THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

GENDER AND SECURITY

This handbook provides a comprehensive look at the study of gender and security in global
politics.
The volume is based on the core argument that gender is conceptually necessary to think-
ing about central questions of security; analytically important for thinking about cause and
effect in security; and politically important for considering possibilities of making the world
better in the future. Contributions to the volume look at various aspects of studying gender
and security through diverse lenses that engage diverse feminisms, with diverse policy con-
cerns, and working with diverse theoretical contributions from scholars of security more
broadly. It is grouped into four thematic sections:

• Gendered approaches to security (including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological

approaches);
• Gendered insecurities in global politics (including the ways insecurity in global politics
is distributed and read on the basis of gender);
• Gendered practices of security (including how policy practice and theory work together,
or do not);
• Gendered security institutions (across a wide variety of spaces and places in global
politics).

This handbook will be of great interest to students of gender studies, security studies and
IR in general.

Caron E. Gentry is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the

University of St Andrews, UK. She has published multiple books and journal articles,
including, most recently, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores (2015, with Laura Sjoberg) and
Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War (2013).

Laura J. Shepherd is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney,

Australia. She is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and
Security in London, UK. She is author/editor of several books, including, most recently,
Gender, UN Peacebuilding and the Politics of Space (2017).

Laura Sjoberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, USA.
She is author or editor of many books, including, most recently, Beyond Mothers, Monsters,
Whores (2015, with Caron E. Gentry), Women as Wartime Rapists (2016), and Interpretive
Quantification (2017, with J. Samuel Barkin).
‘A comprehensive guide to the field of feminist security studies. Its authors present a
compelling case for why security cannot be understood without a gender lens. This Handbook
is a must read for all those concerned with global security in its many dimensions.’
J. Ann Tickner, American University, USA

‘International explorations of security and insecurity are now in high gear. Amongst the most
fruitful are those by investigators with an explicit gender curiosity. Delving into Gentry,
Shepherd, and Sjoberg’s new Handbook is the surest way to get up to speed – and join in
– with this crucial international exploration.’
Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push: Exposing and
Challenging Persistent Patriarchy

‘This comprehensive Handbook reflects the diversity and complexities in the study of gender
and security. As such, it is a valuable resource for advanced researchers. For those still testing
these (scholarly) waters, the Handbook would be an excellent starting point.’
Soumita Basu, South Asian University, India
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF GENDER AND SECURITY

Edited by Caron E. Gentry,

Laura J. Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd
and Laura Sjoberg; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Gentry, Caron E., editor. | Shepherd, Laura J., editor. | Sjoberg, Laura,
1979- editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of gender and security / edited by Caron E.
Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg.
Other titles: Handbook of gender and security
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013414 | ISBN 9781138696211 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315525099 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Violence against. | Women—Violence against—
Prevention. | Women and human security.
Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 R686 2019 | DDC 363.32082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013414

ISBN: 978-1-138-69621-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-52509-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton
 CONTENTS

List of contributors viii

List of abbreviations xv

Editors’ introduction 1
Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd, and Laura Sjoberg

PART I
Gendered approaches to security 13

1 Violence against women/violence in the world: toward a feminist

conceptualization of global violence 15
Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

2 Gender, structural violence, and peace 27

Ronni Alexander

3 Gender, race, and the insecurity of  ‘security’ 37

Maryam Khalid

4 Feminist narrative approaches to security 48

Akanksha Mehta and Annick T.R.Wibben

5 Gender, feminism, and war theorizing 59

Laura Sjoberg

6 Men, masculinity, and global insecurity 70

Paul Higate

7 Gendered and sexualized figurations of security 83

Darcy Leigh and Cynthia Weber

v
 Contents

8 Do queer visions trouble human security? 94

Michael J. Bosia

9 Feminist violence and the in/securing of women and feminism 106

Marysia Zalewski and Anne Sisson Runyan

10 Exploring gendered security dynamics through fieldwork

and ethnography 116
Megan Daigle

PART II
Gendered insecurities 127

11 Gender and war 129

Julia Welland

12 Gender and terrorism 140

Caron E. Gentry

13 Gender and everyday violence 151

Alexandria J. Innes and Brent J. Steele

14 Gendered militarism 160

Maya Eichler

15 The gendered political economy of insecurity 171

V. Spike Peterson

16 Gender and genocide: two case studies 182

Choman Hardi

17 Migration and gendered insecurities in global politics 194

Meghana Nayak

18 Gender, violence, and technology 205

Cristina Masters

19 Wartime sexual violence 216

Paul Kirby

20 The role of gender in mobilizing and countering fundamentalist

violent extremist organizations 227
Keith Proctor and Dyan Mazurana

PART III
Gendered security practices239

21 Embodied in/security as care needs 241

Tiina Vaittinen
vi
 Contents

22 Gender agency and violence 252

Elina Penttinen

23 Memory, trauma, and gendered insecurity 262

David Duriesmith

24 The gendered myth of protection 273

Cecilia Åse

25 Sex, sexuality, reproduction, and international security 284

Anna L.Weissman

26 Gender, popular culture, and (in)security 296

Linda Åhäll

PART IV
Gendered security institutions309

27 Gender and the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda 311
Nicole George, Katrina Lee-Koo, and Laura J. Shepherd

28 Peace processes and women’s inclusion 323

Kara Ellerby

29 Gender and peacekeeping 334

Sabrina Karim

30 Gender and post-conflict reconstruction 346

Laura McLeod

31 Gender and security sector reform 359

Megan Bastick

32 Gender in international security organizations 373

Natalie Florea Hudson and Laura Huber

33 Gender and state militaries 385

Melissa T. Brown

34 Gender in paramilitary organizations 396

Sandra McEvoy

Index406

vii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Linda Åhäll is Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University, UK. She is a Feminist
Security Studies scholar with an interest in popular culture/the everyday, as well as the politics
of emotions. She is the author of Sexing War/Policing Gender and co-editor of Emotions, Politics
and War and Gender, Agency and Political Violence. Recent journal articles include ‘Affect as
methodology: feminism and the politics of emotion’ in International Political Sociology (2018),
and ‘The dance of militarisation: a feminist security studies take on the political’ in Critical
Studies on Security (2016).

Ronni Alexander is a peace researcher, peace educator, and peace activist and has lived in Japan
since 1977. She is a Professor in the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies,
Kobe University and the Director of the Kobe University Gender Equality Office. She holds
degrees from Yale University (BA, psychology), International Christian University (MA, public
administration), and Sophia University (PhD, International Relations). She began the Popoki
Peace Project in 2006.

Cecilia Åse is Associate Professor in Political Science and Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at
Stockholm University. She has published widely on gender and nationalism in Sweden. Her
latest work focuses on gender aspects of crisis narratives and military death and is found in
International Feminist Journal of Politics, Cooperation and Conflict, and Journal of Cold War Studies.

Megan Bastick is a researcher at the University of Edinburgh, examining the gendered dimen-
sions of how armed forces engage with their obligations under international law. She has worked
since 2005 with the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, implementing
programmes to support gender mainstreaming in the security sector. Megan has published in
academic journals, developed practitioner-oriented handbooks, and delivers gender and security
training for armed forces, peacekeepers, government officials and women’s organizations.

Michael J. Bosia’s research is on the empowerment of communities facing the pressures of

globalization and marginalization, including the politics of HIV/AIDS, sexual minorities and
LGBT rights, and local food systems published. He has published in Globalizations, Perspectives on
Politics, New Political Science, French Politics, Culture & Society, and five edited collections. Recent

viii
 Contributors

publications include ‘Strange fruit’ in The Journal of Human Rights and ‘To love or to loathe’ in
Sexualities in World Politics. Other recent publications include two edited volumes: with Meredith
Weiss, Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression (University of Illinois
Press, 2013); and Globalization and Food Sovereignty: Global and Local Change in the New Politics
of Food with Peter Andrée, Jeffrey Ayres, M. Bosia, and Marie-Josée Massicotte (University of
Toronto Press). His current project on state homophobia and LGBT activism draws on field
research in France, Uganda, and Egypt.

Melissa T. Brown is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New
York–Borough of Manhattan Community College. She earned her PhD from Rutgers
University. She is the author of Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in U.S. Military
Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Megan Daigle is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of
Birmingham, UK. Her first book, From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century,
was published in 2015 by the University of California Press, and her work has also appeared in
Alternatives and Millennium. Megan’s research focuses on gender and sexuality in international
politics, and especially on the body as the object of security and the subject of resistance.

David Duriesmith is a Development Fellow in the School of Political Science and International
Studies at the University of Queensland. David researches masculinity, armed conflict and
violence. His book Masculinities and New Wars:The Gendered Dynamics of New War was published
by Routledge in 2017. David’s current research focuses on the construction of non-violent
masculinities.

Maya Eichler is Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Community Engagement
and Assistant Professor in the Department of Political and Canadian Studies and the Department
of Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax). Her research interests lie in
feminist security studies, gender and the armed forces, military-to-civilian transitions, military
families, and the privatization of military security.

Kara Ellerby, PhD (University of Arizona, 2011) is faculty in the department of Political
Science & International Relations with a joint appointment in Women & Gender Studies. Her
research interests include global gender norms, gender and security, African post-conflict peace-
building, and feminist International Relations. Her book, No Shortcut to Change: The Unlikely
Path to a More Gender Equitable World, was published in 2017 with NYU Press.

Caron E. Gentry is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University
of St Andrews. She is a Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political
Violence at St Andrews. Her main research topics are gender and terrorism and feminist political
theology. Her work has been published in multiple journals including International Feminist
Journal of Politics, Millennium, and International Relations and Development. She is the author of This
American Moment: A Feminist Christian Realist Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Nicole George is a Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the School of Political
Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. She has a strong interest in
the way gender and politics are configured in Pacific Island contexts, with a particular recent
focus on the gendered impacts of conflict in the region and the roles played by women in

ix
 Contributors

peacebuilding and conflict transition. Recent publications on these themes appear in International
Feminist Journal of Politics, Policing and Society, Third World Thematics, International Political Science
Review, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

Choman Hardi went to England as a refugee in 1993 and was educated at Oxford, London
and Kent Universities. She returned to Kurdistan in 2014 to teach Literature and Gender Studies
and founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies at the American University of
Iraq-Sulaimani (AUIS). She has written about the impact of genocide on Kurdish women in
Iraq in Gendered Experiences of Genocide (Routledge, 2011). Her English poetry collections, Life
for Us (2004) and Considering the Women (2015), were published by Bloodaxe Books. Considering
the Women was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her translation of Sherko Bekes’s Butterfly Valley
won a PEN Translates Award in 2017.

Paul Higate is a Professor in Conflict & Security at the University of Bath, focusing on gender,
security, and militarization. Paul’s work has focused on military masculinities and gendered rela-
tions in a number of substantive contexts that include UN and NATO peacekeeping operations
and private military and security companies. In recent years, Paul’s research has taken a critical
turn with a focus on how far and in what kinds of ways the UK can be said to be subject to
creeping processes of militarization. The particular approach taken to this emerging interest
focuses on the nexus linking history with national culture that combine to normalize and
obscure the use of military power in the contemporary context.

Laura Huber is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Emory University. Her dissertation
examines the impact of civil conflict and international intervention on women’s rights. Her
other work focuses on the integration of women into security forces and the gendered practices
of international security organizations, women’s participation in non-violent and violent politi-
cal behaviour, and the effects of gender equality on violence against civilians. Her work has
appeared in Conflict Management and Peace Science. She holds an MA in Political Science from
Emory University.

Natalie Florea Hudson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Dayton, where she also serves as the Director of the Human Rights Studies
Program. She specializes in gender and International Relations, the politics of human rights,
human security, and international law and organization. Her book, Gender, Human Security and
the UN: Security Language as a Political Framework for Women (Routledge, 2009) examines the
organizational dynamics of women’s activism in the United Nations system and how women
have come to embrace and been impacted by the security discourse in their work for rights and
equality.

Alexandria J. Innes is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of East

Anglia. Her research lies at the intersection of migration studies and security studies, using
ethnographic and narrative methods. She has published research in various academic outlets,
including International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Geopolitics,
and International Relations. Her first monograph, entitled Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge
for Security, was published by Palgrave in 2015. Alexandria founded and co-convenes the
interdisciplinary Migration Research Network at UEA for participatory action research in
migration studies.

x
 Contributors

Sabrina Karim is an Assistant Professor in Government at Cornell University. She is the co-
author of Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping (Oxford University Press, 2017), which was the winner
of the Conflict Research Society Best Book Award in 2017. Her research focuses on interna-
tional involvement in security assistance to post-conflict states, gender reforms in peacekeeping
and domestic security sectors, and the relationship between gender and violence. Her work has
been published in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, The British Journal of
Political Science, The Journal of Peace Research, and International Interactions, among others.

Maryam Khalid is a Lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and Director of the
University’s Bachelor of International Studies programme. Her research sits at the intersection
of race, gender, and sexuality in global politics, with a focus on representation and identity in and
across cultural and political texts. She has a particular interest in the construction of ‘Western’
and ‘Other’ identities. Her current research projects explore representations of ‘brown women’
in various contexts, and how gender, sexuality, and race function in and across historical and
contemporary global governance discourses.

Paul Kirby is Lecturer in International Security at the University of Sussex and a Research
Fellow in the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of wartime sexual violence.

Katrina Lee-Koo is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Deputy Director of

Monash University’s Gender, Peace and Security research centre. Her research examines the
United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, the participation of women in post-conflict
peace process, and the experiences of children and conflict. Recently, she is the co-author of
Ethics and Global Security (with Anthony Burke and Matt McDonald, Routledge, 2014) and
Children and Global Conflict (with Kim Huynh and Bina D’Costa, Cambridge, 2015).

Darcy Leigh is a member of the Law School at the University of Sussex, where she researches
queer, decolonial and crip politics, and pedagogy and works to ‘widen participation’ with
Sussex’s Social Sciences Foundation Year. Dr Leigh has researched and consulted for multiple
decolonial higher education programmes (including at the universities of Alberta and Ottawa)
and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Government, University of Edinburgh, where
she also completed her PhD in International Relations (which won the British International
Studies Association’s ‘Best Thesis’ Prize).

Cristina Masters is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her

research and publication interests are on feminism and war with a specific focus on technology
and posthuman politics. She has published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and
Security Dialogue and her book on Gender and Technologies of Security is forthcoming with
Routledge in 2019. Her broader research interests include feminist methodologies and futures
and the intersections of feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory in International Relations.

Dyan Mazurana, PhD, is Associate Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and a Senior Research
Fellow at the World Peace Foundation. Dyan carries out research in the areas of women, chil-
dren, and armed conflict; gender and armed groups; gendered dimensions of humanitarian
response to conflict and crises; documenting serious crimes committed during conflict; and
accountability, remedy, and reparation. She has published more than 100 scholarly and policy

xi
 Contributors

books, articles, and international reports. Her latest book is Research Methods in Conflict Settings:
A View from Below (Cambridge University Press, 2013) with Karen Jacobsen and Lacey Gale.

Sandra McEvoy is a Clinical Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender,
& Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She has written extensively on the Northern Irish
conflict, including the gendered motivations for women’s participation in political violence;
the impact that such participation has on notions of men and masculinity; and the role that
perpetrators of political violence can play in sustainable peace processes.

Laura McLeod is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK.

Laura’s research interests include gender, feminism and security in post-conflict contexts, in
particular ex-Yugoslavia. She is currently working on a British Academy funded project ‘Do
We Know Gender in Peacebuilding? Gender Knowledge and Peacebuilding Indicators’ which
explores how gender indicators and databases used within UN peacebuilding configure ideas
about gender expertise. Laura’s first book, Gender Politics and Security Discourse: Personal-Political
Imaginations and Feminism in ‘Post-Conflict’ Serbia was published by Routledge in 2016.

Akanksha Mehta is a Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Global Studies,

University of Sussex, UK. She teaches courses on gender, sexuality, race, political violence,
and global history. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. Her
PhD research, titled Right-Wing Sisterhood, was an ethnography of the everyday politics of Hindu
Nationalist Women in India and Israeli Zionist Settler Women in Palestine. She is currently
transforming this work into a monograph. Her broader research interests include feminist, queer,
and postcolonial/decolonial theory, political violence, war and conflict, settler colonial studies,
narrative, visual politics, and critical intersectional pedagogy. She is also a photographer, visual
artist, and community activist.

Meghana Nayak is Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty of Women’s and Gender
Studies at Pace University. Her research focuses on the politics of gender violence and the racial-
ized and gendered categorization of migrants. She is co-author with Eric Selbin of Decentering
International Relations (Zed Books, 2010) and author of Who is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based
Asylum and U.S. Immigration Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Elina Penttinen is a University Lecturer and Director of Master’s programme in Gender

Studies, University of Helsinki. She has published widely on gender and violence and compassion-
based methodology. She leads a multidisciplinary feminist research project on violence and
develops feminist analysis on healing trauma. She is the author of Joy and International Relations:
A New Methodology (Routledge, 2013), and Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-Trafficking: Corporeal
Politics (Routledge, 2008). She teaches courses on feminist methodology, scientific writing and
gender studies and supervises doctoral thesis projects in Gender Studies. Her areas of expertise
are feminist methodology, creative analytic writing, contemplative pedagogy and research on
violence.

V. Spike Peterson is Professor of International Relations at the University of Arizona, and

affiliated faculty in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for LGBT
Studies and International Studies. Her current research features critical analyses of political
economy, racialization, informalization, global householding, and global insecurities, as well as
long histories and current critical queerings of marriage, citizenship, and states/nations.

xii
 Contributors

Keith Proctor is a researcher with subject matter expertise in governance, conflict, and peace-
building. A Visiting Fellow at the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, he was
formerly the Senior Advisor for Countering Violent Extremism at the US Department of State’s
Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, and the Senior Policy Researcher at Mercy
Corps. His work has been covered by CNN,Vice News, and the Washington Post, among other
outlets. Keith is a graduate of Stanford University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at
Tufts, and Harvard Divinity School.

Anne Sisson Runyan is Professor of Political Science and former Head of Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her most recent authored, co-authored,
and co-edited books include Global Gender Politics (Routledge, forthcoming 2018), Global
Gender Issues in the New Millennium (Westview,  2014), Gender and Global Restructuring (Routledge,
2011) and Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America (Ashgate/Routledge, 2013/2016).
She has also served as an associate and guest editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Laura J. Shepherd is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the
University of Sydney, Australia, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace
and Security in London, UK. Laura’s primary research focuses on the United Nations Security
Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda and she has written extensively on the formula-
tion of UNSCR1325 and subsequent Women, Peace and Security resolutions. She is author/
editor of several books, including, most recently, Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space:
Locating Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, 2017), and her research has been published in jour-
nals such as European Journal of International Relations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and
International Affairs.

Laura Sjoberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.

Dr Sjoberg’s work has been published in more than three dozen journals in political science, law,
International Relations, gender studies, and geography. She is author or editor of several books,
including, most recently, Beyond Mothers, Monsters,Whores (with Caron Gentry, Zed Books, 2015),
Women as Wartime Rapists (NYU Press, 2016), and Interpretive Quantification (with J. Samuel
Barkin, University of Michigan Press, 2017).

Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science
at the University of Utah. He is the author of Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics:The Scars
of Violence (Routledge, 2013); Defacing Power:The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics (University
of Michigan Press, 2010) and Ontological Security in International Relations (Routledge, 2008). He
is currently pursuing research projects on the topics of restraint, vicarious identity, micropolitics,
and further studies on ontological security. He is the co-editor of five books, has edited three
journal special issues or symposia, and has published articles in a number of international studies
journals, most recently in Cooperation and Conflict, the European Journal of International Relations,
and Millennium. At the University of Utah, he teaches courses on US foreign policy, international
security, International Relations theory, and international ethics.

Maria Tanyag is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Monash University’s Centre for Gender,
Peace and Security. Her research, which explores the intersections of social reproduction, crisis,
and the political economy of sexual and reproductive freedoms, has been published in Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, Gender & Development,
and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

xiii
 Contributors

Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations and Director of Monash University’s Centre
for Gender, Peace and Security. She is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow
and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Oslo. She is the author of The
Political Economy of Violence against Women (Oxford, 2012) and co-editor with Sara Davies of the
Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security (2018).

Tiina Vaittinen is a postdoctoral researcher in Tampere Peace Research Institute TAPRI,

University of Tampere, Finland. Her work focuses on the global politics of corporeality, migra-
tion, and elderly care, which she analyses with the help of feminist political theory, biopolitics,
and critical disability studies. Her publications can be read in journals such as International
Feminist Journal of Politics, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Global Society.

Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She has
written extensively on sovereignty, intervention, and US foreign policy, as well as on feminist,
gendered, and sexualized understandings and organizations of International Relations. Her latest
book is Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge (Oxford
University Press, 2016).

Anna L. Weissman is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida whose research focuses on
the genealogy of sexuality, gender, and the nation-state. Her dissertation develops the concept of
repronormativity through a study of lesbian, gay, and trans reproductive rights in Western and
Central Europe. Anna’s work has been published in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies, the
International Feminist Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy.

Julia Welland is an Assistant Professor of War Studies and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in
the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. Her current
research explores experiences of joy and pleasure within US veteran communities, and she
continues to be interested by questions about the interrelationship between gender, war, and
military power.

Annick T.R. Wibben is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San
Francisco where she also directs the Peace and Justice Studies programme. From 2001 to 2005,
she worked as co-Investigator of the Information Technology, War and Peace Project at the
Watson Institute for International Studies. She has published two books, Feminist Security Studies:
A Narrative Approach (Routledge, 2011) and Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics
(Routledge, 2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is the Editor of Digital
Media for the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Marysia Zalewski is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University,Wales, UK. Her

research is located at the intersections of critical International Relations theory, feminist theory,
queer theory, and political theory. Currently she is engaged in critical projects on sexual violence
against men, sexed violence and terrorism, performance and knowledge production in
international politics, and creative writing in International Relations. Her book Sexual Violence
against Men in Global Politics (co-edited with Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl and Maria Stern)
was published by Routledge in 2018.

xiv
 ABBREVIATIONS

ANC African National Congress

ART artificial reproduction technologies
ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations
AUEOM African Union Election Observation Mission
CAFOB Colectif des Associations et ONGs Femininies du Burundi
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
CRSV conflict-related sexual violence
CSDP European Union Common Security and Defence Policy
CSO civil society organization
CVE countering violent extremism
CWINF Committee on Women in NATO Forces
DDR Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration
DPKO United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations
DRC Democratic Republic of Congo
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council
EU European Union
FARC Furezas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
FATA federally administrated territories of northern Pakistan
FETs Female Engagement Teams
FMLN Frente Farabundo Martí para Liberación Nacional
FMPKN United Nations Female Military Peacekeepers Network
FRA European Agency for Fundamental Rights
FSS Feminist Security Studies
FYROM Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
GEST Gender Expert and Support Team
GFC Global Financial Crisis
GPE global political economy
HRC Human Rights Council
ICC International Criminal Court
ICD Inter-Congolese Dialogue
ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

xv
 Abbreviations

ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

IDMC Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
IDPs internally displaced persons
IGO international government organization
INGO international non-governmental organization
INSTRAW United Nations Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of
Women
IO international organization
IPE International Political Economy (academic discipline of)
IPV intimate partner violence
IR International Relations (academic discipline of)
IS/ISIS Islamic State
IVAW Iraqi Veterans against the War
IVF in vitro fertilization
LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans*
LGBTQIA lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual/allies
LNP Liberian National Police
LRA Lord’s Resistance Army
LTTE Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
MAMs military-aged males
MARA monitoring, analysis, and reporting arrangements
MILF Moro Islamic Liberation Front
MIMENET military-industrial-media-entertainment-network
MTI Mali Transition Initiative (USAID)
NAP National Action Plan
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCGP NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives
NGO non-governmental organization
NRCC Natural Resources Counter-insurgency Cell
ODC United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
PIF Pacific Islands Forum
PMSC private military and security companies
PO paramilitary organization
PrE productive economy
PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder
R2P Responsibility to Protect
RAF Red Army Faction
RAP Regional Action Plan
RAWA Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan
RE reproductive economy
RMA revolution in military affairs
RPV reproductive, productive, and virtual economies
SADF South African Defence Force
SDGs Sustainable Development Goals
SEA sexual exploitation and abuse
SGBV sexual and gender-based violence

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 Abbreviations

SOFAs Status of Forces Agreements

SS Security Studies (academic discipline of)
SSR security sector reform
TVPA Trafficking Victims Protection Act
UAV unmanned aerial vehicle
UN United Nations
UN Action United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict
UN Women United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women
UNFICYP United Nations Mission in Cyprus
UNFPA United Nations Population Fund
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women (see UN Women)
UNMIK United Nations Mission in Kosovo
UNMIL United Nations Mission in Liberia
UNMIT United Nations Mission in Timor
UNPOL UN Police
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UNSCR United Nations Security Council Resolution
USAID US Agency for International Development
VE virtual economy
VEO violent extremist organizations
WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
WOWWI Women Without Walls Initiative
WPAs women’s protection advisers
WPEV Women Preventing Extremist Violence
WPS Women, Peace and Security
YPG Syria–Kurdish People’s Protection Movement

xvii
 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd, and Laura Sjoberg

Feminist work in International Relations (IR) has been interested in security from its very
beginning; foundational contributions to feminist IR explicitly addressed security (including,
for example, canonical works such as J. Ann Tickner’s (1992) Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, V. Spike Peterson’s (1992) edited collection
Gendered States, and Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (1987) Women and War). More recently, an expli-
cit subfield of Feminist Security Studies has arisen, an area that has been thriving and growing
exponentially over the last decade. Within this subfield, there have been a number of stock-
taking exercises in key texts such as Laura Sjoberg’s edited collection in the journal Security
Studies and follow-up book Gender and International Security (2009); Annick Wibben’s (2011)
Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach; and Maria Stern and Annick Wibben’s (2015)
‘A decade of feminist security studies revisited’ in Security Dialogue. A 2011 Politics & Gender
forum thinking about the state of FSS and a 2013 International Studies Perspectives forum
conceived as a response featured contributions from, among others, Carol Cohn (2011), Bina
D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo (2013), Swati Parashar (2013), and Teresia Teaiwa and Claire
Slatter (2013); these latter collections in particular pushed those of us who identify as
‘Feminist Security Studies’ scholars to consider what that identification means and what are
some of the implications of its articulation.
If FSS is well-established, and there have been some stock-taking exercises, there remains
a gap in the literature where a comprehensive reader engaging with the key topics of FSS
research, written by researchers that have constituted the field internationally, should be. This
is the contribution that we hope this book will make. While we are not interested in stream-
lining the ‘tensions’ that Christine Sylvester (2010) has identified within FSS, as we believe
that these tensions have been, and can continue to be, productive, we hope that this volume
will help crystallize the subfield of FSS, theoretically and empirically, for the scholars interested
in gender, security, and related fields of research.
We have aimed to produce this Handbook as both a work of documentation and a work
of scholarship. The volume is based on the core argument that gender is necessary, concept-
ually, to thinking about the central issues in Security Studies; important in analysing causes
and predicting outcomes; and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive
change. Contributions to the volume examine various aspects of studying gender and security
through diverse lenses that engage diverse feminisms, with diverse policy concerns, and

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 C.E. Gentry, L.J. Shepherd, and L. Sjoberg

working with diverse theoretical contributions from scholars of security more broadly. To
present this wide-ranging body of research, we have produced a Handbook organized around
four major themes, each of which is explored in a specific section. These sections are:
approaches to security (including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches);
gendered insecurities in global politics (including the various ways in which insecurity mani-
fests in the world and the gendered dynamics of these manifestations); practices of security
(including practices not normally considered within the remit of conventional approaches to
security, such as ethical practice, and popular/cultural practices); and security institutions
(including national, regional, and international organizations and modes of organization).
In Part I, on gendered approaches to security, we look to share a variety of the different
theoretical lenses that feminists use to theorize security, along with different foci and
different methods. If, in FSS, there have been a variety of approaches to understanding how
security is gendered and gender is securitized, this section focuses on sharing an overview of
several of them, their commonalities and differences. We argue that no approach to FSS can
(or should) dominate the field of inquiry, but that it is useful to understand the different ways
of thinking about gender and security that are prevalent in the field. Using feminist, decolonial,
queer, and narrative approaches, the chapters in this section explore concepts as narrow as
war and as broad as violence (material, structural, and discursive). A common thread through
the chapters is a concern with gender as a central factor in security however security is defined;
each individual chapter gives a different take and a different contribution to that question.
This collection of approaches aims both to provide a general overview of the theoretical and
methodological tools of the field of FSS and provide foundation for many of the chapters later
in this book exploring particular aspects of, or institutions in, security and/or insecurity from
a feminist perspective.
This first section of the Handbook has two goals. First, it looks to pay homage to the
variety of approaches deployed in thinking about gender, security, and global politics.
Objects (war, conflict, violence, structural violence), subjects (women, gender, masculinity/
femininity, sexuality), and methods (narrativization, fieldwork, ethnography, discourse analy-
sis) vary significantly across a wide variety of work broadly at home in FSS. While even a
Handbook this long and comprehensive cannot do all of the different approaches to thinking
about gender and security full justice, Part I looks to provide a diverse sampling of base
assumptions and frames at the root of research into gender and security in global politics.
Second, and relatedly, this section looks to provide a foundation for the chapters later in
the book analysing gender(ed) insecurities, gender(ed) practices, and gender(ed) insti-
tutions. Much of the thematic work in those chapters draws from or is informed by many
of the approaches that are featured or engaged in this section of the book.
No approach in this section is totalizing, or paradigmatic; none is meant either here or
elsewhere in the FSS literature as exclusive of the others. Instead, each chapter here provides
a lens or a perspective – someplace to look first – that informs its approach to thinking about
gender, security, and global politics. Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag bring to the forefront
the feminist lesson that violence is not something that is or is not – it is a continuum.
Suggesting that gender analysis reveals a multidimensional power structure in global politics
which constitutes violence (and violence as gendered), True and Tanyag emphasize a three-
part strategy key to both understanding and mitigating gendered violence. The authors
characterize violence in the world as multi-layered, as interconnected across forms, and as
demanding both short-term and long-term solutions. Arguing that moments of ‘crisis’ simply
illuminate continuums of violences, True and Tanyag advocate a broad and holistic approach
to (feminist) theorizing of violence.

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 Editors’ introduction

This is a theme that Ronni Alexander picks up in her chapter, ‘Gender, structural violence,
and peace’. Alexander contends that the concept of structural violence is useful to the extent
(and only to the extent) that it takes account of social relations as gendered. Alexander traces
the conceptual history of the concept of structural violence, then applies it to the murder of
Japanese woman Rina Shimabukuro, who was raped then killed around the United States
military base in Okinawa. Through this analysis, Alexander argues that a feminist approach
to theorizing security understands not only militarism and war but all of the aspects of struc-
tural violence as gendered, which allows for an interdependent, intersectional analysis of
gender, violence, and gender violence in global politics.
Intersectional analysis is the focus of Maryam Khalid’s ‘Gender, race, and the insecurity
of “security”’. Khalid approaches the study of (gender and) security with the notion that
understanding the role that race plays in analysing both/either is key. Using postcolonial and
feminist approaches to thinking about security, Khalid argues that the very concept of security
itself does significant work in rendering people insecure based on gender, race, and other
marginalizing factors. Khalid’s chapter suggests that the logics of ‘security’ in practice, and
relatedly the logics of mainstream security theorizing, are gendered and racialized in important
ways. The chapter suggests that any view of what security is, and how it functions, which
fails to take account of these factors is necessarily partial.
Annick T.R. Wibben and Akanksha Mehta’s approach, a narrative approach to (gender
and) security, suggests that the variety of stories and storytellers should be the focus of the
study of security. They demonstrate that identity and security are interdependent, and inter-
act every day. The chapter shows the utility of the approach to (gender and) security that
uses narratives about gender and other intersectional identity markers to understand how the
idea of security comes to be shaped and reshaped. Wibben and Mehta contend that feminist
research into security should both study and use narratives, and that narrative theory offers
an important tool for feminist approaches to security in a wide variety of applications.
Laura Sjoberg’s chapter suggests that feminist theorizing has significant relevance even
in the narrow application where Security Studies is limited to a traditional understanding
that security = war = security. Drawing on Carol Cohn’s (2011) distinction between ‘feminist
security’ studies and feminist ‘security studies’, Sjoberg makes the argument that feminisms
can transform war theorizing across a wide variety of substantive interests. Suggesting that
feminist ‘war theorizing’ can provide different causal and constitutive accounts of the causes,
practices, and consequences of war while ‘feminist security’ theorizing can help to question
the boundaries of the concept of war, Sjoberg goes over a variety of feminist ‘takes’ on war
theorizing. The chapter argues that foregrounding feminisms in understanding war has
significant conceptual and normative payoffs.
One of the payoffs of foregrounding feminisms can be seen in Paul Higate’s chapter on
masculinities and insecurities in global politics. Feminist work on security has suggested that
it is not only women who have gender, and not only femininities that influence social and
political perceptions and balances of power. Research has shown that masculinities matter in
political order (Connell 1995), militarization (Belkin 2012; Eichler 2011), and a wide variety
of other security-related matters. Higate uses the lens of masculinity to think about how
insecurity is produced and distributed in global politics. Theorizing from the example of the
Islamic State (IS), Higate explores the complex gendered matrix of violence, movement, and
insecurity in global politics through assemblage theory. With Higate, feminist theorists who
think about security assemblages (e.g., Shepherd and Sjoberg 2012) consider the compilation
and overlap of different aspects of (gender and) security to see the genderings of security in
multidimensional ways.

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 C.E. Gentry, L.J. Shepherd, and L. Sjoberg

Another tool that feminist theorists have used to think about gender and security is
the idea of figurations, which feature prominently in the approach of Darcy Leigh and
Cynthia Weber. Citing Donna Haraway (1997), Leigh and Weber explain that figurations
are “distillations of shared meanings in forms or images”. The authors argue that gendered
and sexualized figurations can be found across the theory and practice of security, where figur-
ations of security are gendered, sexualized, and geomorphized across conflicts. Using examples
from across global politics, Leigh and Weber argue that some figurations must be made
‘secure’ while others are left ‘insecure’, mediated by race, gender, and sexuality, intersectionally.
Michael Bosia suggests that thinking about sexuality, and queering security, both highlights
homonormativity in the construction of state sovereignty and security and demonstrates the
ways that traditional thinking about what security is and how it operates breaks down when
delinked from the sexualized straitjackets in which the concept is usually imprisoned. He
argues that there is useful analytical purchase in understanding state and international
homophobia as securitized and as a force of insecurity, problematizing the juxtaposition of
rights and security discourses in the process.
Marysia Zalewski and Anne Sisson Runyan’s chapter problematizes the assumption that
feminisms are non-violent in their approaches to and critiques of the violent world of
security. They acknowledge that feminism is itself a violent force, both generally and as a
project within security theorizing and security governance. In Zalewski and Runyan’s
understanding, feminisms within and about security are not violent as opposed to some non-
violent alternative. Instead, they are violences in a world of violences – with the view that
doing violence does not always warrant normative condemnation but does always warrant
recognition. Zalewski and Runyan urge feminist violence toward the gender binaries that
legitimize militarism and war, and suggest that attempts to detract attention from the violences
of feminism do not make them disappear but do make them less available to command and
use to intervene in security assemblages.
Megan Daigle’s chapter, which concludes this section, focuses on the practice of gendered
research into security dynamics through ethnographic fieldwork. Daigle’s chapter engages
with the different contexts and struggles inherent in feminist security fieldwork across widely
different locations. Asking what makes fieldwork feminist, Daigle traces commonalities
between feminist work in Security Studies and the ethnographic fieldwork literature. The
chapter argues that feminist security fieldwork begins from lived experience, amplifies voices
of those whom security is often ‘done to’ rather than ‘done by’, takes a reflexive approach,
and produces ‘messy’ and complicated knowledge. Daigle concludes by discussing the many
advantages of a feminist approach thinking about security that centres the experience of
security.
Turning to Part II, the contributions collected under the title of ‘Gendered insecurities’
explicitly and implicitly take on the abstractions that Security Studies is accused of
perpetuating. Abstractions are thin generalizations about what is meant by security and what
is included in the study of security. Much of the literature in mainstream Security Studies
revolves around the state and its military (and to a lesser extent, economic) power, and how
these engage other states in an anarchic state system. What these abstractions fail to account
for is how security, or rather insecurities, impact and affect the lives of the people within,
beyond, and in between these states. Furthermore, abstractions hide or cloud the operations
of power between states but primarily between people. Therefore, the chapters in this section
examine everything from war and militarism, terrorism, and countering violent extremism,
the experiences of sexual violence in war and genocide, to migration, everyday violence,
and how the global political economy perpetuates further insecurities. These chapters serve

4
 Editors’ introduction

to explore how what are often conceived of as security measures can often result in harmful
practices, resulting in the gendered insecurities of individual lives.
When it comes to IR, feminists have long critiqued the problem of abstraction, which
happens with a simplistic focus on generalizations and long-distance ‘take-aways’. When IR
scholars, and for the purposes of this volume, Security Studies scholars focus only upon the
state, ‘Westphalia’, or the ‘international system’, they therefore fail to acknowledge the indi-
viduals, communities, and societies involved in IR (see Sylvester 1994: 34–35). In a refutation
of abstraction, for almost four decades feminists have attempted to bring the individual into
IR – it is, as Cynthia Enloe declared: the personal is political is international (2000:
195–198).
In J. Ann Tickner’s Gender in International Relations (1992), she takes on the issue of abstrac-
tion in neo-Realism’s focus upon the rationality of state behaviour. She argues, borrowing
from both Richard Ashley and Jean Bethke Elshtain, that “[n]owhere in the rational power-
balancing behavior of states can we find the patriot willing to go to war to defend his women
and children in the name of national security” (Tickner 1992: 42). In such a world, “states
. . . act independently of human interests” (Tickner 1992: 42). It is a cold and lonely world
“in which, as [Elshtain] observes, ‘No children are ever born, and nobody ever dies . . .
There are states, and they are what is’” (Tickner 1992: 42).
Instead of remaining in the abstracted world of rational states and the balance of power,
the people and the stuff of IR emerge in the essays in this section. Though the entire volume
looks at the various facets of gender and security writ large, this section deals with what
‘Security Studies’ portends to address but is hampered by abstractions: insecurities. While
there are a great many more insecurities than covered in these ten chapters, these essays do
an excellent job of positing feminist and gender studies perspectives on war, terrorism, violent
extremism, militarism, sexual violence, genocide, migration, technology, everyday violences,
economics, and violent extremism.
The first chapter of the section, ‘Gender and war’ by Julia Welland, tackles the abstractions
of war head-on, beginning with her statement that “A picture of war is a picture of gendered
bodies”. She starts by examining what gendered bodies are meant to do in wartime. While
men are ‘supposed’ to be the ones who fight war, Welland examines how war plays out on
women’s bodies as well, creating connections with the chapters on ‘Gender and genocide’,
and ‘Wartime sexual violence’. Abstractions erase and silence – in war they erase women’s
active participation in the fighting and men as victims/peacemakers.
Similar gender structures are discussed in Caron E. Gentry’s chapter on ‘Gender and
terrorism’. Terrorism is often conceptualized along both gender and raced lines, leading to
seemingly natural ways of classifying different violences as terrorism or not. The association
of men and hegemonic masculinity with violence has meant that men are seen as ‘natural’
terrorists, which is exacerbated by the colonialist alignment of brown men with problematic
hypermasculinity and hyperaggression.
There is potentially no better way to de-abstract Security Studies than to look at every-
day violences, or ‘those forms of violence that occur as part of the banal experience of everyday
life’, as Alexandria J. Innes and Brent J. Steele do in their chapter. Their main argument is
that if, as Welland argues, war and violence are conceptualized as masculine, then everyday
violence is not. Therefore, the individuals and institutions that encompass it are decentred and
mundane. To be unexceptional, banal, mundane “doesn’t mean [the violence] doesn’t matter”
instead “it goes unnoticed”. Innes and Steele seek to (re)contextualize and complicate these
oft-ignored violences within the realm of Security Studies by looking at the legitimate claims
and the worthiness of study.

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 C.E. Gentry, L.J. Shepherd, and L. Sjoberg

Maya Eichler’s chapter on ‘Gendered militarism’ also begins with a powerful deabstraction
with the discussion of a Canadian veteran’s murder-suicide of his family. Eichler argues this
is a powerful exemplar of “the ripple effects of violence that can occur when soldiers return
home from war, or Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan”. The ignorance of such
violence is a result of the gendered abstraction of militarism, “an ideology that values the
military and its members over civilian society” as well as “militarized . . . means of resolving
differences”. Therefore, militarism is a particular focus of IR feminists who grapple with the
changing nature of militarism over time and the best way to counter it.
Shifting to economics, V. Spike Peterson also notes in her contribution how gendered
global political economy (GPE) is. For Peterson, GPE is no less important to understanding
gendered security than war or everyday violences. By “emphasiz[ing] . . . the differential
valorization – conceptually and materially – of qualities associated with masculinity and
femininity affects the unequal distribution of authority, privilege, resources, and insecurities”.
In her critique of neoliberal capitalism, Peterson helps the reader understand how some
production work is feminized or devalorized, drawing attention to the complexity of both
process and product.
‘Gender and genocide’ is Choman Hardi’s investigation of two genocides in Kurdistan-
Iraq, the 1988 Anfal genocide and the 2014 Ezidi genocide. In order to specifically combat
the gendered erasures that have happened in previous navigations and narrations of genocide,
Hardi chooses to highlight how different governmental agencies rely on the edited statements
of female survivors to tell the story, dependent upon gendered notions of what victimhood
should look like.
Meghana Nayak looks at the various gendered insecurities that migrants face. These might
include, for example, sexual violence and gendered dynamics of labour economies. More
substantially, the chapter offers a theoretical framework that examines the gendered insecur-
ities of states and their encounters with migrants. Nayak suggests an explanation of how
migrants and migration becomes an abstracted perspective in which states presume a gendered
identity as well as embed gendered and biased perspectives about individuals.
Cristina Masters provides a glimpse into the gendered dimensions of violence and techno-
logy with a particular focus on drone warfare in her chapter. Masters specifically looks at
how “[f  ]eminism searches for bodily/embodied enactments of gender” in drone warfare.
Masters convincingly argues that drone warfare is still deeply masculinized and militarized.
Drone warfare is distinctly masculinized in its attempt “to circumvent the fleshy body in
service of mastery, control, and dominance in hopes of eliminating uncertainty and
unpredictability in war – cloaked in precision, humanity, authority, and morality”.
Paul Kirby interrogates the “intersection of gender and insecurity” in wartime sexual
violence. Kirby begins by looking at how the wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s
began the work of both documenting and politicizing rape and sexual violence in war.
Instead of being hidden/accepted in patriarchal socio-political structures as a byproduct of
war, rape at this point in time finally began to be viewed as a violation of human rights and
as a war crime. Kirby additionally examines the scholarship that focuses on the individuals
in the “roles of victim and perpetrator, bystander and protector”. Kirby ends by looking at
the problematic distinction between ‘wartime’ and ‘peacetime’ and how to designate the
sexual violence that takes place in either realm.
The final chapter of this section by Keith Proctor and Dyan Mazurana looks at the role
of gender in countering violent extremist organizations (VEO). They use gender to theorize
how VEOs recruit and keep male and female members. Most importantly, Proctor and
Mazurana argue that those who counter VEOs need to understand the role of gender, as this

6
 Editors’ introduction

is key to providing community alternatives to violence. The central enquiry becomes how
to address VEO membership by offering different visions of these gendered roles.
In Part III, we try to draw attention to particular kinds of security practices, in keeping
with the overarching aim of this volume to explore the work that gender, visible in this
section as gendered practice, does in holding security together as a concept. Four significant
themes emerge through reading the collection of chapters in this section as a body of work:
violence, vulnerability, the politics of representation, and the mutual constitution of the state
and the human subject – an always already gendered subject – through security practices. Each
chapter in this section adds unique insight not only into what it can mean to explore security
practices as though gender matters, but also into the complex and varied ways in which we
might conceive of security practices themselves.
All security issues or concerns, in some sense, are security practices: the movement of bodies
across borders, for example, is a practice, although migration is usually framed as a security
‘issue’; similarly, peace processes – discussed in Part IV on ‘institutions of security’ are indu-
bitably practices, in that the individuals involved are required to physically perform media-
tion, negotiation, and agreement. With this in mind, this section on ‘practices of security’ is
organized around a logic that conceives of security practice as those ritualized, embodied,
performative practices that bring certain configurations of security into being. The various
contributions are bound by the ways in which they demonstrate how security is not only
manifest but actually constituted in practice. This section is not concerned just with physical-
ity, nor process, but the ways in which “little security nothings” (Huysmans 2011: 371) are
constitutive practices, functioning in particular ways to bring particular configurations of
security into being. Thus, the contributions variously interrogate the regulation of sexuality
as a political practice that renders certain gender expressions and gendered relations insecure,
and the commemorative practices that conjure particular configurations of security and peace:
these are embodied, productive, security practices.
Each of the chapters touches in some way on violence: the various forms that violence
takes; its productive power; the politics of its glorification or prevention. David Duriesmith,
for example, draws attention to the ways in which memories and memorialization of violence
and trauma produce and reproduce particular meanings attached to violent acts, meanings
which are, in turn, deployed in political contexts by political actors to legitimize or dele-
gitimize other kinds of violence, to create and perpetuate relations of (in)security. Elina
Penttinen, by contrast, explores the relationship between violence and agency, seeking to
understand how agency can be expressed in violent and non-violent ways. Crucially,
Penttinen explains that gendered agency need not be conceptually tied to the perpetration
of violence: different security imaginaries are possible.
The second theme we identify in Part III relates to vulnerability. In some way, each of
the chapters in this section touches on the inherent vulnerability of subjectivity and the
impossibility of understanding security without understanding the ways in which our
relational connections to our many others – those connections that make us inescapably
vulnerable – render us simultaneously secure and insecure. Tiina Vaittinen’s engagement
with feminist care ethics and theories of embodiment (both of which we can understand as
forms of security practice) offers a way to understand how vulnerability is central to security
practices that rely on and are informed by gendered power, which determines how and under
what circumstances bodies come to matter in contemporary global politics. Relatedly, in her
analysis of the gendered logics of protection, Cecilia Åse explores many dimensions of
vulnerability, as she examines the ways in which the state and other security actors articulate
and therefore constitute the vulnerable, feminized, subject as the referent object of security

7
 C.E. Gentry, L.J. Shepherd, and L. Sjoberg

policies and practices. Vulnerability, therefore, is central to security practices, because it is

an inescapable dimension of human subjectivity (this idea also echoes through Penttinen’s
chapter).
Third, we identify a theme related to the politics of representation in security practices.
This theme is particularly prominent in the chapters by David Duriesmith and Linda Åhäll.
Åhäll illuminates the insights that can be derived from treating popular cultural artefacts as
forms of security practices. Through the analysis of one such artefact (a song by pop artist Katy
Perry), Åhäll lays bare both the gendered logics of the song and the ways in which, in com-
bination with associated representational practices (including the music video and promotional
interview material), the song constructs particular interpretive possibilities for the subjects it
represents, including women, soldiers, and the military as an institution. Taking the concept
of representation in a slightly different direction, Duriesmith examines the politics of memo-
rialization, highlighting – among other insights – the fact that “[e]ven when memorialization
practices look to commemorate war and trauma these are often startlingly gender-blind, either
totally excluding women from the picture or relying on tropes of female victims and male
soldiers” (Duriesmith, this volume). The descriptive representation of women – or lack thereof
– in state-led commemorations of war and collective trauma is a security practice that functions
to constitute a female subject of war defined by her vulnerability, if not her complete absence.
This links to the fourth and final theme we identify, which is the mutual constitution of
state and subject through security practices. Anna L. Weissman’s analysis of sex and sexuality
through the lens of gender and security demonstrates the total and inescapable imbrication
of the security practices of the state (through which, in part, the state is reproduced as a
coherent and stable entity, see inter alia Weber 1992) with subjectivity. Toward her conclusion
that “[s]ex is very much a part of state-making” (Weissman, this volume), Weissman builds
a persuasive theory of ‘repronormativity’ to account for the ways in which the state secures
reproduction, including reproductive rights and reproductive capacity, to certain bodies that
present or perform gender in certain ways. Similarly, the processes of militarism that Åhäll
examines, evidenced in the popular cultural artefact that serves as her vehicle for analysis of
security practices, configures the relationship between the state (and state violence) and the
subject in particular ways.
There are, of course, many more issues and considerations raised by these thoughtful inter-
ventions into debates about security practices than those we have discussed here. Each
contribution pushes us to understand security in different ways, to rethink and problematize
the ways in which we make sense of gender, and to reconsider the relationship between
gender and security practices. Each contribution adds unique insight not only into what it
can mean to explore security practices as though gender matters, but also into the complex
and varied ways in which we might conceive of security practices themselves.
Analysis of security institutions, presented in Part IV, reveals themes of women’s rights
and women’s agency. Further, the chapters in this collection examine, in different ways, the
relationship between feminist encounters with security institutions, and gender mainstreaming
initiatives in those same institutions; the latter can often translate to a ‘box ticking’ exercise
in compliance with prescribed ‘gender-responsive’ requirements that might not, necessarily,
lead to feminist, progressive, or emancipatory outcomes. A related and final theme that
emerges in this section is the difference between ‘women’ and ‘gender’; each chapter speaks,
in its own way, to the frequent slippage between these concepts and the ways in which
security institutions treat them as synonymous. The chapters, individually and collectively,
explore and interrogate the ways in which particular configurations of gender are produced
in, and are productive of, security institutions.

8
 Editors’ introduction

In her powerful and provocative exploration of motherhood, Adrienne Rich distinguishes

between motherhood as a relationship – “of any woman to her powers of reproduction and
to children” (1976: 13) – and as an institution. Rich argues that the institution of motherhood
has “been a keystone of the most diverse social and political systems”, elaborating on the con-
ceptualization of motherhood as an institution by articulating it as an idea or, more accurately,
a set of ideas and ideals, a cognitive schema that regulates and organizes human behaviour.
In this section, the various authors engage with security institutions in a literal, material sense,
examining the activities and initiatives of institutions such as the United Nations and the
African Union, and with those more ideational institutions that materialize through practice
in different ways in different contexts, such as the Women, Peace and Security agenda and
the institutionalization of post-conflict reconstruction.
The contributors to this section move seamlessly between the analysis of physical security
institutions and the regulatory functions embedded within, or productive of, these institutions,
each examining the work that gender does to make these institutions make sense. In Part IV
– and indeed, throughout this book as a whole – authors work with the “concept, nature,
and practice of gender” (Zalewski 1995: 341) to explore and interrogate the ways in which
particular configurations of gender are produced in, and are productive of, security institutions.
While the chapters themselves engage with questions of gender and security in different ways
and across different contexts, there are a number of thematic resonances that emerge from
reading this section as a whole.
The first theme we identify revolves around the centrality of women’s rights to feminist
analysis of security institutions. As Nicole George, Katrina Lee-Koo and Laura J. Shepherd
note in their chapter, the right of women to participate meaningfully in peace and security
governance was formalized at the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City in
1975. Arguments about the significance of, and need for, the advancement of women’s rights
in and through security institutions, however, pre-date even the International Women’s
Congress which took place at The Hague in 1915 and which served as the foundation for the
formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – a prominent
security institution largely unrecognized as such in conventional accounts of security offered
within the disciplines of politics and IR. Kara Ellerby, by contrast, documents many moments
of resistance to the advancement of women’s rights in her careful analysis of women’s
participation in peace processes since 1992. Ellerby finds, as others have similarly noted, that
the post-conflict moment (such as it is meaningful to talk of ‘post-conflict’ at all; see Zarkov
and Cockburn 2002: 9) is often “a patriarchal time zone” (Enloe 2004: 215), in which
women’s rights are traded away for the illusion of progress in other areas.
A second theme is the possibility of a tension in security institutions between feminist
engagement and gender mainstreaming. Feminist scholarship in Security Studies and beyond
has engaged extensively with the politics, and political utility, of gender mainstreaming as a
strategy for advancing women’s rights and diminishing gendered inequalities. In their chapter,
Natalie Florea Hudson and Laura Huber offer a compelling historiography of gender main-
streaming in security institutions, concluding that “[t]he disappointing record on gender
mainstreaming thus far has revived long-time skepticism about co-optation” (Hudson and
Huber, this volume) among feminist scholars and practitioners.
In the specific context of peacekeeping operations, Sabrina Karim reaches a similarly
sobering conclusion, noting that efforts to mainstream gender (which she usefully distinguishes
from efforts to ‘balance’ gender in peacekeeping operations such that there are equal numbers
of men and women on mission and in command) have notably failed to achieve the cultural
change for which its proponents hoped. Karim, however, proposes that “it is possible that

9
 C.E. Gentry, L.J. Shepherd, and L. Sjoberg

gender mainstreaming may help mitigate some of the pernicious effects of male dominance
in peacekeeping operations” (Karim, this volume) and therefore achieve the feminist ends
to which it was hoped by its supporters that gender mainstreaming would be the means.
The third, and related theme, is the tension between ‘women’ and ‘gender’ in security
institutions. Megan Bastick focuses on this tension in her analysis of security sector reform
(SSR), beginning with an acknowledgement of the “tendency for approaches to gender-
responsive SSR to be limited to increasing women’s participation in the security sector”
(Bastick, this volume). Laura McLeod identifies the potential for slippage between ‘women’
and ‘gender’ as a central problematique in the analysis of post-conflict reconstruction,
recognizing that “there are diverse, overlapping and sometimes competing ideas about what
it means to ‘do’ gender in post-conflict reconstruction. Do we look to include women,
develop a gender perspective, or seek to advocate a feminist outcome?” (McLeod, this
volume).
All of the authors in this section acknowledge that all three strategies are essential
components of a gendered approach to security institutions. Sometimes the questions we ask
in our research might seek to understand how women are represented in formal peace and
security governance (and which women have access to these spaces, and what influence they
have when they are there; see Ellerby, this volume) or whether the presence of women in
peacekeeping missions changes the dynamics of the mission itself (see Karim, this volume).
Sometimes, by contrast, we might focus on the ways in which logics of gender organize
peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery (see McLeod, this volume) or security sector reform
(see Bastick, this volume). Both can be compatible with a feminist outcome, and provided
that there is conceptual clarity such that gender is not seen or used as a “synonym for
women” (Carver 1996), the tension can be a productive one.
The fourth and final theme we trace through the chapters in this section is that of
women’s agency. The agency of women in peace processes, peacekeeping, post-conflict
reconstruction and security organizations more broadly is made visible in each of the contri-
butions here. The chapters that focus on state militaries and paramilitary organizations in
particular offer rich accounts of the varied and complex ways in which women work with/
through, and are simultaneously produced in and through, the gendered rules of these
institutions. Agency is far from unidimensional in these accounts; joining similarly nuanced
accounts of women’s agency in security practices, Melissa T. Brown and Sandra McEvoy
illuminate the ways in which women’s participation in, and resistance to, military and
paramilitary organizations create spaces for, and tensions in, agentic performances.
The relationship between gender, agency, and violence is brought to the fore through
the examination of militaries and paramilitaries as security institutions. One dimension of
this relationship is an exploration of the gendered power necessary to sustain them as insti-
tutions: as McEvoy notes, “the incorporation of women into such forces in effect maintains
the strict gendered hierarchies of these institutions rather than disrupt them” (McEvoy, this
volume). It cannot be assumed that the simple presence of women in military and paramilitary
organizations will change the culture of the organization. In a particularly eloquent phrase,
Brown observes that “militaries have found ways to weaponize femininity” (Brown, this
volume), which suggests that ‘gender balancing’, as discussed by Karim, is a strategy unlikely
to achieve feminist outcomes across the board.
The cultures of security institutions, as with other forms of institution, are by nature
embedded and difficult to shift: there is a reason why behaviours or rules to which we have
become so habituated as to no longer question are deemed ‘institutionalized’. The authors
in this section skilfully show that these cultures are gendered, and that the institutions they

10
 Editors’ introduction

examine are inextricably implicated in the (re)production of gender as a power relation in

security settings.
We have collected here a diverse and sometimes provocative collection of essays that we
believe represents a good range of the diversity and provocations of the field of Feminist
Security Studies and associated fields of study. Perhaps not everyone who has contributed a
chapter to this volume would identify as a researcher in the field of FSS, but, as each chapter
shows, everyone is working with the concepts of gender and security in different ways to make
sense of the world they encounter. We have deliberately avoided offering definitions of the
key concepts that animate this collection – gender and security – in our introduction, as part
of the strength and richness of FSS research lies in the diverse ways in which these concepts
are grasped and deployed. This book can, therefore, be read as a series of conceptual interven-
tions, a set of grounded empirical investigations, a number of theoretical and methodological
considerations to guide research and practice: it is all of these things, and more than these
things. As with the field of Feminist Security Studies itself, we hope that this book stands as
much more than the sum of its individual parts, and attests to the lasting insights generated by
those who attend to, and work with, gender and security.

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2001. London: Hurst and Company.
Carver, Terrell. 1996. Gender is Not a Synonym for Women. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cohn, Carol. 2011. ‘“Feminist Security Studies”: Toward a reflexive practice’. Politics & Gender 7(4):
581−586.
Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
D’Costa, Bina and Katrina Lee-Koo. 2013. ‘The politics of voice: Feminist Security Studies and the
Asia-Pacific’. International Studies Perspectives 14(4): 451−454.
Eichler, Maya. 2011. Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-Soviet Russia. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, revised
edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism
and Technoscience. London/New York: Routledge.
Huysmans, Jef. 2011. ‘What’s in an act? On security speech acts and little security nothings’. Security
Dialogue 42(4/5): 371–383.
Parashar, Swati. 2013. ‘Feminist (in)securities and camp politics’. International Studies Perspectives 14(4):
440–443.
Peterson, V. Spike (ed.). 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory.
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co.
Shepherd, Laura J. and Laura Sjoberg. 2012. ‘Trans-bodies in/of war(s): Cisprivilege and contemporary
security strategy’. Feminist Review 101: 5–23.
Sjoberg, Laura. 2009. Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives. London/New York:
Routledge.
Stern, Maria and Annick Wibben. 2015. ‘A decade of feminist security studies revisited’, Security
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Sylvester, Christine. 2010. ‘Tensions in feminist security studies’. Security Dialogue 41(6): 607–614.
Teaiwa, Teresia and Claire Slatter. 2013. ‘Samting Nating: Pacific waves at the margins of Feminist
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Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Weber, Cynthia. 1992. ‘Reconsidering statehood: Examining the sovereignty/intervention boundary’.
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Wibben, Annick. 2011. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London/New York: Routledge.
Zalewski, Marysia. 1995. ‘Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia?’ International Affairs 71(2):
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12
 PART I

Gendered approaches to security

 1
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN/
VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD
Toward a feminist conceptualization
of global violence

Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

Today’s world is characterized by escalating insecurity and conflict. Promoting sustainable

peace is a global challenge that goes beyond a concern for particular fragile and/or conflicted-
affected territories. Feminist conceptualizations of violence offer less partial and more
encompassing analysis of all forms of harm within and across borders. With a gendered lens,
feminist analysts observe and connect violence at the micro level of the family, household,
and community with violence at the macro level, in production relations, vis-à-vis states and
non-state actors (Peterson 2003; Tickner 1992). Understanding the connections among
different forms of violence, their causes and its consequences, in a global context has never
been more important. As well, feminist perspectives make visible the relationship among
different forms of violence such as physical, psychological, and economic violence with
structural discrimination and symbolic harms. Importantly, they highlight how violence in
times of crisis and transition is rooted in pre-existing gendered inequalities that cut across
and often reinforce hierarchies of class, race/ethnicity, nationality/citizenship, religion, and
sexuality. To achieve global peace and security, a feminist approach strives to be inclusive,
not by adding violence against women to the list of violence to be eliminated, but by
analysing the intersections of power relations across all sites of belonging and strife.
In this chapter, we build on the significant contributions of feminist International
Relations (IR) scholars to theorizing the continuum of violence.1 IR feminists explore
broader and alternative meanings to peace and security that challenge the traditionally state-
centric, top-down, and militarized notions of security in mainstream IR. First, global politics
remains male-dominated despite recent progress globally and within states in increasing
women’s political and economic leadership. Feminists contend that definitions of war,
security, and peace, when drawn largely from male perspectives, tend to view these concepts
in narrow terms that privilege masculine traits and activities. Second, the international system
– from states’ foreign policy and diplomacy, to macro- and micro-economic processes, and
cultural globalization – reflects gendered hierarchies built on and sustained by constructions
of masculinities and femininities. These gender hierarchies perpetuate artificial distinctions

15
 Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

between public and private spheres, the political and the economic, productive and repro-
ductive economies, as well as crisis and non-crisis settings. They obscure the continuum of
violence across these interconnected spheres that serves the interests of privileged groups
such as, white, heterosexual, elite men and also elite women given their relative structural
privileges secured through bargaining with dominant gender norms and inequalities
(Kandiyoti 1988). The failure to see the connections among different situations and types of
violence comes at the cost of the marginalization, violence toward, and bodily depletion
of women and girls as well as other feminized, minority groups.
We outline three key components to a feminist reconceptualization of violence in a crisis-
prone world. The first part of the chapter identifies how violence occurs in layers drawing
attention to the mutual constitution of insecurities occurring at household, community, state,
and global levels. We use the term layers rather than sites of violence to emphasize the ways
by which global processes directly and indirectly enable violence at subnational levels, and
vice versa. The second part examines the equal importance of and interconnections across
different forms of violence as physical, structural, and symbolic harms. Recognizing the
continuum across forms of violence is crucial, especially given contemporary securitization
and crisis narratives that typically isolate physical violence from broader structural inequali-
ties and symbolic discrimination. In the third part of this chapter, we demonstrate how
inclusive and lasting peace demands that we bridge the gaps in attention and resource
allocation between immediate or emergency humanitarian assistance and long-term socio-
economic development for crisis situations. Integrating these three components is necessary
for attending to the multidimensional threats to ‘human’ security.
In May 2016, the first World Humanitarian Summit was held in Istanbul, Turkey
involving 9,000 participants from 173 member states, including 55 heads of state and
government, hundreds of private sector representatives, and thousands of people from civil
society and non-governmental organizations in attendance (UN Secretary General 2016).
The Summit was convened in response to unprecedented levels of human suffering brought
about by civil strife, armed conflicts, natural disasters, and pervasive violations of international
humanitarian and human rights laws (UN Secretary General 2016). According to the global
report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), in 2015 alone there were
27.8 million new displacements in 127 countries; 8.6 million of the total was associated with
conflict and violence in 28 countries, and 19.2 million with disasters in 113 countries (IDMC
2016: 7). Moreover, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) argues that in our current
crisis-prone world this means that many women and girls are experiencing heightened levels
of violence and vulnerability (UNFPA 2015). They bear distinctive, gender-specific harms
while in displacement such as heightened exposure to sexually transmitted infections, including
HIV/AIDS, unwanted and forced pregnancies, maternal mortality, and sexual and gender-
based violence (SGBV). What does it mean to reconceptualize global violence in a fragile,
crisis-prone world? How and in what ways, can a feminist understanding of peace and security
allow us to make sense of the multiple crisis narratives in global politics?

Revisiting the feminist continuum of violence

The continuum of violence is rendered visible from the standpoint or ‘situated knowledges’
of the oppressed (Haraway 1988). Specifically, a feminist standpoint epistemology examines
how global and/or national crises permeate, and are built upon the lives of the most marginal-
ized especially indigenous and internally displaced women and girls (Harding 1991, see also
Tickner 2015). Security, from their standpoints, brings into view the multiple and overlapping

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 Violence against women and in the world

hierarchical relationships of power that undermine their human dignity and capabilities.
Their experiences of recurring armed conflicts, economic recessions, and environmental dis-
asters pushes us to rethink binary logics that sever the interconnectedness of various political,
economic, and socio-cultural insecurities from the individual to the community and the state
and global society.
Global moments and spaces designated as ‘crisis’ or ‘in crisis’ might serve as critical junc-
tures where dominant understandings of and solutions to attain security can potentially be
reoriented. Drawing on feminist conceptualizations of violence allows us to critically examine
and harness the rhetoric and momentum created in crises to address the pre-existing violence
and injustices that women and girls routinely face in their households, communities, and
states that are exacerbated in extraordinary circumstances. As Sjoberg, Hudson, and Weber
(2015: 530) argue, “it is important to pay as much attention to what is not swept up in the
rhetoric of crisis as to what is included”. This involves the equal investigation of where
representations of crisis are drawing our attention to and away from particular understandings
of peace and security.
In a crisis-prone world, feminist reconceptualizations of violence question representations
of armed conflicts, economic recessions, and environmental disasters as ‘exceptional’ or sepa-
rate from everyday political, economic, and social structural inequalities that define human
capabilities and individual life chances. For example, Cynthia Enloe notes that in investigating
the ‘mundane’ in conjunction with dramatic events, we begin to reveal “that power was
deeply at work where it was least apparent” (2011: 447). Because of their explicit focus on
scrutinising silences and boundaries of knowledge, feminist research methodologies offer the
range of toolkits for understanding the political nature of our precarious world (Ackerly and
True 2010; Wibben 2016). In the following sections, we demonstrate, through a diverse set
of case studies and empirical evidence, that lasting peace and security also occurs on a
continuum – from the absence of inter- and intra-state conflicts to inclusive and non-violent
economies where rights to bodily autonomy and integrity are recognized.

Layers of violence: linking the personal with the international

Contrary to most mainstream IR scholars who regard the global decline in inter- and intra-
state violent deaths as evidence of a decline in violence per se, “feminist scholars analyse
private sphere domestic violence as both a form of political violence (Peterson 1992; Cockburn
2010) and a precondition for more visible violence against women in the public sphere” (True
2015a: 555). Security is not just the absence of inter- and intra-state armed conflicts but also
of women’s and girls’ bodily autonomy and integrity especially within their families, clans,
and kinship networks which typically remain invisible, underreported, or uncounted (see
Davies, True and Tanyag 2016). SGBV perpetrated against women and girls at the house-
hold and community levels frequently fuels and exacerbates intra-group conflicts, including
wars, and financial crises and environmental disasters (True 2012).

Armed conflicts
In conflict situations, feminists have shown and continue to show, how patriarchal gender
relations are at the heart of militarism, especially discourses of masculinities and femininities
through which the state as well as any armed group draws the complicity of both men and
women (Enloe 1989; Tickner 1992). This is evident in how armed conflicts, whether inter-
state wars or clan, and one-sided violence, rely upon or mobilize the valorization of violent

17
 Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

masculinities of male combatants, as well as the feminized representation of dutiful mothers,

wives, and daughters who through acts of sacrifice support these conflicts even in so far as
directly participating in violence themselves. Further, the gendered construction of crises helps
legitimate special powers by the state even at the expense of civil liberties in responding
to national security threats via its projected image of the patriarchal provider of the family
and protector writ large to citizens, especially women and children, within and outside of
its borders (True 2015b: 420).
The interconnectedness of various layers of violence is clearly demonstrated through the
prevalence of low-intensity, protracted armed conflicts in the Asia Pacific region where
egregious SGBV typically goes unreported due to significant reporting constraints. For
example, Davies, True and Tanyag (2016) argue “if a conflict is too small-scale to be recorded,
the SGBV which is linked to it, will also go unnoticed”. Using the case of a ‘successful’ peace
process in Mindanao, Philippines between the national government and the ethnic minority
Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), they show that clan/kinship and intra-community
conflicts are not ‘securitized’ owing to their typical exclusion from national peace negotia-
tions. Consequently, we are unable to know the full extent of SGBV perpetrated against
women and girls on the basis that they serve as symbolic carriers of clan and ethnic identities.
And yet, silencing experiences of SGBV within clans and ethnic groupings might allow for
national peace agreements to be signed. However, this does not mean an end to the violence
women and girls experience in their households and communities.
The precarious lives experienced by internally displaced persons (IDPs), minority groups,
and indigenous communities globally stand in contrast to the ‘declinist’ thesis that represents
a global decline in war and violence based on state-recorded violent deaths (True 2015a).
However, a feminist continuum of violence reveals this claim as deeply flawed because it
obscures “interpersonal violence, and implicitly denies its relevance to international security”
(True 2015a: 555). First, studies have shown that while men and boys suffer direct deaths
during wartime, mortality for women and girls tends to increase after conflicts as a result of
the lingering socio-economic consequences of conflict such as poverty and continued mili-
tarism (Ormhaug, Meier and Hernes 2009; UNFPA 2015; The Brookings-LSE Project 2014).
Second, research by Li and Wen (2005) which uses a time-series cross-national analysis, sug-
gests that, over time, women’s mortality in war is as high as men’s largely due to the long-term
effects of war. That is, gendered indirect deaths add up to the same levels as direct deaths thus
underscoring the importance of employing a feminist continuum of violence perspective.

Financial crises
Similarly, the permeability among different layers of insecurity has been made evident in the
case of critiques on how the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) legitimized severe austerity
measures, particularly cutbacks on social welfare services while leaving neoliberal economic
models and undemocratic financial institutions intact (Hozic and True 2016). Consequently,
poor families who are largely dependent on public services continue to suffer, especially
women and girls and in households with intense demands for care work such as those with
the elderly, infirm, or disabled (see also Elson 2009). Moreover, the feminization of social
welfare service means that cutbacks resulted in job losses that had ripple effects on the well-
being of households with female breadwinners employed in these sectors. Studies have
shown direct links between economic strains caused by global economic crises and transitions,
and intra-household violence such as heightened rates of domestic violence and suicide
(Sutton 2010; True 2012). For labour exporting countries in Asia, the GFC is merely one

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 Violence against women and in the world

manifestation in a series of recurrent social, economic, and political crises rooted in global
capitalism and neoliberal globalization (Spitzer and Piper 2014). Hence, survival of household
and national economies continues to be built on the backs of mostly women migrants whose
vulnerability to violence and exploitation are intensified during crisis periods (Spitzer and
Piper 2014; Sassen 2000).
By contrast, the GFC benefited economic elites and wealthy states, demonstrating how
it has served to retrench the neoliberal global political economy rather than reform it
fundamentally (Hozic and True 2016). At the heart of the crisis, as scholars argue, is how
economic systems continue to be built on rewarding “masculinist modes of control [that]
pervade the practices of both financialization and militarization” (Hozic and True 2016: 5).
Feminist political economy analysis reveals the continuum of violence “by showing how
macro level non-recognition of socially reproductive work is intimately connected to
everyday depletion of individuals, households, and communities” (Elias and Rai 2015: 427).
When labour is only valued in certain respects and not others, the economic opportunities
and access to resources available to women and girls are further constrained by unequal
gendered divisions of labour beginning in the household.
For instance, global economic processes are also at once racialized and sexualized – the
material effects of which directly reproduce particular cultural and heteronormative
representations of ‘the family’ that inform allocation of societal resources. That is, neoliberal
economic policies in so far as they consider the family as a site of economic production and
distribution – have had detrimental impacts such as for left-behind families of labour migrants
primarily from developing countries; or in the varied economic exclusions experienced by
‘queer’ families where their unions are not even recognized by national laws (Safri and
Graham 2010; Smith 2016). These multi-layered barriers emanating at household levels
continue to engender the exclusion of broader groups of women and girls from key economic
decision-making bodies such as in corporate boardrooms, national economic bodies on
macro-economic policy, foreign investment, trade, and taxation (Prügl and True 2014). As
a result they create and reinforce the conditions that gradually deplete the health and well-
being of women and girls, including the households and communities that depend on their
unpaid labour (Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas 2014).

Environmental disasters
Crisis responses and representations of environmental disasters also typically obscure how
security is a multidimensional concept that encompasses various threats to human life. For
example, as J. Ann Tickner (2015) points out, indigenous knowledge offers a holist view that
recognizes the eternal continuity of life between humanity and earth. However, as Western
colonization pushed indigenous communities to the peripheries, so have indigenous beliefs
and identities been rendered ‘invalid’ and permanently under threat. Indeed, in the case of
the Amazon River, development aggression has meant that hundreds of indigenous lives have
been lost in their effort to stake their rightful claim to protect the river where their identities
and sustenance are rooted. In other parts of the world, environmental activists, especially
those belonging to indigenous and ethnic minorities, protesting the excesses of multinational
mining and logging corporations are routinely targeted in often state-sanctioned extrajudicial
killings. According to one study in 2015 alone, there were at least 185 documented deaths
in 16 countries all of which are in the global South (Global Witness 2016). In indigenous
communities that are also typically matriarchal, the gendered nature of targeted political vio-
lence on women indigenous leaders, such as the assassination of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran

19
 Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

indigenous land rights activist, remains under-examined in the context of increasing

securitization of environmental issues (Global Witness 2016; see also Lakhani 2016).
The historical and contemporary dislocation of many indigenous communities from their
ancestral domains at the same time exposes them to the severest consequences of climate
change. Since they are literally pushed to the margins, this means they are more likely to
reside in remote regions where the direct weather impacts of rising sea levels and changing
global temperatures are felt. Consequently, their geographical remoteness and their indigenous
status might also mean that they have pre-existing barriers to accessing state social welfare
services disproportionately affecting women and girls due to distinct sexual and reproductive
health needs. This also suggests that they have the least access to humanitarian relief and
assistance when calamities do occur precisely on the basis of their indigenous and/or minor-
ity status. Finally, the growing attention on climate change is exposing its consequences as
threat multipliers which can amplify societal tensions that trigger armed conflicts, particularly
with resource scarcities in times of drought or flooding (IDMC 2016). For certain geograph-
ical contexts where communities are routinely exposed to severe natural disasters as well
as armed conflicts, the death and displacement they experience are compounded, multiple,
and increasingly normalized (UNFPA 2015; IDMC 2016).
A feminist continuum of violence engages with social science research that exposes how
environmental disasters are as much social, political, and economic phenomena (Neumayer
and Plumper 2007). Employing a feminist perspective means critically interrogating the
extents by which constructions of risks at national and community levels actually expose and
address why women and girls do not necessarily share in the distribution of material resources
post-disaster because their productive and reproductive contributions in households are
undervalued. As a result, women and girls are also prevented from fully participating in
leadership roles for disaster prevention at community and national levels (ActionAid
International 2016).

Forms of violence: linking physical, symbolic, and structural harms

Reconceptualizing global violence from a feminist perspective considers how violence oper-
ates in various forms (Cockburn 2004, 2010). That is, “power operates not only through
direct coercion but also through the structured relations of production and reproduction that
govern the distribution and use of resources, benefits, privileges and authority within the
home and transnational society at large” (True 2012: 30). Interrogating the continuum of
violence in this regard is even more crucial given the securitization of sexual violence. For
instance, preventing sexual violence in armed conflicts specifically and in crisis and emergen-
cies more broadly has been recognized as a global security goal through the Women, Peace
and Security (WPS) agenda beginning with UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
Furthermore, WPS has been pivotal in establishing the norm that states and international
actors are responsible for women’s protection against SGBV, the promotion of their participa-
tion in peace and security processes, as well as broadening their roles in peacebuilding and
conflict prevention (see Shepherd 2014; True 2016). However, the agenda has been criticized
for its tendency to be narrowly interpreted as a policy of making war safe for women and
girls (Shepherd 2016). Rather, the point is not to isolate visible or ‘incident-based’ forms of
violence directly inflicted on an individual’s body during crisis from the wider gendered
structures and symbols that relegate unequal status and levels of access to resources and
decision-making that significantly impact life chances prior to and in the aftermath of a crisis.

20
 Violence against women and in the world

Between 1990 and 2011 across 31 peace processes, women represented just 2 per cent of
chief mediators, 4 per cent of witnesses and signatories, and 9 per cent of negotiators (UN
Women 2015: 45). These figures underscore the significant strides that are needed for
achieving gender balance in peace processes. However, Thania Paffenholz et al. (2016: 6)
argue that

the direct inclusion of women does not per se increase the likelihood that more peace
agreements are signed and implemented. What makes a difference is the influence
women actually have on a process. In short, making women’s participation count is
more important than merely counting the number of women included in peace
processes.

In bringing women into formal political and economic decision-making, we must also
seek to uncover how and why broader groups of women and girls are kept out of these pro-
cesses, which might mean shining a light to material inequalities within intersectional identity
categories (Paffenholz et al. 2016). By focusing exclusively on the former, we reproduce “a
highly feminised, and perhaps fetishised, portrait of women’s agency as peacebuilders. This
portrait may not necessarily be empowering in the longer term and may mask other more
complex gendered experiences of conflict” (George 2016: 3). For instance, feminist scholars
have identified that prevailing and deeply embedded masculine biases in security sectors,
among other factors, prevent inclusive peace (Wilén 2014). Another related example is the
broader participation of women at informal and community levels where they are better able
to leverage cultural and religious values to legitimize their leadership roles rather than in
state-level peacebuilding (George 2016).
What these conditions emphasize is the relevance of interrogating not just why women
should have a voice in peace processes as a sign of empowerment, but also how and why
many keep silent and/or are silenced by these processes in historically contingent and
context-specific ways (see Parpart 2010). First, we must be attentive to the unintended
consequences the inclusion of women in these formal political spaces might bring in
heightening their risks as targets of political violence. This is likely to occur when efforts to
bring women ‘in’ are not matched by attitudinal or cultural reforms on women’s political
participation and gender equality more broadly (Ní Aoláin 2006). Indeed, political compro-
mises during transitions often involve ‘patriarchal bargains’ such that women’s rights and
gender equality are neglected in order to secure the peace and advance ethnic group
grievances (Davies, True and Tanyag 2016).
Second, the global attention through the WPS agenda to ending SGBV in conflicts and
emergencies must take stock of the ongoing challenges and complexity associated with
reporting SGBV among internally displaced women and girls in fragile contexts especially.
For example, studies show that experiences of conflict-related SGBV are strongly mediated
by the ethnic, religious, minority status of women and girls (see Baaz and Stern 2009).
Building on similar points, the study by Davies and True (2015) reveals the strong empirical
relationship between normalized and systemic gender discrimination and which groups of
women are most at risk of mass SGBV. As minority women, the physical harms they experi-
ence while in displacement are compounded by their marginalization from state structures
of protection prior to and after armed conflicts. This also means that they have greater
barriers to accessing justice, thus further enabling impunity for individual perpetrators. In
effect, their pre-existing marginalization from political, economic, and legal resources renders
them effective targets because perpetrators are likely to go scot free (Davies and True 2015).

21
 Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

Narrowing the gap between humanitarian and long-term

development responses
Crises and emergencies are more frequently occurring in fragile states with recurrent and
protracted internal displacement the ‘new normal’. As Levenson-Keohane and Madjsberg
(2016: 8) argue,

the costs of economic, social, and environmental problems compound over time,
whether it’s an Ebola outbreak that escalates to an epidemic, a flood of refugees that
tests the strength of the EU, or the rise of social inequalities that reinforce poverty . . .
And governments and international organisations spend 40 times as much money
responding to crises as they do trying to prevent them.

Feminists have a role to play in critically interrogating how our responses to crises might,
paradoxically, be reinforcing the conditions for their proliferation by deepening the silos
between political-military and socio-economic security (see True and Tanyag 2017).
The deployment of crisis narratives might further lend credence to more exclusionary
decision-making processes on the basis of attending to what is immediate and urgent.
Consequently, such strategies might normalize crisis responses that divert resources away from
long-term prevention of violence and sustainable development. Studies show that the bulk
of global expenditures for creating and containing violence continue to significantly outweigh
global resources allocated for building peace (Mercy Corps 2016). We are already seeing this,
for instance, in how environmental threats are increasingly used to legitimize the strengthening
of militaries due to their expanding role for responding to disasters primarily in restoring
political order (see for example Chandler 2001). And yet, ‘disaster militarism’ or militarized
humanitarianism more broadly, when juxtaposed against global austerity policies that reduce
state support for social welfare services including health, reveal how international peace and
security policy-making are less able to challenge unequal political and economic power
structures.2 Militarizing responses to environmental disasters obscures how they are shaped by
socio-cultural, political and economic processes that pre-date periods of crisis.
For internally displaced populations, especially women and girls, rebuilding secure lives after
a disaster requires reducing the presence of arms and militaries, providing access to justice and
to resources for human as well as economic development. From their standpoints, these are all
simultaneously immediate and long-term needs. Refugees and IDPs embody the adverse
implications of reinforcing artificial distinctions between immediate and long-term interventions
such that one is prioritized over the other. As the director for the IDMC points out,

refugee crises are, in large part, a symptom of the failure to protect and assist IDPs in
their own country. Many if not most refugees do not cross a border at the first sign
of war. They flee first inside their country, hoping for peace or aid that never comes.
Bilak 2016

A crisis occurs, therefore, as a result of accumulated failures in protection. In order to address

the root causes of the global refugee crisis, we need to understand the structural condi-
tions that push whole families and communities to be internally displaced and subsequently
to move across seas and borders (IDMC 2016).
For example, states have the responsibility to promote the health and well-being of all
individuals under international human rights and humanitarian laws regardless of crisis

22
 Violence against women and in the world

(UNGA 2013). Bodily autonomy and integrity, especially for women and girls in crisis
situations, are both an outcome of addressing pre-existing gendered inequalities and pre-
condition for meaningful political and economic participation post-crisis. A disproportionate
focus on allocating state and international resources for military power in order to protect
or secure ‘victims’ of global violence ultimately fails when the health and well-being of
individuals, families, and communities are fundamentally neglected due to long-term human
development taking a ‘back seat’ in security agendas. Despite the intensification of sexual
and reproductive health needs of women and girls in displacement and fragile contexts,
state and global expenditure inflows to sustain the health and well-being of women and girls
remain inadequate. Over half of the world’s maternal deaths routinely occur in the poorest,
most conflict-afflicted, and fragile states (UN Women 2015; UNFPA 2015). These pre-
ventable deaths are among the most egregious forms of gender-based violence directly
influenced by global distributions of resources.
A feminist continuum of violence can inform more comprehensive protection mechanisms
for victims of SGBV in crisis contexts. In IDP camps, for instance, where there might be
higher rates of SGBV that go unreported, there is an even greater unmet need for compre-
hensive services and supplies that are crucial to treating the often brutal consequences of rape
and sexual violence (Center for Reproductive Rights 2016). The timely and effective
provision of emergency health, water, and sanitation services is interconnected with strong
social welfare service delivery before and after crises. Gender-sensitive crisis responses also
require strengthening pre-existing SGBV reporting mechanisms so that they are not readily
rendered inutile in crisis and emergencies. More importantly, crisis responses must attend to
how pre-existing cultural or traditional beliefs help propagate myths and misconceptions
regarding women’s sexual and biological needs which might also underpin various forms of
SGBV in crisis.
Deeply embedded barriers such as shame and stigma prevent victims from reporting
experiences of rape and sexual violence. They are particularly effective in societies with
strong ‘honour’ codes such that violating a woman’s body serves to violate clan or kinship
identities (see Davies, True and Tanyag 2016). Importantly, shame and stigma are mutually
shaped and exacerbated by low awareness on sexual and reproductive health among women
and girls. Such reporting barriers also point to wider gendered inequalities in accessing sex
education, contraception, and safe abortion to the detriment of women and girls’ bodily
autonomy before, during, and after crises (Center for Reproductive Rights 2016). Meanwhile,
the very lack of reporting of SGBV affects the availability of sexual and reproductive health
services such as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), which is partly informed by prevalence
estimates.

Conclusion: sustainable peace requires a ‘global’ understanding of violence

In this chapter, we have offered a reconceptualization of the feminist ‘continuum of violence’
notion for addressing global violence in a crisis-prone world. At a time of protracted, com-
pounded and recurrent crises generated by conflicts, recessions, and disasters, our analytical
and policy tools must encompass multiple dimensions of peace and security. This includes
examining layers of violence to render visible the links between personal or individual
violence, and violence writ large; the different forms of violence occurring in a continuum
of physical, structural and symbolic harms; and the timing or phase in which violence occurs
in order to mitigate the tendency to privilege immediate and militarized security at the
expense of long-term peacebuilding. We argue that our capacity to prevent conflict and

23
 Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

violence and to forge peaceful societies rests on our ability to comprehend the connections
among these layers, forms and time-frames of violence, and how they fuel and exacerbate
one another.
Recognizing that global violence and violence against women and girls occur on a
continuum necessitates a commensurate, holistic approach to achieving more inclusive,
sustainable, and just societies. Such an aspiration might be realized by abandoning the siloed
approach to political-military order and socio-economic stabilization that constitutes current
peace- and state-building agendas. It requires integrating immediate humanitarian needs with
long-term human development. In practice, this means strengthening the implementation of
the WPS agenda and integrating its prevention, protection, participation, and relief and
recovery pillars alongside the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). A continuum
of peace, as well as of violence, demands that we create solutions that promote security and
dignity for all, beginning with those on the margins particularly the indigenous and internally
displaced who disproportionately bear the consequences of multiple crises.

Notes
1 See Cockburn 2004, 2010; Tickner 1992; Enloe 1989.
2 See for examples Rock (2014) on militarizing the Ebola Crisis and Fukushima et al. (2014) on disaster
militarism in the Asia Pacific region.

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 2
GENDER, STRUCTURAL
VIOLENCE, AND PEACE
Ronni Alexander

Introduction
In March 2016, a young Japanese woman named Rina Shimabukuro was reported missing
in Okinawa, the island housing 75 per cent of US military installations in Japan. Two months
later, her mutilated body was found in the woods. A former US Marine and current employee
at a US military base was arrested and accused of rape and murder. The outraged local
community gave a collective shout of “Our anger has reached its limit!” and, several weeks
after the body was found, people gathered at a mass demonstration to express their anger at
the US bases in general and sexual violence by US soldiers in particular (CBS News 2016).
Some of those voices called the rape an example of not only direct violence but also structural
violence such as militarization and racism (Takara 2016).1
Violence is a frequently used term with a multiplicity of definitions generally related to
violence as force and/or violence as violation.2 The idea of structural violence was first
suggested by peace scholar Johan Galtung (1969) who, in seeking a more precise understanding
of peace, proposed that violence can come from invisible sources and affect people in indirect
ways. This approach enriched understanding of peace and non-peace, and has become a core
concept in peace research. However, as Galtung did not recognize the role of gender in the
construction of violence or the ways that social structures are engendered, analyses using
structural violence often lack a gender perspective.
Taking a feminist approach, this chapter analyses the concept of structural violence and
suggests that it can be useful only if it incorporates an understanding of how social relations
are gendered. In order to do this, I will first contextualize the concept of structural violence
by looking at some of the debates underlying the emerging discipline of peace research at
the time it was proposed in the late 1960s by Johan Galtung, and then examine the concept
itself, introducing Galtung’s violence triangle. The rape and murder of Ms Shimabukuro is
used here to illustrate the importance of understanding gender and show both limitations of
the concept of structural violence as well as ways in which it can be put to use.

Setting the stage: agendas for peace research

Throughout history, scholars, theologians, and activists alike have sought ways for people to
live in peace. Most Western approaches focus on war and take its absence to mean peace. In

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 Ronni Alexander

this view, states have primary responsibility for war and, by association, for peace, but, as
many feminist scholars have pointed out, these analyses do not consider the ways citizenship,
social institutions, and states themselves are masculinized nor do they address the ways that
war and peace affect men and women differently (see, for example, Enloe 1989; Hooper 2001;
Parpart and Zalewski 2008; Reardon 1985; Shepherd 2008; Sjoberg 2013; Sylvester 2013).
This lack of a critical and gendered perspective also applies to the origins of what we know
as peace research today. In the wake of the devastation wrought by two world wars, American
peace research in the 1950s and 60s focused on measurable and objective causes of war, taking
a scientific and positivist approach. Given urgency by the Cold and Vietnam Wars, the primary
objective was the prevention of war or achieving negative peace. In contrast, for European
peace researchers, the Vietnam War brought American imperialism and neocolonialism into
focus. Countries of the global South that had been under foreign domination were gaining
independence and grappling with the legacies of their colonial past as well as with the neo-
colonial policies and proxy wars foisted on them by the Cold War adversaries. ‘Development’
was seen as a panacea for the growing gaps in income, access to basic human needs such as
food, water and fuel, education, health care, and life expectancy between the countries of the
North and those in the global South. But development strategies soon proved to be far less
effective and much more problematic than initially promised.
It was against these deep divisions over methodology, focus, and the role of violence in the
creation of peace that Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung first proposed his idea of structural
violence (1969). Galtung had studied and taught in the United States and was greatly influenced
by American positivism. In the 1960s, he had also spent time in Africa, experiencing firsthand
the reality of maldevelopment, and at the Institute of Gandhian Studies in Varanassi, India.
While he retained his belief, honed in the United States, in the efficacy of using a scientific
approach, he joined his European colleagues in acknowledging the importance of stressing
issues of social justice (Lawler 1995: 70). This is reflected in his understanding of the focus for
peace research which he suggested has two branches: “negative peace which is the absence of
violence, absence of war – and positive peace which is the integration of human society”
(Galtung 1964: 2).3 Many scholars have subsequently used this negative/positive peace
approach. Taking a scientific approach, some scholars try to measure the degree of peacefulness/
peacelessness.4 Others apply it to peace education, such as feminist scholars Birgit Brock-Utne
(1997) and Betty Reardon (Reardon and Snauwert 2015: 115), the latter of whom prefers the
term ‘organic’ to positive peace. Reardon was one of the first scholars to identify the importance
of women’s rights in creating peace, seeing global violence and warfare as both the “cause and
consequence of the structural violence that denies the human rights of women” (1993: 71)
and to identify the relationship between sexism and militarism (1985). Around the same time,
Cynthia Enloe (1989) identified ways in which understandings of gender underlie international
politics. These and subsequent feminist understandings of peace, violence, and the military
make it clear that, while Rina Shimabukuro and her murderer might have had a personal dis-
pute, the institutionalized militarism, misogyny, and racism of the US military in Japan set the
stage for her rape and murder.

Galtung’s concept of structural violence

Galtung proposed structural violence in the context of seeking a global focus for peace that
would be different from that of International Relations and help to transform the international
system (Lawler 1995: 50). He hoped to find non-violent solutions to not only direct acts
of violence, but also to what he saw as highly unacceptable social orders. This required

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 Gender, structural violence, and peace

addressing the ways people unintentionally cause extreme harm. In looking for a structural
approach, Galtung borrows from Marx, but credits Gandhi for giving him an appreciation
of holistic approaches acknowledging the interconnectedness and sacredness of all life and
for the inspiration to move away from the actor-oriented perspective of much Western
science (Galtung 1985: 146; 1990: 302).
Working toward a clear definition of violence, Galtung begins with the idea that “violence
is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental
realizations are below their potential realizations” (1969: 185). He uses a definition that is
not limited to intentionally destructive acts, calling for an “extended concept” of violence,
defined as the “cause of the difference between the potential and actual”. He offers the
example of a person dying from tuberculosis in the 18th century and one dying of the same
cause today. In the former example, medical knowledge was such that death would have
been unavoidable and thus not considered to be violence. Today, however, when medical
resources are available, then violence would be present. If the actual is avoidable and the
potential is higher than the actual, then there is violence. If the actual is unavoidable, then
violence is not present (1969: 168–169).
Galtung stresses the importance of clarifying this extended concept of violence, and thinks
in terms of influence involving a subject, an object and an action. He outlines six dimensions.
The first two characterize the mode of influence: physical (violence that works on the body)/
psychological (violence that works on the soul) and negative (coercion)/positive (reward)
approaches. The third dimension focuses on the presence or absence of an object that is hurt,
including such aspects as the threat of violence and destruction of things rather than persons.
The fourth dimension concerns whether or not there is a subject who acts. The fifth
dimension concerns whether the violence is intended or unintended and the sixth distinguishes
between manifest and latent violence (Galtung 1969: 169–172).
The above dimensions reflect aspects of both violence as force and violence as violation.
Structural violence refers in particular to the fourth dimension and describes the less visible
aspects of violence, contrasting it with personal violence which occurs when there is a person
who can be held accountable for the injurious act. Structural violence is “unintended harm
to human beings”, a slow process of misery that eventually leads to death (Galtung 1985:
145–146). While lives might be lost as a result of structural violence, “the violence is built
into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances”
(Galtung 1969: 171).5 Thus when the identities of both the subject and object of violence
are clear, it is personal violence; when they are not clear, it is structural violence.6 Galtung
does not distinguish between male and female bodies as subjects of structural violence and
is not concerned with recognition, but rather with the possibility for avoidance. Hunger is
structural violence if it is objectively avoidable regardless of the cause, and a slave is subject
to structural violence regardless of whether s/he is aware of his/her condition.
For Galtung, subjects and objects are important for identifying the presence of violence,
but he does not concern himself with the process of subjectification in particular socio-
political contexts (see, for example, McSorley 2013; Price 2012; Shepherd 2009; Sylvester
2013). However, an understanding of violence as being both produced by and productive of
particular subjectivities would allow for a more nuanced understanding of the construction
of both violence and resistance.
When the concept of structural violence was first introduced, it opened up a whole
range of possibilities for the study of violence and peace. Galtung himself was interested
in the relationship between peace and health, and structural violence provided a way to
address the harmful effects of poverty without invoking, in his terms, subjects and objects.

29
 Ronni Alexander

Many scholars working on health issues have found structural violence useful for explaining
the complexity of HIV/AIDS and other cases of extreme suffering. Medical anthropologist
Paul Farmer, for example, looks at illness in Haiti and Latin America (Farmer 2005, 2009)
as a problem not only of individual behaviours and opportunities, but also as a manifestation
of structural violence. Others have used, and criticized, structural violence in analyses of
issues in poverty, human rights, and human security (Ho 2007; Pogge 2003; Shepherd 2008).
Structural violence is a concept which, in many ways, is a reflection of its time. It was
offered to peace researchers in the late 1960s as a way to nuance their understanding of the
meaning of peace; a way to talk about life and death issues of nuclear war and development
in the same conversation. In general, it was greeted with approval by those interested in issues
of development and post- and/or neocolonialism, but those focusing on war and nuclear war
found the concept to be overly normative and too broad. They felt that allowing the inclusion
of everything would lead to the illumination of nothing. It could not help to prevent nuclear
holocaust nor could it contribute to the creation of a more peaceful world (Boulding 1977).7
Critics have also focused on Galtung’s reliance on negation, binaries, and opposites to
explain the relationship of violence to peace. Feminists have criticized Galtung’s structural
violence, as well as his later work, for its dependence on binaries and opposites, noting the
lack of recognition of the ways the pairs are unequal and are gendered. Although Galtung does
occasionally mention men and women, his understanding is based on male and female bodies
rather than norms of masculinity/femininity and gender hierarchies.8 Structural violence as
a concept could be greatly enhanced by reflecting the wealth of feminist scholarship from a
range of theoretical perspectives that addresses the construction of gender and the ways
gendered hierarchies impact International Relations, that is relations international as performed
by gendered bodies (for example, see Enloe 2007; Butler 2004; Parpart and Zalewski 2008;
Sjoberg 2013; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Shepherd 2008; Åhäll and Shepherd 2012; Connell
1987; Tickner 1992; Sylvester 1994; Whitworth 2004).
Confortini (2006), in an extensive discussion of the ways Galtung fails even to mention
gender except in one publication (Galtung 1996), offers four possible ways that feminism might
contribute to his work.9 She suggests that understanding gender as power relations would lead
to the realization of ways that gendered norms and customs contribute to the reproduction of
violence. In particular, attention should be paid to masculinity and the relation of masculinity
to the production of violence, as well as to the importance of language in the production/
reproduction of violence and peace. Confortini suggests that the introduction of a feminist
perspective into analyses of structural violence will allow for a deeper understanding. Conversely,
without one, the ultimate goal of social justice will be impossible to achieve.

Cultural violence and the violence triangle

As suggested earlier, Galtung’s ultimate objective in studying and defining violence is the
creation of peace. Finding himself dissatisfied with the direct/structural violence binary, in
1990 he added a third dimension: cultural violence. As outlined below, he used triangles to
illustrate this concept as well as its positive opposite.
The violence (vicious) triangle came from the need for understanding not only the use
of violence but also the legitimation of that use in order to transcend it (Galtung 1990: 291).
Direct and structural violence comprise two corners of the violence triangle. To the third
corner is assigned cultural violence, defined as “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere
of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science
and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or

30
 Gender, structural violence, and peace

structural violence” (1990: 291). In other words, cultural violence makes direct, and at
times structural, violence acceptable. It is through this process of normalization that violence
becomes invisible and/or unrecognizable as violence. Causality flows in all six directions of
the violence triangle, and can begin from any point and go in any direction. So, for example,
an act of explosive violence (direct violence) can be understood as terrorism and cause intoler-
ance toward particular groups (structural violence) justified by the injury (cultural violence).
Similarly, perceived intolerance (structural violence) can lead to explosive violence (just war)
legitimated by claims of protection of human rights, culture, and/or religion (cultural vio-
lence). Equally, insistence that certain religious or cultural practices be followed (cultural
violence) can lead to explosive violence (direct violence) which, in turn, can be followed by
further intolerance and sanctions (structural violence), and so on.
As the terminology suggests, Galtung’s structural violence is predicated on oppressive and
exploitative social structures. For example, torture is a visible and direct manifestation of vio-
lence, but it is built upon “strategies of capitalist and social imperialism” (Galtung 1994: 133).
These social structures both make the perpetrators of violence invisible and at the same
time serve to legitimize the violence so as to make it imperceptible and/or acceptable to the
majority of people. Accordingly, the eradication of this violence or, in Galtung’s framework,
the transcendence of structural violence to structural peace (transformation of negative peace
to positive peace) requires not only eliminating the immediate visible signs of violence, but
also the underlying structural/cultural causes.
As with his other concepts, Galtung contrasts the violence (vicious) triangle to a self-
reinforcing virtuous triangle. The conversion of vicious to virtuous requires work on all three
corners at the same time; changing one is not sufficient to change the others. Anticipating
criticism that cultural violence further broadens the agenda for peace studies, he suggests that
like the study of health, the study of peace is complex and that peace research could contribute
to a new scientific enterprise, “the science of human culture” (1990: 303, emphasis in original).
In Galtung’s 1969 article, he suggested that “[o]ne husband beating his wife is personal
violence, but one million husbands keeping one million wives in ignorance constitutes struc-
tural violence” (1969: 171). The addition of cultural violence might enable a more dynamic
analysis of gender violence. Even so, without a gender perspective, the utility of the violence
triangle is extremely limited.
Using the above example, Galtung might, in 1990, have also described one man beating
his wife as an example of cultural violence, because in some cultures, men ‘discipline’ their
wives. This assessment of wife-beating as direct violence and/or cultural violence is helpful,
but does not address the act of ‘wife-beating’ as a performance of masculinity (see, for example,
Butler 1990; Connell 1987). In fact, as the second part of Galtung’s sentence refers to keeping
women in ignorance, it implies not only the lack of subjectivity on the part of the women
but also an implicit understanding that if women were less ignorant they might prevent or
at least avoid being beaten by their husbands. Again, there is no attention given to the role
of gender hierarchies in the ‘private’ lives of men and women, nor to the cultural/social
circumstances in which this wife-beating and knowledge deprivation occur.10 In other words,
Galtung does not interrogate how masculinity and/or femininity contribute to social under-
standings of violence, particularly of the ways certain understandings of masculinity normalize
male violence.
Like structural violence, the violence triangle is, to a great extent, based on binaries –
negative/positive, male/female, top dogs/under dogs – and on pre-existing structures and
hierarchies of power. For Galtung, these structures are not relations of power as produced
and productive in a Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1976), nor are they constructed through

31
 Ronni Alexander

discourses. Rather, they are simply there. Structural violence tells us that there are underlying
oppressive structures that allow the ‘top dogs’ to be rich while the ‘under dogs’ suffer, and
that those same structures obscure the oppression experienced by the under dogs from the
top dogs, and perhaps even to the under dogs themselves (Galtung 1969). What it does not
tell us however, is how those structures came to be in place. What discursive practices and/
or norms create and maintain the unequal power relations within our social institutions?
Galtung identifies “religion and ideology, language and art, empirical and formal science”
(1990: 296) as six cultural domains used to legitimize structural and/or direct violence but
fails to explore the role of power in those contexts. The ‘top dogs’ are powerful, but how
is their power defined and from where does it originate? And, who exactly are those ‘top
dogs’ and ‘under dogs’? Galtung builds his arguments on opposing binaries, but ignores both
how the two sides of the binary are, respectively, privileged and marginalized, and the range
of difference within and among those groups (see, for example, Chaudry 2004; Collins 2000;
Crenshaw 1991). In describing them as such, he is reproducing the invisibility of those who
do not match his categories. Both the violent and virtuous triangles thus both identify, and
reproduce, violence (Price 2012).

Gender, militarization and structural violence

In this section, we return to the example of Rina Shimabukuro to consider how use of a
gendered understanding of structural violence could make visible the intersections of mili-
tarism, gender, and racism. Using the violence triangle as a point of departure, we can identify
the ways different kinds of violence are constituted by, and serve to constitute, each other.
Sexual assault and murder are obviously instances of direct violence. However, use of the
violence triangle allows us to see that these acts of violence are not only the result of a single
violent act by a single violent man. It is important that the perpetrator was a man, and also that
he was employed by the military and a former Marine stationed in Okinawa. Why? Because
militarized masculinities both promote and normalize the use of violence including, and espec-
ially, sexual violence (Enloe 2007; Whitworth 2004; Lutz 2009; Vine 2015; de Matos and
Ward 2012; Higate 2003).11
Militaries are institutions that promote the use and control of violence. On the one hand,
they need to take new recruits and make them into soldiers who will not baulk at engaging
in killing other humans. On the other hand, those same soldiers have to be controlled so
that they do not turn their aggression and violence on one another. Connell and Messerschmidt
(2005) discuss the idea of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, suggesting that, although there are many
different masculinities, certain features such as reluctance to express emotion and toughness
are prioritized. Militaries are one place where hegemonic masculinity is cultivated and spread.
Feminist scholars have shown how militaries invoke gendered hierarchies to promote
masculinity through misogyny and the denigration of femininity. These hierarchies play into
colonial hierarchies of domination and subjugation through which colonizers assert their
superiority by degrading feminized and ‘barbarian’ others. Militarization multiplies this pro-
cess of othering and feminizing by glorifying and normalizing the military masculinity. The
normalization occurs to such an extent that ‘militarization of the everyday’ becomes invisible.
Military hardware incorporated into everyday food labels is but one example of the many
ways that military motifs (camouflage designs, clothing styles, etc.), ideas, and language have
become part of mass culture and everyday life (Enloe 1989; Alexander 2015).
The rape and murder of Rina Shimabukuro occurred against a background of militarism,
militarization, and militarized masculinities. Okinawa was the site of a bloody battle in June

32
 Gender, structural violence, and peace

of 1945 and in addition to heavy military casualties on both sides, one in four Okinawan
civilians were said to have been killed, many by Japanese soldiers. Okinawa was not included
when independence was re-established in Japan after the signing of the peace treaty. The
island remained occupied, and a large (and contested) US military presence stayed even after
Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972. Today, as mentioned, the island hosts 75 per cent
of the US military forces in Japan, including large and controversial bases.12 The murder of
Rina Shimabukuro is one of the most recent of close to 500 reported incidences of sexual
violence by US soldiers in Japan, most of which go unprosecuted in Japan and are often
swept under the carpet by US military authorities (Associated Press 2014).13
As we can identify many layers of ‘avoidable harm’, some intentional and some not, in
the rape and murder of Rina Shimabukuro, structural violence can be said to be present. We
can also find cultural violence, as Galtung (1990: 296) suggests that the ideology of militarism
is the way militarization as a process becomes invisible and normal. His essentialist understand-
ing of gender as sex might allow recognition that the perpetrator was a man and the victim
a woman, but would ignore the militarized masculine violence of the ‘victorious’ US military
presence in ‘defeated’ Japan, especially in the already marginalized Okinawa. Promiscuous
sexual behaviour, excessive consumption of alcohol, substance abuse, and aggressive behaviour
are all part of military masculinity and, when combined with hierarchies of domination, result
in situations where the health and well-being of the local population is put at risk. In this
case, making violence ‘avoidable’ would be to question the military presence itself.

Conclusion
Structural violence is a concept that grew out of divisions in the peace research community
in the late 1960s. It was proposed by Johan Galtung with the objective of creating a more
nuanced definition of peace by making visible the harm caused by violence having no subject
or object. The concept has been useful, particularly for addressing issues of positive peace
and social justice, but was at the time criticized for expanding the definition of peace and
violence to such an extent that it was no longer useful for preventing war or for peace action.
Johan Galtung has been criticized for his positivist perspective, as well as his use and treat-
ment of binaries as equal opposites without interrogating the power relations between the
members of each pair. Moreover, his work lacks a gender perspective, an understanding
of gender as power relations and of the ways social institutions are gendered. The case of
the rape and murder of Rina Shimabukuro illustrates these shortcomings, particularly with
reference to militarism and militarization.
Structural violence was initially intended as a way to incorporate issues such as hunger or
maldevelopment into the conversation about peace and violence; war was understood in the
context of direct violence. The lack of an understanding of the ways social structures are
gendered prevented the linking of structural/cultural violence with militarism, militarization,
and war. In order to do this, it is preferable to move away from unidimensional structures and
understand structural violence as institutionalized relations of power which are supported by,
and support, gendered social hierarchies in the form of social relations, customs, and norms.
The analysis of intersecting relations of differing violence(s) including structural or institutional
violence can be useful for making hidden aspects of violence visible, showing the ways
violence is produced and reproduced, and understanding the ways the peace and/or violence
experienced by one person is related to that experienced by others. Such an understanding
reflects that true peace is only possible for one if it is also possible for all.

33
 Ronni Alexander

Notes
1 US military bases abroad are governed by Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs). In Japan, the
SOFAs limit the access and jurisdiction of local authorities to members of the US military suspected
of committing crimes. As a result, many soldiers have escaped prosecution for sexual violence. “At
US military bases in Japan, most service members found culpable in sex crimes in recent years did
not go to prison . . . . Instead, in a review of hundreds of cases filed in America’s largest overseas
military installation, offenders were fined, demoted, restricted to their bases or removed from
the military” (Associated Press 2014).
2 According to Bufacchi (2005), the word ‘violence’ comes from the Latin violentia (vehemence,
impetuosity) and “because acts of excessive force frequently result in the violation of norms, rights
or rules, the meaning of violence is often conflated with that of ‘Violations’, from the Latin violare,
meaning ‘infringement’” (p. 194). ‘Force’ is often used synonymously with violence, but while
violence refers to destructive actions, force is not necessarily destructive or measurable as particular
actions. Some scholars argue that the degree to which a particular act of violence is intentional and/
or harmful is not necessarily clear (Dewey 1916: 364; Pogge 2003), and so understanding violence
means understanding its relation to power (Arendt 1969). Like Galtung, these scholars note that as
it is often not possible to identify the perpetrators, violence is not necessarily goal oriented and
involves more than the intentional use of force to inflict damage, injury, or death to particular
‘others’.
3 Quincy Wright distinguished between negative peace (the absence of war) and positive peace,
(international justice). He believed that the “positive aspect of peace – justice – cannot be separated
from the negative aspect – elimination of violence” (Wright 1964).
4 T he Positive Peace Index, for example, is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators.
It ranks countries and territories on three broad themes: the level of safety and security in society;
the extent of domestic or international conflict; and the degree of militarization (Institute for
Economics and Peace 2016: 9).
5 In a footnote (n13; p.188), Galtung (1969) refers to an essay by Stokeley Carmichael in ‘Black
Power’ (p. 51 in David Cooper (ed.) (1968) The Dialectics of Liberation, London: Penguin) in which
he distinguishes between two types of racism: individual and institutional. Galtung confirms that
the individual/institutional division is the same as his personal/structural violence but emphasizes
that a person might act on behalf of a group, while ‘individual’ is understood as the opposite of a
group. Group violence, he asserts, is important, but is not institutional.
6 Webel and Galtung (2007) discuss the meaning of structure in the following way. “If conflict =
incompatible/contradictory goals, where do the goals come from? We can identify three broad
categories of answer: from Nature, Culture and Structure. Nature is in us, and around us; Culture
is in us as internalized values and norms; and Structure is around us as institutionalized, positive and
negative, sanctions” (15–16).
7 Galtung addresses this criticism in his later work, saying that positive peace can only come through
addressing the underlying causes of negative peace, the virtuous triangle and through his work with
Transcend (Galtung 1987, 1990; Webel and Galtung 2007).
8 Joan Scott, for example, defines gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on
perceived differences . . . a way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1988: 7).
9 These are: (1) understanding gender as power relations; (2) recognizing that dichotomous categories
are gendered and reproduce violence; (3) recognizing the ways language is gendered and ways
violence and peace are constituted through language and (4) recognizing that violence is both
productive of, and produced by, gender identities (Confortini 2006: 333).
10 Needless to say, in this example, ‘ignorance’ no doubt refers to ‘education’ which of course is
important. However, it makes one curious as to the depth of Galtung’s interest in the dimensions
and realities of women’s knowledge.
11 It is important to note that the discourse of sexual violence in the military often excludes male to
male sexual violence (Kwon 2010).
12 Okinawa Prefecture and the Japanese government are currently deadlocked over plans for relocating
US Marines from the Futenma base to Guam, building a new base at Henoko and a helipad in the
pristine forest of Takae.
13 According to the National Police Agency and Okinawa prefectural police, in the early 1990s there
were close to 300 crimes committed by those with ties to the US military in Japan. The number
dropped to 90 in 1996, but by 2003 had risen to 194. The number has hovered at around 100
annually thereafter, with about half of the crimes committed in Okinawa (Okinawa Times 2016).

34
 Gender, structural violence, and peace

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 3
GENDER, RACE, AND THE
INSECURITY OF ‘SECURITY’
Maryam Khalid

Introduction
‘Security’ is a contested concept in International Relations (IR) and related disciplines. Both
in terms of scholarly study and practice, ‘security’ reflects a range of assumptions, knowledges,
and concerns about the world and the people in it. Security Studies (SS) emerged as a subfield
of IR during the Cold War period, dominated largely by realist understandings of the world.
Concerned with what was assumed to be the ‘aggressive’ nature of humans and a state system
that was rooted in the anarchical, realists (and later neorealists) were concerned with securing
the nation-state from outside the boundaries of the national community. While the field has
taken broader approaches to ‘security’ (and other related concerns), the function of the state
as protector is largely unproblematized. Engaging with mainstream SS entails acknowledg-
ing the field’s relationship with the assumptions and logics of mainstream IR more broadly,
and how the logics of SS and security-as-practice interact with broader (historical and
contemporary) gendered and racialized discourses of global politics, and ultimately function
to enable and perpetuate violence.
To this end, this chapter outlines feminist and postcolonial approaches to SS (in the
context of IR more broadly) and key examples of security-as-practice in order to illustrate
that both are fundamentally gendered and racialized. Considering how using gender and race
can be used as lenses to provide insights into understanding what ‘security’ might entail, the
chapter outlines critiques of dominant perspectives and offers insights into the field that
would otherwise be overlooked. The first section of the chapter sets out some of the core
concerns and assumptions of dominant mainstream approaches to SS, tracing the logics that
underscore these approaches. The second section sets out how feminist and postcolonial
scholars have analysed and contested dominant meanings of ‘security’ and key events related
to the concerns of SS. Gender and race are necessary for thinking about the core issues in
SS, for analysing events and phenomena related to ‘security’. The third and fourth sections
of the chapter draw on contemporary examples to illustrate how ‘security’ is inextricably
linked to broader dominant discourses (such as ‘development’), demonstrating how the
gendered and racialized logics of ‘security’ function in practice.

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 Maryam Khalid

Interrogating mainstream Security Studies

‘Mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ SS refers to the work on security done through the lens of the
IR approach of political Realism. Mainstream SS shares with Realism a core set of assumptions,
logics, and narratives which are reflected in the work of a range of scholars. Realist thinkers
(both classical and neo) take the state as the referent object of ‘security’, and have tended to
focus largely on war as the main threat to the security of the state. At the most basic level,
this is also reflected in another key tradition of ‘mainstream’ IR (and SS): Liberalism. While
allowing for more potential for cooperation between states than Realism, Liberal approaches
in SS are, like Realism, also underscored by a concern with states and ‘security’ in terms of
a positivist problem-solving focused approach which takes particular power and social
relationships as ‘given’ (Cox 1981). In this context, the core issues in mainstream SS tend to
overlook individuals as actors, instead focusing on the interaction between militaristic states,
analysing inter-state relationships primarily in terms of war within a system in which (inter-
state) violence is perceived to be endemic (inter alia Walt 1991). This reflects the broader
assumptions and logics underscoring ‘mainstream’ IR, in which (state-centric) politics is
posited as centred around competition for power among states, with power exerted through
coercive capability largely focused on military and economic power. This perspective is illus-
trative of the focus, in ‘mainstream’ SS (and IR) on particular expressions of masculinity
(associated with ‘men’) in terms of understanding the world and engaging with it. Classical
Realism, for example, makes assumptions about ‘human nature’ (often extrapolating behav-
iours commonly associated with ‘men’ and ascribing certain behaviours to non-white
‘Others’) in engaging with concepts such as power and rationality, and functions as a highly
gendered and racialized paradigm that overlooks (and indeed obscures) the varied human
experiences in which states should be understood (Youngs 2004).
There are a range of approaches that seek to de-centre the state in the study of ‘security’,
and in doing so, reconceptualize the idea of ‘security’ as more than “the study of the threat,
use and control of military force” (Walt 1991: 212). These approaches have sought to broaden
understandings of what ‘security’ encompasses. For example, constructivists go beyond mili-
tarism to include the political, social, economic, and environmental (increasing ‘threat’ to
include political oppression, poverty, environmental degradation). As Barry Buzan explains
it, ‘security’ in this approach

includes a substantial range of concerns about the conditions of existence. Quite

where this range of concerns ceases to merit the urgency of the “security” label
(which identifies threats as significant enough to warrant emergency action and
exceptional measures including the use of force) and becomes part of everyday
uncertainties of life is one of the difficulties of the concept.
1991: 432–433

The Copenhagen school addresses this by moving away from a normative approach to
‘security’ by using the concept of ‘securitization’ as an analytical tool to identify how and
where the concept of ‘security’ is deployed. Feminists and postcolonial scholars share a similar
commitment in terms of engaging with ‘security’, critiquing what ‘security’ entails, how the
concept has been used, and to what effect, by interrogating the gendered and racialized
assumptions and knowledge that underpin its use in scholarship and the way it has operated
in practice. Feminist and postcolonial SS scholars have sought to move away from the
narrowness of the field by seeking to develop non-state-centric approaches to ‘security’, and

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 Gender, race, and the insecurity of ‘security’

take a variety of approaches to understanding and interrogating the function of gender and
race in global politics, and in the field of IR and subfields such as SS. They are broadly
concerned with uncovering the assumptions, logics, and power relations that shape the fields
(and practice), using gender and race as both analytical categories and empirical units of ana-
lysis. Ultimately, these scholars have reconceptualized SS and IR’s key assumptions and core
concerns. In these perspectives, ‘security’ can be understood as encompassing myriad political,
economic, and social relationships, as well as processes and practices. While not overlooking
the nation-state, feminist and postcolonial scholars see ‘security’ (and thus the realm of SS)
more broadly. This means considering key actors in the realm of SS beyond the nation-state,
and acknowledging the individual in global politics. For example, a feminist or postcolonial
approach to SS asks who is secured by the activities taking place in the name of ‘security’
(such as military activities and interventions, legislation, military expenditure).
At the most basic level, feminist scholars interrogating SS (and IR) share a commitment
to challenging the idea of gender (and, often, sex) as biologically determined, instead under-
standing gender as “a set of socially constructed characteristics describing what men and
women ought to be” (Tickner and Sjoberg 2013: 206). Gaining traction in the 1980s
and 1990s, feminist IR scholars have interrogated the masculinist bias in IR, identifying and
challenging a series of gendered binaries and hierarchies which privileged the masculine over
the feminine, and underscored the analysis of the discipline (e.g., male/female, masculine/
feminine, rational/irrational, strong/weak, public/private, perpetrator/victim, protector/
protected) (Tickner 1992; Hooper 2001; Sjoberg 2009a). J. Ann Tickner explained, “inter-
national relations is a man’s world, a world of power and conflict in which warfare is a
privileged activity” (1988: 429). Laura Sjoberg (2009b: 1), speaking of international security
more specifically, explains that

[w]omen in privileged positions in international security policy-making remain rare

(and are often identified primarily by their gender when they do reach those positions),
and entire scholarly texts can be found with no reference to women or gender at all.

The key insights of feminist critiques of SS highlight the role of the human subject (as
opposed to a state-centric focus) and make clear the importance of identifying and interro-
gating dominant configurations of masculinity and femininity (and the binary understandings
of gender that underpin this worldview). Feminist IR scholars have asked a range of questions
about gender, ranging from its function as “an identity-constituting system” that shapes the
ways in which states position themselves vis-à-vis state and non-state actors in global politics
(Wadley 2010: 54), to empirical analyses that seek to uncover the role women (otherwise
largely under-researched in SS) play in ‘security’ in various contexts (MacKenzie 2010).
Indeed, the assumptions of IR and SS, feminists argue, perpetuate the violence that they seek
to prevent. Binary understandings of ‘men’ and ‘women’, the roles they play, and ultimately,
the idea of ‘security’ have material impacts that perpetuate dominant discourses of gender
and security. For example, Laura Shepherd’s (2008) work on UN Resolution 1325 illustrates
how the Resolution’s discursive construction reflects the dominant gendered discourse in
which women are passive and peaceful.
Postcolonial scholars (and some feminist scholars) look to race as both an analytical lens
and empirical unit of analysis, and have sought to expose the Western-centric nature of SS
(in terms of obscuring the function of race in global politics) and of security-as-practice (in
enacting and enabling particular events and privileging the rights of some over others in the
name of ‘security’). They too critique the idea of the state as the central actor in relation to

39
 Maryam Khalid

‘security’ but also as the provider of ‘security’, by analysing the ways in which the state
engages in activities that render some peoples ‘insecure’. For example, dominant discourses
of ‘security’ feature commonly accepted ‘markers of progress’ which are “part of a chronology
where only certain events and dates, such as World War Two, the Cold War, and September
11 2001, matter” in terms of understanding and achieving peace and security (Nayak and
Selbin 2010: 125; Krishna 2001). Relatedly, and as feminist scholars argue through a gender
lens, mainstream IR and SS take a particular view of what entails ‘secure’ and ‘peace’ and
who is able to achieve ‘peace’ and ‘security’ (Nayak and Selbin 2010: 125). This must be
understood against the dominant views in the field that are deeply Western-centric (emerging
from a Eurocentric history) in some key ways: privileging Anglo-American perspectives on
key issues, events, and concepts, deploying racialized (at times orientalist) knowledge of the
non-Western world in making sense of events taking place there, and presuming the rational,
ethical, and benign character of the Western ‘Self’.
As Pinar Bilgin explains, while there is a research agenda in SS that explores ‘security’
within the “South/Third/developing world, it offers relatively little insight into non-Western
insecurities” (2010: 617). Tracing this back to canonical texts in the field, Tarak Barkawi
and Mark Laffey highlight the overwhelmingly Western focus of these, to the extent that
even content looking beyond Western states reflects Western interests at the time (for
example, one of the two chapters of the 1941 edition of Makers of Modern Strategy, a standard
text in the field, focused on Japanese naval strategy at a time when this was a pressing concern
for the US) (2006: 335). As they explain, these texts “take for granted . . . the point of view
of Western great powers in a world they dominate and compete over”; this perspective is
reflected in the dominant texts of contemporary SS, which explain violence in non-Western
parts of the world through a lack of European institutions rather than drawing on, for
example, the role that colonial legacies play in the political landscape of various regions
(Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 336, 347).

Gender, race, and (in)security

How, then, do gender and race function to shape dominant ideas about security and insecur-
ity? Understanding security as gendered and racialized means understanding gender and race
as ways of ordering the world that are imbued with power to create, legitimize, and naturalize
knowledge (for example, knowledge about and for people, places, ideas). For example,
Peterson and Runyan point out that mainstream understandings of ‘power’ and relatedly of
‘security’ are gendered in that they privilege aggressive masculinities. In this view, outside
masculine and militarized ways of seeing the world, ‘security’ might be understood as “cele-
brating and sustaining life” but in dominant understandings it is presupposed as “the capacity
to be indifferent to ‘others’ and, if necessary, to harm them” (2010: 18). The normalization
of gender in this way functions as a dominant logic of security; this not only shapes “who
and what is masculinized”, it is also “inextricable from devaluing who and what is feminized”
(Peterson and Runyan 2010: 18).
As the next two sections will illustrate, dominant logics of security are refracted through
gendered and racialized understandings of the world, in which ‘Western’ and ‘masculine’
values (of ‘appropriate’ global governance, order, development, and economic rationality)
are privileged over the (feminized) ‘backwardness’ of the ‘underdeveloped Other’. Engaging
with this means examining the power of gender and race in global politics more broadly
(not just security) in terms of the ways in which certain entities, states, and peoples (within,
between, and beyond states) are masculinized and feminized (Peterson and Runyan 2010:

40
 Gender, race, and the insecurity of ‘security’

18). Gender and race are “powerful legitimator[s] of war and national security” (Tickner
2002: 336). As Jill Steans explains, there are “deep and profound connections between the
construction of masculinities, femininities, and state-sanctioned violence” (2006: 61). One
example of this is the protector/protected ‘myth’ (or ‘Man as Warrior’ and ‘Beautiful Souls’),
where women (assumed to be weak, vulnerable) are constructed as in need of the (military)
protection that is offered by the (masculine) state (e.g., Elshtain 1985). In contemporary
politics the operation of race in relation to this is particularly salient in terms of the contem-
porary expression of the ‘white man’s’ (and woman’s) burden in dominant narratives of
security post-9/11, which will be explored in the last section of this chapter.

Security and development since the two world wars

A particularly salient example of the practice and scholarly concerns of security lies at the
intersection of ‘development’ and interventionism. In the contemporary context, this finds
expression in neoliberal restructuring and related interventions (military, economic, or
otherwise) into non-Western states in the name of ‘security’; these are inextricably linked to
dominant discourses of ‘development’, which itself is racialized, gendered, and rooted in
imperialism. With antecedents in European colonial understandings of the notion of ‘progress’
as defined against ‘backward’, ‘passive’, ‘stagnant’, or ‘declining’ non-Western societies, the
project to engage in the political and economic development of these societies along liberal
and capitalist lines has been repackaged as a highly gendered and racialized version of the
‘white man’s burden’ that has been used to justify colonialism. While not drawing explicitly
on the overtly sexist or racist binaries of the colonial era, dominant development discourses
post-1945 have been predicated on the basic logics underscoring colonial discourses. That
is, discourses of development/underdevelopment find expression in a series of differences
between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (urban/rural, modern/traditional, productive/unproductive), illus-
trating the interplay between gender and race in determining what constitutes ‘appropriate’
global political order (Khalid 2016).
Analysing this discourse through the lenses of gender and race reveals the ways in which
‘security’ and ‘development’ intersect and the impacts this has; put another way, using race
and gender to interrogate mainstream scholarship on, and practices of, ‘security’ and ‘develop-
ment’ illustrates how intervention is enabled by the securitization of development. To speak
of the practice of development as ‘securitized’ means to understand development as being
conceptualized and pursued in the context of gendered and racialized understandings of
‘security’ more broadly. For example, the practice of development is aimed specifically at
places and peoples that are perceived to threaten ‘our’ ‘security’, and is predicated on and
(re)produces racialized and gendered logics (Duffield 2001: 15). As Duffield writes, in the
contemporary context there are “pressures to reprioritize development criteria in relation to
supporting intervention, reconstructing crisis states and, in order to stem terrorist recruitment,
protecting livelihoods and promoting opportunity within strategically important areas of
instability” (Duffield 2006: 14).
One way this has been done is through the concept of ‘failed’ states. As Bilgin explains,
this concept “finds fault with some states (or their leaders/regimes) but not with the global
political-economic structure that allows them to ‘fail’” (2010: 619). In constructing the world
as comprised of developed/underdeveloped and effective/failed states, dominant develop
ment discourse (re)produces categories of ‘civilized’ (democratic, egalitarian, developed) and
‘barbaric’ (backward, despotic, underdeveloped) (Duffield 2007: 227–228) which are gendered
in their privileging of particular kinds of output, effort, and activeness. The ‘barbaric’ is able

41
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to be constructed as such not only by reference to cultural norms ascribed to ‘them’ but also
through delineating ‘them’ in ways that draw on gendered behaviours. For example, ‘their’
economic stagnation is the result of ‘feminine’ illogical or irrational economic choices, and
is pitted against ‘our’ economic rationality (a ‘masculine’ trait). The very ability to represent
the world in this way is predicated on the deployment of gendered and racialized binaries
such as “civilized/barbarian, advanced/backward, active/passive, industrious/sensuous”,
which are applied to peoples who do not “measure up” to “our” standards of civilization
(Duffield 2007: 230).
The Truman Doctrine is a useful historical example of this; the doctrine “set a framework
that directed the security policies” of US administrations until the 1990s (Sjöstedt 2007: 236).
For example, post-Second World War US foreign aid programmes such as the Marshall Plan
were designed to “serve as a global mechanism to maintain international order while pro-
moting economic growth in developing and the newly-emerging countries” (Tschirgi 2006:
47) and as “precursors” of contemporary “development assistance” incorporated aid into a
‘security’ strategy to contain threats from those constructed as ‘Other’ (Duffield 2002: 1065–
1066). Dividing the world into spheres of ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’ embodied in
(‘Western’) capitalism and communism was a feature of the Truman doctrine, which illus-
trated the racialized and gendered logics underlying constructions of ‘them’ and ‘us’ that
operate in dominant discourses of ‘security’. In the context of the Truman doctrine, this was
reflected in, for example, “the cultivation of imperial masculinity” equating manliness and
heroism with physical strength, military service, and uncritical loyalty to the state’ (Dean
2001: 12–18). In terms of Cold War logics, this can be seen in the feminization of commun-
ists and homosexuals (for example, through the use of the term ‘pinko’ to describe those
accused of being sympathetic to communists). Cold War constructions of US ‘Self’, then,
were organized around a desire to project a hypermasculine ‘Self’, against the threatening
masculinity posed by an ‘aggressive’ and ‘totalitarian’ ‘Other’, and the ‘homosexual threat’
inside (Weldes 1999: 46; Hooper 2001: 86–87).
This is also reflected in more contemporary discourses of ‘progress’ in relation to ‘failed’
and ‘fragile’ states, a core ‘security’ concern in the field of SS. This illustrates the gendered
and racialized nature of mainstream development and security discourse, which has a fixation
on ‘us’ (in the West) performing appropriate masculinity (as expressed in particular political
and economic behaviours), and a concomitant concern with feminization. Fears of insecurity
are centred around vulnerability (as a feminine trait) if assertive or aggressive policies are not
pursued to manage these states (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007: 412). ‘Failed’ states have failed
to perform the ‘Western’ and ‘masculine’ traits of rationality, wealth, and power, failing to
achieve ‘progress’ by subscribing to the ideals of neoliberalism. In this scenario, the ‘Other’
embodies “brownness, blackness or yellowness shackled by superstitions or fundamentalisms
. . . and exhibits irrationality, poverty, and powerlessness” (Ling 2008: 1, 3). The functions
of gender and race in terms of ‘security’ concerns of ‘developed’ states here intersect to
enable practices which “promote neo-trusteeship or benign imperialism” and “legitimize
these prescriptions as non-racist, technical fixes to failures of governance” (Shilliam 2008:
778–779). In this way, the idea and practice of ‘development’ is securitized and operates a
“liberal relation of governance” – speaking of ‘development’ means exercising the power to
speak on behalf of particular types of peoples’ “rights, freedoms, and well-being” (Duffield
2007: 230).
The relationship between development and security discourses is captured in the common
assertion in security scholarship and political discourse that by promoting ‘their’ development,
‘our’ security and indeed global security might be achieved (Duffield 2007: 225–226). This

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 Gender, race, and the insecurity of ‘security’

concern has historical antecedents that illustrate the central role of ‘othering’ (both racial-
ized and gendered) in security (as practice and scholarship). As Duffield explains, “[T]he
nineteenth-century liberal urge to protect and better has been supplemented by a contemporary
developmental need to secure unfamiliar and incomplete life” (2007: 234). Indeed, a
demarcation between a civilized ‘Self’ and underdeveloped ‘Other’ has been central to the
liberal international world order since at least the Wilsonian era, and been used to prescribe
the necessity of ‘us’ bringing ‘progress’ to ‘them’; delivering ‘rational’ political and economic
institutions to supposedly ‘backward’ societies has functioned as a security strategy in post-First
World War liberal internationalism, with integration into the political and economic systems
of the ‘West’ designed to ‘lift’ non-Western peoples into the realm of the civilized or ‘developed’
(Hobson 2012: 167–169; Smith 1999: 177–178). While the provision of development aid by
wealthy capitalist economies has, in dominant contemporary discourses, been “framed in uni-
versalist terms of bringing progress and development to the Third World”, the concern with
development is focused on ‘our’ security as much as ‘theirs’ (McCormack 2011: 246).

‘Security’ and the ‘Eastern Other’ in contemporary global politics

The ways in which performances of masculinity and femininity (and the binary relationship
between them) have been central to dominant narratives of threat and violence in global
politics, and organized into hierarchies structured by both gender and race, is particularly
well illustrated by using the Middle East as a case study. A focal point of dominant security
discourses since the 1990s, the practice and scholarship of ‘security’ in relation to this region
illustrates well the ways in which gender and race function to shape contemporary mainstream
security concerns, particularly in Western scholarship and (foreign) policy. In dominant
understandings of contemporary global politics, the Middle East has been viewed as a key
site of ‘threat’ to global ‘order’ and ‘security’. As one of the most significant actors in rela-
tion to this, the US’s engagements with the Middle East offer insights into the operation of
gender and race in relation to ‘security’ in this context. Both race and gender function to
shape understandings of Middle Eastern states and their peoples (largely viewed as a mono-
lithic entity), as well as responses to (and constructions of) threats to ‘our’ (Western) ‘security’
emanating from this region. The history of intervention in this region illustrates well how
security is linked to other discourses, in particular discourses of development. These function
together to enable intervention and often result in the very violence and other insecurities
they seek to redress.
Dominant discourses of security focused on states in the Middle East through the 1990s
and particularly after the 11 September 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on the US. In this context,
mainstream discourses of security, and the activities carried out within this discursive
framework, were closely linked to discourses of development which themselves have led to
activities (such as economic restructuring) in many parts of the world. In particular, they
have operated in the Middle East to render the region as being in need of economic and
military intervention in the name of global ‘security’ and ‘order’. As Meghana Nayak points
out, this is reflected in US security prescriptions that have focused on ‘appropriate’ economic
and political development policies that encourage the ‘Eastern Other’ to subscribe to
‘Western’ political and economic models in order to make “the world safe for capitalism”;
this is inextricably linked to the assertion of ‘Western’ identity in the racialized and gendered
hierarchy of global politics (Nayak 2006: 56).
Of particular importance here is ‘democratization’ as a ‘security concern’ as it intersects
with development, both in terms of dominant global politics and in US policy toward the

43
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Middle East specifically. The ways in which ‘security threats’ are identified and acted upon
is mediated by traditional understandings of gender and expectations of the behaviours of
particular ethnic groups, which shape discourses that posit the Middle East as a ‘threat’ to
those outside the region (and, at times, to those constructed as vulnerable within the region).
Of interest here is the ways in which acceptable performances of masculinity and femininity
are deployed in relation to both ‘them’ and ‘us’. An example that highlights this well is the
operation of US neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions, which have purported that
democratization and broader economic ‘development’ are necessary to avoid leaving the
US “‘weak’, ‘helpless’, and ‘dependent’” on its European allies in the face of security threats
emerging from the Middle East (Takacs 2005: 298). For example, in dominant discourses of
threat after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and representations of identity within these
discourses) ‘security’ (as practice and field of research) was configured by racialized and gen-
dered logics in the form of the trope of ‘oriental despotism’ in relation to Saddam Hussein’s
regime in Iraq. The trope, as deployed in dominant narratives of ‘security’ in relation to the
Middle East in service of the 2003 US-led war in Iraq, simultaneously posited the Ba’ath
regime as embodying a barbarism specific to the Middle East (expressed through violence
inflicted upon the Iraqi population as well as through deviant sexual behaviour), and cast
‘ordinary’ Iraqis wholly as victims unable to secure their own liberation from despotism
(Khalid 2014).
‘Security’ in this narrative reflected a common concern in dominant discourses of global
politics, of (re)affirming ‘our’ masculine self-image in the face of the uncontrolled masculinity
of the ‘Other’. In the contemporary context, in relation to the Middle East specifically,
orientalism operates as a particular type of racialization that intersects with gender in relation
to ‘security’. Much like gendered logics, orientalist logics deploy binaries in order to make sense
of the world and, in doing so, create dichotomies between a ‘civilized West’ and a ‘backward
East’. Organized into a series of hierarchical categories, these logics function to delineate ‘Arab/
Muslim’ ‘Other’ and ‘Western’ ‘Self’ through racialized and gendered characteristics. In con-
temporary discourses of ‘development’ and ‘security’, ‘civilization’ and ‘backwardness’ are often
identified through particular understandings of ‘appropriate’ economic strategy and ‘develop-
ment’. Contemporary gendered orientalist representations of the Middle East, both inside and
outside academia, draw an explicit link between economic and political development and (in)
security in doing this (Tuastad 2003).
In relation to this, in both the practice and study of ‘security’ (and global politics more
broadly), a particular definition of ‘progress’ is privileged (Saurin 2006: 27). This is captured
in the assertion that “‘the rest of the world’ has benefited and continues to benefit from the
spread of the West’s civilizing values and institutions” (Jones 2006: 55). These ideas have a
long history, and can be identified in various permutations in specific historical and
geographical contexts. However, they are made intelligible through continually recognizable
(and naturalized) understandings of gender and race. Retaining the basic binary logics shaping
‘East’–‘West’ interactions during the colonial era and earlier, contemporary expressions are
seen in the hierarchical categories of ‘us’/‘them’, ‘civilized’/‘barbaric’ that are understood
and constructed by reference to lack of ‘appropriate’ political and economic structures
in terms of contemporary ‘security’ discourse relating to the Middle East and ‘the West’. In
predicating ‘Arab culture’ and/or ‘Islam’ (or the Islamic world) as backward, orientalist
discourses simultaneously construct the ‘West’ as rational and progressive by contrast (Sardar
1999: 55). For example, the limited flourishing of state capitalism in the Middle East after
decolonization has been explained as the outcome of cultural peculiarities emerging from
the influence of Islam in the region (Sadowski 1993: 15–19). Indeed, the discourse of ‘Islam’

44
 Gender, race, and the insecurity of ‘security’

(in mainstream media, academic, and political representations) has found a ‘security’ problem
in the (male) Middle Eastern ‘Other’. This ‘Other’ is identifiable through ‘his’ lack of econo-
mic and political ‘progress’, reflected in the rejection of (Western-but-universalized) values
that are purported to ensure ‘progress’ (Said 1997; Sardar 1999; Samiei 2010). In these ways,
gendered and orientalist discourses construct ‘the East’ as a site of insecurity (for ‘us’ as much
as for the feminized ‘ordinary’ Middle Easterners in these narratives) precisely because of its
failure to adopt ‘appropriate’ modes and paths of political and economic development.

Conclusion
Ultimately, ‘security’ as a concept and practice is shaped by the operation of gender and
race (two of the most fundamental ways of understanding the world and the people in it).
Acknowledging the ways in which gender and race have mediated the concept and practice
of ‘security’ is central to challenging dominant understandings and practices of ‘security’. For
example, in the context of the Middle East, gender and race (in the form of orientalism)
offer insights into how long-standing narratives of the region’s ‘backwardness’ and ‘barbarism’
are repackaged in the contemporary context, and how violent conflicts here have been
enabled and how they have played out. Gender and race function separately but also together,
at various points, to organize the world into us/them. This is done by drawing on dominant
binary logics in which particular understandings of ‘masculinity’/‘femininity’ and ‘West’/‘East’
are mapped onto various peoples and places. These logics are reflected in both the mainstream
research agendas and analyses in the field of SS (and IR) (shaping how the field thinks and
works) and in the practice of global politics by states that dominate this sphere of activity.
Utilizing the insights of analyses that explore the function of gender and race in relation to
‘security’ is important because this approach offers ways to challenge the dominant understand-
ings of (in)security that privilege particular political and economic values, enable conflict,
silence non-Western concerns about what ‘security’ entails, and ultimately has gendered and
racialized effects.

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 4
FEMINIST NARRATIVE
APPROACHES TO SECURITY
Akanksha Mehta and Annick T.R. Wibben

Introduction
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, queer Chicana feminist activist and scholar
Gloria Anzaldúa writes about how the world is not safe:

We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the
panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning
coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the streets.
1999 [1987]: 42

Women, especially those on the margins of societies stratified by the intersections of

gender, race, class, sexuality, and more, have often found themselves ‘unsafe’ in a variety
of ways – “when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of
all races hunt her as prey” (ibid.). Notes Anzaldúa (ibid.):

alienated from her mother culture, “alien” in the dominant culture, the woman of
color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified she can’t respond,
her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she
inhabits.

Anzaldúa’s narratives of (in)security and borders do not find space in most literatures in
Security Studies. Yet, for feminist scholars who study security, voices like hers are crucial to
not only understanding the politics of gender, identity, and the everyday but the very making
and unmaking of the meanings and practices of security. Anzaldúa wants “the freedom to
carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods
out of my entrails. And,” she goes on, “if going home is denied me then I will have to stand
and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my
own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (1999 [1987]: 44). As feminist
scholars maintain, until hierarchies of gender and “other hierarchies associated with class
and race are dismantled and until women have control over their own security a truly
comprehensive system of security cannot be devised” (Tickner 1992: 30).

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 Feminist narrative approaches to security

As (in)securities shift and slide according to contexts, a narrative approach to gender and
security offers crucial insights where “the differences among stories and storytellers, which
characterize personal narratives, are explicitly acknowledged” (Wibben 2011: 86). Paying
attention to (personal) narratives shows how identity and security implicate each other in the
everyday: In her exploration of the life stories of poor Mayan women at the end of the civil
war in Guatemala, Maria Stern (2005) finds that their experiences with (in)securities were
shaped by the varied relations to the dominant Ladino community and the Guatemalan state
as well as within the household, the Mayan community, and the fincas where the women
lived and worked. Paying this kind of close attention also reveals that emphasizing only some
identities (for example, national identities, in the case of dominant frameworks of national
security) privileges certain kinds of security over others, marginalizing, ignoring, and silencing
a variety of actors and their lived experiences.
This chapter will discuss narrative approaches to gender and security to show how chal-
lenging dominant modes of thinking security needs to entail attention to gender and other
intersectional markers of identity that are intimately involved in shaping that which is to be
secured in the first place. While it will dwell mostly on how narratives can be used as a mode
of analysis, this chapter will also consider how narrative as a mode or form of writing can
reshape understandings of security.

What are narratives and what do narratives do?

A narrative, put simply, is “a way of making sense of the world around us” (Moulin 2016:
138). Through narratives, we engage with the world, produce meanings and knowledges,
articulate our intentions and politics, and justify our actions (Wibben 2011: 2). They, thus,
“tell us a lot about the limits and possibilities of political life, since they articulate particular
worldviews, create and enable certain political subjects, and (re)produce specific understandings
about facts, relations, and formations” (Moulin 2016: 138). As discursive formations in motion,
narratives are sites where power is exercised and worlds are investigated as well as invented
(Wibben 2011: 2). Narratives can insist on grand singular meanings that confirm social orders
and power structures but can also disrupt overarching discourses and understandings of the
world, challenging authoritarian structures and hierarchies (Shapiro 1998: 19).
Traditional security narratives organize themselves around (nation) states and their sover-
eignty, treating the two as “ontologically stable and unproblematically identifiable” (Wibben
2011: 72). These narratives limit how we think about security and disallow the crucial ques-
tions: What is security? Whose security is important? How is security achieved? How do
multiple insecurities intersect? (ibid.: 65). They also simultaneously allow the powerful to
frame any issue/event in terms of security and to exclude a plethora of voices, contradictions,
contexts, contesting claims, interpretations, experiences, and subjectivities. Approaches in
Critical Security Studies have worked to address the silences in traditional security narratives
by moving beyond the state as the referent of security (e.g., Booth 1991; Buzan 1991; Wæver
1995). Elaborating on the processes and practices of security, some of this scholarship
highlights the “contextual nature of security meanings” and creates space for debates on the
politics of securitization (Wibben 2011: 78). The Copenhagen school (Buzan, Wæver and
de Wilde 1998), for example, applies speech act theory to processes and practices of security
to elaborate on securitization and desecuritization as processes that frame and de-frame a
situation/issue/event in terms of security. Notably these processes rely on security agents
who are subjects that are seen as authorized and legitimate to frame an issue or event as a
security situation – an important issue for feminist scholars.

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Problematically, the changes proposed by some of these approaches are “largely additive
rather than subversive” (Wibben 2011: 81) as they aim to broaden and deepen security narra-
tives without investigating, challenging, and displacing their fundamental structure, foundations,
and the politics of the very meaning of security. For example, while these approaches include
gendered readings of security with women as referents of security, their analyses rely on
identifying security agents, i.e. subjects that have the ability to speak and to be heard (Hansen
2000: 294). While these critical approaches move beyond the state as the (only) security agent,
they continue to make liberal assumptions about political subjectivities and the politics of
speaking, listening, and being heard. Where will everyday narratives of security and insecurity
find place in these analyses? Can marginalized groups (such as women of colour, working class
women, lower caste women, trans* women, etc.) become authorized agents of security? Are
their narratives of security/insecurity irrelevant? Would Anzaldúa’s (1999 [1987]) words and
the experiences of poor Mayan women whom Stern (2005) researches be heard in these
frameworks? What other sites of security narratives (e.g., Daigle 2015; Park-Kang 2014;
Shepherd 2013) are we missing? How can feminist and gendered voices be considered worthy
of speaking and be heard if the very meaning and politics of security are undisturbed?
A feminist narrative approach to Security Studies addresses the aforementioned short-
comings in traditional and certain critical approaches and offers new ways of thinking about
security, methodologies, methods, and research ethics, as well as the practices and politics
of academic knowledge production (Wibben 2011, 2016a, 2016c). It takes into account
everyday gendered experiences and stories of (in)security and violence, paying attention to
the multiplicity of identities and subjectivities and how they shape our personal-political
lives. It recognizes that narratives of (in)security are “untidy” and non-linear and that feminist
knowledge production can only occur by paying attention to their twists, turns, messiness,
surprises, and contradictions (Stern 2005: 12; Zalewski 2008: 42–61).
A feminist narrative approach to security allows scholars to dissect hegemonic (and often
oppressive) understandings of world politics and political violence and to challenge dominant
stories by writing politics and security from multiple, alternative, and decolonial vantage
points. Troubling the very meaning of security and what it means to be secure, it dispels the
dichotomy between security and insecurity. It acknowledges that there “is not one version
of security, but how the security of some is deeply implicated in, and even predicated upon,
insecurity for others” (Wibben 2011: 91). For example, the Hindu right-wing and Zionist
settler women that Mehta (2015, 2016) researches, find utmost safety, peace, mobility, and
agency only at times of heightened violence and tensions with the ‘other’ and their commu-
nities. Their security (from its discourses and policies to its everyday practices) hinges upon
moments of rampant instability and furthers violence and insecurity in the lives of their
designated ‘others’.
Finally, a feminist narrative approach to security interrogates not only the stories but also
the intersectional positionalities of the storytellers, etching out silences, emotions, and voices
that remain unspoken and unheard and addressing the politics of speaking, listening, and being
heard (Wibben 2011). Feminist scholars such as Anzaldúa have long employed narratives to
write the lives and politics of women and their experiences of identity and (in)security.
However, these narratives have not found a space in the canons of academic work in political
science, International Relations (IR), and Security Studies. A feminist narrative approach
to Security Studies not only brings such stories to the core of scholarship but also questions
the mechanisms and reasons for their silencing. In doing so, it also acknowledges that in
our writing and analyses of narratives of security, some stories will always be unspoken and
unheard.

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Using narratives in feminist research

There are two key ways in which narratives are used in the study of gender and security – as
a mode of analysis and a form/style of writing and expression. As mentioned in the previous
section, as a mode of analysis, narratives offer a way of examining the production of meanings
and politics in our research on gender and security, as well as in the words and actions of
our interlocutors. Narrative theory offers a toolbox to formulate, compare and challenge
different interpretations of events and actions, and narrative analysis can help to elaborate on
the actualization of interpretation and its conditions of possibility, thus helping to clarify
value judgements and the politics of telling stories (Wibben 2011, 2016a; Moulin 2016).
As a form or style of writing, narratives offer a mode of knowing and knowledge produc-
tion that moves far away from positivist knowledge production, thereby providing means
of epistemological critique and pluralism in the social sciences (and especially in politics, IR,
and security) research. Feminist narrative writing challenges the rigidities, norms, and bound-
aries of ‘disciplines’, questioning the very ways in which academics have been trained to
think, speak, and write and providing alternate forms of engagement where theories are inter-
twined with stories. Feminist narrative writing also reclaims “the importance of everyday life
to understanding global processes . . . presenting alternative voices (and consequently unheard
stories) of [ordinary] peoples, places, and events that are central to the unfolding of inter-
national affairs” (Moulin 2016: 145). Most importantly, as feminists of colour from Anzaldúa
to Audre Lorde (1983, 1984) have long explored and has more recently been discussed by
Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee (2016; see also Dauphinee 2013), narrative
writing offers a means of inserting the researcher and her subjectivities into the research,
forcing scholars to “consider their own complicities, partialities, and problematic placements
in the unfolding of the plots that constitute their argument/understanding of particular
international problems” (Moulin 2016: 145).

Gendered security narratives

When we study security, one of the key concerns and questions is the frame through which
we perceive the world. After all, we need to know which issues and events Security Studies
should be concerned with, what security means, and who is being secured. To this end,
students of security are generally taught particular security logics (Huysmans 1998, 2006)
which find their expression in “a fairly closed narrative structure consisting of four main
elements: threats locating danger, referents to be secured, agents to provide security, and means
to contain danger” (Wibben 2011: 66). These security logics, which operate also in critical
security scholarship, continue to limit the meanings of security, the politics of these meanings,
and the kinds of stories that can be told and that are heard. Framing security in a manner
different from the above-mentioned four-fold structure tends to not get the desired attention.
In what follows, we will discuss three examples that illustrate the workings of feminist narrative
approaches to gender and security. The first two examples are centred around the events
of 9/11, its aftermath, and the ‘war on terror’. The final example is centred on the Maoist
movement in contemporary India.
In a televised address the night of 9/11, Bush provided the official narrative of the day,
framing the events in a way in which they were ordered and comprehensible, legitimizing the
responses of the state and limiting any alternative narratives (Wibben 2011: 57). Danger was
located (e.g., Al-Qaida and other ‘terrorist’ organizations as well as states such as Afghanistan
and Iraq); referents that were to be secured were identified (the ‘American’ people, their ‘way

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of life’, and their interests referred to as ‘our people’ and ‘our nation’); agents that were
authorized to speak about security and provide security were identified (the US state and
military); and the means to contain danger were unleashed (the ‘war on terror’ and its racialized
draconian policies, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture and detention mechanisms, etc.).
By framing the events along this familiar narrative structure, the 9/11 narratives paint the
events as “‘uncaused’ cause” (Zehfuss 2003: 521) and work “to preclude certain kinds of
questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for
retaliation” (Butler 2004: 4).
A feminist narrative approach offers new ways to understand how the gendered, racialized,
and incomplete narrative of 11 September 2001 did not begin and end on that day. Bush’s
address to the nation and subsequent official 9/11 narratives, while focusing on the loss of
‘American life’, attack on ‘American values’, and the urgent to need to protect ‘our nation’,
omitted narratives that questioned US exceptionalism, liberalism, the limitations of pluralism
and multiculturalism in the US, and the meanings of what it means to be ‘American’ or hold
‘American values’. Feminist and postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak (1988: 287)
argues that by “measuring silences” and what is left unheard, we are “investigating, identifying,
and measuring . . . the ‘deviation’ from an ideal that is irreducibly differential”. A feminist
narrative approach to 9/11, thus, not only analyses how and why these omissions were
deployed to build a singular story that benefits certain (draconian) security responses but also
makes space for silenced stories, emotions, bodies, reactions, and aftermaths to 9/11; from
the racial discrimination and attacks faced by Muslim (and Sikh) men and women (most of
whom were also ‘American’) to post-traumatic stress among those returning from the
frontlines of the ‘war on terror’.
Furthermore, a feminist narrative approach to the aftermath of 9/11 also examines how
gender was used to make the case for military intervention and invasion of Afghanistan and
Iraq (e.g., Hunt and Rygiel 2006). For example, to make the case for intervention in
Afghanistan, Laura Bush, then first-lady of the US, used the weekly presidential radio address
on 17 November 2001 to claim that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights
and dignity of women” and that ousting the Taliban would be a step toward this goal of
saving Afghan women and girls. This co-optation of women’s rights issues and of a feminist
agenda in the theatre of war, and the orientalist assumptions and narratives it relies on, must
be interrogated. Many of the problems experienced by the Afghan population, and women
in particular, were the outcome of decades of war in which the US was deeply implicated
and hence the sudden “‘focus on women’s liberation in Afghanistan [seems] little more
than a cynical ploy’” (Stabile and Kumar 2005: 765). What is more, Dana Cloud’s analysis
of photographs of the ‘War on Terror’ published in Time magazine and Time.com in the
year following 11 September 2001, reveals how the photo essays “construct paradigmatic
binary oppositions, encourage viewers to adopt a paternalistic stance toward Afghan women,
and offer images of modernity, aligned with light, in contrast to the darkness of chaos and
backwardness” (Cloud 2004: 290–291).
When doing narrative analysis, the point of view from which the elements of a story are
presented is important. Presenting the story from a particular point of view results in a certain
focalization, that is the relation between who perceives and what is perceived (Bal 1997: 8).
A second example of feminist narrative analysis from the ‘war on terror’ that keenly highlights
the above-mentioned process of focalization involves the representations of the US Marine
Corps Female Engagement Teams (FETs). FETs are all female teams, generally attached to
a male infantry battalion, who are charged with engaging Afghan women as women as part
of the effort to ‘win hearts and minds’ in US counterinsurgency practices in Afghanistan.

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When Keally McBride and Wibben (2012) analysed representations of FETs in official
documents as well as worldwide media reports, they found that none of the material available
even considered the point of view of Afghan women who were supposed to be benefiting
from the actions of women in FETs. Only one account, written by the team who came up
with the idea for FET (Pottinger, Jilani and Russo 2010), features an unnamed Afghan elder
who is quoted saying, “‘your men come to fight, but we know the women come to help’”
(p. 4). Even seemingly progressive accounts, such as that of Ann Jones for The Nation (2010),
while drawing out some of the broader context of Afghan women’s lives and its material
realities end up not featuring a single Afghan voice (Wibben 2016b). Narratives of women
in FETs highlight the gendering of war, conflict, and counterinsurgency, where gendered
assumptions about men, women, and their roles (with men as combatants and women as
peacemakers) are solidified and used as the basis of policy (Khalili 2011). With FETs as the
focal point of these narratives, and the subsequent silencing of Afghan women’s lives, stories,
and experiences, they also highlight the inherent power hierarchies of the ‘war on terror’
that are built on orientalized, gendered, and racialized stereotypes of the Afghan women (and
men). Similarly, Melanie Richter-Montpetit’s (2007, 2016) feminist queer analyses of the
racialized/sexualized torture of detainees by the US military at the Abu Ghraib prison (offi-
cially known as the Baghdad Central Prison) in Iraq highlight the orientalist gendered and
racialized stereotypes of Iraqi men (and women) and the colonialist/civilizational workings
of the violence of the ‘war on terror’.
What we see through this second example of the FETs (and Abu Ghraib) is that even
feminist narratives can have trouble overcoming colonialist framings that do not pay sufficient
attention to multifaceted local contexts and “replicate problematic aspects of Western
representations of Third-World nations or communities, aspects that have their roots in the
history of colonization” (Narayan 1997: 45). Indeed this particular kind of embedded femi-
nism (Hunt 2006) has proved deeply divisive among feminists as it has also provided further
evidence that “the Third World Woman” (Mohanty 1988: 333) still cannot speak – or at
least cannot be heard. Beyond the issue of colonialist representation there is also the question
of not just the gendered but racialized and orientalist frames at play in these latest attempts
to save brown women from brown men (Spivak 1988; Bhattacharya 2008). As far as the ‘war
on terror’ narrative is concerned (see also Wibben 2016b), it is clearly not enough to simply
ask for women to be included, whether as objects or agents of intervention, but we always
have to ask how that inclusion takes place. Narrative analysis can help tease out the nuances
of particular representations and provide revealing evidence.
A third example that highlights the necessity of a feminist narrative approach to security
is the political violence and struggle of the Maoist/Naxalite movement in India and the
question of women’s participation in it. United under the umbrella of an organization called
the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the Naxalite movement is a group of women and
men from economically and socio-culturally marginalized populations. Members of the
group perceive the Indian state as a neoliberal and upper-caste oppressor that marginalizes,
loots, and kills in its quest for natural resources, land, and political power (Parashar 2013:
622). The male leadership of the party and the movement insist that the ‘people’s war’ they
are waging also aims to obliterate patriarchy and the subjugation of women (Mehta 2012:
203). Dominant security narratives perpetuated and supported by the Indian state as well as
traditional security analyses construct the Maoists/Naxalites as ‘deviant’ citizens that are the
greatest internal security threat to the country (Ramana 2008).
While these analyses are predominantly gender-blind, they remain perturbed by the parti-
cipation of women in armed conflict and violence, theorizing women as “victims” of male

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cadres, who are not only instrumentalized into joining the movement but are also routinely
subjected to sexual violence within the movement (Mehta 2012: 203). Left-wing and feminist
activist responses to these dominant security narratives examine the larger structural violence
faced by marginalized communities across India and highlight the brutality of the state’s
military/paramilitary excesses in the name of counterinsurgency and security (Bhatia 2006;
Sundar 2006; Roy 2010). Feminist narrative approaches that draw on grassroots, activist, dis-
cursive, and ethnographic knowledges and are grounded in the intersectionality of gender,
caste, and class (can) offer an even more nuanced understanding of the Maoist movement
and the experiences and politics of its members. Problematizing knowledge claims and
binaries put forth by both the state and the male leadership of the Maoist/Naxalite movement,
feminist narrative research seeks to find the difficult “middle path” to understand women’s
participation, roles, and politics in this armed conflict (Parashar 2016: 42). Feminist scholars
not only question the state’s conception of citizenship, (in)security, threat, violence, develop-
ment, and its counterinsurgency excesses, but also draw out the gender- and caste-based
contradictions, exclusions, and violence within the Maoist movement (Mehta 2012; Parashar
2016).
Capturing women’s multiple experiences in this movement in a “war collage” that blurs
and juxtaposes “high and low politics, places, and people” (Sylvester 2013: 126), feminist
narrative approaches assert that here “there are no linear stories, no dominant emotion, no
binaries between victimhood and agency, and plenty of gray areas between their [women
insurgents’] traditional gender roles as wives and mothers and as combatants and militants”
(Parashar 2016: 45). Paying attention to silences, emotions, bodies, the everyday lives and
experiences of Maoist women, and the relationships between the researcher and the
researched, feminist narrative approaches examine interviews with Maoist women as well
as various other sources such as their songs, poetry, fiction, visuals, films, autobiographical
writings, and political speeches and commentaries (Mehta 2012; Parashar 2016). They assert
that although this armed conflict enables certain shifts in traditional gender norms and roles
and opens up spaces for mobilization of female cadres, women in the movement were largely
foot soldiers who provided logistical support and cultural legitimacy while being excluded
from larger decision-making and leadership roles in the party and movement (Mehta 2012;
Parashar 2016). Women joined the movement for various personal-political reasons (including
ideology, unemployment, and as a means to resist patriarchies in society and find ‘safety’ and
‘security’ from state violence). However, they continued to face both class and caste patri-
archies and violence in ‘mainstream’ society as well as various exclusions and violences within
the movement (Mehta 2012; Parashar 2016). Their participations were varied and adapted
to the overall male-formulated strategies of the movement. Women also departed the move-
ment for various reasons, including the exclusions they faced within the party. Women’s
bodies in the movement are thus sites of a continuum of violence, which also extends to the
anti-Maoist and counterinsurgency operations of the state. As the Indian state seeks to ‘elimi-
nate’ or ‘rehabilitate’ the ‘deviant’ Maoist citizens, women bear the brunt of state harassment,
abuse, torture, sexual violence, and exploitation that is rampant in the military/paramilitary
operations (Mehta 2012; Parashar 2016).
As all of the three aforementioned examples have demonstrated, feminist narrative appro-
aches uncover the contested and changing meanings of security and insecurity and highlight
how these intersect with categories such as gender, class, caste, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.
In doing so, gendered security narratives also address bigger questions about power in the
disciplines of Security Studies and IR (as well as Gender Studies) – whose stories get told
and why? Whose narratives are excluded? What binaries are used to sustain stories and why?

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What is lost with these exclusions and binaries? (Parashar 2016: 51). These are questions
without which we cannot begin to fully comprehend the world we inhabit.

Limits of narrative approaches

Gendered security narratives tell complex and difficult stories of the world around us. As
mentioned in the earlier sections of this chapter, gendered security narratives enable different
ways of thinking about the world and the politics of security, violence, and peace. However,
scholars who engage with these narratives and who use narrative as a form of writing and
knowledge production (must) grapple with a variety of ethical dilemmas that function as the
possible limitations of these approaches.
Here, we must begin by asking the basic questions: Whose stories are we telling? To whom?
Who benefits from these narrations and analyses? Why are we telling these stories? How are
we telling them? Since there will always be stories that continue to be untold or unheard, we
need to further examine why they are omitted. We should ask: What stories are we choosing
not to tell and why? Whose voices – and therefore stories – are we unable to hear because of
our biases? As we offer varied ways of thinking about the world and shed light on a multi-
tude of power hierarchies, positionalities, privileges, and politics, we must always remember
in the process of telling and analysing stories, we remain hindered by blind spots around the
intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, caste, ability, etc. As shown by the examples in
the previous sections, feminist analyses are also limited and at times reproduce problematic
assumptions.
We need to acknowledge that narratives about security are not easy to read and write. They
involve trauma, violence, intense emotions, embodied experiences, and stories that are often
far out of our comfort zones. How do we mediate someone else’s experience of security,
of conflict, of violence, of peace, and of trauma while acknowledging the distortions we bring
to it? How do we write emotions and embodied politics? What are the effects of (secondary)
trauma on our researcher-selves? Especially when we write auto-ethnographic narratives
of security, how do we address the need for self-care? At the same time, how can we prevent
our exercises in knowledge production from turning into practices of navel-gazing and self-
indulgence? Finally, it is important to remember that even though we challenge dominant
narratives about security, we also continue to be complicit in the production and maintenance
of various gendered and racialized hierarchies inside and outside the academy. How do we
engage with and subvert hegemonic narratives while acknowledging our role in their
perpetuation?

Conclusion
Overall, critical feminisms take seriously the multiplicity of women’s lives, interests, and ideas
and highlight the difficult political questions at stake. As Carol Cohn (2013: 2) highlights
in relation to war: “The diversity of women’s experiences of and relations to war are due
to both diversity among women and among war.” Additionally, “women are also thinkers
who make their own sense of the multiple social, cultural, economic, and political forces
which structure their lives” (ibid.). This multiplicity consequently “gives rise to contradictory
interests among women [which means that] attempts to generalize about ‘women and war’
[. . .] always run the risk of doing conceptual violence to the realities of women’s lives”
(ibid.). To maintain the necessary contextual specificity, as well as to be able to offer multiple
points of view and highlight complexities, we argue for sharing/creating a multiplicity of

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 Akanksha Mehta and Annick T.R. Wibben

narratives. Crucially, when multiple narratives circulate, there is also room to “oppose the
terms of power and authority circulated and recirculate in discourse” (Shapiro 1988: 19) by
highlighting different storylines and insisting that they do not all have to align neatly.
It is important to stress – as we have done above – that thinking about gendered insecurities
through narratives is actually not a new approach, but rather a really old one. The work of
Anzaldúa, quoted at the outset of this chapter, is one example of writing on the identity–
security nexus, integrating not just poetry but also writing in a multiplicity of languages to
capture the variety of narrative standpoints. I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú 1983) is another
example in the genre of testimonio that is not a recognizable text about security as far as Security
Studies is concerned, but it clearly deals with the relevant issues. Meanwhile the work
of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, which attempted to write disappeared resistance fighter
Zoulika Oudai back into existence, further reveals the importance of the literary imagination
for feminist work rethinking security (Doubiago 2016). Indeed, it is possible to read much of
women’s storytelling in this way. That this work has long existed but is not, generally, read as
pertaining to security (even in feminist circles) is indicative of broader disciplinary questions
about whose work and in which formats gets taken seriously. The increasing attention to
narrative(s) in (Feminist) Security Studies, and IR more broadly, is hence both exciting and
revealing.

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 5
GENDER, FEMINISM,
AND WAR THEORIZING
Laura Sjoberg

Many of the traditional locations of war theorizing in disciplinary political science tend to
ignore gender and feminism, or to treat them as tertiary in the meaning, causes, and consti-
tution of war. For example, the journal Security Studies had, through the mid-2000s, never
even incidentally published the word ‘woman’. Several overview articles or textbooks on
war theorizing either do not address gender at all, or footnote a few places where they note
that it is possible that men and women might behave differently in particular situations. On
the other hand, war theorizing has not always been the most comfortable ground for feminist
analysis, given both the strong history of feminist pacifism and the association of war theo-
rizing with a particularly narrow, disciplinary notion of the study of war. Feminist thinking
about war has often mixed activism, pacifism, creative methodology, artistry, and the like
– where ‘war theorizing’ feels like a classification that captures and sanitizes a small part of
that work.
So the potential for feminist war theorizing seems grim, and fraught with tension.
Carol Cohn (2011) made a distinction in the term “feminist security studies” – where she
commented that work in that field looks different depending on which two words you
group. In Cohn’s (2011) view, feminist “Security Studies” represents a feminist approach
to the traditional subject matter and practice of the scholarship of Security Studies, while
“feminist security” studies represents an approach that puts feminist analysis of security first.
This chapter explores feminist war theorizing from both sides. It begins with feminist ‘takes’
on traditional war theorizing. A second subsection considers what might look different about
war theorizing that puts feminism first. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the history
and trajectory of feminist war theorizing.

Feminisms on war theorizing

War theorizing within Security Studies has many dimensions – theorizing about the nature
of war, about the causes of war, about the practices of war, and about the impacts of war.
Feminist theorizing about war has been present since well before feminist theorizing entered
International Relations (IR) in the mid to late 1980s, but this chapter will focus on the work
that has been either explicitly engaged in IR or been used in IR work. It has chosen that
focus because IR debates about sex, gender, and sexuality often either lag behind or represent

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partially scholarship in Gender Studies, or even in cognate disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences. Feminist work in IR is that work most likely to explicitly engage with, or
implicitly critique, IR and Security Studies’ theorizations of what war is, how it happens,
and what its impacts are.

Feminist foundations
Perhaps the earliest work that had an impact on IR and addressed the relationship between
gender and violence came in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three works stand out as
exemplars: Susan Rae Peterson’s (1977) analysis of the “protection racket”, Cynthia Enloe’s
(1983) understanding of militarized masculinities, and Betty Reardon’s (1985) analysis of
sexism and the war system. I mention these three works because they contribute important
key ideas that continue to be reflected in feminist work theorizing war.
Sue Rae Peterson made the argument that discussions of the responsibility to protect women
from violence can be seen as a ‘racket’ where masculinity is tied to claims to protect women,
and the actual protection of women is secondary or even irrelevant. In plain language for IR
purposes, states will commit political violence claiming their purpose is to protect women and
children ‘back home’, and will seek and receive recognition for the claim even when the
political violence, on balance, increases risk to women. This understanding has been crucial to
the development of feminist work on the multiplicity of gendered impacts of wars (e.g., Cohn
2013), gendered claims for war justification (e.g., Cooke and Wollacott 1993; Sjoberg 2013),
and the use of images of female civilians to justify or claim humane treatment of civilians (e.g.,
Carpenter 2005; Sjoberg 2006).
Cynthia Enloe (1983), asking “Does khaki become you?”, looks at the ways that militar-
ization in social and political realms can shape women’s lives and structure gender relations.
She outlines many of the roles that women play in wars and conflicts that are often invisible
in historical, analytical, and even media coverage of those events. In addition to traditional
understandings of women as the civilian victims of war, Enloe suggests that women can be
found in many other places: as nurses, as army wives, as prostitutes, as workers, and as sol-
diers. Enloe contends that recognizing women in these many roles in war and conflict could
easily (and incorrectly) lead to the conclusion that war is becoming less gendered, and less
gender-oppressive. She argues instead that the institutions of war and conflict do not become
less gendered simply by the inclusion of women in their already-gendered structures and
functions. Instead, those institutions structure the (gendered) experiences of their parti-
cipants. Enloe then argues that militarization can be seen not only in the roles that women
have in war and conflict, but also in times that scholars and citizens alike might otherwise
consider peaceful. Looking at everyday phenomena, from the shape of the noodles in a can
of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup to the ways that town economies can be built around
military bases, Enloe shows that the gendered implications of war and conflict are much more
wide-ranging in time and space than the traditional boundaries of a geographic location and
a start and end date for a war. She also suggests that the variety of gendered implications,
from educational and job constraints to impacts on social structure and from sex-differential
military rules to sex-differential pressures on patriotism, are wider than was previously
accounted for in accounts of the victimization of female civilians. This understanding has
been crucial to work exploring the gendered structures around female soldiers (e.g., Richter-
Montpetit 2007; MacKenzie 2009; Brown 2012), representations of women’s political vio-
lence (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; McEvoy 2009; Parashar 2014), and explorations of gendered
militarization (Cockburn 2010; Sjoberg and Via 2010; Golan 1997; McClintock 1993).

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Betty Reardon’s (1985) Sexism and the War System proposes that militarization and
sexism are not just related, they are co-constituted. Discussing what she identifies as the
“militarist-sexist symbiosis”, Reardon characterizes misogyny as the “mother’s milk” of
militarism (1985: 52). Looking to point out the “need for an integration of feminist scholarship
with peace research in order to overcome the inadequacies of each in their separate attempts
to abolish respectively sexism and war”, Reardon (1985: 1, 5) argues that sexism could not
exist without militarism, and militarism could not exist without sexism – that they are inter-
dependent manifestations of the common problem of social violence. Reardon goes on to
analyse the ways in which the “war system” – the competitive social order that fuels conflicts
from arguments to large-scale wars – is produced by the same forces that produce male and
masculinized dominance in social and political structures. She contends that this war system
pervades not only interstate relations but also everyday life, and that it does so in gendered
ways. To address these issues, Reardon suggests that feminists and peace researchers join
forces, making war theorizing more central to feminist analysis and making peace research less
of a male-dominated field. Like Enloe, though, Reardon does not see this being accomplished
by the addition of female researchers to the cadre of those who do peace research. Instead,
she (1985: 76) suggests that there is a “Cartesian trap” where the epistemological referents
of peace research need to change to allow it to understand the (gendered) war system.
Reardon argues that feminist thought is transformative both for how war and security are
conceptualized, and for how they can be researched. An understanding of a fundamental
relationship between sexism and the war system can be seen in feminist work analysing the
gendered nature of security discourses (Shepherd 2008; Kronsell and Svedberg 2011; McLeod
2015; Stern and Zalewski 2009), the relationship between feminist scholarship and peace
research (Confortini 2006; Tickner 1992; Pankhurst 2012), and the relationship between
feminist activism and the achievement of peace (de Alwis 2009; Confortini 2012; Berkowitz
2003).

Feminist ‘takes’ on war theorizing

There is not just one feminist approach to theorizing war, and not just one feminist theory
of war. Instead, there have been many feminist approaches to thinking about what war is,
what causes war, how wars are constituted, how wars impact people, and how to think about
wars in normative and practical terms. These works are, of course, too numerous and too
diverse to do justice to in a short chapter on feminist war theorizing. Instead, using the
methodology of feminist sociologist Nilufer Göle (2000), this chapter will discuss various
‘snapshots’ of feminist war theorizing. These snapshots will discuss a work within a parti-
cular approach in some detail, mentioning, where relevant, other similar works, to give some
context for the diversity of ways that feminists have contributed to knowledges about wars
and conflicts. This section features five such snapshots: Annick Wibben’s (2010) Feminist
Security Studies: A Narrative Approach; Laura Shepherd’s (2008) Gender, Violence, and Security;
Katherine Moon’s (1997) Sex among Allies; and Swati Parashar’s (2013) ‘What wars and “war
bodies” know about International Relations’.
Wibben’s (2010) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach suggests that one of the
most important contributions feminisms can make to thinking about war and conflict is to
challenge the inherited meanings in both the theory and practice of security. In opening the
book, Wibben suggests that the narratives of security that often receive attention, both in
the mainstream of the field of scholarship that studies war and in the policy world, are often

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narrow discourses that take gendered assumptions so for granted that they are often barely
visible in (rehearsed) discussions. As Wibben (2010: 1–2) argues:

[T]he question of a shared understanding, or normality, is central to feminist inter-

ventions . . . [b]ecause feminist theorizing starts from women’s experiences of everyday
life, . . . resistance to abstraction, . . . a corrective to the generalizing and universalizing
tendencies in traditional science.

In other words, feminisms are in the simultaneous business of deconstructing the universalized
and gendered elements of traditional theories of war and conflict and bringing attention to
the narratives of security in everyday life that the gendered nature of traditional narratives
makes invisible. Since narratives can make meanings, express intentions, and legitimize
actions, Wibben (2010: 2) argues that feminist war theorizing (with feminist security theoriz-
ing more generally) should focus on the content and form of war narratives. Wibben (2010)
uses this approach to thinking about security to analyse the relationships between nationalist
narratives and gendered accounts of security. Other scholars have looked at gendered
narratives in the framing of what sort of security is provided (Gjørv 2012), the inclusion of
female peacekeepers in deployed forces (Karim and Beardsley 2013), the gendered nature
of security narratives in Serbia (McLeod 2015), and gendered discourses of private security
companies in global politics (Eichler 2015).
Laura Shepherd’s (2008) Gender, Violence, and Security also pays attention to the narratives
around security, but with particular attention to the relationship between (gendered) violence
and security – where (gendered) violence is defined, in Judith Butler’s (2004: 35) terms as
that which “emerges from a profound desire to keep the binary order of gender natural or
necessary”. Feminist attention to the study of security, then, should “study the subjects
produced through gendered violence in the context of debates over the meaning and content
of security” (Shepherd 2008: 2). In Gender, Violence, and Security, Shepherd (2008) performs
a poststructuralist feminist reading of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 to
think about the relationship between (international) security and (gender) violence as a
complex, co-constitutive one. Shepherd argues that the resolution is undergirded by a liberal
notion of gender (and politics) which produces and reproduces an essential subject of
‘women’ as a group which is homogenized by the assumption of the essential commonalities
of pacifism and an interest in the social good or social order. Put straightforwardly: the very
deployment of women and femininity in a limited and essentializing frame in the interest of
peace is an instantiation of gendered violence. Shepherd (2008) uses this understanding to
suggest that the constitution of (international) security as something to which (a particular
notion of) women are essential is part of the gendered violence it nominally looks to eradicate.
This careful deconstruction of assumptions about women, gender, war, and security is a
key snapshot of feminist poststructuralist war theorizing which demonstrates that the
deconstruction of settled gender binaries is key to understanding not only war, but broader
relationships between gender, violence, and security. Helen Basini (2013) has used a similar
approach to think about disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration strategies in ‘post-
conflict’ Liberia. Other scholars have examined the relationship between motherhood and
political violence (Åhäll 2015), the global governance of refugees (Olivius 2016), campaigns
against nuclear proliferation (Eschle 2013), and counterinsurgency practices (Dyvik 2014).
Poststructuralist feminist theorizing has also been done on the co-constitution of sexuality and
the nation (e.g., Weber 2016) and the violences that can be involved in political inclusions
(e.g., Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 2013) as well as claims to sexual equality (Picq and
Thiel 2015).

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Katharine Moon’s (1997) Sex among Allies predates both Shepherd’s and Wibben’s books,
and includes some different elements. Sex among Allies traces the parallel and related evolutions
of US–Korea security relations and the evolution of law and practices around camptown
prostitution in Korea. Using the combination of ethnographic interviews, historical analysis,
and policy analysis, Moon (1997) contends that camptown prostitution was a subject of
interstate security, and interstate security was integral in constituting the ways that camptown
prostitution was structured and functioned. She argues that international security was both
sexualized and economized, and that both sexual relationships and economic ones were
securitized. While ‘war theorizing’ has traditionally been done at the level of states or state
leaders, Moon (1997) makes the case that ordinary people’s lives were both the locus of the
conflict and impacted by the conflict. This understanding is evident in other feminist work
that looks at the everyday in security issues, including work on everyday terrorism (Pain
2014; Gentry 2015; Innes and Steele 2015), everyday insecurity (Blanchard 2003), and
women’s bodies as weapons of war (Sjoberg and Peet 2011; Cohn 2013; Sjoberg 2013).
Other scholars have also looked at the inter-relationship between political economy and
security issues conceptually (Tickner 1992; Whitworth 1994; Marchand and Runyan 2010).
Swati Parashar’s (2013: 615) ‘What wars and “war bodies” know about International
Relations’ argues “that war is not a disruption of the ‘everyday’, an abstraction that has a
definite beginning and end”, but “war shapes the banal and the fervent”. Parashar (2013)
looks at war in the everyday and the everyday in war, but from a very different perspective
than Moon’s piece. Parashar’s (2013) article starts with the observation that it is strange how
central war theorizing is to disciplinary inquiry in IR given how unfamiliar most IR theorists
are with living war. She then suggests that those who are situated within, or across, wars and
conflicts, have a different and richer knowing of the international, and the wars within it, than
those who would study it with data extracted from those happenings in various ways. Parashar
(2013) argues that looking at war from the perspective of ‘war bodies’ changes the questions
war theorists should ask – where people who live wars are less interested in how wars begin
and end, and more interested in how they work – everyday life inside wars. She then extends
the argument to contend that war theorizing should focus on war bodies which are “dead,
decapitated, abused, and brutalized” because those flesh-and-blood bodies are at both the
literal and figurative center of wars (Parashar 2013: 620). Parashar’s (2013) account of war
starts from embodiment and experience, looking both at those issues generally and at their
gendered origins and implications. Other feminists have looked to theorize war and violence
as experienced (Sylvester 2012; Dyvik 2016; Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah 2016) and
embodied (Wilcox 2015; Crane-Seeber 2016; Daggett 2015).
These various feminist ‘takes’ on war theorizing have some things in common – a focus
on gender, an interest in broadening or even casting aside traditional approaches to theorizing
war, and attention to the margins of the international not only in their own right but also
to understand the implications of and for what John Mearsheimer (2001) calls “great power
politics”. Still, their epistemological, ontological, and even political divergences suggest that
there is not just one feminist theory of war, but many. I have presented them in this section
as ‘takes’ on theorizing war because I think that each approach (along with many others that
could not be detailed here) has something to offer, and what they have to offer cannot be
confined or adequately described by trying to categorize sub-paradigms of different types of
feminist war theorizing. Instead, resisting the traditional metrics of disciplinary inquiry which
urge classes, categorizations, and boxes, I mean to suggest that many feminisms have many
different approaches to war theorizing, which together (even when incommensurable) and
separately offer a wide variety of tools for studying war that are not available when feminist

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perspectives are ignored or diminished. The next section looks to consider some of the things
that can be learned from an amalgamated group of (sometimes incommensurable) feminist
theories of war and conflict.

Foregrounding feminisms in feminist war theorizing

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Carol Cohn (2011) suggested that there
is a significant difference between feminist ‘Security Studies’ and ‘feminist security’ studies,
even though each uses the same three words as a descriptor. The former, Cohn argues, takes
as a given a pre-existing field of inquiry ‘Security Studies’ and tries to intervene in its preset
terms of debate in feminist ways. The latter thinks about what security might look like from
a feminist perspective. Similarly, I argue that taking mainstream (or even critical) ‘war theo-
rizing’ as a starting point for feminist ‘war theorizing’ looks fundamentally different from
‘feminist war’ theorizing. Much of my previous work has done the former – looked at the
existing body of literature theorizing war, and tried to make interventions taking various
assumptions from that literature as givens (e.g., Sjoberg 2012, 2013). This chapter is interested
in thinking about the implications of the former – how foregrounding feminism in the
analysis of war has been able to (and can continue to) change the terms of the debate.
The first way that foregrounding feminisms in theorizing war shapes war theorizing is
that it has a profound effect on thinking about what war is. Whether feminist theorists start
thinking about war from women’s experiences (e.g., Cohn 2013), theorize war bodies (e.g.,
Parashar 2013), or think about the gendered implications of militarism (e.g., Enloe 1983;
Sjoberg and Via 2010), they almost universally suggest that wars are not things that have a
discrete beginning and end as many traditionally histories assume. Instead, looking at everyday
violence (e.g., Pain 2014), sexual violence (e.g., Baaz and Stern 2009), and military practices
(e.g., Sasson-Levy 2003), feminist theorists have demonstrated both that militarism is the
norm rather than the exception in social and political life, and that conflicts have impacts
both before they ‘start’ and after they ‘end’, if either really happens at all. Along with
suggesting that the timing of war is longer and less clear than many other war theorists realize,
feminist theorists then argue that the scope of wars’ reach is larger than many war theorists
acknowledge. War reaches into homes, jobs, social relationships, nutrition, health, gender
relations, sexual relations, environmental surroundings, and many other areas traditionally
considered outside of the reach of war theorizing. Feminist scholars have also suggested that
the theoretical line between ‘war’ and violence which is ‘not war’ can be arbitrary, empirically
problematic, and normatively problematic. Instead of ‘war’ being some privileged (often inter-
state) unique form of violence that connotes emergency, feminist theorists have suggested
that states, non-state actors, and even individual people are involved in everyday wars and
everyday terrorism that matter for safety and security. As such, many ‘feminist security’ takes
on war theorizing can provide a basis for thinking of ‘war theorizing’ as a part of broader
feminist theorizing on violence, and can serve to critique and reconstruct the object of war
theorizing.
A second way that foregrounding feminisms in war theorizing can shape how war is
thought about is that feminism explicitly looks to identify where and how gender matters in
wars. Feminists have suggested (e.g., Sjoberg 2013) that gender is essential to every part of
thinking about a war, from the causes and consequences to the nature of war, and from the
experiences of war to the stories that are told of wars. Here, many feminisms contribute
many different ways in which gender matters (e.g., Shepherd 2014). Some feminist research
has looked at where women are in wars (e.g., Enloe 2010), how women are involved in

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wars (e.g., Sjoberg and Gentry 2011), and how women experience wars (e.g., Cohn 2013).
This work suggests that the causal accounts and histories of wars most traditionally told both
by scholars and more generally were written largely by men for men with an interest and
narrow focus on men’s experiences. It suggests that looking for women in wars not only
uncovers the experiences of half of the population that was previously neglected, but also
shows different dimensions to war and conflict. However, feminists thinking about war and
conflict have been careful to suggest that it is not only women who have gender. This has
resulted in a number of studies of men and masculinity in war and conflict (e.g., Cohn and
Enloe 2003; Hutchings 2008; Belkin 2012), as well as studies that pay attention to the ways
that gender, rather than sex, operates in war and conflict.
By paying attention to the ways that gender, rather than sex, operates in war and conflict,
I mean that many feminist researchers who focus on war and conflict look to see how
masculinities and femininities operate in the discourses and narratives surrounding war; in
the decisions that war-makers make around strategy, tactics or logistics; and in the ways that
people understand war. Scholars have looked at how war shapes femininities (e.g., Enloe
1983), how feminization functions in war (e.g., Peterson 2010; Sjoberg 2013); and how wars
affect gender roles and vice versa (e.g., Cohn 2013). But feminists have also suggested that
it is important to understand that gender is neither a binary (male/female, masculine/
feminine) nor a scale (from masculine to feminine) (e.g., Shepherd 2008). Instead, feminists
studying war have observed that militarisms can be simultaneously masculinizing and
feminizing (e.g., Eichler 2011), and can be queer or queering (e.g., Weber 2002, 2016).
Seeing gender in war is not just a matter of locating where men are and where women are:
it is about complex matrices of bodies, performances, and social forces, and their multifaceted
and multidimensional genderings.
A third way that foregrounding feminisms in war theorizing has a unique intellectual
footprint is that thinking about gender in war and conflict often opens up war theorizing to
a host of concerns that traditional war theorists did not find relevant. An early feminist
theorist in IR suggested that feminist work is by definition concerned with the position not
only of women but of everyone who is socially subjugated (Brown 1988). Others (e.g.,
Tickner 1992; Steans 1998) have argued that feminist research is interested not only in gender-
based emancipation, but in emancipation more generally. As a result, feminist scholars have
found wars not only in brothels (Moon 1997) and beauty parlours (Enloe 2010), but also in
homes (Cohn 2013) and prisons (Richter-Montpetit 2007). Feminists have looked to theorize
war through decolonization (Dixit 2014), sexuality (Weber 2016), and class (Chowdhury
and Nair 2003).
These are just a few of the lessons that can be learned from individual pieces of feminist
research doing war theorizing as well as from the work as an aggregate. Each of these lessons
interrogates the scope, substance, and normative direction of traditional war theorizing, and
raises questions about what a useful starting point for thinking about war might be. While
traditional war theorizing might start at histories of diplomatic relations, feminist work has
shown that starting at gender, at intersectionality, and at the everyday provides a potentially
richer bank of resources with which to understand what war is and how it works.

Looking back and looking forward to feminist war theorizing

Feminist scholars who theorize war have not only interrogated what war is, how it might be
studied, where women and gender are in war and conflict, and who else might be marginal-
ized in either wars or the discourses around them. Feminist work has also fundamentally

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questioned what it means to theorize. If Carol Cohn (2011) suggested it is important to

distinguish ‘feminist security’ studies from feminist ‘Security Studies’, I argue here that it is
equally important to distinguish feminist ‘war theorizing’ from ‘feminist theorizing’ war.
In this distinction, feminist ‘war theorizing’ takes war theorizing as a given, and does that
work with a feminist lens. ‘Feminist theorizing’, however, takes on a different meaning when
we dive into feminist work theorizing theory itself. Marysia Zalewski (1996: 341) argued that
there are three ways that scholars can see theorizing: theory as a tool, theory as critique, and
theory as practice. Most traditional war theorizing uses theory as a tool, looking to leverage
it to gain knowledge of the causes of war. Most critical war theorizing uses theory as critique,
looking to leverage it to point out the fundamental flaws in the existing system. Zalewski
(1996: 346) argues, and I agree here, that many feminist theorists treat theory as everyday
practice. She suggests that “these writers do not think of theory as a noun at all, but as a verb”.
Along these lines, “theorizing is a way of life, a form of life, something we all do” (Zalewski
1996: 346).
In this sense, feminist war theorizing is not something static in books, or in snapshots, or
in lists of commonalities. It is something vibrant, alive, moving, and changing. Feminist
theorizing of war shares, and keeps, a gender lens to look at the nature, constitution, causes,
practices, and consequences of wars, in a broad definition and with a broad view. But outside
of falling within those categories, feminist war theorizing has no rules, no boundaries, and
therefore no limitations. ‘Feminist theorizing’ war is a way of theorizing as much as it is a
theoretical perspective, and both have many contributions and boundless potential.

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 6
MEN, MASCULINITY, AND
GLOBAL INSECURITY
Paul Higate

In recent years, the rise of Islamic State (IS) and their high-profile use of extreme violence in
Syria has been used to shock the public and, in turn, stimulate a militarized response from
the wider international community. For many, the violence perpetrated by IS exemplifies a
deeply visceral form of insecurity, where the use of social media by the group renders horrific
imagery instantly accessible to its geographically disparate audience. What most analyses of
this and other contemporary conflicts miss is that gender is vital to thinking about what
violence is in global politics, and that conflict should often be viewed in light of what I call
the men-masculinity-security nexus.
In this chapter, discussion of men, masculinity, and global insecurity is organized into three
main sections. It opens with an overview of men and (in)security in global politics before
considering complexity in gender identity alongside feminist-influenced explanations for
insecurity. It then considers a binary marked by forms of ‘bestial’ masculinity, contrasting a
beheading video at one end of the spectrum with an account of a rational and heroic former
soldier who travels to fight the ‘extremists’. Finally, in moving beyond the oppositional
framing of these groups as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘civilized’, respectively, this chapter argues that,
when viewed through the lens of masculinity, there is a good degree of commonality in
gendered identity and practice across contexts. The particular commonality on which it focuses
is the common perception that militarized violence is effective and desirable. Varied claims to
state or non-state group masculinity are manifested in fairly similar resorts to violence – a
perception that can inspire violent cycles of insecurity. The chapter concludes by considering
the nexus linking masculinity, insecurity and global politics theoretically.

Masculinity, insecurity and global politics

The empirical record suggests that men feature overwhelmingly in criminal activities from
low level, everyday transgression, through to transnational crime, with the latter institutional-
ized through the global, neoliberal and heteronormative orders (Griffin 2007; Weber 2016).
Invariably, it is men who deploy, control, and train militaries (Goldstein 2001), including
non-state actors such as right-wing, extremist militia (Kimmel and Ferber 2000). And it is
men who are most likely to be involved in shootings outside of the formal military context,
demonstrated in the massacres in Columbine (Consalvo 2003), Sandy Hook (Kellner 2013),

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and in the case of the killer Anders Breivik, on the island of Utoya in Norway (Van Gerven
2011). It is also (younger) men that dominate gangs and are most likely to use weapons to
inflict injury and death on others (Myrttinen 2012). As a key aspect of the wider war machine,
it is men who dominate the military-industrial-media-entertainment-network (MIMENET)
(Der Derian 2001), and it is also men who are at the forefront of the small arms trade that
has a hugely damaging impact on communities across the globe (Farr, Myrttinen and Albrecht
2009). Men are disproportionately responsible for violence against women and at certain
moments other men, in both the public and private spheres (Fahlberg and Pepper 2016). As
the masculinity scholar Raewyn Connell has argued, though not all men are rapists, it is
mainly men who rape as their experience of power and the performance of a (violent)
compensatory masculinity might provide for a sense of entitlement over the bodies of others.
Indeed, it might be reasonable to assume that men are implicated in many contemporary
global insecurities that involve not just direct violence in its physical or militarized guise
(Runyan and Petersen 1999), but also structural violence from poverty through environmental
degradation, and on to corporate irresponsibility (Galtung 1969).
While the tendency to conflate gender with women pervades popular culture and beyond,
to the level of high politics (Carver 1998), the nexus linking insecurity with masculinity has
been of justifiable concern to critical scholars of gender. Behaviours of the kinds indicated
above are made possible by constellations of power and privilege manifest in ideas, symbols,
and values associated with, though not determined by, the biological category of male. Men
can be feminized through being framed as ‘pussies’ or ‘faggots’ as noted in army training when
they fail to live up to particular standards of soldiering masculinity, and similarly women
might be undermined through their rejection of feminine values (styles of dress, haircut,
demeanour, and so forth) embodied in the label ‘butch’ (Halberstam 1998). The association
of violence with certain expressions of masculinity is of particular concern here and to large
degree is normalized, whereas the same cannot be said of feminized others who use violence;
the gender-contradictory ways female peacekeepers (Henry 2012) or female boxers (Mennesson
2000) are framed, stand as cases in point that span the military, civilian, and International
Relations contexts (Carver 2014).

Gendered articulations of the everyday

Over recent decades, scholars have questioned the malestream tenets of social scientific
thought through revealing how understandings of the social world – and in particular for the
purposes of the current chapter – security, follow masculinized logics. This critical scholarship
foregrounds everyday experience through revealing the ways in which it makes possible
global politics that turn on the marginalization of particular others, including women and
feminized men (Cohn 1987; Tickner 1992; Hooper 2001; Parpart and Zalewski 1997;
Basham 2013; Marchbank and Letherby 2013). It is the routine, from manly chats with
colleagues around the water cooler in the office to the alcohol infused post-work gathering
in the bar on a Friday evening, and from the idle banter on the golf course at the weekend,
that helps foster prized masculine social bonds (Enloe 1989).
These bonds and the authoritative social norms upon which they depend are explicitly
revered by some, or simply unquestioned by others through derivatives of Connell’s (1995)
complicit masculinities. Yet, taken together, these webs of masculinized social relations
and the logics that shape them inhere with the power to influence access to economic and
political resources for subordinate others in the case of women or marginal men. For example,
masculine norms at the heart of core militaristic beliefs conceive of the world as a dangerous

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place invariably requiring a violent response. Responses of these kinds retain their authority
even when they are implicated in future insecurity; the ascendancy of IS in Iraq post the
US/UK invasion and occupation is a case in point. Explicitly violent (and therefore,
apparently resolute approaches) are contrasted with feminized qualities of indecision argued
to signal weakness and irrationality. The compelling belief held by many that human nature
is disposed to conflict and that having enemies is a natural state of affairs normalizes the
ubiquitous trope of masculinity as protector in ways that position femininity as vulnerable
and dependent on the powerful (Stiehm 1982; Enloe 2002). Infused with ideas of masculinity,
these beliefs speak to gendered structures of feeling, seeing, and thinking that have
demonstrable influence on the international.
Consider recent military interventions through masculinized narratives that rendered
invasion, occupation, and reconstruction thinkable in the case of those states deemed to have
failed – Afghanistan in 2001 (Manchanda 2015) and Libya in 2011 (St John 2011). Many
years after these interventions, these states remain deeply insecure and the violence endured
by citizens within them continues unabated. The image of the drowned Syrian refugee child
floating face down in the Mediterranean Sea underscores the wider impact of ongoing
conflict on some of the most vulnerable citizens in areas of conflict. The forefronting of
masculinity and the continued presence of insecurity together is not a coincidence – it is
representative of the gendered nexus between masculinity, violence, and insecurity.
Whether facilitated by patriarchal (Brownmiller 1975) or fratriarchal structures (Mechling
2008), gender orders shaped by masculinity remain largely impervious to change, and the
power structures that make them possible are largely immutable. While masculinities can
vary over time and space, and their hold on popular or even strategic culture tighten and
relax, those are differences of type and degree rather than differences of structure and kind.
For example, the hegemonic warrior model around which military culture revolves demon-
strates surprising tenacity even when a greater proportion of females constitute the overall
personnel strength of these institutions. From its normalized role in systems of oppression
where it has lain undisturbed in ‘plain view’ as Aaron Belkin (2012) puts it in regard to the
US military, masculinity’s heteronormativity has been sustained through the enduring view
that gender roles are natural(ized) expressions of soldierly identity nested in maleness. Further
examples of hegemonic masculinity fuelling insecurity include the highly visible, media-
revered masculinity in positions of authority in the business world (Connell and Wood
2005), or others in a broader sense who benefit from the patriarchal dividend that signals the
myriad resources (cultural, economic, political) that accrue to men through the subordination
of women. This dividend can help explain the performance of certain kinds of exploitative
masculinity in contexts such as the academy, where we might hope to find greater awareness
and more effective challenges to the gender/power nexus. Yet (even) here, masculinized
sexual harassment, discrimination, and prejudice preserve the gendered status quo, where
feminized scholars might be denied access to positions of authority and, in turn, the potential
to contribute to wider institutional transformation.

Masculinities and complexity

Feminist scholars have taught us a good deal about complexity in masculinity, not least that
sensitivity to plurality in identity requires us to consider masculinities that, in turn, has
consequences for making sense of diverse configurations of (in)security and masculinity
(Pease and Pringle 2001). Many men actively fight for peace, while others are conscious of
their privileged status and act accordingly in positive ways to mitigate insecurities or the use

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of militarized violence – the activities of the group Iraqi Veterans against the War (IVAW)
are a case in point (Tidy 2015). Challenging masculine norms for those who self-identify as
male can sometimes attract violent forms of gendered opprobrium, since masculinity is a
somewhat precarious achievement requiring frequent reiteration and affirmation such that
threats to it are invariably heightened.
As Lois Bibbings (2009) has argued, First World War conscientious objectors (CO) should
not be seen as cowards, since the pacifist inclinations of these men was met with brutal state
violence through torture and imprisonment. And yet discourses of unmanly cowardice domi-
nated even that torture and imprisonment. Enduring this brutality required great physical
and mental fortitude, a high degree of self-belief and self-discipline – attributes that signal
not weakness, but are rather, exemplary military masculine attributes. Enthusiastically sup-
ported by a number of pro-war women, the White Feather Campaign (where white feathers
were handed to COs during the First and Second World Wars), can be seen as a direct attack
on masculinity in the case of those soldiers who were unwilling to fulfil a key civic duty as
soldier and protector of the nation (Hart 2010).
Still in the 21st century, the ‘peaceful’ work of Amnesty International – an organization
that is headed by a man – or the appointment of Linda Hudson in 2013 to the role of CEO
at the defence/arms company BAE systems, underlines complexity in gender identity. In
these illustrative examples, biological sex is explicitly decoupled from gender (or at least
gendered perception), or in more ‘progressive’ companies, feminized qualities are recast as
advantageous to businesses of traditional masculine kinds (Lyddon 2016). In other contexts,
the decoupling of sex and gender seems inconceivable to practitioners of security policy. For
example, policies intended for those who have suffered sexual violence in war are often
inconsistently applied. Victims of conflict sexual violence might be marginalized in these
kinds of intervention (Grey and Shepherd 2012), and prosecuting female perpetrators has
met with a number of obstacles (Sjoberg 2016).
Kimberly Hutchings (2008) has argued that the links between masculinity and war are
often framed in contradictory ways and, as such, invoke incommensurability in soldierly
gender identity. Thus, rather than being seen as a ‘macho’ institution, the military could be
conceived of as a highly feminized place of mutual care and domestic activity, where dense
social bonds between soldiers foster compassion and love for one another (Titunik 2008), or
where high levels of professionalism blur traditional gender divides (King 2013). The
sociologist David Morgan notes with some poignancy the ways in which British male soldiers
wept – an emotion typically associated with the feminine – as they buried their dead during
the Falkland/Malvinas campaign in 1982. The much demonized and highly evocative
grinning figure of Lynndie England holding a naked Iraqi man on a leash represents the
thoroughgoing subversion (for some) of femininity (Ehrenreich 2007), and as Tickner and
Sjoberg (2011: 2) astutely assert “gender is mapped in global politics in complicated, surprising
and multi-layered ways” demanding theoretical sophistication and specificity from the
analyst. Broadening understanding to engage race, class, age, and sexual identity reveals
further complexity in the ways that power is reflected and refracted through the prism of
identity, of which masculinity is but one element of a wider constellation of social relations
(Hopkins and Noble 2009; McCall 2005).

Masculinity and insecurity: some explanations

Framed in ideal-typical terms, the point of departure for liberal feminists who aim to chal-
lenge insecurity through specific policy approaches is the argument that women have been

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spuriously accorded a subordinate intellectual and physical status in a broader gender order
where masculinity is privileged (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). This power disparity
continues to be institutionalized in structures that render women peripheral to the central
levers of power in the corporate world, the military, the political sphere, and in many other
areas of public and private life. In response, liberal feminists argue that rather than attempting
to effect change from the margins for those institutions responsible for generating and
reproducing insecurities through gender hierarchies, they need to be ‘on the inside’ in order
to transform regressive structures. Underscored in the gender mainstreaming and critical mass
agendas (Grey 2006), liberal feminist policies can also be seen to include aspects of essentialist
feminism and poststructural feminism. Essentialist feminist perspectives tend to accord biological
difference and/or processes of gender socialization greater influence in shaping gender identity
(Steans 2013). Men are believed to be disposed to creating insecurity, whereas women are
framed as altogether more peaceful, epitomized in Jean Elshtain’s notion of a ‘beautiful soul’
where women are conceived of as ‘life-givers’ rather than ‘life-takers’ (Elshtain 1987). In this
understanding, the (over-determined) links between insecurity and gender are explained by
the inherent biological qualities of testosterone and masculine physicality; these dimensions are
rarely far from the explanatory surface in commonsense understanding (Cohn 2000).
Others suggest that expectations associated with gender and communicated to people
understood to be of one sex or another put social pressure on those who are seen as, or see
themselves as, men. For example, Joshua Goldstein (2001) noted that men were susceptible
to pressure to fight in wars from women who questioned their masculinity. Scholars have
demonstrated how ads for military recruitment (Brown 2012), routines of military training
(Belkin 2012), demands for bravery (Belkin 2012), and calls for cold killing (Cohn 1987) all
often rely on challenging the masculinity of the actor when s/he might fall short of the
expected behaviour. Still other scholars have argued that it is difficult to disentangle
assemblages of masculinity, virility, and violence (Puar 2017; Baaz and Stern 2009) both for
observers of gendered security policy and for actors inside of it.

Beasts and heroes: binary pictures of masculinities

At the time of writing, the British news media has focused on analysing the actions and
masculinities of two groups of men: those who fight for IS, and those who travel to fight
against it. While both subjects of news coverage are understood to be biologically male,
written as men, and understood through lenses of masculinities, that is where the similarities
of coverage of those two groups of men ended. The coverage of the men who fought for IS
as men characterized their masculinity as a primitive, beastly, unevolved, or uncivilized
masculinity, while the coverage of those who travelled to fight against IS as men characterized
their masculinity as a rational, calculative, brave, benevolent, and modern masculinity.

Beasts of men
At the time of writing, approximately 800 individuals had travelled to Syria and Iraq from
the UK in order to support the IS Caliphate (BBC 2016) from a total of around 30,000 from
over 100 countries (Tuck, Silverman and Smalley 2016). Contrary to the superficial
representation of these men in the media and more widely, those migrating to fight and
support IS are a heterogeneous group. For example, an influential report written in 2008 by
MI5’s Behavioural Science Unit argues that individuals who turn to violent extremism in the
case of the so-called radicalized do not have a typical profile; rather they reflect the diverse

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communities from which they originate. Many have children, do not fit the loner stereotype,
and the limited role of extremist preachers in their lives underscores their status as religious
novices. Indeed, the report argues that counter to common sense understandings, religious
identity can actually protect against radicalization. That many are married also complicates the
myth that these men are driven by sexual frustration (Travis 2008).
However, there is also evidence that a number of traditional Muslim men do accord
heterosexual activity a degree of importance in relation to the promise of so-called ‘Jihadi
brides’ as spoils of war (Aly 2015). In research that asked men to reflect on their (later renounced)
experience of Jihad, one male argued that “girls will look at me, I’m a Mujahid now”. He went
on to refer to his gun as a ‘penis extension’ (Khan 2015) and alluded to opportunities to express
a masculine, heterosexual prowess since his behaviour was no longer governed by religious
strictures. Exacerbated by poverty and a sense of emasculation, radicalization has also been
explained by attempts to ‘restore honour’ through the use of violence as a key element of a
wider narrative of compensatory masculinity (Aslam 2012). It is notable that those without
violent pasts have enacted the most brutal acts – the case of so-called Jihadi John’s public
beheading of James Foley is a grim case in point. And, in keeping with these masculine themes
is the use of anabolic steroids in the Australian context by those deemed to have been radicalized,
together with previous employment in occupations and leisure activities closely associated with
violence, including night club door bouncers and gang membership (Plummer 2014).
While those labelled as radicalized largely belie the stereotypical pathologies of ‘evil’ that
have typically come to define them, they are nonetheless framed in sensational terms in
relation to their aberrant masculinities. At their migratory peak, for example, a number of
IS fighters were referred to as Gangster Jihadis (Faiola and Mekhennet 2015), a label that
both exceptionalized and normalized them as men of dangerous, yet familiar kinds. While
this construction may glamorize them in the eyes of particular audiences, in delving a little
deeper, the analyst Shiraz Maher elicits a narrative from one of the so-called Pompey Jihadis
from Portsmouth in the UK that reveals the gendered insecurity behind such bravado.
Shiraz’s subject says, “Will you write a book about me? Send me a copy please . . . address
it to the big tent in the Syrian desert” (Maher 2014). Maher notes that this was during the
time of the so-called 5-Star Jihad, when many IS fighters in Syria would post photos and
tweets of the luxurious, ‘gangster’ lifestyle they were leading, though, the incongruous
juxtaposition of the ascetic Jihadi with Western-style decadence invoking contrasting
masculinities was contentious and questionable for some (Batchelor 2015).
Finally, IS have been particularly sensitive to the power of brotherhood in their recruit-
ment practices. For example, their online magazine Dabiq frequently features photos of men
smiling and hugging, or rejoicing in a group. Prospective members of IS are told that their
‘brothers’ will be a great resource to them, and they will spend all their time together. Unlike
what we find with many groups that use violence, IS’s approach is shaped by increasingly
degrading innovation within the context of unaccountable and autonomous masculinized
and fratriarchal sub-cultures (Higate 2012). These sub-cultures help make possible violence
of both extreme and performative kinds (Spens 2014), the latter of which has proved effective
at drawing in anti-IS fighters as well as eliciting broader militarized responses from the US
and the UK governments, among others.

Rational, bourgeois soldiers: anti-IS fighters

A small, but significant number of men with military backgrounds, a number from biker
gangs, and others with no formal affiliation have travelled to fight against IS in recent years.

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While research on these groups is scant, the work of Tuck et al. (2016) throws light on the
former soldier element of the group through a study that was comprised of 300 anti-IS
fighters with an average age of 32. They originated principally from Western states. Around
half of the overall sample was fighting for either the Syria-Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection
Movements) or Iraqi-Kurdish Peshmerga.
The tragic exploits of the former-soldier cohort has attracted the most attention from
British and international media. Unlike financial motivations driving the archetypal mercenary
figure, a key reason for relinquishing a materially comfortable life and travelling to fight IS
in Iraq and Syria in austere conditions has been the motivation to quell the evil of the enemy.
Many of these soldiers who have travelled to fight IS describe their motivation as horror at
the most brutal public acts of IS. Exemplary of this powerful catalyst to take up arms, is the
former soldier Jim, a British citizen who is both appalled and disgusted at seeing an IS fighter
holding to camera the severed head of a woman. Ubiquitous descriptions of IS as depraved,
and as an ‘evil death cult’ by the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, provide
the discursive conditions of possibility for legitimizing all but the use of militarized violence
in reducing the Caliphate’s territory. As one English fighter with the YPG argued:

It’s time to get dirty 100% pure violence is needed stop this, stop tip toeing round
and start kicking in doors. Kidnap these f*ckers of [sic] the street, water board every
potential terrorist lock up and kill every one of them if you the government can’t
or won’t then let those who are willing.
Tuck et al. 2016: 21

Before his death at the hand of IS, the former Canadian soldier John Gallagher explicitly
derided pacifists, appeasement, and tolerance. His belief was that the destruction of IS
‘without mercy’ remained the only option.
Drawing on his autobiographical documentary Point and Shoot (SamsonAwesome
Documentaries 2015), Matthew VanDyke frames his role in helping to overthrow Libya’s
Muamma Gadaffi as part of a wider gendered rite-de-passage. He identifies Lawrence of Arabia
as his favourite film, and considered that helping the anti-government rebels was a ‘thrill’.
The film presents his audience with man of action imagery, within the wider context of the
Arab Spring. The US citizen VanDyke invokes the failure of the international system to take
action “and to combat those forces that seek to harm and oppress” local people (Tuck et al.
2016: 24). Former US Marine Patrick Maxwell makes explicit adventure-seeking in what he
describes as a “black and white conflict against marauders [IS]” as key motivators to travel and
fight. Invoking a historically influential gendered and national trope, he also refers to his desire
to “have a Teddy Roosevelt style adventure . . . to get a cool story out of it” (Bofetta and
Brennan 2015). Others framed the possibility that they might die on the battlefield as a form
of sacrifice.

Beyond the binary: masculinity, violence and insecurity

Both those who fight for IS and those who travel to fight against it are framed in the above
media coverage, and often in their own words, as men rather than as gender-neutral people,
and their stories are told in terms of characteristics associated with masculinities. Yet the
characteristics associated with masculinities are so divergent – the IS fighters’ masculinities
are described in terms of barbarism, uncivilization, sexuality, and uncontrollability – primitive
masculinity gone wrong. Those who fight against IS are framed (and frame themselves) as

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brave men stepping up to tasks that even their governments might be too unmanly to
accomplish – where masculinity is associated with bravery, honour, duty, rationality, and
even the responsibility to combat the primitive masculinity associated with the ‘other’.
Discussions of fighters for IS are dominated by narratives of an uncivilized masculinity, while
discussions of fighters against IS are dominated by narratives of a civilized masculinity, where
those understood as uncivilized are characterized as doing barbaric violence, while those
understood as civilized are characterized as using force.
The ways in which these differences are presented assumes numerous forms, with the
kinds of violence they are understood to use functioning as shorthand for the nature of
the actors being discussed. Yet, the dichotomized construction of evil versus good central
to the preferred meanings sketched here obscures masculinity’s role in the genesis and
sustaining of wider insecurity to which both groups contribute. Below, I will discuss several
aspects of this masculinity–insecurity nexus both generally and with reference to the examples
detailed above.

Violence and radicalization

First, many masculinities are characterized in terms of, and framed in ways that engage in
the encouragement of, various forms of militarized violence. In the example above, IS
fighters talk about the expectations of masculinities being fulfilled by defending the Caliphate
– masculine righteousness, while their opponents talk about defending the innocent Yazidi
people – masculine chivalry. Second, these characterizations are not just external to the
fighters and recruiters in news stories – they are used by the fighters and recruiters. Those
interested in engaging people in fighting appeal to the senses of masculinities of potential
fighters, and those fighting affirm narratives of their masculinity in descriptions of their
conduct. This has been seen in cases as disparate as US military recruitment (Enloe 2015),
Indian military training (Banerjee 2012), and IS online recruitment tactics (Atran 2015).
It is not just that masculinities and manhood are mentioned by recruiters and fighters,
whether in IS or in other conflicts. It is actually that ways to achieve, and prove, manhood
have been central to narratives of war and conflict for a long time. Scholars have suggested
that full citizenship in political entities has long been linked to the masculine ability to fight
to protect those political entities (Elshtain 1987). While some men remain potential fighters
and others are actual fighters, the linking of masculine protection to citizenship is age-old. In
these discourses, real men can (and do) fight for the integrity and principles of their political,
social, and even religious organizations. One comes into manhood by participating in that
protective/fighting behaviour. Those who refuse to engage in the fighting, then, are charac-
terized as less manly, or as engaging in a less ideal form of masculinity, where masculinity is
deployed “as a rhetorical device to problematize the identities” of those on either side (Kimmel
2003: 605).
We see this even more in forms of extremist violence. As David Plummer argues “it is
difficult not to conclude that masculinity is a key force that underwrites and sustains extrem-
ism” (Plummer 2014) and that, in the case of so-called extremists, masculinity is used as a
form of social and ideological capital to further their cause (Ferber and Kimmel 2008; Sirin
2015). When masculinity is either called upon or challenged, extreme behaviour can result.
For example, a number of those men fighting against IS discussed their potential death in
combat in similar terms to those fighting for IS, where dying is what ‘he has to do’ to accom-
plish a goal and fulfil his masculine destiny. This sentiment is integral to a historical masculine
trope where life is relinquished to a greater cause (Cobb 2012).

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The gendered state and insecurity

Gendered discourses of masculinity do not only directly influence calls to militarized violence
in state and non-state military groups. They are also, as discussed above, integral to citizen-
ship discourses, tropes of national identity, interstate relations, and historical narratives. Often
in global politics, the gender or perceived gender of the state is also engaged in terms that
speak directly to questions of security. Often, states or non-state actors that refuse to do vio-
lence or are inefficient in their use of violence are characterized as cowardly, weak, or hypo-
masculine – “helpless or effete” (Kimmel 2003: 608), while states that are seen as overusing
violence or engaging in brutality are characterized as barbaric or hyper-masculine. Gendered
discourses are also implicated in the search for and conquering of territory. In the case of IS,
the Caliphate is undergirded by the ideology of expansion where, quite literally, occupying
greater space remains a common feature of masculinity from the everyday, embodied-assertive
actions of individuals in public spaces, through to the abstract structure of the state that seeks
to colonize space (Bourdieu 2001). Many who travel to fight against IS engage a narrative
that resonates with the obligations of Empire referred to in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The
White Man’s Burden’, and in a broader sense US ‘manifest destiny’ that is compelled to civi-
lize the barbaric other through the use of gendered violence. Counterintuitively perhaps, the
shared logics of religious obligation and state expansion framed in civilizational terms apply
to masculine narratives on both sides of the IS conflict. They cohere around a violent hyper-
masculinity where “an emphasis on physical power and supremacy . . . is achieved . . . by the
emasculation of others . . . through [state] expansion and intervention” (Coe et al. 2007: 35).
In other words, it is not just a direct call to militarized violence that links masculinities and
insecurities in global politics. It is also that the relationship between masculinities and calls to
violence is mediated by the fact that being a real man is tied in political, social, and cultural
discourses to particular forms of militarized citizenship. Those links themselves produce
insecurity (and anxiety) in men looking to perform those masculinities, and the behaviours
that they call for and reify distribute insecurity in a wide variety of ways.

Concluding thoughts
In this chapter I have argued that, among others, IS fighters and those opposing them share
a commitment to militarized violence as the sole means by which to achieve their competing
aims of either building or challenging the Caliphate. I have suggested that these and other
calls to militarized violence frame the legitimation of a wide range of social, cultural, political,
and economic violence in terms of masculine privilege and male obligation. Crucially,
violence has been shown to be a naturalized expression of masculinity that, while promising
resolution to conflict, invariably inheres with a logic of escalation that helps normalize
insecurity. Conceived of in these terms, masculinity is deeply implicated in causes of violence
and, as such, is also important in helping us to think through alternative responses that
eschew its use. However, attempts to strip the use of violence with the authority it currently
commands from contexts that link the everyday with the international face considerable
challenges.
For example, at the time of writing and in the few weeks leading up to the British 2017
general election, the leader of the opposition Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, has been parodied
in a photo mock-up as a ‘classic hippy’ in one of the UK’s best-selling tabloid newspapers,
The Sun (Newton Dunn 2017). His less than strident support of the British nuclear deterrent
Trident and the military alliance NATO, together with a thoughtful perspective on recent

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failed military interventions in Iraq and Syria among others, is signified in the form of a
stereotypical peacenik. The long-haired Corbyn is presented in ‘ethnic clothing’ consisting
of a bandanna and waistcoat, adorned with five necklaces symbolizing peace. The backdrop
to this imagery are hundreds of signs more often seen on street demonstrations, that include
reference to climate change as part of a wider matrix of meaning linked to his vapid stance
on numerous other political issues. He is holding two fingers up in a sign of peace with the
preferred meanings framing this representation aimed at eliciting deep scepticism of a feckless
and wholly ineffective masculinity at best, and at worst a sense that the country’s national
security would be gravely jeopardized if he were to become prime minister. The latter
masculinity speaks of danger. He is neither protector nor leader, but rather ditherer inflected
with a cerebral masculinity that particular strands of British culture continue to regard warily
in ways that speak to the binaries of decision/indecision, action/inaction, violence/peace,
and in explicitly gendered terms, soft versus hard masculinity. It is these dynamics that
underpin global insecurity, to which positive change must work toward imbuing more
‘peaceful’ masculinities with an authority that they have hitherto been denied. This is a task
that begins with (sometimes difficult) conversations over the dinner table, and ends with the
usurping of belligerence in the realm of the international where masculinities demeaned as
conciliatory are recast as robust in their moment of humility.

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 7
GENDERED AND SEXUALIZED
FIGURATIONS OF SECURITY
Darcy Leigh and Cynthia Weber

Introduction
Figurations are distillations of shared meanings in words or images (Haraway 1997) that reply
upon multiple, contested, and often contradictory understandings of what get called sexes,
genders, and sexualities to make sense of and secure the world. As we outline in this chapter,
gendered and sexualized figurations are implicitly and explicitly drawn upon in security
theory and practice. Because gendered and sexualized figurations of security participate in
the organization, regulation, and conduct of international security, security scholars and
practitioners need clear theoretical and methodological frameworks to help them identify
and analyse gendered and sexualized figurations.
In this chapter, we first introduce one such theoretical and methodological framework to
identify and analyse gendered and sexualized figurations. This framework draws heavily on
Donna Haraway’s conceptionalization of figuration in the context of Feminist Technoscience
Studies and its employment by Cynthia Weber (2016) in the context of Queer International
Relations. In the second section, we put this framework to work in relation to three empirical
examples of gendered and sexualized figurations. These empirical examples illustrate: (1) how
figurations of security are gendered as masculine and feminine and are embodied in the
imagined figures of men and women; (2) how figurations of security are sexualized as
heterosexual or homosexual1 and attached to a range of sexualized understandings of perverse
and normal figurations; and (3) how figurations of security are geomorphized as inanimate,
non-human, geological or environmental sexed, gendered, and sexualized figurations of
security.

Figuration as a theoretical and methodological approach

to gendered and sexualized Security Studies
Donna Haraway’s understanding of figuration as the distillation of shared meanings in forms
or images is used by a wide range of feminist and queer studies scholars as a critical conceptual
device (Kuntsman 2009: 29). In this section, we explain Haraway’s notion of figuration. In
the next section, we will apply her ideas to sexed, gendered, and sexualized figurations of
security.

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Haraway explains figuration as the employment of semiotic tropes that combine knowl-
edges, practices, and power to (in)form how we map our worlds and understand the actual
things in those worlds (1997).2 Unpacking Haraway’s description, we are left with four key
elements through which figurations take specific forms: tropes, temporalities, performativities,
and worldings (1997: 11).
Tropes are material and semiotic expressions of actual things that express how we under-
stand those actual things. Whether they take linguistic, artistic, or visual form, for example,
tropes are akin to figures of speech that are not “literal or self-identical” to what they describe
(Haraway 1997: 11). Figures of speech enable us to express what something or someone is
like while (potentially) at the same time grasping that the figuration is not identical to the
figure of speech we have employed. This is what allows figuration to be something that both
makes representation appear to be possible and interrupts representation in any literal sense.
For no matter how much textual, visual, or artistic languages might strive to literally repre-
sent something, they always involve “at least some kind of displacement that can trouble
identifications and certainties” (Haraway 1997: 11) between a figuration and an actual thing.
Haraway’s second element of figuration is temporalities. Temporality expresses a relation-
ship to time. Haraway notes that figurations are historically rooted in progressive, eschatological
temporality because they are embedded within “the semiotics of Western Christian realism”.
Because Western Christian figurations hold the promise of salvation in the afterlife, they
embody this progressive temporality (Haraway 1997: 9). This medieval notion of developmen-
tal temporality persists as a vital aspect of (some) contemporary figurations, even when con-
temporary figurations take secular forms (e.g., when it is science, not God, that promises to
deliver us from evil through technological innovation (Haraway 1997: 10) and when they
employ developmental time in a variety of ways). Expanding Haraway’s use of temporalities
in relation to figurations, Weber (2016) and our analysis below show that temporalities can
take far more forms in relation to figurations, with Haraway’s understanding of Western
Christian developmental temporalities being just one illustration.
Haraway’s third element of figuration is performativities. Coined by Judith Butler to
explain how sexes, genders, and sexualities appear to be normal, natural, and true, the term
performativity expresses how repeated iterations of acts constitute the subjects who are said
to be performing them (Butler 1999: xv). Applying Nietzsche’s idea that there is no doer
behind the deed and that the deed is everything (1999: 33) to an analysis of sexes, genders,
and sexualities, Butler argues that enactments of gender make it appear as if sex – which Butler
understands as a social construct – is natural and normal, and as if particular sexed bodies map
‘naturally’ onto particular genders. It is through the everyday inhabiting of these various sexes,
genders, and sexualities by everyday ‘doers’ who performatively enact them, that the
subjectivities of these doers of sex, gender, and sexuality appear to come into being. As we
will suggest in the next section, these ‘doers’ or subjectivities are understood in a multitude
of ways. They may be animate (humans) subjectivities, inanimate (non-human) subjectivities,
or even a mix of animate and inanimate subjectivities.
Once enacted, performativities do not freeze sexed, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities
and what Foucault (1978) describes as the networks of power and pleasure which are productive
of subjectivities. Rather, because each enactment is itself particular, it holds the possibility of
reworking, rewiring, and resisting both ‘frozen’ notions of sex, gender, and sexuality and their
institutionalized organizations of power.
Following Butler, Haraway argues that “[f]igurations are performative images that can be
inhabited” (Haraway 1997: 11). These figurations are never stable. For every performance
of a figuration depends upon innumerable particularities, including: historical circumstances,

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geopolitical context, spatial location, social/psychic/affective/political dispositions as well

as perceived/attributed traits (racial, sexual, classed, gendered, [dis]abled) of individuals
in relation to the figurations they are presumed to inhabit, an individual’s success, failure or
jamming of their assigned/assumed figuration as they performatively enact it, and how these
performativities are received and read by others. Because no two performative enactments
are ever identical (Butler 1999), every repetition and inhabitation introduces some, even
tiny, amount of difference. What this means is that figurations are never completely frozen,
for they are always only distilled forms or images that change – even in small ways – through
their every iteration and inhabitation. Therefore, institutional arrangements of, for example,
sexed, gendered, and sexualized securities are likewise less stable than they appear to be.
All of these aspects of performativity – in combination with how tropes and temporalities
are deployed – combine to produce the final element of figuration – worlding (in International
Relations, see Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Worlding refers to the ways we imagine and try
to represent the world through the figurations we have conjured up. As noted earlier, figura-
tions are not representations. They do not represent the world because there is never an
identical fit between a figuration and an actual thing, much less a fit with the whole world
itself. What this means for Haraway, then, is that worlding practices are as contestable as the
figurations that produce them and are productive of them (1997: 11). In their attempts to
“map universes of knowledge, practice, and power” (Haraway 1997: 11), then, worlding
practices produce what Haraway calls “contestable maps” (1997: 11) that – like figurations in
general – betray how power is mobilized to impose a particular mapping of the world that
will never quite correspond to the world itself. It is in these lacks of fit – of figurations to
actual doers and of worldings to actual worlds – where resistances to figurations and their
worlding practices are often located.

Empirical applications of figuration

In this section, we apply Haraway’s notion of figuration to sexed, gendered, and sexualized
figurations of security. First, we consider how figurations of security are gendered as masculine
and feminine and are embodied in the imagined figures of men and women. Second, we
describe how figurations of security are sexualized as heterosexual or homosexual and attached
to a range of sexualized understandings of perverse and normal figurations. Third, we explore
how figurations of security are geomorphized as inanimate, non-human, geological or
environmental sexed, gendered, and sexualized figurations of security. In each case, we show
how these figurations take the form of tropes, temporalities, performativities, and worldings,
as well as outline what investigating gendered, sexed, and sexualized figurations of security
reveals about security more broadly.

Masculinity and femininity, men and women

Militaries are key sites of figurations of security. The dominant set of gendered tropes at work
in the military are of aggressive men protecting peaceful women and of aggressive masculinity
deployed to protect peaceful femininity. The Western soldier, for example, is regularly
figured as a man embodying hegemonic military masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt
2005; Duncanson 2013). This means he is a strong, aggressive, and tough protector of the
sovereign nation-state or homefront/homeland against security threats. While this figuration
of hegemonic military masculinity is grounded in an imaginary of a particular kind of male

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soldier, it also circulates beyond the human body: national identity and security policies
themselves are regularly imagined as hegemonically masculine (e.g., Cohn 1987).
In contrast to aggressive male hegemonically masculine protectors, women are regularly
figured as “beautiful souls”, located in the homeland (Elshtain 1995). Beautiful souls are those
feminine figurations who – because they are imagined as inherently peaceful and nurturing
– are figured as in need of protection by men. These women in need of security might be
the wives, mothers, or daughters of the hegemonically masculine man (or even ‘the
motherland’). Women who do engage in conflict are therefore often figured as deviant and/
or irrational (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015: 20).
These gendered security tropes are racialized. As the Western solider appears in most
Western hegemonic discourses, for example, he is understood as white. This white man is
also often imagined as heterosexual and not disabled. This white, heterosexual and non-
disabled man must protect white women from racially darkened men and women who are
figured as security threats. Similarly, the peaceful, nurturing, feminine woman is often figured
as white. Again, she is figured as heterosexual as well as not disabled. For white women who
engage in conflict, their deviance is seen as exceptional (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). For
racially darkened women, however, violence is often seen as inevitable and as a threat to
security in itself.
Progressive developmental temporalities are central to these figurations. While rational white
men are imagined as more developed than irrational peaceful or violent white women, white
and non-disabled men and women together are figured as more ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ than
black and/or disabled figurations. All these figurations are then deployed in the service of white
security practices that ‘civilize’ and ‘develop’ the ‘uncivilized’ and ‘undeveloped’ racially dark-
ened other – or protect the ‘civilization’ of white society from ‘uncivilized’ and ‘undeveloped’
racially darkened security threats. For example, Indigenous societies where women take on more
leadership roles are perceived as undeveloped and in need of development, or as threatening the
security of settler societies (Allen 1998; St. Denis 2007). Similarly, ‘oppressed’ Muslim women
are seen as in need of rescuing from ‘unenlightened’ Muslim men (Spivak 1990). This becomes
entangled in Western rationales for and practices of war in the Middle East, as well as policing
of Muslims and other racially darkened populations in Europe and North America.
Once again, however, tracing figurations reveals contingencies and diversity: some figura-
tions are unable to develop and are permanently located ‘in the past’ within this developmental
temporality. The disabled and insane cannot, for example, be civilized. Nor can they be
hegemonically masculine military protectors of the nation. Similarly, Indigenous people and
genders are figured as either temporally fixed or, when not fixed, as inauthentically Indigenous.
In Indigenous land and self-government claims, for example, Indigenous claimants must dem-
onstrate a relationship with the past, and may not use resources for ‘new’ purposes, if their
claims to those resources are to be judged legitimately ‘Indigenous’ (Coulthard 2014; Povinelli
2015; Leigh 2014).
The temporalities that underpin these gendered figurations of security not only demonstrate
the entanglement of security, gender, and sex; they also demonstrate the contingency of
figuration. For example, the military masculinities emerging around development, peace, and
counter-insurgency operations are all arguably different to more conventional military mas-
culinities oriented to combat and conquest (Duncanson 2013; Cornish 2015). As figurations
of security change, so does the figuration of gender and sexuality.
These tropes and temporalities construct the figuration of the protector of security (the
soldier) as a figuration who is most easily (and most often) performatively inhabitable by
white, Western, non-disabled men. In the cases of military involvement in sexual exploitation,

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unchecked aggression against civilians, and extreme torturous violence against ‘opponents’,
we might say that militaries not only embrace hegemonic masculinity but take it to extremes.
When women specifically engage in this violence, we might say that women as well as men
embrace hegemonic masculinity, refusing the trope of the woman as a beautiful soul (e.g.,
in Abu Graib). At the same time, however, hegemonic masculinity can only be inhabited by
women to a certain degree and in certain ways: women who engage in violence and combat
are also seen as perverse and are denigrated through the tropes of “mothers, monsters and
whores” (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Alternatively, in anti-militarist groups such as Mothers
for Peace in the US or in activism by mothers of veteran and serving soldiers, we can see
women embracing the ‘beautiful soul’ and mother tropes. In doing so, these women reaffirm
the very tropes that often denigrate them – but do so in ways that arguably subvert the tropes
to feminist political ends.
These gendered and sexed figurations of security – in the forms of tropes, temporalities,
and performativities – combine to produce forms of worlding. This worlding, we have shown,
is grounded in and underpins racialized, colonizing, and patriarchal power relations. In the
name of security, this worlding legitimizes and often enacts settler and neo-colonialisms. This
is visible when Indigenous women lead Indigenous people in defence of Indigenous lands and
state violence against Indigenous people and land is then justified not only in the name of the
security of the society, state, or economy, but specifically against an underdeveloped threaten-
ing and barbaric Indigenous culture in which women are violent and/or leaders (e.g., in the
1999 stand-off between Mohawk and police at Oka, or the 2016 protests against Enbridge
Inc.’s Northern Gateway oil pipeline – both in Canada). This worlding also legitimizes and
enacts ongoing Western military action in the Middle East. For example, ‘improper’ gender-
ing and relationships between men and women (‘women’s rights’) were repeatedly evoked to
justify the UK invasion of Iraq. This colonial and racist worlding is, we have shown, made
visible through an analysis of gendered and sexed figurations of security and is inseparable
from those figurations.
Overall, looking at gendered figurations of security in these ways reveals how integral
security practices are to constituting gender relations and how central gender relations are to
constituting security practices. It reveals the multiple forms of power at play in security –
from the national and international to the intimate and everyday. Finally, the varied gendered
figurations of security described here also demonstrate that gender and security do not map
onto each other uniformly. Instead, relationships between gender and security are as diverse
as the racialized, non-disabled and otherwise intersectional figurations that are used to
legitimize them.

Heterosexuality and homosexuality, perverse and normal

Gender is inseparable from sexuality. The dominant set of tropes described above – the figura-
tions of aggressive white men protecting peaceful white women and of aggressive masculinity
deployed to protect peaceful femininity – are not only understood as gendered but also as
sexualized. The security apparatus and nations are imagined as a heterosexual, nuclear family:
the father protects wives, mothers, and daughters at war; the wives and mothers provide
support from home as well as producing and nurturing more soldiers (Peterson 1999, 2013;
Yuval-Davis 1997). These figurations of heterosexual husband soldiers protecting their
heterosexual wives are grounded as much in understandings of protecting the homeland/
homefront as they are in protecting the heterosexual home, which traditional security narra-
tives figure as the building block of the family, the home, the society, the nation, and the
civilization (Peterson 1999).

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In this dominant security narrative, not only does there seem be little room for homosexuals
or homosexuality, but security is actively defined in opposition to what get figured as potent-
ially perverse (homo)sexualities. This is particularly the case when sexualities are attached to
racially darkened, non-disabled or non(re)productive figurations. So, for example, the trope
of the white Western heterosexual solider must, in the name of security, protect the white
Western woman and homeland against perverse racially darkened sexualities, as he does in
narratives that justify settler-colonialism, war, and anti-migration practices (Weber 2016).
Similarly, the white Western heterosexual father must protect the (re)productive potential
of the woman, wife, mother, and/or motherland.
Developmental temporalities are central to these figurations. The perverse sexualized
‘others’ who must be saved or protected against by the West in the name of security, are
imagined as ‘undeveloped’ and in need of ‘development’. Even the growing recognition of
LGBT rights in the West is perceived as evidence of the West’s developed and progressive
nature in contrast to the underdevelopment of racially darkened populations. This is the case,
for example, when international aid is linked to recognition of aid recipients’ legal recognition
of LGBT rights, or “gay conditionality” (Rao 2012).
Once again, however, multiple temporalities are at work here and these point to the
contingencies of sexualized figurations of security. This is particularly true in the case of
the figuration of the racially darkened and disabled terrorist who is figured as undeveloped
and undevelopable, stuck forever in time and incapable of progress. This temporal figuration
of the terrorist justifies violence against so-called terrorists in the name of security that would
not be justifiable if development were possible.
Turning to performativities, we can see these sexualized figurations of security taken up
and inhabited in at least three ways. First, many Western homosexuals have taken up the
narrative of progress and development in an effort to access Western society – including,
centrally, participation in Western militaries and state-recognized family life, via “homona-
tionalism” (Puar 2007), “homonormativity” (Duggan 2003), and other diverse forms of LGBT
or queer representation in contemporary militaries (Bulmer 2013; Richter-Montpetit 2015;
Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira 2008). These figurations of sexuality with security in the
military also shape sexual and gender identities, practices, and normativities (Crane-Seeber
2016; Howell 2014; Wool 2015).
At the same time, other contemporary ‘homosexuals’ find the narrative of progress
oppressive or constraining. Those who reject this figuration object to institutions, structures
of understanding, and practical orientations that value only hetero/homonormative ways
of being ‘homosexual’ (in marriage, the military, and consumption – see Duggan 2003).
Objections to narratives of homosexual inclusion in Western society as progress also centre
on the way this narrative enacts sexualized and racialized forms of worlding. For example, by
excluding racially darkened people from homosexuality which is imagined as ‘progressive’,
‘normal’, white, or by justifying violence against ‘non-progressive’, ‘perverse’ racialized others.
Conversely, some security practices are justified on the basis of a homosexualized other, as in
US military interventions in various Caribbean states (Weber 1999).
A third and related performative orientation to sexualized figurations of security involves
exceeding the binaries assumed by those figurations. As in the men/women and masculinity/
femininity examples above, homosexual/heterosexual and normal/perverse are often figured
in binary (‘either/or’) opposition. Yet by paying attention to the specificity and contingency
of figurations, we can see that this is not always the case. As Weber (2016) and Altman and
Symons (2016) show through an analysis of the Eurovision Song Contest winner Conchita

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Wurst, some subjects performatively inhabit both male and/or female, both normal and/or
perverse, and both racially darkened and/or white European.
Each of these sexualized tropes, temporalities, and performativities of security combine
to produce sexualized forms of worlding. In addition to creating racist, colonial, and patri-
archal power relations in general (as described above), this worlding includes a sexualized
global order in which ‘good’ and ‘bad’ states are mapped onto ‘good’ and ‘bad’ homosexuals.
International relations, power and violence are then justified through sexualized figurations
of security.
Overall, then, examining sexualized and gendered figurations of security and not only
the ways that sexuality is inextricably entwined with gender and security as well as race, it
also shows the sexualized and gendered binaries at the heart of security logics. Further, this
analysis troubles the stability of those binaries and shows how they might be or are exceeded.

Animate and inanimate, human and non-human

Turning to gendered, sexed, and sexualized figurations of security as non-human or inanimate,
we might ask who or what counts as gendered, sexed, and sexualized in the first place. For
example, might figurations of the material environment, such as South Asian and South
American jungle or the Middle Eastern desert, be understood as security threats? For each
material environment is figured in gendered, sexualized, and racialized ways to authorize a
particular type of warfare against particular kinds of enemies such as the guerrilla or terrorist
(Povinelli 2015). Similarly, the ‘empty’ melting Arctic has generated renewed security
concerns around Arctic sovereignty. Historically, Arctic nations rushed to ‘fill’ the ‘empty’
Arctic with citizens to assert state sovereignty (Tester and Kulchyski 1994). In Canada,
making Indigenous people citizens – and thus securing Arctic sovereignty – meant attempting
to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian gender, sexual, and familial norms (Leigh 2009). This
further figured the perceived material environment with gender, sexuality, and security as
well as race and Indigeneity.
One of the most provocative examples of the material environment as a figuration comes
from Elizabeth Povinelli’s analysis of how a creek in northern Australia, whose Indigenous
name is Tjipel, has become a contested figuration of security among Indigenous people, the
Australian government and the mining industry (Povinelli 2015; see also Povinelli 2016).
According to some of the Indigenous women who live near this creek, the creek used to be
a girl, who turned into a boy, who turned into a creek. This means, Povinelli suggests, that
some people might call Tjipel “transgender” or “butch”, particularly in the “contemporary
fields into which her legs extend” (Povinelli 2015: 177).3 The creek’s gender is part of the
version of the creek that these Indigenous women want to preserve. But Indigenous people
must be careful about telling public stories about sexuality or gender because Indigenous
people are themselves figured as racially darkened, undeveloped, perverse security threats by
the Australian liberal state (Povinelli 2015: 176). That means that Indigenous figurations of
this creek might be used by the state to justify state claims to the creek.
What each of these examples demonstrates is that the security of the material environment
can be gendered, sexed, and sexualized. Below, we elaborate the example of the transgender
creek to demonstrate how tropes, temporalities, performativities, and worlding function in
such figurations.
Povinelli’s description of the Australian transgender creek illustrates how non-human and
geological figurations of security function through tropes, temporalities, performativities,
and worldings. The lives of the Indigenous women in Povinelli’s research are, in their

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account, inseparable from Tjipel and her gendered story because Tjipel determines much of
what is possible for them. This includes in terms of fishing, foraging, and connecting them
with their mothers as well as other Indigenous communities via oral history. This makes it
difficult to see where Tjipel’s life ends and the lives of these Indigenous women begin. These
women want to keep living with Tjipel in her current form. At the same time, some
politicians, mining companies, and Indigenous representatives want to extract natural
resources from Tjipel. Or they want to extract natural resources elsewhere in ways that would
damage her or alter her current form.
Multiple tropes circulate and are visible in Povinelli’s description of the contestation over
Tjipel. In the eyes of the Australian state, a trope of the authentic, traditional Indigenous
person is a prerequisite for Indigenous legal rights to land. This is in tension with another
trope – the welfare-claiming, money-hungry, lazy Indigenous person who would be too
modern to have rights to land. At the same time, as we describe below, implicit in the
traditional Indigenous trope is a fear for the security of the nation in the face of perverse
Indigenous sexuality. Tjipel herself embodies further tropes. For mining companies and the
Australian government, the creek is an inanimate property-like resource. For the Indigenous
women in Povinelli’s research, however, Tjipel is an animate gendered figure.
Temporalities are central to these tropes. In the dominant Australian state narrative, the
authentic and traditional Indigenous person endures from the past but is also fixed in time.
Proof of temporal continuity is, in fact, a legal requirement for Indigenous claims to land on
the basis of Indigeneity. The inauthentic Indigenous person has, however, progressed so far
into modernity that they are no longer perceived as legitimately Indigenous. At the same
time, the ‘development’ of Tjipel is seen as a civilized and civilizing move, in contrast to
efforts to sustain the creek in her current form. The mining companies and the Australian
government are also seen as civilized and civilizing in progressive time, while Tjipel’s
Indigenous advocates are seen as temporally regressive.
Performativities are key to understanding the contestation over Tjipel as well as the creek
herself. The Indigenous women who seek to maintain Tjipel in her current form must strike
a careful performative balance. As Povinelli describes, if Indigenous communities are not
perceived to have properly ‘developed’ – including in their gendered, sexual, and familial
arrangements – then the Australian state might claim authority over those communities or
even attempt to destroy them in the name of ‘development’, as settler-states including
Australia have long done and continue to do (Wolfe 2006). Thus being perceived to be
perverse is a risk that the Indigenous women who seek to maintain Tjipel in her current form
must avoid – and so, in Povinelli’s account, they avoid telling Tjipel’s full story. Yet if
Indigenous people are perceived to have ‘developed’ too much – to be inauthentic and non-
traditional – then the Australian state might not recognize Indigenous rights or claims to
land. In Povinelli’s account, this means that the Indigenous women who seek to maintain
Tjipel in her current form must also performatively demonstrate their authenticity and
tradition in order to stake a claim to Tjipel.
Through these tropes, temporalities, and performativities, Tjipel becomes a site of multiple
and contested worldings. Povinelli shows how the mining industry figures Tjipel – and land
more generally – as an inanimate geological resource with potential market value. The
Indigenous women who live with her figure her as part of a broader reciprocal relationship
between humans and non-humans. In these ways, the struggle over Tjipel is a struggle over
worlding: in Povinelli’s account ‘developing’ Tjipel means extinguishing the world in which
Indigenous people live in reciprocity with her, in favour of a world where industrializing
capitalist humans relate to land as inanimate property. These worldings enact but also contest
ongoing settler-colonialism in Australia.

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Reading gendered, sexed, and sexualized figurations of security as inanimate and/or non-
human raises further questions for thinking about security more broadly. We might ask
whether a geological formation can even be considered as a gendered figuration – not just
metaphorically but actually. Povinelli suggests that it is precisely by designating Tjipel as ‘geo-
logical’ that the security of the liberal state and Australian nation is protected against the threat
of alternate Indigenous forms of worlding. We might also ask, following Povinelli, how who,
or what, counts as a gendered and sexualized figuration more generally assumes a line between
the ‘biological’ and the ‘geological’. For example, how does that line designate proper objects
and agents of security, and what worlds does it enable or work to extinguish? Finally, Povinelli’s
analysis raises the difficult question of who or what does not count as a gendered and sexualized
figuration of security. The Australian state does not recognize Tjipel as a gendered and sexual-
ized figuration and this functions to protect the state’s security and the interests of extractive
capital along with the tropes and worldings in which they are entangled. What else is not
considered to be a gendered and sexualized figuration in the service of ‘security’? What other
gendered, sexualized, and geological figurations need not be made ‘secure’?

Conclusion
Investigating sexed, gendered, and sexualized figurations of security by paying attention to
tropes, temporalities, performativities, and worldings offers four key insights about security.
First, it demonstrates how sex, gender, and sexuality are integrated into security concerns,
while at the same time exposing the contingency, variability, and complexity of those inte-
grations. Second, it underscores the centrality of not just either/or but also and/or logics in
theories and policies of sexed, gendered, and sexualized security. Third, it expands the range
of figurations that we might understand to be sexed, gendered, and sexualized in relation to
security, from the human or animate to the non-human or inanimate. Further, it exposes how
particularly state and corporate actors attempt to narrow this range of legitimate figurations, in
the very name of security. Finally, all of these moves separately and together illustrate how
sexed, gendered, and sexualized figurations of security are always intersectionally produced and
disputed, and how these disputes can be central to contemporary formulations of power.

Notes
1 Heterosexual and homosexual do not exhaust the wide range of existing potential expressions of
sexuality, just as male and female or masculine and feminine do not exhaust the range of sexes or
genders. We examine these expressions of sexes, genders, and sexualities in our analysis because these
are the dominant expressions used at the moment in figurations of security.
2 Our explanation of Haraway condenses and paraphrases longer discussions by Cynthia Weber (2016).
3 The Indigenous women Povinelli describes do not (in her story) call the creek transgender or butch.
While we often use the term ‘gendered’ in this chapter, we have chosen not to use the term
‘transgendered’ in this instance to reflect both Povinelli’s careful situation of the term in those ‘con-
temporary fields’ and the rejection of the word ‘transgendered’ by contemporary transgender
activists.

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 8
DO QUEER VISIONS TROUBLE
HUMAN SECURITY?
Michael J. Bosia

Before feminist scholarship, work on security in disciplinary International Relations (IR)

focused – myopically, some would soon say – on the sovereign state as the key actor, and
the key object, of thinking about what it means to be secure. Among other contributions,
feminist scholars were among the first to suggest that it is important to make visible in research
those whose insecurity is often invisible to traditional, state-centric understandings of security
(see discussion in Sjoberg 2009). Building on this call for visibility, feminist scholars of human
security1 examined gendered dimensions of what it means to be secure (and insecure, a
language rarely used in traditional work on security) for people rather than states.
In this chapter, I draw from the human security framework as a way to enter the dialogue
over human security in queer terms at a time when sexual and gender minorities face
increasing violence and repression globally. Can understandings of human security through
gender lenses be re-thought and re-read through queer lenses to afford meaningful protection
to gender or sexual minorities as queer? Taking queerness as a substantive, critical lens, this
chapter examines how the sex and sexuality of gender and sexual minorities is constituted as
proscribed, producing insecurity for/in those marginalized because their conduct is what in
the West has been called queer, by its defenders and detractors.
To ‘queer’ (in verb form) human security, I argue, requires a political formulation that
is oppositional and emancipatory, with an eye toward the constitution of political risk. With
this focus, I argue, there is space (and indeed necessity) to question the framing of the state
(individually and collectively) as an ally or even advocate for rights and to examine where
state security conflicts with the security of sexual and gender minorities. Rather than main-
streaming an LGBT rights paradigm, queering security draws attention to the complex lived
experiences and (in)securities of sexual and gender minorities.
Being neither a straightforward supporter of LGBT human security or a straightforward
opponent, a queer analysis examines the “ambivalence, pretension, and ‘drag’” Sjoberg finds
in queering IR (2014: 611), as the state is at once conjured in human security as good for
sexual and gender minorities and a threat to being queer. The assessment of vulnerabilities
that security is called to address, as feminist theory points out, is a complex conversation that
implies universal social categories – such as woman – that are tied inextricably to localized
processes of identification and assessments of vulnerability. For feminists, these are embedded
in well-known and recognizable gender hierarchies that allocate security and insecurity for

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 Do queer visions trouble human security?

women (Sjoberg 2016) – in ways that might ignore gender or sexual identity outside a binary.
Though the experiences of woman vary, as do the historical factors that produce the category
of woman within a gender binary and the kinds of vulnerabilities some women face, woman
itself is a universal and paradigmatic social form, while gender and sexual identity are
conceptually fluid, contextual, and situational as lived, so difficult for a universal binary to
capture. This chapter discusses the positionality of sexual minorities in security landscapes
as foundational to an argument about the importance of queering vulnerabilities. It moves
on to discuss how this intervention alters visions of the relationships between security,
sovereignty, and the state. The chapter concludes with a discussion about how queering
security resituates people’s security.

Sexual minorities in/of international security

Sexual and gender minorities often live in processes of articulation subject to globalizing
discourses that are not yet paradigmatic locally, as these processes generate novel socio-sexual
identity categories in contexts where they are not yet well-known and recognizable. Indeed,
security and insecurity actually are dependent on evolving social ostracism tied to the intro-
duction of a sexual binary that positions a homosexual subject as hostile to a heterosexual
one. These novel forms override a gender continuum or other social and historical forms
through which same-sex loving and gender identity had previously been constituted (Murray
and Roscoe 1998; Epprecht 2008; Herdt 1997), so that the historical and the novel categories
are not themselves related and neither might at any given time or place be conclusive. In
South Korea, for example, contract marriages enable sexual minorities to fulfil their hetero-
sexual social obligations, and thus avoid ostracism and isolation while enabling some embrace
of LGBT identity and culture (Cho 2009), while marriage in Uganda for some same-sex
couples or between gay men and transwomen exists as an important social ritual, though
with significant risk and also devoid, like most heterosexual marriages, of any legal status or
claim to one.
More often than not, novel notions of a sexual binary that distinguishes between hetero-
sexual and homosexual as sexual identities, though well-known in the West, are today carried
elsewhere through the policies and rhetorics of state actors, allies, and proxies – almost always
as state homophobia (Bosia and Weiss 2013) deploying a ‘gay peril’ in order to articulate a
social danger against which state security and autonomy can be organized. In a first wave in
the 1990s, embattled leaders used criminal sodomy charges to delegitimize their opponents
and conjure a ‘gay peril’ as subversive danger that required state intervention: when Robert
Mugabe in Zimbabwe faced a declining economy, rising discontent, and pressures from
international actors, he had charges brought against the incumbent president, who was con-
victed and fled to South Africa; during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohammed subjected his own deputy to a trial after they disagreed publically about
reforms demanded by global financial interests; Egypt’s security apparatus seized and prose-
cuted 52 men on charges of debauchery in a trial broadcast nationally, just as the Muslim
Brotherhood was gaining power in civil society (Bosia 2013). After a period of denialism and
repression, during which autocrats like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni claimed that homosexual-
ity did not exist in their countries and the populist leaders in Poland and Moscow called out
the police to suppress small pro-LGBT demonstrations as part of their nationalist agenda,
state actors and allies facing rising opposition and international pressure turned decidedly
to enhanced criminal penalties for homosexuality, including laws proposed in Uganda and
Nigeria and adopted in Russia that ban any positive discussion of homosexuality. At each

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moment, state actors, allies, and proxies promulgate a relatively consistent extrapolation of
homosexuality that instructs about a sexual binary at the same time as it ostracizes out-
siders and enemies as a sexual danger to a secure state. Even where state action has not been
instigated but rhetoric is inflamed, either police violence, harassment, and extortion entrap
gender and sexual minorities, or gangs target them for beatings and torture, both often with
impunity.
Where once sexual and gender minorities might have lived discrete lives in communities
where they fulfilled their social obligations, the onslaught of state homophobia has redefined
gender and sexuality to render their lives vulnerable and in peril. During the 1950s’ Lavender
Scare in the US, it might have been police raids on clandestine bars that created insecurity
for LGBT people (Johnson 2004); today, it is online social networks where men, for example,
arrange either individual meetings or social gatherings that often provide opportunities for
police entrapment and extortion (Bosia 2015). In Egypt, the social atmosphere is so poisoned
against sexual and gender minorities that, once arrested, they have no recourse to attorneys,
human rights organizations, or family support, and disappear into the prison system (Long
2016). In Chechnya, state proxies have used counterinsurgency strategies to unlock networks
of gay men one-by-one, kidnap and torture them, and encourage their families to execute
them. In Uganda, where global NGOs have funded one of the most extensive arrays of
services for HIV prevention, treatment, and care, gay men and transwomen were largely
denied access to services until new regulations for US funding ended patterns of exclusion.
Still, they are subject to entrapment by police, the publication of their names whether or
not they pay extortion, and subsequent social isolation and death threats, and their advocacy
groups are denied the licences needed to operate.
As a result, claims to security for sexual and gender minorities are measured against state
actors, allies, and proxies as they invoke social paranoia (Bosia 2014), suggesting that such
states, as the source of the evolution of vulnerabilities against which queered security should
be deployed, would be hostile to the provision of security for sexual and gender minorities.
Indeed, sexual and gender minorities find few durable allies among states, because state
security interests can trump human security needs even among erstwhile allies (Bosia 2015),
but also because the invocation of a ‘gay peril’ by homophobic state actors can so cloud the
political climate that even regime opponents dare not advocate for sexual security needs,
even while women might organize within or against a regime (or both). In essence, sexual
security is in broad and ongoing conflict with the security needs of homophobic states and
sovereignty itself.
Closely analysing the status of the social outsider, the dissident, or the outlaw recalls
analysis of the hybrid, ambivalent, and even drag (as reproduction, pretence, and subversion)
Sjoberg points out (2014), and the clandestine networks through which such myriad forms
operate, much like notions of Indigeneity suggest forms of sociability and governance outside
the state (see Picq (2015) on the connections between sexuality and Indigeneity). To claim
security is to normalize and denude queerness, making sexual hierarchies an object of state
action (not to Indigenize them) within a sovereign apparatus that is constitutionally indifferent
to the security of sexual and gender minorities. As Weber suggests (2014), however, queering
ideas of security destabilizes the very notion of security in its measurement against insecurity
as disorder, bringing our attention to queer in celebrating the incoherent in theoretical terms
(Weber 2016) and the in between of lived sexual experience, as, for example, the outsider
already implies an inside to be outside of. In essence, I argue that queer entails some of the
very risks targeted by security, so that only through risk can we get beyond the trouble with
security.

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 Do queer visions trouble human security?

Queering vulnerabilities
As situational, the landscape for gender and sexual minorities in security is ever-changing,
and the early new millennium is no exception. Waves of a new, disconnected and modular
form of state homophobia, and the work of global LGBT rights advocates and agencies in
reaction to it, combine with broad access to the internet to provide both the homophobic
push against which sexual and gender minorities organize locally as LGBT, and the homophilic
pull of LGBT identities to access global networks and empowered allies. This is not to
say that LGBT identities are everywhere identical or everywhere meaningful. Instead, even
the adaptation of a global model of political organizing allows significant local variation
in understandings and identification, with the meanings and structures in situ shaping new
forms grafted through them.2 At the same time, the nearly universal discourse of LGBT rights
(as human rights) has structured the struggle against very real bodily insecurities in terms of
the restrictions on the state or invocations of state action embedded in the notion of rights.
Broadly speaking, the provision of security for sexual minorities is, nearly everywhere,
argued in human rights terms.
However, human rights discourses used by LGBT advocates and allied states have been
sparingly adjusted for the contexts and debates in which they get deployed, creating attitudes
that pose communal, familial, or national rights against the notions of the individual that
serve as the foundation for human rights. Scholars have offered strong critiques of the rights
agenda because of this kind of incommensurability (Thoreson 2017), because rights get tied
to a Western or imperial agenda (Puar 2007; Massad 2007), or because debates over rights
and cultural self-determination overwhelm the needs of sexual and gender minorities
(Rahman 2014). As security moves from the defence of the individual to addressing
community needs and conditions, it does so in part to address these critiques as it claims to
at least complement rights campaigns (if not supplant them), as security aims to overcome
structural patterns of exclusion or insecurity on a collective and not individual basis (Tripp,
Ferree and Ewig 2013).
Other human rights scholarship has turned to the concept of vulnerability as the organizing
principle through which rights and the claim to security they encapsulate are conceptualized
(Turner 2006; Bergoffen 2011). Like studies of insecurity, this approach identifies rights at
the intersection of social processes and bodily integrity, pointing out how violence, torture,
genocide, rape, and deprivation target human dignity by assaulting the integrity of the body.
In effect, these scholars avoid accusations of Western underpinnings by arguing that the
vulnerability paradigm improves on notions of rights as it seeks to justify the social bonds that
provide security (Turner 2006) and organize our relationships to each other (Fineman 2010).
Differently, I contend that today’s configurations of LGBT insecurity-vulnerability are
situated within contexts where LGBT rights arise at best alongside the elaboration of a gay
menace, with state and social action doubling-down in novel patterns that exhibit a range of
differences despite their similar policies and rhetorics. Indeed, whether it is through state action
(Bosia 2014) or the work of international advocates (Massad 2007), state homophobia and
global homopositivity have redefined the nature of same-sex loving to reveal the once discrete
or clandestine same-gender relationships that existed prior to these new impositions. ‘LGBT’
bodies are thus rendered newly visible and so vulnerable in new ways, and their vulnerability
is constituted as modular through remarkably similar forms of homophobic policy and rhetoric
deployed situationally – for different reasons, in different contexts (Bosia and Weiss 2013).
In Egypt, for example, transwomen, and men who have sexual relationships with men,
are being swept up in a police dragnet, taken into custody, subjected to forced anal exams,

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and then disappeared within the prison system, without access to familial, legal, or social
resources for their defence (Long 2016). At the same time, authorities in Egypt and Uganda
will cooperate with media to display queer bodies – forcing transwomen to strip before
cameras, making arrests in the company of so-called journalists, publishing the names and
photos of those accused of promoting LGBT rights (Long 2016; Bosia 2014). These processes
are imbedded in the actions of state actors, allies, and proxies – both homophobic and
homopositive – that enable non-state actors to enforce violence against sexually deviant
bodies in Russia, or that render lesbian and gay (LG) bodies less than full citizens in France
when they were deprived of the legal right to reproduction that is central to the civic
marriage to which they now have access (Bosia 2014).
As a result, queering vulnerabilities or insecurities requires a continued differentiation of
bodies in an evolving process absent an unmistakable evolutionary trajectory (Broqua 2013),
not through durable local structures of meaning contained in either LGBT rights or a ‘gay
peril’, but the impromptu organizing of novel vulnerabilities that vary across class, ethnic,
religious, and regional differences. In some contexts, for example, the relatively weak intro-
duction of either homophobia or LGBT networks still might subsume emerging sexualities
within the structures of gender, age, and class that shape bodily vulnerability (Broqua 2013).
In these contexts, effeminate men might face greater peril, social ostracism, or policing,
especially where recourse to sex work situates them alongside other gendered criminals, or as
in Egypt, when masculinity is affirmed against a variety of gendered and sexed vulnerabilities
shaped by the security apparatus. Elsewhere, the introduction of a ‘gay peril’ is transforming
sexuality by defining LGBT people in relation to, but separate from, gender, so that women’s
rights might be recognized in Uganda while policy and rhetoric renders LGBT bodies more
vulnerable, and in Egypt, the use of forced anal exams parallels the use of rape against both
men and women dissident detainees. Where policy is increasingly LGBT-friendly, sexuality
might be normalized as wholly apart from gender but sexual identity is durably contentious
– sometimes violently so – and non-normative sexuality can face new forms of criminality
and bodily vulnerability. In both France and the US, the legal availability of marriage was
accompanied by a rising wave of anti-LGBT violence spurred by political rhetoric, as well as
urban securitization regimes that fenced off, paved over, and policed public space where queer
men had found companionship, often across a variety of differences, for decades before.
At the same time, local variation in processes of what Roscoe (1997) called ‘homosexual-
ization’ provides that accusations attached to homosexuality might seem remarkably similar,
and might be dehumanizing, but the structured effects of these accusations vary. As insecurity
appeals to the collective application of human security to vulnerable bodies, these variations
in the ostracism of same-gender loving and gender diversity, or their protection, demonstrate
that collectivities defending sexual and gender minorities might currently be weakly consti-
tuted, ad hoc, or non-existent. Queering human security must then take account of not just
variation, but disaggregation, lack of consolidation, and even definitional absence. Indeed,
queer bodies can be isolated, targeted by authorities or mobs, prior to opportunities for col-
lective flight or fight, but also, where they are conjured as conspiracies, they can be collectively
vilified and officially ostracized.
While to be queer is, by definition, ambiguously oppositional drag, and same-gender loving
has been everywhere sociable though not durably collective, security points us to the necessity
of empowering collectivities that might not yet exist in an articulated, structured, and mutually
defensive fashion. Indeed, variations in the landscape of homosexualizations mean that no
universal category applies in cities and villages, in the north and the south, among men,
women, or gender minorities, or, for example, from Uganda and Kenya to Tanzania and

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Rwanda. But granting security to sexual or gender minorities because of the new vulnerabilities
they face forces a social reconsideration of sexuality, so that even when not purposefully
LGBT, organizations need to be available for sexual and gender minorities to petition if they
live in rural Thailand or urban South Africa, advocates must know whose vulnerabilities
qualify across a range of possible sexual and gender expressions, and claimants must articulate
their selves so that they know protections apply to them.
Such identity articulations risk the inevitability of a certain LGBT sexual and gender
construction, however variable, especially as advocates seek security through the application
of power from the state. The state, as sovereign, has the legal authority to offer protection
and discipline violence; against the homophobic state, it is the state itself that must change
through the recognition that sexual minorities exist and deserve protection, because of their
structured position, from the vulnerable circumstances that the state subjects them to. But
both state intervention and consolidation of identity are in opposition to queer, which
celebrates the expressions of human diversity and the possibilities of bodily relationships, so
that security closes down the very possibility of queer solidarities that are outside the state.
So how can we queer security when security requires the recognition of a consolidated
structured identity and some intervention for the state? This tension between the LGBT and
the queer in the notion of security, as the former calls forth the state and the latter operates
as oppositional, requires greater attention to the conceptualization of the state as ally.

Security, sovereignty, and the state

The provision of human security to those who are vulnerable because of their sexual
expression or gender representation requires empowered actors who can provide the material
support and structural conditions that make security possible in the world as it is right now.
That means turning to states or a specific state as benefactor and ally, so that it is the state
straddling global and local organizations and the assortment of quasi-state actors who fill the
security void. However, the state, by historical construction, is not well suited to serve as
the ally of human security for sexual and gender minorities always, everywhere, and when
necessary. The sovereign state is neither ally nor enemy of sexual and gender minorities; by
looking at queer visions of security, we can see the state’s indifference to the vulnerabilities
of gender and sexual minorities (Bosia 2015) and the necessity of a queer alternative.
Historically, the rise of the sovereign European state – and its extension globally – is a
process of social, cultural, and political construction, over time establishing the contours of
state power at the same time the state elaborates mechanisms necessary for state actors, allies,
and proxies to render human society and the natural environment understandable in ways
that facilitate the extraction of resources necessary for security in terms of bodies and material
(Scott 1998). As Scott demonstrates, the sovereign state by right and force radically transforms
a multiplicity of forms and practices into precise and ordered structures. Language, urban
planning, agricultural practices, weights and measures, for example, attend the needs of the
state through the standardization of social life necessary for the extraction of bodies and
material no matter how state institutions were characterized, the sociocultural context of
state action, or regime ideologies. Tilly (1985) argues that these expropriations are nothing
but extortion, as the state defines the dangers society faces and then imposes processes and
structures that support the development of resources the state can extract in order to secure
against those very dangers, while Peterson (2013) includes gender, sexuality, reproduction,
and labour among those resources necessarily elaborated by the state.
Human security, then, is the flip side of the state security coin, as it requires submission
to state processes and participation in the expulsion of some who are rendered exceptional

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so that others can be secure; those defined as outside of human security’s protections are
necessary as their exclusion cements uncontested sovereign rule and security within (Agamben
2005). Here we begin to see why I call the state a psychopath, indifferent to loving or
loathing (Bosia 2015):3 from the clinical definition (Cleckley 1988), the state has only its
own interests; it is incapable of empathy and indifferent to truth, but also attractive and
charming, and dynamic. Despite this confidence, the state is subject to suicidal ideation as it
invokes existential threats, warning of insecurity and demise even as it imposes security and
order. This psychopathic state, then, also is the source of sexual and gender identities
transformed in the service of re/productive social relations defined and understood by the
state, where homosexuality is exposed in public as the target of statecraft, revealing foreign
or domestic dangers as seditious conspiracy requiring a vigilant security apparatus to diagnose
and cure,4 or generating sympathetic rights that embrace certain sexual and gender minorities
on the definitional terms established by the state.
This understanding of the state compels suspicion of even allegedly pro-LGBT policies,
including processes of homonormativity where queer alternatives to acceptable LGBT identi-
ties remain at the margins as homosexuality is mainstreamed in marital, heterosexual terms
(Duggan 2002), or homonationalism (Puar 2007) and homocolonialism (Rahman 2014)
where state ambitions draw legitimacy by supporting LGBT rights against enemies seen as
backward and retrograde. Both the homophobic and homophilic state have interests and
strategies, but not true affinities. If statecraft is the consolidation of rule, possibly through the
organization of constituencies, the state is by nature largely indifferent to ultimate questions
of rights and inclusion.
If sexuality is something the sovereign state considers to be in its jurisprudence (and as we
might consider that such systems of classification and identification are part and parcel of
statecraft), then interference in the state’s ability to regulate sexuality is an affront to sover-
eignty. Indeed, as homosexualization rides on waves of state homophobia, the link between
the constitution of sexual and gender minorities as a ‘gay peril’ and advocacy on behalf of their
emancipation in response serves to legitimate the state’s sovereign right to construct sexuality,
as ostracism and LGBT rights both make claims on a state to act (even in the invocation of
the UN). At the same time, the defence of emerging LGBT collectivities becomes deeply
threatening to the homophobic state, carried by outside forces, transnational actors, state
competitors or frenemies, and global institutions; it redoubles sovereignty as a defensive turn.
We can see this clearly in response to claims of LGBT advocates against states, when state
actors, allies, and proxies mark LGBT advocacy as an affront to the dignity of their people
and anathema to their collective values.
Moreover, human rights as international discourse, though once imbedded in US Cold War
strategic interests (Moyne 2010), was most recently fostered as a ‘cascade’ of transitional justice
strategies that penalized authoritarian state practice, first in Argentina in 1984 (Lutz and Sikkink
2001). South Africa’s transition from the apartheid regime moved from a discourse of national
liberation to one of human rights, legitimizing the new multiracial democracy through indi-
vidual and participatory guarantees characterized through the African concept of interconnec-
tion called Ubuntu that defined both transitional justice (Wilson 2001) and the incorporation
of LGBT rights among those rights articulated in the constitution (Palmberg 1999). With these
tools, South African AIDS activists confronted the Thabo Mbeki government over its indif-
ference to treatment access as a violation of human rights (Zivi 2011). The connection between
democratic transition and LGBT rights brings us back to Argentina, where a renewed emphasis
on accountability, human rights, and national identity spurred the adoption of LG marriage
and laws providing greater security to gender minorities (Pousadela 2013).

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This interrelationship of human rights, LGBT rights, and transitional justice situates protec-
tions of any sort for sexual and gender minorities – promoted by other sovereign powers,
imposed as limits on the sovereign state, or tied to the removal of sovereign state actors – as
an affront to sovereign authorities who assert their power against the very notion of LGBT
inclusion, define their rule through the exception characterized as a ‘gay peril’, and more
broadly claim the sovereign right to rule a collectivity specifically against the individual rights
associated with the defence of those rendered vulnerable through strategies of the very same
state. While some situate this dilemma in different sovereignties, be they individual or collec-
tive (see, for example, Turner 2006), my argument is that LGBT claims have come to define
sexual minorities as constitutively in opposition to state sovereignty for non-democratic
regimes, and only to be situationally embraced by open democratic ones. When state homo-
phobia is a tool of authoritarian and illiberal governance to assert state sovereignty, it makes
LGBT advocacy a fifth column constituted against the sovereign state even if it seeks inclusion
within. In such contexts, homophobia, even as social stigma, is nothing more than the work
of state allies and proxies as part of the clientelistic networks that enforce sovereignty. Global
advocacy only serves to amplify the challenge to sovereignty in its pursuit of limits on the
authoritarian state, even more so when allies include powerful Western states.
But it is also the ‘rights cascade’ that accompanies democratic transitions that makes state
sovereignty the intractable enemy of LGBT collectivities. The extension of security to sexual
and gender minorities can occur only through the kinds of institutions that authoritarians
lack. Autonomous courts provide security against exclusion, access to services requires a
rationalized and professional bureaucracy, financial transparency provides a check on the
political manipulation of state institutions as well as international aid, well-paid professional
policing reduces incentives for the extortion to which sexual and gender minorities are
particularly vulnerable, and programmatic parties link the inclusion of sexual and gender
minorities to broader social currents. Clearly, these are all manifestations of democratic
transition, as it remains empirically and theoretically impossible to queer authoritarian states
in any way that would provide for the substantive security of sexual and gender minorities
without substantive institutional reform and development. Even in Uganda, where advocates
have won legal victories, these victories are in the context of external pressures on the regime
or internal contestation over spoils and not because of juridical autonomy; elsewhere, when
democratic rights are newly restricted, as in Hungary, Poland, or Egypt – or in Putin’s
consolidation of power – a ‘gay peril’ serves to legitimate authoritarian aspirations just as
newly empowered actors weaken institutions of accountability.5

Troubling and resituating security

Queer visions troubling security also serve as a bridge between the empirical and the
theoretical, since queer thinking challenges both notions of security and understandings of
what sexual and gender minorities are and what they experience. Drawing on the lessons
Warner (1993: xi) first proposed as he suggested the conceptual value-added of queerness
and the possible queering of the planet, “there remains a question whether or in what context
queers have political interests, as queers, that connect them to broader demands for justice
and freedom”.
One thing that a queer vision of security shows is that people can at once seek justice and
freedom through institutions and be positioned in a way that is oppositional to, or critical
of, a range of social institutions. Queer visions of security implicate sexuality in a variety of
formal and informal stigmatizing structures in the everyday, which is at the same time

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translocal, global, and local. However, talking queer today must be sensitive to the ways that
sexuality and gender might be lived within and not outside normative systems, so that same-
gender sexuality has not always been coming to terms with its oppositional stance.
Historical analysis, for example, includes Goldberg’s contribution to Fear that intends to
articulate the colonial discourses of sodomy that sought to destabilize extant Indigenous
sexualities (1993), and Rao (2015) who seeks to understand how the sexual demands one
19th-century Baganda king placed on young men in his court are now politicized in Uganda;
both narratives suggest contexts where same-gender sexuality existed within dominant
normative structures. Similarly, Broqua’s account of sexual and gender minorities in Bamako,
Mali (2013), refutes the political and theoretical claim that translocal same-gender sociability
results in ever more globally similar identifications, instead pointing to how sexuality and
gender might be lived simultaneously within dominant norms and transformed, so that the
nature of visibility and invisibility is troubled. Finally, LGBT politics in the West has
decidedly turned away from queer, offering instead a ‘normal’ now linked to hegemonic
forms in terms of reproduction and empire (Duggan 2002; Puar 2007).
In these and other ways, queer itself is a product of, and in reaction to, macropolitical and/
or widespread transformations of sexuality and gender, where gender and sexual minorities
have been and are redefined as a degeneracy or ‘gay peril’. In today’s contexts, the oppositional
and critical status linked to sexuality often is socially new, and the disclosure of same-gender
sexuality and its articulation as homosexuality represents a transformation that is situationally
different. Like other forms of late development, modular homophobia or compulsory hetero-
sexuality today can skip historical steps Western societies experienced, moving from unrec-
ognized or unremarkable same-gender sexual expression to stigmatized homosexuality in rapid
succession, and just as rapidly offer sexual and gender minorities transnational support and
organizing in the form of fully articulated LGBT identities as a response to the new risks they
face. Certainly, historical moments of queer sociability occurred without outside support, in
discrete and clandestine form, ever watchful of authorities, where today’s LGBT politics is
compelled to speak publically by both advocates and enemies.
Often, then, the queer moment when Western states imposed compulsory heterosexuality
and the concomitant ostracism of same-gender sexuality simply does not exist today, or does
so in a significantly different framework. In the past, drag, ambivalence, and pretence could
be used as a form of critical engagement with structures of oppression where no other possibilities
of resistance existed, and a discrete system of meaning was elaborated to enable sociability and
cruising in public because no other opportunities for intimacy were available. Such forms
entailed great risk, from entrapment and imprisonment to forced conversion therapies, with
few if any allies available for support. The security landscape confronted by sexual and gender
minorities is very different today in many (though by no means all) parts of the world, where
models of dealing with the sexual and gender diversity range from this sort of rejection to a
liberal inclusive approach to normalizing homosexuality. In this new, varied, complex world,
oppositional and critical approaches to the vision of queering security have, in my view, two
main insights to offer the theory and practice of human security.
First, security must be delinked from the state as the state is the normalizing force where
homoprotectionism is manifest as an aspect of internal ordering or external ambitions. A
queer approach to the state would challenge the sovereign structures that normalize some as
citizens against others who are excepted in moments of manufactured crisis. To do so
suggests an approach that enables a broader deliberation outside the compulsory forces of
homophobia and homophilia, without relying on aspects of the state and without recourse
to international institutions linked to the state, so that liberation and not homoconsolidation is

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the priority. Fundamentally, protection of and support for sexual and gender minorities
require the elaboration of a broad agenda promoting sexual and gender minority rights as
democratic rights, as democratic rights impose some limits on sovereign power, and theorizing
global and local networks of shared sovereignty and emancipation that Indigenize and
supplant the sovereign ambitions of the state. These networks should be the first recourse
for securitizing sexual and gender minorities through tangible social support; legal training,
internet security, extortion money, medical care, economic support, and arrangements for
exile are all strategies of queer material support that can operate critical of, or even outside,
the purview of the state.
Second, for people’s security, queer opposition to homonationalism or homonormativity
is risky business. Defending the oppressed is in tension with dismantling the social systems
that except them from protection. In one moment, we appeal to the stigmatizing hostile
institutions in order to secure the vulnerable against an immediate danger; in another we
accept that the work of life-building that the vulnerable are doing places them at risk, and
that risk is a necessary and immediate component of what it means to be queer. As individual
and collective, these risks invoke our intercession without regard to shared identification and
recognition, acting broadly in defence of the emancipatory rights and bodily integrity
necessary for collective deliberation among all sexual and gender minorities. This is particularly
important where prior forms of same-sex sociability once normalized as discrete are suddenly
impossible as the state outs those entrapped in its homophobic clutches, so that the work of
security is not to define a newly vulnerable person as LGBT in order to legitimate their
security, but instead to provide the means necessary for self-definition and an understanding
of risk in a newly hostile environment. To demand security from an authoritarian state, in
fact, does nothing but legitimate the state as a source of security, invoking unholy bonds
between authoritarians and sexual minorities, much like those between the extremist National
Front in France and the gay men whose support is won by promising to secure them against
a variety of imagined dangers.
Oppositionality, then, is not just in queer visions of what security is; it is also present
in practices that attempt to bring queer visions of security to security practice. The queer in
security is at once always present and impossible; security as it embraces the power of the
state regulates sexual and gender behaviour, and therefore at the same time cannot be queer.
So human security of sexual and gender minorities is at once wrapped up in and threatened
by state notions of security. Ambivalently fluid, queer visions of human security, then,
necessarily take into account both/and: in state discourses of human security, and in opposition
to the normative constitution of sexualities and gender identities by/in statecraft.

Notes
1 E.g., Heidi Hudson (2005); Natalie Hudson (2009); Hoogenson and Stuvøy (2006); Tripp, Ferree
and Ewig (2013); Hoogensen and Rottem (2004).
2 See Broqua (2013), for example, on adaptations to French notions of sexual identity within the
shaping influence of Malian forms and structures.
3 This section draws on work I previously published in Bosia (2015).
4 See, for example, Johnson (2004) on the Lavender Scare, or Amar (2014) on protections for women
and sexual minorities.
5 This is not to say that democracies are always better for sexual and gender minorities; only that the
varieties of organizing possible in democracies, the complexity of state actors and contenders always
in conflict, and the set of rights available in open democracies makes resistance to homophobia pos-
sible. Still, to do so has, historically, forced a conceptualization of sexual and gender minorities in
group terms, and fostered a discourse about rights, privacy, and speech.

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 9
FEMINIST VIOLENCE AND THE
IN/SECURING OF WOMEN
AND FEMINISM
Marysia Zalewski and Anne Sisson Runyan

Introduction
As feminist scholars we acknowledge the violent force of feminism as something required in
order to challenge hegemonic knowledges and practices. For many this appears as a provoca-
tive statement, yet as we have argued, “feminism, in all its multiplicity, is part progenitor
and product of modernity; but also antithetical to modernity. Shattering myths, blurring and
betraying boundaries, obliterating social/sexual contracts – feminism has vigorously deployed
and celebrated these kinds of violence” (Zalewski and Runyan 2013: 298).
Feminism most surely has a long history of, and association with, violent militancy both
epistemic and activist, and to forget this effectively places feminism in the realm of (feminized)
innocent knowledge-making. It also potentially divests feminism of the power and agency
to expose the violences it is against, especially the epistemologies, ethics, and ideologies of
misogyny, patriarchy, and heterosexism and the structural and discursive violence they have,
in combination, wrought around the globe. However, feminism’s presence in the landscape
of international security is marked by stark contradictions in the context of violence. For
many, feminism’s agency to achieve change has been obstructed through its co-optation by
neoliberal agendas (McRobbie 2009; Fraser 2007; Halley 2006). At the same time, feminism
is charged with being securitized and, as such, functioning as a handmaiden servicing the
needs of US/UK-led counterterrorist strategies and rhetorics (Zalewski and Runyan 2013,
2015). On these readings, feminism as a project within security governance emerges as
paradoxically both deadened and deadly. Deadly as ‘muscled up’ security feminism (Nesiah
2012), acting to shore up, provide cover for, and/or incite hegemonic economic and political
violence – as such enacting deadly violence on behalf of hegemonic others. Simultaneously,
feminism emerges as deadened or ‘undone’ (McRobbie 2009), with its militant challenges
to the status quo eviscerated. This is an important set of contradictions for contemporary
analyses of the relationship between feminism, gender, and international security.
In this contribution, we introduce and reflect on these multiple faces of feminist violence
specifically in the context of the international security machine, observing the contradictions
and ironies of these various characterizations to encourage more understanding about the
violences of feminism and the ensuing tense relationship with in/security, gender, women,
and power. To do this we first trace some of the linkages between feminism and violence

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 Feminist violence and in/security

in both theory and action. Then we move to offer empirical examples and comment on
some of the reverberations of resistances in the women, peace, and security project to
the work of violence within feminist theory, most notably in relation to the securing of
women and feminism. In our concluding comments we return to the provocation of feminist
violence and issues arising from it.

Feminist violence
There is a mixed theoretical and practical history in regard to the violence of feminism. We
are not suggesting there is an ‘authentic’ feminism with violence at its core, though we can
point to significant examples of violence motivated by feminist ideas, such as some of the
tactics of suffragists and radical feminists in Western settings and armed revolutionary femi-
nists in non-Western settings. Moreover, historically, feminists have worked hard to strategize
around their explicit use of violence, regularly making decisions about when violence is an
appropriate tactic or strategy to resist and overturn patriarchal violence (Frazer and Hutchings
2014). Perhaps predictably, most often the attachment to violence that has traditionally caused
the most concern is that which is conventionally visible, concrete, and practical, usually
physical violence or damage to property. A crucial part of this decision-making has revolved
around the likely ineffectiveness of non-violent tactics and the likely negative effect of the
use of violent tactics. So, for example, the silent performances of Women in Black1 might
be seen as non-violent action, whereas the fire-bombing of a lap dancing club can be con-
strued as clearly violent (especially given the potential for fatalities). A sense of incremental
variations or a continuum of (feminist) violence in reaction to (patriarchal) violence might
feasibly be constructed with ‘peaceful/silent’ performance, or non-threatening ‘questioning’
at one end, with ‘actual’ violence to people and/or property at the other. The question of
‘effectiveness’ aside, the banality of this idea is swiftly illustrated given a putatively peaceful
act can very easily be felt, interpreted or understood as violent – a word, a touch, or a paint-
ing, for example, especially that which is feminist inspired.2 Or as Žižek (2008: 180) puts it,
“sometimes a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst”. Violence in this sense
is elusive, slippery and not easily captured within a definition.
Perhaps more obvious is the violent epistemological work of feminism, even if the word
violence is not typically attached to resistant knowledge-making practices. Feminist theorists
have undoubtedly had the intention of overturning conventional knowledge bases in regard
to gender/sex, including the bases of professionalized knowledge (such as the law, science,
medicine, and education) and historical and theoretical knowledge (including philosophy,
political theory, and history) as well as that powerful knowledge source – ‘common sense’. It
is thus surprising at one level that feminism is so clearly much more associated with peace
(Sylvester 2013), as a goal and as a mode of non-violent activism. And within the contempo-
rary women, peace, and security machinery, there appears to be more interest in reform rather
than revolution. Indeed feminism has commonly been perceived as more of a moral force
(with its feminized associations) as opposed to a political one (with its masculinized associa-
tions). In the face of this paradox, it is important to present the violent force of feminism to
think front and centre about the huge amount of work being done to keep feminism ‘inno-
cent’, and the powerful resulting discomfort, not least from feminists, when explicitly speaking
to the work of feminist violence. It is also important to illustrate the serious practical and
empirically trackable consequences of ignoring feminism’s violent face as documented in
international security practices that we address in our next section.

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 Marysia Zalewski and Anne Sisson Runyan

Some traces of the importance of maintaining connections between feminism and violence
are found in the work of Valerie Solanas and Jack Halberstam. The work of Solanas is always
a dangerous choice given the title of her infamous book SCUM Manifesto (1968) is widely
understood to be an acronym for ‘The Society for Cutting Up Men’. A violent suggestion
to be sure and not one to be taken literally (although Solanas did shoot Andy Warhol). Her
work has consistently been decried by feminists and non-feminists alike (for perhaps obvious
reasons), one effect of which has been to submerge the philosophical and epistemological
originality and power of her work, notwithstanding its violent vocabulary. This theoretical
power has more recently been resuscitated through the writings of Halberstam (2011, 2013).3
Halberstam’s book Gaga Feminism (2013) might similarly be placed at the unacceptable edge
of intellectual and academic reason and acceptability given its use of the idea of ‘gaga’ both
in theory and in the form of ‘pop icon’ Lady Gaga. Yet in Gaga Feminism Halberstam tracks
a “different terrain of feminism”, one in which he finds a series of actors who partake in
“loudly refusing the categories assigned to them” (2013: xiv). This is crucial in the context
of understanding feminist violence. This type of refusal (most often through the bodies/
voices of women) is an undeniable facet of feminist work which is not innocent or non-
violent, yet the place for it in public politics is consistently curtailed and subject to sanctions.
We can see this very clearly in the context of international security where assigned roles for
women are centrally in the realms of either innocence (women in need of protection) and/
or empowerment (via masculinized others). This is something we go on to explicate in more
detail in the next section.
It is helpful to briefly contemplate this kind of loud (even if ‘only’ epistemological) feminist
refusal to illustrate the work of feminist violence. To do this we need to look more closely
at the ways in which this kind of work becomes ‘placed’, or pushed to be mis-placed (or
rejected) given its reception as a kind of ‘toxic femininity’. Feminized toxicity has a much
more squeezed place than ‘toxic masculinities’ (boys behaving badly). This way we can bring
into clearer focus the boundaries around gender – this is important as it is around and at
boundaries that violence (as well as resistance and policing) so often occurs. As such, pushing
at the boundaries of sense-making and at ostensible ‘dividing lines’ (for example, between
peace and war, or between hetero- and homo-sex) keeps the work of politics and power more
‘visible’. It also alerts us more sharply and insistently to the ways in which gendered subjects,
especially feminized subjects, are made ‘secure’ and simultaneously made insecure when they
are perceived to take difficult or radical positions: “casting [women] feminists beyond differ-
ence can cast them out of security” (Sylvester 2013: 612). There are clear parallels here
between the representations of woman and of feminism which are both coded as potentially
uncontrollable (Elshtain 1987; Zalewski and Runyan 2013), inciting a variety of possibilities
for control within hegemonic institutions. So in part we are tracing and keeping visible the
‘loud refusal’ to better illustrate the Janus-faced character – or the simultaneous weak and
strong visage – of governance feminism, most especially in its ‘security’ frame. Its show of
strength is found in the growing focus on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda at
the highest levels. It has been enshrined in UN efforts at security sector reform under former
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, championed by the likes of former US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, promoted as the basis of a feminist foreign policy by Swedish Foreign Minister
Margot Wallstrom, and endorsed by celebrity A-lister Angelina Jolie. Its weakness lies in the
illusory and sequestered nature of this strength. To explicate, we now move to discuss some
of the ways that feminist violating principles emerge and disappear in the arena of security/
governance feminism.

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Securing women/making feminism safe

Feminist scholars and activists undoubtedly anticipated that the centring of gender would
significantly disrupt the harmful gendered conceptions, discourses, and practices of inter-
national security. Instead, the central site through which feminism has made a mark on
international security is the figure of the ‘secured woman’ – or woman in need of being
secured. She is very much a focus of international governance attention. This taps very well
into chivalric fantasies and paternalistic imperatives given it rests on traditional notions of
perennially weak and non-violent women in need of protection. By association, feminism
also appears to have secured a special place on the global security agenda, primarily in its
capacity to offer theoretical support for the feminized specialness of the category of woman.
This suggests that feminism has also been made ‘safe’ for international governance. Stripped
of its intentions to assault masculinist, capitalist, Western, and state privilege as well as its
understanding of ‘woman’ as an unstable category, feminism becomes ironically corseted
into the project of securing ‘women’, or indeed the ‘properly feminine’, in its security
governance formation. These are some of the ways this transpires.
The first site we turn to here to illustrate relates to the ‘women and peace’ thesis. As noted
earlier, women have traditionally been perpetually connected to peace. This association
remains strong despite clear evidence to the contrary. Yet in the context of international
security, a significant amount of work has been carried out which appears to persuasively
demonstrate that the insecurity of states rests more on the insecurity of women than on the
lack of democratic systems or the presence of economic and racial disparities (see Hudson
et al. 2008/9). This work strongly implies that the ‘securing’ of women is necessary if there
is to be any peace – an argument that has a hefty measure of political currency in international
governance spheres, perhaps especially in the context of licensing interventionist actions.
Sjoberg and Peet’s statistical analysis of civilian victimization in wars over time demonstrates
that women’s insecurities arising from gender inequality and violence “are not just a predictor
of states’ likelihoods to make war” but are the central dynamic of war understood as a “pro-
tection racket” (2011: 176). Under the auspices of ‘masculinist protection’ (Young 2003),
“wars are fought for ‘our’ women or ‘innocent’ women and fought on the bodies of ‘their’
women” (Sjoberg and Peet 2011: 176). Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (1987) classic formulation
of women constructed as ‘Beautiful Souls’ and the ‘Pacifist Many’ and in overwhelmingly
persistent need of protection emerges very clearly as the epistemological linchpin of this
arrangement. It also quite starkly shows how strong traditional gender binaries are in gover-
nance thinking and policy given the arguments about men and peace have little or no
currency in this. Is any society secure unless men are secure? The strangeness of this question
underscores our earlier point about gendered boundaries as complexly hierarchical and
consistently re-secured.
What of women’s violence? As indicated, Elshtain (1987) is an important theorist in this
discussion as in her classic book, Women and War, she writes of the ‘Ferocious Few’, which
she equates with bellicose women. These intruders interrupt the masculinist protection racket
of war by either becoming protectors themselves, or refuting the assumption of women as
innocent and non-violent, thus robbing the protection racket of its grounding. The significant
contemporary focus on women’s violence in Feminist Security Studies or FSS (see, for
example, Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 2011) has, in part, challenged the myth of the ‘Beautiful
Soul’. This myth not only sets up women as the embodiment of the nation, but also summons
the idea of the masculinized ‘Just Warrior’ (Elshtain 1987) to protect ‘his’ homeland women,
while inviting the targeting of the women of the enemy as a way to most undermine the

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nation they embody. If women were no longer denied political agency and the capacity for
political violence, thus seen not as the ‘Ferocious Few’ but as warriors of many stripes, this
might expose this house of gendered cards on which the war system rests. Moreover, the
propensities for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) this protection racket also sets up,
not only abroad but also at home when the ‘protected’ (and even feminine ‘protectors’) do
not properly conform to Beautiful Souls, are also exposed.
Of course, feminists have long been frontline Just Warriors in the struggle to liberate
women from SGBV, taking both non-violent and violent action for this cause. We might
recall the 1983 feminist cult classic, ‘Born in Flames’, in which a socialist revolution has
occurred in the US, yet sexual and racial violence continue. Revolutionary women of colour
form renegade brigades to confront rapists and batterers, ultimately escalating their struggle to
armed rebellion and acts of terror (oddly presciently, blowing up the World Trade Center).
Compare this with the more secured and safe feminism of contemporary security feminism.
Massaged through what Janet Halley (2006) refers to as ‘the halls of power’, it has led at best
to reformist international institutional responses, such as the toothless call for a moratorium
on SGBV in war in UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 (Cohn 2013). At
worst, it has been associated with abetting imperialist violence in the name of ‘securing
women’, as in the oft-cited case of the Feminist Majority support for the US invasion of
Afghanistan to oust the Taliban (Russo 2006). Both of these anti-state and pro-state violence
responses can be seen as leaving the protection racket in place in part because they both
reproduce the ‘womenandsecurity’ nexus that continues to imagine femininity as pacific,
passive, and in need of masculinized protection.
Centring women’s violence, particularly as combatants, terrorists, and torturers, counters
imaginaries of women as essentially non-violent and as subjects to be secured. Not surpris-
ingly, though, there is still a much larger body of research on women’s peace activism over
time and globally (see, for example, Cockburn 2007) than on women’s martial violence.
While such activism has included much civil disobedience and defiance of authority,4 a more
sanitized ‘womenandpeace’ nexus undergirds the uptake by security governance that women
should be included in, and even central to institutional peacemaking and peacebuilding pro-
jects, albeit with minimal effect thus far (Cohn 2013), relying heavily on Elshtain’s ‘Pacifist
Many’, and thus ‘Beautiful Soul’, story. But even as a focus on women’s violence insecures the
essentialist figure of the Beautiful Soul and ‘her’ availability as the goad for war, ultimately
the securing of women lies at the heart of both feminist security and peace studies projects as
both hold that women’s security is foundational to international security and peace. Ultimately,
too, they have both been morphed into similar anemic responses as ‘a gender perspective’ has
been acknowledged by and institutionalized in the security sector through the packaging of
women’s security “as a cohesive thing that fits neatly into the traditional security paradigms”
(Meger 2016: 150). Critiques of the securitization of gender (read women), however, go
further. The singling out of SGBV in war for approbation and ‘zero tolerance’, while ignoring
widespread gender violence perpetrated in ‘peacetime’ or by non-combatants as well as the
violence of war itself, is described as a dangerous ‘fetishization’ (Meger 2016). Moreover,
this fetish built into UNSCR 1325 is seen as constituting a violent reinscription of racial
and sexual boundaries and a thoroughly imperialist project, in that combating SGBV in
war becomes a pretext for the racialized and Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ (Pratt 2013). We,
too, have noted that the spectacularization of SGBV in the global mediascape has not only
produced whitewashed and neocolonial images of sexual violence, but also has ‘cauterized’
critical thinking about how the will to act on sexual violence perpetrated against only certain
bodies produces its own violences (Zalewski and Runyan 2015). Thus, the securitization of

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gender not only fails to secure women (and a whole host of ‘others’), but also rejuvenates the
war system and particularly legitimizes the war on terror.
Interestingly, then, ‘security feminism’, a subset of governance feminism, appears simultan-
eously and contradictorily as hopelessly ineffectual and as virulently potent. Immanent in
such critiques is that feminism had once been a non-violent force for transformational
change, but now has been either so co-opted by institutional forces as to drained it of its
capacity for change, or so perverted to serve the forces of violence as to be unrecognizable
as feminism. But what of this assumption that feminism was once non-violent and it is in
its co-optation and perversion that it has become violent? Does this imply that feminism,
like women, needs to be (re)secured away from violence?
As we have previously argued (Zalewski and Runyan 2013), the suturing of feminism to
the temporally figured female body, creates a kind of solipsism that invites metaphoric
descriptions of feminism as once robust but now weak, decaying, and decadent, seemingly
overcome or seduced by superior institutional forces that outpace it and corner it at every
turn. It also invites insistent questions as to whether women are non-violent or violent and
thus whether the proper stance of feminism is pacifism or militancy. But both stances carry
violence. With respect to a pacifist feminist position, “in identifying the non-violent feminist
action in pursuit of peace as exemplary . . . the violence of enacting ‘feminine’ values as a
way of overturning the gender order” is revealed (Frazer and Hutchings 2014: 150). With
respect to a militant feminist position, the advocacy of violent feminist action can be seen as
“troublingly close to the very [patriarchal] violence” it rejects (Frazer and Hutchings 2014:
150). Thus feminism has an inescapable relationship to violence, whether conceived as paci-
fist or militant. In part, this arises from the continuing binary between peace and war.

Peace, as Elshtain has observed, is “an ontologically suspicious concept” as it is

inconceivable without war, and binary understandings of war and peace often rely on
degraded notions of the feminine and deny the disharmony and disorder of political
and social life.
Blanchard 2003: 1299

But it also arises from moves to secure both women and their presumed extension, femi-
nism, as a subject. In order for a subject to be secured, it must be represented as a knowable,
coherent, stable, and bounded identity/entity (Stern 2006: 193). Yet, “any given (and
thereby securable representation) of the subject . . . will be haunted by supplementary or
excluded voices, subject positions – ‘What about “me”?’ – that will inevitably clamour for
attention in even the most careful attempts at representation” (Stern 2006: 201). This exposes,
then, the illusion, and indeed, impossibility of security and the secured subject.
This understanding of the illusory nature of “the dominant logic of (in)security” (Stern
2006: 200) and the violence it takes to fix subjects in ways that make them appear securable
gives considerable pause when it comes to the goal of securing of women. While we share
the desire and support the need to unrelentingly counter gender inequality and violence
rampant across the globe, and particularly visited on racialized and classed ciswomen and
sexual and gender minorities in the global South and North, we also recognize the unrelenting
problematique of the violence that securing the subject poses. But we are far more concerned
about attempts to secure feminism, not just in the form of security feminism but also with
respect to any stripping it of, inoculating it against, saving it from, or otherwise securing
it away from violence as if it had some originary innocence. Attributing a Beautiful Soul to
feminism is perhaps more problematic than attributing it to women because it denies the

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epistemic disharmony and disordering to which most of its political theory over time has been
dedicated. Fixing feminism as a pure and purely non-violent force flies in the face of con-
temporary understandings that all theory construction and concept-making is necessarily
violent through the process of foregrounding some ideas at the expense of others. But given
feminism’s particularly marginalized theory status by its association with unimportant, weak,
and even crazy female bodies and minds, especially in the realm of Security (and Peace)
Studies, it is all the more important to consider how feminism has been, and can continue
to be, ferocious in its challenges to epistemic privileges of all sorts. To us, to insecure
feminism is to in effect release it/non-police it to perform more of this violence.
This call to violence, not ‘peace and security’, in feminist thought might seem heretical,
but “censorship . . . of what might be unfamiliar, provocative” (Parashar 2013: 442) is the
result of a ‘secured’ and ‘peaceful’ feminism. In a world in which those who identify as
feminists (or just ‘women’) continue to be trivialized, vilified, deprived, assaulted, tortured,
imprisoned, and killed, there is in some sense no safe feminism, nor can we can afford to
settle for one. Insecured feminisms voice loud refusals of the soft violences of neoliberal and
securitizing incorporations as well as the hard violences of persistently virulent and lethal
patriarchies.
In our concluding section, we revisit the provocation for violence and the challenges of
recognizing multiple and contradictory feminist violences in theory, practice, and the global
scene of violence to resist the securing of feminism.

Conclusion: insecuring feminism

We recognize that the idea of feminist violence sits uneasily in a world awash in so much
egregious violence and so much of it directed at feminized (and feminist) subjects. But forms
of violence have been, and are, a necessary part of a range of feminist histories and actions;
‘being improper’, to be ‘unbecoming’, refusing the normative and material pleasures of
collaboration have been significant theoretical and political activities within feminism
(Zalewski 2013: 4). And with Jack Halberstam, we, “have no truck with clichéd accounts
of women striking out for independence and becoming powerful in the process” (Halberstam
2013: xiv). We encourage recollection of the uncompromising anarcha-feminist spirit of
Solanas and a recognition of loud and even violent refusals of women who have fought for
justice and even ‘peace’.
We do this to unsettle what have become the international icons of the Janus-faced
‘womenandpeace’ and ‘womenandsecurity’ tropes interwoven in the WPS agenda in which
women are to be (safely) non-violent, secured from (some forms of) violence and (safely)
empowered for the purposes of the illusory project of security. Pakistani Malala Yousafzai,
the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, known worldwide by her first name (as the
result of her 2013 autobiography, I am Malala), while courageous herself to speak out against
her attackers5 and for the education of girls, has come to symbolize the imperative to secure
women and especially girls. Her story has become particularly attractive to Western audiences,
as it slides so easily into the groove that Gayatri Spivak (1988) so powerfully and succinctly
articulated – “saving brown women from brown men”. At the same time that her story
stokes the imperialist and masculinist politics of protection, it also has been given the air of
a neoliberal feminist success story – an individualist female triumph over the dark forces
of gender traditionalism (marked as a distinctly non-Western characteristic). For those millions
like her, but not sharing her story of empowerment, security feminism steps in, whether in
the ‘soft’ (and glamorous) guise of Angelina Jolie, hypervisibly attending to female victims
of violence, or the ‘hard’ guise of the Hillary Clintonesque fusion of women’s rights with

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counterterrorism and (inter)national security. These tropes of the secured woman and
security feminism, we argue, carry much unwanted violence and it is feminist violence to
these that we advocate.
But we also are urging that feminist thought, particularly in the field of international peace
and security, maintains a relationship to violence. The tight association of women with peace
lingers, despite mounting empirical evidence of women’s political (and interpersonal)
violence. But we also know that women’s ‘peace’ politics against patriarchal violence has
involved strategic debates about the use of non-violence and violence, with tactics falling
along this continuum across time and place. But what has gained significant traction in policy
circles, not surprisingly, is the image of the chaste woman in need of protection from
violation and a chastened feminism, made safe for incorporation into conventional security
thinking and practice. The cost of this is a preservation of the gender order that feminists
have typically rebelled against, and a lack of the disruptions of the security complex that
feminists thought a gender critique would usher in. To be secured, feminism has to disavow
any connection to violence, including its own rowdy and unruly history of thought and
action.
There are of course dangers in ‘insecuring’ feminism. The everyday and spectacular
violence visited on women and so many ‘others’ around the globe has driven feminist
insistences for security apparatuses to address these widespread insecurities arising out of the
very protection rackets (designed to sustain masculinist, Western, state, and capitalist privilege)
they have set up. The modicum of inroads these insistences have yielded, from UNSCR
1325 and including women in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR)
programmes to (non-militarized) humanitarian aid, have arguably made a difference in the
lives of some women in conflict zones. But this should not silence feminist critiques of
the massive violence left in place or the whole project of security, which in its illusory
attempts to secure the subject, (re)creates that violence. The idea that women/feminists have
to be ‘palatable’, appealing, and non-confrontational to be heard, taken seriously, and not
targeted for (more) violence, requires a disavowal of feminine/feminist violence.
There are compelling justifications for feminist work to advance things that have been
associated with being better for women, and particularly women in the global South, and
seem preferable to unreconstructed and unrestrained militarized state security, such as the
‘development-security’ project. But being ‘better for women’ is not the same as gender/
social justice. To what degree are ‘we’ (feminists) resigned to this gaping gap? Does this tell
us something about a retreat from the violence of feminism the more we seek ‘change’? To
theoretically and politically ‘accept’ these conditions (what else can we do?) suggests to us
that we might not be pushing our thinking hard enough about feminism as an ‘antagonistic
force’.
We recognize that speaking about feminist violence can also evoke fearful and hostile
responses from feminists committed to opposing all violence and staying within the comfort
zone of women’s peacefulness. But surely feminism is at some of its best when acting as a
kind of ‘interruptive agency’ (Berlant 2011) or when likened to ‘guerilla warfare’ against
patriarchy (Runyan and Peterson 1991). We see such insights as political-epistemological
incitements for embracing a connection between feminism and violence as a disruption of
hegemonic orders. Shifting from a focus on the violations of women to a violating feminism
‘hurts’ because it shakes the peaceful women-non-violent feminism nexus that has gained
traction morally and rhetorically if not ultimately substantially.
Crucially, feminist violence must continuously be directed to the gendered binaries
and boundaries contained within and around the tropes of the Beautiful Soul and Just

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Warrior – namely peace/war, non-violence/violence, insecure/secure. For example, how

might queering the Just Warrior be a way of both representing feminist epistemic violence
and doing it? How might this help, at least epistemologically, to address the paradox of, and
unacceptable choices between, a deadened and deadly feminism? We leave this to future
work, but we see something in a queered feminism that rails against ‘taming’ and acknowledges
its intentional violating force.

Notes
1 Self-described as a worldwide network of feminist-informed women taking non-violent actions, such
as silent vigils and sit-downs in public places, to bear witness to and resist acts of war, militarization,
and other forms of violence by their countries. See http://womeninblack.org/ (accessed 28 April
2018).
2 An intriguing recent example is Sarah Levy’s portrait of the then US Presidential candidate Donald
Trump. The medium she used was her own menstrual blood. www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-
3236927/Artist-fires-presidential-candidate-Donald-Trump-s-outrageous-sexist-comments-
painting-portrait-using-menstrual-blood-tampon.html (accessed 28 April 2018).
3 Also by Avita Ronnell in her 2004 introductory chapter to SCUM who makes clear that SCUM is
an important work of theory.
4 Consider the women of the Greenham Common peace camp who repeatedly vandalized and
breached fences surrounding a nuclear arms base in Britain and blockaded cruise missile convoys
destined for it.
5 Taliban adherents who shot her in the head for daring to seek an education.

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 10
EXPLORING GENDERED
SECURITY DYNAMICS
THROUGH FIELDWORK
AND ETHNOGRAPHY
Megan Daigle

Introduction
Fieldwork and ethnography are increasingly part of the lexicon of methods and methodolo-
gies for Security Studies, offering distinct advantages – as well as contradictions – for feminists
looking to see gender at work in the world of security. By way of reflecting on the possibility
of ‘feminist’ fieldwork, I want to begin by presenting two cases for consideration, two kinds of
fieldwork: one ‘on the ground’ and the other seemingly high above it, both figuratively and
literally. The first was ethnographic fieldwork in Havana, Cuba, where I interviewed young
people who pursued sexual relationships with foreigners. There, the sounds of laughter,
thumping bass line of reggaetón music, and the roaring of car engines filled my interview
recordings. My voice recorder, for that matter, had a broken battery panel from months of
heavy use and abuse. The notebook in which I scrawled my thoughts and interview notes
was the only one I’d been able to find in Cuba’s sparsely stocked shops, and its cover was
holding on by a mere thread, pages stained with coffee and dog-eared from living at the
bottom of my bag. I worked through networks I built myself, snowballing one contact into
more and more, hitting the streets to strike up conversations in cafés and bars, on street
corners, on the beach, at all hours of the day and night. I learned how to duck the police.
I felt (not without qualms, not without irony) like a fieldworker.
My interviewees were mostly women and mostly young, glamorous, clad in bright colours
and rhinestones, coordinated from head to toe. The conversations often started out stilted
and awkward, leaving me with the sense that an insurmountable gulf of understanding stood
between us. I remember straining to find common ground . . . complimenting them on their
hair, sunglasses, nails . . . feeling like I’d failed them as they reached across the table to inspect
my hands, discovered with horror my own nails, unpolished and bitten to the quick . . .
being told who to see to get that sorted out, writing the name and phone number down in
earnest, knowing that I’d never go.
The second was field research in New York City and Washington, DC, where I inter-
viewed United Nations officials, international NGO staff, and government workers working
on what is called the Women, Peace and Security agenda about their work. I booked

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appointments and showed my identification to countless security guards, clipping glossy

visitor nametags to my jacket and waiting in glitzy office foyers, heels clicking on tiled floors.
Glass and steel. I recall feeling quite self-conscious yet again – underdressed and unsophisti-
cated. I had spent an hour in the stationery shop selecting just the right notebook from the
hundreds available and a shiny, new pen. I spent my mornings compiling a list of names from
staff rosters on websites, the pages of published reports, and conference programmes before
setting up meetings for the afternoons by email and phone. Always between 9:00 and 6:00,
and always beginning and ending precisely on time.
This time around, my interviewees were also mostly women – women who, despite their
impressive offices and job titles, often seemed to remind me somewhat of myself. Mostly
white, very educated, career focused, existing fluently in worlds that centre law, policy,
advocacy, negotiation. I remember laughing easily, getting each others’ jokes . . . chatting
about jobs they’d held and receiving their career advice . . . getting recommendations for
good bars or clothing shops, writing them down in earnest, putting them in my pocket and
knowing I could never afford to go.
Looking at that crisp, new notebook in my hands, I began to feel like a fraud, or maybe a
hypocrite, betraying my ethnographic roots. Where I had once observed mass arrests, argued
for my informants in police stations, done interviews after midnight and in secret, and sat on
rooftops sipping rum with my contacts, now I was shown to my seat by receptionists. Sitting
in those waiting rooms, I asked myself, which is more feminist? To turn up on the doorsteps
(metaphorically speaking) of marginalized women, asking to be let in for a peek at their worlds
– and bolstering my own career in the process with publications and conference presentations?
Or to focus on these privileged women and their corridors of power, the women who work
with – and build their careers on – those very marginalized women? Which is the more feminist
of the two? And what, for that matter, makes fieldwork feminist – if anything?
What follows is not a text on method, but rather a reflection on the utility and challenges
of fieldwork and ethnography for the study of gender and security. Within the confines of
this volume, we are all asking what this thing called gender really is, and particularly in the
context of security. I want to ask, how do we know? Research methods and methodologies
are an inherently feminist issue – they help us decide what worthwhile, rigorous, ethical
research looks like. Ethnographic fieldwork and International Relations (IR) might be
“strange bedfellows”, as Wanda Vrasti has argued (2010: 87), but this arm’s-length history
belies a potential for engagement with the micropolitical, the intimate, the relational – a
radical move in Security Studies, not to mention within the broader discipline of IR. Given
that the intimate sphere is so often seen as feminine and thus apolitical (see Pratt and Rosner
2012: 17), it is also a feminist move, though one that asks us to rely on interpersonal methods
and will thus always remain fraught with tensions.

Entering fieldwork spaces

Fieldwork is an umbrella that covers a wide variety of research methods: in-depth interviewing
and oral history, participant observation, collaborative data analysis, reflective writing or field
journaling, among others. In this chapter, I will be recklessly conflating fieldwork with
ethnography, as many others do, a methodology drawn from the discipline of anthropology.
In that light, fieldwork is prolonged, immersive, and empirical; it means absorbing the field
through your pores by whatever means available. Ethnographic fieldwork takes experience
as its starting point, contending that immersion in a given setting – a culture (broadly writ),
movement, class, profession, or whatever else that might mean – helps the researcher to see

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that setting differently (see Clifford and Marcus 2010; Ratelle 2013; Daigle 2015, 2017;
Schatz 2009; Vrasti 2010, 2013). Thus, in practice, fieldwork can encompass day-to-day
interactions with neighbours and friends, public events such as concerts or rallies, attending
or teaching classes, or volunteering – anything that might grant a meaningful insight into
lived experience. Field research methods lend themselves to uncovering contingency, fluidity,
and relationality in social relationships and processes.
Fieldwork is also an attitude to research, an openness that necessitates an engagement with
and an embrace of multifaceted, constantly evolving research. Edward Schatz (2009: 5)
describes field research as the attempt and desire to get “neck deep” in a given setting. Field
methods incite us as researchers to go and find out, through experience and interaction, as
much as we can – and what we never knew we did not know. They just might be the
epitome of what Luis Lobo-Guerrero (2013: 25) has called “wondering as research attitude”.
That comprehensive engagement means that fieldwork is also interdisciplinary by nature,
which recommends it for the study of both gender, which is not discretely containable within
the confines of any one discipline, and security, which frequently unfolds in volatile settings
where the usual or expected paths to properly disciplined knowledge might be unavailable.
Writing recently on the topic of researching gender and war, Annick Wibben argued,
“feminist inquiries need to remain uncomfortably lodged at the intersection of multiple fields
of scholarship” (2016: 2). Fieldwork is one avenue for maintaining a constant interrogation of
limits and exposure of assumptions.
Methodologically, little could be more ostensibly feminist than exploring conflict and
security by asking those most marginalized people who bear its brunt in daily life (women,
sexual and gender nonconformists, racialized groups) for their experience. But field research
is never so simple: “All social researchers,” argue Caroline Ramazanoğlu and Janet Holland,
“can exercise power by turning people’s lives into authoritative texts: by hearing some things
and ignoring or excluding others” (2002: 113). Deciding whose story will be told and whose
will not, not to mention determining which ones are outliers and which are just inconvenient
to the research project, is always and everywhere an exercise of power.
Of course, little of this tells you what fieldwork will actually be like, or how it will feel
to exist in fieldwork spaces, or to find out what a so-called field might be. Conducting field-
work requires confidence and a level of social fluency, which does not come easily to eve-
ryone, in order to apply for research funding, get interviews, mingle and build networks, and
seize whatever ephemeral opportunities might arise in a fast-moving and time-limited scene.
Fieldwork is often uncomfortable. In many cases, I found my interviews frustrating. They
were often shorter than I had intended them to be, depending on the time that my research
subjects had available or cared to contribute, and sometimes they felt directionless or even
hostile. In New York and Washington, my interviewees were public figures whom I could
check out in advance, reading their published work and preparing questions accordingly, but
they were also busy people with little time to spare. In Havana, on the other hand, my
interviewees were not officeholders – they had no public profile, no necessary interest in my
research, no stake in any broader political project.
Fieldwork spaces are also frequently banal. In each of my field trips, I spent hours and
even days in my room alone: preparing for interviews, writing up notes, filling out paperwork,
trying (and often failing) to arrange interviews via email or phone, or just killing time or
figuring out how to make life work in this place. I waited in cafés, waited for emails and
calls, waited for travel visas, waited for files to upload . . . . In Cuba, I even waited for
permission to leave the country at the end of my stay. What is more, my work has often
required me to work through and even to interview a wide cast of characters with whom I

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would not normally like to socialize, from the fixers and intermediaries who propositioned
me and extorted money from my informants, to the gatekeepers who dismissed me and
sometimes shut me out in more institutional spaces. This is what Pamela Fishman (1977)
once called “interactional shitwork”: the cost of admission and operation within certain
rarefied or discriminating spaces. Fieldwork, in new cities and surrounded by strangers, can
be exceptionally lonely.

Being feminist in the field

Returning to my question of what makes fieldwork feminist, there are a few key ideas in
common between Feminist Security Studies and the ethnographic fieldwork literature, or
rather shared bases from which each sets out to understand the world. First, fieldwork
necessarily begins from lived experience. Through interviews and observation, among other
methods, field researchers centre experience – others’ as well as their own – and defer to the
subjects of the research on the matter of their own lives, experiences, relationships, and
interactions. Here I will return to Edward Schatz, a political ethnographer who argues,
“while one can and should be sceptical about aspects of individual testimony, a general
sympathy for interlocutors is nonetheless the hallmark of ethnographic research” (2009: 7).
Likewise, the anthropologist Lorraine Nencel describes “radical empathy” as a key feature
of ethnographic research (2014: 82). Beginning from women’s concrete experience has
always been a key tenet of feminist research of all kinds, or what Patricia Hill Collins has
called the “criterion of credibility” for all knowledge about women (quoted in Brooks 2007:
56; see also Reinharz 1992). Thus, if Feminist Security Studies is at least in part about
amplifying the voices of the people who security is ‘done to’ – and I believe it should be
– then fieldwork is a useful window onto that experience.
With this focus on micro-level, lived, and relational experience, field research by nature
moves away from state-centric logics that centre lenses of military and governance institutions.
In the discipline of IR, security is generally seen to be synonymous with national or state
security. Feminists like J. Ann Tickner have long asserted that feminist IR, on the other
hand, is about deconstructing this orthodoxy and asking non-state-centric questions (2006:
22–27). If Feminist Security Studies is about challenging this state-centric view of security
itself, then fieldwork is a tool for doing just that, even in the study of global processes and
forces, because it foregrounds the micro, the individual, the personal, the relational, and
interactional in every setting. With its focus on the micro, the interactional, the relational,
field research consists of “frustrated and frustrating research relationships, dialogic research
relationships, collaborative research relationships, affective relationships, antagonistic research
relations, formal research relations, etc. or a little bit of each” (Nencel 2014: 78). Ethnographic
fieldwork thus “expands – indeed, it often explodes – how we understand the boundaries of
the ‘political’” (Schatz 2009: 10). This has great potential for how we think about security,
insecurity, conflict, and risk.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, field research offers a critical potential that can
be used to disrupt researchers’ own assumptions and orthodoxies – even feminist ones! – as
a continuation of the feminist critical political project. James Clifford has argued that, through
the prolonged engagement of ethnographic research, the subject of our research is unavoidably
revealed as what she is: a “speaking [subject], who sees as well as is seen, who evades, argues,
probes back” (2010: 14). To put perhaps too fine a point on it, by going into fieldwork
spaces to consult with the people whose lives have been upended by violence, or who have
found themselves the object of security structures and discourses, we give ourselves the
opportunity to be told we are wrong, that our theories do not fit or our representations of

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their identities, relationships, and experiences are misjudged. Fieldwork thus provides the
chance to confront and explore difference, and to subject our own suppositions to rigorous
reassessment (see Scharff 2010: 90–91).
This opportunity for feminist reflexivity gets at a key tension within feminism itself as
both a normative and an analytical project. Writing about women living in conservative
settings such as orthodox Jewish communities, state-sponsored marriage promotion
programmes, and evangelical Christian ‘ex-gay’ ministries, anthropologists Orit Avishai,
Lynne Gerber, and Jennifer Randles have dubbed this the “feminist ethnographer’s dilemma”:

We had to think past what we came to perceive as a standard feminist response to

our cases, resist the temptation of a more standard analysis that we intuited would
have garnered praise in our academic communities, and stick with our perceptions
and experiences to develop analyses that confounded our expectations.
2012: 406

They write about discovering agency in unexpected places and reassessing their views
of purportedly antifeminist spaces and practices. This dilemma is, of course, not unique to
particularly conservative research settings (Meadow 2012: 467). That challenge, when
principles do not match up with findings, is central to what fieldwork offers feminism: a
continual re-evaluation of feminist principles, which will in turn help build a more inclusive
and progressive feminism. This challenge echoes that offered time and again, both theoretically
and empirically, by queer and women of colour feminists (see, for example, Mohanty 1988;
Doezema 2001; Spivak 1981, 1998; Rubin 1993). In this way, field research has brought me
into close and prolonged contact with informants who rejected my assessment of violence
and struggle in their lives, and it has helped me to see and understand the ‘patriarchal
bargains’ that women and gender minorities make to stay safe and build happy lives (Kandiyoti
1988), or the ways that gender can shape practices of security in ways that my feminist
principles did not help me to predict. And my research has been the stronger for it.

Producing and embracing messy knowledge

To some extent, all scholarship is messy and incomplete, but field research’s character as an
immersive and interpersonal methodology foregrounds that mess and makes it unavoidable.
It is, as Patai writes, a “messy business” from beginning to end (1991: 139, 150). Modes of
research that take lived experience as their starting point and depend on interpersonal
methods are, by nature, unpredictable and to some degree uncontrollable. Indeed, Carol
Cohn writes pithily, “Here is an understatement: in the course of my research, many things
shifted” (2006: 91). Informants contest and subvert the questions they are asked and the
research process itself; findings disrupt our hypotheses and research designs; meetings and
interviews are abruptly cancelled or unfold in unforeseen ways; some important sources
turn out to be unavailable, or even nonexistent, while others appear unexpectedly; chance
encounters wind up opening new doors or revealing new information. Particularly in
sometimes volatile or unfamiliar places, fieldwork forces us as researchers to embrace open-
endedness, unpredictability, and indeterminacy – of our research trajectories, but also of our
empirical cases and theories, our conclusions, our knowledges.
One corollary of this is that field research tends to disrupt neat assumptions and categories
– and with them, disciplinary norms. When I was researching young women who dated
foreigners for material gain and escapism in Cuba, my interviewees constantly defied all

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expectations of them – both mine and others’ around them – and subverted the knowledge
that had been created about them as either liberated or repressed, amoral or self-sacrificing,
shallow or rigidly calculating. Their stories were a patent challenge to binary thinking about
their gender, race, class, sexuality, or even their job histories and education (see Daigle 2015).
Moreover, in ethnography, the line between participant and observer, insider and outsider,
is often more of a sliding scale, and one’s degree of embeddedness and acceptance in a given
setting is frequently decided not by the researcher but by the subjects of research (Buch and
Staller 2007: 202–4). In fieldwork, I was confronted with the realization, like Amalia Cabezas,
that the “unified object of my research . . . did not exist, was ambiguous, or at the very least
was quite an unstable subject” (2009: 8; see also Nencel 2005: 345–361).
This kind of research posits a political subjectivity that is “multiple, as unknowable, as
shifting” (Pillow 2003: 180). Similarly, Caroline Ramazanoğlu and Janet Holland argue for
feminist research that depicts the subject as decentred and multiplied, identities as iterative
and performative, and truths as local rather than universal (2002: 90–94; see also Edkins 2013:
285). In gender and security, these points might be particularly apt, as conflict and violence
throw into ever-sharper relief dynamics and relationships that exist across the slippery
spectrum of gendered violence before, during, and after conflict.
Second, messy research shows us that positionality matters, and all the more so for research
that takes places across lines of difference and vulnerability. Subjectivities and relationships
within any given space are always shaped by intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class,
ability, and Indigeneity. Thus, my own race, gender, nationality, education, upbringing, and
lived experience – and what I and the people I interviewed took those things to mean – had
all marked me and shaped the kind of interactions I would have with these people, the kind
of interviews I would and could conduct, and the writing I would eventually produce, as
Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber also notes (2007: 129). The same project, conducted by another
researcher, would unfold very differently – that is, a researcher who was Cuban, male, or
much older than I was would have quite distinct experiences and interactions from my own
in Havana, while a researcher with more experience or personal connections in policy and
advocacy might have greater success in New York. Situational dynamics between the self
and the interviewee, especially differences of power and privilege, shape research and go a
long way toward destabilizing disciplinary research norms of objectivity and detachment.
These ideals are impossible in interpersonal research, but I would also argue that they are
detrimental to truly engaged, embedded, and representative research with marginalized
subjects across lines of race, gender, class, and culture (see Zalewski 2006: 46). Fieldwork
experience makes conclusions such as these not only apparent but inescapable.

Ethics and fieldwork

While conducting fieldwork in New York, when I would find myself with extra time
between interviews or meetings, I would sit down to write my swirling thoughts in a field
journal. It was an effort to capture whatever half-formed thoughts and ephemeral bits of the
preceding interview that I could before they evaporated, and looking back at it now, I find
that I only occasionally dwelled long on research ethics. Given that my interviewees in New
York and Washington were comparatively influential people, I felt that my power to harm
them as an inept researcher was minimal. The ethical quandaries would come at the stage of
writing, when I would be faced with the challenge of anonymizing quotations and anecdotes,
a difficult task in a small field of NGO workers and UN staffers – and a problematic one
when policies and events have been shaped by personalities and relationships at every stage.

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In Cuba, on the other hand, I knew that the risks my informants faced were not professional
scorn; they were physical and sexual violence, detention, or destitution. They would be
nearly impossible to identify from what I eventually wrote about them, but participating in
my research process as it unfolded meant risking heightened surveillance by police and other
actors. In fieldwork, the ethical principle of reflexivity entails “a sense of responsibility against
harming the research participants and representing them in a way that respects and highlights
their agency” (Nencel 2014: 78). In Security Studies, especially, ethics means safety – avoiding
real, visceral danger and mediating vulnerability – but it also means acknowledging and
reconciling the dangers of appropriation in how we represent the subjects of research.
Stephanie Wahab writes about the dangerous potential for an extractive, “colonial” relationship
between a researcher and those whose lives and testimonies provide her with material; a
danger that must be carefully navigated and all the more so when the subjects of research
already experience marginality and repression (2003: 637; see also Nencel 2005).
Anthropology, the discipline with which ethnographic fieldwork is most intimately asso-
ciated, provides a methodological literature that is also conscientiously caught up in ethical
debates, in large part due to well-placed criticism that the practice of ethnography has under-
gone for its historical ties to colonialism. Indeed, Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes an anthro-
pological tradition that saw white anthropologists build their careers by “taking” knowledge
and experience from Indigenous communities. “The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one
of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary”, she writes (2012: 1–4). Edward
Bruner argues that the genesis of ethnography stems in part from an “imperialist nostalgia”,
which longs for the cultures decimated by the colonial project (Bruner 1989: 439). “Much as
we may try to deny or evade it,” Bruner continues, “colonialism, ethnography, and tourism
have much in common, as they were born together and are relatives” (1989: 439). Since those
early days,

anthropology has made a conscious effort to become aware of and distance itself from
the Eurocentric assumptions that informed the early days of ethnographic writing.
This is why to use ethnography is not just to familiarise oneself with a particular
method or genre, it is “to be conscious of the contradictions of such knowing and
the history of shame that precedes and marks all of our efforts”.
Vrasti 2010: 81, quoting Behar 2003: 16

Diane Bell (2013: 2) writes of an “awkward relationship between anthropology and

feminism”, where feminist approaches have not always been welcomed into ethnographic
circles. Thus, for decades already, ethnographers have engaged in debates on confronting the
problems of colonialist exploitation and sexism.
Ethnography’s ongoing reckoning with its legacies has impelled ethnographers to pursue
a more inclusive research practice, along the way questioning the primacy and objectivity of
the researcher, the one-way flow of information from researched to researcher, and the
authority of the researcher to speak for and represent the stories of her informants. Both
feminist and ethnographic research are working toward building consultative and collaborative
research practices with research subjects wherein knowledge is co-constituted between the
researcher and informants. The result is a research practice that engages in ethical reflection
and reflexivity, but must do so knowing that the process is never complete. Similarly,
theoretical interventions from poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and queer theory allow
feminists to see the limitations of feminist thought, but not necessarily to overcome them
(Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002: 102).

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Awareness of oppressive frameworks of race, gender, class, and sexuality can help to
mediate these problems and create space for respect, trust, and even humour between a
researcher and the people she studies, but it cannot “erase the divide” (Nencel 2005: 7; see
also Hoefinger 2013). Some, like Patti Lather (2001) and Wanda Pillow (2003) argue that
even these efforts simply reproduce existing power imbalances; Daphne Patai calls them
“feel-good measure” (1991: 147). There is no way out of these concerns: it is and will remain
important to ask ethical questions and work toward answering them in the course of research,
even if no satisfactory answer can be found.
Finally, ethical research might not always look like you expect it to look. To give just
one example, Maria Stern and Lorraine Nencel have each asserted that an ethical process of
field research ought to be reciprocal, giving interviewees the opportunity to read and
comment on the finished product (Stern 2001: 70; Nencel 2005). While certainly admirable,
this kind of reciprocity is not always possible, and particularly not in the context of studying
gender and security, where outbreaks of violence and displacement can disrupt even the
best-laid research plans. For my own part, I have had many interviewees who, for their own
safety, preferred never to see me again. This kind of reciprocal research practice can also
place additional demands on the time and energy of informants, to whom the research might
mean and offer little – an ethical concern in itself. Truly ethical research, feminist or not,
requires constant consultation with the subjects of research themselves, who are the real
experts, on what they need to be safe and minimize the harm caused by research. It cannot
be captured by a discrete set of ethical principles and it is never totally complete.

Conclusion: what is feminist about fieldwork?

Ethnographic field research engenders contradictions. For example, while research ethics
remain of paramount importance – particularly for feminist approaches and particularly in
the study of security and vulnerability it generates – in the course of my own endeavours to
produce feminist fieldwork, I have learned that there is no blueprint. ‘Good’, ethical,
rigorous, feminist research will not always look the same, or as I might have expected it to
look before I started out. What is more, despite the commitment of Feminist Security Studies
to producing groundbreaking research about women and gender in security, being in
possession of feminist principles on its own is no insurance against ethical and methodological
struggles in fieldwork. Writing about the evolving practice of feminist ethnography, Christa
Craven and Dána-Ain Davis write that, “the appearance of greater respect for and equality
with research subjects afforded by feminist ethnography can mask the potential for deeper
forms of exploitation” (2013: 4).
Add to that the fact that positionality matters: individual researchers will experience field-
work differently and achieve different findings according to their own specific location
within matrices of gender and gender presentation, race, social class, ability, and age, among
other factors. That said, however, I as the researcher will also be different from one fieldwork
context to another. My priorities and modes of working will change in different settings,
even for the same project and ostensibly the ‘same’ research subjects. Put differently, who
we are matters – but who we are can also change. Vincent Crapanzano writes of the field-
worker as “trickster” (2010), meaning not deception but rather the moulding of the self to
the circumstances, research goals, and setting at hand.
At its most basic, fieldwork implies going there – in terms of travel, immersion, and
committing to research for a protracted period of weeks, months, and even years. It can be
argued that this is, in itself, an inherently feminist facet of fieldwork in that it encourages

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researchers to consult meaningfully with the subjects of their research and take seriously
micropolitical factors – the intimate, the interpersonal, the everyday. The greatest contradiction
facing fieldworkers, however, is that the field, where we go, where we study, where we learn,
is not a place. As Wanda Vrasti (2010: 5) has written, “the method of separating the world
‘out there’ from theories ‘in here’” is a problematic one that makes a mechanistic research
method of what should be a lively, dynamic, and vibrant methodology. Going back to
ethnography’s historic links to the imperial project, the division between field and not-field is
a complicated one that exoticizes the colonial other and sets out difference for the delectation
of the white, wealthy, foreign ethnographer (see Cuomo and Massaro 2016). The division
between ‘home’ and ‘field’ will always haunt all field research. What is more, if the field is
not a place, then claims to authority, status, or knowledge based on the simple fact of having
‘been there’ will always be empty ones in need of critical assessment.
Ultimately, these tensions are productive and interesting ones in themselves, and certainly
they are questions we would never have encountered if we did not leave home to go out
into the field, whatever and wherever that might be. The key thing is to never turn away
from these tensions, to sit with them and see what makes them tick. What fieldwork can do
is facilitate a micro-level focus on interaction, subjectivity, and relationality, which is in itself
a pointed challenge to approaches that erase experience and marginality in favour of state-
centric and militaristic security structures and concerns. By centring the experience of
security, ethnographic fieldwork provides an avenue for demonstrating that gender is never,
ever a marginal concern.

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 PART II

Gendered insecurities
 11
GENDER AND WAR
Julia Welland

Introduction: war, International Relations and feminism

War continues to fascinate, trouble, and preoccupy the minds of academics, politicians,
philosophers, writers, and artists. As a phenomenon it has been extensively analysed;
attempted to be captured by stories, images, and poetry; and provides the backdrop to
countless books, films and artworks. As I write, a tentative ceasefire has begun in Syria in a
civil war that has now been raging for over five years; François Hollande, the French
premier, has declared his country is ‘at war’ with the terrorist organization variously referred
to as ‘Isis’ or ‘Daesh’; and in the UK, where I live and work, First World War commemorative
activities are ongoing during its centenary years. War, in short, surrounds us. As the feminist
Christine Sylvester has written (2013: 100):

[I]n a globalized era war touches everyone, even those whose bodies are not in any
direct line of fire: people feel the war touch directly, through news reports, aid and
relief campaigns, books, films, visual art, discussions in schools and universities, through
philosophical inquiry, or by knowing someone who is or has been involved in war.

Emerging in the years following the First World War, International Relations (IR) is a
discipline borne out of war. ‘The Great War’ saw 8.5 million soldiers killed, 21 million
injured, and 7.7 million as prisoners of war or simply ‘missing’. Widely perceived as a war
that nobody wanted and which appeared to be a product of misunderstanding, lack of
accountability, and uncontrollable and irrational processes, the First World War impelled the
argument for the systematic study of international politics with the explicit purpose of
controlling and reforming its conduct. While the discipline embraced liberal idea(l)s during
the inter-war years, after the failure of the League of Nations and the amplification of the
horrors of the First World War during the Second World War, IR – and its sub-discipline,
Security Studies – came to be dominated by the theoretical insights of realism and its
philosophical forebears. Influenced by the writings of the Prussian General and military
strategist, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), for many realists understandings of war begin
and end with the state. Drawing on Clausewitz’s famous maxim, “War is a mere continuation
of policy by other means” (2004: 14), war is understood as a rational foreign policy decision
taken by state actors in the name of national self-interest.

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In light of this dominance by realism, when in the late 1980s/early 1990s feminists and
other gender-aware scholars and practitioners began to enter into the academic and policy
worlds of international politics and security, there was some scepticism as to what an analysis
of gender could contribute to understandings of war (see Tickner (1997) for an overview of
how and why this scepticism arose). However, while realist or similarly Clausewitz-inspired
engagements might offer insights into the strategies of state armies, the weaponry used, and
when and why peace accords were signed, they fail to take account of how war is a profoundly
gendered activity. In comparison, feminists recognize that gender is integral to the ways that
war is imagined, produced, and enacted, and that depending on the gender of your body
and whether an individual identifies/or is identified as a man or woman, they will experience
war’s conduct, impact, and aftermath differently. Feminist research on and about war is
therefore vital in uncovering these experiences. This chapter is going to address three
interlinked areas of feminist research on gender and war: the gendered imaginings of war;
the gendered effects of war; and the gendered erasures from war.

Gendered imaginings of war

Gender is crucial to our imagining of war. A picture of war is a picture of gendered bodies,
and the familiar gendered picture or imaginary of war is a masculine one: wars are understood
to be declared by male heads of states, planned by male military generals, and fought by male
soldiers. Women, meanwhile, are relegated to the home front and to the margins of war
scholarship. Such a picture takes for granted that these bodies are cis-gendered1 and regulated
by a normative heterosexuality, whereby the masculine bodies of soldiers fight for the
feminine bodies of their wives and girlfriends far away from the battlefield.
In 1987, Jean Bethke Elshtain, one of the first and most prominent feminists in IR, pub-
lished her now seminal text Women and War. In this text, Elshtain surveys a range of war
narratives and demonstrates the significance of gender to the distinction between the ‘protec-
tor’ and the ‘protected’. Elshtain argues that in the West there is a tradition that “assumes an
affinity between women and peace, between men and war”, transmitted through culturally
constructed myths and memories. This tradition means that in times of war “real men and
women” take on the personas of “Just Warriors” (courageous men) and “Beautiful Souls”
(vulnerable women). Elshtain is explicit that “these tropes . . . do not denote what men and
women really are in time[s] of war”, rather, “they function to re-create and secure women’s
location as noncombatants and men’s as warriors” (Elshtain 1995: 4, original emphasis).
This gendered imaginary of war can be traced across historical periods, geographies, and
cultures. For example, in a widely circulated recruitment poster in Britain during the early
stages of the First World War, two women and a small child are depicted watching a group
of military men depart for war, under the words “Women of Britain say ‘GO!’”.2 The
message is clear: British women were expected to encourage their male relatives to enlist,
while remaining at home themselves; British men were expected to volunteer to fight, and
feel ashamed (and emasculated) should they stay or refuse to fight.
More recently, this gendered imagery and imaginary – with a distinctly racialized and
orientalized3 inflection – could be traced in the debates and rhetoric surrounding the 2001
US-led invasion into Afghanistan (see Cloud 2004). While the military intervention was
explained, in part, through a traditional Security Studies discourse of ‘national security’,4
wider support for the intervention was gained through an appeal to ‘save’ the women of
Afghanistan, who, under the Taliban, lived in highly oppressive conditions. In the run-up
to, and the opening months of, the invasion, US media was flooded with stories about how

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Afghan women were not allowed to leave their homes without a male chaperone, were
forbidden to wear nail varnish or high heels, and were prevented from talking loudly or
laughing out loud, as well as how it was the United States’ responsibility to alleviate their
suffering and secure their human rights. The then First Lady, Laura Bush, made an impassioned
radio address in which she drew explicit connections “between the plight of women of
Afghanistan, the Taliban and the terrorists responsible for 9/11” (Russo 2006: 561):

The brutal repression of women is a central goal of the terrorists . . . Only the
terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail
polish . . . The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of
women.
Bush 2001

In this imaginary of war, the women of Afghanistan are vulnerable, infantilized and agent-
less (Shepherd 2006: 20) ‘Beautiful Souls’, awaiting rescue and liberation by the brave and
righteous ‘Just Warriors’ of the United States’ (masculine) armed forces.
However, just as Elshtain makes clear, this discursive construction of vulnerable Afghan
women and brave US men does not denote what men and women really were during the
war, or, at least, it does not denote what men and women only or always were. Laura Bush’s
description of Afghan women, for example, failed to take account of Afghan women who
were members of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan and who had
been fighting for political and social rights in their country since the 1970s (see www.rawa.
org/index.php). Rather, Afghan women were ‘written’ in such a way that justified a particular
militarized response to their suffering (Hunt 2002). The gendered imagining of Afghan
women as passive victims in need of protection was central to making possible and garnering
support for the war-making of the US state.
Cynthia Enloe, another key feminist thinker within IR, has also paid attention to the ways
in which both war and militaries rely upon a gender order in which there is a clear division
of labour between men and women. In her vast body of scholarship (for example, see: 1983,
1993, 2007), Enloe makes use of the concept ‘militarized masculinity’ to denote the particular
‘type’ of masculinity produced within militaries. At its most basic level, militarized or military
masculinity can be understood as “the assertion that traits stereotypically associated with
masculinity can be acquired and proven through military service or action, and combat
in particular”, and that this gender identity is central to the perpetuation of violence in
international affairs (Eichler 2014: 81; see also Hutchings 2008).
There is a rich feminist literature that makes use of this concept and explores the
production, operation, and effects of military and militarized masculinities across the globe
(for example, Eichler 2011; Belkin 2012; Duncanson 2013). Much of this work draws on
Raewyn Connell’s understanding of hegemonic masculinity as “one form of masculinity rather
than others that is culturally exalted” (Connell 2005: 77). In the military, hegemonic
masculinity tends to be associated with strength, dominance, violence, and courage, and most
closely aligned with the combat arms of the military – for example, special forces, ground
combat teams, marines, and fighter pilots. However, while feminists and gender-aware
scholars have drawn on hegemonic masculinity in their analysis of militarized and military
masculinities, they have also pointed to ways in which ideas of hegemonic masculinity have
been challenged through military service. Claire Duncanson, for example, uses soldier
memoirs of British service personnel who deployed to Afghanistan (2001–2014) and/or Iraq
(2003–2011) to demonstrate that while there is plenty of evidence to support arguments

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about the presence of hegemonic or ‘war-fighting’ military masculinities during these two
deployments, there is also evidence to suggest there were instances of a ‘peacebuilding
masculinity’ simultaneously present. Duncanson argues that this ‘peacebuilding masculinity’
was constructed through “relations of equality, empathy, care, [and] respect” with local
Afghans and Iraqis (Duncanson 2013: 148). For Duncanson, this peacebuilding masculinity
is significant because it suggests that military personnel might be able to contribute not just
toward violence and war-making, but the achievement of peace and security (p. 149).
‘Properly’ gendered bodies are therefore crucial to our imagining and doing of war.
Cis-men are expected to take on the ‘masculine’ virtues of strength, valour, and dominance,
achieved through military service and war-fighting. Cis-women, meanwhile, are those who
are fought for, embodying the ‘feminine’ virtues of passivity, vulnerability, and innocence.
While these gendered imaginings are integral to securing men as combatants and women as
non-combatants (think, for example, to the only very recent decision to lift the bans on
women serving on the frontline in the British and US armed forces), they also mean that
men and women will experience the effects of war differently.

Gendered effects of war

While war has never been an exclusively masculine zone, with militaries having always been
reliant on women’s work for their function (Enloe 1983), the gendered imaginary of war in
which women are non-combatants and relegated to the home front has meant that women
have become symbols for the social and cultural values of the warring sides (Yuval-Davis
1997). As such, women’s bodies have often become the surface upon which war is waged.
While examples of this can be traced in calls by French colonialists in the 1950s for Algerian
women to be ‘de-veiled’ during the Algerian War of Independence, or in how both
Palestinian and Israeli women are encouraged to have children in support of their respective
nations, one area that has received sustained feminist engagement has been in relation to the
use of sexual violence against women during armed conflict.
Rape and sexual violence have long been features of war and armed conflict. A report
published in 2007 documents instances of conflict-related sexual violence in 51 countries
across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, over a 20-year period between
1987 and 2007 (Bastick, Grimm and Kunz 2007). Despite war and sexual violence’s close
relationship, however, it has only been in recent years that it has attracted scholarly and media
attention. Previously, sexual violence during war (when acknowledged) was viewed as an
inevitable, albeit unfortunate, feature of armed conflict. Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern
note how rape has historically connoted revenge and triumph for the winning side, with the
women of the defeated side the “war booty” for the victorious (male) soldiers. Implicit in
these accounts is the understanding that it is men’s (hetero)sexuality that is the driving force
of this sexual violence, and when this sexuality is untethered from ‘normal’ societal controls,
such as during the throes of war, it easily results in rape (Baaz and Stern 2009: 498).
Rather than explanations that unproblematically link sexual violence to supposedly
biologically male and (hetero)sexual desires and needs, feminists have sought to explore
alternative understandings. For example, and drawing on understandings of the gendered
imaginary of war discussed above, “[i]f symbolically protecting ‘their’ women is crucial to
men fighting wars, then attacking the ‘enemy’s’ women serves simultaneously to emasculate
the ‘enemy’ and take away his reason for fighting” (Sjoberg 2016: 185). Thus, while the act
of rape sends a symbolic message of dominance to all women (Card 1996), for the perpetrators
it also serves to feminize the enemy through their failure to protect ‘their’ women.

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Given the physical and symbolic damage that is achieved through rape and sexual violence
to both the (mostly) women who experience it and to the social and cultural fabric of their
society, it is perhaps unsurprising it has featured in so many armed conflicts. During the 1990s
there were two particular instances when rape was so widespread and used in such a way to
be classified as a tool of genocide. In both the Bosnian conflict (1992–1994) and the Rwandan
genocide (1994), rape was understood not ‘just’ as a crime against its victim and women
more generally, but as a weapon against an ethnic or national group (Sjoberg and Peet 2011).
Used primarily, but not exclusively, by Serbian forces against Bosnian women during the
Bosnian war, and against Tutsi women by Hutu militias in Rwanda, in both cases women
were targeted precisely because of their ethnicity and the rapes committed with the intent
to destroy, in whole or part, the ethnic group.
In light of the evidence of the prevalence of gender-based sexualized violence, it was also
around this time that researchers, policymakers, and media commentators began to use the
phrase ‘rape as a weapon of war’, as well as it being classed as a war crime in international
law. The increased attention revealed sexual violence’s presence across multiple conflict
zones, as well as ensuring its appearance on the agenda of the United Nations, numerous
human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the much-publicized 2014
Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London, co-chaired by the then British
Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and the Special Envoy of the UN High Commissioner
on Refugees and film star, Angelina Jolie.
The labelling of rape as a ‘weapon of war’, its discussion at the highest levels of international
security, and a global initiative aimed at eradicating it and other forms of sexual violence
during armed conflict, all signal that this particular feminist concern about war has moved
from the margins to the centre. However, while acknowledging the feminist success of
politicizing this issue, feminists have also questioned what this increased attention has
excluded in discussions of war and/or sexual violence. For example, attention has been
drawn to the ways in which the ‘rape as a weapon of war’ narrative might over-simplify the
specificities and complexities of wartime sexual violence (Baaz and Stern 2013); how
stereotypical assumptions about women, their victimhood, and their sexual and reproductive
identities risk being reproduced (Gardam and Jarvis 2001); and how a preoccupation with
sexual violence during war often results in sexual violence outside war or perpetrated by
‘peacekeepers’ being ignored (Whitworth 2004), as well as other forms of physical and
structural violence women might experience during armed conflict (for example, that women
are more likely than men to experience poverty, become a refugee, and lack access to
healthcare and education) (Gardam and Jarvis 2001).
The majority of feminist work on wars’ effects has focused on the experiences of women.
This is because there has been a historical tendency within IR and studies of war to focus
on men and their experiences. There are, however, scholars who argue that it is not women’s
experiences of war that have been ignored, but men’s. Adam Jones has written extensively
(see his 2009 text for an overview) on men, violence, and feminist IR, paying particular
attention to the gendered effects of genocide in war. One of Jones’ key contentions is the
gender-selective – what he refers to as ‘gendercidal’ – killing of men during armed conflict;
particularly men of perceived ‘battle age’ (approximately between 15 and 55). Jones argues
“that gendercide – at least when it targets males – has attracted virtually no attention at the
level of scholarship or public policy” (Jones 2000: 186). For Jones, the male victims of war
and men’s gendered experiences of war have been ignored in scholarship, and by feminists
in particular.

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Men, of course, do experience war and its effects differently. Feminists, however, have
not ignored their experiences. Concerned with asking questions about gender, and not
(exclusively) about women and/or femininity, there is a rich feminist literature that engages
with the experiences of men and masculinity in war and global politics more broadly (see
the discussion of military and militarized masculinities above). As Laura Sjoberg writes in a
review of one of Jones’ texts: feminism provides the tools for “identifying and understanding
[the] complex, interdependent webs of gender hierarchy in global politics” and is therefore
“an essential component” to Jones’ work on “men’s victimization” (2012: 308). While Jones’
critique of feminism might be misplaced, just as a preoccupation with wartime sexual violence
against women obscures a host of other violences they might experience, it is worth
considering how certain assumptions about gender and gendered bodies excludes and silences
certain stories and voices from understandings of war.

Gendered erasures of war

Feminist research on war has done much to interrogate and deconstruct the powerful and
enduring gendered imaginings of war, as well as bringing attention to and politicizing the
gender-specific experiences these imaginings, in part, make possible. It has also been central
in drawing attention to less familiar stories and those that challenge gendered expectations
about what men and women do in war, and what war does to men and women. In this final
section, some of these lesser-known stories are going to be told. Three in particular will be
focused on: women as combatants and perpetrators of violence; men who are opposed to
war; and male victims of sexual violence.

Women as combatants and perpetrators

In contradistinction to popular conceptualizations of women as victims and peacemakers,
women have often been active participants of war. Women have taken up arms in guerrilla
movements in South and Central America; fought in nationalist movements across Africa
and the Middle East; and have perpetrated sexualized violence in Rwanda, Liberia, the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Iraq. While such women have often been
written out of historical accounts of wars, when they have been taken account of they have
often been fetishized or had their motives reduced to a one-dimensional or stereotypical
(gendered) narrative.
Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Gentry and Sjoberg 2015)
have examined representations of women who have committed proscribed political violence
in Chechnya, Palestine, Rwanda, and the US military women who engaged in sexual torture
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Sjoberg and Gentry argue that these women are not portrayed
as regular criminals, soldiers, or terrorists, rather, “they are captured in storeyed fantasies
which deny women’s agency and reify gender stereotypes and subordination” (Sjoberg and
Gentry 2007: 5). In particular, their violence is presented through a series of gendered
narratives: the mother narrative, monster narrative, and whore narrative. While the mother
narrative explains women’s violence as a need to nurture and a way of being loyal to men;
the monster narrative scripts the women as insane, thus eliminating rational behaviour,
ideology, or culpability from them; and the whore narrative explains the violence as a
product of the evils of women’s sexuality. Such narratives work to fully other violent women,
portraying them not as ‘true’ women, but “singular mistakes and freak accidents” (Sjoberg
and Gentry 2007: 13), denying them both womanhood and political agency. As such, the

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gendered imaginary of women as peaceful remains intact and violent women are not held
to account in the same way as men.
Swati Parashar has also sought to complicate the stories that are told (or not told) about
women and war. Parashar is critical of those who fail to recognize the political or religious
reasons why women might choose to fight:

[T]o always question their [women militants’] motives is an inherent gender biased
position . . . After all we never ask why a man took up arms or his motivations for
committing suicide bombing – whether he was raped, humiliated, a social pariah
or was thinking about the grandeur of an afterlife. We assume he had political issues
to settle.
Parashar 2014: 52

In her in-depth analysis of women’s participation in militancy in Kashmir and as part of

the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, Parashar unpacks the intricacies
of women’s motivations for choosing to fight – often inspired by the same nationalistic or
militaristic zeal as men – and the complexities of their wartime experiences. Parashar also
documents how despite playing central roles in the respective nationalist and religious
movements, militant women both in Kashmir and the LTTE have been excluded and
silenced from the political discourses surrounding the wars and from national narratives.

Men, masculinity, and opposition to war

The peace movement has, unsurprisingly, been traditionally associated with women. From the
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s in the UK, to women’s peace
activism in Liberia in the early 2000s, and to the numerous examples of women instru-
mentalizing their femininity or identity as ‘mother’ in the name of peace,5 opposition to war
has been understood as a distinctly feminized activity. However, just as there are numerous
stories of women joining militaries, perpetrating violence, and rejecting or subverting
assumptions about their peaceful nature, so too are there examples of men who actively
oppose war, are conscientious objectors, or at the forefront of peace campaigns (see Rowe
2013).
Given femininity’s long association with peace and masculinity with war, feminist
engagements with peaceful men often explore the ways in which ideas about masculinity are
reproduced and/or challenged in narratives surrounding peaceful men and their actions in
international affairs. Daniel Conway (2012), for example, details the use of masculinity, and
militarized masculinity in particular, in war resistance during apartheid in South Africa.
Through detailed interviews with individual objectors and an analysis of statements made by
the ‘End Conscription Campaign’ during apartheid, Conway explores how narratives of
self-empowerment and autonomy offered access to a transgressive masculine identity not
offered by the state. Conway goes on to question the extent to which objection was a radical
act given that the alternative performance of masculinity offered actually embodied and
symbolized many of the same images serving soldiers were assumed to have a monopoly in.
As such, the construction of a masculinity of objection took place within, and did not
challenge, the boundaries that exalted militarization.
Joanna Tidy (2015) has also explored the ways in which militarized masculinity has
operated within military peace movements. Analysing a 2007 documentary film, Body of War,
which portrays the anti-war activism of Tomas Young, a paralysed Iraq veteran, Tidy pays

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attention to how masculine privilege operates within the US movement, producing

hierarchies of experience, which leave in place the foundations of militarism and war-
making. Tidy demonstrates how within Body of War, the authority of Young, and the
military peace movement as a whole, “rests upon a military masculine authenticity of
experience expressed in the trope of the ‘boots on the ground’ perspective” (Tidy 2015:
458). Thus, while Young’s anti-war calls produce dissent, contesting the military and the
privileging of its practices, it also relies on and reproduces the authority of militarized
masculinity, whereby this particular gendered subject is privileged above all others.
Both Conway and Tidy make visible groups of men frequently left out of the ‘war story’
commonly told, as well as the everyday workings of (militarized) masculinity in war resistance
movements and how it is contested and reproduced. Their research reminds us of the
multifaceted way that gender and war are interlinked, both in its practice and resistance
to it.

Men as victims and survivors of sexual violence

While conventional analyses of gender and war emphasize the vulnerabilities of women and
girls, and their sexual vulnerabilities in particular, sexual violence against men and boys has
received far less attention (for exceptions, see Sivakumarian 2007; Lewis 2014; Zalewski
et al. 2018). This is despite the fact that, as with sexual violence against women, sexual
violence against men has been chronicled for centuries (taking place in Ancient Persia and
the Crusades, as well as by Ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Norse armies (Sivakumarian 2007:
257)), and in the decade between 1998 and 2008 was documented in 25 conflict-affected
countries, with additional reports emerging from Libya, Syria, the DRC, and the Central
African Republic since then (Dolan 2014: 1). While it remains that women and girls are
disproportionally affected by sexual violence in conflict, where surveys have been conducted
they suggest that levels of sexual violence against men and boys is much higher than is
generally assumed or publicly admitted. However, despite evidence suggesting sexual violence
against men in conflict is widespread, men and boys are often absent or footnoted in discussions
and/or policies surrounding the issue, while in UN documentation and charity and NGO
literature there is “frequent use of gendered pronouns to refer to victims and perpetrators”
(Lewis 2014: 212).
Chloe Lewis has analysed international materials pertaining to conflict-related sexual
violence and identified three representations of men and masculinities produced and relied
upon within them: the ‘Male Perpetrator’, ‘Strategic Ally’, and elusive ‘Male Victim Subject’.
Lewis argues that the strength of the gendered stories of war materializes in these documents
in the “dominance of the ‘Male Perpetrator’ and concomitant repress-entation of the ‘Male
Victim Subject’” (Lewis 2014: 204, original emphasis). Such language works to (re)produce
gendered assumptions and imaginaries of war, whereby women and girls are presumed as
potential or actual victims of sexual violence, and men (and to a lesser extent, boys) are the
presumed potential or actual perpetrators. As such, legal, conceptual, and programmatic
spaces available to men within international sexual violence discourse is limited (Lewis 2014:
203–204), and doctors, counsellors, and humanitarian workers on the ground in conflict
zones presume they are not susceptible to sexual violence and fail to pick up on the signs
that such violence has occurred (Sivakumarian 2007: 256).
Paying attention to wartime sexual violence against men is an important feminist concern,
not only because it might “lead to a more nuanced consideration of the roles men and
women play in armed conflict . . . dispel[ling] the idea of women solely as victims and men

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only as perpetrators” (Sivakumarian 2007: 260), but also because sexual violence, whether
directed at men’s or women’s bodies is about power and domination, and establishes a
gendered relationship between the victim and perpetrator. Because gender stereotyping
tells us that masculinity is strong and powerful and that femininity is weak and helpless,
and that these attributes map onto understandings of the perpetrator and victim, respectively,
“[r]egardless of the actual gender of the perpetrator or victim, the characteristic of masculinity
is attributed to the perpetrator and femininity to the victim” (Sivakumarian 2007: 271). A
gendered analysis of wartime sexual violence is therefore integral to understanding why
sexual violence takes place and its individual, communal, and societal effects.

Conclusion
Gender shapes, directs, and helps make possible war. It constructs how we think about war,
how individuals experience it, and how we respond to war’s effects. It renders (hyper)visible
certain bodies and experiences, while obscuring or silencing others. To not engage in an
analysis of war’s gendered dynamics or to assume it is the purview of ‘gender-neutral’ states
is to fail to fully take account of both wars’ and gender’s operations. This chapter has detailed
three interrelated ways how being ‘feminist curious’ (Enloe 2004) has uncovered the ways in
which war is a profoundly gendered activity. First, gender was shown to be crucial to how
we imagine war. While battlefields are populated with the masculine bodies of ‘Just Warriors’,
feminine ‘Beautiful Souls’ are relegated to the private sphere and are whom war is fought for.
Despite the term imaginary being critical here, such gendered myths are crucial to the workings
of militaries and the practice of war. These gendered imaginaries, however, impact not just
on the doing of war, but also on how men and women experience war. In the second section
the gendered effects of war were considered. While as the (imagined) ‘protector’ men are
more likely to fight and be targeted as combatants, women’s position as the ‘protected’ and
as the bearers of society’s culture and values, mean their bodies frequently become the terri-
tories upon which battles are fought. As such, rape and sexual violence have frequently been
directed toward women and girls in times of war because of the devastating and humiliating
effects it has on them, the men who are perceived to have failed to protect them, and their
wider community. These same imaginaries also work to exclude certain bodies from war nar-
ratives. In the final section three such exclusions were considered: violent women, peaceful
men, and male victims of sexual violence. While not straightforwardly connected, these three
war stories can be joined together by the gendered assumptions that work to obscure and
silence the experiences and voices found within them. Despite overwhelming evidence that
men and women take part and experience war in multifaceted ways, the men and women
documented in the final section do not fit within the dominant war narratives that states rely
on to continue to make war. Feminist research seeks to uncover these lesser-told stories, as
well as interrogate those that are more familiar. Such research is vital, both in achieving a
fuller understanding of war and for strategies that look to resist its continuation.

Notes
1 Cis-gendered individuals refer to those “who have a match between the gender they were assigned
at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity” (Schilt and Westbrook 2009: 461).
2 A picture of the photo can be found here: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/14592.
3 This term is drawn from the work of Edward Said, who in 1978 published his seminal text
Orientalism. The text explored the West’s cultural representations of ‘The East’ and its depictions
of those who lived there as exotic, sexually deviant, depraved, and barbaric.

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4 The Taliban, the then majority ruling party of Afghanistan, had refused to surrender Osama Bin
Laden, the assumed ‘ring leader’ of the 11 September attacks on America, to the American authori-
ties, prompting the American-led military intervention in October 2001. The intervention was to
last over 13 years, causing the deaths of thousands of soldiers and Afghan civilians.
5 For example, in Argentina in the 1970s the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’, an explicitly ‘women-
only’ movement, protested against the ‘disappearances’ of their sons, while Palestinian and Israeli-
Jewish women have engaged in joint resistance to political violence through calling for the end of
illegal Israeli occupation and building peace initiatives.

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 12
GENDER AND TERRORISM
Caron E. Gentry

In January 2016, an armed militia group took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in
Harney County, Oregon. The leader was Ammon Bundy, who believed he was ordained
by God to end the federal government’s ownership of the mostly rural land in Harney
County. He formed the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, a far-right-wing militia, that
cooperated with and was supported by other militias. Even though Bundy and his associates
let law enforcement know that they intended to take over the refuge headquarters and did
so on 2 January, law enforcement stayed away from the area until the fifth week of the siege.
During the siege, other militias set up a defensive perimeter around the headquarters and the
police allowed members to leave and enter the refuge at will. It was not until the fourth
week of the siege that law enforcement intercepted some of the leaders resulting in a
shooting, a car chase, and arrests. Still the siege went on for another two weeks before the
remaining members surrendered to the FBI.
None of these men were charged with acts of terrorism – even though they: tried to sup-
plant the US government’s federal authority in this area; used the threat of force to achieve
their goals; and shot at the police and resisted arrest. Ammon Bundy is a white, middle-class
Mormon man who had managed a fleet of cars in Arizona but whose father is a local rancher.
Imagine if Bundy was not white, not middle-class, and not a Mormon. What if he was brown
and an immigrant, believing that the US federal government had perpetrated harms in other
parts of the world? Would law enforcement still have stayed away? Would the charges have
included terrorism?
I use this example to demonstrate that terrorism is a heavily contested term and, therefore,
activity. Most Terrorism Studies scholars would argue that terrorism is a method of violence
or the threat of violence that targets non-combatants and is extra-judicial as it operates
outside of the confines of war and challenges the state’s monopoly on violence in order to
achieve political goals (see Richards 2015). Yet, terrorism is a pejorative label (see Hoffman
2006: 23–24) that is applied unequally to non-state actors as opposed to state actors to denote
illegitimacy and immorality (see Gentry 2014). While it might not be immediately apparent,
this is evidence of the gendered hierarchical system that intersects with other factors, such
as race, class, religion, etc.
Therefore, this chapter will look at gender and terrorism by starting at the same place that
feminism did in International Relations (IR): with the women as per Cynthia Enloe (1983).

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After that it will look at how men, the ‘normal’ terrorists, are gendered. The following
section is an intersectional analysis of neo-Orientalism and the War on Terror. The final
section looks at the gendered hierarchical international system and how this automatically
connotes legitimacy onto states and illegitimacy onto politically violent non-state actors, even
if both states and non-states are using the same style of violence. The section concludes with
the recent work on queering IR and Terrorism Studies, as sexuality is central to gender
hierarchy of the international system and to the study of terrorism.

Where Are the Women?

The study of gender and terrorism in many ways began with the study of women and terror-
ism. The term terrorism originated during the French Revolution and the Rule of Terror
(Hoffman 2006: 3–4). While first associated with state terrorism, terrorism became applied and
an accepted label for non-state violence in the aftermath of the failed 1848 nationalist move-
ments in Europe (Miller 1995). A detail that is often missed is that women were involved in
these groups. For instance, in the Russian populist group, Naradnoya Volya, that operated
from 1879 to 1894, women were intimately involved in its activities and ideological develop-
ment (Carroll 2000; Siljak 2009).
Instead, the first time that women’s participation is noted and studied is in the Marxist-
Leninist movements in the 1960s across the globe. Terrorism Studies only began in earnest
in the 1970s mainly among a group of scholars in the West (see Ranstorp 2009). Several
Terrorism Studies scholars, including Leonard Weinburg and William Eubank (1987, 1989)
and H.H.A. Cooper (1979), looked at women’s participation, but the study of women or of
gender by feminists (with the exception of Robin Morgan (1989) and Kathleen Blee (1991)
(who wrote on women and the Ku Klux Klan) was relatively ignored until the early 2000s.
Thus, this first section starts with the distinctly feminist question, where are the women
(Enloe 1983), and it goes further to ask, how are they represented or gendered?
The first feminist text to look at women’s participation in terrorism was second wave
feminist Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (1989). Morgan’s book is
a reflection on her participation in the United States’ student movement in the 1960s and
her brief flirtation with joining the rising Weather Underground. The Weather Underground
was a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group that led violent riots in Chicago, robbed post offices
along the Eastern seaboard, and bombed banks on Wall Street and even the US Capitol
Building and the Pentagon (Gentry 2004). The Weather Underground, like other Marxist-
Leninist groups worldwide (including the West German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red
Brigades, France’s Action Direct, and the Japanese Red Army), had a high number of women
members and leaders. When Morgan was a student in New York in the late 1960s, she found
the Weather Underground’s politics to be high masculinist (prioritizing the male members
and leaders, as well as a violent masculinist ideology) and deeply sexualized, which they were
(see Gentry 2004). Thus, her reflections on all terrorist groups and members is seen through her
experiences with the Weather Underground.
Morgan (1989: 27–28) names the male terrorist, the Demon Lover, as “the ultimate sexual
ideal of a male-centred tradition[,] . . . the logical extension of the patriarchal hero”. Morgan
surprisingly refers to women as “token” terrorists because women typically exist “outside
the body politic, except as victims or tokens”. She denies women the capability to make
decisions for themselves. The “token” terrorist “is no more a true representative of women
than the airbrushed Playboy centrefold”. A “‘revolutionary’ woman” buys into the “male
‘radical’ line” and “diassociate[s] herself from her womanhood . . . her reality” (Morgan 1989:

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59–60). The token terrorist defends her loyalty and her commitment while in denial to her
true self. Thus women who participate in the armed struggle have made the wrong choice,
forsaking the more humane path of feminism for male-dominated political violence.
Morgan’s perspective, while based upon her own experience, unfortunately contributes to
some of the gendered stereotypes that existed in Terrorism Studies. For instance, that women
became involved in terrorist organizations because of their boyfriends or husbands (Weinburg
and Eubank (1987) although later work moves away from this argument (Weinburg and
Eubank (2011)) or were hypersexualized (see Anonymous 1976). Thus, Laura Sjoberg and
myself (2007) began critiquing the narratives that surrounded women’s participation in
extranormal political violence. As Julia Welland discussed in Chapter 11, our work looked at
Palestinian women’s participation in suicide martyrdom as well as the Chechen ‘Black
Widows’. The main purpose of Mothers, Monsters, Whores, and its subsequent second edition
(Gentry and Sjoberg 2015a), was to produce an intervention in the gendered narratives that
claimed women participated in terrorism: out of some biologically determined maternal need
(the Mother narrative; see also Gentry 2009); because she was insane or irrational (the Monster
narrative), or because she was either hypersexualized or ‘deviantly’ sexualized as gay (the
Whore narrative; see also Sjoberg and Gentry 2008). These narratives served to disassociate
women from the political nature of terrorism (an element intrinsic to the definition of ter-
rorism (see Schmid and Jongman 2006: 5)) and to complicate their agency regarding the
choices they made to be violent.
Therefore, Swati Parashar’s (2009, 2011, 2014) work on women’s involvement in
conservative/religious militant groups in Sri Lanka and Kashmir is incredibly important.
Parashar’s work looks at the women who have often been overlooked because the previous
assumption was that as conservative groups had strict gender roles this limited women to the
private and therefore their engagement with violence. Subsequently, women were not
‘terrorists’ – as they were not the ones pulling the trigger of the gun or planting and setting
off a bomb. However, what Parashar found was the unseen labour of women and reached
the conclusion that women’s participation in political violence should be conceptualized not
as a binary between victim or agent, but as individuals who challenge both feminist and
mainstream notions of what it means to participate and support political violence.
While it has been accepted that more women participate in Marxist-Leninist groups
(because of the equality emphasized in the ideology) or in ethno-nationalist groups (also
owed to the slightly different nature of the desired social equality inherent to these primarily
anti-colonialist movements), an intersectional approach requires that feminist scholars ask the
other questions (Matsuda 1991): if someone sees gender, they should ask where is race; if
they see race, they should ask where is religion; etc. An intersectional approach acknowledges
that gender, as a structuring force, does not operate independently but often works in tandem
and indistinguishably from other forms of oppression, such as race, class, sexuality, religion,
geo-political location, etc. (Runyan and Peterson 2013: 35; Davis 2008), and thus
intersectional analysis of gender and terrorism requires us to look at what other factors are
involved in the telling of women’s participation in terrorism.
Intersectional approaches are needed more than ever as there has been increased media
coverage of the women who are joining IS in Syria and acting in support of them in the
West. Asking the other question has also led me to look at ‘gendered neo-orientalism’
(Gentry 2016a), particularly in the ways that women’s participation in al-Qaeda are under-
stood (Gentry 2016b). Gendered neo-orientalism is both a departure from Edward Said’s
(1978) orientalism and from the more recent neo-orientalism. Said’s orientalism looks at
the discursive binary from the ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ West toward the people, places,

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and aesthetics associated with Arabia, holding these to be anti-progress and ‘backward’.
Where orientalism used to be a way of studying and describing those things associated with
the East, Said introduces a postcolonial critique of it. Later work on neo-orientalism took
orientalism further, arguing that neo-orientalism is a bias against all of those associated with
Islam (even tacit association) (Nayak and Malone 2009) and in the discourse that holds Islam
as “atavistic, resistant to progress, brutal, and violent” (Gentry 2016b). This is related to ter-
rorism through the neo-orientalist assumption that Muslims’ allegiance to sharia law means
the liberal necessity of a “contract between society and state” cannot be formed (Tuastad
2003: 594–595).
Neo-orientalism is deeply gendered. It assumes that rationality is a Western trait (as well
as a masculine one as will be discussed further below). Within Terrorism Studies and in the
discourse of the War on Terror (see Shepherd 2006; Nayak 2006), Muslim men (again, to
be discussed below) were described as hypermasculine by being overly violent. This meant
that Muslim women were presented as the victims of Muslim men’s hyper-ness. As described
by both Welland in Chapter 11 and Cecilia Åse in Chapter 24, Muslim women were scripted
to fit the idealized (brown) woman in need of protection from brown men by the (superior)
white forces of the US and/or NATO (which is a very Spivak-ian moment of “white men
saving brown women from brown men” (see Spivak 1988)). The ‘oppression’ of Muslim
women became the “categorical proof of Islamic terror” upon which the US could project
its hypermasculinist protector image against and above the “dehumanized and demonized”
Muslim men (Nayak 2006: 49–50).
Given this portrayal of women associated with Islam, it is difficult to makes sense of the
women who choose to be violent. When women affiliate themselves with al-Qaeda, such as
Myrium Degaque, a Belgian woman who self-detonated in Iraq, or Sajida al-Rishawi, a
woman whose bomb pack failed to detonate in Amman, Jordan (see Gentry and Sjoberg
2015a: 59), or are affiliated with al-Qaeda, like Aafia Siddiqui, a woman who may or may
not have fundraised for al-Qaeda (Gentry 2011; 2016a), some in the media or academics have
to make sense of them within the pre-set discursive arrangements in gendered neo-orientalism.
Thus, Degaque was described as a Catholic schoolgirl gone wrong who married a Muslim
man who converted her to radical Islam; al-Rishawi was described similarly as a dominated
wife; and Siddiqui has been described as alternatively crazy or also dominated by her husband
(see Gentry and Sjoberg 2015a: 82–83; Gentry 2016a).
Furthermore, these problematic gender tropes are showing up in the discussions of the
women who join or act for IS. IS differs from al-Qaeda in that it has actively recruited
women from the West to join it and come to the territory it controls in Syria. Because IS
is interested in state-building, this has meant that women do have a dedicated role within
this state – to marry and have children in the support of the nation. This role/cast-typing
for women in IS is similar to what has been observed of women’s ideal role in ethno-
nationalist movements: to be the mother of the nation (see Yuval-Davis 1997). Yet, IS has
also left the door open for women’s participation in the armed struggle – if too many men
have been killed, women will be allowed to participate in the struggle (Winter 2015).
Some of the media and other academics have cast women’s decision to involve themselves
in IS as wholly dependent upon these stereotypes. Some depict the young women who have
gone to Syria as “girls” who were “lured” across the border (Benhold 2015). These young
women have been groomed online and therefore tricked or deceived into the struggle
(Ferguson 2015). Others describe them as women who desire material possessions and that
the promise of top-of-the-line kitchen appliances and marital bliss is enough to make them
leave the West and join their future husbands in Syria (Bloom 2015). Yet, again, these

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narratives do not fully explore why women have become involved (Sjoberg and Gentry
2016). Trying to deflect or at least minimize women’s agency and understanding of their
choice to engage in political violence is at odds with how men’s involvement and political
choices are depicted. Instead, the normal terrorist or the terrorist ‘norm’ is often conflated
with men, unless those men happen to ‘deviate’ from the white, Western ideal.

Masculinities and terrorism

Since gender is a binary that assumes dichotomous differences between woman/femininity
and man/masculinity, this binary also works in how female terrorists are discussed – in
opposition to male terrorists. Masculinity is associated with logic, rationality, strength/
aggressiveness. Therefore, men are associated with these traits and from there it is assumed
that men are naturally inclined to be involved in the public sphere (Pateman 1980; Elshtain
1981). Women are associated with opposing traits, emotion, irrationality or hysteria, and
passivity, which excludes them from the public and shutters them in the private sphere
(Pateman 1980; Elshtain 1981). These gendered assumptions about the presumed attributes
and behaviours of men or women carry into Terrorism Studies.
As mentioned previously, early Terrorism Studies rarely touched upon women’s involve-
ment in terrorism. When they were mentioned, gendered assumptions were often present –
that they imitated men, had no understanding of justice or the political rationale behind the
violence, or, again, that they were sex crazed (Anonymous 1976; Cooper 1979). Thus, much
of the literature on terrorists within Terrorism Studies was implicitly about men or about a
gender-neutral actor. This becomes clear when one looks at ‘politicalization/mobilization’
and the rational actor model versus the radicalization and postmodern/new terrorism.
When learning about the motivations behind a person’s decision to join terrorism – this
has historically been termed ‘mobilization’ or ‘politicalization’ – scholarship often centres on
a belief in the political cause of the group as well as a desire to belong to something, often
due to friendship and family ties (Peteet 1991; della Porta 1992). Several studies focus on
‘push/pull’ factors, or the factors that exist in mainstream society that push a person toward
terrorism, such as lack of education, low socio-economic status, or low job prospects, and
the elements that are attractive about the terrorist organization (pull factors), such as money,
status, and group acceptance (Taylor and Horgan 2006; see also McCauley and Moskalenko
(2008; 2011) for a longer discussion). While push/pull include both masculine (political) and
feminine (emotional) reasons for involvement, this rationale begins to break down when an
intersectional analysis is conducted on the Terrorism Studies literature on mobilization/
politicalization. For instance, the rational actor model that has been adopted is distinctly
masculinist and when politicalization is applied to radical Islamist terrorism the term
‘radicalization’ is used, which relies upon problematic hypermasculinized discourse.
Sjoberg and Gentry (2009) used the work on suicide terrorism to argue that ‘gender-
neutrality’ is never neutral and makes implicit assumptions based upon the masculine ideal
(see also Charlesworth 1999: 381). Robert Pape’s (2005) work on suicide terrorism employs
a rational actor model and argues that suicide campaigns work because “the terrorists’ political
cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations” (Pape 2005: 22). This makes
suicide terrorism a strategic choice made by persons capable of rational decision-making in
the interest of political power and control. Furthermore, suicide terrorists are “psychologically
normal” (Pape 2005: 23) and “come from a broad array of lifestyles” (Pape 2005: 17). Again,
Pape’s work depends upon gender-neutrality but it is couched within distinctly masculine
discourse. Thus, Sjoberg and Gentry (2009) critique this study for masculinist bias: strategic

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logic prioritizes rationality and calculation (masculine-related values) over emotion and care
(feminist-related values). Yet, both of these sets of values are important – no one makes a
decision without weighing both (Sjoberg and Gentry 2009; see also Crawford (2000) which
is about the role of emotions in the study and practice of IR).
The masculinist norm of strategic, logical (suicide) terrorism loses its neutrality when it is
intersected with other factors, in particular, gender and the neo-orientalist conflation of
religion and race. When Pape (2005: 209) considers women, separating them from the suicide
terrorist norm, he hypothesizes that as women age, they receive fewer marriage proposals and
“acting as a human bomb . . . is an understood and accepted offering for a woman who will
never become a mother” (Pape 2005: 230). Additionally, women become suicide terrorists
due to rape, which is “a stigma that destroys their prospects for marriage and rules out pro-
creation as a means of contributing to the community” (Pape 2005: 230; Bloom 2005; Bloom
2011). While this tells the reader more about Pape’s thinking on women, it serves to highlight
how he accepts masculine traits as the norm for suicide terrorism.
Intersectionality also needs to be applied to the study of religious terrorism. As Terrorism
Studies began to address religious terrorism in the 1980s, the work slowly became imbued
with gendered neo-orientalism. The Marxist-Leninist groups’ dominance faded in the 1970s
and in its place groups with religious ties, such as Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and
Hezbollah in Lebanon, grew in prominence. This resulted in a new emphasis on the study
of religious terrorism (see Ranstorp 1996). By the 1990s, after the sarin gas attack on the
Tokyo subway system by Aum Shinrikyo, the truck bombing of the Federal Building in
Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a white nationalist with ties to Christian extremist
groups, and the first World Trade Center bombing by al-Qaeda in New York, Terrorism
Studies experts Walter Laqueur (1996, 2000) and Bruce Hoffman (Lesser et al. 1999) began
to herald the rise of what they called ‘postmodern’ or ‘new’ terrorism. The postmodern
terrorism thesis warned that in the coming decades terrorist attacks would be on a massive
scale with very high number of fatalities and it would be driven by fundamentalist or extremist
ideology. This theory only seemed to be borne out with the events of 9/11, 3/11 (the 2004
attack on Spanish trains), 7/7 (the 2005 attack on London’s transit system), and now with
the shootings in Paris in 2015 and bombings in Brussels in 2016.
Unfortunately, new terrorism also became conflated with neo-orientalism, especially in
the War on Terror discourse (see Gentry and Sjoberg 2015b). Dag Tuastad (2003) traces how
American politicians and academics adopted an increasingly neo-orientalist stance which
gradually emerged in the post-9/11 era. The War on Terror discourse created a Manichean
vision of the (Christian, white) West fighting an ages-old battle against the (radical) Islamic
forces in the Middle East – a modern day crusade (Jarvis 2009; see also Jackson 2005). More
particularly, it created a dynamic where the counter-terrorist (the US and allies in the War
on Terror) were rational actors facing “Islamic terrorists” who are “‘crazy madmen’ acting
under the influence of mental disorders and deprived of any rational logic related to social,
political, or religious conditions” (Hellmich 2008: 113). Men associated with Islam were
presented as “Irrational Barbarians” (Shepherd 2006: 25) who threatened, not just submissive
Muslim women, but the very civilizational structure of the West as their atavistic violence
was pointed at bringing down the US and its allies (see Nayak 2006; Nayak and Malone
2009).
This discursive binary that relies upon racialized hypermasculinity becomes clear if one
contrasts the treatment of the men involved in the Oregon refuge takeover. By staying away
and trying to negotiate with the militia, instead of immediately engaging them as terrorists,
Bundy and his supporters were treated as rational actors who could reason and be trusted

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not to use force. It would be hard to imagine that the same scenario would occur if the
people involved were associated with a group such as IS or al-Qaeda. This demonstrates that
there is a hierarchy dependent upon, not just gender, but race and religion. In fact, this
hierarchy between white men who used the threat of violence and the fear of Muslims as
exhibited in the increasing Islamophobic attacks in the West suggests that there is a larger
structural hierarchy at play.

Gender hierarchy and queering terrorism

Gender hierarchy is often associated with Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt’s work
on ‘hegemonic masculinity’, where one form of masculinity dominates other masculinities
and all femininities. In IR, the dominant form of masculinity is most often associated with
white, upper-class, heterosexual, well-educated masculinities (Runyan and Peterson 2013:
6). While hegemonic masculinity is most often associated with individuals, it is also apparent
in how organizations and structures work, which leads to situations such as ‘glass ceilings’,
the euphemism for the unseen and unspoken structures that prevent women from advancing
in their chosen careers, or ‘pipeline leaks’, when these structures lead women to seek
employment outside of what had once been their chosen career (Sjoberg (2008) is a great
discussion of how this hierarchy exists in the field of IR). Gender hierarchical structuring is
also seen in the ordering of IR as both a field of study and how we study it.
In her 2013 book, Gendering Global Conflict, Sjoberg argues that the permissive cause of
war is not anarchy, as concluded by neo-Realist Kenneth Waltz (1959, 1979), instead it is
gender and the gender hierarchy of the international system. The Westphalian international
system, with its focus on rational and sovereign states, is masculinist and prioritizes masculine
attributes and behaviour – power politics and assertive/aggression (see also Tickner 1992).
Since states are the primary actor, they are also the prioritized actor. They exist in a dicho-
tomous relationship with terrorist organizations, as terrorist organizations are deemed ille-
gitimate for violating the Westphalian norm of states as the only legitimate source of violence
(see Sjoberg 2009).
Furthermore, Gentry (2014) argues that this binary does not just speak to state versus
terrorist legitimacy/illegitimacy, but it also speaks to how morality is parcelled out. States
with the monopoly on violence are also seen as the moral actors, making all groups that
challenge a state’s sovereignty and monopoly on violence illegitimate. Within Terrorism
Studies, it is often acknowledged that terrorism is not just a pejorative label, but one that
rests uncomfortably on a slippery slope to demonstrate non-state actors’ illegitimacy. Even
when terrorism is defined as a method of violence, if a state uses the same style of violence
that state is not often labelled a terrorist state (even though the origins of the term began
with state violence) (see Jackson 2005; Blakely 2007, 2009). This can be seen in the conviction
of Nelson Mandela for terrorism and his sentencing to Robben Island, a former prison for
political prisoners, in South Africa; yet, after he was released he went on to become the
President of South Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1993.
In order to further demonstrate the binary of legitimate/moral/state versus illegitimate/
immoral/terrorist, Christine Sylvester and Swati Parashar (2009) used the Mahabharata, which
is an ancient epic Sanskrit tale about the Kurukshetra War between the Kaurava and Pandava
princes. Sylvester and Parashar draw parallels between how the two sides represented
themselves and their enemies with the War on Terror. The warring princes both claimed
righteousness and designated the other side as immoral – both then claiming a masculinist
right to use force and violence. Furthermore, in this epic battle represented as good versus

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bad, the individuals who were harmed and suffered from the violence were obscured and
seen as unimportant. This too is the operation of gender, where the agency and experiences
of individuals are erased (see Sylvester 1994). Thus, Sylvester and Parashar use the Mahabharata
as an intervening text to reveal the complexity of the gender hierarchy in the War on Terror
and the silences it creates.
As feminism continues to interrogate the depth of intersectionality, sexuality and queer
theory play a larger part in feminist IR. Queer designates “the open mesh of possibilities,
gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the
constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made)
to signify monolithically” (Sedgewick 1993: 8 as cited in Weber 2014: 596).
While Cynthia Weber (2014) argues that queering IR is important for a variety of reasons,
including how cis-gender (or how an individual expresses their sexuality corresponds with
their birth sex) and heteronormativity work on the lives of queer folk, Weber’s third
argument is quite important to the study of gender and terrorism. She argues that

queer international theories explicitly engage . . . [IR’s] governing dichotomy –

order versus anarchy. Among the ways the “order vs. anarchy” dichotomy functions
(and, importantly, fails to function) in international relations is by articulating
“order vs. anarchy” as “normal vs. perverse” and, more specifically, as “hetero/
homo-normative vs. queer”.
Weber 2014: 597

In this statement, Weber efficiently captures the sentiment of this chapter: that the gendered
structuring of Terrorism Studies is used to uphold the ‘order versus anarchy’ dichotomy in
which terrorists are gendered actors and terrorist groups and the act of terrorism are gendered
as immoral and illegitimate. Thus, queering IR aims to dismantle this hierarchical ordering
which rests on more than gender, but also sexuality, religion, race, and other structural
forces.
Jasbir Puar (2006) has already begun the work of queering Terrorism Studies by looking
at the rise of nationalism within the US after the 9/11 attacks. In her article with Amit Rai
(2002), they argue that sexuality is central to Terrorism Studies and its construction of the
‘terrorist’, tying the terrorist with the monsters of the 18th and 19th centuries with their
pathologized aggression. In post-9/11 America, al-Qaeda and bin Laden were conceived as
monsters living within a “shadowy evil” (Puar and Rai 2002: 118), which Puar and Rai
(2002: 119) then tie to Michel Foucault’s notion of the monster, which is an animal/third-
gender human. In the post-9/11 discourse, al-Qaeda ‘terrorists’ were often depicted, as
mentioned, as hyper-masculine, -sexual, and -aggressive. In contrast, Puar and Rai (2002:
122) point out that American counterterrorism was a form of civilization and rational
knowledge. In a rather impressive summation, Puar and Rai (2002: 124) say:

Our contention is that today the knowledge and form of power that is mobilized to
analyze, taxonomize, psychologize, and defeat terrorism has a genealogical connection
to the West’s abnormals, and specifically those premodern monsters that Western civi-
lization had seemed to bury and lay to rest long ago. . . . The undesirable, the vagrant,
the Gypsy, the savage, the Hottentot Venus, or the sexual depravity of the Oriental
torrid zone shares a basic kinship with the terrorist-monster.

Therefore, the Western counterpart is able to maintain its rational, heteronormative,

civilizational force, which governs the rest of the world. The process of queering this

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 Caron E. Gentry

dichotomous and hierarchical structuring is to undo this power dynamic and to make clear
just how absurd some of these discursive narratives and imaginings are.

Conclusion
Gender is threaded throughout the study of terrorism. It is seen in how politically violent
individuals are conceptualized and understood. Women are often seen as lacking political
rationale, which implicates how their agency is understood. When gender intersects with
other factors – of particular importance at this time is the neo-orientalist bias against Islam
and all associated with it – women’s involvement and personal understanding of the violence
they are committing are further challenged. While the ‘male terrorist’ is presented as the
‘normal terrorist’, this is only true if that male terrorist is white and driven by a secular ideol-
ogy. Once religion and race become factors, as they do again with neo-orientalism, then the
male terrorist is stripped of (masculine) rationality and strategy. This creates a gender hierar-
chy, where, even in Terrorism Studies, once again white male actors are the ones to have
the valued masculine attributes and those that do not possess them are somehow lacking. The
gender hierarchy forms and informs the perceived moral legitimacy of states versus non-state
terrorist actors, which has only recently begun to be interrogated, with queer theory being
the latest inroad.

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 13
GENDER AND EVERYDAY
VIOLENCE
Alexandria J. Innes and Brent J. Steele

Everyday violence, generally, refers to those forms of violence that occur as part of the banal
experience of everyday life. By definition, everyday violence does not refer to the high
politics of war and conflict, or the exceptional and dramatic violence of terrorism and natural
disaster. Everyday violence refers to the recurring violence that happens in quotidian life.
While these forms of violence often appear to be far removed from international politics,
here we illustrate ways in which they are, in fact, inextricably tied to international politics
and international security. We also demonstrate that everyday violence in general is often
gendered in nature or is often a consequence of the gendered dynamics of international
politics. The neglect of these forms of violence in Security Studies and International Relations
(IR) theory further reveals gender bias in the discipline.
In this chapter we explore how the conceptualization of everyday violence ties to the esta-
blished understandings of violence in IR, and how conceptualizations of violence in Security
Studies and IR might be adapted to account for everyday violence, making them better able
to reflect the experiences of diverse identities. In what follows we will provide a more nuanced
definition of everyday violence, before demonstrating where everyday violence is tied parti-
cularly to gender. We will move from there to situate the concept of gender violence within
work on international security. Finally, we will provide some illustrative empirical examples
of forms of gendered everyday violence, suggesting some areas that are ripe for further study.

Defining everyday violence

The term everyday violence has been used variously in different disciplines. For example, in
psychology everyday violence refers to acts of violence that become a habitual part of the
everyday, in the sense that they are accepted and are rarely questioned – things like aggressive
driving, bullying, corporal punishment, and violence in forms of entertainment such as
movies and videogames (Hollin 2015). Historian Gemma Clark refers to everyday violence
in the Irish civil war as acts of force or intimidation that are not part of military strategy but
are carried out as violent forms of protest, such as destroying property (Clark 2014; Whelehan
2016). In IR the concept of everyday violence begins with an acknowledgement that
violence is not confined to exceptional events. Violence occurs in everyday life and in
unexceptional circumstances. It (1) is decentred; (2) includes both agents and structures; and

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 Alexandria J. Innes and Brent J. Steele

(3) is unexceptional. The very fact that everyday violence is mundane and pervasive is what
causes it to be ignored by those in high politics, even though it is the majority of violence
in the world.
Everyday violence first and foremost is a decentred concept in the context of Security
Studies and IR theory. A focus on everyday violence means a shift away from the unit of
the state as actor (although the state can be implicated as an agent of violence) to the
individual and the experiential. However, attending to everyday life allows for the decentred
individual to be embedded in their circumstances and relationships. Rather than an isolated
(neoliberal) individual as is foregrounded by some approaches to violence and security in IR,
a focus on the everyday embeds an individual in their experiences, therefore rendering an
individual who has familial and community relationships, a complex identity, and a fluid way
of being in the world. Consequently, violence is not limited to physical or bodily harm, nor
is it always instrumental. Violence can be structural and violence can be done to the person’s
way of being in the world as well as to the body.
Second, violence includes both structures and agents. A primary rendering of violence
that has been utilized in Security Studies and IR that captures everyday forms of violence is
structural violence. Structural violence was addressed first in Peace Studies by Galtung
(1969), conceptualized as forms of social injustice that must be understood as preventing
peace, because true peace cannot be established when social injustice prevails. Structural
violence, adopted by feminists in the 1990s, broadens the scope for understanding violence
in Security Studies and IR, as violence is not that brought about by a malevolent actor, but
is the result of injustice in the world that creates harm (Tickner 1992; Peterson 1992). For
example, the structural violence that disrupts family life as a consequence of family visa law
in the UK produces insecurity in the everyday, and the separation of families can be
understood as violence to a way of being in the world (Innes and Steele 2015). Further, work
on social injustice and structural violence typically examines socio-economic injustice but
can equally be applied to identity characteristics such as gender, race, religion, age, ethnicity,
sexuality, and so on. In fact, attending to social injustice and incorporating activist scholarship
in IR in various forms has been a core part of the feminist project, in particular with regard
to gender and identity-based injustices (Stern 2005; Eschle and Maiguashca 2007; Ackerly
and True 2008; Marshall 2011). Indeed, work that looks at normative whiteness in (Western)
society configured around the white, propertied male similarly exposes structural violence as
it manifests in everyday life (Hurd 2008).
Critiques of structural violence include the notion that it broadens the definition of vio-
lence too far so as to render it meaningless (Thomas 2011) and also that it then overlooks or
excuses agent-based violence. However, shifting from structural to everyday violence permits
a more complex understanding of agency that acknowledges embeddedness in circumstances
but does not overlook the role of agency, or, for that matter, structures. For example, in
cases of rape, the agent of violence is not just the rapist as an ‘exceptional violence’ reading
would suggest. Nor is it just a rape-culture society, as a structural reading would suggest and
potentially excuse the rapist as a victim of rape culture. Instead, an everyday focus looks at
rape as an act of violence that is perpetrated by a violent agent, but also examines the system
and society that blames the victim, the state that systematically fails in prosecution and pro-
tection, or the conditions of war and violence that normalize sexual violence committed
against a dehumanized ‘enemy’ (Alison 2007; Kirby 2012). The violence of rape is not
just a one-off instance of harm, but is a harm that reoccurs over time both as it is relived
in prosecution processes and testimony and as it lingers in trauma and memory. Thus, the
scope for understanding the conditions that give rise to violence, the form the violence takes,

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the author of violence, the subject of violence, and the aftermath of violence is extended
significantly by situating violence in the everyday.
Third, such violence is unexceptional. By ‘unexceptional’ we do not mean it doesn’t
matter – quite the opposite – it matters a lot. Rather, it goes unnoticed. The shift away from
violence that is exceptional to understand violence as something that can be habitual and
reoccurring is particularly appropriate to provide insight into gendered forms of violence.
For example, Paul Kirby discusses rape as a weapon of war as a particular form of gendered
violence, citing the debates as to whether rape as a weapon of war is constituted as harm to
all women because of how the female body is appropriated as vulnerable and commodified
as a spoil of war, or whether rape is a specifically genocidal tool used instrumentally to bring
about a political objective. Understanding wartime rape as an everyday violence allows
primarily for the former, but also has explanatory power as to why the latter might work
effectively by situating the debate in structural gender dynamics (Kirby 2012).
This unexceptional, habitual, and everyday violence forms part of international politics and,
in particular, part of international security. An impetus to open the concept of security has
emerged from critical security scholarship and Feminist Security Studies. Scholars in these areas
of Security Studies have argued that security is not simply characterized by states or by the
ability of states to protect their populations (McSweeney 1999; Fierke 2007; Shepherd 2008;
Wibben 2011). Rather, security and insecurity can be discursive, performative, ontological,
and experiential (Campbell 1998; Shepherd 2008; Hansen 2011; Steele 2008; Kinnvall 2006;
Wibben 2011). Security is experienced in different ways by different people, groups, and
communities at different times. As Annick T.R. Wibben (2010) articulated, the dominant state
narrative of security might not reflect the form of security that is of prior importance for
particular groups and communities. For example, minority and marginalized women experi-
enced insecurity as a consequence of 9/11 not tied to the threat of ongoing terrorism, but tied
more closely to the economic implications of the falling dollar, the retraction of the tourism
industry, the potential effects on the labour market, and the immediate concerns to family life
(Wibben 2011). These economic insecurities were bound up in the practicalities of everyday
life yet were simultaneously connected to the international politics of terrorism.
Attending to everyday violence is part of the larger critical and feminist security project.
If we accept the premise that violence has relevance in international politics not only when
it occurs as an offshoot of war and conflict, but as it is experienced in everyday life, then it
is necessary to look more deeply at how to conceptualize everyday violence.
Sjoberg, Hudson and Weber, in their 2015 introduction to the conference-inspired special
issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, offer a consideration of crisis, elaborating
that events that are constituted as crisis are subject to power: for a political event to become
a crisis it needs to be identified by political actors, by the media, and by the public as such.
A focus on the everyday circumvents the power dynamics that underlie exceptionalist politics
in the same way these authors seek to circumvent the power in attributing crisis. In the same
way that we understand crisis as essentially gendered, a product of a gendered world, then
we can also understand the exceptionalist politics of IR as a product of a gendered world.
Conceptualizations of violence as one-off or exceptional are a product of a world that assumes
violence, particularly among states, in the public sphere represents a topic of concern to
international politics while violence that is habitual and takes place in the home or the private
sphere is not. Furthermore, as designations of crisis often write out female experiences, so
designations of what type of violence is appropriately exceptional to be included in IR also
write out female experience, effectively normalizing violence against women. Nevertheless,
attending to the embeddedness of individuals in the world to understand the forces of

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everyday violence permits, and even requires, contextualizing such violence in a way that
reveals how it is produced by, or relies on, phenomena of international politics, as shall be
discussed in examples below. Gendered everyday violence shifts what is considered ‘appro-
priate’ violence for study in IR and the topics that emerge are likely to be topics that have
been silenced by the hetero-patriarchal nature of the world and the discipline.

Everyday violence and (gendered) security

IR as an academic discipline that emerged in the West is normatively white, propertied, and
hetero-masculine. A focus on everyday violence is a decentring tool of IR that looks to
individuals embedded in circumstances, identities, and relationships that deviate from the
white, propertied, hetero-male and examines how violence manifests in the everyday.
The stakes of incorporating everyday violence into IR are particularly relevant for
revealing gendered processes and concepts both in practice and theory. The particular
contributions can be divided into three different forms. The first is conceptual: looking to
everyday violence is a means of conceptualizing violence that does not rely on pre-established
ideas as to what is a legitimate concern for IR or what type of violence has an international
character. While existing conceptualizations of violence are often the result of detailed and
careful theorizing, they are also housed in a field that has, structurally, been subject to
the domination of Western masculine ideas. Attending to everyday violence circumvents the
conventions of the field and allows for a decentred conceptualization that can contribute to
and expand existing conceptualizations without being bound by them.
The second, and related, contribution of a focus on everyday violence is that of under-
standing what form the violence must take in order to be considered worthy of the field.
Normally in IR scholarship, violence must have a particular reach or scope, or must have a
dimension of international power at stake. Everyday violence might not obviously meet this
scope because the scope of the violence in question is obscured by its habitual nature or
because it takes place in the private domain and is arguably outside of the purview of the
state. Yet, the cumulative effect of everyday violence is significant: it might be produced by
dynamics of international politics, or it might shape dynamics of international politics.
Examining habitual violence reveals how such violence might be, and indeed is more likely
to be, gendered because of how the public and international spheres as fields of study have
been consistently dominated by the masculine.
Finally, the third contribution of a focus on the everyday is the complexity it adds to be
able to understand violence that might be unique to particular intersectional identities.
Situating people and events into contextual circumstances and relationships offers insight into
how different identities relate to each other, intersect, overlap, and importantly, experience
forms of everyday violence. This can contextualize how violence is experienced and how
insecurity is constituted more deeply, and offer a complex understanding of identity dynamics
in questions of violence and insecurity.
Thus, these contributions can be summarized into (1) legitimacy, (2) worthiness and (3)
complexity and contextualization. The following section provides some empirical illustrations
of how these three contributions of everyday violence further our understanding of gendered
insecurities in IR.

Legitimacy
The types of violence that produce things that are cast as legitimate insecurities in IR tend
to involve war and conflict or, in Critical Security Studies, other things that provoke

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widespread threat to states or society – such as environmental disaster and public health.
Violence that happens in the private realm and the everyday has been increasingly of interest
to feminist scholars who are interested in how politics happen at the margins of society
(Sjoberg and Gentry 2015).
Domestic violence is an everyday form of violence that produces insecurities. Its relation-
ship to International Relations is not always clear when IR is limited to the public realm,
given that the nature of domestic violence is that it happens in private, although feminists
have given some attention to the links between domestic violence and IR (Enloe 2000; Pain
2014). There is a point at which private insecurities in the everyday can be understood as
public issues.
One of these areas is the ongoing debate as to whether a need to escape domestic violence
can form the basis for an application for asylum. Much legal work has examined the issue of
domestic violence as a form of persecution under the refugee definition (Anker 2000–01;
Bookey 2013; Sinha 2001). The 1951 Refugee Convention definition, which forms the basis
for most state assessments of asylum applications, says that a person must be outside of the
home country, must be fleeing persecution by a body the state is unable or unwilling to
control, and that persecution has to be on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership
of a particular social group, or political opinion (UN General Assembly 1967). Arguably,
where a government does not provide sufficient protection for victims of domestic violence,
it can be understood as violence by a body that the state is unwilling or unable to control.
When the violence is aimed systematically at a particular individual it can be understood as
targeted persecution. The problem, therefore, is the nexus reason that forms part of the
asylum definition. If domestic violence can be understood to be for reasons of ‘race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’ then it meets the
criteria for the asylum definition. The legal question has then tended to be whether gender
(notwithstanding the fact that domestic violence can affect both sexes and all gender ident-
ities) can constitute a social group – and overwhelmingly thus far, the answer has been no,
although there have been some caveats, particularly in the US (Sinha 2001; Bookey 2013).
In terms of the meaningfulness of this debate for everyday violence in Security Studies and
IR, the question of whether gender can be considered a social group is less important than
the attention given to the agent or the perpetrator of violence. Spousal violence is separated
from other forms of violence by other actors, as it is constructed as apolitical and confined to
domestic space. Feminist work on war and militarization has contested the boundaries between
wartime violence and peacetime violence, revealing identical forms of violence that are
constituted differently under conditions of war and peace, and this distinction structures and
orders everyday life. For example, violence on the frontlines against men is heroic, while
violence against women is shameful. Violence in war seeks the public good, violence in the
home is clandestine, remains hidden, and is not a public matter (Cooke 2001; Enloe 2000;
Sjoberg 2006; Wibben 2011; Zalewski 1996). Failing to recognize either domestic violence
or violence against women as legitimate forms of persecution under the refugee definition
reproduces and perpetuates gendered violence in the everyday, both in the pragmatic daily
lives of affected women and also in the broader constitution of society.

Worthiness
Turning to everyday forms of violence allows attention to habitual acts and structural violence
as opposed to exceptional events. Everyday violence can reveal forms of violence that would
otherwise be obscured. There has been much work on the recognition of rape as a weapon

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of war and genocide. Less attention (albeit some, in particular Myriam Denov’s (2006) work)
has been directed at the aftermath of sexual violence in post-conflict rebuilding and the
impact this might have on the ongoing daily experiences of people who have been victims
of sexual violence.
Work on rape as a weapon of war and other instances of sexual violence during conflict
takes gendered forms of violence and sexual violence and shows how they are present in the
high politics of war and conflict. The inverse to that, which everyday violence offers, is to
look at how gendered and sexual violence in the everyday is part and parcel of international
politics.
For example, in Denov’s work on war-affected girls in Sierra Leone she examines the
ongoing effects of sexual violence post-conflict, recognizing that sexual violence has an
ongoing effect on the mind and the body: the violence does not end with the termination
of the act (Denov 2006). Denov finds that women and girls who were victims of sexual
violence during the conflict were not given sufficient consideration in the reconciliation and
rebuilding processes. For example, sexual violence continued to be a problem in the
‘Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration’ camps, meaning that girls did not feel safe
there and often left, preferring to live on the streets. Girls were unwilling to testify at the
‘Truth and Reconciliation’ Commission or the tribunal due to shame attached to their
actions during the conflict. The affected girls often found themselves unable to reconnect
with their families and support networks, and unable to support themselves, ending up
re-victimized. In this way, gendered violence and sexual violence are reproduced through
the institutions of international post-conflict management.
Here gendered violence – the devaluing of women’s lives based on sexual violence –
produces a situation of ongoing violence for women that impacts their everyday experiences.
It is bound up in both agents and structures and is experienced in the everyday. This
structural violence linked to shame and embedded in the institutional design of post-conflict
rebuilding processes is not given the same importance as demobilization and the removal
of weapons. Thus, international efforts to rebuild overlook these gendered experiences of
violence, foregrounding physical militarized violence and producing conditions in which
everyday violence continues to reproduce itself. By obscuring sexual violence and female
experiences, this form of everyday violence is cast beyond the remit of IR. Attending
to everyday violence opens IR to account for gendered experiences in conflict and to
acknowledge the structural violence that is embedded in institutional processes as an important
consideration in international politics.

Complexity and contextualization

A further contribution of everyday violence is the complexity and contextualization it can
add to work on identity and (in)security in IR. Shifting from structural violence, which offers
insight into the normative male-propertied-whiteness in society, looking at everyday
experiences can then account for experiences of intersectional identities incorporating
gender, class, and race that are affected by structural disadvantage because of the inherent
bias toward propertied white males at the core of (Western) society.
In a neoliberal society that privileges de jure equality over de facto equality, identity impacts
how one experiences the world. Because attending to everyday violence looks at how people
experience the world particularly, it is a uniquely useful vehicle for revealing violences
tied to identity. It is often particularly difficult to pin down the role of violence with regard
to intersectional identities, principally in positivist studies that seek to isolate variables to

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determine cause and effect. This is something that has been explored in detail in work on
the politics of race and ethnicity in particular: for example, both race and social class affect
particular outcomes and cannot be easily extricated from each other. Work in everyday
violence, then, can offer the experiential insight that can deepen and contextualize such
studies and show how they are tied to the normative bias toward the white propertied male
in (Western) society. Specifically, forms of everyday violence can be tied to neoliberal
governance, through which gendered insecurities emerge.
The neoliberal world that allows for the free movement of goods and services often
requires the free movement of labour to accompany it. Families cannot earn sufficient
income at home and frequently those of working age travel to where work is available. These
journeys might involve secure or insecure visa statuses, which are often designed to pro-
tect employers by ascertaining a stable workforce rather than protecting workers. They also
might involve a lack of visa status, or a visa status that does not reflect the nature of the work
undertaken (Crenshaw 1991; Piper 2003). Women are increasingly separated from their
children by economic need. Similarly, women are often left in vulnerable positions by the
isolation caused by off-shore working, which leads to insecurity in the form of modern day
slavery and sex trafficking as well as physical and sexual violence from employers (Gulcur
and Ilkkaracan 2002). Race, nationality, and ethnicity are bound up in this politics of
migration, whereby particular racial, national, or ethnic groups are associated with sex work
or manual labour, treated as second-class citizens often due to lack of visa status or to
limitations placed upon their visa status, and discriminated against more broadly in society,
producing conditions for everyday violence.
Experiential work that illustrates how women become trafficked and enslaved reveals
gendered insecurities that are often wrought by the needs produced by the neoliberal
economy. Women who are in insecure visa status are also more likely to become long-term
victims of physical and sexual violence and be unable or unwilling to seek help as it would
render their immigration status still more insecure (Crenshaw 1991). Movement of people
across borders, particularly when inspired by economic need, incorporates gender, race, and
class identities that impact how people are received and the experiences they have both in
contact with society and with the law of the receiving state. For example, the question of
whether migration is ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’ is often raised in assessing what kind of support
a woman might need, which again might create conditions of everyday violence as a woman
is cast in a ‘criminal’ role and denied support (Piper 2003). Nevertheless, the ‘forced/
voluntary’ dichotomy is not reflective of experiences in the world. For example, if a woman
migrates for work based on economic need she is considered a ‘voluntary’ migrant despite
not having chosen her economic circumstances that compelled migration, and that have,
arguably, done violence to her habitual way of being in the world.

Conclusion
This discussion has illustrated three advantages for incorporating everyday violence into IR
in terms of how this allows for greater insight into gendered forms of violence and
intersectional violence that might be obscured by the conventional ways of conceptualizing
violence in the international sphere. A focus on everyday violence contributes to the feminist
project of opening the conceptualization of security by incorporating violence that happens
outside of war and conflict, outside of exceptional events and that permeates the private,
domestic and personal. Looking at this type of violence in IR can further our understanding
of IR embedded in the world, rather than only as part of exceptional and elite politics.

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Everyday violence in IR also allows for attention to structural violence as it plays out in
quotidian life, embedding structural phenomena in the lived outcomes and bringing scholarly
attention to insecurities that emerge as a consequence of structural phenomena. Finally,
research that looks to everyday violence in IR is uniquely placed to offer insight into
experiences as they are embedded in circumstances, cultures, lifestyles, and relationships. This
can challenge the Western, hetero-masculine and class biases at the heart of IR theory for
richer contextualized analyses.

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 14
GENDERED MILITARISM
Maya Eichler

Before turning the gun on himself, Lionel Desmond killed his wife Shanna, his ten-year-old
daughter Aaliya, and his mother Brenda. Desmond was a Canadian veteran of the Afghan
war. The media’s coverage of this murder-suicide in January 2017 quickly focused on the
lack of adequate services for veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Desmond
had reportedly struggled to receive help for his mental health condition, and his acts of vio-
lence toward his family were explained in this context. However, this focus on the struggles
of (male) veterans sidelined the stories of the female victims and of gendered family violence
(Renzetti 2017). Nowhere in the public conversation did commentators question the
ripple effects of violence that can occur when soldiers return home from war, or Canada’s
participation in the war in Afghanistan itself. Gendered militarism informed the dominant
framing of the story in a way that diminished those parts of the story that did not fit with
the image of militarized men as protectors of women and children.
Militarism is an ideology that values the military and its members over civilian society,
and that privileges militarized over non-militarized means of resolving differences. Militarism
must be seen as gendered because it relies on, reproduces, and helps justify unequal and
hierarchical gender norms and relations. At its core, gendered militarism constructs feminized
populations in need of masculinized protection. It defines characteristics stereotypically asso-
ciated with masculinity, such as strength, aggression, courage, and toughness, in opposition
to, and as more valuable than, characteristics stereotypically associated with femininity, such
as pacifism, empathy, vulnerability, or weakness. Despite promoting this simplistic dichotomy
of masculinized protectors and feminized protected, militarism in fact depends on a range of
gendered identity constructions within and beyond the military, such as the masculinized
soldier, strong militarized leader, unmanly deserter, patriotic mother, loyal military wife,
vulnerable girl, or feminized civilian (Enloe 2000).
Militarism has been a central concept in feminist research across fields such as International
Relations (IR), Security Studies, Peace Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. For ana-
lytical and political reasons, the study of militarism, militaries, and militarization is important
to feminist scholars. Feminists show that militarism is the outcome of a process that includes
the successful militarization of masculinities and femininities. They argue that it is not pos-
sible to accurately understand why military conflict persists in global politics without taking
into account the role of gender. As militarism is one of the main sources of, and justifications

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for, unequal gendered power relations, challenging militarism is understood to be a necessary

component of the feminist struggle for social change (Cockburn 2010).
The aim of this chapter is to introduce readers to feminist scholarship on militarism by
asking three interrelated questions: How do feminist scholars conceptualize militarism? How
is gendered militarism evolving in the contemporary period? What do feminists say about how
to resist or transform militarism? The first section explores the feminist argument that gender
and militarism need to be conceptualized as mutually constitutive, and that the relevance of
gendered militarism goes beyond the state, the military, or war to the broader militarization
of society and everyday life. The second section argues that the concept of gendered militarism
helps explain the perpetuation and persistence of militarized violence in global politics, but
that it is important to examine the evolving nature of gendered militarism. It outlines three
recent shifts in gendered militarism in the West: the emergence of global gendered protection
narratives, the opening of combat roles to women, and the greater reliance on private military
and security companies. These changes indicate a complexly gendered form of contemporary
Western militarism, but one that nonetheless reinforces gender(ed) inequalities. The third
section lays out two different feminist approaches to countering gendered militarism, one
insisting that anti-militarism is central to feminism and the other seeking to redefine gender
roles within the framework of contemporary militaries. Whether we choose to focus on
demilitarizing masculinities and femininities or on the de- or re-gendering of militarism and
militaries, feminist scholars agree that a gender lens is key to understanding militarism and its
role in the global production of violence.

Conceptualizing gendered militarism

Despite women’s deepening integration into militaries since the late 20th century, the
association of women with pacifism and men with militarism remains strong. The belief
in the inevitability of military conflict also remains strong, having gained renewed salience
over the last 15 years with the global war on terror. Speaking to both ideas, feminist scholarship
on gendered militarism questions the assumed necessity of militarism in global politics and
militarized gender roles across societies. Central to feminist theorizing is the insight that
perceived gender differences are socially constructed rather than biological; understanding
militarized gender roles as constructs helps contest militarism as a ‘natural’ part of IR. Thus,
gender and militarism can be seen as ‘mutually constitutive’ – we cannot understand one
without the other (Sjoberg and Via 2010: 233; Sjoberg 2015). Militarism is a defining element
of gender norms and relations, while notions of masculinity and femininity are constitutive
pillars of militarism (Cockburn 2010).
Feminist scholars explore how masculinities and men become militarized and how femi-
ninities and women come to be seen as peace-loving, vulnerable, or requiring masculinized
protection (Runyan 1990; Enloe 2000; Young 2003; Whitworth 2004; Eichler 2012). Which
military policies, cultural practices, or societal pressures lead men to behave in ways that
conform to, rather than resist, militarism, and lead women to be defined simultaneously as
justifications for war and its victim? Government policies and societal expectations construct
soldiering as the natural domain of men, while women’s participation in violence is under-
stood to be exceptional, personal, or deviant instead of typical, political, or normal (Sjoberg
and Gentry 2007; Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). Central to war discourses is the ‘Beautiful
Soul narrative’ (Elshtain 1987) that constructs women as peaceful, links them to the private
sphere over that of war-making, and perceives women as casus belli (Sjoberg 2010). One
of the tenets of militarism is “that in times of crisis those who are feminine need armed

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protection” (Enloe 2002: 23). The gendered politics of protection (Runyan 1990) that arises
from militarism and war constructs masculinized protectors opposite the feminized protected,
and thus helps justify unequal gendered relations of power. Militarism buttresses the legiti-
macy of states as masculinized protectors of the feminized nation, and is thus closely tied
to state legitimacy, nationalism, and the waging of war (Nagel 2004). Hierarchical, unequal,
and dichotomous notions of masculinity and femininity lie at the centre of states’ ability to
organize for violence and are therefore crucial to understanding why and how international
conflict occurs (Sjoberg 2013).
Militaries are the central institution for the promotion and enforcement of gendered
militarism, and have long been structured in gendered ways. As male-dominated institutions
they privilege masculinity and marginalize women and values associated with femininity.
Men are vastly overrepresented in armed forces worldwide, and states predominantly use
men to engage in combat (Mathers 2013). While the waging of war is often justified through
the need to protect feminized subjects, the training of soldiers involves the denigration
of women and characteristics associated with femininity, such as weakness, helplessness, or
peacefulness. In addition, militarized masculinity is constructed in relation to a range of sub-
ordinate and marginalized masculinities such as gays, draft evaders, deserters, enemies, or the
‘barbaric other’. Despite the growing acceptance of female and LGBTQ military members
in Western militaries over the past two decades, the dominant construction of militarized
masculinity remains rooted in opposition to femininity and subordinate and marginalized
masculinities, and still heavily relies on heterosexism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism for
its reproduction (Whitworth 2004).
It is also important to consider the relevance of gendered militarism beyond state institutions
and the time and space of war (Cuomo 1996). Taking into account the broader militarization
of society and everyday life, gendered militarism can, for example, come to define personal
identities, whether for the young soldier undergoing basic training or the woman who is
comforted by the promise of masculinized protection. It also can shape family dynamics in
complex ways, as militaries rely on military spouses, primarily wives, to ensure soldiers’ well-
being, morale, and work flexibility (Enloe 2000; Horn 2009), or on mothers to ensure the
enlistment of young men (Eichler 2012; Christensen 2016). Gendered militarism, furthermore,
permeates formal and informal sites of learning, such as schools, video games, social networking
sites, popular culture, sports, citizenship guides, or the training of aid workers (Taber 2015).
Gender is central to the functioning of militarism, while militarism contributes to unequal
gender(ed) relations through its privileging of the military and men as protectors. Militarism,
militaries, and militarization are some of the main sources of unequal gendered power rela-
tions in societies across the globe. The gendered myth of protection elevates men’s citizenship
and social status over women’s. This was reflected, for example, in post-Second World War
veterans programmes established by the US government through the GI Bill. These benefits
“not only disadvantaged women – they reflected, reinforced, and further embedded traditional
gender norms that positioned men as protectors and providers, and women as their home-
bound dependents” (Murray 2011: 84). The GI Bill had a negative impact on women’s access
to higher education and their economic and social status in the post-war era (Nagowski
2005). Gendered militarism is also a factor in political power relations; association with
militarism and the waging of war often brings advantages for political leaders seeking to
establish their legitimacy. This was the case, for example, with Vladimir Putin whose sudden
rise in popularity and success at his first presidential election in 2000 were directly linked to
his forceful execution of the Second Chechen War (Eichler 2012). Thus, an examination of
gendered militarism is important for understanding gender inequalities and gendered power
dynamics more broadly.

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This section has offered a brief overview of how feminist scholars conceptualize militarism
as gendered. Feminist scholars argue that gender and militarism must be understood as mutu-
ally constitutive, and that gendered militarism is intimately tied to the military, nationalism,
state legitimacy, and the waging of war. They conceptualize gendered militarism as an ideo-
logy that promotes masculinized, militarized protection of populations defined as vulnerable
and feminized. Feminist scholarship understands gendered militarism as also relevant to a
broader set of actors, times, and places and connected to the militarization of society and
everyday life. Gendered militarism exists before, during, and after war, across public and pri-
vate sectors, and across state and society. The insight that militarism shapes and is shaped by
understandings of masculinity and femininity allows feminist scholars to contest militarized
gender roles and the militarism they help sustain. Next, I use a feminist analysis to illuminate
the changing nature of gendered militarism in contemporary global politics.

Changing forms of gendered militarism

Gendered militarism helps explain the persistence and perpetuation of militarized violence
in global politics. The tropes of gendered militarism are regularly invoked when state and
military leaders demonstrate strength through military force, justify military intervention
through myths of gendered protection, or recruit male citizens through appeals to their
masculine identity as protectors. But it is important to be attentive to the changing form
gendered militarism is taking in the contemporary period. Moreover, as Kimberly Hutchings
(2008) has argued, we should not assume that there is a substantive relationship between war
and masculinity. It is the hierarchical and oppositional nature of how masculinity is understood
that helps reproduce militarism and war, rather than the association of masculinity with
aggression, toughness, or violence itself. While state militarism has historically relied on a
division between masculinized protectors and feminized protected (Runyan 1990), the
masculine/feminine dichotomy underpinning gendered militarism is less clear-cut today. As
well, new actors have joined the nation-state in the reproduction of gendered militarism, be
they non-state armed groups or private contractors. In this section I outline three recent
changes to gendered militarism: the shift toward a global gendered myth of protection, the
incorporation of women into gendered militarism, and the greater inclusion of the private
sector into gendered militarism.
The past two to three decades have witnessed the rise of a new militarism in the West
that asserts not only the protection of the feminized nation by the masculinized nation-state,
but a responsibility of Western states to protect vulnerable populations in the global South
(Doty 1996; Orford 2011; Hall and Shepherd 2013). This form of militarism has redefined
the acceptable use of force in the name of protecting human rights and has justified new
types of military intervention, such as humanitarian interventions or stability and peace
operations, in the post-Cold War period. While Western states play a key role in producing
this global protection narrative, so do international organizations, such as the United Nations,
military alliances such as NATO, as well as globally active non-governmental organizations
and private military and security companies (Eichler 2015a). Critics have noted that this new
militarism relies on hierarchical notions of ‘first-world’ saviours and ‘third-world’ victims
that require protection, and thus harkens back to earlier discourses and practices of Western
colonialism. Western military interventions in the global South, they argue, are less about
protecting vulnerable populations than they are about maintaining global inequalities and
asserting the superior status of Western states as global protectors (Agathangelou and Ling
2003; Whitworth 2004; O’Reilly 2012).

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Importantly, this contemporary form of militarism is profoundly gendered and racialized

in ways that reinforce unequal relations between the West and the global periphery. The
national protection story of men defending and protecting ‘their’ women is reframed as a
global protection story in which masculinized Western heroes protect and rescue vulnerable
and passive feminized Third-World populations (Wilcox 2009: 76). It relies on gendered and
racialized constructions, such as that of morally superior Western states and men, emancipated
Western women, uncivilized ‘others’ who oppress ‘their’ women, and Muslim women
whose rights have to be protected through Western military intervention. This new gendered
militarism informed the post 9/11 US-led, international wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which
were justified in part by claims of protecting local women’s rights (Young 2003; Hunt and
Rygiel 2006; Shepherd 2008). This global protection story is evolving, and more recently
has begun to include the protection of LGBTQ rights in the global South, especially in the
Middle East and Africa, by Western states (Sjoberg 2015).
Just as a women’s rights discourse has been incorporated into justifications for Western-
led military interventions, there has also been a push domestically to increase and deepen
the participation of women in Western militaries. Despite the widespread historic pattern of
combatant men and non-combatant women (Goldstein 2001), changes in the organization
of force, such as the shift from conscript to volunteer forces, the changing nature of warfare,
as well as feminist advocacy for equal citizenship, have brought about an expansion of
women’s presence in Western militaries (Elshtain 2000; Carreiras 2006). This evolution in
gendered militarism as a result of women’s active participation in the military as soldiers and
in combat, requires us to rethink traditional notions of militarized femininity (Eager 2014). In
this context, feminist scholars have begun to investigate how particular militaries and societies
understand the increasing incorporation of women and femininities into militaries and the
waging of war (Lobasz 2008; Stachowitsch 2013). A growing number of countries – most
recently Australia and the US – have lifted the combat ban on women. Does this shift in
women’s historic place in gendered militarism indicate a transformation of gendered protector
roles?
Canada ordered its military to remove all barriers to women’s employment almost 30 years
ago and can thus serve as an instructive example to explore this question. Not unlike other
Western countries, Canada had long excluded women from combat roles and selectively
incorporated them into support roles, especially during times of war and thus need of
‘manpower’ (Pierson 1983). In fact, the military’s selective inclusion of women was codified
in a quota policy that determined a minimum percentage of men for each military profession,
ranging from 100 per cent in the combat arms to 0 per cent in the dental trades. This policy
enforced the ties between combat, men, and masculinity and aimed to preserve the military
as a masculine institution. It also reinforced the dichotomous gendered notions of protector/
protected so central to gendered militarism. Only as a result of social and legal pressures, such
as lobbying from the women’s movement and a human rights tribunal decision in 1989, did
women in Canada gain full access to all military occupations (Winslow and Dunn 2002;
Eichler 2013).
Women’s combat participation came under public scrutiny during Canada’s military
involvement in Afghanistan (2001–2014), which resulted in the first combat deaths of female
soldiers in Canadian history. Even though barriers to women’s full integration had been
lifted much earlier, the public conversation on women in the military was framed by
contesting narratives of women’s equality versus difference. The media coverage claimed that
Canadian female soldiers in Afghanistan had both achieved the status of ‘equal’ warriors and
brought gender-specific ‘feminine’ skills to their jobs (Chapman and Eichler 2014). Such a

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contradictory construction of militarized femininity in which female soldiers are seen as equal
to, and still as different from, male soldiers, reproduces masculinity as the norm of soldiering
rather than acknowledging women as soldiers in their own right. As this example shows,
despite the removal of gender discriminatory policy, gender constructions have continued
to shape perceptions of soldiering in Canada. They also have limited women’s military inte-
gration; women represent approximately 15 per cent of the Canadian military today, but
remain concentrated in non-combat roles such as medical, dental, clerical, and other support
occupations (Eichler 2013). Changes in the gender order of the Canadian military have
challenged, but not broken, the link between masculinity and protection. They indicate the
complex gendering of contemporary militarism in which women are more deeply incorporated
into the waging of war than in the past, but ideas about gender differences are reinforced in
new ways (Eichler 2013; Chapman and Eichler 2014).
Privatization is another means through which gendered militarism is being reshaped
in the contemporary period (Eichler 2015b). Over the past two to three decades, states such
as the US and the UK have increasingly relied on private military and security contractors,
especially in their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Privatization creates new opportunities for
profit making, and shifts the discourse of protection from a citizenship right to a market rela-
tion. The emergence of new market-based protector masculinity, such as that of the private
security contractor, complicates feminist analyses of gendered militarism, which has
traditionally focused on the context of state militaries (Eichler 2013, 2015a, 2015b).
While privatization challenges a state-centric view of gendered militarism, it largely rein-
forces and even exacerbates the unequal gendered protection relations which characterize
public militaries. Women’s access to private security jobs is limited; they form a minority of
employees, and are particularly underrepresented in the most security-focused and militarized
spheres of private security work such as security and risk management, security and protec-
tion services, and field deployments. Employees who are assigned security and protection
tasks often have a history of employment in public security and military forces, particularly
in the most deeply masculinized parts of public forces such as the Army and Special Forces.
Furthermore, inadequate regulation and the very nature of privatization present obstacles
to the enforcement of public gender equality guidelines by reducing public oversight and
pressure (Eichler 2013). Privatization reinforces gender inequalities between women and men
in the security sphere, but it also creates new inequalities among men and masculinities. The
private security industry, which is based in the West but operates globally, is heavily reliant
on the labour of non-Western citizens, so-called ‘third country nationals’ as well as locals in
the country of operation. This non-Western labour pool consists predominantly of men from
countries in the global South, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines,
El Salvador, Chile, or Uganda. The very significant differences in employment conditions
and in the type of work assigned make evident a gendered and racialized hierarchy that posi-
tions men from the global South as subordinate to white, Western contractors. More
dangerous work is disproportionately performed by local and migrant men, while their vastly
lower pay signifies their de-valued position in the global labour market (Eichler 2014a,
2015a; Chisholm 2015; Barker 2015; Higate 2012). The emergence of globally operating
private military and security companies as key actors in global politics thus complicates our
understanding of gendered protector roles and the role of gendered militarism in the
reproduction of gender inequalities.
Feminist analysis offers important insights into militarism’s changing forms, as these three
examples show. They point to the ways in which gendered militarism is being redefined
through global gendered protection myths, women’s partial and unequal incorporation into

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the role of militarized protector, and the outsourcing of militarized protection functions to
the private sector. Significantly, while gendered militarism is evolving, it still reinforces gen-
dered hierarchies, both between and among women and men, and masculinities and
femininities, and across national/global and public/private spheres.

Resisting or transforming gendered militarism?

Considering the centrality of gendered militarism to the perpetuation of global military
violence and the reproduction of national and global gendered hierarchies, it is worth asking
how gendered militarism can be resisted or transformed. Feminists have traditionally asserted
that militarism and feminism are not compatible, that a feminist politics requires anti-
militarism, and that gender equality is unachievable in a world shaped by militarism. Recently,
some feminist scholars have asked how contemporary militarism and militaries can be
reshaped in ways that do not reinforce gender hierarchies. In this section, I briefly outline
these two approaches to tackling gendered militarism from a feminist perspective.
The first approach contends that militarism, in its privileging of traits stereotypically
associated with masculinity, is inherently tied to masculinism and the reproduction of gender
inequalities. In this view, anti-militarism without feminism is bound to fail. This insight is
pertinent considering that the peace movement, which has historically been male dominated,
has often lacked awareness of, or even actively resisted, feminist insights. The reproduction
of gender inequalities within anti-militarist movements undermines their ability to radically
challenge militarism (Cockburn 2012). In contrast, women’s peace movements have explicitly
linked militarism to women’s subordination by men and masculinized institutions. While
some women’s peace movements have reinforced gender essentialism, arguing that women
are inherently peaceful, loving, and connected to nature, most recognize that men and
women are socialized into differently gendered militarized roles (Cockburn 2007).
As the anti-militarist feminist approach asserts, successfully challenging militarism requires
redefining societal gender norms. Feminists see potential for a demilitarization of mas-
culinities in the example of veterans’ peace movements, such as the GI anti-Vietnam War
Movement in the United States (Sharoni 2008; Stur 2011). When militarized men turn away
from militarism they challenge the ideal of the masculinized warrior, but veterans’ peace
movements can also inadvertently end up privileging the militarized, masculinized experiences
of male veterans (Tidy 2015). To truly challenge militarism, movements working for peace
need to pay careful attention to militarism’s underlying gender norms. This can be done by
actively demilitarizing masculinities, endorsing multiple alternative norms of masculinity, and
reducing gender hierarchies (Enloe 2002; Sharoni 2008; Ashe 2012; Schroer-Hippel 2011).
Importantly, the demilitarization of masculinities needs to be accompanied by a demilitarization
of supporting femininities, be they ideas about patriotic mothers, loyal military wives, female
soldiers, or feminized vulnerability and need for protection (Enloe 2000).
Other feminists have argued that not only is women’s inclusion into the military necessary
to achieving equality, it is possible to de- or re-gender the military and thus remake militarism
(Duncanson 2013; Duncanson and Woodward 2016). The goal is to redefine the dichotomous,
hierarchical gender norms that operate within militaries and to delink soldiering from violent
and aggressive notions of masculinity. Claire Duncanson (2013) has argued that a remaking
of militarized masculinity is possible and, moreover, is necessary to ensure the success of
military operations that include the tasks of peacekeeping or peacebuilding. Other feminist
scholars, such as Sandra Whitworth (2004), are sceptical about the military’s potential to
cultivate non-violent and non-hierarchical peacekeeper masculinities in light of its long

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association with aggressive, racist, sexist, and homophobic norms of masculinity. As well,
women’s inclusion into combat roles, as discussed above, does not necessarily disrupt the
norm of the masculinized warrior (also see Welland 2010). To truly remake the gender order
of militaries would require new methods of recruitment, training, and motivation that no
longer privilege masculinity and denigrate femininity. Developing ideas about how militaries
can be de- or re-gendered is an important feminist contribution, as interrogating the gender
order and purpose of militaries can potentially open space to question the use of gendered
militarism on a wider scale.
While the traditional feminist approach to gendered militarism has been to argue for an
anti-militarist politics, the reformist feminist approach envisions ways to redefine the role of
militaries and the gendered basis of militarism. The latter asserts that militaries and military
actions do not necessarily have to entail hierarchical gender norms and lead to unequal
gendered outcomes. This approach fits with recent attempts at the UN and NATO to gender
mainstream international military and peacekeeping missions by including a gender perspective
throughout planning and operations (MacKay 2005; Prescott 2013). Many feminists remain
doubtful, arguing that women’s deeper integration into militarism, particularly into combat,
leads to the ‘militarization of gender equality’ and the perpetuation of military violence
(Ware 2012). Taking into account not only militaries but broader processes of militarization,
feminist analyses of gendered militarism underline the need for a dual strategy: to contribute
to the remaking of military gender orders while also contesting the gendered and militarized
protector roles that operate in society more broadly (Eichler 2014b).

Conclusion
Gender is central to the functioning of militarism, while militarism helps justify unequal
gender(ed) relations by privileging the masculine institution of the military and men as
militarized protectors. Gender and militarism must be understood as mutually constitutive,
and gendered militarism as intimately bound with nationalism, state legitimacy, and the
waging of war. Despite these close ties, gendered militarism operates before, during, and
after war, beyond the state, and across public and private sectors. Gendered militarism can
be conceptualized as an ideology that promotes masculinized, militarized protection of
feminized, vulnerable populations, but its manifestations are diverse and evolving. Recent
shifts in gendered militarism in the West include its reframing as a global gendered protection
narrative, the greater incorporation of women into militarism, and an increased reliance on
the private security sector. Contemporary forms of militarism are gendered in complex ways
that do not neatly map onto the male–female dichotomy of protector–protected. Instead,
gendered militarism involves a complex interplay of masculinities and femininities, from
vulnerable feminized populations in the global periphery and militarized combat femininities
in the West, to peacekeeping and private security masculinities that embody new forms of
masculinized protection.
Feminist critiques of militarism are joined by feminist efforts to remake contemporary
militarism and reform the gender order of militaries. Recognizing the danger of militarizing
gender equality and co-opting femininities (and women’s rights discourse) into contemp-
orary gendered militarism, feminists need to engage in efforts to reform militaries as well as
oppose gendered militarism in domestic and international politics. One of the key contri-
butions of feminist scholarship has been to ‘denaturalize’ the idea that militarism is a necessary
feature of global politics and to show how militarism is the outcome of a process of successful
militarization that heavily relies on gender. As militarism continues to evolve and it is hard

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to maintain certainty about the necessary link between masculinism and militarism in today’s
complexly gendered world, feminist scholarship remains crucial to understanding the
gendered basis for the reproduction of violence in global politics.

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 15
THE GENDERED POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF INSECURITY
V. Spike Peterson

As documented in this volume, feminists have produced incisive accounts of how gender
operates pervasively to shape and often ‘normalize’ inequalities, conflicts, social violence, and
even wars.1 Those working in ‘Security Studies’ tend to focus on embodied forms of violence
and the ideational premises, institutional practices, and political dynamics that shape questions
of security as these are foregrounded in International Relations (IR) research. While many
acknowledge the role of economic factors, few take political economy as their starting
point.2 In contrast, my chapter here offers a schematic overview of ways in which today’s
global political economy (GPE) is pervasively gendered and how this gendering produces and
differentially ‘distributes’ insecurities. In particular, I emphasize how the differential valorization
– conceptually and materially – of qualities associated with masculinity and femininity affects
the unequal distribution of authority, privilege, resources, and insecurities. I begin by
reviewing key features of neoliberal globalization and reflecting on definitions of in/security.
As a preface to the substantive discussion, I note several starting points that help situate sub-
sequent argumentation, and also clarify how I deploy gender in this chapter. I then introduce
my analytical framing of GPE and use that framing to survey how neoliberal globalization
produces a wide array of insecurities.

Neoliberal globalization
Historical, socio-cultural, and geopolitical differences shape the implementation and
implications of neoliberal policies. Deregulation (to remove existing state restraints) has
permitted the hyper-mobility of (‘foot-loose’) capital, induced phenomenal growth in crisis-
prone financial markets, and increased the power of private capital interests. Liberalization
(to open borders to the flow of goods and capital) is selectively implemented: powerful states
engage in protectionism (less through tariffs than rules, regulations, and subsidies) while
developing countries have limited control over protecting domestic industries, goods
produced, and the jobs provided. Privatization (to replace the ‘inefficiencies’ of public
ownership and control) has entailed loss of nationalized industries in developing economies
and a decrease in public sector employment and provision of social services worldwide.
Finally, specialization in economic activities (to promote ‘comparative advantage’) and
export-oriented policies are favoured in pursuit of economic development and growth.

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The results of neoliberal policies are complex, uneven, and controversial. While economic
growth was the objective and has been realized in some areas and sectors, evidence increasingly
suggests expanding inequalities – indeed a polarization – of resources within and between
countries.3 Global restructuring has in important senses eroded the autonomy of states and
weakened many, but critics counter that neoliberal discourse obscures the state’s continued,
even strengthened, role in sustaining the rights and power of private capital. In effect, global
processes are not so much ‘deregulated’ but reregulated by market forces (rather than socially
accountable state/government forces). The priority of market forces is profit-making, not
welfare provision; and when welfare declines, insecurities rise.
Insecurity in many ways appears easier to specify than security. David Roberts (2008: 28)
defines human insecurity as “avoidable civilian deaths, occurring globally, caused by social,
political and economic institutions and structures, built and operated by humans and which
could feasibly be changed”. Here I expand Roberts’ definition to include not only civilian
deaths but also psychological and physical threats, risks, losses, harms, and/or other forms of
violence ‘caused by’ institutional arrangements. In other words, insecurities are an effect
of ‘avoidable’ suffering, or more expansively, of vulnerabilities that could, in theory, be
avoided or prevented but, as an effect of prevailing power relations, are not. This encompassing
definition acknowledges that everyone faces insecurities, but it also allows us to distinguish
particular forms of insecurity and their uneven distribution and effects; it allows me to con-
sider not only embodied and hence more obvious insecurities that feature in accounts of war
and disasters, but also less visible yet systemically devastating insecurities generated by
prevailing power relations operating in the GPE.

Starting points and defining gender

I note several background assumptions that shape my substantive argumentation but cannot
be elaborated here.4 First, I assume a critical orientation toward neoliberal capitalism under-
stood as inextricably socio-cultural, economic, and political processes, operating worldwide
across ‘levels of analysis’ and promoting a polarization of rich-poor (within and between
states/nations) and attendant, prevailing harms (see, for example, Anievas and Nişancioğlu
2015). Second, my critical orientation toward capitalism is part of a more encompassing
critique directed at intersecting structural hierarchies and their attendant insecurities, especially
those of sex/gender, sexualities, ethnicity/race, and national ‘difference’. Third, I advocate
poststructural feminist theory/practice that seeks not only to ‘empower women’ but to
advance critical analysis and transformation of these intersecting structural hierarchies, which
are linked by the governing code of gender.
How I understand and deploy gender is crucial for claims made in this chapter. Referencing
‘empirical’ gender – embodied males and females – is useful when describing who is agentic
and/or subjected to particular expectations or practices. Referencing ‘analytical’ gender –
asymmetric masculine-feminine difference as a governing code – is crucial when interpreting
how and why questions. Gender as a systemic code valorizes that which is characterized and
privileged as masculine (reason, agency, productive, political) at the expense of that which is
stigmatized as feminine (emotion, dependence, reproductive, personal). Three points are key.
First, gender is relational, so that privileging masculinized qualities is inextricable from devaluing
feminized qualities; and gender is systemic: manifestations of it are less individual ‘choices’ than
effects of institutionalized codes, norms, and rules. Second, the privileging of masculinity does
not privilege all men or only men. Rather, gender coding pervades language and culture and
operates to devalue whatever is feminized, so that not only embodied subjects, but also qualities,
knowledge, objects, bodies, identities, skills, and activities are differentially valued, privileged,

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and accorded legitimacy. Fourth, the more a concept, entity or person is feminized, the more
likely (not invariably) that their devaluation is assumed, naturalized, and hence does not need
explaining.
Recognizing that feminizing something devalues it has particular relevance for political
economy, where assessments of ‘value’ are key: shaping what we desire, how much we desire
it, what its value is relative to alternatives, and what trade-offs we are willing to make in
pursuit of realizing particular desires. It is crucial to ‘see’ how this devalorizing is simultaneously
ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic). Culturally this occurs
through gender as a governing code that operates pervasively, and usually unconsciously, to
re/produce differential valorization of what is associated with femininity (relative to mas-
culinity), whether in ordinary language, particular discourses, advertisements, entertainments,
or explicit ideological beliefs. And cultural coding translates into economic effects through
ideologies, policies, and practices that ‘take for granted’ that feminized skills, training, labour,
careers, reproductive and caring work, etc., are devalued, literally by being unpaid, poorly
paid, trivialized, denigrated, disregarded, or simply unacknowledged. Moreover, through
an analytical gender lens we can see that the taken-for-granted devaluation of ‘women’s
work’ is generalized from women to include feminized ‘others’: migrants, ‘unskilled’ workers,
marginalized (especially, racially stigmatized) populations, the urban poor, and developing
countries. This economic devalorization of people and nations, and its attendant insecurities,
is either hardly noticed or deemed ‘acceptable’ because it is consistent with cultural
devalorization of feminized ‘others’.
In sum, the ideological work that gender does is deeply problematic. Because the coding
is pervasive (surprisingly few objects/entities or concepts are free of all gender associations)
its effects are typically unnoticed and thus elude critical reflection, yet operate powerfully to
perpetuate unequal (cultural, symbolic) valorizations that translate into (material, embodied)
inequalities, social violence, and systemic insecurities.

RPV as analytical framing of global political economy

In A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy I venture beyond a narrow definition of
economics to develop an alternative ‘RPV’ framework of interactive reproductive, productive,
and virtual economies.5 This expansive approach aims to bring the conceptual and material
dimensions of ‘social reproduction’, non-wage labour, and informalization into relation with
the increasingly transnational, flexibilized and precarious conditions of the ‘productive
economy’, as well as with the increasingly consequential ‘virtual economy’ of financial markets
and the exchange less of (material) goods than of (symbolic, non-material, cultural) informa-
tion/knowledge. Hence, the RPV framing provides a way to see reproductive, informal and
formal work, transnational production, capital movements, and the commodification of infor-
mation/knowledge as co-constituting dimensions of global dynamics. It is especially helpful for
illuminating how neoliberal globalization exacerbates structural hierarchies and their attendant
insecurities. Critics tend to focus on one or another of these hierarchies, or at best ‘add’ one
to another. In what follows I use the relational RPV framing to survey how today’s neoliberal
GPE is pervasively gendered and how this gendering affects intersecting and wide-ranging
insecurities.

Productive economy
The productive economy (PrE) is conventionally understood as the sphere of formal
(contractual, regulated) exchanges, with production differentiated among three sectors:

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 V. Spike Peterson

primary (natural resources), secondary (manufactures), and tertiary (services). Globalization

is complicating these distinctions, especially as technological developments reconfigure each
sector and their interrelationships. Prominent shifts in the PrE that entail insecurities include,
first, a general decline in world prices of and demand for (non-oil) primary products. This
has been devastating to economies where primary production might (as it did for earlier
industrializing countries) otherwise fuel industrial development. Instead, these countries and
the most vulnerable within them face insecurities associated with deepening unemployment,
reduced ability to attract foreign investment, and likelihood of worsening debt dependency.
As one response, some countries promote their ‘cheapened’ and often unregulated, non-
unionized labour as a competitive resource and/or encourage their people to migrate in
search of work; both strategies involve insecure conditions of labour and everyday life.
‘De-industrialization’ is a second major shift that especially affects previously productive
manufacturing areas of the global North and major cities worldwide. Changes include
downsizing, ‘jobless growth’, loss of skilled and often unionized positions, growth in low-
wage, semi- and un-skilled jobs, and relocation of production to lower wage areas. This
translates into general employment insecurity, exacerbated for all but elite workers through
‘flexibilization’ processes that favour management (at the expense of workers). Gendered
effects include increases in un- and under-employment, especially of men, coupled with
erosion of unionized wages, which depletes household pooling resources and typically places
additional pressure on women to ensure adequate family/household provisioning. In the
global South, ‘privatized’ export enclaves become favoured at the expense of state-directed
domestic industrialization and the jobs it provided (primarily for urban men).
A third and closely related trend is dramatic growth in, and globalization of, services, which
now constitute employment for the majority of workers in the global North and increasingly
for those in the South. De-industrialization and growth in services are associated with income
polarization and a ‘declining middle’, as service jobs tend to be either skilled and high-waged
(professional-managerial jobs in health, education, financial, and legal services) or semi-,
un-skilled and poorly paid (in cleaning, food, retail, and telemarketing services). Institutionalized
patterns here tend to reproduce, and often exacerbate, familiar inequalities and their insecurities,
as differential access to education, training, and career opportunities is structured by gender,
race, class, and national location. In short, entrenched inequalities continue to deepen and far
fewer can ever hope to prosper, thus also depleting what emotional security the anticipation
of ‘working for a better future’ affords.
‘Flexibilization’ captures much that is praised and also despised about neoliberal restructur-
ing: more temporary, part-time, non-unionized jobs with fewer benefits, and more just-in-
time, decentralized, and subcontracted production processes. It tends to increase the power
and autonomy of management, generating fewer choices for labour. It is more attractive to
those with highly valued skills or individuals who seek flexible working arrangements given
particular life conditions, including mothers and single parents with childcare responsibilities.
However much some benefit from these changes, it remains the case that in the absence
of regulatory frameworks that protect workers’ rights and generate living wages, flexibiliz-
ation translates into greater insecurity of employment and income for the majority of the
world’s workers. Mies (1998/1986) genders this trend by calling it “housewifization”: where
male workers who expected otherwise now find themselves in the situation of housewives
– atomized, unorganized, and economically insecure. This trend is also – and inextricably
– raced, classed, and nationalized because those who are economically insecure undertake
devalorized labour: women as well as racially marginalized men, youth, the urban poor, and
labour migrants.

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Reproductive economy
In contrast to the PrE, the reproductive economy (RE) rarely appears in conventional
accounts, which remain preoccupied with waged labour, formal market exchange, and public
sphere activities. With other feminists I argue for the importance, indeed centrality, of the
RE, given that it underpins all else! I focus here on two aspects of the RE that reveal this
centrality to gendering political economy and insecurity: the devalorization of ‘women’s
work’ (especially, social reproduction) and the dramatic expansion of informal economic
activities worldwide.6
In spite of cultural variations and conflicting realities, men continue to be seen as the
primary breadwinners in ‘productive’ income-earning activities, and women as the primary
home-makers engaged in (unpaid) care-giving activities associated with the family/household
sphere of domestic reproduction. The traditional ideology of patriarchal states, religions, and
families situates women in the privacy of the home as loyal dependants and caring service
providers; their primary role is to sustain family life with emotional, sensual, and material
labour and, when necessary (or culturally desirable), supplemental earnings. ‘Women’s work’
is devalorized as ‘merely reproductive’ – natural, unlearned, unskilled, voluntary, ‘done for
love not money’ – and hence not valued ‘economically’. This work has two dominant
features: first, providing indispensable but unpaid caring labour that enables newborns to
healthily develop, children to be appropriately socialized, and dependants of whatever age
to survive and ideally to thrive; and second, providing physical labour that ensures – through
multiple tasks of organizing, scheduling, cleaning, shopping, nursing, cooking, etc. – the
material and ideally prosperous maintenance of family/household well-being. In these senses,
‘women’s work’ merges emotional and material labour and is decisive for determining the
security – or not – of family members.
Social reproduction ensures the daily and generational continuity of individuals and col-
lectivities. Access to market, community, and public resources variously shapes the conditions
of social reproduction, but most of the work involved is unpaid, assigned to women, and
situated in or near households. Feminists argue that economic theory is impoverished by
its failure to account for domestic labour and its structural importance, not least, because
work in the RE produces labour power (workers) and the social infrastructure upon which
the formal economy depends. Employers benefit from this ‘free’ (unpaid) labour first, by not
having to pay the full costs of producing the labour force, and second, by the downward
pressure on wage demands this generates in the formal economy (insofar as employers are
not ‘expected’ to pay for social reproduction). As a corollary, workers and their families ‘lose’
out in these arrangements in terms of labour choices, bargaining power, and ultimately,
material compensation. In short, this ‘hidden’ work sustains reproductive processes (upon
which all else depends), produces intangible social assets (upon which market activities
depend), and significantly shapes the quality and quantity of labour, goods, services, and
financial assets available within and beyond the household (through production, consumption,
savings, intergenerational transmission of assets). Reproductive labour effectively underpins
and sustains all ‘productive’ work, and when the former is compromised all else is less secure.
Not only is the work that women do devalued (both ideologically and materially), but
women in general have fewer legal protections than men, fewer property rights, and less
access to education, training, and work opportunities that are associated with highly valued
skills and more secure employment. In short, women – and especially women who are
racially and economically disadvantaged – have very limited options for generating income
that might reduce insecurities. Moreover, in spite of heading one-third of global households,

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women seeking employment confront gender stereotyping that projects them as ‘secondary’
earners, which is then used to justify lower wages, and in labour markets women cluster
where ‘feminized’ skills (personal service, caring labour) are preferred but poorly paid. Yet
at the same time, gender codes hold women disproportionately responsible for their own
and their family’s well-being, even – or especially? – under deteriorating economic conditions.
These entwined developments reveal tensions between state capacities, patterns of capital
accumulation, and the viability of households as basic socio-economic units. Too often,
expectations can exceed what human capacities and structural conditions permit, and feminists
refer to a crisis of social reproduction as pressure increases – primarily on women as care givers
and household sustainers – to ‘make up the difference’ between an amplification of care needs
(emotional and physical) and a reduction of monetized income and public welfare.7 These
crisis conditions are compounded by inadequate public support for policies enabling a balance
of family life and work obligations (childcare, parental leave) and exacerbated by men’s
increasing un- and under-employment yet reluctance to do ‘women’s work’ in the household.
The global ‘care economy’ represents the international manifestation of – and the pretence of
mitigating – local and national crises of care and the stark insecurities they generate. As families
worldwide confront shrinking economic resources, women are expected to compensate – to
absorb the costs of ‘adjusting’ to the loss of monetized income (due to unemployment or
poorly paid work) and/or a decline in other forms of support (social services, welfare transfers).
Sassen calls this the “feminization of survival” (2000) and as a survival strategy, women
especially rely on informal activities to ensure social reproduction.
Informal activities, informality, and informalization share a reference to ‘work’ that occurs
outside of formal (recorded, regulated, taxed) arrangements. Until recently, economists
neglected these income-generating activities, viewing them as marginal to ‘official’ market
activity and expecting them to wane with state development and modern industrialization.
In recent decades, however, the scale and significance of informality have expanded and
mounting evidence confirms that informality is both a cyclical and continuous feature of
capitalist development; it constitutes the primary source of income generation in the global
South; and it shapes the social reproduction practices and resource-pooling strategies of
households worldwide (Peterson 2010a, 2010c, 2012). In today’s global economy, informal-
ization is of particular relevance because economic crises expand the scale of informal
activities and the inequalities and insecurities that attend them.
Patriarchal and racist ideologies devalue feminized bodies, skills, and labour, limit women’s
access to valorized skills and resources, and thereby constrain the choices available for work
outside of stereotypical roles for women (and feminized ‘others’). Capital takes advantage of
existing structural hierarchies – and the ideologies and identities that reproduce them – by
presupposing the reproductive labour of women, channelling feminized workers into inse-
cure, low-paying services and labour-intensive employment, and promoting informalization
and flexibilization (which are enabled by state complicity in deregulation). Informalization
depresses formal wages and effectively disciplines all workers. The increase in women’s
labour, and that of other vulnerable groups, serves the structural interests of capital by secur-
ing higher profits, inhibiting collective organization (through the isolation of workers), and
obscuring structural contradictions (by ‘taking up the slack’ while leaving capitalist/patriarchal
principles intact), thus frustrating systemic analyses and potentially more effective resistances.
Insecurities mount, yet masculinist ideologies interact with racism (which is inextricable from
national hierarchies and migration policies) to render women, the poor, migrants, and recent
immigrants the prototypical workers of the informal/flexibilized economy and, arguably, the
(insecure) future of all but elite workers worldwide.

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Virtual economy
The virtual economy (VE) is the least familiar to non-economists yet crucial to analysing
recent decades of restructuring and its insecurities. This economy has grown in significance
as ICTs have compressed time-space, enabled the shift from material-intensive to knowledge-
intensive industries, facilitated the expansion of services and the exchange of intangibles, and
fuelled tremendous growth in financial market transactions. I distinguish here two ‘modes’
of the VE: global finance and the informational economy.
Since the 1970s, floating exchange rates, reduced capital controls, offshore banking, deseg-
mentation, new financial instruments, and the rise of institutional investors have interacted
to amplify the speed, scale, and complexity of financial transactions. Neoliberal policy
changes and powerful ICTs have enabled the mobility of capital and a massing of virtual
(because abstract, imagined) ‘financial’ assets not being created by investments in the ‘real’
economy (of industries and material production) but by ‘betting’ on the projected value of
currencies and stocks in transnational financial markets. This ‘delinking’ of virtual from ‘real’
value does not, however, insulate the real economy from global finance, because prices ‘set’
in the VE (through interest and exchange rates) have decisive effects throughout the socio-
economic order. The allure of financial trading encourages short-term speculation over
long-term investments in industry, infrastructure, and more socially beneficial endeavours.
It exacerbates the devalorization of manufacturing, which shifts production toward flexibi-
lization and more high-tech, highly skilled, masculinized jobs and devalorized, feminized
services. The expansion, complexity, and non-transparency of global financial transactions
makes money laundering easier, which enhances opportunities for illicit financial trading
as well as organized crime (including traffic in women, migrants, drugs, and weapons), and
decreases tax contributions that underpin public welfare.
Access to credit becomes decisive for individuals and states, and is deeply structured by
familiar hierarchies favouring those who are already ‘valued/valuable’ and not those who are
already insecure. Increasing urgency in regard to ‘managing money’ and investment strate-
gies shifts status and decision-making power within households, businesses, governments,
and global institutions. These changes disrupt conventional identities, functions, and sites of
authority, especially as pursuit of profits displaces provision of basic needs, and governments
compete for private global capital at the expense of ‘ensuring’ public welfare.
Financial crises and stock market scandals reveal the extent to which (primarily male)
agents in this rarefied environment ‘play’ casino capitalism (Prügl 2012; Griffin 2013; Elson
2014). Deregulation and liberalization effectively ‘encourage’ taking greater chances in
pursuit of higher returns, while rashness is facilitated by weak reserve requirements, the spiral
of innovative financial instruments, the mentality of short-termism, the lure of ‘managing’
risk through derivatives and hedge-funds, and the non-transparency of financial transactions
(Grown, Elson and Čağatay 2000; Gender & Development 2010; Roberts 2015). As critics
predict, crises ensue, generating individual, family/household, and national insecurities.
Women suffer disproportionately: loss of secure jobs and earnings due to their concentration
in precarious forms of employment; lengthened work hours as they ‘cushion’ the impact of
lost household income; decreased participation of girls in education, and deteriorated health
conditions for women; increased child labour and women’s licit and illicit informal activities;
and increased acts of violence against women (Aslanbeigui and Summerfield 2001; Harcourt
2014). Females are the primary losers, but entire societies are affected as deteriorating
conditions of social reproduction, health, and education have long-term consequences for
collective well-being and national prosperity. Yet prevailing economic theories neither

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adequately analyse the risks nor take seriously who pays when crises ensue (Peterson 2010b;
Young, Bakker and Elson 2011; Hozic and True 2016).
As a vicious corollary, the secure, stable provision of social welfare is ideologically
constructed as a ‘luxury’ that viable national economies cannot afford, while corporate
welfare is typically enhanced as a ‘necessary’ aspect of ‘resolving’ crises and improving
national competitiveness (especially, Bruff 2014). Given recent crises, the instability of
financial markets is now acknowledged but still not adequately addressed, so managers and
traders suffer little compared to the losses suffered by ‘main street’ borrowers and pensioners.
At the global level, financial decision-making power is concentrated in firms and organizations
with little public accountability, signalling a democratic deficit that is also increasingly
recognized, but again not adequately addressed.

The informational economy

As its label suggests, this mode of the VE foregrounds the exchange of information itself. While
all processes involve ‘conceptual content’, information here is the commodity: ideas, codes,
concepts, knowledge, ‘intellectual capital’ are what is being ‘valued’ and exchanged. What
matters here is that information/knowledge is inherently conceptual and hence cultural; its
commodification thus entails a fusion of culture and economy that contravenes conventional eco-
nomic theory (as well as the ‘symbolic vs material’ divide). We cannot just ‘add’ informational
goods to existing theories, as if the number of commodities in circulation has simply increased.
Consider, for example, these characteristics of the informational economy: a self-transforming
feedback loop between knowledge and its ‘use’; the imperative of accelerating innovation; the
defiance of exclusive possession; a capacity to increase in value through use; and an intrinsic
dissolution of cultural-economic distinctions (especially, Castells 2000; Peterson 2003). Rather,
the cultural ‘substance’ of informational goods entails both changes in thinking about produc-
tion and exchange and more complex metamorphoses in thinking itself. My point is that the
informational economy necessarily involves a transformation not only of goods but also of
minds, thinking, and cultural codes, and these changes shape inequalities and in/securities.
Technologies are again central. Computer-based digitization enables the conversion (reduc-
tion) of information, images, literature, music, and even human experience into a binary code
of 1s and 0s available to anyone with the relevant ‘reading’ capacity (conceptual and techno-
logical). Not only are these many and diverse phenomena reduced to a common, universal,
code but in coded form they are available around the world, virtually without the constraints
of time and space. Digitization also effectively ‘objectifies’ these diverse phenomena, rendering
them objects/commodities that are tradable. While the benefits are well rehearsed, there are
more troubling aspects that warrant our attention. Not all information/knowledge is deemed
worthy of digitization or incorporation in networks of communication. Whose questions are
pursued and whose concerns are silenced? Whose health needs are prioritized, whose project
is funded, whose paradigm is presumed, and whose priorities govern? What is included and
to what effect is inherently political, with profound and far-reaching implications: increasing
‘value’ and security for some while decreasing, resiting or destroying it for others. Finally,
how do we interpret and evaluate the effects of this ‘objectification’ and ‘commodification’
of the life world, where the ‘value’ of any information, product, body part, or experience is
increasingly subject to determination by transnational market forces?
Neither money nor information are neutral. Made meaningful by being embedded in
power laden contexts, they carry, convey, and confer valorizations (read: power) in multiple
ways, with multiple and diverse effects far beyond simplistic reckoning. Adequate analyses

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of these developments and the in/securities they involve requires taking the politics of
cultural coding seriously and taking seriously the gender of cultural coding.

Conclusion
As surveyed here, the stark and increasing polarization of economic resources between nations
of the North and South, and between rich and poor within them, generates countless condi-
tions of insecurity. For the majority of individuals worldwide, neoliberal restructuring has
meant declining household income, reduced access to safe and secure employment, decreased
provision of publicly funded social services, and phenomenal growth of ‘informal’ work in
the home, community, shadow economy, and criminal activities. In the global North, reduc-
tion of social services disproportionately hurts women, stigmatized minorities, the urban poor,
and immigrant families. Restructuring imposed in the global South exacerbates women’s
poverty by promoting outward-oriented growth rather than meeting domestic subsistence
needs, while reducing public subsidies (which increases the cost of basic goods) spurs urbani-
zation and labour migrations that increase the number of female-headed households, aggravates
un- and under-employment of men (which reduces household income and increases women’s
re/productive work), and disrupts traditional social forms of support for women. These
conditions of precarity and vulnerability exemplify insecurities that force people to pursue
often risky ‘survival strategies’ to generate resources however they can. Yet earning income
informally rarely generates household ‘prosperity’ and is often very risky, while migrating
transnationally is increasingly difficult and is too often deadly.
With other feminists, I argue that these global trends render most ‘feminized’ people (and
nations) less secure, and that these practices and policies are shaped by masculinist and racist
ways of thinking in regard to how ‘work’ and ‘economics’ are defined, who should do what
kinds of work, and how different activities are valued. There is much more to be said about
the gendered political economy of insecurity, and my focus in this chapter has neglected
important complexities and omitted aspects of resistance and transformation (Peterson 2014).
I hope, however, that foregrounding gender as a governing code of valorizations has demonstrated
its too often unacknowledged but extremely powerful influence in shaping economic ‘reali-
ties’ and their attendant in/securities. If, as Steinem (1997: 84) observes, “economics is only
a system of values”, and if, as I argue, gender is a cultural code that shapes virtually all valuing,
then gender is constitutive of ‘economics’ as a system. I conclude that we cannot adequately ana-
lyse or appropriately resist neoliberal globalization and its many insecurities without taking
gender – analytically and empirically – very seriously indeed.

Notes
1 See inter alia Cockburn 2010, 2013; Cohn 2013; Detraz 2012; Enloe 2007; Baaz and Stern 2013;
McLeod 2016; Security Dialogue 2004; Security Studies 2009; Shepherd 2008, 2013; Sjoberg 2013;
Sjoberg and Via 2010; Wibben 2011.
2 Work integrating political economy and security includes Amoore and de Goede 2010; Andreas and
Greenhill 2010; Arnson and Zartman 2005; Duffield 2007; Peterson 2008, 2010a, 2013; Stavrianakis
and Selby 2013.
3 See inter alia Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers and Seguino 2009; Peterson and Runyan 2010; Peck
2010; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Shields, Bruff and Macartney 2011; Milanovic 2012; Bruff 2014;
LeBaron 2014.
4 Arguments in this chapter draw from and go beyond my earlier work, especially 2003, 2007, 2008,
2009, 2010a, 2010c, 2012.
5 I refer to ‘economies’ in a Foucauldian sense: as mutually constituted (therefore coexisting and
interactive) systemic sites through and across which power operates. These sites include socio-cultural

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processes of self-formation and cultural socialization that underpin identities and their political
implications. The subjective, conceptual, and cultural dimensions of these sites are understood as
inextricable from (mutually constituted by) material conditions, social practices, and institutional
structures.
6 Definitions are debated, but a central issue is that informal practices fall ‘outside’ of formal (regulated)
market operations and hence elude government control, recording, and taxation.
7 See inter alia Bezanson 2006; Guha-Khasnobis, Kanbur and Ostrom 2006; Bakker and Silvey 2008;
Peterson 2010a, 2012; Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas 2014; Fraser 2016.

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 16
GENDER AND GENOCIDE
Two case studies
Choman Hardi

Introduction
Genocide is a violent process of destruction and rupture that leads to the creation of a traum-
atized and disconnected underclass. It feeds off widespread negative perceptions of particular
groups and enhances the social and political inequalities already inherent in a society.
Genocidal practices target men and women differently. While men are usually selected for
destruction, women, who are perceived as bearers of a community’s ‘honour’ and its future
generations, are targeted by sexual violence and forced impregnation. After reviewing the
literature in the field of gender and genocide and tracing its development, this chapter studies
women’s experiences of two cases of genocide in Kurdistan-Iraq. More specifically, it
discusses the Anfal genocide in 1988 and the Ezidi genocide in 2014 with a particular focus
on sexual violence. Comparing the experiences of female survivors of two different genocides
in the same region helps us understand how the dominant discourses of the time influence
women’s narrations, endurance, and survival.
Claudia Card (2003: 63) identifies “social death” to be “the peculiar evil” which disting-
uishes genocide from other kinds of mass murders. This is when “survivors lose their cultural
heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections”, leaving them unable “to
pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and
projects of earlier generations” (2003: 73). Card (2003: 76) goes on to add that since women
live their lives through connections and are socially responsible for transmitting language,
values, and traditions from one generation to the next, they are alienated and disconnected
from their families and communities through genocidal rape.
Lisa Pine (2004: 364) reminds us that utilizing gender as an analytical tool in Holocaust
Studies started with the development of feminist theory in the 1970s. The second-wave
feminists critiqued women’s representation in literature, media, and discourses produced by
men (de Beauvoir 1949; Friedan 1963; Millett 1969) and aimed to shed light on women’s
‘hidden’ experiences and their marginalization in history (Rowbotham 1975; Bennett
1989). Making women visible, researching about their ‘hidden experiences’, and giving
voice became an important field of study that reshaped many disciplines. Genocide Studies
was no exception. The development of feminist theory went hand in hand with UN
Security Council Resolutions which addressed discrimination against women, recognized

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gender-based violence as a crime, and acknowledged sexual violence at times of conflict as

a war crime.1
The academic literature in the field of gender and genocide has undergone two main
shifts. First of all, there has been a move away from essentialism and toward seeing gender
as an oppressive social construct that shapes people’s experiences of violence and influences
their survival strategies and coping mechanisms (see below). Second, research has moved
toward inclusivity and an appreciation that men, as well as women, can be victims of violence,
including sexual violence. Research into men’s vulnerability and victimization gained promi-
nence specifically in the context of the Balkan Wars. Women too are no longer seen as mere
victims of men’s wars. In some instances, they incite violence, participate in it, and even
become perpetrators. The Rwandan genocide was a striking example of women participating
in violence.
This chapter draws on my previous foundational research on gendered experiences of the
Anfal genocide (Hardi 2011). Motivated by the need to expand the Anfal narrative and
ensure the inclusion of women’s experiences in it, I was dissatisfied with the public discourse
on Anfal. The simplistic and nationalist discourse focused on the victims of mass graves who
were mostly men, the extensive use of chemical weapons, and the destruction of villages and
the farming community. I argued that “measuring Anfal by death and destruction . . . the
Kurdish revolution has produced a gender-blind and therefore an impoverished understanding
of Anfal” (Hardi 2011: 4).
Survivors of national catastrophes carry the burden of ‘telling the truth’. Even after
28 years Anfal surviving women are still expected to continue telling the Anfal story and to
mourn the dead. In fact, their stories are highly edited by the official channels and only some
aspects of their experiences are embraced while the others are left out (Hardi 2011). The
focus on violence marginalizes some aspects of women’s experiences while highlighting
others. Furthermore, ignoring the aftermath seems to be common in other parts of the world
(Ross 2001 and Todeschini 2001). The public endorsement of certain stories and denial of
others is “profoundly political” and it determines “‘appropriate’ expressions of suffering”
(Todeschini 2001: 104). This endorsement shapes women’s testimonies, forcing them to
recount certain experiences while excluding others.
I have also relied on three interviews conducted by Yazda (a global Ezidi organization),2
my own interviews with two activists, extensive reports by NGOs and international agencies,
and media coverage. I decided not to conduct interviews with Ezidi women specifically
because everyone else is. Survivors are pressured to recount their experiences of rape and
sexual enslavement for journalists, researchers, NGO workers, and governmental officials.
Their “urgent need for safety and privacy” (Minwalla 2015) is sacrificed for “the greater
good”. As early as December 2014 (four months after the assault began) Amnesty International
reported that members of the community and local activists oblige Ezidi women to talk about
their ordeal. In several cases, survivors had not given informed consent and were interviewed
by journalists who claimed to work in the medical profession. These women are thus
disempowered and victimized once again, leading to further trauma and isolation.
The following sections discuss problems associated with the essentialist approach to gender
in relation to genocide studies and shed light on the more recent theoretical developments
resulting from it. The situation of women survivors of two cases of genocide in Kurdistan
will then be addressed, followed by highlighting the dominant narratives’ different positions
on sexual violence and the consequences for women survivors. For both groups, the
possibilities of speaking out, seeking help, and healing are shaped by their communities’
dominant discourses and attitudes.

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Feminism, essentialism, and genocide

Genocide Studies and its precursor, Holocaust Studies, have struggled with gender
essentialization. Women’s social characteristics, according to this view, are essentially different
from men’s. Women are hence considered emotional and peaceful while men are considered
rational and aggressive. This section explores the flaws of such a view of gender in relation
to genocide.
The Holocaust historian, Joan Ringelheim (1984), was first to identify that Holocaust
literature was ‘gender-neutral’ and it ignored women’s voices. Women’s experiences were
considered irrelevant to the collective memory of the Holocaust. This disregard of certain
experiences, Ringelheim (1998) argued, led to memories being ignored by survivors and
eventually ‘forgotten’. In an interview, Marianne Hirsh clarified that early feminist scholar-
ship in Holocaust Studies started because feminists wanted “to add women’s voices to the
canonical narratives by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel” and to examine “modes of narrative
and memory for gender dimensions and from feminist perspectives” (Altinay and Peto
2015: 387).
At first, feminist scholars, in line with cultural feminism, argued that women fared better
than men during the Holocaust because of their nurturing skills and their talent for building
communities. Writers such as Ringelheim (1984), Sybil Milton (1984), and Myrna Goldenberg
(1998) argued that in the concentration and labour camps women were more supportive of
each other when compared to men, which was an important factor in their survival. This
view was supported by survivor testimonies which highlighted examples of bonding and
helping each other (Bondy 1998; Delbo 1995). Goldenberg stated that women’s memories
of the Holocaust

emphasize women’s strong concern for one another as well as their dependency on
one another to withstand the barbarism of the camps; their adaptation of homemaking
skills into coping skills; and the effects of their heightened physical vulnerability and
fear of rape.
1998: 327

Yet, others have been critical of researchers in this field. Anna Hardman argued that
survivors’ testimonies have been used selectively by scholars, “identifying what they consider
to be ‘female’ experience” (cited in Pine 2004: 371). In other words, it is the researchers’
own bias and their selective use of testimonies that has led to the conclusion that women
cooperated with each other more than men. Pine stated that women who defied gender
expectations, by not behaving in a ‘feminine’ and selfless manner because they were focused
on their own survival, were “not discussed by historians, even though some survivors have
mentioned such women; there has been a taboo in treating them” (Pine 2004: 372).
Furthermore, Pascal Rachel Bos (2003: 27) argued that the focus on female cooperation led
to a “generalized (and sometimes essentialized) analysis of gender difference which glorified
women in general instead of cataloguing the historical experiences of individual women”.
The author explained that certain women’s experiences that might have been “unique or
even exceptional” were assumed to apply to all Jewish women. This, she clarified, led to “a
(sometimes not so) subtle idealization of women’s strength”.
Similarly, in a re-evaluation of her earlier work, Ringelheim criticized her own “uncon-
scious use of cultural feminism as a frame through which to view Jewish women survivors”
(1998: 384). Cultural feminism essentializes gender differences rather than criticizing the social

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norms that construct them. Like patriarchy, it considers men and women to be radically dif-
ferent from each other but concludes that women’s culture (assumed to be caring) is superior
to men’s culture (assumed to be aggressive). Hence, Ringelheim (1998: 386) argues “feminin-
ity”, which was considered oppressive in the past, is made “sacred”. She goes on to state that
“[t]o suggest that among those Jews who lived through the Holocaust, women rather than
men survived better is to move toward acceptance of valorization of oppression, even if one
uses a culture and not a biological argument”.
Additionally, testimony might not always be reliable and survivors’ accounts might not
fully correspond to what is widely regarded to be the situation’s ‘reality’. Bos (2003: 31)
clarified that testimonies are influenced by various factors and selection takes place on three
levels: the experience a witness chooses to talk about, her memory, and the narrative style
(structure, tone, and order). Bos (2003: 36) criticized feminist scholars who over-emphasized
the bonding aspects of women’s experiences. She argued that because of gender socialization,
women are more likely to highlight cooperation whereas men highlight independence.
These factors select or limit what is told. This does not mean that women helped each other
while men did not.

Toward inclusivity: gender and genocide

Recent scholarship in this field goes against essential differences between men and women.
It acknowledges that war and genocide are gendered, that men and women are generally
treated differently by perpetrators, but this is seen as a consequence of socially constructed
views of men’s and women’s abilities and roles in society. Equally, it counters the view that
women are kinder than men because both men and women can participate in genocidal
violence. Gender socialization encourages male participation in violence but hampers females’
participation. On the other hand, when a group is forced to defend its identity, women’s
participation in violence rises, disrupting and challenging gender norms.
Women’s sexual vulnerability during genocide and mass violence received considerable
attention in the context of more recent conflicts. Speaking of the Balkans war in 1992 where
women were raped on a large scale, Catharine MacKinnon (1994: 11–12) addressed rape as
an instrument of genocide:

This is not rape out of control. It is rape under control. It is also rape unto death, rape
as massacre, rape to kill, and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an
instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home, and never want to go
back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle.
It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a
people. It is rape as genocide.

Looking at genocide from a wider perspective, Adam Jones (2009: 140) argued that research
on gender and mass violence focused specifically on “‘femicide,’ the selective killing of women
and girls; and sexual violence against women, especially rape”. He elaborated on “femicide”
by introducing the term “gendercidal institutions” which he defined to be “female infanticide
and feticide, maternal mortality, and gendered deficits of health care, education, and nutrition”
(Jones 2009: 283). These are cultural practices, Jones explained, which have killed far more
women than the women or men killed during political violence and genocide.
Yet, the Balkan Wars also brought attention to men’s vulnerability both in the sense of being
selectively targeted for annihilation and also for being victims of sexual violence and rape.

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Dubravka Zarkov (1997) and Euan Hague (1997) discussed feminization of male victims
through raping and exerting control over them. Until this point, Zarkov (1997: 146) clarified,
the international legal institutions failed to acknowledge male victims of sexual violence due
to cultural norms and assumptions: “Association of femininity and victimization is so natural
– wars or no wars – that few laws had anything to say about it.” It is therefore essential to
question the assumed link between ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ as well as ‘male’ and ‘masculine’.
Hague (1997: 52) refuted the notion that “all that is female is feminine and all that is male
is masculine” because, as we can see in the Balkan context, males can be masculinized (Serbs
and Bosnian Serbs) or emasculated/feminized (Muslims and Croatians).
Hague (1997) stated that through rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina

traditional gender assumptions of which persons are “masculine” and which

“feminine” came under attack, and in many cases were asserted, through ascriptions
of national identity. The qualities of power, domination and violent subjugation
often associated with a hegemonic masculinity accrued, in this context, to the
national identities known as “Serb” and “Bosnian Serb”.
Hague 1997: 53

In this context hegemonic masculinity and ethnicity coincided to construct a dominant

and violent Serbian masculinity which emasculated Muslim and Croatian male victims
through rape. This can be related to Yuval-Davis’s argument about the consequences of
oppression for men of the victim group: “Feelings of disempowerment which result from
processes of colonization and subjugation have often been interpreted by the colonized men
as processes of demasculinization and/or feminization” (1997: 67). Men, in the aftermath of
violent conflict, reclaim their threatened masculinity through gaining power and control over
women and sometimes resorting to violence. Hence continuing the circle of violence long
after the initial conflict has ended.
A question that may be asked here is, while men and women can be victims of both
annihilation and sexual violence at times of violent conflict, why is it that, historically, men
are more likely to be selected for extermination and women for rape? The social construction
and expectations of manhood and womanhood might explain this differential treatment.
Jones (2009: 173) identified “non-combatant men of ‘battle age’” as the group that is consist-
ently targeted for destruction. He clarified that this might be because they are “nearly
universally perceived as the group posing the greatest danger to the conquering force”.
On the other hand, women, because of their role in biological reproduction and social-
ization of children, are considered keepers and symbols of the nation: “Women are often
constructed as the cultural symbols of the collectivity, of its boundaries, as carriers of the
collectivity’s honour and as its intergenerational reproducers of culture” (Yuval-Davis 1997:
67). Hence, raping women undermines the victim group’s ability to biologically reproduce,
their identity, and their ‘honour’. It also serves as a mechanism to emasculate the men who
are not able to ‘protect their women’, as is traditionally expected of them, and their honour
and integrity as men are tarnished. As Geetanjali Gangoli (2006: 535) points out, this
‘dishonouring’ works only when “the meaning of honor as symbolically vested primarily . . .
in women’s bodies is shared by both the communities of the perpetrators and the victims”.
Gender role reversals go even further than men as victims. Women can be perpetrators
of genocide as well. For instance, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was another example
that included widespread rape of women. While the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) recognized sexual violence as a war crime and a crime against

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humanity, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) recognized “rape and
sexual violence” as acts of genocide.3 Another novelty of the ICTR was that for the first
time in history a woman, namely Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, was convicted of genocide.4
Nyiramasuhuko had been Minister for Family Welfare and Women’s Empowerment and was
convicted for inciting rape of Tutsi women.
Jones’ (2009: 221) discussion of “genocidal women” in the context of Rwanda rebukes
essentialism: “when women are provided with positive and negative incentives similar to
those of men, their degree of participation in genocide, and the violence and cruelty they
exhibit, will run closely parallel to their male counterparts.” Hence, Jones concludes,
researchers should not be searching for an essential difference in women’s approach to peace
but should search for “the range of cultural and policy mechanisms that either allow or, more
frequently, inhibit the expression of women’s aggressive and genocidal potential” (2009:
221). Yet, even when women do the same things as men, it is important to recognize that
“women and men as actors experience violence and conflict differently, both as victims and
as perpetrators, with differential access to resources (including power and decision making)”
(Cockburn, cited in Jones 2009: 150). While acknowledging that women benefit less than
men when they engage in violence, Gangoli (2006: 536) argues that:

women who act thus do enjoy some privileges that are denied to those women
who may oppose these acts . . . [they] enjoy power over the men and women of the
“other” community, while also enjoying praise and privileges for supporting national
struggles.

In current conflicts, the concern about women’s and men’s participation in genocide
and ethnic cleansing remains central. For instance, while the focus of ISIS tends to be on
radicalization and recruitment, when considering the fears of genocide or ethnic cleansing
of the Ezidis, Christians, Shabaks, and others, how the individuals undertake the violence is
still being shaped. For instance, as ISIS seeks a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, it needs more
than military and jihadist support to survive. It aims to involve women in building the Islamic
State without giving them ‘central’ and combative roles. Despite being given non-violent
roles, it will be interesting to know how women supporters of ISIS treat other women, such
as Ezidis and Christians who were captured by ISIS, and whether they participate in inflicting
pain upon them and encouraging their rape and enslavement.
Furthermore, in response to ISIS, in 2012 Kurdish women in Syria mobilized and formed
the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) to fight the Syrian government and ISIS. The 15,000-
strong army comprises 35 per cent of Kurdish troops in Syria (Dirik 2014). These women
were instrumental in helping the trapped Ezidis escape ISIS in August 2014 (Bucciarelli
2014). More recently YPJ started training Arab and Ezidi women to defend themselves and
fight (McKernan 2017). In the Kurdish region of Iraq, where I am based, YPJ women have
become a symbol of perseverance, bravery, and patriotism, all traditionally considered to be
masculine traits. They have proven that women can lead, strategize, and win wars, challenging
negative gender stereotypes.

The Anfal and Ezidi genocides

Genocide does not happen in a vacuum. It is the last stage of a process of escalating hostility
toward a particular group. Both of the targeted populations in the Anfal and Ezidi genocides
were perceived as ‘defective’ and ‘in need of reparation’ by the perpetrators. Despite

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similarities between their experiences as victims of genocide, different tools were used ‘to
repair’ them. This section compares the Anfal and the Ezidi genocides, focusing on sexual
violence. It highlights the shifting discourses about genocidal sexual violence in the Kurdish
community and its consequences for women survivors.
Al-Anfal (or ‘the Spoils’) was the culmination of the Ba’ath Party’s, which controlled Iraq,
soaring violence against Kurdistan’s village population. It punished them for their support
to the Kurdish resistance. The campaign targeted six geographical regions (three on the
borders of Iran and Turkey and three inland). In 1987 the state passed a number of decrees
and administrative orders which declared these areas “prohibited for security reasons” and
called civilians “saboteurs” (Middle East Watch 1993: 77–80). In the same year chemical
weapons were used against the population for the first time (Middle East Watch 1993: 60;
Hardi 2011: 103). Evoking no reaction from the international community, the Ba’ath state
was able to step up its plan for genocide. The attacks, launched between 23 February and
6 September 1988, demolished over 2,000 villages, destroyed water sources, looted animals
and farming machinery, and burned farms down (Resool 1990). Two hundred and eighty-
one locations were attacked with poison gas (Baban 2000), more than 100,000 civilians were
murdered, and the rest (mostly families) were detained in prison camps until the General
Amnesty in September 1988 (Middle East Watch 1993; Hardi 2011).
ISIS took Mousel, a major city of over 1 million inhabitants in northern Iraq, in June 2014.
Ezidi activists were seriously concerned about the fate of their community and approached
members of the Kurdistan Parliament for help.5 Because Sinjar, the Ezidi heartland, is 150
kilometres away from the Kurdistan region and surrounded by Sunni Arab villages, it was
vulnerable. Despite reassurances of protection by Kurdish officials (Mahmud 2016), the Ezidi
community woke up on the morning of 3 August 2014 to the sight of peshmarga (Kurdish
army) abandoning them to ISIS (Human Rights Council 2016). ISIS attacked Sinjar from
several directions, murdering hundreds of men and enslaving between 5,000 to 7,000 women
and children on the way. Civilians who managed to escape ISIS headed to Mount Sinjar
where they were stranded in the summer heat for weeks. On 7 August, US forces, and later
UK forces, started air drops to relieve those trapped on the mountain (Ackerman, Chulov
and Borger 2014; BBC 2014a). On 11 August, Kurdish fighters from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and
Iran collaborated on securing a safe passage through ISIS lines for the Ezidi survivors (Tharoor
2014). The siege was finally broken in December 2014, allowing the remaining civilians to
come down (BBC 2014b).
The tools of genocide were different in these campaigns. While the former Iraqi state used
conventional bombardment, extensive gassing, starvation in the camps, and mass shootings,
ISIS used forced conversion into Islam (making women and children memorize and recite
the Quran, pray five times a day, fast during Ramadhan), sexual slavery and forced
impregnation, removal of children, and the mass shooting of men.
The Ba’athists and ISIS treated men and women differently. While men were killed
within days of their capture (being perceived as a threat), women and children were usually
kept alive to face a different fate. Some families during the Anfal campaign were also
transported, killed, and buried in mass graves. Even then, they were treated differently from
the men. While the blindfolded men were taken out of the trucks and shot one by one (Hardi
2011: 18) the families were lined up and shot in large groups (Hardi 2011: 54). The majority
of Anfal women were detained in prison for months until the September 1988 General
Amnesty was announced. They experienced hunger, disease, sexual and physical abuse, and
death of children. Ezidi women, on the other hand, were used solely as sex slaves.

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Sexual abuse of Anfal and Ezidi women

One major difference between Anfal and Ezidi survivors is related to their experience and
recounting of sexual abuse. While women were sexually abused during Anfal, this was not
systematic. In most cases the perpetrators of sexual abuse acted opportunistically, taking
advantage of female prisoners’ vulnerable positions (Hardi 2011: 63–64). There were
reports about women being abducted and gifted to Arab tribes in Iraq and the surrounding
countries. Some Iraqi tribes, fearing reprisal by the Kurds, contacted the Ministry of
Human Rights in Erbil after the fall of the Ba’ath regime. They informed the ministry that
some Kurdish women were given to them as “presents” but they were well treated, married
off, and had children (Hardi 2011: 62). It is unclear whether these acts were officially
sanctioned by the state. An Iraqi state document named 18 women who were allegedly
sold to brothels in Egypt.6 This document was later pronounced inauthentic by the Iraqi
High Tribunal.
Rape of Ezidi women, on the other hand, was widespread and systematic. They were
repeatedly and brutally raped. Some women reported being raped and beaten while their
arms and legs were tied and while their children could hear their screams in the next room.7
One woman was raped while nine months pregnant and every time she refused to sleep with
her captor he would deprive her and her children of food for a day.8 Another reported that
her captor beat and tortured her children every time she refused him.9 They were enslaved,
frequently sold, and gang raped for punishment if they tried to escape.
The Human Rights Council (HRC) (2016), which recognized the Ezidi case as genocide,10
listed these rapes as war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not acts of genocide. HRC
argued that even though Ezidi women were repeatedly raped, there was no “mass rape” of
the hundreds of captive women who were surrounded by armed men. This is an odd argu-
ment as it contradicts the conventional conceptualization of genocide. The women were
targeted as reproducers of the community and as carriers of its honour (Yuval-Davis 1997:
67). In this sense, if killing Ezidi men eliminated ‘a threat’, then sexually enslaving Ezidi
women ensured the destruction of the Ezidis as a group (and hence genocide) through destroy-
ing their ability to reproduce Ezidi children. Rape served to “occupy the womb” (Fisher 1996)
of Ezidi women so that they give birth to new generations of children who are not Ezidi but
“Muslim”.
Another major difference is that while the official Anfal narrative silenced all talks of
sexual abuse (Hardi 2011: 65) the Ezidi discourse is centred on it. Women who survived
Anfal could not speak about sexual abuse and were “left with memories that had not been
worked through, that had no easy access to public space” (Grossmann 1995: 177). They lived
with “the burden of silence and the fear of being found out” (Hardi 2011: 67) and were
unable to seek help. Researching the consequences of rape, I found that female survivors of
Anfal were held responsible for the crimes committed against them. They were shamed and
stigmatized, forced to relocate to a different region where no one knew them, deprived of
the custody of their children, never dared to get married (in the case of unmarried girls who
were no longer virgins), and some were killed by their own relatives (Hardi 2011: 60). These
concerns influenced survivors’ testimonies and censored their Anfal stories.
While Anfal survivors could not speak about sexual violence, Ezidi survivors are expected
and are at times forced to speak about it. In fact, the focus on sexual abuse in the Ezidi case
is so strong that many of their other horrific experiences are marginalized and disregarded.
While reading testimonies of women survivors it is startling that ISIS’ torture of children
and the poisoning of babies11 are sidelined by rape stories.

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 Choman Hardi

Despite the openness of the Ezidi discourse to sexual abuse, talking about such experiences
is not easy. Soon after the first women captives managed to escape ISIS in 2014, the Ezidi
spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh, urged members of the community to welcome them back and
care for them. Although very helpful, the stigma has not lifted in a culture so centred on
notions of honour and shame.
Young unmarried women who have returned from ISIS captivity are particularly
vulnerable. Some of them have felt the need to undergo virginity tests to prove that they
have not been raped. Minwalla points out that these tests are “retraumatizing” and “invasive”
(Fadel 2014). Some of them have gone through surgery to repair their hymen and restore
their virginity in order to be accepted back in their community. Additionally, the women
who were impregnated during rape by ‘the enemy’ are seen as ‘soiled’ or ‘tainted’. Children
born of rape are considered an enemy of the targeted community (Reid-Cunningham 2008).
Therefore, some Ezidi survivors resorted to abortion, which is still illegal in Kurdistan (Fadel
2014).
Survivors find themselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they are pressurized
to talk about sexual enslavement and raise awareness about Ezidi victimization by ISIS; and,
on the other hand, the patriarchal society victimizes them for having been raped. Women
returnees are also not consulted about their place of residence upon returning. They are
automatically relocated in IDP camps with the rest of the community where everyone sees
them as ISIS sex slaves. Some survivors even report lack of sympathy by the community
which has become saturated with these stories and is desensitized and unsupportive.12 They
are told by relatives and friends that what they have experienced is not unique and has
happened to many other women around them, therefore they should stop crying and try to
move on. In this way women who have been victimized and made powerless by perpetrators
are once again made powerless by their own government and community.

Conclusion
Women survivors of Anfal and the Ezidi genocide have suffered enormously in the aftermath
of these atrocities. They are stigmatized as victims of violence, as women ‘without
guardian[s]’,13 and as sexually abused women. While sexual abuse was not an instrument of
genocide during Anfal, as it was during the Ezidi catastrophe, it was not uncommon. Publicly,
sexual abuse in the context of Anfal was taboo. Those whose rape became public faced major
repercussions after Anfal. On the other hand, rape of Ezidi women is a major part of the
official narrative and women are put under enormous pressure to talk. This has led to
exploitation of survivors by journalists and researchers. They are expected to speak when the
community wants them to speak and to be silent when the community does not want to
hear certain aspects of their stories.
The cases discussed above confirm that while both men and women can be victimized in
violent conflict, often they are targeted differently. In line with cultural perceptions of men
as aggressors and women as reproducers of the group, men comprise the largest number of
casualties in genocide while women are raped and forcibly impregnated. It is therefore
essential that research becomes more sensitive to men’s and women’s different vulnerabilities
in these contexts. Recent events also prove that both men and women can engage in
violence to perpetrate crimes or fight for liberation. Perhaps future research can shed more
light on the range of factors that mobilize men and women while recognizing that even
when they experience similar things (either as victims or as perpetrators) they will have
differential access to power and resources.

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Notes
1 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979; UN
Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, 1993; Security Council Resolution
1325, 2000; Security Council Resolution 1820, 2008.
2 I am grateful to my research assistant, Shavgar Mohammed Salih Haji, who transcribed the interviews
into English. The names of survivors have been changed to protect their identity.
3 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 2 September 1998, The Prosecutor versus Jean-Paul
Akayesu. Paragraph 731.
4 ‘First woman to be charged with genocide sentenced to life in prison’. The Telegraph, UK, 24 June
2011. Available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/rwanda/8596121/
First-woman-to-be-charged-with-genocide-sentenced-to-life-in-prison.html (accessed 9 January
2017).
5 Interview with Judge Qasim Rafu, Ezidi activist.
6 Top secret Iraqi document reveals Kurdish girls sent to harems and nightclubs in Egypt, 7/2/2003.
KurdishMedia.com.
7 Layla (Yazda Documentation Centre) and Rezhna Mahmud, former SEED Director of Psychological
Services.
8 Interview with Kijan, Yazda Documentation Centre.
9 Interview with Sara, Yazda Documentation Centre.
10 Carla Del Ponte, one of the commissioners of the independent inquiry on the Ezidi genocide, stated
that: “ISIS has made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the
elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide” (UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights 2016).
11 Interview with Kijan, Yazda Documentation Centre.
12 Interview with Rezhna Mahmud, former SEED Director of Psychological Services
13 This expression is widely used about Anfal surviving women by themselves and the larger
community.

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 17
MIGRATION AND
GENDERED INSECURITIES
IN GLOBAL POLITICS
Meghana Nayak

Introduction1
Migrants face gendered insecurities that manifest in multiple ways. They might experience
sexual violence at various points in their migration journeys (Freedman 2012). They migrate
to/from particular countries because of the gendered dynamics of labour economies (Sassen
1984; Kofman et al. 2000). And, they face challenges in their daily lives, particularly due to
the violence that prompted their migration journeys as well as contested legal statuses and
forced or exploitative labour (Marchand 2008). This chapter posits a theoretical framework
for exploring another dynamic of these gendered insecurities: the gendered insecurities of
states as they encounter migrants.
State insecurities about migrants are gendered in terms of masculinist anxieties about
the alleged threats migrants pose or about what to do about migration flows; furthermore, the
state deals with these insecurities through gendered categorizations of migrants. For example,
migrants are constructed as threats or as vulnerable, and accordingly, as those who should be
deported, detained, surveilled, or contained, or protected and supported through immigration
relief or social services. Indeed, an increasing number of studies are exploring how states
depict and construct migrants, particularly in the context of increased migrant flows in
Europe, immigration debates in the US, and the detention of asylum seekers by Australia.
These classifications are in turn used by states to exercise sovereign power and to influence
other countries. The importance of this framework is to situate gendered studies of migration
within the context of global politics, attentive to the workings of masculinist sovereign
power and international relations.
The next section fleshes out a feminist theoretical framework that ‘genders’ state insecurity
about migrants. The following section then applies this framework to the example of immi-
gration relief, or protection from deportation. This kind of relief might come in the form
of special visas or asylum.2 My focus in this chapter is how the US approaches immigration
relief for migrant survivors of sex trafficking.
I look at this particular empirical case study for several reasons. First, we are able to
explore the gendered components of US insecurity about migrants. The US theorizes sex
trafficking, a form of gender violence, so as to reserve immigration relief only for the most
‘vulnerable’ and for trafficking victims who can testify against traffickers, whom the US frame

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as connected to terrorism. Accordingly, we see at play the masculinist moral panic about
whom to protect and whom to criminalize. This kind of hyperreactivity is relevant in most
interactions between states and migrants but, in this case, government officials make pro-
clamations about what counts as sex trafficking, thus revealing quite explicitly understandings
about gender violence. Second, we see how processes of gendered categorization and classi-
fication work, as the US makes distinctions between migrants who experienced sex trafficking,
migrants who experienced labour trafficking, migrants who were smuggled, undocumented
migrants, and migrants who were sex workers. These distinctions are gendered because they
rely upon and perpetuate assumptions about gender violence and gendered ideas about
‘innocence’. Thus through the example of trafficking we actually can discuss multiple empi-
rical examples of the classification of migrants. Third, we see that state insecurity underlies
not only exclusionary practices toward migrants but also protective practices. The legislation
that offers immigration relief for trafficking victims is used to prevent the entry of sex
workers as well as to shape and influence how other countries address prostitution because
of enduring fears and repulsion about sex work perpetuated by moral abolitionists. The
concluding section explores why examining the theoretical underpinnings and empirical
examples of the gendered insecurities of states is crucial to understanding the gendered
politics of migration and the lived experiences of migrants.

Gendered insecurities, states, and migrants

I draw upon critical constructivist3 explorations of state insecurity, which contend that state
identity is constituted through the interpretation of what is ‘dangerous’ and ‘threatening’
to the state. Without such threats, the state cannot exist because it would not be able to
construct a meaningful identity and to justify its attempts to reify and control borders.
And thus, the drive for security never ultimately succeeds (Connolly 1996; Campbell 1998;
Nayak and Selbin 2010). But this discussion is incomplete without a gendered lens. To
‘gender’ insecurity/security means several things when we draw upon Feminist Security
Studies scholarship.
First, we must rethink what counts as security, inclusive of not only issues like war and
weapons but also other topics such as poverty and interpersonal violence, and who gets to be
secure; as Sjoberg notes “secure states often contain insecure women” (2009: 198). Second,
we learn that security practices and studies value and are committed to hegemonic masculinities
(Sjoberg 2010: 5). Third, gender as a lens is not simply about ‘adding’ gender as a variable
but rather about transforming entire ways of thinking about what it means to be secure and
insecure, thus helping to understand why security problems occur and to pose solutions
(ibid.: 5). Finally, we can be curious particularly when a gendered analysis is missing; that
absence means something about the way people think and talk about security (ibid.: 5–6).
So, what does the gendered insecurity of states look like? First, states express masculinist
anxiety through the desire for domination. As Tickner notes, there are multiple modes of
masculinity, but hegemonic masculinity is “sustained through its opposition to various
subordinated and devalued masculinities, such as homosexuality, and more important,
through its relation to various devalued femininities” (Tickner 1992: 6). In the case of states
perpetuating and constructing fear, hypermasculinity is at play, which “arises when agents of
hegemonic masculinity feel threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inflate, exaggerate,
or otherwise distort their traditional masculinity” (Agathangelou and Ling 2004: 519).
Hypermasculinity scripts any perceived loss of power, such as the ease with which some
foreign nationals may ‘cross’ a border, as a humiliating failure because it reveals the fragility
of masculine power.

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 Meghana Nayak

This fragility is apparent via depictions of ‘hordes’ of migrants overrunning borders. As

Doty notes, there are many state practices that “aim to create order, to banish amibiguity,
to create stability and fixedness” (Doty 2003: 14). Specifically, states are insecure about
migrants because “the movement of human beings across territorialized and coded geographic,
cultural, and political space is itself a flow understood as threatening to order, security, and
identity” (Doty 2003: 14). The very presence of migrants at or inside borders is represented
as evidence of the weakness of states (Hansen and Papademetriou 2014). Huysmans (2006)
argues that worries about migration are central to European Union identity-making,
particularly as migration is increasingly framed not as an economic or humanitarian issue but
as a ‘security’ issue, which then imagines migrants as indubitably ‘different’. As Huysmans
deftly illustrates, the issue is not whether migrants are ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ threats, but rather
how securitizing an issue sets into motion certain policies as well as ways of relating to
migrants, as foreigners/others/outsiders to be feared rather than as people to be viewed with
compassion or as rights-holders.
The second manifestation of the gendered insecurities of states is through masculinist,
paternalist ‘protection’ (Young 2003). States offer protection to citizens from ‘bad things’
(terrorism, changes in society, economic problems) in exchange for the support of state
policies, such as militarization and discrimination, ostensibly meant to keep the citizenry safe.
The ‘protector’ is not a brute, forcing his domination upon others, but rather a “courageous,
responsible, and virtuous man . . . [a] ‘good’ man” willing to risk facing threats and danger
to protect those for whom he is responsible (Young 2003: 4). Masculine protection requires
“feminine subordination”; “[t]hat he finds her worthy of such risks gives substance to her
self” (Young 2003: 5). In other words, those who are to be protected become valuable by
virtue of desiring, requiring, and accepting masculinized protection. While migrants are not
citizens, acceptance of the state’s protection means legitimizing the state.
Thus, in examining states’ gendered insecurities in response to migration, we should
not limit the focus to the construction and treatment of those deemed as threats. The
way that states classify and treat those deemed as non-threatening, vulnerable, or helpless
is also significant to how states manage insecurity about migrants in gendered ways. As
Huysman importantly points out, “even when not directly spoken [of] as a threat, asylum
[and other forms of immigration relief] can be rendered as a security question by being
institutionally and discursively integrated in policy frameworks that [focus on] policing
and defence” (2006: 4). Even if a state is protecting a migrant, such as through a grant of
asylum, discourses of masculinized security and insecurity underscore this act; asylum
protection and immigration relief should not be presumed as necessarily humanitarian or
compassionate.
The abilities both to protect and to secure are pivotal to the production of masculinist state
identity, as impenetrable yet protective. Both protection and security allow countries to
construct themselves as powerful. To restrict as well as to protect is to be the kind of state
that is ‘masculine’ and ‘civilized’ enough to have control over how sovereignty is enacted.
Feminist analyses of gender, war, and militarization show that the gendered binaries that
dictate who is to be protected are the same ones that demand that states engage in organized
violence and militarization (Sjoberg 2006; Kinsella 2011). In other words, the protection of
(some) innocent people, primarily women, constructed as vulnerable and worthy of saving,
is a site for states to assert hegemonic masculinity. Further, proclamations of being the kind
of state that protects does not mean that migrants will actually be ‘protected’ or experience
security, particularly if one evaluates experiences of legal, social, and political exclusion,
violence, and discrimination facing migrants, including those who have received asylum or

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other forms of immigration relief. Rather, the ability to protect migrants stems from the same
gendered logic as the ability to restrict or exclude migrants.
Furthermore, the kinds of states that are strong and secure enough to both restrict and to
protect migrants position themselves as ‘better’ than other countries. To be better means
to be ‘manly’ in the right ways: strong enough to defend borders against threats from ‘bad’
migrants intent on doing harm to and draining resources from the ‘homeland’, yet valiant
enough to extend protection to vulnerable migrants in need of defence from persecution.
Weak and bad countries drive out migrants due to persecutory practices, corruption,
impoverishment, or bad governance; weak and bad countries are overrun by migrants from
neighbouring countries. Strong and good countries accept the very migrants weak countries
push out and are simultaneously more capable of immigrant restrictionism.4 As I illustrate
below, states aim to resolve the gendered insecurities they experience around migrants by
proclaiming to be able to protect and restrict migrants.

Good migrants and good states

As several migration scholars have documented, migrants’ rights organizations have helped
to draw attention to the experiences of those forced to migrate due to trafficking. As stories
increasingly emerge about sex slavery, confiscated passports, indentured servitude, and
exploitation, anti-trafficking campaigns aim to pressure states and international organizations
to address the rights of these particular migrants. Countries might feign taking trafficking
seriously, but often their efforts ultimately result in the criminalization and deportation
of migrants involved in commercial sex acts, whether forced or voluntary (Kinney 2013).
This section explores how state insecurities about migrants eclipse attempts to alleviate the
insecurities of migrants.
In 1998, the Clinton Administration issued a directive to address trafficking through the
“prevention, protection, and support of victims” as well as the prosecution of traffickers.
President Clinton signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) into law on
28 October 2000. It provides special ‘T’ visas for those whose lives would be in danger if they
were returned to their countries of origin. Around the same time, after US-led negotiations,
on 15 November 2000, the United Nations adopted a new document, the Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing
the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo Protocol),
with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime serving as the monitoring body. The US
became a signatory to the Protocol in December 2000 and ratified it in 2005.
The US framed its commitment to ending trafficking as part of its own legacy in ending
slavery. It saw both the TVPA and Palermo Protocol as the commencement of “unprecedented
momentum” in a global fight to end this type of violence. But this is not a simple story of
a government’s attempt to ‘protect’ migrants who are survivors of trafficking. First, the US
makes distinctions about who counts as a trafficking victim, thus discounting the experiences
of other migrants. Second, anti-trafficking rhetoric is bound up with counter-terrorism
efforts.
As to the first point, the T visa creates and relies upon distinctions between categories of
victims. The US and the United Nations both ostensibly include a wide variety of trafficking
scenarios:

A woman from a developing country who ends up enslaved at a garment factory

in the United States; or a man smuggled from a North African country into Europe
and then forced to harvest crops under threat of beatings or death; or a Nepali

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 Meghana Nayak

woman who is taken across the Indian border and held against her will to work as
a prostitute.
Kapur 2013: 334

But popular and governmental discourses in the US focus predominantly on sex trafficking.
The T visa is technically for survivors of both sex trafficking and labour trafficking. The 2000
TVPA defines “severe forms of trafficking in persons” as follows:

Sex Trafficking: the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining

of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act, in which the
commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in
which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18
years of age;
Labor Trafficking: the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining
of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or
coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude,
peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

Thus the US claims that labour trafficking victims are included in their anti-trafficking
efforts, but the disproportionate focus on sex trafficking victims stems from the role of
abolitionists in drafting and supporting the TVPA. Abolitionists have historically been involved
in eliminating all forms of sex trafficking and prostitution and engaging in moral crusades to
end these activities. During the negotiations leading up to the passage of the TVPA, abolitionists
won ‘ideologically’ in using the human trafficking issue as a way to demonize and abolish
prostitution (Bromfield and Capous-Desyllas 2012). Feminist critiques of abolitionist perspec-
tives focus on how these moralistic views of trafficking construct ideas of innocence. For
abolitionists, the concern is that trafficking and prostitution both destroy the inherent goodness
and purity of women. The innocent woman is targeted, stalked, abducted in the dead of night,
and then robbed of her virginity. The all-too-easy reference to ‘slavery’ by abolitionists distracts
attention from a more complex view of how neoliberal economic policies, immigration
restrictionism, racist and misogynistic constructions of people from certain communities, and
exploitation of workers contribute to trafficking and indentured servitude. Furthermore,
abolitionists feminize victims so as to set up masculinized states as protectors of helpless women.
But while TVPA discourse privileges sex trafficking over labour trafficking victims, it also
makes a distinction between ‘good’ sex trafficking victims and ‘bad’ sex workers. The
inclusion of sex workers along with trafficking survivors served to elicit support for TVPA
legislation by ‘inflating’ the numbers of women affected by commercial sex (Chapkis 2003:
927). But in reality, sex workers are usually not eligible for the TVPA if there is any evidence
that the person chose rather than was deceived or forced into prostitution. Furthermore, more
broadly speaking, in the US, sex workers are ‘inadmissible aliens’ because they are allegedly
participating in ‘moral turpitude’, or deviant behaviour. The codification states:

Any alien who (i) is coming to the U.S. solely, principally, or incidentally to engage
in prostitution, or has engaged in prostitution within 10 years of the date of
application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status . . . is inadmissible.
U.S.C. § 1182

Moral turpitude is a legal concept with roots in early 19th-century racialized and gendered
norms (Simon-Kerr 2012). African Americans and Indigenous Americans in general, white

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men who committed fraud, and female prostitutes were constructed as less ‘credible’ in
legal settings because of their presumed, inherent ‘deviance’. Indeed, these ‘morally bankrupt’
people were apparently even more suspect than people who committed violence. The turpi-
tude concept has had a remarkable hold on how the US legal and criminal justice systems
operate, playing a role as well in immigration and asylum decisions (Simon-Kerr 2012: 1002,
n. 14). Sex workers are not considered to be ‘innocent’ but rather deviant criminals in the
genealogy of US legal thought. Thus, any trafficked person who receives a T visa did so
because they were able to prove that they did not wilfully engage in sex work.
The gendered distinction between sex trafficking and sex work, or between ‘good’ and
‘bad’ victim, is related to the distinction made between sex trafficking and labour trafficking.
Chapkis (2003: 924) argues that the TVPA was passed and reauthorized in a way that
entrenched a divide between “violated innocents” and “illegal immigrants”. The latter are
imagined to be not only deviant prostitute women but also men who cross illegally into the
US for their own opportunities. While women also cross into the US, popular and government
discourse depicts border-crossers as predominantly men. The TVPA distinguishes between
labour exploitation, that undocumented migrants are likely to experience, and labour trafficking,
that ‘innocent’ migrants are allegedly likely to experience. Specifically, in the TVPA, labour
trafficking must include “force, fraud, or coercion” whereas exploitation includes “extremely
low wages . . ., long hours, poor working conditions, lack of avenues of redress, and may be
linked to various forms of mistreatment of immigrants”. So, the primary focus on sex
trafficking is also because a more comprehensive focus on labour trafficking would potentially
open the door to count as victims the undocumented migrants who have experienced labour
exploitation.
In order to further distinguish between ‘innocent’ migrants and ‘deceptive’ migrants, the
US not only downplays labour trafficking but also makes a distinction between trafficking
and smuggling. While the US and United Nations definitions of trafficking focus on
deception, coercion, and control, the understandings of smuggling are different. Article 3 of
the Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, supplementing the
United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime notes:

(a) “ Smuggling of migrants” shall mean the procurement, in order to obtain,

directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry
of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a
permanent resident;
(b) “Illegal entry” shall mean crossing borders without complying with the necessary
requirements for legal entry into the receiving State.

The above definition of smuggling, unlike the definition of trafficking, does not hinge
on an explanation of the exploitative and violent effects on those who are smuggled but
rather on the ‘bad behaviour’ of illegal entry. Indeed, the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime points out that there are distinctions between trafficking and smuggling in terms
of purpose, consent, and outcomes to show that trafficking is so much worse. The distinctions,
according to the US Customs and Immigration Services, are listed as follows. The smuggling
of migrants, while often undertaken in degrading and/or dangerous conditions, involves
consent to smuggling. On the other hand, trafficking victims have “either never consented
or, if they initially consented, that consent has been rendered meaningless by the coercive,
deceptive or abusive actions of the traffickers”. Further, “smuggling ends with the arrival
of the migrants at their destination”, whereas trafficking involves the ongoing exploitation

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of the victims in some manner to generate illicit profits for the traffickers. Finally, in
smuggling, profits are gained from transporting the migrant or facilitating a person staying
in the destination country whereas profits in trafficking are “derived from exploitation”.
The trafficked victim is allegedly tricked by a fraudulent trafficker into entering the
country; the smuggled migrant is the fraudulent actor through his or her free will. Migrants
are effectively judged based on whether they seem to “consent” to activity deemed to be
“immoral”, such as prostitution or wilfully entering a country without proper documentation
(Bhabha and Zard 2006: 6–8). “Deceptive” migrants are hypermasculinized as dangerous,
criminal men (and some women) who threaten the paternalistic and protective masculinity
of good, masculinist states.
The term ‘smuggled alien’ arose concomitantly with the term ‘illegal alien’ in US political
discourse so as to describe those whose “first act” upon reaching the US was to “break laws”
in a “clandestine manner” (Srikantiah 2007: 188). The TVPA and US agencies involved with
the immigration/asylum process cling to the difference between smuggling and trafficking
to deter fraudulent attempts by undocumented economic migrants to take advantage of
immigration relief options (Srikantiah 2007: 192). The prototypical victim eligible for the
T visa must be under full ‘control’ of the trafficker so as to prove that she did not willingly
choose to enter the US without proper documentation. This approach makes sense given
that the Palermo Protocol and the TVPA both rely upon a criminal justice perspective
emphasizing prosecution of traffickers. But this criminal justice perspective allows states to
use the Protocol as an excuse to strengthen anti-immigrantism (Chuang 2006).
As Bhabha points out, some asylum seekers and migrants, already having fled other forms
of violence, can become victims of trafficking because of the desperate choices they make,
such as the use of “smugglers, counterfeit documents, subterfuge and clandestine behavior
to circumvent mandatory visa requirements” (Bhabha 2002: 172). Haynes is thus concerned
about the impact of anti-smuggling stances on trafficking victims (Haynes 2004: 244).
However, she too makes a distinction between trafficking and smuggling victims in terms
of ‘choice’.

Smuggling involves delivering persons to the country they wish to enter, initiated
by the potential migrant. Smuggling often takes place under horrible and possibly
life threatening conditions, but smuggled persons are left to their own devices upon
delivery. Smuggling is not as lucrative for the perpetrators, as smugglers usually
make only a short-term profit on the act of moving a person, while traffickers regard
people as highly profitable, reusable, re-sellable, and expendable commodities.
Haynes 2004: 232

But the experiences of smuggled undocumented migrants, as Haynes does note, are
inherently exploitative and violent. They, too, experience gendered insecurities, including
sexual assault, the added burdens women accompanied by children experience (van Liempt
2008), and complex negotiations of masculinity within male migrant smuggling networks
(Ahmad 2008). Thus, the alleged ‘choice’ of smuggled migrants should be put in context.
Systematic constraints, such as border patrols, vigilante groups, lack of resources or legal
literacy to legally migrate, and immigration restrictionist measures and laws, contribute to
the necessity of smuggling as well as to patterns of exposure to and risk of violence. The
perceived distinction between the prototypical female trafficking victim and the conniving
male smuggled alien reveals a gendered politics to who gets protected. In addition, both
scenarios deny the multiple forms of agency and gender hierarchy simultaneously at play

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during migration; there are varying degrees of coercion, exploitation, and choice occurring
in both trafficking and smuggling.
Further, the focus on trafficked migrants is motivated by the desire of the US to target
traffickers. To be eligible for the T visa, migrants must agree to comply with ‘reasonable
requests’ from law enforcement for the purposes of investigating the trafficking. There are
some exceptions as well as growing awareness that cooperation with criminal investigations
can put both migrants and their families in danger. But the expectation of compliance means
that protection is bound up with how the US government is increasingly targeting traffickers
as a part of counter-terrorism efforts. As Kapur notes, anti-trafficking “has invariably lapsed
into the use of sexual and moral surveillance techniques over women while also betraying a
visceral concern over border security” (2013: 334). Both the Bush and Obama administrations
framed trafficking as national security concerns and explicitly linked trafficking to terrorist
networks. This matters because categorizations of migrants do not simply impact people’s
lives by making them insecure, but they also are useful to the US in promoting certain kinds
of policies, and not just regarding terrorism.
Specifically, the TVPA requires the creation of ‘Trafficking in Persons’ (TIP) country
reports by the US State Department to assess the effectiveness of countries around the world
in combating trafficking. After compiling these reports, the State Department can then group
these countries in ranked ‘tiers’. Tier 1 includes countries that have fully complied with the
minimum standards the TVPA established. Tier 2 indicates that countries did not comply
with these standards but did attempt to do so. Tier 3 countries are not compliant and did
not make any efforts. Countries on the Tier 2 Watch List have large numbers of trafficking
victims, and failed to make any improvements in anti-trafficking policies, even if they
promised to. What is done with these rankings?
Particularly for Tier 3 countries, the US can enact sanctions related to nonhumanitarian,
non-trade-related foreign assistance and can use its influence to deny foreign assistance
by international financial institutions and multilateral development banks to these countries.
The decision as to which countries to pressure or punish is not always directly related to the
content of the TIP report but rather due to already existing relationships between the US
and those countries. Crucial to note is that anti-trafficking policies must also be anti-
prostitution, as of the 2003 reauthorization of the TVPA. That means that through the TIP
reports, the US has effectively punished or threatened to punish countries that support sex
workers’ rights.
I raise these issues about the TIP reports because state insecurity is not simply about how
a country views its own borders but also about how it postures and performs gender in the
context of global politics. When countries act as if they are in control of their borders by
categorizing migrants, it matters not only to the people most impacted by state practices but
also to other states because the classifications of migrants are rooted in ideas about how states
should behave about particular issues, such as human rights violations, trafficking of goods
and people, criminal networks, and fluxes in labour markets. For example, Flynn (2014)
traces the global spread and diffusion of immigration detention as a way to manage migration,
examining in particular the role of the US in policy innovation in this regard.

Conclusions
The framework of examining the gendered insecurities of states as they encounter migrants
is crucial for exploring and finding trends in how and why people who cross borders might
be treated in different ways. Further, it underscores that the rights of migrants should be

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studied concomitantly with critical analyses of state practices of categorizing migrants. Finally,
it shows the necessity of a gendered analysis in understanding the securitization of migrants.
At the same time, this framework cannot be used to ‘predict’ who will be constructed as
‘good’ or ‘bad’, and how the state will interact with migrants. First, the line between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ is often shifting and arbitrary, considering that many who ultimately receive
immigration relief and are ostensibly categorized as ‘good’ might have been detained,
questioned, or at any point in their journeys classified as ‘bad’. This is particularly in countries
with mandatory detention policies toward a variety of ‘classifications’ of migrants. But, there
are not enough robust feminist analyses of detention and deportation as ‘insecure’ practices
by states; such studies would help us trace shifting classifications (see Nayak 2015). Further,
as Weber (2016) points out, queer analysis is required to analyse how the ‘unwanted im/
migrant’ is a threat as a sexually perverse ‘underdeveloped’ figure, as evidenced in policies
that seek to ban promiscuous and deviant bodies, such as queer migrants, sex workers, and
HIV positive migrants; here, too, draconian policies coexist with attempts to extend legal
protection for those persecuted due to gender identity or sexual orientation, leading to
contradictory and confusing experiences by migrants with the state (Nayak 2015).
Second, it might be hard to identify which migrants will be classified in different categories
because of the difficulties in deciding who counts as a migrant. Heretofore, this chapter has
presumed an a priori category of ‘migrant’. But who is a migrant? When does one ‘stop’
being a migrant? Must one be ‘on the move’ to be a migrant? For how long must one be
moving in order to be a migrant? These questions require feminist analysis because they get
at why and how bodies are classified.
Third, states are not acting unilaterally upon migrants. Migrants’ rights groups and activists
craft narratives about migrants’ journeys and desires that confront and rewrite state
categorizations and subsequent policies. In so doing, they challenge why states are insecure
about migrants and act in ways that exacerbate migrants’ insecurities. Specifically, they
organize to challenge the detention of migrants, to support safe passage of migrants into
countries, to elicit legal support for asylum seekers, and to challenge unhelpful distinctions
such as those made between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants (Basok 2010; Nayak 2016).
In sum, in order to understand the gendered insecurities that migrants experience, we must
also investigate how state insecurities about migrants are gendered and contribute to migrant
insecurities via classifications and related policies of migrants as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But these
categories are not timeless or deterministic. Rather, they help show us how ‘migrants’ and
‘states’ are embroiled in a co-constitutive relationship.

Notes
1 With permission from Oxford University Press, I have reproduced or rewritten portions of Meghana
Nayak (2015) Who is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and U.S. Immigration Politics. New
York: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–68, 103, 110–111, 114–117, 120, 186.
2 Asylum is legal protection extended to those migrants who qualify under the 1951 United Nations
Convention Related to the Status of Refugees if they are fleeing their countries of origin due to fear
of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group.
3 Critical constructivist theories trace how political actors behave toward other actors or events based
on the meanings they have assigned to those entities or events. Thus, state interests cannot be pre-
sumed but must be unpacked to explore where interests come from, and how those interests are
mediated by social contexts as well as by ideas that give meaning to those contexts and material
conditions. Critical constructivists challenge that states are a ‘given’, arguing instead that states are
always in the process of becoming via practices of identity formation.

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4 While I do not have room to explore the issue of international hierarchy here, I am essentially
arguing that policies regarding migration become a site for creating distinctions between ‘better’ and
‘worse’ countries. I am influenced by the scholarship of Ann Towns about how states are socially
ranked. As Towns notes, “[s]ocial hierarchy, a term [that can be used] synonymously with social
inequality, stratification or rank, concerns the ordering of acts as superior or inferior to one another in socially
important respects” (Towns 2010: 4445, emphasis original).

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 18
GENDER, VIOLENCE, AND
TECHNOLOGY
Cristina Masters

Introduction
Nascent IR feminist scholarship on the revolution in military affairs, cyborg soldiers, and
drone warfare reveals there is no singular way of thinking about the relationship between
gender, violence, and technology and the complex ways in which they interface in practices
of war (Bayard de Volo 2016; Daggett 2015; Holmqvist 2013; Manjikian 2013; Masters 2005,
2008; Wilcox 2014). What this scholarship does reveal, however, is that careful attention to
gender through feminist sensibilities surfaces new sites of enquiry into the corporeal politics
of war – how it is embodied, experienced, and rendered intelligible. This scholarship both
extends IR feminist understandings of the relationship between gender and war, specifically
research on militarized masculinities, and also offers new insights into untangling what often
emerges as naturalized connections between men, masculinity, and violence. The use of
advanced technology in war, therefore, presents new challenges for feminist(s) thinking about
the relationship between gender and violence. And rather than take gender as a given, even
if likely a continued site of war’s intelligibility, this chapter is concerned with exploring the
contingent ways in which gender is trafficked and what work it is doing in high-tech practices
of war with a particular focus on drone warfare. Taking seriously that at the same time gender
might be done in human–machine interfaces, it is equally important to interrogate how it
might be undone or loosened in ways that might provoke new ways of being in the world.
Because technology furnishes us with “fresh sources of power”, Donna Haraway argues
(1991: 165), what is urgently needed are “fresh sources of analysis and political action”. The
chapter attempts to offer some fresh feminist insight into critically navigating the complex
network of gender, violence, and technology. The aim of the chapter is threefold:

1 to offer some insight into key feminist debates on the relationship between gender and
technology;
2 to offer a feminist analysis of gendered frames of thought which render drone warfare
intelligible and permissible and to demonstrate how gender works to (dis)embody war
anew;
3 to offer some feminist insight into the ambivalent, and thus, open relationship between
technology and violence where gender’s hold might be loosened, enabling challenges
to war’s gendered grids of intelligibility and enactments of violence.

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 Cristina Masters

The use of advanced technologies in practices of war present IR feminists with unique
challenges in thinking through the fraught representations and relations engendered by new
embodiments and frames of intelligibility in high-tech warfare. It also potentially produces
new sites for the articulation of power and new sites of resistance to gender regimes of power.
With this in mind, this chapter advocates for a critically ambivalent attitude to the transgressive
potentialities of technology for rethinking and subverting gender as an entrenched and
persistent relation of power in practices of contemporary war. One attentive and sensitive
to both the deadly enactments of gendered technologies of war and the resistant opportunities
available even in the most violent of representations and performances of human–machine
interfaces.

Drone warfare and gendered (dis)embodiments

Feminists, I would argue, have effectively exposed the many ways in which war is fundamen-
tally reliant on gender (Cohn 1987; Enloe 1989; Elshtain 1987; Sjoberg 2014). While there
is little agreement among feminists on what this means exactly for how we understand war’s
gendered contours, it suggests that not only does war rely on the production of gendered
bodies to do its intense work, with the constitutive effect of producing diverse experiences
of war, but that war’s very representation and ‘knowability’ – how it is understood, explained,
normalized, and legitimated – is fundamentally tethered to gender. Without gender, and I
would add to this race and sexuality, war loses its bearing(s). Put differently, gender keeps
war ‘straight’ (Daggett 2015). The implication of this is weighty; challenging war necessitates
challenging its gendered grids of intelligibility and the various corporealities enacted through
its practice(s). This is both unsettling and provocative in the context of drone warfare when
at first glance it is not obvious how it fits into gendered grids of intelligibility and its embodi-
ments appear as unfamiliar in relation to rich feminist analyses of war.
Feminist searches for bodily/embodied enactments of gender in practices of drone warfare,
therefore, are hardly surprising considering that militaries the world over invest much time,
money, and energy into producing contingent embodiments, notably militarized forms of
masculinity (see Whitworth 2004; Eichler 2014). ‘Feeling like a man’ surely matters to the
business of war – and militaries have certainly worked hard to reproduce and sustain the link
between masculinity and war – but does it matter to the successful enactment of drone
warfare?
While the body of the soldier might be essential to certain types of war, it is not clear that
bodily enactments of masculinity are essential to, or easily enacted, in drone warfare as such.
Cara Daggett, for example, argues that militarized masculinity “no longer makes sense” as
either the embodied orientation for killing in war or as the embodied provision of war’s moral
intelligibility. In collapsing two key axes of classic warfare – home/combat and distance/
intimacy – her contention is that drones queer “the experience of killing” in, producing “illeg-
ible assemblages” that fail to map neatly onto gendered binaries (Daggett 2015: 362). Drones,
she argues, can then be understood as “genderqueer” bodies. This queering is partly an effect
of the space of protection from which drone pilots operate, far from physical combat, where
the risk of death that haunts traditional practices of soldiering is very much absent. Seen in
this way, brute strength, heteronormativity, proximate killing, heroism, and valour – all
bodily performances associated with militarized masculinity – make little sense in the context
of the successful enactment of drone warfare. Her queer analysis strips away the romanticized
cloak of militarized masculine subjectivity, making available vital space for challenging how
the production of particular gendered identities (militarized masculinities) does a great deal

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of work for normalizing and making killing in war possible. For Daggett this embodied and
queer liminality offers some hope for challenging the morality of killing in war, where the
bodily sensations of “discomfort” and “trauma” experienced by drone operators in the act of
killing at an “intimate distance” might serve to disrupt the flow of war (2015: 363).
Cara Daggett is not alone in critically rethinking militarized masculinity in relation to
drones. Lorraine Bayard de Volo (2016) traces a similar difficulty in her research on drone
operators where claims to hegemonic militarized forms of masculinity are tenuous, yet
punctuated with determined attempts to cling to it evident in practices such as the donning
of US Air Force flight suits and new medals for honourable service specifically for drone
pilots. In different ways, Daggett and Bayard de Volo draw attention to the precarious and
relative position of traditional gendered subjectivities for conferring intelligible performative
frameworks for doing the work of drone warfare. Neither is suggesting that gender is absent
or obsolete but instead that human–machine interfaces possibly serve to loosen the hold of
militarized forms of embodied masculinity as an orienting frame of war. This might offer
hope as Daggett proposes, or it might lead to new ‘recalibrations’ of contingent militarized
masculinities as Bayard de Volo demonstrates (see also Manjikian 2013). Both reveal the
constructed, contingent, fluid and contested nature of hegemonic subject positions in high-
tech warfare. It would be wrong, however, to take this to mean masculinity has been
abandoned as an orienting frame of drone warfare (see Masters 2005, 2008; Manjikian 2013).
My analysis of drone warfare, consequently, both supplements and departs from analyses
concerned with what Kimberly Hutchings (2008) refers to as substantive accounts of masculin-
ity’s relationship to war. Substantive accounts, she argues, are primarily concerned with how
war anchors (or not) masculinity, and how it provides “a fixed reference point for any negotia-
tion or renegotiation on what masculinity or, in particular, hegemonic masculinity may mean”
(Hutchings 2008: 390; original emphasis). In this configuration, war gives masculinity meaning.
While these accounts are undoubtedly useful for troubling masculinity as a stable signifier, there
is a risk of linking the relationship between the two to ‘fixed content’.
Bearing this in mind, Hutchings urges us to think about masculinity as much as a ‘frame-
work for thought’ as any given material reality in war. As a formal relation, rather than simply
as a substantive one, this framework works through two logics: “a logic of contrast (between
masculinities) and as a logic of contradiction (between masculinity and femininity)”
(Hutchings 2008: 390). “The work done by the formal relational properties of masculinity
as a concept”, she argues, “enables more radical questions to be asked” about war as a social
practice, ones made possible through foregrounding relationality in the intricate connections
between gender and war (Hutchings 2008: 390). Focusing solely on embodiment might
mean missing how gender, masculinity in particular, works as a powerful framework for
thought in drone warfare, while also taking seriously that ignoring the material realities of
discontinuous or new embodiments hailed in drone interfaces might also risk missing key
aspects of its gendered politics.
Thus we can think about how masculinity renders drone warfare intelligible through
contrasts between masculinities and contradictions between masculinity and femininity and
what this means for how it is (or is not) embodied anew. The following section will work
to demonstrate how gender is essential to drone warfare but in ways that do not necessarily
rely on traditional or obvious corporealities including militarized masculinity for its enactment.
It explores how masculinity works to produce a distinct visual frame for thought in drone
warfare, one that is reliant upon an effacement of the human body. It also explores a
gendered embodiment specific to the politics of surveillance and killing in drone warfare –
the military-age male.

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Drone (dis)embodiments
How does drone warfare enact a masculine framework for thought with material gendered
effects, and an (dis)embodied politics through logics of contrast and contradiction? This is
where militarized masculinity as an embodied subject position might very well reach its limits
for helping feminists think critically about the gendered politics of war in the context of
drones. Though, as we will see shortly, drone warfare’s masculine visuality might best
be understood as not only masculinized but also exceedingly militarized. It just might
not present itself as quite so neatly contained in and enacted by the fleshy bodies of soldiers,
even as it persists as a central feature of drone interfaces and as constitutive of distinctive
repositioning of human bodies in relation to technology (see Cohn 1987; Masters 2005,
2008; Manjikian 2013).
Drone warfare, I would argue, is an attempt, however futile and misleading, to circumvent
the fleshy body in service of mastery, control, and dominance in hopes of eliminating
uncertainty and unpredictability in war – cloaked in precision, humanity, authority, and
morality – through the production of a distinct mode of seeing and looking. Variously called
a “drone stare” (Wall and Monahan 2011), “scopic regime” (Gregory 2011; Shaw and Akhter
2012), “cosmic view” (Kaplan 2006), this visual modality, I would further argue, is
fundamentally masculine. While many critical scholars of drone warfare draw on feminist
research to think through its visual logics, few identify this disposition as distinctly masculine,
instead preferring to exclusively focus on its colonial and racial representations. Missing from
these accounts, then, is an explicit engagement with how gender is integral to its politics.
The following is an attempt to fill this gap by tracing the gendered politics of drone warfare.
This requires particular attention to how the body is represented in military discourses and
the shift to a distinctly masculine visuality as the antidote to the limitations of the fleshy body
and its failure to live up to the demands of contemporary high-tech warfare.

Steely masculine displacements of the fleshy body of war

The denigration of the body and its codification in the mind-body dualism in gendered
knowledge practices is something feminists have long been familiar with in its historical
associations of women with messy, leaky, and emotional embodiment – in short, women as
the weaker sex – which endure to this day (see Haraway 1991; Hawkesworth 1989).
Paradoxically, growing dependence on advanced technology in the US military (the number
of drones in operation is growing exponentially and the demand for drone pilots can hardly
be met by the US Air Force) has also had the effect of constituting men in similar ways to
women’s inferior positioning in the mind-body hierarchical dualism, as vulnerable and
problematically embodied. Whereas in the past concerted efforts by militaries to enhance the
performance of soldiers through prosthetic technological interfaces – rigorous physical train-
ing and reconditioning the body into a fighting machine, outfitting soldiers with numerous
prosthetic enhancements including an assortment of weapons, sight enhancement, for
example, night vision goggles, and targeting assistance technology, and also including a range
of performance-enhancing drugs such as Modafinil which allow soldiers to stay awake and
alert for more than 24hours – appeared to achieve the body desired, more and more soldiers
(who are still mostly men although this will slowly change with the recent inclusion of
women in combat roles in the US military) are being constituted as physically, emotionally,
and mentally limited in relation to new technological advancements. Perhaps more important
is how soldiers have also been repositioned in the interface as bodies in need of protection.

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This can be traced back to the Vietnam War and the almost 60,000 American troops sent
home in body bags (see Masters 2005). Wars from above, of which drone warfare is the latest
incarnation, are represented as better able to keep both the American public and US soldiers
safe. Piloting a drone from the Nevada Desert, far from the battlefield, could not be any
safer, with the risk of death in combat effectively circumvented. The same cannot be said,
however, for civilians on the ground, a point I will return to below.
Contemporary technological developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robotics,
and artificial intelligence by the US military, therefore, are not coincidental to attempts to
disavow the fleshy body and are directly linked to techno-strategic discourses (Cohn 1987)
that situate the human body as the principal limitation and impediment to war’s successful
prosecution, irrespective of the extent of its prosthetic enhancement (Masters 2005, 2008).
This captures what I identify as a politics of displacement through the human–machine
interface, where in attempts to push beyond the limitations of humans, the fleshy body is
subsumed, subordinated, and decentred.
Drone warfare as an interface of displacement, however, is not a straightforward matter,
easily traced, immediately apparent, or entirely new in its disposition to the body. This should
not be taken to mean that the body is effectively overcome, lost or fully abandoned in the
politics of displacement. Nor should it suggest that prosthetic interfaces where flesh meets
technology have ceased – indeed they continue as daily features of militaries and practices of
war – merely that they are represented as no longer sufficient for achieving dreams of domi-
nance and control. An important reminder is that representations of displacement tell a story,
and while discourses of drone warfare very much attempt to disavow the fleshy body, it is
anything but unmanned in practice. A single kill by drone, for example, involves anywhere
from 100 to 200 people (Benjamin 2013; Hussain 2013). From US Air Force pilots manning
multiple consoles and monitoring, targeting, and killing from the Nevada Desert, to soldiers
(usually US Marines) with ‘boots on the ground’ on forward operating bases (FOBs) in
countries of operation, to a ‘kill chain’ including the Office of the President, the Pentagon
and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
the National Security Council (NSC), and, lest we forget, those living under drones and its
so-called ‘high value’ and ‘pattern of life’ targets. The body, as this demonstrates and as will
be further detailed below, continues to be of central importance to drone warfare even if in
discontinuous and dissonant ways, and it implicates many, many people in its politics. As
Shaw and Akhter (2012: 1493) perceptively point out, “drones are always messier and fleshier
than advertised”.
Yet drone warfare as unmanned leaves a powerful impression, linguistically producing a
sense of war absent of people. War becomes something else through this absence, a kind of
war that is not war, where the body is at once incidental and also terribly fundamental to its
politics. The impression of war without bodies – a politics of wilfully disavowing the body
– aids in its unimpeded prosecution by circumventing the one thing that continually stands
in its way: the unruly fleshy body. In high-tech warfare humans are presented as the code
problem and what the politics of displacement suggests, then, is something about how the
body is approached in the “gendered war talk” (Cohn 1987) of the revolution in military
affairs (RMA) more broadly, and in drone warfare more specifically.
In this talk, the fleshy body is represented as getting in the way of war. Human bodies die,
get maimed, fatigued, experience PTSD, and generally suffer in immeasurable ways. They
also suffer moral dilemmas over the killing they are trained to dispassionately do. In the gen-
dered war talk of drone warfare, however, drones suffer no such limitations. Drones have
staying power and stamina. Predator and Reaper drones with their Hellfire missiles can

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operate for an average of 42 hours sending hundreds of hours of uninterrupted video feed,
and the still under development Vulture promises to stay in the air for up to five years
“turning in lazy circles above any area that needs constant observation” (Benjamin 2013: loc
590–592). Northrop Grumman describes the Global Hawk drone as

a provider of persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information.

Able to fly at high altitudes for greater than 30 hours [it] is designed to gather near-
real-time, high-resolution imagery of large areas of land in all types of weather – day
or night.1

Nor do drones suffer moral quandaries. Drones are represented as more reliable, intelligent,
vigilant, protective, capable, seductively offering dreams of control and dominance at a safe
distance (Monahan 2009).
Put simply, drones appear to surpass all human limitations. This masculine framework for
thinking about drones is made partly evident in its distinct disposition to the fleshy body
where it is positioned as feminized in relation to technology, as supportive but not necessarily
essential. In other words, the modification of a discourse that has long animated masculinist
relations of power between men and women – discourses where women have been constituted
as tethered to the messy body and its accompanying limitations, with the powerful effect of
producing profoundly unequal relations of power through discourses of protector and
protected – into one that now animates a central distinction between technology and human
where technology comes to inhabit the higher rung of the gender hierarchy. This is evident
in attempts to frame drones as ‘just warriors’, for example, more humane in their precision
and rational calculations (Singer 2009). Worth noting is that this particular militarized
masculine construct acquires meaning because of how it sits in relation to women as ‘Beautiful
Souls’ (see Elshtain 1987 for her insights into the Just Warrior/Beautiful Soul binary). In
other words, it is the contradiction between advanced technologies and human soldiers and
how it is represented through gendered dualisms, not any fixed content for what militarized
masculinity might mean at any given time, that produces masculine frameworks of thought
in the gendered politics of drone warfare.
Drawing attention to how fleshy soldiers are represented and displaced through
contradictory logics in relation to so-called unmanned and autonomous technology gets us to
think about the shifting subject of war where “sleek metal speeding above” (Kaplan 2006:
403) the earth appears more and more to displace human soldiers. In attempting to eschew
the fleshy body it is not that gender, or more precisely masculinity, is abandoned, but rather
that gender is reworked to map onto distinctions between technology and flesh primarily
through the mind-body dualism. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the conspicuous
privileging of sight in drone warfare. Worth remembering is that attempts to overcome the
messy and embodied politics of war through a visual masculinist politics of displacement is
of course paradoxical when its primary mission is to injure the body (see Sylvester 2013;
Cohn 1987). The following section explores the relationship between visuality and drone
warfare enabled by the displacement of the fleshy body.

Masculine visualities: gendered and (dis)embodied politics of killing from above

The relationship between masculinity and vision precedes drone warfare. Vision has long
been connected to masculinity’s negation of the body, and serving as one of its primary

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sources of claims to knowledge and power. Well before the advent of killer drones, Donna
Haraway (1991: 188) argued that vision is,

the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and
into the conquering gaze from nowhere . . . the gaze that mythically inscribes all the
marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim to power to see and not
be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked
positions of Man and White.

Given this, feminists are indeed familiar with the relationship between vision and
masculinity – the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ – where claims to see have been integral to the production
of the unitary, bounded rational, masculine, individual subject whose identity begins and
ends at the skin. With regard to the visual politics of drone warfare there is much to excavate
from Haraway’s influential claims concerning how masculinity comes to inform this distinct,
and exceptionally peculiar, way of looking at the world.
From altitudes of often more than 10,000 feet, high above the clouds, drones privilege a
way of seeing, achieved through the disavowal of the fleshy body and in association instead
with visual technologies of surveillance and identification, that appear as ‘God-like’. Like God
they cannot be seen, but are very much heard and felt, often in vengeful and deadly ways
associated with the vengeful God of the Old Testament. This gaze from above and from
nowhere also works to confer legitimacy to claims to know and thus able to precisely target
so-called dangerous subjects. In Luce Irigaray’s words (1978: 50), “more than any other sense,
the eye objectifies and it masters. It sets at a distance, maintains a distance”. But drones are
represented as also like Santa Claus. While this might seem like an odd association, discourses
of drone warfare have done much to present drones as much more humane and benign in
their ‘signature strikes’ and ‘pattern of life analysis’ than indiscriminate killing from the air.
In fact, they have been sold as far superior to traditional forms of fighting terror precisely
because drone warfare can supposedly discriminate between terrorist and civilian. Like Santa,
drones are represented as ‘knowing’ who has been good or bad, and if you have been bad
the warning ‘you’d better watch out’ takes on deadly meaning.
Considering this and operating at proximate distances with “unparalleled capacity to see
and survey”, “the drone’s eye structures more than vision; it shapes the way we think, talk
about, and evaluate a bombing” (Husain 2013: 2–3). It is not, as Nasser Hussain (ibid.) argues,
“just one among other ways of looking” where to see is to believe and to believe is to know.
Drone warfare takes vision a step further; expressing a masculine framework of thinking where
to look is to destroy by seeing the world as target (Chow 2006) through the aperture of a
camera. Sight, in this regard, is productive of turning people into objects, and in its objectify-
ing mode it works to classify, categorize, and make objects knowable with the capacity to
transform people into potential and actual targets. Again, Haraway’s (1991: 189) insights are
prescient:

Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives
way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-
trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary
practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.

Unencumbered by the messy weight of the fleshy body, the drone’s gaze attempts to
produce a framework for thinking seemingly unsullied by the “finite point of view” of those

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trapped by their bodies, “an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias” (Haraway 1991: 183).
And as such, it is in stark contrast to, and deeply disruptive of, “the familiar geometry and
perspective of our mundane, grounded vision” (Hussain 2013: 3).
Disavowals of grounded vision are analogous to the historical denigration of situated,
embodied, and contingent knowledges often positively associated by feminists with women,
and operating through a logic of contradiction where masculinity has long been associated
with the mind, rationality, objectivity, and femininity with the messy, emotional, fleshy body
(see Haraway 1991). Similar to the hierarchical relationality produced through gendered
frames of thinking, where the feminine is necessary yet excluded, drone warfare also produces
asymmetrical relations of power where those who are seen are fundamental to its practice
but excluded from “participation in its visual economy”, leaving little or “no possibility of
returning the gaze” (Hussain 2013: 4). Despite this, though, those on the ground have found
ways to return the gaze. #NotaBugSplat is an art installation of a massive portrait, in a region
of northern Pakistan heavily bombed by US drones. “[W]hen viewed by a drone camera,
what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an
innocent child victim’s face” (https://notabugsplat.com).
It is important to note, however, this is not simply a masculine visuality of old, evident,
for example, in Second World War aerial bombing where targets appear as blips on radar
screens and pilots remain far from the devastating effects of killing at a distance. Through
real-time visual feed, drone warfare produces a distinct masculine visuality that works
through blurring some boundaries of old – intimate/distance and homefront/battlefield (see
Daggett 2015) – and in so doing profoundly restructures embodied experiences of warfare
for both soldiers at consoles, as noted above, and for those on the ground. This newish
masculine gaze is much more intimate and does not necessarily effect the same kind of (dis)
embodied politics as other cyborgian corporealities. It is achieved through the mobility
afforded by the camera, enabling movement between far and near, where drones operate
simultaneously at a distance and up close and personal, though what is seen on the screen is
not the high-resolution, in colour, feed represented in recent Hollywood productions such
as Eye in the Sky (2016). Drones’ real-time video feeds are in black and white, grainy in
quality, and have no sound. This “mute world of dumb figures moving about on a screen
has particular consequences . . . the lack of synchronic sound renders it a ghostly world in
which the figures seem unalive, even before they are killed” (Hussain 2013: 4).
For those sitting (un)comfortably at the console, sound is limited to conversation with
those in the kill chain. Beyond this there is no sound, no touch, no taste, and no smell
from those being watched on the ground to (re)structure drone pilots’ experience; it is a
purely visual experience. While it is also likely a rather monotonous and mundane everyday
experience, it also shares something in common with the experience of watching pornography
where the “so-called money shot or male orgasm structures the film and retrospectively casts
the action leading up to it as anticipation, so the experience of watching the drone strike
footage is characterized by anticipation of the coming explosion, the moment of the strike”
(Hussain 2013: 5). For those on the ground, the experience emerges as viscerally reversed
with little about it that could be construed as pornographic, but also undoubtedly anticipatory,
though in anxious rather than excited ways. For those on the ground, drones also appear as
profoundly disembodied in their invisibility. They are not seen, but they can be heard, the
buzzing sound of a drone flying high above, a persistent, everyday lived experience for those
subject to living under drones and insistently making those on the ground visible.
Much has been made of the supposed intimacy of drone warfare. Sitting at screens deep
in the Nevada Desert watching hundreds of thousands of hours of video feed, drone pilots

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can literally spend months watching one individual, visually tracking their daily routines,
interactions with family and friends, and any infinite number of mundane acts that make up
someone’s everyday life. Without a doubt this might very well produce a sense of attachment
by drone pilots to those they watch. But is it quite this straightforward? Claims about this
relational intimacy assume to an extent that it is an accidental, thus hopeful, effect of the
politics of drone warfare. But what if it is not accidental, and instead a fundamental part of
its masculine visual logic? I would argue that as much as drone warfare’s visual intimacy
might work against the act of killing by Hellfire missile, it might do even more work to
smooth the path of killing because of how this sustained form of looking is bound up in
claims to know – and know for certain – that those who are targeted must be the dangerous
subjects they are claimed to be. It is this very intimacy, effected through the interface, that
provides moral certitude and in this way works to legitimize killing at an intimate distance
more so than killing indiscriminately at a distance.
Moreover, missing from analyses of the resistant possibilities offered by the intimate
interface is attention to the work visual technologies are doing in structuring the experience
of watching. It is not an unfettered experience. It is shaped by the camera, framed on a
screen, and bound up in the deadly logics of war where those who appear on the screen are
not simply people moving about their lives and being watched for the fun of it. Watching
is already framed through the claim that those watched are potentially dangerous subjects,
where being watched already constitutes those on the ground as potential targets as soon as
they appear on the screen. In other words, looking through the camera of a drone is not
neutral, random, arbitrary, and it is certainly not unintentional. Drone warfare’s masculine
visual frames of thinking, therefore, work not only to produce a steely disembodied subject
of war that is not war, but also to produce an attending and contrasting masculine embodied
subject upon which to enact its deadly politics, the military-age male (MAM).
The US government classifies any male eligible for combat as potential enemy combatants.
Additionally any MAMs killed in a drone strike, are considered combatants “unless there is
explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent” (Sex and Drone Strikes: 5)2. A
surface-level reading of this means that all men in areas the US deems a concern, such as the
federally administrated territories of northern Pakistan (FATA), are viewed as dangerous
subjects. This category not only traffics in gender but also in race to produce an embodied
target of drone warfare. A performative feminist reading of this category, however, reveals
a more troubling gendered politics: the production of whole populations as MAMs in drone
imaginaries. Performative accounts of gender have taught us gender is a profoundly ambiguous
category open to subjective (mis)interpretation. In this sense, the question of who exactly is
a MAM becomes of outmost importance. Is it obvious for instance that the person who
appears on the screen, in real-time, grainy, black and white feeds, is between the ages of 18
and 49? Is it obvious who is a man and who is a woman from this perspective? Is a young
boy playing with a toy gun a MAM? Is a woman in a burqa a MAM? As Medea Benjamin
(2013: loc 357–359) argues:

Despite all the super-duper cameras, video images can be misinterpreted. A truck
carrying boxes of pomegranates can look just like a truck carrying boxes of explosives.
A tall bearded man in a robe can look just like another tall bearded man in a robe.

The problem is that the discourse of MAM assumes one’s gender and age are obvious, as
though the category of identity is neatly engraved on one’s forehead, rather than the
ambiguous signifier that it is. (Mis)identifications become possible not because of ‘human

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error’ as such but because the category itself is open to interpretation and the logic through
which these determinations are being made – a masculinized scopic regime – work to turn
whole populations into targets, thus legitimizing and normalizing their murder. Hellfire
missiles perform the ultimate performative feat of transforming all victims of drone warfare
into MAMs, and the onus left to those on the ground to prove otherwise, to challenge the
godly pronouncements of the drone. This is why Hussain rightly argues that drone warfare
is not simply “one among other ways of looking” because everyone becomes a risky subject,
and therefore, to all intents and purposes, a MAM. Understanding how populations subject
to the operation of drones from above and how they all become MAMs is an attempt to
demonstrate that “dominant visualities are necessarily partial, relativistic, particular, subjective
and subjectivising, and despite claims otherwise, frequently embodied. In claiming to be all
seeing and all knowing, paradoxically these visual regimes are at best fragmentary” (Masters
2015: 221).

Conclusion
Human–machine interfaces sometimes appear to offer some escape from exclusionary and
hierarchical gendered embodiments. They might also make possible even deadlier gender(ed)
relations of power where it is far too easy to forget the radical potentialities of cyborgian
interfaces for “imagining a world without gender” (Haraway 1991: 150). The interface,
therefore, is not anxiety free for feminists rethinking the complex relationship between
gender and technology in the milieu of war. As feminists know too well, the fragility of
identity often results in the deadliest of politics. Global politics is exemplary in this regard
where claims to identity continue to be shored up often in profoundly violent ways. There
is little to suggest, then, that human–machine interfaces necessarily lead to better politics,
the cyborg after all is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”
(ibid.: 151). And to move too quickly to claim gender is obsolete in militarized human–
machine interfaces is perhaps to ignore how discourses of masculinity continuously and
detrimentally attempt to escape the body. This does not mean the body is ever successfully
evacuated from high-tech warfare, and as demonstrated above, it is far from absent and
therefore continues to offer the possibility of rupture and challenge to the gendered politics
of drone warfare.

Notes
1  See www.northropgrumman.com/capabilities/globalhawk
2  See www.wilpf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sex-and-drone-strikes.pdf

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 19
WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Paul Kirby

Introducing wartime sexual violence

There is no more obvious intersection of gender and insecurity than war rape. It is for many
the most extreme emblem of male dominance, a wretched scene of women’s collective
subordination and disposability, best summed up in Susan Brownmiller’s now infamous
declaration that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which
all men keep all women in a state of fear” (1975: 15). Writing in the mid-1970s, Brownmiller’s
concern was the persistence of rape across recorded human history, against which wartime rape
stands out only as the most vivid case study. It is as if war provides an environment in which
misogynistic violence, otherwise at least partly restrained by social convention, is unleashed
under the justification of an existential struggle between nations. In a more limited version of
this thesis, war rape is not an exceptional act of barbarity, but can only be understood by
reference to the gender relations existing before war (and, in turn, shaping the post-war order)
(Cockburn 2004; Moser 2001; Reardon 1996).
If war is, in the classic Clausewitzian formula, the continuation of politics by other means,
then war rape might be thought of as the continuation of patriarchy by other means. The
idea that rape is part of a conscious process which guarantees certain configurations of power
is a recurrent theme in academic, activist, and policy literature. Without it, war rape would
not have come to be seen as political violence at all. And yet from this politicization spring
a succession of overlapping theories, and diverse responses to sexual violence as an international
political problem.
In this short contribution, I do not provide a comprehensive taxonomy of violence, and
therefore use ‘war rape’, ‘wartime sexual violence’, and ‘conflict-related sexual violence’
relatively interchangeably, although it should be noted that the first term refers to a more
restricted range of acts where, in the definition adopted by the International Criminal Court
(ICC),

the perpetrator invaded the body of a person by conduct resulting in penetration,

however slight, of any part of the body of the victim or of the perpetrator with a sexual
organ, or of the anal or genital opening of the victim with any object or any other part
of the body.1

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‘Mass rape’ tends to refer to a scale of rape distinctive of certain conflicts. While some
scholars prefer to write of sexualized violence, I use ‘sexual violence’ to refer to the range
of acts in addition to penetration, but which nevertheless are directed at sexual identity or
sexualized body parts (for example, forced impregnation, sexual humiliation, or sexual
torture). ‘Gender violence’ refers to a still wider category of acts, in which gender identity
plays a part in the motive for, or character of, violence. For example, the murder of men
suspected of being homosexual would count as an act of gender violence, but not necessarily
of sexual violence.
This chapter, following a brief survey of the literature, maps contributions and disagreements
relating to the patterns of wartime sexual violence; the causes of wartime sexual violence;
the persons implicated as perpetrators and victims of conflict-related sexual violence; and the
contested borders of sexual violence within and without conflict.

Threads
The sense of mass rape as a crime against humanity is widely shared today. It is perhaps
curious, then, that concentrated research on sexual violence in conflict is relatively recent.
The earliest academic work on wartime sexual violence came from outside conflict and peace
research, drawing on emerging programmes in women’s studies and their offshoots in
literature, journalism, philosophy, and sociology. As is often noted, the focus on wartime rape
in its specificity was spurred by the Bosnian war and its atrocities (Stiglmayer 1994; Allen
1996; Buss 2007). Reports of mass rape, conceived as part of an ethno-nationalist strategy
by Serbian forces to ethnically cleanse the former Yugoslavia of its Muslim population,
helped galvanize an argument that rape was integral to the strategy of war. It was demonstrated
that detention camps – the spatial locus for sexual violence during the war – had been
established on the same pattern across occupied territories, and that the rapes carried out
against women and their families followed a similar script (Sharlach 2000: 96–98). The
evidence of mass rape in Bosnia, and the genocidal rape in Rwanda that followed in 1994,
occasioned a new and broad sensitivity to sexual exploitation and violence, including in
hitherto neglected historical cases, most infamously the ‘rape of Nanking’ (Chang 1997).
This first thread of scholarly inquiry into wartime sexual violence revealed its existence in
a dual sense, both by documenting and politicizing it. Academics and investigative journalists
provided the necessary evidence of sexual violence and also insisted that atrocities were not
‘natural’ byproducts of war, but should instead be understood in more explicitly feminist
terms. Rape was, in the words of one early feminist account, “not an aggressive manifestation
of sexuality, but rather a sexual manifestation of aggression” (Seifert 1994: 55). The emerging
scholarship on war rape followed the more general feminist project of exposing sexual violence
as an act of power, both resulting from and contributing to inequality between the sexes
(Bourke 2007). In short, the cultural background to sexual violence was patriarchy (Seifert
1996). And if sexual violence was political in its purpose, it could be prosecuted as a crime,
and considered an aspect of international peace and security. Feminist research consequently
contributed to a change in international political practice over the next decade, the benchmarks
of which were prosecutions of rape as a war crime at the ad hoc tribunals on the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the emergence of an international legal definition of rape, and the
inclusion of sexual violence as a protection issue in the global Women, Peace and Security
agenda (Chinkin 1994; Mibenge 2013; Aroussi 2011; Kirby and Shepherd 2016).
A second, overlapping thread took the political character of wartime sexual violence as
its starting point, and began to elaborate on and fine-tune earlier explanations. Bosnia and
Rwanda remained key reference points, but the field expanded toward a recovery of the
historical record and documentation of new or continuing conflicts, most notably those in
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Sierra Leone, Darfur, and especially in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
At the same time, political scientists began to examine sexual violence more explicitly
(Sharlach 2000; Wood 2006). Others sought more precise conceptual terms to describe how
rape in war functioned, drawing on unfolding conversations in feminist and political theory
(Diken and Laustsen 2005). At the same time, the field came to recognize a broader spectrum
of persons affected by wartime sexual violence, from male survivors and children born of
rape to those exploited and abused by the peacekeepers deployed as their ostensible protectors
(Sivakumaran 2007; Carpenter 2000; M. Henry 2013).
The first generation of scholarship had lamented indifference to sexual violence and suc-
cessfully agitated to place it on policy agendas; the second came to be more critical of how
this new attention from the international community operated. Whereas it had been common
to see sexual violence as oppressive of women in general, recognizing it as organized violence
also meant noticing the ways in which multiple constituencies experienced, perpetrated, or
manipulated it. For example, evidence of mass rape could be used to reinforce ideas
of distinct ethnic groups. Far from advancing feminist solidarity across borders, this kind of
discursive manoeuvre could subsume women’s experiences within a collective, and quite
traditional, security identity (Hansen 2001). Just as atrocities committed by German soldiers
in Belgium in 1914 had become the material for war propaganda, so scholars in feminist and
peace studies worried that survivor testimony might support militarized responses. Rather
than just seeking greater awareness, research now more closely examined the terms of what
Doris Buss (2007) called “curious visibility”: how the perspectives of lawyers, policy-makers,
and publics were themselves partial.
A third, more recent, thread has taken up this concern by rethinking the basic connections
between sexual violence and conflict. For some, this has meant questioning why the inter-
national community has seized more strongly on conflict-related sexual violence than other
aspects of the Women, Peace and Security agenda (Hudson 2012). For others, global attention
risks prioritizing rape over other human rights abuses in a ‘hierarchy of harm’ (N. Henry
2013). For others still, the incompleteness of prior explanations demands a renewed sense
of the gender in gender violence (Davies and True 2015). The continuing expansion of the
interdisciplinary research agenda on sexual violence in, beyond, and on the border of organ-
ized violence has led to a flourishing of studies on individual conflicts, each with its own
distinctive coordinates of identity and repertoires of violence.

Patterns
Because early scholarship sought to show that sexual violence was a real phenomenon of
war, it understandably tended to emphasize the most horrific cases. While the politicization
of rape repudiated excuses for rape as a natural inevitability, it at the same time encouraged
a view of rape as consistently central to the practice of war. Yet not all conflicts are marked
by mass rape. It appears from general reports and the testimonies of kidnapped women that
Viet Cong forces engaged in little, if any, organized sexual violence during the Vietnam
War, despite their extensive use of other terroristic methods (Brownmiller 1975: 90–92). In
the cases of the Sri Lankan and El Salvadoran civil wars, scholars have noted that neither the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) nor the Frente Farabundo Martí para Liberación
Nacional (FMLN) had significant claims of sexual violence levelled against them, despite
their willingness to engage in other kinds of attacks against civilian targets (Wood 2006:
313–317).
The degree of variation is non-trivial. In Dara Cohen’s analysis of 91 civil wars between
1980 and 2012, 21 conflicts were coded as exhibiting rape on a massive scale at some point

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(which Cohen classifies as at least one year where at least one party to the conflict engaged
in rape described as ‘massive’, ‘systematic’, ‘a weapon of terror’ or similar in US State
Department human rights summaries) (Cohen 2016: 72–73). But almost as many conflicts
– 17 – had no rapes reported for them, 15 had isolated reports, and the remaining
38 numerous reports.2 What is known as the ‘repertoire of violence’ – the variety of acts
that might be favoured or forbidden by an armed group – therefore varies for reasons that
are still not well understood, but for which there are a number of plausible explanations (as
discussed in the next section).
Both the overall level and the trend of conflict-related sexual violence have been subject
to some controversy in recent years. Sexual violence is often framed as a ‘hidden’ crime,
meaning that the stigma and shame associated with it deters survivors from reporting it to
authorities. The result is a paucity of data for historical conflicts, but also potentially a source
of misleading information on more recent ones. As international agencies came to recognize
sexual violence as a feature of conflict, and as entities such as UN peacekeeping missions are
tasked with combating it, so too are greater efforts made to measure it. As a consequence,
it is hard to distinguish between an increase in recorded rapes that reflects an underlying
trend and an increase that reflects better mechanisms for reporting. The increase in the
visibility of sexual violence might also lead some activist groups and non-governmental
organizations to overstate the level of sexual violence relative to other human rights abuses,
which at the very least makes it difficult to correct misleading statistics (Cohen and Hoover
Green 2012).
The high-profile mass rapes of the 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda are instructive for under-
standing the difficulties of confirming empirical patterns. Bosnian government and European
Community estimates from 1992 put the number of women who had been raped at 14,000
and 20,000, respectively, and 20,000 is still given as the total in some comparative studies
(see the endnote in Skjelsbæk 2006: 398 and also Green 2004: 111). But even before the
war was concluded, reports for UN agencies were quoting a different upper estimate of
60,000 victims (Bunch and Reilly 1994: 36). Whether the total fell closer to 20,000 or
50,000 (the more commonly given high estimate) carried clear political connotations, as did
the identity of the survivors, because the argument for rape as genocide was stronger if they
were almost all identified as Muslim (see the discussion in Engle 2005). In the case of the
Rwandan genocide, the staggering scale of rape – commonly given as between 250,000 and
500,000 cases – might if anything be an under-estimate. The original calculation, necessarily
crude, was based on the number of pregnancies recorded as resulting from rape, but did not
consider unreported pregnancies, rapes of women otherwise unable to become pregnant,
or rapes of men (Palermo and Peterman 2011). In short, the accurate estimation of levels of
wartime rape is challenging in the extreme, and always subject to incorporation into larger
ideological agendas that might seek to both exaggerate and minimize abuses.

Causes
For a number of feminist scholars, predominantly those working in the first thread of research
outlined above, the most important fact about wartime sexual violence is that it is highly
organized, which is to say that it is pursued as part of an overall policy. This view has come
to be known as the ‘weapon of war’ thesis. Claudia Card, for one, described rape “as a form
of terrorism” and argued that “martial rape has become a political institution” (1996: 6, 9).
Claims of a similar type are made by activists and policy-makers on a regular basis (see
Crawford 2013; Kirby 2013). The weapon of war thesis is frequently invoked to explain

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violence in the DRC, where sexual violence is seen as following from armed group struggles
over minerals (e.g., Gosling and Prendergast 2011). On this account, rape is chosen because
it is efficient. The weapon of war thesis is often combined with, but is sometimes also in
conflict with, explanations of rape in terms of social norms and patriarchal culture. Where
conjoined, it is argued that the effectiveness of rape is directly predicated on social attitudes
toward gender. When women are symbolically associated with the nation, where they lack
rights or resources, and when cultural codes treat them as the property of men, there will
be power in violating women as a bloody ‘signal’ to the enemy. It is as if women’s bodies
constitute “a ceremonial battlefield” (Brownmiller 1975: 38). Yet the emphasis on social
norms may also complicate the weapon of war thesis where the explanation relies more on
the beliefs and ideology of the perpetrators than on their rational pursuit of a material self-
interest. If individuals and communities are targeted not for their resources but because of their
identities, then the acts might, in the end, be explicable without an overall rape strategy.
Evidence is available both for and against the weapon of war thesis. One prominent survey
of government armed forces in the DRC – involving 193 interviews – suggested that direct
orders to rape were rare to the point of non-existence (Baaz and Stern 2009). But another,
based on interviews with 96 ex-combatants, claimed that orders to rape were in fact quite
common (Schneider, Banholzer and Albarracin 2015).3 More broadly, rape has been blamed
on the breakdown of chains of command – allowing soldiers to carry out opportunistic
attacks as they desire – but also attributed to strong military hierarchy – in which rape might
occur against the individual preferences of soldiers (on the former see Butler, Gluch and
Mitchell 2007). Rape has been described as an extension and enforcement of cultural norms,
but also as violently undermining them (Clark 2014: 464–465). If understood as an act of
humiliation, rape against women is a way of shaming men, and will therefore be most
effective in societies dominated by patriarchal norms (see MacKenzie 2010). Yet political
scientists have also argued that peacetime levels of patriarchy are a bad predictor for wartime
levels of rape (Cohen 2016: 89–97). Indeed, the designation of ‘patriarchy’ might be so
general as to strip the concept of much use in developing concrete explanations.4
A general environment of aggressive masculinity cannot explain why some groups (and
some individuals within groups) carry out certain kinds of violence but not others. As a result,
political scientists have turned their attention to variations in the micro-political environ-
ment, differentiating between actors in any given conflict. Armed groups are institutions with
internal training regimes and political ideologies, facing external constraints and opportunities
depending on their enemies, the fluctuating fortunes of the conflict, and the pressure of out-
side actors (e.g., a great power intervention in a civil war). Rational choice theories have
tended to see armed group behaviours as calculated responses to multiple incentives, and
therefore support the idea that sexual violence is ‘chosen’ as a tactic. More convincingly,
whether and how sexual violence is deployed depends on the everyday practices that bind
armed groups together. At this level of analysis, it becomes possible to understand why some
groups might not engage in sexual violence, despite apparent ‘incentives’ to do so. Some
armed groups convey a political education of restraint to their members that plausibly reduces
violence against civilians (Hoover Green 2016). In sum, while attempts to explain conflict-
related sexual violence have become more detailed and more precise, there is still disagreement
over causes and the proper degree of abstraction from individual cases. The expansion in
interest has produced a larger field of inquiry, an array of insights and critiques, and with it
a sense of messiness that defies easy answers.5

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Persons
At the same time as elaborating on why sexual violence occurs in conflict, recent scholar-
ship has also investigated who takes on the roles of victim and perpetrator, bystander and
protector. It is common to suppose that rebel armed groups are the main perpetrators of
conflict-related sexual violence, as well as other abuses against civilians. But, again, there is
considerable variation to consider. Cross-national data show that state security forces are more
often responsible (Cohen 2016: 74–75). Moreover, not all protagonists in a conflict are self-
evidently members of armed groups. Attackers might conceal their affiliation. Alternatively,
networks of violent actors can be fluid: at some moments closer to civilian status, at others
active combatants. While the weapon of war thesis predicts organized violence by combatants,
there is also evidence that intimate partner violence – violence carried out by husbands,
boyfriends, and lovers – increases in wartime, and that the damage done to social norms can
also enable violence by civilians and authority figures (such as teachers, government officials,
and religious leaders) (see Stark and Ager 2011). Critics charge that framing gender violence
as ‘conflict-related’ rather than ‘community based’ has the effect of ignoring certain
perpetrators, moving attention away from long-running dynamics of poverty and misogyny
which result in violence in the absence of any singular strategy (True 2012: 121–128).
Whether as combatants or civilians, perpetrators of sexual violence are assumed to be
male. But this is not always the case. Although few studies pursue the point, there is evidence
that women perpetrate sexual violence at higher levels during conflict than in peacetime.
A prominent survey of human rights violations in the eastern DRC found that women had
often participated in acts of sexual violence against other women, and against men in a
smaller, but still significant, fraction of cases (Johnson et al. 2010). In the case of Sierra Leone,
women were significant participants in armed groups, and were frequently implicated in
sexual violence. While sexual violence was almost always ‘male-led’, mixed sex groups were
often responsible for group rape, in which women restrained female noncombatant victims,
used objects to carry out penetrative rapes themselves, and boasted about involvement in
rape on similar terms to their male compatriots (Cohen 2013: 399–400, 403–405).
Early contributions to the study of sexual violence saw women in general as the target
for wartime rape, and subsequent studies have highlighted how ethnic, national, or religious
identity might single out groups of women for particular violence.6 But women are not
always the sole targets for rape: in some circumstances they might not be the majority
victims, or at least not in any undifferentiated sense. Nor need sexual violence stem from a
superficially ‘heterosexual’ frame in which men collectively view women as legitimate
targets. Men and boys are increasingly understood to experience conflict-related sexual
violence in specific ways, and with consequences distinct from those faced by women.
In instances from the Crusades to Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland and the DRC, men have
endured rape, genital beatings, enforced masturbation, coerced nudity, and related forms of
violence (Sivakumaran 2007). In Liberia, a household survey carried out in 2008 found that
a third of male ex-combatants had experienced sexual violence over the preceding two
decades. This compared to 7 per cent among male non-combatants (Johnson et al. 2008).
And in the DRC, a parallel study reported that 24 per cent of men interviewed had
experienced sexual violence, a significant majority (80%) during a period of conflict (Johnson
et al. 2010). About half of all the male ex-combatants surveyed reported sexual violence,
compared to three-quarters of female ex-combatants and a third of all women. In other
words, male ex-combatants were more likely to have experienced sexual violence than
civilian women, but less likely to have experienced it than female ex-combatants.

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Findings such as these suggest that men might face high risks of sexual violence in distinct
settings: as part of forcible recruitment, during political detention and torture, and in the
process of displacement as refugees (see the data and discussion in Human Rights Watch
2013 and Oosterhoff, Zwanikken and Ketting 2004). High levels of sexual violence in these
situations need not imply that men are harmed to the same extent as women. Instead, careful
attention is needed to the ways in which sexual violence against men has been recorded
under different terminology, stymying proper comparison (e.g., when simply labelled
‘torture’), and to circumstances where men might be singled out for violence, such as where
they are ascribed homosexual or ‘deviant’ identities (Sivakumaran 2005). The discourse of
sexuality is meaningful for both perpetrators and survivors: for the former because it confirms
the un-masculine nature of whoever is being raped and for the latter because it may prevent
reporting out of shame at accusations of homosexuality. The diverse contextual relations of
perpetrator and victim pose a challenge to simplistic policy and activist narratives.

Borders
The study of wartime sexual violence is, then, made complex by the difficulty of knowing
what and how much sexual violence there is in conflict, by a range of possible explanations
for the diverse forms of sexual violence that do occur, and by a number of different roles
that gendered individuals take in relation to that violence. This last complexity is also evident
in the very designation of sexual violence as ‘wartime’ or ‘conflict-related’. Critics associated
with the third thread of research outlined above have paid particular attention to this point
in recent years, and have sought to trouble the assumed boundaries that demarcate ‘wartime’
as uniquely horrific. In doing so, they have also highlighted how the topic of wartime sexual
violence is implicated in a whole series of global processes – of politics, culture, colonialism,
humanitarianism, and entertainment – that blur what might initially appear to be the self-
evidently honourable reasons for studying it.
The difficulty of distinguishing between the locations of sexual violence can be seen even
in close proximity to the conflict space itself. When formally declared, wars have recordable
start and end dates, but the damage done and the dynamics they unleash are not constrained
by those timeframes. For one, the after-effects of war frustrate easy diagnosis: is an act of
sexual violence carried out by an ex-combatant ‘conflict-related’ or not? A propensity to
violence among soldiers might flow less from the situation of war itself than from a broader
military culture that denigrates feminine characteristics and enables harassment, and which
shares characteristics with peacetime institutions (Bayard de Volo and Hall 2015; Morris
1996; Sanday 2007). A transitional justice mechanism might be expected to resolve the truth
of a war, and provide some resolution for survivors, but will itself be caught up in political
agendas and ideological antagonisms. Most famously, the war crime of rape was formally
prosecuted at the Tokyo Tribunal following the Second World War, but not at the
Nuremburg Tribunal. Far from closure, the aftermath of war therefore re-inscribed a
supposed civilizational difference between the acts of Europeans and non-Europeans (see
Henry 2011). For Doris Buss (2007), one reason that activists were so successful in
foregrounding gender crimes in both the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and
for Rwanda was because they were tied to ideas of ethnic war. Because the tribunals focused
principally on this ‘ethnic’ dimension they also turned rape into a mark of distinctly Serbian
evil, while in the Rwandan case, rape similarly became a question of Tutsi (female) victims
and Hutu (male) perpetrators, rendering invisible other gendered atrocities (Mibenge 2013).

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Conclusion
What, then, does the conflict space include? Certainly elements of violence and inequality
characteristic of war can live on in the ‘post-conflict’ moment. Yet spaces far from the war
zone are also linked to conflict: violence found there might consequently be thought of as
‘conflict-related’. Refugee camps and immigration detention centres are extensions of a con-
flict in this sense, as are the homes of military personnel in peacetime settings. ‘Domestic’
violence might, consequently, be as political as war rape (Gray 2016). Police interventions in
response to domestic violence express ideals of protection, and conceptions of security, not so
different from those engaged in wartime (Cuomo 2013). Wars capture attention, but ‘peace-
time’ gender relations around the world are characterized by high levels of violence against
women (e.g., Boesten 2014). Fixation on a foreign conflict might then direct civil society
groups in the global North away from the polities in which they can have greatest effect
toward a ‘saviour’ role in conflicts they understand poorly. When distant atrocities dominate
discussion, the domestic politics of violence and human rights escape scrutiny (Fassin 2007).
Nor does the visibility of wartime sexual violence guarantee that it is alleviated by inter-
national action. The conceptualization of, and response to, human rights abuses proceeds
according to the current logic of security politics. In practice this has meant that feminist civil
society groups have petitioned the United Nations – and especially its supreme body the
Security Council – to respond, partly through peacekeeping missions and other manifestations
of armed force. For a number of critics, the risk is that sexual violence will be securitized –
interpreted as requiring a decisive response from security actors in ways that sideline peaceful
methods of conflict resolution, exclude the voices of civilians and activists, and potentially
contribute to the continuation of a cycle of violence (Hirschauer 2014; Pratt 2013).
It is possible then to imagine the debate around wartime sexual violence as a series of
extensions: from cases of extreme mass rape to conflicts with varied perpetration, potentially
including armed groups that do not engage in war rape at all; from a focus on exceptional
military actors to militarization as a whole and to the incidence of intimate partner and civilian
sexual violence; from the war zone to wider structures of gender inequality; from the formal
span of war to pre- and post-conflict spaces where violence might persist and mutate; and from
a restricted selection of behaviours around rape to a spectrum of gender violence and domi-
nation. In each case, the growth of dedicated feminist and gender scholarship over the last
decades has expanded the understanding of war rape, spurring new public and government
responses, and in turn transforming the international politics of sexual violence.

Notes
1 The ICC definition further clarifies that such an act must take place by coercion or the threat of
coercion and during a period of international armed conflict.
2 The data source is yearly US State Department reports, which Cohen shows to be compatible with
human rights reporting at the time, and which she uses to code for the successive levels.
3 The difference in conclusion is in part attributable to the armed group in question. Eriksson Baaz
and Stern interviewed members of the FARDC (the Armed Forces of the DRC), while Schneider
et al.’s sample was mainly drawn from the Mai-Mai militia. The 14 FARDC respondents in the
latter sample also reported that they did not hear any direct orders to rape (Schneider et al. 2015:
1353).
4 A similar point is made by Clark (2014: 466–467).
5 A case put best by Baaz and Stern (2013).
6 The process is not simple, and comes wrapped in layers of collective experience and memory.
Compare, for example, Zarkov (2007) and Mookherjee (2015).

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 20
THE ROLE OF GENDER IN
MOBILIZING AND COUNTERING
FUNDAMENTALIST VIOLENT
EXTREMIST ORGANIZATIONS
Keith Proctor and Dyan Mazurana

“The men from Salt go to Syria to fight because they’re real men”, the woman said as we
sat together in Salt, an ancient hilltop city in the fertile valleys of west-central Jordan. The
woman, a mother wrapped in black, sat on the floor in her house, pouring sweetened tea
into small glass cups. The noise of the street filtered through the window. “The men from
Salt are real men”, she said again. “They hear about the rape of women in Syria and they
have to go”. By comparison, she said, the men of Amman “only care about their hair”. She
mimicked a foppish urbanite stroking his locks. She laughed. Her three sons had all left,
pledging themselves to the black flag of the Islamic State in Syria. Two were now dead. “I’m
glad they went”, she said. “Jihad was their duty as Muslim men, to protect their sisters”.
“And where did they learn about this duty, and about jihad?” I asked her. “From me, of
course”, she said, passing the tea. “They learned it at home”.1

Introduction/context
Gender identity and gendered political narratives are fundamental to understanding conflict,
and yet gender remains under-explored in much of the literature on violent extremist organ-
izations. This has resulted in significant gaps in theory, knowledge, policy, and programming
(Saltman and Smith 2015; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). In this chapter we apply a gender lens
to better understand how violent extremist organizations attract and maintain their male and
female members. We explore the centrality of gender within the family, which is a site of
both recruitment and resistance to violent extremism. We reflect on how policy-makers and
implementers grapple with gender as they attempt to shrink sources of support for violent
extremist movements, insurgencies, and non-state armed actors. We conclude that violent
extremism and fundamentalist violent extremist organizations should be understood as rooted
in deeply gendered identity, gendered obligation, gendered emotion, gendered opportunity,
and gendered political narratives.
Within policy-making and academic circles, the term ‘violent extremism’ is saddled with
ambiguity. The United States government, the European Union, and the United Nations
all lack an official definition. The result is a conceptual vagueness that undermines analysis,

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policy, cooperation, and programming. Moreover, confusion about what constitutes violent
extremism can be harmful, particularly where it provides a licence to governments around
the world to brand their foes – including civil society actors, religious leaders, and human
rights activists – as extremist enemies of the state (United Nations 2009; Cortright et al.
2012). While widely accepted definitions do not exist, violent extremism is generally des-
cribed as (a) the use, support, and/or advocacy of violence, (b) typically by non-state actors,
(c) in support of political, ideological, or religious goals that (d) contradict values of
democracy, human rights, and rule of law (USAID 2011; United Nations 2016). This is far
from precise; indeed, these characteristics encompass many, if not most, of the world’s non-
state armed actors. The aim of this article is not to litigate existing definitions. Rather, we
are primarily concerned with fundamentalist violent extremist organizations for whom the
policing of the female identity and body is a central characteristic of an ideology justified,
however shallowly, by Islamic tradition. The so-called Islamic State (ISIS) is emblematic, as
are the Taliban, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and the regional franchises of Al-Qaeda.

Theorizing gender and violent extremist organizations

Whereas ‘sex’ refers to inherent biological and physical characteristics, ‘gender’ refers to the
socially constructed roles, behaviours, and expectations that a society imposes on men and
women. Like ethnicity, religion, and class, gender is a fundamental category of analysis,
informing identity, duty, desire, power, and obligation. Conceptually interdependent,
masculinity and femininity are given meaning by a border that is shared and often vigilantly
policed. Masculinity and femininity inform not only how individuals are viewed, but how
they view themselves. Given its role in categorizing and hierarchically structuring social
relationships, gender organizes authority and responsibility, and informs personal rights,
access to resources, and life options. Gendered systems of power are in turn upheld, extended,
and enforced by a range of social institutions: political, social, economic, legal, and cultural
(Cohn 2012; Mazurana and Proctor 2014).
As a social structure flush with symbolic meaning, gender infuses conflict, informing the
justifications, narratives, and application of violence (Enloe 2000; Goldstein 2001; USIP
2015). This is certainly true of violent extremist organizations, for whom gender identities
and political narratives are central. The role gender plays in the manifestation and perpetuation
of violent extremism is illuminated through our gendered consideration of the New Wars
theory, as elaborated by Mary Kaldor (2013).
The New Wars theory is concerned with conflicts in fragile and failed states, where goals,
methods, means of finance and war economies, and use of identity politics and political
narratives contrast sharply with Westphalian conflicts. Kaldor’s insights track closely with
the characteristics of today’s fundamentalist violent extremist movements, some of whom
epitomize the New War antagonist. Critically, identity politics created through conflict is
the linchpin: “political mobilization around identity is the aim of war rather than an instru-
ment of war, as was the case in ‘old wars’” (Kaldor 2013: 3). Whereas Old Wars were fought
for geopolitical interests or ideologies (e.g., democracy or socialism), New Wars are fought
to gain access to state resources for particular identity groups, while explicitly seeking to
exclude other identity groups from those same resources. At the same time, war itself is both
the means and the goal.
New Wars are fought by disparate and loose networks of groups including armed forces
and groups, paramilitaries, mercenaries, extremists, criminals, politicians, their financiers and
commercial backers. Given the varying reasons for each group’s participation – economic
interest, criminal interest, adventure, social mobility, revenge and retribution, fascination

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with violence, desire for the status of ‘real man’, peer pressure – and thus the inherent
instability of these networks, New Wars and violent extremist organizations within them
must mobilize identity politics and political narratives in an effort to hold themselves together.
War is an integral part of the construction of these political narratives and identities, where
fear, hatred, and reward are drawn upon to create ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ and fuse together the
different groups and their motivations (Kaldor 2007).
We contend that the creation and maintenance of these New War identities are deeply
and inherently shaped by gender. Defining the roles of men and women is central to processes
of militarization, recruitment, and the propagation of violence. This is particularly evident
among fundamentalist violent extremist organizations where the division of public and pri-
vate spheres, the cloistering of women, and a militant defence of home and tradition are
rooted in obligations and hierarchies that are deeply gendered. Importantly, the subjugation
of women by such movements is not incidental, but at the heart of their ideology, appeal,
identity creation, and political narratives.
Of course, gendered hierarchies are not unique to violent extremist movements. In spite of
variations across cultures and contexts, gender norms in most societies situate women and girls
unequally compared to men. Restrictions on female rights – political, economic, social, sexual,
and reproductive – abound across societies, in ways both implicit and explicit. In few cases,
however, is gender-based hierarchy as explicitly part of the political programme as it is in the
case of fundamentalist violent extremist groups, where the subjugation of women is a core
element – rather than a byproduct – of extremist ideology (Soussan and Weingarten 2014).

Seeking the status of a ‘real man’

Extremist organizations manipulate masculinity and femininity to facilitate recruitment and
gain traction in communities (Mazurana and Proctor 2013). This is perhaps most obvious in
terms of masculinity. Socially constructed expectations around masculinity can push male
youth into the arms of recruiters, particularly where young men feel a need to prove
themselves, and where insurgencies or extremist organizations – in the absence of other
culturally appropriate avenues – offer them the opportunity to do so (Kimmel 2005; Mazurana
and Proctor 2013). In marginalized communities, a hypermasculine ideal might take hold as
a palliative to the sense of emasculation that stems from poverty, humiliation, and
disempowerment (Baird 2012; Martin 2015; Van Leuven, Mazurana and Gordon 2016).2
As Van Leuven, Mazurana and Gordon (2016) argue, those who join fundamentalist
violent extremist organizations are often seeking to fulfil gendered expectations, to become
the idealized men and women these organizations claim they have the capacity to become.
In Jordan, for example, young men who pledged themselves to ISIS or Al-Qaeda, were
celebrated – as the mother quoted above celebrated her dead sons – as the community’s ‘real
men’. In interviews, this phrase was echoed by the peers, siblings, and elders of those who
ventured to Syria and never came back (Proctor 2015b).
By conflating manliness with violent action, purportedly for the protection of other
(weaker) people or in defence of ideologies, fundamentalist violent extremist organizations
are able to leverage social and cultural expectations of masculinity, silencing or humiliat-
ing those who refuse to participate (USIP 2015). Among those who waver, shame can be a
powerful lash. Not surprisingly, in Jordan the recruits to fundamentalist violent extremist
organizations are often following the example of an esteemed male of the community – a
cousin or brother who went before, and whom the aspirant seeks to emulate. The language
of ‘radicalization’ might muddy a central reality; the first step, for many, to becoming a
violent extremist might be less an ideological act than a social one.

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What appears central in many recruitment narratives is that masculinity is defined by the
individual’s responsibility to community, which might be both literal and imagined, local
and geopolitical. The community, the home, the domestic and private: these are the spaces
of the feminine, which might be threatened by other males or groups. Thus the drive to
protect the community’s women and children infuses masculine justifications for violence.
In Jordan, recruits often cited a protection narrative as part of their justifying motive: after
seeing reports of Syrian women and children killed by Syrian government forces, they said
they were compelled to defend their Sunni sisters against the Assad regime and its Shiite
Iranian backers. The regional, sectarian anxieties were translated through, justified by, and
amplified using intimate, personal desires to be perceived socially as an empowered, dutiful
male (Proctor 2015b).

‘Women worth protecting’ and those that push the boundaries

The centrality of the male as protector illuminates the critical, symbolic role in which women
and girls are cast. Their bodies and behaviours are held to represent the feminine ‘protected’:
families, ethnicities, cultures, and the ethnic or national group (Saghal and Yuval-Davis 1992;
Peterson 2007; Mazurana and Proctor 2013). When women’s and girls’ sexual purity defines
the honour and integrity of the group or movement, the violation of their bodies – either
literally or figuratively – stains the honour of the entire group. This animates the masculine
identity as ‘protector’, the flip-side of the subjugation of the feminine, but also perversely
fuels war-time sexual violence. Because the purity of women and girls is associated with the
integrity of a nation and ethnicity, they might be systematically targeted by the conqueror.
Rape, as a weapon of war, is no accidental byproduct. Rather, it is a likely outcome of mili-
tarized masculinity, an inversion (but only partially) of the masculine duty to protect, itself
rooted in gendered hierarchy. The Islamic State’s horrific sexual enslavement of Yazidi
women and girls is emblematic but hardly unique.
Of course, women and girls are not simply or overtly victims. Female recruits might seek
an opportunity to escape environments of domestic drudgery or gender-based abuse, or to
redress past humiliations. Like their male counterparts, they might also seek power, adventure,
the admiration of their peers, and a chance to commit to a larger-than-self movement. It is
not unusual for women to work in the service of violent extremist movements, not merely
as facilitators, but as active participants: recruiters, logistical supporters, and sometimes as
fighters and suicide bombers (Mazurana 2012; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; USAID 2015). Yet,
even where women are participants and actors, they operate within, and through their
behaviour reinforce, the accepted gender hierarchies of the violent extremist movements.

The role of the family

The domestic sphere features prominently in the violent extremist enterprise. Family, as a
conduit of culture and belief, can play a central role in shaping attitudes toward violence and
non-violence. In an analysis of violent extremism in the West Bank, Cragin et al. (2015)
found family to be more important than other kinds of social networks in shaping individual
perspectives on non-violence. Parental influence appears to be particularly important. Among
respondents, those who claimed their parents had a minimal impact on their decision-making
were also statistically more likely to engage in violence (Cragin et al. 2015: 13).
Sometimes, however, family members play an actively malignant role: siblings follow one
another into armed insurgencies; a child might be tutored in extremist ideology on her

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mother’s lap; fathers might speak proudly of martyred sons. Militant family ties can play a
key role in violent extremist recruitment (Sageman 2004; Bakker 2006 as cited in Davis and
Cragin 2009). Recruitment to groups such as Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyyah or the Abu
Sayyaf Group of the Philippines appeared, in many cases, to be conducted through family,
clan, and tribal relationships (Davis and Cragin 2009).
But violent movements do not merely recruit through family and tribe; rather, they seek
to replicate kinship structures. Manufacturing, manipulating, and rendering personal a collective
identity – as if it were an extended family – is vital to creating and sustaining a transnational
movement (McCauley and Moskalenko 2010). Violent extremist movements seek to create
alternative and idealized family structures. They seek to replace individual recruits’ families
and create new families for them, filling social and emotional vacuums. Charismatic leaders
offer paternal substitutes. The extremist movement promises jihadi brides and grooms fulfilment
of ‘true’ manhood and womanhood (Bloom 2012; Van Leuven et al. 2016).
The example of the Islamic State (ISIS) is illustrative; the manipulation of gender, family,
and the domestic space is central to the so-called Caliphate’s recruiting narratives. ISIS
appeals to male recruits by instrumentalizing and militarizing expectations of the ideal
masculine. To female recruits they offer a hyper-feminized ideal in which they have an
opportunity to join an Islamic ‘sisterhood’ and become jihadi brides (USIP 2015; Van Leuven
et al. 2016). Devotion to the movement, grounded in idealized domestic commitments, can
offer an important antidote to those who feel marginalized, powerless, or unrooted in their
own communities, as well as to formalize a recruit’s commitment to the communal enterprise
(De Bode 2015; USIP 2015). Potential recruits who have suffered abuse or neglect in their
own family can be particularly susceptible to such overtures (Vidino 2015: 408–409; Proctor
2015a). Marriage, a marker of the transition to manhood and womanhood, is used to entice
both male and female recruits, and to formalize their commitment to the extremist enterprise
(Bloom 2012; Saltman and Smith 2015; Van Leuven et al. 2016).
Importantly, the domestic narratives deployed and manipulated by violent extremists
often disappoint. While domestic life in the so-called Islamic State has been glamourized in
social media, the reality – for men and women – is more likely to be one of impoverishment,
insecurity, and fear (Van Leuven et al. 2016).

Applying a gender lens to countering violent extremism:

sources of resistance
If gender identities can be politicized, militarized, and manipulated by violent extremists,
they might also point to key sources of resilience. Though violent extremists might exploit
domestic commitments, family ties can also promote peace. While not in themselves decisive,
obligations to a wife, children, or elderly dependants can keep males home, ‘raising the costs’
of participation (Cragin 2014; Lankford and Gillespie 2011; Horgan 2009; Lilja 2009).
Kurzman (2011, as cited in Cragin 2014) observed that having economic dependants deterred
some would-be suicide bombers from becoming martyrs.
Apart from prevention, family can work as a ‘pull factor’ in getting extremists to give up
violence. Commitment to family, or a desire to start one, can be an important motive in
disengagement (Altier, Horgan and Thoroughgood 2014; Reinares 2011). Bjorgo (2008,
cited in Hearne 2009) finds that new family and marital commitments can be central to
explaining why extremists abandon violence. Consequently, a number of deradicalization
programmes – in Saudi Arabia, for example – emphasize binding former extremists in
commitments to their families and larger communities (Bhulai, Chowdhury Fink and Zeiger

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2014; Proctor 2015a). Those who lack close family ties are encouraged to build them: upon
release, former prisoners have been assisted in finding employment, obtaining housing, and
starting a family (Lankford and Gillespie 2011).
The extent to which programmatic efforts succeed in preventing violent extremism will
hinge on whether they can help males create a life of meaning, achieve dignity, and redress
experiences of emasculation, without resort to the powerful and often thrilling appeals of
violent extremism. In eastern Afghanistan, analysis found that the insurgency’s top recruits
were not motivated by money or ideology, but were ambitious and charismatic young males
eager to prove themselves, protect their culture, and preserve religious norms. Given their
leadership potential and the respect they commanded, the men (and they were all men)
involved in the programme were seen as playing an outsized role in shaping the direction of
their communities and the region. They were highly sought after by insurgency recruiters.
The Natural Resources Counter-insurgency Cell (NRCC) attempted to deny armed oppo-
sition groups these key recruits, not through handouts, but by cultivating a new status
marker within the community that was culturally resonant and that spoke to the ambitions
of participants to establish their masculine identities. Selection of participants was highly
competitive. Working with local elders, NRCC developed a merit-based programme with
an intentionally high attrition rate: the goal was to avoid handouts, instead offering an
opportunity that would be hard to grasp, hard to hold, and therefore of considerable social
value. NRCC projects, designed and implemented through the cohort of programme
graduates, aimed to fill real, locally defined needs, and in turn provide participants with the
social cachet they sought. Programme implementers observed successes. Insurgent recruitment
in the programme areas dropped, as did violence (Kleinfeld and Bader 2014).
Of course, many empowerment programmes amount to little more than trainings for
young people. Civic engagement programmes typically identify a real gap – the powerlessness
of sidelined groups – but they often fail because they do not link to tangible opportunities
for participation. In most cases, traditional male elites are loath to incorporate new voices.
Where existing political institutions lack the capacity or the will to accept a new generation,
empowerment programmes raise expectations doomed to go unfulfilled. The implicit goal,
if often unrealized, of empowerment programmes is to provide non-violent avenues for
(predominately male) individuals to assert themselves in public spaces. It is unclear if this can
be done consistently. However, an approach rooted in an analysis of gendered expectations
and obligations appears central to any scheme that aims to channel ‘at-risk’ (male) individuals
toward non-violence.

Women, the public sphere, and female empowerment

Throughout the programmatic and academic literature on violent extremism, women remain
among the most important potential actors and participants in countering violent extremism
(Naraghi-Anderlini 2007; USAID 2015). Given their proximity to a community’s youth – as
mothers, caretakers, and teachers – women are perhaps best placed to identify and predict
vulnerabilities to violent extremism (Hearne 2009). Yet, for women to play a prevention
role, they must be informed and empowered, within the broader community but also within
the home. A mother might spot concerning behaviours in her sons or daughters, only to
be silenced by her spouse. In many communities, the social isolation of women restricts
interactions with authorities, including law enforcement, and reduces opportunities to air
concerns outside the home. Not coincidentally, where such isolation dynamics predominate,
violent extremist organizations enjoy greater freedom of movement and the means and
opportunity to reach potential recruits without detection or resistance.

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There appears to be a positive relationship between female empowerment and the resi-
lience of a state and community to violence and violent extremism (Couture 2014). Where
women are not subjects, but agents of their own choosing, they are more likely to resist
conservative violent extremist organizations, adding their voices to the chorus of opposition.
Ample evidence supports this assertion. More gender-inclusive societies tend to be less
violent (Caprioli 2005; Enloe 2007). Studies find that norms of gender equality within a state
are associated with a range of attitudes and behaviours averse to violent conflict (Melander
2005; Tessler and Warriner 1997; Tessler, Nachtwey and Grant 1999). Conversely, gender
inequality is correlated with a country’s likelihood to experience armed conflict (Hudson
et al. 2012). The greater women’s access to political power, the lower the likelihood that a
state will engage in interstate disputes and in war (Regan and Akeviciute 2003). Finally, states
that are indifferent about enforcing their own laws that protect women are significantly more
likely to fail to comply with international laws and norms (Hudson et al. 2012).
In many societies, female empowerment programmes are fraught with risk, particularly
where they are seen to overstep the cultural comfort zone of the community. Given their
sensitive nature, gender-based interventions can unwittingly endanger participants and might
play into the hands of violent extremist movements (Saucier et al. 2009; Chowdhury Fink
and Barakat 2013). Where interventions are seen as intrusive, guided by outsiders, or a threat
to local values, they might offend community members and contribute to the appeal of
violent extremist movements’ recruitment narratives. Furthermore, there is rightly a good
deal of concern among women’s rights’ defenders and feminists about the instrumentalization
and securitization of women as tools within counterterrorism agendas.
In spite of these very real risks, female empowerment3 programmes have the potential
to transform both public and private spheres. In Morocco, a female imam programme has
dramatically expanded the role Moroccan women play within the religious sphere, entrusting
them to act as teachers, counsellors, and social service providers, and giving Islam a female
face (Hearne 2009; Couture 2014). Such initiatives can also have important impacts within
the home by giving women the confidence and competence to engage with spouses and
children on issues.
There are many examples of programmes that appear to be making progress. The US
Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Mali Transition Initiative (MTI) imple-
mented community-level programmes that sought gradually to incorporate and empower
women in the public sphere, and to shift popular attitudes toward women through cash-for-
work programmes, theatre competitions, and the establishment of a community market
garden. An evaluation of MTI found that public attitudes toward women had improved, and
that these shifts correlated with a drop in support for violent extremism (USAID 2016).
Micro-credit programmes in Bangladesh improved women’s status across a range of indicators,
beyond greater access to financial resources: expanded social networks, a greater voice in
household decision-making, and increased freedom of mobility (Pitt, Khandker and
Cartwright 2003). In Nigeria, the Women without Walls Initiative (WOWWI) programme
worked to prevent crime and extremism by providing women with the resources and
knowledge to counsel at-risk youth. Participants said the programme helped them better
understand their roles as mothers and women in preventing extremism (Okenyodo 2016).
Finally, the international organization Women Without Borders offers a ‘Mothers School’
model. The programme supports local partners in delivering home-based workshops that
offer income-generation programmes while also creating a safe space for women to discuss
the risk violent extremism poses to their families and communities (Chowdhury and Barakat
2013).

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Of course, the challenge of preventing violent extremism cannot be placed solely at the
feet of mothers and sisters. In most cases, such efforts will only be effective if they are inte-
grated in regional engagements with a variety of governmental and non-governmental
stakeholders. The impacts of individual programmes scale, in part, by conducting interventions
that offer templates for collaborative, community-based action. In many (if not most) cases,
such efforts must incorporate regional or national law enforcement actors. In Nigeria, the
Women Preventing Extremist Violence (WPEV) programme trained women-led civil society
organizations to better understand radicalization and how to prevent it – and also aimed to
improve relations with local law enforcement.
This is easier said than done. Just as expectations around masculinity and femininity can
facilitate radicalization and recruitment, they can also complicate community prevention
efforts. In a follow-on project to the WPEV programme, female participants found that male
officers at local police stations did not welcome their outreach, potentially undermining
future engagements (Okenyodo 2016). While this is not always the case, and the WOWWI
programme experience with local police appeared to be more positive (ibid.), building
opportunities for tangible cooperation between women’s groups and the formal authorities
remains, in most cases, a steep hill to climb.

Conclusion
Gender dynamics are central to understanding who fights and why. Hierarchies, social
relations, and communal obligations are all highly gendered. They explain differences in
power, inform motive, and structure the relationships among men and between men and
women. Affirming these hierarchies is both an engine and aim of war. This is clear in the
case of fundamentalist violent extremist organizations, for whom the policing of the female
identity and body is both a tool and an end, a means by which gendered identities are
mobilized, and a core purpose of the political programme where cycles of domination,
protection, and obligation are observed, practised, and replicated. Fundamentalist violent
extremist movements gain traction in no small part because they speak to desires and anxieties
that are, for some, culturally resonant and highly personal.
This has clear implications for policy. State-led efforts to counter violent extremism have
been slow to appreciate how gender identities and gendered political narratives fuel violent
extremist movements. Jobs training programmes aimed at diverting ‘angry young men’ from
joining violent movements have been a popular remedy. Yet, transactional, market-oriented
approaches to countering violent extremism have generally come up short. To the extent
that economic investments and training programmes lead to growth in occupational
opportunities (itself highly doubtful), the link between young men’s poverty and support for
or participation in violent extremism seems far weaker than would appear to warrant
longstanding policy and programming prescriptions (Fair and Haqqani 2006; Krueger 2008;
Berman et al. 2011).
Most efforts to counter violent ideologies – through ‘norms shaping’ narrative programmes
and education efforts – appear to be similarly lacklustre in their results (Van Hiel and Mervielde
2003; Bartlett and Miller 2011). Why? In part, perhaps, because most programmes assume,
explicitly or not, that violent radicalization is a straightforward intellectual choice, a weighing
of various options, and therefore one that can be manipulated or shaped through a precise
application of external pressures. This seems wrong-headed. Violent radicalization is a social
experience. It hinges on personal and communal sources of meaning that are deeply gendered:
how recruits view themselves and how they are viewed by others whose respect they crave.

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Efforts to counter violent extremism are perhaps bound to fail where they are not anchored
in the social experiences that give violent ideologies resonance and meaning. Attention to
the significance of gendered identities in these social experiences can help bridge that gap.
Modesty is called for, however. Alternative sources of meaning are not easily manufactured,
certainly not by spreadsheet development programs designed in Western capitals.

Notes
1 Interview conducted by Keith Proctor, April 2015, Salt, Jordan.
2 While there are a range of recruitment experiences, Sageman (2004) notes that recruits are often not
simply passive ‘at-risk’ converts. Rather, admission to the ranks of a violent extremist organization
offers a palliative to frustration and an opportunity to remake a dissatisfying world; an opportunity,
in the words of a former ISIS recruit, “to make a society according to our values” (Proctor 2015b).
3 Indicators measuring relative levels of female empowerment might include: gender parity in school,
the number of seats held by women in parliament, female unemployment and literacy rates,
contraception use.

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 PART III

Gendered security practices

 21
EMBODIED IN/SECURITY
AS CARE NEEDS
Tiina Vaittinen

Introduction
In (neo)liberal political discourses, the ideal subject is an independent Homo oeconomicus: a
masculine, disembodied being, who is self-sufficient and self-caring, while knowingly making
rational, utilitarian, and abstracted ethical choices for the common good of all. The liberal
subject is an invulnerable individual, or at least well secured against any risks in life. He is
never ill; he does not leak bodily fluids (because he seems not to have a body); and he never
ages. Or, in case he does age, he does so actively and ‘successfully’, in ways that his body’s
care needs would never gain control of his life: the life of a subjective, rational Self. Feminist
social and political theory argues that these conceptions of political subjectivity are non-
realistic: such disembodied subjects simply do not exist (see Bacchi and Beasley 2002; Beattie
and Schick 2013; Cohn 2014; Fineman 2008; Grosz 1994; Hoppania and Vaittinen 2015;
Robinson 1999, 2011; Ruddick 1990; Shildrick 2002, 2012; Tronto 1993; Vaittinen 2015,
2017).
While vulnerable embodiment is discursively associated merely with women, children,
and the weak, the truth is that as human beings we all are bodies, and as such vulnerable,
relational, and dependent. As political subjects we are perhaps meant to ‘own’ our bodies,
to be in control of them and our lives. Yet, the bodies that our subjectivity inhabits might
in fact both pre-exist and outlive the subjective ‘I’. We are intercorporeal: conceived, born,
raised, and sustained by other bodies. We live - and die - in concrete relations with others.
Thus, as opposed to being the self-caring ideal subjects of (neo)liberal politics, as bodies we
are dependent, fleshy, and irrational. We are vulnerable, sometimes sick and dis/abled, every
day in contact with our own bodily fluids - and frequently also with those of others. We are
made of and sometimes governed by the fluids, bacteria, and hormones that move within,
without, and between our bodies (see Fishel 2015; Irni 2013; Preciado 2013). Our lives are
inherently frail. We start ageing and decaying the moment we are born.
In other words, the fact of embodiment makes the liberal understanding of subjectivity
ultimately an illusion. Nevertheless, global politics and its security policies and practices
continue to build on the liberal conceptions of life. In other words, the contemporary
security policies and practices tend to build on an illusion. In this chapter, I challenge these
illusionary yet prevailing understandings of security through different accounts of embodied

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in/security. I begin the chapter with a discussion of feminist analysis of vulnerability. Here,
I rely on accounts that emerge from the feminist ethics of care tradition (e.g., Robinson
1999, 2011), as well as Carol Cohn’s (2014) interrogation of vulnerability in international
security discourses.
Feminist conceptions of vulnerability and care challenge conventional security practices,
and reveal them as unrealistic, by foregrounding the human beings’ existential dependency
on each other for survival (e.g., Robinson 2011; Beattie and Schick 2013; Butler 2004). Yet,
as I have argued elsewhere (Vaittinen 2015), they also rarely explicitly engage with the body
organism and its materiality, which need be recognized if embodied in/security is to be taken
seriously. In this chapter, I interrogate the body in more concrete terms. Here, I first show
how embodied realities of human life have always been central in Feminist Security Studies,
albeit usually in contexts of direct violence and hence in/securities external to the body.
I then introduce the concept of the lowest common denominator of embodiment, which
emphasizes the body’s need of care from other bodies and, while defying essentialism, is
applicable to all living bodies at all times (Vaittinen 2017). Unlike in the usual security frames
that begin with direct violence, in this conception, embodied in/security becomes defined
through to the body’s most basic needs, which necessitate care relations with other bodies
at times when we are corporeally incapable of being the liberal individual subjects that we
are meant to be.
In the concluding section, I juxtapose my conception of embodied in/security with the
conceptions that seem to predominate security discourses more generally. I argue that, some-
times also in Feminist Security Studies, the empirical contexts of direct violence, war, and
militarism easily (re)produce perceptions of embodied in/security that begin with the threats
that bodies pose to other bodies. Here, in/secure bodies are primarily present as subjects and
objects of violence, rather than as caring and in need of care. Consequently, the threats that
the body, as an organism, poses to itself remain unaddressed. I argue that ultimately at stake
here are two contending gendered ontologies of human relatedness through which security
policies can be shaped: feminized dependency on other bodies’ care against masculine per-
ceptions of the bodies of Others as primarily threatening. Both the conceptions of embodied
in/vulnerability are profoundly relational, yet the security practices that they (re)produce are
fundamentally different.

Existential vulnerability and the ethics of care

Feminist literature (e.g., Fineman 2008; Beattie and Schick 2013) has emphasized the necessity
to put vulnerability instead of liberal individualism at the centre of political discourses and
practices, since vulnerability describes the condition of human life much more realistically
than individual, rational autonomy does. This way of thinking is particularly present in the
feminist ethics of care tradition, which provides a powerful alternative to liberal individualistic
thinking about ethics, morality, and politics. Foregrounding the existential dependency of
every human being on each other’s care for survival, feminist accounts of care can also force-
fully challenge the conventional security thinking, by presenting the lack of care as a threat
to human security (Robinson 2011).
Feminist ethics of care argues that practices of care give rise to an alternative moral
thinking, which is capable of realistically accounting for the situatedness of the moral subject
(see, e.g., Tronto 1993; Robinson 1999, 2011; Ruddick 1990). Feminist care ethicists
show how moral decisions are never made in a political void or behind a ‘veil of ignorance’,
as in the Kantian tradition, but in concrete relations with particular others. Importantly,

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emphasizing practices of care as a source of moral and political relatedness, feminist ethics of
care demonstrates how human existential vulnerability - that is, our dependency on care as
well as our capacity to respond caringly - is a powerful site and source of politics rather than
a realm external to it (Tronto 1993; Robinson 1999, 2011; Vaittinen 2015).
In peace and conflict research, feminists have also argued that the kind of thinking that
derives from care is capable of challenging militarism and customary thinking of global justice,
while providing avenues to re-imagine just peace (Confortini and Ruane 2014; Forcey 1991;
Bailey 1994; Ben-Porath 2008; Robinson 1999, 2011; Ruddick 1990; Tronto 2008; Held
2006, 2008). Of critical significance in this literature is Sara Ruddick’s book Maternal Thinking:
Toward a Politics of Peace. Although she talks about mothering, and refuses to extend the argu-
ment to caring more generally, her account is closely related to the ethics of care. Ruddick
argues that, since maternal practices are based on the preservation of life and fostering of
growth and on the recognition of complex embodied relationality of human beings, the
thinking that arises from mothering can be used as “an engaged and visionary standpoint
from which to criticize the destructiveness of war and begin to reinvent peace” (Ruddick
1990: 12).
Accounts such as Ruddick’s have been criticized for purporting essentialized imageries
of ‘women as peacemakers’, or ‘women as caretakers’ (Forcey 1991; Duhan Kaplan 1994;
Väyrynen 2010). These criticisms, however, seem to miss the point of feminist care ethics
as an argument about the kind of thinking that caring elicits. Ruddick’s maternal thinking,
or feminist care ethics more widely, is not an argument about what ‘women’ are. It is an
argument about the epistemologies enacted by practices of care, which in turn can be con-
ducted by genders of all kinds (Ruddick 1990: 40–41; Cohn 2014). Although care is
frequently socially constructed as a female responsibility, this need not be the case. Indeed,
to claim that care ethics automatically essentializes women as carers is not only incorrect,
but also paradoxically risks essentializing care and dependency as feminine which, as shown
below, has direct implications on the politics of vulnerability and in/security.
Fiona Robinson (2011) in particular has challenged the liberal rights-based discourses of
human security with an argument that derives from critical feminist ethics of care. Addressing
questions such as gendered labour in the global political economy, humanitarian intervention
and peace building (see also Tronto 2008; Held 2008), she draws attention to adequate care
delivery as a central security concern for all human life. Consequently, Robinson challenges
the perceptions that human security would begin and end at the protection of people against
external threats of violence. Similarly Carol Cohn (2014: 52, citing Kirby 2006) points out
that the predominant conceptions of human security are easily co-opted by “methodological
individualism”, and hence by the fallacy that political subjects were autonomous individuals
rather than dependent on one another.
In her contribution to a symposium honouring Sara Ruddick’s life work (see Robinson
and Confortini 2014), Cohn (2014) reads Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as “a heuristic device”
through which to rethink vulnerability in international security discourses. She points out
that vulnerability is “one of the core concepts” in both politics of care as well as security,
yet a “foundational contrast” is found in conceptions of “who or what is seen as vulnerable
and in need of preservation” (Cohn 2014: 51, original emphasis). This question, she maintains,
is of fundamental importance, since perceptions of vulnerability are highly consequential for
the policies and practices of security.
For Cohn (2014: 53) “the most important piece of the puzzle” is “the ways in which
vulnerability is intensely gendered at the symbolic level”. This is particularly so in the pre-
dominant international security theory and practice, where human vulnerability is perceived

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as a matter of “vulnerable groups” only and thus “displaced onto a subset of humans”.
Drawing on her empirical work at the UN Security Council (SC) as an observer of discussions
on the SC Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security, Cohn demonstrates that
vulnerability is frequently discussed at the SC, yet always with a reference to some Others.
In these discussions, vulnerability is never attached to those responsible for gendered security
practices. The same, of course, applies to much of liberal politics today, where decision
makers and state officials are presumed to be invulnerable, rational minds. In security
practices, however, the implications of such othering are far-reaching, since they fundamentally
shape our gendered understandings of whose in/security is recognized and recognizable.
First, not only is the concept of ‘vulnerable groups’ deeply gendered in practices of secu-
rity, but it is also heteronormatively gendered to apply to (cis)women, who are inherently
connected to the infantilized mass of womenandchildren-and-thedisabledrest. This shows in
the framework of UNSCR 1325 (Cohn 2014: 61), but also in the racialized development
agendas in the global South, where campaigns to invest in a girl for women’s financial
empowerment are promoted as projects of global justice, even if they might, in fact, com-
modify women’s (re)productive bodies for the expansion of neoliberal capitalism (Wilson
2011; Roberts 2015). Such limited conceptions of gendered vulnerability also direct research
and activism, as politically motivated funding instruments often require that researchers and
NGOs focus their activities on ‘vulnerable groups’ that are explicitly defined as womenand-
children (and the disabled rest).
Furthermore, when vulnerability is allowed for some but not others, only certain kinds
of bodies’ vulnerability makes sense. Consequently, those who cannot - because of their sexed
and racialized bodies for instance - appear as vulnerable in the predominant security dis-
courses, seem suspicious and emerge as a threat. The wrong kind of vulnerable bodies appear
as incomprehensible, and the ethical responsibility to secure needs of these ‘other others’
becomes blurred and denied (Ahmed 2010; see also Ahmed 2004). Here, the recent European
political representations of young refugee men make a conspicuous example. Especially in
the social media, but often also in the yellow press, male refugees are recurrently portrayed
as ‘terrorists’ and lazy aliens, who forge asylum claims and come after a better social security
system instead of staying in the conflict zones to defend ‘their’ womenandchildren at home.
Simultaneously, they are represented as sexual predators and pathological rapists, and hence
a threat to ‘our’ womenandgirls (Rettberg and Gajjala 2015). In security politics throughout
Europe, such portrayals have been indirectly and post-factually used as justifications to curb
migration and increase security measures at the borders and in public spaces - which further
adds to the embodied insecurity of those identified as racial Others.
Another example of such racialized embodied in/security is the recurrent police violence
against black men and women in the US (see: http://blacklivesmatter.com/). Here, too, the
racially differentiated and gendered body itself becomes a site of insecurity: potentially
killable (rather than vulnerable) because marked by a difference associated with a threat to
the public security (cf. Weheliye 2014). These examples show not only how “constructions
of vulnerability have security effects” (Cohn 2014: 62), but also how security effects are
constructed in relation to differentially sexuali(zed), gendered, and racialized bodies of the
Other. Some bodies, such as womenandchildren-and-thedisabledrest, become othered in
the liberal discourse through their hyper-vulnerability, whereas the vulnerabilities of other
others are obscured by their threatening embodied appearance. Yet, as feminists have
emphasized, all bodies are existentially vulnerable to life itself, and thus in need of care. I
will return to this argument below, after a brief review of Feminist Security Studies discussions
of the body.

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The body in feminist security studies: a review

While otherwise useful for thinking about the politics of existential vulnerability, feminist
ethics of care has rarely explicitly addressed the body. Here, Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking
is perhaps an exception, with its chapter-long discussion of the existential fleshiness of human
life, its (inter)corporeal beginnings and endings (see Ruddick 1990: 185–218). Simultaneously
in feminist analyses of security, the question of sexed and gendered bodies as well as their
differential value has been a central concern. Carol Cohn (1987), for instance, has shown
how the rational world of defence intellectuals in the nuclear age is constructed on a strangely
dis/embodied discourse. Here, the targets of the war machinery are discursively constructed
as female bodies, or body parts as instruments of penetrable sex, while simultaneously
attention is diverted from what happens to real bodies in war. Also Cynthia Enloe’s work,
beginning from Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Enloe 1989), has always analysed world politics
as gendered, embodied, and situated practice (see also Pettman 1997; Agathangelou 2004).
More recently, and building on existing work in feminist IR, Christine Sylvester (2012) has
further emphasized that understanding war requires that we not only theorize war experiences,
but study them ‘up’ from the concrete level of bodies.
Lauren Wilcox (2015) in turn, in her award-winning book Bodies of Violence, has applied
feminist social and political theory in IR to demonstrate how violence aimed at bodies
operates as a creative force that shapes the limits of political subjectivity. Analysing empirical
cases from drone warfare to suicide bombing to biometric technologies of surveillance,
Wilcox demonstrates the multiple agencies that bodies of violence can take in international
practices of in/security. Similarly, Jessica Auchter (2016: 12) calls attention to the agency of
the dead body in security politics, as “a complex political form, both a human and a thing”.
She argues that security politics always involves death, either in terms of its creation or its
prevention, and therefore Security Studies would benefit from attending to the politics of
“the global dead”.
Feminist scholars have also analysed the global killing machines of the military as made
of actual human bodies of soldiers. Examining British soldiers’ life in the armed forces,
Victoria Basham (2013), for instance, provides a thick ethnographic account of the army,
where the embodied everyday is temporally as well as spatially co-constituted with geopolitics.
She shows how the heteronormative, gendered, and racialized logics of the military make
possible certain kinds of politics of life, which helps to define the subjects and objects of war,
while making it possible for liberal states to wage war against the ‘illiberals’. For Basham,
such biopolitics takes place through what the soldiers are and do as gendered and racialized
bodies, while intra-acting with other bodies and the world. Thus the soldier’s body is both
a concrete (and indeed often insecure) site and instrument of governance, through which
the British nation and position in the world become (re)produced and reiterated.
Aaron Belkin (2012) shows how military masculinity is (re)produced through a concrete
sexual moulding of the soldiers’ bodies into something more complicated than the
hypermasculine and non-feminine. Belkin argues that the US soldiers are not simply produced
as masculine bodies, as is commonly understood. Rather, through concrete and often violent
practices conducted by and on their bodies, the soldiers are systematically governed as the
split in-between of heteronormative gender dichotomies. Belkin shows, for instance, how
in the military academy “men rape each other ‘all of the time’” (2012: 79), and how the
practice of male–male rape cannot be reduced to the heterosexual dominance of and femi-
nization of bodies that are violently penetrated. Instead, when there are systematic practices
where the victims are forced to sexually penetrate the anuses of their gang-rape perpetrators,

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or when the perpetrators give forced blow-jobs to their victims, the heterosexual orders on
which the military presumably relies is confused in fundamental ways.
Belkin’s central argument is that, coupled with the politics of silence, such violent gover-
nance of soldiers’ sexual identities institutes confusion within the military, which in turn
makes militarized bodies more docile and compliant instruments of the global warring
machine of the US Empire. In her research on wartime sexual violence against men in the
Great Lakes region in Africa, Élise Féron has made similar findings. Based on in-depth
research and interviews with both victims and perpetrators, Féron argues that sexual violence
against men is not simply about feminizing and dominating the victim. Rather, it is about
violent, embodied manipulation of the wider social order, orchestrated through the mani-
pulation of the sexual relations and identities of people and communities in the micro-level
(Féron forthcoming; see also Solangon and Patel 2012; Baaz and Stern 2013).
Belkin, Féron, and others underline the ways in which the in/secure body exposed to
violence is both a site and an instrument for the governance of wider social orders. This is
perhaps particularly so when the governmental violence takes place in ‘taboo’ realms of life,
which confuse the heterosexual social norms that lie in the heart of liberal thinking (see
McRuer 2006). As a whole, the above discussion shows how feminist accounts have brought
the body to the centre of security analysis, exposing how differentially gendered and sexed
bodies are asymmetrically exposed to violence, while also asymmetrically identified as
vulnerable. Nevertheless, it seems that in much of feminist security analyses, too, embodied
in/security is primarily analysed through bodies of violence. This is probably due to the
traditional empirical interest of Security Studies in direct violence, war, and militarization.
I believe that, while such an approach does recognize the body as existentially vulnerable
and insecure, it does so only partially. Namely, when vulnerability is understood as the ability
“to be wounded, painfully transformed from outside” (Hutchings 2013: 25, my emphasis),
embodied in/security becomes understood mainly in terms of violent threats that are external
to the body. Yet, to challenge the malestream accounts of (dis)embodied in/security, the
body’s vulnerability to life itself must be acknowledged as well. At this point, it is thus
perhaps necessary to ask what the human body is.

The lowest common denominator of embodiment

The body is ontologically multiple, which means that it is many things at the same time (Mol
2002). Feminist social theory, for instance, has examined the body as inscribed and discursively
(re)produced (Grosz 1994, 1997; Dallery 1992; Butler 1993), but also as that which writes
the world (Kirby 1997; Vaittinen 2017). The body is internally governed by gendered sex
hormones, organic and synthetic alike (Irni 2013; Preciado 2013), while simultaneously home
to other bodies such as microbes (Fishel 2015), or sometimes foetuses (Homanen 2013). As
discussed above, the body is a vulnerable and destroyable target of violence, but also that
which may violently destroy and explode the bodies of others (Wilcox 2015). The body is
differentially grievable (Butler 2004) and dis/abled (Shildrick 2002, 2012; McRuer 2006). It
is a gendered and sexual(ized) object of desire as well as trade (Agathangelou 2004; Penttinen
2008), while simultaneously subject to norms strictly tied to able-bodiedness and the two-
gender binary (Butler 1993; Smith 2013; Shildrick 2012; Repo 2015). The body is a space
that extends toward other bodies, human and non-human alike (Haraway 1991), not only
residing in space but also making space when exposed to/with other bodies (Manning 2009).
The human body can be simultaneously all this, and much more. It is not possible, in the
space of this chapter or a lifetime, to discuss all these complementary ontologies of the body.

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Below, I thus focus on elaborating a particular conception of the body that applies to all
living human beings at all times. I call this concept the lowest common denominator of
embodiment (Vaittinen 2017). Its definition begins with the fact that all human bodies as
organisms have certain fundamental, material needs, which make human beings existentially
dependent on care provided by other bodies.
In addition to breathing, all human bodies need to be fed and hydrated, to digest, and get
rid of excess fluids and excrement in an adequately hygienic way. When incapable of doing
so independently, they need other bodies’ assistance in meeting these basic needs. In the
course of a lifetime, this makes all human bodies dependent on care provided by other
bodies. While there might also be other fundamental needs, I refer to nutrition, hydration,
urination, defecation, and hygiene, because these needs apply to every single living/dying human
body at all times, regardless of age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, status, or any other
attributes of identity or social position. Only at death are our bodies freed from this existential
embodied dependency on other carnal beings – albeit even dead bodies tend to be subject
to various practices of care, security, and governance (see Auchter 2016).
Of course, one can argue against the existential dependency on care by saying that we do
not need concrete care from others throughout and at each moment of our lives. Yet (from
a secular perspective at least) it is a fact that we only have one life, tied to one body organism,
which can be prosthetically fixed and enhanced but only to a certain extent. If we look at the
entire life-course of our embodiment, or do the same at the level of populations, the periods
of life when human beings are (presumably) independent from other bodies are limited to
able-bodied adulthood (cf. McRuer 2006; Shildrick 2002, 2012). Taking this illusionary
independent period of life as the norm leaves out innumerable lives, including our own lives
at the times when we are frail, needy, and dependent. Yet, as shown by Cohn (2014) as well
as by feminist care ethicists, in liberal politics and its security practices, invulnerability and
independence are the norms, while those in need of care and protection are considered as
exceptions. When human vulnerability is examined at the level of the lowest common
denominator of embodiment, it becomes clearer still that, as for human bodies’ existential
need of care, there are no exceptions, only difference.
That all bodies are existentially dependent on care does not mean that all bodies would
need the same care in the same way, or could demand it with the same power and the same
‘voice’. In the field of care needs too, there are power relations, with some vulnerable bodies
being more powerful than others are, even as bare bodies in need of care (see Vaittinen
2015). This is because, in the prevailing material-discursive orders, some bodies are inscribed
with value, eligibility to care and embodied security, while the care needs of others are
turned into something incomprehensible and barely recognizable (Vaittinen 2017).
Nevertheless, the body’s dependency on care given by other bodies is an ontology of human
corporeality that, whether recognized or not, is present in all realistic ontologies of the body.
It is the lowest common denominator.

Embodied in/security and its contending ontologies of relatedness

It is notable that, on the level of the lowest common denominator, the body and its leaky
care needs are not about the feminine. After all, if we only just focus on the fact that
everybody must eat, drink, urinate and defecate, maintain an adequate level of hygiene, and
need care from others when not capable of doing so independently, the lowest common
denominator of embodiment marks a space where telling the feminine from masculine is not
self-evident (Vaittinen 2017). This fact of life applies as much to (cis)women as it does to

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(cis)men, as well as to the various bodies that do not fall into either of the dichotomously
defined gender/sex categories. Hence, as living organisms, our bodies are not only always
latently dependent on care provided by other bodies, but also fundamentally queer. It is even
more notable that, in the era of the Anthropocene, human bodies and their influence are
literally everywhere, as are therefore their leaky, disgust-materialist needs.
Indeed, the fundamental leakiness and filth of human embodiment is also present in the
military. Belkin (2012: 125–172), for instance, has analysed the practices of filth and excre-
mental self-control in the US army. Basham (2013: 87), in turn, uses the loss of excremental
self-control in the battle-field as an example of how the soldiers’ bodies, however disciplined,
might sometimes resist their utilization as the logistical vehicles of killing and being killed.
She writes:

In war . . . it is not at all uncommon for servicemen to tremble, to sweat, to piss
themselves, to vomit, or to shit their pants when they come under fire. . . . When
servicemen’s bodies do not perform as they have been disciplined to do, opportunities
for puzzling out and critiquing how they are normally made intelligible become more
apparent.

My account of embodied in/security emerges from a very different empirical context from
war and the military, namely the international politics of elderly care, and hence from social
security rather than security ‘proper’ (Vaittinen 2017). Here, unlike in a context where the
body loses excremental self-control when exposed to the direct violence of other bodies,
the body’s existential leakiness denotes another type of relatedness with fellow carnal beings.
This relatedness is about care, enacted by the body’s vulnerability to its own decay. As femi-
nists have emphasized, this vulnerability – and the relatedness it necessitates with the Other
– is something that just cannot be done away with.
As argued above, from the most basic needs of the body (to eat, drink, urinate and
defecate, and stay clean) follows that no human being can survive without care provided by
other bodies. As in ethics of care, this inescapable neediness and dependency makes us always
already latently related to and with other bodies - not antagonistically through the exposure
to the embodied other’s violence as in many existing accounts of embodied in/security, but
through care needs that only other human bodies can meet. Yet, whereas my lowest common
denominator of embodiment emphasizes the body’s existential need of care from other
bodies for survival, the traditional premise of Security Studies is equally true: all living bodies
at all times can also be killed by other bodies.
In this regard, it might well be argued that the conventional security paradigms, including
a range of feminist accounts, rely on another lowest common denominator of embodiment,
namely the body’s existential exposure to external threats of violence - the Hobbesian world.
Both these conceptions of embodied in/vulnerability are fundamentally relational. When
one begins with care needs, the relations between people/bodies are defined in terms of
nurturing and sustenance of life, both of which are absolutely necessary for the sustenance
of our species. When one begins with the threat of external violence, our vulnerable bodies’
relations with each other become defined antagonistically, through the threat that the Other
might pose.
Ultimately at stake here are two contending gendered ontologies of human relatedness
through which security policies can be shaped: feminized dependency on other bodies’ care,
against the masculine perceptions of the bodies of others as primarily threatening. Both the
ontologies are true descriptions of human embodiment, yet the security practices that they

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(re)produce are fundamentally different. When embodied in/security is defined merely

through the threat of violence that other bodies might pose, what emerges is a masculine
conception of security that disregards the threats that each body organism poses to itself by
its very life. In these, largely prevailing conceptions of embodied in/security, care-related
questions such a disease, dis/ablement, birth, infancy, as well as the sheer decay of ageing,
appear as lesser security concerns, as do the more feminized functions of the state and global
politics, such as social and health security. Yet, existentially and from the perspective of the
species, it might well be that our need of care from other bodies is more real and true at all
times, than the threat of violence posed by the bodies of the Other. What might security
policies and practices look like, if they were based on what bodies actually are, rather than
fears of what they might be?

Conclusion
Contemporary security policies and practices rely on a liberal, disembodied conception of
human life, which is in many regards illusionary. In this chapter, I have shown how feminist
analyses of care provide a convincing challenge to the hegemonic security discourses, by
emphasizing vulnerability as an existential condition of human life. This literature rarely
explicitly discusses the body in its material carnality, however, which Feminist Security
Studies does, yet with a focus on direct violence that is external to the body. Consequently,
in Feminist Security Studies, too, the body organism’s vulnerability to its very own decay
becomes overshadowed as a question of everyday embodied in/security.
In this chapter, I have presented a parallel reading of feminist care theorists’ contributions
to Security Studies on one hand, and Feminist Security Studies discussions of embodied
security on the other. Introducing the concept of lowest common denominator of embodi-
ment, I suggest that the existential care needs of the body are inherent in all ontologies of
the human body, and hence in all ontologies of embodied in/security. It is therefore crucial
that care needs as a shared existential condition of human life be integrated in policies and
practices of security, not just as an issue of ‘vulnerable groups’, or womenandchildren-and-
thedisabledrest, but as something that applies to each and every human being. As long as this
is not done, security policies and practices continue to build on an illusionary understanding
of human life - that is, on an illusionary understanding of that which they claim to protect.

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 22
GENDER AGENCY AND
VIOLENCE
Elina Penttinen

The question of gender and agency in the context of violence is a topic of much debate in
feminist scholarship. The controversy lies in developing understanding of how violence is
gendered without reinforcing gender stereotypes about women as passive victims and men
as aggressive perpetrators, and to develop new understanding of how especially women use
and enact agency in conflict and post-conflict settings. In this chapter I combine Feminist
Security Studies with feminist research on violence in order to deepen understandings of
how gender and agency can be understood in the context of violence. The objective of the
chapter is to focus on how violence is gendered, how gender norms and normative notions
of gender inform manifestations and practices of violence in public and private spheres, as
well as to look for possibilities of agency in the midst of violence.
My objective is to broaden the analysis of gender-based violence in Feminist Security
Studies which focuses on large-scale gender-based violence in conflict areas (Baaz and Stern
2014; Gould and Agnich 2016) on the politics of gender-mainstreaming (Basu 2016; Pratt
and Richter-Devroe 2011) by combining research on intimate partner violence (IPV)
(Dobash and Dobash 1998; McKey 2005) in order to develop understanding of how the
large-scale and small-scale manifestations are linked and reflect hierarchic gender orders. I
emphasize that in the context of Feminist Security Studies it is important to recognize the
connectedness of violence in the practices ‘out there’ and ‘over here’ especially if the research
on conflict areas is done by scholars situated in the global North.
The fact remains also that women and girls are disproportionately affected by gender-
based violence globally (Meger 2015; True 2015) and that this violence is deeply reflective
of male-domination, patriarchy and traditional gender relations (York 2011). The question
that arises is about the possibilities to transform these oppressive structures which naturalize
women’s subordination and manifest as various levels and degrees of violence. Is agency
something that emerges after the conflict or experience of violence? Are women always
passive victims? Or is violent resistance and participation in violent conflicts sign of
emancipation, empowerment, and transformation of gender norms?
In this chapter I hope to bring emphasis to the complexity of violence as an integral
element to society and culture and in so doing broaden our understanding of what gendered
agency is in the context of violence. The chapter is divided into three sections. First, I discuss
the challenges in defining violence in feminist terms. Second, I focus on what violence is

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 Gender agency and violence

seen to say about gender and agency. Last, I argue for the recognition of agency of targets
of violence and thus broaden our understanding of agency in the context of violence and
how it can be supported. Thus, my approach is informed by feminist ethics of non-violence
(Butler 2009) and I seek to challenge feminist scholarship which equates violence enacted
by women as transformative of the normative violence of hierarchic gender order.

Challenges in defining gender-based violence in feminist terms

How we define what is violence matters in terms of what kinds of acts and practices are
understood as a violation and what kinds of practices are accepted as part of normal society.
Feminist research on violence begins with the premise that the hierarchic gender order,
which is based on normative heterosexuality and gender binary is in itself a practice of
violence (McKey 2005; York 2011). Therefore, the heterosexual social contract which
assigns women a specific gender role as mothers, nurturers, and caretakers naturalized by
their biology is a practice of normalized discrimination (Karhu 2016). The binary gender
order is named as a system of normative violence by Judith Butler (Karhu 2016; Butler 2009),
a system that informs the manifestation of discrimination and diverse violent practices against
women, gender and sexual minorities in a social order informed by compulsory heterosexuality.
These include, for example, the pathologization of gender non-conformative persons and
sexual minorities (Honkasalo 2016), medical procedures on intersex babies, and everyday
practices of exclusion and discrimination against women and girls based on their role in the
heteronormative social order. Violence against women in the context of normative violence
of the binary gender order is a practice of maintaining that order through control and
intimidation. It is important to understand that women and girls are not vulnerable because
of their biology, but because the hierarchic gender order assigns women and girls to a
subordinate position.
What is important to note here is that the poststructuralist feminist approach (Butler 2004,
2009; Karhu 2016) maintains that the range of manifestations of violence such as war on
terror, hate crimes, gender-based violence, IPV, and sexual abuse are not separate or distinct
forms of violence. The basis of the diverse manifestations and practices of violence is the
normative violence of hierarchic gender order. Therefore, violence against women in wars,
for example, is not a spillover of war to the private sphere, but based on the normative
violence which informs the public–private distinctions. Feminist research on violence against
women in the global North emphasizes this connectedness (McKey 2005). Moreover, the
practices of non-physical abuse such as coercive control, psychological abuse or threat of
violence are seen as manifestations of the hierarchic gender order in feminist research
(Lammers, Ritchie and Robertson 2008; Meger 2015).
In this regard, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence
against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention ISTA 2011) offers the most
comprehensive definition of gender-based violence to date. First of all, it frames gender-
based violence as “a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between women
and men, which have led to domination over, and discrimination against, women by men and
to the prevention of the full advancement of women” (p. 5). This refers to the challenges
women face in terms of equal rights in civil society as well as direct and indirect violence
toward women on the basis of their gender. What is notable here in this definition for
Feminist Security Studies is that whereas the convention recognizes the increase in gender-
based violence during and after armed conflict, it does not differentiate between violence
against women in conflict areas and in areas of Western liberal democracies.

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 Elina Penttinen

The convention defines violence against women as

a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women and shall
mean all acts of gender-based violence that result in, or are likely to result in,
physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including
threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring
in public or in private life.
ISTA 2011: 8

What is relevant here is that the Istanbul convention identifies for the first time psycho-
logical violence and threats of violence as violence against women. This challenges the
conventional distinctions between what is regarded as actual violence and what is regarded
as a warning sign of violence to come. In this definition the threat of violence in itself is
already defined as violence. In addition non-physical practices of coercive control of women
in the private sphere are to be taken seriously as large-scale physical violence against women
in the public sphere such as during conflicts. The mundane and often disregarded IPV is seen
here as a manifestation of gender-based violence that is often normalized as part of hetero-
sexual relationships. Men’s rights organizations have already reacted strongly against this as
it is seen to threaten the power relations in heteronormative relations. Therefore, the objec-
tive is not only to react and respond to violence after the fact, but to prevent violence and
transform discriminatory gender order.
The boundary between normalized and extreme forms of gender-based violence may also
be reiterated in feminist research which prioritizes gender-based violence of scale in conflict
settings as indicative of the problem (Gould and Agnich 2016) and simultaneously distances
the practices of gender-based violence in the context of the private sphere. McKey (2005)
emphasizes that this emphasis on gender-based violence in conflict areas reflects the con-
ventional understanding according to which violence in the public sphere is regarded as
unacceptable, whereas violence in families and in the privacy of homes is left untouched
or less relevant. McKey (2005: 17) argues that even though one in four women in Britain
experiences violence during their lifetime by men known to them, this does not raise as
much public discussion as the violence perpetrated by strangers in public places does. This
reflects the implicit assumptions about what is considered as unacceptable violence at societal
level and what kinds of violence are seen as up to partners in adult relationships to figure
out on their own. This refers to the level of responsibility for individuals who are targeted
by violence. The partner who is abused in an adult relationship can be seen as responsible
for ending the abuse and the relationship, whereas in the context of large-scale violence the
targets are not seen to have such possibilities. Or IPV can be seen as a problem of personal
psychopathologies such as narcissism or continuation of violence from the family of origin
(Elmquist et al. 2016) and thus fundamentally different from systematic violence such as rape
as a strategy of war. Moreover, violence in the privacy of the home and family might be
seen as violence as a normal part of relationships (Velonis 2016). But if violence in public
and private spheres is seen as manifestations of hierarchic gender order, IPV can also be seen
as a large-scale manifestation of violence, albeit it takes place in the private sphere.
Feminist phenomenological research on violence (Crann and Barata 2016) challenges the
prioritization of large-scale physical violence over mundane practices of gender-based
violence by building the definition of violence on the basis of how it is experienced. Thus
this approach challenges the role of the academic expert as the one who gets to decide what
violence is and what it means. Moreover, the feminist phenomenological approach to

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violence highlights how violence cannot be reduced to the violent event and does not have
a clear beginning or ending for the target. A person who has been abused and violated carries
the sense of being dirty or different from others long into adulthood (Ronkainen 2008). The
experience of violence is deeply transformative. It challenges core beliefs of a person in their
own sense of self, goodness in others, capacity to trust other people and society (Penttinen
2016). Experience-based research shows that targets of violence name psychological abuse
and living under fear as more harmful than the direct physical violence.

What does violence say about gender?

As explained above, feminist research on violence is informed by the premise that gender-
based violence reflects structural gender hierarchy. However, the controversy lies in
understanding what violence says about gender. How do we account for the fact that women
are disproportionately affected by gender-based violence during conflicts and not reiterate
essentialist notions of women as passive victims?
Recently, in the discussion on gender-based violence, the inclusion of how men and boys
are affected by these practices enables us to broaden the scope of who is affected (Kirby and
Shepherd 2016). This means recognizing how men and boys are targeted in gender-specific
ways during conflicts and in the context of militarism. In addition, the analysis of hazing
practices and sexualized torture enables one to see how gender norms and normative notions
of gender concretize in the context of male victims of gender-based violence. Thus the
objective is to broaden the understanding of gender-based violence as something that affects
mainly women. Agency appears as something that emerges after the conflict in the form of
activism (Hill, Aboitiz and Poehlman-Doumbouya 2003; McLeod 2015) or the diverse social
roles that women take in conflict resolution (Cockburn 2007).
Another approach that challenges the binary opposition between women as targets of
violence and men as perpetrators, which informs much research on gender and violence, is
a focus on women as active perpetrators of violence (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Henshaw
(2016) argues that critical study of men and masculinities also reinforces gender stereo-
types as it focuses on the critical study of men in the context of terrorism and militarism.
For example, hypermasculinist male culture and hegemonic masculinity are seen to inform
men’s choices to participate in violent conflicts. This is problematic, as women’s roles in
the same violent conflicts are ignored as well as underestimated. Moreover, women might
have their own reasons and motivations to join which are not reflective of stereotypical
gender roles. Indeed, women who participate in conflicts as perpetrators of intimate and
extreme violence are seen as challenging gender norms (Hassani 2016) and having agency
(Brown 2014). Yet, such arguments do not mention whether targets of violence transform
gender norms.
The gender of active perpetrators and passive victims is also a source of much debate in
the literature of IPV. The challenge has to do with acknowledging the fact that the majority
of IPV is still perpetrated by men toward women known to them (McKey 2005; Dobash
and Dobash 2004) and recognizing how women use violence against men in heterosexual
relationships. In the context of research on IPV, a critical perspective to feminist research
on violence is called ‘gender symmetry’ or the family violence approach (Johnson 2006).
This approach contends that violence in the context of intimate relationships is perpetrated
by both genders approximately equally. Feminist research on violence has traditionally
gathered data from women’s shelters, court cases, reports to the police, first-person accounts
of survivors and from anti-violence organizations both at national and international level

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(Dobash and Dobash 2004; McKey 2005). The evidence shows clearly that domestic and
gender-based violence is, for the most part, perpetrated by men and targets women known
to them. On the other hand, the family violence uses statistical analysis based on survey data
from large generalizable samples (Velonis 2016). Both approaches accuse each other of
methodological biases.
What is relevant here is how research design and methodology, in addition to the defi-
nition of violence, influence research outcomes. Johnson (2006) emphasizes that the general
surveys are not apt to measure the kind of systematic coercive control, which is telling of
IPV in heterosexual relationships (Anderson 2009). Instead, the surveys mainly ask questions
about situational violence, such as throwing objects at a partner, or using physical force or
verbal abuse during heated arguments, and show that there is a gender symmetry in the
respondents who use such practices (Velonis 2016). However, such situational violence is
different from the practice of what Johnson names as ‘intimate terrorism’; such practices are
systematic acts of coercive control in heterosexual relationships. Intimate terrorism refers to
a practice where the target is terrorized into subjecting to the perpetrators will by systematic
acts of coercive control, isolation of the target, financial control, intimidation, manipulation,
and blame-shifting. Moreover, these practices are reflective of the normative heterosexual
gender order; the targets are controlled in terms of dress and appearance, the cleanliness of
the house, and parenting (Alaggia and Vine 2006; York 2011). Women do retaliate against
such practices of coercive control with violence, either as a means to break free, to defend
themselves, or defend their children. On the other hand, women who reported using vio-
lence because they were angry reported doing so without much guilt or remorse about their
actions (Velonis 2016). This does not imply, however, that there is a gender symmetry to
violence in families and heterosexual relationships.
I am concerned with the feminist theorizing on violence in which there is a tendency to
equate violence with having agency (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Hassani 2016) as a means
to transform gender orders. I find these arguments problematic because they do not challenge
the normative violence of binary gender order. Rather, these challenge the boundary
between binary opposites by also including women in the category of those who can domi-
nate and discriminate against others. It is a matter of shifting power relations within the
context of normative violence, but not about transforming the implicitly violent power
structure. Women who use violence challenge gender stereotypes and, perhaps, gender roles
in relationships and institutions, but this is different from transforming the gender norms.
Emphasis on violence as agency reinforces the category of the victim as passive, feminized
other.
The challenge here is to rethink what agency is, what the real consequences of violence
are, and recognize how agency is not the binary opposite of being a victim, nor something
that victims might gain after the violent conflict or relationship has ended. In practice this
means destabilizing the category of the victim as ontologically passive and thus without
agency. Moreover, it means redefining vulnerability as integral to being human (Butler 2004;
Salamon 2010) instead of weakness. Emphasizing the use of violence enforces the prioritization
of masculine subjectivity by the argument that ‘also women’ can enact harsh violence and
thus be recognized as subjects. For the targets of systematic and patterned abuse, these
arguments would hardly make any sense, whether they were male or female. Therefore, the
level of abstraction in theorizing gender, agency, and violence can lead to a dystopian
worldview in which the use of violence is seen as a positive force and a sign of gendered
agency without much compassion toward the feminized others who are victimized, violated,
and hurt in return.

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In the next section I discuss further how recognizing agency in the midst of violence can
enable moving beyond the binary opposition between active perpetrators and passive victims
in order to pave the way for feminist ethics of non-violence (Karhu 2016; Butler 2009).
Therefore, in order to recognize gendered agency in the context of violence, it is crucial
also to look for how agency is enacted into being in non-violent ways.

Possibilities for agency in the midst of gendered violence

The experience of violence is deeply humiliating and transforms the sense of self of the target
and their sense of belonging to a community (Penttinen 2016). Moreover, cultures and
societies that value individualism, strength, heteronormative heterosexual relationships,
and the pursuit of happiness, reinforce also the sense of shame that is the result of experience
of violence. In my own research with women who had lived in abusive relationships,1 the
reasons that made them stay longer in the relationships included having to admit to them-
selves and others that the abuse happened to them. As one of the respondents mentioned,
“I did not want to be one of ‘those’ women” referring to being an ‘abused woman’ as a sure
sign of bad judgement, being stupid enough to fall for the wrong guy, or too subjugated to
leave. It is also difficult to admit that one’s partner is abusive and the shame associated with
being involved with a man who uses violence. This might have resulted in rationalizing and
minimizing diverse forms of abuse as part of the normal relationship or not ‘bad enough’ to
take action to leave, and reflects the valorization of strength and responsibility at the expense
of one’s own safety. In this section I focus on recognition of agency during the process of
seeking help and support and seeking justice for the violence. My goal is to destabilize the
category of the victim as a passive, feminized other and broaden the understanding of agency
in the context of gender-based violence.
Agency is understood here as both process and actions that lead to change and trans-
formation. Therefore, agency is different from taking action that might or might not lead to
change. We know agency from the outcome of the action and not on the type of action that
is taken. I have argued elsewhere (Penttinen 2016) that the process of transforming trauma
should be regarded as a sign of agency as it leads to change and transformation at a personal
level. Here, I focus on the actions and processes that targets of violence have taken that have
led to a change in their situation.
Recognition of agency in the midst of gendered violence means, first of all, paying
attention to how the targets of violence are able to transform their situations and seek help,
support, and justice. These can be, for example, disclosing the experience of violence,
making formal or informal reports, taking necessary steps to leave the relationship, and
making a safety plan. Or, these can be the actions of individual peacekeeper, security agent,
or police officer who helps a target of violence even beyond their own job description
(Penttinen 2013). Therefore, the difficulty of recognizing agency in the midst of violence
and oppressive conditions might only be a problem of level of analysis. When the focus is
on large-scale violence, such as war, it is difficult to discern how individuals are able to
transform their situation, heal and recover as well as support each other. Including also
research data that focuses on the level of lived experience can broaden the perspective to
recognize the ways in which there is already agency within contexts of violence. What does
it take to really make changes once a person has been systematically violated?
Turning attention to healing and recovery as a relevant object of research in the context
of Feminist Security Studies is therefore not a practice of denying violent practices and
structures, but opening toward the individual experience of violence with a strong sense of

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validation. This includes the validation that during violence the person who is the target is
victimized and rendered helpless. At that moment they were not able to defend themselves.
It is crucial to understand that such an experience results in debilitating shame and self-blame
(Crann and Barata 2016) and it takes courage and strength to break from the internalization
of the message which normative violence induces in the victim. Therefore, reporting violence
should not be taken for granted.
As there is a tendency to blame the victim for sexual assault or challenge their credibility,
there is a social risk for the victims of sexualized violence to make an official report of the
crimes done to them. According to Carretta, Burgess and DeMarco (2016), women who
made a formal report of rape to the police received negative social reactions. For example, in
the US, only approximately 50 per cent of rape cases were formally reported to the police
in 2008 and only 24 per cent of the reported cases led to consequences for the perpetrator
of violence. This means that making a formal report does not necessarily lead to justice,
but more likely results in hostility toward the victim, adding another layer of suffering to
her experience. Ronkainen (2008) calls this the culture of postmodern harshness, referring
to the responsibility placed on the victim for her own victimization. McKey emphasizes
(2005) that discriminatory gender order is enabled and maintained in the global North by
distancing gender-based violence as something that is a symptom of non-democratic and
Islamic societies. This adds a level of responsibility for the individuals in liberal democracies
to be able to individually assess the risks in public and private spheres in order to ensure their
own safety. If being victimized is the result of misjudgement on the part of the target, of her
incapacity to assess the risks, then being violated is indeed deeply shameful. This adds shame
to the target of violence for the fact that they were not able to prevent, defend, or protect
themselves during the event, or they might be regarded as naive or weak.
Carretta et al. (2016) explain that the key factor that contributed to healing and social
adjustment of the rape victims in their study was being believed and listened to. In opposition
to formal reporting, informal disclosure of the experience of violence enabled the victims to
heal. In practice, this means that their victimization was also validated and that they were
seen and heard. This was helpful even if the abuse occurred in childhood and was disclosed
much later in adulthood. The validation of violence means turning toward the experience
of violence with compassion and without the need to fix it or change it for the person
(Germer and Neff 2015). This is a practice of stripping the cultural negative connotations of
victimhood and reducing the sense of shame which is a consequence of violence. Paradoxically,
validation of the fact that the person was victimized in gender-specific ways was key to
supporting their agency and recovery. It enabled the target of violence to recognize that the
harm done to them was violence, and something that was not in their control or their own
fault. Letting go of self-blame and shame also opens the possibility to take necessary steps to
improve one’s situation and make lasting changes, which are indeed signs of agency.
Crann and Barata (2016) argue that we need new ways of understanding resilience by
researching how women who have been the target of violence define what resilience means
to them and what actions they expressed as forms of resilience. Such forms of self-proclaimed
agency were, for example, telling someone, reporting the abuse to the police who actually
were able to help, making a safety plan with the help of a support organization, leaving the
relationship even though this meant financial difficulties and, further on, participating in
support groups, offering help to other victims of violence. These examples show that resi-
lience and agency is the capacity to action which leads to changing circumstances. Moreover,
it shows how agency of a person emerges in relationship with supportive people. Agency is
not something that someone either has or does not have. It can be evoked with support from

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others and enacted into being even against all odds. Recognizing agency in this way enables
to us move beyond the conceptualization of violence as agency and transformation of gender
norms.
Moreover, agency is something that can be supported in the validation of violence by
formal organizations. This means also willingness of persons working in institutions such
as police, the judicial system, social work, development aid, health care, and other agencies
who come into contact with people who have been targets of violence to really recognize
and validate their experience. This is a challenge because the people working in these services
might also hold onto cultural constructs that normalize certain levels of violence such as
coercive control in heterosexual relationships or fear and intimidation as simply warning signs
of violence and not actual violence.
In this regard, I also want to emphasize that academic scholarship in Feminist Security
Studies can be a practice of violence validation as well. Recognizing the agency that is already
present in the midst of violence enables us to open up to the complexity of lived experience
and move beyond the normative violence of binary gender order. Therefore, there is a direct
link between the capacity to validate how violence hurts and understanding what agency is.
How we define what kinds of actions and events are regarded as unacceptable and violent
is, on the other hand, linked with how targets of violence can recognize what has been done
to them as unacceptable and wrong instead of being a normal part of patriarchal power
relations. In this process the academic scholarship on research on violence in the context of
Security Studies can play a crucial role. It is about being accountable to the millions of people
who are affected by gender-based violence on a daily basis; those who are close and those
who are in distant locations. It is a matter of recognizing how the women, men, and sexual
and gender minorities already enact agency in their everyday life, how they are able to influ-
ence change regardless of the outside conditions and often bleak circumstances. Therefore,
the recognition of agency in the midst of violence can be a practice that enables the
strengthening of these processes for the victims of violence, instead of being a practice that
enforces and reiterates the normative notions of shame and weakness associated with the
experience of violence.

Concluding words
In this chapter I have shown how gender-based violence is not something that happens only
‘somewhere else’ or to ‘someone else’ but that it is part of everyday life in societies both in
peaceful democracies as well as conflict areas. I have explained how conceptualizing agency
in the context of violence is difficult because the debate on how violence is gendered often
masks or renders invisible the agency of the persons who have been the targets of violence
as well as the people in national and international organizations who, in practice, offer help
and services to people who have been violated. Instead the focus turns to discussing what
violence says about gender and can lead to problematic conclusions that see violent resistance
or participation in conflicts as the salient forms of agency and thus leave the category of the
passive victims intact.
My goal has been to show that even a small step taken to transform a violent situation
should be recognized as agency, because it takes enormous courage to challenge the practices
of violence that emerge out of hierarchic gender order. Moreover, the validation of this
violence as real, harmful and something that hurts for a long time is in itself a practice that
can support the process of healing and recovery and enhance personal and social transformation.

259
 Elina Penttinen

I want to emphasize that gender-based violence emerges out of the normative violence
of a binary gender order that informs cultures and societies globally. To create new
understandings of gender and agency in the context of Feminist Security Studies we need to
develop a meta-analysis of violence, which recognizes how gendered violence here and
elsewhere are reflective of the same system of power. This approach opens the conceptualization
of agency toward practices that transform normative gender orders and not only change
power relations between genders. In addition we need to develop further experienced-based
research, which builds the understanding of agency from the perspective of targets of violence
themselves and what enacting and embodying agency is to them.
Such a multifaceted approach enables us to recognize agency in non-normative ways and
in unexpected places, which can be easily overlooked if the focus remains solely on gender
discrimination and gendered disempowerment, or violence as agency. Violence is a complex
phenomenon that cannot be distanced to faraway places, to other families, or to other men
and women who perpetrate violence, but is entangled in our everyday practices. We need
to be ready to look directly at how violence is configured in our everyday lives, in the lives
of people close to us, in our own neighbourhoods and workplaces, and build an active
practice of validation and resistance in alignment with feminist ethics of non-violence in
order to transform the ontologically violent normative gender order.

Note
1 This research project involves moderating online support groups and interviews with targets of IPV
in collaboration with Women’s Line, a non-governmental organization which offers counselling and
support to women who have been targets of IPV. The research is funded by University of Helsinki
three-year grants.

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Velonis, A.J. 2016. ‘“He never did anything you typically think of as abuse”: Experiences with violence
in controlling and non-controlling relationships in a non-agency sample of women’. Violence Against
Women 22(9): 1031–1054.
York, M.R. 2011. Gender Attitudes and Violence against Women. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholar.

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 23
MEMORY, TRAUMA, AND
GENDERED INSECURITY
David Duriesmith

Introduction
This chapter explores the intersections between the study of memory and trauma with a
particular focus on gendered insecurity. From the memorialization of battlefields, to ceno-
taphs and formal war memorials, the international political landscape is scattered with sites
seeking to commemorate trauma and insecurity (Mayo 1988). These sites, which may seek
to commemorate armed conflict, atrocities against civilians, or other violent events, draw
directly on gendered histories to articulate a coherent narrative about what has occurred.
Although a growing body of work has been produced on memory and trauma within
scholarship on International Relations (IR) and security, a far smaller section of work has
explicitly explored this in relation to gender (Pető and Altınay 2016). Of the existing work
which has considered memorization and trauma from a gendered perspective, the focus has
primarily been on commemoration, or lack of commemoration, of women’s gendered
insecurity, rather than integrating the concept of gender more broadly to the ways in which
trauma and memory are conceptualized in the international sphere.
In exploring the links between trauma, memory, and gendered insecurity, this chapter
looks to read gender into practices of memorization of traumatic events which may not be
initially understood to be defined by gendered insecurity, such as commemoration of the
Second World War. It introduces Barry’s (2010) concept of expendability to Butler’s (2009)
theorization of grievable lives as a way to frame the normalization of certain traumatic
experiences through commemoration. This looks to reconcile the way in which the politics
of collective memory are used to smooth over some traumatic events by providing a cohesive
narrative of success or strength, while creating new gendered insecurities and traumas by
placing certain experiences beyond political ineligibility (Edkins 2003b).
The chapter begins with an overview of the study of memory and trauma, looking at how
the political study of trauma and memory has developed since the end of the Second World
War. The review of existing literature focuses on the studies of trauma and memory from
political frameworks, rather than the large bodies of clinical, psychoanalytic, and psychological
work that has been conducted with a focus on individuals. It then outlines how notions of
trauma and memory have been applied to security scholarship over the past decade. This
suggests that the introduction of trauma and memory represents a component of the broader

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recognition of affective and narrative politics as key components to practices of security in

the international sphere.
After having reviewed the main contributions to the study of trauma and memory, the
chapter focuses on the gendered interventions that have emerged so far. Utilizing feminist
scholarship on insecurity and trauma it outlines the ways in which the existing work on
trauma and memory might intersect. This chapter suggests the international literature
on trauma and memory has not systematically accounted for gendered insecurity as a site of
trauma, and the literature on gendered insecurity has not engaged deeply with practices
of memorization and trauma.
After having provided this overview of the existing scholarship the chapter turns to look
at the gendered politics of trauma and memory through the commemoration of the dead.1
By looking at the way in which certain kinds of trauma are memorialized and others silenced,
it is argued that some deaths are only rendered grievable by erasing their trauma, while others
are defined as legitimate subjects of collective trauma. It has been well established that
narratives of sacrifice and duty are used to smooth over the trauma of collective violence
(Edkins 2003a). At the same time, it is suggested that memorization practices reinforce
gendered patterns of silence that further contribute to the trauma caused by states’ security-
seeking activities. The chapter concludes by considering ways in which scholarship on
memory and trauma could be used to enhance recent feminist debates on gendered insecurity.

The origins of trauma and memory studies

The study of trauma originates in early 20th-century clinical studies which attempted to
explain what became known as shellshock (Kaplan 2005: 24–25). The concept of psychological
trauma was initially employed to explain the continuing harm exhibited by large populations
of former fighters who exhibited ‘war neuroses’, characterized by an inability to move on
from their experiences of violence (Resende and Budryte 2014). In this initial use, the
concept of trauma looked to encapsulate the psychological harm done to individuals who
could not assimilate the events they had experienced into their personal narrative, identity,
or worldview. Since this initial usage, the concept of trauma has come to be used to frame
experiences or events that are so unsettling they disrupt the collective ability to express,
understand, or narrate what has occurred (Bleiker and Hutchison 2008).
The core concept of trauma centres on the inability to assimilate experiences and events
(Kristeva 1989; Resende and Budryte 2014). Whether experienced individually or collectively,
traumatic episodes are those that “rupture the linear narratives through which one experiences
the everyday” (Bleiker and Hutchison 2008: 388). In this sense trauma is not just about
injury, in the medical sense, but is about the incommensurability of an idea or experience
to the existing frames of reference (Bistoen 2016: 161). Within psychological literature
significant emphasis is placed on individuals’ abilities to process episodes with their own sense
of self (Ehlers and Clark 2000). Politically the study of trauma has focused more directly
on collective attempts to memorize and process incommensurable events at a national or
communal level (Winter 2006).
The interest in collective trauma and memory has particularly focused on how traumatic
events are politically framed after the fact within contested political terrain. With the growing
awareness of the scale of mass killings and atrocities that had been committed during the
Second World War, nations started to rebuild not only through stories of heroes and success,
but through a commemoration of the massacres and mass killings. With the horrors of the
Japanese invasion of China, the bombing of Hamburg or Dresden, and the Holocaust,

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thinkers scrambled to develop new ways of understanding the meaning and implications
of these social ruptures for post-war national narratives (Bell 2003). Collective trauma is
collective in nature due to the ways in which it strikes “a blow to the basic tissues of social
life that damages the bonds attaching people together” (Erikson 1995: 187). When describing
large-scale ruptures from the everyday, such as genocide, terrorism, civil war, natural disasters
or displacement, the concept of trauma has provided a useful explanation for the difficulty
of articulating satisfactory narratives of what has occurred (Resende and Budryte 2014). The
inability to narrate traumatic experiences means that even when individuals and communit-
ies have survived violent ruptures, these events endure as a significant point of reference
(Humphrey 2002; Herman 1992). The use of traumatic events as a reference point to poli-
tically contextualize and justify state action means that practices of memorization are of key
importance for understanding contemporary politics (Ferreira 2014; Innes and Steele 2014).

International memory and trauma studies

Though the study of trauma has a long history in the other disciplines, the exploration of
trauma and memory studies into scholarship on global politics is a more recent development.
The earliest interventions within IR have come as part of broader attempts to come to terms
with affect, identity politics, transitional justice, and histories of political violence (Edkins
2003b; Bell 2006; Ahmed 2014). Writing in 2006, Bell noted that at that point the study of
memory had not “played a substantial role in the academic study of international relations”
(Bell 2006: 1). Despite the lack of attention to practices of memorization and trauma, a
growing body of work has come to explore how these practices inform the international
security landscape (Becker 2014).
The more substantial inclusions of scholarship on memorization and trauma within IR
have come from a cluster of scholars working broadly on the notion of affect and narrative
in the international sphere. Research from Bleiker and Hutchinson (2008) and Bell (2003)
has looked to memorization scholarship as a mechanism to better understand how events
that are unintelligible can shape the global political landscape. Traumas, as events or experi-
ences that defy understanding, required new tools to conceptualize the enduring impact of
violent ruptures on states that have been affected by mass killings, war, natural disasters, and
other incomprehensible events (Ahmed 2014: 34).
As argued by Fierke (2006), collective trauma is an enduring feature of international
security tensions. In this understanding, traumas are continuing features in state security
actions. Trauma is ongoing, rather than a past event, due to the ways in which attempts to
memorize and comprehend experiences continually recreate and redefine violence (Novick
1999). There is a tension here between authors who emphasize collective trauma’s ability to
remain unprocessed and incomprehensible, and those who foreground the ways in which
trauma is used in a politically expedient way to create ‘eternal truths’ around the meaning
of violence (Erikson 1995; Fierke 2006). Whether emphasizing earnest attempts to compre-
hend the incomprehensible, or the calculated use of traumatic ruptures to justify security
orientations, traumatic events haunt global politics long after the occurrences have passed
(Auchter 2014). This ghostly quality of past trauma means that in current security relationships
the meaning of bodies subjected to violence remain politically in play, although often highly
contested (Auchter 2014).
By way of illustration, to understand the current security tensions between Japan and
China it is not enough to comprehend the material distribution of power, or the geopolitical
significance of the region. It is necessary to grasp the enduring significance of trauma around

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the invasion of China in the 1930s and pacification of Japan from 1945. In an instance like
this, although most of the actors who were directly involved in those events have died, their
significance remains open to reinterpretation. For this reason sites of memorization, such as
Japan’s Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni or the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall should be
understood as locations where the security is practised and contested through the haunting
politics of memorization and trauma (Auchter 2014). It is for this reason that scholars have
argued that locations of memorization should not be understood as dead locations where the
past is presented, but as living locations where the meaning of past trauma is forged.

Gendered insecurity, memory, and trauma

While there have been substantial efforts to address the role of memory and trauma across a
wide range of topics (including ontological security, identity creation, political apologies,
foreign policy formation, climate security, and post-conflict reconstruction), there has been
very little engagement with this work to the notion of gender (Pető and Altınay 2016).
Memory scholarship with a focus on gender and trauma has emphasized the importance of
silences and experiences of gendered insecurities that are placed beyond the scope of formal
memorization (Pető 2016). As most research around memorization and trauma within the
study of global politics has used national and ethnic politics as the primary lens, this has
excluded the many traumas that do not fit within the dominant narrative of the state and
communal conflict.
Feminist scholars have been particularly sensitive to the ways in which acts of memorization
and commemoration are not gender neutral. Where formal practices of memorization have
attempted to process and smooth over state atrocities along ethnic or national lines, rarely
are formal practices of memorization organized to commemorate violence that targets women
(Edkins 2003b; Abiral 2016). Even when memorialization practices look to commemorate
war and trauma, these are often startlingly gender-blind, either totally excluding women
from the picture or relying on tropes of female victims and male soldiers (Mühlhäuser 2016;
Doğan 2016). Because trauma scholarship began with the study of adult male combatants,
and then with women and children as victims of abuse, gender-sensitive scholarship has
looked to chart the ways in which the field has ignored and silenced sites of trauma that do
not fit within dominant narratives, such as the experiences of female combatants (Harel-
Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah 2016).
Feminist explorations of women’s experiences of war and post-conflict trauma have
emphasized that dominant narratives often reinforce, reproduce, or silence particular gendered
traumas that target women (Sasson-Levy 2016). While dominant narratives of male soldiers’
experience of war will either be commemorated or celebrated, violence against women
(chiefly sexual violence) is excluded within most formal processes of remembrance (Pető
2016). In the wake of war the precise targeting of women is often downplayed as individual
criminality, silenced as a shameful side product of violent ruptures, or denied wholescale
(Mühlhäuser 2016). The culture of silence that surrounds gender-based violence has also
been identified by feminist scholars as a factor that might contribute to ongoing trauma and
gendered insecurity (Attarian 2016).
Memorization of traumatic events, principally in formal outlets, has often been constructed
to reinforce a militarized and masculinist manifestation of national identity, through pushing
out other narratives and experiences of trauma to the periphery (Enloe 2016). In a recent
edited volume on gender and memorization, the editors note that the cross-cutting theme in
work on this topic is a curiosity around gendered silences. They suggest that feminists

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attempt to redress silences through explorations of situated knowledge and intersectional

perspectives (Pető and Altınay 2016: 2–3). While feminists retain a keen interest in the
memorization of collective trauma, this research is principally focused on the narratives,
experiences, and traumas of groups who experience particular gendered insecurities. Feminists
have emphasized the ways in which the memorization of trauma can be understood as a
securitized act, one that produces security threats, and creates narratives of who (or what)
should protect one from them (Ferreira 2014: 94–97). At the same time, feminist work on
silence and memorization has suggested that the erasure of women from narratives of ‘what
happened’ during periods of violence both reproduces the traumatic quality of violence by
placing it beyond intelligibility, and practically facilitates re-victimization as abuses are denied
political recognition.
Feminist work on trauma and memory has emphasized that women face particular kinds
of insecurity on the basis of their gender coinciding with episodes of other violence (Attarian
2016). During violent ruptures, different groups face particular vulnerabilities depending on
their position and characteristics within society. Much of the literature on trauma and
memory has explored particular ethnic and national trauma, emphasizing that targeting ethnic
and national groupings has the capacity to produce particular collective traumas, and that this
trauma can serve as an enduring source of insecurity (Ferreira 2014).2 Though these ethnic
and national narratives of trauma are often integral to how atrocities are remembered, the
gendered targeting of particular groups, and the insecurities that this produces is far less
recognized within existing scholarship on memory and trauma.
While sexual violence against women has often been normalized as an unfortunate but
inevitable outcome of war, the memorization of gendered traumas is often characterized
by cultures of silence, shame, and stigma (Pető 2016: 38). In many conflicts, the systematic
abuses suffered by women, and their particular vulnerability to abuse on the basis of their
gender, are suppressed by dominant narratives of what occurred. In some instances, rape is
employed in official narratives of what has occurred as a way to emphasize brutality (such as
in relation to the Rape of Nanking, or the Rape of Belgium), and in other instances sexual
violence is so integral to the traumatic events that have occurred that they include direct
narration around sexual violence (such as the Mỹ Lai Massacre or the Sierra Leone Civil
War). However, in many more instances the presence and prevalence of sexual violence are
excluded from formal narratives of what has occurred (Pető 2016).
The silencing of narratives around women’s victimization is argued by Abiral (2016) to
reproduce narratives of feminine respectability and masculine resilience which facilities rape.
Looking at women who were subjected to sexual violence during imprisonment during the
1980 Turkish coup, Abiral (2016: 95–96) explains that narratives of rape were downplayed
and discounted because they challenged both the state’s claim to the justice of their imprison-
ment of radicals, and the dominant discourse of strong masculine resistance from those who
were imprisoned. Both sides, Abiral argues, discredited and excluded women’s experiences
of sexual violence from formal acts of memorization. Abiral (2016: 100) maintains that this
erasure, by both state officials and women’s male colleagues, reinforced women’s vulnerability
by hiding violence that had occurred and emphasizing that if women had experienced
violence they were culpable for it. To admit to the violence that had occurred, and to
therefore admit the gendered vulnerability of female inmates, would have disrupted the
dissidents’ narrative of masculine strength and resilience during incarceration and existing
feminine notions of feminine respectability that placed the blame for sexual violence onto
the victim. This has meant that the existing memorization practices in Turkey around the
1980 coup contribute to women’s gendered insecurity, and foster the exact attitudes which

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made sexual violence a potent tool for punishing women for their involvement in dissident
politics.
The example of Turkish women’s experiences during the 1980 coup is instructive of
both the ways in which gendered insecurities make traumatic experiences possible, and
of the ways in which memorization practices can reproduce those gendered insecurities.
Abiral’s (2016) work on Turkey is also indicative of the dominant strand of work on gender,
memorization, and trauma that has been conducted so far in its focus on breaking silences
around unspoken traumas and untold narratives of women’s gendered insecurity. Although
there has been discussion on a wide range of contexts (such as experiences of female com-
batants, interpretation of war fiction on women’s trauma, or bringing light to previously
obscured experiences of sexual violence) the focus of research on gender and memorization
of trauma has not extended to systematically exploring the memorization of men’s gendered
insecurity as soldiers and legitimate victim/perpetrators of war.

Gendering insecurity and memories of trauma

Considering the origins of trauma studies in research about shell shock, it is interesting that
so far the studies of gender and collective trauma have not systematically addressed the
question of gender, insecurity, and trauma in male soldiers. While initial studies of trauma
and female combatants exist (Sasson-Levy 2016; Doğan 2016) and a significant body of work
on psychological trauma and masculinities after war has been produced over the past decades
(Mazlin 2010; Morag 2009; Meyer 2009; Lerner 2003), the majority of work on memory
and collective trauma from a gendered perspective has been on locating women’s experi-
ences, articulating how these experiences are gendered, and elucidating the ways in which
memorization of collective trauma has relied on regressive notions of femininity. Missing
from this picture are the ways in which some gendered insecurities are presented as traumatic
while others are framed as heroic sacrifices.
Other scholars have noted the way in which women’s experiences of trauma and gender-
based violence are devalued and discounted by formal memorization processes, such that they
are excluded from formal processes of commemoration (Pető and Altınay 2016). This
argument can reasonably be extended to apply to men’s experiences of wartime trauma due
to participation in armed conflict and the particular gendered vulnerability that they face on
the basis of their expendability as armed fighters. As much as smoothing over and processing
traumatic events, formal practices of memorization look to reframe instances of violence
within existing narratives of heroism and success so as to erase the trauma that they contain
(Edkins 2003a).
This can be seen most clearly in the commemoration of the dead after war. Formal sites
of commemoration for atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, bring the
trauma of events that have occurred to the forefront, keeping the horror of events in primary
focus. In contrast, war memorials, cenotaphs, and military shrines have a tendency to com-
memorate agentic sacrifice as a way to frame violence and death. Sites of military remembrance
look to justify the violence and loss experienced by soldiers. These sites downplay both
gendered insecurity and the traumatic component of wartime experiences, producing active
narratives of soldiers’ choice to fight and the necessary losses they endure (Basham 2016).
While the lives of soldiers are framed as grievable and worthy of commemoration, their
deaths are put forward as necessary sacrifices, mourned for their loss and celebrated for having
chosen to take up the call to fight (Edkins 2003b: 81). This framing of violence downplays
what Barry (2010) has called the expendability of men in war. Men are mobilized and made

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available for war through norms of masculinity that demand men answer the call to fight
when war erupts. Barry (2010: 106) argues that this constitutes a particular kind of gendered
insecurity for men; they are made to be expendable for the nation in exchange for receiving
patriarchal privileges. This is a particular gendered insecurity because of the way in which
masculinity demands that for someone to adopt the mantle of a ‘real man’ they must fulfil
stereotyped tropes of what a man is, including being available to fight and die. Barry (2010:
8) argues that every “society makes men’s readiness to fight in combat a matter of their
manhood”. This produces a particular kind of gendered insecurity that is excluded from
formal acts of memorization: the social coercion of men to fight and potentially die in armed
conflict.
The commemoration of soldiers who have died is at the heart of many military memorial
sites and days. Many of the most significant sites of military commemoration, such as the
Scottish National War Memorial, the Australian Shrine of Remembrance, or the South
African National Museum of Military History, are defined by rolls of honour, listing the
names of those (primarily enlisted men) who have died in armed conflict on behalf of their
nation. While these sites downplay the traumatic components of the events they memorialize,
they remain sites of grief for those enlisted citizens who have died. Memorials for fallen
military personnel focus intimately on their sacrifice on behalf of the presumed audience of
civilian men and women. They are often adorned with reminders of what those who have
died gave up on behalf of those who now attend their memorial, demanding memorization
and grief. These memorials enshrine the gendered logic of masculine protectors and noble
sacrifice, while hiding traumas that are placed beyond the logic of militarized masculinity.
In this sense it is possible to look at Butler’s notion of grievable lives to understand how
combatant deaths are memorialized while their trauma is not.
Butler (2009: 15) has suggested that the grievability of a life is determined by the extent
to which a life is recognized as a life. Grief, Butler argues, stems from the recognition of
both what a life is and, importantly, of what a life could have been. While some lives are
recognizable as lives, and therefore as worthy of grief, others are not and cannot be included
within our memorization practices due to their unintelligibility. At the same time, the degree
to which lives are deemed grievable is determined by the way in which they are positioned
within the gendered hierarchies of meaning and value (Pain 2015b: 83). The soldiers whose
lives are commemorated in honour rolls are commemorated as military men whose voluntary
sacrifice is given in the name of the nation; they are commemorated by the extent to which
their lives are recognizable within narratives of militarized masculinity, protection, and
service. Their grievability is a component of their coherence to narratives of male sacrifice
and protection, their loss is made valuable and intelligible because they are framed as
masculine protectors who have died on behalf of the feminized nation.
In most instances the civilian victims of war are not memorized in sites of collective
formal commemoration (Basham 2016: 888). Instead, Noakes (2010) suggests that in most
instances the commemoration of civilian victims in war would require an unacceptable
recognition of the killing involved in war. For most war memorials it is the death and
sacrifice of (largely male) soldiers that is deemed worthy of grief, the inclusion of those whom
they might have killed complicates this picture, disrupting the purity of soldiers’ noble
sacrifice (Basham 2016). Soldiers’ sacrifice is directly framed on behalf of the nation, which
is feminized as a collective body in need of defence from a masculine protector. Recognition
of civilian deaths would complicate this potent gendered narrative and demand recognition
that fallen soldiers not only defend the weak, but also participate in killing themselves
(Noakes 2010).

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While most war memorials do not commemorate those civilians who are killed in war,
there are some exceptions. In sites such as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, where
‘innocent’ victims are commemorated, they are memorialized in line with safe narratives of
the vulnerable and insecure victim. Their lives are not recognized as worthy of grief because
of the voluntary sacrifice they rendered to the nation, as is the case with soldiers, but due to
their innocence as feminized civilians. These lives are deemed grievable precisely due to their
insecurity, as women, children, or innocent men unable to fend for themselves and preyed
upon by a demonized military other. While soldiers are commemorated for their agentic
strength to give up their lives, the victims of the Nanjing Massacre are recognized due to
their ability to be read within pre-existing narratives of innocent civilians preyed upon by a
savage foreign military power. This relies on a similar gendered configuration of trauma,
although placing the emphasis on the agency of a foreign power rather than the honoured
dead.
In both the example of military memorials for service persons, and in the sites of com-
memoration for civilian victims of foreign-led atrocities, the grief that is sought coheres
closely to the gendered narratives of Just Warriors and Beautiful Souls (Elshtain 1987; Basham
2016). Male soldiers’ deaths might be commemorated, but not their trauma, their pain, or
the unintelligibility of their participation in mass violence. It is necessary that the particular
gendered insecurity faced by men due to their military expendability is not recognized in
formal commemoration. To recognize this insecurity and the trauma of men who are coerced
to fight and kill on behalf of the state would sully the narrative of their agentic sacrifice and
complicate recognition of the fallen as grievable according to their performance of militarized
masculinity. Similarly, women’s experience of collective violence might be commemorated
when they are the victims of foreign aggression, but not as soldiers, as victims of their own
state’s predation, or for their other suffering experienced as victims of militarized societies
(Basham 2016).
Shadowing each of the examples of formal memorization explored in this chapter are
collective traumas that remain ungrievable, reproducing gendered insecurities and locating
certain populations as the acceptable inheritors of violence. Wartime violence is deemed
acceptable against male soldiers, as the extent to which their humanity is recognized is the
extent to which their gendered performance coheres to the strictures of militarized
masculinity. Within this limited narrative frame there is not room to collectively grieve men
(particularly young, racialized men) as a group who may endure a particular trauma on the
basis of their expendability. Similarly, the examples previously raised in this chapter of
the sexual abuse of women dissidents in Turkey is beyond the scope of formal memorization
due to the disruption it would cause to the existing attempts to narrate and smooth over that
period of violence (Abiral 2016). In each of the cases explored, practices of memorization
are profoundly gendered, they draw on discourses of how masculine and feminine subjects
should behave if they wish to be recognized as grievable lives. Their trauma is only
recognizable and deemed worthy of memorization to the extent that it coheres to gendered
narratives of who might be vulnerable, and in what ways, erasing some gendered insecurities
while naturalizing others.

Conclusion
In light of the significance granted to the notion of trauma within Security Studies literature
on memory, this chapter has advocated for a gendered framework as a necessary step forward
in understanding how practices of memorization relate to trauma and gendered insecurity

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(Auchter 2014; Bell 2003; Resende and Budryte 2014; Bartelson 2006). The inclusion of a
gendered lens to the study of memory and trauma both challenges us to read gender into
acts of memorization where it might not initially be explicit, and to locate sites of gendered
trauma that have been erased from formal commemoration. Further developing feminist
thought on the relationship between gendered insecurity, memory, and trauma also has the
capacity to enrich existing work being done by feminists on sources of gendered insecurity
(Fox 2004; Marhia 2013). Engaging in this work in a more sustained way might produce
new pathways to explore memorization of trauma through current work on the positive use
of silence (Dingli 2015; Parpart 2010), the relationship between interpersonal violence and
war (Pain 2015a), or narrative approaches to security (Wibben 2011). The unique frame of
trauma as a site of unintelligibility of experiences aligns uniquely with the interests of Feminist
Security Studies in silences and meaning creation. Initial sites of exploration outlined in this
chapter suggest that memory and trauma are valuable sites for deeper future engagements.

Notes
1 Scholarship on memorization and trauma has looked at a wide range of outlets including plays,
biographies, and fictionalized accounts. However, this chapter focuses specifically on formal and
collective sites of commemoration such as physical memorials and memorial days.
2 There is a rich literature on enduring collective trauma and healing in post-conflict societies such as
South Africa. This scholarship has drawn heavily on theorization that came out of the Holocaust and
its enduring impact on international Jewish communities (for example, see Gobodo-Madikizela
2008).

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 24
THE GENDERED MYTH OF
PROTECTION
Cecilia Åse

Introduction
The myth of protection is based on the belief that men can and should protect women and
children. This gendered myth positions men as the defenders and guardians of women’s
physical welfare and security. It associates safety and control with masculinity and vulnerabil-
ity and dependency with femininity. In the name of protection, women’s agency is restricted,
and men’s control over women’s bodies and sexuality stays unopposed. Feminist thinkers and
activists argue that while the myth declares safety and protection, it actually justifies gender
hierarchies, unequal citizenship, and aggressive international politics. The myth of protection,
writes J. Ann Tickner (2001), is crucial to uphold the legitimacy of war and the impossibility
of peace.
The gender and sexuality norms of the protection myth span international relations and
military violence between states as well as domestic politics. Providing protection is what
ultimately justifies the liberal state and legitimates its monopoly on violence. But, as Carole
Pateman (1988) and Iris Marion Young (2003) expose, the state’s protection effectively
incorporates gender. For women, protection is conditional on heterosexual accessibility and
‘honourable’ femininity. This identity subsumes men’s ‘natural’ right to women’s sexuality.
The ‘honourable’ woman is promised safety and security if she gives up independence and
control over her body and sexuality. In this sense the myth idealizes what is, in effect, a
‘protection racket’: Women pay with their freedom for a protection that is not provided.
In this chapter I expand on how feminist scholars have analysed and contested the gendered
myth of protection. There is a strong feminist tradition of critiquing patriarchal arguments
that justify women’s political subjugation to men with their putative ‘weakness’ and ‘need’
to be protected. The argument that, for her own good, a woman must be under a man’s
political, economic, and moral guardianship, was criticized by classic thinkers such as Mary
Wollstonecraft (1792), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), and Virginia Woolf (1938).
Contemporary feminist theorists have continued this historical tradition. This chapter focuses
on key analyses, including the radical conceptualizations of the myth of protection put
forward in the 1970s and the present-day feminist postcolonial dialogues on the role of inter-
national norms of protection in global politics. I argue that the protection myth uses gender
to naturalize power relations and that unequal gender norms consequently define

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conceptualizations of agency, citizenship, and security. In demonstrating how protection

depends on gendered hierarchies and women’s subjugation, feminist analyses question both
the legitimacy and acceptability of state sovereignty and international politics.
The chapter focuses on the ideas and identities that the gendered myth of protection
actualizes, as well as on its concrete politics and implications, and its effects for understand-
ings of citizenship and agency. In the first section I examine the construction of protector/
protected identities and how the gendered myth of protection has brought these identities
into national security discourse and war-making. The second section develops feminist inter-
rogations into the discourses and institutions that claim to deliver protection and the political
limitations of a gender-protection framework are laid out. The protection myth’s significance
for women’s citizenship and political agency are discussed in the third section. In the con-
clusion I emphasize the obstacles to challenging the gendered myth of protection and
highlight the pressing need for feminist interventions.

Protector/protected ideas and identities

At the core of the protection myth is the creation and preservation of a gender binary. The
association of women/femininities with that which should be protected – such as the family/
household, the territory/homeland, and the in-group’s culture and tradition – is decisive, as
is the incorporation of manliness and masculinity into the identity of the protector. Protector/
protected identities also depend on intersectional categories based on race/ethnicity, class,
and sexuality. In particular, race and gender intersect in the construction of a heterosexually
desirable ‘white femininity’ as the requirement for being one of ‘our’ protected women. This
racialized construction leads to women of colour being additionally exposed to violence and
vulnerability.
In national security discourses, those who protect and those who are protected are repre-
sented as “Just Warriors” and “Beautiful Souls”, respectively, in the words of Jean Bethke
Elshtain (1987). These archaic gender roles are both opposite and interconnected; they ‘need’
each other. Women have traditionally not been called upon to bear arms, but they have been
helpmeets of military violence because they symbolize that which the protectors should fight
for and protect. In these constructions, the ‘white woman’ typifies the status of a protected
object. White femininity is the privileged ‘reason’ for protection (Shome 2001). In Western
countries, war propaganda that portrays the homeland as a white, sexually vulnerable woman
or young girl has been common. In the inter-war years, representations of the national
territory as a female body whose chastity was threatened by an aggressive, often racialized,
masculine enemy were prevalent in Europe (Theweleit 1995). Moreover, during the Cold
War, strategic thinking was rife with gender imagery. US narratives portrayed European
countries as sexualized bodies, open for communist penetration. France, for example, was
equated to a hysterical woman who did not know what was good for her (Costigliola 1997).
Keeping bodies/states apart and controlling sick or feminized states was vital in the geopolitics
of the time.
Protection narratives have also been in operation at the start and continuation of the
global war on terror. Feminist research identifies how certain strategic representations of
masculinity and protection were decisive to gain support for this war as an appropriate
response to the September 2001 attacks. The West’s handling of 9/11 has been characterized
as a version of ‘hypermasculinity’ that includes reactionary and rigid gender roles, violent
retribution, militarized political reactions, and a strong focus on social order and control
(Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006; Young 2003). Following the attacks, American women’s

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agency was downplayed. They were positioned as passive victims and objects that the national
subject should have protected (Hunt 2002). These representations fuelled convictions that
aggressive military action was necessary and unavoidable.
Following 9/11, the protection myth was reworked on orientalist lines to centre on a
victimized Muslim/third-world woman ‘needing’ protection from the West. In this connec-
tion, protection equalled “white men saving brown women from brown men” in feminist
theorist Gayatri Spivak’s (1988: 296) well-known expression. Efforts to ‘save’ women or
‘civilize’ subordinated peoples have historically been conditioned by gender and race. In
colonial discourse, white men gained masculinized and racialized authority by conquering
‘virgin’ lands or ‘rescuing’ non-Western women through, for example, body policing and
unveiling procedures (McClintock 1995). European women presumably needed protection
because of the ‘uncontrollable’ sexuality that was projected onto colonized males, who were
attributed with aggressive sexual urges or constructed as effeminate and feminized (Pettman
1996; Stoler 2010). Colonialist thinking justified racism and white supremacy through
protector–protected binaries and identities.
In contemporary Western narratives, protecting the victims of other societies’ patriarchal
values and traditions can motivate war-making and make it appear noble, righteous, and even
feminist. Drawing on liberal feminist agendas, fighting gender inequality became a justificatory
motif of the war on terror. These conceptualizations frame women and girls as the tokens
of their cultural or religious context. They are transformed into faceless victims used to prop
up the Western self and to legitimate war-making (Lippe 2012). When the enemy is linked
to gender oppression, military interventions, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, appear
more desirable and can gain political legitimacy. Thus, women’s and girls’ physical
vulnerability and subjugation around the globe are used as a motif to justify violent military
action on the part of the US and its allies.
The gendered myth of protection has influenced strategic security discourse and foreign
policy choices in the West from the early 20th century until today. It reoccurs in colonialist
undertakings and is fundamental to aggressive and strategic thinking and war-making. But
the myth also explicitly affects non-belligerent security doctrines that authorize military
violence only in self-defence. Border control and protection of a feminized homeland are
masculinized activities also in countries that strongly repudiate aggressive military action and
war-making (Åse 2016; Prokkola and Ridanpää 2015). Although a protector would seemingly
be content with protecting ‘his’ nation/woman, the myth of protection actually feeds into
the ‘cult of the offensive’, that is, the prioritization of bellicose military measures and
capabilities (Wilcox 2009). A proper protector requires military capabilities large enough to
either deter or positively conquer a potential attacker. This dynamic denies defensive security
alternatives and paves the way for increased military expenditure and aggressive security
strategies.
The gendering of protector/protected identities constructs war-making and military
conflict as a contest between masculine belligerents. Winning a war is represented as proving
oneself to be the strongest and most masculine protector. In this sense, war is ‘about’ mas-
culinity, and contests over masculinity motivate and justify military violence (Enloe 2007).
Because masculine credentials are at stake, de-masculinization – through, for example, being
positively identified as a sissy or a wimp – is not only degrading but also militarily weakening.
The ‘wimp factor’ is an important catalyst of the gender scripts that underlie war-making
(Cohn 1993).
However, although representations of masculinity and masculine muscle are primary in
warfare, gender scholars emphasize that there are no universal criteria for masculinity

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(Connell 1995). Masculinities vary between historical and national contexts, social groups,
and identities. The meanings of masculinity in relation to war are also shifting. Kimberly
Hutchings (2008) points to the different versions of masculinities that feminist scholars have
uncovered. These include the rational, calculating, and disembodied masculinity of war and
nuclear strategists (Cohn 1987); the highly emotional and expressive masculinity that followed
the experiences of the First World War and prescribed masculine rejuvenation through
sacrifice and a ‘cult of the fallen’ (Mosse 1990); and the forcefully potent masculinity
associated with the status of ‘global hegemonic masculine heroic protector’ that the US
leadership created for itself following the 9/11 attacks (Messerschmidt 2013; Young 2003).
Rather than any substantive meaning or definition of masculinity, it is its relational status
– i.e. that masculinity and femininity are opposing and mutually exclusive categories – that
invoke masculinity as a fundamental component of military and foreign policy conflicts
(Hutchings 2008).
The relational property of masculinity reinforces the protector/protected binary. Different
forms of masculinity share the vital characteristic that they are not feminine. Masculinity is
constructed in opposition to femininity and devalues that which is constructed as feminine.
In the hierarchy of masculinities, masculinity associated with femininity is at the lowest
level. In this logic, being feminized is necessarily de-masculinizing, dishonouring, and
debasing (Connell 1995). This means that although masculinity is predominantly constructed
homosocially – i.e. in relations between men – it nonetheless involves women and femininity.
Generally, men can use constructions of women/femininity to diminish or institute masculine
status and prestige in relation to other men. Women/femininity is a form of “masculinity
currency” (Kimmel 1996: 7).
In accordance with the hierarchies of masculinities, male protectors’ masculinity is
confirmed by excluding women and femininity. Historically, mandatory and exclusively male
conscription have provided a strong association between being a protector and masculinity
(Kronsell 2012). As a male rite of passage, conscription encourages men’s loyalty with other
men as, in Spike Peterson’s (1999: 43) words, they “play out the us/them script of protecting
‘their own’ women and violating the enemy’s men/women”. The homosocial logics of
masculinity constructions reinforce women’s vulnerability in war. When military conflict is
represented as a contest of masculinities, women/femininities provide a male protector
both possibilities to increase his own masculine status and the means to de-masculinize the
opponent by getting at ‘his’ women and children. Women and feminized others are made
vulnerable when the abuse and contempt of anything associated with femininity are repre-
sented as a possibility to increase one’s masculinity and – presumably – also to increase one’s
chances of beating an enemy.
Moreover, women’s bodies are represented in ways that quite literally rationalize gendered
protection. They are constructed as personifications of a national territory, as keepers of the
history and cultural traditions of communities, and as the biological reproducers of these
communities’ future members (Yuval-Davis 1997). This position makes women and girls
vulnerable to attacks in war and armed conflicts, creating situations in which, as Jan Jindy
Pettman (1996: 101) describes it, “[b]odies, boundaries, violence and power, come together
in devastating combinations”. Although both men/boys and women/girls are targets of rape
and sexual violence, their physical and sexual vulnerability and the symbolical values attached
to their bodies differ. The notion that female bodies can be perceived as enemy territory or
property underscores practices such as the systematic rape of women and girls (Mostov 2000;
Seifert 1996). Protector/protected identities construct the sexual assault or rape of individ-
ual women as a possible way to disgrace a whole nation and as an insult to the masculine

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adversary, who is ashamed of his failure to protect ‘his’ women. Forcefully impregnating
women destroys them as biological reproducers and terminates the community’s genetic and
cultural lineage (Hansen 2001). This means that women are attacked in their role as per-
sonifications of a political community. It also means that war and military conflict are
conditioned on the preparedness to commit rape and other acts of sexual violence.
Importantly, the protection myth both idealizes and devalues women and femininity. On
the one hand, the myth requires men to invest sexually and emotionally into an idealized
and feminized object whose protection is their masculine duty. On the other hand, the
violence and war-making that protecting this idealized femininity justifies involves
de-masculinizing and feminizing the enemy or opponent, which might also include sexually
attacking ‘his’ women. In this patriarchal arrangement, treating an adversary as if he was a
penetrable woman becomes a form of humiliation and degradation. Representations of
femininity are used to emasculate and, in so doing, to humiliate and damage the opponent.
Feminist scholars demonstrate how the myth of protection relies on gender hierarchies
that appear to make war noble and men chivalrous, and to protect women and children from
harm and suffering, but in fact, the myth is fundamentally implicated in the insecurity and
violence from which it ensures protection. Recent theorizations of the protection myth
(Sjoberg 2013; Sjoberg and Peet 2011) argue that its consequences extend to civilian
victimization in general. By not fighting with enemy soldiers or military forces but rather
victimizing civilians, one warring party asserts his virility and dominance and simultaneously
emasculates and reveals his belligerent’s feminized inadequacy. In accordance with protector–
protected identities, targeting and hurting civilians translates symbolically to reaching women
in their prescribed role as a sign of community, territory, and the in-group. As Laura Sjoberg
and Jessica Peet (2011: 176) contend, “[s]tates are actually attacking women when they are
attacking civilians”. In this understanding, the gendered myth of protection is a focal point
of contemporary war and its horrific targeting of civilian populations.

Re/negotiations of protection politics

Since the 2000s, the international community has been engaged in reworking the rhetoric
and politics of protection, including its gender dimensions. Important international initiatives
include the norms of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Women, Peace and
Security agenda (WPS). The former principle was endorsed by the United Nations in 2005
and recognizes the international community’s responsibility to protect populations from
genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, the latter represents
several Security Council Resolutions (2000–2015) specifically addressed at protecting women
and girls and ensuring women’s participation in building sustainable peace. An important
background for these new international frameworks was the political experiences of the
1990s, particularly the Balkan Wars and the genocide in Rwanda. These events illustrated
the horrendous consequences of the international community’s failure to protect civilians
and drew international attention to the gender consequences of armed conflicts (Hall and
Shepherd 2013).
Feminist activists and researchers acknowledge that the international norms of protection
represent significant achievements in highlighting and supporting women’s political role
in global politics, but they also warn against the misappropriation of feminist demands in
protection and securitization narratives. Feminists stress that, in itself, the protector–protected
relationship is fundamentally unequal and invites paternalism. Iris Marion Young (2003: 20)
warns privileged women not to identify with the masculine protector in relation to victimized

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and vulnerable others. Applications to protect and ‘rescue’ non-Western women and girls
from their national and societal contexts support white Western supremacy (Eisenstein 2007;
Hunt 2002).
Framing international norms around (a lack of) protection and mobilizing on the grounds
that women require protection could obscure gender power and run the risk of victimizing
women and viewing their gender, or even their bodies, as the cause of their vulnerability.
Critical feminist discussions of the WPS have noted that problematic essentialist understandings
of women and girls characterize these UN-initiated norms and policies. Critiques have
concerned the equalling of gender with women and the unwillingness to problematize
masculinities and discuss men as perpetrators of sexual violence. The lack of relational and
structural power perspectives that characterizes these initiatives has also been emphasized
(Puechguirbal 2010; Shepherd 2008). Moreover, a focus on protection limits the possibilities
for a more fundamental questioning of war-making and military violence as necessary and
acceptable political actions. Placing women’s and girls’ vulnerability and exposure to rape
and sexual violence in the context of regulating warfare prioritizes a military or soldier per-
spective. For example, UN troops’ involvement in sexualized violence, rape, and misconduct
has been targeted, but from the perspective that these crimes discredit the ‘protectors’/
peacekeepers and delegitimize the UN and its military missions. These understandings
consider women’s and girls’ vulnerability and exposure to rape and sexual violence as pro-
blematic only to the extent that it can be regarded as a threat to the legitimacy of war (Jansson
and Eduards 2016). In this feminist interpretation, the significance of WPS narratives is to
legitimate war-making rather than to protect women and girls.
Moreover, the myth of protection is problematic not only in the context of the UN and
the international community; its consequences are also evident within nation states and in
domestic politics. The conflation of state protection, violence, and masculinity is particularly
challenging from a feminist perspective. For Judith Hicks Stiehm (1982), the biggest problem
with the protection myth is the exclusive privilege it bestows on men to exercise violence.
She argues that defending the state should be the responsibility of all citizens, terminating
the roles of the protector and the protected. Feminists discuss whether the recognition of
women as full-blown military protectors with combat skills and capacities leads to a de-
masculinization of the protector’s identity and a discontinuation of the protection myth. In
many countries, restrictions on women’s and gays’ admission into armed forces have been
lifted, and sexual discrimination and LGBT issues are beginning to be addressed (Sundevall
and Persson 2016). Research discussing women’s entry into armed forces as ‘full’ soldiers has
recognized that while stereotypes are certainly challenged, military organizations’ reactions
to a changing gender composition cannot be interpreted as a straightforward de-gendering
of military work or a re-negotiation of gender hierarchies (Persson 2011). But changing
conceptualizations of masculinity within military organizations have also been understood as
a possible breach of the myth of protection. In particular, a new ‘peacebuilder masculinity’,
which dismantles gender hierarchies and emphasizes values and competences other than those
traditionally associated with military masculinities, has the potential to challenge gendered
protection (Duncanson 2013).
Including women in military institutions does not necessarily challenge the masculinization
of the protector identities or sever the links between representations of masculinities and
violence (Eisenstein 2007: 6). Women’s association with the identity of the protected stands
in the way of their performing state-sponsored violence. Societal discomfort with women’s
combat roles is signalled, for example, through language: Women are commonly designated
‘women soldiers’, while the generic term ‘soldier’ is reserved for men. They are seldom

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portrayed as agents of lethal violence or as performing heroic war deeds; rather, they are
associated with sexual or familial roles as daughters, girlfriends or mothers in political and
media discourse (Ette 2013; Repo 2008). A case in point is the widely publicized story of
US war heroine Jessica Lynch, who was injured in Iraq in 2003. She was rescued from an
Iraq hospital in an operation that the US military planned, filmed, and staged for propaganda
reasons. Lynch’s heroism consisted in successfully being protected and taken back to the
‘home front’ (Prividera and Howard III 2006).
Although individual women obviously perform soldiers’ duties and take part in military
violence, their standing as protected remains robust and difficult to surrender. A female
soldier might be as professional and capable as a male soldier, but her gender requires
her to simultaneously be vulnerable and in need of protection (Sjoberg 2007). For a woman
to appropriate military violence and a warrior identity is less of a challenge to the myth of
protection than to renounce the identity as protected. Justifications of military violence
depend profoundly on the idea that women – who ‘require’ protection – provide a ‘good
cause’ for war.

Agency and victimization

Feminist theorists claim that what counts as state protection actually supports women’s
vulnerability. In this understanding victimization is the core of the protection myth, and
associating women/femininities with dependency and a lack of agency is critical. Writing in
1977, Susan Rae Peterson claims that rape demonstrates that the modern liberal state does
not successfully protect women from coercive acts by others, and that women’s citizenship
is therefore incomplete. For her rape exemplifies how the state turns into a “male protection
racket” (Peterson 1977: 30). Women are conditioned to ‘avoid’ rape and sexual assault by,
for example, adjusting their appearance and restricting their free movement. These
intimidating gender norms facilitate the social control of women and girls by targeting, for
example, their clothing or appearance. The logic is that if a woman restricts her independence
and limits her agency – i.e., if she conforms to normative femininity – then she can count
on protection. But at the same time, this gender conformity supposedly guarantees that she
will not need protection. Consequently, a woman is worthy of protection only if she never
needs it. In this argument, the state’s claim to protect women totally lacks substance. In this
analysis state ‘protection’ actually sustains women’s systemic insecurity, dependency, and
susceptibility to rigid and limiting gender norms.
The feminist argument is that the liberal state’s claim to protect its citizens is in effect
conditioned on the denial of women’s agency and bodily autonomy. A failure to safeguard
women’s integrity defines the foundational thinking behind modern state-building. In
classical political theory, protection is the highest good: it is what justifies the existence of
the state. For social contract theorists, rational agreement in the form of a social contract
institutes political order and transfers to the sovereign state the supreme right to use violence
to protect “life, liberty and the estate” (Locke [1690/1772] 2004: 276). As political order is
established, civil society is created, and while masculine citizens become each other’s political
equals, women are not incorporated as full citizens.
The social contract depends on a sexual contract that affirms women’s political and sexual
subordination to men, according to Carole Pateman (1988). The delimitation of civil society
– through the public/private divide – is crucial in this regard. Women are considered to
belong to the private sphere. This sphere is a necessary prerequisite for political order, but
it remains outside what is considered political. Placing women outside of the public/civil

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sphere establishes men’s ‘natural’ sex right, their control over and right to women’s sexed
bodies. In this argument, the state grants men the power both to define and control women’s
bodies and sexuality. Men’s sex right can manifest itself in the design of the marriage contract
or in social institutions such as prostitution or trafficking. Women’s citizenship is conditioned
on being sexually available, which is an identity that defies bodily autonomy and incorporates
neither agency nor independence.
Feminist thinkers have often turned to issues of coerced heterosexuality, sexualized vio-
lence, and a lack of sexual integrity and agency to understand how state fundamentals – the
rule of law, citizenship, and public/private distinctions – are gendered (see MacKinnon
1989). These analyses underscore how state-building has incorporated women’s sexual
availability. Because men’s unregulated and ‘private’ access to their bodies is a condition for
political order, the state cannot guarantee women and girls’ bodily integrity. Consequently,
state protection is not fulfilled. If women’s sexual availability rather than the protection
of their bodily integrity describes politics, then gendered insecurity – and not the equal
protection of all citizens – defines the political order.
Feminist thinkers emphasize how, in the give-and-take of protection politics, women give
up agency and autonomy. For Iris Marion Young (2003) the logic of masculinist protection
places state protection on a par with paternalistic familial relations. Thereby, women and
children are reduced to a subordinate position in both the state and the family or household.
In exchange for protection, women are required to concede from politics and decision
making. In the logic of state protection politics, constructing women and girls as innocent,
weak, and without agency justifies the strong and protective state. “Those protected are
required to be objectified for the protector to feel safe and sovereign in his position” (Eduards
2007: 52).
To be ‘safe’ and ‘protected’, women and girls should renounce responsibility for their
own protection: “Beautiful Souls” should not (have to) fight or defend themselves. From
the perspective of the protection myth, women and girls are safer without agency. Gendering
dependency and victimhood strengthens and legitimates protection (Åse 2015). It should be
noted that within the liberal state, racialized and sexualized narratives also figure strongly
in establishing who is awarded protection at all. Young and fecund white women can
be represented as ‘ideal victims’ (Christie 1986) especially worthy of state protection. In
particular, victimizing such women can confirm the protector’s status. But in colonialist
narratives, ‘brown women’ can also be used to bolster the liberal state when they are
represented as victims in need of ‘rescue’ from their cultures and societies. Establishing a lack
of agency and instituting gendered dependency safeguards the protector’s status as a legitimate
protector, in relation to both those defined as ‘our’ and ‘others’’ women and girls.
The coupling of protection with the disavowal of agency has been critiqued in relation
both to gendered citizenship within liberal states and contemporary international initiatives
such as the WPS agenda. Feminists have argued that international norms and UN resolutions
that allegedly protect women actually remove their agency by ascribing them an essentialized
and subordinated identity as victims (Puechguirbal 2010; Shepherd 2008). According to
Vivienne Jabri (2007: 120), it is important to note that victims are rendered vulnerable
through their very construction as victims. The protection myth emphasizes this dynamic.
Constructing women and girls as victims who ‘need’ protection opens them up to further
victimization: Their status as objects to be acted upon, rather than agents in their own right,
is consolidated, as is the acute physical vulnerability of being a venue through which mas-
culinity is created and can prove itself. Representations of violent and sexually aggressive
masculinities – which women and girls should fear and need the ‘good’ or ‘benevolent’

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protector to be safe from – strengthen the political appeal of the protection myth. It is
signalled to women and girls both that masculinities are dangerous and sexually aggressive
and that protection is possible only through subordination to the masculine protector. These
representations tell women and girls that fear is a necessary precondition of security, and that
loyalty and obedience to the protector is the best instrument for safety and well-being.

Conclusion
Feminist thinkers have consistently critiqued the gendered myth of protection and dismantled
the idea that women and feminized others should be protected by men. Calling the protector/
protected binary into question and de-constructing the gendered identities of the masculine
protector and the feminine protected, challenges the external and internal authority of the
sovereign liberal state. A prerequisite for a state’s sovereignty is the successful protection
of its citizens, which is seen in terms of upholding the monopoly of violence internally and
the unconditional protection of state territory externally. The sovereign state is one, and the
legitimacy of its (internal and external) violence is conditioned on this imperative oneness.
When it comes to the legitimacy of the sovereign state, unanimity is required. Differing
perspectives, criticism, and critiques become dangerous when they challenge the foundations
of the political order. As Iris Marion Young (2003: 14) states, there is a bargain implicit in
the protector role, demanding women either to submit to protection or to become outcasts
who, without state backing and support, can be legitimately attacked by “others’” violent
masculinities.
The political effectiveness of the gendered myth of protection lies in how it promises
protection from violence and vulnerability. The belief that men must and should protect
women and children comes forth as the only possible ‘answer’ in situations of violence, fear,
and insecurity. This means that safety and security become conditioned on accepting the
myth as reality and conforming to restricting and unequal gender norms. It also means that
other ways of thinking about human security are diminished and that criticism of gender
hierarchies and rigid gender and sexuality norms can be conceptualized as a security threat.
As Cynthia Enloe (2007: 61) notes, turning the world into a dangerous place unmistakably
benefits the protector. A task for feminist scholars and activists is to find ways to counter
fear-producing narratives and to think critically and work imaginatively to conceptualize new
forms of agency, citizenship, safety and security. A necessary component of this work is to
question what is taken for granted, to de-naturalize and politicize, and to move the boundaries
between what is considered necessary and unchangeable and what is open for negotiation
and change. This requires a disengagement from hierarchies, and unitary views and perspec-
tives, and an engagement in manifoldness and uncertainty. It requires that we enter those
places that, according to the protector, are unsafe and dangerous.

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 25
SEX, SEXUALITY,
REPRODUCTION, AND
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
Anna L. Weissman

Introduction
Reproduction has been a key focus of feminist theory, though its far-reaching and multi-
level security implications have not been adequately explored. This chapter considers how
normative reproduction interpellates both gendered subjects and a state system that reflects
this patriarchal ordering, and leads to a construction of threat that plays out across women’s
bodies.
Introducing the theory of ‘repronormativity’, this chapter shows how it structures the
state, society, and the perception of domestic and international threat. Repronormativity
describes the normative parameters limiting reproduction. It divides societies into desirable
and undesirable reproducers, those who are encouraged or discouraged from procreating.
‘Desirable’ producers fit the template of the ideal citizen – the heterosexual, cis-gendered
member of the hegemonic identity group; the restrictions of this template cross many axes
of identity, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, ability, and sexuality. These desirable
producers are often incentivized to procreate and parent, which can include the provision
of financial benefits and/or open access to artificial reproduction technologies (ART) and
adoption. Undesirable reproducers are disincentivized and can face significant legal and social
barriers to procreation and parenting.
The first section establishes key feminist theories in understanding the gendered and
hetero-sexed concepts in reproduction, and highlights the construction of procreative gender
roles as foundational to patriarchal society. The sections that follow examine the connections
between birth and belonging, and identify the important distinctions between the ‘nation’
(i.e., collective identity) and the ‘state’ (i.e., political organization); oftentimes these are in
conflict. Difference is shown as inherent in homogenizing projects of nationalisms, reifying
a division between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, which is maintained through limitations on
reproduction. Understanding these distinctions provides insight into how national difference
motivates conflict, particularly against women and minorities. The case studies provide
examples of how laws limit reproduction to only certain citizens, showing that far more than
simply recreating the next generation of humans, reproduction is sociobiological: patriarchal
values are recreated and reified when reproduction is limited to heterosexual sex acts. Though

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there might be some variation, there is a near-universal promotion of the hetero-nuclear

family and traditional gender roles as the bedrock of modern human civilization.

Patriarchy, gender roles, and reproduction

Feminist scholarship has traced the long history of patriarchy, from female subordination in
Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE to the Enlightenment’s avowal of biological
sexual dimorphism, which provided a ‘natural’ basis for the differentiation of physical ability,
social roles, and political/legal status in modern society (Rubin 1975; Lerner 1986; Peterson
1992; Hawkesworth 2013). Not only are male and female bodies seen as different – divided
into categories of male and female – but these distinctions are used to justify differentiation,
from behaviour and emotions to career choices and salaries (Puri 2004: 111). These socially
constructed gender roles prescribe certain characteristics to women and men – femininity
and masculinity – that delimit what is appropriate or assumed behaviour and interests.
Masculinity creates men who must be self-confident, ambitious, aggressive, stoic; femininity
is not only characterized by the opposite – weak, sensitive, nurturing, child-oriented – but
also devalued compared to masculinity.
The patriarchy privileges not only a hegemonic masculinity, but also a normative sexuality:
hegemonic heterosexuality. This is called heterosexism or heteronormativity. Not only is
there a normalization and institutionalization of heterosexuality, but also a rejection of non-
heterosexuality (Peterson 1999: 39). As Hawkesworth writes, heteronormativity “enshrines
the man–woman dyad as the basic unit of society; privileges reproduction as a heterosexual
domain; and produces gender dimorphism, sexual divisions of labor, and occupational and
legal arrangements that privilege heterosexuals” (2013: 38). Patriarchal society creates and is
recreated by what it deems as the basic unit of society – a heterosexual man–woman dyad –
but ultimately, the heterosexual nuclear family. Within this family structure, traditional gender
roles are cemented, such that womanhood is conflated with motherhood and men are reified
as the economic, political, and spiritual heads of their families – like the pater familias in
Ancient Rome. Thus traditional gender roles are inherently and foundationally procreative.
Early state-making, seen from the ancient kin-based groups to more centralized political
orders, continued this patriarchal ordering of political membership; thus, these traditional
procreative gender roles were institutionalized with the advent of modern states and state-
centric nationalism (Peterson 1999: 41). In other words, the idea of the sex/gender binary
(the concept of masculinity and femininity), the resulting oppositional gender roles, and the
heterosexual man–woman dyad were all cemented by the creation of the modern state.
Inherited unproblematically and reified by the modern system, this social hierarchy was
naturalized as the necessary foundation of the state (Rubin 1975; Lerner 1986; Peterson
1992). Thus, all kinship acts (e.g., marriage, sex acts, or parenting) outside of this heterosexual
nuclear family are considered not only ‘unnatural’, or morally wrong, but seen as particularly
destructive to the fabric of (heteropatriarchal) society.
Sex acts are social. Since patriarchal society founds itself on the traditional family model
of the heterosexual man–woman dyad, its survival is reliant on the maintenance of this system.
Anything outside of that is considered a threat. For example, there have been laws that deem
particular sex acts criminal, mostly sex outside of vaginal intercourse. Sodomy and oral sex,
still outlawed in many countries, have been characterized historically as “gross indecency”
(Canada from 1892, unchanged until 1987; Lyons 2016), as a “social scourge” and “public
indecency” (France, 1960 parliamentary amendment, overturned in 1981; Sibalis 2005), and
“outside the order of nature” (Section 377 Indian Penal Code, struck down in 2009 and then

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recriminalized 2013; Harris 2013). Even the umbrella term of ‘sodomy’ as referring to anal
or oral copulation – non-vaginal intercourse – divides non-reproductive from reproductive
sex acts, and illegitimate from legitimate sex acts. It can be argued that these laws specifically
target non-reproductive sex acts; since they are outside of the heteronormative framework
of the traditional family, they are perceived as threatening.
State control over reproduction extends from non-procreative sex to parenting. Parenting
too is ruled by heteronormativity, which can be seen through the differences in laws and
public opinion regarding same-sex unions versus same-sex parenting. Even for countries that
have passed same-sex marriage laws, there still remains lower public support regarding gay
men adopting a child or lesbian women pursuing ART (Weissman 2017). Citing several
EU-wide and national surveys regarding attitudes toward LGBT individuals, the 2009 study
from the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) showed that though there were
some differences among countries and demographics of respondents, “the most negative
results surface when asked if homosexuals [sic] should be allowed to adopt children” (European
Agency for Fundamental Rights 2009: 36; Weissman 2017). Compared to other LGBT rights,
European support for same-sex parenting is the lowest. This phenomenon can be seen in
countries outside of Europe as well (Ipsos Global @dvisor 2013;1 Weissman 2017).
Laws targeting non-normative sexuality and the low public support of non-normative
parenting can be explained through the concept of repronormativity. Repronormativity
privileges sex acts that can lead to reproduction over those that do not, and constructs
procreation as a “compulsory narrative” (Edelman 2004: 21; Franke 2001; Downing 2015).
This concept describes a normative reproductive paradigm that is “limited to legitimized,
state-sanctioned heteronormative acts of reproduction specifically through the patriarchal
heteronormative family, and service to this reproduction of the heteropatriarchal nation-state”
(Weissman 2017: 3; italics added). Reproduction is only encouraged in service of particular
groups; repronormativity is thus not enforced for everyone, and is inherently a heterosexual,
racialized paradigm. Those who are incentivized to reproduce (the ‘legitimate’ reproducers)
follow the nation’s conception of desirable reproducer – often the “white, monied wombs”
(Franke 2001: 195) who are a part of a heterosexual nuclear family. Anyone outside of this
ideal nation – people who do not fit the template – are often discouraged from reproducing.
Thus, at the most foundational level, it can be argued that sociopolitical belonging is more
specifically tied to the heterosexual sex act itself. The limitation of legitimate sex to the
(reproductive) heteronormative sex act actually reproduces the state. It recreates the values
and roles of heteropatriarchal society – the structures that privilege heterosexuality, traditional
gender roles, the social values that value men and masculinities over women and femininities.
Stevens (1999) describes this process:

By taxonomizing the orderly and disorderly forms of being of its population –

through the reproduction of kinship rules on birth certificates, marriage licenses,
passports – the state’s relation to normal and deviant forms of being is not
stenographic, but pornographic. The state puts on display the sexual and other outlaws
and aliens who exist as such only by virtue of that same state.
p. xv; emphasis added

In this sense, Stevens (1999: 12) suggests that sex differences are constituted through
political societies (rather than constitutive of them). Kinship rules (e.g., marriage, parenting,
sexual relations), instrumental to the reproduction of the values of political societies, can be
thought of as actually producing the sex/gender dichotomies of femininity and masculinity.

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Specifically controlling the processes of reproduction actually interpellates gendered and

hetero-sexed ‘bearers’ and ‘non-bearers’ of children, and creates particular unequal relations
between them (Stevens 1999). It actually tethers sexuality and gender roles. This not only
keeps non-heteronormative couples from parenting/procreating, but also creates an inevitability
of reproduction for certain heterosexual women. Having children becomes a foregone
conclusion; it identifies the female body with reproductive desires and creates a demand to
reproduce (Denbow 2014: 109). Patriarchal society aims to treat (heteronormative) reproduc-
tion as natural; and in doing so, it also naturalizes the state. In an effort to uncover the
co-constitution of sexuality and the state, this chapter continues to explore the relationship
between sex, birth, and belonging, and how ‘outsiders’ are constructed via perception of
illegitimate reproduction: ultimately, how threat is constructed via heteronormativity.

The nation and (assemblages of) the state

Hegemonic heterosexuality has tethered sociopolitical belonging to birth. The nation too has,
from time immemorial, always been connected to ideas of birth and ancestry. A “nation” is
understood as the “imagined” or “abstract” community (Anderson 1983; James 1996: 34)2
of people, who see themselves as having some ties of common descent, culture, heritage,
language, religion; the axes of identification go on. There can be more than one nation
within a state (for example, the Basque and the Spanish in Spain; or the different formal
nations within the United Kingdom – Scots, Welsh, English, Northern Irish – in addition
to the informal diasporic nations), and a nation can be found in several states (for example,
the Kurdish nation, who inhabit Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Armenia).
The terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are often conflated. However, there are distinctions. In
defining a ‘state’, often the Weberian definition is given, which refers to a political organ-
ization with a centralized government that has a monopoly of legitimate force within an
identifiable territory (Weber 1946). In other words, a state is comprised of the laws,
administration, a specific geographic area, the authority of the government itself. Though
the state is often considered a unified and fixed entity, its power should be seen rather as a
diffusion of assemblage of power (see Sharma and Gupta 2006: 8; Mitchell 1991; Hansen
and Stepputat 2001). There is a coming together of the ideational and the material, an
assemblage of individuals, institutions, and forces into the “micropolitics of everyday state-
making” (Hansen and Stepputat 2001).3 Thus, the power of ‘the state’ extends through many
institutions, including education, the media, the economy, and medicine (Yuval-Davis 1997:
13; Althusser 1971). The reach of the state assemblage also extends to the socio-cultural
organization of sexual relations and kinship rules, as can be seen in the case study examples.
By understanding ‘the state’ as an assemblage, its long and varied reach becomes apparent.

Sex, the nation-state, and difference

Concepts of nationalism and national unity

Nationalism has been the focus of long and varied study, with works from anthropology,
sociology, history, and political science considering its different forms and causes. There are
different definitions of nationalisms, and this chapter builds off a combination of ideas.
Essentially, nationalism is the idea that the identifying cultural ties of language, ancestry,
shared myths, or birthplace (i.e., the nation) should be the primary identity for a group of
people (Ignatieff 1993). Relatedly, there is the notion of territorial self-determination and

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defending this against other nations (Ignatieff 1993; Gellner 1983). In sum, most nationalisms
encompass two features: defining of territorial boundaries of the nation, and defining the
membership boundaries of the population that makes up the nation – the [hegemonic] group
that “deserves this territorial control” (Barrington 1997: 714). There becomes an ‘us’ and a
‘them’ – a ‘here’, and a ‘there’. In many ways, nationalism constructs an ideal (Motyl 1992)
– an ideal group of homogeneous citizens that more often than not, rarely actually exists.
And yet, this has been the fiction that nationalist ideologies propagate: the idea that there is
one unifying concept of ‘insiders’. This normalizes the hegemony of the group, and naturalizes
what Yuval-Davis (1997) describes as the inherent connection between nationalism and
racism. In effect, nationalism constructs the out-group(s) as “assumed deviants from the
‘normal’” (1997: 1).
So what is ‘national unity’ and how does it come about? Zubaida proposes that ethnic
homogeneity – often the aim of nationalism – is constructed, a result of a long history
of political processes which facilitated centralization (1989: 13 in Yuval-Davis 1997: 16).
Stevens (1999) writes extensively of this creation of difference, not a phenomenon of
“physical characteristics” but rather of “practices”, particularly involving the role of the state
(p. 173). Othering practices are varied and found throughout the world, stemming from
different social, legal, or economic pressures; these practices include the ghettoization of
minority communities (see Sassen 1999), immigration laws targeting individuals with non-
normative sexualities (see Minter 1993; Luibheid 2002; and Canaday 2011), or laws denying
same-sex parenting rights. These practices help construct the in-group. They delimit
geographic “insides” (the white wealthy suburb vs. the impoverished, non-white ghetto),
and identities of “insiders” (the heterosexual cis-gendered women vs. the “foreign women
suspected of being lesbians, sex workers, or unwed pregnant women who are actively denied
entry in the US” (Puri 2014: 348; Lubheid 2005)).
Ultimately, this chapter looks to the limitations on reproduction to identify how these
limitations and the privileging of the heterosex act (re)create the privileged group – the
nation – which make up these embodied boundaries. Uncovering the state-sponsored sexual
(re)defining of the boundaries of the nation, the roles of sex in the nationalist project become
apparent – both domestically and internationally. Issues of nationalism, the nation-state, even
normative reproduction are inherently oppositional and relational, and have serious
implications for issues of international security.

Sexual (re)defining of the boundaries of nation

Laws regulating marriage are particularly instructive in seeing the nation-state’s intense interest
in sex and reproduction, and the regulation and racialization of kinship ties through state
limits. For example, several US state constitutions had explicit bans against interracial marriage.
US anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized cohabitation, sex, and marriage between
individuals of different races, were maintained until 1967.4 The focus of the penalties is telling:
dating back from 1866, Alabama punished extramarital sex as a misdemeanour, but interracial
sex as a felony (Richter 2015). This practice was affirmed by the Supreme Court Ruling Pace
v. Alabama (1883) which permitted the harsher penalties for interracial sex compared to the
same crime committed by intraracial couples. Ultimately, the purpose of these laws was to
protect white hegemony, particularly in disallowing the creation of mixed-race children.
There are other examples of limitations on marriage that showcase state interest in
controlling out-group offspring. A ruling from Cairo in 2010 urged the Egyptian government
to strip Egyptian men who are married to Israeli women of their citizenship (BBC News

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2010). There was specific recommendation that the government should consider the religion
of the woman: whether she was or was not Jewish. The lawyer involved in the case, Nabih
el-Wahsh, maintained that the issue was aimed at “protecting Egyptian youth and Egyptian
national security”, and that the children of these marriages should not be allowed to join the
military (BBC News 2010).
These laws regulating marriage, race, sex, and reproduction actually map distinctive
bloodlines onto political territories, embodying borders and recreating these through repro-
normative reproduction. With a division between legitimate and illegitimate reproducers,
there is a reification of the supremacy of the hegemonic group. The key is to understand
reproduction as biological and social: the reproduction not only of human beings, but of
privileged values, and the reproduction of national, ethnic, racial categories (Yuval-Davis
and Anthias 1989: 8).
Women play a significant role in reproducing the nation, both biologically and socially.
Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989: 7) have provided a now-classic characterization of women’s
reproductive capabilities within nationalisms, which describes women as biological
reproducers of members and boundaries of ethnic collectivities, as transmitters of culture,
and as signifiers of ethnic or national difference. In addition to the physical aspect to
reproduction, there is the (bio)social (re)creation of embodied boundaries, of the collectivity,
of culture and language. As Kristeva writes, “women have the luck and the responsibility of
being boundary-subjects” (1993: 35). This has led to devastating consequences, demonstrating
serious implications for issues of security.
Viewing women as symbolic centres has propagated the use of rape as a weapon of war
and other gendered consequences of the faulty civilian immunity principle. Sjoberg and Peet
(2011) have shown that rape during war targets women as the “property and pride of the
male/masculine enemies” (p. 166). Thus, when women in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Bosnia, Colombia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan were being raped by the enemy
militaries, it was for far more than sexual gratification: these were strategic acts to attempt to
humiliate, destabilize communities, and sow fear by specifically targeting individuals who are
symbols of that nation.
Women are also targeted as sociobiological reproducers of that very nation. Repronormativity
identifies the conception of normative reproduction as one of the impetuses of war and con-
flict, highlighting particularly the sex act that reifies women as producers of nations with
embodied borders. Since women produce future citizens, they are targeted. For example, in
Bosnia, systematic rape was used for the aim of population displacement: a Médecins Sans
Frontières report explains that “women were raped so they could give birth to a Serbian baby”
(Smith-Spark 2004). Nikolic-Ristanovic further explains, “[i]n this war, rape has been used
as a method of ‘production’ of children for the rapist’s nationality” (1998: 1259). In Bangladesh
there was a similar impetus: Gita Saghal of Amnesty International explains that during the
Bangladeshi fight for independence in 1971, the Pakistani troops were saying “we will make
you breed Punjabi children”, the idea being that the ethnic group at large would be affected
(Smith-Spark 2004).

Pro- and anti-natalist policies and the nation:

case studies of repronormativity
The idea of the nation is based on a binary conception of insiders and outsiders. This
boundary becomes more and more pronounced when national homogeneity becomes the
goal; reproduction in particular becomes less of a women’s health issue and more so about
the “national health” and endurance of the nation (Albanese 2003: 11). Thus, access to

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abortion, contraception, IVF, or even adoption by some individuals are seen as “analogous
to treason, ‘race suicide,’ or genocide” (de Grazia 1992: 55). There is a maintenance of
difference through the privileging of certain reproduction. Uneven access to certain
reproductive rights identifies this privileging, and the privileged are encouraged to reproduce
while others are dissuaded by legal or cultural constraints. Those who are incentivized
to reproduce are not coincidentally within the heteropatriarchal ideal: they are encouraged to
reproduce, and thus reproduce those structures and values.
Reproductive laws in Eastern European countries throughout the 20th century illustrate
the rise of nationalist regimes and subsequent changes in reproductive rights (Albanese 2003),
not unrelatedly coinciding with re-traditionalization of gender roles. In the years immediately
before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a revival of the veneration of
masculinity, and denigration of the iconic Soviet woman worker; women were called back
into the kitchens to their “purely womanly mission” (Gorbachev 1987). Alongside this
re-traditionalization of gender roles, access to abortion and contraception became limited
(Albanese 2003). In Poland, similar developments took place. After the fall of communism
in Poland in 1989 and the exit of occupying Soviet forces, there too was a revival of Polish
masculinity and the feminine ideal of motherhood. Communism was seen as “castrating”
(Graff 1999) and “real” Polish men would now regain their masculine identities as protectors,
and regain control over their nation. This came in the form of restrictive reproductive
policies: one of the first laws to pass in the new democracy was the abortion ban in 1993,
which rolled back the lax Soviet reproductive laws. Polish women were called up to regain
their “true” “Polish” identities as Matki Polki (Polish Mothers), reproducers of the nation
and protectors of the culture. The end of a foreign communist occupation in Poland began
the dissolving of Polish women’s reproductive rights (Nowicka 2007: 167–168).
These developments are not just relics from the past but continue today. In Russia, a
recent decrease in the population growth coupled with a surge in nationalist ideology have
renewed the conception of demographic power: there has been a resurgence in nationalist-
motivated religiosity, with Putin declaring in 2001 the “special role” of “holy Russia” in
protecting Christianity (Stewart 2004: 52). Two years later in 2003, laws regarding abortion
were changed: the existing liberal 13 grounds for abortion were reduced to just four (Stewart
2004).5 In 2011 there were further restrictions, limiting abortions to the first 12 weeks of
pregnancy, and a mandatory 48-hour waiting period (Bateson 2013).
Pronatalist policies do not encourage all reproduction, but rather that which is deemed
to reproduce the nation’s normative citizen, per repronormativity. Often, access to repro-
duction is limited to just the hegemonic group, with racial and heteronormative parameters.
For example, Poland’s restrictive laws against abortion compel heterosexual women to
procreate, but same-sex couples are discouraged from reproducing: same-sex couples cannot
legally marry, adopt, or utilize ART in Poland. Even for some countries with more progressive
same-sex rights, there are still repronormative policies limiting reproduction to certain
individuals. In France, same-sex couples won the right to marry in 2013, which also included
the right to adopt children. However, full reproductive rights are based on sexual orientation.
Same-sex couples, though able to legally marry and adopt in France, still cannot access
technologies such as in vitro fertilization. The 1994 law of bioethics limits ART to coha-
bitating heterosexual couples (married or unmarried) with a verifiable diagnosis of infertility
(Agence de la Biomédecine 2013). For these couples, ART is even publically funded by the
French national health system, directly legitimizing a particular definition of family and
reproduction. The fight for same-sex rights in France has proved very contentious, with
thousands marching against not only same-sex marriage, but particularly same-sex parenting

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rights. Protestors held signs that read “Mom and Dad, there’s nothing better for a child”,
and called the potential legalization of ART “dangerous for the family, for children, and the
country” (Danel 2014 in Weissman 2017: 10). Poland and France are arguably more
restrictive than other European countries; however, even in a country as comparatively
progressive as Sweden, there is evidence of repronormative restrictions.
Swedish same-sex couples can marry, adopt children, and have access to reproductive
technology such as IVF. In 1972, Sweden was even the first country to legally recognize the
new gender of transgender individuals post-sex reassignment surgery. However, there was a
catch: to have their new gender recognized by the state, Swedish trans individuals had to
become sterilized (or otherwise lack reproductive capability). This requirement was connected
to the long history of sterilization in the country: approximately 63,000 people between 1935
and 1975 who were considered ‘undesirable’ were forcibly sterilized; this included ‘mixed-
race individuals’ and single mothers with many children, grouped together with ‘deviants’
and criminals (Zaremba 1997 in Gallagher 1998; Lynoe 2007; Weissman 2017). In a country
considered one of the most liberal in the world, there was still a conception of a legitimate
reproducer. This definition did not extend to trans individuals, until the statute was over-
turned in 2013 (and not without opposition) (Pasulka 2012). Sweden was only one of many
countries in Europe with this law; as of 2016, 18 European countries require sterilization
before legal change of gender for trans individuals.6
In all of the examples highlighted above, there is a common thread: the resurgence or
maintenance of heteronormative procreative gender roles in the perception of threat. All
harnessed control over procreation in efforts to reproduce not only certain peoples, but also
power and social values, reifying the dichotomy of insiders and outsiders. Changes in repro-
ductive laws spotlight who is considered a part of the nation, who is thus considered a
legitimate reproducer, one who can (and should) also reproduce the values and culture of
the society. In all three anti-natalist cases, LGBTQ individuals were considered outsiders,
and therefore barred access to different aspects of reproduction, from adoption (parenting)
to IVF treatments.

Conclusion: what do reproductive rights tell us about sexuality,

the nation-state, and security?
Sex is very much a part of state-making. As has been described, the patriarchal sex-gender
system codifies several dichotomies: sex as biological (male/female), gender as masculine/
feminine, and sexuality as heterosexual/homosexual (Peterson 1999: 40). But this ordering
is more than symbolic – it provides the basis for political ordering as well. The hierarchical
social system of patriarchy that denigrates femininity and reifies male power was institutionalized
by the state; it also institutionalized heterosexual desire and the nuclear family as the basis of
society. Heteronormativity as a part of the state apparatus has normalized state control over
women’s bodies, a state interest in regulating sexual reproduction, and state policing of sexual
acts (Peterson 1999: 40), as has been shown throughout this chapter. Threat has become
defined as that which is outside of these parameters, which includes sex acts, reproduction
(including parenting), and women’s ability to control their own bodies. Heteronormativity
ultimately constructs threat, and this plays out across women’s bodies as the boundaries of
nations.
By reifying the heteropatriarchal nuclear family (the heterosexual, man–woman dyad),
reproduction is limited to heterosexual reproduction, which tethers certain genders to certain

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sexualities. Restrictive reproductive laws highlight this tethering of sexuality and gender
roles: normative sexuality reinforces normative gender, while obstructing the structural links
between the two. In other words, heterosexual women’s identities become essentialized and
maternalized; heterosexual women are reified as the only legitimate reproducers of the
hegemonic nation. This creates and maintains a non-reproductive identity for non-
heterosexual individuals, and reifies (heterosexual) women as the symbolic centres of the
nation, limiting greatly the rights and interests of all people.
Ultimately, seemingly unrelated issues are revealed as connected when considering
normative conceptions of reproduction. The parallels between wartime rape and laws barring
same-sex couples from parenting can be explained through repronormativity. Narratives that
construct a dichotomous society of insiders and outsiders propagate conceptions of legitimate
and illegitimate reproduction, which inscribe (hegemonic) heterosexual women as the only
legitimate reproducers. This both bars non-heteronormative parenting, and targets women
as symbols of the nation. The nationalist state identity is constructed and reified not only as
sexual, but also necessarily oppositional.
Though feminist scholarship has considered certain aspects of reproduction and the nation,
there is much work to be done to consider how heteronormative narratives structure the
state and the state system. Sexuality governs relationships, but also social institutions and
structures; the state apparatus through its different arms works to normalize heteronormativity.
And in this way, there is a co-constitution: normalizing heteronormativity also normalizes
the state (Puri 2014; Stevens 1999; Cooper 1993; Duggan 1994). As Puri explains, “The
point then, is to question not only the state’s role in regulating sex and gender, but also how
this regulation helps constitute the state and its imagination . . . the state is neither neutral
nor neutered” (2014: 346). For repronormativity, much of this recreation of the patriarchal
state stems from the privileging of the necessarily reproductive heterosexual sex act. Sex is
an integral part of state-making.

Notes
1 Fourteen of the 16 countries polled by Ipsos Global @dvisor (2013) had lower support for same-sex
marriage/legal recognition versus same-sex adoption, outside of the +/– 3.1 per cent margin of error.
These countries include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain,
Hungary, Italy, Poland, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden. The countries excluded: Japan and the
United States.
2 James 1996: 34: “A nation is at once an objectively abstract society of strangers, usually connected
by a state, and a subjectively embodied community whose members experience themselves as an
integrated group of compatriots”.
3 Foucault’s (2007, 2008) concept of biopower applies here, describing how the state’s disciplining
power and social control extends over populations and physical bodies, through for instance the
state-medical apparatus.
4 Until the US Supreme Court Case Loving v. Virginia (1967), which declared these laws unconstitu-
tional and ended all racial marriage restrictions in the US.
5 Before this law changed, women could get an abortion for economic and social reasons – if they
were unmarried, too poor, unemployed, had too small housing, or already had three children. Now
the only legal grounds for abortion include if the pregnancy was the result of rape, incarceration, if
she has a disabled or deceased husband, or if either partner is unfit as a parent as deemed by court
ruling (Stewart 2004: 52).
6 These countries include Finland, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania,
Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Latvia (TGEU, 2016). There are also six countries wherein there is
no legal gender recognition: Hungary, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Moldova, and Cyprus.

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 26
GENDER, POPULAR CULTURE,
AND (IN)SECURITY
Linda Åhäll

Introduction
On 7 July 2016 the television show BBC Breakfast had a segment on the Conservative Party
leadership contest to replace David Cameron as the next British prime minister accompanied
by the music of US pop star Katy Perry’s hit song ‘Roar’. Paying attention to how gender
works as a logic that informs practice facilitates a critique of that which we often take for
granted, that which we think is just ‘normal’ or that which we think is ‘just entertainment’.
It is about processes and practices of normalization that are fundamentally political as they
reinforce social and cultural boundaries that limit what certain bodies should or should not
be or do. The leadership contest was between two female candidates, Theresa May and
Andrea Leadsom, and, yes, this was a first for a major political party in the UK, but, by pre-
senting it to the music of Perry’s ‘Girl Power’ message (“I went from zero to my own hero”
. . . “I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar”) their difference to the norm of men
as society’s ‘natural’ leaders was emphasized. May and Leadsom were coded as women first,
politicians second. They were belittled through dominant gender logics as female politicians,
not just politicians. The fact that the two candidates had female bodies mattered and, impor-
tantly, it was through popular cultural references that this difference was underscored. The
choice of background music was every bit as political as the content of the segment.
Feminist scholars have pointed out that when we read, watch, and listen to stories of war,
women are most often recognized as passive victims or associated only with peace and/or
resistance to war, despite that we know that women too participate in war and political vio-
lence. In recent years, women have become more visible as soldiers, rebels, ‘terrorists’, and
spies in popular culture texts1 – sometimes literally written back into histories of war2 – at the
same time as more and more roles within national armed forces are opening up to women.
And yet, the representation of women’s agency in war and political violence is still often one
of female terrorists, female soldiers, or female rebels (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). These examples,
fictional and real, open up for questioning how exactly gender, popular culture, and security
are connected.
This chapter explores how we can theorize popular culture and analyse popular culture
texts in relation to gendered security politics and practices. To start with, when analysing
popular culture the visual often takes centre-stage. What counts as ‘text’ (and indeed ‘popular’

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culture) should therefore be understood in its broadest sense, as cultural representation and
meaning-making practices. This is important as a ‘text’ can also be read through what is not
seen and also through what we might feel when encountering it. In this way, popular culture
is not only a ‘medium’ through which we can study global politics (although it is this too,
of course), it is itself inherently political.
When trying to understand how popular culture is related to security practices (and global
politics more broadly), the pioneering writings of Roland Barthes (1915–1980), often
considered founding texts of cultural studies, are a good starting point. Barthes was incredibly
productive, mainly through shorter essays, and was exceptional in demonstrating how popu-
lar culture and the everyday reveal dynamics underpinning global politics, such as nationalism
and imperialism, that might otherwise remain hidden. Barthes might not have self-identified
as a feminist, but he was certainly interested in body politics and wrote several essays that
touch upon what womanhood might entail, for example on the objectification of women’s
bodies in the essay ‘Striptease’, written in 1955 (see Barthes 2000).
Similarly, a feminist curiosity that explores gender as something that we do, as a logic that
informs practice, rather than an identity category that individuals belong to (or not), opens
up for analyses of how global and national politics are linked to a politics of the everyday.
Often, it is about challenging that which is taken for granted. That is to say, if it had been
as ‘normal’ for women to be prime ministers or presidents as it is for men, there would have
been no point in using popular cultural resources to draw attention to the gendered
dimensions of the Conservative Party leadership contest in the first place.
I have chosen to illustrate how gender, popular culture, and security practices are connec-
ted by focusing on pop music, more specifically, another song by Katy Perry: the 2013 hit
song ‘Part of Me’. Following Barthes, I analyse it in two ways: as forming part of the ‘obvious’
and ‘obtuse’ meaning. I demonstrate how both these meanings rely on gendered logics of
war. First, however, we need to discuss what attuning to popular culture as an approach to
analyse political practices might mean.

The politics of popular culture

There is a growing interest in the study of aesthetics, visuality, art, and popular culture in
International Relations (IR). Traditionally, ‘popular’ culture might have been perceived
as that produced for and/or by the ‘masses’, the people, and associated with ‘low’ culture, as
the opposite to ‘high’ culture, such as fine art. Today, those boundaries are arguably blurred.
Among IR scholars interested in popular culture, some focus on fictional storytelling, others
on mass/social media representations, and others still take the personal and/or the mundane
of ‘the everyday’ as a starting point for analysis. Thus, what counts as popular culture might
include as diverse empirical sources as Facebook and other social media platforms (Crilley
2016); science fiction (Weldes 2003); videogames (Robinson 2016); music (Davies and
Franklin 2015); the Eurovision Song Contest (Baker 2017); the fantasy television series Game
of Thrones (Clapton and Shepherd 2017); superheroes (Crowe 2012); the Bible (Grayson
2012); children’s stories (Grayson 2013); zombies (Drezner 2014); advertisement (Åhäll
2015a); and celebrity activism (Bergman-Rosamond 2016). Or, popular culture might be
not only a site for empirical analysis but a way to ‘do’ IR differently, such as using art-based
collage as methodology (Särmä 2015) or exploring war through song writing (Hast 2016).
As a result of popular culture being such a varied ‘site’ and approach for analysis, a useful
way to justify analysing popular culture artefacts as practices of global politics is to think of
political puzzles:

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If a puzzle is the main research challenge, then it can be addressed with all means
available, independently of their provenance or label. A source may stem from this
or that discipline, it may be academically sanctioned or not, expressed in prose or
poetic form, it may be language based on visual or musical or take any other shape
or form: it is legitimate as long as it helps to illuminate the puzzle in question.
Bleiker 2003: 420

Thus, although scholars might have different reasons for engaging with the global politics of
art, fiction, aesthetics, and culture, they usually share the conviction that our understandings
of global political events are not limited to political statements and policy documents. Instead,
the common ground is an understanding of ‘the political’ that is beyond a focus on ‘politics’
and ‘policies’ as traditionally understood. Instead, the focus is often on representation, as “the
production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language” (Hall 1997: 17).
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Roger Silverstone understands media as a cultural space
where the world, in the form of mediated narratives and images, appears to us, and, as a result,
is interwoven with everyday experience and constituted as our lived world (2007: 27). Here,
media is the everyday environment in which we live; the everyday is mediated. In this sense,
it is only through the process of representation that political reality comes into being (Bleiker
2001: 512). We give meaning by how we represent something, the words we use, the images
we produce, the emotions we associate with, the ways we classify and conceptualize and
the values we ascribe it (Hall 1997: 3). Thus, through language, representation is central
to the processes by which meaning, but also culture, is produced (Hall 1997: 1). Importantly,
representation works as much through what is shown as through what is not. This is why
cultural practices are political practices and representation is always an act of power (Bleiker
2001: 515).
But popular culture is also particularly interesting because it is, per definition, often dis-
guised as ‘mere entertainment’. Paying attention to the politics of popular culture is therefore
about where practices of global politics actually take place; how, as feminists have long
argued, the private and personal is political; that the domestic/local/everyday cannot be sepa-
rated out from the global; and that both fictional and ‘real’ case studies are representations of
political events, both include the telling of stories about the world we live in. If we want to
understand global politics we cannot afford to ignore the cultural politics of the everyday
simply because this is where the effects of political processes are normalized. We need to look
beyond obvious ‘political settings’, to also study that which “goes without saying” (Barthes
2000: 132); to show how these sites are ways of communicating global politics; how popular
culture constitutes ‘the political’.

Gendered security practices: stories of women in combat

‘Part of Me’ is a music video from 2012 in which Katy Perry joins the US Marine Corps.
As such it is a representation of women’s agency in war; it tells a story that fits well with
recent changes in policy when it comes to what roles are open to women and other ‘others’
in armed forces: In 2010, the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy that prevented openly gay
servicemen and women to serve in the US armed forces was repealed. In 2011, Australia
removed their ban on women in combat roles and the UK announced that women were
to be allowed to serve on submarines from 2013. In 2012, the US announced that female
US Marines were allowed to train in combat roles. In January 2013, outgoing Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta announced that the US ban on women in combat roles was to be

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removed. While the British Ministry of Defence had decided to keep their exclusion policy
on women in close-combat roles in 2010, yet another review was brought forward and in
July 2016, Prime Minister Cameron finally announced that the UK, too, without any
exceptions to the rule, would remove the ban.
These changes in policy might be explained by recent changes in how wars are fought
(asymmetrical and technological warfare) which has meant that legal exclusion policies with
regard to who are in combat roles have become more and more difficult to justify but also
less and less necessary to maintain. Not only have feminists argued that exclusion policies
justified along the lines of social cohesion are deeply unjust and inefficient (Basham 2009;
Woodward and Winter 2007; Åhäll 2016a), but, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, American and
British women have already proved themselves by being either assigned to combat units in
an ad hoc way or to women-only so-called Female Engagement Teams. The point to make
here is that the ‘Part of Me’ music video – as entertainment – speaks directly to contemporary
policy changes with regard to the role of women at war in these countries.

Setting the scene for analysis

While recognizing the multiple and varied ways in which gender might be used as an analytical
category, I approach the political puzzle of gender, security, and popular culture with an
analytical focus on bodies, specifically how bodies are informed by a visual, gendered logic.
This is because a focus on popular culture most often puts the visual at the centre-stage of
politics, and a focus on bodies puts the visual logic of gender at the centre of politics. Using
gender as a logic – a social, cultural and political idea and practice – about the (assumed)
shape of bodies, usually divided into women and men, enables us to see how bodies are valued
differently; how bodies are ‘sexed’ visually and how this means that certain bodies matter
while others do not (see Shepherd 2015; Åhäll 2018).
Although, in reality, meaning-making is more complex and the various ‘sense-making tools’
we have at our disposal feed into each other, when analysing the politics of popular culture it
is useful, for analytical purposes, to break the overall storytelling down into what we hear, what
we see, and what we (are supposed to) feel. Again, Barthes’ thinking offers a starting point. In
the essay ‘The Third Meaning’3 Barthes addresses what he calls “the obtuse meaning”. The
obtuse meaning is different from the ‘obvious’ meaning. The obtuse meaning is about disguise,
and, more importantly, the obtuse meaning is about emotion. Caught up in the disguise,
Barthes argues, such emotion is never sticky, it is an emotion that simply designates “what one
loves, what one wants to defend”. The obtuse meaning is about “an emotion value, an
evaluation” (Barthes 2000: 324).
In what follows, I discuss my analysis of ‘Part of Me’ in two parts: first, the ‘obvious’
meaning is about the story told through the narrative of the lyrics (what we hear)4 and the
music video (what we see). This is how the obvious meaning is about content. Drawing on
feminist IR scholarship on women’s agency in war I highlight two narratives: the ‘Masculinized
Subject’ story and the ‘Personal/Desperation’ story. Then, I draw on feminist scholarship on
militarization to discuss the ‘obtuse’ storytelling. This is about context and the hidden poli-
tics of ‘Part of Me’, including what we (are supposed to) feel. First though, a brief description
of the music video is needed.
The music video starts with an opening scene in which Perry is sitting in her car outside
her boyfriend’s workplace. She is listening to a radio show. The host asks a woman who has
called in “So, why are you still with him?” Perry is holding and looking at a necklace,
presumably a gift from her boyfriend. She sees the boyfriend through the window, leaning

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over a female colleague, with whom he is – we are led to assume – having an affair. Perry
walks in, returns the necklace, calls him a liar and storms off.
Upset, she drives off. She stops at a gas station where she happens to see an advert for the
US Marines that says: “All women are created equal, then some become Marines.” In a rather
impulsive move, she goes straight to the gas station bathrooms and cuts her hair short (while
still upset), removes her bracelets, bandages her breasts and changes her outfit: takes off her
pink dress and puts on a pair of trousers and a hoodie.
Perry registers for recruit training and then joins the basic combat instruction course. She
is trained in various combat skills. She runs obstacle courses, drags fellow soldiers to ‘safety’,
learns martial arts and wrestling, and excels on the shooting ground. As the song climaxes
Perry is singing along to the chorus, dancing beneath a huge American flag. At the end of
the video the transformation of Perry into a warrior is complete, with body armour and
camouflage face paint.

The ‘obvious’ meaning

The ‘masculinized subject’ story: on becoming

Feminist scholars have stressed that analyses of gender must not only focus on ‘women’ simply
because both men and women “have genders, experience gender, and live in a gendered
world” (Sjoberg 2015: 440). A focus on gender as ‘women’ excludes people who identify as
both or neither men and women, and such a narrow focus fails to problematize how the binary
categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are formed, performed, and reinforced in the first place.
Further, the gendering of identity is always intersected with other factors, such as class, race,
age, and dis/ableism. Finally, when focusing on ‘women’ in the guise of focusing on gender,
“the work masculinity is doing” (Zalewski 2015) remains invisible.
Exploring the work of masculinity is important because in stories about war and peace,
men and masculinity are most often linked to active fighting and/or protection, while
women and femininity are associated with peace, victimhood, and in need of protection (see
Elshtain 1995; Young 2003). Militaries, those institutions designed to fight wars in the name
of protecting the state and its citizens are overwhelmingly masculine institutions. This is
because masculinity has been normalized and regularized throughout the history of most
military institutions. For example, military training typically depends on the denigration
of anything that could be considered feminine, because “to act like a soldier is not to be
‘womanly’” (Detraz 2012: 31).
In popular culture, the stereotypical female heroine – as ‘action chick’, ‘tough girl’, or
‘violent femme’ – is likely to be muscular but not too muscular, independent, but not as
tough as the males around her, and she is typically childless (Inness 2004: 12; see also Inness
1999 and White 2007). This is why stories of female heroines of war most often include
narratives of motherhood, or rather an inability of motherhood. This is why it becomes
important to emphasize that O’Neil, the female lead character in G.I. Jane discussed below,
loses her period, the symbol of her life-giving capacity. Or, how in the fourth season of
Homeland, Carrie Mathison, the female protagonist must leave her daughter to excel as a
CIA agent, or why the epithet “she died childless” is added in the epilogue to the film Female
Agents. Only by giving up their feminine attributes and/or maternal roles are these female
subjects able to act out the masculinized norm (see Åhäll 2015b).
Further, stories of heroines/female protagonists of war often include a process of trans-
formation that, quite literally, transforms the female subject into a masculinized subject. This

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is often done by ‘removing’ feminine attributes and/or symbols of motherhood. For example,
Terrell Carver (2007) notes the masculinization of the female body in the film G.I. Jane
(1997), about the first (fictional) woman, Jordan O’Neil, to undergo training with the US
Naval Special Warfare Group. In order to turn O’Neil’s (played by Demi Moore) soft,
feminine body into a hard machine, it needs to be militarized – and this means masculinized:

O’Neil has to train hard, and she loses her period (the female physician describes
this as ‘normal’ for female athletes). In the end she does well enough humping a
very large man off a battlefield, albeit with buddy-assistance, and well enough to
pass all the other physical hurdles, including pain endurance and psychological
resilience. When she shouts “Suck my dick!,” context and metaphor triumph over
all, and she’s in.
Carver 2007: 314

However, by showing the female body going through a transformation process it is assumed
that it was feminine and ‘womanly’ from the beginning. ‘Natural’ qualities of womanhood
– such as being caring, nurturing, able to give life – are taken for granted and included as a
prerequisite in order for the transformation to take place; included only to be removed later.
In other words, a female body in a masculinized environment seemingly, per definition, must
change to fit in.
Although there is no discussion of menstruation, ‘Part of Me’ also includes similar scenes
of bodily metamorphosis. Most obviously, the scene in the gas station bathrooms communicates
Perry’s transformation into a masculinized subject. Perry ‘removes’ her feminine attributes by
cutting her hair short (while increasingly emotional), by removing her bracelets, by bandaging
her breasts in an attempt at making them ‘disappear’, and by changing from a pink dress into
a more masculine, or at least gender neutral, jeans and hoodie outfit. By visually removing
symbolic femininity, Perry’s body is simultaneously de-femininized and masculinized. She has
transformed into the masculinized, militarized subject. In this way, ‘Part of Me’ reinforces
the military as a masculinized institution and the idea that women’s bodies must change to
fit in.

The ‘Personal/Desperation’ story: on belonging

Feminist scholars have noted that motivations for women’s involvement in political violence,
such as in terrorist acts, is represented differently from men’s. In contrast to violent men,
violent women are usually not depicted as rational actors with political ambitions and beliefs.
Instead, they are seen as exceptions to the rule of peaceful women and their actions are often
explained as a result of personal grievances and/or personal connections (see Eager 2008;
Gentry 2009; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Åhäll 2015b). Thus, one way in which a violent
woman’s agency is circumscribed is by portraying her choice to play an active part in political
violence in relational terms, typically, that a woman’s actions were ‘because of a man’. This
includes stories of fragile women who are either easily manipulated or physically coerced by
men into committing violence, or so grief-stricken by the death of a husband, brother, or
son that they see no other way out than violent revenge.5
Another ‘explanation’ as to why a woman might have participated in political violence is
as a result of personal shortcomings or failures as a woman. Here, the motivation is typically
explained in domestic and maternal language, for example, described through a focus on the
individual’s marriage, divorce, children or lack of children (Gentry 2009: 242). Thus, even

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though women and men alike are motivated by both strategy and personal politicization, the
representation of women’s agency in political violence is more likely to include personal
stories of belonging, friendship, and/or relational ties with family members.
We can identify the ‘Personal/Desperation’ story in ‘Part of Me’ in several ways. First, as
already mentioned, Perry only joins the Marines in the first place because her boyfriend
cheated on her. Thus, similarly to how female ‘terrorists’ are represented in mass media, for
Perry the motivation behind joining the armed forces is ‘because of a man’. Second, the song
is sung to the ex-boyfriend. Grammatically, Perry is the first person perspective, whereas the
former boyfriend is the second person perspective:

You chewed me up and spit me out

Like I was poison in your mouth
You took my light, you drained me down.

The music video also includes a couple of ‘flashback scenes’ in which Perry is thinking
back to her previous life with her former boyfriend. We are, thus, reminded of the fact that
it was all because of him that Perry ended up in the army. When she is reading a letter from
him, asking her to take him back, he is given a voice:

“It was nothing. Please forgive, and let’s move past this. I’m still the guy you fell in love
with. I just made a stupid mistake. Look deep inside, and try to remember what we are.
I miss your face / Jason.”

By setting the letter on fire, while the vocals sound “You will never put me down again.
I’m glowing”, she rejects his offer. Explaining the video, Perry says that this scene is about
how she had “found an inner strength I didn’t know I had before” (YouTube 2012). While
we can agree and read this as empowerment, it is still, both visually and lyrically, a story
about a relationship to a man. Moreover, each verse ends with Perry inviting the ex-boyfriend
to look at her (“Now look at me”). We might read this as a romantic revenge narrative –
that she is happy without him (“Now look at me, I’m sparkling!”) – but it also echoes the
male gaze, that women are something to look at. Furthermore, while Perry might no longer
‘belong’ to an unfaithful boyfriend, there is another story of belonging in ‘Part of Me’.
Disappointed, distraught, and deceived, in the second verse, Perry sings: “I just wanna
throw my phone away. Find out who is really there for me.” The boyfriend has clearly failed to
‘be there for her’, to protect her, to make her happy. Instead, as it turns out, it is the army
that is really there for her; it is joining the Marines that makes her happy again. When she
hands in her phone, keys, and other private belongings in exchange for a military kit with
boots and clothing, a social contract of sorts is agreed in which she gives up her previous,
personal life and gets protection from the military in return. This is about her sense of
belonging but also about a duty of care. In the end, by joining the Marines, Perry gets a new
purpose, and by extension, the army becomes her new ‘family’. Happy again, she does not
need her mistreating boyfriend anymore. She is, after all, ‘sparkling’ and ‘glowing’.

The ‘obtuse’ meaning

So far we have discussed how the ‘obvious’ storytelling in ‘Part of Me’ relies on a gendered
logic of belonging and masculinization. However, meaning-making is not just about the
story told but also about what is not told and about what we are expected to feel. There is
more to the story. A feminist perspective is also useful when going beyond storytelling to

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analyse the obtuse meaning. As mentioned above, to Barthes the obtuse meaning is about
disguise, about a more hidden politics that is also about emotion. This part of the analysis,
therefore, answers the question, ‘so what?’. Why does it matter that Katy Perry – one of the
most successful female pop artists in the world – joins the US Marines in a music video?
Some of the most ground-breaking feminist critiques of ‘security’ and the way in which
practices of wars are gendered can be attributed to Cynthia Enloe’s pioneering work on
militarization – the specific sort of transforming process by which something becomes con-
trolled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or militaristic
ideas and criteria (Enloe 2000: 291). There are several ways in which militarism and mili-
tarization historically have been defined or conceptualized in IR6 but at the most basic level
both militarism and militarization are about preparation for war. Militarism is usually defined
as a belief that conflicts should/can be solved by military means, whereas militarization is
seen as a process or practice supporting such a belief. Perhaps most commonly, militarism
and militarization are conflated as the equivalent to military build-ups, an approach generally
focused on (states’) quantitative increases in weapons production and imports, military
personnel and military expenditure. Here, militarism is measured through various indicators
and the process of militarization is about acquiring military capability.7
Importantly, what feminist scholarship adds to knowledge about militarism and militariz-
ation is how such concepts are often linked to nationalism and always linked to gender
as crucial to the construction, maintenance, but also as the potential reversal of, militarism.
Thus, from a feminist perspective, militarism is not easily measureable and not merely an
ideology/belief/value system but, ultimately, also about social relationships in the everyday
organized around war and preparation for war. In this way, a feminist perspective on
militarism facilitates a focus on people’s rather than governments’ preparation for war. And,
it enables analysis of that which is not immediately recognized as ‘military characteristics’.
Crucially, this means that processes of militarization do not only take place in the obvious
(military) contexts and places but, in fact, the list of what can be militarized is virtually endless
(Enloe 2000: 4). Thus, whereas militarism might be an open, visible, and conscious display
of, and belief in, militaristic ideology, militarization can be seen as a much more subtle
process of the normalization of a militarized society: as the social and cultural prepara-
tion for the idea of war, which relies on a gendered logic and takes place in the mediatized
everyday (Åhäll 2016b).
Explaining the music video, Perry said that she chose the military plot because it repre-
sented the song, saying, “It’s an affirmation of strength, so I wanted to go the strongest route
I ever could” (Wikipedia 2016). In this sense, ‘Part of Me’ is showcasing that women too
have the physical and mental strength to occupy the toughest of jobs. However, as Enloe
explains, the danger with liberal “add women and stir” approaches to gender equality with
regard to women’s inclusion in armed forces is that such narratives of ‘liberation’ could just
be another ‘manoeuvre’ actually camouflaging the militarization of women’s lives (Enloe
2000: 45). This is because patriarchal governments have their own, non-feminist reasons
for expanding the numbers and roles of women as soldiers (p. 279). In other words, adding
women might not necessarily change the military as a masculinized institution. Adding
women might not necessarily lead to a more gender-equal or gender-neutral institution. And
it might not break the link between war and masculinization.
‘Part of Me’ is militaristic in the sense that it does not question militarism as the belief in
military solutions. In fact, as Naomi Wolf (2012) suggested, “it feels . . . like an ad; specifically,
a focus-grouped, consumer-tested ad to attract more women to join the Marines”. It was
produced and released at a time when the US Department of Defense was preparing to

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remove a ban on women in combat roles. When the music video premiered, Perry explained
how the video was made:

We use only Marines, no actors or actresses. We used all of the Marine’s equipment
and they were so lovely to us, I always have fun even though it’s a lot of work.
Even though I was sore and exhausted, I was so educated on people in the service,
who I’ve always respected but the stuff they go through, and the kind of loyalty
they possess, it’s very communal, and community. Not to sound weird, but it seems
like the heart of America. Seriously, the heart.
MTV 2012

In addition to having actual Marines as actors in the music video, it also uses military
equipment such as amphibious assault vehicles and helicopters. Yet, Perry’s spokespeople
“declined to comment” when asked about who paid for the music video (Wolf 2012). The
context in which this video is made can therefore be linked to what James Der Derian (2009)
has termed the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network (MIMENET).
Furthermore, the obtuse meaning is about how we are expected to feel. ‘Part of Me’
begins with a nice, sweet girl who has her heart broken but, as the song climaxes, is happy
again, dancing under a huge American flag. It ends with her, the camouflaged, face paint-
wearing warrior-girl, looking into the camera, meeting our gaze. No longer breakable, she
has found her place in the world. As women, ‘Part of Me’ might make ‘us’ feel empowered
by the message to not let someone “take our light”, “drain us down”, “chew us up”, “rip
us off” or “break our souls”; that we deserve better than “cheap love”. We (people of all
genders) might feel convinced that, of course, women too can excel in the most physically
and mentally challenging of jobs. However, when we are made to feel good that becoming
a Marine can be the solution to our personal problems, we forget what is omitted in the
story. We forget that militaries are designed to fight wars, that weapons and military
equipment are designed to kill, and we forget to question war as something ‘we just do’, as
something ‘just normal’.8 We fail to question, why war in the first place? We also forget that
for many women in the armed forces, navigating how to fit in within masculinized institutions
is not easy. Particularly: when speaking out against sexist behaviour risks negatively affecting
your own career rather than the career of the abuser; and when actual threat of sexual abuse
is more likely to come from your own peers rather than ‘the enemy’ (see Benedict 2009).9
Then, there is another logic of insecurity for women within army ranks.
To return to Barthes, who says that the obtuse meaning is about “[e]motion value,
evaluation”, this analysis is an attempt at paying attention to links between who we are, what
we do, and how we affectively normalize a militarized society. Thus, the references to Perry
sparkling and glowing (really happy) give a rather glittery representation of soldiering, one
in which the horrors of war and also justifications for war have been erased, silenced, washed
away. The effect is political because ‘Part of Me’, in this sense, sanitizes war and omits the
fact that “war’s body kills and suffers” (Ruddick 2002: 204). It is because militarization has
become naturalized and normalized over time that these processes take place without many
of us taking notice. Without noticing, we too have become militarized.

Conclusion
‘Part of Me’ might at first glance sound and look ‘feminist’, advocating that women too can
do the toughest of jobs, that women too can go to war, that women too are physically strong

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and emotionally ‘unbreakable’. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this story of
female empowerment. However, if we move away from equating gender with ‘women’ and
instead focus on gender as a logic – as ideas about bodies that informs practice through
processes of masculinization and feminization – we are able to tell a different story of how
popular culture informs gendered security politics and practices.
In this chapter, I have discussed how the ‘obvious’ meaning of ‘Part of Me’, as that which
we hear and that which we see, draws on gendered logics of agency of war through narratives
of belonging and masculinization. I have also demonstrated how, through what we might
feel, the ‘obtuse’ meaning of ‘Part of Me’ is about the normalization of war and the
reinforcement of a militarized society. It is about how we ourselves might become militarized.
Often reaching a much wider audience than typical policy documents, popular culture
‘sites’ can discuss ‘politics’ in a seemingly apolitical context, claiming to be ‘just entertainment’.
However, if we believe the purpose for studies of global politics is to ‘reintroduce society
into it’ (Barthes 2000: 93), then a study of the politics of the everyday, of popular culture
and the seemingly apolitical fictional is perhaps the most political site of all, simply because
it barely registers as politics. Thus, to explore the politics of popular culture it is important
to explore ‘the political’ beyond what is traditionally considered ‘politics’, but also beyond
texts and written language, to also explore meaning-making through visual and affective global
politics. By reintroducing society into global politics we might be able to offer alternative
openings into political puzzles of gendered security practices.

Notes
1 Examples specifically emphasizing women’s role in war and/or female protagonists include Hollywood
blockbusters such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012); European films such as Female Agents (2008) and The
Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008); television series such as Homeland (2011–), Our Girl (2013–), Britz
(2007).
2 For example, Svetlana Alexievich received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, at least in part, for
her collection of women’s stories of being soldiers in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World
War, voices whose contributions later had been erased from the national historical narrative.
3 The essay was written in 1970 and originally published in the collection Image-Music-Text.
4 Here, ‘what we hear’ is limited to the lyrics but it is of course possible to also include the musical
arrangement (see Davies and Franklin 2015).
5 How Chechen female suicide bombers became known as ‘black widows’ is perhaps the most famous
example of the latter.
6 See Stavrianakis and Selby (2012) for an overview.
7 The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) publishes annual Yearbooks on arms
transfers and their databases are publically available. See www.sipri.org.
8 Interestingly, at one point in Part 3 of the Making of ‘Part of Me’, Perry says, “I don’t condone
violence”. A man responds, “This is not violence. This is protection”. Perry says: “That’s what they
say” (YouTube 2012).
9 For example, Benedict’s research shows that 30 per cent of military women in the US armed forces
are raped while serving, 71 per cent are sexually assaulted, and 90 per cent are sexually harassed. In
2009, the US Department of Defense estimated that some 90 per cent of military sexual assaults are
never reported (BBC News 2009).

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 PART IV

Gendered security institutions

 27
GENDER AND THE UN’S
WOMEN, PEACE AND
SECURITY AGENDA
Nicole George, Katrina Lee-Koo, and Laura J. Shepherd

Introduction
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda at the United Nations is the architecture
through which the gendered impacts of war, violence, and security practices are governed.
Inaugurated in 2000 with the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the WPS
agenda comprises eight resolutions (at the time of writing), addressing various dimensions of
the prevention of violence, the participation of women in peace and security governance,
and the protection of women’s rights and their bodies. In this chapter, we treat the WPS
agenda as an institution, in the broadest sense of it being a set of rules or practices that
structure and inform interaction in the realm of peace and security. The WPS agenda as an
institution is also articulated within and in relation to other institutions at the international,
regional, national, and local levels. We use this structure to organize our overview of gender
and the UN’s WPS agenda. First, we explore the international dimension, outlining the
gendered and institutional politics of the WPS agenda at the United Nations itself. Second,
we trace the support of and resistance to the WPS agenda as an institution at the regional
level, with a specific focus on the Asia Pacific region. In the final substantive section we use
the case study of Australian engagement with the WPS agenda to illuminate some of the
institutional complexities at the national level.

The international dimension

The gendered institutional politics of the UN’s WPS agenda at the international level have
two facets. First is the way in which the WPS agenda as an institution was formed, tracing
its inception back to the late 1990s and the mobilization of women’s civil society organization
around the issues of peace and security that gave rise to the foundational resolution. The
second facet relates to the ‘bedding in’ of the WPS agenda at the United Nations, in particular
at the UN Security Council, which can legitimately be considered the formal institutional
‘home’ of the WPS agenda and its architecture. In this section, we address each of these
facets in turn, interweaving the analysis of the institutional politics with commentary on the
ways in which the WPS agenda informs and is informed by specific configurations and
operations of gendered power.

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Formation of the institution

It is important to remember that, despite the widespread tendency to represent the passage
of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 as the moment at which the WPS agenda was given form at the
United Nations, the agenda did not emerge fully formed at this historic moment. According
to some, we can trace the development of the WPS agenda back to the first World Conference
on Women in Mexico City in 1975; one of the three agreed outcomes of the conference
related to the desire to see an increased contribution made by women in the realm of peace
and security. This objective continued to inform debate and advocacy over the subsequent
decades, and was afforded significant attention at the Fourth World Conference on Women
in Beijing in 1995. Both the Beijing Declaration and the outcome document of the Beijing
Conference, the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), were endorsed by the UN General
Assembly in its fiftieth session (A/RES/50/203); the Platform for Action includes a full chapter
on ‘Women and Armed Conflict’. The BPfA demanded recognition of the fact that armed
conflict affects women and men differently, and that the management of armed conflict and
post-conflict reconstruction needs to take into account the protection of women’s rights
and bodies, the prevention of gendered and sexualized violence, and the participation of
women in peacebuilding. As Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini and Judy El-Bushra (2004: 13) note,
“[a]t Beijing, the impact of armed conflict on women was noted as a specific emerging issue
requiring attention. Its inclusion in the Platform for Action spurred the growth of a global
women’s peace movement”.
Naraghi-Anderlini traces the process through which the resolution that inaugurated the
WPS agenda came to pass to the moment in 2000 when a group of civil society organizations
“launched a global appeal for a Security Council resolution that would formally recognise
women’s rights to participation in peace and security issues and protection in conflict zones”
(Naraghi-Anderlini 2007: 7). In June 2000, a dozen women from a range of non-government
organizations (NGOs) sat at a table with women from UNIFEM (now the United Nations
Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or UN Women) in a room
in New York, across the street from the UN Headquarters, and debated what should happen
from this point forward. The UNIFEM staffer called upon the office of the Namibian mission
to the UN for assistance; Namibia had passed the Windhoek Declaration and Namibia Plan
of Action on Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective in Multidimensional Peace Support
Operations at the Women’s Conference in May 2000, was at the time one of the ten elected
members of the UN Security Council, and was due to hold the presidency in October.
UNIFEM asked the Namibian mission to send someone who could help with drafting a
resolution in accordance with the required format and language for presentation to the
Council, and the mission provided both technical support and, ultimately, political support
for the text that became UNSCR 1325.
Civil society involvement in the drafting and passage of the resolution was significant,
and influential. Prior to the resolution being presented to the Council, for example, each of
the women who had had a seat at the table during the preliminary discussions was asked
to persuade three Council members of the importance of this initiative. The importance of
allies in a political process such as this cannot be overstated; Bangladesh, Jamaica, Canada,
and Namibia, of course, were particular supporters of the resolution among the E-10, and
eventually a coalition was built that included the UK as a permanent member. These member
states sought unanimous adoption, and the resolution was indeed adopted unanimously,
representing a degree of collaboration between member states and civil society around
the issues of gender, peace, and conflict that continues to this day. The group that prompted

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the gathering of momentum around these issues has now been formalized under the auspices
of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, and subsequent WPS reso-
lutions have often been mobilized by civil society working in and through the NGO
Working Group.
The formation and scope of the WPS agenda has its own gender politics. Women are
clearly not a homogenous group; women have been perpetrators and victims of violence,
peace activists and spoilers, they have been willing and effective soldiers, and they have been
forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of escalating conflicts. There is a representation
politics to the emphasis on women as peacemakers that we must be attuned to in our study
of the WPS agenda. It has been argued that, in UNSCR 1325, women are predominantly
positioned as “fragile, passive and in need of protection” (Shepherd 2011: 506); although
there is also recognition of women’s agency, this configuration does not really come to the
foreground until the WPS agenda is consolidated in later resolutions including UNSCR 1889
and UNSCR 2122. Both of these latter emphasize women as agents of change – and both,
perhaps not incidentally, were heavily influenced by women’s civil society organizations
rather than being propounded by member states within the Security Council.

The institutional context

The institutional context into which UNSCR 1325 emerged – the UN Security Council
– had historically neither been sensitive to the gendered dimensions of peace and conflict,
nor receptive to the idea that such matters should be incorporated into core business. The
Council was broadly considered the preserve of masculinized power and militarized visions
of security (Cohn 2008), although there were certain shifts in the mid-1990s that created an
opportunity for furthering debate about gender, peace, and conflict. The United Nations
system as a whole, prior to the 1990s, tended to operationalize a state-centric conceptualization
of security, in which the referent object of security policies and practice was the state. During
the early 1990s, this conceptual framework shifted, such that a broader conceptualization of
security began to develop, in which multiple referent objects could exist (including the indi-
vidual human subject). This movement, with a concomitant emphasis not on state security
but on human security, is significant in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to the
discussion of gender, peace, and conflict. The Council to this day remains somewhat conser-
vative in its engagement with ‘non-traditional’ security issues, including global health issues,
the protection of civilians, and the management of complex emergencies. The ability of
women’s civil society organizations to coordinate their efforts, and to successfully advocate
for the inclusion of issues pertaining to women’s rights and the prevention of sexualized
violence in and after conflict at the Council is thus noteworthy.
It is fair to say that commitment to the WPS agenda within the Security Council has
been somewhat inconsistent. Following the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in 2000, it was a
further eight years before another resolution was published under the thematic area of
‘women and peace and security’, from where the WPS agenda got its name. Various reso-
lutions and associated WPS documentation, including the annual Reports of the Secretary-
General on this topic, bemoan the lack of institutional support for the implementation of
the WPS agenda across the United Nations. Failures in implementation led the secretary-
general to call for the development of a system-wide action plan, which was developed in
2005 but which has never enjoyed significant investment at the UN beyond the scope of
the annual reports. There appears to be a lack of integration of WPS provisions and principles
in the ‘core business’ resolutions of the UN SC, and UN entities such as the Department of

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Peacekeeping Operations and the Peacebuilding Commission each have relatively limited
integration of the agenda in their operations (although this does not mean that there is not
good gender work happening in these units, which is an interesting puzzle in itself).
UNSCR 2242 formally recognizes the need for better effort in operationalizing the WPS
agenda at UN HQ. This resolution urges UN entities “to redouble their efforts to integrate
women’s needs and gender perspectives into their work, including in all policy and planning
processes and assessment missions” (UN Security Council 2015: OP 4). An emphasis is put
on accountability, with gender targets suggested as key performance indicators for all UN
senior managers at HQ and in the field. There are other institutional mechanisms that are
proposed within this resolution, including the creation of an Informal Group of Experts to
inform Council deliberations, and briefings by civil society on country-specific considerations
and various thematic concerns. This is the strongest language to date on the ways in which
the UN as an institution is expected to respond to the WPS agenda, but the fact that there
has been a demonstrable need to articulate expectations in such clear and pressing terms
might be evidence of a shaky commitment to these provisions and principles from the outset.
A final comment on the institutionalization of the WPS agenda relates to a further pro-
vision in the most recent resolution: “closer working relationships within the United Nations”
are encouraged, “among all those responsible for implementing the WPS agenda, including
UN Women, taking into account their role on women, peace and security coordination and
accountability, and the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in
Conflict” (UN Security Council 2015: OP 4). In the introduction to this chapter, we noted
the three ‘pillars’ of the WPS agenda: the prevention of violence; the participation of women
in peace and security governance; and the protection of women’s rights and their bodies. There
has been a perceptible bifurcation of the agenda over time along the lines of protection and
participation, with prevention being somewhat diminished. The institutionalization of the
protection agenda, in the form of the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-
General on Sexual Violence in Conflict and the creation of UN Action Against Sexual
Violence in Conflict (UN Action) as a supporting and coordinating entity across the UN
system, affords a degree of institutional privilege and positioning that is absent from the
participation agenda (despite the best efforts of UN Women). This is perhaps a result of
the gendered logics of protection (Young 2003) that make it easier, conceptually, to accept
a peace and security governance architecture that positions women as victims of violence
rather than agents of change. With this in mind, it seems that there is still some way to go
before the WPS agenda transforms the institution of which is it a part, or takes full account
of the lives and experiences of women in conflict and post-conflict settings, the recognition
and transformation of which was the vision that guided the authors of UNSCR 1325.

The regional dimension

Regional intergovernmental institutions can play an important intermediary role in assisting
the diffusion of the WPS agenda. Regional institutions that have incorporated aspects of the
WPS framework include the African Union, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation, the Pacific Islands Forum, the International Conference on the Great Lakes
region, and the Southern African Development Community (Davies, Nackers and Teitt
2014: 335). But the process of bedding this framework into regional policy might see aspects
of the WPS agenda moulded or stretched in ways that can be both enabling and constraining
for broader regional debate on gender and security. To understand how this occurs and the
impact it has on regional articulations of WPS priorities it is helpful to consider the gendered

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architecture of entitlement that structures debate on gender and security in regional contexts
and how this shapes both the reception of the WPS agenda and its re-articulation as a regional
policy platform (George 2016a). This approach is particularly productive for analysis of the
differing ways WPS provisions have bedded into regional policy of intergovernmental
organizations operating in Asia and the Pacific, and aids understanding of why regional
institutions such as the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) have been quicker to recognize the WPS
agenda than has the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Norms of non-
interference, considered foundational within ASEAN, appear to have made it more difficult
for women activists to win institutional support for this agenda (Davies, Nackers and Teitt,
2014). Within the PIF, the development of institutional mechanisms designed to manage the
outbreak of conflict that occurs internally, within states, has contributed to a relaxation of
these norms. This has opened the way for greater recognition of women’s own contributions,
as peacebuilders, to the realization of regional order and security. While this feminized
association of women and peace has been enabling at one level, it has also limited the extent
to which women are deemed to be entitled to enter into other aspects of gender and security
debate in the Pacific region.
The 2012 launch of the PIF’s regional action plan (RAP) on UNSCR 1325 occurred
with some fanfare. It was a noteworthy development in a region where gender analysis more
commonly identifies structural impediments that restrict women’s agency. These include
regional indicators which show high to extreme levels of gender violence, low rates of female
participation in paid work, and women’s marginal presence in institutional decision-making
(UN Women 2011; True et al. 2014).
In part, this policy advance reflects the determination of a key group of women peace
activists. Indeed, it can be viewed as the culmination of a hard-fought ten-year campaign,
spearheaded by women from Pacific Island countries that had experienced conflict and
instability in the 1990s and 2000s. These conflicts had seen elected governments toppled
from power in Fiji and Solomon Islands, and PNG’s own defence forces deployed in the
island territory of Bougainville to quell an armed secessionist movement. Casualties from
these conflicts ranged from single-digit figures in Fiji to between 100 and 400 in Solomon
Islands to roughly 10 per cent of Bougainville’s population. In all contexts, conflict heightened
nationalist sentiment, while sharpening mistrust and suspicion among groups in the com-
munity. This provided easy triggers for further violence and unrest and challenges for those
attempting to promote conflict-settlement processes in the years that followed.
While women were sometimes active participants in, and supporters of warring groups,
many women in these countries also experienced particular kinds of hardship, deprivation,
and sometimes brutal forms of gendered violence as a result of the instability. These gendered
burdens prompted groups of women in each setting to become involved in peace negoti-
ation and conflict mitigation efforts. This work built on the legacies of regional campaigns
for peace that were spearheaded by groups of Pacific Island women in earlier decades. In
these campaigns, women have voiced resistance to imported and home-grown varieties of
militarism in their countries, as well as the nuclear testing programmes conducted in the
region by foreign powers (Teaiwa 1994, 2008; Alexander 2010). References to faith and
custom have always been integral to this work (George 2015). In later periods, as women
bravely stood between combatant groups to speak of peace, this practice continued. They
were careful to remind all present that their ‘peacetalk’ was authorized by local cultural
practices upholding women’s maternal and familial roles, and in some contexts also had a
sacred connotation, reflected in the teachings of Christian faith (Hermkens 2011; George
2015).

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But in a broader socio-political context where politics and conflict are often understood
as men’s business, these same women often struggled to win support for the idea that sus-
tainable peace needed political systems that allowed women to have equitable forms of
participation. Hence, women peace activists welcomed the establishment of UNSCR 1325,
describing it in the region as a “loud hailer” that lent international legitimacy to their
demands for recognition and enhanced involvement in longer-term processes of conflict
transition and governance (FemLINKPACIFIC 2008). Forming a coalition that became
known as Pacific Peacewomen, these groups worked regionally to build awareness of the
UN agenda among regional policy-makers. From the mid-2000s their lobbying targeted
the PIF as an institution that could play a key role in formalizing the provisions of UNSCR
1325 into a regional policy framework.
The PIF was itself conducive to the arguments of the region’s WPS activists at this time,
and particularly the emphasis placed on women’s conflict-prevention and peacebuilding
capabilities. These demands coincided with the pessimistic opinion of a particular group of
security analysts (often external observers of the region) who, in the early 2000s, began to
argue that the Pacific Islands region constituted an “arc of instability”, and was characterized
by splintered, weak or failed states (Reilly 2000). Although exaggerated and belittling, these
accounts were also influential in a region that was still coming to terms with the human, social,
and material costs of the violent unrest that had taken hold in some island states, and particularly
those in the Western Pacific (Firth 2001).
Hence there was an increasing conviction among regional policy-makers that new regional
security mechanisms were needed and that to do nothing was to invite a more violent future
for Pacific peoples. To this end, increased attention was focused upon the PIF, and the role
it might play as a security-building institution able to manage localized sources of crisis and
insecurity (Firth 2001). This shift occurred despite the institution’s foundational principles of
respect for the sovereign status of member states and non-interference in the domestic affairs
of member states. The new focus on crisis management was given its strongest and most
‘interventionist’ policy expression in its Biketawa Declaration, adopted in 2000. This declaration
established a list of actions that are available to the forum secretary-general to act in a ‘good
offices’ capacity to avert or manage unrest, conflict, and political crises in the region (PIFS
2000).
The provisions of the Biketawa Declaration were followed with concrete action in the
years that followed. They were invoked in 2003, to give authorization to the PIF to oversee
the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), a conflict transition and
statebuilding intervention that lasted from 2003 until 2013. In 2009, they were later invoked
again, this time more controversially, to suspend Fiji from the PIF after its military leaders
failed to deliver on repeated promises to re-establish a democratic governance process (Tarte
2014). It is important to note that no detailed gender analysis or planning was undertaken
to support these initiatives and that women had little capacity to influence how the Forum
managed these interventions (George 2016a; Westendorf 2013). Gender analysts and women’s
peacebuilding coalitions were quick to observe this inattention as the PIF assumed a more
activist posture on crisis management and, from 2006, they began to work within and
alongside the organization to maintain pressure for stronger recognition of the WPS agenda.
To win regional support for gender reform in regional security policy, women emphasized
the contributions they had made to conflict mediation but also warned of the costs that might
accrue to the region if their peacebuilding capacities were ignored. This was a productive
political tactic. As noted earlier, women peacebuilders had often sought to legitimate their
efforts to halt conflict by arguing their interventions were legitimated in custom and in faith.

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Before the PIF they now also highlighted the strategic value of this activity, particularly as the
region dealt with the legacies of conflict-related instability. Their proposition was that, if
the PIF sought to present itself as a crisis management institution, it must give greater policy
recognition to the crisis management activities undertaken by the region’s women. Ultimately
the argument was persuasive. Indeed, its institutional purchase was made clear at the launch
of the RAP in October 2012, when PIF Secretary-General Tuiloma Neroni Slade, described
the plan as “utilizing and enhancing the inherent capabilities of women as peacebuilders,
including at state institution levels, to provide a secure and conflict free environment for our
communities” (PIFS 2012).
This categorization of women as ‘inherent’ peacebuilders was a powerful validation of
women’s demands which is emphasized in the RAP. But when read more critically, this
recognition is also revealing of the way women are positioned as entitled actors in the debate
on regional security more generally. That is to say, PIF security policy is currently focused on
the threats to regional order that emanate from localized outbreaks of conflict, and women’s
capacities to assist in the management of these ‘crises’.
But it is important to consider the gendered implications that accrue to women when
peacebuilding is described by policy-makers as a skill that is ‘inherent’ to them or framed in
highly feminized terms. On the one hand, there is a risk that women’s peacebuilding
capabilities are written into the policy architecture in ways that do not recognize this as
political acumen, but rather as a natural and innate gendered instinct. In the Pacific region,
this role is said to be reflective of women’s dutiful roles as brokers of peace in custom or as
bearers of faith values. The problem with this construction is that it can be both constraining
and enabling. While the institutional architecture might entitle women to operate as grass-
roots or community-level peacebuilders, it could also make it more difficult for those same
women to have their peacebuilding expertise recognized as political skill in the institutionalized
and male-dominated processes of settlement negotiation and post-conflict governance. The
experiences of women peacebuilders in post-conflict Bougainville are a poignant testi-
mony to this challenge. Here women proudly remember the roles they played in bringing
peace to their country but also complain of their inability to make concrete contributions in
the post-conflict sphere of institutionalized decision-making (George 2016b).
The institutionalized architecture of entitlement might have other constraining impacts
too. As we have shown, in the Pacific Islands regions the present policy architecture entitles
women to participate in security debate in a reactive sense as responders to security challenges,
particularly incidents of violent unrest. But this same architecture makes it more difficult for
women to articulate their own perspectives on the management of security challenges. This
dynamic is particularly clear if we examine regional debates on environmental security in the
Pacific Islands and the growing challenges many countries in the region are facing as they
contend with the phenomenon of sea-level rise (Fry 2015). Women environmental activists
have sometimes faced generalized difficulties in making the gendered dimension of climate
change understood, and in some contexts also found it difficult to win support for the idea
that environmental precarity poses particular security challenges for women (George 2016a).
For example, in some contests, women’s efforts to take leadership of projects to address phe-
nomena such as sea-level rise is resisted and they might be castigated for entering ‘the man’s
world’ (Rakova, cited in George 2016a: 384). This resistance comes about because this type
of activity challenges the prevailing normative architecture of dutiful gendered virtue that
frames where and how women are able to speak on the subject of security. It also disrupts a
general positioning of Pacific women as resilient to climate change because of their traditional
(and feminized) kinship with nature (Lane and McNaught 2009; cf. Arora-Jonsson 2011).

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While the Pacific Island region’s peace activists have logged impressive gains in winning
institutional recognition for the WPS agenda at the regional level, tensions around the
framing of security challenges, and the ways in which women are entitled to participate in
the debate remain unresolved. These are likely to become more profound sticking points
for regional articulations of the WPS agenda in advocacy, and in formal institutionalized
policy, as the impacts of climate change become more urgent for Pacific Island peoples into
the future.

The national dimension

Individual UN member states are central to the implementation of the WPS agenda. How the
institution of the state translates and implements WPS will directly impact upon how women
and men experience peace and security. Keeping in mind the discussions above, this section
will examine how the WPS agenda is institutionalized at the national level. It will consider
how UN member states absorb WPS values as they trickle down from the global and regional
levels, as well as how WPS – as an institution – can be shaped and adapted by state behaviour.
The implementation of the WPS agenda by Australia – a significant actor in the Asia Pacific
– provides an example of this.
The most common ways for WPS to be institutionalized by a state is through a National
Action Plan (NAP). Drawing inspiration from the suite of WPS resolutions, a country’s NAP
serves as its policy for how it intends to implement the WPS agenda in its foreign and domestic
policies. The first NAP was developed by Denmark in 2005 and at the time of writing there
were 74 NAPs worldwide. Among their benefits, NAPs can provide the opportunity for states
to organize, resource, and assign responsibilities for achieving clearly defined and time-bound
WPS outcomes. For non-state actors such as civil society, a NAP also has the capacity to create
a transparent and accountable framework for the government’s work. In some cases it might
do this by establishing a baseline or targets from which civil society can monitor progress and
gauge successes and shortcomings.
NAPs usually have two central components. The first is a narrative outline that establishes
a conceptual framework for how states and the WPS agenda will interact on issues of peace
and conflict. The second component sets out how WPS values will be implemented. As a set
of technical frameworks, this is usually presented as a matrix of actions, and is followed by a
monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework, and an approach to reporting and governance.
Collectively these two elements speak to how national institutions seek to translate, implement,
and account for their engagement with the WPS agenda.
The most prominent way in which NAPs conceptualize the WPS agenda is through their
orientation as either an inward- or outward-looking policy (see Shepherd 2016). This ref-
lects whether states believe that the WPS agenda needs to be implemented as a domestic
policy within conflict-affected states, or as a foreign policy for peaceful states working abroad.
Within the Asia Pacific region, for instance, Australia and Japan are routinely described as
having an outward-looking NAP while Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and others are
inward looking. While on one level this might appear uncontroversial, it can communicate
much about how states seek to position themselves and their responsibilities around peace
and security.
Australia’s outward-facing NAP, for instance, suggests it is unaffected by conflict, and
is a nation whose primary responsibility to the WPS agenda lies outside its own borders.
It is therefore oriented toward Australia’s work with states and multilateral bodies on issues
of conflict prevention, military engagements, and peacebuilding. Its highlighting of the WPS

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agenda while occupying a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2013–14
supports this vision of Australia as a middle power actor encouraging global norm diffusion
(Lee-Koo 2014: 300).
However, the national labelling of WPS as either a foreign or domestic obligation is
problematic. First, it can silence those within the nation who believe they fall within the
purview of WPS. In positioning themselves as non-conflict, or non-post-conflict, national
institutions convey powerful messages to those within their borders or broader communities.
In positioning their NAPs as foreign policies, the governments of Australia and Japan, for
example, are telling Indigenous populations and comfort women that their experiences of
violence are neither visible nor legitimate. Second, this discursive labelling of the policy as
foreign fails to recognize the fluidity of violence and movement. For example, the Australian
NAP excludes the Department of Immigration and Border Protection from implementa-
tion responsibilities. This means that women who experience violence while seeking asylum
in Australia – in transit, offshore detention facilities, or on the mainland – are not rendered
visible under the NAP. This highlights a disconnection between Australia’s policies on
irregular migration (seen as a domestic policy) and WPS (seen as a foreign policy).
However, a nation’s conceptual framing of WPS means little if it is not supported by
implementation strategies. Successful implementation of WPS requires both political will and
accountability within the nation. It has been recognized globally that, while WPS has strong
rhetorical support, the political will and accountability for implementation is weak. Often
there are context-specific triggers that build political will within countries. Three issues were
relevant to Australia: first, the widespread and coordinated advocacy of the civil society sector
has been a catalyst in ensuring accountability; second, the public airing of accounts of gender-
based violence and discrimination within the Australian Defence Force has led to a stronger
political commitment to WPS; finally, Australia’s candidacy for a temporary United Nations
Security Council seat in 2013 undoubtedly influenced its decision to release a NAP in 2012.
However, the politics of WPS is separate from the leadership and coordination that is
necessary for the day-to-day implementation of WPS at the national level. A strong NAP
is necessary to ensure that WPS values become appropriately embedded into the relevant
implementing agencies. Yet, as we noted earlier, the WPS agenda is yet to effectively
transform the state. This is at least partly because most NAPs are often weak policy documents.
The 2015 Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325, undertaken by UN Women,
notes that the most significant reason why NAPs lack strong impact is their weak language
and frameworks. The study notes that most first generation NAPs lack the technical definition
for clear implementation. This includes the failure to make a clear statement of comprehensive
goals and create clear lines of responsibilities, budgets, timelines, and oversight mechanisms.
Moreover, the study notes that good NAPs have strong leadership and effective coordination,
an inclusive design process, costing and budget allocations, robust M&E frameworks, and
flexibility to adapt to emerging situations (Coomaraswamy 2015: 241).
While the Australian NAP avoids some of these criticisms, it lacks most of the highlighted
features of a good NAP. The issue of effective coordination is one such area. Australia and
Indonesia have the only NAPs in the Asia Pacific that are coordinated by women’s ministries
and not foreign or defence ministries. Coordination has an important impact upon the
success of NAPs. First, coordination by a women’s ministry suggests that WPS is primarily
a women’s as opposed to a peace and security issue. This is contrary to the intent of WPS which
seeks to mainstream women’s equality into peace and security – not the other way around.
In the case of Australia, it further marginalizes the agenda as the Office for Women describes
its mission as to “work across government to deliver policies and programmes to advance

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gender equality and improve the lives of Australian women” (Australian Government n.d.).
Its focus upon Australian women is inconsistent with the NAP’s orientation as a foreign
policy document. Second, as a reasonably small section of government with limited resources,
it has little political capacity to effectively demand implementation or reprimand failures by
large and dominant foreign, defence, or legal agencies.
Similarly, the weak M&E framework sees the Australian NAP fall short of best practice.
Australia’s M&E framework is largely quantitative in design, requiring relevant government
agencies to ‘list’, ‘describe’, and ‘number’ the activities that correspond to relevant actions
and strategies within the document. This style of reporting is predominantly free of analysis.
It does not discuss the circumstances in which WPS activities are carried out, nor does it
attempt to discover the outcomes and impact of actions accredited to NAP implementation
(see Lee-Koo 2016). In this sense, while it might capture the buzz of activities around the
WPS agenda, it does not account for the quality of those activities.
Finally, the Australian NAP falls prey to the gendered logics of protection noted earlier
in this chapter. The narrative presented in the Australian NAP reflects a strong understanding
of the equal importance and interconnected nature of the WPS pillars, however the NAP’s
framework does not support this balance. In a 2015 survey, members of Australia’s civil
society reported that they believed the government overwhelmingly favoured the protection
agenda and was very poor on activities associated particularly with the prevention of conflict
(Lee-Koo 2015). Similarly, the persistence of the protection focus is evident in the
government’s actions. Missed opportunities to publically advocate for women’s strong
participation in peace processes, including in global efforts to end the conflict in Syria, and
in Myanmar’s peace process (where Australia is the second largest bilateral donor) provide
two ready examples of the failure to promote the participation and prevention pillars.

Conclusion
The WPS agenda seeks to embed principles of gender equality into peace and security
governance. It is itself an institution that changes and shifts as it interacts with other actors and
institutions at the global, regional, and national levels. The institution is (re)produced in
and through the UN Security Council resolutions that constitute the formal architecture. This
in turn shapes the National and Regional Action Plans for implementation, and the actions
of the networks of policy-makers, practitioners, advocates, and analysts who engage with the
provisions and principles of the WPS agenda. WPS is not without its criticisms and challenges,
from arguments about the depoliticization and/or militarization of gender equality, to the
prospect of dilution through diversification of the agenda to include, for example, a focus on
men and boys (see Kirby and Shepherd 2016). Thus, the agenda remains a ‘work in progress’
and an institution under development. Yet, the need for its continuation is as pressing now
as it was when the foundational resolution was adopted. As this chapter has demonstrated,
though, gendered politics, feminist politics, and institutional politics and cultures within and
between institutions will both inhibit and promote the capacity for WPS to achieve its goal
of facilitating positive changes in the lives of women and girls impacted by armed conflict.

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 28
PEACE PROCESSES AND
WOMEN’S INCLUSION
Kara Ellerby

Introduction
International security institutions finally seem to be in agreement regarding the importance
of including women during peace processes. The United Nations has formally affirmed that
the inclusion of women in peace processes is generally good for peace. Former UN Secretary-
General, Ban Ki-Moon, stated that having women at the table improves the quality of
agreements and their implementation (UN 2009). UN Women also cites new research on
how women specifically make for more ‘peaceful’ outcomes:

[P]eace processes that included women as witnesses, signatories, mediators, and/or

negotiators demonstrated a 20% increase in the probability of a peace agreement
lasting at least two years. This increases over time, with a 35% increase in the
probability of a peace agreement lasting 15 years.
Stone 2014, cited from UN Women 2015b

If the inclusion of women is so effective at generating longer and stronger peace processes,
then one would think the dynamics of peace processes would be changing. However, this
is not necessarily the case.
In general, the statistics on women’s participation in peace processes are disappointing.1
Between 1992 and 2011, 9 per cent of negotiators at peace talks were women and fewer
than 4 per cent were signatories (UN Women 2012). In 2012, for the first time there was a
female Chief Negotiator during the Philippines-Mindanao negotiations. Another important
measure of women’s interests and participation in peace processes are formal peace agreements.
Strong and more woman-aware agreements can make for clearer priorities in resolving
conflict and better-defined roles for all parties in ensuring peace. It might also create more
space for women’s participation in order to pursue long-term conflict resolution and
more representative processes. But women are also often excluded in the production of peace
agreements, which rarely mention women or women’s issues (Bell and O’Rourke 2010). Of
the 58 civil war peace processes since 1990, only about 60 per cent make any mention
of women, and then only about 10 per cent mention women and gender issues to the point
one could argue they actually reflect “women’s interests” (Ellerby 2016).

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Women are not participating formally despite being active in promoting peace within
their respective countries: as long as there has been conflict, there have been and are women
organizing to manage its effects and end it (Naraghi-Anderlini 2007; Anderson 2016; Tripp
et al. 2009). In all of the cases examined in this chapter, local women were organized working
for peace, and invested in creating a process to not only end conflict, but also improve lives.
But despite there always already being women ready to work for peace, there is a consistent
problem of these very women being excluded once peace processes begin. Often these local
women, who have firsthand knowledge of a conflict (the parties involved, the issues to be
resolved, and the particular complexities of a given locale), are not called upon to participate
in negotiating peace.
This chapter first examines three major ‘barriers’ to women’s participation in peace pro-
cesses. I then outline peace processes that have produced the most ‘woman-aware’ peace
agreements in the last almost 30 years and what accounts for this outcome. There are seven
cases in the last 25 years where peace processes have resulted in higher levels of women’s
substantive representation in peace agreements, these include: Guatemala (1994–1996),
Burundi (2001), the Democratic Republic of Congo (2003), Sudan-Darfur (2006), Uganda
(2007), the Philippines-Bangsamoro (2012), and Colombia (2016).2 For example, in
Guatemala’s ‘Firm and Lasting Peace’ agreement, women are ensured equal access to work,
housing, property, and education. The ‘Darfur Peace Agreement’ included entire sections
on women, emphasizing how women should be represented in other peacebuilding endeav-
ours (such as reintegration programmes and policing), should be protected from gender-based
violence, and should receive necessary services such as maternity care and restitution from
the state.
In these seven cases, women’s interests resulted from three jointly necessary conditions:
a women’s agenda, access to the peace process, and advocacy from UNIFEM/UN Women
(Ellerby 2016).3 An agenda indicates women’s groups had a specific and sometimes written
set of priorities that could be included in an agreement. Access covers the ways women have
a variety of formal and/or informal interactions with the process either as part of warring
parties and/or via negotiators and their organizations. Advocacy represents various forms of
support from negotiating parties and mediators for women’s security concerns. All of the
peace processes listed above had all three conditions, indicating these were central to why
their agreements include women’s interests and security concerns.

Barriers for women in peacebuilding

According to Irene Santiago, a former negotiator for the Philippines Government during its
negotiations with the Moro Islamic Front (MILF), there are three barriers to women’s
participation in peacebuilding: conceptual, technical, and political barriers. The first is a
“conceptual barrier; when peace negotiations are intended to end war, only war actors are
admitted” (O’Reilly, Ó Súillebháin and Paffenholz 2015). She outlines that in order to
change this dynamic, talks must not just be about ending war but also creating peace. The
second barrier is a ‘technical barrier’ where women have less experience in activities that
will help them to participate in peace talks. Santiago states this is overcome with capacity-
building and better engagement with women’s informal peacebuilding skills. The third and
biggest barrier is a “political barrier to acknowledging the importance of women in decision
making. Most people are still seeing the inclusion of women as a quota to be met rather than
a valuable tool that affects the outcome” (Santiago, cited in O’Reilly et al. 2015: 22).
Because women are still not included as peace negotiators or mediators and are rarely sign-
atories on peace agreements, it (re)enforces the idea that women are not formal practitioners

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of peace because they do not participate in war in the same ways as men. Women are not
usually military leaders (of any group); their role as soldiers is often obscured; and women’s
other wartime roles are either rendered invisible or considered unimportant. This ‘conceptual
barrier’ is the ultimate paradox for women working to end conflict: while women are
(problematically) assumed to be more ‘peaceful’ than men, this peacefulness is often used to
exclude them from participating in peace negotiations. The fraught and incorrect logic
maintains that because women do not ‘participate’ in conflict they should not be at the
negotiation table (Itto 2006). During Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement negotiations,
for example, the Sudanese Government argued against gender quotas introduced by women
negotiators on the grounds “they had not been fighting women” (ibid.).
Similarly, during El Salvador’s peace negotiations, Lorena Peña “affirmed that the special
problems of women were simply not discussed during the negotiations” (as quoted in Luciak
2001: 39). Leaders who did champion women’s rights and attempted to introduce the issues
into the peace dialogue faced resistance for attempting to “divide the revolution” (Luciak
2001: 39). Because of the gendered ways of thinking that privilege certain ways of participating
in conflict over others, only men’s roles and positions are considered relevant to establishing
peace. This is the ‘conceptual barrier’ to peace. This has normalized gendered practices of
peacemaking in which rebel and government leaders are the only ones invited to negotiate,
and all other groups and parties are excluded, despite the fact that the outcomes of the
negotiations will have huge impacts on their lives.
The ‘political barrier’, or the degree to which women are seen as central to the overall
peace process, also matters because it shapes if and how women’s issues are addressed during
negotiations. Political barriers can result in an either complementary or competitive process
for women’s security concerns (Ellerby 2017a). Some peace processes treat women’s security
concerns as complementary to the overall peace process, meaning women’s security demands
are integrated as part of the larger peace platforms. Other processes treat women’s issues as
though they are in competition with overall peace demands. For example, in El Salvador,
women’s issues were seen as competing with their overall Marxist demands. This caused
one woman rebel leader who supported women’s rights, Nidia Díaz, to not bring them up.
Another female commander, “considered the organized women’s movement extremist and
radical” (Luciak 2001: 39). These same women spoke of experiencing discrimination within
the rebel movement and this might have shaped the degree to which they felt empowered
to represent women’s interests (ibid.). In contrast, in Guatemala, rebel negotiator Luz Mendez
stated she learned from El Salvador’s failure to address women’s issues, and consciously made
it an issue in the commission (ibid.). Mendez was able to challenge and overcome political
barriers to women’s security concerns, resulting in a much more woman-aware peace
agreement in Guatemala.
The final barrier, the ‘technical barrier’, has to do with overcoming the actual ‘costs’
of promoting women during peace processes. Often the biggest constraints for women’s
participation in peace processes are practical and logistical: it takes time and money.
Advocating for peace requires both human and financial resources; events, activities, meetings,
and conferences require resources that small-scale women’s movements do not often have.
Organizing conferences, caravans, trainings, and meetings takes financial and technical
support. Local and regional organizations might have the ‘woman power’ and desire to
change things, but need money to make it happen. Perhaps one of the most significant kinds
of support that large global and regional security organizations can offer women is to give
them the resources they need and let them continue doing their work. For example, during
the Darfur peace process, UNIFEM paid for some Darfurian women to fly to the peace talks

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in Abuja (Page, Whitman and Anderson 2009: 10–11). Women’s peace processes in all of
these countries started ‘local’, and no one knows better what is at stake and what needs to
be resolved than those women directly affected by conflict. According to Dr Zahiba Yousuf
and David Newton (2013), in their overview of women’s participation in peace processes:

Women in the case studies identified a lack of resources and capacity to engage in
institutional politics, including deficits in funding . . . The reality of women as primary
caregivers in the home should also be recognised. Responsibilities such as child care
and economic welfare may impede those desiring to engage in both civil society and
formal politics.

Ultimately these barriers might help explain why so many peace processes exclude women
and their security demands in subsequent agreements. By examining the seven more ‘success-
ful’ cases in which women have participated and have stronger agreements, one can begin
to outline a set of strategies for ensuring women’s future participation.

Overcoming barriers to women’s participation in peace processes

As outlined in the introduction, there are three ways women already working for peace can
be supported by other groups to ensure more woman-aware agreements and overcome the
barriers previously discussed. These include supporting women to prepare their own agenda
for peace processes; ensuring both formal and informal access to peace processes; and advocating
on behalf of women’s groups, particularly when participation in the peace process is limited.

Women with an agenda

One important feature of the seven peace processes listed above is the degree to which women
had their own sets of priorities for peace processes, and how often these priorities were for-
mally written. In Guatemala, women were organized via the Civil Society Assembly (Assemblea
de Sociedad Civil), which represented different groups during negotiations (Berger 2006: 35).
This ‘Women’s Sector’ produced an actual set of demands, many of which were directly
written into the final agreement (Carillo and Chinchilla 2010: 146). To outline a women’s
agenda for the Burundian talks in 2001, UNIFEM sponsored a conference for Burundian
women working for peace (Agbalajobi 2009; UNIFEM 2000). The ‘All-Party Burundi
Women’s Peace Conference’ included delegates from all sides and women drafted their
own set of demands titled, ‘Women’s Proposals to Engender the Draft Arusha Peace and
Reconciliation Agreement’. Their proposal included: a 30 per cent quota; the need to address
sexual violence; equal access to education and changes to property and land rights; a ‘women’s
charter’ in the constitution; mechanisms for ensuring women’s proposals are budgeted for
(Anderson 2016: 72; Tripp et al. 2009). Twenty-three of these provisions are included in the
peace agreement (Tripp et al. 2009).
In preparation for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue (ICD), UNIFEM supported 60 women
from across different sides of the conflict and country to generate a single agenda for the
dialogue, called the ‘Nairobi Declaration and Action Plan’. Women from more than 150
women’s rights organizations, along with some regional groups mobilized to meet and demand
access to the negotiations and to make sure women’s issues were included (Tripp et al. 2009:
214). These organizations also created regional organizations that worked to get women
representatives into the discussions on peace. Some of their main concerns included: making

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sure the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) be

included in the constitution; recognition of UNSCR 1325 and the Southern African
Development Community’s Declaration on Gender Equality; and a 30 per cent quota for
women delegates and in all levels of government (Tripp et al. 2009: 213; Whitman 2007).
Over 10 per cent of delegates for the ICD were women (UN Women 2012: 3).
For the Darfur negotiations, UNIFEM worked with women’s groups to help them
formulate their agenda as well (Itto 2006). This team also helped women delegates create a
platform that was incorporated into the final agreement, which had over 70 sections regarding
women. The agreement included provisions to ensure women were a part of wealth sharing,
had land rights, affirmative actions, and access to Disarmament, Demobilization and
Reintegration (DDR) programmes (ibid.).
While there is thus far relatively little academic work written on women’s role in the
current peace process in Colombia, one can glean from NGO and UN Women itself
the active role they played in fostering women’s participation in the peace process. Initially
women were not included. So, with the support of UN Women, women’s organizations
convened the First National Summit for Women and Peace in 2013 with 450 Colombian
women (UN Women 2015c). Here it was decided women should pursue a ‘gender
subcommittee’ to make sure women were represented, and in the coming weeks parties to
the negotiations all agreed women played an important role in peacebuilding (Herbolzheimer
2016; Krystalli 2016).

Access to peace processes matters

While access to a peace process might seem like an obvious condition for a peace process to
represent women’s interests, the form of access can vary greatly. One striking similarity for
all seven cases is that women who organized as a group were always at first excluded. While
some women participated because they were part of either the government or rebel groups,
women more generally were not included until they demanded it. While in all of these cases
women sought formal access to peace negotiations, in some of these cases women were
denied this formal access, so they found informal routes to be heard. In other cases women
were party to negotiations and ensured they spoke on behalf of other women.
In both Guatemala’s 1994–1996 agreement, and 20 years later in Colombia (2014–2016),
women’s groups had formal access to the peace process through special civil society advisory
bodies specifically dedicated to women’s issues. In Guatemala over 20 feminist and women’s
groups combined as the ‘Women’s Sector’ as part of the Civil Society Assembly (Berger
2006: 35). Initially there had not been a Women’s Sector but women’s groups were successful
in lobbying for its importance, and they were able to develop a common platform across
political preferences and class distinctions (Luciak 2001: 39). In Colombia in 2014, both the
government and FARC agreed to a ‘gender subcommittee’ to review and add to the final
agreement (Comunicado Conjunto (Joint Communiqué) 2014). The subcommittee met
with delegates from civil society organizations who worked on gender and LGBTI issues
needing to be addressed as part of the peace process and Colombia may have produced the
first peace agreement to address sexuality (other than sexual violence) in the actual agreement
(UN Women 2015c).
In Burundi, initially women were excluded from the peace process. After organizing with
UNIFEM’s help, the Colectif des Associations et ONGs Femininies du Burundi (CAFOB)
trained women in leadership and peacebuilding and focused on how to get women into
positions of power (Tripp et al. 2009: 210). These organizations were eventually able to send

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seven non-accredited delegates to the 1998 negotiations (ibid.). In Uganda, women had to
work very hard to be included and then were only granted observer status toward the end,
though they eventually created a peace caravan that travelled from the DRC to Uganda
(Nabukeera-Musoke 2009). But UNIFEM’s gender adviser to the Secretary-General’s Special
Envoy to the Lord’s Resistance Army-Affected Areas in Uganda helped women’s groups
during the negotiations by acting as a consultant and helping them develop protocols to
contribute to the accords (ibid.).

Advocating for women

While women need an agenda and access for women’s interests to be more fully addressed
as part of peace processes, this is often mediated through the advocacy of large security
institutions, and specifically UN Women (formerly UNIFEM). In producing agendas and
supporting women’s access, UN Women played an important role in all of the cases (except
Guatemala).
In Burundi the team of gender experts invited during initial talks included two technical
experts from UNIFEM who provided support for local women (Page et al. 2009: 10). And
during the ICD, UNIFEM helped local and regional organizations organize a women’s
‘Peace Table’ in 2001 that led to women’s participation and the inclusion of gender issues
during the dialogue (UN Women 2012: 3). Then, in preparation for the dialogue, UNIFEM
held direct meetings with the Chief Facilitator, Sir Ketumile Masire to discuss how to make
sure women were included (Whitman 2007).
In the DRC, UNIFEM (along with local NGOS Femmes Africa Solidarité and Women
as Partners for Peace in Africa) held workshop sessions with women activists on the logistics
of reforming the constitution, electoral and judicial systems so they could ensure there were
not just women, but women representing women’s interests at the peace table (Whitman
2007). One workshop included 64 women who were going to directly participate in the
talks, which also included information about how to participate (O’Reilly et al. 2015: 18).
UNIFEM also provided 14 consultants to help women delegates with technical knowledge
and support during negotiations (Whitman 2007).
UNIFEM-Khartoum worked with Sudanese civil society organizations (CSOs) to identify
Darfurian women to participate in the Darfur peace talks (Page et al. 2009: 10–11). Then,
during the last round of negotiations in Darfur, UNIFEM organized a ‘Gender Expert and
Support Team’ (GEST) (UN Women 2012: 10; UNICEF 2007). The team actually
participated in the peace negotiations after having met with women’s groups to form an
agenda (UNICEF 2007). Dr Mary Maboreke, a senior gender adviser for the African Union
and UNIFEM, connected GEST members with women from each negotiating party. In this
sense, the priorities set forth by women were reaching both sides of the conflict. Then, after
the Gender Team left the talks, UNIFEM added a gender adviser to continue monitoring
and speaking up for the GEST’s agenda (Page et al. 2009: 10–11).
In Uganda UNIFEM had a gender adviser to the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to
the LRA-Affected Areas of Uganda. This adviser was able to directly lobby the Special Envoy
and negotiating parties on behalf of the women’s groups (UN Women 2012: 10). As noted
by UN Women, this had an effect:

There is a striking difference in the language of the agreements between the earlier
accords and the later ones, dating from the point at which the women’s coalition
had begun to be able to articulate and communicate their views to the parties.
UN Women 2012: 10

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Subsequently, the government appointed two high-level women to their negotiating team
and 16 women were included as ‘gender experts’ (UN Women 2012).
UN Women also supported women’s training in the Philippines, helping women with
“peace-brokering skills and knowledge of international rights guarantees” (UN Women
Philippines 2016).
Also, along with the Mindanao Commission of Women (MCW) and the Women and
Gender Institute (WAGI) of Miriam College, UN Women hosted ‘Open Days on Women,
Peace and Security’. The event included women from Indigenous and Muslim women’s
groups, CSOs from Mindanao, peace activists, and the Philippine Government. The goal was
to facilitate civil society participation in the peace negotiations (UN Women 2011).
Additionally, UN Women programmes supported Bangsamoro women to “increase capacities
to advocate for their rights guaranteed under CEDAW and the UNSCR 1325” (UN Women
Philippines 2016). Many of these women worked on ‘peace panels’ for both the government
and MILF (ibid.).
According to a review of UN Women’s activities during Colombia’s peace process, CSOs
articulated that UN Women generally did the job of “brokering and facilitating space for
dialogue and exchange, in keeping with the objective of supporting women’s participation
and leadership roles in peace and security work, rather than acting as their voice” (UN
Women 2013: 110). One of the ‘gender experts’, Nelly Velandia, who participated in the
talks in Havana, noted how UN Women helped in capacity-building: “With all this technical
support, I feel that I’ve matured politically; it has helped me develop” (UN Women 2015c).
This was particularly the case at the local level where small NGOs felt protected from
larger groups and the ability to contribute in spaces normally closed to them (ibid.). In other
words, UN Women amplified women’s groups and brokered their access to the actual peace
processes.

Limits to ‘support’ from security organizations

Despite UN Women’s efforts to support local women’s organizations in their efforts to
participate in peace processes, it is worth discussing some important limits and drawbacks of
such ‘support’. For example, in Burundi, even though UNIFEM supported women meeting,
especially for the All-Women’s Peace Conference, these women were elites, often living
abroad. The women who attended the Peace Conference appear to have had little effect on
getting more women to actually participate in the agreement’s generation (Anderson 2016:
63). Rather, it was local civil society women who had a greater impact in making sure
women were included (ibid.). In this instance, while a conference matters, if it does not
include the women ‘on the ground’, but rather elites who might not even live in the country,
then the likelihood of civil society buy-in and support is diminished. It is important to make
sure security organizations are not usurping local women’s peace networks, but supporting
them in what they are already doing.
Another limit relates to the sort of issues UN Women ‘supports’ and advocates for during
peace processes. In particular, there is the potential issue of prioritizing sexual violence over
other gendered issues such as land or development. Some UN Women reports seemed to
emphasize the need to prioritize sexual violence (e.g., UN Women 2012). According to my
previous work on peace agreements, in the last six years more agreements are doing a better
job of including different types of provisions for women; they are less unidimensional (Ellerby
2015). But the largest increase in provisions related to women was focused on protecting

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women and girls from sexual violence. For example, Mali and the DRC’s latest peace
processes outlined the need to stop, investigate, and prosecute sexual violence as a war crime.
However, neither agreement actually specified women or gender in the text, only referencing
the need to end sexual violence. But given how the Women, Peace and Security agenda has
so many resolutions now specifically targeting sexual violence (such as UNSCRs 1820, 1960,
and 2106), there is little doubt these references focus on primarily women and girls. This
matters for three reasons. First, this might ignore that men and boys are also victims of sexual
violence. Second, the emphasis on sexual violence might render other issues women face,
such as displacement and poverty, as lower priorities during negotiations. The third issue
is that when global security institutions prioritize particular issues, such as sexual violence,
it can actually lead to a “fetishization of sexual violence in conflict in which it has become
the issue of negotiating women’s security to the detriment of other issues central to women’s
lives” (Ellerby 2015). Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern’s research on rape in the
DRC presents a powerful illustration of this dynamic. They identified a “commercialization
of rape”, where rape becomes a means to solicit aid and attention from the international
community. But such funding is not accompanied by more critical discussion of the racialized
and colonizing narrative produced by such measures (Baaz and Stern 2013: 112). Also,
treating rape as a war crime (as the United Nations emphasizes), treats conflict-related sexual
violence as an exceptional form of violence, rather than endemic to the daily life of women
(True 2012: 126).
The final major issue with UN Women advocating on behalf of women is that it seems
that it is only this branch of the UN system consistently undertaking such activities: the effort
to ‘include women’ seems to be relegated to woman-centred organizations. Scholar Sanam
Naraghi-Anderlini calls it ‘passing the buck’ and ‘ghettoizing women’ in which women-
centred organizations, such as UN Women, are the only entities integrating women into
security discourses and practices. UN Women/UNIFEM is in charge of all issues related to
women, rather than it really being ‘mainstreamed’ throughout the security institution network
(Naraghi-Anderlini 2007: 204). As she continues, the funding is not usually there to actually
help UNIFEM support women.
Naraghi-Anderlini also notes how efforts to include ‘gender advisers’, ‘gender units’, and
‘gender issues’ creates a sort of double-bind: if such ‘gender’ entities are not included, then
women get ignored, but when there is a specific officer or unit dedicated to ‘gender’,
then other units might feel ‘off the hook’ for thinking about women and/or gender since
they assume gender is ‘being dealt with’ (Naraghi-Anderlini 2007: 26). In this sense, all others
involved can ‘pass the buck’ on thinking about gender and/or including women because there
is a specific entity to do so. Each of the cases discussed uses ‘gender experts’ in some form, but
this relegates issues related to gender to a particular group. Gender becomes a special interest
of peace processes, rather than a common thread throughout any issue being discussed.
Women are then ‘ghettoized’ because they are kept either isolated or contained in a particular
manner, rather than integrated throughout the process and included in all parties involved.
Alongside this is the problematic way that gender is basically used as a synonym for
women when discussing ‘gender issues’ or needing ‘gender experts’ during peace processes.
If the point of gender advisers and teams is to make sure peace processes think about and
include women, then gender has little meaning past adding women to a process. This ‘add-
women’ logic is troubling because gender (masculinities and femininities) is a key source of
conflict and violence more generally (Ellerby 2017b; Sjoberg 2013), so to have it relegated
as something to be ‘added’ to conflict means not getting to the root of violence more
generally.

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Conclusion
It is worth noting that, of these ‘successful’ cases for women’s inclusion in peace processes,
all are still struggling to implement a (strong) peace. Burundi, the DRC, Northern Uganda,
Sudan, and the Philippines still have active conflict. Colombia’s public vote on accepting its
progressive agreement also failed, and some emerging research suggests this was directly
related to its language on gender and sexuality (Campoy 2016). Some of these cases are
basically perpetual peace processes with new agreements and new promises every few years.
But, if women are not included at some point in the formal process, it does not usually get
any easier to include them later. In other words, even when peace does not ensue, an active
women’s movement is still important. This is because women will affect any future peace
negotiations, either through their participation or exclusion. And the role women will play
after an agreement is subsequently shaped by how they participate in the peace process.
Further, it does seem that the exclusion of women is becoming harder for groups to justify.
While Syria’s peace process excluded women it was met with vocal outrage (Issa and Drew
2016). Colombia’s process, although voted down by Colombians, is perhaps the most inclusive
peace process to date and could signal a change in perspectives by large security organizations
about how peace is materialized in a post-conflict state. The logic of peace negotiations,
which renders such activities an elite affair including only warring parties, might be shifting
in favour of a more inclusive process that engages heavily with civil society. If this is the case,
it will be good for women who are already organized and active in their communities.
As other scholars and practitioners note, changing this exclusion of women in peace
processes begins with international actors, such as the United Nations, doing a better job of
including women in its own ranks, including as mediators (Yousuf and Newton 2013). Also,
women cannot be tokenized, and quotas that ensure only a particular number of women to
participate reinforce women as ‘outside’ the process. Even UN Women itself notes the rather
ad hoc nature of including women – while clearly flexibility and context matter, this means
every peace process requires particular strategies to include women when it is by no means
guaranteed:

[The United Nations] must have a standardized protocol that ensures engagement
of women’s civil society groups in formal peace negotiations. This should not be
done ad hoc and late in the game; it should be automatic and should regularize
women’s participation from the start.
UN Women 2012: 20

As long as conflict emerges and continues in states, women will organize to address it.
They should be the first actors engaged in thinking about building peaceful states rather than
the last if states want to find ways to broker more enduring and engaged peace agreements.
In all of the cases discussed women had to battle to get access to a process that would directly
affect them. This is where security institutions really matter: they can make sure activists
have access and voice early and often during efforts to foster peace.

Notes
1 The data do show small signs of improvement over time (Ellerby 2016).
2 For further discussion of these cases see Ellerby 2016.
3 UN Women is the name of the United Nations organizations dedicated to women’s issues, including
security. However, it was known as UNIFEM prior to 2012. I use whichever name coincides with
the actual peace process, so primarily I refer to UNIFEM.

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 29
GENDER AND PEACEKEEPING
Sabrina Karim

Introduction
In 2000, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented the document that became known
as the Brahimi Report (the full title of which is the ‘Comprehensive review of the whole
question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects’) to the General Assembly. This
report marked the beginning of an attempt to reform the way peacekeeping missions were
conducted in order to include more complex, multidimensional, and dynamic mandates so
as to ensure that the past failures of Bosnia and Rwanda did not repeat themselves. Almost
concurrently, there was also a growing demand on the part of international and local women’s
groups/NGOs, as well as other members of civil society from all around the world, to push
for a Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda after the 1995 Beijing Declaration adopted
at the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995. In 2001, the United Nations
(UN) Security Council passed Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), which is a landmark
international legal framework that addresses not only the impact of war on women, but also
the important role women play in conflict management, resolution, and peace. The change
in the way that peacekeeping has been undertaken, to include more complex and multi-
dimensional mandates, has recently converged with the WPS agenda and has made women’s
representation and gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping missions a major priority within
the UN. There are now almost no mandates that do not include the mention of gender
equality in the security forces (Karim and Beardsley 2013).
This chapter looks in depth at this convergence in agendas. As peacekeeping missions
have taken on broader mandates to include peacebuilding activities such as organizing
elections, disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating solders, security sector reform, rule of
law, promoting good governance, and human rights, they have also incorporated gender
equality in peacekeeping operations through gender balancing and gender mainstreaming as
ways to achieve more complex mandates. This chapter investigates this dynamic, first
providing a historical overview of gender and peacekeeping. I then explore gender
mainstreaming and gender balancing, specifically mentioning the challenges of implementing
both types of policies. The chapter concludes by arguing that a more holistic approach
toward incorporating ‘gender’ – equal opportunity – in peacekeeping missions is necessary
in order to achieve its mandates.

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 Gender and peacekeeping

Historical overview of gender and international peacekeeping

There are two ways that gender equality has been incorporated into peacekeeping operations:
gender balancing and gender mainstreaming. Gender balancing refers to “the degree to
which men and women hold the full range of positions in a society or organization” (UN
2000b: 6). The goal is to increase women’s representation in peacekeeping missions. Gender
mainstreaming refers to “the process of assessing the implications for men and for women of
any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in all areas and at all levels”,
and 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
programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men
benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.
UN 2000b: 6

The goal is to change mission culture so that it is not dominated by male-centric beliefs,
opinions, and actions. These two mechanisms are core tenets of the WPS agenda and are
integral parts of current peacekeeping operations as well (Karim and Beardsley 2017).
UN peacekeeping operations began during the Cold War, when most missions were com-
posed of military personnel in charge of observing compliance to ceasefires and settlements.
In the 1990s, peacekeeping operations began to take a more multidimensional approach, and
with the Brahimi Report issued in 2000, most peacekeeping missions expanded their mandates
to include peacebuilding activities such as organizing elections, disarming, demobilizing,
and reintegrating solders, security sector reform, rule of law, promoting good governance and
human rights (UN 2000a). Yet, despite the fact that conflict has always been a gendered
experience, and despite a growing movement toward a WPS agenda in the 1990s, issues
pertaining to gender were not a part of the Brahimi Report and a gender perspective was not
included in peacekeeping operations until later in the 2000s. In other words, these two pro-
cesses happened parallel to one another. It was not until the push for the implementation of
the UNSCR 1325 that gender equality in peacekeeping became more of a mainstream idea.
The Windhoek Declaration and the Namibia Plan of Action on Mainstreaming a Gender
Perspective in Multidimensional Peace Support Operations, which stressed the importance
of gender mainstreaming and gender balancing in UN peace operations, was the first major
document linking the WPS agenda to peacekeeping. However, the WPS agenda has been an
integral part of UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN DPKO) since the adoption
of UNSC 1325 in October of 2000, which legally mandated peacekeeping operations to
include women in decision-making roles in all aspects of the peacekeeping and peacebuilding
process. UNSCR 1325 mentions the incorporation of a gender perspective in peacekeeping
operations several times (UN 2000c). Subsequent resolutions since UNSCR 1325 also affirm
that gender should be an integral part of peacekeeping operations globally.
Due to UNSCR 1325 and subsequent related resolutions, gender is now mentioned in
almost every mandate authorizing peacekeeping missions (Karim and Beardsley 2013). However,
the mandates vary in their scope of mentioning gender: some only prohibit sexual exploitation
and abuse (SEA) by peacekeepers, while others mention specific objectives such as promoting
women’s participation in politics, or preventing sexual violence. In these mandates, ‘gender’
has largely referred to either women’s participation (in politics, the security sector, etc.) or
protection (SEA). This variation in the incorporation of gender in different mandates is related

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to the way the UN has prioritized and conceptualized gender at different periods in time. When
women’s protections, mostly in preventing SEA, was a UN priority such as after scandals in
the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it was included into all future mandates. The same
became true as conflict-related sexual violence became a UN priority through various UN
Security Council resolutions. And, when women’s participation in politics or the security sector
was a priority, then provisions for peacekeeping operations to help women’s participation were
included in mandates. Thus, peacekeeping mandates, and the introduction of new stipulations
related to gender, demonstrate how the UN has evolved on the issue.
Relatedly, the High-level Review of UNSCR 1325 (High-level Review on Women,
Peace and Security: 15 years of Security Council resolution 1325)1 points to a number of
successes when it comes to gender balancing and gender mainstreaming in missions.
Nevertheless, UN DPKO faces numerous challenges ensuring that peacekeeping missions fulfil
the UNSCR 1325 mandate, including the implementation of gender balancing and gender
mainstreaming in peacekeeping operations. These successes and benefits are covered in more
depth below.

Gender and regional peacekeeping operations

UN peacekeeping operations are not the only international institution to consider gender
balancing and mainstreaming. In fact, Kronsell (2012) suggests that many countries have
reached a state of ‘post-national’ defence where the goal of militaries is less focused on national
threats and more focused on achieving peace and peacebuilding outside of the home country,
particularly through regional organizations. She suggests that this requires a change in the way
that peacebuilding is conducted to include a gender perspective. In following with this idea,
regional organizations have also incorporated the WPS agenda into their operations. In 1998,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) created a permanent office, the Office on
Women in the NATO Forces, within the International Military Staff to provide information
on gender and diversity issues and to support the work of the Committee on Women in the
NATO Forces (CWINF), later renamed the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives
(NCGP) (NATO 2007). In 2009, the CWINF’s mandate was extended to support the inte-
gration of a gender perspective into NATO’s military operations, specifically to support the
implementation of UNSCRs 1325 and related resolutions (NATO 2007). The committee’s
principal mission is now to advise NATO’s military leadership and member nations on critical
issues and policies affecting service women in the NATO Forces (NATO 2007). In 2000,
only five countries reported specific policies and legislation for women’s participation in armed
forces, but by 2013, these policies were in place in all 28 NATO countries (UN Women
2015).
The NCGP is responsible for collecting data on women’s participation in NATO Forces
and operations. In 2000, only six NATO countries had equal enlistment for women and men,
but by 2013, all NATO members offered this opportunity, although there are still certain
positions in a number of countries that are closed for women, such as combat positions, sub-
marines, and tanks (UN Women 2015). The data find that on average the representation of
women has only risen very modestly from 7.4 per cent in 1999 to 10.6 per cent in 2013 (UN
Women 2015). The data also suggest that increased representation nationally does not auto-
matically transform into more women in international operations (Schjølset 2013). While
most NATO countries contribute women to missions, Schjølset (2013) finds that countries
with higher numbers of women in national militaries do not necessarily contribute more to
NATO missions. This means that there are different mechanisms to increase women’s repre-
sentation into national organizations versus international missions.

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In addition to NATO, the European Union has also been engaging in peacekeeping mis-
sions under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Missions operate globally but
also have a substantial focus on geographical areas considered relevant for the EU (Olsson and
Möller 2013). The EU’s civilian mission mandates focus on assignments such as strengthening
the rule of law, peacebuilding, and monitoring human rights. As such, it has embraced gender
policies in the planning and implementation of its international crisis management missions.
On some occasions, the operation’s mandate includes specific provisions which address gender
issues, often as a specific part of addressing human rights. This is the case in Indonesia and
Georgia, the police capacity-building missions in Afghanistan and Bosnia and Herzegovina,
the rule of law mission in Kosovo, and the military operation in Chad and Central African
Republic (Kaski 2011). Both CSDP missions in the DRC – the police advisory and military
reform – have a direct mandate to work toward gender equality and the fight against sexual
violence and impunity in the DRC (Kaski 2011). Nearly every CSDP mission includes a
gender adviser, liaison officer or focal point (EUBAM Rafah being the only exception), but
only a few CSDP missions have or have had an appointed gender adviser working solely with
issues related to gender mainstreaming and the implementation of the UNSCR 1325 (Kaski
2011).
Unfortunately, the EU does not provide data on the number or proportions of uniformed
women (police or military) in missions (Olsson and Möller 2013). They only report total
numbers of women in missions, which includes civilians. Between 2006 and 2011, the EU
reported data on the civilian personnel category for 17 field missions. The number of women
deployed in EU operations has, on average, increased, from 190 women personnel deployed
in December 2006 to 1,000 in December 2011 (Olsson and Möller 2013) Women’s participation
increased from 18% in 2006 to 25% in December 2011 (Olsson and Möller 2013).
Finally, the African Union has also included a gender perspective in its missions. The
Women and Gender Development Directorate (WGDD) was created in 2000 under the Office
of the Chairperson of the Commission (African Union 2009). It has overall mandate of ensuring
that capacity is built for all AU organs and member states to understand gender, develop skills
for achieving gender mainstreaming in all policy and programme processes and actions by 2020
(African Union 2009). In 2009, the African Union developed a gender policy for their missions
as a way to achieve the mandate. The overall goal of this policy is to “adopt a rights-based
approach to development through evidence-based decision-making and the use of gender-
disaggregated data and performance indicators for the achievement of gender equality and
women’s empowerment in Africa” (African Union 2009: 9–10). It also seeks to “promote a
gender responsive environment and practices and to undertake commitments linked to the
realization of gender equality and women’s empowerment in member states at the international,
continental, regional and national level” (African Union 2009: 9–10). In 2016, the African
Union approved the deployment of an All-Woman African Union Election Observation
Mission (AUEOM) to observe the parliamentary elections in September 2016.

Gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping operations

As shown above, peacekeeping operations across the board have taken major steps to main-
stream gender by developing special units or offices in the security organization dedicated
to gender perspectives, including the gender policy advisers at the United Nations Department
of Peacekeeping Operations (UN DPKO), CWINF, the Gender Section in the OSCE and
WGDD. Gender has been mainstreamed in peacekeeping missions through the appointment
of gender advisers and the establishment of gender units within missions. They aim to ensure

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a broad range of activities on gender both within the mission and with host populations. In
2010, there were gender advisers in ten multidimensional peacekeeping missions and gender
focal points in six traditional peacekeeping missions, but now all multidimensional
peacekeeping missions have gender units (UN Women 2015). Another way gender has been
mainstreamed is through women’s protection advisers (WPAs), which were mandated by the
Security Council in 2009, and are deployed to countries with evidence of conflict-related
sexual violence (CRSV). They have complementary roles to the gender advisers. WPAs focus
specifically on the integration of CRSV considerations in the activities of the mission,
including monitoring, analysis and reporting on sexual violence and advocating and engaging
with parties to the conflict with regard to their obligations to prevent and address CRSV.
According to the High-level Review of UNSCR 1325 mentioned above, gender
mainstreaming successes include the deployment of the first female force commander to the
UN Mission in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in 2014; the appointment by the Office of Military
Affairs of a full-time military gender adviser, who has initiated the establishment of the Female
Military Peacekeepers Network (FMPKN) to create a space of mutual support, mentoring,
training, and advocacy for UN female military staff; and the launch of the international
network of female police peacekeepers and an international peacekeeping award for women
by the Police Division (UN Women 2015). Moreover, monitoring, analysis, and reporting
arrangements (MARA) on CRSV have been established, and a UNPOL best-practices toolkit
has been developed, on policing and training curriculum for UN Police on preventing and
investigating sexual and gender-based violence in post-conflict settings (UN Women 2015).
While there has not been a comprehensive study about whether these types of methods
to enhance gender mainstreaming help improve gender equality in missions, there is some
anecdotal evidence that gender mainstreaming might be an important component for
achieving parts of peacekeeping mandates. Using evidence from the mission in the UNMIT
mission in Timor-Leste from 1999–2006, Olsson (2009) finds that peacekeeping missions
could change gender power relations in the host country. Further, Olsson and Tryggestad
(2001) find that peacekeeping operations benefit when gender mainstreaming is conducted.
Additionally, there is some evidence that peacekeeping missions help promote gender equality
in the host country. When peacekeeping missions are present, host countries are more likely
to adopt gender-balancing policies and UNSCR 1325 National Action Plans (Karim and
Beardsley 2017; Huber and Karim 2017). This means that peacekeeping missions might be
important vehicles to promote gender equality in host countries, but the extent to which
gender mainstreaming within peacekeeping operations helps with this process is still unclear.
Despite the potential successes that gender mainstreaming has brought to missions, the
evidence suggests that there has been minimal cultural change within peacekeeping operations
when it comes to gender. Carreiras (2010) argues that because peacekeeping missions draw
from military and police institutions that are highly gendered organizations, peacekeeping
missions themselves are highly gendered spaces. Indeed, peacekeeping missions continue to
be dominated by men in terms of numbers, which reinforces masculine imagery. Even the
recent efforts to increase the numbers of women, especially in UNPOL, have not had too
much of an effect on changes within the culture of peacekeeping operations (Carreiras 2010).
Women are not represented in all parts of the peacekeeping operations. In a survey of
female peacekeepers in the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) in 2012, women complained
that they were not allowed to leave their bases and interact with other women from other
contingents, that they were not allowed to interact with the host population, and that they
experience high levels of discrimination in their job (Karim and Beardsley 2017). They also
complained of problems of sexual harassment within the mission. Additionally, studies reveal

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that SEA continues to be a major problem in peacekeeping missions (Karim and Beardsley
2016; Nordås and Rustad 2013), despite the fact that Conduct and Discipline Teams (CDT)
were established in all peacekeeping missions in response to a large number of cases of SEA
by UN and related personnel reported in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nevertheless, in
Liberia, for example, one study estimates that about 58,000 women aged 18–30 had engaged
in transactional sex with UN personnel at some point since the mission’s inception (Beber
et al. 2017).
There are many authors who argue that it is unrealistic for female peacekeepers to change
the culture of peacekeeping operations and that it is unreasonable even if it were possible
(Simić 2010). Nevertheless, it is possible that gender mainstreaming might help mitigate some
of the pernicious effects of male dominance in peacekeeping operations. Karim and Beardsley
(2016, 2017) find that if peacekeeping missions are composed of countries that do well on
gender equality, those missions are likely to have fewer counts of SEA. This suggests that the
focus for fighting patriarchy in peacekeeping operations might be on improving the quality
of individuals in missions by setting standards for recruitment of personnel based on individual
beliefs about gender equality and better training of personnel. Gender mainstreaming in
national militaries seems to be the key for gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping operations.
There have been numerous challenges to effectively gender mainstream peacekeeping
missions. Many of the masculine-oriented rules, norms, identities, and ideas that make up the
culture of peacekeeping missions cannot be changed overnight. With respect to gender advisers
and CRSV, advisers are mostly women, which affects how the issue is perceived: it is perceived
as a women’s problem, and not a problem that must be addressed by all. The gender advisers
are also often understaffed, under-resourced, and often play multiple roles in the mission,
which gives them little time to focus on CRSV. These shortcomings are largely because
gender has yet to be prioritized in missions. Moreover, some of the challenges for gender
mainstreaming stem from a lack of proper understanding of what mainstreaming means and
in the difficulty of measuring implementation of gender mainstreaming. It is not straightforward
to assess how gender is mainstreamed into programmes nor how gender mainstreaming is
measured. The problem is that civilian gender focal points and gender units are not always
embedded with military personnel and do not meet with them often. In most missions, they
meet with military and police personnel only train them on UNSCR 1325. These trainings
do not necessarily focus on how UNSCR 1325 might be useful for peacekeeping effectiveness,
but rather address definitions and the specifics of the mandate.2
The lack of understanding is further compounded by the fact that peacekeeping operations
are composed of many different countries. This means that, within the mission, individuals
have varying degrees of knowledge and understanding about not only how to do their job,
but also in terms of having a gender perspective. Coordinating among individuals with
differing understanding and skills is a challenge for peacekeeping missions in general, but it is
also challenging for gender advisers and focal points who must work around different cultural
understandings of gender. The lack of understanding of how to mainstream and how to
measure mainstreaming are barriers that missions must overcome in order to more effectively
adopt a gender perspective in missions.

Gender balancing in peacekeeping operations

Despite some attention to gender mainstreaming, attention has also been placed on gender
balancing peacekeeping operations. In 2007, the UN hailed the first all-female police unit
deployment from India to Liberia.3 Another was deployed in 2010 from Bangladesh to Haiti.

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 Sabrina Karim

In 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched a campaign to increase the share of

female peacekeepers to 10 per cent in military units and 20 per cent in police units by 2014,4
and with the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 2242, the UN has set an ambitious
new target to double the number of women in peacekeeping in the next five years.
The heightened focus on, and implementation of, gender-balancing mechanisms might
be because it is easier to justify in terms of operational effectiveness. Policy-makers, practi-
tioners, and academics have sought to justify women’s representation into peacekeeping
operations as a way to ensure operational effectiveness. In fact, scholars suggest framing the
importance of gender balancing and mainstreaming in terms of operational effectiveness in
order to gain more traction for implementation (Egnell, Hojem and Berts 2014). For example,
the Windhoek Declaration and the Namibia Plan of Action on Mainstreaming a Gender
Perspective was based on a comprehensive study entitled, ‘Mainstreaming a gender perspective
in multidimensional peace operations’ on the peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Cambodia,
El Salvador, and Namibia. The study concluded that “women’s presence improves access
and support for local women; it makes men peacekeepers more reflective and respons-
ible; and it broadens the repertoire of skills and styles available within the mission, often with
the effect of reducing conflict and confrontation”, which are justifications used today for
increasing the representation of women in peacekeeping missions.
Currently, the UN argues that “female peacekeepers act as role models in the local
environment, inspiring women and girls in often male-dominated societies to push for their
own rights and for participation in peace processes” (UN Website 2016). They also state that

the increased recruitment of women is critical for: empowering women in the host
community; addressing specific needs of female ex-combatants during the process
of demobilizing and reintegration into civilian life; helping make the peacekeeping
force approachable to women in the community; interviewing survivors of gender-
based violence; mentoring female cadets at police and military academies; interacting
with women in societies where women are prohibited from speaking to men.
UN Website 2016

Finally, they argue that

the presence of women peacekeepers can also: help to reduce conflict and confron-
tation; improve access and support for local women; provide role models for women
in the community; provide a greater sense of security to local populations, including
women and children; and broaden the skill set available within a peacekeeping
mission.
UN Website 2016

Bridges and Horsfall (2009) have argued that female peacekeepers might also improve the
mission environment especially in regard to reducing peacekeeper SEA. Including more
women is considered as an important policy lever to address such misconduct. While
critiquing this approach, Jennings (2011: 7) notes that some make an assumption that
“women’s presence makes for a more compassionate, empathetic and better behaved
operation”. Moreover, the Zeid Report or the 2005 “Comprehensive strategy to eliminate
future sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations peacekeeping operations” recommends
that including more female peacekeepers, who might help introduce a different culture and
bolster accountability, should be a crucial element in a “comprehensive strategy to eliminate

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future sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping operations (United
Nations 2005)”.5
Scholars have echoed policy-makers in suggesting that women bring particular advantages
to peacekeeping operations. Bridges and Horsfall (2009) argue that increasing the representation
of women will help combat sexual misconduct perpetrated by some male soldiers, and will
engender trust and improve the reputation of peacekeepers among local populations. While
women and men do undoubtedly bring different skills and experiences to operations, it is
worth noting several critiques of this need to justify women’s representation in peacekeeping
operations. First, a reduction of the value added by female peacekeepers to feminine stereo-
types can entrench those stereotypes and will miss much of the variation in the tendencies
of women. Kathleen Jennings (2011: 7) has used the label of “affirmative gender essentialisms”
to capture the perspective that “while the feminine traits associated with women may be
generally positive, they nonetheless dismiss women’s diverse capabilities, experiences and
interests in favor of a particular ideal based on the ‘essential’ character of womanhood”.
Stereotypes about women being irrelevant to, or a liability in, providing physical protection
become entrenched when female peacekeeping successes are highlighted based on their
performance in helping to empower local women or their advocacy for female victims of
violence. Moreover, female peacekeepers might not be the best advocates for local women.
Expecting women to focus their attention on helping other women because they share a
demographic similarity might be unrealistic. Gender is not the only relevant axis of identity.
Class, race, religion, education, language, ethnicity, locality, nationality, North/South, etc.,
all feature heavily in the intersection of peacekeepers and locals. The category of ‘woman’
is not a homogenous group that always shares common interests, which means it might be
unrealistic for women across different countries to form alliances and advocate for the same
issues.
An overemphasis on differences between women and men as the basis for gender reforms
places the onus of the mission’s success on the women, who are likely to remain the minority
sex, and overlooks the potential role that all peacekeepers, including men, can play in carry-
ing out the reforms. The expectation that female personnel will be better suited to keep their
male counterparts in line displaces the responsibility for the individual behaviour of male
peacekeepers onto female personnel, and that might be a burden that the women choose not
to carry. The resulting burden on women puts them in a bind, as the role of monitoring the
behaviour of their fellow friends, colleagues, and even superiors could disrupt their career
advancement and increase undesirable interpersonal conflict. Much more, policy reforms that
exclude much of a role for the male peacekeepers miss out on harnessing change in the largest
demographic segment of the missions.
Critiques aside, the data on women’s representation demonstrate that there are simply
not enough women in missions to make substantive changes in operations. This includes a
lack of women in missions in general, but more importantly in leadership positions, as well
as participation in a diversity of tasks. There have been some improvements in women’s
representation in peacekeeping missions. Since December 2006, the proportion of female
troops has doubled, although it remains low at less than 3 per cent of the total size of the
troop contingents. For police personnel, during this time period, the proportion of women
in an individual police role has nearly doubled and is at a higher level than the proportions
of female troops, although the upward trajectory has attenuated (Karim and Beardsley 2013,
2015, 2017). From the end of 2010 to the present, there has been non-trending fluctuation
in the proportions of females sent of between approximately 12–16 per cent in all missions
(Karim and Beardsley 2013, 2015, 2017). Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald (2015) find

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that sex parity is not a primary goal of most contributing countries and is largely a by-product
of force sizes. Other scholars suggest that two incentives might guide the variation in female
peacekeeping contributions: the availability of female personnel and gender equality within
the contributing countries. Karim and Beardsley (2015, 2017) find that when countries have
higher numbers of women in their national militaries, they are more likely to send female
peacekeepers (although this finding differs for NATO countries (see Schjølset 2013). Karim
and Beardsley (2015, 2017) also find that when contributing countries have better records
of gender equality, they are more likely to send female soldiers to peacekeeping missions.
This means that countries that do gender mainstreaming well in their national militaries might
be more likely to send female peacekeepers to missions and therefore improve gender
balancing in peacekeeping missions.
In addition to the women’s representation being low, Karim and Beardsley (2013, 2015,
2017) find that female military peacekeepers actually end up in the safest missions, or missions
where there are fewer peacekeepers’ deaths, higher GDP of the host country, and lower levels
of sexual violence. For example, while the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP)
installed its first female force commander in 2014, no other mission has a female force
commander, and Cyprus is one of the safest missions (with respect to peacekeeping deaths).
This points to the fact that even though representation might be increasing, women might
not be deploying to missions evenly or where they might be most needed. Indeed, comments
by high-ranking officials in the Bangladeshi military (Bangladesh is one of the top contributing
countries to peacekeeping missions) stated that the Bangladeshi military is careful about where
it sends its female soldiers (Karim and Beardsley 2017). Additionally, female soldiers that
deploy on missions are typically doctors, nurses, or administrative staff, and not necessarily
the soldiers on the frontlines or the ones doing the actual peacebuilding (Karim and Beardsley
2017), and they rarely interact with local women (Karim 2016). In my own research, I have
found that due to women’s restrictions on mobility in missions, female peacekeepers might
not have the ‘added benefits’ suggested by policy-makers and scholars (Karim 2016). Thus,
the main challenges for gender balancing in peace operations are compliance from member
states to send women to different types of missions as well as ensuring that women fully
participate within missions.

Conclusion
In general, there is a consensus that peacekeeping missions contribute to longer term peace
(Fortna 2008), that peacekeeping might reduce levels of one-sided violence and battlefield
fatalities (Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2013), peacekeeping might mitigate the potential
for conflict to spread from one state to the next (Beardsley 2011), and reduce the geographic
scope of violence (Beardsley and Gleditsch 2015). While peacekeeping missions are vital
for ensuring a durable and quality peace, the adoption of a gendered perspective in UN
peacekeeping operations is a relatively new innovation that came into fruition in the 2000s.
The merging of the Brahimi Report with UNSCR 1325 has enabled peacekeeping missions
to not only focus on conflict recurrence, violence, the spread of conflict, and human rights,
but also gender equality in and through peacekeeping missions.
Through gender balancing and mainstreaming in peacekeeping missions, including regional
peacekeeping, peacekeeping operations all over the world include gender-sensitive policies
and a higher number of female peacekeepers. As a result, peacekeeping missions have
improved from previous models of operations. However, there is still much work to be done.
In my research, I have found an ‘access gap’ in peacekeeping effectiveness (Karim 2016). That

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is, until the barriers that women face in peacekeeping missions are removed, peacekeeping
missions will not reach their full potentials. Moreover, there must be more clarity on how to
mainstream gender. The inclusion of gender advisers and officers has helped achieve some of
the goals of the mandates, but in order to change mission culture to be more egalitarian,
where women and men are able to assume a variety of positions and be promoted, where
women and men’s beliefs are taken seriously, and where promoting gender equality becomes
a task for both men and women in the mission, both gender balancing and mainstreaming
should be more of a priority within the UN, among member states, and even in host countries.
One way to move forward is through promoting ‘equal opportunity peacekeeping’ (Karim
and Beardsley 2017). This type of peacekeeping includes a more holistic and transformational
approach to peacekeeping that focuses on altering existing structures in peacekeeping missions
to be more egalitarian. Such an approach involves taking measures to change the gendered
nature or culture of the missions through shifts in practices, roles, priorities, and activities that
treat genders equally. This gender equality in peacekeeping missions can occur through
changes in how leaders in missions (special representatives of the secretary-general (srsg), force
commander, and police commissioner) are chosen, by ensuring that they hold beliefs about
the importance of gender equality. For example, the selection process can include questions
about gender equality, as well as questions about other characteristics that are important for
peacekeeping, such as how well they perform on communication, empathy, and caring, among
others, in addition to the formal skills that are required for the job. Moreover, cultural changes
can happen by changing standards for recruitment, promotion, and evaluation. Currently,
these standards are often based on male physiological advantages such as strength, and not in
areas where women often have a physiological advantage such as agility. Other skills are neces-
sary beyond fitness, such as the ability to listen, communicate, and collaborate. Yet, these types
of skills are not included in assessing recruitment or promotion. Changing standards for
recruitment to reflect the needs and objectives of peacekeeping operations as a whole, as well
as specialized units, will improve mission efficacy beyond the status quo arbitrary and archaic
standards. These types of institutional and cultural changes in militaries, police, and peacekeep-
ing missions can go a long way in ensuring that peacekeeping missions not only achieve gender
balancing and mainstreaming, but also that they achieve the more complex mandates that have
come along with multidimensional peacekeeping operations.

Notes
1 Security Council convened a High-level Review to assess 15 years of progress at the global, regional,
and national levels of the implementation of UNSCR 1325. To inform this discussion, the secretary-
general commissioned a Global Study – led by independent lead author Radhika Coomaraswamy
– on the implementation of Resolution 1325 and recommendations on the way forward for women,
peace, and security.
2 These are observations from attending training sessions in the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) in
2012.
3 See Pruitt (2016) for an extensive overview of this unit.
4 This goal was not met.
5 This report was written at the request of the secretary-general at the time who asked then Permanent
Representative of Jordan to the UN, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein to report on the issue of
SEA in peacekeeping missions.

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 30
GENDER AND POST-CONFLICT
RECONSTRUCTION
Laura McLeod

This chapter considers some of the ways in which gender is informed and reproduced by
processes and practices of post-conflict reconstruction. Feminist scholars have often pointed
to the ways in which the ending of war is never quite clear-cut (Enloe 1993: 4; Handrahan
2004: 429–430), noting that the post-war moment holds potential for a positive or negative
transformation of gender relations (Zarkov and Cockburn 2002). I build on these insights
to take seriously the intersections between gender and the international, suggesting that
this is crucial to a feminist analysis of a post-conflict context. As will become clear, ‘the
international’ is a heuristic device used to make sense of a diverse, always precarious, and
slippery group of actors. When talking about ‘the international’, I refer to the presence of
a varied and incoherent range of international bodies (organizations, institutions, agencies,
NGOs, bilateral donors, contractors, individuals, and so on) in post-conflict contexts. I draw
on this heuristic device to allow a feminist analysis of how gender manifests in post-conflict
reconstruction, and how this depends on the interactions between local and international
actors.
Since 1945, the type of involvement assumed by outside actors has become more visible:
there has been a shift from conflict management (mediation, negotiation, and holding
ceasefires) to wide-ranging and complex peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions undertaking
a range of statebuilding activities (Richmond 2010). The sheer numbers of internationals
in a post-conflict context has also dramatically increased: between 1989 and 1994 the number
of UN peacekeepers increased from 11,000 to 75,000 (DPKO n.d.) – but peacekeepers
are the tip of the iceberg in terms of international presence in a post-conflict context. The
“peacebuilding culture” (Autesserre 2010: 13) encompasses a very diverse group of actors
holding different ideas about what constitutes “post-conflict reconstruction”. These ideas,
alongside various configurations of ‘gender’, serve to profoundly shape gendered outcomes.
The intersections between gender and the international are apparent in an anecdote in a 2008
interview I conducted with Igaballe Rogova, the coordinator of Kosovo Women’s Network,
a coalition of feminist and women’s NGOs in post-conflict Kosovo:

They [international institutions] came with prejudices about Kosova: [that] this is a
patriarchal Islamic country, but they brought patriarchy to Kosova, by bringing
a system with men . . . The UN when they came to Kosova, they were using a law

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that existed 500 years ago. [laughing] It’s called Kanun.1 And they were giving
Kanun to their staff and saying “this is Kosova”.
And we say to them, “hey, hello, we are in 21st century, we have laws, we have
government, how can you expect that we live [as we did] 500 years ago?” They
were telling me that I’m not sensitive to Kanun! I don’t live 500 years ago, I live
today in the 21st century.2

In this anecdote, Igaballe describes some of the myriad ways in which the United Nations
Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) contributed to the post-war gender order in Kosovo. Following
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 (June 1999), Kosovo had been placed
under UN administration pending the determination of its final status. This resolution
established a significant international presence targeted toward post-conflict reconstruction
and statebuilding processes largely overseen by UNMIK. As Igaballe’s anecdote suggests,
UNMIK initially seemed “inclined to stress the more backward traditions, which undermined
the position of women”, through references to Kanun, 15th-century oral laws (Lyth 2001:
11). A report by the Swedish donor organization, Kvinna till Kvinna, noted that the book
codifying Kanun was “found on many UN-officers’ desks” and was even referred to as a
“prevailing law” in Kosovo by a male UN official in a March 2000 meeting about domestic
violence (Lyth 2001: 11–12). As Igaballe points out, this legal tradition was no longer
relevant to the life that she lives, and almost certainly, these laws had been eroded by over
40 years of state socialism, which granted specific rights to women.
Igaballe’s anecdote reminds us that taking seriously both gender and the international
is key to enabling a better understanding of how gender is informed and reproduced by
practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. To unpack this further, this chapter
proceeds in three parts. First, what is apparent from Igaballe’s story is that ‘reconstruction’
(in some ways, initially at least) relates to ideas about a specific (imagined?) past. What is
clear here is that the term ‘post-conflict reconstruction’ is riddled with ambiguities that have
gendered ramifications. Thus, the first section of this chapter considers the ambiguity of the
term ‘post-conflict reconstruction’ to draw our attention to the implications for how gender
is informed and reproduced by practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. In the
second section, attention moves toward making sense of the diverse gender dimensions of
post-conflict reconstruction. Here, I draw upon the categories used by Elaine Zuckerman
and Marcia Greenberg (2004): women-focused activities; developing a gender perspective
(gender mainstreaming); and gender transformation. These gender dimensions allow us to
map the various ways in which the international might seek to develop, consider, or achieve
gender goals in practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. Going back to
Igaballe’s anecdote, what is apparent is that relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’
actors matter in shaping the gender dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction. In this regard,
the third section considers the scholarship that makes sense of power relations between (a
diverse and incoherent range of) local and international actors in the post-conflict space.
Here, I argue that there is a need to develop a specifically feminist analysis of these interactions.
I conclude by drawing together these three parts to demonstrate that the intersection of
gender and the international allows us a nuanced understanding of how gender is informed
and reproduced by practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction.

The ambiguity of ‘post-conflict reconstruction’: implications for gender

Broadly speaking, the term ‘post-conflict reconstruction’ is used to refer to the various
processes and practices relating to the creation of a “stable, reconstituted, and sustainable

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society after conflict” (Ní Aoláin, Haynes and Cahn 2011: 87). This might overlap with
several of the processes and practices covered in this book, including peacekeeping, peace-
building, and security sector reform. It is very difficult to separate post-conflict peacekeeping,
peacebuilding, and reconstruction as discrete and separate phrases; indeed, the various pro-
cesses relate to each other and are deeply integrated (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011: 86). Crucially,
feminist work tends to recognize that there is much slippage between these processes, and
that women’s contributions “usually are informal, ad hoc, and rarely part of formal peace
process, so their stories often drift, unacknowledged” (Porter 2007: 1). Feminist scholars also
recognize that the post-conflict moment has significant and lasting gendered ramifications.
Will the moment reproduce familiar old exclusions and oppressions? “Or will policy-makers
be alert to the possibilities of reshaping the relationship between women and men, the
feminine and the masculine?” (Zarkov and Cockburn 2002: 11). The ways in which a post-
conflict moment transforms, alters or sustains gender relations is profoundly shaped by our
conceptualizations of post-conflict reconstruction. In part, this is because ‘post-conflict
reconstruction’ is an ambiguous and stretchy term, with a range of temporal and spatial
questions surrounding its conceptualization.
The notion of post-conflict suggests a particular temporal moment that comes after a war,
but this is not necessarily a period without conflict or violence. As many feminists point
out, the post-conflict period can be characterized by violence, insecurity, and militarization,
even where peace accords have been agreed (Enloe 1993, 2010: 211–225; Zarkov and
Cockburn 2002; Handrahan 2004: 430–436). The labelling of a particular context as post-
conflict is highly political, and might well relate to representations of the state’s identity
(McLeod 2011, 2016; Hughes and Pupavac 2005). But this labelling matters for how
international actors can respond to gender concerns. We can see this in the case of Colombia.
A specialist in gender-based violence points out that the Colombian state

doesn’t want to be seen as a middle-income country that’s in war, as it’s trying to

be this strong economic influence in the region. So for [the Colombian state], being
classified as a humanitarian setting is completely beneath them and degrading.
But that shuts a lot of windows for some money that can get funnelled through
the humanitarian framework for specific topics . . . the way in which we understand
or conceptualize this space actually affects what kind of policies we do . . . So for
gender-based violence (GBV) response, I think the classification of a humanitarian
setting is important because it activates [particular] guidelines. It activates mandates
of inter-sectoral coordination, what actions can I do to prevent and respond to
gender-based violence and which ways is it going to be done. Because [how we
deal with GBV will] be done differently in a humanitarian setting than it will in
the development setting.3

As the interviewee points out, the act of labelling a space as being a humanitarian or
development context matters. The same applies to the labelling of a space or a project as
being post-conflict. Such labels carry with them a set of ramifications – from the mandate
that actors have, the funding available, to the networks and support that can be utilized – that
might shape the gender response to the problem. This is not about whether one response is
better than another, as what is ‘better’ is entirely contingent upon varying needs, but rather
about recognizing that we cast a specific configuration of post-conflict into existence, which
has gendered repercussions (McLeod 2011: 595).

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Reconstruction is also a point of interest. Do we mean development? Transformation? A

return to the old? Achieving security? We might choose to say post-conflict recovery instead.
While we view ‘post-conflict’ as a (stretchy) reference to a particular temporal and spatial
site, reconstruction (or recovery) refers to the activity that the international carries out on
that site. How reconstruction is comprehended shapes how intervention is ‘done’, and how
the transition occurs. At a simplistic level, ‘reconstruction’ suggests that efforts are made to
rebuild or transform social, political, legal, and economic institutions in a conflict-affected
society. However, in seeking to achieve ‘reconstruction’, a range of normative ideas about
‘normal life’ and what a functioning state looks like come to the fore. These normative ideas
include gender relations and opportunities in the reconstructed state, ensuring that the
making or remaking of a state following a conflict is loaded with gendered assumptions. Two
examples illustrate this.
First, returning to Igaballe’s anecdote which opened this chapter, in the case of Kosovo,
it appears that reconstruction goals were centred upon achieving a particular configuration
of a Kosovan state that drew upon laws that did not necessarily match up with the expectations
and hopes of women in modern Kosovo. In this case, reconstruction is viewed as a return
to what is imagined to be a culturally ‘accurate’ past. These assumptions about what women
in Kosovo could do resurfaced in other ways: for instance, in an initiative designed to give
a tractor to all families who had owned one before the war, some UNMIK officials felt that
women heads of households could hire men to do the ploughing for them, regardless of the
wishes of women who owned the tractor (Corrin 2000: 81). Through drawing on Kanun
and ideas about ‘Muslin women’ and ‘traditional cultures’, some international actors (initially
at least, perhaps inadvertently) allowed assumptions about gender and ethnicity to shape the
dynamics of reconstruction initiatives in Kosovo (Corrin 2000: 81–82).
Not all visions of reconstruction are about returning to an imagined past. Other pro-
jects, such as those in a post-conflict, post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, were fathomed as an
opportunity to “build Aceh back better” (Jauhola 2013: 3). The hope of transformation that
underpins such initiatives suggests an aspiration to undertake social, economic, and political
development which recognizes gender-related challenges, suggesting ways that a ‘gender
lens’ might sharpen understanding, and capitalizing on opportunities presented by new rules,
institutions, and resources (Zuckerman and Greenberg 2004). Certainly, in Aceh, Marjaana
Jauhola found that for international actors, the paradigm of ‘build back better’ was “inter-
preted to mean more than the quality of the reconstructed infrastructure. It was also used
to promote ideas of social transformation” (2013: 4). For instance, a radio drama series
Women Can Do It Too!, produced by Oxfam International, had a storyline reiterating a
heteronormative female subject with an economically productive future (Jauhola 2013:
87–132). Here, we can perhaps see elements of what many would rush to say is an example
of an overbearing neoliberal order governing gender aspirations in post-conflict reconstruc-
tion. However, as Jauhola points out, this sort of analysis falls short, for the storyline
becomes “entangled with other social hierarchies and encounters . . . gaining meaning in
the locally lived experiences” (2013: 130). How the international affects gender relations
and possibilities in a post-conflict space is negotiated through a combination of local and
international understanding of what is meant by post-conflict reconstruction and the social,
political, legal, and economic directions that this might involve. Before considering how
we can make sense of the gendered nature of local/international interactions in post-conflict
contexts, we need to consider the diverse ways in which ‘gender’ is conceptualized within
the international.

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Gender dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction initiatives

The Women, Peace and Security architecture calls for stronger and more meaningful atten-
tion to gender concerns and the needs of women in all aspects of peace – from the peace
process, to peacebuilding, peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction. The term ‘post-
conflict reconstruction’ appears surprisingly infrequently in the actual resolutions 4 and
perhaps tends to be used as a ‘catch-all’ phrase to allow a degree of ambiguity about exactly
what post-conflict process or practice is the target for a gender perspective. Nonetheless,
what has become increasingly apparent since UNSCR 1325 was passed by the Security
Council in October 2000 is that knowing what it means to develop a ‘gender perspective’
about post-conflict is easier said than done. Thinking about the gendered and feminist
dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction is challenging for a number of reasons. First, there
is no clear, single gendered subject for post-conflict reconstruction projects. As many have
noted, the heteronormative, feminized, vulnerable body is often identified as the target in
need of post-conflict reconstruction (Shepherd 2008: 115–121; Jauhola 2013). However,
few, if any, bodies can easily be categorized in that way, even by international actors. Second,
because there are diverse, overlapping, and sometimes competing ideas about what it means
to ‘do’ gender in post-conflict reconstruction. Do we look to include women, develop a
gender perspective, or seek to advocate a feminist outcome?
To reflect upon the various gender dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction initiatives,
I follow a framework established by Elaine Zuckerman and Marcia Greenberg (2004). They
identify three interrelated gender dimensions invoked to “heal trauma, build social capital and
avoid further violence”: (a) women-focused activities, (b) gender-aware programming,
and (c) strategic attention to transforming gender relations (Zuckerman and Greenberg 2004).
Any one initiative carried out by international actors may encompass several of these gendered
ideas in complementary and contradictory ways.

(a) Women-focused activities

This gender dimension refers to activities targeted at women and their specific needs or
rights. This approach recognizes that women likely have experienced and been affected by
conflict differently. International organizations might carry out a gender analysis that reveals
the need to develop initiatives targeted at women’s property or employment rights, educational
opportunities, or health care. Realizing that “health system transformations have incredibly
gendered needs and outcomes” (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011: 269) means that there might be a need
to focus on the requirements of women. For instance, the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) in the Central African Republic developed specific systems to deal with
the effects of sexual violence (Ní Aoláin et al. 2011: 269). This required training a handful
of staff to provide treatment to survivors of sexual violence and ensuring that there were
adequate support structures in place for women who felt comfortable coming forward (Ní
Aoláin et al. 2011: 269). Such programmes need to be designed in a way that is mindful of
the cultural dynamics shaping how women respond to such initiatives. Are women able to
travel to the clinic? Is the support in place adequate to ensure that resources are not stretched?
Are clinics run by people that women feel safe to talk to? Will there be any stigma for women
who are seen at these clinics?
Another type of women-focused activity are those targeted at increasing the visible
presence of female bodies in formal and informal political arenas. This can be seen in
the development of initiatives targeted at women’s specific inclusion. For instance, in 1997,

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the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Sarajevo
developed the programme ‘Women in Politics’, which sought to train women in developing
a political profile (Naraghi-Anderlini 2007: 119). This programme ran alongside a campaign
led by women’s NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which successfully pushed for a 2001
electoral law establishing a quota of at least 30 per cent of the less represented gender on the
closed electoral lists (Aganović and Delić 2014: 142–143). How successful has this quota
been? On the one hand, the quota has been relatively successful in ensuring that women are
elected to parliament (21.4 per cent of seats in 2016 (World Bank 2017)). But there remains
a degree of stigma around female involvement in formal politics, in no small part because
politics is considered je kurva (a whore). While this primarily refers to the high levels of
corruption within elite politics, the phrase has gendered implications (Helms 2013: 159).
This adds up to a context where being in politics is not thought to be a respectable profession
for women (Helms 2013: 159). Additionally, there is a perception that some female politicians
are inexperienced and are puppets for their male leaders (Pupavac 2005: 394). What this
begins to point to is that many efforts by the international to address women’s specific needs
are often ‘small-scale’ and ‘disjointed’ (Naraghi-Anderlini 2007: 119). In the case of increasing
female political representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vanessa Pupavac suggests that this
“merely signifies a form of therapeutic inclusion since Bosnian politicians’ role has been
reduced to little more than role playing, rubber-stamping internationally determined
legislation” (2005: 394). In short, international gender goals about increasing female political
representation in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina become a box-ticking exercise where
(superficially) the goals are met, but patriarchal structures and assumptions are left unaddressed.
The case of political representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina points to a problem often
identified by feminist scholars as the “not now, later” phenomenon (Enloe 2014: 120–121).
‘Later’ suggests that we can resolve post-conflict problems without considering gendered
power relations, without taking seriously women’s experiences, without reference to social
conditions of masculinity and femininity (Enloe 2014: 121). Can we really transform gendered
power relations ‘later’? Should the transformation of structures not take place at the very
beginning, so patriarchal conditions are not entrenched? Addressing the specific needs of
women in post-conflict reconstruction requires not only asking questions and gathering data,
but also a deliberate attempt to address and become aware of patriarchal structures that
prevent us from addressing women’s needs.

(b) Gender-aware programming

Gender-aware programming refers to ideas about gender mainstreaming. It describes
systematic attempts to reconsider “processes of policy formulation and implementation across
all issue areas and at all levels from a gender-differentiated perspective” (True 2003: 369).
Crucially, gender mainstreaming differs from anti-discrimination law and policy seeking to
remove barriers to equality (e.g., the creation of quotas mentioned in the previous paragraph)
and “starts from the recognition that gender differences shape policy processes and outcomes”
(True 2003: 369). For instance, attempts to systematically identify and address gender issues
challenging or improving post-conflict reconstruction efforts have occurred in disarmament,
demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes. Here, it has been recognized that DDR
tends to focus on the needs of adult, male ex-combatants (Mazurana and Cole 2014: 195).
This has been because of a lack of awareness about the specific needs of women and girl
ex-combatants – from making the assumption that all ex-combatants had fighting roles and
therefore have a gun qualifying as entrance to DDR process, to being unaware of the social

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stigma that women and girls might face should they register for DDR processes, to limited
employment opportunities for women ex-combatants (Mazurana and Cole 2014: 204–210).
A gender-aware DDR programme would then consider how the set-up and operationalization
of DDR processes in that particular context needs to allow for the different needs of female
and male ex-combatants.
However, there have been a number of critiques with gender-aware programming. First
and foremost, there is an uneasy relationship between gender mainstreaming, gender, and
feminism. While gender mainstreaming could have radical possibilities, there is currently
disconnect between gender mainstreaming practices and feminist theories (Zalewski 2010:
24). This is evident when we look at how some UN agencies have sought to meet gender
mainstreaming targets in post-conflict reconstruction programming. I carried out research
about one such programme in Serbia during 2008–2009. The agency in question was one
that carried out disarmament programmes across ex-Yugoslavia. They had been prompted
to allocate at least 10 per cent of their budget toward achieving gender mainstreaming
goals, and had chosen to focus upon domestic violence concerns (McLeod 2016: 130). When
I queried the decision to focus on small arms abuse in domestic violence over the agency’s
usual issues – such as weapon destruction and stockpile management – the response was that
it was difficult to include gender in such matters (McLeod 2016: 130). Here, gender has
become separated from the overall agenda rather than integrated throughout. Feminist theory
could (for instance) suggest that stockpile management and destruction is a profoundly gen-
dered concern tied up to social perceptions about masculinity and femininity. This position
would in turn result in the development of subtle policies that might target men and women
differently. A disconnect between feminist hopes and gender-aware programming might
manifest because of institutional limitations about what gender goals are palatable to inter-
national organizations (if not the individuals working within them). Nevertheless, from many
feminist perspectives, this is merely a transitory, limited, instrumentalist, and/or essentialist
way of including gender within processes and practices of post-conflict reconstruction.
Similar problems occur when it comes to delegating efforts to achieve gender-aware
programming to named gender experts. Many post-conflict reconstruction missions and
organizations now appoint gender advisers and gender focal points, who are deemed to have
specific knowledge about gender which they can use to oversee and implement gender goals
throughout the organization’s or mission’s post-conflict process. What many gender advisers
and focal points report is that they find their roles occur in isolation from the rest of the
activities within their institution. That is, instead of gender considerations being integrated
and mainstreamed, gender is considered to be separate from other post-conflict issues,
ironically further perpetuating the marginalization of gender concerns.

(c) Gender transformation

For many feminist scholars and activists, the only way that gender concerns can be meaning-
fully addressed is through transformation. This refers to the transformation of power relations
“associated with masculinity, war and militarized societies” (Zuckerman and Greenberg
2004: 79). From this perspective, post-conflict reconstruction is an opportunity to transform
gender relations in order to achieve a more secure society. These ideas are very much linked
to feminist ideas about security, which are “multilevel and multidimensional” and refer to
“the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual” (Tickner 1992: 66).
For some feminists, post-conflict reconstruction projects seeking to account for gender are
criticized for not being feminist enough. For instance, Cynthia Cockburn has noted that

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UNSCR 1325 has tended to focus on women “as victims to be sorry for, as competent actors
with use-value in peace-making, and as potential decision-makers” rather than being a tool
to transform “masculine cultures of violence” that perpetuate war (2013: 444).
Feminist activists working in post-conflict contexts continually seek to propose a trans-
formation of gender relations in peacebuilding, otherwise “the gender regime that emerges
from war is likely in the short run to disturb the peace with continuing violence, and in the
long run to maintain militarism and war-readiness” (Cockburn 2013: 445). As Mazurana and
McKay (1999; cited in El-Bushra 2007: 6) point out, women peace activists have deep
localized knowledge and their activism tends to be multidimensional, addressing the “psycho-
social, relational and spiritual as well as the political and economic dimensions of conflict
transformation”. For instance, during 2005, the Serbian feminist anti-militarist NGO,
Women in Black, sought to develop localized interpretations of UNSCR 1325 emphasizing
that the achievement of peace relied on challenging the structural foundations of militarism
and securing transitional justice (McLeod 2012: 144–147).
However, it is important to realize that not all women’s organizations will share the same
goals. Women’s organizations are often viewed as central to reconciliation, with many
foreign intervention agencies and donors looking to women and women’s NGOs as “‘natural’
leaders of reconciliation initiatives” (Helms 2010: 17). Indeed, the participation of women
in civil society is thought to be central to the success of international peacebuilding activities,
especially those being carried out by UN programmes (Shepherd 2015). However, not all
women’s organizations are pursuing the goals of gender transformation, and many might
even be co-opted or utilized by international actors to meet their own gender goals. Here,
careful investigation of the relationship between local and international actors can reveal what
kind of understanding about gender shapes the activity being conducted, and why that
understanding of gender is being reproduced in processes and practices of post-conflict
reconstruction.

Making sense of the interactions between local and international actors

Having understood how the ambiguity of ‘post-conflict reconstruction’ has gendered rami-
fications, and that gender can be realized in multifarious ways by the international, I now
wish to highlight how making sense of the interactions between the local and international
is crucial to a nuanced understanding of how gender is informed and reproduced by practices
and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. As we now realize, the apparent end of a
conflict often brings with it a noticeable international presence and attempts to build new
institutions, transform policy, and reshape social, political, economic, and legal structures.
Local actors and intended recipients respond to these interventionary practices and processes
in a number of ways. These interactions shape how gender is problematized, considered,
performed, and affects the lives of people.
The starting point to this is to realize that ‘local’ and ‘international’ are not absolute or
stable terms. From the local hire working for an international organization, to the international
who ends up living in the area for decades, it is clear that the categories ‘local’ and ‘inter-
national’ are slippery and can never be cleanly attached to spaces or bodies. However, as one
means of understanding gendered power relations between various actors – power relations
shaped by various agendas, mandates, finances, networks, and so on – ‘local’ and ‘international’
are useful as a heuristic device that can explain something about the process and practice
of post-conflict reconstruction. The following paragraphs outline a feminist utilization of
conceptual tools used within critical peace and conflict studies to make sense of the dynamics

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of local and international interactions in post-conflict reconstruction. Thinking about these

interactions can enable us to consider how gender is informed and reproduced by practices
and processes of post-conflict reconstruction.
Within the field of critical peace and conflict studies, ideas about the liberal peace have
been interrogated via conceptual models such as hybridity (see Mac Ginty 2010, 2011),
friction (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013), the politics of scale (Hameiri and Jones 2017). The
liberal peace describes a peace devised upon Westphalian state norms, upheld and supported
by international peacekeepers seeking to (re)construct the administrative, physical, social, and
economic infrastructures of post-conflict states (Paris 2002). However, such analyses have
been criticized for being simplistic and creating an impression of a “monolithic international
institution imposing an agenda onto the local context” (Mac Ginty 2010: 391). Above all,
there is a concern that focusing on the liberal peace has supported a tendency to strip people
of agency. For this reason, scholars have drawn upon ideas about hybridity, which has a long
heritage in postcolonial thought (Bhabha 1985), to unpack ways that local actors “subvert,
exhaust, renegotiate and resist the liberal peace” (Mac Ginty 2011: 6–7).
As a concept, hybridity allows us to notice how “different actors and processes cooperate
and compete on different issue agendas” (Mac Ginty 2010: 397), enabling us to avoid simplistic
analysis of conflict and post-conflict processes (Mac Ginty 2010). While there have been
attempts to instrumentalize the concept, it is not a concept that “can be crafted in a laboratory
and rolled out in a neat factory packaging as part of a peacebuilding, stabilization or development
programme” (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2017: 220). It is intended as an analytical tool
through which we can make sense of power relations between actors in the post-conflict
context, and is useful specifically to reflect upon encounters and interactions between global/
international and local actors.
Unquestionably, such contributions have omitted feminist perspectives and ideas. However,
some scholars have started to utilize the framework within a specifically feminist analysis
(McLeod 2015; Partis-Jennings 2017; Ryan and Basini 2017; George 2017). It is worth paying
attention to the “kinship” (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2015: 168) between critical
and feminist approaches to peacebuilding, as together they can prompt a more nuanced set
of questions about the gendered dynamics between local and international actors and how
that shapes and produces gender in the practice and process of post-conflict reconstruction.
A feminist analysis of hybridity has three key benefits. First, it draws on the feminist insight
that there is an intimate relationship between the personal, political, and international (Enloe
2014: 348). This insight is powerful because it recognizes that these changes are not simple
or natural, but shaped by political processes (Enloe 1993: 14). Thus, a feminist analysis of
hybridity enables a more “textured perception of the personal and political experiences that
matter in the development of an initiative” (McLeod 2015: 64). A feminist might pay attention
to aspects normally neglected by the concept; including memories, understanding the inter-
national as individual and complex, and the realization that ‘post-war’ can be understood in
multifarious ways.
Second, the feminist perspective allows us to ask questions about ‘who’ participates and
‘how’ this participation takes place in any given initiative (Ryan and Basini 2017: 15). Such
questions are important for drawing attention to the ways in which local actors are portrayed.
As Caitlin Ryan and Helen Basini found, local actors working to develop 1325 NAPS in
Liberia and Sierra Leone were “feminized”, ultimately shaping relationships between “locals”
and “internationals” (Ryan and Basini 2017: 16). Of course, not all local actors are “equally
‘feminized’”, and so paying attention to these nuances allows us to further unpack the
complexity of relationships between local and international actors (Ryan and Basini 2017: 16).

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Third, feminists urge us to reorientate “research towards the affective and relational
dimensions of peace” (Shepherd 2014: 112). Hannah Partis-Jennings argues that hybridity
can be useful to think about felt experiences and environmental aspects of personal feelings
in order to understand how the affective dimension comes to the fore (2017: 3). In her study
of peacebuilding actors in Afghanistan, Partis-Jennings found that female respondents
working for international organizations were “conscious of their hybrid bodies, which were
marked as both female and foreign, both vulnerable and powerful” (2017: 8). For instance,
a female Afghan UN spokesperson could go without a headscarf when inside a UN-marked
vehicle as she was then “linked to the power and symbolism of international status” which
protected her (Partis-Jennings 2017: 9). Here, a feminist approach allows us to realize the
importance of selfhood, and the individualized, bodily aspects of hybridity, drawing attention
to highly personal aspects of encounters between international and local actors that shape
gendered outcomes in processes and practices of post-conflict reconstruction.
Making feminist sense of interactions between local and international actors in processes
and practices of post-conflict reconstruction can help us better analyse the manifestations of
‘gender’ itself in these practices and processes. For instance, when thinking about how actors
strive to achieve gender-sensitive post-conflict reconstruction in the name of meeting the
goals of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Already there has been a lot of
research around the WPS agenda: how international organizations have interpreted the
resolutions (e.g., Shepherd 2008) or how activists on the ground have responded to and used
the resolutions (e.g., McLeod 2016). But taking research into another direction, and taking
seriously local and international encounters, paying particular attention to how gender
materializes, could reveal new insights. For instance, Caitlin Ryan and Helen Basini have
considered attempts to create a NAP to implement the WPS resolutions in Liberia and Sierra
Leone. Paying attention to the interactions between local and international actors has revealed
that the question of which women’s groups participated is reflective of those who could
access and were willing to comply with the international agenda (Ryan and Basini 2017: 9).
Such relationships have ramifications for what goals are created and/or how WPS goals are
(not) implemented – highlighting the significance of these local and international encounters
for the ways in which gender-sensitive post-conflict reconstruction occurs.

Conclusions
This chapter has pointed to how paying attention to the intersection of gender and the
international allows us a better understanding of how gender is informed and reproduced by
practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. In today’s globalized and interconnected
world, post-conflict contexts do not operate in a vacuum and, as we have noted, a range of
international actors will arrive in, operate in, or respond to, a post-conflict context with the
express goal of achieving ‘reconstruction’. Such goals have highly gendered outcomes. To
make sense of this, I have suggested that there are three key considerations that any feminist
analysis of post-conflict reconstruction needs to ponder upon.
In the first instance, making gendered sense of post-conflict reconstruction requires us to
take seriously how a diverse range of actors interpret and respond to various configurations
and problematizations of what it means to ‘do’ post-conflict reconstruction. While there is
always a temporal and spatial ambiguity around the term ‘post-conflict reconstruction’, the
use of the phrase, and the processes and practices surrounding it has enormously gendered
ramifications. A feminist analysis remains attuned to the complexities of violence and power
in the use of the term ‘post-conflict reconstruction’. Second, that it is worthwhile considering

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how gender itself manifests within international policies targeted at gender and post-conflict
reconstruction. There are several different ways in which gender goals can be implemented,
and realizing this means that what constitutes the achievement of ‘gender’ remains unfixed and
subject to negotiation. Thus, and third, it is critical to pay attention to the ways that ‘inter-
national’ and ‘local’ actors (even in the most precarious and temporary articulation of these
heuristic categories) relate to each other. Noticing the encounters between local and
international actors brings our gaze toward important questions about gendered power
relations in post-conflict reconstruction: Who participates, and why? What is the personal?
What do bodies feel? Addressing these questions enables us to realize how gender is informed
and reproduced by practices and processes of post-conflict reconstruction in all sorts of
obvious and not-so-obvious ways.

Acknowledgements
The research used in this chapter has drawn upon financial support from several research
projects, and the author would like to note all sources of support with gratitude, including
a postgraduate scholarship from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (PTA-
031-2005-00220); the European Research Council (FP7/2007-2013/ERC grant agreement
No. 295576-UIC); and a British Academy Small Research Grant for the project ‘Do we
know gender in peacebuilding?’

Notes
1 Also known as Leke Dukagjini, a compilation of ancient Albanian customary law containing rules
on family law, hereditary law, criminal law, and other issues of relevance for the traditional Albanian
pastoral society (Lyth 2001: 11–12).
2 Interview, Igaballe Rogova, Coordinator, Kosovo Women’s Network, Pristina, Kosovo. 3 June
2008.
3 Interview, Senior Gender and Development adviser. Washington DC, USA. 19 January 2016.
4 Once in UNSCR 1325 (2000), point 8(a); and once in UNSCR 2122 (2013), point 5.

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 31
GENDER AND SECURITY
SECTOR REFORM
Megan Bastick

Security sector reform, referred to as ‘SSR’, is used to describe efforts to strengthen the
effectiveness, accountability, and good governance of the security sector. SSR emerged as a
distinct policy agenda through the late 1990s, framing security as a development issue.
Feminist critique of SSR is levelled at both failure to implement policy commitments that
SSR be gender-responsive – address the different needs of men, women, boys, and girls, and
facilitate the participation of women as well as men – and at gender and SSR policy approaches
themselves.
The next section of this chapter introduces the concept of SSR, its key concerns and
policy approach, and some of the dominant critiques. The third outlines how gender is
addressed in the United Nation’s (UN’s) SSR policy and in the resolutions of the Security
Council, as important influences on institutional SSR policies and global practice. It highlights
the tendency for approaches to gender-responsive SSR to be limited to increasing women’s
participation in the security sector, neglecting the institutional changes in values and culture
needed both to give women equal opportunities and to achieve sustained and meaningful
improvements in service provision. The most substantive section of the chapter then draws
together analysis of successes and challenges in implementing SSR in a gender-responsive
way, organized thematically around three key areas: delivery of security services; human
resources and organizational culture of security sector institutions; and participation in SSR
processes. It is informed by both practice-orientated literature from institutions supporting
SSR processes, and academic critique of SSR analysts and feminist legal and security scholars.
This overview finds incremental gender and SSR successes in many countries, in increasing
women’s participation in formal security sector institutions, building their influence in
informal security and justice mechanisms and processes, and improving responses to gender-
based violence. Nonetheless, persistent challenges remain, as in all efforts to overcome gender
inequality, not least in marshalling political will and resources. Moreover, as understandings
of gender in peacebuilding and in violence prevention have broadened to emphasize men,
masculinities, and intersectionality, gender and SSR policy and practice need to mature
accordingly.

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The concept of security sector reform

SSR emerged as a distinct policy agenda through the late 1990s, founded upon arguments
that good governance of the security sector is a precondition for stability, development and
human security. Institutions use a range of terminology to emphasize different aspects,
referring to ‘security system reform’, ‘security sector development’, ‘security sector transform-
ation’ or ‘justice and security sector reform’. SSR refers to a process with two sets of goals:
a normative concern to ensure good governance of the security sector by strengthening manage-
ment, accountability, and civilian oversight; and a practical concern to develop effectiveness
and efficiency by restructuring and reforming the sector and building its human and material
resources. Each goal must be present to constitute SSR, and must be pursued within a frame-
work of democratic civilian control, rule of law, and respect for human rights. As contrasted
with merely ‘train and equip’ initiatives, in SSR commitment to specific norms and standards
concerning the management, control, and oversight of the security sector is developed. SSR
is grounded upon a broad understanding of the ‘security sector’ as including all the structures,
institutions, and personnel responsible for security provision, management, and oversight; not
only armed forces, police, intelligence services, and other security providers, but also
government ministries, parliaments, ombuds institutions, the judiciary, and civil society.1 No
nation embodies perfection in security sector governance. Efforts in developed countries
to, for example, ensure that women and men are recruited and promoted fairly in police
and armed forces can be understood as SSR. However, as a development concept, SSR has
largely been applied to developing and fragile states.
Critique of SSR is levelled at both faulty implementation and the approach itself. SSR
analysts have long emphasized the necessity of local ownership of SSR programmes: “reforms
that are not shaped and driven by local actors are unlikely to be implemented properly and
sustained” (Nathan 2007). SSR is often criticized as excessively focused on building capacity
within security institutions, at the expense of a people-centred or societal approach (Kunz and
Valasek 2012; Denney 2014; Mannitz 2014). SSR thus needs to be process-orientated, to
ensure that it is led by local government, parliament, authorities, and civil society, and it
engages communities beyond (male) elites. At the same time, one must not let a technocratic
approach obscure that SSR is fundamentally about changing institutional cultures and values.
Critiques of the non-sustainability of externally driven SSR have matured into a broader
pessimism as to whether SSR ‘works’. Analysis of programmes to support SSR in Liberia,
the Palestinian Territories, and Timor-Leste found that domestic actors only selectively
adopted the proffered international standards of democratic security governance; rules
were adopted but not implemented; new organizational structures were created but remained
mostly ‘symbolic’; and operational capacities were increased without the intended security
governance standards (Schroeder, Chappuis and Kocak 2014). Too often, SSR support and
funding is too short-term and too constrained by deliverables. SSR efforts are not adequately
focused on fostering the necessary values and ideals needed to achieve sustained improvements
in governance, nor to grapple with the political and social complexities implied. In particular,
when SSR is attempted in insecure environments, there tends to be an over-emphasis on
security at the expense of good governance. Hudson identifies failure of SSR as part of the
broader failure of the neoliberal governance model, arguing that SSR “seeks to manage risks
rather than address root causes of insecurity, underdevelopment and inequality” (Hudson
2012: 77).2
These dilemmas notwithstanding, SSR is likely to remain a feature of the security and
development ‘policyscape’. The emphasis on security in the Sustainable Development Goals

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and on security sector institutions in their indicators has been greeted as potentially opening
new space for external assistance to SSR. As such, it remains important that critical voices
remain engaged in improving approaches to SSR, including its capacity to meet the diverse
needs of women, girls, men, and boys.

How gender is (re)produced in SSR policies

The African Union (AU), European Union, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), UN, and a number of SSR donor nations explicitly refer to gender
in their SSR policies. The AU’s SSR policy has, arguably, the most progressive vision, aiming
“to bring about transformative possibilities for gender equity within the security sector”
(African Union 2013: para. 16(i)). It distinguishes between ‘gender best practices’, in the sense
of gender-responsive programming, and ‘women-focused’ activities, such as measures to
involve women in SSR processes. This chapter concentrates on the UN’s policy framework,
as it was the model for subsequent institutional policies and guides a wide range of UN SSR
activities.
The UN Secretary-General’s 2008 report on SSR, the foundational document for UN
SSR policy, includes as one of its ten core principles that SSR be gender-sensitive and seek
to address sexual and gender-based violence. It describes ‘integration of a gender perspective’
in SSR as “inherent to an inclusive and socially responsive approach to security . . . key to
developing security sector institutions that are non-discriminatory, representative of the
population and capable of effectively responding to the specific security needs of diverse
groups” (para. 37). These references stemmed in part from the strong and early engagement
of the UN Development Fund for Women and UN International Research and Training
Institute for the Advancement of Women in internal policy-making. From 2008, the Security
Council has explicitly referred to SSR in its resolutions on Women, Peace and Security.
SSR is framed as playing a role in protecting women from violence, with emphasis on sexual
violence in conflict. This is to be achieved through legislative and policy reform, training
for security sector personnel, the inclusion of more women in the security sector, vetting to
exclude perpetrators of sexual violence from the security sector, and improvements to judicial
proceedings to better address survivors’ and witnesses’ needs. There is also emphasis on
women’s participation in SSR and women’s access to justice.3 The 2014 Security Council
resolution on SSR recognized “the importance of women’s equal and effective participation
and full involvement in all stages of the security sector reform process” (para. 19).
The understandings of the relationships between gender and security articulated in the
Security Council resolutions are limited and tend toward invoking essentializing stereo-
types of women. The UN’s commitments to gender-responsive SSR fall short of aspiring to
transform security sector institutions and processes to address the underlying causes and struc-
tures of gender inequality, deeply embedded in discriminatory norms, prejudices, and stereo-
types. Indeed, this criticism can be made of much gender and SSR discourse and practice:
that it primarily seeks to respond to women’s insecurities, rather than challenge their underlying
causes; that it is insufficiently directed toward changing values at an individual and institutional
level within the security sector, and broader society.
More sophisticated guidance for UN agencies was published in 2012 as an Integrated
Technical Guidance Note on Gender and SSR. This proposes that SSR begin with a thorough
analysis of cultural norms relating to gender in the context under consideration, how these
have shifted during conflict and transition, and how conflict might have exacerbated pre-
existing gender discrimination, with attention also to sexual orientation. It stresses engaging

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with women and men in security sector institutions. Increased participation of women
in security sector institutions is emphasized, but alongside broader capacity development
for gender analysis and gender-responsive institutional policies and procedures. As such, the
UN’s framework for programming does a better job of recognizing that a gender-responsive
approach is not only about women’s insecurity, but should address the different rights, per-
spectives, priorities, needs, and capacities of women, girls, men, and boys; and be cognisant of
the differences that other identity factors, such as age, religion, ethnic affiliation, and sexual
orientation, make. The gulf between policy and practice is significant, however, as explored
below.
It is interesting to reflect upon the UN Integrated Technical Guidance Note on Gender and
SSR’s suggestion that gender-responsiveness’s “potential as a more acceptable SSR objective
can make it a valuable catalyst and entry point for wider SSR reform” (UN SSR Task Force
2012: 39). That is, the perception that recruitment of women in the security sector is
comparatively uncontroversial, politically palatable. Mushonga’s (2015) analysis of SSR in
Zimbabwe concludes exactly this: that increasing the number of women in the security sector
is considered unthreatening by the government; as such, significant progress has been made
on this in a context when efforts to reform the security sector to promote democracy have
met with firm resistance. In other contexts, as will be discussed below, promoting gender
equality is (mis)perceived as too likely to offend local sensibilities. This speaks to the contrast
between a limited, and thus unthreatening approach to gender-responsive SSR that merely
‘adds women’, and a deeper approach that foregrounds structural gender inequalities, with
the political and social sensitivities that this entails.

How gender is (re)produced in SSR practice

How gendered power relations are expressed in, mediate, and influence SSR processes could
be analysed from an infinite number of perspectives. There are gendered constructions of
power in the relations between the international, regional, national, and local; between the
state and the non-state; the capital and the country. Gender is embedded in the contours
of what is described as relevant to security, and the purposes ascribed to security sector insti-
tutions. The following will focus on three broad areas of SSR practice: improving delivery
of security services; reconfiguring the human resources and organizational culture of security
sector institutions; and consultation and decision-making in SSR processes. It will examine
‘approaches’ to making SSR more gender-responsive in practice, and associated practical and
conceptual dilemmas.

Improving delivery of security services

One of the foundational assumptions of SSR is that security sector actors are often among
the main perpetrators of violence, in particular during and after conflict. SSR programmes
often include a focus on prevention of human rights abuses by police, armed forces, and in
prisons, through implementing codes of conduct and internal disciplinary systems, and
human rights training. A focus on arbitrary imprisonment and mistreatment during detention
dominates such approaches. While important, this tends to privilege the experience of men,
and overlook the sexual harassment that women and girls often face by male members of the
security sector, and the complicity of the security sector in prostitution and human trafficking.
The unconscious orientation of many SSR programmes to the insecurities affecting men is
a manifestation of what Ní Aoláin describes as SSR’s export of Western security sector

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institutions’ inherent ‘gender distortions’, including exclusion of and discrimination against

women (Ní Aoláin 2009: 1072).
Some SSR programmes with an explicit focus on gender have tried to address such issues.
In Liberia, for example, gender reforms within the police have included establishing a Gender
Affairs Section with responsibility to respond to complaints against police personnel of sexual
harassment, domestic violence, and persistent non-payment of mandatory child support
(Gaanderse and Valasek 2011: 146). Sierra Leone’s police reform from 2008 likewise focused
upon addressing sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation by police, as well as improving
community policing and handling of gender-based violence cases (Fofana Ibrahim 2012).
The political attention to conflict-related sexual violence since 2008 has brought abuse of
women by armed forces into focus. UN SSR programmes in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC), Côte d’Ivoire, Somalia, and South Sudan have tried to address sexual
violence committed by national armed forces. The armed forces of the DRC have an action
plan focused on command responsibility and accountability, which contributed to the pro-
secution, in 2013–2014, of 37 members of the armed forces, including senior officers, for
crimes of sexual violence (UN Secretary-General 2015: para. 35). But Baaz and Stern argue
that “the frenzy to attend to the scourge of sexual violence” in the SSR agenda leaves
unaddressed gendered power relations in other crucial aspects of the military (Baaz and Stern
2011: 563–564).
There is a grim irony in a gender-responsive approach to SSR requiring, on the one hand,
trying to stop security forces from abusing the local population and, on the other, encouraging
those same security forces, in particular police, to better respond to crimes such as domestic
violence and sexual abuse committed within the community. This is the challenging reality
that SSR works with: trying to build the community’s trust in police so that they report
crimes, while trying to build the capacity of police to respond well to such reports, while
refraining from themselves abusing victims or alleged perpetrators.
Gender-responsive SSR is often translated into improving how police and other security
sector actors respond to gender-based violence. We know that gender-based violence is
generally poorly handled by police. Data from 57 countries suggest that on average only
11 per cent of women who experience sexual assault report it; compared to 38 per cent
of women who would report a robbery (UN Women 2011: 51). Addressing gender-based
violence in SSR has included, for example: analysis of legislative gaps; developing strategic
plans around specific forms of gender-based violence; building security sector capacities
through development of procedures, record management systems, and training of police,
judges, and lawyers; and advocacy campaigns within the security sector and wider society.
Multi-sectoral prevention and response measures can be established, linking security and
justice actors with healthcare providers, NGO advocates, service providers, and community
structures; and recognizing that security sector responses to gender-based violence should be
part of broader efforts to change underlying attitudes and inequalities.
In a number of post-conflict countries, such as Afghanistan, the DRC, Liberia, Rwanda,
Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste, the UN has supported the development of
special police units focused on gender-based violence. Staff receive training on domestic
and sexual violence, and systems are established to facilitate referral of victims to medical and
other services. It is claimed these units increase awareness of women’s rights at the commu-
nity level and rebuild women’s trust in security sector institutions, and in some cases have
increased reporting and conviction rates and expanded survivors’ access to services (UN
2015: 180). An alternative model with similar aims used in much of Latin America and in
India is women’s police stations. While both have been shown to be effective to various

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degrees, there is a danger that special/women’s units become the focus of reform attention
and resources to the exclusion of service-wide improvements. Furthermore, progress in
policing sexual and gender-based violence is often undermined by delays and corruption
in the justice system. Effective response to gender-based violence demands engagement
with a wide range of security and justice actors, including the police, judiciary, lawyers and
bar associations, the prison service, government departments, legal aid, and civil society
groups.
Better developed approaches to gender-based violence in SSR attempt to reform not only
service delivery, but the institutional culture and incentive structures that lead to poor service
delivery. As with any SSR effort, to achieve any meaningful improvement, gender-responsive
SSR needs to address the attitudes and values underlying discriminatory practices. This
requires thinking beyond women, to how masculinities, male power, and male powerlessness
are instrumentalized and reinforced by the security sector. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and Atlantic Initiative
are working with judges (men and women) to improve judicial handling of domestic violence
cases, by fostering understanding of how unconscious bias and gender-based stereotypes lead
to discriminatory judicial practice. This is but one component of a broader programme
of work on gender bias within the judiciary, which includes research on the experiences of
victims and the attitudes and opinions of judicial practitioners; development of institutional
mechanisms to prevent and respond to sexual harassment; training and mentoring of judges,
prosecutors, and legal educators to themselves deliver training on gender bias, sexual harass-
ment, and domestic violence; and development of new curricula on gender bias for law
schools. Addressing masculinities within the police on an individual level, in Pakistan an
NGO called Rozan has worked with police educators to develop and implement an ‘Attitudinal
Change Module’. This training facilitates men exploring their own understandings of and
experiences of masculinity, while encouraging discussion of the roles of women, seeking
to improve self-awareness of one’s own attitudes and prejudices, and through this improve
services for female victims of violence (Wright and Welsh 2014: 34). Such approaches are
not without their critics. Baaz and Stern argue that attempts to reconfigure gender through
training problematically assume “that we know what gender is and does, as well as how we
can ‘do gender’ better” (2011: 564). This objection seems less cogent in a case such as this,
where the training is developed and delivered by local, rather than outside, experts.
While reforming state institutions remains a focus for gender advocates, in many cultures
domestic and sexual violence are customarily dealt with also through informal and/or tradi-
tional systems, often interdependently with state institutions (Denney and Domingo 2013:
3). Generalizations about traditional justice mechanisms are problematic given their diversity,
but evidence from many contexts speaks of their deeply patriarchal structures, and tendency
to prioritize social harmony over victims’ rights (Myrttinen, Naujoks and El-Bushra 2014;
UNIFEM 2009). In many countries, local women’s rights NGOs, at times with international
support, have worked with their informal and/or traditional systems to sensitize them
to women’s rights, and to advocate for the participation of women. Handling of gender-
based violence is often a focus, as well as marriage, divorce, and women’s inheritance rights
(UN Women 2011: 76–78). In Liberia, a regional women’s network, WIPNET, helped to
develop women’s Peace Huts as a place for community-based dispute-resolution. Members
of the Peace Huts work with the local police to identify those suspected of crimes against
women, pressuring for their arrest. In some towns, the Peace Huts directly resolve grievances
with a promise not to repeat the offence, enforced through intense community scrutiny
(DFID CHASE 2012: 21–22).

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Feminist scholars often struggle with a desire to have violence against women and girls
addressed, but a fear that emphasizing women’s victimization inadequately acknowledges
their agency. Local level SSR in Rwanda offers a positive example of how attending to
gender-based violence in tandem with women’s empowerment can be catalytic. Cherry and
Hategekimana argue that violence against women has been reduced through SSR that involves
men and women in making the police responsive to community-level violence, alongside
women’s economic empowerment measures that challenge patriarchy. While the police play
a significant role in addressing gender-based violence, it is the community that remains the
key actor: “a good policy can only be a vessel for success if the ‘top down’ changes in polic-
ing are implemented simultaneously with a ‘bottom up’ strategy of empowering women at
grassroots level” (2013: 111).
Gender-based violence against men and boys has received little attention in those terms in
SSR discourse and practice, despite mounting evidence of the prevalence of sexual violence
against boys and men in conflict zones. There is some emergent good practice in providing
services tailored to male victims of sexual and domestic violence in the United Kingdom and
United States, some innovative practices in South African prisons, and some recent practitioner
resources (UNHCR 2012; Watson 2014). However, other forms of violence disproportionately
affecting men and boys which could be described as ‘gender-based’ are at times the subject
of attention in SSR, such as police harassment and extortion and gang violence. Despite the
references to sexual orientation in UN SSR tools, addressing violence targeting lesbian, gay,
and bisexual communities never seems to be considered within SSR; and insecurities related
to gender identity remain largely invisible in SSR discourse and practice.4 Explicitly analysing
the gendered nature of violence against not only women and girls, but against men and boys
and sexual and gender minorities, is needed to move the gender and SSR discourse beyond
only women and girls, and help to identify intersections between gender, age, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, and identity, and other characteristics. In recent years, some excellent
analysis of gender, masculinities, and insecurities in peacebuilding contexts has been published,
offering the SSR community conceptual tools to do this.5

Reconfiguring the human resources and organizational culture of

security sector institutions
Vetting security sector personnel to exclude those who have committed sexual and gender-
based violence has been emphasized in the Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace
and Security. It was described in the UN’s High-Level Review on implementation of SCR
1325 as “critically important” (UN 2015: 179). However, in practice vetting for human
rights violations was attempted in Liberia, with mixed results, and has not since been widely
pursued in SSR.
Recruiting women into security sector institutions, in particular police, has been the most
dominant approach to making SSR gender-responsive. A range of rationales direct these
efforts: a commitment to equal employment opportunities of men and women; a sense that
more women will increase the perceived legitimacy of and trust in the security services; a
claim that women bring different, useful skills and strengths. Indeed, there is evidence that
police services with more women receive better levels of reporting by women of sexual
assault, and of male and female police officers’ different policing styles (Bastick 2014: n. 9).
There is likewise evidence from recent military operations that having a mix of female and
male personnel expands force capability (‘Whose Security?’ 2015).

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Approaches to recruiting more women into security sector institutions might be guided
by targets or quotas set by the government or by an institution itself. They often include
such measures as advertising campaigns targeting women, and outreach through women’s
organizations. SSR ‘doctrine’ recognizes that SSR should seek to do more than ‘add women’,
in countering “systemic discriminatory practices manifested in the security sector, including
women’s confinement to traditional roles and tasks, conditions of work and employment
that inhibit their full and equal participation” (UN SSR Task Force 2012: 38). In practice,
however, SSR falls short of achieving this deeper institutional transformation. Experiences
from Timor-Leste and Sierra Leone suggest that women recruited into police services
through SSR programmes often remain in low-ranking positions and/or pigeon holed into
the family violence team. Male colleagues resist operational assignments with women, and
efforts to fast-track more highly educated female recruits are resented by both men and less-
qualified women (Hudson 2012: 92; Fofana Ibrahim 2012: 26–28). Likewise, while Lebanon,
Liberia, and Zimbabwe have successfully increased the number of female police officers,
more structural changes are needed to overcome sexist institutional cultures (Khattab and
Myrttinen 2014; Bacon 2015; Mushonga 2015). Even South Africa, with its comparatively
long SSR experience of integrating women in the security sector, has found sexual harassment
and negative stereotypes concerning women’s capabilities to be highly resilient (Hendricks
and Valasek 2010). In developed democracies, as in developing and fragile states, retaining
women in the security sector requires reforming an institutional culture that disparages the
feminine and is too often pervaded by sexual harassment. To begin to deliver women equal
opportunities for career progression requires inter alia policies that accommodate caring
responsibilities and proactive attention to women’s assignments and promotion, alongside a
deep process of changing attitudes and behaviours.
Women in the security sector should not be seen as responsible, by virtue of their sex,
for making the institution a more equitable employer and provider of public services. But,
they nonetheless are often active in advocating for better conditions and opportunities for
female personnel, and better quality of service provision for women, such that support to
women’s networks can be itself an SSR priority. In the Western Balkans, the UN supports
a regional network of women police officers. A number of international and regional organ-
izations have supported the Liberia Female Law Enforcement Association and the Association
of Women in the Security Sector in Sierra Leone, and UN female police networks helped
set up national female police networks in Haiti and South Sudan. Such strategies bring to
the fore a central tension in approaches to gender and SSR. While many SSR practitioners
view pursing more women in the security sector as a self-evident goal in building a rights-
respecting institution – and indeed women in the security sector almost without exception
express a wish for a more equal proportion of men and women – many feminist scholars are
uncomfortable with what looks like essentializing and instrumentalizing women, particularly
as concerns women in the military.

Consultation and decision-making in SSR processes

Inclusive local ownership has been embraced as one of the guiding principles of SSR,
although it is often poorly implemented in practice. Gender and SSR advocates argue that
inclusive local ownership requires proactive measures to ensure women’s participation in the
planning of SSR and to engage them in SSR programmes at the grassroots and at decision-
making levels (Kunz and Valasek 2012; Gordon, Roos and Welch 2015). As already discussed,
this should be part of broad and deep engagement of civil society in SSR, acknowledging

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that there will often be distrust and different priorities between civil society and security
sector actors. Attention needs to be paid to facilitating engagement and communication
between these different stakeholders, including developing the security sector’s commitment
to the principles of transparency and civilian oversight.
At the grassroots – in all regions, rural and urban, and among minority and marginalized
communities – engagement with women is important because of the likelihood that tradi-
tional approaches to SSR assessment and planning, such as speaking to male village elders,
do not identify girls’ and women’s security and justice needs. SSR policy also reflects the
message of the Women, Peace and Security agenda that women might have the capacity to
facilitate grassroots reconciliation, and have influence upon how the security sector is
perceived. Naraghi-Anderlini argues that local women have the potential to be effective local
advocates for SSR, given their interest in such issues as local security needs, accountability
for human rights abuses, disarmament, and equal opportunities, “but are often sidelined and
ignored by local political and military leaders, and by international SSR practitioners alike”
(2008: 105).
Some SSR processes have made progress toward inclusion through developing commu-
nity security committees to consult with women and men about their needs. In Haiti, UN
Women has supported such committees, which are convened by community women’s
groups and bring together local authorities, police, education and health workers, a local
magistrate, and religious leaders. As well as functioning to hold service providers accountable
to the local population, the committees respond to cases of violence against women and girls.
They can provide immediate shelter and assistance to victims, refer them, and monitor their
cases. This has increased reporting of violence against women, improved police responsiveness,
and is seen to have reduced violence by countering impunity (DFID CHASE 2012: 22–23).
In Sierra Leone, women were not initially represented on the provincial and district security
committees established through the SSR process. Local gender activists, supported by DCAF,
worked with rural women to give them practical information and skills to help them better
participate in dialogue on security issues at their community level, and facilitated direct access
to members of their local security committees (Pratt 2014).
At strategic levels also, SSR can benefit from inclusive consultation and decision-making
in bringing a broader range of concerns to the table. The engagement of female parliamentar-
ians and civil society actors in the South African defence review process demonstrates this:
grassroots women’s organizations raised previously unrecognized issues, such as the environ-
mental impacts of military activities, and the dispossession of people from land seized by the
military (Naraghi-Anderlini and Conaway 2004). A number of SSR resources emphasize
the potential to involve female parliamentarians in SSR processes, but it should be recognized
that, of itself, women’s increasing participation in parliaments (which globally roughly
doubled between 1997 and 2015, from 12 per cent to 23 per cent) does not necessarily lead
to women’s active participation in security decision-making. As of January 2015, female
government ministers in 191 countries held a combined total of 1,116 portfolios. Only
17 women held portfolios for defence and/or veterans’ affairs; 33 for home affairs and/or
immigration, and 34 for justice (IPU 2017; IPU and UN Women 2015). Indeed, Ní Aoláin
(2009: 1080) observes that “most of the locales where security sector reform is discussed,
decided, and implemented are decision-making entities that have a history of poorly (or not)
representing women”. Most obviously, women rarely head security sector institutions.
The difficulty of ensuring diverse and meaningful participation in SSR at decision-making
levels demands reconsideration of who should be around the table, and short and longer term
measures. The longer term measures include those to facilitate women’s ascent into leadership

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in security sector institutions, build institutional cultures that value inclusion and gender
equality, and sustain dialogue between the security sector and civil society. In the short term,
giving formal space to a number of representatives of civil society organizations can allow
women’s rights and other gender activists to take part. The minister responsible for gender
or women’s affairs might have a seat. ‘Gender expertise’ can be one of the criteria by which
committee members are appointed. National human rights institutions can be formally
involved. Consulting broadly on SSR can facilitate the input of a diverse range of academic
and community experts.
While local ownership should drive engagement with women and girls, in practice narrow
conceptions of who local ‘owners’ are can constrain commitment to measures explicitly
framed around promoting gender equality, which should be a key part of any gender-
responsive SSR. In cultural contexts characterized by gender discrimination and patriarchal
values, where it is perceived that ‘locals’ do not value gender equality, international actors
are often hesitant to advocate for it (if they even consider it). They might fear that arguing
for measures to promote gender equality will be perceived as imposing culturally alien
‘Northern’ values, which could potentially destabilize the whole SSR process (Salahub and
Nerland 2010; Gordon, Roos and Welch 2015). This tendency is replicated among gender
advocates when it comes to advocating for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and
intersex people to be addressed in SSR: there can be a fear that attention to these often highly
stigmatized groups will derail efforts to promote women’s equality. However, as Naraghi-
Anderlini argues, principles of respect, equality, and inclusion are, depending upon whom
is asked, also local values (2008: 123). Although women in different cultural contexts organize
to advocate on gender equality differently, and might identify different priorities and strate-
gies, the suggestion that commitment to gender equality is a Northern value is manifestly
a fiction, but one conveniently peddled by those looking for reasons to disregard gender
equality advocates and eschew prioritizing gender equality. Likewise, advocates for the rights
of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people (or some at least of these groups) can be
found, and potentially supported, in almost any country. These difficulties can be mitigated
through measures to support the involvement of local human rights advocates, including
women’s groups, in the SSR process.
A little-scrutinized aspect of participation in SSR is the gendered dynamics of SSR
advising. Salahub and Nerland (2010: 269) point out that because women are underrepresented
at senior levels in security sector institutions in SSR donor countries, they are also less likely
to be represented among the trainers, mentors, and experts advising on SSR issues in conflict-
affected states. In a recent online discussion on the topic, participants suggested that the trend
toward ‘securitization’ of SSR, with SSR attempted in more unstable environments, rein-
forces a bias toward using serving and retired military and police as SSR advisers; but that
women were better represented in justice sector work and as human rights and (of course!)
gender experts (‘Is SSR Male Dominated?’ 2016). Research on mentoring and training of
local security forces by foreign militaries suggests that SSR advisory relationships are pro-
foundly shaped by not only the cultures of the militaries involved, but dynamics of gender,
age, and race.

Conclusion
There is plenty of feminist criticism of gender and SSR discourse and practice being overly
women-focused, and too liberal feminist in focusing on opportunities for individual women.
In recent years, there has been significant development in tools to support planning,

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implementation, and evaluation of SSR in ways that are sensitive to the intersectional nature
of vulnerabilities to discrimination and violence, including men’s and boys’ insecurities, and
the vulnerabilities of sexual and gender minorities. As in so many areas of peacebuilding
and development practice, one should not seek to address the needs of other groups at the
expense of women and girls, but to have the vision, commitment, skills, and resourcing for
an inclusive approach. It is useful to re-emphasize the ideals upon which SSR discourse
and policy are founded: democratic civilian control of the security sector, the rule of law and
respect for human rights. To achieve these ideals, SSR should explicitly seek to overcome
gender inequality, discrimination, and violence in all its forms, whomever its victims. The
fact that gender was emphasized in foundational UN SSR policy is a solid base upon which
to build this more comprehensive understanding.
In practice, the key challenges to achieving gender-responsive SSR remain commitment
and resourcing. A UN review of funds allocated to six post-conflict countries found that
while access to justice programmes in six out of seven cases did meet their gender-related
milestones, other aspects of SSR performed very poorly as regards setting or reaching gender
objectives (Douglas 2015: 92). As such, it is little wonder that gender and SSR initiatives
have been dismissed as “talkshop . . . chiefly cosmetic . . . not likely to have a durable impact”
(Baaz and Utas 2012: 9). But, those who condemn SSR for having failed to eradicate vio-
lence against women and achieve gender equality perhaps expect too much, too soon. First,
as peppered throughout this chapter, we see incremental progress in many countries under-
taking SSR in improving responses to gender-based violence and increasing women’s access
to careers in the security sector. Second, and more profoundly, one of the key constraints to
success in ‘gender and SSR’, and in SSR more generally, is the limited timeframes within
which SSR tends to be conceived. Shepherding a process of changing the institutional culture
within a security sector institution, let alone within broader society, takes a long time. The
road blocks encountered in efforts to more equally integrate women into the security sector
underscore the centrality of power relations in any SSR process. As Gordon, Roos, and
Welch emphasize, gender-responsive SSR is essentially a struggle to change “how power
relations operate and how they produce and are reproduced and reinforced by the security
sector institutions” (2015: 6). This is true of SSR more generally. The value-added of a robust
SSR approach can be to foreground these considerations of power, gendered and otherwise.
But, to achieve its transformative goals, the gender focus must not lose its critical edge: it
must continually challenge, and be alert to the risk of legitimizing, practices of discrimination
and violence embedded in security sector norms and practices.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Geneva Centre for the Democratic
Control of Armed Forces in writing this chapter. She thanks Anna Kadar and Marta Ghittoni
for research assistance, and colleagues Lorraine Serrano and Heather Huhtanen for their
comments.

Notes
1 For more comprehensive introduction to the concept of SSR see: Bryden and Hänggi 2004; Born
and Schnabel 2009; DCAF 2017.
2 More comprehensive critique of SSR in theory and practice can be found in: Sedra 2010; Schnabel
and Farr 2012; Burian 2016.
3 See: UN Security Council 2008, para. 10; UN Security Council 2009, paras 8, 17; UN Security
Council 2013a, para. 16; UN Security Council 2013b, paras 4, 10.

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4 Although for an excellent gender and SSR analysis encompassing issues related to men and sexual
and gender minorities see: Khattab and Myrttinen 2014.
5 See: Myrttinen, Naujoks and El-Bushra 2014; Wright and Welsh 2014; Tielemans 2015; ‘Gender
Analysis of Conflict: A Toolkit’ 2016.

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series. New York: UNIFEM. Available at www.unifem.org/progress/2008/media/POWW08_
Report_Full_Text.pdf (accessed 27 April 2018).
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the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325’. New York: UN Women.
United Nations SSR Task Force. 2012. ‘Security sector reform integrated technical guidance notes’.
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democratic_governance/Security_sector_reform.html (accessed 1 May 2018).
Watson, Callum. 2014. ‘Preventing and responding to sexual and domestic violence against men:
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default/files/publications/documents/SDVAM_FINAL%20online.pdf (accessed 30 April 2018).
‘Whose Security? Practical examples of gender perspectives in military operations’. 2015. Kungsangen:
Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations. Available at www.forsvarsmakten.se/siteassets/
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Wright, Hannah and Patrick Welsh. 2014. ‘Masculinities, conflict and peacebuilding: Perspectives on
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gender-lens (accessed 30 April 2018).

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 32
GENDER IN INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY ORGANIZATIONS
Natalie Florea Hudson and Laura Huber

Introduction
Gender practices in global and regional security organizations form the gendered norms and
expectations regarding the ‘proper’ behaviour, perspectives, and attitudes, which can support
and/or challenge patriarchy. While most analyses of ‘gender practices’ in international
security focus primarily on the implementation (or lack thereof) of UN Security Council
Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325), this chapter begins by examining the beginnings of gender
work in security organizations and the conceptualization of ‘gender practices’ before moving
to a discussion of sex- and gender-sensitive policies and programmes in these spaces. We
then discuss and debunk some of the myths and assumptions around gender policies in the
context of international peace and security. We conclude by highlighting some of the most
promising, if imperfect, developments around gender and women.
Although gender practices developed new significance and meaning in 2000 with the
adoption of SCR 1325, some security organizations worked on gender equality prior to this.
For example, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the largest
regional security organization, committed itself to the “promotion of women’s participation
in society” in the late 1990s, appointing the first focal point for gender issues in 1998 and a
gender adviser to the Secretariat in 1999 (OSCE/OHIHR 1997). The gender adviser worked
toward the adoption of a Gender Action Plan in June 2000, a few months before the open
debate of 1325 at the Security Council. This plan led to some important procedural chances,
including the gender-formulation of job descriptions, the introduction of a gender module
to the training course for staff, and regular collection of sex-disaggregated data of women’s
participation with OSCE – a critical first step to understanding women’s and men’s differing
participation. Notably, this institutional shift occurred shortly following the adoption of the
1995 Beijing Platform for Action that established a global advocacy framework recognizing
women’s unique protection needs in conflict and participation in conflict prevention and
resolution.
Examining ‘gender practices’ not only requires analysis prior to SCR 1325, it also demands
a recognition that patriarchal ‘gender practices’ have long been part of international security
organizations and militarism. It is these negative practices that privilege violence, masculinity,
and national security that current ‘gender practices’ attempt to address. In other words,

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international security organizations have been performing gender since their establishment
by privileging masculinity and militarism as the only means to peace, and it is only now that
the international community is focused on ‘gender practices’ to counter and reconstruct
embedded current gendered practices. Thus, this chapter examines the positive policy
changes aimed at reforming gender practices toward the goal of gender equality. This includes
policies, programmes, procedures, structures, initiatives, and resources that affect an institution
– both its internal culture and its external outreach. In this way, these are, in fact, practices
that involve repetition, imperfection, ongoing effort and learning, and hopefully, improvement
over time. Deconstructing one set of gender practices and reconstructing another is incredibly
hard and complicated work that requires long-term investment. The successful transformation
of gender practices requires not only policies that increase women’s participation in and
comfort with security institutions, but must reconsider the conceptualization of security itself
and redefine valued security traits from those associated with hypermasculinity to include
more feminine, queer, and non-hegemonic masculine perspectives. While there has been
notable progress and concrete achievements, particularly in the last 15 years, gender practices
often fall short, produce unintended and even harmful consequences, and create new gendered
tensions and contradictions with which the international community must grapple.

Gender mainstreaming as a gender practice: policy development

before and after 1325
Although gender mainstreaming is now a common strategy and policy in international peace
and security, the approach did not originate there. Emerging in international development
circles in the 1970s, gender mainstreaming transitioned from feminist theorizing to application
in global policy (Hudson 2005). With the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, 183 UN Member
States established gender mainstreaming as a global strategy for achieving organizational
and societal gender. In July 1997, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) defined
gender mainstreaming as:

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 any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the concerns and experiences
of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitor-
ing and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal
spheres.
UN General Assembly A/52/3 1997: 27

The radical concept institutionalized the goal of altering existing social and political
frameworks to result in different gendered outcomes.
Gender mainstreaming, in theory, has the potential to go beyond an additive approach of
inserting more women into existing political structures to a more transformative “strategy to
re-invent the processes of policy design, implementation, and evaluation” (True 2003: 371).
Gender mainstreaming asserts the importance of breaking down gendered traditional roles and
integrating traditionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ occupations (True and Mintrom 2001).
Mainstreaming strategies emphasize “systematic procedures and mechanisms within organizations
– particularly government and public institutions – for explicitly taking into account gender
issues at all stages of policy making and programme design and implementation” (Baden and
Goetz 1998: 20). This comprehensive strategy involves both integration and agenda-setting,

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and requires the analysis of the concerns and experiences of men and women “as agents, not
simply as recipients” (Connelly et al. 2000: 63). The reality is that gender mainstreaming most
often focuses on the inclusion of women as an untapped resource essential to sustainable peace
and security. As Olsson and Tryggestad (2001: 1) argue, gender mainstreaming in the UN is
about “equal access to and full participation of women in power structures and their full
involvement in all efforts for the prevention and resolution of conflicts” and therefore, is
“essential for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security”.
The challenges with gender mainstreaming extend beyond the problematic assumption that
gender and women are synonymous. Many scholars and practitioners have found the “rather
bland, bureaucratic acceptance of the method of gender mainstreaming in international
institutions . . . detracts attention from the ways that sexed and gendered inequalities are
woven into the international system . . . deradicalizing claims to equality” (Charlesworth
2005: 2). The disappointing record on gender mainstreaming thus far has revived long-
time scepticism about co-optation, and many feminists question the wisdom of entrusting
state-based organizations with the capacity to engage in the power politics that keep gender
hierarchies in place.

Governments and international organizations often have lacked the will to

implement gender mainstreaming, have used it as an excuse to cut women-focused
programs, have distorted feminist goals in the process of implementation and have
co-opted feminist rhetoric for their own agendas.
Prügl 2009: 175

Despite these criticisms, gender mainstreaming remains a common strategy and policy tool
with international security organizations to at least change, if not transform, institutional
gender practices. In this sense, it is useful to envision gender mainstreaming as a process that
is deeply entrenched and always incomplete and “something that ‘people-as-bodies’ do
through their practices in relation to others” (Eveline and Bacchi 2005: 506). Gender main-
streaming is ongoing gender practice that allows for evaluation at the levels of incorporation
(gender balancing of everyday operations), representation (in decision-making roles),
protection (from gender-based violence), and recognition (of the important impact of a
gender perspective in terms of rights and needs) (Ellerby 2013). Gender mainstreaming refers
to the “places where choices are considered and decisions made that affect the economic,
social and political options of large numbers of people. It is where the action is. It is where
things happen” (Anderson 1993: 10).

Gender balancing as the entry point for gender practices

While gender practices, and specifically gender mainstreaming, take many forms, gender
balancing is often the entry point for institutions. Similar to Karim in this volume we dis-
tinguish between gender balancing and gender mainstreaming, but here we complicate that
distinction by highlighting how gender balancing can (although not necessarily) contribute
to more holistic gender mainstreaming goals. Gender balancing, which seeks to increase the
physical representation of women relative to men in a full range of positions in an organization,
is both particularly important and challenging in international security institutions. Women
are profoundly underrepresented in the security sector. Women’s representation in police
and military forces range from 1–34 per cent and from 0.5–26 per cent, respectively (Ellerby
2013). Gender-balancing reforms seek to ameliorate this disparity by recruiting and retaining

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more women in security institutions. While these policies are often referred to as ‘gender’
balancing, in reality, most are ‘sex-balancing’ reforms that do not necessarily ensure that
gender roles or identities have shifted in significant ways.1 While sex-balancing reforms are
not sufficient to improve gender equality, they can increase women’s access to the security
sector and challenge gender dichotomies and stereotypes. Further, such reforms indicate that
the security sector is more representative and, potentially, more responsive to women’s needs
and concerns (Ellerby 2013).
To improve sex-ratios, many security institutions sponsor female-focused recruitment
drives that specifically seek to appeal to female job candidates, usually by emphasizing the
compatibility of certain security roles with common female skills or traits. For example, women
are often targeted for recruitment into sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) preven-
tion units or children’s and family units, since it is assumed that women are more concerned
with ‘women’s issues’ and are better capable at handling them (Dharmpuri 2011). Further,
women are seen as attractive candidates for certain security roles because they are either able
to access areas and individuals unavailable to men in uniform, or are seen as less violent,
aggressive or corrupt, improving relations with victims, suspects, and the general population
(Holliday 2012). For example, in Yemen, a female-focused recruitment campaign was launched
with NATO support in 2011 for counter-terrorism police units that emphasized female
officers’ unique ability to search female terror suspects in Yemen’s conservative society.2
Additionally, security institutions can also develop gender quotas or targets that set a mini-
mum level of representation for women, usually between 5 and 50 per cent.3 As of 2012,
about 40 per cent of countries hold publicly announced gender targets or quotas in at least
one of their security institutions.4 For example, in 2005, the Liberian National Police (LNP)
instituted a 15 per cent (and later 30 per cent) female quota (Huber and Karim 2018). Despite
the potential of quotas to change the composition of security forces, scholars and practitioners
have warned that such measures could lead to institutional hierarchies in which women,
especially ‘quota women’ or those recruited under the quota, are viewed as less qualified or
deserving of their position (Bacon 2015). These critiques call into question the fairness of
quotas both to men who might feel discriminated against and to women who lose respect
and their reputation.
International organizations also commonly hold targets, and less commonly, formal quotas.
NATO, for instance, encourages its member states to increase women’s representation within
the armed forces, set a target of 30 per cent female representation, declared gender balancing
to be a priority, and published guidelines and handbooks for best practices on recruiting and
retaining more women (NATO 2010). Similarly, the UN set a target of 20 per cent female
representation among UN police by 2014 and renewed their commitment to realize that goal
by 2020 (UNPOL 2014). The connection between these trends at the national and inter-
national levels cannot be understated. International organizations rely on the voluntary contri-
butions of national militaries to staff their operations. The dramatic gender gap in member
states’ armed forces is only exacerbated when these militaries must deploy individuals abroad.
For instance, because the EU did not implement gender-sensitive planning and design of the
Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the gender imbalance of member states
“simply and uncritically carries over to the new institutional setup” (Kronsell 2012: 116).
Further, international security institutions hold normative, political, and economic power
that can be leveraged to influence individual states to adopt gender reform. Thus, when the
prevailing gender order is not questioned and not deliberately addressed, then it is reproduced.
Gender practices can also be considered and implemented in security programming, such
as Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR). DDR is an integral component

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of post-conflict reconstruction, seeking to demobilize and disarm former combatants and

return them to civilian lives. Gender-blind DDR does not consider the differing implications
of the programming for male and female combatants and individuals associated with the
conflict. As a result, many DDR programmes cater primarily to male combatants and over-
look mobilized women (MacKenzie 2012). For example, a common criterion for eligibility
in DDR is the sacrifice of a weapon, but this policy harms women involved in the conflict
who might not have weapons or might have had their weapons taken away. As a result,
mobilized women cannot benefit from DDR programmes, which further destabilizes peace
(Basini 2013). Entrance requirements for women can be altered to accommodate the different
ways women participate in conflict (Basini 2013) and women can be provided with specialized
health services, separate housing and dining facilities, and specialized job training (DCAF
2008). Such practices in DDR allow formerly mobilized women to receive services that ease
their transition into post-conflict society.
Recruitment campaigns, gender quotas, and gender-sensitive DDR programmes are only
a few examples of gender practices sponsored or encouraged by international security
institutions. While these practices have been in place for decades, the last 15 years have seen
a significant increase in gender reforms. This growing attention, however, can be a slippery
slope as having more female bodies does not mean that an organization is addressing gender
inequality in meaningful ways.

Debunking the myths about gender practices

For many, gender practices can lead to organizational innovations, such as gender field
advisers (GFS) and gender focal points (GFP),that meet tactical level challenges and enhance
the effectiveness of the security sector. Proponents of gender practices generally focus on
arguments about enhancing the effectiveness of the security sector (Egnell 2016). First,
increasing women’s representation can provide opportunities for other ‘gender-sensitive’ tasks
to take place, especially in societies with strict gender roles that limit interaction between
men and women. Female officers can conduct body searches of female suspects, access female
areas of houses or buildings, supervise female suspects, prisoners, and victims. Further, some
research suggests that female officers might make male and female victims, suspects, and wit-
nesses more comfortable and at ease (Schuck and Rabe-Hemp 2007). For example, the US
army deployed Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to Afghanistan in the context of the
NATO mission in hopes that female soldiers would increase access to female civilians and
decrease local hostility (Holliday 2012).
Gender practices might also affect the institution’s culture, policies, and interactions with
civilians. One common argument is that gender balancing sensitizes the institution’s policies
and procedures to women’s issues (DCAF 2008; Dhamapuri 2011; Naraghi-Anderlini 2007).
Further, gender mainstreaming might result in more comprehensive security due to women’s
unique experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and skills (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002). Similarly,
gender balancing might improve responses to SGBV, since it is assumed that female personnel
are more concerned with SGBV, capable at addressing it, and sympathetic with and comforting
to female victims (Naraghi-Anderlini 2007; Dhampuri 2011). Gender balancing might increase
the security sector’s perceived legitimacy as women are stereotypically assumed less aggressive
and corrupt (Baaz and Utas 2012; Dollar, Fisman and Gatti 2001; Hendricks 2012; Karim
2016). Additionally, maternity and childcare policies allow mothers (and fathers) to continue
working within the security sector, which might improve performance due to decreased turn-
over. Finally, gender practices promote women’s fundamental right to participate in security
and encourage women’s empowerment (Olsson and Gizelis 2013).

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However, gender balancing is not without critics, particularly those who challenge its
motivations and justifications (Karim and Beardsley 2017). First, gender balancing, better
referred to as sex balancing, relies on essentialist and homogenizing claims regarding women’s
bodies, abilities, interests, and priorities (Dhampuri 2011; Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill and
Caprioli 2012). For example, scholars dispute the claim that women should be better at
addressing SGBV, instead emphasizing the importance of training over gender (Charlesworth
2008; Toupin 2014). The essentialist and instrumentalist justifications for gender balancing
can limit women’s access to certain roles that are not conventionally associated with femi-
ninity. Further, there is also the possibility that if women do not live up to, or even exceed,
expectations, gender balancing will be declared a failure (Otto 2006). Gender-balancing
efforts could also increase tensions among women, especially if they target only elite women
(Pupavac 2005). Second, gender balancing is often criticized as a minimalist reform. Gender
balancing is a relatively quick reform that, on the surface, demonstrates progress. However,
beneath this quantitative change often lies a complex story in which women’s power within
the institution remains limited and hypermasculinity prevails.
Similarly, other gender mainstreaming efforts have been critiqued. One critique argues
that calls for gender mainstreaming reflect Westernized values and liberal feminism (Arat
2015). Moreover, commentators claim that gender mainstreaming efforts are often too
minimal and have little to no effect on the larger gendered cultures and norms. While these
latter critiques are often not challenging the premise of gender mainstreaming, they recognize
that in its implementation, gender mainstreaming is often piecemeal, half-hearted, disorgan-
ized, and limited. For example, there might be little coordination among various security
institutions and reforms might be adopted in a haphazard manner, without proper funding,
planning, or contextualization. Finally, gender mainstreaming often suffers from a lack of
local ownership and design that specializes it for the specific obstacles, challenges, and context
of the security institution, which can undermine sustainability and success (Basini and Ryan
2016).
There is rarely a strict or useful distinction between gender balancing, gender mainstreaming,
and other gender reforms. This largely occurs because various types of gender reform must
be mutually reinforcing. Gender-balancing reforms address a symptom of larger ‘negative
gender practices’ within security and society. They acknowledge that more women need to
participate in security, without directly addressing the root cause of women’s low participation.
In other words, gender-balancing reforms often address the outcome of a hypermasculinized
culture without directly challenging and changing that culture. Unfortunately, gender-
balancing policies are often enacted with the assumption that larger gender reforms will result.
However, women’s physical presence within an institution does not guarantee substantive or
symbolic influence or power (Dharmpuri 2011). The underlying reason for women’s low
participation is beyond the control of individual women (or men), but instead lies with
institutional culture, gender norms, and structural obstacles that limit women’s access to,
comfort with, and participation in security. Therefore, while we cannot equate gender
balancing with necessarily increasing gender equality, gender mainstreaming and gender
reform rarely occur without gender balancing.
Additionally, gender mainstreaming and gender balancing do not constitute comprehensive
gender practices as they are often overwhelmingly silent about men and masculinity. Gender
mainstreaming and balancing have become relatively synonymous with feminine/
female mainstreaming and sex ratio balancing in that they primarily focus on recruiting
women and making the institution more sensitive to the needs of women. In this way, the
implications of gender practice reforms for men and individuals who identify with other

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genders are largely overlooked. This oversight risks increasing male–female tensions if men
view gender mainstreaming policies as giving unfair advantages to female colleagues. There
is also a risk of ignoring other gendered issues and persons, such as LGBTQ individuals and
heteronormativity. However, there are policies that can addresses these silences, such as
paternity leave, campaigns to recognize the importance of other types of masculinity in
security (for example, a new emphasis on the importance of technology rather than brute
strength), LGBTQ sensitization, and LGBTQ harassment or inclusion policies (Hagen 2016).
While there have been major advances in altering gender practices within security insti-
tutions to emphasize gender equality, many ongoing, negative gender practices persist that
uphold patriarchal hierarchies (Whitworth 2004). For example, although women’s repre-
sentation in the security sector has increased, women continue to be severely underrepresented
in decision-making positions and tend to be overrepresented in administrative roles. In UN
peacekeeping missions in 2014, for example, women comprised 30 per cent of civilian per-
sonnel, 10 per cent of police personnel, and 3 per cent of military personnel, indicating that
women are largely absent in ‘hard’ security-oriented roles (UN Foundation 2015). Similarly,
the EU Military Staff estimates that only 3–8 per cent of the deployed personnel in Common
Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military operations are female (Meiske 2015). Women
are still extremely underrepresented in combat positions as some states continue to bar
women from combat, and in the states that allow women to serve in combat,5 women com-
prise a very small percentage of combat troops.6 From methods of recruitment such as
national secondments to the consistent and reliable collection of sex-disaggregated data,
challenges remain for transforming organizational practices.
Finally, as mentioned above, security institutions hold deeply entrenched gender practices
that must be disrupted for successful gender balancing and gender mainstreaming to occur.
However, despite some success in promoting greater women’s participation in and comfort
with security positions, the beliefs surrounding what makes a good soldier – and the
consequential effects on training programmes, promotion and appointments, standards
of behaviours, and institutional norms – remain strongly entrenched. The image of the ideal
security personnel supported by most security institutions continues to be steeped in mas-
culinity. Security officers are commonly idealized as strong, tough, brave, and at times,
aggressive heroes who engage in violence (Goldstein 2001). This supports an institutional
culture that promotes masculine values and devalues feminine values. Until this discourse is
challenged and disrupted, attempts to instil new gender practices might fall short in the face
of entrenched values and norms that exist purposefully to promote the ‘ideal’ soldier, police
officer, border guard, etc. Therefore, scholars and practitioners need to redefine the meaning
of security, the goals of security institutions, and the desired characteristics in security
personnel to break from militarized masculine ideals and create a new and more equitable
set of gender practices.

Gender practices with the potential to take power seriously: looking ahead
As with any ‘practice’, gender practices are imperfect and continue to evolve and improve.
While there is good reason to be critical of gender reform, many policies show great promise
to not simply address the symptoms of gender inequality, but to directly challenge and
overturn institutionalized patriarchy. As with all reforms, there is no single solution and no
guarantee of success; additional factors such as political will, resources, and institutional and
grassroots support, must also be considered. Below, we explore three gender practices that
have potential to actively engage with and challenge larger power structures to support

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sustainable reform: gender advisers, gender training, and national, regional, and institutional
action plans for gender reform.
The creation and institutionalization of gender affairs offices and gender advisers is a
notable accomplishment of the 21st century. Prior to 2000, such offices and positions did
not exist and now they are a regular procedural component of international peace operations
in the field and at headquarters, from the Department of Peacekeeping Operation in New
York to NATO in Brussels. The positions reflect new political space and opportunity
structures to focus on women and gender in the operations and services of international
security organizations. When these focal points are held by individuals who are trained
experts in gender relations and when their offices are fully funded and centrally positioned
in decision-making, as is the case with NATO’s Special Representative on Women, Peace
and Security, they have great potential.
Gender training also presents an opportunity to directly challenge and overturn pre-
existing gendered stereotypes among security personnel. ‘Gender training’ seeks to sensitize
security personnel to the differing needs, experiences, challenges, and work of women and
men. The trainings can be internally focused, examining how these gender practices affect
the experience of security personnel, or externally focused to improve response to gendered
security threats. These trainings can lead security personnel to confront their gendered
prejudices or ignorances and learn how to be more aware of, responsive to, and concerned
with gendered inequalities in security. Changing individual attitudes and behaviours can be
an impactful first step in facilitating a shift in gender practices and breaking down patriarchy
within security sectors.
Gender training to date has fallen short of expectations. According to the Folke Bernadotte
Academy, gender training most often emphasizes representation and code of conduct rules
as opposed to highlighting existing peace work and ensuring local women’s empowerment
and participation. It also rarely takes up tough connections between sexuality, masculinity,
violence, and militarism. Still, prior to UNSCR 1325, gender training was a rarity and
extremely limited. Now gender training is a regular occurrence and is both conducted within
international security organizations and by non-governmental organizations (Lyytikäinen
2007). Instead of relying on the common trope of ‘adding women’ to the security discussion,
gender training must engage with uncomfortable topics by highlighting how the institution
perpetuates patriarchy, questioning how this culture harms the institution and the population,
and how the institution’s hierarchies and conceptions of security, masculinity, and effectiveness
must be re-evaluated.
Finally, National Action Plans (NAPs) and Regional Action Plans (RAPs) can be a practical
means through which states and regions can translate their commitments into concrete policies
and programmes.7 In general, these plans emerge as formal and publically available policy
documents that outline national commitments and policy procedures to comply with and
implement international standards on women, peace and security (WPS). Specifically, these
documents detail the action that a government is currently taking and those initiatives that it
will undertake in a given period of time (United Nations 2010). To date, 63 NAPs currently
exist, 16 new NAPs are in progress, and close to 20 have already undergone at least one review
and revision process.8
RAPs are a critical tool given the cross-border impact of many contemporary armed con-
flicts (Hudson 2013). In 2008, the EU adopted a regional strategy known as the Comprehensive
Approach to the Implementation of SCR 1325 and 1820. Notably, the EU is now reporting
on its women, peace, and security indicators. The African Union (AU) adopted a gender policy
in 2009 which cites commitments to international and regional gender equality instruments,

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including SCR 1325 and the 1995 Maputo Protocol. In 2012, the Pacific Regional Action
Plan was established; and the League of Arab states approved a regional strategy entitled,
‘Protection of Arab Women: Peace and Security’.9 Further, NATO has developed specific
policy commitments on WPS which recognize the importance of active inclusion, participa-
tion, and the role of women for dealing successfully with contemporary security challenges.10
In November 2011, NATO’s Secretary-General released the organization’s first annual report
on the implementation of 1325 (2000) and NATO now has an established special representa-
tive for WPS. OSCE recently commissioned a study comparing NAPs and other national
strategies for the implementation of SCR 1325. While only 27 out of 57 participating countries
in the OSCE have NAPs, all participating states are asked to report on the OSCE Code of
Conduct, which includes reporting on gender (Peace Research Institute 2013).
Without a doubt, the process of developing an action plan can be as important as the text
itself. If undertaken in an inclusive and comprehensive manner, the development process can
create new spaces and entry points for actors to dialogue in ways they might not normally
have done on such issues. This dialogue raises awareness about the WPS agenda, enhances
understanding of the many ways SCR 1325 applies to foreign and domestic policy, encourages
new partnerships, and empowers marginalized groups. When women’s organizations or
peace activist groups are sitting at the same table as military officials, police, or other senior
officials, people’s minds are opened to the many ways that women’s rights and gender
equality are, in fact, critical considerations to national, regional, and global peace and security
concerns.11

Conclusion
Gender reform in international and regional security institutions has become increasingly
common in the past two decades, radically changing the connotation of gender practices in
security. Gender practices in the realm of security conventionally and historically promoted
patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Since the dawn of NGO advocacy movements for
human security and international commitments to the Beijing Platform for Action (1995)
and the WPS agenda, international security institutions have experienced a wave of reforms
that challenged previous gender practices and replaced them with ‘positive’ ones that promote
gender equality in security. Still, gender practices are far from perfect and are constantly
implemented, criticized, reformulated, and tried again. As noted, gender practices involve
repetition, imperfection, ongoing effort and learning, and improvement. By engaging with
the uncomfortable challenges, problems, and failures of gender reform practices, we can learn
from previous experiences and improve future efforts to redefine the connotation of ‘gender
practices’ in security from one of patriarchy, which gender reform attempts to change, to
one in which positive gender relations and gender equality are the norm.

Notes
1 While female or sex balancing more adequately describes these reforms, ‘gender balancing’ is con-
sistent with the terminology used by the UN and other security institutions.
2 See the newspaper announcement: https://dialogo-americas.com/en/articles/yemen-female-
police-officers-fight-terrorism. We also acknowledge that the dialogue used to justify female officers
removes agency from female terrorists by referring to them as ‘being used by terrorists’, denying
that women could voluntarily and knowingly participate in such nefarious activities.
3 While some institutions use quotas to limit women’s representation, this section focuses on ‘positive’
gender quotas.

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4 Based on a random sample of 88 states from the Huber (n.d.) dataset.

5 While the exact number is unknown, probably fewer than 25 countries allow women to serve in
combat.
6 While women tend to be nominally barred from serving in combat, many women serve in the same
environment and perform the same duties as combat personnel.
7 W hile the original WPS resolution, 1325, did not mention, much less require, NAPs or RAPs, the
UN Security Council Presidential Statement (2002) and the UN Secretary-General’s Report (2004),
invites UN member states to prepare such plans to implement 1325. Further, UN Security Council
Resolution 1889 (2009) welcomed “the efforts of Member States in implementing . . . resolution
1325 (2000) at the national level, including the development of national action plans”.
8 https://actionplans.inclusivesecurity.org/
9 General Secretariat of the League of Arab States, ‘Regional Strategy: Protection of Arab Women,
Peace and Security’ in collaboration with Arab Women Organization and UN Women (2012),
p. 9, available at www.arabwomenorg.org/Content/Publications/strpeceng.pdf.
10 Since 2007, NATO has developed an operational framework to implement the WPS UNSC resolu-
tions. In 2007, the NATO/Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council adopted a policy on implementing
Resolution 1325. In 2009, the Bi-Strategic Command Directive 40-1 on Integrating SCR 1325
and Gender Perspectives in the NATO Command Structure recognized the importance of gender
considerations. In 2010, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly adopted Resolution 381 which calls
for the incorporation of UNSC Resolution 1325 and related resolutions into NATO policies. In
2012, the NATO Chicago Summit Declaration reaffirmed member countries’ commitment to the
full implementation of Resolution 1325 and the NATO Secretary General appointed Ms. Mari
Skåre as his Special Representative on Women, Peace and Security. For more, see www.dcaf.ch/
involvement-parliaments-advancing-women-peace-and-security-agenda-nato-member-countries.
11 See Basini and Ryan (2016) and Aisling Swaine (2016) for critiques of NAPs.

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 33
GENDER AND STATE
MILITARIES
Melissa T. Brown

Across cultures and time periods, military service has been tied to masculinity and the
transformation of boys into men. The masculinity produced by militaries is often presumed
to take one specific form – that of the hard, aggressive warrior. However, military institutions
reproduce and reinforce multiple forms of both masculinity and femininity. Militaries have
depended on both men and women filling gendered roles. This chapter explores how
conscription, recruitment, training, and the motivation of soldiers to fight all draw on and
produce masculinity in various forms in order to induce the desired militarized performances
from men, as well as how militaries have relied on women to play prescribed roles as camp
followers, wives, prostitutes, nurses, and soldiers, subordinate to and supporting military
men. It also addresses the ways in which the practice of warfare is informed by gender.

Military masculinities
While militaries have historically been associated with masculinity, the components of
military masculinity change with time and context, with new military roles and advances
in technology, as well as with major political, economic, and social changes in the societies
of which militaries are a part. Even in the same general time period, militaries engaging in
different types of missions might cultivate or encourage different masculine ideals. So, for
instance, while the hegemonic masculinity for Israeli combat soldiers “emphasizes two
complementary themes: emotional and physical self-control and thrill” (Sasson-Levy 2003:
457), Finnish peacekeeper masculinities follow the narratives of “reliable professionals” and
“sensitive dads”, as well as “tough fighters” (Mäki-Rahkola and Myrttinen 2014).
Different military roles can produce multiple forms of masculinity within a single military
(Barrett 1996; Higate 2003; Morgan 1994). Frank Barrett shows how officers in the US Navy
validate themselves by drawing on different strands of hegemonic masculinity. While officers
generally emphasized their discipline, perseverance, and toughness, naval aviators focused on
their risk-taking behaviour and surface warfare officers their endurance of hardship and their
ability to perform under pressure. While the archetypal image of the masculine warrior as
portrayed “in statues, heroic paintings, comic books, and popular films” exhibits “aggression,
courage, a capacity for violence, and sometimes, a willingness for sacrifice” (Morgan 1994:

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165–166), militaries and their soldiers develop a variety of masculine models to facilitate what
they do.
The relationship between soldiering and masculinity has generally been taken for granted
as natural and given. Feminist scholars have attempted to de-naturalize the connection,
revealing how it has been constructed (Cohn 1998; Elshtain 1987; Goldstein 2001; Higate
2003; Stiehm 1989). In trying to understand why, despite great human diversity in both
warfighting and in gender, virtually all societies have dealt with war by creating fighting
groups that are predominantly or exclusively male, Joshua Goldstein finds that fighting does
not come naturally to either men or women: “to help overcome soldiers’ reluctance to fight,
cultures develop gender roles that equate ‘manhood’ with toughness under fire” (2001: 9).
Gender identity is used to motivate and coerce men:

Contrary to the idea that war thrills men, expresses innate masculinity, or gives men
a fulfilling occupation, all evidence indicates that war is something societies impose
on men, who most often need to be dragged kicking and screaming into it,
constantly brainwashed and disciplined once there, and rewarded and honored
afterwards.
Goldstein 2001: 253

Masculinity helps militaries get men into the ranks, train and socialize them, have them stick
with boring and/or dangerous jobs, and be willing to harm others.

Conscription and recruitment

Militaries fill their ranks through conscription or voluntary enlistment. Social compliance
with conscription is enhanced by connections between masculinity and military service.
Conscription ties men as a group to national defence. As a general rule, state militaries do
not draft women. (While Israel does, it excludes many categories of women and drafts them
for shorter terms than men and for non-combat roles only (see Golan 1997).) Participation
in the military can serve as a rite of passage and a facet of adult male citizenship. The chance
to achieve masculinity and the rights of citizenship can induce acquiescence by relatively
disempowered groups of men who might be expected to resent the state. For example, in
Bolivia, conscripts generally come from poor communities and lower-status ethnic groups
that have been the target of military repression. However, young men comply with
conscription, often eagerly, because they earn a sense of masculine identity that counters the
prejudice they face, respect from their communities as responsible adult men, and a military
booklet that allows them to acquire a national identity card that grants them citizenship rights
and access to urban employment (Gill 1997).
In the absence of conscription, militaries must find volunteers. Masculinity is a central
element of those appeals. Cynthia Enloe notes that recruiting efforts often target particular
racial or ethnic groups and seek to connect service to a masculine identity thought to be
relevant to that group. So if recruiting calls are “aimed at the young men – and their parents
– of an ethnic or racial group that is marginalized politically or economically, the appeal can
weave together communal notions of manliness with desperate hopes for ‘first class citizenship’
and career opportunities” (Enloe 2000: 237), while if they are aimed at the members of
“ethnic or racial communities that already enjoy either political or economic privileges under
the status quo, then the siren call of recruiters can couple communal notions of manliness
to communal presumptions of cultural superiority and national leadership” (ibid.).

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When the US military needed to find volunteers after ending conscription in the early
1970s, its branches ended up drawing on several different strands of masculinity, altering their
approach depending on factors such as the roles to be filled and the groups being targeted.
The various masculine appeals included not only a traditional warrior ideal, but also economic
independence and breadwinner status, physical and mental challenges that allow men to
prove themselves, dominance and mastery by means of technology, and hybrid forms of
masculinity that blend strength and power with egalitarianism and compassion (Brown 2012).
As more military jobs come to depend on technical skill than physical strength and advances
in technology mean that many military jobs are specialized and similar to civilian occupations,
militaries could theoretically attempt to de-gender their appeals (especially if they open more
of those jobs to women). However, while militaries might alter the forms of masculinity they
use to sell themselves and align them more closely with masculine ideals dominant in civilian
life, masculinity remains an ideological bulwark of recruiting. In fact, recruiting shortfalls,
whatever their causes, may be blamed on a perceived feminization of the military (ibid.).

Training and motivation to fight

However militaries acquire their supply of men, they must then be socialized into military
life. Military training transforms young civilian men into soldiers, inculcating in them the
behaviours and attitudes that a given military finds appropriate and necessary, usually
including discipline, the habit of obeying orders, and a willingness to endure unpleasant,
painful experiences. Militaries have relied on gender to achieve this transformation, associating
the wanted qualities with masculinity while denigrating women and femininity. Trainers
humiliate recruits by calling them women, girls, pussies, sissies, and other feminized insults
(Francke 1997; Gill 1997). Sandra Whitworth argues that militaries foster desired masculine
ideals by disparaging “everything marked by difference, whether that be women, people of
color, or homosexuality” so that soldiers learn “to deny, indeed to obliterate, the ‘other’
within themselves” (2004: 161). These practices make militaries “resistant to the inclusion
of the ‘other’ within their ranks, whether that be members of ‘other’ ethnic or racial groups,
gay men and lesbians, or women” because their presence would interfere with the construction
of military masculinity (ibid.: 162).
Heterosexuality is usually central to the masculine military culture into which recruits
are socialized. As noted, the insults flung at recruits in basic training might include homo-
phobic slurs, which are meant to put the recruit in a subordinate, feminine subject position
(a position that he can transcend by performing as desired). A military can use the exclusion
and denigration of gay men to help it produce a particular masculinity:

By subscribing to stereotypical views of gay men, the military has been able to use
homophobia to demand that male recruits show only their strength and their
aggression and to insure that those who did not ‘fit’ were totally ostracized by their
peers.
Herbert 1998: 79

The absence of openly gay men can also allow soldiers to enjoy intense homosocial bonds
and homoerotic experiences while having their heterosexual masculinity verified by the
military (Cohn 1998). When the Clinton administration proposed lifting the ban on gay
service members, the resulting debates focused almost entirely on gay men, not lesbians, even
though women were more likely to be discharged for homosexuality. The issue of privacy

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– not generally an expected attribute of military life – surfaced often. The subtext, Carol
Cohn argues, was that soldiers might end up showering with gay men who could look at
them, and thus these soldiers might have to imagine themselves as the object of the male
gaze, a feminization unacceptable for masculinized soldiers. Whether militaries tolerate gays
has often depended on personnel needs (Shilts 1993). Many militaries have changed their
official policies and now allow gay soldiers to serve openly. This does not signify a declining
importance of masculinity to military culture. Rather, as homophobia declines in a society
at large, homosexuality might no longer function so strongly as a signifier of a feminized
other, and gay men could be less of a threat to the institution’s masculinity if they can
conform to and embody other elements of militarized masculinity.
While military training might involve the denigration of women and femininity, a differ-
entiation from women that valorizes them can be used to motivate men to fight. Militaries
rely on a myth that women need protection and men are naturally their protectors (Stiehm
1989). Women serve as a peaceful “other” to male warriors, life-giving “Beautiful Souls” to
men’s life-taking “Just Warriors” (Elshtain 1987). Men’s belief that they are protecting
women might not only validate their masculinity, it might allow them to withstand
the horrors of combat. Men can “endure and commit terrible acts” if they believe that the
situation is temporary and “they have a place to return to, or at least to die trying to protect
– a place called home or normal or peacetime”. That place is constructed as a “nurturing,
‘feminine’ domain” and “normal life becomes feminized and combat masculinized” (Goldstein
2001: 301).

Militarized femininities
While militaries are associated with masculinity and men have almost exclusively been
combatants, militaries depend on femininity to help them construct masculinities, and they
depend on women to enact particular feminine roles; this includes encouraging men to fight
and sustaining their morale, surrendering their sons to the state willingly as ‘patriotic mothers’,
cheerfully coping with shortages of food and other goods in wartime, and taking temporary
wartime jobs but relinquishing them to returning soldiers. Women have served military
purposes as camp followers, wives, prostitutes, nurses, and as soldiers themselves.

Camp followers
Into the 1800s, militaries depended on camp followers to perform a range of traditionally
feminine occupations, including food preparation, laundry, sewing, and nursing. Women,
many of them married to soldiers, were “a normal part of European armies at least from the
fourteenth until well into the nineteenth century” (Hacker 1981: 643). Military leaders
complained that the women distracted men from their duties and slowed down the march,
but they also relied on their labour to keep soldiers in fighting shape. In the 17th century,
European armies acquired the ability to successfully utilize gunpowder weapons, which
required tactical changes and new forms of training and organization. Armies became larger
and more centrally managed, and they began to exert greater control over support services and
the women providing them. Some women gained official recognition but were newly sub-
ject to regulation. Armies became harder to follow once they controlled the means of
transport, so officers could limit the number of women – now formally restricted to wives
– who accompanied soldiers on campaign. By the 18th century, the British mandated no
more than six wives (generally of sergeants) per company of 100 men to do sewing and

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laundry: “‘wives on the strength,’ as the British army called them, could now draw rations
in token of their legitimate military status but must also accept duties defined in much
greater detail” (Hacker 1988: 18). In the 19th century, these women “gradually gave way
to uniformed, paid, male support services under direct army orders” (ibid.: 20).
The term ‘camp follower’ is often associated with prostitution (and certainly some of
the women who laboured for armies supplied soldiers with sex), even though such women
provided a variety of vital services. Commanders found camp followers useful much of the
time, but also believed they were an impediment to army mobility and a disruptive influence.
When commanders wanted to rid themselves of excess women, it was easier to expel them
“if they could be portrayed as rootless, promiscuous, parasitic, and generally a drag on
the military’s discipline and battle readiness . . . thus camp follower was commonly equated
with prostitute” (Enloe 2000: 40). That any woman “chose to make her life among rough men
was presumed proof enough of her loose character” (ibid.). Officers could disparage camp
followers as prostitutes and force them out, and then acquire new ones when needed. This
characterization of women associated with armies as sexually promiscuous continued to
haunt women as they became formal members of militaries in the 20th century.

Military wives
Militaries have had a fraught relationship with soldiers’ wives. Wives can further military
goals, but they also might divide a husband’s loyalties. Once militaries began providing their
own support services, enlisted men were generally discouraged or even prohibited from
marrying, while officers were expected to marry, and their wives were pressured to contribute
volunteer labour to improving life in the military community. In the late 20th century, if
militaries transitioned from conscription to volunteer forces, they needed to become more
accommodating of military families in order to retain trained personnel. Frequent relocation
hampers the ability of military wives to pursue their own careers or education (Segal 1999),
so despite the various services that a military might provide, a traditional family model
in which the soldier-husband is head of household and the wife his helpmate best suits
the military establishment. Until the 1980s, the US military officially referred to wives as
‘dependants’ (and continued to do so unofficially in the years after), a term that “reflected
the subordinate role assigned to wives in military culture” (Lehr 1999: 120) and ignored their
contributions. Military wives are expected to shape their lives around their husbands’ careers
and act in ways that support force readiness. They have to take on all family responsibilities
when their husbands deploy but are supposed to yield authority when he returns. They know
that their behaviour and any complaints about military life that they voice can affect their
husbands’ career prospects (Enloe 1983). A military wife is discouraged from socializing
across her husband’s rank; enlisted men’s wives cannot be friends with officers’ wives (ibid.).
Wives are expected to maintain the military hierarchy and identify more with their husbands
and the institution than with other women.
If militaries successfully socialize wives, they can make use of them in a variety of ways:
to “help win civilian support and sympathy for the military by making it seem a less brutal
or insulated institution”; to “give male soldiers emotional support and incentives to ‘act like
men’ in battle”; to “provide cheap or unpaid labor for the dozens of social agencies on
a modern base which in turn sustain the military as a self-sufficient ‘community’”; and,
ultimately, to “bear children and bring up those children – especially the boys – to imagine
that enlistment into the military is a natural and rewarding thing to do, thereby providing
the military with its most reliable manpower tool” (ibid.: 48–49). The expectations of

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military wives are rooted in presumptions about gender; the relatively few military husbands
that exist – many of them service members themselves – are not expected to play the same
roles (Enloe 2000).

Prostitutes
Militaries have generally assumed that appropriately masculine soldiers, whether married
or not, require a sexual outlet. Soldiers might, in fact, feel pressure to demonstrate their
masculinity by pursuing sex. Commanders have grappled with the conflict between

their belief that any soldier who was a ‘real man’ needed sexual access to women
and their fear that uncontrolled sexual relations with local, or ‘native,’ women would
undermine the physical and moral vigor of men, making them less valuable in battle.
Enloe 2000: 62

A frequent solution has been for militaries to exert control over prostitutes, from the British
Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which subjected women suspected of prostitution to
surveillance, medical examination, and treatment, to basing agreements of recent decades
which require women who work in bars near overseas military bases to register with officials
and undergo regular medical tests. During wartime, some militaries have directly organized
brothels, often with separate facilities for officers and enlisted men and for soldiers of different
races. In each of these cases, steps are taken “to protect the male customers without under-
mining their perceptions of themselves as sexualized men” (Enloe 1993: 145); to control
sexually transmitted infections, it is the women who must undergo (and pay for) examinations,
not the soldiers.

Nurses
Before the 1850s, nursing was not a professionalized skill, but one of the tasks that made
up women’s traditional labour. The same women who provisioned, cooked, sewed, and did
laundry for militaries also nursed wounded soldiers. When militaries took over support
services from women, these included medical care. With the Crimean War, however, British
and Russian forces began formally integrating female nurses into military operations. The
United States followed suit during the Civil War, and French women worked in military
hospitals during the 1870s when France fought Russia. The professionalization of nursing
was accomplished not just through training in medical care, sanitation, and nutrition, but
through the training’s restriction to middle-class, ‘respectable’ women who would comport
themselves in the most disciplined, moralistic manner, to shield military nurses from the
charges of promiscuity that had been aimed at camp followers (Enloe 1983). This meant
that non-white women were excluded from British and American nursing schools, and
the African-American women who nursed soldiers for both sides during the US Civil War
were not officially recognized as nurses. In 1898, with the Spanish-American War, the US
Congress authorized the creation of a Nurse Corps Division which hired contract nurses,
and it established the Army Nurse Corps in 1901 and the Navy Nurse Corps in 1908. Nurses
served with official military status in several militaries in both World Wars (with eventual,
grudging inclusion of black women in the US), becoming permanent parts of military
institutions after the Second World War.
Despite initial resistance to women nurses by many military officials, especially medical
personnel, in the 20th century, military nursing was perceived as women’s work (Reeves

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1996). Not only do nurses fill the vital military function of providing medical care, militaries
can make use of their femininity to bolster soldiers’ morale. By performing feminine roles,
nurses can enhance male soldiers’ masculine sense of themselves as warriors. That might
be one reason why even in contexts when military nurses have served close to the front and
been at risk of enemy attack, they have not been categorized as serving in combat, reserving
that masculine designation for the male soldiers. In the First World War, men immobilized
by ‘combat exhaustion’ could be motivated to fight again by the presence of women. Nurses
were “an audience before which men would be most likely to want to prove their manhood
by going back on the line – exactly the effect desired by the generals” (Goldstein 2001: 308).
Injured soldiers came to expect and demand that women would care for them.

Servicewomen
In the 20th century, state militaries began enlisting women other than nurses to cope with
manpower shortages. While militaries have needed women’s labour, they have sought to
harness it in ways that will not threaten masculinized military culture. Instead of classifying
women as soldiers, militaries might hire women as civilians, which keeps militaries purely
male but gives commanders less control over the women. Militaries might also segregate
women into auxiliary forces, highlighting their secondary status. When integrated into the
regular military, women’s roles are still carefully delimited. The pattern that developed
during the 20th century was that women would initially do jobs similar to those they might
do in the civilian workforce, such as clerical work, but wartime labour shortages expanded
women’s roles into areas previously considered unsuitable. When the crisis passed, women
were quickly demobilized or returned to very limited roles. Militaries often tried to draw
a bright line between combat jobs, which were restricted to men, and non-combat jobs.
In the Second World War, British anti-aircraft batteries included women and men. Women
in the artillery crews operated the fire control instruments and searchlights and had targeting
and hit confirmation duties. The men standing next to them actually fired the weapons and
were designated combat personnel, while the women were officially not in combat (Goldman
and Stites 1982). When women performed tasks that “previously only ‘masculine’ men could
supposedly do, the activity itself was devalued in men’s eyes”, so militaries had to find ways
to differentiate women’s contributions from men’s (Williams 1989: 43).
As women have become permanent fixtures in many militaries around the world – they
currently make up 10 per cent or more of the forces in Australia, Canada, Eritrea, France,
Israel, Norway, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, and the United States – contention over what
jobs they can and should fill has persisted. Definitions of combat have shifted so that militaries
can use women in ways that suit their operational needs but that allow some roles to remain
out of bounds to women and reserved for men as ‘real’ combat. A few militaries have offi-
cially removed restrictions on women’s participation in ground combat, though the number
of women involved is small, and they can be framed as exceptional. What this means for the
masculinizing practices of militaries is something feminist scholars will want to keep a close
eye on as the integration of women into combat roles unfolds.
To function within masculine military cultures, women have had to manage their gender
presentation. The military has been seen as so obviously a man’s place that any woman who
wanted to be part of it must either be a whore or unnaturally mannish – a lesbian (Herbert
1998). Sexual slurs against American servicewomen in the Second World War led to a strict
policing of the dress and behaviour of enlisted women in subsequent years, to cultivate a
respectable, feminine image (Holm 1992). Military women “must strike a balance between

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femininity and masculinity in which they are feminine enough to be perceived as women,
specifically heterosexual women, yet masculine enough to be perceived as capable of
soldiering” (Herbert 1988: 82).
Uniforms are thus an area of gendered concern. Militaries have struggled to create women’s
uniforms that convey feminine respectability, carry no hint of ‘mannishness’, provide a con-
trast to the men’s appearance, but still appear ‘military’, worrying over such questions as
whether women’s uniforms should have breast pockets to match the men’s or if that would
call too much attention to their breasts. When women entered the US service academies in
1976, military planners wanted these women to visually fit in among the male cadets and not
stand out on parade but also to be clearly distinguishable from men: “the fear of ‘masculinizing’
women was a constant refrain in the official discussion of female appearance, reflecting both
concern with women replacing men as soldiers and disavowal of the possibility of lesbians”
(Hillman 1999: 70). Military institutions and servicewomen themselves may both work to
ensure that military women perform gender in ways that minimize the disruptiveness of their
presence.
The expansion of women’s roles might be a result of political decisions imposed on mili-
taries that they resist in various ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US military ran numerous
studies of women’s impact on military effectiveness, each of which assumed that women’s
presence in a unit would degrade its performance and “sought to discover ways that women
compare unfavorably with men in order to justify excluding them” (Williams 1989: 59). In
addition to formal limits on women’s roles, sexual harassment and assault of military women
can serve to demonstrate to them that their presence is unwanted and they do not belong
(Francke 1997). A ban on lesbians can also be a tool to control military women and keep
them within bounds. When servicewomen enter previously all-male fields, accusing them of
lesbianism is a way servicemen can maintain their sense of masculinity, in effect, alleging that
what they do is a man’s job, and the women who do it are not ‘real’ women (Benecke and
Dodge 1996). Servicewomen who do not make themselves sexually available or who socialize
with women also open themselves up to charges of lesbianism. A lesbian ban can “discourage
women from entering those jobs that are seen as most masculine, thus allowing the military
to preserve some arenas . . . ‘for men only’” (Herbert 1988: 79).

Gendered warfare
The association of masculinity with warfighting not only helps men fight, it influences how
militaries fight and the tactics they choose. While rape might be commonly understood
as an unfortunate by-product of war, the importance of gender to militaries can make it a
strategic choice. If women carry symbolic resonance and protecting them is a justification
for fighting, then forces have the incentive to target and rape the other side’s women as an
assault on the opponent’s masculinity. Rape makes gendered sense as a tactic “because of the
symbolic function it serves of attacking (and corrupting the purity of) women as a way to
communicate dominance over the enemy state and/or nation” (Sjoberg 2013: 218). If men
fight to protect women and the ideals they represent, then raping or killing those women
makes soldiers fail in the masculine role of protector. Militaries also make use of gender as
a signifier of power through feminization of opponents – putting an enemy in a subordinate
position and expressing an intent and ability to dominate that enemy by associating it with
markers of femininity. Such feminization takes place not just in depictions of the enemy, but
at the tactical level of warfighting as well. From the castration and anal rape of captured
enemy soldiers in the ancient world to the sexual abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu

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Ghraib after the US invasion of Iraq, “feminization of soldiers, prisoners, and civilians
expresses a message of domination from one belligerent to another” (ibid.: 240).
Constructions of militarized masculinity can also influence how militaries decide to
deploy new technologies. Whether a specific technology is perceived as enhancing the
bravery of soldiers or giving an advantage to holding back affects the gendered evaluation
of that technology (Wilcox 2010). When technologies “fail to favor either male bodies or
masculine characteristics . . . they are likely to be ignored or underestimated by belligerents
in conflict” (ibid.: 66). In the years before the First World War, dropping bombs from the
sky was posited as unchivalrous and incompatible with honourable soldiering, so in that war,
planes were used mainly for reconnaissance, ground support, and destroying enemy planes.
The British and French preferred for their fighter pilots to fly as ‘lone wolves’, even as the
Germans more effectively grouped their planes into squadrons, because the ‘single-combat’
model was considered more knight-like and appropriately masculine, and the Germans were
called cowardly and unmanly. Thus, “the use of airplanes in World War I was associated not
with their actual technological advantages, but with the ability of the planes to be used in
ways that supported the bravery and strength of soldiers without impugning their chivalry”
(ibid.: 67).
Technologies are not inherently masculine or feminine, but militaries might code them
as masculine or configure them for male bodies to make their use conform to the military’s
existing gender ideals. Military technologies, such as airplanes or weapons systems, are
designed with male bodies (which tend to be taller and have longer limbs than women’s)
in mind (Richman-Loo and Weber 1996), building in a bias against women and marking
the technology as masculine. Even when not physically constructed for male bodies, military
technologies can be socially constructed as masculine. Military personnel who patrol
cyberspace, which involves working with computers, are described by military leaders as
“cyberwarriors” who “command” the internet (Manjikian 2014: 53), connecting these jobs
to masculinized combat. New technologies can be made to fit existing constructions of
military masculinity, or the forms of masculinity dominant in military institutions might
evolve to accommodate technological changes.
While militaries might resist the inclusion of women, they have come to make use of
them in specifically gendered ways, realizing that women soldiers can be of use to them as
women. Women can bolster a military’s legitimacy. In the Gulf War, the contrast of “the
allegedly liberated American woman tank mechanic with the Saudi woman deprived of a
driver’s license” helped present the US “as the advanced, civilized country whose duty it is”
to lead a new world order (Enloe 1993: 170). Within the NATO alliance, incorporating
women can serve “as proof of [a] military’s social enlightenment” (ibid.: 86).
Beyond communicating messages about progressiveness, militaries have found ways to
weaponize femininity. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has used women to interact
with and search local women. At the prisons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, women
interrogators sexually humiliated prisoners. By “utilizing the assumptions of distinctly
gendered cultures, the white female US soldier proceeds to violate the physical and religious
(or cultural) integrity of the Arab male prisoner” resulting in “a racially gendered theater of
subordination” (Feinman 2007: 68–69). The sexual abuses included “a female interrogator
in a tight shirt straddling a detainee in a virtual lap dance and a female interrogator wiping
red ink, made to look like menstrual blood, on a detainee” (Musa 2007: 82). This use of
women interrogators “for male detainees from communities where men have little unregulated
contact with women who aren’t their wives or family members does not just exploit gender
roles and cultural mores; it also takes advantage of the military women” (Musa 2007: 86).

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Militaries have taken advantage of women in various contexts throughout history; exploiting
the femininity of women with the status of soldiers is simply the latest gendered stratagem.

Conclusion
Militaries cultivate masculinities and use them to get men into the armed forces, to train them,
and to motivate them. The construction of masculinity might require femininity to serve as
a contrast and can be enhanced when women reinforce men’s roles. When military institutions
make choices, not just about their personnel but about how to fight, ideas about gender can
influence those decisions. Militaries have evolved over the centuries, in their organization,
tactics, weapons, and other elements. While a reliance on gender has remained constant, its
deployment and the forms of masculinity and femininity nurtured by militaries have been
adjusted to suit military needs or because larger social and political forces required it of them.
Now, militaries have gone so far as to mobilize women for some forms of combat, not as a
desperate, temporary wartime measure, but as a regular feature of volunteer forces. Thus far,
this has not presaged equality between military men and women or a dismantling of the gen-
dered foundations of service. The relationship between gender and military institutions is a
resilient one.

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 34
GENDER IN PARAMILITARY
ORGANIZATIONS
Sandra McEvoy

Feminist scholars of International Relations (IR) are increasingly focusing their attention on
the workings of political institutions, and as the contributors to this volume affirm, no
meaningful understanding of (any) institution can be had without also asking about the
relationship between power, institutions, and gender. In fact, it has been feminist scholars
that have persistently worked to reveal the complexities of gender, and have illustrated
myriad ways in which powerful institutions dictate how it is practised. This chapter explores
the role that gender plays in paramilitary organizations (POs) and why it is important to
consider gender and power when trying to understand paramilitary groups.
Of course, power is always already gendered, so we must examine ways that masculinity
and femininity are produced, intertwined, and internalized, as ‘natural’, and ‘instinctive’. No
discussion of gender and power is complete without also recognizing the role of American
theorist Judith Butler’s notion that gender is constructed through our own repetitive
performances. She ‘troubles’ the notion of an essentialized masculinity and femininity,
arguing that gender is constructed and considered “a performative accomplishment which
the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to
perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 2002: 214) and the analysis I present here draws on
Butler’s theorization of gender.
In sometimes subtle but still significant ways, institutions instruct entire communities how
to sequence their gender performance so that community members, shopkeepers, schools,
law enforcement, etc. perform, rehearse, and repeat these behaviours until their comprehension
of permissible forms of gender performance are mastered. Given the power and influence of
POs, they are fruitful sites for an examination of gender and illustrate the unfinished nature
of our gendered analysis of these institutions. Such an investigation will simultaneously affirm
Enloe’s assertion that we have just begun to understand “the amount and the varieties of
power that it takes to prepare for militarized conflict”, as well as “to wage and sustain” it
(Enloe, cited in Sjoberg and Via 2010: xiii).

Paramilitaries: from the inside out

A growing field of research is devoted to developing a typology of groups that engage in
politically motivated violence (see Aliyev 2016; Davis and Pereira 2003; Saab and Taylor

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2009). Inquiries of this type attempt to make distinctions between groups based on their
structure, group membership, recruitment, funding, political objectives, leadership structure,
etc. For the purposes of this analysis, I make a distinction simply between those groups that
commit acts of political violence to advance the position or policies of a state or “pro-state”,
and those groups that engage in acts of political violence in opposition to the position or
policies of a state, or “non-state”.1 Lacking a comprehensive definition that accounts for
the wide variation of structures and motives of pro- and non-state paramilitaries, I find the
combination of two definitions useful in conceptualizing POs. First, Carey and Mitchell
(2013) outline the important structural elements of pro-state violent groups, asserting that
such groups have a “link to government but exist outside the regular security apparatus, and
have some level of organization” (Carey and Mitchell 2013: 250). Gillespie’s (2017) definition
of paramilitaries (in the Northern Irish context) makes no distinction between pro- and anti-
state, but adds a functional component to Carey’s definition, stating that a PO is one that
“is prepared to use illegal means, including the use of violence, to achieve political objectives”
(Gillespie 2017: 200). In this way, Gillespie considers the use of various forms of violence
and illegal activities for political gain. Unfortunately, mainstream scholars of Security Studies
infrequently consider gender as a lens of analysis as a feature worthy of investigation. In
so doing, investigations of how POs are gendered and how such insights might enhance
our understanding of men’s and women’s presence2 in non-state and pro-state armed groups
would be left unproblematized, if it were not for the work of feminist scholars of IR (see
Blee 1991; Mason 2002; Enloe 2000, 2010; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 2015, 2016; McEvoy
2009; Parashar 2011; Cohn 2012).
A highlight in feminist investigations related to women and armed insurgencies is the
work of Dyan Mazurana (Mazurana. 2009, 2013; Mazurana and McKay 2001; Mazurana
et al. 2013; Nojumi, Mazurana and Stites 2008). Mazurana (2013) explores the various roles
that women play in hierarchical structures of non-state armed groups with an emphasis on
the ways that many groups manipulate gender to enhance their opposition to the state,
including how this manipulation changes over time. Building on Enloe’s tenacious efforts to
uncover the countless ways in which states depend on men and women (of all types) to wage
war, Mazurana is one of a small handful of scholars that pay close attention to the highly
gendered and militarized, decision-making processes that operate inside armed groups.3 At
a practical level, our knowledge of these dynamics is constrained by limited access to these
sensitive internal power structures. Sadly, despite the upsurge in scholarly interest in POs
over the last decade, scholars continue to miss the obvious ways that gender (and race, class,
sexuality, etc.) affects paramilitary operations due to an unyielding desire to ask normative
(non-gendered) questions that ignore gender and power – again, we must turn to feminist
scholars of IR for guidance. In her examination of the intimate ways in which gender and
militarization are intertwined in the ongoing US war in Iraq, Enloe (2010), perhaps one of
the best interpreters of the many machinations of militarized gender relations, reminds us
that our efforts must be ongoing and are frequently discouraged by war wagers themselves:

[T]here are always fresh questions to ask about what it takes to wage wars – about
all the efforts to manipulate disparate ideas about femininity, about the attempts
to mobilize particular groups of women, about the pressures on certain women to
remain loyal and silent. There are more efforts to control women and to squeeze
standards for femininity and manliness into narrow molds than most war wagers will
admit.
Enloe 2010: 1–2

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I build my argument from data and observations derived from my own multi-year access
to Protestant POs in Northern Ireland, combined with insights and empirical data collected
from other (predominantly) feminist scholars of PO and Conflict Studies.4 This exploration
reveals the efforts of POs to ‘manipulate’ and ‘mobilize’ ideas about femininity and masculinity
that would otherwise go unnoticed without a closer examination of the endogenous gendered
dynamics of POs.
Initially, the act of looking at the internal operations of politically violent organizations
might feel somewhat unusual, maybe even voyeuristic. Headlines and news reports from
bloody and chaotic sites of an activity involving violent POs is far more engaging than
sustained study of group motivations. However, once we commit to looking at POs from
a different angle we find that not only are the members of such organizations mums and dads,
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, but that the group itself is engaged in a deli-
berative set of behaviours – each gendered, and essential to the operation of the organization.
In this way, every member of the group learns these behaviours, and commits to their practice
so that the group can successfully exploit them. As curious scholars of IR we have to ask how
these gendered behaviours are taught and learned. Further, who benefits from individuals
conforming to these gendered scripts?

Charting endogenous gender dynamics

Like their peacetime counterparts, political institutions such as POs rely heavily on context-
specific constructions of power relationships between femininities and masculinities in order
to maintain order.5 However, unlike their peacetime counterparts, POs (and their male-
dominated leadership structures) engage in a multifaceted process of deploying, regulating,
and fabricating particular forms of militarized masculinities and femininities with a meticulous
level of detail. That is to say, influential leaders within POs often interpret and reinterpret
gender norms for the group in such a way that members perform tasks for the PO even if
the behaviour itself is somewhat contrary to standard interpretations of femininity and
masculinity. For example, in circumstances where men might not be available to transport
arms (a traditionally masculine endeavour) leadership of an organization might direct women
to perform the task. If successful, women might be used again and again in this role and,
over time, shift or modify the conventionally gendered understanding of the job. Here again,
Butler’s emphasis on the significance of ‘repetitive performance’ of gender, and its link to
the ways that actors come to understand themselves in this process, provides additional
insight to the ways that gender is produced and reproduced within these important institutions.

Deployment
Despite their many differences in terms of their political, economic, or cultural aspirations,
or motivations for action, most POs share a common and powerful weapon – proficiency in
the deployment of gender. Similar to the ways that generals and commanders deploy certain
weapons and personnel to engage in military action, PO leaders deploy gender to increase
operational effectiveness. Scholars and practitioners of many types have widely observed this
practice in violent conflicts across the globe. On the surface, we might suspect that selecting
men who “behave like men are expected to” and women who “behave like women are
supposed to” is as far as military leaders think about notions of femininity and masculinity
when planning mission for the group (Sjoberg 2014: 88). Despite women’s longstanding
presence in war, the US military has also noted the strategic benefits of using women to carry
out deadly attacks. Such an acknowledgement suggests that the military now sees the value

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in even a superficial gender analysis that the sensitivities of its ‘fighting men’ might be
exploited by considering women less lethal than men (Byrd and Decker 2008). No example
is more illustrative of this idea than the women who feign pregnancy to transport explosives
or other armaments to escape detection (Mullholland 2015), or women who exploit their
essential role as mothers to transport arms from one part of a city to another using baby
carriages (Bloom 2011). In such cases, we often focus on the ways that the organization has
exploited gender norms in order to plan the attack, but this focus diverts our attention away
from the important negotiations inside of the organization that affirm the utility of femininity
in this action. To be clear, my interest is not only that gender plays an important role in
whether ‘men’ or ‘women’ are chosen to perform a task for the PO. Instead, I want to draw
attention to the ways that focusing on operational effectiveness allows us overlook the
(gendered) acquiescence of the woman, ‘behaving as she is expected’, to embody a hyper-
feminine role in the organization. In so doing normative notions of gender are reinscribed
again and again. In this scenario (and in order for the PO to continue operating effectively),
both men (and masculinities) and women (and femininities) must accept the often narrow
and extremely specific construction of gender that is being marketed by the PO. In each
subsequent action, each time the PO conceives of a task where it calls for its members to
perform masculine or feminine characteristics, these particular forms create a gendered point
of view for the group that is transmitted not only to its members but to the wider public,
over and over again. Over time, these gendered practices become organic to the group and,
perhaps without much noticing, become the standards by which the group operates. In this
way, both new and existing members intuitively adopt these ideas about gender as a condition
of their membership.

Regulation
In conflict and post-conflict communities around the world, POs and other pro- and non-
state armed groups frequently serve as local forms of law enforcement when state police
are either absent or unacceptable to the local population. As both power brokers and power-
ful regulators of social customs and standards, some POs use their community influence
to regulate acceptable forms of gender and sexuality and punish violators. While street-level
enforcement can be swift and harsh, in many contexts unofficial armed units of men (and
women) are often preferred by locals where the relationship between the community and the
police and military is abusive. Julie Mazzei (2009) traces these relationships in Chiapas,
Colombia and El Salvador, and illustrates the difficult task of making distinctions between
groups who are committed to defending communities under siege from hostile forces, or
community groups interested in profiting from local populations (e.g., racketeering, drug
dealing, smuggling of various types, etc.), often using force. Groups outside of Latin America
are rife with POs including Northern Ireland, Ukraine, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and much of
North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. In almost all of these cases, making distinctions between
protection and exploitation can be very difficult. When women are invited to join politically
violent groups (including state militaries), feminists have been among the first to recognize
that more critical thinking is needed to assess the real ‘opportunities’ that military service
provides women, but also to not draw conclusions that women’s mere presence alone disrupts
a PO’s patriarchal structures (Cock 1989: 188).
Jacklyn Cock examines women’s recruitment into the South African Defence Force
(SADF). Writing at the height of the apartheid regime’s militarization, and three years before
(but not then predicted) the 1994 fall of that white apartheid regime, Cock assesses the future

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of South African politics following decades of violence and inter-communal conflict. Using
extensive interviews with women members of both the pro-state SADF and the anti-state
military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), Cock reveals that it has taken
sophisticated gender hierarchies in South Africa to sustain what, at times, appeared to be a
perpetual state of warfare in the country.
One particularly valuable contribution that Cock makes to our thinking on gender and
political violence in POs is her demonstration of how South African white, ‘coloured’,
and black women were drawn into the war by serving in the state’s military units as clerical
and administrative assistants. Cock asserts that, although the ruling white male civilian and
military elite of 1980s and 1990s South Africa permitted and even encouraged women to
serve in the military, and that although women wore uniforms and obtained military ranks,
their participation in the military did not fundamentally change or threaten the traditional,
thoroughly embedded understandings of femininity in South Africa. She states, “It is
significant that the increasing incorporation of women as a minority of the armed forces has
not seriously breached the ideology of gender roles or the sexual division of labor” (Cock
1989: 188). In so doing, Cock requires us to consider how the incorporation of women into
such forces in effect maintains the strict gendered hierarchies of these institutions rather than
disrupting them. That is, women adopt masculinized social and political practices and beliefs
in order to maintain status within insurgent groups with their own gendered hierarchies.
Cock’s work uncovers the many similarities between women’s experiences of gender
subordination within both pro-state and anti- or non-state forces. That is, despite the
significant differences between the political aims and objectives of the anti-state military wing
of the ANC and the pro-state SADF, ‘coloured’, black, and white women in both groups
experienced the same process of initial gender integration in the group during war and the
same gender exclusion from these same forces once active fighting ceased.
A similar type of regulation of gender by POs occurred during the 30-year conflict in
Northern Ireland. Newspaper reports indicate that in some cases hardline Protestant paramili-
taries took responsibility for monitoring (mostly) women’s behaviour, including how many
times a woman was seen visiting local drinking establishments, whether she was known to
have had sex with men in the community, and if she was in any way engaging in a relationship
with married ‘hard men’, (male members of Protestant POs). In many ways, the POs’ leader-
ship (male and female) would have considered this kind of behaviour an embarrassment to the
community, and would sanction a woman even if she was not a formal member of the organi-
zation. It is important to note that while the male-led Protestant POs were publically against
married paramilitary men dating or being unfaithful to their wives, as in any community, more
privately some men were not always faithful to their wives. However, unlike most communi-
ties where conflict is not present, these POs served as moral arbiters in their community and
had the authority to intimidate, threaten, or even harm women who violated a strict set of
rules related to acceptable forms of femininity and sexuality.6 What is most interesting about
this dynamic is that the very rules that are imbedded in the community to allow PO men to
judge women for ‘unladylike’ behaviour are the same rules that prevent men from dispensing
punishment. In other words, only particular, gender-conforming PO women, sanctioned by
their masculine leadership (men and women) were permitted to punish other women.

Fabrication
In many conflict and post-conflict environments around the world, POs are powerful mem-
bers of their respective communities and, as such, have the unique ability to create and then

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 Gender in paramilitary organizations

elevate very localized, even street-level, understandings of acceptable forms of masculinity

and femininity.7 Connell (2012) refer to the hierarchical nature of “local gender orders” that
privilege certain forms of masculinity and femininity in ways that are essential to operation
of both state and institutional structures. Men and women both inside and outside of conflict
zones are also rewarded for their compliance to stereotypical gender rules. For example, men
and women might develop closer bonds with one another, or trust one another in ways that
men and women who are gender non-conforming might not. While research into gender
conformity in conflict zones is scant, I suggest that women and men in POs have the same
motivation to conform to stereotypical gender norms, or as Rudman and Fairchild (2004)
assert, a fear of social sanction or backlash.
In this context, POs actively fabricate rules about masculinity and femininity in ways that
will support the needs of the organization. What is remarkable is that POs have the ability
to temporarily suspend or violate the same community’s norms that developed prior to the
outbreak of war. In these ways, POs work to validate what would ordinarily be understood
as infractions to standardized feminine or masculine behaviour by sanctioning exceptions. In
the conflict in Northern Ireland, the ways in which people (especially women) performed
femininity and masculinity gave PO members the opportunity to contribute to the protection
of their community in ways that disrupted traditional notions of gender, while at the same
time did not impede their continuing responsibilities as mothers and wives. In fact, of the
women that I spoke to, I perceived that only one woman might have been conscious of
the ways in which she became masculinized while serving the PO. Moreover, in a conflict
that required women to alternate between masculinity and femininity, often many times a
day, none of my 30 interviewees disclosed to me that they ever felt as though they were
being masculinized.
In 2006, ‘Chloe’ an active member of a large Protestant PO, emphasized to me how
capable ordinary Protestant women defended their communities and their families even
though such behaviour was often a personally difficult undertaking:

We were ordinary housewives. Women who could think and act to protect our
way of life . . . Some things I can’t forgive myself for, and are as clear as if they
happened yesterday. Some things I regret, and others I felt I didn’t have a choice.
What I and my contemporaries did was for our children, our homes and our
country . . . I want the truth to be known that we were not monsters . . . You
know I am not a hardened terrorist but a daughter, sister, mother and grandmother.
Interview with the author, 2006

What is particularly interesting about Chloe’s gendered experience of serving her

Protestant PO are the ways in which we might imagine her daily ‘work’. In any given day
we could assume that as a mother, Chloe devoted several hours of her day to the many duties
related to child rearing and maintaining her home. In several extended interviews with
Chloe, she indicated that she engaged in activities outside of her duties as wife and mother
that were more ‘masculine’ in nature, including transporting intelligence into and out of jails,
transporting arms, and serving as a look-out for paramilitary-related operations – all mas-
culinized roles. As the day winds to a close and Chloe returns home, we can again imagine
her slipping almost seamlessly back into her highly feminized role as wife and mother. I came
to think of this activity as a sort of ‘gendered sequencing’ where women switched back
and forth from one gendered behaviour to another as the needs of the group required. On
one hand, women serve and support their communities through PO service (masculinized

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 Sandra McEvoy

behaviour), and on the other hand they maintain their dedication to their families as mothers
(feminized behaviour).
In the same July 2006 interview, Chloe also described her husband’s disapproval of her
service to a PO. Despite her husband being a founding member of the PO (which might
suggest a more favourable impression of service to the organization) she believed that his
objections to her membership in the organization were based on a strict interpretation of
gender roles. Showing me a picture of some of the women in her unit at a jail protest, she
shares some additional reasons why she believed her husband did not want her to be a
member of a PO:

Because I was a woman! No other reason, but because I was a woman and a woman
was expected to stay at home. Even though I went out to work and brought in
money, I was still expected to stay at home to do as you were told. And all of the
women were the same, every one of them women in that picture were the same.
We all had a hard time with our husbands, every one of us because they didn’t want
us to do this . . . It wasn’t our job. We weren’t supposed to do this.
Interview with the author, 2006

Chloe’s insights illustrate the ways that women could serve POs in roles that limited their
time ‘performing’ masculinity and serve their families in their full time ‘feminized’ roles. Each
woman that I spoke to seemed to prefer this arrangement, but I could not help but consider
the benefits to POs. It seemed clear to me that women’s agreement to serve the POs while
maintaining their ‘responsibilities’ at home seemed especially beneficial to PO leadership by
allowing women to serve the group while not threatening male power in POs (or at home).
Maintaining this delicate balance between the usefulness of women without destabilizing
male power can be tricky. Mazurana (2013: 167) observes, “Adding women and girls into
an armed group means that male leaders have to tread carefully so as not to unbalance the
fragile masculinity they have helped to create among their predominately male force”. Citing
some of these same concerns over women’s empowerment in armed groups, Davis (2017:
136) observes that male leaders worry that despite women being useful tactical operatives,
assigning women these kinds of roles might require them to be incorporated in the leadership
of the organization. In the Northern Irish case, any early tensions between male leadership
and male rank and file members deteriorated in the years following the signing of the Belfast/
Good Friday Peace Accords. Whereas women’s service to Protestant POs might at one time
have felt like an intrusion into a militarized masculine space, almost two decades following
the Good Friday Agreement, most ultra-Protestant men no longer view women’s participation
in or support for political violence an indictment on their own inability to protect their
community. Today many formerly violent men understand that women played critical roles
in resisting armed Republicanism and accept that without their service Protestant loses could
have been more significant.

Conclusion
Writing in the US following the turbulent politics of the 1960s, noted German political
philosopher Hannah Arendt (1970) explored the justification of the use of violence and its
implications for politics. Arendt’s inquiries were inspired by the student movements of the
1960s, the fallout from the war in Vietnam, and the beginnings of the nuclear arms race
between the US and Russia in the Cold War. During the period, Americans also watched a

402
 Gender in paramilitary organizations

bloody battle for African American civil rights and for gay rights, witnessed the assassinations
of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and endured the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In all of these political movements, Arendt found herself returning to the central role of the
power of political institutions. She states: “All political institutions are manifestations and
materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people
ceases to uphold them” (Arendt, cited in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 238).
Here, Arendt emphasizes that not only are political institutions the products of power
but, crucially, that this power is preserved by the assent of people. In other words, “without
the living power” of people to legitimate institutions, she asserts they will collapse, “petrify
and decay”. Arendt’s observations remind us that institutions, including POs, militaries, and
the state itself, require intricate decision-making, vision, intention, and attention to power.
Without individuals and groups participating at every level, the institutions cease to exist.
Honing our skills at developing a gendered lens of analysis entails patience, persistence,
curiosity, and determination (Enloe in Cohn 2012).

Notes
1 For an examination of the evolution of paramilitary forces see Scobell and Hammitt (1998).
2 Increasingly, feminist informed scholars are interested in the experiences and contributions of actors
in paramilitary groups who do not perform binary forms of gender or gender expression. Relatively
few scholars are doing work in relation to these identities in relationship to political violence or
post-conflict environments (see Sjoberg 2014; McEvoy 2015). The popularity of new research by
Weber (2015, 2016) that theorizes ‘queer’ approaches in IR suggests that scholars of gender and
conflict might soon embrace non-binary identities in conflict.
3 One of the earliest investigations of the internal dynamics of politically violent groups is David
Rapoport’s (1988) edited text Inside Terror Organizations. While the collection does not address the
importance of gender to understanding politically violent groups, it does provide a helpful lens
through which to understand organizations based on patterns of organizational behaviour and sources
of ideology.
4 McEvoy 2009 establishes the presence of as many as 2,000 women members of Protestant paramilitaries
throughout the Troubles.
5 It is worth noting that gender non-conformity is an especially serious threat to members of the global
transgender community inside and outside of conflict environments. In the first three months of
2017, seven gender non-conforming people of colour have been murdered in the US. U.S. based
LGBTQ+ rights organization, The Human Rights Campaign, asserts these numbers are on pace to
exceed the 2016 death toll of 23 – the highest number on record.
6 Themes of protection, loyalty, violence, and community are central to ultra-Protestant (or Loyalist)
communities in Northern Ireland, especially during the Troubles. Playwright Gary Mitchell’s 2004
play Loyal Women was loosely inspired by a terrible incident in which women affiliated to a Protestant
PO in Belfast engaged in a deadly punishment style attack on a woman in their community. The
woman was accused of engaging in various behaviours that conservative Protestants felt brought
shame to their community. Although a very atypical incident it does demonstrate the power of POs
to regulate gender and sexuality.
7 Although not the focus of this present work, these gender constructions are also intimately linked
to class.

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 INDEX

3/11/2004 145 age 73, 76, 98, 123, 133, 145, 152, 157, 175,
7/7/2005 145 186, 198, 207, 213, 241, 247, 300, 362, 365,
9/11/2001 40, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 131, 138n4, 368; see also children; youth
145, 147, 153, 164, 274, 275, 276 agency 7, 8, 10, 21, 50, 51, 52, 54, 91, 106,
1951 Refugee Convention 155, 202; see also 110, 113, 120, 122, 133, 134, 142, 144, 147,
asylum; refugees 148, 151, 152, 155, 156, 172, 177, 200, 233,
#NotaBugSplat 212 245, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260,
267, 269, 273, 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 296,
abortion 190, 292n5: access 23, 290 297, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 352, 365, 375,
Abu Ghraib 53, 87, 134, 393 381n2
Abu Sayyaf 231 Åhäll, Linda 8
access gap 342 Alabama 288
activism 48, 59, 152, 183, 223, 244, 255, 315, Albania 292n6, 356n1
328, 331, 355: AIDS 100; celebrity 108, 297; Alexander, Ronni 3
environmental 19, 317; Ezidi 183, 188; Alexievich, Svetlana 305n2
feminist 54, 61, 106, 109, 277, 281, 352, Algeria 56, 132
353, 367, 368; human rights 228; land rights Algerian War for Independence 132
20; left-wing 54; migrants’ rights 202; Al-Hussein, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid 343n5
non-violent 107; peace 27, 59, 87, 110, 135, alien see migration
313, 315, 316, 318, 329, 353, 381; sexual Al-Qaeda 43, 51, 142, 143, 145, 147, 228, 229
violence 216, 219, 220, 222; scholarly 152; Al Shabaab 228
trans* 91 Amazon River 19
adoption 284, 286, 290, 291, 292n1 America see Canada; Latin America; Mexico;
affect 85, 119, 263, 264, 304, 305, 355 South America; United States
Afghanistan 51, 72, 110, 131, 132, 138n4, 232, Amnesty International 73, 183, 289
337, 355, 363: gender in 52, 53, 130, 131, anarcha-feminist 112
289; war 6, 52, 110, 130, 160, 164, 165, anarchy 4, 37, 146, 147
275, 299, 377, 393; see also Female Anfal genocide 6, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190
Engagement Teams (FETs); Revolutionary Annan, Kofi 108, 334
Association of Women in Afghanistan anthropology 30, 117, 119, 120, 122, 287
(RAWA); Taliban anti-migration practices 88, 157, 176, 196, 198,
African Americans 198, 390, 403 200, 244, 288
African National Congress (ANC) 400 Anzaldua, Gloria 48, 50, 51, 56
African Union 9, 314, 328, 337, 361, 380 apologies 265
African Union Election Observation Mission Arctic 89
(AUEOM) 337 Arendt, Hannah 298, 402, 403

406
 Index

Argentina 100, 138n5, 292n1 Biketawa Declaration 316

Armenia 287 bin Laden, Osama 138n4, 147; see also Al-Qaeda
art 30, 32, 59, 84, 107, 129, 212, 297, 298, biography 270n1
385: as method 297, 298; and war 129 birth 189, 284, 287, 289: certificates 286; as
artificial reproductive technologies (ART) 284, insecurity 249; sex assigned at 137n1, 147
286, 290, 291; see also in vitro fertilization Black Lives Matter 244
(IVF) blackness 42, 86, 244, 390, 400
Åse, Cecilia 7, 143 Blee, Kathleen 141
Ashley, Richard 5 bodies 5, 6, 7, 8, 17, 20, 23, 27, 29, 30, 52, 54,
Asian Financial Crisis 95 61, 63, 64, 65, 71, 84, 86, 97, 98, 99, 103,
Asia Pacific region 18, 311, 315, 318, 319: 108, 109, 110, 112, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137,
disaster militarism in 24n2; see also 137n1, 152, 153, 155, 156, 172, 176, 178,
Association of South East Asian Nations 186, 202, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212,
(ASEAN) 214, 216, 217, 220, 228, 230, 234, 241–249,
Association of South East Asian Nations 264, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 284,
(ASEAN) 315 285, 287, 291, 296, 297, 299, 301, 304, 305,
asylum 155, 194, 196, 199, 200, 202, 202n2, 311, 312, 314, 350, 353, 355, 356, 375, 377,
244, 319; see also migration; refugees 378, 393
Auchter, Jessica 245 Body of War (film) 135, 136
austerity 18, 22 Boko Haram 228
Australia 75, 89, 90, 91, 164, 194, 292n1, 298, Bolivia 386
311, 318, 319, 320, 391 border patrols 200, 201, 275, 379
Australian Shrine of Remembrance 268 borders 22, 143, 195, 198, 199, 201, 275, 380;
authority 6, 20, 56, 72, 78, 79, 90, 99, 110, see also citizenship; migration
122, 124, 136, 140, 171, 177, 208, 221, 228, Bosia, Michael 4, 103n3
275, 281, 287, 389, 400 Bosnia and Herzegovina 133, 186, 217, 219,
autobiography 54, 76, 112; see also narrative 289, 292n6, 334, 337, 340, 351, 364
autonomy 17, 23, 75, 95, 101, 135, 172, 174, Bosnian War 133, 217
210, 242, 243, 279, 280 Bougainville 315, 317; see also Solomon Islands
Brahimi Report 334, 335, 342
Baaz, Maria Erikkson 132, 223n3, 330, 363, Breivik, Anders 71
364 Brock-Utne, Birgit 28
balance of power 3, 5 brothel 65, 189, 390; see also prostitution
Balkan Wars 183, 185, 186, 277, 366; see also brotherhood 75, 95
Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bosnian War; brothers 229, 301, 398
Croatia; International Criminal Tribunal for Brown, Melissa T. 10
the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); Kosovo; Brownmiller, Susan 216
Macedonia (FYROM); Montenegro; Serbia; brownness 42, 140, 280: saving brown women
Slovenia; Yugoslavia (former) from brown men 53, 112, 143, 275, 280;
Bangladesh 165, 233, 289, 312, 339, 342 see also blackness; orientalism; race;
Barkawi, Tarak 40 yellowness
Barthes, Roland 297, 299, 303, 304 Brussels 145, 380
Basham, Victoria 245, 248 Bulgaria 292n6
Basini, Helen 62, 354, 355 Bundy, Ammon 140, 145
Bastick, Megan 10 Burundi 324, 326, 327, 328, 329, 331
Bayard de Volo, Lorraine 207 Bush, George W. 51, 52, 201
beautiful soul 41, 74, 86, 87, 109, 110, 111, Bush, Laura 52, 131
113, 130, 131, 137, 161, 210, 269, 274, 280, Buss, Doris 218, 222
388; see also civilian Butler, Judith 62, 84, 253, 262, 268, 396, 398
beauty parlours 65
Beijing 312 Cabezas, Amalia 121
Beijing Declaration 312, 334 Caceres, Berta 19
Beijing Platform for Action 312, 373, 374, 381 Cameron, David 76, 296, 299
Belgium 145, 218, 266, 292n1, 292n6, 380; see camouflage 32, 300, 303, 304
also Brussels camp followers 385, 388–389, 390
Belkin, Aaron 72, 245, 246, 248 Canada 6, 76, 87, 89, 160, 164, 165, 285,
Bible 297 292n1, 312, 391

407
 Index

capitalism 6, 19, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 90, 109, civilian victimization 60, 109, 221, 268, 269,
113, 172, 176, 177, 214, 244; see also 277, 278, 279
neoliberalisms civil society 16, 95, 223, 228, 234, 253, 279,
Card, Claudia 182, 219 311, 312, 313, 318, 319, 320
care 73, 96, 132, 145, 174, 175, 176, 190, 232, Clark, Gemma 151
241, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 302, 377, class 15, 48, 50, 54, 55, 65, 73, 85, 98, 111,
391: care economy 176; care ethics 7, 242, 117, 121, 123, 140, 142, 146, 156, 158, 174,
243, 245, 247, 248, 249; care work 18, 232, 182, 228, 247, 274, 284, 300, 327, 390, 397,
247, 253, 326; health care 28, 103, 133, 185, 403n7
259, 324, 350, 363, 390, 391; self-care 55; Clausewitz, Carl von 129, 130, 216
see also empathy Clifford, James 119
Carver, Terrell 301 climate change 20, 79, 265, 317, 318; see also
caste 50, 53, 54, 55 sea level; temperature; weather
Catholic 143 Clinton, Hilary 108, 112
Central African Republic 136, 337, 350 Clinton, William Jefferson 197, 387
Chad 337 Cockburn, Cynthia 352
Chechnya 96, 134, 142, 162, 289, 305n5 Cock, Jacklyn 399, 400
child 9, 75, 130, 143, 157, 174, 175, 176, 186, Cohen, Dara Kay 219, 223n2
188, 189, 200, 231, 233, 241, 269, 280, 281, Cohn, Carol 1, 3, 55, 59, 64, 66, 120, 242,
285, 286, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292n5, 297, 243, 244, 245, 247, 388
300, 301, 326, 340, 376, 377, 389, 401: Cold War 28, 42, 100, 163, 274, 335, 402: and
abuse 258, 265; born of war rape 188, 189, IR Security Studies 37, 40
190, 218, 289; boys 18, 108, 136, 213, 221, collage 54, 297
255, 276, 320, 330, 359, 361, 362, 365, 369, Collins, Patricia Hill 119
385, 389; casualties 72, 212; enslavement Colombia 289, 324, 327, 329, 331, 348, 399;
188; girls 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, see also Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
52, 136, 143, 156, 160, 177, 185, 189, Colombia (FARC)
191n6, 229, 230, 244, 252, 253, 274, 275, colonialism 5, 28, 30, 41, 53, 87, 88, 90, 122,
276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 300, 304, 320, 132, 163, 222, 275, 280; see also decolonial
330, 340, 351, 352, 359, 361, 362, 365, 367, theory; homocolonialism
368, 369, 387, 402; labour 177; to be Columbine massacre 70
protected 5, 18, 60, 130, 160, 230, 256, 273, combatants 18, 53, 54, 110, 132, 134, 137, 164,
276, 277; radicalized 230; support 363; 213, 221, 265, 267, 268, 315, 377, 388:
trafficking 197; see also daughters; families; ‘enemy’ 213; ex- 220, 221, 222, 340, 351,
reproduction; sons; womenandchildren; 352, 377; see also soldiers
youth combat restrictions and exclusions 161, 164,
Chile 165 165, 167, 208, 298, 299, 304, 336, 379,
China 263, 264, 265; see also Beijing; Rape of 382n5, 382n6, 386, 391
Nanking comic books 385
chivalry 77, 109, 277, 393 communism 42, 274, 290; see also China; Cuba;
Christianity 84, 120, 145, 187, 290, 315; see Soviet Union
also Catholic; Protestant Communist Party of India 53
cis-: gender 130, 137n1, 147, 284; cis-men 132, comparative advantage 171
248; cis-women 132, 244, 247, 288 Confortini, Catia C. 30, 34n9
citizenship 15, 18, 54, 60, 72, 77, 78, 89, 98, Congo see Democratic Republic of Congo
102, 162, 164, 165, 196, 273, 274, 279, 280, Connell, R. W./Raewyn 32, 71, 131, 146, 401
281, 284, 288, 289, 290, 386: British 76; as conscientious objectors 73; see also World War I
masculinized 28, 54, 162, 163, 279, 300, conscription 135, 164, 276, 385, 386, 387, 389
386 militarized 78, 278; second-class 157; constructivisms 38, 195, 202n3
United States 76; see also migration; contraception: access 23, 290; use as an
passports indicator of female empowerment 235
civilians 6, 33, 60, 71, 87, 110, 130, 132, Convention on the Elimination All Forms of
138n4, 140, 160, 164, 172, 186, 188, 209, Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
211, 218, 220, 221, 223, 262, 268, 269, 277, see United Nations Convention on the
289, 313, 337, 339, 340, 360, 367, 369, 377, Elimination All Forms of Discrimination
379, 387, 389, 391, 393, 400; see also Against Women (CEDAW)
beautiful soul; civilian victimization Copenhagen school 38, 49

408
 Index

Corbyn, Jeremy 78, 79 deregulation 171, 176, 177

corporations 19, 74, 91, 178: irresponsibility 71 desecuritization 49
Côte d’Ivoire 363 Desmond, Aaliya 160
countering violent extremism (CVE) 52, 53, Desmond, Brenda 160
54, 62, 86, 96, 106, 113, 145, 147, 201, 232, Desmond, Lionel 160
233, 376 Desmond, Shanna 160
counterinsurgency see countering violent Diaz, Nidia 324
extremism disability, dis/ableism 18, 86, 87, 88, 241, 244,
counterterrorism see countering violent 246, 249, 292n5, 300
extremism disarmament, demobilization, and
courts see judiciary; see also International reconstruction (DDR) 60, 113, 156, 327,
Criminal Court (ICC); law 351, 352, 376, 377
crime 95, 98, 133, 179, 183, 190, 200, 201, discourse analysis 2, 173
217, 219, 222, 233, 258, 278, 363, 364: hate discourses 37, 44, 49, 62, 73, 78, 103, 135, 147,
253; organized 177; see also crime against 172, 182, 198, 241, 274: Anfal 183; citizenship
humanity; law; war crime 78, 165; colonial 102, 163, 275; development
Crimean War 390 37, 41, 42, 43, 44; of drone warfare 211; of
crimes against humanity 189, 217, 277 gender 17, 37, 39, 65, 73, 77, 78, 109, 144,
criminality 98, 134, 157, 195, 197, 265, 285, 164, 167, 196, 210, 214, 266, 269, 279, 379;
288, 291 globalizing 95, 100; of LGBT rights 97, 100,
crisis 2, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 38, 41, 64, 103n5; of migration 200; orientalist 44, 143;
102, 153–154, 161, 176, 316, 317, 337, 391, and power 31–32; racialized 44, 86, 143;
403; see also Asian Financial Crisis; Global security 4, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 50, 61, 62, 65,
Financial Crisis (GFC) 119, 130, 161, 208, 209, 213, 242, 243, 244,
Critical Security Studies 49, 51, 153, 154 245, 249, 274, 275, 330; of Security Sector
Croatia 186, 292n6 Reform (SSR) 361, 365, 368, 369; of sexual
Cuba 116, 118, 120, 121, 122, 329 violence 34n11, 136, 188, 189, 190, 222; of
Cuban Missile Crisis 403 sodomy 102; of trafficking 198, 199, 200; of
Cyprus 292n6, 338, 342; see also United the War on Terror 143, 145; see also discourse
Nations Mission in Cyprus (UNFICYP) analysis; media; narratives
Czech Republic 292n6 disembodiment 205, 206, 208, 210, 212, 213,
241, 246, 249, 276
Da’esh see Islamic State divorce 301, 364
Daggett, Cara New 206, 207 Djebar, Assia 56
Daigle, Megan 4 documentaries 76, 135
Darfur 324 domestic violence see families – violence in
daughters 18, 86, 87, 160, 232, 279, 300, 398, Dresden bombing 263
401 drones 6, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211,
Dauphinee, Elizabeth 51 212, 213, 214, 245; see also Global Hawk;
D’Costa, Bina 1 Vulture
decolonial theory 2, 3, 37, 38, 39, 50, 52, 122, Duncanson, Claire 131, 132, 166
143, 273, 354; see also colonialism Duriesmith, David 7, 8
defecation 247, 248; see also sanitation
Degaque, Myrium 143 Ebola 22, 24n2
de-industrialization 174 Egypt 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 136, 189, 191n6,
democracy 41, 100, 101, 103, 103n5, 109, 178, 288, 289
228, 253, 258, 259, 290, 316, 360, 362, 366, Eichler, Maya 6
369 El-Bushra, Judy 312,
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 134, Ellerby, Kara 9
136, 218, 220, 221, 223n3, 289, 328, 330, El Salvador 165, 218, 325, 340, 399
331, 336, 337, 363 El Salvador Civil War 218
democratization 43, 44 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 1, 5, 74, 109, 130
Denmark 318 embodiment 6, 7, 55, 63, 71, 78, 83, 85, 109,
Denov, Myriam 156 135, 171, 172, 173, 205, 206, 207, 210, 212,
deportation 194, 197, 202 213, 214, 241–249, 288, 289, 292n2
deradicalization 231; see also countering violent emotion 32, 50, 52, 54, 55, 73, 145, 174, 176,
extremism; prevention 208, 212, 231, 276, 277, 285, 298, 299, 301,

409
 Index

303, 305, 385, 389: association with 363, 364, 365, 366; see also brothers;
femininity 73, 144, 145, 172, 184, 227; children; household; husbandhood; kinship;
labour 175; see also affect; care; empathy marriage; reproduction; sisters; visa law;
empathy 100, 119, 132, 160, 343 wifehood
empire 78, 102, 246; see also colonialism; fatherhood 18 87, 88, 140, 231, 377
imperialism fear 42, 48, 90, 113, 146, 184, 189, 195, 196,
employment 18, 32, 60, 117, 121, 144, 146, 202n2, 216, 229, 231, 249, 255, 259, 280,
157, 164, 165, 175, 176, 179, 232, 257, 338, 281, 289, 365, 368, 390, 392, 401
339, 343, 350, 352, 365, 366, 373, 376, 386, Fear 102
392, 398: insecurity 174, 177; public sector fecundity 280
171; and radicalization 75; training 103, 162, Female Engagement Teams (FETs) 52, 53, 299,
173, 174, 175, 232, 234, 301, 325, 329, 364, 376, 377, 379, 380
373, 377, 378, 380, 390; see also Feminist Majority 110
unemployment feminization 6, 7, 16, 18, 32, 40, 42, 45, 65,
England see United Kingdom 71, 72, 73, 106, 107, 109, 112, 132, 135,
England, Lynndie 73 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 172, 173, 176, 177,
Enlightenment 285 179, 186, 198, 210, 231, 242, 245, 246, 248,
Enloe, Cynthia 5, 17, 28, 60, 61, 131, 140, 249, 256, 257, 268, 269, 274, 275, 276, 277,
245, 281, 303, 386, 396, 397 281, 305, 315, 317, 350, 354, 387, 388, 392,
environment 17, 19–20, 22, 38, 64, 71, 99, 393, 401, 402
155, 317, 367; see also climate change Feron, Elise 246
epistemology 16, 51, 61, 63, 106, 107, 108, fieldwork 2, 4, 116–124
109, 113, 114, 243, figurations 4, 83–85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,
Eritrea 391 91n1, 109, 111, 202
essentialism 33, 62, 74, 110, 166, 183, 184, Fiji 315, 316
187, 242, 243, 255, 278, 280, 292, 341, 352, film 54, 76, 129, 133, 135, 151, 212, 279, 300,
366, 378 305n1, 385; see also Body of War; Eye in the
ethnography 2, 4, 55, 63, 116, 117, 119, 120, Sky; G.I. Jane; Zero Dark Thirty
121, 122, 123, 124, 245: and knowledge 54 Finland 292n1
European Agency for Fundamental Rights First World War see World War, First
(FRA) 286 Fishman, Pamela 119
European Union (EU) 22, 196, 227, 286, 314, flexibilization 173, 174
337, 361 focalization 52; see also narratives
Eurovision Song Contest 88, 297; see also Foley, James 75
Conchita Wurst food 28, 32, 189, 247, 388: service industry
everyday terrorism 63, 64, 256 174; see also nutrition
expendability 200, 262, 267, 268, 269; see also Foucault, Michel 31, 84, 147, 179n5, 292n3
grievability; killability Fourth World Conference on Women 312,
Eye in the Sky (film) 212 334
Ezidi 6, 77, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, France 98, 103, 103n2, 129, 132, 141, 274,
191n10, 230 285, 290, 291, 292n1, 292n6, 390, 391, 393:
Ezidi genocide 6, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, Action Direct 141; National Front 103;
191n10 see also Paris
fraud 198, 199, 200
Falkland/Malvinas campaign 73 French Revolution 141
families 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 87, 90, 96, 97, 98, Frente Farabundo Martí para Liberación Nacional
144, 152, 153, 156, 157, 162, 174, 175, 176, (FMLN) 218; see also El Salvador
177, 182, 188, 213, 217, 227, 233, 260, 274, fuel 28
279, 280, 284, 285, 290, 302, 315, 349, 376, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
401, 402: as economic units 19, 156, 157, (FARC) 327
175, 349; heteronormative representations
19, 87, 88, 89, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, Galtung, Johan 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 33, 34n2,
290, 291; immigrant 179, 201; left-behind 34n5, 34n6, 34n7, 152; see also structural
19; military 389, 393; murder-suicide 6, 160; violence
nuclear 87; and peace 230, 231, 232, 233; Game of Thrones 297
queer 22; violence in 17, 18, 31, 155, 223, Gandhi, Mahatma 29
252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260n1, 347, 352, gangs 71, 75

410
 Index

gender advisers 328, 330, 337, 338, 339, 343, governance feminism 108, 111: security 4, 9,
352, 373, 380 10, 106, 110, 311, 314, 320, 360
gender balancing 9, 10, 21, 334, 335, 336, 338, Great Lakes region 246, 314; see also Burundi;
339, 340, 342, 343, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC);
381n1; see also gender mainstreaming; Rwanda; Tanzania; Uganda
Women, Peace, and Security Agenda Greece 136, 292n6
gender binaries 4, 31, 39, 62, 65, 95, 109, 246, Greenberg, Marcia 347, 350
253, 274, 291 Greenham Common 114n4, 135
gender experts 328, 329, 330, 352, 368 grievability 246, 262, 263, 267, 268, 269; see
gender field advisers 377; see also gender also expendability; killability
advisers Guantanamo Bay prison 393
gender focal points 338, 339, 352, 377 Guatemala 49, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328
gender mainstreaming 8, 9, 10, 74, 252, 312, Gulf War 393
334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342,
343, 347, 351, 352, 374, 375, 377, 378, Haiti 30, 339, 366, 367
379; see also gender balancing; National Halberstam, Judith/Jack 108, 112
Action Plans (NAPs); Regional Action Halley, Janet 110
Plans (RAPs); Women, Peace, and Security Hamburg bombing 263
(WPS) agenda Haraway, Donna 4, 83, 84, 85, 91n2, 205, 211
gender quotas 164, 324, 325, 326, 327, 331, Hardi, Choman 6
351, 366, 376, 381n3 Hague, Euan 186
gender training 380; see also employment Hague, The 9
– training Hague, William 133
gender transformation 347, 352, 353 Hamas 145
genetics 277 health 19, 22, 23, 30, 31, 33, 64, 155, 175,
genocidal rape 133, 156, 185, 187, 219 177, 178, 241, 249, 313, 377: jobs in 174,
genocide 4, 5, 6, 97, 133, 182, 183, 184, 185, 367; mental 160; and peace 29; reproductive
186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 264, 277, 290; see 20, 23, 289, 290; see also care – health care;
also Anfal genocide; Ezidi genocide; dis/ability; HIV/AIDS; nurses; post-
Rwandan genocide traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); tuberculosis
Genocide Studies 182, 183, 184 heteronormativity 19, 70, 72, 88, 147, 206,
Gentry, Caron E. 5, 109, 134, 144, 146 244, 245, 253, 254, 257, 285, 286, 287, 288,
geology 83, 85, 89, 90, 91 290, 291, 292, 349, 350, 379
George, Nicole 9 heteropatriarchy 154, 285, 286, 288, 290, 291
Georgia 337 heterosexism 106, 162, 285
Germany 129, 141, 292n1, 402: in Belgium heterosexuality 16, 75, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88,
218; Red Army Faction (RAF) 141; in 91n1, 95, 100, 130, 132, 146, 154, 158, 221,
World War I 218, 393; see also Dresden 245, 246, 253, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259, 273,
bombing; Hamburg bombing; Holocaust; 274, 284, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 387, 392;
Nuremburg Tribunal compulsory 102, 254, 280
G.I. Jane (film) 300–301 Hezbollah 145
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 273 Higate, Paul 3
Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 18, 19 Hindu right-wing women 50
Global Hawk 210; see also drones Hirsh, Marianne 184
globalization 19, 171–172, 173, 174, 179: historiography 9
cultural 15; see also neoliberalisms history 20, 21, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 52, 53, 60, 63,
global North 28, 111, 174, 179, 223, 252, 253, 64, 65, 76, 78, 84, 89, 90, 95, 99, 102, 107,
258, 341, 368 112, 117, 121, 122, 124, 130, 132, 133, 134,
global South 19, 28, 40, 111, 113, 163, 164, 144, 151, 164, 166, 171, 182, 184, 186, 187,
165, 174, 176, 179, 244, 341 208, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 253, 262, 264,
Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in 273, 275, 276, 285, 287, 288, 291, 296, 300,
Conflict 133 303, 305n2, 312, 313, 334, 367, 385, 394
Goldstein, Joshua 74, 386 HIV/AIDS 16, 30, 100, 202: prevention 96
Gole, Nilufer 61 Hollande, François 129
governance 42, 96, 101, 109, 119, 157, 197, Holocaust 184, 185, 263, 270n2
245, 246, 247, 316, 317, 334, 335, 359, 360: Holocaust Studies 182, 184; see also Genocide
global 40, 62 Studies

411
 Index

homeland 85, 86, 87, 88, 109, 197, 274, 275 228, 229, 203, 231, 234, 247, 263, 264, 265,
Homeland 300, 305n1 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 284, 287, 292, 297,
homocolonialism 100 300, 341, 348, 362, 365, 386
homoconsolidation 102 imperialism 28, 31, 41, 42, 97, 110, 112, 122,
homoeroticism 387 124, 297; see also colonialism; empire
homonationalism 88, 100, 103; see also Inayatullah, Naeem 51
heteronormativity; homocolonialism; India 28, 51, 53, 54, 77, 165, 198, 285, 339,
homoconsolidation; homonormativity 363; see also Kashmir
homonormativity 4, 88, 100, 103, 147 indigeneity 16, 18, 19, 20, 24, 86, 87, 89, 90,
Homo oeconomicus 241 91, 91n3, 96, 102, 103, 121, 122, 198, 319,
homophilia 100, 102; homopositivity 329; see also localness
homophobia 4, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, Indonesia 231, 318, 319, 337, 349
102, 103, 103n5, 162, 167, 387, 388 Industrialization 174, 176
homopositivity 97, 98; see also homophilia industry 171, 177: knowledge-intensive 177;
homoprotectionism 102 nationalized 171
homosexuality 42, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91n1, 95, informalization 173, 176
86, 98, 100, 102, 108, 195, 217, 222, 286, information 120, 122, 173, 177, 178, 219, 328,
291, 387, 388 336, 367; see also education; knowledge;
homosexualization 98, 100 technology
homosociality 276, 387 Innes, Alexandria J. 5
Honduras 19 insurgency 227, 229, 230, 397, 400; see also
household 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 49, 174, 175, violent extremism
176, 177, 179, 221, 233, 274, 280, 349, 389; Inter-Congolese Dialogue 326
see also families internal displacement 16, 20, 22, 23, 222, 264,
housewives see wifehood 313, 330: and research 123
Huber, Laura 9 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Hudson, Heidi 17, 153, 360 (IDMC) 16
Hudson, Linda 73 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 18, 20, 21,
Hudson, Natalie Florea 9 22, 24, 330
human nature 38, 72 International Committee of the Red Cross
human security 16, 30, 94, 96, 98,99, 100, 102, (ICRC) 350
103, 242, 243, 281, 313, 360, 381 International Conference on the Great Lakes
human trafficking 157, 194, 197, 200, 201, 280, Region 314
362: anti-trafficking campaigns 197, 198, International Criminal Court (ICC) 216,
201; labour trafficking 195, 198, 199; sex 223n1
trafficking 157, 195, 197, 198, 199, 280; International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
survivors 194, 195, 197, 200; see also Yugoslavia (ICTY) 186, 217, 222
Palermo Protocol; Trafficking Victims International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Protection Act (ICTR) 187, 191n3, 217, 222
Hungary 101, 292n1, 292n6 International Studies Perspectives 1
hunger 188: as structural violence 29, 33; see intimate partner violence (IPV) see families
also food; nutrition – violence in
husbandhood 31, 87, 142, 143, 221, 292n5, in vitro fertilization 290, 291
301, 389, 390, 402 Iran 188, 230, 287
Hussain, Nasser 211, 214 Iraq 6, 44, 51, 52, 53, 74, 76, 132, 134, 143,
Hussein, Saddam 44 182, 188, 189, 279, 287: Ba’ath regime 44,
hybridity 96, 354, 355, 387 188; Islamic State in 72, 74, 76, 187, 188;
hydration 247; see also water UK invasion of 87, 299; US Invasion of 44,
hypermasculinity 5, 145, 195, 274, 374, 378; see 52, 76, 131, 164, 165, 275, 299, 393, 397;
also masculinities veterans against the war 73, 1; see also Islamic
hyper-mobility 171 State; Kurdistan; Saddam Hussein
Ireland 287
identity 3, 6, 21, 39, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 56, 70, Irish civil war 151
72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 86, 95, 96, 99, 100, Islam 44, 52, 143, 146, 186, 188, 189, 217,
103n2, 111, 131, 135, 137n1, 152, 154, 156, 219, 228, 231, 233, 258, 346: gender
160, 163, 185, 186, 191n2, 195, 196, 202, relations in 75, 86, 143, 145, 164, 227, 275,
202n3, 211, 213, 217, 218, 219, 221, 227, 329

412
 Index

Islamic State (IS or ISIS) 3, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 212, 266, 377; standpoint 16, 34n10, 353,
77, 78, 129, 142, 143, 146, 187, 188, 189, 377; technical 328, 339, 352; see also
190, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235n2 authority; education; experience;
Islamism 144, 145 information; methodology; reflexivity;
Islamophobia 110, 145, 146, 148 standpoint feminism
Israel 132, 138n5, 288, 385, 386, 391 Korea, South 63, 95, 292n1
Italy 141, 292n1: Red Brigades 141; see also Kosovo 292n6, 337, 346, 347, 349: Kosovo
Rome Women’s Network 356; see also United
Ivory Coast see Côte d’Ivoire Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)
Kronsell, Annica 336
Jabri, Vivienne 280 Ku Klux Klan 141
Jamaica 312 Kurdistan 6, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 287:
Japan 3, 27, 28, 33, 34n1, 34n12, 34n13, 40, genocide 182; parliament 188; Syria–Kurdish
263, 264, 265, 292n1, 318, 319: Red Army People’s Protection Movement (YPG) 76,
141; see also Okinawa; Tokyo; Tokyo 187; Peshmerga 76; see also Anfal; Ezidi/
Tribunal Yazidi; Iraq
Jauhola, Marjanna 349 Kurukshetra War 146
Jemaah Islamiyyah 231 Kvinna till Kvinna 347
Jennings, Kathleen 340, 341
jihad 227: 5-Star 75 Lady Gaga 108
‘Jihadi brides’ 75, 231 Laffey, Mark 40
‘Jihadi John’ 75 land rights 20, 53, 86, 87, 90, 140, 175, 210,
Jihadis 187: Gangster 75; Pompey 75 326, 329, 367; see also property
Jolie, Angelina 108, 112, 133 language 30, 32, 34n9, 56, 84, 99, 136, 172,
Jones, Adam 133, 134, 185, 186, 187 182, 229, 278, 287, 289, 298, 301, 305, 312,
Jones, Ann 53 314, 319, 328, 331, 341
Jordan 143, 227, 229, 230, 343n5 Latin America 30, 363, 399
journalism 98, 183, 190, 217 Latvia 292n6
judiciary 101, 255, 292n5, 360, 364; see also laundry 388, 389, 390
law; rule of law Lavender Scare 96, 103n4
Just Warrior 109, 110, 114, 130, 131, 137, 210, law 99, 101, 117, 136, 155, 157, 164, 175, 186,
269, 274, 388 196, 199, 202, 228, 232, 233, 234, 287, 291,
320, 347, 349, 351: abortion 292n5; about
Kaldor, Mary 228 homosexuality 19, 95, 98, 100, 285, 286,
Kant, Immanuel 242 288, 289, 290, 292n1; human rights 16, 22;
Karim, Sabrina 9, 10, 375 as knowledge 103, 107, 363, 364; labour
Kashmir 135, 142 194; migration 194, 200, 201, 288; of moral
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 403 turpitude 198; prostitution 63, 198, 199;
Kenya 98, 326 rape 133, 217, 218, 292; reproduction 98,
kidnapping 76, 96, 218 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292;
killability 244; see also expendability; grievability services 174; sex 285, 286; sharia 143; visa
Ki-Moon, Ban 323, 340 152, 157; see also judiciary; land rights; legal
King, Martin Luther 403 recognition; legal resources; police; rule of
kinship 17, 18, 23, 231, 285, 286, 287, 288, law; Trafficking Victims Protection Act
317, 354 (TVPA); see also United States Supreme
Kipling, Rudyard 78 Court
Kirby, Paul 6, 153 law enforcement see police
knowability 111, 121, 206, 211 Lawrence of Arabia (film) 76
knowledge 17, 37, 40, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, leadership 15, 20, 21, 53, 54, 86, 232, 276,
66, 84, 85, 107, 117, 118, 119, 124, 173, 296, 297, 317, 319, 327, 329, 336, 341, 367,
211, 213, 233, 303, 324, 329, 339, 352: 386, 397, 398, 400, 402
complicated 4, 120–121; deprivation 31; Leadsom, Andrea 296
gendered 38, 107, 172, 208; hegemonic 106; League of Arab States 381, 382n9
indigenous 19, 122; industries 177, 178–179; League of Nations 129
limits 18, 222, 227, 397; medical 29; Lebanon 145, 366
positivist 51, 147; production 50, 106, 107; Lee-Koo, Katrina 1, 9
racialized 38, 40; situated 16, 54, 63, 124, legal see law

413
 Index

legal recognition 88 Mahabharata 146

legal resources 21, 98, 202 Mali 102, 103n2, 233, 330
legitimacy/legitimation 18, 30, 31, 41, 49, 54, Mandela, Nelson 146
78, 91, 100, 101, 103, 140, 141, 146, 148, Maoist movement in India 51, 53, 54
154–155, 162, 163, 167, 173, 206, 211, 267, Maputo Protocol 381
273, 274, 275, 278, 280, 281, 286, 287, 288, marriage 88, 120, 145, 231, 280, 285, 286, 289,
289, 291, 292, 316, 319, 365, 377, 393 301, 364: contract 95; heteronormative 88;
Leigh, Darcy 4 interracial 288, 292n4; laws 286, 288, 289;
Levi, Primo 184 LGBT 95, 98, 100, 286, 288, 290, 292n1; see
Levy, Sarah 114n2 also divorce; family; husbandhood; kinship;
LGBTQIA 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, wifehood
103, 278, 286, 291, 327, 379: military Marshall Plan 42
members 162; rights 88, 94, 98, 100, 101, Marxism 325
164, 291, 403n5; see also homosexuality; Marxist-Leninist movements 141, 142, 145
queer; trans* Marx, Karl 29
liberal feminisms 62, 73, 74, 112, 275, 303, Masters, Cristina 6
368, 378 maternal mortality 16, 23, 185
liberalisms 38, 43, 50, 52, 89, 129, 143, 241, Maternal Thinking 243, 245
242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 253, 273: maternity care 324, 377
and democracy 253, 254, 258; and inclusivity May, Theresa 296
102; and peace 354; and the state 52, 89, 91, Mazurana, Dyan 6, 353, 397, 402
253, 254, 278, 279, 280, 281; and violent Mbeki, Thabo 100
extremism 71, 143; see also liberal feminisms; McEvoy, Sandra 10
neoliberalisms McLeod, Laura 10
liberalization 171, 177 McVeigh, Timothy 145
Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) 135, Mearsheimer, John 63
218; see also Sri Lanka media 45, 53, 60, 72, 74, 76, 98, 110, 130,
Liberia 62, 134, 135, 221, 338, 339, 354, 355, 132, 133, 142, 143, 153, 160, 164, 182, 183,
360, 363, 364, 365, 366: National Police 279, 287, 297, 298, 302; see also art;
(LNP) 376; see also United Nations Mission autobiography; biography; comic books;
in Liberia (UNMIL) documentaries; film’ journalism; military-
Liberia Female Law Enforcement Association industrial-media-entertainment-network
366 (MIMENET); music; plays; popular culture;
Libya 72, 76, 136 radio; sciences fiction; social media; video
life expectancy 28 games
literacy 200, 235n3; see also education mediation 7, 21, 323, 324, 331, 346
literary imagination 56 Mediterranean Sea 72
literature 178, 182, 217 Mehta, Akanksha 3, 50
Lithuania 292n6 memory 152, 184, 185, 223n6, 262, 263, 264,
Lobo-Guerrero, Luis 118 265, 266, 267, 269, 270
localness 27, 33, 34n1, 53, 76, 94, 95, 97, 98, Mendez, Luz 325
99, 102, 103, 121, 132, 140, 164, 165, 176, mercenaries 76, 228
183, 230, 232, 233, 234, 298, 311, 315, 316, Mesopotamia 285
317, 324, 325, 326, 328, 329, 334, 340, 341, methodology 2, 17, 50, 61, 83, 116, 117, 118,
342, 346, 347, 349, 353, 354, 355, 356, 360, 124, 297: and bias 256; as divisive 28, 256;
362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 377, 378, diversity in the study of gender/security 2,
380, 390, 393, 399, 400, 401 11; innovations in Feminist Security Studies
logging 19 50, 59, 117; interpersonal 117, 120; see also
logistics 54, 65, 230, 248, 325; see also camp art; collage; discourse analysis; ethnography;
followers; nurses fieldwork; figurations; knowledge; narrative
London 133, 145 analysis; snapshots; statistics
Lorde, Audre 51 Mexico 9, 312
Lynch, Jessica 279 Middle East 43, 44, 45, 86, 87, 89, 132, 134,
145, 164, 165; see also Egypt; Iran; Iraq;
Maboreke, Mary 328 Israel; orientalism; Palestine; Syria
Macedonia 292n6 migration 4, 5, 6, 7, 140, 157, 174, 176, 179,
MacKinnon, Catherine 185 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202,

414
 Index

203n4, 223, 319, 367: aliens 198, 200, 244; Mothers for Peace 87
detention 194, 201, 202, 223, 319; and movies see film
families 19, 179; feminization 173; queer Mugabe, Robert 95
migrants 202, 288; smuggling (of migrants) murder 3, 6, 27, 28, 32, 33, 160, 182, 188,
195, 197, 199, 200, 201; to support the 214, 217, 403n5
Islamic State (IS/ISIS) 74, 75; undocumented Museveni, Yoweri 95
migrants 195, 199, 200; and vulnerability 19, music 116, 178, 296, 297, 298; see also videos
165, 173, 194, 197, 199, 202; see also – music
anti-migration practices; asylum; citizenship; Muslim see Islam
deportation; human trafficking; internal Muslim Brotherhood 95
displacement; Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre (IDMC); internally Namibia 312, 335, 340
displaced persons (IDPs); refugees; visa Namibia Plan of Action on Mainstreaming a
militarism 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 17, 18, 22, 28, 33, 38, Gender Perspective in Multidimensional
61, 65, 124, 135, 136, 160–168, 214, 242, Peace Support Operations see Windhoek
243, 255, 303, 315, 353, 373, 374, 380 Declaration
militarization 3, 6, 15, 19, 22, 23, 24n2, 27, 32, Naradnoya Volya 141
33, 34n4, 40, 60, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, narrative analysis 49–50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56,
113, 114n1, 131, 134, 135, 155, 156, 160, 185, 266, 269
162, 163, 196, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 218, narratives 2, 3, 45, 48, 49–50, 77, 135, 142,
223, 229, 230, 231, 246, 265, 268, 269, 274, 144, 148, 183, 184, 202, 222, 228, 234, 262,
299, 301, 303, 304, 305, 313, 320, 348, 352, 264, 266, 267, 274, 275, 281, 292, 298, 299,
379, 381, 385, 393, 396, 397, 398, 399, 402; 302, 303, 385: of 11 September 2001 52; of
see also securitization Anfal 183, 189, 190; of the Australian state
military-aged males (MAMs) 207, 213, 214 90, 320; of crisis 16, 22; of Female
military-industrial-media-entertainment Engagement Teams (FETs) 53; gendered 52,
network (MIMENET) 71, 304 53, 54, 55, 72, 75, 76, 77, 102, 130, 134,
military training 71, 74, 77, 162, 167, 187, 208, 161, 163, 164, 167, 227, 230, 264, 267, 269,
220, 300, 338, 339, 350, 361, 362, 363, 368, 280, 302, 385; as method 49, 51; mother,
385, 387, 388 monster, and whore 134, 142; personal 49,
military uniforms 337, 376, 389, 392, 400 263; of procreation 286, 292, 300; protection
militias 70, 133, 140, 145, 223n3 161, 163, 164, 167, 230, 274, 277; racialized
mining 19, 89, 90; see also geology 52, 275, 280, 330; ‘rape as a weapon of war’
misogyny 28, 32, 61, 106, 162, 221; see also 133; recruitment 228, 229, 230, 231, 233,
patriarchy; sexism 234; scholarly 38; of security 41, 43, 44, 48,
Mohammed, Mahathir 95 51, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 87, 89, 120, 137,
Moldova 292n6 153, 263, 265, 267, 269, 305; style 185; of
Montenegro 292n6 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) 278,
Moon, Katherine 61, 63 320; see also discourse analysis; discourses;
Moore, Demi 301 narrative analysis
Morgan, David 73 National Action Plan (NAP) 318, 319, 320,
Morgan, Robin 141, 142 338, 354, 355, 380, 381, 382n7; see also
Morocco 233 gender mainstreaming; Regional Action Plan
Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) 18, 324 (RAP); Women, Peace, and Security (WPS)
motherhood 62, 86, 87, 88, 90, 145, 160, 174, agenda
227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 243, 253, 279, 285, nationalism 62, 95, 134, 135, 141, 142, 143,
290, 291, 300, 301, 315, 377, 401, 402: of 147, 162, 163, 167, 183, 217, 284, 285,
combatants 54, 86, 162, 233; countering 287–288, 289, 290, 292, 297, 303, 315:
extremism 232, 233, 234; feminized in war white 145; see also homonationalism;
discourses 17; heterosexualized 292; as an patriotism
institution 9, 292; language 301; narrative nationality 15, 121, 155, 157, 202n2, 289, 341;
of politically violent women 87, 134, 142, see also citizenship
145, 300, 301; of the nation 132, 143, 160; nationalization 171, 174
patriotic 160, 166, 388; and peace 135, 243; natural disasters 16, 20, 151, 264; see also
and political violence 62; as a relationship 9; tsunami
see also parenting; pregnancy; reproduction; natural resources 53, 90, 174; see also
wifehood environment

415
 Index

Natural Resources Counter-insurgency Cell Palermo Protocol 197, 200; see also human
(NRCC) 232 trafficking; Trafficking Victims Protection
Nayak, Meghana 6, 43 Act (TVPA)
neocolonialism see colonialism Palestine 132, 134, 138n5, 142, 145, 360
neoliberalisms 6, 18, 19, 41, 42, 53, 70, 106, Panetta, Leon 298
112, 152, 156, 157, 171, 172, 173, 177, 179, Pape, Robert 144, 145
198, 241, 244, 349, 360: restructuring 41, paramilitaries 10, 54, 228, 396, 397, 398, 400,
174, 179; see also capitalism; globalization; 401, 403n1, 403n2, 403n4; see also militia;
liberalisms violent extremist organizations
Nepal 165, 197–198, 318 Parashar, Swati 1, 61, 63, 135, 142, 146, 147
Nevada 209, 212 parenting 256, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 290,
New Wars 228, 229 291, 292: rights 288, 290; see also fatherhood;
New York 116, 118, 121, 141, 380 motherhood; reproduction
Nietzsche, Friedrich 84 Paris 145
Nigeria 95, 233, 234 parliaments 235n3, 337, 351, 360, 367; see also
Nobel Prize: Literature 305n2; Peace 112, 146 Kurdistan – parliament; North Atlantic
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Treaty Organization (NATO) –
78, 143, 163, 167, 336, 337, 342, 376, 377, Parliamentary Assembly; United States
380, 381, 382n10, 393: Committee on – Congress
Women in NATO Forces (CWINF) 336; Partis-Jennings, Hannah 355
NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives passports 197, 286
(NCGP) 336; Office on Women 336; Pateman, Carole 273, 279
Parliamentary Assembly 382n10 patriarchy 9, 17, 18, 21, 53, 54, 87, 89, 106,
Northern Ireland 221, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 107, 111, 112, 113, 120, 141, 154, 175,
403n6 176, 185, 190, 214, 216, 217, 220, 252, 259,
Norway 28, 71, 136, 292n6, 391 268, 273, 275, 277, 284, 285, 286, 287, 291,
nuclear arms race 402 292, 303, 339, 346, 351, 364, 365, 368, 373,
nuclear war 30 379, 380, 381, 399: in political structures 6,
nuclear weapons 78, 114n4, 245, 276, 315; 72; see also heteropatriarchy; misogyny;
see also proliferation sexism
Nuremburg Tribunal 222 patriotism 5, 60, 160, 166, 187, 388; see also
nurses 60, 342, 385, 388, 390–391 nationalism
nursing 175, 388, 390 peacebuilding 10, 20, 21, 23, 110, 132, 166,
nutrition 64, 185, 247, 390 312, 314, 316, 317, 318, 324, 327, 334, 335,
Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline 187 336, 337, 342, 346, 348, 350, 353, 354, 355,
356, 359, 365, 369
Obama, Barack 201 Peace Huts 364
Okinawa 3, 27, 32, 33, 34n12, 34n13 peacekeepers 257, 278, 346, 354: female 62, 71,
Oklahoma City 145 338, 340, 341, 341; and masculinities 166,
ontological security 265 385; and violence 133, 218, 335; see also
ontology 49, 63, 111, 153, 242, 256, 260: of peacekeeping; United Nations Female
the body 246, 247, 248, 249 Military Peacekeepers Network (FMPKN)
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and peacekeeping 9, 166, 167, 219, 223, 334, 335,
Development (OECD) 361 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 346,
Organization for Security and Co-operation in 348, 350, 379: ‘equal opportunity’ 343; and
Europe (OSCE) 337, 351, 373, 381 gender balance 10, 62, 339–342, 343; and
orientalism 40, 44, 45, 52, 53, 130, 137n3, 141, gender mainstreaming 167, 335, 336, 338,
142, 143, 145, 148, 275 339, 34; see also United Nations; United
Oudai, Zoulikha 56 Nations Department of Peacekeeping
Oxfam International 349 Operations
Peet, Jessica 109, 277, 289
Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) 314, 315, 316, 317: Pena, Lorena 325
Regional Action Plan 315, 317 Penttinen, Elina 7, 8
pacifism 59, 62, 73, 76, 109, 110, 111, 160, perpetrators 6, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34n2, 39, 132,
161 136, 137, 155, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 200,
Pakistan 112, 165, 212, 213, 289, 364, 399; 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 245, 246, 252, 255,
see also Kashmir 256, 257, 258, 260, 267, 278, 361, 362, 363;

416
 Index

female 73, 134, 135, 183, 186, 187, 221, 312, 313, 336, 338, 348, 364, 376; of
313; see also rape; war violence 7, 22, 23, 28, 33, 39, 172, 253,
Perry, Katy 8, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 254, 258, 311, 314, 316, 318, 320, 335, 359,
303, 304, 305n8 373, 375; of violent extremism 231, 232,
Peterson, Susan Rae 60, 279 233, 234; see also countering violent
Peterson, V. Spike 1, 6, 40, 99, 276 extremism
Pettman, Jan Jindy 276 prison 34n1, 65, 73, 96, 98, 102, 112, 129,
phenomenology 254 146, 188, 189, 232, 266, 362, 364, 365, 377,
Philippines 18, 165, 231, 318, 323, 324, 329, 392, 393; see also Abu Ghraib
331 private military and security companies
philosophy 107, 108, 129, 217 (PMSCs) 161, 163, 165
Pine, Lisa 182, 184 privatization 171, 174: military 165
Playboy 141 privilege 6, 16, 20, 32, 39, 40, 55, 71, 72, 78,
plays 270n1, 403n6 109, 112, 113, 117, 121, 136, 171, 172, 268,
Plummer, David 77 277, 285, 286, 288, 290, 314, 362
Point and Shoot 76 Proctor, Keith 6, 235n1
Poland 95, 101, 290, 291, 292n1 proliferation 62
police 87, 95, 116, 117, 140, 223, 234, 255, propaganda 218, 274, 279
257, 258, 337, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, property 90, 107, 151, 175, 324, 326, 350:
367, 368, 375, 376, 379, 381, 399: capacity- women as 220, 276, 289; see also land rights
building 337; Japanese 34n13; Liberian prostitution 60, 63, 195, 198, 199, 200, 280,
National Police (LNP) 376; National Police 362, 385, 388, 389, 390: abolitionists 195,
198; camptown 63; see also human trafficking
Agency 339; surveillance 122; UN
Protestant 398, 400, 401, 402, 403n4, 403n6
peacekeeper police 338, 339, 340, 341, 343,
proxy wars 28
366, 376, 379; violence 96, 97, 244, 363,
Puar, Jasbir 147
365, 399
Pupavac, Vanessa 351
political science 50, 59, 287
Putin, Vladimir 101, 162, 290
Politics & Gender 1
popular culture 2, 8, 71, 162, 296, 297, 298,
queer 48, 53, 65, 88, 94, 99, 100, 101, 103,
299, 300, 305, 385; see also media; social 114, 120, 122, 141, 147, 148, 202, 206, 207,
media; zombies 248, 374, 403n2: approaches to security 2,
population 290; see also United Nations 4, 65, 83, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103,
Population Fund 114, 141, 147, 206; bodies 98; families 19;
populism 95, 141 migrants 202; Terrorism Studies 147, 148
pornography 212, 286
positionalities 50, 55, 95, 121, 123 race 3, 4, 5, 15, 37–45, 48, 50, 51, 54, 73, 85,
Positive Peace Index 34n4 86, 88, 89, 100, 109, 110, 120, 121, 123,
Postcolonialism see decolonial theory 140, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 155, 156,
poststructuralism 62, 74, 122, 172, 253 157, 172, 173, 174, 175, 202n2, 206, 208,
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 52, 160, 213, 244, 247, 274, 275, 284, 288, 289, 290,
209 291, 292n4, 300, 341, 368, 386, 387, 390,
poverty 18, 22, 23, 29, 42, 49, 50, 172, 176, 393, 397, 400, 403n5; see also blackness;
179, 221, 292n5, 330: as a consequence of brownness; indigeneity; racism; whiteness;
conflict 18; and gender 133, 179, 221, 229, yellowness
330; and maternal mortality 23; and racialization 19, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45,
radicalization 75, 234; as a security issue 38, 52, 53, 55, 86, 87, 88, 89, 110, 111, 118,
195; as structural violence 30, 71; urban 173, 130, 145, 164, 165, 198, 244, 245, 269, 274,
174, 179 275, 280, 286, 288
Povinelli, Elizabeth 89. 90. 91, 91n3 racism 27, 28, 32, 34n5, 42, 52, 87, 89, 162,
pregnancy 189, 219, 288, 290, 292n5: fake 399; 167, 176, 179, 198, 275, 288, 330; see also
forced 16 orientalism; race; racialization
prevention 22, 23, 24, 245, 362, 363: disaster radicalization 74, 75, 77, 144, 187, 229, 234;
20; of gender-equal participation 20, 146, see also poverty – radicalization; violent
298, 351; HIV 96; of human trafficking 197; extremism
of migration 195; of nuclear holocaust 30; of radio 52, 131, 299
peace 21, 152; of sexual violence 20, 253, Rai, Amit 147

417
 Index

rape 3, 6, 23, 27, 28, 32, 33, 71, 97, 98, 132, Romania 292n6
133, 135, 137, 145, 152, 153, 155, 156, 183, Rome 285
184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 216, 217, 219, Roosevelt, Teddy 76
220, 221, 222, 223, 223n3, 227, 230, 245, Ruddick, Sara 243, 245
254, 258, 266, 276, 277, 278, 279, 289, 292, Runyan, Anne Sisson 4, 40
292n5, 305n9, 330, 392: children born of rule of law 228, 280, 334, 335, 337, 360, 369;
218; male–male 245; see also genocidal rape; see also law
Rape of Nanking; sexual violence rural 41, 99, 140, 367
rape culture 152 Russia 95, 98, 141, 290, 292n6, 390, 391, 402;
Rape of Belgium 266 see also Chechnya
Rape of Nanking 217, 266 Rwanda 6, 99, 133, 134, 187, 218, 219, 334,
Rapoport, David 403n3 363, 365; see also International Criminal
realisms 5, 37, 38, 129, 130, 146: Christian 84; Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR); Rwandan
see also anarchy; human nature genocide
Reardon, Betty 28, 60, 61 Rwandan genocide 133, 183, 186, 217, 219,
reflexivity 4, 120, 122 277
refugees 22, 72, 133, 222, 244: camps 223; Ryan, Caitlin 354, 355
crisis 22; and domestic violence 155;
governance 62; see also asylum; internally sacrifice 18, 76, 183, 263, 267, 268, 269, 273,
displaced persons (IDPs); migrants 276, 377, 385
Regional Action Plan (RAP) 315, 317, 320, Said, Edward 137n3, 142
380, 381, 382n7; see also gender Sandy Hook massacre 70
mainstreaming; National Action Plan (NAP); sanitation 23, 390; see also defecation; urination
Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda Santa Claus 211
Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands Santiago, Irene 324
(RAMSI) 316 Saudi Arabia 231, 393
relational autonomy 242 Schatz, Edward 118, 119
relationality 118, 124, 207, 212, 243 science 20, 29, 30, 31, 32, 50, 59, 62, 84, 107
religion 15, 21, 31, 32, 54, 75, 77, 78, 98, 135, science fiction 297
140, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 155, 175, Scottish National War Memorial 268
202n2, 221, 228, 232, 233, 275, 287, 289, Scott, Joan 34n8, 99
290, 341, 362, 367, 393; see also Christianity; sea level 20, 317; see also climate change
Hinduism; Islam Second World War see World War, Second
reproduction 8, 9, 88, 98, 99, 132, 175, 186, securitization 2, 16, 18, 30, 49, 112, 196, 266,
284, 286, 290, 292: access 290; gender roles 277: of development 41, 63; of
284, 285, 290, 291; heterosexual/ environmental issues 20; of feminism 106,
heteronormative 285, 286, 287; social 173, 110, 111, 233, 277; and homophobia 4; of
175, 176, 177, 186, 286; sociobiological 284, migrants 202; of security sector reform 368;
289; state control of 285, 286, 287, 288, of sexual violence 20, 63, 103, 223; urban 98
289, 290, 291, 292; see also abortion; Security Dialogue 1
adoption; artificial reproductive technologies Security Studies 1, 59
(ART); birth; contraception; fecundity; in September 11, 2001 see 09/11/2011
vitro fertilization (IVF); parenting; Serbia 62, 133, 186, 217, 222, 289, 292n6, 352,
pregnancy; repronormativity 353
repronormativity 284, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292 sewing 388, 389, 390
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 60, 277 sexism 28, 41, 60, 61, 122, 167, 304, 366
restructuring see neoliberalisms – restructuring sex trafficking see human trafficking
Revolutionary Association of Women in sexual contract 279
Afghanistan (RAWA) 131 sexual violence 4, 5, 6, 20, 23, 27, 33, 34n1,
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 205, 209 34n11, 54, 64, 73, 110, 122, 132, 133, 134,
Rich, Adrienne 9 136, 137, 152, 156, 157, 182, 183, 185, 186,
Richter-Montpetit, Melanie 53 187, 188, 189, 194, 216–223, 230, 246, 265,
Ringelheim, Joan 184, 185 266, 267, 276, 277, 278, 326, 327, 329, 330,
al-Rishawi, Sajida 143 335, 336, 338, 342, 350, 361, 363, 364, 365;
Roberts, David 172 see also rape
Robinson, Fiona 243 shame 23, 122, 155, 156, 189, 190, 219, 222,
Rogova, Igabelle 346, 347, 349, 356n2 229, 257, 258, 259, 265, 266, 403n6

418
 Index

Sheikh, Baba 190 Spain 145, 287, 292n1

Shepherd, Laura J. 9, 39, 61, 62, 63 Spanish-American War 390
Shimabukuro, Rina 3, 27, 28, 32, 33 Spivak, Gayatri 52, 112, 143, 275
Shinrikyo, Aum 145 sports 162
Siddiqui, Aafia 143 Sri Lanka 135, 142, 218, 399
Sierra Leone 156, 218, 221, 266, 354, 355, 363, Sri Lanka Civil War 218
367 standpoint feminism 16, 22
Sierra Leone Civil War 266 statebuilding 316, 346, 347
Sikhism 52 statistics 30, 109, 219, 230, 256, 323
sisterhood 231 Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) 34n1
sisters 227, 230, 234, 398, 401 Steans, Jill 41
Sjoberg, Laura 1, 3, 17, 94, 96, 109, 134, 142, Steele, Brent J. 5
144, 146, 153, 277, 289 Stern, Maria 1, 49, 50, 123, 132, 223n3, 330,
Slade, Tuiloma Neroni 317 363, 364
Slovakia 292n6 Stiehm, Judith Hicks 278
Slovenia 292n6 stigma 23, 101, 102, 103, 145, 172, 173, 179,
small arms 71, 352 189, 190, 219, 266, 350, 351, 352, 368
smell 212 strategic culture 72
snapshots 61, 62, 66 strategy 42, 43, 65, 100, 107, 113, 129, 130,
social contract 143, 279, 302: heterosexual 253; 148, 151, 187, 209, 274, 275, 302, 317, 398:
see also sexual contract counterinsurgency 96, 106; of mass rape 217,
social media 70, 231, 244, 297: Facebook 297 220, 254, 289, 392; naval 40; nuclear 276; of
sociology 28, 61, 73, 217, 287 terrorism 144, 145
Solanas, Valerie 108, 112 structural violence 2, 3, 27, 28–30, 31, 32, 33,
soldiering 71, 72, 73, 85, 86, 161, 162, 165, 34n5, 54, 71, 106, 133, 152, 155, 156, 158;
166, 206, 300, 304, 386, 392, 393; see also see also poverty
military training Sudan 324, 325, 331: civil society organizations
soldiers 6, 8, 32, 54, 60, 70, 73, 75, 76, 85, 87, (CSOs) 328; Comprehensive Peace
129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138n1, 160, Agreement negotiations 325; see also Darfur;
162, 164, 165, 166, 206, 208, 210, 212, 220, South Sudan
222, 245, 246, 248, 265, 267, 268, 269, 277, Sweden 108, 291, 292n1, 347, 391
278, 279, 296, 303, 305n2, 313, 325, 341, Switzerland 292n6
342, 377, 379, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, Sylvester, Christine 1, 129, 146, 245
391, 392, 393, 394: British 245; cyborg 205; Syria 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 79, 129, 136, 142,
German 218; Israeli 385; Japanese 33; US 187, 188, 227, 229, 230, 287, 320, 331;
27, 33, 34n1, 209, 245; see also combatants; see also Islamic State
peacekeepers
Solomon Islands 315, 316; see also Bougainville; ‘T’ visa see visa
Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon tactics 65, 107, 113, 220, 392
Islands (RAMSI) Taliban 52, 110, 114n5, 130, 131, 138n4, 228
Somalia 363 Tanyag, Maria 2, 18
sons 138n5, 227, 229, 231, 232, 301, 388, 398 Tanzania 98
sound 116, 212; see also music tariff 171; see also tax
soup 60 taste 212
South Africa 95, 99, 100, 135, 146, 270n2, tax 19, 176, 177, 180n6; see also tariff
365, 366, 367, 391, 400: Defence Force 367, Teaiwa, Teresia 1
399, 400; National Museum of Military temperature 20
History 268; see also African National terrorism see violent extremism; see also
Congress (ANC) everyday terrorism
Southern African Development Community Terrorism Studies 140, 141, 142, 143, 144,
314, 327 145, 146, 147, 148
South Sudan 363, 366 Thailand 99
sovereignty 4, 49, 85, 89, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, theology 27; see also religion
101, 102, 103, 146, 194, 196, 274, 279, 280, Tickner, J. Ann 1, 5, 19, 39, 73, 119, 195, 273
281, 316 Tidy, Joanna 135, 136
Soviet Union 290, 305n2; see also Cold War; Timor-Leste 338, 360, 363, 366; see also United
Russia Nations Mission in Timor (UNMIT)

419
 Index

Tjipel 89, 90, 91 338, 342; Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 347,

Tokyo 145 349; Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) 338,
Tokyo Tribunal 222 343n2; Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT)
torture 31, 52, 53, 54, 73, 96, 97, 110, 112, 338; Office on Drugs and Crime (ODC)
134, 189, 217, 222, 255; see also water 197, 199; police 338, 339, 363, 366, 376;
boarding Population Fund (UNFPA) 16; Research
totalitarianism 42 and Training Institute for the Advancement
touch 107, 212 of Women (INSTRAW) 361; Security
Towns, Ann 203n4 Council 182, 223, 244, 311, 312, 313, 319,
toxicity: ‘toxic’ femininity 108; ‘toxic’ 320, 359; Security Sector Reform (SSR)
masculinities 108; see also femininities; 108, 359, 363, 369; Sustainable Development
masculinities Goals (SDGs) 24
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) United Nations Convention on the Elimination
197, 199, 199, 200, 201; see also human All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
trafficking; Palermo Protocol (CEDAW) 24, 191n1, 327, 329
trans* 50, 89, 91n3, 30, 96, 97, 98, 291 United Nations Development Fund for Women
translocality 102 (UNIFEM) 312, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328,
trauma 7, 8, 55, 152, 182, 183, 190, 207, 257, 329, 330, 331, 331n3, 333, 364, 372, 382;
262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, see also United Nations Entity for Gender
270n1, 270n2, 350 Equality and the Empowerment of Women
True, Jacqui 2, 21 (UN Women)
Truman Doctrine 42 United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and
Trump, Donald 114n2 the Empowerment of Women (UN Women)
tsunami 349 312, 314, 319, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328,
tuberculosis 29 329, 330, 331, 331n3, 361, 367
Turkey 16, 188, 266, 267, 269, 287, 324, 328, United Nations Security Council Resolution
331 1244 347
United Nations Security Council Resolution
Ubuntu 100 1325 20, 29, 62, 110, 113, 182, 191n1, 244,
Uganda 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 165 277, 280, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319,
Ukraine 292n6 323, 327, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 342,
unemployment 54, 174, 176, 179, 235n3, 343n1, 350, 353, 356n4, 365, 373, 380,
292n5 382n7, 382n10; see also Women, Peace, and
United Kingdom 76, 79, 114n4, 132, 133, 245, Security (WPS)
268, 287, 292n1, 296, 365, 388, 389: United Nations Security Council Resolution
Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 390; 1820 191n1, 330, 369n3; see also Women,
elections 78, 296; news media 74, 76; sexual Peace, and Security (WPS)
and gender-based violence in 254; soldiers United Nations Security Council Resolution
73, 131, 245, 299, 390, 391, 392; World 1888 369n3; see also Women, Peace, and
War I recruiting 130; see also David Security (WPS)
Cameron; London; Northern Ireland; United Nations Security Council Resolution
Theresa May 1889 313, 382n7; see also Women, Peace,
United Nations 9, 62, 100, 116, 121, 133, 136, and Security (WPS)
167, 182, 197, 219, 223, 227, 277, 278, 311, United Nations Security Council Resolution
312, 313, 314, 316, 319, 323, 330, 331, 334, 1960 330; see also Women, Peace, and
335, 336, 339, 340, 341, 343, 346, 352, 353, Security (WPS)
362, 369, 375, 379, 381n1: Action Against United Nations Security Council Resolution
Sexual Violence in Conflict (UN Action) 2106 330, 369n3; see also Women, Peace,
314; Convention Related to the Status of and Security (WPS)
Refugees 202n2; Department of United Nations Security Council Resolution
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) 219, 313, 2122 313, 356n4, 369n3; see also Women,
335, 336, 337, 346, 380; Economic and Peace, and Security (WPS)
Social Council (ECOSOC) 374; Female United Nations Security Council Resolution
Military Peacekeepers Network (FMPKN) 2242 314, 340; see also Women, Peace, and
338; Headquarters 314; High Commissioner Security (WPS)
on Refugees (HCR) 133; member states United States 28, 39, 40, 42, 51, 52, 96, 98,
318, 374; Mission in Cyprus (UNFICYP) 106, 110, 130, 131, 140, 143, 145, 155, 197,

420
 Index

201, 213, 227, 244, 246, 274, 275, 292n1, Vietnam War 28, 209, 218, 266, 402: Mỹ Lai
299, 300, 304, 365, 390, 402, 403n5: 11 Massacre 266; protests 166; see also United
September 2001 43, 138n4, 145, 147, 276; States – 1960s student movement
1960s student movement 141, 166, 402; in violent extremism 4, 5, 31, 51, 110, 131, 134,
Afghanistan 72, 110, 130, 131, 138n4, 145, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148,
164, 165; Agency for International 151, 153, 195, 196, 201, 211, 218, 219, 244,
Development (USAID) 233; armed forces 255, 264, 296, 301, 302, 381n2, 401:
27, 28, 72, 77, 88, 131, 132, 134, 188, 207, recruitment 41; suicide terrorism 144, 145;
208, 209, 212, 245, 248, 279, 298, 300, 303, terrorist figure 88, 89, 141, 142, 144, 244;
305n9, 377, 385, 387, 389, 390, 391, 392, see also insurgency
393, 398; asylum law 155, 197, 198, 199, violent extremist organizations (VEOs) 129,
201, 288; bans against interracial marriage 141, 144, 146, 201: see also militias;
288, 292n4; base in Okinawa 3, 27, 28, 33, paramilitaries
34n13; Capitol Building 141; Citizens for visa 157, 194, 200: law 152; travel 118; ‘T’ visa
Constitutional Freedom 140; Civil War 390; in the United States 197, 198, 199, 200, 201
Congress 390; counterinsurgency 52; Vrasti, Wanda 117, 122, 124
Customs and Immigration Services 199; vulnerability 7, 8, 16, 19, 41, 42, 44, 72, 94,
Department of Defense 303; exceptionalism 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 121, 122, 123,
52; flag 300, 304; foreign aid 42; GI Bill 130, 131, 136, 153, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164,
162; immigration debates 155, 194, 195, 166, 167, 172, 174, 176, 179, 183, 184, 185,
201; in Iraq 72, 145, 164, 165, 188, 393, 188, 189, 190, 194, 196, 197, 208, 232, 241,
397; in Korea 63; in Libya 72; ‘manifest 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 256, 266,
destiny’ 78; in the Middle East 43, 44; 267, 269, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280,
military bases 3, 27, 34n1; military peace 281, 350, 355, 368, 369
movement 135, 136; neoconservative foreign Vulture 210; see also drones
policy 44; Pentagon 141; and private military
contractors 165; sexual violence in 258, Wallstrom, Margot 108
305n9; State Department 201, 219, 223n2; Waltz, Kenneth 146
Supreme Court 288, 292n4; see also Alabama; war see Algerian War for Independence; Balkan
Washington, DC; Nevada; New York; Wars; Bosnian War; Cold War; Crimean
Oklahoma City; Weather Underground; War; El Salvador Civil War; Gulf War; Irish
World Trade Center Civil War; Kurukshetra War; nuclear war;
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) 209 Sierra Leone Civil War; Spanish-American
urban 41, 98, 99, 173, 174, 179, 227, 367, 386, War; Sri Lanka Civil War; United States – in
394, 402 Afghanistan; United States – Civil War;
urbanization 179 United States – in Iraq; Vietnam War; ‘war
urban planning 99 on terror’; World War I; World War II
urination 247, 248; see also sanitation war crime 6, 133, 183, 186, 189, 217, 222,
277, 330; see also crime; crimes against
Vaittinen, Tiina 7 humanity
VanDyke, Matthew 76 Warhol, Andy 108
victimhood 6, 8, 39, 44, 54, 133, 137, 142, ‘war on terror’ 51, 52, 53, 110, 111, 141, 143,
161, 163, 183, 185, 198, 200, 216, 222, 246, 145, 146, 147, 161, 253, 274, 275
252, 255, 256, 257, 259, 265, 266, 267, 269, Washington, DC 116, 118, 121
275, 280, 296, 300, 330, 365; see also civilian water 23, 28, 188; see also hydration; sea level
victimization water board 76; see also torture
victims 5, 23, 33, 44, 53, 60, 73, 112, 131, 133, weather 20, 210; see also temperature; tsunami
134, 136, 137, 141, 143, 152, 155, 156, 157, Weather Underground 141
160, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 212, 217, Weber, Cynthia 4, 8, 17, 83, 84, 88, 91n2, 96,
219, 221, 222, 230, 245, 246, 258, 259, 269, 147, 153, 202, 403n2
313, 314, 341, 363, 364, 367, 369, 376, 377: Weber, Max 287
of drone warfare 214; of human trafficking Weissman, Anna L. 8
194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201; see also Welland, Julia 5, 142, 143
agency; civilian victimization; genocide; Westphalian state system 5, 146, 228, 354
rape; victimhood White Feather Campaign 73
video games 151, 162, 297 whiteness 16, 86, 146, 152, 156; see also
videos 210, 212, 213: beheading 70; music 8, privilege; race
298, 299, 300, 302, 303, 304 Whitworth, Sandra 166, 387

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 Index

Wibben, Annick T. R. 1, 3, 61–62, 63, 118 World Humanitarian Summit 16

Wiesel, Elie 184 worldings 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91
wifehood 18, 31, 54, 60, 86, 87, 88, 130, 143, World Trade Center 110, 145; see also
160, 162, 166, 174, 231, 385, 388, 389, 390, 9/11/2001
393, 400, 401; see also families; husbandhood; World War, First I 43, 73, 129, 130, 276, 391,
marriage; motherhood 393
Wilcox, Lauren 245 World War, Second 40, 42, 129, 162, 212,
Wilson, Woodrow 43 222, 262, 263, 305n2, 390, 391
Windhoek Declaration 312, 335, 340 Wright, Quincy 34n3
Wollstonecraft, Mary 273 Wurst, Conchita 88–89
Women in Black 107, 353
womenandchildren 244, 249 Yazidi see Ezidi
Women, Peace, and Security agenda (WPS) 9, yellowness 42
20, 21, 24, 107, 108, 112, 116, 217, 218, 277, Young, Iris Marion 273, 277, 280, 281
278, 280, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, Young, Tomas 135, 136
319, 320, 329, 330, 334, 335, 336, 343n1, 350, Yousafzai, Malala 112
355, 361, 365, 367, 380, 381, 382, 382n7, youth 102, 112, 116, 120, 162, 190, 213, 244,
382n10; see also United Nations Security 269, 274, 280, 386, 387: and violent
Council Resolution 1325; United Nations extremism 71, 143, 229, 232, 234
Security Council Resolution 1820; United Yugoslavia (former) 6, 186, 217, 221, 352;
Nations Security Council Resolution 1888; see also Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia;
United Nations Security Council Resolution International Criminal Tribunal for the
1889; United Nations Security Council Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); Kosovo;
Resolution 1960; United Nations Security Macedonia (FYROM); Montenegro; Serbia;
Council Resolution 2106; United Nations Slovenia
Security Council Resolution 2122; United Yuval-Davis, Nira 186, 288, 289
Nations Security Council Resolution 2242
Women Preventing Extremist Violence Zalewski, Marysia 4, 66
(WPEV) 234 Zarkov, Dubravka 186
Women’s International League for Peace and Zero Dark Thirty (film) 305
Freedom (WILPF) 9 Zimbabwe 95, 362, 366
Women without Borders 233 Zionist settler women 50
Women Without Walls Initiative (WOWWI) Zizek, Slavoj 107
233, 234 zombies 297
Woolf, Virginia 273 Zuckerman, Elaine 347, 350

422