Sustainable Development needs security, not guns

When the US Supreme Court said that States could not prohibit their citizens from carrying firearms in public this Monday, immediate questions were raised for the implications of this ruling for sustainable development.

Security is one of the most crucial pre-conditions for sustainable development. Fragile states - and cities - around the world struggle to achieve sustainable development against almost unbeatable odds: warfare and violent conflict is inherently disruptive to the prosperity of regular citizens and the planet. It creates fear-filled 'war economies' run by warlords and those who benefit from trafficking in guns, drugs, people, and illegal substances - which usually has disastrous impacts on any kind of long term developmental process and on the local environment. Increasingly, development organisations are being forced - partly through the growing concerns about terrorism, partly because in-security is increasingly impacting them - to find joined-up solutions with Departments of Defense. It is not, to put it mildly, an easy partnership.

Controlling - even elliminating - the trade in small arms is generally seen as a potential solution to some of the rampant violence in fragile states. In some areas, access to guns is higher than access to basic food stuff. It makes it easier for children to become child-soldiers, for communities to 'suddenly' erupt into violence, and for more death to happen more quickly.

But controlling the arms trade is very difficult to do. Not least, the people who financially benefit will go to great political lengths to keep those metal containers rolling off the production line and into the hands of people who intend to use them.

Other solutions include 'bottom up', community-based approaches to security. Those communities where people know one another and watch out for one another tend to be significantly safer - and far more effective - than those guarded by barbed wire and security alarms.

Given the challenges caused by free-flowing arms trades where people are allowed to carry guns openly in some of the most dangerous parts of the world - and where that fact is part of what makes them some of the most dangerous parts of the world -  one has to wonder if the recent ruling is really going to bring 'freedom' to the American people.