International Relations - Security International

International Relations - Security

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: CONCEPTS on HUMAN SECURITY

Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?

Roland Paris

An Overly Broad Definition of Human Security:

According to Paris, the concept of human security is so broad as to become virtually meaningless. In 1994 the United Nations (U.N.) defined human security as comprising two main categories: (1) chronic threats such as hunger, disease, and depression, and (2) acute threats such as sudden hurtful disruptions to the ordinary patterns of daily human life. The U.N. definition further defines the specific threats covered by the notion of human security into numerous categories of particular threats ranging from issues affecting food supplies, economics, and environmental concerns to personal, community and political security.

Paris suggests that this all-encompassing approach to defining human security is too inclusive because it defines to so many types of threats that, in effect, it defines nothing more than the entire spectrum of every conceivable issue in human life. In particular, Paris points out the more amorphous threats included in the definitions offered by countries like Japan, which includes threats to dignity and economic prosperity, as well as those definitions suggested by numerous academic articles that include similarly expansive concerns within the framework of human security.

Narrowing the Conceptual Definition of Human Security:

According to Paris (and others), the concept of human security is also plagued by the extent to which its parameters and definitions rely on subjective distinctions and on arbitrary designations that depend largely on cultural values and perspectives. In that regard, even the attempts to narrow its focus are susceptible to subjective characterizations. For example, the approaches formulated by Harvard scholars and the Kroc Institute focus on the identification of "essential" elements such as those sufficiently important to justify fighting over, and those that rise to the top of comprehensive "human security audits," respectively.

Paris maintains that while these criteria may help narrow the scope of what falls under the umbrella of human security, ultimately, even those distinctions necessarily involve subjective assignment of relative importance of specific concerns. Paradoxically, by focusing on areas traditionally relegated to nation building and international relations to the exclusion of violent threats, the formulae suggested by these approaches guarantees safety with regard to quality-of-life-related concerns while all but ignoring bona fide threats to human safety posed by outright violent conflict.

Moreover, Paris reminds us that such broad, expansive, and subjective definitions lend themselves to partisan use by political leaders and government authorities.

According to Paris, both nations and various political entities within nations may have a vested interest in opposing any definition of human security that is more precise, because the more vague formulation is more amenable to use as a means of justifying offensive action against other nation states or for the purposes of promoting politically motivated expenditures of public resources, respectively, by classifying virtually any objective as an issue of human security.

Finally, Paris introduces the concept of a matrix-based approach designed to include both military and non-military threats to nation states to address the traditional focus of security threats to the entire spectrum of potential threats to nations from external origin, internal conflict, as well as from nonviolent threats of a more chronic nature that affect individuals rather than whole societies.

Applying International Relations and Security Principles to an Imprecise Concept:

Paris is correct in his observation that the concept of human security is an extremely broad notion that comprises individual components of widely varied significance. Likewise, it is true that different approaches to the issue and the definitions offered by various theorists are mutually contradictory and that even within any single framework, subjective application and arbitrary distinctions render any conclusions susceptible to corruption and diversion for the purposes of justifying internal policies and expenditures of public resources as well as international actions under the all-inclusive definition of security concerns.

In that regard, the criticisms suggested by Paris may have particular contemporary relevance in connection with the manner in which the Bush administration justified the proposed and continuing U.S. involvement in Iraq. Similarly, the simultaneous failure of the federal government to adequately address domestic threats to human security such as the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina lend credence to his observations about the susceptibility of vague definitions to partisan interests.

However, Paris seems to have complicated the issue unnecessarily. To illustrate by analogy, human health much like human security is a broad, inclusive concept that includes everything from chronic low-level disease management and acute minor discomforts to deadly disease and acute medical emergencies. Nevertheless, the field of modern healthcare has established protocols for dealing effectively with all the issues that fall within the very general concept of health without diminishing its ability to address particular health threats in proportion to their relative importance.