3.2: What Do We Mean by ‘Human Security’?

The security discussed in this chapter is characterized by living an everyday life within a stable society functioning within a stable environment. The security furnished by a healthy environment provides the primal backdrop to our lives and enables stable society. It is knowing that the air is clean, the water safe, that the sun will shine, the rain will fall, and the seasons cycle predictably. It is the reasonable expectation that if you plant a crop, or cast a net into the water, you will return a harvest. Most of this type of security depends upon the healthy functioning of the supporting components of our environment. When these environmental components are in jeopardy, so are we.

Obviously, other aspects of security also constitute part of our everyday lives. These include reasonable expectations of being able to sleep safely, be warm, grow food, live, be educated and employed, worship, vote and make decisions, dream and be resilient in the face of illness and tragedy. As well, it is the ability and freedom to visit, enjoy life, love, marry, and have children in the knowledge that they will grow and develop, play and learn, and anticipate their own future without undue anxiety. This chapter does not directly address these aspects of security, although it will become obvious that environmental circumstances can profoundly affect them.

A third aspect of security includes military and judicial security. It is the security that commonly comes to mind when we talk about security. We visualize it when we think of ‘Wars on Terror,’ of ‘Homeland Security,’ of multiple check-stops, surveillance cameras—on street posts and in our televisions and computers, of body scanners and of police on every corner and in the sky, of monitoring the internet and sustaining judicial systems geared to overpopulating jails. It is the security provided by standing armies with bloated budgets and also the security presumed by carrying personal firearms or living in gated communities. These types of security are often based on fear and their lack is often connected with greed, self-interest, demagoguery, intolerance and indifference.

These diverse aspects of security can be traced to the seminal work of Abraham Maslow (1943) who classified human needs and aspirations into physiological needs (directly required for survival), safety (health and well-being), love and belonging, social esteem and self-actualization. While some features of Maslow’s hierarchical model have been superseded, his basic idea of the diversity of needs remains uncontested. Humanity’s efforts to satisfy all those needs, and our hope that they will be fulfilled in the future, are fundamental to the ideal of security—as evident in former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s (2005, pp. 1-3) paraphrasing human security as “freedom from want and fear.” Our basic survival and safety depend most directly on the healthy functioning of our natural environment, while the needs for love, belonging, esteem and success depend on the functioning of societies. Although we cannot ignore these latter types of security, this chapter does not address them. Nevertheless, with humans being what they are, all of these types of ‘security’ determine our lives. As our populations increase, the societal priorities of these various forms of security change, and in modern society, the emphasis rarely is placed on the environment. One thing is becoming increasingly obvious: human security faces existential peril because the environment is failing, and the driver of this is human action. To understand why, we need some context regarding security and some history as to how we got here.

The inclusiveness of the concept is evident in the descriptive models of human security. The four pillar model (Lautensach, 2006) distinguishes four traditional areas of security (or sources of insecurity). These are: (a) the military – strategic security of the state; (b) economic security, particularly its conceptualization through unorthodox models of sustainable economies; (c) the health of populations as described by epidemiology and the complex determinants of population health, community health, and health care priorities; and (d) environmental security that is primarily determined by the complex interactions between human populations and the source, sink, and maintenance functions of their host ecosystems. This chapter addresses primarily the fourth pillar. These four pillars include diverse sources of threats and cover the same ground as the ‘seven dimensions’ of the 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994): economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. An important strength of this approach is its comprehensive exploration of the interdependence of the different sources of insecurity. These sources were traditionally considered under the purview of different academic specialties and were (and still are) usually studied in isolation from each other. The strength of the comprehensive approach lies in its versatility and its capacity to detect and characterize synergistic effects and multifactorial causation.