HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Year 2008, Issue: 39, 1 - 17, 01.05.2008

Eddie J. Girdner

https://doi.org/10.1501/Intrel_0000000215

Abstract

HUMAN INSECURITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract

The spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the last quarter century has greatly increased human insecurity. The United States became a provider not of global security but rather insecurity. The destruction of the environment under the established regime is often seen to be the major source of human insecurity. At a deeper level, however, it is clear that the underlying malady is neoliberal capitalism, the logic of which precludes addressing the demise of the global ecosystem, poverty and hegemonic wars. Mainstream academics have characteristically saluted the neoliberal agenda and proceeded to reinforce and propagate the ideology underlying the deceptive mantra that there is no alternative. Human security is sorely lacking in a world where people are being vaporized by increasingly horrible forms of bombs, where about half of the population make less than two US dollars a day, where urban slum colonies proliferate, and where war budgets eat up ever larger portions of national state budgets

Keywords

Environment, Financial Terrorism, Global Poverty, Human Security, Neoliberalism, United States, War