The notion of Human Security has been developed by Prof Amartya Sen and others as an alternative to conventional concepts of poverty and development. Instead of focusing on an open-ended process of development it defines the problem more in terms of risk or insecurity. The emphasis is not on what people might wish to gain but on retaining what they already have and protecting them from destitution. Sen describes Human Security as “freedom from fear and freedom from want”. See pages 8-9 of the final report of the Commission on Human Security - Human Security Now.

But the global trend in humanitarianism is towards greater involvement of Western political agendas with development. This arises largely from the end of the Cold War and the dominance of the USA. It leads to greater willingness to intervene in humanitarian crises but there is always a risk that altruistic intentions will be subverted by narrow political interests. Hence it is no surprise to find that ‘Human Security’ often seems to be little more that an extension of Western security to the local level in poorer countries. Mark Duffield has explored and explained this phenomenon in his book Global Governance and the New Wars (Zed Books 2001; for Zed catalogue see www.zedbooks.co.uk). He has written more explicitly about Human Security in a paper with Nicholas Waddell titled Human Security and Global Danger.

I believe that there is still space to assert a concept of Human Security closer to that of Sen. My views are set out in a paper on Humanitarian Trends. This began as research for CAFOD and was later developed for the Imgard Coninx Stiftung in Berlin and is due for publication in a collection of papers later in 2006. This paper starts from global trends and works towards the idea of Human Security as a protection against narrow Western interests that sometimes get mixed up with humanitarian and development policy.

But starting from analysis on the ground, among very poor people, I came to the conclusion that Human Security better represents the reality of their lives than concepts such as poverty and development. Indeed, they do not make a very strong distinction between everyday risk and what the world calls ‘disaster’. They also discount humanitarian aid as a reliable source of support. Within a week of the massive Gujarat earthquake of 2001, SEWA members were saying that they did not want relief aid they wanted support to resume their livelihoods. So long as they relied on aid they would always be at risk but if they started work again they would be self-reliant and could cope with new and unforeseen risks. Without work they felt vulnerable. Because SEWA is a membership organisation it responded to these requests. The striking feature was that SEWA moved into livelihood response much faster than international agencies. My analysis of this issue was published by AIDMI in a booklet, Disasters and Vulnerability. I summarized my thinking on Human Security in 2004 in a paper for ActionAid as part of a pack of materials on conflict issues. See Paper 5, Human Security.

A Human Security lens can usefully be applied to any disaster response. After the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 the EU funded a range of reconstruction programmes. I reviewed one of these, run by AIDMI, and advised that Human Security was a more accurate and useful concept than ‘Livelihood Relief Fund’ - the title being used at that time. See Beyond Relief review of a ‘Human Securities’ approach to the Gujarat Earthquake

By viewing the issue of poverty from the perspective of risks and threats, the Human Security concept creates a natural link between Vulnerability Analysis, as used to establish strategies towards Sustainable Livelihoods, and Conflict Analysis. Indeed, one of the major weaknesses in current humanitarian thinking is the artificial distinction between conflict and other threats. In most cases conflict manifests itself as a nexus of political-security issues that are closely connected to other causes of vulnerability. For example, in Nepal it is hard to say whether the conflict is a result of social exclusion or political struggle; the two elements are inextricably mixed.

This leads to a separation between responses to conflict and other factors relating to poverty. Instead of integrating the understanding of conflict into development strategy, agencies tend to treat development as the core activity and conflict as a peripheral and temporary phenomenon. The solution to this is strategic Conflict Analysis.