States of Insecurity and the Gendered Politics of Fear

"Terrorism" has become a catchall term for the enemy who challenges U.S. imperialism. Viewed by the likes of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, terrorism is the activity of terrorists; and terrorists are not us, nor are they like us—terrorists are those who hate "our" freedom/democracy, modernity/secularism, and hard-won success. "Terrorism" has now fully replaced communism as the globe's scourge. "Our" enemies, the enemies of democracy and freedom, exist everywhere and anywhere. Yet much of the rest of the world thinks that President Bush is more of a threat to the world than Saddam Hussein.

(Eisenstein 2004, 8)

Just months before the beginning of World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed Congress, invoking a future in which security figured in what now may seem to be archaic ways:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth freedom is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

(Roosevelt 1941)

Reading this address 65 years later, it is difficult to imagine a world in which security required peace rather than "the crash of a bomb," freedom to worship rather than the imposition of evangelical Christianity worldwide; economic opportunities for every nation; and where the freedom from fear stood in direct opposition to armed conflict and war. Indeed, as we write this introduction, U.S. President George Bush has announced his intent to dismantle Social Security "as we know it." Three decades after conservative revolutionaries ascended to the White House in the United States, the last of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's great society programs—one that brought a measure of security to the country's elderly—may yet be dismantled by conservatives.

This special issue was born out of our shared concern about the meanings that have accrued to "security" during the U.S. war on terror, particularly the articulation of "security" to a political agenda that promotes militarization, a word we use following Cynthia Enloe (2000). Enloe describes militarization as "a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas," a process that involves the kind of "institutional, ideological and economic transformations" the United States has experienced in the years since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 (2000, 3). Conceptions of security in particular have been increasingly militarized, coming to depend on military needs and perspectives for their definitions, in ways that are often directly tied to forms of aggressive masculinity. Our analysis of the nexus among security, fear, and gender within the context of ever more aggressive militarization worldwide is divided into three sections in this introduction. In the first, we address how the term "security" has been hijacked since the commencement of the U.S. global war on terror, mainly as an alibi for a series of economic policies, political decisions, and military actions that have had the effect of making many women throughout the world infinitely less secure. In the second section, we discuss the construction of fear within contemporary political discourse, its...