Exploring the enduring tension between state power, the social contract, and the protection of human security in contemporary society.
Human security has, over time, become secondary and almost invisible. It existed only when it aligned with the state’s interests. When it did not, it is dismissed as weakness. The history of human polity is not merely a chronicle of progress, but a remnant upon which the quest for security is perpetually inscribed, only to be obliterated by the inexorable abuse of power.
Since the primordial integration of tribes into the ‘Leviathan’ of the state, (Thomas Hobbes) or ‘Constitutional Government’ (John Locke) or even to the ‘General Will’ (Rousseau), The Covenant implicit or explicit has been one of surrendered autonomy in exchange for guaranteed safety. Yet, this guarantee has proven to be an illusory promise, a ghost that recedes as one approaches.
John Locke would put it, “there is a social contract between the government and the governed, thus replacing outdated and unjust provisions with laws that reflect the ethos, needs and aspirations of contemporary world, and it is a stride towards fulfilling the contract”.
Human security has often been overlooked when state interests and security imperatives take precedence and has faded into a vague background substantially a ‘casualty of the state’s own raison d’être’, (an expression suggests a paradoxical situation where the state, in its attempt to preserve itself, sacrifices the very people or values it is supposed to protect. For example, a government might suspend civil liberties becoming the ‘casualty’ in the name of ‘national security’ the ‘raison d’être’).
Monopoly of Violence and the Erosion of Security
The genesis of this irreconcilable paradox lies in the state’s monopolization of legitimate violence. Hobbes’s sovereign, emerged from the ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ (a Latin philosophical phrase coined by Thomas Hobbes which means “The war of all against all” to describe the chaotic, violent ‘ state of nature’), which was meant to be a bulwark against the predatory chaos of nature. Rousseau believed that ‘man would realize his freedom by submitting his particular will to the direction of the General Will’.
He further envisaged the Social Contract whereby all individuals surrender their natural liberty to the power of the community that provides them civil liberty; what they lose as individuals, they gain it back as members of the community.
This concentration of power, born from surrendered freedoms ultimately transformed that power into its own corrupting force and has turned into the source of its own decay or became the instrument of its own perversion. In some contexts, institutions established to maintain order have also been criticized for restricting civil liberties and political freedoms. In certain historical contexts, the pursuit of state security has at times been accompanied by restrictions on civic freedoms, creating tensions between collective security and individual rights.
The Architecture of Denial and Everyday Resistance
This denial is not a mere omission but an active systematic process. It operates through panoptic institutions that enforce conformity through hegemonic narratives that recast oppression as protection and through a legal superstructure that reifies the state’s prerogative over the individual’s inviolability.
The proletariat, the dissentient, the ethnically and ideologically marginalized cohorts experience security not as a palpable reality but as a languishing abstraction. Theirs is a Sisyphean struggle against structural violence, the silent depredations of economic paucity, the corrosive fear of nocturnal knocks on the door, the erasure of cultural identity under the steamroller of assimilationist policies. Human struggle under this yoke is characterized by a profound ambivalence. There is the overt insurrectionist who meets the state’s coercive might often with enfilading rhetoric and at times with desperate force.
Theirs is a path of clarion calls and martyrdom, a dramatic but repeated ephemeral defiance against the Goliathan edifice. More pervasive however, is the quotidian resistance, the obdurate preservation of language in hushed tones, the tacit networks of mutual aid that form a substrate beneath the state’s notice, the liminal spaces where identity is nurtured away from the hegemon’s gaze. This is a struggle not for triumphal overthrow, but for perseveration, for the fragile perpetuation of selfhood and community against the entropic forces of control.
The psychological landscape of this existence is one of cognitive dissonance and existential weariness. Individuals living under restrictive political conditions often face significant challenges in accessing justice and protecting their rights, where the seeker of justice finds themselves enmeshed in a labyrinthine bureaucracy designed to exacerbate impotence. Trust the bedrock of human security atrophies. The social contract frays into a tatter of suspicion and apathy, as the state’s presence becomes a ubiquitous reminder of potential reprisal. The spirit, subjected to this unremitting pressure, may succumb to resignation, a numbed acclimation to the stultifying air of unfreedom.
Conclusion: The Tragic Loop of Power and Human Survival
Thus, the narrative of civilization is shadowed by this perennial tension. States frequently face challenges in balancing the pursuit of order with the protection of individual rights and human dignity rendering human security a fugacious ideal, glimpsed in the interstices of control but never held fast. The human struggle therefore, is not a linear march toward liberation but a cyclical often tragic, engagement with power’s proclivity to aggrandize itself at the expense of the very security it vows to provide. It is a story without a terminus, a dialectic of domination and resilience written in the lexicon of obfuscated rights and unyielding spirit, where the only constant is the fading echo of a security long denied.
The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Global Strategic Forum – GSF.
Fida Hussain
The writer is a researcher, writer, and political analyst from Kashmir. He holds a Master's degree in Political Science and International Relations and writes on human security, governance, conflict studies, and contemporary international affairs. He can be reached at hussainfida0125@gmail.com
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