Engendering Human Security: Feminist Perspectives

This book engages with current debates on human security, offering a variety of feminist perspectives on the gender reconfigurations of the state, power/knowledge systems, sexuality, care, labour and the implications of globalisation for people's quotidian security. A key thematic area concerns the intersection between gender-as a domain of power-and human security as a new policy framework. The contributions in this book present an integration of a feminist materialist analysis of gender relations with a feminist post-modern approach to gender representation and cultural construction. A combination of the two approaches links culture with politics and economics, and integrates analysis of class, ethnicity and other dimensions of gender identity.

This book presents a variety of feminist perspectives on human security under globalisation. Looking at gender as a multifaceted power domain, and human security as a policy framework, it explores the configuration of the state, power/knowledge systems and the implications for people living with deprivation and social exclusion. It offers new forms of analysis to expose the gendered character of global transformation and the explicit and implicit threats to human security in different places. The contributors explore the gendered implications of transnational processes such as conflict, international migration, human trafficking, the changing boundaries of work and care, environmental degradation, neo-conservatism and body politics. They challenge conventional approaches to politics and economics and suggest alternative ways of framing strategies and policies.

Thanh-Dam Truong is Associate Professor in Women, Gender and Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands. Saskia Wieringa is director of the International Information Center and Archives for the Women's Movement in Amsterdam and also an affiliated senior researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Amrita Chhachhi is Lecturer in the Women, Gender and Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands.