ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ethical possibilities, and dangers, of security practices by considering the relationship between ideas and power and between theory and practice: the connections between the way that theorists in the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Security Studies have understood and conceptualised security, and the way that it is practiced by governments and other security actors. While a range of theorists, organisations and activists advanced claims that the focus of security attention needed to shift from states to people or global society, the most prominent among these moves was arguably the discourse of human security. Making sense of human security is difficult because it is not clear how we should understand the discourse itself. If approached as a paradigm, human security must be found wanting. It gives us very little by way of a conceptual framework for understanding or analysing security in international relations, pointing instead to the imperative of attention to threats to individuals.
