Through the Gender Lens: A Feminist Analysis of ‘Security’

Volume:38

Issue:1

Review Essay

Nicole Detraz, International Security and Gender (Dimensions of Security), Polity, UK, 2012, 168 pp., $21.39 (trade paperback), ISBN 978-0745651170

Annick T.R. Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (PRIO New Security Studies), Routledge, US, 2011, 224 pp., $33.28 (trade paperback), ISBN 978-0415457286

Located in an anarchic world where self-help is the only mode available for survival, nothing shoots to prominence the way the idea of security does. For in providing a ‘comforting’ counter-narrative to a danger that is synonymous with death, it is in securing oneself from any ‘existential’ threat that lays the safest bet. In fact, the idea of security is one of those few political projects that agents and actors of all kinds subscribe to and whose achievement would be wished away by none. But while its demand is witnessed on the widest scale, the supply of security is restricted to a chosen few.