Surprisingly few analysts and development practitioners have raised concerns in recent years about the apparently intensifying relationship taking place between the fields of international security and development. Superficial evidence of this relationship is visible in daily international news reports, which relay that humanitarian and development matters are now commonly enforced and backed by the potential threat of sending in the troops. As news coverage of Afghanistan makes evident, peacemaking forces are also increasingly grasping at development as a strategy to quell resistance by winning over the occupied population’s hearts and minds. Behind the scenes in international policy circles, violent conflict...

This essay takes a critical look at the formation and practice of the Comprehensive Approach (CA) agenda. The CA is one of several concepts that have been conceived by Northern governments and the international community in order to increase coherence between civilian and military responses to failed states, fragile situations, and armed conflicts. The essay identifies how different approaches to these problems have made convergence possible and highlights that the differences also explain the continuing diversity in the understanding of challenges and remedies to perceived emergencies. By studying the specific ways in which the civil-military boundary is shifting and development...

There are ample reasons to contemplate why the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, posed this question in opening his address to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His friendly and reflective tone are indicative of the enlargement of the security-development nexus that now binds these institutions together and thus merges two traditionally separate realms. The policy world and international society are conventionally understood as compartmentalized into, respectively, security and hard power, on the one side, and soft power and development, on the other. The expanding security-development nexus enables, for example, a development rationale being used to legitimize military...

The idea that international efforts to enhance development in the South have been subsumed by the West’s concerns with its own security has captured the imagination of researchers and policy makers alike. While the conclusions drawn from this thesis, and from the substantial literature it has generated, may vary widely, ‘securitization’ has become lodged in the conventional wisdom about emerging trends in international relations.

According to many analysts, a central feature of securitization is the proliferation of opaque subcontracting chains that link governments and transnational development agencies with private business interests (often operating on the fringes of legality). As duties...

In September 2008, the US ambassador was thrown out of Bolivia, having been accused by the national government of fostering divisions and conspiracy against the country’s democratic order. In the weeks previous to this announcement, Bolivia had been the scene of several violent clashes between rival factions disputing the value of reforms aimed at the democratization of political structures and mechanisms for economic redistribution.¹ In the months following this initial announcement, more expulsions followed. The US Peace Corps, the US Drug Enforcement Agency, and USAID personnel were expelled from Bolivia on the grounds that they were involved in covert actions...

Although war and post-war contexts across the nonwealthy South reveal a great range of governance arrangements that have arisen out of specific historical trajectories, the transformations of the state represent a dominant contemporary trend (Hardt and Negri 2005; Joxe 2002). Arguably, in the domain of security and development such statal transformation is violently tangible. In examining illustrative instances, including the recently formed institution of ‘community police’ in post-war Mozambique and the controversial use of so-called Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, this essay will argue that a pervasive trend in state transformation is the securitization of the social....

On 20 May 2007, heavy fighting broke out in Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in North Lebanon. The initial clash between the Lebanese Army and a new militia group, Fatah al-Islam (Conquest of Islam), killed 20 militants and 21 soldiers and soon turned the camp into a war zone.¹ After 15 weeks of intense bombardment and gunfire, the camp was reduced to rubble, and the death toll had reached almost 500, including around 220 militants and 168 army troops. At least 47 Palestinian civilians were also killed in the bloody standoff, which forced the camp’s 30,000 residents...

The problem of climate change has rapidly come to preoccupy development researchers and policy makers. This essay discusses recent international attention being paid to Bangladesh as a result of this growing concern and considers the implications of this issue for human security. It asks whether lessons are being learned from the past about how coherent policy responses to long-standing environmental and developmental problems can be developed, questions the ‘crisis narrative’ approach to climate change, and draws a historical comparison with a major donor-led flood control initiative that took place two decades ago in Bangladesh. Comparing the contemporary challenges of climate...

Returning to the Indonesian island of Lombok in 2001, I was struck by the bewildering range of civilian patrol and security groups that had sprung up since the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, when the country embarked on a rocky process of democratization and decentralization. These groups have put their mark on the landscape in the form of hundreds of guard posts and occasional fortress-like watchtowers, strategically placed along major traffic routes. Driving through Central and East Lombok, my companions easily identified the group to which a guard post belonged from its emblematic colors and insignia. Most...

This essay uses an ethnographic example taken from the ongoing revitalization of Buddhism in Cambodia to challenge the proposition that understandings of security should be limited and unified by establishing criteria that are independent of specific worldviews (Alagappa 1998: 51). All discourses and practices of security are embedded in history and culture; they are therefore both inescapably plural and inextricably tied to power.

The concepts of security that have until now enjoyed political and academic currency have come mainly from the field of security studies. I contend that these have been largely ethnocentric and insensitive to alternative ways of formulating...