A new joint publication by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) is designed to provide parliamentarians around the world with a toolkit for prioritizing human security and common security as opposed to militarized state security.
With every passing month, our world becomes more violent and dangerous. After a decline in the 1990s and early 2000s, the number of conflicts around the world has been growing – and no region has been left untouched. These conflicts often involve multiple parties and are increasingly fuelled by transnational criminal activity. Some have been going on for decades and some remain unaddressed by the international community. Their cost is immense, however, and it is usually civilians who pay the heaviest price.
The future hardly looks encouraging. Disinformation, social media and artificial intelligence (AI) are spreading hate, division and mistrust. AI-powered weapons are making it easier than ever to kill, while cyberattacks on critical infrastructure are also taking their toll. Meanwhile, nuclear disarmament has come to a grinding halt and global tensions are distracting our leaders from the urgent – and sometimes existential – challenges that face us: climate change, pandemics, hunger and much, much more. We need multilateral collaboration to address and fix these challenges. But conflicts take us in the opposite direction.
Two alternative approaches offer new possibilities to get us all back on track. The first is human security, which is about engaging with and representing people, and implies contextualized and tailored legislation rooted in several dimensions relating to the well-being of the individual. The second is common security, which takes the principles of human security to a larger scale and enshrines the idea that dialogue, multilateralism and collaboration are key to any attempt to solve a problem.