What is Security?

For most of history, security in international relations meant one thing: protecting the state from military threats. A country was "secure" if no one was likely to invade it.

This traditional security framework dominated the Cold War era. Security meant:

• Military strength and deterrence
• Alliances (NATO vs. Warsaw Pact)
• Intelligence and counter-espionage
• Territorial defense

The entire global order was organized around the question: How do we prevent World War III?

The Expanding Definition

After the Cold War, scholars and policymakers argued the definition was too narrow. The 1994 UN Human Development Report introduced human security — shifting focus from states to people.

Human security includes:

The key insight: a state can be militarily secure while its people suffer terribly. North Korea has nuclear weapons but widespread famine.

Worked Example: Two Lenses on Yemen

Apply both frameworks to one case and the difference becomes concrete. Since 2015, Yemen has been torn by civil war between the internationally recognized government (backed by a Saudi-led coalition) and the Houthi movement (aligned with Iran).

Through the traditional-security lens, the story is about states, armies, and territory: coalition airstrikes, Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, control of the port of Hodeidah, and a collapsed central government.

Through the human-security lens, the picture is very different. The UN repeatedly called Yemen the world's worst humanitarian crisis. A 2021 UNDP-backed estimate put the death toll at roughly 377,000 by the end of that year — and about 60% of those deaths came from indirect causes such as hunger, lack of clean water, and untreated disease (including a massive cholera outbreak from 2016 onward) rather than from combat itself.

The lesson: a purely military reading of Yemen misses where most of the suffering actually happens. Which lens you use decides what you measure, what you fund, and what "winning" would even mean.