War, Virtual War and Human Security - 2007 Programme Session 6

Session Six: Force Multipliers? Worse than States? NGOs and Conflict
Chair: Graeme Goldsworthy

The Madness of Coalitions
Tom Kane
Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom

In 1997, a coalition of non-governmental organizations convinced state governments to negotiate the Ottawa Convention banning land mines. The NGOs’ success at achieving an apparently laudable goal inspired the hope that such groups would constitute a potent and benevolent new force in international affairs. Since then, however, a range of critics have accused NGOs of being less benign than they appear. This paper examines one obstacle NGO coalitions face in their attempt to promote wise policy effectively. Since these coalitions are, by definition, composed of different groups with different methods, different political leanings and different perceptions of issues, it is difficult for such coalitions to unite around any proposal that deviates from so-called common wisdom. It is equally difficult for moderate members of such coalitions to avoid lending tacit support to more extreme minorities. This study illustrates these points with a brief case study of the activist groups that opposed America’s participation in the Vietnam War. The author goes on to explore ways in which twenty-first NGOs have encountered these obstacles and attempted to overcome them, drawing on the NGOs’ published literature supplemented by interview data.

Combat Against Global Warming: Are planetary ethics serving Europe's energy interests by enhancing global conflict?
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom

‘Global warming’ has become a major international policy issue in response to a potentially catastrophic environmental threat, or so we are told. Analysis of this policy involves natural and social sciences: climatology and climate modelling; impact studies, energy politics and policy, economics, development and innovation studies.
Important questions remain unanswered regarding the link between human use of fossil fuels and changes in Earth's climate. Prominent European political leaders in particular have called for drastic and immediate changes in energy policy on the grounds that these changes are necessary to mitigate or even combat climate change. This raises the question of why so many leaders are eager to adopt policies likely to involve considerable global sacrifice when there is little evidence that such measures can achieve their stated climate change mitigation. One cannot know these leaders' minds but the ‘underpinning’ science and lobbying efforts can be examined, as well as the arguments used to persuade the rest of the world that planetary salvation requires ever tighter, universal emission regulations, subsidies, trading and aid streams. I observed that the favoured policies support western European interests in a variety of areas, especially relating to energy security, innovation policy and interventionist powers. If this EU strategy succeeds in implementing a global emission trading system, it may strengthen the West at the expense of the developing world, especially China and India at the expense of other developed regions (USA) and the European Union at the expense of its member governments. Observed political conflict can thus be explained. Impacts on future climate remain highly speculative because the threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is based on a mixture of computer based, unverifiable forecasts and dubious emission projections.

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Reflecting on Human Security Or, About the Inherent Nature of National Security
Efstathios T. Fakiolas
Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Strategy and Southeast European Affairs Analyst, Department of Strategic Planning, ATEbank (Agricultural Bank of Greece).

The human security literature helps refocus our attention on human beings. But it is one thing to emphasise the human dimension of security and it is another to elevate human security into the rank of a distinct form of security, and thereby to monopolize, as human security scholars do, human beings as the referent object of security. A question immediately arises: is national security and the state a-human or non-human in their origins, nature and orientation? If the answer is yes, then is the state an entity that, apart from incrementally obtaining a certain degree of ‘relative autonomy’, takes on and retains a semblance of self-sufficiency beyond and out of the sphere of human beings’ collective action? Again, it is one thing to assert that the state has in many cases proved unable or indifferent to protect its people and advance human security and it is another to argue that the state is inherently a-social or, put it alternatively, does not originate and instantiate in human interaction and consciousness.
The aim of the paper, therefore, is to speculate upon the inherent human nature of security and, in particular, the state’s national security. It starts out from the assumption that if the objective is meant to be about anything other than inter-subjectively constructed entities of human interaction and consciousness, it is to subscribe to the view that the material reality of the social world precedes and exists out there beyond the historical development of human beings. The logic I suggest finds expression in Karl Marx’s dictum that people make their history but not as they please; they make it under circumstances inherited from the past. Human beings are the one and only driving force of history thanks to their unique collective activity, though their freedom is not unrestrained. They are the sole agents who possess emergent power, which is structurally embedded within particular historical limits prefigured by social material conditions of the past and the present.
From this angle, the state, I suggest, is both a constellation of human beings in several collective forms, that is the social forces, and a configuration of social relations. The state exists not only as a “real” structural entity but also as a social force. It is a bearer both of agential and structural properties. But as a social force, the state is at this point in time the dominant agent of world politics in the sense that it monopolizes the emergent power. This is meant to imply that thanks to its agential capacity, the state is the most relevant constellation of actors within territorially ordered institutional confines, the ‘supreme’ political form of the social organization of human beings in terms of rule making, accountability and legitimacy
To come full circle, the paper challenges the prevailing view held in the human security literature, even though scarcely openly spoken out, that the state is virtually separate from society and human beings. It suggests that the human security scholars should no longer monopolize human beings as the referent object of security. National and human security are closely related in that their common denominator is human beings in their collective form. It seeks, in that regard, to offer an alternative problematique, not to present definite conclusions, thereby laying the foundations for a new approach to human security.