ABSTRACT
More recently, the frameworks of human security advocates have been challenged by radical critics, asserting that rather than universal claims of ‘human security’ empowering individuals, they, in fact, represent the expansion of new relations and technologies of governance, through which global regulatory norms operate on behalf of neoliberal capitalism, framed through the ‘biopolitical’ imperative of securing populations rather than the security of states. The universal framing of human security has therefore been understood as constitutive of a new globalised international order, both by the radical advocates and radical critics of ‘human security’. This chapter will first highlight the success of constructivism in challenging traditional rationalist framings of security and then draw out how the move to idealist constructions has been reinforced through approaches which have sought to criticise human security on the basis of its universalising claims.
