The Rohingya Crisis, Sense of Self and the Complex Mediation of “Being”

 

Upon reading Ken Booth’s paper, I couldn’t help but think of Jacques’s famed speech in ‘As You Like It” written by Shakespeare. The opening lines go something like this:

 

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts…

 

The aspect of role-play that Ken Booth so eloquently describes struck a chord with me. As a student of International Relations, one thing was clear to me very early on. To remain detached and unequivocal about developments in the international political landscape is supposedly imperative for an objective stance. However, as Ken Booth puts it, detaching identity and a sense of self from any study politics it to render it insubstantial. Famously Carol Hanisch, an American civil rights activist in 70s wrote an essay titled “the personal is political”. And this can be applied to my perception of security issues, it is deeply tied to my sense of self.

Furthermore, Ken Booth makes an important distinction at the outset. He maps out the differences in the notions of “I” and “me”. According to Booth (1994) in terms of the development of individuals as specialists in strategic or security studies, the "me" is the identity ascribed by the profession to an individual (and therefore the identity taken on through seeing oneself in relation to those of the same profession); the "I" is the inner self, which, to a lesser or greater degree may subjectively want to play the role differently. I think in some senses, it applies to my personal journey as an International Relations student as well. In some ways Ken Booth suggests that academic journeys are governed by the current political landscapes. The Political Science students in 60s and 70s studied the Cold War, arms deterrence and militarisation because they were in the figurative sense “surrounded by it”.

On other hand, Critical Security studies provides an ever-expanding field of study. Issues of race, class, ethnicity, the environment, biodiversity, food security, gender and a myriad of others have entered the scope of the security studies. From its traditional, militarised understandings it has progressed to a sort of all-encompassing discipline. Another important aspect of Ken Booth’s paper is his insistence on meaning-making. The ultimate goal of security studies according to Booth is to discern the meaning of security at its basest conceptualisation. In a lot of ways, as has been reiterated many times, security means different things to different people.

With accordance to this line of thought, the Rohingya crisis I wrote about in my first blog post was a precarious case of state security versus individual security of a group. It points to a complex meditation on individual emancipation and collective emancipation. In some ways, it asks a question of whether individual security measures should give way to a larger group. The ‘security dilemma’ that Booth contends with speaks to this in some ways as well. Furthermore, Lene Hansen provides us with a holistic understanding of security from the Feminist perspective. Specifically, the ‘security of silence’ and ‘subsuming security’ and how it can be attributed to gender. Furthermore, how gender comes under the ambit of social security not national security (Hansen, 2000). Silencing an already persecuted minority such as the Rohingya, especially the women and children becomes a complicated matter of international politics. A simple example is the fact that even after fleeing from Myanmar and arriving at refugee camps, it makes matters more complicated. Despite having crossed the border, many of them alone with their children, Rohingya women and girls face additional challenges: insecurity, violence, very limited mobility or ability to speak up and influence decisions in their communities (Breaking Barriers for Rohingya Refugee Women, 2019).

A simple thing becomes apparent; it is possible that without an International Relations background I would not have understood the nuances and complexities of the women in the first place. But, since understanding what the Copenhagen School calls its willingness and ability to engage the widening-deepening debate in security studies, that is whether the concept of security should be expanded to cover other issues or sectors than the military and secondly, whether entities other than the state should be able to make the claim to have its threats located under the security rubric (Hansen, 2000). Our ability to understand and perceive the world is fundamentally rooted in the values we hold and our lived experiences.

My sense of self has evolved from a bystander or rather an inactive member on the side lines to actively understanding the plight of these women. Furthermore, another valid point Booth makes is about our own individual personhood. He posits if feminist theorising is correct about the relationship between individual experience and theory, then students of security should think about the implications of this for their own lives and work (Booth, 1994). This is exactly what I have attempted to do here. Threading our personal experiences and using that as a lens to comprehend issues of gender, identities and our sense of self is almost emancipatory in some sense. Moreover, as a student of International Security it makes for an interesting view of how I ‘used to’ perceive an issue as to how I perceive it now.

Additionally, to view security as essentially to be emancipatory is novel stance for sure. It argues that the irreducible unit of security studies is the individual or humans. The embedded individual is a product of their lived experiences. Thus, the intersectional individual has the choice to make certain decisions simply by virtue of them being ‘human’. Being human is to exercise that choice, which interestingly does not really consider whether it may or may not negatively impact the larger community. In exercising that very ‘choice’ we make our conception of the good life which echoes Aristotelian roots. Perhaps, the ‘choice’ the Myanmar state is making in persecuting the Rohingya is an extension of their conception of emancipation? This is quite evidently a challenging question to consider.

Lastly it can be said that my sense of self is dynamic and ever-changing. Much like how Booth perceives security to be constitutive and constituted by the political realm, I think the same can be said about our sense of self. To revert back to Shakespeare, perhaps the world is a stage and we are merely the actors, trying our best to make the smallest changes in how perceive the world. 





Art by: James C. Christensen










List of References:


  1. Hansen, L. (2000). The Little Mermaid's silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School. Millennium, 29(2), 285-306.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298000290020501 

  2. Booth, K. (1994). Security and Self reflections of a fallen realist. https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/1414 

  3.  Breaking barriers for Rohingya refugee women. (2019, November 25). Oxfam International. https://www.oxfam.org/en/breaking-barriers-rohingya-refugee-women 



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