Securitizing Poverty: the Role of NGOs in the Protection of Human Security in Indonesia 1

In the past few years, security concept has become increasingly expanded in its referent object, core values and type of threats. Among scholars, Richard Ullman was the first to advocate an extension of security concept to include a wide range of issues from natural disasters and diseases to environmental degradation.2 Such advocacy was prominent with the end of Cold War that led to the decline of military threats, while other threats to human being (poverty, diseases, natural disaster, environmental degradation, and so on) have seemed to increase in the past few decades. This extension has nevertheless turned security into a sharply contested concept in the study of International Relations. On the one hand, defending the “traditionalist ” view of security, scholars such as Stephen Walt and Patrick Morgan argue that the state should remain the only referent of security because they believe that security should only deal with deliberate threats (primarily of a military nature) to the physical security of the nation-state. Moreover, with regard to the scope of security concept, they believe that security should be limited to the international level, that is, rivalries between states. On the other hand, moving beyond this traditionalist approach, Ken Booth, Simon Dalby and Barry Buzan argue that the referen