States and regimes tend to focus more on physical and military security than human security and non-traditional threats. Many governments justify increased armament spending based on the possibility of military threats and external invasion. While the possibility of conventional military action is a serious concern, many of the immediate threats facing people cannot be dealt with militarily.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the list of common challenges facing most of the states regularly reveal conditions of fragility, fragmentation, perpetuated conflicts, authoritarianism, and de-development. Crises of legitimacy, inclusivity and representation, absence of accountability, and normalcy of marginalization and alienation, are additional common characteristics of the region’s frameworks of governance. Consequent to all these predicaments, the notion of ‘peace’ has largely shrunk to become a mere function of securitized interventions, with regimes’ ‘security first’ paradigms and security-driven frameworks – to empower security establishments and armies — providing the engine of state (re)formation processes.
Yet, the region cannot be analyzed as a ‘monolithic and homogeneous entity’, but as was recently argued by Marwan Muasher, Arab countries can be subdivided today into three distinct categories: those “that are thriving, those that are struggling, and those that have become failing or failed states”. However, even with this typology, the countries in the region tend to dismiss a critical element, namely, centering people, their freedoms and security, and their prospects of human development, in the core of any processes of reform, statebuilding, and governance. In other words, and as was argued by Muasher, “states also must adopt a new political framework in which citizens are seen as resources, not threats, and are treated as an equal and necessary part of the decision-making process”.
Said differently, we argue for moving away from the paradigm of “security is about weaponry” to a modality of “security is about people.” The centrality of the people in political systems and developmental processes means capitalizing on them as resources, not threats. The human security approach should emphasize a civilian non-armed/non-militarized method that is people-centric, law-abiding, comprehensive, and preventive. In this regard, the ‘security’ component here should be primarily guided by expanding critical social safety nets, human development policies and practices to alleviate suffering, non-traditional/non-conventional threats, and multi-dimensional insecurity. This would open up new avenues that have been forcibly blocked and denied by regimes that are fixated on securitized approaches to everyday life, which ironically violates, instead of protecting, the people and their security. As a result, we become continuously faced with the question of: Whose security?
Alaa Tartir, Program Director of Al-Shabaka, Engaged Scholar, Global Citizen 