The Gender Imperative

Human Security vs State Security

Betty A. Reardon, Asha Hans

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429838781
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays by feminist scholar-activists addresses the crucial problem of human security in a world of heavily armed, militarized states. It describes the gendered aspects of human security excluded from the realist militarism that dominates current security policy in most nation states. The book deepens and broadens current security discourses, encouraging serious consideration of alternatives to the present global security system that functions to advantage state security over human security, a system the contributors perceive to be rooted in the patriarchal nature of the nation state.

This second edition will be of interest to academics and students of gender studies, women's studies, international studies, development studies, human rights, security studies, peace studies and peace education.

Part I
Confronting the militarized state security paradigm

Human security from a feminist perspective

1
Women and human security

A feminist framework and critique of the prevailing patriarchal security system

Betty A. Reardon

This is a revised version of an argument first published in Japanese as ‘Toward Human Security: A Feminist Framework for Demilitarization’ in Women’s Asia, No. 33, 2003. It also contains arguments I have published in other journals.¹ A few updates have been added to this edition.

A core thesis on human security

The present discourse on human security, while broadening the components and definitions of security as it is pursued in the international system, has yet to face the core problematic of human security, militarized patriarchy. Within this emerging discourse, there has been no significant acknowledgement that human security can never can be achieved within the present highly militarized, war-prone, patriarchal nation state system. Neither, as I have argued for more than three decades, is it achievable within patriarchy which is the foundation of the war system (Reardon 1985). This collection of articles, exploring human security from a feminist perspective, is grounded in a set of assertions and arguments about what constitutes human security and what most obstructs it. Two propositions lie at the centre of these assertions and arguments: first, if human security is to be achieved, patriarchy must be replaced with gender equality, and second, war as an institution must be abolished in favour of non-violent structures and processes for resolving conflict and achieving national policy goals.

In short, concepts and modes of thinking about security must be transformed. This volume is intended to illuminate the consequences to human security posed by the lack of gender perspective that excludes women’s experiences and needs from the wider security policy discourse and to encourage inquiry and discussion in which the necessary thinking about the dominant concept of security and its transformation might take place. Toward such transformation, we argue, a serious examination of security issues in women’s daily lives in ordinary times and the gender particularities of their experiences in armed conflict are the primary and essential conditions for changing security thinking. We acknowledge, as does Bernedette Muthien in her article in this volume, that security itself, even as the notion of assurance of protection against great harms to the nation – that is, national security – is a contested term. That contestation, for the most part, concerns the issue of what constitutes security rather than the clarification of the term itself. In this article and in the contributions for which it is the foundation, both conceptual meanings and constitutive components will be addressed.

The purpose of this introductory discussion is to lay out arguments and assertions so as to make the case for the consideration of one proposed alternative concept of human security, a feminist comprehensive framework that addresses multiple, interrelated and essential foundations and sources of human security. Each of the remaining articles offers a deeper assessment of a particular aspect of security or case of insecurity to further illuminate the fundamental concepts that comprise this feminist framework for human security and demonstrate how women’s experience reveals the ultimate futility of war and all forms of armed conflict. These assessments inquire into the policies and strategies that could produce the requisite transformation of the war system into an international system that is truly committed to the achievement of comprehensive human security for all peoples of the Earth.

The problem of human security in a militarized world

During the weeks in which the first version of this article was prepared (2009), the news media was rife with indications of a vision of a future in which national interests would be pursued by military force, examples being North Korea’s testing of a nuclear weapon and American politicians raising the specter of threats to national security to rationalize the use of torture to obtain ‘intelligence’ from ‘terrorists’. The New York Times reported on 9 June 2009, ‘Global Arms Spending Up, Study Shows. World governments spent $1.46 trillion on upgrading their armed forces last year despite the economic downturn’ (p. A6). We continue to live in a world in which our leaders, those charged with responsibility for our ‘national security’, perceive that security to be under constant threat, so severe as to necessitate the acquisition of ever more destructive weapons, so insidious as to convince normally democratic societies that the exigencies of security permit states to violate internationally agreed-upon standards of human rights. Nations and forces seeking entry into the higher levels of the global power hierarchy pursue the development of nuclear weapons, even in the face of the 2017 ban treaty – a proliferation of the possibilities for the total destruction of vast regions of the planet. We are constantly told we are under threat by other nations, justifying the violation of all standards of civility and frustrating impulses toward sociality and international cooperation, the conditions most conducive to human security within and among nations. Rather than engaging in the vigorous pursuit of such conditions, nations and some non-state actors – with ambitions to hold powers of state or who purport to represent the interest of particular peoples – continue to pursue military power in the name of national security or peoples’ interests. Yet nations are not secure, and the interests of peoples are not served. The world, as our leaders persuade us, is dangerous. We contend, however, that the major dangers it holds are not the ones from which our states are prepared to protect us. The major dangers are in the daily insecurities of most of the peoples of the world, be they at peace or at war, a fact obscured by the priorities of current security policies and, as Michele W. Milner observes in her article, the media that report them.

For more than a year prior to 19 March 2003 – the day on which the United States invaded Iraq – the American people were instructed repeatedly that their security was severely threatened by Iraq, its association with terrorists, its development of weapons of mass destruction (never found) and its tyrannical leader. The British people were similarly instructed about these same threats to their national security that required pre-emptive military action. So, too, are the Pakistanis warned about India – indeed, it was stated that had the Indian Army been intervening within the country rather than the Taliban, the Pakistani government would have reacted with far greater haste to the advance of a political force seeking to impose an extreme patriarchal, misogynist regime; Indians are warned about Pakistan; North Koreans about South Korea and the United States and vice versa; Iranians about the United States and vice versa; the Israelis about Palestine: the list could go on.

The cumulative effect of these instructions from national leaderships about threats to security is an intense and pervasive sense of insecurity that persuades populations to maintain and support heavily armed states to protect them. Only with strong militaries, it is widely believed, can nations have any assurance of security. It is popular wisdom that before September 11, 2001, the American people, citizens of the most militarily advanced and powerful nation in world history, perceived their ‘homeland’ to be secure, a security based on the mightiest military the world had ever known. Although it was clear that even the mightiest military could not secure the nation against such attacks as crumbled the World Trade Towers and shattered the illusion of invulnerability held by so many Americans, the ‘homeland security’ discourse that ensued was largely limited to new methods of warfare, new forms of militarism and invasive surveillance to meet the ‘new threats’. Consideration of how these new threats might affect the possibilities of progress toward the newly emerging concept of human security was not on the new national security agenda in the United States or in any of the nations involved in the War on Terror.

A pivotal question, seldom asked in the American security discourse, or indeed, in any nation, is ‘Who among the citizens of the mighty state perceived and now perceives themselves to be truly secure?’ Was it the single mother on minimum wage or welfare; a community on the edge of a toxic waste site; the black youth needing to walk through a racist neighbourhood; a young woman required, on returning from a late work shift, to walk alone on poorly lighted streets, blocks from the bus or subway to her home; the family living in a trailer park in a tornado area? Those whose loved ones and homes were swept away by Hurricanes Katrina and Maria? Is it the thousands upon thousands of Americans who in 2008 and 2009 lost their jobs and most of their retirement investments? Who among such vulnerable people of any nation are, in fact, secure? What is security? The advent of the concept of human security and the discussion of the relationship between national/state or strategic security and human or people’s security is an opportunity to address these and other related queries.

To advance that discussion, we propose a feminist concept and framework of security to challenge the militarized state security system and to call attention to the gendered effects of that system, as they impact particularly on women. Many of these effects are chronicled in this collection of articles. The integral relationship between gender and militarism has been well explored and, feminists would argue, established in extensive literature on the topic.² Norma Nemeh, in telling us in her article of how the convergence of sexism and militarism impact Jordanian women, attests to the integral relationship between these two attributes of patriarchy. This collection attempts to build upon the current feminist discourse on women, war and peace, with an inquiry into alternatives to militarized national security within the context of gender as constructed in the present patriarchal order of world politics.

The essential significance of a feminist perspective is in its potential to illuminate the human security deficits imposed by the present system on virtually all vulnerable populations in all states, no matter their place in the global hierarchy. Through study of the gendered experience of women, a feminist perspective also sheds light on the ways in which human security is destroyed by armed conflict and is systematically weakened by all forms of militarized security. Feminists have attributed this systemic vulnerability to the power imbalance between men and women at the heart of patriarchy, still manifest in some form in most societies. I would also contend that the disadvantaged position of women in patriarchy puts in jeopardy the security of most of the human community – even the patriarchs. If women and those who depend upon them are not secure, to what extent can a nation, in the true sense of the word, meaning the people of a state or society, be secure? This is one of the central questions that informs this collection on gendered aspects of significant obstacles to and possibilities for the achievement of human security.

We intend to argue that authentic national security is human security, and we encourage readers to consider whether militarized state security can ever really assure it. Indeed, it is the militarized system of state security that seriously threatens human security in ways to be elaborated later in this article. This and other chapters will put forth some feminist assertions about security as a basis of our arguments and about a perspective from which to view the cases of insecurity and struggles for alternatives to militarized security described here.

Feminism asserts the equal human value of women and men and argues for the changes necessary to realize it. ‘Feminist’ here means as seen and analyzed from women’s gendered perspective, a perspective influenced both by women’s exclusion and marginalization from security politics and by their experience of struggle to provide day-by-day basic human security throughout history and still today throughout most of the world. This is the work that patriarchy has assigned them. In recent years the term ‘masculinist’ has begun to appear in literature dealing with various aspects of the gender problematic. I take this term to mean as seen from and interpreted in the light of men’s gendered experience – now the subject of masculinities studies – particularly with regard to their public roles and also from the perspective of their purported human superiority to women and children (Breines et al. 2000). The term is often used to indicate, as well, the exclusion of women from the subject at hand or a discourse which does not consider others. The exclusionist male view of the masculinist perspective is in contrast with a feminist perspective which often also includes others as a consequence of the recognition of the organic and integral relationship between women and those to whom they relate. As noted by such scholars as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Mary Belenky (1986), many women think and behave in relational terms, nurturing relationships, while men tend to think in terms of separateness of themselves and the groups to which they belong, among them the nation state. The masculinist perspective tends also to be individualistic, an attribute I believe accounts for the fact that even the foundations of universal human rights are articulated only in terms of the individual, as is much of the current discourse on human security.³ Neither forms of thinking are sexually – that is, biologically – determined, nor are they innate. Most gender scholars attribute these characteristics, as they do gender itself, to socialization, education and experience and therefore view them as subject to change through these same processes. Both these forms of thinking have security policy implications and consequences to be discussed next in a proposal for a feminist framework for human security and a critique of militarized state security.

‘Gender’, as the concept is generally used in works that deal with the differences and inequalities between men and women, is a socially derived concept, a culturally varied construct that assigns to men and women a set of cultural roles and social functions only minimally determined by their respective reproductive and sexual characteristics. However, the concept of gender that underlies the arguments articulated in this article is that it is the conceptual structure through which patriarchy has historically assured the psychosocial acceptance of the particular positions in the masculinist hierarchy to which patriarchy assigns men, women and children (Reardon 2008). Patriarchy has convinced most of humanity that the traditional gender roles and expectations that have governed relationships among men, women, children and society are the product of nature, designed by their ‘divine creator’. Cultural practices regarding gender roles may vary, but the fundamental hierarchal structure is similar in all patriarchal societies. Gender is a system maintenance mechanism of patriarchy as manifest in the state, and the term ‘gendered’ as used here pertains to sex roles in the patriarchal order. This order we contend – in agreement with various scholars developing the field of masculinities studies – also severely restricts the human potential of men and exacts great costs from the majority of them, especially those in the ranks of the vulnerable, as observed elsewhere in this article.⁴

Patriarchy: a framework for human insecurity and a source of gender injustice

The present militarized system of state security is but a reification of the core political paradigm that has existed in most societies throughout most of human history. Patriarchy is likely to have preceded the state that is an abstraction for the power of governance, a depersonalization of power that allows those who hold and exercise it, to rationalize and obscure the harm they cause to those over whom they have power. What previously had been customary and viewed as cultural practice became sanctified and institutionalized in the nation state which claimed sovereign, often absolute, power over its peoples and based its claim to power on divine will. The state, it was asserted, was ordained by God – or the gods, among whom some rulers numbered themselves – and those who ruled were chosen by God to do so. Institutional religion reinforced the claim, and its institutions also reified the hierarchal order through which patriarchy organized itself. The state and institutionalized religion, the intermediaries between people or the gods, the armed forces mustered by these two institutions, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: challenging patriarchal violence
• PART I Confronting the militarized state security paradigm: human security from a feminist perspective
• PART II Patriarchal conditioning to violence and human insecurity
• PART III Militarization/demilitarization: eroding and promoting human security
• PART IV Alternative and transitional approaches to human security
• Conclusion: framing a gender and human security discourse: initiating the inquiry
• Annexure: Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820
• Index