Securing Inequality
Ammar Shamaileh
As somebody whose research has largely focused on expressions of dissent in authoritarian contexts, when the topic of security is brought up, my mind neither turns to issues regarding the securitization of domains by the state nor the provision of security to an individual or entity. Rather, my thoughts regarding security revolve around the decision made by individuals to choose insecurity. What could compel a person to take on the risks associated with protest when it is unlikely that their participation in such protests will be pivotal? Moreover, protesters often demand the downfall of a ruling paradigm without having a clear idea of what will follow. Protesters whose preferences often vary wildly may cast aside one regime without any clear notion of what the next paradigm might look like. Thus, protest is risky, even for the pure altruist whose motivations are entirely selfless. Why would an individual contribute to a cause whose success might produce insecurity for their society?
One of the most rewarding aspects of participating in the Critical Security Studies Qatar Hub is that it has forced me to zoom out and think more broadly about the underlying theoretical mechanisms that motivate much of my reasoning on people’s decisions to choose insecurity. The opportunity to converse with academics and practitioners who often examine similar issues from vastly different vantage points has helped me identify a number of blind spots in my reasoning. Much of my own research focuses on the strategic logic underlying the decision to protest in contexts that are highly repressive. The mainstream literature on violent and non-violent protest often fails to take a bottom-up approach to understanding the scope and nature of the decisions made by individuals to take on the risks associated with challenging those who hold the reins of the state. I hope my own contribution to our hub will be to highlight the underlying logic to both the everyday and spectacular political decisions taken on by the ostensibly apolitical. This short piece offers a parsimonious reflection on how I tend to think about security, and national security in particular, in my future work.
I define security as “the absence of threats to values” possessed and for which individuals believe they are entitled. This definition follows from the canonical conceptualization of security offered by Arnold Wolfers (1952), but it additionally requires both possession of the relevant values and a sense of entitlement over such values. While these additional requirements may appear to be pedantic, it is my contention that they are crucial to understanding efforts to provide security. Without possession there is nothing to secure, and without entitlement there is no threat.
Moreover, the source of variation in security concerns resides not in the existence of values, but heterogeneity in the possession and sense of entitlement over such values. Using different terms to express these concepts, Hawi’s piece in this collection provides a compelling and thoughtful examination of the wide range of values and entitlement over such values that may be possessed, including values that are both material and ideational. The heterogeneity in the values we seek to secure are fundamentally related to our experiences, backgrounds, beliefs, and the narratives that guide our ethical/moral reasoning, as well as what we possess.
The variance in the possession and entitlement over values implies that the scope, nature, and intensity of security concerns will differ from person to person. As a result, any attempt to provide security to multiple people will produce disparate outcomes. More importantly, it is rare that any event or action will leave all within a large group of individuals more secure. For example, the decision to increase military spending to prevent attacks by a potential invading force may seemingly secure the whole nation, but the dedication of finite resources to this form of security will leave others less secure in other domains. As such, discussions of security should at least contemplate micro-level security dynamics before considering macro- and meso-level security.
How might we then think about the consequences of the state’s provision of security to a nation? Consider a tunnel-visioned state that is focused exclusively on security. I turn to this ideal type, not in order to characterize states as generally being characterized by such a nature, but to theoretically examine a state that is entirely interested in providing security. Assuming a faithful attempt to provide national security, the state’s efforts under ideal circumstances will be status quo preserving. As Menge notes in his piece, there is a future orientation to security. Within the framework I outline in this essay, the goal is to preserve control over the values I possess and believe I am entitled to own tomorrow. As such, resources dedicated to security are expended on protecting the prevailing set of entitlements and possessions, including the inequities embedded in the status quo.
The status quo protected by the state need not be static. Indeed, perhaps some of the most troubling values secured by the state relate to trajectories. The state may attempt to secure future interests that extend beyond what it already possesses, but which capture the trajectory it is on. It may be rooted in the perception that crime must be reduced at a certain rate, access to some resource needs to continue to expand, or that the economy or institutions must modernize at a particular pace. The nation’s economic security may require that disparity-producing growth be maintained at a certain rate. Policies meant to produce growth often do so at the expense of producing greater inequality. Lebanon’s economic resilience is viewed as vital to the survival of a state whose institutions are weak, yet efforts to maintain its economic trajectory has contributed to rampant inequality in economic outcomes and opportunities. In the United States, the tradeoff between security and fairness can be most readily gleaned from the debates surrounding the 2008 financial crisis and whether or not to extend lifelines to economic actors whose mere existences were perceived to be necessary to the economic security of the state but who were viewed as the primary reason for the crisis itself. As such, the provision of this form of security may simultaneously act as a legitimizing force and a producer of greater inequity in the distribution of entitlements and possessions. While this statement echoes Marxist critiques of the state, it is important to note that the inequity produced under this framework does not require that the capitalist class rule directly or indirectly.
Of course, faithful attempts at providing security to a community or nation cannot be assumed given that the agents involved in the design and provision of such security carry with them their own set of possessions, entitlements, and interests. Nevertheless, even under fairly benevolent assumptions, attempts to provide security by state actors can produce undesirable outcomes. Thus, the predatory state that actively seeks to advance the interests of certain elites at the expense of others may produce additional incentives for individuals to cast aside the security it provides, yet even a state whose actions are superficially neutral can place their societies on trajectories that compel many to prefer insecurity to the status quo.
What motivates people to plunge themselves and their communities into insecurity? To my knowledge, there is no exhaustive list. Broadly speaking, we can infer from the above that perhaps people are more willing to risk insecurity when entitlement over values that are not possessed outweigh those that are possessed. Such entitlement may be justified or unjustified, material or ideational, morally reprehensible or normatively laudable, but the belief that an individual or an individual’s group is either deserving of more than what they have or that they are on the path to receiving less than they deserve is likely to push people to rebel. When what the state secures is not relatively valuable to a segment of a population, the conditions for them to cast off the security of the state are present.
None of what is written above is meant to imply that the provision of security to a group by a state or state-like entity is inherently undesirable. It is simply a recognition of the costs baked into providing security to a group and the reasoning for why even the seemingly ideal state might be resisted by some. Such costs extend beyond those associated with the explicit protection of ruling elite interests, cronyism, and corruption and are embedded within the nature of any endeavor that seeks to provide security to a group. While these costs are to some extent inevitable, they should be contemplated when theorizing or examining the provision of security by states and other entities. No discussion of efforts to secure some interest should take place without identifying the primary beneficiaries and victims of such actions.
references
Assouad, Lydia. 2023. “Rethinking the Lebanese Economic Miracle: The Extreme Concentration of Income and Wealth in Lebanon, 2005–2014.” Journal of Development Economics 161: 103003. Read More.
Barrow, Clyde W. 1993. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neomarxist, Postmarxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Read More.
Block, Fred. 2021. “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State.” In The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy, edited by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, 32-47. New York: Routledge. Read More.
Bergh, Andreas, and Therese Nilsson. 2010. “Do Liberalization and Globalization Increase Income Inequality?” European Journal of Political Economy 26, no. 4: 488-505. Read More.
C.A.S.E. Collective. 2006. “|Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto.” Security Dialogue 37, no. 4: 443-487. Read More.
Gurr, Ted R. 1970. Why Men Rebel? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Read More.
Limberg, Julian. 2019. “‘Tax the Rich?’ The Financial Crisis, Fiscal Fairness, and Progressive Income Taxation.” European Political Science Review 11, no. 3: 319-336. Read More.
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Read More.
Przeworski, Adam, and Michael Wallerstein. 1988. “Structural Dependence of the State on Capital.” American Political Science Review 82, no. 1: 11-29. Read More.
Putnam, Robert David. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster. Read More.
Smith, Heather Jean, and Daniel Joseph Ortiz. 2002. “The Different Consequences of Personal and Group Relative Deprivation.” In Relative Deprivation: Specification, Development, and Integration, edited by Iain Walker, and Heather Jean Smith, 91-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More.
Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169-191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More.
Wolfers, Arnold. 1952. “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol.” Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4: 481-502. Read More.
World Bank. 2021. Lebanon Economic Monitor: Lebanon Sinking (To the Top 3). World Bank. Accessed May 16, 2023. Read More.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ammar Shamaileh is an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Shamaileh's research primarily focuses on the relationship between other-regarding preferences and collective action in the Middle East.
citation
To cite: Shamaileh, A. "Securing Inequality." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.