2. LESSONS
A. Human Security Approach in Conflict Affected Areas (Lesson #2628)
Observations:
Human security is composed of three key principles: freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom
from indignity. Civil society peacebuilding efforts, using a ‘people first’ human security approach, provide
a framework that ensures that the most vulnerable will be active stakeholders in creating sustainable peace.
Discussion:
In early 2012, I resourced a peacebuilding project for a Dutch humanitarian organization in Afghanistan.
The project was to strengthen civil society capacities in four Afghan provinces in effectively resolving and
mitigating conflict while enhancing the status and inclusion of women and opening a national debate on
peace and conflict resolution. The project included linking state and non-state actors in these peacebuilding
efforts. The project covered Bamyan, Faryab, Kandahar, and Takhar provinces.
The first task of the project called for a baseline survey. My job was to train data collectors in the
fundamentals of peacebuilding and then help design the survey questions. At the end I then aggregated
data from a baseline survey coming from these four provinces. When the data was all collected, I was
surprised that the security concerns that I expected to see as most pressing were, in fact, at the bottom of
the list… if listed at all. I expected terrorism, local warlords, and attacks from the Taliban or the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to be the biggest threats to security. Instead, what the
residents in rural areas of the country were far more concerned with were things such as poverty,
unemployment, conflicts with neighbors, family feuds, cultural conflicts of early/forced marriages, as well
as land and water disputes. Many of these, survey respondents reported, could escalate into serious violence
if not contained. This gap in what I, as an outsider, speculated, and what local people experienced as the
most pressing insecurities, was quite profound. By focusing on the wrong insecurities, I could have
inadvertently and unintentionally increased their insecurity. Designing the most useful programming came
about by taking the time to listen to their concerns through the mechanism of a baseline survey.
A security sector response to localized violence through the lens of national security threats would have
missed the mark in terms of addressing the most imminent security needs on the ground in these provinces.
Programs to equip and train local security forces to respond to terrorism, for example, would not have
addressed issues of land claims. What was more effective in reducing local conflicts was an enhancement
of the negotiating and mediating capacity of the local elders (“Shurah”). In conflict affected areas, a human
security approach develops processes that listen to civil society perspectives, trusting that through their
access and connections they know best what their constituent security needs are.
Developing ‘people first’ processes is complicated, takes time, and perhaps most significantly, takes trust
between security stakeholders. Partnering with civic groups is effective because they have entrée, trust, and
cultural competencies to interpret the local context and realities. Because of this access, civil society groups
have constraints that need to be understood and appreciated by outsiders. The trust given to civil society
groups by local communities necessitates that they are not viewed as partial to one or the other side in a
conflict and have an independence from parties vested in the conflict. They work at empowerment of
vulnerable citizens and their access is based on mutual consent and transparency. As such, these civil
society groups sometimes have direct access to key conflict affected areas and even combatants. Civil
society groups do not think in terms of ‘good guys and bad guys,’ but rather in terms of ‘conflict
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