‘The Utility of Human Security’:

Which Humans? What Security?

A Reply to Thomas & Tow

ALEX J. BELLAMY & MATT McDONALD*

School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Thomas & Tow’s evaluation of the utility of human security is an important con-
tribution to an ongoing debate about what security is and for whom security
should be provided. In particular, the authors’ engagement with the human se-
curity agenda is important given the centrality of this approach to recent at-
tempts to rethink security. This article argues, however, that Thomas & Tow’s
approach to the human security agenda is problematic for two central reasons.
First, their attempt to narrow security to make this approach amenable to state
policymakers risks reifying the sources of insecurity for individuals everywhere.
Second, the conception of human security they put forward appears largely in-
consistent with the normative concerns inherent in the human security agenda.

T
HOMAS & TOW’S evaluation of ‘the
utility of human security’ marks an
interesting contribution to the ongo-
ing dialogue about what makes people in-
secure and the global strategies that can be
developed to deal with these problems.1
Their aim is to investigate whether the
emerging discourse of human security can
inform a more effective approach to inter-
national security. In order to do so, they call
for a narrower understanding of human se-
curity to enable it to ‘accrue greater analyti-
cal and policy value’ (p. 178). Although we
sympathize with the direction in which
Thomas & Tow are heading and whole-
heartedly agree that human security marks
a much needed departure from the statist
and militarist approach to security that
dominated the field of International Rela-
tions (IR) during and after the Cold War,
their attempt to co-opt human security into
a state-centric framework is problematic.
We would also argue that the conception of
human security put forward by Thomas &
Tow is largely inconsistent with the norma-
tive concerns inherent in the human secu-
rity agenda.
The Problem of State-Centrism
The attempt to make human security ame-
nable to state policymakers is problematic
for three principal reasons. First, Thomas &
Tow overlook the point that, viewed from a
human security perspective, states are more
often part of the problem than the source of
the solution. Whereas most writers on hu-
man security insist that the individual’s
security needs to be prioritized, Thomas &
Tow argue that the state and international
borders should remain the primary focus.
Thus, ‘an event or crisis becomes a truly
human security problem ... when the rami-
fications of not overcoming it cross a state’s
borders and assume a truly international
significance, affecting other societies and

Security Dialogue © 2002 PRIO. SAGE Publications, Vol. 33(3): 373–377. ISSN: 0967-0106 [028858]
374
individuals’ (p. 179). By their account, hu-
man suffering only constitutes a ‘true’
threat to human security when it crosses
borders. This means that states and their
borders rather than individuals remain the
primary referent of security. However, not
only are states unable to provide security
for their citizens despite the appropriation
of vast amounts of resources for this goal,
many states actively contribute to individ-
ual insecurity.2 This may be through the di-
rect murder of citizens (as in Yugoslavia
and Rwanda), their abuse of citizens’ hu-
man rights (as in China and South Africa),
the redistribution of income away from de-
velopment needs towards militarism (as in
India and Pakistan) or their material and
rhetorical support for a global economic
order that makes some people very rich
while impoverishing a third of humanity
(as in the USA and Japan). If states are often
agents of human insecurity rather than se-
curity, then the co-option of human security
into a statist policy framework risks limit-
ing the emancipatory potential of this secu-
rity discourse. Not only does Thomas &
Tow’s approach miss the point that human
security should interrogate what makes
people insecure, it also threatens to re-
legitimize the very social structures (states
and an international society) that create in-
security and limit the potential for alleviat-
ing suffering, wherever it may be.
Second, Thomas & Tow’s understanding
of human security prioritizes ‘death by
politics’ over ‘death by economics’.3 This
shift comes when they argue that the hu-
man security agenda needs to ‘provide tan-
gible threat parameters’ (p. 181). In order to
prevent human security from becoming
‘too amorphous and therefore question-
able’, Thomas & Tow propose demarcating
between general and specific threats, which
they confess means emphasizing the threat
from terrorism over and above the threat
from malnutrition. Thus, they argue that
humanitarian intervention and peacebuild-
ing operations are the most effective practi-
cal strategies for responding to human se-
curity threats. By fortunate coincidence,
such strategies ‘dovetail’ with the continua-
Security Dialogue vol. 33, no. 3, September 2002
tion of a statist conception of security. It
appears that the sole criterion used by Tho-
mas & Tow for singling out ‘specific’ over
‘general’ threats, and statist rather than
non-statist solutions, is so-called ‘policy
relevance’. This is deeply problematic, be-
cause it allows realist ontology to ‘trump’
the security of individuals. If we were to
follow Thomas & Tow, therefore, we would
argue that the needs of human security dic-
tated that terrorism, which kills fewer than
5,000 people per year – even in a year as
unusually bloody as 2001 – should be given
political priority (and hence more re-
sources) over the ‘general’ threat of malnu-
trition, which kills over 40,000 people every
day. Thomas & Tow focus their analysis on
areas of human security prioritized by the
West in terms of ‘death by politics’ and the
strategies for addressing those threats in
terms of intervention. What they overlook,
however, is that the threats they identify
are not the most prescient ones globally,
nor will the interventionist strategies they
advocate deal with the global human inse-
curity predicament. Although the West be-
came more interventionist in the 1990s, the
result has not been an easing of the human
insecurity predicament. Rather, while there
are certainly more elections around the
world, there is also more inequality, more
malnutrition, more refugees and more pre-
ventable disease than there was before
Western states became ‘good international
citizens’. It is also worth bearing in mind
that the Third World pays nine times more
to the West in debt servicing than the West
gives to the Third World in humanitarian
assistance and development aid.
Our third point of contention is that
Thomas & Tow have a very limited concep-
tion of ‘transnational’. The authors do not
point out, for example, that the West is al-
ready implicated in many of the problems it
is trying to address. For instance, the op-
pression of Palestinians and the terrorism it
breeds is directly linked to the $5 billion in
military assistance that the USA gives to
Israel each year. More indirectly, the col-
lapse of Yugoslavia was in no small part
due to the prior collapse of its economy,
Alex J. Bellamy & Matt McDonald ‘The Utility of Human Security’: Which Humans? What Security?
which was largely due to the lending poli-
cies of the USA and the International Mone-
tary Fund. The second problem with this
selective transnationalism is that it pro-
duces political practices (interventionism)
that do very little to ease human suffering
in the Third World. Intervening in the do-
mestic economy of Third World states to
promote good governance and neoliberal
economics frequently only benefits local
elites and donors.4 Finally, Thomas & Tow’s
understanding of what constitutes a trans-
national security threat draws our attention
to sovereignty issues and military solutions,
prioritizing the nature of the intervention
over the extent to which it enhances human
security.
In their attempt to make a human secu-
rity agenda ‘policy relevant’, Thomas &
Tow are changing its scope to such an
extent that it risks losing its emancipatory
potential. Rather than furthering the human
security agenda, they are essentially calling
for its closure by forcing it to cohabit with
the very political structures it is trying to in-
terrogate. As Anthony Burke put it, ‘we
should be wary of a situation where human
security approaches might be co-opted by
or quarantined within a realist-cum-
traditional framework whose assumptions
remain fundamentally intact, along with
the policy and political structures they have
supported’.5
Defining Human Security
We agree with Thomas & Tow that advo-
cates of human security ought to identify
precisely what it is they are talking about.
However, considerable work has been done
in this field. In a central work on human se-
curity, Caroline Thomas argued that the
approach should prioritize the security of
the individual and that security is achieved
only when basic material needs are met and
‘meaningful participation in the life of the
community’ and human dignity are real-
ized.6 This understanding is very similar to
the findings of the 1994 United Nations
Human Development Report (UNHDR) that
Thomas & Tow cite at the outset of their
375
contribution. According to the UNHDR,
human security meant ‘safety from chronic
threats such as hunger, disease and repres-
sion’ and ‘protection from sudden and
harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily
life’.7 Interestingly, the UNHDR and subse-
quent writers on human security have not
distinguished between ‘specific’ and ‘gen-
eral’ threats, as Thomas & Tow do.8 The
UNHDR identified seven aspects of human
security, only one of which (‘political secu-
rity’) fits Thomas & Tow’s interpretation.
Thomas & Tow openly acknowledge this,
arguing that ‘the implied breadth of this
application may have devalued the human
security aspect by broadening the idea be-
yond measurable limits’ (p. 181).
Here, their argument becomes inconsis-
tent. On the one hand, the authors demand
a rigorous set of ‘threat parameters’, but in
response to the UN’s identification of seven
quite specific sources of human insecurity
they argue that human security becomes
immeasurable, and thus by implication
unworkable in policy terms. What this
means is that economic, food, health,
environmental, personal and community
sources of human insecurity9 are airbrushed
into policy irrelevance by the insistence that
we kowtow to realism. Whereas most ad-
vocates of human security would view the
seven sources of insecurity as largely self-
evident, for Thomas & Tow the only thing
that is self-evident is that aspects of human
security that for them are immeasurable are
therefore unworkable in policy terms. No-
where in their article do they explain why a
broad notion of human security is ‘un-
workable’. Their implied answer comes
when they tell us that the human security
discourse ‘neither delegitimizes the state
nor devalues sovereignty’ (p. 189). This po-
sition is fundamentally different from the
normative concerns inherent in the human
security discourse, concerns that prompted
its original elaboration.
A discourse of human security that does
not delegitimize states when they act as
agents of human insecurity, does not de-
value sovereignty when it protects the per-
petrators of human wrongs, or does not
376
challenge the moral value of an interna-
tional economic system and structure of
states that creates and perpetuates most of
the globe’s insecurity has, at best, a very
limited utility. At worst, it helps to sustain
the very practices and structures that cause
human insecurity in the first place. It allows
Western states to intervene to halt human
suffering wherever and whenever it suits
them, as in East Timor and Kosovo. At the
same time, it allows them to turn a blind
eye to human suffering when it does not
suit, as in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and – for
more than two decades – East Timor. It al-
lows them to dictate how other states
should run their own affairs by linking the
delivery of aid to the so-called ‘good gov-
ernance’ agenda while seizing a king’s ran-
som in debt interest repayment. For the
human security agenda to begin to change
global political practice, it must be able to
interrogate, evaluate and criticize the prac-
tices that make people insecure in the first
place. At times, this will mean that human
security should operate less as a policy
agenda within existing political structures
and discourses than as a radical critique of
those practices. Seeking to make the human
security agenda amenable to foreign minis-
tries and policymakers without changing
their terms of reference ultimately involves
complicity in the very sources of insecurity
that the human security discourse is re-
sponding to.
So what should a human security agenda
look like? First, for it to make any sense at
all, it should focus on humans. Whereas
Thomas & Tow argue that only those hu-
mans whose suffering crosses borders
should constitute a human security prob-
lem, we contend that human security
should have a genuinely humanitarian
starting point. That is, our focus should be
humans everywhere. Our first question, as
the UNHDR noted, needs to be ‘What
things make humans insecure?’ The seven
sources of insecurity identified in the
UNHDR provide a very useful starting
point. Humans need basic subsistence
(housing, healthcare, sanitation, food and
clothing), without which they are insecure.
Security Dialogue vol. 33, no. 3, September 2002
Humans also need to be able to participate
in collective endeavours, as well as to be
free from persecution and unnecessary
harm. In contrast, very few people in the
world are threatened by neighbouring
states. Many more are threatened either di-
rectly or indirectly by their own state.
Second, if humans are to be our starting
point, what is the role of states? Although
more people today are threatened by their
own state than by other people’s, that does
not mean that states cannot fulfil a positive
role in pursuing human security. Having
identified the things that make people inse-
cure, we need to identify strategies for deal-
ing with them. This begins with an interro-
gation of the role of the state. A useful way
of thinking about this is the notion of ‘sov-
ereignty as responsibility’ recently put for-
ward by the International Commission on
Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).10
ICISS argued that sovereign rights entailed
a responsibility for humane governance
and the provision of human security. We
need to ask whether particular states and
policies are in accord with this responsibil-
ity. This involves interrogating the human
rights record of Zimbabwe and the foreign
aid policy of Australia, for example. In the
highly likely event that we find both to be
inimical to human security, we need to
identify how and why this is the case, as
well as propose alternative strategies that
would further the pursuit of human secu-
rity. In this way, it is possible to use the
human security agenda to investigate and
advise on policy without allowing it to be
co-opted by realism. Foreign ministries do
not have a monopoly on knowledge of
what constitutes IR or human security. Nor
are they the sole actors in promoting hu-
man security. Organizations such as Am-
nesty International, Oxfam and Greenpeace
should be identified as key agents of hu-
man security.
Thus, Thomas & Tow’s evaluation of the
utility of human security is troubling for
several reasons. They overlook the role of
the state as the primary agent of human
insecurity; they prioritize ‘death by politics’
over ‘death by economics’; and they employ
Alex J. Bellamy & Matt McDonald ‘The Utility of Human Security’: Which Humans? What Security?
a narrow understanding of ‘transnational’
that implies that the West is not already
implicated in the suffering it is purportedly
trying to alleviate. The effect of following
Thomas & Tow would be to close the hu-
man security agenda by forgoing its critical
capacity and to relegitimize the structural
causes of most human insecurity. Why do
the questions ‘What makes people inse-
cure?’ and ‘What strategies can we develop
for dealing with that?’ not already have suf-
ficient policy value, as Thomas & Tow sug-
gest? We suggest that the answer to this is
more to do with the moral inadequacy of
contemporary international society than
with any failing on the part of those non-
state actors championing human security.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
* Alex J. Bellamy is a Lecturer in Peace &
Conflict Studies and Matt McDonald is
a Research Student at the School of Po-
litical Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland.
1 Nicholas Thomas & William T. Tow,
‘The Utility of Human Security: Sover-
eignty and Humanitarian Intervention’,
Security Dialogue, vol. 33, no. 2, June
2002, pp. 177–192. All page references in
the text are to this article.
2 See, for example, Ken Booth, ‘Human
Wrongs in International Relations’, In-
ternational Affairs, vol. 71, no. 1, January
1995, pp. 103–126.
377
3 These terms are Ken Booth’s.
4 Rita Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democ-
racy: Development Discourse and Good
Governance in Africa (London: Zed
Books, 2000).
5 Anthony Burke, ‘Caught Between Na-
tional and Human Security: Knowledge
and Power in Post-Crisis Asia’, Pacifica
Review, vol. 13, no. 3, October 2001, pp.
215–239, on p. 222.
6 Caroline Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in
Caroline Thomas & Peter Wilkin, eds,
Globalization, Human Security and the
African Experience (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 1999), pp. 1–13, on p. 3.
7 United Nations Development Pro-
gramme, Human Development Report
1994 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), p. 23.
8 See, for instance, Edward Newman,
‘Human Security and Constructivism’,
International Studies Perspectives, vol. 2,
no. 3, August 2001, pp. 239–251; Astri
Suhrke, ‘Human Security and the Inter-
ests of States’, Security Dialogue, vol. 30,
no. 3, September 1999, pp. 265–276; and
George Porter, ‘An Ethical Basis for
Achieving Global Human Security’, De-
velopment, vol. 3, no. 1, March 1995, pp.
56–59.
9 All identified by the UNHDR.
10 International Commission on Interven-
tion and State Sovereignty, The Respon-
sibility to Protect (Ottawa: ICISS, 2001).