Critical Perspectives on Human Security: Rethinking Emancipation and Power in International Relations

by Burgess; J. Peter

• ISBN13: 9780415567343
• ISBN10: 0415567343
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This new book presents critical approaches towards Human Security, which has become one of the key areas for policy and academic debate within Security Studies and IR.The Human Security paradigm has had considerable significance for academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Under the rubric of Human Security, security policy practices seem to have transformed their goals and approaches, re-prioritising economic and social welfare issuesãthat were marginal to the state-based geo-political rivalries of the Cold War era. Human Security has reflected and reinforced the reconceptualisation of international security, both broadening and deepening it, and, in so doing, it has helped extend and shape the space within which security concerns inform international policy practices. However,ãin its wider use, Human Security has become an amorphous and unclear political concept, seen by someãas progressive and radical and by others asãtainted by association with the imposition of neo-liberal practices and values on non-Western spacesãor as legitimizing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan.This book is concerned with critical perspectives towards Human Security, highlighting some of the tensions which can emerge between critical perspectives which discursively radicalise Human Security within frameworks of emancipatory possibility and those which attempt to deconstruct Human Security within the framework of an externally imposed attempt to regulate and order the globe on behalf of hegemonic power. The chapters gathered in this edited collection represent a range of critical approaches which bring together alternative understandings of human security.This book will be of great interest to students of human security studies and critical security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Introduction: Emancipation and power in human security	p. 1
	p. 11
'We the peoples': Contending discourses of security in human rights theory and practice	p. 13
Development of the human security field: A critical examination	p. 28
Post-colonial hybridity and the return of human security	p. 43
Securitizing 'bare life': Critical perspectives on human security discourse	p. 56
Human security, biopoverty and the possibility for emancipation	p. 69
Institutionalised and co-opted: Why human security has lost its way	p. 83
	p. 97
The limits to emancipation in the human security framework	p. 99
Rethinking global discourses of security	p. 114
Human security and the securing of human life: Tracing global sovereign and biopolitical rule	p. 129
Problematizing life under biopower: A Foucauldian versus an Agambenite critique of human security	p. 144
Rethinking human security: History, economy, governmentality	p. 157
Human security: Sovereignty and disorder	p. 172
Inhuman security	p. 186
Further reading	p. 198
Index	p. 202
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