The Gender Imperative ─ Human Security vs State Security

The volume offers a feminist security framework as an alternative to militarized state security. It suggests that a more comprehensive concept of what comprises human security holds the greatest possibility for developing a culture of peace based on a security system that no longer depends upon threat and force so as to maintain order among nations. The Gender Imperative poses a challenge to current violence-prone systems of national security.

Some of the articles place emphasis on women's contributions to the struggle for peace. Other illustrate in detail the deprivation of women's daily human security in circumstances of civil order as well as armed conflict, placing violence against women in the context of the larger system of violence perpetuated by the continued conflation of armed might with national security. The contributors attempt to deepen and broaden current security discourses, and consider alternatives to the current global security system that advantages state security over human security that they perceive to be rooted in the patriarchal nature of the nation state.

Betty A. Reardon, Founding Director Emerita of the International Institutes on Peace Education (IIPE), a global consortium for continuing education on issues of peace, is a feminist peace educator. Her work with IIPE and as a theorist and designer of pedagogic materials and processes in peace education was recognized by the special Honorable Mention Award from UNESCO at the Peace Education Prize Ceremonies of 2001. She was the initiator and the first Academic Coordinator of the Hague Appeal for Peace Global Campaign for Peace Education launched in 1999. She is recipient of the 2009 Sean MacBride Peace Prize awarded by the International Peace Bureau. Author and editor of many publications, her published and unpublished professional papers are archived in the Ward M. Canaday Special Collections at the University of Toledo Library in Ohio.
Asha Hans, Founder Director of School of Women's Studies, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, presently heads a gender research institute --- Sansristi. A peace activist, she has written extensively on issues of peace and security including Kashmiri women and refugee women in India. She has also worked on issues of gender and disability.