Virtuous imperialism or a shared global objective? - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 63

relations policy programme (Government of Canada 2004) and had supported
leading policy-relevant research institutes, which continued to explore and
develop the concept . 5
This leadership was celebrated in May 2013 when a number of the lead-
ing policy makers who fronted the human security agenda 15 years earlier
met in Bergen, Norway, to re-visit the concept and agenda and look back on
how it has developed. The original signatories to the Lysøen Declaration, a
declaration of intent signed by the then foreign ministers Lloyd Axworthy
(Canada) and Knut Vollebæk (Norway), played a lead role again by opening a
conference that for all intents and purposes demonstrated that despite all the
controversies surrounding the concept, human security is still relevant. But
it still remains to be asked - in what ways is it relevant? Who is this concept
really for?
Although the current Canadian government has significantly down-
played (if not rejected) an explicit role in the human security agenda since
it came into power in 2006, the rationale that was behind the develop-
ment of this concept in the 1990s and early 2000s, and its further implicit
operationalization, provides a good example of how the human security
concept has been burdened with what I call a 'virtuous imperialism' repu-
tation. This term expresses the way in which human security has often been
perceived, to put it bluntly, as a one-way-feel-good concept for the global
North to attend to insecurity in the global South. It also served as a way
to protect the North (northern states) from the South (southern peoples/
southern threats).
At that time, human security appeared to have provided Canada with its
raison d'être in the international community. Human security was a concept and
policy application that was consistent with Canada's soft power approaches,
in Canada but also amongst other middle power states such as Norway. The
'complementary' nature of human security, where it does not replace state
security but provides an added dimension that should be addressed, suited
middle power politics. Thus states like Canada and Norway emphasized, and
tried to contribute to, this complementary role by promoting human secu-
rity (particularly the protection of civilians) at the Security Council (MacLean
2000:275). Canada and Norway assumed much of the leading roles in the
drafting of the 1997 Anti-Personnel Landmines Treaty, and the creation of
the International Criminal Court in 1998 (ibid.). Canada took the human
security approach on board in a more vigorous manner however, designing a
whole foreign policy programme around the concept, and the choices Canada
was making was influential in the human security debate (Mack 2004; Human
Security Centre 2005). This included the debates regarding definition. The
definition offered by the UNDP Human Security Report in 1994 was vague
and rather inelegant. On one level the statement 'freedom from fear, freedom
from want' might generate intuitive agreement, but finding out what this
meant concretely was decidedly more difficult. The UNDP report focused on