The right to human security, politically enshrined in global conventions, has become wholly interpreted in military terms. Time to rethink its principles and thereby retheorise the human.
There are times when the bare facts of human insecurity, our fundamental precariousness as individuals, groups and species, can hit us in the face. However, in modernity, it is more likely to recede into the background as an intensifying matrix of non-palpable threats and risks. Once, people could find sanctuary far from the madding shroud of abstracted risk. Now, the risk matrix is becoming so interconnected, globalised and abstracted that it is impossible to escape. Nuclear winter will not fade off at its edges. Viral pandemics arrive with dramatic virulence, even in ostensibly isolated places. And climate change is globally changing the planet, including in ways that become even more intense at its poles. In short, these threats and risks involve ontological changes that are unsettling all social and environmental life across the planet. Darkness has descended over the planet with mediatised spotlights on the invasion of Ukraine and the war against the Palestinians in Gaza. This should be a time for basic rethinking of ontological questions concerning the meaning of human security, but the opposite seems to be happening. The militarisation of the world is intensifying while so-called ‘human security’ continues to be reduced to food aid and disaster relief.
The Meaning of Human Security
The idea and practice of ‘human security’has emerged slowly as a regime of thinking and acting during recent decades. The paradigm shift that made possible the first conceptions of human security was based on an emergent and important ideological movement rather than a single pronouncement. Across the course of the twentieth century, documents such as the constitution of the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights linked peace and security to broader social justice issues. Within this broad change in sensibility, present in at least one lineage of the sustainable development and social justice movement, it is possible to point to key moments and documents that mark the development and consolidation of the new conception of human security. Three foundational documents can be singled out: the 1994 Human Development Report, the 2003 report, Human Security Now, and the 2010 Secretary General’s statement, Human Security. It is indicative of the predominance of the prime assumption that the United Nations Human Security Unit has not initiated any major new conceptual developments since those documents.
However, despite the early pathbreaking work done on the concept, proponents of human security remain imprisoned by existing dominant discourses. Instead of taking the concept of ‘human’ as relating to the human condition and treating state security (and therefore military security) as being encompassed by human security, they tend to treat human security and military security as separate domains. In the context of contemporary international relations, this seems positive when arguments are made for giving more credence to human security. It seems to counter contemporary dominant trends. Nevertheless, over the last few decades, the dominant approach has been to consolidate state security and military security, as they have such commonsense prominence that the more recent concern with human security has struggled to find even a complementary place alongside those violence-related regimes. This is part of the reason why assertions of parity or complementarity seem to be radical in their challenge to the dominant paradigm. They are not.
It is as if the state-based security (and its military apparatus, which itself should be a subordinate category of state practices) has a separate life from the human. When military security is subsequently brought back into a complementary relationship to human-wide categories such as rights, development, and security, it becomes more than their equal because of a self-confirming process. We need military security because our military insecurity is intensifying. It is easy to see why this is the case, given the extraordinary emphasis from the West on the Global War on Terror, Homeland Security, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s possible military reclamation of Taiwan, and Hamas’s attack on Israeli citizens. The obvious paradox is that massively increasing global spending on military security has made the world more insecure, unsettling the basic conditions of freedom from fear.
In this context, it is worth asking why disaster security (which should, in the context of the climate change crisis, be prioritised over military security) continues to be a secondary regime of human activity. States continually reproduce the conditions for engaging in military activity while, for the most part, states delegate disaster engagement to a relatively marginal team that works on response-preparedness plans.
Japan is a telling example to follow here. The country was largely demilitarised after World War II, and it is often said to be one of the most disaster-prepared states in the world. Certainly, it has comprehensive plans for responding to disasters and an integrated network of administrators from the Central Disaster Management Council, chaired by the prime minister, linked down to the prefectures and the municipalities. In 2001, a Ministry of State for Disaster Management was established to coordinate disaster management policies and disaster responses. Nevertheless, the Japanese Self-Defence Force had its annual budget increased to USD 56 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, while the budget for disaster risk management was cut in 2022 to USD 4 billion, less than 0.5 per cent of the total national account expenditure, down from 6 to 8 per cent of the national budget in the 1960s. This is at a time of increased extreme events brought on by climate change.
Why, in this current climate of deep awareness of the consequences of disasters, are nation-states, including disaster-sensitive states such as Japan, intensifying military security while effectively downgrading disaster responsiveness? It is not just because of recent mobilisation around military security linked to Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan and Kashmir. More deeply, the longer-term shift turns on the dominant reduction of ‘human security’ to a flat modern notion of freedom.
The Limits of Tying Human Security to Freedom from Want
Most of the human security literature has nothing more than high-sounding phrases to contribute to subjective questions of ontological security. Security and risk are integral to the broad ontological condition of being human. Security can never be absolute, and risk takes many forms and levels of intensity. However, neither military security nor ‘freedom from want’ can explain that integral relation. For a person or community experiencing deep ontological insecurity, it does not matter whether or not they have enough food to stave off hunger or shelter over their heads to keep the rain out. For a person or community fearful that their cultural existence is subtly under threat, it does not necessarily console them that their material needs are all being met or that the state has control. And to complicate things further by a different example, for a God-fearing person, fear is part of the condition of their existence. Contradictorily, it is one’s relationship to the source of that fear—God—that believers fear losing.
Despite this complexity, most of the literature on human security tends to focus on the material conditions of embodied security. Even the discussions of freedom from fear tend to concentrate on the leftovers from the centring of military and state security. Freedom from fear becomes freedom from fear of military action either by another state or one’s own state. This criticism depends upon an analytical distinction between two interrelated dimensions of human security—material and existential. Material security concerns embodied needs—nutritious food, clean water, shelter, bodily integrity, and so on. Existential security concerns sense and sensibility. It is more than just a psychology of safety. Existential security is founded upon a sense of place, a sense of engagement, a sense of meaningful relations, and so on. Together, material and existential security add up to ontological security in general.
Unfortunately, the meaning of this ontological insecurity is submerged in the medicalised codification (abstraction) of the very language that we use to describe it. For example, the effects of the 2011 Japanese tsunami on children have been discussed by Kenji Hayashi and Naoko Tomita in terms of abstracted psychoanalytic terms such as PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. This concept was first used in the 1980s in relation to the Vietnam War and was taken up as a category of analysis in Japan in the 1990s. The evidence for PTSD is strong but circumstantial: school essays by children bear titles such as ‘Tsunami was black and smelly’ (written by a second grader), ‘The rumble in the earth’ (by a fifth grader), and ‘Listlessness, nausea, and a funny feeling’ (by a sixth grader).
These are expressions of personal existential insecurity directly related to a disaster, but the process of existential insecurity includes this level and goes deeper and wider, adding dimensions that will never appear in children’s essays. The effects of the Japanese bubble crisis, the global financial crisis, precarious employment, and changing understandings of identity have been changing family life for many decades and have had a profound impact on the ontological security of people in everyday life.
When combined with the ontological unsettling of social relations in contemporary Japan as part of a global process, the impact is compounded. These existential effects thus go beyond the materiality of economic precarity or even personal fear of a further earthquake, a tsunami or radiation poisoning. A slow unsettling of meaning, a cultural crisis, is now evident, particularly for younger generations living in Japanese cities. Japan Inc., brand power, consumption affluence, and the national state no longer provide a sense of existential security that they once did, even if only superficially, under conditions of capitalist growth. In Anne Allison’s words:
‘Hopelessness and futurelessness are buzzwords of the times. So is the phrase ‘relationless society’ (muenshakai): a descriptor of a country where the stitching of connectedness between people is fraying at the seams. Being alone—literally, psychically, socially—is the new human condition for Japan/ese in the 21st century. In an age when people are expected to be ‘responsibly independent’ (jiko sekinin), one-third of the population lives alone and 32,000 die ‘lonely deaths’ (at home all alone)—the same number as those who commit suicide—every year.’
It is no accident, then, that one of the most common concepts used since the tsunami in Japanese disaster-relief campaigns is kizuna, meaning ties or bonds. Certain words have begun to be used by the state to name what is ideologically needed to respond to such crises, without the technocratic state any longer being able practically to effect such bonds or even engender political trust from the general citizenry. Emperor Akihito and now Emperor Naruhito might be called upon to give speeches about pulling together as a nation, but for all the people who love their speeches, many others dismiss them as political expressions of the state’s ideological apparatus.
Shackling the concept of ‘freedom’ to modern desires for choice?
According to Human Security Now, freedom is not only central to human fulfilment. It is also what makes it possible:
The Commission on Human Security’s definition of human security: to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfillment. Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms—freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means using processes that build on people’s strengths and aspirations…’
What should be noted is that freedom is the basis of human security here. Having made a categorical modern claim, the report goes on to relativise that claim—except in relation to freedom. Freedom remains the universalising bedrock. The passage continues: ‘What people consider to be “vital”—what they consider to be “of the essence of life” and “crucially important”—varies across individuals and societies.’ That is why any concept of human security must be dynamic.
Yes, of course, any concept should be dynamic. However, despite this apparent openness, Amartya Sen and the other authors of the report do not consider the various dialectical tensions that have been argued about across human history, particularly since the eighteenth century. These include grounding tensions between freedoms to choose and existential limits to that choice, between autonomy and authority, and between liberty and equality. The relationship to human rights tends to reduce human security to the liberal notion of ‘freedom from’—that is, freedom from basic insecurities or negative freedom—rather than treating rights as a contingent codification of positive conditions needed for human flourishing…
Human rights should be the ethically generated expression of society-wide debates about the base necessities to sustain a flourishing life, but here, they remain overgeneralised and thin. Here, human security just is. A descriptive claim about basic securities—food, shelter, and so on—joins hands with a single ethical imperative: freedom…
Towards treating security in all its complexity
Insecurity is caught in the intensifying tensions of intersecting social formations as processes of globalisation have thrown together practices and sensibilities associated with different life-worlds. This might be called a clash of ontologies. The reference here to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is a critique rather than an extension of his approach. The clash referred to is not that between ill-defined ‘civilisations’, nor is it a dubious variation on the ‘ethnic differences cause violence’ argument. Rather, as has been developed across the course of this book, the clash refers to tensions that arise at the intersection of different ways of being in the world—customary, traditional, modern, and postmodern ways of living temporally, spatially, corporeally and epistemologically…
The relevance to a country such as Japan, with its contemporary intersecting layers of customary, traditional, and modern rationalities, is profound. Going back to the question of disaster response, arguably, the more traditionally oriented people of Tohoku, particularly people living in less urbanised areas, were better able to cope with the deprivation and the strictures of crisis-management authority after the tsunami than those living in the megacities. It has even been noted in the general press that if an earthquake of the kind predicted for Tokyo actually happened, the ensuing social upheaval would be chaotic by comparison.
The point that I am making is that people need more than the mechanics of material disaster relief to cope with such crises as deaths. That additional support does not necessarily have to come from traditional cosmologies that respond actively to mortality, but telling someone that they have PTSD and offering a session of counselling is not a sufficient replacement. Describing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 that killed over 100,000 people, Gennifer Weisenfeld writes: ‘Bereaved families and the religious community, however made sure that the memories of their loved one’s were not swept away in modernity’s erasures; they foregrounded the primary sacred function of the memorial to honor and appease the spirits of the dead.’
It must be acknowledged that the possibilities that are given by modern analytical (including liberal) approaches are extraordinarily important. In relation to natural disasters, modern systems—when they are communicated well—these approaches give us the fragile security of knowing in advance what is about to hit us and the objective security of vacating a vulnerable area before a natural event occurs. Modern technological platforms measure and forecast the possibilities of disasters and the parameters of what they might entail. Postmodern systems of cybernetic risk control join these platforms. By sensor deployment, for example, we know when a tsunami or earthquake is coming, but in addition, by using mathematical algorithms and modelling against known variables, we can ‘know’ their probable consequences, or at least think we can. It is called ‘probabilistic risk assessment’.
On the other hand, the taking away is deeply problematic. First, probabilistic risk assessment is a form of codifying abstraction that usually fails to consider non-linear, indirect, compounding or other risk issues. It gives the impression of safety, defended by scientific verity, as if probabilities are actualities. Combined with the false assurances of self-interested bodies such as the nuclear power industry, it takes away from the fact that risk is ever-present.
Second, and more importantly, modern technoscience and management subsume every understanding of nature and its effects within an imminent frame that tends to reduce disaster response to a technical task. It tends to foreground a technocratic process shorn of the meaning of cultural difference and seeking to overcome nature. This is not to suggest the ‘end of culture’ or the ‘end of nature’, to re-invoke the phrase used by Bill McKibben. Rather, in the sense used by Charles Taylor, it is to suggest that when modern scientific secular understandings frame disaster relief, something is lost. To give a secular example, in contemporary disaster management, the science and politics of safety tend to override prior senses of identity, culture and livelihood. In the case of Sri Lanka, after the 2004 tsunami, modern no-build buffer zones were legislated, overriding the long history of some communities (modern, traditional, and customary) for whom living along the shoreline was central to their way of life.
Natural crises such as floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes were once framed by traditional cosmologies, the episteme of religions, that gave existential sustenance in the face of ongoing fear. The Biblical story of the flood relates to a covenant with God, as does the Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh. Japanese stories of its earthquakes are related to the way in which its islands sit upon the catfish Namazu. The catfish flops about, constrained only by a huge rock controlled by the god Kashima. These cosmologies now tend to be relegated to the edges of modern social life, demarcated in ritual observance, or referred to in quaint reminders such as the use by the Japan Meteorological Society of a stylised catfish in its Earthquake Early Warning logo.
This means that in relation to natural disasters, while we have the technological capacity to predict and marginally contain the impact of tsunamis, we are offered little more than nominally enhanced material security. To the extent that the modern notion of ‘freedom from’ offers negative freedom, we find ourselves increasingly alone in the world, dependent on what is often now perceived as unreliable technological systems and fallible experts. This contributes to a different kind of fear, a deep unsettling of the meaning of fear.
An Alternative Framing of Human Security
This brings us to a new definition of human security. Summarising the previous discussion, human security can be defined as one of the foundational conditions of being human, including both the sustainable protection and provision of the material conditions for meeting the embodied needs of people and the protection of the variable ontological conditions for maintaining a dignified, flourishing life. It follows from this definition that the core focus of human security should be on situations that will cause the most vulnerability. Risk management should be most responsive to immediate events or processes that have both an extensive and intensive impact in producing material and existential vulnerabilities of people in general or a category of persons across a particular locale.
Thus, within this definition, we can analytically distinguish between two kinds of human security. Negative human security concerns the process of responding to the violations and challenges to the security of people and environments. That is, negative human security is focused on stopping bad things from happening. This is in keeping with the main argument of this chapter that human security needs to be framed by the risks affecting the human condition from embodied risks to more abstract risks, and second, that military security needs to be subordinated to this larger task. Positive human security, on the other hand, concerns the process of sustaining the variable and contingent conditions of, and capacities for, vibrant human life across all the domains of social life.
To be sure, a conceptual critique is not going to displace military defence and war from the centre of government focus, funding, and ideological legitimation. Just as it is not enough in the past to point to the massive financial costs of military defence and how those funds might be used otherwise, this conceptual critique needs to come with a transitional practice to decentering the military. The modest initiating suggestion that I want to put forward here is for countries to expand the role and training of military forces to encompass disaster preparation and management. Further suggestions would follow, including unilaterally disarming those weapons that cannot be used except as a threat to security—nuclear weapons, space-based weapons, and weapons of cyber disruption—but we do not have the space to more than hint at that argument…
We need to treat ‘the human’ or the social’ as the foundational category of life—which means that human security is relevant across the domains of the social. At the same time, military security needs to be put in its place as a means, not an end… In the contemporary globalising world of nation-states and translocalised violence, military security (or food security, housing provision, or gender equity) provides one necessary but not sufficient material condition of human security that connects all other dimensions of the social…
Rather than being absolute, human security should be grounded in processes of social sustainability and social relationality. Rather than being absolute, security is conditionally relational. In these terms, insecurity—both material and existential insecurity—can sometimes be a good thing, as can uncertainty, struggle, and adversity, so long as they do not attack the foundation of what it means to be positively alive and related to others in enriching ways. This becomes particularly relevant in the present when, in the domain of politics, rendering citizens insecure while asking them to trust a certain cohort of politicians to return total security has become one of the fuels of a full-blown legitimation crisis. This, in turn, allows for further spirals of existential anxiety, dissembling, and existential anxiety.
It is similarly complex in the domain of ecology. The classical modern high-romantic sensibility of the sublime, which included the dialectic of the fear and love of nature, has been largely supplanted by the technoscientific sensibility that nature can be either controlled or at least substantially moderated by geo-engineering precautions and responses.
On one side of the ledger, the abstraction of the processes of ecological degradation allows right-wing politicians to deny or defer positive action. On the other side of the ledger, prevention, response, and remediation have become clamours in an echoing catch-cry that bounces off the walls. Its proponents have not really worked through what these concepts mean for the human condition beyond inscribing technical steps in a giant Gantt chart. For all of the possible strength of that process and the accuracy of the evidence that supports it, there is an existential reason why it is only convincing a proportion of unsettled citizens. Thus, in the context of climate change, it becomes increasingly important that risk assessment is not reduced to carbon accounting and meteorological metrics.
A complex sense of our mutual insecurity would be a much saner response to the current situation than the current mainstream confidence that, in our ingenuity and innovation, security-based assessments will eventually lead us to control the comprehensive challenge that faces us on this planet. At least by adding disaster prevention, response, and remediation to the task of our ‘defence’ forces, we would be giving them something positive to do that does not fuel the spiral of (in)security. From such small things, another world is possible…
This is an excerpt from James’s forthcoming book, Global Crisis and Insecurity: The Human Condition, Darkly (Cambridge University Press, 2025).