The concept of human security became popular in the 1990s as a new framework for conceptualizing security. This framework, promoted by the UN and particularly actively endorsed by countries such as Norway, Canada and Japan, shifted the referent of security from states to human beings and its understanding from protection from physical violence to protection from a more variegated set of threats to human life and well-being. Since its appearance, it underwent widespread criticism for being extremely broad and vague, and a rich and diverse debate has developed around the theoretical soundness of the concept and its relevance for policy-making.
This paper analyses the context in which HS security emerged and reviews its different usages with a particular focus on its application to refugees. It argues that even if traditional normative definitions comprise too many different aspects challenging its policy-relevance, its contribution to security studies goes beyond the statement that security is a matter of people’s lives irrespective of their juridical status. Speaking of HS security encourages to include the subjective understanding of security into the broader picture, and to question both an excessively normative use of the concept and the obsession for measurable indices that have characterized both theoretical speculation around the concept and attempts at operationalization. Neither normative nor “benchmarking” (Homolar 2015) approaches account for the production of perceived conditions of security and insecurity.
Applying a human security framework to refugee hosting areas, which can be seen as social field where diverse actors interact between themselves and the structure provided by the field itself (Bourdieu 1985), can help analysing the multiple interactions through which human (in)security is produced in contexts directly or indirectly affected by conflict, as well as their implications for people’s lives, providing interesting information for more context specific policy- making.
