The Security Imperative

The Security Imperative

The Gender Imperative

The book asserts that human security derives from the experience and expectation of human well-being which depends on four essential conditions: a life sustaining environment, the meeting of essential physical needs, respect for the identity and dignity of persons and groups, protection from avoidable harm and expectations of remedy from them. The book demonstrates their integral relationship to human security. Patriarchy being the germinal paradigm from which most major human institutions such as the state, the economy, organised religions and social relations have evolved, the book argues that fundamental inequalities must be challenged for the sake of equality and security. The fundamental point raised is that expectation of human well-being is a continuing cause of armed conflict which constitutes a threat to peace and survival of all humanity and human security cannot exist within a militarised security system. The editors of the book bring together 14 essays which critically examine militarised security in order to find human security pathways, show ways in which to refute the dominant paradigm, indicate a clear gender analysis that challenges the current system, and suggests alternatives to militarised security. With a mix of female and male feminist scholar activists as contributors, the book makes an important contribution to a new discourse on human security.

National Security Imperatives and the Neorealist State

This thesis argues that pragmatic, neorealist interests-reducing Iran's international isolation, opening avenues for economic cooperation and commercial exchange, restoring religious and cultural links, and safeguarding the mutually advantageous relationships with influential powers in the region- are the true foundations of Iranian national security and foreign policy decisionmaking. Iran's imperative has been-and still is-focused on the pragmatic national security interests of the nation-state model vice the ideological potential for spreading its brand of Islamic revolution abroad. The causes of these Islamic revolutionary groups, no matter how noble in the Iranian leaderships' eye, do not outweigh the more classic nation-state decisionmaking process that the Iranian government undergoes when it determines the best course of action on an issue of foreign policy and/or national security) realpolitik. It is the neorealist approach which always wins out in national security matters of a state. Presented are four case studies of Iranian relations with Azerbaijan, Turkey, Israel, and four Persian Gulf States (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia). What each reveals is an Islamic Iran's whose policy decisions and actions compelled by the rational, state model of neorealism and not ideology.