Human Security (ePub)

There is a real security gap in the world today. Millions of people
in regions like the Middle East or East and Central Africa or
Central Asia where new wars are taking place live in daily fear of
violence. Moreover new wars are increasingly intertwined with other
global risks the spread of disease, vulnerability to natural
disasters, poverty and homelessness. Yet our security conceptions,
drawn from the dominant experience of World War II and based on the
use of conventional military force, do not reduce that insecurity;
rather they make it worse.

This book is an exploration of this security gap. It makes the
case for a new approach to security based on a global conversation-
a public debate among civil society groups and individuals as well
as states and international institutions. The chapters follow on
from Kaldors path breaking analysis of the character of new wars in
places like the Balkans or Africa during the 1990s.

The first four chapters provide a context; they cover the
experience of humanitarian intervention, the nature of American
power, the new nationalist and religious movements that are
associated with globalization, and how these various aspects of
current security dilemmas have played out in the Balkans. The last
three chapters are more normative, dealing with the evolution of
the idea of global civil society, the relevance of just war theory
in a global era, and the concept of human security and what it
might mean to implement such a concept.

This book will appeal to all those interested in issues of peace
and conflict, in particular to students of politics and
international relations.