Gender and Security in the Mediterranean
Abstract This contribution explores security issues in the Mediterranean from a feminist perspective. Feminists have developed a broad and dynamic understanding of security and insecurity. This approach takes ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ issues as interconnected on the personal, national and international level. This allows for a comprehensive perspective on the basic human need for security. It is argued that EU policies that stress ‘soft’ security issues offer more sustainable and at the same time ‘realistic’ ways of establishing an ‘area of peace and stability in the Mediterranean’ [Barcelona Declaration, 1995] than those that stress ‘hard’ security issues. After discussing feminist and developmental perspectives on comprehensive security concepts, the contribution presents some important indicators of ‘Gendered Human Security’ in EMP countries. It argues that it is important to address the huge gaps in gendered human security in order to strengthen the civil and security dimension of the EMP. The contribution finally explores the possible positive effects of womens’ participation in the armed forces. Will these processes change militarized security cultures and help create a more comprehensive security approach?
Hybrid Hegemonic Masculinity of the EU before and after the Arab Spring: A Gender Analysis of Euro-Mediterranean Security Relations
In the academic literature on EU–southern Mediterranean relations, a focal point of neglect has been the gendered dimension of Euro-Mediterranean relations. This article argues that the Euro-Mediterranean space has been formed within the gendered global West/non-West relations with the purpose of promoting the West's security interests. Euro-Mediterranean security relations, thus, embody a gendered power hierarchy between the hybrid hegemonic masculinity of the EU (bourgeois-rational and citizen-warrior) and the subordinate (both feminized and hypermasculinized) southern neighbourhood. In addition, it shows that following the Arab Spring the EU has been determined to maintain the status quo by reconstructing these gendered power relations. This gender analysis contributes to the literature on Euro-Mediterranean relations through its specific focus on the (re)construction processes of gendered identities within the West/non-West context in tandem with the EU's competing notions of security.
ImageCLEF 2017: ImageCLEF Tuberculosis Task - the SGEast Submission
In this paper, we describe our methodologies in an attempt to improve the diagnosis accuracy of drug resistant tuberculosis and also of identifying the type of tuberculosis present in the patient, as per the requirements of the ImageCLEF tuberculosis task of ImageCLEF 2017. Firstly, we employed the concept of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which can be used to identify useful features in the Computerized Tomography (CT) scans that were provided in the competition and perform the classification based on them. Secondly, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) were used on top of CNNs by utilizing CNNs as a feature extractor and the RNNs as a classifier. In order for our model to produce acceptable results, proper preprocessing was performed prior to providing the input data to the models for training, such as image slicing and data augmentation. Our methods were able to reach rank 4 and 5 for the subtask involving drug-resistant tuberculosis and rank 1 and 2 for the other subtask of identifying the tuberculosis type, according to the evaluation performed by ImageCLEF.