Since the end of the Cold War, there have been numerous attempts to redefine and re-focus the concept of security. Perhaps the most controversial and complex is the idea of human security. Though operating at the margins of security discourse and practice it has produced an intense debate on a global basis but also within and across regions including Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

The phrase “human security” surfaced occasionally in the first nine decades of the twentieth century but only after its formulation in the UNDP's Human Development Report in 1994 did it begin to penetrate academic and policy discourse. Portrayed alternatively as a new theory, concept, paradigm, analytic starting point, world view, political agenda, normative benchmark, and policy framework, it has inspired a shelf of books, scores of journal articles, several governmental reports, and dozens of new seminars and teaching programmes.

Human security is based on three fundamental assumptions. First, that the individual (or the individual in a group or community, say ethnic Serbs in Bosnia) is one of the referent points (or in some formulations the referent point) of security. Traditionally, the nation-state has been the primary referent object of security. Security has been concerned with protecting territory, or advancing the national interests or core values of states. Advocates of human security suggest that this emphasis on securing states has been at the expense of the security of people. “Forgotten [are] the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them security symbolize[s] protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression, and environmental hazards.”

Second, the concept assumes that the security of the individual or the group is subject to a variety of threats of which military threats from outside the state are only one and usually not the most significant. The 1994 UNDP Human Development report identifies seven main categories: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security.