INTRODUCTION: WHY HUMAN SECURITY MATTERS

Dennis Altman

If one were to ask most Australians whether a threat to our security would be more likely to result from a conventional military attack, a terrorist movement, or a rapid increase in global warming leading to large numbers of displaced persons seeking refuge elsewhere, most would probably select the third alternative. The annual Lowy Institute Poll that reports Australians' views on a number of security issues has found a number of issues are considered very important, including some that are largely domestic such as protecting Australian jobs and strengthening the economy. Among issues that might be conceived of as included under the rubric of 'human security', and that rate highly, are stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, combating international terrorism and 'improving relations with immediate neighbours in the Pacific'. Tackling climate change has declined as a priority issue over the past few years, and support for foreign aid is reasonably high. Most interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which 'foreign policy goals' are conceived of as cutting across the normal divide between 'foreign' and 'domestic' (Hansen 2011).

In a common sense way, then, most of us understand that our security is dependent on much more than conventional military defence against invasion, and that many of the most vexed issues threatening global and regional stability are those related to 'economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security', the seven themes identified by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in introducing the concept of human security into mainstream discourse in the 1990s (UNDP 1994).

We live in a world in which the old assumptions of a clear division between the domestic and the international spheres no longer make sense. Writing of the greater Mekong area and the spread of HIV in the late 1990s the economist Doug Porter (1997:213–214) pointed out:

The nexus of HIV transmission across this territory is a metaphor for the globalization of investment, trade and cultural identity. Although the dominant realist tradition in international relations conceives national territorial spaces as homogenous and exclusive, what is referred to as 'the new global cultural economy' has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order which cannot be adequately understood in terms of centre-periphery, inner-outer, state border models of the past.

Why Human Security Matters asks how this understanding might be better integrated into debates about the future directions of Australian foreign policy, and our interactions with the rest of the world.

This book grew out of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. Our original proposal stated:

The purpose of this project is to interrogate the concept of human security and the potential to apply the concept to key aspects of Australia's foreign policy and external relations, both in the Asia-Pacific region and globally. The project will investigate the usefulness of this concept, placing particular emphasis on emerging security issues such as identity based conflicts; terrorism; the drug trade; human trafficking; new epidemic diseases; climate change and food security. It will examine how such issues might be more efficiently connected with more traditional concerns of interstate armed conflict.

Human security has become a portmanteau term capable of being stretched to encompass almost every issue of momentary concern. As Joseph Camilleri points out in his theoretical chapter, the term is often used so broadly as to be meaningless. In 2006 the then Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock defended strengthened government anti-terrorism provisions, bitterly criticised by civil liberties groups, as contributing to 'human security'. This is probably not consistent with how most of our contributors would define the term.

One of the primary aims of this book is to give a coherent account of 'human security' as a way of thinking about the real threats that exist in an increasingly interconnected world. Australia is unlikely to face a military invasion, of the sort we might have experienced in World War II, but its security is threatened by a series of global upheavals around food, water, new epidemics, transnational crime and climate change. As a small rich country in a region undergoing very major economic and political transformations, Australia faces an almost unique challenge. Our immediate region — which is usually understood to encompass the South Pacific and Southeast Asia — contains a vast range of economic, social and political circumstances, and Australia's relations with the diverse countries of the region inevitably means engaging with the full gamut of challenges summed up in the phrase 'human security' (see, regarding Southeast Asia, Kaur and Gong 2010).

Even without using the term, the issues summed up in the term 'human security' are of increasing concern to both government and publics, which is challenging the traditional ways of thinking about foreign policy. Thus while Cotton and Ravenhill's edited survey of Australia foreign policy in the past five years does not even index the term it does include considerable reflection on the importance of climate change and lesser attention to a number of non-traditional security concerns (see, particularly, Elliott 2011). Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in that book is the analysis of the now largely forgotten Australia 2020 Summit organised in the first flush of Rudd's government, where concerns about 'emerging security challenges', particularly around food and climate, received considerable attention (Tyler and White 2011).

One of the strange features of contemporary Australian politics is that at a time of rapidly shifting global political and economic power our political leaders seem less interested in the larger world than at any time in the past forty years. Only under the pressure of a series of international gatherings in late 2011 did Julia Gillard start to articulate a vision of Australia's role in the world, and, other than Kevin Rudd, whose passion to give Australia a larger role on the world stage has become entwined with his own personal ambitions, it is hard to think of a leading...