Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
security issues frequently suffer from being doubly marginalized; first, in domestic
politics (as a private, ‘domestic’ family matter) and, then, in international politics (as
a private, domestic sovereign state matter). The societal security approach, although
successful in adding social identity to the state as a referent object of security, does
not address this shortcoming.
In addition to the limitations of the ‘speech act’ approach to security when
applied to gender-based discrimination, Hansen also criticizes the Copenhagen
School for subsuming such problems in the focus on national and religious identity
(Hansen 2000). Female insecurity is often a by-product of religious or national/ethnic
societal security concerns. Women are often constructed as the embodiment of
national and/or religious culture and, as such, treated more harshly than men when
they step outside the culturally prescribed notion of a ‘good woman’ (Yuval-Davis
1997: 46). Hence adulterous women in some Islamic states are seen as a greater
threat to cultural norms than their male equivalents and, as a result, are punished
more severely.
The insecurity of women can also be seen to be both heightened and obscured
by the rise of military security threats to the state in which they live. Although wars
continue (in the main) to be fought between men, the threat posed to women in such
conflicts has risen greatly in recent history. Feminist IR writers have drawn attention
to this as an antidote to the ‘myth’ of war being fought by men on behalf of the women
and children of their society or state. Those women and children have had to bear
the brunt of the rise of the systematic targeting of civilians in war over the last century,
make up the bulk of refugees and displaced persons resulting from war and have
suffered the greatest deprivations due to states realigning their economies to the
war effort.
In addition, the sexual abuse of women in wartime, although by no means a
new phenomenon, has, in recent years, become more common without being fully
appreciated. Tickner argues that ‘rape is not just an accident of war but often a
systematic military strategy’ (Tickner 2001: 50). Rape has long been practised by
invading military forces, to symbolize their power and the subjugation of the occupied
peoples, but the scale of the attacks in recent ethnic conflicts does suggest something
more orchestrated. For example, 250,000 women are believed to have been raped
in the Rwandan civil war of 1994 (Tickner 2001: 50) and at least 20,000 in the Bosnian
War of 1991–95 (Pettman 1996: 52). Both of these wars were classic ‘societal security’
conflicts where single countries were ravaged by internal national conflict. The
demonizing of and the desire to humiliate the ‘other’, promoted by nationalists,
directly or indirectly legitimized sexual savagery beyond the norm in military conflict.
In the civil wars raging in Sierra Leone, the Congo and Angola in the 1990s
the threat posed to women by mass rape became even more acute due to the likelihood
of contracting HIV/AIDS in the assaults. There can be no more stark an
illustration of how women’s insecurity is heightened by perceptions of national
insecurity.
The most common threat to the lives of women arising from their sexual status,
however, comes from a less obviously violent source than foreign soldiers or
domestic executioners. Mary Anne Warren first coined the term ‘gendercide’ to
highlight the scale of female-specific abortions and infanticide (Warren 1985). The
general preference for male heirs in most societies is exacerbated in countries where
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