Human security and women’s security reality in Northwest Russia - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 237

Since non-state crisis centres began to emerge in Russia in the early 1990s,
they have achieved a great deal of international attention; and became recog-
nized as a vital agent of civil society development in Russia (Sperling 1999;
Richter 2002; Sundstrom 2002; Johnson 2006). Amid concerns of weak
civil society development in Russia, this agreement of the solid standing of
women's groups and the level of institutionalization and organization of the
Russian women's movement in the mid-2000s made them particularly use-
ful for a study of a civil voice of security as they are rather well established.
This rather solid standing of the organization allowed a focus on the research
method to understand human security from the bottom up (Stuvøy 2010b).
The development of non-state crisis centres in Russia was initially furthered
by money from foreign sources (Richter 2002; Sundstrom 2006). The inter-
national gender cooperation that emerged with the end of the Communist era
and as part of Western support of civil society in the 'third wave of democ-
racy' (Ottaway and Carothers 2000) strongly affected the kind of groups that
developed in Russia. International benefactors had specific motives with
their funding, pertaining to political and social agendas reflected in their
programmes that aimed at promoting democracy, civil society and a free
market (Kay 2004:250). Further, many funding bodies assumed the flow of
knowledge to be unidirectional from the West to the East (Kay 2004). Thus
the demands of the foreign funders regarding the development of organiza-
tional structure and requirements of grant applications significantly impacted
the development of Russian women's groups. The previous informal entities
women engaged in and with during perestroika ( neformal'nye ) were sud-
denly required to formalize, register as NGOs and professionalize (Hemment
2004b:316). Julie Hemment identifies frustration among women activists in
regard to the agendas of international collaborators. For example, the foreign-
ers emphasized the importance of violence against women, but local women
activists were sceptical to crisis centres because 'they did not think gendered
violence was the most pressing issue facing Russian women and expressed
concern that so many resources were put into it' (Hemment 2004a:823). For
example, crisis centres are premised upon a Western assumption about wom-
en's economic dependence on men and that women are stuck in the home.
Hemment emphasizes that '[t]his was not true for Soviet women, who were
brought into the workforce and guaranteed formal equality by the socialist
“paternalist” or “parent” state' (Hemment 2004a:823). Also, the notion of
the nuclear family was hardly realized in Soviet times, not least due to hous-
ing shortages, and the extended family was common. 'For all these reasons,'
explains Hemment, 'domestic conflict most commonly expressed itself in the
form of tension over rights to living space, interpersonal strife, or alcohol-
ism' (Hemment 2004a:823). For Russian women, therefore, it was a complex
and diverse set of issues that comprised the 'crisis' they found themselves in.
When crisis centres began to emerge in Russia, Russian women approached
the centres with all these crisis situations, not only domestic violence.