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Question 1

What role does the concept of 'human security' have to our understanding of security studies?

a) The conceptual reconciliation about the security of the state and people are developed analytical frameworks which for practical intents and purposes have been received within the policy community albeit limited within the Western hemisphere based on the premise that in the post-Cold War context security decision-making processes should properly be operational in both senses of states and their peoples.

b) The concept of human security gained increasing currency in the mid-1990s, serving to highlight critical issues. In particular the concept of human society has privileged the problem of intra-state violence, the conceptual significance of which has served to challenge the eminence of state-centric realpolitik discourse an increasingly irrelevant in the post-Cold War political climate.

c) The concept of human security does not challenge the relevance of the state-centric arguments in so far as these concern the protection of the state from external military violence. However, the concept does show that state-centric realism is not a sufficient security argument in that it does not adequately address the security of people within states and therefore does not serve as the dominant understanding.

d) The realism of state-centric realpolitik, in so far that they concern the protection of the state from external military violence as an unchanging and privileged interest of the policy making community regardless of domestic political concerns, continues to assume significance as the most useful understanding of security issues.

Question 2

In what ways has the purpose of human security been conceptually significant?

a) Human security has put particular emphasis on the nexus between conflict and development, a concept which is very useful. The significance of the nexus between development and conflict is not just that it raises ethical issues about human suffering and inequalities, but that its frequent outcomes, so called state future, has dire local, regional, and global effects.

b) From a normative perspective the concept serves to highlight good global norms. Human security often serves as an umbrella norm. Developing good global norms is not only important for moral and ethical reasons but also because they serve to enhance state and international society.

c) The development of the human security highlights the view that the threats to humans as well as to state entities are changing and increasing. These changes have spurred debates about the meaning of security and the arguments for its broadening and deepening. Like internal violence, these transnational issues have serious local, regional, and global effects.

d) All of the above

Question 3

What does the concept of human security involve?

a) Human security is a narrow conceptual approach to security. The threat of violence to people by the state, or by any other actor, is a normative and subjective endeavor. What correlates to violence in the international system is therefore inherently contentious and human security will lack a definitive analytical framework.

b) Human security is a broad analytical pursuit. Human security is defined as the protection of individuals and communities from war and other forms of violence both in the state, and within the international system. Systemic violence has an analytical value because contributory factors to human forms of insecurity are essentially correlates of objective violence and causal hypotheses of causes can be empirically tested.

c) Human security is the wide label understood to denote a broad understanding of the need to protect humans and advance their freedoms. Human security is therefore equated with a broad spectrum of threats and needs and requires further analysis before it can be termed a school in security.

d) The human security label is divided over what defines human security; freedom from violence or freedom from wants. However, the problem with expanding the definition is that the numbered possible causal hypothesis becomes so vast that research and analysis is too broad to formulate into a cohesive framework

Question 4

In what ways has it been argued that humanitarian intervention is a justifiable form of human security?

a) Human security perspectives on humanitarian intervention raise questions about the principle of sovereignty, the state, and international stability. While sovereignty may be an explanatory tool, it is also the case that an increasingly inter-related global international stability will depend on human security inside states.

b) Humanitarian intervention is justified on the grounds of promoting or restoring international stability. It devalues the problem of prioritizing conflicts that have strategic implications over those that may be more violent thereby establishing a connection between international order and human security.

c) Politically the responsibility to protect extends to acceptance by developing countries as determining operational policy. Making sovereignty unconditional is regarded as the means by which developing states can control their internal affairs. External security makes them less prone to internal violence.

d) Humanitarian intervention is not justifiable. Use of force to violate the sovereign territorial state engenders greater international issues by disrupting the international order; firstly arbitrary intervention violates inviolability norm which was the founding principle of international society; and secondly, it promotes risk of contagion and regional over-spill.

Question 5

To what advantage can tensions in human security be reconciled in order to create a possible framework of analysis?

a) The connections between the schools in human security are apparent. The causal link can be multi-faceted and interrelated. For example threats of poverty, disease and poor governance are interconnected to causes of political violence. In these ways the schools are mutually constitutive, the different conceptual approaches work towards the same analytical links.

b) Causality can be a circular dynamic, for example not only can poverty and poor governance cause political violence, it can also work to the opposite end as well: political violence can cause poverty and bad governance

c) Because the conceptual framework identifies the problem of violence and the causes of violence, it provides a sound basis for the policy community. Important crisis management will require immediate action and crisis prevention. Proper management requires policies that address the narrow schools focus on violence and the broad schools focus on development.

d) All of the above

Question 6

How sufficient are the state-centric and human-centric arguments to an understanding of security?

a) Realism focuses on external threats to the state and has failed to deliver security to people inside states which is normatively objectionable and makes the state, the realist referent object, vulnerable to both external and internal threats.

b) The survival of the state and territory is the constant and unyielding concern of the policy making community. International security can only be obtained through the state as the referent object and as the presiding factor in securing the domestic realm.

c) Human security has a normative value but has empirically unsubstantiated conceptual value. Realist state-centrism is the means by which threats can be objectively identified. Military threats, contagion, regional overspill in conflict have continued to be the contributing problem of international de-stabilization of the state and, by association, human insecurity.

d) All of the above

Question 7

To what extent is realism and/or human security a sufficient argument for the concept of sovereignty?

a) Realism's state-centric position has important relevance for understanding some important threats to the state. Corresponding to Hobbes' state-centric position, Realism's state-centric focus acknowledges that security concerns external violence and malfunctioning states, the importance being the unconditional preference of sovereignty.

b) Critics contest that realism fails to explicitly address the people within if it makes the referent object the state. However, the conjectural objection raised represents a misunderstanding of sovereignty in the contemporary international order: the comparative security/insecurity of people within state borders is contingent on the integrity of the territory from physical harm.

c) Sovereignty is conditional on the extent to which the people are secure. Neglecting consideration of the contractual nature of sovereignty, realism leaves the impression that it has reified the state at the expense of the people.

d) Realism recognizes the centrality of internal violence by privileging the contractual nature of sovereignty to state-centric security. Because the political tradition of security is an extension of the conditional protection of the people the state can fulfill its contractual obligation by maintaining control, use and threat of violence.

Question 8

To what extent can an understanding of both state-centric and humans security arguments be deemed necessary in the contemporary context of the scope and extent of threats?

a) Attempts to facilitate the emergence of a dual understanding of state-centric and human-centric arguments are too abstract and embryonic to develop a complete understanding of security. Much more work needs to be done to make it a clear and consistent framework, although theoretical moves are evolving in the right direction.

b) The contemporary context is one in which people are vulnerable to a diversity of threats, not all of which will be felt in the same way. The most vulnerable are argued to be those whose government is failing and whose state elites are unwilling or too incapacitated to act. Internally constructed human security is the logical means of securing the state.

c) Contemporary international society is still vulnerable to the pressures and constraints of military capabilities of other states, more so given that smaller and weaker states are embarking on nuclear programs and competitive resource access. It follows therefore that state-centric security continues to dominate the security agenda as the most viable means for reacting to new developments.

d) State-centric security and human-centric security have very different interests. The problem, however, is one of what would happen if the interests proved to be mutually incompatible? A preferential policy favorable to one approach could result in the neglecting of the other. Reconciliation under such circumstances would be unattainable.

Question 9

What is the utility of the concept of human security to practitioners of security policy?

a) Human security has yet to provide itself as the conceptual tool that can be used for framing diplomatic exchanges. The connections between conflict and human development are largely remitting from policy rhetoric. Indeed a pattern emerging from the human policy vacuum has been an increasing occurrences of internal ethnic violence punctuated by an unwillingness to assume moral and resource responsibility for intervention

b) In the Asia-Pacific region several states have rejected the broad school's understanding of developmental needs and the broader non-military trans-national activities, regarding it as subversive economic imperialism designed to facilitate capitalist market access for exploitative intent.

c) The concept's capacity as a tool to guide practitioners in international society has been demonstrated by the increased interest in human-centric themes in foreign policy objectives. Human security has been operationalised which has had a positive impact on the human security network amongst major world powers.

d) Case studies have demonstrated that the narrow human security agenda has been adopted in occurrences of human insecurity crisis if it serves their own national interests. However, policy objectives have resulted in the production of decreasing internal violence.

Question 10

What are the future prospects of the human security concept to the study of security and to practitioners in the policy community?

a) Human security has established a cross-disciplinary triangular relationship between security, governance and development and established an inter-disciplinary connection between the schools that comprise its study.

b) In developing countries the historical perpetrators of human security are beginning to accept norms of human rights and human security because of the long-term gains from securing access to international financial institutions and securing aid agreements that will bolster political power.

c) Because human security makes people the referent objects it puts an onus on explaining why the state is the referent object if it is not a means to people's security. Human security continues to usefully highlight this disparity and the understanding of security and the role of sovereignty

d) The viability of the UN as assuming leadership of human security and providing the institutional moral framework through which human security can become part of the policy community is increasingly being brought into question. Recent trends of states bypassing UN norms and death tolls from internal conflict seem to indicate the continued prevalence the state will have in international society.

Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 06.

Chapter 06

Instructions

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

Question 10