Militarization

Citation:

Golan, Galia. 2019. "Militarization and Gender in Israel." In: Galia Golan: An Academic Pioneer on the Soviet Union, Peace and Conflict Studies, and a Peace and Feminist Activist: 221-35. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Author: Galia Golan

Abstract:

Many changes have occurred in recent years with regard to the status of women in Israel in general and the effects of militarization on gender in particular. The present chapter attempts to update the picture as well as point to often contradictory as well as disturbing recent trends. Therefore, I shall focus on the changes that have occurred, i.e., what is new, the results of these changes, and the reactions or responses to them (primarily amongst women). I shall not deal with the Palestinian minority in Israel, for whom militarization has quite different effects, including the effects related to gender. This topic has been addressed elsewhere and warrants far greater attention than I can accord in this short chapter. Another caveat is that even within Jewish Israeli society there are vast differences of class, ethnicity, and so on, which do produce differences and refinements in the way militarization affects each of them, some of which may impact on gender. These will be referred to only slightly in the following analysis.

Topics: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, Women, Gender Analysis, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Israel

Year: 2019

Citation:

Otto, Dianne. 2018. “Women, Peace and Security: A Critical Analysis of the Security Council’s Vision.” In Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, edited by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Hayes, and Nahla Valji. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Author: Dianne Otto

Abstract:

This chapter historicizes the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. It opens by describing the vision of peace emerging out of the Hague Congress of Women, wherein a pacifist agenda perceived resorting to arms to resolve inter-state disputes as unacceptable. It analyzes this vision in the context of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, and argues that the Security Council fails in protecting women from conflict-related harm. It demonstrates how feminist conceptions of positive peace have become captive to the militarized security frame of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how peace needs to be reconceptualized to strengthen the feminist opposition to war and to fight protective stereotypes of women.

Keywords: pacifism, Women Peace and Security agenda, Hague Congress of Women, United Nations, security council, positive peace

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Peace and Security, International Organizations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Peacebuilding, Peacekeeping, Peace Processes, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS

Year: 2018

Citation:

Motoyama, Hisako. 2018. “Formulating Japan’s UNSCR 1325 National Action Plan and Forgetting the ‘Comfort Women.’” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (1): 39–53.

Author: Hisako Motoyama

Abstract:

In September 2015, the Japanese government announced its first national action plan (NAP) to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, just ten days after forcefully legislating controversial security bills that would effectively lift the constitutional restrictions on overseas exercise of military force. Why did the conservative administration embrace Resolution 1325 while propelling militarization? This paper examines the formulation process of Japan’s NAP, focusing on gendered struggle over remilitarization and war memory, especially that of the “comfort women,” or Japanese imperial military sexual slavery during World War II. I will examine how post–Cold War remilitarization in Japan was closely intertwined with the struggle over war memory and the gender order of the nation, and how the conservative administration embraced international gender equality norms in an attempt to identify itself as a powerful liberal democracy engaged in maintaining the international security order, and to erase the memory of imperial military sexual violence in the past. By doing so, I attempt to critically reconsider the framework of the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda, which constructs powerful developed nations “not in conflict” as innocent supporters of women in conflict zones.

Keywords: Security Council Resolution 1325, women, peace and security, military sexual violence, imperialism, militarization

Topics: Democracy / Democratization, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Peace and Security, International Organizations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325, Sexual Violence, Sexual Slavery, SV against Women Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2018

Citation:

Eichler, Maya. 2013. “Gender and the Privatization of Security: Neoliberal Transformation of the Militarized Gender Order.” Critical Studies on Security 1 (3): 311-25.

Author: Maya Eichler

Abstract:

The increasing reliance on private military and security companies (PMSCs) in contemporary military conflict marks a historic shift in the state’s organization of military violence. This transformation has gendered underpinnings and entails gender-specific outcomes, at the same time as it reveals a gendered continuum between public and private military and security organizations. As the US example illustrates, security privatization was facilitated by the broader neoliberal transformation of the militarized gender order and itself has had negative implications for gender equality in the military and security sphere. Based on original research, this article argues that PMSCs are deeply gendered organizations whose employment practices tends to intensify the gendered division of labour that is characteristic of public militaries. While business and operational needs may allow for temporary disruptions of gender norms, masculinism remains not only vital but is reinvigorated by privatization. Political goals such as gender equality are sidelined in a sector premised on de-regulation and free markets. In contrast to problem-solving approaches that view gender as a problem of accountability or operational effectiveness in regards to PMSCs, this article shows that gender is deeply implicated in the expansion and organization of private force at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Keywords: private security, privatization of military security, PMSCs, Gender, feminist security studies, neoliberalism, militarization, United States

Topics: Armed Conflict, "New Wars", Economies, Gender, Gender Roles, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Masculinism, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Private Military & Security, Militarization, Privatization, Violence Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2013

Citation:

Hendricks, Cheryl. 2017. "Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the African Union's Peace and Security Architecture." Africa Development 42 (3): 73-98.

Author: Cheryl Hendricks

Abstract:

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Conflict, Peace and Security, International Organizations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Peacebuilding, Peace Processes, Post-Conflict, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS Regions: Africa

Year: 2017

Citation:

Basu, Soumita, and Laura J. Shepherd. 2018. "Prevention in Pieces: Representing Conflict in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda." Global Affairs 3(4-5): 441-453.

Authors: Soumita Basu, Laura J. Shepherd

Abstract:

The Women, Peace and Security agenda is often operationalized across three priority areas: the participation of women in peace and security governance; the protection of women’s rights and bodies (specifically, but not limited to, conflict-related sexual violence); and the prevention of conflict. In this short paper, we explore violence prevention in more detail, and argue that it is of critical importance to define conflict as well as prevention. We draw on the illustrative examples of Australia, the UK and India to explain how this definitional work happens within the machinery of the state and the networks of civil society. Understanding how conflict is theorized by different actors in different locations not only gives insight into the tendency towards militarization in the WPS agenda but also can be interpreted as a manifestation of contestation over ownership of the WPS agenda and its location between the state and civil society.

Keywords: women, peace and security, UNSCR 1325, National Action Plans

Topics: Civil Society, Conflict Prevention, Gender, Women, Conflict, Peace and Security, Governance, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Rights, Women's Rights, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325, Sexual Violence, SV against Women, Violence Regions: Asia, South Asia, Europe, Northern Europe, Oceania Countries: Australia, India, United Kingdom

Year: 2018

Citation:

Stachowitsch, Saskia. 2015. “The Reconstruction of Masculinities in Global Politics: Gendering Strategies in the Field of Private Security.” Men and Masculinities 18(2): 363-386.

Author: Saskia Stachowitsch

Abstract:

The concept of masculinities has been central to the analysis of private security as a gendered phenomenon. This research has either focused on the identity constructions and practices of security contractors as men or on masculinity as a theoretical and ideological framework for making sense of security outsourcing. This article aims to overcome this dualism by developing a relational, strategic, and discursive understanding of masculinities and focusing on the gendering strategies that create them. These strategies are identified as masculinization of the market and feminization of the state, feminization and racialization of (some) security work, hypermasculinization as a critical or affirmative discourse, romanticizing the autonomous male bond, and militarization of private security. It is argued that private security as well as critical discourses on it integrate business, humanitarian, and militarized masculinities in a way that ultimately legitimizes masculinism and reconstructs masculinity as a privileged category in international politics.

Keywords: private security, feminist international relations, PMSCs, gendering strategies, masculinism

Topics: Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Masculinism, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Private Military & Security, Militarization, Security Regions: Americas, North America, Europe, Northern Europe Countries: United Kingdom, United States of America

Year: 2015

Citation:

Millar, Katharine M., and Joanna Tidy. 2017. “Combat as a Moving Target: Masculinities, the Heroic Soldier Myth, and Normative Martial Violence.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 142-60.

Authors: Katharine M. Millar, Joanna Tidy

Abstract:

This article problematizes the conceptualization and use of ‘combat’ within critical scholarship on masculinities, militaries, and war. We trace, firstly, how combat appears as an empirical category within traditional war studies scholarship, describing an ostensibly self-evident physical practice. We then examine how feminist and gender approaches – in contrast – reveal ‘combat’ as a normative imagination of martial violence. This imagination of violence is key to the constitution of the masculine ideal, and normalization of military force, through the heroic soldier myth. We argue, however, that despite this critical impulse, much of feminist and gender analysis exhibits conceptual ‘slippage’: combat is still often treated as a ‘common-sense’ empirical category – a thing that ‘is’ – in masculinities theorizing. This treatment of gendered-imaginary-as- empirics imports a set of normative investments that limit the extent to which the heroic soldier myth, and the political work that it undertakes, can be deconstructed. As a consequence, whilst we know how masculinities are constituted in relation to ‘combat’, we lack the corollary understanding of how masculinities constitute combat, and how the resulting imagination sustains military authority and the broader social acceptance of war. We argue that unpacking these dynamics and addressing this lacuna is key to the articulation of a meaningfully ‘critical’ gender and military studies.

Keywords: combat, military masculinities, critical, soldiers, violence

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Feminisms, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Violence

Year: 2017

Citation:

Bulmer, Sarah, and Maya Eichler. 2017. “Unmaking Militarized Masculinity: Veterans and the Project of Military-to-Civilian Transition.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 161-81.

Authors: Sarah Bulmer, Maya Eichler

Abstract:

Feminist scholarship on war and militarization has typically focussed on the making of militarized masculinity. However, in this article, we shed light on the process of ‘unmaking’ militarized masculinity through the experiences of veterans transitioning from military to civilian life. We argue that in the twenty-first century, veterans’ successful reintegration into civilian society is integral to the legitimacy of armed force in Western polities and is therefore a central concern of policymakers, third-sector service providers, and the media. But militarized masculinity is not easily unmade. Veterans often struggle with their transition to civilian life and the negotiation of military and civilian gender norms. They may have an ambivalent relationship with the state and the military. Furthermore, militarized masculinity is embodied and experienced, and has a long and contradictory afterlife in veterans themselves. Attempts to unmake militarized masculinity in the figure of the veteran challenge some of the key concepts currently employed by feminist scholars of war and militarization. In practice, embodied veteran identities refuse a totalizing conception of what militarized masculinity might be, and demonstrate the limits of efforts to exceptionalize the military, as opposed to the civilian, aspects of veteran identity. In turn, the very liminality of this ‘unmaking’ troubles and undoes neat categorizations of military/civilian and their implied masculine/feminine gendering. We suggest that an excessive focus on the making of militarized masculinity has limited our capacity to engage with the dynamic, co-constitutive, and contradictory processes which shape veterans’ post-military lives.

Keywords: militarized masculinity, veterans, experience, Gender, military-to-civilian transitions, militarization

Topics: Combatants, Male Combatants, DDR, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Discourses, Livelihoods, Militarized Livelihoods, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Peacebuilding

Year: 2017

Citation:

Chisholm, Amanda. 2017. “Clients, Contractors, and the Everyday Masculinities in Global Private Security.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 120–41. 

Author: Amanda Chisholm

Abstract:

This article explores the intimate relationships between the client and the security contractor. It draws upon autoethnography to bring into focus the client/contractor encounters and demonstrate how such encounters (re)shape the marginal and hegemonic men/masculinities of the security industry – masculinities which work to legitimize not only who and what are appropriate security providers but also how value/valuation of security is understood and practised. As such it contributes to the broader debates about gender and war by (1) demonstrating how the researcher is always embedded in and shaped by the research she produces; and (2) by bringing to the fore the multitude of masculinities, beyond the hegemonic militarized, that emerge in private security markets.

Keywords: autoethnography, military, militarization, private military and security companies, masculinities, feminist political economy

Topics: Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Private Military & Security, Militaries, Militarization, Political Economies, Security

Year: 2017