ABSTRACT
Individual concerns health, welfare and other ‘low politics’ issues are the stuff of domestic politics and need to be kept separate from the ‘high politics’ of state security. This approach was justified on the premise that failing to deter or losing a war would undermine the satisfaction of low politics aspirations. Such an expansive interpretation of security found many critics amongst realists, who were not shaken from their belief in maintaining a narrower focus on what constitutes security studies by the ending of the cold war. As with the academic treatment of security, however, it is important to remember that the notion that the conduct of international security politics should be about non-military as well as military issues was not born of the 1990 peace dividend. Perhaps most significantly for the advancement of deepened security, the Canadian government signed a declaration with their Norwegian counterparts at the 1998 Lysoen Conference launching the Human Security Network.
