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