1 The United Nations and Human Security: Between Solidarism and Pluralism Edward Newman In: Mary Martin and Taylor Owen, eds, Routledge Handbook of Human Security, London: Routledge 2013. Human security appears to be at the heart of much of the UN’s work. The organization’s Charter, its humanitarian programmes and agencies, and the normative ideas it promotes all appear to point towards a people-centred worldview, and the modern human security movement owes much to a UN report which popularized the concept in 1994. However, there is a paradox in the UN’s association with human security, and this has implications for the operationalization of human security more broadly. Human security, taken to its logical conclusion, holds ‘critical’ implications for the way politics and economics are organized: it challenges the values and institutions which currently exist as they relate to human welfare, and it questions the interests that are served by these values and institutions. Above all, human security is solidarist in a cosmopolitan sense: it implies moral obligations towards humans across borders, and that free and secure individuals are the foundation of peace and security between and within states. 1 Yet, in reality, the UN is in many ways inherently quite conservative. Instead of taking a ‘critical’ approach to human security, it attempts to promote human security within the existing political, legal and normative constraints of the ‘real world’. It promotes and protects state sovereignty in a conventional Westphalian way. In addition, instead of being truly solidarist, the UN – at least at the level of states – embraces a pluralist view of international politics and humanity. That is, it promotes the idea that order in international society is based upon cooperation and rules amongst independent sovereign states, and norms including non-interference. According to this, there is no consensus on issues of justice and rights, and – except in extreme circumstances – differences amongst states must be tolerated. There are certainly interesting developments in the 21 st Century which suggest that the UN, as a collectivity and as an actor, is moving closer to a meaningful role as a promoter and agent of human security – such as the human protection agenda, and the broadening definition of security that is being embraced throughout the organization – even though this is not necessarily expressed in the language of ‘human security’. However, the commitment of the UN to human security seems to be limited in fundamental ways as a result of its nature and structure. Can these tensions be reconciled? Are policy- oriented human security initiatives inevitably undermined by their co-option into statist agendas? Is the radical, emancipatory promise of the concept of human security blunted when it is exposed to policy, or can policy-oriented human security initiatives have a positive impact from within? Human Security In its broadest sense, human security seeks to place the individual as the referent object of security, rather than – although not necessarily in opposition to – constructions such as state sovereignty and ‘national security’. In broad terms human security is ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’: positive and negative freedoms and rights as they relate to fundamental individual needs. 2 Human security is normative; it argues that there is an ethical responsibility to re-orient security around the individual, and much human security scholarship is therefore explicitly or implicitly underpinned by a solidarist or cosmopolitan commitment. Some human security scholarship also seeks to present explanatory arguments concerning the nature of security, deprivation and conflict. In addition, many scholars and practitioners working on human security emphasise the policy orientation of this approach; they believe that the concept of human security can and should result in policy changes which improve the welfare of people. Growing interest in human security since the early 1990s can be seen within a particular historical and social context which saw challenges to the narrow, state-centric, militarised national security paradigm which had dominated academic and policy thinking for decades. This background is well documented elsewhere and need not be examined closely here. 3 There is no uncontested definition of, or approach to, human security; very few supporters of the concept would describe it as a ‘paradigm’ (although it has been described as such). 4 Like most non-traditional security approaches, human security – as a starting point – challenges orthodox neorealist conceptions of international security. Scholars of human security argue that for many people in the world – perhaps even most – the greatest threats to ‘security’ come