Africa: Facing Human Security Challenges in the 21st Century

Chapter 12 - Review of the Past and Present, Conclusions and Looking Ahead

471 Chapter 12 Review of the Past and Present, Conclusions and Looking Ahead Overview Human insecurity in Africa is not a problem of the future. There are many concerns in the world today, and human insecurity is currently in the front seat. Africa can only address so many problems at a time. But, the continent cannot afford to put human insecurity off until the need to find a solution becomes dire. All the research and projections we have found show that there have been indeed dire situations in the past as well as now. For example, children are already dying in large numbers in poverty-stricken regions due to preventable waterborne illness, and the destruction of natural ecosystems is greatly reducing fresh water biodiversity, fratricidal wars leading to untold human suffering, environmental destruction, natural disasters, issues as droughts, pandemics, famine, oppressive politics, and name them, are not in short supply. The effects of these problems will continue to snowball until a viable global solution is implemented. As the situation stands now, it is impossible to end with an answer, only another question. How will Africa’s humanity survive securely? Overview of Human Security in the 21st Century Globalization, especially in its predatory form, has prompted the diversification of security threats and the hegemonic realist security paradigm is ill-equipped to address them. In other words, the contemporary world is one in which a number of seemingly distinct processes are occurring more or less simultaneously, and acquiring a global reach, often in highly interconnected fashion. In a rapidly globalizing world high consequence risks (Beck, 1992) have become integral to the functioning of society. The global condition is one of heightened vulnerability as much for states as for groups 472 and individuals. One need only think of the effects of financial crises, nuclear accidents, oil spills, ozone depletion, global warming, or terrorist attacks. If there is one characteristic that distinguishes contemporary life it is the globalization of insecurity, especially human insecurity. By adopting the human security framework, the individual rather than the state may be prioritized in security analysis. For some forty five years the grand narrative of the Cold War shaped our understanding of security. However, recent events have shown that the narrow military focus of the realist security paradigm cannot adequately address the ever-diversifying range of non-state, trans-border security threats which have emerged in the post-Cold War era and which stem from the onset of globalization. This book has been threading the argument that, in light of the failure of recent attempts to address security concerns by recourse to military intervention, there is a pressing need to adopt an alternative security framework. This study adopted a qualitative methodology, this approach having been deemed most suitable for the analysis of the body of literature which informs our study. The process by which one particular issue is incorporated into security discourse (“securitization”) is examined through the lens of the case study of cross-border migration of pandemics. The use of specific aspects of human security provides the necessary context and specificity to complement the analysis of the theoretical aspects of the human security debate. The book concludes that the human security framework certainly enriches the security debate at the present moment of relative (in)stability but would prove less useful in the event of a resurgence of military threats, when the realist paradigm would be better equipped to offer explanations of actor behavior. It is also concluded that the human security framework will be better able to cope with the change that will characterize the decades ahead, rather than a rigid and inflexible realist security narrative. 473 Theoretical Opposition between National and Human Security Human security places the individual as the referent object of security rather than—although not necessarily in opposition to— constructions such as state sovereignty and “national security.” It is both an academic approach and a fledgling policy movement. Human security has become a popular theme for students, scholars and—at least rhetorically—in some policy circles, but it has not yet found full acceptance within academic security studies. This essay will describe the background to the emergence of human security ideas, which can be found in the opening up of security studies at the end of the Cold War, the convergence of security and development analysis in academic and policy circles, and normative developments in international politics relating to human rights and...