ABSTRACT
Over the last 50 years a wide range of campaigning voices, particularly those inspired by feminist activism and scholarship, have sought to put the ordinary, everyday violence experienced by women (and children) across the globe at the centre of any agenda for social change. This has not been an easy path to follow. Struggles have persisted concerning how to understand such violence and how to measure it. Those struggles have often become entangled in the questions of who does what to whom (Hester 2013) and whether or not the answers to such questions are gender symmetrical or not. Much of that work has confined itself, historically, to making sense of such violence(s) as they occur between intimate partners known to each other in the confines of their relationship. The debates that this focus generated largely took for granted the presumption that private violence and public violence were separate and separable. This collection challenges those constructions and the domain assumptions in which they are rooted. Here, what is understood as risky, who the risky are, from whom they are at risk and how risk should be responded to, are our core questions. What is security, for whom and from what, is similarly central. Taking intimate partner violence (IPV) as the focus and the most common form of gendered violence confronting women globally, this collection seeks to undo and then remake the dominant constructions and understandings of risk and security.
