Human Security and its Subjects

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe UN has changed the world by combining liberal internationalism, the state, and liberal institutionalism, as well as by endeavouring to place the subjects of security first. The notion of human security (HS) emerged through these processes and through the convergence of various concepts, including peacekeeping, human rights, development, and peace-building. HS has been central to the UN's recent normative and legal impact and to the UN's many peacekeeping and peace-building environments around the world.The UN has modified older interest-based and state-based conceptions of sovereignty and security.' Wider versions of security incorporating people and humanity are now commonly debated, as previous modernist notions of sovereignty and power have softened. This process has not been straightforward. It is still commonplace for actors and scholars to assume that state security is foremost and that the UN operates mainly on an intergovernmental basis, driven by member-states' narrow concepts of interests and security.Physical and ontological insecurity represent a disruption of while human security represents a gathering, tidal turn of humanity's longstanding interest in redressing insecurity and building a viable localto-global peace.2 The process of establishing HS involves understanding the limits of security and designing practices that are expressions of humanity, empathy, and the desire to emancipate others. These practices should not spill over into redesigning others' expressions of humanity, however; rather, they should recognize autonomy in political, social, cultural, and economic life. HS in governmentalizing form may spark off resistance and new cycles of violence. A broader view of security is not necessarily a recipe for interventionism, governmentality, or the disguise of structural power. It may instead be an emancipatory form of security, encompassing respect, empathy, determination to help, solidarity, and care. From this perspective, HS has a firm philosophical, post-colonial, and pluralist basis. This subject driven, subaltern concept of HS is determined by the people who face insecurity-the powerless and marginalized subjects often located in the global south.HS has been translated into something far more significant than what Edward Newman has called an weak but normatively attractive concept, David Chandler has called the dog that didn't bark, and Roland Paris and others have argued is a concept unable to overcome naked interests or its own limited resources.5 HS is certainly normatively potent, but it has also been discursively influential in the understanding and development of a peace and security architecture in the post-colonial and increasingly subaltern era; and it has slowly amassed material capacity.This article argues that critiques about the material or conceptual limitations of HS fail to fully comprehend the political legitimacy of HS in local and transnational civil society, as well as in the peacebuilding architecture, as the concept has slowly gathered institutional capacity.4 HS connects in many societies of the world with broadly defined social and international values and norms, such as human rights, representation, equality, and sustainability. It implies humanity in the sense of an inner imperative to empathize with and assist those who need help, simultaneously respecting the political and social autonomy of others.This version of HS offers the potential to represent locally constructed, subaltern perceptions of security in diverse cultural, social, economic, political, and local-to-global settings.5 Subaltern engagements provide HS with local legitimacy. This legitimacy, along with HS's legitimacy (albeit contested), show that the concept is neither analytically weak nor impossible to implement. HS has amassed a range of instruments, resources, and institutions to form a legal footing, while consisting of a philosophy of solidarity, empathy, and care. …