Humane Security: Towards Transformative Solidarities in Policy and Practice

The 2022 UNDP Special Report: Human Insecurity in the Anthropocene and the 2023-24 Human Development Report: Breaking the Gridlock – Reimagining Cooperation in a Polarized World point to a global moment of critical multi-crisis. While the ‘Anthropocene’ has been rejected as a geological concept (Witze 2024), it retains its major significance as a critical sociological concept pointing to urgent needs for global system change, integrating vital questions of ecological degradation, human insecurity, technological threats, socio-political polarization, and contested (“post-normal”) science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).

This paper responds to these two reports: the UNDP 2022 Special Report concerning human security in the Anthropocene (hereafter ‘UNDP Special Report’, UNDP 2022), and the 2023-24 Human Development Report 2023-24’s (hereafter HDR 2023-24, UNDP 2024), which calls to urgently ‘break the gridlock’ of multi-crisis. It returns to the concept of human security first proposed in the 1990s, integrating recent conversations on the ‘soul’ of the concept and ‘humane security’ (Khoo 2023).

Following an earlier policy forum contribution (Khoo 2023), this paper considers six integrative suggestions for practical ways to operationalize human security ideas and principles: 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 ethical relationality; v) decentralizing policy and practice; and, vi) adopting an integrative perspective deepening the vital and ‘humane’ interpretations of human security and global cooperation, taking on the Ogata-Sen recommendations for integrated policies that jointly emphasise survival, livelihood and dignity.

The paper argues that these integrative discussions on human and humane security offer a response to the combined Research Committees’ call to converge thinking about economic and environmental crises, inequalities, social transformations, and futures.