Origins
The emergence of the human security discourse was the product of a convergence of factors at the end of the Cold War. These challenged the dominance of the neorealist paradigm’s focus on states, “mutually assured destruction” and military security and briefly enabled a broader concept of security to emerge. The increasingly rapid pace of globalisation; the failure of liberal state building through the instruments of the Washington Consensus; the reduced threat of nuclear war between the superpowers, the exponential rise in the spread and consolidation of democratisation and international human rights norms opened a space in which both ‘development’ and concepts of ‘security’ could be reconsidered.
At the same time the increasing number of internal violent conflicts in Africa, Asia and Europe (Balkans) resulted in concepts of national and international security failing to reflect the challenges of the post Cold War security environment whilst the failure of neoliberal development models to generate growth, particularly in Africa, or to deal with the consequences of complex new threats (such as HIV and climate change) reinforced the sense that international institutions and states were not organised to address such problems in an integrated way.
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