Human security assemblages. Transformations and governmental rationalities in Canada and Japan.

Abstract

The thesis examines Canadian and Japanese human security assemblages. It aims to delve below stereotypical imageries ¿representing¿ these human security articulations. The concept of ¿human security¿ is not a starting point, but a result of elements, processes, structures and mechanisms which need to be investigated in order to reveal insights about a given articulation of human security. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. Academics have frequently avoided studying the messiness of political discourses and practices and their mutual dependencies or their lack thereof. By contrast, this thesis ascertains what has lain beneath Canadian and Japanese spatio-temporal articulation of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrain which have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of certain versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the thesis is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country¿s advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan¿s bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences.