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Concerns regarding human security arguably define the contemporary world. Such concerns relate to the human desire to live with "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" (United Nations System Task Team, 2012). There are significant challenges for contemporary human security that have emerged with processes of globalization, climate change, migration, population growth, violent extremism, transnational crime, constantly developing technologies, poverty, and inequality. More than ever perhaps, it is essential to consider the importance of economics, livelihoods, ecology, health, politics, and society when we seek to better understand human security. However, the dominant focus in psychology has remained relatively fixed on individual needs, perspectives, and experiences.Security has long been an object of study within the discipline of psychology. With notable exceptions related to issues of the environment, culture, and society that appear in this special section, our disciplinary approaches have tended to approach security rather narrowly as an individualized process. As a discipline, we have primarily focused on understanding and supporting secure minds, thoughts, emotions, and identities, in essence a stable selfhood that grows in a stable or secure personal environment. Beginning with a North American humanistic perspective, security was initially theorized in psychology as requiring a blending of fundamental needs as well as personality development to create different levels of secure personhood (Maslow, 1942). Psychoanalytic thinkers have posited relational attachments as central to developing the psychic organization needed for this secure sense of self (Ainsworth & Ainsworth, 1958;Bowlby, 1958;Fairbarin, 1952;Klein, 1927). Primarily, it was considered that successful emotional and social development results from positive attachment experiences in both childhood and adulthood.This notion of the secure personhood has permeated other nation states beyond the United States and Europe, where the focus has tended to remain on individualistic aspects of personal security. As such, cross-cultural psychologists have also considered security in terms of people's internal psychological processes through attention on developmental perspectives (Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, & Sagi-Schwartz, 2016), psychological needs (Malka, Soto, Inzlicht, & Lelkes, 2014), and moral values (Schwartz, 2012.

Building on the U.N. human security taxonomy of 1994, this article aims to explore the constructability of a reliable, valid, parsimonious, useful measure of human security that is relevant to contemporary environments and situations? A seminal 1994 U.N. report, Human Security in Theory and Practice, outlined seven types of human security (personal, health, food, community, economic, environmental, political). A quarter-century on, we added two more, cyber and national security, and tested if a single measure could capture all nine security concerns. A national sample of N = 1033 New Zealanders completed a brief online measure in which participants reported yes or no to experiencing each type of security and basic demographics. Guttman scaling placed these needs in an ascending order of difficulty. Analogous to a staircase, security may be scaled from personal up to political security (coefficient of reproducibility = .88), with three distinct but interrelated flights:(1) proximal (personal, health, food security); (2) social (cyber, community, economic, environmental); and (3) distal (national, political). We confirmed this nine-step, three-flight measure in our sample (Χ 2 = 81.72; df = 24; RMSEA = .048, 90%CI [.037, .06]; CFI = .976; TLI = .964; SRMR = .028). The measure showed configural, metric, scalar, and factorial invariances (across random-split subgroups). Ethnic groups and the precariously employed scored significantly differently, in coherent ways, on the security staircase scale.

In mid-February 2020 New Zealand released its long overdue ‘Countering terrorism and violent extremism national strategy.’ This article draws on the experience of three academic commentators who cast a critical eye over the document and whose respective thoughts are brought together here. The approach taken is to discuss the purpose and fundamentals of what strategy is to provide a framework with which to review New Zealand’s first publicly released counter-terrorism strategy. Unfortunately, this important and long overdue strategy, in the view of the authors, comes up well short of what it should be. The authors offer a challenge to New Zealand’s policy makers concerned with national security to seek more depth in the consideration of their approach, to present a strategy with less graphic design, more substantial discussion of the fundamental questions relating to the management of modern terrorism and violent extremism, and an appreciation of the nuanced New Zealand experience with political violence from late twentieth century to the present day.

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