written by M. Salih Elmas printable version send your friend

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Last week, les Istanbulais lived through terrible times when an unforeseen calamity blew through the European side of the city. Meteorologists had forecasted the weather and predicted a probable disaster in particular locations before the city flooded; however, they didn’t anticipate such a catastrophe, with more than thirty people dead, hundreds of houses, workplaces and factories submerged and billions of dollars in material damages. Istanbul Governor Mr. Guler summarized what happened last week and put the press in the picture well when briefing them about the consequences of the disaster. He pointed out that the entire society and also the whole world was responsible for the flood disaster, not a particular individual person. Guler continuously affirmed that “humans made nature harm them”.[1] Yes, we, as citizens of the world, are now exhausting what we benefited and gained for the last two hundred years in return for becoming a more civilized, more modernized and more developed society with better material living conditions. Two hundred years without any concern and inquietude to environmental concerns and natural degeneration during the industrialization period and here we are: floods, earthquakes and epidemics with the fear of being victimized by any of them.

Beck’s Risk Society Thesis is the one of themes of the most notorious academic debates related to environmental issues, attributing the evolution of local threats and risks like floods and earthquakes to global problems. According to this thesis, industrialization is the main pillar of modernity and modernity based on industrial economy and producing “goods”, which means “products that enhance living conditions and benefits that allow people upward mobility” in the material sense, and unconsciously generated “bads” like uncontrollable floods, epidemics and droughts.[2] If one asks if humanity has been witnessing similar catastrophes and disasters for hundreds of years, I regard it as a very naïve question. Yes, humanity has experienced such cataclysms before but they did not result in such tragedies, affecting millions of people overall. In a possible earthquake in Istanbul, for example, we are calculating the expected number of deaths to be in the thousands. Then, what changed compared to before? Ill-balanced and irregular domestic migration, unstable urban sprawl, settling on water courses, inadequate infrastructure services, incompetent urban planning and irregular urbanization…Two hundred years ago humanity was not so globally connected both physically and mentally; we were not so responsible for the results of our actions towards others and we were not debating and trying to solve the abovementioned problems that colonize the lives of billions of people. Therefore, industrialization in the way of modernity made nature get ataxia[3] and all that we experienced in Istanbul, or what Europe witnessed four years before in August in Switzerland, Germany and Austria[4] are the results of this ataxia and the illness that nature caught.

Along with the environmental dimension, it is also worth debating the security dimension of the problem we face today because of the fact that the nature is becoming the threat itself. Therefore, think again, how much do we feel we are sain et sauf? What does it mean to be secure in an environment trying to challenge us? The concept of security and our security concerns have changed broadly within the last twenty years. We all know that it is not possible to squeeze the security concept into the narrow boundaries of military issues and concerns like in the Napoleonic Wars. Or we shouldn’t consider security as a concept limited to national boundaries and antagonistic threats like in the Cold War. After the Second World War, the concept of security was very much attached to the military because of the antagonism between the two poles of the world, USA vs. USSR. Thus, for a normal citizen being secure meant just being covered and protected from the military threats of the outer world inside pre-defined borders of countries. It was based on citizenship and if you were a citizen of one country, you had to be protected by the state itself from the enemies settled outside of the state’s borders.[5] However, security in our age is more than military and more than national sovereignty. Security is now being conceptualized, not for the sake of political interests of the nation-states on the state level; it is being redefined on the basis of people, groups and individuals. Therefore, security studies have begun to analyze the concept of security on the human level with the term “human security”. 

Human security as a concept first appeared to explicate that security is more than conflicts between states and more than a search for arms to protect borders when United Nations published the Human Development Report in 1994. Social aspects of security and sustained welfare and wellbeing are main concerns in the concept and the Report emphasized sustainable human development and promoted all aspects affecting people’s daily lives, income security, health security and environmental security.[6] In that sense, environmental problems, natural disasters, their following consequences and threats and risks arising from natural ataxias are seen as a part of human life with security and stability. Floods, earthquakes and natural cataclysms alone are not the threat, these calamities are considerably critical in terms of their fatal consequences for human life. 

Thus, security studies, the concept of human security, encompasses all aspects of human life and threats coming from environmental degeneration are one side of this perspective so we should think this now: Is a life lost in a battle for state-sovereignty more valuable and worthier than the lives lost as a result of a flood disaster, or an earthquake, or an epidemic? Can one human life be compared with another, whatever the reason? Hence, the state or other responsible bodies of the state should see a natural disaster, a flood or an earthquake in this way while evolving policies within a global and broader security perspective that reckon with natural ataxias.

M. Salih ELMAS

Researcher in Sociology

E-mail: msalihelmas@gmail.com