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Abstract
Human security is a concept focused on individuals ability to live and thrive without being held back by concerns of survival or day-to-day living. The concept has received increasing attention since the United Nations Development Programmes 1994 Human Development Report highlighted the importance of the concept. Two decades later, the subfield of human security still lacks a publically available, cross-national time series dataset of human security, and with it empirical studies that investigate the causes and effects of threats to human security. This dissertation serves as a first step in addressing this lacuna by revisiting the conceptualization of human security, presenting a new dataset of one component of the broader human security, personal security, which captures an individuals vulnerability to violent threats to their self. It also evaluates the causes and effects of threats to personal security. The first chapter introduces the project. The second chapter lays out the argument for a new conceptualization of human security, conceptualizes personal security, and presents a new dataset of personal security variables. The resulting dataset consists of estimates and error estimates of four categories of threats to personal security as well as a measure of overall threats to personal security for 186 countries from 2005 to 2014. The third chapter uses the new dataset to assess the effects of empowerment rights on personal security. Here, I lay out the argument that empowerment rights can constrain government actors, but not civilian actors, in initiating threats to personal security of civilians and government agents. The results of this study indicate that empowerment rights can have a constraining effect on government actors, and that the effects of different empowerment rights on threats to personal security can vary by the actor initiating violence. The fourth chapter assesses how threats to personal security, as conceptualized and measured in this project, compare to individual perceptions of human rights conditions and safety. The results from this study show a strong negative relationship between civilian-government threats to personal security and perceptions of human rights and safety. The fifth and final chapter, reviews the project and discusses avenues for future research.