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The concept of human security, introduced to the global public policy lexicon in
1994, did two things. First, it challenged conventional and dominant state-centric
approaches to security to rethink security in universal people-centred terms.
Second, in its focus on human life and dignity, it called for a profound transition
in security thinking to make all people everywhere matter. This article argues
that the development of human security within the UN system has not sufficiently
met these objectives. Through an analysis of three key human security sectors—
food security, health security and disaster events—it reveals how conventional
approaches to human security can be implicated in neglect, invisibility and marginalisation such that those already facing insecurity are made worse off still.
A critical human security lens demonstrates that foregrounding recognition,
solidarity and agency can help to expose invisibilities and encourage strategies to
make people count.

ABSTRACT: The concept of human security, introduced to the global public policy lexicon in 1994, did two things. First, it challenged conventional and dominant state-centric approaches to security to rethink security in universal people-centred terms. Second, in its focus on human life and dignity, it called for a profound transition in security thinking to make all people everywhere matter. This article argues that the development of human security within the UN system has not sufficiently met these objectives. Through an analysis of three key human security sectors—food security, health security and disaster events—it reveals how conventional approaches to human security can be implicated in neglect, invisibility and marginalisation such that those already facing insecurity are made worse off still. A critical human security lens demonstrates that foregrounding recognition, solidarity and agency can help to expose invisibilities and encourage strategies to make people count.

There have been clear calls for enhanced international cooperation to meet the environmental, economic and criminal challenges of transnational environmental crime (TEC), defined here to include illegal wildlife trade, timber trafficking and the black market in ozone-depleting substances. In the absence of an overarching international or transnational environmental crime legal framework, institutional settings are characterized by regime density and complexity amid a growing number of actors across related but distinct institutional settings. Scholars of international cooperation have worried that this kind of complexity leads to legal indeterminacy, normative ambiguity and regulatory uncertainty that will make cooperation more difficult. In the TEC sphere, these propositions remain under-researched and untested. This article sketches the contours of a study that would bring some conceptual and empirical clarity to these issues. In doing so, it outlines the constitutive elements of the TEC regime complex and the nature of institutional interplay between and among those elements

Australian scholarship on "International Relations and the environment" rests on the shoulders of a comparatively small number of researchers. Their contribution to scholarly debate and policy analysis, however, belies the numbers. The corpus thus produced offers both breadth, through the range of environmental issues explored, and depth through a strong commitment to theoretical inquiry and a willingness to challenge and defy traditional disciplinary boundaries. Underpinning this is a recognition that the agenda of "IR and the environment" has long moved beyond policy-tracing analysis of inter-state cooperation, diplomatic negotiations and multilateral institutions. Robust intellectual, conceptual and empirical "conversations" on global environmental issues mean that there are often points of divergence among those working in this field. Nevertheless, the Australian scholarly output on International Relations and the environment can be characterized by three important themes: a critique of neoliberalism, a commitment to ethical inquiry (and, indeed, to a politics of solidarity) that reveals a complex politics of knowledge, discourse and power; and a disciplinary heterodoxy accompanied by a critical interrogation of theoretical constructs and organizing principles embedded in ideas about the state, sovereignty and security. This is not, I argue here, an interest in theory for theory's sake. Rather, Australian scholarship on International Relations and the environment is motivated by real concerns about how best to protect the environment and by a real commitment to those who are most affected by the ecological, social and economic consequences of environmental change.

The global politics of the environment is increasingly a politics of transnational harm that raises important questions about injustice and global ethics. One response to the injustices of environmental harm is found in the demands for cosmopolitan harm conventions - social practices that define what is permissible in relations between human beings in a way that does not privilege the interests of insiders over outsiders. This article explores the theory and practice of cosmopolitan environmental harm conventions with particular attention to the issues of rights, obligations and a politics of consent. It concludes that while many existing environmental harm conventions are often only marginally cosmopolitan, despite appearances to the contrary, cosmopolitan ideas are sufficiently robust to provide a theoretical and ethical road map for dealing with global environmental injustice.

Australia's climate change relationship with developing countries is framed by the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Under those agreements, Australia has committed to take a lead in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and to provide technological and financial support to developing countries. In practice, Australian governments of both political hues have adopted a somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent attitude to developing countries within climate change politics and their fulfilment of those commitments has been uneven. This is particularly so if the concept of the 'Global South' is expanded from developing countries to include those people who are vulnerable to the environmental, social and economic impacts of climate change.

This article analyses the role of environmental policy in the alliance between Australia and the United States. It examines whether the alliance relationship has had an impact on the two countries' international environmental policies and whether environmental concerns have helped to define the alliance in any way. It focuses primarily on the years since the end of the Cold War, the period in which global environmental issues have become much more central to the agenda of international politics. This is also the period in which environmental concerns have become much more central to debates about the nature of global peace and security and the means by which it should be achieved. Environmental concerns might, therefore, be expected to have become more relevant to an alliance relationship which still has security concerns at its core. There is little evidence to suggest that this is so.

Most studies of regionalism in Southeast Asia pay little attention to environmental concerns as part of the region's empirical dynamic. In contrast, this article examines the ways in which governments have come to "govern" environmental issues at a regional scale under the auspices of ASEAN, against the backdrop of debates about the political topography of Southeast Asian regionalism. The framework adopted here brings together analyses of the public space of formal regional governance arrangements, the inter-subjective space of regional identity building, and the private space of regional social practices. Underpinning this is the question of whether moves to supposedly "flatter" forms of regional governance have been accompanied by for more democratic or participatory forms of regionalism. I conclude that regional environmental structures under ASEAN are more akin to "invited spaces" and have generally failed to offer effective channels of communication for, or democratic representation of, a wider range of stakeholders, including civil society groups and local communities.

Despite the post-September 11 focus on regional security and the continued emphasis on regional economic cooperation, environmental degradation should not be overlooked as an important issue for US policy in and relationship with the Asia-Pacific. It is an important issue in its own right, presenting the countries of the region with ecological, economic and social (human security) challenges. There are both ethical and instrumental impulses for the United States, as a rich industrialised country and as a disproportionate consumer of resources and polluter of global waste, to provide environmental assistance to the Asia-Pacific. Despite global demands that the 'new' new world (environmental) order should be based on solidarity and collective responsibility, neither US environmental policy towards the region nor the regional consequences of its international environmental policy more generally meet this test. The US is fundamentally self-regarding rather than other-regarding in the various dimensions of its environmental relationship with the region. The consequences for both the region and for the US may be substantial. Continued environmental degradation in the region has the potential to undermine other US policy goals, in terms of its reputation, it economic objectives and even its more orthodox geopolitical security objectives.

Environmental degradation in Southeast Asia has been implicated in what some describe as a failure of regional cooperation and a crisis of regional identity and credibility within ASEAN. This article examines environmental decline in Southeast Asia as a consequence of the region's changing political economy and modes of production and suggests that regional cooperation on environmental challenges is more likely to be successful if it reflects some form of bounded cosmopolitanism embedded in a regional community of rights and duties. Drawing on identity-based accounts of regional cooperation to explore the relationship between ideas, interests and policy in the region, it identifies three phases of environmental cooperation since 1977. It argues that, despite apparent ideational and institutional advances over this period, ASEAN has been unable to respond effectively to regional environmental challenges for normative as well as material reasons. Yet while environmental cooperation has been constrained by the ASEAN way, the imperatives for such cooperation have challenged the ASEAN's political norms and confirmed the ambiguities of regional identity within Southeast Asia.