Ken Booth’s Theory of World Security is an immensely provocative book that takes new security concepts to their logical conclusion. Traditionally, international relations has defined security in referent to states. This is why realists always talk about ‘national security’ or the security dilemma (as one states increases its power to feel secure, it makes other states insecure which compels them to increase their power). However, new concepts have emerged like human security, which encompasses freedom from want and freedom from fear. Instead of states, the referent of security is individual human beings, and policy should be oriented to providing human security throughout the world. In a perfect world, global peace would result when no human beings felt insecure and therefore had no need for violence.

Booth takes this new conception of security and grounds it in critical IR theory, Marxism, and most importantly, the Frankfurt School’s notion of emancipation. He argues that the production of insecurity is caused by worldwide structures and processes that cause suffering, or those ‘life-determining’ conditions that prevent individuals from being truly free. Thus, to promote human security requires altering those structures, thereby creating what Booth calls ‘world security’ by emancipating human beings from those structural conditions that cause and reproduce suffering. Emancipation itself should be treated as a social practice, one that requires that we critically interrogate existing social structures to identify how they reproduce insecurity. Armed with this knowledge, we must practice emancipation by creating new structures that promote freedom and help human beings overcome their own insecurity. The result is a new social structure Booth terms an emancipatory community. “A emancipatory community is therefore a free association of individuals, recognizing their solidarity in relation to common conceptions of what it is to live an ethical life, binding people together with a sense of belonging and a distinctive network of ideas and support.” Emancipatory communities must also accept and recognize the multiple identities that people may have. In this way, they can provide ontological security`, or a stable sense of Self.

These new approaches to security do not go uncriticized. Most notable is Roland Paris’s argument that human security is really hot air, a concept so broad that it gives policy makers no meaningful guides to action. The same criticism might be applied to world security and the practice of emancipation: what does it mean to change social structures and create a emancipatory community? Aren’t these just abstract concepts that have no relation to events in the real world?

However, real world events suggest that the paradigm shift has actually taken place and that states are reorienting their policies toward human security. In fact, it is already codified in existing military doctrine. “The cornerstone of any [counterinsurgency] effort is establishing security for the civilian populace. Without a secure environment, no permanent reforms can be implemented and disorder spreads.” (p. 42) While FM 3-24 emphasizes physical security, it also stresses that counterinsurgents meet the interests and grievances of the local people by constantly interacting with them and designing operations to fulfill those requirements. (Chap. 3, pp. 97-99) More advanced doctrine, such as Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design, reinforces this point by emphasizing how commander’s must design military operations with the widest amount of input possible from all relevant participants:

“An architect or industrial designer has a client, but often they are not aware what the client truly wants. The client may have provided a statement of work, but this is often incomplete—there are things he wants but either forgot to ask or did not know what to ask for. If the client is a committee, say for the construction of a new hospital or the design of a new freeway, there are often disparate needs that must be taken into account in the final design. Designers learn about the problem through discourse with the client in which the designer is constantly questioning his assumptions and probing the limits of his knowledge. Designers simultaneously build an understanding of the problem through the creation of a conceptual solution or design.” (p. 13)

If campaign design is applied to the context of counterinsurgency, then the people become the primary clients of operational commanders. How commanders provide security through an operational plan must therefore take into account the people’s understanding of what it means to be secure and constantly engage the people in discourse and communication that enables both sides to collectively and collaboratively formulate a plan that results in the provision of security. The result is a popular counterinsurgent community in which all actors involved understand the problem of security similarly (that is, they have an intersubjective and shared understanding) and support each other in the production of security. This community itself can be considered a social structure that create social conditions that promotes the freedom of the people and spreads cooperative ideas about the community throughout society. Most importantly, it would meet Booth’s criteria for an emancipatory community in which individual actors share ideas and support each other in a common ethical and moral context.

The popular counterinsurgent community should be understood as only a temporary solution to the problem of long-term governance and the creation of state institutions that are seen as legitimate by the people. Initially, social structures may exist that divide the people and reproduce insecurity by fueling ethnosectarian violence or sheltering criminal networks. These structures reproduce conflict by promoting conflicting identities between groups that do not accept each other’s existence and take conflict between them to be an established fact of life. To overcome these structures requires building social connections between the people that allow them to work together with a common understanding of security that collectively identifies and eliminates threats to the community. Counterinsurgents thereby broker relations between people that overcome their conflicting identities and create political and social space for each group to accept and recognize each other. As counterinsurgents broker these connections by putting common ideas about security into practice, otherwise conflicting groups are provided opportunities to learn that they too share ideas about security, and in fact their identities do not have to be conflictual. Instead, groups can exist within a single shared identity, one that is defined by ideas about security that are realized by the social conditions created by counterinsurgents and which reflect the common ideas about security held by the people.

Ultimately, this requires that counterinsurgents must foster indigenous institutions among the people that put their ideas about security into practice, and this process begins with the formation of the popular counterinsurgent community. Once the people and counterinsurgents share ideas about security, they can jointly practice these ideas with the participation of the people. As participation grows with the popular counterinsurgent community and indigenous security institutions gain strength and become sustainable, then counterinsurgents can begin to leave the newly unified popular community. This can be considered an idealized example of emancipatory practice.

One last note: emancipation should be considered a relative term, and not absolute. In reality, no human beings are completely free from social structures, and this is true even in democratic societies which still reproduce some form of suffering. Thus, when I speak of emancipation, I really mean relative emancipation; the new structures produced by counterinsurgents will provide more freedom to the people, yet their very existence restricts freedom in one form or another. Absolute emancipation and freedom from suffering is impossible, but significant improvements and relative emancipation resulting is social stability and institutional legitimacy is possible.

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