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The 'securitization' of health has generated considerable debate. In public health, the debate focuses mainly on health effects. Although securitization may refocus attention and resources toward certain health issues, it may focus undue attention on a few issues or on the military aspects of issues to the detriment of a broad range of health issues and their human rights aspects. In international relations, the concern is the effect on security analysis and policy. While some welcome a broadening of the security agenda to include items such as health, others are concerned that analytical rigour and operational effectiveness are lost. This article argues that, normative concerns notwithstanding, securitizing is occurring as a result of perceived changes, associated with globalization, that are creating changes in the nature or degree of threats. But, in international relations, security is largely a social construction, as the Copenhagen School claims. Contemporary social struggles are ongoing around competitions to define security. The article argues that human security is a concept that has considerable relevance for understanding the nature of change that is producing new or intensified threats. It also offers conceptual space for analyzing what security is provided and for whom in the changing world order.

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This article seeks to advance analyses and responses to conflict prevention and reconstruction in Africa that go beyond state-centric perspectives to include a range of non-state players. Drawing on examples from both Uganda and Canada, it focuses on the activities of NGOs that have 'partnered' with state-based actors in various peacekeeping and peace-building operations as well as on the increasingly important role played by think-tanks. The latter have emerged in Africa as major contributors to the proliferating literature on the political economy of violence, an approach that recognizes that African conflict reflects imperatives of production and consumption in relations that juxtapose Africa's political institutions and cultures with international and global political economies. The article argues that novel forms of 'security communities' are emerging from the non-state/state/international partnerships and coalitions that have developed around contemporary issues like 'blood' diamonds, small arms, debt and HIV/AIDS, thus drawing attention to connections between conflict and development.As Africa entered the new century, 'internal' conflicts, regional effects and global responses posed challenges for analysis and practice for both states and non-state actors, soldiers and civil societies. These challenges have been intensified with the growing awareness that such conflicts are not often 'complex political emergencies' (CPEs) (Cliffe 1999) but rather reflections of deep-seated development difficulties and deficiencies: hence, the emergence of a literature on the political economy of violence that recognizes that conflict is not an aberration but rather a reflection of the imperatives of basic needs for local communities given cumulative negative impacts of globalizations and structural adjustments over the last two decades (Reno 1998 andSmillie et al. 2000;Stein 2001). Such awareness poses profound challenges to appropriate responses from African and international agencies: the appearance of African think-tanks on security as well as on development, ecology and gender. This has led to the continuing identification and privileging of a range of 'new' issues and partnerships as exemplified by the Uganda Debt Network (UDN) treated below as it seeks to improve the economic context for peace-building.In this article we suggest that the very profundity of emerging challenges to human security and development reinforces new attention to the role of a variety of non-state actors in a variety of peace-keeping, peace-building or peace-making responses: from indigenous, intermediary and international NGOs to think-tanks (Nation

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