ABSTRACT
The vision of a responsibility to protect presented by the International Commission on Human Security assigned an integral role to the idea of human security. The concept of human security has gained the support of a determined minority of international legal theorists and policy-makers. The forms of human suffering that are addressed by “human security” policies were the subject of the political philosophy and activism of Hannah Arendt. For Hannah Arendt, humanity—understood not in metaphysical terms, but as the empirical incarnation of the eighteenth century ideal—has become the addressee, and consequently the guarantor, of the right to have rights. Arendt’s idea of a right to have rights offers a valuable source of guidance in fleshing out the content of the still-unsettled concept of human security. The idea of human security initially enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in the realms of both international policy-making and international law.
