Human Security

Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; on leave as Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. This article is based on a paper presented at the 15th Asia Pacific Roundtable, Kuala Lumpur, 4-7 June, 2001. The author would like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of the article. We need to fashion a new concept of human security that is reflected in the lives of our people, not in the weapons of our country. Mahbub ul Haq(1)THE IDEA OF 'HUMAN SECURITY' has rekindled the debate over what 'security' means and how best to achieve it. Much of the debate concerns the different ways in which the concept has been defined and pursued by its various national and transnational advocates. Although it is presented as a global template on which to recast the security philosophies and policies of countries fundamentally to reflect the changing conditions and principles of world order, human security has also been an instrument of national strategic priorities that often have strong domestic roots. As such, human security has been presented variously as a means of reducing the human costs of violent conflict, as a strategy to enable governments to address basic human needs and offset the inequities of globalization, and as a framework for providing social safety nets to people impoverished and marginalized by sudden and severe economic crises.The different interpretations of human security are not necessarily incompatible, but they do create ground for controversy and suspicion in multilateral settings. Reconciling the different meanings of, and approaches to, human security is thus crucial to any meaningful effort to operationalize the concept and make it into a potent instrument of a just and secure world.For the advocates of human security in the West, a powerful challenge to the idea comes from the 'East' (Asia), a challenge that draws upon the East's traditional understandings of security, claims of cultural specificity, and relative abundance of illiberal polities. To be sure, Asia hosts some of the strongest advocates of the human security idea. But the understanding of human security now prevalent in much of Asia differs in important respects from its meaning in Canada and other Western countries. Some Asian governments and analysts see human security as yet another attempt by the West to impose its liberal values and political institutions on non-Western societies. Others question the 'newness' of the concept, claiming that the emphasis of the human security idea on a broad range of non-military threats mirrors earlier, home-grown notions of 'comprehensive security' formulated by many regional governments.I argue that human security is a distinctive notion, which goes well beyond all earlier attempts by Asian governments to 'redefine' and broaden their own traditional understanding of security as protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity against military threats. At the same time, the development of this notion has strong roots within the region, which could provide an important foundation for promoting a collective human security agenda. To identify a common conceptual ground between the East and the West remains a challenge for scholars and policy-makers concerned with the promotion of human security in both arenas.In the first part of this article, an examination of the various understandings of human security, especially the perceived tension between 'freedom from want' and 'freedom from fear' is followed by an analysis of the similarities and differences between human security and existing security concepts in the region, specifically comprehensive security and co-operative security. The extent to which a new idea like human security could find acceptance in the region depends very much on how it resonates with existing ideas and practices concerning security. …