Researching War

Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics

Annick T. R. Wibben

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317418306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Researching War provides a unique overview of varied feminist contributions to the study of war through case studies from around the world. Written by well-respected scholars, each chapter explicitly showcases the role of feminist methodological, ethical and political commitments in the research process.

Designed to be useful for teaching also, the book provides insight into feminist research practices for students and scholars wanting to further their understanding what it means to study war (and other issues) from a feminist perspective. To this end, every author follows a four-part structure in the presentation of their case study: outlining a research puzzle, explaining the chosen approach, describing the findings and, finally, offering a reflection on the feminist commitments that guided the research.

This book:

• Provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on war by drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, peace research, postcolonial theory, queer studies, security studies, and women's studies;
• Showcases a multiplicity of experiences with war and violence, emphasizing everyday experiences of war and violence with accounts from around the world;
• Challenges stereotypical accounts of women, violence, and war by pointing to contradictions and unexpected continuities as well as unexpected findings made possible by adopting a feminist perspective;
• Teases out linkages between various forms of political violence (against women, but increasingly also by women);
• Discusses theoretical and methodological innovation in feminist research on war.

This book will be essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Security Studies, Gender and Conflict, Women and War, Feminist International Relations and Research Methods.

Part I In Wars

1 Chechen political violence as desperation

What feminist discourse analysis reveals

Caron E. Gentry

DOI: 10.4324/9781315687490-2

In gender studies, we often look at how binaries (also of gender) operate, in an effort to deconstruct them. Within a binary, one element is prioritized and valued over the other element. Gender is a social construct of differences between masculinity and femininity: masculinity is and has been prioritized or valorized over femininity (Peterson & Runyan, 2009). We can also break down what are considered masculine traits versus feminine traits. The West often values masculine rationality over feminine irrationality; logic over illogic (hysteria); stoic passivity over emotions; resoluteness over flightiness. However, gender reaches beyond individual representations and expectations of masculinity, femininity, and queer and transgender identity. In short, ‘gender is not reducible to the individual subject’s experience of it, but it is one of the central nodes of meaning through which a social order gives me my place in being’ (Mann, 2011, p. 22). Therefore, gender acts as an apparatus that underpins how actors order the world and how actors are ordered by it (Mann, 2011). As feminist scholars, we examine how the gender apparatus informs and constructs power structures, differentials, and binaries.

This chapter will study how terrorist actors, particularly Chechens, are ordered by the gender apparatus. Simply put, as J. Ann Tickner (1992) and Christine Sylvester (1999) have argued previously, states are the legitimate masculine actor in the Westphalian system. While this creates different operational binaries between states and non-state actors, this chapter will demonstrate that terrorist organizations are constructed as illegitimate feminized actors (Sjoberg, 2009; Gentry, 2014; Gentry & Sjoberg, 2014). This means the Chechen conflict is gendered: the Russian state has been constructed as a masculine, legitimate state and the Chechen sub-state actors as irrational and desperate, and thus, feminized.

Following a series of Palestinian women’s suicide attacks from October 2002 to 2004, it seemed as if something ‘new’ was happening with women who engaged in political violence. In October of 2002, Chechen women were part of the 40-person team that captured and held 850 hostages at a Moscow theater. The siege lasted two-and-a-half days and it ended when the Russian Alpha Group forces pumped an unknown, probably illegal, nerve gas into the theater, killing all of the Chechen hostage-takers and 130 of the hostages. Throughout the summer of 2003 and ending in August 2004, other Chechen women committed a series of suicide attacks in Moscow.

The newspapers seemed to focus on these women who were dressed in black, possibly hijabs, and explosive belts. During the Moscow hostage siege, these mysterious women pointed guns at hostages but were simultaneously reassuring and kind to them, according to survivors. Many of the photos that accompanied these stories showed the Chechen women dead in the theater seats. These disturbing images proved that even though the Russians used illegal nerve gas against both the hostage-takers and hostages, they also went through and shot the hostage-takers in the head post-mortem. Other images included the Chechen women’s bodies being transported away in busses, having been put in the seats, sitting up, and leaning against the fully transparent windows. In other words, these images—a form of discourse—were creepy.

Post-structual feminists recognize that discourse, as written, spoken, or visual text, reveals constructions of power, legitimacy, and status. The images that surrounded women’s involvement in Chechen political violence troubled me because they are evidence of a gendered binary used to construct Russian legitimacy and Chechen illegitimacy. Chechen ‘terrorists’ became props to demonstrate Russian military superiority (the reliance on the nerve gas, the heavy-handed raid that killed one-eighth of the hostages, and the display of the dead bodies) and thus, their lives and bodies were undeserving of respect; they were disproportionately feared (killed by both the gas and a gun). The newspaper accounts attributed the women’s actions to the men and the patriarchal communities that surrounded them. While not knowing the exact motivations of Chechen women, my feminist training led me to query the intentions and motivations behind this rhetoric, which dismissed and discounted women’s agency.

For instance, ‘Black Widows’ is a moniker given to Chechen women who participate in suicide bombings along the border of Chechnya as well as in Moscow. While the media claims the Russian government coined the phrase, and the Russian government points the finger back at the media, the phrase is meant to indicate that the women who participated did so because they had lost husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers to the Chechen struggle for national independence from Russia. Because of this loss, the women were believed to be enacting revenge against the Russian state. This is a particularly gendered rationale: the Chechen women’s motivation is attributed to personal loss, not to political struggle. This is evident when one looks at the discourse of desperation surrounding Chechen violence. Desperation, like many labels, employs power. When desperation is defined, it is clear that it is not just highly gendered but shares some significant attributes with neo-Orientalist perspectives on Muslims. Further, Chechen society was often depicted as desperate because the socio-political situation had so eroded that the people had no norms and values to guide them. This devalorizes all Chechens through implications of irrationality.

Thus, this chapter will examine the discourse of desperation that surrounds Chechen resistance to Russian imperialism through discourse analysis, using previous research to do so. In 2011, Kathryn Whitworth and I published ‘The Discourse of Desperation: The Intersections of Neo-Orientalism, Gender, and Islam in the Chechen Struggle’ in the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. This chapter, like our article, argues that desperation is reliant upon gendered, racialized, and religious assumptions that discredit Chechens and their cause. The chapter will first introduce the puzzle of gendered Russian-Chechen history and its relationships with neo-Orientalism and new terrorism. Then it will turn to a discussion of discourse analysis and how this method can be used to reveal the power structures in this conflict. The impact of these power structures will be further discussed in the findings, and then I will explain just how necessary feminist thought was to studying this particular problem.

The Puzzle: The Gendered History of the Chechen Conflict

The Chechen struggle is a protracted one. While many may only conceive of the conflict as dating back to the end of the Cold War, Chechnya was actually a colony of czarist Imperial Russia. Chechnya is in the Caucasus, a region located between the Black and Caspian Seas that includes Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, and Georgia. Chechnya is not very ethnically diverse. Sixty-seven percent of the population is Chechen; 25.5 percent is Russian; the rest is comprised of neighboring ethnicities, as well as Ukrainians and Armenians. Sunni Islam is the predominant religion practiced by Chechens, whereas the Russian population is primarily Russian Orthodox. Post-9/11, the Chechen conflict has been described as part of the supposed radical Islamist global conflict as led by Al Qaeda. However, Islam was not the predominant factor in Chechnya’s centuries-long nationalist resistance to Russian imperialism.

The Russian Empire began military advances against Chechnya, and neighboring Georgia and Adyghe, in the early 1700s. Even as neighboring states, such as Georgia and Dagestan, acquiesced to Russia’s imperial expansion, the Chechens continued to resist, waging wars in the late 1700s and early 1800s before Chechnya was incorporated into the Russian empire in 1858. During the Russian Civil War (1917–22), Chechnya joined Ingushetia, North Ossetia-Alania, and Dagestan in establishing a separate Republic of the Mountaineers of the North Caucasus, which existed only between 1917 and 1920. In June 1920, the Red Army of Bolshevik Russia occupied this region, subsuming it within the Soviet Union.

Chechen resistance continued, and Chechens collaborated with the Nazis as a way of undermining Soviet rule. Due to this, Premier Joseph Stalin deported the entire Chechen population in 1944 to Kazakhstan. One-quarter of the population died in the process. Even though the Chechens were given the right to return in 1957 and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev restored the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Russification policies, which demanded Russian proficiency and other cultural tests, as well as settling ethnic Russians in the Republic, continued in the region.

At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chechens fought a devastatingly brutal war for national independence from 1994, resulting in Russian military withdrawal and de facto independence in 1996. After several bombings and hostage-takings along the Chechen-Russian border and the suspicious bombing of apartment buildings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk (which some observers believe were actually orchestrated by the Russian FSB in order to win public support for intervention), Russia re-invaded Chechnya in 1999. Both sides used particularly vicious tactics targeting civilian populations in the second war. The Russians razed villages, committed acts of ethnic cleansing, used rape as a weapon, and tortured many captives. For their part, the Chechens carried out bombings, attacks, and sieges, again along the Chechen border and in Moscow. While supposedly the second war ended in 2000 with Russia as the victor, insurgent violence continued over the next decade.

It is estimated that between 25,000 and 200,000 Chechen militants and civilians and between 8,000 and 40,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the second war (Radio Free Europe, 2005). This means that roughly 18 percent of the Chechen population was killed in the second war alone, based on Chechen population counts of 1.1 million in 2002 and 1.2 million people in 2010 (CNN 2015). We can assume, therefore, that nearly all Chechens have lost relatives or close friends in the struggle. To imply that the Black Widows’ sole raison d’être is the loss of male family members is thus misleading. Instead, this depiction is better explained by analyzing it as part of a specifically gendered rationale in a gendered conflict. In other words, the Russian government’s and media’s insistence that women’s involvement in the conflict stems from the loss of family members is reliant upon gendered ideas of women’s role in society (as family-oriented) and a lack of rationality. This supports and feeds into a discourse about the irrationality of Chechen society as a whole and Chechen terrorism in particular, which is a gendered construction of the conflict.

Irrationality and Desperation: Gendered Neo-Orientalism

In the media, the language of loss—more specifically the widowhood of women—is linked to a more profound condition: desperation. Media accounts of the Black Widows implicitly and explicitly stated that Chechen society had changed for the worse and women’s participation in the political violence was indicative of this. The Chechen population, it was insinuated, was broken, destroyed, and desperate. Since the Chechen population was considered desperate, there were no boundaries limiting their political resistance against Russia. How, and in relation to which other markers, are these claims of desperation constructed? What does this mean for the Chechen struggle and the Russian response to it?

Desperation here is gendered; it is tied to emotions and especially hysteria, which already are feminized (as opposed to reason, which is masculinized). This gendering through language is used to feminize, and thus devalorize, all of Chechen society. However, feminists are concerned not just with gender but also how groups are marginalized on the basis of race, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front-other Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Feminists study war
• PART I In Wars
• PART II After Wars
• PART III Everyday Wars
• Index