URN:NBN:f:tsv-oa76029 DOI: 10.11143/fennia.76029 Refections Envisioning human security – commentary to Gill JOHN MORRISSEY Morrissey, J. (2018) Envisioning human security – commentary to Gill. Fennia 196(2) 225–229. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76029 Prompted by Nick Gill’s review essay, ‘The suppression of welcome’, this commentary additionally refects on attendant questions of security and responsibility in seeking to conceptualize a more human-centred vision of populations and population management in our current moment of refugee crisis in Europe. It charts how we might productively conceptualize and enact a ‘human security’ vision of population management, how such a vision requires us to think diferently and cooperatively about security, and ultimately how this compels us to supplant a prevailing narrative of external threat and risk with a story of shared precarity, human empathy and collective responsibility. Keywords: European refugee crisis, human security, responsibility John Morrissey, School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway H91 CF50, Ireland. E-mail: john. morrissey@nuigalway.ie Introduction Nick Gill’s (2018) essay, ‘The suppression of welcome’, correctly calls out the impoverished logics and bureaucratic architectures of traditional statist security concerns. His piece is also abounding in hope and belief in the spirit of human empathy for the most marginalized in our societies. In sharing that hope, I want to take up a salient question he poses: “[t]o what extent can welcomers and welcoming initiatives be supported by international cooperation, global organisational and communication systems, and resource-gathering mechanisms?” (Gill 2018, 88). It is a key question, primarily because it signals the importance of transnational cooperation in dealing with a crisis that is transnational in scale. But within any transnational organisational framework lie states, and when we shift our focus from the ‘state’ to the ‘transnational’, we tend to invoke the import of global institutions in a way that frequently lets the state of the hook. We often fail subsequently in theorizing the efective implementation of cooperation, and in insisting upon the responsibilities to do so. In responding to Nick’s piece, I am wondering about a certain reluctance to call for the state and its various administrative structures and legal armatures to support and enact ‘welcome’. An ongoing sustained critique of (neo)liberal state interventionary urges is important, for sure, but I think there may be more to be said in terms of state responsibilities, and the responsibilities of transnational, collective-state organisations such as the European Union (EU), towards human security and the protection of human rights for refugees and asylum seekers. To this end, I want to refect here on how we might productively conceptualize a ‘human security’ vision of population management in a transnational context, which behoves us to think diferently and cooperatively about ‘security’, and, crucially, to vigorously contest how its parameters are discursively defned and framed. © 2018 by the author. This open access article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.