We are socialized into believing that war and power politics are spheres of activity with which men have a special affinity and that their voiced in describing and prescribing for this world are therefore likely to be more authentic. The roles traditionally ascribed to women – in reproduction, in households, and even in the economy – are generally considered irrelevant to the traditional construction of the field. Ignoring women’s experiences contributes not only to their exclusion but also to a process of self-selection that results in an overwhelmingly male population both in the foreign policy world and in the academic field of international relations. (4-5)
… the marginalization of women in the arena of foreign policy-making through the kind of gender stereotyping suggests that international politics has always been a gendered activity in the modern state system. (5)
Since foreign and military policy-making has been largely conducted by men, the discipline that analyses these activities is bound to be primarily about men and masculinity. (5)
Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially sanctioned, unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce compliance with men’s stated superiority. (6)
While what it means to be a man or a woman varies across cultures and history, in most cultures gender differences signify relationships or inequality and the domination of women by men. (7)
… one could characterize most contemporary feminist scholarship in terms of the dual beliefs that gender difference has played an important and essential role in the structuring of social inequalities in much of human history and that the resulting differences in self-identification, human understandings, social status, and power relationships are unjustified. (7)
In political discourse, this becomes translated into stereotypical notions about those who inhabit the outside. Like women, foreigners are frequently portrayed as “the other”: nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted as irrational, emotional, and unstable, characteristics that are also attributed to women. The construction of this discourse and the way in which we are taught to think about international politics closely parallel the way in which we are socialized into understanding gender differences. (9) – gender as ‘the other’
A more fundamental challenge to realism came from scholars influenced by the Marxist tradition. Motivated by a different agenda, one that emphasizes issues of equality and justice rather than issues of order and control, scholars using a variety of more radical approaches attempted to move the field away from its excessively Western focus toward a consideration of those marginalized areas of the world system that had been subject to Western colonization. (12-3)
While it is obvious that not all women are feminists, feminist theories are constructed out of the experiences of women in their many and varied circumstances, experiences that have generally been rendered invisible by most intellectual disciplines. (14)
Most contemporary feminist scholars claim that the sources of discrimination against women run much deeper than legal restraints: they are emeshed in the economic, cultural, and social structures of society and thus do not end when legal restraints are removed. Almost all feminist perspectives have been motivated by the common goal of attempting to describe and explain the sources of gender inequality, and hence women’s oppression, and to seek strategies to end them. (15)
Feminists claim that women are oppressed in a multiplicity of ways that depend on culture, class, and race as well as on gender. (15)
While Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the source of women’s oppression, radical feminists claim that women are oppressed by the system of patriarchy that has existed under almost all modes of production. Patriarchy is institutionalized through legal and economic, as well as social and cultural institutions. (15)
Feminists in the psychoanalytic tradition look for the source of women’s oppression deep in the psyche, in gender relationships into which we are socialised from birth. (15)
Socialist feminists claim that women’s position in society is determined both by structures of production in the economy and by structures of reproduction in the household, structures that are reinforced by the early socialisation of children into gender roles. Women’s unequal status in all these structures must be eliminated for full equality to be achieved. (15-6)
Socialist feminism thus tries to understand the position of women in their multiple roles in order to find a single standpoint from which to explain their condition. Using standpoint in the sense that it has been used by Marxists, these theorists claim that those who are oppressed have a better understanding of the sources of their oppression than their oppressors. (16)
This notion of standpoint has been seriously criticized by postmodern feminists who argue that a unified representation of women across class, racial, and cultural lines is an impossibility. Just as feminists more generally have criticized existing knowledge that is grounded in the experiences of white Western males, postmodernists claim that feminists themselves are in danger of essentializing the meaning of woman when they draw exclusively on the experiences of white Western women. Postmodernists believe that a multiplicity of women’s voices must be heard lest feminism itself become one more hierarchical system of knowledge construction. (16)
Any attempt to construct feminist perspectives on international relations must take this concern of postmodernists seriously. (16)
The world of international politics is a masculine domain, how could feminist perspectives contribute anything new to its academic discourse? Many male scholars have already noted that, given our current technologies of destruction and the high degree of economic inequality and environmental degradation that now exists, we are desperately in need of changes in the way world politics is conducted. (17)
Feminist theories, which speak out of the various experiences of women – who are usually on the margins of society and interstate politics 0 can offer us some new insights on the behaviour of states and the need of individuals, particularly those one the peripheries of the international system. (18)
Feminist theories must go beyond injecting women’s experiences into different disciplines and attempt to challenge the core concepts of the disciplines themselves. Concepts central to international relations theory and practice, such as power, sovereignty, and security, have been framed in terms that we associate with masculinity. Drawing on feminist theories to examine and critique the meaning of these and other concepts fundamental to international politics could help us to reformulate these concepts in ways that might allow us to see new possibilities for solving our current insecurities. Suggesting that the personal is political, feminist scholars have brought to our attention distinctions between public and private in the domestic polity: examining these artificial boundary distinctions in the domestic polity could shed new light on international boundaries, such as those between anarchy and order, which are so fundamental to the conceptual framework of realist discourse. (18)
The construction of hierarchical binary oppositions has been central to theorizing about international relations. Distinctions between domestic and foreign, inside and outside, order and anarchy, and centre and periphery have served as important assumptions in theory construction and as organizing principles for the way we view the world. (19)
Feminists can bring to light gender hierarchies embedded in the theories and practices of world politics and allow us to see the extent to which all these systems of domination are interrelated. (19)
Thinking of security in multidimensional terms allows us to get away from prioritizing military issues, issues that have been central to the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed from women’s experiences. (22-3)
If we were to include women’s experiences in our assumptions about the security-seeking behaviour of states, how would it change the way in which we think about national security? Given the sexual division of labour, men’s association with violence has been legitimated through war and the instruments of the state. Feminist perspectives must introduce the issue of domestic violence and analyse how the boundaries between public and private, domestic and international, political and economic, are permeable and interrelated. (23)
Like most contemporary feminists, Evelyn Fox Keller rejects this positivist view of science that imposes a coercive, hierarchical, and conformist pattern on scientific inquiry. Since most contemporary feminist scholars believe that knowledge is socially constructed, they are sceptical of finding an unmediated foundation for knowledge that realists claim is possible. Since they believe that it is language that transmits knowledge, many feminists suggest that the scholarly claims about the neutral uses of language and about objectivity must continually be questioned. (36)
When we consider security from the perspective of the individual, we find that new thinking is beginning to provide us with definitions of security that are less state-centred and less militaristic. (53)
Feminist reformulations of the meaning of security are needed to draw attention to the extent to which gender hierarchies themselves are a source of domination and thus an obstacle to a truly comprehensive definition of security. (53)
Third World women defined insecurity more broadly in terms of the structural violence associated with imperialism, militarism, racism, and sexism. Yet all agreed that security meant nothing if it was built on others’ insecurity. (54-4)
… contemporary new thinkers also include the elimination of structural violence in their definition of security. (55)
Claiming that militarism, sexism, and racism are interconnected, most feminists would agree that the behaviour of individuals and the domestic policies of states cannot be separated from state’s behaviour in the international system. Feminists call attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women within states, vulnerabilities that grow out of hierarchical gender relations that are also interrelated with international politics. (56)
In militarized societies women are particularly vulnerable to rape, and evidence suggests that domestic violence is higher in military families or in families that include men with prior military service. Even though most public violence is committed by men against other men, it is more often women who feel threatened in public places. Jill Radford suggests that when women feel it is unsafe to go out alone, their equal access to job opportunities is limited. (56)
Feminist theories draw our attention to another anarchy/order distinction – the boundary between a public domestic space protected, at least theoretically, by the rule of law and the private space of the family where, in many cases, no such legal protection exists. In most states domestic violence is not considered a concern of the state, and even when it is, law enforcement officials are often unwilling to get involved. Domestic assaults on women, often seen as “victim precipitated,” are not taken as seriously as criminal assaults. (57)
Feminist perspectives on security would assume that violence, whether it be in the international, national, or family realm, is interconnected. Family violence must be seen in the context of wider power relations; it occurs within a gendered society in which male power dominates at all levels. If men are traditionally seen as protectors, an important aspect of this role is protecting women against certain men. (58) Feminist perspectives on national security take us beyond realism’s statist representations. They allow us to see that the realist view of national security is constructed out of a masculinised discourse that, while it is only a partial view of reality, is taken as universal. Women’s definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional. Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual. (66)
Feminist perspective on national security demonstrates that there are equally plausible alternative ways of conceptualising security and prescribing for its realization. They also draw our attention to examining the world from perspectives not of elite decision-makers but of those who are outside positions of power yet can present an equally plausible representation of reality. (132)
- Power is a set of ever-changing relations.
- Power is not possessed but exercised. By exercising power certain relationship is being built. (e.g. patriarchy: power operates to shape certain types of people, certain desires and relationships.)
- Thus, power is not necessarily repressive, but rather productive. There is always resistance.
* Disciplinary power
- Based on classification, surveillance and control of individuals.
- Modern power (based on routine surveillance)
- Creation of new forms of knowledge such as medicine, criminology and sexology in hierarchical categories. Knowledge is produced by discourses.
- The role of medicine, criminal justice, psychiatry is to produce new forms of power and knowledge over bodies.
- Development of disciplinary techniques. Exercised on the bodies of individual
- Collection of knowledge of individual and population (e.g. fertility rate)
* Biopower – thought of as a subject of disciplinary power
- From right of death to power over life. Power to foster life.
- Power is to govern people (e.g. demographic, statistics are important for the govt. to build policies)
- Biopower aims to govern a population’s life forces. (as the medium for the play of power)
: the body comes to be linked to new political rationalities specifically located within new technologies of biopower.
- These two forms come together in broad ‘technologies of power/knowledge’.
Two forms: 1) The anatomic-politics of the human body (Body as a machine)
(focus on the discipline of the individual body to normalise their comportment)
2) The bio-politics of the population (the regulation of the population)
(population become new objective power that could be managed, e.g. baby bonus, life protecting laws)
- We become ‘self-regulating’ subjects who monitor our health and act to reduce our ‘risk factors’.
- Surveillance is central to biopower and is institutionalised through the types of disciplinary techniques, which result in the production of ‘docile bodies’.
- Biopolitics become a scientific and political problem to be known categorised and governed.
- Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls.
- Biopower is an individualising and a totalising form of power.
* Biopower since 1984
- Capitalism and the modern nation state are impossible without biopower. (142-3)
- Medicine shifts its focus from curing disease to health, risk and prevention.
- Expansion of biological knowledge: genetics, genomics, neuroscience.
- Scientific development and biomedicine in the context of state and law (how these are used)
- Biological discourse has come to understand our body.
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.”
Wombats are Australian marsupials; they are short-legged, muscular quadrupeds, approximately 1 metre (39 in) in length with a very short tail. They are found in forested, mountainous, and heathland areas of south-eastern Australia and Tasmania. The name wombat comes from the Eora Aboriginal community who were the original inhabitants of the Sydney area.
Wombats dig extensive burrow systems with rodent-like front teeth and powerful claws. One distinctive adaptation of wombats is their backwards pouch. The advantage of a backwards-facing pouch is that when digging, the wombat does not gather dirt in its pouch over its young. Although mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, wombats will also venture out to feed on cool or overcast days. They are not commonly seen, but leave ample evidence of their passage, treating fences as minor inconveniences to be gone through or under, and leaving distinctive cubic faeces.
Wombats are herbivores; their diet consists mostly of grasses, sedges, herbs, bark and roots. Their incisor teeth somewhat resemble those of the placental rodents, being adapted for gnawing tough vegetation. Like many other herbivorous mammals, they have a large diastema between the incisors and the cheek teeth, which are relatively simple.
Wombats have an extraordinarily slow metabolism, taking around 14 days to complete digestion, which aids their survival in arid conditions. They generally move slowly, and because of this are known for taking shortcuts, but when threatened they can reach up to 40 km/h (25 mph) and maintain that speed for up to 90 seconds.
Humans can receive puncture wounds from wombat claws as well as bites.
(from Butler, Gender Trouble and translated version)
Within philosophical discourse itself, the notion of "the person" has received analytic elaboration on the assumption that whatever social context the person is "in" remains somehow externally related to the definitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation. (22)
철학적 담론 자체로 '사람' 이란, 그 사람이 '처한' 모든 사회적 맥락이 어쨋든 사람됨을 정의하는 구조와 외적으로 연관되어 있다는 전제에 입각한 분석적 연구를 수용해왔다. (115)
"Intelligible" genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire. In other words, the spectres of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produces by the very laws that seek establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the "expression" or "effect" of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice. (23)
'인식 가능한' 젠더는 어떤 의미에서는 섹스, 젠더, 성 습관, 그리고 욕망 간에 일관성과 연속성의 관계를 설정하고 유지한다. 다시 말해 불연속성이나 비일관성이라는 유령들, 기존의 연속성이나 일관성의 규범과 관련해서만 존재할 법한 그 유령들은 다름 아닌 법 때문에 계속 금지되고, 또 그 법 때문에 생산된다. 이 법은 생물학적 섹스, 문화적으로 구성된 젠더, 그리고 성 습관을 통해 표명되는 섹스와 젠더의 '표현물' 이나 '결과물' 가운데 어떤 인과론적이거나 표현론적인 관계망을 설정하고자 한다. (116)
Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (45)
젠더는 본질의 외관, 자연스러운 듯한 존재를 생산하기 위해 오랫동안 응결되어온 매우 단단한 규제의 틀 안에서 반복된 몸의 양식화이자 반복된 일단의 행위이다. (147)
The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original.
비이성애적 틀 안에서 이성애의 구성물을 반복하는 것은, 이른바 이성애적 원본이라는 것이 순전히 만들어진 위상임을 분명하게 드러낸다. (144)
KM Fierke, 'Human Insecurity', Critical Approaches to International Security (London: Polity, 2007) 144-166.
Human security
- Human security shifts attention away from states to individuals, emphasizing human rights, rethinking of the relationship between security and development.
- notion that underdevelopment is dangerous in so far as it correlates and coexists with violent conflict. (144)
Human security was first popularized by the UN Development Programme and was a response to an observation after the end of the Cold War that in today's conflicts civilians are often the victims and even the primary targets of violence.
- e.g. child soldiers, refugees, rape (145)
The concept of human security and its themes
- sustainable development (environmental protection)
- human development
--- the safety of individuals is key to global security (145)
other three different themes:
- human rights and the rule of law -> individuals have a basic right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
- the safety of peoples -> secure the moral and legal rights of non-combatants in war, assist in building the peace and preventing future conflict, and improve the basic living conditions of refugees.
- sustainable development, including economic, social and environmental rights -> the strategic objective is to alleviate poverty to redistribute wealth and to encourage participatory governance. (146)
A Critical Concept?
Human security emphasizes meeting basic material needs as well as preserving human dignity, which includes meaningful participation in a community.
Although states are not the focus, they are not unimportant. They should play a crucial role in creating and maintaining structures of authority and responsibility that contribute to human security. However, in a globalising world, they can't always implement international obligations because they lack control within their borders and have inadequate institutional capacity and resources.
This is exacerbated by the proliferation of non-state actors, such as international arms dealers, non-state paramilitaries, international crime and terrorism.
Buzan recognizes that the state is 'a necessary condition for individual security because without the state it is not clear what other agency is o act on behalf individuals. (Top-Down approach)
Arguably, this misses the point. As Williams point out, societal security refers to the process by which society is securitized and acquires an identity, which may be linked to processes of state securitization. (Bottom-Up approach) (148)
Human security has been a key concept of NGOs and others who are interested in actually transforming global economic structures. (150)
Development and security
Development and security used to be largely separate areas of study and practice. Development studies addressed questions of global inequality and poverty. Security studies focused on conflict and war. (150)
The critical Marxist literature on development is premised on the idea that globalization is not a new phenomenon. The underdevelopment of the South has gone hand in hand with the development of the North in a capitalist world economy.
Critics of European imperialism in the early part of the twentieth century, and not least Lenin, argued that capitalism was fuelled by the need to expand in search of profit. Imperialism was a manifestation of this global expansion in pursuit of wealth. (151)
Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974) World System Theory provided a framework for understanding the relationship between the development of the industrial core, the underdevelopment of a periphery, which provided raw materials, and a semi-periphery, which produced luxury goods and provided a buffer against revolutionary transformation. (151)
It wasn't that the South was undeveloped, but rather that it had been deliberately underdeveloped within a global relationship. (151)
This discourse of underdevelopment has largely disappeared since the 1980s and particularly since the end of the Cold War. In its place, a neo-liberal agenda, which promotes the free market, the universal legitimacy of private economic power and individual choice within the marketplace, has emerged. (152)
In contrast to economic assumptions that globalization is delivering economic growth for all, free market liberalization since the 1980s had accelerated the widening of this gap. (152)
Security
The conflicts related in some cases to the failure of states to consolidate their authority over an area which may have been exacerbated by the loss of superpower funding as the Cold War ended. Failed states and, along with them, conflict proliferated in the 1990s. (153)
The victims in these conflicts are overwhelmingly citizens, rather than the representatives of recognizable state armies.
The global downsizing of armies following the end of the Cold War created a large pool of private mercenaries and an expanding role for them, and the privatisation of security, under the auspices of corporate actors or Western states (Musah in Milliken 2003:166-9)
The outbreak of new wars has corresponded with an increasing emphasis in the academic literature and in political discourse on the idea that liberal democracies don't fight with one another. (153)
Empires and imperial states have repeatedly deployed force against states and populations in the periphery in the service of the project of extending European rule and institutions to the rest of the world. (154)
Liberal governance as a solution
Liberal discourses of development and democracy have focused on individual states, ignoring the embeddedness of these states in historical relations that are global.
Mark Duffield (2001) provides a critical analysis of the relationship between security and development, which has increasingly been addressed within a liberal governance model. (154)
Development discourse has changed from an emphasis on supporting pro-Western Southern elites through aid to the transformation of entire societies. In the first half of the 1990s, the international community was very focused on humanitarian intervention in different conflict areas. (155)
The change, since the mid-1990s, is Duffield (2001:11) argues, one of policy rather than in the nature of the conflict. The reason for the change of policy is the conclusion that underdevelopment is dangerous and is a source of conflict. This conclusion, which is an extension of the liberal model, does not locate underdevelopment or 'failed states' in an unjust global system which has emerged along with a capitalist world economy and a history of imperialism. The liberal governance model internalizes the causes of conflict and political instability. (155)
Duffield examines human security as part of a Foucauldian strategy of biopolitics, whereby a strategic complex of global actors and governing agencies, through a newly formed public-private relationship, shape and control civil population. (156)
A Critical analysis
Development and security discourses reinforced a liberal agenda of transforming entire societies into liberal democracies. This agenda is problematic for two reasons.
1st: as it represents a new regime of power, albeit ‘softer’ than the old imperialist regime, Marxists view human security as a repackaging of liberal humanitarianism, with its routine failure to address underlying social causes.
2nd: the discourse failed to problematize the role of historical global relations in the production of ‘failed states’. (156)
The liberal model locates the problem of human insecurity in the failure of individual states to proceed along the pathway to successful statehood.
The dependency model locates the problem in historical and global relations that continue to constrain or underdevelop large parts of the world. (157)
In the liberal model, democracy is an ideal type, towards which all states should want to progress. The failure of certain states establishes the problem of human insecurity as arising from the lack of stateness and prescribes a response, that is, reconstructing the state as a liberal democracy.
The liberal model fails to hitoricize processes of state-making or to recognize local and global processes that have contributed to the construction of different types of state. (157)
Failed states
The critical methodological potential of human security lies not in bringing an ideal model of democracy and political order to the ‘problem’ of failed states, but in an analysis of these processes of construction at different levels and how they intersect. (159)
The shift from the modernization and development theories of the 1950s and 1960s to the democratization theories of the 1980s and 1990s is one of emphasis, from the state as the centre of social control to ‘advocating and supporting the construction of conformist civil societies as supposedly autonomous spaces of individual freedom and association’. (160-161)
What is missing from these logics, Bilgin and Morton argue, is any question about the processes by which these states become ‘weak’ while others become strong. They never ask the question of who has failed the ‘failed state’?
Claims about ‘failed states’ do not reflect on the power-knowledge relationship. (161)
The construction of famine and genocide
The problem relates to a lack of clarity regarding the language employed and a failure to recognize the relationship between the use of categories and the practices that emerge as a result. (161)
Jenny Edkins (2000, 2005) problematizes the conceptualization of famine as a natural disaster for which no one is to blame, and asks a question about ‘who might be responsible for a famine, rather than what caused it’. (162)
Famine as a natural disaster produces victims who need welfare provision or aid, rather than agents with a political voice. These victims then become subject to administrative mechanisms of food distribution and aid. This process depoliticizes famine and constitutes it as a site for intervention and control. (163)
Edkins: Starvation is no more ‘natural’ than suffocation: it is no more a shortage of food than the latter is a shortage of air. (163)
By demonstrating the parallels between mass starvation and genocide, Edkins politicizes the former, showing that it is often a product of human intentionality, through a series of small acts, rather than a natural disaster. This introduces an element of human responsibility and agency in the construction of human insecurity. (163)
Arguably, both famine and genocide involve two levels of intentionality. The first is the intentionality of the political groups that produce the catastrophe. The second is the intentionality of the international community in responding – or not responding 0 to the human catastrophe. (164)
Conclusion
A more critical approach to the concept of human security would place less emphasis on ‘fixing’ the meaning of categories and instead explore the conceptual worlds that have given rise to various forms of insecurity. This requires problematizing the liberal assumptions underlying the concept, in order to prise open a more critical space for asking questions about the meaning of political community and the processes by which human security might more effectively be constructed. (166)
i was thinking of the tourism poster that i mentioned in previous post, and seeing these women in traditional coustume made me think how this image produces meaning and gender. if i have to relate 'performative gender' to this image, i would have to borrow from Butler that, gender is a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being (45). thus, the image of women in Hanbok carefully preparing food is highly sexed gender as 'female' with (socially recognised or socially accepted) female characteristics, female roles and heterosexuality (who serves king). this reinforces coherent gender. so no good. i mean i wouldn't be this annoyed if there wasn't two women in hanbok and such text. it could've been better if there was both male and female, or two women smiling at camera (so they don't look very submissive), or no person, no text. it could've been better to appeal foreign tourists with only food images. don't put women in traditional coustume with no face or feast like a king kinda stuff.
no, if i were in korea, i must be twenty five instead
i had ambitious dream about becoming twenty five when i was seventeen
i thought i would be 'cool' career woman busy working, in a word - city chick
i though i would be travelling around the world writing and photographying
.... but i still have long way to go
everything has been changed since then.. my dreams, my thoughts, and my surroundings
three years back before got into uni, i thought i would be a much better person
but yet i think i am a little bit better person
+junjie and other friends gave me a surprise party
i really didnt expect that but i wasnt very surprised
dunno why
+'wicked', broadway musical
it was fantastic
whenever i see musical or other dance performance, i wanna be a dancer too
i should have chosen to do ballet. seriously
+sydney
the one thing i noticed was korean tourism posters in bus stops
in that poster there was a huge dining table (korean style) filled with heaps of dishes
AND two women in hanbok. the poster doesnt show their face coz the camera angle was from the top
so it was more focusing on 'food' and person who is 'preparing food for someone' - someone here is obviously people who have potential (money, time and interest) to come to korea
at a first glance i thought .. 'hmm.. so korean govt. is making korea an 'exotic' and 'traditional' place to attract western people with our food'. i thought it wasnt too bad coz there is korean wave and so much of popularity and awareness of korean food here so using images of food is a good strategy.
but then i realised the weirdness of text on that poster. 'win a trip to korea and feast like a king'
what the.....!
the poster was emphasising food and women preparing food so carefully (of course no face shown)
and they say 'feast like a king'? it seems to me that korea is attracting only male tourists.
i understand the phrase 'feast like a king' when you are well treated with food
but when this phrase is used with this image.... i thought it's sexist. i felt the poster is saying,
'you come to korea, our submissive korean women will serve you nice food and feed you like a king'.
(the link:: http://www.ilovekoreanfood.com.au/ :: the site doesnt have the actual poster with text in bus stops but initiall image is this one)
- this festival has been there for quite long time. intially they advocate legalising use of marijuana.
i remember my first time in nimbin. the first thing i saw in entrance of viallage was police office.
yet, people there sell and buy weed unofficially but freely. the funny thing is they have such hemp embassy and museum, which are good source to learn about weed or experience it. i really wanted to go this festival since 2007 but had no change. this time i should make it.
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