Security-Development Nexus: Resolving Intra-State Conflicts - Assignment Example

Security-Development Nexus: A Holistic and Integrated Approach To Resolving Intra Conflicts Introduction Traditionally, activities intended to promote development and provide humanitarian assistance in war-torn countries stay clear of the conflict, in the same way that peacekeeping forces limit their concerns on security matters. This thinking was altered during the post-Cold War period as governments and international institutions became aware of the need to integrate security and development in mediating conflicts in collapsed or potentially failing states. The previously distinct and separate policy areas of security and development have overlapped, with the nexus concept developed as a strategy of integrating national and international intervention policies in non-Western states with serious peace and order problems. International donors realized that it would be impractical to consider development without taking security and conflict issues into account. This is the essence of the term security-development nexus, which proceeds on the theory that security-related operations will not bring sustainable benefit to a troubled state if not accompanied by longer-term development work. Definitions Security is defined as the protection of the territorial integrity, stability and vital interests of a state through the use of political, legal or coercive instruments at the state or international level. After the Cold War, this definition has been broadened to include non-military threats such as transnational crimes, population movements and those arising from socio-economic conditions. The police or military usually conduct security operations. In the international arena, the UN Security Council is empowered to dispatch peacekeeping forces to trouble areas. As for development, it refers to the processes and strategies through which societies and states work to achieve more prosperous and equitable standards of living. Development activities are undertaken to promote socio-economic growth, provide education and health services, and build infrastructure facilities. Among the agencies that provide development assistance to nations in need include the various specialised UN agencies, bilateral and multilateral donor organisations, international financial institutions, development banks and international NGOs. In the past, these development workers step around conflict and confine their activities on development and humanitarian assistance. Linkages The linkages between security and development actually began to be appreciated soon after the Cold War, which was given impetus by 9/11 when it emphasised that terrorism, weak state capacity, public health crises and economic decay can cross borders with ease (Burr, et al., 2007). According to Haag (2004), the Cold War was about stability and the maintenance of the status quo, with security thinking focused on the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and on managing and monitoring peace-agreements between states, on the other. Containment was then the key concept through which security thinking and practice was defined and understood. After the Cold War and 9/11, security thinking is now defined by much more dynamic concepts such as prevention, transition and integration. Peace operations have since the early 1990s become charged, for example, with the task of enforcing a peace, and of assuming de facto sovereignty over a territory, as in the case of East-Timor and Kosovo. As a consequence of these developments, security policy and, more specifically peace operations, have increasingly assumed responsibility for managing large-scale socio-economic and political change. Moreover, it has been recognized that investments in both “conflict prevention” and “post-conflict reconstruction” form an integral and central element of security-policy. To provide peace and security, therefore, policy-instruments outside the toolbox of traditional security-policy would need to be mobilized (Haag, 2004). Thus, security in a globalised world has taken on new meaning in the post-9/11 period, with traditional notions of security undergoing thorough evaluations and transformation. No issue in recent history has affected international, regional and national security as the phenomenon of terrorism. Acts of terrorism have taken many forms in the past but globalisation has sharply increased the terrorist threat to the world community and has enhanced its potential for greater damage. Similarly, transnational criminal activities – drug trafficking, illicit trade in small arms, smuggling of contraband, and money laundering – now take place across national borders with greater ease and increasing levels of sophistication. There is increasing evidence to support the widely held view that there is a link between transnational organized criminal activities and terrorism (Ward, 2007). The superpower rivalry ended by the Cold War meant that the UN Security Council emerged to play a much more powerful role in global politics. Moreover, the characteristics of many of the violent conflicts that reach the table of the UN Security Council are markedly different from those of the Cold War era. In the past, the conflicts were very much directed at civilians, so when a war erupted in a country, development agencies generally withdrew and left the arena for humanitarian agencies, or waited for a peace agreement to be established before projects could be re-established. During the Cold War, security and development were thoroughly institutionalized as separate “policy fields” with distinct objectives and means of intervention. Following this geographical ordering of world politics was an institutionalization of two distinct fields of operations whose areas of concerns and modes of intervention diverged so as to create a conceptual and political division of labor, thus resulting in an absence of a common organizational, political and conceptual framework for the formulation of policies based on the recognition of the intimate inter-linkages between development and security. UN Role In the development of a conceptual framework for a policy based on the security-development nexus, the UN Security Council has been thrust forward in a leading role. The reason is that issues related to development are included in the UN charter of the UN, whose aim is to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” The institutional and political design of the UN thus still reflects the profound instititutionalisation of “security” and “development” as two separate policy fields. These two policy fields are, furthermore, backed by concomitant social scientific disciplines that have contributed to considerable cognitive division of labor as ‘development” and a “culture of prevention” rather than a culture of reaction. The policies aimed at addressing conflict-prevention and post-conflict peace building are coordinated rather than integrated. Coordination is then a recognition that two separate units should work closely together because their operations are inter-dependent. The more complex and inter-dependent the problems are, the more need there is for integration between distinct units and agencies to work together. Coordination does not say anything about authority, responsibility, action, implementation, all of which are crucial to an attempt to establish what everybody agree is needed, namely, a more integrated, holistic, sustainable and long-term approach to peace building, conflict-prevention and long-term socio-economic and political development. The reason why coordination is the name of the game is found in the considerable political challenges involved in seeking to establish new inter-governmental decision-making bodies. Integration of development and security policy would require the establishment of new inter-governmental decision-making bodies with new mandates and resources. However, efforts to re-distribute political power between member-states, or between inter-governmental bodies within the UN, are fraught with intensely political problems, as member-state jealously guard their positions, leverage and influence over the UN. Peace operations and development assistance in a country are functionally and financially separated from each other, since peace operations are financed by the main UN body while development is funded by the executive board and from extra-budgetary funding from bilateral funds. Moreover, development assistance is typically negotiated for longer periods with the host government, while peace operations imply that the host government is either ousted or placed under international command. Hence, coordination is the name of the game. As Griffin (2003) has observed, success of coordinated efforts on the ground often hinges on the relationship between the resident coordinator and the high-level special representative of the UN Secretary General, who is usually in charge of the good offices or peacekeeping presence and also officially the lead authority over the whole UN presence on the ground, but who often enjoys little in the way of resources within which to enforce this authority. The Brahim Report, one of several studies on the strategic importance of the security-development nexus, observed that the nature of peace operations had expanded considerably, thus requiring a broader set of competence and functions. This broadening in scope of peace operations had much to do with the problems faced by the UN in so-called “failed states,” where the UN would have to assume de facto sovereignty to re-build basic state-structures. For example, the Report noted that an international civilian police force could not function effectively without a criminal justice system and training in human rights. A “doctrinal shift” in peace operations was suggested in the report. Thus far, however, no such “doctrinal shift” can be said to have taken place, although several organizational changes have been made to bring in rule of law expertise in planning peace operations. Dealing with terrorism and transnational crime now require greater levels of cooperation and collaboration between governments, increased expertise, and use of sophisticated technology. New security risks have emerged on a global scale thereby increasing pressure on all states to meet new and emerging international standards of security. Traditional security measures no longer suffice and greater efforts are needed to keep apace with shifting security threats. For the Caribbean region, it means dedicating far greater resources Another study called the Princeton Project suggested that the US government should integrate its soft power, as defined by Nye Jr. (2002), with its hard power in pursuit of its objectives. In so doing, its soft power would be used to attract other states to US goals rather than bending them to US will. The US as the world’s largest trading nation has a vested interest in securing the safety and security of international trade. With 95 percent of US imports moving by sea, some 11 million containers were off-loaded at U.S. ports in 2005. This volume of container traffic increases US vulnerability not only to the smuggling and use of weapons of mass destruction but also to drug trafficking. At the same time, the US welcomes over 51 million visitors to its shores each year. Estimates on the economic cost of a WMD attack are enormous. One study suggests that a 12-day closure as result would cost $58 billion dollars, while another places the losses due to port closures at $trillion. For this reason, the Princeton Project proposed the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community as a whole can help strengthen government capacity and encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion. Examples A few examples of conflict areas where intervention used the security-development nexus approach were East Timor, Kosovo and Somalia. According to the Institute of Peace Academy (2007), the peacekeeping operations conducted by the UN Security Council in East Timor and Kosovo were expanded from mere peacekeeping to making preparations for a democratic election, protecting civilians, reintegrating ex-combatants into society, and even establishing governing institutions and systems and performing administrative functions for key government offices. The same integrated strategy was followed for the peace efforts in Somalia. In this African country, the intra-state conflict was a vicious circle, which required post-conflict assistance. The reason is that there were unique characteristics in the Somalian conflict in terms of the pattern of the armed fighting, criminality and governance in a collapsed state. On that basis, the peace effort produced a dense network of informal and formal systems of communication, cooperation and governance, thus helping the local communities adapt to the collapse of the state, manage risks and provide for themselves a somewhat more predictable environment in which to pursue livelihood activities (Menkhaus, 2004). The key to this evolution of anarchy has been the shifting interest of an emerging business community for whom street crimes and armed conflict are generally bad for business. In the view of Ward (2007), these examples showed how coordination between organizational units whose goals, mandates and authority were established and institutionalized during the formative period of the UN are as popular as they are ineffective in bringing development and security policies closer together. In the absence of changing mandates, authority and inter-governmental structures, coordination will probably remain the name of the game insofar as UN reform in this area is concerned. The explanation for the focus on “coordination” as a solution to the challenges of the relation between development and security resides in the fact that more and better coordination does not challenge the crucial but much more difficult issue of the political and institutional structures within which development policy and security policy are formulated and implemented. These political and institutional structures are defined by deep-seated tensions about the nature and status of state sovereignty, on the efficacy and legitimacy of the UN in global politics, and on the tension between UN as the promoter of certain universal principles, on the one hand, and the UN as the guardian of a pluralist system of states, on the other (Ward, 2007). In this view, the issues at stake in the debates on how to integrate development and security policies revolve around the UN as an inter-governmental and political body not in its bureaucratic structure. The reason is that the challenges and obstacles to reform in this field are essentially political ones, not organizational. These political tensions may be reflected in organizational turf-battles and in bureaucratic politics, which phenomena of basic political structures defined by the principle of state sovereignty and by the tension between universalism and pluralism. While there is a strong correlation between development and security, there is a different context for security assistance, such that separate modalities and assistance instruments must be developed to accommodate this new and evolving threat. Conclusion In the words of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (2005), the world “will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.” The foregoing discussion emphasises the need to understand the linkages between security and development, which has become in urgent in a world where terrorism, weak state capacity, public health crises and economic contagion can cross borders easily. These linkages can be observed through the prism of peacekeeping interventions, community policing, human rights, gender equality, land disputes, squatters, nation building, social movements, disarmament and reintegration programs as well as the different democratisation process that take place in different parts of the world. According to the International Peace Academy in Sweden, the security-development nexus that is only now being understood and addressed by the international community is an important one because most contemporary wars are intra-state conflicts with far-reaching regional as well as international dimension and ramifications. These conflicts stunt a country’s growth and may be the actual consequence of a country’s failed development efforts. In sum, there is a need to securitise the development agenda for failed or failing countries. References 1) Anderson, M. & Olson, L. (2003), Confronting War: Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners, Cambridge MA. 2) Annan, K. (2005), In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, Report to the UN General Assembly, 25 March 2005, available at: http://www.un.org/largerfreedom.htm (accessed 10 October 2008). 3) Boyce, J.K. 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