Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
Table 1.2 Narrow, wide and deep conceptions of security
Types of issues
Military
Non-military
Referent object of security Using military means Unsolvable by military
State Narrow Wide
Non-state actor
Individual
Copenhagen School
Human Security
lives but it can also, of course, imperil them. Additionally, human lives can be
imperilled by a range of issues other than military ones. A thorough application of
security in the study of global politics must, surely, recognize this or else admit that
it is a more limited field of enquiry; ‘War Studies’ or ‘Strategic Studies’, for example.
The conceptualization of International Relations, like the conduct of International
Relations, was frozen in time between 1945 and 1990. (See Table 1.2.)
The international political agenda
The meaning of ‘security’ is not just an arcane matter of academic semantics. The
term carries significant weight in ‘real world’ political affairs since threats to the
security of states have to be a priority for governments and threats to the lives of
people are increasingly accepted as more important than other matters of contention.
The need to widen the meaning of security in global politics was recognized by
prominent statesmen long before it achieved a certain fashionability following the
end of the Cold War. In the late 1970s the Independent Commission on International
Development Issues, chaired by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and
including the former premiers of the UK and Sweden, Heath and Palme, concluded
in their influential report that:
An important task of constructive international policy will have to consist in
[sic] providing a new, more comprehensive understanding of ‘security’ which
would be less restricted to the purely military aspects. . . .
Our survival depends not only on military balance, but on global cooperation
to ensure a sustainable biological environment based on equitably
shared resources.
(ICIDI 1980: 124)
The Brandt Report helped raise the profile of poverty as an international issue
(see Chapter 4) but global security politics continued to be focused on military
matters in general, and the Cold War in particular, until the passing into history of
that conflict at the end of the 1980s. As with the academic treatment of security,
however, it is important to remember that the notion that the conduct of international
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