Gendering Security and Insecurity : Post/Neocolonial Security Logics and Feminist Interventions

Security studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, the book provides an approach that allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analysis of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.

This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Third World Thematics.

Navtej K. Purewal is Reader in Political Sociology and Development Studies at SOAS University of London, UK. Her recent publications have focused on gender and neoliberal governmentality as well as assemblages of gender/caste/religion through resistance in South Asia. She is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective.

Sophia Dingli is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her work is located at the intersection of realist, critical and postcolonial theories, and she has published works on the topics of gender and security and silence in political theory and practice.