Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security

Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd, Laura Sjoberg, Caron E. Gentry, Laura J. Shepherd, Laura Sjoberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315525075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This handbook provides a comprehensive look at the study of gender and security in global politics.

The volume is based on the core argument that gender is conceptually necessary to thinking about central questions of security; analytically important for thinking about cause and effect in security; and politically important for considering possibilities of making the world better in the future. Contributions to the volume look at various aspects of studying gender and security through diverse lenses that engage diverse feminisms, with diverse policy concerns, and working with diverse theoretical contributions from scholars of security more broadly. It is grouped into four thematic sections:

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• Gendered approaches to security (including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches);

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• Gendered insecurities in global politics (including the ways insecurity in global politics is distributed and read on the basis of gender);

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• Gendered practices of security (including how policy practice and theory work together, or do not);

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• Gendered security institutions (across a wide variety of spaces and places in global politics).

This handbook will be of great interest to students of gender studies, security studies and IR in general.

PART I
Gendered approaches to security

1
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN/VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD

Toward a feminist conceptualization of global violence

Jacqui True and Maria Tanyag

Today’s world is characterized by escalating insecurity and conflict. Promoting sustainable peace is a global challenge that goes beyond a concern for particular fragile and/or conflicted-affected territories. Feminist conceptualizations of violence offer less partial and more encompassing analysis of all forms of harm within and across borders. With a gendered lens, feminist analysts observe and connect violence at the micro level of the family, household, and community with violence at the macro level, in production relations, vis-à-vis states and non-state actors (Peterson 2003; Tickner 1992). Understanding the connections among different forms of violence, their causes and its consequences, in a global context has never been more important. As well, feminist perspectives make visible the relationship among different forms of violence such as physical, psychological, and economic violence with structural discrimination and symbolic harms. Importantly, they highlight how violence in times of crisis and transition is rooted in pre-existing gendered inequalities that cut across and often reinforce hierarchies of class, race/ethnicity, nationality/citizenship, religion, and sexuality. To achieve global peace and security, a feminist approach strives to be inclusive, not by adding violence against women to the list of violence to be eliminated, but by analysing the intersections of power relations across all sites of belonging and strife.

In this chapter, we build on the significant contributions of feminist International Relations (IR) scholars to theorizing the continuum of violence.¹ IR feminists explore broader and alternative meanings to peace and security that challenge the traditionally state-centric, top-down, and militarized notions of security in mainstream IR. First, global politics remains male-dominated despite recent progress globally and within states in increasing women’s political and economic leadership. Feminists contend that definitions of war, security, and peace, when drawn largely from male perspectives, tend to view these concepts in narrow terms that privilege masculine traits and activities. Second, the international system – from states’ foreign policy and diplomacy, to macro- and micro-economic processes, and cultural globalization – reflects gendered hierarchies built on and sustained by constructions of masculinities and femininities. These gender hierarchies perpetuate artificial distinctions between public and private spheres, the political and the economic, productive and reproductive economies, as well as crisis and non-crisis settings. They obscure the continuum of violence across these interconnected spheres that serves the interests of privileged groups such as, white, heterosexual, elite men and also elite women given their relative structural privileges secured through bargaining with dominant gender norms and inequalities (Kandiyoti 1988). The failure to see the connections among different situations and types of violence comes at the cost of the marginalization, violence toward, and bodily depletion of women and girls as well as other feminized, minority groups.

We outline three key components to a feminist reconceptualization of violence in a crisis-prone world. The first part of the chapter identifies how violence occurs in layers drawing attention to the mutual constitution of insecurities occurring at household, community, state, and global levels. We use the term layers rather than sites of violence to emphasize the ways by which global processes directly and indirectly enable violence at subnational levels, and vice versa. The second part examines the equal importance of and interconnections across different forms of violence as physical, structural, and symbolic harms. Recognizing the continuum across forms of violence is crucial, especially given contemporary securitization and crisis narratives that typically isolate physical violence from broader structural inequalities and symbolic discrimination. In the third part of this chapter, we demonstrate how inclusive and lasting peace demands that we bridge the gaps in attention and resource allocation between immediate or emergency humanitarian assistance and long-term socioeconomic development for crisis situations. Integrating these three components is necessary for attending to the multidimensional threats to ‘human’ security.

In May 2016, the first World Humanitarian Summit was held in Istanbul, Turkey involving 9,000 participants from 173 member states, including 55 heads of state and government, hundreds of private sector representatives, and thousands of people from civil society and non-governmental organizations in attendance (UN Secretary General 2016). The Summit was convened in response to unprecedented levels of human suffering brought about by civil strife, armed conflicts, natural disasters, and pervasive violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws (UN Secretary General 2016). According to the global report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), in 2015 alone there were 27.8 million new displacements in 127 countries; 8.6 million of the total was associated with conflict and violence in 28 countries, and 19.2 million with disasters in 113 countries (IDMC 2016: 7). Moreover, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) argues that in our current crisis-prone world this means that many women and girls are experiencing heightened levels of violence and vulnerability (UNFPA 2015). They bear distinctive, gender-specific harms while in displacement such as heightened exposure to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, unwanted and forced pregnancies, maternal mortality, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). What does it mean to reconceptualize global violence in a fragile, crisis-prone world? How and in what ways, can a feminist understanding of peace and security allow us to make sense of the multiple crisis narratives in global politics?

Revisiting the feminist continuum of violence

The continuum of violence is rendered visible from the standpoint or ‘situated knowledges’ of the oppressed (Haraway 1988). Specifically, a feminist standpoint epistemology examines how global and/or national crises permeate, and are built upon the lives of the most marginalized especially indigenous and internally displaced women and girls (Harding 1991, see also Tickner 2015). Security, from their standpoints, brings into view the multiple and overlapping hierarchical relationships of power that undermine their human dignity and capabilities. Their experiences of recurring armed conflicts, economic recessions, and environmental disasters pushes us to rethink binary logics that sever the interconnectedness of various political, economic, and socio-cultural insecurities from the individual to the community and the state and global society.

Global moments and spaces designated as ‘crisis’ or ‘in crisis’ might serve as critical junctures where dominant understandings of and solutions to attain security can potentially be reoriented. Drawing on feminist conceptualizations of violence allows us to critically examine and harness the rhetoric and momentum created in crises to address the pre-existing violence and injustices that women and girls routinely face in their households, communities, and states that are exacerbated in extraordinary circumstances. As Sjoberg, Hudson, and Weber (2015: 530) argue, “it is important to pay as much attention to what is not swept up in the rhetoric of crisis as to what is included”. This involves the equal investigation of where representations of crisis are drawing our attention to and away from particular understandings of peace and security.

In a crisis-prone world, feminist reconceptualizations of violence question representations of armed conflicts, economic recessions, and environmental disasters as ‘exceptional’ or separate from everyday political, economic, and social structural inequalities that define human capabilities and individual life chances. For example, Cynthia Enloe notes that in investigating the ‘mundane’ in conjunction with dramatic events, we begin to reveal “that power was deeply at work where it was least apparent” (2011: 447). Because of their explicit focus on scrutinising silences and boundaries of knowledge, feminist research methodologies offer the range of toolkits for understanding the political nature of our precarious world (Ackerly and True 2010; Wibben 2016). In the following sections, we demonstrate, through a diverse set of case studies and empirical evidence, that lasting peace and security also occurs on a continuum – from the absence of inter- and intra-state conflicts to inclusive and non-violent economies where rights to bodily autonomy and integrity are recognized.

Layers of violence: linking the personal with the international

Contrary to most mainstream IR scholars who regard the global decline in inter- and intrastate violent deaths as evidence of a decline in violence per se, “feminist scholars analyse private sphere domestic violence as both a form of political violence (Peterson 1992; Cockburn 2010) and a precondition for more visible violence against women in the public sphere” (True 2015a: 555). Security is not just the absence of inter- and intra-state armed conflicts but also of women’s and girls’ bodily autonomy and integrity especially within their families, clans, and kinship networks which typically remain invisible, underreported, or uncounted (see Davies, True and Tanyag 2016). SGBV perpetrated against women and girls at the household and community levels frequently fuels and exacerbates intra-group conflicts, including wars, and financial crises and environmental disasters (True 2012).

Armed conflicts

In conflict situations, feminists have shown and continue to show, how patriarchal gender relations are at the heart of militarism, especially discourses of masculinities and femininities through which the state as well as any armed group draws the complicity of both men and women (Enloe 1989; Tickner 1992). This is evident in how armed conflicts, whether interstate wars or clan, and one-sided violence, rely upon or mobilize the valorization of violent masculinities of male combatants, as well as the feminized representation of dutiful mothers, wives, and daughters who through acts of sacrifice support these conflicts even in so far as directly participating in violence themselves. Further, the gendered construction of crises helps legitimate special powers by the state even at the expense of civil liberties in responding to national security threats via its projected image of the patriarchal provider of the family and protector writ large to citizens, especially women and children, within and outside of its borders (True 2015b: 420).

The interconnectedness of various layers of violence is clearly demonstrated through the prevalence of low-intensity, protracted armed conflicts in the Asia Pacific region where egregious SGBV typically goes unreported due to significant reporting constraints. For example, Davies, True and Tanyag (2016) argue “if a conflict is too small-scale to be recorded, the SGBV which is linked to it, will also go unnoticed”. Using the case of a ‘successful’ peace process in Mindanao, Philippines between the national government and the ethnic minority Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), they show that clan/kinship and intra-community conflicts are not ‘securitized’ owing to their typical exclusion from national peace negotiations. Consequently, we are unable to know the full extent of SGBV perpetrated against women and girls on the basis that they serve as symbolic carriers of clan and ethnic identities. And yet, silencing experiences of SGBV within clans and ethnic groupings might allow for national peace agreements to be signed. However, this does not mean an end to the violence women and girls experience in their households and communities.

The precarious lives experienced by internally displaced persons (IDPs), minority groups, and indigenous communities globally stand in contrast to the ‘declinist’ thesis that represents a global decline in war and violence based on state-recorded violent deaths (True 2015a). However, a feminist continuum of violence reveals this claim as deeply flawed because it obscures “interpersonal violence, and implicitly denies its relevance to international security” (True 2015a: 555). First, studies have shown that while men and boys suffer direct deaths during wartime, mortality for women and girls tends to increase after conflicts as a result of the lingering socio-economic consequences of conflict such as poverty and continued militarism (Ormhaug, Meier and Hernes 2009; UNFPA 2015; The Brookings-LSE Project 2014). Second, research by Li and Wen (2005) which uses a time-series cross-national analysis, suggests that, over time, women’s mortality in war is as high as men’s largely due to the long-term effects of war. That is, gendered indirect deaths add up to the same levels as direct deaths thus underscoring the importance of employing a feminist continuum of violence perspective.

Financial crises

Similarly, the permeability among different layers of insecurity has been made evident in the case of critiques on how the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) legitimized severe austerity measures, particularly cutbacks on social welfare services while leaving neoliberal economic models and undemocratic financial institutions intact (Hozic and True 2016). Consequently, poor families who are largely dependent on public services continue to suffer, especially women and girls and in households with intense demands for care work such as those with the elderly, infirm, or disabled (see also Elson 2009). Moreover, the feminization of social welfare service means that cutbacks resulted in job losses that had ripple effects on the well-being of households with female breadwinners employed in these sectors. Studies have shown direct links between economic strains caused by global economic crises and transitions, and intra-household violence such as heightened rates of domestic violence and suicide (Sutton 2010; True 2012). For labour exporting countries in Asia, the GFC is merely one manifestation in a series of recurrent social, economic, and political crises rooted in global capitalism and neoliberal globalization (Spitzer and Piper 2014). Hence, survival of household and national economies continues to be built on the backs of mostly women migrants whose vulnerability to violence and exploitation are intensified during crisis periods (Spitzer and Piper 2014; Sassen 2000).

By contrast, the GFC benefited economic elites and wealthy states, demonstrating how it has served to retrench the neoliberal global political economy rather than reform it fundamentally (Hozic and True 2016). At the heart of the crisis, as scholars argue, is how economic systems continue to be built on rewarding “masculinist modes of control [that] pervade the practices of both financialization and militarization” (Hozic and True 2016: 5). Feminist political economy analy...