Zed Books Global Governance and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Global Governance and BiopoliticsRegulating Human SecurityBy David RobertsZed Books LtdCopyright © 2010 David RobertsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84813-216-0ContentsTable and figures, vi, Acknowledgements, vii, Abbreviations, viii, Introduction, 1, 1 Humanizing security?, 9, 2 Global governance or global hegemony?, 27, 3 A new 'nebuleuse'?, 48, 4 Neoliberalism, water and sanitation, 73, 5 Social reconstruction and World Bank policy, 110, 6 Norms and change, 147, Conclusion, 160, Bibliography, 167, Index, 188, CHAPTER 1HUMANIZING SECURITY?Depending on one's perspective, human security is either a project whose time has come or one whose time has come and gone. This chapter is a response to the 'death through discourse' that has accompanied human security's efforts to negotiate for itself a place in security practices around the world, leaving us fiddling while Rome burns. It is a challenge to the reproachful lack of urgency vested in the millions of lives that end unnecessarily and prematurely around the world. The chapter discusses the isolation and marginalization of human security, along with the incoherence of mainstream security's priorities, before foregrounding a means of recovering the human security idea.THE STATE AND SECURITYState-centric security has rarely been concerned with the lives of human beings. Security concepts have traditionally been understood with regard to military hardware and, more lately, economic resources, technology and so on. The state in state-centrism is most ordinarily an anonymized entity at conflict with other anonymized states in a 'state of nature'. Mainstream IR has advanced into considering the role of international institutions in IR, but these are similarly anonymized and seemingly divorced from human creation and subjective determinism, as well as from the consequences of international institutional diktat. The discipline remains divorced from the social reality it claims to describe and in denial of the wider, global intellectual trend towards subjective normativity, as if, in the words of Slavoj Zizek, it is 'prepared, step by step, to accept as familiar a bizarre and morbid situation' (2002: 32). This is not to suggest that state-centrism has no place in security studies; but it is to highlight how security is studied almost without reference to the human population at large, prompting Professor Roy Preiswerk to ask, more than twenty-five years ago, 'could we study International Relations as if people mattered?' (1982). Nearly a quarter of a century later, Heidi Hudson was still asking the same question (2005). In the intervening period, IR broadly has moved a long way from its early, narrow confines; but it still rarely considers humans, either as actors in causation or as victims of security 'dilemmas', unless they are stipulated enemies of the progressive liberal order in which IR is situated (Sylvester 1994).Realist argument has long been defined by assumptions of an immutable human nature and the fatalistic inevitability of violent interstate exchanges in an anarchic international environment regulated imperfectly by international institutions (Brown 2009; Crawford 2009; Booth and Wheeler 2008: 24–6). Furthermore, security is not 'real' unless it is possessed of certain characteristics. The 'real' matters of traditional security involve terrorism, nuclear weapons and rogue states, civil war, warlords and direct violence constituting 'hard' security. 'Soft' security is so labelled since it involves the abuse of human life on a very large scale, mainly by indirect causation, normally devoid of military weapons at the instant of their deployment, often absent obvious state involvement. For these reasons, the conditions of billions of people living in relative or absolute poverty, which threatens and/or extinguishes their lives routinely, is not considered a matter of security by the traditional security community. T