I forgot to tell you las time the objective of my upcoming academic excursion: a more concrete idea about what the positive side of security is - if such a thing does in fat exist. As a keen reader of this blog would have noted - is there any? - a good part of the news posted here has to be with either the changing role of traditional security, or the nature challenge of new threats and old security apparatuses. However, there are some scholars that maintain that security is more than just "the absence of threats," or, in other commonly used words, living more than just surviving.
My first encounters with that idea have not get me convinced, but I admit that reaching to the bottom of this matter is key to give the concept more robustness. The "human" side of the concept well deserves it. I found an insightful introduction to the issue in this paper by a Rhonda Powell, but I have several doubts about her position - wait for them in the paper I plan to submit this term. So, then, lets keep the review going on:
+ Truong (2009) "Feminist Knowledge and Human Security"
The author offers this time a deeper insight on the work of feminists about care, further elaborating on the links to human security. There is an especial emphasis on epistemology, and the kind of knowledge that is considered when studying the proposed problems. From the feminist side, there is a constant plea for a more inclusive construction of knowledge. Truong says "[T]he assumption that a standard of impartiality (strong objectivity) enables one to judge some perspectives as better than others contradicts the situated knowledge claim - which purports that all knowledge is partial." Therefore, the author links the context to subjective views of it, granting an importance that is not observed by the orthodoxy of social sciences.
There are at least to implications from this posture: first, methodologically, it is argued that human security is due to go beyond objective analysis and inform indexes with qualitative views of the situation. This view, shared by many other authors, may not totally forbid attempts to measure the concept, but it will restrict any idea of stand-alone factor as those of the HDI.
Second, a less considered consequence of the insertion of subjectivity is how it hinders the possible quality of the concept as a policy tool. Following the dictum, there is no reason to consider human security less partial than other analyses, and so any recommendation on any issue - poverty, conflict, any - product of a human security study can be as wrong as any other analysis. This a fact that has been already observed in the field of vulnerability studies, close to human security, where the same situation occurs. If we add serous doubts about the methodological improvements in the assessment of causalities brought by the concept, one wonders if the focus should not be reoriented.
The ethics of care also have some implications about identity that are well-worth examining. Close to more traditional - may I say Aristotelean - ideas of identity, Engster brings forward a 'rational theory of obligation' that bases provision of security to someone that is not from one's immediate group out of interdependence. Accounts grounded in more emotive principles give more importance to affinity or sympathy as engines of care. The author uses the umbrella term of "relational ontology". Let me observe that care seems to be more related to protection than empowerment or fear, so the kind of identity here serves as a boundary element to move from the threat to its absence, but does it relate to a security community? It seems to me that the model so far proposed is too focused on protection and less on empowerment, and somehow disconnected of the nature of the threats.