The Logic of Human Security and Why it Matters

The real-world effectiveness of HS integration and operationalisation is difficult to assess, let alone measure. Nevertheless, it seems that much of the effort around operationalising HS within defence seems to omit an appreciation that the underlying logic of human security appears more inherently relevant to defence — and indeed more operationalisable in principle — than might otherwise be thought. Perhaps much of this is because a robust logic of human security is rarely, if ever, articulated.

That is what this article seeks to do. It puts forward a claim about the underlying logic of HS, by reasoning through what the concept is about, why it emerged, and how it proposes to solve the problem(s) it responds to. With its logic unpacked and articulated in this manner, the military salience of HS should be all the more apparent.

 The What

As a security studies concept, HS focuses on the security of individuals and their communities. It is founded on the twin pillars of ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ (a third pillar is often cited as ‘freedom from indignity’). Given that the unit of analysis for HS is individual people, in analytical terms it can be contrasted with national security whose unit of analysis is the (nation-)state, and with international security whose unit of analysis is the international system of states. From this, we can write out the first part of the logic of human security — the what — as follows:

 The HS concept:

(a) identifies people as the unit of security analysis.

So far, this is mostly common knowledge to those with a basic awareness of HS. But why is it necessary to focus on the security of the individual?

The Why

All concepts serve a purpose: they help us understand and navigate the world. So when new concepts arise, it is typically in response to the perceived inadequacies of pre-existing ones. This is no less true when it comes to security studies concepts. To shed light on the why of the HS concept we need to understand the driving force(s) behind its emergence. Much has been written about the confluence of factors that eventually formalised the concept in the UN’s 1994 Human Development Report, and fully conveying that story is beyond the scope of this piece. However, there are a few points to highlight.

The concept of HS was conceived in the late 20th century in response to the perceived inadequacies of the traditional security studies concepts — primarily that of national security. National security had its foundations in realist theories of international politics, which positioned states as the primary unit of analysis (i.e., the thing to be secured) and emphasised hard military power (i.e., bullets and bombs) as the means for each state to achieve security against the others. 

 The challenge was that in the second half of the 20th century, an increasing number of violent conflicts appeared to be happening within states rather than between them. The traditional lens of national security didn’t have much to say about civil wars, ethnic violence, and genocides. What’s more, the national security lens appeared to gloss over the reality that in much of the world, issues like economic deprivation, disease, malnutrition, and environmental degradation were far more acute threats to people’s security than the threat of attack by another state. Indeed, for many people it was their own state that threatened them the most.

 The HS concept was born against this backdrop and was brought to a global audience through the previously mentioned 1994 Human Development Report. But importantly, the concept’s central rationale was that understanding and mitigating these threats to people’s security would enable a more sophisticated approach to preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict. Put simply, the concept’s underlying purpose — its why — was solving the problem of war.

This purpose was explicit in the Human Development Report itself. The report’s foreword highlights that human insecurities are a global challenge because, if left unaddressed, they lead to “conflicts and emergencies,” which are their “tragic consequences”. Human insecurities serve as “early warning signals” of these risks, such that addressing those insecurities “upstream” of conflicts/crises is “far cheaper” than tackling the latter once they actually break out. Indeed, I’m setting the scene for the report, it highlights a quote from 1945 by the then-US Secretary of State in which he remarked that freedom from fear and freedom from want — two core pillars of the HS concept — represented “two fronts” in the “battle of peace,” and that “only victory on both fronts can assure the world of an enduring peace… [and] make the world secure from war.”

The claim that the core purpose of the HS concept was to solve the problem of war and violent conflict is also supported in the security studies scholarship, especially in the works that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s as academic and policy debate raged around this new concept (e.g. Newman, 2001; Paris, 2001; Thomas, 2001; King & Murray, 2001). (It is unfortunate that so much HS thinking since the late 2000s appears not to have critically re-engaged with the core purpose of the concept, thereby missing opportunities to discover and rationalise more effective ways to operationalise the concept amongst different actors.)

 With this in mind, we can now add the why to the logic statement that was started earlier. Therefore, the logic of HS would be as follows:

The HS concept:

(a) identifies people as the unit of security analysis, in order to 

(b) enable a more sophisticated approach to solving the problem of war.

However, the logic is incomplete if left like this, as it doesn’t adequately capture how (a) relates to (b). In other words, if part (a) of the logic identifies the what (i.e. focusing on the security of individual people) and part (b)identifies the why (i.e. solving the problem of war), then what’s missing is the how that mediates between them. This poses the question: how does viewing people as the unit of security analysis help solve the problem of war? 

Experiences of Insecurity

Addressing this gap in the logic takes us not only into the realms of psychology, social psychology, and cognitive science, but also into the field of affective science, meaning the study of emotional states (or ‘affect’). This is because much of what insecurity means at the individual level is actually a question of what it means for someone to feel they are secure. 

 An in-depth discussion of these topics is not possible here. But suffice to say that the experiential (especially psychological and affective) nature of security at the individual level is well grounded in the academic literature (e.g.  Tyler, 1997; Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Rivera & Paez, 2007; O’Brien & Tropp, 2015; Gasper & Gomez, 2015; Yamamoto, 2020; Hopner et al, 2020). As Tadjbakhsh explains in the Routledge Handbook of Human Security, HS “is as much an objective notion that can be measured against quantitative indicators… as a subject factor that requires qualitative assessment of how people ‘feel’ secure,” which means that “objective and subjective perceptions of insecurity persist as much, if differently, among inhabitants of Parisian suburbs as they do in Darfur.” 

If the core purpose of the HS concept is to better solve the problem of war, then consequently there is a need to understand not only the relative levels of insecurity that people are feeling, but also why they feel that way. Because while generalisations about what makes people feel more or less secure may be plausible and often valid, they may also not be. Greater economic deprivation very often means greater insecurity at the individual level. But failing to understand exactly whether and to what extent this is actually making people feel more or less insecure makes it difficult to assess the relative salience of economic deprivation in that time and place. 

However, even obtaining that kind of understanding would not fully close the above gap in the HS logic. To close that gap between parts (a) and (b) in the logic, we would need to understand how, when, and why feelings or experiences of insecurity manifest in ways that increase the risk of violent conflict and war. In other words, how experiences of insecurity affect behaviours that drive or exacerbate violent conflict. And this, it would seem, requires a behavioural understanding of (in)security. In fact, this something that the 1994 Human Development Report explicitly refers to, when noting the causal relationship between people’s perceptions of threats and injustices on the one hand, and the outbreak of violence on the other.

 Moreover, the UN’s latest HS report, New Threats to Human Security (2022), highlighted that global increases in economic prosperity and living standards had not resulted in corresponding increases in people’s feelings of security. And for this reason, the report saw fit to introduce an Index of Perceived Human Insecurity (I-PHI). Because under the logic of HS, it is people’s perceptions of insecurities that can drive them to behave in ways that exacerbate violent conflict. And this is the concept’s fundamental concern.

We can now close the earlier logic gap and complete the logic of HS in full:

The HS concept:

(a) identifies people as the unit of security analysis, in order to 

(b) understand how perceptions/experiences of insecurity affect behaviours, in order to 

(c) enable a more sophisticated approach to solving the problem of war.

Conclusions 

There are at least two key implications of this logic for the UK military.

 First, the HS concept is more closely aligned with core defence concerns than might otherwise be thought. When deciding how and where to allocate military resources to achieve the greatest effect, it is reasonable to assume that addressing those human insecurities that are (if left unchecked) more likely to drive violent conflict is of higher importance than addressing those that are less likely to do so. HS is not merely something for development or humanitarian actors to think about; it is an integral part of understanding, influencing, affecting, and operating within a highly interconnected, complex, dynamic, and information-saturated world, where images and narratives influence perceptions that shape behaviour.

 Second, the logic of HS implies that its military integration and mainstreaming could be further advanced through leveraging and building upon the suite of existing tools (analytical or otherwise) that are designed to help understand the range of dynamics and atmospherics within the human environment. If the HS logic articulated above is sound, then to consider these tools as somehow inappropriate, or not in keeping with the ethos or spirit of HS, would be to misconstrue the underlying purpose of the HS concept itself.

Moreover, as understanding and responding to conflicts and crises becomes only more complex due to information saturation and the abundance of dis/mis-information — not to mention the exacerbating role of AI in all this — then understanding the relationship between real-world phenomena, people’s perceptions of threats and vulnerabilities, their subjective experiences of insecurity, and the behaviours that are driven by all of this, will become only more essential for the purposes of understanding and mitigating population-centric security threats as conflict drivers.