Freedom vs Necessity in International Relations: Human-Centred Approaches to Security and Development
Author(s): David Chandler (Author)
Publisher: Zed Books
Publication Date: 14 Mar. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 200 pages
ISBN-10: 1780324847
ISBN-13: 9781780324845
Book Description
The last two decades have seen the remarkable rise to dominance of human-centred understandings of the world. Indeed, it is now rare to read any analysis of insecurity, conflict or development which does not discuss the need to ’empower’ or ‘capacity-build’ local individuals or communities.
In this path-breaking book, Chandler presents a radical challenge to such approaches, arguing that the solutions to the world’s problems are now not perceived to lie within external structures of economic, political and social relations, but instead with individuals and groups who are often seen to be the most marginal and powerless. This fundamental change has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from state-based to society-based understandings of the world. Chandler provocatively argues that human-centred approaches have limited rather than expanded the transformative possibilities available to us, and if real change is to be achieved – both at a local and a global level – then a radical re-think in Western thought is required.
Editorial Reviews
Review
David Chandler’s compelling and challenging text demands that we recognize the extent to which North/Western preoccupations with and claims for human security” have become a battering ram used against (rather than for) the world’s poor and dispossessed. Chandler argues that the decidedly person unfriendly shift from state responsibility/ies for citizens to citizens reliance on themselves reeks of (neo)liberalism run amok and elides the place of the powerful. This is a salutary and powerful reminder that to whatever extent people make their own history they do not do so under conditions of their choosing, and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the degree to which the material and ideological conditions of our everyday lives continue to shaped by the all too real, actually existing, world in which we live. This critical-in several senses of the word-thought-provoking work merits much attention and discussion.” –Eric Selbin, Southwestern University
In this important and provocative book, packed with deep insights, Chandler illustrates how global problems are turned into problems of human subjectivity. This book will set the vital question of the discursive shift from the external to the internal world at the top of the agenda. –Jonathan Joseph, The University of Sheffield
About the Author
David Chandler is professor of international relations and research director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He is the author of several books and edits the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses.
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