Human security denotes a human-denominated, as opposed to State, focus for security. It highlights the duality of individual, universal—universalizable—human rights. This duality is central to the notion of human rights tied to human security. While not in itself the focus of this small book, the idea of human security beyond borders is fundamentally an exercise in reimagining the traditionally State-based loci of responsibility for those individual but also universal human rights.
In other words, though human rights can be taken to be universal, the responsibility for their security has been State-grounded. Though States have never been omnipotent in terms of their own or their citizens’ security, this particular moment in time poses especial challenges to territorially delineated security. The challenges of geopolitical shifts compounded by unprecedented impacts of climate change, migration, and pandemic (potential) make a case for rethinking human security of citizens and non-citizens alike—beyond borders.
Human security presents a lens through which to approach a human rights/responsibility nexus. Building on the philosophical background informed by Christian ethics and the Enlightenment, it represents the culmination of a half-century’s worth of effort to raise global awareness of human rights, dating from the establishment of the post–World War II institutions of the United Nations system.
1.1 Origins
The origin of State responsibility for security predates even the Treaty of Westphalia. It is to be found in the two pillars of modernity which arguably emerged with the articulation of dual allegiance expressed in Christianity . While not arguing for an exclusive Christian viewpoint of human security, taking the particular contributions of the influence of Christian ideas about God and the State into account does shed light on the secular constellation of Statehood which continues to be the building block of the international, State-based world order. Thus these dual allegiances refer not to those separate allegiances owed God and Caesar, but instead to the dual pillars of human and especially universal human rights. Here the first pillar refers to the conception of a deity in the arcane world, conveying a human right on the human creatures of the earth created in that image.
Building upon this argument, the second pillar confers that human right universally, on all human beings as beings created in that image.In Christianity there is only one god who is fundamentally concerned with every individual person’s salvation, it paves the way for modern individualism, which culminates in the assumption that the individual has inalienable rights. (Hösle 2003, 23)
Pillars one and two together lead one step further even from the separation, referred to above, between the spheres of Caesar and of God. They coalesce into a demand upon the governing State, the secular Caesarian State, to uphold the universalistic morality demanded by Christianity . “[Christianity] made possible a politics that was finally free of all religious and especially ritual considerations. …Through an extremely intensive moralization of the religious, it demanded an influence on politics that went far beyond what was conceivable for the ancients” (Hösle 2003, 24). In doing so, Christianity set a high bar for governance and States :Only through reflection on the transcendent god did humans emerge from their immediate unity with their political community, and no matter how much this god at first bound this community to a religious value world whose claims were even more unconditional than those of the polis, his ultimate decline left behind a social world in which even the values of one’s own community appear to be objective facts that have no claim of their own to be loved or even merely obeyed. At the same time, this belief afforded a strong upswing, even an infinite emotion, to universal ideals, according to which all human beings should be regarded as equal. For if there is only one god, then he can hardly be the god of one’s own people alone. (Hösle 2003, 23)
This process reinforced the secularity of the State, while simultaneously endowing it singularly with the authority and responsibility and accountability for a moral security: a human security. This is not to argue that either universal human rights or a State guarantee of security is accepted or implemented. It is to assert that the originating impulses exist and permeate if not penetrate the status quo, which is arguably the ideal of the universality of human security.If Christianity demanded only a retreat from the world, it would be in a sense less threatening than it actually is. The difficulty with Christianity, however, consists in the fact that it not only devalues politics, but also makes demands on politics, based on its universalistic and individualistic ethics. (Hösle 2003, 24)
1.2 Emergence of Human Security
The concept of human security emerged in the post–Cold War era of the briefly heralded ‘unipolar’ moment which seemed to imply the end of inter-State security threats. It was first explicitly named in the 1994 United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) report , New Dimensions of Human Security, yet built on a long tradition of sovereignty theory. The human security scaffold is predicated on the national responsibility to accept, promote, and protect the—ever-expanding—pantheon of those human rights. Nef (1999) and others count between five and seven dimensions of human security, each of them with echoes in the UN definitions of human, as well as political and social, cultural and economic rights. They are generally accepted as including: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. Given both the vagary of their definitions and the vastness of their possible scope, with the sole exception of provisions of asylum tied to political (in)security, none of these human security elements are protected by legal provisions nationally, let alone internationally. Consequently, while these elements of human security ‘rights’ have benefited from a boundless imagination, the same cannot be said for the creativity applied to their realization, which remains the responsibility of the citizen-State.
In practice, however, this is not the case, as non-State actors (NSAs) of various kinds advocate, influence, write, and implement the ordering rules. At the same time, the very legitimacy of the world order—State and NSAs all—is undergoing a shift: an uncoordinated stress test whose outcome is uncertain. Indeed, the State has also undergone a transformation. While the scope of human rights has expanded, that of States’ rights has both expanded and contracted, at times retracting and contracting and at others effectually expanding (again): constrained first by the Cold War logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) ; opened to new forms of government by the ideas of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ (Faubion and Rabinow 1994) and the 1990s’ promulgation of issue-specific governance regimes that included NSAs (Rosenau 1992); seemingly eroded by the ‘diffusion’ of power (Guzzini and Neumann 2012); only to be recaptured in the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) of 2001 (ICISS 2001). On the one hand, myriad regulations and treaties curtail State maneuvering with regard to, among many others, the realm of international health crises through the International Health Regulations (IHR , updated 2005, brought into effect 2007). On the other, adaptations to States’ continued (full) responsibility for the realization of human rights of their citizens continue to put the onus for an ultimate guarantee of human security (Šehović 2014) at their doorsteps. This is one side of the emergent challenge. The other is the void of imaginative beyond-State responses to the acceptance, promotion, and protection of the human rights’ realization of non-citizens beyond borders.
This book aims to address this gap by reimagining both State and human security beyond borders. Chapters 1 and 2 begin by laying out the foundational arguments that underscore State responsibility for citizens’ human rights. Chapter 3 analyzes the kind of gap that has emerged between the expansion of individual human rights and the (inadequate) adaptation to State responsibilities for such rights. Chapter 4 delves into concept of order, analyzing high and low-orders of State and human security. Chapters 5 and 6 offer case studies on migration and health to illustrate and evaluate these hypotheses. Chapter 7 concludes with possible policy and research recommendations.
1.3 Conceptual Overview
Like the concept of human security itself, this book has the potential to become an unwieldy tome. In order to limit its remit, it will focus on delineating the definitions of human security juxtaposed against State security (defense) and in relation to health security and citizenship. In addition to the 1994 UNDP report , the argument builds on that of the Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now, (2003) , and the literature on the social determinants of health (Benatar 2011; Gill and Benatar 2016). This in turn builds upon centuries of development of the argument that State has the responsibility to promote and protect the rights of its citizens, not only in terms of territorial integrity but also in terms of welfare—including health (Gill and Benatar 2016). Together, these link national and international human security, and are applicable to reimagining, for example, citizenship rights to health security beyond borders (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Nexus of health diplomacy –health security
Health diplomacy: Diplomacy of/for health | Health security/defense |
Health (science) for diplomacy–security | Health security–human security |
This illustrative nexus shows that just as global and international health diplomacy are differentiable, so, too, is international health security from global health...