Security and the Human Infrastructure

Human infrastructure: the stable inter-relationships between plural identity-based groups within a state. It is dependent on equitable access to engagement with the spaces, places, and patterns of social and cultural interactions between and within communities. Human security is only possible in plural states if the state’s human infrastructure is secure. A functional and robust human infrastructure ensures that each particularistic identity within a state has access to the means to achieve human security. The tapestry of interrelationships within a state requires equity, access, and agency to be spread equally across communities. The chapter suggests that there is a group of violent actors who have a specific interest in damaging the human infrastructure, meaning the network of relationships between different particularistic identities in society—the basis of state stability and cohesion. These actors are conflated with terrorists when ideology is seen as the sole reason for a spectacle violence act, and it is asserted here that identity, its maintenance, dominance, and preservation, via the use of violence, is what we experience and often label as domestic terrorism and extremism. What is perceived as a lone actor is, in reality, an individual who has been socially radicalised and self-actualised. Using a dataset of 2 billion toxic and softly violent online and offline occurrences, the present work evaluates a new categorisation of spectacle violence actors called anomists. These actors seek to attack the system of stable interrelationships in society. Their cause is identity wellbeing and welfare. They do not have one ideology, do not attack political targets, and they are not devout religious adherents. Securing the undefended vulnerability of the human infrastructure of societies, from actors who seek to divide, degrade and perpetuate distrust, should be considered protecting our fourth border—land, sea, air and the human infrastructure.