State of Play and the Road Ahead

In the globalizing twenty-first century, just about everything affects human rights and just about everything affects security. Conflicts large and small, detectable and covert, range across physical and virtual space, spurred by the proliferation of dramatic technological developments such as armed drones, lethal autonomous robots, and tools of cyberconflict. How do we reconcile these emerging security threats with a universal commitment to human rights? This chapter describes the political state of play in this complex landscape and explains how the chapters that follow in this part map the emerging legal and human rights dilemmas that flow from armed drone warfare, cyberconflict, ‘securitizing’ human rights, and pursuing sustainable security. It closes by offering the imperative of ‘humanizing security’ as the most promising way to reconcile these concepts in the future.