Japan and Human Security Revisited

Human Security, an Alternative Security Concept

If one accepts as a starting point Arnold Wolfers’ view that security is ‘the absence of threat to acquired values,’ security policies are actions taken to reduce or limit the probability of damage to one’s acquired values. After World War II, and especially with the emergence of the Cold War, national security was seen almost by definition as the absence of military threats to the state or the state’s ability to repel them, and states used military force to counter threats. The end of the Cold War was seen as proof that world politics had changed, since the global bifurcation into two hostile blocs had gone down the drain. With the division of the world into two blocs, with neutral in between, gone, the lid put on regional and international conflicts was also gone.

In the post-Cold War era, the front lines of war shifted, with armed conflicts occurring more frequently within state borders than across them. Armed conflicts shifted from wars to intermediate and minor conflicts, with an increasing number of conflicts involving control of territory and the breakup of states. Many low-level conflicts in the post-Cold War era involved civilian casualties and displacement on an agonizing scale. The horrific situation in which civilians in conflicts found themselves, and the perpetration of crimes against human rights, were appalling. Wars were not what they used to be. There was an increasing number of perceived threats to security that military measures could not counter.

The unrelenting human costs of violent conflict became one of the reasons why the discussion of the nature of security resurfaced. A redefinition of security was seen to be required by the near disappearance of conventional military threats to the major powers and by an increasing awareness of the costs of the new wars, both for affected countries and for the international community. With the focus shifting towards threats so far neglected in the security discourse, the security concept itself, used in analyses and studies, national security, seemed increasingly dysfunctional.

In an influential contribution to the ongoing debate, Emma Rothschild described the extension of the security concept. She clarified the emerging understanding of its complexity by, beginning with the state, describing security as ‘being brought down to the individual, brought up to the international system or supranational physical environment, broadened from a focus on the military to include the environment, society, and economy, and finally, diffused in all directions to include local governments, international agreements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public opinion, forces of nature, and the financial market as sources of responsibility.’

In 1994, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issued a path-breaking report manifesting the importance of the concept of human security. The core attribute of the concept is clear: the referent of security is the individual as opposed to the state. This alternative security concept was broad and drew seemingly unorganized objectives into one overarching theme with a common goal of countering the multiplicity of threats, not to the state as in the case of national security, but to human beings, individuals, or a community of people. The report identified seven subcategories of security: environmental, economic, health, political, personal, food, and community security.

The new security concept did not emphasize values such as territorial integrity and national interest, but rather safety, well-being, and dignity. It was multilayered, with security considered from the state level down to the individual level. In contrast to the traditional interpretation of security as national security, the security referent in human security is people, not the country. Human security is a global and inclusive concept dealing with a universal concern to which national boundaries are irrelevant, and dealing with (1) security of people, not just secu-rity of territory; (2) security of individuals, not just security of their nations; (3) security through development, not security through arms, and (4) security of all people everywhere—in their homes, in their jobs, in their streets, in their communities and in their environment.

In 1995, the Commission on Global Governance opined, ‘Too often in the past, however, preserving the security of the state has been used as an excuse for policies that undermined the security of people.’ However, human security adherents argued that the human security concept did not replace, but rather com-plemented, the traditional state-centered national security concept. It was made eminently clear by high-ranking MOFA official Takasu Yukio at a conference in Ulan Bator in 2000:

Human security efforts will not replace national security arrangements—the protection of territory and the life and property of the people remains the responsibility of government. While national security is a prerequisite for ensuring security—that is, the survival and dignity of the individual—it is not the only requirement. Even if a state becomes rich and strong, there is no guarantee that the individuals who live in that state will be safe and rich. The role of government is to provide a foundation or environment that will enable individuals to take care of themselves and to develop their capabilities without undue restrictions.

The traditional security concept, national security, emphasizes the protection of the state and national survival, prioritizing state security over that of individuals. Ogata Sadako, who was a figurehead for human security, emphasized ‘that the task of the challenge to focus on the security of the people is not to replace state security. Security of the state has to be reinforced. Both are needed and they complement each other.’

Human security is a concept addressing threats to people and ways to overcome them. The CHS’s report incorporates two approaches—bottom-up and top-down. The former focuses on empowering people through development programs, best attained in a community context, while the latter places the onus on the state to protect people’s well-being through sound rule of law and judicial institutions. With people as the security referent, human security is an umbrella concept encompassing threats to security, such as human rights violations, political instability, poverty, economic underdevelopment, terrorism, environmental degradation, and ethnic and religious violence. It is only too apparent that instruments traditionally employed in national security policy―such as soldiers and weapons―are inadequate for, or may even undermine, the advancement of human security.

Defining human security so expansively that it seemed to capture almost everything that could be considered a threat to well-being was seen to be falling into the trap described by Daniel Deudney in 1990: ‘If everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labelled a “security threat,” the term loses any analytical usefulness and becomes a loose synonym of “bad”.’ This criticism hit the human security concept. The concept was found to be hard to pin down, even ‘slippery’, as it was described in Roland Paris’ famous characterization.

Many analysts commented initially that the human security concept was vague. One was the leading human security researcher Amitav Acharya. He presented a scathing indictment of the theoreticians’ efforts to make the concept more precise and, by extension, more measurable. It was ‘morally suspect and politically short-sighted. To speak of human security in Asia, where poverty and authoritarianism remain pervasive maladies, without bringing in the question of polit-ical rights and economic vulnerabilities, is to severely undermine the utility of the concept in moving the region away from the traditional understanding of security and devising policy tools to institutionalise the new understanding.’

Human security became a contested concept seen as normatively attractive but theoretically weak. It lacked the necessary precision to serve as a useful theoretical construct and was seen as an exercise in conceptual overstretch, which diminished its usefulness as a policy tool. On precisely this point, others believed ‘human security—despite its theoretical difficulties—may suffer in conceptual integrity but can work in practice.’ Roland Paris argued that ‘human security is powerful precisely because it lacks precision and thereby encompasses the diverse perspectives and objectives of all the members of the coalition.’ He even claimed that the concept was useful only as a unifying label for those who prioritized development and humanitarian issues and that the vagueness in its definition was deliberate, going so far as to suggest that the ambiguity was cultivated so that the term human security could hold together a fragile coalition of middle powers, international agencies, and NGOs, being an effective cam-paign slogan aimed at attracting public attention, political interest, and government money.

Vagueness was not seen as a problem by Japanese proponents of human security. Clausen (2009) described how a part of the appeal of the human security concept in Japan lies in its vagueness, while Bacon (2014) noted that its breadth and lack of precision were among the reasons for its success as the approved perspective in Japan.

Two aspects of human security were outlined in the CHS’s report: ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’. In the wide-ranging intellectual debate around the human security concept, a narrow vs broad approach formed. Japan’s broad approach to human security was largely drawn on the work of the UNDP, as well as subsequent work of CHS, the Japanese government, and numerous academics. The narrow conception was the so-called Canadian approach, which largely restricted the parameters of human security to violent threats against the individual, which could come from a vast array of issues, including the drug trade, landmines, ethnic discord, state failure, and trafficking in small arms.