ABSTRACT
Before feminist scholarship, work on security in disciplinary International Relations (IR) focused – myopically, some would soon say – on the sovereign state as the key actor, and the key object, of thinking about what it means to be secure. Among other contributions, feminist scholars were among the first to suggest that it is important to make visible in research those whose insecurity is often invisible to traditional, state-centric understandings of security (see discussion in Sjoberg 2009). Building on this call for visibility, feminist scholars of human security 1 examined gendered dimensions of what it means to be secure (and insecure, a language rarely used in traditional work on security) for people rather than states.
