The Intellectual Perils of Broad Human Security: Deepening the Critique of International Relations

Abstract

Pauline Ewan discussed, in a recent issue of Politics, how the human security debate is stymied by conceptual and definitional weaknesses, and how it is politicised in conventional security studies. In response, this article takes a different approach and develops from the critical security literature a working conceptualisation and definition of broad human insecurity. It proposes as one example of objectively identifiable and measurable dimension of human insecurity the largely preventable high rates of under five mortality (U5M) and demonstrates its origins in the socially constructed international system. In this way, it responds to Ewan's remarks concerning the need to debate subjectivity and historical (and contemporary) political determinism in order to circumvent the unending ‘circuitous debates’ that stymie the development of human security.