First Excerpt (2)

The principal connotation of individual security in modern political thought is as a relation between the individual and the state: Security is an objective of individuals, but one that can only be achieved in a collective or political process. Even the idea of national or state security in the sense that became widespread after 1815 refers to a collective process in which the participants are themselves states; the Westphalian settlement, or Kant's cosmopolitan federation, or the equilibrium of Europe. But the "human security" of the new international principles seems to impose relations that are only tenuously political. The security of an individual in one country is to be achieved through the agency of a state (or a substate group, or a suprastate organization) in another country. The individual is thereby very much less than a co-lawmaker, in Kant's sense, in the political procedure that ensures security. She is less, even, than a co-beneficiary (like a wife or a shop assistant): she is not even a partner in being protected.

The nonpolitical character of the new principles poses evident problems…The individual who is "troubled by violence" does not know who (sic) to ask for protection (which agency of the United Nations, which nongovernmental organization, and in what language?), and she has no political recourse if the protection is not provided.(3) The interposition of poorly understood and only incipiently political rights is even more insidious, in some circumstances, if the assertion of a new international right has the effect of subverting a local and potentially more resilient political process. One of the charges made against the humanitarian policies of the 1990s is indeed that by depoliticizing procedures of emergency relief, they tend to subvert the local politics in which individual subjects are conscious participants, and which constitutes the only consistent source of continuing security.

Second Excerpt(4) (pp. 81-82)

The main objection to NGOs as a source of security… follows from the defining characteristic of the NGO as a voluntary organization. There is a stark inequality of voluntariness, in particular, between the "donors" and the "recipients" of security. An international relief charity operating in the zone of a civil war or a distant famine, for example, is made up of individual volunteers (including people who have volunteered to be employed at low salaries) and funded by voluntary contributions (including voluntary contributions from governments of tax revenues). In contrast, the individuals who receive relief are in circumstances of the most extreme lack of voluntariness: They are as far as one can be from the self-sufficiency of the individual will that is at the heart of, for example, Kant's political theory….

African Rights, in its harsh criticism of international "humanitarianism" in Somalia, contrasts the public accountability of official agencies with the voluntariness of NGOs: "while agencies such as UNICEF and WHO have a duty to be present, the presence of NGOs is a privilege." The relationship between people who provide and people who use "social services and health care" is thus one of "goodwill" rather than of "contract". Individuals become "passive recipients" of charity, and they are thereby made even more insecure: "the insecurity of the relationship that results can also undermine the effectiveness of the program" … (5)

It has been suggested that the "civil-society strategy" is an insufficient source of individual security because it is insufficiently political. As civil society is (by self-definition) nongovernmental; individual security is (by the definition of liberal political theory) both the objective of and the justification for government. The civil society is the domain of the voluntary; individual security is the justification for coercion. But the nongovernmental society is itself of notably increased political importance in the post-Cold War world. The new political theory of the NGO is indeed the assertion of a new politics: the assertion that the "we" of civil society, or the nongovernmental and the noncoercive, is a constituent, and even a defining constituent of political life.

Emma Rothschild is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Chair of the Research Council of the Common Security Forum.