1.5: Resources and References

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Review

Key Points

Human security differs in principle from state-centered security in its subjective, people-centred focus on welfare, justice, dignity and rights.
Human security can be quantified with a variety of metrics and indices, and differentiated into pillars or dimensions that focus on the key aspects of politics, sociality, economics, health and environment.
Over its quarter century history as a concept, human security has undergone significant changes and developments. Two dominant change were the increasing focus on sources of insecurity and on environmental security.
Those changes were influenced by new ideas, new value priorities, historical changes in global power relationships, and lately, global environmental changes marking the Anthropocene.
In response to the fundamental changes to the global ecology, climate, population dynamics, resource availability and population health, the UN has embarked on an ambitious program described by the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Considerations of sustainable human security informed those goals, albeit with suboptimal results.
Ongoing global changes give rise to concerns about the mode of human survival and which associated scenarios it might lead to in terms of political power relationships and modes of human security.

.Extension Activities & Further Research

Write your own future history of the world by combining some of Raskin et al’s (2002) six scenarios into a sequence of eras. For each era, describe the status of human security in its various dimensions or pillars – in your community, in your country and globally. You could do this in the form of a table.
Identify the chapter(s) in this text where you can learn more about the particular challenges to human security that concern you the most.
As you read through the rest of this book, ask yourself with each chapter: Which of Potter’s modes of survival are being described by the author(s)? Which ones are being advertised as desirable or probable for the future?
As you read through the rest of this book, ask yourself with each chapter: Which of Raskin’s scenarios are being described by the author(s)? Which ones are being advertised as probable for the future?
The past decade has seen a worrisome increase in mass killings of unsuspecting civilians in places like schools and shopping centres, especially in the US. Do you think that this phenomenon is somehow connected to the Anthropocene? Or is it more likely that there is no connection? How might you find out?
Describe how you perceive the future prospects for human security and the bigger geopolitical picture as they arise from the following likely developments:
1. Increasing desperation to keep economies afloat (i.e. growing)
2. Disappearance of coastal territories and even countries (especially islands) to sea level rise
3. Disappearance of the boreal forest in extensive forest fires
4. In the absence of effective central governance, building of resilience by local communities

List of Terms

See Glossary for full list of terms and definitions.

Anthropocene
Conventional Development Paradigm (CDP)
cornucopianism
environmental security
Four Pillars Model of human security
overshoot
securitisation
seven dimensions
sustainability

References

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Footnote

Those characteristics, as well as the close association between human security and some of the Sustainable Development Goals, were summarized in a keynote speech by Achim Steiner for the UNDP.
The 17 SDGs and their targets are summarised in the UN's 2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The connections between the UN’s model of sustainable development and their interpretation of human security are expressed in the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security. A high-level meeting on 19 February 2019 reiterated that commitment with Officials Stress Relevance of Human Security in SDG Era.
As Thompson (1997, p. 146) noted, “people tend to feel secure not when all these risks have been eliminated (for that is impossible) but when they perceive them to be satisfactorily coped with.”
“All action is goal-directed and all goals value-selected” (Madsden, 1996, p. 80).
We exempt from our discussion at this time all objections and criticisms that were made on the basis of hidden agenda. For example, the cacophony of critics that emerged after the Club of Rome published their first Limits to Growth in 1972 seemed to have been largely motivated by non-academic interests, as judging by the fact that not one of their objections has passed the test of time.
The melting of Himalayan glaciers was still accelerating in June 2019 (Inside climate News 23 June). Imagine the implications for the human security of the millions who live in the valleys of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and other rivers fed by those glaciers.
Ecological support structures include ecosystems, the structural relationships within and among them, biomass, biogeochemical cycles and other homeostatic mechanisms (Wackernagel & Rees, 1996, p. 35). See discussions in Chapter 3, Chapter 9 and Chapter 12.
The biodiversity of a region (or planet) consists of the number of species in its biotic communities and the diversity of genetic variants within each species.
This relationship connects the environmental impact I of a population of size P with a per capita consumption (‘affluence’) A and a per capita technological, cultural, institutional impact P.
The Global Footprint Network publishes a wealth of statistics and data on footprints and on the ecological overshoot of countries and humanity on the whole: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/ (accessed 3 August 2019)
Most informative in that respect are plots of the HIS against the GDP of countries, as shown e.g. in Hastings (2011). Especially interesting are the outliers.
The IPBES provides a 2019 update with Nature's Dangerous Decline 'Unprecedented'; Species Extinction Rates 'Accelerating'.
For example, India is already building a wall along its border with Bangladesh; North Africa is becoming Europe’s ‘buffer zone’; the US are fortifying and sealing their border with Mexico; Israel’s wall is already complete. Russia’s ‘Great Firewall’ constrains cyber traffic. Other reincarnations of the ‘Great Wall’ approach will doubtlessly appear.
The prospect of limited survival coupled with partial collapse of traditional institutions and orders has been advocated by Jem Bendell (2018), including a program for ‘Deep Adaptation’ to cope with it.

Review

.Extension Activities & Further Research

List of Terms

Suggested Reading

References

Footnote