ABSTRACT
The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought human security to the forefront of the response to dealing with global pandemics. Whilst human security takes the individual as the referent object of security, the law approaches securitisation from a completely different direction by attempting to secure the threat – in this case, COVID-19. Taking the current global pandemic as its focus, this paper will argue that public pedagogy around modes of protection in emergency situations serves to sanction state security and its regimes of surveillance. Consequently, it will be argued that the discourse of human security is used to mobilise legal responses to the COVID-19 threat, which ultimately serves as a means to (re)legitimise the surveillance state.
