A MORE encompassing view of human security has been evolving for the last over a decade. Even the military generals have shed the view that they are the only providers of security to people from external threats. Or, the police force is the only provider of security from internal threats. This is not withstanding the importance of external and internal territorial security. Internal threats are intricately linked to country’s domestic socio-economic and political policy outlook.
And, external threats are closely intertwined with the outlook on foreign policy and international relations. What people, therefore, need is security from policy errors in both the domestic and international realms. Clearly, they need a secure politico-economic environment whose political economy needs to be appreciated to develop a more holistic view of human security.
The threats that people face today are very wide-ranging. These include poverty, inequity, injustice, joblessness, discrimination, lack of opportunities, scarcity of water, sanitation, hygiene; lack of healthcare, educational facilities, and solid housing; shortage of electricity, gas; poor quality products and services, disease, natural disasters; crime, war; terror, and intolerance of diversity.
Intra-country socio-economic insecurity of the deprived in our country emanates from the insecurity of those with whom the country’s resources are concentrated. While the deprived are supposed to strive for their share of the resources, the ones with abundance should be distributing and sharing power and wealth with the ones who lack the same. This does not happen because of the insecurity of those who possess, who are much too scared to let go. They fear that they will then not have enough left for themselves or for their posterity.
So, they must hold on tightly to what they have even if it is far in excess of their requirements and their capacity to manage. This is why land reforms do not take place. The peasantry continues to add to the burden on the mother land because they cannot take charge of their own lives and cannot add to the wealth of the nation.
The tendency to extract surplus is found even in most of the business sector where too the multiplier does not kick off like it should for inclusive development.
Emphasis here remains, inter alia, on price profits rather than sharing with the customers and other stakeholders who would then feed back into business enterprise making it grow far bigger than it would through the current tendency towards filling coffers of owner managers. There is little realisation that uplift and security of the society comes not just from own wealth and security but by starting a process of national wealth maximisation.
The latter, however, requires sharing and distribution in the present that the haves won’t do out of their own insecurity. It is their insecurity that then feeds into deprivation and insecurity of populace at large. And, it is the politico-economic network of the insecure haves that exacerbates the insecurity of the deprived people.
However much we may cut back on defence expenditure, unless we develop a sense of the virtuous cycle of economic development that can be entered through prudent socio-economic and business behaviour, the issue of human security will persist.
If this sense of virtuous cycle cannot be developed after going to some of the best educational centres that the wealthy go to, then we must fall back to the guidelines from the Quran.
Our Holy Book advises that those endowed with abundance must distribute and share with the ones who do not have. This sharing can also be done during the course of doing business or running the economy and managing its various economic sectors by giving fair and due returns to the input providers.
People would then be further saved from the insecurity of injustice, inequity, discrimination, and lack of opportunities. Human security would be augmented that much. But, in practice, the lessons of both the Western textbooks and the Quran are ignored.
Amongst the various reasons are insecurity of the dominant politico-economic groups as stated earlier and the idols that are still popular to worship which include wealth.
To secure the dominant political and economic groups, it is mediocrity that continues to be propped up whose own insecurity leads to weak institutions and thus the insecurity in the areas of health, hygiene, sanitation, and disease. Education and health will not look up no matter how much is the money pumped into them unless and until there is good governance with leakages blocked.
Also, there has to be a demand for education from the downtrodden which will not be forthcoming unless they are integrated into the formal system through an inclusive economic policy outlook. And, such a policy regime we will not have for as long as the country’s dominant interests are grappling with issues of their own insecurity.
Human insecurity now stands compounded with threats to life and property from not just across the frontiers but from within from just about anywhere. This is a problem that transcends national boundaries. It emanates from two sources. First one comprises the policy errors made by the USA and its allies in the 1980s that revived a certain view of Islamic religion to fight the then atheistic Soviet bloc. Even though not many Muslims subscribe to this view, it has come to prevail as the view of religion.
Secondly, intolerant as it is, it found ideological support too in one school of thought that is just one school and not the whole of religion. Even though there is no compulsion in religion according to the Quran, these bigots run riot mostly in the softer states of the Middle East and Asia to enforce their view on all. Soft governments of the developing world are ill at ease to bring the situation under control. Human insecurity in these countries has assumed serious proportions on this count too.
Informal armies are springing up in some such states to counter these groups militarily which is further aggravating insecurity in these countries. These informal outfits on both sides, however, receive human supply primarily from the deprived segments of the society whose welfare aspects are taken care of by the group leadership serving as the patron of the community.
The economic aspect feeding into these patron-client networks can only be dealt with by strong national economic policies that would enable integration of these clients into the national mainstream instead of creating state-lets within states or throwing up trans-national terror outfits. The other feeder into these patron-client networks is political and ideological.
The political and ideological prong feeds strongly on the Palestinian issue on which the world must move fast for quicker resolution. Otherwise, it will continue to fuel violent agitation thus dissipating good national energies that should otherwise be focused on national economic development.
Saudi plan approved in Beirut in 2002 may, at least, be given an honest try by all Muslim states with the hope that it works so that they may then get back to alleviating other human insecurity issues in their own countries.
A part of the effort requires joint marketing of the Saudi plan to the USA in whose interest it ought to be to have the Palestinian issue resolved sooner rather than later. After all, the issue of human insecurity as far as terror is concerned has also struck the US where too the people are agitating for peace.
The core policy group in the US must somehow now sell to Israel that Israeli security is in security in the region. Israel cannot be secure by making its neighbours insecure which human insecurity is now spilling all across the world. In this globalising world, either all will be secure or none at all for which reason all must augment human security by testing alternative strategies and generating some more.