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 This
page is intended to provide information that is useful not only to interested
government agencies and NGOs but also to students, community groups and
interested members of the public.
If you have a question or a contribution to make
to the discussions and debates that will appear
on this website, you can forward it on-line.
As an example, our first entry is a response to
an issue basic to our aims:
Defining Human Security
The concept of human security emerged in mainstream
political debate through the United Nations Development
Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report.
Here, human security was defined as having two
main aspects: safety from chronic threats such
as hunger, disease and repression; and protection
from sudden and harmful disruptions in the pattern
of daily life.
The rationale for the elaboration of the concept of human security
in the UNDP’s report, and a concern which continues to underpin
a range of critical approaches to the way security is understood and
practiced, was the need to contest traditional approaches to security
that seemed to be marginal to the daily threats facing people around
the world. As the UNDP (1994:22) notes, ‘Human security is a
child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job that was
not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident
who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons—it
is a concern with human life and dignity’. It is in this light
that the concept of human security should be viewed: as an
attempt to focus more directly on the myriad factors and processes
that render individuals insecure, and to contest the necessary equation
of security with the territorial inviolability of states. Such an
approach reflects a concern with extending boundaries of ethical responsibility
beyond the state; with moving away from viewing those outside state
boundaries as ‘others’; with de-legitimising military
force as the central tool for achieving security; and with focusing
more fundamentally on the structural causes of insecurity: accepted
political, social and economic arrangements and forms of organisation
that undermine individual welfare (whether it be the structure of
the international economy that creates or furthers poverty or the
denial of full citizenship rights to minority groups in particular
states) or retard the potential to which individual insecurity can
be fundamentally redressed.
Clearly, this conception of security (as human
security) widens the ambit of what factors should
be considered to be security threats, and what
agents are capable of redressing these threats.
For its part, the UNDP identifies a range of human
security ‘sectors’: economic, food,
health, environmental, personal, community and
political security. Importantly, these sectors
or components are seen as fundamentally inter-dependent,
again pointing to the role of the structural bases
of security threats. The structural nature of these
concerns provides some conceptual clarity to the
concept of human security, whilst allowing for
a range of actions and actors to be considered.
The study of security and the sources of insecurity must, for proponents
of human security, extend beyond the study of the threat
or use of force between states in international relations. It must
investigate and interrogate the role of a range of (often accepted)
forms of organisation and practice that serve to undermine individual
well-being throughout the world every day. This conception of security
both reflects the reality of what security means for the vast majority
of individuals throughout the world (who are usually more at risk
through hunger, disease and environmental change than armed conflict)
and serves as a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of, and
approaches to, security that ignore these sources of insecurity at
best, and contribute to them at worst. This approach does not seek
to ignore military conflict as a fundamental basis for insecurity,
but does seek to point to the various other ways in which we might
begin to think about, and practice, security: one requiring an alteration
in our ethical assumptions to consider, more fully, the nature of
obligations beyond the borders of the nation-state and towards the
most vulnerable both domestically and internationally.
For discussions of the concept of ‘human
security’ see for example:
•
Human Security Center at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Human Security Report
http://www.humansecurityreport.info/about_1.htm
•
Human Security Program of the Canadian government
http://www.humansecurity.gc.ca/menu-en.asp
Matt McDonald, International Relations, UNSW |
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| Sources of Insecurity ©Copyright
2004 |
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