Anthropology is interested in how security and insecurity is understood and imagined in a variety of ways by differently positioned people on the ground. This includes the quest for safety of a woman fleeing to a safe house or a refugee crossing borders. Ethnographic exploration of different perspectives on safety may help us to envision and work towards “genuine” notions of security.

This chapter explored different aspects and approaches to security. In a world that seems to be increasingly crisis-driven and shaken by a climate of fear, the longing for safety and “safer spaces” looms large – and can easily be instrumentalised.

Security, Power, and Belonging

Anthropologists of security examine how technologies of surveillance, border policing and militarisation shape not only the architecture of urban landscapes and global markets, but also our daily practices and feelings of belonging. Anthropologists of humanitarianism have shown that so-called “soft power” measures are not only waning, but have always been integral to militarised forms of “hard power”.

Scholarship on securitisation reveals how measures taken to enable stability and national security are structured around the needs of dominant social groups. Human security regimes thus ultimately cater to the powerful by protecting private property in a late capitalist, neo-imperial world (dis)order.

Feminism, Victim Support, and Modes of Solidarity

Women have been at the forefront of caring for and protecting the victims of a patriarchal world order that places profit over the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. Across the world, feminists advocate for women’s rights and push for the implementation of international policies, securing sexual and reproductive rights for women, children and gender minorities.

At the same time, transnational feminist scholars point out how rights have also been used to legitimise the surveillance and criminalisation of working-class men of colour and to back the agendas of neo-imperialist powers. Such extractivist agendas are geared towards the exploitation or incarceration of migrants and disenfranchised populations of the (post)colonial global South.

Under such conditions, women and queers (not just in the South) are the most likely to experience additional violence and exploitation at the hands of intimate partners and other men and sometimes women, but the least likely to report such violence. This is due not only to stigmatisation, the lack of rights or their structurally weak position in a particular society, but to them wanting to protect their own men from police and other state authorities (cf. Crenshaw 1989: 163).

The position of survivors of violence who find access to women’s shelters and institutions that provide victim support can be complicated. By adhering to the rules of safe houses and claiming victim rights, they are interpellated by and comply with state structures. This may further alienate “victims” from the marginalised communities they identify with and from those people who may give them a sense of home and safety.

These complexities pose a conundrum to transnational feminists and humanitarians who want to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable populations. Instead of aiming to rescue “poor” women from their “brutal” men, it requires non-repressive modes of solidarity. It compels us to find ways of opposing not just interpersonal violence, but also violence that permeates international politics and economic structures.

Contradictions, Nuances, and Genuine Security

Margo Okazawa-Rey thinks through the contradictions we are faced with as engaged scholars and activists in the global North, who aim to stand in solidarity with the most precariously positioned people in the world, but who inadvertently benefit from international regimes of security. What Okazawa-Rey calls a holistic or “genuine security” cannot be brought about through high security prisons and militarisation. On the contrary, it requires a nuanced intersectional and transnational analysis of the interconnectedness of life.

Rather than giving up on the notion of security altogether, she encourages us to ask ourselves “what keeps us alive in the fullest sense of the word”. In this broad transnational feminist understanding, “security means ensuring livelihood for everyone” and every being on the planet (2020: 90). Such solidarity requires we understand that “our destinies are inextricably linked” to the less privileged. Thus, we see ourselves not as potential helpers positioned outside the proverbial “burning house”, but inside: “So genuine security and peace imply the questions: How can we avoid the fire in the first place? And if there is a fire, how can all of us get out?” (2020: 91)

Persisting in Critical Solidarity

Certainly, there are no easy answers on how to make the planet a safer and livable place for all beings. Perhaps the answer starts by pointing out and bearing with the inconsistencies at stake and by not getting tired of seeking ways of being in (critical) solidarity.

Author: Serena O. Dankwa

References

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Available at Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive.

Meyer, K. (2020). “We care about feminist notions of genuine security”. A Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien 26, 87-96. Read pages 90 and 98 specifically.