Gender, Violence, and Human Security

Critical Feminist Perspectives

Aili Mari Tripp, Myra Marx Ferree, Christina Ewig

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814764909
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The nature of human security is changing globally: interstate conflict and even intrastate conflict may be diminishing worldwide, yet threats to individuals and communities persist. Large-scale violence by formal and informal armed forces intersects with interpersonal and domestic forms of violence in mutually reinforcing ways. Gender, Violence, and Human Security takes a critical look at notions of human security and violence through a feminist lens, drawing on both theoretical perspectives and empirical examinations through case studies from a variety of contexts around the globe. This fascinating volume goes beyond existing feminist international relations engagements with security studies to identify not only limitations of the human security approach, but also possible synergies between feminist and human security approaches. Noted scholars Aili Mari Tripp, Myra Marx Ferree, and Christina Ewig, along with their distinguished group of contributors, analyze specific case studies from around the globe, ranging from post-conflict security in Croatia to the relationship between state policy and gender-based crime in the United States. Shifting the focus of the term “human security” from its defensive emphasis to a more proactive notion of peace, the book ultimately calls for addressing the structural issues that give rise to violence. A hard-hitting critique of the ways in which global inequalities are often overlooked by human security theorists, Gender, Violence, and Human Security presents a much-needed intervention into the study of power relations throughout the world.

PART ONE

Retheorizing Human Security through a Gender Lens

1

Toward a Gender Perspective on Human Security

AILI MARI TRIPP

One of the major successes of international feminism in the mid-1990s was to transform the human rights discourse from a gender-neutral frame into one that acknowledged that “women’s rights are human rights” (Agosin 2001; Cook 1994; Peters and Wolper 1994). Today, the United Nations and many other international actors and national governments around the globe, including Canada, Norway, Japan, and the United States, have adopted the concept of “human security” in their policymaking. In fact, human security has become the dominant frame for international regulation today. It allows diverse actors from the North and South, governmental and nongovernmental sectors, and conservatives as well as progressives to talk about security in ways that were not possible when the only frame available was that of the nation-state (Christie 2010, 170). Human security shifts the focus away from state security to threats to security that affect people, for example, threats emerging from famine, epidemics, economic decline, environmental degradation, migration, and other such crises. It focuses on human agency in confronting these challenges, rather than simply state agency.

From a feminist perspective, there are many limitations in the ways that the concept has been used and for some, it does not sufficiently differ from traditional state-centered notions of security. But like human rights, the concept has become important enough in international policymaking to call for feminist attention. Moreover, there are significant overlaps with feminist approaches that make it well worth recasting from a gender perspective to make it a more useful concept. Indeed, feminist perspectives have already had an influence in transforming the concept, particularly in the context of key UN resolutions involving women’s involvement in peacemaking.

Some human rights activists fear human security will displace the focus on individual rights and human rights. Others are concerned that it makes development and human rights into security concerns, embedding human rights policy, for example, in a security discourse rather than a legal one. Human rights and human security, however, should be seen as complementary approaches that can mutually reinforce one another. Rather than displacing “human rights,” human security is able to focus on threats to human life that are not adequately protected by the conventional notions of “human rights” and by narrowly legal solutions (Owen 2004, 382, cited in Howard-Hassman 2010, 27). But it can also enrich the human rights approach by pointing to connections between human rights abuses and other forms of insecurity and by adding a collective approach to security to the individual focus that is at the core of most human rights discourses.

Among many international practitioners and scholars, there has been a discursive shift from a state-centered to a human-centered approach to security, and from a focus on strategic national interests to the collective needs of humankind, although some argue that the changes have not been adequately reflected in institutional frameworks and power relations (Chandler 2008, 465). The shift to a human security perspective, not surprisingly, coincides with the end of the Cold War and the global decline in the amount and intensity of intrastate and interstate conflict that took place globally after 1990 (Goldstein 2011; Gurr 2000; Human Security Report 2005). These changes have forced practitioners and theorists alike to focus on the wide variety of insecurities that have persisted despite these changes in the nature of conflict, as well as new forms of human insecurity that have emerged.

In this book, we critically explore the relationship between human security and gender, with particular attention to violence at all levels of social organization. We are interested both in expanding the notion of human security to make clear how it can and should be attentive to gender relations as well as in using the human security framework to better understand how violence is related to people’s daily lives and livelihoods in gendered ways. While some argue that human security has become a new orthodoxy (Christie 2010) and a guise for the continuation of traditional state-oriented foreign policy, we see it as an opening of discursive space that has already allowed for new policy interventions by feminists and has additional potential to be tapped.

We explore how a human security perspective helps us understand how gender and violence are related, but also how violence itself is both gendered and creates gender. This approach brings a stronger concern with gender justice to the human security perspective itself. While there are countless themes that touch on the relationship between human security and gender, we focus on violence as an entry point into understanding human security in contexts of civil conflict, economic vulnerability, trafficking, domestic violence, social marginalization, and other gendered phenomena. By examining the structure of gender relations and the construction of gender in violence, we show how insecurities may foment violence in gendered ways, and how an understanding of gender dynamics can and should be brought into defining solutions.

The volume takes a critical look at gender, violence, and human security from several angles: theoretical perspectives that engage the debates regarding human security and empirical examinations through case studies.

This introductory chapter examines the utility of the concept of human security from a feminist perspective by first outlining the history of the concept. It describes some of the feminist engagements with “security studies” and identifies some synergies between feminist approaches and human security approaches. The rest of the chapter looks critically at the continuing limitations of the human security approach and how a feminist perspective might enrich the concept. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the book chapters.

This chapter argues for an approach to human security that is concerned with linkages between various forms of insecurity and gender-based violence and among the various levels of violence, from interstate wars and civil conflicts to interpersonal violence at a local level. Rather than treating the state as gender neutral, as the human security approach generally does, the state itself is seen as gendered. So too are the economic, political, and social relations that give rise to violence. Violence is perpetrated both against individuals and against women or men as a group. Agency similarly has both individual and collective dimensions. This perspective shifts the focus of the term human security from its defensive emphasis to a more proactive notion of peace that requires addressing the structural issues that give rise to violence. It critiques the ways in which global inequalities are often overlooked by human security theorists, as well as some of the disembodied notions of human security that overlook power relations. Finally, it takes up the idea of intersectionality to show how the “human” is only present in specific intersecting forms that reflect gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, and other structural positions.

Evolution of the Concept of Human Security

The concept of human security emerged from discussions among communities of policy makers, academics, and NGO activists in the mid-1990s (Truong, Wieringa, and Chhacchi 2006, x). Human security was first defined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1994 as encompassing generalized threats such as those derived from economic, food, health, or environmental insecurity, and threats to personal, community, and political security, or human rights violations (UNDP 1994). The focus from the start was on forms of insecurity that are not encompassed in frameworks of either human development or human rights nor in the traditional state security framework. The objective of human security is to “safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats, in a way that is consistent with long-term human fulfillment” (Alkire 2003).

Security was no longer tied to orthodox neorealist notions of security nor to an external military threat to the state. Unlike the traditional realist focus on national self-interest, military and economic power, and the survival of the state, human security recognizes insecurity emerging from interstate and intrastate conflict, postconflict contexts, as well as insecurity related to phenomena like migration, poverty, health epidemics, and environmental disasters.

Some, like the Canadian government, have focused on the “freedom of fear” aspect of human security and the need to protect citizens from violent conflict, recognizing that violence is tied to poverty, inequality, and lack of state capacity. Others, like the Japanese government, have focused on a broader “freedom from want” approach that includes hunger, disease, and natural disasters, because more people are killed from these insecurities than from conflict or genocide. The Japanese include protection against poverty and provision of basic education, health care, and social protection in their definition of human security. A third approach to human security sees it as an umbrella concept for all non-traditional security issues, for example, HIV/AIDS, terrorism, small arms, land mines, and human trafficking (Newman 2010).

The focus of human security was to be on the impact of insecurities on people, not just their consequences for the state. Influential peace researcher Ramesh Thakur defined human security as “concerned with the protection of people from critical and life-threatening dangers, regardless of whether the threats are rooted in anthropogenic activities or natural events, whether they lie within or outside states, and whether they are direct or structural. It is ‘human centred’ in that its principal focus is on people both as individuals and as communal groups. It is ‘security oriented’ in that the focus is on freedom from fear, danger and threat” (Thakur 2004).

The concept of human security redefined security from state security to the security of ordinary citizens. Traditional security studies had citizens supporting the sovereignty of the state. The human security approach flipped this around so that the state and state sovereignty were to serve their citizens (Newman 2010, 79). Moreover, with the human security approach, states became responsible not only for their citizens, but also for people outside their own state. States thus had responsibilities to protect people when their own states could not provide that protection. This later morphed into the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) policy, approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, which stipulates that the international community can militarily intervene when states fail to protect their citizens from massive loss of life. R2P encompassed key human security principles, including a focus on the protection of the individual citizen rather than state security; the focus on the political, economic, and social causes of humanitarian crisis; and prevention of crisis. The state still features prominently in many human security approaches because, it is argued, the state is the most important protector of people’s human security (Christie 2010, 173). The centrality of the state in the practice of implementing human security objectives has led some to worry that human security will be used to justify greater state intervention by using protection as a pretext (Shani 2007, 7).

Human security is distinct from the idea of human development, which focuses on long-term human capabilities (Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Nussbaum 2000), and that of human rights, which focuses more on legal frameworks for individual rights and security. Women’s human rights are codified in the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which requires states to take steps to end discrimination against women and ensure that women can enjoy human rights. This chapter takes the position that all three concepts—human security, human development, and human rights—are necessary. The human security framework, in fact, highlights the links between development and security and the ways in which lack of human security, conflict, inequality, and lack of choice negatively impact development. It also highlights the links between human rights and insecurity. People may have the legal rights and protections from discrimination and violence, but in reality structural constraints, including lack of income, education, and access to the legal system, as well as cultural constraints, may prevent them from exercising those rights. It also has the potential to address some of the concerns of feminist critics of the human rights approach, particularly anthropologists, who have challenged the ways in which universal assumptions about women’s rights might be tempered by local understandings and definitions of justice and rights. (See the work of Dorothy Hodgson, Sally Merry, Lila Abu-Lughod, Pamela Scully, and many others.) By focusing on agency, the concept can help bridge the need to protect women’s rights with local priorities and conceptions of gender justice.

The concept of human security has arisen at a time when the nature of insecurity is changing globally: interstate conflict and even intrastate conflict are diminishing. Yet threats to individuals and communities persist. Economic, food, health, and environmental crises produce human insecurities that can be regarded as forms of violence. Moreover, interpersonal violence, large-scale violence, and structural violence can mutually reinforce each another. Violence as an issue is universal: Whether states are economically developed or struggling to meet basic human needs, they face issues of violence internally, at their borders, and in their international engagements. Violence is also particular: individuals, communities, and nations experience it in gender-specific ways that intersect with class, race, age, sexuality, and nationality.

Human security is, in principle, an attractive normative frame for feminists because it looks at the impact of insecurities on people, not just the consequences of conflict for the state. It focuses on societal activities, not just on state action. It highlights the agency of those affected by insecurity, and focuses on positive action to expand human capabilities, not just defenses of rights.

Feminist Security Studies

Feminist security studies—which range in perspective from critical feminism, to feminist constructivism, liberal feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonial feminism—have succeeded in problematizing the notion of security for over two decades (Sjoberg and Via 2010, 4). The early work by feminist international relations scholars questioned the conventional realist understandings of conflict and the frames that defined the study of war and militarism (e.g., Ann Tickner, Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Anne Sisson Runyan, Christine Sylvester). The critique was deepened with a new generation of international relations feminist scholars (e.g., Laura Sjoberg, Laura Shepherd, Sandra Via, Elisabeth Prügl, Charli Carpenter, Helen Kinsella). The questions of feminist security scholars parallel the questions asked by human security advocates in asking whose security policy makers are seeking: that of the state, of people, or of women, in particular. Feminist scholars have challenged the lack of women in international security policymaking, documenting the masculine nature of the state and security agencies nationally and globally. Like human security theorists, feminists have broadened our understanding of security to include not just war, b...