Saviors and Survivors - Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

This book rethinks security theory from a feminist perspective – uniquely, it engages feminism, security, and strategic studies to provide a distinct feminist approach to Security Studies.

The volume explicitly works toward an opening up of security studies that would allow for feminist (and other) narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. To make this possible, it presents a feminist reading of security studies that aims to invigorate the debate and radicalize critical security studies. Since feminism is a political project, and security studies are, at their base, about particular visions of the political and their attendant institutions, this is of necessity a political intervention. The book works through and beyond security studies to explore possible spaces where an opening of security, necessary to make way for feminist insights, can take place. While it develops and illustrates a feminist narrative approach to security, it is also intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices.

This book provides develops a comprehensive framework for the emerging field of feminist security studies and will be of great interest to students and scholars of feminist IR, critical security studies, gender studies and IR and security studies in general.

In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down to earth by proving, in a very engaging and entertaining way, that human moments meet big ideas on a regular basis. Now Smith offers the natural offspring of that book, expanding the “day in a life” concept to life as a whole in Driving with Plato.

Start with being born. For some, like Sartre, you get off to a bad start: You didn’t ask to be born, and there’s little point to it anyway, as life is meaningless. And yet for Martin Heidegger, if you hadn’t been born, you’d have no sense of your own being, and that would be a tragic loss. How about midlife crisis? When Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, he deliberately set his story of spiritual transformation at the halfway point of his life. Nietzsche, too, in his autobiography, spoke of burying his forty-fifth year as he went on to yet higher forms of actualization as a self-styled superman. Drawing on the great philosophers, as well as on literature, art, politics, and psychology, Smith creates the richest possible range of ideas for readers to contemplate, all in a warm, humorous voice that revels both in life’s absurdities and in the pure delight of discovery.

Grounding abstract ideas in concrete experience, Driving with Plato helps us think more deeply about the key events in our lives even as it provides a philosophical education that everyone can appreciate and enjoy.