Human security refers in its broadest sense to the protection of individuals from harm. Human Security: Theory and Action explores the theory and application of concepts central to this notion of security. It examines the conceptual roots of human security, connecting its origins to its applications and challenges in war and peacetime. With a unique focus on the evolving notion of responsibility for security, the text introduces the critical questions and priorities that underpin policies and actions. The text is organized around four sections. The introduction offers an overview of human security and its basic tenets and historical foundations. The second section focuses on human security in armed conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, discussing such issues as the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, racial inequality, peacekeeping and peace negotiation processes, and humanitarian assistance. The third section identifies the long-term issues that are necessary for a durable human security, including human rights, food security, poverty, gender equality, health security, and environmental sustainability. The final section applies the concepts introduced in the book to twenty-first century concerns and offers insights on turning theory into action. Integrated into the text are many case studies to broaden the student's awareness beyond the conflicts and issues that dominate the media. By balancing theoretical explanations with concrete illustrative cases, both historical and contemporary, the text provides intellectually challenging and intrinsically interesting material and offers a unique, comprehensive introduction human security in war and peace. The second edition of Human Security: Theory and Action examines the conceptual roots of human security, connecting its origins to its application in a time of conflict, inequality, environmental stress, and the aftermath of a global pandemic.

The Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) enjoy some of the happiest populations and highest standards of living in the world, thanks in part to stable, democratic systems of government. Here, David Delfs Erbo Andersen presents a syncretic history of political and socioeconomic developments in the three Scandinavian countries since the early modern period, and contrasts their peaceful transitions with the more dramatic histories of otherwise similar European countries, like France and Germany. Unlike these and many other countries—the United States among them—Scandinavia’s transition to democracy from monarchy was not marked by major violent upheavals or extreme political antagonism. Rather, Scandinavia’s peaceful process of democratization owed itself to the development of a penetrative bureaucracy in the early modern period and the activism of cooperative associations, first of farmers in the early nineteenth century and then of industrialized workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thanks to the gradual, relatively consensual adoption of political reforms and social norms, the history of ”Nordic democratic exceptionalism” today helps account for the ongoing stability of the Scandinavian countries.

The new world order as it stood after the apparent end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR was greeted with enthusiasm and optimism almost everywhere, but especially in the West. Less than a quarter century later that optimism has faded dramatically, with the rise of populism, nationalism, religious extremism and civil discord disrupting political and social norms around the world. This book reveals the extent to which events that began as internal political crises in Europe, the Middle East and the USA have sent ripple effects reaching into all points of the globe. The projection of liberal democratic predominance in the 1990s, has faded as illiberal governance gains support worldwide. Long-standing international trade patterns are disrupted, perhaps permanently, by the weaponization of economic sanctions, real and perceived threats of terrorism raise levels of anxiety everywhere, and severe new weather patterns inflict floods, fires, drought and hurricanes on populations unused to such extremes. This book describes and analyses many of these phenomena in the hope that better understanding of them may help ameliorate their consequences.