Civilizing Process or Civilizing Mission? Toward a Post-Western Understanding of Human Security

This paper seeks to critically interrogate the view that the emergence of ‘human security’ can be seen as a manifestation of what Norbert Elias aptly termed the ‘civilizing process’. Despite its recent adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012 and its institutionalization through the United Nations system, Human Security may be viewed –not only in its ‘narrow’ but also its ‘broad’ guises—as the latest instantiation of the ‘civilizing mission’ facilitating the continued intervention of the western-dominated ‘international community’ in previously colonized areas of the world. Critically reworked, however, human security has the potential to constitute a powerful ‘global ethic’ by distancing itself from its western ‘secular’ origins and recognizing the multiple religio-cultural contexts in which human dignity is embedded.