What constitutes ‘national security discourses’? How far have the IR Feminists questioned how ‘security’ has been problematised? (2012, 15 Marks)
A discourse is a structured way of speaking that fixes what counts as true and sayable. National security discourses are the statements, images and expert vocabularies through which states define who is threatened, by whom, and what may be done in response. Feminist IR asks whose experience they leave out and what they make normal.
What constitutes national security discourses
- A referent object: the sovereign state, its territory and survival, treated as identical with the safety of its people.
- A threat and an enemy: usually an external, militarised Other. David Campbell (Writing Security, 1992) argues that danger is written, not found: naming threats produces the identity of the state that claims to be defended.
- Authorised speakers: governments, militaries and defence intellectuals who, in Copenhagen School terms, securitise an issue and lift it out of normal politics.
- A specialised language: deterrence, credibility, collateral damage, surgical strikes, which abstracts violence into technique.
- A gendered division: a male protector-soldier and a feminised protected population.
How IR feminists problematised security
- Making women visible. Cynthia Enloe (Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 1989) asked “Where are the women?” and found them around bases, in diplomatic households and on plantations, sustaining a system the discourse treats as genderless.
- Redefining the referent. J. Ann Tickner (Gender in International Relations, 1992) showed that a state can be secure while women within it face domestic violence, poverty and structural violence.
- Deconstructing the language. Carol Cohn (1987) showed how technostrategic jargon, full of sexual and domestic imagery, makes mass death unsayable.
- Exposing the protection myth. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Women and War, 1987) dismantled the just warrior and beautiful soul; Iris Marion Young (2003) called masculinist protection a bargain trading women’s obedience for safety.
- Critiquing the critics. Lene Hansen (2000) showed that securitisation theory is silent on gendered insecurity that cannot be spoken publicly.
- Southern voices. Swati Parashar (Women and Militant Wars, 2014) showed South Asian women as militants and agents, not only victims.
How far: achievements and limits
- Real gains: Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) founded the Women, Peace and Security agenda; the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals treated rape as a war crime and an act of genocide. In India, the Babita Puniya judgment (2020) opened permanent commissions to women officers.
- Limits: the Secretary-General’s 2025 report found women were only 7% of negotiators and 14% of mediators in 2024. Sweden dropped its feminist foreign policy in 2022. Robert O. Keohane (1998) asked for testable hypotheses, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty warned against universalising Western women’s experience, as “saving women” in Afghanistan after 2001 showed.
Conclusion
Feminists have questioned security more deeply than any other school: its referent, its language and the gendered protection bargain beneath it. They have reshaped vocabulary and norms more than budgets and war-making, which remain organised around the state-centric discourse they criticise.