Abhay Kumar Singh replies: China’s growing influence in the South Pacific was thrust into the limelight when word leaked in March 2022 that it has negotiated a secret security agreement with the Solomon Islands, a country with which it established diplomatic ties only in 2019. Despite fervent parley by Australia and the US against this security agreement, the leader of the Solomon Islands formally announced the conclusion of this security agreement with China.

Kishore Kumar Khera replies: Defence is a term used for actions or set of actions undertaken by an individual, system, entity, organisation or a state to mitigate damage from an attack or a possible attack. It normally but not necessarily relates to actions against physical aggression. Nowadays virtual dimension too is added in the overarching definition of defence.

D.P.K. Pillay replies: Essentially human security implies citizen-centric security. The origin of the concept of human security can be traced to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 1994, which defined for the first time the scope of human security in modern times to include seven areas which are as under:

Abhay Kumar Singh replies: In general, domain awareness and situational awareness both grasp very similar activities which is “knowing what is going on around us”. However, they have slightly different connotations and are not synonymous.