Human security and women’s security reality in Northwest Russia - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 238

Thus, although the crisis centres were set up to address violence against
women, a wide array of issues were raised on their phone hotline service.
Violence against women was clearly a local, human security issue, but could not
be divorced from, or reject, other issues of insecurity experienced by women.
Local activists became critical of the effects of the international intervention
in their work. Their practical experience with immediate service provision
created a space for critique and invention. As practical experience broadened,
also regionally, the impact of the international agendas and restrictions was
challenged. James Richter noted that the expansion of donor funding beyond
Moscow and St Petersburg facilitated the emergence of local crisis centres
that developed forms of assistance and activism beyond donor restrictions
(Richter 2002:39). Although non-state crisis centres in the regions were not
divorced from international trends of women's activism and agendas, their
immediate and concrete action was oriented towards practical challenges and
grassroots needs. Their concerns were mainly local challenges. While keeping
international donors pleased, local crisis centres were committed to objectives
of altering or improving the immediate life-situation of vulnerable victims,
as defined by the victims themselves. The tensions between the objectives
of the Western NGO bureaucracy and the local livelihoods inspired critical
reflection by crisis centre representatives on their own work. Drawing upon
extensive research in post-Soviet Russia, Julie Hemment acknowledged the
influence of the international agendas on local concerns but advocated a local
lens:
[I]f we pay close attention to what is happening on the ground, we will
see that this [the dominance of the international agendas] is not the
whole story. First, NGOs are diverse in status and form and their mem-
bers are not solely elite. Second, although international aid certainly
exerts a powerful influence on group activities, it does not determine
them. In the nongovernmental sphere, Russian women draw on interna-
tional aid to strategize and make sense of the realignments in their lives
and to articulate a way forward. What comes into view if we shift the
lens?
(Hemment 2004b:316)
Hemment shifts the lens in order to examine conceptions of democracy devel-
opment on the local level and violence against women. For my focus on security,
I thus learned from Hemment's work, but also from Richter's (2002), that
this lens can be particularly fruitful because local activists develop their own
strategies independently of international demands and donor requirements.
As a basis for exploring local security production, I therefore examined
how non-state Russian crisis centres strategized in the local context . 7 The
women's groups formulated the objective of addressing violence against
women and established and provided assistance to victims with the aim of