Feminist Security Studies

Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach does more than add women to security studies. It asks how security becomes intelligible through stories. Annick T. R. Wibben shows states, strategists, and disciplines repeatedly narrating threats, protectors, victims, and necessary violence. Those narratives decide whose death constitutes a security crisis, whose fear remains private, and which institutions gain power in the name of safety.

Conventional realism treats the state as subject and survival, borders, and military capacity as security’s center. Feminist inquiry begins with domestic violence, displacement, poverty, care burdens, and postwar insecurity, demonstrating that state and human security may conflict. A territorially secure, heavily armed state can expose women, minorities, and refugees to systematic danger; the state itself may be the source of threat.

Wibben’s innovation is to make narrative theory a research method. Security stories organize disorder through characters, causation, chronology, and endings: who becomes an active hero, who appears only as a silent victim, which histories disappear, and what future is made inevitable. Researchers must analyze form, institutions of circulation, and their own position rather than simply gather “authentic voices,” because interviews, media, law, and aid systems also reshape life stories.

This method changes the status of experience. Personal accounts by women are not emotional examples appended to grand strategy; they can challenge its scale and categories. When a story of war, borders, or terrorism begins with cooking, care, waiting, disappearance, or migration, security no longer means the absence of war. It includes bodily integrity, material survival, continuing relationships, and voice. Narrative is both evidence and a terrain of political struggle.

“Feminism” is not one identity or predetermined answer. Who represents women, which differences coalition suppresses, and how researchers avoid turning participants into consumable victim stories are methodological ethics. Opening security studies does not mean every marginalized narrative is automatically true. It means enabling contestation and exposing the institutions that give particular versions official authority.

Narrative inquiry has limits. Detached from budgets, weapons, law, and organizations, it can over-linguisticize material power; a life story cannot automatically represent a group, and memory and translation transform testimony. Digital propaganda, algorithmic surveillance, climate securitization, and social-media warfare after 2011 require additional tools. Political economy, archives, ethnography, and quantitative harm data should complement the method.

For FemRes readers, the book offers a practice for reading security news and policy: ask who tells the story, where its timeline begins, who has agency, who must accept protection, and which violence is written as necessary. Feminist security studies can then listen to lived experience without romanticizing it. Before security policy changes, the range of security stories permitted to be heard often has to change first.