INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY AND PRAXIS
ASSIGNMENT II

1. Introduction
The end of the Cold War opened the doors for a new era in the international relations history, the era of globalization. New actors, new events, new issues being securitized and new approaches of international relations, particularly of International Security Studies came out in this period. With this set of new affairs, the concepts of Human Security and Human Rights gained relevance in the international security and international norms field. And because those terms are still contested among both the academics and the States’ decision-makers, there is a need for us to understand what they really mean.

The purpose of the present essay is to bring forward the differences between Human Security and Human Rights, regarding the fact that they are very similar and complementary, and also to understand the implications that the emphasis in the concept of Human Security have for the States foreign policy and for the international order and justice. The essay is composed by an introduction, a main body where we develop the answers for the research questions, a conclusion and finally the references.

2. The Prominence of the Concept Human Rights in International Relations 3.1. Human Security different from Human Rights?
Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, due the debate raised because of the Holocaust, the WWII and many others factors, it is known that Human Rights gained more emphasis in the post-Cold War period, when the emergence of new wars (no longer conflicts between nation-states, but intra-state conflicts opposing individuals or communities inside the State mainly characterized by ethnic causes or political identity issues) started to threat the fundamental rights of the individual, such as the right to live. And the prominence of Human Rights, as well as the new wars, after the cold war are some of the reasons for the appearance of the Human Security concept in academic studies on Security, later in the 1970s and 1980s (Baylis and Smith: 2010).

Therefore, as we can see, Human Rights and Human Security are very connected not only because both concepts are a product of the crescent globalization and democratization, but also because they are interdependent and complementary in the sense that, accordingly to Baylis and Smith (2010), Human Security challenges the state-centric notion of security, focusing on the individual as the main referent object of analysis, which means that Human Security is about security of individuals rather than security of States or governments, and there from, for a individual to be safe or secure it requires the assurance of Human Rights. So in some sense, as Buzan (1983) – cited in Ramcharan (2002) – argues, Human Rights norms define the meaning of individual security and the only way to achieve human security is upholding Human Rights; since security means to be safe or secure of any kind of threat, there is no way an individual can be safe if his fundamental Human Rights are threatened.

Regardless the fact that Human Security and Human Rights are this connected as they are, we can still point out some differences between them. Accordingly to UDHR (1948) Human Rights refers to the rights inherent to all human beings regardless of race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion or other status. The concept also includes the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and among many others. Human Rights address a persistent question of human existence, the relationship of person(s) to state and society; it is a legal category with universal validity and application.

On the other hand, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defined Human Security as both "safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression" and “protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life" (UNDP, 1994: 23), quoted in Hassmann (2011). It represents both a vertical and horizontal expansion which deeps and wide the traditional notion of national security, focusing on the individual/people as the referent object of security and including several areas of the individuals’ well-being as Food, Health, Economic, Environmental, Personal, Political and Community Security (Baylis and Smith: 2010).

In few words, the main difference between these concepts is focused in the fact that Human Rights are based in a legal statement, validated in the UDHR, in the regional regimes of human rights and also in the States’ constitution, which regulates the relationship between the governments and their citizens within the state’s borders. Furthermore, the responsibility to provide and ensure the satisfaction of Human Rights to the individuals is from the State or Government, States have the legitimacy and control over its society within its territory.

Whereas Human Security is a matter of moral obligation, in which the responsibility to assure security to individuals is from the international community in the exercise of the moral and ethics, besides that it is more universal and global, in contrast to Human Rights, it is applicable to all individuals whether they are citizens or non-citizens, whether they are migrants, refugees or displaced person(s), whether the society is from the North or the South. As Ramcharan (2002) advocates, the essence of human security is to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms that have been distilled and articulated by the international community.

3.2. Implications of the prominence of the concept of human security for the foreign policy of states and understandings of international order and justice
Human Security is relatively a new concept, based on the liberal approach which seeks to contrast the realist notion of security that gives emphasis to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of States from external military threats. So, basically, Human Security attempts to redefine and broader the meaning of security by changing the referent object from the State to the individual and also expanding the Human Rights agenda.

Said that, we found that Human Security seeks not only to expand the concept of Human Rights, but furthermore, it seeks to change the focus on the role and responsibility of the State in providing security for the individuals by including the international community’s responsibility. In other words, it is an attempt to bring forward multilateral mechanisms and efforts in order to assure the security of the individual and, consequently, assure international security.
Hence to a greater extent, the implications of the prominence of the concept of Human Security for the international order and justice are the regularization and legitimization of the International Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). At some point this concept is used as an argument for the powerful states to intervene in others states to achieve a certain interest by abusing the principle of non-interference in the internal problems of a sovereign State, when the States cannot protect their own citizens, just like what happened in Libya (2011) where the US and its allies intervened militarily, blessed by the UN on the basis that the government of Muahmar Ghadaffi was violating the fundamental rights of its citizens and therefore was not able to guarantee their safety. So the international community, in this case, had the responsibility to protect this individuals against the violations and, precisely, to reestablish the national order and thus, the international order and justice which had been jeopardized. Still, the implication of the prominence of the concept for the States’ foreign policy is the inclusion of the component of Human Security in the process of formulation of states’ foreign policy agenda. So States now have this moral obligation to protect the individuals, in case of any threat to their security, whether being its citizens or not. Case in point the Ebola virus that is desolating particularly the West African countries but, even though it is still in those countries only, it became a concern of the international community which is joining efforts in order to control the situation, based on the cosmopolitan argument (both moral and institutional) that all individuals are equal and we are all living in a interdependent and globalized society, so the States have this duty to protect the individual security in order to promote international security.

3. Conclusion
Got to this point, we found that Human Rights are, after all, a component of Human Security. In other words, Human Security is an attempt to extent the concept of Human Rights and, both concepts are a product of the liberal approach of international relations and security trying to contrast the traditional view that focuses on the State as the main actor of international relations. The prominence of these concepts demonstrates that the struggle between realists and liberals about which one explains better the international system still continues, because Human Security is only a concept created by the academics from the liberal grounds to counterbalance the concept of National Security brought by the realists. 4. References * Baylis, John and Smith, Steve (2001), The Globalization of World Politics, New York. * Hassmann, Howard (2001), Human Security: Undermining Human Rights?, Wilfrid Laurier in http://www.operationspaix.net/DATA/DOCUMENT/4350~v~Human_Security__Undermining_Human_Rights_.pdf * Ramcharan, Bertrad (2002), Human Rights and Human Security in http://www.unocha.org/humansecurity/chs/activities/outreach/ramcharan.pdf * http://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/documents/udhr_translations/eng.pdf

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[ 2 ]. B. Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations. Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press. 1983
[ 3 ]. http://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/documents/udhr_translations/eng.pdf
[ 4 ]. United Nations Development Programme (1994), Human Development Report 1994, New York, Oxford University Press.