A Critical Appraisal of Human Security Thresholds and the African Union’s Human Security Agenda in the Twenty-First Century

Human security is a contentious idea. There is little agreement on what constitutes a threat to human security after more than 30 years of use, and there are hundreds of criteria that have been put out. As part of a larger continental, institutional, and moral transformation in Africa in the early 1990s, this paper contends that concepts of human security were incorporated into the practice of Pan-Africanism. The notion that the traditional understanding of security has led to the impoverishment of the African continent served as the foundation for the ideational shift. Africa may be able to overcome its economic and security challenges with a new, individual-centered approach to security. In large part, the Kampala Movement and the policy-making of Salim Ahmed Salim, the Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity at the time, are credited with dispelling the appeal of conventional security concepts among the African ruling class and presenting human security as a compelling substitute to bridge the resulting intellectual gap. As a result of the ideational shift, the African Union (AU) was established as a vehicle for the interstate dissemination and advancement of human security concepts. Almost of the decisions, declaration protocols that African leaders accepted in the first eight years after the founding of the AU had strong human security undertones. However, advancing its human security agenda is proving to be extremely difficult for the AU. The international community's backing of Libyan rebels and the Arab revolution, which resulted in the overthrow of two main AU financiers, have made human security seem like a taboo topic within the AU. This paper will address a threshold-based definition that resolves the fundamental conundrum of human security, which is that definitions are either too broad, giving priority to a literal shift in reference to the individual over the requirements of policymakers, or too narrow, compromising conceptual integrity for policy utility. A thresholdbased definition aims to be both conceptually sound and pertinent to policy. This paper later offers a framework for the analysis, emphasising that the founding of the AU was informed, in part, by human security concerns. An overview of human security concepts as they could be perceived inside the AU follows, highlighting the aspects of human security found in important AU texts. This paper looks at AU organisations that support human security. The last section looks at the difficulties the AU has persuading the African elite to embrace the human security theory as the ideal standards and tenets of their governments.