Militarism

Citation:

Alwan, Christine, and S. Laurel Weldon. 2017. “What is Feminist Foreign Policy? An Explanatory Evaluation of Foreign Policy in OECD Countries.” Paper prepared for 2017 European Conference on Politics and Gender, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Authors: Christine Alwan, S. Laurel Weldon

Abstract:

In 2015, Sweden’s foreign affairs minister boldly acclaimed that the state had a feminist foreign policy, with rights, representation, and resources at its core (Patel 2015). While these criteria may be a helpful for understanding the variety of issues foreign policy makers must consider to develop and implement gender equitable policy, they do not provide a specific framework for a feminist foreign policy theory. We hope to address this lack of specificity by drawing on existing theories of foreign policy and feminist IR.  We argue why the idea of a feminist foreign policy is radical given the nature of international politics, state militaries, and government actors. We point to the symbiotic relationship between militarism and masculinity with militarism and the state. This androcentric view of international politics does not adequately address the ways in which women’s lives affect and are affected by foreign policy decisions. We hope that these initial discussions will help both policy scholars and practitioners develop and incorporate a feminist theory of foreign policy into foreign policy decision-making.

Topics: Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Militarism, Rights

Year: 2017

Citation:

Authors: Curtis Holland, Gordana Rabrenovic

Abstract:

This study critically examines how masculinities and intersecting ethnonational and social class identities underscore the social and political agencies of excombatants in Northern Ireland and in the specific context of community-based peacebuilding. The authors draw on interviews with female and male leaders in grassroots and governmental organizations, which illustrate how state-led practices of exclusion reshape such intersectional identities and increase the instrumentality of hypermasculinist, pseudo-paramilitary practices in maintaining excombatants’ status and control on neighborhood levels. The research documents how structural dynamics of excombatants’ social class locations and political disaffection help shape their social agencies of “resistance,” underscored by desires for autonomy and recognition, and channeled by ethnogendered scripts rooted in both violent cultures of paramilitarism and nonviolent peacebuilding masculinities. The implications on women of male excombatants’ takeover of leadership roles in the community sector are also discussed.

Keywords: masculinities, peacebuilding, paramilitaries, class, Northern Ireland, exclusion, transitional justice

Topics: Armed Conflict, Class, Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Justice, Transitional Justice, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Paramilitaries, Peacebuilding Regions: Europe, Northern Europe Countries: United Kingdom

Year: 2018

Citation:

Pain, Rachel. 2015. "Intimate War." Political Geography 44: 64-73.

Author: Rachel Pain

Abstract:

Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.

Keywords: domestic violence, war, intimacy, geopolitics, emotions, military tactics, militarism

Topics: Armed Conflict, Domestic Violence, Gender, Women, Men, Gender-Based Violence, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Violence

Year: 2015

Citation:

Nagel, Joane. 2012. “Intersecting Identities and Global Climate Change.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19 (4): 467–76.

Author: Joane Nagel

Abstract:

This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and national identities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vulnerabilities to disasters suggests that women are more vulnerable than men to many meteorological disasters related to climate change, specifically flooding and drought. This is because of their relative poverty, economic activities (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governing women's modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contemporary links between masculinity and the military in environmental politics, polar research and large-scale strategies for managing risk, including from climate change, suggests that men and their perspectives have more influence over climate change policies because of their historical domination of science and government. I expect that masculinist identities, cultures and militarised institutions will tend to favour large-scale remedies, such as geoengineering, minimise mitigation strategies, such as reducing energy use, and emphasise ‘security’ problems of global climate change.

Keywords: Gender, masculinity, climate change, militarism, identity

Topics: Class, Economies, Poverty, Environment, Climate Change, Environmental Disasters, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Race, Security, Sexuality

Year: 2012

Citation:

Chisholm, Amanda, and Maya Eichler. 2018. “Reproductions of Global Security: Accounting for the Private Security Household.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (4): 563–82.

Authors: Amanda Chisholm, Maya Eichler

Abstract:

This article shows how private security households exist at the nexus of two foundational logics of contemporary warfare—militarism and neoliberalism. The celebration of neoliberalism and normalization of militarism allow the private security industry to draw upon the labor of eager contractors and their supportive spouses. This article develops a feminist analysis of the role of the private security household in global security assemblages. In what ways are households connected to the outsourcing of security work to Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), and how are these connections gendered? Through interviews with female spouses of former UK Special Air Services soldiers, now private security contractors, we demonstrate how the household is both silenced and yet indispensable to how PMSCs operate and how liberal states conduct war. These spouses supported the transition from military service to private security work, managed the household, and planned their careers or sacrificed them to accommodate their husband’s security work. Their gendered labor was conditioned by former military life but animated by neoliberal market logics. For the most part, the women we interviewed normalized the militarized values of their husband’s work and celebrated the freedom and financial rewards this type of security work brought. 

Keywords: private security, households, female spouses, women's labor, private military and security companies

Topics: Feminisms, Households, Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Private Military & Security, Militarism, Security

Year: 2018

Citation:

Pereira, Charmaine. 2018. "Beyond the Spectacular: Contextualizing Gender Relations in the Wake of the Boko Haram Insurgency." Meridians 17 (2): 246-68.

Author: Charmaine Pereira

Abstract:

The aim of this essay is to interrogate gender relations in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency in a way that recognizes continuities as well as discontinuities across multiple dimensions of social relations. The essay begins by outlining the changing trajectory of the Boko Haram insurgency and scholarly efforts to understand it as a social phenomenon. The second section discusses how research and media recognition of Boko Haram’s violence in relation to women led to a focus on spectacular events, such as mass abductions and suicide bombings. It is critical to recognize the politics of visibility and nonvisibility regarding women in the gendered dynamics set in motion by Boko Haram’s spectacles of violence. Finally, the essay points to ways in which feminist analyses of conflict and militarism throw light on the more suppressed yet critical dimensions of gender relations that surface in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency.

Keywords: Boko Haram, spectacular, violence, visibility, gender politics

Topics: Armed Conflict, Conflict, Gender, Women, Gender Analysis, Gendered Power Relations, Media, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Race, Religion

Year: 2018

Citation:

Otto, Dianne. 2004. “Securing the 'Gender Legitimacy' of the UN Security Council: Prising Gender from Its Historical Moorings.” Legal Studies Research Paper 92, Faculty of Law, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne.

Author: Dianne Otto

Abstract:

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Peace and Security, International Organizations, Militarism, Political Participation, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325 Regions: Asia, South Asia, Oceania Countries: Afghanistan, Timor-Leste

Year: 2004

Citation:

Abelenda, Ana Ines. 2014. "A Feminist Perspective on the Post-2015 Development Agenda." The Equal Rights Review 13: 117-28.

Author: Ana Ines Abelenda

Abstract:

World leaders and diverse development actors are currently embroiled in a series of negotiations around a new global development agenda to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) once they expire in 2015. The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) has been heavily involved in seeking to shape the new agenda to ensure that it adequately addresses human rights, including women’s rights and gender equality. The negotiation process has been complex, frustrating at times for civil society and women’s rights advocates, yet a historical opportunity to re-shape global understandings of development in the struggle towards social, economic, ecological and gender justice. As the world navigates a context of multiple intersecting global crises coupled with increasing inequality and militarism, it becomes clear that business as usual is not an option. A paradigm shift is needed. This position paper presents a feminist analysis to help unpack what is at stake for people and the planet by pushing the envelope on the kind of world we want to live in. This approach is one which both AWID and  the author believe is key to systemic change. A mere look at the ‘shopping list’ of goals and targets currently on the negotiating table is not enough. Feminist and progressive social movements must not bypass the opportunity to challenge the systemic root causes in the current economic system that continue to undermine women’s autonomy and the achievement of human rights for all.

Topics: Civil Society, Development, Economies, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Organizations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights

Year: 2014

Citation:

Henry, Marsha. 2017. “Problematizing Military Masculinity, Intersectionality and Male Vulnerability in Feminist Critical Military Studies.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 182-99.

Author: Marsha Henry

Abstract:

Recent work on the multiplicity of masculinities within specific military contexts deploys the concept of intersectionality in order to draw attention to the hierarchies present in military organizations or to acknowledge male vulnerability in situations of war and conflict. While it is important to examine the breadth and depth of masculinity as an ideology and practice of domination, it is also important for discussions of military masculinity, and intersectionality, to be connected with the ‘originary’ black feminist project from which intersectionality was born. This may indeed reflect a more nuanced and historically attuned account of such concepts as intersectionality, but also black and double consciousness, standpoint and situated knowledges. In particular, what happens when concepts central to feminist theorizing and activism suddenly become of use for studying dominant groups such as male military men? What are our responsibilities in using these concepts in unexpected and perhaps politically questionable ways? This article looks at recent feminist theorizing on intersectionality, and several examples of the use of intersectionality in relation to masculinity and the military, and finally suggests some cautionary ways forward for rethinking militaries, masculinities, and feminist theories.

Keywords: military masculinity, militarised masculinities, intersectionality, Gender, race, class, vulnerability, marginal, privilege

Topics: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, Men, Gender Roles, Gendered Power Relations, Intersectionality, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Race

Year: 2017

Citation:

Thomas Miller Klubock. 1998. Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author: Thomas Miller Klubock

Annotation:

Topics: Class, Development, Economies, Extractive Industries, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Militarism Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Chile

Year: 1998