Gender, Violence and Security

Discourse as Practice

Laura Shepherd

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848136816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do understandings of the relationships between gender, violence, security and the international inform policy and practice in which these notions are central? What are the practical implications of basing policy on problematic discourses? In this highly original poststructural feminist critique, the author maps the discursive terrains of institutions, both NGOs and the UN, which formulate and implement resolutions and guides of practice that affect gender issues in the context of international policy practices. The author investigates UN Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in 2000 to address gender issues in conflict areas, in order to examine the discursive construction of security policy that takes gender seriously. In doing so, she argues that language is not merely descriptive of social/political reality but rather constitutive of it. Moving from concept to discourse, and in turn to practice, the author analyses the ways in which the resolution's discursive construction had an enormous influence over the practicalities of its implementation, and how the resulting tensions and inconsistencies in its construction contributed to its failures. The book argues for a re-conceptualisation of gendered violence in conjunction with security, in order to avoid partial and highly problematic understandings of their practical relationship. Drawing together theoretical work on discourses of gender violence and international security, sexualised violence in war, gender and peace processes, and the domestic-international dichotomy with her own rigorous empirical investigation, the author develops a compelling discourse-theoretical analysis that promises to have far-reaching impact in both academic and policy environments.

1 | INTRODUCTION

Women’s bodies have actually become battle grounds … the violence is all about destroying … the inbuilt strength of a woman to build a community.

Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng, Uganda, 2006

We have documented … systematic sexual violence, committed by the Burmese military as a weapon of war in the ongoing conflict … where women are raped … in order to terrorize the women, and the local community, morally, psychologically, and also physically.

Nang Charm Tong, Burma, 2006

We’ve had reports from women … about some very difficult situations that lesbians have been going through. There is more violence towards them because they’ve broken away from the gender role expected of them. This is why there is more repression…. they suffer direct repression on their bodies and their lives.

Elisabeth Castillo, Colombia, 2006¹

These personal narratives, provided by women reflecting on the difficulties of coordinating research on and activism against gendered violence, are disturbing to say the least. Taken from the website of Amnesty International’s ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ campaign, the above testimonies draw attention not only to the crucial need to better the experiences of women who live under threat of violence, but also to the conceptual and practical impediments to combating violence against women in contemporary academic and policy environments. In the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), one of the most salient obstacles is the ways in which gendered violence has been conventionally and conceptually precluded as an object of study (Peterson and Runyan 1999: 115–17).

Feminist challenges to the well-defined and equally well-defended boundaries of IR² have drawn attention not only to the potential of transgressing those boundaries but also to the importance of understanding (gendered) violence in relation to security.³ Turning the analytical focus of this research to gendered violence is motivated by two related concerns. ‘[V]iolence establishes social relationships … it marks and makes bodies … it constitutes subjects even as it renders them incomplete’ (D’Cruze and Rao 2004: 503). This latter understanding of violence, as constitutive of subjectivity, has historically been absented from academic theorizing of security, where violence is conventionally conceived of as a functional mechanism within an anarchic international system.⁴ Second, given that violence ‘marks and makes bodies’, I seek to understand the types of body that are marked and made through violence that is specifically gendered – that is, violence that ‘emerges from a profound desire to keep the binary order of gender natural or necessary’ (Butler 2004: 35). Stemming from a desire to formulate a theorization of security in relation to violence, I argue that studying the subjects produced through gendered violence in the context of debates over the meaning and content of security provides more coherent accounts of both violence and security.

The notion that identity is central to theorizing security has been well explicated by scholars critical of conventional, state-centric approaches to security.⁵ ‘Recognising gender as a significant dimension of identity and security opens the door to non-state-based views of security and aptly illustrates how identity shapes individual and collective security needs’ (Hoogensen and Rottem 2004: 156). However, most of these critical voices seek to interject into academic debates on security by broadening the accepted agenda of security – to include the recognition of multiple phenomena, from earthquakes to economic deprivation, as threatening to security – and proliferating the referent objects of security discourse, such that security is no longer solely the concern of states but also of communities, societies and individuals. While scholars of security have contested the parameters of debates about security, and feminist scholars of security have drawn attention to the importance of gender as a category of analysis, there is little work being done on the ways in which the organizational logics of security and violence are discursively constituted (see Shepherd and Weldes 2007).

CONTRIBUTIONS OF A FEMINIST POSTSTRUCTURALIST⁶

I identify myself as a feminist researcher, and recognize that this entails a curiosity about ‘the concept, nature and practice of gender’ (Zalewski 1995: 341). This curiosity questions the ways in which gender is made meaningful in social/political interactions and the practices – or performances – through which gender configures boundaries of subjectivity. In this book, I treat gender as a noun, a verb and a logic that is product/productive of the performances of violence and security I investigate here. I espouse a feminism that seeks to challenge conventional constructions of gendered subjectivity and political community, while acknowledging the intellectual heritage of feminisms that seek to claim rights on behalf of a stable subject and maintain fidelity to a regime of truth that constitutes the universal category of ‘women’ (Butler 2004: 8–11). While a feminist project that does not assume a stable ontology of gender may seem problematic, I argue, along with Judith Butler, that ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (1999: 189).

A focus on articulation entails a further commitment to the analytical centrality of language – or, as I see it, discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues that an integral part of feminist theory is the willingness to ‘tackle the question of the language available for theoretical purposes and the constraints it places on what can be said’ (1987: 479). To me, this aspect of feminist theory is definitive of my feminist politics. If ‘men and women are the stories that have been told about “men” and “women”’ (Sylvester 1994: 4), and the way that ‘men’ and ‘women’ both act and are acted upon, then the language used to tell those stories and describe those actions is not just worthy of analytical attention but can form the basis of an engaged critique. Furthermore, an approach that recognizes that there is more to the discursive constitution of gender – the stories that are told about ‘men’ and ‘women’ – than linguistic practices can enable thinking gender differently.

Alison Stone, reading Butler’s work on feminism and political theory, argues that this type of approach constitutes a ‘genealogical feminism’, in which the organizational logics of feminism – historically assumed to be ‘women’ and/or ‘gender’ – are ‘continually re-enacted through corporeal activities’ (2005: 12). This approach allows for research that investigates the ways in which ‘women’ as subjects and objects act, speak, write and represent themselves, are represented, written about, spoken about and acted on. There is no singular feminine subject or feminist approach, just as, in my understanding, the notion of a singular feminist project is unsustainable. My study therefore seeks to contribute to contemporary debates in its desire to think differently the concepts of gender, violence, security and the international by investigating how these concepts are (re)presented and (re)produced in a particular discursive context.⁷

Espousing a poststructural politics is not always acknowledged to be compatible with a commitment to a feminist politics.⁸ Traversing this terrain entails constructing a politics that speaks of ‘undecidability’ (Elam 1994: 32). With reference to the difficulties of formulating a feminist politics without a definitive subject, Diane Elam argues that ‘undecidability forms part of a situation of representation, political action, or ethical judgement … We may not yet know what women can do or be, but feminism has an obligation at the very least to think about what this might mean’ (Elam 1994: 32). Thus, the theory/practice⁹ of feminist poststructuralisms in whatever guise does not represent ‘simply another oxymoron, a new quagmire of contradiction for feminists to sink in’ (Moi 1990: 368) but rather a dynamic and thorough exploration of what feminism itself ‘might mean’.

This in no way suggests that other feminisms have not enabled the articulation of critiques of gender and other relations of power that are valid, vigorous and vital. My political consciousness developed through the tracing of feminist work in the discipline of anthropology that drew attention to the ‘margins, silences and bottom rungs’ of the discipline.¹⁰ It was from this perspective that I learned what I meant when I called myself a feminist, and what it meant politically to pay close attention to the development of gendered subjectivities. This background gave me a strong appreciation for the particular rather than the abstract, the specific rather than the general, and most of all for the practices of power that are product/productive of ways of being in the world. The value in telling a different story is in the telling, in illustrating the ways in which these stories are constructed and could be constructed differently. The transience is best encapsulated in this quote from de Lauretis:

This shift implies, in my opinion, a dis-placement and a self-displacement: leaving or giving up a place that is safe, that is ‘home’ … for another place that is unknown and risky, … a place of discourse from which speaking and thinking are at best tentative, uncertain and unguaranteed. But the leaving is not a choice: one could not live there in the first place. (cited in Brooks 1997: 211)

INTRODUCING 1325

In this study, I explore the discursive constitution of concepts of (gender) violence and (international) security in particular texts.¹¹ In using the texts that I do as vehicles for analysis I emphatically do not want to suggest that the documents as they stand are too problematic to serve as the foundation for academic and activist work that seeks to combat gender violence and frame such violence as an international security concern. The texts themselves are treated as vehicles for the theoretical investigation I undertake here: an exploration of the potential for reconceptualizing the concepts of (gender) violence and (international) security. However, the study undertaken here is explicitly not ‘merely’ theoretical, or ‘academic’ in the pejorative sense of the term.¹² My interest in the concepts of (international) security and (gender) violence is indeed motivated by a desire to see whether these concepts could be reconceived, in keeping with a commitment to thinking these concepts differently. However, I also consider the implications of such a reconceptualization on policy as well as academic work. I wish to provide for those undertaking such work the possibility of alternative concepts with which to proceed. Therefore, this book, despite its theoretical leaning and heritage, does indeed have an avowedly practical application.

In undertaking this study, I wish to contribute to both policy and academic debates. I offer a reconceptualization of (international) security and (gender) violence through my analysis, drawing on bodies of academic literature to establish the limits of the relevant discourses. Furthermore, I illustrate the ways in which these concepts, as they currently inform policy and academic debates, are both a product of and productive of the difficulties described above. This book uses United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, and related documentation from the United Nations and the NGO Working Group for Women, Peace and Security, as a vehicle for the analysis of the question, ‘How are the concepts of (international) security and (gender) violence discursively constituted, and with what effects?’ These two institutions both claim a degree of author-ity over the Resolution,¹³ the United Nations through the Security Council and the NGO Working Group through the advocacy of its members that, as they claim, successfully resulted in the adoption of the Resolution (NGO WG 2005).

UNSCR 1325 was adopted in 2000 with the aim of ensuring that all efforts towards peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction, as well as the conduct of armed conflict itself, would entail sensitivity towards gendered violence and gendered inequalities. The Resolution is an appropriate vehicle for this analysis, providing as it does an articulation of the concepts of gender, violence, security and the international with which I am concerned. The Resolution refers to ‘the primary responsibility of the Security Council under the Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security’ (UNSC 2000a: Preamble) and, further, to the need for the international community to ‘protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse’ (UNSC 2000a: Article 10) in the provision of security.

Thus, I treat UNSCR 1325 as a site at which discourses of (international) security and (gender) violence are in contact, a site at which it is possible to identify different articulations of the concepts of gender, violence, security and the international that constitute different discourses of (gender) violence and (international) security. Through discourse-theoretical analysis, I explore the tensions and inconsistencies that are product/productive of the contact of these discourses. That is, specific conceptualizations of security (as ‘international’) and violence (as ‘gender’) inform the Resolution. Through my analysis I unpick the discursive construction of these concepts and investigate the implications of the Resolution, and therefore the concepts that are product/productive of it, for policy and research in this area. I conclude that the organization of the Resolution around liberal concepts of international security and gender violence suggests that transformation of social/political community can only be achieved through processes of peace(state)building and gender mainstreaming.¹⁴ In developing a critique of these processes, I argue that they cannot deliver the radical reforms that UNSCR 1325 purports to seek.

Academic and advocacy research that exists on UNSCR 1325 affirms the significance of the Resolution, arguing for instance that

Resolution 1325 is a watershed political framework that makes women – and a gender perspective – relevant to negotiating peace agreements, planning refugee camps and peacekeeping operations and reconstructing war-torn societies. It makes the pursuit of gender equality relevant to every single Council action, ranging from mine clearance to elections to security sector reform. (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002: 3)

UNSCR 1325 has been lauded as ‘unique’ (Cohn 2004: 8–9), and has provided governments and non-government actors alike with a comprehensive set of tools with which to approach the issue of conflict resolution through a gendered lens. In a survey of civil society activity, ‘[o]ut of a total of 44 respondents, 38 indicated that they use 1325 in their work on women, peace and security issues’ (NGO WG 2004: 5).

However, it has also been recognized that ‘peace agreements, electoral and judicial reform and government restructuring are only as good as their implementation’ (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002: 84). The capacities of UNSCR 1325, such as they are, while potentially enabling the redress of gendered inequalities in conflict and post-conflict situations, have largely been lost in translation in the Resolution’s journey from adoption to advocacy tool. It has been argued that the implementation of policy aimed at ameliorating the situations of women can function to misrepresent the involvement of women in processes of reconstruction by sustaining the women-as-peacemaker stereotype (Pankhurst 2004: 38; see also Whitbread 2005; Wilson 2005). Also, such ‘gender-sensitive’ policy is ...