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論文

Human Security: Bounds of Possibility

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Yoichi Mine

要旨
本論文は、2007 年 9 月 7 ～ 8 日に開催された「持続可能な社会のための科学と技術に関する国際会議 2007『国際開発協力』」（主催：日本学術会議）の講演
原稿に簡単な文献の注釈を付して、そのまま活字にしたものである。人間の安全保障という国際規範は、国連開発計画（UNDP）の『人間開発報告書 1994 年版』
で提示され、2003 年の緒方・セン委員会報告書（『安全保障の今日的課題』朝日
新聞社）によって深められた。本稿では、人権、人間開発、サステイナビリティ
といった隣接する国際規範と対比させることで、人間の安全保障の概念の意義を際立たせようと試みた。講演原稿という性格上、議論は簡潔なものだが、社会科学、人文学、自然科学の諸分野を結びつける学術的な統合概念として、人間の安全保障は大きな役割を果たすことができると強調している。2011 年の「人間の安全保障学会」の設立を控えた今、ささやかな問題提起としてお読みいただければ幸いである。なお、本稿の内容をふくらませた日本語版「人間の安全保障と開発－地平線の広がり」は、武者小路公秀編『人間の安全保障－国家中心主義をこえて』（ミネルヴァ書房、2009 年）に収録されている。

1. Human Security as a Hybrid of Different Generations of Human Rights
It has often been suggested that the Japanese approach toward humansecurity is development-oriented, in stark contrast with the Canadian approach
which placed a distinct emphasis on humanitarian intervention in conflictsituations. As a general framework, however, human security was originally
put forward as an agenda to integrate “freedom from fear” (peace) and “freedom
from want” (development), the dual ideals upheld in the post-war formative
years of the United Nations, and inscribed in the preamble of the JapaneseConstitution promulgated in 1946 as follows: “We recognize that all peoples of
the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want”. The Final
Report of the Commission on Human Security, the so-called Ogata-Sen Report,
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released in 2003 is also structured along this dual vision of basic freedoms .

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In its formal aspect, the expression of freedom from critical threats toindividuals corresponds to the framework of liberty, of negative freedom, suchas freedom from coercion, torture and death threats, freedom from autocracy,
and freedom from arbitrary forfeiture of property: the type of freedoms
3prioritized by the philosopher, Isaiah Berlin . On the other hand, the post-war
era has witnessed another thread of evolution of human rights, a series of social
rights toward material well-being, rights to health, to education, to decent
work, to housing, to good environment, etc. What is noteworthy in the humansecurity agenda is that the substantial parts of these social rights toward wellbeing, positive freedom, is accommodated in the form of negative freedom, as
freedom from want.
Idealists would say that the human security approach provides us with aframework in which negative and positive freedoms, civil liberties and social
rights, can be reconciled and put forward in an integrative way. On the other
hand, sceptics would maintain that the agenda is to keep social rights, thesecond generation of human rights, alive as a subspecies of classic negative
freedom, in the face of the retreat of the state: dual demise of the socialist
economy and the Keynesian welfare states under globalization. In any case, atthe least, human security can be instrumental in putting multiple generationsof human rights under a single umbrella, so as to lay directly on the agenda thequestion of prioritizing a certain set of human rights in a given situation.

2. Human Security and Human Development as Shadow and LightIn spite of potentials that human security as a binding notion would
possess, the new-born concept had to spend an adverse infancy, being facedwith the global trend of political securitization combined with economistic
market fundamentalism that accelerated after September 11. Those who
wave a flag of political human security, especially that of the universal“responsibility to protect” beyond the borders of nation-states, run the risk ofbeing regarded as kin to the military strategists of the Pentagon, despite thefact that human security had originally been set forward to foster the principleof multilateralism. In this case, the natural, political connotations of the single
term “security” are viewed with suspicion. On the other hand, those who
endorse the value of security in economic contexts, like the one presented in theHuman Security: Bounds of Possibility

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recent ILO report , can be detested by neo-liberals due to the perceived affinityof human security with social security. The latter criticism seldom comes to thesurface, as long as the bulk of discussion around the human security agenda isconfined to the realm of international politics.
However, the central fact is that the notion of human security was born
originally as a younger sibling to human development, under the influence of agroup of development economists, a scholarly circle of UNDP, immediately after
the demise of the Cold War. First, the concept of human development, which
was defined as the continuous process of enlarging the range of people’s choices
so that they can lead lives they value, was introduced in the inaugural issueof Human Development Report in 1990. It is widely known that the concept
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drew heavily on the capability theory elaborated by Amartya Sen . The notionof human development is much broader than the Human Development Index(HDI), a combination of life expectancy (which crudely corresponds to humansurvival), GDP per capita (to human livelihood), and literacy/school enrolment
rates (to human dignity), which was designed to counter and replace per capita
income as the leading tool of quantitative measurement of human well-being.
HDI seems to have achieved the initial objective of countering the economistic
income poverty approach, augmenting its influence among development
experts, though Sen himself once revealed his criticism against such a crude6

attempt of indexing .
After an interval of several years, the notion of human security was
introduced in Human Development Report 1994 on the initiative of the
Pakistani economist, Mahbub ul Haq. The concept of human security waselaborated further in the Ogata-Sen report published in 2003, in which Sen
paid attention to the effects of boundary-crossing downside risks, which
may drastically swamp the past achievements of human development in
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individual societies . Downside risks should include the outbreak of violent
wars and conflicts, spread of emerging infectious diseases, rapid degradationof environment, havoc caused by natural disasters and megascience accidents,
and intensification of social discrimination, exclusion and deprivation. In thecourse of manifestation of those risks, the range of choices of the affected people
can be extremely circumscribed.
The human security approach seen in the developmentalist perspectiveis thus to address a situation, in which those vulnerable to risks are exposed

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to an extremity of insecurities, by preventing the occurrence of disasters,
protecting the worst-affected people, and promoting the resilience and problemsolving abilities of multi-layered human communities. In other words, humansecurity is the collective effort of countering adversity, of safeguarding the
choices of the most insecure, and of placing the society back on the “right track”
of the forward-looking, Aristotelian process of human development. If humandevelopment looks at the light and promotion, human security takes care of the
shadow and protection, and the light and the shadow unite.
In this perspective, human security is practically understood as an agenda
to promote human actions in face of systemic catastrophe. Although thetraditional Marxist theory used to produce insights into the cumulative natureof crises in a capitalist society, neo-classical economics tends to exclude suchcases from the subject of analysis due to its obsession with market equilibrium.
Human security can theoretically be understood as an extension of Sen’s
entitlement theory, which was developed through his analysis of famine crises
in South Asia and Africa, beyond the question of food entitlement failure well8

into more general crisis situations . One of the relevant works in this regard,even though they do not use the term human security explicitly, is the indepth study of African famines by Alex de Waal, who includes the HIV/AIDS
9pandemic in the famine crisis defined in a broad term, as a new variant famine .
Another illuminating work is the comprehensive survey of African poverty
by the historian, John Iliffe, who drew a perspicuous distinction between
structural, long-term poverty (typically Asian-European) and conjunctural,
temporary poverty (typically African), and convincingly stated that both types
10of poverty tend to converge in contemporary Africa . The interface between thetwo human approaches can be reexamined in light of these lines of studies in
the humanities.

3. Listening to the Voices of the Insecure
Based on the above discussion, the quintessence of the human security
approach is now formulated tentatively in the following way. To start with,human security requires us to listen carefully to the voices of the most insecurepeople who are exposed to serious risks and suffering acute deprivation. Even
though downside risks affect everybody, insecurities spread unevenly.

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When ethnic emotion erupts, those civilians who do not possess resources
to protect themselves, to evacuate or to emigrate become easy targets ofwarring parties. In refugee camps, strong men often monopolize distributed
foods and deprive women, children and the weak of their food entitlements.
The socially excluded persons living with HIV/AIDS but being denied
citizenship cannot access to the ARV treatment, even though the government
where they live does provide such a service. In debt-laden households, young
voiceless children often fall prey to human trafficking, in connivance withpublic authorities. When the food price soars, landless people begin to starve
earlier than other segments of the population. The people who cannot afford
to live outside the industrial zones suffer respiratory problems caused by thehazardous emission from smoky factories. The people who cannot but choose
the cheapest foods are exposed to the risks of dangerous food additives. The
people who have no choice but to live in a wetland delta have their houses
swept away by the deluge caused by the global climate change. And finally,
those who have decided to sacrifice their lives for others are tortured and“disappear”, as a warning threat to those who are to follow them, leaving theirfamilies in despair and destitution.
Considering the duality of freedom from fear and freedom from want, thetarget of inquiry should be the psychological as well as physical insecuritiesof the most vulnerable to risks and threats, as well as the ways in which they
perceive insecurities as a matter of life experience. The World Bank once
conducted a worldwide survey on voices of the poor, and presented some of theresults in its World Development Report in 2001, though the citation was madeonly in a piecemeal way as collateral evidence to strengthen its own policy
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agenda of poverty reduction . The bottom-up characteristics of human security
thinking lead us to reconsider the distinctive attribute of human security visà-vis human rights. While human rights as universal norms are thought tobe possessed intrinsically by every human being, the attention to humaninsecurities always starts with the specification of pressing human needs
and human aspirations on the ground. The inquiry can be supplemented by aparallel effort of economists toward disaggregation of misleading national-level
macro statistics, taking into consideration such factors as class, occupation,
gender, age, race, ethnicity and horizontal inequality.
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contribute toward reaching at an agreement on priority, based on a sharedunderstanding about what are the basic capabilities (vital core of human life)
for everyone, and what are the particular sets of human rights to which urgent
attention is to be drawn, in a given society at a given time. By examining
human insecurities in extreme, crisis situations, human security thinking will
help us to narrow down the focus of human development, and to reaffirm, or
to create, a value system of the society about what should be secured for every
member of the society. Even though risks easily cross the border, the prioritythat emerges out of particular human insecurity situations can be different
from place to place, from time to time.
Happiness is abstract, but human miseries are always with concrete
realities. In a society, what is the most ardently sought for by the most insecure
may be political stability, while in another society, this can be cultural dignity,
gender equality escape from chronic poverty, or a unique combination of them.
Although cosmopolitanism is expected to foster human solidarity, the trajectoryof human development is path-dependent and should be given a firm direction
by the examination of urgent needs arising from human insecurities. From
this perspective, the attempt of Martha Nussbaum to start with formulatinga universal list of basic human capabilities seems to be an upside-down
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thinking .

4. Risk, Solidarity, and Security Dilemma
Downside risks, such as wars, armed conflicts, sudden spread of infectious
diseases, natural and human-made disasters, pounce upon a wide swath ofpeople at a time. Those risks compel the most vulnerable strata of society to
suffer most, intensifying their insecurities, but the rest of the society cannot
stay completely safe either. As was stated by Ulrich Beck, the smog crosses
borders without hindrance and democratically affects both haves and have13

nots . In a similar vein, those who chose to exit from a decaying city center toa rich suburb cannot be free from the consequences of the neglect of the poor,
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such as violent urban crime . This border-crossing nature of risks invites us toreexamine the orientation of social solidarity.
The French anarchist Joseph Proudhon once argued that the propertyof the rich and the property of the poor are opposed to each other, while theHuman Security: Bounds of Possibility

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freedom and security of the rich and the freedom and security of the poor
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may reinforce each other . With the advent of global risk society, the zerosum confrontation between haves and have-nots is being intensified, but the
ground for solidarity between groups can also be consolidated, through sharedconcern and shared insecurities, in quest of common security. The perceptionthat everybody is faced with common threats may strengthen social cohesion,
crossing and redefining group boundaries.
Here comes the question of identity. Solidarity against risks presupposes asituation where we are exposed to common risks. It is no wonder that narrative
expression of insecurities given by individuals reveals nothing but collective
perception of common insecurities of their communities as symbolic function.
Except for pure natural disasters, however, the problem is that risks are often
associated with certain people, others, such as hostile ethnic groups, foreigners,
migrants from a contaminated area, poor people, heathen, angry minority,
arrogant majority, and so on. Mahmood Mamdani writes that before September
11, he thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect, though16

he now thinks that this is not always the case . What we witness is that manysocieties are trapped in security dilemma, in which a group of people, theoriginal player, starts to react to their perceived threat, provoking a similar
kind of reaction of another player, which is perceived as a much greater threatby the original player. As a result, all players feel more insecure, and are
exposed to new risks of accidental discharge of weapons. In this case, rational
choices of individual players to achieve their own parochial security make theentire system extremely insecure.
National security is bound by national boundaries, but human security
is not. The practitioners of human security should clearly go beyond thedichotomy between us and others, between the universalist civil discourse andthe traditionalist culture discourse, and try to avoid the cumulative vicious
circle of security dilemma. As long as a motion to achieve security for a certain
group may be perceived as incompatible with security for another group, wemust be conscious about whose security we are talking about. A sound starting
point would be not to seek hastily for a common interest, but rather to eliminate
the room for elite manipulation of differences in perceived insecurities among
opposing groups, which may lead to devastating consequences.

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5. Human Security and Sustainability in an Globalizing World
Thus far, the bounds of possibility of the concept of human security
have been discussed in contradistinction with human rights and humandevelopment. At this section, some limits intrinsic in the human security
approach are indicated.
As long as the UN human triad, i.e., human rights, human development
and human security, are more or less based on the framework ofmethodological individualism, a different conception is needed to envisiona holistic system, which would also accommodate sustainable interaction
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between nature and human society . The human security approach does notprovide a framework to expound directly the future shape of human society,nor to explain the structural causation of poverty and insecurity, but rather
to bring forward just a way of how to see critical things. In order to examine
if a certain system, capitalist or non-capitalist, is sustainable, we have to look
for a different framework of theoretical scheme, beyond the perspective ofcommunity resilience and individual coping. Despite the weakness of humansecurity, however, we cannot think of the future shape of a sustainable society
separately from the examination of human insecurities, simply because asystem which fails to provide substantial security for every part of society
cannot be sustainable. In this sense, human security and sustainability areinterdependent.
As local economies are integrated into the global economy, polarization of
growth points and stagnant points tends to be accelerated, conflicts over theappropriation of a bigger share of the fruits are to be intensified, epidemics
may deliver a heavy blow to the entire society, and individual security as wellas the sustainability of nature and human society can be placed under serious
threats. In the age of globalization, the uneven nature of growth as well as theerosion of social security and social cohesion obliges us to rethink the quality ofdevelopment itself, and to take even more sensitive attitudes toward material,
individual and cultural insecurities intensified by the increased connectivity ofhuman activities. An exemplary case is post-apartheid South Africa, now being
firmly integrated to the rest of the world, where, in spite of a continuous, robust
economic growth rate of 5 percent, the unemployment rate hovers around 40
percent, the Gini coefficient has reached at the staggering level of 0.7, andHuman Security: Bounds of Possibility

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there is almost no sign of the world’s worst crime rate being reduced. A society
in such a state of tension cannot be sustainable, and today’s South Africa is far
from an exception, but a microcosm of the globalizing world.
In Japan, the human security agenda started to be discussed in earnest
around 1997, when the Asian financial crisis was about to shake the entire
world. At that time, some policy practitioners and some scholars withinstitutional approaches discussed much about systemic risks and the prospect
to devise region-wide social safety-net, but such initiatives were swamped in theface of the shift of global focus from market failure to governance failure. Still,
however, the peoples of East Asia continue to be faced with multiple humansecurity challenges. In addition to the massive Tsunami disaster in December
2004 and repeated earthquakes, the new century witnesses waves of emerging
infectious diseases crossing borders, as well as the lingering effects, and theunexpected outbreaks, of violent conflicts in many countries such as Myanmar,
Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines. It is this range of challenges
which makes the comprehensive interpretation of human security attractive
to many local stakeholders, and compels them to put the sustainability of thepresent global system in question, seeking for an alternative.

6. Conclusion: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach?
In fact, there are sharply contrasting institutional practices of humansecurity in this part of the world. In 2002, the Thai government set up the
Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, whose major mission
includes the promotion of social welfare of vulnerable people, such as “children,
youth, the disadvantaged, persons with disabilities and older persons”. At least,
a repressive option to solve the violent conflict in the south by military might is
not regarded as a part of human security in the Thai context. In contrast, thegovernment of Philippines has introduced the Human Security Act in February
2007 to repress the Muslim separationists also in the south of the country,with its iron-fist measures criticized by local civil society organizations, while
praised by the US and Australian governments. The meaning of humansecurity is still fiercely contested in Asia.
Then, should we dismiss the notion of human security altogether on theassumption that the concept has irretrievably contaminated in the process of10

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securitization onslaught after September 11? Should we distance ourselvesfrom such a political embroilment and lock up the concept in the realm of
academic investigation? Or, should we invest on a more comprehensive, “Asianstyle” approach of human security, keeping its ambiguities as an advantage?
There is no easy, ready-made answer. The point is however that the peoplesof the world are still faced with multiple challenges that the human security
approach originally intended to address, and there are pressing needs tocoordinate public actions in an integrative, accommodating framework. Even
if we practically abandon the human security approach, those challenges will
simply stay as they are. Human security may not be a universal theorem that
explains every aspect of human life, but still can be a powerful lighthouse,
which illuminates critical aspects of human society in dynamic change.

References
1 This paper was originally read at International Cooperation for Development: The International
Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability 2007 organized by the Science Councilof Japan on September 7 and 8, 2007.
2 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994: New Dimensionsof Human Security, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, Ottawa: International
Development Research Centre, 2001; Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now,
New York: Commission on Human Security, 2003.
3 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. See also: Hannah
Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Viking, 1968.
4 International Labour Organization, Economic Security for a Better World, Geneva: International
Labour Office, 2004.
5 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992; Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction,
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6 Amartya Sen, “Assessing Human Development,” in: United Nations Development Programme,
Human Development Report 1999: Globalization with a Human Face, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999, p. 23.
7 Amartya Sen, “Development, Rights and Human Security,” in: Commission on Human Security,
op.cit., pp. 8-9. See also: Mary Kaldor, Human Security: Reflections on Globalization andIntervention, Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
8 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981.
9 Alex De Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis – Yet, London and New York:
Zed Books, 2006.

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10 John Iliffe, The African Poor: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
11 Deepa Narayan et al. eds., Voices of the Poor, 3 vols., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000
and 2002; World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
12 Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
13 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, tr. Mark Ritter, London: Sage, 1992.
14 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,and States, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
15 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, ou, Recherches sur le principe du droit etdu gouvernement: Premier mémoire, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966.
16 Mamdani, Mahmood, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots ofTerror, New York : Pantheon Books, 2004.
17 As for the philosophical grounds of the UN triad plus “human needs”, see: Des Gasper, “Human
Rights, Human Needs, Human Development, Human Security: Relationships between FourInternational ‘Human’ Discourses,” Institute of Social Studies Working Paper No. 445, 2007.