Concepts, Paradigms, Elephants and Security
Concepts matter. They really matter. They can influence our interpretations and understandings of the world; where we decide to direct our time and attention; and even why and when we go to war. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has two definitions of a concept. The first definition is “an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances”. The second definition is “something conceived in the mind” (which, granted, is pretty abstract and generic itself).
For a fair amount of time I’ve been thinking about a particular concept: human security. There’s a large volume of literature on human security and the issues under its conceptual umbrella. But something I’ve noticed through many conversations — both as a participant and observer — is that there’s clearly a challenge around getting the concept to resonate well enough to become properly and comprehensively understandable (intuitive, even) by a wide range of people.
Many of the debates and discussions about ‘the human security concept’ often seem to metaphorically resemble a diverse group of people studying a four-dimensional artefact. They can name it, agree it’s a thing, and generally identify when it materialised into existence. But at the same time, they can struggle to come up with a shared description and understanding of what exactly they’re looking at.
Sometimes this also reminds me of the famous elephant meme, which depicts several blind-folded people each touching a different part of the elephant — trunk, belly, ears, legs, tail, etc. No single person can see the animal in its entirety and so each person thinks they’re touching a different type of animal. The point is that they’re all touching the same one. But they only perceive a particular aspect of it based on where they’re standing at that point in time, the limited scope of their sensory (touch) inputs, and how all of this maps onto their existing mental models of different animals.
Perhaps the struggle faced by complex concepts (like human security) to gain purchase amongst a wide variety of people might be better explained by thinking about them in terms of paradigms rather than concepts.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn explored the importance of paradigms in shaping the scientific enterprise. Tracing a number of pivotal scientific discoveries by Galileo, Aristotle and others, Kuhn argued that scientific revolutions are characterised not just by systematic progress that aggregates incrementally over time, but by shifts in the prevailing paradigm. (Here’s where we get the term ‘paradigm shift’.)
Paradigms influence how we study the world and the particular tools and techniques for doing so. But more importantly, paradigms also influence what we see as there to be studied. Kuhn believed that “something like a paradigm is a prerequisite for perception itself. What a man sees depends on both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.” In this sense, paradigms are analogous to worldviews. What you see influences what you believe, but what you believe also influences what you see.
Drawing on these thoughts and applying them to the example of human security, we can hypothesise that human security isn’t just a concept but a new security paradigm.
Viewing human security as a paradigm rather than merely a concept could help explain why conversations around human security remain so challenging, and why they can often be characterised by a feeling of re-hashing the same debates rather than breaking new ground. In short, the wide range of people working on human security from so many different angles might not only lack a shared conceptual view of security, but also occupy fundamentally different (perhaps incompatible) paradigms.
This is what Kuhn referred to as “the most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms”: “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds… Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other.” In an observation that resonates well with debates around human security, Kuhn wrote:
Usually the opponents of a new paradigm can legitimately claim that even in the area of crisis it is little superior to its traditional rival. Of course, it handles some problems better, has disclosed some new regularities. But the older paradigm can presumably be articulated to meet these challenges as it has met others before.
New paradigms face an uphill struggle against the prevailing one. But what does the trajectory of the successful new paradigm look like? Kuhn had some observations on this too:
Rather than a single group conversion, what happens is an interesting shift in the distribution of professional allegiances. At the start a new candidate for paradigm [sic] may have few supporters, and on occasions the supporters’ motives may be suspect. Nevertheless, if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it. And as that goes on, if the paradigm is one destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase… Gradually, the number of experiments, instruments, articles, and books based upon the paradigm will multiply.
Of course it’s still possible that something like human security is indeed a concept and not a full-blown paradigm. If so, it would be useful to identify lessons from the successful emergence of other security concepts, in order to identify the factors that influence a concept’s probability of success under the prevailing paradigm. For instance, the concepts of (counter-)insurgency and ‘wars amongst the people’ were fairly novel in the early 20th century but are today considered almost axiomatic. At this point an interesting question arises: when is something a concept, and when is it a paradigm? Three scenarios come to mind:
- Scenario 1: The concept is a new concept but it ‘fits’ within the prevailing paradigm.
- Scenario 2: The concept is not just a new concept but an entirely new paradigm itself.
- Scenario 3: The concept is a new concept but it ‘fits’ within a paradigm that has not yet emerged or become mainstream.
No, I don’t know how to determine which of those scenarios something (including human security) might fall into. But for now, here’s a couple of back-of-the-napkin propositions. First, when seeking to propagate a new concept, its proponents should consider whether it’s likely to be just a new concept or whether it’s possibly an entirely new paradigm. Even if that question can’t be answered conclusively, exploring the question might help.
Second, when a new concept is struggling to gain traction under the prevailing paradigm, its proponents should consider how other related concepts emerged successfully in the past, including the factors that allowed them to be successful. This might shed light on how to increase the new concept’s probability of success.
