Imagining security from gender violence in the Pacific Islands: Rights and rightfulness through a vernacular lens

Abstract This article develops a vernacular security lens to examine the relationship between gender violence and security in three Pacific Island settings: Fiji, Bougainville, and Kanak communities in New Caledonia. This approach is deployed to analyse findings from a novel photo elicitation field study researching women’s everyday perspectives on the relationship between gendered familial violence and insecurity and how this insecurity can be managed. Vernacular security approaches enable close attention to the contingent ways that security is understood – how it is imagined or feels to particular groups and how these imaginaries can be contested. These perspectives have affinity with feminist security studies objectives which have exposed the hegemonic and gender-subordinating impacts of security projects. Yet vernacular security analysis of ‘security’ imaginaries may also reveal possibilities for ‘everyday’ forms of gendered resistance. This study examines women’s reflections on gender restrictive sociocultural expectations that can be generative of gendered violence yet also shows how everyday women’s cultural knowledge and practice can provide a foundation for resistance against gender violence too. These findings have potential application for debates on gender violence and security in other pluralized regulatory contexts that extend far beyond the Pacific Islands region.