Empowering the human security debate: making it coherent and meaningful

Despite ongoing Realist entrenchment in and domination of a still relatively narrow conceptualisation of “security”, an increasingly recognised school of thought has attempted to redefine the security referent from the State/soldiery to the human being. The problem for both critics and proponents of the human security school has been potential incoherence due to the inevitable breadth and scope associated with the human security condition, leading to accusations of incoherence form more traditional perspectives. This article traces the evolution of the ideas in this debate and offers a way forward which, it is hoped, satisfies the dominant paradigm’s concerns in terms of a viable security conceptualisation. It then identifies visible and empirical security issues that directly affect a far greater proportion of the world’s population than those areas normally identified as security issues in the dominant Realist literature.