ABSTRACT
As a South African gender and peace researcher and women’s rights activist I have come, as have many of my international colleagues, to question the prevailing notions of security as it is embedded in the nation-state paradigm. Being a country only recently governed under a democratic state that has fi nally enfranchised its African citizens, the South African experience teaches us much about the limits of this paradigm and the possibilities that may be found with the notion of human security. The following article refl ects that experience as it critically interrogates constructions of security generically, and human security specifi cally, in relation to women and notions of women’s security. The constructs of national security and human security will be critiqued, questioning whose interests these constructs serve, and how they are specifi cally gendered (and class-based) and neglect issues relevant to women specifi cally, and other marginalized members of the international community.
