Human security, human development and migration
Photo: Somalia (Jacob van Garderen)
Building on earlier and ongoing collaborative work,[1] this first line of research focuses on notions of human security and human development as concepts that challenge traditional notions of security and development.
Human development and human security frameworks
The new concepts have emerged from attempts to give practical meaning to socioeconomic and cultural rights and provide a normative framework for evaluating development outcomes, both within national territories and internationally.
The human development framework tends to focus on reconceiving and redirecting development within a national territory, whereas the human security framework deals with the security of persons and communities in a wider variety of situations, such as vulnerabilities resulting from migration, political persecution and environmental degradation.
The human security and human development concepts broaden the scope of investigation by going beyond conventional sources of insecurity, such as violence and war, and traditional measurements of development, such as monetary income levels.
The concept of human development draws on the important work of Amartya Sen and focuses on the broad range of circumstances, including education levels, health and distribution of resources, that impact on persons’ capabilities and range of choices and options in life.
Human security encompasses freedom from want and indignity next to freedom from fear, and pays attention to non-conventional sources of insecurity, such as environmental degradation, food scarcity, population displacement and institutionalized forms of gender violence.
Both seek to focus thinking about prioritisation within sectors (as in the MDGs programme) and between sectors. Human security thinking in particular contributes to thinking beyond now partly obsolete framings of issues in terms of supposedly largely self-contained (for both explanation and evaluation) national boxes. It looks at diverse, situation-specific, interacting threats and how they affect the lives of ordinary people, especially the most vulnerable.
International migration
This first line of research analyses aspects of human security and human development in various dimensions. In particular, a major transnational force is international migration, which affects the lives of people in both countries of origin and host countries.
Migration is fuelled by human insecurity and underdevelopment, and policies aimed at dealing with migration flows are a major determinant of social justice in the field of human mobility flows as one important dimension of contemporary globalization.
The ongoing research project on ‘Migration, Gender and Social Justice’, which is funded by the Canada-based International Development Research Council (IDRC), is being coordinated by Thanh-Dam Truong. The project started in 2010 and runs to the end of 2012. The project’s main objective is to coordinate and synthesize work on the feminization of migration, in partnership with a group of universities and research institutes, mainly from the global South.
GGSJ researchers and contact
Researchers working on normative and theoretical dimensions of human security/development are:
Des Gasper, Helen Hintjens, Karim Knio and Thanh-Dam Truong.
Staff involved in research on migration include:
Sylvia Bergh, Des Gasper, Jeff Handmaker, Helen Hintjens, Roy Huijsmans, Rosalba Icaza, Karin Astrid Siegmann and Thanh-Dam Truong.
PhD students working in this area are:
Stefania Donzelli, Kenji Kimura, Atsushi Sano, Fulgencio Lucas Seda and Shamsudeen Ziblim.
For more information contact Des Gasper
