Human Security Psychology: A Linking Construct for an Eclectic Discipline

Key Dimensions of Human Security

HS has emerged as a broad, interdisciplinary concept that was coined by the United Nations Development Program (1994) and developed across different disciplines and regions (Black & Swatuk, 2009; Chourou, 2009; Commission on Human security, 2003; Fukuda-Parr & Messineo, 2012; Kaldor, 2007; Najam, 2003; Othman, 2009; Poku & Sandkjaer, 2009; Sabur, 2009; United Nations Development Programme, 1994; Wun Gaeo, 2009). This development has contributed to broadening ideas about security in various disciplines (e.g. Security Studies, Politics, International Relations) out beyond a prior fixation on the nation state and militaristic concerns to overtly centralise the needs of human beings (Fukuda-Parr & Messineo, 2012). Whilst conceptualisations and explorations of HS remain varied (see Bajpai, 2003; Chandler, 2008; Martin & Owen, 2010; MacFarlane & Khong, 2006; Paris, 2001; Tadjbakhsh & Chenoy, 2007), the shift in focus to people signals the importance of the psychology of security (discussed below). Relatedly, some formulations adopt narrower foci on particular threats, such political violence (MacFarlane & Khong, 2006) or intergroup conflicts (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998). Conversely, others adopt a broader conceptualisation that encompasses all threats to humanity (Alkire, 2003; Commission on Human security, 2003; Glušac et al., 2001; Hampson & Penny, 2007; Haq, 1994; Japan, 1999; Sen, 2000; United Nations Trust Fund for Human security, 1994). Rather than rehearse these differences of scope, this article adopts the broad position that HS underpins the protection and advancement of people within and across societies.

We adopt the stance that HS refers to a multifaceted and somewhat aspirational state whereby people experience freedom from threats, restrictions and discrimination, to go about their daily lives with dignity and without harm. Advancements to this state with a psychological sense of security require efforts to alleviate threats and to support people to address their needs. These efforts include those associated with economics, food and water, social structures, environmental and political conditions, interpersonal and intergroup relationships and so forth. As such, promoting HS involves psychologically and materially orientated efforts to understand, establish and support the conditions for human beings to be secure and to respond to situations of insecurity on personal, community, societal and global scales.

Contributing significantly to conceptual work in this space, the landmark 1994 United Nations Report that formalised the term Human Security proposed seven dimensions: Personal, Health, Food, Environmental, Community, Economic and Political. (1) Personal security means living free from violence; (2) Health security encompasses protection from disease and infection, alongside access to affordable health care; (3) Food security entails both physical and financial access to nutritious food; (4) Environmental security is concerned with the integrity and health of the physical environment; (5) Community security is about safe neighbourhoods, and peaceful intergroup relations; (6) Economic security centres on regular basic incomes and (7) Political security is about ensuring basic human rights. Extending these categories of HS within psychology, Carr, Hopner, et al. (2021) added two further dimensions: (8) National security focuses on the safety of countries from both traditional and non-traditional threats and (9) Cybersecurity encompasses the safety of information technology, critical infrastructure and associated digital hazards. In an age of major climate change, socio-economic disruptions and where distinctions between domestic and foreign are becoming moot somewhat (as is highlighted by organised crime and terrorism), we also need to consider a further dimension, (10) Global security. Categorising such dimensions is important, but this is not an exhaustive list. It must be kept open to further developments, and we need to theorise how such dimensions emerge and relate to one another as interrelated elements of HS.

It is important to explore how different dimensions of HS interact and often work in concert in shaping situations of risk and safety. For instance, economic security can be enhanced through the provision of liveable wages that enable people to experience increased food security by being able to afford decent food. However, this positive shift is only sustainable if global warming is curtailed ensuring that the environment within which food is produced is protected or secured. In turn, alleviating hunger and increasing access to nutritious food can enhance people’s psychological and physical wellbeing. Healthier and more resilient people can then actively contribute to community service and security, which supports reductions in violence and crime. Secure communities also increase the likelihood that local inhabitants can participate in collective efforts that contribute to political stability and in turn national security. Relatedly, securing access to digital infrastructure can also enhance peoples’ civic participation and open further avenues that secur their economic livelihoods. Global security is often enhanced through national and international arrangements that protect personal, economic, food, health, cyber, national, environmental and political securities.

Recent human tragedies reveal just how these various dimensions of HS are entangled and often mutually influential. For example, interconnections between dimensions were apparent in Afghanistan in August 2021, when over 60,000 people fled from Kunduz (one of Afghanistan’s largest cities) ahead of the Taliban advance. Bombing and weapons fire in parts of Afghanistan wreaked significant damage on the environment. Markets were destroyed reducing access to food and diminishing livelihoods and correspondingly economic security. Internally displaced persons moving into public parks in the capital of Kabul exacerbated a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which then engulfed Afghanistan and further undermined the health of people striving to survive illnesses associated with poor sanitation from overcrowding. Personal security was severely undermined as evidenced by images of men, accused of theft, tarred and paraded through the streets. Taliban edicts were reportedly issued to single or widowed women of particular ages requiring them to marry Taliban fighters. The collapse of the government and President Ghani’s hasty exit from the country exacerbated existing points of political and national insecurity.

Interconnections between dimensions of HS are also embedded in wider ecologies of [in]security that are typically obscured. The outcomes of the Taliban advance played out in a highly Eurocentric-securitised landscape featuring long histories of foreign domination, colonial agendas and biopolitics (Howell & Ritcher-Montpetit, 2019). Situations of human [in]security experienced recently in Afghanistan also emerged from histories of intergroup and even intersocietal relations. As Gruffydd Jones (2015, p. 65) asserts, military interventions in the so-called ‘failed state’ of Afghanistan were ‘irredeemably rooted in an imperial and racialized imagination’. This imagination is often used to legitimise the hegemonic status of the United States and its allies and when coupled with the poorly planned withdrawal facilitated the events in Kunduz and Kabul in 2021.

Such cascading threats to HS are not out of place in countries such as the United States (US) where unliveable wages and growing economic inequalities are driving falls in standards of living and social relations. These inequalities are aggravated by inadequate welfare supports, and barriers to health care and decent food for the hundreds of thousands of people now congregating in shanty towns in parks, and on the edges of cities. The cascading effects of insecurity have been dampened somewhat by societal stability and wealth in the U.S. However, increasing economic insecurity, growing income inequalities and increased deprivation within such wealthy states is exacerbating political polarisation and increasing the appeal of populism (Lonergan & Blyth, 2020) and conspiracy theories (Bergman, 2018). These developments are contributing to increased societal instability. The threats to HS in these societies are also the products of interactions between various elements, including those associated with neoliberal agendas and racial, gendered and classed hierarchies. But in these cases, the national situations have been more stable because of the continued functioning of key institutional mechanisms. However, these are not immune to reconfiguration and in directions that undermine HS more generally.

Human Security as a Nexus of Dynamic Assemblages

Given that dimensions of HS are dynamic, processual and interconnected, there is merit in conceptualising human security, at least provisionally from the vantage point of Assemblage Theory (Hopner et al., 2021). Assemblage Theory was introduced by Deleuze and Guattari to make sense of the processes via which any whole or entity from molecules to natural organisms, species and ecosystems take form. It was argued that similar processes of emergence appear to occur across a range of scales. This is not to say that the resulting assemblages are the same, but rather the processes through which various entities take form resonates whether an assemblage is associated with biological or socio-cultural processes. Correspondingly, both natural and socio-cultural entities and processes are considered interdependent. For example, this is evident in how increasingly severe weather events are shaped by human-induced climate changes. Mitigating changes to climate requires the rethinking of human practices associated with present political and economic systems.

Foundational to Assemblage Theory is an orientation towards the world as an emerging or contingent ecosystem that takes shape through the dynamics of stability and instability (Anderson et al., 2012). From this perspective, the world is emergent and comprises a nexus of various assemblages or dynamic socio-material formations. These assemblages are constituted through the congregation or drawing and holding together of heterogeneous human and non-human elements – including persons, institutions, technologies, places, procedures and norms – within a recognisable and relational terrain (Anderson et al., 2012; DeLanda, 2006/2019; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). HS is entangled within a nexus of socio-political, cultural, economic and personal relations/assemblages within which various elements fit together and mutually influence one another.

Reflecting the entanglement of human and non-human elements within such assemblages, what are often positioned in analytical psychology as externalities or contextual factors are no longer positioned as extraneous variables. These factors can be repositioned as key elements within assembling situations of [in]security that are arranged according to social psychological processes and power structures evident in the ongoing dynamics and intersections of economics, culture, gender, class, place, wealth, and so forth (McFarlane, 2011). These elements combine to constitute an ontology of emergence through relational processes of assemblage, dis-assemblage and re-assemblage that span the natural and socio-cultural aspects of human existence. As Sellar (2009, p. 69) notes, this emergent ontology ‘…functions as a key strength by emphasising that all wholes are themselves the products of underlying processes and relations that can never be said to be completely or finally fixed’. This means that even if we have addressed security concerns associated with a particular flood by coordinating relief efforts and offering appropriate psychological supports, another flood may be a few months away. Disasters can reassemble, but people can also learn from previous events, anticipate, prepare for and with the right resources mitigate particular negative consequences. Correspondingly, disaster assemblages can be conceptualised as comprising the conditional combination of sets of human and non-human elements within dynamic processes of stability and transformation, which often draw together aspects of various dimensions of HS.

The holding together and dynamic ordering or positioning of elements, entities and structures in relation to one another within such assemblages is termed territorialisation. For our purposes, territorialisation refers to the dynamic positioning, inter-relating and reordering of elements (personal, economic, national, cyber and so on) within the evolving mosaic that is HS (DeLanda, 2006, 2019). Various elements of HS cohere and reassemble as situations change. Whilst a HS assemblage is open to dis-assemblage and reassemblage in particular situations, these formations often appear to us as stable structures due to processes of territorialisation and sedimentation that hold various elements in place (McGuirk et al., 2016). The contingent holding together of various elements is central to assembling through emergent connective alliances wherein ‘…. new connections occur and old one’s rupture’ (Hillier & Abrahams, 2013, p. 20). As elements [re]order (reterritorialised) within connective alliances they come to comprise an evolving ‘geography of relations’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987). Ongoing processes of the territorialisation, deterritorialisation (removing) and reterritorialisation (repositioning) of elements are central to the dynamic coherence, taking apart and re-construction of the different dimensions of HS. These processes are entwined, whereby ‘while territorialization gives dimension and consistency to an assemblage and consolidates certain relationships, deterritorialization enables the emergence of new properties through the inclusion of new components and subsequent relations’ (Sellar, 2009, p. 71). From this perspective, dimensions of HS are shaped through a complex network of territorialised alliances between key elements. Further, some key elements, such as a psychological sense of security are territorialised across different dimensions as the persons concerned navigate the terrain of their everyday lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies how when new assemblages form these often draw together elements form existing assemblages in creating new events, developments and changes in HS (Jacobs, 2006). We can think of the emergent pandemic assemblage process using the metaphor of a snowball that gets bigger as it rolls together various elements. For example, the pandemic emerged initially on a local scale when a human being contracted the virus and spread it to others. Through viral transmission it expanded over time into a global HS development that is comprised of connective alliances (networks) between biological processes, persons, groups, places, supply chains, institutions, economies, political systems, and so forth. Processes of territorialisation situated such existing elements from personal, community, economic and health assemblages in relation to new emergent elements, such as lockdowns, border closures, workflow redesigns and global scientific collaborations to create and distribute vaccines. There is empirical support for the emphasis we are placing on the centrality of the dynamic relations between different elements, including place and politics in the assemblage of the pandemic. For example, Syropoulis et al. (2021) reported that across nation states, those with more harmonious relationships between groups and with other nations, and with higher levels of equality, social justice and social security were more prepared for and experienced better outcomes from the COVID-19 pandemic. The rhetorical styles adopted by different countries’ leaders in different nations also reflected tremendous variances in policy used to respond to the pandemic and associated effectiveness. The old formula of building national solidarity was most effective in pandemic prevention (Hopner et al., 2021; Vignoles et al., 2021), but given existing cleavages and differential impacts of the pandemic, this was easier said than done in many jurisdictions (Chan et al., 2021).

Combined, pandemic elements noted above populate various efforts to secure personal, community, national, food, environmental and economic security. Further, the dynamics of effort, assemblage and change are located in the unfolding of time in general, but speed up within particular key moments. Resembling Lewin’s (1947) concept of ‘unfreezing moments’ (Lewin, 1947), Liu et al., (2014) define ‘critical junctures’ as moments of potential for substantive change in societal and national systems. As new connective alliances between elements such as health systems, supply chains and politics gained traction across different nation states, we also saw the stubborn reproduction of inequities of access to resources, including vaccines and food to sustain people across the world. As the peak of the pandemic recedes, it is becoming apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic presented the unrealized potential to become an historically salient critical juncture. The pandemic does not appear to have substantially reassembled existing national health systems in the direction of increased equity, nor the international system of trade and aid that configures health outcomes for different individuals, classes and nations.

Whilst not always referring overtly to Assemblage Theory, sources cited just above reflect how psychologists are beginning to employ assemblage thinking to consider how key elements and processes combine (assemble), and recombine (reassemble), to shape the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hopner et al., 2021; Montiel et al., 2021; Syropoulos et al., 2021). Empirically, such joined up thinking can orientate psychologists in a flexible manner towards the processual, agentive and socio-material complexities that are central to different dimensions of HS developments such as the pandemic, as well as to how key elements work in collective alliance both within and between dimensions. As the pandemic continues to evolve as a multidimensional HS event, some emergent elements (e.g. lockdowns, border closures) are now being deterritorialised and this is associated with political tensions regarding where the balance should be reached between prioritising health, economic, and other dimensions of HS.

Assemblage thinking can also inform our understanding of the experiences and actions of people as they are caught up in real time and evolving situations at different scales from personal to group, nation, region and globe. For example, Colebrook (2002) and Yulianto et al. (2021) have also drawn upon Assemblage Theory to argue that human beings can be approached as key elements within assemblages that are shaped through various situational, social, historical and genetic assemblages. This structurally orientated theory does not lose sight of the person, but rather positions the person and the psychological centrally within emergent developments such as the pandemic in which people often respond to threats and risks with personal and collective agency. This line of reasoning is in accord with contemporary understandings of the interconnected self (Kaya & Kale, 2016; King et al., 2017), whereby people are conceptualised as agentive beings whose actions also have consequences for the very structures within which they are located (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). These are important considerations because people, especially leaders in moments of crisis (see Haslam & Reicher, 2007) often exercise considerable agency in the face of material and psychological restraints when attempting to securitise themselves and those around them. Their efforts can also be restrained through the agentive acts of different persons, political factions, institutional practices and material situations.

An assemblage orientation to the human self also offers a broader understanding of agency and influence between the human and non-human elements of assemblages (Hamilakis & Jones, 2017). As Sellar (2009, p. 73) proposes, ‘the concept of a single and fixed point of agency, unique to humans no longer holds as the human itself is constituted by the physical, social and cultural elements with which it relates’. This theoretical assertion is important when thinking about HS developments, such as pandemics, whereby a virus can be seen as exhibiting a form of agency in influencing reactions from the human beings it infects. Further, at critical junctures different elements carry agency or have a greater influence on the unfolding events, only to then fade out of prominence at other conjunctures (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). This stance on the agency of non-human elements is not out of place in indigenous psychological thinking whereby material objects, for example, have a lifeforce of their own and agentive functions in shaping human experience, actions, ways-of- being and lives (Decolonial Psychology Editorial Collective, 2021; Guimarães, 2020; King et al., 2017).

Briefly, Assemblage Theory is useful for expending present understandings of HS and the development of HSP. This theory positions people as interconnected with various human and non-human elements of the world, including histories of intergroup and intersocietal relations (Kaya & Kale, 2016; King et al., 2017; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). From this perspective, HS and experiences of insecurity are the agentive product of various relational influences within which people are immersed. Whilst we have theorised HS as an assemblage based on an emergent and processual ontology in this section, it is important to also consider how issues of security have been theorised, researched and responded to at key points throughout the history of psychology. This is crucial for us to situate our assemblage-based orientation to HSP within the discipline.

The Focus on Security in Psychology

Theorising, research and practice regarding HS concerns in psycology has been eclectic, drawing on both analytical and continental philosophical traditions, and spanning humanistic, psychoanalytical, social cognitive and critical paradigms (Abrams & Hogg, 1988; Adler, 1925; Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Bowlby, 1969; 1982; Dontsov & Perelygina, 2013; Goldgeier, 1997; Hodgetts et al., 2020; Maslow, 1942; Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Schneier, 2008; Zinchenko, 2011; Zotova, 2011). Although eclectic, such scholarship has predominantly focused on psychological security as a mental appraisal system. This system is understood to be shaped by cultural processes and ideologies that connect individual minds to the world through various attachments to other people, shared identities and particular personal and intergroup relational contexts (Bar-Tal, 1990; Dontsov et al., 2013; Mercer, 1995; Schneier, 2008; Zinchenko, 2011). This psychological ‘sense of security’ is thought to have real world implications and can be undermined by threatening experiences and fear (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Dontsov & Perelygina, 2013; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), which result in experiences of insecurity and reduced wellbeing (Munyon et al., 2020). Depending on a person’s perceived ability to act, such a sense of insecurity can both motivate actions to mitigate a threat or undermine responses (Harding et al., 2018; Lazarus, 1991).

Considerable insights into the importance of HS can be found throughout the history of our discipline and early theoretical formulations continue to influence contemporary theory, research and practice. For example, Adler’s (1925) individual psychology presents a general understanding of human beings that foregrounds the importance of secure environments (including interdependence with others, positive vocational arrangements and amicable societal structures) for equality, cultivating well-functioning persons and mitigating experiences (feelings) of insecurity. Maslow 1940’s humanistic psychology was influenced by Adler’s work and further identified HS in its general form as a key human need. In Maslow’s (1942) view, security needs encompass personal, emotional, health and financial considerations. Maslow positioned feelings of insecurity as a subjective human reaction to different situations that can be read today as reflecting the interwoven nature of various dimensions of HS. For these seminal scholars, psychological security was seen as a sense of secure personhood that is achieved through attachments to other people, institutions and society. Ultimately, such early perspectives invoked an ideal or aspirational world characterised by benevolence in which persons can feel as if they belong, are safe, happy and included because their psychological and material needs are met. Along similar lines, but from a later social cognitive perspective, social psychologists have similarly focused on issues of belonging and how people gain a sense of psychological security through attachments to, and identification with particular groups and contexts (Mercer, 1995; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Derivatively, the range of situations producing intergroup anxiety/uncertainty feeding into feelings of threat and the different types of group-based threat emerging from different situations have been extensively theorised (Stephan et al., 1999).

From a social cognitive perspective, appraisals of threats and one’s ability to respond effectively are central to a person’s sense of security. For example, Lazarus and Folkman (1984) argued that the experience of insecurity and fear is a psychological manifestation linked to two appraisals: The first relates to the appraisal made by the person to identify a threat (early evaluation), and the second is an appraisal of their ability to adequately deal with the threat. The focus is on psychological security as a cognitive process involving heuristically based decision-making processes that trade-off the severity and probability of any threat against the magnitude of costs and the perceived effectiveness of any countermeasures (Schneier, 2008). Such appraisals extend beyond concerns of personal security. They also relate to collective security as evaluated by different people, including experts, high-ranking officials, and religious, community, cultural and political leaders. Additionally, understandings and responses to threats are not solely mediated by rational cognitive appraisals of situations. They are also shaped by emotions (particularly fear) that can motivate people to take particular actions to try and ensure some security for themselves, whilst at times undermining the security of others (Harding et al., 2018; Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1993).

Further, a sense of insecurity does not depend solely on subjective psychological factors, or an evaluation of an objective material reality. In the practical world, the cues, information and emotional states people rely upon to assess threats are often limited, shifting and tinged by material restraints and a range of human, relational and perceptive noise (Simon, 1990). Why is this so? For a number of reasons: First, evolving situations are often unclear and difficult to comprehend. Even the abilities of ‘experts’ to predict future developments are constrained (Tetlock, 2009). Thus, it is difficult to draw unequivocal conclusions about a present state of affairs and/or future situations. Under these circumstances, people tend to rely on their own, or other people’s, subjective appraisals of events as there is no other way to assess the dangers facing the person, group, country or globe. Second, in many cases, populations do not hold all the information necessary to make credible evaluations of threats, and so rely on partial and often conflicting reports (this is even so for political leaders and experts) (Achen & Bartels, 2017). Third, there are often many factors affecting appraisals made by different individuals of the two issues posed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984). People diverge in their material situations, beliefs, cultures, ideologies, shared narratives, feelings, experiences and their knowledge about specific HS developments. Thus, they can differ widely in their appraisals of threats, and their abilities to cope and respond to ensure their own and others’ security (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998).

Relatedly, psychological security has been approached as an achievable state realised through varying degrees of overcoming actual threats and gaining protection against adverse possibilities, which is fundamentally driven by a human need for stability, safety and security. It has also been proposed that from childhood, each of us cultivates a personal view of the world derived from perceptions of security and danger, which is shaped through collective meaning systems. Stability is achieved through routine, often relating to secure employment, being loved, experiences of law and order, as well as cultural and national safety (Zotova, 2011). Zinchenko (2011) argues that a sense of security can be usefully viewed as a psychological system that is anchored in broader group-based meaning systems, ideologies and situations in society (Bar-Tal, 1990; Dontsov et al., 2013; Zinchenko, 2011). Dontsov et al. (2013) extend this conceptualisation to consider how a focus on human collective existence within various diverse groupings can illuminate how personal and collective consciousness of security is shaped by culture, history, economics, political and intergroup relations (Dontsov & Perelygina, 2013; Zinchenko, 2011; Zinchenko & Zotova, 2014; Zotova, 2011). People often feel (in)secure, with, or in relation to others who are similar or different to them. A key disciplinary goal identified by these psychologists is ensuring people and groups have the resources needed to develop this sense of security that enables them to flourish through being treated with dignity, fairness and respect (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Zotova, 2011).

As is evident in this broad focus on contextual influences on a psychological sense of security, the prominence of social cognitive perspectives in recent years has not led to the neglect of awareness of the broader material, political and intergroup contexts in which people reside and learn to perceive the world around them. Issues of security have been further conceptualised beyond individual perceptions to encompass actual situations that often encompass material, interpersonal and intergroup elements. Of particular interest for psychologists has been how these collectivist elements are implicated within experiences of [in]security and efforts to respond to the needs of persons within situations of threat and conflict (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Dontsov & Perelygina, 2013; Stephan et al., 1999; Zinchenko & Zotova, 2014).

These considerations are also reflected in a focus on shared meaning systems (e.g. ideologies, narratives, discourses and social representations) that populate both human minds as well as embodied and institutional practices and objects in the material world (Hodgetts et al., 2020; King et al., 2017). It is also recognised that these shared meaning systems or collective psychological processes can fester divisions and increase insecurities associated with classes, ethnicities, genders, religions, sexualities, [dis]abilities, and so forth (Butler, 2003; Foucault, 1980; Fine & Asch, 1988; Hodgetts & Griffin, 2015; Moscovici; 2001). In response, psychologists have documented how the dominance of narratives of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, for example, have shaped institutional responses to poverty that have rendered people experiencing hardship more insecure (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). This orientation foregrounds how people often make sense of various threats collectively and in the ways that can have very material implications for how different groups and institutions understand and respond to situations of insecurity (Zotova & Karapetyan, 2018). Work in this area also suggests that the human need for a sense of security is somewhat universal, but not equitably achievable for different groups. The absence of such security is associated with increased inequalities in the prevalence of hardship and reduced wellbeing (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017; Munyon et al., 2020).

Correspondingly, a key focus in psychology has been on the promotion of collective and national security and wellbeing by facilitating more equitable access to securitising resources (income, shelter, food and attachments) across the population (Kennedy & Hallowell, 2021; Zotova & Karapetyan, 2018). That is, insecurities in employment, for example, have been associated with reductions in personal, community and national security, whilst increased job security is associated with increased wellbeing (Kalleberg, 2018). Relatedly, Zotova and Karapetyan (2018, p. 110) have proposed that ‘…fluctuations in a population’s level of psychological wellbeing can act as an indicator of the psychological security of the entire society and reflect the accuracy or invalidity of many dimensions and actions by the state’.

Above, we have touched on prominent efforts in psychology to understand, research and promote psychological security, including the need for a broader focused approach. We consider issues of application across various sub-disciplinary areas in more detail in the following section. For now, it is also important to acknowledge that since psychologies modern inception, some of our disciplinary activities have been less positive and have also contributed to the continued insecurity of some groups for the benefit of others. For example, Le Bon’s (1896/1977) classic study of crowds in France in the late 1800s comprised an aristocratic response to perceived threats to social stability from the lower classes. This threat perception accompanied rapid urbanisation and the emergence of class politics, emancipatory slave movements and early feminist formations. Correspondingly, Le Bon proposed that contagious hysterical emotional states submerged individuals from these groups within a mob mentality, thus reducing individual capacities for rational, ‘principled judgments’, and self-control. Le Bon (1896/1977, p. 36) displayed classist, racist and sexist biases to argue that those affected belonged ‘…to inferior forms of evolution – in women, children, and savages, for instance’ and contributed to efforts to ensure the security of the well-heeled at the expense of less affluent groups (Reicher, 2011).

Similar biases stemming from fear of the other and of disruptions to the status quo are also found in early work from experimental psychologists associated with the Eugenics movement (Guthrie, 2004). This movement lent scientific credence to the racism of this time by associating racial differences in educational performance with variables such as skin pigmentation and hair floccule thickness. Simultaneously, significant contextual factors (externalities) that impacted groups differently, including histories of slavery and associated socio-economic and educational exclusions were ignored. Research in this area contributed legitimacy to processes of dehumanisation and racialism that increased insecurities for many people of colour (Guthrie, 2004).

More contemporary examples of how our discipline can exacerbate insecurities for some groups whilst privileging others are evident in homophobic pathologising and discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities (Hegarty, 2017); the normalising and reification of Eurocentric and psychologising constructions of human development, childhood and parenting (Burman, 2016); reifying ideologies of individualism in support of neoliberal agendas that obscure the relational nature of structural poverty (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017; Klein, 2017); and the involvement of US psychologists in the ideologically driven overthrow of democratically elected governments in other sovereign nations (Herman, 1995). Relevant to these exemplars is the concept of martial politics, which refers to ongoing battles or conflictual situations between groups (Howell, 2018). This concept speaks to the politics of HS and our disciplines’ role at key times in justifying and lending legitimacy to the subordination (insecuritising) of impoverished, racialised, queer, disabled and indigenous communities.

Raising these issues of power and politics in psychology is in keeping with the emphasis placed in Assemblage Theory on how these dynamic formations often emerge through structural hierarchies that feature inequities in knowledge production and resource control. These hierarchies result in some elements or persons/groups exercising more influence in the discipline and power over others (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011; McGurik et al., 2016). In psychology some groups and nation states have exercised more power than others in theorising, researching, putting their ideas into practice and influencing disciplinary directions (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). Relatedly, it is important to engage in disciplinary reflexivity to develop a broader, more inclusive and pluralistic orientation towards HSP that includes previously suppressed or ignored traditions in psychology (Allwood & Berry, 2006; Decolonial Psychology Editorial Collective, 2021; Guimarães, 2020; King & Hodgetts, 2017). Considering our disciplinary biases and mistakes is also invaluable in the continued emergence of psychology as an epistemic assemblage (see next section).

As a reflection of the diverse efforts from within psychology and increased recognition of the need for plurality, we approach HSP as a multifaceted and eclectic undertaking. HSP includes a focus on a sense of [in]security as a psychological state of mind that features preceptions, experiences and feelings of safety and risk. This sense of security is further shaped by material situations that render some people more secure than others depending on the key elements in play at any one time. Put simply, HSP is comprised of the elements of psychology that relate to theorising, researching and addressing issues of human [in]security. This is a multifaceted undertaking that encompasses heterogeneous efforts to extend knowledge of the conditions and human actions that enable human beings to not only feel safe and secure, but to also be safe and secure. There are considerable personal, group, societal and cultural differences that must be addressed within such an undertaking. There is much to learn about how dimensions of HS morph across different locales and how different priorities emerge for different groups as they navigate evolving situations, events, threats and relations. To enhance the efficacy of contributions from psychology to address issues of HS, it is important that we begin to consider key foci and contributions from various sub-disciplinary areas.

Diverse Sub-disciplinary Applications in Human Security Psychology

Like other disciplines, including archaeology (Hamilakis & Jones, 2017), applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2018) and occupational science (Sellar, 2009), psychology can be conceptualised as an epistemic assemblages-of-assemblages (nexus of sub-disciplines) that has assembled, disassembled and reassembled (emerged) ‘…from the unpredictable relations formed among scientists’ (Sellar, 2009) and associated points of theoretical, methodological and practice congruencies and tensions. Each sub-discipline features dynamic foci, overlapping and varying understandings of what it is to be an individual or human being and how psychologists document and respond to HS concerns. Rather than try and reconcile different philosophical tensions associated with, for example, epistemological tensions between positivism and social constructionism, we approach psychology as a dynamic assemblage-of-assemblages within which plurality of thought, orientation and focus for action is a strength of our science.

Conceptualising psychology as a disciplinary assemblage reflects the positioning of our discipline as a human product that is part of the world, and which does not simply produce knowledge of the world from nowhere in the Archimedean sense (Baker & McGuirk, 2017). HSP related theory, research and practice emerges through contingent processes of knowledge production, methodological developments and practice applications that often morph in relation to the HS dimensions with which different sub-disciplines are engaged. Correspondingly, in engaging with HS domains and situations psychologists also contribute to the reassembling of these situations. In short, we see HSP as an emergent disciplinary undertaking that has been shaped by generations of psychologists addressing various HS concerns, and correspondingly reworking existing elements of theory, method and practice as the discipline continues to emerge through the reterritorialisation of various conjunctions between sub-disciplines (McFarlane, 2011). These processes of disciplinary emergence are overtly evident, for example, in relation to the contemporary pluralising of psychology globally. They are also reflected in the growing diversity of HS concerns with which psychology engages. These include risk appraisals regarding exposure to traumatic events (Marshall et al., 2007), issues of safety and effective responses to circumstantial hazards (Watson, et al., 2011); self-preservation, shared security and peace building (Christie & Montiel, 2013; Kennedy & Hallowell, 2021), impacts of colonisation on indigenous suicides and processes of self-determination (Lawson-Te Aho & Liu, 2010); initiatives to address economic and related precarities (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017; Kalleberg, 2018); and efforts to understand and limit climate change (Nielsen et al., 2021).

To recap, HSP draws together elements (theoretical, methodological and practice orientations) from different sub-disciplinary areas in-order-to better understand and address concerns related to the 10 dimensions of HS identified above and more. This section further attends to various sub-disciplinary efforts that can be understood as contributing to a HSP that spans personal, community, institutional, national and global scales.

Clinical psychology addresses the mental health security of individuals and groups, often through the amelioration of the impacts of various insecurities that contribute to deep intra-psychological impacts, including violence, anxiety, depression and suicide. At least since the time of Adler (1925), work in this area reminds us about how very personal issues of HS can be and how acute these can become. Correspondingly, clinical approaches primarily address the personal and intra-psychic elements of HS that people accumulate, particularly in the aftermath of traumas and disruptions from situations of insecurity. Approaches such as psychotherapy contribute to HS and processes of re-assemblage at a personal level by strengthening a person’s sense of security and helping secure their minds, emotions and identities (Hopner et al., 2020). Such work supports changes in lives by helping people find respite, shelter and a sense of support and attachment, belonging and safety. This is important because an insecure sense of personhood can result in what Laing (1965) termed a state of ‘ontological insecurity’. This state encompasses an inability to cohere a sustainable biographical narrative, which is associated with being overwhelmed by anxiety, for example. Correspondingly, central to work stemming from psychoanalytic and humanistic traditions is the promotion of positive attachments to other people, groups, places, continuity and routines that support wellbeing (Klein, 1927; Maxwell et al., 2021; Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Zotova & Karapetyan, 2018). Such work is also extended through the reterritorialising of insights from indigenous psychologies that approach ontological security as being entwined within a person’s position within familial and tribal networks, along with spiritual connections to various non-human entities that include rivers, mountains, forests, oceans, and so forth (Kaya & Kale, 2016; King et al., 2017). Such a focus also allows for further cross fertilisation between clinical and indigenous psychologies and issues of environmental security/psychology and political security/psychology.

Work psychologists also consider a range of security concerns relating to organisational processes. Humanitarian work psychology, for example, focuses overtly on understanding and addressing issues of insecurity and injustice at work (Carr, 2021). Humanitarian work psychologists promote HS through advocating healthy and inclusive organisational structures, practices and efforts to address issues of economic insecurity. These psychologists also raise awareness of inequities in health service access and delivery, for example, and work to improve service developments and equity in access and care (Searle & Rice, 2020). Another key foci lies in preventing mental and physical health insecurities by promoting decent work, job sustainability and income security as a means of address growing insecurities that accompany precarious work and unsustainable livelihoods (Carr et al., 2018; 2021b). Institutionalising living wages (economic security) is associated with spill over effects in terms of personal, health, food, community, national and political securities (Carr, Hopner, et al., 2021; McWha-Hermann, et al., 2021).

Demonstrating further overlaps between sub-disciplinary areas, community psychologists have a long history of responding to the needs of communities facing upheavals that are shaped at the intersections of various domains of HS and personal and collective precarity (Jahoda et al., 1933/1971). Of particular concern are relationships between economic [in]securities and a range of subsequent community and health insecurities (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017; Simpson et al., 2021). Such efforts involve helping people navigate adverse work and welfare systems that often fail to meet their mandates to promote HS and wellbeing (Carr et al., 2018; 2021b; Hodgetts et al., 2021; Kalleberg, 2018). For example, a current project of several authors of this article involves working in collaboration with households experiencing in-work poverty, their trade union and various central government agencies to inform policy and service responses to economic, income, housing, food, health and community insecurities. This effort reflects the realisation that many of the decisions that shape local [in]securities are not made within the households or local communities who are directly impacted. The interaction between communities and central government is an important HS nexus, but one that is dominated by the government. The project draws on insights into how households respond to various insecurities to inform the rehumanizing and refinement of policies and institutional practices administered by central government agencies. This is important given the function of social security policies (health, housing and education employment) in moderating the negative impacts of the social determinants of health (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). That is, when such systems are well resourced and focused on meeting human needs over financial restraint, they can mitigate the impacts of adverse (insecure) living conditions on marginalised lives (Simpson et al., 2021). As Kennedy and Hallowell (2021, p. 4) note, ‘reducing inequalities is one key strategy in building shared security’.

HS is entangled with politics. On the one hand, psychology and psychological processes are seen by political psychologists to be embedded within and produced by political institutions, organisations, leaders and the state. On the other, politics, politicians, governing institutions and the state are understood from a psychological perspective. Through this bi-directional analysis combining bottom-up and top-down processes, political psychology touches on many aspects of HS (Carr, Hopner, et al., 2021; Hopner et al., 2020). Research in political psychology reveals how particular terrorist events, such as the 9-11 attacks in the US, for example, have had distinct and accumulative effects on personal, cyber, community, national and political security over the last two decades (Brown et al., 2009). The impacts of 9-11 have exerted bottom-up effects on the emotional climate in the US, including heightened anxiety and fear (Huddy & Feldman, 2011; Choi et al., 2021), creating acceptance of laws to reduce privacy and restrict freedoms. These measures (emergent elements) have polarised different groups in the US citizenry, further breaking down a shared sense of national community, for example, into ‘red’ (Republican) and ‘blue’ (Democrat) factions (Jacobson, 2010). Ongoing hostilities between these factions have exacerbated issues of national insecurity, increased violence and mistrust, and eventually leading to a near insurrection with the US Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021. Conversely, the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in response to 9-11 have further compromised every dimension of HS for Afghanis and Iraqis. The near collapse of these states has required the reassembling of HS in these nations. Political psychology traces the historical trajectories of these security assemblages and seeks to develop effective responses as a means of promoting HS (Liu, 2022).

Moving to arguably the broadest scale, whilst also grappling with complex local concerns, environmental psychology overlaps with activities within clinical, organisational, community and political psychologies. Environmental psychology is concerned with human development and actions within natural and built settings. It explores complex interconnections between natural and socio-cultural elements of environmental security (Anderson et al., 2012; DeLanda, 2006, 2019; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Relatedly, prominent organisations within our discipline, including the American Psychological Association (2008), have identified the most prominent insecurities on a global scale as climate change and associated environmental crises and disruptions (Nielsen et al., 2021). These crises have resulted from the activities of human beings, spurred on by unsustainable business practices and resource exploitation that have local and global consequences. For example, improper mining conditions in Brazil are producing impacts at both local and global levels in terms of environmental degradation. Locally vulnerable populations in this emerging economy often become entrapped within exploitative and insecure work conditions and engaged in environmentally destructive work that also displaces local communities. Coelho et al. (2020) have shown that these processes are related to increases in violent crime, insecure housing and detrimental economic conditions. Also evident is a psychological transformation towards a fatalistic (insecure) perspective about the place of local people in society. Involuntary disruptions to place-based attachments and routines, in particular, contribute to reduced ontological security and wellbeing (Helly, Efrat & Josef, 2021). In the work of environmental psychologists to theorise, document and address such HS concerns, we can see resonances between personal or clinical considerations, processes of community disruption, indecent work, intergroup conflicts, politics, environmental degradation and climate change.

Moving Forward

We have proposed HSP as a key disciplinary focal point in general psychology that combines insights from across the discipline to theorise and explore the multiple and interrelated dimensions of HS, which enable or undermine the abilities of human beings to feel and be secure. This article lays out a multifaceted and multilevel orientation towards HS concerns in psychology that extends out beyond personal perceptions to encompass both human and non-human elements related to the securitising of persons, groups, communities, institutions, systems and the globe (Bar-Tal, 2020; Hopner et al., 2020; Kennedy & Hallowell, 2021; Zotova & Karapetyan, 2018). It has been important to also consider some of the diversity of our disciplinary perspectives on this topic in the past and into the present in order to inform how we might develop HSP into the future. We contend that all the traditions included above offer useful insights into aspects of the puzzle that is HS. Embracing disciplinary pluralism is crucial if we are to combine our efforts programmatically or at least enhance cross sub-disciplinary dialogues to further contribute to people achieving a sustainable sense of security that can underpin their dignity and flourishing (Bar-Tal & Jacobson, 1998; Zotova, 2011). It can enhance the scope of our efforts to know, document and address the HS needs of different people and groups. This is important because like other academic disciplines (Pennycook, 2018), contemporary psychology was assembled around WEIRD knowledge frames and is increasingly accepting the limits of such frames. The discipline is opening further to theory, methods and practices from other traditions, including psychologies of the interconnected self (Guimarães, 2020; Hodgetts et al., 2020; King & Hodgetts, 2017; Liu, 2017). As such, we present an initial formulation of HSP as a diverse and evolving undertaking that encompasses human and non-human elements, and dynamic relationships between these parts.

The primacy of collective processes in realising aspirations for security means more attention to group and intergroup psychologies, and issues of diversity and precarity (Moghaddam, 2022). Work in this area also requires the further development of eclectic approaches to engage with the dynamics of global socio-political trends (Bar-Tal, 2020; Moghaddam, 2019), increased wealth concentration and the plight of people facing socio-economic insecurities (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). Such an orientation is reflected in the emphasis we have placed in this article on understanding people as socio-economically and culturally immersed or interconnected beings. People make meaning of their situations (psychology) through various cognitive processes as well as by drawing on collective narratives or shared meaning structures that are open to manipulation and which often differ between social groups. As such, HSP engages both with personal understandings and reactions to situations of [in]security as well as recognising the needs for changes to insecure material circumstances, many of which reside beyond the control of individuals.

Assemblage Theory has provided one orientation towards bringing together various elements of HSP that respond through theory, research and practice to HS concerns as a means of offering a general lay-of-the-land. This theory orientates us towards how HS and our disciplinary responses are composed and re-composed over time, and are rearticulated through the dynamic emergence of situations that cohere within and impact human lives (McFarlane, 2011). Informed by this theoretical perspective, we see several mai components to our proposal for HSP. (1) Since its inception, psychology has addressed issues of [in]security and, rightly, continues to promote HS. (2) A focus on this topic area is appropriate for general psychology because concerns about HS are universal insofar as issues of personal safety, health, food, community, economic, political, environmental, cyber, national and global security are material and impact everyone. (3) A focus on psychological states and how people experience, make sense of, and behave within particular situations of [in]security should remain central to HSP. (4) HSP needs to be inclusive of different foci and paradigms within the discipline and be aware of how these develop knowledge and responses to HS. (5) There is utility in approaching HSP as an epistemic assemblage of sub-disciplinary assemblages. (6) Situations and experiences of [in]security are not shared equitably both within and across societies.

HSP needs to continue to produce knowledge and practices that help persons and groups secure themselves. Such knowledge production can involve documenting the unfolding of HS situations such as the present pandemic (Hopner, et al., 2021). It can also involve looking at past situations of insecurity to extrapolate insights that enable us to anticipate and mitigate related events in the future. Of central concern is how such situations emerged through dynamic relations between various interconnected elements that influence the composition, stability, functioning and consequences of HS assemblages over time (Delanda, 2006). Relations between elements can be explored in terms of the strength and character of connective alliances, reciprocal influences, tensions, routines of influence, and so forth (Sellar, 2009). This orientation requires us to recognise that our own disciplinary assemblages are entangled with, are influenced by, and influence the HS assemblages with which psychologists engage.

To develop HSP further we plan to embark on two interrelated strands of work. The first involves efforts to further theorise, document and understand different dimensions of HS and how these emerge within particular situations and implicate particular persons, groups and institutions. The second involves embracing the praxis orientation of psychology as a discipline because HS is too important a topic to be reduced to an academic spectator sport. Foundational to these efforts is identifying the processes through which various constituent relational features and elements (e.g. material living conditions, institutional practices and intergroup relations) shape the sense of security experienced by different persons and groups (Müller, 2015). This is important because whilst human [in]security concerns may manifest locally (as in the case of people in Afghan cities facing food and economic insecurities) the insecurities people face are organised through complex interrelations that often span a range of scales (personal to global). Central is a big picture orientation towards processuality, dynamism and uncertainty in HS situations and our disciplinary responses (Baker & McGuirk, 2017). It requires psychologists to explore how different human and non-human elements are related to one another through connective alliances (Hillier & Abrahams, 2013) and which elements and interconnections can be addressed when rendering effective assistance in particular situations. Psychology features a long history of rendering such assistance.