Roland Paris

Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?

Human security is the latest in a long line of neologisms—including common security, global security, cooperative security, and comprehensive security—that encourage policymakers and scholars to think about international security as something more than the military defense of state interests and territory. Although deanitions of human security vary, most formulations emphasize the welfare of ordinary people. Among the most vocal promoters of human security are the governments of Canada and Norway, which have taken the lead in establishing a “human security network” of states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that endorse the concept.1 The term has also begun to appear in academic works,2 and is the subject of new research projects at several major universities.3 Human Security Roland Paris

Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism

I o n e of the challenges facing the international community in the post-Cold War era is the increasingly pervasive problem of civil conflict.’ Indeed, all of the thirty major armed conflicts fought in the world in 1995 were intrastate wars.’ Devising ways of responding to this violence has been a topic of considerable debate among policymakers and students of conflict management in recent years.3 But no less important is the task of determining what to do once the fighting stops. Operations that aim to prevent violence from reigniting after the initial termination of hostilities-commonly called “postconflict peacebuilding”have been conducted in eight war-shattered states since the end of the Cold War: Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola,

International peacebuilding and the ‘mission civilisatrice’

International peacebuilding operations seek to stabilise countries that have recently experienced civil wars. In pursuing this goal, however, international peacebuilders have promulgated a particular vision of how states should organise themselves internally, based on the principles of liberal democracy and market-oriented economics. By reconstructing war-shattered states in accordance with this vision, peacebuilders have effectively ‘transmitted’ standards of appropriate behaviour from the Western-liberal core of the international system to the failed states of the periphery. From this perspective, peacebuilding resembles an updated (and more benign) version of the mission civilisatrice , or the colonial-era belief that the European imperial powers had a duty to ‘civilise’ dependent populations and territories.

Saving liberal peacebuilding

Liberal peacebuilding has become the target of considerable criticism. Although much of this criticism is warranted, a number of scholars and commentators have come to the opinion that liberal peacebuilding is either fundamentally destructive, or illegitimate, or both. On close analysis, however, many of these critiques appear to be exaggerated or misdirected. At a time when the future of peacebuilding is uncertain, it is important to distinguish between justified and unjustified criticisms, and to promote a more balanced debate on the meaning, shortcomings and prospects of liberal peacebuilding.

Broadening the Study of Peace Operations

The academic study of peace operations, long a dusty and isolated corner of political science, experienced a renaissance in the early 1990s, when the United Nations launched a flurry of new missions. Although enthusiasm for deploying new peace operations cooled after setbacks in Somalia and Bosnia, the task of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of existing operations continues to attract intense scholarly attention. This research has helped policymakers improve existing techniques for responding to what is arguably the most pressing security problem of the post-Cold War era: pervasive civil and ethnic conflicts. Nevertheless, the literature on peace operations has neglected broader questionsabout the relationship between these activities and our theoretical understanding of international politics. Building the study of peace missions into a mature academic subfield will require a concerted effort to move beyond the urrent preoccupation with practical operational issues. Such a research strategy would open up a number of interesting and theoretically important questions. It might also enhance communication between students of peace operations and other branches of international relations. Three research agendas that consider norms, global culture, and international governance offer the possibility of building the requisite bridges between theory and practice.

Kosovo and the Metaphor War

In the spring of 1999, American political leaders debated how to respond to the ongoing military and humanitarian crisis in the Kosovo region of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where armed Serbs under the control of thenYugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic appeared to be conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the province’s predominantly Albanian population. Six months earlier in the fall of 1998, the Yugoslav army had forced members

Still an Inscrutable Concept

causes political difficulties, and I am disinclined towards that kind of political pandering. The idea also risks mixing up the quite different agendas of international security, on the one hand, and social security and civil liberties, on the other. There is certainly a case for studying the interplay between the international and domestic security agendas, but my concern is that human security aims more at collapsing them than at opening up their relationship. Reductionism in security thinking eliminates the distinctiveness of international security being about interaction among social collectivities. While a moral case for making individuals the ultimate referent object can be constructed, the cost to be paid is loss of analytical purchase on collective actors both as the main agents of security provision and as possessors of a claim to survival in their own right. Individuals are not free standing, but only take their meaning from the societies in which they operate: they are not some kind of bottom line to which all else can or should be reduced or subordinated. By attempting to collapse all the possible referent objects for security into a single one, human security excludes the claims of both collective and non-human (e.g. environmental) referent objects in a way that defies both other moral claims and the actual practices of securitization. Finally, reconstructing human rights as human security reinforces the danger that security is taken to be the desired end. Human rights is much better placed to support the idea that the desired end is some form of desecuritization down into normal politics.

The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention

While the normative and legal aspects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine have been explored in great detail, scholars have largely overlooked the more practical question of whether and how international military action can avert mass atrocities. To shed light on this question, this article investigates the ‘strategic logic’ of preventive humanitarian intervention, or the assumed link between external military action and the desired outcome of preventing or stopping mass killing. It contends that there are five fundamental and seemingly irremediable tensions in this logic, all of which cast doubt on the feasibility of preventive humanitarian intervention and on the long-term prospects of R2P.

The Globalization of Taxation? Electronic Commerce and the Transformation of the State

The anticipated growth of new communications technologies, including the Internet and other digital networks, will make it increasingly difficult for states to tax global commerce effectively. Greater harmonization and coordination of national tax policies will likely be required in the coming years in order to address this problem. Given that the history of the state is inseparable from the history of taxation, this “globalization of taxation” could have far-reaching political implications. The modern state itself emerged out of a fiscal crisis of medieval European feudalism, which by the 14th and 15th centuries was increasingly incapable of raising sufficient revenues to support the mounting expenses of warfare. If new developments in the technology of commerce are now undermining the efficiency of the state as an autonomous taxing entity, fiscal pressures may produce a similar shift in de facto political authority away from the state and toward whatever international mechanisms are created to expedite the taxation of these new forms of commerce.

Are Canadians still liberal internationalists? Foreign policy and public opinion in the Harper era

Since coming into office in 2006, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected many of the symbols and practices of the liberal internationalist approach to foreign affairs that Canadian governments of all political stripes broadly embraced during the preceding six decades. As part of this change, the Harper government has also promoted a new narrative about Canada’s history and foreign policy, which encourages Canadians to change how they think about their country and its role in the world. By examining recent opinion surveys, this article asks whether Canadian public attitudes on foreign policy have shifted away from liberal internationalism and toward the Harper governments narrative since 2006.