From Disarmament and Development to Inclusive Peace and Security: Four Decades of IDS Research

This introductory article surveys four decades of work on peace, security, and development, centring on articles published in previous issues of the IDS Bulletin. These articles focused initially on disarmament and its actual and potential contributions to development. After the end of the Cold War, development research engaged more and more directly with conflict prevention and peace-building, turning the spotlight upon security. IDS work has been distinctive in three respects. First, in interrogating the multiple meanings of security, delinking it from state and international security. Second, by tracing the complex links between global, national, local, and personal security. Third, in its insistence that security be inclusive, drawing upon the experience and agency of the people and groups who are ‘developed’ and ‘secured’

Whose Security? Building Inclusive and Secure Societies in an Unequal and Insecure World

Development researchers, governance specialists, security and international relations analysts are cartographers of the modern world. Their job is to untangle the tangled, yet in doing so they all too often make flat all that is high and rolling. This paper considers one particular piece of map-making: the interface between security and development. It tries to render visible some of the bumps, joins and turnings which lie beneath the maps. It starts by arguing for a historical perspective. The theory and practice of security is like that of development issued from the historical transformations which gave rise to the post-Second World War world order. Since the end of the Cold War they have increasingly intertwined and security has been mainstreamed into development. Yet neither security nor development has fully extricated itself from the violent and extractive relationships which developed in the colonial period and continue in many respects to this day. The paper then explores the ensuing contradictions which lie at the heart of the security–development nexus. On the one hand, security is a process of political ordering. Even more than development, it intermeshes with established power structures, property relations and inequalities. On the other hand, it is founded upon the claim that states and other forms of public order make citizens safe from violence and insecurity. In principle, it is equally shared and socially inclusive, even if in practice it is anything but.UK Department for International Developmen

Whose Violence, Whose Security? Can Violence Reduction and Security Work for Poor, Excluded and Vulnerable People?

This paper probes behind the assumptions underpinning the violence reduction agendas of the UN and the World Bank: that all forms of violence are commensurate and fit neatly into causal models; that violence is ‘development in reverse’ and inseparable from state fragility; and that security is a self-evident public good. It presents a framework to classify global, state and non-state or local violences and the interactions amongst them. It suggests that the starting point for any evaluation of security as well as violence reduction should be the vernacular understandings and day-to-day experience of poor, excluded and vulnerable people, including those living at insurgent margins

Politics, Class and Development (Editorial)

The State is a powerful reality and a still more powerful abstraction. An abstraction which conservatives who believe in ‘political order’ affirm; which revolutionaries hope to smash or negate; which planners and technocrats make use of in order to propound ideologies of state managed development; and the influence of which others who see it as the captive of class forces minimise. All the essays in this issue of the IDS Bulletin attempt to penetrate behind this abstraction by looking at various state institutions in a concrete way. In concentrating on the State we may, ourselves, in conclusion contribute to the myth of its omnipotence. Development studies may be as much in need of a theory of revolutionary change as of a theory of planning

Editorial: Britain: A Case for Development?

For the past four years the major industrial OECD countries have been in the throes of a crisis brought to a head by the oil price rises of 1973-74, but arising from longer-run difficulties which had already begun to appear by the late 1960s. The crisis is by no means over. The situation of the economically stronger countries such as the USA, Japan and West Germany seems to be on the upturn but the recovery of others including Britain is still very much in doubt

Introduction: Security in the Vernacular and Peacebuilding at the Margins; Rethinking Violence Reduction

This article introduces a Peacebuilding special issue on rethinking security, peacebuilding and violence reduction in the light of Sustainable Development Goal 16 on ‘promoting peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development’. The special issue presents new analysis and case studies, which aim to challenge and refresh the established policy consensus around violence reduction and security. They are distinctive in focusing upon the vernacular or local understandings of those at the receiving end of direct and structural violence; and in analysing the insurgent margins where violence and insecurity are most concentrated