Of risk, uncertainty, safety, and trust: (re)locating human insecurities

Abstract

This overview considers four concepts: uncertainty, risk, safety, and trust. In addressing issues of insecurity and uncertainty we tend to think immediately of such processes and events as climate change and its social and economic impact; transnational crimes and the consequences for local communities; regional security and conflict; access to clean and drinkable water, food, shelter, health care, education, and a sustainable livelihood; sexual, ethnic, and youth violence; and forced migration, land-grabbing and population displacement. A range of causes of increasing human insecurity can also be identified: social changes arising from national, regional, and global events and processes with reference to processes of economic integration, but also the more directly apprehended occurrences of the scramble for natural resources, armed conflicts, accelerated urbanization and industrialization, and the large-scale commercialization of everyday life. But these issues have to be located within a conceptual discussion of the complex relationships between safety and risk and between uncertainty and trust derived from the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Mary Douglas, Olivia Harris, James C. Scott, and E.P. Thompson.