Centre for Research on Security Practices

How do we define security? Does security mean increased surveillance and weaponization? Is it the feeling of home and belonging? Who deserves security, and how is this state of security realized at both local and national levels? And how may these definitions of security be at odds?

Security is a broad and often contested term, which nonetheless dominates both public discourse and the policy landscape. While this definition remains in flux in the face of emergent issues such as health pandemics, migration, war, homelessness, income disparity, and other forms of marginalization, it is nonetheless critical to understand security as a means to generate connections between practices and experiences of security and securitization.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) provides a framework for defining “human security” as a freedom from fear, want, poverty and despair, and the work of the Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP) both engages and extends this definition. We do so by thinking through global and state-level practices of security and securitization that uphold structural forms of power and which, somewhat paradoxically, leaves particular populations vulnerable. CRSP takes this tension as the heart of its work and the place through which a more fulsome and productive notion of security may be generated. We do so not only through traditional academic methods, but also through the use of innovative and applied methodologies.