Security and the Challenge to Liberal Values

Security is valuable to any society. For each society, security offers a form of stability in the face of vulnerability, but within liberal democratic polities, security also provides – at least in theory – a social environment within which individual citizens and other dwellers can flourish. That is, security offers to citizens and others a stable framework for the pursuit of the various goods that they seek to realize for themselves. Henry Shue speaks of individual security as a basic right – indeed, as a right that underwrites all other rights, including, in his view, other basic rights such as