Rethinking Security: For What and For Whom in a Post-COVID World

Chapters 1, 6, and 14, are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com How has the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the meaning and practice of security? This book addresses one of the most pressing yet insufficiently explored questions to emerge from the global health crisis: how a pandemic has challenged established security paradigms and forced a reconsideration of the boundaries between public health, governance, vulnerability, and political order. Building on Critical Security Studies, the volume interrogates the limits of dominant state-centric and neorealist approaches, while revisiting the broader intellectual legacy opened up by the concept of human security since the 1994 UNDP Report. Rather than treating the pandemic as a temporary disruption, the contributors approach it as a critical moment that exposes the conceptual and political inadequacies of conventional security thinking. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the book examines how security agendas and public policy responses have evolved in Spain and in other contexts, including Portugal, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil. By combining theoretical reflection with empirical analysis, this volume makes a distinctive contribution to the study of security in the post-pandemic era. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy practitioners seeking to understand how COVID-19 has reconfigured both the language of security and the policy frameworks through which contemporary societies respond to large-scale threats.