building Commission (2005) in the UN. These new UN institutions have taken an
interest in addressing intra-state conflict in Africa and Asia.
Human Security and Peace-building: Concepts and Norms
The 1991 First Gulf War was a turning point in Japanese foreign policy when the
country was severely criticized internationally and humiliated for not making any
manpower contribution despite offering US$13 billion to the allied war effort. Tokyo1
subsequently resolved to play a more active role in international affairs. In actuality,
the impulse to play a larger role commensurate to its economic weight (rather than to
punch below its weight) had not been absent. Then Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo
articulated his doctrine to play an active political role for peace and stability in
Southeast Asia three years after the 1974 violent riots in Bangkok and Jakarta against
then Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei’s visits. One of the Southeast Asian complaints
then was that the Northeast Asian giant was an exploitative economic animal. Even
before the First Gulf War, Japan was actively seeking to play a political role to deal
with the civil war in Cambodia.
Prime Minister Obuchi’s articulation of the human security concept did not
emerge from a vacuum but a long-standing desire that Japan should play a larger
security role given its status as a great economic power. During his tenure, Obuchi
also supported a ban on landmines (which took place during his tenure) and a
maritime security role especially anti-piracy for Japan. Besides the desire to play a
larger security role beyond economics, the human security concept gained traction
because it was acceptable to the political mainstream and public opinion. After all,
ensuring the security of communities and individuals seems like a good thing and
therefore uncontroversial insofar as the SDF is kept out of harm’s way.
That Japan found the human security idea attractive was also due to its
sensitivity to international ideational trends and norms in the 1990s. In that decade
after the Cold War, the world and the UN were confronted by deadly intra-state
conflict. Ideas defining human security as either “freedom from fear” or “freedom
from want” became more popular and were incorporated in various UN documents to
address conflicts which are within rather than between states.v In the case of peacebuilding,
the concept was first introduced by former UN Secretary General Boutros
Boutro-Ghali in his policy paper titled “An Agenda for Peace” submitted to the UNSC
and the General Assembly in 1992. This paper proposed a four step seamless
approach by the UN to address effectively issues related to peace and security,
namely, preventive diplomacy, peace-making, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding.
Japan eventually embraced the new international norm of peace-building as
desirable.
In 1991, Japan dispatched its troops for UNPKO, the first time its military
has gone abroad for a mission since the end of World War II, to Cambodia. Despite
vociferous resistance from the Japan Socialist Party (the number one opposition party
then), liberal newspapers, and a pacifistic public, the idea of Japanese participation in
UN peacekeeping gradually won public acceptance, in part, because no SDF member
were killed in Cambodia. By the time the SDF was dispatched to East Timor for
UNPKO, the public had accepted the idea of SDF’s participation in UNPKO as their
country’s contribution to regional peace and stability.