ABSTRACT
The idea of human security was developed to encourage states and international organizations to direct similar amounts of energy and resources to so-called ‘soft issues’, such as health, women's issues and child safety, as they would towards the more familiar aspects of national security, such as border defence and the maintenance of militaries. The concept of human security has been applied primarily in the developing world, or the ‘Global South’. As stated in Chapter 4, this tends to imply that human security issues do not exist in First World or Northern states. The present focus of human security concerns can, consequently, mask a host of shared concerns, and hinder those of us who are working actively on issues such as health, protection of women and children and migration from collaboration across the developed/developing world divide. Public health problems, such as the spread of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and the efforts at international cooperation outlined in this chapter, form an issue of human security around which such collaboration could occur. The goals of the 2004 Tromsø conference, Human Security in the Arctic, and of this volume are to explore the extent to which the concept of human security may contribute to Arctic research and vice versa, and to outline present and future threats in the Arctic regions of Northern states.
