Human security is a relatively new paradigm in development studies. Most often, when governments refer to ‘national security’, they are referring to the survival of the state and the rulers rather than the security of the people.
The new paradigm of human security must be differentiated from the traditional narrow view of ‘national security’ which is anchored on the defence of the state and its apparatus.
The World Bank’s 2011 Development Report underlines security as the primary development challenge of our time, given how conflict and violence undermine livelihoods and the life-chances of millions on our planet. Human security has been defined as “the obligation of the state to provide a facilitating environment for equality and individual participation through democracy, adherence to human rights and the participation of civil society”. It involves the responsibility to protect individuals and communities from the physical and emotional insecurity from war, violence and conflict as well as natural and man-made disasters.
At the heart of the contemporary crisis of human security is globalisation and how it negatively impacts national systems.
While it has enhanced global trade and welfare, it has also engendered new vulnerabilities. Financial contagion and the spread of viral epidemic diseases pose greater risks than ever before. Communities that hibernated in cultural cocoons have suddenly found themselves exposed to new habits and mindsets that may seem unwelcome and even threatening.
Terrorist networks such as Boko Haram, al Qaeda and the Islamic State have become transnational organisations that thrive on the opportunities opened by new technologies and communications channels.
Globalisation has to some extent also altered the character of the Westphalian territorial state as we have always known it; eroding the traditional ‘parental role’ of the state and its capacity, authority and legitimacy. It has engendered new inequities between the rich and the poor. The celebrated French economist, Thomas Piketty, has undertaken a magisterial study using time series and econometric modelling to demonstrate how deepening inequalities are shaping the fate of nations and of our civilisation itself.
Deepening frustrations occasioned by inequality, and youth unemployment coupled with the absence of political expression and dwindling socio-economic opportunities were the key elements that explain the “Arab Spring” and the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The Middle East and North Africa have probably the worst records for youth joblessness in the world, averaging some 25 percent. In spite of vast hydrocarbon resources, what the economic historian Charles Issawi termed ‘the fertile crescent’ has remained trapped in the Middle Ages, with little or no liberty or opportunities for its growing army of unemployed youths.
Linked to this is the new architecture of global power and the insecurity that it engenders. The Cold War created two major centres of power, one based in Washington DC and the other based in Moscow. Today, we live in a largely unipolar world in which the United States is the preponderant economic, military and political power. I have long admired America’s illustrious statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy who often rose up to the occasion when the world was in peril. But American foreign policy has often oscillated between isolationism and internationalism, an inconsistency which has not always augured well for world order.
The neo-conservatives, a narrow clique of neo-Nazis who dominated the Bush administration, brought into American foreign policy a new pagan and illiberal ethos that has nothing to do with the true spirit of the American people and their age-old commitment to solidarity and fraternity of nations. As a consequence, in Beijing, Moscow, Caracas, Cairo and elsewhere, a new generation of leaders is quietly rejecting American unilateralism and the neoconservative spirit underpinning it.
The emerging economic powers are questioning the legitimacy of the existing institutions of global governance, from the IMF to the World Bank and the dollar-dominated international monetary order. Such a situation of flux, in which no one is able or willing to assume world leadership, can only be a recipe for chaos.
In an influential article a decade ago, the neo-conservative public intellectual Robert Kaplan prophesied a coming age of disorder, singling out West Africa as the signifier in his premonition of a future of chaos and disintegration: “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger.” He points to trends such as disease, uncontrolled population growth, criminal violence, resource scarcity, refugees and the “increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders” as factors likely to speed up the inevitable process of societal collapse in Africa.
Kaplan makes oblique references to Nigeria as one of the countries destined to fail, painting an apocalyptic picture of impending chaos: “To understand the events of the next fifty years…one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war”. Kaplan was writing in 1994 when Liberia and Sierra Leone were enmeshed in violent conflict. Today, West Africa is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. The guns have fallen silent as ECOWAS countries make heroic efforts to consolidate democracy and rebuild their economies while restoring hope to their people. The mysterious outbreak of Ebola in the summer of 2014 has been a major dampener to the emerging optimism.
The ongoing insurgency in northern Nigeria comes dangerously close to confirming Kaplan’s self-fulfilling prophecies. It is by far the greatest challenge to our nationhood since the civil war. In Nasarawa State, Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Benue and other parts of the Middle Belt, well armed “Fulanis” are waging a murderous Jihad against defenseless peasants. Thousands are being killed while a humanitarian tragedy is being unleashed. And the whole world is silent. The disgraceful theatre of parliamentarians climbing over the fence of the National Assembly presages the coming disorder.
Meanwhile, the naira has been devalued, as the government faces an impending fiscal crisis. Whoever imagines that peaceful elections can be held in 2015 under the present atmosphere cannot be serious.
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
