“…to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfillment. Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms – freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means using processes that build on people’s strengths and aspirations. It means creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity.”
UN Commission on Human Security, 2003
Security and defense are essential to ensure the attainment of national interests, and one of these is precisely the protection of all citizens and the resources found in the territory of a country. In this regard, States should articulate concepts and security policies with the multidimensional security notion, which arises as a vision in which holistic development and peace on rights and freedoms of the human being basis are the focus of public action. To fulfill this purpose, it’s necessary that States have the tools that allow them to safeguard the territorial integrity, effectively exercise sovereignty, and promoting sustainable development.
One cross cutting aspects of these policies should be the granularity, understood as the detailed kknowledge of specific local conditions. This approach allows formulating policies taking into coinsideration the culture, social processes and natural resources of each area, ensuring a high level of precision and therefore better results. In addition, knowing in detail the dynamics of target areas will make possible an early identification and monitoring of potential threats, risks and trends that go against national interests.
However, in practice, many governments think of security and defense as aspects that are above all, and forget that those are the means, and not the purpose. In this sense, they formulate policies to protect the territory, borders, cyberspace, and citizens, but often forget that is people who must be at the center, and that security is only a means to ensure that their rights and freedoms are exercised, as contrary as often happens, a means to limit them.
Therefore, it’s essential that civil society and international organizations promote human security as the root concept for all security policies, because the fight is not against threats but to achieve opportunities and spaces that allow us to fully develop our potential as a human beings.
Finally, we must emphasize that security and defense are tools to achieve development, but the focus of these is the human being and the social, territorial, cultural, political and economic dynamics happening around the people . For this reason, this post has focused on the individual as the source, participant and recipient of the security policies. In this sense, humanize this growing sector remains the big bet for the present and future.