Human security will find its greatest test, and perhaps make its greatest accomplishments, in Africa. In part, that’s because Africans are the originators of the concept. They understand security in a very particular, very immediate way. As one ambassador put it to Beebe,

You Americans are always looking for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Yes, we do have those things in Africa. We have terrorism. Our terrorism is poverty, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. We have weapons of mass destruction as well. It is an AK-47, usually carried by a child. All of this is played out every day in an environment we don’t even control.¹

It was an oppressively hot Sunday in September 2009 when Beebe found himself part of a delegation being escorted through the town of Huambo, Angola, from the regional military headquarters to the newly renovated military hospital. Beyond the gates of the hospital, a curious line of hospital staff were waiting for the visitors. The purpose of the trip was rather innocuous: to discover the role and effectiveness of the hospital in providing treatment for HIV in the military. After all, this was a military hospital.²

The chief doctor, a captain in the Angolan army, briefed the delegation on the state of the hospital just a few years earlier: the building was near collapse, the interior of the hospital was completely dilapidated, and there were no sterile areas for surgery. Pictures showed patients lying on cots, on the floor, and outside. There was precious little equipment; what there was didn’t work. Most of the patients in the hospital appeared to be civilians. As the doctor proudly continued his presentation about how the hospital had been revitalized and now had beds for patients, a pharmacy, and a surgical ward, one member of the delegation raised what seemed to be the obvious question: “You service only the military and their dependents here, correct?” The young doctor, a bit puzzled, looked up and said, “Why no. Over 60 percent of the people we see here have nothing to do with the military.” The delegate was baffled “Well, why don’t they just go to the local hospital? Is the service here that much better?” The young doctor smiled gently and said, “No, sir. We are the only hospital in the entire region. This is the only place anyone can go for medicine. Many of the patients we see are carried by their families over fifty kilometers. How can we turn them away, sir?”

The doctor’s statement was not surprising. Militaries’ roles and perceptions of security in Africa have always been quite different from those in the United States and other Western countries. We simply don’t understand what constitutes security in the minds of Africans. Yet, until the West stops trying to impose what we feel is right for African security and begins listening to what Africans say is relevant, we will never be able to contribute in a positive way to this hugely important continent.

As the senior Africa analyst on the U.S. Army staff, Beebe had the job of discovering how Africans defined security. After researching the question in fifteen different countries, he found that the base philosophy of what constitutes a threat for the United States—and other Western countries—is quite different from the way Africans conceive of threats to themselves. While Western language defines security through a lens of military threat—planes, tanks, defense budgets, and standing armies along a border prepared to go on the offensive—African security—or insecurity—is best defined as conditions -based. Most Africans talked about security in terms of security-sector reform, health, poverty, and environmental shock caused by climate change. The tremendous droughts and food shortages of 2008 suggested that food security might be at the very top of security concerns in Africa.

Of course, security is debated in Africa like everywhere else. There are still political and military elites who stick to traditional state-centered views. And for many Africans, human security is a way of critiquing these views. Do states actually protect and ensure the welfare of their people; how can they do better; how can they be made accountable when they fail?

The African perspective of human security changes how the world looks—from top to bottom. The conventional global map divides continental land masses into the sovereign states that have made up what we have known as the international system since the end of World War II. This image of the world, in which the territorial state is the overriding definition of authority and security, was a “system” that was constructed—by both East and West—and imposed on the developing world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In this Western-biased state-sovereign system, the state reigned supreme and was the focal object of international discourse and military protection/defense. Conventional militaries were identified with national security; their job was to protect the state from enemies. At the same time, they constituted a potential threat to opposing states. In the twentieth century, the state maintained relative hegemony over what have been called elements of national power: diplomatic tools, control of information and its dissemination, military power projection, and economic viability. State sovereignty was paramount, although additional legal frameworks were constructed to adjudicate international infractions. Indeed, the United States championed the development of most of these international agencies, organizations, and bodies after the end of World War II.

Security alliances were an essential element in this structure. NATO, for example, was formed as an organization to represent a group of states, with Article 5 explicitly stating that an attack on one ally would be considered an attack on all. Elsewhere, states were divided up according to positions in the Cold War—they were pro-West, pro-Soviet, or nonaligned. These positions mattered much more than what was going on inside states. Many leaders in what was known as the third world—the Idi Amins and Mobutu Sese Sekos—were known to be ruthless, oppressive, and dictatorial, but because the world was divided into two poles, intervention in these countries was only carried out when it was in the self-interest of one—or both—of those poles. Seldom were actions carried out based on the needs of people. Nowhere was this more obvious than on the African continent, where the United States and the Soviet Union played a brutal game of tit for tat using African states as pieces. Populations in these oppressive and oppressed states had little voice in their own affairs and little way of telling the rest of the world the conditions they had to put up with.

During the twentieth century, a discussion of security would have been incomplete without a brief mention of protecting the economic viability of the state. Economic power was guaranteed by state military prowess, or so it was assumed, until multinational corporations blurred the line that separated national from international interest. Economic ties were formed with allies with an understanding that each state had a vested interest in protecting those economic links. A multitrillion-dollar military-industrial complex was developed to support and defend this system. It worked well as long as the world was bipolar and the other guys were doing the same thing. In short, we all played with the same rule book, bending and breaking the rules where we could.

This was the way we viewed the world—through the prism of state-based enemies and threats similar to ourselves. Yet, what happened to the United States—and the world—on September 11, 2001, was an attack not launched from inside the system, not instigated by a state, and certainly not symmetric. There will be volumes written on the “failures of intelligence” to identify this new type of threat, yet in the final analysis, it has to be understood in terms of the way conditions of insecurity allow new actors to leverage twenty-first-century technologies and create subterranean international networks.

The second-most-crippling attack on the United States was launched just a few short years later, in August 2005. Again, this attack was not launched from inside the system, not instigated by a state following the rules of sovereign interaction, and certainly not symmetric. This attack was not masterminded by one group bent on the destruction of the United States, but the second- and third-order effects of it rippled throughout the entire country. The attacker this time was Hurricane Katrina.

Conditions-based threats, or “creeping vulnerabilities,” such as natural calamities or networks of extremists are commonplace on the African continent. So what would the world of security look like if we adopted a conditions-based, African approach?

Worldmapper.org, is a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan and the University of Sheffield to create cartograms that show what the world “really looks like.” It is one way of representing the world through African eyes. Cartograms are simply graphical representations of data. The cartograms “grow” or “shrink” countries according to the prevalence or absence of the criterion. In global cartograms of HIV/AIDS and malaria deaths, Africa appears as a bloated mass, by far the dominant shape. North America and Europe practically vanish, as do even China and India in the malaria map, though India remains a significant mass on the HIV/AIDS map.

When the criterion is switched to poverty, Africa is a substantial bloc matched or exceeded by parts of the Middle East, China, and the Indian subcontinent. However, when deaths as a result of drought is the criterion, Africa is without equal anywhere in the world. Almost every other country is eliminated from the cartogram because deaths from lack of potable water have been eliminated from the world—except Africa, where they occur on a massive scale.

Finally, when the criterion is child labor, the cartograms show that the phenomenon is quite well distributed, though it is almost invisible in Europe and North America. But the size of the problem in Africa is self-evident. What these “catastrophe” cartograms make clear is that threats related to the basic needs of daily life—safe food, drinking water, medicine, and opportunities for education and self-improvement (things that are denied to any child in the labor force)—are vast and utterly predominant in Africa. These massive challenges—rendered as such in the distortions of the cartograms—are at the heart of human insecurity from Cape Town to Cairo, Dakar to Mogadishu.

Challenges such as these would test to the breaking point governments’ legitimacy and capacity to respond in the developed world. The challenges facing African states expose the powerlessness of states—at worst, an absence of political will, and at best, an inability to deliver. The security architecture is no more than a house of cards. None of these conditions (HIV/AIDS, poverty, famine, and child labor) alone presents an overwhelming security “threat,” yet when even one of those cards is pulled, it is enough to collapse the entire house. Additionally, the impact of these conditions-based security concerns doesn’t stop at the border—it extends to groups of people whose cultural and tribal lineages spread over multiple borders.

The geopolitical borders of most African states were, of course, determined not by Africans but by the Berlin Conference of 1884- 1885. Many African national borders make sense from a Western perspective but have little relevance to ethnic or tribal cultures divided between several countries, little impact on herdsmen traveling with their herds in search of fertile grazing lands and water, and little real significance for indigenous populations who cross these borders as part of their everyday lives. What this means is that the governments in power are not necessarily representative of the populations but of interest groups and subgroups within the states.

If the West continues to demand adherence to a traditional view of security, we risk becoming marginalized in the eyes of those who most need a sustainable definition for security. If you went to the doctor with a sore throat, only to have the doctor place you on the examination table, break one leg, then declare the problem not to be a sore throat but a broken leg, how often would you go back for treatment? To retain any relevance in the eyes of Africans, the West will have to shift from imposing what we see as the right definition of security on Africa to supporting what Africans see as a relevant definition for their own security. During a discussion at the Pentagon, in 2007 a senior African military attaché pointed out, “Most people in my country don’t like the military and don’t want the military in their cities.” Beebe anticipated the reasons: the militaries are predatory, dangerous, supportive of the regime, and corrupt. But as the African attaché continued, it was clear that his reason was far more practical:

Our people don’t like us because they do not see us as value added to society or to the development of our countries. You, the United States, want to train us on peacekeeping but don’t want to give us training on how to be doctors, or how to build roads and bridges. Teach us about water and sanitation and how to help our countries develop. This is what will keep the peace, you see.

For Africa to be successful in the twenty-first century, it will need to become less militaristic. The 2007 Human Security Report Project indicates that conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are steadily decreasing in both number and lethality. In 2002, there were thirteen state-based conflicts. By 2006, the number had dropped to seven. Yet, this does not mean Africa is becoming any more stable. One of the main reasons for the decline in conflicts has been the way in which the United Nations has brokered cease-fires and deployed peacekeepers to maintain those cease-fires. Since 1999, the number of personnel deployed in multilateral peace missions in Africa has been increasing at a staggering rate—from 4,853 civilian and military personnel deployed in seven missions in 1999 to 76,814 personnel deployed across sixteen missions in 2009. The challenge is how to bring about a sustainable peace without the need for international peacekeepers.

What is needed in Africa is a blending of police, military, and development experts to create an organization along the lines of a civilian protection and development corps. Nowhere in the world is the concept of engagement brigades more applicable than in Africa. While the West continues to impose a bifurcated, Western model of military and police upon Africa, it has also created a dangerous competition over scarce resources among the different powerful and potentially destabilizing security organizations, especially between militaries and police. While one organization will often receive the lion’s share of resources through foreign military training, the organization that lacks resources may take to looting, stealing, or worse from the populations it is supposed to protect. In North Kivu, a province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when Beebe visited in 2008, police officers were earning an average of about $7 per month, mainly because each corrupt level of government was taking a cut. Even by African standards, this was nowhere near enough to survive. So, the police resorted to setting up roadblocks and patrolling for bribes. Most frustrating was the thought that had the very simple concepts of mobile banking been used, police would have been ensured adequate pay and would not have resorted to being part of the security challenge.

A better way would be to take the senior African military attaché’s advice and facilitate the transformation of military and police units into engagement brigades that add value to their countries. This would mean doing away with trying to create forces in the Western image. Of course, the engagement brigades must be able to provide security in dangerous situations and be able to contribute to African peacekeeping. That means they have to be able to perform human-security operations rather than traditional war fighting. They need to be taught not to fight military enemies but to protect people, to create humanitarian space and, in the process, to fight the conditions of instability. They need to be taught how to operate in support of law and order under rules of engagement more akin to those of police forces than those of militaries.

Because engagement brigades are not the same as militaries, they can undertake civilian tasks as well. Units could be designated to provide heavy engineering support for development of roads, bridges, and other types of infrastructure. The vocational training developed in such engagement brigades could then be used in the civilian sector once brigade personnel were released from service. Africa suffers immensely from two factors in this respect—large standing military forces with little to do and a civilian sector grossly deficient in skilled labor. The creation of engagement brigades would remedy both problems. When Beebe visited the chief of Angolan Defense Forces (CHOD), the general was asked why the Angolan military had not reduced its forces as it had promised. The general answered directly:

We have approximately 155,000 personnel. We would like to have only 120,000. However, do you expect us to put 35,000 people on the street when the only skills they have are basic military skills? How does that help the stability and development of our country? We want our military to be a vehicle for the development of our country, not its detriment.

Africa also suffers from a lack of adequate housing. Engagement brigades could be developed to tackle this shortage too. Angola is pioneering a potential solution by converting traditional mechanized infantry units into rapid engineering and construction units with the assistance of a remarkable machine that very few people in the West have heard of. Yet in Africa it could prove to be a more powerful “weapon” than an M1 tank or F-16 fighter. According to its manufacturer, MIC Industries, the Ultimate Building Machine (UBM) is a self-contained factory on wheels capable of fabricating and assembling an entire building at remote construction sites. Traditional construction time is shortened, since UBM-made steel buildings require no screws, bolts, fasteners, beams, trusses, or columns. The machine is programmed at the site or remotely, and then fed a roll of steel that it bends into panels to create a permanent shelter. A crew of ten to twelve trained skilled workers can assemble a building as large as 10,000 square feet in a single day. The training to master the equipment takes less than two days.

Technical fixes alone are not the answer. The engagement brigades would be asked to consult with the local population about what kind of houses are most appropriate and how best to build them quickly and efficiently.

Rapid-construction engagement brigades could provide housing for thousands within a matter of weeks. Other engagement brigades could work on power supply, prioritizing lightweight, long- duration renewable energy—solar and wind power—water supply, and sanitation. In this way, militaries and police forces can transform themselves from twentieth-century operations competing for scarce resources and preying on their own populations to twenty-first-century vehicles for social development and bedrocks of skilled labor forces. The West should support a shift in training and manning philosophies away from creating defense forces aimed at armed threats to a security-engagement-brigade model oriented around combating the conditions of instability and hindrances to development.

Assisting in the conversion of defense forces will be challenging for Western militaries that don’t have a lot of “development” skills and expertise themselves. We will have to look outside the traditional military lanes of training. One such effort, the STAR-TIDES project, is a consortium run out of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Beebe first met the director of STAR-TIDES, Dr. Linton Wells, in 2007. STAR (Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research) TIDES (is a research effort to encourage information sharing and develop communities of interest to support populations under stress). STAR-TIDES promotes affordable, sustainable support. It has operated and conducted research in most parts of the globe with a solid record of success. STAR-TIDES has also been successful in breaking down barriers and building bridges between business, civil society, and government stakeholders working toward a common goal. This organization is well suited to help the transformation of African engagement brigades. Where a human-security framework conceptualizes the nexus of defense and development, STAR-TIDES has put it into practice.

How necessary for security is this? According to the 2009 UN Millennium Development Goals Report, more than 62 percent of sub-Saharan African populations live without access to water and sanitation, durable housing, or adequate living space. Africa also lives in the dark, literally, with more than 74 percent of the total population having no access to electricity. The numbers are even more staggering for rural populations, which also tend to be most vulnerable during times of near conflict and conflict. Africa is the only continent where, according to International Energy Agency estimates, there will be more people living without electricity in 2030 than there are now.