ABSTRACT
As is well known by now, ‘human’ security differs from conventional approaches to security because it prioritizes the needs and well-being of people rather than states (UNDP 1994). Generally speaking, conventional security studies remain mired in the quicksand of realist assumptions which conflate state and people. The state, as the only legitimate representative of the collective will of the ‘people’ it controls, is empowered through the doctrine of national security to define and defend the longterm, ‘national interest’ of its people from external aggression. The interests of the ‘people’, the national community, are equated with those of the state and consequently any threat, real or imagined, to the state’s boundaries, institutions, subjects and values from outside, even if these threats come from within the state’s borders by dissident and minority groups, is regarded as external aggression. Thus, conventional security approaches have been complicit in the legitimization of the state as a ‘natural’ and unchanging unit of international relations and also the extension of its coercive power over ‘its’ people. As the authors of the Human Security Report point out, far more people have been killed by their own states than by foreign armies (HSC 2005: viii). Furthermore, the hegemonic doctrine of national security is unable to account for the myriad of security threats posed by the capricious nature of neo-liberal globalization. These include threats to economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security as documented by the UNDP in their ground-breaking Human Development Report 1994 which helped introduce the concept of ‘human security’ to an audience of international policy-makers, NGOs and academics (UNDP 1994: 24-25).
