1.1: Ontology of the Human Security Concept – Cross-cutting Themes

Ontology of the Human Security Concept – Cross-cutting Themes

In a rapidly changing world, a quarter century signifies a long time for the development of an idea. During that time human security has morphed into what we regard as a guiding narrative throughout the world. In the early 1990s it became increasingly clear that the end of the cold war would not be accompanied by an end to armed conflict but that instead the nature of violent conflict was changing, away from the traditional interstate wars of the past four centuries towards conflicts within states, fuelled by ethnic, religious or ideological divisions. States no longer seemed to be the only entities whose security mattered. 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, and the state seemed no longer capable to guarantee that. Moreover, governments increasingly recognised that the security of the state largely depends on the security of its regions, communities, families and individuals, albeit not nearly all of the latter in an equitable fashion; and that financial income by itself constitutes an inadequate measure of that security.^[1]

Although those notions came across as unconventional at the time, they were evidenced by the sporadic examples of states failing to fulfil their obligations as security guarantors, to the point where they threatened the security of their own citizens. The most appalling cases cumulated in genocide as exemplified by the Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, Rwanda, Syria and a sad long list of others throughout history, dating back long before we had a word for it. At the other end of the spectrum of state power lay examples of states that lost the capacity to assure their citizens’ security, as seen in today’s Somalia, Iraq, Myanmar and another sad long list. In between we see everyday examples of police brutality, government corruption, media censorship and unscrupulous resource grabbing. It became clear that a primary requirement for the security of human beings was not merely the absence of war but the absence of structural, cultural and personal violence (Galtung, 1969), and that the discipline of international relations as a field of endeavour cannot by itself deliver on those challenges. This was of course not a new idea; but somehow the transition out of the Cold War seemed the right time to express it in the form of a new model of security.

The idea of human security emerged centuries ago in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau which provided a raison d’être for the modern state as its prime guarantor. Thus, since the birth of the nation state with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 human security has been implicitly regarded as the primary reason for having a state in the first place (Pitsuwan, 2007). In 1968 Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson (1969, p. 43) proposed “… that the peace and security of people take priority over the sovereignty of states…” Historical developments, as alluded to above, also favoured that paradigm shift. Besides the collapse of the Soviet empire, globalization in its many manifestations turned people’s attention away from state security and from military threats and defences, towards a more cosmopolitan people-centered perspective, backed by the UN.

Human security as a concept began to gain recognition when it was publicized as the topic of the UN’s Human Development Report in 1994 (UNDP, 1994). Since then it has attracted increasing attention among theorists, policymakers, and, to a limited extent (as in Canada during the 1990s), voters. The UNDP’s Human Security Framework (Jolly & Ray, 2006) and a report for the UN Centre for Regional Development (Mani, 2002) summarise the influence of human security on UN policy. This influence took three forms: the idea that the primacy of citizens’ human rights not only obliges the state to protect them but that sometimes they be protected from state authority; the notion that the destitute situation of many people around the world necessitates decisive development efforts on the part of states (Thakur, 2010); and the realization that human security is too important and too complex an obligation to be left to national governments in isolation without the support of civil society.

In 2003 the UN Commission on Human Security, chaired by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen, reported that the world needed “a new security framework that centers directly on people” and that focuses on “shielding people from acute threats and empowering people to take charge of their own lives” (Commission on Human Security, 2003, p. iv). This goal of individual empowerment seems rather a long way removed from the traditional priorities of state security.

The Human Security Network, founded in 1998, at the time of writing includes twelve developed and developing countries worldwide (plus one observer), who contributed to the UNDP’s human security framework. Their relative emphases vary between the human rights focus (e.g. Norway, and the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague) and the development focus (e.g. Switzerland, and formerly Japan). In recent years the Network has somewhat receded out of the public spotlight but its member countries continue to emphasise human security priorities on the international stage.

What seemed new about the concept was its shifted perspective, from the state as the subject and object of security policy to the human individual as the centre of security considerations – from state security to human security (Hampson et al., 2002; Tadjbakhsh & Chenoy, 2006). And since human beings, unlike states, are capable of sensations and emotions, human security was recognised as partly contingent on those particular states of mind that we tend to associate with human well-being. The UN’s various definitions since 1994 revolve around the three principles of (a) freedom from fear, (b) freedom from want and (c) freedom to live in dignity (United Nations Human Security Unit, 2016; Annan, 2005). A working definition of human security, based on those principles and credited to David Hastings (2011), would be the attainment of physical, mental, and spiritual peace/security of individuals and communities at home and in the world – in a balanced local/global context. The subjective aspect embodied in the three principles dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (details in Chapter 2).

Those three principles are rooted in basic human needs, expressed, for example, in the Abraham Maslow’s (1943) taxonomy and Martha Nussbaum’s ten central capabilities (2011, pp. 33-34). They depend on variables that extend beyond what has traditionally been regarded as the political arena. This extension and broadening also marks the direction in which the human security concept has developed. Besides the absence of violent threats, some analysts began to include among the conditions for human security a relative safety from economic destitution, from acute infectious disease, minimum complements of safe fresh water, adequate nutrition, and protection from environmental degradation and disasters.

To address those concerns, a useful interpretation of human security must encompass the various dimensions or directions from which threats can emerge, as mentioned above. To address that requirement, the four pillars model of human securitywas proposed (Lautensach 2006). The first pillar consists of the traditional area of military/strategic security of the state and its rule of law; the second is economic security, particularly as it is now conceptualised through heterodox models of sustainable circular or zero-growth economies; the third is public health as described by epidemiology and the determinants of community health and health care priorities; the fourth pillar is environmental security, primarily determined by the complex interactions between human populations and the source and sink functions of their host ecosystems. The four pillars adequately address diverse sources of threats, covering the same ground as the seven dimensions of the 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994) (economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security). Those pillars or dimensions interact with each other in a complex network of relationships that sometimes lead to unexpected and sudden effects.

Others were less prepared to extend human security into such ‘soft threats’ and preferred a more ‘narrow’ or ‘lean’ form of the concept. Critics from the Copenhagen School expressed the concern that the concept was running the danger of leaving nothing out, of labelling all human problems security issues; that such securitisation would be of little help for addressing practical challenges because the concept’s heterogeneity would prevent people from developing suitably coherent descriptive models that could inform effective policy priorities. In response, proponents of extended interpretations point to the fact that many more deaths occur annually from so-called ‘soft’ threats than from any threats to national security or armed violence; the fact that most of those deaths would have been preventable translates into an obligation. The 2020 pandemic offered further support for an inclusive model that integrates health, economics, politics and the environment.

Even before the pandemic, the dispute was swayed towards the inclusive view by two developments. First, the realisation dawned that since the mid-20^th century the planet had been undergoing drastic changes that were increasingly recognised as pervasive, accelerating and partly irreversible; it was expressed in new conceptual models under names of ‘Great Acceleration’ (Steffen et al., 2015), ‘Safe Operating Space for Humanity’ (Rockström et al., 2009) and the new imperatives of Anthropocene era (Burtynsky et al., 2018). Those new circumstances are affecting the security of states as well as all those other pillars and dimensions. Secondly, the UN involved itself in successive global initiatives aimed at ensuring the sustainability of human security across all its pillars or dimensions. This began with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015) and continued with their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; 2015-2030) (United Nations, 2015). The latter have gained recognition as a well-known example of the wide and ‘people-centred’ interpretation of human security informing a program for global development and sustainability that includes the empowerment of non-state actors, bypassing the securitisation debate.^[2]

A further direction into which the human security concept was extended was the future. With the advent of the MDGs, and to a much greater extent with the SDGs, it became acceptable to officially express concern with the future well-being of people’s children, and, from middle age onward, with the well-being of their children, and so on. This long-term intergenerational concern has gradually come to inform the agenda of human security initiatives, as indicated by the emergence of sustainability in some form or other as a cornerstone of long-term human security (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). More often than not, concern for human security is now synonymous with concern for sustainable human security (Lautensach, 2020).

No security provision can be effective unless it is sustainable. In fact, as we will argue below, many practices and policies contribute to people’s insecurity for the very reason that they cannot be sustained. Much of the heat in debates about sustainability comes from differences in definitions of sustainability and of sustainable development. The most widely popularized definition originated from a 1987 report of the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development, the so-called Brundtland report (WCED, 1987, p. 24): Sustainable development is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Unfortunately it gives no specifics on what those present needs might be, where to draw the line between needs and wants, how to comply with physical limits to growth (Meadows et al., 2004), nor how to address the implied intergenerational conflict. Because of those shortcomings, definitions based more explicitly on the ecological context seem preferable. Wackernagel and Rees (1996, p. 55) defined sustainability as “living off the income generated by the remaining natural capital stocks.” These definitions refer to ecological sustainability; other forms of sustainability that have been recognized in the literature include economic, cultural and social sustainability (Lautensach & Lautensach, 2012; Raworth, 2017). Elsewhere, one of us (Lautensach, 2020, p. 2) defined sustainability as “living within limits set by global geophysical processes, by ecological support structures and their capacities, by social groups and interactions, and by the basic needs of all living organisms, including Homo sapiens.” Regardless which definition one favours, it seems clear that sustainability cannot be omitted from any plan for long-term security as a necessary (though not sufficient) requirement. The SDGs and the Agenda 2030 (UN, 2015) represent clear evidence that sustainability, development and human security are part and parcel of the UN’s agenda. The waves of public protests in 2019/20 against irresponsible climate policies indicate growing popular demand for more proactive and forward-thinking governance.

The extended models strengthen the human security concept as they cover comprehensively the interdependent sources of insecurity that were traditionally considered under the purview of different academic specialties and were (and still are) studied largely in isolation from each other. The strength of the comprehensive approach lies in its capacity to detect and characterize synergistic effects and interactions among multiple causes. Moreover, the comprehensive approach allowed analysts to develop methods for assessing and verifying diverse aspects of human security as exemplified by the human security index (Hastings, 2011).

Notwithstanding those analytical strengths, human security represents an intellectual construct, informed by various idiosyncratic notions of well-being, and only in a small part is it informed by objective truths.^[3] But that normative aspect can also be regarded as another strength, namely that the value priorities informing its diverse components are shared widely, priorities that focus on the continued security and well-being of human individuals (Thakur, 2010). It seems indisputable that our decisions and actions are influenced to a great extent by our values, aspirations, ideals, attitudes, and unquestioned assumptions—all of which are culturally contingent.^[4] This is equally true for people referred to as idealists as it is for so-called ‘realists.’ People care about human security because they identify with its underlying values and ideals—human welfare, human rights and dignity, justice, non-violence, and the abhorrence of suffering (Kaldor & Beebe, 2010). This reconceptualization as a set of moral norms is evident in several key policy documents of the United Nations. More detailed discussions of the epistemological basis of human security, its ethics and its intercultural interpretations are given in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4.