Virtuous imperialism or a shared global objective? - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 71

the lives of women and other subordinated groups' (ibid.). If the Canadian
approach is any example, state elites operating in isolation from community
voices tend to still understand security in narrow, state-based, militarized and
violence-focused terms.
Feminist and gender security studies have been active for decades, as long
as, if not longer than, the human security agenda. There are some important,
principled overlaps between human security and feminist and gender security
perspectives, though dominant human security theorizing and policy mak-
ing have failed to adequately draw on these connections. While the human
security concept was still nascent, Christine Sylvester's work in 1994 was an
already well-developed demonstration of the complexity of a gender security
perspective that accounted for individual or human security. In that work she
stated that a gender perspective, and feminist perspective more particularly,
'paints security and cooperation in multihued multistandpoints that may be
discredited as monstrous by modernists but that will not go away' (Sylvester
1994:169). Sylvester's multidimensional approach recognized that there 'can
be no coherent statement, inscription, or morality that makes the definitive
home, covers all the contingencies of contingent existence, and thereby ends
insecurity' (ibid.:183). We nevertheless struggle with these contingencies,
working with the 'elusiveness' that is security:
To work with this elusiveness requires a recognition that [security] is
intensified in the late or postmodern era by the number and types of
insecuring actions that rivet our attention. This is a time of simultaneous
struggles, of storms with many centers unfolding on many fronts at once
… Some simultaneous struggles are relatively easy to see, as in South
Africa, where efforts to homestead the acrid terrain of apartheid move
in cross-cutting directions; there are similar struggles, it seems, in Peru,
erstwhile Yugoslavia, Liberia, Canada, Angola. Other types of struggles
are more difficult to follow, as in the see-sawing efforts to 'secure' the
international environment or to secure reproductive rights or religious
identities.
(ibid.)
Sylvester thus acknowledged that we face obvious insecurities (those widely
recognized by dominant discourses) and less obvious ones (such as repro-
ductive rights) that reflect the securities of the unheard or marginalized.
The problem of isolating only one dimension of security is further illus-
trated in the divide and discourses of non-Western feminisms, highlighting
the 'us-them' polarization inherent within Western thinking overall, and
Western feminisms themselves. Western feminisms may aptly identify the
lack of acknowledgement of diverse insecurities by the traditional security
framework, but non-Western feminisms wage similar arguments against
Western feminisms themselves: 'Western feminist scholarship cannot avoid