Combatting insecurity in the everyday: the global anti-street harassment movement as everyday security practitioners

Street harassment renders countless women, girls and others insecure in their everyday lives. Over the past two decades a global grassroots movement developed to combat street harassment and its attendant insecurities. But neither phenomenon has excited the attention of Security Studies, critical or otherwise. In this paper, we focus on the global anti-street harassment movement, conceptualising its activists as ‘everyday security practitioners’ who, like privileged security practitioners in the state or the academy, theorise street harassment and devise and implement strategies to tackle it. In so doing we argue that Security Studies should pay more attention to the everyday, to insecurities like street harassment, and to such ‘everyday security practitioners’. To illustrate this argument we first define street harassment. We then consider Security Studies and its exclusion of the everyday. To argue for its inclusion in Security Studies, we explicate the diverse insecurities produced by street harassment, conceptualise 'everyday security practitioners’, and provide some illustrations of strategies deployed by the global anti-street harassment movement both to bring street harassment to wider public attention as a pervasive everyday insecurity and to combat it. We conclude with two suggestions for Security Studies

The Security imaginary: Explaining military isomorphism

This article proposes the notion of a security imaginary as a heuristic tool for exploring military isomorphism (the phenomenon that weapons and military strategies begin to look the same across the world) at a time when the US model of defence transformation is being adopted by an increasing number of countries. Built on a critical constructivist foundation, the security-imaginary approach is contrasted with rationalist and neo-institutionalist ways of explaining military diffusion and emulation. Merging cultural and constructivist themes, the article offers a ‘strong cultural’ argument to explain why a country would emulate a foreign military model and how this model is constituted in and comes to constitute a society’s security imaginary.Web of Scienc

UK nuclear interests:Security, resilience and Trident

This paper examines UK national (security and nuclear) interests in relation to Trident and the recent putative shift in conceptions of UK national interests from a discourse of ‘security’ to one of ‘resilience’. We discuss the rise of resilience in the discourse of UK national interests and reflect upon its possible articulations with the concept and goal of security, in order to make sense of what a shift from security to resilience would entail. We then assess the practices of UK nuclear weapons policy, and Trident in particular, in relation to the requirements with which a resilient nuclear weapons policy would need to comply. We conclude that the perceived requirements of deterrence as a communicative practice in large part explain missed opportunities to acknowledge the risk of a nuclear accident and the possibility of a consistent shift towards resilience as a national priority

The evolution of international security studies and the everyday: Suggestions from the Buffyverse

Security studies is again reflecting on its origins and debating how best to study in/security. In this article, we interrogate the contemporary evolutionary narrative about (international) security studies. We unpack the myth's components and argue that it restricts the empirical focus of (international) security studies, limits its analytical insights, and constrains the sorts of interlocutors with whom it engages. We then argue that these limitations can at least partially be remedied by examining the performance of identities and in/securities in everyday life. In order initially to establish the important similarities between (international) security studies and the everyday, we trace elements of the evolutionary myth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel - which both stand in for, and are, the everyday in our analysis. We then argue that the Buffyverse offers a complex understanding of (identities and) in/security as a terrain of everyday theorizing, negotiation and contestation - what we call the 'entanglement' of in/security discourses - that overcomes the shortcomings of (international) security studies and its myth, providing insights fruitful for the study of in/security. In conclusion, we briefly draw out the implications of our analysis for potential directions in (international) security studies scholarship and pedagogy.</p