Human security: a comprehensive perspective
In this article, human security is presented as a comprehensive set of requirements that facilitate the flourishing of human societies in the socio-political, economic, health-related and ecological senses. This perspective builds on a narrower concept of human security that developed over the past two decades and that culminated in a critical assessment of even more traditional conceptions of security. Until the end of the Cold War era security tended to be regarded as largely synonymous with international security and most people regarded security as an area of study for political scientists, military analysts and government advisors that concern themselves with the security of states. Consequently, this intellectual territory was dominated by strategic thinkers and specialists of international relations. Up to this day the assumption that all important security considerations can be dealt with under the roof of state security dominates the discourse of conservative realist writers.
The end of the Cold War brought the destabilization of the old strategic power blocks as well as a change in the nature of violent conflicts, away from traditional interstate war towards intrastate conflicts fueled by tensions between ethnic, religious or ideological camps. The discourse about security received a fresh infusion of thought from political liberals, theorists as well as activists, who argued that states are not the only entities whose security ought to concern us. Regions, communities, families and individuals can only feel secure if they have reason to believe that their continued functioning is not going to be threatened at every turn. Furthermore, the security of the state largely depends on the security of those other entities. Occasionally states evidently fail to fulfill their obligations as security guarantors, even to the point of threatening the security of their citizens. Another influence came from the area of peace research based on Johan Galtung’s work that established conditions for the absence of structural and personal violence. These insights shifted perspective from the state as the subject and object of security policy to the human individual as the center of security considerations – from state security to human security. And since human beings, unlike states, are capable of sensations and emotions, human security was recognized as partly contingent on those particular states of mind that we tend to associate with human well-being.
This shift of perspective attracted growing attention in the wider international relations and social science literature, which in turn spurred into active existence a number of new institutions and agendas. The Human Security Network, a ‘group of like-minded countries’ that emerged from the campaign to eliminate landmines, was formally launched at a ministerial meeting in Norway in 1999. Several workshops sponsored by member countries have helped focus the efforts of academic specialists and practitioners. The Commission on Human Security was established by the UN and the government of Japan in January 2001 in order to further stimulate interest in and research on a range of human security issues. Several countries elevated human security as a priority in their foreign policy; in Canada this led to the establishment of the government-funded Canadian Consortium on Human Security. The United Nations greatly expanded their agenda on human security concerns epitomized by the Secretary General’s personal commitment to active involvement. Human security was defined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as subsumed under seven aspects: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security.
On the theoretical front, the concept of human security was further extended and enriched by considerations that reach beyond what has traditionally been regarded as the political arena. Human security is now widely taken to include more than the absence of violent conflict with its agenda of peace building and conflict prevention. It also includes a relative safety from acute infectious disease, minimum complements of safe fresh water and adequate nutrition, and a formal guarantee for basic human rights and dignity. This conceptual expansion gave rise to a tension between human security and some ramifications of globalization, which has further stimulated multidisciplinary research efforts into human security. Geographers, sociologists, ethicists, educationists, psychologists, life scientists and health scientists have joined the ranks of stakeholder experts and are contributing to a much more comprehensive – and long overdue – transdisciplinary understanding of human security issues. For too long complex challenges to human security have remained intransigent because their analysis remained too parochial, restricted to the exclusive territory of a single academic discipline or area of practical expertise. No-one should be surprised that peace and human security have proven so elusive in many of the world’s crisis areas.
One additional direction of expansion of the security concept concerns future generations. Traditional security studies tended to focus on the status quo plus one or two electoral periods. In contrast many individuals, cultures and religions are concerned with the future well-being of children and future generations. This long-term humanitarian concern needs to be translated to a greater extent into human security agendas; some progress has been made towards that end, as reflected by many definitions of sustainability. They were further entrenched in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.
The efforts towards the conceptual expansion of human security were driven by diverse motivations. Hampson and Hay identified three distinct conceptions of human security that motivated people to expand human security beyond state security. The ‘natural rights/rule of law conception’ that informs an emphasis on individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the humanitarian conception that focuses on the relief and prevention of human suffering and justifies humanitarian intervention towards those aims; and a wider-reaching social justice conception that embraces the quality of people’s social and natural environments and focuses on threats to human health and well-being coming from environmental degradation and from the forces of globalization.
Development agencies operating under national, super-national or non-governmental umbrellas have adopted this extension of the security concept into environmental and ethical dimensions. This reconceptualization is evident in several key policy documents of the United Nations. The Secretary General’s Millennium Report defines the UN’s security agenda as ‘freedom from fear’, and their development agenda as ‘freedom from want’. The UN’s guiding principles on security are paraphrased in negative terms as freedom from a condition that is evidently undesirable. Similarly, Alkire defined the objective of human security as ‘to safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats, and to do so without impeding long-term human flourishing’. While this definition still seems vague it at least introduces the vital requirement of sustainability. King and Murray offered a definition of human security in measurable and more positive terms, namely ‘the number of years of future life spent outside the state of generalized poverty’. This definition draws our attention to the determinants of ‘generalized poverty’ which the authors derive from the UNDP’s Human Development Index (incorporating per-capita income, health, education) and from various parameters denoting the extent of political freedom and democratic rights. However, it disregards risks of very low probability and very high costs, such as nuclear terrorism, it still remains unnecessarily vague, and it again ignores sustainability.
All of the foregoing definitions and conceptualizations leave room for improvement. First, leaving aside the logical difficulties with negative definitions, the fact that ‘freedom’, ‘fear’ and ‘want’ are highly subjective and emotive concepts seems unhelpful. Different individuals will experience those sensations to different extents, depending on differential metabolic states, emotional states, situational and associative contexts, as well as cultural backgrounds. An absence of wants or needs can also be caused by an absence of self-confidence, a negative self image or a defeatist self concept. To employ those concepts as benchmarks for human security seems not much more helpful than using ‘universal happiness’ or ‘world peace’. They represent nice ideals but they lack the degree of substantive particularity that is required of a programmatic aim or policy goal. For example, we can be quite certain that in advocating ‘freedom from want’ the UN General Secretary did not have in mind mass conversion to Buddhism, nor the legalization of cannabis. More seriously, he would have been advised in no uncertain terms not to interfere with the worldwide corporate efforts to encourage mass consumption and economic growth, had he pointed to the stunning contribution those efforts make towards the creation of new ‘wants’ and even of ‘needs’.
The clarity of such negative definitions can be much improved by reducing wants and needs to the minimum requirements for human survival, such as in ‘freedom from starvation’. However, this amounts to merely stating the obvious, namely that we ought to prevent people from starving. In other respects, such as in the case of personal income, it is not clear what the minimum requirements should be. And with regard to political freedom and other human rights the concept of minimum requirements makes little sense.
Secondly, the focus on ‘freedoms’ blinds the observer to the problem of limits or of scale. In any given quasi-closed system (such as an island, a desert oasis, or a planet) the extent to which the human inhabitants’ needs and wants can be satisfied depends on the population size. Other variables, such as individual affluence and technological sophistication also apply, but only temporarily. For example, it seems self-evident that a Mali population of 1% of the present size would not possibly be threatened by shortages of potable water, while a population 100 times the present size would experience chronic mass shortage beyond the hope of any exogenous or intrinsic help. The crucial problem with a focus on ‘freedoms’ is that the same freedom from water shortage can be achieved without any effort in the former case while remaining utterly unachievable in the latter. The UN’s development agenda merely state the intention “to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people who do not have access to safe drinking water (currently 20 percent).” The UN projects the 2015 world population to range between seven and eight billion, with disproportionately high growth in several of the poorest African countries including Mali. What if a sufficient amount of potable water simply cannot be made available without compromising agricultural production or the health of source and sink ecosystems? How useful is it to set such a goal without first exploring its contingencies?
In order to gain a better understanding of what constitutes human security and how it could be realistically achieved in specific contexts, it is helpful to first examine what sources of insecurity might threaten the global citizen. Because of the subjective nature of human security such an examination must involve consultation with the people in question. Multinational opinion surveys tend to point towards criminal violence, armed conflicts (civil or international), terrorism, infectious disease, and ‘natural disasters’ as the events that attract the most concern in people. The latter include extreme weather events, climatic aberrations, pest invasions, famines, floods, land slides, earthquakes and volcanism, and meteorite impacts. Other sources of insecurity include economic collapses, personal bankruptcy, personal accidents with traumatic health effects, and chronic health problems. Of course all of those factors potentially give rise to acute wants and needs in the individual. In this respect we are merely moving upstream in the line of causation. But by focusing on those sources of insecurity we eliminate some of the subjectivity and heterogeneity of the above-mentioned ‘freedoms’ while gaining the advantage of focusing on more clearly defined targets. This would better facilitate proactive and preventive policy planning and enable us to enlist a host of descriptive-analytical sciences in our planning efforts. Returning to the example of water shortage in Mali, by focusing on possible causes of water shortage and on the systemic requirements for water security the observer would be forced to take into account the limits of the local system, an essential requirement for the design of long-term effective and sustainable policies.
Some might object to this claim of objectivity by arguing that equally subjective differences apply to the ways in which those catastrophic events are experienced by the individual. Also, to some extent at least some of the threats are socially constructed. I do not propose that a focus on sources of insecurity rids the human security concept of all its subjectivity. But those differences of experience and socially constructed significance pale compared to the variation in personal preferences in what constitutes ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ and how they might best be satisfied. Furthermore, the list of sources of insecurity still represents clearly defined targets that offer possibilities for focussed mitigation. I argue, therefore, that by concentrating on sources of insecurity we can eliminate unreasonable, unjust and counterproductive needs and wants from our scope of targets. Given the added strength of source analysis with regard to problems of scale I feel justified in advocating it as the superior conceptual approach.
By focusing on the sources of insecurity we also expand our attention necessarily beyond the scope of peace research in Galtung’s sense, namely the absence of personal violence and the presence of social justice. The reason is that some of those sources are situated outside of the social realm and are shaped by the ecological interactions between our species and its biotic and abiotic environment, beyond ethics and justice. Thus, human security in its expanded meaning includes more than peace.
An additional advantage of source analysis lies in its transdisciplinary perspective. The heterogeneous list of sources of insecurity presented above already suggests that human security cannot possibly be understood by a single kind of expert. Instead, a successful analysis of human security as it applies to a particular community, region or country requires experts from at least four broad areas which we refer to as the ‘four pillars’ of human security: the traditional area of military/strategic security of the state; economic security, particularly the contribution made by heterodox models of sustainable economies; the area of population health, combining epidemiology and the complex determinants of community health and health care priorities; and environmental science that models the complex interactions between human populations and the source and sink functions of their host ecosystems. We can take additional encouragement from the observation that each of the listed sources of insecurity can in fact be attributed to one or several of those four areas. Each pillar can contribute to our understanding of the sources of human insecurity and enable us to mitigate their effects.
Military/strategic security deals with international and domestic relations between groups with diverse interests. Traditionally, in the international realm the agents included states and groups of states. The course of globalization has changed the situation necessitating that the roles of NGOs and transnational corporations also be included. Specific sources of insecurity in this area include the impacts of globalization, terrorism and transnational crime on state security; the impacts of resource scarcity on international relations, refugee crises, and the trade in human slaves and body parts. Security studies also need to focus on the prospects for international law and international courts, and other regimes for the prevention, resolution, arbitration and monitoring of conflicts. Internally to states, the agenda of strategic security have been increasingly focused on human rights issues, ethnic and cultural divisions, and displaced populations as sources of insecurity – in short, the absence of personal and structural violence. The evident significance of those determinants squarely contradicts the ethical assumptions that underlie realist ideology.
Economic security has often been studied in separation from military/strategic aspects, even though the welfare of a national economy was very much considered within the national interest. Where the two areas were conflated was in connection with access to resources, the implication being that an abundance of resources allows for economic growth, which in turn was expected to provide greater economic security for all citizens. We are now faced with evidence that those assumptions are no longer justified. In fact, global depletion of resources, pollution, ecosystem deterioration and overconsumption are turning them around in the sense that increased consumption is likely to decrease economic security in the medium and long term. As a result of this change, a concern for human security demands that normative priorities be reconsidered, along with our notions of what constitutes development and progress. This also necessitates a critical re-evaluation of the real impact of technologies. This paradigm change contradicts traditional assumptions underlying neoclassical economic theory and realist political ethics and therefore faces significant opposition. Nevertheless, some economists, responding to this challenge, have developed heterodox theories of sustainable economics and zero growth models that, once implemented, are likely to make a significant contribution to human security.
Considering the extent to which the average citizen worries about his/her personal health and about the possibility of epidemics, it seems astounding that traditional security studies have taken little notice of health security. In the expanded concept of human security, population health and community health care are incorporated as the fourth ‘pillar’. In part this compensates for past oversights, but to a large extent this is also seen as a proactive measure in the light of the negative consequences that the global environmental crisis exerts on population health. Those consequences include an increased risk of epidemics and pandemics, the spread of animal vectors such as mosquitoes, increased bacterial resistance against antibiotics, and the higher fraction of immunologically compromised hosts in malnourished human populations. Therefore, the areas of epidemiology, preventive population health, and medical psychology have a great deal to contribute to human security.
Among the environmental sciences, the areas that have the most to offer towards a better understanding of human security are those that deal with the study and management of environmental support structures. Those structures are ecosystems, functioning as sources for raw materials and energy and as sinks for our wastes. They vary in the extents to which they have been modified by humans. Specialists in the new field of ecosystem health are developing diagnostic tools, descriptive modeling and therapeutic methods that help in the design of management regimes and proactive guidelines. In addition to such scientific insights and technological innovations, an improvement of environmental security requires that many of the culturally conditioned attitudes toward the natural environment be re-examined. Jared Diamond’s analysis of the causes behind historical incidents of societal collapse or survival lends some empirical support to this suggestion. If we accept that all human endeavors and activities take place within ecosystems and that the limits to those human agenda are dictated by the sources and sinks provided by those ecosystems, then a concern for human security must necessarily extend to our species’ life support system, especially at this time when its continued functioning is under threat.
Security is commonly conceptualized as freedom from the dangers of certain conditions deemed undesirable - need, want, fear and violence. Efforts to address security challenges and devise mitigation measures would benefit from a closer scrutiny of the sources of human insecurity. The range of sources of insecurity covers four broad areas, which suggests that a sufficiently comprehensive concept of human security rests on the four pillars of military/strategic, economic, health-related and environmental security. Similarly, an in-depth understanding of security challenges is predicated on the collaboration of experts in political/social science, economics, medical science and environmental science. Thus, an expanded perspective on human security refers not only to an enlargement of the spectrum of human security concerns but a more transdisciplinary approach to understanding and addressing human security.
Adopting this new approach towards our security will have repercussions on areas far removed from traditional security studies. It will necessitate changes in the educational systems and the curriculum at many levels towards more transdisciplinary ways of teaching and learning about security. It will change the way our media analyze and report on security threats and security crises. It will necessitate a discussion about our values and our notions of progress. And it might change the way we conceptualize our future history as a global society consisting of a plurality of [[region]al] societies, and how to care for its security and peaceful existence.
A more detailed version of this article was published in the Australasian Journal of Human Security Vol. 2 Issue 3 (2006).
Further Reading
Ecological security:
- Diamond, Jared. 2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking Penguin, London. ISBN: 0143036556
- Dobkowski, Michael N. and Isidor Wallimann. 2002. On the Edge of Scarcity: Environment, Resources, Population, Sustainability and Conflict. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. ISBN: 0815629435
- Rapport, D. 1998. Ecosystem Health. Blackwell, London. ISBN: 0632043687
Economic security:
- Daly, Herman E. 1993. Introduction to ‘Essays toward a steady-state economy’. In Valuing the Earth. Daly, Herman E. and Kenneth N Townsend (eds.), 11-50. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN: 0262540681
Example of an opinion survey on priorities in human security:
- Crime, Health Are Top Concerns in Britain, Angus Reid Global Monitor, July 16, 2005.
Health security:
- Garrett, Laurie. 2000. Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. Hyperion, New York. ISBN: 0786884401
- McMichael, Anthony J. 2001. Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN: 052180311X
On peace and security:
- Galtung, Johan. 1969. ‘Violence, peace, and peace research’. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3):167-191.
Policy and underlying value concepts:
- Alkire, Sabina. 2002. ‘Conceptual framework for the Commission on Human Security’.
- Lautensach, A.K. and Lautensach, S.W. ‘The Challenge of Global Sustainability’. New Thinking 2(1):Winter/Spring 2004.
- UN Millennium Project. 2005. Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. United Nations, New York. ISBN: 1844072177
- UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 1994. Human Development Report 1994. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0195091701
- UNEP-MAB (Millennium Assessment Board). 2005. Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being. UNEP-WCMC, London.
Sociopolitical security:
- Barkdull, John. 2000. Why environmental ethics matters to international relations. Current History, November:361-366.
- Hampson, F.O. and J.B. Hay. 2002. Human security: A review of the scholarly literature. Human Security Bulletin. Presented at the CCHS Annual Meeting.
- King, G. and C. Murray. 2002. ‘Rethinking Human Security’. Political Science Quarterly, 116(4):585-610.
