Gender and 'positive' security

Focusing predominantly on the works of Ken Booth and Bill McSweeney, this article explores how the normative commitment of the two writers to the individual referent and to a set of values constitutive of human agency is reflective of a more 'positive' security. In particular, the article focuses on how in their formulation of values, both Booth (security as emancipation) and McSweeney (ontological security) draw on gender and feminist approaches and, importantly, how critical feminist scholarship can profitably be used to reconcile concentration on both the global and the local, thus providing greater conceptual clarity and empirical grounding to the positive security project.