Conceptual Evolution and Fundamental Challenges in Transition from Cold War Security Discourse and Emergence of Human Security Discourse in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

It is widely accepted that human security is one of the latest, most critical topics in the political science literature and international relations. This concept proposes that the origin or goal of security provision must be human beings. In fact, human security has the concept of 'the human' embedded at the heart of it.With a more extensive interpretation, human security has extended the scope of security and has assessed social and economic issues within this framework. Understanding human security requires the comprehension of its conceptual evolution process. As such, the main issue covered in the current study was understanding the nature of conceptual evolutions of human security in two periods before and after the Cold War. To realize this issue, we evaluated some of the most important international efforts and documents related to the concept and derived the significant factors and subcategories in two periods. Despite following the evolutionary process of human security and becoming one of the most important security discourses, this concept still deals with serious challenges in conceptual and functional areas. Therefore, the second and main question of the present study was: what is the nature of key challenges of human security discourse at national and international levels? To answer this question, we used the exploratory approach and a descriptive-analytical method to explain the most important challenges facing human security in conceptual and functional dimensions.