Human security and women’s security reality in Northwest Russia - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 234

positively affirmed as comprising human security and what is concur-
rently disqualified; there must be analytical sensitivity given to the
people, places and things that are marginalized when an 'expert' claims
to be providing a precise/scientific/workable definition of human security
that is of practical use.
(Grayson 2004:357)
According to this view, any delimitation of human security aimed at making
the concept analytically useful therefore entails a political positioning.
One way in which many have dealt with the problem of conceptual clari-
fication is by defining human security in terms of a limited set of issues. For
example, in the Human Security Report 2005, the first annual report of the
Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia in Canada,
human security is defined in terms of political violence. Their aim is to
map 'the incidence, severity, and consequences of political violence around
the world' and thereby to provide 'data and analysis that is essential to evi-
dence-based security policy '. 2 The measuring of political violence is linked
to a threshold of twenty-five deaths (Human Security Centre 2005:67) . 3 I n
order for human security to be quantifiable, it must be defined and opera-
tionalized, and, thus, a narrow conceptualization is needed in order to employ
quantitative measurements. Furthermore, the focus of the Human Security
Report has rightly been recognized as being 'broadly within the realist rubric'
(Roberts 2006:257) with a focus on 'hard security' in terms of political vio-
lence. Alternatively, Booysen (2002) defines human security by including
all the seven components listed by UNDP (economic, food, health, environ-
ment, political, community, personal) and calculates an Inefficiency Ratio.
This expresses 'the extent to which efforts at human security are translated
into actual achievement' (Booysen 2002:274) . 4 Other attempts at composite
indexing, e.g. Steve Lonergan et al . (2000) and Gary King and Christopher J.
L. Murray (2001/2002), also display the difficulties of choosing dimensions
to include and, importantly, problems in regard to the availability of reli-
able data (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007:241) . 5 The indexing is a task of the
researcher(s), as seen in King and Murray's (2001/2002:592) technical defini-
tion of human security: 'We define an individual's human security as his or
her expectation of years of life without experiencing the state of generalized
poverty. Population human security is then an aggregation of individuals'
human security.' Further suggestions for mapping human security link the
specification of human security to a certain threshold (Owen 2004a, b) or to
a scale of severity (Roberts 2006). The rationale behind the threshold-based
definition put forward by Taylor Owen is that openness to all threats that peo-
ple possibly experience is crucial. Instead of listing specific threats to human
security and thereby narrowing down the possible threats to humans, an open
approach 'allows all possible harms to be considered' (Owen 2004b:381)
where the scale of the threat is what matters. Consequently, all threats should