from beloW: an alternative perspeCtive on human seCurity gerhard hoffstaedter and Chris roche

introduCtion State-centred conceptions of security have been critiqued widely, not least because a focus on the state renders structural inequalities within states and the insecurity that exists within borders invisible. Moreover, states are often the source of insecurity thus making ‘national’ security somewhat of a misnomer and insufficient as an approach to security. Security-seeking behaviours associated with a realist perspective of national security have been increasingly called into question and the concept of ‘human security’ has gained traction in terms of theorising security and policy legitimacy. As is explained throughout this book human security shifts the focus of security from the state to the individual and offers a different approach to both the pursuit of security and development principles (Kaldor 2007:184). This individualising of security has far-reaching ramifications and, most relevant for this chapter, has implications for Australia’s foreign policy as we seek further to address the balance between the security–development nexus. Recently, security studies more generally has been criticised for being ‘Western-centric’ (Buzan and Hansen 2009:19), as have peacebuilding initiatives and humanitarian assistance (Pugh 2004). The sum of these arguments is that notions 148

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of insecurity, and the intervention that often follows from these, is rooted in Western hegemonic understandings of security at best, or a thinly veiled continuation of colonial practices at worst (Pugh 2004). Human security, too, is seen as a Western project, which limits its appeal and reach considerably (McDonald 2002:293). Duffield goes further and argues that human security is a technology that empowers northern institutions to act upon southern individuals (Duffield 2005, 2007). For Duffield the fusion of security and development has led to the incorporation of NGOs into humanitarian interventions, mainly in the war on terror, and many NGOs have become uncritical accomplices of Western foreign policy (Duffield 2005:16). More relevant for this chapter, however, is the ways in which these arguments point to the continuing ‘top-down’ approaches to security, rather than allowing space for ‘bottom up’ practices. It is not being argued that security practices or responsibility for security need to be, conceptually or politically, removed from state institutions, but it is problematic to assume that the state can adequately deliver human security. Indeed, some states do not do so in practice, nor do they know how best to. Baker and Scheye (2007) argue that current security sector reform policy continues to follow a state-centric model. They suggest this is problematic for two reasons. First, in the context of fragile or failed states the state is incapable or unwilling of providing security and justice; and second, it rests on the assumption (which the authors suggest is a fallacy) that the state is the only actor in security and justice (Baker and Scheye 2007).1 Emerging out of discussions of human security, both its potential and limitations, is the concept of ‘security from below’. This takes the concept of human security further than simply the involvement of civil society organisations in security questions. It focuses on the local level and the ways in which individuals and communities seek, provide and advocate for security, thus reversing the common security discourse. Furthermore, it allows analytical space for the recognition that states are often unable or unwilling to provide security, particularly weak or failed states. Security from below suggests that human security frameworks should ‘be grounded more firmly in the lived experiences of people who are insecure’ (Luckham 2009:3). Luckham further argues that this is essential for four reasons (2009:3–4). First, because security in itself is unequally distributed and often stratified along existing social inequalities, be it on the basis of socioeconomic background, between rural–urban divides, against women and minorities and so on. Second, it recognises agency 149

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in those who suffer insecurity, violence and poverty. Third, it enables security to be grounded in empirical evidence, rather than in ‘over romanticised perceptions of grass roots institutions and initiatives’. And finally, those who experience insecurity often see the state as complicit in this insecurity. This final point fundamentally resonates with notions of legitimacy and accountability, which will be discussed in more detail below. In his analysis of the notion of agency in security studies, Jef Huysmans asks: ‘who is going to protect those who are no longer protected by their states?’ (2006:1). In his argument for a greater acknowledgement of the notion of agency in security studies, Huysmans (2006:2) suggests that an [a]gency-focused analysis and the notion of protection introduce[s] a more sociologically oriented unpacking of situations of insecurity as a political struggle in a competitive field that is characterised by a particular structure of power relations and certain understandings of how political agency can be asserted.

He suggests that we cannot simply look at the ‘widening’ of security studies, thanks to the work of critical social and political scholars, but we must also understand the political capacity of claims made on behalf of new understandings of insecurity (also see McDonald this volume). That is, not everyone has the capacity to make claims of protection and/or insecurity. In this regard, Huysmans (2006:9–10) suggests that the concept of ‘situated agency’ is central. Although his analysis is in regards to the capacity of various agencies to make claims of protection, it serves as a reminder of the necessity to conceptualise understandings of ‘security from below’. This could be understood in terms of the use of ‘security from below’ to highlight the ways in which those with seemingly restricted capacity to seek security do indeed exercise agency and seek security in ways that may be parallel to, or even contrary to, the state practices. We argue that ‘security from below’ provides a useful means of addressing some of the propositions made by Camilleri’s chapters in this book, that he argues would need to underpin a human security policy framework, notably the need to ‘rethink the profound insecurities and vulnerabilities that are integral to the contemporary human condition’ (chapter 2), ‘identify important civil society actors and include them in the dialogue’; deepen ‘understanding of societal perceptions and aspirations . . . [to] foster the political processes 150

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conducive to conflict resolution or mitigation’ and ‘become more attuned to cultural, religious and political sensitivities than is presently the case’ (chapter 4). seCurity from beloW The discussion on ‘security from below’ is based on a special issue of the IDS bulletin on Transforming Security and Development in an Unequal World (Colak and Pearce 2009). The authors engage the problem of assuming that the state can in fact deliver (human) security: This weakness of the State security response has contributed to a gradual erosion of the idea of security as a public good, as well as loss of faith in state security provision. Many people on the ground already depend on private and informal forms of security and justice provision. Wealth and poverty determines the choice: private security firms on the one hand and local gunman [sic] on the other (Colak and Pearce 2009:11–12).

But they also recognise the need for the state or others who can provide public goods: ‘Security from below’, we argue, should not be a substitute for security as a public good. The challenge, however, is how the latter can be constructed in contemporary contexts of multiple violences and insecurity, with weak States, corrupt and non accountable security institutions and with powerful global networks trafficking arms and drugs that foster violence and further erode the State’s legitimate monopoly over the means of violence. Rather than widen the idea of security to embrace ever more areas of human interaction, we need to ‘humanize’ security provision, or make it people-centred but publicly delivered (Colak and Pearce 2009:12)

Conceptualising ‘security from below’ means recognising the informal and private ways in which individuals and communities seek security and justice without discounting state, community and private security provisions. This becomes particularly relevant where states are weak and/or ineffectual in delivering security, a condition that has led to the ‘erosion of the idea of security as a public good, as well as loss of faith in security provision’ (Colak and Pearce 2009:11). However, 151

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it is argued that while human security must be people-centred, it must also be publicly delivered; that is, human security, or security from below, should not substitute the state or others who can deliver security. Here, they recognise the limits and disadvantages of purely market-led, community-led, donor-led, or state-led responses, as each on its own cannot deliver security adequately. Thus, security can be conceived of as ‘a precious entitlement of citizens, not a gift from an often . . . repressive or absent state’ (Luckham 2009:6). This is particularly problematic in a post-conflict scenario, which can spark the return to a Hobbesian state where security is sought in ethnic and religious enclaves that protect their own. This version of security from below is an exclusionary and dangerous one, where people seek exclusionary models of protection along shared identity lines. Drawing on the post-war Iraqi experience of militias and no-go zones the argument is made that without a strong state communities establish what they call ‘human security from below’ (Dekker and Jan Faber 2008:39). This is not to say that protection cannot be afforded across ethnic, religious and other identity lines. However, the authors do show that there is often a dissonance between human security from below, i.e. modes of self-protection and human security from above, i.e. supportive international media, diaspora, international community etc. Cecilia Jacob (2011:1) refers to this as a ‘security gap’ in that it is problematic to conceive of human security emanating from structures or institutions (state or non-state) that are themselves often weak, ineffectual or where the political state remains in ‘self survival mode’. The fundamental contribution here, however, is that defining and conceptualising security starts at the local level, rather than the policy section of government. From there security becomes a cooperative endeavour between the local/community and the national/state through a variety of recursive links between the two. It is important to note that much of security, and in turn insecurity, is largely subjectively defined: ‘what to some may represent security might to others mean insecurity’ (Horst 2006:48–49). Therefore, when we talk about security, this is intricately connected to notions of insecurity. To understand and analyse ‘security from below’, we must also understand what represents insecurity to individuals and the ways that this perception is rooted in historical, cultural, political and social contexts. Alexandra Kent (2006) argues that notions of security are ultimately culturally embedded; essentially, we cannot conceive of a single neutral, analytical concept of security 152

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that can be universally applied. Furthermore, Kent (2006:346) argues that the relationship between power, legitimacy and security needs to be analysed through a cultural lens: ‘Any attempt to define other people’s security for them necessarily excludes those people’s own constructions of meaning’ (Kent 2006:347). In her analysis of Buddhism and moral legitimacy in Cambodia, Kent suggests that the UN security agenda is ‘glossing over’ important indigenous practices of security (Kent 2006:345). This erosion of the idea of security as a public good is fundamentally linked to notions of legitimacy, accountability and transparency. Where state provisions of security are considered opaque or illegitimate, community forms of security-seeking behaviour are more likely to occur, be it parallel to, or in conflict with, state security measures. This is perhaps best exemplified in Afghanistan where international-led security-seeking behaviour has led to the collapse of state institutions and profound illegitimacy of security apparatuses in the eyes of the population. In his account of local and tribal forms of justice and security (the Jirga and Arbakai systems), Mohammed Osman Tariq (2009) describes the ways in which these are ascribed greater legitimacy from the communities that they support, albeit displaying internal inequalities, e.g. regarding gender. These ‘bottomup’ security approaches are more ‘embedded’, provide greater security for their communities and embody culturally and locally inflected principles of equality, justice and rule of law (Tariq 2009). Moreover, they are based on community and shared values, a principle that Colak and Pearce (2009) suggests is central to the successful functioning of security capabilities. stories of survival In her research on Somali refugees in Kenyan camps, Cindy Horst (2006:65) found that a nomadic past and high mobility were connected to the security and stability of the community. Mobility had been, and continues to be, a way of dealing with various insecurities, such as economic insecurity and food insecurity. This is buttressed by strong kinship ties that can geographically extend trans-nationally and include a diverse range of individuals of differing socioeconomic status, gender and age (Horst 2006). The politics of reciprocity is also central to the successful security function of these kinship ties. In terms of social security, Horst (2006:62–63) argues that whilst decisions are based on cultural frameworks (not 153

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merely technical ‘best’ options) this is not to say they are necessarily constrained by cultural values. Rather, flexibility allows for a ‘plurality of cultural understandings, a concept referring to the cultural means that people employ to deal with insecurity’ (Horst 2006:62). Horst’s research provides a strong case for understanding the ways in which people deal with insecurity from a historical perspective, a perspective that is arguably often lost in the labelling of certain groups as ‘refugees’, which characterises individuals who may be exercising agency in their search for security as vulnerable victims of insecurity. Indeed, asylum seekers and refugees often protect themselves and find solutions to their security risks through a wide array of means. In Malaysia almost one hundred thousand refugees registered by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and tens of thousands of unregistered asylum seekers find work, negotiate police extortion and deal with rent-seeking from an often hostile community. They do this by creating ‘security from below’ through ethnic networks, religious communities and with the help of civil society actors. Stories they tell evolve around the community spirit, the role of faith and the hope they carry with them that their status of limbo (and therefore continued insecurity) will end soon. These stories are important as they provide a counterpoint to the national narratives of security in Malaysia that vilify what the state deems ‘illegal immigrants’ and makes them into a convenient scapegoat for rising crime and economic downturns. The dissonance between how those who are excluded from power and those who are in power view security is one of the reasons ‘security from below’ is such a powerful concept. It demonstrates the multiplicity of security and insecurity narratives at work. One alternative narrative of refugees in Malaysia is about a refugee group that has managed to move out of the anonymity and insecurity of the city and set up a refugee farm. They have achieved this through negotiation and the building of trust and partnership with the local community, supported by the UNHCR. This pilot project aims to provide both a livelihood and secure dwelling to participants. This group has secured a lease for a farm on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur where they grow vegetables and keep chickens. This community farm supplies some urban refugees with fresh food, provides a home to the workers and allows the participants to feel ‘at home’ and secure. They are seeking durable solutions to their plight and hope to engage the international community in this process. The Chin Refugee Committee has been most active and successful in 154

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activating their diaspora, especially in the United States, to help them achieve their goal of being resettled. Pressure groups lobby Congress and the US continually signals to the UNHCR that they will prioritise the resettlement of Chin refugees. For every success story, such as the one of the Chin community in Malaysia, there are stories of failure, where refugees fail to find adequate self-protection mechanisms. However, the success stories should illustrate that refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia can find ways to protect themselves with the help of international agencies and support from interested parties, such as Australia. Key for this help to work is that Australia and others need to provide their support in ways that build upon—and in particular do not undermine—existing strategies. Achieng describes a similar case for peacemaking where ‘through their agency, social groups from different ethnic backgrounds formulate mechanisms for making peace. These mechanisms . . . have enabled groups [to] achieve a level of security and engage in both political and social economic activities’ (Achieng 2011:2). Achieng focuses on negotiations between ethnic groups in Kenya regarding access to land. This negotiation over ongoing access to land for food production is crucial to food security and therefore people’s livelihoods. Although these socially embedded peacemaking efforts are evident, they have not translated into strong peacebuilding mechanisms in Kenya. Thus, Achieng (2011:19) argues that it is at this level that international institutions could ‘act as checkmates’ so as to ensure that security actions at a societal level are not ‘usurped by canny politicians and manipulated to [their] benefit’. This highlights how both the notion of ‘security from below’ and ‘security as a public good’ are complementary in that ‘different actors could take up the agenda at different levels to not only sustain efforts that communities come up with, but also buttress these in several significant ways’ (Achieng 2011:19). This is where responsible actors can help shape the security agendas and support ‘security from below’, bearing in mind that irresponsible ones can unhinge these efforts just as easily. Acknowledging the various practices of ‘security from below’ also highlights the ways in which notions of risk and security may differ. For example, youths in urban areas of South Africa, where gang affiliation is high, have differing notions of risk regarding sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention. While human security work may focus on lowering the risk of the spread of HIV/AIDS by encouraging condom use, this may not accord with notions of risk and security as experienced by youths in that area (Walsh and Mitchell 2006). 155

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This provides an illustrative example of the ways in which security generally, and human security specifically, would benefit from being grounded in the lived realities of those who experience human security. Research into gang affiliation in urban areas of South Africa has identified the ways in which ‘gang life seemed an attractive pathway and a possible means of income in a life characterised by risk and violence’ and that street gangs are ‘seen as an opportunity for young men to gain . . . security’ (Walsh and Mitchell 2006:58–59). Walsh and Mitchell (2006) discuss these findings in relation to the spiralling AIDS epidemic in Africa and the capacity of various agencies to combat it. While this analysis does not necessarily specifically outline the contours of locally-based security practices, Walsh and Mitchell do highlight the need to contextually base discussions of human and individual security in the everyday lived realities of those who experience insecurity, and to understand the multiple and intersecting insecurities that individuals face. In this way, security from below allows for an analytical and conceptual depth that is not available when we focus our attentions on security policy that is primarily discerned from the priorities of Western governments and NGOs (Hoffstaedter and Roche 2011). As Walsh and Mitchell point out: ‘If young men are living in an environment of extreme violence, where life is seen as insignificant or highly risky, the ability and desire to protect themselves from AIDS may well seem of minor importance’ (2006:60). These differences in defining security needs and priorities have also been mediated by a resurgence of the notion of culture when defining the contours of insecurity. Some have subsequently argued that all social insecurities are culturally produced and have historically always been so (Weldes et al. 1999:1). This provides an important perspective on the understanding of security-seeking behaviour at a local or individual level, or security from below, as insecurity and security are inextricably linked; that is, ‘security from below’ will be able to respond to culturally relevant understandings of and perceptions of insecurity. Indeed, if insecurities are culturally produced then identity and insecurity are ‘produced in a mutually constitutive process’ (Weldes et al. 1999:10–11). By saying that insecurities and threats are culturally produced or constructed, it is not suggested that they do not exist, but rather that security discourse produces an ‘established common sense’ in which some dangers are brought to the fore, whilst others are repressed or ignored (Weldes et al. 1999:12). 156

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In the case of Cambodia, a collective past of traumatisation and continuing inequalities means that the population generally is distrustful of state institutions. Moreover, the state has a limited capacity (or unwillingness) to deliver security and justice, particularly to those who are marginalised or on the fringes of society. Indeed, the state often was not clearly visible as an autonomous actor leading to a lack of distinction between the state and the private sector in Cambodia: In 1989, the [State of Cambodia] launched a rapid liberalization of the economy, privatizing land, natural resources and state enterprises and deregulating markets. This process operated to the advantage of regime insiders, who snapped up the most valuable assets and concentrated landholdings and wealth in their own hands. In the process, elaborate networks of patronage and corruption were generated which tied insiders more tightly to the regime than socialist ideology had ever managed to do. It also placed huge political ‘slush funds’ at the disposal of the CPP. These were used to fund highly politicized and heavily publicized school, road, and hospital-building programmes, whose outputs were invariably named after [Cambodian People’s Party] leader Hun Sen. The same funds also paid for vast ‘gift-giving’ exercises in the lead-up to elections. By these means the profile of the party as an ‘economic party’ dedicated to helping the rural poor was raised (Hughes 2007:838).

Meanwhile, security and support is sought through ‘networks of patronage, kinship or . . . traditional authority figures such as elders, monks and nuns’ (Kent 2006:348). This may often be in tension with the state as Buddhism can represent to the powerful in Cambodia a threat to their privilege and could potentially undermine their moral legitimacy. However, it can also be a source of strength to leaders, as although they may be considered to have the right to possess power, moral legitimacy is gained when one exercises power in ways that are consistent with Khmer notions of righteousness (Kent 2006:350–351). This highlights how notions of legitimacy, not just security, are culturally and contextually embedded. Kent thus argues for ‘meticulous work [that] reveal[s] the limitless complexity of contextualized discourse and practices of security, including our own’ (Kent 2006:347). This often presents a challenge to external actors who find the cultural choices and definitions different to their own. 157

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Clay Shirky in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus tells the story of the women of Mangalore and their efforts to protect themselves from attacks from a fundamentalist Hindu group. During their physical abuse in a pub—a place ‘well-behaved’ Indian women should not be—they posted photographs of the incident on a Facebook page entitled ‘The loose and pub-going women of Mangalore’, which soon had some fifteen thousand members. Following further threats to remove them from pubs on Valentine’s Day, the women launched a ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign sending pink underwear to the BJP group. The authorities, now alerted by the publicity, arrested the BJP group’s leader and held him in prison over the period around Valentine’s Day. As Shirky notes, the technology enabled women to publicly expose the behaviour of the BJP group at relatively low risk, but also to demonstrate the level of support that they could activate (Shirky 2010). While this support demanded no more than a ‘click’, it nevertheless brought attention to an issue that might otherwise have garnered no publicity at all, and a sense of solidarity to the women involved. Other groups such as Ushahidi, Twaweza/Uwazi and Global Voices are also using new technologies in various ways to ‘crowdsource’, aggregate and visualise citizens’ concerns and voices. This is arguably providing new means of creating ‘security from below’ and self-protection strategies. While there is an ongoing debate as to whether the use of social media is little more than ‘clicktivisim’ or ‘slacktavisim’, as it favours ‘the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger’ (Gladwell 2010), there is no doubt that there is a lot of innovative use of ‘real-time’ technology in this area. Access to information and vertical and horizontal communication has always been key to self-protection. As a recent conference on the topic of ‘Early Warning for Protection’ concluded, there are a number of formal and informal systems, some of which are very old and some more recent. ‘Each has benefits and risks, and a role to play—none alone provides a solution to the prevention of mass atrocities. How these systems and mechanisms interact in different environments for maximum benefit remains an emerging practice.’ (Wynn-Pope and Cousins 2011:4). However, Patrick Meier, the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi, noted at this conference that ‘traditionally early warning specialists have been preoccupied with conflict prediction at the expense of establishing mechanisms that enhance local capacity to warn and be warned . . . the focus should 158

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be on equipping communities that are broadly at risk of these crimes with the tools to efficiently and effectively share what is the right information for them’ (Wynn-Pope and Cousins 2011:10–11). impliCations for australian foreign poliCy The focus on governance initiatives that bolster institutions is only one plank of security provisions in development work. Furthermore this work has tended to focus on the ‘machinery of government’ as opposed to broader notions of governance. Attempts to promote ‘good governance’ and engage in programs that are ‘apparently supportive of civil society, have in fact undermined the representation of collective interests in [for instance] Cambodia through insistence on highly regulated and atomizing modes of participation, aimed at demobilizing and depoliticizing contentious groups in Cambodian society, and routing contentious politics through internationally sanctioned sites of participation’ (Hughes 2007:834). More engagement is needed with communities and their interpretations of what security means, i.e. what they require to enhance their wellbeing and live their lives with dignity free from fear and want. As we have outlined elsewhere, the international aid community and national governments often create what we have termed ‘theatre states’ that perform some attributes of what Western donors and states believe a functioning nation-state should look and act like (Hoffstaedter and Roche 2011). Much more sensitivity towards domestic, indigenous and local versions of the state, its power and security mechanisms, as well as its relationship to the private and civil society sectors, has to be demonstrated in order to achieve lasting security and development engagements for Australian agencies and their partners. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) continues to be a case in point where international (in particular Australian) intervention did not sufficiently engage security from below. A 2006 Oxfam Australia and New Zealand report: highlights the needs and views of ordinary Solomon Islanders about RAMSI and security, including their desire for: 1 Stronger concepts of peace and security, tied to broader notions of economic, social or environmental vulnerability. 2 Jobs, essential services, and improved livelihoods. 3 Better outreach to the community by government and donors. 159

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4 Support for efforts to decrease disputes, crime, violence and antisocial behaviour and a renewed focus on ending violence against women in the home and community. 5 A transparent mandate for change. Further, the report also notes the importance of empowering women and young people in peace building processes within communities and the need for greater engagement with community-based organisations by government officials and RAMSI personnel than has been the case to date (Maclellan 2006:7).

The last point is a crucial one we have reiterated throughout this chapter, i.e. that engagement, interaction and negotiation, in the sense of a mutual negotiation of positionality, direction and intention between equals, is paramount to understanding and making ‘security from below’ work. Only if all parties feel respected and listened to can there be a fruitful dialogue. Unsurprisingly, ‘[m]any interviewees for this report stressed that they would like to see RAMSI, and its PPF officers in particular, interact more with Solomon Islanders— both so that they might understand the cultural context better, and so that Solomon Islanders can understand RAMSI and the cultures of its staff better’ (Maclellan 2006:23). For instance, tensions between customary and non-customary law were played out as a conflict between ‘introduced law’ and kastom (customary law and conventions) during RAMSI. Kastom became invoked as a symbol of resistance and in direct contradiction with state security institutions (Allen 2009:1). In the case of RAMSI, tensions between the competing notions of indigenous self-governance and Western notions of state-building have contributed to the continuation of weak state institutions and failures in human capacity building. This was exacerbated by the existence of what Anderson (2008:73–74) calls ‘aid trauma’, the harmful side effects of a foreign de facto occupation. Another feature of aid trauma is a ‘bubble economy’ largely induced by a highly paid international presence. In the Solomon Islands, RAMSI has created such an economy that has led to rapid housing inflation and has ultimately shifted the pattern of accommodation in Honiara (where the largest international presence is based), adversely affecting the housing security of local individuals. As foreigners live in this bubble economy, they can cope with the inflation, while locals are increasingly excluded (Anderson 2008:74–75). Therefore, looking at security from below allows us 160

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to see how top-down approaches can not only insufficiently provide security, but actually perpetuate cycles of human insecurity. Whilst RAMSI may have been successful in providing physical or limited notions of security, human security has not been delivered in the eyes of many Solomon Islanders. Surveys and polls attest to relative stabilisation of the country and an amelioration of the security situation in real terms; however, they also show that the overall livelihood situation has not changed with most indicators pointing to ‘no change’. Especially women and girls saw little improvement to their lives. Law and justice is still considered corrupt, the 2010 election is seen as fraudulent.2 There are a number of implications for international NGOs and humanitarian agencies, some of which have been acknowledged for some time, others which are perhaps more novel. First, as Mary Anderson and others noted over twenty years ago, it is critical that there is a sound understanding of capacities as well as vulnerabilities of groups that aid agencies seek to support (Anderson and Woodrow 1998). This needs to include capacities of self-protection broadly defined. Casey Barrs’ study of the ways communities protect themselves has documented more than one hundred tactics and strategies used by community members to protect themselves in violent situations (Barrs 2010). Second, agencies need to engage local communities in dialogue about their notions of security and wellbeing. As Oxfam’s paper on the Solomon Islands suggests, local people often have broader and more holistic understandings of security which need to be understood if the strategies they use to promote it are to be best supported. Assisting communities to prepare for insecurity can also be important; they usually have to rely on their own initiative and resources. As Wyn Pope notes: In areas prone to violence it is fundamental that communities are aware of what they need to do to prepare for violence and, in all probability, flight. This may include agreed meeting points among family and friends and an easy access ‘go bag’ with identity papers and any legal documents such as land ownership papers. Such preparedness may also involve hoarding food in safe places, or simple agreement among communities, friends and families about who will carry what if an immediate evacuation is necessary for survival. 161

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Community preparedness is also about how vulnerable communities survive in situ. Whether they agree to light fires only at night, work in the fields in the dark, and camouflage their existence throughout the day are questions and decisions communities need to make. Some communities may chose to hide signs of wealth and transfer assets in order to create a picture that may be less attractive to parties of the conflict who may be inclined to loot local villages to fund their war . . . There is much NGOs can learn from existing survival techniques developed by communities, and much work that can be done in this area (Wynn-Pope 2010:11).

Third, there is potential to make greater use of new technologies and social media. In particular the use of advances in telecommunications, online social media and GIS mapping offer some important opportunities. There are untapped possibilities for collaboration between development and humanitarian NGOs and conflict earlywarning practitioners—particularly those who are developing and using new technologies. However these opportunities offer risks as well as benefits and further work is needed to explore these more systematically (Wynn-Pope 2010:15–18). Fourth, agencies can do more to create safe spaces for these understandings to be more openly debated by other actors including governments and donors where it is appropriate and prudent to do so. This can start to promote a broader public dialogue to ‘reimagine’ what human wellbeing needs to look like if it is to allow people to better cope with future shocks and threats to their human security (Haddad et al. 2011). Finally agencies should be incorporating the learning that they acquire from this engagement with communities into their advocacy at regional and international levels in order to influence the practice of others. This could include encouraging a place for diaspora groups, who have first-hand experience of selfprotection, to become involved in policy dialogue with governments and international organisations such as the UN. As Camilleri points out in this volume, human security and by extension security from below, ‘requires a “whole-of-government”, “whole-of-governance” and “whole-of-society” approach’. This concerted effort of the Australian government to take seriously the views and attitudes towards security of people elsewhere is necessary for good policy. Our pursuance of ‘security from below’ especially argues for the ‘whole-of-society’ approach to include those people our foreign policy affects in a far-reaching dialogue. 162

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Thus security questions within foreign policy cannot only be envisaged from our point of view, but must include the various voices and views of those we seek to protect, aid and support. This is not to undermine Australia’s security concerns; indeed, if possible one would look for solutions that both bolster Australia’s national security agenda and build ‘security from below’ in communities Australia is engaged in. This bears both opportunities and risks. We have outlined many of the opportunities, but as Duffield and others have convincingly argued, the risks of governments taking over and using human security and ‘security from below’ as modes of control and interference are ever-present (De Larrinaga and Doucet 2008; Duffield 2005, 2007). ConClusion The Australian government could greatly benefit from more engagement with research on and within communities both here and overseas and the multiplicity of conceiving security and insecurity. There is ample room for several branches of the government to seek out experiences, research and stories that can rewrite how Australian foreign policy views security and its national interests. Such stories should raise the need for a more in-depth understanding of security, human security and people’s lived experiences thereof. They should also raise the issue of accountability of government, the Australian and others, to its citizens. As we have argued throughout this chapter, and is evident from the literature on ‘security from below’, security is a public service and public good and thus must be delivered by the state to its citizens. The discussions of how this happens, the failings of some mechanisms and the success of others are a starting point to achieve a more nuanced understanding of security as a whole. ‘Security from below’ provides one platform and mechanisms to begin such a dialogue. aCknoWledgements We would like to acknowledge and thank Sarah Smith for her excellent research assistance.

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notes 1 This is in addition to assumptions about the role of the state as singular actor or as a clearly separate entity to the private sector and civil society spheres (Hughes 2007; Chabal and Daloz 1999). 2 http://www.ramsi.org/solomon-islands/peoples-survey.html (date accessed 10 April 2011).

referenCes Achieng, R 2011 ‘Building Bridges: Changing the Meaning of Places as Spaces for Human Security’ in ECAS 2011—4th European Conference on African Studies, Uppsala. Allen, M 2009 ‘Resisting RAMSI: Intervention, Identity and Symbolism in Solomon Islands’, Oceania 79(1):1–17. Anderson, MB and PJ Woodrow 1998 Rising from the Ashes: Development Strategies in Times of Disaster, IT Publications, London. Anderson, T 2008 ‘RAMSI: Intervention, Aid Trauma and Self Governance’, Journal of Australian Political Economy 62:62–92. Baker, B and E Scheye 2007 ‘Multi-layered Justice and Security Delivery in Post-conflict and Fragile States’, Conflict, Security and Development 7(4):503–528. Barrs, C 2010 ‘Preparedness Support: Helping Brace Beneficiaries, Local Staff and Partners for Violence’, CUNY Centre, New York. Buzan, B and L Hansen 2009 The Evolution of International Security Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chabal, P and JP Daloz 1999 Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, James Currey, Oxford. Colak, A and J Pearce 2009 ‘“Security from Below” in Contexts of Chronic Violence’, IDS Bulletin 40(2):11–19. De Larrinaga, M and MG Doucet 2008 ‘Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security’ Security Dialogue 39(5):517–537. Dekker, M and M Jan Faber 2008 ‘Human Security from Below in a Hobbesian Environment’, Security and Human Rights 19(1):37–44. Duffield, MR 2005 ‘Human Security: Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror’: Paper Prepared for the German Development Institute (GDI) Panel ‘New Interfaces Between Security and Development’, 11th General Conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), Bonn, 21–24 September. Duffield, MR 2007 Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Polity, Cambridge. 164

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Gladwell, M 2010 ‘Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted’, New Yorker, 4 October. Haddad, L, N Hossain, JA McGregor and L Mehta 2011 ‘Introduction: Time to Reimagine Development?’, IDS Bulletin 42(5):1–12. Hoffstaedter, G and C Roche 2011 ‘“All the World’s a Stage”: Structure, Agency and Accountability in International Aid,’ Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy 16(4):529–543. Horst, C 2006. Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya, Berghahn Books, New York. Hughes, C 2007 ‘Transnational Networks, International Organizations and Political Participation in Cambodia: Human Rights, Labour Rights and Common Rights’, Democratization 14(5):834–852. Huysmans, J 2006 ‘Agency and the Politics of Protection’ in J Huysmans, A Dobson and R Prokhovnik eds The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency, Routledge, London. Jacobs, C 2011 ‘Human Security and the Politics of Protection’ in ISA Asia-Pacific Conference: Regions, States and Peoples in a World of Many Worlds, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Kaldor, M 2007 Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention, Polity Press, Cambridge. Kent, A 2006 ‘Reconfiguring Security: Buddhism and Moral Legitimacy in Cambodia’, Security Dialogue 37 (3):343–361. Luckham, R 2009 ‘Introduction: Transforming Security and Development in an Unequal World’, IDS Bulletin 40(2):1–10. Maclellan, N 2006 ‘Bridging the Gap Between State and Society: New Directions for the Solomon Islands’, Oxfam Australia and Oxfam New Zealand. McDonald, M 2002 ‘Human Security and the Construction of Security’, Global Society 16(3):277–295. Pugh, M 2004 ‘Peacekeeping and Critical Theory’, International Peacekeeping 11(1):39–58. Shirky, C 2010 Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Penguin, New York. Tariq, MO 2009 ‘Community-based Security and Justice: Arbakai in Afghanistan’, IDS Bulletin 40(2):20–27. Walsh, S and C Mitchell 2006 ‘“I’m too young to die”: Masculinity, Danger and Desire in Urban South Africa’, Gender and Development 14(1):57–68. Weldes, J, M Laffey, and H Gusterson 1999 ‘Introduction: Constructing Insecurity’ in J Weldes, M Laffey, H Gusterson and R Duvall eds 165

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Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger, University of Minnesota Press, MN. Wynn-Pope, P 2010 ‘NGOs and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities Crimes: A Practical Workshop for NGOs to Develop and Share Strategies to Implement the Responsibility to Protect in the Asia-Pacific Region’, 23–24 November 2009, Oxfam Australia. Wynn-Pope, P and S Cousins 2011 ‘Early Warning for Protection: Technologies and Practice for the Prevention of Mass Atrocity Crimes’, Oxfam Australia.

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9 the prevention of mass atroCities: from prinCiple to australian foreign poliCy alex J bellamy

As other contributors to this volume point out, security has traditionally been understood as the purview of the state. Within this context, two of the main legal guarantors of state security are the principles of sovereignty and non-interference. From this perspective, world security is best achieved by establishing a basic degree of international order based on each state’s recognition of every other state’s right to rule a particular territory and engage in external relations. This idea sits at the heart of contemporary international society’s rules governing relations between states. Article 2(7) of the UN Charter prohibits the world body from interfering in the domestic affairs of other states, while Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force by states except in self-defence or with the approval of the UN Security Council. The moral value of this system of security rests on the assumption that sovereign states are the best guardians of human security. But once we accept that the value of state security is partly derived from the presumed capacity of states to protect humans, we are immediately confronted with the challenge of how best to respond when sovereign states are unable to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity (hereafter ‘genocide and mass atrocities’) or engage in these practices 167

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themselves. According to one study, in the twentieth century alone some two hundred and sixty million people were killed by their own government. This figure is six times the number of people killed in battle by foreign governments during the same period (Rummel 1994). Because these figures include casualties of both the First and Second World Wars the number of people killed by their own government relative to those killed by other governments is today significantly greater than this. Between them, in 2011 governments in Libya, Syria and Yemen intentionally killed thousands of civilian protesters. A few years earlier, the Sudanese government and its Janjawiid militia were responsible for the killing of at least a quarter of a million people and for the forced displacement of more than two million civilians in Darfur. Other recent cases include mass killing in the former Yugoslavia and in East Timor and the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which approximately eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered in 100 days. At the 2005 World Summit, the world’s largest ever gathering of heads of state and government committed themselves unanimously to a new principle—the Responsibility to Protect, or RtoP. As agreed by UN member states, the principle rests on three equally important and non-sequential pillars (UN General Assembly 2005:138–139): 1 The responsibility of the state to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and from their incitement (para. 138). 2 The international community’s responsibility to assist the state to fulfil its responsibility to protect (para. 139). 3 In situations where a state has manifestly failed to protect its population from the four crimes, the international community’s responsibility to take timely and decisive action through peaceful diplomatic and humanitarian means and, if that fails, other more forceful means in a manner consistent with Chapters VI (pacific measures), VII (enforcement measures) and VIII (regional arrangements) of the UN Charter (para. 139).

For the first time, governments declared themselves responsible for the protection of their populations from four of the most serious crimes and promised that in some circumstances the security of individuals and groups should be prioritised over the security of states, replacing the logic of Westphalian sovereignty with a new, humancentred, logic. The UN Security Council reaffirmed RtoP in 2006 168

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(Resolution 1674) and indicated its preparedness to act in response to the four crimes (collectively labelled ‘mass atrocities’ in this chapter) and again three years later (Resolution 1894). The UN SecretaryGeneral has issued three reports focusing on the implementation of RtoP, early warning and assessment of mass atrocity threats, and the role of regional organisations respectively, and has established a new Joint Office of the Special Advisers for the Prevention of Genocide and RtoP (hereafter ‘Joint Office’) that will provide the world body with early warning advice. The General Assembly has held informal dialogues on RtoP, a plenary debate, and has issued a resolution pledging to give implementation of the principle its ongoing attention. More importantly, however, RtoP has been incorporated into practice. Most notably, it was used to frame the world’s response to post-election massacres in Kenya and to the Libyan regime’s brutal response to the 2011 uprising. Australia has been at the forefront of the global debate about RtoP as one of the principle’s most vocal advocates. While it shares this view with other like-minded states such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, Austria and Belgium, who have also been active advocates, there are two significant aspects of Australia’s activism. First, Australia has become a more enthusiastic, vocal and active proponent of RtoP than Canada, the archetypal middle power that initially fostered and promoted the principle along with the concept of human security. Whereas RtoP has enjoyed bipartisan support in Australia—though the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has supplemented rhetorical support with financial investment (see below)—in Canada, RtoP was seen as a partisan issue and was dropped entirely for a time by the Conservative Harper government. Indeed, one Canadian Ambassador reported having received formal instruction from Ottawa to avoid discussing or promoting RtoP. Second, Australia supported RtoP despite the fact that the Bush administration in the US had grave reservations about it. Indeed, although the Obama administration has made the US a key ally of RtoP, under Bush it contributed as much as any other government to the near derailing of the principle during the negotiations leading up to the 2005 agreement. At that time, Australian diplomacy at the UN was focused on countering and overcoming US unease as much as that of any other country (see Evans 2009, Bellamy 2009). This suggests both that middle-power support for particular norms and principles is not necessarily constant and enduring but also that middle powers can sometimes operate independently of their 169

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‘great and powerful friends’ and achieve goals without their active support. Having helped forge an international consensus on RtoP, Australia now faces the challenge of how to incorporate RtoP into foreign policy. The suggestion that a middle power with limited influence can make a difference by incorporating RtoP into foreign policy might be doubted, but there are examples of Australia playing a role. On the positive side of the ledger, in 2006 Australia responded rapidly to requests from the government of Timor-Leste for assistance in resolving a crisis that could have easily escalated into civil war, state collapse and mass atrocities. More recently, Australia contributed humanitarian assistance in support of the international mission in Libya. But Australia has contributed to some notable failures of policy too. Prior to the 1999 referendum on independence in Timor-Leste, analysts clearly warned that a vote in favour of independence would provoke anti-civilian violence by Indonesian-backed militias, that the UN observers stationed in the country were incapable of protecting civilians and that Indonesian security guarantees were not credible (see Chesterman 2004:49–60). Nevertheless, the Australian government advised that the referendum take place without the provision of additional security. In the widely anticipated violence that followed, around fourteen hundred civilians were killed and approximately three hundred thousand were displaced. In 1995, shortly after the Rwandan genocide, Australian peacekeepers were present at the Kibeho refugee camp when the army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) massacred more than four thousand refugees. One of Australia’s key studies on peacekeeping notes that Australian peacekeepers (including army medics) witnessed the massacre but goes on to comment only that ‘Rwanda has made a tremendous recovery since’ (Connor 2009:60). This papers over a litany of atrocities perpetrated by the RPF after the Kibeho massacre. Despite having first-hand experience of the RPF’s capacity for mass killing, the Australian government did not condemn the RPF, insist that UN reports documenting other atrocities be published, warn that the RPF’s subsequent invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997 carried with it a significant risk of mass atrocities, or remain alert to the prospect of mass atrocities. After invading the DRC, the RPF and its Congolese allies, Laurent Kabila’s ADFL, pursued and massacred some quarter of a million Hutu refugees. More than two and a half million people perished in the war they triggered. 170

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Both sets of cases suggest that there are circumstances in which middle powers—sometimes operating well outside their immediate regions—can have an impact on the prevention of mass atrocities and protection of vulnerable populations whether for good or ill. Seen in this light, governments like Australia that commit to principles such as RtoP must also consider implementing them in their foreign policy. The challenges of incorporating normative principles such as human security, or RtoP which can be understood as forming one— fairly narrow—part of the human security agenda, are recognised in Joseph Camilleri’s contribution to this volume. As Camilleri notes, sustained policy change requires a genuine commitment from the top of government—not just to the relevant language but to a detailed policy agenda associated with that language. The articulation of such an agenda requires input not only from government departments, but also from parliament and society—the ‘whole-of-society’ approach identified by Camilleri. Taking up these issues, this chapter examines Australia’s first steps towards implementing RtoP into national policy, focusing especially on the appointment of a ‘national coordinator’. It argues that Australia played a key part in the origins and development of the principle. Most notably, foreign minister Gareth Evans was a principal norm entrepreneur for RtoP, without whom the principle would not have emerged and evolved. The chapter also notes that the Australian government has been a key and vocal supporter of RtoP, much to its credit. However, Australia has so far avoided incorporating atrocity prevention systematically into its foreign policy. In the conclusion, I examine the reasons for this and propose some remedies. The chapter proceeds in five parts. First, I briefly examine the prominent role of Australians in developing and advocating RtoP— notably the norm entrepreneurial role played by Gareth Evans but also the roles of Alexander Downer and former Permanent Representative to the UN, John Dauth. Second, I set out the Australian government’s commitment to RtoP and briefly discuss the sources of that commitment. Third, I explore the use of national focal points as a first step towards implementing RtoP into foreign policy. The fourth section reflects on how Australia interprets and is implementing its own focal point strategy. The fifth, concluding section, explains and evaluates this approach and argues for the establishment of a ‘task force’ to examine the adoption of a more comprehensive strategy for implementing RtoP. 171

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Before proceeding, though, it is important to stress that this chapter relates only to the incorporation of RtoP into foreign policy and that this does not exhaust the principle’s policy implications. As I noted earlier, RtoP’s first pillar relates to the state’s responsibility to protect its own population from genocide and mass atrocities. This suggests that there are significant domestic policy implications. There is a temptation to think that stable developed states such as Australia need not invest in the first pillar, owing to the low likelihood of genocide and mass atrocities. This should be avoided for at least three reasons. First, RtoP’s first pillar is universal and enduring in scope. Second, taking pillar one seriously strengthens the principle as a whole by demonstrating that it is not only directed against the world’s weak and unstable states. Third, RtoP applies not just to ‘citizens’ but to all populations under a state’s care. Potential relevant activities for Australia fall into two baskets. The first relates to measures designed to prevent ethnic or racial violence, or incitement to violence. This might include further work on the recognition of past wrongs to Australia’s indigenous peoples and reconciliation with those peoples, the incorporation of RtoP considerations into Australia’s periodic review at the UN Human Rights Council, an examination of racism, racial violence and media incitement—an issue brought to the fore by the Cronulla riots and the role of sections of the media. The second basket of activities relates to measures that Australia might take to protect non-citizens under its care. Two UNHCR officials have argued that states exercise their RtoP by fulfilling their obligations under international refugee law and providing safe refuge to those who flee genocide and mass atrocities (Barbour and Gorlick 2008). There is a strong case for viewing immigration policy as a central tenet of the implementation of the RtoP. We need to interrogate whether aspects of actual and proposed policies—such as deterrence of flight, arbitrary detention, deporting asylum seekers to non-Convention countries and towing boats back into international waters—are consistent with Australia’s responsibility to protect from the four crimes all people under the its care. australians as norm entrepreneurs Middle powers have often acted as norm entrepreneurs. The most often discussed cases are Canada’s promotion of the international convention on the prohibition of landmines and its support for the 172

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International Criminal Court. To some extent, Australians can lay claim to having played a key role as norm entrepreneurs of RtoP. This section identifies two particularly important contributions that prominent Australians have made. First, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans formulated the RtoP principle itself. Second, Evans and Australia’s permanent mission to the UN played an important norm entrepreneurship role. Evans was instrumental in persuading Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel to adopt the RtoP principle and Australia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, John Dauth, helped broker the global consensus that emerged in 2005, with the support of the then Liberal Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer. Gareth Evans has been described by one commentator as possibly ‘the most influential Australian political figure of the past half century on the international stage’ (Gyngell 2009) and it is certainly true that he did more than any other single person to develop the RtoP concept and put it squarely on the global agenda. In 2000, Evans was invited by the Canadian government to co-chair the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty with Mohammad Sahnoun, and it is well known that along with Ramesh Thakur and Michael Ignatieff, Evans was responsible for writing the Commission’s final report, which coined the phrase Responsibility to Protect in its title. Perhaps less well known is the fact that Evans himself first identified the term RtoP as a way of reconciling the principles of human rights and state sovereignty. Sometime between the Commission’s Ottawa and Geneva roundtables in early 2001, Gareth Evans came up with the idea of reframing the debate in terms of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (Weiss and Hubert 2001:335). The participants at Geneva endorsed ‘the possible approach’ of RtoP though several argued that the Commission continued to place undue emphasis on the military dimension—an oft-repeated criticism. The RtoP phrase won broad, though not universal, support from the Commission’s subsequent roundtables (see Bellamy 2009). Having devised the principle, Evans went on to play the role of ‘norm entrepreneur’. He helped protect RtoP from the fallout over Iraq and then ensured that it was placed on the agenda at the 2005 World Summit. When ham-fisted attempts were made to stretch the concept to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Evans denounced the proponents of this view, rightly arguing that the ‘poorly and inconsistently’ argued humanitarian justification for the war in Iraq ‘almost choked at birth what many were hoping was an emerging new norm justifying intervention on the basis of the principle of “responsibility 173

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to protect”’ (Evans 2004:62). Although the Iraq experience undoubtedly damaged efforts to build consensus on RtoP, Evans’ denunciation of the invasion and insistence that nothing in the principle could be used to justify it, helped insulate RtoP from the worst of the fallout. Thus, while Iraq slowed progress towards consensus on RtoP, the principle lived to fight another day. After being appointed to serve on Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel charged with recommending reforms that would enable the UN to respond more effectively to twenty-first century challenges, Evans persuaded the panel to incorporate the RtoP. In its December 2004 report, the Panel endorsed the ‘emerging norm that there is a responsibility to protect’ and confirmed the developing consensus that this norm was ‘exercisable by the Security Council’ (High Level Panel 2004:para. 203). As David Hannay’s (2008:211–222) account of High Level Panel’s deliberations attests, the adoption of RtoP was in no way assured and took persistent advocacy on Evans’ part. When the High Level Panel’s recommendation on RtoP was adopted by Annan himself, the effort began to draft a reform document that could command a consensus in the General Assembly. Australia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, John Dauth, played an important role in the process. In late 2004, the General Assembly’s President, Jean Ping, Foreign Minister of Gabon, began consulting with the permanent delegations. Ping brought together ten permanent representatives, including two from the Western bloc (Australia and the Netherlands) to act as summit ‘facilitators’. The facilitators were responsible for negotiating on the text with the wider membership and for establishing points of consensus. Ping had anticipated that a final draft would be prepared and agreed by the end of August 2005, well before the summit itself in September. In the end, the summit negotiations proved more protracted and divisive than Ping or Annan had imagined and were only concluded at the last minute, when it seemed that the whole reform agenda would collapse. In the diplomatic maelstrom, RtoP made it into the summit declaration despite last-ditch attempts to have it removed. As John Dauth later explained in a personal email to the author, the final text was agreed in the North’s Delegates Room at the very last minute, reflecting ‘only an absolute determination on our side to have the concept included, at the cost of dropping everything else’. 174

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rtoP and the rudd/gillard government Australia’s commitment to RtoP continued with the change of government in 2007; indeed, its level of support for the principle increased significantly. In this area at least, there was striking continuity of policy between the Rudd and Gillard-led governments, perhaps indicating Rudd’s leadership on this issue area. Australia has consistently spoken in favour of the principle in UN Security Council meetings on the Protection of Civilians and at the UN Human Rights Council. For example, at a 2008 Council meeting on the Protection of Civilians, Australia’s statement of support for the RtoP provided one of the clearest single-paragraph statements to date of what the principle stands for. As the Australian representative put it: In 2005, world leaders recognized the responsibility we all share to protect vulnerable communities from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. While it is the primary role of States to protect their own populations from these evils, the international community has a responsibility to assist States to exercise that responsibility and, in appropriate circumstances, to take collective action, consistent with the [United Nations] Charter, to prevent such mass atrocity crimes.

Australia also joined calls for the UN to begin translating the principle from words into deeds, arguing that ‘[m]ore must be done to develop a practical approach for implementation of the responsibility to protect principle’ and then welcoming the appointment of Edward Luck as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on RtoP and stating that ‘Australia looks forward to working with Member States to continue our consideration of the principle and to give effect to it in appropriate circumstances’ (S/PV.5898, 27 May 2008:25). Australian support for the implementation of RtoP has remained clear and unambiguous. It used the 2009 meeting on the Protection of Civilians to voice its support for the Secretary-General’s 2009 report on strengthening the RtoP and clarifying measures for implementation, stating that: ‘we expect the report to contribute to a shared conceptual understanding of the principle that was agreed by our leaders at the 2005 World Summit and to a shared appreciation of what is required on the part of Member States and the United Nations to implement the principle’ (S/PV.6066 (Resumption 1), 14 January 2009:17). In addition, Australia identified the need to address 175

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challenges relating to the implementation of protection mandates in peace operations, citing the recent adjustment of the mandate of the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) authorising additional capacity as an example of the protection challenges posed by complex crises. In January 2009, Australia co-hosted with Uruguay a seminar on protection mandates. In May 2009, the Australian government announced a significant deepening of its commitment to RtoP. In addition to lending diplomatic support to the principle, participating in the ‘Group of Friends’ in New York, and providing financial assistance to the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser and subsequently the Joint Office, the government also committed itself to support research and outreach work aimed at strengthening the principle and building capacity through a $2 million Australian RtoP Fund and various track-two initiatives such as the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, its Global Centre partner based in New York, and the newly-established international civil society coalition, also based in New York. Taken together, these initiatives made Australia one of the world’s most active proponents of the RtoP principle. More recently, in 2011 Australia was at the forefront of calls to apply RtoP to the situation in Libya. At a Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd urged his colleagues to ‘send a strong message to the Gaddafi regime’, reminding them that the international community had ‘a responsibility to protect civilian populations from mass atrocities’ (in Dunne and Gifkins 2011). In May 2011, Rudd gave a key speech on the topic of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ in which he strongly reiterated Australia’s commitment to RtoP and outlined four steps that the government planned to take—or was already taking—to give effect to this commitment: 1 The appointment of a senior DFAT official as national RtoP coordinator; 2 An offer to host a meeting of national RtoP focal points (see below); 3 An offer to assist in co-chairing a ministerial meeting on RtoP in New York concurrent with the UN General Assembly’s annual plenary session; 4 A commitment to provide financial support to several bodies engaged in work to implement and advocate the RtoP, including the Asia-Pacific Centre, the Global Centre, the International 176

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NGO coalition on RtoP, and the Joint Office of the UN SecretaryGeneral’s Special Advisers on Genocide Prevention and RtoP (Rudd 2011). There are two underlying reasons why Australia has adopted an enduring and bipartisan commitment to RtoP (the association of RtoP with Australian values and its fit with national security interests) and one additional reason why the Rudd/Gillard governments have been particularly strident in its RtoP advocacy (the connection between RtoP and the government’s policy of re-engaging with multilateralism). rtop and multilateralism A cornerstone of the Rudd’s foreign policy was what the government describes as a re-engagement with multilateral institutions. Indeed, strengthening the global multilateral system—and the UN especially— was identified by former Foreign Minister Stephen Smith as one of the three principal pillars of Australian foreign policy, a vision first proposed by Rudd during his time as Opposition Spokesman for Foreign Affairs. This preference for multilateralism, it should be stressed, is a key part of the ALP’s foreign policy tradition. For example, in the negotiations that preceded the establishment of the UN Charter, Herbert ‘Doc’ Evatt had been a prominent champion of the rights of small and medium-sized states, and in the early 1990s Gareth Evans played an important role in reinvigorating the global body after the Cold War by leading both efforts to establish peace in Cambodia and calls for the strengthening of the UN system. In a number of speeches in 2007–2008, Rudd and Smith argued that the Howard government’s preference for bilateralism was unsuited to addressing the complex global challenges—including climate change, environmental degradation, terrorism and transnational crime, and nuclear proliferation—confronting Australia today. Instead, they argued that in an interdependent world, such challenges could not be addressed by one state alone or even by two states working together. Solutions required multilateral engagement through both regional and global frameworks. Australia’s campaign for election to the UN Security Council was one part of a much broader policy of constructive re-engagement with the UN. Three elements in particular are worth noting. First, the decision to expand Australia’s overall commitment to international 177

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aid and in particular Australia’s aid commitment to Africa. Although this has proven controversial in light of the budget deficit, both elements of this policy were signalled prior to the 2007 election and reflect longer-standing ALP commitments to Africa. Second, the commitment to strengthening peace operations and to playing a leadership role in developing the UN’s protection of civilians in armed conflict agenda. Significant innovations in this area include the following: the establishment of a standing deployable police capacity (the Australian Federal Police’s (AFP) International Deployment Group), initiated by the Howard government and augmented by the appointment of an Australian (Andy Hughes) as the UN’s senior police adviser; diplomatic leadership on the protection of civilians issue, demonstrated by the co-hosting of a meeting on the subject in New York; and establishment of an Asia-Pacific Centre of Excellence in Civil-Military Cooperation, spearheaded by arguably Australia’s leading thinker on the protection of civilians, Michael Smith. The third form of Australian engagement with the UN was in the field of climate change, where the government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, set aside funds to assist developing countries to meet environmental challenges and committed to play a constructive role in the Kyoto review process—a move which ultimately failed and contributed to the ousting of Rudd as prime minister. However, while these three elements of constructive engagement with the UN may explain why the Rudd government stepped up support for the RtoP, it does not account for the bipartisan nature of that support. To do that, we need to consider the synergies between RtoP and Australia’s values and interests. rtop and australian values Although foreign policy under the Howard government is usually portrayed as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘realist’, it is important to recognise that there was deep synergy between the two basic claims made by RtoP and the values of Australian policy-makers from both sides of politics, as expressed by their foreign policy behaviour. At its core, RtoP makes two basic claims: (1) states are responsible for the protection of their populations from genocide and mass atrocities; (2) when they manifestly fail to protect their populations, the international community acquires a responsibility to step in with appropriate measures. These claims sit comfortably alongside Australian ideas about universal principles of basic fairness and natural 178

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justice, resulting in clear continuity of thought on this subject. There is a history of bipartisan commitment to both these tenets, stretching back over a number of years and covering crises in Cambodia, Namibia, East Timor, Darfur, the Solomon Islands, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and elsewhere. In relation to each of these crises, governments from both parties criticised governments when they failed to fulfil their most basic sovereign responsibilities, supported international measures assuming responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations and censured international bodies when they failed to deliver on their responsibilities. While the Howard and Rudd governments may have disagreed on the relative merits of the UN as peacekeeper—with the Howard government preferring coalitions of the willing and regional arrangements—on core values there was a deeper synergy between the two. It was the Howard government, let us recall, that led the interventions into East Timor and the Solomon Islands, established a standing deployable police capacity and ratified Australia’s accession to the International Criminal Court (ICC). All these measures displayed a core commitment to the basic values of RtoP. That said, one overlooks at one’s peril the pragmatic streak in Australia’s foreign policy: pragmatism has certainly been evident in Australia’s approach to implementing RtoP (see below). rtop and australian interests A third reason for Australia’s commitment to RtoP lies in the synergy between the implementation of the principle and Australia’s security interests, both regional and global. As the 2009 Defence White Paper made clear, Australian interests are best protected by the maintenance of order. As well as being ethically valuable, states that are responsible and effective states are seen as the best barriers against challenges such as international terrorism, transnational crime, people smuggling and irregular migration, all challenges associated with global interdependence. In 2009, this interdependence was demonstrated by the fact that the escalation of violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka produced an increase in people seeking asylum in Australia. Moreover, as the global financial crisis made abundantly clear, Australia’s wealth depends on international trade. As such, there is a close link between Australia’s security interests, national wealth and the maintenance of order and stability, and a connection between the latter and RtoP. A good 179

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example of this relationship in practice is the Regional Assistance to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) program. As we noted earlier, RtoP’s second pillar relates to the international community’s responsibility to assist states to build the capacity to protect. The range of possible assistance that might be provided to states extends from small-scale bilateral partnerships covering technical matters, to different forms of targeted development assistance, to comprehensive and multifaceted assistance arrangements such as RAMSI. Deployed at the request of the Solomon Islands government and organised under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Forum, RAMSI assisted the Solomon Islands government in restoring law and order, disarming armed groups and ensuring that the Islands’ criminals were tried under the criminal justice system. Over time, RAMSI has transitioned into a broader capacity-building partnership aimed at helping the government to build and sustain the rule of law, good governance, local conflict resolution mechanisms, and economic development. As such, although it has encountered many challenges, RAMSI provides an excellent example of pillar two engagement at work. Crucially, for our purposes, the immediate catalyst for Australia’s decision to work with the Pacific Islands Forum in assisting the Solomon Islands, was the release of a report in June 2003 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) (Wainwright 2003). The report claimed that the collapse of the government in the Solomon Islands posed a threat to Australian security because it would make the Solomon Islands a potential haven for organised international criminals and, more worryingly, terrorists. A few days after the report was released, the Australian government called for the establishment of RAMSI, augmenting with a humanitarian case for action the security arguments put forward by ASPI. A similar case—that the maintenance of stability through measures to assist sovereigns under stress supports the defence of Australia’s interests—could also be made in relation to Australia’s commitments to East Timor and Cambodia, and its more remote commitments to operations off the coast of Somalia. It is clear from this section that the Australian government has voiced strong support for RtoP, its implementation and the prevention of mass atrocities more generally. This has been much clearer and more consistent than Australia’s support for human security more generally. Moreover, although Evans and Rudd might be the most vocal advocates of the principle in political circles, RtoP enjoys bipartisan support thanks to a combination of material and normative factors. This brings us to the question of how governments might 180

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give effect to their support for RtoP. Earlier, I noted that former Foreign Minister Rudd identified four key elements of policy directed towards this goal, the key one being the appointment of a national ‘RtoP coordinator’. The remainder of the chapter examines the idea of implementing RtoP through national coordinators or ‘focal points’ and evaluates Australia’s approach. mainstreaming rtop: national foCal points National governments are pivotal to the implementation of RtoP and the prevention of mass atrocities. Besides fulfilling their own responsibility to protect, ensuring that the United Nations and regional arrangements have the political support and resources they need to implement their atrocity prevention plans, and making resources available for preventive efforts when international action is needed, national governments—especially those, like Australia, that have voiced loud support for the principle—should also give effect to their international commitments by integrating RtoP into foreign policy. A useful starting point is the idea of appointing national RtoP focal points. This idea was proposed by the Global Centre for RtoP, based in New York, and was adopted by the Group of Friends of RtoP. Among other things, the Global Centre proposed that national RtoP focal points would: • provide national decision-makers with early analysis of emerging situations considered likely to give rise to one or more of the RtoP crimes; • provide advice directly to the executive about matters relating to the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities; • coordinate national responses to mass atrocities—thereby providing an atrocity lens for national decision-making; • spearhead cooperation with the UN’s Joint Office Genocide Prevention and RtoP and other relevant agencies and offices; • help foster international consensus on the results of early warning analysis; • make it possible for governments to respond to mass atrocities in a timely and decisive fashion; • collaborate with other focal points. In the US, the Obama Administration pre-empted thinking about RtoP focal points in April 2010 by appointing David Pressman as 181

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Director for War Crimes, Atrocities, and Civilian Protection within the Office of the National Security Advisor. This appointment had been recommended by the bipartisan Genocide Prevention Task Force, whose 2008 report set out a comprehensive agenda for mainstreaming genocide prevention into US foreign policy (GPTF 2008). In 2011, the President issued Presidential Study Directive-10 (PSD-10) calling for, among other things, the establishment of a whole-of-government ‘Atrocity Prevention Board’. Other governments have followed the US lead but none have gone quite as far. Denmark, for instance, nominated its Human Rights Ambassador, Arnold Skibsted, as RtoP focal point. Although a modest first step, the appointment of national focal points creates the potential for an atrocity prevention lens to inform national-level decision making. Over time, this could strengthen national and regional approaches to preventing mass atrocities, as well as facilitate United Nations activities in this area. In May 2011, Costa Rica, Denmark and Ghana convened an inaugural meeting of national focal points in New York. Attended by the representatives of thirty-one countries—suggesting a decent though modest degree of initial take-up—the meeting’s main focus was on how to give meaning to the role of ‘focal point’ strategy, and to establish a useful network of focal points. In relation to the first issue, while delegates agreed on the need to openly embrace a ‘mass atrocity prevention culture’ there were differences on the appropriate location of focal points within national systems. Nonetheless, there was agreement that the role of the focal point was to act as a convener and coordinator of state power rather than an implementer in its own right. Moreover, there was broad agreement that the domestic role of focal points included the development and implementation of national RtoP plans, the gathering of information about domestic situations and the coordination of national preventive strategies. It should be stressed here that some Western governments, Australia included, continue to see domestic implementation as something that only ‘weak’ or vulnerable states should do. For these states, RtoP is viewed as an exclusively foreign policy affair. As a matter of external policy, the principal role of the focal point would be to socialise policy-makers and to advocate the principle, coordinate atrocity prevention planning, provide early warning and assessment, coordinate national responses to mass atrocities overseas, liaise with others, support prevention and aid the work of the UN and relevant regional bodies. According to the Global Centre 182

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for RtoP (2011), ‘one of the top initial priorities identified for focal points is to establish an early warning system within their office for receiving and disseminating information about emergent situations in both their respective countries and neighbourhoods’. The logic here is that early warning advice forces policy-makers to consider the options and take decisions while the associated analysis provides a repository of information and the catalyst for the development of policy options. Confronted with clear advice about the risk of atrocities and a range of plausible policy options, decision-makers would be forced to either take steps to prevent atrocities or face the judgement of history that they chose to do nothing in the face of clear information about imminent threats. It is widely recognised that cooperation between governments is important for both advancing norms and practices of atrocity prevention and for responding effectively when crises erupt. As a result, it is not surprising that the inaugural meeting of focal points agreed to establish a network that could accomplish four primary goals. First, conduct regional monitoring and peer-reviewing aimed at strengthening early warning. Second, mobilise ‘coalitions of support, dialogue and preventive action’ at both the regional and global levels. Third, foster strong partnerships between the UN and regional organisations. Fourth, socialise governments and societies into a culture of prevention and decisive response to mass atrocities. To achieve these goals, the network would not only tie governments together through the focal points but also tie in regional arrangements and the UN system, the latter through the Joint Office. There is a danger of overlap between the focal points network and the New York-based Group of Friends of RtoP which comprises representatives from like-minded permanent missions to the UN, and is currently chaired by The Netherlands and Rwanda. Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General, Edward Luck, helpfully suggested that the two groups’ different memberships implied different functions: the ‘friends’ comprised like-minded governments who cooperated in joint advocacy at the UN; the appointment of ‘focal points’ does not require ‘friendship’ of RtoP and can therefore provide a basis for dialogue between governments with different views on the principle. Although there is broad agreement amongst like-minded states that the establishment of national focal points and a network of focal points is a useful first step towards implementing RtoP in national policy, governments also agree that significant challenges lie ahead. 183

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Perhaps the most pressing question, which resonates with some of Camilleri’s concerns about human security concerns more broadly, relates to establishing an appropriate space for focal points within national bureaucracies and to defining their roles vis-a-vis existing agencies and mandates. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to implementing new policy agendas into existing bureaucratic structures. In practice, it is likely that the form given to national RtoP focal points by different countries will include elements of each. Both have significant advantages and some pitfalls. The first, which characterises the approach pursued in the US, is specialisation. This approach rests on the premise that in order to get something done, it has to be made somebody’s job. The specialisation route involves the establishment of a post or office tasked with performing work directly related to the issue area at hand—in this case the prevention of mass atrocities and coordination of responses. The main strengths of this approach are that institutionalisation makes it more likely that the work will actually get done and the establishment of an ‘interest group’ within national bureaucracies makes it more likely that a mass atrocity prevention perspective will be brought to bear on the policy process. Indeed, one way of conceptualising this approach is by seeing it as establishing a mass atrocity prevention seat at the policy table. In this scheme of things, the focal point would argue the mass atrocity prevention case in policy debates and provide a unique perspective. This perspective could also contribute to longer-term planning by providing advice to foreign aid programs about the impact of aid programming on atrocity prevention and the identification of specific long-term preventive programs that might be funded. Interestingly, although Australia has not taken this approach to RtoP and atrocity prevention, AusAID has incorporated it to some extent with the appointment of specialist advisers to guide policy and practice covering thematic areas such as conflict and gender. This model generates the capacity to provide independent advice to senior decision-makers and to bring an atrocity prevention lens to bear on decision-making. In other words, by making atrocity prevention somebody’s job, it gives physical meaning to the idea of ensuring that atrocity prevention has a voice at the policy table. David Pressman, the US National Security Council’s Director for War Crimes and Atrocities and RtoP focal point, has argued it is imperative that focal points be located within the national government (rather than in Permanent Missions to the UN, for example), have sufficient 184

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standing to deliver inputs directly into executive decision-making— including early-warning advice that the executive might not wish to hear—and have the capacity to coordinate policy across a number of relevant departments and agencies. In some situations, the national focal point may be called upon to direct whole-of-government responses to the threat of mass atrocities and the appointment should have the seniority and capacity to fulfil this role. Assigning the role of focal point to a diplomat housed in a country’s permanent mission to the United Nations would limit the position’s capacity to advise executive decision-making and coordinate national responses, thereby undermining the role and the priority of the atrocity lens in national decision-making. The principal weakness of this model is its susceptibility to political change. As an essentially political appointment, a specialised atrocity prevention/RtoP focal point role would be vulnerable to being eliminated by a future government less committed to RtoP. This poses a risk of discontinuity only too evident in the Australian context. Although RtoP has enjoyed bipartisan support in Australia, there is a risk that a future Liberal government might see RtoP as a plank of Labor foreign policy, one that it might rhetorically support but not commit resources to. One potential remedy might be to ensure that the specialist focal point position is institutionalised in and supported by a public service base. Another might be to secure bipartisan commitment, much as the US did when the establishment of the position of Director for War Crimes and Atrocity Prevention was recommended by a bipartisan task force (Genocide Prevention Task Force 2008), and to ensure that the focal point engages in dialogue and information sharing with the opposition party. A crucial aspect in this may be the independence of the focal point and its capacity to deliver advice that runs counter to the particular policies of the government of the day. A further weakness of this approach is bureaucratic. Establishing a specialised focal point could run the risk of creating an institutional silo that inhibits the spread of RtoP norms and its culture of prevention through relevant government departments and agencies. This tendency has already been evident in relation to gender, where the establishment of offices dedicated to advancing women’s rights have tended to be used by other bureaucratic arms to justify their inaction on the issue. The inadvertent inhibition of mainstreaming might run counter to the purposes of the focal points initiatives. An associated problem is bureaucratic clout. It is unlikely that major departments 185

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and programs—such as aid agencies, foreign affairs departments, intelligence agencies or militaries, with massive budgets—would share sensitive information with, or pay much attention to, the advice of a specialist focal point with a small (if any) staff and tiny budget. This would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the focal point to play a convening or coordinating role in the event of an emergency or imminent emergency. It is important to stress, however, that the US model goes some way towards addressing this problem by situating the focal point inside the National Security Agency, thereby theoretically allowing it to speak and act through the National Security Advisor, with all the clout this office commands. Moreover, as US decision-making in the run up to the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya shows, the sharing of information across government agencies may result in the establishment of informal coalitions that include the focal point. In that case, the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Permanent Representative to the UN Susan Rice and Presidential Advisor Samantha Power were key vehicles for advancing the atrocity prevention case and helped to persuade the President to act over the contrary advice of the Secretary of Defense and some others. The second approach is mainstreaming. Rather than creating specific offices and mandates, the mainstreaming approach is premised on the view that the best way to implement policy or mindset shifts is to integrate it throughout the work of a bureaucracy. By this account, rather than making atrocity prevention the concern of a few specialists, governments should make it the business of all their bureaucrats in relevant departments and agencies. Thus, rather than giving atrocity prevention a seat at the table, mainstreaming suggests that everyone at the table be versed in atrocity prevention. The key strength of this approach is that it is much less vulnerable to political change and more likely to withstand changes of government, providing a foundation for long-term implementation. This gives it a potentially better chance to be sustainable and strengthens the likelihood of RtoP being incorporated into the public service’s standard operating procedures. Some also suggest that the mainstreaming approach increases the chances of coordination across government departments (Global Centre 2011), but this could also work both ways with a generalist within a department becoming more susceptible to departmental ‘stovepiping’ and insularity. Finally, mainstreaming appears to offer the best way to ensure that 186

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norms are internalised throughout relevant departments so that they become a regular part of thinking and decision-making. But there are some serious weaknesses with the mainstreaming approach. As bitter experience with attempts to mainstream conflict prevention in the UN attest, if the task of policy implementation is not given to a specific actor it is not likely to get done. On the one hand, mainstreaming might simply be overlooked entirely. This is not helped by the fact that it is often not altogether clear what mainstreaming entails or how we know when something has been mainstreamed. Without a clear understanding of what mainstreaming might entail and how it might be measured, tangible implementation and behavioural change is unlikely. On the other hand, bureaucracies tend to resist external change and protect their own programs, behaviours and modes of thinking. Mainstreaming allows them to do this by employing new language to redescribe what they were doing anyway. In this way, agencies can claim to have mainstreamed a particular policy or idea without actually changing their behaviour. There was some evidence of this, for example, in the way that some humanitarian non-governmental organisations and UN humanitarian agencies mainstreamed the protection of civilians agenda by simply relabelling work with displaced persons and other vulnerable groups as protection. This gets us to the related problem that mainstreaming can be equated with policy on the cheap. States following the mainstreaming approach might be able to avoid assigning new staff or resources to atrocity prevention, which might mean that in overburdened bureaucracies little—if any—new work will actually be done. If governments succumb to this pitfall, it is unlikely that they will strengthen their capacity for early warning and analysis or their cooperation with other states, the UN and regional organisations. As Camilleri notes, the adoption of new ways of thinking about and practising security raises a host of complex implementation questions. This is evident even in relation to the seemingly modest move of implementing the RtoP by appointing national focal points. Having sketched out the basic ideas surrounding the focal points initiative and two broad concepts for integrating it into foreign policy, the following section provides a brief overview of the steps that Australia has taken thus far.

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the australian approaCh Australia’s former foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, first committed the government to establishing an RtoP focal point at a ministerial meeting in New York held concurrently with the annual general debate of the UN General Assembly in September 2010. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) was then tasked with developing a way of implementing this commitment. This, it should be stressed, came in a context of cuts to DFAT’s budget on top of nearly two decades of budgetary decline, and a burgeoning international portfolio including renewed activism in global climate change talks, regional multilateralism, nuclear non-proliferation and a bid for election to the UN Security Council. DFAT officials also considered that Australia has limited international influence when it comes to crisis decision-making and that, in practice, it is much more likely to be a follower than a leader in shaping international responses to mass atrocities. Against this background, it was agreed largely by default that the focal point would be housed within DFAT (alternatives might have been to situate it in the Prime Minister and Cabinet Office, the Department of Defence, or AusAID—I have seen no evidence that these options were considered), and DFAT’s budgetary and workload situation meant that there was clearly little scope for the establishment of a new office even if that was the direction ministers and officials wanted to go—and there is no evidence that it was. Beyond the establishment of the focal point, there was little in the way of specific tasking, but key priorities identified by the minister and DFAT officials included: (1) promoting and building consensus on RtoP in the Asia-Pacific region; (2) supporting the work of civil society groups, including the Asia-Pacific Centre for RtoP, the Global Centre for RtoP and the Global NGO Coalition for RtoP, aimed at furthering RtoP; (3) coordinating activities with the UN’s Joint Office; (4) supporting the work of the emerging network of RtoP focal points, including by offering to host a meeting of focal points in Australia. Absent from this list were some elements that were central in earlier ideas about the role of focal points; especially early warning and assessment functions, strategic planning, the provision of atrocity-specific advice, and the coordination of national responses to imminent and actual atrocities. In early 2011, Rudd announced the appointment of Deborah Stokes, a senior DFAT official with ambassadorial experience, as the 188

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‘national coordinator’ for RtoP. The appointment of such a senior official to this role appeared to signal that the Australian government intended to reshape its practices to take account of RtoP and atrocity prevention and, at face value from the foreign minister’s speech, nodded towards the specialisation model (Rudd 2011). However, this was not what was planned since the role of ‘national coordinator’ was only one of many responsibilities assigned to Stokes. Her other responsibilities included managing a department containing more than one hundred staff and covering such matters as: Australia’s relations with the UN, its international diplomacy on the environment and climate change, management of the team charged with Australia’s campaign for election to the UN Security Council, and hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM). The role of RtoP coordinator was therefore only one of several tasks given to Stokes, and one of the least pressing in terms of the personnel and budgetary requirements. No DFAT officials were added to Stokes’ team to cover the RtoP brief which was managed in the same way as before, by the small team working on UN issues. To date, perhaps the most prominent practical role adopted and advanced by the ‘national coordinator’ is steering Australia’s support for regional advocacy of RtoP as a principle. This was identified as a key priority and includes encouraging other governments in the region to appoint their own RtoP focal points. The principal cornerstone of this strategy has been the financial support to civil society discussed earlier, which predated the appointment of a national coordinator. One of the products of this financial support was the release in 2011 of the Final Report of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) Study Group on RtoP, an initiative partly funded by Australia and co-chaired by CSCAP Australia (along with CSCAP Canada, CSCAP Indonesia and CSCAP Philippines). Accompanying the Group’s recommendations about strengthening regional capacity to prevent and respond to mass atrocities was a call for an ASEAN Regional Forum experts group to meet to evaluate the recommendations and to pass on its own recommendations that might eventually inform ministerial dialogue. Australian officials have indicated that Australia might consider taking up this proposal as part of its regional advocacy strategy. It is important to stress that DFAT understands the advocacy role of the RtoP focal point in traditional Westminster terms: as a civil servant, the focal point is there to advise and support the 189

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minister in his or her advocacy work and to execute ministerial instructions rather than to directly advocate. In relation to crisis response, Australian officials argue that the government already has effective whole-of-government mechanisms, which include the Australian Defence Force (ADF), for developing policy options, decision-making and implementation and see no need for overlaying them with new offices or instruments. For these officials, the relative smallness of the Australian government machinery, and the push over the past two decades to make government ‘joined up’, means that a combination of personal relationships and existing mechanisms are sufficient to meet the challenges. As a result they tend to see little merit in establishing a new national early warning capacity because there are already a plethora of information sources available to the government. Besides, they suggest that in practice, ministers—particularly activist ministers—tend to take information from a variety of sources. The logic that there is no need for behavioural change or new policies extends to Australia’s relationship with the UN’s Joint Office. Although coordinating with the Joint Office was a task specifically identified for both focal points and the focal point network, the appointment of a focal point is not expected to alter the way in which Australia relates to the Joint Office. Before the appointment of the national coordinator this was handled by the Permanent Mission, and most recently by the First Secretary responsible for legal affairs. It is not envisaged that this will change, with the Permanent Mission fielding the relationship with the UN and then reporting back to the focal point in Canberra. The one area where there will be change is that the national coordinator will attend focal points meetings. It is not clear who will represent Australia at Group of Friends meetings, but this will likely continue to be a diplomat from the Permanent Mission. hopes, limits and the Way forWard It seems clear from the preceding discussion that Australia has adopted a narrow interpretation of the role of national focal point. Clearly, from an RtoP perspective there is a lot to applaud in Australia’s approach: it has been a vocal champion of RtoP, it has supported the work of the UN Secretary-General, it has played a proactive and positive role in responding to RtoP-related emergencies both in its own neighbourhood and overseas and it has committed significant 190

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resources to supporting civil society. The latter has achieved good results, with the Asia-Pacific Centre for RtoP fostering dialogue in more than a dozen countries in the region and contributing to a significant and positive turnaround in regional attitudes. Australia has also pioneered the idea of whole-of-government coordination, has developed expertise in peace operations and the protection of civilians, and led the world in strategic thinking about international policing capacity. In other words, even without a focal point or specifically incorporating RtoP into foreign policy, Australia has already done more than many other like-minded governments to build the required capacity. However, the litmus test is whether the incorporation of RtoP into foreign policy makes a country better able to contribute to the prevention of mass atrocities and protection of vulnerable people. Simply put, all other things being equal, would the ‘national coordinator’ for RtoP have produced better protection outcomes in Timor-Leste in 1999 and Rwanda/DRC from 1995 onwards? The short answer is ‘probably not’. In relation to Timor-Leste, because it lacked a well-understood and operationalised mechanism for early warning and analysis, a clear route by which the RtoP focal point could alert the foreign minister, a process permitting the focal point in extremis to bring concerns directly to the prime minister or parliament, it is unlikely that the new arrangements would have added significant weight to existing warnings of atrocities in the event of a positive vote on independence. Only the processes mentioned above establish a paper trail demonstrating the clarity and reliability of advice to senior ministers necessary to influence them. It is likely that Prime Minister John Howard would have acted differently and taken more measures to ensure human protection in 1999 had a senior official backed by a clear mechanism and public voice warned him that atrocities in Timor were very likely without additional protective measures. This might also have put Indonesia on notice, tempering the behaviour of militia in Timor-Leste. In relation to Kibeho, part of the problem may have been that information gathered by Australian witnesses to the massacre was not passed on or translated into policy. More troubling is the possibility that information was passed on, but that the government of the day decided not to voice concerns because international opinion was so supportive of the RPF and so grateful that it had terminated the Rwandan genocide when then international community had failed to do so. The ‘national coordinator’ could at least have received this 191

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information from Australian defence personnel and circulated it, but without a strategic and analytical capacity, a public presence, or a direct relationship with relevant UN officials it is unlikely that this would have made much difference. There are many reasons for these limitations, but two stand out. First, although the Australian government has embraced the language of RtoP it has not embraced the principle more broadly or made a comprehensive commitment to integrate it into foreign policy. In short, to date the government tends to see RtoP more as a rhetorical device to support existing initiatives and behaviours than as a new policy departure. In sharp contrast to the Obama administration that has taken steps to incorporate atrocity prevention into US policy, Australia has not yet given strategic direction to its incorporation of RtoP into foreign policy. While at the time of writing Kevin Rudd was actively engaged on the issue, no additional resources have been assigned to support his own department’s work or that of the government more broadly. These problems are rooted in a wider predicament, identified by Camilleri in relation to human security more broadly: the absence of governmental, bureaucratic, parliamentary and societal debate about what ‘supporting RtoP’ actually means, what sorts of policies it entails and whether Australia is seriously committed to the idea of ‘ending mass atrocities once and for all’ (Evans 2009). Second, despite the best efforts of a relatively small number of people, there is no ‘whole-of-society’ engagement with atrocity prevention. The study of mass atrocities in Australian universities remains quite weak. Despite a proliferation of thinktanks on traditional security issues, Australia has no internationally-competitive peace research institute and no thinktanks capable of producing detailed analysis of ongoing and imminent emergencies and of offering viable policy recommendations. Outside academe, civil society coverage is patchy and commitment to it depends on the issue in question and the tireless work of individuals. The result is that there is a relatively weak community outside government offering analysis, giving detailed policy advice, advocating particular policies or responses and training the next generation. Reversing this problem poses challenges to academe, civil society and government itself. Here we might heed the advice of Camilleri and lessons from the USA. A first step might be to commission a bipartisan task force to explore how Australia might incorporate RtoP more fully into its foreign policy. Its deliberations would provide the context 192

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for a wider parliamentary and societal debate about Australia’s commitment to preventing mass atrocities and protecting vulnerable populations that might enable the emergence of new strategies and resources. aCknoWledgements Thanks to Dennis Altman, Sara Davies, Robyn Eckersley, Rachel Gerber, Pablo Kang, Edward Luck, Ladan Ocara, Sue Robertson, Monica Serrano, Deborah Stokes and Paul D Williams for assistance with this chapter. referenCes Barbour, B and D Gorlick 2008 ‘Embracing the Responsibility to Protect: A Repertoire of Measures Including Asylum for Potential Victims’, International Journal of Refugee Law 20(4):533–566. Bellamy, AJ 2009 The Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities, Polity, Oxford. Chesterman, S 2004 You, the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration and State-Building, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Connor, J 2009 ‘Intervention and Domestic Politics’ in David Horner, Peter Londey and Jean Bou eds Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty Years in the Field, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Department of Defence 2009 Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030, Defence White Paper. Dunne, T and J Gifkins 2011 ‘Libya and the State of Intervention’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 65(5):515–529. Evans, G 2004 ‘When is it Right to Fight?’ Survival 46(3):59–82. Evans, G 2009 The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF) 2008 Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for US Policy-makers, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC. Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 2011 ‘Meeting of National Focal Points on R2P’, New York, 17–18 May. Gyngell, A 2009 ‘The Norm Entrepreneur’, Australian Book Review, April. Hannay, D 2008 New World Disorder: The UN After the Cold War—An Insider’s View, IB Tauris, London. 193

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Horner, D, P Londey and J Bou eds 2009, Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty Years in the Field, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. High Level Panel 2004 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A/59/565, 2 December. Rudd, K 2001 ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility: Protecting the Rights of Individuals Within States’, speech to the Civil-Military Affairs Conference, Asia-Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence, 25 May. Rummel, RJ 1994 Death by Government, Transaction Books, New York. United Nations General Assembly 2005 ‘World Summit Outcomes’, UN Document A/60/L.1, 20 September. Wainwright, E 2003 ‘Our Failing Neighbour—Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 10 June. Weiss, TG and D Hubert 2001 The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background, IDRC, Ottawa.

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10 ConClusion: the politiCal virtues of human seCurity robyn eckersley

The chapters in this volume make it abundantly clear that human security is a contested concept. It is resisted by many traditional security analysts and practitioners, and there is disagreement among its supporters on a range of fundamental questions, including how to define the security referent, the sources and types of insecurity, the providers of security, the response to insecurities and the conditions for long-term security. The human security debate has also produced some strange bedfellows among the sceptics. For example, traditional security analysts have resisted the incursion of what they see as an unwieldy and over-burdened security discourse into their narrow and tidy domain, while critical security scholars fear that human security may be misappropriated by security elites. The concept has taken root in the United Nations system, but it has had a chequered history in influencing the security policies of nation-states and regions, as Joseph Camilleri has shown in his historical overview of theory and practice. Yet despite the many disagreements among scholars and policy-makers, the concept has not only persisted but also enjoyed slow but steadily increasing acceptance over the last two decades. Of course, the contested character of human security clearly raises major challenges for those seeking to promote and institutionalise human security as a coherent, over-arching framework for guiding security policy and practice in the new century, no less in Australia than elsewhere. Before offering some concluding reflections on how the chapters in this volume seek to meet these challenges, I want to 195

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suggest that this disagreement should not be considered as a problem that stands in the way of institutionalisation. Rather, disagreement should be welcomed because it has opened up the horizons of security thinking and exposed the complex policy trade-offs that are unavoidably part of security policy-making and practice. Should governments invest in more military hardware or more preventative health care? Should they invest in more border security or more overseas aid? Much has been said about the dangers of ‘securitising’ harms and risks that have not traditionally been understood as security threats (such as environmental problems, and threats to human health). However, much less has been said about the virtues of debating and therefore ‘democratising’ security discourses. Whatever else one may think of the concept of human security, it has spawned a rich array of arguments and counter-arguments that are the life-blood of any democracy. The debate has highlighted connections and contradictions between domestic and foreign policies, drawn attention to the interests that are privileged and those that are marginalised or neglected by different framings of security, exposed the opportunity costs of different national security policies and decisions and widened the range of security options on the table for local, national, regional and international communities. While the concept of human security is certainly an elastic one, it is not infinitely elastic. There are limits to how far it can be stretched since it both depends and plays upon pre-existing ideas of national security that have grown up alongside the nation-state. It requires the identification of harmful threats or risks, it plays on fundamental ideas of safety and protection and it calls for prioritisation in the policy queue. Indeed, this is the primary political virtue of human security: it unsettles and questions conventional understandings of security that are often taken for granted and insulated from the full glare of critical publicity. For example, if it is accepted that ‘weather of mass destruction’ is no less harmful to states and human communities than ‘weapons of mass destruction’ then a human security frame invites us to ask why governments typically adopt a much less risk-averse response to the former, but not the latter. This is how new ideas often take root—through appeal to analogies and anomalies—and proponents of human security have skilfully played upon traditional repertoires of securityspeak to stretch our comprehension and imagination of cause and effect, critically reflect upon ultimate ends and draw new connections between ends and means. 196

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The chapters in this book all demonstrate this virtue in different ways while also showing how critical scholarship can be constructive and policy-relevant. Together, they provide the first sustained analysis of how the concept of human security might be adapted and institutionalised in Australia. They also show how the concept of human security has the potential to inaugurate a sea change in Australia’s foreign policy away from the traditional notion of the Australian island continent as a fortress to be defended, and towards a deeper acknowledgement of the inextricable interdependencies between the security of Australia, the region and the rest of the world. While the pliability of human security is often seen as a liability, it can also be seen as representing another kind of virtue insofar as it is trans-ideological and trans-cultural and can therefore provide a flexible basis for cooperation. Human security can be accommodated by a wide range of political traditions (conservative, liberal, social democratic and green), and a wide range of cultural and religious perspectives. It can be made to speak to the values and experience of communities in many different places, from Torres Strait Islanders to Tasmanians, from Filipinos to Fijians, by tapping into shared values, experiences and matters of common concern. As Matt McDonald has persuasively argued in his chapter on ‘Human Security and the Politics of Security’, unless human security can be translated into a local idiom in ways that resonate with local values and narratives, it is unlikely to mobilise local understanding and support for security policies, or security interventions. These arguments are reinforced by Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Chris Roche in their chapter on ‘Security from below: An alternative perspective on human security’. If human security is fundamentally a people-centred concept, then it should begin with an appreciation of how insecurities are existentially experienced and understood at the local level. Without such an understanding, opportunities for an appropriately tailored response by a range of different ‘providers’ (both state and non-state) will be missed and well-meaning interventions to provide security may ultimately backfire. Of course, attentiveness to local experiences of insecurities should not preclude a more critical analysis of the broader structural drivers of insecurities, many of which may be beyond the reach of not only local communities but also individual states. Human security is ultimately a cosmopolitan concern that transcends the interests of nation-states and is rooted in the idea of respect for all persons, irrespective of ethnicity, nationality and religion. Yet the primary responsibility for providing security still rests 197

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with nation-states, so the provision of human security necessarily requires, among other things, international cooperation to redress common threats and risks to human safety and physical and mental wellbeing. The trans-ideological character of human security means that it has the potential to enable the fusing of horizons between different states, cultures and communities. Of course, sceptics might still insist that the elasticity of the concept of human security is precisely why it provides a poor basis for developing an analytically rigorous and coherent framework for guiding national security. According to this argument, human security may be fine for international organisations like the United Nations, and regional organisations that must also accommodate different cultures and communities, but not for nation-states that must treat national security as an overriding imperative. Yet this argument naïvely assumes that national security, unlike human security, is a tightly defined and clearly understood concept. Traditional conceptualisations of national security are no less elastic or contestable than human security. The ‘national interest’ is an empty signifier invoked by governments to represent interests, matters and concerns that are deemed of overriding importance. National security in defence of national interests is, like international anarchy, ‘what states make of it’ (with apologies to Alex Wendt). It is therefore a mistake to assume that national security and human security are necessarily irreconcilable. As Stephen James demonstrates in his chapter ‘In defence of breadth: The broad approach to human security’, just as the differences between broad and narrow understandings of human security are overdrawn, so too are the differences between human and national security. Indeed, one of the key insights of this book is that locating national security in a broader human security framework is more likely to deliver lasting national security over the longer term than the pursuit of a narrow understanding of national security that prioritises ‘the national interest’. Joseph Camilleri’s second chapter provides a comprehensive discussion as to how this might be done in the Australian context, beginning with a parliamentary inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. He also makes a strong case for not only a ‘whole-of-government’ approach but also a ‘whole-of-governance’ and ‘whole-of-society’ approach, one which acknowledges the important role played by all levels of government and civil society. Such an approach is eminently suited to the wide 198

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range of human security challenges that cannot be shoehorned into a traditional national security frame. In his mock national security strategy for Australia, which builds upon former Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 ‘National Security Statement’ to the Parliament (Rudd 2008), Anthony Burke also provides a practical demonstration of how human and national security might be reconciled. His strategy—called ‘Australia’s Global Security: A National Strategy for a More Secure World’—shows how a general normative commitment to human security can be framed in terms that are consistent with Australia’s national security, as well as with Australia’s commitment to international law, human rights and sustainable development. His national strategy provides a much more rigorous and far-sighted response to Rudd’s call for a renovated framing of national security than the 2009 Defence White Paper, which struggles fully to comprehend and accommodate many of the complex interdependencies that now characterise our globalised world. This is particularly evident in the White Paper’s definition of national security. After posing the question ‘What is meant by national security?’ the White Paper (Department of Defence 2009:20) replied: Freedom from attack or the threat of attack; the maintenance of our territorial integrity; the maintenance of our political sovereignty; the preservation of our hard won freedoms; and the maintenance of our fundamental capacity to advance economic prosperity for all Australians.

The White Paper’s formulation (which is more a national defence than a national security strategy) continues to betray an old Cold War mentality of ‘us versus them’ that fails to acknowledge Australia’s complicity in contributing to some of the new security risks that will increasingly dominate security debates in the twenty-first century. The most significant of these new threats is climate change, so I shall single it out for special treatment. While the White Paper mentions climate change, it does not consider it a significant enough threat before 2030 to warrant any significant shift in security policy. Yet all credible scientific assessments make it clear that the world is on a path of warming that is projected to reach around 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, which will take the world into the red zone of dangerous climate change unless there is a drastic reduction in aggregate global greenhouse emissions in the next critical decade (Steffen 2010). 199

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This fundamental point was forcefully delivered at a major conference on ‘Four Degrees or More?: Australia in a Hot World’, held at the University of Melbourne in July 2011, which painted a bleak picture of what four degrees means for Australia and the region (Four Degrees 2011a).1 The gathering of leading scientists showed that average annual temperatures in Australia are expected to increase by about 3 degrees to 5 degrees in coastal areas and 4 to 6 degrees inland by 2100, while extreme weather events (storms and floods, rain and hail, extremely high temperatures and wildfires) are expected to occur with greater frequency. Sea-level rise and storm surges are expected to damage and erode coastlines, coastal properties and coastal infrastructure. Average annual rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 50 per cent in southern Australia, with major implications for agricultural production and food security. Fisheries are expected to decline with increasing ocean acidification and the cost of food, water and transport fuels is expected to rise significantly. Coral bleaching will have a devastating effect on tourism and the many allied industries dependent on the Great Barrier Reef, and Australia is expected to face a major wave of species extinction. Added to these problems is the likely negative feedback loops arising from the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and the Arctic permafrost, which would release significant quantities of methane gas into the atmosphere and thereby accelerate global warming (Christoff and Eckersley 2011). Warming of even 2 degrees, which we are destined to overshoot, will have devastating impacts on most countries in our region. The Asia Pacific is one of the most natural disaster–prone regions in the world in terms of floods, cyclones and extreme rainfall, which will be seriously exacerbated by climate change (Asian Development Bank 2009:2). Low-lying island states and coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise and, in the case of some Pacific Islands, to total inundation in the medium to longer term. Both agricultural and fishery production will be seriously affected, with growing risks of food scarcity. Most estimates of climateinduced migration are unreliable, but the most widely cited estimate of the number of people moving within countries and across borders as a result of environmental change is around two hundred million by 2050 (International Organization for Migration 2011). However, if global average temperatures break through the 2 degrees ‘guardrail’ and climb to around 4 degrees or more by the end of the century, as currently predicted, then we can expect to see significant human 200

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suffering, loss of livelihoods and identity, along with the biggest people movement in human history. Among the texts adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council in its eighteenth regular session in 2011 was a resolution on human rights and climate change in which the Council ‘Reiterates its concern that climate change poses an immediate and far reaching threat to people and communities around the world and has adverse implications for the full enjoyment of human rights’ (Human Rights Council 2011). It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive threat to human security (whether narrowly or broadly conceived) than climate change, and difficult to imagine how it might be averted through an unreconstructed state-centric framework of national security. Even from a traditional national security perspective, the White Paper failed to assess the risks of climate change to the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) capabilities and to ‘homeland security’. In particular, the ability of the ADF to discharge its traditional role of safeguarding Australia from external threats will be compromised with the expected rising cost of transport fuels and the increasing risk of damage to coastal bases (Christoff and Eckersley 2011:13). It will also be increasingly called upon to assist in emergencies arising from extreme weather events. Most traditional security analysts have characterised climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ that will exacerbate a range of preexisting tensions and conflicts. They have focused on issues of border security arising from the movement of so-called ‘climate refugees’ as well as on threats to critical infrastructure (including military bases), disputes over the boundaries of exclusive economic zones and access to offshore resources (see, for example, Busby 2008; CNA Corporation 2007; CNA Corporation 2009; Dupont and Pearman 2005). While these are all important problems, to reduce climate change to an ‘external threat’ to the nation-state makes it appear as if it is emanating from outside the nationstate, as something ‘others’ do to ‘us’, as if the nation-state has no complicity in the generation of climate risks. In focusing only on external, acute, discrete and deliberate threats, the 2009 Defence White Paper’s formulation of national security effectively ignores internal, chronic, continuing and unintended threats and risks to the wellbeing of Australian citizens. This lopsided characterisation of the problem serves to obscure the underlying drivers of climate change (that is, continued use of fossil fuel), leading to a misallocation 201

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of responsibility and a misdirection of resources in responding to the problem. There are certainly dangers associated with securitising environmental problems such as climate change, but the ultimate question should not be whether securitisation is desirable or not but rather ‘what kind of securitization is likely to generate and legitimate a more concerted and effective national response to climate change’ (Christoff and Eckersley 2011:11). How, then, should national security be reformulated in the context of an over-arching, whole-of-government commitment to human security? The following formulation provides one possibility: National security is a set of conditions that enable a state to safeguard the physical and mental wellbeing and livelihoods of its citizens, and the integrity of its territory, including life support systems and ecosystems, from both direct and indirect threats and risks (Christoff and Eckersley 2011:14).

This formulation does not assume that all threats and risks to Australian citizens are externally-generated, or that they require a military response, but it is broad enough to include such threats and risks. It can encompass a national defence strategy as one significant component of a broader, whole-of-government human security strategy. It directs attention to the conditions that are most likely to guarantee lasting security, consistent with Australia’s international commitments to multilateralism and the rule of law. It also draws connections between human security and environmental security by acknowledging the need to safeguard the wellbeing of citizens and the ecosystems upon which they depend. Since Australia’s ecosystems are particularly fragile and especially vulnerable to climate change, this necessarily requires an aggressive response to climate change, which is also the first-best response to addressing the high vulnerability to climate change of Australia’s neighbours in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. A human security framework demands a whole-of-government response to climate change, from defence to government procurement, from energy policy to taxation policy, and from transport to industry and agriculture. Ultimately, this response would be coordinated and integrated by cabinet, which would need to identify and address contradictions and tensions across different policy domains, and across different levels of government. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to outline a policy and institutional blueprint, a few 202

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examples related to climate change should provide an indication of the ramifications of a human security approach. For the ADF, a human security framework would require building additional capacity for the provision of emergency disaster relief in response to the growing incidence of extreme weather events at home and in the wider region, to the east, north and west. It would also require a concerted effort to increase the energy efficiency and reduce the ‘carbon footprint’ of the ADF and to develop a climate adaptation strategy, including ‘climate-proofing’ defence installations and reducing dependence on oil before prices escalate with the onset of peak oil. For AusAID, it would require stepping up bilateral and multilateral aid to deal with the growing stresses and strains of climate change in the most-affected regions of the world—the Asia Pacific and Africa. This should include not only emergency relief but also financial and other resource provision for mitigation and adaptation that are additional to pre-existing aid commitments in accordance with Australia’s obligations and commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the new Green Climate Fund. The departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Climate Change, will face an increasingly demanding international climate agenda. Meetings and negotiations under the UNFCCC (including the negotiation of new protocols, compliance rules, ongoing review of commitments etc.) are expected to become a permanent and increasingly prominent feature of international politics. A commitment to human security necessarily requires an ongoing and full commitment to these UN goals and processes. Australia could also play a proactive and leading role in pushing for the negotiation of a new convention to deal with environmentally-induced forced migration to ensure an orderly, cooperative and equitable resettlement of displaced persons and to avoid a kneejerk domestic campaign based on ‘stopping the boats’. Yet among the myriad policies and measures that are potentially available, the centrepiece of a national response to climate change based on a human security framework would be an aggressive mitigation strategy in the critical decade ahead. This requires Australia to raise its ambition beyond the modest Copenhagen pledge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 from a 2000 baseline towards a target that is within the range recommended for developed countries by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, 203

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which is minus 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 from a 1990 baseline. Yet the definition of human security offered above would also require Australia to reconsider its heavy dependence on coal exports, since the emissions generated from these exports would ultimately undermine an aggressive domestic mitigation strategy. In the absence of breakthrough technologies, this could be best achieved through a multilateral response, such as a multilateral agreement that would oversee the orderly and equitable phase-out of the most polluting and most abundant fossil fuel.2 The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change made it clear that delaying restructuring towards a low-carbon economy is more costly than early action, and that the costs of restructuring will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of failing to avert dangerous climate change (Stern 2006). Nothing less will safeguard the wellbeing of Australians, ecosystems and the economy over the long term, and nothing less will safeguard the health, livelihoods and identities of those communities beyond Australia’s shores who are highly vulnerable to climate change. Although Australia has yet to make any concerted and comprehensive commitment to human security at the national level, there are some building blocks in existence (many of AusAID’s programs, such as its community-based climate change action grants to help developing countries respond to climate change) and others under construction (such as the new Energy Package enacted in 2011, which will put a price on carbon) that could provide some foundations for such a commitment. As Alex Bellamy shows, Australia has been an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of responsibility to protect (RtoP). This principle imposes new responsibilities upon both sovereign states and the international community to prevent mass atrocities and therefore forms an important component of both the narrow and broad human security agenda. Australia has engaged in regional advocacy of the principle, and it has taken some first steps towards implementing the principle through the appointment of a national coordinator. Yet no government has taken the step of placing RtoP in a broader, human security, context. Likewise, David Mickler has argued that Australia’s increasing engagement with Africa lacks a coherent guiding framework and that human security is an obvious candidate given the region’s acute and complex human security challenges. However, this should not be a cynical exercise to garner votes for Australia’s bid for an elected seat on the United Nations Security Council for 2013–2014, or merely 204

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to smooth the way for Australia’s mining companies, which are a growing presence in the region. A genuine engagement through a commitment to human security would require Australia to make a greater commitment to peacekeeping operations, the resettlement of refugees and famine relief. In this respect, Australia has much to learn from Norway—a very small state that has been able to wield international influence well beyond its size on the basis of what has been described as its ‘regime of goodness’ in overseas aid work (Witoszek 2011).3 Finding common cause with African nations on the challenges of both climate change mitigation and adaptation would provide another building block towards a more concerted commitment to human security. The security implications of climate change have so far been debated twice in the United Nations Security Council (in 2007 and 2011) and are likely to be revisited many times. Yet despite the many opportunities that beckon, the core elements of Australia’s foreign and security policy have undergone very little change since the end of the Second World War. The general bipartisanship in foreign and security policy regarding these core elements stands in stark contrast to the intense partisan debates between the major political parties over domestic public policy. James Cotton and John Ravenhill’s analysis of foreign policy during the Rudd/Gillard government shows that loyalty to the US alliance continues to represent the central pillar of national security policy, showing strong continuity with predecessors, and with no notable hedging strategies vis-a-vis China (Cotton and Ravenhill 2011). This reinforces Henry Nau’s (2007:36) argument that we can only understand relations between states when we factor in the relative identities, not just relative capabilities. But the point of this volume is that relations between states, including foreign policy identities, can change over time as a result of new forms of engagement over common problems. Australia has struggled to find a new vocabulary of foreign and security policy that might connect with its own region, even though—like its neighbours—it is more exposed to risks of climate change than most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. A human security framework, as Joseph Camilleri has argued in his second chapter, can provide ‘a useful bridge between the country’s past reliance on great and powerful friends and the need to accommodate and benefit from the current shift in the geopolitical and geoeconomic centre of gravity’. Far from an electoral liability, human security has been found to resonate with Australian voters who have 205

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shown that they consider health and environmental issues as no less pressing than economic and defence issues (Pietsch and McAllister 2010). Even if governments elect not to embrace a human security framework in the foreseeable future, they may find that it will be forced upon them, by the middle of the century, and most certainly by late century, by the sheer force of events. notes 1 For a follow-up report, see Four Degrees 2011b. 2 I am indebted to Peter Christoff, who came up with the idea of a ‘nonproliferation treaty’ for coal. 3 According to Witoszek (2011:13), the phrase ‘regime of goodness’ was coined by Terje Tvedt in light of Gro Harlem Brundtland’s claim that ‘It is typically Norwegian to be good.’

referenCes Asian Development Bank 2009 Policy Options to Support Climate-induced Migration, Technical Assistance Report Project Number: 43181-01 Research and Development Technical Assistance (RDTA), December. Busby, J 2008 ‘Who Cares about the Weather? Climate Change and US National Security’, Security Studies 17(3):468–504. Christoff, P and R Eckersley 2011 ‘No Island is an Island: Rethinking National Security in a Four Degree World’, paper presented to the International Studies Association Asia-Pacific Regional Section Inaugural Conference, University of Queensland, 29–30 September. CNA Corporation 2009 Powering America’s Defense: Energy and Risks to National Security, The CNA Corporation, Alexandria, VA. CNA Corporation 2007 National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, The CNA Corporation, Alexandria, VA. Cotton, J and J Ravenhill 2011 ‘Middle Power Dreaming: Australian Foreign Policy during the Rudd–Gillard Governments’ in J Cotton and J Ravenhill eds Middle Power Dreaming: Australia in World Affairs 2006–2010, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Department of Defence 2009 Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Defence White Paper 2009, Australian Government, Canberra. Dupont, A and G Pearman 2005 Heating Up the Planet: Climate Change and Security, Lowy Institute Paper No. 12, Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney. 206

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Four Degrees 2011a Conference Homepage, www.fourdegrees2011.com.au (accessed 22 April 2012). Four Degrees 2011b Follow-up website: http://www.sustainable.unimelb. edu.au/content/pages/conference-four-degrees-or-more-australia-hotworld (accessed 22 December 2011). Human Rights Council 2011 18th Session, 30 September 2011, Agenda item 3, Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development; A/HRC/18/L.26/Rev.1. International Organization for Migration 2011 ‘Migration and Climate Change’, http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/copnehagen-and-beyond (accessed 22 December 2011). Nau, HR 2007 Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions and Ideas, CQ Press, Washington, DC. Pietsch, J and I McAllister 2011 ‘Human Security in Australia: Public Interest and Political Consequences’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 64(2):225–244. Rudd, K 2008 First National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament, 4 December, http://www.iseas.edu.sg/aseanstudiescentre/ ascdf3_Rudd_NatSec_041209.pdf (accessed 22 December 2011). Steffen, W 2010 The Critical Decade: Climate Science, Risks and Responses, Commonwealth of Australia (Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency), Canberra. Stern, N 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change 2006, HM Treasury and Cabinet Office, London, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index. htm (accessed 28 December 2011). Witoszek, N 2011 The Origin of the ‘Regime of Goodness’: Remapping the Cultural History of Norway, Universitetforlaget, Oslo.

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index Note: page references to notes at the end of chapters are italicised. Abbott, Tony 4 see also Liberal Party of Australia ABC see Australian Broadcasting Corporation Aceh 74 Acharya, Amitav 14 Achieng, Roseline 155 ADF see Australian Defence Force Afghanistan 66, 73, 75, 94, 96, 98, 153, 179 local and tribal justice in 153 militarised humanitarianism in 27 and The Greens 4 and US military 22 AFP see Australian Federal Police Africa 8, 10, 43, 178, 203, 204–205 and Australia 127–147 and Australian diplomacy 128–129 and conflict resolution 141–142 corruption in 131, 140, 143 and development assistance 140–141 displaced populations in 142–143 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) 140 famine in 122 Francophone States of Africa 129 and human security 135–138 International Forum on Africa 129 Mining Indaba 129 ‘new engagement’ with 127–133 resources in 131–132, 140 responsible governance 139–140 and Rudd/Gillard government 127, 128–133 sub-Saharan region of 135 Africa Day 129 African Development Report 2008/09 137 Africa Down Under 129

African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) 22 African Union (AU) 22, 128, 129 ‘aid trauma’ 160 Air Force One (film) 41 al-Qaeda 92 see also terrorism; Bali bombing; Islamist extremism; September 11 attacks ALP 120, 132 and Responsibility to Protect 169, 177–178 see also Evans; Gillard; Keating; Rudd America see United States of America Amnesty International 43 Anderson, Mary 161 Anderson, Tim 160 Annan, Kofi 173, 174 anti-personnel mines convention (1997) 24 ANZUS Treaty 97 APEC 22, 59 Arab spring 92 Arctic permafrost 200 ASEAN 22, 68–69, 95 ASEAN–Australia Forum 68 ASEAN–Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA) 68 ASEAN–Australia Profile Alert Group 69 ASEAN Charter 22 ASEAN Chiefs of Police forum 68 ASEAN+3 22 ASEAN Regional Forum 59, 68, 96, 189 ASEAN vision 2020 22 Asia 4, 5–6, 59, 62, 67, 76 corruption in 94 Asia Pacific 59, 68–69, 70, 74, 97, 203 community of the 59, 62 natural disasters and 200

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INDEX Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 98, 176, 188 Asia-Pacific Centre of Excellence in Civil-Military Cooperation 178 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group see APEC Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998) 94 ASIO 66, 78, 104 ASIS 78 Association of Southeast Asian Nations see ASEAN asylum seekers 7, 60, 74, 95, 100, 143, 154, 155 ‘boat people’ 95 and Howard government 118 and people smuggling 95 and Responsibility to Protect 172 and securitisation 120 see also Australia; border protection; refugees; terrorism Attorney-General’s Department 77 AusAID 8, 72, 77, 99, 103 and climate change 203, 204 Aus-CSCAP 80 Australia 34, 108, 115–116 and ASEAN 68 as ASEAN Dialogue Partner 68 and asylum seekers 7, 60, 74, 99–100, 118, 120–121, 143 Attorney-General’s Department 77, 104 and border protection 60, 65, 75, 77, 99, 104, 117 and climate change 63, 100–101, 116, 199–200, 203–204 COAG (Council of Australian Governments) 104 compared with Canada 23 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 8, 103 Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) 69 Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) 67, 77, 78, 103 Department of Treasury 77, 99 Energy Package (2011) 204 Homeland Security Agency 104 and human security 3–9, 57–87, 88–106, 119–124 Human Security Inter-departmental Committee (HSIDC) 77–78 Indigenous peoples and 48, 50, 74 integrated security policy and 102–103

Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade 77, 129, 198 as middle power 9, 169, 170, 172, 173 national coastguard 104 National Intelligence Coordination Committee (NICC) 78 National Security Adviser 67, 103 National Security and International Policy Group 78, 82 National Security Committee 77 National Security Statement 78 Office of National Security 103 Official Development Assistance (ODA) 122, 132–133, 140–141 Queensland floods (2011) 122 and Responsibility to Protect 169–181, 182, 185, 188–193 thinktanks in 80, 192 traditional ties of 127 and UN 69–70 and USA 4–6, 59–60, 70–71, 82 war crimes legislation 97 welfare entitlements in 48–50 see also Australians Australia Leadership Awards 68 Australia 2020 Summit 3 Australia–United States alliance 70, 71, 76, 82, 97, 114, 130, 205 and defence self-reliance 65 and Julia Gillard 4 and Tony Abbott 4 White Paper (1997) on 59 Australian Academy of Social Sciences 2, 10 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 9 Australian Crime Commission 77–78 Australian Customs and Border Protection Service 77, 104 Australian Defence Force 60, 65–66, 89, 97, 98, 190 and climate change 201, 203 Electronic Warfare Self Protection 65 International Deployment Group 178 peacekeeping deployments of 98 Special Forces 65 Special Operations Command 65 Tactical Assault Group 65 ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) tradition 121 Australian Agency for International Development see AusAID

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WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS Australian Federal Police (AFP) 68, 77, 104 Australian Labor Party see ALP Australian Research Council (ARC) 2, 10 Australian Secret Intelligence Service see ASIS Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation see ASIO Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) 180 Australians 1, 48 and security 1, 121 solidarity among 122–123 travel by 7 values of 121–124 Austria 24 Avian Influenza (‘Bird Flu’) 7 Axworthy, Lloyd 14, 25, 108 Baker, Bruce 149 Bali bombing 61 Bali Climate Change Conference (2007) 63 Bali Process on People Smuggling 68 Balkans conflict 94, 179 Ban Ki-Moon 136 Bangkok Treaty 95 Barrs, Casey 161 Bellamy, Alex 5, 10, 47, 204 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 158 Bilson, Bruce 82 ‘Bird Flu’ see Avian Influenza Bishop, Julie 7 BJP see Bharatiya Janata Party ‘boat people’ 99–100 Booth, Ken 107 border protection 60, 65, 75, 99 Bosnia 24 Bougainville conflict 72, 94, 98 Bourdieu, Pierre 44 Bourke, Anthony 8, 9, 10, 120 Brazil 5 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 206 Buddhism 153, 157 Burke, Anthony 199 Burkina Faso 135 Burma see Myanmar Bush, George W and Afghanistan 119 and Iraq 119 and Responsibility to Protect 169 Buzan, Barry 14, 45, 118

Cambodia 66, 69, 94, 98, 153, 159, 177, 179 Cambodian People’s Party 157 corruption in 157 Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping 44 ‘good governance’ in 159 Khmer righteousness 157 patronage in 157 and the state 157 and Thailand 96 trauma in 160 Camilleri, Joseph A 8, 171, 184, 187, 192, 195, 198, 205 human security, conception of 9, 18–19, 133–135 on globalisation of threats 120 on integrated human security 89, 108 on national–international relations 48 on non-state actors 35 and ‘security from below’ 150–151, 162 Canada 20, 35, 57, 108, 169 Chrétien government 23 compared with Australia 23 Harper government 169 and human security 17–18, 23–27, 108 Human Security program (DFAIT) 25 Pearson government 23 Trudeau government 23 Canadian Consortium on Human Security (CCHS) 25 Canberra Commission 69, 95 see also nuclear weapons Chad 142 child soldiers 42 Chile 24 China 4, 5, 6, 22, 67, 71, 92, 205 and Japan 96 and Taiwan 96 and the USA 96 CHOGM 189 Christoff, Peter 206 civil society 149, 150, 159, 164, 176, 192, 198 in Australia 76, 77, 80–81 in Canada 26, 27 and human security 28, 72, 75, 80–81 influential actors in 16 and liberalism 25 and ‘security from below’ 154

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INDEX climate change 3, 6, 26, 188, 189, 202, 203, 204 and Australian multilateralism 177–178 impacts of 199–201 and security 100–102, 117 and Rudd government 63, 120, 121 ‘weather of mass destruction’ 196 see also Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change; Kyoto Protocol Clinton, Hillary 139, 186 Colak, Alexandra 153 Cold War 4, 58, 92, 199 Colombia, conflict in 20 Commission on Human Security (CHS) 20, 35, 93 common security 75 Commonwealth (of Nations) 128 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting see CHOGM communitarian ethics 123 Constructivism 44 Convention on Cluster Munitions 97 COP 15 meeting 82 Copenhagen pledge (climate change) 203 Copenhagen School, security and 41, 44–46, 51 ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ 7 Costa Rica 24, 182 Costello, Peter 6 Cotton, James 3, 205 Council for International Development 7 Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific see CSCAP bodies Crimes Act (Cth), terrorism and 66 crimes against humanity 92, 94, 98, 167, 168, 175 Critical Security theory 46 Cronulla riots 172 CSCAP bodies 189 cyber-crime 21 cyber warfare 92, 96, 98 Darfur, violence in 136, 168, 179 Dauth, John 171, 174 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 135, 142 Kabila, Laurent and 170 UN mission (MONUC) in 176 De Wilde, Jaap 118 Denmark 182 Department of Defence (Aust.) 77, 80, 103, 188

DFAT 80, 176 National Coordinator for Responsibility to Protect 189, 191 and Responsibility to Protect 188–189 Stokes, Deborah and 188–189 Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT, Can.) 17–18, 25–26, 66, 108 Human Security program of 25 Stabilization and Reconstruction Taskforce (START) of 26 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Aust.) see DFAT Derrida, Jacques 44 desecuritisation 46 development see international development dialogue 21, 28, 60, 75, 160 and Africa 139 and common security 75 and Responsibility to Protect 183 and security 80–81 and ‘security from below’ 160, 162, 163 diaspora 15, 152, 155, 162 displaced populations 1, 35, 170, 187 and Africa 128, 135, 142–143 and security 99–100 Downer, Alexander 5, 60 and Responsibility to Protect 171, 173 DRC see Democratic Republic of Congo drug trade 7, 12, 24, 61, 73 Duffield, Mark 149, 163 East Timor 24, 92, 94, 98, 168, 179 and Australian Defence Force 65 and civil society 75 and counterterrorism 66 and UN peacekeeping 69 Eckersley, Robyn 7 Enlightenment 15 environmental security 45, 76, 78, 79, 97, 100–102, 117, 189 Eritrea 142 Ethiopia 128, 142 Ethiopia–Eritrea conflict 20 ethnic cleansing 98, 167, 168, 175 ethno-nationalism 58 EU see European Union European Council 21 European Security Strategy (ESS) 21 European Union (EU) 21

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WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS Evans, Gareth 58 and Cambodia 177 after Cold War 177 on Iraq war (2003) 173 and Responsibility to Protect 171, 173–174 Evatt, Herbert ‘Doc’ 177

Great Depression 47 Greece 24 Green Climate Fund 203 Greens, The 4 Gross National Product (GNP) 13 G8 (Group of Eight) 6 G20 (Group of Twenty) 6, 127

famine 17, 47, 95, 122, 205 FDR (US President) see Roosevelt Fiji 66 Fisher, Bill 129 food security 46, 50, 58, 79, 100, 110, 153 and access to land 155 and Africa 128, 136, 141 and climate change 3, 200 and human security 1, 34, 40, 42 and mobility 153 and Solomon Islands 161 Foucault, Michel 44 fragile states 8, 61, 72, 137, 149 ‘freedom from fear’ 20, 34–36 ‘freedom from want’ 20, 34–36 Future Scenarios Agency 99, 101, 103

Haiti 24, 34 Hannay, David 174 Harper, Stephen 25–26 health security 35, 121 Henry, Ken 4 High Court of Australia 75 HIV/AIDS 2, 8, 44 and Africa 137, 155–156 Hobbes, Thomas 116, 152 Hoffstaedter, Gerhard 10, 197 Horst, Cindy 153 Howard, John 58, 61–62, 65–66, 69, 191 and human security 59–62, 65–66 and Iraq conflict 114–115 and ‘Pacific solution’ 74 and Responsibility to Protect 178–179 and welfare system 49–50 see also Liberal Party of Australia Hughes, Andy 178 Human Development Index (HDI) see UN Human Development Index human rights 17, 35, 51, 94, 111, 128, 173, 199 and Australia 172 and broad human security 20–21, 36, 196 and Canada 26 and civil society 80–81 and climate change 201 and counterterrorism 102 economic and social 42–43 and refugees 100 Human Rights Watch 43 human security and Africa 22, 135–138 analytic usefulness of 13–19, 37–41 and Asia 22 and Australia 3–9, 57–87, 88–106, 119–124 broad approach to 17–18, 34–56 and Canada 17–18, 23–27, 108 and civil society 28, 72, 75 criticisms of 13–19, 37–39, 107–113 defence of 34–56

Gaddafi, Muammar 176 gender 9, 10, 51, 137, 153, 184, 185 genocide 167–168, 172, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 191 and Australian diplomacy 98 and humanitarian intervention 94, 95 in Rwanda 170 in Timor-Leste 170 and UN 169, 183, 190 Ghana 182 Gillard, Julia 3–5, 58, 63, 69, 74, 76 Australia–Malaysia agreement and 74 and US alliance 205 GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping 44, 162 Global Centre (Responsibility to Protect) 176, 181, 182, 183, 188 Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project 112 Global Financial Crisis 34, 179 and austerity measures 47 global warming see climate change globalisation 15, 58, 89, 91, 120 Gorton, John 4 Great Barrier Reef, threats to 200

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INDEX definitions of 1, 2, 3, 18–19, 34–38, 40 and ‘endogeneity’ problem 39 and Europe 21 and Howard government 59–62, 65–66 and insecurities 17–18, 40–41, 149–151, 155–156 and Japan 20–21 and Keating government 58–59, 69 measurability of 41–44 narrow approach to 17–18, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42 operationalisation of 57, 64–81, 88–106 and Rudd/Gillard government 62–64, 66–67, 70 and subjectivity 40–41, 74, 111–116, 119, 123 and securitisation 44–48, 116–119, 123–124, 202 and USA 22, 23, 22, 69, 70, 71 ‘whole-of-governance’ approach to 78–80 ‘whole-of-government’ approach to 77–78 ‘whole-of-society’ approach to 80–81 see also Commission on Human Security; security; UN Human Development Report (1994) Human Security Brief 2007 42–43 Human Security Network 24, 27 Human Security Report Project 42–43 on Africa 136–137 human trafficking 2 Hussein, Saddam 114 Hutu 170 Huysmans, Jef 150 identity 111, 156 and Australia 114, 115, 121, 124 and human security 14–16 see also Diaspora IEAE 96 Ignatieff, Michael 26 and Responsibility to Protect 173 IMF 43 India 5, 6, 66, 92 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 158 and feminism 158 and Pakistan 92, 96 social media in 158 Indian Ocean 6, 127, 130 Indonesia 4, 7, 61, 63, 67, 68, 74, 191

natural disasters and 95 Soeharto, President 94 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) 24, 135 in Africa 142–143 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change 203 International Atomic Energy Agency see IEAE International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 35, 36, 173 International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament 95 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) see Red Cross International Conference on War Affected Children 24 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 100 International Criminal Court 24, 172–173, 179 international development 7, 13 and underdevelopment 42, 94, 117, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141 International Forum on Africa 129 International Humanitarian Law (IHL) 97, 98 ILO 43 International Labour Organization see ILO International Monetary Fund see IMF International NGO coalition (Responsibility to Protect) 177 Iraq conflict in 22, 27, 66, 98, 114–115, 152, 179 need for dialogue in 75 and Responsibility to Protect 173–174 Ireland 24 Islamist extremism 60 Jacob, Cecilia 152 James, Stephen 9, 198 Japan 13, 20–21, 22, 34, 57, 67, 69, 108 Julia Gillard’s visit to 67–68 2011 tsunami 34, 122 Japan–Australia Joint Communiqué (2011) 67 Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation (2007) 67

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WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS Joint Declaration on the ASEAN– Australia Comprehensive Partnership 68 Jordan 24 Kaldor, Mary 22 Keating, Paul 58, 60, 69 Keizo Obuchi 20 Kent, Alexandra 152–153, 157 Kenya 142 access to land in 155 election violence in 169 Korean conflict 74 Krause, Keith 14 Kyoto Protocol 178, 203 landmines 172–173 Liberal Party of Australia 173, 185 see also Abbott; Bishop; Downer; Howard; Ruddock Liberal Party of Canada 23, 25–26 liberalism 25 Liberia 135 Libyan crisis 70 and Australia 170 Gaddafi regime and 176 and Kevin Rudd 176 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) intervention in 186 and Responsibility to Protect 168, 169 Lisbon Strategy 21 Lisbon Treaty 21 Lowy Institute, Director of 8 Luck, Edward 175 Luckham, Robin 149 McAllister, Ian 121 McDonald, Matt 7, 10, 47, 197 Mack, Andrew 14 McMullan, Bob 129 McNamara, Tim 37 malaria 136 Malaysia 66, 67, 74–75 Australia–Malaysia agreement 74 Chin Refugee Committee 154–155 Kuala Lumpur 154 Mali 24 mass atrocities, prevention of 167–194 MDGs see Millennium Development Goals Meier, Patrick 158

Mekong 2 Mickler, David 8, 10, 204 Middle East 20, 75, 130 middle powers 9, 120, 144, 170, 172, 173 military force, use of 60, 65, 71, 73, 92, 97, 107, 121 and human security 18, 133–134 and securitisation 45–46 and the international community 17 and UN Charter 167 see also UN Charter, UN Security Council Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 61 and Africa 132–133, 135–137, 141 Mitchell, Claudia 156 multilateralism 7, 23, 59, 70, 120, 177–178 Multinational Operations Support Team 68–69 Murphy, John 48 Myanmar, Union of 179 Namibia 179 nation-states collapse of 17, 58, 153, 170, 180 fragile 8, 61,72, 137, 149 and human security 46, 123, 195, 197–198 relative capabilities and identities of 205 ‘National Security Statement’ (2008) 62, 199 NATO 186 natural disasters 39, 92, 102 Nau, Henry 205 Neocleous, Mark 118 Netherlands, the 24, 174, 183 New Deal 47 Newman, Ted 123 New Zealand 68 2011 earthquake in 122 NGOs see non-government organisations 9/11 attacks see September 11 attacks non-government organisations (NGOs) 43, 51, 80, 102 and Responsibility to Protect 177, 188 and ‘security from below’ 149, 156, 161, 162 see also civil society non-refoulement 100 norm entrepreneurs 171, 172–174

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INDEX North Atlantic Treaty Organization see NATO North East Asia 96, 103 North Korea 96 Northern Territory (NT) 70–71 Norway 13, 17, 20, 24, 57, 108 lessons for Australia 205, 206 nuclear weapons 1, 20, 69, 95, 96 see also weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Obama, Barack 4 and Responsibility to Protect 169, 181–182, 192 ODA see Official Development Assistance OECD 137, 205 Office of National Assessments 78 Official Development Assistance (ODA) 122, 132, 133, 140–141 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development see OECD overseas aid 7, 62, 196, 205 Owen, Taylor 18, 37, 39–40, 41–44, 47, 50 Oxfam 43, 159–160 Pacific, The 1, 202 Pacific Islands 200 Pacific Islands Forum 180 Pacific Ocean 6 ‘Pacific solution’ 74 Pakistan, conflict in 27 ‘panic politics’ 112 Papua New Guinea (PNG) 66, 72, 75, 94 and natural disaster 95 Paris, Roland 37, 107 peace enforcement 73 peacebuilding 27, 61, 69, 111, 148, 155 peacekeeping 27, 65–66, 69, 94–95 130, 141–142, 170, 205 peacemaking 22, 73, 98, 155 Pearce, Jenny 153 people, unregulated flows of 60, 63 ‘people smuggling’ 7, 8, 67, 68, 95, 99, 104, 179 see also human trafficking people-to-people contact 10, 59, 60, 64, 75 Petersen, Jan 20 Philippines, the 67, 68 Pietsch, Juliet 121 Ping, Jean 129, 174

PNG see Papua New Guinea Poku, Nana K 137 politics of reciprocity 153 Pope, Wyn 161–162 Porter, Doug 2 Porto, Joao Gomes 137 postmodernism 44 post-structuralism 44 poverty 20, 21, 61, 94, 150, 151 and Africa 136, 137, 138, 140 and human security 40, 41, 42, 44, 48–49, 108, 111, 117 Power, Samantha 186 Pressman, David 181, 184 post–Cold War world 57, 63, 71, 94–95, 135 Proliferation Security Initiative 95 Protection of Civilians meetings 175 RAMSI see under Solomon Islands Randall, Doug 117 Ravenhill, John 3, 205 realism (theory) 2, 8, 37, 114, 134, 148, 178 and Copenhagen School 44 and interdependence 6 Red Cross (ICRC) 20, 27 refugees 35, 74, 75, 90, 102, 135, 201, 205 and Africa 142–143 and Australia 99–100, 102, 118, 120–121, 122 and Convention on the Rights of the Child 100 and Democratic Republic of Congo 170 and environment 117 international law on 100 and Japan 21 in Malaysia 154–155 stories of 153–155 and the USA 23 Regional Interfaith Dialogue 68 Renwick, Neil 137 Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) 35, 36, 47, 82, 98, 167–194 and Australia 98, 140, 169–177, 188–193 and Australian bipartisanship 169, 178–179, 192 and Australian interests 179–181 and Australian political parties 185 Australian RtoP Fund 176

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WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS and Australian values 178–179 and Canada 169, 189 Gareth Evans and 171, 173–174 Global NGO Coalition for RtoP 188 Group of Friends of RtoP 181, 183, 190 hopes for, limits to 190–193 and Howard government 175–177 mainstreaming of 181–187 and multilateralism 177–178 and Rudd/Gillard government 170, 175–178 and Rwanda 168, 170, 191–192 and Solomon Islands 180 and specialisation 184–186 and Timor-Leste 170, 191 and UN 168, 169, 171, 173–177, 183, 187 UN Secretary-General 190 UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser 176 and USA 169, 181–182, 184–186 see also crimes against humanity; genocide; mass atrocities; Rwanda Rhodesia/Zimbabwe 128 Rice, Susan 186 Roche, Chris 10, 197 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR) 34, 36 RtoP see Responsibility to Protect R2P see Responsibility to Protect Rudd, Kevin 3, 6, 8, 58, 116, 120, 192 and Africa 128, 130, 131, 138, 140, 144 and Australian values 116, 120–121 and counterterrorism 66–67 and human security 62–63 National Security Statement (2008) of 89 as opposition leader 7 and UN 69 and US alliance 205 Rudd/Gillard government 127, 128, 144, 177, 205 Ruddock, Philip 2, 66 Rwanda 94, 179, 183 Kibeho massacre (1995) 170, 191 1994 genocide in 168, 170–171, 179, 191–192 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 170 Sahnoun, Mohammed 173 SARS (illness) 22 Sawer, Marian 50

Scheye, Eric 149 Schwartz, Peter 117 securitisation 36, 41, 44–48, 51, 109, 112, 118, 202 security 2, 12, 19, 36–41, 44–48, 50–51 and Australia 57–64, 119–123 contested nature of 112–116, 195 and human security project 109–112 and securitisation 116–119, 123–124 Western models of 14–15, 148, 149 security–development nexus 148 ‘security from below’ 148–166 security-seeking behaviours 148, 153, 156 ‘security-speak’ 109, 112, 117, 124 security studies 37–39, 51, 80, 88, 107–108, 110, 148, 150 and discourse 109–116 and securitisation 44–46, 116–119, 123–124 Sen, Amartya 35 September 11 attacks 61 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome see SARS Shirky, Clay 158 Shue, Henry 36, 40 Sierra Leone 135 Simon Fraser University 42–43 Singapore 67 Sino-Japanese tensions 74 Skibsted, Arnold 182 Smith, Michael 72, 178 Smith, Stephen 177 on Africa 128–132 Smith Review of Homeland and Border Security (2008) 89 Slovenia 24 social democracy 41, 51 social security 35, 47, 48, 51, 153 Soeharto, President 94 Solomon Islands 65–66, 71, 72, 73, 98, 179 bubble economy of 160 government of 180 Honiara, housing in 160 Kastom in 160 Operation Helpem Fren 94 PPF (Participating Police Force) officers 160 RAMSI (Regional Assistance Mission) 159–161, 180 Somalia, conflict in 27, 71, 95, 142, 143, 179

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INDEX refugees from 153 South Africa 128 gangs and risk in 155–156 South China Sea 74 Southeast Asia 3, 68, 95–96, 130, 202 South Korea 22, 67 South Pacific 3, 103 South Pacific Nuclear Weapons Free Zone 95 South Sudan 129 sovereignty 15, 19, 38, 47, 58, 107–112, 199 ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ 176 space warfare 98 Sri Lanka 20, 179 Stern Review (climate change) 204 Stokes, Deborah 188–189 Subaltern studies 46 Sudan 135, 142 Sudan conflict 20, 43 Janjawiid militia and 168 killing of civilians during 168 Suharto, President see Soeharto sustainable development 61, 138, 199 Syria regime in 70, 168 atrocities in 168 Switzerland 24 Taiwan 96 Tanzania 142 Tariq, Mohammed Osman 153–154 TB see tuberculosis terrorism 60, 65, 67, 82, 90, 92 and Australia 99, 102, 104, 177, 179 and European Union 20, 21 White Paper (2004) on 66 and ‘whole-of-governance’ approach 78 see also al-Qaeda; Islamist extremism, Bali bombing; September 11 attacks Thailand 24, 34, 66 and Cambodia 96 Thakur, Ramesh 14 and Responsibility to Protect 173 Third World 107 Timor-Leste 71–73, 95, 170, 191 see also East Timor transformationalism 25 transnational crime 13, 67, 68, 73, 79, 177, 179 Treaty on Amity and Cooperation 95

Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 95 see also nuclear weapons tuberculosis 136 Turkey 34 Turnbull, Malcolm 7 Tvedt, Terje 206 2005 World Summit 168, 173 Uganda 142 UNAMID mission (Sudan) 142 United Nations (UN) 13, 16, 17, 19, 26, 198 Australia and 69–70 UN Central Emergency Response Fund 69 UN Children’s Fund 69 UN Charter 97, 98, 167 Article 2(4) (force) in 167 Article 2(7) (domestic affairs) in 167 and Australia 97 UN Development Programme (UNDP) 1–2, 13, 17, 34, 41, 43, 117, 135 UNFCCCC 203 UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCC) 203 UN General Assembly 169, 176 UNHCR 69, 99, 142, 143, 154, 155 UN High Commissioner for Refugees see UNHCR UN Human Development Index 48 and Africa 135 UN Human Development Report (1994) 18, 108 UN High Level Panel 173, 174 see also Annan UN Human Rights Council 172, 175 and climate change 201 UN Human Security Unit 13, 18 UN Joint Office of the Special Advisers for the Prevention of Genocide 169, 183, 190 UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) 141–142 UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSSA) 136 UN Peacebuilding Commission 69 UN police 24 UN Security Council 24, 26, 100 Australian campaign for seat on 127, 132, 142, 177–178, 204–205 and climate change 205 and Responsibility to Protect 168–169, 174, 175, 188, 189

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WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS UN Trust Fund for Human Security 20 UN World Summit (2005) 98 United States Congress 4, 155 United States military 22, 70–71 deployment in Australia 70–71 and human security 22, 69, 70–71 and interrogations 22 and targeted assassinations 22 unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), use of 22 United States of America (USA) 4, 5, 6, 22, 23, 97 ‘Atrocity Prevention Board’ 182 Genocide Prevention Task Force of 182 Office of the National Security Advisor 182 Secretary of Defense 186 war crimes, response to 182 United States State Department 23 Uruguay 176 Vinson, Tony 50 Von Tigerstrom, Barbara 37–38 Wæver, Ole 45, 118 Walsh, Shannon 156 war crimes 97, 98, 167, 175, 182, 184, 185 ‘war on terror’ 78, 92, 114, 149 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 58, 60, 95, 196 see also nuclear weapons Wendt, Alex 198

Wesley, Michael 5 West Antarctic, ice sheets of 200 Western government/governance 72, 75 Western liberalism 14–15 Western values 107 Westphalian sovereignty 15, 168 Whelan, Jacqueline 72 White, Hugh 5 White Papers (Australia) 61, 65, 66, 76, 89, 179, 199, 201 Australia–Asia relations 4 foreign policy (1997) 59 defence (2000) 60 Whitlam, Gough 4 WHO see World Health Organization Williams, Paul W 139 Witoszek, Nina 206 Wolfers, Arnold 38 World Bank 43 World Food Programme 69 World Health Organization 43, 69 World Order Models Project 46 World Resources Institute 117 World Vision 7 World War I 168 World War II 3, 168 World Watch Institute 117 Yemen, civilian deaths in 168 Yugoslavia (the former) 168 Zambia 135 Zimbabwe 135, 179

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