3

論文

Human Security in Non-Conflict States:
A Case of Afghan Unaccompanied Children
in the UK
Elisa Montiel Welti &Hisae Nakanishi

1. Introduction:
For almost two decades, the concept of human security has become arecurrent topic in the field of international relations. It is present in a vast
number of academic literatures, often employed as a leitmotif or a guiding
principle of development and foreign policies. While human security originally
aimed to reorient the focus of security from the state to the individuals, its
current incorporation into policy seems to mostly affect the securitization of alarge array of topics that mostly target conflict zones and the underdeveloped
world.
It is true that the concept of human security provided both academicians
and policymakers with more social and human development orientations. On
the other hand, it is frequently quoted to legitimize actions that are linked towhat we call “securitization of development,” which maintains the idea that
security is a prerequisite for sustainable development. With this trend, security
agendas such as the security sector reform, disarmament, demobilization andreintegration (DDR), and capacity building of national army in the post-conflictreconstruction have been emphasized and shared among the OECD member
states’ development assistance programs. After 9.11, this tendency has become
stronger: human security often allowed policies and strategies to be employed
under the name of “the War on Terror.”
An example can be seen in the statement made by Hilary Benn, theSecretary of State at the DFID (Department of International Development) in
the UK. He maintained that state crises were the major concern of theinternational community, which should act upon them decisively “when human4

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security is at risk, and emphasized aid programs should incorporate not only
diplomatic measures but state interventions (Benn, 2004, p.2). It goes without
saying that the reconstructions of Afghanistan and Iraq mobilized aid agenciesof the major donor states into the securitized assistance to such “fragile states.”
Consequently, securitization of development has become a global security
and peace agenda. It is within this context that the protection of “humansecurity” situations in post-conflict zones has been located at the core of security
related assistance programs, as if coercive military interventions were justified
as legitimate means to achieve human security of the people on the ground. The
DFID was one of the most significant players in the War against Terrorism inwhich the US took initiative, having a particularly strong involvement as US
main partner in the War against Saddam in 2003. The above-mentioned
incarnation of the linkage between human security and the securitization ofdevelopment policies has inevitably led to the presumption that human security
crises are predominantly the problem happening in conflict zones.
As an academic concept as well as a policy tool, human security has mainly
concentrated on studying the plights of people in post-conflict societies or inpoverty affected countries. Yet, the expansion of neoliberal economy particularlyin the past one decade produced an enormous gap between the rich and the pooron the global scale. The financial crisis of October 2008 has generated theemergence of people suffering from poverty and the lack of safety observed bothin developed and developing countries demonstrates the need to mainstream
the concept of human security to capture the reality of politically, economicallyand socially vulnerable groups in non-conflict states.
The present article aims to analyze how the concept of human security canbe extended to the developed world and to explore the importance of drawing
attention to the circumstances of vulnerable populations in non-conflict states.
This study also shows how the “ordinary” (not fragile nor conflict prone nor
conflict-experienced) state inevitably needs to deal with migrants from conflictzones who are living in high risk and vulnerable condition. The vulnerabilities
will be illustrated in the present article by an overlook of the challenges of
unaccompanied children entering the UK from Afghanistan, and the situationof invisibility that often affects their condition and increases the risks they face.
In its first part, the article will explore in detail the origins of the linkage ofthe human security with the problems of fragile and/or conflict countries, andHuman Security in Non-Conflict States5

some of the reasons that have left developed states as aid-givers and promotersof prevention of the spill-over of conflict, rather than subjects of humaninsecurity challenges within their territories. For this, the article will explore acommon notion of human security as a tool to secure the developed world bysecuring the vulnerable in other countries, first by the emergence of the concept
as the link between development and security, and later by the development of
human security as an instrument of foreign policy. In its second section, thisarticle will address its limitations to address the vulnerable populations in nonconflict states. This analysis will conclude with an overview of the case of the
Afghan unaccompanied minors in the UK, as an example of human security
challenges in non-conflict states.

2. Conflict Zones and Fragile States as the Central Focus
of Human Security: the Historical Processes
2.1. Human Security as the Intersection between Security and Development
As a term, human security was mentioned for the first time within adocument regarding the topic of development with the aim of influencing theUN’s 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen (Thomas,
2001, p. 163). For this reason, and due to the UNDPs initial role to push thenotion of human security within the human development agenda, most authors
consider the concept as the intersection of both development and security. The
new development agenda was based on the idea that those countries experiencing
war at that time presented a causal relationship between the lack of economicmeans, health, education, and the existence of war; an idea which, in spite ofempirical doubts, became the 1990s international policy consensus: poor
countries have higher risk of falling into conflict than developed ones (Duffield,
Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror, 2005).
Under this belief, poverty alleviation and a new understanding ofdevelopment, as envisioned by Amartya Sen, took importance in the 1990s. The
fight against underdevelopment or poverty reduction became a new focus task
to the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund 1 and theinternational community.
This vision was easily translated in the new language of human security.
In the words of Michael Camdessus, Managing Director of the IMF in his

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address to the tenth UNCTAD in 2000, poverty was seen by the international
community as “the ultimate systemic threat facing humanity” as “[t]he widening
gaps between rich and poor nations are potentially socially explosive. If the poor
are left hopeless, as he explained, “poverty will undermine societies throughconfrontation, violence and civil disorder” (Camdessus, 2000). As a result,poverty alleviation and development strategies became a pillar for the conceptualand operational base of human security. This causal relationship has extended
from the initial link between security and development into a widely acceptedinterpretation of the definition of this concept.
The linkage of security and development, although frequently understoodin the term of human security as centered in the concern of people’s welfare, hastheoretically and practically an undeniable departure from state-centeredideas, in which the developed countries are the model to follow and theunderdeveloped the target of the policy that results from both terms.
The term development, as contemporarily understood, was initially basedon the necessity of the years following the Second World War to advance those
who lost the war and the emerging independent states that resulted from postcolonial times towards economic progress. Development was based on a modelof progress where the developed states were taken as the example of what was
desirable for the underdeveloped ones (Dubois, 2007). Development then, we
can state, became one of the most important pillars for the reconstruction of theworld international order (Dubois, 2007).
In utilitarian terms, the term development has taken priority in its relation
to human security not by giving centrality to the personal security of theirtarget development aid receivers, but as Thomas and Tow describe, due to thecausal dialectic between internal problems and the external order (Kerr, 2003).
The prevention addressing of the problems of underdevelopment inside states
is a requirement to reduce transnational threats, which in turn affects the
security of people in the aid giving countries. In the words of Mahbub ul-Haq:‘[t]he consequences of poverty, disease, drugs, pollution do not stop at borders’(ul-Haq, 1999, p. 83), for which the idea of underdevelopment becomes a threat
to the existence of the developed world as well as the world order as a whole.
Although human security aimed to be a response to the existing security
mechanisms that often failed to protect vulnerable populations of non-citizens,
it has hardly detached from the traditional Hobbesian or Wesphalian conception

Human Security in Non-Conflict States

7of security. Security, when we consider the Hobbesian preoccupation with fear
and its solution, is the highest goal of government and at the same time thereason and the legitimization for sovereignty.
In the implementation of the concept of human security done by development
assistance stakeholders, the focus of the security approach, we could say, hasbeen just repacked into a more socially and politically acceptable wrapping. The
conceptualization of human security has, as a matter of fact, allowed thedeveloped world to bring upon new possibilities for the legitimization of the oldpower strategies, including the previously existing state-centered security
interests and the maintenance of the global status-quo, while opening thepossibility for neoliberal practices to participate in the securitization processes.
Together with the emerging linkage between human security and security
agendas of the donor states, another concept, “Responsibility to Protect” also
emerged immediately after 9.11, as was mentioned briefly above. This newconcept was embodied in the document “Responsibility to Protect: the Report of
the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty” (ICISS,
2001). Practically, this means that a new mobilization of budget for military
security was incorporated to development, and thus security issues wereinserted into the practices of aid institutions that prioritized poverty reductionin the 1990’s.
Within this context, international institutions such as the World Bank
advanced its development policy by incorporating the idea of development asinterlinked with international security. The World Bank started to administerprojects in areas like Afghanistan where such policies were previously a task oforganizations like UNDP and UNICEF. For example, as early as in 2002, theWorld Bank started a project entitled “Emergency Education Rehabilitation
and Development” through which it helped increasing access to formal and nonformal education for women and girls (World Bank, website).
The shift of such programs to the World Bank indicates a broadening of thebusiness of reconstruction to new organizations due to the new conceptualizationof security and development, which allowed for a new budget allocation.
Furthermore, in the last years we have witnessed the privatization of some ofthe security actions, with the appearance of new contractor security companies
that participate in areas that traditionally were exclusively dealt by state
institutions (Gortazar et al, 2012, p.117).

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An example for this phenomenon is the security companies that are involved
in securitization strategies in conflict zones or that, as in the UK, deal with the
management of migrants by organizing the detention, transportation andprofiling (see later discussion in this article).
In September 10, 2012, the UNGA adopted by consensus the resolution (A/RES/66/290) in which UN member states finally agreed on a common
understanding of Human Security, its scope, and the difference of reach between
human security and the concept of responsibility to protect. The mentioned
resolution was closely based on the Japanese understanding of the concept, inwhich human security implied the protection of individuals against common
threats including those of underdevelopment. The resolution clearly underlines
a distinction between the concept of Human Security and Responsibility toProtect, noting that the concept of Human Security is based on sovereign
responsibility, in which providing security is the primary responsibility of
governments and the support of the international community is only
complementary and of an auxiliary nature (Tarnogórski, 2013).
2.2. Human Security As an Instrument of Foreign Policy
Along with the initiative to link security and development came an
opportunity for middle power 2 countries like Canada and Norway to present
their initiatives wrapped around human security as a new leitmotiv of foreign
policy, one invested with much legitimacy (Suhrke, 1999). The launch of thisview in 1998 by foreign ministers Lloyd Axworthy and Knut Vollebaek, with theauspice of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the time, Sadako Ogata,
opened a trend of human security insertion in foreign policies as well as the useof the term by “middle powers” to distinguish their initiatives as progressive
and humanitarian (Suhrke, 1999, p. 256).
This scheme injected the term of human security with the prevalent valuesof the 1990s, a time where conflicts like those in the Democratic Republic ofCongo (DRC) or in the former Yugoslavia got the attention of the media andinternational community. The humanitarian crisis of that decade helped
mainstreaming a number of issues relevant to scenarios where interstate wars
and civilian casualties and abuses were prevalent. This trend, although stronger
until the middle of the first decade of 2000, has followed up to our days andshifted towards Europe.

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An example of this is the movement to embrace human security as theguiding theme behind EU’s security policy, present since the 2004 Barcelona
Report of the Study Group on European Security and followed by the 2007
Madrid Report A European Way of Security and a number of efforts to link theEuropean security and foreign policy agenda with a discourse soaked in humansecurity principles, in which security of Europe is partly understood as theresult of securitizing the outside world. (Martin & Kaldor, 2010).
As foreign policy, the concept of human security in its beginning was
legitimized by its link to the principles of human rights, international
humanitarian law, together with the above mentioned ideas of humandevelopment (Suhrke, 1999, p. 266). The middle powers prioritized the particularfocus in humanitarian assistance to people in violent conflicts. Canada, forexample, expressed such focus by listing that topic as its initial priority offoreign policy for advancing human security, stating that “the protection ofcivilians, concerned with building international will and strengthening norms
and capacity to reduce human costs of armed conflict” was the quintessential
aim of their new foreign policy views (Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs
and International Trade, 2003, p. 11).
Their foreign ministry also stated that “[f]or Canada, human security
means freedom from pervasive threats to people’s rights, safety or lives”(Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 2003, p. 11),and listed other four priorities following the government’s emphasis on
humanitarian assistance, the “support of peace operations, conflict prevention”
and lastly “governance and accountability and public safety” issues (Canadian
Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 2003, p. 11).
While human security was presented in numerous times by its foreign
policy circle advocates, like Lloyd Axworthy, as the alternative to achieve the“safety of people from both violent and non-violent threats” and was explained
as “a condition or state of being characterized by freedom from pervasive threats
to people’s rights, their safety or even their lives” (Canadian Department of
Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1999), the concept was still vitally
aimed to be achieved by state assistance to the underdeveloped, and had transstate and global aims as central objective.
It is not a coincidence that some of its stronger advocates in the foreign
policy circles, such as Axworthy, were known not only by their passion for the10

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new concept but also as advocates of soft power as a strategy necessary for theintentions of middle power states. To the suggestion that “securing people is notjust an ethical imperative, it is the best strategy to secure the state and theinternational system” (Tadjbakhsh & Chenoy, 1997, p. 21) the middle powers
added the possibility of taking a new perspective in the international relations
agenda to make themselves visible and powerful within the existing international
system, under an umbrella of values that are very hard to dismiss.
As a coalition, Canada, Norway and Japan, played a major role pushingimportant items of the new global human security agenda, including theKimberly Process, international regulations regarding child soldiers, thecreation of the “Responsibility to Protect Commission,” “the Convention to Ban
Landmines and the International Criminal Court” (Owen, 2008, p. 35). Alongwith these international law achievements in securing people globally, thepurpose of making themselves visible as mainstreamers of a new agenda wasalso attained.
During the years that Canada and Norway presented their human security
view, they were perceived as virtual superpowers by leading a new trend of
foreign policy. Individually, as explained by Suhrke, for Canada the humansecurity agenda help the country accomplish its wish to appear in theinternational arena as a middle power with its own distinctive initiative and as
a way to differentiate itself and its policies from those of the United States; for
Norway, human security was also the opportunity for the promotion of powerfulideas to give the country a new presence in global politics (Suhrke, 1999).
In the case of Japan, aside from the possibility to make itself more visible
in a positive light by the international community, human security served
national interests by providing a new way, new approach and new reach forJapan’s foreign policy which is heavily constrained by a peace Constitution. In
this particular case, Japanese human security policy has gone as far as being
internalized by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency for peacebuilding projects, in order to make development assistance more necessary, as
in the cases of Japan’s aid assistance to Niger and Rwanda.
While human security has been frequently translated into a new form of
foreign policy agendas and national security objectives intertwined, thequestions asked by David Baldwin regarding the definitional debate of humansecurity take major importance.

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A greater specification of the term in relation to their pertinence is to bequestioned: security for whom, security for which values, security from whatthreats and by what means. If human security is carried out by the developed
states, though their foreign policy agendas, or international institutions, it ismore likely that the answer to the questions are: the security for the membersof the countries involved in its promotion, of their values, by the securitizationof the conflict affected and poor populations outside their borders.

3. Human security in Non-conflict States
3.1. The Question of the Invisibility of the Vulnerable in the Developed WorldIn general the term human security has achieved, by linking security anddevelopment and by the promotion of its humanitarian principles, a shift of thecommon international protection mechanisms from individuals qua citizens to
individuals qua persons 3. Yet, important challenges remain to acknowledge thevulnerable populations within non-conflict states. An important obstacle forthis shift lies in the fact that the human security situation is often measured by
the response or the absence of threats, which normally is believed to be properly
managed by the political mechanisms and institutions in the developed world.
Many authors have touched upon the idea of human security being focusedon the problems of the underdeveloped states. Among them, Mark Duffield
explains on his document Human Security: Linking Development and Security
in an Age of Terror, a distinction between the insured and non-insured
populations of the international arena. Duffield uncovers how, the developed
world aims to facilitate with the notion of human security, the living of
populations that are located within absent or ineffective state-based or regulated
life-support mechanisms, which he refers to as the ‘non-insured’ populations(Duffield, Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror, 2005, pp. 1,
4). According to him, the main target of human security is the problematic of
weakened or failed states being unable to secure their population’s safety, forwhich human security standardizes the acceptable level of response to threatsin the un-insured world. This standardization has been done through thedevelopment of policy and evaluative tools for human security in which theconcept is defined by threats, but that unintentionally leaves out the vulnerable
inside non-conflict states.

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A good illustration of this phenomenon is the response mechanisms tovulnerable people affected by a similar natural disaster in the US and Sri
Lanka. As has been noted by many scholars and journalists, the United Statesis the state which has the largest gap between the rich and the poor and thus
has a big population living under poverty line (Shipler, 2004). Yet, it goes
without saying that the vulnerable in the US can be in theory considered as atarget of the US government’s responsibility to protect. Yet, it is much notable
to observe that the US victims of Hurricane Catalina were left out much longer
period of time and had continued to live under temporary shelters than the
Tsunami affected victims in Sri Lanka who received a larger aid flow fromabroad more than the Sri Lakan government was able to manage. Thisphenomenon of American victims is indicative for how the vulnerable in nonconflict zones is presumed to be outside the realm of the standardized humansecurity threats that are believed to exist only in fragile states.
The other notable example of human insecurity phenomenon is the questionof the so-called “Working Poor” in Japan. According to the statistical data madeby the Ministry of Labor and Health, about 10% of the male working population
and approximately 14% of the female working people were categorized as theworking poor in 2007, which means those who earned money by work but wereactually living under the poverty line defined by Japan’s government（日刊社

会福祉ニュース・レビュー、特集：貧困問題、2001 年 8 月 1 日）．Those who fit
into this group were, as a matter of fact, poorer than those who receive anallowance given by the public assistance system in Japan. Thus, Japan, one of
the largest donor states to the developing world, is not an exception in the sensethat socio-economic vulnerable groups living under the subsistence threat exist
but that the government of Japan has not fully provided protection yet.
The above-mentioned problems of the presence of human insecurity in thedeveloped world show that it is crucial for scholars and policymakers to reconceptualize human security in non-conflict zones. Conceptually, the lack ofacademic attention in this area can be explained by the way human security
has been conventionally defined. Most scholars involved in the definitional
debate of human security, such as Taylor Owen, Kanti Bajpai and King andMurray, explain that in order to give practical applicability to the discourse ofhuman security, the advocates of humanitarian principles as well as those ofhuman development principles envisioned security along two basic trends, theHuman Security in Non-Conflict States

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first one supporting a wide vision that included development concerns known
as freedom from want, and a second dealing with more immediate humanitarianneeds expressed in the notion of freedom from fear.4 These two trends haveoften been described as the foundation for the measurement and the definitionof human security in terms of threats, but have been presumed not relevant to
the developed world.
3.2 The Question of Human Security Assessment
In Duffield’s view the main aim of the international policies linked tohuman security is not necessarily the modification of the living conditions but
the promotion of strategies of self-management of risk and contingencies thatcan be achieved within the context of the non-insured populations (Duffield,
Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror, 2005, p. 8). This policy
therefore results in the creation of an implicit international standard of what is
considered to be a threat.
Furthermore, this standard of threats is reflected in the methodologies forhuman security assessment, which often seem to come to results which mimic
those of the human development index (HDI). The work of King and Murray,
Kanti Bajpai, the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Projectand Taylor Owen could be particularly useful to show particular parameters.
For example, according to King and Murray, human security is partially definedas the number of years of future life spent outside a state of “generalized
poverty” (King and Murray 2001-2002, 585). Their work could therefore beunderstood as the creation of “a function of the risk of being below a thresholdof well-being, what we can call a state of generalized poverty.” That means
falling under what the authors understand as the threshold line of humansecurity itself (King and Murray 2001-2002, 606). Thus, the very notion ofhuman security ultimately gets so close to Human Development Index (HDI)
that is composed by life expectancy, education, and income indices, and has
basically referred to well-being of people.
One of the most important reasons for the results coming so close to thoseof the HDI and other tool for assessing development is that the methodologies
that exist today for human security assessment are based in national standard
measures, failing to provide the correct visibility to problems that are supposed
to have little to do with borders and which often hide under the averages the14

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vulnerable populations living within developed countries. In other words, thestandardization of the visible/acknowledged populations, impact the visibilityor the invisibility of the vulnerable in areas that are not considered as danger
and/or risk zones.

4. The Case of Unaccompanied Afghan Children in the UK
4.1 Problems with State-centric Agencies for the Protection of Migrants
in the Developed World
As is stated earlier, the notion of “Responsibility to Protect”, which had alarge impulse in the early years of 2000, helped to vaguely address the presenceof those who were left out from state-centered view of human security, byplacing the responsibility to protect humans around the globe not only to states
but also to the international actors altogether when a state failed to protect orrepresented a threat to its own population. The emphasis on morality of“Responsibility to Protect” became particularly popular after the Kosovo,
Svrenica and Rwandan catastrophes (ICISS 2001).
Thus, this concept started to be shared in international community tosearch for mechanisms through which state sovereignty could be breached forthe sake of preventing the spillover effects of conflict to neighboring states. The
Kosovo War in particular was indicative as a case in which the EU, representing
the developed world, needed to stop the War as quickly as possible to preventthe spillover of the War to the EU itself. This is how the so-called humanitarian
intervention led by the NATO bombed the conflict area and finished up theWar.
However, there is a question in reality: what the actual actors are in chargeof the protection of vulnerable people within the state boundary in the developed
world, where migrants arrive from conflict zones seeking protection. The flow of
migrants to the developed world, whether they are refugees or forced migrants
or labor migrants, has been substantially increasing.
The case with Kosovo was, as a matter of fact, an exception in the conflictzone’s proximity to the EU. What has happened in the last decade is the massive
wave of migrants who escaped from the fragile states to the developed world.
While people who took refuge to their neighboring states are usually treated as“refugees,” migrants from conflict zones to the developed and industrializedHuman Security in Non-Conflict States

15

states are not necessarily considered as “refugees” but as illegal asylum seekers.
When the developed states receive those asylum seekers, the phenomenon
is ordinarily tackled from a legal perspective. When the so-called illegal asylum
seekers are found, whether they are from Afghanistan or Syria, they are intheory bound to be legally sanctioned. These group of people are put into
detention facilities and/or are forced to go to the third country or to the state of
their origin. There is an argument that those who reach the developed state, forexample, the EU form conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Syria are morewell-to-do than those who stay within the countries as internally displaced or
those who go to their neighboring states. Yet, even in the case in which they
arrive at one of the EU states, and living under the existential crisis, namely noplace to go, no food available, they do not receive so much protection as the
refugees who escaped to the neighboring states.
One of the most salient examples are, according to the authors’ (of thisarticle) observation, Afghan unaccompanied children in the UK. IRIM,
humanitarian news and analysis agency which serves for the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noted the sharp increase in the numberof Afghan asylum seekers in the EU, and stated that based on the report of the
UNHCR, “18000 Afghan asylum seekers exist in the 44 industrialized states” in2008 (IRIN, website). They further maintained that Afghan children under 18
who applied for asylum status in Europe increased in 2008 by 64% from theprevious year.
As the authors observed in their field study conducted in February, 2012
and March 2013 at the Refugee Council and other relevant organizations in
London, this number is just a part of iceberg as the majority of them do not
apply for asylum not knowing the process or fearing if the process would lead todetention.
Gone back to the theoretical aspects of human security and the idea of
Responsibility to Protect, a question here is the fact that the presence of suchpeople who are very vulnerable is not so visible and has not become the targetof the implementation of human security agenda internationally. There areseveral reasons for this. As is stated previously, the state centrism, which often
appears in the agencies involved in assessment and policy development linked
to human security, is the source of a number of problems that affect the visibilityof vulnerable populations in non-conflict states. First, as the current measuring

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mechanisms of human security are tending towards a creation of international
standards of human existence, they are based on some homogenous
determinations of fears and wants.
This does not mean that values and practices are looking to be spreadaround the globe or standardized the levels income, security or other measuresof human existence, but rather that the mentioned determinations are perceived
to have the same numerical value as if they were identical around the globe.
Thus, how much fears and wants (referents of freedom from fear and freedom
from want in UNDP Human Security Report) Afghan people in Afghanistan havecan be at least captured within the existing standardization system. However,fears and wants that are experienced among Afghan asylum seekers would not
be reflected in the measurement of human insecurity situations in the UK.
In this case, several issues relevant to human security end up fallingoutside this value system and stay hidden as non-threats. Authors such a Peter
Burges in his document regarding Human Security for Western Europe havetouch upon the idea that fear, threat and insecurity are the fundamental
categories of the human security complex and are founded on experience,
perceptions, memory, and emotion. They do not obey a logic of material wellbeingor physical threat” being then categories which are context dependent anddifferent for each cultural group. If such idea is right, the expansion of theconcept of human security on a common numerical measure of its threats canturn into the danger of ignoring further those whose fears and wants are far
from the reality of those who give a numerical value to them. The presence ofAfghan unaccompanied children has been, therefore, theoretically outside thescope of policymakers of the UK as one of the domestic policy issue.
A second problem related to the visibility of vulnerable populations in nonconflict states comes from a different source. The state-centric ideas of thehuman security notions mean that the way of tackling the problems and making
risks assessments on the issues of human security is done in the same way as
any other measures that are commonly used by the international community,by the use national averages. These methods repeat the faults of the oldmechanisms of security, ignoring those that hide within their methodologies.
Departing from the previous problem, when we standardize threats, we do not
only do so in a way that they determine what human around the globe should
fear or want, but also we expand such knowledge by the use of the existingHuman Security in Non-Conflict States17

measures we know, such as those of human development.
Here one can note the same pitfall of the measurement of human security
as that of the HDI. As David Chandler has largely emphasized, human security
is shifting focus away from existing mechanisms such as human development,
humanitarian law or human rights, by putting them together in a vague
strategic movement, and also helping camouflage short term strategies under
the new international fashion of human security (Chandler, 2008).
The above-mentioned aspect considered, the vulnerable in the developed
states are considered primarily as the responsibility of the state, which ispresumably able to fulfill. Thus, international society assumes not much room
for intervention. More strongly put, the concept of human security is the creationof the developed states for their own purpose of fulfilling foreign policy strategy
as stated earlier, and thus the implementation is not directed toward the people
who exist within their territorial domain. Therefore, the protection of suchpeople stays within the realm of local NGOs. In the authors’ research, this trend
was also observed. The Refugee Council in London was one of the most active
NGOs for the protection of Afghan unaccompanied children.
Thirdly, the normative legitimization of foreign policy agenda through theuse of the term human security is creating new attention of the international
community on topics like humanitarian assistance in conflict areas,
humanitarian law, and human development, but such legitimization brings
also two major problems. One problem is that human security legitimizes
security measures on topics that should be normalized or politicized, notsecuritized. This means that human security threats are not taken care ofunless a sense of emergency that calls for response exists.
This allows for measures out of the legal to be considered as legitimate, andalso allocates these problems considered as human security threats in conflictor developing states. This problem is one of the major points of criticism of
human security emphasis on the War Against Terror, and one of the reasons
why the international community might lose over time the interests on theterm while human security also loses its grounds for legitimacy. Moreover, bygiving the sense that the international actions and are focused on the, humansecurity might be helping to further ignored issues that can be potentially
dangerous for people around the globe. Thus, the realm of those who are actually
protected becomes further invisible, and the more global security risk will

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emerge in the long run.
The above-mentioned characteristics of how the conventional and statecentric ideas of human security produce the invisibility considered, it is naturalthat those who actually seek human security protection in the ordinary state,
meaning non-conflict and developed state, have not become the focus of theattention of international society, as it is presumed that such people exist onlyin fragile states and those people in fragile state are to be a target group of“responsibility to protect” or “foreign assistance” of the developed world.
In this context, an example of Afghan unaccompanied children should be
addressed in the UK. There is no statistical data about how many Afghan
unaccompanied children have existed in the UK. Yet, it is recognized by the UK
parliament that Afghan children represent one of the largest unaccompanied
alyssum seeking children in the UK (Parliament, UK, website). Thus, the next
section will devote to the reality of such children mainly based on the authors’
field research in 2012 and 2013 as stated above.
4.2. Afghan Unaccompanied Children in the UK
An important example of how vulnerable groups in non-conflict states fallunder the cracks of the present understanding of human security is the case of
those who, due to their legal status, live clandestinely outside the state systems
such as illegal migrants. Although though the lens of security, migration is oneof the most important topics for risk prevention, the study of the link between
human security and illegal migrants in non-conflict states has been marginalized.
Yet, in the last decade we have witnessed an important development on thesurveillance industry as well as in the tightening of policies for migration
controls in developed countries around the world.5 Among different modes of
migration that are happening globally, the migration of people flying countries
in war experience can show us a big gap between the protections thatinternational law grants to them and the realities that those people actuallyencounter.
Among various socially vulnerable groups of people, unaccompanied
children seeking asylum who are originally from conflict zones are one of themost vulnerable people in migration. The field research conducted by theauthors regarding the case study of unaccompanied Afghan children arriving at
the UK can shed light on key findings regarding human security in non-conflictHuman Security in Non-Conflict States

19

states.
All Member States of the European Union have signed up to a range ofinternational and domestic legal instruments pledging to protect not only theircitizens but also non-citizens who are unable or, owing to well-founded fear of
persecution, unwilling to benefit themselves of the protection of their country oforigin. While this commitment is in line to the ideals of human security, inpractice, large groups of non-citizens remain unprotected and in situations ofhuman insecurity.
While the literature review on the development of EU asylum policy hints
that in fact the European Union asylum standards have become less restrictivein the last years, it is the opinion of experts such as Joly and Brouwer (based on
author’s interviews) that the adoption of EU level cooperation on asylum andmigration has lead towards a tightening of the rules for reception. This means,that the reality of reception contradicts the expansion of the policies that appear
to be more migrant/refugee friendly.
New EU policies grant space for new cases for protection of migrants under
the label of “Subsidiary Protection,”as defined in Article 15 of 2004/83/EC,
including those people who are not persecuted by the state but are in possible
harm from a different source at their country of origin (Piotrowicz & van Eck,
2004, p.1). Subsidiary protection is different from the granting Convention
refugee status and is often considered a temporary residence permit forcompassionate reasons. What legal protection asylum seekers receive isdetermined by the way each member state of the EU interprets various
conventions, agreements and the EU Council Directives.
According to European Council for Refugees and Exiles, a directive called“the Directive 2011//95/EU” was issued to set up standards for the qualificationof third-country nationals or stateless persons as beneficiaries of international
protection so that the harmonized criteria within the EU is implemented to
identify people for Subsidiary Protection (ECRE, 2011, p.1). However, whenlooking beyond policy, the overall practices for dealing with migrants throughEurope, including border control, voluntary return and handling of
unaccompanied minors, have impacted asylum-seekers by making it moredifficult to apply for asylum, enter EU territory, be officially acknowledged oncein the territory or be safe from fear or want while awaiting for the response to
their status claim.

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In other words, a paradoxical situation is taking place, where the legal
system for asylum has become more protective of migrants while in practice,
the authorities in each country appear to delay to legal acknowledgement of the
refugee/asylum seekers in order to avoid the new legal obligations resulting
from the new reception policies. The result of these practices has created newvulnerable groups in Europe in which human security is at threat.
The practices in the UK and Ireland fall into a representative case statedabove. The EU revised its Directive on the definition and content of refugee andsubsidiary protection status in 2009. But, as is known well, both countries opted
for the 2004 qualification directive but not for the 2009 directive. Within thesecontexts, according to the field research by the authors of this article, the caseof unaccompanied children in the UK showed two important findings.
First, the level of vulnerability of young males appears to be higher thanthat of young women for two reasons. The first reason is plain demographics.
The majority of unaccompanied children are male (Rousseau, 1995). While theexact numbers remain uncertain due to the fact that many unaccompanied
children enter and remain in Europe trying to remain invisible to the authorities,
it has been estimated that in the Netherlands for example, about 50% of
unaccompanied children that entered the country in 2011 were from Afghanistan,and that from those 9 in every 10 were males (Winter, 2013). The reason is thatin conflict areas, families sent boys away so they won't be recruited into combat
or because they are considered to have more opportunities to find jobs in anothercountry than girls (Mehraby, 2002). Thus, we can say that there are moreunaccompanied young males than females.
The second reasons is that while girls and young women are more often
than males pray of human trafficking, the actual mechanisms of protection to
respond to such threat are more of less well established. Child victims of
trafficking are those children “who are recruited, transported, harbored andreceived for the purpose of exploitation“ (Council of Europe Convention on
Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, 2005). But young males that are
smuggled into Europe do not fall in this category. Their situation is not exactly
seen as an emergency, reason why the institutional mechanisms of protection
and also their classification by the international community as a case of humannon-secured population do not see them as priority. Yet, the case of
unaccompanied boys that arrive in the UK is that of an extremely vulnerable

Human Security in Non-Conflict States21

population.
The vulnerability of these children comes from different sources. According
to the interviews conducted in the Refugee Council at their London Office, someof the most common sources of vulnerability of this population are the following:trauma from having had escape conflict areas and be illegally smuggled into
Europe, having seen close relatives die during their journey to their hostcountry; no access to the normal institutions of protection, health, education oraccess to knowledge to their rights; language difficulties; suffer from social
isolation, discrimination and racism; lack understanding about how the asylum
and immigration system works; and having their age disputed and being treatedas adults.
This last problem, means that as the procedures to established the age of achild, it is often the job of the first person to hold an illegal immigrant indetention to determine if this person is a minor or not. Being phenol-typicallydifferent can cause an authority to wrongly assess the age of a boy, who mightlook older than his age.
The mentioned challenges signify that unaccompanied children in the UK
often choose to live in hiding and have no access to any protection mechanism.
This situation increases their vulnerability. In part, the human insecurity andthe increase of vulnerabilities of these young males can be considered the resultof the disparities between the practice and policy or the immigration and refugeeprotection policies. For example, while the UK has mechanism to protect
unaccompanied children, the practice of this protection system often overlaps
with the desire to keep tight immigration control, for which children are seen
with suspicion and put in circumstances that scares them from trying to findways to reach the channels of protection that are set by international law.
Another important phenomenon to notice is the fact that EU states
generally have stigma of how to cope with the infiltration of Jihadists, or Islamic
radical and militant groups since 9.11, 2001. Young male Afghan migrants in
Europe, more than girls, as found through a number of interviews in the UK,seem to be the group which most European policing authorities seek to avoid
and thus to expel due to the stigma attached to them as possible members ofjihadist groups.
As the Dublin Pact II states that whichever country within the EU receives
first the asylum seeker is obliged to take responsibility in the process of the22

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asylum claim, with new and friendlier policies EU adopted, policing authorities
seem to go to great lengths to avoid such acknowledgment, in particular when
dealing with young males.
The research conducted so far opens new lines of thought for dealing withhuman security within developed countries and will assist the creation of a newframework for the analysis of the vulnerable populations in Japan with humansecurity and gender perspective. It is hoped that the policy-practice disparities
analysis will also lead to a number of recommendations for development of
migration and human security policy where such paradoxical situations do notexist.

5. Conclusion
Human security that emerged in the 1990’s was an epoch-making concept
not only for scholars’ enlarging fields of research in multi-faced research subjects
related to conflict studies, peacebuilding, the study of human rights and etc.
Yet, the application of the concept to development aid was focused on the conflictzones: how to protect “people on the move” in conflict zones from fear and want
has become a key foreign policy agenda particularly of the OECD member
states.
However, with a glance at the question of migrants originated from conflictzones in the developed world, it is obvious for international community to needto extend the scope of security issues of conflict zones to the security policy
agendas of the developed world. In fact, as stated in the above-mentioned
discussions, the so-called securitization of development contributed to thedeveloped world’s extending the idea of human security to mainstreaming
security oriented programs in the conflict zones where the stakeholders of thedeveloped world have engaged in, but not to the protection of migrants and/or
asylum seekers from the conflict zones who actually exist within the developed
world.
Moreover, the expansion of neo-liberal economy in the field of security
apparatus also exacerbated the vulnerability of such population. Helped by thepitfall of the measurement system of human security, human insecurity
situations in the developed and industrialized societies are not visible but are
being escalated. As long as security does not mean sate security today as wasHuman Security in Non-Conflict States

23

developed by the introduction of the concept of human security, the protectionof the vulnerable in the developed world, particularly the migrants from conflictzones should be better addressed as the subject of conflict prevention and of
human insecurity on the global level.
The case of Afghan unaccompanied children in the UK only envisages apart of the growing gap between the theory and the practice. Reconceptualizing
human security is needed to cover the over-arching phenomenon of migration,
not necessarily conflict driven migration per se, but also economic immigration
into the non-conflict, developed states.

Endnotes
1 The Word Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s new focus on poverty alleviation are
particularly significant since it is a shift from the previous goal of increasing growth, a movethat for many scholars, such as King and Murray, is an important example of UNDP’s humansecurity approach on human development.
2 Middle powers are the countries traditionally known within the discipline of international
relations as the states which although do not hold a superpower position still have large
influence in the international arena. Canada, Norway and Japan are well known middle powers
which have used the term human security in the last two decades to differentiate themselves
and to exercise their influence through foreign policy.
3 For more on this topic see the work of Krauze and Williams.
4 Freedom from Fear generally refers to the human security approach that centers in theprotection of individuals from violence and other forms of physical threats, focusing its efforts
on emergency assistance, conflict prevention and resolution, and is often referred to as thenarrow approach of human security. Freedom from want, known as the broad perspective ofhuman security, is understood as a more holistic view of the concept as it includes hunger,
disease and natural disaster as sources of human insecurity.
5 In the words of Sadako Ogata: “several key elements make up human security. A first essential
element is the possibility for all citizens to live in peace and security within their own borders.
This implies the capacity of states and citizens to prevent and resolve conflicts through peacefuland nonviolent means and, after the conflict is over, the ability to effectively carry out
reconciliation efforts. A second element is that people should enjoy without discrimination all
rights and obligations - including human, political, social, economic and cultural rights - thatbelonging to a State implies. A third element is social inclusion - or having equal access to thepolitical, social and economic policy making processes, as well as to draw equal benefits fromthem. A fourth element is that of the establishment of rule of law and the independence of thejustice system. Each individual in a society should have the same rights and obligations and be
subject to the same set of rules. These basic elements which are predicated on the equality of all
before the law, effectively remove any risk of arbitrariness which so often manifests itself in
discrimination, abuse or oppression” (Ogata, 1998).

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Scholar Mary Kaldor, has taken this link a step further by identifying that “the indicator thatcomes closest to a measure of human security is displaced persons. Displaced persons are typicalfeature of contemporary crisis, both natural disasters and wars” (Kaldor & Martin, 2010, p. 4).

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Abstract
Over the last two decades, the concept of human security has become
central to the study and policy of development and international relations. Yet
the use of the concept has mostly focused on responding to the vulnerabilities of
populations in fragile or conflict states. The present article aims to explore howhuman security can be extended to respond to the vulnerable populations in
the developed world and underline the importance of drawing attention to thecircumstances of the vulnerable in non-conflict states.
In its first two sections, this article explains the origins and linkageof human security with the problems of the fragile and conflict countries
by exploring first, the link of development and security; and second, thedevelopment of human security as a tool of foreign policy. The following section
aims to provide an overview of the limitations of the concept to deal with thevulnerable in non-fragile states. It is found that the expansion of neo-liberal
economy in the field of security apparatus also exacerbated the vulnerabilityof such population. Helped by the pitfall of the measurement system of humansecurity, human insecurity situations in the developed and industrializedsocieties are not visible but are being escalated.
The final section of this study sheds light on the example of the Afghanminors in the UK as a particularly interesting illustration of the pledgesof vulnerable populations in ordinary (non-conflict or fragile) states. As isobserved the case of the Afghan minors, the protection of the vulnerable in thedeveloped world, particularly the migrants from conflict zones should be better
addressed as the subject of conflict prevention and of human insecurity on the
global level. Reconceptualizing human security is needed to cover the overarching phenomenon of migration, not necessarily conflict driven migration perse, but also economic immigration into the non-conflict, developed states.