Biosecurity

Ebola: Rethinking Security

Ebola is more than a potential pandemic; it is a prime example of the importance of viewing “security” much more broadly than traditional definitions, which have focused on power, military might, and defensive and offensive capabilities. Human security pushes us to envision security as much more complicated and interconnected. As Derek S. Reveron and Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris describe in their book Human Security in a Borderless World, this more nuanced understanding of security requires we focus on issues of “globalization, climate change, pandemic diseases, endemic poverty, weak and failing states, transnational narcotics trafficking, piracy and vulnerable information systems.”