ABSTRACT
How does one analyze the effects of security when it encapsulates the global such as the policy discourse of human security? Human security is a governmental logic that is concerned with the management of conflict and underdevelopment through mechanisms of global governance (UNDP 1994). Human security is an elusive concept that has attracted an array of definitions, interventions, and political purposes. From the multiplicity of meanings and activities associated with human security, I decided to concentrate on the work of the UN and affiliated agencies. These transnational agencies have adopted a broad understanding of human security, which principally entails the inclusion of people and their everyday concerns for security including unemployment, famine, diseases, earthquakes, flooding, rape, and gun crimes in processes of (global) governance. Implicit in human security is an aspiration to shift political authority away from the traditional centre of the nation-state to multilayered, networked configurations with, and through, a host of (inter)governmental, para-governmental, nongovernmental, and private organizations. Indeed, accounts of global governance including human security often rely on the idea of a shift in the locus of political power and authority. This has prompted many of those debating human security to argue that its agenda is eroding the state and state sovereignty. Yet, if we conceptualize human security as a form of governmentality (Foucault 2009, Rose 1999, O’Malley et al. 1997), it then gives rise to security practices that reconstitute existing forms of political subjectivity including the state and sovereignty, the human and international order, engendering new iterations of the latter. In order to trace and analyze this effect of human security in the world, I examined the intersections between its macro- (at UN headquarters) and micro-politics (onsite where human security is implemented) by drawing on the notion of (global) assemblage in which I emphasized materiality.
