The concept of human security has recently emerged as a way of breaking with the compartmentalization between human rights, development and conflict resolution. Yet the security challenges of the coming decades will bring renewed threats to rights-based approaches.

 

How will modalities of political violence and armed conflict shift over time, and how should human rights movements respond to and anticipate these? How should food insecurity, environment-related illness, lack of access to natural resources, and the problems facing environmental refugees be tackled from a human rights perspective? How should local human rights agendas take on the planetary priorities of climate change, the threat to biodiversity and the depletion of natural resources? How will future patterns of international migration shape global regulation policies, and what will be the impact of the exponential growth of mega-cities in the south due to internal migration? What are the human rights implications of demographic trends such as the aging population in countries of the north and the faster growing and more youthful population of the global south?