Abstract
Against a global landscape of conflicts and disasters disrupting human life, Gender, Violence, and Human Security: Critical Feminist Perspectives offers a welcome feminist intervention into the discourse of human security. The text, which is edited by an interdisciplinary team of scholars with expertise in political science, sociology, and gender and women’s studies, offers those readers unfamiliar with human security a rich and engaging interdisciplinary introduction to the concept of human security and its utility, while also revealing some of the challenges of this framework. The volume offers a set of analytically rich case studies from around the globe that address diverse aspects of human security issues and convincingly demonstrate that human security must be conceptualized as gendered. Gender, Violence, and Human Security thus is a valuable collection both for newcomers to the field and to scholars and practitioners familiar with the framework.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) first defined the concept of human security in 1994 to emphasize those forms of security omitted from the dominant frameworks of human rights and human development. In her introductory chapter to the volume, coeditor Ailli Mari Tripp explains that thinking about human security moves us away from the emphasis on state actors and interests (i.e., state security) to recognize and examine the security of citizens whose lives, livelihoods, and routines may be affected by threats such as famine, economic decline, and environmental crises. The human security discourse presents an important opportunity for feminist scholars to bring concerns about structural and interpersonal violence to the table because human security, unlike state security, considers the security of ordinary citizens and the various forms of insecurity they may experience, including diverse forms of gendered violence such as gendered poverty, battering, and sexual violence, including involuntary sex work.
Most of the 11 contributions following Tripp’s introduction are largely analyses of various forms of human insecurity in different geopolitical regions (some are more theoretically driven pieces). Each analysis places gender concerns front and center, in some instances revealing how seemingly gender-neutral processes or concepts related to human security, such as truth and reconciliation committees in Peru, are in fact gendered, and in other instances highlighting how a widely recognized gender problem, such as violence against women, is also an issue of human security. The volume incorporates analyses from a wide range of geopolitical regions, and is especially successful in showing how human security is not only an issue in the developing world but also in countries like the United States and Germany, where women’s capacity for income earning and maintaining personal safety is a human security issue. While many of the contributions focus on women, the contributors consistently emphasize that incorporating gender into human security is not simply acknowledging women; to that end, the analyses examine gender, men’s and women’s experiences, and gender relations.
The feminist approach to security studies taken throughout the volume stresses the importance of nonstate actors as both those harmed by human insecurity and those engaged in trying to establish human security. Simultaneously, the state is a key actor in many of the contributions, revealing the importance of interconnections between state and society, especially during and after crises. Edith Kinney’s analysis of anti-human trafficking efforts in Thailand, for example, reveals that “efforts to promote human security can legitimate enforcement practices that adversely impact the rights and security of voluntary migrants, trafficked persons, and women working in the commercial sex industry” (81). Kinney places state policy and enforcement practices front and center, showing how human security, while analytically distinct from state security, nonetheless often involves the state. Similarly, Lisa Brush’s discussion of the experiences of poor battered women in the United States centers on an analysis of the gaps in the state that undermine human security.
Ultimately, this collection is a powerful presentation of how central gender is to human security and of how the concept of human security can serve as a unifying framework for understanding a range of complex social processes in an era of global restructuring. For all of its flaws, human security nonetheless has tremendous currency in international policymaking. To influence research on and practice of human security, feminists must ensure that gender is part of the framework. Placing gender and intersectional inequalities front and center illuminates the bases of human insecurity and its often differential effects of women and men and reveals gendered patterns in violence and in economic and political participation. The contributors share a commitment to human security as an analytic framework and as a goal—and on this latter point, many of the analyses are usefully prescriptive in suggesting avenues for increasing human security. This text will thus be relevant and useful to both scholars and policy makers and organizers seeking to effect social change and achieve peace and justice.