This text provides a thorough overview of how states pursue security against violence, and how this pursuit paradoxically creates greater insecurity at the national, international, and individual levels. The traditional insistence that states are the primary and most important actors makes security, ultimately, elusive. This argument provides a compelling framework for students to understand the breadth and nuance of security at each level. Case studies throughout the text bring life to the concepts. This fully revised third edition includes discussion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China and the Uyghurs, the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election; Mexico’s use of its military in internal security, the coup in Myanmar, Orbán’s Hungary, China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan, US-China competition, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Russia’s Wagner Group, North Korea’s missile testing, refugees in Poland, and numerous other examples, large and small. The third edition features: Highlighted cases to illustrate new security threats across the globe, now listed at the start of each chapter Beginning-of-chapter Learning Objectives and End-of-chapter Discussion Questions that reinforce student learning and engagement The unique framework arguing that security remains elusive because of the ethic insisting that states are the most important actors.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This comprehensive Research Handbook considers the place of human security, both in practice and as a concept within international law, examining the preconditions for and consequences of applying human security to international legal thinking and practice. It also proposes a future international law in which human security is central to the law’s purpose. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book makes an important and timely contribution to debates about the relationship between climate change and security in Southeast Asia. It does so through a human security lens, drawing on local and regional expertise to discuss the threats that climate change poses to human security in Southeast Asia and to show how a human security approach draws attention to the importance of adaptation and strategies for social resilience. In doing so, it exposes the consequences of climate change, the impact on community rights and access, the special problem of border areas, before going on to investigate local and regional strategies for addressing the human security challenges of climate change.

This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement. Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues in an attempt to gain access to the international security agenda, particularly in the context of the United Nations. This book explores the nature and implications of the use of security language as a political framework for women, tracing and analyzing the organizational dynamics of women's activism in the United Nations system and how women have come to embrace and been impacted by the security framework, globally and locally. The book argues that, from a feminist and human security perspective, efforts to engender the security discourse have had both a broadening and limiting effect, highlighting reasons to be sceptical of securitization as an inherently beneficial strategy. Four cases studies are used to develop the core themes: (1) the campaign to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325; (2) the strategies utilized by those advocating women's issues in the security arena compared to those advocating for children; (3) the organizational development of the UN Development Fund for Women and how it has come to securitize women; and (4) the activity of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and its challenges in gendering its security approach. The work will be of interest to students of critical security, gender studies, international organizations and international relations in general. Natalie Florea Hudson received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton. She specializes in gender and international relations, human rights, international security studies, and international law and organization.

The United Nations and Human Security highlights and analyzes the changing peace and security challenges faced by the United Nations in an evolving international environment that is no longer solely characterized by states and inter-state security. The authors, who comprise both scholars and UN practitioners, cover a wide range of pressing current issues - including refugees, international tribunals, the promotion of democracy, ethics, regional organizations, humanitarian intervention, conflict prevention and peacekeeping - that form a cutting-edge and controversial security agenda.

Climate change has been identified as one of the greatest threats to humanity of all times. In addition to producing adverse environmental conditions such as rising sea level, drought, crop failure, vector-borne diseases, extreme events, degradation of water/air quality and heat waves, climate change is also considered a threat multiplier that leads to local and international conflicts and armed interventions. Urban areas may bear the brunt of climate change, as they are the centers of human habitation, anthropogenic stressors and environmental degradation, and the ensuing health impacts are of grave societal concern. The papers in this volume span a suite of climate change repercussions, paying particular attention to national security and human health aspects. It is an outcome of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held during April 28-30, 2011 in Dubrovnik, Croatia, sponsored by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program. The contributions cut across the elements of modeling, natural, political and social sciences, engineering, politics, military intervention, urban planning, industrial activities, epidemiology and healthcare.

The concept of 'human security' has influenced discourse and practice and has been the subject of vigorous debate. Despite its relevance to central questions of international law, human security has until recently received little attention from international lawyers. This book has two related goals: to evaluate human security as a concept that could be used in the analysis of international law, and to determine what insights about a human security approach might be gained by considering it from the perspective of international law. The first part of the book examines the evolution and meanings of the concept and its links with existing theories and principles of international law. The second part explores the ways in which human security has been and could be used in relation to the diverse topics of humanitarian intervention, internally displaced persons, small arms control, and global public health. The analysis sheds new light on debates about the concept's potential and limitations.

Human security provides one of the most important protections; a person-centred axis of freedom from fear, from want and to live with dignity. It is surprising given its centrality to the human experience, that its connection with human rights has not yet been explored in a truly systematic way. This important new book addresses that gap in the literature by analysing whether human security might provide the tools for an expansive and integrated interpretation of international human rights. The examination takes a two-part approach. Firstly, it evaluates convergences between human security and all human rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural – and constructs an investigative framework focused on the human security-human rights synergy. It then goes on to explore its practical application in the thematic cores of violence against women and undocumented migrants in the law and case-law of UN, European, Inter-American and African human rights bodies. It takes both a legal and interdisciplinary approach, recognising that human security and its relationship with human rights cuts across disciplinary boundaries. Innovative and rigorous, this is an important contribution to human rights scholarship.

This new book presents critical approaches towards Human Security, which has become one of the key areas for policy and academic debate within Security Studies and IR. The Human Security paradigm has had considerable significance for academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Under the rubric of Human Security, security policy practices seem to have transformed their goals and approaches, re-prioritising economic and social welfare issues that were marginal to the state-based geo-political rivalries of the Cold War era. Human Security has reflected and reinforced the reconceptualisation of international security, both broadening and deepening it, and, in so doing, it has helped extend and shape the space within which security concerns inform international policy practices. However, in its wider use, Human Security has become an amorphous and unclear political concept, seen by some as progressive and radical and by others as tainted by association with the imposition of neo-liberal practices and values on non-Western spaces or as legitimizing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is concerned with critical perspectives towards Human Security, highlighting some of the tensions which can emerge between critical perspectives which discursively radicalise Human Security within frameworks of emancipatory possibility and those which attempt to deconstruct Human Security within the framework of an externally imposed attempt to regulate and order the globe on behalf of hegemonic power. The chapters gathered in this edited collection represent a range of critical approaches which bring together alternative understandings of human security. This book will be of great interest to students of human security studies and critical security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations.