The EU's Human Security Discourse and Practice: Where are we now?
George Christou, University of Warwick
The language of human security has been prominent in the EU's official discourse for a number of years, with the high point its appearance in the 2008 Report on implementing the European Security Strategy. Whilst human security was seen as a new approach for the EU in the development of its foreign and security policy, no doubt offering an alternative logic to that of the War on Terror, the aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which such an alternative actually features in the EU’s discourse and practice in the post-Lisbon era, and in particular in the context of the events of the Arab Spring. It seeks to uncover where and how the concept is spoken within the EU’s institutional milieu, how it is understood by the relevant policy-makers in the EU, and the impact and implication of this across key areas of security in relation to EU practice. Indeed the paper seeks to establish how far such a concept has and can be established as the driving concept for European foreign and security policy in a changing and dynamic world order.