LIVELIHOODS AND SECURITY IN AFRICA: CONTENDING PERSPECTIVES IN THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER

Introduction

Development, as we typically define it, implies the integration of livelihoods into an increasingly global economy where the destinies of people living continents apart are no longer separate. New forms of social consciousness emerge from the effects of these globalized resource flows. Conflicts arise more and more over control of resource flows and the way in which these resources are conceived, managed, and sustained. These conflicts, in turn, pose challenges to existing ways of governing at different levels. The growing realization that individual livelihoods and the fate of local communities can no longer be viewed in isolation from national or international structures and processes has given rise to new forms of scholarship in which micro and macro considerations are being combined to provide fresh perspectives and insights on issues that previously were studied in isolation from each other. This means that in the same way that we are increasingly interdependent in pursuit of our livelihoods, we are as scholars more and more dependent on each others' theoretical and methodological contributions. Even though many are slow in recognizing it, interdisciplinarity is no longer something to be despised or discarded.

One field in which this convergence of social and economic forces is influencing the parameters of scholarship is that concerned with "security". The latter has for a long time occupied a prominent place in the literature on international relations. Debates about security, therefore, have typically been interpreted mainly in terms of what it means to the nation-state, and primarily in terms of military security. This orientation among international relations scholars was particularly pronounced in the days of the Cold War when calculations about military security were driving state policy, especially among the Big Powers. The "realist" school, which argues that states act in the international arena to maximize their own security, was for a long time the trend-setter in the study of international politics.

Realist assumptions continue to influence the field but they have become increasingly challenged, particularly in recent years, for at least two major reasons. The first is the end of the Cold War which has allowed scholars to revisit such concepts as security with a view to making it more applicable to a world where bipolar tensions between the East and the West no longer dominate the international arena. The other is the globalization of the capitalist economy and the threats to and opportunities for human welfare that follow in the wake of this process. Conflicts over resources and their use are now being studied not merely as international political economy but are increasingly analyzed in terms of security. The Gulf War is an obvious case in point but this is evident also in the way that communities within nation-states, e.g. the Ogoni in Nigeria and the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, struggle to protect their security in the light of threats posed by international forces. At the heart of many of these conflicts are often different interpretations of the concept of security. The latter is not only a concern for states, but also individuals and communities. Furthermore, threats to states, communities, and individuals are no longer seen as only military but also include economic poverty, political instability, and environmental degradation. This new debate also alerts us to the different time horizons that often apply to the notion of security. In thinking about what security means, analysts can no longer escape the differential time horizons that apply to various categories of security. For example, with growing interest in the notion of environmental security has come a recognition of the need for studying the long-term consequences of specific state policies or interventions.

The debates among political scientists, and international relations scholars in particular, therefore, are a fruitful starting-point for a closer examination of how macro and micro sets of issues are increasingly being studied in more holistic terms. The perspectives that are evolving in academic circles are of interest not only because of their theoretical or methodological dimensions but also because they serve as the lenses through which eventually policy is likely to be formulated and evaluated. Theories typically shape the way we interpret the world around us and they are of interest, therefore, not only because of their analytical but also their prescriptive value.

The purpose of this article is not to make an exhaustive analysis of the security literature, but to indicate how principal theoretical perspectives today influence our thinking about peace and security in Africa. Africa is a particularly good case in point for this kind of overview because nowhere else in the world do issues of conservation and development, as well as war and security, interface more manifestly than there.

The Evolving Discourse on Security

The emerging debate on the concept of security seems to take place largely in response to two simple but fundamental questions: (1) what security? and (2) whose security? The discourse centering on the first of these questions may be seen as a lateral expansion of the concept. By emphasizing that threats to states and societies are not only military -- as the case tends to be among realists -- but includes economic poverty, political instability, and environmental degradation, the idea of different categories of security, i.e. political, economic and environmental, has begun to take hold in the literature (e.g. Buzan, 1991). The need for a reconceptualization of security studies has also been argued by Gilpin (1981) and Keohane (1984) and more recently by Ray (1995). An overview of some of these efforts are contained in a recent review article by Baldwin (1995). A good deal of the academic work, particularly by younger scholars, along these lines has been funded in the past ten years by the joint U.S. Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Program on Peace and Security in a Changing World. Other efforts include an edited volume with special focus on Africa (Hjort af Ornas and Salih, 1989) published under the auspices of the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies (now the Nordic Africa Institute). Ken Booth and Peter Vale (1995) have advocated the need for a new and critical outlook on security in southern Africa, using a laterally expanded definition of security. Implied in this and other similar work is the assumption that the various spheres of modern life rather than the state are the primary contexts of security (Latham, 1995:44). These spheres, which are variably defined but include the configuration of military power, the dynamics of collective existence, the structuring of the polity, the organization of material life, and the conditions of biological and non-human life on the planet, are not isolated but intertwined and constitute part of the conceptual apparatus needed for redefining security in the present global setting. The trend of recent events in a number of African countries, e.g. Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia, illustrate the need for studying the interrelationship between these spheres in an integrated fashion if we want to understand the problems of peace and security in the present global environment. Ethnic conflict fueled by the supply of arms from other countries in societies where material existence is hazardous and political institutions are weak combine to adversely affect resource flows which in turn threaten livelihoods. Similarly, more intensified use of natural resources may pose serious security threats to both state and society as the battle for control of water resources in the Middle East and the waters of the Nile highlights.

The ongoing redefinition of security has a simultaneous and complementary vertical dimension. By this is usually meant the inclusion of other units of analysis than the nation- state. "Whose security?" may refer to specific communities of people within a country or to regional and other international entities. In this respect, the study of security issues is expanded both upwards and downwards. The important point is that these levels, like the spheres discussed above, are interrelated. At a practical level, this articulates itself in the motto, often used in NGO circles: "Think globally, act locally!" For the student interested in the connections between livelihoods, security, and governance, it is important to recognize not only that local values and institutions are often mediated by national, regional, and global influences but also that the opposite may take place. The challenges of contemporary governance cannot be resolved at one level alone. Neither local nor national considerations provide long-term solutions if allowed to prevail.

Some of this literature addresses the question of whether it is possible to have a "bottom-up" approach to the definition of security, or, put in somewhat different terms, whether civil society has a place in defining security concerns in the present era. For example, Julie Fisher (1993) points to the problems for indigenous non-governmental organizations in the Third World caused by the dominance of more powerful international (read: Northern) NGOs. Booth and Vale (1995) discuss the challenges facing South Africa and its neighbors in achieving national reconciliation through a focus on people, justice, and change, stressing that regional security is possible only if the building of common identities and the spreading of moral and political obligations to the various state and non-state actors is involved. A more broad-based study of environmental activism in the global arena by Wapner (1995) focuses on the new strength of transnational environmental action groups (TEAGs) and the emergence of a civic public realm that transcends national boundaries. The point he is making is that state actors in the international arena are not only influenced by other states or multinational corporations but increasingly also by TEAGs that demand -- and often obtain -- changes in the behavior and stand of individual governments.

The idea of expanding the study of security vertically has also gained momentum from the growing recognition among comparative politics scholars that the state in some parts of the world is weak or even disintegrating (e.g. Zartmann 1995). The notion of the state as a passive victim rather than an active agent features prominently in much of the contemporary commentary about the emerging security agenda (Del Rosso Jr., 1995). This is perhaps best exemplified by journalist Robert Kaplan's article "The Coming Anarchy" (Kaplan, 1994). In this article, he paints a ghoulish picture of the assorted demographic, environmental, and societal stresses afflicting states in West Africa which he holds up as a harbinger of a future world of "ever-mutating chaos". Among academics, Robert H. Jackson (1990) describes African states as "quasi-states" possessing juridical statehood but having only a tenuous empirical claim to such status. In this perspective, it is easy to see that institutions other than the state may be identified as necessary complements to the task of making the world a safer place.

It may be helpful to summarize this emerging debate by distinguishing the literature along the two cross-cutting lines identified above: (a) the lateral dimension, involving a redefinition of security to include other aspects than the military, and (b) the vertical dimension, extending the concept to involve actors other than the nation-state. The following matrix captures these dimensions and identifies four different "schools" or perspectives that participate in the ongoing discourse on security:

The realist school continues to focus on the state and treats the threat of war between nations as the primary focus of its intellectual concerns. The moralist school dwells first and foremost on the breakdown of political order within a country and the threat of civil violence to human security. While focusing on the use of military means, its concern with security extends beyond the state. The liberal school concentrates its intellectual efforts on the implications of a technologically and economically interdependent world and what governance measures need to be instituted in order to promote greater security and cooperation among existing nation-states. The promotion of democracy on the assumption that democratic states are less likely to go to war with each other is a cornerstone of this approach. The populist school is furthest removed from mainstream realist studies in accepting an expanded definition of the concept along both a vertical and a lateral line. Thus, its main concern is with the effects of resource degradation not only for the security of states but also for individuals and societies alike. In the remainder of this paper I shall deal with each of these schools in turn.

The Realist School

In spite of the growing interest, particularly in recent years, in redefining security, it would be wrong to imply that realism is waning as a leading paradigm in the study of international relations. It continues to occupy a hegemonic position especially among analysts of foreign policy in the United States. The extent to which there are new concepts of security emerging in the literature is more the outcome of new groups of scholars taking an interest in it than a major upheaval in the study of international relations. Realism is very much alive and kicking, as the saying goes.

This does not mean that all those who may be referred to as "realists" in their approach to the study of security are of one and the same persuasion. Particularly when looking at security studies in international relations over time, it is clear that the interpretation of war and military threat, and their implications for national and collective security, has varied. Going back to the seminal work of Quincy Wright (1942), war was primarily a problem to be solved, a disease to be cured, rather than an instrument of statecraft. Although the preoccupation was with war, it was affecting national security as a malfunction of the international system. Growing out of scholarship in the period between the two World Wars, realism, in that perspective, called for interventions to improve the workings of the international system as a whole. "National security", however, took on a very different meaning in the Cold War era when consideration of force as it relates to policy in conflicts among nations emerged as the first and foremost concern of realists. Although the initial period after 1945 was characterized by a definite caution with regard to how far to interpret security only in military terms (e.g. Brodie 1949), the emergence of "deterrence theory" in the 1950s and 1960s initiated a specific focus on nuclear weaponry and related issues such as arms control and limited war. Because it was assumed that no one really wanted to use nuclear weapons, except as last resort defence, security strategizing took on the logic of chess players. The objective of the national security analyst was to always offer a winning option without risking the imposition of a global disaster.

The work of Thomas Schelling (1960) stands out as a good illustration of the orientation of realist scholars of that period. The breakdown of detente and the renewal of cold war tensions in the 1980s stimulated further interest in security studies, but the realist's concern tended to remain focused on "the study of the threat, use, and control of military force". What was new in this latter period was that perspectives from history, psychology, and organization theory were brought in to enrich security studies. In none of these versions of realism, however, did concern with livelihoods and resource flows feature with the exception that realists acknowledged that war in the modern era would have a disastrous effect on civilian life.

There is obviously much more that should and could be said about the realist school. Suffice it to stress here, that realism does not necessarily mean that military force or war is the only variable entering into the equation of what constitutes security. Nor does realism have to exclude concerns about the nature of the international system. What is best in the interest of a nation, in other words, may take on variable interpretations in the realist perspective. It is important to take this into consideration in the contemporary setting when other intellectual perspectives are being launched to challenge realism. The latter is likely to still hold its ground and, at least in the United States, foreign policy debates are likely to be pursued on the terms set by realists rather than by other schools. In other words, it is not very likely that Washington security analysts are going to be persuaded to abandon their own realist premises in favor of some other "fashionable" theory. In this respect, one can reasonably assume that the 'hardcore' realist perspective on security will continue to be significant in the ongoing discourse on security. The challenge, therefore, is how to make environmental and other concerns an integral part of the realist equation.

The Moralist School

The fact that the global setting in the 1990s differs from the Cold War scenario creates space for alternative perspectives that now compete for attention among scholars. A particularly important driving force for the emergence of rivaling schools is the tendency for conflicts to be within rather than between states. Such conflicts tend to be particularly violent in multi-ethnic states (Carment, 1993). Evans (1994:3) mentions that of the 30 conflicts receiving international attention in 1992, no less than 29 were within state borders (Evans, 1994:3). This trend has been exacerbated by the breakdown of empires, notably the Soviet one, but also the collapse of the state in many former colonies in Africa. Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia, mini- states without their own clout in the global arena, have occupied the attention of policy analysts in recent years, not the military threat of competing global super-powers.

This is to many the essence of what is sometimes referred to as the "post-imperialist age". The principle of national self-determination, we have come to assume, is not in question. Interventions are no longer imperial but humanitarian. We prefer to imagine the acts of rescue undertaken in countries like Bosnia, Kurdistan and Somalia since 1989 as exercises in post-imperial disinterestedness, as a form of therapeutics uncontaminated by lust for conquest or imperial rivalry, as Ignatieff (1995:78) argues. Nor is this mere illusion. In the cases mentioned above, the intervening forces have stopped short of occupation. Even if these interventions have been more associated with failure than success, they have changed the parameters of the debate about security in ways that still prevail.

The bottom line of the moralist school is that the international community has a collective responsibility for not only all member states but also for the people living in these member states. It is no longer possible to define security in narrow national terms; it must be viewed as cooperative, i.e. as involving every member state of the international community in renouncing the use of force among themselves and coming collectively to the aid of any one of them attacked. Cooperative security, then, in the language of one analyst (Evans, 1994:7), means consultation rather than confrontation, reassurance rather than deterrence, transparency rather than secrecy, prevention rather than correction, and interdependence rather than unilateralism. Peace is seen as a necessary condition for development, this school argues while pointing to the fact that it is no coincidence that those countries whose economies are declining, whose political institutions are failing, and where human rights are not respected should also be those experiencing the greatest amounts of turmoil and violence.

The moralist position favors a stronger role for preventive diplomacy conducted not unilaterally by the already strong powers but through global or regional mechanisms. Its advocates point to the fact, for instance, that UN's peacekeeping budget for 1993 was $3.3 billion while the cost of the U.S.-led coalition that defeated Iraq spent more than $70 billion. To enhance the mechanisms available for pursuing collective security, a number of proposals have been made. Some suggest that if member states contributed just 5 per cent of their existing defense budgets to the UN, the world body would have a security budget of some $40 billion a year -- more than ten times what it now has available. Others have suggested a flat levy on international air travel or a 0.1 per cent turnover tax on foreign exchange transactions to boost the ability of the UN to engage in preventive diplomacy and peace- keeping.

The moralist position, however, has its own problems which stem not only from the failures of the global efforts in recent years to ensure collective security or pursue preventive diplomacy. The political will to engage in these ventures has understandably slackened in the mid-1990s even though the real reason for the failures is that there was never enough of it in the first place. For example, it is hardly reasonable for states to deny the UN desperately needed funds, then turn around and blame it for the failures that lack of resources inevitably generate. Nor is it reasonable to blame the UN as an institution for the failures of member states in the Security Council to provide decisive leadership.

Another problem with the moralist position is the difficulty in determining its boundaries. Morality is often invoked but seldom delineated. Because objectives and motives are hard to concretize in situations where morality is an important factor, exercises aimed at crisis prevention often create their own backlash (Harff 1995:36). Humanitarianism is morally seductive but it also easily leads to hubris of the same kind that characterized the old imperialism. What else but imperial arrogance, asks Ignatieff (1995:79), could have led any one to assume that an outside power -- even one mandated by the international community -- could have gone into Somalia, put an end to factional fighting, and then exited, all within months?

Our moral reflex -- something must be done -- has often been sustained by the unexamined assumption that we have the power to do anything. We have taken our technological and logistical might for granted. Now that we are faced with the partial, if not total, failure of almost all interventions attempted in the name of humanitarianism or collective security, the theme of moral disgust is emerging. The thought is not too far away that maybe civil wars must be allowed to burn themselves out on their own accord. Add to that the anguished suspicion that our attempts to stop them have either delayed the inevitable or even prolonged the agony and we find ourselves adopting the moral reflex of self-exculpation by blaming the victim and thus justifying moral withdrawal.

There is a need for every one who seriously ponders what we can do in Burundi, in the former Yugoslavia after the Dayton Peace Accord, or in any other place where intra-state violence occurs or is likely to occur, to consider the dilemma that follows from adopting the moralist stand. It is a seductive stand, but it creates its own traps in which we all are prone to fall. The moralist argument, therefore, while important for pointing to the relationship between civil war and the collapse of resource flows and livelihoods, carries its own prescriptive limitations when it comes to policies which are not always fully considered. The result is typically disgust, cynicism, and withdrawal, i.e. the opposite of what the school demands of the global community to do.

The Liberal School

The liberal school lays primary emphasis on the growing economic and technological inter-dependence of states and societies in the contemporary world setting. It accepts that security concerns go beyond military aspects. In a liberal international economic system, vulnerability to external economic events and dependence on foreigners are a necessary consequence of immersion in global markets. They are viewed as the source of opportunities for improved living standards, not threats to be avoided. This means that the sense of insecurity for individuals, firms, and nations that follows from the uncertainty associated with liberal capitalism is regarded as a necessary evil, if not an outright positive thing (Cable, 1995). Yet, even liberals agree that policies that enhance security, for example, to guarantee resource flows, are necessary. There are different versions of this liberal definition of security.

Robert McNamara (1968) is among those who first argued for a broader definition of security than what was typically inherent in the concept of "national security" in the Cold War era. His apostasy is particularly interesting given his role as architect earlier in the decade of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara, on the eve of becoming President of the World Bank, articulated an expansive notion of security that included the promotion of economic, social and political development in "poor nations" as a means of preventing conflict and preserving a minimal measure of global order and stability. Contrary to the moralists who argue that peace is a precondition for development, McNamara argued that development is a precondition for peace. The problem with his expanded notion of security was how to delineate and operationalize it. It was not easy to identify, for example, which specific policies would really promote greater global security. The policy of massive resource transfers in support of the poor that was pursued by the World Bank in the 1970s under Mr. McNamara's leadership, proved quite soon to be inadequate for that purpose. All it did was leave these poor nations heavily indebted to the West.

Others who tried to articulate a similar non-military definition of security were not more successful. For example, during the 1970s, a growing number of activist scholars began pointing to ecological degradation and population growth as existential threats to human survival. They questioned the positivist assumptions underlying the dominant liberal view of development as inherently good. Science and technology, these activist scholars argued, were more ambiguous instruments than had generally been accepted. This group, preaching the new gospel of saving the planet, included, as Del Rosso, Jr. (1995:185) reminds us, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Jacques Cousteau, Paul Ehrlich, Buckminster Fuller, Garrett Hardin, and Margaret Mead. Every one of them emphasized a particular aspect of the problem, but the urgency that drove their separate appeals was enshrined in the 1972 Club of Rome study, The Limits to Growth, which painted an unremittingly grim picture in which the world's economic system was destined to collapse as a result of unchecked population growth and industrial growth. It was ironically the alarmist nature of their warnings of inescapable disaster that in the end undermined the political impact of their calls. At least in the perspective prevailing in policy circles in the 1970s, these doomsday prophets were seen as advancing prescriptions that were totally unfeasible. Whether they should be described as being ahead of their time or not, these advocates of "saving the planet" had very limited impact on either the "silent majority" or the policy-makers in governments because the explicit link between non-military phenomena and the prevailing, typically realist notion of security was not effectively made. This verdict applies also to the effort by Lester Brown (1977), eventually President of the World Watch Institute, and Robert Ullman (1983) in redefining national security to include such security threats as climate change, soil erosion, food shortages, and deforestation.

It was only with the dramatic shifts in geopolitical terms after the end of the Cold War that space evolved for considering more seriously the points about security advocated by the liberal school. Gwyn Prins (1992) was one of the first and more influential in advocating a new field of security in which the key referent object was the entire globe rather than the state. Global security is about survival. The existential needs of humans -- and non-humans, notably animals, trees, and plants -- were now more readily accepted as part of the security agenda. Building on James Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis", which describes a world in which all elements, including human beings, are inextricably linked by powerful feedback loops that sustain a fragile global equilibrium. This new apostasy of security emphasized the critical interrelationships among some of the most daunting threats to human existence such as poverty, environmental degradation, and rapid demographic change (Myers, 1989).

Much of this global perspective was dismissed by conventional security analysts as "globaloney", but this liberal message had greater impact in the 1990s than it had two decades earlier. Behind their often inflated rhetoric there lay, after all, some important, and underappreciated, dimensions of the evolving international system which, following the liberalization of the world economy in the 1980s, had become increasingly apparent. The critique that the liberal definition of security moved the concept away from the fundamental notion of "protection from organized violence" could no longer be sustained because it was now more readily recognized than in the 1970s that factors emerging in the non-military realm were capable of causing as much harm to stability and order as the arsenals of the world's armies. For example, Homer-Dixon (1994), drawing on a wide range of cases from around the world, concludes that environmental scarcities definitely contribute to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world.

The philosophical underpinnings of the liberal gospel of security in the 1990s are not new; what is new is its pretension for filling the conceptual vacuum left in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. It takes two forms. One is political, the other is economic in orientation. The former emphasizes the importance of promoting democracy around the world as a means of enhancing global security, the assumption being that democratic states tend to go to war against each other less readily than other types of regime. This notion has become an important complement to the earlier preoccupation with development as a preventive measure. Today, the liberal gospel tends to be expressed as follows: democracy promotes development and development in turn promotes security. The liberals also have contributed toward making "geoeconomics" emerge as a natural successor to geopolitics in a world in which the force of arms is not only bad for humanity but also bad for business (Del Rosso, Jr. 1995).

The liberal definition of security continues to exercise influence in academic circles, yet there is evidence as well that these ideas have begun to permeate policy circles too. For example, in the US State Department, traditionally a fortress of realist thinking, there exists, since President Clinton took office, a special Under-Secretary for Global Affairs. Former Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, in an address at Stanford University in April 1996, confirmed the Administration's acceptance that global environmental issues must be a vital part of U.S. foreign policy. Governments in many other countries around the world have already taken steps in this direction. We can safely say, therefore, that non-military aspects of security as they affect not only the nation-state but the global community as an integrated whole are receiving greater recognition today. More and more analysts and policy-makers realize that livelihoods and resource flows have to be secured in new and more imaginative ways than in the past.

The Populist School

The populist school shares some of the same points as the liberal perspective on development. In particular, it accepts that the security concept needs to be expanded to include non-military aspects. Like the liberal school, it also recognizes that developmentalism today must be tempered with a definite dose of environmentalism. It differs from the former, however, in that it recognizes not only states and markets as important actors, but also people. To the populist school, indigenous organizations and civil society are important concepts. Livelihoods and resource flows cannot be adequately secured unless citizens, and more specifically the poor and marginalized peoples of the globe, have a voice in the matter. To ensure their security the world needs to be governed in different ways than we have been used to in the past.

The environmental and demographic threats that the liberal school identifies in more generic terms are seen by the populists as applying in differential terms. The poor and the marginalized are more exposed than others. It is their livelihoods that need special protection. It is the way resource flows affect them that should be our priority. The populist school draws considerable inspiration from the Report of the Global Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). Like the liberal school, populists differ among themselves in terms of what concern to give highest priority. One noticeable difference is in the way populists relate to the question of how large-scale development affects small-scale efforts and vice versa.

One group starts from the assumption that the principal challenge is to draw upon the lessons of grass-roots development for the purpose of improving national or global development. It presupposes that the foundation for development lies with the people, that they are the best judges of how to judiciously use scarce resources. For this group, security lies in the notion that things grounded in society stand a better chance of being protected and promoted. If developmental and environmental factors may pose a threat to human survival and security, then it is important to get the equation right by proceeding from the bottom up. Considering the magnitude of the challenge, however, it is important to ask: how large can small ultimately become? Can that which is local build upon itself so that small is institutionalized and widely replicated? Can a species of development flourish that maintains the virtues of smallness, but at the same time reaches large numbers of people, transfers genuine power to the poor, and provides the prospect of sustainable development (Uvin, 1996)?

Annis (1987) answers these questions affirmatively with reference to Latin America. He believes that every Latin American country is now interlaced with a thickening web of grassroots organizations intertwined with each other and the state which provides the basis for the "scaling up" of small-scale development. Friberg and Hettne (1988) agree with Annis and add that micro processes can produce macro transformation for three reasons. First, the conventional distinctions of levels (local, national, global) are simplifications that distort our understanding of the aggregate effects of dispersed and localized phenomena. Second, there is a dynamic interplay between the functional macro system and the territorial micro system, which has been spurred by local responses to the operation of the world economic system in which those who suffer from unemployment, marginalization, and the destruction of their habitat react and take their future into their own hands. The resulting dialectic between the macro and the micro makes more room for local initiatives. Third, while the issues of local development vary quite a bit because of contextual differences, they are similar at a deeper level. It is possible, therefore, to speak of a tendency toward convergence, the two authors argue.

There certainly appears to be a growing consensus, not only among analysts but also practitioners, that the implementation of many global policies will require acceptance of these policies by most of the people of the world (Alger 1990). The view of Western moral and technical superiority that was so prevalent some years ago is finally being called into question. For example, the notion that Europeans could succeed where indigenous people had failed can no longer be sustained on the basis of existing performance records, whether the sector is agriculture or health. The refocus on the poor, therefore, draws attention to the indigenous, often marginalized, groups who in the past were subjected to the experiments of Western developmentalism. In trying to find answers to the questions raised by the interplay of environment, human rights, governance, and development, Western models are no longer viewed with the same confidence as before. In fact, it is increasingly recognized, as in the case of the CAMPFIRE project in Zimbabwe (Derman, 1995), that national proprietorship and local ownership must be recognized as fundamental to the success of any effort to combine environmental concerns (in this case wildlife protection) with the development aspirations of indigenous communities. An interesting example of what Brock (1991) calls "peace through parks", which involves the participation of grassroots communities as well as governmental agencies, is the attempt to establish the world's largest consecutive wildlife corridor in southern Africa, involving South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This is a practical example of the efforts in the region to reduce the tensions between South Africa and the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) that Booth and Vale (1995) are advocating in their review of post-apartheid security concerns in the region.

An opposite approach to dealing with the macro-micro interrelations is to start from the more negative assumption that all macro (or mega) development is harmful to the micro, whether defined in human, institutional or biological terms. Many analysts adopting this particular approach focus their attention on what development does to indigenous communities. Their security is being threatened by the global development forces set in motion by an assertive capitalist economy. Sometimes, these concerns are expanded to include not only human communities but also wildlife, whose existence is being threatened by economic or social forces. "Parks and people" programs constitute one practical example of how governments, and sometimes NGOs, have tried to deal with the tensions that exist, e.g. in east and southern Africa, between the development needs of human communities and the demands of wildlife protection.

Another example of interest here is the struggle to protect the rain forest in the Amazon. Of particular significance has been the Kayapo Indian protest which over the years helped galvanize a new environmental consciousness in Brazil and in neighboring countries. The protest focused on the proposal to build the Kararao Dam, which would have drowned a considerable part of the rain forest and would have displaced members of the local Indian community. With the help of international NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Survival International the Kayapo staged a major demonstration in the town of Altamira that eventually had the effect of making the World Bank withdraw its promise of a loan for the project to the Brazilian Government (Fisher 1994). The Altamira Kayapo protest not only achieved the objective of stemming further destruction of the rain forest, but also profoundly changed the political reality of the indigenous Indian communities and their expectations of what they could do to protect their own livelihoods. In this case, the small managed successfully to defend itself against the large-scale development efforts funded by governments and international finance institutions.

Some of the same concerns have arisen in conjunction with the conservation of biodiversity. Here it is not so much human communities as biological riches that are at stake, but the two go together in that the best protectors of biodiversity are often local communities who have a stake in the continued existence of certain species. Community management of biodiversity, therefore, has more recently become an interest of scholars and practitioners alike both in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where such diversity is particularly rich. There is also growing realization in the richer parts of the world that these efforts are of value not only to the local communities but also to the rest of the world. Again, it is the small, by being defended, that can provide benefits to the large.

While the security concept which presupposes that the protection of local communities has a value to the global community at large is still enigma to most security analysts, the populist school does provide a new dimension to the discourse on security that complements other perspectives in a meaningful manner. By so doing, it also challenges existing structures of governance and calls for ways of linking analysis of livelihoods, security, and governance in new ways. Its concerns can no longer be taken as only esoteric. They are increasingly part of the global discourse on security.

Four Separate Tables?

This paper has traced the evolving discourse on the concept of security in recent years. A number of important points emerge from this review. The first is that the vertical and horizontal expansion of the concept has broadened the debate and created at least four different perspectives that compete for attention among academics and policy analysts alike. As a result, the debate is richer and no longer the prerogative of a highly specialized group of international relations experts alone. Even though each of these perspectives has its own limitations, especially when it comes to operationalization, security is now viewed as a much broader and more complex concern than in the past.

A second point is that the actors participating in the debate about security are no longer only government officials worrying about the security of the nation-state. Increasingly, representatives of civil society participate in the debate with a view to demonstrating how the definition of security bears on their welfare and livelihoods as well. Even though many analysts experience the present situation as disorderly and dismiss the debate in the post-Cold War era as confusing, the parameters of the debate have changed for good because the stakeholders are now so much more a diverse group than before. The recognition that civil society is as important an actor as the state guarantees that the concept of security will be defined in terms that reflect society's interests in ways that was not the case before.

The third point is that the rise of "geoeconomics" is drawing attention to new dimensions of security that are difficult for governments to ignore in a world where "everything is related to everything else, only more so now than ever", to quote an American diplomat (Del Rosso, Jr. 1995:175). Threats to economic security are potentially as harmful as many military threats might be. For example, the disruption of supplies, whether it is food, oil, or raw materials needed for production, can cause major damage to a country's economy and potentially spark political violence. Such threats to resource flows are bound to have implications for people's livelihoods in ways that politicians cannot ignore. They can affect rich countries as well as poor.

The fourth point is that human-induced environmental scarcity such as degradation of land resources and population pressures, helps precipitate agricultural shortfalls, which in turn leads to adverse social and political outcomes. Many parts of Africa, for example, are vulnerable to such interactions. Although some may wish to brush off such a scenario as scare tactics, there is a definite need to build into the calculation of security the fact that it is affected by a dual set of variables, one fast-moving, the other operating in the longer haul. The discourse on security in the past has been influenced mainly by consideration of the fast- moving variables such as military interventions or economic crashes. Equally important, however, are the processes of land degradation, population growth, climate change and, not the least, human values, which, if not considered, may cause as much long-term damage to resource flows and livelihoods as those more readily considered by security analysts.

These four concluding observations suggest the need for ensuring that advocates of the four schools presented above are able to enter into dialogue with each other. There has been a tendency for each school to ignore the others. To use Gabriel Almond's (1990) characterization of the debates in the field of comparative politics in the 1980s, advocates of each perspective have been seated at separate tables, engaging only each other while ignoring their neighbors at other tables in debate. This tendency not only limits the extent to which new theories and research is developed, but also ignores the practical policy implications of such misguided insularity.

If we fail to take a holistic view of security, we first of all overlook the inherent contradictions within the concept itself as it applies to contemporary problems and challenges. To start with, one person's security is often another's insecurity. In a world that is increasingly not only interconnected but also stratified between rich and poor, this becomes both an intellectual and a policy challenge. As Athanasiou (1996) argues, it is necessary for advocates of any one of the perspectives listed above to recognize the difference between panaceas and solutions. At a time when the most politically powerful movements addressing economic and social inequalities tend to be fundamentalist, when corporate environmentalism is having greater influence, and when even some "greens" fear the notion of "equity," is it possible that we will witness the emergence of greater dialogue between these four perspectives on security?

Such dialogue would become possible only if advocates of each perspective are ready to engage in some form of compromise of their core position. For example, realists need to reconsider their tendency to reify the state. Security is ultimately defined and acted upon by human beings. At the same time, those coming at security from a moralist or populist perspective gain little from merely pursuing an anti-statist position. Their calls for a redefinition of security and the creation of new governance structures to realize it will meet with little response unless they incorporate the important role of the state. For example, civil society cannot act alone. Its influence can only be secured in the context of a functioning state. Furthermore, liberal analysts need to acknowledge that technology as a mediating factor between human beings and environment is not only positive but often associated with negative implications. For example, the tendencies towards homogenization, or "monoculturalism" reduce not only biodiversity but also other kinds of diversity that are inherently productive.

Each perspective, therefore, needs to be more adaptive and open to the possibility of integrating aspects of security that originate from other schools. A particular challenge in this regard will be how far realists can transcend their concern with state security issues and bridge the gap between macro and micro aspects of security. How far, for instance, does the economic dimension, notably factors associated with the globalization of the market, provide an entry point for broadening and deepening the realist perspective on security to include both non-military and civil society aspects on security? This and related questions need the attention of both researchers and practitioners if the global challenges that lie in the interface between (1) conservation and development and (2) war and peace are going to be better understood and more effectively acted upon.

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