Resilience and human security: The post-interventionist paradigm

TLDR

Current debates fear that broad human security is being eclipsed by R2P and a narrow military focus, framing it as a tension between preventive resilience practices and interventionist liberal internationalism. The paper proposes a post‑interventionist reading that reframes human security as a shift from liberal internationalist intervention toward fostering the self‑securing agency of the vulnerable. This perspective shows that international intervention, including under R2P, operates through a resilience paradigm, sidestepping many issues of liberal interventionist frameworks.

Abstract

In current discussions, many commentators express a fear that ‘broad’ human security approaches are being sidelined by the rise of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) and the ‘narrow’ focus on military intervention. An alternative reading is sketched out here, which suggests that debates over ‘narrow’ or ‘broad’ human security frameworks have undertheorized the discursive paradigm at the heart of human security. This paradigm is drawn out in terms of the juxtaposition of preventive human security practices of resilience, working upon the empowerment of the vulnerable, and the interventionist security practices of liberal internationalism, working upon the protection of victims. It is suggested that human security can be conceptually analysed in terms of post-intervention, as a shift away from liberal internationalist claims of Western securing or sovereign agency and towards a concern with facilitating or developing the self-securing agency – resilience – of those held to be the most vulnerable. This approach takes us beyond the focus on the technical means of intervention – whether coercive force is deployed or not – and allows us to see how international intervention, including under the R2P, increasingly operates under the paradigm of resilience and human security, thereby evading many of the problems confronted by liberal framings of intervention.