Suchergebnisse

"Since the end of the Cold War, Human Security has become an important approach in international politics, law, and political science. In contrast to the so-called 'Westphalian System' that knows only states as subjects and objects of security, human security aims at the security of individual human beings if failed or failing states do not protect them nor provide for their basic needs. Thereby, such heterogeneous forms of security as security from war, food security, energy security or security from crime and traffic accidents become common problems of international politics. Developing this new concept of security, UN documents as well as some experts suggest that the extended concept of security is a recurrence of the premodern concept of security that prevailed before the clear-cut distinction between domestic and international politics and the evolution of the system of states. This introduction discusses contributions on the premodern and contemporary history of (human) security and tries to assess the heuristic potential of the concept for historical research." (author's abstract)

"In the present discussion on 'Human Security', Insurances have been only lately involved. The contribution starts with the assumption that Insurances are historically an especially fruitful object of research for the general question of the history of security regimes. It shows that, contrary to some suggestions held in risk sociology, early Mediterranean maritime insurances are to be judged rather as something completely different than the modern insurances from the 17th century onwards managed by merchants' companies and states. The latter belonged to a secular process of constructing a 'normal secure society' during enlightenment. The relationship between Timescapes, Spatiality and Insurances is analyzed: are Insurances per se an instrument of colonizing 'the future' because they are instrumental in calculating and constructing clearly defined 'risks'? or is that future orientation just one element, but is perhaps the wider socio-political context with its prevailing timescapes in which the insurance operations were embedded a changing one from pre- to postmodernity? Asking those questions the article contributes to an approach of using 'human security' as a heuristical device to explore the history of security production." (author's abstract)

While no one disputes that the core element of human security is the physical protection of people, most new views are that human security should also include the empowerment of people. The varying opinions of what empowerment encompasses are all rooted in Enlightenment Liberalism. Both the broad & narrow schools of human security have conceptual & practical difficulties. Hoping to move beyond these difficulties, three ways of viewing the future of human security are discussed: as Liotta's threats vs vulnerabilities model; as a potential guiding principle for EU foreign policy; & as Taylor Owen's (2004) human security threshold. The narrow conceptualization focuses on violence, but millions die each year from nonviolent preventable human security threats. People should not have to be vulnerable to serious harm. While there must be a threshold of the harms against which they can feasibly be protected, in the name of human security, every effort should be made to protect people not just from war & conflict but from preventable disease, starvation, civil conflict, & terrorism. Tables, Figures. J. Stanton