Critically evaluate the concept of human security

Authors Avatar


  1. Introduction

The concept of human security has emerged in the recent decade to re-balance debates on security away from an exclusive and excessive focus on military security of the state and its institutions, towards the people whom the state serves. (Kofi Annan, 1999) It has great potential in the era of globalization to renew our focus on global threats and challenges to human well being and advancement.

Long-established concepts of national or military security, focusing on the territorial State, are unfit to analyze many factors of risk, threat or sudden change in the daily lives of persons caused by other insecurities such as poverty, environmental hazards, global epidemic diseases, natural disasters, and gender-based violence. All these elements of menace that affect people’s rights and dignity, have usually not been considered as risks which can be related to security which the State has an obligation to prevent or improve. Such threats often become invisible in the public debate that generally centers its concerns on national security of the State, or in some cases on public security related only to combating crime or exposed violent conflict.

The fragmented attention to each of these problems does not offer a holistic approach to phenomena that are actually interrelated and therefore limits the development of more structural solutions to the violation of human rights that may derive from such situations.2

My intention is to see how this concepts has evolved and its main issues nowadays.  Therefore, the central aims of this essay are to: 1) Present an overview of the evolution of the human security concept and its main components 2) Critiques and challenges of the human security concept 3) To analyze how human security relates to international in general and human rights in particular

  1. Evolution of Human Security Concept

Many international actors, organizations and academics have been debating the meaning of security. According to Macfarlane, security itself is an issue that always has been considered a state matter, both as the subject in charge of providing it to the persons under its jurisdiction, as well as the object worthy of protection and regulation through laws and policies. The security of individual human beings, in contrast, was largely ignored.

Securities studies and the security establishment had long been focused on foreign and defense policy mechanisms to avoid, prevent, and if need be win interstate military disputes. (Del Rosso, n.d.) Unfortunately, although huge amount of funds may have increased the relative security of individual nations the number of people who die as an indirect result of military conflict each year has grown. Even successful examples of territorial security do not necessarily ensure the security of citizens within a state; North Korea would be a perfect example.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduced threat of a major-power war started a wider debate about whether to broaden the concepts of security further. (Klare,1992). The main result of these debates was to consider security from a global perspective rather than only from the perspective of individual nations. From this moment on the focus of security started to shift from the state to the individual and include military as well as nonmilitary threats.

The post-Cold war concept of human security is a much better response to threats that had been overlooked by state –centered concepts of national, military and territorial security. This concept has also been very crucial as a response to new risks posed by the process of globalization and the intensification of transnational relations, such as violent conflicts within States sudden economic downturns, environmental dangers and global infectious diseases as HIV/AIDS, all of which create mutual and interlinked vulnerabilities for persons around the world. (Human Security Centre, 2005)

Join now!

The contemporary idea of human security was first briefly referred to in 1993 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and then fully articulated by Mahbub ul-Haq through the 1994 UNDP Annual Report on Human Development.

The Vienna Declaration and Program of Action had put an end to the historical discussion carried out during the Cold War regarding the hierarchy of civil and political rights with respect to ESC Rights or vice-versa, and clarified that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated”,(UN General Assembly, 2005) adopting an integral understanding of human rights.

  1. Components of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay