Human Security

The concept of human security represents a departure from orthodox neorealist security studies because it places human beings, rather than solely states, at the center of international and national security policies. The human security paradigm means that human beings and their complex social and economic interaction are given policy primacy with or over states. The referents of the human security approach are individuals and its end goal is the protection of people from traditional (i.e., military) and nontraditional threats such as poverty and diseases. Moving the security agenda beyond a merely statist conception does not mean to replace it but to complement and build on it. Central to this is the understanding that human security deprivations can undermine peace and stability within and between states, whereas an overemphasis on state security concerns can be detrimental to human welfare needs. The state remains a central provider of security but state security, although necessary, is not a sufficient condition for human welfare. In these terms, the human security approach is framed around theoretical and practical applications that go beyond considerations about unitary state actors; it requires a multidisciplinary approach that reflects on the totality of social, economic, and power structures embedded in the present world order.

Human security has fully entered the policy and academic debates in the early 1990s; nevertheless, despite its widespread usage within national and international policy circles, its definition remains highly contested. The holistic vision of protecting the security of people lends itself to a variety of interpretations shaped by relative understandings of what constitutes a threat to the security of individuals, how the intensity and repercussion of any given threat can be measured (i.e., historical data or forward-looking forecasts), and by what possible means the threat can be prevented or removed. In other words, the ambiguities surrounding the concept of human security remain anchored in the fundamentally interpretative and debatable nature of the concept itself. Substantively, the malleability of the approach has allowed scope for tailored pragmatic responses functional to the policy priorities of the states and intergovernmental organizations. A claim to be dismissed is that human security does not necessarily equate to empty rhetoric; the coalition of states and supranational organizations that have supported the approach can count numerous accomplishments such as the Ottawa [Page 429]Convention (i.e., Mine Ban Treaty), the recent establishment of the International Criminal Court, and the Optional Protocol to the Convention of the Rights of the Child.