Boomerang Effect: the Convergence of National and Human Security

Abstract

Partly as a result of the 11 September 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, policy decisions and future choices may well be driven by a blurring of concerns that involve state-centric security (in which military forces have traditionally been the best form of protection) and human security (in which instruments other than the military may prove the primary means of protection). The implications for the analyst and policymaker are tremendous. We may be witnessing a `boomerang effect' in which we must focus on both national and human security and yet realize that excessive focus on one aspect of security at the expense or detriment of the other may well cause us to be `boomeranged' by a poor balancing of ends and means in a changing security environment.

National Security Strategies: Security from What, for Whom, and by What Means

“…Thus, it might be said that individual security becomes as important as global security. Liotta (2002) observes that the divisions between the traditional and the non-traditional understanding of security are artificial and not discrete. He believes that foreign and domestic policy concerns will blur because there is less concern about state protection relying on military action and state-to-state power relationships and more concern about individual citizen security.…”

Policy Brief: Non-State Actors in Maritime Security

“…As the drivers of violence internationally have shifted away from major stateto-state conflict and toward substate conflicts and violence driven by nonstate actors, there has been a corresponding shift in discussing security in broader terms such as "soft" or "human" security challenges. 1 This definition encompasses issues such as substate violence, terrorism, and state stability, and the diagnoses and solutions to these challenges necessarily involve nonstate actors more directly than traditional definitions of security focused on military conflict. Alongside this shift, there has also been a shift in institutional structures used to address international security challenges.…”

Preparing for disaster: a comparative analysis of education for critical infrastructure collapse

“…In particular, it is considered that terrorism (and particularly 9/11) produced a set of conditions that pulled diverging national systems towards each other. For example, Liotta (2002) argues that states are becoming increasingly similar in treating national and human security as a conjoint issue. Similarly, Lutterback (2005) considers that European states are synchronising in the ways in which they have militarised their security apparatus.…”

“…By securitisation, we mean the way in which certain aspects of life which may not have traditionally been seen as security issues, are considered as such. Most scholars of securitisation would argue that national approaches to securitisation are converging (see Liotta 2002;Lutterbeck 2005) since the end of the Cold War, due to the effects of globalisation and new threats including the 'War on Terror' and climate change. They also assume that this convergence tends to be dominated by the approach of the US, as the most influential nation politically, culturally and economically.…”