’Security’ as a Legal Concept: developing a clear conception of the role and power of rights as ‘brakes’ on security action

Security and insecurity have important and often distorting impacts on law.
A powerful rhetorical and political notion, ‘security’ is at once capable of underpinning repressive state action and forming the basis of human rights claims against the state for protection from public and private violence. In respect of the former, states and international organisations often justify actions that undermine freedom of expression, association, religious practice and belief, as well as the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment, by reference to security. In respect of the latter, marginalised and vulnerable individuals and groups often underpin their (legal and political claims) for police protection against inter-personal violence on a putative ‘right to security’.

The confluence of these invocations of ‘security’ to compel state action creates intriguing territory for rights. On the one hand these differing demands are rights-driven: they have the potential to produce improvements in baseline security and thus help to address a serious global public health challenge: inter-personal violence. On the other hand they may legitimate over-reaching state action that undermines legal standards of rights protection intended to strictly limit what states may do, including what they may do in pursuit of security.

Security is, then, a key category for a range of disciplines, including law. As a concept it requires careful analysis, but while political science, geography, criminology, sociology, conflict studies, and computer science have developed discipline-specific understandings of security, law has not. While much legal scholarship, and international policy-making, recognises security and rights as interconnected and interdependent values and goals, there is limited available work on how the two can be effectively conceptualised in one, multi-faceted understanding of security. Security is, thus, something that has a clear exogenous impact on law and legal analyses but which does not itself have meaningful content as a legal concept. This project will address that vital lacuna to develop a theoretically rich, practically applicable understanding of security that is both empowering and limiting, and which includes within it a clear conception of the role and power of rights as ‘brakes’ on security action.

This is vital for attempts to address the global challenge of building resilience (including effective and inclusive institutions) in the face of insecurity, risk and shocks. Many international policy approaches to these challenges deploy legal instruments across a range of fields from financial regulation to police accountability and health care provision that are designed to deliver rights protection but which can be disturbed by perceived security risks. A rigorous concept of security as a legal category is, thus, vital to design, implement, and appraise (trans)national approaches to the great challenges of (among other things) hunger, poverty, climate change and adaptation, violence, and inequality that face the world today and which are the target of the SDGs.

The successful candidate for this project will have:

• A First Class Honours degree in Law or cognate discipline (such as international relations) and, preferably, a Masters degree in Law or cognate discipline;
• Demonstrated knowledge of international law including international human rights law;
• Evidence of capacity for cross-disciplinary research;
• Excellent written communication skills;
• Capacity to work independently;
• A commitment to public engagement and the broad dissemination of research;
• Enthusiasm for the project;
• Demonstrated appreciation of the role (and limitations) of law in tackling ‘global challenges’

For more details on the scholarship, please visit our University webpage: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgr/global-challenges-scholarship.aspx