HUMAN SECURITY

The concept of human security is too contested to make any valuable contribution to the study of security

The concept of human security is too contested to make any valuable contribution to the study of security.

Introduction

The concept of human security represents a departure from orthodox neorealist security studies because it places human beings, rather than solely states, at the center of international and national security policies. Human security has fully entered the policy and academic debates in the early 1990s; nevertheless, despite its widespread usage within national and international policy circles, its definition remains highly contested. Within the discipline of political science, the study of security was, until the 1990s, dominated by strategic studies.

The end of the Cold War dealt a significant blow to the legitimacy of strategic studies as the centerpiece of the study of security, resulting in the transformation of the field into what we now know as security studies. This entry traces the history of that transformation, beginning with the evolution of strategic studies, its challengers, and the emergence of security studies as the new moniker for the field. It begins with the so-called golden age of strategic studies, in which the central concepts of Cold War security and defense were elaborated, and in particular, intellectual work was performed to integrate nuclear weapons into the discussion on national defense.

It then considers the other two periods of Cold War strategic studies: the first characterized by the operationalization of arms control in the period of détente and the second coincident with the period known as the Second Cold War. As the Second Cold War swiftly gave way to the rapid transformation of Europe and the Cold War's end, the criticisms of strategic studies that had been voiced throughout its history gained greater purchase within the discipline. The entry traces first the emergence of security studies in the 1990s as a reformed study of security after the Cold War's end and then the changes wrought to the field by the events of September 11, 2001. The final section in the entry considers the state of the field today.

The close connection of the periodization of strategic and security studies with the major events of the post-war world is no accident. Security studies are a policy science and were intimately connected to the creation of the human security in the United States following World War II. The close connection of academic disciplines and the security state is by no means unique to strategic studies and has been particularly noted in the creation of area studies within political science, but the ties were particularly overt in the case of strategic studies. While strategic studies developed as a recognized academic discipline within the universities, it was always closely tied to military institutions, as in the case of the RAND Corporation, formed to conduct research for the U.S. Air Force.

As a policy science with a military focus, strategic studies was underpinned theoretically by the political realism that emerged in the ...