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Human Insecurity (human + insecurity)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2009
Laura J. Shepherd
In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second, I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that international politics recognises neither as ,war' nor ,peace' and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of feminist security studies , the centrality of the human subject; the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity; and the gendered conceptual framework that underpins the discipline of IR , we are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global. [source]

Revealing the socioeconomic impact of small disasters in Colombia using the DesInventar database

DISASTERS, Issue 2 2010
Mabel C. Marulanda
Small disasters are usually the product of climate variability and climate change. Analysis of them illustrates that they increase difficulties for local development,frequently affecting the livelihoods of poor people and perpetuating their level of poverty and human insecurity,and entail challenges for a country's development. In contrast to extreme events, small disasters are often invisible at the national level and their effects are not considered as relevant from a macroeconomic standpoint. Nevertheless, their accumulated impact causes economic, environmental and social problems. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the DesInventar database, developed in 1994 by the Network for Social Studies in Disaster Prevention in Latin America. In addition, it proposes a new version of the Local Disaster Index developed in 2005 within the framework of the Disaster Risk and Management Indicators Program for the Americas, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank. [source]

At Peace but Insecure The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Life

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2001
Thomas Lines
Summaries This article examines the forms of insecurity which have developed in the societies of the Commonwealth of Independent States since the USSR broke up in 1991. That huge political upheaval was remarkable for the lack of overt conflict that accompanied it: restricted wars in a few peripheral regions and only isolated episodes of political violence and social unrest elsewhere. Yet most citizens of these twelve countries have seen the manifold security of their lives under the Soviet Union vanish. Exposed often for the first time to crime, they have also lost secure entitlements to employment, housing, education, health care and old-age pensions, as well as cheap utilities and housing. For many people the overriding sense has been one of loss, as even the political security gained with the reduction in repression is compromised by the instability of the USSR's weak successor states. The article examines the paradox of a situation of pervasive human insecurity in a region which so far has remained largely at peace. [source]

Constitutionalizing Inequality and the Clash of Globalizations

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2002
Stephen Gill
Intensified inequalities, social dislocations and human insecurity have coincided with a redefinition of the political in the emerging world order. Part of this redefinition involves the emergence of new constitutionalism. New constitutionalism limits democratic control over central elements of economic policy and regulation by locking in future governments to liberal frameworks of accumulation premised on freedom of enterprise. New political "limits of the possible" are also redefined by a "clash of globalizations" as new constitutionalism and more generally "globalization from above" is contested from below by nationalists, populists and fundamentalists as well as diverse progressive movements in innovative forms of global political agency. [source]