Human security and women’s security reality in Northwest Russia - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 232

identified women's security concerns. These initiatives indicate that security
today is conceptualized broadly, and that the struggle for acknowledgement
of the issue of violence against women has led to results. Nonetheless, as one
Russian NGO activist on violence against women explained, other security
issues mostly gain more attention:
Today here [in Russia], [and] equally in the whole world, questions of
terrorism etc. are bigger. That's probably the case in many societies. The
thing is that preventive measures are more difficult to [present] than
reactive. That is, reaction is easier. Or at least, the problem becomes more
visible when you react. And preventive [action] is invisible.
(Informant 10/2006)
In popular discourse, security continues to be a special domain associated
with the state. The choice of addressing security on the basis of non-
state women's groups and their work to remedy violence against women
reveals a concern with analysing security based on accounts of other actors
than state representatives. Such an actor perspective has been advocated
and applied by feminist international relations scholars since the 1990s
(see Enloe 1996; Sylvester 2004; Ackerly and True 2006), which have
strongly inspired my work. The concern with people's own capacities or
empowerment to enhance human security has been a further inspiration,
and my research interest has been to examine how security is created by
non-state crisis centres in Northwest Russia. In Russia, non-state crisis
centres were established in the 1990s on the initiative of local women's
groups and funded and encouraged by foreigner donors. Women's groups
represent an active civil society actor that is acknowledged as strong and
stable (Sperling 1999; Richter 2002; Sundstrom 2002; Johnson 2006).
I illustrate the inventive, networked and ad hoc character of their work,
which explains their successes in security production as well as its fragility
(Stuvøy 2010a). This contributes to understanding the role of local crisis
centres in Northwest Russia and also intervenes in debates on human secu-
rity because the analysis exposes the struggle over the understanding and
conceptual clarification of security.
To begin with, I address a core question of the human security debate:
'What is security?' Two other questions, security by whom and for whom, are
addressed by analysing crisis centres as a local security actor and their security
practices.
What is security?
Over the course of my work, I have experienced that a security analysis of
violence against women is often met with bewilderment. My informants were
puzzled by my interest in the concept of human security. They did, however,