To what extent do feminist perspectives contribute to our understanding of Contemporary Security Challenges? The Case of Human Trafficking

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Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2017 in the subject Public Safety and Order, Disaster Relief, grade: 78, University of Kent, language: English, abstract: This paper uses a feminist lens to investigate to what extent feminist perspectives contribute to the understanding of contemporary security challenges. The concentration of this paper lies on human trafficking as a security challenge. While it is acknowledged that other security challenges exist, this paper aims to provide a thorough analysis of a particular case to address the research question. Human trafficking is of great relevance, as it is a transnational crime which affects every country in the world whether as country of origin, transit or destination for victims.This paper compares the traditional approach of realism with the feminist perspectives with reference to human trafficking, focusing on the respective security referent, security threat and policy focus. Instead of taking on a specific lens of each tradition, the commonalities of realism and feminism are taken as a basis to analyse human trafficking to ensure comparability. This paper argues that feminist approaches to security contribute to a great extent to the understanding of human trafficking as feminist perspectives shift the focus of traditional security theories from state security to human security. Moreover, feminists put attention to the social construction of a gendered hierarchy which marginalises victims of trafficking, and in turn hinders the state to set an adequate policy focus to combat human trafficking.This paper is structured as follows: the first chapter looks at the concept of 'Contemporary Security Challenge', outlining six criteria which define what constitutes a Contemporary Security Challenge. The second chapter explains the case selection of human trafficking by applying the established criteria to this particular case. The third chapter outlines the viewpoints of the traditional security approaches on human trafficking, focusing mostly on the realist perspective, while the fourth chapter analyses human trafficking using a feminist perspective. In the fifth chapter, a discussion reviews the results of the analysis.