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Security governance between State and market: human security and security
sector reform.
Alessandro Arienzo
One of the more interesting themes of the present debate about the role
of the State in relation to the changes of democratic politics and of the
economy on a worldwide scale is represented by the space acquired by
policies of governance. The latter is an ambiguous but very evocative concept,
so much so that it constitutes one of the key terms of the principal documents
written by international agencies and institutions like the UN, the WTO, the
World Bank, and the OECD. Such is its currency that it has even been
affirmed as the political category with which the attempt to prefigure and to
accomplish a whole process of reform of the practices of European
government has been undertaken.1
The term governance is used to designate, roughly, a form, a style ofgoverning that is different and alternative to the style of government.
2 The
former is horizontal, flexible and inclusive; the latter is hierarchical, rigid and
strongly centralised. This term is thus understood to mean processes and
structures of decision that cannot be traced back to the exercise of political
sovereignty. On the contrary, these process and structures are organised on the
basis of a horizontal and negotiable relation between bearers of manifold
interests, a relation which aims at shared decisions and collective action.3 The
relation between these two styles, between policies of governance and the
exercise of government, has often been understood in opposed, when not
mutually exclusive, terms. The comparison between these two models iscertainly part of the very complex debate on the role of the State and on the
presumed crisis that traverses the modern form of government, particularly in
its democratic guise. The models of a true and genuine democracy of
governance are opposed to a ‘Westphalian’ political and territorial order,
which is supposedly threatened by ‘globalising-provincialising’ impulses and
finds itself in difficulty due to the procedures of a democratic and
representative government that is now held to be ever less able to take rapid
and efficacious decisions.
1 The key document is the Governance in the European Union: a White Paper (COM, 2001,
428 final) published by the Commission of the EU. Among the extensive literature on theargument, I note the following: G. De Búrca and J. Scott, Constitutional Change in the EU:
from Uniformità to Flexibility?, Oxford, Hart, 2001; L. Hooghe and G. Marks, Multilevel
governance and European Integration, Boulder, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; L. Hooghe, The
European Commission and the Integration of Europe. Images of Governance, Cambridge,
CUP, 2001; M. Jachtenfuchs, The governance approach to european integration, “Journal of
Common Market Studies”, vol. 39, 2001, pp. 245-264.2 J.N. Rosenau / E.-O. Czempiel, Governance Without Government: Order and Change in
World Politics, Cambridge, CUP, 1992.3 As an introduction to the theme of governance, see: L.S. Finkelstein, What is global
governance, «Global Governance», vol. 1, n. 3, 1995, pp. 367-371; J. Pierre and B.G. Peters,
Governance, Politics and the State, London, Macmillan Press, 2000; R. O. Keohane,
Governance in a Partially Globalized World , «American Political Science Review», vol. 95,
2001, p. 12 e ss; I. Bache and M. Flinders, Multi-level governance in theory and practice,Oxford, O.U.P., 2004; G. Borrelli (ed.), Governance, pp. 125-157.
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Among the contexts in which governance meets democratic theory and
in which the role and the function assumed today by territorial sovereignties in
international politics is interrogated with greater intensity, there is the
variegated context of the policies meant to favour processes of pacification,
development and transition or democratic transformation of vast areas of theworld. They are processes that, when they do not explicitly assume forms of
armed intervention or of peace enforcing, are presented precisely in the
clothes of good governance, operating in relation with multiple actors, among
them States, and through States and supranational institutions, in order to
guarantee ample and shared safety and security. The theme of security, in both
of these declinations, thus assumes a central role in the debates on the State
and democracy today. In the last decade, the transformations that have
occurred following the fall of the equilibria produced by the cold war have
produced profound and substantial changes in the theory and practices of
international security, thus assigning a growing role to policies of governance.
The proposal by the UN to develop politics of support and recovery for Statesand populations in difficulty on the basis of the new concept of human
security, and the concomitant process of affirmation at the global level of
security sector reform, are at the basis of the current hypotheses of security
governance.
The first part of this contribution is thus dedicated to reconstructing the
salient traits of theories of governance that operate on the foundation of
reflections on global security. The changes and transformation that have
occurred in this category will be analysed in the second part, giving specific
attention to the implications that they demonstrate in the international
management of movements of populations. My goal is to investigate therelation that is established between governance and State, beginning from the
transformations in the codification of the notion of security and from the
reflections produced in the field of security governance on the displacement of
populations following serious crises or emergencies. In the context of this
specific governance, I will attempt to paint a picture of differentiated policies,
set to work by – and by means of – multiple actors, including the State. The
goal of these policies is to bring economic development, security and
democratic government into synergy. This nexus is at the centre of reflections
on global security governance and constitutes the nucleus of a strategy that
aims to support failing (or transitional) States that risk being transformed into
‘rogue States’, thus activating dynamics of war. In the same way, this nexus isat the heart of an ensemble of focused policies that are today posited on the
basis of attempts to respond to the immense movements of populations
produced by poverty, conflicts, sickness and environmental disasters. In such
policies, the State is attributed different roles and functions and, in some
cases, competing roles: sometimes it operates as guarantee and principle
author of policies of security/safety; at other times it is nothing other than one
actor among many that compete in the realisation of definite policies at the
international level; more often, it is instead the ‘object’ of more complex
strategies of security governance. We thus come to see global security
governance as the exercise of a non-statal government over populations. It
necessitates the strengthening both of statal institutions and also of
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autonomous dynamics of the competitive market. Governance thus seems to
be able to be functional only in the shadow of the State and market.4. The first
offers it a normative and territorial context of reference, as well as the
guarantee of a substantial security community; the second furnishes it with the
general form of exchanges.
The State between governance and government
Governance is a complex category whose matrix is multidisciplinary. It
is used in different contexts: from theories of the State to doctrines of
administration and to organisational models of economic corporations, from
theories of local and urban governance to reflections on globalisation and on
international politics. In all these cases, it describes specific modalities of
coordination of collective action. Certainly, with the term “governance” we
refer to practices that usually regard groups or institutions whose operations
are not founded on the recourse to authority and to the sanctioning power ofstatal government, even if the fundamental objectives are not different from
those of government.
“It is rather a matter of a difference in processes. […] It [i.e.
governance] refers to the development of governing styles in which
boundaries between and within public and private sectors have become
blurred”5; “governance is ultimately concerned with creating the
conditions for ordered rule and collective action”.6
There are multiple and often very different models of governance.Renate Mayntz has placed these models in an arc of positions that go from a
new style of government, distinct from the model of hierarchical control and
characterised by a greater degree of cooperation and by interaction between
State and non-statal actors within mixed public/private decisional networks, to
an ensemble of distinct modalities of coordination of individual actions,
understood as primary forms of construction of the social order.7 This
expression can be used to mean different models or styles of political conduct
that vary from a more restricted interpretation of network to an extremely
broader interpretation that is applicable to any form of organising collective
action.
4 This is maintained by Philippe Schmitter, who argues that the State and the market are two
‘shadows’ that sustain any discourse and politics of governance. This thesis runs through all
his most recent interventions on the theme of governance. Among his many works, I therefore
refer only to the following: Examining the present euro-polity with the help of past-theories,
pp. 1-14 and Imagining the Future of the Euro-Polity with the Help of New Concepts, in
Governance in the European Union, pp. 121-50. Both essay are now to be found in
Governance in the European Union, edited by G. Marks, F. Scharpf, P. Schmitter, E W.
Streeck, London, Sage, 1996.5 G. Stoker, Governance as a theory: five propositions, “International Social Science
Journal”, vol.L, 1998, pp.17-28, p.17.6 Ibid., p.18.7
R. Mayntz, New challenges to governance theory, European University Institute, JeanMonnet Chair Paper RSC No 98/50, 1998.
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In the first and more restricted meaning, governance can refer to
practices of regulation and self-regulation of economic and financial
corporations, thus attributing to the State a merely regulative function. In such
a case, it is configured as a complex of political tools that aim at the self-
government of organised interests aligned with, and sustaining, a ‘minimumState’ that works to care for the autonomous flows of a competitive society.
However, this meaning can also be understood as a complex of policies that,
being centred on the preponderant role of negotiating procedures between
actors and on the contribution of expert knowledges, aspires to be a horizontal
and participatory resolution of the difficulties of democratic government. If
representative-democratic politics seems to accentuate its own elitarian and
conflictual results, thus revealing itself ever less able to govern effectively the
impulses of a complex contemporaneity, this notion of governance would then
be able to amplify the spaces of access to decision making and to the
realisation of policy. Consequently, it would be able to increase the number
and the quality of actors engaged in the process of political mediation.However it is defined, governance is certainly an index of the growing
importance that governing by policies assumes in opposition to the
government of politics and representation. As Giorgio Giraudi and Mariastella
Righettini write, it signifies
“the transition from institutional systems of government, prevalently
founded on institutions of representation (parties and parliaments) and
orientated to the centrality of the functions of inputs, to systems of
government orientated to the re-evaluation of modalities of action more
oriented to efficacy and to the efficacy of outputs”.8
It is a process that, delegating the major part of the processes of policy
making to non-representative institutions, tries to respond to the problem of
the exacerbation of the temporal and programmatical gap between the cycle of
policy and the political-electoral cycle. Governance can now be interpreted as
the most recent moment in a attempt at political rationalisation of a procedural
and goal-oriented nature. Its dispositifs aim to contain the conflicts produced
by the processes of globalisation and of internationalisation, setting networks
of actors to work in order to preserve the equilibria of politics and of the
market that rule the contemporary liberal democracies, and to circumscribe
and nourish the role, still central, of the authority of government.
9
This taking of distance from the model of the vertical exercise of
government is perhaps one of the characterising elements of contemporary
8 G. Giraudi, M.S. Righettini, Le autorità amministrative indipendenti. Dalla democrazia
della rappresentanza alla democrazia dell’efficienza, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2002, p.202. See
also: E.L. Rabin, Federal Regulation in Historical Perspective, “Stanford Law Review”, vol.
XXXVIII, pp.1186 ss; M. Gentot, Les autorites administratives indépendent , Paris, PUF,
1991.9On the significance of the term “dispositif”, beginning from Foucault’s usage, see the volume
edited by G. Jaquinot-Delaunay and L. Monnoyer, Le dispositif. Entre usage et concept ,
“Hermès”, n.25, 1999. See also: G. Deleuze, What is a dispositif ? In Michel Foucault
Philosopher , edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 159-168; G.Agamben Che cos’è un dispositivo, Roma, Nottetempo, 2006.
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reflections on governance. Additionally, it seems to be precisely that ‘phobia
of the State’, which according to Michel Foucault was indicative of a crisis of
the system of liberal governmentality that could be referred to the increase of
the economic cost of the exercise of freedom.10
The foucauldian thesis is
particularly important precisely because it ties the crisis of the form of liberalgovernment to the contextual promotion of freedom, on the one hand, and
links mechanisms of security to the goal of stabilising a specific modality of
governing the population, on the other. Considering it in this interpretative
frame, governance could be understood as an expression of a market-oriented
governmentality; by means of security policies, it is exercised on populations
and on intermediate nuclei of organisation of collective life, prevalently
operating on interests and on the deployment of knowledge. Nevertheless, in
this frame we would still need to understand the relation between this specific
type of governmentality and a State that would not be other than ‘a vicissitude
of government’, the ‘correlate’ of a certain way of governing.11
Thus, similar to the different disciplinary contexts in which it is used,there are also different models of governance thematised on the level of
international politics. Among these, one of the most significant is expressed
by the report On Our Global Neighborhood , written by the Commission of
Global Governance of the UN. In this document we find side by side and
intertwined two levels of analysis competing within an extremely broad and
articulated definition of the term. It is used both in order to understand an
ensemble of processes of a cooperative type aiming at attaining objectives
shared by diverse actors, and also in order to describe a modality of relation
between institutions (public and/or private, formally or informally
constituted), which is able to produce compliance and to animate efficientorganisational and decisional structures. Governance, therefore, as a complex
of processes and of structures that would represent:
“the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and
private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through
which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-
operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and
regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal
arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or
perceive to be in their interest”.12
It is thus defined, at the same time, as: a) a system of formal and
informal institutions aiming at the definition and at the conduct of shared
politics on questions of ‘common interest’; b) a complex of ‘processes’
intended to allow the agreement between the parts on the basis of a horizontal
negotiation. The objective is that of delineating global networks of actors and
processes capable of operating autonomously from the more usual politics
10 M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979,
London, Palgrave, 2008.11 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France, 1977-
1978, London, Palgrave, 2007.12 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighborhood , Oxford, OUP, 1995, p.5.
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between States. In other words, we find in governance a series of dispositifs
able to intervene positively in an ample spectrum of conflictual situations that
remain irresolvable – or which can appear to be resolvable only with difficulty
– by means of interstatal relations alone. In such a way, it tends to favour the
realisation of shared politics without having recourse to the political-administrative frame of the statal bureaucracies or to the normative frame of
multiple juridical-political systems.
Today, the definition of governance proposed by this report is that which
is generally accepted and used in the international political debate, even if,
rather than prescribing a specific model of relation between different actors on
the global stage, it seems to describe those processes for which, from the end
of the Second World War, a growing number of institutions and organisations
has assumed an important role on a global scale, in order to confront global
emergencies (from the management of natural resources or international trade
to climate change), as well as in order to respond globally to local
emergencies (from humanitarian emergencies to environmental disasters).Precisely due to this, it is thus particularly significant that in a different report
of the UN in 2002, the Human Development Report – Deepening Democracy
in a Fragmented World ,13
good governance is described in completely
different terms as an ensemble of “institutions, rules and political processes”
that can be defined as democratic when it offers “a system with
institutionalised procedures for open and competitive political participation,
competitively elected chief executives and substantial limits on the powers of
the chief executives”.14
In such a way, it was possible to promote a
“participation through democratic governance”, which appears still to be
strongly linked to modules of representative government.15
In this document,the field of application of governance is restricted to the statal and institutional
level. There is thus configured with this expression a typically prescriptive
dimension that tends to affirm the political system that is prevalent on the
global level: the democratic-representative system. In this case, good
governance is nothing other than the exercise of a transparent representative
government, responsive and accountable according to the typical procedures
of democratic government.
These different meanings of governance that emerge from the
documents of the UN, rather than signalling the indecision and the
incoherence of the think-tanks of this organism, express the complex and
ambiguous relation that seems to be instituted between governance and State,and between governance and democratic government. In order better to
understand this relation, it is useful to investigate the contemporary debate
13 UNDP, Human Development Report – Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World ,
New York – Oxford, OUP, 2002. The Human Development Reports are annual reports written
by the UNDP. Their publication began in 1990, “with the single goal of putting people back at
the center of the development process in terms of economic debate, policy and advocacy. The
goal was both massive and simple, with far-ranging implications – going beyond income to
assess the level of people’s long-term well being. Bringing about development of the people,
by the people, and for the people, and emphasizing that the goals of development are choices
and freedoms”, http://hdr.undp.org/aboutus 14
UNDP, Human Development Report – Deepening Democracy, p.36.15 Ibid., p.53.
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promoted within the UN on security governance. This puts the problem of a
‘non-statal’ government of populations at the centre of the reform efforts of
the international organisations, which is realised by means of policies of
territorial state-building and market building, and by means of policies of
support for transnational networks of collective actors and regulative powers.In this sense, security governance seems to activate two types of processes:
the first can be referred to policies of construction and reinforcement of statal
institutions; the second aims to promote both productive and pro-social
relations, and also a system of exchange that can favour the birth of an
efficient and competitive market. In the open scenes of this emerging
planetary security governance, the themes of development and of democracy
now constitute the fulcrum points around which there are attempts to create
‘shared’ global policies, which are articulated in a plurality of dispositifs of
security. On these themes, the series of programmatic documents written in
the last decade by the agencies of the UN operating in the field of global
security are important. They are important not so much because they delineatea picture of affirmed and realised policies, which remains a long way off, but
due to the modalities with which they indicate and develop some important
themes, and because of the solutions that they delineate for some of the
difficulties found in international politics. More than about policies, this is
now an investigation about the ‘discourses’ of global security. This
investigation emerges from the conviction that governance now constitutes a
category/instrument that is useful for comprehending today – that is, for
interpreting, rather than describing, the concrete developments of
contemporary politics.16
Human security governance and security sector reform
It is only recently that governance has been applied to the field of
security. This has been due to an important change that occurred in the
approach to the theme of security by the international organisms such as the
UN, the OECD, the World Bank and some of the States the compose the G8
and the security council of the UN. From being a category articulated
prevalently around the necessities of self-preservation of the State, security
today is interpreted in a broader sense as human security. The reasons for this
transformation are multiple. The permanent conflictuality of the so-called cold
war, whose strongly ideological traits characterised the multiplication ofinternal wars in the context of a relatively stable international order, has been
substituted by an incoherent and multiform intertwining of wars between
States, international police operations, preventative aggressions, humanitarian
crises, terrorisms and national and global resistances. The military equilibrium
between the super powers, which even gave some form and a direction to the
dispersed instances of conflict in the world, has fallen, thus liberating
16 A different approach (though in my opinion a complementary one) to that which is used in
this study follows the opposite path, beginning from the analysis of concrete practices in order
to track down their discourses and logics. An excellent example is offered by the volume of
Serena Marcenò, Le Tecnologie Politiche dell’Acqua. Governance e Conflitti in Palestina,Milano, Mimesis, 2005.
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energises and tensions to which it appears to be difficult today to give a single
meaning. Thus, if security was understood and practiced as national security
and defined in military terms during the cold war, the proliferation in the last
two decades of threats, emergencies and risks as well as the interpretation in
terms of security given to questions traditionally external to the spectre ofdefence, have promoted the progressive amplification of the concept. As
Heiner Hänggi has argued:
“it was increasingly noted that security might be endangered by more
than military threats alone, which led to the inclusion of political,
economic, societal and environmental aspects”; “there is a growing
recognition that in the age of globalization, and with the proliferation of
internal wars and ‘failed states’, individual and collectives other than the
state could, and indeed should, be the object of security”.17
This process has developed in parallel into a double transformation inthe approach to the theme of security. In the first place, there was the
elaboration of a new politics of security, described as security sector reform,
which has put in discussion both the strictly statal defensive interpretation of
security and also the centrality attributed to the public-statal actors,
particularly the army and the police. If both the statal institutions as well as
those structures whose primary function is to protect society have traditionally
been ascribed to the level of security, the expression security sector instead
attempted to expand its goals and methods from the usual military
environment to include public security and individual security from crime,
disorder and violence. The new security agenda has therefore stimulated thereconsideration of civil-military relations, with the goal of promoting a
definition of the security sector that can superannuate the mere subordination
of the armed forces to regularly ‘elected’ civil leaders, as was stabilised by the
Copenhagen Document on the Human Dimension (1990).18
The objectives of
this document were both the improvement of the efficacy of interventions to
guarantee the security of States, and the enlargement of spaces for the
democratic control of the diverse institutions connected to the promotion of
security. The launch in 2000 by the secretary general of the UN Kofi Annan
of the Global Compact Initiative affirmed, instead, the principle according to
which peace and international security were placed in more danger from intra-
statal conflicts than by conflicts between States. The weakness and thepotential collapse of the State constituted, therefore, dangers for regional and
global security greater than those represented by States endowed with an
excessive military power. The same campaign also emphasised how an entire
series of non-statal actors were now able to put at risk the security and good
governance of States, and noted that the victims of the conflicts that have
17 H. Hänggi, Making Sense of Security Sector Governance, p.6, in Challenges of Security
Sector Governance, edited by H. Hänggi and T. H. Winkler, DCAF & LIT Verlag, 2003, pp.
3-23.18 And therefore by the successive Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
(CSCE) held in the same year, and finally by the Moscow Document on the Human Dimension (1991).
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occurred in the post cold war period have been constituted almost solely by
civilians. Precisely in order to offer a response to these dramatic claims, the
necessity of a collective security no longer focused on the security of States
was proposed, a collective security that would be able to include a safety net
for individuals, for their rights and for their potentialities of development.According to the indications given by the secretary general of the UN in
the important document written in 2001 by the Development Assistance
Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), entitled DAC Guidelines: Helping Prevent Violent
Conflict , security is defined as
“an all-encompassing condition in which people and communities live in
freedom, peace and safety, participate fully in the governance of their
countries, enjoy the protection of fundamental rights, have access to
resources and the basic necessities of life, and inhabit an environment
which is not detrimental to their health and well-being. The security ofpeople and the security of states are mutually reinforcing. A wide range
of state institutions and other entities may be responsible for ensuring
some aspect of security”.19
On this basis, there was thus the need to begin a security system reform,
understood as the affirmation of a
“‘security system’ – which includes all the actors, their roles,
responsibilities and actions – working together to manage and operate
the system in a manner that is more consistent with democratic normsand sound principles of good governance, and thus contributes to a well-
functioning security framework”.20
Security system reform has represented an important turning point in the
codification of security and of the role that statal institutions must play in
order to guarantee it. However, it assumed an even broader meaning when the
UN itself promoted it as a key component of the broader “human security”
agenda begun in its programme of development (UNDP).21
The second transformation has been due precisely to the assumption of
new considerations on the theme of security by the United Nations, beginning
in the early 1990s. This has resulted in the expression human security. Theseconsiderations have expanded the range of activities of security to include
themes of the guarantee of political and economic liberties, economic and
civil development, individual and collective protection from political, ethnic
and religious oppressions, from criminality and corruption, from poverty,
illiteracy and disease as well as from natural calamities. The first current
definition of the term appears in the Human Development Report of 1994.
19 OECD-DAC, The DAC Guidelines: Helping Prevent Violent Conflict , Paris, OECD
Publishing, 2001, p.38.20 Ibid.21
OECD-DAC, Security System Reform and Governance, Paris, OECD Publishing, 2005,p.11.
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The observation that
“the concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly as
security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national
interests in foreign policy or as a global security threat of nuclearholocaust… Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people
who sought security in their daily lives”,22
is followed by the affirmation according to which
“human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first,
safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And
second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the
patterns of daily life – whether in homes, in jobs or in communities”.23
The initial definition thus referred security to a twofold freedom:freedom from fear and freedom from want. It listed seven specific elements
that composed human security: 1. economic security, understood as absence
of poverty; 2. food security, understod as absence of hunger and malnutrition;
3. medical security, understood as access to medical care; 4. environmental
security, understood as absence of pollution and access to environmental
resources; 5. personal security, understood as absence of threats to the person
and to property of goods; 6. security of community, understood as the
protection of the existence of groups and cultures and of their conservation; 7.
political security, understood as enjoyment of civil and political rights. This
vision was strongly contested due to its excessive extension of factors relevantto a notion of security understood, at least on the international level, in more
limited terms. At the same time, it was also criticised for having offered a
merely negative definition of security. In order to respond to this second
objection, a different definition of diversity was proposed in 2000. Between
2000 and 2003, the concept has been articulated both within the notion of a
‘responsibility to protect’, promoted as a central category for the international
policies of the Canadian International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (ICISS), and also within the different proposal of a notion of
‘responsibility for development’, promoted by the Commission on Human
Security (CHS), strongly promoted by Japan and by its then minister Keizo
Obuki.
24
The document Human Security Now of 2003, written by thiscommission and taken up by the UN, took into account and integrated both the
proposals. It affirmed that human security “is concerned with safeguarding
and expanding people’s vital freedoms. It requires both shielding people from
acute threats and empowering people to take charge of their own lives”.25
In
22 UNDP, Human Development Report , New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 22.
23 Ibid.24 On these developments, see: R. Paris, Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air ,
“International Security”, vol. 26, n.2, 2001, pp.87-102; G. King and C.J.L. Murray,
Rethinking Human Security, ‘Political Science Quarterly’, vol.116, n.4, 2001-2002, pp. 585-
610; D. Henk, Human Security: Relevance and Implications, ‘Parameters’, vol. XXV,
summer 2005, pp. 91-106.25 CHS, Human Security Now, New York & London, Grundy & Northledge, 2003, p. iv.
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the more recent document Security System Reform and Governance,26
written
in 2005 by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, arguments
for adhesion to this new definition of the term security are located in the
attempt to make it valid as an operative context within which the interventions
of governments and international institutions in contexts of crisis can bepromoted and directed. In this document, security is connected “to personal
and State safety, access to social services and political processes. It is a core
government responsibility, necessary for economic and social development
and vital for the protection of human rights”.27
Nevertheless, as security sector
reforms is still strongly concentrated on the use of public resources for the
guaranteeing of security of citizens, it cannot but confirm the centrality of
statal institutions connected to such a function.28
In fact, the lines of
intervention stabilised by the OECD, although establishing the necessity of
States’ favouring the realisation of ‘extensive’ and structured policies of
security in a system of policies that are not derivable solely from defence,
intelligence and policing, affirm that
“the overall objective of security system reform is to create a secure
environment that is conducive to development, poverty reduction and
democracy. This secure environment rests upon two essential pillars: i)
the ability of the state, through its development policy and programmes,
to generate conditions that mitigate the vulnerabilities to which its
people are exposed; and ii) the ability of the state to use the range of
policy instruments at its disposal to prevent or address security threats
that affect society’s well-being.29
The centre of reform policies for the security sector therefore remains
the State. Thanks to the support of many actors, that State must be made
capable of utilising its own political and institutional resources in order to
guarantee the affirmation of complex understanding of security. The goal is
now to promote a notion of security that is no longer centred on the
recognition of external and internal enemies, but that occurs within a whole
government approach, whose objectives are “[to] foster interministerial
dialogue, implement institutional change, and mainstream security as a public
policy and governance issue”.30
The construction of this ‘secure environment’, and its positioning
alongside different institutions that compose the State and government andthat seem to play a prevalent role here, however, requires the participation of
26 Two important previous documents that anticipated the themes were: DAC, Helping
Prevent Violent Conflict (2001) and DAC, Poverty Reductions (2001). Also important is the
document Security issues and development co-operation: a conceptual framework for
enhancing policy coherence, in Conflict Prevention and Development Co-operation Papers,
vol. 2, n.3, 2001, pp. 33-71.27 OECD-DAC, Security System Reform and Governance, op cit., p.11.28
Although it was precisely beginning with it that there began the discussion around the
themes of the ‘privatisation’ of security and of developments inherent to the market of private
security.29
OECD-DAC, Security System Reform and Governance, op cit. p.16, italics mine.30 Ibid., p. 12.
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different actors. Civil society, adequately supported by international
programmes of cooperation and development, must, in fact, create and diffuse
“a pro-reform environment for democratic governance”.31
The construction of
a democratic environment is held to be the result both of the promotion of
security, and of an economically productive and competitive space. Itconstitutes, therefore, one of the elements by means of which a virtuous circle
between security and development should be activated. Development,
however, seems to be articulated still, and prevalently, on a national and
territorial basis.
The report Human Security Now, however, had already clarified how
the reform of sectors connected to security was an integral part, but not
exhaustive, of a more complex human security. The security policies of States
and of international organisms therefore had to be supplemented by policies
centred on the development of people and populations. Furthermore, the
network of powers that has to support and promote these policies does not
have a determinate territorial basis; on the contrary, it exists in the intersticesof this rupture between States and the national and territorial dimension that
constitutes one of the characteristics of what we call global governance. This
network is plural and global, because it is constituted by governments, by
different institutions that operate on the global, regional or local level, by
differentiated realities that are supposed to compose national and international
‘civil societies’. This situation prompted Roland Paris to say that
“the idea of human security is the glue that holds together a jumbled
coalition of ‘middle power’ states, development agencies, and NGOs –
all of which seek to shift attention and resources away fromconventional security issues and toward goals that have traditionally
fallen under the rubric of international development”.32
Certainly, if “security and development are increasingly seen as being
inextricably linked”, it thus becomes necessary “to mainstream security as a
public policy and governance issue”.33
And it is precisely due to this that the
report Human Security Now emphasises the complementarity between human
security and security of the State. In particular, it emphasises the necessity of
favouring the care of individuals and of communities in a context that does
not contemplate in an exclusive fashion threats comprehended as dangers for
security: “achieving human security includes not just protecting people butalso empowering people to fend for themselves”.34
For such an end, “the
range of actors is expanded beyond the State alone”.35
The security of the
State is no longer, therefore, the objective of security. Rather, it constitutes
merely an instrument, albeit necessary, which a security system needs to
assure in order to guarantee the promotion of democratic freedoms and the
development of a competitive market.
31 Ibid., p. 16.
32 R. Paris, Human Security, p.88.33 OECD-DAC, Security System Reform and Governance, p.16. 34
HSC, Human Security Now, New York, 2003, p. 4.35 Ibid., p. 52
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All these documents thus allow us to observe the twofold relation that
is instituted between security policies and interstatal politics, on the one hand,
and between security and development, on the other hand. In the context of
the new security agenda, the notions of security and of development are thus
shown to be interdependent. Security is no longer linked in exclusive terms tothe level of statal defence of its own order or the level of the security of the
population faced by pressing and imminent threats. It is instead linked to
processes of growth and of economic-social development that, while based on
policies of promotion and of individual and collective defence from
immediate threats, contribute to the strengthening of the State and the care of
populations understood as aggregations of individuals. Security thus becomes
human security.
Security governance therefore includes in a single nexus two different
declinations:
a) the first, which we can call ‘security-conservation’, includes themost common reflection on the defence of the State and of the
nation from the external and internal enemy. As we will see, a
particular tension is also assumed in this case, a tension that is
relative to the strengthening of the statal institutions by means of
processes of international governance (of help and support) and of
State building.
b) the second can be defined as ‘security-development’. This is the
security related to intervention on populations, on their productive
and self-reproductive capabilities. It is the more complex humansecurity that, theorised by the UN, explicitly underwrites the
proposals of global security governance. It prefigures, alongside
processes of State building, paths of market building and of
“activation” of a potent civil society.
The first includes both that range of instruments at the disposition of
the State – the ordinary and extraordinary constitutional provisions, the army,
intelligence services – that aim to guarantee the conservation of the political
order faced by pressing threats, and also the processes of institutional,
bureaucratic and administrative construction that tend to configure a stable,
efficient and democratic statal architecture. The second and perhaps moreimportant declination, on the other hand, includes those dispositifs that aim to
promote a certain economic and social development, in such a way as to
constitute not so much the objective of processes of political and institutional
stabilisation, as in the past, as, instead, their precondition. This twofold
strategy of security is not prevalently concerned, therefore, with States and
borders, but with populations and individuals according to a project of
strengthening and development centred on a democratic political model.
However, this strategy cannot and does not want to reduce the State as an
instrument of order and of containment of conflicts and of populations. In
substance, the strengthening of the State and of its institutions is always
possible by means of the promotion of well being and of the development of
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its population; but this means that, simultaneously, the situations in which a
State does not exist or, though existing formally, is not able to guarantee any
security, become more complex. In these cases, the model activated by human
security presupposes that it is the market, free exchange of interests and the
flowing together of more complex relations that can be referred to aninternational and global civil society. These are to be constituted as the
preconditions and the instruments of efficacious State building. It thus offers
the political legitimacy and consensus that weak or failed institutions lack.
Furthermore, the States to which this security governance prevalently refers
are failing or transitional states: weak political and institutional organisations,
often organised exclusively around the repressive potential of the army and
around the redistribution of external aid. In reality, recent reflections on
security governance derives from the failure of traditional policies of peace
building, and from the evident limits of programmes of peace enforcing. The
construction of a stable statal-territorial organisation remains a cardinal
element of security policies. However, it is the networks of regulative powerand of international organisms that have to promote the construction of a
market and of an economy of development and, by means of this, to favour
civil society and to give form to the political legitimacy that are necessary for
the construction of a firm statal authority. In other words, only the correct
functioning of the market and of the autonomous flows of international civil
society can offer political legitimacy to processes (often diversely intended) of
statal and territorial construction and stabilisation.
Populations, migrations, development
Security governance, as it appears in these documents, shapes a
complex of policies that intervene on the most diverse aspects of human life.
These policies find application on local, regional, and global levels by
intervening on people and on populations. Certainly, themes such as control
and administration of birthrates and mortality, the proliferation of conflicts
and wars, of struggles against epidemics, famine, new diseases, poverty and
scarcity of resources, posit the exercise of a specific governmentality at the
centre of these policies. This governmentality has as its object not only the
States, nor simply individuals, but populations, although the individual
remains the social unit of reference. The individual appears as the holder of
rights and is put at the basis of processes of construction of the democratic-representative political architecture. These processes are declined as
procedures of empowerment.
Yet when security intervenes as a guarantee of safety or of
development, it intervenes upon groups and populations on the basis of a
profoundly different logic of government. This logic affects population as an
‘aggregate body’, as a united set of processes and phenomena that can be
made objective. In this context, the territorial dimension shows its importance
as a principle of separation and spatial division that is necessary for the
localisation of security interventions. Indeed, processes of State building and
market building that underlie policies of global security governance can end
well only if they are able to offer paths of stabilisation and territorial
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localisation. It is possible to construct the object “population”, which is then
intervened upon by means of dispositifs of multiple security, only within well
defined territorial frameworks, even if potentially permeable.
Once again, the existence of an indissoluble relation between State and
territory is no longer the precondition for the existence of sovereign politicalorder. On the contrary, it is the construction of a sovereign order that becomes
the objective of policies that are ordered on a territorial basis and that aim at
the construction of State institutions and of a productive and mercantile space.
In this sense, control and management of migrations, the containment of
phenomena like movement and de-localisation of populations due to
environmental or military crises, probably represent the principal testing
ground of these policies, as they lie at the crossroad of all these problems.36
Discourses around security, when they are applied to these phenomena, are
perhaps those that help us to understand in greater detail the logic of
government of populations that underlies contemporary reflections on global
governance and the role that they attribute to the State.The logic of governing the phenomenon of migration follows the lines
of promoting foreseeable and ordered movements through concerted and
multilateral policies of global governance of migrations: “Multilateral
approaches are essential for promoting orderly and predictable movements of
people. Needed is an international migration framework of norms, processes
and institutional arrangements to ensure such order and predictability”.37
Order and predictability are, in these cases, verifiable objectives only on the
basis of the efficacy of territorial intervention of implemented policies. These
policies certainly exist due to the contribution of several actors, but they still
see a central role attributed to statal authorities. It is precisely the necessity ofcontrol and territorial management of phenomena, fluid in their own nature,
which pushes towards concerted policies and toward the strengthening of
territorial divisions. This is because “to identify and implement solutions to
displacement situations […] through voluntary repatriation, resettlement or
integration into host communities”,38
implies an effort by the international
community to reinforce territorial control and government of populations,
exercised by State institutions with the support of supranational actors and
policies.
In this sense, the change that has occurred in the last decades regarding
support policies for refugees is significant. While refugees were previously
“taken care of” by welcoming policies that were centrally organised on thebasis of an individual right to find refuge in the host country – a policy with a
juridical ‘matrix’, which is focused upon the individual as the bearer of
inalienable rights – the refugee is today “taken care of” by security policies
that provide assistance and support to repatriation, but also forced
mobilisation.39
These policies are supported by humanitarian intervention
which is offered by the networks of organisations and international agencies
36 D. Graham (ed.), Migration, Globalisation and Human Security, London, Routledge, 1999.
37 HSC, Human Security Now, p. 52.38 Ibid.39
On this theme, see: H. Adelman, From Refugees to Forced Migration: the UNHCR and Human Security, ‘International Migration Review’, vol.35, n.1, 2001, pp.7-32.
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and that are implemented by resorting – when necessary – to the usage of
force by States. The comments of Nevzat Soguk seem to be important in this
context. He has stressed how the conventional discourse on the refugee
constitutes, in reality, a narrative procedure
“on human displacement and estrangement, that seems more strange
than conventional. It is a strange discourse, for it has no place for
displaced humans, and no place for the refugee and the refugee’s
voice”.40
This narrative is configured as a discourse about the State, which aims to
reinforce the State and its territorial dimension:
“Conventional refugee discourse is instrumental in statecraft. […] the
refugee discourse, articulating a specific historical image of the refugee,
serves as a boundary-producing discourse instrumental in the expression,empowerment and institutionalization of a territorialized figure of
citizen-subject, the presumed foundational subject on the basis of which
the sovereign state has been articulated historically. Refugee discourse
is, in other words, a statist discourse, anchored primarily in statism”.41
In this sense, the State is confirmed both as the holder of a monopoly of
the usage of legitimate force and as the holder of a monopoly upon the
legitimate circulation of commodities and people.42
However, at least in the
latter case, regulation of processes and the management of fallouts produced
by this regulation have to be undertaken by international security ‘agents’. Inthis light, the pronouncement of the High Commission of the United Nations
for refugees in its Hague Program of 2004 is significant.43
It maintained “an
increasing externalisation of tools and measures of control of migrations, even
of those aiming to make policies of repatriation more effective”.44
Instead of
structuring interventions on the basis of individual rights, the eventual
attribution of which remains among the competences of territorial
sovereignties, security governance tries to define a migration framework
within which these moves can be played out and their containment and
protection can be offered. Certainly, this framework will be able to work only
by means of States and beyond them, as the irreducible dimension to the
territorial division of migrations and movements of peoples makes de-territorialised policies necessary, alongside strongly territorialising policies.
Without a clear territorial dimension, it appears to be difficult to build a
system capable of individuating in time the risks that are linked to these
phenomena and to operate in order to restrain situations of worse
40 N. Soguk, Refugees and Statecraft , ‘International Politics’, vol. 35, 1998, pp.447-468, cit.
p.448.41 Ibid., p.449.42
J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State,
Cambridge, CUP, 2000.43 Presidency conclusions, 4-5th November 2004 – 14292/04 Annex I.44
E. Rigo, Pratiche di cittadinanza e governo della circolazione nello spazio europeo, op cit.p.291, in Biopolitica e democrazia, edited by A. Vinale, pp.279-296.
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disadvantage:
“The security risks arising during large-scale forced population
movements need to be acknowledged and better understood […] Given
the permeability of borders and the ease of travel, efforts to strengthenthe refugee regime and establish and international migration framework
need to be accompanied by improvements in the protection of the
internally displaced persons”.45
Security governance, therefore, is exercised by attempting to prevent, to
anticipate and to govern the crisis in consideration of the ineliminable facts
that are offered by migration impulses, by the fallibility of policies of
repression or mere containment of migrations. As Enrica Rigo points out,
“to govern circulation means to govern the predictability of an event that
can occur or not. The calculation of an aleatory factor which isexpressed by the notion of luck (chance?) […] that politics and law
make when they assume as their object no longer human nature but the
population. Substantially, it is the government of security, understood
not only in the private-security sense”.46
In this context, development and economic promotion policies assume a
prevalent and determinant role, in a double sense: on the one hand, the
construction of a competitive market promotes wealth and economic
development, thus slowing down the most dramatic reasons for the
movements of populations and favouring a migration that is linked to
aspirations instead of necessities. On the other hand, promoting regulated and
ordered movements “reinforces the interdependence of countries and
communities and enhances diversity. It facilitates the transfer of skills and
knowledge. It stimulates economic growth and development”.47
It is the first of these two observations that receives more attention in
Human Security Now. The link between development and migrations is
certainly complex: if natural fluctuations of markets and the unavoidable
phases of economic crisis can push people to emigrate, it is also true that most
of the movements that are directed towards the richest countries come from
middle-income countries. This occurs because
“research also shows that poverty reduction strategies may contribute to
increased movements of people in the short and medium terms because
people have access more to the money, information and networks that
are essential for moving from one country to another”.48
Certainly, migratory policies are closely linked both to demographic
dimensions and to dimensions of control of resources (human and
45 HSC, Human Security, p.52.46 E. Rigo, Pratiche di cittadinanza, p.295.47
HSC, Human Security, p. 41.48 Ibid., p. 44.
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environmental) as well as to dimensions of the economy and the market.
Franck Düvell emphasises how the current policies are articulated beginning
from needs of the labour market and how they compose a global regime of
government of ‘hybrid’ migrations, in which States, post-national formations
and new global actors such as the International Organisation for Migration orthe multiple NGOs that intervene on this theme compete.
49
In the section of Human Security Now entitled Economic security - the
power to choose among opportunities, as well as in the document A
Development Co-operation Lens on Terrorism Prevention, the link between
security and development is also evoked in order to respond to the fears
provoked by an international terrorism that is favoured by these movements of
people and populations. Migration data, and in more general terms,
movements of populations and people, assume a very particular importance
within the framework of security policies. This occurs because these
movements, more than other phenomena, reveal the conditions of deep
insecurity that characterise the condition of the planet. It is possible to addressthis condition only by defining ‘structural’ and long-term policies. For this
reason, in both the documents, the necessity of programmes that structure the
relation between governments, donors and all those actors who are involved in
the processes of prevention of conflicts and of support for development are
strongly stressed. At the same time, the necessity of strengthening governance
by means of policies that encourage the correct development of difficult areas
is re-emphasised. In other words, “the key issue is how to establish a
democratic political order, buttressed by social and economic growth”.50
The governmental logic that gives shape to the specific practices of
government of security governance is thus the expression of the efforts ofredefinition of the relations between State and government. It is, therefore, a
definition that occurs on the basis of specific mechanisms of security, which
operate as agents of economic development in the forms of a genuine
governance of populations. In this sense, what Michel Foucault wrote during
his course in 1978 on biopolitics seems to be confirmed: namely, that what
was at stake specifically in the liberalism that developed from the 1930s until
now is how to regulate the global exercise of political power on the principles
of a market economy”. Security governance shows how the global exercise of
a certain type of political power is based upon principles of regulation of the
economic system. In this sense, today a new and very particular intertwining
between macro- and micro- economic paradigms would seem to confirm thefoucauldian thesis of a liberal system that gives birth to an economic and
social regime in which the enterprise is not simply an institution, but a way of
acting in the economic and social field. According to Foucault in this society,
the more the law allows individuals the possibility of acting as they want in
the form of free enterprise, the more there are developed in society multiple
49 F. Düvell, La Globalizazzione del controllo delle migrazioni, in I confini delle liberta. Per
un’analisi politica delle migrazioni contemporanee, edited by S. Mezzadra, Roma,
DeriveApprodi, 2004, pp.23-50. Of the same author see also: Europäische und internationale
Migration. Theorie, Empirie, Geschichte. Münster, Lit, 2006; and F. Düvell and B. Jordan
Migration: Boundaries of Equality and Justice, Cambridge: Polity, 2003.50 HSC, Human Security Now, pp. 67-68; italics mine.
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forms and peculiar dynamics of securing and strengthening the unity of the
‘enterprise’ by way of security policies.
The intertwining between micro- and macro- economics seems, indeed,
to function as a principle of regulation of the liberal economy of power and as
a logic of the exercise of those powers that compose it. Micro-economicsintervenes by offering those first principles on the basis of which rules and
normative prescriptions are defined. In an axiomatic way, these rules and
prescriptions have to lead the rational behaviour of individuals. In this way,
the aim is to reconstruct their strategic interactions and to define the lines of
optimisation of choices and preferences. The different theories of rational
choice and the modelling produced by game theory are the most well known
expressions of these theories. Macro-economics, even though it is based
mostly on the same assumptions that regulate micro-economics, is instead
concerned with the economy at an aggregate level and with the effects of
general equilibrium that behaviours and economic processes produce at a
global level. Micro-economic logic works as a ‘matrix’ on which specificprocesses of individualisation are grafted and on which they take form. These
processes constitute the grid of intelligibility and the rational core of projects
of reorganisation of the welfare state and of the reordering of the labour
market that mark neo-liberal contemporaneity. Micro-economics, therefore,
structures the ‘internal’, rational limit for the game of competition and the
procedures of its regulation. On the other hand, macro-economics gives form
to the ‘external’ limit of competitive dynamics, by structuring and describing
the environment within which processes of economic globalisation and
internationalisation have to assume a dynamic but stabilised and systemic
structure. This happens, in particular, through the models described byinternationalist macro-economics, those that emerge from the different trade
theories (established micro-economically) and the complex systems of
analysis of price-equilibrium (asset pricing).
Moreover, economic theory in the last decades has extensively scaled
down the idea that in the formalisation of models, individual preferences as
well as the technological and institutional framework in which these
preferences worked, could be taken for granted. Moreover, the idea that
economic agents are fully rational, self-interested and endowed with
potentially unlimited capacities of calculation and attention has been
reconsidered. Thanks to the reflections of Nobel Prize winners like Herbert
Simon and Daniel Kahneman (although the process has much more distantroots), the study of cognitive limitations in decisional processes as an
unavoidable component of micro-economic theory has been completely
affirmed in economics. A theoretical framework has emerged that poses the
problem of preferences in close connection with the problem of ‘social’
mechanisms of transformation and composition of these preferences. This
framework has transformed the traditional micro-economic models into ‘auto-
poietic’ models in which even the choices act upon preferences. As Pierluigi
Sacco and Stefano Zamagni argue, “the process of social selection becomes,
in a certain sense, the true fundamental level of description of economic
phenomenology”, and thus,
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“insofar as pro-sociality can conquer a socially salient position, the
object of economic policy is no longer simply that of arranging
incentives that push self-interested agents to choose in a coherent way
with the goals fixed by the policy maker. The object of economic policy,
instead, becomes also that of creating the conditions for a growth and fora strengthening of pro-sociality and for its intelligent usage for the
prosecution of social welfare”.51
Governance, particularly in its security declination, represents an effort
of activation of pro-social behaviours. It is in the attempt of building a
complex of inter-individual and collective pro-social relations that we find the
profound reason for the emergence of a security governance that aims to
structure a new relation between the State and non-state actors, although
within the limits that are imposed by the equilibrium between economic
development, security dispositifs and representative democracy. Economic
development of the market and democratic political order thus composesystems of verification, the principles on the basis of which the results that
have been reached by policies of security governance can be verified.
Therefore, security, development and population are perhaps the terms that
more than others mark how the processes of transformation of current liberal
governmentality express a ‘critical’ moment of acceleration and systemic
change. On the one hand, there is the will to see the political democratic
model affirmed on a global scale; on the other hand, there is the attempt to
support this model by means of policies of governance that empty the
representative dimension and reduce the space of the exercise of government.
In similar terms, there is therefore the attempt to favour autonomousdevelopments of a competitive market through regulative policies that,
however, have to be supported by dispositifs of security because the
conservation and the increase, on a global level, of prevalent power structures
need the enlargement of the liberal political space and of the market.
These policies use governance as well as wars by intervening on
populations and individuals, also by means of statal units. In this framework,
the democratic political system is certainly ‘the’ political model of reference,
even if it has been transformed from a representative system centred upon
government into a more complex and ambiguous mixed system of
government/governance. In such a system, the weakness of State institutions
is compensated for with transnational networks of support, processes ofpolitical or economic delocalisation, or of re-allocation on a macro-regional or
global scale of instances of decision. The State, therefore, maintains a role – a
function – that is central and unavoidable today. It remains, on the global
level, the “unit of measurement” of spaces needed to guarantee those
territorial divisions from which the organisation, prediction, intervention upon
movements (of men or commodities) and management of flows begins. The
supply of strength that is proper to States works, like the Hobbesian sovereign,
to confirm and guarantee the ‘pacts’. Individuals and populations are the
51 P. Sacco and S. Zamagni, Introduzione. Qualcosa è cambiato e molto ancora si profila
all’orizzonte, p.10, in P.Sacco e S. Zamagni (eds), Teoria Economica e Relazioni Interpersonali, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006.
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objects of new governmental practices that are exercised on a local and global
scale, which, although they transcend the State, exploit its sovereign
dimension in order to guarantee the continuity of those processes of political
individualisation that we call citizenship. This citizenship is described by
Human Security Now in the following terms: “a person’s membership in aparticular state, is at the centre of democratic governance. It determines
whether a person has the right to take part in decisions, voice opinions and
benefits from the protection and rights granted by the state”.52
Thus, it is not an accident that global security governance is proposed
precisely by starting from the contexts in which the cores of state-political
power are weaker but where the possibility of building a political-state order,
on the basis of market and civil society principles, is greater. In these places,
development founded on the construction of concurrential and competitive
open markets is found alongside diversified instruments of security that
embrace the level of construction or of the strengthening of the existing
political order and state system – that are necessary for the government ofpopulations – as well as the broader level of the construction of a social,
plural, competitive, democratic organisation by means of specific processes of
individualisation. Security governance is presented as the declination of a
governmental rationality, at the centre of which there is a process of
‘attenuation’ of the State as well as a politics of negotiation between ‘rational’
actors on the basis of specific interests. The micro-macro system offers to this
politics, composed of strategic interactions between ‘rational’ actors, a logic
and a system of verification; security provides its guidelines; and the
population constitutes its privileged object.
52 M. Foucault, Nascita della Biopolitica, p. 133.