McSweeney, Bill. "The Meaning of Security". In Security, Identity, and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations, by Bill McSweeney, 13-22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- The view of security as a military and policing issue, focused on physical security and the security of property rights, rather than a broader conception of human security is likely because security officials are trained to value quantifiable scientific information over subjective perceptions of security, and because the state finds it much more difficult to make people feel secure than to build forts or increase the size of security forces (15).
- The original meaning of 'security' was without cares, stemming from the Latin root of 'se' -- without -- and 'cura' -- worry or care. This meaning of carelessness died out by the mid-1800s, transformed into a meaning of something being fixed, predictable, and stable. The noun 'security' has evolved more narrowly during the end of the 18th Century, shifting its meaning from the state of being secure to referring primary to the means -- e.g., police, locks, guns, etc. -- by which that being secure is achieved (16-18).
- The fully modern association between security, particularly 'national security', and the military stems from the mid-1940s, when scholars made an active attempt to unite military affairs and foreign policy under the concept of 'security'. This new conception encapsulated a larger vision of national defense including not only the military, but all aspects of society (19-20).
- A major change following the 1940s was a transformation of the subject of security. Whereas previous definitions had discussed individual security, the new definition applied primarily to the security of the state. During the Cold War, all other forms of 'security' were subsumed into the concept of 'national security' (21-22).
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