The Militarisation of Human Security: a Contradictio in Terminis?

In June 2015, the Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations stressed that '[w]hen a protection crisis occurs, UN personnel cannot stand by as civilians are threatened or killed. They must use every tool available to them to protect civilians under imminent threat'. The same report reaffirmed the 'primacy of politics' in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions, since '[l]asting peace is achieved not through military and technical engagements, but through political solutions'. With the increased focus on the protection of human rights and building sustainable peace, human security has become a more prominent part of the UN peacekeeping strategy. However, the UN is also set on improving the success rates of its civilian protection mandates. This inevitably requires proactive military action, which seems contradictory to the UN's focus on human security as a politically informed concept. This paper explores whether there is a gap between civilian protection as referred to in contemporary UN peacekeeping policy, informed by the political language of human security, and civilian protection as a military concept. This paper argues that the so-called militarisation of human security in the context of peacekeeping operations contributes to political and military conceptions of protection being used interchangeably, which compromises the effectiveness of peace operations. This paper first explains how human security became part of the peacekeeping lexicon. It then looks into the definition of 'protection of civilians' in light of both human security and military approaches. The fact that the protection of civilians has become more political and military at the same time strengthens the idea that human security as an objective has become militarised. The deployment of the protection brigade in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the intervention brigade in Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) underline this. The main conclusion drawn is that the objective of human security cannot be adopted in what is still at large a military operation without differentiating between political and military conceptions of protection. The argument set out in this paper contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the conflation of political and military policy in the context of peacekeeping operations and how this negatively affects the effectiveness of these operations.