Reclaiming Human Security in an Age of Global Fragility: Structural Violence, Posthuman Ethics, and the Politics of Care

Three decades after the United Nations Development Programme introduced the concept of human security (1994), this continues to evolve under the pressures of ecological collapse, datafication, and new forms of global inequality. This article maps key concepts which can guide our thinking on contemporary human security. It offers an expanded theoretical framework integrating structural and slow violence with new materialism and feminist posthuman ethics. Drawing on the scholarship of Johan Galtung, Rob Nixon, Rosi Braidotti, Achille Mbembe, and Naomi Klein, the paper argues that human security must shift from an anthropocentric to a zoe-centered paradigm. Such paradigm offers a framework for harmonious coexistence of human, inhuman and non-human beings alike, one that situates care, interdependence, and planetary justice at its core. Four renewal paths – normative, ecological, technological, and epistemic – are developed to guide this transformation. The paper concludes with a call for epistemic humility and collective ethical responsibility – particularly by knowledge producers such as academics – toward subaltern communities and future generations.