ABSTRACT
Each country or region confronts a different context of human security and faces a set of specific challenges embedded in people’s daily-lived experience (especially in developing countries and across Oceania). Yet, the vulnerability and precariousness of their circumstances are neither readily understood nor measurable. State-led action tends to be generic and imitative, if it occurs at all. Rarely does it seek to address effectively the conditioning factors and social imaginary underlying deeply rooted types of insecurity and the “violence” of their situations. How then are we to proceed? The following chapter reconsiders human security within conceptual discussions of “safety” and “risk” and their complex relationship to “trust” and “uncertainty”. It argues that the field of human security needs to engage more fully with a range of sociological and anthropological concepts to maintain its relevance and gain greater analytical purchase on the multiple insecurities of the twenty-first century. In particular, we focus on the utility of important theoretical and empirical developments and their relevance for the Pacific context in the understanding of marginality and by extension insecurity generated by such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Mary Douglas, Olivia Harris, James C. Scott and Edward P. Thompson.
