چكيده فارسي :
A mere four years after launching his ethical revolution in the field of economics through the human development reports at UNDP, Mahbub Ul Haq took on the international security community for his next people-centered crusade. The opportune moment of the end of the Cold War, and the hopes for a peace dividend, led him towards conceptualising another term, Human Security. Describing it in short as ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ in the 1994 HDR, Haq sought to draw attention not just to levels of human development achieved, but to the ‘security’ of gains made by focusing on ‘downside risks’ such as political conflicts, wars, economic fluctuations, natural disasters, extreme impoverishment, environmental pollution, ill health, illiteracy and other social menaces.
While human security as a concept has been truly revolutionary, its inter-disciplinary nature has not been properly understood at best, and misused at worse in an increasingly militarized world. What would it take to put human security back on its enlightening path as Haq had conceived it, as a bridge between the security and development communities, as a focus on secure and insecure people worldwide which does not contribute more to the increasing North/South rifts?
This article will argue that as a theoretical concept, Human Security embodies a number of added values for the fields of security studies and human development. As a normative approach, the concept was adopted as a principled-based foreign policy by a number of governments and regional organizations. Its flexibility, and the lack of its precise definition, however, lent itself to contentious manipulations that deviated considerably from the compassionate world order, based on equality and justice, which Mahbub Ul Haq envisioned. The arguments will be laid out in four sections in the chapter. In the first conceptual part, we shall explore and analyze the genesis of human security, its provenance on the international scene, the different definitions and critiques it has solicited, and its added value to the fields of security studies and human development . Part II will delineate four chronological phases when the international community engaged with the concept as an answer to the demanding questions of the times. Part III examines four ways in which the noble idea of human security may have been compromised by the way that states and international organizations have used the concept to their advantage. Finally, Part IV will present the seven challenges that this author sees as needed to bring back human security to its correct path towards an ethical approach to policy making.
