Editor’s Note
As the specter of an existential military conflict between the world’s two nuclear superpowers faded with the ending of the Cold War, scholars and policymakers began to question some of the most basic assumptions undergirding the study of international security. How useful, after all, were the heavily militarized, bipolar security frameworks designed to manage the Cold War? What would “security” entail in the post-Cold War era? Confronted with these questions, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published a landmark Human Development Report in 1994, claiming: The world can never be at peace unless people have security in their daily lives. Future conflicts may be within nations rather than between them—with their origins buried deep in growing socio-economic deprivation and disparities. The search for security in such a milieu lies in development, not in arms.1 The integrity of the nation-state, in other words, ought to be preceded by the security of the human individual as the referential object in the study of international security. Those interested in pursuing human-focused security identified a new set of issues as threats to international security, such as terrorism, environmental disasters, pandemics, organized crime, cyberattacks, illegal immigration, climate change, and resource exhaustion. The transnational nature of these “non-traditional” security threats requires equally non-traditional methods of engagement. Proponents of human security thereby argue that any individual state can no longer confront its security issues on its own: it will need regional (if not global) cooperation; it will need the participation of nonstate actors; it will have to think holistically about the root causes of instability; and it will have to develop creative solutions that do not rely solely on its military capabilities. As Xiong Guangkai, former People’s Liberation Army general, once said: “Faced with various non-traditional security threats, actions by a single country stand no chance and international cooperation remains the only powerful and effective instrument.”2 While a call to redefine our understanding of security has helped scholars and policymakers find new, practical ways of confronting the realities of a post-Cold War world, the conceptual framework provided by human security has not been immune to criticism. Roland Paris criticizes it for being overly vague and imprecise, “encompassing everything from physical security to psychological well-being.”3 Other voices, emanating predominantly from non-Western countries, claim that deploying human security as a foreign policy goal provides a pretext for developed nations to interfere in the domestic affairs of developing ones.4 Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press for the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 1994), 1. 2 “Global Cooperation Vital for Security,” Xinhua, June 23, 2005, http://www.china.org.cn/english/2005/Jun/132866.htm. 3 Roland Paris, “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air,” International Security 26, no. 2: 88. 4 Pierre Sané, Human Security: Approaches and Challenges (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2008), 4. 1
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