Telemedicine as a tool for improving human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 154

My goal is to explore and evaluate these assumptions en route to reaching a
conclusion about the relationship between telemedicine and human security.
Traditional and alternative views of security
Health, medicine and access to healthcare have not been a focus of the security
studies community. The development of security studies as an academic field
of inquiry, separate from broader international relations theories and political
philosophies, took a decidedly narrow focus regarding what could be consid-
ered relevant to security discourses. Despite centuries of diverse theoretical
traditions that recognized security from the position of individuals as well as
states (Rothschild 1995; Hoogensen 2005a), security was reduced to one actor
in one context, looking at the survival of the state in the international system.
This focus on one actor as an independent actor within a system fighting
for its survival has been difficult to sustain as the only way to understand
security. If the focus is only states, even these abstract actors develop complex
relationships with other states, observable as 'regions'. The Arctic presents an
interesting case in this regard. The Arctic is a region composed of multiple
states. But it is unique as a region, as most of the states that are consid-
ered Arctic have only a small part of their territory within the Arctic circle
(Hoogensen 2005b). Theorists such as Barry Buzan developed the concept of
the 'security complex' (Buzan 1990:13) to provide a way of understanding
that security is a phenomenon that must be studied at a regional level. Buzan
characterizes a regional security complex as 'a set of states whose major secu-
rity perceptions and concerns are so interlinked that their national security
cannot reasonably be analysed apart from one another' (Buzan 1990:13). In
their book Security: A New Framework for Analysis , Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver
and Jaap de Wilde (Buzan et al . 1998:11) emphasize the notion that
all states in the system are enmeshed in a global web of security inter-
dependence. But because most political and military threats travel more
easily over short distances than over long ones, insecurity is often associ-
ated with proximity. Most states fear their neighbours more than distant
powers; security interdependence as a whole is far from uniform. The
normal pattern of security interdependence in a geographically diverse,
anarchic international system is one of regionally based clusters, which
we label security complexes [emphasis added].
The above understanding of security is largely rooted in the realist tradition
of international relations and reflects some of the dominant thinking in secu-
rity analysis. It focuses on the state-based and military aspects of security. As
already discussed in the introductory chapters of this topic, after the end of
the Cold War many scholars argued for the need to widen the focus of security
studies so as to integrate more sectors. The likelihood of military aggression