The security dilemma redux

In traditional international relations - particularly realist theory - the security dilemma was something great powers found themselves trapped by: each power built up forces for security, but every other power saw this and built up their own forces, thereby renewing the dilemma for all. Ultimately, this shows the futility of security based solely on adversarial logic and military force where there is more than one powerful actor.

Much current thinking on security, though, revolves around human security. This concept has taken off in the last decade or two - I think one of the many IR aspects given life by the post-Cold War world - and I think it's creating its own security dilemma.

The concept is contested, but basically revolves around the security of human needs rather than those of the state - things like work, physical safety, economic security, environmental security, food security, etc. Human security came about partly as a response to the fact that states often endangered the security of individuals rather than protecting it - which, ironically, was often done for reasons of 'national security'. This being the case, the concept was first applied in praxis under the rubric of 'responsibility to protect' people in weak / authoritarian states in the developing world.

I think people have applied it to their everyday lives since before it was codified, though - we all have an innate need for our own form of human security. The problem here, and I might not be the first to say this, is how to provide human security for all under the current international architecture. Forgetting Malthus and assuming that there's enough to guarantee everyone a dignified existence, that's only the beginning. We in the developed world have become used to a standard of living involving comparatively huge levels of resource consumption, and we cannot deny that part of that has come from depriving others of those resources in what is a zero-sum game.

Of course, we naturally want to protect our lifestyle from being eroded - this is the innate need for human security. But here's the kicker: in a world with a) such competition for resources, and b) the engineered inequality of their distribution, what we are protecting is deprivation. Deprivation breeds - and in fact incentivises - behaviours like illegal immigration and revisionist (i.e. anti-status quo) violence. These in turn provoke actions related to the symptoms more than the causes, like military action, which reduce human security further and perpetuate the cycle.

Therefore, there is no such thing as security for some - everybody has it or nobody does.

So there you have it: a genuine paradox wherein the ultimate political 'good' is unachievable under the current political system. This is our own security dilemma, and it is one shared by every individual who benefits from this inequality.