Critical human (in)security: meanings, measurements, and multi-dimensionality

The concept of human security has a diversity of meanings, and the original term was located within International Relations and its sub-discipline, Security Studies. Broader interpretations of human security emerged in the 1990s, which recognised a wider range of risks and threats facing people, particularly in the context of globalisation and the negative impacts of the Washington Consensus (Lopes, Reference Lopes2012) and the spread of Human Rights norms. International organisations and development studies took the lead in integrating the human security framework into their programmes, policies, and research with a much greater recognition of security as ‘human’ as people-centred rather a militaristic focus on territorial integrity (Newman, Reference Newman2021). The institutional, legal and operational foundation for this broader interpretation of human security was initially established by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it was ultimately reinforced by the International Bill of Human Rights (1976) ^{Footnote 1} . But the idea was most clearly articulated as a distinct approach by Mahbub ul Haq’s 1994 Human Development Report. The Report defined human security as including ‘safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily lives, whether in homes, jobs or communities’ (UNDP, 1994:23). This expanded concept of human security was constructed as a partner, rather than a component, of human development, with a clear distinction between the security of states and the security of persons, with a focus not just on physical safety of individuals but their ability to secure and hold basic goods. This approach became even more firmly established with the establishing of the UN Trust Fund for Human Security in 1999, and the Human Security Unit in 2004 with the overall objective:

The ideational underpinning of human security has also been strongly influenced by Sen’s theory of capability and functionings. Sen argues that human freedom depends on capabilities and functioning that individuals can have to be and do things they value and the choices they are able to make (Sen Reference Sen, Nussbaum and Sen1993). From the point of view of capabilities, freedom is not only about the absence of external interference and formal freedom to do something but also the substantial opportunities to achieve it. Sen (Reference Sen, Nussbaum and Sen1993) further argued for development as freedom in contrast to development as GDP growth or modernisation. This perspective shifts the focus of efforts for development from economic development at the national level to human development at individual level with an emphasis on capabilities and functioning rather than simply on growth as an indicator or progress and well-being.

Whilst there has been a flurry of activity around the concept and its adoption by regional organisations such as the EU and ASEAN, and country governments around the world, it is not without its critics. Duffield (Reference Duffield and Klingebiel2006) perceives human security as a ‘technology of international governance’. He raises the question of whether this concept ‘heralds a new vision of human security’ (Duffield, Reference Duffield and Klingebiel2006:33). In some quarters it is its breadth, ambiguity and lack of precision that renders the concept redundant (Paris, Reference Paris2001; Martin and Taylor, Reference Martin and Taylor2010), in others it is its inability to capture gendered contexts that undermines the idea (Newman, Reference Newman2010). For Booth (Reference Booth2007:327) the policy orientation of human security and its adoption by some governments has made critical security scholars suspicious of human security as a hegemonic discourse that has been appropriated by the ‘cold monster of the sovereign state’. Krause (Reference Krause, Brzoska and Croll2004:44) considers the broad vision of human security as ‘ultimately nothing more than a shopping list; it involves slapping the label of human security on a wide range of issues that have no necessary link, and at a certain point, human security becomes a loose synonym for “bad things that can happen”’.

Whilst critiques have cautioned about the lack of definitive boundaries to the concept or have suggested it is simply a renaming of other problems as human security concerns (see Jolly and Ray, Reference Jolly and Ray2006) this approach promotes the recognition ‘of the interrelated causes of threats and the need for interrelated actions either to prevent them from arising or to control them when they do’ (Jolly and Ray, Reference Jolly and Ray2006:9).

The foundational human security framework as proposed by the UNDP and outlined in Table 1 is composed of a range of critical and integrated dimensions of life including economic security, food security, health security, environmental and community security, and personal and political freedom, parameters which both overlap and extend core social policy concerns around inequality, social protection and risk mitigation, and redistribution. Table 1 draws together these different dimensions and includes objective indicators as means of measuring and identifying potential sources of security and insecurity.

Table 1. Foundational human security parameters and indicators

Source: Based on the 1994 UNDP Human development report, New dimensions of human security and United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (2016).

Economic security refers to standard of living and is connected to employment status, income/earnings, state support (in work and out of work), private provision, assets and savings, household debt, education and skills, and access to and availability of public services. Food security refers to physical and economic access to food in terms of availability and affordability and state support to facilitate this (Werthes et al., Reference Werthes, Heaven and Vollnhalls2011). Health security is concerned with access to and availability of health provision, ability to pay, access to clean water, housing quality and density, and sanitation facilities. Environmental security focuses on vulnerability to hazards, disaster, environmental change, and pollution, and it calls into focus infrastructure and living environment, housing rubbish disposal, and sanitation. The combined and interlinked dimensions of community, personal, and political security refers to threats of community and personal violence, and political violence, community segregation, and conflict as well as social capital, surveillance, civil rights, right to vote and civic participation, and crime rates. Threats may come from institutions of the state, from other groups (ethnic and religious conflict), or from individuals in the form of street crime, sexual assault and rape, and domestic violence.

Figure 1. An integrated framework for understanding state capacity for critical human security.

Source: Authors own

There has been a tendency to explore these dimensions as distinct and separate policy arenas in social and public policy, so the human security framework has the potential to draw together and integrate intellectual traditions and substantive knowledge across disciplines and policy areas. In addition, we argue that integrating state capacity and an intersectoral lens within the human security analytical framework as demonstrated in Figure 1, can draw out overlapping systems of discrimination and privilege, particularly around gender, class, status, age, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation, which can have a profound impact on human security and perceptions and experiences of risk, insecurity, and protection.

Methodology for meaning-making and analysis

This paper is concerned with developing and integrating the concepts of critical human security and state capacity as an approach for better understanding and addressing policy challenges in a post-pandemic world with a particular focus on East Asia and Europe. It draws on a range of debates across disciplines and existing secondary sources to frame and inform the analysis as well as two hybrid international collaborative workshops as a research methodology to facilitate collaborative meaning-making and which involved research teams from the UK and Korea as well as invited policy stakeholders. The collaborative workshops were held in 2022 (in Bristol and Seoul, respectively) to provide a domain for understanding and exploring knowledge processes and perspectives (Orngreen and Levinson, Reference Ørngreen and Levinsen2017). They were specifically designed to inform the research and contribute to concept and theory building through the production of data from participants with shared interests but from different perspectives to generate new insights (Hu, Reference Hu2024). The international collaborative workshops were utilised as creative, problem-solving contexts with participants as part of the research design and the data-producing apparatus leading to the the ‘state capacity for critical human security’ framework which it utilised in this and other papers in the collection, and outlined in Figure 1. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law Research Ethics Committee, University of Bristol, UK.

The next section of this paper will seek to deepen and extend our understanding of critical human security and state capacity and the linkages between them. It will propose and outline framework with a focus on protection, empowerment, and capabilities with an emphasis on state capacity for crital human security.

Reframing connections between human security, state capacity and social policy

Our understanding of human security draws on the UN approach that defines human security as ‘a dynamic and practical policy framework for addressing widespread and cross-cutting threats facing Governments and people’ (UN, nd). It is also an approach that is universal in that

Whilst sympathetic to the conceptual relevance of critical human security, Newman (Reference Newman2010:82) suggests that ‘human security is normatively attractive but analytically weak’, a concern that we seek to address in this paper through the integration of a ‘state capacity for human security’ approach and a greater emphasis on intersectionality in the framework. This approach extends the approach beyond one that could be reduced to a methodological and practical framework for human security, and instead presents a perspective that is theoretically and conceptually robust. Whilst presenting an approach in which the focus is on capabilities of both the state and individuals, as well as empowerment and protection, so this is combined with a recognition of the social barriers, discrimination, and exclusion faced by people when seeking to exercise freedom and achieve their true potential, a dynamic which we argue is not adequately and explicitly captured in current debates.

It is also vital to utilise the concept as it connects to values, institutions, and state capacities which connect to welfare and underlying sources of insecurity (Newman, Reference Newman2021:11) and how these manifest for different groups of people in different places. An intersectional approach to social policy and human security illuminates the complex ways in which multiple and interlocking inequalities are organised and exclusionary policy outcomes produced by ignoring the differential impact of policy on diverse population (Williams, Reference Williams2021). Thus critical human security can be concerned not only with protection from chronic threats, such as hunger, disease. and repression, but can also adopt a more relative approach in addressing harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life and their intersection and uneven distribution in the spheres of economic, food and water, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security. Our approach is more about relational and relative security rather than absolute minimum, basic protection floors and survival (Alkire, Reference Alkire2003:24).

Power relations, intersectionality and the ‘…racialised politics of security and insecurity’ (Pan, Reference Pan2021:40) permeate and structure insecurities, gender relations, and patriarchal institutions and, in turn, access to resources and opportunity, substantive rights, privilege, and oppression (Purkayastha, Reference Purkayastha2018) are at the core of critical human security. As Thomas (Reference Thomas2001:160) argues insecurity results ‘directly from existing power structures that determine who enjoys the entitlement to security and who does not’. Therefore, questions will be focused around the nature of existing structures and institutions of power at different spatial scales, as well as distribution and access in relation to economic and political organisation and resources. Human security is a concept that can only have meaning in relation to the specific social, historical, cultural, and institutional contexts in which it is embedded, whilst comparing, contrasting, explaining, and analysing these structures of power and organisation can highlight how and why these dynamics play out in different social contexts and for different groups of people.

State capacity, human security, and post-COVID governance

The extraordinary capacity, reach, and impact of the modern state (Weiss, Reference Weiss1998) has been never so evident as during the pandemic. The importance of ‘effective states’ in tackling both unanticipated shocks and radical uncertainty (King and Kay, Reference King and Kay2021) as well as radical volatility has come to the fore (Weiss and Thurborn, Reference Weiss and Thurbon2022; van Apeldoorn and de Graaff, Reference van Apeldoorn and de Graaff2022), as has increased scrutiny of the states ability to ‘protect and empower’ its people in times of crisis. The recent global pandemic and its aftermath, as well as the variety of policy responses to it and their uneven impacts between and within countries and regime types, have reanimated the theoretical debates of the 1990s and 2000s around the issue of state capacity (Mao, Reference Mao2021). The ability of the state to mobilise resources, to regulate, to redistribute, what Weiss called the ‘infrastructural power of the state’ has become a sharp focus during the pandemic. As Kavanagh and Singh (Reference Kavanagh and Singh2020:997) point out ‘[s]ome of the governments assessed to be most prepared by public health experts – with the greatest capacity for outbreak response – have failed to respond effectively to the pandemic’. Table 2 draws on the Global Health Security (GHS) index, which is based on measurements across a number of domains to ascertain a country’s capability to prevent and respond to epidemics and pandemics (Cameron et al. Reference Cameron, Nuzzo and Bell2019; Kavanagh and Singh, Reference Kavanagh and Singh2020). These domains include prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens; early detection and reporting; rapid response and mitigation; sufficient and robust health systems to treat and protect health workers; commitment to improving national capacity, finance and adherence to norm; and overall risk environment and country vulnerability to biological threats. The United States is placed first all of the categories apart from rapid response and overall risk environment. In contrast, as Table 2 demonstrates, only Thailand and South Korea make it into the top ten from amongst East and South East Asian countries, even though research on East Asia and COVID-19 would seem to suggest that countries in the region have been more successful than others in responding to and containing the pandemic (Chung et al., Reference Chung, Jung and Jung2024). Kavangh and Singh (Reference Kavanagh and Singh2020) highlight how COVID-19 has demonstrated the limitations of these measures of state capacity and preparedness, whilst it has also demonstrated the Westerncentrism embedded in theoretical perspectives and tools developed in the US and Europe. Pan (Reference Pan2021) refers to the racialised hierarchies in the international system and perceptions of the West as the ‘zone of security’ with non-Western countries and regions, China and East Asia more generally in this context, represented as the ‘zone of insecurity’, which, at least in the early stages, limited the response to the spread of the virus particularly in the US and the UK. Chekar and Kim (Reference Chekar and Kim2022) have also referred to the notion of ‘COVID-exceptionalism’ that emerged and was applied to East Asia, enabled through ideas around ‘authoritarian advantages’ or ‘Confucian values’. It was strongly associated with racialised stereotypes of a mask-wearing culture, greater willingness to trade privacy for safety and a greater acceptance of digital surveillance, and a population that is ‘obedient’ or collectivist. This could be contrasted with ‘Western’ countries where pandemic mitigation strategies were unsuccessful and constructed as ‘inevitable’ since their populations are neither ‘obedient’ nor ‘collective’ (Chekar and Kim, Reference Chekar and Kim2022).

Table 2. Global health security index 2019 (Selected countries Europe, North America, and East and South East Asia with ranking)

Source: Compiled by authors derived from Global health security index 2019 (2019) John Hopkins University, USA. 2019 Global health security index.

The recent pandemic has thrown into confusion taken for granted assumptions that states with ‘strong’ capacity can be linked to high levels of human security and an ability to address pandemic and crisis situations, with the state capacity debates increasingly recognising differentiation, unevenness, and adaptability (Weiss and Thurbon, Reference Weiss and Thurbon2022) For Weiss and Thurborn (Reference Weiss and Thurbon2022) the focus on adaptability of states and their differential capacity is key to understanding that while ‘all modern states are endowed with a modicum of infrastructural power …. However, their capacities for acting in different policy arenas are by no means similar’ (ibid. 700). The state capacity concept developed in the 1990s focused on two key state capacity: extractive-distributive and transformative. Extractive-distributive capacity entails the ability to mobilise economic resources for redistribution, while transformative capacity is linked to the ability of the state to mobilise the business sector to foster industry and innovation. State capacity is often associated with a state’s ability to accomplish its intended policy actions through its three faces: administrative and institutional capacity which facilitates the implementation of policies; extractive capacity for the collection of resources and information to the provision of public services; and coercive capacity through which policies can be enforced. However, as Wu et al., (Reference Wu, Ramesh and Howlett2015:166) have pointed out, ‘there are many disagreements about the detailed conceptual and definitional aspects of the subject’. Developing a broader and more detailed framework, Wu et al., (2015:167) identify policy capacity as ‘a set of skills and resources – or competences and capabilities – necessary to perform policy functions’. Key competences include analytical, operational, and political which, in turn, operate a three different levels – individual, organisational, and systemic. In the context of COVID-19, Weiss and Thurborn (Reference Weiss and Thurbon2022) extended the state capacity framework of extractive-distributive and transformative by introducing a third element of state capacity namely salutary capacity, which is ‘the state’s ability to correct and counteract the course of a national health emergency’. With reference to COVID-19, specific measures of salutary capacity include ‘the ability to control national borders, to enforce quarantine, communicate a public health threat, mandate public health measures, methodically test, trace, and isolate, mobilise health infrastructure, personnel and medical equipment, and ultimately to vaccinate the population’ (ibid. 701).

Extractive-distributive capacity has played an enormously important role both during and after the pandemic. The IMF has estimated that as of September 2020, worldwide fiscal response to the COVID-19 crisis has amounted to 12 per cent of global GDP, well above the level that was seen during the global financial crisis in 2008 (International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2020). The American ‘Build Back Better’ rescue plan amounted to 1.9 trillion USD (Warner et al., Reference Warner, Kelly and Zhang2023), while the European Union has approved its Recovery Plan allocating 2 trillion euros for post-COVID recovery (Delhomme and Hervey, Reference Delhomme and Hervey2022) in unprecedented fiscal and monetary expansion in both contexts. In the UK, Besley and Dann (Reference Besley and Dann2022) has argued that fiscal state capacity has been crucial in terms of rapidly implementing the furlough schemes at the height of the onset of the pandemic. Many advanced industrialised countries have also implemented unprecedented social safety net measures to protect workers, in addition to providing massive liquidity support for firms. Besley and Dann (Reference Besley and Dann2022:2) assert that ‘[s]uch endeavours could only have been achieved in countries where the state had the capabilities to do so’. Crucially, redistributive state capacities are key both in ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states. As Gisselquist and Vaccaro (Reference Gisselquist and Vaccaro2021) highlighted, countries with less effective states have not only been more affected by COVID-19, but COVID-19 also has increased demands on states and on less effective states in particular.

Transformative state capacities have also come to the fore in terms of innovation, R&D, and business and state collaborations. ‘Dynamic state capacities’ have been defined by Mazzucato and Kattel (Reference Mazzucato and Kattel2020) as ‘capacity to adapt and learn; capacity to align public services and citizen needs; capacity to govern resilient production systems; and capacity to govern data and digital platforms’. As they argue:

However, the global unevenness of the state’s infrastructural power has been extensively documented. Gisselquist and Vaccaro (2021) highlight the inequalities between advanced industrial countries and developing countries in terms of state capacities. vom Hau (Reference vom Hau2012) emphasises how state capacity varies across different states, between areas of state capacity, as well as across time. Aras and Yorulmazlar (Reference Aras and Yorulmazlar2020) highlighted the problems of state capacities in terms of devolution, centralisation, and subsidiarity in terms of negotiating the central command with local needs in the context of emergency. They argue that ‘the ability of central authorities to effectively detect and respond to local requirements has emerged as a major question mark. Not only in federal states such as the United States, but also in centralized and devolutionary nations such as Italy, Spain, and the UK, governments were clueless about local needs and failed to allocate emergency requirements’ (ibid. 4). Similarly, Richards et al., (Reference Richards, Warner, Smith and Coyle2022) argued that the strongly centralised UK has become an ‘incoherent’ state during COVID-19. Aras and Yorulmazlar (Reference Aras and Yorulmazlar2020:4) assert that:

The redistributive, transformative, and salutary capacities are interconnected and relational. With permanent polycrisis, intentional experimentation needs to respond to complex multisectoral challenges, which cannot be addressed by traditional sectoral reforms. The lines between redistributive, transformative, and salutary capacities are blurred and state capacities are not just commanded, designed and implemented, but co-produced with highly unequal social groups and communities. Trust is a foundational element of state capacities (Besley and Dray, Reference Besley and Dray2022), not just in terms of adaptability and resilience, but also in a sense of state capacities being interpersonal, intersectional, and interdependent. The fragility of contemporary state transformation, for example the transformation from welfare state to social-ecological state, which supposed to integrate three key dimensions: vulnerability, protection and resilience, ‘is yet to be invented’ (Laurent, Reference Laurent2019).

Figure 1 provides a visualisation of the people-centred, state capacity for critical human security framework. At the core is the ambition of critical human security across the different domains with a focus on protection, empowerment, and capabilities that is universal and intersection. The focus of state capacity and its dimensions is on policy strategies and political choices to achieve these policy goals, and with the salutary capacity to recognise failure or contradictions, and to reassess policy instruments. Critical human security highlights that it can only be secured through state capacities which are fundamentally intersectional. State capacities may be variegated and uneven across the different critical human security parameters or domains, or state capacities deployed in one domain could come into conflict with another domain. Jones and Hameiri (Reference Jones and Hameiri2022), looking at the UK, as an example of the neoliberalisation of the regulatory state, argue that the regulatory state hollowed out state capacities and effective decision-making capacities resulting in the inability of the British state to address basic social problems during the COVID-19 pandemic and meeting social needs. Deregulation, privatisation, and outsourcing has had severe impact on COVID responses in the UK, where ‘the regulatory state has been hollowed out, both politically, in terms of its connection to the citizenry, and bureaucratically, in terms of its actual capacity to manage social problems’ (ibid. 1033). This highlights a broader issue of possible ‘de-coupling’ of state capacities across different critical human security domains as well as the enabling and disabling state capacities manifesting and unfolding during an emergency situation like COVID-19.

COVID-19 put all forms of state capacity in both democratic and authoritarian regimes under severe pressure and whilst regime type and state capacity may well shape the range of policy instruments and choices available to political leaders looking across the Europe and East Asia there was no one ‘ideal’ combination of state capacity and regime type (Mao, Reference Mao2021;Yen et al., Reference Yen, Liu and Won2021). It is often argued that authoritarian regimes have strong coercive capacity through which to achieve policy goals and compliance, as well as centralised decision making and implementation capacity and mobilisation and cooperation capacity. However, this can also be accompanied by weak information capacity, which Mao (Reference Mao2021) argues had implications for delayed responses in the early phase of the crisis in China. In contrast, democracies are more likely to possess strong information capacity and mobilisation and cooperative capacity, but the paradox is that this did little to enhance the speed of response in most democracies as discussed in the next sections of this paper in relation to Europe and East Asia. Across all regime types in times of crisis and uncertain risk it is salutary capacity as outlined by Weiss and Thurbon (Reference Weiss and Thurbon2022) that can contribute to the strengthening of state capacity for critical human security in consolidated democracies and authoritarian regimes and the ability to recognise and respond to negative impacts of policy choices on protection and empowerment.

The interplay of social, political, and economic factors – interacting separately, in combination with one another, and with the physical environment – ‘creates a mosaic of risks and hazards that affect people and the places they inhabit’ (Cutter et al., Reference Cutter, Mitchell and Scott2000). The multidisciplinary revival and reimagination of the concept of critical human security and its integration with state capacity framework provides a lens for recognising and integrating contemporary dynamics and dimensions of human security and disrupting hegemonic structures of power, neoliberal globalisation, Western normative order, and patriarchal institutions.

European Responses to the COVID out-break

A distinctive element of the responses to the COVID outbreak in Europe has been the double burden of misplaced confidence in the existing health care system on the one hand, and late detection of the infection and lost control of the spread on the other hand. Salutary state capacities, that is preventative capacities, have been weak. Lack of PPE, lack of testing tools and track-and-trace digital infrastructure meant that the spread of the infection was fast and the burden of response became increasingly vast both in economic as well as in social terms (Stoto, et al., Reference Stoto, Reno, Tsolova and Fantini2023). Countries with extensive welfare states and public health care systems often demonstrated weak salutary capacities, which requires a close investigation. Such weak salutary capacities necessitated a large redistributive capacity with extensive state support provided to firms, households, and public provisions. However, the redistributive capacities have shown considerable unevenness between European countries. Job retention programmes had vastly different coverage, in countries like Italy, Cyprus, and Croatia, up to 40 per cent of jobs were supported by government intervention in 2020 – compared to 1 per cent in Hungary. Inequalities in wage replacement rates were also very high: while Austria, Poland, and Czechia offered 100 per cent replacement; Cyprus, Finland, and Greece offered 60 per cent replacement rate (Eurofund, 2021). Countries with established comprehensive job retention schemes prior to the pandemic provided better cushioning such as flexibility and some/reduced economic security (OECD, 2022). However, Cantillon et al., (Reference Cantillon, Seeleib-Kaiser and van der Veen2021: 331) assert that ‘on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, social security systems in continental Europe welfare states appear to be weaker than at the time of previous crisis: the dualisation and flexibilisation had become less protective, especially for the bottom end of the labour market’.

Transformative state capacities have also been slow in response. COVID-19 has highlighted Europe’s weak digital infrastructure and regulatory ambiguities. Access to vaccination has been delayed by the complex supranational negotiations led by the EU, but over time vaccination coverage has improved and became one of the highest in the world.

The post-COVID landscape in Europe has been dominated by polycrisis, where the crisis of the pandemic has been coupled with cost-of-living crisis, debt crisis, inflation, economic recession, and climate crisis. The economic pressures of inflation, economic recession, and debt crises have placed public services under severe strain in many European countries. The health care systems have been under severe strain in managing the fallout from the pandemic in the form of excessive waiting list, staff shortages, and recruitment crisis. WHO (2022) estimated that the pandemic has reversed earlier gains in poverty reduction in Europe, and in 2021, an additional 4.3 million people in Europe had been pushed under the US$5.50 a day poverty line (WHO, 2022). Food insecurity (Loopstra, et al., Reference Loopstra, Reeves, McKee and Struckles2016; Garratt, Reference Garratt2020) is on the rise in Europe as social benefits, particularly out of work benefits are not protecting against food insecurity and intensification of weather-related events in Europe 2010-2020 disrupting food supplies. The permacrisis has also impacted on issues such as political instability, rise of authoritarianism, and misinformation (see for example Bohle et al., Reference Bohle, Greskovits and Naczyk2024) which also created further post-COVID governance challenges in many European countries.

For Natili et al., (Reference Natili, Negri and Ronchi2022) the effect of ‘double dualisation’ in Europe represents key challenges, where increasing inequalities are observed both between labour market insiders and outsiders, and between core and peripheral countries in Europe. Importantly, from a critical human security perspective, these patterns of dualisations can also be extended to issues such as dualisation of age, race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

The post-COVID governance in European countries faces enormous challenges in addressing complex and intersectional societal issues, rebuilding key institutional capacities and working towards future resilience. The EU’s Recovery Fund represents a significant effort in offering a ‘New Marshall plan for Europe’ in boosting economic growth by green and digital investment. On paper, the aim of the Recovery Fund is to facilitate salutary, redistribute, and transformative capacities, the key question will remain as to how these funds will be able to tackle the deepening dualisation and fragmentation of European societies, and crucially how the ‘social’ can be integrated into the digital and green initiatives and policy frameworks.

East Asian Responses to the COVID out break

East Asian countries implemented a range of measure to contain and control the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, although the variation was more substantial between the more affluent countries in Northeast Asia and developing countries in Southeast Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore all took speedy and aggressive actions from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Chinese Mainland adopting more stringent approach than any other country in the world beginning with a complete travel ban and effective lockdown of the 11 million residents in Wuhan (Wei, Reference Wei2020). The Chinese government implemented a ‘zero-COVID’ strategy, targeting local communities with confirmed cases to prevent further transmission (Huang and Duan, Reference Huang and Duan2020). While this approach garnered cooperation from residents, it was criticised for its harsh and repressive nature in a wider global context. It has been argued that the implementation of such draconian measures can arguably be possible in authoritarian regimes such as China as well as an indication of the effectiveness of authoritarian states in crisis situations to mobilise state capacity for human security. However, policy learning and cognitive capacity gained from the SARS epidemic in 2003 also contributed to pandemic preparedness, as in other East Asian countries. In addition, whilst the Chinese healthcare system responded well overall with the mobilisation of medical teams from across the other provinces and cities, use of community hospitals and the rapid construction of medical facilities (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023), nevertheless, the Chinese government responses to handling a surge in cases in such a way was strongly related salutary state capacity and public health provision (Shaw et al., Reference Shaw, Kim and Hua2020) and ensuing concern that medical facilities and personnel would be unable to deal with the potentially enormous surge of patients once transmission of COVID-19 virus grew beyond control.

Furthermore, a primary policy failure at the outset of the outbreak can be attributed to the Chinese government’s initial handling of the situation in Wuhan and more general suppression of information on public health grounds and to control public perceptions of the pandemic and government responses to it. Despite Dr. Li Wen-Liang’s report of a surge in patients with pneumonia-like symptoms, local authorities suppressed the information, fearing political repercussions, instead of alerting those in higher authorities to the potentially emerging crisis. This suppression hindered an effective early response, allowing the virus to gain a foothold in Wuhan. The seemingly highly interventionist Chinese state failed to contain the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, which in turn led to a crisis of critical human security, particularly for the Wuhan population.

In contrast to China’s approach, Japan’s and South Korea’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak emphasised rapid action and mobilised resources through public health infrastructure (Shaw et al., Reference Shaw, Kim and Hua2020; Yang and Kwon, Reference Yang and Kwon2020). South Korea’s state capacity to manage health crisis and to mobilise resources was outstanding compared to other countries. Leveraging its National Health Insurance system and information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities, South Korea effectively implemented the ‘3Ts’ strategy: Test, Trace, and Treat. This strategy capitalised on the nation’s testing and treatment facilities, while the ICT infrastructure facilitated comprehensive contact tracing of infected individuals. Such effective responses from Japan and South Korea challenged the conventional wisdom that the welfare states are less protective than their European counterparts. Yang and Kwon (Reference Yang and Kwon2020) underscore the crucial role of public cooperation in bolstering the effectiveness of these preventative measures. Highly effective responses were also related to digital technology deeply integrated to public infrastructure. With this South Korea was able to exercise state capacity to contain and control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. However, the aggressive testing and tracing measures combined with the Korean governments authorisation to access private data of confirmed and potential patients and disclose their information during an emergency of this nature (You, 2020) raised concerns about potential infringements on individual freedoms and privacy (Cho et al., Reference Cho, Ballbach, Claus-Kim, Kim, Lee and Shim2020). As You (2020) explains

Japan was also able to mitigate effectively initial transmission of COVID-19 at the earlier stage (Tashiro and Shaw, Reference Tashiro and Shaw2020). The Japanese government was able to detect people with infection and trace their contact using data harnessed by the ICT infrastructure. Japanese public healthcare system was mobilised to respond to clusters of people with infection. Japanese sophisticated system of sanitation as well as collaboration from the public following protocols to prevent the transmission were also important factors accounting for low level of infection in Japan.

In terms of redistributive capacity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan and South Korea spent substantially less than their European counterparts. Japan’s and Korea’s support for job retention were much smaller than in European countries (OECD 2022), and in terms of GDP, Korea’s income support in relation to the COVID pandemic accounted for 6 percent, well below the OECD average of 11.7 percent, as the contribution by Kennnett, Lee, Kwon, and Luts explain in this Themed Section. The relatively low level of public spending was also due to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic was less severe in these countries when compared to Europe as well as traditionally cautious approach toward public finance. The Japanese government implemented a new economic package in fiscal years 2021-2022, aiming to stimulate economic growth and improve income distribution. This package, valued at JPY 78.9 trillion (approximately 14.6 per cent of GDP) according to the OECD, (2021), comprised four key pillars. In response to the immediate effects of the pandemic in 2020, the government also established two supplementary budgets (Ando et al., Reference Ando, Furukawa, Nakata and Sumiya2020). These emergency measures provided support for both households and businesses/workers.

In contrast to Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asian developing countries faced challenges in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. This stemmed, in part, from limitations in state capacity, particularly in crisis management and public healthcare systems, which were not as well-developed as those of their Northeast Asian counterparts. A notable weakness was the delayed detection of community transmission of the virus. While South Korea and Japan identified domestic cases in early January 2020, Southeast Asian countries only confirmed local infections by March. This delay, coupled with the region’s robust economic ties with China, likely contributed to a wider, undetected spread of the virus.

Upon detection of the virus, most Southeast Asian countries established intergovernmental task forces for crisis management and implemented a range of containment measures. Stringency varied across the region: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos adopted stricter measures, significantly restricting movement. In contrast, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand opted for a less stringent approach, allowing essential economic activities while discouraging gatherings. Notably, these latter countries had implemented universal healthcare systems since the 2010s (Aspinal, Reference Aspinall2014; Obermann et al., Reference Obermann, Jowett and Kwon2018). The pandemic, however, exposed limitations within these systems. While Thailand’s universal healthcare system appeared to manage the situation effectively, the pandemic highlighted weaknesses in the public health infrastructure of Indonesia and the Philippines (Kwon et al., Reference Kwon, Ha, Yang, Park, Yi and M.2023).

A significant disparity existed in healthcare resource distribution across countries in Southeast Asia. Medical personnel and facilities were heavily concentrated in metropolitan areas, particularly capital cities. This resulted in a substantial gap in public healthcare capacity between urban and rural regions. Even within major cities, testing capabilities were limited, hindering accurate assessments of COVID-19 spread. Consequently, hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed during peak infection periods, particularly in Indonesia (January 2020 and August 2021) and the Philippines (August 2020 and March 2021) (Kwon et al., Reference Kwon, Ha, Yang, Park, Yi and M.2023).

In addition to the health care crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about, economic recessions that would take place posed crisis to the livelihood of poor households. Indonesia and the Philippines extended the existing conditional cash transfer programmes to provide economic relief to poor households. In Indonesia 9 million households received cash transfers through the PKU programme, while 18 million households received cash transfers through 4P programme in the Philippines. It is important to note that the two countries improved state capacity to deliver such supports to poor households as they had to address inadequacy in their cash transfer programmes since the global economic crisis in 2008.

Concluding remarks

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed new threats to human security across East Asia and Europe, revealing the limitations of traditional welfare state institutions in providing comprehensive social protection and responding to systemic crisis. The long-held assumption that larger, high spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic assumption given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. This paper, along with other contributions in this Themed Section, suggests that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address. By considering multi-dimensional well-being outcomes, we gain a deeper understanding of the impact of public policy responses to the pandemic. Additionally, the concept of state capacity is brought to the forefront to explore its role in shaping these outcomes. State capacity refers to a government’s ability to manage public institutions and systems (e.g., bureaucracies, healthcare, and crisis management) and mobilise resources to effectively deliver public services. It acts as a critical bridge between government intentions and human security outcomes. Notably, state capacity encompasses not only the implementation of social policies but also the level of public trust in government institutions, which can be sustained and maintained through effective policy interventions for human security.

The brief overview of European responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that European states believed to have strong state capacity of protection were, for the most part, unable to provide protection against new threats, while East Asian countries were able to respond more rapidly, and better able to deal with the situations with less comprehensive welfare arrangements. However, this is only one aspect of the multifaceted crisis.

East Asian countries, particularly Japan and South Korea, demonstrated effective early-phase containment of COVID-19 due to their robust state capacity in crisis management and public healthcare. Leveraging strong detection capabilities and efficient contact tracing systems, these countries successfully flattened the infection curve, minimising the pandemic’s social and economic disruptions. While Japan and South Korea did allocate significant fiscal resources for emergency economic relief, their spending remained notably lower compared to their European counterparts.

Developing countries in Southeast Asia, along with China, faced significant challenges due to limitations in state capacity. Apprehensive that their healthcare systems would be overwhelmed, most countries implemented stringent, and in some cases, draconian measures to restrict movement and social interaction. While these measures may have been successful in containing viral transmission, they also impinged upon critical aspects of human security, including personal and political freedoms. Furthermore, the universal healthcare systems established in Indonesia and the Philippines since the 2010s revealed critical weaknesses, such as limited capabilities and unequal resource distribution.

The contrasting experiences of Europe and East Asia underscore the need for multifaceted state capacity in securing critical human security. This capacity should encompass protective, redistributive, and transformative functions. Furthermore, it’s crucial to acknowledge the internal variations within a single nation’s state capacity. For instance, while East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan displayed robust capabilities for viral containment, limitations emerged in their vaccine programme development. Notably, state capacities across various dimensions, while often complementary, can have unintended consequences during implementation. State interventions leveraging specific capacities, such as regulatory power to ensure health security, might inadvertently undermine other crucial human security dimensions, like personal liberty. In essence, this paper emphasises the significance of state capacity to mobilise, regulate, and redistribute social and economic resources in achieving multi-dimensional human security.