Human security and «excluding inclusion»: The frontiers in the active and passive citizenship exercise

This article considers two current topics: citizenship and security, in relation with a phenomenon denominated here as «excluding inclusion» (Agamben, 2003: 38). The first topic emphasizes the active participation while the second one, conceived as human security, highlights the acceptance of oppression due to fear and/or insecurity, in accordance to diverse situations in which an individual can be involved. Thus, human security will be studied as one of the main elements required by the exercise of democracy, devoted to its basic principles. In this sense, a democracy needs some givens to exist. Therefore, human security reinforces an active citizenship or even a critical citizenship, whereas an «excluding inclusion» provokes a lack of citizenship, or even a limited one as a result to the prevailing conditions of being marginalized. This provokes that both variables are considered as mutually exclusive, with direct consequences in the participation and involvement in the decision making process from a State. Hence, the guiding research question will be: How to constitute true active citizenship in the midst of pseudo-inclusive processes? As a hypothesis to solve this query, we would propose that: There is a positive proportional relation between security of any kind and the rise of participation and development; thus, the absence of security, specifically of human security brings to those who undergo it, to allow acts of «excluding inclusion». As a consequence, they become less active or participant. In this sense, is the latter type of inclusion an unavoidable obstacle in the construction of citizenship? Does human insecurity firstly drive to the acceptance of «excluding inclusion», and then to its consequential lack of security, that finally develop a vicious cycle? How to reconcile democracy, human insecurity, and a kind of inclusion that differentiates between the citizen who is currently constructing its economic, social and political community from a citizen who is considered as vulnerable and, therefore, as someone who could be sacrificed? These are also some questions to be considered in the paper.