Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
Table 1.4 Security threats
Threats
The threatened
Individuals Societal groups Government The world
Individuals
Crime,
‘hate crimes’
Societal groups ‘Hate crimes’ Genocide Civil war
Government Human rights Genocide, War, economic Nuclear war
abuses politicide sanctions
Global Poverty, Global Global
industrial accidents, warming warming
pollution
Non-human Disease, Asteroid/
natural disasters
comet collision
the years that values other than this are becoming prioritized and that the pursuit of
state security can often undermine human security. Political issues are myriad but
can ulitmately be distilled down to contention over the allocation of certain core values
such as security, economic gain and altruism.
It is perfectly natural to give priority to security over the other values since
it is a precondition for realizing their allocation. If security is considered from the
perspective of individual people, however, issues are less easily compartmentalized.
Most issues of state altruism, such as the granting of foreign aid, are matters of life
and death to the people affected. Many issues of state economic gain, such as the
altering the terms of international trade, are security matters for people in other states
affected by the change. State altruism exists in the world, as do some limitations to
the pursuit of economic gain, but not to the same prominence as in the domestic
politics of states where individual people are empowered with votes and/or rights of
citizenship. Individual security is recognized in democratic states as overriding other
values (at least most of the time), as is evidenced by health and safety laws restricting
business activities and ‘social security’ laws. In global politics issues of life and death
frequently are not treated as priorities because they do not coincide with state gain
or security. The blinkered pursuit of profit can enrich some but imperil others. If
saving others from abuse or disaster is seen as an act of charity, rather than political
duty, it will only happen infrequently and selectively. Actual threats to people (Table
1.3) and perceived threats (Table 1.1) are so far removed from the way in which
issues are conventionally ordered on the political agenda by states that International
Relations theory and international political practice needs to find ways of accommodating
them, or cease to be connected in any meaningful way with human behaviour
and needs.
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