ABSTRACT

As noted elsewhere throughout this volume, the term or concept ‘human security’ was introduced to the international community when the seminal Human Development Report , authored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was published in 1994. As the concept was fi nally adopted by a small number of governments in the East and West and then spread into academic circles, skeptical political realists (such as Professor Seizaburo Sato in Japan) began to question whether human security would soon be in a credible position to replace national security. In Sato’s view, the concept was simply fl awed. 2 These critics have a point in terms of their intellectual bias toward the concept of national security. No one can make the case that states no longer exist and no longer care about their national security, but I contend that human security has become increasingly relevant to the world in which we now live, largely because of the growth of interdependence among states and their peoples.