Human Security

Security is central to the study of international politics—with “state” as the unit around which it is woven. The concept of human security emerged toward the end of the Cold War as a major contestation to the traditional, state-centric notion of security that had thus far dominated the discipline of international relations (IR). Based on the realist theory in IR, the traditional understanding of security emphasizes the need to protect the state and its territorial integrity with militarization, assimilation of weapons, and power politics as supreme in the national security paradigm. Human security, on the other hand, questions the primacy of the state in the security discourse and seeks to shift the referent object of security from the state to human beings and social groups ...