Human Security Thinking in Practice

- ’Personal Security’, ‘Citizen Security’, Comprehensive Mappings

Des Gasper
International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Oscar A. Gómez
Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto

November 2014 pre-final version of paper that appeared in 2015 in Contemporary Politics,
21(1), 100-116. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569775.2014.993906#.VL4lL9KsWkE

ABSTRACT

The paper describes the introduction of an emphasis on ‘personal security’ in human security
thinking and practice, as part of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to compartmentalize the
pursuit of security. It reviews the past twenty years of attention to ‘personal security’: both in
compartments that consider organized physical violence or threats to personal safety and
property (‘citizen security’), and as parts of more wide-ranging examination of threats to
fulfilment of basic needs and rights, for example in comprehensive mapping exercises
undertaken in various UNDP Regional and National Human Development Reports or in
studies of women’s security. The paper reflects on the complex process of opening-up
conventional security thinking and practice, seeking value-added and depth without shrinking
into preconceived compartments.

Keywords: human security, personal security, citizen security, gender violence, Human
Development Reports

1. The evolution of a boundary concept: the limits of compartmentalization

Human security analysis looks at threats to fulfilment of basic values in people’s lives. It
seeks to reorient use of the prioritizing concept ‘security’, towards securing basic needs of
ordinary people. So it answers the question ‘whose security?’ with: ‘each of us and all of us’.
In addressing next the question ‘security of what?’, some forms of human security analysis
have adopted compartmentalization, trying to separately discuss ‘personal security’,
‘economic security’, ‘environmental security’ and so on. This can be helpful, and fits
established bureaucratic and disciplinary convenience. It is also often unhelpful. Many
important threats arise out of the interconnections between different aspects and forces in
particular situations, so that much of the value-added from human security analysis comes
not from putting a new name on topics already considered under existing bureaucratic and
disciplinary arrangements but from functioning as a boundary concept to transcend those
divisions, flexibly according to the nature of particular situations. A focus on how people live
and can live, and the function of looking at priority values and priority threats, require a
transdisciplinary holistic perspective, at least periodically, in order to see linkages and to
draw comparisons across ‘sectors’ to try to ensure priority attention to the threats most
relevant in the given time and place.
We examine these themes with special reference to ‘personal security’, a
prominent—and some argue pre-eminently important—area in human security policy and
research, that stands in contrast to the predominant fields of policy attention in the 20th
century: national state security and economic growth. We touch on three major
(overlapping) sub-areas of work:- violence against civilians, during wars, civil wars and other
armed conflict; crime against civilians; and violence against women, during peace as well as
war, considered as part of broader examination of threats and forms of marginalization
affecting women.
Section 2 explains the emergence of the category ‘personal security’ inside the initial
formulation of ‘human security’. Section 3 looks at violence-centred work on human security,
especially the work led from Canada. Section 4 looks at some of the work on gender,
violence and personal security. Section 5 examines work on selected issues of personal
security under the new label of ‘citizen security’ which includes a primary focus on issues of
crime. Section 6 places the work on personal security in perspective by review of the foci of
around twenty Human Development Reports (HDRs) which have explicitly used a human
security framework, and sees that only a minority adopted either a violence-focus or crime-
focus. It compares that subset with HDRs which essayed a more comprehensive mapping of
human security issues in a country or region. Section 7 discusses the roles of each type of
study and some implications from the swathe of experience that the paper has reviewed
regarding the potential of human security analyses for opening-up security thinking and
doing.
The human security perspective was launched in 1994 by that year’s global Human
Development Report (UNDP 1994). To judge the progress made since then is a complex
task. Both the progress and the relevant information are scattered across two hundred
countries and innumerable organizations; and the concepts and criteria of judgement
require careful thought. As usual, the glass seems both part full and part empty. The record
is mixed but includes major advances and gradual subterranean root-formation and spread.

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Comparison with the impact of human security thinking’s sibling, human rights thinking, in
the first twenty years after the 1948 Universal Declaration (Moyn 2010), confirms that we
need to look in many different ‘glasses’, within each of which change processes of a long-
term nature are ongoing. In some human security ‘glasses’ there has, by historical
standards, been a surprising degree of movement and impact. Judged in terms of need,
many of the changes appear limited and slow; judged by historic precedents, some seem
relatively fast.
That so much activity, over two decades, would be triggered by a short (19 pages,
apart from its annexes of country examples) and rather quickly drafted chapter in the 1994
Human Development Report – Ch.2: ‘New Dimensions of Human Security’ – is striking. The
Report, led by Mahbub ul Haq, aimed for a short-run impact: setting the agenda for the
Copenhagen Summit on Social Development of 1995. Its Overview was entitled ‘An Agenda
for the Social Summit’. The report hoped to contribute to grasping a post-Cold War ‘peace
dividend’ (discussed in its chapter 3), and to promote a new architecture for international
development cooperation (chapter 4). It had some influence on the 1995 Summit, but that
did not adopt an explicit language of ‘human security’, and probably not much of a peace
dividend was reaped. Much though of what chapter 4 proposed for re-focusing development
cooperation did gradually emerge during the next decade, seen for example in the
Millennium Declaration of 2000 and the Millennium Development Goals framework.
Chapter 2, the chapter on human security ideas, has had a wider influence that has
snowballed during the following two decades, albeit subject to diverse periodic blockages.
The influence covers a variety of countries and fora—governmental (e.g., in Japan, Latvia,
Costa Rica, Switzerland, Thailand)i, inter-governmental (e.g., in European Union foreign
policy) and global (including the UN apex, UNESCO, and the HDR Office); as well as
research and policy discussions in fields such as environmental change, migration, conflict,
social protection and humanitarian assistance. This broad-based spread lay behind the
General Assembly’s endorsement in 2012 of an agreed understanding of human security.
For judging progress, we need to observe practice over sustained periods, and not
only in one or two milieux. Related to this, we should avoid essentializing complex, plural
and evolving discourses. A symptom of such reductionism is the use by some authors of the
phrase ‘human security’ when they mean ‘human security approaches’/’human security
thinking’/’human security practices’, or in fact just one particular variant. ‘Human security’
becomes converted into a quasi-agent and variegated realities become reduced to an
oversimplified representation. For Hudson et al., ‘Human security has emerged as a
theoretical perspective and an operational framework for solving foreign policy problems in

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the post-Cold War era’ (2013, p. 24); whereas, as outlined by Haq (1999) or his collaborator
Sen (2013), human security analysis instead, or also, emerged as a way of transcending the
conventional way of conceiving of ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ policy issues.ii
Our paper looks at the practice of human security analysis across three discursive
milieux mentioned earlier: ‘personal security’ in war and post-war, ‘citizen security’ against
crime, and security for women. In addition we give special attention to the world of Human
Development Reports, where ‘human security’ analysis was advanced under that label for
the first time. The HDR milieu allows us to look at varied practice from around the globe.

2. ‘Dimensions of Human Security’ and the notion of ‘personal security’

The UN Charter of 1945 and the antecedent streams of debate emphasised both the
plurality and the interconnection of major values and corresponding threats. Human security
discourse emerged in the 1990s as part of revisiting and rethinking these 1940s post World
War Two themes, for the post Cold War era. It has frequently used the 1940s language of
‘freedom from fear’, ‘freedom from want’, and ‘human dignity’ – hence also ‘freedom from
indignity’ – and stresses how these are interlinked. To help go beyond such broad-brush
language and support the required context-specific analyses, the 1994 global HDR
presented the seven dimensions of Human Security – economic-, food-, health-,
environmental-, personal-, community-, and political- security – that form the focus of this
collection of papers (UNDP 1994, pp. 24-25). This is in reality primarily a list of sets of
values, presented as a checklist for reviewing corresponding threats to those values, as the
report then did (pp. 25-33). Most of the 1994 HDR was devoted to proposed mechanisms
for making progress in managing the threats. Many of the threats discussed are relevant to
several of the value-areas, and all the value areas impinge and interact in persons’ lives.
Except for bureaucratic or academic ease, there is little reason to consider any value area in
isolation. Indeed, the 1994 HDR did not present the list of seven as the sole or sufficient
way to think about human security. It warned that the categories link, overlap, and do not
cover all relevant issues.
Some of the categories were in early stages of construction, and the report did not
have the time nor, for its purposes, a need to fine-tune. ‘Personal security’ extended across
security from physical violence, from other crimes against life and property, and from
accidents, abuse (including self-abuse, such as via drugs) and neglect; ‘economic security’
covered besides employment and income also housing, which could easily have been a
separate category; the discussion of ‘community security’ covered inter-community conflict,

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indigenous peoples, and more; and ‘political security’ referred to respect for ‘basic human
rights’ (p.32), presumably meaning basic civil and political rights. At most, the list served as
a way of presenting a multitude of relevant issues in a fairly orderly way, using categories
that might link to existing policy portfolios. Of the seven, most could be fitted largely to
existing policy discourses and portfolios, such as food, health, environment, and civil and
political rights. This applied less fully for ‘personal security’, given its sprawling scope and
the habitual preoccupation of existing security apparatuses with the security of state
interests, of property, and of themselves. ‘Community security’ too was not sharply
specified, nor necessarily represented in existing portfolios, which reflects its political
contentiousness.
Reflecting the speed of preparation and the brevity of this part of the report, the
conceptualisation was unrefined. Hence while chapter 2 is entitled ‘New dimensions of
human security’, it never mentioned ‘dimensions’ again after the title. Presumably the list of
seven ‘categories’ provided that discussion. But it was all rather provisional, and the report’s
Overview never discussed either ‘dimensions’ or ‘categories’, nor the list of seven. Instead it
presented in detail the proposals on a new development cooperation architecture and on
reaping a peace dividend, in line with its title ‘An agenda for the Social Summit’. The
Commission on Human Security (2003) too did not adopt the list.
Using a checklist of standard questions about ‘security’—Whose security? Security as
perceived by whom? Security of which values? Against which threats? Secured by whom? To
what extent? By what instruments?—one sees that while the seven 1994 categories are all
relevant to security of persons, not all have the same status. Food security and
environmental security are inputs or instruments towards health and other priority values for
people’s lives; hence the 1994 HDR discussion of environmental security in particular was
not about a separate set of environmental values but about some distinctive threats. And
since the seven areas are specified in terms of different questions/criteria, they substantially
overlap.
‘Personal security’ in particular was an imperfect label. Several if not all the other
categories are also ‘personal’, including health, access to adequate food, income and work,
and (under ‘political security’) civil liberties, including for freely chosen and respected
community membership.iii
Not explicitly discussed in the 1994 HDR was psychological security, a key aspect of
‘security of what?’. Yet it is fundamental in lived experience, and central to peace and
human dignity and as a basis for effective personal agency. It forms part of everyday
understandings of ‘personal security’. Hence “telling one’s story…is part of the process of

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achieving security” (Wibben 2011:95). Attention here has grown in later work such as by
Jennifer Leaning (2013; Leaning et al. 2004), UNESCO regional human security studies (e.g.
Burgess et al. 2007; UNESCO 2008) and some UNDP human development reports (such as
for Chile 1998 and Latvia 2003), as well as through increasing attention to ‘subjective’
measures (covering both expressed popular perceptions and other measures of subjective
states). The psychological aspects of ‘personal security’ are crucial elements in a human
security research and policy agenda, we will argue.
Human security analysis has often brought an enrichment of security thinking and
doing that includes ‘deepening’ (attending to the interests of persons and not only states)
but also ‘widening’ (attending to more threats than violence and more values than physical
security), empowerment from below (‘secured by whom, with what instruments?’), and
stronger attention to subjective dimensions of perception and agency (‘security as perceived
by whom?’; Wibben 2011). Deepening seems to be more readily acknowledged by existing
security studies and security establishments than these other features. Thus some authors
have wished to reduce the concept of ‘human security’ to be only what the 1994 HDR
included under ‘personal security’, or less; arguing that this is the distinctive additional area
highlighted outside of already existing policy languages and portfolios. Acceptance of such a
proposal would increase a danger of unbalanced attention to aspects considered in isolation.
And while personal security as freedom from human-caused physical violence and (other)
crime has undoubtedly long been a widely accepted concept, even if not under that label, it
is far from the only longstanding referent of security. Discussion of personal economic
security became frequent from the mid 19th century onwards (including later partly as ‘social
security’). The same applies for food security, treated under that label since at least the
1970s but under other names earlier.
In the new Routledge Handbook of Human Security (Martin and Owen 2013), which
has a strong emphasis on the management of violence, the term ‘human security’ occurs
over 2400 times, but ‘personal security’ only three times; nor has it been replaced by ‘citizen
security’, which appears not at all. In comparison, other frequencies are: Food security 20x;
Environmental security 8x; Economic security 6x; Health security 6x; Political security 6x;
Community security 2x. (Some comparable terms rank as follows: National security 136x;
State security 33x; Global security 16x; Military security 8x.) So, none of the 1994 list of
seven labels is much adopted by the Handbook, with the exception of the longer-standing
‘food security’. This might partly be because of the disciplinary composition of the selected
authors and topics, but also because other labels are already in use, some of the categories
(notably the least used terms—‘personal security’ and ‘community security’) have particular

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problems, and because the encompassing term ‘human security’ matches the unity of a
person’s life better than does attempted compartmentalisation.
Correspondingly, we do not see much current use in policy and planning of the
specific term ‘personal security’ in the way indicated in the 1994 HDR, outside of some
national HDRs. Instead we see, first, to be discussed in section 3, attempts to reduce to a
focus on security against physical violence only while yet giving this the encompassing name
‘human security’, which serves to avoid using that term for a more comprehensive focus and
for comparisons about what promotes people’s security. In contrast, as discussed in section
4, work on gender violence that adopts a human security framework does so precisely to
insist on a comprehensive focus and not a focus on physical violence alone. Next, much
work goes on under the title ‘personal security services’ or ‘security management’, largely as
profit-making business, or on security from accidents, under names such as ‘safety’ and ‘risk
reduction’; these we will not discuss. We look instead in section 5 at a version of the
‘personal security’ pillar which has emerged and flourished in some public policy discourses
under the variant name ‘citizen security’.

3. ‘Personal Security’ relabelled as ‘human security’ and reduced to freedom from

The 1994 HDR specified at least three types of threat to personal security: (1) Threats from
external or internal, regular or irregular (armed) conflict; (2) Threats internal to the polity,
excluding armed conflict, including diverse kinds of crime, whether committed by the state
or others; (3) Threats to the self, related to suicide and drug use (p. 30). The second type
corresponds fairly closely to the agenda of ‘citizen security’. The third type is less discussed
currently in work using the title ‘human security’, which is unfortunate, given for example
the scale and failure of the War on Drugs.
The first type of threat, armed conflict, has been at the forefront in much human
security discussion. An opening stage brought several impressive examples of successful
initiatives supported by the Canadian Liberal Party government from 1996 on, launched by
the foreign minister between 1996 and 2000, Lloyd Axworthy, and executed in partnership
with a dozen other governments from four continents, grouped from 1998 in the Human
Security Network. These included: the Ottawa Process (1996-98) leading to the 1999 Anti-
Personnel Mine Ban Convention; the process leading to the 1998 Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court; and the sponsoring of the International Commission on

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Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001), which developed the doctrine of the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P; Axworthy 2013) that was adopted at the 2005 World Summit.
The articulations in 1996-97 still embraced a comprehensive understanding of human
security. Delimitation of ‘the Canadian version’, with only personal security as the focus of
human security analysis and policy, came in 1999 after the successes of establishing the
mine ban and the ICC (Black 2005) and in response to severe budget-cuts. The restriction
sought manageable short- and medium-term targets while still seeking to brand a distinctive
Canadian way that bolstered an increasingly precarious national identity (Bosold and
Werthes 2005; Bosold 2007). Complex views of human insecurities and their relation to well-
being and other possible threats were still spoken about by Axworthy (2001) when out of
power and continued in the agenda of the Human Security Network. But a ‘freedom-from-
fear’ doctrine, by which was meant fear of physical violence inflicted by persons, took over
in Canadian foreign policy (Hynek and Bosold 2009). It is reflected in perhaps the most
prominent and enduring component of the research agenda laid down at that time, the
Human Security Report series led by Andrew Mack, where human security is reduced to
personal security which is further reduced to security from organized physical violence, but
with attention to all its effects including malnutrition and disease. Canada came to advocate
possible armed interventions, justified in terms of R2P. The other elements of a human
security agenda were quashed after a Conservative government came to power in 2006.
The Canadian-led human security approach highlighted what Axworthy called ‘new
diplomacy.’ In the case of the Ottawa Convention, Gwozdecky and Sinclair (2001) show how
multiple levels of collaboration between governments, NGOs and different international
organizations aided reaching an agreement notably quickly, resulting in a Nobel prize for the
leading coalition of NGOs, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Hynek and Bosold
(2009) describe the subsequent practice of subordinating NGOs as dependent security
services contractors. They argue that:
The narrowing of [or to] the freedom-from-fear doctrine [in Canada] has been a result of
both the militarization of human security (including the introduction of responsibility to
protect), where international factors were dominant, and of the transfer of responsibility and
competency to NGOs in the areas of earlier human security focus, such as landmines
(domestic factors were decisive here). …[These] are complementary technologies of
governance in the period of permanent complex emergency. (Hynek and Bosold 2009: 749)
Axworthy and associates stressed an inspirational role of human security ideas in
global governance, facilitating progress through participation of a wider range of actors, as
permitted by new information and communication technologies. A focus on personal security

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was intended as a first stage on the way to an expanded conception of human security, not
as its terminus. In contrast, in the version in the Human Security Reports (HSRs) the focus
is reduced to political violence. The reports argue that the data do not support prominent
current narratives about war in our time and show instead major declines. The HSRs extend
the research led by Kaldor (2007; Kaldor et al. 2007) on the changing patterns of armed
conflict, and support a direct conversation with the traditional security scholarship which is
typically skeptical to the human security idea.
The intention behind the HSR research remains transformational, despite its narrow
vision of the person that focuses only on bodily integrity. The Reports have confronted the
tendency of traditional security actors to overemphasize the threat of armed conflict despite
mounting evidence of a general decline in violence, as argued also by Pinker (2011). The
2013 Report was dedicated to support Pinker’s argument, while noting the modalities of
violence that have resisted the general trend, such as low intensity conflicts. The 2012
Report addressed sexual violence during war, arguing that the current degree of emphasis
on rape is not supported by the evidence, while the globally pervasive problem of domestic
violence is usually overlooked. The reports sometimes seem to adhere to the view that there
can be no good security (Neocleous 2013), that security should not be a desired end goal
(Buzan 2004), and thus that it is necessary to watch and to limit what is done for security.
Limiting the scope of ‘human security’ to this narrow vision of the person, all other threats
to the person may be dealt with, suggests Buzan, by using human rights or other ideas. This
attempt to appropriate security language for one aspect, and exclude for example economic
security, runs counter to the opening of security thinking-and-doing to a broader picture of
the person.
Work on ‘human security’ as civilian freedom from violence continues as an
important and well-funded stream. Given the abundance of concepts already available in
conflict and peace studies, institutionalized well before the emergence of human security
ideas, the work’s impact has perhaps not been fundamental. The emergence of the
Responsibility to Protect doctrine, first as a proposed offshoot of human security thinking
and then as a doctrine of its own, has also constrained the welcome given to other human
security ideas in discussions of conflict, though this might be only temporary. Greater value-
added might arise from broader-focus work—such as illustrated by the work on gender,
violence and human security which we discuss next—which looks bottom-up at people’s lives
as a whole, not top-down at artificially isolated aspects.

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4. Gender, violence and human security

The concept [of human security] was a boon for feminist scholars in particular: it gave them
a language to interject concerns about the kinds of interpersonal and structural violence
women experience into larger debates on security. (Heideman 2013: 217).
…[W]omen are often the ones most victimized by violence in times of armed conflict… [Their]
basic well-being is also severely threatened in daily life by unequal access to resources,
services and opportunities, not to mention the many forms of violence women experience
under “ordinary circumstances”. … [T]he concept of human security is able to capture this
broader range of threats and risks. … It is therefore not surprising that the appearance of the
concept was celebrated as offering new lenses through which to understand the difficulties
women and girls encounter… (Rubio-Marin and Estrada-Tanck 2013: 238).

A substantial body of work has applied human security ideas to gender concerns and
personal security, and at the same time has enriched human security analysis with ideas
from gender theory (Truong et al. 2006, 2014; see also Wibben 2011). The gender-free
discussion in most human security work—including by the Commission on Human Security
(2003) argues Tripp (2013)—uses an overly abstracted notion of humanity: ‘…assumptions
based upon “identity-less” individuals are inadequate for generating conceptions and
perceptions of security… [And] when focusing on identity, gender cannot be excluded’
(Hoogensen and Stuvoy 2006: 217).
Rather than shrinking human security concerns into one compartment, the gender-
informed work emphasises how understanding and promoting people’s security requires
holistic consideration of their lives. Promoting the security of battered women, for example,
cannot be done in isolation from considering their economic empowerment and access to
health and other care support services, argues a study from Pennsylvania.
They say they want work and love [Freud’s summary of basic human needs] that allow them
to challenge conventional notions of feminine domesticity and dependency without fearing
punishment from employers, police, welfare bureaucrats, or coercive and controlling men.
They want to build communities of care that will encourage them to flourish as they
determine their own life projects and pursue work and love free of want and fear. (Brush
2013, p.127).
But, argues Bumiller (2013), current U.S. technologies of governance show no interest in the
wider systems of opportunity, constraint and discrimination, and have converted the agenda
of physical security for women into a project for the control specifically of black men,
notably through frequent and lengthy incarceration.

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 Human security analysis ‘has real configuring power on gender relations’ argues
Ferree (2013: 291), in part because it can bring consideration of those wider systems.
Rubio-Marin and Estrada-Tanck show how it complements human rights law, which provides
criteria for what are important risks and damage but is traditionally highly individualistic in
focus. Human security analysis shows if and how ‘the violations of rights happen as part of a
systematic pattern…of structural discrimination and vulnerability’, and looks at the ‘collective
conditions necessary for the enjoyment of all human rights’ (2013: 253). From examination
of cases of killings in Turkey and Mexico, and broad campaigns to mobilize and deepen
human rights law, they argue that a human security perspective helps to guide human rights
thinking towards states’ positive obligations to protect rights, not only to investigate and
punish violations. Meaningful reparations for violence and murder consist not merely of an
amount of cash, but also reforms to help change a discriminatory and dangerous
environment.
One theme that emerges from the gender and human security literature, as in other
branches of human security work, is the central importance of perception and framing.
‘Personal security’ involves fundamental psychological dimensions. Human security analysis
then characteristically, if not always, leads to attention to the multiple different perceptions
of threats and (in)security: by ‘experts’, including from various different disciplinary
traditions, and by ‘citizenry’, including from various different social milieux, strata, and
cultural traditions, and from non-citizens too. While in some cases it is adequate to speak of
expert assessments as ‘objective’ and ‘citizen’ assessments as ‘subjective’, sometimes a
different vocabulary is needed, for the assessments may draw on different sources of
information, different criteria for responding to uncertainties, and different values about
what is important. Sometimes the gaps between objective and subjective versions of
(human) security threats can reasonably be understood in terms of popular paranoia or
popular insouciance, but not always. Cases where citizen assessments are misplaced, cases
where ‘expert’ assessments are misplaced, and cases where nobody reliably knows are all
widespread. The field for investigation is very rich, as one sees for example in ‘citizen
security’ studies.

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5. ‘Citizen security’ studies

The notion of ‘citizen security’ may predate ‘human security’ as a widely used policy motif. It
emerged as a guiding goal for the reform of the security forces in Spain after the Franco
regime ended in the late 1970s. Thus the concept emerged not in security studies silos in
rich countries but in public fora in the ‘semi-periphery’. It subsequently influenced efforts to
renovate ideas of security in many countries in the Americas which had suffered under
authoritarianism and the National Security Doctrine of the 1950s to 1980s (Feierstein 2010).
Similarly in the Philippines, the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986 resulted in a new People’s
Security doctrine somewhat similar to human security thinking, which is still evolving
(Gomez 2011).
The citizen security concept arose initially thus in efforts to disband a bloated state
repressive apparatus, reinvent the institution of the police, and confront the legacies of
general distrust of state institutions and rule of law. Later, although the task of disbanding
was deemed completed, the spectrum of issues in citizen security studies has grown,
including concerns with gender, youth, privatization of physical security services, and
immigration. It overlaps with the SSR (Security Sector Reform) agenda noted by Krause
(2013). Indeed the citizen security approach gives an umbrella that allows a transformation
of the negative views of ‘security’ that linger given the memories of abuses and repression.
The concept has been rising in several international organizations (see e.g. the World
Development Report 2011) and is perhaps becoming a sister ‘boundary object’ that appeals
to multiple audiences and facilitates communication between them (Star and Griesemer
1989, Gomez 2011).iv
Besides its focus on the building and strengthening of institutions such as the police
and the criminal justice system, the citizen security approach has served to explore in depth
the objective-subjective dialectic inherent to security: first, crime and violence threats are
objective in their occurrence but have lasting and probably self-reproducing consequences
on general perceptions, which in turn affect future behaviour; second, perceptions can vary
markedly from objectively identified realities, but also sometimes capture phenomena
missed by ‘expert’ or official studies and monitoring systems. The Costa Rican HDR defined
citizen security as “the personal, objective and subjective condition of being free from
violence or from the threat of intentional violence or dispossession by others” (UNDP 2005,
p. 35). This conception necessitates inclusion of perception surveys to catch the view from
below. Such surveys now benefit from decades of research on “fear of crime” (Hale 1996)
and present a higher level of methodological sophistication compared to much other human

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security research. The surveys may, for example, be prepared so as to help in testing causal
models of the factors behind crime.
The data gathered on perceptions and realities is then translated into various forms;
for example, indexes, such as versions of the Human Development Index (HDI) modified by
a personal security variable, as done in Costa Rica. Furthermore, questions have been used
to find the costs that the feeling of insecurity brings in terms of loss of tranquillity, freedoms
sacrificed and resources allocated.
The focus on strengthening existing institutions that is characteristic of citizen
security studies is in danger of maintaining some of the vices of traditional security
orientations. Despite how important the control of crime is for the legitimacy of the state
(especially the government), uses of the approach have often tended to overlook other
security ‘providers’ apart from private physical security services. In some citizen security
reports the traditional means for security—the police and the penal justice system—seem to
be more prominent than the threats themselves.
Interestingly, some research on citizen security warns that “the dilemma of modern
policing is not necessarily about how to decrease crime rates but about how to reduce the
feeling of insecurity.” (Ruiz Vásquez et al. 2006, p. 74). The Costa Rican HDR (2005)
revealed that the perceived frequency of some crimes is as much as eight times the
(estimated) real occurrence. The recent citizen security report for Latin America shows that
levels of felt insecurity are similar for all the region despite very different recorded or
estimated incidences (UNDP 2013). One hopes ‘citizen security’ studies can at least partly
correct such perceptions and open traditional thinking and doing, amongst both the citizenry
and the traditional security organizations, to more comprehensive perspectives in human
security analysis so that misallocations of fear can be better understood and counteracted.
A danger exists of misusing the adjective ‘citizen’, to discriminate against non-
citizens. Not surprisingly, elsewhere in the literature non-citizens are an important concern
in human security studies (Edwards and Ferstman 2010). Choice of the adjective ‘citizen’
may have matched the mainly urban nature of the phenomena scrutinized in citizen security
work, while the term’s ambiguity (‘citizen’ can refer to membership of the city or
membership of the state) may have been supportive of state-building projects in the
societies adopting this language. Yet, migration and the trans-boundary nature of crime and
many other human security issues demand attention to non-citizens, and it is not clear if a
citizen security language is up to that task. Migrants have been traditionally scapegoated for
crime and other social ills notwithstanding that statistics show such fears are very largely
unfounded (UNDP 2005, 2012b, Cantarero Escandell 2010).

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6. Has work on human security reduced to ‘personal security’?

Krause (2013) reviews why personal safety and bodily security are so important, hence why
this category of human security studies is deservedly prominent and why security sector
reform has become central in much foreign policy and development aid since 1994. He tries
though to go further: ‘Many of the problems that would come under the UNDP or Human
Security Commission understanding of human security have thus fallen by the wayside (for
example, health or food security)’ (Krause, 2013, p.84). Indeed, much of what goes under
the label ‘human security’ within the European and North American governments and
international agencies that he looks at is focused on control of physical violence. We saw
that amongst the ‘dimensions’ of human security raised by the 1994 Human Development
Report several fitted in established policy portfolios, while ‘personal security’ matched less
well. But just as not all work on human development or human rights needs to be under
ministries or agencies or budget headings with those labels, the same is true with the cross-
cutting concerns of human security. In addition, work on health and food security is
prominent in human security research and policy in various locales:- in comprehensive
mapping studies; when tracing the interconnections between conventional ‘sectors’, such as
in work on the health impacts of wars or of economic policy choices; and, not least, in the
large volume of work on global environmental change and human security (e.g., Brauch et
al. 2008; Matthew et al. 2010; Sygna et al. 2013), which traces out the implications of
environmental change for people’s lives, in and across all portfolios.
The National and Regional Human Development Reports that have taken human
security as an explicit theme or framework allow us to consider the operationalisation locally
of human security themes across many aspects and arenas. A study led by Richard Jolly
looked at the human security focused reports prepared for (and/or supported by) UNDP in
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lesotho, Macedonia,
Moldova, Mozambique, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste (Jolly
and Basu Ray 2006, 2007). Jolly observed that Human Development Reports conceived in
terms of human security have been:
typically in one or other of three broad settings:
● by countries which have just emerged from conflict;
● by countries facing elements of national (and in some cases, regional) insecurity as a result
of military activity; and

14
 ● by countries in the midst of fundamental socio-political and economic transition. (Jolly
2013, p. 140).
These three origins might generate three different typical report types, though Jolly and
Basu Ray did not explicitly address that question. In contrast, a follow-up study by Gomez et
al. (2013) considered whether there are distinctive types. This study reviewed around
twenty Human Development Reports, including a few still in process of completion and one
that was never approved for publication by the national government (Pakistan). The new
study was able to access literature in Spanish, which helped to reveal additional interesting
work such as a very ambitious but not widely known report from Chile (1998); and observed
that a number of common design options have emerged.
Two common emphases found in these Human Development Reports are, first,
comprehensive mapping (an attempt to look at all the major types of threat to human
security in the given time and place), and second, personal security, with special reference
to crimes against person (bodily security) and property. This second type of HDR could thus
be called citizen security reporting, and some reports used that name. So one can see both
narrowly and broadly framed work on human security, and can speculate that securities with
already established organizational homes and names appear less likely to be treated under a
new name such as human or personal security.
Also seen several times in this set of HDRs are, third, studies that focus on what is
considered a central (potential) provider/actor/problem: the state. These studies are very
relevant to ‘personal security’ but not relevant to, or concerned with, it alone. For example,
the report on Afghanistan (2004) identified the huge efforts necessary to address multiple
threats in order to make state-building feasible; and the Palestine (2009) report found that
most threats felt by the population relate to indignity and to the impossibility under
occupation of having an adequate state provider. Both reports show the insufficiency of a
narrow violence- or crime-centred agenda.
Fourth, there are several studies that identify and focus on one or sometimes more
other distinctive challenges that are felt or experienced as priorities in the particular
setting—for example, food security, as examined in the 2012 Africa regional report. In fact
all the stronger HDRs that have adopted a human security approach include a focus on
working out what are locally relevant priority issues, even if they do a (relatively)
comprehensive mapping or a ‘citizen security’ study or centre on state-building.
Based on their comparative review, Jolly and Basu Ray provided advice for future
studies. Many studies have adopted most or much of it, including in various citizen security
reports. We select some of the points. First, do not analyse only in terms of the seven areas

15
of possible insecurity suggested in the 1994 HDR; focus in terms of the distinctive
challenges encountered in each specific case. While some subsequent reports have found
the checklist of seven areas still a helpful handrail, we saw that many others have gone
beyond it. They do what Taylor Owen, for example, has called for: move away from a
universal set of criteria to instead use locally relevant and locally determined criteria, and to
get down from national to local level. By shifting scales from the national to the local,
human security becomes a manageable concept, reducing from hundreds of possible threats
down to a handful of priority challenges (Owen 2013, pp. 310-311). One can identify danger
‘hotspots’, localities which are marked by several intense human security threats, and
which—given also threat interlinkages—should be high priorities for support. As he notes:
‘hotspots are an effective means of presenting large amounts of information to the public
and to the policy-making community. This process is replicable in any region or country’
(Owen 2013, p.317). Similar analysis is now done in some national HDRs (e.g., Benin 2012).
Indeed it was done already in the 1994 global HDR, which sketched ‘a partial set of
indicators [which] even though it captures only a few dimensions, if several of the indicators
point in the same direction, the country [concerned] may be heading for trouble’ (UNDP
1994, p.38). Annex 1 of the 1994 Report applied this method to presciently identify and
warn of a set of countries in (then) silent crisis.
Second, Jolly and Basu Ray stressed measurement, to provide sharp focus, build
respectability, find unforeseen phenomena and reveal unseen patterns. Many recent HDRs
perform well in this respect, and some are outstanding, for example the reports from Costa
Rica, Philippines, the Caribbean and Benin, all of which prominently include citizen security
concerns. Third, building on measurement, Jolly and Basu Ray called for comparing the
security benefits of various sorts from alternative possible expenditures, to examine cost-
effectiveness and trade-offs. This is more politically daring and, while Mahbub ul Haq had
the boldness to do so (Gasper 2011), not many HDRs have openly followed suit. An
exception is the 2012 Africa report, which compares expenditures in defence with those in
agriculture and suggests a typically much better cost-benefit balance from investing in
nutrition rather than arms and armies (UNDP 2012, pp. 53, 90). National reports have found
that this kind of approach is often not easy because of political sensitivities. Also at country
level the actual usage of budgets requires careful interpretation—e.g., much of a defence
budget might be for pensions for early-retired soldiers benefitting from peace and longer life
expectancy. Still, reports on citizen security have usefully suggested ways to assess the
impacts of threats and security measures: for instance, the 2013 Latin America regional HDR
shows how persons restrict their leisure activities because of fear of crime, and the 2005

16
Costa Rica report asked about money spent on personal protection and the time lost in
protective measures. Data-rich reports allow other analysts to extend these sorts of
comparisons later.
The comprehensive mapping approach in human security reporting responds to the
challenge of presenting full pictures of security as envisioned in the 1994 HDR. The HDRs,
with their substantial financial, institutional and intellectual support, have offered a good
opportunity to test what originally seemed to some observers too large to be meaningful.
‘Personal security’ figures in these comprehensive reports, but not considered in isolation.
The reports in this category illustrate diverse options. The reports for the Arab Countries and
Benin stayed conservatively with the 1994 typology of aspects, while the Thailand and
Latvia reports innovated. Following the conservative approach facilitates comparison across
countries and regions, since each such study uses the same categories. The comparisons
are often revealing, such as that for the Arab Countries (UNDP 2009a) crime is not a major
reason for concern while for the Central America report (UNDP 2009c) it was considered
almost by definition the most important component of human security. Having a fixed list
also helps identification of biases in perception of threats (Slovic 1987). Even if perception
surveys do not show nutrition as a major source of concern, for instance in the Arab
Countries, the list makes sure that nutrition issues are examined; and the objective
indicators reveal that nutrition there should indeed be cause for concern.
The Benin report produced a Human Security Index via a simple aggregation of the
subjective proxies used for each of the seven 1994 security categories. This allowed
comparison of the public perception of threats with ‘objective’ measurements and with the
HDI, for each region in Benin. The effort provided a synthesis of the information captured
by the institutions in charge of statistics, and confronted it with what the fears held by the
population suggested the government should also know. Some of the subjective measures
became incorporated by the national statistical system, thanks to collaboration with the
relevant offices, who will now produce the human security index regularly. The Benin
example illustrates a way of institutionalising human security analysis and of thereby
grounding the types of discussion that it aims to foster.
The approaches in the Thailand and Latvia reports moved beyond the old
classification of securities. In the former, a fast audit over the basic sources of concern
contained in the 1994 list led into an effort to identify, through views from both experts and
lay persons, prospective problems of the future. Doing so supports the prevention-better-
than-cure orientation in human security thinking and helps to generate discussion of the
roles the various social actors will be required to play in countering the challenges foreseen.

17
 The Latvia report team created and applied the idea of securitability, i.e. capability to
avoid insecurity or restore security. They identified configurations of actors that are or can
be catalytic for promoting human security, and analyzed how such catalytic effects took
place. They studied also: the psychology of feelings of insecurity; issues related to the most
proximate network of support, the family; and the links to the social contract with the larger
community. This report’s approach shows relevant possibilities for when merely
consolidation of existing institutions is no longer a sufficient option for addressing
challenges.
A comprehensive mapping approach has its problems. Besides the demands in
resources and the methodological difficulties, it is not usually conducive to preparation of
detailed policies. A multi-threat human security report cannot provide thoroughly researched
solutions for all the issues that it investigates. For that, it is necessary to proceed to focused
efforts, such as seen in the citizen security reports, but now on the basis of having chosen
these priority challenges and foci through the fresh comparative overview. This is the ideal
dynamic in a human way to conceive of security; threats will never be absent and the
soundness of security conceptions depends on their ability to identify new issues sufficiently
in time, periodically relocate efforts in order to ease both objective harm and subjective
fears, and start over again without essentializing anything except, perhaps, the humans that
a human security approach places at its centre.

7. Conclusions - Why the concept of human security is elastic and has neither
shrunk to personal security nor stayed in seven boxes

This paper has overviewed some aspects of the evolution of human security thinking and
doing during the last twenty years, with main attention to the ‘lens’ of work on personal
security. Ideas have multiple potentials which emerge over long periods, not all at once, and
a relevant comparison that we mentioned earlier is with the unfolding of human security
thinking’s partner, human rights discourse, which has manifestly evolved over decades and
generations in numerous spaces and directions. In principle, the personal security ‘lens’ was
an artefact to focus on a particular set of threatened values, but in practice it has largely
been used to look at some particular types of threat. Examining literature that uses this lens
to look at physical violence and crime, sometimes with special reference to gender, some
potentials of the approach were seen. Human security approaches to these personal security
threats have challenged established narratives of security, both through the focus on
individuals and by opening the way for more complex pictures of the person, not only the

18
physical but also the emotional person. An emphasis on the psychological and the subjective
makes the role of ‘framing’ and the human biases in risk perception crucial in further work
and a source of insights that can facilitate the opening of security thinking. Human security
research and practice can contribute to dispelling unnecessary anxieties and showing
opportunities for flourishing beyond irrational fears.
The ‘lens’ of ‘personal security’ is nonetheless an artefact, and so any of the various
personal security approaches should still lead authors to connect their analysis to the
broader human security picture. A human security approach is seen to involve a combination
of direct attention to specific issues and to broad mappings of diverse causal factors and
threats, factors which in their interaction determine the (non-)fulfilment and vulnerability of
basic needs, rights and values of various types of people in their particular and diverse
circumstances. This approach, with its attention to the intersection of diverse factors in the
lives of specific persons and types of people in specific contexts, can add distinctive and
novel insights (Tadjbakhsh 2013).
The fundamental interconnections between different threats and also between
different values make it problematic to divide security into sharply distinct categories:
‘personal’ versus ‘economic’ versus ‘health’ and so on. Adequately engaging with real
human-environmental (‘socio-ecological’) systems requires using less fixed pre-set divisions,
and benefits from the human security concept’s elasticity, as evidenced in the reports that
we have discussed. Using a “human security perspective [helps us] to analyse in an
integrated manner the collective threats that facilitate human rights violations of individual
persons and [to] highlight the interrelatedness between conditions that would otherwise be
analysed in an isolated manner” (Estrada-Tanck 2013, p.168). A ‘wide-angle lens’ human
security perspective (leading into ‘zoom lens’ in-depth work on identified priority areas and
groups) facilitates the necessary ‘boundary work’ (Star and Griesemer 1989, Gomez 2011)
that spans between conventionally separated intellectual and political spheres. In the
process, a human security approach may promote two essential qualities: the perception of
an intensively interconnected global system which we share; and the ability to think
sensitively about how other people live their lives (Gasper 2013). It can thereby favour
changes of perspective that are needed in how people perceive shared interests and shared
humanity (Gasper 2009, Mine and Gomez 2013; cf. Beck 2009).
This emphasis on the expanding circle of the human security idea must not be
understood as a dismissal of research and practice in relation to organized violence.
Personal physical security is fundamentally important. But declarations that only intentional
violence, organised violence (MacFarlane and Khong 2006), and/or violence in public spaces

19
should be the focus in all ‘human security’ analysis are highly questionable. Such steps lose
much or most of the value-added from a human security perspective, which looks at the
threats to how people live and can live and which adds value through person-centred
attention to the intersections of multiple dimensions of life. Domestic violence, unorganised
crime, physical damage from environmental events or from accidents, and many other
matters are all often greater threats than intentional/organised/public/political violence.
We should distinguish between a fixed, reduced characterization—such as that
‘human security’ should be treated only as ‘personal security’ or only as physical security
against organised intentional violence—and a situational focusing of attention according to
circumstances in a particular time and place. Prescriptive attempts to fix security agendas
have typically been frustrated in due course by the unpredictability and interlinkages of
threats. A human security agenda calls not for a permanent scanning and analysis of
everything, nor for a permanent fixed focus on one pre-set part of life, but an alternation
between periodic wide scanning followed by intensive focus on the insecurities identified as
most pressing in the particular time and location. This agenda makes us think about how
priorities are decided, which are the relevant providers and means, and how do we decide
which trade-offs are tolerable and which not. The interaction and alternation between
narrower focus studies such as citizen security-type reports and on the other hand
comprehensive mappings suggests how the agenda of human security analysis is to help
prioritise within the broad realms of human development and human rights, in a context-
sensitive way. Human security analysis needs thus to work within a broad intellectual
perspective, if the vices of in-silo securitization are to be kept at bay.

20
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i
Switzerland has a Human Security Division (Peace, Human Rights, Humanitarian Policy, Migration) in its
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thailand has a Ministry of Social Development and Human Security.
ii
See e.g. the review in Tarnogórski (2013).
iii
Further, Article 3 in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person", whereas the HDR
1994 categor of perso al securit i cludes the right to life rather tha l i g outside it.
iv
The 2011 World Development Report tried to introduce its own concept of citizen security, meaning only
freedo fro ph sical viole ce a d the fear thereof. The ‘eport s atte pted e clusio of other t pes of
freedom, violence and fear, notably crimes against property, and (in practice) even domestic violence, deviates
from the usage now established from the Hispanophone literature.

25