Based on the experiences of Mayan women, Stern critically re-considers the connections between security, subjectivity and identity. By engaging in a careful reading of how Mayan women "speak" security in relation to the different contexts that inform their lives, she explores the multiplicity of both identity and security, and questions the main story of security imbedded in the modern "paradox of sovereignty."

This book rethinks security theory from a feminist perspective – uniquely, it engages feminism, security, and strategic studies to provide a distinct feminist approach to security studies. The volume explicitly works toward an opening up of security studies that would allow for feminist (and other) narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. To make this possible, it presents a feminist reading of security studies that aims to invigorate the debate and radicalize critical security studies. Since feminism is a political project, and security studies are, at their base, about particular visions of the political and their attendant institutions, this is of necessity a political intervention. The book works through and beyond security studies to explore possible spaces where an opening of security, necessary to make way for feminist insights, can take place. While it develops and illustrates a feminist narrative approach to security, it is also intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices. This book provides develops a comprehensive framework for the emerging field of feminist security studies and will be of great interest to students and scholars of feminist IR, critical security studies, gender studies and IR and security studies in general.

Based on geo- and biopolitical analyses, this book reconsiders how security policies and practices legitimate state and non-state violence in the Colombian conflict. Using the case study of the official Democratic Security Policy (DSP), Echavarría examines how security discourses write the political identities of state, self and others. She claims that the DSP delimits politics, the political, and the imaginaries of peace and war through conditioning the possibilities for identity formation. In/security in Colombia offers an innovative application of a large theoretical framework on the performative character of security discourses and furthers a nuanced understanding of the security problematique in a postcolonial setting. This wide-reaching study will benefit students, scholars and policy-makers in the fields of security, peace and conflict, and Latin American issues.

Scholars in many of the disciplines surrounding politics explicitly utilize either a narrative perspective or a metaphor perspective (though rarely the two in combination) to analyze issues -- theoretical and practical, domestic and international -- in the broad field of politics. Among the topics they have studied are: competing metaphors for the state or nation which have been coined over the centuries in diverse cultures; the frequency with which communal and international conflicts are generated, at least in part, by the clashing religious and historical narratives held by opposing groups; the cognitive short-cuts employing metaphor by which citizens make sense of politics; the need for political candidates to project a convincing self-narrative; the extent to which the metaphors used to formulate social issues determine the policies which will be developed to resolve them; the failure of narratives around the security of the nation to take account of the individual experiences of women and children. This volume is the first in which eminent scholars from disciplines as diverse as social psychology, anthropology, political theory, international relations, feminist political science, and media studies, have sought to integrate the narrative and the metaphor perspectives on politics. It will appeal to any scholar interested in the many ways in which narrative and metaphor function in combination as cognitive and rhetorical instruments in discourse around politics.

Violence against Women in and beyond Conflict explores the processes and structures that underlie and contribute to sexual violence and internal displacement in armed conflict, utilizing extensive ethnographic research to provide cutting-edge insights. The author argues that the key to understanding violence against women lies at the intersection of transnational capital, race, and gender that not only contribute to its production but also to its persistence. The book uses the Colombian armed conflict as the primary case study but develops a broader framework for theorizing the relationship between the global political economy, the history of coloniality, and intersectional constructions of gender and race with regard to conflict and violence. It offers an understanding of violence against women as not isolated from, but part and a symptom of, a larger system of political, social, and economic inequality that is rooted in colonialism, and exploited and exacerbated by transnational capital relations. The author also shows how the state and non-state actors, most prominently paramilitaries, are involved in this relationship of violence. The book highlights implications for meaningful and sustainable peace in post-conflict contexts. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, gender studies, and conflict studies; as well as policymakers, (non)governmental organizations, and practitioners interested in conflict and security.

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

‘The Security-Development Nexus: Peace, Conflict and Development’ approaches the subject of the security-development nexus from a variety of different perspectives. Chapters within this study address the nexus specifically, as well as investigate its related issues, particularly those linked to studies of conflict and peace. These expositions are supported by a strong geographical focus, with case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe being included. Overall, the text’s collected essays provide a detailed and comprehensive view of conflict, security and development.