Dangerous Liaisons: Human Security, Neoliberalism, and Corporate (Mis)Conduct.

Human security has been presented by a growing collection of states as a concept that is transforming global governance structures in significant ways by broadening and deepening understandings of security to address the needs of common people. Yet the entrenchment of the human security paradigm within several members of the human security vanguard has been accompanied by a renewed commitment to the principles of neoliberalism both domestically and within the international sphere. Thus, the dominance of neoliberal economic ideology has created various 'common-sense' propositions with respect to human security that has made it possible for rights, responsibilities, problems, and solutions to be defined in particular ways that narrow the policy spaces in which states with human security agendas are prepared to act while maintaining other unequal power/relations that benefit national economic interests. As such, this paper will examine how human security has been reconciled with reductions in other forms of stateled social regulation and an increasing deference to market imperatives that are constitutive of a geopolitical gaze that enables and disables particular types of policy actions through the identification of threats, opportunities, and moments that necessitate the evasion of responsibility. The specific empirical focus will be centred around the discursive relations of the human security agenda in Canada that have thus far left Canadian-based transnational corporations unaccountable for gross misconduct that contributes to human insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]