Absolute despair would be the wrong response [to the current situation in Iraq]. Instead the disaster that is the West's current strategy in Iraq must be used as a constructive call to the international community to reconfi gure its foreign policy around human security rather than national security. Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Aff airs 1Human security refers to the security of individuals and communities, expressed as both 'freedom from fear' and 'freedom from want'. Severe threats to human security range from genocide and slavery to natural disasters such as hurricanes or fl oods to massive violations of the right to food, health and housing. In this article, we argue that the adoption of a human security concept represents a qualitative change in the conduct of foreign and security policy. This step-change is particularly relevant for the European Union as it seeks to improve its eff ectiveness and visibility as a collective global actor. Terms matter, and human security is not simply a leitmotif for EU security policies, 2 or an analytical label which categorizes the EU's international role in the way that concepts such as normative power or civilian power have done. 3 Rather, it provides an enduring and dynamic organizing frame for security action, a frame which European foreign policy texts and practices currently lack. Thus human security can be seen as a proactive strategic narrative with the potential to further EU foreign policy integration. To elaborate this organizing frame, we examine two distinct aspects of a human security doctrine: lexis, or what is said and written about it; and praxis, or what it means in terms of everyday actions, from policies to tactics on the ground.The lexis of human security matters because it deals with how policy-makers and the European public view and articulate issues of external security. This is not just the stuff of academic discussions; we need to know what we mean when we talk about the ideas, values, interests and goals of EU external relations. Even practitioners who regard concepts with suspicion as abstract and unhelpful use
The concept of human security, while much contested in both academic and policy debates, and highly fragmented across different meanings and forms of implementation, offers a potential locus around which global security discourse might converge, particularly in light of current shifts in US security thinking. However, key pioneers of human security, such as the United Nations and Canada, appear to be losing their enthusiasm for the concept, just at the moment when others such as the European Union, are advancing a human security agenda. This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN's use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.
The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policy-makers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach, which focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the actorness of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool to access and assess human security in the field. Dialogue allows the recognition of the power of the researched in the construction of knowledge of security, reflecting the conceptual shift represented by human security from states to communities and individuals. In the Kosovo study, dialogic research captured individual agency in the face of pervasive insecurity, revealing its contradictory effects. It led to the identification of a multidirectional security marker as a means to understand experiences of insecurity in relation to strategies to combat it. Three such markers: self-reliance, informality and community solidarity, emerged and are analysed in the case of Kosovo. Simultaneously denoting restrictions on people's security and possibilities for overcoming those very same limitations, the markers express the agential dimension of human security and show how agency and security interact.
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