This project aims to reflect upon the human security enterprise from a critical angle, exploring human security as a terrain contested by a variety of state and non-state actors with competing approaches to securing human beings. The current scholarly literature on human security provides an important challenge to the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security by taking the survival and wellbeing of individuals into account. At the same time, however, it has tended to approach disputes over the meaning of human security and how it should be implemented in practice as obstacles to the development of human security as an effective field of study or policy agenda, rather than a field of political struggle that is itself in need of explanation. This project, by contrast, begins from the basic assumption is that actors in international relations ? including but not limited to international institutions, regional organisations, states, NGOs and civil societies ? conceptualise human security differently depending on their respective self-identities, and these self-identities are dynamically constructed, rather than given, evolving in specific political contexts but also shaped by historical legacies. One of the most prominent divisions in human security discourse has been between the West and East Asia. This project will accordingly focus on comparing and contrasting human security discourses in the EU and East Asia. By approaching states, international organisations and civil society actors as agents with socially constructed identities and interests, this project will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of their role in human security governance. Attention to the complexity and contestation within human security discourse and the presence of non-Western voices will also provide an opportunity for reassessing claims that the emancipatory potential of the human security agenda has been undermined through its cooption by a neocolonial, neoliberal project led by Western liberal states.