Title: Globalization and Human Security Research Project

PI: Paul James
Affiliation: Globalism Institute/RMIT University, Melbourne
Email: paul.james@rmit.edu.au
Short Description: Across the world, despite increasing attention to regimes of control and security, processes associated with contemporary globalization seem to bring with them conditions of increasing insecurity. To what extent is this objectively the case, and what can be done about it?

Overall, we have four related substantive research questions:

1. What are the sources of insecurity?
   Responding to this question entails going beyond identifying the immediate threats-these are by now readily apparent, even if their interconnections need fundamental research and the nature of those threats needs careful analysis. It leads to examining the deeper sources of insecurity: political, cultural, economic, environmental, and health insecurity from the level of local and regional arenas to the national and global. This will provide a stronger basis for understanding the ground of conflict, violence and other forms of insecurity in the world today, and thus for orienting policy-decisions in relation to national and regional security. Our key focus is examining the local-global context of polities and communities under threat-the so-called 'failing states', polities-communities in the aftermath of widespread violence or war, and polities-communities in the South experiencing increasing human insecurity despite the absence of the immediate pressures of war.
   
   Subsidiary questions: What are the dominant patterns of insecurity in the world today? From whence does violence most often arise? How do states come to be defined as 'failed' or 'failing' states? Are thereforms of structural insecurity and violence that go unrecognized by the current emphasis on military security? How important are political, military, economic cultural, psychological, medical and environmental factors in generating conditions of insecurity? To what extent are the conditions of contemporary insecurity framed culturally? To what extent are processes of globalization implicated in conditions of insecurity?
   
   Themes: Wellbeing-wretchedness, inclusion-exclusion, equality-wealth distribution, identity-difference, mediation-disconnectedness, past-present, local knowledges-expert systems, authority-participation, belonging-mobility, freedom-obligation.
   
   (NB. These themes are made much more concrete below, but for the purposes of examining the sources of insecurity we do not want to presume lines of causation.)
2. What are the conditions of sustainable human security?
   As the other side of the first concern about the sources of insecurity, we will develop the interpretative bases for more adequately debating how in practical terms the conditions of human security might best be sustained or revitalized under different circumstances, including when countries are defined as being governed by 'failing states'.
   
   Subsidiary questions: What kinds of governance are possible across the various arenas from the local to the global and how might they most productively enhance security? How should these various levels of governance be related? When is military intervention necessary and when is it counterproductive? What are the best means of post-violence reconstruction? How effective are the various means of post-violence reconciliation such as international criminal courts, truth commissions, bureaux of missing persons and economic reconstruction initiatives? What are the possibilities for supporting human security by contributing to enhanced community sustainability?
   
   Themes:
   1. International Relations and Security: Global governance including international security regimes and agreements, global terrorism and military intervention, peace-keeping and its social consequences, arms control and the proliferation of weapons, including WMD.
   2. States and Security Regimes of governance under conditions of erosion of national sovereignty, civic agency fragmenting or 'failing' states in a globalizing world, nationalism and its relation to questions of identity and conflict.
   3. Civil Societies and Security: The effects of military operations in zones of instability, cultures of insecurity, risk and distrust including the effects of a globalizing media, cultural sources of terrorism, violence and social disintegration within and across cultural borders.
   4. Regions and Security: South and South-East Asia, North East Asia, including Korea and China, Central Asia, including Afghanistan, the Pacific, the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa.
3. What are the principles of sustainable security?
   Here the emphasis might be on developing an interpretative-philosophical framework to interrogate the dominant understandings of security, including the concept of 'human security' itself, to develop the ethical principles upon which sustainable practices can be built.
   
   Subsidiary questions: What are the key ethical underpinnings of human security? When do outsiders have a responsibility to protect or support insecure others? When do outsiders have a right to intervene, and what are the limits on that intervention?


4. How are the conditions of sustainable security to be secured under conditions of immediate pressure and conflict?
   In other words, 'what is to be done?' What are the implications for practice of a more thorough understanding of the sources of insecurity and conditions and principles of sustainable security? This dimension of our work is intended to go beyond the general to the particular, to instances of clear and present danger. How should governments, international organizations and NGOs be responding now given the patterned signs of social and political breakdown in a particular polity-communities such as the Congo, Haiti, the Solomon Islands, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name a few. On what activities and support processes should the emphasis of intervening bodies be placed in these circumstances? What should the role of institutions of global governance, including the United Nations, in current situations of continuing violence such as Iraq? What kinds of relations should be developed between levels of governance-global, regional, national and local-in dealing with contemporary situations where postwar reconstruction is under pressure and threatening to break down?