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Gendering Insecurities, Informalization and “War Economies”

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Abstract

David Roberts (2008) observes that defining human security is more contentious than defining human insecurity (also Burke 2007). Like many others, Roberts draws on diverse literatures referencing institutional, indirect, or structural violence to generate a definition of insecurity as “avoidable civilian deaths, occurring globally, caused by social, political and economic institutions and structures, built and operated by humans and which could feasibly be changed” (2008, 28). Indirect or structural violence refers to the presumably unintended but recurring patterns of suffering or harm that result from the way social institutions or structures “order” expectations, norms, and practices.1 “War” is arguably a display of structural violence at its extremity. Feminists have produced incisive accounts of how in/security, violence, conflicts, and wars are pervasively gendered.2 But existing analyses tend to focus on masculinist identities and ideologies in the context of embodied and “political” forms of violence, leaving aside how these are inextricably linked to economic phenomena.

Essentially, the fragmentation and informalization of war is paralleled by the informalization of the economy.

(Kaldor 1999/2001, 104)

The phenomenon of the informal economy is both deceivingly simple and extraordinarily complex, trivial in its everyday manifestations and capable of subverting the economic and political order of nations.

(Portes and Haller 2005, 403)

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    Wendy Harcourt (Associate Professor of Critical Development and Feminist Studies) (Associate Professor of Critical Development and Feminist Studies)

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Peterson, V.S. (2016). Gendering Insecurities, Informalization and “War Economies”. In: Harcourt, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_30

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