Last year, we saw a world saturated with the language of security. Media reflected and reinforced this condition, flooding public discourse with references to threat, danger, and survival. However, beneath the apparent universality of this state of insecurity lay a fundamental question: security for whom? Not all forms of insecurity were narrated equally, nor were all subjects of insecurity granted the same political weight or even the same weight or visibility.
While the media coverage overwhelmingly privileged state-centric and securitized frames, gendered and human experiences of insecurity remained marginal or were instrumentalized for political gain. In other words, for women and marginalized communities, insecurity has not been a “breaking news” event but a structural condition of crises. Accepting the presence of this narrative imbalance is critical to understanding how political priorities are set, whose suffering becomes politically acceptable and actionable, and whose remains peripheral.
This article argues that dominant narratives have contained gendered insecurity within a narrow, militarized framework. The global crisis fatigue that emerged in 2025, on the other hand, has functioned to normalize the exclusion of women from the very security architectures built in their name without their real presence and without acknowledging women as political actors with security knowledge of their own.
Most of us do not experience global conflicts directly. Instead, we live in what Walter Lippmann (1998) described as a ‘pseudo-environment’- a mental map of the world constructed through news reports, social media, and political speeches. In 2025, these maps were heavily shaped by “spectacular” violence such as missile strikes, bombs, drone footage, live-streamed terror attacks, and political assassinations. This past year was also narrated as a series of existential threats to the state, a framing that privileges immediacy over structural casualty. This mediated reality has also provided a crucial lens through which ordinary individuals have started to interpret the world’s complexity.
The media has long played a major role in shaping perceptions, including political perceptions of security. In 2025, the media’s role became even more important, as crises were no longer treated as exceptional disruptions to the global system but rather as a normalized condition. The language of security dominated the headlines and political messaging in 2025. “Borders under threat,” “national survival,” “regional or strategic stability” became daily headlines, reinforcing a state-centric understanding of what it means to be secure, while marginalizing non-military dimensions of security. As media narratives have prioritized state-centric, militarized security, in this environment, insecurity has been reframed primarily through an emphasis on geopolitical competition, military and intelligence capabilities, border control –a return to ‘hard power’ once again.
Securitization increasingly became a default narrative logic. Political actors framed their decisions as necessary responses to an existential threat, while the media amplified these frames without much critical investigation. The emphasis on urgency and presence of threat narrows the space for alternative understandings of security, sidelining social, economic, and gendered vulnerabilities that are less visible but no less destabilizing. It also produced a political understanding in which the emergencies were invoked to justify exceptional measures and to obscure the visibility of everyday insecurities, which were largely marginalized.
Additionally, when the public is bombarded from every corner with “breaking news,” the capacity for empathy and for understanding issues more deeply is stretched thin, creating the ‘crisis fatigue’ phenomenon, a tool of political management that dulls moral sensitivity rather than encouraging informed engagement. As Neil Postman (1985) warned, we are not suppressed by a lack of information but by its abundance, creating a state of political paralysis.
As conflicts and crises persisted, media attention cycles shortened, and many long-term humanitarian issues, such as gendered violence, economic precarity, and displacement, struggled to maintain visibility. These issues were addressed as humanitarian concerns rather than security priorities, thereby removing them from the political agenda while stripping them of urgency or accountability. Accordingly, policies responding to security crises rarely addressed the conditions that produced the issues categorized as such.
It is crucial to note that gendered vulnerabilities were not absent from media narratives. Still, they were contained within a narrow, patriarchal frame, and as a result, gendered insecurity became structurally marginalized and politically expendable. Women were most frequently depicted in crisis coverage as victims, mourners, or caregivers. Women’s experiences were often used to evoke moral urgency while keeping them distant from authority or decision-making, disconnecting them from their capacity for agency and from their potential roles in community resilience and conflict mitigation.
When women are represented primarily through vulnerability, their insecurity becomes part of a background condition rather than a political agenda requiring substantive solutions. Crisis fatigue further normalized these traditional representations, rendering these already marginalized issues less narratively urgent over time. The result was a media environment in which some forms of suffering or insecurities were rendered visible and grievable, at the expense of others. Such hierarchies shape not only public opinion but, more importantly, policy responses.
Narratives, as tools of power, often functioned as filters that shaped the story of 2025. The narratives through which insecurity is communicated are not politically neutral. The media exercises narrative power in determining what counts as security and whose insecurity warrants public attention. In 2025, state survival was the dominant securitized frame. In this context, women frequently appeared as grieving mothers or displaced caregivers, portrayed as a consequence of the conflict. They were rarely given voice, agency, or a defining role in political solutions, a pattern that reflects long-standing hierarchies of authority within both media and security policymaking. With this narrative containment, women are mainly framed as victims to be protected in this essentially male-led fortress of security understanding. Thus, gendered insecurity remains a private tragedy rather than a public priority in the security agenda and policy decision-making.
2025 has mirrored the fragility of the world in which we live. It showed that true safety remains elusive, especially for those whose lives are structured by care, precarity, and endurance rather than power projection. In Antonio Gramsci’s (1971, 276) words, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 2025 reflects precisely this interval, where instability generates both narrative excess and moral exhaustion. Yet these moments are not only periods of danger, crises, and anxiety but also moments of political choice. Recentering women’s (and other marginalized groups’) experiences should not be an act of moral charity. Security must be reimagined so that women are not merely affected subjects and victims without agency, but rather indispensable political actors in the search for stability and security.
References:
Lippmann, Walter. 1998. Public Opinion. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. (Originally published in 1922.)
Postman, Neil. 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
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