Human Security – Conflict, Critique and Consensus: Colloquium Remarks and a
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of the colloquium in this issue of Security Dialogue was to both summarize and advance the rich but scattered literature on human security. The result is a microcosm of the ten-year academic debate, told through the condensed perspectives of many of the people who shaped it. This article first summarizes the 21 thoughtful and innovative commentaries, and identifies three principle themes: the theoretical broad-versus-narrow debate, human security’s practi-cal utility, and the fundamental critique and defense of the concept. Then, it is proposed that a threshold-based conceptualization, one rooted in the original UNDP definition, offers a conciliatory way forward to what is often characterized as a fractured debate. It is suggested that limiting threat inclusion by severity, rather than by cause, bridges the divide between the broad and narrow proponents, addresses the many critiques of the concept, and provides a clear policy agenda operating on various scales. Keywords critical security studies • development studies • humanitarian intervention • human security WHEN ASKED CRITICALLY about the level of uncertainty, debate,conjecture, and outright skepticism regarding the concept ofhuman security, former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy responded assertively: ‘The world had no idea what sovereignty and the security infrastructure would look like immediately following the signing of the treaty of Westphalia. Norms evolved through decades of debate, thought, action, conflict and compromise’(Axworthy, 2001b). This is worth considering as we address the state and future of the concept of human security – knee-jerk dismissals are clearly premature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.090 | 0.183 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.038 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".