Geoscience Reference
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Although the USA did not buy into the human security agenda, it manipu-
lated the same priorities that are dominant in human security foreign policies
and practices - 'or it claims to be pursuing values that, as the National
Security Strategy puts it, are “true for every person, in every society”' (ibid.)
- and therefore could be equated with the motives behind such human secu-
rity initiatives. As succinctly expressed in The Economist , 'rich countries must
sometimes be prepared to kill' ( The Economist 2003) in the interest of facili-
tating development and security. These positions are top-down expressions
of security, applied by secure elites judging their own societies to be free of
insecurity but threatened from the outside. This vision of human security has
not disappeared or died down in the past 15 years, but as noted above can be
argued to have instead found new life in the R2P doctrine. Without a deeper
understanding of what human security can and should entail, how it might be
a way towards reducing inequalities, incidences of violence and poverty, both
in the global South and North, a one-way virtuous imperialism can result
(Chandler 2012).
The need for more voices in security discourses:
learning from indigenous perspectives
To discover that the food which for generations has nourished them and
kept them whole physically and spiritually is now poisoning them is pro-
foundly disturbing and threatens Indigenous Peoples' cultural survival
… The Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic continue to see contaminant and
climate change variability as a major threat to our collective survival as
Peoples.
(Statement prepared by the Indigenous Peoples Secretariat on
behalf of Arctic Council Permanent Participants: A Call for
Further Action, in Nilsson and Huntington 2002:v)
Human security perceptions in and from the North can be seen to be influ-
enced by a number of voices, not least indigenous (highlighting security of
identity and the environment, as well as economy; see chapters by Slowey and
Irlbacher-Fox et al ., this topic) and women (highlighting personal security; see
chapters by Lvova and Stuvøy, this topic). In the next two sections I wish to
draw attention to both indigenous and women's positions. The relevance of
indigenous voices should be significant to the security discourse (Stern 2006).
These are voices that span the world over, transcend the constructed bound-
aries of North/South, East/West, West/'other', as these voices represent and
highlight insecurities from ethnic and cultural genocide, disease epidemics,
colonization, oppression and discrimination by race, gender, class and ethnic-
ity, to economic and cultural destruction of key natural resources and, for some,
the planet itself. Indigenous issues and human security are linked, as exempli-
fied by a statement from the United Nations Guide for Indigenous Peoples:
 
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