Critically assess the changing nature of the concept of national security. (2002, 2010, 2014, 15 Marks)
Security means freedom from threat. Arnold Wolfers called national security an “ambiguous symbol” (1952): objectively the absence of threats to acquired values, subjectively the absence of fear that they will be attacked. What has changed since 1945 is the answer to three questions: security of whom, from what, and by what means.
The traditional conception
- Walter Lippmann (1943) held a nation secure when it need not sacrifice core values to avoid war and could defend them by victory if challenged. With Hans J. Morgenthau, realists made the state the referent, external attack the threat, and armies, alliances and deterrence the means.
- Coherent for the Cold War, it was blind to people inside the state and to threats no army could see.
How the concept changed
- Widening. Barry Buzan‘s People, States and Fear (1983) added political, economic, societal and environmental sectors to the military one.
- Deepening. The UNDP report of 1994 moved the referent to the individual: human security spans economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. Ken Booth (1991) equated security with emancipation.
- Postcolonial correction. Mohammed Ayoob showed that new states face mainly internal threats from incomplete state-making. Non-aligned states argued that people without food could not afford the arms race of the industrial North.
- New threats. Non-state actors, cyber attacks, pandemics and climate change are transnational, travel fast in an ICT-linked world and are interlinked: recession drives migration, migration strains food and environment, scarcity breeds conflict.
- Constructivist turn. The Copenhagen School (Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde) treats security as a speech act: issues become threats when successfully securitised.
Critical assessment
- Loss of precision. Stephen M. Walt (1991) warned that folding pollution or recession into security destroys the field’s coherence.
- Securitisation risk. Labelling migration or dissent a security issue licenses emergency powers and shrinks liberty.
- Return of hard security. World military spending hit a record $2,887 billion in 2025 (SIPRI). Ukraine, the Pahalgam attack (April 2025) and India’s Operation Sindoor (May 2025) show the army is not obsolete.
- Hybrid threats. The 2026 Hormuz restrictions, which endangered some 45% of India’s crude imports, fused military and energy security.
- Rhetoric over resources. Human security changed the vocabulary of policy more than its budgets, and developing states resisted it as a licence for intervention.
The Indian experience
India’s official idiom is comprehensive national security: a two-front military problem alongside internal security, energy, water and cyber threats, coordinated by the National Security Council system. Yet India has published no National Security Strategy ranking these threats, which shows how hard the widened concept is to prioritise.
Conclusion
National security has become multidimensional and people-centred in language while remaining state-centric in practice and budgets. The defensible position keeps the military core but asks every time whose security is at stake and who gains from calling something a threat.