By Lieke Prins During the three months of my fieldwork in Medellín (the second-largest city in Colombia) I researched the political ideology of social science students and how this ideology manifested itself in practice. In order to understand their position and their actions, I lived with two Colombian students and participated in their day-to-day life. From the very first moment that I met the two girls, I noticed their passion concerning the construction of peace, their resistance movements against the politically right capitalist mindset, their fight for justice and their search for human security. Not only did they resist, they dedicated all of their time to build – for what they believed to be – a better Colombia. During interviews, observations and heaps of informal conversations with my roommates and their peers I started to understand the conflict, the political ideology and the actions of the students step by step. However, on the 17th of March, during the national strike I felt and experienced the pain and the hurt and the necessity for change for the first time.
Tag: human security
Yesterday, members of our department and Thomas H. Eriksen (Oslo University) presented their new book A World of Insecurity. This collection of essays is the result of years of fruitful cooperation and debate in the context of the department’s research programme, Constructing Human Security in a Globalizing World (CONSEC), and it provides a captivating sample of the research carried out by our staff.
The concept of Human Security was introduced by the UN Development Programme in 1994, in order to expand the scope of development work and research. Human Security was defined as ‘freedom from want and freedom from fear’. This books draws on a different approach that includes subjective and existential dimensions in an area which has been dominated by quantitative and ‘objective’ measurements of well-being.
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