Non-Traditional Notions

Non-traditional security begins by questioning the most basic assumption of the traditional view: security for whom? Instead of automatically answering "the state," it asks whether the real subject of security should be people — individuals, communities, or even all of humanity. This shift in the referent (the "who") forces a re-examination of the other three elements of security: what is being secured, from what threats, and by what approach.

Expanding the Referent: From State to People

In traditional security, the referent is the state — its territory, sovereignty, and governing institutions. Non-traditional notions expand this. When proponents ask "Security for who?", they answer: not just the state, but also individuals, communities, or all humankind. This broader view is often called human security or global security.

The core idea is that security should mean the protection of people more than the protection of states. While state security and human security should ideally be the same thing, secure states do not automatically mean secure peoples. Protecting citizens from foreign attack is a necessary condition for individual security, but it is not a sufficient one. A stark fact supports this: during the last 100 years, more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies.

Two Conceptions of Human Security: Narrow vs. Broad

All proponents of human security agree that its primary goal is the protection of individuals. However, they disagree sharply about what threats individuals should be protected from.

• Narrow concept: Focuses on violent threats to individuals. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it, this means "the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence." The threat agenda here remains largely about physical harm, but from internal sources (civil war, genocide, terrorism) rather than just external military attack.

• Broad concept: Argues that the threat agenda must include hunger, disease, and natural disasters. The reasoning is simple: these kill far more people than war, genocide, and terrorism combined. Human security policy, in this view, should protect people from these threats as well as from violence. In its widest formulation, the human security agenda also encompasses economic security and threats to human dignity. This is often summarised as addressing both "freedom from fear" (the narrow focus on violence) and "freedom from want" (the broad focus on poverty, disease, and deprivation).

Global Security: A Response to Interconnected Threats

The idea of global security emerged in the 1990s in response to threats that are inherently global in nature. These include:

• Global warming and climate change
• International terrorism …