Introduction

The human security approach, as an alternative analytical and normative approach to the traditional security lens for identifying threats, to whom and how to address them, is one of those overlooked great ideas that fall victim to their genesis. Although it is a continuation of constructivist attempts to broaden and deepen security studies by moving the referent object from states to people and communities, human security, given its normative agenda and close association with international organizations, has stayed at the fringes of academia. The concept was officially coined in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report 1994. Since then, it has officially served as the umbrella concept for the foreign policy of middle-power countries such as Canada and Japan, and the subject of an international Commission on Human Security co-chaired by Sadako Ogata, the former head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the academic Amartya Sen. By 2012, after years of lobbying by a coalition of countries under the banner of Friends of Human Security, it became the subject of a United Nations General Assembly resolution.

Despite its noble and logical aim to look at security from the perspective of those for whom it matters, namely people, the human security concept has not been able to gather much political or academic currency. Within academia, an interdisciplinary approach that puts the focus on people has not been able to extensively break into security studies, which continues to be dominated by realism and liberalism. Despite the UN resolution calling it an approach that is defined by freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom from indignity, debates still rage about the lack of a precise definition and the virtues of narrow versus broad definitions. Politically, the concept still courts controversy and rejection nearly thirty years after its introduction. Its close association with the notion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in debates about international interventions has alienated Southern countries that are skeptical about violations of state sovereignty and new conditionalities for receiving aid. No country has adopted it as a goal at the national level, raising skepticism about its utility for domestic policymaking.

Yet the human security concept represents a malleable tool for analyzing the root causes of threats and their multidimensional consequences for different types of insecurities. It can be operationalized through applying specific principles to policymaking.