(Page 9 of 18) - A Conceptual Overview of Security in a Globalizing World authored by Smith, Steve.

natural what are contingent and culturally/historically specific definitions of the
participants and issues. For Klein, the core concepts of traditional security studies are
constructs ‘made intelligible to social agents through the medium of language. Instead
of presuming their existence and meaning, we ought to historicize and relativize them
as sets of practices with distinct genealogical trajectories. The issue, in short, is not
whether they are true or false but how they have acquired their meaning’.

Campbell,

looking at US foreign policy, ‘offers a non-essentialist account of danger which
highlights how the very domains of inside/outside, self/other, and domestic/foreign –
these moral spaces made possible by the ethical borders of identity as much as the
territorial boundaries of states – are constituted through the writing of a threat’.

For

Campbell, ‘security…is first and foremost a performative discourse constitutive of
political order’.

The main criticisms of post-structuralist work is that it is not open to

the form of empirical testing found in the social sciences; by offering a series of
readings or narratives it refuses simple notions of ‘truth’ and is thus open to criticism
for being relativistic.

4) Human Security

The concept of human security emerged out of the 1994 United Nations Development
Program (UNDP)

, which proposed a shift in focus away from nuclear security to

human security: ‘With the dark shadows of the cold war receding, one can now see
that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations. For most people, a
feeling off insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of
a cataclysmic world event. Will they and their families have enough to eat? Will they
lose their jobs? Will their streets and neigborhoods be safe from crime? Will they be
tortured by a repressive state? Will they become a victim of violence because of their
gender? Will their religion or ethnic origin target them for persecution? In the final
analysis, human security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job
that was not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who
was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons – it is a concern with
human life and dignity.’

The Report outlines seven areas of human security:

economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal
security, community security and political security, and identifies six main threats to
human security: unchecked population growth, disparities in economic opportunities,
migration pressures, environmental degradation, drug trafficking, and international
terrorism.

In 1997 the UNDP refined the concept of human security, introducing the

distinction between income poverty and human poverty: the former refers to an
income of US$1 a day and less, the latter factors such as life expectancy and

Bradley S.Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order: The Global Politics of Deterrence,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p 10.

David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

Ibid, p 253.

United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Human Development Report 1994, (New York:

Oxford University Press). (Citations that follow are from a reprint of sections of the report,
‘Redefining Security: The Human Dimension’, in Current History, May 1995, pp 229-136.

Ibid, p 229.

Ibid, pp 230-236.