Realism is good---it protects legal institutions from violent ethnic groups which turns ethnocentrism and prevents war.

6. The two faces of security – and of peace Security, especially state security, tends to be enacted in contexts of the violently contested political authority. Often it is enacted through violent power, rebranded as legitimate force. Small wonder that some in the development community, including those who drafted SDG 16, hesitate to use the word at all. But although security is a deeply disputed idea, it is also a highly necessary one. Security functions simultaneously as an analytical construct, as a frame for policy and as a moral narrative. It is distinct from the equally ambiguous if less contentious concept of peace. Yet, at the same time, it is often seen as essential to the preservation of peace.

Most of the things that international decision-makers, political and security elites and development practitioners do in security’s name are supposed to protect the safety and welfare of people in a world of multiple challenges and threats. However, there is a tendency to slide from global, to national, to citizen and to human security and back again, without enough serious reflection on how they interconnect and on where tensions and contradictions lie hidden. Development agencies have too often plunged into security policies and programmes, without a clear understanding of where they might lead, who would benefit and how they might go wrong.

The ambiguities stem in part from a deep-seated tension between two distinct visions of security (summarised in Table 3), which interconnect, yet are in deep tension with eachother. On the one hand, security can be seen as a process of political and social ordering, aiming to reduce violence and keep the peace. As such it is territorially organised and kept in place globally as well as nationally through the authoritative discourses and practices of power, including socially sanctioned violence. It connects to conceptions of what Galtung termed ‘negative peace’: the ending of overt violence, without necessarily transforming the conditions giving rise to this violence or attending to the quality of the subsequent peace.

In this view security is a public good delivered in principle by states, much like official or donor-driven development.29 Yet in a world where states and indeed the international order face sustained challenges, security is often kept in place also through alternative nonstate or ‘hybrid’ networks of violence and protection.30 Moreover, security is far from being an unalloyed public good. In principle, it is equally shared and socially inclusive, even if in practice it is anything but, especially at the insurgent margins where insecurity is most acute. For in practice it protects socially embedded power, established property relations and social privilege – and reinforces global, national and local inequalities.

On the other hand, security can be seen (in the vernacular) as an entitlement of citizens and more widely human beings to social peace and protection from violence, abuses of rights and social injustice, along with other existential risks such as famine or disease. It connects to the idea of ‘positive peace’, including transformations in the social conditions giving rise to violence and deepening the relationships between states and their citizens.

The vernacular understandings, day-to-day experience, resilience and agency of the people and groups who are ‘secured’ and ‘developed’ are in this view the touchstone by which to evaluate security and violence reduction. Most people fall back upon their social identities – as women and men, members of families, clans, castes, ethnic groups, sects, religions and nationalities – to navigate their social worlds, to respond to insecurity and violence and (sometimes) to organise for violence. At the same time, these identities are written into the structures of power and inequality, being deployed to establish hierarchies of citizenship and patterns of exclusion. Ensuring that security is inclusive and not simply the security of particular groups or the property of the well-armed, powerful and wealthy, is fraught with difficulty and must be negotiated at multiple levels.