Human Security as Statecraft: Structural Conditions, Articulations and Unintended Consequences

This book critically investigates the discourses and practices of human security and aims to delve below the stereotypical imageries representing them.

Drawing on Foucault and Deleuze, the author approaches human security from a new perspective, with the aim of ascertaining what has been behind and underneath a certain spatio-temporal articulation of human security, and with what political implications and consequences. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. This book examines the Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrains have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of these versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the book is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country’s advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan’s bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences.

This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, human security, global governance, foreign policy and IR/Security studies.

Nikola Hynek is Research Leader of the Centre for International Security at the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague, and Lecturer at Charles University in Prague.