ABSTRACT
Human security is an idea with little apparent utility: relatively impoverished in conceptual terms, it has so far proven largely unworkable in practice. Nevertheless, the principle of protecting individual human life before national interest has become an increasingly influential norm of the international community and the power of the idea that security should be about people has persisted, despite the fact that no consensus has been achieved about how the concept of human security should be understood. More than a decade of conceptual innovation has added subtlety to the debate, and throughout this period of revisionism and refinement, human security has been variously adopted, adapted and co-opted by different international actors.
