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security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be the individual rather than the state. Human security holds that a people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability. The concept emerged from a post-Cold War, multi-disciplinary understanding of security involving a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that insuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity. Critics of the concept argue that its vagueness undermines its effectiveness, that it has become little more than a vehicle for activists wishing to promote certain causes, and that it does not help the research community understand what security means or help decision makers to formulate good policies. In order for human security to challenge global inequalities, there has to be cooperation between a countrys foreign policy and its approach to global health. However, the interest of the state has continued to overshadow the interest of the people. For instance, Canadas foreign policy, three Ds, has been criticized for emphasizing defense more than development.
Introduction
The concept of human security has emerged in the recent decade to re-balance debates on security away from an exclusive and excessive focus on military security of the state and its institutions, towards the people whom the state serves. (Kofi Annan, 1999) It has great potential in the era of globalization to renew our focus on global threats and challenges to human well being and advancement.
Long-established concepts of national or military security, focusing on the territorial State, are unfit to analyze many factors of risk, threat or sudden change in the daily lives of persons caused by other insecurities such as poverty, environmental hazards, global epidemic diseases, natural disasters, and gender-based violence. All these elements of menace that affect people's rights and dignity, have usually not been considered as risks which can be related to security which the State has an obligation to prevent or improve. Such threats often become invisible in the public debate that generally centers its concerns on national security of the State, or in some cases on public security related only to combating crime or exposed violent conflict.
Human security is an emerging paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenge the traditional notion of national security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be the individual rather than the state. Human security holds that a people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability. The concept emerged from a post-Cold War, multi-disciplinary understanding of security involving a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report[1] is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that insuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.[2] Critics of the concept argue that its vagueness undermines its effectiveness,[3] that it has become little more than a vehicle for activists wishing to promote certain causes, and that it does not help the research community understand what security means or help decision makers to formulate good policies.[4] In order for human security to challenge global inequalities, there has to be cooperation between a countrys f oreign policy and its approach to global health. However, the interest of the state has continued to overshadow the interest of the people. For instance, Canadas foreign policy, three Ds, has been criticized for emphasizing defense more than development.[5]
Origins[edit]
The emergence of the human security discourse was the product of a convergence of factors at the end of the Cold War. These challenged the dominance of the neorealist paradigms focus on states, mutually assured destruction and military security and briefly enabled a broader concept of security to emerge. The
increasingly rapid pace of globalisation; the failure of liberal state building through the instruments of the Washington Consensus; the reduced threat of nuclear war between the superpowers, the exponential rise in the spread and consolidation of democratisation and international human rights norms opened a space in which both development and concepts of security could be reconsidered. At the same time the increasing number of internal violent conflicts in Africa, Asia and Europe (Balkans) resulted in concepts of national and international security failing to reflect the challenges of the post Cold War security environment whilst the failure of neoliberal development models to generate growth, particularly in Africa, or to deal with the consequences of complex new threats (such as HIV and climate change) reinforced the sense that international institutions and states were not organised to address such problems in an integrated way. The principal possible indicators of movement toward an individualized conception of security lie in the first place in the evolution of international society's consideration of rights of individuals in the face of potential threats from states. The most obvious foci of analysis here are the UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and its associated covenants (1966), and conventions related to particular crimes (e.g.,genocide) and the rights of particular groups (e.g, women, racial groups, and refugees).[6]
Freedom from Fear This school seeks to limit the practice of Human Security to protecting individuals from violent conflicts while recognizing that these violent threats are strongly associated with poverty, lack of state capacity and other forms of inequities.[9] This approach argues that limiting the focus to violence is a realistic and manageable approach towards Human Security. Emergency assistance, conflict prevention and resolution, peace-building are the main concerns of this approach. Canada, for example, was a critical player in the efforts to ban landmines and has incorporated the "Freedom from Fear" agenda as a primary component in its own foreign policy. However, whether such narrow approach can truly serve its purpose in guaranteeing more fruitful results remains to be an issue. For instance, the conflicts in Darfur are often used in questioning the effectiveness of the "Responsibility to Protect, a key component of the Freedom from Fear agenda.
Freedom from Want The school advocates a holistic approach in achieving human security and argues that the threat agenda should be broadened to include hunger, disease and natural disasters because they are inseparable concepts in addressing the root of human insecurity[1] and they kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined.[10] Different from "Freedom from Fear", it expands the focus beyond violence with emphasis on development and security goals.
Despite their differences, these two approaches to human security can be considered complementary rather than contradictory.[10] Expressions to this effect include:
Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941, in which "Freedom from Want" is characterized as the third and "Freedom from Fear" is the fourth such fundamental, universal, freedom.
The Government of Japan considers Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want to be equal in developing Japans foreign policy. Moreover, the UNDP 1994 called for the worlds attention to both agendas.
Surin Pitsuwan, current Secretary-General of ASEAN cites theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Houme to conclude that "human security is the primary purpose of organizing a state in the beginning.".[11] He goes on to observe that the 1994 Human Development Report states that it is "reviving this concept" and suggests that the authors of the 1994 HDR may be alluding to Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech without literally citing that presentation.
Although "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want" are the most commonly referred to categories of human security practice, an increasing number of alternative ideas continue to emerge on how to best practice human security. Among them:
G. King and C. Murray.[12] King and Murray try to narrow down the human security definition to one's "expectation of years of life without experiencing the state of generalized poverty". In their definition, the "generalized poverty" means "falling below critical thresholds in any domain of well-being"; and it is in the same article, they give brief review and categories of "Domains of Well-being". This set of defition is similar with "freedom from want" but more concretely focused on some value system.
Caroline Thomas.[13] She regards human security as describing "a condition of existence" which entails basic material needs, human dignity, including meaningful participation in the life of the community, and an active and substantive notion of democracy from the local to the global.
Roland Paris.[14] He argues that many ways to define "human security" are related with certain set of value and lose the neutral position. So he suggests to take human security as a category of research. As such, he gives a 2*2 matrix to illustrate the security studies field.
Traditional security is about a state's ability to defend itself against external threats. Traditional security (often referred to as national security or state security) describes the philosophy of international security predominance since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the rise of the nation-states. While international relations theory includes many variants of traditional security,
from realism to liberalism, the fundamental trait that these schools share is their focus on the primacy of the nation-state.
The following table contrasts four differences between the two perspectives:
Unlike traditional concepts of security, which focus on defending borders from external military threats, Human security and national security should beand often aremutually reinforcing. But secure states do not automatically mean secure peoples. Indeed, far more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies during the last 100 years.
Which definition of human security does the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) work with?
We work with the narrow definition, which takes violence to be the main indicator of human insecurity. Our reasons for adopting the narrow definition of human security are largely pragmatic. As there are already several reports examining trends in global poverty, disease, and other indicators of human insecurity covered by the broad definition, there would be little point in duplicating their analyses. Moreover, it is necessary to isolate the trends in organized violence from the trends in poverty, for example, in order to analyze the relationship between the two threats.
Unlike traditional concepts of security, which focus on defending borders from external military threats, Human security and national security should beand often aremutually reinforcing. But secure states do not automatically mean secure peoples. Indeed, far more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies during the last 100 years.
Which definition of human security does the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) work with?
We work with the narrow definition, which takes violence to be the main indicator of human insecurity. Our reasons for adopting the narrow definition of human security are largely pragmatic. As there are already several reports examining trends in global poverty, disease, and other indicators of human insecurity covered by the broad definition, there would be little point in duplicating their analyses. Moreover, it is necessary to isolate the trends in organized violence from the trends in poverty, for example, in order to analyze the relationship between the two threats.