NEW SECURITY AGENDA: HUMAN SECURITY

S.Satheesmohan
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Defence and Strategic Studies – General Sir John Kotelawala
Defence University
Preamble

• New security agenda

• Arguments for human security

• Human security: what’s new?

• Critiques of human security

• Conclusion
New security agenda
• In the 1980s, the Copenhagen Peace Institute (Copenhagen School) critiqued
the limitation of the traditional security approach and called for new issues to
be given consideration.

• Non-traditional security approach offered five categories of security based on

the sources of threat.

• Military
• Political
• Economical
• Environmental
• Societal

Security: A new framework of analysis (Buzan et al.1998)

Key developments in the emergence of
human security
• 1994- UNDP Human Development Report. Credited with introducing the concept in a
systematic way and linking it to human rights, human development, and personal
security, and protection of the environment.

• July 1998 -120 states adapted the Rome Statute which formed the legal basis for the
International Criminal Court (ICC).

• March 1999- United Nations Trust Found for Human Security launched by Government
of Japan and UN Secretariat.

• September 2001 – UN Millennium Declaration launched (MDGs)

• 30 September 2001- Commission on Human Security.

• December 2001- ICISS Report – The Responsibility to Protect.

• 1o July 2002- Sixty states ratified the Statute of Rome thereby entering it into force in
the institutional form of the ICC.
Human Security
• Human security is not a concern with weapons - it is a concern with
human life and dignity. UNDP HDR 1994

• Freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom to live in dignity.
UNDP HDR 1994

• Developed the concept of human security as an operational tool

for policy formulation and implementation. Commission on Human
Security – 2001

• Protect human life in the face of mass killings, and the imperative of
preserving and respecting state sovereignty. ICISS 2001
Key arguments for human security

• Economic security

• Food security

• Health security

• Political security

• Environmental security

• Personal security

• Community security
Human security: what’s new?
• Continued focus on deprivation.

• Highlights downside risks.

• Places particular emphasis on conflicts.

• Highlights need for democracy and empowerment.

• Highlights need for an integrated framework form of action.

• Frames certain problems as international concerns requiring

international action.
Global Defence Spending $ 1.917 trillion in
2019: Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute
Critiques of human security

• Too broad to be useful as security agenda.

• National interest, rather than global altruism.

• Liberal reformist tool of global capitalism.

• Neo-colonial agenda and failed states intervention.

Conclusion

• A new security agenda.

• Economy and security led to the language of a new World Order.

• A gradual shift from the hegemony of strategic studies to more open

ended and interdisciplinary security studies.

• Globalisation and inequality (prosperity for whom?)

• Human security is now unquestionably anything but not hot air.