Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018 | Page 13

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
Gender and Security
In recent years, a paradigm shift among international organizations, governments,
and NGOs from a state security perspective to a human security perspective
has opened the field of international relations to an array of topics not
previously integrated into conceptualizations of security, including gender issues.
This has brought into the mainstream a gendered view of what it means to be secure.
The literature on gender and security highlights the need to consider the
unique and differentiated circumstances of women around the world. This is something
that until recently mainstream international relations writings have ignored.
Hudson (2005) argues that “A realist national security project enforces conformity
to values that are often male-defined. Feminists therefore point out that an understanding
of security issues needs to be extended to include the specific security
concerns of women” (157). Human security approaches allow scholars to do that.
As Hoogensen and Stuvoy (2006) note in their discussion of gendered approaches
to human security, “The widening of the security agenda and the focus on the
individual allows for the integration of non-state perspectives to inform security
theory and security approaches” (207–8). However, a human security approach
to looking at gender issues is not without pitfalls. The way that some groups conceptualize
community security can minimize the importance of health security,
particularly when it comes to women’s health.
Human security was first introduced in the 1994 Human Development Report.
While human security primarily focuses on the individual as opposed to the
state, it also focuses on community security. Frerks (2008) points out that one of
the difficulties of the human security approach is the comprehensive nature of the
concept. He asks, “How does one respect the multidimensionality of human security
without becoming paralysed in the face of all those challenges that demand
simultaneous and integrated action?” (12).
This multidimensionality may also mean that women’s needs take lower
precedence. In some situations, the individual woman is only conceptualized as
part of a community that takes higher precedence. This paper will discuss how in
two communities, women are expected to subordinate individual health needs to
what are perceived as community needs and community norms. These community
norms form an essential part of how a community sees itself and thus what
it needs to do to survive in way that is in keeping with its own self-perception.
Often, the discourse surrounding community norms ignores the nondominant
groups within the community and the challenges of intersectionality. How women
are asked to understand their own security is shaped by the idea that their health
needs and control of their own reproduction threaten the culture, the very survival
of their communities, and even the nation-state. However, discourse about
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