The second generation of human security: lessons from the UN and EU experience

The concept of human security, while much contested in both academic and policy debates, and highly fragmented across different meanings and forms of implementation, offers a potential locus around which global security discourse might converge, particularly in light of current shifts in US security thinking. However, key pioneers of human security, such as the United Nations and Canada, appear to be losing their enthusiasm for the concept, just at the moment when others such as the European Union, are advancing a human security agenda. This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN's use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.     

Public Gifts and Political Identities: Sir Richard Acland, Common Wealth, and the Moral Politics of Land Ownership in the 1940s

Richard Acland's political career with the Common Wealth Partyhas formed an important reference point in debates on the characterof popular politics during the 1940s, as well as a larger narrativeof the influence of radicalism in British public life. WhilstAcland's subsequent career as a moral educationalist and peacecampaigner has been largely ignored, his postwar fame dependedheavily on his celebrated transfer of substantial landed estatesto the National Trust at a key point in his public life. Wesuggest that this famous ‘gift’ was the result ofcomplex calculations in which Acland sought to maximize thepolitical capital from this private asset. The authorized familyversion of this transaction was also the product of a personalstruggle within the family. It is possible to interpert Acland'scampaigns as a belated attempt by a provincial landowner toreverse the declining influence of the gentry by the promotionof a fresh moral politics which was beset by the contradictionsof Acland's leadership as well as by organizational failures     

THE EARLIEST USE OF CORUNDUM AND DIAMOND,IN PREHISTORIC CHINA*

The majority of prehistoric lithic artefacts were fashioned from rocks and minerals no harder than quartz, and there is no prehistoric evidence for the working of harder materials, such as corundum and diamond. The earliest physical evidence for the use of corundum (ruby, sapphire) is thought to be the abrasive grit recovered from Bronze Age Minoan quartz beads (c. 1700–1500 bc ), while diamond is thought to have been used no earlier than 500 bc , in India. Here we show that corundum was worked c. 4000–3500 bc during the Neolithic period in China, in the form of polished axes from the Liangzhu and Sanxingcun cultures. We also present physical evidence that later Liangzhu axes (c. 2500 bc ), made from the same previously undescribed rock whose most abundant component is corundum, were polished to a mirror‐like finish with a diamond abrasive. Our findings, which are the first to support the use of corundum and diamond in a prehistoric context, may also help to explain the trademark feature of the Neolithic in China, vast quantities of finely polished nephrite jade artefacts.