To see Upcoming Speaker Events, specifically, visit: Speaker Series.
To see Past Events & News, visit: Past Events & News.
Originally published on OpenGlobalRights.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
To build gender-just sustainable peace, post-war states must make deep changes to address extractivism and inequality.
To build peace that is gender-just and sustainable, we need to start with two questions: What are the conditions of people’s lives at the end of wars, and what do they need to recover? And how can the root causes of war be addressed? Answering them reveals that what usually happens in post-war contexts is essentially the opposite of what’s required!
To build gender-just sustainable peace, post-war states must repair war’s harms, create sustainable livelihoods, invest in both social and physical infrastructure, transform the inequalities that underlie wars, and find ways to forestall the worst of the climate and ecological crises and to restore biodiversity and ecosystems.
Instead of such efforts, which are essentially about rebuilding people’s lives and livelihoods, and the environments on which they depend, we see economic recovery prescriptions designed to rebuild the state’s financial stability and its ability to pay its debt.
The need to service debts not only weighs heavily against the use of financial resources for rebuilding, it also traps states in a series of conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions when states seek foreign assistance, including the demand to increase private inward investment and drastically limit public expenditure. In order to service their debt, many post-war states are, in effect, forced to prioritize the extraction and export of whatever natural resources they might have.
An economy built on the extraction and export of natural resources undermines the prospects for gender-just sustainable peace. From a feminist perspective, peace does not just mean ameliorating war’s impacts on women and other historically marginalized groups; it means transforming the multiple forms of inequality that drive armed conflict in the first place. Extraction-oriented economies work against meeting these goals in at least four ways.
First, gender-just sustainable peace requires at a minimum freedom from physical violence, including sexual violence. There is, however, abundant evidence that pursuing a strategy of natural resource extraction leads to multiple kinds of violences, especially against local women; environmental defenders; and Indigenous, peasant, and other land-based and marginalized communities.
Second, it also needs the restoration of the means of livelihood destroyed by war, as well as the development of new livelihood opportunities. The industrial extraction of natural resources, however, doesn’t deliver on providing jobs, especially not for women and other marginalized groups. Worse still, it typically undermines pre-existing land- and water-based livelihoods (e.g., by poisoning land and water with arsenic, lead, and other toxic metals or usurping the water supply). Moreover, since it also often involves land-grabbing, it displaces many more people, denying them their livelihoods.
Third, this kind of peace requires states that can invest resources in the transformation of inequalities through investing in social services and in physical and social infrastructure. But extractive industries, despite their promises of filling state coffers, actually export the country’s wealth out of the country, yielding little of the revenue benefit the government was supposedly going to receive, thanks to a toxic mix of tax incentives, corruption and corporate criminality, undervaluation of assets, and broken promises.
Finally, gender-just sustainable peace is arguably impossible without a safe and healthy country and planet, but the polluting, ecosystem-destroying nature of extractive industries poisons air and water and drives climate disruption.
We want to emphasize, however, that the problem is not simply extractive industries, but rather extractivism, understood as both a mode of capitalist production and a defining feature of (white Northern) man’s relation to people and the planet. Extractivist capitalism is a system built on centuries of colonial plunder—including the exploitation and extraction of natural resources and labor from the Global South and from racialized communities in the Global North, while dispossessing Indigenous and other local communities of their land and livelihoods.
Based in a worldview that sees both nature and most humans as no more than objects of extraction, it has orchestrated processes that have immiserated populations in large parts of the world through slavery, subjugation, or structural adjustment; as such, it has operated as the central driver of inequalities, insecurities, armed conflict, and ecological collapse.
This distinction between extractive industries and extractivism is consequential. If the problem is understood to solely be extractive industries, their practices and power, it is conceivable to look for solutions in better national and international regulation of the sector. But if the problem is understood to be the underlying assumptions of an entire economic system and its philosophical underpinnings, it becomes clear that a more radical solution is required, an entire paradigm shift in how we approach post-war economic reconstruction.
Post-war economic reconstruction, if it is to meet people’s needs in the aftermath of war and to achieve gender-just sustainable peace, must center an ethic of care for both humans and ecosystems. Feminists recognize that care is at the heart of what we all need to survive and thrive, and see care as necessarily central to how humans should relate to the more-than-human world.
This is the paradigm shift that we need: a shift towards caring for, valuing, and respecting nature, instead of seeing natural resources as something to exploit and extract; a shift towards seeing nature itself as having agency, rather than just as a thing to manipulate and bend to our will; and a shift towards making our economic goals be human and planetary flourishing, instead of ever-expanding GDP and profit-making.
To be clear, then, in briefly considering the ways in which extractivism undermines the prospects for sustainable peace, we are not repeating claims about a “resource curse,” the “lootability” of high-value mineral resources, and the ways that they facilitate corruption. Nor are we laying the vast damages of extractive industries at the doorstep of “weak governance.”
Instead, we are arguing that it is extractivism itself, the logic of extractivist capitalism, that must be foregrounded. For it dominates the questions asked and unasked, as well as the economic options prioritized, at war’s end. And consistently, overwhelmingly, this is destructive to people, to the land and water they depend upon, and to peace itself.
If our goal is to build gender-just peace that is sustainable both politically and environmentally, extractivism must be acknowledged as a moral and practical failure. An approach to peacebuilding, and to political economy itself, rooted in an ethic of care for both humans and ecosystems can no longer be dismissed as idealistic fantasy; it is the only viable way forward.
Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions—not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them.
Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She works with Carol on the Consortium’s “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet” Project, co-authoring works including "Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States" in Review of International Political Economy (2019) and "Women, Peace and Security in a Changing Climate" in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2020).
Originally published on the LSE Women, Peace and Security blog.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson discuss strategic policy opportunities to boost the UK Government WPS agenda in climate justice and gender equality.
In the 15 years of UK Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policies, programme and National Action Plans, there has been next to no mention of climate change.
How is this possible?
The entire point of the WPS agenda is to ensure that women can live secure lives. And there is no graver threat to women’s security than climate change.
“An atlas of human suffering” is how UN Secretary-General António Guterres described a 2022 IPCC report on the threat of climate change to human wellbeing: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this”. The report warns that increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are “causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage. They have exposed millions of people to acute food and water insecurity, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, on Small Islands and in the Arctic.” About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change. Throughout the globe, the climate crisis poses the gravest threat to the security and wellbeing of women and other marginalised groups. As the IPCC notes, “People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit.”
Women often bear the brunt of climate change: they are the majority of the world’s poor; their role of caring for households, children and the elderly leave them least able to flee; they are more dependent than men on local natural resources for their livelihoods; and unequal gender relations often leave them with few economic or material resources.
Whether in sudden-onset disasters such as floods and typhoons, or slow-onset disasters such as rising sea level, increasing temperatures, land and forest degradation, desertification, and the loss of biodiversity, women are disproportionately affected. When these crises combine with armed conflict, the situation for women becomes exponentially worse.
Other governments, if not the UK, are integrating climate change and WPS in their policies and practice. The UK government has one small fund which makes the links, but both Sweden and Canada bring together the WPS agenda and the climate crisis in their Feminist Foreign Policies. The Scottish Government also recognises the ways that climate change and conflict have mutually reinforcing gendered impacts, and supports women in their efforts to address them. These governments seem to be responding to the UN Secretary-General’s call, in his 2019 Annual Report on the WPS agenda, for “better analysis and concrete, immediate actions to address the linkages between climate change and conflict from a gender perspective.”
Feminist scholars (also see here and here), too, have long been making the case for the WPS Agenda to take the climate crisis more seriously.
It is high time the UK government did so.
In so doing, it not only has an opportunity to make its WPS policy far more realistic, relevant and timely; it also has the opportunity to learn from the history of WPS. It is crucial that it does.
The WPS agenda was an agenda with ambitious aims that could have had truly transformative impacts. Yet it has become a relatively limited programme, focused on a somewhat narrow set of goals: protecting women from the harms of armed conflict, especially conflict-related sexual violence, and supporting the participation of women in peace processes. These are, of course, important aims in and of themselves. Their achievement would improve the lives of many women. But the original motivating goal of the many feminists and women’s organisations who campaigned for a UNSC resolution was much more expansive. Many hoped that bringing a gender lens into the UNSC’s work would foster a more inclusive and transformative approach to peace and security. Some campaigned for the WPS agenda to directly address the root causes of war in the gendered dynamics of militarism and capitalism. In the memorable words of Cora Weiss, one of the drafters of what became UNSCR 1325, the goal was not to make war safe for women, but to eradicate war. This has fallen by the wayside.
The risk, when thinking about women and the climate crisis, or about the ways climate change must be an integral part of the WPS agenda, is that the programme will be similarly limited; a risk that the focus will be only on the ways women suffer disproportionately, or on the need to include more women in climate decision-making. Indeed, most of the current reports that bring WPS, and climate together fall into that trap. They offer multi-country studies establishing that gender inequality, climate vulnerability and state fragility are positively correlated or frame the key problem for women, when climate change and conflict combine, as increased levels of GBV, or provide case studies of women sustaining inclusive peace on the frontlines of climate change
Again, these issues deserve attention, in and of themselves. But they miss the fundamental point, the life-or-death point, the how-to-avoid-descending-more-deeply-into-the-atlas-of-human suffering-point: that our only real hope is to address the root causes of the climate catastrophe we now face. The rest is just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
It is only by confronting what’s driving both the climate crisis and the wars which motivated the WPS agenda – the current extractivist economic model, rooted in centuries of colonial plunder, appropriation of women’s labour, and environmental destruction – that a renewed WPS agenda could offer any real hope.
And offer hope it can. If the UK government decides to raise its ambition – acknowledging not only the centrality of the climate crisis to the WPS agenda, but also the urgent necessity of addressing the crises’ root causes – meaningful, life-altering change can occur. The most profoundly important thing that a renewed WPS agenda can offer is the insight that current “realist” models of how to ensure security and a “thriving” economy have led to world in which almost no one, except perhaps the most hyper-elite among us, can be secure, while planetary well-being is teetering. And feminist alternative visions of the values that should be at the heart of our economies and our relation to the rest of the natural world do, in fact, offer far more realistic pathways to avoid the worst of the crises we face; they can propel us to a world where people, including women and other marginalised groups, are safe and secure, are able to flourish.
In short, the UK’s policy on WPS must confront the economic root causes of both war and the climate crisis and adopt policies that reflect feminist alternative models of economies designed to foster the well-being of all people and the planet itself.
This is perhaps the only thing that really matters at this moment in human history – all the rest is deck chairs.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author(s) only, and do not necessarily reflect LSE's or those or the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
About the authors
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions -- not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her research and writing has focused on gender and security issues ranging from work on the discourse of civilian nuclear defense intellectuals and U.S. national security elites to gender integration issues in the US military, the concept of “vulnerability” in security and humanitarian discourse, and gender mainstreaming in international peace and security institutions. Currently, much of her energy is devoted to a collaborative international knowledge building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet,” which she works on jointly with Claire Duncanson.
Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace and security, with a particular focus on and gender and peacebuilding. She teaches and supervises in these areas to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Edinburgh. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace. She is the author of Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press, 2016), and a range of publications on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and on gender in militaries. Claire works with Carol Cohn at the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet” Project (https://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace ), co-authoring "Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States" in Review of International Political Economy (2019) and "WPS in a Changing Climate" in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2020). Claire is an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the implementation of the WPS agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on the WPS Agenda.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
In the Global North, “climate security” has become a dominant frame for thinking—and not thinking—about the climate crisis.
The framing assumes that climate change will disrupt weather and environmental systems, putting pressure on economic and social systems as well as natural resources, leading to large-scale displacement; all of this is expected to create instability, to worsen tensions and create new ones, and to increase the threat of violent conflicts. Though views within this framing rarely claim that climate change is the sole cause of conflict, they often see climate change as ushering in “an era of persistent conflict… a security environment much more ambiguous and unpredictable than that faced during the Cold War.” Climate change is framed as a “threat multiplier,” driving insecurity and violence, particularly across the Global South. While this body of research points to very real and worsening problems, it also pulls attention and resources from addressing the causes of the climate crisis and the necessary solutions.
It is critical to note, however, that the “security” that is of most concern in this framing is threats to the security of powerful states in the Global North, and “security” is taken to mean the ability to defend not only their state borders, but also their political, economic, and military dominance. The privileging of this narrative stems in part from the fact that Global North departments of defense typically have far more power and resources, particularly when it comes to international interventions, than those governing development or the environment. But it goes beyond institutional power and resources. We can only fully explain the privileging of security institutions and framings (especially their influence on the climate crisis) and the grip they have on the popular imagination by paying attention to gender.
Indeed, securitization is a gendered dynamic. It is the process of situating issues in the military sphere, which is itself rendered “serious” and “realistic” by ideas about gender. For generations, the idea that militaries are the most effective means of achieving security has been naturalized by its association with ideas about masculinity: that strength is defined by being able to protect oneself using physical force; that bullies only understand force; that vulnerability invites attack; that security requires impenetrable borders; and so on. This association of manliness with a militarized conception of national identity and national security helps make militaries, military spending, and military solutions seem like the superior, realistic, natural, and obvious routes to achieving security. Conversely, any potential refusal to privilege them is feminized, marking alternative ways of thinking as weak and unrealistic; consider US Ambassador Nikki Haley framing her opposition to discussing a nuclear weapons ban this way: “As a mom, as a daughter, there is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons. But we have to be realistic.” Ideas about gender naturalize militarized conceptions of security and securitization itself, helping render the “climate security” framework as the most powerful and realistic way of addressing the climate crisis.
Yet there are multiple problems in this gendered “climate security” framing, as well as dangers with the overall securitization of the climate crisis. First, it centers a vision of the world from the perspective of Northern elites, which locates climate change threats as coming from “out there”—from its victims, from outsiders, from people in Global South countries where the violence that threatens “stability” will supposedly occur, and from where displaced people will supposedly be trying to flee—instead of correctly locating the threats to the planet as coming from the Global North countries, militaries, and corporations that are actually the most responsible for it.
Second, it is a framing that leads to a militarized response, which justifies increases in budgets of military and other “security” institutions, capturing the resources we need to solve the climate and wider ecological crises. It further compounds the problem by fostering and legitimating the expansion of military training and operations—thereby increasing their vast use of fossil fuels and other forms of environmental degradation—making the climate and eco-crises worse, not better.
Third, it sets up preservation of the status quo as the goal, whereas dealing with the climate crisis requires massive changes to the status quo. This is especially so if the countries that are least responsible for carbon emissions, and where those most affected live, are ever going to get access to the resources they need to respond.
Fourth, and perhaps the most devastating, is that, if our intention is to head off the worst of climate change and even try to reverse it, framing the climate crisis as a security crisis completely misdirects our attention. The climate crisis is not a crisis of security; it is a crisis of extractivist capitalism, an economic system that incentivizes the exploitation of natural resources as if they were unlimited and “externalizes” the environmental costs of production—from pollution to the release of greenhouse gases. Through its dependence on fossil fuels for cheap energy and industrial agriculture that overexploits soil and water supplies, extractivist capitalism champions growth at all costs, including the destruction of the environment. Its neoliberal insistence on “liberating” markets and denouncing regulation and collective action has made it impossible to take the actions needed to halt climate breakdown.
And it misdirects our attention because the climate crisis is not a crisis of security; it is a crisis of a white western masculinist framing of the relation between humanity and nature. That is, it is a crisis that is a reflection of western, white, male-dominated philosophical and religious traditions, in which man has been seen as separate from and independent of nature, his proper role to dominate “her” and bend her to his will. As Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and feminists around the world have long argued, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity’s relation to the rest of nature. It fails to recognize that not only do we need to take care of nature, but that nature takes care of us, that we are part of nature, that nature has agency, that humankind is just one species among many on this planet, and that our fundamental relationship to the more-than-human world is one of complex interdependence and reciprocity.
To say that the climate crisis is a crisis of extractivist capitalism, and the western masculinist mindset that underpins it, is not to ignore that the climate crisis will cause tremendous “insecurity” in people’s lives. But that word abstracts, misnames and erases the reality. The climate crisis will cause more people to go hungry; more children to be malnourished, their growth and capacities stunted. More people will drown in floods, typhoons, and hurricanes, or burn to death in wildfires, while others will only have the places they live destroyed. More people will lose their only means of livelihood, as the plants, animals, and ecosystems that have been part of their material survival and cultural identity for generations perish. Many more will be uprooted from the territories of their ancestors and communities that sustain them because those places have become unlivable; others will sicken, be disabled, and die from infectious diseases new to their areas, to which they have no immunity. And a lack of resources—a result of grotesque global inequality—will prevent untold numbers from escaping or protecting themselves and the people they love from any of these impacts.
That is not insecurity; it is a human and species-wide disaster of catastrophic scale, and the answer cannot be to “secure,” to “enhance security,” or to talk of “climate-related security risks.” If we misname, and misunderstand, what this is a crisis of, we will misunderstand what we need to do to try to fix it.
What we need to do is transform the root causes of this catastrophe, which will take nothing short of a paradigm shift: from a model that conceives the purpose of economic activity as ever-increasing extraction, exploitation, and consumption of nature’s resources, and human labor, for the purpose of profit, to one which focuses on meeting human needs and ensuring the sustainability of the resources and ecosystems on which life depends. In other words, we need a feminist green transformation: a restructuring of production, consumption, and political-economic relations along truly sustainable pathways.
First steps could include developing a feminist political-economic analysis of the transnational actors and processes that present the largest threats to sustainable life on Earth; mapping routes to intervene in those processes; and articulating policy alternatives that transform our understanding of the purposes of economic activity and of humans’ relation to the planet. We have been calling this a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet.”
As we have argued elsewhere, we need to unapologetically claim the mantle of “realism” for an economic system based on an ethics of care—for people and planet—over the short-sighted, destructive ethic of unlimited individualistic acquisition and corporate consolidation of wealth; a system that recognizes interdependence—among people and among nations—as the basis for mutual collaborative action, rather than mutual armament. One that recognizes that the goal of sufficiency, of ensuring livelihoods and lives of dignity, will never be achieved in a system that deepens, rather than transforms, inequalities.
© 2023 CONSORTIUM ON GENDER, SECURITY & HUMAN RIGHTSLEGAL STATEMENT All photographs used on this site, and any materials posted on it, are the property of their respective owners, and are used by permission. Photographs: The images used on the site may not be downloaded, used, or reproduced in any way without the permission of the owner of the image. Materials: Visitors to the site are welcome to peruse the materials posted for their own research or for educational purposes. These materials, whether the property of the Consortium or of another, may only be reproduced with the permission of the owner of the material. This website contains copyrighted materials. The Consortium believes that any use of copyrighted material on this site is both permissive and in accordance with the Fair Use doctrine of 17 U.S.C. § 107. If, however, you believe that your intellectual property rights have been violated, please contact the Consortium at info@genderandsecurity.org.