The Right to Security - Securing Rights or Securitising Rights

Abstract

The right to security is inherently ambiguous. It encapsulates on one hand a commitment to rights, which we commonly associate with absence from coercion, but on the other hand a commitment to coercion in the name of individual and collective security. This ambiguity has been exploited in complex ways, and has particular implications. The political implications of the extension of the right to security, and the direction in which political rhetoric is taking the right, raise the stakes required in clarifying and delimiting the right even further. This chapter will thus seek to present reasons for limiting the right to security to the narrowest possible set of claims and correlative duties on the state, and even to think of a ‘right to insecurity’. It will be divided into four further parts: the next will explore the varied legal meanings attributed to the right to security; the third will examine rhetorical expressions of the right to security; the fourth will explore attempts to cast security as a meta-right and the problems involved with this; and the fifth will examine the risks inherent in the symbiotic process of ‘securitising rights’ and ‘righting security’.