May NUI Galway Academic Appointed Policy Advisor on Human Security with United Nations

Professor John Morrissey will help lead an extension of the United Nations Human Security Strategy

NUI Galway Professor John Morrissey has been appointed International Consultant and Policy Advisor on Human Security in the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations. Professor Morrissey will help lead an extension of the UN’s human security strategy in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in a new vision for human development and human security.

The UN’s Human Development Report Office is focused on promoting innovative new ideas in the United Nations, advocating practical policy changes, and constructively challenging policies and approaches that constrain human development. Since 1990, the Human Development Report Office has annually published the UN’s Human Development Reports. It is currently strategising to advance more supportive human development programmes in a time of great uncertainty and planetary crisis.

Professor Morrissey said: “The mission of the Human Development Report Office is to advance human development through informed interventionary strategy, and I am really honoured to be able to add my research expertise in support of that vital global challenge. The world is facing an inflection point in the international development landscape. As we seek to rebuild from Covid-19, we need to more holistically conceive a conjoined sense of human-environmental well-being by tackling the overlapping precarities of our ecologies and societies.

“There are a range of structural political economy and political ecology reasons for our current global pandemic and wider set of environmental crises, and my hope is to aid the Human Development Report Office in addressing these with renewed vision, resources and regulatory power. The extension and broadening of a ‘human security’ agenda at the UN is more urgent now than ever, in moving beyond narrow traditional statist senses of security, and instead insisting upon the global interconnectedness of human-environmental security and critical need for cooperation and solidarity in safeguarding the future of our planet.”

Professor Morrissey’s research and writing connect overarching concerns of geopolitics, human security and international development, on which he has published widely. His latest book, Haven: The Mediterranean Crisis and Human Security, was published in November 2020. He has held prestigious visiting fellowships at City University of New York, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and Australian National University in recent years, and he has a great passion for teaching, twice winning NUI Galway’s President’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He has been Programme Director of Geography’s award-winning MA in Environment, Society and Development since its inception in 2009.

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