Humane Security: Solidarity in Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT This paper responds to the UNDP 2022 Special Report on Human Security in the Anthropocene (hereafter ‘UNDP Special Report’, UNDP 2022), and HDCA Human Security Thematic Group’s sessions at the 2022 HDCA Antwerp conference, focused on interrogating the ‘soul’ of the human security concept. In order to facilitate the practical implementation of human security principles, I offer six integrative suggestions for a convergent view that reinforces human security’s emancipatory critical and transformative potential, substantiating the UNDP Special Report’s demand for greater solidarity: i) recalling the Stockholm Conference’s agenda for global solidarity; ii) drawing on emancipatory legacies of established social movements; iii) applying differentiated measures to address vulnerability; iv) learning from indigenous and local insights on ‘coordination’ that emphasize relationality; v) decentralizing policy and practice; and, vi) An integrative perspective deepening the ‘humane’ interpretation of human security, taking on the Ogata-Sen recommendations for integrated policies, jointly emphasizing survival, livelihood and dignity. Keywords: Human security; Anthropocene; human development; UNDP Special Report 2022; Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment; Ogata-Sen Commission on Human Security.


Introduction
This paper responds to the UNDP 2022 Special Report on Human Security in the Anthropocene (hereafter "UNDP Special Report", UNDP 2022), and HDCA Human Security Thematic Group's sessions at the 2022 HDCA Antwerp conference, focused on interrogating the "soul" of the human security concept. In order to facilitate the practical implementation of human security principles, I offer six integrative suggestions for a convergent view that reinforces human security's emancipatory critical and transformative potential, substantiating the UNDP Special Report's demand for greater solidarity: (i) recalling the Stockholm Conference's agenda for global solidarity; (ii) drawing on emancipatory legacies of established social movements; (iii) applying differentiated measures to address vulnerability; (iv) learning from indigenous and local insights on "coordination" that emphasise relationality; (v) decentralising policy and practice; and (vi) An integrative perspective deepening the "humane" interpretation of human security, taking on the Ogata-Sen recommendations for integrated policies, jointly emphasising survival, livelihood and dignity.
The new discussions of human security "in the Anthropocene" are likely to reopen the "narrow" versus "broad" debate in human security analysis, which seeks to pragmatically delimit the scope of security interventions by applying a "threshold of severity" (Owen 2004). These debates can converge on a greater consensus when emphasising the requirement for all agencies involved to protect "the vital core of all human lives from critical and pervasive environmental, economic, food, health, personal and political threats' (Owen 2004, 383). Human security extends beyond an individualistic focus, noting the importance of ordinary collectivities in securing people's lives against such threats. The principle of solidarity cannot be kept at arm's length (Hudson 2005, 160), since people's safety from chronic threats such as poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation is increasingly recognised as being essentially collective in character.
New debates need to be anchored in previous advances. The Ogata-Sen report for the Commission on Human Security (2003) foregrounds the safeguarding and expansion of people's "vital freedoms', with integrated policies to empower and shield people from acute threats, focusing on three main dimensions: survival, livelihood and dignity. The pursuant UN General Assembly Resolution asserts that the three main pillars of the UN system, namely human rights, development, and peace and security are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. It clarifies that freedom and "dignity" concern everyone's, (but in particular vulnerable people's) entitlements to freedom from fear and want, offering equal opportunity to enjoy all human rights and fully develop their human potential. Human security responses should therefore be "people-centred, comprehensive, context-specific, and prevention-oriented" (UNGA 2012, at 3).
At the high level, the 2012 UNGA Resolution indicates that local policies and practices, and lessons from people's experiences of structural harm and violence should be given greater attention, to avoid reproducing and validating past assaults of fear and want. This points to the need to attend to the intersections of deprivation and vulnerability, which are not only individual in character and remain as indispensable aspects of human development, with special attention needed towards wider risks and potential disruption and destruction (Gasper and Gómez 2014).

Paradoxes of Human Security in the Anthropocene
The novelty of the terms "human security" and "the Anthropocene" may function to mask an over-generalization of "humanity", glossing over the unevenness of the human condition. Thus, "human security" and "the Anthropocene" may lack "humaneness'using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "humane" as a security regime "characterised by sympathy with, and consideration for others; feeling or showing compassion … ; benevolent, kind".
The UNDP Special Report notes the urgent need for a paradigm shift, to secure a common human future amidst multiple planetary crises. However, there is little guarantee that the "soul" of this shift will be humane. Even if these concepts have a humane "soul", we cannot be confident that this "soul" will translate into humane substance, of actually-experienced humane-ness, by those who need it most.
The quest for human security in the Anthropocene seems to simultaneously reflect an opportune moment, "kairos', and "Kafka Time" which is already too late, given the large proportion of humanity already suffering heightened planetary risks and vulnerabilities. "The Anthropocene" context embeds complex, interlinked challenges: rising hunger, climate change, forced displacement, the uncertain effects of digitalization on human life, continuing violent conflict, political fragility, widening inequalities, gender-based violence and dismaying gaps and inequalities in healthcare systems (UNDP 2022, 5-6). As the UNDP Special Report notes, interconnections between planetary environmental impacts and human risks and vulnerabilities were magnified by the global COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the complexity and interrelatedness of human security threats. Many uneven and unjust distributions of human vulnerabilities have surfaced and can be connected to environmental fragilities within and across borders.
The current security paradigm remains distanced from the human rights and development pillars, failing to integrate structural policies needed to secure individuals' and communities' needs and protect their survival, livelihoods and dignity from vulnerabilities, risks and threats. Contradictory climate and humanitarian regimes are tearing the fabric of shared humanity, creating abyssal inhumanity within states, at borders and on the high seas. While cautious steps towards cooperative climate action offer hope for humanity, environmentally destructive extractivist policies and hardening migration and border policing point to a cynical security paradigm of exclusionary and deadly "armed lifeboats' (Mann 2022), rather than the protective ideal of greater solidarity invoked by the Special Report (UNDP 2022).
Human security and the Anthropocene become paradoxical concepts when their aspirations remain at the semantic level, while failing to put people at the centre of the security discourse and policies. Security priorities need to work towards substantively enhancing people's security by addressing their vital needs (UNDP 2022, 3). The latter requires people to be meaningfully involved in processes of arriving at national solutions that are compatible with local realities. The call for greater collaboration and partnership involves governments, international and regional organizations, but also civil society (UNGA 2012, at 3 g). The Anthropocene concept has highlighted the magnitude of human disruptions to planetary processes (ibid.), but it has not been accompanied by clear policies and participatory processes, targeted towards ameliorating the burdens on the most vulnerable, with respect for their dignity, livelihoods, needs, knowledge and experiences. The differentiated responsibilities of parties who most benefit from environmental degradation towards those bearing the greatest burden of consequences should be highlighted as the centrepiece of "greater solidarity". These differentiated responsibilities were clearly articulated in the Rio and Bali principles (Raman 2022) yet tend to remain invisible in human security policies and practices.

Recalling an Emancipatory Moment for Global Solidarity
The 50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference on the Human Environment in 2022 recalled a promising, emancipatory moment for global solidarity. The Stockholm Conference was a key precursor to the 1994 UNDP Human Security report, the acknowledged origin point for the human security concept and subsequent establishment of the Human Security Commission in 2001. The 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference offered an opportunity to recover the confluence of decolonial, feminist and environmental perspectives that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Only One Earth" was Stockholm's powerful slogan, the title of the Commission's report by Barbara Ward and René Dubos (1972). The issues discussed included the war crime of ecocide, fears about chemical pollution's health harms, as well as the global necessity for alternatives to dangerous superpower rivalry. The risk of civilizational-scale annihilation by weapons of mass destruction came to dominate global security discussions throughout the Cold War. Despite this dominating spectre, the Stockholm Conference gave rise to global environmental cooperation to monitor and regulate dangerous pollutants, demonstrating that superpower antagonism was not the sole security option. Scientists and civil society became new actors in the global system, cooperating with willing governments to address scientific ignorance about environmental problems, and developing an international framework for cooperative science and global regulation as practical enactments of solidarity. The abstract UN Charter duty for all governments to cooperate to prevent irreversible harm to the human environment enjoyed a concrete moment of realization, recognising that all life and the wellbeing of present and future generations collectively depend on a common project. This would later, in the 1980s, become known as "sustainable development".
Global solidarity became contested because leaders in both Global South and Global North tended to contrast the differing realities of pollution abatement in rich countries and major deprivations experienced by the majority living in poverty in poor countries. By predicating human safety and wellbeing on the state of the biosphere as a whole, the Stockholm Declaration initiated a common, solidaristic precursor concept of "environmental security" which even the states that neglected to attend the Conference ultimately endorsed. Nevertheless, the differentiated responsibility principle remained contested along the Global North-South divide. Linkages between pollution and poverty were forced to split along this global North/ South division, eliding the differentiated impacts and unequal benefits and harms which in reality separate the wealthy and powerful (whose survival, livelihoods and dignity remain secure, regardless of hemisphere, country, or region) from the poor and powerless.

Securing Survival, Livelihood and Dignity
The Special Report (UNDP 2022, 3) notes that we should revisit the human security concept to understand how the new generation of interacting threats plays out in the Anthropocene context and affects human security. However, policies for the Anthropocene must conserve human security's task of placing people at the centre of the security paradigm. The human security paradigm was part of an overall post-Cold War shift to reconsider key threats that had been ignored or de-emphasised during the Cold War. Shifting the security focus onto the individual brought into view the tension between "all peoples' and "all persons' in the global system. How could cooperative, comprehensive, societal, collective, and international aspects of security to be operationalised, given the shift of focus onto insecurities experienced at these different levels? The new concept of human security broadened the analysis of threats and harms, however agency became more diffuse and potentially gap-ridden and contradictory. Governments have the primary role and responsibility for ensuring the survival, livelihood and dignity of their citizens (UNGA 2012, at 3), but today, they operate in a more crowded policy space of international agreements, NGOs, public opinion, deregulated and financialized markets.
Ideas about "ecological security" and "Anthropocene" crisis return the human security discourse to "broad" definitions of human security and collective concerns. "People-centred security" is an idea more readily aligned with individual and collective human development, not merely territorial security, as noted in the Special Report (UNDP 2022, 34). Ecological issues further extend human security's broad scope and definition to include the nonhuman world on which human development depends, demanding "worldly" accounts of security that are not only human-centred, but oriented towards coexistence, solidarity and care (Ward and Dubos 1972;Lövbrand, Mobjörk, and Söder 2021).
Environmental, decolonial and feminist movements have constructively criticised predominant "liberal" security, development and humanitarian paradigms from a bottom-up, grassroots perspective, seeking just and emancipatory possibilities that speak to concerns for survival, livelihoods and dignity. Feminist and decolonial lenses redefine power in relational terms, "where the survival of one depends on the well-being of the other" (Hudson 2005, 156-7). Indigenous critiques of "crisis epistemology" offer a valuably grounded alternative to overly abstract, top-down constructions of global crisis, carefully countering potentially unjust and inhumane responses to Anthropocene crises with an indigenous epistemology of coordination (Whyte 2020) that protects access to vital resources and livelihoods, with dignity. "Coordination" draws on Indigenous philosophies to emphasise a relational ethics of responsibility and connection, drawing on moral bonds and kin relationships to generate responsible capacities to respond, challenge and change.

Recapturing the Narrative of Development Despite "New Threats'
Fukuda-Parr's, "Recapturing the Narrative of Development" (2012) helpfully flags what human security policies should not leave behind, rescuing the central critical and normative subjects, objectives and narratives of development from overly abstract, technical and depoliticised discussions.
Efforts to recapture the narrative of human development and align it with integrated and humane security are usefully complemented by rich new critical intellectual histories of the UN system, security, humanitarianism and law, which collectively shed light on human security in the context of dynamic and emergent new understandings of global politics, economics and the norms and ethics of security, violence, peace and humanitarianism. Discussion of these works falls outside the scope of this present brief, policy-focused article. Format limitations do not allow for detailed references, but examples include recent critical works by scholars such as Kathryn Sikkink, Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, Nicholas Dirks and Hugo Slim. This new critical-historical scholarship points to the importance of adequately historicised and contextualised ideas, policy and practice. Slim (2022) argues for changes in humanitarian intervention, which put civilians centre-stage because experiences of war today are different from those of the past. Twenty-first century war is largely a problem of civilian displacement and deprivation, causing people to suffer from multi-dimensional poverty including lack of access to food, water, shelter and safety. Slim calls for a rebalancing of scale, reversing the trend towards centralization in humanitarian assistance. More decentralised and localised responses are needed. Leivas-Vargas and others (2022) offer innovative networked community research from Medellìn, Colombia, as a concrete example of localised "coordination" for conflict transformation. Slim (2022) further notes that a singular understanding of "humanity" may not fit all, an observation which reinforces the need to think with the human development and capabilities approach, fitting Slim's call to understand the "more kaleidoscopic and varied reality for each person" (Slim 2022, 182). This is needed to truly see and understand diverse needs for relief and protection, especially less traditionally emphasised needs including mental health, education, climate adaptation, accountability and protection (op cit 183-4).

Conclusion: Six Implications for Solidarity and Humane Security
Today, the multiple and intersecting global crises of the Anthropocene remind us that the liberal paradigm for solidarity and cooperation stands at a critical juncture, four "generations' after the UN Charter was signed and came into force, and half a century since the Stockholm Declaration placed environmental issues at the forefront of international concern. This contribution recalls the Stockholm Conference as a seminal moment linking critical and solidaristic development thinking, responsibility for harmful pollution and normative commitments to improve well-being for all people around the world. The four "generations' do not imply chronological progression, so much as complementary and coexisting rights categoriesnegative liberal rights, positive socio-economic rights, collective rights of solidarity and possibly an existential "zeroth generation" rights of humanity. The Anthropocene moment returns the policy debates around human security to existential questions about the "soul" of human security, asking what or who is to be secured in the context of a new generation of interconnected and planetary threats menacing humanity as a whole.
Historical insights and local innovations enrich our reassessment of human security as both concept and policy, shedding light on factors obstructing a fuller paradigm shift towards a more humane and inclusive shared world. Holding on to both objectives of protection (freedom from fear) and empowerment (freedom from want), human security shifts the focus from a security problem of states to a survival problem of people (Hudson 2005, 163), envisioning beyond bare survival to broader livelihoods and dignity (Ogata and Sen 2003).
The UNDP Special Report's call for solidarity requires a contextualised appreciation of global solidarity's many historical travails. In the current situation of intensified statism and cynical neorealism, human security must recapture the solidarity narrative of common responsibilities for planetary wellbeing, requiring differentiated responsibilities towards the more vulnerable and disadvantaged. States must work together with diverse partners to restore the soul of human security as a humane theory, policy and practice at different levels. International, regional and local initiatives already exist to be built upon, for example the African Human Security Initiative (Hudson 2005, 165, 167). Women-centred perspectives and Indigenous "epistemologies of coordination" (Whyte 2020) provide templates for solidarity, incorporating the "local turn" (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013), including local forms of networked human security from below (Leivas Vargas, Aristizábal, and Zuluaga García 2022). Contextualised local perspectives can help policymakers to identify hierarchies and exclusions and pursue "bottom-up" ways to redefine and secure human capabilities to live in freedom from fear and want, as the Special Report hopes for.
Three quarters of a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), half a century after the Stockholm Declaration on the human environment, and three decades after the Vienna Declaration recalling indivisible and interdependent rights, human security finds itself in a new "posthuman" context, wherein the subject of rights is re-shaped by a deep questioning of the "human" as the subject of rights universalism, development and security. The Anthropocene crisis should be a provocation for recapturing an inclusive and equitable, not exclusionary narrative of development. For human security to form the basis for humane policies in the Anthropocene, policies and practices that exemplify the human-environmental solidarity principle of common but differentiated responsibilities should be foremost. The fundamental objective of solidaristic humane security merits deep consideration, in the face of post-human predicaments and the conative poverty of Anthropocene crisis discourse.
What can policymakers and practitioners bear in mind, to enable human security to retain its timeliness and critical and transformative potential, and prevent it from becoming trapped in too-late Kafka time? The UNDP Special Report's message, "demanding greater solidarity" can be reinforced by resisting the temptation to treat human insecurity amidst the Anthropocene as an entirely novel emergency without precedents.
To conclude, six policy messages may be considered for human security in the Anthropocene. Firstly, human security policies and practice should recall the solidaristic legacies of the Stockholm Conference on the human environment, fifty years on. Secondly, human security thinking should not forget the critical and emancipatory legacies of earlier feminist, decolonial, indigenous and environmental movements, which have continuously struggled to respond to different facets of human insecurity from earlier moments in time until the present. Thirdly, the principle of solidarity requires differentiated measures. Fourthly, the differentiation principle can draw from Indigenous and localised critiques and proposals for "coordination", involving multilevel and networked approaches grounded in concrete, localised experiences of vulnerability and insecurity. Greater attention should be given to locally and relationally coordinated action which mobilises solidaristic and ethical relationships of responsibility and connection for collective survival, livelihoods and dignity, foregrounding prevention of, and not deepening existing unjust patterns of risk and harm. Fifthly, critical challenges to unrepresentative generalizations about "humanity" need to be taken seriously. Critical and adequately contextualised perspectives are needed to support more decentralised, better informed and localised ways of thinking and working. Finally, sixthly, and most appropriately for this journal, the human development and capabilities approach fits a need for "humane" meaning broader, more diversified and pluralistic approaches to human security. Far from being vague or abstract, these can be grounded in locally contextualised, concrete human needs for freedom from fear and want. Recalling the triple commitment to human rights, development, and peace and security, these six suggestions recapture the human development narrative, restoring hope that human security can offer a more humane prospect for human survival, livelihoods and dignity.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Su-ming Khoo is Senior Lecturer and Head of Sociology in the School of Political Science and Sociology and Socioeconomic Impact Research Cluster leader in the Ryan Institute at the University of Galway, Ireland and Visiting Professor at CriSHET, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Su-ming researches and teaches on human development, human rights, public goods, development alternatives, decoloniality, global activism, development education and higher education. She is co-editor of four books with Helen Kara: Researching in the Age of COVID-19, Volumes I, II and III (Policy Press, 2020) and Qualitative and Digital Research in Times of Crisis (Bristol University Press, 2021) https://www.nuigalway.ie/our-research/people/political-science-and-sociology/ sumingkhoo/ ORCID Su-ming Khoo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8346-3913