Gendered Perspectives on Security in International Relations

When most people hear the word “security,” they picture armies, borders, missiles, and the survival of the nation-state. This is the traditional view that has dominated international relations since the discipline began. But feminist scholars argue that this picture is dangerously incomplete. By focusing almost entirely on the protection of the state from external military threats, mainstream theory ignores the daily insecurities faced by ordinary people, especially women. A gendered lens asks a deeper question: secure for whom, and at whose expense?

Why traditional ideas of security fall short 🔗

For decades, the dominant approach in international relations, especially realism, treated security as something that belonged to the state. A secure state was one that could defend itself from other states in an anarchic world. Power was measured in terms of military strength and sovereignty.

Feminist scholars challenge this framework on a basic factual point. Most wars since 1945 have not been fought between states across borders but within states, which means the threat to ordinary people often comes from internal conflict, not foreign invasion. If security is supposed to protect citizens, then a definition built only around inter-state war misses where most violence actually happens.

The most influential voice here is J. Ann Tickner, whose 1992 book Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security argued that the traditional model is not neutral at all. It is built on assumptions that quietly privilege a narrow, masculine view of the world, where rationality means competition and security means military domination. As she famously put it, leaving gender out of security analysis does not make that analysis gender-neutral; it simply hides the gendered assumptions already baked in.

The masculine bias in security thinking 🔗

Feminists point out that the qualities valued in mainstream security thinking, such as toughness, autonomy, rationality, and the willingness to use force, are culturally coded as masculine. Qualities associated with the feminine, such as care, cooperation, and interdependence, are treated as soft and irrelevant to “serious” politics.

This is not just about language. Tickner argued that the discipline interrogates concepts like power, security, and the “rational economic man” and finds them narrow, abstract, and one-sidedly masculine. When the entire field defines its core concepts this way, it becomes blind to forms of insecurity that do not fit the military mould.

Redefining security from the ground up 🔗

The feminist alternative is to broaden the meaning of security itself. Instead of asking only how the state can protect its borders, feminist scholars ask how individuals and communities can be made safe from all forms of violence.

Tickner and other feminist theorists define security broadly as the diminution of all forms of violence, whether physical, structural, or ecological. This is a multilevel and multidimensional idea. It connects the security of the state to the security of the individual and recognises that the two are not always the same thing.

The four dimensions of comprehensive security 🔗

Tickner’s reconceptualisation extends security across several interlocking dimensions rather than leaving it confined to the military.

Military security: Freedom from direct physical violence and armed conflict. This remains important, but it is only one part of the picture, not the whole.

Economic security: Access to the resources needed to live a dignified life. Tickner highlighted how the global economy rewards men and women differently, and how vast amounts of women’s labour, both in the home and in low-paid industry, remain invisible and unrewarded in standard economic analysis.

Ecological security: Protection from environmental degradation and disaster. Feminists ask what value a concept of security can have if it says nothing about the ecological threats to survival on the planet.

Personal and structural security: Freedom from the everyday violence that ordinary people, especially women, face within their own societies, including domestic violence, sexual violence, and poverty.

This broadened vision connects closely to what scholars and bodies like the United Nations later called human security, an approach that places the safety and dignity of the individual, rather than the state, at the centre of analysis.

When state security creates personal insecurity 🔗

One of the sharpest feminist insights is that the pursuit of state security can directly produce insecurity for vulnerable people. The two goals are not automatically aligned.

Several feminist studies have shown how the security of the state can become a direct cause of insecurity for the more vulnerable in society. Resources poured into the military are resources not spent on health, education, or social welfare. Wars fought in the name of national defence often devastate the very civilian populations they claim to protect. Feminist scholars note that civilians, primarily women and children, now make up the overwhelming majority of casualties and refugees in modern conflict, which turns the idea of war as protection on its head.

The exploitation of women for state ends 🔗

Feminists also examine how states use women instrumentally to serve security goals. Women are mobilised as symbols of the nation to be protected, as caregivers who raise and support soldiers, and as workers who sustain the economy during wartime. Yet this contribution is rarely acknowledged in the masculine narrative of security, where the soldier and the statesman take centre stage. When women are treated mainly as tools for achieving state security, gender is reduced to a secondary issue rather than recognised as central to how security actually works.

The protector and the protected 🔗

A central concept in feminist security studies is the protector-protected dynamic, sometimes discussed as the “myth of protection.” This is the idea, deeply embedded in war culture, that strong men fight to protect weak and vulnerable women and children at home.

The political theorist Iris Marion Young called this the “logic of masculinist protection.” It rests on a clear division: the masculinised war front where men sacrifice themselves, and the feminised home front that must be defended. Feminist scholars argue that this spatial and gendered separation reinforces the idea that men have an obligation to use violence for the nation while women’s role is to care for its future citizens.

The problem is that this dynamic deepens gender inequality. Tickner, along with scholars like Cynthia Enloe, argued that the relationship between protectors and the protected entrenches a hierarchy in which masculine traits are elevated and women are positioned as passive, dependent, and in need of guarding. The promise of protection becomes a justification for keeping women out of decision-making and out of power.

The protector can become the predator 🔗

There is a darker side to this dynamic. The same figure cast as the protector can become the source of harm, which is why some scholars describe a protector-predator relationship. Soldiers, police, and even peacekeeping forces meant to provide security have in many documented cases perpetrated violence against the very civilians they were sent to protect. The line between the one who guards and the one who threatens is far less stable than the traditional narrative admits.

Rape as a weapon of war 🔗

Perhaps the most powerful evidence for the feminist redefinition of security is the use of sexual violence as a deliberate military strategy. This is not random violence or an unfortunate by-product of conflict. In many wars it has been used systematically to humiliate, terrorise, and destroy communities.

The international community formally recognised this in 2008, when the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1820. The resolution condemned the use of sexual violence as a tool of war and declared that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or a constitutive act of genocide. It marked the first time the UN explicitly linked sexual violence as a tactic of war to the broader women, peace, and security agenda.

The resolution recognised that women and girls are deliberately targeted, in some cases as a tactic to humiliate, dominate, and forcibly displace an entire community or ethnic group. The United Nations has noted that such violence is “highly effective” precisely because it shatters families, drives women out of economic life, keeps girls away from school, and undermines faith in the state’s ability to protect its citizens. Here, the personal and the political collapse into one. An attack on a woman’s body is a strategic attack on a community’s survival, which is exactly the connection that traditional, state-centric security analysis fails to capture.

Women as agents, not just victims 🔗

It would be a mistake to read feminist security studies as portraying women only as victims. A gendered lens also reveals women as active agents who shape security outcomes.

Women serve as combatants, peacebuilders, community organisers, and negotiators. The growing integration of women into militaries and into peace processes has begun to challenge the old assumption that women are merely the protected and never the protectors. The landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security recognised exactly this, calling for women’s participation in conflict prevention, resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction. Recognising this agency is essential to building a fuller and more accurate account of how security is actually produced and sustained.

Why this matters 🔗

The feminist perspective on security is not simply about adding women to an existing framework. It is about questioning the framework itself. By insisting that security must include the individual and the community, not just the state, feminist scholars expose the hidden costs of a militarised worldview and the assumptions that sustain it.

This shift has had real-world consequences, shaping the human security agenda, influencing international law on wartime sexual violence, and pushing peacekeeping and policy toward greater gender sensitivity. Critics rightly point out that gender perspectives remain under-represented in foreign and security policy across the world, and that translating these ideas into practice is still a work in progress. But the core argument endures: a definition of security that cannot account for the daily violence faced by half the world’s population is a definition that needs rethinking.

What do you think? If security were measured by how safe ordinary people feel in their homes and communities rather than by the strength of a country’s military, how different would national priorities look? And can traditional, state-centred models of security genuinely adapt to address gendered violence, or does a truly human-centred approach require us to abandon the old framework altogether?

References

1. https://www.e-ir.info/2013/03/12/gender-security-as-a-category-of-international-politics/
2. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=41672
3. https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1230/Tickner.pdf
4. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/gender-in-international-relations/9780231075398/
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00108367211007871
6. https://www.un.org/press/en/2008/sc9364.doc.htm
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1820
8. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/sexual-violence-war-tactic-security-council-resolution-1888-next-steps
9. https://www.peacewomen.org/SCR-1820