¶ … Threats to security are seen to come not only from external military aggression but also from a myriad of internal challenges -- separatist movements, social unrest, or the collapse of the political system." -- Anwar 2003,
With the international attention given to "military aggression," especially external military aggression, in recent years, it is easy to allow one's idea of was security means to become clouded with Hobbesian and Machiavellian notions of armed conflict, with "war on terror" images of military and intelligence operations hunting down terrorists, and with the debate on nuclear proliferation in developing (or underdeveloped) nations like Iran and North Korea. What these definitions of security lack, however, is a full understanding of the term; military operations and protection from terrorist attacks are most certainly important factors in a nation's security, however, they are far from being the total measure of peace and stability in a society.
Anwar's definition of security as something that includes internal factors is especially significant in today's climate in southeast Asia. These nations face significant threats to their security each day; these threats are not in the form of nuclear threats or military invasion from other nations, but in the form of human security issues such as poverty and hunger, the accessibility of healthcare and gainful employment, protection from the state against human rights violations, and protection both of and from the environment (Henk 2005). Human security scholars assert that the security of the individual citizen from the above factors, among others, has primary importance in developing nations, above that of security against military aggression.
The field of human security studies is vast, and is unquestionable out of the scope of this paper. Instead of attempting a generalized treatment of the field which would most definitely fail to fully explain the concepts involved, this paper will instead treat the issue of human security in two developing Asian nations: Indonesia and Burma. These examples were chose because of their obvious differences as well as their similar need for a more secure human situation. This case study will demonstrate that despite the economic and political differences, both Indonesia and Burma lack sufficient human security protections to ensure their most beneficial situation for both the state and its individual citizens.
To fully explore the situation in these nations, first we will examine the definitions of human security and how they are important in the developing world, followed by a specific examples of how this human security is not protected in Indonesia and Burma, concluding with ways that the governments of these two states might better protect human security, and why this would be beneficial to their overall security as well as the individual security of citizens.
HUMAN SECURITY: A FRAMEWORK FOR COMPLETE SECURITY
Political theory has long assumed that the principle actor in international relations is the state; states interact in order to ensure their own well-being and, in doing so, ensure the well-being of their citizens (Hayden 2004). The end of the Cold War revealed holes in this theory; there were states who were in no danger of foreign invasion or attack who were substantially insecure. This revelation led one think tank to note that there existed "challenges to security other than political rivalry and armaments," for example, development issues, overpopulation, and environmental degradation, among others (Stockholm Initiative, 1991, p. 17).
These threats to individual citizens, while not military or external threats and not perceived as immediately threatening to the state, are actually a state security issue. Rawls defines "unjust social arrangements" as "violence." (Rawls 1999, p. 302). The endorsement (even if it is implicit and not stated) of violence against citizens is most definitely a threat against a state's security. Aside from an outright citizen rebellion, which is obviously detrimental to the security of a state, citizens who are hungry, without shelter, unhealthy, unprotected from crime, and not fairly represented in government are detrimental to the security of the state in a manner other than militarily; each injury suffered by an unprotected citizen will eventually be felt by the state as a whole.
This shift in the idea of security from something that only applies to states en toto to a value of which every individual deserves protection from outside harms, including those potentially inflicted by the state itself (repression of beliefs or speech, or limited voting rights, for example) became a full-fledged theory of security in 1994, when the United Nations Development Program issued a report on the concept and state of human security (UN 1994)....
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