(Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium
The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.