5
“Escorting Kids to Kindergarten”: Human Security in Action
Condoleezza Rice, shortly before she was appointed National Security Advisor, succinctly demonstrated her twentieth-century instincts about security when, interviewed by the New York Times, she said: “Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.”
New York Times, October 27, 2000
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Escorting kids to kindergarten is emblematic of human security in action. In zones of insecurity, children may not be able to attend school because they risk being kidnapped or seized to become child soldiers or child prostitutes, because the route to school is rife with fighting or land mines; because their families do not have enough money to pay for books or uniforms; because they have to stay at home and look after their siblings while their mothers work; or because there is no school and there are no teachers. So being able to take kids to kindergarten is a measure of human security.
Studies show that primary education, especially the education of girls, is one of the most important factors contributing to development and stability. Moreover, when members of the 82nd Airborne escort kids safely to school, they gain the trust of the local population, which is the key precondition for all the other tasks of a human-security approach. It is even better if the 82nd Airborne helps local people (military, police, or parents) to escort kids to kindergarten.
So what else has to be done to implement human security, especially in places wracked by violence? The experience of the British Army in Basra, in the Shi’ia-dominated south of Iraq, is a case study of the limits of counterinsurgency and the potential for human security. British forces were responsible for security in Basra from the invasion in March 2003 until their withdrawal in June 2009. In the early days after the invasion, they were rather confident that they could cope because of their long experience in colonial policing and in Northern Ireland. Indeed, the methods they adopted were much the same as those adopted in the surge three years later. The British strongly criticized their American counterparts for their heavy-handed tactics, often causing exasperation. One senior American official said of Major-General Jonathan Shaw, the British commander: “It’s insufferable. He comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counterinsurgency . . . the notorious Northern Ireland came up again.”1
The situation in Basra was initially peaceful. Basrawis welcomed the British with open arms, having suffered greatly under Saddam Hussein. British soldiers were able to patrol the streets and hand out food aid, winning “hearts and minds” and maintaining security largely through deals with local religious and tribal militia leaders. Like Sarajevo and Baghdad, Basra had historically been a wealthy cosmopolitan city with a population that included Muslims, Jews, and Christians (Chaldean, Assyrian, and Armenian), as well as Mandaeans (a pre-Islamic Gnostic sect), Arabs, Kurds, and even a black minority dating from the eighth century. It had suffered greatly from the loss of its date and palm industry after the discovery of oil, and more recently from the war with Iran and UN-imposed sanctions, the brutal treatment of the Marsh Arabs, and Saddam Hussein’s total neglect of the city as punishment for the 1991 uprisings against him. The city’s population had swelled with poor Shi’ia immigrants after the draining of the marshes.
Basra’s security situation deteriorated dramatically within a short period. Armed Islamist groups made their appearance on the streets of Basra soon after the invasion. In addition to the Badr Corps and the Mahdi army, these groups included Al-Fadhila (a Sadrist spin-off founded in 2003) and Tha’r Allah (a local party formed by Yusif al-Musawi, the leader of the Shaykhiya Muslim minority). It was Islamist groups, dominated by Al-Fadhila, that took over the provincial government after the elections of 2005. Violence began as revenge attacks against former Ba’athist Party members and military officials but graduated into a toxic hybrid of political and criminal activities, including the following:
• Insurgent attacks against British forces, especially by the Mahdi army, which forced the British to take cover and protect themselves, reducing their presence on the streets.
• Sectarian cleansing against Sunnis and Christians. (Some people whom Kaldor interviewed claimed that this was not sectarianism; it was largely because Sunnis were former Ba’athists and Christians were wealthy and could afford to leave.) In particular, the Christians who were licensed to sell alcohol were targeted.
• A scramble for resources among various tribal and religious groups, including vicious competition to control the oil ministry, oil facilities, and the oil workers’ trades union so as to siphon off oil revenue.
• Honor killings, killings of prominent intellectuals, and attacks on women who did not wear head scarves.
• Pervasive criminality with rampant kidnapping and hostage taking for ransom. Many of the people whom Kaldor met in Basra had experienced the kidnapping of a family member or someone else close to them. Two of the sons of her local guide had been kidnapped; one escaped and one was ransomed. A woman running an NGO had been kidnapped when seven months pregnant. She was released only when the kidnappers found that it was a case of mistaken identity; they had thought she was someone who worked at the airport for the British.
Included in this lethal brew of politics and crime were demands for an autonomous Shi’ia region in the south. The main proponent of this idea was the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a political party that favored a region composed of nine Shi’ia-dominated governorates in the south, while Al-Fadhila favored a region largely concentrated on Basra because it had no base in other regions. Prominent Americans such as Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith have supported these demands because they see partition, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a solution to sectarian conflict. As Kaldor was to discover, there is little support for these proposals among ordinary Basrawis who have always considered themselves to be Iraqi. Earlier attempts to carve out an autonomous region have always failed, and, indeed, as the historian Reidar Visser has convincingly shown, there is no historical precedent for such a proposal.2
The violence in Basra was nourished by widespread poverty. The paradox of Basra is that despite the fact that it sits on top of one of the richest oil reserves in the world—black oil seeps through the sand—and despite its wealthy past, it has become one of the poorest cities in the world. Infrastructure never kept pace with the explosion of the population, and what little that existed was utterly corroded by years of neglect. The slums in suburbs like Hayyaniya are as deprived as any third-world shantytown. Some 70 to 80 percent of the population of Basra is unemployed. In the slums there is no electricity or running water or access to clean sanitation. Half-built and half-destroyed dwellings, open sewers, mud, and trash litter the gray-and-brown landscape.
As the situation got worse and worse, the British decided in September 2007 that, because they were part of the problem—the target of many attacks—they should withdraw to Basra Airport. At just the moment when the Americans were succeeding in developing a model of counterinsurgency that had many similarities with the early British approaches, the British were abandoning their efforts. They made a deal with the Mahdi army supposedly to reduce violence and to secure their retreat. It was an ignominious moment.
So what went wrong? Part of the answer is that the British were unprepared and thin on the ground. They had been told that the war would be over quickly as a result of the use of “overwhelming force” and that it was unnecessary to prepare for reconstruction. They assumed that they would be welcomed; yet although Basrawis hated Saddam Hussein they were also deeply suspicious of foreign occupiers. A poll taken soon after the invasion showed that 53.7 percent of the people thought that the British were occupiers; this had risen to 75.7 percent of the population by October. As one Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) political leader said in July 2003: “We told the British that their forces are too small to protect us and people don’t respect the ordinary police. . . . They told us they’d make Iraq an ideal country in the Middle East. They’ve made it a symbol of looting and destruction.”3
The British had no idea of the depth and breadth of the problem—the disintegrating infrastructure, the traumatized population, and the collapse of governance. They lacked appropriate equipment for countering roadside bombs, for example, and for operating in the desert. They did not have enough men to “flood” the disturbed areas with patrols as the counterinsurgency strategy recommended. They went into Basra with 40,000 troops but rapidly reduced to 8,000 and most of the time had approximately 4,000 rising to nearly 6,000 in the last few months; at least 33,000 would have been needed to maintain security in a city the size of Basra. They also lacked civilian support. A particular problem was the lax way they recruited in order to quickly build a police force, which allowed for massive militia infiltration. But above all, the British troops lacked political and moral support. Even though many officers had privately opposed the invasion, they were, of course, identified with an unpopular war. There was no consensus in government about how much or what type of support should be provided. A case that was brought against soldiers for abusing Iraqi prisoners under the Human Rights Act further weakened morale. They felt they were there simply because the Americans wanted them, and they saw themselves holding the ring until the time came to withdraw. Most soldiers wanted to get through their mission as quickly as possible, with the least damage.
But another problem was that the counterinsurgency strategy can only bring short-term security. After the 2005 elections, it was very difficult to confront the Islamist groups who were now part of the government. Similar problems could affect the rest of Iraq if the security gains of 2006 and 2007 are not sustained in political and economic terms. In other words, if the government fails to build trust among all Iraqis, if it fails to establish effective law-and-order institutions, provide basic services, and expand the possibilities for legitimate ways of making a living—violence could easily escalate again.
The situation in Basra changed again after March 2008, when, in what was known as the “charge of the knights,” the Iraqi army invaded Basra, backed by American forces, in order to free the city of militias and criminal gangs. The “charge of the knights” involved fierce fighting and what the Americans call kinetic operations. Missiles were fired into areas where the militias were thought to reside, killing civilians and militants alike. This was followed by several months of high-intensity operations, in which Iraqi units searched whole areas for weapons and arrested suspected militia members. In addition to those held in American custody in Camp Bucca, the Iraqis themselves detained several hundred suspects. There were also many deals being made under the surface. Over a few months, Iraqi security forces reestablished their monopoly on violence.
The British commander who arrived in Basra in August 2008 decided to adopt a human security-oriented approach, with a focus on finding the best way for local people to meet their own needs; he defined the center of gravity of the mission as the optimism of Basrawis. “The first thing we did,” says Major General Andy Salmon,
was to become much more embedded than before. It was a conscious decision to embed really deeply. Before us, the military transition teams followed the Iraqi army in armored Mastiffs, huge vehicles that kept getting left behind especially on narrow streets. The Iraqis often got really irritated. So we put the blokes in Iraqi army vehicles alongside the Iraqis. It reduced our profile, made us less of a target, and it improved situational awareness and influence. We used the Mastiffs only for logistical runs at night or to escort visitors and reconstruction teams.
Then we did the same with reconstruction. We created joint British-Iraqi teams for joint civil-military ops. And we had Iraqis accompany visiting businessmen as well. You need to get rid of the ego, support the Iraqis and give the operation an Iraqi face.4
In the initial phases of the operation, the approach was more military, trying to create zones of normality, free of militias, through a combination of arrests, weapons searches, and local deals. At the same time, efforts were made to improve the performance of the police; some 4,000 police belonging to militias were dismissed. Violence began to dip between September and November. By November, Basra was the quietest it had been since 2003.
But very soon, the British started to introduce compacts to deliver the needs of the people. According to Salmon, “What we tried to do was to get the municipal authorities to get in touch with people and to organize compacts of different sorts. Governance tends to mean bureaucracy, and it’s often a huge obstacle to getting things done, especially the bureaucracy left from Saddam’s time.” Compacts are also a way of dealing with corruption. Salmon says, “Corruption is endemic; everyone does it, everyone wants a cut, and so you can’t trust anyone. There’s no community social conscience.”
Salmon talked about what he called the “index of human security”: “Our motto was ‘deliver, see, and tell.’ It’s really important that Iraqis supported by coalition forces deliver something tangible—water, for example, cleaning up trash, or effective policing—and that people see it and they tell others about it. Rumor spreads like wildfire in Basra.” The British during this period also tried to create local institutions, like district development forums, so that compacts would be sustainable. “People need to be able to see tangible progress on the things that matter to them,” says Salmon. “We allowed them to have a voice and what they want is essential services, freedom of movement, freedom of social ambition—a future for their children.”
Of course, key to local institution building is trustworthy government. The provincial elections in January 2009 made an important difference. The key strategy for security during the elections was to talk to all the key players. The British and Iraqi authorities held regular election meetings and used them to focus on constructive politics. They helped establish a set of informal rules among political parties, like not tearing down each others’ posters. Everyone expected violence to ramp up, but it didn’t. There was a big turnout of voters in Basra (much less in the surrounding countryside, which explains the overall turnout of 48 percent). The Da’wa Party, the party of Prime Minister Maliki, won the largest share of the vote; its members are much more trusted than the previous ruling politicians.
But perhaps the most important aspect of the new approach was the emphasis on respect for the dignity of local people. “The most amazing thing we did,” says Salmon, “a massive thing, was to help local people build a shrine in Hayyaniya.” The shrine commemorated nineteen local victims of “Chemical Ali,” Ali Hassan al-Majid, a first cousin of Saddam Hussein who became notorious for the brutality with which he suppressed internal Iraqi opposition to Saddam. The nineteen people, including women and children, had been made to drink a liter of gasoline before being executed in 1991 after the Shi’ia uprisings. The shrine was built in their memory at a cost of $80,000. “We had nineteen giant candles and all the sheikhs and the only survivor were present at the unveiling ceremony, which I was asked to open,” says Salmon. “It was really important because the local people had never felt respected before and it was a kind of closure to a tragic chapter in their history.”
Kaldor went to Basra in December 2008. She went independently of the British military and flew in to Basra on a Royal Jordanian flight from Amman. She had been reading Patrick Cockburn’s book on Muqtada al-Sadr on the plane. When she arrived, her bags were searched by customs. The book’s glossy cover, with Muqtada’s picture and English writing, was greeted with excitement by the customs officers, who were probably poor Shi’ia. One of them kissed the picture of Muqtada and asked if he could keep the cover. It was a vivid reminder, right at the outset, of the continuing appeal of Sadrist ideology. At the same time, an interesting dimension of the story was that a British officer was present at customs, yet the Iraqi customs officer showed no fear of displaying his beliefs in front of him.
Downtown Basra felt very safe. Kaldor stayed in a hotel (formerly known by journalists as kidnap hotel) and could walk around and go to a supermarket up to 9 o’clock at night without a head scarf. She walked down the main street and went to a Christian church service on Sunday. She talked to some of the Christians although they were a little nervous. At night, the only sounds were dogs barking, cocks crowing, and the call for prayer. She was told that the Eid celebrations were livelier than they had been in any year since 1990. The only sign of abnormality was the presence of the Iraqi army in the streets.
Kaldor interviewed middle-class people from a range of political parties, from the business sector and civil society, and they all expressed rather similar views. They were all grateful to Prime Minister Maliki for his intervention. The problems faced in Basra, both political and economic, were attributed mainly to poor governance—to corruption, lack of capacity, and sheer criminality among local politicians. While they favored greater autonomy for Basra in the long term, so that Basra can control more of its oil wealth, they believed that Maliki’s actions demonstrated the need for centralized government. Many were hopeful that the forthcoming provincial elections would bring in a better class of politicians.
Kaldor had hoped to visit people living in the slums, but her guide refused to enter the districts, fearing, he said, for his life, and not just for hers. The very same day they had this conversation, a British military vehicle was stoned in Hayyaniya. But Kaldor did talk to people who came from there. She was told that within the slums, there are some who blame the Mahdi army, the Sadrist militias, for their troubles, including the loss of life and destruction of homes in the “charge of the knights.” But there are also many who believe that the reduction in violence was the result not of the “charge of the knights” but rather of Muqtada al-Sadr’s ordering members of the Mahdi army to put down their weapons. As one person who knows them well said chillingly: “If Muqtada gives the order, they will write their wills and kiss their families goodbye.”
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A human-security approach aims at preventing an escalation of violence. In areas of insecurity, there is no clear distinction between war and peace, and there are many possible causes of conflict. They were all present in Basra. There were religious differences (between Sunni, Shi’ia, and Christian communities), ideological differences (opposition to Ba’athism), tribal competition, extreme social and economic inequality, and a scramble for oil revenues. There was also nationalist resistance to foreign occupation. However, conflict is present in all societies, and it can be an opportunity for creativity as well as destruction. Indeed, some theorists argue that conflict is the opposite of violence; violence is a rupture that prevents division and difference.5 Although conflict is often more polarized in areas of insecurity, the real difference between areas of security and areas of insecurity is the existence of mechanisms for managing conflicts peacefully.
Democracy can be viewed as the peaceful management of conflicts. In the United States, there is a big division between Republicans and Democrats, but no one really imagines that this will lead to civil war, not because the divide is not deep but because there exists a set of institutions—elections, Congress, the legal system, the police, the media, the right to association—to prevent violence, to eliminate private sources of violence (e.g., access to illegal weapons), and to channel conflict into more or less constructive debate and argument. These institutions create a buffer that absorbs the risks of violent conflict.
In areas of insecurity, this buffer do not exist or are very thin. In Basra, the local government had failed to provide basic services over a long period. There had been no elections, and, before the invasion, government positions were packed with Saddam supporters. Although there was a strong police force, the justice system was totally untrustworthy. When the British arrived, they had no capacity to run a government and they allowed partisan people to infiltrate the police. There were unemployed young men with nothing to do. There was plenty of oil money acquired licitly or illicitly to pay them to fight. And there were many conflict entrepreneurs (warlords, paramilitary leaders, criminal gangs) ready to exploit the insecurity and organize the violence for personal and political gain.
When prevention fails, and violence escalates, a human-security approach aims to reverse the process: to stop the violence rather than to side with one party to the violence. This is much more expensive and difficult than prevention. This is why a human-security approach stresses the need to work proactively before conflict turns violent and violence turns to catastrophe.
The tasks to be undertaken can be grouped under four interrelated headings:

Sustainable Security

This requires the establishment of lasting perceptions of safety and stability. It is the tactic or foundation from which all other activities follow. In areas of insecurity, people are most worried about violence; they fear getting killed or captured, losing their homes or families. If people fear for their immediate survival, they will mortgage their tomorrows for survival today—abandoning livelihoods, destroying land on which they depend, turning to unsavory strongmen for protection.
In wars, the key task of a human security approach is the protection of civilians—protecting ordinary people from violence. This is the first principle of human security - it is about human rights and, in particular, the right to life. This is very different from traditional peacekeeping, which aimed at separation of the combatants, and utterly different from war fighting. It is only in recent years that protection of civilians has become part of the language of security. It has become standard to include protection of civilians in United Nations Security Council resolutions authorizing United Nations peacekeeping missions. However, very little has been done in terms of implementation. For most individual nation-states that contribute to the United Nations and other multilateral operations, protection of civilians is not seen as a main goal, although many nations refer to protection, particularly Canada and the UK.6
Techniques for civilian protection include the establishment of enclaves and safe havens, humanitarian corridors or lifelines through which aid can be delivered, as well as demobilization and disarmament of militias and other illegal armed groups. In Afghanistan, the McChrystal strategy aims at creating “population hubs,” or “gated communities.” In counterinsurgency doctrine, the ink-spot theory suggests that safe areas can be created spot by spot, and they will eventually spread. Sometimes it is enough to have areas protected by civilian international personnel—the United Nations compound in East Timor became one such safe haven. Sometimes civilian protection requires robust military action.
In Sierra Leone, United Nations troops were deployed in 1999 with an explicit mandate to disarm militias and protect civilians. But after rebels killed several UN troops and took some 500 hostages, British forces were sent to protect the capital. British troops freed the road between Freetown, and the UN began a much more serious effort to disarm rebels. While both the British and the UN avoided involvement in the conflict they were ready to be ruthless when attacked. When rebels attacked British paratroopers at Lungi-Lol twenty miles from the airport, the British demolished the rebel force and gained a huge psychological advantage. On the other hand, after the West Side Boys, one of the most notorious rebel groups, had taken British soldiers hostage, soldiers tried to arrest the Westside boys rather than shoot them. (The commander of the land forces was Andy Salmon, who was to introduce a human-security approach in Basra.) By January 2002, when the war was declared over, more than 70,000 combatants, including many children and women, had been demobilized.
Since 2005, UN forces in the Congo have tried to act more aggressively, especially in Ituri and the Kivus, in disarming militias and protecting civilians. The UN mission has established a protection framework and set up joint protection working groups. Victoria Holt and Toby Berkman report that military protection activities include
removal of threats against civilians by a “cordon-and-search operation and/or disarmament of individuals threatening the civilian population,” the establishment of buffer zones between combatants” and safe areas “with adequate military protection,” utilization of an “area domination” strategy through frequent patrols, overflights, and “mobile temporary operations bases,” escorting humanitarian and human rights actors to areas, and evacuating populations out of danger zones.7
In particular, the Pakistani brigade in South Kivu has introduced some innovative techniques, partly derived from experiences on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Operation Night Flash organized village defense committees to alert peacekeepers to imminent attacks, reportedly through banging pots and blowing whistles. The EU mission Operation Artemis was an important turning point. The effort was better prepared, than other missions in the area and included satellite equipment and special forces, as well as medical capacity, and an emphasis, assisted by knowledge of the French language, on bottom-up communication; unfortunately, the mission only lasted a few months.
The Congo mission suffers from not having enough troops and from inadequate training and equipment. It is always difficult to balance inadequate force (e.g., insufficient power to protect civilians in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, indeed, the Congo) with excessive force that kills, injures, or displaces those who are supposed to be protected. And when there are not enough troops there is a temptation to use force less sparingly.
Protecting people is not sustainable security. Safe havens or enclaves have to provide a basis for more long-term measures to reestablish a monopoly of force and the institutions of law and order. By “monopoly of force,” we mean a situation where there are no private armed groups and where only the military and the police are allowed to use force, and then only under very stringent conditions. This is where a human-security approach differs from counterinsurgency. Human-security operations, even in the midst of war, are in support of law and order where law and order is based on human rights. This has profound implications for the rules of engagement. The rules of engagement are shaped by domestic law rather than by the laws of armed conflict. In Basra after January 2008, Coalition troops were operating under Iraqi judicial authority because sovereignty had been handed over to Iraq and this had consequences for tightening the rules of engagement. When operating in support of law and order, soldiers have the right to self-defense and to use force to protect a third party, but there is no concept of “military necessity” that can be used to justify killing enemies or collateral damage. This means trying to arrest members of militias and other irregular forces rather than killing them. This kind of operation is, of course, risky, riskier perhaps than offensive war-fighting operations. In particular, civilian protection comes before force protection in such situations. Soldiers have to act more like firefighters or police officers, risking their lives to save others.
Zones of insecurity usually exist side by side with zones of security or peace. Contemporary wars are extraordinarily patchy or fragmented. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the town of Tuzla defended itself against Serb and Croat extremists through a combination of police and local volunteers and managed to keep the town out of the war. Towns in Northern Ireland during the troubles did the same thing. The majority of the Iraqi governorates have been peaceful. Outsiders tend to neglect the areas of peace, and that is usually a mistake. This is not just because the vortex of violence has a tendency to spread through displaced people, criminal activities, and extremist ideas. It is also because peaceful areas can be used as a model to show the way for more violent areas. Inclusive ideas and peaceful activities like trade can spread, countering the spread of violence. Neglect of the generally peaceful north in Afghanistan, for example, has been a huge mistake; now the insurgency is spreading there. While protecting people and creating safe enclaves, military forces may need to contribute to efforts to preserve the safer areas that already exist.
In many potential conflict situations, apparently desirable cuts in military spending have actually contributed to violence. It is noteworthy that in the early 1990s, the main conflict zones were in the areas where cuts in military spending by states in those areas had been greatest—Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, and Africa. Redundant soldiers sold their weapons or formed armed militia groups or criminal gangs. The surplus stocks of weapons left over from the Cold War period were a major factor in the spike in wars in the early 1990s. Without extensive programs of integration of former soldiers and conversion of equipment, cuts in military spending can lead to military privatization or simply violent anarchy.
As a result, since the late 1990s terms like micro-disarmament and practical disarmament have been introduced by the international development community to describe the control of weapons and militias. It has been an intensive learning process. In Sierra Leone, despite the demobilization in the final stages of the war, the United Nations was not very successful in collecting weapons and reintegrating former soldiers up to 2001. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that only between 1 and 2 percent of weapons had been collected. Reintegration programs designed to give ex-combatants skills failed because the skills (e.g., carpentry) were not matched to demand; further, tool kits were given directly to individuals, many of whom chose to sell them.
The “arms for development” program was introduced by UNDP in 2002 to solve some of these problems. In addition to helping the government of Sierra Leone develop legislation and licensing procedures to control small arms and light weapons, as well as illicit arms trafficking, especially on the borders, the program designed community-based approaches to weapons collection. The idea was that weapons collection would be much more effective if it were community-based rather than individual-based (the individual has an incentive to sell the weapons). In this program, villages were offered a development project of their choosing worth some $18,000 if their village was declared weapons-free by the Sierra Leonean police. Each community was given a metal box in which to collect weapons. The weapons were then divided into those which were unsafe and had to be destroyed and those which were safe and potentially licensable. The box was put into the safe-keeping of the village chief or local imam or priest. The village was given a weapons-free certificate, at a ceremony, by the police, on the basis of house-to-house searches. When Kaldor visited Sierra Leone in January 2006, some thirty-two chiefdoms had been declared weapons-free.
Kaldor visited one village in the Tonkolili district that had surrendered 149 weapons, and had chosen to build a soccer stadium. Everyone in Sierra Leone loves soccer; in the village that Kaldor visited they were all either Arsenal or Manchester supporters. Since there was no soccer stadium in the area, they hoped that theirs would become a moneymaker.
The program helped shift Sierra Leoneans’ mentality from the individualist notion that owning weapons is prestigious to collective pride in being weapons-free. It also brought the Sierra Leonean police closer to the community. And it established local ownership of international development programs. Even though the program has continued, subsequent reports do suggest weaknesses, mainly having to do with the capacity of local communities to manage their programs. For instance, in Tonkolili when Kaldor visited the walls of the stadium had been built and nothing else.8
Effective policing is critical in reestablishing a monopoly of violence and establishing law and order. In places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, police forces were often part of the problem. Vetting police and training them to act in accordance with the law and in the public interest is vital. In Bosnia, the United Nations used the international police force to accompany local police and was able to dismiss police chiefs who failed to arrest suspects or acted in other partisan and/or corrupt ways.
But demobilization, disarmament, and policing cannot be effective without effective laws and an effective and fair justice system, including courts, prisons, judges, and magistrates. Transitional justice, involving things such as war-crimes trials and truth-and-reconciliation commissions, is critical in removing any sense of legal impunity and coming to terms with past tragedies. But everyday justice is also fundamental. In Sierra Leone at the end of the war, there were only eight magistrates left. In the Makeni district court, the UNDP supplemented the salaries of two justices of the peace (a retired English teacher and a retired engineer) and a clerk. The court had no water and no generator and was very hot. But, said the magistrate: “We can do without lights but we can’t do without justices of the peace or clerks.” In some places, it is argued that traditional systems of justice should be encouraged; however, these may be invented traditions (created by various factions who hark back to an invented past) and, in places like Afghanistan, can often be very patriarchal and discriminatory.
There also need to be prisons and rules about detention. If suspects are to be arrested rather than killed, they need to be kept somewhere until they can be tried. The period of detention should not be too long, and attention should be paid to what goes on inside prisons, as prisons are often places where criminals and extremist groups are organized and mobilized.
Finally, the role of the armed forces needs to be rethought. In many countries where violence takes place, armies were modeled on European or American armies and designed for European wars. In practice, they were rarely used in wars against other states and their role was mainly domestic—as a symbol of unity, in the best cases, or as a repressive political force, in the worst. So what are armies for? They are often still important in unifying the population; the army in Lebanon has played this role. They can be used for regional cooperation or for contributions to global peacekeeping. In some cases, as in Basra, they are needed in support of law and order; in others, they may be a mechanism to absorb former fighters.

Sustainable Livelihoods

Sustainable security may be the foundation for all other tasks involved in implementing human security, and yet it is impossible to achieve human security without also establishing sustainable livelihoods. Sustainable livelihoods are also about the first principle of human security. Sustainable security is about civil rights, and sustainable livelihoods are about economic and social rights. In many zones of insecurity, survival is not just about escaping bullets; it is about access to food, clean water, shelter, health care, education, and jobs. A human-security approach is about meeting those needs even in the midst of violence. It is about establishing the basis for a legitimate economy to replace the shadow activities through which people survive only precariously.
In zones of insecurity, before, during, and after violent outbreaks, unemployment is often very high. The economic strategies promoted by international aid donors in the 1980s and 1990s (liberal-ization, privatization, and stabilization of budgets) were very effective at dismantling inefficient state sectors that could not compete in global markets. But they were much less effective at stimulating new types of economic activity. Before they were wracked by conflict, many now-insecure countries experienced dramatic falls in government spending, public services, and income levels, and big rises in unemployment. Violence and conflict sped up the dismantling of the legitimate economy: industrial facilities were destroyed, trade was cut off, and many people with vital skills and specialties were either killed or forced to leave. Indeed, the gray or black economy that is associated with “new war” was often the only source of economic opportunities.
Humanitarian assistance has increased threefold over the last two decades.9 It now accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of all official development assistance. Humanitarian assistance can be viewed as a sort of safety net in societies where the normal coping mechanisms have been undermined by the transition from centralized to market economies and by violent upheaval. While humanitarian assistance is essential in situations where people are deprived of everything, it brings particular problems. It can displace local production or pull people away from their sources of livelihood, especially if it is delivered in camps. It is often “taxed” by the warring parties and offers a source of revenue that is recycled into the conflict.
Many post-conflict economies are characterized by high growth rates, largely as a consequence of external assistance. But these growth rates do not necessarily translate into increased employment and self-sustaining economic activity. In very poor countries, sustaining rural production to meet basic needs is key. But in many poor countries, people are forced off their land during violence. These people join the urban unemployed, and, after the conflict ends, many of them do not want to return to backbreaking subsistence farming. In middle-income countries (e.g., the Balkans or Iraq), public works and restructuring state enterprises are the main ways to generate employment. Microcredit (the extension of small loans) has been an important tool for helping victims of war such as displaced people and veterans, especially those who have been disabled by war. But it is rarely substantial enough to contribute in significant ways to employment.
In most “new wars,” the foundations of modern existence—electricity, water and sanitation, and garbage collection—are badly damaged. After security has been achieved, reestablishing these foundations is often the biggest priority of people who have been through war. The international community has a very poor record in providing these services—its failure to do so is one of the biggest complaints in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Yet the provision of services can also provide a source of employment. Indeed the failure to provide services can often rekindle violence—something that is explicitly recognized in contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine.
Beyond the restoration of basic services, investment in environmentally friendly energy, communications, and transport projects that use twenty-first-century technology is essential for maintaining and stimulating production, especially in middle-income countries. Integrating infrastructure throughout a region is an important way to prevent the separation and division of communities; it can both generate employment and stimulate reconciliation.
Efforts to generate jobs also need to be paralleled by increased expenditure on education, health, and social services. In many conflict zones, health-care facilities, social safety nets, and educational opportunities have been greatly weakened or are nonexistent. Indeed, most deaths are caused by lack of access to health care and the spread of disease partly as a result of lack of clean water and sanitation. Extremist groups (nationalists or religious fundamentalists) often offer welfare services, particularly schooling, and consequently have a profound ideological influence, especially on young people. Education is key to developing new skills, especially for those affected by conflict such as displaced persons and demobilized combatants, and it is also a way to bring different groups together. Social services reduce insecurity.
Finally, it is important to deal with the impact of the violence on the environment and what that means for people’s livelihoods. One of the huge obstacles to rural recovery is the devastation of agricultural land and other natural resources by land mines and unexploded ordnance. Much of the land in southern Lebanon and Gaza is unusable because of land mines and other unexploded devices like cluster munitions. Children and animals are regularly killed by unexpected explosions. By way of example, one of the greatest impediments to Angolan economic recovery, as Beebe witnesses daily, is the fact that rich farmland lies fallow because it is full of land mines and other remnants of the civil war. The cost of living in Luanda is one of the highest in the world—three tomatoes cost nearly $17—in large part because all produce has to be imported.

Sustainable Governance

For security and livelihoods to be sustainable, there has to be a political authority that people trust. This is the second principle of human security. The political authority could be an international authority like the one established in Kosovo after the NATO intervention. Or it could be a municipal or state authority. What went wrong in Basra after 2003 was not just Coalition Forces’ failure to help people find legitimate ways of making a living, it was also—most importantly—the weakness and predatory nature of local government. The main reason it is so difficult to reestablish basic services after a conflict is that corruption pervades ruling institutions.
In many zones of insecurity, government is predatory. A position in government is an opportunity to extract resources rather than to contribute to the public good. Criminal/extremist networks that are engaged in violence often reach deep inside government and have an interest in state weakness because it enables their criminal activity. The drug trade in Afghanistan and smuggling in Montenegro are only possible because of state forbearance or, worse, complicity. In Basra, the Al-Fadhila-controlled local government presided over much of the violence and grabbed funds made available for reconstruction.
Among international aid donors and among those who write about insecurity, there is a growing emphasis on state building to counter the state weakness that is associated with insecurity. Indeed, governance activities now account for over half of most Western aid budgets. This usually involves two elements: how to establish formal legitimacy and how to improve the capacity of the state to deliver services. However, both of these elements can easily end up reinforcing the predatory nature of government.
By formal legitimacy, we mean the kind of legal mechanisms through which governments are established. In zones of insecurity, this might be a peace agreement or a United Nations resolution. Peace agreements can rarely provide the basis for long-term peace because they are negotiated not by ordinary citizens but by those engaged in fighting, who often represent the most extreme positions. Agreements like the Oslo Accords (Israel/Palestine), the Dayton Peace Accords (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the Good Friday Agreement (Northern Ireland), and the Taif Agreement (Lebanon) are often cumbersome, unworkable power-sharing arrangements that guarantee power for those who engaged in violence. If they are sustained despite their unworkability, it is either because of a long-term international presence (as in Bosnia and Herzogovina) or because of popular will for peace (as in Northern Ireland and Lebanon). Peace agreements are cease-fires, not constitutions. They can provide space for a political process that might result in a constitution, but they can also block space.
Another method of establishing formal legitimacy is through elections. But elections that take place in conditions of violence are rarely free or fair. Worse, the expectation of elections may ramp up violence. One of way of exerting political control is through winning elections. Ethnic cleansing in places like Bosnia and Iraq can be viewed as a form of gerrymandering (getting rid of people who might vote against you and packing the area with your own supporters). Of course, elections are important, but only in areas where people are not afraid, where former war criminals are excluded from being candidates, and where public debate can provide a basis for choice.
Some of the same problems apply to well-meaning efforts to improve the capacity of state institutions to deliver services, which is known as capacity building. Capacity building can include programs such as public-service reform, assistance to the judiciary, support for elections and parliamentary procedures, and so on. When a position in government is viewed primarily as a source of personal enrichment and not as a contribution to the provision of public services, the technical capacity-building approach of international agencies ends up exacerbating what is misleadingly described as “corruption” though it is much more deep-rooted and embedded in the very character of the state than this term implies.
Legal mechanisms and capacity-building programs are, of course, important where government has established trust. This is why the kind of compacts described by Salmon in Basra are so important. Government is all about the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. There have to be ways to bring government closer to the citizens so that government responds to local needs. And there has to be a political narrative that provides the basis of trust. By moving into Basra and freeing the city of the militias in the “charge of the knights,” Prime Minister Maliki established an Iraqi-nationalist message that supplanted divisive, fear-based sectarian messages. What is needed in zones of conflict is an alternative ideology that can counter religious, ethnic, or tribal exclusivism. This is why the fourth principle—the bottom-up approach is so important.
The town of Tuzla elected a non-nationalist democratic government just before the Bosnian war broke out. Throughout the war, the mayor of Tuzla and the people around him defended “multimulti” values and developed a historical narrative about the way the people of Tuzla had always resisted imperialism and fascism. It was “like Asterix’s village,” one person told Kaldor when she visited during the war. The symbol of Tuzla was the goat because, so it was said, when Bosnia was declared a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the emperor ordered the people to kill all the goats. The people of Tuzla kept one goat, and it turned out to be so productive that it produced enough milk to make cheese for the whole town. The town’s resistance to the Croat Ushtashe regime, which was allied to the Nazis, was also celebrated. The people of Tuzla claim that Tuzla was the largest free city on the continent of Europe in October 1943. A citizens’ forum was established early on in the war to promote “multi-multi” values, and during the war, there were many NGOs designed to do things like helping women who had been traumatized by gender-related war crimes or promoting local development and microcredit. Free and independent radio stations, mainly broadcasting popular music, were important in countering the messages of the nationalists.
Tuzla kept production and services going throughout the war, and crime remained low. By the end of the war, Tuzla was providing 60 percent of the tax revenue of the Bosnian government. Tuzla also introduced modern communications and Internet links long before most of the rest of the world. The city was part of the Zamir (peace) network established by the Open Society Institute. At the end of the war, many young people from Tuzla got scholarships to study abroad because they had applied online.
The municipality of Tuzla and its citizens promoted an idea of the public good, a “community social conscience” as opposed to the pursuit of private interest. Education, media, and local associations were all part of this effort. This is what has to be at the heart of a human-security approach.
In many war zones, it is possible to find women’s groups, or peace and human-rights groups, who try to advocate nonsectarian values, as was done in Tuzla. These groups are often the first target of violence. They are often dismissed by outsiders as marginal and powerless. Yet even where this is apparently the case, they do represent the kernel of an alternative approach. They can offer guidance to outsiders and, if included in talks, can raise issues that outsiders may not even be aware of. Promoting civil society is, thus, not about establishing and funding artificial NGOs based on Western models, but is key to understanding what is happening, and it is about communication and knowledge and helping to establish a common basis for legitimate governance.

Sustainable Development

The principal demand made by one refugee from violence was not for emergency aid or medicines but for a necktie. “He said that this would enable him to be treated as a human being and not a statue.”10 Sustainable development is the strategic end state that brings together all of the sustainable tasks. At the heart of sustainable development is the dignity of the individual.
Amartya Sen describes sustainable development as the construction of a network of entitlements in any given society. These entitlements are ways in which individuals and the communities in which they live can obtain what they need for a dignified life—for instance, production, trade, labor, inheritance, or security (including social security). Thus, sustainable development necessarily depends on and combines sustainable security, sustainable livelihoods, and sustainable governance.
This does not mean that human security is the same as human development, even though development is the end goal of a human-security approach. Human security is, if you like, at the sharp end of development. It is about addressing what Sen calls the “downside risks” that threaten the “vital core” of human beings.11 Yet, it understands the inextricable links between security, livelihoods and governance. Many of the tasks of a human-security strategy are expressed with a local focus. But human security is also regional and global. This is what the fourth and fifth principles of human security—effective multilateralism and regional focus—aim to address.
“New wars” not only blur the differences between public and private, between prevention and recovery, and indeed between war and peace—they blur the differences between the inside and the outside, and between the domestic and the foreign. The vortex of violence pulls in neighboring areas. Displaced persons, criminal activities, weapons flows, and extremist ideas all spill over borders. This is why any human-security approach has to be regional. If human security is to be sustained in Basra, for example, there has to be a commitment by Basra’s neighbors, especially Iran, at the least not to interfere and, at best, to cooperate. The war in Sierra Leone could not have been ended without an end to the war in Liberia since the Sierra Leonean rebels were based in Liberia and the lucrative diamond trade on which they depended went through Liberia, as did weapons. And, of course, the smuggling rings and human trafficking that sustained the Bosnian conflict infected the whole of the Balkans.
“New wars” are global as well as local. Outside militaries, foreign reporters, mercenaries, private security companies, aid agencies, and NGOs are all part of the landscape. And they can be part of the problem. Outsiders cannot contribute to human security unless they are viewed as legitimate. If they are seen as occupiers or colonialists they can easily make things worse. Likewise, outsiders cannot contribute to what is known as security-sector reform (reforming the military, disarmament and demobilization, policing, justice, and the like) if they do not undertake security-sector reform themselves by reshaping the tools needed for a human-security approach. Otherwise they may end up building militaries on the Western model, training new soldiers on the Western model and selling them arms. At the least, this is a huge economic burden; at worst, armies with no external functions can end up as participants in escalating violence.
Human security requires a holistic approach to security, livelihoods, and governance. Creating the tools for implementing human security is thus not only about restructuring the security sector, it involves rethinking civilian programs as well. The key terrain in unstable environments is the human terrain. Starting from a human security standpoint necessarily highlights the interdependencies that exist between security, governance and politics, and social and economic development. It is not possible to create stability unless an holistic approach is adopted.