ABSTRACT
Major structural change in global society, brought about by the end of the cold war, provides a compelling reason to rethink the concept of security — now proven to have been ambiguous at best. In the past, security has often been defined in terms of a reaction to threats to the state, or to national (meaning state) interests ( Du Pisani, 1992, p. 5). The conventional military definition of security ossifies it in geopolitical terms as “the spatial exclusion of threats” ( Dalby, 1992, p. 98). In such circumstances, state or national security become mere code words for safeguarding a political regime and its social elite.
