Language and Power. The Implications of Language for Peace and Development: The Implications of Language for Peace and Development

Language in the Security Discourse

- 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 ...