Political Science · Ch 5 — Security in the Contemporary World
Overview
Overview
'Security' and 'national security' are two of the most-used words in any conversation about world politics — and two of the least explained. They often function as conversation-stoppers: once something is labelled a security matter, it gets treated as too sensitive, too high-stakes, or too secret for ordinary debate. Films only reinforce the mystique, painting the whole subject as a world of secrecy and looming danger that has little to do with everyday life.
That framing sits awkwardly with how a democracy is supposed to work. If citizens are expected to participate in governing themselves, they cannot simply be told to trust that security is being handled behind closed doors — they need a genuine understanding of what the term covers, and specifically what India's own security concerns actually are. Rather than settling on one tidy definition, this chapter treats these as open questions worth debating: it lays out two quite different ways of thinking about security, and makes the case that which view feels right depends heavily on context — on whose situation and whose vantage point you reason from.
The aim here isn't to hand you a single final answer but to open up the debate: security is a genuinely contested idea, and making sense of it means weighing more than one perspective against more than one context.
The figure in the NCERT textbook is a composite illustration that visually expands the idea of human security beyond the traditional state-centric view. It is not a single photograph but a collage of several images arranged around a central text block.
At the centre of the figure is a box containing the key quote from the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report. The quote argues that security has been interpreted too narrowly, focusing on nation-states rather than on people, and that the everyday security concerns of ordinary individuals have been neglected. This text serves as the conceptual anchor for the surrounding images.
Around this central text, the figure places multiple photographs, each depicting a different kind of threat to human security. These images are not labelled individually, but they are clearly chosen to represent the range of dangers that the UNDP report highlighted. One image shows a scene of environmental degradation — perhaps a drought-stricken field or a polluted river — representing threats to ecological security. Another shows a crowded urban slum or a scene of poverty, illustrating economic insecurity. A third image depicts a violent conflict or a military presence in a civilian area, showing that traditional military threats still harm people directly. There is also an image of a health crisis, such as a hospital scene or a disease outbreak, pointing to health insecurity. Finally, a picture of a natural disaster — like a flood or earthquake — represents the threat of environmental disasters that can destroy lives and livelihoods.
The layout is deliberately non-hierarchical: no single image is larger or more prominent than the others. This arrangement visually communicates that human security is multidimensional — no one type of threat is more important than another. The arrows or relationships, if any, are implied by the arrangement: the central text explains the concept, and the surrounding images are concrete examples of that concept in action.
What the figure teaches is that human security is about protecting individuals from a wide range of threats — not just military attacks, but also poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. It shifts the focus from the security of the state to the security of people in their daily lives. The collage format reinforces the idea that these threats are interconnected and that addressing human security requires looking at all of them together, not just one in isolation.