3o Seminário de Relações Internacionais- ABRI Florianópolis- SC- 29 e 30 de setembro de 2016
Área Temática:
Segurança Internacional, Estudos Estratégicos e Política de Defesa
A SEGURANÇA NAS AMÉRICAS EM CHAVE PÓS-COLONIAL: REPENSAR AS RELACOES DE SEGURANÇA HEMISFÉRICAS
Daniel Sebastián Granda Henao IRI/PUC-Rio
Resumo:
As relações sociais e políticas nas Américas têm se pautado por uma racionalidade argumentávelmente (neo)colonial, dadas as diferenciações culturais entre uma América Latina e um Caribe vistos como subdesenvolvidos, barbáricos e ainda numa fase de modernização, por um lado, e uma América Anglo-saxã ‘avançada’, que enxerga potenciais ameaças no seu Outro. A segurança, como subsidiária dessas relações sociais, políticas e econômicas, pauta-se, logo, por essa lógica de diferenciação e hierarquização dos aspectos de gênero, raça e cor, classe e etnia, moderno/pré-moderno entre outros aspectos culturais. Essa lógica seria o que Quijano (2000) se refere como matriz de diferenciação colonial, dando espaço para (re)pensar as relações de segurança no hemisfério desde uma perspectiva crítica da pós-colonialidade .
Recorrentemente, pensa-se nas Américas como um continente pacífico e com baixo nível de conflitos. Isto, argumento, deve-se ao caráter estatocêntrico de alguns trabalhos, que não enxergam outros objetos e níveis de análise. Contraditoriamente, os níveis de violência nas cidades e no campo são estridentes. Há diversas formas de violência direta, de violências culturais e estruturais (GALTUNG 1969) que permeiam ao longo e largo do espaço geográfico pan-americano. Essas análises para o hemisfério partem da premissa de um continente diferenciado: A América do Norte, a Anglo-Saxã, a avançada e líder da liberdade e da democracia, entende conflitos no nível sistêmico, com agendas de segurança de ordem planetária; enquanto a outra América, possui um desenvolvimento tardio e processos de formação e consolidação dos Estados nacionais falidos, o que causa problemas e atritos na escala sistêmica ao não responder sequer pela estabilização e pacificação interna.
A questão da segurança na América Latina chama ainda mais a atenção com o fim da Guerra Fria, e a consequente eclosão da bipolaridade. Isto trouxe possibilidades de pensar a segurança no sul global como diferente das lógicas de confronto ideológico e militarista desse período (BUZAN & HANSEN 2009), para explorar melhor o quê seria uma “agenda de segurança do terceiro mundo” (AYOOB 1995). Na América Latina, chama a atenção a aparente contradição entre uma região de baixa intensidade de conflitos interestatais e alta incidência de violência ao interior desses estados –como já mencionado- (ver HOLSTI 1996; MARES 2001). Essa contradição faz com que se perceba por um lado, que o fim da Guerra Fria também traz o fim das ditas “intervenções” que por muitas vezes significou mudanças de regime em diversos Estados em prol do combate internacional ao comunismo, assim como a perseguição de dissidentes do projeto político do Ocidente.
É, por tanto, dessa contradição que nasce minha inquietação por explorar os significados das seguranças (como fenômeno social e aspiração das comunidades políticas) e da Segurança (no plano teórico-conceitual e das práticas políticas). Há então duas perguntas que se transformam em movimentos e etapas de pesquisa: Num primeiro momento aparece a questão pela Segurança como campo de estudo e as teorizações; de forma sucinta, a pergunta que abordo neste momento seria “O que se fala da segurança da América Latina?”. Derivada dessa pergunta então aparece o como ela se diferencia da outra América (do Norte, branca, anglo-saxã, protestante...), e como se manifesta a lógica do etnocentrismo e da colonialidade do poder na forma de teorizar e pensar a segurança para a região, desta forma seguindo os questionamentos de Bilgin (2010). O segundo movimento procura instigar a voz dos subalternos, seguindo de certa forma o questionamento da Gayatri Spivak (1988) sobre as possibilidades de pensar fora da matriz colonial e do mundo do privilégio da academia no Ocidente. A pergunta central desta etapa consiste em “O que as comunidades políticas na América Latina pensam sobre suas seguranças e inseguranças”, seguindo a perspectiva de Taylor (2012).
Abstract:
Social and political relations in the Americas has an arguably colonial logic, given the cultural differences between a Latin America and Caribbean seen as underdeveloped and barbaric, on the one hand, and an ‘advanced’ Anglo-Saxon America, that perceives its potential threats in its Other. Security, as subsidiary of those social, political and economic relations is, thus, set by such logic of differentiation and hierarchization of gender, race and color, class and ethnicity, modern/ pre-modern, among other cultural aspects. Such logic is what Quijano (2000) calls a “matrix of colonial differentiation”, opening avenues to (re)think hemispheric security from a critical standpoint on post-coloniality.
Frequently, when one thinks about the Americas, is a common place to picture it as a pacific continent, with low-intensive, seldom conflicts. This, I argue, happens due to the state-centered character of most works in the field, which do not reflect over other objects or levels of analysis. Conversely, levels of violence in the cities and countryside are astonishingly high. There are diverse forms of direct, cultural and structural violence (GALTUNG 1969) present all over the pan-american geography. Those hemispheric analyses depart from the premise that there is a differenciated and divided continent: North America, the Anglo-Saxon America, ‘advanced’ and bastion of democracy and freedom, worried about security issues in the systemic level, with agendas of planetary order; while there is the Other America, a Latin America, with late development issues and weak, failed, formation and consolidation processes of their National States, it presents difficulties for the rest of the system, they would not even achieve the necessary stability and internal pacification for political modernity.
The question about security in Latin America becomes even more notable with the outbreak of bipolarity and the end of the Cold War. It has brought possibilities to think security in the Global South as different to the logics of ideological and military confrontation of that period (BUZAN & HANSEN 2009), to explore what would be ‘an agenda of third world security’ (AYOOB 1995). In Latin America, it calls attention the apparent contradiction between low-intensity interstate conflicts and high incidence violence in the interior of those states (see HOLSTI 1996; MARES 2001). Such contradiction realizes, on the one hand, that the end of the Cold War brought along with it the end of the different kinds of ‘interventions’ that meant, most of times, regime changes in pro of an international crusade against communism, and the persecution of dissidence of the Western modern political project.
It is in that contradiction that my concern arises, seeking to explore the meanings of securities (as both a social phenomenon and political communities’ aspiration) and Security (in the conceptual, theoretical realm of violence as a political practice). There are two compassing questions, that become research moves and phases. In a first moment I address the question about Security as an scholarly field of theory, concisely, I ask: “What is therefrom said about security in Latin America?”, in the sense to query how is its security different its antynom (North, Anglo-Saxon, Whithe, Protestant America), and how is the ethnocentric, colonial logic of power manifest in the forms of thinking and theorizing regional security, following the questions posed by Bilgin (2010). The second movement aims to instigate the voice of the subalterns, tracing Spivak’s (1988) point on the possibilities to think out from the colonial matrix and the world of priviledge of Western academia. The central question in this stage of research follows as “What do political communities in Latin America think about their own securities and insecurities?” keeping up to Taylor’s (2012) perspective.
A SEGURANÇA NAS AMÉRICAS EM CHAVE PÓS-COLONIAL: REPENSAR AS RELACOES DE SEGURANÇA HEMISFÉRICAS
Frequently it is thought of the Americas as an apparently peaceful, low-intense conflict continent, in both regions: North America and Latin America. Against to what Mares calls a “Violent Peace”, pointing out that: “the use of violence across national boundaries has been a consistent trait of Latin America’s international politics” (2001: 28), Holsti argues that South America is a no-war zone, only recorded by North America (1996: 154) as there has not been an actual war recorded since 1941, being there only a handful of military crisis rapidly solved through peaceful means. Both authors insist on the contradiction of war absence, and yet a low incidence of major inter-state conflicts in the sense of perceiving consistent symptoms of conflictive relations among states, not always ending at warfare –as is the case of conflict hypotheses with neighboring states, recurrent rupture of diplomatic relations and military mobilizations to borderlines.
On the other hand, there is a never-ending violence that crosses the continent North to South and East to West. Such pervasive violence is domestic and transnational in nature (HURRELL, 1998), and as such, it challenges the traditional assumption that International Security is about inter-state conflict, deterrence and competition, and States’ survival. From those contradictions (first, of “Violent Peace” and second of high incidence of domestic and transnationalized violence) I argue that it is necessary to criticize and rethink the sui generis way in which security phenomena occurs in the Americas, beyond state organizations and traditional International Security assumptions.
I understand the Americas to be a continent subdivided by cultural aspects (an Anglo-Saxon America and a Latin America) as well as in geographical terms (North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean). Authors like Oelsner (2005) understand this problematique similarly, in order to avoid confusion or overlapping of terms. Those divisions, as Mignolo (2005) argues, correspond to a political segregation that opposes a white enlightened America to another underdeveloped, indigenous and black. From such division one can distinguish corresponding security agendas to those subcontinents: Anglo-Saxon, Northern American societies identify their main sources of threat in a systemic scope, is directly involved in main global crusades for “Liberty and Democracy” and at times neglects its colonial and racist past. For the America -the black, indigenous, underdeveloped- security depends on the necessity of running against the gap of development and institutional consolidation; poverty and transnationalized violence are seemed as the main sources of threat, thus, the enemy – for the state and the local elites- is within, and the post-colonial issues are greatly evident, even when unaware.
In a sense, the problems of security in the Americas are connected to the problem of defining the state’s scope of action: a problem of how to take action inside –in the debatable arena-, and how to behave outside –in the anti-political, anarchic realm-. What is at stake in this sort of “Violent Peace”, or ambivalent (in)security, is the problem of where should legitimate political actors locate their survival, so that meanings about security may be observed. As it is a problem about the political modernity definitions and limits, embodied in the diachronic politics of the State (WALKER, 1993), it is also the case of how knowledge is articulated to power, in the way Foucault explains, and how security and Security1 –therefore- are constitutive practices of everyday common life.
Given this initial panorama, in this article I will proceed in a three-layered form of literature revision, in order to check and problematize current literature: First, I trace a sort of genealogy of International Security as a scholarly field and political practice to familiarize the reader with the field and its debates. Second, I present postcolonial approaches to security to destabilize the assumptions of the phenomenon of security and how –traditionally and rationalistically- it is dealt with. Third, I focus on regional security panorama to recognize better the ground this research aims. Finally, there is a fourth section that attempts to structure a possibility of critique from and for the Americas given the discussion raised throughout this article. Before proceeding, I would like to excuse myself to the readers for writing in English. I understand that this act does not “decolonialize” science in a strict manner; nevertheless, it may help to destabilize current established knowledge and open channels of dialogue between South and North.
Debating International Security:
Buzan and Hensen (2009:1) argue that the field of International Security Studies used to be an independent one, with its antecedents in different areas of inquiry, as varied as war studies, military and grand strategies and geopolitics; and that it was rapidly absorbed within the discipline of International Relations after the end of the Second World War. For them, there emerged a distinctive literature, from 1945 on, that provided basis for the study of security, understood as a broader set of political issues, rather than traditional concepts of war, defense or strategy. This shift of conceptual basis, thus, provides that, first; security depended on political and rhetorical force, becoming what Wolfers (1952) calls an “ambiguous symbol”. Second, Security shifted, as it became an area concerned with the novel problems of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, rather than national strategies itself. And third, the field became
1 Throughout the text the reader will find the terms “Security”, for which I refer to the scholarly field, and “security”
to mean the social and political phenomenon itself that the former intends to study. The reason for this differentiation is due to the research program aims at both first and second levels of theoretical work.
more of a civilian enterprise than its traditional military exclusiveness, this due to the fear of total war campaigns, as it happened before and during the Second World War; thus, scholars looked after avoidance and deterrence of armed conflict, as the threat of nuclear weapons use was becoming even more feasible.
In that sense, as Nye and Lynn-Jones put it:
International security is not a discipline but a problem […] It developed around military capabilities and East-West issues that were easy to grasp. Deterrence theory and game theory provided a powerful unifying framework for those central issues, but often at the cost of losing sight of the political and historical context. […]. The central questions are concerned with international violence, but there are also other threats to the security of state. (1988: 6)
By affirming this, one can comprehend that the approach to security as a phenomenon, and Security as a field of study, is not objective, but imbricated amidst political processes. The discipline studies the problem of violence and conflict located in a larger, systemic or global, scale. Helga Haftendorn (1991: 3) puts it as a goal, an issue-area, a concept, a research program or a discipline. Whether in a national, international or global level, she argues, the meaning of each one corresponds to different philosophical traditions and historical interpretations (4).
Stephen Walt argues, nevertheless, that “The main focus of security studies is easy to identify [...]: it is the phenomenon of war. Security studies assumes that conflict between states is always a possibility and that the use of military force has far-reaching effects on states and societies” (1991: 212). For him, and much of realist authors, military power is the central focus of the field; therefore: “security studies may be defined as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force” (NYE et al., 1988 apud WALT, 1991). Although he recognizes in his assessment of the field that, to understand conflict and war it is also relevant to comprehend other sources of threat and national security, and consequently other forms of statecraft, he acknowledges that such an expansion of the boundaries of the field may be counterproductive for the area itself.
Many authors (e.g. ULLMAN, 1983; KRAUSE et al., 1998; KRAUSE, 1998; BUZAN et al., 1998; FIERKE, 2007), on the other hand, criticize the recurrence of systematic and summoned products of national securities approaches as the international form of the field , often focusing in military issues and responses -contra Walt. The concept of national security has indeed provided a paradigm for security analysis equating security with the absence of military threat and with the protection of the nation-state from external vulnerabilities to the internal organization, political communities, population and the resources within a defined territory (ACHARYA, 1997; HAFTENDORN, 1991).
The concept boarded as security in the International Security Studies field is, as Smith (2005) asserts, and provided the discussion above, a contested one; by which he does not mean just that it is difficult to agree on its definition, but that it is “inherently a matter of dispute
because no neutral definition is possible” (27, emphasis in the original). For him, the concept of security is a contested one, as different schools of theory in International Relations understand different meanings about it. Baldwin (1997) had previously undertaken a similar path into unveiling the meanings that theorists and practitioners have taken for granted, when he affirms that: “Redefining 'security' has recently become something of a cottage industry. Most such efforts, however, are more concerned with redefining the policy agendas of nation-states than with the concept of security itself” (5).
Moreover, Buzan and Hansen (2009) defend that there is no agreement upon the definition of what is the object of the field, or the true meaning of the concept, as they put it:
To delineate ISS [International Security Studies] is unfortunately not as straightforward an exercise as one might wish. The label ‘international security’ was not adopted from the outset, but only gradually became accepted, and there is no universally agreed definition of what ISS comprises, and hence no accepted archive of ‘ISS-documents’ that define our object of study […]The absence of a universal definition of what makes up ISS means that ISS has at times become a site for disciplinary politics with different perspectives arguing that they should be included while others (usually different sorts of widening perspectives) should not. (8)
Therefore, Buzan and Hansen suggest that one could reach a heuristic to deal with such contested concept. For them, a definition of the field and its object of study at stake is subjected to four previous questions: first, whether or not is the State a referent object, in the sense of looking after what is it necessary to secure (i.e. the State? Individuals? Ethnic groups? Environment…); second, whether is International Security exclusively about external threats or if internal sources may be considered as well, in order to secure the previous defined referent object; hence, it is a question about the limits of sovereignty and so-called national security. In third place, there is the question about the sectors involved in one’s definition of security, given that the military incorporations cannot give account of the whole chances of starting a conflict or controlling the force; it is a question about the legitimate actors and responses in case of occurring violence. Finally, there is the question about the field’s ties with the dynamics of threats, dangers and urgency; it is a self-reflective question about the embedded politics of the field and its own capacity of transformation; it is an epistemological question about how to know and how to define security in terms of objectivity, subjectivity and/or discursivity. (2009: 10-13).
From such starting point, acknowledging that the mere concept that is taken in different perspectives about the problem is not a pacific point, I start by analizing the meaning of it as put in different perspectives of International Relations Theory in order to trace a trajectory of discussion. As such, it is very important to distinguish –at least- three main branches of security theorization, by the adjacent concepts on which security is defined: complementary concepts narrow the set of questions one can formulate, better seen in Rational Choice approaches; oppositional concepts, in the sense of seeking for alternatives to the standard concept, as
reflected in Peace Research agendas; and parallel ones, that take a wider frame of reference and theorization, as those posed by Critical Security Studies. (BUZAN et al., 2009).
In the Rational Choice approaches, Walt (1999) identifies two ‘waves’ of Rational Choice theorizing: the first intending to illustrate strategies through mathematical modelling, without much rigor acknowledging that it strategy -as they used to call the field back then- is not a branch of mathematics but an issue of social science. The second wave, he argues, has put more emphasis on formal proofs and derivations; as he questions whether the insistence on rigorous mathematical and formal theorizing2 has indeed advanced into the understanding of international security, and, unless formal theory achieves that goal, it should not enjoy higher privileges than other approaches.
Walt (1999: 10) explains that Rational Choice approaches in International Security has often meant the use of game theory, and consequently, this branch makes assumptions of: individualist agents, actors who will seek to maximize their utility; completeness of an actor’s preferences (rankable order of their preferences for different outcomes), transitiveness of preferences (if A is preferred to B, and B to C, then A also to C); a specific structure of the game, meaning that one should know how the actors are, what are they seeking to maximize and what are the patterns of behavior and preferences; and an equilibrium as the ultimate goal of each game.
Rational Choice has been the preferred approach of Realist and Liberal-Institutionalist perspectives in International Relations. It has even given the nickname of “rationalism” for mainstream theory, as seen in Keohane’s (1988) famous speech. In the case of International Security it is also referred in Geopolitics and traditional Strategic Studies, mostly guided by realism and its different currents (i.e. Structural, Offensive, Defensive, Neo-Classical, etc.). This approach has given account of much of the Cold War theory within the field, whether in the nuclear deterrence case (e.g. KRAUSE, 1999), balancing and alliances formation (e.g. WALT, 1985), as well as the study of institutional concerns towards collective security (e.g. OYE, 1986) and the economical influences over security issues (e.g. KEOHANE et al., 1977).
One can locate the last two examples better on the liberal, and neoliberal institutionalist, side of the IR debates. Nevertheless, liberal theories put more emphasis on the peace -not the war- as a telos that humankind must seek in its progressive course. Yet, as Doyle (1983: 206) states:
the peaceful intent and restraint that liberalism does manifest in limited aspects of its foreign affairs announces the possibility of a world peace this side of the grave or of world conquest. It has strengthened the prospects for a world peace established by the steady expansion of a separate peace among liberal societies.
2 “Formal rational choice theory is defined ‘more by the method of theory construction than by the content of its
From the later, one can assert that liberalism does not neglect the fact that war and violence are possible, and even more, that -a rational actor, named human being- must first seek agreements through cooperation and negotiation, but that if the actor’s preferences and interests do not prosper, it may intend to conquer through force. Either way, for Doyle, the aspiration for liberal democratic societies must be to expand itself in order to establish a lasting peace, although it assumes non-intervention as its core principle. It is a similar basis of the rationalism that realism proffers, even when there exist critiques to the explaining power of realist theories contra the preferred Kantian ‘perpetual peace’.
Peace, however, is not only found in liberal traditions; one can also find references to it as an oppositional concept given through Peace Research. Johann Galtung (1969) defined peace as the absence of violence, at observing that the meaning of both concepts were interrelated. Hence, the opposition he proposed is that for reaching peace -in a normative sense- one should first know the causes of violence, so it could be avoided.
In that order of ideas, Galtung defended the existence of different typologies of violence: personal violence and structural violence. both types could assume psychological and physical forms, with or without objects to inflict pain; however, the difference resides in the intentionality or unintentionality, and in the stability (latence or manifestation, associated to social, political and economic structures), correspondingly. Given that axis of violences, Galtung introduces the concepts of positive peace (absence of structural violence and an aspiration towards social justice), and negative peace (absence of personal somatic violence). The concepts that Galtung posed as a pioneer in Peace Research led to a series of questionings and new venues for research about the links between security and development, and the levels on which security could be studied, beyond the state political exclusiveness.
This challenge to the established debate of the meaning security, and the bridges it settled with other disciplines, as sociology, allowed two important movements in the redefinition of the Security field: first, by a redefinition deepening the object of study; that is, by placing the referent object -that to be secured- both above (as in the environment and the planet) and below (as in individuals or specific communities, or even shared values and identities) state level.3
Ullman (1983), who defied the self-definition of security, and its close relation with the orientation of American foreign policy and military strategies and operations, takes an initial step into observing the relation between security and liberty, as one the foundation stones of the modern state. This is, what is one willing to give up in order to obtain more security. From that, he proposes to look to security (especially national security) as:
An action or sequence of events that (1) threatens drastically and over a relatively brief span of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a state,
or (2) threatens significantly to narrow the range of policy choices available to the government of a state or to private, nongovernmental entities (persons, groups, corporations) within the state (133).
That assertion, which for that time seemed revolutionary, led to an opening of the field, so that scholars would discuss the terms upon which security was studied. There were discussions previous to that, nevertheless, the political moment of détente between the USSR and the US, as well as the global economic crisis of the 1980s, seemed appropriate to discuss what security was about. It is necessary to make clear that there has been controversy around the definitions, the actors, the scope and the analytical tools upon which the area of International Security works. It may be traced as back as Wolfers in 1952, when the field was supposedly emerging. However, in the 1980s it becomes much more evident and, along with the strengthening of critical perspectives in the whole IR spectrum, critical perspectives to the mainstream approaches –often rationalistic and neorealist- become widespread.
Critical Security Studies, here associated with the idea of parallel concepts –those that intend to approach the phenomenon through political theory or on a wider frame of the concept, compound a variety of perspectives in IR itself, ranging from Critical Theory through Poststructuralism, Feminism(s) and Postcolonialism. Krause (1998) outlines a research agenda for those criticisms, making challenges to the orthodoxy of the field. In his own revision of the critical security literature, Krause (1998) points out to the examination of (1) the construction of threats and appropriate responses, (2) the construction of the objects of study, and (3) the possibilities of transformation of security dilemmas; as a reply to the core assumptions of mainstream scholarship. For his first exam, he argues that “for a critical scholar […] the world of threats and intentions is supremely a constructed one, involving history, culture, communication, ideologies and related factors” (1998: 306). At the flipside, one also may find a construction over the responses to assure advantage upon such threats, for which Krause asserts in mainstream scholarship has often dealt with deterrence and arms control policies, and by contrast, critical scholarship has shown the importance of agents, for instance in the formation of ‘epistemic communities’ (ADLER, 1992 apud KRAUSE, 1998).
The second question Krause identifies is related to the object of security, similarly to the ‘referent object’ that Buzan and Hansen identify. He specifies that having the state as “custodian of values is a powerful resolution to central problems of modern politics” (1998: 309). Hence, it is a question about the rationality of state as embodiment of politics, rationality of individuals as instrumental actors, and an environment filled with other actors of insecurity; authority becomes the locus of security and whatever is outside the state represents a potential threat. For a change, critical scholars focus on “discourses of threat […as] in large measure constitutive of the object to be secured” (KRAUSE, 1998: 312), this is fully related to the phenomenon Buzan, Waever and de Wilde (1998) label as ‘securitization’, or the relation of self and other Campbell (1992) explores.
Third, there is the exam about the security dilemmas, which, as an analytical tool, exposes the contradictions of the taken responses, which, in return, create a more dangerous environment, so that such object would have to take even higher stakes. It shares with liberal and neo-liberal institutionalist authors the premise of collective security and, that international institutions may help to anticipate outcomes and reach agreements, on the one hand; on the other, indexes the existence of discursive communities around political and cultural identities –such as the one embedded in NATO.
In sum, Krause (1998: 316-7) identifies six claims that are central to a Critical Security research agenda: actors in world politics are social constructs; subjects are constituted through political practices; world politics are not statics and structures are not determining since they are also socially constructed; knowledge is not objective as it involves processes of observation and collective action; interpretative methods are the central focus of research; and, the purpose of theory is not explanation or prediction, but a contextual understanding and practical knowledge.
One can see from the debates traced in this section that security is indeed a very complicated concept to deal with. There is no agreement upon whether scholars and practitioners should adopt a narrow militaristic and state-centered approach, or whether they (we) should look out to a broader definition that defies and understand security as a much comprehensive phenomenon dealing with culture, discourses and identities operating in the ordinary life of individuals and social groups, as well as the politics involved in academia and scholar work. In the next section I will continue with the diagnosis of the field, specifying what post-colonialists contend about the meaning of security and its implications with modernity and capitalism.
Postcolonial openings toward security:
For the purposes of this problem build-up, I want to focus on a Postcolonial standpoint to the problem of international security, since my own critique finds its basis both over the field and the phenomenon, it seems right to look first to the prior critiques raised by authors located on that perspective.
Postcolonial perspectives recall the importance of localized experiences, paying attention to ordinary people’s practices, their intercultural differences and dialogues. This kind of discourse has showed concerns on shifting the frames of reference of social science, along with post-positivist, postmodern and poststructuralist movements (DARBY et al., 1994). For them: “what has driven postcolonialism, and thus what constitutes the core of the discourse, is a focus on the relations of domination and resistance and the effect they have had on identity, in, throughout, and beyond the colonial encounter” (375).
It is important to remember that for post-colonialists, the colonial category transcends the historical experience of domination of Western powers to non-European populations; it is a set of practices that condition the relations of the third world and the West; but also within and among the third world, in the sense of a certain internal coloniality, as Quijano (2000) would suggest.
Pinar Bilgin (2010) suggests that there is an Anglo-Saxon, patriarchal and militarist constituent bias in the International Relations discipline, in the objects and subjects of security, which is manifested in the historical absence of the third world insecurities. This has resulted in a ‘blind spot’ of the international security analyses, in theory and practice. As consequence, the standard mainstream version, and concepts that it operates with, are inadequate to comprise the insecurities at the margins of capitalism and modernity projects.
Furthermore, Postcolonialists make a three-fold constructive critique of the discipline to overcome the ‘blind spots’ and silences by
Challenging the centrality accorded to Europe as the historical source and origin of the international order; it queries the universality accorded to moral and legal perspectives which reflect and reproduce the power relations characteristic of the colonial encounter, and which are thus from being universal; and it questions the epistemological privilege accorded to an understanding of knowledge which is blind to the constitutive, and not merely representational, role of knowledge (SETH 2011: 168).
What post-colonialists are trying to propose is not a negation of the positivist and power-centered International Relations, but rather raising awareness about the colonialistic biases and the Eurocentric character of the discipline, that at times serves as power demonstration and excuse for domination. This is a reflexive move towards acceptance of wider forms of knowledge, acceptance for other political outlooks, and recognition of the intimate link between theory and practice, as well as the ways in which studying a reality also create and recreate such reality. In sum, it acknowledges that there is no pure neutrality nor objectivity in science. The postcolonial challenge is thus about identifying and defying the disparities of power, the domination forms imposed through knowledge, and the exploration for different valid forms of acquiring a sense of reality.
According to Buzan and Hansen (2009: 200-202), a postcolonial perspective for International Security departs from the critique to the Western political organization framed in the State scheme, as well as its implications of the State as the core object of analysis. Therefore, it overseeds the political-military sector of security. It points out to the specificities of the so-called ‘third world’ and the impossibility of foreseeing international relations as an exclusively interstate phenomenon. For postcolonial scholars, the state-centered character in International Security and International Relations is due to the narrative of a particular European historical path that synthetized an awareness of threat and vulnerability outside the political community.
From this perspective, there is a claim about the impossibility of universal globally shared concepts of security, due to study objects (i.e. individual or state survival, sovereignty, among others) differ from their Western standard meanings at times. Thus, governance, legality, legitimacy or violence are diversely understood and, hence, organization and action do not mean the same everywhere. The logic of security is socially constructed under specific culturally localized practices and conditions, it is not absolute nor universal (BUZAN et al., 2009).
The issues that arise from Western logics over global politics are, nevertheless, not easily distinguishable from the whole setting of international (in)security. Arguably, this is an outcome of the dominant Western lenses of analysis, puzzling and problem solving that may invisibilize the underlying problems that Western security poses. Barkawi and Laffey (2006) bring a close analysis of how traditional thought in International Security Studies is poor when approaching contemporary perceived threats, security dilemmas and securitization objects, especially in the third world. They present the challenge that Al Qaeda has represented for the principal powers in the states system, as well as the insecurity dynamics generated since the 9/11 events. Such Western approaches, as seen in academic works and policy initiatives, are rather incomprehensible of the whole reality in which they are embedded.
For those authors, nowadays security relations make evident the old security logic and new issues contradictions. Currentdate issues challenge the interstate experience since they behave on a transnational network basis, not in encapsulated territories with defined boundaries by a large governmental and military organization obsessed with maintaining its status quo.
One of the main critiques to mainstream International Security Studies is that such Eurocentric outlook assumes that global North-South conflicts are derivatives from great powers confrontations; therefore, conflicts in the underdeveloped South are generally minor and generally asymmetric due to internal political instability. They are peripheral to the interests of the dominant actors of the system. Hence, this neglects the agency of ‘non-core’ populations and the violence that they may also suffer (BARKAWI et al. 2006, 330-331; DARBY et al. 1994). All those abstract models do not endure the pain of war, only humans suffer, states are not material entities upon which pain can be inflected. Is as if Westerns do not care about the others when their lives and interests are not in jeopardy.
Himadeep Muppidi (1999) brings another interesting standpoint by affirming that the treatment that Western state powers in World Politics, core to the international system architectured by those same powers, have brought more of insecurity than security for they put their state interests first and play with them as in a world checker board. That is, global powers’ governments see the rest of the world as their own chess set, one that they can
manipulate and treat at their will, without any consideration of those other countries and populations self-understanding, needs or interests, generating a sense of insecurity and threat.
The reflection and respect of the difference and the rupture of hierarchies of domination thus mark a postcolonial security outlook. It is about creating dialogues amidst different backgrounds and security imaginaries, focusing on collective social practices rather than on interstate games. Sovereignty –as the main security referent object- of the political representative organizations is reinterpreted as a rightful independence and autonomy in terms of self-understanding and self-determination, a true anarchy instead of a disguised colonial hierarchy.
Product of the propositions of the different authors presented above, it is possible to elucidate that postcolonial perspectives about international security pose a direct challenge to traditional realist vision of a state-focused security. In a nutshell, the postcolonial predicament challenges the dominant understanding of security in three important respects: “1. Its focus on the interstate level as the point of origin of security threats. 2. Its exclusion of nonmilitary phenomena from the security studies agenda. 3. Its belief in the global balance of power as the legitimate and effective instrument of international order” (ACHARYA, 1999: 301).
To understand security in postcolonial terms means to orient efforts towards a critique of modern State as a Eurocentric apparatus for political organization, and hence to comprehend the vast plurality of political forms of life as valid too. It is to look to the specificities of the global South –or the third world-, understanding the security practices as localized (against an universal view) and socially constructed under certain particular conditions. But above all this, security for the postcolonial movement is normatively traced by the search of breakouts with colonial-like hierarchies of domination, and the resolution through cultural dialogue among security imaginaries.
Finally, the research program of many postcolonial security authors (HÖNKE & MÜLLER 2012) seems to be traced by identifying new research objects and spread the findings of the postcolonial experience; combine analyses of both local agencies and concurrent rationale governance practices; and engaging in interpretative ethnographies to understand the localized experiences. In other terms, according to Darby (2008), rethinking security and insecurity in a postcolonial world is to instigate about othering practices, about the insecurity and the self, and to give voice to the victims and the suffering.
Contemporary Outlooks to Regional Security in Latin America:
Latin America, as opposed to protestant capitalist Anglo-Saxon America, appears during the 19th century as a vindication of the civilizatory project of meridional Europe, a catholic civilization with roots in ancient pre-Roman latins. It is a geographical division that emerges
amidst a new phase of capitalism, signed by the British financial and colonial expansion, without necessarily establishing a direct political dominion. Such discourse authorized the invisibilization, submission and disappearing of the new other constructed through European expansion, built up over the indigenous and black enslaved peoples that inhabited the newly invented Latin America. Although the concept follows an Illuminist French idea of pan-latinism, it operates in a singular way of diminishing and conquering an other for the sake of the Western civilization; one who should not be whoever it were but become a replica of the self (MIGNOLO, 2005).
Thus, one cannot attempt to understand whatever happens in so-called Latin America without associating it with its complementary pair, its alter. This is both a normative and a methodological statement to analyze the current agendas and raise new approaches for the protection and survival of human communities in the referred geographical space of the Americas.
This short review will focus on an outlook to regional literature about security since the post-Cold War, given that it is in that moment when states’ authorities may find a way out for redefining their own agendas from the constraints of bipolarity.
For a start, one can follow Mohammed Ayoob (1995) as he evidences the different particularities of the third world states -a shared identity throughout the région- in contrast to mainstream arguments about the centrality of war and balance of power in world politics. For him, during the Cold War, both superpowers, besides core states, were concerned with their deterrence agendas and the avoidance of a Mutual Assured Destruction, exporting their security agendas elsewhere; to battlefields in recently independent nations -with weak state apparatus and gaps between their territorial extension, political capacities and societal compositions. Moreover, understanding peripheral conflicts as a derivation of superpower competition instead of tracking the culto-historical roots within such. Third world states had at the core of their security issues their underdevelopment, overpopulation and scarcity of resources as vulnerabilities. Andrew Hurrell also complements this assertion, when he affirms for South America, that:
the agenda of regional security should be broadened to include issues such as drug trafficking, drug-related violence and criminality, migration and refugees, environmental degradation, and worsening public order in the face of different forms of internal violence […] the most serious security problems and threats to regional order are domestic and transnational in nature (1998: 530).
Although Latin America passed through an earlier decolonization experience, the region was affected by the same colonial rationale and state-building crisis that elongates its outcomes until nowadays. It was affected by the same peripheral and proxy conflict of the Cold War context that neglected agency for responding to regional and domestic security needs. In addition, it has the misunderstood feature of having domestic frays but very few interstate
confrontation cases, which respond easily to an other-than-state security paradigm. Classes, ideologies and ethnicities mark the divisions for conflict to emerge in several places throughout the hemisphere.
One can argue that regional security in Latin America is a sub-product of the world games of its antonym –Anglo-Saxon America. It can be characterized by the almost absence of interstate conflicts, alongside with forms of irregular and asymmetrical, localized and transnational violence. By far, the most latent hazard to both state and individual’s security is the presence of insurgent groups, paramilitaries, and criminal mobs, often related to drug trafficking and other illegal activities. The United States presence and intervention policies have long influenced much of the governmental positioning and policy-making among the diverse governments, whether for support or contention, even defying the global order and hegemonic power imposed by that power.
Discussing Latin America and Anglo-Saxon America as a dyad of two different backgrounds is at times illusory and oxymoronic. Nevertheless, it is unavoidable to keep in mind that both keep a colonial past, through different experiences and cultural formations though, but share a colonial wound as part of their national formation narratives. Saying that they are opposed to each other is to essentialize the richness and diversity of both, in which the local mixes with the national and the global in terms of security claims.
Nevertheless, while Latin America is more accurately fit in a third world security predicament, as for its underdeveloped character, its internal gaps and weak statehood. For the Anglo-Saxon part, the mainstream realist outlook is more properly put since it self-posits as modern and develop. Realist security lenses are a scheme of Anglo-European creation, that accounts for the Western-modern project of liberal, secular, universalist, state-centered and war-focused security –though that is debatable as well.
Jabri (2013) refers to those antagonist positions as postcolonial and colonial rationalities respectively. While the later focus on the aftermath politics of (post)colonial power, including the political contestations about modern juridical-political boundaries of state, the later view such boundaries as irrelevant to formulate schemes of government and takes them for granted. Jabri’s argument for a temporal-transcending colonial rationality is best evidenced in the construction of different security predicaments in order to culturally divide the continent. What one actually can see is that there is a strong interconnectedness all throughout the hemisphere, whether by domination of the North to the South (which includes Central American and the Caribbean if it is to speak in geophysical terms), or by indirect threatening (from the unsolved social issues in the South to the North). One cannot understand Latin American Security without the United States and Canada included.
Following the discussion about security in the Americas, Herz (2010) points out to some differences to the concept of security in South America, and in a broad sense in Latin America
and the Caribbean. For her, the perceptions of international politics, (in) security, violence and the acceptable levels of external intervention –regarding the variations amongst the different countries- enable the security epistemic community to discuss an own perspective. Those specificities had led to the creation of original forms of cooperation and association, such as the South American Nations Union (UNASUR), its Defense Council (CDS) and some hemispherical processes under the American States Union (OAS). Some features that outstand from this differential conceptualization that Herz presents are: the renewed interest of the South American elites in the security agenda after the Cold War; the higher concern with the distribution of power in the international system; its self-recognition as a peace zone; the centrality of the State and sovereignty concepts in the governing elites mindset, and the discussion of a larger security concept in worldwide scholar circles.
Mônica Hirst (2003; 2006), in an oppositely more realist way, also affirms that security agenda in Latin America is traced by strategical margination from global conflicts theatre and its low military levels when compared to other areas worldwide. For her, the violent situations that require a security approach are more often closer to a human security perspective than to the national security one; nevertheless, is the later the one that has predominated both in policy-making, strategic organization and scholarly work.
Even when both are referring to State-centered paradigms, what is striking is that they all (including also Ayoob and Hurrell) point out the relevance of looking below and above state level to comprehend better the dynamics and issues that distinguish the particular panorama of Latin American security. Even that State remains as an important category for analysis, mostly because most of the political processes transit through State intervention and policy-making, it is not the only explanatory venue for intrastate violence. It is possible to argue that structural violence permeates the issues on the agenda, but this is not often acknowledged.
For instance, in the 2015 Annuary of Regional Security in Latin America and the Caribbean (NIÑO, 2015), the editors characterize the main issues of regional security on the debates over Drugs Enforcement Regime and the War on Drugs. This is a common trend that best exemplify the complexity of security in Latin America; it depends on an inside/outside logic, whether in the form a war to prevent a spillover of insecurity sources to the North, or whether it is an interventionist strategy to keep control of populations and illegal products (drugs); it is a determination of who deserves to be protected and who is at the margins, unfit and must compel to the ideal of good citizen or endure punishment. This controversy is, by definition, transcending the order of fictional state boundaries and entering in the realm of transnational and local violences.
One remaining question in the regional security setting is about the role of international institutions into defining the policy orientations and the prevalent concept for governments. I share here Kenkel’s skepticism over the preference of legal-normativists biases both in
multilateral strands and compounding states, arguing that such preference “can lead to excessive reliance on formal documents rather than effective enforcement” (KENKEL, 2015: 151). Inter-American institutions are framed in interstate relation molds, they copy-paste the Anglo-European model of modern state international organizations, and furthermore, they mislead to instruments for external threats responses even when they also recognize the imperative of localized and transnational insecurity sources.
Hence, it is imperative to see the security predicament in Latin America drafted as a relation between a violent structure –partly due to its colonial legacy- and local decentralized, yet transnational, agencies –product of weak statehood and, possibly, modernity resistance. However, it is very important to recognize that security dynamics in the American hemisphere are also not disconnected from the complete Western-centered predicament. Latin America, as a marginal site of the modern Western logic is indeed subservient to the Eurocentric state-focused security claim.
How can one criticize Security from a post-colonial standpoint? A possibility for reviewing and criticizing Latin America’s Security
Having set the arguments over, first, the concept of security; second, a postcolonial approach of security; and third, the sui generi character of the security in the Americas, I briefly wrap up the main lines of problematization of this article to develop a possibility of future research agenda.
First of all, let us return to the initial contradiction found in literature; that of “Violent Peace”, that states there is no latent inter-state conflict, and nevertheless it is a territory filled with forms of direct and structural violence. This ‘anomaly’, as Holsti (1996) puts it, may call one’s attention to the very definition of what ones understand as security and how International Security approaches the violence phenomena for Latin America. My suggestion is to take a differential concept of security, so that one can adopt a broader frame of reference. It follows the criticisms that Critical Security Studies raise over mainstream definitions, overcoming the rationality of standard(ized) International Security. As seen above, the concept over which the field works is contestable and Latin American panorama contends the militaristic, state-centered basis by the interconnectedness and of its issues (i.e. drugs, mobs, social inequity, police confrontation, social protests, etc.). Security, understood differently, should be approached as an ordinary life issue, it is a matter that is not contained to state-level and military conflict. If it is about the survival of individuals and groups, to understand such predicament may look into the meanings of insecurity for such groups.
One can also place the roots of those sources of insecurity in the colonial problem: state may be seen as a Western political organization that intends to homogenize society and
represent a dominant class that determines rules over the rest of population. As such, it was transplanted to reinvented societies in a process of violent and sanguinary domination. This meant, as well, a resignification of welfare, authority and social rules that challenges what is perceived as ‘normal’ by Eurocentric modern lenses. The problem is the annulation of differences embedded in modern state’s political project of homogenization. It is a problem about accepting and coping with the difference, as Inayatullah and Blaney (2004) would claim. Therefore, a postcolonial critique to both, the state of Security Studies, and the accepted meaning given to the phenomena of security, seems necessary in order to desestabilize the accepted versions of politics and International Relations as a discipline. This work intends to challenge the role of colonialism as a mindset and a legacy, inherent to Western thought and the molds upon which social relations are produced among individuals and institutions. Such a critique, then, confronts the core assumptions to the discipline; as it places its focus on a micro-sociological level of human relations, into individuals and localized communities for an exploration of the different meanings of security, the role it occupies in political organizations and the rules and behaviors such a meaning contains.
Security in Latin America has to be read as the condition upon which living at the margins of modernity and capitalism affects social live in different forms. Scholars and policy-makers are missing the profound roots of the modernity that generate insecurity and fear. The exploration for a postcolonial critique, then, passes through, first, the forms in which coloniality operates within States and elite circles, then, in the top-down responses to perceived threats to dominant classes, as well as the counter-responses emerging from bottom-up. A two-fold purpose for such a critique is necessary: first, denaturalizing the discipline, in order to widen the scope and objects of analysis, since those responses are still lacking complexity for the comprehension of singular situations of unconformity; second, to the basis of the problems, that appear as incomprehensible to the standard view of what should one accept to be secure, but is not reflected on political possibilities. It must be a work that intends to give visibility to those obscured by the current structure of power and place the problem of security as an issue beyond the high spheres of statehood.
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