Handbook on Gender in World Politics 2016931790, 9781783470624, 9781783470617
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English Pages [513] Year 2016
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Table of contents :
Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
1. Introduction
2. Still engaging from the margins?
PART I EXAMPLES OF APPROACHES AND METHODS
3. Gender as a variable in international relations research
4. Feminist historical materialist and critical theory
5. Poststructuralist feminism in world politics
6. Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR
7. Masculinities in international relations
8. Sex, gender and sexuality
9. Feminist methodologies and world politics
PART II THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND BELONGING
10. The gendered state in international relations
11. Gender and citizenship
12. Gender and democratization
13. Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice?
14. Transnational feminist politics: a concept that has outlived its usefulness?
15. Is transnational feminist solidarity possible?
16. Gender, protest and political transition in the Middle East and North Africa
PART III INTERNATIONAL LAW
17. Gender and international law
18. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
19. LGBTI rights: the international context
20. International criminal courts
21. “With all the respect due to their sex”: gender and international humanitarian law
22. Refugees and asylum
23. NGOs, feminist activism and human rights
PART IV GENDERED VIOLENCE
24. The gender of violence in war and conflict
25. Conflict-related sexual violence
26. Female suicide bombing
PART V PEACE AND SECURITY
27. Gender and security
28. Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues
29. Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries
30. The securitisation of human rights
31. Feminist security studies
32. The Women, Peace and Security resolutions: UNSCR 1325 to 2122
33. Peacekeeping
34. Solving the problem of men and masculinities in the private military and security industry
35. Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation
PART VI GLOBAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS
36. Gender and popular culture
37. Cinema and film
38. New media and communications
39. Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps
PART VII POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT
40. Feminist political economy
41. Gender in global restructuring
42. Gender and migration
43. The global political economy of sex work
44. Gender and development
45. Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women: the case of African traders
46. Social reproduction – the Achilles heel of feminist transformation?
PART VIII GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
47. Gender in international governance
48. What is feminist economics?
49. The international financial institutions, structural adjustment and poverty reduction
50. Gender and microfinance/microcredit
51. The International Labour Organization and the gender of work
52. Gender and sustainable development
PART IX CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
53. How effective is gender mainstreaming in international peace and security policymaking?
54. Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds: gender in world politics
Index
Citation preview
JOBNAME: Steans PAGE: 1 SESS: 3 OUTPUT: Tue Jun 21 10:38:38 2016
HANDBOOK ON GENDER IN WORLD POLITICS
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INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER Series Editor: Sylvia Chant, FRSA, Professor of Development Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK International Handbooks on Gender is an exciting new Handbook series under the general editorship and direction of Sylvia Chant. The series will produce high quality, original reference works offering comprehensive overviews of the latest research within key areas of contemporary gender studies. International and comparative in scope, the Handbooks are edited by leading scholars in their respective fields, and comprise specially commissioned contributions from a select cast of authors, bringing together established experts with up-and-coming scholars and researchers. Each volume offers a wide-ranging examination of current issues to produce prestigious and high quality works of lasting significance. Individual volumes will serve as invaluable sources of reference for students and faculty in gender studies and associated fields, as well as for other actors such as NGOs and policymakers keen to engage with academic discussion on gender. Whether used as an information resource on key topics, a companion text or as a platform for further study, Elgar International Handbooks on Gender aim to provide a source of definitive scholarly reference. Titles in the series include: The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism Global and Development Perspectives Edited by Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas-Mateos Handbook on Gender and Health Edited by Jasmine Gideon Handbook on Gender in World Politics Edited by Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage
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Handbook on Gender in World Politics
Edited by
Jill Steans Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory, University of Birmingham, UK
Daniela Tepe-Belfrage Faculty Research Fellow, University of Sheffield, UK
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER
Cheltenham, UK + Northampton, MA, USA
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© Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931790
This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781783470624
ISBN 978 1 78347 061 7 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78347 062 4 (eBook)
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Contents
List of contributors
ix
1 Introduction Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage 2 Still engaging from the margins? J. Ann Tickner PART I
1 5
EXAMPLES OF APPROACHES AND METHODS
3 Gender as a variable in international relations research Andrea den Boer 4 Feminist historical materialist and critical theory Adrienne Roberts 5 Poststructuralist feminism in world politics Maria Stern 6 Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR Anna M. Agathangelou and Heather M. Turcotte 7 Masculinities in international relations Paul Kirby 8 Sex, gender and sexuality Terrell Carver 9 Feminist methodologies and world politics Annick T.R. Wibben PART II
15 24 33 41 50 58 66
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND BELONGING
10 The gendered state in international relations Johanna Kantola 11 Gender and citizenship Jeff Hearn and Alp Biricik 12 Gender and democratization Jane S. Jaquette 13 Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice? Kirsty Alexander and Catherine Eschle
77 85 94 103
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14 Transnational feminist politics: a concept that has outlived its usefulness? Bice Maiguashca 15 Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? Swati Parashar 16 Gender, protest and political transition in the Middle East and North Africa Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt PART III
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137 145 153 162 171 179 187
197 206 215
PEACE AND SECURITY
27 Gender and security Jenny Russell and Valerie M. Hudson 28 Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues Richard C. Eichenberg and Blair M. Read
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GENDERED VIOLENCE
24 The gender of violence in war and conflict Laura Sjoberg 25 Conflict-related sexual violence Paula Drumond 26 Female suicide bombing Claudia Brunner PART V
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INTERNATIONAL LAW
17 Gender and international law Hilary Charlesworth 18 The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Christine Chinkin 19 LGBTI rights: the international context Toni A.M. Johnson 20 International criminal courts Doris Buss 21 “With all the respect due to their sex”: gender and international humanitarian law Helen M. Kinsella 22 Refugees and asylum Jane Freedman 23 NGOs, feminist activism and human rights Jutta Joachim PART IV
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Contents vii 29 Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries A. Cooper Drury and Dursun Peksen 30 The securitisation of human rights Katherine E. Brown 31 Feminist security studies Laura J. Shepherd 32 The Women, Peace and Security resolutions: UNSCR 1325 to 2122 Laura McLeod 33 Peacekeeping Carol Harrington 34 Solving the problem of men and masculinities in the private military and security industry Paul Higate 35 Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation Ruth Jacobson PART VI
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263 271 280 289 298
309 317 326 333
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT
40 Feminist political economy Penny Griffin 41 Gender in global restructuring Anne Sisson Runyan 42 Gender and migration Eleonore Kofman 43 The global political economy of sex work Nicola Smith 44 Gender and development Zoe PflaegerYoung 45 Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women: the case of African traders Akosua K. Darkwah
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GLOBAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS
36 Gender and popular culture Christina Rowley 37 Cinema and film Cristina Masters 38 New media and communications GillianYoungs 39 Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps Varun Pande, Theo P. van der Weide and Rekha Pande PART VII
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viii Handbook on gender in world politics 46 Social reproduction – the Achilles heel of feminist transformation? 394 Shirin M. Rai and Catherine Hoskyns PART VIII
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
47 Gender in international governance Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel 48 What is feminist economics? Drucilla K. Barker 49 The international financial institutions, structural adjustment and poverty reduction Arne Ruckert 50 Gender and microfinance/microcredit Heloise Weber 51 The International Labour Organization and the gender of work Eileen Boris and Susan Zimmermann 52 Gender and sustainable development Emma A. Foster PART IX
Index
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414 422 430 438 446
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
53 How effective is gender mainstreaming in international peace and security policymaking? Jacqui True 54 Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds: gender in world politics Marysia Zalewski
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Contributors
Jill Steans is Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her main research interests are in the fields of gender and international relations theory and international political economy. She has written numerous books, book chapters and journal articles on these subjects, including Gender and International Relations (Polity Press, 2013, 3rd edition). Daniela Tepe-Belfrage is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. She currently holds a Faculty of Social Science Research Fellowship. Her research is concerned with feminist political economy, critical theory, austerity, British politics, and politics of caring and parenting. Her research has been published as a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan, The Myth about Global Civil Society: Domestic Politics to Ban Landmines, and in journals that include International Politics, Public Administration, Review of International Political Economy and Capital and Class. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on Inequality and Insecurity in British Households in British Politics. Anna M. Agathangelou is an Associate Professor in Political Science, York University, Canada. Her work focuses on post-colonial theory, international political economy, transnational feminisms, and racialization and bodies in world politics. She was a Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, USA. Her research focused on corporeality and the use of science, technology and law knowledge in global power shifts and social order. Her work has been published widely, including in the Greek Review of Social Research and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK. She has published widely on women and gender in the Middle East, as well as transnational migration and diaspora mobilization. Her publications include: What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited ix
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with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books, 2007); and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Her most recent book (coedited with Deborah al-Najjar) entitled We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press, 2013) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. She is a member of the Feminist Review Collective. Kirsty Alexander is a Research Assistant at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, and teaches the politics of gender and sexuality at the University of Stirling. Her current research revolves around the ethics and politics of love and examines the value of biophilia for critical theory and the politics of autonomy. Drucilla K. Barker (Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1988) is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, University of South Carolina, USA. She is a radical feminist economist whose research interests are globalization, feminist political economy, and economic anthropology. Her work is interdisciplinary and ranges from examinations of the roles of gender, race and class in social valuations of labour, especially affective labour, to accounts of the financial crises that characterize late global capitalism. She is a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Alp Biricik holds a Ph.D. degree in gender studies from Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests include: critical studies of men and masculinities; internet studies; intersections of body politics, citizenship and militarism; and sexuality studies. Some of his most recent publications are: A Walk on Istiklal Street: Dissident Sexual Geographies, Politics and Citizenship in Istanbul (Linköping University Press, 2014), ‘Hegemony, Transpatriarchies, ICTs and Virtualization’, with Jeff Hearn, Helga Sadowski and Katherine Harrison, in Rethinking Transnational Men, edited by Jeff Hearn, Marina Blagojevic´ and Katherine Harrison (Routledge, 2013) and ‘The “Rotten Report” and the Reproduction of Masculinity, Nation and Security in Turkey’, in Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, edited by Annica Kronsell and Ericka Svedberg (Routledge, 2011). Andrea den Boer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, UK. Her research focuses on gender and international relations issues, with an emphasis on women’s rights and the effectiveness of the UN human rights system, as well as the causes and consequences of violence against women. She is the co-author, along with Valerie Hudson, of numerous publications on
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Contributors xi the effect of the demographic gender imbalance in Asia, including the award-winning book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004). She is editor of the journal Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations and a Principal Investigator on the WomanStats Project, an international database and interdisciplinary research project that facilitates investigations of the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states. Eileen Boris, the Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and Professor of History, Black Studies and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, writes on home and work, social reproduction and social politics. She is the author of the prizewinning books Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and, with Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012, 2015). Her current project considers the making of the woman worker through global labour stands, using the International Labour Organization as her archive. Katherine E. Brown is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London, UK. Her research is focused on women’s involvement in religio-political violence and state responses to these. Her work highlights the gendered impact of contemporary counter-terrorism policies worldwide on human rights and women’s security. She has published widely, details of which can be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/ departments/dsd/people/dsd-a-to-z/brown.aspx, and she tweets @K_E_ Brown27. Claudia Brunner studied political science and gender studies in Vienna and Paris. She holds a Ph.D. in political science. She has repeatedly taught and done research at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany and is currently based at the Centre for Peace Studies and Peace Education at the Alps-Adriatic University of Klagenfurt, Austria as an Assistant Professor. Her transdisciplinary work, for which she has received several scientific awards, focuses on the entanglements of political and epistemic violence and combines elements of sociology of knowledge, discourse/dispositive research, feminist as well as post- and decolonial theory, and feminist international relations (IR). Doris Buss is a Professor of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, teaching and researching in the areas of international law and human rights, women’s rights, global social movements and feminist theory. Her
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xii Handbook on gender in world politics research examines international dimensions of gender equality and women’s rights norms, and their contestation in internationalized legal, regulatory and policy sites. She is the author (with Didi Herman) of Globalizing Family Values: The International Politics of the Christian Right (Minnesota Press, 2003), co-editor (with Ambreena Manji) of International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (Hart, 2005) and co-editor (with Joanne Lebert, Blair Rutherford and Donna Sharkey) of Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts (Routledge, 2014). Gülay Caglar is a Research Fellow in the Division of Gender and Globalization at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include feminist international political economy (IPE), global food governance, feminist value chain analysis and knowledge in global governance. Currently she is leading two subprojects with a gender focus within a research consortium on food security and horticultural value chains in East Africa (HORTINLEA). In her research she investigates how shifts in gendered food practices (production, consumption, food preparation) affect policy priorities in global food governance. She co-edited the book Feminist Strategies in International Governance with Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (Routledge, 2013). Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK, and a graduate of Columbia University and Balliol College, Oxford, UK. His engagement with feminist and gender theory began in the mid-1980s in relation to Marx and Engels. More recently he is the author and editor (with Samuel A. Chambers) of critical studies on the political theory of Judith Butler, Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (Routledge, 2008) and Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Reflections (Routledge, 2008). He has published widely on sex, gender and sexuality, and in particular on masculinity/ies. He is the author of Men in Political Theory (Manchester University Press, 1998) and ‘Men in the Feminist Gaze: What Does This Mean in IR?’ (Millennium, 2008, 37 (1), 107–122) and ‘Men and Masculinities in International Relations Research’ (Brown Journal of World Affairs, 2014, 21 (1), 113–126). Hilary Charlesworth is Distinguished Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Australian National University. She also holds an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. Her research includes the structure of the international legal system, peacebuilding, human rights law and international humanitarian law, and international legal theory, particularly feminist approaches to international law. She received the 2001 American Society of International Law book award for
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Contributors xiii creative legal scholarship for her book, co-authored with Christine Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester University Press, 2000). She was also awarded, with Christine Chinkin, the American Society of International Law’s Goler T. Butcher award in 2006 for ‘outstanding contributions to the development or effective realization of international human rights law’. She is an associate member of the Institut de Droit International and served as judge ad hoc in the International Court of Justice in the Whaling in the Antarctic Case (2011–14). Christine Chinkin, FBA is Professor in International Law at the London School of Economics, UK and a William C. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, USA. She is an academic member of Matrix Chambers. She is the author of many articles on issues of international law and human rights, including co-author of The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester University Press, 2000, with H. Charlesworth) and of The Making of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2007, with A. Boyle), and co-editor of The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2012, with M. Freeman and B. Rudolf). She was Scientific Advisor to the Council of Europe’s committee for the drafting of the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, 2011. Akosua K. Darkwah, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology as well as Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy, both located at the University of Ghana. Her research interest is in the ways in which global economic policies and practices open up as well as limit Ghanaian women’s opportunities for work. She has also been involved in a large-scale global project that investigated the pathways to women’s empowerment. Some of the findings from this research are available in a UN Women’s 2013 publication titled Paid Work, Women’s Empowerment and Inclusive Growth: Transforming the Structures of Constraint. Paula Drumond is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations and political science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva, Switzerland. She is also a Researcher of the Global South Unit for Mediation (GSUM), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. She received her MA degree in international relations from the Institute of International Relations (IRI), PUC-Rio, where she worked as a Lecturer and Deputy Coordinator of the International Relations BA Program. Her research
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xiv Handbook on gender in world politics interests include gender issues in international security and, more specifically, conflict-related sexual violence and gender inclusion in peace-related efforts. She has authored chapters on these themes in edited volumes published by Routledge (2011) and IPEA (2012), and she is currently co-editing a reader in international mediation. A. Cooper Drury (Ph.D., Arizona State University, 1997) is Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Missouri, USA. He is also editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Analysis. His primary research interests focus on the use, outcome and consequences of economic sanctions. Richard C. Eichenberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, USA. He has held grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Social Science Research Council. His research focuses on public opinion, foreign policy, European integration and gender politics. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Mershon International Studies Review, Policy Sciences, Public Opinion Quarterly and World Politics. Catherine Eschle is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Her research and teaching explore the activities and aspirations of social movements in global politics and their implications for the discipline of international relations, with a particular interest in feminist theory and practice. Along with Bice Maiguashca, she pursued an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded research project on feminist ‘anti-globalization’ activism, which has resulted in, among other things, a 2010 book, Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement, and, more recently, a 2014 article in Political Studies entitled ‘Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-opted and Progressive Politics in a Neoliberal Age’. She has also written on anti-nuclear activism, including ‘Gender and the Subject of (Anti-)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women Campaigners against the Bomb’ (International Studies Quarterly, 2013, 57 (4), 713–724), and her current research focuses on anti-austerity and anti-nuclear protest camps in Scotland. Emma A. Foster is a Lecturer in International Politics and Gender in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, environmental politics and Foucault. She is currently researching issues related to queer ecology and queer(ing) development. She has published in a variety of journals, including Gender, Place and
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Contributors xv Culture, British Journal of Politics and International Relations and Globalizations. Jane Freedman is a Professor at the Université de Paris 8, France and a member of the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris (CRESPPA). Her research has focused on gender and migration, with a particular attention to gender in refugee and asylum policies at national and international level. She has also worked as a consultant for the UNHCR, and for various non-governmental organizations and international organizations involved in the protection of asylum seekers and migrants. A revised and updated second edition of her book Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research explores the processes, practices and effects of the contemporary global political economy with a view to understanding how these shape and are shaped by gender identity(ies), and includes publications with Palgrave Macmillan (Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance, 2009, winner of the 2010 BISA IPEG book prize) and in the journals Men and Masculinities, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Australian Journal of International Affairs and Globalizations. Carol Harrington teaches courses on sociology of violence, social policy and knowledge politics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research concerns politics and policy on violence against women and sexual violence. In addition to her book Politicization of Sexual Violence from Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Ashgate, 2010) she has published articles on anti-sex-trafficking policy in Bosnia and Kosovo and on gender expertise within peacekeeping operations. Jeff Hearn is: Guest Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, based in Gender Studies, Örebro University, Sweden; Professor of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland; Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK; and UK Academician in the Social Sciences. He is co-managing editor of Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality, co-editor of NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies and associate editor of Gender, Work and Organization. In 2010 he presented the 26th T.H. Marshall lecture on ‘Genders, Gendering and
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xvi Handbook on gender in world politics Citizenship’. His interests focus on critical studies on men and masculinities, organizations, policy, sexualities, violences and autoethnography, as articulated in his many books, including Men in the Public Eye (Routledge, 1992), ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’ (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), The Violences of Men (Sage, 1998), Sex, Violence and the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), The Limits of Gendered Citizenship (Routledge, 2011) and, most recently, Rethinking Transnational Men (Routledge, 2013). Current research focuses on men, gender and transnationalization. Paul Higate is Reader in Gender and Security in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published on military and militarized masculinities within the context of: the transition from military to civilian life; United Nations peacekeeping; and private military and security companies. He is currently conducting research into the British military’s Reservists programme. Catherine Hoskyns is Professor Emerita in European Studies and Gender Politics at Coventry University, UK. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) in the University of Warwick, UK. She spent many years studying the gender politics of the EU and is the author of Integrating Gender: Women, Law and Politics in the European Union (Verso, 1996). More recently she has been researching the composition of social reproduction and how it can be measured and valued. She is also involved in an experimental project in Nicaragua, which is pioneering the inclusion of a component for women’s unpaid work in the cost structure of fair trade contracts for sesame and coffee. With Shirin M. Rai she is currently investigating the depletion which women suffer as a result of social reproduction, especially in times of crisis and recession. Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, USA. She is co-author of Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), Sex and World Peace (Columbia University Press, 2012) and The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2015). She was named Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis in 2015 by the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the International Studies Association, and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. She is a founder and Principal Investigator of the WomanStats Project.
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Contributors xvii Ruth Jacobson has worked on issues of gender, armed conflict and peace since the 1980s, when she witnessed the impact of war on women and girls in Mozambique and Angola at first hand. Since then, she has carried out fieldwork in a wide range of conflict-affected contexts, including Northern Ireland and the South Caucasus. During the 1990s, she was a staff member of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, UK, where she was a co-editor of the volume States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance (Zed Books, 1999). Since then, she has worked as an independent researcher and consultant, and continues to carry out fieldwork in Mozambique on the gendered processes of post-conflict reconstruction. She remains an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies. Jane S. Jaquette is Professor Emerita in the Politics and Diplomacy and World Affairs departments at Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA and is affiliated with the Watson Institute, Brown University, USA. She has published over 60 articles, edited and contributed to books on comparative women’s political participation, including: Women in Politics (Wiley, 1974); The Women’s Movement in Latin America (Westview, 1994, 2nd edition); Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, with Sharon Wolchik); Women and Gender Equity in Economic Theory and Practice (Duke University Press, 2006, with Gale Summerfield); and Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009), and published essays on feminist interpretations of Machiavelli and Hobbes. She served as President of the Association for Women in Development (1990–91) and of the Latin American Studies Association (1995–97) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Jutta Joachim is Associate Professor in the Institute of Political Science, University of Hannover, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and her MA in international studies from the University of South Carolina, USA. She is author of Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2007) and co-editor of International Organizations and Implementation: Enforcers, Managers, Authorities? (Routledge, 2008) and Transnational Activism in the UN and the EU: A Comparative Study (Routledge, 2009). Her articles have appeared in, among others, International Studies Quarterly, German Journal for International Relations, Security Dialogue, Millennium, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Comparative European Politics and Journal of European Public Policy.
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xviii Handbook on gender in world politics Toni A.M. Johnson is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Leicester, UK and currently a Visiting Scholar at the Australian National University. Her research critically analyses the asylum system, focusing specifically on the intersection of gender, sexuality and race using a feminist/critical theory framework. Johanna Kantola is an Academy Research Fellow (2012–18) in Gender Studies in the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, where she also has a permanent position as Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies. Her monograph Gender and the European Union was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. She is the editor, with Sarah Childs, of Palgrave Macmillan’s Gender and Politics Book Series. Her research has appeared in a wide range of international refereed journals, including Politics and Gender, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Social Politics and European Journal of Women’s Studies. Helen M. Kinsella is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research interests include contemporary political theory, feminist theories, international law, especially international humanitarian law and human rights, and armed conflict, especially gender and armed conflict. Publications include the monograph, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011) and articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Political Theory. Paul Kirby is a Lecturer in International Security at Sussex University, UK. He is currently working on the UK Government’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its relationship to questions of gender equality, security and ethical foreign policy. His other work has focused on gendered attributions of responsibility for violence and on the connections between technology, politics and war. His work has been published widely in academic journals including International Affairs, Men and Masculinities and International Feminist Journal of Politics. Eleonore Kofman is Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship and Co-director of the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University London, UK. She has published extensively on gender and migration, especially on family and skilled migration. Her books include the co-edited Gender, Generation and Family in International Migration (University of Amsterdam Press, 2011) and the co-authored Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction (Palgrave, 2015).
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Contributors xix Bice Maiguashca is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Exeter University, UK. Her publications include: Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, co-authored monograph with Catherine Eschle); Contemporary Political Agency: Theory and Practice in an Age of Globalization (Routledge, 2013, co-edited with Raffaele Marchetti); and ‘“They’re Talkin’ bout a Revolution”, Feminism, Anarchism and the Politics of Social Change in the Global Justice Movement’ (Feminist Review, 2014, 106, 78–94). Cristina Masters is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on feminism, masculinity, and security practices in international politics. Her book Gender and Technologies of Security is forthcoming with Routledge in 2016. Laura McLeod is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. She has worked at Manchester since January 2011, and has been a post-doctoral research associate on the Understanding Institutional Change project (www.manchester.ac.uk/uic), where she researched gender presence in post-conflict peace settlements and constitutional reform, paying particular attention to Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has also carried out research on gender security discourses and postconflict feminist organizing in Serbia. Her broader research interests are focused upon gender, feminism, security studies and peacebuilding. Rekha Pande is Professor and Head of Department, Department of History and Joint Faculty, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. Varun Pande is a Research Scholar in the Department of Computer Science, University of Bridgeport, USA. Swati Parashar is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations and member of the Global Terrorism Research Centre (GTReC) at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She previously worked with policy think tanks in Singapore and New Delhi. Her research and publications focus on critical war and security studies, feminist and post-colonial international relations, and women, gender and political violence in South Asia. Her book Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury (Routledge, 2014) explores the gender dynamics of two conflicts in South Asia through the narratives of militant women. She is a social and political commentator on gender issues in the Asia Pacific region. Dursun Peksen (Ph.D., University of Missouri, 2008) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis, USA. His
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research interests include economic sanctions, foreign military intervention, human rights, civil wars and democratization. Zoe Pflaeger Young is a Lecturer in International Relations at De Montfort University, Leicester, with interests in critical globalization studies, development and practices of resistance. Her research is on approaches to empowerment, World Bank development policy, gender and development and fair trade initiatives, with a focus on Kenya’s coffee industry. Nicola Pratt is Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK. She is particularly interested in feminist approaches, as well as ‘politics from below’. Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Third World Quarterly and Review of International Studies, among others. She is co-author of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009, with Nadje Al-Ali) and co-editor of Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, with Nadje Al-Ali), as well as co-editor of Gender, Governance and International Security (Routledge, 2013, with Sophie Richter-Devroe) and Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (Zed Books, 2015, with Maha El Said and Lena Meari). From 2013–14, she held a British Academy Mid-career Fellowship, researching the history of women’s activism in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, where she directs the Institute’s Programme on Gender and Global Change. Her research focuses on gender politics in global governance, in particular in the areas of labour, agriculture and development. Publications include Transforming Masculine Rule (University of Michigan Press, 2011), ‘If Lehman Brothers Had Been Lehman Sisters …’ (International Political Sociology, 2012, 6 (1), 21–35) and Feminist Strategies in International Governance (Routledge, 2013, co-edited with Gülay Caglar and Susanne Zwingel). She spent the 2014/15 academic year as a Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies and is Co-director of the University of Warwick’s Global Research Priority Programme on International Development. She is the author of Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalisation (Polity Press, 2002) and The Gender Politics of Development (Zed Books/Zubaan Publishers, 2008), co-editor
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Contributors xxi (with Kate Bedford) of Feminists Theorize the International Political Economy, Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and co-editor of Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (Palgrave, 2008, with Georgina Waylen). Her current research interests lie in the area of depletion, which is a gendered cost of social reproduction in everyday political economy. Blair M. Read graduated from Tufts University, USA with degrees in political science and economics. Her senior honours thesis, entitled ‘A Nation of Mothers: Public and Private Applications of Gender and Domesticity in Indonesian Culture and Politics’, focused on gender norms and political behaviour in Indonesian families. She now holds the position of Research Support Associate in the Political Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Her research focuses on informal governance and political behaviour in developing contexts. She is currently working on a field experiment in Bangladesh that examines the effects of women’s participation in local government on development outcomes. Adrienne Roberts is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, USA. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of international political economy, feminist political economy, finance, debt and debt-driven development. Her work has been published in journals that include New Political Economy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Critical Sociology. She is co-editor of Rowman & Littlefield International’s Global Political Economies of Gender and Sexuality Book Series, and co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of the International Political Economy of Gender (Edward Elgar). Christina Rowley is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She researches the many and varied intersections between popular culture and world politics, often with a specific focus on gender. She has written about identities in US foreign policy, in/security and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, US presidential rhetoric, Vietnam War films, and the politics of Firefly and Serenity, among other topics. Her work has appeared in Security Dialogue, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Millennium. Her current interests include the ways in which popular culture is implicated in the concept of soft power, and the everyday popular cultural practices of diverse publics. Arne Ruckert is a Senior Research Associate and part-time Professor at the Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa, Canada. His
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xxii Handbook on gender in world politics principal areas of research include the international financial institutions (IFIs), the international aid architecture, the financial crisis and health equity, social determinants of health, and human rights-based approaches to development and health. He has worked as an independent consultant for various development and international organizations. He edited a collection, Post-neoliberalism in the Americas (Palgrave, 2009), and his research has been published widely, including in The Lancet, Review of International Political Economy, Critical Public Health, Canadian Journal of Public Health and Health Promotion International. Anne Sisson Runyan is Professor and former Head of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA, where she also directed the Taft Research Center. Her most recent co-authored and co-edited books include: Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (Westview Press, 2014, 4th edition); Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate, 2013); and Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances (Routledge, 2011, 2nd edition). She is an associate editor and book review link editor for the International Feminist Journal of Politics and serves on several other editorial boards. Jenny Russell is a 2015 graduate of the George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, USA. While earning her Master of International Affairs degree from the Bush School, she concentrated on security and diplomacy, with a particular interest in gender and world politics. She is a Robertson Fellow and a Presidential Management Fellowship Finalist. Since graduating, she has done consulting work for UN Women and hopes to continue contributing to the scholarly nexus of gender and international security. Laura J. Shepherd is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research focuses on gender politics, peace and critical security studies, and she is author or editor of five books, including the popular textbook Gender Matters in Global Politics (Routledge, 2015, 2nd edition). Much of her research engages with the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, and she has published widely on this theme, including a book with Zed Books in 2008 and several articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations and Australian Journal of International Affairs. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Critical Studies on Security, for which she
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Contributors xxiii edits the ‘Interventions’ section, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Australian Feminist Studies. She blogs as often as she can and tweets from @drljshepherd. Laura Sjoberg is Associate Professor of Political Science with an affiliation with the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida, USA. Her research focuses on gender and security, with concentrations in feminist war theorizing, women’s violence in global politics, and queer interventions in security politics. She currently serves as homebase editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and associate editor of International Studies Review. Her work has been published in more than 50 books and journal articles, including, most recently, her book Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (Columbia University Press, 2013). Nicola Smith is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is interested in exploring the intersections between feminist political economy and queer theory, and is currently completing a monograph on ‘Queer Sexual Economies’. She has published widely on globalization, social justice, feminist political economy, queer theory and commercial sex, and recent books include Body/State (Ashgate, 2013, co-edited with Angus Cameron and Jen Dickinson) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Mary Laing and Katy Pilcher). Maria Stern is Professor in Peace and Development Studies at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests are in (feminist) security studies, the security– development nexus, politics of identity and feminist theory. She is: author of Naming Security – Constructing Identity (Manchester University Press, 2005); co-editor of Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2006); co-author of Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond (Zed Books, 2013, with Maria Eriksson Baaz); and co-editor of Studying the Agency of Being Governed (Routledge, 2014). Additionally, her articles have appeared in the leading international academic journals, including African Affairs, Alternatives, Armed Forces and Society, International Journal of Peace Studies, International Political Sociology, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of International Relations and Development, Journal of Modern African Studies, Review of International Studies and Security Dialogue. J. Ann Tickner is Professor Emerita in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, USA and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of International Service at
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xxiv Handbook on gender in world politics American University, USA. Her principal areas of research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to international relations. Her publications include: Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War World (Columbia University Press, 2001); and A Feminist Voyage through International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is a past President of the International Studies Association. In a 2007 survey she was ranked number 21 of scholars having the greatest impact on the international relations discipline over the past 20 years. Jacqui True is an Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellow on the Political Economy of Post-conflict Violence against Women and a Professor of Politics and International Relations. Her over 100 publications include journal articles on gender mainstreaming and global governance and feminist methodologies that are among the most cited in the field. Her publications include: Theories of International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995, 2013); Gender, Postsocialism and Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2003); Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2006, with Brooke Ackerly and Maria Stern, Chinese translation 2015); and Doing Feminist Research in Social and Political Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, with Brooke Ackerly). Her book The Political Economy of Violence against Women (Oxford University Press, 2012) won several prizes. She is a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s academic network, a co-founder of the Women, Peace and Security Academic Collective and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Heather M. Turcotte is committed to anti-oppressive transnational feminist approaches to decolonizing academia, the interstate system and daily exchange. She received her Ph.D. in politics (feminist studies) from the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is an Assistant Professor in Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA and an associate editor at The Feminist Wire (www. thefeministwire.com). Her interdisciplinary research and teaching are located in the historical intersections of Africana and American studies, critical legal and justice studies, feminist studies and critical geopolitics. Her writing focuses on anti-white supremacy, the transnational criminalization of gender, the politics of violence, and collective frameworks for justice, abolition and liveable worlds. More on her work can be found at https://umassd.academia.edu/HeatherMTurcotte. Heloise Weber is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Development Studies at the School of Political Science and International
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Contributors xxv Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. Her research includes the politics of microcredit and microfinance schemes and poverty, as well as critical engagement with other institutional policy approaches on poverty and development, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda. She has also contributed to debates on method and theory in the study of the global politics of development and inequalities. She is: editor of Politics of Development (Routledge, 2014); co-editor of Recognition and Redistribution: Beyond International Development (Routledge, 2013, with M.T. Berger); and co-author of Rethinking the Third World: International Development and World Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, with M.T. Berger). Theo P. van der Weide is Professor in Information Retrieval and Information Systems, Intelligent Systems, Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Annick T.R. Wibben, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, USA. Her research contributes to critical (particularly feminist) security studies, international theory and feminist international relations. She also has a keen interest in issues of methodology, representation and writing – particularly in terms of feminist and narrative approaches. Her book Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Routledge, 2011) addresses these issues, and her forthcoming edited collection Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics (Routledge) continues this work. Her current research examines the varied experiences of women who have served in the US military during the ‘Global War on Terror’. Gillian Youngs, Professor of Digital Economy, University of Brighton, UK, has a background in the media, business and academia. She is a founding editor and now editorial board member of International Feminist Journal of Politics and has published extensively on feminist theory and issues related to international relations, communications and media and digital economy. Her books to date are: International Relations in a Global Age (Polity Press, 1999); the edited volume Political Economy, Power and the Body (Macmillan, 2000); Global Political Economy in the Information Age (Routledge, 2007); the co-edited volume Globalization: Theory and Practice (Continuum, 2008, 3rd edition); and the edited volume Digital World: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights (Routledge, 2013). Marysia Zalewski is Professor in Gender/International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has written widely on gender, methodology, theory, feminism, masculinity and international relations. Her
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book Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse was published by Routledge in 2013. Her current research includes critical projects on sexual violence against men, the future of sexual violence, sexed violence and terrorism, performance and knowledge production in international politics and creative writing in international relations. She is on the editorial board of International Feminist Journal of Politics. Susan Zimmermann is University Professor at the Central European University, Hungary. She has widely published on the history of international social protection policies and women’s organizations, and on the politics of global inequality. Her most recent monograph in English is Divide, Provide and Rule: An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Policy and Social Reform in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy (CEU Press, 2011). Her interest in global inequalities has informed publications such as ‘The Long-term Trajectory of Antislavery in International Politics: From the Expansion of the European International System to Unequal International Development’, in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labour Relations: The Long-term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, edited by Marcel van der Linden (Brill, 2011), and a related monograph in German. Currently she is working on a book manuscript on the International Labour Organization, woman internationalists, and women’s work in the interwar period (see extract on http://people.ceu.edu/susan_zimmermann). Susanne Zwingel is Associate Professor at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, USA. Her research areas include women’s human rights and their translation, women’s activism around the world, global governance and gender, and feminist and post-colonial international relations theories. She is co-editor of Feminist Strategies in International Governance (Routledge, 2013, with Elisabeth Prügl and Gülay Caglar) and author of the forthcoming Translating International Women’s Rights: The CEDAW Convention in Context (Palgrave). She is also co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte/Journal for Human Rights.
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1. Introduction Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage
When Edward Elgar invited us to co-edit this Handbook on Gender in World Politics, we could not but respond enthusiastically. At the end of the United Nations Decade for Women in 1985, gender was still commonly regarded as, at best, a marginal issue in world politics. Today gender is slowly, yet surely, being mainstreamed into the day-to-day operations of all major international institutions, in regional and national policy-making bodies and development organizations and in legislatures the world over. While we might – and do – continue to debate whether or not commitment to ‘gender mainstreaming’ on the part of political elites is largely rhetorical or increasingly substantive and meaningful, it cannot be denied that gender is now widely recognized as central to the practice of international politics. Concomitantly, gender has emerged as a dynamic field of study across the social sciences. While there is a long-established literature on gender in the academic disciplines of sociology, political science and development studies, during the past three decades scholars working in international relations, international political economy, international law and geography have also made substantive contributions to cutting-edge disciplinary debates and produced weighty empirical studies. One of the pleasures to be had in working on gender in world politics is the opportunities that it affords to engage with scholars in workshops and conferences and in academic journals that bring together academics and postgraduate researchers from many fields of study. At the same time, however, the study of gender in world politics is marked by diversity in approaches and methods. Therefore, in compiling this volume, we were immediately confronted by the challenges that lay in conceptualizing gender and defining what ‘gender in world politics’ might mean, as a first stage in delimiting the scope of this book. Gender might be approached as a social relation of inequality or as a core component of identity politics. Gender is constructed in narratives and practices of representation. Gender might refer to women and men or femininities and masculinities. According to perspective, some scholars focus on relations between the man and woman or masculinities and 1
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femininities, while others regard gender as inextricably linked to sexualities. Moreover, gender is not constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts. Gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constructed identities. As such gender is not easily separated from the political and cultural intersections in which gender is produced and maintained. Making women visible has been, and remains, a central plank of the project to ‘gender’ world politics. However, even as scholars have sought to make women visible, it has long been recognized that the terms ‘gender’ and ‘women’ cannot and should not be conflated. Some of the most innovative and challenging research on gender in world politics focuses on men as men, masculinities, sexualities, and lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, inter-sex and queer identities and the political and legal recognition and rights of differently gendered people. Since gender is constructed – and constructed differently – over time and across cultural locations and because gender is difficult to separate from, or speak about aside from, class, culture, ethnicity and other differences, it has been argued that we cannot approach gender as a discrete variable within the social sciences. And yet, in order to speak to policy-makers and to inform and influence discussion and decision making, it is often necessary to produce rigorous gender differentiated data which will elucidate myriad gender inequalities and/or better enable an effective response to, for example, conflict-related sexualized violence or humanitarian catastrophes. In order to speak to different audiences in a variety of transnational, international and global forums, it can be useful to approach gender in a strategic mode: to treat gender as if it was a coherent and stable category of analysis. In all cases, scholars are generally cognizant of and reflective about the pitfalls of binary constructions and crude forms of gender essentialism. While acknowledging legitimate intellectual and political differences among those working on the gendered dimensions of world politics, we, as editors, took the view that we should not reproduce unhelpful polarized oppositions between positivist and post-positivist, rationalist and constructivist approaches. Instead, we should aim to showcase works that interrogate research puzzles through different theoretical lenses, employing a variety of methodological tools. We have responded to the challenge of representing the wealth of scholarship that now exists on gender in world politics by securing as many excellent contributions as we could accommodate in a book of this kind. Limitations of space have necessitated choices on what to include and omit, but we have endeavoured to solicit contributions that, taken as a whole, provide comprehensive coverage of core areas of current research.
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Introduction 3 These are: examples of approaches and methods; thoughts on the politics of identity and belonging; developments in international law; perspective on conflict and gendered violence; literature on the instrumental use of gender in statecraft; critical studies on peace, security and peacekeeping; the gendered dimensions of global media and communications; and gender in political economy, development and global governance. We have also included contributions that reflect on issues that cut across discrete subject areas, for example the potentialities and limitations of transnational and solidarist political projects, the gender politics in political struggles and state building, the efficacy or otherwise of gender mainstreaming, and the state of play in gender studies within specific academic disciplines. In so far as we have an ‘agenda’, it is to demonstrate that there is a wealth of critical, reflective thinking on gender in transnational, international and global contexts and to convey a sense of the numerous innovative research projects that are now actively pursued in so many fields of study. The focus of some contributions to this volume continues to be on women, while other authors interrogate masculinities, sexualities, LGBT rights and transgender identities. The diversity of this burgeoning body of scholarship notwithstanding, the research presented in this book demonstrates just how much gender has been, and continues to be, keenly relevant to and sorely needed in the theory and practice of world politics. We have been fortunate in securing contributions from both leading experts and outstanding if as yet less established researchers who are forging valuable new research agendas and thereby ensuring the vitality of this most fascinating, vibrant field of study over the long term. Since this book is essentially a compendium of current research, we asked our contributors to write on topics on which they had expertise, from their own point of view, but requested that they also include brief literature reviews and a short bibliography to furnish readers with gateways to further study. Regrettably, it is still the case that most of the literature on gender in world politics is generated by scholars located in the Western world. This is reflected in the geographical locations of the editors and most, not all, of the contributors to this book. We have tried to mitigate, to some degree, what is undoubtedly a weakness of the text by ensuring that the 54 chapters include empirical cases and illustrations drawn from countries and regions around the world. In short, we have aimed to produce a compendium of current scholarship on gender in world politics which reflects the diversity of gender studies within and across a number of academic disciplines. The contributions in the text elucidate the many and varied ways in which gender
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issues are central to national, regional and international policy-making and at the core of the social sciences across the globe. We hope that we have produced a book that will function as an indispensable guide to key literature, approaches and methods and central concepts, themes and issues and which will serve as a comprehensive source of reference for researchers and students alike.
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2. Still engaging from the margins? J. Ann Tickner
In the 25 years since feminist theorizing entered the field of international relations (IR), feminist scholarship has proliferated in creative and exciting ways. The wide-ranging topics with which it has engaged across a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches provide striking evidence of this. Journal articles, books and other scholarly outputs reflect considerable interest in gender issues. In 1999 the first IR feminist journal, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, began publication. Indicators that IR has come to take feminism seriously can be found in the recognition of feminist scholarship as a paradigmatic approach (Maliniak et al., 2008), inclusion of feminist scholarship in certain IR introductory texts, and the publication of a feminist special issue of the journal Security Studies in 2009. Feminist IR dates back to the end of the Cold War, a time when the IR discipline opened up to new issues and new methodological perspectives. When this happened, it was remarkable the extent to which feminist scholars in different parts of the world, and in different disciplines, began thinking along the same lines at about the same time. In 1988 the British journal Millennium published its first special issue on ‘Women and International Relations’, and in 1993 Jan Jindy Pettman published an article in Australia’s leading international affairs journal entitled ‘Gendering International Relations’ (Pettman, 1993). Two years earlier Hilary Charlesworth, in a co-authored article in the American Journal of International Law, had drawn attention to the gendered foundations of international law (Charlesworth et al., 1991). A conference held at Wellesley College, USA in 1990, which brought together feminists and IR scholars, resulted in the edited volume Gendered States (Peterson, 1992). In a 1989 article Robert Keohane, a participant at the 1990 conference, characterized feminist IR as ‘likely to fundamentally change IR’s greatest debates’ (Keohane, 1989: 246). So has this promise of changing IR’s greatest debates been borne out? I would argue that, in spite of the successes noted above and efforts to engage in conversations with both mainstream and other critical approaches, feminist IR has remained on the margins of the discipline, 5
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although this may be changing somewhat – at least in certain geographical locations. It is doubtful whether many IR scholars would agree with one of feminist IR’s central claims that recognizing gender as an analytical and structural category would fundamentally transform the discipline. Citation of feminist work by non-feminists remains limited. But it is not only the degree of non-recognition that has placed feminist IR at the margins of the discipline. Other issues, such as interdisciplinarity, subject matter and methodology, have also contributed to IR feminism’s positioning at what is perceived as being beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally considered IR. Many feminists prefer not to be constrained by the conventional discipline; for them this is an exciting place to be. Yet it has its costs, with respect to recognition and professional opportunities as well as limiting the widespread dissemination of valuable insights that feminist research provides. It also means that students lack the training that is needed to understand the political, cultural, racial and economic inequalities and violence associated with gender discrimination.
MARGINS CAN BE EMPOWERING The post-Second World War IR discipline was greatly influenced by the policy interests of the United States. Since many scholars were trained using US texts, this worldview pervaded IR well beyond the US. The post-war US also proved a favourable environment for the receptivity of the scientific tradition that placed IR (particularly in the US) firmly within the discipline of political science. More recently, even non-US scholars see a continuation of US hegemony, a discipline that, in the words of British scholar Steve Smith, ‘runs the risk … [of becoming] far removed from the agendas and concerns of other parts of the world’ (Smith, 2002: 68).1 While it is always the case that a disproportionate amount of knowledge is produced in privileged resource-rich environments, I do believe that feminism, which is less bound by the scientific and disciplinary constraints of US social science, has been more international and more methodologically pluralistic. It has also successfully pushed beyond the boundaries of IR. Born out of social movement and protest, feminism more generally has been less constrained than the social sciences in serving the interests of the state. IR feminist research is now being produced well beyond the original centres mentioned earlier. Evidence for this can be found in the pages of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP). Founded in 1999 under the editorship of Jan Jindy Pettman of the Australian National
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Still engaging from the margins? 7 University, with subsequent editors from the UK and Canada, whose editorial teams included scholars from different regions and continents, the IFJP is currently edited by scholars from the UK, the US and South Africa, assisted by a team from six continents. During the first half of 2014, the IFJP published articles by authors in the UK, US, Ghana and South Africa; forthcoming articles include authors in India, Canada, Finland, Turkey, Cyprus, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia and Germany.2 Reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the IFJP in 2009, founding editor Jan Jindy Pettman stated that the journal’s goal was to be strongly multidisciplinary. The editorial board has included international lawyers, geographers and anthropologists, as well as those from more conventional IR backgrounds (Pettman, 2009). Over the past 20 years, IR feminists have provided rich empirical case studies shedding light on those at the margins whose lives are deeply affected by global politics and economics. Feminists have demonstrated how the lives of sex workers, domestic servants, home-based workers and those who work at unremunerated caring and reproductive labour are intertwined with global politics and the global economy. They have investigated the gendered discourses through which war is legitimated, as well as the lives of those who suffer the violent consequences of conflict – both soldiers and civilians. Feminists are also paying attention to issues of race and empire. Most recently feminists have begun to introduce queer theory into IR. Feminists are defining the discipline broadly on their own terms and, in so doing, are leaving space for critical engagement with activists and those seeking social change. Many of these issues have been investigated using methodologies not normally employed by IR scholars. Although much of feminist IR falls within critical, constructivist or post-structural methodologies, feminists have paid particular attention to being self-consciously reflective about the purposes and ethical implications of their research. Asking questions that have never been asked before, IR feminists are committed to constructing knowledge from multiple locations and to the importance of studying silences and absences. The issue of creating knowledge from the margins has generated a lively debate in feminist IR. In the introduction to their edited volume Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific, Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo claim that, while critical feminist IR scholars find themselves located on the margins of the discipline, the margins of IR offer a provocative and productive location. They describe ‘borderlands’ that provide a fresh perspective and critical distance from which feminists are investigating new methodologies and issues not considered within the confines of the discipline (D’Costa and Lee-Koo, 2009: 11). Likewise,
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Lily Ling sees marginality as holding exciting possibilities for positive change.3 As early as 1988, Sarah Brown warned that feminist IR might lose some of its critical edge if it was to try to fit into the discipline (Brown, 1988). And in 2007 Marysia Zalewski suggested that holding feminism to the demands of an established discipline would invite critical atrophy (2007: 303).
MARGINS CAN BE LIMITING I have offered some thoughts on how working at the margins has contributed to the creation of a truly international interdisciplinary field using uniquely feminist methodologies. Nevertheless, if, as many believe, feminist IR is still working at the margins, marginalization comes with costs as well as opportunities, particularly in terms of recognition by the rest of the field. In a 2003 article entitled ‘Engaging from the Margins: Feminist Encounters with the “Mainstream” of International Relations’, Jill Steans claimed that IR scholars have engaged selectively with feminists, ignoring those who work with unsettled notions of gender while engaging with those who work within a positivist approach, especially those using quantitative methods. The debate over whether feminists should use quantitative methods has been a lively one; given the link between feminist activism and feminist scholarship, efforts to compile better data that can help us understand the complexity of women’s lives should be welcomed. But using data and defining gender as a variable amenable to causal analysis are different issues.4 What is problematic, particularly in the United States, is that the social scientific approach is the only approach that gets published in mainstream journals. But it is not only the mainstream with which feminists have had difficulties of engagement and recognition. In an article published in 2006, Georgina Waylen castigated critical international political economy (IPE) for barely mentioning gender despite feminist attempts to engage in conversation. As Waylen claims, this is all the more surprising given that critical IPE and feminism have much in common – understanding and changing global structures of domination and using a social constructivist framework. Hilary Charlesworth finds the same problem in international law, where she claims feminism ‘is an optional extra, a decorative frill on the edge of the discipline’ (2011: 17). Feminist economists encounter even greater barriers. Julie Nelson reports that topics such as labour market discrimination, household production and caring work are marginalized by both mainstream and heterodox economic approaches; those
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Still engaging from the margins? 9 who express interest in researching such topics are treated as lightweight, only interested in ‘women’s issues’ rather than ‘real’ economics (2006: 1060). Since very few recent systematic studies of the issue of marginality have been conducted (Foster et al., 2013: 571), I have solicited some personal impressions from feminist IR scholars located in different geographical regions as to whether they have seen progress over the last few years. Two of the places where feminist IR was first established, the UK and Australia, appear to have made the most progress, along with Canada, where critical approaches more generally are thriving. Jill Steans sees a great deal of progress in the UK since she wrote her 2003 article. Courses on gender at the undergraduate and graduate level are established at many universities, and there is a definite resurgence of interest on the part of students. Georgina Waylen sees more citation of feminist work by younger IPE scholars than when she wrote her 2006 article but not much inclusion of feminist work in their research. However, in spite of these more optimistic impressions from British feminist scholars, the only systematic study of the extent of gender courses in the UK reveals that of the 629 modules reviewed across the 16 top-ranked university departments of political science and international relations, there were only 12 sustained gender modules, of which only nine were being taught in 2012 (Foster et al., 2013).5 In Canada, Sandra Whitworth sees openness to feminist approaches as well as to critical theory more generally in most institutions. She attributes this to a strong historical tradition of Marxism and socialism which results in greater acceptance of all types of critical theory. The level of optimism appears to be highest in Australia, where there is a thriving feminist community of IR scholars. Jacqui True reports that there is now a tenured feminist IR scholar at every major university in Australia, and feminist IR scholars hold many Australian Research Council fellowships. And Laura Shepherd reports that IR feminist scholars were able to drive the agenda at the civil society dialogue with the Department of Foreign Affairs during Australia’s term on the UN Security Council in 2014. In both the UK and Australia, some institutions have more than one scholar engaged in feminist research, something that is rarely true in the United States. These successes may be because there is less of a commitment to positivism in these regions. In the United States, positivism increasingly is inhibiting critical scholarship of any kind from being recognized, and there is much less openness to feminist scholarship at the major institutions.6 And it is probably fair to say that feminist IR is still relatively rare in many other parts of the world. Soumita Basu reports
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that in India there is a vibrant women’s movement but academic work on gender is centred in disciplines, such as sociology, politics, history and literature, rather than IR. Elisabeth Prügl reports that she and one junior scholar are the only IR feminist scholars in Switzerland. Gülay Caglar claims that, in Germany, there are few textbooks in IR that integrate feminist theorizing, and the analytical and explanatory power of feminist theorizing is barely acknowledged. The same appears to be true in France.
CONCLUSION It has been 25 years since feminism was introduced into the discipline, yet steps towards its wider recognition have been painfully slow, albeit with signs of progress in certain countries. Many feminist scholars report feeling isolated and even being encouraged to seek other more ‘fruitful’ lines of research. Meghana Nayak, a feminist scholar working in the US, praised the IFJP for providing a sense of community for feminist scholars that they often lack within academic departments (2009). Yet, in spite of its prestige as the leading journal of feminist international politics, the IFJP does not carry the weight of a mainstream journal when it comes to tenure and promotion, at least in the US. Frequently scholars who teach gender courses are in junior or adjunct positions that do not come with possibilities for tenure and promotion, all serious consequences for academic careers. Consequently many feminist scholars are moving beyond attempting to engage in a discipline that still regards their work as marginal; some have left IR for more hospitable homes in women’s studies or other disciplines, demonstrating that there are many fruitful ways to engage in the gendered politics of the international. But, wherever we choose to locate ourselves, we must remain aware of feminists’ longstanding claim that all knowledge is situated in unequal structures of power. Since women’s voices, as well as the voices of those on the margins more generally, have often been silenced or thought to have little worthwhile to say, whose knowledge gets validated and legitimated is a critical issue. Feminists have made a unique contribution in drawing our attention to these unequal power structures, gendered, racial and otherwise, which not only affect whose knowledge gets validated and legitimated, but also how these power structures and our willingness to confront them affect people’s everyday lives. We see all over the world that policymakers and those who work in non-governmental institutions are beginning to recognize the importance
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Still engaging from the margins? 11 of taking gender into consideration. Yet in many places the academy is frustratingly slow in training students to be better equipped to deal with these issues. It is remarkable how much intellectually exciting and politically relevant work the feminist community has produced over the last three decades. Sadly we cannot claim that this important work has changed IR’s great debates. It is high time for it to receive the recognition it deserves.
NOTES 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
I acknowledge that there are rich IR traditions outside the US dating back well before the Second World War. The English School would be one. Nevertheless it was the case that the US agendas came to dominate after that war, a fact noted and criticized by many non-US scholars. Over the last three years the IFJP has published authors from 24 countries, of which Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Palestine, Slovenia, India and South Korea can be considered underrepresented in mainstream academia. Thanks to Laura Sjoberg for supplying this information. Lily Ling provided this observation via personal communication. I am grateful also to Soumita Basu, Gülay Caglar, Emma Foster, V. Spike Peterson, Elisabeth Prügl, Laura Shepherd, Laura Sjoberg, Jill Steans, Jacqui True, Georgina Waylen, Sandra Whitworth and Lauren Wilcox for providing their impressions about the recognition, or lack thereof, of feminist IR in their host countries and institutions. The issue of data and the methods by which they are analysed is a complex one. For a useful discussion of the pros and cons of positivist social scientific methods for feminist IR, see various articles in Politics and Gender (2009), 5 (2). This informative study concludes that teaching gender in the UK is sidelined rather than mainstreamed and suggests that there are institutional constraints on those willing and able to offer gender courses. In courses where gender was offered for one week it was usually placed at the end of the syllabus when student attendance runs low. A study by Thomas Biersteker (2009) of the ten top graduate programmes in the United States finds that, in the core IR theory course for post-graduate students at these universities, constructivist scholarship ranged from 7 to 14 per cent of works assigned. Only two used any feminist work and then only one feminist author (Tickner); more radical perspectives hardly made it at all.
REFERENCES Biersteker, Thomas J. (2009) ‘The parochialism of hegemony: challenges for “American” international relations’, in Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds), International Relations Scholarship around the World, New York: Routledge, pp. 308–327. Brown, Sarah (1988) ‘Feminism, international theory and international relations of gender inequality’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17 (3), 461–475.
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Charlesworth, Hilary (2011) ‘Talking to ourselves: should international lawyers take a break from feminism?’, in Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson (eds), Feminist Perspectives on International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance, Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 17–32. Charlesworth, Hilary, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright (1991) ‘Feminist approaches to international law’, American Journal of International Law, 85 (4), 613–645. D’Costa, Bina and Katrina Lee-Koo (2009) Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, Emma, Peter Kerr, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Byrne and Linda Ahall (2013) ‘The personal is not political: at least in the UK’s top politics and international relations departments’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 15 (4), 566–585. Keohane, Robert O. (1989) ‘International relations theory: contributions of a feminist standpoint’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 18 (2), 245–253. Maliniak, Daniel, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson and Michael J. Tierney (2008) ‘Women in international relations’, Politics and Gender, 4 (1), 122–144. Nayak, Meghana V. (2009) ‘The influence of International Feminist Journal of Politics: possibilities of mentorship and community for junior feminist faculty’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (1), 21–29. Nelson, Julie (2006) ‘Can we talk? Feminist economists in dialogue with social theorists’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31 (4), 1051–1074. Peterson, V. Spike (ed.) (1992) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Pettman, Jan Jindy (1993) ‘Gendering international relations’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 47, 47–60. Pettman, Jan Jindy (2009) ‘IFJP tenth anniversary reflections: in the beginning …’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (1), 2–9. Smith, Steve (2002) ‘The United States and the discipline of international relations: “hegemonic country, hegemonic discipline”’, International Studies Review, 4 (2), 67–85. Steans, Jill (2003) ‘Engaging from the margins: feminist encounters with the “mainstream” of international relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5 (3), 428–454. Waylen, Georgina (2006) ‘You still don’t understand: why troubled engagements continue between feminists and (critical) IPE’, Review of International Studies, 32 (1), 145–164. Zalewski, Marysia (2007) ‘Do we understand each other yet? Troubling feminist encounters with(in) international relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9 (2), 300–312.
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PART I EXAMPLES OF APPROACHES AND METHODS
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3. Gender as a variable in international relations research Andrea den Boer
A significant proportion of research in the social sciences is concerned with measuring and explaining social, economic, and political phenomena. In order to derive these explanations, scholars must devise categories of analysis, or variables that enable them to examine relationships and interactions between the variables. Variables commonly studied in international relations (IR) include: actors such as states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations (IOs), and other institutions; actions such as the use of force, sanctions, giving aid, protection of human rights, or other global norms; and additional variables that further define actors and actions such as level of economic development, type of regime, intensity and duration of the action, and so on. Gender is increasingly used as a variable in international relations research to develop explanations of the extent to which actions and actors are affected by, or have an effect on, gender, generally defined as male and female.
WHY A ‘GENDER AS A VARIABLE’ APPROACH IS USEFUL In contrast to researchers committed to a positivist epistemology, who assert that only scientific methods are appropriate to gain knowledge and truths about the social and political world, most feminist scholars adopting a ‘gender as a variable’ approach in their research view statistical and comparative methods as one sub-set of the useful tools that researchers can use to explain and understand the way in which international relations is gendered. Collecting information disaggregated by gender enables researchers to understand the scale of a problem even prior to conducting further analytical tests: collecting information on indicators that reveal the prevalence of gendered issues such as maternal mortality or domestic violence, for example, is the first step to urging states to action on these issues. The additional information provided through statistical analyses that compare the situation of men and women 15
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across states, particularly when coupled with explanations and interpretations obtained through additional methods, can be used to build theories and devise strategies to empower women. A ‘gender as a variable’ approach can be particularly useful in highlighting patterns of gendered connections between complex political, economic, and social phenomena. As we interrogate the practices of international relations, some questions are difficult to answer without constructing categories of analysis that simplify the subjects under study. Gender as a category of analysis can be used in qualitative case studies that focus on single cases or compare a small number of cases. Conducting cross-national comparisons and using quantitative methods to test hypotheses for large numbers of cases require creating variables that can be measured or scaled. This type of comparative research enables us to identify patterns and interactions regarding the way in which men and women are affected in different ways by international practice or affect international practice. For example, scholars studying war may want to know the extent to which men and women are both the perpetrators and the victims of sexual violence in conflict. They can approach this question by examining the prevalence of sexual violence (disaggregated by gender) in conflicts and in different geographic locations over time to identify common factors that can help explain when this type of violence occurs as well as the factors that might mitigate its use. Women’s rights scholars interested in examining the extent to which the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is effective on a global scale, or which states are more likely to protect specific rights of women, may attempt to answer this question through a quantitative approach that requires viewing gender as a variable. This approach requires that women’s rights be defined in measurable ways, for example so that rights to education are indicated through measures for women’s literacy and rates of primary and secondary education and political rights are represented through female representation in government. Further variables such as regime type, religion, level of economic development, the presence of women’s rights NGOs in the state, or other state characteristics are added to help explain variation in the level of women’s rights protection across states. These sorts of quantitative studies, when combined with qualitative explanations and other methods of interpretation, can be of great use to scholars, policy makers, and activists who seek new strategies for protecting women’s rights and empowering women. It is important to note that much of the gendered variable research conducted within IR utilizes variables that measure aspects of women’s lives rather than a truly gendered approach. This is due in part to a lack
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Gender as a variable in IR research 17 of data disaggregated by gender; there is very little numerical data on gay or bisexual men and women, for example. But it is also due to the reality that women and girls are disproportionately affected by the gendered social, political, and economic inequalities present in the world, and more research incorporating information on women is needed to correct the gender biases found in past studies. As Jacqui True notes, using a ‘violence against women’ approach to understanding violence directed against women and girls rather than ‘gender-based violence’ allows us to acknowledge that women are affected disproportionately by many forms of violence and renders these injustices visible (2012: 9–10).
CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS As the above example of women’s rights research demonstrates, gender variables can never fully capture the complexity of the social world. Women’s rights to education are much more complicated than can be represented through nationally collected statistics for enrolment or literacy. Thus, they can only represent a narrow snapshot of women’s experience. The clarity or graininess of the snapshot depends in part on the validity and reliability of the measures used to create the variables. Data collection can vary greatly from state to state, particularly for culturally sensitive issues, making it difficult to interpret reported figures. Statistics recording incidences of violence against women are a case in point. Violence against women is a key issue of concern to feminist scholars, who may utilize quantitative methods to identify the risk factors that make women more vulnerable to domestic or other forms of violence. Nationally collected data on domestic violence are not always comparable across states, as violence may be defined in different ways. For example, in some states raping one’s spouse may not be considered a form of domestic violence. There may be cultural barriers to collecting reliable information. In some states, women who report domestic violence to the police may be ignored or may be subjected to further violence. Or there may be lack of will or motivation by the state to collect the data. Surveys and interview data collected across different countries have yielded fruitful information regarding the prevalence of domestic violence in individual states, but this data has also made researchers increasingly aware of the difficulties of comparing this sort of information across states. Reported data must also be interpreted to give it meaning. Low rates of reported violence against women may be an indication of low levels of violence, but they can also reflect the presence of cultural stigmas against reporting violence, or a lack of confidence in
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the legal system (if reporting does not lead to sufficient action by the legal authorities, for example). Similarly, an increase in the data concerning domestic violence could be due to an increase in violence, or it could also be due to an increase in the reporting of violence (this frequently occurs in states once legislation is introduced or enforced more effectively). The lack of good-quality data on women has made it difficult to answer some questions regarding the relationship between gender and international practices. International organizations have been calling for improved collection of gender-disaggregated statistics since the late 1980s (reiterated strongly through the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995).1 The United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and other international organizations offer databases with variables segregated by sex for indicators of education, employment, health, public decision making, and demographics, and their emphasis has expanded in recent years to move beyond basic indicators like percentage of women in legislatures or percentage of women in the labour force to include indicators such as whether married and unmarried women can apply for a passport in the same way as a man, and whether there are laws to prevent the unlawful dismissal of pregnant women.2 Unfortunately, the yes/no nature of the variables in this database does not provide opportunities to examine the source information for these variables or contextualize the information. A further data problem concerns the fact that aggregate measurements for women as a single category may hide differences among women themselves resulting from sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, or geographic location (rural versus urban, for example), and does not allow the researcher to account for the way in which identities are historically and contextually specific and change over time. The most comprehensive database on the situation of women worldwide, WomanStats, attempts to disaggregate data on women wherever possible. A multi-disciplinary database, WomanStats provides statistical and textual information on the status and security of women on more than 360 variables in 175 countries, offering information on laws and practices, and statistics for issues ranging from women’s physical, legal, and economic security to women and the media.3 WomanStats collates information from published sources, but the Co-PI team also conduct interviews to supplement the extant literature and then use this information to create unique scales that can be used to compare women’s status cross-nationally. WomanStats is unique as a source of information for scholars interested in studying women, because the variables have been constructed to examine any given issue from a variety of facets.
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Gender as a variable in IR research 19 Violence against women, for example, encompasses over 50 different variables, ranging from laws in theory and in practice regarding rape and domestic violence (addressing issues such as prevalence, convictions, and cultural attitudes) to trafficking, suicide, and murder. Information is disaggregated by geographic location (urban, rural, or according to specific locales within the state) and by other factors such as age, ethnicity, and religion. This database has made it possible to explore linkages between the situation of women and state security through both qualitative and quantitative methods.
RESEARCH Feminist research utilizing gender as a variable has expanded in the past decade as databases have expanded in year coverage as well as in the variety of gendered variables available to researchers. The lack of available data in the past meant that researchers resorted to utilizing simple variables to reflect complex phenomena, with detrimental results, relying on female literacy rates, official statistics for female employment, female share of parliamentary seats, and female life expectancy to represent the status of women in states. Early studies incorporating gendered variables to test hypotheses concerning the effect of human rights treaties on the rights of women, for example, attempted to capture women’s rights using a small number of gendered variables that failed to reflect the complex reality of the rights of women (Hathaway, 2002).4 More recently scholars have been able to show that states that become party to the UN women’s rights convention (CEDAW) demonstrate improvement in the protection of some women’s rights over time. In her examination of CEDAW’s effectiveness, Beth Simmons, for example, finds that membership in CEDAW is associated with improvements in female literacy in all member states, access to family planning (with greater effects in states without a state religion), and employment for women (in countries with strong legal systems) (Simmons, 2009). Simmons’s research is further supported by qualitative country case studies, which provide closer examination of the mechanisms involved in implementing the women’s rights convention within the state, demonstrating the benefits of combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Feminist scholars utilizing quantitative methods have strengthened the field of security studies. Mary Caprioli’s 2003 study of the link between gender hierarchies and inequalities within the state and its behaviour in international conflicts demonstrated that states with higher levels of gender inequality are more aggressive during interstate crises (Caprioli,
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2003). Caprioli’s findings are a useful first step towards examining the relationship between gender equality and state behaviour, although we must also acknowledge that gender equality is difficult to capture using such measurements. In this case, the variable was composed of only two indicators: percentage of women in paid labour, and the average fertility rate. While these two indicators can provide a sense of the level of gender equality in a state, more complex indicators are needed to depict gender equality. By collecting information on women for numerous variables and then creating scales to reflect women’s physical security, the principal investigators of the WomanStats project, led by Valerie Hudson, have conducted studies that build on Caprioli’s initial research, demonstrating that the status of women (including the degree to which they are free from violence) has an effect on the security and stability of the state. According to this research, the level of violence against women in society is a better predictor of state peacefulness, both internally and internationally, than level of democracy, level of wealth, or religion (see, for example, Hudson et al., 2008–09, 2011). Research incorporating gender variables has also shown that the status of women is crucial to post-conflict peace-building processes. Ismene Gizelis, for example, examined the effect of women’s status on the success of peacekeeping operations in 124 civil wars since the Second World War. Through her empirical analysis, she was able to demonstrate that UN peacekeeping operations are significantly more effective in areas of greater female empowerment. Gizelis explains that the ‘status of women within a society is an indicator of social capital and domestic capacity, largely separate from general economic development or political institutions, which can be used by peacekeeping operations to increase the likelihood of a successful mission’ (2009: 521). Utilizing gender as a variable in research has contributed to the growing body of knowledge from ethnographic and other forms of research concerning the relationship between gender and development. Quantitative studies in this field have demonstrated that gender inequality, particularly in areas of education and employment, not only deprives women of their basic rights and makes women more susceptible to various forms of gender-based violence, but also has a negative effect on fertility, mortality (particularly child mortality), and state economic growth and development (Klasen, 2002; Klasen and Lamanna, 2009). IR feminist scholars can also utilize the gendered analyses conducted by other social scientists to construct theories and build explanations of political phenomena. Jacqui True, for example, has drawn on a number of quantitative studies investigating the correlations between domestic violence and gender equity in order to construct an argument concerning the
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Gender as a variable in IR research 21 relationship between women’s susceptibility to domestic violence, poverty, and the global political economy (True, 2012).
CONCLUSIONS Not all research utilizing gender variables is necessarily feminist, but nor does the use of quantitative methods mean that research is not feminist if accompanied by a normative commitment to confronting gendered relations of power and the marginalization and/or subjugation of women. Research that examines the effect of international relations practices on men and women can go beyond an ‘add women and stir’ approach, as it explores the way in which mainstream/masculinist understandings of practices in the study of international relations and world politics broadly conceived are in fact gendered, and thereby open up space for critique of those practices. Feminist scholars utilizing gendered variables should utilize data in a reflective and critical manner, acknowledging where the statistics may be an inadequate representation of women’s lives. As Ann Tickner notes: While not rejecting in principle the use of quantitative data, feminists have recognized how past behavioural realities have been publicly constituted in state-generated indicators in biased, gendered ways, using data that do not adequately reflect the reality of women’s lives and the unequal structures of power within which they are situated. (2006: 19)
Despite the limitations of data and methods involved in capturing gender within specific variables, as the above body of research has demonstrated, feminist quantitative research has made significant contributions to the discipline of international relations and the study of world politics. As Mary Caprioli argues, ‘Feminist theory is rife with testable hypotheses that can only strengthen feminist IR scholarship by identifying false leads and logical errors or by identifying general tendencies that deserve further inquiry’ (2004: 257). Feminist international relations is enriched through the work of scholars like Caprioli, Hudson, and others who have sought to improve data collection and forged links with ‘mainstream’ methods and questioning to demonstrate the relevance of thinking about gender to a broad IR audience. There is no single feminist method. When discussing the opportunities afforded to feminist praxis and theorizing resulting from a merger with postmodernism more than 25 years ago, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson commented that there are multiple feminisms and multiple ways to approach feminist issues. Fraser and Nicholson further asserted that feminism should ‘tailor its methods and
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categories to the specific task at hand, using multiple categories when appropriate and forswearing the metaphysical comfort of a single “feminist method” or “feminist epistemology”’ (1989: 101–102). Feminist international relations, which often utilizes interpretivist and postpositivist methodological frameworks, can also benefit from empirical work that draws on ‘gender as a variable’ approaches. These too help to challenge the masculinist assumptions of our discipline and demonstrate linkages between gendered issues and international practices.
NOTES 1.
In 1989, for example, the United Nations Committee that oversees the women’s rights convention (CEDAW) asked all state parties to collect and report gender-disaggregated statistics. See CEDAW (1990), General Recommendation 9, ‘Statistical data concerning the situation of women’ (Eighth session, 1989), UN Doc. A/44/38. Paragraph 206 of the Beijing Platform for Action outlined the steps that governments were required to collect and analyse in order to improve research and policies pertaining to women. See Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development, and Peace, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, UN Doc. A/CONF. 177/20 (1995). The United Nations evaluated government action in this regard in United Nations Statistical Division (2006). See, for example, World Bank Gender Equality Data and Statistics: Thematic Data, at http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/thematic-data. See the WomanStats Project and Database, www.womanstats.org. For example, Oona Hathaway’s (2002) study of the effectiveness of UN treaties on women’s rights in which women’s political rights were captured using a single variable that measured the percentage of men in the legislature.
2. 3. 4.
REFERENCES Caprioli, Mary (2003) ‘Gender equality and state aggression: the impact of domestic gender equality on state first use of force’, International Interactions, 29 (3), 195–214. Caprioli, Mary (2004) ‘Feminist IR theory and quantitative methodology: a critical analysis’, International Studies Review, 6 (2), 253–269. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson (1989) ‘Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism’, Social Text, 21, 101–102. Gizelis, Theodora-Ismene (2009) ‘Gender empowerment and United Nations peacebuilding’, Journal of Peace Research, 46 (4), 505–523. Hathaway, Oona (2002) ‘Do human rights treaties make a difference?’, Yale Law Journal, 111, 1935–2042. Hudson, Valerie M., Mary Caprioli and Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill (2008–09) ‘The heart of the matter: the security of women and the security of states’, International Security, 33 (3), 7–45. Hudson, Valerie M., Donna Lee Bowen and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen (2011) ‘What is the relationship between inequity in family law and violence against women? Approaching the issue of legal enclaves’, Politics and Gender, 7 (4), 453–492.
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Gender as a variable in IR research 23 Klasen, Stephan (2002) ‘Low schooling for girls, slower growth for all? Cross{country evidence on the effect of gender inequality in education on economic development’, World Bank Economic Review, 16 (3), 345–373. Klasen, Stephan and Francesca Lamanna (2009) ‘The impact of gender inequality in education and employment on economic growth: new evidence for a panel of countries’, Feminist Economics, 15 (3), 91–132. Simmons, Beth A. (2009) Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law and Domestic Enforcement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (2006) ‘Feminism meets international relations: some methodological issues’, in Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds), Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 9–41. True, Jacqui (2012) The Political Economy of Violence against Women, Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations Statistical Division (2006), The World’s Women 2005: Progress in Statistics, New York: United Nations.
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4. Feminist historical materialist and critical theory Adrienne Roberts
For feminists engaged in historical materialist and/or critical analyses of global politics, it is essential to understand the ways in which gender operates as a relation of social power in different times and places. The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the theoretical terrain that underpins this view of gender as a social relation. Key to this literature is an emphasis on the necessity of analysing social, political and economic relations as a complex whole, or totality, rather than as separate parts. This emphasis on the social totality draws much inspiration from work in other areas of international relations (IR) and global political economy (GPE), particularly that within Marxist and (neo-)Gramscian traditions. Yet, in so far as the notion of the complex whole has been quite well established in much recent critical literature, outside of a relatively small (but growing) body of feminist literature, gender relations remain stubbornly on the ‘outside’ of this totality (Whitworth, 2006: 91). The dearth of critical analysis of gender relations is even more apparent in the mainstream literature, which tends to maintain the much longer-standing prioritisation of relations between states (IR) and/or between states and markets (GPE), with little room for considering gender – though ‘women’ do sometimes appear.
UNDERSTANDING FEMINIST HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND CRITICAL THEORY As Jill Steans (1999) explains, while there are differences between feminist historical materialist and feminist critical theory traditions, in broad terms, both approaches are informed by a Marxist analysis of social relations, hegemonic structures and power. They are characterised, she notes, by a ‘reflexive and historical approach to the analysis of gender relations which is primarily concerned with the structures and social practices which support and perpetuate gender relations’ (1999: 115). While the latter may be somewhat more attuned to stressing the importance of the political subject and the possibilities for collective 24
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Feminist historical materialist and critical theory 25 action and resistance (1999: 118), both traditions are ultimately dedicated to developing historically informed analyses of the social structures that constitute and condition gender and compose the framework within which individual and collective actions take place. The notion of ‘historical structures’, which originated in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and was later reformulated by Robert Cox and others, is one entry point for thinking about the social totality. Cox followed Gramsci in his critique of those forms of Marxism that fall prey to ‘historical economism’, by which he meant the reduction of everything to technological and material interests. Historical economism can also be described as a crude form of the base–superstructure model whereby the social relations of production that form the economic ‘base’ are presumed to determine the ‘superstructure’, which includes politics, religion, the law, and presumably gender relations. In contrast, Cox developed a theory and method for analysing global politics that took into account the ideas, institutions and material capabilities that combined to form particular historical structures (Cox, 1993). He then applied these three sets of social forces at three levels, or spheres of activity: production, forms of state and world orders. The theoretical vantage point of historical structures is useful for feminist thinking, as it creates the space for a ‘non-structuralist historicism’ that centralises the importance of historically analysing a range of social practices while simultaneously conceptualising historical change as the result of collective human activity (Gill, 2008: 17). Applying a feminist lens to Gramsci and Cox, Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill point out that, since historical structures ultimately refer to ‘patterned or institutionalized forms of human agency’, this necessarily includes historically specific relations of social reproduction and gender orders, both of which shift over time. Focusing on the global level of analysis, they write: ‘all world orders involve specific gender divisions of labor and structures of power that shape symbolic and material representations of gender relations, that is, gender orders coexist with, serve to shape and are shaped by world orders’ (Bakker and Gill, 2003: 33). Gender orders also have important racialised and class dimensions. As Nicola Short (2013) explains in her reading of Gramsci, within a specific ensemble of social relations (or what Gramsci called a ‘historical bloc’) there are different subjective (i.e. gendered and racialised) positions. These subjective positions are then reflected in the ethico-political sphere (the superstructure), and through dominant ideologies of ‘common sense’, which ‘justify and naturalize hierarchical social divisions’ (2013: 201). Ultimately, she argues, this provides a theoretical framework from which we can see how power might operate differently across an
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ensemble of social relations, with different logics of coercion versus consent operating across different social groups within a social whole (2013: 201). This line of thinking about the complex social whole marks a sharp departure from positivist and empiricist approaches to global politics that are based on the assumption that there are universal laws or regularities that can be uncovered through proper investigation. Cox describes the latter as problem-solving theory – theory that ‘takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action’ (Cox, 1981: 128). The general aim of problem-solving theory is to facilitate the smooth functioning of these relationships and institutions by locating and addressing particular sources of trouble, without calling these relationships and institutions themselves into question. In contrast, the approach to critical theory that has been articulated by Cox and which informs much critical feminist theory – by which I mean both feminist historical materialist and feminist critical theory – ‘is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about’ (1981: 128). Despite the spaces that have been created by these and other commitments to conceptualising the social whole, gender remains underexplored, or ignored altogether, in much mainstream and critical (non-feminist) analysis.
THE DEVALUATION OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION The first reason for the marginalisation of gender from much mainstream and critical analysis within IR and GPE was identified by socialist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. The economy, they argued, is constituted not simply by those social relations that are involved in the production and exchange of commodities, but also by those social relations involved in meeting human needs on a daily and generational basis. Feminists use the term ‘social reproduction’ to refer to this latter set of social relations, which exist in a dialectical relationship with those of production. As Isabella Bakker (2003) explains, this term is generally used to refer to work associated with: (a) biological reproduction (including social constructions of motherhood); (b) the reproduction, socialisation and education of the labour force; and (c) the reproduction and provisioning of care. The organisation of social reproduction varies across time and space and is partly shaped by women’s and feminist movements and other forms of social struggle. It may be partially
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Feminist historical materialist and critical theory 27 subsidised by the state and capital or it may be done primarily within families and/or through the private sector, and it is most often done by women. Despite the fact that economies and polities would not exist without the social reproduction of the population, much of this work is naturalised, feminised, unpaid and thereby devalued. From a historical perspective, this devaluation has its roots in the separation of social reproduction from production that occurred with the development of capitalism. That is, under feudalism, social reproduction and production were interconnected processes that tended to be organised around the land as the basis of subsistence and the family as the labouring unit. With the development of capitalism, however, men (and some women) were compelled to engage in work that was located outside of the home, such as on capitalist farms or in factories. In this process, ‘production’ came to be associated with work performed outside of the home in exchange for wages, while the work of social reproduction remained in the household and came to be associated with women. This had important implications for the social positioning of women, whose work was devalued both materially (i.e. unpaid or low paid) and ideologically (i.e. considered to be valueless from an economic point of view) (Picchio, 1992). The separation of production and social reproduction is artificial in the same way that the separation between the economic and political spheres is artificial. However, whereas international political economy (IPE) approaches have sought to critique the artificial separation of the political and the economic (i.e. states and markets), the same cannot be said for the production/social reproduction relation. Outside of feminist work, there have been few attempts to connect the social relations of production and exchange to the daily activities involved in reproducing people and communities, and/or to document the extent to which these practices are constituted by historically specific gender orders. The Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (Blyth, 2009), for instance, does not contain a single chapter on gender or feminism. While social reproduction does not appear to be a topic of interest, there is a chapter by John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke on their influential ‘everyday IPE’ approach. While this approach usefully defends the need to look beyond states and markets and other ‘big and important things’ to consider everyday actors engaged in everyday practices, it largely overlooks decades of feminist work that has emphasised the ways in which the invisibilisation of these practices reproduces gendered power relations. This ultimately leads everyday IPE to focus on how the ‘weak’ affect and respond to elites and global processes, which
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is rather limited as compared with feminist attempts to link the ‘everyday’ to historical structures (including gender power relations) and to place this within historically specific means of organising the social relations of production and reproduction.1 Let me briefly substantiate the latter point with an example from Gramsci. In his writing on ‘Americanism and Fordism’, Gramsci noted that Fordism was both a form of production based on industrialised factory work and mass consumption and a social system under which industrialists promoted the family as a means of preventing vice. He argued that ‘the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized’ (Gramsci, 2000: 282). Gramsci identified, in other words, the link between what feminists would later call the ‘male breadwinner gender order’ and the desire to produce ‘stable’ nuclear households in the interest of labour discipline under industrial capitalism.
MASCULINISM The occlusion of gender from IPE is further perpetuated by a series of assumptions associated with what Spike Peterson calls ‘masculinism’ (Peterson, 2005). Masculinism, she argues, is rooted in modernist and positivist dedications to ‘rational economic man’ (or homo oeconomicus), whose self-interested, calculating and competitive behaviour is supposed to act as a model for all human decision-making. In this ‘separative-self model’, non-maximising behaviour and motivations (i.e. love, nurture, altruism, etc.) are either ignored completely or devalued (and feminised) as emotional behaviour (England, 1993). In contrast, those masculinised behaviours associated with rational economic man, such as reason, agency and autonomy, are venerated. Masculinism, then, refers to the ways in which gender, as a meaning system, privileges those traits associated with masculinity while those associated with femininity are devalued in the sense of being ‘deemed “economically” irrelevant, characterised as subjective, “natural” and “unskilled”, and typically unpaid’ (Peterson, 2005: 501). To reframe this through the lens of critical feminist theory, it refers to the privileging of masculinity within historically specific gender orders, which are shaped by and help to shape world orders. As Sandra Whitworth has pointed out, changes within the discipline of IPE toward recognising the ‘less powerful’ actors within global politics has made the continued invisibility of women unsustainable (Whitworth,
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Feminist historical materialist and critical theory 29 2006: 92). Yet, outside of critical feminist interventions, this has generally meant adding women and their experiences into pre-existing problem-solving theories, which often takes the form of adding women as a variable. This ultimately fails to interrogate the mutually constitutive nature of women’s and men’s identities, as well as dichotomies of masculinity/femininity that stem from the unequal and hierarchical social relations of gender (Peterson, 2005: 501–502). The limitations of this method can be observed in some of the approaches to gender mainstreaming adopted by national and international institutions (see also Chapters 47, 53 and 54 in this volume). A crucial concern for critical feminist research, then, involves investigating the conditions under which feminist strategising can be (and has been) turned ‘from a mode of resistance into an instrument of power’ (Caglar et al., 2013: 6). An example of this that has become increasingly pervasive in recent years is the appropriation of the language of gender equality by the World Bank and other global governance institutions, in conjunction with a growing number of corporations, which have sought to perpetuate the ‘common sense’ idea of gender equality as smart economics. Rather than using a feminist lens to understand the material and ideological basis of gender inequality, the World Bank ‘uses economic theory to understand what drives differences in key aspects of welfare between men and women’ (World Bank [2012], cited in Roberts, 2015: 213). For the corporations involved, equality between men and women is important because it improves the bottom line; that is, it improves profitability, or what many of them call ‘the gender dividend’ (Roberts, 2015). Ultimately, this line of reasoning instrumentalises women while leaving the global structures of inequality and dominant forms of masculinity unquestioned and firmly intact.
THE ‘STRATEGIC SILENCE’ OF ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE A third and interrelated explanation for the ongoing invisibilisation of gender relations is captured by the notion of the ‘strategic silence’ of policy-making at various sites and scales. Isabella Bakker popularised this term (1995), arguing that a set of dominant assumptions about the gender neutrality of macroeconomic policy-making obscured the fact that global restructuring was occurring on gendered terrain. This early work sought to draw attention to the gendered dimensions of the Washington Consensus model – which included the promotion of foreign direct investment, the liberalisation of trade and finance, the privatisation of
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state enterprises, and the clawback of social services – and to the coercive imposition of these policies through structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the Global South (see also Marchand and Runyan, 2000). More recently, Bakker, along with Brigitte Young and Diane Elson (Young et al., 2011), returned to this theme, focusing specifically on financial governance. Writing in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), they argue that central bank governors, finance ministers, public and private financial institutions, regulators and economists perpetuate a ‘strategic silence’ about gender. This silence is firmly rooted in the ontological assumptions about ‘rational economic man’, as well as assumptions that the ‘high politics’ of financial regulation, along with national and regional fiscal policy-making, are gender-neutral processes best left in the hands of experts. In all of these instances, the silence about gender is ‘strategic’ in the sense that it actively works to obscure the ways in which economic and financial governance ‘interacts with, and reinforces, or restructures, the social organization of gender relations’. At the same time, it masks the ways in which it ‘operates to the disadvantage of women and reinforces gender inequality’ (Young et al., 2011: 1). Indeed, as Gramsci pointed out, consciousness is a social product, and hegemonic ideas, including those that are reproduced in the social sciences, are not objective and neutral, but reflect the views and interests of the ruling classes (Gramsci, 2000, especially sections X and XI). They also clearly reflect gendered power relations.
CONCLUSION As Robert Cox argued, while critical theory can incorporate some aspects of problem-solving theory as it seeks to empirically investigate particular social phenomena, it fundamentally departs from positivist social science in calling into question a variety of institutions and social and power relations. It does so by focusing on their origins and changes over time, and placing them into a broader analysis of historical structures and social totalities. As critical feminists have argued, the social power relations of gender and historically specific gender orders are central to constructing this larger picture of the whole, and thus for understanding the conditions under which social actors can bring about progressive change that challenges the multiple and overlapping basis of disadvantage globally.
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Feminist historical materialist and critical theory 31
NOTE 1.
For critiques of (and feminist alternatives to) this approach, see the special issue of Globalizations on ‘A Feminist Global Political Economy of the Everyday’, edited by Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts (forthcoming).
REFERENCES Bakker, Isabella (2003) ‘Neoliberal governance and the reprivatization of social reproduction’, in Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production, and Social Reproduction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 66–82. Bakker, Isabella (ed.) (1995) The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy, Ottawa: Zed Books. Bakker, Isabella and Stephen Gill (2003) ‘Ontology, method, and hypotheses’, in Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production, and Social Reproduction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–41. Blyth, Mark (2009) Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE): IPE as a Global Conversation, New York: Routledge. Caglar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (2013) ‘Introducing feminist strategies in international governance’, in Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–18. Cox, Robert (1981) ‘Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (2), 126–151. Cox, Robert (1993) ‘Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method’, in Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49–66. England, Paula (1993) ‘The separative self: androcentric bias in neoclassical assumptions’, in Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds), Beyond Economic Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 37–53. Gill, Stephen (2008) Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Gramsci, Antonio (2000) The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, New York: New York University Press. Hobson, John M. and Leonard Seabrooke (2009) ‘Everyday international political economy’, in Mark Blyth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy (IPE): IPE as a Global Conversation, New York: Routledge, pp. 290–306. Marchand, Marianne and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds) (2000) Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, London: Routledge. Peterson, V. Spike (2005) ‘How (the meaning of) gender matters in political economy’, New Political Economy, 10 (4), 499–521. Picchio, Antonella (1992) Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labour Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Adrienne (2015) ‘The political economy of “transnational business feminism”: problematizing the corporate-led gender equality agenda’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17 (2), 209–231. Short, Nicola (2013) ‘Difference and inequality in world affairs’, in Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus (eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 197–216.
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Steans, Jill (1999) ‘The private is global: feminist politics and global political economy’, New Political Economy, 4 (1), 113–128. Whitworth, Sandra (2006) ‘Theory and exclusion: gender, masculinity and international political economy’, in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 88–99. Young, Brigitte, Isabella Bakker and Diane Elson (eds) (2011) Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective, London: Routledge.
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5. Poststructuralist feminism in world politics Maria Stern
It is difficult to engage in the study of gender in world politics without coming across and even adopting some aspects of poststructuralist feminist thought. Most feminist scholars of world politics understand gender to be not only produced through social, political, and economic relations, but also productive of such relations. Studying gender in world politics can entail paying attention to women and girls, and boys and men, as ‘women’ and ‘girls’, and ‘boys’ and ‘men’: to their experiences, identities, actions, and the ways that they are represented, as well as how they resist dominant representations and concrete practices. It can also entail paying attention to the work that gender does in producing what we know of as ‘world politics’ and the subjects of such politics, as well as much more (see Chapter 54, this volume). Poststructural feminist approaches are varied, spanning a whole range of subfields within world politics. Indeed, we should be wary of any attempt (including this one) at defining a field of study: invariably, the resulting picture will contain many gaps, and be constituted by what is excluded as well as what is included. In this chapter, I draw on my own feminist research, as well as that of others, both in explaining poststructuralism more generally and in outlining some poststructuralist feminist (PF) approaches. I thus also aim to show that poststructuralist feminism should not be seen as a separate area of research parsed from poststructuralism, or vice versa; instead, feminist questions about world politics can be asked from a poststructuralist perspective, and poststructuralist-inspired questions can be asked from a feminist perspective. The basic understanding of gender as both produced and productive that a poststructuralist approach (also) entails has come to be a common point of departure for much feminist scholarship. Many of the ideas commonly attributed to poststructuralism have also developed simultaneously (or before) in tenets of feminism. Feminists have challenged that which is taken for granted, told previously silenced stories and histories, paid attention to marginalized knowledges, and critically queried gendered categories and ideologies for decades. 33
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Nonetheless, in the following paragraphs I home in on some of the insights and approaches that can be seen as particularly central to PF. What Do We Mean by ‘Poststructuralism’? Poststructuralism is often loosely applied to a wide body of work that questions dominant understandings about meaning, power, language, knowledge, and subjectivity. To complicate things further, poststructuralism is often used interchangeably with postmodernism, and there are many different ways to define postmodernism. Suffice it to say that postmodernism refers to a body of theory that criticizes many of the accepted assumptions of modern western thought, such as the Enlightenment belief in reason and the rational subject. Simply put, postmodernist theorists remain sceptical of grand narratives, or ‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv), within disciplines, and to any totalizing claims to truth, knowledge, or identity. Poststructuralism can be seen as situated within postmodernist thought as a family of ideas. PF can be seen as a broadly defined approach that pays attention to the ways in which gender is both produced and productive, and to what effect. The ‘structuralism’ part of poststructuralism refers most specifically to the work of Saussure ([1916] 1983), who paid attention to the structure of language (or of discourse). Saussure claimed that language is made up of a system of differences, and that the meaning of the elements of language is understood through the relationship between ‘signs’. ‘Signs’ are words (or sounds or images) that are used to convey meaning. The meaning of the sign, for example ‘woman’, emerges through the relations to and difference from other signs, for example ‘man’ or ‘girl’. Here is where the ‘post’ part of poststructuralism comes into play. Poststructuralist theorists (such as Derrida) question the underlying notion that there exists an ‘absolute identity’ (of something or someone) outside of, or under, discourse. Understood this way, discourses are historically, socially, and institutionally specific structures of representations – yet, and importantly, these structures are neither fixed nor closed. One need not delve deep into the nitty-gritty of theory and method about language and meaning to employ a poststructuralist-inspired approach. Structuralism influenced theory in the humanities and the arts, as well as in the social sciences; so, too, poststructural theory critically interrogated structuralist accounts in these fields. Structuralists maintain that there are fixed structures that determine meaning – be they cultural systems in anthropology, the (international) political economy, the psychology of the human mind, or ideas about the make-up of patriarchy. While poststructuralists also engage with structures, they do it from a
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Poststructuralist feminism in world politics 35 position of ‘post’; that is, the structures do not determine our understanding of the phenomena they embody, nor do they determine future social trajectories. According to poststructuralism, society, and our thinking about it, is contingent (Laclau and Mouffe, 1984).
DISCOURSE AND DECONSTRUCTION Discursive structures can be understood as systems of differences in which the identity/meaning of the separate elements (or signs) is purely relational: we ‘know’ what ‘masculinity’ is through its relation to ‘femininity’. Understood in this way, a discourse does not contain a given stable positive content, but requires that which it excludes (and which threatens its hegemony over meaning) for it to make sense. Any seemingly coherent sign, or representation (e.g. that of ‘male’), is always an unstable configuration in so far as ‘it’ is constituted by, and indeed haunted by, that which is excluded (e.g. ‘female’). Meaning is produced in ways that cannot be fully determined or predicted beforehand, and any fixations in meaning are temporary – the relationship between signs (e.g. the words ‘male’ and ‘female’), as well as between signs and their social and material manifestations (such as particular bodies), are not permanently fixed. Importantly, PF does not imply that bodies, as material realities, do not exist. That would be silly. What comes into question is how we impart meaning on to bodies as, for instance, ‘male’ or ‘female’. Discourses, however, function by giving a semblance of cohesion, order, truth, and closure. They make sense. Deconstructing discourses involves critically interrogating the binary pairs that construct meaning. One thus denaturalizes taken-for-granted truths and opens up the possibility for different meanings to emerge. Much of the impetus of PF has been on challenging prevailing discourses through making visible and destabilizing their gendered underpinnings, questioning their inevitability, and thereby making space for thinking and acting ‘otherwise’. Let me explain with an example from my own work. Using a PF approach, I engage in a deconstructive reading of the European Security Strategy (ESS) (Stern, 2011). I show how the delineations drawn to secure Europe in the text of the ESS also engender ‘Europe’ as multiply masculine by dividing the world into sharp spatiotemporal distinctions. Echoing Europe’s colonial past, I suggest, the ESS represents its ‘others’ as both feminized and subordinate. Ultimately, I argue that gendered and racialized coding produce a picture of ‘Europe’ and its security ‘needs’ by delineating where (or when and what) it is not, as well as where/when it is.
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PF teaches us that, because of their associations with the ‘natural’, gendered divisions provide a powerful mechanism for creating seemingly stable categories. Although we might not agree on their content, we are able to discern characteristics associated with masculinity from those associated with femininity as inscribed in established ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault, 1972). Masculinity and femininity therefore appear as seemingly safe foundations upon which to establish certainty (e.g. ‘Europe’) and help maintain the borders between that which is securely known and the indeterminate. Furthermore, like other binary pairs, masculinity and femininity are relationally constructed through power: that which is associated with masculinity is ‘ranked’ higher than that which is associated with femininity. Furthermore and importantly, FP analysis is not just about signs or binary pairs in themselves; it also engages with the social and material production and effects of discourses. In this way a poststructuralist analysis is always inscribed in, and part of, the ethico-politics with which it engages. Let me provide an example from Maria Eriksson Baaz’s and my work on conflict-related rape (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013), in which we interrogate the dominant feminist discourse of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ (RWOW). RWOW emerged as an answer to the prevalent understanding that wartime rape (if mentioned at all) was a by-product of warring and was a ‘result’ of male soldiers’ heterosexual desires run amok without the constraints of societal norms. RWOW, instead, offers the promise of progressive politics that could potentially stop rape; rape is not inevitable, but is instead a weapon whose use could be impeded. As we interrogated and deconstructed RWOW, we identified its main components, privileged signs, or ‘nodal points’ that glue its overall story together. (Think of an albeit floating bright star around which other stars in a constellation gather. The meaning of the constellation is dominated by the bright star’s imparting the proper position and signification to the other stars in the group.) This affixing process is not self-evident; how certain relations of signs are configured to constitute a constellation of seemingly definitive meaning has everything to do with the workings of politics and political imaginaries. We found that RWOW revolves around four main interrelated points, which organize its narrative: (1) strategicness; (2) gender; (3) culpability; and (4) avoidability. Critically querying these privileged signs and the work that they did in imparting sense to RWOW enabled us to open up space for rethinking the politics and ethics of this discourse. Furthermore, poststructuralism teaches us that there are many competing discourses at play in any discursive field; within any discourse, traces
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Poststructuralist feminism in world politics 37 of other competing discourses persist. As we interrogated and deconstructed RWOW, we saw how it was imbued with meaning in relation to the rape as a by-product of war discourse, among several others. This discourse (or ‘sexed story’ as we called it) ‘haunted’ the story crafted to replace it; its traces helped render RWOW intelligible. For instance, RWOW held political purchase through its promise of rendering rape avoidable. This was made possible through underscoring that gender (as opposed it its constitutive outside, ‘sex’, which is natural and therefore immutable) was malleable, so that violent masculinities could be cured and perpetrators held accountable. Hence, the ‘truth’ being told by RWOW was crafted out of the implied difference to the ‘sexed story’. This example serves to show how discourses (even dominant ones) are merely temporary fixations, which, by necessity, never are complete, although they often masquerade as a universal totality. Instead, discourses are always inherently unstable because of their relation to other discourses and their being constituted through difference, power struggles, and exclusion. Discourses (such as RWOW) therefore demand continual reinforcement because of the inevitable contestations they incite. Therein lies the continual possibility for agency, and for contestation of dominant discourses and the ideologies or logics which underwrite them.
‘TRUTH, POWER, KNOWLEDGE’? Foucault has laid much of the groundwork for poststructuralist theory. He has argued, for instance, that discourses can be seen as regimes of truth that are produced through and reproduce relations of power. For Foucault, power is creative; it does things and produces subjects – both those who seemingly wield ‘it’ and those who are clearly victim to ‘it’. A Foucauldian PF approach, generally speaking, does not search for an inherent meaning or truth (such as the truth about womanhood or femininity, or about the meaning of wartime rape or security), but instead pays attention to what claims of truth – or Truth – do (e.g. what do they hide, what do they render seemingly ‘natural’, and to what effect?). In addition to conducting close textual reading such as those exemplified above, poststructuralist feminists cast their critical eyes on specific instances or processes of world politics. Although Enloe might not usually be considered a FP researcher, her path-breaking questions around gender and militarization (1990) can easily be considered foundational for PF today. The stance of curious feminist researcher can be seen as perhaps the most important aspect of robust PF scholarship (see also Davies and Gannon, 2011: 319).
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In conducting a PF analysis of world politics, one could, for example, pay attention to the ways that the ‘world’ is being represented and enacted, or point out that which is being silenced, or hidden, through such representations and enactments. One could also make the ‘familiar strange’ through asking questions about how the seemingly gender neutral and natural (such as the modern state) came to be seen as natural – and to what effect. This type of approach is often referred to as ‘genealogy’ – a theoretical method developed by Foucault. One could also unsettle dominant truths by paying attention to alternative accounts.
RETHINKING THE SUBJECT Importantly, thinkers such as Foucault and Butler troubled the idea of the subject as outside of, or even the source of, discourse. The main idea here is that we, as subjects, do not exist prior to or outside of the discursive regimes to which we are subjected. Subjectification is the process by which individuals are produced as specific subjects through the workings of power – through regulations that define norms, and disciplinary power that polices those norms. Furthermore, subjects invest in the subject positions allotted to them. Butler (1990) explains how dominant gender discourses hail certain people into certain subject positions, such as that of ‘good woman’, or simply ‘woman’; we, then, as individuals actively engage with these subject positions. The groundwork of PF lies, arguably, in placing under critical scrutiny the binary categories of male and female and masculinity and femininity, and the work they do in processes of subjectification. To help understand the ways in which the subject becomes a subject (and also the ways in which a subject is active in her own subjectification), Butler developed the notion of ‘performativity’. Butler holds that, in ‘performing’ our gender identity (which is produced through discourse), we (re)produce our gender, and our selves. Yet our performances can never quite fully succeed. The subject cannot perfectly inhabit its allotted subject position. We perform (our gender) slightly otherwise; therein lies the space for the political, for agency. Furthermore, intersectional feminism has taught us that different relations of power situate subjects at the interstices of intersecting discourses. (We noted above how racialized and gendered discourses worked together to construct a picture of the European subject.) Feminist analysis has also paid attention to how, for instance, certain subject positions are imbued with meaning – and lived – at the intersection of different relations of power (Crenshaw, 1991).
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Poststructuralist feminism in world politics 39 Importantly, subjects are always more than the subject positions allotted them, no matter how multiple or intersectional such positions may be. Since identity is constructed through difference, the cohesive, sovereign subject remains forever elusive. Moreover, since we cannot make sense of our self without the meaning attached to our subject positions, we can never be ‘free’ from discourse and its power, but we can negotiate, contest, and transform the subject positions we inhabit. Hence we return to the important feminist question of agency, which, in different ways, informs most PF projects. Drawing upon such insights, many scholars pay attention to processes of subjectification in their research. How, they might ask, do discourses about soldiering produce certain types of subject positions (e.g. violent hegemonic heterosexual masculinities) and render others deviant (Chapter 24 in this volume)? How do individuals perform and embody the military masculinities they are subjected to (Chapter 34 in this volume) and to what effect?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS As the above suggests, there are many ways to ask questions inspired by PF. Hence what I have offered here is just a teaser for a rich, robust, and growing family of scholarship that surpasses the labels we clumsily affix to it. Taken as a whole, nonetheless, PF research projects engage in critically approaching the questions of world politics as a field of academic study and an imagined sphere of ethics, politics, and economy that is deeply gendered. FP questions include, for instance: Where are the gendered limits of ‘world politics’? How have these limits been drawn, in whose interest, and to what effect? What and who count as subjects of world politics? Such questions focus on both the production of gender and the work that this production does in underwriting and legitimizing dominant accounts. They also focus on the ‘constitutive outsides’ of what we know of as world politics – its silenced, abject subjects, processes, and narratives, as well as the import of gendered lines of distinction, and their intersections with other relations of power. Furthermore, they focus on the production of gendered subjectivities and gender as productive of subjectivities, as well as offer compelling ways of asking (and answering) the question of agency. Evolving and multifaceted, PF research offers a starting point and a rich source of inspiration for the development of creative ways of studying world politics. For instance, scholars have taken stock of the
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insights briefly outlined above (among others) to critically query discourses, practices, materiality, and technologies, as well as affect, emotions, and embodiment in innovative ways. Such innovations both enrich and transgress the accumulated theoretical and methodological knowledge(s) that poststructuralism, feminisms, and PF scholarship currently impart. This gift – that of creativity and of possibility – is perhaps the most significant.
REFERENCES Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6), 1241–1299. Davies, Bronwyn and Susanne Gannon (2011) ‘Feminism/poststructuralism’, in Bridget Somekh and Cathy Lewin (eds), Research Methods in the Social Sciences, London: Sage, pp. 318–325. Enloe, Cynthia (1990) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksson Baaz, Maria and Maria Stern (2013) Rape as a Weapon of War?, London: Zed Books. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon Books. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1984) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de ([1916] 1983) Course in General Linguistics, London: Duckworth. Stern, Maria (2011) ‘Gender and race in the European Security Strategy: Europe as a “force for good”?’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 14 (1), 28–59.
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6. Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR Anna M. Agathangelou and Heather M. Turcotte
Vous avez beaucoup parle de la memoire. A quoi ca cert d’avoir de la memoire when you have no future? … La memoire est le fuel. The fuel. The fuel, for the future. (Begag, 2011: 2) The articulation of power on a global scale can be more fully understood by being more attentive to the imperialist juncture, the intersections of race, class, and gender relations within and across national boundaries, and the construction and subversion of these boundaries. (Chowdhry and Nair, 2002: 2–3)
Azouz Begag was born of Algerian parents in France. In his postcolonial memory politics, memory is a life approach that reveals the complicated power dynamics of imperial and phantom roots (and routes) between two continents simultaneously. In this example, to remember is to move toward a radical uncertainty that exposes how France and Algeria are sutured in violence together through colonialism. Memory, however, creates a space to engage with life in Algeria in ways that exceed colonial regulation. Thus, memory is a postcolonial analytic that embraces a multiplicity of life within the context of colonial violence; it reads through the cracks of colonial history to engage with the politics of resistance, recovery and life. In other words, postcolonial theory is the writing of the materiality of memory that fuels just futures. Additionally, Chowdhry and Nair’s epigraph reveals how global power is fully understood only when we attend to the ways race, class and gender relations are simultaneously drawn upon to re-constitute colonial frameworks. A feminist grounding of postcolonial theory reads through the fingerprints of colonial history and subverts its boundaries by attending to the multiple and intersecting axes of power. Postcolonial feminisms work to expose narratives of “civilization,” “domestication” and “growth” as forms of oppression; they reveal how colonial frameworks seek to exterminate and assimilate anybody who does not fit into the dominant discourses of the interstate system. This kind of suppression allows for the accumulation and forcible impositions of international policies against communities of the Global South, which in turn enables 41
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the continued privileged position of the Global North. Postcolonial feminism remembers these inequities as the foundation of the interstate system and names white supremacy, heteronormativity and patriarchy. As a practice of subversion, this naming can generate new analyses that further justice. Knowledge production is central to the analysis of global power. Colonial suppressions themselves are instigated, and continue, in international relations (IR) pedagogies and approaches to explaining the relations of “Great Powers in the World,” which attempt to erase the work and life worlds of those who are at the “margins.” IR itself “remains guilty of forgetting and detracting from the thought and acts” of people in the Global South (Jones, 2006: 2). Postcolonial feminist IR is attentive to the ways IR presents itself, and argues that it is a colonial practice of amnesia that obscures IR’s role in reproducing colonial genealogies. While postcolonial theory attends to racialized class orders and feminism in IR has challenged the gendered and sexual inequalities that guide the discipline, postcolonial feminist IR connects and decenters these interventions by refusing the parceling out of power into separate categories. The approaches of postcolonial feminist IR account for how gender, sexuality, race and class are co-constituted within the production of the international. Contending with a world that claims to be global requires us to recognize the multiplicity of works and subjectivities that make up these formations.
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISMS AND THE WORK OF FEMINISM Postcolonial feminisms are theories, methods and practices that examine the violences of our structural conditions and the orders of our everyday expressions. They make explicit the subjectivity of colonial, enslaved and racial constitutions within the international and seek to decolonize knowledge and social relations. As Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (2003) explain, postcolonial feminisms rupture a global order whose sustenance depends on violence and marginalization of differently gendered and racialized subjects. Postcolonial feminisms decolonize knowledge by decentering dominant discourses of global politics and daily life, including within the activist and scholarly work of feminism. As a political movement, feminism recognizes that, apart from genderbased injustice, multiple structural inequalities underlie the global order. Feminism advocates for change on every level and in every site of our lives (hooks, 2000). Part of the feminist struggle is the expansion of our
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Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR 43 worldviews, permitting us to recognize that we are part of the history producing us. Feminist theory accounts for how we become political subjects through interwoven historical configurations (Rich, 1986). Naming the “politics of location” is possible through the interrelated feminist work of standpoint, intersectional, Women of Color, postcolonial and transnational feminisms (e.g., Combahee River Collective [1977] 2002). Above all feminist theory feels a sense of continuing responsibility, accountability and duty to achieve global justice. When we speak of feminisms, we invoke racial, ethnic, gender, ability, national and religious backgrounds to account for difference in ways that push us beyond our nationalized containments—subverting colonial borders—to build global, transnational and multi-racial networks. Such work challenges historical segregations by expressing the multiplicity and connections of our lives. Attending to difference challenges the homogeneous and myopic vision of liberal feminist definitions of “sisterhood” dominating global feminist discourses. Postcolonial feminisms in particular elicit the tensions and counterpoints of feminism in an effort to engage our differing positioning within a power matrix as a necessary part of building feminist solidarity. One way to do so is to point to the various ways feminisms of the Global North contribute to and maintain global hierarchies (Spivak, 1999). Complex networks of global feminists are dedicated to the sole purpose of keeping in place a social order defined by a state framework of colonial, white supremacist and capital relations. As feminists who collude with the state to reproduce the effect of “natural” state-provided rights and make claims to engineered innovations (i.e., women’s rights as human rights), postcolonial feminists point to the strenuous and complex labor that it takes to create such a facade of progressive political, social and economic orders (Minh-ha, 1989; Grewal, 2005). In doing so, postcolonial feminisms intervene in the project of feminism as a homogeneous, unified area of study. They complicate the subject of “woman” with their transnational attention to inequitable distributions of power, gender, race, class, religion and sexuality. This reframes equal rights and protection projects to confront feminist complicities in reaffirming state violence. As Amrita Basu (2000) explains, postcolonial feminisms depart from the work of internationalizing feminism because such a project relies upon colonial dependencies. Instead, postcolonial feminisms point to the limitations of “global sisterhood” models, and their normative liberal/western subject, to examine the heterogeneity of who constitutes the subject of women in what global space and why the realities of difference within feminist movements around the world are necessary conditions for systemic change.
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Postcolonial feminisms refuse the portrayal of women as isolated in “non-western” contexts predominantly through the lens of development and modernization (Narayan, 1997). Instead, they focus on structural interventions of violence and attend to the points of convergence (and divergence) between US anti-racist/Third World feminisms and Third World/transnational feminisms (Spira, 2014). Thus, postcolonial feminisms are generated within varied geopolitical constituencies that articulate their opposition to gender essentialisms and the racial, class and heteronormative privileging within gender studies (Mohanty et al., 1991). Theories on the politics of location decenter imperial geographic reasoning and foreground decolonial thought, which positions postcolonial feminisms within a deeper history of oppositional and discontinuous knowledge formation (Wynter, 2003). It is important to note, however, that many of these scholars and the knowledges produced with these critical frameworks—from both the Global South and the Global North—are relegated to the margins and asymmetrically located within the knowledge matrices of the academy. Because postcolonial feminist theorizations emerge out of decolonizing struggles, they bring an analysis of revolutionary projects whose goals are abolitionary and not reformist. In the edited collection of Audre Lorde’s work I Am Your Sister (Byrd et al., 2009), Lorde argues feminism is imperialist when it puts the interests and needs of privileged women in imperialist countries above the livelihoods and liberatory visions of structurally disempowered communities. Such insights can disrupt the segregations of feminist social relations and the knowledge hierarchies of feminism. By naming these feminist tensions, postcolonial feminisms create the space to challenge the solidification of power within an interstate structure that upholds capitalist and political violence; they transform feminist theory. Because postcolonial feminisms are constituted through the historical relationships with critical, revolutionary feminist theories, they seek social change, justice and the eradication of exploitation and violence through a lens attentive to the multiple intersections of power embedded in international structures and our daily practice. They focus on the embodiment of the personal-as-political and the site in which to name racial, gender, sexual and geographic inequities as a process of rewriting a violent system.
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISMS AND THE WORK OF IR Postcolonial feminisms work to account for the fissures and dispossessions of an interstate system that structures social relationships through a
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Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR 45 dominant “white” heteropatriarchical framework of capitalist exchange (Eisenstein, 2004). Postcolonial feminisms raise questions about the historical formation of the interstate structure and the assumptions made by its major agents. Importantly, postcolonial feminisms account for how our political positions are informed by our geopolitical locations and how these personal locations inform and complicate the study of IR (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004). As discussed above, postcolonial feminisms account for the politics of location. Importantly, they do so alongside the historical political contexts of abolitionist, postcolonial, Marxist and Third World nonalignment global movements (Agathangelou et al., 2015). The historical conditions of global inequity involved in capitalist state formation and the massive restructuring of the world order at the end of World War II catalyzed the formation of IR as a field of study. Simultaneously, this context ensured the conditions for which a postcolonial feminist subject and framework emerge within IR. In the moment of violent global restructuring, and because of the revolutionary push for decolonization, postcolonial feminist identities solidified and became known within academia (McClintock et al., 1997). In short, postcolonial feminist work is generated in the intersections of new transnational formulations of power that have an intimate relationship to IR. As Chowdhry and Nair (2002) explain, postcolonial feminist IR is an analytic and political practice. It is also a sensibility that orients us toward identifying the ways colonialism continues to surface in the study of IR. The work of postcolonial feminist IR is to name the continuation of structural violence, and account for the strategies of resistance and recovery, which can then strengthen our movements for (new) world solidarities. As noted above, postcolonial feminisms gained salience in the historical trajectory of post-World War II analytics. Postcolonial feminists were part of this world reorganization as they articulated, generated and sustained a multiplicity of life through the redistributions of power they questioned. Yet IR too often engages with postcolonialism as a teleological framework generated through colonialism’s end. The division of epistemological engagements and other kinds of practices within IR mystify unequal divisions of labor, which often fictionalize the central role of postcolonial feminisms and feminists within IR. In contrast, postcolonial feminisms centralize postcolonialism and decolonial thought as ongoing analytics that account for the fact that the world has been decisively shaped by colonialism, decolonization processes and the scramble for neocolonial formations. In doing so, they construct a transnational feminist sensibility that challenges essentialisms, nationalistic claims and the interstate system itself (Kaplan et al.,
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1999). Attention to the ways colonialisms continue to change the world means acknowledging how analytical categories themselves inform and shape history. As we have argued elsewhere (Agathangelou and Turcotte, 2009), there are geopolitical and material consequences to how we examine and write any phenomenon in the world. In addition to serving as a field of investigation in IR, postcolonial feminisms complicate and extend disciplinary approaches by showing how dominant accounts and understanding of the international are deeply entrenched in gender, racial, classed and sexual power relationships that limit our analyses to imagine future justice possibilities. When we engage with international operations of power through a historical lens of colonial racial, gender, class and sexual politics, our investigations are critical of the presentations and performances of legitimate IR and its prescribed frameworks. In the cracks and fissures of dominant power, imaginations of a just world expand—postcolonial feminist theory is the writing of these futures.
POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISMS ATTEND TO GENDER IN IR Much of the work produced by feminists in the Global North has focused on the development of their spaces and their own lives at the expense of that of others at the margins and “outside” of their own environments. Many of these colonial divisions are embodied by feminists worldwide and have implications for the ways they approach and do politics. Congruently, many of the critiques against these divisive politics are done by women and feminists outside the dominant site of feminist IR. The postcolonial feminist IR critique is often raised at interstate political and economic meetings, academic conferences and policy-making arenas; or in the sites of dominant power is where their truths are spoken. Postcolonial feminist IR consistently argues in these sites of suppression that gender oppression cannot be separated from national, class or racial oppressions. This refusal exposes the multifaceted relations of power and violence that frame how women’s bodies and their ecologies are produced within global political economy. In turn, this opens up conversations and policy actions to expand resources for survival and more comprehensive strategies of social change (Çagatay et al., 1986; Shiva, 1996). However, the (neo)liberal feminist quest for equality within the interstate framework continues to dominate feminist IR. Postcolonial feminist IR reminds us that feminist equality within an interstate framework is
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Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR 47 only made possible through collusion with the state, and it generates segregation, distrust and colonial orders (Saeidi and Turcotte, 2011). The dominant issue areas of feminist IR—gender mainstreaming, women in conflict zones, women’s rights—inform “new” colonial collaborations of state and feminist knowledge. The affect of neoliberal feminism is the remaking of colonized geopolitical sites and the regulation of women’s bodies in the Global South (Doezema, 2010). The dominant epistemologies of feminist IR place the geopolitical agendas of feminists (protecting women) as the feminist concern rather than addressing the larger geopolitical structures of violence that necessitate such constructions of protection. Postcolonial feminisms continue to discuss how these agendas fail to account for structural violence and the multiple ways such agendas perpetuate First World privilege through violence against Third World communities (Kuokkanen, 2008). Despite intergenerational and contested conversations between feminists in the Global North and postcolonial feminists, the center of feminist IR fails to politically engage with the difficult questions that necessitate co-constitutive analyses and historical specificities of colonial exploitation of racialized genders and sexualities within capitalist state formation (Agathangelou, 2012). Thus, it remains the continued work of postcolonial feminisms to detail how axes of power are mobilized through imperial frameworks to maintain global inequality and violence for the protection of colonial interests. In doing so, postcolonial feminist IR continues to remake the nation, destabilize us/them binaries, challenge the state dominant formulations of IR and draw out the revolutionary possibilities within approaches to power that are systemic and grounded in racial, gender and sexual politics of location.
CONCLUSION Postcolonial feminisms are not new to IR, postcolonial or feminist theory. It is well known, though rarely admitted, that many of the theorizations of IR, postcolonial IR and feminist IR have all reaped intellectual and material benefits from the knowledges and people of postcolonial feminist IR over the years. Yet we are left with these historical questions: How do feminism and IR continue to benefit from colonial positioning that elides the contestations, contradictions and nuances of postcolonial feminisms? Why does it remain a struggle to acknowledge and contend with the productivities of postcolonial feminist IR in particular? The renewed focus on “global gender equity” within IR is built upon the exploitations of postcolonial feminist IR. IR remains a colonial site
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that codifies gender and stifles abolitionary imaginations. However, reading through the cracks of these colonial frameworks we see resistance, recovery and survival. Postcolonial feminist IR exposes how feminisms and IR deal with difference by assuming a world divided and relegating decolonial thought into those spaces outside the dominant “interstate structure.” However, postcolonial feminisms survive in IR. They are crucial to the study of gender and IR because they provide a historical framework of knowing differently within intense systems of domination and inequity. Postcolonial feminisms are knowledges of resistance and possibility— they continue to rework the solidification of power on our bodies. They are the memory politics of our futures.
REFERENCES Agathangelou, Anna M. (2012) ‘The living and being of the streets: Fanon and the Arab uprisings’, Globalizations, 9 (3), 451–466. Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.H.M. Ling (2004) ‘The house of IR: from family power politics to the poisies of worldism’, International Studies Review, 6, 21–49. Agathangelou, Anna M. and Heather M. Turcotte (2009) ‘Postcolonial theories and challenges to “First World-ism”’, in Laura Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 44–58. Agathangelou, Anna M., Dana M. Olwan, Tamara L. Spira and Heather M. Turcotte (2015) ‘Sexual divestments from empire: women’s studies, institutional feeling, and the “odious” machine’, Feminist Formations, 27 (3), 139–167. Basu, Amrita (2000) ‘Globalization of the local/localization of the global: mapping transnational women’s movements’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 1 (1), 68–84. Begag, Azouz (2011) ‘Retour sur images: de Setif à Lyon en BD’, Franco-Maghrebi Crossings Conference, Florida State University, Tallahassee, 4 November. Byrd, Rudolph P., Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (eds) (2009) I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, New York: Oxford University Press. Çagatay, Nildfer, Caren Grown and Aida Santiago (1986) ‘The Nairobi women’s conference: toward a global feminism? (a commentary)’, Feminist Studies, 12 (2), 401–412. Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair (eds) (2002) Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class, New York: Routledge. Combahee River Collective (1977) ‘A Black feminist statement’, reprinted in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds) (2002), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 3rd edn, Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, pp. 210–218. Doezema, Jo (2010) Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters, London: Zed Books. Eisenstein, Zillah (2004) Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West, London: Zed Books. Grewal, Inderpal (2005) Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 234–244. hooks, bell (2000) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: South End Press.
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Reworking postcolonial feminisms in the sites of IR 49 Jones, Branwen G. (ed.) (2006) Decolonizing International Relations, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem (eds) (1999) Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kuokkanen, Rauna (2008) ‘Globalization as racialized, sexualized violence: the case of indigenous women’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10 (2), 216–233. Lewis, Reina and Sara Mills (eds) (2003) Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Routledge. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (eds) (1997) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1989) Woman, Native, Other, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds) (1991) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Narayan, Uma (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, New York: Routledge. Rich, Adrienne (1986) Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Saeidi, Shirin and Heather M. Turcotte (2011) ‘Politicizing emotions: historicizing affective exchange and feminist gatherings’, International Studies Review, 13 (4), 7–9. Shiva, Vandana (1996) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston, MA: South End Press. Spira, Tamara L. (2014) ‘Intimate internationalisms: 1970s “Third World” queer feminist solidarity with Chile’, Feminist Theory, 15 (2), 119–140. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Calcutta: Seagull Books. Wynter, Sylvia (2003) ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 257–337.
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7. Masculinities in international relations Paul Kirby
More than any other area of modern social life, international politics has been the domain of men. It is men who have ruled states and empires, negotiated global trade relations and defined and patrolled political borders, and who overwhelmingly make up the militaries of the world. At the time of writing, the Central Intelligence Agency lists 199 world leaders, only 12 of whom (or around 6 per cent) are women.1 Nearly 80 per cent of all the world’s parliamentarians are men, and Rwanda remains the only country where women constitute the majority in a parliamentary assembly.2 Men dominate the upper echelons of global corporations, universities and religious institutions. Many studies furthermore identify men as the main perpetrators of violence in a wide range of settings. In other words, manhood and global power appear to be intimately related. Feminism came later to international relations than to other academic disciplines, but when it arrived feminist scholars were quick to point out this inequality of representation and practice, revealing the many ways in which men remained dominant. In other words, feminists started to ask the ‘man’ question (Zalewski and Parpart, 1998). Instead of seeing men’s role as natural, feminists and gender scholars began to problematise male power by tracing how it worked, how it was secured and protected, how it related to other forms of identity and power (such as race, class, sexuality or citizenship) and how it could be changed. Although the leaders of states have almost always been men, and although it is men who often benefit from global systems of gender power, this does not mean that men’s place is a result of biology. Ideals of appropriate feminine behaviour are constructs of a particular time and place, and the same goes for male behaviour. Just as gender scholars recognise that there is no single category of ‘Woman’, so too there is no singular ‘Man’. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are both mobile, multiple, sometimes ambiguous and often contested groups of norms. It is thus common to distinguish between men and masculinities, attempting both to understand where certain gendered behaviours come from and to keep sight of the power differentials that benefit concrete individuals and groups. 50
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Masculinities in international relations 51 Because gender research has predominantly focused on the experiences of women, and the ways in which different groups of women are marginalised, exploited or harmed, men can sometimes appear to be homogeneous in the literature (see Carver, 1996). This has led some to question whether men are being neglected by gender theory, and to some disputes over what research should focus on and what that research should be called (see Kimmel et al., 2005).3 However, most of those who have worked on masculinity in international relations have been interested in differences within masculinity and the complicated ways in which masculinities (social norms, forms of status and power) relate to both men and women in certain political contexts. What kinds of masculine identity exist and what do they have to do with global political, economic, military and cultural power? Why are some forms of male identity so intimately associated with certain institutions? And how do gender roles change over time?
WHAT MASCULINITIES ARE The most influential framework for understanding masculinities is that developed by sociologist R.W. Connell, who argues that we should see masculinities as practices and social relations which vary by time and place (Connell, 2005). Masculinities are not biological qualities, although they do include bodily experiences, alongside personal identities and cultural norms. Nor are masculinities unrelated to other forms of power: masculine identity combines with other identities and roles dependent on the social context. Given these principles, Connell identifies four different relations among masculinities: + Hegemony: the cultural exaltation of a certain idea of masculinity in a given society. This means that certain qualities are associated with proper masculinity and are celebrated. For example, military service may be thought of as a distinctly manly occupation, and soldiers seen as a special category of citizen because of their work. Hegemonic forms of masculinity are therefore dominant, but this does not mean that they are permanent. They can be challenged and replaced by other ideas about what masculine qualities matter most. + Subordination: masculine identities that are dominated by others in the overall gender order. Not all forms of masculinity are tolerated or celebrated in patriarchy, and some may become the target for legal discrimination, denigration or forms of official and unofficial
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violence. A key example is the historical domination of gay masculinities by straight masculinities. + Complicity: forms of manhood that support, but are not themselves, hegemonic masculinity. The characteristics of hegemonic masculinity are only ever achieved by a few actual men, but are aspired to by many others. Complicit masculinities endorse these values and benefit from the gender order that celebrates them. + Marginalisation: finally, marginalised masculinities are those that overlap with non-gender power hierarchies, such as those of race and class. For example, in a white supremacist society, masculinities interpreted as ‘black’ might both be celebrated for athleticism (and so in a sense related to hegemonic masculinity) and be condemned in the threatening figure of the black rapist (closer to subordinate masculinities). For Connell, the crucial thing is that hegemonic masculinity ‘authorises’ certain identities and condemns others, and therefore determines whether a marginal identity is socially accepted or not in a certain context. This framework – often simply called the hegemonic masculinity thesis – was intended to explain both the continuation of male dominance and the ways in which masculinities change over time (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 832). It is just one way of understanding what masculinity is, but importantly it delineates that there are many forms that masculinity can take (or many masculine positions that men can adopt) and that these forms have relationships to each other, and do not exist in unified dominance over femininity. One challenge is that this recognition of multiplicity also makes the concept of masculinity slippery and ambiguous. For its proponents, this is an important reflection of how masculinity operates in practice, whilst critics suggest that the hegemonic masculinity framework needs improving or replacing (ibid.). As an academic discipline international relations is also a site of gender bias, and feminists have consequently identified masculinist prejudice in its theories. Because high politics is so often assumed to be the space of men, the gender bias involved in focusing on certain levels of analysis, such as the state, can be invisible to many interpreters. Masculine categories and experiences can take on the unquestioned quality of the universal, against which other perspectives are seen as feminine, inferior or irrelevant. Moreover, neutral and apparently ‘scientific’ explanations can also include deeply gendered assumptions. For example, it has been suggested that liberal theories of world politics build on the model of bourgeois-rationalist economic masculinity and that political realism has a corresponding affinity for a certain Cold War
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Masculinities in international relations 53 version of the statesman (Hooper, 2001: 95–116). Ideas of manhood have also been crucial to colonial practices, such as the development of so-called ‘martial races’ in the British Empire (ibid.: 70–72, 84–85), and today come in many international versions, including the technical expert, the transnational businessman and the globe-trotting film star (see Zalewski and Parpart, 1998).
DIVIDENDS AND HARMS What do masculinities do? Given the multiple masculinities of global politics, there are many possible answers to this question. But some institutions stand out for special analysis. The main example is that of the military, precisely because it is so dominated by male bodies and because it is so associated with masculinity in contemporary society. Again, many of the idealised characteristics of the soldier – bravery, dedication, self-sacrifice and protection – are celebrated in popular culture and political discourse. Politicians go out of their way to associate with troops and to be seen as respecting them. The masculinity of the soldier can therefore be seen as crucial to ideas of the state as we currently hold them. But masculinity is also vital in creating soldiers in the first place. Many gender scholars see in military training the production of soldiers through the enforcement of a particular gender identity. Warriors do not come ready-made, but emerge through processes which tend to denigrate female characteristics and to enforce the kinds of masculinity that enable violence. Without masculinity as a social practice – something that is done to people, and which they do to themselves – we would not have soldiers as we know them. The exact content of military masculinity is open to some dispute, but it remains a key case for connecting gender identities to practices of violence and power dynamics in the international system (see Belkin, 2012). Although the power and privilege of men have been a major topic of research, scholars have also developed nuanced accounts of how men are in fact harmed by norms of masculinity. So whilst the ideal of the soldier is certainly celebrated (and might be a figure of hegemonic masculinity), actual soldiering is dangerous, does not generally pay well, and comes with a range of subsequent problems for participants, such as posttraumatic stress disorder and increased risk of homelessness. The same gender norms that exclude women from militaries also push (indeed, can forcibly enlist) men into those roles. During the twentieth century, this
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meant that many millions of men who had not sought out military identities nevertheless died because they were trained and defined as soldiers. A compelling example of the harms of masculine identity comes from humanitarian actions during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The formal principles of humanitarian organisations required that they act to help those in the most desperate and life-threatening of situations. But in practice humanitarian actors tended to see vulnerability as synonymous with ‘womenandchildren’ (Carpenter, 2003). The result was that men of a certain age (often from the mid-teens all the way to 60) were understood as ‘battle age males’: as in effect fighters, regardless of whether they were in fact aligned with an armed group or otherwise a threat. These men were frequently given lower humanitarian priorities for rescue, despite the fact that their imagined masculine identity in that setting (being battle age males) made them the most vulnerable to extreme violence, including mass execution. It was their gender identity as men that made the thousands killed at Srebrenica targets (ibid.). That men can be selected for killing as men has also further spurred some scholars to see masculinities as a feature of gendercide in wartime (see, for example, Jones, 2006). The gender norm of the battle age male continues to have effects, as when American officials today count any male of ‘military age’ killed by drone strikes as by definition a militant. Clearly, those who embody subordinated and marginalised masculinities can also become targets for violence or find themselves excluded from a range of social goods and rights. Homophobic violence is a powerful reminder of that. But it may also be that the power of hegemonic masculinities comes at a price for those who are succeeding at it. This again reflects the complex internal relations of masculinities and the question of how the material realities of manhood match up to common representations. For example, do some men promote hegemonic ideals as a conscious strategy to maintain control over other men and women (Hooper, 2001: 57–58)? Or do we perpetuate gender hierarchies because that is how we have learned to think of ourselves, and how we can be understood in social settings? If we define the overall system of gender power as masculinist or patriarchal, how should we analyse the role of women as closely involved in ‘making’ masculinities in the first place? Indeed, it is not clear that the actual men who hold greatest power actually correspond much to the social exaltation of the ideal man. So it remains crucial to understand the connections between discourses, lived experiences and material measures of power.
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DEVIANTS AND FUTURES We have already seen that some forms of masculinity are rejected by dominant gender norms: depicted as inadequate, feminine or perverted. Dominant ideas of masculinity are maintained by policing these subordinate and marginal masculinities (Connell, 2005). But, because masculinities are not permanent or stable identities, they can be renegotiated. In some cases, such as the dominance of heterosexual identity in modern Western culture, these changes to masculinity can take a long time. In other cases, the transformation can be surprisingly quick. The last century has seen several points at which masculinity was seen as being in crisis or under serious attack (Hooper, 2001: 66). Within the space of a generation, attitudes to gender practices from fashion to citizenship rights can change and have changed. As many stress, this is because masculinity is not a self-enclosed functional system (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Its present and future are instead, above all, a question of politics. One form that the politics of masculinity takes is in the cultivation of alternative identities at odds with dominant gender norms. This might mean asserting the validity of a certain masculine identity (such as the gay pride movement developing out of clashes between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people and state authorities in the West during the 1970s) or seeking to dissociate certain characteristics (such as aggression) from what it means ‘to be a real man’. It may also mean dislocating the connection between men and masculinity itself. Thus Judith Jack Halberstam (1998) writes of ‘female masculinity’, when biological women feel themselves to be more masculine than feminine and express that in various forms (as the tomboy, the butch lesbian, the drag king and so on). Halberstam argues not just that it is possible to have masculinity without men (we already do), but also that we might counter-intuitively become most aware of what masculinity means socially when it exists without its ‘natural’ body. Although far from hegemonic, these performances of masculinity can nevertheless act as resistance to, and eventually change, more dominant gender norms. Another important dimension in the future of masculinity studies has to do with ‘the global’ itself. The study of masculinities within international relations is relatively young, and scholars in other disciplines have only recently begun to consider what it might mean to study masculinities above the level of the nation-state and national society, or in translation across political and cultural borders. If we understand the pace and thickness of global interactions to be increasing, this raises a number of questions about how masculinities in different places respond
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to homogenising pressures, how the internal power differentials between masculinities express themselves between Global North and South, and whether we can expect convergence around new, globally shared masculine norms (Connell, 2005: 244–266). What does all of this mean for the study of masculinities? On the one hand, we have a large body of analysis available to work with, including contrasting frameworks for understanding masculinity and men’s experiences, case studies of masculinities in context, and subtle analyses of how male identity both benefits and harms men. On the other hand, there are a number of remaining challenges: to refine theories, to translate site-specific insights into a global register, to take the intersection of different forms of power seriously and to ensure that our awareness of plurality does not obscure very real forms of power and dominance (including those of men over women). Because masculinities, like femininities, are open-ended products of human activity, there is also the continual danger that we will reproduce stereotyped ideas of masculinity in the very act of analysing them. In other words, for all our progress we face a familiar challenge: that of uniting a rigorous analysis of gender in international relations with a constant understanding that it is changing beneath our feet, and that not only are the struggles over what it means occurring all around us, but they also include us.
NOTES 1.
Data from Central Intelligence Agency, Chiefs of State and Cabinet Ministers of Foreign Governments, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/world-leaders-1/ (accessed 28 June 2014). These figures are for the top-ranked government official for any given political entity, but exclude heads of states such as queens and kings. Inter-Parliamentary Union, Women in National Parliaments, World Averages, http:// www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm, and World Classification, http://www.ipu.org/wmne/ classif.htm (both accessed 28 June 2014). This information reflects the situation as of 1 May 2014. The field of research is sometimes delineated as ‘masculinity studies’, and at other times as ‘critical masculinity studies’ or ‘men’s studies’, each of which indicates a different kind of analytical and political approach to the subject matter. International relations scholars who study men and masculinities often describe themselves as doing ‘gender studies’, and many are also comfortable with the terminology and politics of feminism (which is not to say that they see no tensions between feminism and the study of men and masculinities). Feminism was indeed a crucial source for thinking about men and masculinities in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside work coming out of the gay liberation movement (see Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005).
2.
3.
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REFERENCES Belkin, Aaron (2012) Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898–2001, London: Hurst. Carpenter, R. Charli (2003) ‘“Women and children first”: gender, norms, and humanitarian evacuation in the Balkans, 1991–95’, International Organization, 57 (4), 661–694. Carver, Terrell (1996) Gender Is Not a Synonym for Women, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Connell, R.W. (2005) Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R.W. and James W. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, 19 (6), 829–859. Halberstam, Judith (1998) Female Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hooper, Charlotte (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Adam (2006) ‘Straight as a rule: heteronormativity, gendercide, and the noncombatant male’, Men and Masculinities, 8 (4), 451–469. Kimmel, Michael S., Jeff Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds) (2005) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, London: Sage. Zalewski, Marysia and Jane Parpart (eds) (1998) The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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8. Sex, gender and sexuality Terrell Carver
It is tempting to see sex, gender and sexuality as analytical categories referring to timeless properties of the human body, social aspects of behaviour that reflect this, and biological imperatives of the species. Indeed there are very powerful political forces heavily invested in promoting that view of those very terms, framed with religious, moral and political ideologies. Ideologies are understood here in a general sense as systems of ideas that organize concepts in a mutually supportive manner, thus generating a sense of coherence and certainty (Freeden, 1998). The view that sex, gender and sexuality are just descriptive concepts, with perhaps some normative aspects, does not capture the power that ideological systems – even ones which seem to omit or marginalize these crucial particularities – exercise in and through social institutions. These institutions – whether overtly political or not – form human beings as subjects and frequently treat them as objects. If sex, gender and sexuality are treated as constructive categories (not just constructed ones), then power-relations start to become visible, and the work involved in keeping them hidden (and in keeping us incurious) emerges (Enloe, 2004). This is how feminists, speaking as and for women as a marginalized majority, have come to view sex, gender and sexuality, though in widely differing ways. However, the point of their work, and of this chapter, is to politicize these terms, and expose the ways that they function in international politics, rather than to make them definitional debating points. On that basis, then, a contemporary view of these concepts must commence with a prior concept, ‘woman’ (Tickner, 1993).
WOMAN, POWER AND FEMINISM Naming ‘woman’ as subject and object of knowledge and thus identifying a perspective that was independent of the frameworks through which men (as such, and as excluding women) had conceptualized the world, has caused something of a knowledge-quake in post-Second World War times (Beauvoir, 1997). While woman had certainly been conceptualized by 58
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Sex, gender and sexuality 59 men, actual women had had little input into knowledge production about themselves, or about their assignment to a second sex, until this point, at least in terms of recognition by male-exclusive or male-dominated institutions. After this feminist intervention, sex was thus no longer merely biological and thus objective, and in that way as in other ways defined from a male-centric perspective. While literatures, scientific and otherwise, appeared to proceed from commonplace notions of bodily difference such that sexual dimorphism was presumed to be obvious, it is notable that this differentiation of humans into two distinct phenotypes presupposes reproduction. Knowledge of what this is and what it is not, how it works and does not work, and why it matters and to whom, are all historically varied and variable (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Claims on all these points, often framed with physical and social science, religion and morality, racial and national purity, social reform and revolution, merely demonstrate the intensely political character of the concepts involved, and how easily they play into national politics and therefore international relations (Stevens, 1999). These are not private or non-state matters, and, as with the domestic/ international distinction, the activity of drawing such lines – and disciplining those who challenge them – merely displays the power-claims through which politics arises. Binary sexual difference as male/female is thus not a mere reflection of heterosexuality as a species-imperative. Rather sexual difference is understood here as a heteronormative project, abnormalizing and abjecting same-sex desires. This denigration then assigns exclusive privilege and normative status to male–female desires, given that male–female difference is already defined in reproductive terms. In popular political discourse the concepts that make up heteronormativity are often referred to as family values – clearly a major ideological term through which religious, moral and political concepts can be powerfully articulated. Feminist theorizing and activisms have intervened decisively in this conceptual nexus through the international women’s movement and any number of ‘grassroots’ political campaigns. These feminist campaigns advocate women’s rights and protections in marriage and divorce, employment and civic life, domestic and public spaces, health and education, property and inheritance, childcare and protection, and innumerable other issues, all of which expose local and national circumstances to international attention (Hawkesworth, 2006). In that way feminist activism has made heterosexuality a highly problematic concept, not merely – and not centrally – in relation to homosexuality, but in relation to the myriad practices through which it is institutionalized and thus projects itself as a singular normality.
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SEXUALITY, LIBERATION AND GENDER The lines of opposition and alliance between feminism, as women’s liberation, and recognition and validation of same-sex desire, as lesbian and gay liberation, are necessarily a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives and interests. Indeed that conjunction has produced questioning within feminism of the concept of woman itself – its reference within a heteronormative understanding of sexual difference and desire, and its reference within hierarchies of political domination and oppression (Phelan, 1989). Much the same is true of the concept of woman in relation to racial and post-colonial struggles for liberation, which are always intersected with nationalisms and social class. The result is the destabilization of an apparently timeless and inescapably biological concept – woman – by showing how it often universalizes white, middle-class values and judgements typical of the so-called developed world (Spivak, 1999). Sex and sexuality are thus politically contested concepts, not because they are internally contradictory or referentially confused, but because they are constitutive of political projects. Their unique power arises because, more than other concepts, these two define – through ideological elaborations – what an individual human is and is supposed to be. So-called ‘trans’ and intersex bodies fit none of these projects, and thus, when made visible, they challenge internationally and nationally imposed frameworks through which persons are recognized as safely normal, or otherwise (Spade, 2011). Gender is a concept originating in nineteenth-century social science, when an objective interest in sex and sexuality became morally and politically acceptable, though – as was the case with knowledge production in general – this was largely confined to males. Typically scientific activity was conducted in ways that made woman the problematic sex in relation to male bodies and minds, and further pathologized homosexuals (of either sex, though more usually males) as deviant with respect to heteronormative practices and institutions. The concept gender was understood to refer to behaviour in relation to sexual dimorphism of the body as a biological normality, which in turn was understood to presuppose reproductive capacities and activities as defining for normal human sexuality. Gender was thus a placeholder in a project of normalization and pathologization of bodies and behaviour in relation to heterosexual male presumptions of superiority (over women in terms of sex and over homosexuality in terms of sexuality). From this perspective properly gendered behaviour for males and females would be distinctly different, given bodily differences in relation to reproduction and – so it
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Sex, gender and sexuality 61 was presumed – childcare and domesticity. Heterosexual men were thus in charge of knowledge-creation in relation to the properly organized sexual behaviour of men and women in relation to each other as different sexes, and in relation to improper sexual behaviour, which was said to contradict natural difference with unnatural sameness. Femininity and masculinity were the concepts through which gender was understood to distinguish female from male behaviour. While this type of descriptive account goes back to Aristotle in his Politics (and was specifically queried by Plato in his Republic), the modern version created therapeutic sciences and reform movements, which did much more than observe supposed regularities and consistencies. Social, medical and moral technologies – using technologies in the very broad sense of tools for building things – were set in motion as political projects. These made human behaviour conform to prescriptive accounts of human excellence and normality, as against deviance, pathology and criminality. These projects included missionary evangelizations, national liberations, racial liberations, class liberations and eugenic sciences, separately and in various combinations. Women’s movements – local, national and international – often mobilized to publicize and enforce laws and policies founded on views of this kind as to what was appropriate to femininity as a universal norm, and what was not (Mottier, 2008). Gender as a transnational technology was distinctly asymmetric, in that it typically focused far more on controlling women’s individuality, agency, bodies and psychologies than men’s. The feminist assault on male-centric drunkenness and domestic violence was a rare exception. The illegalization of male homosexuality that gendered sciences provoked – and that heteronormative religions and moralities reinforced – was also a rare exception to a general practice of presuming males to be unproblematic. This presumption was general, because masculinity was already promulgated as normal to humanity as such, and indeed as a zone where the highest accomplishments of civilization uniquely rested. Commonplace understandings of gender as masculinity and femininity thus create not just a binary, but an overt hierarchy of oppression (Butler, 1990). Gender hierarchy plays out as double standards through which men are generally exalted in virtue of their supposed strengths, and their weaknesses excused, and women are generally relegated to bear their burdens, and to pay heavily for their weaknesses. Genderism is thus an ideology of power, rather like orientalism: while orientalism argues a binary and creates a hierarchy of West over East, it is also to some extent internalized as an ideology by the colonized and oppressed. It thus
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becomes self-confirming of a superiority that might otherwise be contested (Said, 2003). Feminist consciousness-raising is a strategy directed at exactly this issue, namely addressing the subjectivities of those who have grown up with an identity that is authentically felt, but which – with effort – could be questioned and changed. Gender science – pursued from the privileged perspective of white, heterosexual, well-off males – was wholly complicit in the exclusion of women from many aspects of political life (such as voting and officeholding), economic activity (on grounds of marriage or childcare), moral probity (such as unmarried mothers and sex-workers), physical and sporting activities (on grounds of supposed weakness), scientific and cultural life (on grounds of insufficient intelligence or talent), and business and political leadership (on grounds of emotional and psychological unsuitability). The liberation of women since the mid-twentieth century has largely consisted of rolling exclusion back to positions of varying marginalization, with only rare instances of female control. International declarations of rights, national legal acts and policies of anti-discrimination often result in a substitution of fictive equalities of principle for real equalities in practice. Even in societies where principles and practices of gender equality are in place and exercised without undue hindrance, there are religious and other exemptions that preserve male exclusivity and therefore dominance in practical and representational terms. Gender equality itself is highly problematic conceptually precisely because gender constructs a hierarchy, not simply a binary. Gender presumptions arise from a supposedly universal binary of bodily difference. However, since an equality-challenge presumes the conditions through which masculinity and femininity arise as the two categories of behaviour which supposedly exhaust and express two kinds of humanity, it is difficult to see what common factor of humanity is being equalized between the two. On the one hand feminist thinking of gender has exposed masculinity as a power-structure serving the interests of some men over others, and all men over women (Hearn, 1987). On the other hand, strategies of inclusion and reversal, rather than transformative change, often fail to challenge the stereotyping and identity-forming processes through which the concept of gender – and the gendertechnologies which construct masculinity as privilege – has arisen in the first place (Squires, 2005).
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Sex, gender and sexuality 63
GENDER AND THE HUMAN NORM Masculinity and femininity are asymmetric in another way, too. Feminist theorizing has identified ways in which men and masculinity merge with a generically human norm. When this happens, the individual, the citizen and the person are all conceived as not women, since they appear unencumbered with female-specific phenomena, notably menstruation, pregnancy, parturition and lactation. Thus the generic human appears as apparently de-gendered, but in practice always covertly gendered masculine. However, in practical contexts men and masculinity often appear as overtly gendered, but as masculine in ways that are politically and morally presumed to be admirable, or at least unproblematically respectable. These include designations such as husband, father, lover, son and brother, whereas reprehensible aspects of men occupying these roles are presumed non-existent or projected into deviant cases and unaccountable departures from a beneficent norm. Feminists have anyway argued that these roles often or very considerably define and produce the oppression of women. Feminist activisms and researchers have exposed the self-serving incuriosity, widespread hypocrisy and political obduracy that masculinity thrives on, as well as the crucial intersections with race/ethnicity, class, citizenship and numerous other socio-political categorizations that often disguise the gender hierarchy involved. Once the destructive aspects of masculinity begin to appear, often men or males disappear as a named category, and apparently de-gendered criminals, rapists, perpetrators, armies, insurgents, terrorists and the like ‘people’ appear instead. This is not to say that women never do destructive things, and that women never participate in structures of masculine oppression (against other women and many men). Rather this is to note that common locutions identify women as such and in negative ways more than they do men, who are undoubtedly the authors of far more individual and collective violence and destruction (Howe, 2008). Many men respond to feminist work on gender by presuming that it is merely a synonym for women, and doesn’t name anything about them that requires engagement. Analytically masculinities have been arranged into various typologies and hierarchies, often with respect to the damage they cause to women in precisely the way that feminists have indicated. The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been coined to indicate the way that the hierarchical elaboration of masculinities mirrors the Gramscian concept of domination by consent. This concept refers to the social structures that are widely accepted as traditional or natural or normal through which
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individuals understand themselves and their social position. These selfunderstandings and socially validated institutions are hard to shift, even when it might otherwise be clear that they are damaging to the individuals concerned, as well as to others. This influential analysis of masculinity defuses allegations that feminists blame men as such and in toto for women’s oppression – allegations that are very largely untrue. Instead this view of masculinity focuses on a type that is not merely dominant but dominating, and over many men – who might come to object – as well as over women (as publicized by feminists) (Ashe, 2011). However, even approached in this way the analysis itself apparently de-centres women as subjects and objects of knowledge, even when some feminist women undertake research and activism in the area. Also, any thorough investigation of perpetrators of oppression and violence (as opposed to victims) inevitably has a humanizing – and therefore disturbing – aspect to it, as opposed to a simple ascription of moral and political opprobrium to a less well-defined ‘other’ taken to be generic (Cohn, 1987).
POLITICS AND GENDER Sex, gender and sexuality have a long and complicated history in theory and in practice and can never be taken in some purely or merely descriptive sense suggesting an unproblematic object of reference in the body. These concepts have been most thoroughly developed within a feminist frame. Centring sex, gender and sexuality as major concepts challenges the masculinist presumptions through which world politics has been understood.
REFERENCES Ashe, Fidelma (2011) The New Politics of Masculinity: Men, Power and Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Beauvoir, Simone de (1997) The Second Sex, London: Vintage. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Abingdon: Routledge. Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12 (4), 687–718. Enloe, Cynthia (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fausto-Sterling, Ann (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender and Politics in the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books. Freeden, Michael (1998) Ideologies and Political Theories: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Sex, gender and sexuality 65 Hawkesworth, Mary (2006) Globalization and Feminist Activism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hearn, Jeff (1987) Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism, Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Howe, Adrian (2008) Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the Man Question, Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish. Mottier, Véronique (2008) Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phelan, Shane (1989) Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Said, Edward (2003) Orientalism, London: Penguin. Spade, Dean (2011) Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Boston, MA: South End Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Post-colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Squires, Judith (2005) ‘Is mainstreaming transformative? Theorizing mainstreaming in the context of diversity and deliberation’, Social Politics, 12 (3), 366–388. Stevens, Jacqueline (1999) Reproducing the State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (1993) Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York: Columbia University Press.
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9. Feminist methodologies and world politics Annick T.R. Wibben
There is no single distinct feminist method. Feminist political and ethical commitments, however, shape research questions and approaches profoundly. Rather than elevating the discussion of methods and methodology over all other concerns, as some scholarship in international relations (IR) does, feminist scholars use a variety of methods as long as they allow them to address questions they are interested in researching. As a profoundly interdisciplinary endeavor, feminist scholarship is guided by a feminist consciousness. As Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (2006) summarize, feminist methodological debates include “selfconscious reflections on epistemological assumptions, ontological perspective, ethical responsibilities and method choices” (2006: 6, emphasis added). What is more, since feminist research is a critical endeavor, feminist methodological deliberations generally show an awareness of how research can serve to highlight or obscure particular power relations. Methodological choices, including those about particular methods, are always also political.
RECOVERING VOICES Much feminist research aims to recover or highlight voices of those heretofore rarely acknowledged or heard – often women, whose lives are historically underrepresented in IR. This is not to say that all feminist scholars are only interested in “women” (or, more accurately, ciswomen) empirically or as a category of analysis. Many are also interested in how gender is constitutive of and/or constituted by global politics. Nonetheless, “woman” often remains the central subject of feminist analysis, because: (a) there are many scholars whose work very much focuses explicitly on women “as they exist”;1 and (b) when scholars engage with women’s lived experiences, they can use the trick of thinking “of women as stick figures… while also realizing that we cannot talk to stick figures” (Sylvester, 1994: 13). This experience, however, must be contextualized, because gender “as a historically determined difference … can never be studied in isolation from other social processes such as race, 66
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Feminist methodologies and world politics 67 ethnicity and class” (Holvino, 2010: 257). In other words, intersectionality in feminist politics means exploring how those identified as women are experiencing global politics at the intersections of gender, class, caste, race, sexuality, ability, indigeneity, religion and more. Embracing an intersectional approach, which emerges from a critical political stance, means that one always has to pay attention to specific contexts and their politics. Without attentiveness to the specificities of particular struggles within which narratives of identity politics are articulated, the latter quickly mimic hegemonic representations of identity where some, usually the already marginal members, are once again excluded from belonging. In their effort to amplify a multiplicity of (previously unheard) voices, feminist scholars must make every effort not to repeat the epistemic violence embedded in traditional, Eurocentric frameworks (see, for example, Chowdhry and Nair, 2004; Agathangelou and Ling, 2009). If we can “avoid attributing fixed identity groupings to the dynamic processes of positionality and location on the one hand and the contested and shifting political boundaries on the other” (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 200), we are taking a step in the right direction. Of crucial importance is also the consideration of who gets to speak on whose behalf – “because not all women are equally vulnerable with respect to race, class, etc. some women’s voices are more likely to be heard than others by others who have heretofore been giving – or silencing – the accounts of women’s lives” (Lugones and Spelman, 1983: 574). How open a researcher is to engaging in self-reflection, interrogating her own positionality and privilege, questioning its impact on what can be perceived, being willing and able to be surprised, and adopting a stance of curiosity – all of these matter greatly here (Wibben, 2011). In 1984, Chandra Mohanty highlighted the perpetuation of epistemic violence evident in the problematic homogenizing of Third World women: “Universal images of ‘the third-world woman’ (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding ‘third-world difference’ to ‘sexual difference,’ are predicated on (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives” ([1984] 1988: 81). Setting themselves up as the norm, 30 years after Mohanty’s original intervention, feminist scholars (and activists) still slip all too easily into a colonialist representation (Narayan, 1997). Their Eurocentric, colonialist representations are constituted by ahistorical framings that lack attention to complicated, varying local contexts and instead “portray Third-World contexts as dominated by the grip of ‘traditional practices’” (Narayan, 1997: 48–49). Additionally Western feminists in particular need to be aware that “from the vantage point of the colonized … the term
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‘research’ is inevitably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 1). Knowledge creation about the Other always involves drawing the Other into our frame; the identification of issues, actors and events is tailored to our imperial needs, which too often have included the settling of lands, the management of people(s) and the ruling of the Other. These critiques remain relevant today. Knowledge about global issues is produced largely by Western-trained academics, often in Western institutions, with too little reflection on the institutional contexts, embedded assumptions and bias that are reflected in how research is done.2 Since research rarely emerges from those at the receiving end of the policies feminist scholars examine, propose and/or support, scholars of global issues must be particularly attuned to the consequences of scholarship. Not only have feminists been complicit in violence by directly supporting policies that further harm women but, as gender gets mainstreamed, ideas that were developed as part of a radical critique of global institutions and processes are appropriated in support of the very same. Given feminist ethical and political commitments, this is untenable.
FEMINIST COMMITMENTS While not all feminists need to, or could, agree on everything such that there would be a single feminist position, some basic commitments are not negotiable; feminists share a political project committed to emancipation/empowerment and broader social justice, which has to be context-specific and constantly renegotiated. Feminism, defined as such, is not just about adding women, achieving gender equality, studying gender variance or the gendering of institutions and practices, but implies a consciousness of systems of oppression, including capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism and more. Feminist research, especially when it exhibits this kind of broader political consciousness, involves making connections between categories (and disciplines) that are too often considered separately so that intersecting oppressions can be examined and challenged. These commitments also imply that feminist scholars often engage in research that emanates from and is directly applicable to particular activist communities (of which the researcher herself – or himself – might be a part). Consequently, feminists most prize participatory research where they work with or alongside communities and are committed to sharing their findings once the study is completed as a way
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Feminist methodologies and world politics 69 to “give back” to the community (of which the researcher might have become a part in the process). Questions that arise as a result are: Does the researcher have to be sympathetic to the cause she is studying? What if we research those we do not agree with? What if we find out about issues our community partners do not want to hear about? Or what happens to activists when we study their strategies, publish them and thus possibly ruin a strategic advantage or, worse, endanger their lives? A good feminist methodological discussion in the context of global politics thus must always also include considerations about whose aims and interests the research is serving: Do we, as privileged researchers, really have something to offer the communities we are studying or are we appropriating others’ lives? To what end? Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 3) describes how “at the common sense level research was talked about [among the colonized] both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument.” Given these historical and present power relations, feminist methodological considerations, particularly in the context of global politics, must include attention to the epistemic violence that accompanies them.
STRATEGIC COMMITMENTS AND METHODOLOGICAL CHOICES Answers to methodological questions often depend on the more general political orientation of the researcher and are reflected in the ontological and epistemological commitments shaping their work. What is more, as activists, feminist scholars have also used their work strategically to further particular conversations – or to stay clear of them. When feminist scholars make strategic decisions to employ one or another method to engage in particular conversations it might mean accepting the limits of parameters set by others – for example, by applying quantitative methods to engage with the United States (US) foreign policy establishment. This is a possible option when we take seriously the idea of method as a tool and appreciate variations in feminist methodological commitments. It does, however, come at the expense of other considerations such as availability of relevant data, nuance regarding the social construction of gender as well as intersectional understandings thereof, and most importantly the ability to question existing frames of understanding. Many feminists are rightly suspicious of the kind of quantitative methods that require use of databases; states and global institutions rarely collect data on aspects of life that might be of interest to feminist scholars, and
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“quantitative research methods are instruments for constructing reality in certain ways” (Tickner, 2006: 37). While quantitative approaches can be helpful in particular contexts and might provide a certain air of objectivity and rigor, they invariably replicate disciplinary bias. Feminist scholars interested in more radical feminist interventions thus tend to prefer qualitative and interpretative methods (see also Yanow, 2006) because they offer more flexibility to accommodate a radical critique as well as crucial feminist insights about the instability of the category “woman.” These limits of quantitative methods show that at least in feminist contexts they are probably best applied in combination with methods that allow incorporation of reflexivity, a key element of feminist methodologies, into the research process. Nonetheless, quantitative methods are part of a broader conversation that propels the feminist project forward – the trick is to inhabit the contradictions that arise and to discover what makes them productive (see also Wibben, 2011), while realizing that analytical categories are always unstable. (Self-)reflexivity, a commitment “to exploring absence, silence, difference, oppression, and the power of epistemology” (Ackerly and True, 2010: 23) on the part of the researcher as well as within the feminist community, is crucial to research that is always in the process of challenging exclusionary disciplinary frameworks. Since feminists usually arrive late in an already established discipline, their methodological toolkit has to include the development of ways to facilitate reading against the grain. Another aspect of feminist reflexivity, therefore, is attentiveness to the power dynamics of how boundaries are drawn and maintained as well as relationships built and destroyed. Additionally, considering the location of the researcher in relation to all these matters is a key aspect of what Ackerly and True (2010) propose characterizes a feminist research ethics.
SITUATED KNOWLEDGE A feminist research ethic “entails a self-reflexive commitment to revisiting epistemological choices, boundaries and relationships throughout the research process” (Ackerly and True, 2010: 38). Unlike traditional science where objectivity (supposedly) arises from a view from nowhere, “feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges,” writes Donna Haraway (1988: 581). Those who worry that some feminist methodological choices might lead to relativism must consider that they are likely falling into the trap of accepting the universalism/relativism dichotomy of traditional science, notes Haraway. The feminist insistence
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Feminist methodologies and world politics 71 on “partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the web of connections called solidarity in politics and conversations in epistemology” sidesteps this problem and moves beyond the supposed equality of the view from nowhere, which is really “a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry” (ibid.: 584). For feminists, the question of objectivity arises also in the context of debates about authenticity of voice, that is, the question of who gets to speak for whom. As noted above, who is speaking to whom and how is a crucial consideration given the power differentials that structure the research process. To formulate this question as an issue of authenticity, however, distracts from the political stakes involved and can act as a silencing move in itself. Bina D’Costa (2006: 138) makes this point forcefully: “We should discard our self-protective stand on who is best able to represent the marginalized and become more forthright with our own research commitment. We should be able to say what we have to say while being aware of the politics of location.” Focusing on authenticity implies that we could determine, possibly by reference to external or essential criteria, once and for all the truth of an account – yet, especially given intervening issues of language, voice and representation, how would this be done (see also Wibben, 2011)? Instead, “the different experiences and contexts of the subject, the interviewer, and the anticipated reader mean that representation is an intricate process” (D’Costa, 2006: 139). An intersectional approach retains a deep commitment to political contestation. As such, it is attuned to dynamics of location and positionality and also operating in a terrain of contested and shifting political goals and associations (see also Yuval-Davis, 2006), and so can accommodate these concerns. To represent the multiplicity and complexity of women’s voices and insights, feminist scholars draw on a variety of fields for inspiration (methodological and otherwise) to construct an interdisciplinary toolbox. This interdisciplinarity, while sometimes exhausting for the researcher herself, enriches feminist methodological debates. Particularly postcolonial and intersectional theorizing is of crucial importance to global studies, yet too few feminist scholars (in international relations) really engage in this work.3 This chapter, therefore, has tried to highlight the crucial importance of these interventions.
CONCLUSION In line with their political and ethical commitments, in choosing their methods, feminist scholars should (and do) take great care; they are
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aware that what we can see depends on the lenses we see it through. It is important to debate how we study global issues, because methodological choices are always political. The ethico-political implications of adopting one or another method and its attendant ontological and epistemological choices must remain open to contestation. Disagreements among feminist scholars are not just a matter of convenience or a simple mirroring of the disarray in mainstream epistemologies. Disagreements are shaped by differing political commitments: What kind of feminist politics do you support and how do your methodological choices reflect these?
NOTES 1.
2.
3.
This should be read to indicate a rather narrow focus on those gendered “woman,” as most feminists recognize gender to be a social construction, but some scholars still have a hard time considering sex, sexuality, the body and more in this manner. Indeed broad training in research methodologies, ethics and more is woefully inadequate in many graduate programs. While most feminists spend considerable amounts of time considering methodological choices, not enough of it is published in collections accessible to students and junior scholars (exceptions are Ackerly et al., 2006; Ackerly and True, 2010). For important exceptions see for example Chowdhry and Nair (2004) and Agathangelou and Ling (2009). There is also more engagement outside of the international relations field.
REFERENCES Ackerly, Brooke A. and Jacqui True (2010) Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ackerly, Brooke A., Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds) (2006) Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agathangelou, Anna and Lily H.M. Ling (2009) Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds, London: Routledge. Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair (2004) Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class, London: Routledge. D’Costa, Bina (2006) ‘Marginalized identity: new frontiers of research for IR?’, in Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds), Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 129–152. Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14 (3), 575–599. Holvino, Evangelina (2010) ‘Intersections: the simultaneity of race, gender and class in organization studies’, Gender, Work and Organization, 17 (3), 248–277. Lugones, María and Elizabeth V. Spelman (1983) ‘Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for “the woman’s voice”’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 6 (6), 573–581. Mohanty, Chandra T. ([1984] 1988) ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Feminist Review, 30, 61–88.
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Feminist methodologies and world politics 73 Narayan, Uma (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-world Feminism, London: Routledge. Sylvester, Christine (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (2006) ‘Feminism meets international relations: some methodological issues’, in Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds), Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–41. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edn, London: Zed Books. Wibben, Annick T.R. (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, London: Routledge. Yanow, Dvora (ed.) (2006) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006) ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (3), 193–209.
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PART II THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND BELONGING
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10. The gendered state in international relations Johanna Kantola
Feminist research has been intrigued by key paradoxes and dichotomies that the state gives rise to: the public–private dichotomy, the dilemma of in and out of the state, and the relationships that the state has to feminist politics and struggles. In feminist international relations (IR) more specifically, questions about state sovereignty, the state boundaries between the national and the international, and the fiction of the state as a person are at the centre of feminist critiques of mainstream theorizing. General trends in feminist theorizing about the state include a move away from essentialist notions about women and men and the state. Black feminist theorizing about gender, race, ethnicity, and sexism has become more mainstream with the popularity of the notion of intersectionality that highlights how gender intersects with race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class, and other inequality categories. Instead of the state being a real essentialized object, feminist theories tend to explore the ways in which states need to be constantly reproduced through discourses, practices, or material circuits. Feminist scholars explore the power relations behind these constructions, the femininities and masculinities that they rely upon and reproduce, and their differentiated gender impacts. State processes, policies, institutions, discourses, practices, and norms are shown to be gendered and gendering and constitutive of gender orders. States and nations are also racialized and sexualized in that they use norms around heterosexuality to reproduce the state and nation. Feminist scholars have coined the terms homonationalism and homoprotectionism to illustrate how the states draw new boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’: the Others (Puar, 2007). In these approaches, state interests are constructed in the very processes where they are represented or articulated. The ‘affective turn’ in feminist theory further helps in understanding the role of emotions in holding states together (Ahmed, 2004).
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FEMINIST DEBATES ON THE STATE First, the literature on women and the state focuses on women’s exclusion from political, economic, and military state power. Its aim is to expose and explain women’s inferior positions in the decision-making processes when compared to those of men. The policies of states can be beneficial or detrimental to these women, and the overall goal is to add women into the existing (state) institutions. The notion of power is based on a top-down relationship between those who have power and those who do not. Power is thus something to possess, and it is given qualities such as ‘political’, ‘economic’, or ‘military’. The state is also fairly unitary and well defined. It consists of an easily identifiable set of institutions where the powers are located. An example of this type of analysis is the argument that women threaten the key values of states, including autonomy, rationality, and even aggressiveness, and they rather represent dependency, irrationality, emotions, and peacefulness. The analysis of the exclusion of women from the state and women’s opposition to the state is based on clear boundaries about both women and the state. A number of theoretical traditions view the state less optimistically or positively. Here the state is theorized as patriarchal, abusive, or capitalist. These critiques come from very different theoretical traditions, ranging from Catharine MacKinnon’s radical feminism to Marxist and socialist feminism and to Judith Butler’s poststructuralism. The state is theorized to work together with ideologies or modes of governance such as neoliberalism or capitalism to appropriate feminist movement goals, for example in relation to sexual violence (Bumiller, 2008). Radical feminists stress the patriarchal nature of the state, which requires analysing the roles of the state in perpetuating gender inequalities. The state is not an isolated, neutral and narrow institution but rather is embedded in broader gendered societal structures that in turn shape women’s engagements with the state and the policies that emanate from it. MacKinnon (1991) directs her critique at the liberal state in particular and criticizes its laws and policies. Even if the laws on rape, abortion, and pornography are formally there, they are never fully enforced. At the same time, states enforce the equation of women with sexuality, which adds to their oppression. Whilst liberal feminists understand the state in terms of its political institutions, radical feminists extend their focus to the wider structures of the state and society. Radical feminist work shows the patriarchal nature of the formal and informal practices of politics and connects this to the ‘personal’ – families, sexuality, intimate relations, violence – which
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The gendered state in international relations 79 significantly expands the scope of what is studied as politics and the political. The concept of patriarchy informs feminist strategies and political goals: the whole structure of male domination must be dismantled if women’s liberation is to be achieved. Civil society, rather than the state, is the sphere in which women should concentrate their energies in order to challenge patriarchy. Whereas for radical feminists the state is patriarchal, for Marxist feminists the state is essentially capitalist. The state is not just an institution but also a form of social relations. Women’s subordination plays a role in sustaining capitalism through the reproduction of the labour force within the family. Women are oppressed in work and in exclusion from it, and Marxist feminists argue that the familial ideology is to blame. When criticizing welfare states, Marxist feminists argue that the state helps to reproduce and maintain the familial ideology primarily through welfare state policies. In contrast to radical feminists, Marxist feminists argue that women are important in the struggle against capitalism as workers, not as women, and the category ‘women’ is employed in reproductive terms. Socialist feminists attempt to combine the insights of both Marxist and radical feminism. From radical feminists, socialist feminists derive the understanding of the system of oppression called patriarchy and from Marxist feminists the importance of the class oppression defining the situation of all workers. The two approaches are combined in analyses of this ‘dual system’ of capitalism and patriarchy. Feminist IR scholars build upon these approaches and have moved from analysing women and the state to gender and the state. In other words, this gender and the state literature moves from analysing sexist states to patriarchal and later to gendered states. Gender is not a variable but rather an analytical category where gender is a social construct. The focus shifts from women’s exclusion from state institutions to understanding the gendered structures of these institutions and to transforming them. Definitions of power are not unidirectional but multifaceted. The notion of gendered states points to the subtle reproduction of a certain gender system and gender power orders. It is not just that states construct gender, but gender also constitutes the state. The state is a process rather than an easily defined set of institutions as above. This calls for a focus on the complex relations between gender and the state and on the processes that continue to reproduce gender hierarchies in states. For example, in the neoliberal discourse on globalization, the state is typically ‘feminized’ in relation to the more robust market by being represented as a drag on the global economy that must be subordinated and minimized (Marchand and Runyan, 2000: 14). However, the state also paradoxically takes on a new role by becoming more akin to the private
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sector and is thus remasculinized as it is internationalized to assist global capital and as its coercive and surveillance capacities are being enhanced (Marchand and Runyan, 2000: 14). In this way, gender is shown to be fundamental to the constructions of the state. Development scholars point to the fundamentally different meaning of the state in non-Western countries. Like Western debates, these literatures are concerned to examine the processes of state institutions in exercises of power in various areas of the public and private lives of women and women’s resistance to these intrusions (Rai and Lievesley, 1996: 1). However, there are important differences. Postcolonialism, nationalism, economic modernization, and state capacity emerge as key issues in this literature. For example, in Indonesia, the colonial state introduced the emphasis on motherhood and the domesticity of women that was characteristic of Victorian European societies (Wieringa, 2002: 47). During the process of decolonization, women were first urged to join the battle against the colonizers, but later their rights were forgotten or put aside, leading to an even more conservative construction of women’s roles in the state (Wieringa, 2002: 47). When exploring women’s activism, for example in Africa, the ways in which patriarchy is combined with the (neo)patrimonialism in the state become central (Tripp, 2001). In neopatrimonial states, ‘claims to authority are based on personal relations of loyalty and dependence that stand above the law’ (Tripp, 2001: 106) and when combined with patriarchy can exacerbate women’s positions and chances in the states.
REPRODUCING THE STATE DISCURSIVELY AND MATERIALLY Instead of regarding the state as a real essentialized object, feminist theories tend to explore the ways in which it needs to be constantly reproduced through discourses, practices, or material circuits. The unity of the state is reproduced through three key ideas that still dominate IR debates about the state: (1) sovereignty; (2) the distinction between domestic and international politics; and (3) the fiction of the state as a person (Kantola, 2007). Feminist scholarship convincingly illustrates how appealing to these notions is part of the gendered reproduction of the state. Poststructural feminists have sought to deconstruct the internal unity of the state and to theorize the differentiated state as a diverse set of institutions. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson challenge the unity of the state and argue that the state consists of a set of arenas that lack
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The gendered state in international relations 81 coherence (1992). Elisabeth Prügl defines the postmodern state as ‘a decentered state in which authority is shared by multiple levels of government’ (2010: 448). In poststructural analyses, then, the state is a differentiated set of institutions, practices, agencies, and discourses. The state is depicted as a discursive process, and politics and the state are conceptualized in broad terms. The state unity is reproduced discursively through repeated performances (Kantola, 2007; Wadley, 2010). Particular discourses and histories construct state boundaries, identities, and agency. In this process, sovereign states require ‘others’ to establish their very existence: men and states stand against anarchy ‘outside’ and are distinguished from women and feminized others ‘inside’. Cynthia Weber stresses that sovereignty is to be understood as a discursive or cultural way by which the state is reproduced as the natural actor in world politics (1998: 90–91). For Doty, statecraft is not primarily about relations between different state units, but about the construction and reconstruction of the units themselves (Doty, 1996: 141). Thus, a construction of the ‘inside’ versus the ‘outside’ of nations is a function of a state’s discursive authority and power, that is, its ability to fix meaning and identity in relatively stable ways (Doty, 1996: 141). Feminists have questioned the fiction of the ‘state as person’, who has the most important identity in international relations. When states are discussed as actors or persons, they are often given human-like characteristics: rationality, identity, interests, and beliefs. The state has an identity, the defence of which is in the national interest. Feminists challenge the tendency to treat the state as a genderless person and instead point to the ways in which gender is central to the performances of the state (Wadley, 2010: 40). The masculine identity of states is built upon the values of rationality and aggressiveness (Steans, 1998: 48). The values attached to masculinity and femininity can be seen in the words used to describe states: ‘rogue states’ are uncontrollable masculine problem cases, ‘nightwatchman states’ masculine minimalist states. Feminine epithets are used to delegitimize states: ‘nanny states’ are feminine welfare states that result in problematic dependency relations and inhibit competition and market values (Kantola et al., 2011). Feminists have also emphasized the problems related to the tendency to see the state as the key identity category in international relations; this results in the exclusion of such identity categories as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality and renders them invisible. States homogenize political identities in ways that disguise differences within the state – including gender differences – and create differences between states. An expectation that the state is the embodiment of a collective identity reduces all other dimensions impacting on identities, such as
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violence and conflicts, to relations between states. This is based on an idea that citizens identify first and foremost with the state and that the relations between citizens are defined through the state (Steans, 1998: 62–63). The state is not inherently patriarchal but has been historically constructed as patriarchal in a political process whose outcome is/was open. The patriarchal state can be seen, then, not as the manifestation of patriarchal essence, but as the centre of a reverberating set of power relations and political processes in which patriarchy is both constructed and contested. Masculinity is central for understanding ‘the multiple modes of power circulating through the domain called the state’ (Brown, 1995: 177). A number of poststructural feminists ask what the most effective strategies are for empowering women in their engagements with the state. In other words, the feminist aim becomes to make sense not only of the state’s impact on gender, but also of the ways in which the state can be made use of and changed through feminist struggles. The analyses allow the complex, multidimensional, and differentiated relations between the state and gender to be taken into account. They recognize that the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists, thus deconstructing the dichotomy between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the state. Within a framework of diverse discourses and power relations, gender diversity and differences in women’s experiences come to the fore. More recently, ‘renewed materialist feminism’ conceptualizes the state as differentiated too. However, the state and its effects cannot be understood merely in terms of discourses but are embedded in the material phenomena and processes. The renewed material feminism accepts social constructionism but conceptualizes the material realm as irreducible to culture and discourse. When explaining the renewed scholarly interest in materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost single out not only the advances in natural sciences and biopolitical and bioethical issues but also the global political economy and understanding its structural conditions such as neoliberalism (Coole and Frost, 2010: 6–7). From the point of view of theorizing the state, what becomes important is the biopolitical interest of the modern state: the state’s role in managing the life, health, and death of its populations. Seemingly technical questions about biological life processes enter the political order because the state must make decisions about the worthiness of different lives (Coole and Frost, 2010: 23). In this way, states exert powers in shaping, constraining, and constituting life chances and existential opportunities. The exercises of these powers take place in complex circuits ‘whereby discursive and material forms are inextricable
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The gendered state in international relations 83 yet irreducible and material structures are simultaneously over- and underdetermined’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 27). This view encourages Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, biopolitics, and the role of discourse in maintaining social order to be taken seriously and to incorporate the state’s role in maintaining the conditions of capital accumulation into the analyses (Coole and Frost, 2010: 30).
THE CURRENT CONTEXT The changing political and societal context is reflected in the feminist debates about the state. What was first discussed as ‘globalization’ has now been specified as neoliberalization, which takes different forms in different parts of the world. Neoliberal governmentality reflects the infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics. A crosscutting theme in current feminist research is the manifold impact of neoliberalism and its manifestations in states and nations, and feminist engagements with them to the extent that we can talk about a move towards ‘market feminism’ (Kantola and Squires, 2012). Feminist scholars explore, in particular, the ways in which neoliberalism is often combined with other ideologies such as conservatism, radical right populism, or homonationalism, and the gendered outcomes of this. Neoliberalism has become an important theme for feminists seeking to understand contemporary states. Neoliberal logics of governance have resulted in changes in state powers that have been described as state power evaporating upwards, downwards, sideways, and laterally to international organizations, substate organizations, non-elected state bodies, private enterprises, public–private partnerships, and civil societies, with manifold consequences for feminist politics and engagements with the state. The European Union (EU) is an example of a suprastate actor whose powers result in fundamental changes in member states through processes of Europeanization, hence challenging conventional notions of state sovereignty. For Elisabeth Prügl, the EU ‘epitomizes the decentered postmodern state’ and the loss of nation-state autonomy in the context of globalization: engages actors beyond and below the nation state (Prügl, 2010: 448). Neoliberalism has also been conceptualized as a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as non-political and non-ideological problems that need technical solutions. These changes in the states are also transforming state-based feminist strategies and practices from previous ‘state feminism’ to ‘market feminism’ or governance feminism, where
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feminist knowledge is appropriated and transformed to the service of neoliberal states.
REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (2004) ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22 (2), 117–139. Brown, Wendy (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in the Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bumiller, Kristin (2008) In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (2010) ‘Introducing new materialisms’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–43. Doty, Roxanne (1996) ‘Sovereignty and the nation: constructing the boundaries of national identity’, in Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–147. Kantola, Johanna (2007) ‘The gendered reproduction of the state in international relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9 (4), 270–283. Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires (2012) ‘From state feminism to market feminism’, International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400. Kantola, Johanna, Cristian Norocel and Jemima Repo (2011) ‘Gendering school shootings in Finland’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18 (2), 183–198. MacKinnon, Catharine (1991) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marchand, Marianne and Anne Sisson Runyan (2000) ‘Introduction: feminist sightings of global restructuring: conceptualizations and reconceptualizations’, in Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring, London: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Pringle, Rosemary and Sophie Watson (1992) ‘“Women’s interests” and the poststructuralist state’, in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 53–73. Prügl, Elisabeth (2010) ‘Feminism and the postmodern state: gender mainstreaming in European rural development’, Signs, 35 (2), 447–475. Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rai, Shirin and Geraldine Lievesley (eds) (1996) Women and the State: International Perspectives, London: Taylor & Francis. Steans, Jill (1998) Gender and International Relations, Cambridge: Polity. Tripp, Aili Mari (2001) ‘The politics of autonomy and cooptation in Africa: the case of the Ugandan women’s movement’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 39 (1), 101–128. Wadley, Jonathan (2010) ‘Gendering the state: performativity and protection in international security’, in Laura Sjoberg (ed.), Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 38–58. Weber, Cynthia (1998) ‘Performative states’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (1), 77–95. Wieringa, Saskia (2002) Sexual Politics in Indonesia, London: Palgrave.
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11. Gender and citizenship Jeff Hearn and Alp Biricik
In the authoritative body of mainstream work, citizenship has typically been conceptualized in a universal, often abstract manner, easily leading to its construction as a very general, supposedly ‘objective’ notion. Such leanings to decontextualize tend to locate the concept of citizenship within the nation-state and, simultaneously, neglect the diversified contexts in which citizenship, and gendered citizenship in particular, are practised, articulated and experienced. Citizenship is usually conceived as based in rights, responsibilities and/or obligations, and is inclusive of, and sometimes conflates, political and economic entitlements, access and belonging. This involves, in different combinations and to different degrees, not only formal political representation, but also social and cultural rights, access to state machinery and public services, and allegiance to, support for and recruitment to nation, national militaries and militarisms. T.H. Marshall’s (1950) analysis of citizenship has greatly impacted on debates on the issue. Based in socio-historical analysis of the evolution of citizenship in the UK and making links between the rise of capitalism from the eighteenth century until the twentieth century, the work of Marshall defines citizenship as a status bestowed on individuals who are full members of a community. Through socio-historical analysis, Marshall demonstrates the evolution of the social elements that constructed social citizenship in the UK context chronologically as: civil citizenship (emergence of the rights necessary for individual freedom, freedom of speech, and the right to own property in the eighteenth century); political citizenship (emergence of rights to engage in politics such as suffrage and to become a member of a parliament in the nineteenth century); and social citizenship (emergence of the rights to live in economic and secure welfare environments in the twentieth century). His model frames broadly three main axes of institutions of citizenship: law courts, parliament and the welfare system. This idea of citizenship has been subject to strong critique, as it often assumes a specific kind of ethnicized nation-state context, the welfare state, the nuclear family, full male employment, and indeed gendered public/private divisions. On the other hand, the model does provide some 85
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momentum for analysing, and indeed arguing for, historical ‘progressive’ shifts of citizenships: from civil to political to social, and arguably also to economic, cultural, sexual, bodily, intimate, inclusive and other potential citizenships. In many cases such potentialities can be seen as the product of struggles by social movements and their members to become citizens. A historical notion of the dynamic social processes by which people become citizens, what might even be called ‘becoming citizens’, nowadays seems particularly pertinent, with possible shifts: from men with property to men more generally, women with property, women more generally, migrants, other Others, adults, and perhaps children (as opposed to the fixity of citizenship in classical city-states, with male masters, not women or slaves, as citizens).
GENDERING CITIZENSHIP Gender, gendered and gendering, as used here, refer not only to the binaries of male/men/masculinity and female/women/femininity (see Chapters 7 and 8 in this volume). Similarly, male/men and female/women are not necessarily understood here as discrete subjects; there are also queer, transgender and aged, migrant and intersectional sexed/gendered subjectivities. Indeed various gender diversities and variances are increasingly being recognized, including transgender citizenship (Monro and Warren, 2004). As noted, citizenship has historically largely been framed by the nation-state, and in terms of their supposedly gender-neutral, in practice often male, often raced, often classed, citizenries. Indeed supposedly non-gendered citizenship may remain patriarchal in form, not least through the continuation of pre-nationalistic discourses and practices, sometimes around particular notions of ‘genderless’ ‘equality’, as in the Soviet regimes, or more generally in the lack of freedom from genderbased violence, surely one of the most obvious yet least recognized negations of citizenship. The nation-state has been characteristically gendered in the sense that its ‘making’ has usually been a project historically led by men, and at least initially for men or certain classes of men, and also accounted and retold as such in many national histories. It is on to this public political base that women’s political participation has been grafted in many, though not all, countries. At times ‘Men’, ‘Nation’ and state have been represented as almost indivisible. This is perhaps clearest in times of war, and in national contexts with male conscription, but also in terms of seeing or representing nations as the nation-state or the state in terms of state machinery, the
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Gender and citizenship 87 military and paramilitary apparatus, departments of internal, home or ‘homeland’ affairs, state foreign policy machinery, state security services and so on. Men/Nation/state is one way of talking about this. Some forms of (male) citizenship, based on notions of male individualism, are in tension with forms of male-dominated nationalism based on notions of collective, often homogenizing, lineage, culture, language, and exclusion of difference, including violent confrontations occurring in the name of such mythic entities as ‘the people’, religion or ‘blood’. Gendering is also often implicit or explicit in the dominant symbolism of the nation or nation-state, and citizenship therein: the fatherland or the motherland, which is in turn ‘protected’ by men. In the light of the various historical marginalizations and exclusions of women, full inclusion of female citizens requires addressing basic structures of gender and other inequalities in society and citizenship. Women’s, and indeed men’s, gendered citizenship is mediated by a broad range of rights and responsibilities (social, political, economic and so on) that might or might not enable them to possess the status of ‘full members’ of a political community, in the widest sense of the words. One set of issues, emphasized by some feminists, concerns questions of care, emotionality, dependency and interdependency in redefining citizenship in public and private spheres, and their interrelations. In this process, or struggle, gender equality and related policies can be important in enhancing women’s rights and participation, yet that process of achieving more gender-equal citizenship can be highly uneven and problematic, not least for women in different social locations. Having said this, it is important to acknowledge that there are major variations between nation-states in how gendering of citizenship operates across the world, depending on their diverse historical and cultural locations. For example, Suad Joseph demonstrates how in Lebanon citizenship is primarily defined through blood ties and how this constructs the subordination of women. She writes: a child derives citizenship … through her/his father. A woman cannot pass citizenship on to her children or foreign husband, except under limited circumstances. If the children have no known father (or known mother), they can obtain citizenship through their mother or independently if neither parent is known … Until 1960, Lebanese women lost their citizenship at marriage when they married a non-citizen. (Joseph, 1997: 81)
A contrasting case is that of Finland, which became in 1906 the first country to give full political rights to all adults: women and men. Full
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national citizenship for all followed in the wake of the rise of the nationalist movement and as part of the struggle for national independence. Somewhat similar struggles for full citizenship simultaneously for women and men have resulted from postcolonial struggles. However, such formal political rights are themselves often gendered in practice and outcome, along with other gender-unequal aspects of citizenship. With these more contextualized and comparative insights, Marshall’s approach to citizenship referred to above has been subject to extensive critique, as employing a universal Western-centric model, for lack of attention to citizenship within imperial projects, for not problematizing the relations of public and private spaces, including freedom from gender-based violence and militarism, and through gender, class and postcolonial critiques. In particular, feminist scholars have contested mainstream citizenship definitions raised by mainstream and male theorists. By underscoring their gender-blindness and narrow focus, especially on class analysis alone, and neglect of women’s movements and rights (Walby, 1994), feminist studies have addressed the symbiotic relations of patriarchy and nation-states in the subordination of women, with women having to develop different social, economic and cultural relations from men to gain full(er) access to public space (Lister, 2011). In such ways the notion of the genderless nation-state citizen(ship) has been critiqued, in both analytical and policy terms, in part through the recognition of the complexities and contradictions of citizenship. Even so, much work on the gendering of citizenship continues to be largely orientated to rights in the public sphere(s). Moreover, the possibilities for citizenship are clearly frequently and severely limited by gender, but there are also limitations in considering citizenship only through the lens of gender (Oleksy et al., 2011). This concerns, for example, giving more attention to the intersections of gender and sexuality, but also, important though they are, this does not mean that they are automatically prioritized over intersections of gender with other social divisions, such as class, race, ethnicity and religion.
SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP An important shift in debates on gender and citizenship over the last 20 years or so has been the growing interest in the place of sexuality in gendered citizenship. The concept of sexual citizenship, coined by David T. Evans (1993), has been discussed through different theorizations and politics, such as ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer, 2001), ‘sexual/intimate
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Gender and citizenship 89 citizenship’ (Weeks, 1998), ‘dissident sexual citizenship’ (Bell and Binnie, 2000), ‘relational rights’, and even ‘life politics’ or ‘emotional democracy’, as promoted by Anthony Giddens (2002). Such concepts broaden conventional notions of citizenship to less formalized arenas that may well be crucial to individuals’ and communities’ senses of wellbeing, thus representing challenges for both analysis and policy development. Sexual citizenship, like citizenship generically, is not amenable to one single definition; it refers to various ‘(sexual) claims of belonging’ and associated sexual rights and sexual responsibilities (non-exploitation and non-oppression of others) (Brown, 1997: 5) that are sought. Gert Hekma explains: Citizens have been defined in classical liberal theory as adult males operating in a free market. These men [sic] were seen abstractly, without sexuality or body. Using a broader concept of citizenship, however, its cultural, ethnic, gendered, and sexual facets can be emphasized. Citizens have genders, sexualities, and bodies that matter in politics. The rights of free expression, bodily autonomy, institutional inclusion, and spatial themes are all pertinent to the concept of sexual citizenship. (Hekma, 2004: 1)
The concept crosses the private and the public, and directs attention to cultural, political, legal and spatialized aspects of sexual activities and expression. While sexual activities tend to take place mainly in private spaces, actual and potential sexual contacts and partners are often found in public spaces – workplaces, educational institutions, the street, pubs and clubs, and increasingly via virtual public spaces, such as the internet – as well as ambiguous private–public spaces, like domestic parties, and virtual private–public spaces. Sexual citizenship, like citizenship generally, is also partly about movement, in several ways, beyond various private domains: whether movement of women from domestic realms or of lesbians and gay men from specific urban locales. In both such cases civil rights of freedom from abuse and violence, including sexual violence, may be insecure. Reformulation of safe public spaces, again in several senses, with full, protected civil rights, is a central part of struggles for sexual citizenship, which grants people sexual entitlements and sexual responsibilities. The emphasis of these studies has been on the failure of dominant citizenship theories to recognize citizenship as sexualized (Richardson, 2000), as well as gendered and raced, and has substantially altered mainstream understandings of the autonomous, rational and masculinized citizen promoted in liberal theory. The concept of sexual citizenship provides several new analytical routes for understanding attempts to
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transcend heteronormative morals and conflicts, for example through same-sex marriage. On the one hand, sexual citizenship studies focus on issues related to the exclusion of LGBT subjects from their citizenship rights, for example the rejection of gay men from military service; on the other, some studies have concentrated on heterosexual individuals’ rightsbased issues related to belonging to a nation or community (Richardson, 2000), such as single mothers, people who get pleasure from nonmonogamous and non-reproductive sex, and so forth. If sexuality is about negotiating power based on demanding the right to inclusion in the nation-state and public space in spatial terms, then, one of the main concerns of sexual citizenship is the production and transformation of geographies (Brown, 1997; Hearn, 2006) and the quest for new spaces of citizenship to ‘reject modern, foundational, and fixed axes of politics’ (Brown, 1997: 3). Geographies of sexual citizenship include streets, parks and squares, as well as the spatial metaphor of the closet. Inclusionary and exclusionary practices and discourses of sexual politics regarding citizenship can be explored in order to further investigate changing geographies of sexuality, and respond analytically to how citizens are governed as ‘good citizens’ and ‘bad citizens’. David Bell and Jon Binnie consider ‘the city as a stage’ (2000: 4) and underscore that urban contexts are asymmetrically organized geographies produced by inclusions and exclusions depending on gender, sexual identity, race and so on (ibid.: 84). This is especially true for transgender citizens, who have to challenge different forms of exclusion based on their sex/gender and sexuality. Exploring urban conflicts, such as the gentrification of areas where dissident sexual citizens are congregated, highlights ‘a moral topography of sexual citizenship’ (ibid.: 4) and processes by which global sexual cultures are pushed into commodification. Within the context of changing national borders through information and communication technologies, especially the growing market of online social networking technologies, debates on sexual citizenship have extended mainstream theorizations on interplays between intimacy, body, sexuality and citizenship beyond the geographies of nation-states, showing emerging extensions of global/transnational connections (Bell and Binnie, 2000; Richardson, 2000; Plummer, 2001; Hearn, 2006; Lister, 2011). Since sexual citizenship has a socio-spatial character, it is important, with today’s usage of information and ICTs for online dating, sexual trafficking and finding sexual partners, communities and sexual pleasure, to highlight that sexual citizenship should also deal with virtual geographies of sexualities (Hearn, 2006).
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CURRENT REFORMULATIONS Critical approaches are increasingly concerned with the development of the concept of citizenship not only from gendered perspectives, but also from gendered, sexual(ed), intersectional perspectives (Oleksy et al., 2011). Following Ruth Lister (2011), rather than seeing citizenship in a universal way, citizenship must be situated, interpreted and understood within specific political, legal, cultural, social or historical contexts. Lived experiences of citizenship should not be objectified or universalized. Despite critical insights, gendering citizenship often remains primarily within the context and confines of the nation-state or supra-nation-state, as in the European Union (EU), rather than across, beyond or transcending nation-states. This is perhaps especially so with various national moves to citizenship tests and their nationalism, and often classed, raced, xenophobic and gendered dimensions. At the same time in the EU there have been strong moves towards policy agendas seeing citizenship in the context of increasingly diverse, multicultural societies. The concept of ‘European citizenship’ is in play, with its counterpart of ‘Fortress Europe’, excluding many. It is estimated that 20 000 or more lives have been lost over the last 20 years in desperate attempts by the excluded to enter the ‘fortress’. The notion of ‘global citizenship’ has less substance still. Limiting analysis of citizenship to a particular society or nation is increasingly problematic, with greater awareness of global and transnational linkages, and assertion of new nationalisms, and indeed new socialities and forms of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2007). This is especially important with complex migratory and diasporic flows, and for the excluded, non-citizens, refugees, subalterns, undocumented, ‘irregular’ or ‘illegal’ migrants, and so-called ‘bare life’. For example, in relation to likely sexual/violent persecution in their leaving country, asylum seekers may be subject to gendered rules and procedures, in terms of the officially assessed validity of their claims, and those of their family/ household/partner. In a historical view, nation-states may well be rather recent, perhaps temporary, locations for citizenship. There is growing interest in citizenship across borders and boundaries, ‘in-between-ness’, from different shifting vantage points in time and space. This may suggest new formulations, beyond regional locations, of ecologically sustainable citizenship that include gender transformation and social inclusion for future citizens as yet unborn and even non-humans. This shifts attention from gendered, ‘gender-neutral’ methodological nationalism to intersectional
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transnational patriarchies. Here, questions of citizenship in relation to global capitalism and finance, along with environmental threats, impeding citizenships and livelihoods for many, become central. Finally, there are many key open questions highlighted by the EU FEMCIT project: Can the concept of citizenship encompass the transformations that feminist politics seek? What are the restrictions and exclusions of contemporary forms and practices of citizenship? How does the concept of citizenship deal with power, inequality and difference? What are the problems with framing desires and visions for the future in terms of citizenship in a globalizing world of migration, mobility, armed conflict, economic crisis and climate change? Does the concept of citizenship restrict our imaginations and limit our horizons within nation-state formations? Is a feminist, queer or global citizenship thinkable, or should we find a new language for new forms of belonging (http://www.bbk.ac. uk/bisr/events/archive/beyondcitizenship; also see http://www.palgrave. com/series/citizenship,-gender-and-diversity/FEMCIT/)?
REFERENCES Bell, David and Jon Binnie (2000) The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond, Cambridge: Polity. Brown, Michael (1997) Replacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism and Radical Democracy, New York: Guilford Press. Evans, David T. (1993) Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities, London: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony (2002) Runaway World, 2nd edn, London: Profile Books. Hearn, Jeff (2006) ‘The implications of information and communication technologies for sexualities and sexualized violences: contradictions of sexual citizenships’, Political Geography, 25, 944–963. Hekma, Gert (2004) ‘Sexual citizenship’, in Claude J. Summers (ed.), An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, www.glbtq.com/socialsciences/sexual_citizenship.html. Joseph, Suad (1997) ‘The public/private: the imagined boundary in the imagined nation/ state/community: the Lebanese case’, Feminist Review, 57, 73–92. Lister, Ruth (2011) ‘From the intimate to the global: reflections on gendered citizenship’, in Elżbieta H. Oleksy, Jeff Hearn and Dorota Golan´ska (eds), The Limits of Gendered Citizenship: Contexts and Complexities, New York: Routledge, pp. 27–41. Marshall, Thomas H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monro, Surya and Lorna Warren (2004) ‘Transgendering citizenship’, Sexualities, 7 (3), 345–362. Oleksy, Elżbieta, Jeff Hearn and Dorota Golan´ska (eds) (2011) The Limits of Gendered Citizenship, New York: Routledge. Plummer, Ken (2001) ‘The square of intimate citizenship: some preliminary proposals’, Citizenship Studies, 5 (3), 237–253. Richardson, Diane (2000) Rethinking Sexuality, London: Sage. Walby, Sylvia (1994) ‘Is citizenship gendered?’, Sociology, 28 (2), 379–395.
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Gender and citizenship 93 Weeks, Jeffrey (1998) ‘The sexual citizen’, Theory, Culture and Society, 15 (3), 35–52. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2007) ‘Intersectionality, citizenship and contemporary politics of belonging’, in Jennifer Bennett (ed.), Scratching the Surface: Democracy, Traditions, Gender, Lahore: Heinrich Böll Foundation, pp. 7–22.
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12. Gender and democratization Jane S. Jaquette
Women were active and visible participants in opposition movements against authoritarian regimes during the “third wave” of democratization in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This chapter looks at the forms that activism took and the strategies women used to bring their issues onto the agendas of the newly formed or restored democratic governments. It argues that women’s participation in the “third wave” was shaped by an unusual confluence of three global forces, which shaped women’s political strategies and agendas. The first global force was the “third wave” itself, which began in Portugal in 1974 and extended through the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa to the Indonesian transition of 1998. During this period, over 30 countries adopted democratic governance.1 The second was the exponential increase in women’s activism worldwide that began with the UN International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City in 1975 and continued through the Women’s Decade (1975–85) and Beijing conference in 1995. Participation in democratization movements made women “political actors.” In many cases women were able to use their newfound leverage to promote gender equity. The third factor was the implementation of a set of economic policies widely termed the “Washington Consensus,” which required cutbacks in government spending. The reforms succeeded in controlling inflation and establishing the foundations for economic growth, but they had a disproportionately negative immediate impact on women and children, and many women’s groups remain staunchly opposed to them and to the “neoliberal” rationale behind them. An over-emphasis on markets weakened state capacity, while liberalization of international trade and investment created the conditions for the capitalist globalization criticized by many women’s groups for intensifying the exploitation of women as workers and migrants and as victims of human trafficking.
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BEFORE THE “THIRD WAVE” Women’s activism in support of democratic change is not unprecedented. Samuel Huntington finds three “waves” of democratization since the process of forming nation-states began in 1648. A long “first wave,” inspired by the French and American revolutions, took place from 1828 to 1926, and was followed by a period of reversal evident in the rise of totalitarian governments. In Huntington’s “second wave,” from 1943 to 1962, Japan and West Germany were democratized by occupation after World War II, and many newly independent states in the Global South adopted democratic constitutions. Democracy survived in Japan and Germany and in the postcolonial Caribbean, but not in Africa, where over 30 countries soon succumbed to military coups, while countries in Eastern and Central Europe adopted communist authoritarianism under pressure from the Soviet Union. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, repressive military authoritarian regimes overthrew democratic governments, justifying military rule to confront threats from left-wing popular movements and guerrilla insurgencies. The “third wave” beginning in Portugal in 1974 was followed by transitions in Spain and Greece in the 1970s and in South and Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Central and Eastern European countries turned to democratic institutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By 2010, there were 115 electoral democracies in the world, nearly three times the number in 1970. Women’s mobilization also took place in “waves,” but these only partly coincided with Huntington’s timetable. Women were active in the “first wave” French and American revolutions (and played visibly heroic roles in the Latin American independence wars from 1810 to 1823), but were unable to gain traction in their demands for citizenship. These revolutions stimulated feminist critiques of patriarchy, however, and a sweeping gender agenda. Olympe de Gouges’s “The Rights of Woman and the Citizen” (1791), based on Rousseau’s “Rights of Man” and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), influenced those who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 and agreed on a Declaration of Sentiments, including a demand that women be given the vote. The campaigns for women’s suffrage in the United States and the United Kingdom began in the 1860s but did not bear fruit until after World War I. The war brought dramatic cultural changes in gender roles and provided the impetus for the organization of transnational anti-war
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groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. “Women’s emancipation” movements took hold in countries from Chile to Iran and China, and women’s organizations were critical to the Progressive era of social reforms in the United States. The first decades of the twentieth century thus constituted women’s “second wave.” Their “third wave” originated independently, supporting and supported by Huntington’s third wave of transitions from authoritarian rule. An unprecedented political mobilization of women began in Mexico City in 1975, site of the first United Nations (UN) Conference on Women, and continued as the UN Decade for Women (1975–85) stimulated women’s activism at all levels from local to global. The NGO forums provided opportunities for grassroots women to share strategies and experiences, while the official programs of action and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 committed the signatory states to enact a range of gender policies. The UN conferences on human rights (1993) and population (1994) further spurred transnational organizing and agenda-building, culminating in the 4th UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
GENDER AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE “THIRD WAVE” In several of the countries that experienced transitions from authoritarianism in the “third wave”—in Latin America, the Philippines and South Africa—women’s movements joined broader opposition efforts protesting for democratic change. In Indonesia and Ghana, democratization processes themselves prompted women to organize. Activism brought women into the public sphere and put women’s practical and strategic issues onto the agendas of the new democratic governments. Women’s rights were increasingly recognized as a criterion of democratic performance, and women’s participation changed the established boundaries between public and private, as reflected in the Chilean movement’s call for “Democracy in the Country and in the Home.” In South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil and Chile, women’s movements developed lists of demands which were pursued through democratic channels, including changes in laws regarding the family, reproductive rights, and violence against women. In most cases, the new governments agreed to establish or upgrade women’s offices within the executive to promote gender legislation, civic education, and programs to reach poor and marginalized women.
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Gender and democratization 97 Even at this stage, regional differences emerged on goals and tactics. In Latin America, and in Spain and Portugal, the Philippines and several African countries, women’s movements sought goals consistent with the feminist principles of CEDAW, and women’s organizations received critical financial and institutional support from the European Union, bilateral and multilateral foreign assistance programs and European, US and other “Northern” foundations. In Catholic countries, they faced opposition from the Church, which grew increasingly conservative under the papacy of John Paul II. In Indonesia, the Philippines and Korea, women’s movements were careful to deny their connections to “feminism,” which was widely seen, even among women, as a foreign import, opposed to the family and hostile to men. In Islamic countries, such as Indonesia and Pakistan (where Benazir Bhutto’s election in 1988 marked a return to civilian government after the Islamicization carried out under the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq), the need to avoid associations with Western feminism was even greater, although the goals activists sought (family law reform, legal equality for women, and protection against violence) were often the same. In Eastern and Central Europe, however, women leaders who had joined in the opposition to communist governments were very skeptical of the feminist agenda, arguing that they had had “equality” forced upon them from above in keeping with Marxist ideology. Although they were losing access to many of the things feminists elsewhere were demanding, including state-supported child care and the right to have an abortion, women leaders in Central and Eastern Europe resisted feminism as “another ‘ism,’” and took exception to the view that they could learn from Western feminist groups eager to “help.”
POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES, BARRIERS AND GENDER POLICY OUTCOMES In South America, the women’s movements that joined the opposition brought together disparate groups: professionals with feminist goals; exiles; working-class women who had organized to form communal kitchens and child care or to carry out consumer boycotts; and women in political parties. Soon after the return to democracy, these alliances often fell apart, as they lost the shared goal of bringing down the dictatorship. Divisions emerged between elite leaders and their grassroots base and among leaders themselves who might agree on the need to reform laws
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concerning custody, inheritance and divorce and on criminalizing violence against women, but who disagreed on issues of abortion, reproductive rights and sexual preference. These issues similarly divided women in Muslim countries, including Pakistan and Indonesia. Many third wave transitions were brought about by negotiations between the opposition and representatives of the authoritarian regime. In Chile, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Brazil and Ghana, women were virtually absent from these discussions. Further, as women’s movements, and social movements in general, were pushed off center stage and political parties took over the role of outlining political programs and passing legislation, a sense of “disenchantment” grew among those who had hoped that democratic governments would be more open to radical change. Their pessimism was deepened by the global economic recession of the 1980s, and the debt crisis and the austerity policies required under the Washington Consensus. In Peru and the Philippines, women activists experimented with the idea of forming a women’s party, but these efforts were not successful enough to copy elsewhere. On the whole, leftist parties proved more open to including women and to backing legislation for gender equality, but these parties were often run by men who put such issues low on their priority lists. Some women’s groups insisted on autonomy from political parties to avoid cooptation; this allowed them to take principled positions, but kept them from having any real influence on the legislative negotiations taking place within and among political parties. Three strategies were widely adopted: a constitutional strategy based on electing and lobbying delegates to the constitutional assemblies that took place in several countries soon after the transition; an electoral strategy calling for gender quotas to increase women’s representation in national legislatures; and an executive or “state feminist” strategy that largely relied on “women’s machineries,” often women’s ministries with cabinet rank. In Brazil, Spain, Peru, the Philippines and South Africa, women participated actively in drafting new constitutions. The constitutional strategy worked particularly well in Brazil and South Africa. In Brazil, members of the federally established National Council for Women’s Rights coordinated women’s groups to press for a list of demands drawn from local women’s groups, while female legislators (the “lipstick lobby”) worked these issues from inside. The women’s movement’s agenda was framed in pluralist terms, emphasizing that Brazil could only be fully democratic if discrimination on racial and religious as well as gender grounds could be eliminated. Several dozen items from the women’s movement agenda (the “Women’s Letter”) made it into the
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Gender and democratization 99 constitution, and strong lobbying narrowly prevented the insertion of language protecting the inviolability of the right to life “from conception.” In South Africa, the Women’s National Coalition, an independent alliance of women’s organizations led by women from the African National Congress, successfully lobbied for items in the movement’s consensus agenda known as the Women’s Charter, among them socioeconomic rights and laws against violence against women. Women were able to defeat efforts by tribal chiefs to have customary law override the constitution’s equality clause. Indonesian women succeeded in getting non-discrimination and affirmative action principles into the constitution, as did women in the Philippines, but they could not prevent the insertion of a pro-life clause. In Spain, Ghana and Poland, women had little influence over the new constitutions. The electoral strategy was modeled on the success of gender quotas in Europe. Argentina was the first country to adopt a national-level quota law in 1991. Women’s groups lobbied for the law, but it passed only when President Carlos Menem made known his support. The law was not fully implemented until a decision of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1999 ruled that Argentine political parties must put women in winnable positions on their closed party lists. Female representation in the Argentine congress rapidly increased, exceeding the target goal of 33 percent. The obvious success of Argentina’s quota law strengthened campaigns for gender quotas across Latin America and around the world. Today, over 100 countries have quotas or reserved seats for women, and the most recent International Parliamentary Union figures show that Rwanda (63.7 percent women), South Africa (42.7 percent), Senegal (43.7 percent) and Nicaragua (42.0 percent) join Sweden among the top five in terms of women’s representation among democracies with gender quotas. Argentina’s percentage is now 36.6 percent. Quotas have received broad support; they apply to all parties and can be justified on both “equality” and “difference” feminist rationales. But quotas have their limitations. Some countries do not have electoral systems that facilitate quotas (for example Chile and the United States), and legal loopholes have kept most quota laws from reaching their targets. Women elected under quota systems may not support women’s issues, and in some countries, such as Argentina and India, they are widely believed to be stand-ins for male relatives. Women legislators introduce more bills concerning women’s issues, however, and increasing the number of women legislators increases the number of laws passed that address social and gender issues. Women are still largely excluded
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from positions of power within legislatures, and it is clear that women are not above corruption, as some feminists had hoped and many voters appeared to believe. The third strategy is to establish women’s offices in the executive branch that are charged with carrying out a wide range of functions from developing and advocating legislative proposals and monitoring the impact of new laws on women to designing and implementing programs to reach disadvantaged groups. The most important predictor of the effectiveness of these units is the support of the country’s president or ruling party. In Brazil, the feminist members of the National Council on Women’s Rights, which had played an important role in the constitutional convention, resigned when the president appointed a conservative minister of justice. In Ghana, democratically elected president John Kufuor (2001–09) straight-armed women’s groups when he appointed an antifeminist woman to head the newly formed women’s ministry. The trajectory of the Chilean women’s ministry, SERNAM, illustrates some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of women’s ministries, even those with consistent support from the executive and substantial international funding. Formed in response to women’s demands during the transition, SERNAM was established by the Concertación coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, the Party for Democracy and several smaller parties that narrowly won the democratic elections of 1990. SERNAM immediately became the subject of negotiation within the Concertación. President Aylwin, a Christian Democrat, was sensitive to its Catholic constituency and well aware of the opposition’s debt to the Church, which had offered critical support during the Pinochet dictatorship. To maintain unity in the coalition and avoid giving ammunition to the right, where Pinochet still had strong support, Aylwin asked the feminists to soften their demands. The name SERNAM (the Women’s National Service) was itself a compromise, and its first head was a Christian Democratic woman who had not been active in the women’s movement. SERNAM succeeded in improving labor conditions for women, supporting women heads of household, bringing in changes in family law, and getting laws passed on inter-family violence against women, but the increasingly anti-feminist stance of the Catholic Church and ongoing resistance from the right, well represented in Congress, made it difficult for SERNAM to advance its gender agenda. Divorce did not become legal until 2005 (when it was framed in pro-family terms), and Chile’s restrictive abortion law remains in place. SERNAM also came under attack from the left—for its “elitism,” its neglect of the practical gender interests of grassroots women, its failure to incorporate the concerns of indigenous women, and its unwillingness
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Gender and democratization 101 to challenge Chile’s market-oriented economic model—leaving it unable to muster popular pressure in support of its legislative initiatives. As SERNAM remained stymied, President Michelle Bachelet (2006–10 and 2014–present) generated new momentum in her first term, appointing a “parity” cabinet, supporting crèches for working-class women, and making the morning-after pill available, even to teenage women, in state health clinics (later halted by the Supreme Court). Now in her second term, she continues to promote electoral reforms that would make gender quotas feasible. SERNAM’s experience also illustrates some of the issues of “NGOization,” including the absorption of leaders of the women’s movement into the state, the cooptation of NGOs as service providers rather than advocacy groups, and the dependency on outside funding (which shifted elsewhere as Chile’s democracy stabilized and its economy continued to grow). Yet SERNAM did not fall by the wayside or abandon advocacy, and it was not coopted by a president eager to use his “feminist” credentials to enhance his failing democratic legitimacy, as happened in Peru. It has served as a model for other countries.
SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS Where women were active in “third wave” democratization movements, they sought with considerable success to make women’s rights and women’s full citizenship a measure of what it is to be a democracy, reshaping political agendas and challenging restrictive cultural norms not only for women but for other marginalized groups. The political gains made by women’s movements have also revealed deep ideological, class and religious differences among women; many have joined conservative movements and challenged feminist agendas. Yet this too is a victory for women’s political agency, and both practical and strategic feminist claims have stayed on the political agendas of most countries. The experience of women in democratizing political systems dramatically illustrates the need for state capacity in addressing gender issues. Feminist opposition to neoliberalism has not been accompanied by a corresponding support for increasing state capacity and accountability. Yet the state is the institution that is responsible for implementing laws, addressing inequalities, providing security and administering the social services (from education to health) on which women’s lives depend. Finally, not all democracies are the same. Women’s issues have fared well when there is popular support for liberal democracy and human rights and less well in countries where governments are responsive to other claims, whether
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these are for redistribution, indigenous rights or (as appears to be the case in much of the Middle East) the implementation of Islamic norms that restrict women’s rights. The symbiotic relation that occurred in the late twentieth century between women’s mobilization and democratization is not likely to be replicated in future transitions.
NOTE 1.
The recent popular movements known as the Arab Spring uprisings, and the political opening in Myanmar may represent a new “fourth wave,” but one in which the prospects for establishing stable democracies that incorporate women’s rights seem much less promising, while many of the “third wave” democracies seem to be evolving in a more authoritarian direction.
FURTHER READING Alvarez, Sonia (1990) Engendering Democracy in Brazil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brand, Laurie A. (1998) Women, the State and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences, New York: Columbia University Press. Fallon, Kathleen M. (2008) Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in SubSaharan Africa, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Francheschet, Susan, Mona Lena Krook and Jennifer M. Piscopo (eds) (2012) The Impact of Gender Quotas, New York: Oxford University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993) The Third Wave: Demoicratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris (2003) Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaquette, Jane S. (ed.) (1994) The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jaquette, Jane S. and Sharon L. Wolchik (eds) (1998) Women and Democracy in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roces, Mina and Louise Edwards (eds) (2010) Women’s Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational Activism, London: Routledge. Waylen, Georgina (2007) Engendering Transitions: Women’s Mobilization, Institutions and Gender Outcomes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waylen, Georgina (2015) ‘Women activists in democratic transitions’, in Sergio Bitar and Abraham F. Lowenthal (eds), Transitions toward Democracy: Learning from Political Leaders, Stockholm: International IDEA.
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13. Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice? Kirsty Alexander and Catherine Eschle
Inspiring thousands of citizens to gather in streets and parks, prompting a dizzying amount of activity on social media platforms, and making front-page news across continents, the Occupy movement of 2011 presented itself as a unifying popular force in the pursuit of global justice. Taking their cue in part from the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring (see Chapter 16 in this volume), protestors established an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) camp in September 2011 followed by, in the ensuing months, thousands of occupations in cities and towns around the world. The Occupy slogan – ‘We are the 99%’ – plainly suggested the possibility and desirability of solidarity amongst those (the vast majority) disadvantaged by political and economic arrangements that benefited only a few. As one activist-scholar said of the slogan, ‘it was a good one, it was about wealth inequality, but also about inclusion and creating a movement that everyone could be a part of’ (Maharawal, 2013: 178). In light of this, it could be assumed that identity claims did not figure in the Occupy protests. This would be in contrast to many movement mobilisations of the 1980s and 1990s, widely characterised as ‘identity politics’ because they were organised at least in part around a specific group’s experience of injustice and the shared identification that developed on that basis. Occupy might be understood as ‘post-identity politics’, a claim frequently made about the anti-globalisation or global justice movement of which Occupy could be regarded as the latest incarnation. For many commentators, the pursuit of global justice over the last decade and a half has ‘transcended identity politics by seeking to forge a new form of internationalism’ (Callinicos, 2003: 113). The contemporary pursuit of global justice, it is claimed, leaves behind the fractured politics of the past with an agenda behind which all can rally and a politics in which all can participate. Indeed, Occupy was portrayed as a form of post-identity politics by activists involved in the protests – including by feminist-influenced women organising to make Occupy more inclusive. Such women were ‘entrenched in the day-to-day (running meetings, procuring food) and long-term (analyzing structure, building solidarity) work of Occupy Wall 103
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Street from day one’, and it was thanks in part to their efforts that OWS ‘tweaked its “horizontal” structure to ensure a maximum diversity of participation’ (Seltzer, 2011). Yet, as one such activist put it, ‘Elevating the voices of women and people of colour … isn’t about “identity politics” but about sustainability, building “a viable meaningful protest against the hegemony of the rich”’ (cited in Seltzer, 2011). With such formulations, feminists supportive of Occupy reinforced the claim that the protests transcended identity politics. Other feminist commentary revealed a more critical approach to the characterisation of Occupy as post-identity politics. Katha Pollitt turned this idea on its head when she reflected on the movement’s slogan: ‘The notion of common cause, even among the actual working class, is as much a romantic and aspirational construction, as much a matter of “identity politics,” as the oft-derided ideal of “sisterhood”’ (Pollitt, 2012). Cynthia Weber (2013) similarly queried the unifying reach of Occupy, asking whether those who subscribed to the protests, ‘the 99%’, were participating in a collective struggle or pursuing their own individual ends. Such comments are indicative of a feminist scepticism towards Occupy as a vehicle for securing global justice, but they are far from invoking identity politics as the answer. Indeed, these feminists seem to share with the supporters of Occupy discussed above the view that identity politics is part of the problem. Arguably, what we have here is the latest instantiation of an entrenched ‘anti-identity politics’ stance in feminist circles and beyond, which assumes the incompatibility of identity claims and the pursuit of justice. Following Linda Martín Alcoff’s lead (2000), we can identify two versions of this stance. The first is concerned that ‘identity politics undercuts the possibility of creating a progressive political majority’ (2000: 264; see also Alcoff, 2006). Equating identity politics with separatism and partisanship, advocates of this perspective fear the fragmentation of the polity or of class-based struggle; this stems from their assumption that identity claims are necessarily exclusivist (involving claims about difference from and hostility to others and the concomitant establishment of boundaries between one group and another) and subjectivist (unable to see beyond their own subject position). In contrast, the pursuit of justice on this view must involve the pursuit of objective, universal claims about what is good for all. Connectedly, identity politics has also been framed as a politics of recognition in contradistinction to a politics of redistribution (Fraser, 1995), implying corresponding understandings of identity as necessarily about cultural status, and of justice as about equal access to material goods.
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Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice? 105 In the second version of the identity politics critique, ‘the concept of a coherent or unified identity itself is said to be an illusion based on dubious modernist assumptions’ (Alcoff, 2000: 264). In this perspective, identity politics is associated with an essentialist understanding of identity as unitary, complete and static, and as prior to politics, resulting in the exclusion of those who do not fit simple identity categories and the rigidity of identities at legislative and group levels. Proponents of this interpretation may acknowledge a strategic need for the mobilisation of identity claims in particular times and places, but this can be countenanced only in the context of an overall aspiration to unpack and problematise identity categories. A more truly emancipatory and just movement would, on this account, strive for freedom from identity altogether. Notwithstanding important differences between these two articulations of the ‘anti-identity politics’ position, they both share a view of identity politics in which the articulation of identity becomes a political end in itself and a vision of justice in which identity claims have no place. Undoubtedly, identity claims have sometimes been mobilised in problematic ways and to counterproductive effect. We suggest, however, that these problems are not inevitable, and we question the a priori assumption that identity politics and the pursuit of global justice are incompatible. It seems more analytically and theoretically useful to look to actual political practices with a view to answering the following question: how are identities mobilised and to what effect in the pursuit of global justice? This was one of the questions guiding the empirical research on feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism at the World Social Forums conducted by one of us (Catherine Eschle) with Bice Maiguashca for the book Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement. This book made the argument that feminist activists pursue global justice not by transcending or deconstructing their identities, but by mobilising them, in ways that challenge oppression and that are affirmative, complex and other-orientated (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). If we take Occupy as a recent incarnation of the global justice movement, it is no surprise there are parallels between this movement and these research findings on feminist involvement in the World Social Forums. In what follows, we survey internet material tracking women’s and feminist involvement in Occupy to make four tentative claims about the politics of identity in that context. Firstly, as at the Forum, social identities were mobilised in response to oppressive power relations in operation at Occupy camps. The term ‘social identity’ is used in sociology to indicate notions of self connected to common social roles or broad social categories. Not all social
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identities are politicised, but they are likely to be so when produced and regulated by oppressive power relations, that is, when some social groupings are systematically placed in a subordinate structural position to others in ways that constrain, coerce and harm the individuals within them (see Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). Understood in such ways, social identities are not natural but constructed, and not fixed but processual, relational and open to contestation. And there is clear evidence of such contestation at the Occupy camps. Women and others organised individually and collectively to challenge the priority being given to male speakers, the sexual objectification of women activists, the multiple incidences of harassment and rape, and the accompanying prevalence of discourses of victim-blaming and rape apologism (Hardikar, 2012; Namaskar, 2012). Their actions ranged from the creation of women’s groups and meetings, to a Safer Spaces Working Group at Occupy Wall Street, to the release of an open letter to Occupy Glasgow from Glasgow Women’s Activist Forum (2011). Such actions called upon, politicised and to some degree institutionalised social identity categories such as ‘women’. Secondly, these identities were mobilised in Occupy in ways which assumed multiplicity and complexity, with little evidence of the unitary, exclusionary and solipsistic formulations critiqued by those concerned about identity politics. The women cited above were frequently sensitive to the identity claims of other marginalised groups, notably in relation to the need to make Occupy camps safer spaces: ‘A lot of women, queers, and trans people – along with many people of colour and undocumented immigrants – do not feel comfortable sleeping in an open space with a lot of men, surrounded by police. Police presence ensures that protestors could, at any time, be risking arrest; and a racist police system ensures that people of colour will be targeted’ (Obernauer, 2011). Moreover, there is evidence of awareness of the intersectional character of social identity categories, whereby what it means to be ‘women’ or ‘men’ is understood to be fused with and dependent on other identity categories linked to parallel systems of oppression. Thus Ashwini Hardikar’s (2012) account of her experiences of harassment at OWS and in the streets of New York details the multi-layered ways that this harassment invoked and manifested the privilege enjoyed by white, heterosexual men and her own subordinated position as a woman of colour – and the messages posted in response online invoke similarly complex identities. Thirdly, in naming these identities and organising around them, activists seem to have been motivated neither by a fetishisation of suffering nor by a desire to split the movement, as critics of identity politics imply, but rather by anger at the injustices occurring within
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Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice? 107 Occupy and its failure to live up to the promise of pursuing a better world for all. Thus Charlene Obernauer (2011), an organiser of the Safe Spaces Working Group, wrote of ‘justified rage from an unsafe space’, and one Glaswegian activist recalled feeling ‘transfixed with anger and my teeth on edge’ during meetings where the rape of a woman in the George Square camp was dismissed as a plot to discredit Occupy (McAlpine, 2011). These expressions of anger dovetailed with a frustration that the very organisational structures for which Occupy became renowned – leaderless, horizontal, direct democracy – may have facilitated the dodging of responsibility and accountability for sexual violence, along with the privilege enjoyed by straight, white, middle-class men. In such circumstances, it became necessary to name social identity categories, to make visible their connection to oppressive power relations and to insist on such power relations being challenged in Occupy spaces. Fourthly, and finally, identities were also mobilised at Occupy in affirmative ways, to create positive attachments to others in a broader political struggle. As has been remarked in other contexts, collective identities can involve nurturing and pleasurable relationships, producing ‘strength, perseverance, and empathy … culture and community’ (Alcoff, 2006: 5). Indeed, drawing on the work of thinkers who conceptualise identity as ‘a site from which one … is open to the world’ (Alcoff, 2006: 30), and contradicting the view that identity politics is necessarily exclusionary and subjectivist, we see activists at Occupy reaching out from an identity position to others who share similar analyses of oppression and aspirations for change. In this vein, alongside the anger expressed by Occupy women, we find a commitment to creating new, feminist relationships of solidarity between women and between women and men. As Sarah Seltzer (2011) indicates, women organising at OWS shared the ‘defiant hope’ that ‘just maybe … for once, a mobilization for social change can get it right: maintain a broad base of support, connect the dots between different kinds of injustice and achieve staying power’. Or, as one activist asked, ‘So how do we create a movement that allows us to swim with one another?’ (cited in Seltzer, 2011). The desire to ‘swim together’ is fundamentally a desire to build a shared political project, but by acknowledging rather than ignoring the existence of different social identity groupings and by treating their members with equal respect. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this approach can be seen in the institutionalisation at OWS of the ‘progressive stack’, which involved, as Manissa Maharawal explains (2013: 179), ‘the practice of prioritizing people … whose voices have been “traditionally marginalized” (read: women and people of colour). Such people would be bumped up in the
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speaking order to make sure that they were heard over the voices of those who are traditionally privileged (read: white men).’ However controversial such methods may have been, their use at OWS and elsewhere indicates some level of acceptance among activists that Occupy, just like the world it sought to transform, remained stratified by multiple, complex relations of oppression. Through practices like the progressive stack, Maharawal argues, OWS was able to facilitate ‘a radical politics of inclusion’ which was less about mobilising an already unified ‘99%’ and more about realising ‘a vision of social justice based on the active deconstruction and transformation of oppressive power relations, both in the wider world and within the activist community and movement itself’ (2013: 179). In such ways, Occupy activists sought to acknowledge identity categories as politically salient and to build bridges between them in the struggle for global justice. These four claims about the ways in which identities were politicised at Occupy protests lead us to conclude that it is mistaken to characterise Occupy as ‘post-identity politics’. Such a characterisation is reliant analytically on narrow, even stereotyped, notions of what identity is and how it functions, and has the effect empirically of rendering invisible or misrepresenting the motivations and practices of those who were indeed mobilising identity categories and seeking to forge solidarity across them within Occupy settings. Indeed, we fear that the reproduction of the post-identity formulation by feminist Occupy activists and commentators was a metaphorical stab in the foot, contributing to the continued de-legitimisation of the very feminist political claims and diverse constituencies they desired to see more fully incorporated into the struggle for global justice. More generally, the Occupy case reinforces our view that it is problematic to assume the incompatibility of identity politics and the pursuit of justice. Instead, analysts and activists should be acknowledging and exploring the interconnections between the two. This necessitates the development of what Susan Bickford has called an ‘anti-anti-identity politics’ perspective, one which faces up to the inequalities stratifying even the most radical political environments, to the different political subjects to which these inequalities give rise, and to the ‘anger, responsibility and courage’ required to articulate and recreate the most subordinated subject-positions (Bickford, 1997: 125). Such a perspective would also, in our view, necessitate acknowledgement that identities are frequently mobilised in order to counter injustice, not for their own sake. Moreover, we need to look at the other side of the equation and imagine a ‘more just justice’. As many feminists have argued over the years, justice can and should be re-framed to include not only material goods
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Is identity politics compatible with the pursuit of global justice? 109 but also cultural recognition and political representation, not simply universal claims applying equally to all but also specific claims on behalf of disadvantaged groups, and not freedom from identity per se but rather the capacity to define more liberatory identities for ourselves. Rethinking both identity and justice in these ways allows us to see that the mobilisation of identity claims not only is inescapable in the struggle for global justice, but may also help to strengthen and sustain that struggle, ensuring a better world for all.
REFERENCES Alcoff, Linda Martín (2000) ‘Identity politics’, in Lorraine Code (ed.), Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, London: Routledge, pp. 263–264. Alcoff, Linda Martín (2006) ‘The political critique of identity’, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html (accessed 30 March 2009). Bickford, Susan (1997) ‘Anti-anti-identity politics: feminism, democracy and the complexities of citizenship’, Hypatia, 12 (4), 111–131. Callinicos, Alex (2003) An Anti-capitalist Manifesto, Cambridge: Polity. Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (2010) Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fraser, Nancy (1995) ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “postsocialist” age’, New Left Review, I (212), 68–93. Glasgow Women’s Activist Forum (2011) ‘Open letter from Glasgow Women’s Activist Forum to Occupy Glasgow’, http://libcom.org/forums/news/open-letter-glasgowwomens-activist-forum-occupy-glasgow-01112011 (accessed 6 March 2015). Hardikar, Ashwini (2012) ‘The value of a safe space: one WOC’s experience with harassment at Occupy Wall Street’, http://infrontandcenter.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/ the-value-of-a-safe-space/ (accessed 6 March 2015). Maharawal, Manissa McCleave (2013) ‘Occupy Wall Street and a radical politics of inclusion’, Sociological Quarterly, 54 (2), 177–181. McAlpine, Mhairi (2011) ‘De-occupy Glasgow’, http://www.2ndcouncilhouse.co.uk/blog/ 2011/10/27/de-occupy-glasgow/ (accessed 6 March 2015). Namaskar (2012) ‘Occupy patriarchy! A feminist critique of the protests’, http:// www.indymediascotland.org/node/25734 (accessed 6 March 2015). Obernauer, Charlene (2011) ‘Justified rage from an unsafe space: reflection on Occupy Wall Street’, http://occupy.infoshop.org/blogs-mu/2011/10/20/justified-rage-from-anunsafe-space-reflection-on-occupy-wall-street/ (accessed 31 July 2014). Pollitt, Katha (2012) ‘Women: occupy the Left’, Nation, 294 (21), 10, http://www. thenation.com/article/167684/women-occupy-left# (accessed 1 May 2012). Seltzer, Sarah (2011) ‘Where are the women at Occupy Wall Street? Everywhere – and they’re not going away’, http://www.thenation.com/article/164197/where-are-womenoccupy-wall-street-everywhere-and-theyre-not-going-away (accessed 6 March 2015). Weber, Cynthia (2013) International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, 4th edn, London: Routledge.
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14. Transnational feminist politics: a concept that has outlived its usefulness? Bice Maiguashca
The aim of this chapter is to map the meaning, usage and conceptual as well as political implications of the concept of ‘transnational feminism’. More specifically, it will explore the ways in which the term has been defined and deployed, identify some of the debates and tensions that surround its theory and practice and reflect on the ways in which my research with Catherine Eschle into feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism in the context of the World Social Forum (WSF) complicates the assumptions and claims of both its advocates and its critics (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). I will end the chapter by raising some questions about the extent to which ‘transnational feminism’ remains a useful concept and what kind of research agenda any revitalisation of the concept would require. My overall argument is that at best the notion of transnational feminism is a descriptive term that can help us look for and identify empirical instances of feminist co-operation across national borders. Having said this, it remains a concept associated with a number of debates that oversimplify the challenges facing feminist activists, in part because they reproduce false dichotomies that need to be carefully interrogated on the basis of detailed empirical research into contemporary instances of transnational feminist activism.
DEFINING TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM For the purposes of this chapter, I will rely on one of the more uncontroversial expressions of feminism as an ‘emancipatory politics on behalf of women’ (McCann and Kim, 2013: 1). Concretising it a bit further, it denotes a ‘shared principled commitment to challenging gender hierarchies’ (Sperling et al., 2001: 1158), which involves, in my view, a consciousness of injustice, a vision of an alternative, even if inchoate, and a range of collective and individual actions that include, but cannot be reduced to, public expressions of protest. So, if feminism is a form of resistance politics, what does the descriptor ‘transnational’ add to the picture? Jan Jindy Pettman tells us 110
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Transnational feminist politics: has it outlived its usefulness? 111 that transnationalism indicates ‘a range of connections which over-flow states or pass between different groups and people in different states’ (2004: 60 endnote 1), while Desai reminds us that it also captures the efforts of activists from different cultural or national groupings to articulate and/or frame their grievances and aspirations in light of globally recognised discourses (2005: 319). One interesting example of this form of transnationalism can be found in the somewhat surprising reliance of Marxist Indian activists on the liberal concept of ‘women’s rights’ to articulate an otherwise socialist agenda of revolutionary change (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010: 122). Clearly, then, transnationalism implies a feminist activism that occurs in or across particular geographical sites and that manifests a ‘global imagination’ to the extent that it speaks to and from a broader feminist and non-feminist public. Amongst feminist scholars there is a consensus that transnational feminism, as an empirical phenomenon, has a long history and can be dated back as far as the 1830s, rather than to the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85), which is when the concept first gained currency among academics and commentators (Hawkesworth, 2006). Having said this, there is little doubt that the 1975 UN conference saw the start of an explosion in terms of the sheer numbers of women’s groups engaging with each other and with the UN and its agencies (Stienstra, 1994; Basu, 2013: 72). It is thus not surprising that much of the literature on transnational feminism has focused its attention on women’s activism in inter-governmental spaces, such as the UN and the World Bank. Although feminists remain active within these sites today, my research with Catherine Eschle suggests that a significant number of what could be labelled as transnational feminists, disappointed by the limited gains of previous decades of work within the UN, have reoriented their struggles to a range of autonomous ‘social movement’ spaces, such as the World Social Forum, and that understanding and/or conceptualising transnational feminism requires us to learn from this recent rendition of it (see also Pettman, 2004: 57; Conway, 2012). Before moving on to the debates that animate scholars about the political implications of transnational feminism, a few words must be said about the putative social forces associated with it. In other words, who are the protagonists of this kind of activism? Judging from the literature, transnational feminism embraces a wide range of groups, which go from highly institutionalised organisations that seek to work within governmental structures and with elites, to more informal, less institutionalised actors that often eschew working with the state and its appendages. For this reason, a messy mix of social forces is seen to
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populate transnational feminism, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and transnational activist networks (TANs), as well as social movements, especially so-called ‘grassroots’ movements, and international campaigns, which may include all of the above. As I shall argue later, more work needs to be done on conceptually defining and distinguishing these types of actors and exploring the relationship between them. However, if too little work has been done on conceptually and empirically disaggregating these actors, there has at least been some effort to recognise and tease out the complex ways in which local, national, regional and global processes have spawned them. Thus, feminist scholars of transnational feminism rightly point to the fluid dynamic between global and local forces, arguing that women’s groups, whether in the form of social movements or NGOs, have emerged in response to both ‘downward’ (from the global to the local) and ‘upward’ (from the local to the global) trends (Hawkesworth, 2006).
UNDERSTANDING TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM AS A SITE OF CONTROVERSY The main issues on which transnational feminism has been indicted by its critics concern the questions of who is actually represented by this social force and how they go about seeking to bring about change. With regard to the issue of representation, transnational feminism has been depicted by its critics as a battlefield between privileged women and poor women where the interests and agendas of the former have long dominated. In this view, transnational feminism is seen as either an imperialist, Northern feminism, masquerading as a global feminism, or an elitist movement embodying the politics of the educated middle classes from across the world (Desai, 2005). Both these renditions of feminism, allegedly absorbed by the concerns of ‘identity politics’, are indicted for sustaining, rather than opposing, capitalism and all its attendant oppressions (Fraser, 2009; Basu, 2013). With respect to the strategies of transnational feminists, feminist scholars and activists have long debated the merits and de-merits of ‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’ approaches to bringing about social change (Hawkesworth, 2006). Pointing to the de-politicising effect that an ‘insider’ politics can have, feminist scholars argue that women’s NGOs have shifted their efforts from challenging women’s prevailing positions in society to trying to make them more liveable by means of offering
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Transnational feminist politics: has it outlived its usefulness? 113 service provision. In the process, women’s NGOs have become increasingly detached from grassroots social movements. As Silliman tells us, these NGOs are increasingly becoming ‘an arm not merely of the government but of the new global economic order, however unwittingly, however involuntarily’ (1999: 49). The picture being painted here is one of de-radicalisation, at best, and co-optation, at worst.
COMPLICATING THE STORY OF TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM Drawing on my research into feminist anti-globalisation activism across four different field sites, including Paris (2003), London (2004), Mumbai (2004) and Porto Alegre (2005), within the context of the WSF, I shall now offer a riposte to these debates, suggesting that either they tend to rely on and reproduce a series of false choices or they wrongly generalise from one case of transnational feminism (in effect the more institutionalised feminist politics around the UN) to another (in effect the social movement politics of the WSF). Starting with the concerns of co-optation, the choice of working inside or outside the halls of institutional power is not one that many feminist ‘anti-globalisation activists’ that my co-researcher and I talked to recognised. Indeed, in line with arguments that Alvarez has put forward regarding the ‘dual facing’ nature of women’s NGOs in Latin America (1999), our interviewees insisted on the need to engage with both the state and women’s movements simultaneously. To this end, we found that most of the women’s groups/NGOs in our sample undertook at least six types of political practices, which included confronting the state ‘from the outside’ through protests as well as working with it through lobbying/ advocacy campaigns ‘from the inside’ (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). Moreover, we found that many of these women’s NGOs sought to and managed to maintain a participatory ethos within their organisations, despite hierarchical, bureaucratic requirements upheld only ‘for the English’, as a couple of Brazilian interviewees put it. Indeed, we found that formalised organisations employing professionals are not necessarily deracinated from poor or ‘grassroots’ women. One interesting case in point from our research is APMSS in India, a quasi-quango, which nonetheless organises local women into self-governing sanghams (women’s collectives) (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010: 196). Finally, the co-optation story of many critics of transnational feminism does not take into account the fact that women activists are often fully aware of the risks attached to the NGOisation process and deploy strategies to
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mitigate them, a point underlined by our own interviewees and by feminist scholarship (Alvarez, 1999). Turning now to the issue of the non-representative nature of transnational feminism, our study of feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism offers a more complex picture. With respect to the constitution of the groups themselves, the most stark finding of our research is that all four of the most central groups in our sample of 60 – World March, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Articulación Feminista Marcosur (AFM) and International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN) – are regional and/or international networks which are rooted in diverse local and regional contexts, are strongly interconnected with each other and are not Northern in orientation. On the contrary, both AFM and DAWN are explicitly ‘Southern’ in perspective. With respect to the agenda of feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activists, we found that, although there were notable differences in terms of their national priorities, the majority of women’s groups we studied shared a broad normative agenda that converged around five ethical goals. So bodily integrity, in the context of violence against women, is an aspiration for both Northern and Southern women, as are democracy, economic equality, respect for the environment, and peace (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). In this way and in large part because all these women’s groups see themselves as part of a global justice movement, we found no sharp contrasts between Northern and Southern objectives, nor did we find any indication that imperialist, Western notions of justice or rights dominated the form or direction of their struggle. In sum, while Northern NGOs and women’s movements may well have prevailed, and still do, in the transnational sphere around the UN (Desai, 2005: 324), they do not do so in the context of the global justice movement and the WSF. Relatedly, contrary to the claims of feminist critics that transnational feminism is now overly preoccupied with so-called ‘identity politics’, we found that the articulation of these five ethical goals cut across the ‘recognition’/‘redistribution’ dichotomy, calling for a notion of gender justice that addresses multiple systems of power, and its manifold manifestations, and, thereby, recognising both the material and the cultural needs of women (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010: 122). Indeed, as Eschle and I have recently argued (Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014), the framing of feminism as a form of identity politics by feminists seeking to ‘re-position feminism squarely on the left’ (Fraser, 2009) is at best a misrepresentation of the complex politics that feminists engage in and, at worst, an attempt to discipline feminist dissent in ways that serve the purposes of alternative agendas.
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Transnational feminist politics: has it outlived its usefulness? 115 The one criticism of transnational feminism that is confirmed by our research concerns the class privilege of activists. Quite clearly, the professional status and high educational qualifications of our key informants are not typical of the wider population that they seek to engage and galvanise. This insight, however, needs to be tempered by the fact that, as mentioned above, most of the groups we examined, especially in the Brazilian and Indian context, pursued an approach which involved empowering ‘grassroots’ women to make and enact their own decisions.
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM: STILL A USEFUL CONCEPT? Answering the question of whether transnational feminism is still a useful concept depends on what we want the notion of transnational feminism to do for us. If we want a concept that can help us understand the conditions under which diverse feminisms can create links with each other, sustain them and effectively challenge a range of oppressive, hegemonic discourses and practices, then, along with other concepts such as ‘global feminism’ or ‘global sisterhood’, ‘transnational feminism’ remains an anaemic, and even misleading, conceptual starting point. Temporally, the concept is stuck in the particular era that saw its first invocation and, as a result, ontologically, it has elevated a very specific instance of feminist activism – the UN Decade for Women – into the paradigmatic case of cross-national feminist politics, despite evidence from the last decade that this politics has changed. Even spatially, although helpful in reminding us to look across boundaries, it still evokes images of linearity and flat surfaces, rather than a fluid, dialectical process that comprises global, national and local geographies. Despite these weaknesses, I think ‘transnational feminism’ can still be salvaged if we use it as a descriptive concept to identify particular instances of cross-boundary (whether they be national, cultural or legalpolitical) activism. But, even if it is used as a descriptive term, we still need to disentangle which social forces it refers to and how they relate to each other. As already suggested, the literature tends to use it to refer to a combination of two main actors, that is, social movements and TANs, which are understood as distinguishable on the basis of their tactics: while TANs are seen as policy oriented and therefore committed to lobbying from within the bastions of power, social movements are depicted as external to the institutions of power, as confrontational and as inclined to mass protest (Hawkesworth, 2006: 31).
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The problem with this view, as I have argued elsewhere (Maiguashca, 2011), is that social movements in general cannot be reduced to a politics of protest and that feminist anti-globalisation activism in particular must be understood as engaging in manifold political practices simultaneously which go beyond confrontational tactics. Moreover, individual feminist activists can work within and for TANS while at the same time participating in the wider social movement practices that the TAN is a part of. In other words, a feminist activist may find herself lobbying a government on one day, protesting against it on another and running a neighbourhood educational workshop on a third! For this reason, I argue that, if transnational feminism is used as a descriptive term, it should be understood as referring to a social movement in which TANs, NGOs, informal grassroots organisations and individuals all play a part. By redefining transnational feminism as such, I do not seek to erase the dilemmas and tensions raised by some of its feminist critics: all social movements are shaped by internal power relations and inequalities. It does however make it harder for us to rely on well-worn assumptions about institutionalised activism in the context of TANs and NGOs. Instead, it encourages us to pose a series of questions about which TANs are part of which social movements, if any, how a particular TAN might operate within a particular social movement and how the practices of activists within these sites may – or may not – reproduce the dichotomies and hegemonies that have become expected of transnational feminist politics. As we explore these specific enactments of transnational feminist social movement politics, we must develop detailed empirical maps of the interplay of what Grewal and Kaplan call ‘scattered hegemonies’ in which ‘global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, “authentic” forms of tradition, local structures of domination and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels’ all play a role in shaping the origins, nature, strategies and fortunes of feminist struggles (1994: 17). To this end, we must follow McCann and Kim, who call for ‘comparative feminist analyses’ in which we undertake ‘contextualized and historicized investigations of women and gender processes in different social and geographical locations’ (2013: 4), for this historicised and contextspecific approach to tracing transnational feminism militates against easy or quick generalisations and reminds us to be open to the possibility that transnational feminism may look very different depending on where, when and by whom it is enacted.
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REFERENCES Alvarez, Sonia (1999) ‘Advocating feminism: the Latin American feminist NGO “boom”’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1 (2), 181–209. Basu, Amrita (2013) ‘Globalization of the local/localization of the global: mapping transnational women’s transnational movements’, in Carole R. McCann and SeungKyung Kim (eds), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 68–77. Conway, Janet (2012) Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and Its Others, London: Routledge. Desai, Manisha (2005) ‘Transnationalism: the face of feminist politics post-Beijing’, International Social Science Journal, 57 (184), 319–330. Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (2010) Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (2014) ‘Reclaiming feminist futures: co-opted and progressive politics in a neo-liberal age’, Political Studies, 62 (3), 634–651. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history’, New Left Review, 56, 97–117. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (1994) Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices: Scattered Hegemonies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hawkesworth, Mary (2006) Globalization and Feminist Activism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Maiguashca, Bice (2011) ‘Looking beyond the spectacle: social movement theory, feminist anti-globalisation activism and the praxis of principled pragmatism’, Globalizations, 8 (3), 535–549. McCann, Carole R. and Seung-Kyung Kim (2013) ‘Feminist theory: local and global perspectives’, in Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (eds), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 1–7. Pettman, Jan Jindy (2004) ‘Global politics and transnational feminisms’, in Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles and Margaret McFadden (eds), Feminist Politics: Activism and Vision, Local and Global Challenges, London: Zed Books, pp. 49–63. Silliman, Jael (1999) ‘Expanding civil society: shrinking political spaces – the case of women’s nongovernmental organizations’, Social Politics, 96 (1), 23–52. Sperling, Valerie, Myra Marx Ferree and Barbara Risman (2001) ‘Constructing global feminism: transnational advocacy networks and Russian women’s activism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26 (4), 1115–1186. Stienstra, Deborah (1994) Women’s Movements and International Organizations, London: Macmillan.
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15. Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? Swati Parashar
With the debates and concerns that were raised in third wave feminism, which gathered momentum in the 1990s, there seemed to be a consensus that we had perhaps resolved the problem of multiple voices and unifying causes. An understanding prevailed through the turn of the century that feminism had reconciled with diversity, positionality and privilege, with a commitment to recognizing the category of women and displacing it too (Sylvester, 1994). Third wave feminism emphasized the need to foreground the ‘personal’ in an attempt to understand the multiple voices, highlight the many silences and find solidarity in transnational feminist activism, without patronizing or unifying the struggles of the women in the Global South or at the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity and queerness (see for example Basu, 1995; Mohanty, 2003a, 2003b; Hewitt, 2010). It demonstrated not only that ‘global sisterhood’ was a myth, but also that understanding the struggles and suffering of those outside our ‘comfort zone’ was essential to validate our own struggles. Three decades into third wave feminism, there are ominous signs of discomfort, silencing, exclusions and bullying (Sylvester, 2010; Shepherd, 2013). The emphasis on diversity of voices on substantive empirical issues and debates to understand the grand theoretical underpinnings, instead of opening up, has fenced in terrains of knowledge. Feminism not only is deeply engaged with and inspired by the politics of identity but finds itself limited by the very discourses it creates (Borren, 2013). Feminists challenge and resist and yet at the same time endorse the politics of identity, which has consequences for feminist solidarity and activism. In this short chapter, I want to make three main arguments: 1.
2.
While successful in rejecting the grand narratives of feminism, the selective recognition of struggles, voices and discursive locations has become a hindrance in promoting transnational solidarity. Recognizing diversity has meant an uncritical acceptance of all micro politics and cultural interactions and a simplistic understanding and endorsement of the category of difference. 118
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Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? 119 3.
The continuous search for the ‘authentic’ voice to mediate our understanding of the postcolonial world is disingenuous; it has insecured many women whose voices are not considered authentic enough.
I want to finally conclude that an ‘empathetic critique’ model of engagement with fragmented and contested truths can induce that necessary degree of caution as well as optimism as we rethink the possibilities of transnational feminist solidarity.
FROM INTERNATIONAL TO TRANSNATIONAL Before discussing the obstacles to transnational feminist solidarity, it is important to engage with transnationalism itself and how it seems to have challenged and even replaced the ‘international’. The history of women’s collaborative struggles is fraught with ideological conflicts between feminists that were rooted in the East–West divide of the Cold War and in the North–South differences that still dominate. The Fourth UN Women’s Conference at Beijing in 1995 brought these differences to the fore and highlighted the need for feminist activism to extend beyond national boundaries and nation-states to address the new challenges of globalization, neoliberalism, the rise of right-wing movements, identity politics and intra-state conflicts in the Global South (Moghadam, 1994, 2000, 2015; Mohanty, 2003b; Ferree and Tripp, 2006). The exchange of feminist perspectives especially between North and South created a vibrant transnational movement in the 1990s addressing the many impacts of globalization across national and state boundaries. As I. Grewal and Kaplan (2000) argue, transnational instead of international destabilizes boundaries of nation, race and gender. Internationalism, on the other hand, is based on the idea of cooperation that recognizes the nation-states as ‘discrete and sovereign entities’. Feminist internationalism is embedded in the relations between states, their national identity and politics. Transnationalism offers critical recognition to the intersectional links between patriarchies, colonialisms, nationalisms, racisms and other forms of domination. Transnational feminist politics derives from the interdisciplinary study of the complex, unequal relationships between women in diverse cultures and societies. However, this transnational engagement has entered a phase of immense anxieties and contestations based on the very identity/boundary politics that it sought to question.
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SELECTIVE OUTRAGE AND SOLIDARITY The selective recognition of struggles, voices and discursive locations has prevented a meaningful transnationalism from emerging. Some recognizable differences are necessary, encouraging and even bridgeable, others too different to respond to. The Delhi gang rape of a young physiotherapist occurred on 16 December 2012 and was widely covered in the global media. The massive and spontaneous protests in India from young women and men demanding more accountability from the state and society provoked international outrage and curiosity (Parashar, 2012). While Indian feminist activists and scholars used that tragic incident as an opportunity to re-examine and re-open debates about gender-based violence and patriarchal cultural norms in India (Baxi, 2012), Western feminist networks were either silent or subdued in their responses (Parashar, 2012). Although Western feminists have relentlessly pointed out how women and children are killed in US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, how sexual violence is continuously unleashed against women in conflict zones, and that racialized minorities in the Western world face discrimination and human rights violations, the Indian rape case in a non-conflict, everyday setting did not evoke much response. Any condemnation of misogyny and patriarchy in India and the failure of law enforcement to respond to women’s needs was slow and measured; troubling silences emerged owing to considerations of Western privilege, postcolonial concerns about the ‘authentic’ voice, race relations and appropriating third world feminist struggles and causes. One witnesses similar silences in the case of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Transnational solidarity with the suffering civilians of Gaza against a one-sided and brutal military campaign by the Israeli army recently has been extended through petitions and protests in which many feminists have participated. On the other hand, the criticism of the Islamic State and its war against women and minorities in Syria and Iraq has been quite muted. It is worth considering why certain kinds of suffering and pain appeal more and stir our feminist consciousness more than the others. If selective outrage and solidarity are an issue, underlying them are the simplistic categories of the oppressed and oppressor, victim and agent, oriental and occidental, hegemonic and subaltern. One definitely runs the risk of racial othering when problems of the Global South are oversimplified; the endemic problem of rape in rural India, for example, becomes associated with the lack of toilets alone that can be resolved through developmental initiatives (Parashar, 2014). The liberal
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Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? 121 feminist narrative that brown women need saving from the brown men is equally damaging to the cause of transnational feminist solidarity. The uncritical acceptance of all micro politics and cultural interactions and norms makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations around difference and diversity. A useful example in this regard is the worldwide problem of violence against women. While comparative statistics reveal that violence against women and rape are endemic problems across the world (True, 2003), the manner in which societies and states respond to them differs considerably. There is much greater legal recourse and state and community intervention (however flawed) available to women who experience any form of violence in Western countries. In several countries of the Global South, the legal route has been very dubious and a violent experience in itself for women. Despite provisions in the law, police refuse to register cases, side with perpetrators and in most cases blame and shame women for their experiences. In addition, selective interpretations of cultural norms and religious traditions legitimize harmful practices against women such as female foeticide, genital mutilation, (dis)honour killings, child marriages and so on. However, despite the differences in violent experiences and the uniqueness of patriarchy in every society, transnational feminism has yet to develop a language of critique. While feminists remain committed to the politics of anti-racism and anti-colonialism and against Western cultural imperialism, any debate about harmful cultural practices in the Global South remains unexplored or burdened by concerns about the ‘authentic’ voice which can engage in the ‘speech act’. This is a matter of concern given the backlash against women’s rights everywhere but especially in the Global South, where the fight for women’s equality and freedom necessitates not only solidarity across borders but an understanding of the diversity and differences in the language and metaphor of protest and resistance. What constitutes legitimate protests, or legitimate solidarity that a feminist group is allowed to demonstrate, and who gets to call the shots? This prevailing anxiety around the discussion of ‘cultures’ is not based on the recognition of diversity of experiences but rather that such a diversity doesn’t exist. While ‘culturally appropriate’ responses/protests to gender-based violence are essential, they must be premised upon the notion that cultures can have very devastating effects on women’s lives. Patriarchy colludes with racism and capitalism, with cultures and religions, to promote the worst forms of moral policing and violence against women. ‘Cultures’ are not homogeneous belief systems, and we need to develop appropriate discursive strategies to understand and deconstruct them. Women have also reclaimed various aspects of culture for the purposes of their
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struggles, vis-à-vis culture that is deployed solely in the interest of patriarchy. In building transnational solidarity, transcending cultural boundaries in the name of women’s rights is a very difficult and sensitive area. Ethnic group members of movements for improving human rights know the best approach towards raising more awareness on these issues, but we should not let them become isolated in their struggles. We need to build strong inter-cultural relations and promote open and frank dialogue to address the fear of the ‘unknown’ and understand difference.
WHOSE VOICE MATTERS? Related to the argument about selective outrage and solidarity are the censorship and brutal criticisms that some feminists extend towards those whose voice does not seem ‘authentic’ enough and is provocative. In cases where such women do not belong to those communities or cultures they critique, the authenticity argument becomes the only point of validation. On the other hand, women who suffer violence and speak up against their own communities are categorized as native informants, white supremacists, imperialists, right-wing racists and Islamophobes (Sylvester, 2010; Grewal, K., 2012). There are many women/feminists in the public domain whose views have challenged dominant narratives of oppression, inequality and victimhood. Feminists like Ayan Hirsi Ali, Mona Eltahawy, Taslima Nasreen, Azar Nafisi, Madhu Kishwar and others take uncomfortable positions that often result in righteous feminist outrage, censure and non-engagement. Mona Eltahawy’s bold article in Foreign Policy in April 2012 caused enormous outrage among the feminist community as she highlighted the misogyny in the Arab world. She wrote: ‘not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women’ (Eltahawy, 2012). She not only mentioned the gender bias against women that was culturally upheld and promoted but also suggested that it extended to the legal sphere in countries that were theocracies as well as those that claimed secular credentials. Writing amidst what was then widely portrayed as the Arab Spring, she argued: ‘until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun’ (ibid.). Eltahawy found few feminist friends for her scathing criticism of Arab Muslim societies. Kiran Grewal (2012: 587) argues: ‘While diverse political, social and ideological positions are open to the white Western subject, the third
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Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? 123 world woman is still essentialized and homogenized.’ Postcolonial feminism, and its celebration of the third world woman’s voice, has failed to find a way to welcome non-white women’s perspectives without having to endorse them uncritically. This is the problem with the politics of ‘difficult feminists’ whose views challenge normative feminist concerns (Sylvester, 2010). They are treated as pariahs and their views challenged in an acrimonious manner. They are silenced in a cacophony of selfrighteous feminist voices that are concerned with the ‘appropriate’ progressive politics. Uma Narayan puts it in context as she suggests: ‘Given that negative attitudes and stereotypes about third world communities are produced in a number of powerful institutional sites, I find it unlikely that the solution for “western cultural arrogance” lies in third world feminist silence about the problems women face in their national and cultural contexts’ (1997: 135). Cultural tolerance has left no space for non-Western women’s voices to be heard, especially if it concerns their own oppression, or for a nuanced debate to emerge. The reality of many non-Western women’s cultural experiences remains silenced; transnational solidarity suffers amidst such a discourse.
EMPATHETIC CRITIQUE Gender-based violence is on the rise worldwide, and in many countries there is greater media attention drawn to women’s experiences of violence. There seems to be a war on women, and cultures are instrumental in this war; cultural norms are continuously invoked on issues of female foeticide, genital mutilation, (dis)honour killings, domestic violence, sexualized violence, dowries and so on. By ignoring the role of cultures, we would be doing a disservice to those women who are trying to reclaim cultures from patriarchal controls, who are trying to fight cultural controls on their bodies and choices, and against violence. What I propose is a position of empathetic critique that can address these anxieties and selective outrages that are an obstacle to feminist solidarity. Empathetic critique must first begin with the notion that feminist solidarity is not about getting people on the same side or even convincing them. It is rooted in the recognition that feminism started as a politics that was not afraid of outraging the society, of saying the most uncomfortable of things, of raising the most troubling questions of its times and of expressing anger. It is premised on the position of empathetic dialogue that incites action and highlights how we may be implicated in various narratives of oppression. The rules of the dialogue must include selfreflection and an acknowledgement of privilege. Gayatri Spivak draws
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attention to the painstaking labour required to establish an ethical dialogue between the subaltern and the hegemon and the ‘social, linguistic and historical knowledge necessary for the ethical dialogue’ (Morton, 2007: 133). Feminist posturing, worried about the unintended consequences of political positions that appear racist, leaves no space for those who resist patriarchal control over women’s bodies. Ironically, the anti-racist, anticolonial brigade find themselves on the same side of the debate as radical fundamentalists everywhere, especially on the issue of women’s rights: that cultural groups get to decide how women should be represented, what resistance is culturally acceptable and what the ‘authentic’ voice of women is. Amidst this outrage, one needs to revisit Cynthia Enloe’s (1987) vital feminist question: just where are the women? Kiran Grewal’s insightful engagement with Ayan Hirsi Ali, the controversial SomalianDutch feminist, can serve as a conversation starter on some of these issues about authenticity and positionality. Grewal argues: ‘It is we who assert a commitment to both anti-racism and feminism that must find appropriate ways to respond to her [Hirsi Ali]. This is partly in order not to fall into the very trap of doing what we have so long worked to critique: silencing a different and challenging voice’ (Grewal, K., 2012: 589). Neither belligerent censorship nor animated outrage against those voices that unsettle us in our comfort zones can be an appropriate feminist response.
CONCLUSION Third wave feminism has entered a new phase of discursive ambiguity and conceptual anxieties around difference, diversity and patriarchal cultures. There is a genuine crisis of legitimacy and intent as a major roadblock to transnational feminist activism and solidarity. The anxieties exist because our engagement is selective and sporadic, and they cannot be assuaged without revisiting the fundamentals of feminist politics that include the commitment to speak out and coalesce against all forms of violence and oppressions. Nothing that the women’s movements have ever achieved would be possible without the creative power of anger and without the knowledge that we are all implicated in the systems of oppressions in various ways. The intersections of race, class, gender, religion and ethnicity must not become sites of impermeable identity politics and conversation stoppers, but must offer space for questioning and resistance. Transnational feminist solidarity is not only possible but also most essential at this critical juncture of history when human rights
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Is transnational feminist solidarity possible? 125 are being relentlessly targeted and women and girls are being subjected to the worst forms of violence and oppression. Feminists have the responsibility to build that solidarity through greater self-reflection, inclusive research praxis, and the development of a language of critique that is based on not just concern but empathy. As Annick Wibben (2013) suggests, ‘we have to take our differences seriously, we have to talk about our differences and negotiate them, but we cannot let them silence us’.
REFERENCES Basu, S. (ed.) (1995) The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Baxi, Pratiksha (2012) ‘Rape cultures in India’, Kafila Post, http://kafila.org/2012/12/23/ rape-cultures-in-india-pratiksha-baxi/ (accessed 21 September 2014). Borren, Marieke (2013) ‘Feminism as revolutionary practice: from justice and the politics of recognition to freedom’, Hypatia, 28 (1), 197–214. Eltahawy, Mona (2012) ‘Why do they hate us? The real war on women is in the Middle East’, Foreign Policy, 23 April. Enloe, Cynthia (1987) Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ferree, M.M. and A.M. Tripp (2006) Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, New York: New York University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (2000) ‘Postcolonial studies and transnational feminist practices’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 5 (1), http://english.chass. ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm (accessed 21 September 2014). Grewal, Kiran (2012) ‘Reclaiming the voice of the “third world woman”’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 14 (4), 569–590. Hewitt, Nancy A. (ed.) (2010) No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Moghadam, V.M. (1994) Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Assertions and Feminisms in International Perspectives, Oxford: Westview Press. Moghadam, V.M. (2000) ‘Transnational feminist networks: collective action in an era of globalization’, International Sociology, 15, 57–86. Moghadam, V.M. (2015) ‘Transnational activism’, in Laura J. Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, 2nd edn, Abingdon: Routledge. Mohanty, C.T. (2003a) ‘Under Western Eyes revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles’, Signs, 28 (2), 499–535. Mohanty, C.T. (2003b) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morton, Stephen (2007) Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge: Polity. Narayan, Uma (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third-world Feminism, New York: Routledge. Parashar, Swati (2012) ‘The silent feminism’, Gender and Global Governance Net-work, December, http://genderinglobalgovernancenet-work.net/comment/the-silent-feminism/; also ABC, The Drum, Opinion, December, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4444810. html (accessed 23 September 2014).
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Parashar, Swati (2014) ‘Not merely toilets: reframing the debate on Badaun rape’, Hindu Centre for Public Policy, Chennai, http://www.thehinducentre.com/the-arena/article 6110846.ece (accessed 23 September 2014). Shepherd, L.J. (2013) ‘The state of feminist security studies: continuing the conversation’, International Studies Perspectives, 14 (4), 436–439. Sylvester, Christine (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sylvester, C. (2010) ‘Tensions in feminist security studies’, Security Dialogue, 41 (6), 607–614. True, J. (2003) ‘Mainstreaming gender in global public policy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5 (3), 368–396. Wibben, Annick (2013) ‘Q & A with Annick T.R. Wibben: feminist security studies and today’s challenges’, Globalized World Post, March.
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16. Gender, protest and political transition in the Middle East and North Africa Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt
Since the end of 2010, when a wave of mass protests and uprisings swept across several Arab countries, there has been unprecedented media attention on Arab women and their role in regional political transformations. Yet this large body of commentary and speculation has tended towards dichotomous positions, representing women either as the heroines of social media and street protests or as the victims of violent and conservative backlashes. A smaller number of scholars have addressed the gendered dimensions of the political and socio-economic processes unfolding since 2011, including the revolutionary struggles, counterrevolutionary backlashes, street protests, armed uprisings and civil war. They have highlighted the complex and varied picture emerging when applying a gendered lens to political transformations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (Salime, 2012; Kandiyoti, 2013; Pratt, 2013; Al-Ali, 2014; Hafez, 2014; Khalil, 2014; Skalli, 2014).
DISAGGREGATING THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ In this chapter, we avoid using the term ‘Arab Spring’, as it tends to conflate the diversity of transitions and processes taking place in the MENA region, which range from political reform and protest movements in Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and Kuwait to regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. These different situations across countries in the region have different implications for women’s situations and women’s rights there. In general, the uprisings and mass rallies initially created new opportunities for women to participate in public life – as protesters, mobilizers, and volunteers in field hospitals, among other activities that contributed to successfully sustaining popular struggles. In Libya and Syria, where the uprisings turned violent, this has led to a prioritization of violent resistance over non-violent struggle, thereby marginalizing women. In Libya, despite women winning almost 17 per cent of seats in the first parliamentary elections after the fall of Gadhafi, nevertheless women in public life face sustained efforts to silence them through 127
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intimidation and threats (Alnaas and Pratt, 2015). In the case of the Syrian conflict, women have been marginalized in peace talks, despite more than a decade since the passage of UNSCR 1325 calling for women’s participation in peace making and building. In Egypt and Tunisia, countries where regime change was largely peaceful, women have succeeded to different degrees to be part of the political process. In Tunisia, women made up 24 per cent of the constituent assembly and, in April 2014, the government withdrew all of its reservations on the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), thereby paving the way for gender equality to be enshrined in Tunisian law. However, in Egypt, women’s participation in post-Mubarak political institutions has been very low, both before and after the overthrow of former president Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and despite the inclusion of an article in the 2014 constitution that obliges the state to guarantee women’s right to hold public office. In addition to stressing diversity of political processes and outcomes across MENA countries, we would also like to emphasize that women (and men!) in the region are far from homogeneous, and their experiences of post-2011 developments differ. Women’s access to economic and political resources and social support networks also vary according to social class, place of residence, citizenship status, ethnicity, generation, and political and religious affiliation. Generational shifts have become significant in all national contexts, as younger generations of women and men diverge in both method and content from previous generations of political activists and dissidents. While critical of simplistic notions of ‘Facebook revolutions’, we recognize that the use of social media and various forms of on-line activism has contributed to the emergence of new forms of activism amongst young men and women whose gender activism is often linked to wider struggles for wider citizenship and human rights (Skalli, 2014). Women and men are further differentiated by their national contexts and respective political economies, histories of protest and gender regimes. Therefore, it is difficult to speak about the impact of the socio-political transformations since the end of 2010 on women or women’s rights, as though this was singular. Instead, we aim to discuss some of the gendered dimensions of these processes.
HISTORY MATTERS One of the pitfalls of debates about recent developments is the failure to historicize women’s rights activism as well as women’s wider political
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Gender, protest and political transition in the MENA region 129 participation in the MENA region. There exists a long history of women’s involvement in political life and civil society in many countries of the region, particularly Egypt and Tunisia. The Egyptian Feminist Union, led by Huda Shaarawi, which emerged during the period of Egyptian resistance to British colonial rule at the beginning of the twentieth century, was one of the first women’s movements in the region. Over the past decades, Egyptian women activists have spearheaded struggles for civil rights, democracy and human rights alongside women’s rights (Al-Ali, 2000). One of the challenges women’s rights activists in the Middle East face has been to avoid co-option by their respective authoritarian regime’s modernizing policies, of which a form of state feminism has been a key element. Authoritarian regimes have implemented measures to increase gender equality and social justice, as long as these did not challenge the political status quo. We have seen this most conspicuously in Tunisia with Bourguiba’s radical legal reform of the personal status code (governing marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance) and Ben Ali’s politics of secular reformism to consolidate his political authoritarianism (Khalil, 2014: 191). In the contexts of the one-party dictatorships that have been prevalent in the region, it was difficult for women’s rights activists to operate independently of state structures. In Egypt, some women’s rights activists collaborated with Suzanne Mubarak’s National Council for Women, which played a high-profile role in promoting legal reforms for women. Despite the fact that women’s groups on the ground had been working and lobbying for years for these changes, they came to be considered as ‘Suzanne’s Laws’ and, in the post-Mubarak period, there have been attempts to reverse them to signal a break from the past (Elsadda, 2011). In the Moroccan context, many feminist groups and activists have positioned themselves as allies of state agents and the king in complicated political negotiations with political parties and Islamist political players in order to achieve legal reforms (such as the high-profile changes to family law, or Mudawanna) (Salime, 2012: 107). However, many women’s rights activists, whether in Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Iran or Tunisia, have historically been intersectional in their approach to gender-based rights. Egyptian women’s rights activists, for example, protested against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the US invasion of Iraq and the exploitation of factory workers in the decades prior to the ousting of President Mubarak, as well as engaging in contestations with the state over gender policies and wider issues of citizenship and social justice (Al-Ali, 2000). Whilst the majority of Egyptian women’s rights activists have been urban-based and middle-class, nevertheless some
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groups and activists have engaged for a long time in grassroots activism, as well as aspiring to find non-hierarchical ways of organizing, thereby contributing to the process of democratization.
EMBODYING POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS In contexts of rapid political transformations and struggles over power and authority, women’s bodies emerge as key sites of contestation and control, not only in the current period, but also historically and crossnationally. Women’s behaviour and appearance is considered to be symbolic of the national/religious/ethnic community (Kandiyoti, 1991) and, therefore, women are often the target of legislative, legal or informal mechanisms or even physical violence with the aim of imposing dress codes, controlling sexual behaviour, and limiting access to the public sphere, all in the name of ‘restoring authentic values’ but operating to consolidate the authority of new political actors or attempting to ‘break’ the opposition. Feminist scholars studying the various developments in the MENA region highlight that women’s bodies are central to political transformations (Pratt, 2013; Al-Ali, 2014; Hafez, 2014). Several paradoxes have emerged. First, the high level of women’s political participation in both on-line and off-line contexts has not translated into a high level of women present in institutionalized political transition processes (as evident in Egypt, Libya and Yemen, in particular). Second, democratization in the form of electoral politics brings to power conservative political actors with conservative gender agendas, and they use their new power to promote more conservative gender norms (as happened under the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, 2012–13). Third, the increase in gender-based violence, particularly the widespread sexual harassment of women protesters, has been met with the unprecedented mobilization of young men side by side with women against such violence. The apparent increase in violence against women by agents of the state or hired thugs is often a counter-revolutionary strategy to ‘break the will’ of movements calling for political and social change. In Syria, government forces and pro-government militia have used rape as a weapon to break the opposition and civilian support for it (Nasar, 2013). Yet, in Egypt, women, and more specifically the female body, have occupied centre stage in the struggle against patriarchal authority and the determination of the military to thwart the revolution and intimidate those who carry it out. In 2011, Alia Mahdi’s controversial naked photo raised important questions about censorship and ownership of the body in
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Gender, protest and political transition in the MENA region 131 post-Mubarak Egypt. But probably one of the most important acts of rebellion in Egypt was Samira Ibrahim’s lawsuit against the army for subjecting her and six other women arrested in March 2011 to ‘virginity tests’. Since 2011, sexual harassment and rape during protests have increased dramatically, with no perpetrator having been brought to justice at the time of writing (Nadeem Centre et al., 2013). However, unlike the period before 2011, women are willing to speak publicly about sexual harassment and rape, and these issues have become important objectives for mobilizing women and men. What is also remarkable is how the issue of sexual harassment and women’s ability to move safely in public spaces and participate in political activities is no longer perceived to be a diversion from the wider revolutionary struggle, but has been taken up as part of a wider battle for justice, dignity and human rights (Al-Ali, 2014: 124). Whilst the large presence of men in solidarity with women is clearly a sign of changing times, nevertheless elements of the military, some political parties, the police and security services deploy and make use of thuggish violent masculinities to (re-)assert their authority and intimidate women and men who resist the status quo (Al-Ali, 2014: 126). While masculinities and femininities are always perpetually in flux, the level and intensity of contestation over masculinities and femininities have increased since 2011, as have the possibilities of reimagining and challenging hegemonic gender norms (Pratt, 2013; Al-Ali, 2014: 126). Deniz Kandiyoti (2013) argues that we cannot simply explain away the targeting of women’s dress codes, their mobility, their sexuality, their presence during protests and the fact that they are political actors as manifestations of patriarchy and misogyny. Kandiyoti argues that patriarchy no longer functions ‘as usual’ and requires a higher level of coercion and the deployment of more varied ideological state apparatuses to ensure its reproduction. Therefore, the high levels of violence against women since 2011 evidence a logic of ‘masculinist restoration’ that seeks to restore patriarchy (Kandiyoti, 2013). We agree that there is a need to think more deeply about contestations over masculinities at this particular historical juncture. However, it is also necessary to disaggregate ‘men’, who are differently positioned in terms of their class backgrounds and relationships to power, leading to different projects of ‘masculine restoration’. In particular, there is a difference between the restoration projects of working-class and lower-middle-class men who have struggled to provide for their families and fulfil social expectations of ‘breadwinner masculinities’ as a result of two decades of neoliberal economic reforms, as opposed to male political and military elites, whose restoration
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projects are intrinsically bound up with the consolidation of their power and authority (Pratt, 2014).
CONTESTING THE SECULAR/ISLAMIC BINARY Historically, most women’s rights activists in the MENA region have been committed to secularism as a means of protecting and extending women’s rights as well as freedom for religious minorities (Al-Ali, 2000). Socio-political transformations since 2010 have challenged the construction of a secular/Islamic binary with regard to women’s rights and gender agendas. In a context of debates over constitutions, rights and freedoms, increasing numbers of women across the region have challenged the dominant notion that secularism is a prerequisite to guarantee women’s rights. To some degree, there is some continuity between preand post-uprisings with regard to what has been termed ‘Islamic feminism’, an intellectual trend that seeks to reinterpret the Quran in more gender-sensitive ways. However, there is also a ‘pragmatic’ trend of women who seek to frame their women’s rights activism with reference to religion (Muhanna, 2015) or at least to engage seriously in religious debates about women’s rights. Moreover, younger generations of women activists, who are not invested in the secular modernization projects of previous postindependence generations, no longer subscribe to the notion of the secular state as agent of modernization (and therefore a guarantor of women’s rights). This is not a backlash against state feminism (as discussed above) but rather a refusal to compromise democracy and freedom for the sake of women’s rights gains. In Egypt, both secularoriented and Islamist activists have contested the increasing authoritarianism of the ‘secular’ Egyptian government since the military coup against Morsi in July 2013, and in Morocco the February 20th Movement for political reform has been inclusive of secular-oriented and Islamist activists (Salime, 2012).
CONCLUSIONS The impact of socio-political transformations in the MENA region since the end of 2010 on women, women’s rights and gender norms has been varied according to national context, respective histories of state feminism and gender activism, and differences among and between women (based on class, citizenship status and place of residence, amongst other
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Gender, protest and political transition in the MENA region 133 social differences). In general, mass protests and uprisings created new openings for women’s involvement in the public domain. However, these were rapidly threatened by armed conflict, counter-revolutionary backlashes, and the empowerment of Islamist political forces seeking to promote their conservative gender agendas as part of signalling a break from former regimes. In the struggle for political power, women’s bodies have become the targets of violence and control by a range of actors seeking to ‘break the will’ of those seeking change as well as to consolidate their authority. Despite what might appear to be a gloomy picture, there have been significant developments on the societal level. Women survivors of violence are speaking out publicly and breaking the taboo surrounding discussion of sexual abuse and harassment. Moreover, women and men, particularly amongst the youth, are mobilizing to resist violence against women as an integral part of their demands for democracy and dignity. Meanwhile, many youth activists are challenging the notion that only secularism can guarantee women’s rights, particularly where secularoriented regimes are implicated in violations of rights and freedoms, and are engaging with religious texts as well as political religious actors in order to advance their claims for rights and freedoms.
REFERENCES Al-Ali, Nadje (2000) Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Al-Ali, Nadje (2014) ‘Reflections on (counter) revolutionary processes in Egypt’, Feminist Review, 106, 122–128. Alnaas, Sahar M. and Nicola Pratt (2015) ‘Women’s bodies in post-revolution Libya: control and resistance’, in Lena Meari, Maha El Said and Nicola Pratt (eds), Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, London: Zed Books, pp. 155–179. Elsadda, Hoda (2011) ‘Women’s rights activism in post-Jan 25 Egypt: combating the shadow of the First Lady syndrome’, Middle East Law and Governance, 3, 84–93. Hafez, Sherine (2014) ‘The revolution shall not pass through women’s bodies: Egypt, uprising and gender politics’, Journal of North African Studies, 19 (2), 172–185. Kandiyoti, Deniz (1991) ‘Identity and its discontents: women and the nation’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 20 (3), 429–433. Kandiyoti, Deniz (2013) ‘Fear and fury: women and post-revolutionary violence’, Open Democracy, 14 January, http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/fear-andfury-women-and-post-revolutionary-violence (accessed 1 July 2014). Khalil, Andrea (2014) ‘Tunisia’s women: partners in revolution’, Journal of North African Studies, 19 (2), 186–199. Muhanna, Aitemad (2015) ‘Islamist and secular women’s activism and discourses in post uprising Tunisia’, in Lena Meari, Maha El Said and Nicola Pratt (eds), Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, London: Zed Books, pp. 205–231.
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Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Violence, Nazra for Feminist Studies and New Woman Foundation (2013) Sexual Assault and Rape in Tahrir Square and Its Vicinity: A Compendium of Sources 2011–2013, Cairo, http:// nazra.org/sites/nazra/files/attachments/compilation-_of_sexual-violence_-testimonies_ between_20111_2013_en.pdf (accessed 1 July 2014). Nasar, Sema (2013) Violence against Women: Bleeding Wound in the Syrian Conflict, Copenhagen: Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, http://www.euromedrights. org/eng/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Doc-report-VAW-Syria.pdf (accessed 1 July 2014). Pratt, Nicola (2013) ‘Egyptian women: between revolution, counter-revolution, orientalism and authenticity’, Jadaliyya.com, May, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11559/ egyptian-women_between-revolution-counter-revoluti (accessed 1 July 2014). Pratt, Nicola (2014) ‘Crises of social reproduction, the gendered political economy of neo-liberal authoritarianism and the Arab uprisings’, unpublished paper, presented to the workshop ‘Rethinking the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East’, Amman, May. Salime, Zakia (2012) ‘A new feminism? Gender dynamics in Morocco’s February 20th Movement’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5 (5), 101–114. Skalli, Loubna H. (2014) ‘Young women and social media against sexual harassment in North Africa’, Journal of North African Studies, 19 (2), 244–258.
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PART III INTERNATIONAL LAW
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17. Gender and international law Hilary Charlesworth
International law has been slow to pay attention to the concept of gender. To some extent this reflects the power of the traditional account of law: in contrast to politics, goes the legal story, the law offers an objective and impartial system of reasoning about problems, distinct from the actual biases of human decision-makers. International institutions have adopted a range of legal instruments relating to women’s rights, most notably the 1979 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), but there was no discussion of gender in the international legal system as a whole until the last two decades. Feminist voices began to emerge in international law in the early 1990s. They were inspired by a broad range of feminist scholarship, but the most immediate influences were those of feminist international relations (IR) specialists, such as Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Jan Jindy Pettman and J. Ann Tickner. These scholars provided perspectives that helped international lawyers unpack the gendered building blocks of international law, including the state, sovereignty, conflict and peace. Feminist IR theorists also pointed to the relationship of gender to other forms of power, such as race, nationality and class, and paid attention to the way that relations of power are constructed between diverse groups of women. This scholarship offered international lawyers the tools, and the inspiration, to challenge the claim that international law offers a rational, detached, universal form of justice.
‘SEX’ AND/OR ‘GENDER’ It is important to note that the term ‘gender’ is used in many different ways on the international plane. In some contexts, the UN has followed the second wave of feminist thought in drawing a clear distinction between the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. It has thus defined sex as a matter of biology and gender as the constructed meaning of sex and the designation of social roles. In other contexts, the UN has effectively
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elided biological sex and gender. Take, for example, the notion of gender mainstreaming adopted by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1997: Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.1
Even more restrictively, the Statute of the International Criminal Court refers to ‘gender’ in the description of some of the crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction, defining it as ‘the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society’.2 The elision of sex and gender found in these definitions, linking gender with biology, implies that gender is a fixed, objective fact about a person. It is based on an assumption of heteronormativity and does not capture the ways that gender is constructed in society to make some actions seem natural and others controversial and thus it affirms the inevitability of fixed, binary, female/ male identities. The linkage of sex and gender also overlooks the performative aspects of gender and its relational nature as well as the role of power relations and the ways that structures of subordination are reproduced (Baden and Goetz, 1997: 3, 7). Consequently, gender has become a synonym for women at the international level, often meaning simply a head count of women or paying attention to women’s assumed vulnerability. An example of this is UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) adopted on 31 October 2000, which launched the Security Council’s ‘women, peace and security’ agenda. UNSCR 1325 called for an increase in women’s representation in peace processes and for the incorporation of a ‘gender perspective’ in peacekeeping. Such a gender perspective is defined as giving attention to the ‘special needs’ of women and girls during repatriation, resettlement and reconstruction, supporting local women’s peace initiatives and protecting the human rights of women and girls in any new legal order. UNSCR 1325 regards gender as all about women, unconnected with masculine identities in times of conflict or violent patterns of conduct accepted because they are coded as male. The UN Secretary-General’s annual reports on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 similarly understand ‘gender perspectives’ as, in the bureaucratese of the UN, ‘the need to prioritize the proactive role women can play in
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Gender and international law 139 peace-building’3 or ‘to take into consideration the special needs of women and girls’4 or increasing the number of women in national and international military forces.5 This restricted account of gender allows problems facing women to be understood as the product of particular cultures, lack of participation in public arenas or lack of information or skills and, as such, obscures the way that gender shapes our understanding of the world, particularly the way in which international conflicts are identified and resolved (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2002). It requires women to change or a change in the position of women, but does not address the power relations between men and women, or require men to change.
FEMINIST ANALYSES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW A more productive analysis of international law may emerge from an explicitly feminist perspective, because feminist theories are based on the goal of understanding and ameliorating women’s inequality and so necessarily address gender as a social relation of inequality. In a legal context, feminist theories analyse ‘the exclusion of (some) women’s needs, interests, aspirations, or attributes from the design or application of the law’ (Réaume, 1996: 271). One strand in feminist scholarship in international law is concerned with the participation of women in the development of legal standards, documenting the absence and exclusion of women from law-making fora. International institutions have been ready targets for this criticism. Examples in the area of human rights include the poor representation of women in the processes of defining human rights standards and in implementing them.6 The lack of women has been connected to the lop-sided concerns of the traditional human rights canon, which sidesteps issues that have a particular significance for women.7 In 2015, the International Court of Justice, the apex of the international legal system, had three women among its 15 permanent judges.8 The Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), by contrast, calls for consideration of the need for a ‘fair representation of female and male judges’. The ICC judiciary has had roughly equal numbers of women and men. Scholars have debated to what extent this has affected the Court’s jurisprudence and how the participation of women affects the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals generally. Another feminist concern has been to investigate the role of gender in international law: how do understandings of masculinity and femininity shape the discipline? Gender in this sense refers not to the characteristics
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of particular men and women but to a set of social constructions, varying over time and place. Common features of these constructions are, first, that masculinity and femininity are defined as opposite to one other and, second, that those qualities or traits deemed masculine are assigned a greater value than those defined as feminine. Feminist scholars have studied the language and imagery of the law and their dependence on gendered categories. An example is the development of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine (R2P), which relies on gendered contrasts between action/inaction, force/passivity, order/chaos, practicality/theory and optimism/pessimism to identify the use of force as the ultimate guarantee of stability (Charlesworth, 2010). A striking pattern in the gender and international law literature generally is the focus on the situation of women in times of armed conflict, particularly sexual violence. While this is a significant area, it tends to overshadow less dramatic but more pervasive human rights concerns, such as the high rates of illiteracy among women in many areas of the world and the world-wide issue of women’s poverty.
THEORY AND PRACTICE While the work of feminist scholars has been important in challenging claims that law operates in an objective, impartial way, feminist international legal writings often draw on a range of theoretical positions that can sit uneasily together. For example, the idea that women have distinctive attitudes, interests and experiences might be combined with an argument that a reconstructed international law can deliver a truly impartial form of justice. This has led to charges of theoretical incoherence or impurity (see, for example, Berman, 2008: 79). As Elizabeth Grosz has observed, such a critique illustrates that feminist theories rest on a tension between their role in analysing the thoroughgoing masculinity of disciplinary knowledges and their role as a response to political feminist goals. Feminist scholars often incur the wrath of the traditional academy because of their overtly political ends. At the same time, they might attract the ire of feminist activists because their work is perceived as being immersed in the male-dominated world of theory (Grosz, 1990: 332). The charge that feminist academics are detached from the ‘real world’ of pragmatic policy decisions is common. Although the work of feminist international lawyers is often grouped under the umbrella of ‘New Approaches to International Law’, there is also some tension between feminist ideas and those of critical theorists. For example, critical theorists have presented the uses of international
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Gender and international law 141 law as a method of ducking responsibility for ethical and political choices (see, for example, Kennedy, 2004, 2006). On this account, international law is worth studying for its contradictions and obfuscations, but it can deliver only illusory benefits. In contrast, feminists have embraced normative legal projects, in particular achieving equality for women. Generally, feminist international lawyers tend to assume that the right sort of international law will achieve women’s equality, or at least get them part of the way to that destination. Despite the limitations of international law identified in feminist analyses, feminists have often invoked international law as a source of transformation and empowerment, portraying international law as a safety net for women, who often face discrimination in national legal systems. Catharine MacKinnon puts this point pithily when she notes that ‘the further away from home women go, the experience has been, the more rights they get … making it more likely that women’s violations … will be recognized as real’ (MacKinnon, 2013: 120). However, this contention is not accepted by all feminists; thus feminist faith in international law has also been controversial.9
DEBATES AND CRITIQUES It is striking that most of the debate and engagement with feminist ideas in international law comes from other feminists. Indeed feminists have created a veritable industry of internal critique, pointing to the problematic assumptions and approaches of their colleagues. Examples include the work of Third World and postmodern feminists. Take in illustration Ratna Kapur’s scrutiny of what she terms the ‘victimization’ rhetoric used by the international human rights movement when discussing the situation of Third World women, particularly in relation to violence and trafficking. Kapur argues that the assumption of a common international women’s victimhood operates to keep women in their place by presenting them as both vulnerable and ignorant. She is critical of a focus on sex as the locus of women’s oppression and urges instead a more complex understanding of women’s lives which involves considering factors such as race, wealth, class and religion (2002). Karen Engle has questioned one of the apparent success stories of international feminist activism, the criminalisation of rape in international criminal tribunals (2005; see also Halley, 2008). She argues that this strategy is built on a view of women as passive victims of sexual violence, and presents a one-dimensional view of the suffering of women
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in conflict. Engle contends that the strategy of prosecution has had the practical effect of reifying ethnic differences in some conflicts and the legal and moral effect of denying the possibility of sexual agency in times of conflict. She is sceptical of the utility of any claims made in the name of feminism and implies that change will depend on economic reforms such as redistribution of wealth (Engle, 2005: 778). To some extent, the internal debates among international legal feminists map on to a divide between scholars and activists alluded to above. Academics seem much more willing to scrutinise the premises of feminist theory and to attack impurity and inconsistency; people working in NGOs or international institutions with feminist agendas, by contrast, are generally keen to work with a big picture. The activist sees the value of feminism in getting more women involved in decisions, or using international law to help women (Charlesworth, 2008: 347). Perhaps the situation is more complex than either the enthusiasts for or critics of feminist analysis in international law claim. It is clear that feminist concepts now have some respectability in the international legal arena. We can see this in the language of UNSCR 1325, referred to above, and the ‘women, peace and security’ agenda it gave birth to. The language of gender has also influenced the development of international criminal law.10 On the other hand, the critiques overstate the power of feminist analysis: in practice, international feminist projects have had limited success in empowering women. Feminist commitments, such as the equality of women, have influenced the development of international law, but they have been incorporated only in a partial manner and implemented without regard to context or empathy for their intended beneficiaries. Dianne Otto has further pointed out that increased institutional acceptance of feminist vocabularies has been undermined by ‘selective engagement’ with feminist ideas, the lack of systems of accountability and the re-emergence of stereotypes of women (2009: 12, 20–21).
THE MARGINS OR THE CENTRE? A regular debate in feminist international legal literature, as in the IR literature, is whether feminist scholars should aim for the margins or the centre of the discipline. The margin is often understood as the place we want to leave behind as we head for the centre, the mainstream, where, it is assumed, power resides and all the action takes place. However, the periphery has its pleasures. It can be an attractive vantage point, offering the sense of adventure, of originality, of solidarity with the (often vaguely
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Gender and international law 143 defined) oppressed against those with power. Hence marginality is of virtue. Indeed, highlighting one’s marginality, one’s willingness to swim against the tide, is a useful technique in international law to bolster claims of academic precision. Ideas of marginality and centrality are also fluid, and there are locations at which they meet and even merge. Thus analysis of the effect of the UN Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 1325 in 2000 shows how a marginal international issue, women’s situations in times of conflict, was given an appearance of centrality through being debated in the UN Security Council. This carapace of importance and priority has since crumbled through lack of oversight and implementation. Feminist scholars have typically paid attention to the location of power within a society. Power is often dispersed and is not always concentrated in a centre, leaving women on the margins. Power is better understood as a network, operating in complex and inconsistent ways (Gunew, 1990: 23). For this reason, one might conclude that international law will always be an imperfect tool to unravel patriarchal power, and will be most effective when it is woven with other forms of regulation.
NOTES 1. 2.
3.
4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9.
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United Nations, Platform for Action, ECOSOC Agreed Conclusions, 1997/2 (1997), www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/ECOSOCAC1997.2.PDF (accessed June 2015). United Nations, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, ICC-ASP/2/Res.3, 12 September 2003, article 7 (3), http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/ADD16852AEE9-4757-ABE7-9CDC7CF02886/283503/RomeStatutEng1.pdf (accessed June 2015). United Nations, Women and Peace and Security: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc. S/2004/814, 13 October 2004, at para. 13 (UN, Women and Peace and Security); see also United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General on Women, Peace and Security, UN Doc. S/2006/770, 27 September 2006. UN, Women and Peace and Security, at para. 48. UN, Women and Peace and Security, at para. 90. In 2015, out of the nine UN human rights treaty committees, with a total of 147 members, 56 are women (38 per cent). However, 31 of the 56 women members are concentrated in two committees, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (22 out of 23 members) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (9 out of 18 members). The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the only committee to have equal numbers of women and men. The Committee on Enforced Disappearances, by contrast, has one woman member out of ten. In the context of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights see Dembour (2006: 188–231). Judge Joan Donoghue (United States), Judge Xue Hanquin (China) and Judge Julia Sebutinde (Uganda). The differences between MacKinnon (2006) and Halley (2006) are an example of this. Zalewski (2007) describes a parallel debate within feminist IR.
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144 10.
Handbook on gender in world politics See the 2014 special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16 (4) on the International Criminal Court.
REFERENCES Baden, Sally and Anne Marie Goetz (1997) ‘Who needs [sex] when you can have [gender]?’, Feminist Review, 56, 3–25. Berman, Nathaniel (2008) ‘Power and irony, or, international law after the Après-Guerre’, in Emmanuelle Jouannet, Hélène Ruiz Fabri and Jean-Marc Sorel (eds), Regards d’une génération de juristes sur le droit international, Paris: Editions A. Pedone, pp. 79–94. Charlesworth, Hilary (2008) ‘Are women peaceful? Reflections on the role of women in peace-building’, Feminist Legal Studies, 16, 347–361. Charlesworth, Hilary (2010) ‘Feminist reflections on the responsibility to protect’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 2 (3), 232–249. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin (2002) ‘Sex, gender and September 11’, American Journal of International Law, 96, 600–605. Dembour, Marie-Bénédicte (2006) Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engle, Karen (2005) ‘Feminism and its (dis)contents: criminalizing wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, American Journal of International Law, 99, 778–816. Grosz, Elizabeth (1990) ‘A note on essentialism and difference’, in Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, London: Routledge, pp. 332–344. Gunew, Sneja (1990) ‘Feminist knowledge: critique and construct’, in Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, London: Routledge, pp. 13–35. Halley, Janet (2006) Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Halley, Janet (2008) ‘Rape in Berlin: reconsidering the criminalisation of rape in the international law of armed conflict’, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 9, 78–124. Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The tragedy of victimization rhetoric: resurrecting the “native” subject in international/post-colonial feminist legal politics’, Harvard Human Rights Law Journal, 15, 1–37. Kennedy, David (2004) The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, David (2006) Of War and Law, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine (2006) Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine (2013) ‘Creating international law: gender as leading edge’, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, 36, 105–122. Otto, Dianne (2009) ‘The exile of inclusion: reflections on gender issues in international law over the last decade’, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 10, 11–26. Réaume, Denise (1996) ‘What’s distinctive about feminist analysis of law?’, Legal Theory, 2 (4), 265–299. Zalewski, Marysia (2007) ‘Do we understand each other yet? Troubling feminist encounters with(in) international relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, 302–312.
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18. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Christine Chinkin
The purposes of the United Nations Organisation (UN) include the promotion of human rights ‘for all without distinction as to … sex’ (UN Charter, article 1(3)). This commitment to the normative standard of non-discrimination on the grounds of sex in the enjoyment of rights was followed up through article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948 and articles 2 and 3 of the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both adopted in 1966. However, these first UN human rights instruments provided minimal guarantees for women; in particular, with the exception of the ICCPR, article 26, there was no free-standing provision requiring equality before the law. Nevertheless they gave women ‘constitutional-legal leverage to renew their quest to improve their status, achieve full citizenship in partnership with men, and enter the world’s political stage’ (Galey, 1995: 8). The quest was strengthened by the UN General Assembly (GA) Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 1967. The Declaration is non-binding and like the UDHR essentially aspirational; however, its agreement facilitated the process of moving to a binding treaty, which was initiated a year later when the Polish delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) proposed an international convention. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the GA in 1979 and opened for signature by States at the midway conference of the UN Decade for Women (1975–85) in Copenhagen in 1980. In 2014 the Convention has 188 States parties from all regions of the world, making it the second most widely ratified international human rights treaty. The major absentee States are the USA, Sudan, South Sudan and Iran.
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CEDAW: AN OVERVIEW Unlike the gender-neutral ‘mainstream’ UN human rights treaties, CEDAW is women-specific; it condemns and requires the elimination of discrimination against women that adversely impacts upon their enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms. It formally comprises a preamble and six parts (articles 1–6, 7–9, 10–14, 15–16, 17–22 and 23–30). More pragmatically, articles 1–5 specify States’ general obligations under the Convention and form an overarching interpretative framework for the application of the subject-specific obligations set out in articles 6–16. Articles 17–22 provide for the establishment of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) and spell out its monitoring functions. Initially these were limited to receiving States’ reports on the measures taken to give effect to the Convention, first within a year of their becoming a party to the Convention and at four-yearly intervals thereafter (article 18). The 1999 Optional Protocol (OP) to the Convention (in force 2000; 105 States parties in 2014) adds two further procedures: an individual complaints procedure with respect to alleged violations of the Convention (OP, article 2) and an inquiry procedure where there is reliable information of ‘grave or systematic’ violations (OP, article 8). States parties may opt out of the inquiry procedure (OP, article 10). The final articles of both the Convention and the OP set out administrative and other details. CEDAW identifies areas where discrimination against women is most marked and where women most need guarantees of non-discrimination. It reflects the realities of women’s lives which resist rigid compartmentalisation and involve spillover between inter alia their working lives, their family lives and their health needs, all of which inform social constructions of women. Its purpose is elimination of discrimination against women as defined in article 1, in order ‘to achieve the full development and advancement of women’ and thus their enjoyment of human rights ‘on a basis of equality with men’ in all fields, including political, social, economic and cultural fields (article 3). States’ positive obligations under the Convention involve instituting ‘appropriate measures’ to eliminate discrimination in social and institutional structures (such as the workplace, politics and the family), modifying social and cultural behaviours to eliminate prejudicial practices and attitudes (articles 2(f) and 5) and adopting ‘temporary special measures’ to accelerate de facto equality between women and men (article 4). CEDAW also attempts to overcome the public/private dichotomy observed in international law (Charlesworth
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The CEDAW 147 and Chinkin, 2000: 30–31). For example, it asserts women’s equal rights to participate in public decision-making bodies and explicitly affirms women’s right to equality within the ‘private’ arena of the family (article 16).
RESERVATIONS The near universality of adherence to the Convention is weakened by extensive and sweeping reservations and interpretative declarations, although reservations to the OP are not permitted (OP, article 17). CEDAW, article 28(2) follows the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties by prohibiting reservations incompatible with the object and purpose of the Convention, although the consequences of making an incompatible reservation or of an objection to such a reservation are not spelled out. Reservations have been made to CEDAW articles 1–5 which are critical to the fulfilment of its objectives. For instance, a number of States parties have differently worded reservations to the common effect that the Convention is not binding in so far as its provisions conflict with Islamic Shariah law or with the State’s Constitution, or that the State is willing to comply with the Convention in so far as such compliance is not contrary to these other normative codes. It is not only Islamic States that have made reservations to the opening articles. Reservations to article 2 are especially problematic and of questionable validity, as their indeterminacy, imprecision and open-ended nature is contrary to the certainty required of a legal obligation. Further, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, article 27 stipulates that ‘[a] party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty’. In practice few States parties have entered objections to reservations made by other States, and those that have been made are without prejudice to the entry into force of the Convention between the reserving State and the objecting State. The CEDAW Committee has expressed its concern about the number and substance of reservations in General Recommendations (GR) 4 and 20 and has questioned individual States about the reasons for their reservations and urged their review or removal. Many reservations have been removed so that ‘the current situation in relation to reservations is a significant improvement of that of its early years … [H]owever … [f]ew which are explained on the basis of culture and religion have been withdrawn’ (Connors, 2012: 595).
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BEYOND CEDAW Despite its strengths, the Convention has its limitations. For instance it may be criticised as projecting a particular image of women: at work in the paid economy (articles 11, 16(g)), with access to educational institutions (article 10), seeking political participation (articles 7, 8), entering legal and economic transactions (articles 13, 15), married to a man (article 16), of child-bearing age (articles 4(2), 12(2) 16(d), (e), (f)). The only explicit acknowledgement of the diversity among women is that she may be living in a rural environment (article 14). The prohibition of discrimination is based on sex – the biological difference between women and men – and the measure of equality is by comparison with men. CEDAW is an equality convention that largely takes as its yardstick men’s lives and provides for non-discriminatory access to already constituted structures rather than one that sets out to identify the legal reforms needed to ensure to women, throughout their life cycle, the same choices and the same understanding of human dignity as are accorded to men. This requires moving beyond formal and even substantive equality (Byrnes, 2012: 64), to challenge the hierarchies of power and wealth on which existing institutions are constructed and to seek societal change through the transformation of gender relations (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2013). From almost as soon as CEDAW was adopted, women campaigned for full recognition of ‘women’s rights as human rights’. The assertion by the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights that ‘[t]he human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights’ was a significant victory (World Conference on Human Rights, Declaration and Programme of Action, 1993: I, 18). The CEDAW Committee has also played a significant part in developing women’s human rights. It perceives the Convention as ‘a dynamic instrument that accommodates the development of international law’ (GR 28). Primarily through the adoption of general recommendations, as provided for under article 21 of the Convention, it has fleshed out its ‘understanding of the substantive content of the articles’, taking them beyond their text. While thematic general recommendations clarify the content of States parties’ obligations with respect to specific rights, for instance equality in the family (GR 21), the economic consequences of marriage, family relations and their dissolution (GR 29), participation in political and public life (GR 23) and health care (GR 24)), two more wide-ranging recommendations are especially significant in moving the Convention towards a broader understanding of women’s human rights.
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The CEDAW 149 First, GR 19 redressed the omission of violence against women from CEDAW. This had come to be seen as a major flaw in the Convention, and its inclusion within the human rights canon became the main focus of action by women’s NGOs from the late 1980s onwards. Much violence against women falls outside the ambit of traditional human rights analysis because it is committed by private actors and is often condoned as custom, tradition and even law. The CEDAW Committee had addressed violence against women in GR 12 (1989), which asserted that the Convention requires States to protect women against violence in the family, the workplace and other areas of social life. Subsequently GR 19 (1992) located gender-based violence against women within an ‘equality paradigm’, as a form of discrimination within CEDAW, article 1, and defined it as: ‘violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately. It includes acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering.’ GR 19 identifies sites of violence and some of its manifestations and affirms States’ obligation to exercise due diligence to investigate, eliminate and punish such violence, whether committed by State officials or by non-State actors. The holistic approach demanded by the Committee to prevent and punish ‘all forms of gender-based violence’ despite its diverse manifestations dispelled the notion of such violence as private, even trivial, and was a significant step towards bringing it unequivocally into the domain of international human rights law. The Committee’s work in this regard has been built upon by GA resolutions, notably the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, and by the Vienna Conference on Human Rights and Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women and the subsequent follow-up instruments. But CEDAW remains central. In 2013 the CSW reaffirmed that CEDAW ‘provide[s] an international legal framework and a comprehensive set of measures for the elimination and prevention of all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls, as a cross-cutting issue addressed in different international instruments’. The Committee has maintained this centrality through its decisions in response to individual communications alleging domestic violence (AT v Hungary; Fatma Yildirim v Austria; Şahide Goecke v Austria) and sexual assault and rape, including the sexual abuse of a child with disabilities (RPB v The Philippines; Vertido v The Philippines). The Committee has given substantive content to the concept of due diligence and recommended measures for structural reforms, as well as for reparations to the individual complainants. There is a synergy between institutions with respect to violence against women in that the Inter-American and European human rights courts draw upon the work of the CEDAW Committee, which in turn references these
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courts and the international criminal courts. There is a growing body of coherent jurisprudence with respect to State obligations which go well beyond CEDAW itself (for example, Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v United States; Opuz v Turkey). Second, GR 28 (2010) elaborates upon States’ general obligations under the Convention. Some points are primarily technical, such as affirming the extra-territorial application of the Convention, that it encompasses girls as well as women, and its continued applicability in armed conflicts and states of emergency. Others are more substantive, such as clarifying that the Convention applies to discrimination on the basis of gender – socially constructed identities – as well as biological sex. While it cannot be claimed that this has grounded the admittedly still limited prohibition of discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity in international law, it is certainly congruent with developments elsewhere. GR 28 recognises the diversity in women’s lives and the importance of addressing multiple and intersecting discriminations, for ‘discrimination of women based on sex and gender is inextricably linked with other factors that affect women, such as race, ethnicity, religion or belief, health, status, age, class, caste and sexual orientation and gender identity’. It emphasises that States should not displace equality by the concept of gender equity in implementing their obligations under the Convention. Equity may be used to infer ‘fair’ treatment, but this may include treatment ‘that is different but considered equivalent in terms of rights, benefits, obligations’. While equality can be objectively assessed, equivalence may be subject to cultural determination. It urges States in which the Convention is not part of the domestic legal order to consider taking the requisite steps to ‘domesticate’ it through legislative incorporation. GR 28 also explains the typology of States’ layered obligations under the Convention: to respect, to protect and to fulfil. The obligation to respect requires that States parties refrain from adopting laws and policies that interfere directly or indirectly with a woman’s equal enjoyment of her rights; the obligation to protect – or to ensure respect – is States parties’ positive obligation to protect women from discrimination by non-State actors, and ‘to take steps directly aimed at eliminating customary and all other practices that prejudice and perpetuate the notion of inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes’; and the obligation to fulfil (or promote) is forward-looking, requiring States parties to adopt short-, medium- and long-term public policies, programmes and institutional frameworks to combat discrimination against women in all its forms and manifestations.
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CONCLUSION CEDAW remains the basis for the legal obligations of States with respect to the guarantee of women’s human rights. It is an accessible lobbying tool for local women’s groups within diverse contexts and jurisdictions. It must be read in conjunction with the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence as developed through concluding comments, general recommendations and opinions in response to individual communications. Subsequent soft law instruments adopted at global summit meetings and resolutions of the GA, Human Rights Council and CSW have also contributed to normative understandings. Nevertheless the global commitment to women’s human rights remains fragile, and legal gains are weakened by nonimplementation and threatened by backlash driven by extremisms, economic austerity and a willingness to trade them for other political imperatives.
CEDAW SESSIONS CEDAW, GR 4 (sixth session, 1987). CEDAW, GR 12 (eighth session, 1989), violence against women. CEDAW, GR 19 (11th session, 1992), violence against women. CEDAW, GR 20 (11th session, 1992), Reservations to the Convention. CEDAW, GR 25 (30th session, 2004), on article 4, paragraph 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, on temporary special measures. CEDAW, GR 28 (47th session, 2010), on the core obligations of States parties under article 2 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
INSTRUMENTS AND CASES AT v Hungary, Communication No. 2/2003, 26 January 2005. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979, 1249 UNTS 13. Fatma Yildirim (deceased) v Austria, Communication No. 6/2005, 6 August, 2007, CEDAW/C/39/D/6/2005. Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 1995, A/CONF. 177/20, 1995. Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v United States, Report No. 80/11, Case 2.626, 21 July 2011. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1999, 2131 UNTS 83. Opuz v Turkey (ECtHR) (Application no. 33401/02), 9 June 2009. RPB v The Philippines, Communication No 34/2011, 12 March 2014. Şahide Goecke v Austria, Communication No. 5/2005, 6 August 2007, CEDAW/C/39/D/5/ 2005.
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UN Commission on the Status of Women, The elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls, E/CN.6/2013/L.5, March 2013. United Nations General Assembly Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, UNGA Res. 2263(XXII), 7 November 1967. United Nations General Assembly Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, UNGA Res. 48/104, 20 December 1993. UN World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, 1993, A/CONF.157/23, 1993. Vertido v The Philippines, Communication No. 18/2008, 1 September 2010. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, 1155 UNTS 331.
REFERENCES Byrnes, Andrew (2012) ‘Article 1’, in Marsha Freeman, Christine Chinkin and Beate Rudolf (eds), The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 51–70. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin (2000) The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin (2013) ‘The new United Nations “gender architecture”: a room with a view?’, in Armin von Bogdandy, Anne Peters and Rüdiger Wolfrum (eds), Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Vol. 17, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 1–60. Connors, Jane (2012) ‘Article 28’, in Marsha Freeman, Christine Chinkin and Beate Rudolf (eds), The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 565–595. Freeman, Marsha, Christine Chinkin and Beate Rudolf (eds) (2012) The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galey, Margaret (1995) ‘Forerunners in women’s quest for partnership’, in Anne Winslow (ed.), Women, Politics and the United Nations, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 1–10.
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19. LGBTI rights: the international context Toni A.M. Johnson
The simplicity of the term ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights’ (LGBTI) belies the complexity of the ongoing struggle for justice and the double-edged sword of legal recognition and regulation. Legal restrictions on LGBTI individuals include: the ongoing criminalization and regulation of same-sex sexual practices and intimate relationships (in, for example, Nigeria or Iran); restrictions on the way LGBTI individuals form families via for example adoption or fertility or surrogacy practices (in, for example, Portugal, Italy or Australia); restrictions on access to employment or housing (in, for example, India or Chad); restrictions on the formation of activist networks and publicity of LGBTI solidarity and politics (in, for example, Russia or Belarus); restrictions on trans people’s ability to legally change their gender and the punitive consequences of expressing non-gender-normative identity (in, for example, Romania or Malaysia); and excessive medical intervention in the lives of intersex individuals (in, for example, Australia or the USA). There is no singular avenue used to achieve LGBTI rights, nor definitive consensus on the type of rights that LGBTI individuals ought to be claiming. Legal restrictions on LGBTI rights are often challenged using legal arguments relying on broader rights to civil and political equality, including the right to privacy, freedom of speech or rights to marriage and family life via national law, drawing on international conventions (for example, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Some activist organizations such as Stonewall (UK) argue that formal rights to civil and political equality must be in place as a matter of basic non-discrimination. This approach is not without criticism (see Douglas et al., 2011). Formal equality often relies on a conception of LGBTI as a singular identity. This can preclude more complex considerations of, and responses to, the web of discriminations that occur through intersections of race, class, gender, ability and so on (see Grabham et al., 2009). This flattens out public debate on how LGBTI identities intersect with broader political frameworks and power structures. The pursuit of formal equality for LGBTI people also tends to focus on a particular right. In the West, 153
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the noisy clamour of marriage rights has become the most visible and dominant issue on the formal LGBTI rights agenda. The struggle for relationship recognition, it has been argued, imposes a heteronormative model of relationships on LGBTI people, erasing more complex queer subjectivities. Thus formal equality does little either to deconstruct normative understandings of gender or to validate broader versions and visions of gender in family and intimate life (see Barker, 2012). In this chapter, I will elaborate on some of these conflicts around the acquisition of LGBTI rights. To begin I consider a little of the legal history of homosexuality and illustrate the ongoing impact of British colonialism in the development of anti-sodomy laws.
A LEGAL HISTORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY The significance of law lies in the fact that it is an important social space, a particular set of cultural practices through which meaning and order are generated and enforced. (Moran, 1996: 2)
Volker Turk states that ‘homophobia is a human made construct, fed by political, religious, legal and even pseudo-medical justification’ (2013: 121). The intersection of these powerful mediums has historically played and continues to play a key role in both the ‘creation’ and the ‘demonization’ of the homosexual. Historically, homosexuality, or same-sex sexual relations, has been subject to various professional pronouncements on the nature and status of gay lives. Such pronouncements have led to the regulation of LGBTI existence with both positive and negative legal ramifications. A brief overview of the legal history of homosexuality is littered with interventions proscribing LGBTI sexuality. The law’s invocation of the medically derived term ‘homosexual’ (by K.M. Kertbeny in the mid1800s) ascribed particular meanings to LGBTI individuals, with a focus on the intimate lives of gay men. In the UK the offence of buggery dates back as far as 1533. Buggery was punishable by death in the UK until 1861, with the last execution for sodomy taking place in 1836. In 1861, the Offences against the Person Act removed the death penalty in favour of imprisonment. In 1885, a further amendment to the buggery laws sought to include acts of gross indecency where sodomy could not be proven. England and Wales finally repealed their sodomy laws via the Sexual Offences Act 1967, ten years after the recommendations outlined in the Wolfenden Report.
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LGBTI rights: the international context 155 The spread of anti-sodomy laws worldwide was, in part, enacted by the UK as a colonial force from the sixteenth century onwards. The creation and implementation of legislation prohibiting sodomy during colonization aimed to control the native inhabitants and ‘civilize’ the populace. Prior to colonization the ‘policing’ of same-sex sexual activity was minor, and homosexuality was perceived as a social rather than legal problem. The moderate indigenous response led colonial forces to accuse ‘native’ cultures of failing to adequately punish ‘perverse’ sex. Sodomy laws embraced an ideology of ‘re-education of sexual mores’ as an attempt to assert Christian religious morality over colonized subjects (Human Rights Watch, 2008: 5–8). The validity of this colonially imposed legislation has been subject to challenge in several countries, such as the Indian case of NAZ Foundation v Government of N.C.T. of Delhi and Others [2009]. The petitioners sought the repeal of s.377 of the Indian Penal Code (1860), which reads: ‘[W]hoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment … which may extend to ten years.’ The petitioners claimed ‘queer Indians’ were still bound by the law of the British Raj, a law, they argued, that should have departed with the ousted colonial rulers in 1947 upon independence. They sought to characterize the law as an ‘abhorrent alien legacy’ and demanded the court abandon it as such. The petitioners in the case called upon the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office to apologize for the imposition of this legislation and to acknowledge the ‘immense suffering’ that it had caused. Former British colonial territories make up a notable number of the 78 United Nations (UN) member states that continue to criminalize consensual same-sex sexual activity. Criminalization can lead to both prosecution and persecution. The penalties imposed on lesbian and gay sexual conduct vary widely from state to state, as do their enforcement. Punishment includes incarceration from ten days (for example, Eritrea) to life (for example, Bangladesh), significant monetary fines (for example, Cameroon), commitment to an institution for psychiatric care (for example, Dominica) or, in extreme cases, the death penalty (for example, Iran, Nigeria and Mauritania). The death penalty is ordinarily only given after repeated convictions. The status of LGBTI advocacy organizations in those states varies significantly. Broadly speaking LGBTI movements in the European Union (EU), the USA, Canada, Australia and some parts of South America (Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico) have permission and capacity to openly lobby their governments regarding rights in a transparent manner. The status of LGBTI groups in Russia, the West Indies, parts of
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Africa (excluding South Africa) and the Middle East is more tenuous. LGBTI advocates in these states often engage in political and social advocacy at the expense of their own personal security. Of course, such generalizations minimize the discrimination that is still experienced in the ‘West’ and fail to realize the ongoing and public nature of work by activists in hostile states.
TRAVERSING DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW The development of an LGBTI rights agenda relies on the combined input of local, national and international actors. In analysing the development of LGBTI rights, academic writing often looks to local and national circumstances that may have enabled change, including, for example: favourable political opportunities, such as the Labour Party coming to power in the UK in 1997 following the homophobic Conservative government of the 1980s (see Cooper, 1995); the rise of HIV/AIDS activism (Weait, 2007); and changes to family formation, such as increases in divorce rates and single-parent families, access to fertility services for lesbians and single women, and other examples (Boyd, 1997). While national events and national actors play a key role in shaping change, international decisions and international human rights statements on sexuality can also have a bearing. International judicial decisions that call for change can place some pressure on national agendas. Evidence for this in the EU has been documented by a number of academics (Sommer et al., 2013). The combined effect of EU law and policy (via the European Commission, Parliament and Council) and judgments means that the decisions of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have effects beyond the immediate parties. The multilateral nature of jurisprudence in the EU polity means states that are not party to a legal action may nevertheless feel its effects. Research carried out by Helfer and Voeten considered how positive LGBTI jurisprudence of the ECtHR shapes legal change across European jurisdictions. Their data suggest that if there is a preceding ECtHR decision regarding a particular policy the probability of a state changing its policy to reflect that jurisprudence rises by approximately 14 per cent. They claim that this may be due to: firstly, the threat of future litigation; secondly, the persuasive authority of judicial reasoning; and, thirdly, the agenda-setting effect of international court decisions (2014: 85–86). Beyond the scope of the decision, such jurisprudence may encourage alliances between national and international judges, and provide national judges with a
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LGBTI rights: the international context 157 jurisprudential base to strike down a policy or, at the very least, declare the policy incompatible with human rights norms. See for example the English case of Bellinger v Bellinger [2003]. Case law is a key factor in the development of formal rights, but it is particularly effective when combined with a multi-pronged approach to advancing rights. Patternote and Kollman note, with regard to LGBTI policy, that ‘policy adoption in Europe has been accelerated by processes of international learning via transnational networks, elite lesson drawing as well as albeit – to a much lesser extent – more formal processes of policy harmonization’. More specifically, they note: ‘policy networks in Europe are incredibly porous and the lines between NGOs, domestic policymakers, transnational activists, EU officials, and legal experts are often blurred. Single actors wear multiple hats … in multiple arenas’ (2013: 512–513). Policy actors being ‘networked’ in this way in the EU enables close partnerships to develop through a variety of social and political angles, providing the requisite momentum for policy change. It was not until the early 1990s that sexual orientation became a human rights issue in the international arena. Mertus has noted that the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), established in 1978, was one of the first major LGBTI organizations to try to create a voice at the UN level. ILGA claimed LGBTI discrimination was a global issue, necessitating a global response (Mertus, 2007: 1039). ILGA submitted a number of applications for consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which would have allowed them access to UN proceedings. ILGA’s applications were rejected owing to perceived inappropriate affiliations and negative votes from the USA, Iran, the Russian Federation and a number of other nations. It was not until December 2006 that ILGA, alongside the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians (LBL) and the German group the Lesbian and Gay Federation (LSVD), gained consultative status. Major international human rights NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did not include action or reporting on LGBTI issues or individuals until the 1990s. In the mid-1990s, a number of key UN meetings set the stage for NGOs with a mandate on LGBTI rights to develop closer working relationships with other NGOs and government bodies. In particular the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing saw women’s groups and LGBTI NGOs develop greater allegiances, working towards shared goals and affiliations. International conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political
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Rights (ICCPR) have provided the foundation for broad-based nondiscrimination legislation. The Yogyakarta Principles of 2007, which specifically looked at sexual orientation and gender identity in relation to international human rights, have contributed to an even greater extent to the human rights discourse on discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity. Yogyakarta outlined and developed the UN’s ongoing commitment to confronting discrimination, indicating how sexuality could be considered via the UDHR, the ICCPR and the Refugee Convention. The Yogyakarta Principles make five main recommendations to government. The first is that governments should protect people from homophobic and transphobic violence through the use of ‘hate crime’ laws and should recognize sexual orientation and gender identity as a basis for a claim to asylum. The second principle is that governments should work towards the prevention of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and provide avenues for redress and public investigation. Thirdly, governments should repeal laws that criminalize homosexuality, including sexual conduct between adults, and ensure individuals are not arbitrarily detained by law enforcement bodies simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Fourth is encouragement for the enactment of laws that prohibit discrimination in access to services, employment and health. Finally, governments are encouraged to safeguard freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly (for example, LGBTI safe spaces, pride marches) and protect such expression from acts of violence and intimidation by public and private actors as seen for example in Russia, Poland and Jamaica. The UN Human Rights Committee is one of the most influential human rights organizations, symbolically powerful, and relied on by regional bodies and national courts. The Committee includes a reporting mechanism that allows it to make observations and reflect on areas of concern through its ‘concluding observations’. Possibly inadvertently, the Committee has also brought the language of LGBTI rights into the international sphere and into the reporting mechanisms of state signatories to the ICCPR. With the increased references to sexual orientation and gender identity in the UN these concerns become an integral part of the consideration for states in their own reporting. The emergence of LGBTI rights into spheres such as this has been somewhat tactically useful in bringing LGBTI rights to the discussion table of governments generally hostile to LGBTI politics (see Jamaican prime minister Portia MillerSimpson in the 2012 leadership debates). Additionally the depth and detail of observations regarding sexuality and gender identity have increased over time, and the Committee has become more sensitive to the use of appropriate language regarding LGBTI-identified individuals. For
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LGBTI rights: the international context 159 example, there has been a shift in the use of terms. Simple understandings of ‘sexual orientation’ morphed into the more focused use of LGBT. LGBT then shifted to incorporate the ‘I’ (for intersex) of LGBTI and has now begun to focus on more nuanced sexual and gendered identity (Gerber and Gory, 2014: 413–415). The use of such language has a trickle-down effect, with states being guided on how to refer to and discuss LGBTI concerns in their own country.
INTERNATIONALISM VERSUS IMPERIALISM There are, of course, complexities and concerns in using international law and international conventions in order to guide and standardize the treatment of LGBTI individuals. It has been argued that the internationalization of LGBTI rights is based on a particular European- and US-centric version of LGBTI sexuality. The dominant understanding of ‘sexual orientation’ in the EU and North America assumes it refers to an individual’s fixed and inherent sexual orientation and gender identity. Legitimate concerns have been raised that the use of ‘identity’ terms such as LGBTI or sexual orientation may have the effect of excluding those who do not identify with this particular nomenclature. This may leave some non-normatively gendered/sexuality-conforming individuals even further outside the scope of legal protection and further outside of queer- or LGBTI-identified and identifiable communities. In some countries, the use of LGBTI may be unheard of outside urban areas. Individuals may have same-sex relations but may not refer to them or identify them as fitting within the scope of ‘LGBTI’ identity. The dominant Western definition fails to provide a nuanced approach to sexual and intimate lives that may involve opposite-sex and same-sex relations but are not defined by those relations. The imposition of this definition risks recolonizing sexual orientation and gender identity. Rather, it may be useful to consider ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ as holding ‘a range of potential meanings that are subject to contestation’ (Waites, 2009: 152) and subject to contestation based on an acknowledgement of cultural difference and the way in which that impacts on intimacy. One of the reasons sexuality is positioned in the West as an innate or essential characteristic rather than one that is fluid or has been consciously chosen may be the continued use of the law and medicalized discourse in the bid to gain formal recognition of LGBTI lives. The arguments deployed in court when trying to gain for example rights to privacy or family life are often based on an essentialist trope. Statements
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about sexuality in these contexts often imply a lack of choice or a lack of conscious decision-making – that being gay is a genetic state. A more complex narrative of sexuality is that sexuality may be a choice; that sexuality and/or gender identity are not necessarily static is often excised from legal and social discourse. Thus, an understanding that sexuality is contingent and shifting and may incorporate intimate relationships with both men and women and/or identification as a man, a woman or neither at various points over a lifetime is removed from the scope of legal arguments and therefore legal recognition or protection and broader social acceptance (Sharpe, 2010). The erasure of broader social and culturally specific models of sexuality, intimate relationships and gender identity is part of the critique of international LGBTI movements. Relying on limited definitions of sexual orientation fails to recognize the particular characteristics of other societies that may acknowledge non-normative versions of sexual orientation or gender identity but refuse to label that sexuality as LGBTI, for example the fa’afafine in Samoa or Thai kathoey-identified individuals. On the international stage, versions and visions of how sexuality is to be judged, codified and named must hold up against a Western human rights standard that can have the effect of erasing the peril and potential of cultural difference. Judith Butler has argued that ‘the very public assertion of gayness calls into question what counts as reality, indeed, what counts as human life’ (cited in Gross, 2008: 240). Aeyal Gross notes: Butler regards the issue of the rights of sexual minorities as attempting to bring in to the scope of ‘human’, lives that are considered beyond its borders … ‘human’ is defined in advance in terms that are Western, very often American, and therefore partial and parochial; hence ‘the “human” at issue in human rights is already known, already defined’, and a non-imperialist conception of international human rights ‘must call into question what is meant by the human, and learn from the various ways and means by which it is defined across cultural venues’. (Gross, 2008: 240)
International LGBTI politics must ensure it is aware of its potential to repress particular cultural practices and understandings of sexuality. The dominance of a Western model of sexual orientation and gender identity and the damaging effect to local communities of imposing ‘untested or unsuitable human rights strategies’ should be seriously accounted for by non-indigenous NGOs, advocates and activists (Gerber and Gory, 2014: 419). International NGOs must give local actors the lead in domestic events, asking when and in what form they can offer assistance, or they
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LGBTI rights: the international context 161 run the risk of continuing the very imperialist traditions that lead to the implementation of punitive laws in the first place.
REFERENCES Barker, Nicola (2012) Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-sex Marriage, London: Palgrave. Boyd, Susan B. (1997) Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and Public Policy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cooper, Davina (1995) Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State, New York: New York University Press. Douglas, Stacy, Suhraiya Jivraj and Sarah Lamble (2011) ‘Liabilities of queer anti-racist critique’, Feminist Legal Studies, 19 (2), 107–118. Gerber, Paula and Joel Gory (2014) ‘The UN Human Rights Committee and LGBT rights: what is it doing? What could it be doing?’, Human Rights Law Review, 14 (3), 403–439. Grabham, Emily, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas and Didi Herman (2009) Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, London: Routledge. Gross, Aeyal (2008) ‘Sex, love and marriage: questioning gender and sexuality rights in international law’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 21, 235–253. Helfer, Laurence and Erik Voeten (2014) ‘International courts as agents of legal change: evidence from LGBT rights in Europe’, International Organization, 68 (1), 77–110. Human Rights Watch (2008) This Alien Legacy: The Origins of Sodomy ‘Laws’ in British Colonialism, December, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/lgbt1208_webw cover.pdf (accessed June 2015). Mertus, Julie (2007) ‘The rejection of human rights framings: the case of LGBT advocacy in the US’, Human Rights Quarterly, 29, 1036–1064. Moran, Leslie J. (1996) The Homosexual(ity) of Law, London: Routledge. Patternote, David and Kelly Kollman (2013) ‘Regulating intimate relationships in the European polity: same-sex unions and policy convergence’, Social Politics, 20 (4), 510–533. Sharpe, Andrew (2010) Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law, London: Routledge. Sommer, Udi, Vistor Asal, Katie Zuber and Jonathan Parent (2013) ‘Institutional paths to policy change: judicial versus non-judicial repeal of sodomy laws’, Law and Society Review, 47 (2), 409–439. Turk, Volker (2013) ‘Ensuring protection to LGBTI persons of concern’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 25 (1), 120–129. Waites, Matthew (2009) ‘A critique of sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights discourse: global queer politics beyond the Yogyakarta Principles’, Contemporary Politics, 5 (1), 137–156. Weait, Matthew (2007) The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission, London: Routledge.
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20. International criminal courts Doris Buss
In the last two decades, international criminal courts – such as the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia or the International Criminal Court – have emerged as sites for holding individuals, including state leaders, responsible for large-scale violence and conflict. As arenas with substantial legal and political authority, international courts provide civil society actors, including feminists, with a venue to influence how accountability for conflict and the conditions necessary for peace are understood and addressed. Feminist activism and scholarship on international criminal courts have tended to pursue three main directions: raising the visibility of sexual violence against women as a component of war; expanding the range of gendered harms recognized and prosecuted; and exploring and pushing the limits of international criminal law as a mechanism for ensuring women’s inclusion in the post-conflict transition. The first two directions could be characterized as pursuing political and legal interventions based on visibility, primarily of women’s victimization. The efforts to raise the visibility of sexual violence crimes against women particularly were aimed at addressing the historical erasure of women’s lived experience of war and, by doing so, changing dominant accounts of armed conflict as something that exclusively impacts men, and male soldiers in particular. But while international criminal courts, such as the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals, have issued landmark judgments finding rape was used as an instrument of genocide and a crime against humanity, these successes have reinforced a larger trend that sees women only as victims, and only as victims of sexual violence. The second direction of feminist engagement has sought to expand the range of gendered harms experienced by women and men as a way to address the hegemonic narratives of conflict in which only some women (and children) are victims (usually of sexual violence), and all men are perpetrators. Ensuring inclusion of women, and gendered forms of harm, in the narratives of war is particularly important because of a connection between official accounts of conflict and the terms by which the transition to ‘peace’ is negotiated. This relationship is the focus of a third direction in feminist work on international criminal courts. The question 162
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International criminal courts 163 for some feminist scholars and activists has become how, and in what ways, international criminal prosecutions can impact on efforts to fundamentally include women, and their experiences, in the terms of the post-conflict transition.
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURTS AND FEMINIST ‘POLITICS OF PRESENCE’ The push to establish international criminal courts as a form of accountability for serious violations of law, while having long historical roots, picked up momentum in the context of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. Media reports (Gutman, 1993) of these conflicts included graphic accounts of mass atrocities against civilian populations. Among the reported atrocities were the mass rapes of women in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the establishment of ‘rape camps’ where (primarily Croatian and Muslim) women were held for periods of time and subjected to rape and other abuses. The Yugoslav wars unfolded at a time when women’s experience of armed conflict and the incidences of conflict sexual violence were little known or understood by the public, and largely ignored by international actors and institutions. Media and other reports thus placed wartime rape on the international agenda, and feminist activists sought ways to translate this international attention into a sustained response to violence against women, in both war and ‘peace’ time (Copelon, 1994). The events in Yugoslavia unfolded in the context of an emboldened human rights movement and a shift in human rights activism that saw the increasing use of extensive, authoritative reports based on careful field research and data gathering, as an advocacy tool (Roth, 2004). These reports, generated by human rights organizations but also multilateral institutions, helped shape international responses to the conflicts in both Yugoslavia and Rwanda. When the United Nations Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993 (and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994), for example, it drew upon the Secretary-General’s Commission of Experts’ study of the conflicts. The Commission of Experts’ report on the situation in Yugoslavia, like those authored by human rights organizations, detailed atrocities against civilian populations including the commission of rapes and sexual assault (Oosterveld, 2005). Where wartime sexual violence against women was historically referred to only euphemistically, this report detailed the circumstances in which rapes were carried out, linking
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the rapes to military strategies, suggesting sexual violence was instrumental rather than incidental to the conflicts. The report considered the role of command responsibility in making the rapes possible, concluding that the rapes and sexual violence constituted violations of international law (Oosterveld, 2005: 70–71). This production of detailed research became important to feminist efforts to secure greater international political and legal action on conflict sexual violence. Feminist advocacy during this period focused on two broad goals. The first was working with and within the newly established tribunals (as non-governmental organizations, prosecutors, staff and advisors) to ensure that violence against women was reflected in the interpretation of the legal categories of war crimes and prosecuted as such. Second, feminists sought to deepen knowledge and political awareness of women’s complex experiences of conflict. The first goal was not straightforward. Historically, international legal provisions on war crimes and crimes against humanity largely failed to treat wartime rape as a serious violation. Where rape was recognized, it was defined narrowly as an attack on a ‘woman’s honour’ (Askin, 2003). When the possibility of the Yugoslav Tribunal emerged in the early 1990s, feminists were concerned that the existing, weak legal provisions could result in rape being minimized as a crime, or ignored once the initial public outcry receded. These concerns were eventually laid to rest, though not without substantial feminist lobbying (Van Schaack, 2009). Both the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals issued early judgments ruling that, in the case of Rwanda, rape could constitute genocide (Prosecutor v Akayesu, 1998), and for both Yugoslavia and Rwanda a crime against humanity (Prosecutor v Kunarac et al., 2001). These and other decisions also found that rape and sexual violence constitute a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions (for a more detailed discussion, see de Brouwer, 2005). But the legal determinations that rape could constitute the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity are the most emphasized because these are the most serious and often-prosecuted crimes. They also each underscore the need for detailed knowledge and evidence about the circumstances of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Prosecuting rape as a crime against humanity, for example, requires showing that the act of rape took place as ‘part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population on national, political, ethnic, racial or religious grounds’ (ICTR Statute, article 3). Rape as genocide (ICTR Statute, article 2) requires that the act of rape was ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. Under
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International criminal courts 165 both crimes, individual incidences of rape are understood as a crime against a group. The trial judgments on rape by both the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals thus relied on detailed evidence about the circumstances of rapes and other sexual violence: the large numbers of reports of rape, the similarities in the patterns of rape within and across regions, the location of rapes, the deemed ethnic affiliation of the victims and perpetrators, and the ethnically inflected epithets uttered by military and political leaders, and individual men, leading to or during the rapes (Buss, 2007, 2009). The resulting judgments issued by the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals, as well as evidence gathered at the trials including transcripts of witness testimony, became important sources of knowledge about the gendered effects of conflict (Buss, 2014) and particularly women’s experience of sexualized violence as a gendered form of harm. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (2012: 220) refers to feminist activism of this period as engaging in a ‘politics of presence’ that sought to move ‘women into view as relevant actors’. This seemingly simple process of making women ‘visible’ impacted on how conflict was understood as a gendered phenomenon and one that was connected to pre-conflict social relations and inequalities (Copelon, 1994). The conflict itself then begins to emerge in a more complex light, challenging simplistic characterizations of conflict as aberrational or spontaneous. This feminist ‘politics of presence’ also had important implications for seeing women as equal and worthy members of ‘humanity’ (Buss, 2011; Ní Aoláin, 2012). Prosecuting sexual violence crimes against women in these authoritative institutions is an important expression of women’s full membership in the global citizenry.
GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY AND THE LIMITS OF TRIALS While feminist advocacy within international criminal courts has generated foundational changes to how the gendered contours of conflict are understood, criminal trials remain limited in capturing the gendered affects of conflict. Gender identity and relations are often reiterated in conservative ways by transitional justice institutions such as international courts or truth commissions. The format of trials, based on an adversarial system and bound by evidentiary rules, can limit both who speaks in a trial and on what subject (Kelsall and Stepakoff, 2007). In one notorious case at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the judges struck out sexual violence-related charges against the defendants and limited how and in
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what terms women could give evidence about their experiences, preventing testimony about sexual slavery and forced marriage in the Sierra Leonean conflict (Oosterveld, 2014). For the most part, however, examples such as this are rare, and international criminal courts often take an expansive approach to the rules of evidence, admitting rather than excluding evidence. The more profound limits of trials result from prevailing beliefs and conceptual frameworks that shape how and when a gender lens is used by both lawyers and judges. International courts tend to approach women’s experiences of conflict almost entirely in terms of sexual violence, and a particular form of sexual violence in which rape is enacted with the instrumental purpose of destroying a community. This focus on sexual violence is partly due to feminist efforts to secure greater visibility and hence action on violence against women. However, the conception of rape ‘as a weapon of war’ has become the main lens used by many policy makers and courts to see women’s experiences of conflict. The judgments from the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals usually depict rape – understood as a ‘weapon of war’ – as an inevitable part of armed conflict, conceiving rape as always available as a weapon, and women as always raped or ‘inherently rapeable’ (Marcus, 1992: 388). That is, rape follows from the very existence of conflicts understood as occurring between two polarized ‘sides’. Feminist research has begun to challenge these too-easy assumptions. Elisabeth Wood (2009), for example, broke important ground by specifically challenging assumptions about the inevitability of rape in war. She studied examples of armed conflicts where rape was ‘rare’, revealing a ‘neglected fact’ (2009: 132) that rape is not always a substantial feature of conflict and that by closely examining when and in what contexts conflict rape is widespread we can help identify conditions that impact its prevalence. Other researchers (Baaz and Stern, 2010; Boesten, 2010; Dolan, 2010) have revealed the different kinds of rape and different categories of perpetrators and victims omitted from accounts premised on the singular explanation of rape ‘as a weapon of war’. ‘Everyday’ rape, rape in ‘peace’ time, rape by civilians, and rape against certain kinds of victims may be overlooked or minimized when ‘rape as a weapon of war’ is the dominant lens. Within criminal trials, the over-focus on women as victims of sexual violence, and specifically ‘rape as a weapon of war’, exerts profound limits on women’s testimony about their experiences of conflict. Courts and truth commissions have, for example, re-interpreted women’s testimony as tales of sexual violence (Ross, 2003; Franke, 2006), in which
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International criminal courts 167 women’s suffering is visible only as denoting a communal narrative of pain (Ross, 2005; see also Campbell, 2002). The legal categories of crimes tend to privilege certain types of harms (in relation to bodily autonomy, for example) and discount ‘emotional harms, harms to the home and personal spaces, harm to children and to those with whom women are intimately connected’ (Ní Aoláin et al., 2011: 426). And the legal categories of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes may not reflect women’s ‘subjective experience’ of what constitutes violence (ibid.: 428). A second strand of feminist advocacy and research has thus focused on establishing legal recognition of the varied harms that women and men experience in conflict. ‘Forced marriage’ is one area where feminists have sought to deepen research on the array of practices encapsulated by this term, and have debated the best legal categories for recognizing the gendered harms that result (‘forced marriage’ or ‘sexual slavery’, for example; see Bunting, 2012). Feminist legal advocates have also pushed for cumulative charging so that the harms of rape, for example, are captured in their full complexity, as torture, genocide and so on (Women’s Coalition for Gender Justice, 2009).
GENDERING THE TRANSITION This recognition of the intricate relationship between how harms are identified and the constitution of particular subject positions – victim, for example – in post-conflict justice mechanisms (Ross, 2003; Engle, 2005) has implications for women and men’s access to different forms of recognition in the transitional or post-conflict context. In some postconflict countries, such as Rwanda, only certain categories of victim may be eligible for state-provided assistance (Burnet, 2008). In other contexts, official recognition of gendered harms may impact on whose suffering is accounted for in post-conflict narratives about conflict and peace. The gendered terms by which victim and perpetrator are constructed have implications for the constitution of the ‘transition’ and the place of women in the transitional and post-conflict order. International criminal courts are one site where hegemonic discourses about gender and conflict endure and where the terms by which conflicts and their resolutions are recognized are contested. As authoritative institutions that produce ‘official knowledge’ about conflict and its effects, international criminal courts are an important site to secure recognition of women and men’s experiences in conflict, with the hope that this can then be used to advance women’s positioning in the
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post-conflict transition. However, criminal law has also demonstrated limits in capturing the full range of gender harms, manoeuvring women and their suffering into narrow spaces of recognition, with implications for women’s inclusion in transitional justice processes (Ní Aoláin, 2012: 222–223).
CONCLUSION International criminal courts have a privileged status. They are often seen as having more legitimacy and authority than other, national and transitional, justice institutions (Dixon and Tenove, 2013). They offer an authoritative arena in which internationally agreed norms and values are given expression (Elander, 2013). And the work of these courts is seen as having a knock-on effect on influencing domestic law reform efforts. The ways in which gendered experiences of conflict are captured, or not, by international criminal courts thus have implications beyond individual trials. While feminists must continue to pursue other arenas to expand accountability and redress for the gendered harms women and men suffer in conflict, there is an ongoing need for a feminist ‘politics of presence’ in international criminal courts.
REFERENCES Askin, Kelly D. (2003) ‘Prosecuting wartime rapes and other gender-related crimes under international law: extraordinary advances, enduring obstacles’, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 21, 288–349. Baaz, Maria Eriksson and Maria Stern (2010) The Complexity of Violence: A Critical Analysis of Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uppsala: Sida. Boesten, Jelke (2010) ‘Analyzing rape regimes at the interface of war and peace in Peru’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 4, 110–129. Brouwer, Anne Marie de (2005) Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR, Antwerp: Intersentia. Bunting, Annie (2012) ‘“Forced marriage” in conflict situations: researching and prosecuting old harms and new crimes’, Canadian Journal of Human Rights, 1 (1), 165–185. Burnet, Jennie E. (2008) ‘Sorting and suffering: gender, ethnicity, and social classification in post-genocide Rwanda’, paper delivered at the African Study and Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa, 6 November. Buss, Doris (2007) ‘The curious visibility of wartime rape: gender and ethnicity in international criminal law’, Windsor Journal of Access to Justice, 25, 3–22. Buss, Doris (2009) ‘Rethinking “rape as a weapon of war”’, Feminist Legal Studies, 17 (2), 145–163. Buss, Doris (2011) ‘Performing legal order: some feminist thoughts on international criminal law’, International Criminal Law Review, 11, 409–423. Buss, Doris (2014) ‘Knowing women: translating patriarchy in international criminal law’, Social and Legal Studies, 23 (1), 73–92.
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International criminal courts 169 Campbell, Kirsten (2002) ‘Acts of testimony: legal memories: sexual assault, memory and international humanitarian law’, Signs, 28 (1), 149–178. Copelon, Rhonda (1994) ‘Surfacing gender: reconceptualizing crimes against women in time of war’, in A. Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, pp. 197–218. Dixon, Peter and Chris Tenove (2013) ‘International criminal justice as a transnational field: rules, authority and victims’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7, 393–412. Dolan, Chris (2010) ‘War Is Not Yet Over’: Community Perceptions of Sexual Violence and Its Underpinnings in Eastern DRC, London: International Alert. Elander, Maria (2013) ‘The victim’s address: expressivism and the victim at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7, 95–115. Engle, Karen (2005) ‘Feminism and its (dis)contents: criminalizing wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, American Journal of International Law, 99 (4), 778–816. Franke, Katherine M. (2006) ‘Gendered subjects of transitional justice’, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 15, 813. Gutman, Roy (1993) A Witness to Genocide, New York: Macmillan. Kelsall, Michelle S. and Shanee Stepakoff (2007) ‘“When we wanted to talk about rape”: silencing sexual violence at the Special Court for Sierra Leone’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1, 355–374. Marcus, Sharon (1992) ‘Fighting bodies, fighting words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’, in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge, pp. 385–403. Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala (2012) ‘Advancing feminist positioning in the field of transitional justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6, 205–228. Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala, Dina Francesca Haynes and Naomi Cahn (2011) ‘Criminal justice for gendered violence and beyond’, International Criminal Law Review, 11, 425–443. Oosterveld, Valerie (2005) ‘Prosecution of gender-based crimes in international law’, in Dyan Mazurana, Angela Ravens-Roberts and Jane Parpart (eds), Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 67–82. Oosterveld, Valerie (2014) ‘The representation of rape by the Special Court for Sierra Leone’, in Doris Buss, Joanne Lebert, Blair Rutherford, Donna Sharkey and Obijiofor Aginam (eds), Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts, New York: Routledge, pp. 145–157. Prosecutor v Akayesu, ICTR-96-4-T (Trial Chamber), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 1998. Prosecutor v Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, IT-96-23-T and IT-96-23/1-T, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 2001. Ross, Fiona C. (2003) ‘Using rights to measure wrongs: a case study of method and moral in the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Richard A. Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements, London: Routledge, pp. 163–182. Ross, Fiona C. (2005) ‘Women and the politics of identity: voices in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Vigdis Broch-Due (ed.), Violence and Belonging: The Quest for Identity in Post-colonial Africa, London: Routledge, pp. 214– 235. Roth, Ken (2004) ‘Defending economic, social and cultural rights: practical issues faced by an international human rights organization’, Human Rights Quarterly, 26, 63–73. Van Schaack, Beth (2009) ‘Obstacles on the road to gender justice: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as object lesson’, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, 17 (2), 355–400.
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Women’s Coalition for Gender Justice (2009) Amicus Curiae Observations of the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice Pursuant to Rule 103 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence Situation in the Case of the Prosecutor v. Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo (Vol. ICC, 31 July), International Criminal Court. Wood, Elisabeth J. (2009) ‘Armed groups and sexual violence: when is wartime rape rare?’, Politics and Society, 3 (7), 131–162.
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21. “With all the respect due to their sex”: gender and international humanitarian law Helen M. Kinsella
International humanitarian law is the body of law that governs the use of force in situations of armed conflict. It does so primarily in two ways. One, it regulates the means (arms, for example chemical weapons) and methods (attacks on enemies, for example bombings) of war. And, two, it protects individuals who are not participating in armed conflict (for example civilians) and individuals who are no longer participating in conflict (for example prisoners of war). Currently, the rules and regulations of international humanitarian law are found in its primary treaties, the 1949 Geneva Conventions I–IV and the 1977 Additional Protocols I–II, as well as the conventions restricting or prohibiting the use of certain weapons such as the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and its four protocols. These treaties refer to and build upon previous treaties, such as the 1899 Hague Conventions, and are supplemented by customary law and the rulings of international tribunals and international courts, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Although I refer to it as international humanitarian law this nomenclature is relatively recent. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) promulgated the term international humanitarian law, as opposed to the laws of war, after the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact and the 1945 United Nations Charter respectively outlawed war or limited resort to force. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the director-general of the ICRC, Jean Pictet, championed the use of this term because he believed it to best capture the emphasis on protection and respect of individuals: its humanitarian spirit. Many disagree and argue that, while humanitarian law was indeed in part created to protect individuals not participating or no longer participating in war, its primary role is to protect the interests of states and to allow militaries the maximum flexibility to prosecute war. For these reasons, states and organized militaries refer to it as the 171
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laws of war or, paying formal recognition to the outlawing of war and the incidence of undeclared wars, the laws of armed conflict. International humanitarian law is a historical artifact of specific forms of war and particular hierarchies of social order and relationships (Kinsella, 2011). Its formal articulation and subsequent interpretations reflect that, as exemplified by the dispute over its name, revealing the potentially competing expectations and interpretations of what or whom the law is intended to protect, what it is intended to accomplish, and in whose service. Notably, it is only feminist scholars who have called attention to and documented how sex and sex differences have been constituted by and used to organize relations of power within the law itself. For example, one of the first scholars to analyze gender and international humanitarian law, Judith Gardam, clearly shows how the use of the term “humanitarian” mistakes the standard figures of the law (combatant, civilian) for neutral images. In fact, she argues, both are modeled on a male norm and, furthermore, it is the male combatant who is the central concern of the law (Gardam, 1993). Consequently, to better understand the relationship of the laws of war and gender I first provide a brief historical overview of the development of laws of war, for it informs its present construction, then offer a survey of critiques made by feminist scholars and practitioners, focusing on two basic tenets of international humanitarian law, those of non-discrimination and of the distinction of combatant and civilian, before turning to the possibility of shaping the law through new interpretations and applications.
BRIEF HISTORY The laws of war are composed of two areas of emphasis. The first is the ius ad bello that considers the right of resort to war, and the second is the ius in bello that restrains the means and methods of war. It is principally the ius ad bello that occupied the earliest works on the laws of war owing to persistent disputes over the role and obligations of Christians in participating in war. Continuing in the later Middle Ages, the detailing of theological just war traditions—the work of the Church to define, and defend, licit violence—intermeshed with the secular customs of chivalry. Fundamentally, chivalry was an aristocratic martial code of arms derived from a potent mix of secular and Christian beliefs. In particular, medieval scholars highlighted the secular concepts of honor, prowess, loyalty, and courage—each of which was defined and won through acts of war—as informing the code of conduct for knights. The relationship between Christianity and chivalry was complex and contentious, as befits a
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Gender and international humanitarian law 173 relationship of two distinct, yet interdependent, sources of strategic and social power. Conventionally understood, the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 precipitated the steady diminishment in the importance of Christian thought, specifically its scholarly teachings and debates on ius ad bello or just war. In their writings, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury publicists of law and politics contributed to and assisted in the conceptualization of the “secularization” of the laws of war. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, marked by the steady emergence of secularizing nation-states and the conceptualization of war as an instrument of state formation and practice, the laws of war shifted to primarily concerns of the ius in bello as distinct from considerations of ius ad bello. Therefore, the evaluation of the justness or right of a resort to force no longer determined the restraints on the means and methods of war. In other words, the ius in bello could develop as a standard relatively independent of the reasons for or justice of the war itself. This was an important development in the laws of war, for it required that each belligerent, specifically understood as a sovereign state, obey and uphold the laws of war irrespective of a determination of the just or unjust nature of their cause. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ius in bello was further distinguished between the Law of the Hague and the Law of Geneva. The Law of the Hague describes the “law of warfare proper, that is, the means and methods of war” (Gardam, 1993: 3). A fundamental precept of the laws of war, as articulated in the 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration, is that “the only legitimate object which States should endeavor to accomplish during war was the weakening of the military forces of the enemy” (Gardam, 1993: 3). As further developed in the 1899 and 1907 Hague Regulations (Respecting the Law and Customs of War on Land), the right of each belligerent to injure enemies is not unlimited. Excessive harm and superfluous or unnecessary suffering (harm and suffering deemed inessential to the strategic pursuit of military objectives) are to be avoided. It is primarily the Law of Geneva, within the ius in bello, which progressively developed and delimited the protection of and respect for those who do not participate or are no longer participating in war within the twentieth century. The Law of Geneva promotes and provides for the respect and protection of noncombatants, civilians, and civilian objects—as far as the requirements of military necessity and the maintenance of public order will allow. In the twenty-first century, the Law of Geneva is rooted in both customary and codified law, as represented by the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the two Additional Protocols of 1977.
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Although distinct, humanitarian law and human rights law are frequently invoked in conjunction to underscore the essential concept of human dignity upon which each holds itself to be founded. This mutual reference is grounded in a relationship between the two forms of law clearly articulated in the turbulent decolonization decades of the 1960s and 1970s—as is well illustrated in the General Assembly Resolutions of 1968 and 1969 on “Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts.” Drawing from the rubric of human rights, these statements defined the essential humanitarian and human rights principles applicable in all armed conflicts, whether of an international or internal character, and underscored the necessity of the further development of international humanitarian law to respond to violations in internal armed conflicts. The concerted effort to expand the purview of international humanitarian and human rights law, and to link their application, was a direct result of the contentious conclusion of two decades of decolonization and national liberation wars. A similar pattern is notable in contemporary endeavors to further establish the complementarities of the two branches of law to better respond to armed conflicts. For example, international human rights and humanitarian law increasingly converge in the rulings of regional criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court, in the declarations of the United Nations General Assembly and of the Security Council, in the individual reports of the Special Rapporteurs to the United Nations, and in the work of non-governmental organizations. Customary law is also a significant dimension of international humanitarian law, drawn into the rulings of multiple tribunals and international courts. Thus, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and international human rights law continue to create a formidable system of law. One place where that is noticeable is in the punishment of violations of international humanitarian law, specifically sexual violence, which is also arguably the site of most scholarship on the relationship of gender and international humanitarian law, successfully advocating for rape to be categorized as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.1
GENDER AND INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW While feminist scholars have demonstrated how international humanitarian law is gendered and sexed, each of those concepts has been conceptualized in different ways, with varying dependence on the biological given-ness of sex. For example, the ICRC is involved in a research program on women and war, which takes into consideration and
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Gender and international humanitarian law 175 responds to the critiques first voiced by notable scholars such as Judith Gardam, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and others (see Chinkin and Charlesworth, 1998). Its 2001 report Women Facing War states that while gender is the “socially defined or constructed sex roles or attitudes” sex is “genetic physiological or biological differences only” (International Committee of the Red Cross and Lindsey, 2001: 35). This definition of sex and gender is also common to many United Nations resolutions and documents on women and war; namely, gender is frequently operationalized as if it were the social construction of sex difference, in effect as if sex were a referent of gender. And it is sometimes stated quite dramatically that there can only be two sexes— male and female—from which gender is derived. This matters deeply, for it presumes not only that the many traits and characteristics that differentiate genders are organically and biologically rooted and are essentially immutable and, thus, ahistorical, but also that the relations of sex are dichotomous, oppositional, heterosexual, and hierarchical (Towns, 2010; Pratt, 2013). Put specifically in terms of humanitarian law, while technically all individuals are guaranteed equal protection under international humanitarian law, termed the principle of non-discrimination, women are granted special protections owing to their special needs which are held to be a consequence of their biological sex. As the authoritative Commentary on the 1949 Geneva Convention IV specifically states, “the Geneva Conventions expressly stipulate that women are to be treated with all the respect due to their sex,” and, moreover, it is “natural and normal” to do so (Pictet, 1952: 119). This is not an “adverse distinction,” which would be prohibited by the Conventions, but one which is allowed, for it is based on “suffering, distress or weakness” (Pictet, 1952: 119). This suffering, distress, or weakness both refers to and includes the alwayspresent threat of sexual violation; therefore women are again “the object of special respect and shall be protected in particular against rape, forced prostitution and any other form of indecent assault” (Protocol Additional I, article 76). Left formally undefined by international humanitarian law, the concept of “all the respect” and “special respect” encompasses “physiological specificity, honour and modesty, pregnancy and childbirth.”2 As scholars have pointed out, the conception of honor that striates international humanitarian law, deriving as it does from both Christian and chivalric sources, is distinctly different if it is used in relation to a woman or to a man (Gardam, 1993, 1997; Kinsella, 2011: 776). Thus, respect due to women on the basis of their sex is rooted in the suffering, distress, or weakness women, literally and figuratively, embody at all times, owing to their sexual and reproductive characteristics—women are
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already and always raped/rapeable, and are already/always reproducing.3 Moreover, as Judith Gardam and Michelle Jarvis (2001) make clear, even as women and (their) children are produced as possessing special needs and in need of special protection, the protections afforded to them are couched in prescriptive rather than prohibitive language. And yet men, who must too be at risk for they are also sexual and reproductive creatures, are not in need of special protection, while their honor is gained and secured through martial feats, in effect as combatants, one of which is protecting “their” women from other men (thus the prescriptive rather than prohibitive language). Another effect is to relegate women to the status of civilians, those suffering distress and weakness, regardless of evidence to the contrary. And when this is the governing presumption, the metric of harm and of excessive harm (inherited from the nineteenth-century precept that war is between sovereign states and formal militaries) is indexed to the combatant, such that even collateral damage is assessed according to military objectives. Much has been written on the role of gender in producing the distinction of combatant and civilian (Sjoberg, 2006; Kinsella, 2011), and in governing its implementation (Gardam, 1993; Jones, 2004; Carpenter, 2006), drawing attention to the failure of international humanitarian law to conceptualize or reflect the experiences of the sexes in armed conflict, experiences in which neither sex perfectly aligns with the predicate of sex/gender produced by the law itself. As the history of international humanitarian law illuminates, the construction and protection of the heterosexual family, itself linked to the formation and defense of sovereign states, are both reflected and produced through the law, and women are protected in relation to the success of both (Kinsella, 2011). Yet, because the nexus of gender/sex and of international humanitarian law is historically constituted, the possibility of change is always extant. Indeed, the clear inclusion of rape as a crime against humanity, as well as the continuing exploration of the ways in which the law both overturns and affirms the concept of honor inherited from chivalric and Christian sources, is one example. Another example is the ICRC’s plan to update and reissue the Commentaries on the 1949 Conventions, first published in the 1950s, and those on the Protocols Additional, first published in the 1980s, to better reflect and acknowledge the changing context of the law’s articulation and implementation. Both point to the necessity of continuing to interpret, identify, and alter the politics of meanings captured by the phrase “with all the respect due to their sex.”
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Gender and international humanitarian law 177
NOTES 1. 2. 3.
The literature on sexual violence in armed conflict is extensive. See, for example, Mitchell (2004); Stern and Eriksson Baaz (2013); Chinkin (2014). This entailed special protections for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and mothers of young children (Krill, 1985). Sexual violence against men in armed conflict was not even raised in the preliminary meetings that produced the law and the commentaries, while men caring for younger children or men in need of protection premised on their reproductive capability was also never mentioned. See Sivakumaran (2007).
REFERENCES Carpenter, R. Charli (2006) Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, Aldershot: Ashgate. Chinkin, Christine (2014) ‘Gender and armed conflict’, in Andrew Clapham and Paola Gaeta (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Armed Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 675–699. Chinkin, Christine and Hilary Charlesworth (1998) Feminist Analysis of International Law, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gardam, Judith (1993) Non-combatant Immunity as a Norm of International Humanitarian Law, Norwell, MA: M. Nijhoff. Gardam, Judith (1997) ‘Women and the law of armed conflict: why the silence?’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 46 (1), 55–80. Gardam, Judith Gail and Michelle J. Jarvis (2001) Women, Armed Conflict, and International Law, Boston, MA: Kluwer Law International. International Committee of the Red Cross and Charlotte Lindsey (2001) Women Facing War: ICRC Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women, Geneva: ICRC. Jones, Adam (2004) Gendercide and Genocide, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Kinsella, Helen (2011) The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krill, Françoise (1985) ‘The protection of women in international humanitarian law’, International Review of the Red Cross, 249 (25), 337–363. Mitchell, David S. (2004) ‘Prohibition of rape in international humanitarian law as a norm of jus cogens: clarifying the doctrine’, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, 15, 219–258. Pictet, Jean (1952) The Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949: Commentary, Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross. Pratt, Nicola (2013) ‘Reconceptualizing gender, reinscribing racial–sexual boundaries in international security: the case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace and Security”’, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (4), 772–783. Sivakumaran, Sandesh (2007) ‘Sexual violence against men in armed conflict’, European Journal of International Law, 18 (2), 253–276. Sjoberg, Laura (2006) ‘Gendered realities of the immunity principle: why gender analysis needs feminism’, International Studies Quarterly, 50 (4), 889–910.
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Stern, Maria and Maria Eriksson Baaz (2013) Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond, London: Zed Books. Towns, Ann E. (2010) Women and States: Norms and Hierarchies in International Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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22. Refugees and asylum Jane Freedman
In June 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, announced that the global total of refugees and displaced persons had exceeded 50 million for the first time since the Second World War. This growing number of refugees and displaced persons can be linked to ongoing wars and conflicts, such as those in Syria or South Sudan for example, but wars are not the only reason that people are forced to migrate from their country and to seek refuge elsewhere. Men and women flee owing to various types of persecution, not all of which are fully recognized by the states and international organizations from which they may ask for protection. Gendered differences exist both in the causes of forced migration and in the experiences and needs of refugees and asylum seekers. But still too often these differences are not taken into consideration in national and international policies for protection of forced migrants.
DATA AND CLAIMS According to available data, women and girls represented 49 per cent of the global refugee population in 2013, a proportion which has remained more or less constant for the past decade (UNHCR, 2014). However, there is still a lack of sex-disaggregated data for many of the populations ‘of concern’ to the UNHCR. Even with regard to women coming to seek asylum in countries of the Global North, there are relatively few reliable sex-disaggregated statistics, particularly with reference to motives for asylum claims and results of decision-making and appeals. Many governments do not provide a breakdown of statistics on asylum claimants according to sex, and even fewer provide gendered statistics regarding the proportions of asylum seekers granted refugee status, or other forms of subsidiary protection. There are even fewer reliable statistics concerning women refugees and internationally displaced persons (IDPs) who remain within countries of the South. The lack of accurate genderdisaggregated statistics on refugees and asylum seekers has led some people to make exaggerated claims as to the numbers of women amongst 179
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the world’s refugees. These claims can be seen as in a large part aiming to reverse the ‘invisibility’ of women refugees and asylum seekers which has been a feature of research and policy-making until quite recently. In response to the way in which women have been ignored, some have pushed for a much greater recognition of gender-related issues in the protection of refugees and asylum seekers on the basis that women are the majority of the world’s refugees. Oosterveld, for example, claims that: ‘The faces of refugees are overwhelmingly female: women and children represent eighty per cent of the world’s twenty seven million refugees and displaced people’ (Oosterveld, 1996: 570). Such figures are often used to claim that women are the ‘forgotten majority’ amongst refugee populations, and to make the case for further international and national actions specifically in aid of women refugees. However, a basic problem with these statistics is that they conflate ‘women and children’ into one single category, thus obscuring even further the real nature of the statistical differences between men and women. The amalgamation of ‘women and children’ into one category of ‘vulnerable’ refugees is an important feature of the representations of women refugees in humanitarian actions, representations which can be argued to have major impacts on the way in which gender is treated in issues of refugee protection.
UN GUIDELINES ON GENDER-RELATED PERSECUTION AND THEIR LIMITATIONS One of the reasons why gender has been largely absent from debates over refugees and asylum seekers until fairly recently is the fact that the major international conventions in the area say nothing about women or gender. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and its protocol of 1967, are both silent on the question of gender. Indeed, during the negotiations of this Convention, the then UN High Commissioner remarked that he doubted strongly ‘whether there would be any cases of persecution on account of sex’ (cited in Spijkerboer, 2000: 1). Thus the grounds on which refugee status can be granted under the Convention are persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. This absence of gender from the Convention can be seen as a result of the circumstances under which it was negotiated. As Loescher argues, ‘The Convention was intended to be used by the Western states in dealing with arrivals from the East, and largely reflected the international politics of the early Cold War era’ (Loescher, 2001: 44). The refugee as perceived by the Convention was
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Refugees and asylum 181 thus an individual persecuted by a totalitarian regime because of his political views or activism. Large groups of displaced people fleeing from international conflicts or from civil wars were not envisaged, and neither were individuals fleeing from types of persecution related to their sexual orientation, or refusal to adhere to dominant gender norms. These limitations on the definition of a refugee continue to have important applications today, and mean that it has been difficult for many women to gain refugee status. Violations and persecutions pertinent primarily to women, such as domestic violence, female genital mutilation or forced marriage, are often left out of the spectrum of those that are considered valid as reasons for granting refugee status (Freedman, 2014). Following feminist mobilizations concerning the situation of women fleeing persecution and women in refugee camps, and with an increasing number of women claiming asylum on the basis of gender-related persecutions, the UNHCR has issued a series of Guidelines to try to introduce a gendered perspective into international refugee laws and policies. In 1991 it published Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women (UNHCR, 1991), to be followed by Guidelines on International Protection: Gender-related Persecution within the Context of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention (UNHCR, 2002), Guidelines which called for a gender-sensitive approach to the implementation of the 1951 Convention and increased protection for women fleeing gender-related persecution. These Guidelines have been adopted and integrated into national refugee status determination procedures in several refugeereceiving States, including Canada, the United States, Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. However, the national guidelines are not all equally binding, and have not all had as great an impact as may be imagined, and difficulties still remain for those claiming asylum on the basis of gender-related persecution (Freedman, 2008). In an attempt to unify the asylum and refugee policies within member states, the European Union (EU) has passed a set of Asylum Directives. The new Qualification Directive, passed in 2011, specifies that gender should be taken into account when assessing asylum claims in European countries. However, as with the national gender guidelines, the impact of this Directive has been variable, dependent on many other factors in national asylum systems and policies. One of the difficulties that still persists is the fact that the types of persecutions from which women are fleeing are not recognized as such by those making decisions on refugee status determination. Women now account for about one-third of asylum claimants in most of the states of the Global North. There are still fewer women than men who arrive to claim asylum, not because women are less persecuted, but because of the
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many gender-related constraints that women may face on their abilities to leave their home countries and travel to another country to claim asylum. As many European States, as well as Australia, Canada and the US, attempt to close their borders to influxes of asylum seekers, the journey to one of these countries to claim asylum becomes even more dangerous, and women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence and assault on their journeys (Freedman, 2012). And, when they do reach one of these countries to attempt to claim asylum, their claims are often not recognized, as the forms of persecution they have suffered are not deemed to enter under the grounds of the 1951 Convention, or because they are unable to bring adequate proof of the persecution they have suffered. Gender-related forms of persecution are often still considered as ‘private’ matters and not ‘public’ or ‘political’ issues. The people who carry out these types of persecutions are likely to be private individuals – family or community members – rather than agents of the State. Thus women fleeing domestic violence or forced marriage, for example, may be less likely to have their claims taken seriously. And, as the traditional refugee-receiving States increasingly close their borders, attempting to limit the number of asylum seekers who reach their territory and the number of those who are given refugee status, the level of proof required from asylum seekers is also increasing. Many women find it hard to provide the proof of their persecution, and the demanding interview processes they have to go through may be experienced as a repeat violation. Women who have experienced rape and sexual violence, for example, may be expected to repeat their stories several times in detail, with enough ‘facts’ that can be checked to ensure that their stories are true. Although the UNHCR’s Guidelines state that an asylum seeker should be able to ask for an interviewer of the same sex, this is often not respected, and so women will find themselves having to relate their experiences of sexual violence to a male asylum officer. Similarly, in an attempt to limit claims by mothers who wish to protect their children from female genital mutilation, the French refugee status determination authorities (OFPRA) now request that parents provide a certificate every year to prove that their daughter has not undergone FGM in order to have her temporary refugee status renewed.
GENDER VIOLENCE AND ABUSE AGAINST DETAINEES AND REFUGEES In attempting to deter asylum seekers, and to deal more quickly with their applications, in order that they may be deported if their claims are
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Refugees and asylum 183 not successful, many governments have resorted to detention for asylum seekers. There have been many reports from NGOs about abuses and violence committed against asylum seekers in detention centres, and there is evidence of particular gendered forms of abuse against women. Reports on the Yarl’s Wood Centre in the UK, for example, provide evidence of sexual assault against women detainees. Failure to address these issues, and to ensure a gender-sensitive application of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and of national, regional and international asylum laws and policies, means that many of those fleeing persecution on grounds of gender do not receive adequate protection in their destination countries. The situation is also difficult regarding the protection of women in refugee camps around the world. Refugee camps may be envisaged as zones of protection for the populations within them, places where they will be safe from the conflicts they have fled, but these camps may also be zones of conflict. Specific problems arise for women within these camps, both because of material factors such as the lack of essential resources and because of the gendered political and power structures that exist within the camps. Some of the key difficulties that arise for women living in refugee camps are to do with the ways in which the camps are organized spatially, and also the ways in which the camp routine is organized by those in charge. Based on her research in refugee camps in Kenya, Hyndman describes the ways in which women’s everyday lives in these camps are regulated and framed by tasks such as collecting water and food rations. The spatial organization of the camp structures the women’s management of their time and shapes the social routines and income-earning strategies of refugees and in particular women. Access to health care, food and other services is concentrated within one area in the camp, which facilitates the work of the staff of the UNHCR and NGOs, but can be inconvenient and potentially dangerous for refugees, and can exacerbate women’s workload (Hyndman, 2000). In comparison with the status of citizens and expatriates working within the camp, for the UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations, refugee women occupy a peripheral status of non-citizens or ‘sub-citizens’. This ‘sub-citizen’ status is clearly visible in the camp layout, where the UNHCR housing compound is protected by layers of barbed wire and armed guards, whereas the refugee women, who remain the most vulnerable groups among the camp populations, lack these forms of protection and live in unsafe and unprotected spaces. A major issue is that refugee camps are designed to facilitate the administrative tasks of the UNHCR and of other aid agencies that run the camps or work in them, rather than to make life easier for the refugees
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who live there. Sometimes this organization may put women at risk of violence, for example when they have to go outside of the camp to look for firewood. Gathering firewood is generally designated as a task for women, as it is they who are responsible for cooking and they usually have no choice in the type of fuel they can use to light fires to cook with. The need for firewood is reinforced by the types of food provided by humanitarian relief, which usually consists of rice or flour as staple items, foodstuffs which require wood and water to prepare, both of which are often in short supply in camps. The dangers associated with going outside to collect firewood have been documented in relation to a number of different refugee camps in various countries. Women may also be victims of violence by male refugees within the camps, including their husbands or partners. Research has shown the ways in which the stresses and insecurities of refugee life, and in particular men’s inability to protect or provide for their families, can lead to increasing instances of domestic violence. This type of violence is often not reported or not tackled by camp authorities. Recently reports on Syrian refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon have highlighted the difficulties and insecurities faced by women in particular. One in four Syrian women refugees are now the heads of households and sole providers for their families. Many report that they do not have enough food or adequate housing or shelter. The women reported sexual harassment and abuse both within the refugee camps and from the host society when they left the camps to seek work or food.
GLOBAL NORMS, STRATEGIC FRAMES AND REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES In seeking to understand obstacles to the achievement of gender equality in refugee protection it is also necessary to examine critically the global norms that have been created, and the frames which are used to represent women refugees and asylum seekers. It might be argued that one of the reasons for the uneven impact of global norms in this area is that they are based on frames which represent women refugees principally as vulnerable victims, thus essentializing a particular set of gendered roles, and failing to take into account the underlying gendered relations of power. Representations of ‘refugee women’ as helpless victims also act to depoliticize these women’s experiences and activities (Baines, 2004). Humanitarian responses to refugees often amount to a generalizing and depoliticized depiction of these refugees as helpless victims. Refugees
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Refugees and asylum 185 are thus rendered speechless and without agency, and they are identified not in terms of their individual humanity but as a group whose boundaries and constituents are removed from their historical context and reduced to norms relevant to a state-centric perspective of international relations. This depoliticization can be argued to be particularly acute with regard to women refugees and asylum seekers, as women tend to embody a particular kind of ‘powerlessness’ in the Western imagination, and are thus idealized as ‘victims’ without agency. This use of strategic frames of women as vulnerable victims in need of protection is prevalent amongst practitioners in the international policy community, and it can be argued that the symbols and signifiers of women as vulnerable victims form a valuable part of the ‘cultural tool kit’ of these practitioners. Images of women and children in refugee camps have become common in fundraising campaigns by UNHCR and NGOs. In some contexts these images have been shown to be highly effective in raising public awareness of refugee issues, and of attracting donor support for particular humanitarian crises, or in drawing the attention of political leaders. However, although such framings might be assumed to be beneficial to women, as they are supposed to be used to mobilize support for specific protection measures for women, these frames are in fact essentializing of gender difference, and ignore women’s agency and voice. Women refugees and asylum seekers are, for example, often symbolized as mothers, and in this framing their primary role is to protect their children. Examples of the use of such a frame can be found in asylum policies in various countries which have sought to protect women whose children are at risk of excision. In this case, protection is offered to women purely in their function as ‘mothers’ protecting their ‘innocent’ children from harm. A different way to approach this problem of the essentializing nature of the frames used to describe women asylum seekers and refugees, and of the framing of particular issues of persecution in terms of pre-existing and essentializing norms, is to relate these problems to the question of how gender issues become (or do not become) securitized and the fact that asylum-seeking women themselves are often excluded from the process of ‘framing’ their own claims, because they lack a ‘voice’. To really understand how gender operates as a relationship of power in conflict, in forced migration or in exile, we need to ask those involved how they experience these relationships, and how best to modify them, and thus to give asylum-seeking and refugee women back their voice.
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REFERENCES Baines, Erin K. (2004) Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN, and the Global Refugee Crisis, Aldershot: Ashgate. Freedman, Jane (2008) ‘Women’s right to asylum: protecting the rights of female asylum seekers in Europe’, Human Rights Review, 9 (4), 413–433. Freedman, Jane (2012) ‘Analysing the gendered insecurities of migration: a case study of female sub-Saharan African migrants in Morocco’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14 (1), 36–55. Freedman, Jane (2014) Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hyndman, Jennifer (2000) Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Loescher, Gil (2001) The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oosterveld, Valerie (1996) ‘The Canadian guidelines on gender-related persecution: an evaluation’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 8 (4), 569–596. Spijkerboer, Thomas (2000) Gender and Refugee Status, Aldershot: Ashgate. UNHCR (1991) Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, Geneva: UNHCR. UNHCR (2002) Guidelines on International Protection: Gender-related Persecution within the Context of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and/or Its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Geneva: UNHCR. UNHCR (2014) War’s Human Cost: UNHCR Global Trends 2013, Geneva: UNHCR.
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23. NGOs, feminist activism and human rights Jutta Joachim
When members of the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, “Women, Peace and Security,” at the end of October 2000, acknowledging for the first time the disproportionate impact of war and conflict on women (United Nations, 2000), it almost seemed as if women organizing at the international level had come full circle. A century earlier in 1915 women’s organizations mostly from around Europe and North America had also rallied around the issues of peace and security. Prompted then by the outbreak of World War I, however, women from both neutral and belligerent countries organized the First International Women’s Congress in The Hague, from which a series of proposals emerged for how to bring about world peace. While security figured in subsequent issue campaigns on occasion throughout the following decades, it took until the present for the role of gender to be recognized by states in this policy domain. Granted, the ways in which women organize today and interact with international institutions have changed significantly and in many ways. Nevertheless, we still can detect similarities between the present and the past, including that today just as back then it often takes favorable political opportunity structures, mobilizing resources as well as strategic frames, to gain access to particular policy domains and international governmental organizations where problems as well as likely solutions are discussed. This chapter provides an overview, albeit brief, of feminist organizing at the international level throughout time, highlighting what have been key issues and debates, continuities and breaks. It concludes with a reflection on how feminist activism has been treated and been theorized in scholarly international relations literature.
KEY ISSUES AND DEBATES Seminal works related to women’s organizing at the international level frequently identify three waves, with the first spanning from World War I to World War II and continuing with the second lasting from the 1960s to 187
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the 1980s when the United Nations (UN) declared 1975 to 1985 as the UN Decade for Women and conducted three international conferences devoted to women’s issues during it—the first in Mexico City in 1975, the second in Copenhagen in 1980 and the third in Nairobi in 1985. The beginning of the 1990s and onward mark the third wave, sparked, like the previous two, by symbolic events, especially the ending of the Cold War and a series of UN specialized conferences organized in reaction to it, related to the environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, human rights in Vienna in 1993, population in Cairo in 1994 and women in Beijing in 1995. While these phases are indeed reflective of empirical developments and are useful for analytical purposes, two qualifiers are in order: First, issues and debates within and between women’s organizations mobilizing at the international level cannot be neatly confined to them. Instead, quite a few of them have been recurring themes, though sometimes framed in different ways and therefore supported by altering coalitions. Second, while often triggered and given a platform by international events, issues and debates were quite frequently also rooted in as well as influenced and shaped by developments at the national level.
THE FIRST WAVE: GETTING ORGANIZED BETWEEN 1900 AND WORLD WAR II During the first wave, obtaining political rights, such as the right to vote or equal nationality rights, was particularly high on the agenda of international activists who still were learning to move between the national and international level. As Leila Rupp notes in her article about women’s organizing around the turn of the century, the process of defining who women were and of building a collective identity “was a contested one, challenged over time by competing ideas of why and how women were different from men, what the proper relationship between nationalism and internationalism should be, and how best to express a commitment to transcending or complementing national identities” (1994: 1599). Yet divisions between women’s groups were not only ideological in nature, but sometimes resulted from circumstances related to geography, localities or class. Travelling to international conferences was a privilege reserved to primarily wealthy, educated women from the Northern part of the globe. Moreover, women activists were also confronted with closed political opportunity structures in international institutions. Gaining access to governments or governmental meetings proved immensely difficult, was often dependent on the goodwill of individual officials or states and, if
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NGOs, feminist activism and human rights 189 possible at all, was the privilege of a select few (see Joachim, 2007, chapter 3). Even if women succeeded, their presence was frequently belittled, ridiculed, and perceived in a gendered fashion, as apolitical (Wiltsher, 1985: 99–100). Yet, despite these odds, women’s activism not only resulted in more formal arrangements inside international governmental organizations such as the UN, but also gave rise to the first international women’s organizations (see Stienstra, 1994).
THE SECOND WAVE: MOBILIZING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS DURING THE 1970s AND 1980s The second wave of women’s international activism was akin to the first, sparked by as well as overshadowed by international events. While a catalyst in many respects, the UN women’s conferences taking place during it highlighted not only the challenges of organizing inside governmental institutions, but also how symbolic events such as these are subject to different expectations and interpretations. At the same time as the UN conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi were perceived as an opportunity for networking and exchanging information, they generated opposition from women’s groups who conceived of them as being reflective of male oppression and patriarchal structures. Rather than directing their focus to the UN, these groups organized what they referred to as “counteraction,” such as the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976, where women testified about the male violence they had suffered from. The Tribunal, but also the NGO conferences, the so-called fora that women’s activists organized parallel to the UN conferences, offered participants a much less circumscribed environment for networking, strategizing and exchange (see Stephenson, 1995: 145). This did not mean that they were void of conflicts. Instead, “bloc politics” in the form of prevailing conflicts between East and West/North and South as well as “isms” (for example, racism, Zionism or imperialism) complicated interactions both between governmental delegates at the UN conferences and among activists at the fora (Jaquette, 1995: 47). While feminism and female genital mutilation are often cited in scholarly literature as prime examples for fierce exchanges between women from the North and South, according to Elisabeth Friedman, that these conflicts were symptomatic of different frames of reference is ignored. Rather than conceiving sexism as the source for women’s unequal treatment and discrimination as Northern women often
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did, “Southern advocates saw women’s inequality as part of a larger ‘inequality between nations’ or ‘dependency’ frame, in which Southern peoples were seen as victims of a historical process of Northern exploitation of Southern countries to advance development in the North” (Friedman, 2003: 318; Moghadam, 2005: 85). As much as the UN conferences during the UN Decade were characterized by deep rifts, they nevertheless contributed to the diversification of the international women’s rights movement. Owing to the funding provided by foundations but also UN agencies and owing to the location of especially the end-of-the-decade conference in Nairobi, it became for the first time possible for women from developing countries to be represented in larger numbers at international meetings (Fraser, 1987: 199). The conferences contributed to more systematic evidence of women’s situation globally, since reports and statistics were prepared leading up to them (Pietila and Vickers, 1994: 10). And they taught women how to negotiate the international waters. Commenting on the preparations for the Nairobi conference in 1985, and also the responses from women from around the world to questionnaires that had been sent out prior to it, Arvonne Fraser observed a change from the position at Mexico City: “Many women had moved from detailing their oppression to understanding their power when they organized” (Fraser, 1987: 200–201). Women had gained in procedural and experiential knowledge (Joachim, 2007: 99). They had learned to work together despite their differences and to engage in the politics of issue linkage by framing their concerns so that they resonated with governments.
THE THIRD WAVE: MAINSTREAMING GENDER FROM THE 1990s TO THE PRESENT The third wave of women’s organizing was set off by a watershed in international politics—the end of the Cold War—which freed the agenda in international governmental fora from an exclusive focus on military and state-centered security issues and opened up space for ones previously labeled as “low politics.” Women’s organizations seized the series of specialized conferences on the environment, human rights and population by placing their concerns front and center on the international agenda. The campaigns leading up to the conferences are illustrative of the mobilizing potential that women had accumulated over the past decades of organizing.
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NGOs, feminist activism and human rights 191 Well in advance and as soon as it became official that UN conferences were to be held, women’s organizations organized workshops in preparation to identify relevant topics, drafted consensus documents and inserted their voices in preparatory governmental meetings held at the national, regional and international level. Individual organizations and key women assumed leadership and evolved as “organizational entrepreneurs” given their resources, reputation, experience with organizing, and links to governments and international governmental organizations. Moreover, “[e]mboldened by IGOs’ discursive sanctioning of diversity” (Alvarez, 2000: 14), previously marginalized groups gained even more in visibility and, according to Sonia Alvarez, “a new foothold within the historically predominantly white and mestiza local feminist movement” (ibid.). Contrary to the previous decades and waves, where access to governmental meetings had been difficult to obtain, the conditions for lobbying in the 1990s were more favorable. Rather than being banished to visitor balconies, representatives of non-governmental organizations were allowed onto the negotiation floors, something which had seemed inconceivable within UN rules before. Individual representatives also served as consultants or even official members on governmental delegations, a position which allowed them not only to access meetings otherwise closed off to non-state actors, but also to influence the positions of states more directly. Whether it was a direct outcome of their representation or not is debatable, but women enjoyed and received support from various allies, including powerful states, such as the United States, UN agencies or the secretaries-general appointed for the conferences, but also others that had been rather indifferent to or critical of their organizing, such as the media (Joachim, 2007). As much as these various actors backed women, the 1990s were nonetheless also characteristic of a backlash from conservative, religious groups who fiercely fought against women’s rights and wanted to undo what women had accomplished thus far (Friedman, 2003). That women persevered at all can be attributed to their relentless and tireless lobbying efforts combining astutely scientific knowledge of women’s situation around the world with symbolic politics, such as conducting testimonies with victims at the human rights conference in Vienna or vigils leading up to it (Bunch and Reilly, 1994). Ironically and sadly, horrifying events, such as the mass rape occurring in the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, lent force to their argument that “women’s rights are human rights,” which became a master reference frame for their organizing (Joachim, 2007: 129) and symbolic of what observers like Elisabeth Friedman consider to be the
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greatest achievement of transnational women’s rights movements in the 1990s: the “gendering [of] the agenda” of the UN (Friedman, 2003: 313). “Movement participants shaped global understandings of issues from human rights to population growth, simultaneously mainstreaming gender analysis into areas formerly considered ‘gender-neutral’ and prioritizing women’s rights as integral to the achievement of conference goals” (ibid.: 314).
SCHOLARLY DEBATES AND REFLECTION Summarizing and providing an overview of scholarly writing about feminist rights activism at the international level is not an easy task. Like the movement itself, the respective body of literature has grown tremendously over the past decades while at the same time also becoming more focused, more theoretical and more diversified as far as the approaches as well as the geographical home of the authors are concerned. It can be grouped more or less into three categories. The first encompasses historical narratives which document the activities of women’s organizing at the international level, for which the work of Leila Rupp (1997) is exemplary of those who examine the interwar period looking for signs of an international collective identity. The second wave of women’s activism and more precisely the UN women’s conferences also inspired primarily female scholars to contribute to the fact-finding, stock-taking and documenting of women’s situation that took place in preparation for these events. Ester Boserup’s book Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970) is considered a classic in this respect, providing for the first time a more systematic overview and understanding of women’s status in developing countries. Numerous articles, special issues and books were published on the conferences themselves by scholars from both the North and the South (for example, McIntosh, 1981; Winslow, 1995) who continued the debates set in motion at the conferences about, for example, feminisms or relevant issues and sometimes included in their descriptions and analysis of the events relevant primary documents (see, for example, Fraser, 1987). With greater institutionalization of the women’s movement and their engagement in and with international governmental organizations, scholars began to advance more theoretically driven explanations for this phenomenon. They form the second group in the body of literature reviewed, which consists of studies on women’s involvement in particular international governmental organizations such as the UN across time (for example, Stienstra, 1994; Berkovitch, 1999; Joachim, 2007), and the
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NGOs, feminist activism and human rights 193 ways in which gender has been absent from or inscribed in international organizations (for example, Whitworth, 1994), or contains, like a number of edited volumes, a combination of both (for example, Ferree and Tripp, 2006). The theoretical approaches that the respective authors have drawn from were often “critical” or post-structuralist, and several also borrowed from the repertoire of social movement theories to examine the strategies of women’s organizations or the framing within international organizations. The third group of scholarly writing has been inspired by the recent efforts to mainstream gender in international governmental organizations. These writings evaluate the successes of women’s organizations and assess the implications for the local level, which Elisabeth Friedman (1999) refers to as “transnationalism reversed.” Taking the women’s rights as human rights campaign in the 1990s as exemplary, quite a few scholars, such as Sonia Alvarez, have emphasized its transformative potential, since it provides advocates with “new, internationally sanctioned political scripts they can deploy locally” (Alvarez, 2000: 16), while others, particularly from the developing world, have been more cautious and critical in their assessments. In their eyes, the human rights frame is problematic because it is Euro-centric (for example, Grewal, 1999), reinforces established hierarchies between “the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms” and ignores the “localized specificities of gender inequalities” (ibid.: 337, 340). Concerned with the impact of the engagement of women’s activists at the international level, Sonia Alvarez (2000: 23) concludes that it “exacerbates power and resource imbalances among activist organizations on the home front,” while Vargas and Olea Mauleon (1998: 56) fear ultimately a weakening of solidarity among women owing to the growing competition for funding.
REFERENCES Alvarez, Sonia E. (2000) ‘Translating the global: effects of transnational organizing on local feminist discourses and practices in Latin America’, Meridians, 1, 1–27. Berkovitch, Nitza (1999) From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boserup, Ester (1970) Woman’s Role in Economic Development, London: Allen & Unwin. Bunch, Charlotte and Niamh Reilly (1994) Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights, New York: Center for Women’s Global Leadership and United Nations Development Fund for Women. Ferree, Myra Marx and Aili Tripp (eds) (2006) Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, New York: New York University Press, pp. 51–75.
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Fraser, Arvonne (1987) The U.N. Decade for Women: Documents and Dialogue, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Friedman, Elisabeth J. (1999) ‘The effects of “transnationalism reversed” in Venezuela: assessing the impact of UN global conferences on the women’s movement’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1 (3), 357–381. Friedman, Elisabeth J. (2003) ‘Gendering the agenda: the impact of the transnational women’s rights movement at the UN conferences in the 1990s’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 26, 313–331. Grewal, Inderpal (1999) ‘Women’s rights as human rights: feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality’, Citizenship Studies, 3, 337–354. Jaquette, Jane S. (1995) ‘Losing the battle/winning the war: international politics, women’s issues, and the 1980 mid-decade conference’, in Anne Winslow (ed.), Women, Politics and the United Nations, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 45–60. Joachim, Jutta (2007) Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. McIntosh, Margaret (1981) ‘Comments on Tinker’s “A Feminist View from Copenhagen”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6 (4), 771–790. Moghadam, Valentine M. (2005) Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pietila, Hilkka and Jeanne Vickers (1994) Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations, 2nd edn, London: Zed Books. Rupp, Leila J. (1994) ‘Constructing internationalism: the case of transnational women’s organizations, 1888–1945’, American Historical Review, 99, 1571–1600. Rupp, Leila J. (1997) Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stephenson, Carolyn M. (1995) ‘Women’s international nongovernmental organizations at the United Nations’, in Anne Winslow (ed.), Women, Politics and the United Nations, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 135–154. Stienstra, Deborah (1994) Women’s Movements and International Organizations, New York: St. Martin’s Press. UN Security Council (2000) Resolution 1325, S/RES/1325 (2000), http://www. peacewomen.org/assets/file/BasicWPSDocs/res1325.pdf (accessed 8 May 2014). Vargas, Virginia and Cecilia Olea Mauleon (1998) ‘Roads to Beijing: reflections from inside the process’, in Virginia Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristán (ed.), Roads to Beijing: Fourth World Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, Lima, Santafé de Bogotá and Quito: Ediciones Flora Tristán, UNICEF, UNIFEM. Whitworth, Sandra (1994) Feminism and International Relations, London: Macmillan. Wiltsher, Anne (1985) Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Winslow, Anne (ed.) (1995) Women, Politics and the United Nations, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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PART IV GENDERED VIOLENCE
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24. The gender of violence in war and conflict Laura Sjoberg
He said if I didn’t do what they wanted, they would cut my throat … they both raped me, one after the other … from that day, it never stopped. The rapes went on day and night for a month. (Ziba’s story, from Bosnia, published in The Independent, 7 February 1993) You carry them on you, the marks, the bruises, the scars, your body gets marked where you exist … a primitive outfit of blood and pain, the flesh poem, the poem of the girl … they can get you, have you, use you … I’m lying flat, helpless. (Andrea Dworkin, Mercy) “We didn’t see a piece of bread for nine months,” one woman told me. “We were eating leaves and grass.” A little girl in a pink dress showed me her trembling hands. “We are all sick,” she said. (Lyse Doucet, for BBC International, reporting on the situation in Syria on 29 October 2013) Eleven rebels waited in a queue and raped Jean Paul in turn. When he was too exhausted to hold himself up, the next attacker would wrap his arm under Jean Paul’s hips and lift him by the stomach. He bled freely … “I could feel it like water.” Each of the male prisoners was raped 11 times that night and every night that followed. (Jean Paul’s story, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, published by Will Storr in The Guardian, 16 July 2011)
Very few scholars or policy-makers deny that gendered violence happens during war and conflict. The evidence that war rape is prevalent across all sorts of wars and conflicts is significant enough that it has come to be recognized not only by scholars, but by myriad international organizations, including, but not limited to, the United Nations Security Council, the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, UNICEF, Physicians for Human Rights, and a number of international tribunals looking for wartime and post-war justice. While some conceptualizations of her situation have been highly problematic and some policy reactions to what happened to her have been inadequate, there is a near-universal recognition in global politics that what happened to Ziba in Bosnia-Herzegovina constituted gender-based violence in conflict, and that such violence is normatively unacceptable. 197
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At the same time, the very same institutions that have come to recognize Ziba’s experience as gender-based violence in war often define it narrowly: gender-based violence in conflict is sexual in nature, victimizes women, and happens in the context of fighting perpetrated by armed combatants. Advocacy and jurisprudence around gender-based violence in conflict often exclude by definition Andrea’s experience (which was in New York in 1970, and therefore not in a context traditionally thought of as a war), the hungry Syrian girl’s experience (which was not sexual in nature), and Jean Paul’s experience (which happened to a man). I argue that understanding all four of these people’s experiences as gendered violence in conflict is essential to understanding any of them – as well as the relationship between gender and violence more generally.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR In introducing this chapter, I noted that there seems to be a consensus that Ziba’s experience constitutes gender-based violence in war, and should be recognized, prevented, and punished as such. While that is true, the interpretations of what happened to Ziba in the scholarly and policy worlds still vary significantly. Some readers of Ziba’s story see it as tragic, and a preventable side effect of war and conflict – not as central to war-making or war-fighting. Feminist scholars, however, have made the argument that what happened to Ziba “happens not as a consequence of thoughtless, provocative, or unfortunate behavior but as a question of national warfare” where rape is used “to install a disempowered masculinity as constitutive of the identities of the nation’s men” (Hansen, 2000: 59, 60). In this view, “Enemy Woman’s real and imagined body becomes a tool through which the nation ‘can project its own desires and deficiencies on another’ – attacking women is not about womanhood per se, but what it means to the fighting parties and what it communicates to their enemies” (Mertus, 1994: 18, citing Sedgwick, 1992: 238). While wartime sexual violence is often perpetrated by individuals who are victimizing individuals, feminist work has pointed out that it is systematic, not incidental, and strategic, not isolated. Raping women is gender subordination; it is an individual human rights abuse; it is an individual humiliation; and it is an experience that individual victims have to struggle with long after it ends, assuming that they survive. Those are important elements of wartime rape. The collective element, though – that wartime rape is feminizing to its victims, emasculating to the men who are seen as responsible for protecting the victims, and degrading to
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The gender of violence in war and conflict 199 nationalisms that rely on a protection narrative for their justification and valorization – is also important, especially to understanding what counts as gender-based violence in conflict, and the relationship between gender, violence, and conflict. This collective element is the key, because it shows that the inherited interpretation of gender-based violence in war as victimizing women, sexual in nature, and perpetrated by fighters, is too narrow. If war rape is a part of war because it expresses and operates on existing gender dynamics that are not incidental to but a key part of war and conflict, then gender-based violence in war and conflict can be found across the spectrum of those existing gender dynamics (see discussion in Sjoberg, 2013).
GENDER DYNAMICS, WAR, AND VIOLENCE From its inception (see, for example, Tickner, 1992) to its current instantiations (see, for example, Tripp et al., 2013), feminist scholarship addressing war and conflict has argued that “the meaning, causes, and consequences of war cannot be understood without reference to gender; using gender as a category of analysis transforms the study of war” (Sjoberg, 2013: 3). The foundations for this argument are many. These include but are not limited to evidence: that the international system contains elements of gender hierarchy;1 that war narratives are gendered;2 that states compete for relative gendered positions;3 that the roles of combatant and civilian are assigned on the basis of gender;4 that war experiences are gendered;5 and that nationalism and militarism have their underpinnings in gender dynamics.6 As many of the other entries in this handbook have demonstrated, these and many other dimensions mean that war and conflict are gendered. Understanding war and conflict as gendered has implications for what counts as gender-based violence in them. Particularly, it suggests that war is gender-based violence, and notions of what gender is are bound up in how gender is practiced in war and conflict. In this view, “first, wars start earlier and go on longer than traditional interpretations identify; second, wars reach deeper into societies than conventional reports would portray; finally, wars can be fought with a wider variety of means and with a wider variety of actors than conventionally imagined” (Sjoberg, 2013: 275). These realizations come from decades of research into the complexities of women’s lives in war and conflict, and the ways that their lived experiences defy traditional definitions of war and violence.
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This leads to rejecting simplistic interpretations that suggest that war rape is a separable side effect of generally gender-neutral war and militarism in favor of seeing the relationship between gender, war, and conflict as deep and engrained. Accordingly, I use the term “gender/ violence” to make the suggestion that gender and violence (and conflict) necessarily are paired (where violence is everywhere and always gendered, and gender is everywhere and always violent). This is built on an approach to war and conflict as a continuum, understanding gender/ violence in conflict as etched in normal life and gendered conflict as normalized. This interpretation changes the question – it is no longer a matter of defining gender-based violence in war, but understanding war as gender-based violence, and gender-based violence as war. In the brief discussions that follow, I argue that the experiences of Jean Paul, the unnamed Syrian girl, and Andrea that opened this chapter are genderbased violence in war and conflict. The conclusion of this contribution to the handbook draws those together to make some observations about gendered violence in war and conflict.
MEN, WOMEN, AND GENDERED VIOLENCE IN CONFLICT It is commonly assumed that the word “gender” is used in reference to women, and that “gender issues” is another way to say “women’s issues.” While feminist work in international relations (IR) has pointed out the importance of understanding men and masculinities to get a full picture of global politics, accounts of gender-based violence in war rarely take notice of men as victims of gender-based violence. Some research work that does pay attention to male victimization (for example, Jones, 2002) does so in a sensationalistic way that emphasizes the neglect of men and a notion of reverse discrimination. I argue that each approach is problematic. Jean Paul’s story in the opening of this chapter is tragic and painful. It is also not unique – he is not the only man who has ever been the victim of wartime rape. The notion that sexual violence is something that men do to women, built off the paired notions that gender subordination is something that men do to women and that war-fighting is the business of men, does not fully represent the experiences of men and women in war and conflict. Both research on women perpetrators (for example, Sjoberg and Gentry, 2011) and the evidence of male victimization call for a reinterpretation of the nature of gender-based violence in war. Rather than being solely reliant on the biological sex of the body committing the
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The gender of violence in war and conflict 201 violence or the body victimized by it, gender-based violence in war and conflict is an intimate web of feminization of victims, male or female. Rather than classifying some people (men) as perpetrators and others (women) as victims, it is important to understand not only that anyone can victimize anyone on the basis of gender, but also that the perpetrator/ victim dichotomy itself is problematic for two reasons. First, it is often constructed on the basis of a (gendered) shorthand, where “perpetrators” are a class of people (often military-age males) and “victims” are a different class of people (often innocent women), leaving out many of the perpetrators and many of the victims of gender-based violence in war and conflict. Second, the complexity of real experiences of gender-based violence means that some people are both perpetrators and victims. Some perpetrators were victims of previous gender-based violence and some perpetrators are committing violence at the command of their superiors or even under direct threat of violence against their persons. There is no evidence in Jean Paul’s story that he was personally a perpetrator; there is evidence that he was the victim of gender-based violence and continues to struggle with the stigma of emasculation that comes with being a victim of gender-based violence in war. Jean Paul is afraid to tell his family that he was raped, because he will be considered less of a man. His rapists made racist comments about the feminization of Muslim men, and rape as a punishment for spying. Jean Paul’s rape challenged his masculinity, as well as his family and his ethnic group. His rapists asserted their dominance through sexual violence, and the scars of that assertion mark both his life and the conflict he experienced long after his rapists stopped raping him. Jean Paul’s war was fought with a wider variety of means and by a wider variety of actors than is traditionally seen or understood.
GENDER, VIOLENCE, AND THE SCOPE OF WAR To see Andrea’s war, it is necessary to see non-traditional actors and non-traditional weapons, but it is also to see that war is not limited to the declared battles on marked battlefields between states in the international arena. Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy is a cross between autobiography and fiction – a story of the horrid sexual violence that Andrea endured coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Andrea’s everyday life was a war – and not in the metaphorical sense. Her physical security was constantly under threat, her body constantly attacked, and her world one of gender-based violence. Though New York, where she lived, was technically “at peace” and “secure” during much of the period covered in
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Mercy, Andrea did not benefit from that peace and security. The combination of gender and poverty made Andrea constantly physically insecure. That is why Chris Cuomo suggests that “the spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life,” but this serves to “distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and resistance that so often function as givens in most people’s lives” (1996: 31, 30). Betty Reardon (1985) talked about this as a “war system,” where links between sex and violence dominate a significant amount of contemporary social and political life. While Reardon’s interpretation relies on essentialist notions of what men are and what women are, the underlying argument is an important one: the depth of the links between gender and violence mean that gender, “everyday” violence, and political violence are connected. This point has been reiterated in later work on gender and militarism (see, for example, Peterson, 2010), which has been able to de-couple men/masculinities and women/femininities to argue that a link between masculinities and violence cannot be reducible to links between men/violence and women/victimization. There are, then, several ways that the violence Andrea chronicles can be seen as gender-based violence in war and conflict. First, if conflict is a continuum, Andrea lived within that continuum. Second, Andrea’s experiences are (extreme) examples of the violent performance of gender subordination and the gender subordination expressed in violence. Third, many of the men whose abuse Andrea endured framed their violence in terms of military-linked notions of idealized masculinity, whether they were in the military or in organizations that opposed American militarism. The links between ideal-typical masculinity, expectations of men, and men’s perpetration of violence are well established in the feminist literature on war and conflict (see, for example, Whitworth, 2004). What happened to Andrea demonstrates not only the length and breadth of war and conflict, but the ways that it reaches deeper into people’s lives than most traditional definitions of gender-based violence in war acknowledge.
THE REACH OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN WAR In seeing that depth, it is possible to see the plight of the unnamed Syrian women and children in the news story that started this chapter, as gender-based violence. The little girl in the pink dress whose hand was
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The gender of violence in war and conflict 203 trembling was malnourished and may well have been starving. She is a striking counterexample of the idea that all gender-based violence in war is sexual in nature. I am not arguing that Syrian men are not hungry, sick, or starving – that it is only women and girls who experience those hardships. That would be ridiculous, and there is evidence that many Syrian civilian men are struggling to survive in the ongoing conflict. My argument is more nuanced: that war and conflict often have sex-differential impacts on women because of gender-based assumptions about women’s proper roles, women’s needs, and their priorities in pre-war, wartime, and post-war divisions of labor (see Cohn, 2012). Those sex-differential impacts are far-reaching, and have led feminist scholars to look at the ways that women have unequal access to nutrition, to health care, to social services, to household stability, and to income both during and after conflict. Research has also showed that conservative gender rules, levels of domestic violence, and threats to women’s physical security increase during times of conflict. There are those who would say that characterizing gendered problems with access to nutrition as gender-based violence and so placing these problems in the same category as war rape might trivialize the latter. Talking about the links between different sorts of gender-based violence in war and conflict, however, is not the same as equating the experience of them. If the girl in the pink dress is at a greater risk of malnutrition because she is a girl, then it is important to characterize her hunger as gender-based structural violence (see discussion in Tickner, 1992) in war and conflict.
GENDER/VIOLENCE/WAR AND CONFLICT These readings of gender-based violence in war show that it is not purely sexual, not something that exclusively victimizes women, and not always committed by soldiers on the battlefield. Instead, it suggests, like the lives of Ziba, Jean Paul, Andrea, and the Syrian girl in the pink dress, that gender-based violence in war and conflict is complicated, multidimensional, and everyday. Coming from the theoretical position that war is gender-based violence, and gender hierarchy is war, I argue that a more holistic understanding of gender-based violence helps us to understand (and potentially provide solutions to) not only Ziba’s problems, but those of individual and collective victims across the full spectrum of gender/ violence in a gendered/violent world.
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NOTES 1. 2.
This draws from Kenneth Waltz’s (1979) notion of the international system structure. See, for example, discussion in Wibben (2011) about the ways in which gendered narratives of security are embedded in, and part of, conflict. V. Spike Peterson (2010), for example, discusses the tendency of states to use feminization as a tool of devalorization against their (male or female, masculine or feminine) opponents to signify dominance and victory. See discussion in Young (2003). See discussions in Sjoberg (2013, chapter 9) and Sylvester (2012). Here it is argued that war is something sensed, felt, and lived, and that its experience is gendered by not only what happens to people in war but the ways that they are expected to feel and react. See, for example, Enloe (2010), in which she discusses the ways in which militaries rely on gendered expectations of feminized others (both women “wives” and civilians) to function in times of war and in times of “peace.”
3.
4. 5.
6.
REFERENCES Cohn, Carol (2012) Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity. Cuomo, Chris (1996) ‘War is not just an event: reflections on the significance of everyday violence’, Hypatia, 11 (4), 30–45. Dworkin, Andrea (1993) Mercy, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press. Enloe, Cynthia (2010) Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hansen, Lene (2000) ‘Gender, nation, rape: Bosnia and the construction of security’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (1), 55–75. Jones, Adam (2002) ‘Gender and genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Genocide Research, 4 (1), 65–94. Mertus, Julie (1994) ‘“Woman” in the service of national identity’, Hastings Women’s Law Journal, 5 (1), 5–23. Peterson, V. Spike (2010) ‘Gendered identities, ideologies, and practices in the context of war and militarism’, in Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (eds), Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International. Reardon, Betty (1985) Sexism and the War System, New York: Teachers College Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1992) ‘Nationalisms and sexualities in the age of Wilde’, in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities, New York: Routledge, pp. 235–245. Sjoberg, Laura (2013) Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War, New York: Columbia University Press. Sjoberg, Laura and Caron Gentry (eds) (2011) Women, Gender, and Terrorism, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Sylvester, C. (2012) War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis, London: Routledge. Tickner, J. Ann (1992) Gender in International Relations, New York: Columbia University Press. Tripp, Aili M., Myra M. Ferree and Christina Ewig (eds) (2013) Gender, Violence, and Human Security: Critical Feminist Perspectives, New York: New York University Press. Waltz, Kenneth (1979) Man, the State, and War, New York: Columbia University Press.
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The gender of violence in war and conflict 205 Whitworth, Sandra (2004) Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wibben, Annick (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, New York: Routledge. Young, Iris M. (2003) ‘The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39 (1), 1–25.
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25. Conflict-related sexual violence Paula Drumond
Sexual violence is not a vanishingly rare or trivial characteristic of war making. Particularly in the twentieth century, reports emerged revealing the scourge of sexual violence in warfare. During the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, rape incidence among women is estimated to have ranged from 20 000 to 50 000. In Rwanda, about 250 000 to 50 0000 females were victims of sexual assaults during the 1994 genocide. The deliberate use of sexual violence was also reported during conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and East Timor. The current conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and more recently in Syria and Libya demonstrate that rape, sexual mutilation and sexualised torture remain a salient feature of contemporary conflicts. Despite being increasingly visible in scholarly and policy debates, the prevalence of sexual violence is hard to unveil owing to cultural and religious taboos surrounding sexuality. Gendered conceptions of virility and purity over male and female survivors, respectively, render them socially spoiled. While female victims become socially soiled and unmarriageable, males are feminised or homosexualised in the eyes of their communities. Fearing rejection and social ostracism, survivors prefer to remain silent instead of pursuing justice. The widespread perpetration of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) poses significant challenges for reconstructing the social fabric torn apart by dynamics of violence, potentially producing detrimental effects for building peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of armed conflicts. At the international level, sexual violence has long been a key site of engagement of women’s organisations and feminist movements. Their struggle to address one of the most pervasive forms of gendered insecurity in conflict and post-conflict situations finally materialised in October 2000 with the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000). Yet it took almost eight years until the United Nations pursued effective and coordinated mechanisms for the prevention of and response to sexual violence as a key component of all its peace-related efforts, after the approval of Security Council Resolution 1820. Since then, 206
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Conflict-related sexual violence 207 practitioners, policymakers and researchers have been paying a considerable amount of attention to the matter. From 2009 to 2013, the Security Council has passed three other resolutions devoted to CRSV (UNSCR 1888, 1960 and 2106). Also in 2013, the G8 launched a Declaration on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict and funding amounting to over 30 million dollars to support research and programming to confront such atrocities.
THE HOWS AND WHATS OF CONFLICT-RELATED SEXUAL VIOLENCE We often think of sexual violence as rape and, more specifically, as the forced penile penetration of a female-marked body by a male perpetrator. However, sexual violence is a much broader category that comprises other acts of sexualised violence, including sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, genital mutilation and forced masturbation, among others. More specifically, CRSV is usually defined as any form of sex-based violence that has a temporal, geographical or causal connection to a conflict or post-conflict situation (UN Action 2011: 3). Performances of CRSV can be differently staged depending on the war theatre. Perpetrators and victims can be male or female, civilians or combatants, state officers or militia members. In some conflicts, CRSV is perpetrated pre- or post-mortem, while in others victims are kept alive as a symbol of defeat. Although sexual violence can be publicly performed during ground attacks, as happened in Rwanda, Darfur and the DRC, most acts of sexualised violence are kept away from the public eye. For instance, the UN Commissions of Inquiry on Syria (2015) and Libya (2012) exposed that sex-based assaults are being employed against men and women during interrogation and incarceration. Patterns reported include rape and various types of genital violence, such as electroshock, burning with cigarettes or pouring corrosive chemical substances on the genitals. Conflict-related sexual violence can involve one or multiple attackers. However, it is not uncommon that a third person is coerced into the role of offender. In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, victims themselves represented both the violator and the violated body in cases where Serb officials forced male inmates to perform oral sex on each other. In the DRC and Sierra Leone, fathers were forced to act as rapists of their own female relatives. In these circumstances, the neat divide between victims and perpetrators is blurred by the coercion of a perpetrator–spectator who commands, but does not perform, the sexualised act.
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EXPLAINING AND UNDERSTANDING CRSV Considering that sexual violence is a choice, what then explains its occurrence? What are the motivations of perpetrators? What are the causal or constitutive mechanisms behind episodes of CRSV? Scholarly inquiries have found diverse and often complementary understandings relating to the causes and motives of CRSV. Currently, CRSV is widely acknowledged not as the product of a biologically driven sexual desire but rather as a repertoire of violence that is sexually displayed. Rational Approaches to CRSV Many scholars suggest that sexual violence is deliberately and strategically implemented as a ‘weapon of war’ to achieve perceived personal or collective gains. Leiby (2009) demonstrated that perpetrators use CRSV for achieving various strategic purposes, such as punishment, intelligence gathering and even reproductive destruction of the opponent. For instance, in Peru state agents employed sexual violence as a targeted technique to extract information about insurgent groups, while in Guatemala sexual assaults were usually perpetrated in public attacks in order to intimidate, control and spread political terror among civilians (Leiby, 2009: 449–550). International governmental and nongovernmental organisations also extensively reproduce this rationale. For instance, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008) states that sexual violence is commonly used as ‘a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instil fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group’. This line of thinking has been progressively contested by recent research. In her study of the internal conflict in Peru, Boesten identified that the ‘weapon of war’ thesis conceals how wartime rape can follow various and simultaneous ‘rape regimes’, such as ordinary rape and rape as consumption (Boesten, 2014: 22–23). Most prominently, Baaz and Stern (2009) found another important limitation to this rational explanation. By analysing storylines behind perpetrators’ motivations, they concluded that more complex issues, such as human suffering and unaccomplished constructions of masculinity, function as underlying driving forces of sexual violence (Baaz and Stern, 2009). Thus, a more close and contextual reading might reveal ambiguities and complexities rendered invisible by assumptions of rationality and strategicness.
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Conflict-related sexual violence 209 Structural Approaches to CRSV Another group of scholars explicitly recognises CRSV as part of a continuum of violence and oppression against women. These authors consider sexual violence to be a by-product of patriarchy, a structure that perpetuates male domination over women and, consequently, the subordination and objectification of female-marked bodies. In her seminal work, Brownmiller claimed that ‘all rape is an exercise of power’ rooted in existing gender inequalities and discrimination (1975: 258). Some prominent feminist scholars echoed this argument to explain the mass rapes perpetrated during the war in the Balkans. A volume edited in 1994 by Stiglmayer argued that, although sexual violence can be used to achieve strategic aims, such practice is ingrained in daily acts of masculine domination that create permissive conditions under which sexual assaults emerge as a possibility. In contrast to these accounts, available empirical evidence shows a more nuanced landscape of the interplays between gender identities and conflict-associated sexual violence. For instance, a cross-sectional study estimated that about 760000 men are survivors of CRSV in the DRC (Johnson et al., 2010: 561). The same study identified women as perpetrators in 41 per cent of cases of sexual violence against men (ibid.: 558). Accordingly, an approach to CRSV that focuses exclusively on the pernicious effects of gender on women is empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. Socialisation Approaches to CRSV More recently, comparative studies carried out by Wood (2009) and Cohen (2013) brought group dynamics to the forefront of the analysis on CRSV. Sexual violence, they argue, is not an outward-looking strategy, but emerges from the character of the command structure, recruitment mechanisms or other existing social norms shared by combatants. By interrogating varying levels of CRSV, Wood (2009) shows that rape is unlikely to happen in warscapes in which shared norms or ideologies condemn sexual violence (Wood, 2009: 140). However, such norms depend on the strength of the chain of command and on soldiers’ discipline in order to be enforced (Wood, 2009: 141–142). If the command hierarchy is feeble, then recruits have more opportunities to engage in proscribed practices. Empirical research by Cohen (2013) also diagnoses how combatant socialisation is a key variable to explain the occurrence of sexual violence. Her analysis indicates that groups that use abduction as an
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enlisting practice tend to use rape to create cohesion among fighters (2013: 467). Hence, abduction of combatants is a strong predictor of wartime rape. Against this backdrop, training and socialisation are regarded as crucial components for building a disciplined armed group and, consequently, preventing sexual violence (Wood, 2009; Cohen 2013). The socialisation approaches to CRSV provide innovative contributions to the understanding of this phenomenon. Importantly, the need to provide a thorough understanding of variation in the prevalence of CRSV moved these scholars beyond single-case investigations in the search for causal mechanisms that would allow for generalisation. Nonetheless, the urge for comparison and generalisability drove this body of literature away from a gender-sensitive analysis of the phenomenon, thus missing out important feminist insights on the intricate connection between warring practices and enactments of militarised masculinity. Masculinities-oriented Approaches to CRSV Gender and power are intrinsically connected to multiple constructions of masculinities, which are continuously reproduced and negotiated in relationships of othering and domination in warfare. Acknowledging the multidimensional aspect of gendered hierarchies, some scholars have critically engaged with the concept of masculinities to shed light on how heteronormative scripts of sexual subordination inform practices of war and violence. In this line of thinking masculinity transcends the materiality of body and is entrenched in prescribed social models of gender and sexuality. A series of researchers on masculinities argue that men who fail to match social expectations of manhood experience feelings of frustration, marginalisation and ‘emasculation’. Thus they engage in violent acts capable of boosting their sense of manliness. A study on perpetrators’ narratives conducted in the DRC demonstrated how soldiers commonly justify their behaviour by alluding to an idealised concept of masculinity, which they are unable to fulfil in face of their social and economic disempowerment (Baaz and Stern, 2009). In this context, combatants perceive forced sexual intercourse as a means to satisfy their sexual desire and reaffirm their dominant role as ‘real’ men (2009: 510). Accordingly, CRSV spawns from a process of violent negotiation between competing conceptions of masculinities. Rape, sexual mutilation and humiliation are means of feminising the enemy while fortifying the power and manliness of the aggressor (Goldstein, 2001: 356–362). As Goldstein (2001) recalls, during armed conflicts combatants reproduce
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Conflict-related sexual violence 211 and reaffirm their perceived masculinity by placing their opponents in a position of domination and weakness commonly attributed to femininity. Hierarchies of masculinities are thus intrinsically connected to the sexual violation of both male- and female-marked bodies. Zarkov (2001) advances this debate by putting the intimate connection between power and heterosexuality at the forefront of this debate. In warfare, the penetration of the male body is entangled with imageries of homosexualisation and emasculation, which serve to (re)produce difference between rival groups (Zarkov, 2001: 78). The privileging of heterosexuality and power as key aspects of dominant masculinities is also, in her opinion, key to explaining the concealment of CRSV against men in media reports, scholarly works and other popular representations.
ANALYSIS AND CRITIQUE OF POLICIES AND RESPONSES FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY In the aftermath of the mass rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda, the international community has developed various instruments to address CRSV. In total, the United Nations has approved four Security Council Resolutions devoted to the topic. Following up on aforementioned UNSCR 1820, UNSCR 1888 (2009) decided to include provisions for the protection of women and children in all peace-related efforts. One year later, the Security Council approved UNSCR 1960 (2010) with an eye towards establishing monitoring, analysis and reporting mechanisms on the prevention and punishment of CRSV. More recently, in 2013, UNSCR 2106 addressed the accountability of perpetrators of sexual violence while recognising the role of civil society organisations in enhancing protection mechanisms at the community level. Additionally, pioneering decisions of international tribunals, from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, have significantly contributed to the adjudication of rape and other types of sexualised violence as a war crime, crime against humanity or even genocide. The language – and silences – of these instruments has spawned a growing body of literature interested in investigating the advances and shortcomings of existing policies and responses to CRSV by the international community. Two interrelated issues have sparked off debates between feminist and non-feminist scholars. The first concerns the immediatist approach of the ‘women, peace and security’ agenda and its ensuing political consequences. The second builds upon a critique of the
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myopic and heteronormative conceptualisation of what sexual violence is and who its potential victims are. As noted by Skjelsbaek (2012), despite significant efforts to bring gender-based violence to the international security agenda, current policies are still excessively focused on providing straightforward answers to what is an essentially deep-rooted social problem. This immediatist, result-oriented agenda has provoked an implicit trade-off between protection and empowerment/agency. In other words, the spotlight on protection and (female) vulnerability compromises a more transformative agenda capable of effectively empowering women as agents of change in the fight against sexual and gender-based violence (Grey and Shepherd, 2013: 117; Skjelsbaek, 2012: 163). Rampant reports on the sexual victimisation of males in conflict settings added more fuel to an already sensitive debate. Recent research indicates that men and boys are afflicted by various forms of CRSV, including anal and oral rape, genital beatings and castration (Sivakumaran, 2007). In face of increasing empirical evidence, another group of scholars argued that existing international policies cast a shroud of silence over male victimisation of sexual violence. Analyses of UN policies and documents showed how the organisation commonly conflates gender with sex and sexual violence with male-onfemale rape (Carpenter, 2006; Sivakumaran, 2007; Grey and Shepherd, 2013). This unwarranted women-centred focus ends up reproducing, instead of tackling, gendered imageries of female frailty, while invigorating the male-as-perpetrator stereotype. Considering that the metaphorical feminisation of the enemy is embedded in the sexual subjugation of male-marked bodies, this essentialist imagery impedes a more critical and nuanced approach towards how gendered constructions operate in enactments of CRSV. Yet constructions of masculinity are only recognised in these policies to the extent that they exert pernicious effects on women’s lives. As a consequence, male vulnerabilities remain largely invisible in responses to CRSV. One striking indication of this invisibility can be found in international jurisprudence. Courts insist on interpreting some instances of sexualised violence against males as ‘inhumane acts’ while characterising the same patterns of violence against female-marked bodies as ‘sexual violence’ (Sivakumaran, 2007).
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Conflict-related sexual violence 213
CONCLUSION Sexual violence is thus a recurring phenomenon throughout history and is not limited to specific geographical areas, types of warfare or sexed bodies. The mapping above is far from being exhaustive, but it clearly indicates that much ink has been spilt in the search for its causes and consequences, vastly focusing on the victimisation of the female-marked bodies. Hence, a key aspect of this equation remains overlooked and under-theorised in such endeavours: sexual victimisation of men in war. Current debates usually emphasise men as perpetrators or agents of change in ending violence against women. Heteronormative and essentialist sexual scripts still govern the imagining and framing of sexualised violence. More recently, however, the UN is gradually expanding its conception of CRSV, as shown by the latest UN Secretary-General reports on the topic and UN Security Council Resolution 2106 (2013), which explicitly recognises men and boys as potential targets of sexual violence. The effects of this recognition, however, still remain to be seen.
REFERENCES Baaz, Maria and Maria Stern (2009) ‘Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence, and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC)’, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2), 495–518. Boesten, Jelke (2014) Sexual Violence during War and Peace: Gender, Power and Post-conflict Justice in Peru, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brownmiller, Susan (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Fawcett Columbine. Carpenter, R. Charli (2006) ‘Recognizing gender-based violence against civilian men and boys in conflict situations’, Security Dialogue, 37 (1), 83–103. Cohen, Dara (2013) ‘Explaining rape during civil war: cross-national evidence (1980– 2009)’, American Political Science Review, 107 (3), 461–477. Goldstein, Joshua (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grey, Rosemary and Laura J. Shepherd (2013) ‘“Stop rape now?” Masculinity, responsibility, and conflict-related sexual violence’, Men and Masculinities, 16 (1), 115–135. Johnson, Kirsten, Jennifer Scott, Bigy Rughita, Michael Kisielewski, Jana Asher, Ricardo Ong and Lynn Lawry (2010) ‘Association of sexual violence and human rights violations with physical and mental health in territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’, JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 304 (5), 553–562. Leiby, Michele (2009) ‘Wartime sexual violence in Guatemala and Peru’, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2), 445–468. Sivakumaran, Sandesh (2007) ‘Sexual violence against men in armed conflict’, European Journal of International Law, 18 (2), 253–276.
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Skjelsbaek, Inger (2012) ‘Responsibility to protect or prevent? Victims and perpetrators of sexual violence crimes in armed conflicts’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 4 (2), 154–171. Stiglmayer, Alexandra (1994) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. UN Action against Sexual Violence in Conflict (2011) Analytical and Conceptual Framing of Conflict-related Sexual Violence, http://www.stoprapenow.org/uploads/ advocacyresources/1321456915.pdf (accessed 18 August 2015). Wood, Elisabeth Jean (2009) ‘Armed groups and sexual violence: when is wartime rape rare?’, Politics and Society, 37 (1), 131–161. Zarkov, Dubravka (2001) ‘The body of the other man: sexual violence and the construction of masculinity, sexuality and ethnicity in Croatian media’, in Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (eds), Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, London: Zed Books, pp. 69–82.
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26. Female suicide bombing Claudia Brunner
This chapter was originally supposed to be titled “Female suicide terrorism.” But should we feminize a complex tactic of political violence just because women have become visible in it, and generalize it as illegitimate in the first place? I suggest we speak of women suicide bombers and female suicide bombing instead and carefully distinguish terms and concepts in what is an ideologically charged debate. Similar to “suicide terrorism,” which has turned into a dynamic object of knowledge and privileged signifier within terrorism studies and beyond, the notion of female suicide bombing suggests that there is a specific phenomenon which we can grasp by this term, independently of the specific circumstances of their appearance. Moreover, the terms attack/bombing/ operation, on the one hand, and terrorism, on the other, are frequently conflated both in politics and in research. The very space in between these notions, however, remains oddly open to a most delicate key question of international relations (IR): which political violence is legitimate and which is not? When it comes to speaking and writing about women who intentionally cause their own and others’ death in the context of a violent political conflict, it seems that to some extent the political confrontations including suicide attacks correspond with the discursive contentions in the media and in scholarship. To put it in another way, the issue is a perfect example of how deeply political and epistemic violence are entangled. It is against this backdrop that I would like to discuss female suicide bombing and the recurring question of what is so special about it.
FACTS AND FIGURES Since the 1980s, at least 17 groups have integrated women suicide bombers across Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Somalia, Uzbekistan, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But facts and figures vary remarkably along the criteria of analysis and the quality of sources that authors aggregate in and extract from databases. These sources include many cases where details 215
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remain unknown. Between November 1982 and July 2014, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism counted 148 to 161 attacks committed by up to 179 women, causing 10 deaths on average, while the overall number of attacks is 3800, resulting in 40000 deaths, 105000 people wounded and an uncountable number of people traumatized (CPOST, 2014). Other authors speak of twice as many women involved, while the CPOST databank delivers slightly different results via different search requests and in many cases lacks details even about the perpetrators’ sex/gender. The first registered woman suicide bomber in modern history, a 17-year-old Lebanese girl, acted on behalf of the Syrian Socialist National Party (SSNP) when blowing herself up near an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in 1985 (1982–2013: 46 attacks, 1985–90: 9 by women). Four more women followed her in the first campaign, two of them Christians. The targets were clearly military – religion was not the primary motive. Thereafter, as the increasing generalization of the phenomenon took a different shape – that of the stereotyped fanaticized Islamist suicide terrorist targeting innocent civilians – these women were gradually relegated to a mere footnote in history. This is reminiscent of how the famous state-sponsored kamikaze operations by the Japanese army in World War II were similarly “footnoted” in history. The next appearance of violent female agency in suicide attacks was in Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) allowed women to join suicide operations (1987–2009: 78 attacks, 1994–2009: 26 by women). A decade later, women constituted a third of all suicide attacks organized by the PKK, Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party (1996–2013: 27 attacks, 1996–99: 8 by women), in Turkey. At the same time, women joined suicide bombing campaigns in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (1994–2008: 99 attacks, 2002–04: 7 by women). It was only then that female suicide bombing turned into an object of knowledge in its own right. This is despite the relatively small numbers compared to other regions, such as Russia (2000–2013: 78 attacks, 2001–13: 26 by women), where we could observe a massive feminization of suicide attacks in the last decade. Despite this increasing focus on women’s participation in suicide attacks, other countries such as India, Somalia or Uzbekistan are less covered by scholarly analyses. This also applies to Pakistan (2002–13: 380 attacks, 2007–13: 7 by women), Afghanistan (2002–13: 826 attacks, 2010–12: 4 by women) and Iraq (2003–14: 1554 attacks, 2004–14: 51 by women), which have been far less researched until now. This is also in the face of the enormous numbers of attacks, attackers and deaths, and despite women’s increasing involvement, especially in Iraq, where in 2005 a white European woman, a francophone Belgian
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Female suicide bombing 217 citizen and convert to Islam, committed a suicide attack that raised remarkably more attention than hundreds of other attacks in the past. But what is so different about women’s participation compared to suicide attacks committed by men, except our own dismay over women’s violent agency? The average woman suicide bomber is significantly older than her male compatriots. Owing to deeply embedded societal gender norms, women are less subjected to security measures, feminine clothing allows for better camouflage of the explosives, and women’s use as operatives is still quite unexpected. Moreover, women often enter the stage of violent agency later in campaigns, when the tactic is more developed than at the beginning of the campaign and at a time when larger parts of society support extreme forms of violence. For all these reasons, women’s operations are far more lethal than men’s, and their impact on society is much more intense, because sexed–gendered reporting on the attacks mobilizes more attention. In the West especially, audiences are more likely to deny the militant and violent capabilities of women, while claiming both gender-justice and political stability to be an exclusively Western achievement. This bundle of effects has, over time, turned female suicide bombing into an efficient battle tactic for those who lack more accepted tools of warfare. Secular groups were the first and still are more likely to use this tactic than religious ones. Until 2009, 85 percent of all attacks carried out by women were sponsored by secular organizations and none of them categorically rejects it (O’Rourke, 2009). In contrast, during more than 20 years of suicide bombing since the 1980s, strict Islamist groups did not approve of women bombers. They only started to do this when secular groups in the same conflict did so. The most persistent Orientalist stereotypes about Islamist patriarchal oppression as a primary factor for female suicide bombing prevail about Chechnya, where the problematic image of the “black widow” has been coined by Russian media, and in regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, one of the most analyzed and at the same time most generalized with regard to suicide bombing. The latter has also become a prime example for the sexed–gendered religionization and culturalization of political violence per se. At the same time, it is widely acknowledged that (female) suicide bombing has far less to do with religion or culture than it has with strategic military concerns. The simultaneity of these two framings is but one of many contradictions that we face when trying to find out more about women suicide bombers and female suicide bombing.
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WOMEN SUICIDE BOMBERS OR FEMALE SUICIDE TERRORISM? Women suicide bombers transgress various boundaries and blur wellestablished dichotomies. These include the taboo of committing suicide and the prohibition of killing, especially when the victims are civilians. In terms of numbers, civilians do not constitute the main targets of suicide attacks, despite commonplace and scholarly claims, but these attacks do cause highest lethality (see CPOST, 2014). Other examples of transgression and boundary blurring are women’s visible agency in a political conflict, their roles as life-givers and carers and their paramount place in the private realm. Last, but not least, is the persistent idea that women are intrinsically peaceful. Yet feminist scholars have pointed out for decades that women’s violent agency has always been part of political conflicts, as it has always been central to the discourses that co-constitute these conflicts. While gender norms have changed across the globe in a parallel process, both legitimate and illegitimate armed organizations – in effect militaries and terrorist/resistance movements – have gradually integrated women into their ranks, while remaining deeply masculinist. Men’s and women’s motives to participate in a suicide attack may be largely similar in a given conflict, but the means of their political mobilization by organizations, as well as the ways of being heard in public, vary remarkably along sexed–gendered lines. In terrorism studies and IR too, for a long time gender issues were ignored. With the rise of female suicide bombing, both fields of study seem to have discovered a certain obsession about it. From a feminist intersectional perspective, discourse, experience and reality, violence and the political, knowledge and power, meaning and (il)legitimacy are intimately entangled in a multidimensional societal process that spans across time and space. And in addition to race, class, religion, geopolitical location and possible further categories, sexuality and gender are deeply involved in this challenging object of inquiry at all stages – as they are in the procedures of its interpretation. The constantly increasing literature on the topic largely agrees that (female) suicide bombing has become the ultimate tool of warfare and the distinct method of the so-called fourth wave of terrorism. Most work on the issue applies gender as a variable that seems not to enter analysis until a woman visibly takes part in suicide attacks – as if the overwhelming masculinity, heteronormativity and androcentrism of inter-state warfare and sub-state political violence are untouched by gender at all. At the same time, political violence that is considered illegitimate by those with
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Female suicide bombing 219 the power of the dominant definitions and the tools to implement them is often discursively feminized (through irrationalization, pathologization, sexualization, culturalization and similar discursive procedures) in order to maintain the rationality, sanity and, most importantly, legitimacy of dominant modes of violence acted out by nation states and international alliances. From this, it follows that the very notion of female suicide bombing/terrorism does not merely indicate women’s participation in an attack. It also reinforces the idea that suicide bombing is per se something completely out of the scope of the masculinized notions of rationality and legitimacy in the domain of political agency and violence. As feminist analyses have shown, this intrinsic scheme underlies almost all conventional approaches to the topic, to a certain extent even including rational choice-based and gender-sensitive analyses.
EXPLANATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS Explanations and interpretations of female suicide bombing are often influenced by the context. This is why it has to be noted that terrorism studies and other IR-related scholarship are often close to state-sponsored think-tanks or intelligence services, while explicitly feminist authors, who are rare in terrorism studies and marginalized within the wider field of IR, tend to choose an interpretative or deconstructivist approach that is critical of conventional analyses of political violence and gender issues and often informed by postcolonial and decolonial theory (Brown, 2011; Brunner, 2011; Rajan, 2011; Deylami, 2013). The booming field of terrorism studies more likely yields problem-solving gender analyses. These often result in rather positivist and affirmative, and therefore widely received, but quite commonplace “gender knowledge” on political violence (Skaine, 2006; Berko, 2012). Often, this does not significantly differ from popular journalistic accounts (Victor, 2003) with respect to the specific categories of sexuality and gender. Of course, the range of approaches also includes non-feminist but otherwise comprehensive attempts to grasp gender issues more substantially (Bloom, 2011), but framings are repetitive, as it were. When women suicide bombers are the object of analysis, individualizing approaches are widespread and focus on sexuality-related family status variables or personal deficiencies in order to primarily explain the motives for violent women’s agency. This early profiling-paradigm from criminology has today largely been replaced by more complex approaches in allegedly gender-neutral accounts on suicide bombing, taking the organizational level and the regional history of the given
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conflict into better consideration. However, even within such a frame, psychologizing perspectives are rarely questioned when women are at stake, while society is mostly understood as the personal surroundings of the woman in question. Even on the level of organizations and their inner dynamics and long-term strategies in regional conflicts, women’s violent agency is likely to be framed as forced or, at least, women are represented as duped. This does not necessarily mean that men’s attacks are seen as rational political agency per se. While leaders’ political rationality has to be acknowledged sooner or later, the violent performance of the perpetrators themselves is often framed in terms of suppressed sexuality under the siege of orientalized patriarchy, as well. This is especially so since generalizing accounts repeatedly position examples from the Middle East as paradigmatic. Moreover, the topic of women suicide bombers is often described by way of story-telling both in journalistic and in academic writings. Such presentations thereby reinforce the individual level as the major explanatory factor, while marginalizing the international and global implications of a given conflict, including its repercussions with counter-terrorism policies and other considerations that IR-related studies should actually be capable of taking into account. The weak theoretical foundations and poor methodological self-reflection of terrorism studies add to these problems, which is why sexed–gendered stereotyping can be found at all levels of analysis. It is most strikingly condensed on book covers, the titles and illustrations of which very self-evidently show that sex sells – also in a domain that claims a maximum of distance and objectivity with regard to its object of research. At the same time, the question about a potentially emancipative dimension of female suicide bombing is repeatedly asked. But it is not necessarily feminists who wonder whether women’s participation in suicide attacks is a sign of liberation from triple oppression (by their society’s patriarchy, the paternalist militant organizations and the conflict itself). Rather, it is those who pursue a problem-solving gender approach. The idea that more gender-justice in their respective societies would reduce violence altogether may appear progressive in the first place, but at the same time it equally allows for the larger political context and its global dimensions to be disregarded. This is because gender is only applied as a variable and not conceived of as an intradependently and intersectionally composed category of analysis that would necessarily include geopolitics. All in all, substantial and comprehensive intersectional feminist gender-sensitive analysis is rare, while an implicit counter-terrorist as well as a security- and state-centered perspective underlies much of the
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Female suicide bombing 221 research, even when gender is included in this. Prevalent depictions of women suicide bombers tend to mirror historical Western colonialist views of Third World women, guided by imperialist agendas and their specific Occidentalist genderism. But rebel groups equally frame them in specifically gendered rhetoric. Both narratives try to rewrite violent agency in female suicide bombing into patriarchal ideologies of gender relations, albeit under different preconditions and with different aims, but resulting in the recurring use of stereotyped tropes such as black widows, army of roses, birds of paradise, virgins of heaven or similar references on either side. Those forms of narrative or discursive violence clearly overwrite existing forms of the respective women’s self-representation. For the most part, women’s politically violent agency is policed and transformed in order to maintain masculine privilege. Western narratives particularly function as commodities that help maintain the real and the imagined global divide that so efficiently links political to epistemic violence.
CONCLUSION Most gender-sensitive scholars claim that female suicide bombing has not been investigated enough yet and that we need to find out more about the alleged puzzle of female suicide bombing. I do not think that we need more of the so-called gender analyses that have rather obscured than illuminated the issue at stake. With regard to mainstream-compatible pieces of gendering suicide terrorism, we have reached a cognitive deadlock of redundant stereotyping that starts from and often ends up in embedded feminism in the larger context of Eurocentrist and Occidentalist counter-terrorism expertise. This needs to be challenged by feminist analyses that focus on the core of their competences, the public–private divide, that is so important in the delicate debate about (il)legitimate violence at large. While gender expertise has gained a certain ground in terrorism studies, I believe that feminist terrorism studies remain an oxymoron as long as they are clearly situated in the imperial framework of power and knowledge that dominates them today. From a stateskeptical, anti-militarist and postcolonial feminist point of view, though, I believe that recent contributions from the margins of IR, critical terrorism studies and beyond can lay the foundation for the next level of discussion about gender and political violence in the context of globally asymmetric power relations in general and about female suicide bombing in particular. Those who will be able to grasp the larger picture are those who analytically put power and resistance, subalternity and dominance,
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agency and positionality on the agenda and who widen the perspective beyond the spectacular single woman in case. This involves having a look not only at femininity and masculinity, but also at the androcentrism, heteronormativity and masculinism in the field of IR and at its complicities with the Eurocentrism, Occidentalism and persistent coloniality in both politics and academia. It is within this complex setting that women become suicide bombers, and it is these very same power relations that shape our knowledge about and our remedies against it. Therefore, a feminist gender approach to IR will have to continue insisting on the manifold entanglements between political violence on the one hand and epistemic violence on the other – and position itself with regard to these circumstances.
REFERENCES Berko, Anat (2012) The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bloom, Mia (2011) Bombshell: The Many Faces of Women Terrorists, London: Hurst & Company. Brown, Katherine E. (2011) ‘Blinded by the explosion? Security and resistance in Muslim women’s suicide terrorism’, in Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (eds), Women, Gender, and Terrorism, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 194–226. Brunner, Claudia (2011) Wissensobjekt Selbstmordattentat: epistemische Gewalt und okzidentalistische Selbstvergewisserung in der Terrorismusforschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. CPOST (2014) Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Suicide Attack Database, http://cpostdata.uchicago.edu/search_new.php (accessed 28 July 2014). Deylami, Shirin S. (2013) ‘Saving the enemy: female suicide bombers and the making of American empire’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15 (2), 177–194. O’Rourke, Lindsay A. (2009) ‘What’s special about female suicide terrorism?’, Security Studies, 18 (4), 681–718. Rajan, V.G. Julie (2011) Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence, London: Routledge. Skaine, Rosemarie (2006) Female Suicide Bombers, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Victor, Barbara (2003) Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers, Emmaus, PA: Rodale.
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PART V PEACE AND SECURITY
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27. Gender and security Jenny Russell and Valerie M. Hudson
Security studies has traditionally envisioned a “womanless world” of male actors and masculine instruments. However, a growing body of research treats gender as a category of analysis that makes significant contributions within conventionally defined security studies. The link between the treatment of women and the relative stability and security of nation-states is supported by an increasing number of empirical studies. Hudson et al. (2012) lay out the breadth and implications of this body of research, on which they ground the argument that gender is a variable whose impact on state behavior must be given the same consideration as long-studied variables such as economic wealth or political system. The definitions of “gender” and “security” are themselves nuanced and complex, and as such are outside the scope of this chapter; for a more thorough discussion of this subject, please see Hudson et al. (2008/09). Instead, this chapter will examine state security more narrowly as it relates to conflict and gender more specifically as it relates to the treatment of women within a state. The primary explanans in this body of research is the degree of gender inequality within a given society, that is, the degree to which women are subordinated conceptually, legally, and physically. This chapter examines a select handful of current research findings on gender and security in three categories: gender inequality and both inter- and intrastate conflict; gender inequality and conflict resolution, including peacekeeping operations; and the effect of conflict on gender inequality. Owing to space limitations, many fine works could not be included.
GENDER INEQUALITY, INTERSTATE CONFLICT, AND INTRASTATE CONFLICT Is there a relationship between the level of gender inequality and a state’s involvement in conflict? Research indicates that we should proceed with caution while investigating this linkage, paying close attention to the indicators used to measure gender inequality. For example, Bjarnegard and Melander report that the representation of females in politics is not in 225
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itself a determinant of whether or not states participate in armed conflict or are peaceful (2013). They investigate the statistical association of these two factors within East Asia, where they find for example that, although communist governments set quotas for women’s participation in parliamentary bodies, these bodies actually have little influence over the country’s foreign policy. Female political representation in this context does not reflect levels of inequality within these communist countries, and thus should not be used as the sole measure of gender inequality within a country. As Bjarnegard and Melander note, “[t]he suggestion that more women in parliament will lead to fewer armed conflicts runs the risk of being forwarded as an oversimplified solution to a complex problem” (2013: 558). However, Bjarnegard and Melander’s work offers an alternative operationalization of gender inequality: gender ratios at higher levels of education. When gender inequality is operationalized in this way, it remains significantly correlated with armed conflict when controlling for communism. One implication of Bjarnegard and Melander’s work is that merely instituting quotas is not a substitute for the comprehensive changes in societal gender norms that would be needed to influence the conflict profile of a state. As part of a larger body of work on the subject, Mary Caprioli examines the link between gender inequality and state actions in interstate conflict and finds that low gender equality is linked to more aggressive behavior (2003). To measure gender equality, Caprioli indexes equality based on the percentage of women in the labor force and the fertility level, while controlling for the presence of female leadership at the time of conflict, avoiding the potential pitfalls highlighted by Bjarnegard and Melander. Her research controls for the impact of other relevant variables (major power involvement, number of allies, contiguity, economic growth, GDP, single-day disputes, democratic homogeneity, and democracy) on state behavior. In addition to examining involvement in conflict, Caprioli assesses the relative role of domestic gender equality in predicting aggression, in effect the first use of force in an interstate dispute. Examining 141 states between 1978 and 1992, she finds that gender equality is a statistically significant factor in first use of force – in other words, states with lower gender equality are more likely to be the aggressors in an interstate conflict. Further insight into the relationship between treatment of women and state behavior is offered by Hudson et al. (2008/09). Using their database on the treatment of women in 175 countries (the WomanStats Database, http://womanstats.org), Hudson and co-authors find not only that violence against women within a society is strongly correlated with a state being
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Gender and security 227 less peaceful and less compliant with international norms, but that this variable is a better predictor than more established explanations, including democracy, level of wealth, or Islamic civilization. This correlation is so strong that: [I]f a scholar or policymaker had to select one variable – level of democracy, level of wealth, prevalence of Islamic culture, or the physical security of women – to assist them in predicting which states would be the least peaceful or of the most concern to the international community or have the worst relations with their neighbors, they would do best by choosing the measure of the physical security of women. (Hudson et al., 2008/09: 41)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, empirical findings regarding gender inequality and interstate violence also apply to intrastate conflict. Both Melander (2005) and Caprioli (2005) have extended their research on interstate conflict to confirm its application to violence within the nation-state, and Hudson’s work builds on her early findings that gender imbalances predict internal instability and insecurity. Melander’s work confirms that, as with violence on the interstate level, the impact of gender inequality on intrastate conflict is at least as important as other established predictors of violence, including ethnic factors, economic development, and democracy. For this work, Melander examines three indicators of gender inequality: whether a state’s highest leader is female; the percentage of women in parliament; and the female-to-male ratio in higher education. Although Melander finds that female leadership in and of itself is a weak and insignificant predictor of the predilection for internal violence (this is echoed in Bjarnegard and Melander, 2013), the other two measures of gender inequality are statistically significant indicators. Interestingly, Melander does not find “that it is support from below from other women in influential positions that enable women leaders to make a distinct feminine imprint on policy” (2005: 710). In other words, a higher rate of female representation in parliament does not increase the pacifying effect of female state leadership. Nor does Melander find that the number of women in a legislative body must reach a critical mass (about one-third) before it can achieve a noticeable effect on policy: “the pacifying effect of female parliamentary representation pertains to the rate of representation in general and not specifically to rates of representation exceeding one-third” (2005: 706). In other words, the effect of female parliamentary representation is visible even before representation exceeds the one-third threshold. Caprioli offers an additional perspective on the relationship between gender inequality and intrastate conflict. She hypothesizes that “gender inequality should have a substantial impact on intrastate conflict based on
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the direct impact of structural inequality with its inherent norms of discrimination and violence and the role that structural inequality has in facilitating ethnic rebellion” (2005: 168). She examines country years from 1960 to 1997 in the EUGene dataset, manually updated to 2001, and measures gender inequality by both fertility rate (with higher fertility rate again being associated with greater inequality) and female percentage of the labor force. Using a logistic regression random effects model, Caprioli controls for other causes and confirms that both measures of gender inequality – fertility and representation in the labor force – are statistically significant indicators of a state’s likelihood to experience internal conflict. For states with high fertility rates, the state’s risk of internal conflict is nearly double that of states with low fertility rates; for states with 10 percent of women represented in the labor force, the likelihood of internal conflict is nearly 30 times greater than that of states where 40 percent of women are represented in the labor force (Caprioli, 2005). Additional research has examined the role of gender in other forms of intrastate conflict, such as the role of women in terrorism, or whether the presence of women within an organization makes it more or less likely to resort to violence to achieve political ends. Although important for security studies, these topics are outside the scope of this chapter; a more detailed overview of this subject can be found in Laura Sjoberg’s and Caron Gentry’s work Women, Gender, and Terrorism (2011).
GENDER INEQUALITY AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION The status of women is related not only to a state’s proclivity to slide into violence, but also to its prospect for recovering from violence. In particular, gender equality affects the success of peacekeeping forces, whether one examines the relative equality of women in the indigenous population where peacekeeping is taking place, or the representation of women in the peacekeeping force deployed to the area. In a sense, peacekeeping forces are particularly paradoxical from a gender perspective because they apply stereotypically masculine behavior (the use or threat of force to achieve an end) to enforce behavior that is more strongly associated with stereotypes of women (peace). Building on her previous work, Theodora-Ismene Gizelis develops a multinomial logit model to examine whether a higher pre-conflict status of women is correlated with greater local cooperation with United Nations (U.N.) peacebuilding efforts (2011). Gizelis chooses two case studies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where economic and development
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Gender and security 229 indicators by themselves would seem to predict poor outcomes for long-term stability following civil wars in both countries, but in which outcomes have thus far exceeded expectations. To help explain this phenomenon, Gizelis looks at the status of women. She measures women’s status both by sex ratios and by educational achievement, and finds similar results in both cases: a highly significant positive correlation between pre-war status of women on these measures and post-conflict peacebuilding success. Her empirical analysis suggests that “women’s status can be important in increasing the local population’s cooperation or decreasing the probability of conflict responses toward activities in peacebuilding missions” (2011: 537). Gizelis argues that the variable of women’s status is independent of other factors such as economic development, and finds that (at least in these case studies) the role of women seems to be more impactful at the local level than the state level. She notes that international organizations involved in the peacebuilding process have often failed to engage women, who are often poorly represented in formal networks. Gizelis’s work points to the importance of reevaluating how international peacebuilding efforts engage or fail to engage with women, and of analyzing the interactions between the role of women peacebuilders and official peacebuilding missions. Another aspect of the peacebuilding process considers the role of women as participants or mediators in negotiations. If there are genderbased differences or outcomes in negotiating and mediating styles between men and women, then effective negotiation processes should leverage those differences for a more successful outcome. Thus far, research on the gender composition of negotiating groups has examined negotiating styles and outcomes within simulations. A notable example of this work in international relations is the simulation conducted by Mark Boyer and his colleagues as part of the GlobalEd project (2009). Boyer et al. found that the presence of women, either as members of groups or as mediators, affected the behavior and negotiating style of the group. For example, female participation as either negotiators or mediators increased the volume of negotiating messages. All-female groups also tended to be more collaborative than all-male groups, though this effect diminished somewhat in high-school-aged groups. In Boyer et al.’s study, the groups were blind to the gender composition of both the opposing group and the mediator, reducing the likelihood that differences in behavior were a reaction to others’ gender. Boyer et al.’s findings are an important foundation for further research in the application and interpretation of gender inequality in international peace processes. For example, some question sending ambassador April Glaspie to communicate warnings to Saddam Hussein prior to his
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invasion of Kuwait, suggesting that deterrence was degraded because her warnings were not taken seriously by leaders from a culture where women are not usually found in positions of power. Understanding the role of gender in negotiations is important in light of new policy norms such as those enshrined in UNSCR 1325, which mandates the presence of women at peace negotiations.
EFFECTS OF CONFLICT ON GENDER INEQUALITY An examination of the effects of gender on conflict must also account for the effects of conflict on gender inequality. In what ways does conflict worsen gender inequality? What about in the aftermath of a conflict? Will intervention in a conflict improve the status of women, or worsen it? A prominent example of the treatment of women during armed conflicts is the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Elisabeth Wood has developed a body of work documenting variations in forms of violence and patterns across conflict. She finds a notable absence of sexual violence in some conflicts, dispelling the myth that sexual violence is an inevitable part of war (2009). To explain the presence or absence of sexual violence during war, Wood proposes a top-down theory, which describes the presence or absence of sexual violence as a strategic decision by leadership – for example, this type of violence could alienate a population on whose support the organization depends. Wood’s case study focuses on the Sri Lankan civil war, in which one side of the conflict (the Tamil insurgent group LTTE) was accused of far fewer instances of sexual violence in comparison to the other side (the state forces). Both groups operated within the same framework of gender norms, meaning that the status of women prior to the conflict cannot explain their differing treatment during the conflict. Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordas (2014) have also produced a new dataset, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC), that facilitates study of sexual violence and conflict. The dataset covers 129 conflicts occurring from 1989 to 2009, as well as the post-conflict period for five years after the last year of active conflict and up to five years between periods of active conflict (“interim years”). SVAC covers six dimensions of sexual violence: prevalence, perpetrators, targeting, form, location, and timing. The dataset also distinguishes between three types of perpetrators: state, rebel, and pro-government militias. One notable preliminary finding highlighted by Cohen and Nordas is that the use of sexual violence varies significantly by group – and that “state militaries are
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Gender and security 231 more likely to be reported as perpetrators of sexual violence than either rebel groups or militias” (2014: 418). A complementary body of literature addresses the status of women following a conflict. Researchers have noted that conflict may actually lead to an improved status for women in its aftermath. For example, Mona Tajali (2013) has identified a correlation between post-conflict reconstruction and gender quota adoption. Tajali notes that “[d]eveloping countries … consistently rank higher than some of the most industrialized and democratic countries, such as France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, in achieving critical mass (or at least 30%) of women in the parliament” (2013: 264). In this case, the adoption of gender quotas is reflective of women’s improving status, and Tajali proposes that these rapid gains may be related to the post-conflict context within some developing countries. Tajali specifically examined quota systems established in Rwanda and Afghanistan, where the reconstruction phase offered a “blank-slate” for redefinition of societal gender norms. If women’s groups are already organized on the ground, they may be in a position to effect substantive change, such as the enactment of quotas. Tajali’s work, however, suggests that women’s rights do not necessarily advance in a linear fashion as countries “modernize, industrialize, democratize, or secularize” (2013: 264), but rather non-linearity may be introduced by conflict. In other words, improvements in gender equality are not necessarily contingent on a country’s ability to meet other developmental thresholds. Finally, a growing body of literature examines the impact of intervention in conflict on levels of gender inequality. Caprioli and Douglass (2008) examine six examples of U.N. intervention, comparing levels of gender inequality three years before the intervention and three years after the intervention ended. In these case studies, there is no association between gender inequality and intervention. However, Dursun Peksen, using a broader dataset of 250 interventions between 1946 and 1988 (including unilateral interventions), did identify some patterns. Overall, Peksen’s work suggests that unilateral American interventions will actually cause a statistically significant decline in the political and economic status of women within a country, whereas an intervention by an intergovernmental organization (IGO) contributes to an improvement in women’s political rights. Women’s social rights, however, show no noticeable change in either case, no doubt because significant changes in social treatment of women must take place over a longer period of time than political or economic changes implemented by an external actor in a short time period. Given other research referenced in Peksen’s article linking the status of women to the outcome of peacebuilding operations,
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the impact of intervention on gender inequality cannot be overlooked as an important predictor of success. Peksen argues that it is “imperative that policymakers take into account the possible inadvertent consequences of the intervention in addition to the expected political gains from the use of force against another country” (2011: 465).
CONCLUSION The relationship between gender and security is complex and multifaceted, and the scope of this chapter is limited to only broad categories and a handful of works within this wide-ranging area of inquiry. The importance and legitimacy of gender inequality as a variable affecting state security are now well established in a substantial body of empirical work, and it demands the same consideration in theory-building and policymaking as do more conventional factors such as economic health and regime type. A more thorough understanding of the relationship between gender inequality and conflict may well prove to be of great use in designing policies to prevent and mitigate the latter. While we know that the security of nation-states affects the security of women within their borders, it is also true that the security of women affects the security of the nation-states in which they live. Empirical study is now illuminating that linkage more clearly than ever before.
REFERENCES Bjarnegard, Elin and Erik Melander (2013) ‘Revisiting representation: communism, women in politics, and the decline of armed conflict in East Asia’, International Interactions, 39 (4), 558–574. Boyer, Mark, Brian Urlacher, Natalie Hudson, Anat Niv-Solomon, Lara Janik, Michal Butler, Scott Brown and Andri Ioannou (2009) ‘Gender and negotiations: some experimental findings from an international negotiation simulation’, International Studies Quarterly, 53, 23–47. Caprioli, Mary (2003) ‘Gender equality and state aggression: the impact of domestic gender equality on state first use of force’, International Interactions, 29 (3), 195–214. Caprioli, Mary (2005) ‘Primed for violence: the role of gender inequality in predicting internal conflict’, International Studies Quarterly, 49, June, 161–178. Caprioli, Mary and Kimberly Lynn Douglass (2008) ‘Nation building and women: the effect of intervention on women’s agency’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 4 (1), 45–65. Cohen, Dara Kay and Ragnhild Nordas (2014) ‘Sexual violence in armed conflict: introducing the SVAC dataset, 1989–2009’, Journal of Peace Research, 51, May, 418–428. Gizelis, Theodora-Ismene (2011) ‘A country of their own: women and peacebuilding’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 28 (5), 522–542.
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Gender and security 233 Hudson, Valerie M., Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott and Chad F. Emmett (2008/09) ‘The heart of the matter: the security of women and the security of states’, International Security, 33 (3), 7–45. Hudson, Valerie M., Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmet (2012) Sex and World Peace, New York: Columbia University Press. Melander, Erik (2005) ‘Gender equality and intrastate armed conflict’, International Studies Quarterly, 49, December, 695–714. Peksen, Dursun (2011) ‘Foreign military intervention and women’s rights’, Journal of Peace Research, 48 (4), 455–468. Sjoberg, Laura and Caron Gentry (2011) Women, Gender, and Terrorism, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Tajali, Mona (2013) ‘Gender quota adoption in postconflict contexts: an analysis of actors and factors involved’, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 34 (3), 261–285. Wood, Elisabeth (2009) ‘Armed groups and sexual violence’, Politics and Society, 37, 131–161.
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28. Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues Richard C. Eichenberg and Blair M. Read
One consistent finding in the public opinion literature is that gender is correlated with political attitudes and behavior. In this chapter, we examine cross-national gender differences in attitudes towards international affairs, focusing on attitudes towards war and the use of force, international institutions, and the relationship between gender difference and the political mobilization of women. Scholars have hypothesized that gendered variation in attitudes toward international affairs can be attributed to differences in the ways that men and women perceive threats and risk, to essentialist, biological differences, to a preference of women for consensual international decision making and to the level of political mobilization of women. We briefly review these hypotheses before assessing them with cross-national survey data. We close by assessing the quality of research on gender and public opinion and introduce an agenda for future research. With respect to threat, risk and violence, a consistent finding in the scholarly literature is that men and women differ in their attitudes towards war and the use of force. Conover and Sapiro report an interesting finding in their study of gender differences during the Gulf crisis and war of 1990/91: women in the United States (US) were more likely to exhibit a “fear of war” and to express what the authors call “isolationist” sentiments, that is, more likely to agree that “this country would be better off if we just stayed home and did not concern ourselves with problems in other parts of the world” (1993: 1088–1091). These results are consistent with a broader literature on gender, threat perceptions and risk aversion. Specifically, there is substantial evidence that women perceive higher threat from their environment than do men in the same environments (Huddy et al., 2009). However, they are less likely to favor a forceful response to such threats. For example, women in the US were more threatened than men by terrorism after September 11, 2001, but they were less likely than men to endorse forceful retaliatory measures (Huddy et al., 2005). One explanation may be that women are more likely to experience anxiety at the prospect of forceful retaliation, and anxiety increases the perception of risk and uncertainty (Huddy et 234
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Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues 235 al., 2005: 594–595). We therefore would expect the threat or use of violent military force to produce the largest gender differences in public opinion. However, we might also expect to find that women are more supportive of humanitarian military interventions that are designed to mitigate the effects of violent conflict, as is the case in some studies (Eichenberg, 2003; Brooks and Valentino, 2011). With regard to community and consensual decision making, do men and women also differ on attitudes concerning how their nations should address issues of threat and force? One important finding in the literature is that, although both men and women are more likely to support the multilateral use of force, the effect appears more pronounced among women. For example, in a study of support for using force in 37 countries, Eichenberg found that mention of United Nations (UN) participation increased women’s support by about 8 percentage points (2007). Similarly, Brooks and Valentino find that women are actually more likely than men to support the use of force when the action is approved by the UN (2011). The essentialist view, which is perhaps the largest body of literature on gender difference, is based on the effect of biological difference, especially the fact that women bear children and bear the largest responsibility for their nurture and survival. Hypotheses associated with this line of reasoning—many of them highly contested—include the arguments that women are more empathetic, more caring and compassionate, and more sensitive to threats to human life. This hypothesis is now discounted by many, since hypotheses based on biological difference would predict relatively invariant gender differences across time, issues and cultures, but existing scholarship demonstrates that gender differences vary across all of these dimensions (Reiter, 2015). In the US, for example, there are large gender differences during some conflicts but not in others (Conover and Sapiro, 1993; Eichenberg, 2003). There is less cross-national research on support for using force, but the limited evidence suggests variation rather than uniformity. For example, gender differences on security issues concerning the Middle East peace process are small to nonexistent in Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Jordan and Lebanon (Tessler et al., 1999). There is no single survey in any one country that would allow us to evaluate these hypotheses in a unified analysis, and there are very few comparative surveys that allow a test of even one hypothesis in crossnational perspective. Here, we take an alternative approach by comparing gender differences in a number of opinion surveys across a range of global issues. Our principal question is this: does gender difference characterize attitudes on all global issues, or is gender difference
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confined to a specific issue or set of issues? In addition, we are interested in discovering if gender difference on global issues is universal across countries.
WAR AND THE USE OF FORCE Despite considerable scholarly attention to gender difference on issues of war and military force, much of the existing evidence is confined to the US, which may lack generalizability owing to its domestic politics or global role. Figure 28.1 provides an international comparison of the size of the gender difference on attitudes on the acceptability of war (Eichenberg, 2012 provides a more detailed discussion of this question). There are several striking features of the results. First, the gender differences are large—13 percentage points on average—and display cross-national consistency. This difference exceeds the threshold of statistical significance in 21 of the 29 countries shown in Figure 28.1. Clearly, gender difference on the question of whether war is a necessary instrument of policy is not confined to citizens of the US superpower. It is an issue that divides the genders in most countries. Nonetheless, a notable finding in Figure 28.1 is that there is substantial cross-national variation in the magnitude of gender difference, from a low of 4 percentage points in Romania, Turkey and China to over 20 percentage points in Belgium, Sweden and Australia. This variation casts doubt on the essentialist, biological hypothesis. Evidence in support of the essentialist hypothesis would consist of a large and unvarying gender difference across different political, cultural and strategic contexts. The fact that the size of gender difference varies across countries indicates that factors other than gender also influence the gender differences that result. Does the gendering of attitudes toward war translate into significant gender differences on specific military actions? The answer is complicated: depending on the objective for which force is used or proposed, gender differences range from large to nonexistent. Table 28.1 summarizes gender differences on four questions involving the use of military force by individual nations, the European Union or “international forces.” The first concerns approval of the presence of each nation’s troops in Afghanistan (2004) and subsequent opinions on whether troop levels should be increased, maintained, reduced or withdrawn altogether (question b. in Table 28.1). In 2004, gender differences were everywhere apparent on the question of troop presence in Afghanistan. In Western Europe and Turkey the difference occurs at levels of support that are
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Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues 237
Belgium Sweden Australia Canada Germany Mexico Hungary France Argentina Brazil Netherlands South Africa Japan South Korea Portugal Spain Italy Slovakia India Poland United Kingdom Bulgaria Russia USA Indonesia Saudi Arabia China Romania Turkey
-23 -22 -21 -19 -19 -19 -18 -17 -16 -16 -16 -16 -15 -14 -13 -13 -12 -12 -11 -11 -11 -7 -6 -6 -5 -5 -4 -4 -4
-25
-20
-15
-10
-5
0
Gender difference (women - men)
Source: German Marshall Fund, Transatlantic Trends 2013; and Halifax International Security Forum, Global World Affairs Survey 2013 (survey by IPSOS).
Figure 28.1 “Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following—Under some conditions war is necessary to obtain justice” (gender difference in percentage agreeing) politically tenuous (majority support among men and far less support among women). However, through 2009 and 2011, enthusiasm for the mission in Afghanistan declined, especially among men. By 2011, gender differences remained but are less significant; in all but Turkey, support for troops in Afghanistan had collapsed. Nonetheless, gender remained a significant element of polarization as this process of opinion change unfolded. However, opinions of stationing troops in the Middle East yield a different story (question c. in Table 28.1). The question asks about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and in particular whether “The US and Europeans should send a peace-keeping force to separate the parties.” As Table 28.1 shows, there is a gender difference only in the US, with women now in a strong supportive majority, compared to minority support among men. This replicates a finding discussed above: in past research, gender differences on the use of military forces in the US are
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Table 28.1 Support for deployment and use of military forces (selected cases) a. Percentage approving of presence of troops in Afghanistan, 2004 Men
Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
USA
81
65
–16
950
Western Europe
65
51
–14
6509
Eastern Europe
37
20
–17
916
Turkey
57
35
–22
934
b. Percentage responding “maintain or increase troops in Afghanistan,” 2009 and 2011 2009
Men
Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
USA
73
61
–12
919
Western Europe
50
39
–11
6844
Eastern Europe
29
23
–6
3750
Turkey
47
35
–12
858
2011
Men
Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
USA
34
30
–4
969
Western Europe
42
35
–7
7831
Eastern Europe
32
28
–4
3857
Turkey
54
48
–6
880
c. Percentage approving peace-keeping force in Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 2003
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Men
Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
USA
48
61
13
1001
Western Europe
70
70
0
6012
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Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues 239 d. Percentage approving military action in Libya, 2011 Men
Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
Sweden
79
67
–12
973
Netherlands
71
64
–7
962
USA
66
62
–4
955
Portugal
65
55
–10
959
France
62
58
–4
972
United Kingdom
61
54
–7
955
Spain
59
53
–6
944
Italy
56
43
–13
957
Bulgaria
52
45
–7
948
Germany
51
28
–23
967
Romania
47
41
–6
927
Poland
45
40
–5
828
Slovakia
35
29
–6
923
Turkey
25
25
0
873
smaller when the objective for using force is arguably humanitarian (Eichenberg, 2003; Brooks and Valentino, 2011). We now see that the pattern holds for Western Europe as well: there are large gender differences on the question of troops in Afghanistan, but virtually none on the issue of peace-keeping in the Middle East. A similar pattern holds in opinions concerning the 2011 military attack against the Qaddafi regime in Libya (question d. in Table 28.1). There is a great deal of variety in the national responses, but the level of support is fairly high compared to support for troops in Afghanistan. In addition, with the exception of four countries (Germany, Italy, Portugal and Sweden), gender differences are smaller than those found on many other questions. Again, one suspects that NATO’s humanitarian justification for the attack on Libya is responsible for this pattern.
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS We noted above that some scholars argue that women’s outlook on international affairs is characterized by a preference for consensual
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decision making. Women should therefore demonstrate stronger support for international institutions. From 2003 through 2006, the German Marshall Fund asked respondents in the US, Europe and Turkey about their general level of favorability toward the UN. The question asked was: “Would you say your overall opinion of the United Nations (UN) is very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?” Although not terribly specific, the question does allow a rare comparative evaluation of the hypothesis that women will demonstrate more positive affect toward international institutions. Table 28.2 indicates that there is little evidence for the hypothesis. Table 28.2 Percentage with a favorable opinion of the United Nations, 2003–06
Men Women
Gender difference (women – men)
N
USA Western Europe Eastern Europe
53
70
17
3397
77
77
0
23130
80
82
2
7230
Turkey
57
59
2
2469
By level of political engagement, 2006 Low USA Western Europe Eastern Europe Turkey
Medium
Men Women 57 74
Men 53
Women 71
High Men 47
Women 73
75
77
77
78
74
78
82 59
75 59
86 64
86 60
80 48
82 65
N 943 6727 3378 758
Several features of the data stand out. First, the results at the top of Table 28.2 show that citizens in both Western and Eastern Europe are highly favorable toward the UN, while those in the US and Turkey are less so. The second finding is striking: it is only in the US that there are gender
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Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues 241 differences. In fact, American women reveal attitudes toward the UN that are closer to the average European than to those of men in the US. Table 28.2 also shows that gender polarization in the US exists at all levels of political engagement (and by party identification, not shown). Although it is clear that partisanship and political engagement are strongly correlated with support for the UN, there are also strong gender differences within these groups. In the US, then, general assessments of the UN are thoroughly polarized, and the political significance of polarization is heightened by the fact that the most politically engaged men differ most in their views.
THE POLITICAL MOBILIZATION OF WOMEN The surveys presented above highlight considerable variation in the magnitude of gender difference across issues and countries. What explains this variation? Some theorists argue that the differentiation of women’s views increases as women gain access to higher education and to the labor force (Inglehart and Norris, 2003). In turn, these economic and cognitive resources increase the political mobilization of women. Figure 28.2 reveals this process of gender differentiation by displaying the relationship between the level of women’s political engagement and the average gender difference on several security issues, including ones discussed in previous sections of this chapter. Specifically, it shows the relationship between the percentage of women who frequently discuss politics and attempt to persuade friends and family of their political views, and the average gender difference on a number of security issues. The correlation displayed in Figure 28.2 is a very strong one: countries with higher political engagement among women also display higher gendered differences on security issues. The relationship is highly significant (0.01), and women’s engagement explains 45 percent of the cross-national variation in gender difference on security issues. Clearly, women’s political engagement is an important element in the politics of national security, although Figure 28.2 does reveal that other factors influence the magnitude of gender difference. For example, Sweden, Germany and Spain have levels of gender difference which are higher than expected given their level of female engagement, while Romania, Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands have less. Why this is the case is a matter of speculation. It is likely that some combination of practices in socialization, historical experience, contemporary political discourse and strategic culture also influence gender difference in these countries. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the level of female political
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Average gender difference on security issues
242
Sweden
14
Germany
12
USA
10
Spain
Italy
UK 8
Poland Portugal Slovakia
6
Netherlands France
Bulgaria Turkey Romania
4 5
10
15
20
25
Percentage of women with high political engagement
Note: The measure of political engagement is defined in the text. The average gender difference displayed on the vertical axis is based on the following survey questions: international involvement, Iraq violence threat, peace through strength, spending for European superpower, UN favorability, bypassing the UN, defense spending 2004, war is necessary 2002–11, approve troops to Afghanistan 2004, maintain or increase troops to Afghanistan 2009, approve Libya, and abide by EU decision to use military force. See Eichenberg (2012) for additional elaboration of this relationship.
Figure 28.2 Relationship between women’s political engagement and average gender difference on security issues engagement is a very strong correlate of the magnitude of gender difference, and this has important implications both for theory and for the politics of Western security.
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH The survey data described in this chapter suggest several conclusions. First, there are indeed gender differences across many countries on many international issues. Second, the largest differences occur on questions concerning violence, war and the use of military force. Third, gender difference appears to be smaller when humanitarian objectives are
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Gender difference in attitudes towards global issues 243 pursued through military force. Finally, except in the US, gender difference in attitudes toward international institutions is small, which suggests that there is not a broader polarization among men and women along the liberal–realist divide (in the study of international relations). These findings suggest that other factors are influencing the relationship between gender and attitudes. Perhaps the most interesting finding is not that there are significant differences between men and women on attitudes toward the use of force and international institutions, but that there is significant variation in the magnitude of gendered differences between countries and issues. As we strive toward understanding the underlying mechanisms driving gendered differences in public opinion, researchers should use the rich data available in public opinion surveys to understand individual-level correlates of attitudes that extend beyond binary, gender-based characterizations. The work of Huddy and her colleagues is suggestive in this regard (Huddy et al., 2005). This chapter underlines the fact that gendered variation in attitudes toward the use of force is not confined to the United States. Although public opinion data suggest that violence and war produce the largest gender differences, scholars do not yet have an understanding for the mechanisms driving these differences. As previously discussed, many scholars propose essentialist arguments that emphasize biological differences between men and women, often evoking gender stereotypes such as women’s compassion and maternal nature to explain women’s hesitation to use force. Others rely on explanations that highlight gendered differences in labor markets, education markets or marriage markets to explain why men and women support different policies. Additional scholars argue that attitudes toward war and use of violence are a function of societal power dynamics and reflect mismatches in power both domestically and in interpersonal relationships. As we move forward with a research agenda on gendered variation in attitudes, scholars should prioritize these research questions, moving beyond identifying gendered differences in public opinion to explaining them.
REFERENCES Brooks, Deborah Jordan and Benjamin A. Valentino (2011) ‘A war of one’s own: understanding the gender gap in support for war’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 75 (2), 270–286. Conover, Pamela Johnston and Virginia Sapiro (1993) ‘Gender, feminist consciousness, and war’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (4), 1079–1099. Eichenberg, Richard C. (2003) ‘Gender differences in public attitudes toward the use of force by the United States, 1990–2003’, International Security, 28 (1), 110–141.
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Eichenberg, Richard C. (2007) ‘Gender differences in support for the use of military force in cross-national perspective: the war system, modernization, and the universal logics of military action’, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1329135 (accessed 3 February 2015). Eichenberg, Richard C. (2012) ‘Women, war, and world order: gender difference in security attitudes in Europe and the United States, 2002–2011’, http://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1329135 (accessed 3 February 2015). Huddy, Leonie, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber and Gallya Lahav (2005) ‘Threat, anxiety, and support of antiterrorism policies’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (3), 593–608. Huddy, Leonie, Stanley Feldman and Erin Casese (2009) ‘Terrorism, anxiety, and war’, in Werner G.K. Stritzke, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Denemark, Joseph Clare and Frank Morgan (eds), Terrorism and Torture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 290–312. Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris (2003) Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reiter, Dan (2015) ‘The positivist study of gender and international relations’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59 (7), 1301–1326. Tessler, M., J. Nachtwey and A. Grant (1999) ‘Further tests of the women and peace hypothesis: evidence from cross{national survey research in the Middle East’, International Studies Quarterly, 43 (3), 519–531.
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29. Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries A. Cooper Drury and Dursun Peksen
States, either unilaterally or multilaterally, frequently resort to economic sanctions to pursue a range of foreign policy goals. The use of sanctions often involves such policy objectives as advancing human rights, ending or deterring military offensives, bringing about a cessation in civil wars, preventing nuclear proliferation, punishing state sponsors of terrorism, and resolving trade disputes. Foreign economic measures used by sanctioning countries include trade restrictions (embargoes and boycotts), financial asset freezes, bans on investment, and reduction or suspension of economic and military assistance. Despite the frequent use of economic sanctions, they are generally considered ineffective in coercing the target country to comply with the sanctioning country’s demands (Hufbauer et al., 2007). Research on the consequences of economic coercion, on the other hand, suggests that sanctions not only frequently fail to achieve their policy objective but also incur significant socio-economic and political damage within the target societies. Sanctions, conditional on the severity of the coercion and the wealth of the target country, can worsen public health conditions, democratic freedoms, and human rights conditions in targeted countries (see, for example, Weiss et al., 1997; Peksen, 2009; Peksen and Drury, 2010). While the scholarship on sanctions has been helpful in advancing cumulative knowledge on the effectiveness and consequences of sanctions, scholars mostly neglect the possible effect that sanctions have on disadvantaged groups in society—the groups that would most likely be worst hurt by the sanctions. This chapter discusses the extent to which economic coercion brings about a deterioration in the economic and political status of women, a vulnerable segment of society. Economic coercion is likely to inflict significant effects on the target society in general. Yet it is unlikely that every segment of the society bears the cost of the sanctions equally. Groups with privileged access to political and economic resources might incur no major cost from foreign economic pressures by using public and private resources to their 245
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personal advantage. Vulnerable groups, on the other hand, might significantly suffer from any major political and economic instability caused by the pressure imposed by sanctions, owing to their disadvantaged position in society. Women are among the most vulnerable groups across countries owing to their relative lack of adequate access to education, economic power, and voice in economic and political decision-making mechanisms. The under-representation of women in these key spheres of life thereby inhibits female political and socio-economic empowerment. Consequently, it allows the persistence of hierarchical social structures, making it more likely that women pay a high price as sanctions disrupt the economic and political stability of target countries. Thus, a genderspecific approach is required to understand the differential impact of economic coercion on women—a historically vulnerable group—in countries subjected to sanctions. In the following section, we discuss the mechanisms through which foreign economic punitive measures are detrimental to women’s wellbeing. We substantiate the theoretical claims with empirical evidence indicating that the longer sanctions are in place in a target country, the greater cumulative negative effect women experience in their daily lives. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the possible policy and research implications of the gender-specific effects of sanctions.
SANCTIONS AND WOMEN’S STATUS: A GENDER-SPECIFIC APPROACH TO ECONOMIC STATECRAFT We argue that economic sanctions are linked to women’s status through two interconnected causal mechanisms. The first causal mechanism connects the direct cost of sanctions on the degradation of women’s livelihoods. The second mechanism addresses growing gendered violence and the violation of women’s human rights following the destabilization of social order in the shadow of the sanctions. The Immediate Economic Disruption and the Deterioration of Women’s Livelihoods The most immediate cost of economic coercion on women’s well-being is the loss of jobs that occurs under economic embargoes and boycotts. Export-oriented industries (for example, textiles, apparel, leather goods, and electronic assemblies) face the biggest disruption following the
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Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries 247 imposition of economic sanctions. Women are highly represented in the labor force of industries run by local economic agents or multinational corporations, constituting as much as 60–80 percent of employees in export-oriented industries (Drury and Peksen, 2014). The overrepresentation of women in such industries is owed to the significant need for an unskilled labor force. Because women in many developing countries lack more than a rudimentary education and continue to face cultural hindrances in employment opportunities, female employment is higher in these unskilled sectors of the economy. When economic embargoes and financial restrictions hit those export-oriented sectors, these restrictions disrupt women’s economic well-being by raising unemployment among the female labor force. For instance, Seekins (2005) shows that United States (US) sanctions against Burma that aimed at punishing the Burmese military regime for its repression of the democratic opposition caused significant economic hardship among the female population. One of the components of the sanctions was to ban all imports from Burma to the US, visiting an especially substantial cost on the textile industries. Following the shutdown of several textile factories, a Burma specialist assessed the immediate cost of the sanctions for the Burmese by suggesting that: Some 80,000 jobs have already been lost and this will be followed by another 100,000, mostly young women who provide supplementary income for impoverished families. One recent academic inquiry in central Burma indicated that some of those let off are finding their way into the brothels. There are few other jobs available. If the EU follows suit, more unemployment will result. (Quoted in Seekins, 2005: 442)
Besides the export-oriented sectors, financial and trade sanctions create unemployment in other areas of the economy by slowing the economic exchange in the domestic market, increasing inflation, and creating a black market for scarce market products (Weiss et al., 1997). As economic coercion creates economic difficulties in the target economies, women are very likely to be the first to lose their jobs and face economic discrimination. In most societies, men are still perceived as the main economic contributors to their families, while women are assumed to be primarily in charge of household management and the reproductive work of childbearing and rearing. The case study evidence on the United Nations (UN) sanctions against Iraq suggests that, under the economic hardship of sanctions, Iraqi women—including highly educated, qualified ones—working in the formal labor sectors lost their jobs and were forced back to their traditional roles of being mothers and housewives. These studies further
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suggest that women’s economic problems increased their dependence on familial supervision (Buck et al., 1998; Al-Ali, 2005). Economic Grievances, Social Disorder, and the Deprived Status of Women Economic sanctions will likely increase gender-specific violence and lead to more violations of women’s human rights in target societies. Scholars have found an increase in personalized crime rates in countries under economic coercion (Weiss et al., 1997; Al-Ali, 2005). Growing crime rates decrease women’s already vulnerable security by making them targets of assaults, harassments, rape, and other forms of attacks. Furthermore, economic coercion can strain gender relations at the household level. According to the case study evidence on Iraq during the UN sanctions, Iraqi women faced more domestic violence and abusive treatment by their husbands (Al-Ali, 2005). The Iraqi sanctions led to widespread unemployment, high inflation, and collapse of personal wealth. Al-Ali (2005: 749) suggests that “widespread despair and frustration and the perceived shame of not being able to provide the family with what is needed evokes not only depression but also anger. Women are often at the receiving end of men’s frustrations.” Countries under economic coercion are more likely to experience anti-government violence in the form of protests and demonstrations (Drury and Peksen, 2014). Sanctions destabilize domestic politics, causing more dissatisfaction and violent protests against the regime by economically disadvantaged groups. As the social order collapses with rampant violence, we expect that gender-specific violence will escalate as a result of existing cultural discrimination, inequality, and suppression of women inherent in all hierarchical social structures. Therefore, as target countries go through social disorder in the forms of violent uprisings, there will more incidences of physical and sexual gendered violence that will undermine women’s security and overall status in society.
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE To substantiate the theoretical claims discussed above, we now aggregate all sanctions cases from 1971 to 2005 and examine the duration of the sanction episode (the number of years during which the sanctions were in place) and the impact on women’s socio-economic and political rights during that time. The sanctions data is from Hufbauer et al. (2007). Sanction episodes vary considerably in length, from less than one year to
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Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries 249 over 50 years. The median for sanction duration is seven years, and the mean is ten years. To better capture the impact of sanctions, we assess only the first 18 years of each episode. By limiting the number of years, we exclude extremely long sanction episodes such as the ones against Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. We exclude those cases to ensure that these cases do not drive the results. In addition to the first 18 years of sanctions, we also assess the three years prior to each sanction episode. This allows us to examine whether women’s status was already declining before sanctions were put in place. Quantifying women’s status is a challenging task given the difficulties in the creation of catch-all variables to address the economic, political, and social well-being of women. We use four different measures to capture women’s status. These four measures allow us to address women’s economic, social, and political status comprehensively. To begin with, our analysis of the data utilizes the Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights dataset (Cingranelli and Richards, 2012). This offers three variables—women’s political rights, women’s social rights, and women’s economic rights—to assess quantitatively the rights of women to equal treatment within their society. Additionally, focusing on women’s economic status specifically, we use the percentage of women in the total labor force. This is a continuous measure that accounts for the percentage of female labor in the total labor force in a given year. The data for this variable are from the World Development Indicators database of the World Bank (2012). The women’s rights variables from the CIRI dataset are available for the post-1980 period. This dataset attempts to assess the government’s enforcement of certain international laws to protect women’s rights. It also considers government tolerance of societal discrimination against women in each country across time. Thus, the women’s rights variables enable us to examine to what extent women’s rights are protected in law as well as enforced in practice to achieve greater gender equality. Each country’s score for each of these variables is determined by the annual country reports, published by the US Department of State, which assess the extent to which basic human rights are respected. Each of the variables is a four-category ordinal variable that ranges from zero (high level of violations for women’s rights and toleration for societal discrimination against women) to three (no major violation of women’s rights and no or almost no toleration for societal discrimination against women). Thus, higher scores indicate more respect for women’s rights and less government toleration for societal discrimination against women. Figure 29.1 reports the possible impact of sanctions on women’s political rights in target countries over the duration of the sanctions.
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According to Figure 29.1, women’s political status considerably deteriorates the longer sanctions are in place. Specifically, the average level of respect for women’s political rights goes down by about 14 percent (from 1.70 to 1.45) when sanctions are in place for about 18 years. We also observe that the suggested negative impact is more prevalent after the sanctions were imposed compared to the average level of respect for women’s political rights prior to the imposition of sanctions.
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Figure 29.1 Economic sanctions and women’s political rights Figure 29.2 shows the possible effect that sanctions have on women’s social status in target countries. The average level of respect for women’s social rights significantly declines in the years following the imposition of sanctions. We observe a 46 percent decrease in the average value of women’s social rights (from 1.3 to 0.7) after sanctions are in place for 18 years. Thus, the negative impact of economic coercion appears to be higher for the social rights than the political freedoms. Figure 29.2 also suggests that the decline in women’s social status begins once the sanctions are in place. In Figure 29.3, we examine the likely effect of sanctions on women’s economic rights. There is a 31 percent decline (from 1.3 to 0.9) in the average score of the women’s economic rights variable in target countries when sanctions last 18 years. We also observe that the decrease in women’s economic rights becomes more evident in the years after, rather than the years before, the imposition of sanctions. Compared to Figures 29.1 and 29.2, the average negative impact of sanctions on the economic
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Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries 251
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Figure 29.2 Economic sanctions and women’s social rights
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Figure 29.3 Economic sanctions and women’s economic rights rights appears to be higher than the women’s political rights variable while lower than that for women’s social rights. In Figure 29.4, we further assess the possible effect of sanctions on women’s economic well-being using the female labor participation variable as a proxy. Consistent with the findings for the women’s rights variable, sanctions are likely to undermine women’s participation in the
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Figure 29.4 Economic sanctions and female labor participation total labor force over time. Once sanctions are initiated, we observe that the percentage of women in the total labor force in target countries drops from 37 percent to 31 percent, a 16 percent decline in women’s participation in the labor force. We thus find additional evidence indicating that economic coercion might considerably exacerbate women’s economic well-being over time. Moreover, since this variable compares women’s labor participation relative to men, the finding in Figure 29.4 also suggests that sanctions increase the gender gap in access to economic power and resources and hence might prolong and even worsen gender inequality in the targeted countries.
CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have discussed the extent to which economic sanctions affect women’s status in target countries. The prevalence of gender disparities in access to economic and political opportunities, as well as traditional patriarchic norms and attitudes, makes women more vulnerable to economic and political crises. Given the gender gap in various dimensions of life, economic sanctions will likely bring about a deterioration in the quality of women’s lives by disrupting the regular functioning of the target economies and triggering more political instability. We have discussed the theoretical link between economic
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Economic sanctions and women’s status in target countries 253 sanctions and women’s status through two interrelated causal mechanisms. The first causal mechanism addressed the immediate cost of sanctions on women in relation to the negative consequences of coercion on the regular functioning of the target economy. The second mechanism addressed how economic coercion increased gendered violence and caused more violations of women’s human rights in target societies, by causing more economic frustration and grievances, especially among economically disadvantaged groups. The gendered consequences of sanctions have significant implications for policymaking. Leaders in the US and other major countries should take into account the possibility that sanctions might unintentionally bring about the deterioration in women’s socio-economic and political rights in target countries. This effect is not inconsequential—promoting women’s rights and gender equality is essential to promote good governance, stability, and economic growth and prosperity. Yet sanctions are likely to worsen women’s status and consequently undermine the prospects of a successful outcome for the sanctions. Further, as sanctions consolidate the power of the traditional political elites—almost certainly men—and worsen women’s well-being, sanctioning countries are less likely to promote economic and political stability, and greater respect for human rights, including women’s rights. Is there a solution to this problem? So-called “targeted sanctions,” those that target specific individuals within the ruling elite, might limit the negative effects on women. If these sanctions can put pressure on those in power while not causing significant damage to the economy, women’s jobs might be protected and the stresses on the mass population might be lower. It is not clear, however, if this solution would protect women’s status quo or, if in so doing, this “solution” would make the sanctions even less effective. Another possible option is for sanctioning countries to be mindful of what they sanction, protecting industries that employ more women. Further, aid initiatives aimed specifically at women in sanctioned countries could help mitigate the negative impact sanctions have. Such possible policy alternatives could not only protect women but also enhance the effectiveness of the sanctions by not causing a greater skew in the impact on women’s rights.
REFERENCES Al-Ali, N. (2005) ‘Reconstructing gender: Iraqi women between dictatorship, war, sanctions, and occupation’, Third World Quarterly, 26 (4–5), 739–758.
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Buck, Lori, Nicole Gallant and Kim Richard Nossal (1998) ‘Sanctions as a gendered instrument of statecraft: the case of Iraq’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1), 69–84. Cingranelli, David L. and David L. Richards (2012) The Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Database, http://www.humanrightsdata.com (accessed 24 April 2014). Drury, A. Cooper and Dursun Peksen (2014) ‘Women and economic statecraft: The negative impact economic sanctions visit on women’, European Journal of International Relations, 20 (2), 463–490. Hufbauer, Gary, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly A. Elliott and Barbara Oegg (2007) Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy, 3rd edn, Washington, DC: Patterson Institute for International Economics. Peksen, Dursun (2009) ‘Better or worse? The effect of economic sanctions on human rights’, Journal of Peace Research, 46 (1), 59–77. Peksen, Dursun and A. Cooper Drury (2010) ‘Coercive or corrosive: the negative impact of economic sanctions on democracy’, International Interactions, 36 (3), 240–264. Seekins, Donald M. (2005) ‘Burma and US sanctions: punishing an authoritarian regime’, Asian Survey, 45 (3), 437–452. Weiss, Thomas G., David Cortright, George A. Lopez and Larry Minear (eds) (1997) Political Gain and Civilian Pain: Humanitarian Impacts of Economic Sanctions, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. World Bank (2012) World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/ world-development-indicators (accessed 24 April 2014).
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30. The securitisation of human rights Katherine E. Brown
The field of international relations has long debated the meaning of security and its role in global politics. With the end of the Cold War two trends are notable: a deepening of the concept (so that the security of ‘individuals’ and ‘communities’ might be considered a valid concern of international relations) and a widening of the concept (such that ever broader areas of human life are understood and acted upon through the prism of security). Security therefore is not an objective condition, but a sustained strategic practice aimed at convincing others that a specific development is threatening and risky, requiring immediate action. The process by which this occurs, and how issues and groups are absorbed into the ‘security drama’, is referred to as ‘securitisation’. As described by one United Nations (UN) official, security is ‘sexy and alive, you know buzzes’ (cited in Hudson, 2009: 53–54), because without it nothing else matters. Yet, in response to the war on/of terror, the state simultaneously produces a sense of terror and fear in a banal everyday manner. Thus despite the exceptional processes and practices there are no guarantees of security. This exposes a condition of perpetual insecurity: there is an ‘everyday securitisation’ of ordinary life to the extent that, in the current climate, ‘terrorism’ is with us continuously. This occurs through the institutionalisation of security practices. While defined by a modality of threat-urgency, there is a normalisation of exceptional acts such as banning the burqa. Recent theorising argues that the dramatic securitisation of a field and mundane everyday securitisation operate in tandem. Both forms transcend ‘ordinary politics’ and rise above normal political discussion: the need ‘to do something’ is unquestioned, and the meaning and nature of the threat-urgency problem go unchallenged by political and security elites. This is possible because these dramatic and everyday processes depend upon existing discourses and practices (discursive sediment) through which new security claims resonate (Stritzel, 2011). This pre-existing discursive realm is inherently hierarchical, conditioned by patriarchy and Orientalism. Thus, feminists who theorise this area note that securitisation measures are constituted and experienced differentially by class, location, race, religion and gender. 255
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HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE WAR ON TERROR Securitisation processes can be observed in the field of human rights. In the War on Terror, human rights are upheld as a solution to terrorism while at the same time criticised for ‘handicapping’ Western governments in their quest for security. What is important in this debate about human rights is not whether or not they are upheld in the West or elsewhere, but what they represent in an idealised Western imaginary. Widespread human rights abuses are of course present in the West. However, it is only in the ‘dangerous zones’ of the War on Terror that their absence is seen as a ‘sign’ of terrorism. Indeed, human rights abuses, including abuses against women by Western military forces in the name of combating terrorism, are explained away as a result of their ‘exceptional exposure’ to terrorism in risky environments. It is as if exposure to insecurity and violence outside of ‘civilised lands’ produces an exceptional hyper-masculinity that is used to excuse and justify violations of human rights (Hunt and Rygiel, 2006). Furthermore, as I will explain later, it is a paradox that, while it is recognised that improved women’s security reduces the risk of instability and terrorism, at the same time Western states continue to enact policies that increase women’s vulnerabilities. Adherence to human rights norms is expected. States have to make exceptional claims to deviate from human rights norms and explain away violations as abnormal, and yet rights remain the dominant language through which women and ‘others’ make political claims to increase their security. At the international level, the strategic deployment of women’s rights within the security agenda remit by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), advocates and others has certainly galvanised the project. ‘Human security’ has infiltrated the UN and serves as a bridging/ translating concept through which human rights adherence is linked to good governance, development, state stability and hence security. In the War on Terror this link is made more explicit, as terrorism is assumed to emanate from the ‘uncivilised’, ‘ungoverned’ spaces of weak or failing states that are characterised by their failure to adhere to human rights and women’s rights norms. In practice, we can see the conceptual deepening and broadening of security and attendant policy invigoration of human rights concerns in the adoption of UNSCR 1325 and 1820 and in the 2014 global summit on sexual violence, championed by Angelina Jolie, hosted in London. This is an explicit securitisation of women’s rights where the aim is to ensure greater consideration of women’s rights in order to maximise military operational successes. Additionally, as is well
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The securitisation of human rights 257 critiqued in feminist literature, the military intervention in Afghanistan has been framed in terms of ‘saving Muslim women’ from the Taliban, and, while this is not the only justification for this intervention, a gendered and racialised narrative can certainly be discerned (AbuLughod, 2002). The instrumental use of women’s empowerment by states seeking to demonstrate their ‘stability’ is a notable feature of the ‘securitisation’ of women’s rights. The importance of women’s rights to the ‘War on Terror’ is not missed by terrorist organisations either; both the Taliban in Afghanistan and associated groups in Pakistan deliberately and violently target girls schools, in order to demonstrate their power to recast the gender order and also to symbolically challenge the presence of Western forces and Western association forces. Dramatically the 2014 kidnapping of over 200 school girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram can also be understood in this manner. In 2012, Boko Haram threatened to kidnap the wives of government officials in response to the government imprisoning the wives of Boko Haram members. By 2014 kidnapping of Christian women had become a semi-official tactic. This tactic also resonated with a globalised Islamist–Salafi strategic narrative that characterises ‘the West’ as a location of sexual impurity, corruption and decadence, which is exported globally via a language of women’s rights and military intervention. The international response to the spectacle of so many kidnapped young women was a militarised effort. Australian, British and American military forces were offered to assist the Nigerian state in rescuing the girls. Rather than drawing on criminal and investigative methods, this militarised impulse highlights two issues. First, sending in the military serves as a symbol which demonstrates the seriousness with which the West takes these concerns. This is regardless of their possible effectiveness and utility in rescuing the girls. Second, it highlights how an imperial logic operates in the ‘War on Terror’ as a replication of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ (civilising mission) or ‘white man’s burden’. In this instance, it is based on a patronising assumption that Nigerian forces are incapable or incompetent and, therefore, require foreign assistance. The unusual intervention of Michelle Obama, who as first lady used her privilege to speak (instead of her elected husband) in the presidential address, and the emotive language in which she appealed for international action, resembled Laura Bush’s earlier and much critiqued appeal to halt the Taliban’s ill treatment of women. It is interesting that in this version of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ an international military security response was authorised because ‘terrorists’ committed the crime and also because Western states assumed a ‘right’ and/or ‘burden’ that trumped the international norm of sovereignty.
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SECURITISATION AND DOMESTIC POLITICS The ‘securitisation of human rights’ also occurs in the domestic realm. This is because the ‘global War on Terror’, waged in terms of ‘homeland security’ and perceived threats, is held to also emerge from Trojan horses within ‘liberal heartlands’. In particular ‘new terrorism’ is constituted as an apolitical threat to the ‘security’ of the state and the liberal ‘ways of life’ encompassed within it. Terrorism is no longer perceived as an attack on the state, or on physical life, but as an attack on values: values described in a language of human rights. As a result, both the solution and the causes of terrorism are located in ‘ways of life’ that either uphold or violate human rights norms. This serves to inscribe some ways of life as legitimate and demonise others. Such concerns with ‘ways of life’ are highly gendered. The failure of communities to observe the norms of women’s rights is viewed as a ‘sign’ of radicalisation and potential terrorism and, therefore, the ‘cure’ is to provide leadership courses for women. However, as Rashid notes, ‘the association between initiatives to empower Muslim women and Prevent [UK counter-terrorism policy] is only intelligible through an understanding of a wider policy trajectory in which an imagined, essentialized Muslim community is pathologized’ (2014: 592). This pathologisation could be observed in the response to complaints about, and an alleged document outlining conflicts between, Muslim school governors and others in Birmingham, UK. As the ‘Jihadist plot to take over Birmingham schools’ was unveiled in the UK media in 2014, the UK government responded by asking the former head of the counter-terrorism unit to investigate whether or not Salafi Muslims were ‘infiltrating’ Birmingham schools. In the language used, the selection of topics, and the UK government’s response we can explicitly see the securitisation of women’s rights to education. However, what was clear was that threats to girls’ education was not the central concern but that such attempts represented an existential threat to the secular-Britishidentity narrative which demanded instant extraordinary measures. More directly, although Muslim women are frequently touted as ‘the missing link’ in British counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation projects, the reality revealed in funding and in policy debates is that women are frequently marginalised in both discussions and programmes (Ní Aoláin, 2013). When women are included in counter-radicalisation and counterterrorism activities it is in an ad hoc manner and only then in terms of their presumed influence on men rather than as citizens who are impacted by, and impacting on, the activities (Brown, 2008). As Rashid (2014) and Brown (2008) discuss, at best such assumptions proceed to constrain
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The securitisation of human rights 259 Muslim women’s ability to enact their civil and political rights, and at worst are counter-productive. This counter-productive and limiting function of security discourses is not surprising. As Gearty (2007) argues, the greatest threat to the way of life and human rights of citizens of the West comes not from terrorists but from state agencies. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, while on the one hand Western governments proclaim human rights adherence as the long-term solution to terrorism, on the other they claim that upholding such rights constrains them in their fight against terrorism. Less publicly we can also observe the fundamental paradox at the heart of the securitisation of human rights: ‘greater gender equality and equity are correlated to less violent, more stable societies, yet (male) political leaders and policy-makers often respond to the threats of violence from other men by disempowering women and undermining their status, rather than the opposite’ (Macaulay, 2012). Sjoberg and Peet (2011) refer to this as a ‘protection racket’. Feminists and others studying the securitisation of women’s rights have observed this protection racket and paradox at work in debates regarding Muslim women’s rights to wear a burqa or veil which covers their face. On the one hand veiled women personify a security threat. The niqab in particular is viewed as both a direct security threat, since the person behind the niqab remains hidden, and an ideological threat in that this thereby physically interrupts the progressive landscape of the West. In France it became an offence to wear the full veil or ‘other mask’ in public. This was linked to a public safety and public order issue, as well as to a fear of terrorism carried out by those who wear clothing to ‘hide their face’. Muslim women have attempted to challenge the criminalisation of their veiling strategies through a language of human rights, but courts have yet to seriously question state claims that it is a security threat (Edmunds, 2012). On the other hand, within this same security narrative, Muslim women are considered to be in need of saving from human rights violations carried out by members of their communities. Muslim women are assumed to suffer ‘death by culture’. Muslims are presented as ‘driven’ by cultural traditions and practices that compel them to behave in particular ways. Furthermore, under this perceived threat, certain forms of culture may be preserved, ossified or romanticised – ‘pickled in aspic’ (Mirza, 2013: 101) – and set up in opposition to ‘state-imposed’ rights-based discourses. Muslim women are told they may have rights or tradition, but not both. Yet we can easily note the contradictory actions of the UK (and other countries). On the one hand, there is lip service to human rights-based legislation with action on forced marriage, honour killing and female genital mutilation. On the
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other hand, there is increased regulation of communities through recent legislation on immigration, which effectively prevents migrant women from leaving abusive partners or receiving state support if they seek refuge, and increased counter-terrorism surveillance that undermines the rights and security of Muslim women.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE LITERATURE There are recent developments in the study of the securitisation of women’s human rights in the context of the War on Terror. The counter-terrorism literature operates on the unspoken assumption that because men are most likely to be arrested, detained and killed for their actions they necessarily suffer the most (Huckerby and Satterthwaite, 2013: 2). Thus, the wider gendered effects of counter-terrorism are largely invisible to policy makers, academics and the human rights community. Researchers have yet to fully engage with the impact and effects of such measures on women as women and as citizens. Yet Judith Gardam has noted that ‘women are affected by the war on terror to a much greater degree and number than detainee or terror suspects’ (2010: 65). In her work on Northern Ireland, Ní Aoláin (2013) also attempts to demonstrate the gendered impact of counter-terrorism policies and the impacts on the rights of Northern Irish women, specifically those convicted of terrorism-related offences. Taking a different stance, in 2009 the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms argued that while countering terrorism engaged with a range of gender issues, including targeting sexual minorities under the mantle of anti-terrorism legislation, homophobia and other gendered techniques were exploited to break down the resistance of male suspected terrorists. Puar (2007) investigated homonationalism, and shows how, as ‘queers’ are folded into the nation and granted rights, other men are excluded. Another developing trend within the literature is to consider the resistances and alternative constructions of women’s rights within communities through ethnography and interviews by considering the ‘lifeworlds’ of Muslim women.
CONCLUSION As this discussion outlines there are a number of interlinked elements to the securitisation of human rights, all of which are gendered. The first key element is that human rights have become the ‘benchmark’ of
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The securitisation of human rights 261 security and insecurity. Within this, women’s rights in particular are the ‘go-to’ discursive vehicle and dominant litmus test applied for the ‘suspect–terrorist’, because they represent the presumed greatest visible difference between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’. Second, to that end there is an instrumentalisation of women’s rights in the service of ‘security’. The third element is that state attempts to become secure undermine the human rights of citizens in a gendered and racialised manner – this is referred to as a ‘protection racket’. In effect ‘white men and women are seen to be saving Muslim women from Muslim men’ regardless of need or effect (Mirza, 2013: 100, emphasis in original). All three elements can be observed in the cases discussed: the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram, the Birmingham schools scandal, and Muslim women’s veiling in the West.
REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila (2002) ‘Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others’, American Anthropologist, 104 (3), 783–790. Brown, Katherine E. (2008) ‘The promise and perils of women’s participation in UK mosques: the impact of securitisation agendas on identity, gender and community’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10 (3), 472–491. Edmunds, June (2012) ‘The limits of post-national citizenship: European Muslims, human rights and the hijab’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35 (7), 1181–1199. Gardam, Judith (2010) ‘War, law, terror, nothing new for women’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 32, 61–71. Gearty, Conor (2007) ‘Terrorism and human rights’, Government and Opposition, 42 (3), 340–362. Huckerby, Jane and Margaret Satterthwaite (eds) (2013) Gender, National Security and Counter-terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives, London: Routledge. Hudson, Natalie Florea (2009) ‘Securitizing women’s rights and gender equality’, Journal of Human Rights, 8 (1), 53–70. Hunt, Krista and Kim Rygiel (2006) Engendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, London: Ashgate. Macaulay, Fiona (2012) ‘The paradoxes of securitising gender in the Af-Pak region’, Journal of Peace, Conflict and Development, http://www.bradford.ac.uk/ssis/peaceconflict-and-development/issue-19/Iss-19-Art-E-Fiona.pdf. Mirza, Heidi S. (2013) ‘Muslim women and gender stereotypes in new times’, in Nisha Kapoor, V. Kalra and James Rhodes (eds), The State of Race, London: Routledge, pp. 97–117. Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala (2013) ‘Situating women in counterterrorism discourses: undulating masculinities and luminal femininities symposium’, Boston University Law Review, 93, 1085–1122. Puar, Jaspir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Rashid, Naaz (2014) ‘Giving the silent majority a stronger voice? Initiatives to empower Muslim women as part of the UK’s “War on Terror”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37 (4), 589–604. Sjoberg, Laura and Jessica Peet (2011) ‘A(nother) dark side of the protection racket: targeting women in wars’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13 (2), 163–182. Stritzel, Holger (2011) ‘Security, the translation’, Security Dialogue, 42 (4–5), 343–355.
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31. Feminist security studies Laura J. Shepherd
To frame this (inevitably partial) overview of the discipline, I ask two questions, the first of which is: What is feminist security studies (FSS)? I propose that FSS is the study of security politics and practices – broadly conceived – that is attentive to ‘the concept, nature, and practice of gender’ (Zalewksi, 1995: 341). Marysia Zalewski has suggested that there are two central, guiding questions that motivate feminist security studies: ‘“What work is gender doing?” and: “What about women?”’ (Zalewski, 1995: 341). These guiding questions hold true today. Some FSS scholars take the lives and experiences of women in the context of security politics and practices as their central concern, while others engage with FSS as a series of critical investigations of how the category of gender itself and the corollary identities we associate with subjects come to have meaning in the world through security politics and practices. The second question that helps introduce the topic is: What does feminist security studies contribute to our understanding of the world and the relations of power that inform and infuse it? What, in other words, do feminist security studies scholars do? There are two answers to this question. On the one hand, FSS scholarship is deeply, and deliberately, subversive: it disrupts. Located somewhat uncomfortably in, or at the margins of, the discipline of international relations (IR), FSS challenges the core tenets of that discipline’s treatment of the concept of security. Security, in conventional IR terms, refers to the state, which is assumed to be both unitary and sovereign. The state is what exists to be secured; security policies and practices are aimed at enhancing the security of the state, and security studies should be aimed at enhancing our understanding of how to achieve security for the state. Feminist security studies draws attention to the ways in which such an approach to security both obscures and overlooks significant issues. The assumption of unity within the state, for example, obscures the study of intrastate violence and repression, which is not an argument uniquely developed by FSS scholars, but it also overlooks the ways in which gendered power relations within the state privilege certain security experiences while others are ignored. 263
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In the UK in the 1980s, women set up peace camps at the perimeter of the Royal Air Force station at Greenham Common to protest against the storage of nuclear weapons at the base. Their presence and their protests critiqued the nuclear politics of the time, and challenged the notion that state negotiations between the United Kingdom and the United States over the location of nuclear armaments were simply a matter of military security and diplomacy. The women at the peace camps ‘subverted the security-based strategic vision of international relations by showing … acts of everyday insecurity’ (Sylvester, 1994: 193). Similarly, in espousing an approach to security that starts from the premise that these practices are rich and important sites of knowledge about security politics, FSS scholarship subverts and challenges the conventional logics of security as propounded by international relations as a discipline. FSS scholarship also disrupts the logic of the discipline as a whole, as well as subverting its primary object of analysis. Traditionally, the discipline of international relations has focused on power: Which (unitary, sovereign) states have the most power? How are (unitary, sovereign) states using power? How can we measure power and see its effects in the relationships between (unitary, sovereign) states? Conventional studies within international relations consistently overlook the different forms of power relations that are both produced by and productive of practices of security, as they fail to recognize gender as a critical relation of power. FSS scholars agree with other scholars of security: understanding power is foundational to understanding security. They differ, however, in the recognition that power is gendered. Power is gendered in simple material terms: ideas about gendered bodies and behaviours affect how resources are distributed, who can wield power effectively, and who is likely to be taken seriously as a credible actor in global politics. And power is also gendered in conceptual terms: what we take power to mean informs and is informed by those same ideas about gendered bodies and behaviours.
SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES AND DEBATES The second response to the question of what feminist security studies does is no less transformational but much less easy to capture adequately in a paragraph or two. FSS turns its analytical attention to every form of security politics and practice imaginable, often disrupting the disciplinary boundaries around what should be seen as a security issue. In challenging conventional notions of what ‘security’ means, and whose security matters, feminist security studies scholars find security practices in unexpected places: in the global politics of reproductive health, for
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Feminist security studies 265 example. In the ways in which maternal mortality represents a compromise of basic human securities and the ways in which positive reproductive health practices can alleviate suffering and reduce death rates but are themselves compromised by contested aid and development policies, to a feminist security studies scholar the connections to ‘security’ are selfevident. As a result of this inclusive definition of security, substantive issues in feminist security studies are too numerous to allow engagement in any depth or detail in this short chapter. Instead, in this section I will focus on substantive debates. The first of these two debates relates to the difference between studying gender as a variable in security practices (for which one need not espouse a feminist politics) and studying security as a feminist scholar. As discussed above, many feminist security studies scholars are attentive to the concept of gender as not only a category of analysis but also a logic: a relation of power that is productive of certain ways of being in the world and proscriptive of others. This is a conceptual or theoretical question (how do we conceive of gender?) with methodological implications (how do we study security through gendered lenses?).1 The study of security by feminist scholars tends to emphasize a close association with feminist theory and approaches to research. Early feminist social and political theorists sought to ‘legitimate women as knowers’ (Harding, 1987: 3), and one of the ways in which women’s lives and experiences were brought into the realm of social scientific knowledge was through the development of specifically feminist approaches to research. These approaches tend to be qualitative, centralizing life experiences using narrative and ethnographic approaches. We can see these feminist methods deployed in contemporary feminist security studies, such that different stories are told about what security means, by people – often but not always women – whose voices have historically been silenced. This kind of research responds to Cynthia Enloe’s famous question, asked of the ‘mainstream’ of international relations: ‘Where are the women?’ ([1989] 2000: 7). By contrast, there are FSS scholars who do not tend to use feminist methods, but use conventional methods to feminist ends. This group of scholars treat gender not as a power relation but as a variable. Gender is an identity category, on this view, and is seen as relatively fixed and stable over time, and so can be treated as synonymous with sex. As a variable, gender can be ‘controlled for’ in large-N quantitative studies; we can find out what impact the participation of women has in security governance, for example, or investigate whether it is empirically verifiable that women are more peaceful.
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The second debate I want to discuss here is more of a conundrum, produced by adherence to the arbitrary disciplinary categories imposed in conventional international relations. The discipline tends to distinguish between ‘security studies’, ‘peace studies’ and ‘war studies’, as if it were possible to clearly and cleanly delineate these spheres of interest. War, however, is messy, and security is complicated, and peace is always partial. That said, feminist security studies scholarship has often been associated with peace studies rather than war studies through the gendered assumption that feminists are women and women are inherently peaceful or interested in peace. This allows disciplinary international relations to dismiss the insights of FSS, as a result of the same disciplinary myopia that refuses to recognize the everyday politics of security enacted by women. Feminist security studies does, however, have a rich tradition of theorizing war, as well as examining peace and security. With nearly 30 years between them, Jean Elshtain’s Women and War ([1987] 1995) and Carol Cohn’s edited volume Women and Wars (2013) demonstrate the rootedness of feminist war theory in feminist security studies. Recent scholarship in this area extends our understanding of both war and peace, the complexity and messiness of both and the impossibility of theorizing or studying security in the absence of a rich and nuanced understanding of the dynamics and politics of peace and war.
KEY WORKS AND CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP The first book I read as an international relations postgraduate student, in my quest to re-orient myself away from my undergraduate studies in social anthropology, was Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases ([1989] 2000). I can recommend no better introduction to the discipline of IR. In Bananas, Enloe explores the everyday politics of international affairs; she carefully lays bare the gendered logics and relations of power that structure everyday situations, from the beaches that are central to tourist industries, to the diplomatic wives stationed on military bases. She concludes that ‘the personal is international’, as all of these activities constitute international politics (Enloe [1989] 2000: 195). Enloe’s core insight is about power, and she demonstrates that gender is a form of power that is consistently underestimated in the study of global politics; ‘gender’, she concludes, ‘makes the world go round’ (Enloe [1989] 2000: 1).
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Feminist security studies 267 Ann Tickner makes a similar set of arguments in her disciplineforming 1992 book Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, in which she explores what happens when gender is taken seriously as an organizing logic of world politics. Tickner proposes that international affairs are always already gendered, of course, but the masculinism of statecraft and foreign/security policymaking is obscured by the assumptions that we hold about appropriate behaviour for particular gendered bodies; we assume it is ‘natural’ that state leaders and policy-makers are men. This influential feminist work on broadening and deepening the concept of security, such that it includes the dismantling of structures of violence and domination, pre-dates by some years the articulation of ‘human security’, which constitutes conventional scholarship’s response to the narrowness of the concept of ‘national security’ outlined above. Building on the work of Enloe, Tickner and others, Marysia Zalewski (1995) tackled the politics of feminist political analysis directly in her evocatively titled article ‘Well, What Is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?’ In this article, Zalewski explains that feminist scholars have frequently been asked this or similar questions, asked to account for ‘the feminist perspective’ and asked, albeit implicitly, to endorse the parameters of the question: that ‘Bosnia’ is a subject (or rather a situation) that can be readily apprehended and analysed in a straightforward fashion. Zalewski argues that there can be no meaningful claim to ‘a’ feminist perspective on global politics in general, or war as a practice or Bosnia specifically. Feminist insights are multiple and various; ‘feminism is not a template that can be applied directly to the theories and practices of international relations in order easily to produce, for instance, a feminist perspective on Bosnia’ (Zalewski, 1995: 341). Further, Zalewski draws our attention, as scholars of global politics, to the need to question ‘how beliefs and myths about gender play an important part in creating, maintaining and ending wars, including that in Bosnia’ (1995: 356). Early feminist security studies scholars changed the terrain of security studies in international relations. They made it possible to think about security in new and challenging ways, as noted, but also to rethink how we think about security politics and practices. Specifically, these scholars – notably Elshtain, Cohn and Peterson, in this context – demanded that we critically interrogate the cognitive frameworks though which we make sense of security. Elshtain’s classic 1987 text makes explicit the ways in which gendered logics organize war discourse: both how we think about war and how war-fighting practices are managed. Elshtain’s masculinized ‘Just Warrior’ and feminized ‘Beautiful Soul’ (for whom the warrior fights) not only represent the ways in which our imagining of soldiers
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and civilians is constructed in gendered terms but also are representations of the relationship between the state and the domestic population, foundational to the constitution of the international as a conceptual domain (Elshtain [1987] 1995). The feminization of the domestic sphere and the masculinization of the international sphere are perpetuated in and through the assumptions made about power and authority in international affairs, as is the continued association of masculinity with war, and femininity with peace. Carol Cohn published her influential article ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’ in the same year as Elshtain’s Women and War, and it also focused on language: how we talk about – and thus make sense of – security practices, specifically nuclear weapons technology. Cohn relates how she listened closely to the language used by ‘defense intellectuals’ and identifies the ways in which they euphemized and minimized the unimaginable horrors that the weaponry with which they worked was capable of. Cohn’s analysis of their ‘technostrategic’ discourse (1987: 690) demonstrates that the way that we think and talk about security technologies, politics and practices has a material effect on our engagement with these phenomena. Following the deconstruction of these discourses, ‘[o]ur reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of possible futures, a task of recognizing and developing alternative conceptions of rationality, a task of creating rich and imaginative alternative voices’ (Cohn, 1987: 718). Feminist security studies scholars have taken up this challenge and, in their scholarship, envisioned many possible futures, described in many different voices. I now turn to discuss some of this more contemporary work. The first of the topics I want to comment on relates to current debates about location, positionality and intersectionality. There have recently been discussions about these issues published in two prominent journals: Politics and Gender (Sjoberg, 2011) and International Studies Perspectives (Shepherd, 2013). In these discussions, feminist security studies scholars have pushed themselves and their colleagues to consider the politics of location. In a discipline that has historically been unreflexive about its own location and association with colonial power, it is important that feminist scholars are asking these questions, investigating the ways in which relations of power and domination influence, or even structure, knowledge production in the field. Feminist security studies has also made good use of the concept of intersectionality. In security practices, such as the prosecution of a ‘war on terror’ or the introduction of enhanced surveillance practices at airports or in other public spaces, it is always possible to identify the
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Feminist security studies 269 operation of multiple logics: logics of gender, which normalize particular configurations of gendered power and construct the identities of gendered subjects in particular ways, for example; and logics of race, which normalize particular configurations of racialized power and construct the identities of racialized subjects in particular ways. The relationship between these two logics (and the many others that organize the ways in which we think about the issue at hand) is not additive; the ways in which gendered power is exercised change the configuration of racialized power, and vice versa. The multiple intersections of these power structures have an impact on what is, and is not, meaningful and appropriate within that context. Turning to the second topic I want to highlight, there is much excellent feminist scholarship currently engaging with questions of sexualized violence, particularly conflict-related sexualized violence (CRSV). While feminist scholars have always focused research efforts on rape prevention and on understanding the pathology of sexualized and gender-based violence, feminist security studies scholars have drawn attention to the continuum of such violence across peacetime and armed conflict. There have been important efforts to carefully theorize CRSV, to move away from a ‘one size fits all’ conceptualization of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ and theory of CRSV as a deliberate strategy in conflict. Instead, FSS research has shed light on the ways in which CRSV occurs, and should be theorized, differently in different contexts. FSS scholarship on this topic has also drawn attention to the ways in which we need to think through the representations of victim and perpetrator that inform our theorization of CRSV. We cannot simply take the subject of ‘victim’ and assume homogeneity across contexts. These subjects will be differently gendered and racialized, situated differently within operative power structures in the local context and mobilized differently within the policy contexts that aim to ameliorate suffering. The final topic of contemporary scholarship engaging feminist security studies scholars relates to what might be considered the most important aspect of any form of scholarship: methodology. How do we know what we (think we) know? What is the best way of going about enhancing our knowledge? Whose experiences count, whose voices should be heard and how can we best represent them? Influencing, and being influenced by, debates in other areas of critical security studies, FSS debates about methods continue to make us, as researchers, consider carefully our answers to these questions. It seems appropriate to me to conclude this chapter with a comment on methodology. The question of knowledge – how it is produced, whose claims are heard, how we can adjudicate between two or more competing
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claims, to what ends it is deployed – is foundational to feminist social and political theory. I conclude this chapter with an apology for the partiality of the representation I offer here, and recognize that the diversity of the field is in part what makes such partiality inevitable. What is important is that conversations continue, tensions are explored and critiques offered honestly. Feminist security studies is as rich as it is today in part because of productive deliberations about the knowledge claims we make and the resistance to any representation of the field that attempts to delimit its scope. ‘“[K]nowledge, truth and field definition are in the contestation”’ (Alker, quoted in Sjoberg, 2014: 567); as we continue to develop as a field of study these contestations will also continue, and our representations of the field, such as that given in this chapter, will hopefully bring about both new insights and new ways of understanding and situating the work that we do.
NOTE 1.
On ‘gender as a lens on world politics’ see Runyan and Peterson (2014).
REFERENCES Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12 (4), 687–718. Cohn, Carol (ed.) (2013) Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity. Elshtain, Jean B. ([1987] 1995) Women and War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia ([1989] 2000) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Harding, Sandra (1987) ‘Introduction: is there a feminist method?’, in Sandra Harding (ed.), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–14. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson (2014) Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Shepherd, Laura J. (ed.) (2013) ‘The state of feminist security studies: continuing the conversation’, International Studies Perspectives, 14 (4), 436–462. Sjoberg, Laura (ed.) (2011) ‘The state of feminist security studies: a conversation’, Politics and Gender, 7 (4), 573–604. Sjoberg, Laura (2014) ‘The politics of location and the location of politics: thinking about feminist security studies’, International Studies Perspectives, 15 (4), 566–569. Sylvester, Christine (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (1992) Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York: Columbia University Press. Zalewski, Marysia (1995) ‘Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia?’, International Affairs, 71 (2), 339–356.
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32. The Women, Peace and Security resolutions: UNSCR 1325 to 2122 Laura McLeod
On 31 October 2000, the Security Council – one of the most conservative institutions within the United Nations (UN) – devoted an entire session to a discussion of women and gender in post-conflict contexts (Cohn et al., 2004: 130). During this session, a landmark Security Council resolution was passed: UNSCR 1325. Although just four pages long, the document is far more than just another resolution. UNSCR 1325 urges for the mainstreaming of gender in the armed conflict and security side of the UN by developing an agenda for women’s concerns in post-conflict contexts. While UNSCR 1325 was not the first articulation of gender mainstreaming within the UN system, it was the clearest statement of the standard expected for integrating a gender perspective into peace operations (Väyrynen, 2004: 126). The resolution notes the need: to increase female participation in all post-conflict and peacekeeping processes; to address post-war violence against women; and to develop a gender perspective in all post-conflict policy programmes and initiatives. Crucially, UNSCR 1325 is frequently taken to be a document where ‘gender’ and ‘security’ intersect (Shepherd, 2008: 6), embodying radical possibilities for a reconsideration of how the UN practises security. But the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) revolution did not end there. Between October 2000 and October 2013, seven related WPS resolutions were passed, as detailed in Table 32.1. The later resolutions focus on specific aspects of the WPS agenda, arising from the view that UNSCR 1325 was difficult to implement and a narrower scope was needed to stimulate work in the WPS arena (Skjelsbæk, 2012: 160). The protection agenda ‘emerged as more manageable to work with and made it easier to define benchmarks for success’ (Skjelsbæk, 2012: 160–161). Thus, UNSCR 1820, passed in June 2008, demands awareness of, prevention of, protection from and punishment of rape and other forms of sexual violence committed against women and girls in armed conflict. A responsibility is placed upon UN peacekeeping operations to achieve ‘zero tolerance of sexual exploitation and abuse’. UNSCR 1888, 1960 and 2106 expand these efforts by developing the institutional structure within the UN to address sexual violence in conflict. 271
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Table 32.1 Women, Peace and Security resolutions, October 2000 to October 2013 UNSCR 1325
31 October 2000
Urges for: the increased participation of women at all levels of post-conflict decision-making; inclusion of a gender perspective in all post-conflict processes, including UN programming and reporting; developing a gender-sensitive training for UN peace support operations.
UNSCR 1820
19 June 2008
Notes: that sexual violence is a war crime and that there should be no amnesty or impunity for perpetrators; that women are entitled to full and equal participation in all peacebuilding processes.
UNSCR 1888
30 September 2009
Establishes a UN inter-agency initiative to address sexual violence in conflict. Creation of monitoring and reporting systems for conflict-related sexual violence; appointment of a special representative for sexual violence.
UNSCR 1889
5 October 2009
Urges for further measures to improve female participation in all stages of the peace process; encourages collection and analysis of gender-disaggregated data; welcomes the efforts of member states to create national action plans to implement UNSCR 1325.
UNSCR 1960
16 December 2010
Creation of institutional tools to combat impunity from conflict-related sexual violence: the UN Secretary-General is encouraged to ‘name and shame’ perpetrators of sexual violence in the annual report on armed conflict.
UNSCR 2106
24 June 2013
Reiterates and further reinforces the existing UN institutional infrastructure addressing sexual violence in armed conflict; recognises that gender advisors have a key role to play in raising awareness of gender mainstreaming and gender training.
UNSCR 2122
18 October 2013
Urges for a consistent and improved implementation of UNSCR 1325 by calling for the gathering, inclusion and collation of more detailed information relating to gender and post-conflict contexts, and by encouraging member states to develop funding mechanisms to support civil society organisations implementing UNSCR 1325.
However, with the passing of UNSCR 2106 in June 2013, transnational civil society organisations became concerned that the WPS agenda was becoming dominated and overshadowed by a violence prevention agenda (Shepherd, 2014). The worry was that a focus on the violence prevention
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The Women, Peace and Security resolutions 273 agenda could actually detract from the radical nature of UNSCR 1325 in calling for the participation of women and mainstreaming of gender concerns across the entire post-conflict process. In this regard, the adaptation of UNSCR 2122 in October 2013 was welcomed for its emphasis upon dismantling the ‘barriers to full implementation of UNSCR 1325’ (UNSCR 2122, p. 1). Debates still remain about what it means to achieve the goals of UNSCR 1325 and how they can be achieved. Central to this is a debate about what the achievement of ‘gender security’ looks like. These questions matter for how both the UN system and member states implement the WPS agenda, in part because UNSCR 1889 (October 2009) ‘welcomes’ the efforts of UN member states to develop national action plans (NAPs) to implement UNSCR 1325. These NAPs articulate the ways in which individual member states believe that security should be gendered in their own contexts. These debates about how to achieve the gender security goals of UNSCR 1325 are explored in the remainder of this chapter in two ways: first, by highlighting how different actors have responded to the WPS agenda; and, second, by examining how the resolutions offer a reconceptualisation of ‘gender’ and ‘security’. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on how the WPS resolutions could continue to effect a radical transformation upon the practice of security.
WHO IS AFFECTED BY THE WPS RESOLUTIONS? The initial intention of UNSCR 1325 was primarily ‘as an intervention in the functioning of a global governance institution’ to stimulate activity within the UN system in relation to gender mainstreaming international peace and security institutions (Cohn, 2008: 189–190). However, the effects of UNSCR 1325 have been far-reaching. The UN system, feminist and women’s organisations and national governments have all responded in different ways to the agenda established by UNSCR 1325 (McLeod, 2011). One of the key challenges for the successful implementation of the WPS resolutions has been figuring out ways of translating ‘the statement of principles and commitments outlined in 1325 into the actual, mundane, daily principles of the United Nations’ (Hill, cited in Cohn et al., 2004: 133–134). As a result, a number of sites (including the UN system, national governments and feminist civil society) claiming authority and knowledge of the goals of UNSCR 1325 have sought to assess how best to implement them.
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UNSCR 1325 has reshaped some aspects of the UN’s institutional infrastructure dealing with post-conflict contexts: from peacekeeping missions to UN agencies and offices. The way that the UN does ‘business in peacekeeping’ (Le Roy, cited in Hudson, 2010: 54) has been affected by the presence of UNSCR 1325. UN peacekeeping missions have undertaken procedural shifts, including the creation of gender-sensitive training for peacekeepers and the creation of gender offices and advisors (Hudson, 2010: 55–58). UN agencies have started to allocate a percentage of their budgets to gender issues, in part as a response to the gender mainstreaming demands of UNSCR 1325 (McLeod, 2011: 598–599). However, there are worries that the UN system is adopting an ‘add women and stir’ approach to the process of achieving UNSCR 1325 (Hudson, 2010: 153). This is, in part, because UNSCR 1325 did not appear in a vacuum. The concepts embedded within UNSCR 1325 did not ‘suddenly occur to the UN system’, and ‘the ideas and language in the resolution were built on documents and treaties passed through the UN system since its inception in 1945’ (Hill et al., 2003: 1256). The discursive heritage of UNSCR 1325 and its location within the UN system have meant that its implementation has not been transformative in the way envisaged by feminists. Another rapidly growing area is the development of national action plans (NAPs) to implement the WPS resolutions, which was ‘welcomed’ by the Security Council, in the text of UNSCR 1889. These NAPs are viewed as ‘roadmaps’ for how a state can achieve the gender mainstreaming of international peace and security goals. As of April 2014, 43 NAPs had been launched.1 The goals established within these NAPs are reflective of how the state configures its relationship to conflict and post-conflict. For instance, the Serbian NAP 2010–15 is dominated by representations of Serbia’s external role in peacekeeping, somewhat avoiding meaningful consideration of Serbia’s problematic relationship with the wars in ex-Yugoslavia during the 1990s (McLeod, 2011: 604). Certainly, the NAP is utilised as a way of demonstrating to the world ‘that Serbia is a progressive and forward-thinking state that has dealt with the bulk of the problems caused by the wars of the 1990s’ (McLeod, 2011: 604). Indeed, the Serbian NAP is dominated by instrumental liberal gender equality goals: for instance, in the development of a quota to ensure that 30 per cent of the Serbian security sector is female (Republic of Serbia, 2011: 31). Many NAPs have resorted to quota-based goals for the achievement of gender security within existing state security and defence institutions: an issue which has attracted criticism for missing the radical intentions of UNSCR 1325 to create alternative visions of security.
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The Women, Peace and Security resolutions 275 The interpretation and implementation of UNSCR 1325 within NAPs and the UN system have attracted criticism from the international and transnational feminist movement for the failure to develop and achieve a radical or transformative vision of gender security (see Hudson, 2010; Cockburn, 2013). The WPS resolutions have undoubtedly created a space and entry point for advocacy. For instance, the Kosovo Women’s Network used UNSCR 1325 to insist on a meeting with key UN stakeholders (McLeod, 2016); and activists from Liberia and Burundi used the resolution to access political elites as well as educate local women about their rights (Hudson, 2010: 152). NAPs have added another dimension to the feminist WPS advocacy. Feminist and women’s organisations may lobby states to develop a NAP, or even participate in the development of the provisions made, or write alternative reports on the implementation of a NAP (McLeod, 2016: 93–115). Belgrade Women in Black, a feminist anti-militarist group, criticise the way in which UNSCR 1325 has been interpreted and implemented by the Serbian government within the NAP (McLeod, 2016). However, it is important to note that Serbia’s Women in Black network have utilised and interpreted UNSCR 1325 to support their long-held goals of anti-militarism and the rejection of patriarchy and nationalism (McLeod, 2016). That is, Belgrade Women in Black have sought to use the debates surrounding implementation of UNSCR 1325 as a means of illuminating how a transformative vision of international (gender) security can be achieved.
RETHINKING GENDER AND SECURITY The questions raised by feminist organisations highlight how the WPS agenda can be viewed as an intervention into how we think about the practice of international security. Certainly, the resolutions have been portrayed as offering a radical departure from the militaristic, statecentred security ambitions of the UN Security Council (see Cohn et al., 2004: 139). However, for many, the notion of gender security within UNSCR 1325 reproduces a number of assumptions already held by the UN about security: that the state provides security, that security is the absence of conflict and that security is something that can be achieved (Shepherd, 2008: 127–128). Questions about the extent to which UNSCR 1325 has radically departed, or potentially could radically depart, from state-centred security visions continue to trouble analysts of the WPS resolutions. These questions about the extent to which security can be reimagined are important, because it has ramifications for how gender is interpreted.
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Problematically, UNSCR 1325 does not break away from current dominant UN discourses, and so the WPS agenda within the UN system remains ‘within the confines of modernity’ and avoids deep reflection upon the concept of gender (Väyrynen, 2004: 126). That is, UNSCR 1325 has not been mainstreamed in a way that queries how we might rethink gender. These ‘confines of modernity’ about gender within UNSCR 1325 manifest themselves in two main ways. First, they continue to articulate ‘gender security’ as ‘women-in-needof-protection’. Even where other articulations of femininity occur (women-as-informal-organisers or women-as-formal-actors), women-inneed-of-protection remains the ‘centralized signifier’ (Shepherd, 2008: 119–120). While it is not yet entirely clear exactly how each resolution imagines the female body differently, Laura Shepherd (2011: 508) argues that UNSCR 1820 urges for an increased female participation on the assumption that this will lead to a ‘transformation of the political environment’. Thus, ‘the female subject of security, according to UNSCR 1820, is perhaps in the process of becoming an agent of security’ (Shepherd, 2011: 508). However, it is difficult for a single resolution to effect a radical change, given the way that the resolutions are discursively embedded within existing UN infrastructure, and so the focus on vulnerability and protection is retained. The focus on women-in-need-ofprotection means that the UN system ‘resists a redefinition of tasks and responsibilities that recognizes the experiences and competencies of women’ (Puechguirbal, 2010: 182). Furthermore, like many gender policies within international institutions, gender is conflated with women (Shepherd, 2008: 162). Through the conflation of gender and women, and assuming female vulnerability, UNSCR 1325 is operationalised at institutional levels in a way that fails to question the existing organisational logics of the UN. Reflecting on these articulations of ‘gender’ is important for critically thinking about the ability of instrumental approaches to gender to have meaningful transformation from a feminist perspective. Second, there is an absence of (explicitly stated) men and masculinity. As Cynthia Cockburn points out, ‘nothing had been said’ about men and masculine cultures as UNSCR 1325 was passed through the Security Council (2013: 444). While ‘men’ and ‘man’ are not stated in the text, ‘he’ is represented as someone to protect women from violence (Shepherd, 2008: 121). ‘He’ can protect, prevent and secure: but the culture of violent masculinity is not addressed, and nor are other constructions of masculinities made possible, beyond that of a rational protector. UNSCR 1325 adds to the body of UN discourse that ‘produces certain types of masculinities and femininities as hegemonic’, remaining within the
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The Women, Peace and Security resolutions 277 confines of neoliberal modernity, rendering ‘the variety of ambivalent and unsecured masculinities and femininities silent’ (Väyrynen, 2004: 140). It is clear that UNSCR 1325 reconfigures the relationship between gender and security by prioritising and privileging gender, encouraging a reconceptualisation and transformation of international security. However, for postcolonial feminist scholars, including Nicola Pratt, while UNSCR 1325 ‘reconfigures the gendered binaries of international security, it does so by reinscribing racialized and sexualized hierarchies in the conceptualization and practice of international security’ (2013: 773). The lack of attention paid to how gender ‘works in and through race and sexuality’ means that the racial–sexual hierarchies of international security practice and discourse are normalised through UNSCR 1325 (Pratt, 2013: 780). The way in which UNSCR 1325 conceptualises ‘gender’ tends to reinforce dominant sexual and racial discourse within international security, casting doubts over the extent to which UNSCR 1325 and the WPS resolutions represent a radical transformation and a break from the ‘confines of modernity’.
CONCLUSIONS The creation of the WPS resolutions has been revolutionary in articulating a space and an interest in the achievement of ‘gender security’. However, as this chapter has indicated, there are a number of questions surrounding how we might go about achieving gender mainstreaming and feminist goals in the context of UNSCR 1325. The way that ‘gender’ is conceptualised within UNSCR 1325 and the related WPS resolutions is important. Certainly, there have been a number of ‘failures’ to seriously mainstream gender within the UN system (see Puechguirbal, 2010: 175). But the ‘gender’ questions are far bigger than that: I have noted in this chapter that current interpretations have ignored varieties of masculinities, instead focusing upon the protection of women and an understanding that gender equates to women, employing an ‘add women and stir approach’ to international security. Such an approach runs the risk of separating women from the remainder of the peacekeeping and peacebuilding process, preventing the practice of peace from being meaningfully gendered. Related to this, there is a concern, mostly articulated by the international and transnational feminist movement, that the WPS resolutions focus on addressing the effects of war, as opposed to the causes of war, or even ways of ending war (Cockburn, 2013: 444). Even as the
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resolutions let women into ‘spaces historically dominated by men’ (Pratt, 2013: 775) they reinforce a picture of women as natural peacemakers by the very virtue of their femininity. Escaping essentialising assumptions is tricky, but paying closer attention to the constructions of masculinity and femininity and how they are (and can be) challenged is important in achieving meaningful implementation of the WPS resolutions.
NOTE 1.
See http://www.peacewomen.org/naps/list-of-naps for an up-to-date list (accessed 28 April 2014).
REFERENCES Cockburn, Cynthia (2013) ‘War and security, women and gender: an overview of the issues’, Gender and Development, 21 (3), 433–452. Cohn, Carol (2008) ‘Mainstreaming gender in UN security policy: a path to political transformation?’, in Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 185–206. Cohn, Carol, Helen Kinsella and Sheri Gibbings (2004) ‘Women, peace and security: Resolution 1325’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6 (1), 130–140. Hill, Felicity, Mikele Aboitiz and Sara Poehlman{Doumbouya (2003) ‘Nongovernmental organizations’ role in the buildup and implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325’, Signs, 28 (4), 1255–1269. Hudson, Natalie Florea (2010) Gender, Human Security and the United Nations: Security Language as a Political Framework for Women, London: Routledge. McLeod, Laura (2011) ‘Configurations of post-conflict: impacts of representations of conflict and post-conflict upon the (political) translations of gender security within UNSCR 1325’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13 (4), 594–611. McLeod, Laura (2016) Gender Politics and Security Discourse: Personal-Political Imaginations and Feminism in ‘Post-conflict’ Serbia, London: Routledge. Pratt, Nicola (2013) ‘Reconceptualizing gender, reinscribing racial-sexual boundaries in international security: the case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace and Security”’, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (4), 772–783. Puechguirbal, Nadine (2010) ‘Discourses on gender, patriarchy and Resolution 1325: a textual analysis of documents’, International Peacekeeping, 17 (2), 172–187. Republic of Serbia (2011) National Action Plan to Implement UNSCR 1325 in the Republic of Serbia (2010–2015), Belgrade. Shepherd, Laura J. (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London: Zed Books. Shepherd, Laura J. (2011) ‘Sex, security and superhero(in)es: from 1325 to 1820 and beyond’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13 (4), 504–521. Shepherd, Laura J. (2014) ‘Unlucky for some? Year 13 of the “Women, Peace and Security” agenda’, blogpost, http://wpsac.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/triskaidekaphilia2013-and-the-two-new-women-peace-and-security-resolutions/ (accessed 1 August 2014).
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The Women, Peace and Security resolutions 279 Skjelsbæk, Inger (2012) ‘Responsibility to protect or prevent? Victims and perpetrators of sexual violence crimes in armed conflicts’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 4 (2), 154–171. Väyrynen, Tarja (2004) ‘Gender and UN peace operations: the confines of modernity’, International Peacekeeping, 11 (1), 125–142.
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33. Peacekeeping Carol Harrington
This chapter begins by describing contemporary United Nations (UN) sanctioned peacekeeping operations before outlining how feminist networks have critiqued and intervened in them. Feminist networks active in the UN system insist that gender analysis should shape the peacekeeping agenda, asserting a place for women’s issues as human rights questions and central to peace operations. Issues pursued include: recognition of combat-related violence against women; women’s participation in peace negotiations and broader peace operations; expanding the scope of operations to address women’s political equality and security from both public and private violence; the impact of peace operations on gender relations; and sexual abuse and exploitation committed by peacekeepers. Many feminists active in the UN call for gender mainstreaming as the solution to peacekeeping operations’ negative impacts on women. Some argue that integrating a gender perspective into peace operations makes them more successful overall.
UN PEACE OPERATIONS Since the 1990s UN peace operations have linked peace with representative democracy, economic growth and human rights. Between 1948 and 1988 the UN deployed only 16 peacekeeping operations, which remained politically neutral and limited to monitoring ceasefires and international borders. By contrast, since the 1990s peacekeeping operations have supported fundamental political, economic, social and judicial reforms in co-operation with a range of international organisations. For example, UNMIBH in Bosnia (1995–2002), UNMIK in Kosovo (1999–present) and UNTAET (1999–2002) followed by UNMISET in Timor-Leste 2002–05 all supported rebuilding political institutions, monitored and trained local police and coordinated UN agencies concerned with matters such as economic reconstruction, public health, refugees, minority protection and human rights. UN literature often describes such operations as ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘complex’. Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s seminal An Agenda for Peace (1992) distinguished between ‘peacemaking’, 280
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Peacekeeping 281 ‘peacekeeping’, ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘peace enforcement’ as often overlapping components of peace operations. The military component of operations may be led by forces from contributing countries under UN command or by Security Council-authorised non-UN forces such as NATO. Military peacekeepers actively engage with peacemaking and peacebuilding activities such as facilitating communication among hostile community leaders, working on infrastructure projects and liaising with non-governmental organisations and aid agencies.
WOMEN AND PEACE International women’s organisations have long asserted a political role for women in building global peace. The 1915 women’s movement book Militarism versus Feminism argued that the more militarised a society the worse the status of women (Ogden and Sargant Florence, 1915). The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), founded in 1915 in response to the First World War, subsequently played an important role in asserting women’s status as an issue for the UN system, including the Security Council. Today the WILPF runs the PeaceWomen Project, which advocates for women’s equal participation in peacebuilding and monitors the Security Council and UN system. PeaceWomen run a website (http://www.peacewomen.org/) which provides an invaluable hub of documents, reports and news on UN activity from a feminist perspective. One PeaceWomen committee (C34 or ‘peacekeeping watch’) focuses on peacekeeping operations in particular. Additionally, a nongovernmental organisation working group on Women, Peace and Security set up in 2000 focused upon the passage and implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Their website (http://www.womenpeacesecurity.org/) also provides a useful collection of documents, links and news for any scholar interested in gender and international security. Feminist analysts have criticised women’s exclusion from all dimensions of peace operations. Peacemaking processes typically engage male political leaders in formal peace negotiations, consequently neglecting concerns such as ensuring women’s participation in the post-conflict political process, social rights for women and redress for abuses of women’s human rights. UNIFEM’s 2009 analysis shows no increase since 2000 in women’s typically low level of participation in formal peacemaking. Out of a sample of 21 major peace processes since 1992 women made up only 2.4 per cent of signatories to peace agreements. Furthermore men always led UN-sponsored talks as chief or lead
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mediators, although in the case of African Union-sponsored talks teams of mediators included some women. The introduction of ‘track 2’ mechanisms attempted to amplify women’s voices in peacemaking processes. In Uganda, for example, UNIFEM provided the special envoy to the Lord’s Resistance Army affected areas with a gender advisor, supporting a series of national consultations which contributed to a peace agreement that addressed women’s issues. Even when women act as informal observers to peace negotiations the resulting accords seem more likely to address women’s concerns. Peacebuilding programmes have disadvantaged women by supporting men’s return to civilian employment and political life while addressing women only as wives and mothers. International peacebuilding initiatives often construct peace as a return to imagined pre-conflict gender relations based on a vision of the heterosexual family where the man takes primary responsibility for breadwinning while his wife cares for home and children, her earnings supplementing his. Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes rarely treat women as ex-combatants eligible for economic assistance, education and training for civilian employment. Those programmes that do target former female combatants offer training in less lucrative, feminised occupations. For example, Megan MacKenzie (2012) reports that in Sierra Leone programmes trained women in tie-dying, weaving and tailoring whereas men had opportunities to learn auto-mechanics, plumbing and computer skills. Micro-credit programmes targeted women as wives and mothers with the stated aim of stabilising families and taking pressure off male ex-combatants. MacKenzie argues that international peacebuilding programmes construct peace as restoring a ‘conjugal order’ based on a male-led heterosexual household where women often find themselves more vulnerable than before the conflict. International peace operations may further strengthen post-conflict male dominance by deploying large numbers of militarised male security personnel from various national defence forces, civilian police and private security companies. Research suggests that hegemonic masculine norms which value physical toughness, male-bonding and heterosexual virility prevail in such military and policing occupations. A United States (US) military contractor described contract work on a Bosnian peacekeeping operation of the 1990s as a ‘boys club’.1 Harris and Goldsmith (2010) report that Australian policewomen deployed in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands complained of ‘macho bull-crap’ from many of their male colleagues. These policewomen noted that their male colleagues displayed an overt sexism no longer acceptable in Australian policing culture while working abroad. Similarly, Barrow (2009) reported that
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Peacekeeping 283 women working on peacebuilding in Afghanistan complained of ‘male arrogance’ from expatriate colleagues as greater than usual in a nonpeacekeeping environment. Research on Nordic male peacekeepers found that they imagine peacekeeping as a grand male adventure away from the world of women. Peacekeeping operations often create large, male expatriate populations. For example, Amnesty International estimated that in 1999 the Kosovo ‘international population’, consisting of 40000 military and hundreds of UN and NGO civilian staff, made up around 2 per cent of the entire Kosovo population. This influx of highly paid expatriate militarised men on peacekeeping operations genders opportunities within the local economy. Some analysts speak of ‘peacekeeping economies’ characterised by rising rents and the development of services to cater to the ‘international community’ in urban centres and holiday spots where troops spend time on leave. Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s (2002) report Women, War, Peace found that women work as translators, secretaries, bar staff, waitresses and domestic workers in peacekeeping economies but rarely land well-paid professional jobs. Human rights reports note that peacekeeping operations fuel the growth of commercial sex industries, since even when peacekeepers do not make up the majority of clients they constitute the most lucrative.
SEX TRAFFICKING AND FORCED PROSTITUTION More worryingly, around the turn of the twenty-first century, reports emerged of the involvement of peacekeepers in sex trafficking and forced prostitution. In Bosnia military contractors reportedly boasted of owning girls as young as 12 as personal ‘slaves’ and even used UN vehicles to transport girls to and from brothels. International personnel turned a blind eye to the well-being of the mostly foreign women and girls who worked in bars and nightclubs that catered to the international community. According to testimony, people traffickers confiscated travel documents from East European females seeking to migrate west, paraded them before potential buyers and sold them to South-east European brothels; brothel owners then forced them into sex work without pay, ostensibly because they should pay back their travel and living costs. In 2000, UN police officer Kathryn Bolkovac investigated conditions for Bosnian sex workers, uncovering reports of rape, beatings and inadequate food and medical care among other abuses. Instead of welcoming her investigation Bolkovac’s superiors fired her, although she later won a lawsuit for unfair dismissal. In 2002, Human Rights Watch published a
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damning report on peacekeeping and prostitution in Bosnia, while the UN High Commission for Refugees and Save the Children UK published a report on aid workers in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone trading food and other supplies for sex with under-aged girls. Subsequent human rights reports exposed peacekeeper sexual abuse and exploitation of locals in Kosovo, Macedonia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan, Côte d’ Ivoire, Haiti and Timor-Leste. In 2003 the UN Secretary-General proclaimed ‘zero tolerance’ for sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, and in 2004 he appointed Prince Zeid of Jordan as special advisor on the problem. The 2005 Zeid Report acknowledged past cases of peacekeeper sexual violence and recommended measures to hold peacekeepers criminally accountable for sexual crimes and financially accountable for children fathered while stationed overseas. The report also called for peace operations to provide local people with a clear complaint-making procedure. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) strongly discourages but does not prohibit UN personnel from sexual relationships with beneficiaries of UN assistance and forbids personnel to pay for sex. Critics argue that in effect the UN’s policy amounts to ‘no fraternisation’, thus conflating all sex between peacekeepers and local women with sexual violence.
UNSCR 1325 AND GENDER MAINSTREAMING Reports of peacekeepers’ abuse of women and girls fuelled calls for increased female participation in all dimensions of peace operations and gender training for all peacekeeping personnel, calls strengthened by the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ in 2000. Resolution 1325 requested the Secretary-General to regularly report on the progress of gender mainstreaming within peacekeeping operations alongside a call for more female peacekeepers. Subsequently, the UN Secretary-General urged contributing countries to send more female personnel to peace operations, and the UN produced promotional materials emphasising the work of female peacekeepers, under the slogan ‘the power to empower’. Liberia hosted the first all-female UN policing unit in 2007, and Ellen Løj became the first female head of a peacekeeping operation when she took over the UN mission in Liberia in January 2008. In August 2014, Major-General Kristin Lund became the first female commander of a UN peacekeeping force when she took command of troops in Cyprus. Nevertheless, men continue to dominate senior positions in peace operations, and the
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Peacekeeping 285 percentages of women among international police and military personnel have rarely risen above single digits. Indeed, military peacekeeping personnel mostly consist of men from poorer countries. For example, the top ten UN troop contributors include Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Nepal. Richer countries have preferred to lead the military component of specific operations with Security Council authorisation, as Australia and New Zealand did in Timor-Leste or NATO in Bosnia, but typically do not put large numbers of their personnel under UN command. Many states, for example the UK and US, contract out some military functions, while the UN itself has increasingly engaged private military security companies to provide personnel for less visible roles. Private military security companies focus on recruitment from countries that have seen years of conflict, like Uganda, or where the military has long provided a major source of male employment, like Fiji. Thus, in spite of efforts to recruit more women, various state and UN policies produce the gender, national and racial composition of peacekeeping forces as disproportionately male and from the global south. Interestingly, any increase in female peacekeeping personnel may also come mainly from the global south; for example, the all-female police unit deployed to Liberia in 2007 consisted of Indian women. Scholars have critically engaged theories of military masculinity to analyse the failure of peace operations to address both the post-conflict needs of women and peacekeeper sexual abuse. Some argue that military personnel cannot make good peacekeepers because of their training in violence. However, based on interviews with male peacekeeping troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sierra Leone, Higate (2007) argues that peacekeeper wealth, impunity and privilege explained sexual exploitation better than simplistic notions of military masculinity. He further argues that any theory of military masculinity must also account for military personnel who did not engage in sexual exploitation. Other scholars have asked whether peacekeeping operations may transform military identities and culture. For example, Duncanson’s (2009) analysis of autobiographical accounts from British military peacekeepers found evidence that new forms of peacekeeping masculinity may emerge in the context of peace operations. Thus, some scholars ask whether military identities may be changing because of the new demands of peace operations and as military forces increasingly incorporate women along with sexual and ethnic minorities. Gender analysts actively seek to mould military culture on peacekeeping operations by advocating gender advisor positions on operations and that all peacekeeping troops participate in gender training. Security
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Council Resolution 1325 (2000) calls for peacekeepers to receive gender training, while Resolution 1820 (2008) calls for personnel training in recognising and responding to sexual violence. Resolution 1820 also calls on troop-contributing countries to train troops on sexual exploitation and abuse and hold them accountable for misconduct. Since early in the twenty-first century the DPKO has produced training materials and appointed gender advisors to most peacekeeping operations. Gender advisors provide training for personnel on the mission and may liaise with non-governmental organisations and advocate programmes and policies that progress gender equality. However, these positions have been under-resourced and in some cases side-lined by the mission leadership. Gender training typically focuses upon the differing psychosocial impact of conflict on men and women and the gendered nature of violence. Thus, if such training is not carefully handled, it risks stereotyping men as only combatants and women as only victims of armed conflict. Some gender advisors have resisted focusing on peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse within their work because they see it as a conduct question and do not want to become the ‘sex police’ for the mission. State militaries have different practices regarding training on gender questions and sexual exploitation and abuse, while the amount of time devoted to these issues varies among operations depending on resources and leadership. Thus, some personnel may receive comprehensive training while others receive none. While Security Council Resolution 1325 recognised the ‘urgent need’ for gender mainstreaming of peace operations, little progress has been made. Gender mainstreaming would require evaluation of all peacekeeping policy and programmes in terms of differential impacts on the situation of males and females and effect on gender equality. Therefore, gender officers, gender training and the increased recruitment of women do not in themselves constitute gender mainstreaming. However, in practice states and peacekeeping personnel may interpret and implement gender mainstreaming differently (or not at all) and may conflate gender mainstreaming with other efforts to increase gender equality and gender balance on missions.
RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LITERATURE Gender and peacekeeping form a rapidly evolving field for analysis and policy development. Notably, Bellamy et al.’s 2004 Understanding Peacekeeping made no mention of gender, whereas the 2010 second
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Peacekeeping 287 edition includes a chapter on the topic. This volume and the accompanying website (http://www.polity.co.uk/up2/default.asp) provide a good general introduction to peacekeeping. Annica Kronsell’s (2012) Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping contextualises peacekeeping operations as an aspect of post-national defence and analyses how UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and gender mainstreaming of Swedish and European Union forces have affected post-national defence practices. Louise Olsson’s (2009) Gender Equality and United Nations Peace Operations in Timor Leste provides an in-depth gendered analysis of peacebuilding programmes, as does Megan MacKenzie’s (2012) Female Soldiers, which focuses on the post-conflict experience of former female combatants in Sierra Leone. Several articles report on research into peacekeeper gendered identities and conduct, including Duncanson’s (2009) ‘Forces for Good’, Higate’s (2007) ‘Peacekeepers, Masculinities and Sexual Exploitation’ and Harris and Goldsmith’s 2010 ‘Gendering Transnational Policing’. Books concerned with peacekeeper sexual violence and policy responses include Carol Harrington’s (2010) Politicization of Sexual Violence, which analyses peace operations’ policies and practices on both sexual and gender-based violence and sexual exploitation and abuse, Simic’s (2012) Regulation of Sexual Conduct in UN Peacekeeping Operations, which presents accounts from Bosnian women about their sexual relationships with peacekeepers, and Simm’s (2013) Sex in Peace Operations, which considers possibilities for regulating peacekeeper sexual conduct and holding them accountable for sexual violence.
CONCLUSION Extraordinary progress has been made since the turn of the century in addressing the gendered impact of UN peacekeeping operations through research and policy advocacy. The depth and nuance of knowledge and scholarship concerning gender, conflict and peacebuilding have not always translated into better practices on peacekeeping operations. Thus, we need more research and analysis concerning the implementation of gender-related peacekeeping policy.
NOTE 1.
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Ben Johnston, testimony to the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, Second Session, 24 April 2002, p. 28.
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REFERENCES Barrow, Amy (2009) ‘“[It’s] like a rubber band”: assessing UNSCR 1325 as a gender mainstreaming process’, International Journal of Law in Context, 5 (01), 51–68. Bellamy, Alex J., Paul Williams and Stuart Griffin ([2004] 2010) Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge: Polity. Duncanson, Clair (2009) ‘Forces for good? Narratives of military masculinity in peacekeeping operations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (1), 63–80. Harrington, Carol (2010) Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping, London: Ashgate. Harris, Vandra and Andrew Goldsmith (2010) ‘Gendering transnational policing: experiences of Australian women in international policing operations’, International Peacekeeping, 17 (2), 292–306. Higate, Paul (2007) ‘Peacekeepers, masculinities, and sexual exploitation’, Men and Masculinities, 10 (1), 99–119. Kronsell, Annica (2012) Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping, New York: Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, Megan H. (2012) Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security, and Post-conflict Development, New York: NYU Press. Ogden, C.K. and Mary Sargant Florence (1915) Militarism versus Feminism, London: Allen & Unwin, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/florence/feminism/feminism. html (accessed 16 October 2012). Olsson, Louise (2009) Gender Equality and United Nations Peace Operations in Timor Leste, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Rehn, Elisabeth and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (2002) Women, War, Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace Building, New York: UNIFEM. Simic, Olivia (2012) Regulation of Sexual Conduct in UN Peacekeeping Operations, New York: Springer. Simm, Gabrielle (2013) Sex in Peace Operations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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34. Solving the problem of men and masculinities in the private military and security industry Paul Higate
The private military and security company (PMSC) industry has seen rapid growth over the last 15 or so years, with the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 providing a clear impetus to its expansion, alongside wider trends to outsource public functions across an increasing number of sectors. Conceived of in its widest sense, the industry is estimated to be worth many billions of dollars, and it has a global presence, as it carries out a diversity of roles for non-governmental and governmental actors alike. Indeed, the industry now features as an unremarkable and routine feature of everyday life not least in regard to its involvement in more contentious militarized functions most likely to attract public interest. Prime amongst these is armed close protection (CP) of dignitaries and convoy protection of goods and materials in Iraq and Afghanistan. This leads the author to suggest that we might use private militarized and security company in place of the more widely used term indicated above when referring to those elements of the industry that employ the 5 per cent of armed contractors that have the highest profile. Armed contractors are seen by the public as particularly problematic, with the United States (US) company Blackwater frequently invoking the ‘mercenary’ moniker in light of their nefarious activities in Iraq, culminating in the shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. To give a sense of the scale of the PMSC workforce, a total of 150000 contractors were employed in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2010, a number on a par with those deployed in uniform by national state militaries (Schwartz and Swain, 2011). In sum, private security looks set to further expand, with conflict and post-conflict sites proving highly lucrative as increasing proportions of the reconstruction budget are diverted into security within an industry that has become ubiquitous across, and central to, the global security topography. A broad-ranging scholarship has engaged with security’s privatization, focused on its legal dimensions around questions of accountability, its strategic aspects, the ethical implications of commodifying violence, 289
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continuities (or otherwise) of current-day PMSCs with their mercenary company predecessors, how best to categorize the industry given its ever-expanding complexity in role, and arguments in more specific terms around the potential supplanting of UN peacekeepers with a more efficient contractor workforce, as an exemplar of PMSCs’ utility in relation to speed of response and overall operational effectiveness.
INTER- AND INTRA-GENDERED RELATIONS Though feminist and pro-feminist scholarship has grown apace over the last two decades, until relatively recently the PMSC literature was similarly limited by its ‘malestream’ approach, yet a surge of gendersensitive writing has emerged over the last few years. While the rationale for this work varies in its normative intent from problem-solving to critical emancipatory orientations discussed further below, it has conceived of gender in its complex relational, masculine–feminine aspects rather than simply conflating gender with women, and in addition has also recognized the increasing importance of the industry’s racial dimensions (Chisholm, 2014). Driving this more sophisticated, intersectional framing is the empirical reality on the ground, characterized by its masculinism, together with its increasing reliance on men from the global south who can be employed for substantially less reward than the white, Western former special force cohort (Chisholm, 2014). As costs have been driven down, the latter have declined as a proportion of the overall contractor workforce, with their expertise being maximized as in-country managers or as security detail team leaders out on the ground. Using gender as a category, variable, lens or perspective can bring into sharp relief the operation of power across all levels, from everyday company/host population micro-interactions, through company’s mesolevel institutional sub-cultures, and on to the macro, where masculinity retains an elevated status in the international sphere when conceived of through its neo-liberalized security guise. Using gender as the analytical point of departure facilitates novel lines of enquiry that denaturalize, problematize and destabilize taken-for-granted assumptions (Higate, 2011; Joachim and Schneiker, 2012a, 2012b; Eichler, 2014, 2015). In sum, gender-sensitive analyses can serve as a counterpoint to the acritical, ‘strategic’ and, as such, largely moribund mainstream PMSC literature that leaves undisturbed the deeper logics driving the industry’s exponential growth.
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THE AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTIONS Drawing on sociological and critical men’s studies literatures, the author’s contributions have focused on the armed, embodied contractor, engaged in particular forms of identity work conceptualized through the national lens. Contractors’ social practices unfold within the context of fratriarchal bonds constituted through encounters between marginal men of the global south and white Western, hegemonic contractors. In theoretical terms, armed contractors are argued to be vectors of both neo-liberal and geo-political logics, instantiated through specific kinds of militarized masculinities performed on operations, and with security implications for host populations and fellow contractors alike (Higate, 2013). Conceived of through an intra-masculine frame, these performances become embodied in a typology of contractor perceptions ranging from the demonized figure of the (US) Blackwater cowboy, through to the consummate (British) professional, and on to the local national (LN) or third country national (TCN), who is positioned at the lowest reaches of this gendered hierarchy. The PMSC is a man’s world and, as we now see, the author’s contributions have attempted to render visible these privatized and militarized forms of masculinity in regard to how they shape the security climate through a politics of embodied security profile. Presented chronologically and in a fine-grained sense, the first contribution (Higate, 2009) sketched a research agenda for critical scholars of gender and race focused on the PMSC industry. It discussed how journalistic and media interest had tended to fetishize hypermasculinities underscored in the case of Blackwater (Via, 2010), and, following Cynthia Enloe, it called for research into the invisible cohort of women including spouses/partners whose lives were impacted by contractors. It then urged critical scholars to develop insights into how it was that men from the global south were co-opted into the industry as subordinate forms of masculine labour. A subsequent article demonstrated how national identity was used by contractors to draw distinctions between professionalism enacted through a bourgeois low-profile, restrained and modest masculinity (the British) and their high-profile, ‘all guns blazing’ hypermasculine rogue foil – US ‘cowboy’ contractors – within the context of British contractor memoirs based on experiences in Iraq from 2003 (Higate, 2012a). This was followed by an analysis of men from the global south, Fijians, Salvadorans and Chileans, who have been employed as TCNs, of whom the former were framed as members of an imagined ‘martial race’. Similarly, the corollary of those originating from
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countries with problematic human rights records was believed to be a tough uncompromising masculinity, capable of countering the insurgent threat. Yet these men have necessarily to strike a neo-liberal bargain through trading their labour in the market for force with their (apparent) racialized characteristics (Higate, 2012c). Drawing on the so-called Kabul hazing incident in 2009 involving the company ArmorGroup, a further article (Higate, 2012b) argued that a focus on fratriarchal relations may help explain the ways that dense social bonds can foster a potentially damaging degree of autonomy, where rules of engagement and standard operating procedures can be interpreted loosely, or can be dispensed with altogether. Based on participant observation in 2011 where the author trained to become an armed CP officer in the US, findings revealed some of the ways in which British training instructors informally revered masculinities of restrained, modest and thereby legitimate kinds, in contrast to contractors argued to be quick on the trigger, heavily tattooed, steroid-using and consequently aggressive towards local populations (Higate, 2015). Invoking Judith Hick Stiehm’s (cited in Higate, forthcoming) protector/protected dichotomy, and based on field research in Kabul in 2010, subsequent work focused on the female clients of armed CP contractors working for G4S. Findings suggested that the assumed power relations between (male) CP officers in their authoritative protector role and females in their subservient protected guise could be usurped through the latter’s class position. These women – many of them younger and better educated than the armed CP officer to whom they entrusted their security – were noted to question his authority around the realities of Kabul’s insecurity, much to the chagrin of contractors who believed their security expertise was being undermined (Higate, forthcoming).
SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES Reflecting wider feminist scholarship focused on masculinized organizations and again presented in broadly chronological terms, the first issue to be raised around PMSCs and gender issues concerned the industry’s need to integrate, or ‘mainstream’, women. Published by the Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), this ‘toolkit’ argued for greater inclusion of women, with the overriding rationale that the security sector’s operational effectiveness would be enhanced by such a gendered reconstitution (Schulz and Yeung, 2008). This document was driven in part by a further issue that appears to have moved down the agenda in recent years, the sexual exploitation and
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Solving the problem of masculinities in private security 293 abuse (SEA) of women by private military and security contractors. Illustrative of these abuses were the activities of DynCorp employees in the Balkans in 1999/2000 who were involved in sex trafficking, sexual slavery and sexual relations with minors. This incident pre-dated related commentary around the need for special measures to counter SEA by contractors (Harrington, 2005), together with the legal challenges of so doing (Vrdoljak, 2011). Linked with the implications of PMSC masculinized sub-cultures that can at times fuel exploitative gender relations is the central issue of the industry’s attempt at self regulation in the form of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers (ICoC), which at the time of writing had been signed by over 700 companies. It contains two brief paragraphs entitled ‘Sexual Exploitation and Abuse or Gender Based Violence’, though the complexities and ambiguities of international law, coupled with the absence of an independent party to oversee, monitor and potentially apply sanctions on the industry and transgressive employees, cast doubt on this bureaucratic initiative. However, while the ICoC is to be welcomed as a step in the right direction, its ultimate efficacy remains in doubt, and in a rather more critical sense its real legacy is one of legitimating an industry many continue to find problematic (Leander, 2012).
DEBATES: SOLVING THE ‘PROBLEM’ OF PMSCs? Located within their broader scholarly context, feminist and pro-feminist debates focused on the PMSC industry are in their relative infancy and, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to cohere around the common ground occupied by commentators who share the goal of women’s emancipation. However, to take a number of selective yet illustrative contributions, Saskia Stachowitsch has sought to broaden the orbit of study currently shaping gender-sensitive analyses of PMSCs. She argues not only that the military’s privatization represents a retrograde step for women’s equality, since they are largely excluded from the PMSC sector because of the privileging of men with particular special forces backgrounds, but in turn that it is the state itself that is subject to a form of remasculinization. Here, she states that ‘gender discourses and ideologies are remasculinized in the sense that [privatized] masculinity is being redefined as the efficient guarantor of national security’ (Stachowitsch, 2013: 87). In further finessing this understanding, Stachowitsch combines feminist state theory with feminist global political economy perspectives to reveal the mutually constitutive spheres of the military’s privatization, gendered state transformation, and the gendered dynamics of global markets
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(Stachowitsch, 2015a). These global markets strengthen the neo-liberal state through a proliferation of palatable, humanitarian masculinities that are at some distance from their military and warrior predecessors (Joachim and Schneiker, 2012c). Foregrounding gender in analyses of the state offers a useful counterpoint to earlier debates within the mainstream PMSC literature that conceived of the state’s monopoly on violence as zero-sum, where the corollary of divesting security functions to the private sector was assumed to be a concomitant erosion of state power. Rather, what we now see is the growth in largely unaccountable and somewhat elusive contractor masculinities often working on behalf of the state, while being considerably less visible than their citizen-soldier counterparts. The nexus linking the neo-liberalized state with its security function also chimes with security assemblages (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2010) understood as hybridized, fluid configurations of state and non-state actors that belie traditional categorization. The prevailing logics facilitating these assemblages turn on the ways in which the gendered state has become increasingly concerned to ensure the accumulation of capital across an ever-expanding number of spheres – including security – to the extent that business and war begin to look like reversible aspects of the same fabric. A further, more nuanced and explicitly theoretical contribution by Stachowitsch has sought to overcome the practice– ideology framing noted in the gender/PMSC scholarship through deploying a critical-discourse approach. Rather than focus on pathologies of masculinity exemplified in the current author’s contributions as indicated above, Stachowitsch has argued for a focus on diversified, discursive subject positions, by which the sources of legitimacy for masculinism are broadened in the contemporary period through a series of gendering strategies both within and beyond the PMSC industry (Stachowitsch, 2015b). Maya Eichler’s contributions have revealed the extent to which debates around gender from those sympathetic to the industry have been raised in a primarily problem-solving frame, where a sole concern with the privatization of military functions ‘as is’, rather than what ‘might be’, obscures the foundational circulation of gendered power in the wider field of security (Eichler, 2013: 313–314). Parallel arguments about the dominance of problem-solving approaches are made by Higate and Stachowitsch (2013), though they push their critique further by arguing that it is not simply the work on gender from within the industry that is problem-solving but, more widely, it can be seen in elements of the broader feminist and pro-feminist scholarship in this area. Examples pertinent to the industry highlighted by these authors include scholars’
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Solving the problem of masculinities in private security 295 neglect of management masculinities that, while condemning the hypermasculine excesses of their ‘bad apple’ employees out on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, are nonetheless complicit on account of their superordinate responsibilities. A further limitation of the PMSC/gender literature concerns the extent to which legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence are conflated, together with its conceptualization in the absence of a broader social context that helps to make violence of various kinds possible. Orientalist perspectives were also reproduced by gender scholars, where (Western) women were imagined as natural interlocutors with female members of the host population of whom the latter were essentialized through their victimhood. Overall, the authors argue that the problem-solving elements of these gender-focused literatures lack anything other than a limited sense of agency, reflecting in part the impoverished conceptual toolbox of IR as well as the relative neglect of feminist literatures attuned to questions of emotions, embodiment and agency.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS This chapter has provided an overview of the principal debates and issues discussed by feminist and pro-feminist scholars working on questions of gender and the PMSC industry, as well as the author’s contribution to this literature. It is perhaps surprising to note that feminist- and pro-feministinspired critical emancipatory approaches remain on the periphery, with problem-solving perspectives legitimating the military’s privatization. Earlier contributions calling for the outlawing of the PMSC role in combat and combat support were considerably more forthright in their concern about the rapid proliferation of PMSCs, though these critiques have all but faded away. There are a number of possible explanations for this: (1) that feminist scholars are realistic in their thinking with regard to the potentially insurmountable challenges they face in tackling the very existence and scale of the industry; (2) that their strategic approach seeks incremental change within the context of a long-term approach; or (3) that dominant normative frameworks – for example those central to the wider mainstreaming and critical mass literatures – are simply reproduced in a path-dependent fashion and applied to PMSCs, as scholars have migrated from working on the UN and other militarized or masculine organizations to private security. Yet, rather than attempting to solve the problems of the industry, feminist-inspired agendas might strike
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a more visionary note through sketching a future where security and the violence it engenders are once again seen as a public rather than private good.
REFERENCES Abrahamsen, Rita and Michael Williams (2010) Security beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chisholm, Amanda (2014) ‘Marketing the Gurkha security package: colonial histories and neoliberal economies of private security’, Security Dialogue, 45 (4), 349–372. Eichler, Maya (2013) ‘Gender and the privatization of security: neoliberal transformation of the militarized gender order’, Critical Studies on Security, 1 (3), 311–325. Eichler, Maya (2014) ‘Citizenship and the contracting out of military work: from national conscription to globalized recruitment’, Citizenship Studies, 18 (6–7), 600–614. Eichler, Maya (2015) Gender and Private Security in Global Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrington, Carol (2005) ‘The politics of rescue: peacekeeping and anti-trafficking programmes in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7 (2), 175–206. Higate, Paul (2009) ‘Putting “mercenary masculinities” on the research agenda’, University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies Working Paper 03-09, http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/spais/migrated/documents/higate03 09.pdf (accessed 22 February 2016). Higate, Paul (2011) ‘Mavericks, mercenaries and masculinities: in the business of (in)security?’, in Erika Svedberg and Annica Kronsell (eds), Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, London: Routledge, pp. 182–196. Higate, Paul (2012a) ‘“Cowboys and professionals”: the politics of identity work in the private and military security company’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40 (2), 321–341. Higate, Paul (2012b) ‘“Drinking vodka from the butt crack”: men, masculinities and fratriarchy in the private militarized and security company’, International Journal of Feminist Politics, 14 (4), 450–469. Higate, Paul (2012c) ‘Martial races and enforcement masculinities of the Global South: weaponising Fijian, Chilean, and Salvadoran postcoloniality in the mercenary sector’, Globalizations, 9 (1), 35–52. Higate, Paul (2013) ‘Critical impact report: the politics of profile and the private military and security contractor’, School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Higate, Paul (2015) ‘Aversions to masculine excess in the private military and security company and their effects: don’t be a “Billy Big Bollocks” and beware the “Ninja”!’, in Maya Eichler (ed.), Gender and Private Security in Global Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–146. Higate, Paul (forthcoming) ‘Cat food and clients: gendering the politics of protection in the private militarized security company’, in Simona Sharoni, Julia Welland, Linda Steiner and Jennifer Pedersen (eds), Handbook on Gender and War, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Higate, Paul and Saskia Stachowitsch (2013) ‘The problems of PMSCs or PMSCs as a problem? The role of gender scholarship in the legitimization of violence in private security’, paper presented at the International Studies Association Convention, San Francisco, 3–6 April.
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Solving the problem of masculinities in private security 297 Joachim, Jutta and Andrea Schneiker (2012a) ‘New humanitarians? Frame appropriation through private military and security companies’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 40 (2), 365–388. Joachim, Jutta and Andrea Schneiker (2012b) ‘Of “true professionals” and “ethical hero warriors”: a gender discourse analysis of private military and security companies’, Security Dialogue, 43 (6), 495–512. Joachim, Jutta and Andrea Schneiker (2012c) ‘(Re)masculinizing security? Gender and private military and security companies’, in Linda Åhäll and Laura Shepherd (eds), Gender, Agency and Political Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 70–92. Leander, Anna (2012) ‘What do codes of conduct do? Hybrid constitutionalization and militarization in military markets’, Global Constitutionalism, 1, 91–119. Schulz, Sabrina and Christina Yeung (2008) Private Military and Security Companies and Gender, Geneva: DCAF, OSCE/ODIHR and UN-INSTRAW. Schwartz, Moshe and Joyprada Swain (2011) Department of Defense Contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq: Background and Analysis, Report R 40764, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. Stachowitsch, Saskia (2013) ‘Military privatization and the remasculinization of the state: making the link between the outsourcing of military security and gendered state transformations’, International Relations, 27 (4), 74–94. Stachowitsch, Saskia (2015a) ‘Military privatization as a gendered process: a case for integrating feminist state theory and feminist international relations’, in Maya Eichler (ed.), Gender and Private Security in Global Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–36. Stachowitsch, Saskia (2015b) ‘The reconstruction of masculinities in global politics: gendering strategies in the field of private security’, Men and Masculinities, 18 (3), 363–386. Via, Sandra (2010) ‘Gender, militarism, and globalization: soldiers for hire and hegemonic masculinity’, in Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (eds), Gender, War, and Militarism, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, pp. 42–53. Vrdoljak, Ana (2011) ‘Women and private military and security companies’, in Francesco Francioni and Natalino Ronzitti (eds), War by Contract: Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law and the Regulation of Private Military and Security Companies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 280–298.
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35. Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation Ruth Jacobson
What are the parameters of war and peace in the current era? The global scene has changed dramatically since the 1960s when Johan Galtung (1964) introduced the contrast of ‘negative peace’ – in effect, a lack of overt armed conflict – as counter-posed against his vision of ‘positive peace’. In broad terms, this vision of positive peace is now often summarised as ‘peace with justice’. In the decades following the end of the Cold War, both academic and policy-oriented literature became focused on what were claimed to be the characteristics of ‘new wars’. More recently still, an understanding of what represents ‘peace’ has needed to engage with the fallout from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and with turmoil in the Middle East. These shifting boundaries of war and peace thus constitute a challenge for feminist scholarship in global politics. To take just one example, what name should be given to those situations where all armed hostilities have ceased but where women and girls appear to be at increased risk of violence within their homes from male former combatants?
ISSUES AND DEBATES OVER GENDER AND PEACE Not surprisingly, these debates within feminist scholarship are very wide-ranging. They are all, however, to some extent underpinned by a critique of the hegemonic construction of sexual difference as determinant in the construction of Woman and Man, producing static, ahistorical binary categories. This binary essentialism equates the condition of ‘maleness’ with aggression, violence and propensity for war and counterposes this against female passivity and rejection of violence, expressed in the female ‘natural’ preference for peace. As Cohn and Jacobson point out, although this identification is not entirely uniform across time and place, there are core elements which are so hegemonic as not to ‘require confirmation in the form of actual men’s and women’s behaviours – indeed, it almost seems immune to counter-evidence’ (Cohn and Jacobson, 2013: 105). 298
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Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation 299 At the same time as recognising universal features, it is also important to acknowledge the existence of historically specific constructions of war and peace. The work of Jean Bethke Elshtain is seminal in this regard. She traced the historical evolution in Western societies around (male) ‘just warriors’ providing protection for (female) ‘beautiful souls’ (Elshtain, 1995). In this view, women’s consent to war is not only irrelevant but actually undesirable; it would corrupt their innocence. The ‘beautiful soul’ narrative is crucially related to the separation of a private sphere, to which women are properly restricted, from the ‘public’ sphere of war-making and war-fighting. Within this narrative, any action that women take in relation to war and peace is inescapably gender-coded in terms of a state of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ – with obvious implications for the conceptualisation of women’s political agency. The challenge of binary essentialism in relation to peace and war is most evident in the long-standing debates as to whether capacity to create life axiomatically makes more women ‘more peaceful’; this is generally referred to within the field as ‘maternalism’ (see, for example, Gentry, 2009). As Cohn and Jacobson state, ‘Within feminist writings on peace, militarism, and war, motherhood constitutes a central but highly contested topic’ (2013: 108). Among the principal areas of contestation are: To what extent can a maternalist explanation for women’s opposition to war act to exclude women who are not mothers? Can the role of ‘mother’ be extended to anyone – including males – who display ‘maternal practice’? This is the position argued by Sara Ruddick, who affirms that: ‘Although mothers are not intrinsically peaceful, maternal practice is a “natural resource” for peace politics’ (Ruddick, 1989: 157). This argument has often been supported by reference to collective actions, such as the Mothers of May Square (Madres de la Playa de Mayo) during the brutal Argentinian military regime. Another strand of the academic debate focuses around whether the claims for a universal ‘maternal peacefulness’ can accommodate differences among women across class, race/ethnicity, religion, culture or location. There are manifold empirical examples of mothers who have not espoused a pro-peace position in relation to the armed conflicts that have torn their societies apart, for example in ethno-nationalist conflict of the former Yugoslavia (Zarkov, 2007). Even leaving aside the problematic aspect of claims for a universalised maternal practice, there is a widespread concern in the literature about the degree to which maternalist movements are rooted in traditional constructions of ‘being a proper woman’ and thus do not challenge underlying structures of oppression. For example, it is not contradictory to acknowledge how the courage of the Argentinian Madres opened the way to challenging the regime, but
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still conclude that their impact was significantly limited in the postmilitary regime because of their failure to confront the underpinnings of injustice, particularly in terms of class divisions amongst women (Waylen, 2000). It is evident that, as the debate stands, there is little prospect of a definitive ‘answer’ to these kinds of debates over the relationship between motherhood and peace. There is, however, a broad consensus about how the trope of women’s essential peacefulness only permits women to take ‘a political stance because they are women or mothers, in effect only as reflexive product of their biological or social status’ (Cohn and Jacobson, 2013: 111, emphasis in original). This de-politicisation can often provide the rationale for the exclusion of women from peace negotiations. Even more significantly, it validates the pattern in which women are urged and/or coerced to return to their ‘proper place’. Both aspects can be seen to have significant impacts in post-war gender relations, as demonstrated for example in Jacobson’s study of post-war gender settlements (Jacobson, 2012). Before addressing empirical data on women’s peace activism, it is essential to address how the ‘maternalist’ debate addresses ‘the other half of gender’ – where should we turn to find out about men as fathers, sons, brothers and so on in relation to peace? It does not require any highly specialised knowledge of global politics to identify the roles being played by men in contemporary conflict situations, for example as paramilitary militias in Ukraine or extremist Islamist forces in the Middle East. In terms of scholarship, there is an emerging body of work on the topic of ‘military masculinity’ in a variety of contexts, for example Paul Higate and Marsha Henry on male UN peacekeepers (2009). However, once the focus is shifted to a specific focus on men, masculinities and peace activism, the range of material is more restricted. There is an extensive body of historical work covering conscious objectors (COs) across the twentieth century, at least in the Western context, giving a clear record of the material and emotional suffering of male COs (and sometimes of the women involved with them). However, as Cockburn notes in relation to the organisation War Resisters International (Cockburn, 2012), these accounts lack a specifically gendered analysis. And, although the nuances of Ruddick’s (1989) position on ‘maternal practice’ could open the way to developing a body of work on the fathers/other male care-givers to peace, this has not been the case to date. In sum, at present the now quite extensive body of critical feminist analysis on the theme of women, motherhood and peace is not yet matched by either conceptual or empirical studies which take the male experience as their starting point.
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Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation 301 With this underdeveloped area in mind, the remainder of this chapter will focus on some instances of women’s peace activism which illustrate the relevance of the conceptual elements of protection and political agency outlined above.
WOMEN’S PEACE ACTIVISM, ANTI-MILITARISM AND ANTI-MILITARISATION The term ‘peace activism’ covers a wide spectrum of activities. As noted above, at one end of the spectrum men and women have taken a committed pacifist position on the grounds of their religious and/or moral beliefs which demands a rejection of any form of involvement with the taking of life. Then there is a broad category of actions which can be classified as ‘anti-militarism’; these may start and finish with opposition to a particular war. This was the case in the massive public protests in the United Kingdom and globally against the build-up to invasion of Iraq in early 2003, where female participants interviewed about their reasons often stated that: ‘This is the first march I’ve ever taken part in but I just felt I had to make my voice heard’ (author’s personal observation). However, feminist anti-militarism involves adding a gender critique across the whole field of institutions supporting the global war system, not just the specific arms of their state militaries. Thus, for example, Japanese feminist groups have had long-standing anti-militarist campaigns, drawing on the historical record of their country’s responsibility for sexual slavery but also bringing in the contemporary significance for women of the presence of thousands of US troops on the Okinawa base (Enloe, 2007). At another level of complexity, there is anti-militarisation. In the sense developed by Enloe, militarisation is summarised as ‘a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas’ (Enloe, 2007: 3, emphasis in original). Antimilitarisation is the broadest level of anti-war activism, encompassing, for example, an analysis of cultural, institutional, ideological and economic processes. Among the examples Enloe cites is the fashion industry’s use of khaki – ‘camo’ in US terms – as well as the huge investments of women and men’s skills in the production of weapons. Having made these distinctions, it must be acknowledged that much literature uses the terms more or less inter-changeably. Nevertheless, there are common threads that link all the disparate spheres. Feminist peace activism necessarily involves, in Cohn and Jacobson’s phrase, ‘refusing the promise of protection’.
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Cohn and Jacobson argue: ‘The trope of the “protector and the protected,” while providing a powerfully resonant justification for supporting war, also opens up a powerful avenue for resisting war’ (Cohn and Jacobson, 2013: 116, emphasis added). This statement is just as relevant to the conditions of war and peace in the twenty-first century as it was during the Cold War era. For example, although compulsory military conscription is not now the standard feature it was, service in military forces purportedly offering ‘national protection’ is a central factor of life in societies such as Israel, Turkey and Russia. Cockburn’s survey of anti-conscription movements demonstrates how women of the New Profile organisation in Israel may have initially been mobilised through concern for their sons and daughters but have developed wider strategies, for example through organising youth groups and summer camps for school-age teenagers so that they can develop their own critiques about the militarisation of their society (Cockburn, 2012: 66). Other instances of women activists’ resistance to a specific combat under the banner of ‘motherhood’ have taken on a wider anti-militarist dynamic, which was not even envisaged at the outset. This was the case with the group of 300 women who formed the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia (CSMR) in 1989. Initially, they were campaigning for their sons to be able to return early from their compulsory military service, which they knew to involve appalling and life-threatening conditions; at that point, their concern was focused on protection of their sons and they did not concern themselves with the rights or wrongs of Russia’s war in Chechnya. However, as a result of what they encountered during this stage of their campaigning, the CSMR started to broaden their scope to the objective of reforming Russia’s military system, including the passing of legislation for alternatives to military service. When another phase of war broke out in Chechnya in 1994, the organisation took on a dual role. They organised hundreds of mothers to actually go to Chechnya. Here they negotiated with the Chechen army to obtain the release of captured conscripts, but concurrently the organisation continued to campaign for the reform of the military system and publicised the impact of human rights abuses by Russian forces on Chechen women (Cohn and Jacobson, 2013: 110). Another kind of women’s peace activism that was directed at taking apart the ‘protection deal’ is represented by the Peace Camp at Greenham Common in the UK. In the early 1980s, Tomahawk Cruise missiles carrying a destructive power four times that of the atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima were sited at the US base on the Common. Although initiated by a handful of Welsh women worried over the implications of this, the protest did initially involve men. However, a
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Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation 303 decision was made for it to become a women-only project. According to Cockburn, this was in part because of instances of male conduct during the non-violent actions, but also because: ‘It was symbolically important to show the public the strength of women’s feeling against the missiles, and to express a feminist anti-militarist case, which included a critique of patriarchal gender relations, and in particular of masculinity’ (Cockburn, 2012: 38). This resistance to nuclear protection was vividly played out by the Greenham women and their female supporters, who numbered up to 35000 during the mass encircling of the base, where they emphasised their concern for the futures of children by, for example, attaching toys while also emphasising the economic costs of the UK and US nuclear arsenals and the risks to workers in the nuclear industry. Turning to the current picture, from one perspective feminist peace activism is flourishing. Cockburn’s work indicates a vibrant global network of transnational networks which are taking a specifically feminist stance in relation to militarism. Examples are: Women in Black, spanning several continents, who hold silent vigils; and Women Waging Peace, working to build bridges between isolated local women’s peace groups (Cockburn, 2012). However, there is once again an important reservation. All the authors cited identify that ‘women’ can never represent a single, homogeneous category and the need to recognise the intersectionality of class, ‘race’/ethnicity, religion or culture. However, the literature is not always sufficiently explicit on the way in which the great majority of women’s peace activism has encountered criticism – sometimes virulent – from other women. Thus, the activities of the CSMR brought upon them the accusation of ‘betrayal’ (Liborakina, 1996). Women in the United Kingdom supported prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies with regard to the war in the Falklands/Malvinas and on Britain’s possession of ‘the independent nuclear deterrent’. The silent protests such as those of the Women in Black against Israel’s military actions have been harassed by women and men alike. The need to avoid homogenisation is in no way ignored by the writers cited above, but there remains a dearth of empirically grounded feminist analyses akin to that of Margaret Power on right-wing women in Chile (2002) and Kathleen Blee on women’s involvement in racist and hate movements in the US (2003). Both works demonstrate the value of dismissing oversimplified notions of ‘manipulation of women’ in favour of an analysis of their political motivations. The second reservation concerns the impact of major shifts in the global backdrop of violence. Since the start of the ‘global war on terror’ after the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, women and men have been confronted by relentless assertions, especially through the mainstream
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media, that their only assured protection is through ever more ‘security’ measures. Besides bringing significant benefits to the arms industries, such measures transform relationships of trust between citizens and their governments, through for example accessing information thought to be private. All of these aspects are consistent with, although of course not reducible to, the feminist analysis of militarisation. However, it also needs to be recognised that, in far too many contexts, women today are precluded from even considering the forms of ‘protection’ they would choose, whether through immediate threat of violence or through other less overt but still threatening gendered constraints.
CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to present some of the most salient aspects of the debates around gender and peace. It has argued that a notion of women’s ‘natural’ peacefulness arising from their biology is not sustained by the evidence but that there are still ways in which the experience of motherhood can have significant implications. In particular, it has explored the central theme of ‘the protected and the protectors’. It has further given an indication of how these have been challenged in the past and in the present. At the same time, it has noted the two areas where the literature on global politics would benefit from an expanded examination: first, the relationship between men, masculinities and peace; and, second, the significance of the political agency wielded by women who do not espouse a feminist position.
REFERENCES Blee, Kathleen M. (2003) Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, Oakland: University of California Press. Cockburn, Cynthia (2012) Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements, London: Palgrave. Cohn, Carol and Ruth Jacobson (2013) ‘Women and political activism in the face of war and militarization’, in Carol Cohn (ed.), Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 102– 123. Elshtain, Jean Bethke (1995) Women and War, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia (2007) Globalisation and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Galtung, Johan (1964) ‘An Editorial’, Journal of Peace Research, 1(1), 1–4. Gentry, Caron E. (2009) ‘Twisted maternalism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (2), 235–252.
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Gender, peace activism and anti-militarisation 305 Higate, Paul and Marsha Henry (2009) Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, London: Zed Books. Jacobson, Ruth (2012) ‘Women “after” wars’, in Carol Cohn (ed.), Women and Wars, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 215–241. Liborakina, Marina (1996) Women Fight to Be Heard in Chechen War Dialogue, Washington, DC: Resources for Environmental Activists. Power, Margaret (2002) Right-wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ruddick, Sara (1989) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Waylen, Georgina (2000) ‘Gender and democratic politics: A comparative analysis of consolidation in Argentina and Chile’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 32 (3), 7654–7693. Zarkov, Dubravka (2007) The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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PART VI GLOBAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS
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36. Gender and popular culture Christina Rowley
The argument on popular culture presented here is located within the discipline of international relations (IR). It addresses how and why the gendered dynamics of popular culture are important to the study of world politics. There has been much interesting research conducted within cultural studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, film studies and other disciplines. However, while the themes, methods and assumptions of traditional IR have been challenged by scholars from diverse critical approaches over the last 30 years, this has not always led to increased attention being paid to the importance of popular culture within the discipline. Moreover, gendered analyses of popular culture have suffered under a ‘double burden’ of apparent irrelevance and consequent marginalization. It is essential to study the dynamics of popular culture, and specifically the gendered dynamics, if we are interested in global political processes. An obvious cluster of examples includes those cultural texts that states deploy as recruiting tools and to ‘sell’ war and military intervention, for example Frank Capra’s early 1940s Why We Fight film series or America’s Army: Online. Among other things, these rely heavily on overtly gendered logics of strength, power and nationalism. If we wish to explain why military institutions look and act the way they do, we need to better understand the role popular culture plays in service-members’ recruitment, training and recreation time, for example the images of these institutions they formed prior to and upon joining, and how they consume and (re)produce cultural meanings of violence, war and soldiering. Other examples include the overwhelmingly popular cultural (and gendered) nature of the products that form global economic flows, whether these be (gendered) toys and clothes made in and shipped from East Asia to the US and Europe (via gendered processes of production and trade), music and films that often flow the other way, or languages and foodways that disperse with migrant populations. Transnational flows of popular culture both reinforce existing gendered identities and at the same time provide new spaces for the subversion and re-imagination of these. In this chapter, I am particularly concerned with gender as one of the logics by which popular culture and world politics are intertextually 309
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constituted; in effect, similar gendered representations and assumptions can be found in both popular cultural and world politics texts and practices. However, gender’s ‘taken-for-granted’ binary status plays a key role in obscuring this intertextuality and in making the two spheres appear separate. This makes popular culture appear trivial, while mainstream IR approaches, assumptions and methods appear natural and legitimate to many students and scholars of world politics. In order to destabilize the primacy of disciplinary IR and its accepted themes and preoccupations, this chapter is deliberately centred upon the concept of popular culture. First, I discuss some of the ways in which popular culture is defined, in order to demonstrate the (gendered) foundations on which the distinctions between (popular) culture and (world) politics are built, and how these function to keep popular culture ‘below the radar’ in IR. Next, I explore only a fraction of the many and varied gendered popular culture/world politics interconnections. I discuss some illustrative examples of the ways in which these intersections have been studied, in order to reflect explicitly on how popular culture is and could be studied within IR. I conclude by arguing for the embrace of more localized, particularized and embodied approaches and methodologies if we are to understand more fully the ways in which popular culture matters in world politics and how it should matter to (gendered/feminist and other) IR.
POPULAR CULTURE AND IR Popular culture is often defined as a ‘you know it when you see it’ clustering of phenomena, spanning advertising, books, celebrity culture, fashion, film and television, games, hobbies, music, news media, sports, tourism and, in the last two decades, the web and social media. There may be some quibbling about the precise boundaries, but for most people, most of the time, most popular culture is obvious. The boundaries, the margins – and the implied, undisputed, ‘obvious’ ‘centre’ – and these distinctions are themselves political. Popular culture has, explicitly or implicitly, usually been defined in contrast to something it is not. The modifier ‘popular’ implicates popular culture’s silent and privileged other, ‘high’ culture (in effect, cultural practices understood and enjoyed by elites). When someone is ‘cultured’ (we don’t even need to specify ‘high’), the binary is invoked. High culture includes opera, art, ballet, poetry, classical music and literature, haute (high) couture rather than street fashions. Popular culture – hip hop, graffiti, crunk, I’m a Celebrity … – is ‘low’ culture (barely ‘cultured’ at all).
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Gender and popular culture 311 The ‘high’ and ‘popular’ qualifiers indicate a broadly class-hierarchybased distinction, but subject positions such as class are also gendered – and gender functions similarly across the distinction. In high culture, at least in works which have been valued and which have thus endured, women have historically been the ‘looked at’ objects, portrayed by overwhelmingly male subjects such as painters, poets or sculptors. As the object of the male gaze, women have been presented nude, romanticized and sexualized or, as with the Virgin Mary, imbued with other ‘feminine’ virtues, such as meekness and humility, and ‘mastered’, just as the lump of clay, the natural landscape or the building materials are mastered (creating masterpieces). In popular culture, it can be seen in women’s roles in horror films, in music video dancers, in tattoos of naked women, in ‘page 3 girls’ and so on. While the precise gendered and racialized dynamics always vary according to context, these commonalities belie the supposed distinction between popular and high culture. Popular culture is sometimes simply defined as ‘consumed by a lot of people’, focusing on the sheer popularity of cultural texts and practices. A major problem with this definition is that it cannot specify how many people have to like something before it is considered ‘popular’ enough to be ‘popular culture’. For example, do cult films ‘count’, or just blockbusters? One response is to specify that media in general are popular culture. It does not matter how many people watch an individual film; it is a popular cultural text because films are by definition popular culture. This may seem like hair-splitting, but once we shift the problem to the medium itself, this definitional conundrum starts to reveal the blurring of boundaries between popular culture and IR as well. If the whole of the internet is ‘popular culture’, then ‘conventional’ IR issues such as cybersecurity, military use of networked computers, and global financial transactions made possible by modern communications technologies start to look more like popular culture. Cybersecurity includes the credit card data, personal account details and communications of global publics, held by Facebook, eBay and Spotify. If television is by definition popular culture, then US presidential State of the Union addresses, which since the mid-1960s have been deliberately broadcast in a primetime weekday evening slot, are part of popular culture. In effect, politics and IR are popular culture, just as popular culture is political. Politicians appear not only on the news but on The Daily Show; they need to show they are ‘in touch’ with the citizenry and, further, this is often achieved by reference to popular culture. As scholars, embassies, officials, activists, sportspeople, artists and musicians comment on politics and foreign policy on Twitter, the notion of a clear line between popular culture and IR now appears blurred. In truth, I contend, there was never a line.
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Race, gender, class and other identity distinctions suffuse all boundarydrawing practices between high/low, culture/politics and domestic/ international. These binaries carry with them gendered traces (notably masculine/feminine). Politics, and especially international politics, has traditionally been understood as a masculine realm in which only, or overwhelmingly, men participate. The realm of politics is one based on hard truths and facts on the ground, core to human survival, while popular culture is often contrasted as the (feminized) realm of melodrama, soap operas, chick flicks, based on fiction and emotion, trivial entertainment. From this perspective, if culture, and popular culture, must be studied by academics at all, surely they can and should be contained within other disciplines such as cultural studies, English, drama, music and history of art. The exclusion of popular culture in IR is itself premised upon gendered assumptions. However, if we do not study popular culture within IR, we miss how, when and why pop culture is political and implicated in global processes (see Weldes and Rowley, 2015, for an overview of ways in which popular culture-world politics relations can be conceptualized). In short, wherever we draw the line(s), wherever and however the boundaries between popular culture and IR are drawn, those boundaries – and the act of drawing them – are gendered, and political. When we do not look too closely at what happens as a result of the boundaries and distinctions on which our definitions are based, these distinctions become reified as natural, just the way things are, obvious, unquestioned and unquestionable. Nevertheless, the texts and practices of IR theorists and practitioners, conventionally understood as, for example, politicians, ambassadors, civil servants, trade delegations, union leaders and NGO workers, can and should be analysed for their popular cultural dimensions. Here, the focus remains on ‘traditional’ popular culture – those texts, media, practices and genres outlined at the start of this section – precisely because these have been so frequently and comprehensively marginalized, silenced and ignored within IR. This is not to reinstate the binary, but to recognize that some elements of the social world have hitherto received less than their fair share of attention from ‘mainstream’ IR scholars.
GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE Popular culture is more accepted as a legitimate area of study within ‘critical’ IR scholarship, for example in feminist, poststructural, postcolonial and queer IR. Within feminist approaches to IR, references to
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Gender and popular culture 313 popular culture have gradually been incorporated into more ‘mainstream’ analyses, as well as pop culture being a focus of study in itself. It makes me more than a little uncomfortable though to single out ‘important’ works, and to engage in acts of canonization and mythologization around the ‘foundations’ of popular cultural scholarship in IR. By canonization and mythologization, I mean acts and practices which contributed to the marginalization of feminist scholarship in the first place. If pressed, I would note that, in her analyses, Cynthia Enloe has long refused to maintain the arbitrary distinctions between ‘popular culture’ and ‘IR’. For example, she has deliberately drawn our attention to novels, sneakers, fruit/food and other aspects of daily life that traverse national borders. In particular, Cynthia Weber and Jutta Weldes have both done much to raise the profile of popular culture within critical IR, although Weldes has not published explicitly gender-focused analyses. Debbie Lisle has contributed not only to debates around global cultural communications, but also to forms and practices of popular culture which are not media-focused. This is particularly so in Lisle’s work on ‘dark’ or thano-tourism. From its inception, the International Feminist Journal of Politics has published a welcome range of outputs which have addressed popular culture, including reviews and review essays, interviews and conversations as well as conventional articles. This has allowed popular culture to be discussed in conjunction with themes already accepted as worthy of study, and the complex interconnections to be teased out. Nonetheless, much of the work on popular culture and IR since the late 1980s has focused, in some way, on representations of international relations in popular cultural texts. For the scholar interested in gender, this does not just mean looking at how men and women are portrayed. A focus on bodies reduces our interest to stereotypes, to static understandings, when one of the things that is interesting about popular culture, and which has carried over from literary and cultural criticism into critical IR scholarship, is the function of narrative. Narrative is itself a gendered concept. This includes but goes beyond the observation that vast swathes of popular cultural texts reinforce the heteronormatively gendered ‘boy meets girl, boy gets girl, something goes wrong, successful resolution, happily ever after’ cliché, even if, and as, feminist and queer works might subvert the heteronormative element. Even without an overt love story, the idea of a (male and masculinized) protagonist (with whom the – presumed male – audience is encouraged to identify) who encounters some trouble and must battle (with himself and external forces) for successful resolution has been a key feature of Western storytelling, from before medieval Icelandic sagas to the twenty-first century. Frodo Baggins is an excellent example of such a protagonist.
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The key narrative trope of the American Western genre hinges on the binary between wilderness and civilization, with a man attempting to protect civilization, commonly of the womenandchildren variety, by mastering the wild. As noted earlier, this binary has gendered traces and implications. How and why does this matter to world politics? It matters because popular genres, in this case Westerns, become the go-to cultural resources for populations (here, US Americans) when attempting to make sense not only of the politics of the historical eras in which these films are ostensibly set (US colonial expansion across North America and the genocide of Native American communities) but also of more recent international conflicts (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). Popular cultural texts are the fabric of our understandings of our worlds, our politics and our histories. For this reason, in addition to situating and analysing texts in the historical context of their production, it is important to examine how those historical contexts are deployed or erased as meanings are recycled, reproduced and re-articulated by and in later discourses. However, a focus on narrative and discursive elements of the text is not the whole story (pun intended). Popular culture also draws our attention firmly to the visual and aural logics at work. In Rambo: First Blood Part II, John Rambo is gendered as hypermasculine, in opposition to his feminized Vietnamese captives. This is achieved through visual tropes and symbols as much as through the narrative. Rambo’s bare chest, rippling muscles and proficiency with weapons all prominently feature, while the Vietnamese camp commander is shown sleeping between silk sheets and with a tiny, carefully manicured moustache. Rambo is able to withstand the Thai heat, while the treacherous CIA agent needs a constant supply of ice-cold cans of Coke. No comparison between Rambo and Jesus is ever verbalized, but the visual signifiers, a longhaired Rambo strung up in the Vietnamese prison camp, head hanging limply, arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose, make this analogy clear.
CONSUMING POPULAR CULTURE While discursive, visual and aural representations are spaces in which gender is connoted, and in which it, in turn, functions to connote other meanings, a preoccupation with cultural texts and visual media can often obscure the amount of labour that has to be performed in the reading of these texts and media. Critical analyses of narratives and representations at work within the text may indicate how a film or novel can be read but, by themselves, they do not tell us very much about how, in practice, the novel or film has been read.
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Gender and popular culture 315 Anthony Swofford highlights this well in the opening pages of his 2003 Gulf War memoir Jarhead, when he describes how he and his marine buddies prepare for their imminent deployment to Kuwait by watching Vietnam War films. He argues that, although many US civilians may understand these films as propounding anti-war messages, for military men war films function as pornography, getting them ready for battle. The messages they take from these films are very different. Crucially, the point is not that one reading is ‘correct’ or ‘better’ than another but, rather, that texts contain multiple potential readings. Different elements of the text may be prioritized from different audience positions; women, for example, may not feel that the author’s first-person narrator is speaking to them when he explicitly assumes a male interlocutor and vice versa. We also need to consider, then, how popular culture is consumed. Consumption of popular culture does not merely refer to foodways (in effect, consumption as eating) but to the consumption of artefacts more generally. It draws attention to the active and dynamic nature of culture as lived practices and experiences. If we are interested in understanding the diverse ways in which popular culture and world politics intersect in our daily lives and how their mutual constitution forms the backdrop to our (individual and collective) political consciousnesses, IR scholars (myself included) now need to move beyond the methods that have traditionally been deployed in IR and embrace methods developed by the disciplines mentioned at the start of this chapter. Audience research, ethnographic approaches, participant observation and participant action research (co-producing research with the participants involved) offer richer and more contextualized analyses of how meaning is being actively produced, reproduced and transformed by people in diverse communities and circumstances. These methods can also be utilized in conjunction with close textual readings of, say, websites, films and relevant news media. It may not be possible to go back and interrogate Anthony Swofford’s contemporaries for the different models of masculinity being produced in their viewings of Vietnam War films, as opposed to those of peace activists, but there are many other scenarios which would benefit from such close engagement. The gendered dynamics of the Israel–Palestine conflict and associated attempts to procure peace might, for example, be fruitfully explored through investigations of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, its members and its audiences, to understand how the orchestra functions, its objectives and its achievements. Investigating the politics of affect and emotion (themselves gendered and the study of these considered feminine in an IR context) at work in cultural texts and practices requires not only new ways of researching but
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also new ways of writing and communicating the findings of that research. How can we hope to present accurately and persuasively the complexity and vitality of processes that hinge on emotions and bodily responses (often unconsciously experienced, in fleeting fractions of seconds), in academic modes, styles and genres that remain based on the gendered binary assumptions about communication as reason and rationality? Bystander theatre may be a better model for communicating the findings of audience research than is the peer-reviewed article or the standard conference presentation. Taking seriously the importance of popular culture in world politics – and reflecting explicitly on the ways in which popular cultural practices and texts are gendered – is thus a more fundamental challenge to the boundaries and practices of the discipline than first appears.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Chambers, Samuel A. (2009) The Queer Politics of Television, London: I.B. Tauris. Crawford, Neta (2003) ‘Feminist futures: science fiction, utopia, and the art of possibilities in world politics’, in Jutta Weldes (ed.), To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring the Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, London: Palgrave, pp. 195–220. Enloe, Cynthia (2001) Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hooper, Charlotte (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Kaklamanidou, Betty (2013) Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism: The New Millennium Hollywood Rom Com, Oxford: Routledge. Lisle, Debbie (2006) The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowley, Christina (2007) ‘Firefly/Serenity: gendered space and gendered bodies’, British Journal of Politics of International Relations, 9 (2), 318–325. Rowley, Christina (2014) ‘Popular culture and the politics of the visual’, in Laura J. Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, pp. 361–374. Shepherd, Laura J. (2012) Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, Oxford: Routledge. Weber, Cynthia (2002) ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31 (1), 129–147. Weldes, Jutta and Christina Rowley (2015) ‘So, how does popular culture relate to world politics?’, e-IR, 29 April, http://www.e-ir.info/2015/04/29/so-how-does-popular-culturerelate-to-world-politics/ (accessed 16 June 2015). Wichelen, Sonja van (2005) ‘“My dance immoral? Alhamdulillah no!” Dangdut music and gender politics in contemporary Indonesia’, in Marianne I. Franklin (ed.), Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 161–178.
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37. Cinema and film Cristina Masters
What is it about a visual medium, largely meant to entertain, that demands critical attention from those of us interested in the supposedly ‘high politics’ and ‘serious business’ of the ‘global’ – war, conflict, political economy, security, development – and all the practices, and significantly people, in between and on the margins and bottom rungs? More pressing perhaps is why should feminists turn to film (or go to the cinema!) when crisis appears to best capture the current affective state of world politics? Are films not escapes from the quotidian, rather than sites of critical inquiry? And significantly, what is the relationship between film, world politics and gender? These are but a few relevant questions when thinking through film, cinema and the politics of gender in ‘making the world go round’ (Enloe, 1989). Focusing on film is an immediate attempt to both call into question the ‘real’ and insert the political where both reproductions of dominant gendered orders and challenges to the real through the reel necessarily and significantly evacuate the comfort zone of claims to truth, reality and the so-called objective in world politics. The chapter will attempt to tease out some feminist insights into the cinematic, as well as grapple more generally with how film and cinema operate as sites where gender and world politics – and the intimate relationship between the two – are fundamentally made and unmade.
KNOWLEDGE, PEDAGOGY AND FILM: VISUAL NARRATIVES OF GENDER AND WORLD POLITICS How do we know what we know about world politics? Is it from watching the news? Reading history books and political theory tracts from Plato to Locke? Listening to lectures in classrooms and reading and critically engaging with the edited books and journal articles assigned as essential reading? The Internet and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube? Is it from being alive in the world, with eyes to see, ears to hear and hands to touch? More provocatively, how many of us have actually read an academic text from front to back, a handful of 317
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journal articles or an entire history book in the last year (excluding of course the collected volume you are currently reading!)? But how many of us have gone to the cinema to watch a film? How many of us have curled up on our sofas, either alone or with others, to watch a newly released DVD? A film on Netflix? The only answer of course is yes to all of the above, as we undoubtedly learn about world politics through a variety of sites, institutions and practices, but I know when I think of the Vietnam War I first think of films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam (1986), Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Similar sticky and slippery questions also arise around how we know gender, and debates on nature versus nurture continue to animate feminist and non-feminist conversations alike. Are we simply born with hardwired gender identities, or are they culturally inscribed through the colour and style of children’s clothing, the toys they play with, and constant utterances about boys being boys and girls being girls? How do we learn that boys and men possess certain traits, whilst girls and women possess others, often complementary but frequently oppositional? How do we come to equate particular identities with particular practices? Importantly, how and where are dominant gender norms and ideals challenged? And where, if anywhere, does the cinematic stand in relation to the more obvious sites of knowledge production concerning gender? As with world politics, film undoubtedly plays a significant role in how we come to know, do and undo gender. We need only look at the popularity and impact of Disney films for how we conceptualise gender in AngloAmerican contexts to take seriously the role of the cinematic in gendered politics (Cheu, 2008). Indeed the similarity and very endurance of particular heteronormative and racialised gendered narratives for instance in classic Disney films and international armed intervention are too uncanny to ignore. Damsels in distress and stories of saving by ‘white knight’ characters found in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs echo justifications for Bush’s global war on terrorism in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, and also in the most current war in Iraq with the Islamic State. Another key question is whether cinema merely reflects everyday life, or does it actively work to produce it? In other words, does film reflect real world politics and real gender relations, or does it actively construct visions of world politics and gender relations and their intimate relation therein? If, however, what is ‘real’ is produced through representational politics, as many post-positivist feminists argue, it logically follows that the cinematic is equally understood as a legitimate site of critical inquiry into visual, aural and discursive narratives of gendered world politics.
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Cinema and film 319 The point is not to push film to the forefront of knowledge production but instead to appreciate the cinematic as a site of knowledge and learning about gender and world politics, about where and how we come to know the world we live in and to emphasise the need to take seriously our everyday practices and our relationality as political subjects and their effects on how we enact knowledge claims. As bell hooks (1996: 2) argues, ‘cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people’. And, while most of us would never dream of saying ‘I learnt that in a film’, it is likely the case that it plays a crucial role in our visual registers and significantly our experiential knowledge of the world. What is most interesting for students of gender and world politics is that foregrounding film as a site of knowledge production has the potential to radically and democratically open up ‘epistemic’ vantage points for thinking about how we ‘think about’ gender and how it is produced and deconstructed in the world in which we live. Watching a film and having an opinion about it do not require a doctoral degree or a companion reading list. The viewer is active in the interpretation and often, but not only, takes on the vantage point of the camera. Thus watching film is not simply a passive exercise, but an active engagement and interpretation whether at the level of the conscious or the subconscious. Because film is as much about the cinematographic – the mise-en-scène – the visual story that runs alongside (or in juxtaposition to) the narrative prose demands interpretation (Cheu, 2008; Shapiro, 2009; Carver, 2010). The cinematic also foregrounds two significant registers that challenge dominant masculine knowledge practices in IR: the experiential and the emotional (Sylvester, 2013; Zalewski, 2013). It is to ‘stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge’, as Jack Halberstam (2011: 7) suggests, and to stroll into a space where we are more easily reconciled to the interpretive and ‘subjective perception’. Film, as hooks (1996: 18) presciently captures it, might ‘come to stand in for the quintessential experience of border crossing for everyone who wants to take a look at difference and the different without having to experientially engage “the other”’.
THE MALE GAZE, WAR AND CINEMA In Cynthia Weber’s introduction to Imagining America at War she tells us that a few days after September 11th she went to the cinema. This was her attempt to recoup the ‘normal’ and escape from the horrors of that day which were playing and replaying, over and over and over again, on
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every television screen. She was not alone. In the weeks following the attacks in New York, record numbers found themselves going off to the cinema. Comfort, escape, distraction, perhaps a good laugh, it appeared, could be found in the cinema and on the screen. For Weber, however, this normality was short-lived. Whilst browsing the rack of advertisements at the exit she came across this: a photograph of a landing craft filled with Royal Marine Commandos outfitted in camouflage, their fingers in the triggers of their automatic weapons, their boat speeding through the open seas toward what one suspects is a foreign shoreline. The caption read, ‘Please take your seats. The show is about to start.’ (2006: 1, emphasis added)
What should we make of this moment where, on the one hand, cinema is understood as a space that is both an everyday activity and an escape from the everyday and, on the other hand, there is a claim, in the shape of a postcard, that this everyday space is like war, and that going to war for soldiers is like going to the cinema and watching a film? Cynthia Weber argues that this moment was a visceral reminder that cinema is as much a battlefield of American foreign and security policy as the cities targeted on September 11th, and those soon to be targeted in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. Films such as Pearl Harbor, Collateral Damage and Black Hawk Down, she argues, tell us much about what it means to be ‘American’ in the post-9/11 context, and they do so in both expected and unexpected ways. What it means to be American in these cinematic instances is tightly bound to (heteronormative) gendered tropes and logics where meaning is intimately produced through gender(ed) frames of knowledge. There is an intimate and long-standing relationship between war and cinema, one that dates back to the First World War, the first war to be extensively documented through film and photography. On-the-ground preparations for war were captured on the reel, and film cameras mounted on aircraft gave us the first real view of ‘war from the skies’. The relationship, however, is much more complex than documenting war, where this seemingly simple act in fact critically traverses the space between war, on the one hand, and cinema on the other. Summed up famously, if contentiously, by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception ([1984] 1989: 34), ‘war is cinema and cinema is war’, and he details the co-constitutive relationship of what many of us would assume to be entirely different practices – one ever so real and deadly, the other entirely fictive and entertaining, but captured so startlingly by the Royal Marines recruitment advertisement: ‘Please take
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Cinema and film 321 your seats. The show is about to start.’ How might one understand this claim that war is cinema and cinema is war, and what are the implications for feminists theorising world politics? A simple answer to the former is that, much like cinema, war is representational. The more complicated answer is that war itself is impossible without representation and as such is in itself cinematic, raising a series of complex questions around how we ‘know’ and ‘live’ in the world (questions explored in many of the chapters in this volume) and significantly how we ‘know’ and ‘do’ war. These claims hinge on understandings of the world that are necessarily interpretive and discursive, thus partial, rather than claims to knowledge that posit an objective world that we can ‘see’ and definitively know. War in the former rendition is not an objective reality that we simply engage in and apprehend through observation. As cinematic, it is an attempt at correspondence where what we say about war is what we see as the ‘reality’, ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ of war (e.g. the First Gulf War and Jean Baudrillard’s claim that it did not happen). That it frequently appears as ‘objective’ in our history books with its clearly demarcated battlefields, definitive beginnings and endings, unambiguous allies and enemies, and clear winners and losers is itself an example of the politics of representation. Understanding cinema and war as similar knowledge practices is of primary concern for feminists, because what feminist critical engagements both with film and with world politics bring into stark relief is a shared andro- and/or phallocentrism in representational productions of mainstream cinema and dominant, commonsense understandings of war. Again this is not to suggest that film plays an instrumental role in our understandings of war, gender and world politics, but is to emphasise that the way we experience something like war and how we understand gender are fundamentally connected to how war is visually represented in the media, film, photography and, more recently, YouTube videos. In how we know war this is most evident in whom we understand to be doing war and where war happens – heads of state, generals, diplomats and soldiers all do war in Oval offices, in ‘war rooms’, at international negotiating tables and on battlefields – where the whom and where tend to be male-dominated, in masculine spaces and masculinist in the qualities valued. Cynthia Enloe (1989), perhaps one of the most wellknown feminist scholars of war and world politics, argues that not only is this a radically partial vision of war, but it also actively ignores what sustains and reproduces it in the everyday and problematically excludes the experiences, practices and interventions of a whole half of the world’s population – women. The questions Enloe asks us to consider are: what does war look like from the position of women as diplomats’ wives,
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camp prostitutes and soldiers and significantly how might this fundamentally reconfigure how we understand war, and what are the effects of excluding the experiences and participation of whole swathes of people from our knowledge of war and its violent effects? In the same way that visions of war are highly gendered and mediated through phallocentric positionalities, Laura Mulvey (1975), a feminist theorist of cinema, argues that mainstream film (re)produces what she famously coined the male gaze. Whereas in dominant representations of war women are noticeably absent, in Hollywood film the opposite appears to be true, with women conspicuously on display. Whilst ‘the presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film’, Mulvey (1975: 10) argues, ‘her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’. Cinematically women function as the object of the erotic gaze of male characters in the film and for male viewers. In both instances women appear as little more than objects of desire, passive in their abjectness, echoing in many ways the ways in which women have been constituted in dominant narratives of war as passive objects who provide the necessary backdrop to war but are otherwise incidental: wives, girlfriends and mothers anxiously waiting at home whilst their loved ones risk their lives at war (Enloe, 1989; Weber, 2006; Donald and MacDonald, 2014; Sjoberg, 2014). The Hollywood film Saving Private Ryan is exemplary. Mrs Ryan, the mother of four sons, three already killed in action on the beaches of Normandy, her youngest son missing in action, can do nothing but wait for news of whether he is alive or dead while a team of soldiers led by Tom Hanks’s Captain Miller go behind enemy lines to bring her son home. In these configurations – real and reel – men appear as the active agents of war either as participants or as viewers and women as passive, often mute objects of war with no possibility for intervening in war’s inexorable masculine production. But even in instances where women are lead characters in war films such as GI Jane the male gaze prevails. As Terrell Carver (2007) points out, the film is not at all about women, but rather a deconstruction of masculinity that reveals how masculinity in the military is constructed – what ‘maketh a man’ – and in this particular instance on a body rendered as other. In both their absence and presence, however, women in real and reel visions become little more than objects of war, objects of desire, foils and reflections for male protagonists, where men and masculinity continuously work to configure war’s intelligible frame (Hutchings, 2008). Narratives of war and Hollywood war films, it turns out, far too often (re)produce a phallocentric gaze, where the norms and experiences of the masculine prevail.
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Cinema and film 323 Moreover, what makes these two practices of war and cinema inextricable is what they share in common – modern technology and what feminists such as Luce Irigaray (This Sex Which Is Not One) and Donna Haraway (‘A Cyborg Manifesto’) call a ‘god-like’ masculine visuality where the privileging of sight is a reflection of gendered knowledge frames and the ‘eye’ that sees and the ‘I’ performed on the battlefield and screen coalesce. For example, the camera lens and the artillery gun function through similar logics and share what Virilio names a ‘deadly harmony’ through the centrality of the ‘eye’. Cinema brought this into stark relief while at the same time reshaping and extending the representational politics of war. It is not that cinema has transformed war into a representational practice – it has always been representational – but rather that it has been fundamentally reshaped in the context of two key technological advancements – war from the air and the war on the screen – effecting a triad between representation, technology and mediation. Rey Chow (2006) refers to this as ‘the intertwined logics of world-as-picture and the world-as-target, always returning the results of knowing other cultures to the point of origin, the “eye”/“I”’. In other words, experiences of practices such as war are mediated through masculinist visual registers which perform the production of identity. Cynthia Weber (2006) astutely picks up on a post-9/11 crisis of identity in America and powerfully played out on Hollywood screens by tracing visual moral grammars of American identity and foreign policy. What is deconstructively revealed in her reading of post-9/11 cinematic productions is the centrality (and significantly failure) of gendered visualities in normalising and legitimising the US war on terror. Take for example her reading of Pearl Harbor, released shortly after September 11th. The film, she argues, repeats the grammatical logics of the US administration and major news media of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as an ‘Attack on America’. It was the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that prompted the US to declare war on Japan and officially enter the Second World War. The cinematic elision between the two attacks works to produce a moral equivalence, and in so doing serves to legitimise the war on Afghanistan as the necessary ‘masculine’ and ‘moral’ response to 9/11. In typical Weber style she does not stop there, revealing that despite attempts to suture the two events together they continually come undone. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are not the same; their representational twinning is just that, an attempt to collapse them into the same impossible discursive register. Weber gets us to think through how gender participates in representations of foreign policy and war on the cinematic screen, how soldiers are produced as subjects prepared both to kill and to die, whose lives are worth saving and whose we let and make
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die, and much, much more. Undoubtedly films tell a multitude of stories, from those that celebrate dominant masculinist orders (Black Hawk Down, The Avengers, GI Jane) to end-of-the-world scenarios where inevitably the heteronormative gendered world order is restored (World War Z, The Core, War of the Worlds) and those that resist and expose the limits of practices of politics, international politics and dominant representations of gender and difference (Melancholia, The Book of Eli, District 9, Dr. Strangelove, Dirty Pretty Things).
CONCLUSION There is a politics to understanding film and cinema as cultural, phenomenological and affective texts of gendered world politics that circulate, produce, reproduce and deconstruct identity and difference. It locates us in spaces of the interpretative, discursive and fictive. It makes no claims to the ‘real’ or ‘truth’, even though these may be precisely what are negotiated and produced: ‘what is real is precisely what movies do not do. They give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real. It may look like something familiar, but in actuality it is a different universe from the world of the real’ (hooks, 1996: 1). We experience film not simply as thinking subjects but significantly as embodied subjects, sometimes resistant, frequently compliant. Significantly the cinematic can also articulate ‘alternative’ visions of life that may bring us up close to ‘different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject’ (Halberstam, 2011: 11). Significantly the cinematic is a cultural site of world politics that often produces gendered norms and frames, but can equally undo gender and challenge its too often deadly logics in world politics.
REFERENCES Carver, Terrell (2007) ‘GI Jane: what are the “manners” that “maketh a man”?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, 313–317. Carver, Terrell (2010) ‘Cinematic ontologies and viewer epistemologies: knowing international politics as moving images’, Global Society, 24 (3), 421–431. Cheu, Hoi (2008) Cinematic Howling: Women’s Films, Women’s Film Theories, Toronto: UBC Press. Chow, Rey (2006) The Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, London: Duke University Press. Donald, Ralph and Karen MacDonald (2014) Women in War Films: From Helpless Heroine to GI Jane, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Cinema and film 325 Enloe, Cynthia (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Halberstam, Jack (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, New York: Duke University Press. hooks, bell (1996) Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies, London: Routledge. Hutchings, Kimberly (2008) ‘Making sense of masculinity and war’, Men and Masculinities, 10 (4), 389–404. Mulvey, Laura (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16 (3), 6–18. Shapiro, Michael (2009) Cinematic Geopolitics, London: Routledge. Sjoberg, Laura (2014) Gender, War and Conflict, Cambridge: Polity. Sylvester, Christine (2013) War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis, London: Routledge. Virilio, Paul ([1984] 1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London: Verso. Weber, Cynthia (2006) Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics, and Film, London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia (2013) Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse, London: Routledge.
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38. New media and communications Gillian Youngs
New media and communications represent one of the most transformative dimensions of gender and international relations in the latter part of the last century through to current times and into the future. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have brought all media together and provided ever richer and faster data-based online environments with global reach. The use of ICTs has dramatically changed what it means to talk about international relations in critical terms in relation to the communicative power of men and women (Sarikakis and Shade, 2007; Youngs, 2009). Digital public spheres enabled in particular by the arrival of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s have transformed the informational and communicative patterns of the previous analogue era. Women’s activism and advocacy have contributed to creating many new patterns. These include, for example, powerful combinations of online/ offline activities that allow marginal politics to be conducted and strengthened, as it were, away from the glare and constraining influences of mainstream politics. This has further facilitated interventions from the margins to the mainstream at strategic times and in strategic ways. As well as having implications for theory as much as practice, these changed public sphere conditions also impact on identity, whether we are thinking about identity at group or individual levels (Hafkin and Huyer, 2006). In basic ways, ICTs mean that, for the places and people connected to them, the material nature of society has transformed to a dual context of physical geographical settings combined with virtual technologically mediated ones. In other words, where we are and what we do are a matter of concrete physical locations and face-to-face communications as well as computer-based digital environments whether of text, voice or multimedia visual presence. We can think of this in terms of ‘geospatial’ combined with ‘sociospatial’ circumstances. Geospatial settings have tended to emphasize vertical structures of top-down power relations, whereas sociospatial ones are notable for additionally facilitating horizontal forms of communication and action. These forms of communication and action can be, although of course are not necessarily, disruptive of aspects of those power structures and 326
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New media and communications 327 processes related to them. ICTs developed from a long history of technological transformations in communications, including telegraph, wireless and televisual, and mark a major digital shift, adding the power of computing and continually expanding the amounts of data and the speed at which it can be shared. ICTs have contributed in diverse forms to reformulations of social space and relations. In the context of international relations they have been a game changer for women’s access to and presence on the international stage. In predominantly geospatial times, historically international relations have been heavily male-dominated masculinist spheres of political and economic power, and this largely remains the case. In geospatial and sociospatial times ICTs have, in many ways, extended that power, but have additionally enabled women, through virtual networking and their presence on the World Wide Web, to significantly increase their access to one another and to public spheres in national as well as global settings. This results in a complex situation with regard to possibilities for women’s empowerment and factors inhibiting it. Hence key issues and debates surrounding gender and ICTs play out within this complexity.
THE FUTURE AND THE PAST The gender lens, through which we need to look at ICTs, emphasizes continuities of inequality as well as new patterns of empowerment and possibility. ICT developments have provided new forms of access to politics and the marketplace for women in local and global terms (Harcourt, 1999). It can be argued that sociospatial transformations have to some degree transcended constraints inhibiting access in the conditions of male-dominated structures and processes of the political economy of the past. In simple terms we can think about ICTs as an expanded path to political economy which enhances both established masculinist power patterns and the access and presence women can have in online/offline networks. Put another way, it can be argued that the established conditions for women to have political and economic as well as cultural agency, locally and globally, have been impacted positively by ICTs. As a core feature of globalization, one dramatic impact is the extent to which ICT use has facilitated the growth of global women’s movements, their connectivity with one another and their access to and engagement in mainstream male-dominated politics. This includes connectivity through major actors such as the United Nations (UN) and also in national frameworks.
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Thanks to ICTs and via the World Wide Web, to a significant degree, contemporary international relations include women’s movements activities, interventions and political presence in ways and at scales that could not have been imagined in earlier times. In turn, women’s access to one another within as well as across international boundaries is a vital feature of this transformation, particularly when it is recognized that throughout history their political presence has been predominantly mediated through the masculinist structures of mainstream politics. It can be argued that this has brought a whole new era for women’s politics and their public sphere identities, as well as women’s senses of agency, in their work towards improved gender balances in society. The dual scenario of women’s collective networking, consciousness-raising and knowledgesharing as well as the way women have drawn on these new spaces to work more extensively and sustainably within mainstream settings is crucial to understanding what empowerment currently means (Youngs, 1999). The former is fundamental to the latter and the contemporary transformation of gender and international relations. This is because historically, to a substantial degree, women and women’s interests and concerns in international relations have been invisible. While women’s movements, networking and activism were vibrant in the past, the arrival of ICTs, especially at the global level, has removed severe geospatial constraints on their possibilities to thrive and have an impact in world politics. The capacities of ICTs to cross time and space instantaneously, as well as the data-rich capacities of web presence for individuals and organizations, are essential dimensions of the changed conditions for women’s politics and community building. Sustained reliable and instant communication, as well as the facilities to make large amounts of multimedia and text-based material available to mass audiences on the web, has made women and their concerns present and accessible internationally at totally new scales. This fresh scenario is about women’s voices, perspectives and knowledge and the continuing opportunities for them to put these into the public sphere in their own terms and under their own control. Among other things, this offers greater opportunities to learn about and from one another, as well as facilitating coalition building based on this shared learning.
THE REPRODUCTION OF MALE DOMINANCE–SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY However, at the same time, developments in ICTs represent a powerful continuity and enhancement of male-dominated political economy. This
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New media and communications 329 is evident when ICTs are viewed as one of the latest stages of science and technology innovation in what is often referred to as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) (Youngs, 2012). These STEM areas have always featured at the top of knowledge and application hierarchies in political economy and have always been male-dominated. If anything the new ICT age has embedded this dominance even further. This has deep philosophical as well as practical implications for gender imbalances. These areas are paramount in shaping the world we live in, and ICT developments are yet another stage in that distorted gender picture. To date, women, in their highly limited presence and power in STEM, have had little opportunity to share in creating the drivers that shape the world we live in. The evidence at present indicates that change in this situation is slow to come. A study by Women in Global Science and Technology concluded that the limited presence of women in science, technology and innovation (STI) was a global problem affecting developed as much as developing economies. This 2012 study looked at six countries and one region (Brazil, India, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, South Africa, the United States and the European Union) and found that: A gender imbalance exists in science, technology and innovation worldwide. The number of women in STI falls continuously from secondary school to university, laboratories, teaching and decision making. There are consistently low levels of women in the skilled technology workforce in the private sector, with even fewer females in senior management and as leaders of large companies. A gender imbalance also exists in STI education, where males outnumber females worldwide for reasons of safety and security, teaching methods that favour boys, preconceptions that S and T [science and technology] is a male domain, and unwillingness of families to support their daughters through all levels of education. Women have lower levels of access to ICTs such as internet and smartphones in the majority of countries in the world. (Women in Global Science and Technology, 2013b: 1)
Thus this study supports arguments found in long-standing feminist debates about the importance of linking interpretations of structures and cultures of power to understanding of identities and the part this linkage plays in both maintaining existing circumstances and inhibiting possibilities for change in the future. The masculinist culture of STEM is as influential as its male power base. Both restrict the potential for women to identify either themselves or their life paths as relevant to STEM. Even where women occupy places within STEM, both also impact negatively on women’s opportunity or commitment to struggle up the power tree. Thus in gender terms, while ICTs can be seen as a positive development
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which has enabled transformations in the conditions of international relations, and so a development that should be celebrated, the deeper picture tells a far more complicated and worrying story. This deeper picture calls for greater attention to be paid not only to the uses and applications of ICTs, but also to the sources of innovation that create them and, in this respect, to the historically entrenched structures that maintain the gendered imbalance in constituencies doing the innovating. As with other areas of gender imbalance, this unequal situation represents a loss to society in terms of women’s imagination, creativity, knowledge and invention. It is not an overstatement to say that the world created or transformed by ICTs remains substantially a world created or transformed by men. It is destined to remain so unless the enduring gender imbalances in STEM are urgently and actively addressed. These gaps in women’s access to resources, opportunities, S and T education and employment, and technologies are depriving countries of women’s experience, creativity and ability. They are a waste of the resources invested in the education and support of women and girls and in the national technology and extension systems that do not reach a substantial portion of the population. Developing a scientific and technological workforce as well as supporting a population to understand and use S and T to improve their lives and livelihoods will help to bridge these gaps. Countries will need to mobilize the active participation of women and other underrepresented groups in the science, engineering and technology (SET) and information technology (IT) workforces, and improve the ability of these groups to develop and use technologies in areas such as food production, water and sanitation, and energy. (Women in Global Science and Technology, 2013a: 1, emphasis added)
WOMEN AND INNOVATION As the above discussion indicates, in relation to ICT developments there is a growing need for women’s politics and activism to shift increasingly to a core focus on women and innovation. Such a focus is important because it combines appreciation of the positive and empowering elements of ICTs for disrupting male-dominated patterns of global politics, while drawing attention to how developments in ICTs represent a further embedding of science and technology’s male-dominated structures of knowledge and invention. This would further draw attention to both the celebratory and the troubling sides of ICT transformations. It could serve as a way of encouraging links to be made between successes in innovative use and application of ICTs by women and routes to address the long-term gender imbalance in science and technology. It can be
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New media and communications 331 argued that STEM through ICTs defines our world more than ever. This is especially so with the expansion of ICT use day by day, minute by minute, in different aspects of work, home, leisure and social life. This places as much emphasis on STEM politically as it does economically. However, critical interrogation at any level is inhibited by the hegemonic position STEM has always had in steering what we know and do, make and build, in the modern world. The speed of technological change since the arrival of ICTs inevitably drives us towards a focus on the future. At the same time, critical attention to gender and STEM equally draws us back to a focus on the past and present. How do we develop an interest in and curiosity about how different STEM might be if women had been as influential and active within this area as men have been? How do we get issues and questions related to gender inequality in this area into the public sphere and on to policy agendas? At an even deeper philosophical level how do we generate more thinking about how different the man-made world around us might be if women had played a greater or equal role in imagining and making this world? When we start to think about such questions in relation to the whole concept of innovation, we are directed towards issues about how we see the world, what we want it to be, which kinds of priorities should be followed and how these ends should be achieved. We are inevitably drawn to the fundamentals of ontology and epistemology and a whole history of work in feminist analysis which stresses alternative gender perspectives and understandings (Peterson, 2003). This signals that however much we can see change, including positive change, through ICT empowerment, feminist analysis will always direct us to the deeper view to understand the historically structured environment within which such change takes place. Feminist analysis does not deny the effectiveness of such change nor necessarily diminish it as superficial, but it does indicate the need to ground it and connect it to wider conditions of gendered power, which help us to understand more the specificities of such change and its limitations. A big question raised by high-profile and extensive success in women’s use and application of ICTs is whether such success will be drawn on effectively in the future to change the deeper, more entrenched and more problematic male domination of STEM. This is not just a concern for women but for societies in general and for policymakers at all levels. The fast pace of technological change suggests that innovative capacities in both invention and use will become increasingly influential in shaping societies, cultures and identities. The narrower and less inclusive the approaches to innovation are, whether this be in policy,
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industry or other settings, the less imaginative and creative they are also likely to be. Based on the current state of affairs, bringing more women into STEM and increasing their influence within it represent a huge challenge. However, the range of innovation women have been engaged in through harnessing the potential of ICTs and working to increase women’s influence in global politics is just one of many resources that can be brought to bear on confronting the challenge in new ways. Gender and identity are centrally in play here, and the identities associated with STEM have to be expanded to enable many more girls and women not only to contribute to STEM but to chart totally new directions for it, incorporating as fully as possible women’s as well as men’s perspectives on what new knowledge and trajectories should be developed and to what ends.
REFERENCES Hafkin, Nancy and Sophia Huyer (eds) (2006) Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Harcourt, Wendy (ed.) (1999) Women@Internet, London: Zed Books. Peterson, V. Spike (2003) A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies, London: Routledge. Sarikakis, Katherine and Leslie R. Shade (eds) (2007) Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Women in Global Science and Technology (2013a) National Assessments on Gender Equality in the Knowledge Society: Gender in Science, Technology and Innovation, http://wisat.org/data/documents/GEKS_Summary.pdf (accessed 8 September 2014). Women in Global Science and Technology (2013b) ‘National assessments on gender equality in the knowledge society: gender in science, technology and innovation’, two-page summary, http://wisat.org/data/documents/GEKS_KeyFindings_onepageFeb13.pdf (accessed 8 September 2014). Youngs, Gillian (1999) ‘Virtual voices: real lives’, in Wendy Harcourt (ed.), Women@Internet, London: Zed Books, pp. 55–68. Youngs, Gillian (2009) ‘Blogging and globalization: the blurring of the public/private sphere’, Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 61 (2), 127–138. Youngs, Gillian (2012) ‘Globalization, information and communication technologies and women’s lives’, in Rekha Pande and Theo van der Weide (eds), Globalization, Technology Diffusion and Gender Disparity, Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
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39. Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps Varun Pande, Theo P. van der Weide and Rekha Pande
Around the world there is recognition of gender-based disparities and the need to reduce these gaps to create a gender-just society (see Hausmann et al., 2012). One area which has not received the attention it deserves is the increasingly popular computer gaming industry, which determines the mind set and attitudes of the younger generation and is a major source of informal education for children and adolescents. This chapter analyses how video games contribute to the increasing gender gap in society. We argue that there is gender stereotyping in many of these games, regardless of their genre, and hence, inasmuch as there is no change in mind set, the gender gap continues.
GENDER STEREOTYPING One major factor in creating gender division is gender role stereotyping. Many studies report that girls and young women display less interest in digital games, have less game-related knowledge, and play less frequently and for shorter durations than do boys and young men (Lucas and Sherry, 2004). These differences are reinforced, since games are typically targeted at traditional male interests, such as action-related sports, games and computer programming. In comparison, few digital games target girls except Barbie Fashion Design, a program that allows girls to create outfits, jewellery and hairstyles for Barbie. Most attempts to explain the gender gap in computer game involvement focus on the content and the design of typical games (Kafai, 1998). Several authors have documented how most digital games rely heavily on stereotypes and archaic role models to portray female characters (see, for example, Jansz and Martis, 2003). Many female characters in computer games are weak victims who are protected or rescued by powerful males, meaning they have a low task-attractivity (McCroskey and McCain, 1974). Moreover, visual portrayals of females tend to highlight physical attributes (for 333
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example, through clothing) or exaggerate female sexuality (Schleiner, 2001; Beasley and Standley, 2002). Although such content characteristics presumably attract male players, they might repel females from playing because gender stereotypes might impede identification with the female characters (McCroskey and McCain, 1974). In this mass media, compared to female characters, male characters appear more frequently, talk significantly more, and engage in noted behaviours more, such as achieving and showing leadership. In addition, these media provide distorted representations of women and minorities. We can carry this argument further. Competence in computer games might require media literacy and technical skills and involvement with computer games. This presumably facilitates the acquisition of general computer-related knowledge and abilities. Thus, gaming can help users participate successfully in the information society (Cassell and Jenkins, 1998). Female characters are rarely cast in major roles in these maleoriented computer games. In addition, the vast majority of female characters have been found to be non-playable, meaning that they cannot be played by the gamer (Miller and Summers, 2007). This underscores their secondary and exiguous status. Where playable female characters do appear, they are typically overtly sexualized, portrayed wearing promiscuous dress and engaging in seductive acts (Dietz, 1998). Notably, however, these characters are often high-status, powerful characters and, as such, like the heroic figures more commonly associated with men. This type of female character fits the normative characteristics of an action hero (in effect, the male action hero) by demonstrating strength, speed, intellect and independence (Richard and Zaremba, 2005). However, her sexuality is her defining feature, relegating her status to that of an object to be gazed upon (Mikula, 2003). It follows that, if computer games are more attractive to boys than to girls, they perpetuate gender imbalance in access to modern information technologies. Computer game use is seen as a significant issue for girls because of its links to computer literacy and comfort with technology. This has implications for future career choices as well as the development of cognitive skills. This kind of skill development is important, because research suggests that girls are not inherently less skilled than boys, but learn to become so through gendered processes of knowledge and skill acquisition. If a conscious effort is made to teach girls computer skills, they perform equally well. Thus the problem is less in the actual skill development and more in the area of getting girls to use the technology in ways that are positive, empowering, educational and fun. This presents new opportunities and challenges for feminist strategy and theory. A central tension which results from this is that of providing
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Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps 335 ‘what girls want’ (which often takes very stereotypically feminine forms) and actively seeking to transform gender roles. Given that toys are often viewed as substantial tools of gender socialization, which serve both descriptive and prescriptive purposes, this tension is highly significant. In 1990, approximately 70 per cent of all employed computer specialists were men (Kramer and Lehman, 1990).
INDUSTRY RESPONSES The game industry has its own reasons for exploring this issue. In this $10 billion industry, approximately 75–80 per cent of the sales revenue generated is derived from the male game industry. The widespread success of video games among young boys resulted in almost total market penetration. In the context of total market penetration, some means of expanding the market is required to reach new consumer groups, particularly if all the major players hope to enjoy continued economic growth rather than stagnation. Thus this has turned attention to the long-overlooked girl market. All the women in the video game industry agree that there are gender gaps, but disagree on how to breach these gaps. One answer presumes the need for a girl-only game market (the approach taken by Girl Games and Purple Moon). A second answer presupposes the possibility of expanding or broadening the existing game market to include both male and female consumer interests (the approach taken by Sega). The first group works under the assumption that girls and boys want something fundamentally different from video games, that it is possible to find out what girls want from market research and that the best way of responding to this situation is to create girl-only or girl-directed media that stand alongside more boy-centred media. However, some have argued that, in designing girl-only games, these developers or designers ensure that boys will not play with girl-targeted games, once again ghettoizing girls’ interests as the marked options. The second group argues that it is not new games genres designed specifically for girls that are needed to breach the gender gap, but the successful development of traditional boys’ games with stronger female characters. Sega’s approach has been to introduce female protagonists into many of its fighting games, giving them strengths and capabilities that are attractive to both male and female players. They contend that better marketing of existing games genres to female consumers may help to close the gap between male and female players. Video game companies tend to advertise
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primarily in media space they view as mixed, like MTV, rather than female-targeted publications like Seventeen magazine.
ANALYSING CONTENT With the increasing popularity of video games and the potential of these games to influence the behaviour of and self-conception of youth, it is important that researchers identify the common messages presented in video games. After these messages are understood, researchers can begin to determine the influence they have on children and youth. The roles of female and male characters have been found to be quite different (Dietz, 1998). In summary, content analyses of video games and video game advertisements have consistently found that women are underrepresented, more frequently sexualized, more attractive, less powerful and dressed more scantily than males (Dietz, 1998; Scharrer, 2004).
GENDER, SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND VIOLENCE Besides this, video games also have an impact on violence in society. The violent nature of virtual gaming takes a toll on the players. Various reviews have been presented which focus on the added effect of violence and aggression (see, for example, Bushman and Anderson, 2002). The meta-analysis executed by Anderson and Bushman (2001), which coded for violent ideals, emotions and manners, has generated a consensus that video games progress violence (see also Carnagey and Anderson, 2005). Gender differences in how violence is perceived and understood have been noted by Brenick et al. (2007) (see also Anderson and Bushman, 2001; Williams and Skoric, 2005). Various experiments have been conducted with girls that investigate their relation to violent gaming. Kamala Norris (2004) focused on differences between women, comparing those who played computer games and those who used the computer but did not play computer games. Norris (2004) found that ‘women who play computer games at home have higher aggression scores than women who do not play computer games’ (2004: 723), and also found that ‘having an aggressive personality was related to gaming behavior. In particular, differences were found in levels of anger, physical aggression, and verbal aggression, but not in hostility’ (2004: 725). Therefore, it is safe to say that the possession of a violent nature is related to the specific character of games. Girls who utilized games for
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Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps 337 lengthier sessions, who were involved in more games and had more experience were usually more violent. Also, distinctions were visible in body language, anger and verbal use of speech (Norris, 2004: 725). Interestingly, the research shows that girls who are used to playing more games are less prone to online threats but more prone to lose online friendship and interaction (2004: 725). Viable understandings of this could be that women who had experienced threats did not come back and that those who are more inclined to gaming or more skilled had better protection from outside interference because they had better understanding of online games and the gaming environment (Norris, 2004). Additional brief thoughts are that girls who are engaged in more online gameplay might be getting rid of threats by engaging in more social interactions and making friends, and they could also be following a particular trend socially (2004: 725). From our personal perspective, enhanced game-playing lengthens social connections. A lot of the users fall into the category of older teenagers and young adults. As such, they constitute a group of people who can work and play together and build better team chemistry amongst the players. However, we are not able to say for sure that sexual threats are always invisible to the naked eye. A study shows that ‘women who use the computer to play games experience less sexual harassment online than those who do not, but they find less friendship online the more they play’ (Norris, 2004: 725). Possible explanations for these possibly contradictory results were that women who experienced sexual harassment did not return, that women who play computer games are more technologically skilled or familiar with online environments and thus are better able to avoid harassment and find friends, or that some women simply aren’t seeking friendships through gameplay (Norris, 2004). Norris (2004) also noted that ‘[w]omen whose favorite game was for a more mature audience also experienced less sexual harassment online, but in addition reported a more friendly online environment than women whose favorite game was for a less mature audience’, with possible explanations being: ‘[w]omen who play more mature games may be avoiding sexual harassment by making friends with other people online, or there may be a different online culture in more mature games [intended for those 17 and older]’ (2004: 725). Matthew Eastin’s (2006) studies on girls’ aggressiveness relied on the sex of the person, rival gender groups and individual characteristics. Eastin (2006) has shown that girls adopting a female playing character had to endure more hostility than their male counterparts. In no respect can this be ascribed to the player’s avatar, as they competed with a human user. Different factors of interest that emerged in the study were that, as females competed with boy competitors and their avatars,
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enhanced hostility and violence followed throughout the gameplay. A girl who had a male individual as her character faced violence from male computer players, but the amount of violence declined if it was a female player (Eastin, 2006). A viable interpretation of this is that, as they play the game with a male computer form, girls have to follow and go through the same social variables in the virtual realm that are identified with violence against women in the real world (Eastin, 2006: 359). When females played against both male human opponents and male computer avatars, aggression increased, and females playing a male character experienced increased aggression against male computer agents, but decreased if the computer opponent was female (Eastin, 2006). A possible explanation for why females playing male characters are less aggressive toward female characters is that, ‘when playing with a male avatar, female players conform to social values that inhibit aggression toward women’ (Eastin, 2006: 359). Why is female aggression increased against human opponents, especially male? Perhaps it is the natural feeling of competition, or perhaps it is that females feel the need to be more masculine in a traditionally masculine setting.
SEXUAL OBJECTIFICATION Brenick et al.’s (2007) theory suggests that, compared to females, boy characters are less clichéd. On top of that, the visuals and images are more attuned to masculine than feminine ideological constructs (2007: 414). More recently, Yao et al. have explored sexual ideologies and the enhanced use of non-affirmative clichés of girls (2010). Their study also looked at how independent initiation of sexual claims and threatening acts were more likely in the case of boys. This happens because in video games girls are more likely to be depicted as bodies of sex or sexual objects and so targets for harassment in different scenarios and on different occasions (2010: 85). Yao et al. predicted that sexually designated video games, sexual words and verbal harassment of women would engender a backlash over time. This is because sexually designed video games give rise to sexual ideas and thoughts which, in turn, promote negative ideas about the opposite sex and evidently morally degrade women (2010: 85). They claim that enjoying a sexually objectifying game induces and augments sexual dilemma and thoughts in the users, which then engenders further actions that encourage other sexual acts. This can happen in 25 minutes’ gameplay (2010: 85). Jackson et al.’s research showed that boys are naturally more engaged in the virtual aspects of the gaming world (2009: 440). In addition, too
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Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps 339 much involvement in these games leads to less mannered and moral attitudes and also decreases self-confidence (2009: 440). These negative impacts not only are felt by the young generation, but might have long-term impacts on the next generation too. Children and their morals are changed because of the centralized sexual nature of the virtual world, for the mind set and outlook in the real and virtual world can never be the same for their counterparts. ‘[V]ideo game playing was associated with a lower behavioral self-concept and lower self-esteem’ (2009: 440). These negative findings open the question as to why video games negatively affect self-concept and self-esteem in youths; is it due to the highly sexualized nature and body image ideals that children are unable to match? Is it that children do not have the same powers and abilities as their video game counterparts do?
POSITIVE BENEFITS There are, however, always two sides to a story. In the case of video games, research has shown benefits in several cases. Kutner et al. have shown that video games provide advantages such as the physical pleasure provided (2008). This is valuable, as it develops personal attributes. It can be particularly valuable to children struggling with physical and mental handicaps, providing a source of social pleasure and helping them to build stable relations with friends who share the same types of interest in life. This not only boosts their self-esteem, but also strengthens the confidence they need in society. In such cases, role-managing games can be beneficial in the long run. Furthermore, these activities can help in building creativity, in fostering intelligence and in providing training in problem-solving in daily life (2008: 70). Thus online gaming can be a possible blessing for children of all ages; it might not only make them comfortable in social situations, but also strengthen social connections and teach them the skills required to improve their prospects. In massively multiplayer online games, game lovers from all over the internet come together virtually for a common cause. They learn how to work together and build their characters. This teaches them priceless values. We need to build on these strengths and also make these games more gender-sensitive, so breaking negative stereotypes. Researchers also point out that video games have positive impacts on visuospatial cognition and mental rotation qualities (Ferguson, 2007; Cherney, 2008). Ferguson’s meta-analysis claims that engaging in violent video games augments visuospatial cognition, which can also help learning ability (2007). Benefits have also been identified in cases of
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youths diagnosed with cancer (2007: 315). The study by Cherney (2008) mentions cognitive gender differences, and that ‘women perform better on verbal tests, whereas men demonstrate greater visuospatial capabilities’, and that men also ‘typically outperform females on certain tests of mental rotation … and spatial perception’ (2008: 776). Cherney’s results demonstrate that ‘even a very brief practice [four hours] in computer game play does improve performance on mental rotation skills’ (2008: 783). Cherney suggests that there are gender distinctions; women are capable of doing better verbally and their male counterparts have larger visuospatial competence (2008). It is also noteworthy that men can be better at doing certain tasks involving physiological and mental perceptions (2008: 776). The outcomes of Cherney’s research indicate that even as little as four hours of clear gaming can influence mental rotation skills; women are the beneficiary in these aspects (2008: 783). Furthermore, Cherney says that women achieved more but their total was less than that of their counterparts in most cases (2008: 783). Cherney (2008) discovered that as gamers stay active for action games for a period of ten hours they can get rid of sex disadvantages and eliminate problems of mental rotation, but this is not possible if the game is not full of the necessary action (2008: 784).
CONCLUSION To conclude, one has to look deeply into the positives and negatives that come along with computer games. One fact cannot be denied – they have captured the minds of youth nowadays. The significance of the virtual gaming world is undeniable, and the possibilities it opens up are priceless to children of all ages. Social networking through online gaming is a huge step toward making friendships and connections across the globe. For many, actually to get in a game and be a part of something is to experience the kind of power that they dream of and aspire to get in life. The qualities and the skills that are developed through networking and gaming are greatly valued. There is a potential dark side to everything, but no harm will be done if the right control and manner of use are present in daily usage. Computer gaming has the potential to create a gender-just society, but unless gender stereotyping is taken seriously and dealt with seriously there will be no change in the mind set and the gender gap will be perpetuated.
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Computer games and the reinforcement of gender gaps 341
REFERENCES Anderson, Craig A. and Brad J. Bushman (2001) ‘Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behaviour: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature’, Psychological Science, 12 (5), 353–359. Beasley, Berrin and Tracey C. Standley (2002) ‘Shirts vs. skins: clothing as an indicator of gender role stereotyping in video games’, Mass Communication and Society, 5 (3), 279–293. Brenick, Alaina, Alexandra Henning, Melanie Killen, Alexander O’Connor and Michael Collins (2007) ‘Social valuations of stereotypic images in video games: unfair, legitimate, or “just entertainment”?’, Youth Society, 38, 395–419. Bushman, Brad J. and Craig A. Anderson (2002) ‘Violent video games and hostile expectations: a test of the general aggression model’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28 (12), 1679–1686. Carnagey, N.L. and C.A. Anderson (2005) ‘The effects of reward and punishment in violent video games on aggressive affect, cognition, and behavior’, Psychological Science, 16 (1), 882–889. Cassell, Justine and Henry Jenkins (eds) (1998) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cherney, Isabelle D. (2008) ‘Mom, let me play more computer games: they improve my mental rotation skills’, Sex Roles, 59, 776–786. Dietz, Tracy L. (1998) ‘An examination of violence and gender role portrayals in video games: implications for gender socialization and aggressive behavior’, Sex Roles, 38, 425–442. Eastin, Matthew (2006) ‘Video game violence and the female game player: self- and opponent gender effects on presence and aggressive thoughts’, Human Communication Research, 32 (3), 351–372. Ferguson, Christopher (2007) ‘The good, the bad and the ugly: a meta-analytic review of positive and negative effects of violent video games’, Psychiatric Quarterly, 78 (4), 309–316. Hausmann, Ricardo, Laura D. Tyson and Saadia Zahidi (2012) The Global Gender Gap Report 2012, Geneva: World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_ GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf (accessed July 2013). Jackson, Linda, Zhao Yong, Edward Witt, Hiram Fitzgerald, Alexander von Eye and Rena Harold (2009) ‘Self-concept, self-esteem, gender, race, and information technology use’, Cyber Psychology and Behaviour, 12 (4), 437–440. Jansz, Jeroen and Raynel G. Martis (2003) ‘The representation of gender and ethnicity in digital interactive games’, in M. Copier and Joost Raessens (eds), Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference, Utrecht: Utrecht University, pp. 260–269. Kafai, Yasmin B. (1998) ‘Video game design by girls and boys: variability and consistency of gender differences’, in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (eds), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 90– 114. Kramer, P. and S. Lehman (1990) ‘Mismeasuring women: a critique of research on computer ability and avoidance’, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 16 (1), 158–172. Kutner, L.A., C.K. Olson, D.E. Warner and S.M. Hertzog (2008) ‘Parents’ and sons’ perspectives on video game play: a qualitative study’, Journal of Adolescent Research, 23, 76–96. Lucas, Kristen and John Sherry (2004) ‘Sex differences in video game play: a communication-based explanation’, Communication Research, 31 (5), 499–523.
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McCroskey, James C. and Thomas A. McCain (1974) ‘The measurement of interpersonal attraction’, Speech Monographs, 41 (3), 261–266. Mikula, Maja (2003) ‘Gender and videogames: the political valency of Lara Croft’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 17, 80–87. Miller, Monica K. and Alicia Summers (2007) ‘Gender differences in videogame characters’ roles, appearances, and attire as portrayed in video game magazines’, Sex Roles, 57, 733–742. Norris, Kamala (2004) ‘Gender stereotypes, aggression, and computer games: an online survey of women’, CyberPsychology and Behaviour, 7 (6), 714–727. Richard, Birgit and Jutta Zaremba (2005) ‘Gaming with girls: looking for heroes in computer games’, in John Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (eds), Handbook for Computer Game Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 283–300. Scharrer, Erica (2004) ‘Virtual violence: gender and aggression in video game advertisements’, Mass Communication and Society, 7, 393–412. Schleiner, Anne-Marie (2001) ‘Does Lara Croft wear fake polygons? Gender and gender-role subversion in computer adventure games’, Leonardo, 34 (3), 221–226. Williams, Dmitri and Marko Skoric (2005) ‘Internet fantasy violence: a test of aggression in an online game’, Communication Monographs, 72 (2), 217–233. Yao, Mike, Chad Mahood and Daniel Linz (2010) ‘Sexual priming, gender stereotyping, and likelihood to sexually harass: examining the cognitive effects of playing a sexually-explicit video game’, Sex Roles, 62 (1/2), 77–88.
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PART VII POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT
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40. Feminist political economy Penny Griffin
Feminists ‘do’ political economy in distinctive, diverse and important ways. In drawing on materialist, poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives (Elias, 2011: 105), feminists approach their research questions from various and sometimes incommensurable epistemological orientations, ‘diverse spatial and temporal locations’ and ‘several disciplinary locations’ (Peterson, 2012: 15). This chapter offers an outline of where feminists target their analyses and describes something of the uniqueness of feminist approaches to systems of production, exchange, consumption and reproduction. With ‘a long and distinguished intellectual history’, feminist political economy has been developing a ‘theoretical as well as an empirical and policy-orientated body of literature’ over some time (Hoskyns and Rai, 2007: 298–299). While feminist analyses of the global political economy share a commitment to examining socio-economic processes as always and inherently gendered, a variety of origins, methods, theoretical orientations and empirical approaches to the study of gender exist within and across feminist scholarship. Feminists do not agree on the relationship between sex and the body, nor do they agree on how to approach and study gender. Classifications of feminist political economy are particularly difficult given feminism’s ongoing commitment to challenging the boundaries that discipline academic bodies. Indeed, ‘some of the key contributors to feminist IPE scholarship are writers who would not necessarily locate themselves within the field’ (Elias, 2011: 102). Although many of the scholars cited here define themselves as scholars of either international relations (IR) or international political economy (IPE), feminist political economists do not work only in these disciplines. Thus, this chapter talks broadly about scholarship across three particular fields of study: economics, development studies and studies in (global) governance. Despite a number of important individual contributions to the field, feminist political economy has, over the past decade, and as Hozic and True (forthcoming) note, been relatively dormant as a collective project. In part, this has been due to the security studies focus in IR after the events of 9/11, with IPE something of a quieter voice against IR’s longstanding, and rather noisy, obsession with international security and 345
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military affairs. It is also a result of the priority feminist scholars have given to demonstrating the difference feminist and gender perspectives make to the almost exclusively masculine domain of international security and military affairs (ibid.). Yet, as the pernicious effects of financial crisis persist and neoliberal austerity maintains its grip on economic policy-making, feminism remains a powerful and important voice dedicated to interrogating the gendered foundations and consequences of processes that have received insufficient attention in the mainstream literature.
FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY: KEY IDEAS Feminists who ‘do’ political economy have emerged primarily as heterodox scholars in economics and international political economy (Peterson, 2012: 15). Feminist approaches in IPE are often conflated with ‘critical IPE’, which is concerned explicitly with ‘criticizing the exploitative dynamic of capitalist developments’ (ibid.: 12). Some would argue that feminist IPE is the quintessentially critical IPE, since it integrates into political economy crucial, yet neglected, understandings of everyday life, social relations, the household, culture, identity and gendered structural forces. Sharing critical IPE’s commitment to historicizing economic relations and politicizing economic discourse, feminist IPE is also, however, distinct in centralizing gender in economic processes and interrogating the structural vulnerability of the human body. Despite efforts by feminist scholars to broaden the terminology and interests of critical IPE, ‘the majority of critical IPE scholars can and do ignore feminist writings with impunity’ (Waylen, 2006: 164), and so feminists find themselves having to continually restate their contributions (Elias, 2011: 100–101). Feminist theory seeks not only to ‘empower women’, but ‘to advance critical analysis and transformation of multiple’, and intersecting, ‘structural hierarchies’ (Peterson, 2012: 6). This necessitates a critique not only of ‘patriarchy’, but also of how patriarchy intersects with capitalism and racism. Feminists are engaged constantly in ‘rethinking theoretical premises’ (basic assumptions, guiding principles and discursive foundations) at every stage of research (ibid.), reflecting on the social, political and cultural conditions in which their knowledge is made possible and problematizing and politicizing the role of theory in reproducing how and what we know about the world. Feminists ‘have long struggled with how to theorise “difference” through a critical lens’ and have included in their studies considerations of ‘alleged differences between males and
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Feminist political economy 347 females’, including the structures of inequality these have legitimized, differences among and between women and key structural hierarchies of national ‘difference’, class, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality (ibid.). Feminist political economists are specifically attuned to the function that theoretical assumptions play in the global political economy: assumptions, for example, about ‘rational’ economic action or the human activities that will and will not be counted in national systems of accounts. They take seriously how discourses of neoliberal development, based on widening the reach of the market in developing economies, have circulated certain assumptions about appropriate behaviour in economic markets and are based on the modelling of economic activity on white, middle-class, male bodies. Feminists pay careful attention to the ways in which governance discourses have rewritten local and domestic social relations and how they have rendered alternative modes of thinking difficult, even illegitimate. Feminist political economists concentrate their research largely around questions related to three particular fields of study: economics, development studies and studies in (global) governance. These fields, are, of course, rarely distinct, such that questions of state economic policymaking or development policy-making, for example, intersect with questions of social reproduction, identity or the rise of the informal economy, and so on. If anything can be said to ‘mark’ feminist political economy from other forms of political analysis, it is perhaps that feminist political economists both take seriously the struggle over meanings attached to key terms (like governance, power, capital and so on) and pay particular attention to the secondary partner in any apparently commonsensical political economy binary (male/female, goods/services, local/ global and so on). In particular, feminist analyses, although often as concerned with the productive economy as mainstream and critical IPE scholarship, have sought to centralize the reproductive economy in their analyses, explaining the everyday, and largely uncounted, ‘caring’ and ‘domestic’ activities that enable the functioning of capitalist economies (Elias, 2011: 105–109). Feminist analyses thus play an important role in demonstrating how the productive economy, including its processes and labour dimensions, functions to reproduce ‘forms of social inequality’ within the capitalist productive economy, which ‘may indeed be integral to its functioning’ (ibid.: 105).
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FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY: KEY PRACTICES Feminist critiques of the hierarchies that underpin global economic relations have a long history and include close examination of theoretical and empirical questions. Feminists have challenged the apparently unproblematic masculinist values that are embedded in the theoretical and empirical aspects of economics, development and governance. They have addressed ‘the systemic nature of gender inequality’ in the global political economy ‘and its connection with other forms of inequality’ (Kabeer, 1994: 38), exposing the relations of power that render gendered inequalities reliant on localized social divisions of class and race. They have revealed the gendered divisions of labour that shape the trajectory of contemporary models of capitalism, the impact of development policymaking on gendered social relations, the continued neglect of social reproduction and the exclusion of measurements of women’s unpaid labour from ‘official’ development statistics. Feminist critiques have interrogated the gendered effects of neoliberal restructuring, uncovering the gendered dynamics of the globalization of production, labour, investment and capital. They have noted how women’s involvement in the financial sectors has often been rendered invisible ‘through assumptions and constructions of the “nature” of women and men and their supposed proper place in the socioeconomic and political order’ (Assassi, 2009: 4). Feminist scholarship has problematized the construction of development ‘expertise’ that has rendered gender a marketable but ambiguous ‘variable’ in strategies of economic development, disassembling how feminist knowledge has been adapted to serve the purposes of private actors, corporations and instruments of governance. Feminist economists have sought to challenge the gender blindness of economic theorizing, rethinking economic policy and working actively ‘toward a feminist transformation of economics’ (Barker, 2005: 2189). Drawing particularly from the schools of neoclassical economics, institutionalist economics and Marxist political economy, feminist economists are often more interested in seeking to understand the material dimensions of women’s lives than in understanding gender discursively and have tended to adopt an empiricist methodology. Relying ‘on accepted statistical methods and standards of evidence to support progressive feminist interventions in national and international economic policies’, feminist economists have used empirical studies to, for example, disaggregate economic variables by gender or other demographic characteristics, or to estimate the differential effects of economic policies (ibid.: 2190).
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Feminist political economy 349 Many feminist development scholars are situated in and deploy the tools of feminist economics, and the links between feminist development studies and feminist economics are strong. From early ‘women-indevelopment’ (WID) interventions to more recent ‘gender and development’ (GAD) literature, feminist scholarship in development studies has been extensive. Responding to the continued lack of development theory and practice that considered, or even mentioned, ‘women’, feminist work in and on development began by exposing how women (considered wives and mothers, not agents for change) were being left out of the plans and policies of so-called development ‘experts’ and the damage that this was wreaking, not just on households, but on national growth figures. The publication of Ester Boserup’s highly influential Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970) initiated serious discussion of women’s role(s) in development, delineating on a global scale the sexual division of labour that existed in agrarian economies and revealing the costs to women of the modernization and ‘development’ of poor countries. Feminists today continue to concentrate on the gender division of labour, household composition, gender relations and changing structure of the labour force (Benería, 2003: 10). Feminist work on macro-economic policy and, in particular, the under-studied and pernicious effects of structural adjustment programmes has uncovered how the apparently ‘gender-neutral’ policies and discourses of economic growth prevalent across development actors and institutions have relied on the sexual division of labour and the exploitation of women’s reproductive capacities. The shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ across development (theory, practice and policy) has also provided feminist development studies with new theoretical formulations, initiating ‘a rejection of essentialism in feminist work’ and destabilizing ‘previously assumed connections between structure and the socioeconomic conditions affecting men and women’ (Benería, 2003: 40). This shift is important in understanding the directions taken by contemporary feminist political economy scholarship. Much recent work tends to prefer gender as socially conditioned rather than biologically disaggregable and draws heavily on post-positivist theorizing to link and challenge micro- and macro-economic trends, patterns and relationships. Importantly, feminist work is highly attuned to the intersections between these relationships and generates sharp critiques both of the repeated trivialization of gender in economic analysis and of the gendered relations of power that drive systems of economic development and growth, global financial flows, and systems of manufacturing and production. While many feminists remain anxious at any loss of focus on women’s lives, the turn towards ‘gender’ in feminist
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work has largely succeeded in combining a care for women’s lives with a focus on understanding gender as pivotal to the structures of the global political economy. Feminist scholarship on (global) governance, which has coincided with the explosion of ‘governance’ rhetoric in IR more broadly since the late 1980s, has focused on a variety of areas and themes. Feminists have been particularly attentive to state and non-state mobilizations of power, ‘the changing relationship between states, markets, and civil society and nongovernmental organisations’ (Bedford and Rai, 2010: 5) and changing modes of governance across the international space. Feminist analyses have considered how certain technologies of governance (including strategies of ‘gender mainstreaming’ and ‘diversity management’) have reproduced gendered relations of power, and more recently have reflected on the role that feminists can play in challenging and resisting ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’. Struggles over the ‘meanings attached to the term “governance” have’, however, frequently characterized debate ‘in both the North and the South’ (ibid.). Thus, while Northern scholars have very effectively ‘challenged the ways in which the concept of governance has become a triumphal shorthand for neoliberal shifts in market–state relations’, in the South more critical attention has been paid to the widespread application of ‘state failure’ rhetoric to developing countries (ibid.). Many contemporary governance feminists are interested in reconstructing theory as an end in itself and engage with gender as a ‘governing code’ in the global political economy, shaping how we think, what we presume to know, and how our knowledge claims are legitimated (Peterson, 2005: 502). In practice, this has produced analyses of, for example, the ways in which dominant globalization discourses condition and limit knowledge in the global political economy by reproducing problematic binaries, including the masculinized Western self versus the backward, irrational, indigenous Other, or how the economies of conflict, war and illicit trade are made possible through and impact more forcefully certain people owing to the effects of neoliberal globalization.
KEY WORKS Feminism’s attendance to the exclusionary tactics of naming strategies marks it as particularly averse to ‘best of’ lists, and examples of excellent feminist political economy scholarship are too many to mention. Feminist interventions in studies of the global political economy have sought to build different kinds of knowledge about global politics, combining
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Feminist political economy 351 interdisciplinary approaches to terminology, methodology and empirical analysis. Integrating understandings of culture, everyday life, and material and structural forces and dedicated to transforming knowledge and practice, feminist political economy research ‘has long been characterized by scholarship that is critical, theoretically rich, methodologically radical, and solidly grounded’ (Bedford and Rai, 2010: 12). Placing gender at the heart of social, cultural, political and economic relations, feminist scholarship uncovers the privileging of gendered values in the global political economy and the possibilities for alternative modes of socio-economic organization. Found across the social sciences and particularly in the fields of feminist economics, development studies and IPE, multidisciplinary feminist political economists have responded fiercely to the rise of modernization, the power of mainstream approaches to economic development and the gender blindness of development strategy. Their work has recognized the responsibilities, suffering and contributions of women, Third World or otherwise, across the global political economy. While making women empirically visible in the global political economy has been ‘an indispensable project’, and one that exposes the androcentricity, even overt sexism, of existing structures and paradigms (emphasis in original), Peterson (2005: 501–502) argues that simply adding women to structures constituted as masculine does not tackle the gendered underpinnings of reigning paradigms. ‘Feminist critical theory’, emerging from the Marxist tradition but attuned to the sociopolitical institutionalization of gendered power differences ignored by critical theorists, has analysed gender relations through examination of the structures and social practices that support and perpetuate particular gender relations (Steans, 1999: 114). Importantly, such scholarship ‘does not concentrate so much upon what women do socially, still less on what women are biologically, but rather on the meanings which their actions acquire through social interactions’ (ibid.: 115, emphasis in original). Challenging the binary distinctions (such as goods/services, formal/informal and public/private) that obscure the centrality of ‘domestic’ production in the global political economy, perhaps feminism’s most notable contribution has been its rewriting of the most prominent, and most taken-for-granted, of political economy’s key terms, terms such as ‘work’, ‘production’ and ‘capitalism’. In tending to defy ‘reductionist biological explanations’ for economic events and relations (Bedford and Rai, 2010: 2), feminists prefer rigorous analysis of the gendered realities in which women and men labour and reproduce. Feminists have challenged economic regimes in global and local forms, critiquing extensively (globalized) processes of production,
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reproduction, circulation and consumption. They have exposed gendered divisions of labour and accumulation and have sought to displace the relations of power and privilege that have (purposefully) been obscured from intellectual and public scrutiny. Feminists have contested the dominant, neoliberal, narratives of globalization and have critiqued their dependence on the unquestioned centrality of the market in everyday life, underlining the disproportions of neoliberal policy outcomes, the vulnerabilities reproduced by gendered employment patterns and the feminization of global migration. They have exposed gender’s position in regimes of capitalist investment, production, circulation and consumption, situating the production of knowledge as central to understanding the (re)production of material goods and resources. Feminist authors have highlighted the growth of informalized and precarious jobs appearing primarily in developing countries and the ways in which this impacts different social sectors in specific ways. Their critique of the hegemony of neoliberalism, including its reliance on narratives of marketization and ‘flexible capitalism’, goes to the heart of many political economy preoccupations, including the changing shape of capital and labour relations, employment activities, processes of informalization and decentralization, differing cultures of work, industrial displacement and the polarizing effects of skilled/unskilled definitions of labour. Feminists have intervened to develop and situate the concept of ‘social reproduction’ in political economy inquiry, interrogating how this is institutionalized ‘through gendered labour, discourses, and the organisation of everyday life’ and yet rarely included in the analytical work of political economists or national statistical measurements (Bedford and Rai, 2010: 7). Feminist scholarship has deconstructed the form and function of measures of gender equality in governance, including diversity ‘management’ and quota systems, and their significance in resuscitating capitalist imperatives. Feminists continue to voice concerns around the co-optation and path of feminist knowledge, including the corporatization of development policy-making and practice and the rise of transnational business feminism. In recent years, feminist scholarship’s grip on the politics of restructuring has lent it a particularly incisive edge in discussions of the so-called global financial crisis. Feminist arguments around the gendered foundations of economic development, crisis and governance have captured how changing dynamics of power and knowledge in the global political economy encouraged various crises of capitalism in the twentieth century. Feminist analyses have revealed how shifts in power towards private actors have enabled gendered relations of power and privilege to flourish. Feminist research has scrutinized calls for ‘gender balancing’
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Feminist political economy 353 across organizations, private and public, which is often unproblematically assumed to improve government and business accountability, and has demonstrated the especially high price of austerity measures paid by women across developed and developing countries.
REFERENCES Assassi, Libby (2009) The Gendering of Global Finance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Barker, Drucilla K. (2005) ‘Beyond women and economics: rereading “women’s work”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30 (4), 2189–2209. Bedford, Kate and Shirin Rai (2010) ‘Feminists theorize international political economy’, Signs, 36 (1), 1–18. Benería, Lourdes (2003) Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, London: Routledge. Boserup, Ester (1970) Woman’s Role in Economic Development, London: Allen & Unwin. Elias, Juanita (2011) ‘Critical feminist scholarship and IPE’, in Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney (eds), Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate and Dissensus, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–115. Hoskyns, Catherine and Shirin Rai (2007) ‘Recasting the global political economy: counting women’s unpaid work’, New Political Economy, 12 (3), 297–317. Hozic, Aida and Jacqui True (eds) (forthcoming) Scandalous Economics: The Spectre of Gender and Global Financial Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kabeer, Naila (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, London: Verso. Peterson, V. Spike (2005) ‘How (the meaning of) gender matters in political economy’, New Political Economy, 10 (4), 499–521. Peterson, V. Spike (2012) ‘Rethinking theory’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14 (1), 5–35. Steans, Jill (1999) ‘The private is global: feminist politics and global political economy’, New Political Economy, 4 (1), 113–128. Waylen, Georgina (2006) ‘You still don’t understand: why troubled engagements continue between feminists and (critical) IPE’, Review of International Studies, 32, 145–164.
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41. Gender in global restructuring Anne Sisson Runyan
INTRODUCTION There has been a feminist literature on economic development and international political economy (IPE) since the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s feminist global political economy (GPE) scholarship has been focusing on globalization in part as a result of feminist poststructural and postcolonial interventions that went beyond examinations of the impact of state–market relations on women to bring greater attention to the gendered ideological and socio-cultural underpinnings of the GPE and the production of gendered subjectivities as well as material effects on gendered bodies. But this shift was also in response to the “buzzword” status globalization had achieved in policy circles and even popular culture and the challenges it appeared to be making to even powerful states as arbiters of economic relations. However, despite decades of feminist development and IPE analysis, early globalization studies, whether promulgated by those on the right or left of the political spectrum, largely ignored gender analysis. Instead, totalizing pictures of globalization, whether extolled or lamented, were purveyed that represented it as a force from everywhere and nowhere. Globalization was credited with the unprecedented capacity to break down economic, political and cultural sovereignties and borders in order to spread capitalist production, universalize capitalist values at the expense of social welfare protections, and homogenize cultures through time and space compressions enabled by new transportation and communication technologies. It was also viewed as unstoppable, creating either global cosmopolitanism and/or a global race to the bottom. Feminist scholars (see Marchand and Runyan, 2000) responded to such macro and economistic analyses by pointing out that they: left no room for consideration of human, and particularly women’s, agency in globalizing processes and resistances to them; presented globalization teleologically as an overarching phenomenon rather than a process that is uneven, multidimensional, disjunctive and contradictory with differing effects in differing contexts; and disregarded the masculinist nature of visions of cosmopolitanites free to traverse the globe and the feminized status of those consigned and confined to the bottom. Global restructuring (see 354
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Gender in global restructuring 355 Marchand and Runyan, 2000, 2011) was posited as an alternative conceptual framework to challenge and complicate such uni-directional, omniscient and hegemonic views of globalization. Thus, feminist analyses of global restructuring are not about simply inserting “women” into already existing globalization analyses, but rather restructuring our understandings of this complex process to better see multi-level and co-constitutive economic, political and cultural change, the interrelationships between ideological/symbolic systems, institutional/ structural forces and identity/subjectivity formations, and the intersecting power relations of gender, sexuality, race, class and nation upon which global restructuring depends. Although globalization remains the dominant term in academic, policy and popular parlance, global restructuring, since it represents multidimensional, interconnected and profound transformations that are also ever shifting and open-ended, can better accommodate theoretical constructs and material processes that are not easily subsumed under the still too narrow and foreclosing concept of globalization. Restructuring can be observed in all manner of contexts, but does not necessarily take the same forms, and can be enacted from below as well as from above. While neoliberalism, or the ideology of market fundamentalism, has become deeply attached to and even synonymous with globalization, restructuring need not take solely neoliberal forms, even though they are highly pervasive globally. Foregrounding gender in global restructuring focuses unique attention on the relations between the global and the intimate, specifically the simultaneous restructuring of work (production) and family (reproduction), governance and bodies, and social movements and identities. It also raises new questions about the neoliberalization of feminism and other social movements as well as new proposals for restructuring political resistance to neoliberal priorities.
ISSUES AND DEBATES Saskia Sassen (2002) identified three phases of gender and globalization inquiry from the last few decades of the twentieth century into the new millennium. The first two phases consisted of: (1) the focus in early feminist development studies on the marginalization of women’s subsistence agricultural labor under modernizing development strategies upon which capital-intensive enterprises were parasitic, relying on the “‘invisible’ work of women” to provide family subsistence to keep wages low in cash crop and natural resource extraction industries; and (2) the early feminist IPE critiques of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and “the internationalisation of manufacturing production and the feminisation of
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the proletariat that came with it” most visible in export-processing zones (EPZs) (Sassen, 2002: 92–93). While these inquiries are ongoing, a third phase began with the rise of the term globalization as the most common shorthand to describe the deepening economic, political and cultural shifts that such trends represented. Sassen characterizes the third phase as most concerned with the rise in women’s international migration for remittances as a national development and family survival strategy, the impact of this (as well as male out-migration for remittances) on households and gender relations within them, and the new subjectivities (“including feminist ones”) and potential new solidarities that emerge from these cross-border experiences (2002: 93). Around the same time, V. Spike Peterson (2003) posited that biological and social reproduction and the exchange of signs and symbols (including media representations, advertising and financial transactions) are not separate or secondary spheres outside of the productive economy, but rather constitute economies intertwined with the productive economy, mutually restructuring one another in gendered ways. Feminized reproductive and productive economies (that is, economies that rest on women’s unpaid and ever elastic labor in the household and a cheapened and exploited labor force made quiescent by economic insecurity) are necessary to coronate consumption “as natural, desirable, and key to the meaning of individual and collective life” (Peterson, 2003: 144–145) and to elevate masculinized financial capital over the production of goods and services, laboring bodies and social reproduction. While Peterson sees this interlocking neoliberal restructuring as productive of thoroughgoing depoliticization, Sassen sees openings for new political identities and transnational solidarities arising from labor migrations, albeit significantly circumscribed ones as states exercise increasing controls over borders in the post-9/11 era even as capital demands labor mobility without labor and social protections. Empirical feminist research has revealed that some women with the requisite education and skills are advancing in industrial and post-industrial economies (see, for example, Moghadam et al., 2011) and that labor migration does loosen patriarchal household relations for women who are left behind to manage households and earn income in the wake of male out-migration and for women who migrate on their own to provide better and often sole incomes for themselves and their families left behind (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011). There is also evidence that more “modernized” gender identities and even sexual identities can form when individual women migrate from South to North and from rural to urban areas most often to perform industrial work, care work and sex work, which can also produce newfound worker identities. But, even as patriarchal family orders and
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Gender in global restructuring 357 traditional gender and sexuality roles are restructured by migration, regulatory social controls are still exerted by the sending countries, immigration regimes of host countries, and employers which reinforce gender and sexuality norms and racialized social orders (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011). Moreover, the degree to which and how identities (gender, sexual, worker) are restructured depend upon (im)migrant status (documented or undocumented, guest worker, permanent resident or naturalized citizen), the nature of work (formal or informal, licit or illicit, high-end or low-end), relative class and race privilege, and possibilities for and actualizations of collective organizing (labor, feminist, social justice). There is considerable evidence of an upsurge in (increasingly interrelated) transnational labor, feminist, sexual minority and social justice organizing for economic and social rights as a result of and as part of global restructuring processes and in resistance to neoliberal priorities (see, for example, Moghadam et al., 2011; Moghadam, 2013). The Global Justice Movement (sometimes known as the anti-globalization or critical globalization movement) is most associated with the host of transnational gatherings known as the World Social Forums periodically held around the world since the first mass protests against globalization occurred in 2000, aided then and since by the use of information technologies and social media. These forums, consisting of representatives from an array of local, national and transnational social movements, insist that there are alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. As Valentine Moghadam (2013) observes, in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis induced by Western financial markets, the anti-austerity protests in Europe, the Arab Spring uprisings and the Occupy mobilizations throughout the world to protest widening economic inequality and to claim the economic rights of the “99%” are also a part of the Global Justice Movement. But it has been transnational feminist networks that have extended calls for economic justice and participatory democracy to include equality and an end to all forms of domination, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, nationality and so on. Still there are concerns about neoliberal restructurings of femininities, masculinities, sexualities and feminisms that can undermine the development of transnational social justice solidarities. The widening of economic inequalities between the rich and the rest has also led to widening divisions among women, among men, and among sexual and gender minorities around the world. Ironically, at the same time that neoliberal restructuring was consolidating in the 1990s, attention to gender in global policymaking was gaining traction (see Runyan and Peterson, 2014). In an approach different from feminist agendas for gender and global
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justice, global governance actors, such as UN agencies, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, took up gender equity instrumentally, constituting women and girls as untapped human capital that could drive economic growth if unleashed. As Angela McRobbie (2009) argues, such feminist-inflected equal opportunity and gender mainstreaming policies have enabled some women and girls in the North and South to advance in the high-tech knowledge and high-end service economy. But “the landscape of self-improvement” that such policies inculcate, which is consistent with neoliberal values of self-help and neoliberal privatization of public responsibilities and evisceration of social welfare programs, “substitutes for the feminist values of solidarity and support and instead embraces and promotes female individualisation and condemnation of those who remain unable or unwilling to help themselves” (McRobbie, 2009: 73). Moreover, freedoms to become sexualized in popular culture substitute for sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms. At the same time, masculinities associated with poor, racialized men, as opposed to the financial and corporate elite most responsible for the Great Recession (and a host of earlier economic crises) resulting in large-scale female and male unemployment, are held accountable for holding back poor women, imagined as (always heterosexual and gender-normative) engines of growth, who only need be provided with microcredit to trigger their earning potential (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011). Such gendered neoliberal approaches to upward mobility for the few and poverty alleviation for the rest are also being accompanied by new corporate, international governmental organization (IGO) and nongovernmental organization (NGO) alliances that encourage Northern private philanthropy, as opposed to public redistributions of wealth, to “save” Southern (often female) recipients from a host of poverty-induced bodily harms such as HIV/AIDs and sex trafficking, often through consuming charitable, yet chic, goods ironically produced in the South by laboring bodies under questionable labor conditions and further enriching corporate sponsors even as some of the proceeds go to charitable projects (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011; Runyan and Peterson, 2014). These campaigns serve not only to depoliticize responses to the povertyproducing effects of neoliberal restructuring by substituting consumerism for activism, but also to reproduce neocolonial relations between North and South, which further hampers solidarity-building in transnational social justice movements. As Moghadam (2013: 216) asks, is the transnational restructuring of activism ushering in a “new age of global justice” or is the neoliberal restructuring of activism a sign that “the era of neoliberal globalisation” is “reassert[ing] itself”?
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Gender in global restructuring 359
KEY WORKS AND CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP A further feature of global restructuring that is complicating survival strategies, including migrations, and hindering the development of transnational feminist and social justice movements is the increased securitization of populations, bodies and borders, particularly in the post-9/11 era. Under what some call neoliberal imperialism, the new imperialism or simply Empire, wealth continues to be extracted from the global poor, but through more violent forms of accumulation and dispossession than those associated with earlier colonial or neocolonial periods. At the same time, bodies are more closely surveilled for risk in gendered and racialized ways (the “terrorist” Muslim man, the pregnant undocumented Mexican migrant, the transgender asylum seeker), and such “risky” bodies, which do not conform to hegemonic national identities or are constituted as threatening to national security or jobs and social welfare benefits to be reserved only for (certain) citizens, are held up at borders and/or incarcerated. Still spiraling “war on terror” costs precipitate and justify deep cuts in social welfare programs. Street protests against neoliberal institutions and austerity measures and Occupy encampments for the 99% are met with ever more militarized police actions to disperse and dismantle them. And fiscal discipline is imposed on the most feminized and mostly female (poor debtor states, junk mortgage borrowers, food stamp recipients, minimum wage earners), sometimes under the threat of force, while masculinized and mostly male financial and corporate elites soon after the 2008 economic crisis were rewarded with bailouts, impunity from criminal prosecution, executive raises and once again unprecedented profits (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011; Runyan and Peterson, 2014). There was much talk about (and some research to support) the idea that women financial managers engage in less risky investments, and, thus, were they to be present in greater numbers, future financial crises could be averted (see Marchand and Runyan, 2011), and the European Union is now requiring quotas for female directors to achieve greater gender balance on European corporate boards under this logic. But this is only a superficial fix (and one that privileges only privileged women) and does not address the normalization of crises, ongoing dispossessions and neoliberal restructuring of political, including but not confined to feminist, activism. In a sustained dialogue between Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (2013, chapter 14), Athanasiou encapsulates growing critiques of constant invocations of crisis in arguing that “discourses of crisis become a way to governmentally produced and manage (rather than
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deter) the crisis,” the opposite of what Butler refers to as “a radical democratic uprising” in response to the “precarity” of the many as the few amass wealth. They argue, however, that in order to resist dispossession it is necessary to resist the neoliberal logic of private possessions as its corrective, and instead to counter it with a politics of “interdependency and relationality” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013, chapter 1). Relatedly Nancy Fraser (2013: 236) argues that resistance to “marketisation” cannot be a resurrection or extension of “social protection” without “emancipation.” In the absence of this double move, she argues, emancipatory identity movements (feminist, multiculturalist/anti-racist, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer/intersex, anti-colonial, indigenous) can be more easily subject(ed) to neoliberal responses which reduce solutions to inequality to market mechanisms that may elevate some within and across identity categories, but leave most under conditions of structural inequality and continuing dispossession. Social protection, as a revaluing of social reproduction (and the environmental sustainability upon which it depends) over market forces and a redistribution and leveling of wealth and power, addresses more structural inequalities and dispossessions, but, when it is invoked in the name of protectionism by anti-immigration, homophobic religious and racist nationalist groups or used as the basis for returning to the heteronormative and sexist family wage system in which male employment is valorized or surveilling pregnant or (potentially) diseased bodies to control them for the social good, then it becomes anti-emancipatory. Moreover, if social protection is only pursued within national borders and only for (certain) citizens, it fails not only to be emancipatory but also to arrest global marketization. Fraser acknowledges that more postcolonial (what some now call decolonial or sometimes transnational) feminisms have been and remain most conscious of the necessity to interrelate social protection and emancipation as a critical response to marketization. Thus, a feminist focus on gender in global restructuring has enabled the introduction of human subjects, subjectivity and agency into an otherwise abstract and disempowering IPE focus on states and markets. In the process, it has revealed the co-constitutive restructurings of the intimate and the global, suggestive of both the thoroughgoing nature of neoliberal restructuring and openings for its resistance from personal survival strategies to the forming of transnational solidarities as identities, bodies and movements are restructured not just by neoliberalism but in response to it. It has also widened analysis of how not only gendered but also interconnected sexualized, raced and classed valorizations and devalorizations propel the symbolic power and order the material effects of global restructuring. Finally, it brings attention to restructurings of all
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Gender in global restructuring 361 sorts of boundaries, both negative and positive, which deeply complicate understandings of global restructuring from above and transnational restructurings from below.
REFERENCES Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Kindle version, Cambridge: Polity. Fraser, Nancy (2013) The Fortunes of Feminism: From State-managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, London: Verso. Marchand, Marianne H. and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds) (2000) Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, London: Routledge. Marchand, Marianne H. and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds) (2011) Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. McRobbie, Angela (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change, Los Angeles: Sage. Moghadam, Valentine M. (2013) Globalisation and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Moghadam, Valentine M., Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow (2011) Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, Albany: State University of New York Press. Peterson, V. Spike (2003) A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economies, London: Routledge. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson (2014) Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, 4th edn, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sassen, Saskia (2002) ‘Counter-geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival’, in Kriemild Saunders (ed.), Feminist Post-development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism, and Representation, London: Zed Books, pp. 89–104.
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42. Gender and migration Eleonore Kofman
Until the late 1970s, women’s role in migration had largely been ignored, but by the 1980s women had become a subject of enquiry in the literature on migration, in part owing to the growing presence of feminism in academic disciplines. The new international division of labour and the relocation of production to the Global South changed the gender composition of rural-to-urban migrants, especially in Latin America and Asia (Sassen-Koob, 1984). In her ground-breaking book, Cynthia Enloe (1989) highlighted a diversity of migrations which contributed to making feminist sense of international politics in the post-war years. Women migrated within states to work in manufacturing in the newly created export processing zones (EPZs) in Asia, Mexico and Central America and to supply sexual services at military bases in South Asia. Internationally and regionally, women also migrated to middle-class households in North America and Europe to work as nannies, au pairs and domestic workers. Since the 1990s the field of gender and migration has expanded enormously, especially in response to increased migration from the Global South to the Global North. Theoretically, there has been a shift from the study of women migrants to gender as an analytical category and an engagement with perspectives of transnationalism and globalization. The global has become the scale at which migrations are conceptualized, while the focus has shifted away from production to reproduction, especially domestic and care labour, as the catalyst for the growth of female and, to a lesser extent, male migrations. Female asylum seekers and refugees have also been significant in many flows generated by conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central America, but the issues raised have, to some extent, been different to those in labour migrations. Here, lively discussions concerning the nature of gender persecution, women as a social group, the asylum determination process and gender and asylum in international law have occupied centre stage (Freedman, 2007). Yet despite the growing significance of gendered migrations, migration models have tended to be gender blind, often making implicit assumptions about gender roles and failing to address gender differences. Surprisingly, whilst men constituted the overwhelming focus of research 362
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Gender and migration 363 until the 1990s, their gendered lives and masculinities have been largely excluded until recently from the study of the global transfer of labour.
GLOBAL TRANSFER OF LABOUR Although the proportion of women in migration flows had not increased dramatically from the 1960s (46.5 per cent in 1960) to the beginning of the twenty-first century (48.8 per cent in 2000), it was their growing and visible presence in labour migrations in Asia, Europe and the Middle East which led Castles and Miller (1993) to identify the feminization of migration as the fourth tendency in the contemporary age of migration. Actually the first region to have a majority of female migrants was Latin America, where women had for a long time dominated rural-to-urban migration and had relatively high rates of labour force participation compared to other regions of the Global South. In general, women had traditionally been viewed as family migrants, largely confined to the private sphere, whose mobility stemmed from being appendages of men. Hence feminist interventions in the 1970s and 1980s were primarily concerned with drawing attention to the productive role and labour market incorporation of migrant women into the low end of high-tech and manufacturing sectors which were undergoing restructuring (electronics, textiles, footwear, food processing) in the Global North and relocation to the South. The creation of EPZs, as part of an exportoriented growth strategy, offered foreign investors special privileges of taxes, tariffs and statutory regulations. Large numbers were developed in Mexico (known as maquiladoras), South Asia and, since the early 1990s, China. Globally, 70 per cent of workers in EPZs are women, especially young ones, who are often sought for their ‘nimble fingers’ (Franck and Spehar, 2010). Though sectors of production remain significant, in the past decade attention has switched to migrant women’s contribution to reproductive sectors. Considered an obsolete sector of employment in the 1970s, by the 1990s it was evident that domestic work had become the driving force behind the increase in female labour migration (ILO, 2013). It had increased from 33.2 million in 1995 to 52.6 million in 2010, with notable increases in South-east Asia, the Middle East and Southern Europe. In some of the largest labour exporting countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the majority of migrants are women. As middle-class women increasingly entered the work force, frequently without adequate publicly provided support, it was migrant women as domestic workers circulating within and between regions who became
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essential to reproduction. In some middle- and higher-income countries, a policy of encouraging domestic work to enable middle-class women to participate in the labour force, within a broader drive towards a knowledge-based economy, has been promoted by the state (Elias, 2010; Kofman and Raghuram, 2015). Theoretically, Sassen (2000) analysed the emergence of global cities as strategic sites of globalization in what she called circuits of countergeographies. Global (and large) cities acted as magnets for low-paid labour that served the needs of the highly paid elites in both the shadow and the formal sectors, such as domestic work, cleaning and fast foods. Sex work too, primarily though not exclusively undertaken by women, has increasingly involved international migration on an expanded scale. This has been due to geopolitical dislocations, crises of reproduction arising from a rapid shift to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, structural adjustment and the expansion of tourism for the sexual consumption of the erotic. In turn women’s remittances had become crucial to ensure the survival and social reproduction of their households in the countries of origin by contributing to daily needs, education, health and housing. Other scholars, such as Hochschild (2000), have dealt more specifically with the care deficit, especially in liberal and familial welfare regimes in Southern Europe and North America. This was brought about by the lack, or inadequacy, of affordable provision for children, the disabled and the elderly, the increased participation in paid work by women and the inflexibility of the sexual division of work in the household. Thus women in developed countries such as the United States and in Southern Europe were forced to turn to the private solution of hiring other women, often migrants or from racialized minorities, to undertake household and caring tasks. To describe the global connections and transfer of labour as an aspect of the international division of reproductive labour, Hochschild coined the term ‘global chains of care’, defined as ‘a series of personal links between people across the globe, based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’. The chain served to abstract labour (physical and emotional) upwards. At the same time, in a similar way to how the commodity chain operates, these care chains cascade downwards and incorporate labour that at each stage is remunerated to a lesser extent. Women’s migration thus reconstitutes the division of labour amongst women themselves, whether through other female kin, especially grandmothers, or poorer urban and rural women who attend to the care responsibilities left behind in the countries of origin. The concept of global chains has been widely adopted in framing our analysis of transfers of female labour. It has also generated a number of
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Gender and migration 365 critiques of the narrow coverage of relationships, institutional arrangements and skill levels (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015). Care is, of course, only one form of reproductive labour which encompasses a wide range of activities and relationships necessary for maintaining people both on a daily basis and inter-generationally. This is encapsulated by the concept of social reproduction (see Chapter 46 in this volume). The concept of reproduction, and the way in which it underpins production, had been commonly used by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the past two decades or so this has been pushed into the background, partly as a result of the dominance of the concept of care (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015). However, owing in part to the worsening conditions of social reproduction in the South and the North, there has been renewed interest in the concept and the strategies deployed to overcome deteriorating resources for the maintenance of everyday life. One of the most significant responses to the failures of social reproduction has been migration. In its earlier conceptualization in the 1970s and 1980s, paid labour in the household had been absent, but recent analyses have turned their attention to the commodification and marketization of social reproduction and the assignment of different activities to different categories of workers (Bakker and Silvey, 2008). In particular, low-valued and lowremunerated labour in the household has in many welfare regimes, but especially familial and liberal ones, been filled by migrant labour. Even in welfare states with existing public provision, as in European Nordic states, entitlements to publicly provided services have been tightened for the elderly in particular; the household as a site of paid reproductive labour has been allocated a prominent role. Migrant men to a far greater extent than non-migrant labour are also employed in household tasks, such as gardening, maintenance and care for the elderly. Social reproduction also encompasses activities outside the household, and here, too, female migrant labour may be significant in less skilled sectors such as hospitality (fast food outlets, restaurants, residential homes for the elderly), the maintenance of community life and voluntary activities, as well as skilled sectors, especially health. The focus of attention in the care and social reproduction literature has been on those who migrate as care workers, whether officially or irregularly, and the construction of care markets in different welfare regimes. However, those entering through other routes, such as students and family migrants, also often contribute to reproductive activities. Although family members (spouses, parents) have been treated in academic and policy analyses as dependants they may also be employed as paid workers and unpaid family carers. So too do we need to consider the reproductive needs of those who migrate for work in other sectors, such
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as hospitality and tourism or manufacturing, as in South-east Asian countries (particularly Malaysia and Thailand). Indeed, women may also use marriage strategically to gain a secure residence permit. In Asia, marriage migration from China, the Philippines and Vietnam to Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan has expanded massively in the past two decades as biological replacement levels have declined and poorer men have found it difficult to find spouses. It has accounted for one-quarter of permanent migration in recent years in Japan and about one-half in Korea. Marriage migrants not only look after their new families, including parents-in-law, but may also work as paid carers for the elderly. Thus through the framework of social reproduction we can follow the articulation of different forms and circuits of migration. Compared to domestic work, sex work generates heated debates about its morality, whether it constitutes work and its relationship to trafficking, especially between those arguing that prostitution is always coerced and should therefore be abolished and those who contend it may be voluntary as well as forced (Gould, 2010; see also Chapter 43 in this volume). As trafficking has come to be thought of as a form of modern slavery, state policies have not paid sufficient attention to the structural conditions underpinning it and the coercion faced by migrants, many of them women and children. At the same time, the multiple reasons for engaging in the provision of sex services are not taken into account. Though other forms of trafficking were recognized in the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons and the US Trafficking in Victims Protection Act passed in the same year, the focus has continued to fall on sex trafficking. This reflects the influence of a coalition of feminists, conservatives and Christian evangelicals who came together to promote an agenda for the abolition of prostitution worldwide. Coupled with a securitization discourse, it has had an impact on the immigration policies of states. As we shall see in the next section, immigration regulations have privileged the skilled and imposed restrictions on those performing less skilled work.
IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS AND STRATIFICATION It has been argued that control over citizenship represents the last bastion of national sovereignty in a globalized world and that immigration regulations serve to determine who should be included and excluded as potential members and the conditions of their incorporation (Dauvergne, 2009). However, immigration controls are not simply instrumental
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Gender and migration 367 responses to the needs of employers but also important in linking immigration policy to the idea of nation building, future belonging and citizenship. The key criteria for selection have been designed to ensure the right kind of migrant: one responsible for himself or herself and capable of integrating. States increasingly engage in managing the stratification and determining the conditionalities under which particular categories can work and access social entitlements. Regional spaces have also contributed to reshaping stratifications. Rights of residence and access to welfare divide Europeans from non-European citizens in the European Union (EU). However, amongst nationals of the constituent EU states, all have equal access to mobility rights once the transitionary period of incorporation is over. In contrast, regional bodies such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), set up in 1994, constitute a more unequal space between partners (Canada, Mexico and the US), especially for the less skilled. Here there are sharp inequalities between Mexico and the US and the progressive implementation of harsh border security since 2001. These have heightened the insecurity of border crossings, which are dependent more and more on smugglers and where women have been subjected to gender violence and murder (femicides) (Runyan et al., 2013). Structural adjustment policies and the effects of NAFTA in Mexico have resulted in funnelling more migrant women northwards to the border periphery, from where many seek to continue their migration to the US. More and more states are seeking to attract the skilled – that is, those with tertiary education or professional qualifications – as part of the global competition for the brightest and the best. Although different entry criteria have been used for skilled migrants, the valuation of knowledge tends to have gendered outcomes. Men tend to be more present in the sought-after scientific, financial and management sectors and to earn higher incomes, whilst women are more likely to be working in the welfare sectors, strongly regulated by the state. Skill demarcations also have a bearing on the right to bring in family members, such as spouses and children, and their access to welfare as well as their ability to shift from temporary status, increasingly used in states such as Australia and Canada, as a probationary period, to permanent status. The level of skill, legal status and duration of permit play out differently between women and men and according to ethnicity and nationality. Female migrants work disproportionately in low-skilled jobs or are dependants of the primary migrant. Whilst, as previously noted, there is considerable demand for female migrants in the domestic and care sectors, many states in North America and Europe do not recognize domestic and care work as warranting work permits or, as in Italy and
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Spain, set quotas that do not meet demand, resulting in large numbers of undocumented workers and subsequent regularizations. With the prolonged economic crisis, the quotas have disappeared. States in Asia, such as Malaysia and Singapore, and the Middle East limit permits for less skilled work to temporary ones, often for fixed durations, during which workers have tied contracts. The result of the mismatch between demand and official supply is the creation of irregularity and a cheap and exploited labour force with a high rate of turnover. Sending states too, such as the Philippines, have for some time encouraged the emigration of domestic workers through temporary contracts, along with skilled nurses. Others, such as Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, either ban or discourage women, domestic workers and care workers from emigrating, though this often simply encourages the development of unauthorized migration and undocumented work in the receiving country.
CONCLUSION In the past few decades, gendered migrations and the theoretical lens through which we understand these have changed. In particular, the provision of reproductive labour at different skill levels has come to dominate the study of gendered migrations both within and between regions. Though still significant, especially in China, South-east Asia and Mexico, work in export processing zones has received considerably less attention. Domestic and care labour, largely though not exclusively performed in the privacy of the household, has been the driving force of much female and, to a lesser extent, male migrations. However, it is only recently that the socio-economic inequalities and lack of social protection of such work have been taken up as an issue of human rights to be addressed through an international convention for decent work and improvements in national labour standards. At the same time, economic crises in many countries have affected gendered employment. In many of the countries severely affected by the crisis after 2008, as in Southern Europe, migrant men’s unemployment, badly hit by the downturn in the construction sector, rose substantially, while migrant women maintained their employment in more stable labour markets such as domestic work and care. They appeared to have played an important role in compensating for the income losses of migrant men, although their pay rates and conditions of work may have worsened owing to pressure on national social budgets. And, whilst the level of inflows decreased, the numbers returning were not largely affected. Of
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Gender and migration 369 course, the decision to return or to stay in times of economic crisis and tightening border security may also differ for women and men. Inevitably the crisis had an impact on those countries, such as Mexico, closely tied to destination countries. Remittances did not decline after the initial downturn, but we do not yet have more comprehensive knowledge of the strategies used to cope with the changing circumstances and the effect it had on transnational families.
REFERENCES Bakker, Isabella and Rachel Silvey (eds) (2008) Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction, Abingdon: Routledge. Castles, Stephen and Mark Miller (1993) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, London: Macmillan. Dauvergne, Catherine (2009) ‘Globalizing fragmentation: new pressures on women caught in the immigration law–citizenship law dichotomy’, in Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (eds), Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, New York: New York University Press, pp. 333–355. Elias, Juanita (2010) ‘Making migrant domestic work visible: the rights based approach to migration and the “challenges of social reproduction”’, Review of International Political Economy, 17 (5), 840–859. Enloe, Cynthia (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: Pandora. Franck, Anja and Andrea Spehar (2010) Women’s Labour Migration in the Context of Globalization, WIDE, http://www.waronwant.org/attachments/womens_labour_ migration.pdf (accessed June 2015). Freedman, Jane (2007) Gendering the International Refugee and Asylum Debate, London: Palgrave. Gould, Chandré (2010) ‘The problem of trafficking’, in Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler and Peace Kiguwa (eds), Gender and Migration: Feminist Interventions, London: Zed Books, pp. 31–49. Hochschild, Arlie (2000) ‘Global care chains and emotional surplus value’, in Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, London: Sage, pp. 130–146. ILO (International Labour Organization) (2013) Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection, Geneva: ILO. Kofman, Eleonore and Parvati Raghuram (2015) Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction, London: Palgrave. Runyan, Anne Sisson, Amy Lind, Patricia McDermott and Marianne Marchand (eds) (2013) Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships and Identities in Transnational Perspective, London: Ashgate. Sassen, Saskia (2000) ‘Women’s burden: counter-geographies of globalization and feminization of survival’, Journal of International Affairs, 53 (2), 503–524. Sassen-Koob, Saskia (1984) ‘Notes on the incorporation of third world women into wage labor through immigration and off-shore production’, International Migration Review, 18 (4), 1144–1167.
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43. The global political economy of sex work Nicola Smith
The expansion of the global sex trade over recent decades is the subject of considerable interest and controversy in political, philosophical, sociological, legal, religious, media and medical debates. Contemporary discourse often centres on the morality (or not) of commercial sex and is framed in terms of a series of dichotomies and oppositions such as domination versus liberation, force versus consent, victimhood versus agency and violence versus pleasure. Increasingly, however, feminist scholars are carving out space to think of commercial sex not (just) as a ‘moral issue’ but (also) as a ‘political economy’ issue: that is, to interrogate the political, economic and cultural context(s) of sexual markets by placing this within the wider analysis of global power relations. Coming from a diversity of theoretical and political backgrounds, these scholars explore the complex ways in which the growth and diversification of sex markets world-wide are both produced by and productive of the structural hierarchies of global capitalism. Yet there remains significant contestation over how best to understand the political economy of commercial sex; while some authors contend that the global sexual economy serves primarily to reinforce and reproduce global inequalities, others argue that it might also represent a site of agency and even resistance. This chapter offers an overview of this debate and is structured in four parts. First, it situates the study of commercial sex within broader developments in feminist political economy. Second, it outlines the prevailing view that sex markets work to sustain and exacerbate structural inequalities. Third, it sets out the key alternative perspective, which accepts the importance of structural context, but also insists upon the need for recognition of sex workers’ individual and collective agency. Finally, it points to recent work that draws on the insights of queer theorising in order to challenge the heteronormative gender logics that continue to frame academic, policy and media discourses of commercial sex. 370
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The global political economy of sex work 371
SEXUAL ECONOMIES IN/AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM Feminist political economy is by no means a singular canon of thought; but this highly diverse and multidisciplinary field can nevertheless be understood as a collective project that aims to challenge, and to offer substantive alternative/s to, dominant ‘malestream’ approaches. Vital to this project is a critique of the continued preoccupation with the ‘upper circuits’ of global capitalism such as trade, financial markets and capital flows and a shifting of attention towards the ‘lower circuits’ of capital relations, including domestic labour, tourism and sex work (Agathangelou, 2005: 7). While feminist scholars do not deny the importance of processes of economic production, waged labour and class relations – indeed, they are often directly concerned with such processes – they also stress the crucial role of social reproduction, informal/unpaid labour, and gender relations in the (re)production of global capitalism (see Chapter 46 in this volume). This forms part of a broader agenda to place feminised bodies, identities and activities – including feminised forms of labour, such as domestic, caring and sexual labour – centre-stage in the study of globalisation and capitalism. It is from within this context that the sex industry has emerged both as an important case study in its own right and as a site upon which feminists have sought to remap the very terrain upon which globalisation and capitalism are theorised and analysed empirically.
SEX, WORK AND STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY For many feminist political economists, the global political economy of sex must first and foremost be conceptualised in terms of structural inequalities. They argue that such inequalities are simultaneously gendered, classed and raced, existing as they do between men and women, the rich and poor, and the Global North and South. As with other sectors of the economy, the sex industry is conceptualised as operating in terms of supply and demand: the supply of women from developing countries whose limited economic opportunities lead them to sell sex; and the demand for exotic Others by men from affluent countries who can afford their sexual services (see for instance Peterson, 2003). Particularly prominent in this literature is the work of the radical feminist writer and activist Sheila Jeffreys (2008). In her best-selling book The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade, Jeffreys points to the unprecedented growth of the sex trade into a highly profitable and ubiquitous global industry in recent years. The sex
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trade, she argues, has been profoundly transformed in recent years from a largely marginalised, localised, criminalised and stigmatised sector to a vast and complex industrial machine that exists very much within, rather than outside of, the mainstream corporate sphere. It is, moreover, a highly globalised industry involving transnational flows in the marketing and consumption of women’s bodies through a variety of phenomena including sex tourism, sex trafficking, online pornography and the mail order bride business. This, Jeffreys suggests, represents the ‘commercialisation of women’s subordination’ (2008: 1), which both depends upon and exacerbates stark inequalities between men and women and between developed and developing countries. She therefore strongly condemns what she sees as the social normalisation and political acceptance of sexual commerce and argues that – if the sex trade is to be eradicated – then it must be fully criminalised. For Jeffreys, then, commercial sex represents no less than the exploitation, objectification and commodification of women’s bodies under capitalist globalisation. Another example of work in this vein is that of the postcolonial feminist scholar Anna Agathangelou (2005). In The Global Political Economy of Sex, Agathangelou emphasises the centrality of reproductive labour in maintaining the gendered, racialised and classed hierarchies of global capitalism. Despite its supposedly private nature, reproductive labour – such as sexual and domestic work – is both sustained by and serves to sustain an ‘asymmetric sexual division of labour based on racialised sex and the institutionalisation of desire with millions of women, primarily, paying the price of such exploitation with their labour and their bodies’ (2005: 8). Documenting the lives and experiences of migrant women in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, Agathangelou argues that participation in the sex industry should be understood in terms of processes of capitalist exploitation in which ‘the very self of the worker as a commodity’ is bought and sold (2005: 3). From a poststructuralist perspective, Elina Penttinen (2008) similarly contends that the expansion of global capitalism not only depends upon the use of female bodies for cheap labour but also turns those bodies into commodities in and of themselves. In Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-trafficking: Corporeal Politics, Penttinen draws on auto-ethnographic research in sex bars in Finland in order to link the micro-practices of daily life with the macro-processes of global political economy. The globalised sex trade, she argues, creates and requires ‘a specific kind of woman that is the embodiment of a stereotypical sex object’ – that of the erotic and exotic Other – and a specific kind of consumer – that of ‘the masculine subject that is positioned as the one who consumes, who gazes and who is entertained and served’ (2008: 52–53). The prostitute’s body
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The global political economy of sex work 373 thus becomes a commodity in the global capitalist market upon which male desire is projected and globalisation itself is inscribed (2008: 75). Globalisation, then, not only is a site upon which gendered, racialised and classed hierarchies are maintained, but represents a site upon which such inequalities are felt the most acutely. Such accounts are immensely important in highlighting how sexual economies should be understood as an integral part of – not separate or separable from – the structures and hierarchies of global capitalism. In so doing, they explicitly refuse any notion that the sale and purchase of sex can simply be relegated to the ‘private’ realm, that it can be understood as little more than the product of individual pathology or deviance, or that sex workers themselves are somehow socially disembedded and free from external constraints. However, one difficulty of such accounts might lie in the fact that – despite coming from different theoretical and political traditions – they all share a broadly similar ontology of commercial sex, for it is not just that the conditions under which commercial sex takes place can lead to exploitation but instead that commercial sex itself constitutes exploitation; the essential dynamic is that of one human body being sold to, and bought by, another. Because the context is assumed to be an oppressive one, it is in effect held constant, with the space to explore diverse motivations, experiences and understandings of commercial sex within differently structured contexts sharply circumscribed by the ontological commitment to commercialsex-as-harm.
SEX WORK, POWER AND RESISTANCE It is for precisely this reason that some feminist political economists ask whether commercial sex might itself represent a site of resistance to (as opposed to oppression under) gendered, classed and racialised power relations. In Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, for example, Prabha Kotiswaran (2011) argues that ‘an overarching theory of exploitation in relation to sex work is not possible given the heterogeneity of sex markets and the varied modes of organization that mediate it’ (2011: 246). Although Kotiswaran agrees that sex workers across the world face significant material constraints, she also argues that the broader institutional and legal context of sex markets forms an important part of that structural context. Conducting in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among female sex workers in both Kolkata and Tirupati, Kotiswaran emphasises the important role of legal and institutional frameworks – which criminalise and stigmatise sex workers
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rather than offering them the social and legal protection of other workers – in directly creating the conditions for exploitation to take place. At the same time, she highlights how sex workers in India are themselves demanding that their sexual labour be afforded the full social and legal status of work and how, in so doing, they are openly challenging conventional separations between sex and work. The complex intersections between sex and work are also explored by Amalia Cabezas (2009) in her book Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Cabezas shows how – as former colonies – both Cuba and the Dominican Republic can be viewed as ‘gendered and raced spaces eroticised along a colonial axis of power … [that] reinforce all the former divisions of labour, capital, and power’ (2009: 31). Yet Cabezas is also highly critical of accounts that depict women in the sex industry as victims of poverty without choices, for this erases the multiple ways in which they exercise agency – including by (and not simply despite) engaging in commodified intimate exchange. Instead, her overarching aim is to trouble dominant discourses of exploited third world women and predatory white men in which there is ‘no liminal space, only simplistic binaries, where women ultimately lose and men eventually gain’ (2009: 117). In contrast, she finds that ‘women’s tales of their experiences are often riddled with contradictions that suggest agency, multivalent meanings, and fluctuating situations. These relationships can be ephemeral, amorphous, and strategic, combining affect, money, mobility, and yes, even pleasure’ (ibid.). Cabezas therefore contends not only that commercial sex unsettles dichotomies between money and love, business and pleasure, but also that the mixing of intimacy and labour can itself destabilise and even subvert inequalities in terms of gender, race and class, as well. Another feminist scholar to underscore the complexities of the political economy of sex markets is Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) in her book Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Although Bernstein is careful to recognise that the sex industry is often characterised by exploitation, violence and disadvantage world-wide, she argues that the growing participation of many socio-economically advantaged people as sellers, rather than just consumers, of sexual services also deserves our attention. Focusing on post-industrial cities in North America and Northern Europe – San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm – Bernstein explores how modern-industrial street prostitution is being increasingly replaced by a highly diversified sexual economy across a wide variety of different performances, embodiments, identities, activities and spatialities.
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The global political economy of sex work 375 Linking local developments to large-scale shifts in the global political economy (such as the reorientation away from productive labour and towards services and consumption in urban centres), Bernstein points to the emergence of a new ‘postindustrial paradigm of sexual commerce’ (2007: 168) in which sexuality increasingly becomes defined in recreational and market-based terms. In so doing, she emphasises how commercial sex is practised and experienced in a multiplicity of disparate ways and that such practices and experiences must always be seen as ‘situated squarely within… economic and cultural currents, rather than regarded as exceptions to be judged apart’ (2007: 188). A particular advantage of these latter accounts is that they all take social relations of power seriously without being reductive; rather, power relations are conceptualised as being multifarious, multi-dimensional, multi-layered and, at times, contradictory. This allows them directly to challenge dichotomous understandings of sex workers as either atomised individuals who are separable from/unbounded by the social context in which they are situated or passive objects of deterministic structures. Instead, they treat commercial sex as a (set of) meaning(s) and practice(s) that are historically/culturally contingent and socially/politically contested. Commercial sex is therefore understood as deeply implicated in, but not determined by, social relations of power in complex ways that may, at times, serve to subvert and destabilise existing power relations as well as to reinforce them. Importantly, then, such accounts do not deny the importance of structural context or of unequal class, race, gender and global power relations. Equally, though, they do not treat power structures as determining that only one kind of lived experience can be had; rather, structure and agency are treated as co-constitutive.
QUEERING SEXUAL ECONOMIES Despite the contestation over the meaning(s) and practice(s) of commercial sex outlined above, one notable feature of the feminist political economy literature on global sex – which is also true of the wider literature on sex markets – is the persistent focus on ‘straight’ commercial sexual exchange. Simply put, sex workers are assumed to be cis-gendered women, clients are assumed to be cis-gendered men, and both the nature of commercial sexual exchange and the identities of the participants involved are assumed to be heterosexual ones. Other embodiments and performances of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) sex working remain under-theorised and under-researched both within and outside of feminist political economy.
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This suggests that there is a need to broaden the empirical focus of sex work research beyond that of the female worker/male client binary and, in so doing, to challenge the routine erasure of queer and trans* lives in debates about commercial sex and in the study of global political economy more broadly. In practical terms, this means that academic research (and policy debate) should do justice – and not just pay lip service – to the diversity of gendered and sexualised identities, practices, activities and embodiments within and across the global sex industry, not least by involving queer and trans* sex workers themselves as active participants in (rather than as passive objects of) discourses about commercial sex. More work is also needed to situate sexual economies within the broader analysis of heteronormative gender logics and power relations. A major contribution of queer theory is to highlight how Western cultures and societies are organised around foundational distinctions between public and private, moral and immoral, and how such divisions are embedded and embodied in the institutionalisation of heterosexual marriage and in hierarchical sex and parenting roles (Griffin, 2009). An important task, therefore, is to consider how sexual economies might in some respects destabilise heteronormative power relations and how the lack of legal and cultural legitimacy in so many local, national and international contexts should be seen in the light of this. For example, in their edited volume Queer Sex Work, Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher and Nicola Smith (2015) bring together a multiplicity of different empirical case studies – including erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography, grey sexual economies and BSDM – from academic scholars, policy practitioners, activists and sex workers from across the world in order to explore the complex intersections between sexual labour and heteronormative power relations. In one chapter, for instance, Zahra Stardust (2015: 67) discusses her research with sex workers, strippers, pole dancers, burlesque artists and queer performers in Sydney to explore how erotic labour provides space for ‘critical femininities, diverse desires, fluid sexualities, queer temporalities, interclass contact, negotiating boundaries, gender performativity, and challenging oppressive laws and stigma’ whilst simultaneously reproducing unequal hierarchies along axes of gender, sexuality, race, age and body-size. What this ultimately highlights is the need not just to queer the political economy of sex work but also to have a political economy of queer sex work by acknowledging, not erasing, unequal relations of power whilst also explicitly challenging heterocentric gender logics in debates about commercial sex and in feminist political economy more broadly.
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REFERENCES Agathangelou, Anna (2005) The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernstein, Elizabeth (2007) Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cabezas, Amalia L. (2009) Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Griffin, Penny (2009) Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffreys, Sheila (2008) The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade, Oxford: Taylor & Francis. Kotiswaran, Prabha (2011) Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laing, Mary, Katy Pilcher and Nicola Smith (eds) (2015) Queer Sex Work, London: Routledge. Penttinen, Elina (2008) Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-trafficking: Corporeal Politics, London: Routledge. Peterson, V. Spike (2003) A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies, London: Routledge. Stardust, Zahra (2015) ‘Critical femininities, fluid sexualities and queer temporalities: erotic performers on objectification, femmephobia and oppression’, in Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher and Nicola Smith (eds), Queer Sex Work, London: Routledge, pp. 67–78.
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44. Gender and development Zoe Pflaeger Young
GENDER MAINSTREAMING AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT Gender and development has gone from being a marginal, critical intervention to integration into mainstream development policy and practice. International and national development agencies now have policies as well as staff and specialised units dedicated to gender issues, and international NGOs include gender issues in their mission statements and remits (Pearson, 2005). To the extent that the gender agenda ‘has arrived’ in international development, gender mainstreaming has been successful. While the concept of gender mainstreaming can be defined in a number of ways, there is a broadly shared agreement that the aim is to produce transformatory processes and practices that reduce gender inequalities through the systematic integration of a gendered perspective in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development policy and programmes across all spheres (Woodford-Berger, 2004). Gender concerns should be viewed as important to all aspects of development, and the responsibility for gender policy should be shared across the institution. In order to put gender mainstreaming into practice, a wide range of analytical tools, frameworks and measures have been developed, such as training manuals, ‘awareness-raising’ and ‘gender sensitisation’ exercises, checklists, gender-disaggregated data collection and gender-specific studies, gender impact assessments and gender analyses of budgets. These have been seen as a means to achieving gender equality. By the end of the 1990s, the language of women’s empowerment and gender equality was widely adopted by international development organisations, such as the UNDP and the World Bank, and national development agencies, gradually becoming a central pillar in their development policies and programmes. Notably, the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG) aimed to ‘promote gender equity and women’s empowerment’. Not only did this place gender issues high on the list of internationally recognised development objectives, but it also indicated recognition that there are strong linkages between gender equality and all 378
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Gender and development 379 the other MDGs (Pearson, 2005: 168). To an extent, this could be seen as a success in terms of achieving widespread and official recognition that gender is central to all development activities. However, concerns have been raised with regard to the limited commitment to the importance of gender issues in practice and the instrumentalisation of gender and development as a strategy to achieve other development objectives rather than being motivated by a political commitment to gender equality itself (Pearson, 2005: 174). While there has been almost unquestioned acceptance of gender equality and women’s empowerment at the level of policy discourse, the caveats about measurement and implementation developed at length by scholars and practitioners contributing to debates on gender and empowerment have largely been ignored. Despite the celebratory and optimistic language of policy discourse, the impressive array of analytical tools that have been developed to operationalise gender mainstreaming and the inclusion of gender experts in international and national development agencies, the achievements of gender and development projects and policies have been disappointing (Parpart, 2014: 383–384). Gender inequality is still prevalent, and many feminists have questioned whether gender mainstreaming has lost its transformative potential, with the concepts of empowerment and gender equality being used either in a broad and ambiguous way that is devoid of meaning and clarity or in a limited and instrumental way that strips them of their radical potential (Cornwall et al., 2007; Smyth, 2010). In her examination of the third MDG, Naila Kabeer (2005) argues that, although the indicators associated with the Goal – on education, employment and political participation – do have the potential to make a positive contribution to gender equality and women’s empowerment, they alone are insufficient. Empowerment not only entails the ability to actively make strategic life choices, but also implies that these choices are exercised in ways that challenge existing power relations. For choices to be meaningful, alternatives must exist and crucially must also be seen to exist. Taking up wage work would be seen as evidence of progress in women’s empowerment under the MDGs, but it is more likely to be transformative if it was taken up in response to a new opportunity and contributed to a woman’s sense of independence, rather than simply being a strategy of survival (Kabeer, 2005: 13–15). Similarly, access to education may lead to positive changes in women’s lives, such as an increased role in economic decision-making and access to resources within and beyond the household, but these changes are conditioned by the context in which education is provided. Indeed, education can be a means of equipping girls to become better wives and mothers, to fulfil
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their given roles and responsibilities more effectively, but not to challenge them (Kabeer, 2005: 16–18). What is missing in the adoption of gender equality and women’s empowerment in the MDGs is the mobilisation of women and the development of their collective capacity to hold authorities and policymakers to account. Empowerment ‘is not only about addressing immediate inequalities faced by women, but also changes in consciousness and agency that challenge patriarchal structures’ (Sen and Mukherjee, 2014: 190). Sen and Mukherjee argue that gender inequalities can be more effectively addressed under the post-2015 Development Agenda if there is greater recognition of the multiple dimensions of women’s rights and agency as well as greater institutional and financial support for women’s organisations and gender equality activists and experts (Sen and Mukherjee, 2014). A rights-based approach to gender may be one way to more adequately tackle inequalities and structural discrimination, missing from the MDGs.
THE WORLD BANK AND GENDER EQUALITY To an extent, the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (hereafter WDR 2012) (World Bank, 2011) represents a welcome advance in its approach to gender equality and development. Gender equality has been integrated into the World Bank’s PostWashington Consensus agenda since the early 2000s, but this is the first time the World Bank has devoted its annual flagship publication to the topic. A number of feminist authors agree that it indicates an important discursive shift in the World Bank’s treatment of gender equality, paying greater attention to its intrinsic value as opposed to, or at least as well as, instrumental arguments that it is ‘smart economics’ (Elson, 2012; Ravazi, 2012). The ‘smart economics’ approach rationalised ‘investing’ in women and girls for more effective development outcomes, as evidenced by the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan 2007–10, which made the business case for investing in MDG 3 as a means to achieving investment and growth. Even more concerning was the uptake of this slogan by a range of gender and development stakeholders, which popularised this notion of the ‘Girl Effect’ (Chant, 2012: 199–201). While the WDR 2012 still sees gender equality as contributing to economic efficiency and the achievement of other development goals, it acknowledges that growth is not always good for gender equality and develops a relatively expansive understanding of gender inequality that pays greater attention to social and political gender issues as well as the economic. Notably, there is an
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Gender and development 381 increased interest in gender equality as a political project that involves women’s engagement in collective action and an important role for women’s movements and feminist organisations (Ravazi, 2012: 424–426). Despite some positive advances, the WDR 2012 still has some significant limitations and glaring omissions in its approach to gender equality. For example, it pays attention to wage inequalities and the unequal division of unpaid care work, but its policy recommendations are concerned with reducing the amount of women’s unpaid work through improved infrastructure and the provision of paid childcare rather than with redistributing unpaid care work more equally between men and women. It does not aim to change the way jobs are valued so as to increase the pay and status of ‘women’s work’ (Elson, 2012). While social policy is seen as important, it is largely reduced to conditional cash transfers with little acknowledgement of the concerns that have been raised that these serve to overburden women while reinforcing traditional gender divisions of labour by discouraging men from caregiving. There is little discussion of the need for greater investment in public services (Ravazi, 2012: 430–431). Perhaps the most significant omission, however, is the lack of engagement with a gender bias in macroeconomic policy and acknowledgement that it is women who often bear the brunt of economic crises through the intensification of both their paid and their unpaid work. Indeed, there is barely any recognition of the Bank’s own role in promoting economic policies that have contributed to many of the acknowledged problems and that place financial constraints on the recommended reforms (Elson, 2012: 182). In terms of the future of the gender and development agenda, there are two important and related issues that require greater acknowledgement and more substantial analysis within dominant development agendas: the inclusion of men in gender and development and the importance of care work for development.
INCLUDING MEN IN GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT A key theoretical contribution of the gender and development approach was that gender relations are unequal power relations that involve both men and women. Accordingly, the need to incorporate men in development work around gender issues has been seen as an important part of the effort to integrate gender into development policy, at least at the level of policy discourse. However, in practice gender has still tended to be associated with women, and gender interventions have largely been by
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women for women rather than systematically incorporating men. Since the late 1990s, calls have been increasing to ‘men-stream’ gender and development through greater recognition of the need for men’s involvement in gender interventions and more dedicated efforts to realise this (Chant and Gutmann, 2002). A growing interest in ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ in the social sciences has filtered into development policy, and during the last 10–15 years there has been a significant increase in the number of development projects working with men, although these have largely been around personal change rather than structural inequalities (Cornwall et al., 2011). This agenda has emphasised the need to move away from essentialised and simplistic notions of masculinity and femininity. While most women continue to face greater social and economic disadvantages than their male counterparts, the tendency to emphasise the ways in which men benefit from development that women do not ‘gives the very misleading impression that men’s power and privileges are uniform, fixed and universal’ (Chant and Gutmann, 2002: 271). As research into men and masculinity has shown, particular groups of men, such as young lowerincome males, can also be vulnerable to insecurity and marginalisation. The inclusion of men can help to address men’s needs and interests as well, as men can also suffer from the burdens of the imposed, hegemonic form of masculinity. In any given context, only a small minority of men are able to play out the role of the ‘ideal man’, while the majority face a degree of anxiety around living up to the ideals of masculinity (Sweetman, 2013: 4). Arguably, economic changes as well as the unintended consequences of development policies have contributed to a crisis of men and masculinity in some contexts. It is also clear that the exclusion of men from gender interventions has had negative impacts for women. Projects aimed at the empowerment of women in the Global South, particularly in the context of economic crises, can disrupt gender norms and challenge the roles of men and women in the household in ways which can, at least in the short term, lead to the unintended consequences of increased male violence and excessive burdens on women. Women’s empowerment projects and social policy that targets women often lead to increased workloads and responsibilities for those women, while men are driven further from assuming familial responsibilities, as in the case of conditional cash transfers (Chant and Gutmann, 2002: 275). In this context, there is potential for projects working with men to reform gender norms and gender roles in ways that can help to rebuild a sense of male pride and dignity based on progressive, gender-equitable ideals, so that men can evolve ways of behaving that support women’s rights and gender equality as well as
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Gender and development 383 freeing themselves from the constraints of limiting gender norms (Sweetman, 2013: 5). However, there are some issues that have raised concerns among feminists. There is agreement that men should be included in gender and development, but it is less clear in what way men should be included and what this inclusion should involve. One strategy may be to bring more male staff into gender-related development work. Gender-sensitive men can help to address some of the problems that have been identified in terms of institutional resistance to gender and may help to change institutional cultures (Chant and Gutmann, 2002: 277–278). This strategy may be a pragmatic approach that can help to achieve goals in the short term, but there are concerns that male representation of female voices and interests may in the long term work against challenging and transforming gender norms. There are also concerns that the complexity of the message can lead to misperceptions that can undo transformative work on gender inequality, for example the emergence of arguments that women are to blame for men’s plight and men are now the real victims in gender relations (Sweetman, 2013: 9–10). Finally, concerns have been raised that the focus on men can take resources away from work with women and women’s organisations. So, while there is some consensus over the need to include men in gender and development, there continue to be debates among feminists over how best to achieve this.
GENDER, DEVELOPMENT AND CARE A final issue that is key to approaches to gender and development is that of care and unpaid work. Care involves a wide range of activities in the home or the local community that directly or indirectly contribute to the meeting of the material, developmental, emotional and spiritual needs of one or more people. As outlined by Chopra and Sweetman (2014), care work is important to our societies and our well-being; it underpins all development progress and is critical to addressing inequality and vulnerability. Arguably, it should therefore be a priority for those working within development. However, in most societies care work is denigrated and undervalued, and the burden of unpaid (and paid) care work is disproportionately born by women and girls owing to prevailing gender norms and values. This unequal distribution of care work undermines women’s ability to seek employment and income, often resulting in women taking up low-paid, part-time or less secure forms of work, and also constrains their ability to participate on equal terms with men in development interventions. The burden of direct and indirect care is
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greater in the Global South, where there is a lack of basic amenities and essential public services, and for women living in poverty who are unable to lessen the load by investing in labour-saving technologies or paying for private services (Chopra and Sweetman, 2014: 409–411). Therefore, gender equality requires the transformation of gender norms that disproportionately assign responsibility to women and girls for the unpaid care work that is essential to keep economies and societies functioning. The issue of care has largely been missing from development agendas, because it is associated with the private sphere of the household and therefore seen as an issue for individual families to work out. It is not well understood as a social good that needs to be supported by wider communities and societies as a whole. The invisibility of care work is also politically convenient, because it enables governments to tacitly draw on unpaid care to fill the gap left by austerity measures and to absorb the shocks of economic crises. Feminists have worked to increase the visibility of care work through recognising the contribution that paid and unpaid care work makes to the functioning of the economy as well as to address the unequal distribution of the burden of care work (Chopra and Sweetman, 2014: 412–414). Developing a transformative approach to care is an important component in the wider gender equality agenda, which involves working with men to transform norms around fatherhood and care work, as well as working with governments and development partners to pay more attention to the issue of care and to incorporate it into their development policies to work to reduce the burden of care work through the provision of technology and infrastructure. The WDR 12 does go some way to addressing the issue of care more adequately, for example discussing the importance of the provision of services and infrastructure to reduce the burden of care work, but it stops short of contributing to a rethinking of gender roles and the value of care work.
REFERENCES Chant, Sylvia (2012) ‘The disappearing of “smart economics”? The World Development Report 2012 on Gender Equality: some concerns about the preparatory process and the prospects for paradigm change’, Global Social Policy, 12 (2), 198–218. Chant, Sylvia and Matthew Gutmann (2002) ‘“Men-streaming” gender? Questions for gender and development policy in the twenty-first century’, Progress in Development Studies, 2 (4), 269–282. Chopra, Deepta and Caroline Sweetman (2014) ‘Introduction to gender, development and care’, Gender and Development, 22 (3), 409–421. Cornwall, Andrea, Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead (eds) (2007) Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges, London: Zed Books.
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Gender and development 385 Cornwall, Andrea, Jerker Edstrom and Alan Greig (eds) (2011) Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities, London: Zed Books. Elson, Diane (2012) ‘Review of World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development’, Global Social Policy, 12 (2), 178–183. Kabeer, Naila (2005) ‘Gender equality and women’s empowerment: a critical analysis of the third Millennium Development Goal’, Gender and Development, 13 (1), 13–24. Parpart, Jane (2014) ‘Exploring the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming in international development institutions’, Journal of International Development, 26, 382–395. Pearson, Ruth (2005) ‘The rise and rise of gender and development’, in Uma Kothari (ed.), A Radical History of Development Studies, London: Zed Books, pp. 157–179. Razavi, Shahra (2012) ‘World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development – a commentary’, Development and Change, 43 (1), 423–437. Sen, Gita and Avanti Mukherjee (2014) ‘No empowerment without rights, no rights without politics: gender-equality, MDGs and the post-2015 Development Agenda’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15 (2–3), 188–202. Smyth, Ines (2010) ‘Talking of gender: words and meanings in development organisations’, in Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade (eds), Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, Rugby: Oxfam, pp. 143–152. Sweetman, Caroline (2013) ‘Introduction: working with men on gender equality’, Gender and Development, 21 (1), 1–13. Woodford-Berger, Prudence (2004) ‘Gender mainstreaming: what is it (about) and should we continue doing it?’, IDS Bulletin, 35 (4), 65–72. World Bank (2011) World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank.
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45. Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women: the case of African traders Akosua K. Darkwah
Nagar et al. (2002) have argued that there are very few studies that investigate the impact of economic globalisation on workers in the informal economy in the developing world. Indeed, much of the writing on women focuses on workers in the formal economy, specifically factory workers. As a continent that contributes less than 1 per cent to global export flows (Meagher, 2003), Africa rarely features in these discussions. This chapter seeks to redress this dual imbalance by focusing on the impact of the processes of globalisation on Ghanaian women workers in the informal economy, specifically traders. I do so for a number of reasons. First, focusing on traders moves us away from the dominant conceptualisation of women in the third world as participating in globalisation processes largely as factory workers. Secondly, unlike factory workers, traders are much more likely to be either self-employed or employers. An analysis of traders therefore allows us to interrogate the impact of globalisation on women as employers or self-employed workers as opposed to as employees and to uncover the extent to which the impact of globalisation is dependent on one’s location in the labour market as employee, employer or self-employed. Finally, because Africa contributes little to the global export of manufactured goods and receives minuscule amounts of foreign direct investment, it is in trade flows that Africa’s insertion into the global economy is made evident. While the implications of this from a development perspective are largely seen as negative, the private accumulation opportunities it offers to individuals are undisputed (see Meagher, 2003), and therefore the focus of this chapter. Ultimately, by offering an account of the impact of globalisation on Ghanaian workers in the informal economy, I hope to unsettle the dominant discourse on globalisation and women in the developing world.
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Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women 387
GLOBALISATION Over the last two decades, globalisation has become a buzzword used as often by academics as by politicians and journalists. It is, however, difficult to reach a consensus as to what exactly the word means. For our purposes, I restrict my definition of globalisation to the range of neoliberal economic processes that compel a country’s integration into the global economy. In the African context, the international financial institutions set these processes into motion in the early 1980s when they insisted that countries such as Ghana that were experiencing an economic decline adopt a structural adjustment policy. I draw on JohnstonAnumonwo and Doane (2011: 9) to define the informal economy as the sector of the economy that provides jobs which do not involve working with written contracts or adhering to labour laws. Based on the available data, Africa’s informal economy is the largest in the world. Chen (2007: 82) notes that it accounts for 72 per cent of non-agricultural employment on the continent. Ghana is no different, and women are much more likely to be found working in the informal as opposed to the formal sector of the economy. According to the most recent Ghana Living Standards Survey, while 75 per cent of Ghanaian men work in the informal sector of the economy, the same is true for 91.2 per cent of Ghanaian women (Ghana Statistical Service, 2008: 36). There is no consensus on the gendered effects of globalisation on women workers in the developing world. The ‘optimist’ school argues that globalisation provides new opportunities for women as state management of the economy is relaxed to allow for the magic hand of the market to reign supreme. Women with an entrepreneurial spirit and the appropriate resources are thus able to take advantage of the new incomegenerating opportunities that a liberalised economy provides. A second variant of this school argues that, in the aftermath of the debt crisis of the 1970s, gender relations have changed. Men have had to contend with their inability to cater fully for their family’s needs and therefore increasingly accept women’s participation in the labour market (for a detailed review of this literature see Biles, 2008). The ‘pessimists’, on the other hand, argue that men are much more likely to benefit from globalisation processes than women do. Globalisation puts further constraints on women who already find themselves in the more precarious jobs in any economy. With lower levels of education and capital, these women are unable to take advantage of the economic opportunities that globalisation processes make possible. In addition, women bear the brunt of the ill-effects of liberalisation processes; the
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removal of health subsidies, for example, forces women to take on additional responsibilities of care for ill kin. Sparr (1994) summarises this perspective succinctly when she argues that women’s lives have been mortgaged for the adoption of a recovery programme which ultimately did little for them (for a fuller analysis of this perspective see Baliamoune-Lutz, 2007). Johnston-Anumonwo and Doane (2011) have argued that much of the reason why there seems to be no consensus on the impact of globalisation lies in the fact that the existing studies focus on different groups of workers in very different contexts. To provide clarity on these matters, this chapter holds two issues constant so as to allow for better comparisons. I focus on one group of people (Ghanaians) and one set of workers (traders). I explore the extent to which the lives of Ghanaian workers in the informal economy, specifically self-employed traders, reflect the optimist and pessimist views.
GLOBALISATION AND TRADERS Drawing on a variety of scholars who study Ghanaian female traders, I argue that the debate as to the benefits or otherwise from globalisation is far more nuanced than the optimist–pessimist debate suggests. It is not simply that globalisation is good for these traders or otherwise; it is that globalisation is simultaneously good and bad for these traders. In other words, like the two-faced Greek god Janus, globalisation is two-faced. I propose to demonstrate this by looking at what globalisation means for self-employed traders of global consumer items. Trading is a long-established business in the Ghanaian context. Records dating as far back as the mid-1800s note the presence of women in markets as traders. Brodie Cruickshank, a Scottish merchant, offers one such account as follows: ‘The whole population are traders to a certain extent. It is the delight of the African women to sit in the market-places under the trees, exposing their wares for sale, or to hawk them through the streets from door to door, and from village to village’ (1853: 11, 280–281). During this time, while women were more visible in markets, men were involved in cross-border trade that saw them travelling across borders for wares. With the British creation of the public service, which offered spaces mostly for men (Tsikata, 1997), cross-border trade lost its appeal for the most part. Women filled the spaces left by men and slowly built cross-border trading enterprises. Today, female traders are a very visible part of the Ghanaian landscape. Whether as street sellers carrying
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Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women 389 as much as they can on their heads, as table-top entrepreneurs who display their wares on tables in front of their homes, as shop owners in suburbs across the city or in market stalls designed specifically for trading purposes, female traders are a permanent fixture in Ghanaian society. An analysis of the impact of globalisation on this group affords us an opportunity to investigate the ways in which these processes have affected a long-established group of self-employed women in the Ghanaian context. In studying the ways in which globalisation impacts traders, it becomes clear that the policies introduced in Ghana to aid in the country’s insertion into the global economy produced contradictory effects for traders of global consumer items. Liberalisation had a positive impact on these female traders but not in the sense that the optimist literature presents. Ghanaian women have very high levels of labour force participation. Globalisation therefore did not serve to open up opportunities for women to enter the labour market as the optimists argue. Instead, globalisation processes, specifically the relaxation of rules on trading, streamlined trading processes in Ghana and made the business of trade less cumbersome. Women working in other sectors of the economy therefore opted to work in the distribution sector of the economy, causing an explosion in the numbers of women working in this sector (Aryeetey, 1994). Some of the rules that were changed included the imposition of price controls that put limitations on how much profit traders could make and currency controls that restricted the availability of foreign currency with which traders could import goods of their choice. The contradictory effects of these policy changes are evident in analyses of traders of global consumer items involved in both intra-continental and inter-continental trade. I illustrate these contradictions by focusing on three groups of self-employed traders from quite different socioeconomic backgrounds who are by extension involved in trade at different levels. I start with an analysis of women involved in intra-continental trade. These women generally have low levels of education. In one study, 35 per cent had not had formal education of any kind and none had tertiary education (Wrigley-Asante, 2013). Of the three groups of women discussed here, they also work with the lowest levels of capital. Scholars such as Desai (2009) and Wrigley-Asante (2013) point to the ways in which women’s participation in intra-continental trade has increased tremendously in the last three decades thanks to various globalisation processes. Two-thirds of such traders are women (Desai, 2009), and their activities are made possible by a range of liberalisation processes, specifically the efforts to integrate various countries into a global trading
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system. To aid in these efforts, restrictions on what kinds of consumer goods to import, from where to import and how much of it to import have been removed, thus making it possible to import whatever one wants from the neighbouring African countries. The financial benefits of such trade are evident in the life stories of Wrigley-Asante’s (2013) respondents, who note among other things their ability to provide for the basic needs of children, such as the ability to build houses and thus provide shelter for children, ensuring that children’s rights to education are upheld by paying school fees, including in one case paying for postgraduate education of one child in a foreign country, and finally being able to have disposable income to allow the traders to fulfil lifelong dreams such as making the trip to Mecca, a trip crucial for Muslim adherents. In the work of Desai (2009) and Wrigley-Asante (2013), the contradictory effects of liberalisation processes are not made evident; the studies speak largely to the optimist side of the debate. In focusing on long-distance traders who travel across continents on purchasing trips, Darkwah (2007) makes these contradictory effects on traders more evident. These inter-continental traders are better educated, including some with tertiary education, and work with larger sums of money (a minimum of $5000 per buying trip) than the intra-continental traders. In her study of these traders, Darkwah (2007) argues that liberalisation policies are Janus-faced; while some policies such as the removal of trade barriers make it possible for these traders to purchase as many goods as they can afford to purchase from countries as far flung as they desire, other policies such as the devaluation policies limit the financial opportunities that are available to them. To be able to purchase the same amount of goods on purchasing trips that are roughly six months apart, traders have to constantly increase the prices of goods on the Ghanaian market. Ghanaian consumers, on the other hand, whose incomes are rarely increased in tandem with inflation, find their purchasing power declining on a regular basis. This situation is best captured in the words of Lynne Brydon’s interviewees in Accra, who summarise the contrast between life before and after trade liberalisation perfectly when they say ‘then, plenty money, no goods: now, plenty goods, no money’ (Brydon, 1992: 101). Ghanaian traders make a lot of money on the rare occasions when the Ghanaian cedi is stable against the dollar while other currencies, particularly in Asian countries, are declining. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s was a good time for such traders. In one year, some traders made enough to put up a house (Darkwah, 2002). Such situations are few and far between though. Traders find themselves often faced with
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Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women 391 declining economic circumstances. Occasionally, the Ghana Union of Traders Associations organises market closures to demonstrate their displeasure with the declining economic circumstances they face. The most recent of them at the time of writing took place during the last week of June 2014. Bowles (2013) looks at a new crop of self-employed trading entrepreneurs involved in inter-continental trade – young women with dual citizenships and tertiary degrees from Western universities who draw on their international networks, social ties and cosmopolitanism to engage in trading businesses – trading in jewellery, designer shoes or designer handbags – that are incredibly successful, making profits of, in some cases, 100 per cent (Bowles, 2013). While exactly how much they earned in a month could be debated, it was clear that these young women were building houses and purchasing luxury vehicles with cash. Although Bowles’s (2013) article presents a very optimistic account of the lives of these cosmopolitan women whose very lives are an embodiment of the dynamics of mobility that globalisation presents, there is a downside to this account. Economic processes completely outside their control could curtail these women’s success stories. As with the women firmly located in Ghana who go back and forth between Ghana and the West to purchase consumer goods for sale in Ghana, these cosmopolitan traders’ ability to make profits is dependent on the stability of the cedi vis-à-vis other major trading currencies, particularly the dollar. The year 2014 saw a freefall of the cedi from an exchange rate of 2.2 Ghana cedis to a dollar in the early part of the year to a rate of 3 Ghana cedis to a dollar over a three-month period, leading international financial news agencies such as Bloomberg to declare Ghana the country with the fastest-depreciating currency in 2014. Such a situation results in price increases to allow the traders to continue purchasing consumer goods from outside Ghana while maintaining their profit margins. Without increases in income to match this free fall of the Ghana cedi, the purchasing power of the Ghanaian public shrinks, decreasing sales and by extension profits for these traders. Brydon’s (1992) respondents’ assessment of the situation is as likely to be true in the years ahead as it was in the early 1990s.
CONCLUSION A focus on three different groups of self-employed traders with varying levels of education and working capital highlights the more nuanced accounting of the impact of globalisation that this chapter seeks to highlight. The optimist–pessimist dichotomy largely evident in the
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broader literature on women and globalisation focuses on employees in the formal economy. In focusing on self-employed women workers in the informal economy, I have sought to show the ways in which globalisation has both a positive and a negative impact on this group of people. What globalisation means for such workers is very different from what the dominant literature suggests. Globalisation processes worsen the precarious nature of working in the informal economy. Compared to workers in the formal economy, those in the informal economy can count on fewer safety nets. Having a situation where they experience both the negative and the positive impacts of globalisation heightens the sense of insecurity that such workers face; they take a step forward only to later on take one or two steps backward, in a cyclical fashion. What is worse, rarely can they count on somebody to catch them should they fall when taking a step backwards.
REFERENCES Aryeetey, Ernest (1994) ‘Private investment under uncertainty in Ghana’, World Development, 22 (8), 1211–1221. Baliamoune-Lutz, Mina (2007) ‘Globalisation and gender inequality: is Africa different?’, Journal of African Economies, 16, 301–348. Biles, James J. (2008) ‘Informal work and livelihoods in Mexico: getting by or getting ahead?’, Professional Geographer, 6, 541–555. Bowles, Laurian R. (2013) ‘Transnational mobility, social capital and cosmopolitan women traders in Ghana’, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 6 (2), 208–217. Brydon, Lynne (1992) ‘Ghanaian women in the migration process’, in Sylvia Chant (ed.), Gender and Migration in Developing Countries, London: Belhaven Press, pp. 91–108. Chen, Martha (2007) ‘Rethinking the informal economy: linkages with the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment’, in Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur and Elinor Ostrom (eds), Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 75–92. Cruickshank, Brodie (1853) Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa Including an Account of the Native Tribes and Their Intercourse with Europeans, London: Hurst and Blackett. Darkwah, Akosua K. (2002) ‘Trading goes global: Ghanaian long distance traders in an era of globalisation’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Darkwah, Akosua K. (2007) ‘Making hay while the sun shines: Ghanaian female traders and their insertion in the global economy’, in Nandini Gunewardena and Ann Kingsolver (eds), The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities, Oxford: James Currey, pp. 61–83. Desai, Manisha (2009) ‘Women cross-border traders in Africa: rethinking global trade’, Development, 52 (3), 377–386. Ghana Statistical Service (2008) Ghana Living Standards Survey, http://www.stats ghana.gov.gh/docfiles/glss5_report.pdf.
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Globalisation, development and the empowerment of women 393 Johnston-Anumonwo, Ibipo and Donna L. Doane (2011) ‘Globalisation, economic crisis and Africa’s informal economy women workers’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32, 8–21. Meagher, Kate (2003) ‘The back door to globalisation? Structural adjustment, globalisation and transborder trade in West Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 95, 57–75. Nagar, Richa, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell and Susan Hanson (2002) ‘Locating globalisation: feminist (re)readings of the subjects and spaces of globalisation’, Economic Geography, 78 (3), 257–284. Sparr, Pamela (ed.) (1994) Mortgaging Women’s Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment, London: Zed Books. Tsikata, Dzodzi (1997) ‘Gender equality and the state in Ghana: some issues of policy and practice’, in Ayesha M. Imam, Amina Mama and Fatou Sow (eds), Engendering African Social Sciences, Dakar: CODESRIA, pp. 381–412. Wrigley-Asante, Charlotte (2013) ‘Survival or escaping poverty: the perspectives of poverty and well-being among Ghanaian women in cross-border trading’, Journal of Gender Studies, 22 (3), 320–334.
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46. Social reproduction – the Achilles heel of feminist transformation? Shirin M. Rai and Catherine Hoskyns
Social reproduction was traditionally used as a descriptive category and set against production as a way of describing the known world and all the activities within it. Today the concept and the issues surrounding social reproduction have come to a new prominence as economic crisis and austerity cut into social provision and as feminist activists and scholars call for a rethink on issues of care, work and the social economy. At present, social reproduction is largely unrecognised and undervalued in economic terms, and it is for this reason that we have called it the Achilles heel which undermines progress towards feminist transformation. Before neo-classical economics put the emphasis almost exclusively on production, social reproduction was regarded as being at the centre of capital accumulation (Bakker and Silvey, 2008: 2). Thus production was seen as serving social reproduction rather than the other way about. Subsequently the emphasis on production has led to the positioning of social reproduction as a ‘second-level’ activity outside the market economy. As a result it is either undervalued or not valued at all and continues for the most part to be excluded from the economic calculus. We define social reproduction as follows: 1.
2.
3.
biological reproduction, which includes reproducing labour and the provision of the sexual, emotional and affective services that are required to maintain households and intimate relationships – the socialisation of sexuality; production in the home, of both goods and services, incorporating some types of home-based agriculture and different forms of care, as well as social provisioning and voluntary work directed at meeting needs in and of the community; reproduction of culture and ideology, which stabilises (and sometimes challenges) dominant social relations. (Laslett and Brenner, 1989: 382–383; Hoskyns and Rai, 2007: 300)
Clearly these definitions cross the divide between paid and unpaid work, and illustrate the complexity of the relationship between the two which is 394
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Social reproduction and feminist transformation? 395 reflected in feminist debates on issues of social reproduction. One issue that is increasingly important is the globalisation of social reproduction through care chains and migration. While Marx saw social reproduction as outside the central contradiction he was examining – the extraction of surplus value by capital from labour – Engels treated domestic work as significant; he saw women as the reserve army of labour in times of capitalist crises. This argument was taken up in the 1970s by socialist feminists, who initiated a debate on domestic labour, seeing surplus value as being extracted from women’s unpaid work to the advantage of husbands, capital or the state (Hartmann, 1979). Controversy was caused by radical feminist proposals for ‘wages for housework’, on the grounds that this would tie women too closely to caring roles. Such debates have carried on to the present day with ever more sophisticated data being used to explain and make visible the continuing subsidy to the market and capital from the ‘free’ reproduction and maintenance of labour power in the home. Feminist economists have also disaggregated the household, seeing it as the home not just for altruism and/or consumption but for multiple gendered transfers between individuals, the market and the state (Folbre, 2001). The debt crisis in the 1980s reignited these debates as structural adjustment policies were adopted in the economies and states of the South. It demonstrated the extent to which women were being adversely affected as their work and care burdens increased in the context of eroding social provisions. This same debate is now framing discussions about the effects of the current global crisis on women and households. As production becomes ever more global and international, and the composition of social reproduction and the balance between state and private provision more complex, issues of migration and care work, human trafficking and sex work across the North/South boundaries are critical to understanding the global political economy. Inequities of class and race in analysing social reproduction have been conceptualised as ‘stratified reproduction’ and continue to demand attention (Colen, 1995; Fraser, 1995). While the definition of social reproduction covers both paid work and unpaid work, paid work is counted as production and as such is both measured and valued and included in the gross domestic product (GDP) of all countries; unpaid work is not.
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THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM OF NATIONAL ACCOUNTS The 1993 United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), which is authorised by all major international institutions, sets out by common agreement how to map national economies in order to establish GDP, identify national and global trends and make cross-national comparisons. What is important here is that the UNSNA sets the ‘production boundary’, which establishes what activities are counted as ‘productive’, and therefore part of the market economy, and what are ‘not counted’ (Waring, 1988). Under this rubric domestic services are not regarded as part of production and are therefore excluded from measurements of economic activity. Part of the reason for this exclusion is that it would be difficult and expensive to measure this work. However, other non-market activities such as government services are included, and therefore a valuation of social reproductive work would not be impossible (Hoskyns and Rai, 2007). The predominance of neoliberal ideology means that the ‘unpredictable and emotional’ world of homecare is not easily admitted to the ‘safe’ world of market economics. The disciplinary role of the UNSNA can be seen clearly in the case of Norway, where national accounts for the periods 1935–43 and 1946–49 included estimates of the value of unpaid household work. However, the introduction of the first UN international standard for national accounts caused Norway to omit the value of unpaid labour from 1950 in the interests of producing internationally comparable national account figures. Waring has argued: ‘if you are invisible as a producer in the GDP, you are invisible in the distribution of benefits in the economic framework of the national budget’ (2012). The fact that unpaid service work in the home, such as care of children and adults, preparation of meals and transportation of household members, is seen to be outside the production boundary is particularly important, since this renders these activities invisible and severs the link between domestic labour and other economic processes; this has been seen by some as a violation of human rights (Sepulveda Carmona, 2013). How to Measure? As a response to these exclusions and technical concerns, feminist economists and statisticians have shown what methods could be used to measure and value unpaid work and have at the same time been setting
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Social reproduction and feminist transformation? 397 out the arguments and rationale for so doing. On questions of methodology, the main division has been between those who would measure inputs and time spent and those who would measure outputs – that is meals prepared, children cared for and so on. Time spent can be measured either by giving it a ‘replacement value’, how much it would cost to replace unpaid workers with paid workers, or by giving it an ‘opportunity value’, calculated on the amount the unpaid worker would be earning if s/he were in the paid labour market instead of doing unpaid work. Attempts to use such forms of measurement in order to value unpaid work have been made in some countries, notably the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Called household satellite accounts (HSAs), these follow the formulations of the SNA but do not form an integral part of national accounts. HSAs measure and give a value to unpaid work and thus provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the economy. When these valuations were made in 1992 in Canada, the replacement value of unpaid work came to $284.9 billion and the opportunity value to $318.8 billion. However, despite these striking results, the financial and political inputs needed to develop HSAs further are notably lacking. Another important form of measurement is the time use survey (TUS). This uses a variety of data collection methods – diaries, field surveys and interviews – to log the paid and unpaid work being done by members of households. These data can then be used to make a monetary evaluation (Esquivel et al., 2008). A TUS conducted in Tanzania in 2006 found that the value of unpaid care work at this point was equal to ‘63% of GDP’. Women overall spent the least amount of time on leisure, most on unpaid care work and only slightly less than men on ‘productive’ work (TGNP, 2009).
CARE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION In recent years the terms ‘care work’ and ‘the care economy’ have been used to designate an important part of social reproduction; ‘care’ seems attractive as a term because it is more easily translated into everyday vocabulary. Care work emphasises the care of persons, which takes place in households and communities in all societies. The highlighting of care resulted in part from feminist disquiet that the emphasis on social reproduction was reducing the importance of non-commodified caring and that labelling social reproduction as production had the effect of marketising intimate social relations. The emphasis on care also caused a
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greater awareness among policy makers that if women were to enter the labour market more attention to their caring roles would be necessary. However, a move that began with an emphasis on the need to recognise unpaid care work and share care more equally among parents has increasingly resulted in an emphasis on the needs of employers for more ‘flexible’ work under the rubric ‘reconciliation of work and family’ (Stratigaki, 2004). Razavi has suggested that care work is framed by what she calls the ‘care diamond’, which is composed of family/household, state, market and non-profit institutions. This can be used to track changes in care provision in different contexts (2007: 21). However, as the care economy framework has become more prevalent in the debates on social provisioning, we would argue that using the care economy as shorthand for social reproduction runs the risk of neglecting important aspects of social reproductive work such as biological reproduction, production in the home and the transmission of culture and values. Depletion through Social Reproduction The non-recognition of social reproductive work and its consequences for individuals, households and communities can be conceptualised through what has been termed ‘depletion’ (Elson, 2000; Rai et al., 2014). This involves identifying concepts, indicators and forms of measurement for the depletion of the physical and mental resources of those engaged in social reproductive work. Depletion occurs (albeit at different rates and levels in different social contexts) when the gap between the outflows (mainly domestic, affective and reproductive labour) and the inflows (medical care, earned income and time) goes below a threshold of biological, financial and emotional sustainability. Without the recognition of social reproductive work, we can also not recognise the extent and intensity of harm that is done through depletion in the doing of this work, and can therefore not address how this might be accounted for and reversed.
CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS The debates on social reproduction are particularly important today, as the globalisation of capital affects different sectors of the economy, including social reproduction, in different forms. This can be seen in the fragmentation of this sector, with multiple and varied effects of and responses to increased levels of commodification. The current economic
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Social reproduction and feminist transformation? 399 crisis and the consequent erosion of the welfare state increase the depletion of the most vulnerable and point to the importance of addressing issues of social reproduction. Feminist scholars have analysed how social reproduction comes to fill the gaps in times of crises, to the cost of those engaged in this work (Elson, 2000). These effects on social reproduction are not new, as the analyses of the 1980s debt crisis (Sen and Grown, 1987) and the East Asian crisis (Truong, 1999) show. Bringing these histories and power relations into view provides us with an alternative perspective from which to view the current crisis, a perspective that emphasises the links between systems of production, exchange, consumption and social reproduction. We have set out the debates about social reproduction and made the argument for counting social reproductive work in national accounts in order to recognise its importance in the global political economy. As women tend to do the majority of this work, such recognition would also be a form of redistributing social power and ensuring gender justice. Based on feminist theoretical and empirical work, Figure 46.1 gives an impressionistic view of what the global political economy would look like if social reproduction and domestic labour were given their proper place. It shows that there are three sectors of the economy, the domestic, the public (the state) and the private (capital). These interact in complex ways and vary in strength depending on particular conjunctures and variables in the global South and North. HSA and TUS calculations suggest that the domestic sectors contribute more that they receive in benefits and wages, providing a considerable subsidy to capital; the depletion of those doing social reproduction is another layer of this subsidy. These subsidies are not recognised. Figure 46.1 also shows that the international regulatory system spans all three sectors. The domestic sector has least influence over the nature of regulatory practices, which reproduce the exclusion of the domestic sphere through governance mechanisms such as the UNSNA. Since, formally at least, the job of economic analysis and of accounting is to be accurate and lay the basis for policy, the distortions discussed above present serious underlying problems. They also allow mainstream economists and policy makers to abstract economic decisions more easily from their social contexts and consequences. One result of this is that it is not possible accurately to measure the shift (mostly of women) from unpaid to paid work, and as a result the consequences for the household and the community are not properly evaluated. Similarly, the extent and effect of the increasing commercialisation of domestic services is not adequately recorded because there is no benchmark against which it can be measured. The proper identification of these problems and their
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Depletion of resources and capacities
Fragmentation of functions and services
South
Domestic sector (household and communities) – providing services, labour and social reproduction, subsistence and value
Public sector (state and nonstate actors) – limited functions, welfare and wage payments
Global private sector (capital) – producing marketised goods and services, paying wages and taxes
Domestic sector (household and communities) – providing services, labour and social reproduction, subsistence and value
Depletion of resources and capacities
Source:
International regimes regulating private, state and household economies
Public sector (state and nonstate actors) – welfare and wage payments, providing regulation and services
Fragmentation of functions and services
North
Authors’ own figure.
Figure 46.1 Recasting international political economy consequences would add an important dimension to the debate on the changing role of the state in the North and the South. It would also define more accurately the ways in which existing forms of regulation (national accounts, for example, or trade policy) shape and determine how issues to do with social reproduction are treated. These absences represent a serious problem but one which as yet is insufficiently recognised. It is obscured by the current structures of the international system and how people understand them. Though these structures and visualisations are embedded in custom and tradition, we would argue that they are becoming increasingly dysfunctional in the new global economic and political system. We have tracked above the multiple meanings of social reproduction, the various forms it has taken in feminist debates, the ways in which gender as a variable has been treated in the development of economic ideas, and the processes through which social reproduction has been marginalised (Folbre, 2010). In what other economic process would the provision of one basic input – in this case labour power – remain largely unrecognised and uncosted in economic terms? This non-recognition is now embedded in the structure of capitalism itself. It is this sleight of hand, perpetuated by greed, custom, inertia and the contradictory emotions that people, including women, have towards the notion of care,
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Social reproduction and feminist transformation? 401 which makes gender justice so hard to achieve. Unless a remedy is found which meets and addresses these contradictions, the undervaluing and non-recognition of social reproduction will remain the Achilles heel which blocks progress towards feminist transformation.
REFERENCES Bakker, Isabella and Rachel Silvey (eds) (2008) Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction, London: Routledge. Colen, Shellee (1995) ‘“Like a mother to them”: stratified reproduction and West Indian childcare workers and employers in New York’, in Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 78–102. Elson, Diane (2000) ‘The progress of women: empowerment and economics’, in Progress of the World’s Women, New York: UNIFEM, pp. 15–36. Esquivel, Valeria, Debbie Budlender, Nancy Folbre and Indira Hirway (2008) ‘Explorations: time-use surveys in the South’, Feminist Economics, 14 (3), 107–152. Folbre, Nancy (2001) The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, New York: New Press. Folbre, Nancy (2010) Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Nancy (1995) ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “postsocialist age”’, New Left Review, 212, 68–93. Hartmann, Heidi (1979) ‘The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism’, Capital and Class, 3 (2), 1–33. Hoskyns, Catherine and Shirin M. Rai (2007) ‘Recasting the international political economy: counting women’s unpaid work’, New Political Economy, 12 (3), 297–317. Laslett, Barbara and Johanna Brenner (1989) ‘Gender and social reproduction: historical perspectives’, Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 381–404. Rai, Shirin M., Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas (2014) ‘Depletion: the cost of social reproduction’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16 (1), 86–105. Razavi, Shahra (2007) The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context: Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options, Gender and Development Programme Paper no. 3, Geneva: UNRISD. Sen, Gita and Caren Grown (1987) Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, New York: Monthly Review Press. Sepulveda Carmona, Magdalena (2013) ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights’, United Nations, A/68/150. Stratigaki, Maria (2004) ‘The co-option of gender concepts in EU policies: the case of “reconciliation of work and family”’, Social Politics, 11 (1), 30–56. TGNP (Tanzania Gender Networking Programme) (2009) Who Cares for Us? Time Use Study of Unpaid Care Work in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam: TGNP. Truong, Thanh-Dam (1999) ‘The underbelly of the tiger: gender and the demystification of the Asian Miracle’, Review of International Political Economy, 6 (2), 133–165. Waring, Marilyn (1988) If Women Counted? A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Waring, Marilyn (2012) ‘Making visible the invisible: commodification is not the answer’, Open Democracy, 7 May, http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/marilyn-waring/makingvisible-invisible-commodification-is-not-answer.
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PART VIII GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
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47. Gender in international governance Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel
Feminist movements have made gender relations, long taken for granted as an unspoken organizing principle of societies, into a political issue, and with the rise of multilateralism at the end of the twentieth century they catapulted the debate about gender into the realm of international politics. Here, gender relations have become a topic of international governance: feminists have made claims towards being, and have been, integrated into international institutions in various ways; gender has become the object of international law, programmes, and projects; and international governance mechanisms are now in place seeking to influence the organization of gender relations around the world. In this chapter we provide an overview of the ways gender has become an issue in international institutions and the ways it now operates in international governance. We first explore the history of efforts to get gender on the agenda of international institutions, together with the critique of such efforts. Next, we describe strategies geared towards changing gender relations in international institutions, in particular legal strategies and gender mainstreaming, and discuss the controversies around these strategies. Then we unravel strands of contemporary efforts to measure the impacts international engagements and strategies have on gender relations around the world.
GETTING GENDER ON THE AGENDA The history of feminist activism in the League of Nations is only beginning to be written, but such activism was significant. The Treaty of Versailles, which founded both the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO), required that positions in the League secretariat and in the International Labour Office be open to women, that the ILO would consider the protection of women, and that women would be included in government delegations when topics that concerned them were discussed. This language entered the treaty largely as a result of intense feminist lobbying at Versailles. In 1925, 11 feminist organizations 405
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formed the Joint Standing Committee of Women’s International Organizations (later the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organizations), which became the primary interlocutor for the League on women’s issues. The Committee worked on the promotion of world peace, targeted the disarmament conferences of the late 1920s, took up the issue of women’s economic rights – including in the aftermath of the great depression combating efforts to restrict women’s right to work – and fought trafficking and prostitution. In addition to lobbying the League and the ILO from the outside, feminists also were active inside the new international organizations, where they served as experts and staff, such as on the League’s Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children or in the ILO’s Bureau of Women and Children. After 1945, feminists resumed their internationalist activism by targeting the United Nations (UN). According to Antrobus (2004), this activism can be divided into three broad phases reflecting the institutional transformations it generated. The first phase, from 1945 to 1974, was a phase of international knowledge formation. The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) – founded in 1946 and at the time both an institutional and movement-oriented women’s space – succeeded in framing the legal and socio-economic dimensions of the inferior status of women as internationally relevant. This understanding was expressed in the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women of 1967. The second phase, from 1975 to 1995, marks an era of global transformation with an explosion of international awareness raising in terms of both the publicity that gender equality received and the multiplicity of actors involved. The 1976–85 UN Decade for Women and the corresponding conferences spawned new institutions to work for gender equality on all levels, including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the Convention on Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The global dialogue made possible by the world conferences enabled a learning process that first acknowledged differences among women and then envisaged joint strategies of action. The decade produced, moreover, a vibrant, articulate, and diverse global women’s movement, whose main nodes were transnational networks knowledgeable about reframing global justice issues in a variety of fields and influencing various UN conferences in the 1990s. At the Beijing women’s conference in 1995 feminist activists demanded the participation of women in formal channels of power, winning support for gender mainstreaming and a comprehensive catalogue of state commitments in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA).
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Gender in international governance 407 Antrobus characterizes the phase of gender politics in international governance from 1996 to the date of the publication of her book in 2004 as one of consolidation and of a shift of allegiances. The phase generated disenchantment with international processes among feminists, as commitments to neoliberal economic governance harmed women’s socioeconomic conditions. In this process, feminism itself has been neoliberalized, as gender equality has been construed as ‘smart economics’ in the policies of the World Bank and as international business has signed on to the agenda. Further, gender has entered new policy fields, in particular the security arena, prompted by a number of Security Council resolutions since 2000. Also, various UN women’s agencies have been consolidated to form a new UN Agency for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women, which went into operation in January 2011, combining both operational and standardsetting mandates and raising hope for a new momentum for feminist politics at the UN. Feminist engagements with international institutions thus have generated ambiguous outcomes. On the positive side, transnational women’s networks have been quite successful in setting agendas. They have engaged in ‘strategic framing’ or ‘discursive politics’ to legitimize certain gender equality claims and to make them plausible and acceptable for policy-makers (Hawkesworth, 2006; Joachim, 2007). However, feminist entanglements with governmental or inter-governmental institutions have also led to a taming of movement demands. As Hawkesworth states, ‘outsider politics is often marginalized as utopian, while insider politics is often co-opted … or derailed by the standard operating procedures of gendered institutions’ (2006: 108). This is evident, for example, in World Bank projects that perpetuate heteronormative constructions of the family or in the taming of the designs of anti-war activists that accompanied the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. Clearly, getting on the agenda of international institutions is just the first step; the challenge is to stay there and to prevent feminist ideas from becoming distorted beyond recognition.
FEMINIST STRATEGIES IN INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE In the arenas of international governance two key strategies have emerged for advancing feminist issues, in effect legal strategies and gender mainstreaming. Both strategies reflect the tension between feminist change projects and institutional commitments.
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Legal Strategies The idea of gender equality was, at least rhetorically, part of the human rights framework since its very inception, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 already contains language to that effect, thanks to the lobbying efforts of a handful of early women’s rights advocates. However, it took the wave of global consciousness-raising regarding gender inequality in the 1970s to make women’s rights relevant enough to codify them in a human rights treaty: the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). A decade and a half later, in 1993, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights coined the slogan ‘women’s rights are human rights’ and thus emphasized the centrality of women’s experiences for a holistic understanding of human rights. The integration of a gender perspective into the human rights framework has meant a stronger focus on the manifold ways in which women experience human rights violations because they are women. With a few exceptions, this has not implied a comprehensive understanding of gender as a social structure that affects all humans and of sexism as a form of oppression that generally benefits (some) men (more than others); the dominant paradigm of gender in international law still is that women have to be enabled to reach the same level of self-determination as men. While this may sound like a flawed approach to eradicating gender-based discrimination, the process of pulling women’s issues out of seclusion and emphasizing their centrality to the meaning of human rights has been a remarkable (if slow and cumbersome) endeavour. When the CEDAW Committee came into being, it was isolated and lacking the resources to fulfil even its most basic functions, but over time it has become a leader among the UN treaty bodies in developing an understanding of human rights violations perpetrated by non-state actors and of intersectional dimensions of discrimination. The CEDAW Committee has reinforced the Convention’s comprehensive definition of discrimination against women (CEDAW, article 1) through general recommendations specifying the meaning of women’s rights in diverse contexts.1 These attempts to push the dialogue further and make it more useful for women around the world have come from Committee experts, but they would be unthinkable without the strong civil society input that CEDAW has attracted over time. However, since anti-feminist voices at the UN sometimes discredit the CEDAW Committee as a group of ‘radical feminists’, CEDAW experts have also taken cautious positions in order to avoid jeopardizing their legitimacy as women’s rights advocates in the eyes of state actors.
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Gender in international governance 409 Gender Mainstreaming Gender mainstreaming (GM) entered the international governance arena through the Beijing Platform for Action, more than 15 years after the adoption of CEDAW, in part because of recognition that laws were not enough and that gender equality required far-ranging institutional change. After its introduction, GM diffused rapidly as a key strategy for promoting gender equality. Paradoxically, it also has become the most maligned strategy among feminists, as studies are proliferating on its multiple failures. In order to understand this paradox it is useful to distinguish between the conceptual dimension and the institutional dimension of gender mainstreaming. One of the reasons for the wide acceptance of GM is a lack of conceptual clarity: GM can mean all things to all people. Usually, definitions refer to GM as ‘the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action … in all areas and at all levels’ (UN ECOSOC 1997/2). Most definitions articulate that the goal is to achieve gender equality, but none specify exactly what gender equality means. The definition of gender equality is a long-standing point of contention in feminist literature (Squires, 2005). Depending on whether the focus is for instance on equality of opportunity or equality of outcomes, the orientation of mainstreaming policies varies. In the absence of a clear definition, the operationalization of gender equality comes to rest on lay knowledge and normative – mostly conservative – assumptions about appropriate gender roles and gender relations. As a consequence, gender equality becomes the object of ‘discursive politics’ that operate to shrink, stretch, or bend gender equality goals (Lombardo et al., 2009). Accordingly, there is ample evidence that GM has often been instrumentalized to meet other goals. For example, European Union (EU) mainstreaming policies are framed in ways that serve neoliberal labour market policy goals; family policy and issues of work/family reconciliation have become a means for the activation and flexibilization of women for the labour market. Questions of gendered power relations typically are not taken into account, and the ways in which gender inequality intersects with other inequalities, such as class, are ignored. From an institutional perspective, GM is intended to create the conditions for institutional learning, for instance by building up gender expertise within organizations. The idea is to enable bureaucrats to reorganize institutional procedures and to redefine policy values in ways to achieve gender equality. In practice, empirical studies show that
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mainstreaming policies face strong administrative and institutional resistance. For the case of the EU, for instance, Stratigaki (2005) depicts how high- and middle-level bureaucrats strategize against the implementation of GM. Hafner-Burton and Pollack (2009) advance the criticism that most organizations have tried to implement GM relying on voluntary measures and argue that bureaucrats need to be encouraged to conform to the mainstreaming mandate through ‘hard incentives’ (in effect performance-oriented promotion or remuneration). Some feminist scholars, however, doubt that the gendered-ness of organizations can be escaped. Their studies attest to the persistence of gendered power asymmetries in bureaucracies. These take form in the under-representation of women in key positions. They are also implicit in institutional rules, which prescribe appropriate social behaviour along gender lines and determine whose claims are heard. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality framework, scholars have described GM as a technology of government which produces certain kinds of gendered subjects. These studies shift the focus from the effects of organizational power asymmetries on the implementation of GM to the power effects of mainstreaming practices themselves. Thus, GM is not just subject to power struggles but also a technique of power.
MEASURING IMPACTS OF INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE ON GENDER RELATIONS When seeking to assess the impact of international feminist and gender equality politics, scholars have looked at the actions of governments and civil society organizations. Governments have moved impressively in the field of legislative changes, for example in regard to gender-based violence and equal employment policies. Even if often there is little evidence of de facto change as a consequence, increasingly judiciary bodies take notice of international human rights treaties and their significance for domestic contexts. Non-governmental initiatives have drawn on CEDAW to lobby and raise awareness among government representatives, the judiciary, parliamentarians, or civil servants and thus have helped create the knowledge necessary for legal and policy change. In addition, they teach women about their rights and establish connections between different organizations so that collaboration along the lines of women’s rights is more likely and women’s voices become louder. Embedded in this activism, gender equality norms travel from international to local contexts and back, and as they do are being contested and translated. The literature tracing such processes looks into agency
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Gender in international governance 411 that uses international gender norms to influence domestic gender regimes; it analyses actor constellations and context characteristics that shape strategies and outcomes of norm translation processes. Levitt et al. (2013) have coined the term ‘vernacularization’ for the process of making international gender norms understandable and acceptable in other-thanglobal contexts. This notion of translation/vernacularization rejects the idea of a one-way flow from global to local; it sees national and local contexts in themselves as actively producing norms and, as a result, potentially contesting or transforming global ‘value packages’. Norm translation literature reformulates the question of impact to focus less on structured outcomes than on contextualized interpretation and application of gender equality norms. A similar focus on processes is evident in research on mechanisms that various scholars have identified in the implementation of GM. For example, at the organizational level Moser’s (2005) analysis of the World Bank identifies processes of evaporation, invisibilization, and resistance. Other scholars approach implementation processes discursively, and have identified the shrinking, stretching, and bending of gender equality goals in various policy arenas (Lombardo et al., 2009), or the co-optation, normalization, and silencing of differences in the implementation of the EU’s rural development policies (Prügl, 2009). Recent debates around composite gender (in)equality measurements similarly push away from static diagnostics of outcomes towards a consideration of processes. A number of indicators, such as the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap, have served the purpose of holding accountable. However, they also have become the subject of critique in view of a new push to better measure progress on gender equality. Liebowitz and Zwingel (2014) argue that the indicators capture only a slice of reality, privileging that which is easily measurable, while hiding significant forms of discrimination. Moreover, they contribute to producing realities rather than represent realities, and they are blind to agency in processes of social change. Liebowitz and Zwingel suggest the CEDAW Committee’s review of state parties to the Convention as an alternative to assessing progress towards gender equality because it is better at attending to the complexity and fluidity of gender norms and pays attention to context-specific agency to confront gender hierarchies.
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CONCLUSION By making gender relations a matter of international governance, feminist activists have entered a unique field of contestation. They have carved out spaces in international institutions, helped create new organizations and practices, and helped develop international law in support of their diverse struggles. However, as much as CEDAW and gender mainstreaming have become a resource for struggles in various spaces, they are also embroiled in discursive commitments, inter-state negotiation, and organizational politics. Thus, internationalist feminist struggle no longer entails getting a foot in the door and gaining a voice, but requires critiquing existing gender policies and programmes, guarding against faithless norm translations, watching out for mechanisms of power that distort outcomes, and keeping at bay the governmentalities emerging from measurement and other technocratic procedures.
NOTE 1.
The Committee’s general recommendations can be accessed at http://www2.ohchr.org/ english/bodies/cedaw/comments.htm.
REFERENCES Antrobus, Peggy (2004) The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies, London: Zed Books. Hafner-Burton, Emilie M. and Mark A. Pollack (2009) ‘Mainstreaming gender in the European Union: getting the incentives right’, Comparative European Politics, 7 (1), 114–138. Hawkesworth, Mary E. (2006) Globalization and Feminist Activism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Joachim, Jutta (2007) Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Levitt, Peggy, Sally Engle Merry, Rosa Alayza and Mercedes Criso´stomo Meza (2013) ‘Doing vernacularization: the encounter between global and local ideas about women’s rights in Peru’, in Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, London: Routledge, pp. 127–142. Liebowitz, Debra and Susanne Zwingel (2014) ‘Gender equality oversimplified: using CEDAW to counter the measurement obsession’, International Studies Review, 16 (3), 362–389. Lombardo, Emanuela, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (2009) ‘Stretching and bending gender equality: a discursive politics approach’, in Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo (eds), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking, London: Routledge, pp. 1–18. Moser, Caroline (2005) ‘Has gender mainstreaming failed?’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7 (4), 576–590.
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Gender in international governance 413 Prügl, Elisabeth (2009) ‘Does gender mainstreaming work? Feminist engagements with the German agricultural state’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (2), 174–195. Squires, Judith (2005) ‘Is mainstreaming transformative? Theorizing mainstreaming in the context of diversity and deliberation’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, 12 (3), 366–388. Stratigaki, Maria (2005) ‘Gender mainstreaming vs positive action: an ongoing conflict in EU gender equality policy’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12 (2), 165–186.
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48. What is feminist economics? Drucilla K. Barker
Feminist economics is a relative newcomer to the economics profession. Although the economic position of women has been a question for many years, a uniquely feminist community of economists does not emerge until the early 1990s. It was marked by the launching of the journal Feminist Economics, as well as the International Association for Feminist Economists (IAFFE). It is a pluralistic, and sometimes interdisciplinary, approach to economics that works toward a transformation of economics. Using gender and other markers of social difference as analytical categories, feminist economists show that implicit and unexamined values are deeply embedded in both theoretical and empirical economic scholarship. Absent feminist analyses, economics rationalizes and naturalizes existing social hierarchies based on gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality. Although this is especially true of issues germane to women’s lives such as occupational segregation and the wage gap, the feminization of poverty and the provision of domestic labor, it is no less true of issues such as development and macroeconomics. All economic phenomena are likely to have asymmetric impacts on women and men, since they occupy different and overlapping social locations. Feminist economics is also defined by what it is not. It is not mainstream economics, the type of economics that one reads about in the Wall Street Journal or hears about on all of the major television networks and in all of the leading business magazines. Mainstream economists define economics as the science of choice: how societies, which are simply aggregates of individuals, choose to allocate scarce resources among competing goods. These individuals, divided into consumers and producers, are rational economic agents whose market interactions determine economic outcomes: prices, incomes and profits. Consumers make choices that maximize their happiness or satisfaction, and firms maximize their profits by their choice of which commodities to produce at which price. Their interactions in the “free market” are the best way to ensure that societies will prosper economically. Feminist economists critique the twin notions of rational economic agents and the free market. Free markets do not exist except in 414
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What is feminist economics? 415 mathematical models of the economy. Although there are numerous “mom and pop” stores, the real world is dominated by large multinational corporations that determine economic conditions at the very highest levels of business and government. Rational economic agents are similarly fictitious. They are posited as abstract entities devoid of social context and obligation to others and do not bear any markers of gender, race or class. These assumptions exclude a myriad of cultural and social factors and exclude considerations of children, the elderly, the disabled, and racially and ethnically stigmatized persons (Strassmann, 1993). Mainstream economics also obscures the structural barriers that maintain gendered and racialized social hierarchies.
EARLY QUESTIONS Although not formally named until the 1990s, the foundation for feminist economics was built during the 1960s and 1970s by scholars working in three different theoretical traditions: neoclassical economics, institutionalist economics and Marxist political economy. All the traditions were informed by a central quest in feminist scholarship: isolating the cause of women’s subordination and finding its antidotes. For feminist economists working in the neoclassical tradition, women’s subordinate position in labor markets was the cause, and labor force equality was the antidote. Thus their work focused on questions about women’s labor force participation, the gender wage gap and occupational segregation. They note that, although women’s labor force participation rates increased steadily during the twentieth century, the wage gap and occupational segregation remain entrenched features of the workplace. Mainstream economics explains this as a rational outcome of women’s choices. They choose occupations that are compatible with their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Feminist economists disagree. For example, Barbara Bergman, an early pioneer in the field, argued that, because there are fewer female-dominated occupations than maledominated occupations, women are “crowded” into them. The surplus of women, relative to the demand for their labor, helps to keep their wages low and male wages high. Like any other system of dominance and privilege, occupational segregation perpetuates itself through the selfinterest of its beneficiaries (Bergmann, 1986). Of course, earnings inequalities and occupational segregation are also attributable to other markers of social identity such as race and ethnicity. Other feminist
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economists incorporated racial inequalities into their analysis by examining wages as a social practice that produced particular social relations and hierarchies (Figart et al., 2002). Feminist economists also examined the impacts of women’s labor force participation on intra-household decision-making and resource allocation. Acknowledging that family relationships have elements of both conflict and cooperation, they describe family interactions as a type of negotiation, and the allocations of resources and responsibilities within the household are the results of these bargains. Their analyses showed that women’s bargaining power within the household was at least partly determined by their labor market earnings potential. Feminist work in the Marxist political economy tradition was similar in that feminist economists argued that gender oppression was a result of the sexual division of labor. The important distinction however was their emphasis on the importance of non-monetized productive activities within the household—domestic labor. Meals must be cooked, beds made and children cared for. One solution available to relatively elite women is to use some of their income to purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home, services provided mainly by poor women from minority, working-class or Third-World immigrant backgrounds. The pressures created by the neoliberal policies accompanying economic globalization leave these women with few options other than to participate in the poorly paid, insecure and devalorized segments of transnational markets for domestic labor, often forgoing the care of their own children and families. Bringing domestic labor to the forefront of economic analyses raised another issue: what sort of work is domestic labor? Activities are considered work if another person can be paid to do them. Cooking, cleaning and similar tasks easily fit this definition; however, other activities such as childcare, eldercare and caring for the emotional needs of family, friends and colleagues may be qualitatively different (Himmelweit, 1995). Some feminist economists argue that caring labor should be considered analytically distinct from other sorts of domestic labor because the quality of care received depends, in part, on the quality of the relationships connecting the givers and the receivers of care (Folbre and Nelson, 2000). This is true whether the work is unpaid or paid. Other feminist economists argue that this analysis essentializes women’s work and works against gender equality. Although the question of whether caring labor is distinctive, and what is distinctive about it, remains in flux, one thing is certain. Neoliberal economic policies endanger its supply by devaluing caring labor and the people who provide it.
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What is feminist economics? 417
POLICY CONTRIBUTIONS One of the challenges faced by feminist economists is that they are trying both to change the discipline and to work within it. They are trying to influence public policy debates at local, national, international and transnational levels. However, they work within a discipline that calls itself “the queen of the social sciences,” and its scientific status is derived from its “rigorous,” read mathematical, modeling and by a strict allegiance to the separation of positive (what is) and normative economics (what ought to be). Although this distinction has been thoroughly debunked in both the philosophy of science and feminist economics literature, it remains a truism in mainstream economics. Feminist economists do have explicit values: gender equity, racial equality, environmental sustainability and so forth. They use the tools of mainstream economics—mathematical models, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics—to produce research that will improve the lives of women and others lower on the ladder of social privilege. Such research may be done on local, national and transnational levels. The importance of this type of research is evident in the United Nations (UN) documents and declarations articulating its long-standing commitment to gender equality and to the empowerment of women and girls. This commitment began when the UN declared 1975 as the Year of the Woman and marked this by a world conference in Mexico City. Subsequently 1976 to 1985 was designated as the Decade for Women and was followed by three more world conferences in Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing in 1995. The 1995 Beijing Conference resulted in the Platform for Action (UN Women, 1995), which established an agenda for gender equality and women’s rights that extended far into the future. Progress reports have been conducted every five years since, with the most recent being The Progress of the World’s Women: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights (UN Women, 2015). The 1995 Platform has 12 areas of concern, two of which particularly reflect the influence of feminist economics: women and poverty and women and the economy. This chapter will discuss four strategic objectives in these areas: the adoption of macroeconomic and development policies that address the needs of poor women; the development of gender-sensitive methodologies; the elimination of occupational segregation and employment discrimination; and the harmonization of work and family responsibilities for women and men. First, the adoption of macroeconomic and development policies to address the needs of poor women has been a central area of concern in
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the work of feminist economists such as Diane Elson (1991) and Lourdes Benería (1996). By taking the importance of non-monetized domestic labor seriously they were better able to understand the effects of structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Models that do not allow for consideration of the work necessary to maintain and reproduce the labor force implicitly assume that such labor will be forthcoming independently of its valuation and compensation. When this assumption is made explicit, it demonstrates that the full economic costs of structural adjustment were seriously underestimated. SAPs did not save money, but merely transferred costs from the monetized sector into the nonmonetized sector of the household. The bulk of these costs fall mainly on women and girls, as they increase their paid and unpaid working hours. Structural adjustment required government spending cutbacks on health, education and other social services. As public provisioning was reduced, families had to provide these services for themselves or go without them altogether. Policymakers assumed that there was an unlimited supply of women’s labor available to compensate for the reduction in public sector social services. Since the value of household labor is not officially counted, these costs were hidden. Women in the developing world had to cope with rising commodity prices, cutbacks in public services such as health and education, and rising male unemployment rates. The gendered effects of current austerity measures have similar negative consequences for women, increasing their paid and unpaid work while lowering their standard of living. The imperative to develop gender-based methodologies is another strategic objective that reflects the influence of feminist economics. Again non-monetized domestic labor comes to the fore. Because it is non-monetized the value of this labor is not included in systems of national accounting designed to provide a basis for economic policy and planning. Such planning is therefore based on faulty data and assumptions. Feminist economists, however, have a solution: to quantify and account for the real value of domestic labor. One such method relies on the collection of time-use surveys and then imputes a value to labor time. For example, if a household member spends ten hours per week cleaning the house then the value of that production is equal to what one would have to pay either to have it done by specialists (cooking by a cook, childcare by a nanny and so forth) or by assigning a standard, nonspecialist wage. This method is the simplest and most widely used at the present. A major problem with this method is that it does not account for differences in the efficiency of time use by paid and unpaid labor. Another is that it is difficult to accurately account for joint production— activities done at the same time, for example cooking a meal and caring
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What is feminist economics? 419 for children. Nonetheless, estimates show that unpaid labor adds at least 30 percent to the value of national income. To the extent that policymakers ignore this value, economic policies will continue to be less effective than they might otherwise be in measuring economic wellbeing, gauging the effects of women’s labor force participation and instituting appropriate policies. Feminist economic research into ways to eliminate occupational segregation and employment discrimination has taken different forms. As discussed above, feminist economists have demonstrated both theoretically and empirically that mainstream arguments rationalizing the gender wage gap and occupational segregation are biased and incomplete. According to mainstream economics, both occupational segregation and the wage gap are attributed to women’s rational choices to prioritize domestic responsibilities over career choices. Women choose lowerpaying occupations because they are compatible with parenting responsibilities. They are lower-paying because they require smaller investments in human capital. Human capital refers to the education, skills, training and experience necessary for particular occupations. Human capital proponents argue that women’s investments in human capital are the result of rational, cost–benefit calculations. Women, so the theory goes, expect to interrupt paid work to rear children. Since they expect to spend fewer years in the workforce owing to time off for child rearing, they have fewer years to reap the rewards from their investment in human capital. While they are out of the labor force, they do not receive on-the-job training. They fail to accumulate work experience, and their human capital depreciates, so that when they reenter the workforce they are even further disadvantaged. However, this argument is circular. Women invest less in human capital or choose a less demanding job because they anticipate spending less time in the labor force than will their spouses. They anticipate spending less time in the labor force because their potential earnings are lower. In other words, women earn less because they invest in less human capital, and they invest in less human capital because they are paid less. This argument is also empirically false. Empirical studies that analyze how much of the wage gap is due to human capital differences and how much is due to discrimination show that human capital differences— years of education, years of experience, interruptions in labor force participation, and differences between full-time and part-time work— explain only 30–50 percent of the wage gap. Moreover, human capital is the result not only of individual choice, but of gendered norms about the education and training of women. The exclusion of women from highpaying, high-prestige jobs in science, engineering and technology is
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likewise well documented. Similarly, women are conspicuously absent from relatively high-paying jobs in craft occupations such as plumbing, electrical work and carpentry work. These occupations often require apprenticeship skills that should be acquired during childhood and early adulthood. That women are excluded from acquiring such skills reflects discriminatory gender norms rather than natural affinities (Barker and Feiner, 2004). Finally, the harmonization of family responsibilities between women and men, often referred to as work/family balance in the workplace, requires replacing the shop-worn model of the male breadwinner/female caretaker model of the family. This model no longer describes the situations of families and perhaps it never did. Women’s labor force participation roughly equals that of men; many women are the sole breadwinners in their families. Still public policies and cultural norms about appropriate gender roles continue to disadvantage them in terms of labor market earnings. Women are still largely responsible for both childcare and eldercare in both the global north and the global south. This is a cultural rather than a purely economic phenomenon, and requires an interdisciplinary approach to address the causal factors and appropriate solutions. Sadly, in the global north, the problem for middleclass and elite women is to rely on low-cost domestic labor provided by transnational migrants. These migrants in turn rely on less privileged women in their home countries to provide the day-to-day care their families require.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS A critical understanding of the economic disadvantages women face as a result of cultural imperatives and economic constraints that assign to them the primary responsibility for domestic labor and devalue their labor market contributions is a central feature of feminist economics. Many of the issues facing women during the last half of the twentieth century remain entrenched today: the wage gap has hardly budged, occupational segregation is still predominant, the time and resources for domestic labor are still scarce, and economic policies continue to push costs from the market economy into the household economy. In addition, new issues have come to the fore with the recurring global crises as financial risks are shifted from the financial sector to the household sector. Poor women, members of the working class, students and migrants find themselves in debt traps that are seemingly intractable. Austerity measures are forcibly imposed as solutions to national debts;
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What is feminist economics? 421 microcredit is touted as a panacea for poverty, risky mortgages as the solution for urban blight, and student debt as the ticket to the middle class. Although many of the solutions to these problems are couched in terms of the relationship between women’s empowerment and overall economic prosperity, the so-called “business case,” new work is being done on the importance of alternative, non-capitalist economic practices that engender solidarity economies with spaces for economic justice and egalitarian interdependence (Bergeron and Healy, 2015). These are new and important areas for interdisciplinary feminist economics research.
REFERENCES Barker, Drucilla K. and Susan F. Feiner (2004) Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Benería, Lourdes (1996) ‘The legacy of structural adjustment in Latin America’, in M.J. Dudley and Lourdes Benería (eds), Economic Restructuring in the Americas, Ithaca, NY: Latin American Studies Program, Cornell University, pp. 3–30. Bergeron, Suzanne and Stephen Healy (2015) ‘Beyond the business case: a community economies approach to gender, development and social economy’, in P. Utting (ed.), Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe?, London: Zed Books, pp. 72–85. Bergmann, Barbara R. (1986) The Economic Emergence of Women, New York: Basic Books. Elson, Diane (ed.) (1991) Male Bias in the Development Process, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Figart, Deborah M., Ellen Mutari and Marilyn Power (2002) Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policies in the United States, London: Routledge. Folbre, Nancy and Julie A. Nelson (2000) ‘For love or money – or both?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14 (4), 123–140. Himmelweit, Susan (1995) ‘The discovery of “unpaid work”: the social consequences of the expansion of “work”’, Feminist Economics, 1 (2), 1–19. Strassmann, Diane (1993) ‘Not a free market: the rhetoric of disciplinary authority in economics’, in M.A. Ferber (ed.), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 54–68. UN Women (1995) Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, http://www.un.org/ womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/economy.htm (accessed 4 May 2015). UN Women (2015) The Progress of the World’s Women: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, New York: UN Women.
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49. The international financial institutions, structural adjustment and poverty reduction Arne Ruckert
INTRODUCTION The global financial crisis of 2008 has brought the international financial institutions (IFIs), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and their adjustment policies back into the spotlight of global economic governance. Long criticised for the socially harmful impacts of some of their neoliberal policy prescriptions, the IFIs responded in the early 2000s with a major policy overhaul of their lending practices, introducing the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach. The PRSP approach was supposed to formally replace structural adjustment by ensuring country ownership and civil society participation in all aspects of policy development and programme implementation. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the IFIs further modified some of their lending programmes to respond to the challenging macro-economic and fiscal environment that it created. This chapter traces these recent policy changes inside the IFIs and discusses their various gender impacts. It argues that structural adjustment has become more poverty-sensitive over time, especially by linking debt relief administered through the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC II) Initiative to the delivery of basic social services to the poor as part of the PRSP process. Nevertheless, poverty reduction and its social agenda, rather than being opposed to the neoliberal vision, have become important addenda to market-enabling reforms, and have therefore not overcome many of the negative gender impacts of previous generations of SAPs. In response to the global financial crisis, the IFIs have returned to more traditional forms of structural adjustment, further reinforcing their commitment to market-promoting reforms with little regard for their detrimental social consequences. The chapter unfolds in the following manner. It first documents the transition from structural adjustment to the PRSP approach. It then discusses in more detail the content and nature of PRSPs, with a specific 422
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The IFIs, structural adjustment and poverty reduction 423 focus on how the introduction of PRSPs has impacted gender-relevant aspects of structural adjustment. The chapter then turns to the IFIs’ response to the global financial crisis of 2008, noting how the emergence of a global austerity regime is signalling the return of more traditional forms of structural adjustment. The chapter concludes by highlighting the need for more gender-sensitive policy making at the IFIs, given the (still) largely feminised nature of global poverty.
FROM STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT TO POVERTY REDUCTION Structural adjustment policies were first introduced by the IMF and the World Bank in the early 1980s in response to the debt crisis of developing countries that began in 1982 with Mexico’s announcement that it would default on its international debt obligations. Ostensibly addressing growing structural imbalances in the global economy and restoring debt sustainability in the periphery, SAPs were hastily implemented all across the developing world: ‘by 1987 the World Bank had approved 52 structural adjustment loans and 70 sectoral adjustment loans. During the period 1980–89, 171 SAPs were introduced in sub-Saharan Africa; a further 57 had been initiated by the end of 1996’ (Simon, 2008: 89). Often summed up as the ‘Washington Consensus’, structural adjustment combines liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation policies, which were attached as loan conditionalities to IMF and World Bank lending agreements to ensure their implementation. The overall goals of SAPs were to achieve fiscal stability and a positive balance of payments, while restructuring and diversifying the economy away from domestic production towards export markets. To achieve this, SAPs included: budget deficit reduction strategies; privatisation of state-controlled assets; removal of subsidies; currency devaluations; deregulation of labour markets; trade and financial liberalisation; and tax reductions. Thus, the emergence of SAPs represented a turnabout in development thinking that began in the 1970s. Until then, statist approaches and understandings of development had been dominant ever since the Keynesian revolution in economics. But, with the ascendance of SAPs, the IFIs put pressure on low-income countries to downsize the role of the state to providing health and other social services as a last resort, coupled with an increased role of the private sector in service delivery for the rich and poor alike (Brugha et al., 2014). The deep gender impacts of SAPs have been widely documented in the literature. SAPs had the effect of reinforcing gender inequities because of
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the way in which women often filled the gap that was created by the retreat of the state from the provision of public services, especially in the care economy (health, pensions, education, etc.). In the absence of state-provided and increasingly privatised services, women had to bear an unequal share of the burden of the social problems caused by SAPs and take on additional responsibilities in the realm of social reproduction (see Chapter 46 in this volume). What is more, women are generally more likely to be deprived of health and education services than men when they are in short supply, and women have special needs for health services owing to their childbearing and rearing roles (Busingye, 2002). In the area of trade, liberalisation policies of SAPs provided, on the one hand, enhanced working opportunities for women owing to the growth of labour-intensive, export-oriented production, especially in export processing zones. But this liberalisation process often caused female workers to end up at the bottom of an increasingly flexible global production system, in poorly paid employment with precarious working conditions (van Staveren, 2008). In fact, growth in female labour participation in countries under implementation of SAPs has largely been concentrated in the informal sector. Integrating large female labour reserves into the world market has put downward pressure on global wage levels, and led to the displacement of many male workers, a process referred to as the feminisation of labour (Ali, 2003).
POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGIES AND GENDER The failure of SAPs to conclusively achieve either their stated economic (balancing of the economy and debt sustainability) or social (poverty reduction) goals, as grudgingly acknowledged even by the IFIs, led to the introduction of the PRSP approach in the late 1990s. The accumulation of negative evidence of SAPs on the welfare of the world’s poorest populations eventually led to a rethinking of development policy and practice, culminating in the articulation of the Post-Washington Consensus. The Post-Washington Consensus more openly acknowledges market failure and the need for governments to address markets’ adverse distributional side-effects. This implies a stronger role for the state in the provision and regulation of social services, also because areas such as health and education have increasingly been identified as important ingredients for improving productivity and stimulating economic growth. As part of this rethinking process, the international community announced at the G7 summit in Cologne in 1999 that SAPs would be replaced by the PRSP approach, led by the IMF and World Bank and
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The IFIs, structural adjustment and poverty reduction 425 with a new focus on poverty reduction. In theory, PRSPs place greater emphasis on social aspects of the development process, especially health and education, and PRSP guidelines call for the papers to be countrydriven, comprehensive, results-oriented, partnership-oriented, and based on a long-term perspective (Ruckert and Labonté, 2012). The PRSP process was also linked up with debt relief initiatives; countries wishing to qualify for debt relief, debt assistance or concessionary loans under the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme of the IFIs are required to complete a PRSP. In consequence, PRSPs have become somewhat of an ‘industry standard’ and are now required by most bi- and multilateral donors before they consider providing any foreign aid. Most of the academic and NGO reviews of the PRSP approach come to the same conclusion: that it ultimately did not stray far enough away from the neoliberal macro-economic framework to address global poverty effectively. Each PRSP still requires strict macro-economic policy reforms from debtor countries, which largely reflect the conditions of SAP loans, especially as these relate to the macro-economic policy environment (Ruckert and Labonté, 2012). The link between approval of a PRSP and debt relief has provided a powerful incentive for developing countries to further implement often controversial policies of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation that had previously been rejected. At the same time, in the social realm, there are some important differences between SAPs and PRSPs, leading some authors to describe the IFI policy regime of the 2000s as one of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’. With the introduction of PRSPs, the IFIs started to somewhat deviate from the neoliberal policy book, by promoting a more prominent, but still limited, role for the state in empowering people, reducing poverty, enabling citizen participation, providing social services to the poor and upholding an adequate regulatory environment. This is best expressed by the IFIs’ expectation (and explicit conditionality) that resources freed up by debt relief would be invested by HIPC countries into social programmes, especially conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. CCTs focus on the human capital formation of children and are designed to promote their productive capacities. However, far from being opposed to the neoliberal vision, CCTs imply an ‘active social policy’ that does not envision social protection from the market, but rather understands the goal of social policy to lie in integrating the poor with increased capabilities into market structures (Ruckert, 2010). Under CCTs, access to social services is linked to a number of stringent conditions, adding new elements of gendered disciplining to the arsenal of power and control of neoliberalism.
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The PRSP process was also intended to fix the failure to effectively address gender issues under the SAP framework. The World Bank’s PRSP Sourcebook, for example, recommends that all PRSPs include a chapter containing a gender analysis. Yet many studies reveal that the majority of PRSPs do not include any chapters on gender or recognise that macro-economic policies or budgets can be gendered, despite recent academic advances in modelling the gender impacts of macro-economic policies (Whitehead, 2003). Thus, gender-based distortions of markets are largely ignored as most PRSPs fail to tackle gender issues in their macro-economic policy frameworks. As noted previously, better civil society participation is an integral part of the PRSP process, and the IFIs require a ‘national dialogue’ in preparation of a comprehensive national poverty reduction strategy. Yet such consultations were often conducted solely for the means of fulfilling the criteria for debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. Criticisms of neoliberal macro-economic policy from civil society have ‘not been allowed to surface within the PRSP process’ (Whitehead, 2003: 5) or when they have surfaced have been largely ignored. While both men’s and women’s voices were excluded from the consultation process, it has particularly been the case for women and women’s organisations to remain unheard. This has been attributed by some to a lack of education, low confidence levels, and women’s roles within the family (Bell, 2003). In the end, national governments, in concert with the IFIs, had the leading role in determining the content of PRSPs. Yet comprehension of gender issues among national governments is poor, especially in the finance and planning ministries responsible for developing PRSPs. It is fair to argue that the World Bank and IMF continue to fail to recognise the gendered consequences of PRSPs and other policy-based loans that undermine empowering women and achieving gender equality and poverty reduction. For example, PRSPs still have similar macroeconomic policy prescriptions to their older counterparts (SAPs), despite the well-known gender effects of policies such as privatisation, leading to increased household and work burdens for women. When gender concerns are integrated into PRSPs, they tend to be framed through the ‘women in development’ approach, which is seen as obsolete by most gender advocates (Zuckerman, 2002). Schech and Vas Dev suggest that the Bank employs an ‘integrationist approach’ which ‘encapsulates gender issues within existing development paradigms without attempting to transform an overall development agenda whose ultimate objective is economic growth as opposed to equity’ (2007: 15). Thus, the World Bank has adopted the language of gender mainstreaming while doing little to actually change its policy approach under the PRSP framework and
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The IFIs, structural adjustment and poverty reduction 427 maintaining the same macro-economic focus that ignores how these policies can be gendered.
AFTER THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS The global financial crisis has brought the IFIs back to the spotlight in global economic governance and returned structural adjustment to the centre of public policy discourse. The ascendancy of a global austerity regime signals the return of more traditional forms of structural adjustment, with a blatant disregard for the social consequences of severe budget cuts, including a marked increase in global poverty since 2008. In response to the crisis, the IFIs were made the central crisis fighters at the G20 summit in London in April 2009, as world leaders committed to providing an additional $1.1 trillion in emergency financing – with $750 billion to be channelled through the IMF and at least $6 billion ear-marked for concessional and flexible funding for low-income countries. As part of the crisis response, the IFIs introduced a host of new lending tools ostensibly to provide more flexibility to countries in need of IFI support, including at the IMF the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) and the High-Access Precautionary Stand-by Arrangement (HAPA), and at the World Bank the Rapid Social Response (RSR) Program. However, the poorest countries that most strongly require help in jump-starting their economies and insulating the poor from social expenditure cuts have been largely left behind in the allocation of IFI funding, while middleincome countries (arguably of greater economic interest to the wealthier countries that hold greatest influence over World Bank and IMF policy) received the bulk of it. This lack of external aid has been identified as a key reason why some developing countries (for example Nigeria and Vietnam) have not been able to launch stimulus programmes domestically (Ruckert and Labonté, 2012). What is equally problematic is the way in which the IFIs have in their rhetoric embraced expansionary fiscal and monetary policy but in practice continue to prescribe very restrictive macro-economic policies reminiscent of earlier generations of structural adjustment. A comprehensive study assessing 181 IMF loan agreements between 2008 and 2013 found that, while most countries slightly increased expenditure in the immediate crisis response phase (2008–10), fiscal contraction was wide-spread during the onset of fiscal consolidation (2010–12) and then rapidly accelerated (in the phase of on-going global financial crisis 2013–15). For the period 2013–15, more than half of all governments worldwide (or 94 in total) were advised by the IMF to cut their budgets by 3.3 per cent
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of GDP, on average, with fiscal consolidation strongest in the developing world: 68 developing countries were expected to reduce their spending by 3.7 per cent of GDP, on average, compared to 2.2 per cent of GDP in 26 high-income countries (Ortiz and Cummins, 2013). An alarming number of countries underwent excessive fiscal contraction, defined as cutting expenditures below pre-crisis levels. Overall, 44 governments (33 developing and 11 high-income) were projected to have fiscal envelopes in 2013–15 that were smaller than those during 2005–07 in GDP terms (Ortiz and Cummins, 2013). Thus, the global financial crisis has been used by the IFIs as a backdrop to further promote the reduction of the role of the state in service provision and the economy.
CONCLUSION The introduction of the PRSP approach in the early 2000s raised hope amongst anti-poverty advocates that the IFIs were, at least somewhat, retreating from traditional structural adjustment policies and allowing developing countries more leeway in formulating their own unique mix of development policies. While PRSPs did indeed put more emphasis on poverty reduction through linking PRSPs to debt relief and social investments, it has become apparent that these changes were not transformational but rather cosmetic and short-lived. In fact, it is arguably the very policies promoted so vigorously by the IFIs, especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, that are at the heart of the failure to achieve significant global poverty reduction. What is more, conventional poverty analysis, designs and monitoring systems that are part of the IFI toolkit remain inadequate at capturing or describing the gendered dimensions of poverty and the different effects that development interventions have on men and women in developing countries. As long as PRSPs rely on these methods of data collection they will be ignorant of gender differences in poverty, and their implementation will probably fail to address these problems, to the detriment of both women and overall poverty reduction objectives. Until PRSPs properly acknowledge gender inequalities, national development strategies will reinforce unequal gender relations that hinder development.
REFERENCES Ali, Khadija (2003) ‘Gender exploitation: from structural adjustment policies to poverty reduction strategies’, Pakistan Development Review, 42 (4) (Part II), 669–694.
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The IFIs, structural adjustment and poverty reduction 429 Bell, Emma (2003) Gender and PRSPs: With Experiences from Tanzania, Bolivia, Viet Nam and Mozambique, https://www.ids.ac.uk/bridge/reports/re67.pdf (accessed 1 October 2013). Brugha, Ruairi, Carlos Bruen and Viroj Tangcharoenthasien (2014) ‘Understanding global health policy’, in G.W. Brown, G. Yamey and Sarah Wamala (eds), The Handbook of Global Health Policy, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 19–45. Busingye, Winnie (2002) Assessing the Impacts of Structural Adjustment Programs on Women and Gender Relations within Households: The Case of the Kabale District, http://www.eldis.org/go/home&id=18806&type=Document#.U7GCeLGse1h (accessed 30 June 2014). Ortiz, Isabel and Matthew Cummins (2013) The Age of Austerity: A Review of Public Recent Evidence in Public Expenditure and Adjustment Measures from 181 Countries, New York and Geneva: IPD and South Centre. Ruckert, Arne (2010) ‘The forgotten dimension of social reproduction: the World Bank and the poverty reduction paradigm’, Review of International Political Economy, 17 (5), 816–839. Ruckert, Arne and Ronald Labonté (2012) ‘The financial crisis and global health: the International Monetary Fund’s policy response’, Health Promotion International, 28 (3), 357–366. Schech, Susanne and Vas Dev, Sanjugta (2007) ‘Gender justice: the World Bank’s new approach to the poor?’, Development in Practice, 17 (1), 14–26. Simon, David (2008) ‘Neoliberalism, structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategies’, in Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter (eds), The Companion to Development Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 86–92. Staveren, Irene van (2008) ‘The gender bias of the poverty reduction strategy framework’, Review of International Political Economy, 15 (2), 289–313. Whitehead, Ann (2003) Failing Women, Sustaining Poverty: Gender in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, London: Gender and Development Network/Christian Aid. Zuckerman, Elaine (2002) ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and gender’, background paper for the Conference on Sustainable Poverty Reduction and PRSPs, Berlin, 13–16 May, www.genderaction.org/images/PRSPs&Gender-GTZ.pdf.
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50. Gender and microfinance/microcredit Heloise Weber
This chapter begins by introducing microfinance/microcredit as a globally conceived poverty reduction strategy of international development institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and specifically focuses on its promotion as a method for empowering poor women. Advocates celebrate and promote microfinance/microcredit in terms of a successful strategy for simultaneously achieving both gender empowerment and poverty reduction. However, there are well-substantiated critical studies that demonstrate a disjuncture between the ‘empowering gender discourses’ and the experiences of poor women and their families targeted by microfinance/microcredit as a poverty reduction strategy. Such studies have focused on how poor women are subjected to practices of discipline and rule through microcredit schemes. In some instances this involves the deliberate appropriation of gendered cultural norms in order to secure the repayment of loans. The overall effect has been to reinforce gendered social norms, practices and relations, thereby engendering development through exploitation and further subjection of poor women and their families. In order to develop a better understanding of gender and microfinance/ microcredit it is necessary to critically reflect on some fundamental aspects of the latter’s underlying premises, its institutional contexts, which should include an account of its embedding in the politics of global development more generally, the means through which gendered justifications are deployed as a form of discipline and rule, and the methods of evaluating the success or failure of such schemes. Through an analytical approach that links micro-political relations with macropolitical trends and transformations, we can render visible the organization of disciplinary power that shapes everyday gendered experiences of disempowerment in the context of microcredit schemes. At the same time, we can gain an appreciation of practices of resistance that shape and challenge the politics of development as a ‘method of rule’. A critical examination of the case of microfinance/microcredit illustrates how a distinctly neoliberal conception of ‘gender empowerment’ has come to frame the concept of empowerment itself. This strongly signals the need 430
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Gender and microfinance/microcredit 431 for progressive approaches in gender studies and feminism to be sensitive to the politics of engendering development and disempowerment.
INTRODUCTION: MICROFINANCE/MICROCREDIT AND GENDER The politics of microfinance and women’s empowerment is by now understood to comprise a far more complex and complicated dynamic than initially assumed in the latter part of the 1990s. Not only has the early euphoria around microcredit and microfinance schemes and women’s empowerment dissipated significantly, but there is by now ample critical research that supplements and corroborates early critical studies on microcredit and women’s empowerment specifically, and on microcredit and development more generally. Let us begin with an explanation of what microfinance/microcredit is: Microcredit schemes entail the supply of small loans to individuals, usually within groups, as capital investment to enable income generation, or for self-employment. Microfinance refers to the provision of a range of financial services in addition to microcredit, such as options for savings and insurance schemes. Microcredit programmes are increasingly complemented with microfinancial services (see Weber, 2004: 363). The novelty of microcredit, advocates argue, lies in the fact that poor women and also men who are not normally considered creditworthy by the conventional banking system are now given the opportunity to access credit. This framing of microcredit in terms of financial inclusion for poverty reduction is one of its core justifications. The use of what is termed social collateral in contrast to collateral of monetary value is also emphasized as a unique feature of the strategy. This means that in most cases microcredit is given to individuals within groups, who in turn collectively guarantee repayments of their loans, making the group mutually responsible for individual members’ loan repayments. This understanding of social collateral is represented as peer support and peer monitoring in microcredit-based poverty reduction schemes. Microcredit received global prominence with the first Global Summit of Microcredit in 1997 in Washington DC, USA. The Summit inaugurated a global ‘action plan’ to target 100 million poor families with a special pledge to reach ‘especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial services by the year 2005’. The gendered discourse of the empowering effects of microcredit was made explicit throughout that conference, and nothing reflects the
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centrality of this theme better than the following quote from the opening keynote plenary. John Hatch, then Managing Director of FINCA, stated: My heart is brimming with joy and gratitude, because today is truly a birthday. Today we have given birth to one of the largest humanitarian endeavours ever attempted by the human family. Today we have launched a movement … It will be led not by governments, but by their citizens. Its greatest victories will not be won by soldiers, but by mothers. Its most important acts of creativity and generosity will be demonstrated not by technicians or donors, but by the very poor themselves. Today has launched a movement too powerful to fail. Its power is fuelled by the most potent energy of all, a mother’s love for her children … They are the victims of severe poverty. The even larger tragedy is that tens of millions of additional children, although they have survived, remain ill fed, ill educated, ill housed and in ill health, simply because their mothers have no access to credit, and therefore lack the opportunity to seek the employment they require to better support their children … Well, I regard microcredit as a poverty vaccine, and it is targeted to address the biggest killer of children, severe poverty. So, when I see the summit, I don’t see it in my mind, I see it in a vision; I see 100 million women with access to credit, yes, but I also see 500 million children eating three square meals a day; I see 500 million children who when they get sick their mothers have enough money to buy medicines to restore their health. (Microcredit Summit, 1997)
This highly gendered discourse is complemented by a corresponding justification of microfinance/microcredit in poverty reduction more generally. As John Hatch continued, We have created at this summit a cause too large to be completed by a few microcredit institutions. In this context it simply doesn’t make sense any more to fight for market share, to steal each other’s clients, or invade the coverage area of other microcredit institutions when there are so many potential clients who still have not gained access to microcredit services. (Microcredit Summit, 1997)
The ‘market’ for microfinance and microcredit is deemed so large that microfinance institutions (MFIs) do not have to compete with one another; what is expressed here is a reconfiguration of poverty as an opportunity for investment-driven growth, understood to be opening a field for financial activity so extensive and pervasive that it offers a large market for MFIs. The event thus marks the confluence of a neoliberal politics of development and discourses of empowering gender at the level of international institutions. There is, however, a deeper political economy background to this high-level global Microcredit Summit of 1997.
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Gender and microfinance/microcredit 433
ORGANIZING NEOLIBERAL POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT: THE WORLD BANK, STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMMES AND MICROCREDIT The adoption of microcredit schemes at the level of international development institutions, and especially the World Bank, has been integrally linked to policies aimed at facilitating and ‘managing’ the political project of neoliberal development. It is in this context also that the discourses of poverty reduction merge with discourses of ‘mainstreaming gender in development’ at the level of international development institutions. Microcredit schemes were incorporated as policy at the level of the World Bank as part of its broader strategic framework for neoliberal development, expressed most clearly in the form of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). In this context, microcredit schemes were conceived as a means both to advance SAPs, especially financial sector liberalization, and to ‘appease’ the social resistance that they engendered. It is in the context of SAPs that microcredit emerged as a targeted poverty reduction strategy at the level of the World Bank, and subsequently played a crucial part in the rewriting of the World Bank’s financial sector policy itself. It has been argued that microfinance/microcredit schemes were strategically appropriated by international development institutions in order to realize a ‘dual purpose’ of neoliberal development: advanced as a poverty reduction strategy, it facilitated the project of neoliberal development itself and especially for markets in finance – or more specifically credit – with microcredit simultaneously being used by poor (and economically vulnerable) individuals and families to secure their livelihood needs. At the same time, debt-dependent social relations at the level of communities served to undermine potential social solidarity against SAPs by disrupting local social support networks. That is to say, microcredit has been functioning in the policy parlance to ‘smooth consumption’ of basic needs, with repayment rates sustained frequently through ‘pyramid loans’, cross-borrowing and/or loans being recovered through violent and legally sanctioned strategies of dispossession (Weber, 2014: 548). The social and political transformations that have been a consequence of the extension of microcredit include the transformation of service-oriented NGOs to MFIs. Operating as an MFI (and not an NGO providing ‘welfare’) requires compliance with the rules and regulations that foreground financial sustainability over the actual experiences of the poor women and men (Weber, 2014). Microcredit has nevertheless
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been promoted as an empowering poverty reduction strategy. Appreciating these critical backdrops about the global politics of microcredit can help us better understand its role in ‘engendering’ development.
GENDER EMPOWERMENT AS THE ‘TARGETING OF WOMEN’ WITH MICROCREDIT: A COMPLEMENTARY DISCOURSE OF NEOLIBERAL POLITICS? The role of women in development and questions of gender empowerment are neither new nor recent. Indeed, the World Bank had already been engaged in efforts to address women’s empowerment through its development strategies since the 1970s. These early policy initiatives were influenced by Ester Boserup’s work on the neglected role of ‘women in development’. While not reducing the renewed focus on ‘gender and development’ in the 1980s to strategic motivations aimed at facilitating neoliberal development, it should be noted that it coincided with the rise of neoliberal development, the accompanying rise of NGOs in development, and funding for gender ‘empowerment’-oriented development projects. Microcredit projects became central to this conjuncture. This general trend has been borne out more recently with the World Bank’s new focus on gender empowerment through ‘smart economics’ (see Elias, 2013), which identifies finance and credit prominently as a target concern. In March 2003, the World Bank had adopted Operational Policy 4.20 on Gender and Development. This was revised in March 2012, and the objectives of the World Bank’s gender policy are clearly explicated in the reformulated approach, even if in somewhat broad terms: The objective of the Bank’s gender and development policy is to assist member countries to reduce poverty and enhance economic growth, human well-being, and development effectiveness by addressing the gender disparities and inequalities that are barriers to development, and by assisting member countries in formulating and implementing their gender and development goals. (World Bank, 2012)
Interpreting this statement, it is quite clear that the World Bank’s gender and development policy is instrumental to its broader objectives of economic growth and poverty reduction. There are several critical studies that have since emerged documenting the rise of gender-focused poverty alleviation strategies and their location within neoliberal politics more generally. Given the role of microcredit schemes within the politics of neoliberal development generally, and the role of microcredit schemes in
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Gender and microfinance/microcredit 435 SAPs more specifically, it should not be surprising that microcredit and gender empowerment is first and foremost related to the realization of economic growth. It is clear that gender empowerment, while serving as a normative discourse (indeed a justification for liberalization and privatization), is associated with a neoliberal conception of development, on the one hand. On the other hand, the World Bank’s gender policy is seen as instrumental to the realization of economic growth – unequal gender relations are conceived as ‘constituting a barrier’ to development, rather than seeing the alteration of such unequal relations per se as the objective of gender policy.
MICROFINANCE/MICROCREDIT: ENGENDERING DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY Critical approaches to microfinance/microcredit (mostly based on primary field research) and development have explicated the quite adverse experiences that poor women are subjected to as a consequence of efforts to extend loans and sustain repayment rates. As Aminur Rahman (1999) demonstrated with regard to the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh – publicly regarded as the model microcredit institution for its role in empowering women – women were subjected to peer pressure and social discipline in order to sustain repayment rates. Rahman’s research uncovered the ‘hidden transcripts’ of microcredit in the context of the Grameen Bank: he showed how gendered cultural norms were strategically used by bank workers (and also peers) to discipline poor women who were unable to pay back their loans. More recently, Lamia Karim’s (2011) research on the Grameen Bank has corroborated Rahman’s early critical research, explicating the continuing persistence of the adverse impact of microcredit on women. These critical studies that have exposed how microcredit is engendering development and poverty are not uniquely applicable to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, but are rather indicative of more general and pervasive experiences with microcredit (see, for example, Rankin, 2001; Fernando, 2007; Geleta, 2015). Katharine Rankin has in addition demonstrated how assumptions about ‘rational economic woman’ underline microcredit as a means to empowering poor women and explicated further its close affinities with the neoliberal development project (Rankin, 2001: 11). Quoting one of the central global promoters of the approach, she draws attention to the operating logic of the approach: ‘As the World Bank social capital web page puts it, “poor but closely-knit communities pledge their social capital in lieu of the material assets that commercial banks require as collateral”.’ As
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several critical studies have shown, such instrumentalizing of thick local social relations with the sole aim of securing repayments works to reinforce gendered social relations and to undermine often valuable forms of social solidarity. It is in this sense that microfinance and microcredit schemes are engendering social relations and the lives of poor families and communities.
CONCLUSION In order to better apprehend what is at stake in ‘gender and microfinance/microcredit’ it is important to be more reflective of our methods of analysis. For example, to measure the success or failure of microcredit merely by reference to aggregate figures on economic growth, or to repayment rates as an indicator of its success and sustainability, is highly problematic. It is also too limiting only to focus on the impacts of microfinance on women and its effects on gender relations within families. As important as these studies are, they need to be situated within an analysis oriented to the broader social and political contexts of development and its contradictions. A narrow focus offers incomplete and skewed explanations of gender empowerment/ disempowerment, and results analytically in ‘units’ of analysis that are too neat and distinct. Such approaches may well be conducive only to the objectives of liberal feminism and its political project of development (see, for example, Elias, 2013). By explicating both the political significance and limitations of methods of analyses of ‘microfinance and gender empowerment’, we can better apprehend the politics of ‘en/ gendering development’. An analytical framework that integrates the ‘anthropological’ frame of reference with the broader structural contexts of trends and transformations of the global political economy points to a framework that connects local relations with national and global institutional policies. It also allows for locating the debates within political ideology and thus for a political engagement of the meaning of empowerment itself (for an excellent discussion of a similar point see Parmar, 2003). Therefore, very important impact assessment studies on microfinance and women’s disempowerment needs to be situated, analytically, within a wider context of the globally constituted neoliberal development project. Such critical attention is especially important as microcredit is now also explicitly identified as part of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. This continued reliance on microcredit as a poverty reduction scheme prevails in the context of full knowledge of its adverse social implications (see Weber, 2004,
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Gender and microfinance/microcredit 437 2014). In the post-2015 SDGs agenda an explicit link is established with neoliberal development policies. This raises the question of the extent to which its authors anticipate the continued need to ensure microcredit remains as a ‘consumption smoothing’ strategy for poor women and men, while also relying on its disciplinary effects. The critical analytical approach of linking micro-political experiences with macro-political frameworks of development and poverty is, therefore, ever more pertinent in the context of intensifying development contradictions within which ‘en/gendering development’ discourses serve to detract from its politics of disempowerment.
REFERENCES Elias, Juanita (2013) ‘Davos woman to the rescue of global capitalism: postfeminist politics and competitiveness promotion at the World Economic Forum’, International Political Sociology, 7, 152–169. Fernando, Jude (ed.) (2007) Microfinance: Perils and Prospects, New York: Routledge. Geleta, Bekele Esayas (2015) The Microfinance Mirage: The Politics of Poverty, Social Capital and Women’s Empowerment in Ethiopia, Farnham: Ashgate. Karim, Lamia (2011) Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Microcredit Summit (1997) Closing plenary, audio recording tape no. 070, Audio Recording Services, Maryland. Parmar, Aradhana (2003) ‘Micro-credit, empowerment, and agency: re-evaluating the discourse’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 24 (3), 461–476. Rahman, Aminur (1999) Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: An Anthropological Study of the Rhetoric and Realities of Grameen Bank Lending, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rankin, N. Katharine (2001) ‘Governing development: neoliberalism, microcredit, and rational economic woman’, Economy and Society, 30 (1), 18–37. Weber, Heloise (2004) ‘The new economy and social risk: banking on the poor’, Review of International Political Economy, 11 (4), 356–386. Weber, Heloise (2014) ‘Global politics of microfinancing poverty in Asia: the case of Bangladesh unpacked’, Asian Studies Review, 38 (4), 544–563. World Bank (2012) ‘OP 4.20 – Gender and Development’, http://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/EXTPOLICIES/EXTOPMANUAL/0,,contentMDK: 20064559~pagePK:64141683~piPK:64141620~theSitePK:502184,00.html (accessed 30 August 2015).
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51. The International Labour Organization and the gender of work Eileen Boris and Susan Zimmermann
The International Labour Organization was formed in 1919 to counter the threat of class revolution and to level economic competition among nations. As an interstate (and inter-empire) organization it began as a specialized agency of the League of Nations and then became part of the United Nations. Its internal organization resembles that of these larger bodies: it consists of a secretariat – the International Labour Office (the Office) run by an elected director-general – and a general assembly – the annual International Labour Conference (ILC) – as well as an elected Governing Body. It is uniquely tripartite, with all committees and national delegations divided between government, worker, and employer representatives. ILO conventions, non-binding recommendations, and declarations on conditions of employment and social insurance have applied to the worker, regardless of sex. However, the male industrial worker defined the norm, and gender-neutral instruments could carry highly gendered implications and effects. Women workers constituted a distinct class, requiring specific conventions to address the bodily functions and social circumstances that differentiated them from men. Within this configuration, women of colour and rural women in the South stood as the ‘other’ in relation to their male counterparts and to women in industrialized countries, needing additional measures to protect their income-generating and childbearing capacities. Though conventions function as binding treaties for signatory nations, the ILO never possessed the hard power necessary to compel member states to implement them. Nonetheless, it has played an important normative role in shaping global constructions of gender through generating social knowledge about and setting aspirational rules for the world of work. From the start, the ILO promoted ratification of conventions and encouraged incorporation of its standards in labour legislation worldwide. Increasingly, it provided ‘technical’ support for nations to create and operate institutional apparatuses, like labour bureaus for example, which would deal in a systematic manner with women’s work and also advise on overall implementation of standards. 438
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The ILO and the gender of work 439 The ILO was the first interstate organization that addressed gender in international politics in an overarching manner, making international labour policy into a forerunner and driving force of the globalization of gender policy. Though the United Nations established a Commission on the Status of Women in 1946, the ILO remained responsible for the economic rights of women. Not only did the Commission rely on ILO expertise, but also, as a committee of political appointees drawn from national elites, it did not prioritize women workers or provide trade union women with access on the scale that the ILO could. Yet, like other UN entities, the ILO sometimes became a staging ground for the politics of the Cold War, decolonization, apartheid, and Palestinian rights. In such politics, women’s status became a point of argument for the superiority of one side over another. Historically, the formal representation of workers at the ILC offered trade union and socialist women access to decision-making, but the institutional role of women within the ILO lagged. Since the early 1930s, the Office has contained a designated section on women’s work, sometimes associated with children’s labour, which morphed into a gender division in the late twentieth century in response to an overall shift from policies for women to gender mainstreaming. Today, in cooperating with other leading international agencies, the ILO seeks to cushion the worst consequences of globalization, especially those impacting women as the mainstay of local economies. While commitment to gender parity now exists, the organization is still male dominated. The new interest in global labour studies, international organizations, and global policy has triggered a wave of scholarship that explores the past and present of the ILO. Earlier literature, mostly from the 1990s, established basic facts on women within the ILO, the treatment of women workers, and feminist strategies in relation to the gendered nature of global governance and institutions, including the ILO. Recent literature considers specific conventions, transnational circuits of knowledge, the impact of the ILO on national women’s politics, feminist interaction with the ILO in various periods, key female officers within the organization, ILO engagement with women in the Southern hemisphere, and the gender of ILO conventions themselves. The dealings of trade union women from all over the world and of women from communist countries with the ILO, as well as the interaction between the ILO and national gender policies, deserve more attention. If studies on domestic workers give any indication of the direction of research, scholars will continue to assess shifts in ILO activities, re-evaluating past efforts in the process. For nearly a century, the tension between gender equality and gendered difference, the unequal global development of labour relations, and the
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relationship of women (and men) to productive and reproductive work lay at the core of ILO politics and discourse on women’s work. These themes intertwined with each other in conventions on maternity and care work as well as equal pay, pillars of a gendered programme that played out unequally for industrialized and developing countries.
REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR The politics of maternity and care work shaped the ILO’s standardsetting policies in relation to reproductive labour. Visions of sexual and gendered difference, as well as attention to unequal global development, permeated these policies. The Maternity Protection Convention (C3, 1919) constructed maternity as an insurmountable obstacle to engagement with productive work. A mandatory protection period and social benefits were to protect and support women before and after childbirth. But the 1919 convention covered only industrial and commercial employment until revision in 1952 (C103), when it extended to all kinds of undertakings, including domestic service, home-work, and agriculture. Women unionists successfully fought during the 1952 revision for the principle that compulsory social insurance or public monies should pay for benefits, not employers who might then refuse to hire women to avoid such costs. Related ILO discourse conflated pregnancy with the social function of motherhood. In the interwar period, the attempt to extend social benefits for women in industrial countries who wished to prioritize family work over employment floundered. Simultaneously, when the ILO created separate standards to ameliorate the harsh, racialized labour conditions of ‘indigenous’ populations in the Southern hemisphere, the organization addressed the subsistence work of ‘native communities’. Both the Forced Labour and the Recruitment Conventions (C29, 1930 and C50, 1936) included clauses aimed at ensuring the reproduction of these communities by limiting the proportion of adult males removed into forced labour. While the ‘universal’ standards being crafted for the industrial world ignored the value of unpaid family labour, the ‘special’ standards for racialized labour in the Southern hemisphere bluntly recognized the indispensability of uncompensated subsistence work for the ongoing extraction and commodification of ‘native’ labour. During the Cold War, the ILO finally promoted measures to alleviate the ‘double day’ experienced by increasing numbers of women employed outside of the home in industrialized nations. State-socialist nations proudly pointed to the equal participation of their women in all phases of
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The ILO and the gender of work 441 social life, facilitated by public services. Labour feminists from elsewhere advocated a similar course of action. As part of its overall initiative on ‘Women in a Changing World’ (1963–64) the ILO passed Women with Family Responsibilities (R123, 1965) as a non-binding recommendation that called for child care facilities, job training and placement services, coordination of school hours with work schedules, and public provisions to lighten household tasks. Such gender policies aimed to accommodate the increasing commodification of women’s work across the globe. Maintaining the dual perspective that social reproduction was women’s special problem but also the concern of society at large, R123 reinforced even as it sought to relieve the gender division of labour. Women participants at the ILC generally understood such accommodations as supplementing an equal rights and non-discrimination agenda even if directed only to women. Sixteen years later, the ILO adopted this position with the Workers with Family Responsibilities Convention (C156) and Recommendation (R165). New provisions highlighted the impact of family responsibilities on eligibility for pension and unemployment benefits and urged adoption of parental leave. Meanwhile, the ILO from the 1970s intensified efforts to improve the conditions of women’s reproductive labours in developing nations by including within its understanding of ‘basic needs’ the minimum goods and services required to sustain daily life, such as access to clean water and household equipment. A further revision of the maternity convention in 2000 (C183) casts maternity benefits as fulfilling equal rights for all women, adding an article on ‘Employment Protection and Non-discrimination’. By then, the ILO had fully embraced equality discourses, accepting the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women after opposing it in the 1960s on the grounds that it would supersede ILO special treatment conventions for women. In recent decades the growth of dual breadwinner and dual caregiver families has generated a massive wave of outsourcing of household work. Pushed by structural adjustment policies to seek livelihoods abroad, poor women from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe became transnational caregivers whose labours allow other women to go out to work. Though ILO conventions sometimes included domestic workers, loopholes permitted states to eliminate them from coverage. As the ILO in the early twenty-first century committed to ending labour trafficking of migrant workers, it became receptive to the demands of an international movement of domestic workers, supported by feminist NGOs and key
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international labour federations. Convention 189, Decent Work for Domestic Workers (2011), recognizes the worth of monetized reproductive labour.
EQUAL REMUNERATION Concepts of female difference shaped how the ILO addressed the woman worker in most realms, but over the course of the twentieth century an equality-oriented approach came to the forefront. All ILO stakeholders embraced the principle ‘equal remuneration for work of equal value’, enshrined in its 1919 Constitution. In 1927, the ILC envisioned an instrument that supported minimum wage-fixing ‘machineries’ for lowwaged and unorganized industries, specifying female-dominated ‘homeworking trades’. Focusing exclusively on mechanisms for establishing minimum wages, the subsequent Minimum Wage-fixing Machinery Convention (C26, 1928) aimed to surmount anxiety with regard to possible international interference with both pre-given wage levels and wage differentials between industrial and ‘backward’ countries. The proposal for a wage-fixing mechanism spurred the first demands of organized women within and outside of the ILO to activate the institution’s formal commitment to equal pay, arguing that only genderneutral standards could help to raise the low wages of working women. In the end, only the accompanying recommendation included the equal pay principle. While many trade union women considered C26 a positive first step towards better compensation, British and international women’s organizations demanded that the Permanent Court of International Justice declare illegal ILO standards that ignored legal equality between the sexes. Multiple confrontations between the ILO and women’s organizations throughout the 1930s contributed to a more principled debate on ‘the status of women’ in international politics during which the ILO insisted on special labour protection for women and claimed the exclusive competence for the economic element of resulting policies. From the mid-1930s it appeared that the ILO might move beyond a purely formal commitment to equal pay by advocating fixing wages in terms of the work, not sex of the worker. The 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia affirmed, with reference to race, religion, and sex, non-discrimination as fundamental to the human right to ‘economic security and equal opportunity’. But the equality accepted for women in the metropole did not necessarily extend to those in colonies. Feminist protests led to inclusion of ‘sex’ in the non-discrimination clause of the 1947 Social Policy
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The ILO and the gender of work 443 (Non-metropolitan Territories) Convention (C82), and thus the application of the equal pay principle in so far as it operated in metropoles. Responding to the push by state-socialist nations and legal equality feminists to move jurisdiction over women’s economic rights to another UN body, the ILO promoted the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention (C100). This instrument calls for ‘objective appraisal of jobs on the basis of the work to be performed’ rather than the sex of the worker. It offers multiple paths toward compliance. Nonetheless, developing economies, like India, would lag in determining equal pay. Neither this convention nor its accompanying recommendation addressed occupational segregation by sex: the crowding of women into the bottom of the job hierarchy and into low-waged sectors – consequences that feminists had emphasized to the Office as early as 1928. Equal Remuneration quickly became one of the most adopted conventions, with 171 ratifications by 2014. In extending standards to female-dominated sectors through conventions for nursing, home-work, and domestic work and by tackling informal and unwaged labour, the ILO later began to recognize that wage justice depends on more than the equal pay principle.
GLOBAL INEQUALITIES ILO awareness of global inequality was multi-fold. It has considered the impact of unequal economic development on labour relations worldwide. The ILO constitution allowed for adapting universal standards to the developing world, but also permitted exempting non-self-governing territories from such standards. The Office pro-actively embraced a developmental vision with regard to labour relations in the Southern hemisphere. From 1926, the ILO promoted the creation of a set of special standards aimed at the suppression, control, and amelioration of the extremely oppressive labour relations in colonial regimes and the League of Nations mandates. The Office sought gendered stipulations in these standards. With opposition by many international women’s groups, the conflict over special labour protections and visions of gendered social relations infused the very first wave of standard setting for the developing world. The Forced Labour Convention abolished forced labour for women and children while allowing it to continue for adult men who laboured for public (colonial) enterprises. In preparing the Recruiting of Indigenous Workers Convention, the Office carefully avoided the discussion of women-specific restrictions, but exempted from coverage recruitment
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into domestic service upon instigation of the British government delegate. The political tension around sex-specific regulations for women’s involvement in long-term contract labour grew into open conflict during the preparation of the Contracts of Employment (Indigenous Workers) and the Penal Sanction (Indigenous Workers) Conventions (C64 and C65, 1939). The Office finally withdrew a clause that would have restricted women’s capacity to individually engage in contract labour. At the end of the 1930s, the ILO apparently had accepted the reality of ‘native’ women’s paid work under the most taxing circumstances, while insisting on highly gendered visions of the family and community life of ‘native’ workers. After 1945, it persisted in casting women from developing nations as different from those from industrialized ones. The question of whether women could be incorporated into existing national development or required special programmes replicated earlier equality versus difference debates on standard setting. By the 1960s, ILO officials and consultants were helping to set the ‘women in development’ paradigm by discussing: the hardship of rural household labour; the gendered impact of modernized agricultural production; the shortage of social services; the necessity of training; and the preference for community-run remedies. The ILO would foster development through transforming family subsistence activities, like dairying, into sources of income generation. It promoted home-based labours in the South even as it sought to restrict industrial home-work. During the UN Decade of the Woman (1975–85), the Programme on Rural Women and ILO regional offices engaged with feminist NGOs to empower rural women in Africa and Asia through self-employment and self-organization. A resulting coalition formulated the Home Work Convention (C177, 1996), which called for placing work in the home under labour standards available to other workers. C177 initiated a set of more recent standards to address a global economy that relies upon contracting out, offshore production, and flexibility and particularly relegates women to unregulated and unprotected sectors. Renewed concerns with labour trafficking and forced labour joined exposure of the sweatshop as part of ILO efforts to apply labour standards to the informal economy. ILO discourse today focuses on the woman worker who may be a mother but whose dependency now is intimately tied to an unfettered marketplace. A century after its founding, the ILO continues to uphold its foundational idea that ‘labour is not merely … a commodity’. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, and in cooperation with the World Health Organization, it adopted the Social Protection Floor (SFP) to assist developing and middle-income countries with guaranteeing minimum
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The ILO and the gender of work 445 social standards for the entire population. The Social Protection Floors Recommendation (R202, 2012) lists ‘equal opportunity and gender equality’ as one goal. Responding to the accelerated corrosion of social infrastructure and social reproduction in many parts of the world, this new global initiative would end the exclusion of women from more traditional social protection systems. The limited capacity of the ILO to alleviate women’s multiple burdens persists, as does the gap between norm setting and fulfilment. Nonetheless, the ILO distinguishes itself among institutions of global governance by focusing on core labour standards linked to human rights. With the SFP and recent standards for labour previously judged ‘atypical’, it offers tools for women, no less than men, to demand decent work and better living.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING ILO, Labordoc, http://labordoc.ilo.org/ (makes available all ILO publications, journals, printed proceedings, etc., and refers to literature about the ILO). ILO, NORMLEX, Information System on International Labour Standards, http:// www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12000:0::NO::: (includes texts and information on all ILO Standards; all quotes from these Standards are taken from this database). Boris, Eileen and Jennifer Fish (2014) ‘“Slaves no more”: making global labour standards for domestic workers’, Feminist Studies, 40 (2), 411–443. Boris, Eileen and Jill Jensen (2012) ‘The ILO: women’s networks and the making of the women worker’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (eds), Women and Social Movements, International: 1840 to Present, Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press. Boris, Eileen, Dorothea Hoehtker and Susan Zimmermann (eds) (forthcoming) Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/International Labour Office. Cobble, Dorothy Sue (2014) ‘A higher “standard of life” for the world: U.S. labour women’s reform internationalism and the legacies of 1919’, Journal of American History, 100, 1052–1085. Prügl, Elisabeth (1999) The Global Construction of Gender: Home-based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century, New York: Columbia University Press. Riegelman Lubin, Carol and Anne Winslow (1990) Social Justice for Women: The International Labour Organization and Women, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whitworth, Sandra (1994) ‘Gender, international relations and the case of the ILO’, Review of International Studies, 20, 389–405. Zimmermann, Susan (forthcoming) ‘Night work for white women, bonded labour for coloured women? Contentious traditions and the globalization of gender-specific labour protection and legal equality politics, 1926 to 1939’, in Sara Kimble and Marion Röwekamp (eds), New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History, New York: Routledge.
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52. Gender and sustainable development Emma A. Foster
The concept of sustainable development came to prominence in the early 1990s and remains a buzzword for (inter)national environmental politics, yet the definition of sustainable development is vague and contestable. Nonetheless, this chapter focuses on the United Nations (UN) definition of sustainable development in order to reflect on the relationship between gender and contemporary environmental management. The chapter begins by outlining some background to the concept of sustainable development on the international stage. Next, the chapter discusses the roles of women in environmental decision making more broadly. The chapter then addresses feminist interventions relating to sustainable development. Finally, the chapter considers contemporary scholarship relating to gender and sustainable development, specifically gender and climate change, before concluding. Overall, this chapter demonstrates how sustainable development, which is perhaps the most prolifically used framework for managing environmental problems, is based on gendered assumptions and produces gendered outcomes that feminists and gender scholars have sought to identify and correct.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Concerned with issues such as pollution and resource limits, the UN held the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. This was the first international conference to consider the relationship between human activities and environmental degradation, and here the tension between economic development and environmental sustainability was strongly acknowledged. Indeed, prior to the 1970s it was generally accepted that economic growth was of paramount concern, and little reflection was given to the environmental consequences of unregulated growth. Whilst the 1972 Stockholm conference acknowledged the problem, setting up the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to coordinate environmental issues internationally, it did not offer a solution for reconciling economic growth with environmental sustainability. Instead, some 15 years later, the World Commission on Environment and 446
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Gender and sustainable development 447 Development (WCED), chaired by the then Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, officially launched the working definition of sustainable development as a framework to integrate environmental concerns with economic decision making. The definition, which was adopted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, also known as the Rio Earth Summit), reads as follows: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987: 43). This definition of sustainable development continues to be important in environmental management despite many environmentalists problematising the same as too vague and too weak to solve the grave environmental harms, most often related to climate change, which affect the planet. Thus sustainable development has been criticised for privileging economic growth to the detriment of the environment. Nevertheless, at the UNCED the concept of sustainable development was met with much enthusiasm and, unlike the position at the related conferences which preceded it, the international consensus on sustainable development afforded considerable attention to the place of women in relation to environmental degradation and as implementers of environmental initiatives. The focus on women as environmental managers and victims of environmental degradation has been criticised by many feminists (an issue I shall discuss shortly). Yet, in the processes leading up to the 1992 UNCED, there was much activity from environmental/ecological feminists (ecofeminists), which I now turn to discuss.
ECOFEMINIST INTERVENTIONS AND THE CONCEPTION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Ecofeminism is a strand of feminist theory and ecologism/ environmentalism that is primarily concerned with the relationship between the degradation of nature and gender inequalities, recognising these two phenomena to be intimately linked. Generally speaking, ecofeminists recognise that women and nature are jointly oppressed under patriarchal capitalism and, partly as a consequence, women are better placed to safeguard the environment as they share an affinity with the natural world. Based on this premise, ecofeminists have commented on, informed and critiqued a variety of environmental matters, not least international environmental politics and UN environmental activities. Indeed, in the run-up to the UNCED a variety of events, conferences and working groups were staged by ecofeminist and women’s groups, with
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the purpose of informing the debates around, and shaping the policy outcomes related to, sustainable development. These included the 1991 World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet and the Women and Children First Workshop. These conferences and workshops challenged the dominant norms of development, rallying against violence, militarism, economic growth, misdirected science, oppressive economic socio-political structures and the general exclusion of women (Braidotti, 1994: 102). For example, the Women and Children First Workshop noted: ‘We are determined to change the a-symmetric and dominant relationship of the economy with nature, of men with women, and of the North with the South. Our aim is nothing less than a revolution on behalf of women, children and the environment’ (UNCED Women and Children First Workshop, 1991, cited in Braidotti, 1994). Similarly, parallel to UNCED, ecofeminists organised a separate forum, Planeta Femea. In this forum, the consensus was that women are the main victims of poverty and environmental degradation and that industrialisation has affected the health of ‘women’ and their families (Braidotti, 1994: 5). Returning to the official UNCED event and the policy-informing documents produced from it, most notably the Rio Declaration and the more comprehensive Agenda 21, it would seem that the ecofeminist and women’s lobby was successful in making the experiences of women visible. For example, Agenda 21, which is the main international guidebook to sustainable development, included an entire chapter dedicated to women and sustainable development, and throughout the document women are acknowledged to be key to sustainable development decision making, as well as featuring in relation to the particular risks environmental degradation poses for women and the relationship between reproductive and sexual health and rights, overpopulation and the strain on the environment. In all, Agenda 21 narrated the position of women as the disproportionate victims of environmental degradation and as key to effective environmental governance. Although these official policyinforming documents did not go as far as the ecofeminists and women’s groups might have liked, it has generally been considered that this particular lobby was fairly successful in informing and transforming the sustainable development debate at an international level (Buckingham, 2004). All that said, at the 20-year UNCED review conference held in Rio in 2012 (also known as UNCED+20), there was a sense among ecofeminists and women’s groups that the attention paid to the position of women in relation to the environment had been ‘all talk’ and had not been implemented by policy makers. For example, the UN Women’s Major Group (WMG) released a statement on the outcomes of
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Gender and sustainable development 449 UNCED+20 which clearly expressed their disappointment. This statement concluded: At Rio+20, governments had a historic chance to take bold steps to end poverty and environmental destruction … to take concrete measures to fully implement women’s rights and women’s leadership. We now risk increased poverty, inequities and irreversible environmental damage. This is not the future we want, nor the future we need. (WMG, 2012)
Incidentally, this is in the context of a 20-year review conference which was met with much disappointment on the part of stakeholders and the international community more broadly, marking a more extensive disillusionment with sustainable development and international governance. Despite the loss of momentum, the ecofeminist/women’s lobby increased the attention granted to gender dynamics and inequalities in the UN rhetoric on sustainable development. However, many gender scholars have since critiqued these efforts and the gender norms they rely upon. The main contention is that whilst the alliance made between the UN and the ecofeminist/women’s lobby may have been strategically valuable at the time, as gender appears to be mainstreamed into environmental debates, this mainstreaming is superficial and uneven rather than structural and comprehensive – a critique made of gender mainstreaming more broadly. Rather than offering the potential to reconfigure problematic gender relations it actually re-entrenches the gender norms that underpin inequalities. Thus feminists have questioned the costs of this UN/ ecofeminist alliance.
FEMINIST CONCERNS AND THE (MIS)CONCEPTION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT The ecofeminist activity which fed into the UNCED process was underpinned by the assumption that women have a special relationship with nature. Indeed, as I indicated above, a large proportion of ecofeminist scholars and activists argue that women have a particular bond with nature because of their roles as mothers, which places women at the intersection between this generation and the next with a particular investment in saving the planet for their children, and/or because women and nature have been simultaneously oppressed by men and patriarchal forms of capitalism (see Mies and Shiva, 1993). These assumptions about women are utilised to make the case that women make better environmental managers as they have a greater (intergenerational) investment in saving the planet, have a higher propensity to care (as mothers) and are
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more likely to suffer environmental ills owing to their proximity to the natural world. In other words, with regard to the latter, as women are more likely to be primary carers, providing food, water and so on, they are more likely to suffer if food, water and fuel are rendered scarce. Whilst ecofeminism is not a unified movement, with some strands drawing from poststructuralism and premised on a much more nuanced and fluid conceptualisation of gender and nature, the ecofeminism that held most currency in terms of UN processes followed the logic outlined above, namely that women are closer to nature (both literally and spiritually). Indeed, these constructions of femininity have been widely criticised by feminist scholars because they essentialise women and universalise women’s experiences (Braidotti, 1994: 104). This essentialising/universalising process works to undermine the differences between women, marked by age, geographical location, class, sexuality and so on. Moreover it reinforces the idea, common to classical Western thought, that women are closer to nature, and men consequently are closer to culture. The nexus drawn between women and nature has traditionally been used to justify women’s exclusion from the public sphere and, as such, has been widely problematised by feminists. Thus this strand of ecofeminism, and its influence on sustainable development policy making, works to reproduce these problematic constructions which many feminists and gender scholars have vehemently critiqued. Another criticism of the trend of focusing on women in contemporary sustainable development practice highlights how policies ignore men and masculinities. For instance, Melissa Leach (1992) argues that, by emphasising the role women play in environmental issues, the relationship between men and environmental management and resource use is subsequently underestimated. Similarly, feminists have argued that the focus on women as key decision makers in terms of the environment works to excuse men from having to protect the environment by locating environmental concerns within a feminised ethic of care. The final criticism of sustainable development levied by feminists and gender/sexuality scholars relates to the heterosexualised character of sustainable development theory and practice. This criticism is more directed at sustainable development itself rather than ecofeminist interventions into the sustainable development debate. Here, I would like to return to the definition of sustainable development: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987: 43). This oft-cited definition relates to a key facet of sustainable development: that is, the idea of intergenerational justice and future generations. Indeed, it is common to hear amongst sustainable development proponents that the
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Gender and sustainable development 451 main justification for protecting the environment is to ensure ‘our children and our children’s children’ have a safe world to inhabit. Thus some gender and sexuality scholars have highlighted that sustainable development rhetoric is very much about procreation and inheritance. Indeed, both procreation and inheritance are very much tied to heterosexuality, as heterosexually normative sexual behaviour produces children and the environment is to be inherited by those children who are biologically related. This raises the question, within a sustainable development paradigm, what investment do childless people and/or LGBTQ communities have in saving the environment? Further this has led some authors, like Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (2005) and Sarah Ensor (2012), to call for a queer and spinster ecology (respectively) which rejects notions of care for the environment as solely located in future generations produced through heterosex. As noted above, sustainable development has been subject to criticism from a variety of feminists and gender scholars within the academy. Moreover, sustainable development on the international stage has integrated ecofeminist activist concerns yet, more recently, has been considered a disappointment by ecofeminist and women’s groups for not ameliorating gender injustices as was set out in the promises of UNCED. Thus the next section reviews contemporary debates on sustainable development and gender through a focus on perhaps the most important issue in contemporary environmental politics: climate change.
GENDER AND CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change refers to changes to the planet’s weather patterns. Anthropogenic climate change refers to changes to the planet’s weather patterns due to human activities, including carbon emissions and deforestation. Climate change results in detrimental weather patterns (natural disasters) and may ultimately result in making the Earth uninhabitable for humans, as well as other life-forms. The international focus on climate change has once again reignited a focus on women as the primary victims in, and potential saviours of, natural habitats that are threatened by climate change. The rationale put forward is that although the effects of climate change transcend geographical borders it is generally accepted that the poorest people are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change as they are more likely to live in areas which are impacted by natural disasters (for example, flood plains), more likely to utilise natural resources for subsistence and less able to adapt to natural disasters and resource depletion. Given that women tend to make
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up the poorest of the poor globally it can be presumed that women are inequitably affected by the consequences of climate change. According to authors like Bernadette Resurrección (2013) the emphasis on women in climate change debates has been reignited somewhat. Resurrección argues that the focus on women is influential in said debates, despite the feminist critiques outlined in the previous section, because it presents a stable and fixed (and therefore palatable) identity associated with womanhood and conversely strategically works as a point of departure for feminist advocacy in governance over environmental issues. Therefore there is considerable focus on women, as decision makers and victims, in relation to climate change, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) initiatives seeking to include more engagement with women’s groups. That said, although this works as an avenue for feminist and women’s engagement in environmental policy making and governance, albeit through strategies which are problematised by many academic feminists, if we look at the results of this gender mainstreaming the level at which women are involved with said governance is poor. For example, the major agreements relating to the setting of carbon emissions have been made mainly by men. Most notably at the negotiations leading to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the delegates who had the most significant opportunity to shape the debates tended to be men from more powerful nations, which hold more sway internationally. Thus the voices of women and less powerful countries were marginalised. Indeed, women’s organisations have been more involved in negotiations since Kyoto, such as Doha 2012 and Copenhagen 2013, through the UNFCCC’s engagement with groups like Gender CC – Women for Climate Justice. However, the demographic of these global negotiations is still largely male dominated. Where we do see women’s participation encouraged is in implementation strategies ‘on the ground’ such as community-based resource management to prevent deforestation. However, arguably even these activities tend to mainstream gender in a piecemeal way and inadequately through failing to provide adequate training regarding resource management and not capitalising on local knowledge of habitats (Denton, 2002: 13). Moreover, owing to the essentialist underpinnings of linking women and nature in the climate change debate, it is unsurprising that women tend to be employed in grassroots, community and home-based management of resources (which echoes women’s traditional roles in the home), whilst men tend to be located in consultative and decision-making arenas (again echoing men’s traditional roles in the public sphere).
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Gender and sustainable development 453
CONCLUSION An apparent relationship between women and the environment, considering women both as particularly vulnerable to environmental degradation and natural disasters and as actors crucial to the successful implementation of pro-environment policies, appears to have been accepted by sustainable development proponents at an international level. Indeed some women’s groups and feminists have capitalised on, and in some cases encouraged, the construction of women as closer to nature in order to gain some strategic advantages and advocacy within environmental governance. However, despite the acceptance of mainstreaming gender in environmental policy making at the 1992 UNCED and in subsequent review conferences, as well as in climate change negotiations since the 2012 Doha conference, it remains that women tend to be implementers of environmental policies rather than decision makers in a decision-making process which is dominated by men and big nations (Denton, 2002). Moreover, the gendered assumptions utilised by ecofeminists strategically to be heard on the international stage actually work to undermine feminist ends through essentialising and universalising women and their experiences and negating a more nuanced focus on gender, alongside other identity intersections like ethnicity and sexuality, as these interact with environments and environmental concerns.
REFERENCES Braidotti, Rosi (ed.) (1994) Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis, London: Zed Books. Buckingham, Susan (2004) ‘Ecofeminism in the twenty{first century’, Geographical Journal, 170 (2), 146–154. Denton, Fatma (2002) ‘Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter?’, Gender and Development, 10 (2), 10–20. Ensor, Sarah (2012) ‘Spinster ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and nonreproductive futurity’, American Literature, 84 (2), 409–435. Leach, Melissa (1992) ‘Gender and the environment: traps and opportunities’, Development and Practice, 2 (1), 12–22. Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva (1993) Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona (2005) ‘Unnatural passions? Notes toward a queer ecology’, Invisible Culture, 9, https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandi lands.html (accessed May 2015). Resurrección, Bernadette P. (2013) ‘Persistent women and environment linkages in climate change and sustainable development agendas’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 40, 33–43. WCED (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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WMG (2012) ‘Final statement on Rio+20 by Women’s Major Group’, http:// www.uncsd2012.org/index.php?page=view&nr=1307&type=230&menu=38 (accessed May 2015).
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PART IX CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
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53. How effective is gender mainstreaming in international peace and security policymaking? Jacqui True
Over the last two decades, gender mainstreaming has been adopted in a variety of forms, creating both opportunities and risks for advancing women’s rights and gender equality. A gender mainstreaming policy revolution began with the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which called for the integration of a gender perspective into all programmes and policies (see True, 2003; Krook and True, 2012). The UN Economic and Social Council Agreed Conclusions 1997/2 further provided the framework for action and defined gender mainstreaming in terms of ‘the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels’. This chapter considers gender mainstreaming practices implemented in the context of international peace and security, and assesses how effective they have been. It calls for a more transformative model of gender mainstreaming that mobilizes diverse gender perspectives to challenge conventional biased, male-centred frameworks. For this to be achieved, the participation of women and women’s organizations in designing and implementing gender mainstreaming policies is crucial, as well as the involvement of international organizations in strengthening the relationship between governments and civil society in delivering gender mainstreaming.
MAINSTREAMING UNSCR 1325 ON WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY Numerous state and international commitments have been made since the UN Beijing conference to mainstream gender analysis across all public policies and at all levels of policymaking. Efforts to connect mainstreaming to the remit of security policies within the UN system have been advanced through the mandate of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 and six subsequent UNSC resolutions that make up the 457
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cross-cutting Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. This agenda is a significant international normative framework addressing the genderspecific impacts of conflict on women and girls, including protection against sexual and gender-based violence, promotion of women’s participation in peace and security processes, and support for women’s roles as peacebuilders in the prevention of conflict. Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 proposes gender mainstreaming as a means to redress women’s marginalization in peace negotiations, peacekeeping missions and peacebuilding processes (Cohn, 2008). It calls for the integration of gender across UN policies and operations, including the need for equal participation of women in peace and security decision-making, a gender approach to policy analysis, and sex-specific data and research on peace operations. More than a decade after its adoption, however, the Security Council is still ‘call[ing] on all parties to peace talks to facilitate the equal and full participation of women at all decision-making levels’ (also 2122 (2013), para. 7(c)). The Security Council has stated deep concerns about the ‘persistent obstacles and challenges to women’s participation and full involvement’ (1820 (2008) preamble), the ‘underrepresentation of women at all stages of peace processes’ (1888, 1889, 1960 preambles) and the ‘lack of women as Chief or Lead peace mediators in United-Nations sponsored peace talks’ (1889 (2009) preamble), noting ‘the negative impact this has on durable peace, security and reconciliation’ (1889 (2009) preamble). In the decade since 2004 when the UN Secretary-General first called for Women, Peace and Security national action plans (NAPs), mandated in SCR 1889, 49 countries and one regional organization have adopted these plans to integrate UNSCR 1325 into their national frameworks. NAPs are conceived as the major policy mechanism of diffusion for the Women, Peace and Security agenda (Miller et al., 2014), though they are not the only mainstreaming tools (Hudson, 2013: 17). Yet the majority of UN member states (136 states)1 have not adopted NAPs. These plans should designate specific measures, clear targets and appropriate benchmarks for full implementation of UNSCR 1325. These were reviewed by the UN global study on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 and discussed at the Security Council open debate in October 2015. A global consensus on gender mainstreaming in international peace and security is readily sought after but, as indicated by the slow adoption of NAPs, that consensus has yet to be achieved. Thus far, the implementation and reality of gender mainstreaming in peace and security policymaking have failed to match the aspirations of UNSCR 1325.
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How effective is gender mainstreaming in policymaking? 459
MODELS OF GENDER MAINSTREAMING IMPLEMENTATION Synthesis of research on gender mainstreaming in theory and practice by True and Parisi (2013) indicates the emergence of five main gender mainstreaming models. These models are relevant to understanding and explaining the lack of progress in mainstreaming gender in national and international peace and security institutions and settings. Gender-as-sameness Model The gender-as-sameness model of gender mainstreaming is an example of an ‘add women and stir’ approach in which gender concerns are simply added to existing frameworks without substantially challenging them. This approach usually highlights the necessity to include women in the areas from which they have been traditionally excluded. In the peace and security context, this model has prominently led to the increased emphasis on integrating women into armed forces, such as in Sweden’s approach extending compulsory military service to women (Kronsell, 2012) or the US decision lifting the ban on women in combat roles (MacKenzie, 2015). Seeking for gender neutrality, this model of gender mainstreaming tends not to question men/masculinity and its relationship to militarization but instead expects women to conform to the male norm. Gender-as-difference Model While the gender-as-sameness model focuses on women becoming like men, the gender-as-difference approach to gender mainstreaming revalues women/femininity as crucially different from men/masculinity. This approach refers to the distinct contributions of women and men in the society and calls for their equal valuation. In the context of peace and security, this model has resulted in the depiction of women as natural peacebuilders. The unique role of women in bringing about lasting peace and rebuilding post-conflict societies is affirmed, but it is primarily justified in terms of their peaceful and caring feminine qualities. Similarly, in peacekeeping operations the argument for deployment of female soldiers is often dictated by the hope that women will have ‘a civilizing effect’ on their male colleagues and, in consequence, their presence will prevent sexual and gender-based violence within the military (see Carvajal, 2010; Pruitt, 2013). The UN Secretariat has repeatedly emphasized the proven benefits of having more female peacekeepers, that they enhance confidence-building with the local community by presenting an
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organization that looks more like a civilian society than a military occupation force (IRIN, 2010). Ultimately, the gender-as-difference model commonly falls into the trap of essentialism and perpetuates gender stereotyping. Gender-as-intersectionality Model In contrast to the gender-as-sameness and gender-as-difference models, which both present integrationist approaches, the gender-asintersectionality model of mainstreaming takes into account the complexity of gender relations. More specifically, it reflects on social inequalities that come into interplay with gender. Mainstreaming a gender perspective into peace and conflict analysis reveals, for instance, that sexual and gender-based violence is not targeted at all women in the same way. Rather, women belonging to ethnic and/or religious minority groups that are relatively disempowered vis-à-vis the state or dominant armed groups often become the main target (see Pratt, 2013; Davies and True, 2015). Transformationalist Model The transformationalist model integrates a gender perspective to challenge existing frameworks. This model calls for the transformation of gender relations and creating a new standard for both women and men. Mainstreaming gender analysis in the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty resulted in the inclusion of a gender criterion intended to prevent arms exports to areas where such arms might be used to provoke the use of sexual and gender-based violence (see Shepherd and True, 2014). Similarly, Margot Wallström’s decision in March 2015 not to continue the cooperation on arms deals with Saudi Arabia, where the access to weapons is considered a driver of human rights abuses and violence against women specifically, presents the security policy which integrates a gender perspective in order to deliver equality and justice (True, 2015). Resistance-to-gender-mainstreaming Model The last model is based on resistance to or even rejection of gender mainstreaming. Organizations and institutions might develop superficial policies to integrate a gender perspective in their programmes while remaining ambivalent to gender mainstreaming principles especially where they intend to bring about gender equality outcomes. Over the last decade, many western countries launched NAPs on Women, Peace and Security with a solely external focus. These NAPs adopted selective
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How effective is gender mainstreaming in policymaking? 461 approaches to gender mainstreaming and were commonly geared toward conflict-affected developing countries, while not scrutinizing the gendered impact of their own peace and security institutional and policymaking processes on the realization of women’s security at the local and national level (see Shepherd and True, 2014; Gizelis and Olsson, 2015).
EVALUATING GENDER MAINSTREAMING IN PEACE AND SECURITY Although originally conceived as a gender equality strategy, in practice gender mainstreaming may detract from and indeed serve to depoliticize gender equality goals and outcomes. There are five main criticisms that can be levelled at gender mainstreaming in peace and security policymaking. The first criticism argues that resistance to gender mainstreaming undermines its intended effects. Gender mainstreaming is often adopted as an empty signifier in the form of a checklist to satisfy external actors rather than to achieve gender equality goals. For instance, the 2012 launch of a Women, Peace and Security NAP by the Australian government might have been motivated by a desire to gain a seat on the UN Security Council rather than to advance gender equality in peace and security policymaking (True, forthcoming). Moreover, a gender perspective can be mainstreamed through practices that contradict gender equality principles. For instance, as part of their gender mainstreaming policy many Western countries integrate women into the armed forces, where sexual and gender-based violence is rife. At the same time, their border protection policies that restrict the influx of immigration undermine responsiveness to the sexual and gender-based violence faced by women, girls and boys, in particular, fleeing from conflict countries. The second criticism indicates that gender mainstreaming practices often refer to a single normative perspective while neglecting the complexity of gender relations in different contexts. In peace and security operations, gender is commonly used as a synonym for women. Gender mainstreaming, as represented in UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820, is chiefly limited to the inclusion of women’s issues, such as ‘women’s role in peace-building’, ‘the protection of women’ and ‘women and girls affected by armed conflict’. Conceptually, at least, women and girls remain passive victims protected by male soldiers, militarized states, or their male representatives on the Security Council. Such victimhood denies women the agency extended by UNSCR 1325, perpetuating the stereotype of women as non-violent peacemakers and men as violent
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aggressors. UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security is also silent about the underlying gender roles that celebrate masculine aggression and condone violence against women, as well as the gendered socioeconomic inequalities that make women more vulnerable during conflict and post-conflict situations (Shepherd, 2008, forthcoming; True, 2012). By extension, gender mainstreaming policies might (intentionally or not) homogenize women as a group, ignoring other factors that contribute to gender inequalities. For instance, the assumption about women at the peace table is that they represent the voices of all women. Practice shows, however, that the interests of women from different ethnic or religious groups may be distinct (Paffenholz et al., 2015). When leaving out the reflection on the diversity among women (and men), gender mainstreaming reinforces gender stereotyping. The third criticism contends that the evaluation of the impact of gender mainstreaming is at best challenging. Gender mainstreaming is deployed in a variety of forms and operations, which makes it problematic to assess its intended and actual effects. What is more, the different meanings of gender and gender equality might limit the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming efforts. For instance, understanding gender equality in terms of integrating women into the military in reality entails involving more women as agents of state-sanctioned violence. Gender stereotypes are also reinforced by the idea implicit in this military gender mainstreaming that only the personal experience and gender identity of police or peacekeepers can increase responsiveness to protect women and children as well as men as opposed to a political mandate supported by leadership performance indicators and professional training of police and peacekeepers regardless of gender. The fourth criticism points to the co-optation of gender mainstreaming as a means to achieve other goals such as security and development that are only indirectly linked to gender equality. Gender mainstreaming in peace and security policymaking is often set as an objective so far as it brings lasting peace and stability and regardless of how gender-equal is the peace and stability. For instance, women are included at the peace table not because they have an equal democratic right to be there (Dahl, 1998), but because they are expected to contribute with unique feminine qualities. Moreover, the goal of peace and stability in the context of UN peacebuilding operations often privileges physical security and electoral machinery over social and economic security. That vision impairs the ability of women to procure basic housing, food, health and education, and the context of poverty perpetuates women’s vulnerability to violence in post-conflict states (Hall and True, 2009; True, 2012). Thus, gender mainstreaming in UN peacekeeping missions may not bring about a real,
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How effective is gender mainstreaming in policymaking? 463 substantive improvement in women’s security after war or conflict. Ultimately, the goal of gender equality is sacrificed for other institutional ends, and gender mainstreaming in this form in practice maintains women in a subordinated position. The fifth criticism points to the exclusion of women’s civil society organizations in designing gender mainstreaming strategies. Gender mainstreaming administered by the state and international security apparatus may silence the voice of women’s organizations by bureaucratizing feminism. In many countries, the development and adoption of Women, Peace and Security NAPs involved only minor consultation with women’s civil society and little (if any) founding for their participation in evaluation and progress monitoring. This lack of partnership between governmental and non-governmental actors undermines the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming. The UN is often a crucial actor in opening as well as limiting the spaces for local women’s participation in peace and security processes. In countries like Congo, Liberia, Nepal, Kosovo and East Timor, local women’s organizations have worked very closely with the UN gender advisor and gender affairs units within UN peacekeeping missions to integrate gender perspectives in peacekeeping missions and transitional and new governments. Together, they have promoted registration of female voters, and trained female candidates for campaigns and elections, coordinated gender mainstreaming across mission departments, and developed gender-sensitive programmes and training for UN personnel and local police, including demobilization programmes for security and military personnel. These initiatives in particular have tended to emphasize visions of gender equality that are not based on male-as-norm behaviour or models but are sensitive to differences between women and men while not fixing or essentializing these differences. Gender mainstreaming has been readily assimilated in these peace processes because it is presented as an organizing principle that can be carried out by anyone with the use of technical tools. However, while consulting with women’s organizations may be a key criterion on a ‘gender mainstreaming checklist’, mainstreaming does not necessarily mandate or monitor civil society’s influence over peace and security decisions and outcomes (WILPF, 2015).
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CONCLUSION: MOVING BEYOND THE SHORTCOMINGS The effectiveness of gender mainstreaming has so far been limited. As gender has become more de rigueur in international peace and security policymaking it has been less able to challenge political or economic power structures. To overcome the shortcomings of current gender mainstreaming policy in international peace and security, an integrated framework for action is required. Three key conditions need to be satisfied. First, gender mainstreaming practices should address both institutional and structural barriers to equality faced by different groups of women (and men). To do so, gender analysis should inform any gender mainstreaming actions. Second, the expertise of women and women’s civil society organizations must be substantially involved in designing, implementing and monitoring gender mainstreaming programmes such as Women, Peace and Security NAPs, women protection advisors and gender advisor mechanisms in UN peace operations and other initiatives as well, for gender analysis to be credible and relevant. Third, the UN has to play a facilitative role in strengthening relationships between governments, universities and civil society actors for a transformative vision of gender mainstreaming in peace and security that would reconnect mainstreaming efforts with feminist goals of justice and equality. Without a doubt, new spaces and opportunities for policy dialogue, debate and contestation by governmental and non-governmental civil society actors have been opened as a result of the gender mainstreaming mandate of UNSCR 1325. However, mainstreaming gender in peace and security requires strong leadership by states and international organizations and an emphasis on equality and justice in order to fully realize women’s security.
NOTE 1.
Compared with 49 UN member states that have adopted national action plans and the eight UN member states in the Pacific Islands Forum that have adopted a regional action plan.
REFERENCES Carvajal, Doreen (2010) ‘The female approach to peacekeeping’, New York Times, 5 March, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/world/africa/06iht-ffpeace.html?ref=globalhome.
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How effective is gender mainstreaming in policymaking? 465 Cohn, Carol (2008) ‘Mainstreaming gender in UN security policy: a path to political transformation?’, in Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, pp. 185–206. Dahl, Robert (1998) On Democracy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Davies, Sarah E. and Jacqui True (2015) ‘Preventing conflict-related sexual and genderbased violence: bringing gender analysis back’, Security Dialogue, 46 (6), 495–512. Gizelis, Theodora-Ismene and Louise Olsson (eds) (2015) Gender, Peace and Security: Implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325, New York: Routledge. Hall, Nina and Jacqui True (2009) ‘Gender mainstreaming in a post-conflict state: toward democratic peace in Timor Leste’, in Katrina Lee Koo and Bina D’Costa (eds), Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 159–174. Hudson, Natalie F. (2013) ‘National and regional implementation of Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security’, background article for UN Global Review Meeting, Global Technical Review Meetings, Building accountability for implementation of Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security, UN Women, Glen Cove, NY, 5–7 November. IRIN (2010) ‘Women UN peacekeepers: more needed – an advantage’, IRIN Global: Humanitarian News and Analysis, project of the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, 20 May. Kronsell, Annica (2012) Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping, New York: Oxford University Press. Krook, Mona Lena and Jacqui True (2012) ‘Rethinking the life cycles of international norms: the United Nations and the global promotion of gender equality’, European Journal of International Relations, 18 (1), 103–127. MacKenzie, Megan (2015) Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth That Women Can’t Fight, New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Barbara, Milad Pournik and Aisling Swaine (2014) Women in Peace and Security through United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325: Literature Review, Content Analysis of National Action Plans, and Implementation, Washington, DC: Institute for Global and International Studies, George Washington University. Paffenholz, Thania, Nicholas Ross, Stephen Dixon, Anna L. Schluchter and J. True (2015) ‘Making women count: assessing women’s inclusion and influence on the quality and sustainability of peace negotiations and implementation’, report submitted to UN Women as an input into the global study in preparation for the High-level Review on the Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, April. Pratt, Nicola (2013) ‘Reconceptualizing gender, reinscribing racial–sexual boundaries in international security: the case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace and Security”’, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (4), 772–783. Pruitt, L. (2013) ‘All female police contingents: feminism and the discourse of armed protection’, International Peacekeeping, 20 (1), 67–79. Shepherd, Laura J. (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London: Zed Books. Shepherd, Laura (forthcoming) ‘Making war safe for women? National action plans and the militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, International Political Science Review, 37 (3). Shepherd, Laura J. and Jacqui True (2014) ‘The Women, Peace and Security agenda and Australian leadership in the world: from rhetoric to commitment?’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67 (3), 257–284. True, Jacqui (2003) ‘Mainstreaming gender in global public policy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5 (3), 368–396, translated into Croatian in Žene i politika, Zagreb: Centre for Women’s Studies, 2015. True, Jacqui (2012) The Political Economy of Violence against Women, New York: Oxford University Press.
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True, Jacqui (2015) ‘Why we need a feminist foreign policy to stop war’, Open Democracy, 50.50, 20 April, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/jacqui-true/why-weneed-feminist-foreign-policy-to-stop-war. True, Jacqui (forthcoming) ‘Explaining the global diffusion of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, International Political Science Review, 37 (3). True, Jacqui and Laura Parisi (2013) ‘Gender mainstreaming in global governance’, in Elisabeth Prügl, Gülay Caglar and Susanne Zwingel (eds), Feminist Strategies in International Governance, New York: Routledge, pp. 37–56. WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) (2015) Leveraging UNSCR 1325 National Action Plans for Local Change, Geneva: WILPF.
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54. Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds: gender in world politics Marysia Zalewski
How can so much change and yet remain the same? (Halberstam, 2012: 37)
As soon as one starts to think critically about the two major concepts and sets of practices of interest here – gender and politics – they start to unravel immediately. Gender opens up as complexly about femininity, sexuality, masculinity, women and men at a minimum (and all plural), and always unfathomably intertwined with a multitude of other identity categories, not least race and ethnicity. Moreover, gender as a concept for analysis is not necessarily accompanied by feminist politics or its wide range of intellectual competencies and commitments. In what ways might this matter? Politics, also complex, is conventionally thought to be about government and matters of state and security, in all of which scholars and others interested in the practices of gender are also interested in one way or another. Yet one of the significant insights generated through feminist work – the personal is political – opens up the term politics in a plethora of unthought-of ways, showing that it works on a wide range of levels difficult to access without the multi-faceted intellectual tools of feminist theory, perhaps, in part, answering the question I posed at the end of the first paragraph. In the discipline of international relations, for example, which has some claim to be the study of ‘world politics’, feminist scholarship has illustrated how governments rely on certain forms of gendered labour and heteronormative commitments to make policies about welfare or security, or that making decisions to go to war regularly involves conventionally gendered and racialized tropes of masculinized protectors and feminized vulnerability, sometimes implicitly, though not always. Further still, feminist scholarship has opened up the myriad ways in which small everyday acts around gender, as well as large ones, contribute to co-creating the high politics of the international political sphere, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. The chapters not only illustrate the many ways gender works to co-constitute international politics; they also suggest, if indirectly, that the study of gender has 467
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become a significant and established part of the study of world or international politics. How could we doubt it? From theory and method, to statecraft and sexuality, to nationalism and popular culture, to political economy and human rights (the list is lengthy), the practice and study of gender seem to have (rightly) secured a firm place in the analysis of world politics. Yet one might pause to question this, given the egregious inequalities and violences involving gender that persist locally and globally, not least those consequent to overt political decisions, though on this point one might also question what we expect of our theories, methods and concepts, whether academics, policy makers or activists. There certainly seems to be an expectation of change as a result of effectively using theory and method and the right concepts; feminist work has historically been energized by the expectation of change consequent to the insights it has provided through its work (Scott, 2011). And change would seem logical given it is the case that feminist work on gender seriously disturbs normalized knowledges and practices, and not just in the more rationalistic arenas of policy and academic knowledge production, but also in the personal spheres of identity and subjectivity. Yet, despite the familiarity of the idea that ‘the personal is political’, the trails and connections between these two realms remain enigmatic and resisted. They are unsurprisingly resisted perhaps, given that, as just mentioned, the exposure of the work of gender through feminism induces troubling disturbances. And disturbances to hegemonic practices are not going to go unnoticed or unchallenged, however implicitly or circuitously. Notwithstanding, it does seem that the analysis of gender in world or international politics is here to stay, and further it appears that it would be difficult to turn the clock back. How could we doubt it? The puzzle I want to open up in this short chapter is about imagined (feminist) futures and present ‘failures’ in the context of world politics. To pick up on Jack Halberstam’s question which opens this chapter, ‘How can so much change and yet remain the same?’ (2012: 37); this question is surely one that many feminist scholars and activists ponder over, some loudly, some quietly, but it is one that is consistently raised. And expectations have been high for the ‘gendering’ of international politics and international relations; consider Kimberly Hutchings’s comments made in 2008: When the project of bringing feminist insights to bear on international politics was formulated it had a clear-cut set of goals: to demonstrate how gendered relations of power sustain contemporary world politics and political economy; to deconstruct dominant masculinist conceptual frameworks; and to work to
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Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds 469 transform both the academy and political practice in the light of feminist values. (Hutchings, 2008: 100)
Her comments clearly indicate the temporal transformational intentions and future hopes of feminist international relations. Have any of those aims she describes transpired? The gendered relations of power that sustain contemporary world politics and political economy have been rigorously demonstrated by feminist scholars. Similarly, dominant masculinist frameworks have been scrupulously picked over, taken apart and exposed. What about transforming the academy and political practice in the light of feminist values? Perhaps this was too much of a ‘big ask’, even assuming agreement could be reached on ‘feminist values’. Some might also claim that, despite seemingly clear conceptual, legislative and political success in regard to the first two points made by Hutchings, their success might be disputed given that disparities related to gender remain rampant: sexual violence, domestic violence, income inequalities and positions of power to name a few. So – how can so much change and yet remain the same? Jack Halberstam poses this question in Gaga Feminism (2012) when reflecting on Shulamith Firestone’s polemical and futuristic call in The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Creating analysis out of a mix of Marxism and radical feminism (and more), Firestone imagined a successful feminist revolution via the use of reproductive technologies. She anticipated that future women would no longer need to physically reproduce the species themselves, as technology would take this over. This ‘biological liberation’ – to ‘unwomen’ women – would have a domino effect, releasing possibilities for liberation in all other realms of women’s lives. What might seem like a both quaint and eccentric argument today, not least given its mix of apparent essentialism and bizarre futuristic imaginings, was nevertheless innovative and ground-breaking at the time. Yet Halberstam’s question challenges this temporally structured commonsense comment about Firestone’s work, namely that it was ground-breaking at the time, as if the ground would remain broken instead of re-forming back into traditional forms. Though there may not be much of a contemporary appetite for Firestone’s cyborg imaginings (though who doubts the ongoing effects of motherhood on disparate women’s lives?), it is clearly the case that gender-inflected inequalities and violences violently persist. Why haven’t things changed over time, or at least anywhere near enough? Here we might reflect a little more closely on what appears to be a founding concept for feminism: gender.
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GENDER One of the main functions of a concept is that they give us a good night’s sleep. (Hall, 1991: 43)
Definitions of gender are plentiful in institutional literatures and policy documents. Most tend to readily accept the idea that gender is separate from sex, the former judged as learned or cultural, the latter located within the biological and anatomical/chromosomal. This distinction remains institutionally solid, which inevitably has a significant impact on the ways that gender is imagined to work. Taking the United Nations as a body with a great deal invested in gender, in earlier decades (e.g. the 1960s and 1970s) gender was most often associated with women. More recently it has become generally accepted that gender includes men, and the opportunities and calls for learning ‘better masculinities’ have proliferated. The ‘easiness’ around earlier understandings of gender (Scott, 2011: 6) as ‘learned behaviour’ and the possibilities of them being un- or re-learned have smoothly morphed into policies geared at re-educating men to enact better masculinities and empowering women to be less vulnerable; these are very familiar in the world of gender-‘sensitive’ policy making. Yet for contemporary feminist and critical scholars the picture is not as clear. Gender is a messy entanglement of things, ideas, behaviours and identities, and its relationship to ‘biological’ sex and material, performative and epistemological productions of sex is exceedingly complex – all enough to trouble one’s sleep indeed. However, for critical scholars it is precisely the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender so interesting (Scott, 2011: 5). Yet the idea that gender reformulation ‘should be easy’, or at least ‘doable’, remains ever present. In this sense gender has perhaps become too ‘comfortable’, inducing something akin to critical somnambulance. As a concept imagined through feminist work, it necessarily brings with it critical thinking potential about pasts, presents, futures and sexual difference. Yet this critical acuity persistently dissipates, as J. Ann Tickner notes in her concluding comments in Chapter 2 in this volume. Perhaps this is something to do with an engineered evacuation of feminist politics from gender in analysis and policy. I am dubious about this argument given that, in my view, it is unfeasible to disentangle gender from feminism and vice versa, or at least that questions about gender become something distinctly ‘other’ outwith the work of the intellectual tools of feminism(s),1 but more because it is suggestive of the methodological potential of suturing them back together – weaving feminism back into gender again in order to achieve the much desired but still unattainable gender
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Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds 471 results. I think this misses a more simple if more disturbing and dangerous point about ‘casual forgetting’, a term used by Cynthia Enloe in her Foreword to a special issue on ‘Gender and IR’ in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2007). Shiera el-Malik takes up the idea of casual forgetting in her article, focusing (in part) on that special ‘Gender and IR’ issue, and in particular Enloe’s discussion of the ‘comfort when feminist questions are “forgotten”’ (el-Malik, 2015). In the context of one of the disciplinary homes of the study of world politics – international relations – discussion about the impact of feminist work and its lingering marginality has been present for several decades (see Chapter 2 in this volume). For many, these have become exasperating discussions given the wide and impressive range of feminist scholarship produced in this realm. Moreover the negativity attached to the ongoing sense that feminist work and scholars are ‘marginal’ is very discomfiting in the increasingly professionalized and careerist institutional environments many feminist scholars work in. Yet things don’t change anywhere near what was (and is) desired or expected, suggesting that practices of ‘casual forgetting’ are more prevalent than supposed or, more, that the work done through casual forgetting is much more significant than imagined. Let me offer one seemingly banal example. As I finalize this chapter in September 2015, I am preparing to go to the European International Studies Association Conference, the theme of which is ‘Worlds of Violence’. It looks set to be an immensely interesting event. There is a huge range of panels spanning the impossibly wide spectrum that the idea of ‘worlds of violence’ conjures. Significant also is the site of the conference, the island of Sicily. In an email to section chairs at the conference, two of the participants reminded us that as delegates we would ‘be gathering at the gate of the Mediterranean sea of death’,2 given Sicily’s position as a site of arrival for people fleeing violence and seeking asylum, many of whom die in the surrounding waters. This is not the banal example, of course; rather, the issue causing a great deal of pre-conference consternation concerns ‘names on doors’ at the Hilton hotel where the conference primarily takes place. It became apparent that the conference organizing committee had made a decision to rename some of the panel rooms (with name plates on the doors) after scholars deemed fundamentally important to the founding of the discipline: 18 names in total, all white, all dead, all men. The acronym DWEMs,3 which one surely imagined was anachronistic in twenty-firstcentury academic practices, materializes as still pertinent ‘after all these years’. The absence of women from this list of significant names proffers symbolic injury, of course; as delegates troop in and out of panel rooms,
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they are constantly being reminded, if subtly, like a ‘casual reminder’, that the ‘world of international studies’ still belongs to (white) men, even the dead ones. There are further layers of casual forgetting that might be exhumed here, including the names of the many (dead) women who might have been included on the list of those fundamental to theorizing the realm of the ‘international’. And, notably, the issue of ‘all-male line-ups’ had been of serious concern in two of the other professional organizations associated with academic theorizing of the international just a few months before, as detailed in a letter prepared to be sent to the EISA organizing committee by a group of students and scholars: + The February 2015 International Studies Association annual convention was subject to much criticism for the almost complete absence of non-white scholars, and the scarcity of female scholars in its Sapphire Series, which was meant to showcase contemporary international relations. + The April 2015 Political Studies Association annual conference starred an all-male keynote speaker line-up. When this was brought to their attention, the Association decided to ensure that their 2016 conference would have an all-female keynote speaker line-up. + Dr Saara Särmä (University of Tampere, Finland) curated an ‘all-male panels’ Tumblr, which attracted widespread media attention from outlets including the BBC, Time and CBC throughout 2015.4 Perhaps these are not important enough issues. Perhaps the pluralism of theoretical traditions indicated in the choice of male theorists chosen by the EISA organizers is suggestive of (acceptable) attention to diversity and difference. Perhaps the context of the profound theme of the conference and the geographical siting of it at a ‘gateway to death’ render trivial the focus on EISA’s acts of the ‘casual forgetting’ of women. However, shrouds of innocence and respect too regularly mask the ‘simple violences’ that acts of ‘casual forgetting’ summon. It is too easy, far too easy, to readily remember the already and always remembered, revered and honoured. And it isn’t simply that there are women who have visibly mattered in the pursuance of theorizing the ‘international’; remembering that there are ‘others’ who are not male or white propels us into knowing better (and for longer) that there are other ‘worlds of politics’ than the one(s) disciplinary boundaries capture and insist on as natural. These are worlds where ‘different’ people matter and not just those who insist on retaining the centre and locus of importance: the ubiquitously present white men. The bodies washing up on European
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Conjoined, complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds 473 beaches remind us of this. How soon will it be before they are forgotten (again) too? As stated in my opening paragraphs, the feminist-inspired and intellectually informed exposure of the work of gender induces troubling disturbances to hegemonic practices. This is unlikely to go unnoticed or unchallenged, even if circuitously. There are abundant gestures around and about gender in policy, politics and academic theorizing, yet the persistent sense that things don’t change (anywhere near enough) lingers. It was imagined that it would be better by now. This book goes into production round about the time of the EISA conference in Sicily. I imagine that the organizers of the conference will be bemused by the strength of the reaction to the ‘all-male line-up’. A letter which asks for an explanation and reparation is being sent, and action to draw attention to the ‘all-male line-up’ at the conference is planned.5 I imagine the organizers will be puzzled by the levels of frustration and anger, possibly irritated and a touch defensive too. I wonder what is expected of them, what ‘we’6 expect of them. I wonder this in part because I suspect that we all forget that we are all ‘men’, especially at events like this, so it is easy to keep forgetting women. Though this might seem an unnecessarily provocative or indeed strange statement, I write it to encourage ‘active remembering’ (el-Malik, 2015: 503) about the work of sexual difference, about which critical thinking has been firmly entombed under the comforting auspices of the concept of gender. Feminism was never meant to be so comfortable or comforting. Recall the work of Luce Irigaray, who reminds us that there has never been a space for women as women. Women have only ever been represented as a lack, the opposite to, the same as or the complement of the one subject (Irigaray, 1993; Grosz, 2005: 174). Indeed the hard work of sexual difference has yet to come given that in language, politics, representation and writing there is (still) only one sex. Given the ease of casual forgetting about women, do we doubt it?
NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
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My use and understanding of ‘feminism(s)’ is eclectic, multi-layered and queer-laced. See also Shiera el-Malik on the idea of a ‘feminist-neutral’ form of gender analysis (2015: 523). Federica Caso and Tiina Vaittinen. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2RcAGEZQAY. From the letter written by Dr Laura McLeod and Dr Daniela Tepe-Belfrage and co-signed by several other signatories. Facebook is playing a huge part in the pre-conference organization of this. I count myself as part of this ‘we’.
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REFERENCES Firestone, Shulamith (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution, London: Women’s Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack (2012) Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hall, Stuart (1991) ‘Old and new identities’, in Anthony D. Kind (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-system, London: Macmillan, pp. 42–69. Hutchings, Kimberly (2008) ‘1988 and 1998: contrast and continuity in feminist international relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37 (1), 97–105. Irigaray, Luce (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London: Athlone Press. el-Malik, Shiera S. (2015) ‘Why Orientalism still matters: reading “casual forgetting” and “active remembering” as neoliberal forms of contestation in international politics’, Review of International Studies, 41 (3), 503–525. Scott, Joan W. (2011) The Fantasy of Feminist History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Index Afghanistan 216, 257 Africa 387 Algeria 41 ‘anti-globalisation’ activism 105, 113, 114, 116 Arab Muslim societies 122 MENA see MENA countries Argentina 99 Australia 9 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action 457 Bosnia 283–4 Brazil 98–9, 100 Burma 247 Canada 9 care and social reproduction see social reproduction Chile, SERNAM 100–101 cinema and film 317–24 narratives of gender and world politics 317–19 war representations condundrum 319–21 world politics’ shared phallocentrism 321–4 see also computer games citizenship see gender and citizenship class and social privilege 112, 115, 188–9 colonialism see postcolonial feminisms computer games 333–40 benefits of 339–40 content analyses of games 336 gender stereotyping 333–5 industry responses to girl market 335–6 sexual objectification/moral attitudes 338–9 violence and girls’ aggressiveness 336–8 see also cinema and film
conflict-related sexual violence 206–13 approaches to understanding 208–11 feminist security studies and 269 masculinities-oriented 210–11, 292–3 rational approach 208 socialisation approach 209–10 structural approach 209 as any form of sex-based violence 207 international community’s responses 211–12 male victimization 207 UN Security Council Resolutions 206–7, 211, 271–8 see also gender of violence in war and conflict Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 146–51 1999 Optional Protocol 146 adoption of 145, 408 articles overview 146–7 Committee’s General Recommendations 147, 148–50 effectiveness and limitations 19, 148 reservations 147 criminal courts see international criminal courts critical theory see feminist historical materialist theory and critical theory Democratic Republic of Congo 197, 201, 206, 209, 285 democratization see gender and democratization development scholarship 349–40 development see gender and development; gender and global restructuring; gender and sustainable development; gender and microfinance/microcredit discursive structures 35–7
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homonationalism/protectionism 77 popular culture see popular culture ‘refugee women’ as helpless victims 184–5 security and 225, 276 ‘maternal peacefulness’ 299–300 UN conceptualisation 461–2 ‘with all due respect to their sex’ 174–6 women and nature construct 450 ecofeminism see gender and sustainable development economic sanctions 245–53 effectiveness and effects of 245–6 disruption/deterioration of livelihoods 246–8 increase in social disorder 248 empirical evidence on detrimental effects of 248–52 (CIRI) Human Rights dataset 249 women’s economic rights 250–51 women’s economic well-being 251–2 women’s political rights 250 women’s social status 250, 251 overview 252–3 economics see economic sanctions; feminist economics; feminist historical materialist and critical theory; feminist political economy; gender and development; gender and microfinance/microcredit; gender and migration; gender in global restructuring; globalisation, development and empowerment; international financial institutions’ structural adjustment policies education 258 Egypt 128, 129–31, 132 empowerment 378–80, 430–31, 434–5 environmental governance see sustainable development Eurocentric frameworks 67–8, 83, 91 Europe/European Union attitudes 238–9, 240 citizenship 83, 91–2, 367
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and employment 368–9 EU Asylum Directives 181 European International Studies Association 471–3 European Security Strategy 35 jurisprudence 156–7 ‘female masculinity’ 55 female suicide bombing 215–22 prevalence and motivations of 215–16 profile of actors 217 studies: explanations and interpretations 219–21 future agenda 221–2 the term ‘terrorism’ 215 women’s agency, gender as variable 218–19 feminism activism (1900 to present day) first wave 95–6, 188–9, 281, 405–6 second wave (1970s to 1990s) 189–90, 406 third wave (1990s to present) 190–92, 407 democratization see gender and democratization First International Women’s Congress 187 key issues and debates 187–8 key strategies 407–10 MENA countries see MENA countries scholarly writing on, overview 192–3 UN women’s conferences 189–90 methodologies see feminist methodologies theory and scholarship concept of gender 63, 470–73 ecofeminism 447–9 historical materialist see feminist historical materialist and critical theory in international law 139–42, 162 international relations see international relations
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Index 477 postcolonial see postcolonial feminisms poststrucuralist see poststructuralist feminist approaches private military and security companies 290, 293–5 security studies see feminist security studies on the state 78–80 transnational see transnational feminism on war and conflict 199–200, 321–4 feminist economics 414–21 barriers encountered in 8–9 capitalism and social reproduction 27–8, 363–4 foundational disciplines 415 global development issues 355–8 mainstream economics and 414–15 measuring value of unpaid work 396–7 overview 420–21 policy contributions/objectives 417–20 gender-based methodologies 418–19 harmonization of family responsibilities 420 macroeconomic development policies 417–18 occupational segregation/ employment discrimination 419–20 question of choice 415–16 question of domestic/caring labour 416 sexual division of labour 416 see also feminist political economy feminist historical materialist and critical theory 24–30 masculinism and 28–9 postcolonial feminism and 45 ‘renewed materialist feminism’ 82–3 ‘social reproduction’, devaluation of 26–8
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social totality and ‘historical structures’ 24–6 strategic silence of policy-making 29–30 feminist IR see international relations (IR) feminist methodologies 66–72 commitment to political project 68–9, 417 Eurocentric frameworks 67–8 objectivity/situated knowledges 70–71 overview 71–2 recovering voices 66–7 strategic commitments, choice and reflexivity 69–70 feminist political economy 345–53 development scholarship and 349–40 governance (global) scholarship and 350 key ideas 346–7 key practices 348–50 key works on 350–53 commercial sex 371–6 see also feminist economics feminist security studies focus, contribution and functionality 263–4 substantive issues and debates 264–6 key and current works 266–70 ‘a’ feminist perspective 267 cognitive frameworks/language 267–8 gender 19–20, 266–7 location, positionality and intersectionality 268–9 methodology 269–70 sexualized violence 269 ‘peace studies’ and ‘war studies’ 266 Finland 87–8 Foucault, Michel 37, 410 France 41 ‘gender empowerment’ 379–80, 430–31, 434–5 gender and citizenship 85–92 FEMCIT 92
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gendering citizenship 86–8 global variations 87–8 immigration regulations 366–8 Marshall’s socio-historical analysis 85–6, 88 mediating citizenship 87 reformulations of approach to 91–2 sexual citizenship and geographies 88–90 see also identity politics gender and democratization 94–102 overview 101–2 political opportunities and barriers 97–8 constitution strategy 98 electoral strategy/quota laws 99 executive strategy 100–101 opposition to dictatorships 97–8 third wave activism and precedents 95–7, 130 gender and development 378–84 care and unpaid work 383–4 global restructuring see gender and global restructuring including men systematically 381–3 mainstreaming and empowerment 378–80 disappointment 378–9 sustainable development see gender and sustainable development World Bank and gender equality 380–81 gender and microfinance/microcredit 430–37 definitions and function 431–2 engendering: discipline and rule through 435–6 facilitating/organizing neoliberal purposes 433–4 gender empowerment as targeting strategy 434–5 Global Summit of Microcredit discourse 431–2 migration and see gender and migration overview 436–7 gender and migration 362–9 global transfer of labour 363–6
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marriage 366 reproductive sectors 363–4 sex work 366 social reproduction 365 immigration regulation/ nation-building 366–8 overview 368–9 regional spaces 367 valuation of knowledge 367 works on 356–7, 359 gender and popular culture 312–14 gender and security 225–32 gender inequality and conflict resolution 228–30 and state conflict, studies 225–8 effects of conflict on 230–32 gender mainstreaming 461–3 Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict dataset 230–31 women as negotiators and mediators 229–30 gender and sustainable development 446–53 (mis)conceptions based on woman/ nature bond 449–51 climate change 451–2 ecofeminist interventions and UNCED+20 447–9 Agenda 21 and 448 international background to 446–7 overview 453 Planeta Femea 448 gender as a concept approaches to 1–2, 33 concept origination 60–62 feminist methodologies 66–7, 199–200 feminist theorizing 63, 470–73 and the human norm 63–4 masculinities and 51 overview of progress of 470–73 sex and/or gender 137–39 see also gender as a variable gender as a variable 15–22 analytical category 79–80, 199–200 data collection challenges 17–19 mainstreaming implementation models 459–61
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Index 479 overview 21–22 research using 19–21 usefulness of 15–17 see also gender as a concept gender differences in attitude to global security hypotheses on 234–6 community and consensus 235 essentialist view 235 threat, risk and violence 234 international institutions 239–41 overview of survey data 242–3 political engagement of women and 241–2 war and use of force 236–9 gender in global restructuring 354–61 issues and debates 354–8 scholarship in 359–61 early globalization studies 354 see also globalisation, development and empowerment gender in international governance 405–12 gender mainstreaming 409–10 impact measurement 410–12 League of Nations and UN 405–7 legal strategies 407–8 gender in international law see international law gender mainstreaming (UNCR 1325) 143, 284–6, 457–8, 461–2 development evaluations 378–9 peace and security policymaking 457–64 addressing shortcoming 464 evaluating 461–3 implementation models 459–61 UN systems 457–8 used at international level 138, 409–10, 412 gender models 459–61 gender of violence in war and conflict 197–203 Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy 197, 201–2 everyday life as war 201–2 far-reaching sex-differentials 202–3
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international organisations’ approach to 197–8 Jean Paul’s story, from Democratic Republic of Congo 197, 201 male victimization 200–201 overview 203 sexual violence, feminist approach to 198–9 Syrian experience 197, 202–3 Ziba’s story, from Bosnia 197–8 see also conflict-related sexual violence gender of work 438–45 economic sanctions and 246–8 equal remuneration 442–3 global inequalities 355–8, 443–4 International Labour Organization 438–40 reproductive labour and maternity 440–42 gendered state, the 77–84 citizenship see gender and citizenship current context (neoliberalization) 83–4 key issues in feminist theorizing 77 gender and the state 79–80 state as capitalist 79 state as patriarchal 78–9 state to non-Western countries 80 women’s exclusion 78 the state reproduced 77, 80–83 ‘renewed materialist feminism’ and 82–3 ‘state as person’ 81 Geneva Conventions 164, 171, 173 Ghanaian traders 386–92 Global Summit of Microcredit 431–2 global transfer of labour 363–6 globalisation, development and empowerment 386–92 Ghanaian traders and 386, 388–91 cross-border trade 388–9 inter-continental trade 389–90 intra-continental trade 389 globalisation as neoliberal economic process 387 poor women and macroeconomics 417–18
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liberalisation as Janus-faced 390 optimistic-pessimistic dichotomy 387–8 see also gender in global restructuring governance see international governance Grameen Bank 435 health services 424–5 hegemonic masculinity thesis 51–2, 63–4 heteronormativity 59, 61, 138, 154, 313, 376, 467 heterosexuality 451 historical materialist and critical theory see feminist historical materialist and critical theory historicizing women’s rights activism 128–30 homosexuality 61, 154–6 human rights 174, 187–93 securitisation of 256–61 treaties 408 humanitarian law see international criminal courts; international humanitarian law identity politics 103–9 ‘absolute identity’ 34 identity and justice as incompatible 104, 108–9 identity politics as unitary and exclusive 105, 159 Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement 105 masculinities 53–4 mobilisation of identity 105–8 affirmatively 107 assuming multiplicity and complexity 106 responding to oppressive power relations 105–6 through anger at injustice 106–7 Occupy movement and feminist critique 103–4 transnational feminism and 114, 118 see also gender and citizenship
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India 10, 113, 120, 155 information and communication technologies 326–32 ‘geospatial’ and ‘sociospatial’ circumstances 326–7 impact on male dominance-science 328–30 impact on women’s networks 327–8 STEM, masculinist culture of 329–30 STEM, women and innovation 330–32 see also popular culture innovation 239–32 International Committee of the Red Cross 171, 174–5 international criminal courts 162–8 feminist activism and scholarship on 162–3 feminist advocacy, ‘politics of presence’ 163–5, 168 gendered subjectivity and gendered harms 165–7 humanitarian law see international humanitarian law overview 167–8 International Feminist Journal of Politics 5, 6–7, 10 international financial institutions’ structural adjustment policies 30, 418, 422–8 financial crisis and fiscal contraction 427–8 introduction of PRSP 424–5 (neoliberal) conditional cash transfers 425 and gender issues 426–7 microfinance/microcredit schemes 433 overview 428 transition to the PRSP approach 423–4 international governance 350, 405–12 gender mainstreaming 409–10 impact measurement 410–12 League of Nations and UN 405–7 legal strategies 407–8 international humanitarian law 171–6
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Index 481 criminal courts see international criminal courts customary law and 174 gender and 174–6 combatant and civilian 176 conception of honour and 172–3, 175–6 Geneva Conventions 164, 173 historical context of laws of war and gender 172–4 concept of human dignity 174 legitimisation (ius ad bello and ius in bello) 173 human rights law and 174 role, state and military flexibility 171–2 International Labour Organization (ILO) 405–6, 438–45 Equal Remuneration Convention 443 Forced Labour Convention 443 Minimum Wage-fixing Machinery Convention 442 Recruiting of Indigenous Workers Convention 443–4 Social Protection Floor 444–5 Women with Family Responsibilities 441 international law 137–43 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women defining legal standards 139 definitions of gender in 137–8 feminist analyses in 139–40 feminist debate and critiques 141–2 humanitarian law 171–6 LGBTI rights see LGBTI rights marginal or central 142–3 role of gender 139–40 theory and practice, tensions 140–41 UN Security Council Resolutions see United Nations International Monetary Fund (IMF) 422, 423, 426–8 international political economy (IPE) see feminist political economy international relations (IR) as a colonial site 44–7
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feminist scholarship in 50, 52–3 complex and ‘forgotten’ worlds 467–73 International Feminist Journal of Politics 6–7 methodologies 7, 66–72 reproducing the state 80–84 security studies 263–4 the state see gendered state, the working at the margins 5–11 international law see international law popular culture and see popular culture transnational feminism see transnational feminism variables used in research 15–22 internationalism 119 Iraq 216–17, 247–8 Israel 216, 302 Japanese feminist groups 301 justice and identity politics see identity politics Kenya 183 Kosovo 283 labour see gender of work law see Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women; humanitarian law; international criminal courts; international law; League of Nations; LGBTI rights; non-government organisations; refugees and asylum Lebanon 87 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex see LGBTI rights LGBTI rights 153–61 academic cis-gendered research and 375–6 advance across domestic and international law 156–9 academic analyses of 156 judicial calls for change, and policy actors 156–7
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international conventions and 157–8 International Lesbian and Gay Association 157 internationalism versus imperialism 159–61 the ‘human’ in human rights 160 legal history of homosexuality 154–6 restrictions on, and intersections 90, 153–4 UN Human Rights Committee 158 Yogyakarta 158 Liberia 228–9 Libya 127, 130, 239 mainstreaming see gender mainstreaming marginalisation/marginality as advantageous 6–8, 142–3 as limiting 8–10 ‘casual forgetting’ 471–3 masculinities and 52 ‘social reproduction’, devaluation of 26–8 ‘strategic silence’ of policy-making 29–30 Marxist influences 24–5, 79, 416 ‘masculinism’ (rational economic man) 28–9 discursive formulations 36 masculinities 50–56 as practices and social relations 51–3 changing nature of 55–6 effects of (the soldier ideal) 53–4 environmental management and 450 the generic human norm 61, 63–4 hegemonic masculinity 51–2, 282–3, 298, 328 ‘masculinist restoration’ 131–2 peace activism 300–301 place in gender theory 50–51, 290–92 private military and security industry see private military and security industry in science, technology and innovation 329–30 understanding conflict-related violence 210–11, 276–7 ‘maternalism’ 299–30
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maternity and reproductive labour 440–42 media see information and communication technologies MENA countries (protest and politics) 122, 127–33 failure to historicize women’s involvement 128–30 national/religious/ethnic based controls 130–32 secular/Islamic binary 132 Shariah law 147 state co-option and status quo 129 women’s position post–2011 uprisings 127–8 overview of impact 132–3 microfinance/microcredit see gender and microfinance/microcredit migration see gender and migration Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 378–80 neoliberal politics 83–4, 357–60, 387, 425 microfinance see microfinance/ microcredit Nigeria 257 non-government organisations (NGOs) as MFIs 433 ‘dual-facing’ nature of 113 feminist activism (1900 to present day) 187–93 first wave 188–9 second wave (1970s and 1980s) 189–90 third wave (1990s to present) 190–92 key issues and debates 187–8 overview of scholarly writing on 192–3 UN women’s conferences 189–90 Northern Ireland 260 Norway 396 Occupy movement 103–9, 359 Pakistan 216 patriarchy 78–9, 82, 121–2, 131, 209
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Index 483 peace activism 298–304 and ‘global war on terror’ 303–4 anti-militarisation 301 anti-militarism (1980s–2016) 302–3 gender mainstreaming in 461–3 historically specific constructions 299 masculinities and 300–301 ‘maternalism’ 299–30 ‘protector and the protected’ 302 Women, Peace and Security resolutions 271–3 peace and security policymaking 457–64 addressing shortcomings 464 evaluating 461–3 gender models 459–61 UN systems 457–8 peacekeeping 280–87 conflict resolution 20, 45, 228–30 personnel and military masculinity 285–6 recent literature on 286–7 sexual abuse and exploitation 283–4 UN operations 280–81 UNCR (1325) 273–5, 284–6 women’s organisations and placement 281–3 political economy see feminist political economy politics of location 44 popular culture 309–16 cinema and film 317–24 war representations conundrum 319–21 world politics’ shared phallocentrism 321–4 computer games 333–40 benefits of 339–40 content analyses of games 336 gender stereotyping 333–5 industry responses to girl market 335–6 sexual objectification/moral attitudes 338–9 violence and girls’ aggressiveness 336–8 consumption of 314–16
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definition conundrums 310–11 gender and 312–14 gendered dynamics of 309–10 intersect with world politics 315–16, 321–4 IR and 310–12 ‘male gaze’ 311, 322 narrative, function of 313–14 see also information and communication technologies positivism 9, 26 postcolonial feminisms 41–8 Eurocentric frameworks 67–8, 123 feminism and 42–4, 80 focus of 41–2, 44 IR and 44–6 gender oppression 46–7 overview 47–8 sexuality 60, 155 poststructuralist feminist approaches 33–40 deconstructing discourses 35–7, 80–81, 82 foundational approaches 37–8 overview 39–40 poststructuralism, broadly defined 34–5 subjectification 38–40 poverty reduction see international financial institutions’ structural adjustment policies; gender and microfinance/microcredit Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) 422–8 power see subjectification and power private military and security industry 289–96 codes of conduct 293 gender mainstreaming and sexual exploitation 292–3 gender-sensitive scholarship 290–92 contractors and identity 291–2 personnel numbers 289 problem-solving theory 26 quantitative methods 8, 69–70 quota laws 99
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racial dimensions 25, 77, 120–21, 124 colonial aspects see postcolonial feminisms rape 107, 120, 130–31 as ‘weapon of war’ 36, 208, 230, 269 criminalisation of 141–2, 163–7 war rape 197–203 see also sexual abuse Red Cross 171, 174–5 refugees and asylum 179–85 data (conflated) on women and children 179–80 detention centres 182–4 global norms as obstacle to gender equality 184–5 grounds for refugee status 180–81 UN High Commissioner for Refugees 179, 183, 185 Guidelines and their limitations 180–82 religion 97, 132, 172–3, 217 reproductive labour 364–5, 372, 440–42 Russia 216, 302 Rwanda 162, 163, 164–5, 166, 206 Saussure, Ferdinand de 34 science, technology and innovation 329–32 securitisation of human rights counter-terrorism literature 260 domestic politics and 258–60 gendered concerns with ‘ways of life’ 258 Muslim women and 259–60 ‘protection racket’ paradox 259 field and mundane operating in tandem 255 idealised Western imaginary 256 women tactically targeted, military response 257 NGO agenda remit 256–7 overview 260–61 security see feminist security studies; gender and security; gender and state conflict; gender differences in attitudes to global security; private military and security
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industry; securitisation of human rights Serbia 274 sex work 366, 370–76 as sustaining structural inequalities 371–3 economic study of 371 individual agency (power and resistance) 373–5 queer theorizing 375–6 sex, gender and sexuality 58–64 citizenship and 88–90 computer game characters 333–4, 338–9 elision of biological sex and gender 137–8, 175 gender, the concept as transnational technology 61–2 gender equality 62 gender science 62 origination 60–61 generic human 63–4 LGBTI rights see LGBTI rights originating gender research 60–62 sustainable development rhetoric 451 ‘woman’ and heteronormative project 58–9 ‘woman,’ the concept 60 sexual abuse 206–13, 269, 283–4, 292–3 see also rape sexual violence see conflict-related sexual violence; gender of violence in war and conflict; rape Shariah law 147 Sierra Leone 165–6, 228–9, 282 social reproduction 394–401 care and 397–8 definition and course of debate 394–5 current developments 398–401 ‘depletion’ 398 devaluation/non-recognition of 26–8, 394, 398, 400–401 gender and development issues 383–4 measurement of value of unpaid work 396–7
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Index 485 reproductive labour 364–5, 372, 440–42 UN System of National Accounts 396 social services 424 South Africa 99 South America 97–8 Sri Lanka 216, 230 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) 329–32 structural adjustment policies see international financial institutions’ structural adjustment policies subjectification and power 37, 78, 38–40 within criminal law courts 165–7 heteronormativity 59, 61, 138, 154, 313, 376, 467 masculinities and 51–2 suicide bombing see female suicide bombing sustainable development see gender and sustainable development Syria 127–8, 130, 197, 202–3, 207, 216 Third World women 64, 141 transnational activist networks (TANs) 112, 115–16 transnational feminism 110–16 ‘anti-globalisation’ groups 114 as a site of controversy 112–13 ‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’ approaches 112–13 co-optation 113–14 non-representational nature of 112, 114, 118, 120 transnational activist networks and social movements 115–16 definition, history and protagonists 110–12 class privilege 115 solidarity question 118–25 ‘authentic’ voice argument 122–3, 124 censure and non-engagement 122–3 empathetic critique proposition 123–4
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global West–South divide 120–21 international to transnational process 119 ominous signs 118–19 selective silences 120–21 third wave feminism 118–19, 124–5 transnational activist networks (TANs) 115–16 usefulness as a social movement 115–16 Tunisia 128, 129 United Kingdom of Great Britain 9 citizenship 85 Greenham Common 264, 302–3 LGBTI activism and rights 153, 154–5 Northern Ireland 260 refugee detention 183 security policy 258 United Nations 260, 366 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women Commission on the Status of Women 439 Conference on Environment and Development 447–9, 451 Conference on the Human Environment 446 definition of gender 137–9 ECOSOC (1997/2) 409, 457 German Marshall Fund survey 240 High Commissioner for Refugees 179, 180–82, 183, 185 Human Rights Committee 158 human rights instruments 145 peacekeeping operations 280–81 Platform for Action 417 Security Council Resolutions 206–7, 211, 256 (UNCR 1325) 138, 142, 230, 271–8 mainstreaming 143, 284–6, 457–8, 461–2 (UNCR 1820) 271–2, 286
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(UNCR 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106 and 2122) 272–3 Women, Peace and Security 271–8 1993 UN System of National Accounts 396 transnational feminism and 111 Women’s Conferences 119, 189–90 United States of America 6, 9 attitudes to troop deployment 238 Global Summit of Microcredit 431–2 hegemony 6 immigration 366 International Women’sYear conference (1975) 94 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 103–4, 107–8 Washington Consensus model 29–30, 94, 424 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights 148 violence see gender in violence; rape; sexual abuse; war and conflict war and conflict 16 as representational/cinematic 321–4 combatant socialisation 209–10 criminal courts see international criminal courts female suicide bombings 215–17 gender inequality and 230–32 gendered differences in attitude to 234, 236–9 gendered violence see gender of violence Geneva Conventions 164, 171, 173 global South/West divide 120 harms of masculine identity 53–4, 200–201, 315
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humanitarian law see international humanitarian law MENA countries’ uprisings 127–33 Middle Eastern conflict 120 private military and security operations 289–96 rape as a ‘weapon of war’ 36, 208, 230, 269 refugees and asylum 179–85 ‘woman’ 60, 66–7 and heteronormative project 58–9, 130 as object of male cultural gaze 311, 322 WomanStats project 20 Women in Global Science and Technology 329, 330 women’s rights 16–17, 19 Women, Peace and Security resolutions 271–8 national action plans (NAPs) 273, 274–5, 458, 461, 463 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 281 work see gender of work World Bank 29, 358, 380–81, 433, 434–5 structural adjustment policies see international financial institutions’ structural adjustment policies World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development 380–81 World Economic Forum 358 World Social Forums 105 Yugoslav wars 162, 163–5, 166, 206, 207
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