Human security and women’s security reality in Northwest Russia - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 233

also talk about violence against women as security: 'Security in the family.
Time to act' was for example the title of a recommendation prepared by the
Russian Association of Crisis Centres (RACC) in 2003 that aimed to inform
legislative and executive powers on how to improve the efforts to prevent vio-
lence in the family in Russia. The concept of human security is not theorized
or discussed among these women activists, however, which suggests thereby
that the realization of human security can be localized but its theorization less
so. In international politics, among core stakeholders and elites, the human
security concept is a means to legitimating international responses to com-
plex emergencies and conflicts, but the local level, such as women's security
from violence in Northwest Russia, is less relevant to the thinking of human
security in terms of policy. Thus a question is raised, a hesitancy expressed,
regarding my project and how the case of violence against women fits in
with the concept of human security. In contrast, Caroline Bunch, for example,
emphasizes that violence against women is the epitome of a human security
issue: 'Yet, if you look at definitions of human security, there is no better
paradigm for human insecurity than violence against women, which directly
and indirectly affects a vast number of people' (Bunch 2004:32).
She suggests that the human security concept is a means of examining
fundamental threats to security inherent in the everyday violence of domestic
abuse. Moving away from the tendency to ignore women's lives in security
analyses will, it is argued, contribute to an improved understanding and con-
sideration of a comprehensive human security reality (Bunch 2004).
In conceptual debates, the scholarly interest in learning about the com-
plex reality of human security competes against demands for a delimitation
of the concept, in terms of issues, causal inferences and values (Buzan 2004;
Krause 2004; Mack 2004; Paris 2004). The empirical descriptiveness of the
concept, the number of issues that it can potentially describe and incorporate
into security thinking, is identified as a problem . 1 Specifically concerned with
interconnectedness of threats in the human security concept, Andrew Mack
(2004:367) notes that this is an 'unhelpful' jargon because '[a]ny definition
that conflates dependent and independent variables renders causal analysis vir-
tually impossible'. Conceptual clarification is a focal point of critique against
the concept of human security. Sabina Alkire (2004) remarks that there are
thirty or more definitions of human security, and that the key conceptual
challenge is to name priority issues that represent the vital core of security.
This character of the concept is the basis for a critical view of human security
as a framework of analysis because the concept is considered too vague to gen-
erate specific research questions (Paris 2001). Kyle Grayson importantly notes
however that the politics involved in delimiting and defining human security
need to be openly and critically assessed:
[I]t is imperative that 'the aspiration to power' that is inherent in any
definitional claim be exposed and debated in terms of both what is being