The uncertain future of human security in the UN

Abstract

Since its original articulation in the 1994 Human Development Report, the concept of human security has been widely used to understand and address post‐Cold War threats to international peace and security. However, a review of policy documents using the concept in the United Nations (UN) system finds that human security is at risk of disappearing from the organisational landscape. I argue that this is a result of three interrelated problems with the way human security has been used–the failure to distinguish clearly between the concept and practice of human development and of human security, a lack of differentiation between human rights and human security and a lack of attention to the perils of conceptual overstretch. Two possible solutions are discussed. First, a narrow definition of human security as freedom from organised violence is reviewed and critiqued. Second, a threshold‐based conceptualisation of threats to human security is defined and used to address the three problems with the use of human security in the UN system. The chapter concludes that the narrow definition of human security is unnecessarily restrictive, leaving out too many relevant threats, and that the UN system is uniquely positioned to actualise a broad threshold‐based conceptualisation.