ABSTRACT
Human security, like all security, is a contested concept. That is, it is construed and represented in a subjective fashion, in parallel with all other matters claimed to be security issues by virtue of the language used. If realism engages weakly with a narrow interpretation of human security, defined loosely as—but limited tightly by—the idea of damage to civilians occurring as a consequence of political violence, it effectively rejects the broader imaginings of what human security can and does mean. Human security can be enhanced through reverse engineering: of the policies of global governance which preventably incur mass lethality. Global governance and neo-liberalism have long advocated and authorised, to the exclusion of local solutions, transnational corporations to privatise and render efficient otherwise inefficient state delivery of biopoverty essentials such as water. This chapter presents a consideration of human security revolving around biopoverty. Biopoverty is the avoidable absence of resources—nutrition, medicine, water, sanitation, vaccination—without which civilians die unnecessarily.
