Whilst theories of need have prompted far less scholarship than the rights framework, there is a significant body of work that attempts to theorise human needs. This is briefly summarised here to contextualise the efforts of this study to understand the needs of victims.
In the environment of humanitarian action, needs emphasise the urgent, i.e. those required for life. There is no shared definition of humanitarian need, but evidence of broad agreement around four „core‟ elements: “the protection of life, health, subsistence and physical security.” (Darcy and Hoffmann, 2003) For the victims met in this study needs include these and other „higher‟ needs beyond the physiological that would traditionally be excluded by an emergency humanitarian approach. Here we discuss a hierarchy of needs where these include, but are not restricted to, these most urgent or basic needs.
The classic paper of Maslow (1943) presents a hierarchy of human needs, defining five levels of need (see Figure 1), beginning with physiological needs and ascending to needs which are psychological in nature. The bottom two levels of this hierarchy have been associated with basic needs. Maslow claimed that only when lower needs are satisfied will an individual seek to address the higher needs. Whilst this approach is not unchallenged it does allow us to provide a basis to assess the priorities of families of the Missing. Primary needs are likely to be physiological: to ensure that the family can continue to feed and shelter itself in the absence of the missing person, and this may translate into a desire to guarantee economic security. Safety needs are also likely to be important for those emerging from a situation of armed conflict: in some cases the fact that a family member is missing in a situation of conflict, perhaps arrested, may pose a genuine security risk to other family members.
61
Figure 1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943).4
Maslow emphasises that for children safety includes enjoying a “normal family setup” (ibid: 7), and to avoid separation from parents. Health is also placed into this category by Maslow, and in those contexts where affected families are poor, a reduction in household income through loss of the missing person‟s contribution will often impact through an inability to afford basic healthcare. Where physiological and safety needs are met the need for love becomes dominant. The absence of a spouse, a parent or a child, and resulting thwarting of such needs is at the core of “maladjustment and more severe psychopathology” (ibid: 9). The psychological need to know the truth about a missing person will be inextricably linked to basic needs for love and belonging. What Maslow called „esteem needs‟ are hugely challenged by a relative being missing. This will include those impacts occurring in the social spaces of family and community, such as stigmatisation or exclusion, as well as perceptions that an authority, such as the state, is contemptuous of the family.
Maslow fails to consider the timescale on which needs remain unmet. Clearly the basic physiological needs cannot remain unmet in the long term, but it is the nature of the phenomenon of the Missing that the problems families face are chronic in nature. As a result, economic security can be precarious in the long-term. The nature of not knowing the fate of a missing person is that it continues indefinitely, and it is not being
4
62
able to resolve the ambiguity of the loss of the loved one in the long term that most defines the particular psychological torment of families of the Missing (see Section 2.3).
Burton (1990) and others (Lederer, 1980; Galtung, 1980) have built upon Maslow's ideas to develop theories of human need. Burton posits the existence of certain universal needs that must be satisfied, and argues that conflict and instability in developing countries arise because people are denied not only their biological needs, but also psychological needs that relate to growth and development (1997). Burton, however, perceives human needs in a different way from Maslow, seeing them as a collection of requirements for human development which do not have a hierarchical order; rather, the addressing of all needs is sought simultaneously in an intense and relentless manner (Burton, 1990). The basic axioms of such a needs theory have been articulated as:
A need is a conscious or unconscious recognition of a lack of something „indispensable‟ for a state of personal equilibrium, physically or emotionally. The indispensable something, the obtaining of which relieves the feeling, is a „satisfier‟. A need can be defined only as it is relieved by the specific satisfier. (Freidman, 1990: 257)
In the case of individual victims, this approach demands that we define a need in terms of what is required to address it. This theoretical approach then suggests a methodology in which needs are defined by those most able to define the relevant „satisfier‟, i.e. the victims themselves. This suggests that a victim-centred methodology can most effectively understand such needs. The implications of Burton‟s approach are that:
…while basic human needs themselves are universal, transcending differences in class, gender, and culture, their satisfiers are culturally determined. [..] In absolutising basic human needs, John Burton and his fellow thinkers absolutely relativised their satisfiers. (Rubenstein, 2001)
This reflects the tension when attempting to understand needs empirically between the universalising tradition in both the rights discourse and development and an understanding, reinforced by the post-modern turn, that needs are highly relative. Policymakers ignore cultural projections of human needs at their peril (Douglas et al., 1998). Doyal and Gough (1991) have proposed a hierarchical theory of needs in a developmental context in which universal goals (avoidance of harm, participation) give
63
rise to basic needs (physical health, critical autonomy, autonomy of agency), also universal, distinguished from wants which are driven by personal preference and cultural environment. Basic needs then define intermediate needs which are satisfied in a culturally dependent way. An example would be the basic need for nutrition that is satisfied according to cultural norms by locally preferred and available food. However, Doyal and Gough posit that these satisfiers have universal satisfier characteristics; in this example the fact that foodstuff must satisfy a minimum daily calorific requirement. The result of their approach is a list of universal goals, basic needs and universal satisfier characteristics with claims to universality, but with a framework that understands the difference in the expression of need across contexts. This permits the possibility of a universalism around basic needs, but on the understanding that their expression and satisfaction will be local and contingent.
Sen and Nussbaum have developed another approach, formulated in terms of human functional capabilities, i.e. what people are actually able to be and to do. For Sen functionings “constitute a person‟s being” (1992: 4-7) and since functionings are “intrinsically valuable” (ibid) they amount to states of well-being. Capabilities are the set of functionings that are feasible to a person, i.e. from which she can choose and which relate to needs but indirectly, since what any one individual can do with a certain resource is dependent upon their functioning. The capability approach demands an understanding of the needs individuals have for resources and their diverse abilities to convert resources into functioning. Nussbaum has formalised this approach in a style similar to Gough and Doyal, making a list of these capabilities (Nussbaum, 2000), in which all are considered equally fundamental. Nussbaum‟s approach explicitly embraces universalism, critiquing a relativist approach. The language of rights can then use this list to draw basic normative conclusions: one defines a level of capability to function and aims to enforce that.
The resolution of the desire for a universal theory of needs, not least as a tool for practice, with acknowledgement of the reality of cultural difference has prompted much debate. Gough has written that:
There remains a deep contradiction between the domination of post- modernism and cultural relativism in intellectual life and the universalism and globalism dominant in the real world of institutions and politics. (Gough, 2002: 1)
64
This tension between the supposedly universal and the local is encompassed by this study. For Gough the solution is clear: needs are universal, but satisfiers are time and place specific (2002). In practice, in the development setting in which such theories arise, a universalist and prescriptive approach dominates as seen in the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals, Human Development Index etc. In transitional justice similarly prescriptive approaches have dominated and this thesis will argue that greater attention to the cultural context in which victims‟ needs develop is required for transitional justice mechanisms to be created which can address the needs of both individuals and communities.
That satisfiers are highly local leads to the expectation that the needs expressed, or at least the demands made in response to victimhood, are likely to also be local and contingent. This has methodological implications, in that acknowledging the importance of context implies that ethnographic methods should be privileged where possible. However, a strongly localist approach will challenge the ability of such studies to compare across contexts. In practice there is no simple conflict between the local and the global. Needs are constructed at many levels: individual, family, community, region and nation; the extent to which each is relevant can be explored in ethnographic research. It will be seen that in the victim communities studied here local factors and national constructs have a greater impact than the discourse of hegemonic globalisation allows. This thesis will attempt to understand needs in a context-specific way, as they are understood by those expressing them. It will also however seek phenomena and variables that are common across contexts, with the overarching aim of proposing policy and methodologies that can most effectively comprehend and address such needs across a wide range of contexts. This may arise from an understanding of what Doyal and Gough call „intermediate needs‟ (1991), analogous in some cases to basic needs, that may be sufficiently common that they can constitute the foundation of a genuinely bottom-up universalism.
The idea of „measuring‟ needs implicitly involves two elements: the application of relevant norms (such as would come from a benchmark established by a basic needs approach); and an assessment of how the reality differs. In this sense, needs assessment is concerned with identifying and measuring deficits and as such this study employs the traditional paradigm of humanitarian assistance as a deficit replacement approach. The novel element of the victim-centred approach (Section 3.2) used here is that victims themselves define those benchmarks.
65
Just as rights are presented by their advocates as apolitical, so humanitarians present needs as somehow beyond politics:
We get round the profoundly political nature of needs by saying instead that needs are basic, fundamental and just deeply human. Our humanitarian belief is - quite simply - that needs pre-exist politics and that meeting them should thus transcend particular political priorities and policies. (Slim, 2004: 3)
Those who seek to actively deny the addressing of needs are aware of their political uses: “Need is also a political instrument, meticulously prepared, calculated and used.” (Foucault, 1977: 26) Fraser (1988) maintains that the politics of needs is characterised by actively appearing non-political, assuming that the interpretation of needs, and indeed who makes that interpretation, is unproblematic and that existing public discourse on needs is authoritative and fair. The fact that this is so often not the case drives the victim- centred approach, in which victims themselves interpret and articulate their needs. Throughout this study, an awareness of the politics of needs and of their addressing, in families, communities and states, is maintained through an emphasis on the discursive and an understanding that statements of needs are intrinsically political.
One critique of all these approaches to human needs is that they construct the person as fundamentally non-social (Douglas and Ney, 1998). With the exception of Maslow‟s discussion of love, belonging and esteem, theorists of need define humans as non-relational beings with individual needs. In practice, poverty itself is perceived as something relative, measured not in absolute terms but as a deficit in comparison with others. More general concerns about equity are excluded from the needs narrative, social justice is never touched upon. The economistic approach of needs theories that claim universality is challenged by the data of this study that show that social structures and relationships with family, community and the broader society are a key component of how people perceive needs. Thus whilst the above theories will inform the understanding of this thesis, they will not constrain it.