Introduction: Transforming Security and Development in an Unequal World

Security is a contested concept, which means very different things to different people. It bears the heavy historical imprint of the existing state system and of global capitalism. However this IDS Bulletin contends that it is essential that the development community understands and engages with security issues, for violent conflict and insecurity can no longer be treated as exogenous shocks disturbing the smooth course of development; but rather they should be seen as intrinsic to development itself. In the twenty?first century, the dominant state?based narratives of security are no longer credible and need to be rethought, especially from the perspective of the poor, vulnerable and dispossessed. This article and this IDS Bulletin as a whole are an attempt to sketch out a multilevel framework for the governance of (in)security, taking human and citizen security as its starting point, and addressing the gender, class, ethnic, religious, etc. inequalities built into the dominant narratives of security

Assessing the influence of the Responsibility to Protect on the UN Security Council during the Arab Spring

This article challenges those perspectives which assert first, that the Security Council’s engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) during the Arab Spring evidences a generally positive trend, and second, that the response to the Arab Spring, particularly Syria, highlights the need for veto restraint. With respect to the first point, the evidence presented in this article suggests that the manner in which R2P has been employed by the Security Council during this period evidences three key trends: first, a willingness to invoke R2P only in the context of Pillar I; second, a pronounced lack of consensus surrounding Pillar III; and third, the persistent prioritisation of national interests over humanitarian concerns. With respect to veto restraint, this article argues that there is no evidence that this idea will have any significant impact on decision-making at the Security Council; the Council’s response to the Arab Spring suggests that national interests continue to trump humanitarian need

The doctrine of the 'responsibility to protect' as a practice of political exceptionalism

The consensus on the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has replaced ideas of humanitarian intervention with a new vision of the responsibilities that states have to protect their peoples from the most egregious suffering. The contention of this article is that this is a politics of exceptionalism, whereby power is legitimated by reference to its effectiveness in responding to emergency or crisis. By analysing the doctrine in this way, new light is shed on the debate surrounding the responsibility to protect. First, understanding the doctrine in terms of exceptionalism helps explain the paradox of how the doctrine has been assimilated so readily into institutional and state practice without manifesting any greater commitment to international intervention. Second, understanding these new security practices in terms of exceptionalism allows us to move beyond questions of imperialism. Once understood in terms of exceptionalism, it can be shown that the stakes in the debate on the responsibility to protect are restricted not only to relations between states, but also to relations within them: principles of representative government are to be substituted with paternalist and authoritarian visions of state power