Reintroducing The Human Security

About the Book

South Asia, with its immense human security deficit, compounded by inter-state tensions and the consequent diversion of human and financial resources from people’s needs to states’ preferences, urgently requires a change in mindset. When the peoples of the region obtained independence from colonial domination, human security was the overarching norm. The great hope was that freedom would bring them broad-based security and opportunities for self-development. Some six decades later, those hopes remain unrealized to a large degree. While large numbers of people remain mired in poverty and insecurity, the political orientation of elites has slid into an overwhelming preoccupation with state security. This volume is an attempt to redress the balance. Its thrust is to bring human security back to centre stage and to highlight the problems and needs of the people of the subcontinent.

This book is the latest in a series of the work undertaken by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) on alternative approaches to security, and second on the subject of human security.

About the Author

Mallika Joseph is presently Assistant Director at IPCS. She has just completed her doctoral thesis on Interpol within the context of emerging threats to international security. She works on security sector reforms and has worked with the DFID on a study on Security Sector Reforms in Asia. In 2006, she was part of the DFID high level technical team that offered consultancy for broad based SSR engagement in Guyana. She has co-authored three books.

Rajesh M. Basrur was a Shastri Fellow at Simon Fraser University in Canada in 1994, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995-1996. He is Director, Centre for Global Studies, Mumbai. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.