ABSTRACT
The concept of human security gained prominence in the 1990s amid some optimism that it might shape a new world order in which ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’1 would eclipse the dominant state-centric vision of security focused on the sovereign nation-state and its national interest. Human security has since evolved as a conceptual framework for understanding more complex threats to humans in a rapidly globalizing world. For proponents of the human security paradigm, elevating global health to the status of a human security issue has offered the possibility that a deeper understanding of our mutual vulnerability
to global health threats might strengthen commitment to the right to health and to humanity’s collective well-being. Less optimistic observers of the evolving relationship between health and security have observed a dominant focus on a small number of virulent pathogens criss-crossing national borders: pathogens that pose a potential emergency to particular (and largely) western, industrialized nationstates and their economic and geopolitical interests (Ingram 2009; O’Manique and Fourie 2010; Brown 2011). As health and disease have entered the lexicon of globalization more attention is being paid to health as an important foreign policy issue, but with formal inter-state and multi-lateral strategies operating in the context of a world deeply unequal and divided (Ingram 2009, 2085). Competing and overlapping conceptions of (in)security are reflected in contemporary practices of global health governance (see Chapter 11), with significant tension between the conception of health as a human security issue linked to a broader analysis of the ideological and structural forces shaping both the governance of global health and the conditions that shape human health, and the more hegemonic view of health as a national security issue in which our increasingly globalized world is producing new pathogens that threaten particular interests of nation-states.
