The “Uninvestigated”: Human Security Research for a Political Scientist
By Michio Umegaki
Encountering the Uninvestigated
This March, I visited Mr. Tan and his family for the fourth time in six years. More than one year had passed since the last visit. With the temperature approaching 100 degrees under the clear blue sky, he still looked relaxed with his usual smile. He had a new leg below the right knee, made of acrylic material, replacing the old wooden makeshift. He was giving an instruction to Liem on how to rinse rice before cooking it for lunch.
Liem is a 17-year old Down Syndrome daughter, who is identified as a “victim” of Agent Orange, the infamous dioxin-producing herbicide that the US sprayed in Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. She was born after two healthy boys and one baby girl who died young at age 5. Though 17, Liem is no taller than 5 feet. She has a younger sister, who is healthy, but I never saw the two playing together. Liem stays home often entertaining herself alone by mimicking a letter-writing adult, a fancy model changing a few clothes in her possession or simply by chasing around half a dozen puppies and dogs of various sizes. She is immensely intelligent and innovative, but remains illiterate.
I did not see Liem or Mr. Tan preparing anything else. But that the family was having a lunch alone surprised me. It used to be always part of routine that the family skipped a meal or two almost every other day.
A large new house, made of cinder blocks and bricks, was now sitting next to the old, a 20 square-meter cubicle. Mr. Tan said the government had given him the fund to build this new house as part of its poor relief efforts. The old cubicle stands alone now unused but looking exactly the same as in the days when Mr. Tan and his family lived. Finally, the signs of improved life arrived.
The new house was at one end of a young and green rice paddy, which only until two years ago was no more than a wasteland. There were no yellow or red patches of bare and uncultivated spots. Mr. Tan said that it could “barely support” his and the extended family of eleven. But he was not complaining.
| “Their cash income put them right among millions of others who lived way below the “one dollar a day” poverty line. They produced children up to a perceived ceiling. But the ceiling was set by the sources of livelihood, including the meager cash income, and not by the fear of having additional child or children with birth defects.” |
He never complained all through the four rounds of observations and interviews in the past six years. He never grieved over the failure of the government to provide a special fund earmarked for the families of Agent Orange victims. He himself does not receive a relief fund for the war invalid, either. He never complained about the approaching deadlines, which were frequent and many, for payment of the bank loans. “I have my friends and relatives here I can ask for cash whenever I need to pay back the bank loans.” In fact, he never complained about the constant needs to borrow money from a local bank or from his friends and relatives just to support his family.
Born in 1947, Mr. Tan was already 27 years old when he was recruited by ARVN (Army of Republic of Vietnam.) He was injured and lost his right leg at a nearby Phu Cat Airport, a strategic airbase for the south for the duration of the war. He was spared of the treacherous “re-education” camp after 1975. Probably he was too insignificant in the eyes of the probing officials of the new, socialist government. He and his wife had been also left entirely alone taking care of the needs of their own and extended family, embracing the persistent pain in his right leg, attending to a relatively large farm land, and looking after the mentally-disabled Liem among other things. The list of chores is overwhelmingly long for the aging and disabled Tan and his wife.
Mr. Tan and his family are one of the 100 households I interviewed in three regions of Vietnam.[2] The common denominator was one or more children with birth defects, believed to be caused by direct and/or indirect exposure to dioxin-producing Agent Orange. I interviewed Mr. Tan the first time around the time when I was beginning to get, actually, exasperated by the repeat of similar or even identical answers to my structured interviews. I was beginning to concede to the advocates of quantitative analysis back in my university: Get sufficient number of cases to establish correlations among the relevant variables, get a few alternative answers to the puzzle you had set out to solve, and get out of the field.
Mr. Tan and his family represented more than themselves. Their cash income put them right among millions of others who lived way below the “one dollar a day” poverty line. They produced children up to a perceived ceiling. But the ceiling was set by the sources of livelihood, including the meager cash income, and not by the fear of having additional child or children with birth defects. Their formal education ended when they reached 10 or 11 years old, long before even functional literacy had been firmly established. The old 20 square-meter cubicle did not have an indoor toilet, neither was running water available. In other words, Mr. Tan and his family was a picture-perfect target for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.
But I was conducting research specifically on the families of Agent Orange victims. And there was nothing outstanding about the families. A political scientist in me kept pushing me to look for “regularities” unique to Mr. Tan’s group. That Mr. Tan and his family represented many groupings of people was a real problem for me. All indications were that they were as ordinary as everybody else within broad categories of families who are poor, illiterate, and generally deprived of the conditions for healthy life.
It was Mr. Tan’s responses to my inquiry that stopped me to think. We were standing in the back of the cubicle at the end of the first round of interview. Empty herbicide and pesticide bags were strewn around. Ever conscious of the purpose of my research, I asked him if the use of the herbicides or pesticides ever bothered him. Baffled, he asked if he should have and said, “Everyone here uses them.” I conceded and asked if he or anybody else at least followed those instructions for the use of the chemicals? “The instructions? We don’t have enough money to buy those things in the instructions,” he replied pointing to the illustrations of the protective gloves, garments and masks on the labels.
Mr. Tan’s responses and behaviors showed no obvious indication that perhaps the herbicide or any other toxic agrochemicals, whether for war-time or peace-time use, may have occupied a special spot in Mr. Tan’s consciousness. My expectation persisted that these families would have to exhibit a unique pattern of behavior. The expectation betrayed, I needed to reformulate the question for the research by shuffling and reshuffling words crossing my mind, and eventually came up with something that best described my bafflement: looking for something that is readily identifiable by its absence – echoing the 1994 Human Development Report’s definition of human security that it “is more readily identifiable by its absence.”
What was clearly absent from the behaviors of the families of Agent Orange victims was a sign that they were the families of particular hardship, of having the handicapped children whose cause and/or remedies were, they believed, beyond their control. Living as normally as they could, Mr. Tan and his family were effectively deleting all the indications that they were different from the rest of the community. That the families of extraordinary hardship tried to lead an ordinary life was what separated them from the rest of the communities. The hardship, I could only guess, lay in their efforts to sustain life as expected of any other member in the community.
| “Participation here does not mean merely that people attend public hearing on new policy proposals, or that people go to the polling station at each election, local or national. It entails people’s efforts with whatever resources at their disposal in defending or promoting their welfare.” |
I came upon a simple realization that just because one led life normally did not mean that his or her life was free of extraordinary hardship or threat of disruptions. I had been approaching the families of Agent Orange victims with this realization in reverse. “Normal conduct of life”, or anything ordinary, which had been beyond the purview of my investigation, began to occupy my thinking as I continued the interviews of the remaining families with the Agent Orange victims.
What is in it for a political scientist?
Preoccupation with big events such as war, civil strife, natural or man-made disasters or pandemics had always been a natural part in my intellectual curiosity. For one thing, justification for research into these cataclysmic events could be easily found in the presence of thousands or millions of their victims. Every effort should be invested into reaching to and nipping at their roots. In fact, examples of such efforts were many such as the development of anti-HIV vaccination, large-scale reforestation projects, establishment of primary care systems, or elaborate systems of flood control, together consuming billions of dollars. But while looking at Mr. Tan and his family’s life, a simple question popped up. How could we justify the efforts to deal with the cataclysmic events which would consume so much time, and, during that interim, even the life of the individuals for whom the efforts may have been invested in the first place?
There is a plenty of evidence of the consumed life during the interim. Over 15 million hunger-induced deaths per year, millions of refugees and millions more of those at home who fail to join them, millions of pandemic-triggered deaths and just as many or more casualties tucked in different parts of the world as victims of “internal strife” are but only a few samples of the consequences of the interim. None of these is, as Caroline Thomas puts it, “the product of bad luck.”[3] Misplaced policy agenda or misallocation of financial and human resources may top the list of the villains. The way we look at human life should be also somewhere high in the list. After all, we seem to set ourselves for an impossible path to choose between the protection of the future generations from the recurrence of the known calamities and that of the current generation, to whom the choice is merely to live with them.
These staggering figures, however, betray one more important point. There is life in refugee camps as there is life for those who are struck by terminal ills such as AIDS. People try to lead a normal life in as much as the circumstances allow them to, however extraordinary the circumstances may be. Attention to “normal” conduct of life, as prompted by Mr. Tan and his family, is a response to all too obvious a fact of life that people do not hinge their lives upon the fulfillment of a set of conditions nor suspend living just because it is short of certain prerequisites.
With this attention, Human Security Commission’s final report, Human Security Now no longer reads like a goal to be reached. It is a statement of an obvious: “…people are the most active participants in determining their well-being.”[4] A responsibility for a political scientist seems to me is to uncover the conditions under which this “participation” works.
Participation here does not mean merely that people attend public hearing on new policy proposals, or that people go to the polling station at each election, local or national. It entails people’s efforts with whatever resources at their disposal in defending or promoting their welfare. Of course people are not always or consistently conscious of what makes their lives short of safety and security. They are, however, aware when life becomes intolerable within the purview of their own lives. They are the spotters of human security “through its absence than presence.” Participation begins when people spot through the normal conduct of life what is wanting in it and what is threatening to disrupt it.
However, a distinction needs to be made between the lone spotters and those who work with others under the similar living conditions. For the former, the information about the threats is nothing but paralyzing. The lone spotters, sometimes the making of their own choices as evident in many of the families of my research, have no choice but to confront, or live with the threats with their own resources alone. Often the choice for them is none but to internalize the burden, and remain silent about it. The lone spotters, consciously or unconsciously, conceal the problem that needs to be addressed.
| “The state comes into existence through mutual recognition with other states, theorists of international relations claim. The assumption is that in order for a state to observe its contract with the residents within unfettered, reciprocal recognition among the states is the prerequisite.” |
The information when shared with others, on the other hand, is a part of spreading the burden of what the information says and of the following action among many, eventually lessening it on each. They help uncover the depth and the scope of the problem, the fact that the problem is not there to be dealt with alone. The step to take seems obvious: make sure these spotters are not left alone. A net result may come close to forming what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined community,”[5] except that what people share to be part of that community is not a common “vernacular” language, but the awareness of a common “problem” within and beyond the physical boundaries of their communities. I am aware of the emergence of such communities through other research projects in Northern Thailand among the AIDS victims, some of whom recognize the immensely positive impact upon the way they conduct life for the remaining life. The 100 hundred families of my research offer a stark contrast. Astonishingly, only four among the 100 knew of the other similar families in the community. Their anonymity, calculated or unintended, in the community is the clearest indication of how weighty the problem they face alone.
In order to grasp the significance of the step, one point needs to be emphasized about a policy, designed and implemented by the government to change or improve people’s life. A policy is usually designed so as to maximize its “beneficiaries” with minimum spending. Consequently, the broader the scope of the beneficiaries a policy presumes, the less tuned that policy becomes towards the specific contexts defining the needs of the people for whom the policy is supposed to be devised in the first place. Any policy, then, requires customization or appropriation of its impact within the contexts where the problem in need of solution manifests itself. Effectiveness of any given policy depends, in other words, on the people’s ability and willingness to customize the impact.
The spotters’ role in this is obvious, and the need for sharing the information thus acquired among the wider groups is obvious in keeping the customization process as their own and making it cost-efficient, i.e., less margin of error in keeping up with the intention of a broadly defined policy.
Another responsibility of a political scientist is to re-evaluate the role of the state. It is ironic that just about everyone on earth has become a member of a nation-state, the evidence abounds indicative of the state failing to observe its contract with the citizens. The evidence illuminates the problem of a minimalist approach to government, of minimizing the state’s role to the defense of national borders. What is the point of defending a national border when nothing else is achieved within it? The state, which exonerates its responsibility by merely defending the national border, could well be a “source of threat to its own people.”[6] A similar argument can be made that the state sanctioning enormously expensive projects to nip all threats of disruptions at their roots for the sake of future generation is tantamount to abandoning its responsibility for the current generation of people.
A point of departure for rethinking about the state is, again, Human Security Now, which observes that threats to security and safety may lie in the “events largely beyond [people’s and communities’] control.”[7] The significance of this observation becomes even more obvious as people’s participation, as conceived above, increases in determining their well-being. There seems to be two spheres of action where the state plays a significant role. One is a reduction of the scope of events beyond people’s control, and the other, an increase in the scope of people’s control over events.
Either way, however, the role of the state has to be conceived with caution. In the former, the state could easily justify its exercise of power in controlling the events beyond the small reaches of people and their communities, and even beyond the national border. The state in fact has done this often in the name of protecting the people within and to the exclusion of those without. In other words, the promotion of the state role thus conceived can be susceptible to opening the backdoor to bringing back in, the old national security, “quarantine,” argument: the closing of the wall so that the residents within are immune to the changes or threats without.
An alternative is to lower the guard for a prompt and thorough grasp of the nature of the threatening events so that they do not stand alien to life within the wall. The alternative role of the state is to promote the flow of necessary information so as to remove the ungrounded fear, mobilize the resources of both sides of the wall, and coordinate necessary actions unfettered by the wall. Internally, too, the state can facilitate the dissemination of information across the regions. All protective walls, which may have been installed to guard the “residents” within, may have instead merely raised the cost of relevant information. The walls should not stand in the way of sharing necessary information concerning the nature and origins of threats, and/or how people moderate their impact while customizing, or appropriating the benefits of, a policy.
In other words, the role of the state needs to be reversed from closing to opening the national—and regional—borders for promoting the dissemination of necessary information, thereby lowering its cost, and constructing the infrastructure for it. One important prerequisite for such an infrastructure to work is the presence of an international norm or a consensus that a gain by one is also a gain for the others, not a loss. Environmental degradation of distant origins, pandemics such as HIV, and widespread toxic agrochemicals are all events whose information cannot be stowed within the walls of nations, regions, or communities.
In the latter, the value of the conventional method is undeniable. The goal of formal education and other forms of organized training is, among others, to improve the ability of people and communities to digest information, reducing often prohibitively high cost of relevant information, necessary for grasping the nature, and moderating, the impact of disruptive threats to life. After all, the more people are informed, the less burden upon each otherwise-isolated individuals or communities in confronting, diffusing, and even living with the disruptive threats, and the more willing they become to customize a policy devised elsewhere within the context of their own lives.
My view of the role of the state may be overly optimistic. Yet, evidence is that the best that many existing countries manage to do is to keep their national borders intact only. Even some of the OECD members’ performance in lessening their internal income gap, as indicated by Gini index, is woeful, disqualifying it as a “developed” country. The national border, however, is kept intact. In some developing countries, nearly 10 or more percent of the working age group is suffering from AIDS. They still maintain their national borders intact. My view is neither optimistic nor idealistic.
If the protection of national borders is the state’s response to the residents’ need for at least a symbol of allegiance, where is the state’s response to the other, more pressing, needs of the residents within? The state comes into existence through mutual recognition with other states, theorists of international relations claim. The assumption is that in order for a state to observe its contract with the residents within unfettered, reciprocal recognition among the states is the prerequisite. The dominant view needs to be reversed: the state is there to respond to the residents’ needs, and residents are not there to justify the state’s claim of the ultimate authority in the eyes of other states.
My initial encounter with political science took place when the discipline was going through a sort of soul-searching: how to make the knowledge that political scientific research helped accumulate relevant in political life. It was a response to a hyper-behavioralism of the day. The term, “relevance,” dominated the political discourse then. I still remember, though, something that did not sit well with me when I came across a declaration: …as the regularities of human behavior become more apparent, the possibilities of reliable social planning on a local and global scale become greater.”[8]
Life, represented by one set of “regularities” or other, is not much more than life viewed from a distance. It may tell more about the viewer than the viewed. I always wish to know what the viewed view of themselves. The best way to do this may be to let the viewed describe their life in their own language. If I fail to extract “regularities” from it, I would have to blame it on the poverty of my conceptual imagination. But at least I may be still responding to half of one of my mentors’ claims:
One wishes to know not only what science abstractly contribute to policy but also how much one’s particular science, at a given stage of development, can actually help in working out practical commitments.[9]
Professor Umegaki taught at Georgetown University, Department of Government before joining Keio University in 1990. His research topics include: US-Japanese relations, Japanese foreign policy and politics. After joining Keio, he found myself deeply involved in the affairs of Southeast Asia, with critical views toward development economists. He has completed long term research in northern Thailand on families who are victims of AIDs; another on the families of Agent Orange victims in Vietnam; and still another, which is currently in progress, on the impact of agrochemicals on the environment and health. His English publications include After the Restoration: Beginning of Japan’s Modern State, New York University Press, 1988 and Human Insecurity in East Asia, United Nations University Press, 2009.
[1] I borrowed this notion from Gayattri Spivak as quoted in Roxana Waterson, ed., Southeast Asian Lives, National University of Singapore, 2007, p. 7.
[2] See, Michio Umegaki, Vu Le Thao Chi and Tran Duc Phan, “Embracing human insecurity: Agent Orange-Dioxin and the legacies of the war in Viet Nam,” in Umegaki et. al., eds, Human Insecurity in East Asia, United Nations University Press, 2009, pp. 21-46.
[3] Caroline Thomas, Global Governance, Development and Human Security, Pluto Press, 2000, p.9.
[4] Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now, Commission on Human Security, 2003, p.4
[5] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Vero, 1983.
[6] Human Security Now, p. 2
[7] ibid, p.11.
[8] Charles Easton Rothwell, “Foreword,” in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell, eds., The Policy Sciences, 1951, Stanford University Press, 1951, pp. viii-ix.
[9] Harry Eckstein, “Political science and Public Policy,” in Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., Contemporary Political Science, McGrow-Hill, 1967, p.124.