Chapter 1
Grounding our
knowledge agenda
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This chapter discusses the notions of security and justice in the broader context of war and violence.

Present-day violence features many ‘hybrid’ characteristics as it mixes classic interstate force,[1] transnational conflict drivers (such as crime, terrorism and religious ideology)[2] and domestic struggles for power and wealth at various levels. The result is an overlapping patchwork of warfare, internationalised civil wars and transnational conflict and crime, as well as organised violence within national boundaries. Important parts of this patchwork are to some extent still shielded from the rest of the world by the veneer of sovereignty and UN-sanctioned state borders.[3] However, for all practical purposes this patchwork is intimately connected with the external world, as modern-day possibilities for violence have irrevocably meshed with its age-old legacies and practices, thanks to the waves of globalisation that have greatly reduced physical, regulatory and mental barriers to communication and movement.[4] This creates new uncertainties about the dynamics and connections between different manifestations of violence while leaving familiar questions about global anarchy and social justice intact and unresolved.[5]

Against this backdrop, ‘security and justice’ is a slightly amorphous term that tends to be invoked in contrast with the insecurity and injustice that are inevitable consequences of episodes of violence and conflict. The insecurity that episodes of violence create requires no explanation. The injustice they create follows from the growing dominance of might over right, which increases as a conflict persists.[6] The connection between the nature of violence and the conceptualisation, organisation and delivery of security and justice is intimate for two reasons. First, the nature of violence, and in particular its underlying political-economic drivers and dynamics, informs how and for whom security and justice are organized and delivered. Second, the manner of organisation of security and justice can in turn bring about violence, social order, or both at the same time (but e.g. for different groups). In consequence, at the conceptual level ‘security and justice’ represent simultaneously – and somewhat paradoxically – the opposite of violence as well as a factor that can contribute to it. At a less conceptual level, ‘security and justice’ also constitute a normative aspiration and a more technical toolkit.[7] Each of these three meanings is briefly examined below:

Security and justice as concept for establishing order
in the face of violence

The organisation and provision of security and justice offers a basic, short-term solution to the problem of socio-political disorder and violence. In its simple version, compliance with customs, rules and regulations is ultimately enforced by armed agents of the dominating political power – not necessarily the state – and the threat of violence.[8] This ensures a minimum level of safety and justice that may be profoundly illiberal and unequal, but nevertheless allows for basic human social and economic interaction.[9] In its more complex version, it will be combined with peaceful methods, in addition to threats and guns, to settle disputes and contain violence, relying on political dialogue, negotiation, reconciliation and civil resistance, which appeal to shared humanity, norms and beliefs.[10] The trouble is that such ‘softer’ alternative methods of bringing about security and justice – softer compared with ‘hard’ enforcement – tend to be powerless in the face of the lowest-common-denominator logic of violence: those who resort to it have the power to enforce their will at the cost of the life, property and rights of those who do not.[11]

Creating more sustainable socio-political order and ensuring the continued absence of violence requires the complex version of the organisation and provision of security and justice. In addition it requires substantive complementary features such as a measure of tolerance in social relations, productive economic development with a distribution of wealth perceived as sufficiently ‘just’ and an adequate measure of political inclusivity. In short, ‘security and justice’ need to be connected with other areas of socio-economic development to provide a longer-term, more sustainable solution to the problems of social order and violence. This was precisely what many sought to accomplish through the notion of human security: identifying and establishing such connections.

Security and justice as normative aspiration for how order
should be maintained

Security and justice as basic conceptual solutions to the problem of socio-political disorder do not tell us how such order will be maintained or for whom. It can just as easily take the form of a repressive security apparatus under a dictatorship, rough-and-ready security and justice provision on the basis of tribal customary practice, or accountable neighbourhood policing. Hybrids are also imaginable – and indeed prevalent. In short, security and justice are not absolute notions, but matters of degree. They are a public good by design, not by necessity.[12] The notions of civil–military relations, democratic control over security forces and accountability under the law reflect the normative ambition of expanding the – in many cases – limited provision of security and justice on the basis of criteria such as impartiality and accountability.[13] Both historically and today, this expansion is controversial. Even when there is abstract acceptance of such normative notions, their practical application in a particular context tends to be both unique and highly contested.[14] In consequence, local variations of security and justice solutions have their own morality, are diverse and can hardly be measured against a single standard. This raises the questions of what norms are locally appropriate, what functionality is acceptable and what constitutes progress.

Security and justice as a set of institutional tools with a certain functionality and legitimacy

Providing security and justice requires organisation and, in consequence, ‘security and justice’ has become a shorthand reference for the entire set of institutions and organisations that enable the delivery of security and justice as private, public or private/public goods with their different policies, rules, capabilities, accountability mechanisms and client or target groups. The variety of institutional manifestations of the concept of security and justice is huge, reflecting not only historical path-dependencies, geography and custom, but also elite interests, public preferences and recent policy choices. The upshot of this is that the normative question of how and for whom order is maintained must be considered in the context of complex bureaucratic and customary systems that have their own administrative logic and organisational interests. This suggests that, at least in the short run, the security and justice make-up of most contexts is highly determined and therefore resistant to any efforts to introduce change.

The preceding discussion suggests that, in the face of 21st-century violence, providing security and justice remains an important basic method for (re)establishing and maintaining social order while simultaneously representing a heavily contested notion about how this should happen in highly context-specific, change-resistant organisational realities. Figure 1 below demonstrates how these reflections on the meaning of security and justice in the broader panorama of social disorder and violence shape and inform the central research questions of CRU’s Security and Justice Research Programme. These central research questions are further detailed in the next chapter.

Figure 1
From analysis to research questions

From analysis to research questions
This is the classic form of organised violence that dominates history books: from the Warring States Period and the Thirty Years’ War to the Israeli–Arab wars. It is inhabited by statesmen like Otto von Bismarck, generals like Norman Schwarzkopf, and military theorists like Nikolai Ogarkov. Illustrative literature includes: Clausewitz, C. (1992) [1832], On War, David Campbell Publishers: London; Metz, S. and J. Kievit (1995), Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs, US Army War College: Carlisle Barracks; Smith, R. (2007), The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Random House: New York.
Patrick, S. (2011), Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security, Oxford University Press: Oxford; OECD (2012), Think Global, Act Global: Global Factors that Influence Conflict and Fragility, OECD Publishing: Paris; Van Veen, E. (2014), Upgrading Peacekeeping to Counter Transnational Conflict Drivers: Five Essential Actions, Policy brief, Clingendael Conflict Research Unit: The Hague.
See, for example: World Bank (2000, 2002), Voices of the Poor, Global Studies, online (consulted 18 September 2014); Collier, P. (2008), The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, Oxford University Press: Oxford; North, D., J. Wallis, and B. Weingast (2009), Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; Kaldor, M. (2012), New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Third edition, Stanford University Press: Stanford; Simpson, E. (2012), War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, Hurst & Company: London; Haugen, G. and V. Boutros (2014), The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
For example: Heine, J. and R. Thakur (eds) (2011), The Dark Side of Globalization, United Nations University Press: New York.
As for instance discussed in: Bull, H. (2002), The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, Third edition, Palgrave: London; Guzzini, S. (2002), Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy, Routledge: London. The research project on non-conventional violence of Clingendael’s Conflict Research Unit represents an initial effort to develop a better grasp of these uncertainties (see: http://www.clingendael.nl/publication/non-conventional-armed-violence-new-challenges-and-responses).
A striking example is how the war on terror has gradually led to severe abrogations of civil rights in developed as well as in developing nations.
For example: Cawthra, G. and R. Luckham (2003) (eds), Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, Zed Books: London; OECD (2007), OECD DAC Handbook on Security System Reform: Supporting Security and Justice, OECD Publishing: Paris; Sedra, M. (2010), The Future of Security Sector Reform, CIGI: Waterloo.
For compliance to be sustainable (i.e. requiring a limited amount of security and justice resources), customs, rules and regulations must reflect prevailing social beliefs, values and attitudes.
The civil wars in Syria and Iraq serve as a stark reminder that the normatively imperfect maintenance of socio-political order can be far preferable to disorder as its alternative. The violence associated with disorder can acquire such gruesome characteristics and vast proportions, gradually transforming beyond recognition the aims for which it was originally mobilised, that even a repressive dictatorship comes to be seen as the lesser evil.
See for example: Chenoweth, E. and M. Stephan (2011), Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Columbia University Press: New York; Odendaal, A. (2013), A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding, United States Institute for Peace Press: Washington, DC.
This logic is the core of many processes of state formation that seek to centralise and monopolise such capabilities. See: Tilly, C. (1992), Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992, Blackwell: Oxford; Fukuyama, F. (2011), The Origins of Political Order, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York.
Kaul, I. et al. (eds) (2003), Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization, Oxford University Press (OUP): Oxford.
For example: Huntington, S. (1957), The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA; OECD-DAC (2005), Security System Reform and Governance, OECD Publishing: Paris.
See for example: Schroeder, U., F. Chappuis and D. Kocak (2014), ‘Security Sector Reform and the Emergence of Hybrid Security Governance’, International Peacekeeping, 21:2, pp. 214–230.
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