ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, Japan has incorporated the concept of human security into its foreign policy. After establishing the concept of human security as one of its international policy pillars, Japan began to take the lead in refining the concept and then initiated norm diffusion in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), whose member states adopted a resolution on human security by consensus in 2012. The author demonstrates Japan’s involvement in the norm-diffusion process. Why and how has Japan been involved in creating and disseminating a global normative idea of human security? What are the constraints on Japanese policy elites in promoting the idea of human security?

Japan’s pursuit of global “intellectual leadership” led to the establishment of the Commission on Human Security and further to the promotion of the human security concept it in the UNGA. Propagating global values and norms and taking entrepreneurial leadership in multilateral fora are relatively new challenges for Japanese diplomacy. Networking with like-minded member states was the key word in exerting this entrepreneurial leadership. However, partly due to Japan’s distinctive negotiation style, the definitional content of human security lost clarity. Japan’s achievement as a norm entrepreneur was thus not complete.