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Feminist Critiques of Human Security

Whereas gender disparities in human security provides an important level of analysis, the primary interest of feminist analyses is to make women’s perspectives visible - to gather and interpret information from the standpoints of girls’ and women’s diverse experiences in order to affect policy making in regard to women’s rights. Feminist analysts’ larger referents are human security discourses and androcentric biases. They bring to the forefront girls’ and women’s experiences to emphasize that removing gender-linked insecurities, such as unequal social relationships, are critical to women’s security.

Feminist analysts accept as true that patriarchal assumptions and actions privilege men and are globally endemic - although these vary by race, class, culture, and Euro-American, non-Western, and other perspectives. Reiterating this perspective, Gunhild Hoogensen emphasized that security should be defined by those who are least secure: “Feminisms, including western, non-western, and indigenous feminisms, offer powerful arguments articulating voices of the insecure, and deserve to be heard and responded to by mainstream sources.”

A key feminist question about human security is “whose security is emphasized and how?” The feminist answer is that boys’ and men’s security is prioritized over that of girls and women because of sexism whereby women and girls are discriminated against because of their gender. Yet, even when acknowledged, this question must continually be reintroduced because it is easily forgotten within typically masculinist-dominant human security discourses. Other feminist questions are, “how do ordinary women define human security as compared with prevailing meanings?” and “what forces in a nation or community create, reinforce, and maintain gendered conditions of human insecurity, and what are these?” In their critiques, feminist scholars assert that human security must privilege issues of physical, structural, and ecological violence rather than military security. Also, their critiques underscore interrelationships between military, economic, and sexual violence.

Envisioning a global security that takes into account both state security and the security of individuals and their natural environment, J. Ann Tickner encapsulated the ways in which feminist critiques diverge from traditional masculinist notions of human security:
Feminist perspectives on security start with the individual or community, rather than the state or the international system. Rejecting universal explanations that, they believe, contain hidden gender biases, since they are so often based on the experiences of men, feminists frequently draw on local interpretation to explain women’s relatively deprived position and their insecurity...feminists seek to uncover how gender hierarchies and their intersection with race and class exacerbate women’s insecurities.

Similarly, Erin Baines observed that, “Feminists offer not only important data on the security of the individual but also fresh new perspectives into the nexus of the individual and structures of violence at the local, national and global level.”

Feminist critiques of threats to women and girls’ human security consequently raise awareness about missing pieces within the prevailing human security discourse. They eschew reductionism or piecemeal approaches by considering all constraints that prevent girls and women from attaining human security. Baines identified three central themes emerging from feminist scholarship on human security: 1) impacts of armed conflict on women, gender relations, and gender roles; 2) ways international humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping operations widen or diminish unequal gender relations; and 3) women’s absence from decision making positions that are central to peace-building.

Peace educator Betty Reardon, a pioneer feminist critic of the concept of security and peace, asserted that feminists view of human security stresses human relationships and meeting human needs, whereas a masculine view tends to emphasize institutions and organizations. According to Reardon, two key overall factors feminists identified as critical in improving human security are protection from attack and fulfillment of fundamental needs; however, security agendas typically favor the former. Reardon visualized a feminist global agenda for human security as follows:
A feminist world security system would attempt to include all peoples and all nations based on a notion of extended kinship including the entire human family...[that] any system to be effective must be fully global, that no nation can fully assure its own security, as the security of each is best assured by the security of all.

Reardon further argued that security should be redefined to emphasize a life-affirming stance and to incorporate social justice, economic equity, and ecological balance such as the agenda developed by the Women’s International Network for Gender and Security (WINGHS) with its four critical feminist dimensions of human security: a healthy planet, meeting basic human needs, respecting and fulfilling human rights, and renunciation of violence and armed conflict in preference for nonviolent change and conflict resolution.

Inger Skjelsbaek, although supportive of the importance of feminist security analyses, questioned whether feminist concepts of human security are viable. She observed that women’s experiences and identifications contain considerable diversity and noted that not all women are subordinate to men. Contemporary feminist analyses and critiques, however, are cognizant that experiences and perspectives vary according to ethnicities, race, class, sexualities, geographies, and culture.

Gender justice is another key aspect of improving women’s human security that is only occasionally discussed within feminist human security discourses. Gender justice refers to legal processes that are equitable, not privileged by and for men, and which distinguish gender-specific injustices that women experience. Girls and women are usually rendered invisible or are marginalized within judicial processes, including war tribunals, when they seek justice in response to gender-specific violence. Within the context of armed conflicts and their aftermath, “gender injustice perpetuates inequality, violates fundamental human rights, hinders healing and psychological restoration, and prevents societies from developing their full potential.”