Human Security as Political Resource : A Response to David Chandler’s ‘Human Security : The Dog that didn’t Bark

Introduction :

FROM AN ACADEMIC STANDPOINT, I see two ways of dealing with the currently influential discourse of ‘human security’. The first consists in assessing the internal logic of the arguments supporting (or contesting) the new doctrine, and in examining their expected political and ethical consequences through the use of logical reasoning. Although valuable, however, such exercises present a risk : as Pierre Bourdieu (1990 : 48–51) has put it (following Marx), it is a frequent mistake of ‘professional exponents of logos and logic’ to ‘take the things of logic for the logic of things’. In response, the second, more sociological, way favours long-term empirical analyses focused on the transforming and unchanged practices surrounding the new doctrine and their consequences for the actors concerned, in terms of resources, social/political positions and hierarchies, ‘rules of the game’, stability and change, etc.
The major interest of David Chandler’s (2008) review essay is to call for critical distance and empirical research as regards human security, in order that we might better understand the growing appropriation of the human security discourse by state officers and bureaucratic decisionmakers. This is the core of his quite severe criticism of Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh & Anuradha M. Chenoy’s (2007) Human Security : Concepts and Implications. Those authors do not propose in-depth empirical analyses of the politically oriented appropriation of human security, though they do acknowledge its possibility when they discuss the relation between human security and the ‘responsibility to protect’, as well as the interventionist and discretionary content of the latter doctrine.

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