1 Introduction
One of the inherent realities in the human security paradigm – the idea that security’s chief focus is the vulnerabilities of individuals – is that those that are most acutely aware of insecurities are often the furthest removed from the resources needed to address them. In the face of scarcity, local actors may seek external resources, turning to outside sources for additional capital; however, sourcing funding or capital externally comes with its own set of challenges. Resources earmarked for local scale projects are limited, and funding may come laden with obligations tied to other interests. Furthermore, international or state actors can influence how security and development agendas are implemented or prioritized in favour of their own interests. As a result, much of the discourse, policy, and practices can become disconnected from the individuals and communities in need. As Liotta and Owen describe it, “[i]dealism thus becomes enmeshed in realism; actions taken on behalf of the powerless are determined only by the powerful.” Security policies and projects can be developed in a manner that relegates locally derived human security values to secondary considerations in favour of the interests of more powerful actors. As a consequence, the pursuit of security can be perceived as operating in a top-down manner and communities become passive receivers and objects of policy, not as actors or agents capable of consolidating local security discourse and influencing policy.
Given this context, it is not always possible for local actors to achieve the security goals which they value most; however, it is incorrect to characterise local actors as passive, and an injustice to deny the agency they have as security actors. Local people are important agents for security, deeply involved with the effort to improve the conditions in their communities. For empowered local actors, the lack of resources can be perceived as just another barrier to overcome, not something that builds dependence and erodes agency. But, in these situations, what characterises those actors who actively pursue security goals in their communities? What types of strategies can local actors apply to achieve their security goals?
This article presents and reflects on the perspectives of community level actors regarding their role in improving security conditions in their communities. Using a conceptual framework based on the capability approach, human security, and securitization it explores how local actors engage in security-making, apply strategies, and leverage agency to achieve their goals. More specifically, it presents and discusses strategies employed by two distinct actors – a local non-governmental organization and an independent group of community dwellers – in their attempts to socially construct and achieve valued functionings. This qualitative study demonstrates community level actors views on their role as agents in achieving human security functionings, despite recognizing their own limitations in achieving higher-level functionings. Additionally, it shows that agency is partially dependent on their recognition as legitimate securitizing agents by more powerful actors and potential partner groups. The first two sections of this paper will present the methodological and theoretical components of the study. The later sections will provide empirical evidence of these strategies and processes from local community level actors in the research area, and a discussion of the implications for the use of securitization theory in regards to human security – specifically, whether a bottom-up form of securitization can be applied in analyzing local actor security dynamics. In doing so, this paper argues that more attention is needed to analyzing security dynamics at the grassroots level, and in particular, the role of local actors in sculpting security values.
2 Methods
The study employed a qualitative case study approach, organized into desk, field, and synthesis phases. Qualitative case study design was selected to allow for a fuller exploration of the complexity inherent in human security as well as a high level of detail in regards to informant perspectives regarding security strategies. The desk phase began with the selection of a research area and the examination of articles and published reports on development and potential human security issues in that area. At this phase, both broad and narrow conceptualizations of human security were considered. The aim of this phase was to familiarize the researcher with contemporary security and development issues in post-conflict Liberia, including a knowledge base regarding influential actors and organizations in the research area, as well as to develop interview guides and establish a baseline for comparing interview data. Liberia was selected as a research area based on three factors: firstly, the high likelihood of diverse individual perspectives on sources of insecurity given the post-conflict and less-developed country status of the setting ; secondly, the presence of significant international organizations focusing on development and security issues; and thirdly, the widespread use of English enabling the researcher and informants to communicate clearly and effectively, thereby minimizing the chances for misinterpretation. Social media tools and message boards were employed by the researcher to build a contact network to garner further information on potential research communities. A specific case study area was identified – characterized by geographic and social boundaries – and selected based on the presence of thematically relevant organizations and groups
During the field phase of this study, participant observation, group discussions, and one-on-one interviews were used as the primary sources of data collection. The interview process consisted of an unstructured and a semi-structured component. Nineteen informants were recruited to participate through both purposeful and snowball sampling. Initial informants were contacted through social media, then additional informants were recruited via local networks. This method of convenience sampling was used in order to more effectively understand the social connections between actors on the ground, helping to highlight the types of social networks and capital available to informants. Sixteen informants were recruited in this manner, including government workers, volunteers, and other relevant security actors. An additional three targeted interviews were conducted with non-Liberian staff working in fields related to human security or development. Additionally, a final interview was conducted with the leader of YCWL in order to confirm details regarding the organizations history, objectives, and strategies. All interviews except one were recorded, transcribed, and anonymized to protect informant identities. The remaining informant, employed in the police sector, declined to be recorded, so the researcher took handwritten notes. One-on-one interviews utilized an interview guide developed during the desk phase, but iteratively modified during the observation period. Group interviews, inter-organizational meetings and relevant written sources, such as internal documents and annual reports, also provided the researcher with additional details regarding the strategies applied by the actors in the two cases discussed in this study.
The synthesis phase consisted of data coding using a thematic framework to analyze and process the informants’ responses. Unstructured portions of interviews were coded into emergent thematic categories generated through multiple readings by the researcher. Semi-structured portions of the interviews were coded using a framework developed on the basis ofspecific question responses as well as the general research questions. The themes used for analyzing the research were centered on informant definitions of security, perceptions of security responsibility, perceptions inter-actor relations, and several more.
3 Conceptual Framework
In approaching and analyzing this research a conceptual framework was developed to encapsulate issues of security, values, agency, and actor relations. This was achieved by incorporating three key ideas into its analytical perspective: human security gives us a flexible and inclusive notion of threats and insecurities; the capability approach provides an understanding of values, agency, and a normative reference point; and, securitization gives us an analytical starting point for understanding how security issues are constructed and pursued by local actor.
Securitization and Security-Making
Exploring the role of local actors in the pursuit of security is about understanding how security happens at the local level. Security is not a fixed concept and is influenced by complex array of structures and variables. Moreover, security is fragmented in terms of subject, object, and practice. Borrowing from the Copenhagen School’s notion of securitization, this research adopts a social constructivist approach to security in order to understand how local actors imbue security with their own values and meanings. By applying this concept to analyze security dynamics at a local level, one can better understand the potential roles of local actors.
Securitization describes the process in which security threats are socially constructed through speech acts. The units involved in this process are securitizing agents, referent objects, and functional actors. The securitizing agent is an actor who makes a claim that a particular issue – the referent object – is a threat or is threatened. If the claim is deemed credible by the functional actors or audience, then that object is falls into the realm of security threat to be acted upon through some kind of special handling. This process of actor claims and audience acceptance generates notions of security and threats.
Framing this process as interplay between claim making actors (securitizing agents) and audiences (functional actors) fundamentally alters the arena in which security values are determined. Williams describes how “[n]ot only is the realm of possible threats enlarged, but the actors or objects that are threatened … can be extended to include actors and objects well beyond the military security of the territorial state.” However, despite this widening of potential actors, not every securitizing claimant will be successful in shaping security. Thierry Balzacq suggests three considerations that influence effective securitization: 1) it is context-dependent; 2) it is audience-centered; and 3) the dynamics of power. This is reinforced by Williams who notes that, not all actors are empowered to make effective claims:
[W]hile the securitization process is in principle completely open (any “securitizing actor” can attempt to securitize any issue and referent object), in practice it is structured by the differential capacity of actors to make socially effective claims about threats, by the forms in which these claims can be made in order to be recognized and accepted as convincing by the relevant audience.
Securitizing actors require social or political legitimacy to have their claims accepted. Furthermore, claims need to have a degree of resonance with the interests or values of their audience. Securitizing acts that lack social, cultural, or political relevance to the audience are unlikely to align with their needs and expectations.
Audience receptivity and the legitimacy of the response is a key aspect of securitization. Not only are socially derived norms, experiences, and values relevant to what is viewed as a potential insecurity, they also influence the legitimacy of claims of imminence and what actions can be reasonably taken in response. The securitizing agent may be recognized as a legitimate speaker for security, but agreement on responses towards the referent are still contingent on what is acceptable to the audience. For example, mass shootings in schools might be regarded as a very resonant and legitimate source of insecurity, but it is doubtful that issuing weapons to students would be regarded as a legitimate response. A security claim must be deemed credible by the audience in terms of both the threat and the response.
Taking this into account, it is clear that while securitization is largely about convincing an audience to break free of normal politics, the process is also intersubjective, having elements of social negotiation. In the context of local level actors, this means that security claims should focus on issues and insecurities are relevant at the local level but retain resonance amongst potential audiences. Since insecurities at this level are often highly localized, they may not be intuitively relevant to non-local audiences. The agency of securitizing actors is potentially limited by a number of factors, including their social and political capital, perceived legitimacy as speakers of security, and their claims about referent objects.
Human Security
Understanding the role of local actors in the pursuit of security necessitates adopting a concept of security that is relevant for them. The reality for many people is that traditional notions of state-based security have limited bearing on their daily lives. State-oriented traditions of security offer little to address issues like undernourishment or the persecution of sexual minorities. Security at the local level often has more to do with underdevelopment and human rights than military or state power.
The connection between underdevelopment and insecurity was in part popularized by of the 1994 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report. The report mainstreamed human security, effectively shifting the focus of security discourse from a state-centric notion to one that recognized the security needs of individuals and communities. As Emma Rothschild notes, one of the results of this shift was the connection drawn between the security of individuals, states, and the international systems as a whole. The reality of post-cold war insecurities meant that if the world was to be made secure, then the security of individuals needed to be addressed alongside interstate conflicts. Without buttressing the security of people, creating the conditions for peace would not be possible. This bound the individual and the global, creating a space and potential for audience susceptibility to security claims from local actors.
Unfortunately, it is both a conceptual and logistical challenge to address the diverse security needs of individuals and groups. Human security acknowledges insecurities as being highly contextualized, considering a broad range of possible threats. Not only is it difficult to identify specific threats to individual wellbeing, but it is difficult to codify them into a way that is conducive to policy development and analysis. The UNDP suggested seven categories of security threats that should be interpreted as potentially destabilizing: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security. However, this range of concepts could be considered somewhat unwieldly, which is perhaps why in 2003 the Commission on Human Security (CHS) reformulate human security as follows:
Human security in its broadest sense embraces far more than the absence of violent conflict. It encompasses human rights, good governance, access to education and health care, and ensuring that each individual has opportunities and choices to fulfil his or her own potential…Freedom from want, freedom from fear and the freedom of the future generations to inherit a healthy natural environment – these are the interrelated building blocks of human, and therefore national security.
Security expands beyond survival and recognizes the need to live a life that individuals have cause to value. While this reformulation creates a more manageable conceptual paradigm, it offers little to help delineate units of analysis or understand how individuals determine priorities and appraise security needs. Freedom from fear and want may capture the fundamental imagery, but does little to provide a blueprint for policy, practice, and analysis. The non-specificity of the core requirements of human security is at the heart of much of the critique of the concept. However, in a study of numerous National Human Development Reports (NHDR), Richard Jolly and Deepayan Basu Ray demonstrate that when human security analyses have been executed these criticisms fail to manifest as impediments to operationalizing a conceptually open, people-centered, and context dependent framework. Jolly and Basu Ray’s analysis suggests that developing a concrete list of human security components or factors is not necessary from an operational point of view – human security needs can effectively be identified “in theater” so to speak. However, while their analysis demonstrates the value of flexible definitions, it does little to explain how security values and needs are constructed at the individual level. To bridge this gap this study employed the capability approach.
Capability Approach
The capability approach is a normative evaluative framework focused on the ability of individuals to achieve the things they value, and the expansion of real freedoms and opportunities. The fundamental units of this approach are functionings and capabilities. Functionings are those things that an individual has cause to value doing or being. Capabilities are freedoms and capacities that one has to achieve various functionings. The classic example is that of a starving child as compared to a fasting monk. Eating, fasting, and starving are all potential functionings; however, fasting is fundamentally different from starving because for the monk it is a choice. The monk exists in a situation of greater security as he retains the ability to eat if exposed to a risk or deterioration in livelihood.
Generally, the capability approach is not conventionally folded into discussions of human security except for when one is clarifying the distinction between human development and human security. However, this paper argues that the ability of individuals and communities to achieve human security goals – herein referred to as security functionings – is a capability in itself. We argue and demonstrate, that individuals are fundamental agents in the pursuit security functionings. Not considering agency and choices in regards to security alienates individuals from the values that matter most to them.
The connection between values, agency, and security-making is at the heart of this research, and one which is articulated in the 2003 report from the Commission on Human Security (CHS), which states that “[h]uman security must also aim at developing the capabilities of individuals and communities to make informed choices and to act on behalf of causes and interests in many spheres of life.” This means creating the conditions for the expansion of capabilities of people to pursue security functionings while ensuring that achieved functionings are not lost. Efforts to support human security must be evaluated by whether or not they expand opportunities and remove barriers to the pursuit of security functionings.
The question is how to identify the functionings that are valued by local level actors? Several authors have attempted to codify universal capabilities lists or sets to apply as a supplement to Sen’s framework. However, Sen has himself remained skeptical of these attempts:
The problem is not with listing important capabilities, but with insisting on one predetermined canonical list of capabilities, chosen by theorists without any general social discussion or public reasoning. To have such a fixed … is to deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should be included and why… public discussion and reasoning can lead to a better understanding of the role, reach and significance of particular capabilities…
Lists of capabilities created by an external actor precludes participation and thereby undermines local values. If our aim is to understand how local values manifest, it is essential to look for security needs as expressed and pursued by local actors themselves. An actor making a security claim can be interpreted as a kind of expression of value – a declaration that a particular functioning is needed to assure some security goal. The referent object represents a valued security functioning, or some combination of doings or beings that if not addressed will result in insecurity or downside risks.
Not all security functionings will be the subject of a security claim. Social and political contexts influence which values are likely to be presented, and these claims might not represent the most critical security needs of individuals and communities. Social structures and power disparity between actors will inevitably influence the values that get expressed within social groups. Denuelin and McGregor have argued that the capability approach needs to be strengthened through a recognition of how social factors influence the development values. Our social nature influences which referent objects become subject to security claim. For example, power disparity between genders might translate into completely different value sets being securitized. Therefore, when considering human security concerns it is important to be cognizant of how social factors impact value forming and security-making processes in three ways: firstly, that social dynamics can influence which functionings are valued; secondly, that power dynamics can influence which values are expressed as a security claim; and thirdly, that these influences are potentially omnidirectional, including from non-local actors.
Below we explore how local actors experience the pursuit of security functionings. The research investigates the dynamics surrounding how valued security functionings manifest, and the strategies employed by local actors to achieve functionings that are locally valued. In doing so, it utilizes the idea of securitization to explain the ways in which local actors construct and position their security needs. Furthermore, it will highlight the differential capacity make effective claims and negotiate power disparities between actors in regards to security making.