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1. Introduction
With the end of the Cold War and the accelerating process of globalization, the concept of
(international) security, one of the key concepts in international relations (IR), increasingly came
under the scrutiny of critical scholars of security and of IR more generally. This group of
scholars called for a fundamental shift of focus in the academic concept of security and for major
reform in security policies that reflect what are from their perspective the real causes of
insecurity in world politics. Critical IR theorists advocated the use of the term “human security”,
which had been introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in
opposition to the more traditional term of “national security”, to guide research and practice.
This relatively novel concept identifies individuals and collectivities as the objects of security
and emphasizes human rights, good governance, and, more generally, quality of life issues as the
central dimensions of (international) security. Moreover, it hypothesizes that non-state actors,
especially global civil society actors, will be prominent in advocating the concept of human
security and in launching initiatives to translate this concept into concrete policy initiatives that
address the sources of human insecurity. This hypothesis is grounded in insightful and
convincing arguments, but has not really been empirically tested.
Have (international) movements emerged since the end of the Cold War whose goals reflect the
ideas that critical security theorists espouse? Have global civil society actors been an important
force of change in international security discourse? And if so, to what extent have these
movements/actors been successful in realizing their goals? These are the questions that this paper
is concerned with. This attempt to test some of the statements put forward by critical IR scholars
uses evidence from two different cases: the Kimberley Process, an initiative concerned with the
Convention