Journal of Human Security | 2013 | Volume 9 | Issue 1 | Pages 1-3

DOI: 10.12924/johs2013.09010001

ISSN: 1835-3800

Editorial

Sabina Lautensach

Editor-in-Chief

of the Journal of Human Security, Human Security Institute (Canada), University of Northern

British Columbia, Terrace, BC V8G 4A2, Canada; E-Mail: [email protected]

Submitted: 6 January 2013 | Accepted: 7 January 2013 | Published: 16 January 2013

Dear Reader,

A few changes have caught up with our venerable

journal since our last issue. As you have noticed, JHS

is now published by Librello, an excellent new

publishing house based in Switzerland. Volumes 1

though 7 are still available through the RMIT website.

The two issues of volume 8 are available freely

through our personal blog site [1] and from this

current issue onward our issues will be available by

open access through the Librello website [2]. All

archived volumes are also accessible though the

Librello site, although volumes 1 through 7 are still

on pay per view. We are grateful to the people at

Librello for providing access to our archive in its

entirety through their webside.

The state of human security has also experienced

some notable changes. The 2012

Human Security

Report

[3] painted a glowingly optimistic picture of

human security improving worldwide. Of course such

sweeping proclamations always rely heavily on their

small print, in this case the particular definition of

human security employed. Unfortunately there is not

even a small print definition to be found in the

Report. The reader is obliged to infer that definition

from the sources of insecurity that the document

recognises. They encompass all forms of 'organised

violence': interstate and intrastate armed conflict, the

severity and persistence of warfare, and various kinds

of military interventions. Thus, the Report limits itself

to what Johan Galtung, the pioneer of peace studies,

calls 'direct violence'.

What the Report does not count as human

insecurity is what Galtung calls 'structural violence',

the slow death from hunger and preventable or

curable diseases, caused not by intentional acts of

commission, but by neglect, by acts of omission, by

gross inequality and by an unjust structure of society.

It is estimated that structural violence kills over

100,000 people every day, mostly children [4].

Galtung [5] also introduced the concept of 'cultural

violence', the advocacy of direct and structural

violence in education, the media, literature and art, in

the form of nationalism, racism, sexism and other

forms of discrimination and prejudice. One wonders

how differently the Report's pronouncements would

have come out under such a more inclusive

perspective.

Furthermore, the Report fully ignores the fourth

pillar of human security, on which the other three so

frequently depend: the stability, productivity and

resilience of environmental support structures. It

represents the ecologically naïve position that we

encounter from time to time in a minority of

students, that food comes from grocery stores and

disease from germs. With respect to the forth pillar,

the decline of human prospects hardly requires any

further argument.

Given its narrow focus, the Report's assessments

and prognoses assume a similarly narrow validity. Its

optimistic outlook is not anything new; previous

Reports from 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009/10

invariably announced declines in the number of

armed conflicts and their deadliness, in genocide, in

human rights abuses, and in terrorism [6]. Those

claims are supported by the work of Joshia Goldstein

under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

and Steven Pinker, showing that wars are becoming

less common and on average less deadly.

Even when one engages with the Report on its

own narrow conceptual territory, not all of its

proclamations appear equally defensible. The claim

that the number and severity of human rights

violations in general are in decline can hardly be

supported by data showing decreasing incidence of

direct violence alone. Moreover, even in terms of

direct physical violence the US State Department's

data on its Political Terror Scale (PTS) indicate more

of a steady state, or at best a return to 'normal' after

a post-Cold War upsurge [7]. This curiously stands in

contrast to a demonstrable increase in the number of

'democratic' governments.

An additional reason why overly optimistic reports

like this may do more harm to global human security

(however defined) than they reassure an already

complacent OECD consumer is in its implicit message.

Tak e, for instance, the claim that rape has decreased

as a weapon of war: "mainstream narratives on

wartime sexual violence and the impact of war on

education are often one-sided ad misleading". The

Report blames NGOs for over-reporting. "The

worldwide incidence of sexual violence has likely

declined" ([3], p. 79). Framing the information in this

way can do severe damage to the cause of human

rights. Readers too often infer that things are getting

better all the time anyway, which is of course what

everybody wants to believe and constantly looks to

see confirmed, but this is also fundamentally

counterproductive to the quest for human rights.

That quest relies desperately on continuous funding,

which under neoliberal administrations must come

increasingly from private donors and charitable

organisations. Those in turn base their allocation

decisions on research reports such as this one.

This objection has nothing to do with the fact that

the Report's claims may be factually correct, at least

in part. It rather addresses the strategic blunder, the

outrageous offence to millions of women, and the

damage to the cause of human rights and women's

security. It raises the question about underlying

motives, and Jürgen Habermas's famous question,

"who benefits?" What might be the reasons why an

organisation dedicated to human security would

dissociate itself ideologically from the human rights

movement? The Human Security Report Project

(HSRP), affiliated with Simon Fraser University in

Vancouver, Canada, claims to be an independent

research centre even though it receives funds from

several national governments (Switzerland, Sweden,

UK, Norway) and a private investment banking

organisation.

Among the actors who might benefit from the

proposition that the global situation of women and

human rights has improved (and been misrepresented

by others) are organisations in charge of allocating

scarce resources, as well as all those who would

rather see those funds be allocated towards more

expressly industrial interests, such as defense

contracts. The idea of empowering women

particularly has never sat well with groups of certain

ideological bents, from orthodox religious

organisations to extreme conservatives.

As an active educator, I was also surprised by the

Report's claim, based on data published by UNESCO's

Institute for Statistics, to the effect that educational

outcomes did not decline during periods of warfare.

Intuitively such a claim seems grotesque. To put it

bluntly, if the schoolhouse burning down has no

impact on education, then why do we bother with

building schoolhouses? Surely kids who are drafted

into armies will be unable to attend school? One

wonders about the quality of the data used to make

this claim sound even marginally convincing. But

again my concern lies as much with possible motives

as it does with the claim's veracity. Is it intended as a

justification of military conflict, or as belittlement of

its horrors? Who benefits from it?

On the other side of the coin is the researcher's

obligation to report whatever conclusions their data

indicate unequivocally. And, as we all know but not

do not always acknowledge, bias of framing is

unavoidable. Ideally the researcher would cope by

representing their conclusions in more than one form,

framing them from diverse ideological viewpoints.

Academics are (or should be) well acquainted with

such dialectical approaches. However, such

ideological fence-sitting tends to be frowned upon by

funders. Their interest is to see their points of view

confirmed. These two approaches appear

fundamentally irreconcilable, which usually leaves the

decision up to the power differential. I leave it to the

reader to guess which side is more powerful, a

funding organisation or the researcher.

Taking this argument one step further, the

question arises what counterhegemonic obligations

arise for the researcher from this inequitable

situation. Many would name a judicious screening of

possible funding agencies, taking into account the

extent of academic latitude, possible conditional

strings leading to moral or financial commitments,

and the overall ideological bent of the organisation.

This ideal clashes of course frequently with what are

perceived inevitably as 'realities on the ground'. But

so do other academic ideals, such as objectivity,

veracity, and equity. We still are expected to try our

best. Sadly, the authors of the Human Security

Report evidently did not.

Wishing you all a very peaceful 2013!

References

1. Human Security Institute. Available from:

http://blogs.unbc.ca/hsi/journal-of-human-security

(Accessed on 5 January 2013).

2. Librello Publishing House. Journal of Human

Security. Available from: http://librelloph.com/

journalofhumansecurity (Accessed on 5 January 2013).

3. Human Security Report Project. Available from:

http://www.Hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/2012/

text.aspx (Accessed on 5 January 2013).

4. Fischer D. Peacebuilding Processes. In:

Lautensach A, Lautensach S, editors. Human Security

in World Affairs: Problems and Opportunities. Vienna,

Austria: Caesar Press; 2013.

5. Galtung J. A Theory of Conflict: Overcoming

Direct Violence. Transcend University Press; 2010.

6. Human Security Report Project. Available from:

http://www.hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/

human-security-report.aspx (Accessed on 5 January

2013).

7. Wood R. Doubting a New Ear in Human Security?

Available from: http://Politicalviolenceataglance.org/

2012/11/15/doubting-a-new-era-in-human-security

(Accessed on 5 January 2013).