Human Security, Mutual Vulnerability, and Sustainable Development: a Critical View
Human Security, Mutual Vulnerability, and Sustainable Development: A Critical View by Jorge Nef This essay is an attempt to provide a historical and structural frame of reference for the study of human security, from a distinctively “foreign” standpoint.1 More specifically, the essay explores its various meanings, intellectual roots, and antecedents, as well as, the debates and controversies about its significance and its implications for the conduct of global politics and foreign policy. In addition, and more substantively, the aim of the paper is to advance some tentative observations regarding the interface among peace, human rights, and sustainable development in a post–Cold War context. The main thesis in this analysis is that growing interdependence, a main consequence of integration and globalization, creates mutual vulnerability for all nations, groups, and individuals. With the end of World War II, military security and economic development became the parameters of what was then construed as a rigid bipolar world system. The end of the Cold War spearheaded a tendency to celebrate unipolarity and the “end of history”2 as the inevitable result of globalization and the work of market forces. However, this neofunctional utopia came to an abrupt end with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In its stead, an all-encompassing and already evolving mutation of the national security doctrine reemerged, centered not on deterrence but on preemption. Its prime manifestation has been the War on Terror. As with the Cold War, but without the constraint of mutual deterrence, security is perceived once again as an endless zero-sum game.3 In this new context, the once unthinkable, yet omnipresent, negative-score game, has become a distinct probability.
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