Unlocking the Doors Feminist Insights for Inclusion in Governance, Peace and Security

This is the third primer in the series. It analyses the successes and gaps in women's movements' approaches to the intersections between governance and the security complex. These insights are based on AWDF's analysis of some of the major challenges confronting movement building in the areas of governance, peace and security. With these primers, our objective is to re position feminist politics as a fundamental expression of accountability to our cause and constituencies, and to provide an opportunity for advancing individual and collective learning

Statecraft and Pursuing Women's Rights in Africa

This particular primer maps key areas of feminist analysis and intervention in governance. Based on existing research on the major factors that hinder women's political participation, emphasis is placed on electoral systems, political parties, quotas and national constitutional mechanisms. These are also areas where the impact of the women's rights movement has been felt. This primer therefore assesses the ways in which women's participation in governance has been assured, the challenges arising from these approaches, and lessons therein. This primer is intended to benefit women's rights activists and organisations at the frontline of local and national mobilisation initiatives that  seek to enhance women's leadership. We hope the primer is useful for building alliances and structuring support across various institutions working towards enhancing women's political participation

Asymmetrical conflict and human security: Reflections from Kenya

This paper focuses on contemporary challenges to the human security framework through an examination of asymmetrical conflict generated by extremist insurgents, specifically Al Shabaab in Kenya. The political and security dynamics generated by extremist groups often find reinforcement in local contestations over power and territory, resulting in an interaction between local and 'external'. It is the product of these interactions in the form of opportunities, resultant discourses, responses and what they offer to an expansion of normative ideas about human security and conflict that this paper focuses on. Using Kenya as a case study, this paper explores the interface between the growth of Al Shabaab, securitisation of governance and political elite consensus on the policy relationship between human security versus a state security model. This paper pursues the argument that the rise in the intensity and nature of Al Shabaab attacks in Kenya has influenced the interpretation of the country's security threats and the application of strategies. Rather than aiding the application of human security as central to national security, it has rolled back previous gains

Boundary anxieties and infrastructures of violence: Somali identity in post-Westgate Kenya

This article explores infrastructures of violence created by ongoing contestations around insecurity related to violent insurgency in Kenya. It draws on public discourses and policy responses emerging from the September 2013 terror attack at Westgate in Nairobi. In examining security policies developed to cordon off particular geographical sites and therefore construct Kenyan Somalis as the ‘other’, I argue that what is produced is a mobile security infrastructure. This mobility is evident in a move from a singular focus on physical security installations and visible security personnel, to less visible forms of security which rely on surveillance both by the state and citizens. I examine how security infrastructure discursively and through policy mobilise and redefine Somali1 masculinities as other and therefore dangerous