ABSTRACT
In the 1994 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report (UNDP HDR) human security was defined as the security of people, as their freedom from fear and want in the midst of threats in economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political domains. Thus, the UNDP takes a broad approach to human security. In the defence of the broad approach to human security, this chapter concentrates on its analytic usefulness, its measurability and how it can meet anxieties about ‘securitisation’ (that is, how an issue becomes a matter of security). A refrain of debates in the literature is the concern that human security—and certainly the broad approach to it—will undermine the analytical usefulness, rigour and causal parsimony that orthodox security studies gives to explore various insecurities. The idea that human security messes up the tidy sub-discipline of security studies is also unpersuasive.
