ABSTRACT
This chapter speculates about and critically examines the potential reasons explaining why international legal scholarship has remained largely resistant and silent towards the increasingly dominant human security discourse. The first, and perhaps most fundamental, explanation for the lack of attention to the human security discourse lies in the divide between the disciplines of international law and international relations (IR). A closely related concern is that human security discourse is not relevant to international law, because security is a political rather than legal construct. Another, unexplored reason for the absence of human security in the minds of international legal scholars is the impact of the fragmentation and specialization that now characterizes international law. The one specialization where one might expect human security to be discussed in the context of international law is international human rights law. The main criticism of human security is that its broad conceptualization makes the concept vague, hollow and unworkable.
