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- 33 LANGUAGE IN THE SECURITY DISCOURSE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, LANGUAGE AND GENDER By Carol Cohn Introduction My role in this volume is to explore the language employed in the conceptualisation and practice of “security.” So I must start by noting that “security”, as discussed in this paper, is actually a very specific, perhaps even odd, use of the term. “Security” itself is a word that can refer to a huge range of phenomena, and it is a key concept employed in a variety of discourses. Looking at its most common dictionary definitions, “freedom from danger, freedom from fear or anxiety”, it is easy to see its resonance at an individual, psychological level; it is also to see its application to the social and economic conditions and relations within which people live. What might (or should) be less self-evident is the way “security” is deployed in what is commonly referred to as “security discourse” (i.e., “International Security” or “National Security” discourse), as developed and employed by both academics and policy elites. Here, the use of this word, meaning “freedom from danger and fear”, has implicit in the extraordinarily narrow assumptions about both what security consists of, and how to attain it. This is the only way to make sense of the fact that “security discourse” is not a discourse about the multiple dimensions and determinants of “security” broadly writ; but rather, it is a discourse that has as its principal referents “weapons” and “war”. So rather than “Security, Language and Gender”, it would be more accurate to say that this paper is about “Weapons, War, Language and Gender”. The relation between these four terms is a topic that has threaded through my research, in different permutations, for the past 20 years. For the purposes of this volume, I offer snapshots of three different moments in that journey, three different locales where we can explore the relation of language, security and gender. In examining the language used by practitioners at these three sites, I will focus on the ways that international and national security discourse itself (hereafter simply referred to as “security discourse”) is gendered, and the effects of that gendering. The first discourse I discuss is that of American civilian nuclear defence intellectuals the men (to this day, there are few women in the field) who from the time of the - 34 - first nuclear bomb have formulated the paradigms most commonly used to think about the use of nuclear weapons, strategies for “nuclear war fighting” , deterrence, and nuclear arms control. Elsewhere I have argued that both the specific language that they use and the professional discourse within which it is embedded serve to radically disconnect defence intellectuals from the very realities which they purport to be addressing (Cohn 1987a, 1987b). While there are many mechanisms that contribute to this effect, here I will only touch upon the role of gendered imagery. I will not argue (and do not believe) that the gendered language of nuclear defence intellectualssomehowrevealsthe“realmotivationbehindthearmsrace”orapowerful association between “missile envy” and “penis envy”.6 Such a reductionist explanation cannot begin to do justice to the complexity of motivations, ideas, institutions and politics that underpin the growth of nuclear arsenals. However, it is also a mistake to ignore the prevalence of gendered metaphors and imagery in nuclear discourse, and in this chapter I will explore the ways in which they function. The second snapshot moves us up a decade, to the language used by security experts and politicians to discuss nuclear proliferation. In this case, I will argue that proliferation discourse itself legitimates the current global distribution of state power through racialised and gendered metaphors. In so doing it actually fosters the nuclear aspirations of countries that might not otherwise find nuclear weapons programmes so desirable. The third location is the appearance of gender in the discourse of the United Nations Security Council, in the form of Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325), unanimously adopted by the Security Council in October 2000. This moment is qualitatively different from the others, as it represents the first time that gender is brought into security discourse overtly, purposefully, consciously, as a subject of security discourse – rather than as an unacknowledged, unexamined, embedded metaphor. SCR 1325, along with the wider “women, peace and security agenda” it has come to symbolise, offers an enormous conceptual opening by asserting the centrality of gender itself to the ways we need to think about security...

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