Panel

Security and Gender in Southeast Asia today
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Over the past half-century, academic and political discourse about and practices designed to deliver security have emerged within the Western elite of a global, patriarchal constellation of power relations. The identification of issues as threats to security is thus framed both by a starkly gendered history but also by culture; indigenous and women’s experiences, practices and discourses of security/insecurity hold little sway in those arenas in which the dominant security agenda is forged.
With the end of the Cold War, scholars began historicizing and broadening the ‘realist’ concept of security from a concern with the state towards concern with the security of the individual and the economic, environmental, health and community problems that threatened it. The concept of “human security” was then adopted by the United Nations as a working tool (UNDP 1994). In the wake of the Twin Tower attacks on 9/11 2001, the relationship between security and development then became a major focus of attention for academics and policy makers alike. The recipe for establishing global security is captured in the Liberal Peace Model, which assumes that democratization, human rights, liberal market economics and the integration of societies into the global community bring peace and stability. This model has been exported to “developing” countries throughout not only Southeast Asia, but the entire globe.
A great deal of recent empirical research shows, however, that the imposition of this model upon societies with very different histories and cultural bases than those from which the model derives often leads to increased instability and economic vulnerability. In poor countries, the imperatives of neoliberalization often mean that national elites intimidate the poor in order to enforce the stability that benefits the global market. As the poor become swept into the global market, patterns of autonomy and authority in communities and families rapidly shift or even collapse. This can impact directly on gender relations; men may feel impotent in the new hierarchy, women may become doubly burdened with the feminization of low-paid employment in industry. The pace of socio-economic transformation in many poorer countries today is often accompanied by anxiety about national or ethnic purity, which may find expression in increasingly intense policing of female corporeal, sexual and conjugal morality. This may co-exist with pressures upon women to break loose from social control by migrating to find work. Both men and women often find themselves faced with difficulties in reconciling conflicting values and divergent personal or collectives needs.
By fixing meaning, a priori definitions of security inevitably exclude other possible constructions of meaning and legitimate world order. Rigorous analysis of security therefore requires paying attention to gender, culture and local experience and examining not only the discourse but also the gendered practices used to identify or avert danger.

Conveners:

Alexandra Kent alix.kent@swipnet.se
Helle Rydström Helle.Rystrom@genus.lu.se