Jude Lal Fernando – « Rethinking Human Security »

Georgio Shani, a scholar based in Japan, has argued for a non-Western and post-secular understanding of human security in countering the hegemony of the existing human security discourse.^[1] Here Western hegemony means political dominance through military intervention and economic dominance through neoliberal governmentality both of which are presented as a civilizing, liberalizing, and democratizing mission. Post-secular signifies an awareness and recognition of plurality of cultural-religious worldviews within which our understanding of human dignity is imbedded.^[2] However, one could read Shani as linking human insecurity simply to the ‘failure of the states, in the North as well as the South, to recognize the increasing cultural diversity of their populations…’.^[3] Thus Shani’s critique and his interest in the post-secular overlook the deliberate silencing of critically reflective cultural-religio strands and the deliberate promotion of their fundamentalist versions in the public sphere. 

It is worth recalling that post-secular thinking emerged mostly in the West particularly as part of the explanation given to the rise of militant fundamentalist religious movements across the world and their impact on the public sphere.

Some of these movements, themselves resulted from numerous military interventions and neoliberal restructuring of economies after the Cold War as a form of neocolonialism. In the Korean conflict, the most ardent proponents of international military intervention come from the fundamentalist type Christian evangelical churches in the USA and South Korea which preexisted the recent rise of fundamentalist groups. These churches see North Korea as the devil and continuously pray for the downfall of the regime. Such moves reflect an ideology that has blended together both Christian exclusivism and political supremacy.

Nevertheless, there are other Christian communities whose faith has given rise to a different vision and hope of human security. Such voices have emerged out of critically reflective religious practices based on experiences of Pacific and Korean wars in particular. Recognition of such a religious plurality does not mean going back to an atavistic uncritical religio-nationalistic past, but to critically envision faith from the perspectives of the victims of both secularist (coopted UN human security discourse and its civilizing mission) and religious (religious fundamentalist movements) hegemonies.