ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book and it begins by noting the ironic contrast between the lack of focus in security studies on questions of ethics and the pervasive influence of unstated and unexamined ethical assumptions on security policies and behaviours. Ethics is not an optional extra to discussions about or practices of security. The book does not propose to have all the answers to the difficult questions of developing and institutionalizing a cosmopolitan approach to global security, although it deals with some of the more difficult questions in its pages. Much detail about the ways in which individuals and the communities to which they belong define and engage with international obligations regarding global security threats, however, will necessarily be context-specific, driven by a combination of capacity and vulnerability to those threats, and perceptions thereof.