Non-traditional security and new threats

Non-traditional security asks a different question: 'Security for whom?' Not just for the state, but for individuals, communities and humankind as a whole.

Why? Because states can themselves be a danger to their people. In the last hundred years, more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies.

Human security puts people first. There are two versions:

• Narrow: protection from violence, from wars, genocide and terrorism.
• Broad: also protection from hunger, disease and disasters, that is, 'freedom from want' as well as freedom from fear.

Global security (an idea from the 1990s): some threats are so big and so cross-border that no country can solve them alone: global warming, international terrorism, and epidemics like HIV-AIDS, bird flu or COVID-19.

New sources of threats:

• Terrorism: violence aimed at civilians to force political change.
• Human rights abuses, by governments or armed groups.
• Global poverty: most of the world's poorest people live in a few regions; sub-Saharan Africa is both the poorest region and the one with the most armed conflicts.
• Migration: refugees flee war or persecution across a border, and countries are expected to accept them; economic migrants come by choice, and countries are not obliged to admit them. Internally displaced people flee their homes but stay inside their country, like the Kashmiri Pandits who left the Valley.
• Epidemics, which spread through travel and trade.

A threat counts as a security threat only if it endangers the very existence of whatever is being protected. That depends on the place: rising seas threaten the Maldives' existence; HIV-AIDS threatened Botswana's population; genocide destroyed lives in Rwanda.