African Environmental and Human Security in the 21st Century By ...

and nonliving systems, but we can focus on those relationships between political organizations, societies, and terrorist organizations that are vying for legitimacy. This point leads to our final concern, reflected in the criterion of “meaning.”

This fourth criterion, meaning, speaks to the human and social domains of living systems.¹⁴ It reflects the rules of behavior, values, intentions, goals, strategies, designs, and power relations essential to human social life.¹⁵ In essence, “meaning” refers to the unique perspective or view of the world a system has, based on its unique qualities. For the purposes of this discussion, this criterion refers to a system's mental map. For example, while the United States may regard Al-Qaeda members as terrorists, Al-Qaeda members view themselves as martyrs. Different societies—based on their unique historical experiences, culture, and norms—have different perspectives on the world and view world events differently. This worldview shapes, for example, the quality of the relationship individuals or groups of individuals have towards a particular state, and legitimacy measures the quality of those state-societal connections. This is a key point as states work to offer their people security in a bid to gain legitimacy vis-à-vis extremists and terrorists. Francis Fukuyama notes the importance of state legitimacy: “The state's institutions not only have to work together properly as a whole in an administrative sense, they also have to be perceived as being legitimate by the underlying society.”¹⁶ Security, however, must be interpreted from the individual's perspective because it is the individual who ultimately decides on his or her behavior and whether or not the state has earned his or her loyalty. Subsequently, we now explore human security as a means to gain this holistic and empathetic perspective.

Human Security¹⁷

When the UN presents aggregate data such as 1 billion people who lack access to clean water, 2 billion people who lack access to clean sanitation, 3 million people who die from water-related diseases annually, 14 million people (including 6 million children) who die from hunger