This book is testimony to the emergent nature of human security as an idea, as a useful construct and as an operational strategy. The aim is to showcase new directions that may enrich the human security agenda. Some human security discourse is still rooted in the traditional language of the aid-agency/UN development/economic growth models, often hostile to the corporate and business sector, and sometimes negligent of sustainability and climate change issues. Another limited and outmoded approach is an exaggerated focus on Western interventions, especially military ones, as a "solution" to problems in poor or conflict-prone areas.

"Human Security" was introduced as a construct by the UNDP in 1994. The inherent combination of law-enforcement and people-centred humanitarianism has strived to provide an umbrella to both protect people from threats while empowering them to control their destinies. But with accelerating economic globalization and information flows there is a need to revisit the concept. A new paradigm of Sustainable Human Security is required. This book argues that proponents of a human security approach should welcome efforts to remove the barriers between enterprise, corporations, aid and development agencies, government agencies, citizen groups and the UN; and work towards multi-stakeholder approaches and solutions for vulnerable populations. Such an approach is clearly vital in responding to the imperatives of concerted action on issues such as climate change, HIV, terrorism, organised crime and poverty. The agenda may have changed, but it remains true that almost all human tragedies are avoidable.

This book examines a number of global problems through the lens of human security and the needs of the individual: global governance; health; the environment and the exploitation of natural resources; peace and reconciliation; the responsibility to protect; and economic development and prosperity. In the latter case, the role of business in the human security pantheon is promulgated. There are many reasons why businesses may want to engage with the needs of vulnerable populations – not least the fact that companies cannot function without secure trading environments. In addition, there are growing demands for corporate responsibility and citizenship from markets, customers, shareholders, employees and, critically, communities.

This book throws new light on the human security agenda. It will be essential reading for anyone involved in the debates on human security as well as for practitioners and scholars in international affairs, global governance, peace studies, climate change and the environment, healthcare, responsibility to protect and corporate responsibility.

Dr. Paula Martín-Salván is Associate Professor of English at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her current research focuses on the representation of communities in modernist and postmodernist fiction, in the light of theorizations by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and J. Hillis Miller. Her recent publications include the edited volume Community in Twentieth Century Fiction (Palgrave 2013, co-eds. Julián Jiménez and Gerardo Rodríguez) and the monograph The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene’s Fiction (Palgrave 2015).

Dr. Gerardo Rodríguez Salas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Granada (Spain). He has published on literary theory and twentieth-century women’s fiction (Mansfield, Hurston, Stein, Frame, Carter, Bird) and is a specialist in New Zealand and Australian Literature. He is the author of three books on Katherine Mansfield (the latest by Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) and co-editor of Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Palgrave, 2013). His most recent articles/chapters have appeared in Continuum, Palgrave, Australian Literary Studies, Antipodes, FEMSPEC, JASAL, Bilingual Review, Atlantis and Meanjin.

Dr. Maria J. Lopez teaches in the English Department at the University of Córdoba, Spain, where she received her PhD in English Literature in 2008. She has published Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (Rodopi, 2011), has co-edited the special number "J.M. Coetzee and the non-English Literary Traditions" in EJES (2016), and has published in journals such as the Journal of Southern African Studies (Terence Ranger Prize 2010), the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, English Studies, or English in Africa.