Gendered and Racialized Logics of Insecurity, Development and Intervention

Abstract

In her article ‘Gendering Insecurities, Informalization and “War Economies” ’, V. Spike Peterson identifies the too-often overlooked links between ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’, and outlines the connections between political violence and economic practices. Focusing on the uneven and contradictory logics and practices of neoliberalism, she illustrates how the local and global inequalities produced by neoliberal global restructuring create insecurities that lead to militarized conflict and war. Peterson’s discussion of gender, development, economic restructuring and security illustrates that expanding economic inequalities are inextricably linked to expanding political insecurities. In this chapter I explore these ideas with a specific focus on the ways in which racialized and gendered discourses of security and development enable the militarized conflicts that have contributed to the development of informal economies in post-war contexts. In doing so I provide an overview of how dominant discourses of development, democratization and security are interconnected along gendered and racialized lines, in order to show how development discourses fit into broader (historical and contemporary) gendered and racialized discourses of global politics (especially in terms of security and global order); how these discourses are militarized, thus enabling and perpetuating violence; and their gendered and racialized effects. I thereby draw on discourses of development, security and intervention related to what has been called, in these discourses, the ‘third’ or ‘developing world’, with a specific focus on the contemporary Middle East.