Citation

Ewan P. Politics 2007; 27(3): 182-189.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and Blackwell Publishing, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-9256.2007.00298.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

‘Human security’ has been framed as a transformative project that seeks to reinvent the theory and practice of security beyond the national security priorities of states. Central to this project is a holistic and people-centred approach that broadens the concept of security and problematises the view that the security concerns of individual men and women are best served by the security policies of their states. Yet although these ideas have gained ground in policy circles, the academic literature in this area has been dominated by debates about the merits and demerits of human security's expansion of the contemporary security agenda. This article explores two key objections to the holistic character of human security and argues that critics underestimate the politics involved in delimiting this concept. In order to deepen our understanding of the politics of human insecurity, human security scholarship must move beyond its current preoccupation with narrow forms of conceptual clarification.