Denmark

In Search of Feminist Foreign Policy: Gender, Development, and Danish State Identity

Citation:

Richey, Lisa Ann. 2001. “In Search of Feminist Foreign Policy: Gender, Development, and Danish State Identity.” Cooperation and Conflict 36 (2): 177-212.

Author: Lisa Ann Richey

Abstract:

This article investigates the extent to which the Danish state's identification with gender issues is transferred into Danish development policy. Is Denmark pursuing a gender and development policy that is radically different from most other Western donor states and, if not, why might we see a less progressive policy in Denmark than we might expect from a domestically `feminist' state? In this article, it is suggested that the very nature of development aid and the policies in place to promote it are gendered. Gender and development aid could provide an arena for international constitution of domestically `feminist' policies. However, it is argued that `development' itself poses important challenges for implementing the goals of Denmark's gender and development policies. Conversely, implementing the critical strategy of agenda-setting within gender and development would reconstitute both `development' and the identity of the Danish state as donor.

Topics: Development, Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Gendered Discourses Regions: Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Denmark

Year: 2001

Reclaiming Peoples’ Power in Copenhagen 2009: A Victory for Ecosocialist Ecofeminism

Citation:

Kaara, Wahu. 2010. “Reclaiming Peoples’ Power in Copenhagen 2009: A Victory for Ecosocialist Ecofeminism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 21 (2): 107–11.

Author: Wahu Kaara

Abstract:

The article describes the contribution of African women to ecosocialism. The authors argue that the 2009 Copenhagen Conference represents the recognition that the collapsing patriarchal market economy owes humanity an economic debt, and owes the planet an ecological and climate debt. The author compares the status of the police forces in Kenya and Denmark, since both uphold the bankrupt system of neoliberalism.

Keywords: females, socialism, human ecology, protest movements

Topics: Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women Regions: Africa, East Africa, Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Denmark, Kenya

Year: 2010

Cosmopolitan Militaries and Dialogic Peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish Women Soldiers in Afghanistan

Citation:

Rosamond, Annika Bergman, and Annica Kronsell. 2018. "Cosmopolitan Militaries and Dialogic Peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish Women Soldiers in Afghanistan." International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (2): 172-87.

Authors: Annika Bergman Rosamond, Annica Kronsell

Abstract:

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women's war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers' reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states' adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that we less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogic peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogic peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women. 

Keywords: feminist security studies, cosmopolitanism, dialogic peacekeeping, women soldiers, non-great powers, Narratives

Topics: Combatants, Female Combatants, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Discourses, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Peacekeeping, Security Regions: Asia, South Asia, Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Afghanistan, Denmark, Sweden

Year: 2018

Women and Weapons: Redressing the Gender Gap: A Danish Response

Citation:

Nielsen, Jenny. 2014. "Women and Weapons: Redressing the Gender Gap: A Danish Response." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 70 (5): 17-20.

Author: Jenny Nielsen

Abstract:

In nuclear war, women would suffer at least as much as men. But women tend to be underrepresented in fieldssuch as high-level politics, diplomacy, military affairs, and science and technologythat bear on nuclear policy. Authors from four countriesSalma Malik of Pakistan (2014), Polina Sinovets of Ukraine (2014), Reshmi Kazi of India (2014), and Jenny Nielsen of Denmarkdiscuss how women might gain greater influence on nuclear weapons policy and how their empowerment might affect disarmament and nonproliferation efforts.

Keywords: Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, disarmament, gender, International Atomic Energy Agency, nonproliferation, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons policy, Rebecca Johnson, Rose Gottemoeller, women

Topics: Gender, Women, Gender Balance, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Weapons /Arms, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Regions: Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Denmark

Year: 2014

Women, Peace, Security, and the National Action Plans

Citation:

Fritz, Jan Marie, Sharon Doering, and F. Belgin Gumru. 2011. “‘Women, Peace, Security, and the National Action Plans.” Journal of Applied Social Science 5 (1): 1-23.

Authors: Jan Marie Fritz, Sharon Doering, F. Belgin Gumru

Abstract:

Twenty criteria are used to analyze sixteen national action plans that focus on women, peace, and security. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, a base for the national plans, highlights the terrible consequences of violent conflict on women and girls as well as the important role of women in all peacebuilding processes. Suggestions are made for those developing or revising plans and include addressing the relevant points from four UN Security Council resolutions (1325, 1820, 1888, and 1889); specifying all processes and timelines; and including civil society participation in all phases of a plan's development; implementation, and assessment.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Civil Society, Gender, Women, Peacebuilding, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325, UNSCR 1820, UNSCR 1888, UNSCR 1889 Regions: Africa, West Africa, Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Côte D'Ivoire, Denmark, Finland, Liberia, United Kingdom

Year: 2011

Rape, Love and War - Personal or Political?

Citation:

Ericsson, Kjersti. 2011. "Rape, Love and WarPersonal or Political?" Theoretical Criminology 15 (1): 67-82.

Author: Kjersti Ericsson

Abstract:

This article discusses how war rapes and consensual sexual relationships with enemy soldiers are framed and understood, with special emphasis on the consequences for the women involved. It [examines] war rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkan war and Danish and Norwegian women's sexual relationships with German occupant soldiers during the Second World War. I argue that the conception of women's sexuality as national property is central to understanding the attitudes towards both categories of women. To preserve their dignity, war rape victims may profit from a collective, political discourse. Women having had consensual relationships [with] enemy soldiers, however, have to extricate themselves from the collective and political discourse and interpret what happened to them as strictly personal.

Keywords: war rape, coping strategies, nation, sexuality, victim

Annotation:

Uses empirical research that has been done in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Denmark, Norway (latter countries in the post-WWII era). (Ericsson 67-70)

Quotes:

"Rape used as a weapon of war demonstrates that women in one sense are objects of men's transactions in this context: they are not violated as individual women, but as the nation's women: the attack on their sexuality is an affront to the national collective of men." (71)

"Despite this, not even war rape victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina could escape the suspicion that they might have been implicated in their own violation." (73)

"The stories of the Norwegian war children make one wonder: how will the mothers of children conceived through war rapes deal with questions from their sons and daughters when they want to know who their father is?" (76)

"To put it very shortly: relief for the rape victims lies in framing themselves as part of the collective, while for someone with consensual relations it lies in framing themselves as individuals." (77)

"Skjelsbæk mentions a fatwa issued by the imam of Sarajevo in 1994, a fatwa that both she and several of her interviewees deem very important.  In the fatwa, the imam declared that Bosnian women who had been subjected to sexual violence ought to be looked upon as war heroes.  The message that war rape victims were to be considered war heroes, and not least the source of this message, a religious authority, made this alternative conception a possible resource, both to individual women that had experienced rape, and for therapeutic work with rape victims." (77)

"On the other hand, if rape is understood mainly in a gendered frame of reference, the woman feels her female identity as damaged, and shame, guilt, and silence is the result." (78)

"However, if solidarity with raped women is made contingent upon a strong identification with the ethnic group, the woman as an autonomous individual may be seen as less important.  Even if the rape victim, through the ethnic interpretation, may escape being constructed as a woman of questionable morals, or as 'damaged goods' as Skjelsbæk  points out, other aspects of patriarchal patterns may nevertheless assert themselves….Some of the health workers interviewed by Skjelsbæk  also feel that there has been an increase in violence against women in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.  If this holds true, it fits with a conception of woman's body belonging to her ethnic or national group in the patriarchal sense, an ownership that is threatened in war and may have to be reinforced in post-war times.  If there has really been a backlash, this may perhaps be a manifestation of the sinister side of the notion linking a woman's body very strongly to her ethnic group." (79)

 

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Ethnicity, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Security, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women, Sexuality Regions: Europe, Balkans, Eastern Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Denmark, Norway

Year: 2011

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