Science, Panjab University CHD.
Paper Coordinator Dr. Jayati Srivastava
Shibashis Chatterjee
Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Professor, Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Author Sneha Banerjee School of International
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Content Reviewer Dr. Jayati Srivastava Associate Professor, School
of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Language Editor Dr. Jayati Srivastava Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Component-I(B)- Module Structure
GENDER AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
What is Feminism?
International Politics Through the ‘Gender’
Lens
a) Hegemonic Masculinity b) A Feminist View of ‘Security’
c) Critiquing the Institution of War d) Militarisation and Protection Rackets e) Feminist Engagement with IPE
Component-II- Description of Module
Items Description of Module
Subject Name Political Science
Paper Name P.10 International Politics
Module Name Unit II: Themes in International Politics Gender and International Politics
Module ID M-10
Pre-requisite
Objectives To develop an introductory understanding of
‘gender’ and feminism
To understand the implications of using ‘gender’ in the study of International Politics
To understand the various ways in which feminist scholarship has contributed in enriching debates within International Politics
Keywords Gender, Feminism, Patriarchy, Public-Private Divide, Masculinity, Power, Human Security, Critique of War, Protection Rackets
Component III- MAIN CONTENT of the module: Gender and International Politics
INTRODUCTION
Gender is everywhere. When we dress a girl child in soft colours and frilly clothes, buy a male child a gun, when we admonish girls for behaving like boys, or tease boys for being timid ‘like girls’, we are ‘doing’ gender. (V. Geetha 2012: xiii)
Gender is a social construction where a fixed set of characteristics are attributed to males and females. The social construction of gender leads to an understanding of male and female as having separate characteristics and roles which are defined as masculine and feminine. The whole idea of saying boys will be boys and girls should know where to draw the line is derived from this understanding. In this process of attributing values to certain characteristics of both the ‘genders,’ women come to be seen as naturally inferior to men. Of course this natural ‘inferiority’ can differ across societies and cultures. Discriminating between men and women is based on this social construction of gender; there is nothing natural or normal about it. However, gender discrimination manifests itself in various forms covertly and overtly in different forms in different societies.
In this module, we will aim towards an understanding of how gender impinges on International Politics. The school of thought which can be credited with highlighting how gender can be used as a lens or an analytical category to engage with various disciplines including International Politics, and as such to critique social structures from a ‘gendered’
standpoint is that of feminism. Thus, in our engagement with gendered International Politics in this module, feminist thought will be our primary traction.
Hence before moving on to an overview of gender and international politics, it is important to first gather a sense of what feminism entails and some of its core conceptual issues. We would then focus on developing an understanding of the various implications of using a gendered lens to view International Politics and such an engagement has been organised thematically to facilitate a broader sampling of scholarship in this field. Feminist scholarship within International Politics which employs gender as the central variable of analysis is a relatively new but vibrant enterprise. The themes taken up here in this module do not in any way represent an exhaustive survey of this field; it is an attempt at developing an indicative
understanding of this approach and undertakes a broad overview of its multiple currents.
This module is divided broadly in two major parts with focus on thematic engagement and is thus organised as follows:
1. What is Feminism?
2. International Politics Through the ‘Gender’ Lens a) Hegemonic Masculinity
b) A Feminist View of ‘Security’
c) Critiquing the Institution of War d) Militarisation and Protection Rackets e) Feminist Engagement with IPE
WHAT IS FEMINISM?
In a nutshell, feminism seeks to demonstrate how gender is one of the important sources of creating hierarchies in society which leads to the devaluation and subordination of the
‘feminine’ and domination of the ‘masculine’. Some of the most important tools through which they highlight the manifestations of such a hierarchical ordering of the society are:
Sex-Gender Distinction: It refers to the fact that sex is ‘biological’, i.e. people are born as male or female1 while gender is socially constructed, i.e. people are conditioned into behaving ‘appropriately’ according to their assigned ‘masculine’ or
‘feminine’ gender roles. However, gender roles are not divided into separate water- tight compartments but in reality are quite fluid. For example, men and women both may know how to cook and both may be having paid jobs outside the household, but
‘earning a living’ is still considered to be a ‘man’s job’ which is to be a ‘protector’
and a ‘bread-winner’ and ‘cooking and caring’ as a ‘woman’s job’ which is to be a
1 It is important to note here that human species does not homogenously consist of males and females, and there are many who are ‘intersex’ i.e. a different sex which in turn is not a homogenous category. Owing to the social construction of gender and the ensuing impossibility of imagining beyond the masculine/feminine in a hierarchical manner, ‘intersex’ bodies are either medically interfered with to be made into either male or female or else face social ostracism as eunuchs. For further critical engagement on this issue, see Anne Fausto Sterling (2004), “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are not enough”, in Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson (eds.), The Gendered Society Reader, London: OUP.
‘nurturer’ and ‘care-giver’. This distinction is not a benign attempt at defining roles for smooth operation of the society as is commonly believed; rather the underlying assumption is that of capability and weakness of ‘men and ‘women’ respectively which determines who is ‘fit’ to do what and thus embodies a hierarchy between both roles. Therefore, it is a matter of positive affirmation if by deciding to wage a war Indira Gandhi earns the right to be called “the only man in her Cabinet” but a matter of shame when in face of an enemy infiltration Atal Bihari Vajpayee feels compelled to clarify that he will command appropriate action by the Indian armed forces as he
“is not wearing bangles” (i.e. he is not a woman implying he is not weak). Due to the devaluation of the ‘feminine’, women who may demonstrate masculine characteristics may either face discouragement or alternatively occasionally appreciated. However men who demonstrate feminine characteristics are stigmatised and ridiculed as
‘effeminate’. All these arguments indicate that these conscious acts of socially attributing characteristics and creating hierarchies in a gendered manner are not done in a vacuum but in a particular social context. Feminists refer to this context as
‘patriarchy’, which is discussed in brief below.
Patriarchy: Derived from Latin words, it literally means the “rule of the father” but rather than referring to real situations where the father is ruler in the literal sense, it is a heuristic tool in feminist scholarship to understand oppression of women. Gerda Lerner defines patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalisation of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general” (1986: 239), where women are
‘naturally’ associated with the domestic sphere while men are identified with the
‘public interest’. In fact, ‘patriarchy’ is not a monolithic concept and increasingly feminists have been using ‘patriarchies’ to incorporate the diversity of the manifestations of women’s oppression across cultures and societies.
A particularly important insight in this contextis provided by Maria Mies (1986) which elucidates the intricate relationship between patriarchy and the most important mode of organisation of the international political economy, i.e. capitalism and
describes violence as the open secret of the capitalist system in order to bring about subordination at two levels: firstly, defining women as mothers and housewives put their labour within the household outside the ambit of the economic sphere and thus
“50 per cent of human labour was defined as a free resource” (1986: ix); secondly, European capitalists brought capitalism to Asia, Africa and South and Central America by force, by colonisation. Thus, violence is the systemic characteristic of capitalism which sought to gain control over ‘nature’ whose resources were available for free and hence “women and the colonies were treated as ‘nature’, they were
‘naturalized’” (Mies 1986: x). Thus, it is very important to understand here that gender differentiation and related hierarchies are not just limited to narrow aspects of private life but have immensely political consequences that impinge on all aspects of social life. This is the logic behind the very important feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’ which aims to break the myth of a dichotomy between ‘public’ and
‘private’. This argument is further elaborated below.
Artificial Public-Private Divide: Feminist scholarship builds upon the ‘public-private distinction’ whereby men are associated with the ‘public’ (i.e. the political sphere and being ‘providers’ for the family by engaging in remunerative work) and women were confined to the ‘private’ (i.e. the domestic sphere of the household primarily because of their biological reproductive work which also implied that they will be entrusted with non-remunerative work of social reproduction). The public-private dichotomy also entails privileging of men and masculinist ideas translating into adverse implications for women’s health, education and their access to equal opportunities in various spheres. As a spiral effect, this then explains the generally lower qualifications of women and the semiskilled nature of their ‘productive’ work. V.
Spike Peterson (2003) draws attention to the shifts in the way ‘public’ and ‘private’
were understood with the coming in of capitalist industrialisation. According to her,
“‘Public’ retained its association with the state/ government/ coercion but in liberal discourse ‘private’ gained stature as a reference to civic activities and/or economic exchanges (productive market relations). Sex/ affective familial relations and the caring labour of reproductive work were cast as pre-contractual and pre-capitalist – as
‘natural’ and hence neither political nor economic” (Peterson 2003: 80). With the advent of capitalism, a systematic devaluation of women’s reproductive labour took place with the coming in of a ‘family wage’ for the man who was seen as the
‘provider’ for the housewife and the family by engaging in remunerative work in a
‘sexualised labour market’, while women were entrusted with non-remunerative work of social reproduction within the family as an extension of their biological reproductive work. Referring to the labour market as ‘sexualised’ implies that work opportunities are available to men and women differently, often with different wages.
This is closely linked to the sex-gender distinction and patriarchal social order where despite relative non-relevance of sexual attributes vis-à-vis labour, various opportunities are denied or deemed unfit for some, on a gendered basis.
Interestingly, while women’s work in the household has been economically devalued by justifying it as ‘natural’ activity, however in contemporary times due to various factors the same functions that women have been performing for free since time immemorial are also available for sale in the market. This compels one to wonder,
“Why does women’s reproductive labor have to be “denaturalized” (by looking after non-relatives) in order to be socially valued, while “natural” intimate labor remains morally desirable?” (Xiang and Toyota 2010). It is here that one can see, that one of the major ways in which power manifests itself in a globalised international political economy is to constantly innovate various mechanisms to sustain the artificial distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. Feminist scholarship has highlighted how a public-private dichotomy contributes to economic devaluation of women’s work within the household and how such a devaluation is important for capitalism due to the availability of women’s critical social reproductive functions as a ‘free resource’.
While how labour is organised in society is one of the cornerstones of the artificial public-private divide, it has also been the cause of women’s political exclusion, like denial of right to vote and right to property till the very recent past against which struggle continues though, right from the ‘suffragette’ movement of the 19th-20th
century which was mainly Western in location but also influenced women’s political rights in the constitutions of decolonised countries like India. As recently as 2005, Kuwait granted the right to vote and contest in elections to its women citizens (BBC News 2005). Women’s representation not just in domestic and international politics but in various politico-economic-legal decision-making institutions in the world remains a concern.
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS THROUGH THE ‘GENDER’ LENS
Though feminism roughly traces its origins to the eighteenth century, it is only as recently as the 1980s that feminists have made inroads to the discipline of International Politics/
International Relations (IR). Since then, there have been “troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists” owing to the fact that they draw on different realities and use different epistemologies (Tickner 1997). The basic objective of feminist approach to IR theory is to fundamentally question the claims of gender neutrality that mask entrenched assumptions which privilege the ‘masculine’ in the way ‘power’, ‘autonomy’, ‘rationality’
and the ‘public’ are understood within the discipline of International Politics which makes the mainstream scholarship in this discipline inherently ‘gendered’.
Feminist engagement with the discipline of International Politics has been broadly guided by an effort to extend the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ to also that ‘the personal is international’ (Sjoberg 2011). Cynthia Enloe has noted insightfully:
Read forward, ‘the personal is international’ in so far as ideas about what it means to be a ‘respectable’ woman or an ‘honorable’ man have been shaped by colonizing policies, trading strategies, and military doctrines … the implications of a feminist understanding of international politics are thrown into sharper relief when one reads
‘the personal is international’ the other way round: the international is personal. This calls for a radical new imagining of what it takes for governments to ally with each other, compete with, and wage war with each other. (Enloe 1990 quoted in Sjoberg 2011: 114)
As V. Spike Peterson (2004) points out, feminist interventions have taken up broadly three overlapping issues – to unmask the androcentrism in the discipline and its consequence; to add women’s experiences and ‘stir’; and to ‘reconstruct theory’. The second task holds appeal to non-feminists in the discipline as well as practitioners in international relations who mostly obfuscate it with ‘adding women and stirring’, thus conflating ‘women’ as an empirical category with ‘gender’ as an analytical category. Feminist theorists also look at policy implications, an issue that mainly revolves around the second theme identified here.
Feminist interventions in this field of enquiry (as in other fields) have strived to locate
‘gender’ in general and ‘women’ in particular with the help of an analysis of “power and the division of labour… [whereby] women’s different but related location within a global political economy both links and divides women of the world” (Robinson 1997: 776).
Within disciplinary trajectories, feminist scholarship is often place under the ‘third debate’
among the “great debates” in the discipline of International Politics which is related to the paradigmatic challenge to the ‘neo-neo’ consensus of the mainstream scholarship by ‘critical theories’. It is noteworthy here that the critique which feminist scholarship in International Politics has presented to the mainstream or what they often refer to as the ‘male-stream’ of the discipline have never remained marginal and peripheral at the high-table of International Politics. As indicated above, this is often a result of using different methodologies and what each school-of-thought considers as the core puzzle to be addressed through its theorisations.
As a consequence, feminists in International Politics have had to variously deal with non- engagements, troubled engagements, or have been handed out directions on how to be
‘appropriately’ theoretical (Tickner 2006; Keohane 1989; Weber 1994).
Feminist theorisations not just in International Politics but also elsewhere have often faced the charge of talking only about women under the guise of ‘gender’, and that under the pretext of visibilising women, feminists in turn invisibilise men. This criticism however, is not based on a thorough survey of feminist scholarship. When feminists highlight the problem of masculine privilege and related androcentrism, they in fact are using gender as an analytical variable where they demonstrate the hierarchical link between masculinities and femininities. Thus, a logical theoretical enterprise as a converse of prevalent androcentrism
is the act of seeking to visibilise women – their location, voices and experiences. An important work that squarely addresses this issue is that of Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (2008) where they undertake the task of Rethinking the Man Question, another useful survey of feminist work on the issue of masculinities within International Politics is provided in Remkus (2012).
In our effort to view International Politics through a gender ‘lens’ whereby we will use feminist scholarship as our primary footing in this module, we will begin by first understanding the very important concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. We will then proceed to exploring the expanse of feminist scholarship in International Politics through themes, such as: A Feminist View of ‘Security’, Critiquing the Institution of War, Militarisation and Protection Rackets and Feminist Engagement with IPE.
Hegemonic Masculinity
J. Ann Tickner uses R.W. Connell’s (1987) concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to explain the masculinist arena of international politics. According to this concept, not only is masculinity understood in opposition to inferior and devalued femininities but also in
“opposition to various subordinated and devalued masculinities, such as homosexuality”
(Tickner 1992: 6). Feminist analysis demonstrates how in Western political thought, the devalued and inferior femininities find place in the ‘private’ while hegemonic masculinity dominates the ‘public’. The ‘public’ is the political sphere which is characterised as a sphere of competition and in ‘state of nature’ conceptualisation, it is a state of “war of everyman against everyman” (Tickner 1992: 45) and the subtext of such a conceptualisation is that every man fights to protect the ‘private’ household that he leads.
This understanding can be easily extrapolated to read the subtext of mainstream IPE theoretical perspectives be it liberal, economic nationalist or Marxist which further the artificial public-private distinction in two ways: firstly, by their gender-neutral pretence, they in fact bolster the masculinity of the ‘public’ which is supposedly governed by ‘rational’
factors; secondly, the household where most of women’s economically devalued social
reproduction functions take place is invisibilised or inadequately accounted for in their respective conceptualisations of the international political economy.
It is important to note here that to contend that ‘the economic’ and ‘the public’ have been carried on as male enterprises, is to only highlight their masculinist nature and in no way does it suggest that men are inherently ‘rational’ and thus fit to conduct economic affairs while women are inherently non-economically oriented. Such a dichotomy is what the masculinist theoretical IPE mainstream seeks to sustain. One can see a parallel of this phenomenon in feminist reconceptualisations of ‘war’ and ‘security studies’ in traditional IR theory. For example, Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987) points out the dichotomy of what she identifies as male
“Just Warriors” and female “Beautiful Souls”, which effectively acts to keep women out of the realm of the ‘political’ since war-making is considered to be the highest form of politics in many senses. However, confusion arises because of a strand often identified as maternal feminists, who argue in favour of celebrating what has been previously devalued as
‘feminine’ – i.e. women’s caregiving roles. Such ‘maternal thinking’ does not believe that there is anything ‘natural’ about women’s caregiving behaviour, it is a part of gendered socialisation and women learn those roles. Given that women are conditioned to be
‘peaceful’ and ‘caring’, it is important to tap on that resource and mobilise women as pacifists – who can facilitate peaceful settlement of disputes, and promote the value of peace in a broader sense (Ruddick 1989). Similarly, a logical extension of maternal feminists’
argument in the economic sphere would mean that women’s care-giving roles equip them to understand the pitfalls of commodification of all aspects of human life and hence they can promote the value of relationships of affection even in the economic sphere.
A Feminist View of ‘Security’
Given the centrality of the concept of ‘security’ in International Politics, it is important to understand it critically, which essentially involves unraveling its nuances rather than seeing it as a monolith. Also given the fact that the world we live in is characterized by pluralities of all sorts, most fundamental of those pluralities being that of gender, it is important to investigate the bearings of introducing gender as a tool of analysis when we study the world
and International Politics. Thus, in this section let us explore the feminist engagement with
‘security’ as has been traditionally understood in IR theory, in this section.
Achieving ‘security’ has been considered to be the prime concern of ‘rational’ and ‘unitary’
States in the ‘anarchical’ international arena. This conception was propounded by neo-realist Kenneth Waltz in ‘the’ Theory of International Politics (1979). Such a neo-realist Waltzian systemic analysis has resonated well with neo-liberal institutionalists and even the constructivists are quite comfortable with it. The difference between the dominant schools lies in ‘what they make of’ anarchy. Traditional IR theories consider States as the primary referent, in their engagement with ‘security’; where States want security from other States in military terms. Thus, ‘mainstream’ IR theories mostly talk in highly abstract and impersonalized terms with gender-neutral pretensions which has been a source of their
“troubled engagements”.
One of the first feminist attempts at developing a comprehensive challenge to traditionally statist and military understanding of ‘security’ was by J. Ann Tickner (1992) in her path breaking work Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. In order to present a feminist view on security, she critiques the privilege accorded to the ‘levels of analysis’ making an argument against artificial boundary construction by extending the feminist critique of public-private distinction to International Politics and focusing on important continuities like exclusion of women and violence against them, across sectors - not only in military terms but also in terms of “global economic security” and
“ecological security”. Flowing from this, “feminist perspectives on security prioritize issues associated with the achievement of justice… ignored in conventional theories…, which have been preoccupied with questions relating to order” (Tickner 1992: 134). She explains the masculinist nature of International Politics with the help of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and seeks to redefine power as a means of ‘mutual enablement’.
In the discipline of International Politics when realists look at the omnipresent phenomenon of war between states by attributing structural reasons like the ‘security dilemma’ in a ‘self- help system, maximization of power and/or optimization of security through strategies like
‘deterrence’, they claim to present a ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ science of the international system. Hence, drawing from Richard Ashley, Tickner believes that such structural formulation of the international system in terms of an “abstract and unitary actor… has led to an antihumanism whereby states, posited unproblematically as unitary actors, act independently of human interests” (Tickner 1992: 42). Jill Steans also echoes this by emphasising that “[r]ethinking security means recognizing the common humanity and worth of all human beings” (1998: 105).
To this she goes on to add that “neorealist characterizations of state behavior, in terms of self- help, autonomy, and power seeking, privilege characteristics associated with the Western construction of masculinity” (Tickner 1992: 42). Moreover, the anarchy/order dichotomy is flawed in as much as it turns a blind eye to intersectionality of violence across the public- private and domestic/international dichotomies. Hence for Tickner the concept of “common security” as originated in peace research and conceptualisation of security as elimination of all kinds of structural violence is a better way to understand security once feminist concerns of eliminating patriarchal domination and subordination are also added to it. Furthermore, such transformations in the way we understand security are of most value in the contemporary times when the possibility of complete destruction is absolutely real with the presence of nuclear weapons. In a nuclear age, ‘war’ and preparation for it cannot and must not be understood in the same traditional way.
South Asian feminists engage with issues of ‘security’ in the region, on the lines pioneered by Tickner. They highlight the fact that this region figures as one of the worst in terms of almost all human development indicators, particularly with regard to violence against women. They also note that as a result of a high incidence of both inter- and intra- State armed conflicts in the region, there is ‘militarization’ which has its intersections with patriarchy and thus impacts women’s security. However, militarization and its intersections with patriarchy are not unique to this region, the argument here is to only highlight the fact that South Asian feminists have used these ideas to understand the regional context. Mostly, they find the
‘human security’ approach useful, though they do warn against accepting ‘human’ as gender-
neutral and advocate enriching it by inclusion of women’s experiences (Rajagopalan 2005;
Manchanda 2001; Chadha Behera 2004).
Though feminists seek to engender the traditional understandings of ‘security’ by including women’s experiences, they are wary of falling in the trap of homogenising the experiences of
‘women’ given the fact that among them multiplicities of race, class and location in the international system are of prime importance. This is a criticism often levelled against liberal (e.g. Enloe) and standpoint (e.g. Tickner) feminists by critical and postmodern feminists (e.g.
Christine Sylvester).
Reviewing Tickner’s reformulations of ways to understand ‘security’, Sylvester notes that,
“Feminism addresses women, but increasingly it problematizes women as “women”. Tickner is nearly unfaltering in her certainty that real women exist; that women have life experiences to match typical tropes; and that women have uncolonized wisdom to tap for international relations” (emphasis added; 1993: 824). Emily S. Rosenberg has also noted that, “Although she tries to avoid essentializing the “masculine” or the “feminine”, she does accept the argument that women have developed cultural characteristics that make them more amenable to mediation, cooperative solutions, and caring for others” (1993: 1043). Thus, even with her disclaimer of non-essentialisation the standpoint feminist in Tickner is unable to sustain that.
Hence despite attempts to present a “nongendered perspective on global security” Tickner thus seem to suggest an alternative and arguably more appropriate “women’s way” of doing IR. On the issue of essentialisation and difference in the experiences of men and women, Elshtain notes:
“Though knowledge and understanding may in some interesting ways be embodied – and this this may help to account for why men and women, at least some of the time, and to culturally specific ends and purposes, experience the world in different ways – no embodied being, male or female, has access to the whole or anything like “the totality”. This being the case, the scholar is free to explore gender differences without presuming the superiority of a gendered narrative that closes out contesting interpretations.
Not being hobbled in advance by the conceptual claims of gender as prison, the critic is open to intimations and possibilities of gender as prism” (emphasis in original;
1997: 78).
Sylvester draws attention to the fact that, “Enloe has been accused in the past of being atheoretical, in that she does not present the reader with a discipline-recognizable framework for her arguments, nor endeavor to refer her findings back to IR theory in a way that could compel the field to review its inadequacies” (1994: 1038). However, Sylvester is conscious of the fact that “to quibble with [Enloe’s] way of showing how everyday people and the dailiness of their lives comprise aspects of international relations is to privilege the usual way we in the field understand theory” (1994: 1038). Enloe has in fact, clarified that
“militarisation is especially valuable for theory because it encourages rather than suppresses cross-cultural dialogue” (1987: 540). This is because militarisation can potentially explain both North American and European feminists’ examination of women’s role as ‘diplomatic wives’ and the predominantly Third World feminists’ concerns about “the state’s ideological manipulation of women’s family and work expectations … government exploit[ation of]
notions of motherhood to secure support for its war[s] …” and the proliferation of ‘comfort women’ around military bases as well as the use of rape as a weapon of war (Enloe 1987:
541). Sylvester does not at all challenge the theoretical potential or usefulness of the concept of ‘militarisation’. She is only arguing that one needs to spend a “little more time with definitional issues” in order to elucidate how and “whether it [is] something different [from]
patriarchy” (1994: 1037).
As noted earlier, feminist reconceptualisations of ‘security’ have resonated well with concepts like “common security” which are not distinctively feminist in their origin. Another recent challenge o traditional ways of understanding ‘security’ comes from conceptions of
‘human security’, an approach that received an impetus from the United Nations.
Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh et. al. (2007) roughly trace the Human Security concept to Boutros B. Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace, which was then “officially launched” through the 1994 UNDP Human Developmment Report. The concept has immense coinage within the UN and Kofi Annan “adopted the human security agenda in a quest for a new UN mandate in the 1999 Millennium Declaration… [including] economic development, social justice, environmental protection, democratization, disarmament, and respect for human rights and the rule of law” (Tadjbakhsh et. al. 2007: 24). The Global Commission on Human Security
in its 2003 report Human Security Now defined ‘human security’ in terms of protecting “the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and fulfillment”
(Tadjbakhsh et. al. 2007: 24). Mostly, feminists find the ‘human security’ approach useful, though they do warn against accepting ‘human’ as gender-neutral and advocate enriching it by inclusion of women’s experiences (Muthien 2000 and Hudson 2005).
Heidi Hudson (2005) presents a feminist critique of other non-feminist challenges to the way
‘security’ has been traditionally understood in IR theory. She talks about the Copenhagen School (identified with the likes of Barry Buzan, Ole Waever et al.) understanding of
“securitisation” as an extreme version of politicisation and posit the existential threats to the security of a collective in the ‘realm of the international’ and hence draw a distinction between the international and the social and argue in favour of including gender in social security since it concerns individuals and is not a matter of collective security. Thus, Hudson points out how the Copenhagen School does include women in its analysis, but effectively keeps them on the periphery, thereby preserving the ethos of ‘malestream’ thinking on security. (Hudson 2005)
Hudson (2005) also looks at the relatively new ‘Critical Security Studies’ (CSS; identified with the likes of Ken Booth, Richard Wyn Jones, Michael Williams, Keith Krause et al.) which seeks to recast individuals and not states as the primary referents of security. This school presents a critique of realism, state-centrism and militarism – replacing them with notions of justice and emancipation. Therefore, Hudson identifies that there is convergence between CSS and postmodern feminism, nonetheless with focus on ‘individual’ human beings, dangers of universalisation lurk.
Hudson (2005) then moves on to look at the ‘human security’ approach and finds merit in it by virtue of its attempts at shifting focus “from a security dilemma of states to a survival dilemma of people” since it covers notions like ‘freedom from want and fear’. She feels feminist alternative of ‘relational thinking’ can build upon this approach to explore the linkages between gendered and global power relations and cites efforts to that effect by Nira
Yuval-Davis who talks about ‘transversal politics’ and Sylvester’s visions of ‘empathetic cooperation’.
Others have also deliberated on the prospects for feminist engagements in the ‘human security’ framework:
“Feminist engagements with the human security framework need to open up a new space for constructive thinking and deliberation from which a bridge can be formed between the normative approach to human security (the human being as a bearer of capabilities, rights, entitlements and duties) and the interpretative approach (which human beings we are talking about, in what context, where and to what effect). The former is significant in the matter of recognition of rights and in preventing state derogation of its duties. The latter recognises the complexity of the operation of power within and across the categories of gender, ethnicity and generation. When grounded in realities of deprivation for which a politics of social transformation is required, an interpretative approach to human security can contribute to redressive action more properly suited to the context in which rights are claimed” (Truong et. al 2006: xxii)
Thus, feminists are open to productive engagements with other critical scholarship in order to engender the dominant understanding of ‘security’ in statist and military terms.
To summarise this discussion on feminist conceptions of ‘security’, one can conclude that essentially what they are envisioning is moving away from all tendencies of creating artificial boundaries/dichotomies and challenging all other kinds of hierarchies. This is because politics in general, including international politics is defined and conditioned by ‘hegemonic masculinity’ where though all women may not be disprivileged, but ‘some women’ always come to be dominated by ‘some men’ and ‘some men’ dominate all others in the system.
Such a system inevitably invisibilises and marginalises ‘women’ and feminist projects seek to recover those marginalisations and render visibility to the previously devalued. Thus,
‘security’ cannot be understood in abstract terms where the most vulnerable in the system are unaccounted for. Despite the shortcomings of a statist analysis, most feminists agree that state is still the single largest political actor capable of resource mobilisation and hence the real goal is to endeavour towards transforming state-security from an end to a means of promoting engendered human security (Hudson 2005).
Critiquing the Institution of War
In order to develop an alternate understanding of national security, feminists undertake a critique of the institution of war. The primacy of the role of the military and the imagery of the male ‘citizen-warrior’, further devalues femininities and cements the masculinist nature of the ‘national security’ domain (Tickner 1992). As Steans points out, feminist critique of
‘national security’ mostly begins with an “impact-on” approach, i.e. ascertaining the costs of military expenditure on women and notes that “the massive use of resources and capital to fund the military deplete[s] the resources available to support social, medical and education spending” (1998: 112) which affects women, the most and contributes to feminization of poverty. Hence she attests the feminist argument favouring rechanneling of resources from military to other sectors.
Another aspect of this approach is to analyse the impact of war on women which raises
“profound issues about power relations between men and women and about the way that power relations change in wars” (Brittain 2003: 47). While women may choose to be and permitted to be combatants in some cases, in most others during wars when men are away at the war front, women are also known to participate in economic activities which they may not have in peace time. For example, during the World Wars, while men in the First and the Second Worlds enlisted in the armies, women were invoked to come out in large numbers to keep the factories running while the men were away. But, once the men returned, it was
‘please get back into the kitchen’ and there was a heightened value attached to their reproductive and care-giving roles towards the war torn soldiers. Another example is the rewards of “Heroic Mother” and “Order of Maternal Glory (first, second and third class)”
given to women who raised ten children or nine, eight, seven children respectively, under the Stalin regime in post-World War II Soviet Union (Rappaport 1999). This was floated as incentive for women to have more children and particularly sons in the face of huge loss of people, particularly male soldiers as casualties in the war. This particular case is ironic since it demonstrates how firstly, women’s bodies are considered instrumental for national goals, thus irrespective of serious reproductive health concerns women are viewed as ‘child-bearing machines’. Secondly, it also demonstrates that women’s reproductive capabilities are differently viewed or valued in different parts of the world and thus women in the ‘Third
World’ are variously stigmatised, reprimanded and disincentivised for having many children since it is seen as contributing to the ‘population explosion’ and a threat to ‘sustainable development’.
Further, during wars rape has been systematically employed as a weapon against the enemy because women are supposed to be the signifiers of a community’s honour. Wars and armed conflicts also result in large scale displacement whereby women and the children are known to be the worst affected which has exacerbated with the changing nature of war from an interstate phenomenon to increasing blurring of distinction between inter & intra state armed conflicts (Brittain 2003). Cynthia Enloe in her authoritative work Bananas, Beaches and Bases as well has her later work Manoeuvres drawn critical focus on the issue of sexual violence during wars, not just in the form of brutal rape by soldiers but also in the form of various kinds of sexual exploitation that women are drawn into, often for survival or as an unfair trade-off for ‘security’. An example of such sexual exploitation is highlighted by Katherine Moon (1997) in her book Sex Among Allies where she has critically explored the case of prostitution camps mushrooming around US military bases in Korea during 1970s with active intervention of the Korean government for the hospitality of U.S. solidiers. J.
Ann Tickner has observed that “Moon’s study challenges the conventional meaning of national (in)security;… and how often policies deemed necessary for national security can cause insecurity for certain citizens” (2006: 32).
One of Cynthia Enloe’s most incisive case studies in Manoeuvres is that of the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war by various conflicting parties during the prolonged conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s (Enloe 2000). It is worth emphasising here that the issue of sexual violence in war is not a story of distant past but is a continuing feature of wars and various kinds of conflict situations since time immemorial. The perceived lethal-power of any weapon determines its continued use in conflict situations, and it is thus a very important issue that in 1990s in Europe when the protracted conflicts around the breakdown of former Yugoslavia ensued, rape was used as a significant weapon even in the age of advanced weaponry and ‘the nuclear age’ (Enloe 2000).
During wars, women’s bodies are geopoliticised and they become the signifiers of boundaries and territories. Concepts of ‘State’ and ‘nationalism’ as they play out in international politics have an inherent gendered characteristic. The construction of ‘nation’ is based on ideas of
‘motherhood’ and women come to be the signifiers of the creation of ‘us’ and ‘them’
identities. Demands of separate statehood on the basis of this creation of ‘the other’ and assumptions about ‘essential’ character of the glorified ‘self’ and demonised ‘Other’ often lead to situations of armed conflict. Such armed conflict situations have important implications on the way gender plays out in the society – both during actual conflict and after that. Notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ acquire particular meanings that manifest themselves in complex ways. Since women’s bodies become the sites of asserting the ‘self’
in opposition to the ‘other’, the same bodies also act as the sites that are to be conquered by the ‘other’, they represent honour, and to violate and desecrate women by sexual violence and rape become a way of humiliating and dishonouring the men, families and communities to which they belonged (Contursi 1999). This is the prime motor behind sexual violence against women which has repeated itself over and over again throughout the world. The nation is viewed as the ‘mother’ who has been violated and plundered by the enemy and thus her
‘sons’ must come to her rescue and take revenge from the enemy. The perception of the nation as a female body leads to what Jan Jindy Pettman observes as “confusing the rapes of actual women with the outrage of political attack or defeat, and in the process women’s pain and rights are appropriated into a masculinist power politics” (1996: 49).
A sustained engagement by feminists (not just academic but also at the policy level in International Politics) with the issue of gendered nature of the institution of war as well as the grave issue of sexual violence inflicted on women during wars and/or conflict situations of various kinds, has led to a recognition and acknowledgement of the injustice women have faced. The United Nations Security Council since 2000 has adopted five key resolutions on this issue:
1325 (on Women, War and Peace),
1820 (on sexual violence in conflict),
1888 (on developing mechanisms to effectively address conflict-related sexual violence as raised by Resolution 1820),
1889 (on strengthening the implementation and monitoring of Resolution 1325),
1960 (a resolution whereby the Security Council requested detailed information on suspected perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence)
Militarisation and Protection Rackets
The “impact-on” approach is however just one step in critiquing traditional notion of
‘national security’. Feminists have employed the concepts of “militarism” and
“militarisation” pioneered by Cynthia Enloe, in order to further their arguments. Such a task involves looking at the military as an institution militarism as an ideology and militarisation as a process which has both material and ideological dimensions (Enloe 1983, 1987 and 2000). The institution of military has been closed to women mostly and even when it is accessible women do not find space at the ‘front’ as combatants, but only replay their avowedly patriarchal feminine caregiver and supporter roles. The ideology of militarism is sustained by the oppositional notions of male ‘citizen-warriors’ and women essentialised as
“passive victims in need of protection” (Tickner 1992: 59). This ideology is sustained by employing familial analogies which can be found in frequent invocations by the state for women to nurture “sons” who can be “soldiers” to protect – the nation and its women and children (equating women with children effectively infantilises them). The ideology of militarism gets entrenched by the process of militarisation which leads to not only an adverse impact on social expenditure in favour of maintaining the army and an escalated defence expenditure but also the legitimisation of the use of force even for civil purposes. In this sense, Enloe characterises the military as “more than just one more patriarchal institution … [because of its] close identification to the state … [which gives it] a kind of influence and privilege rarely enjoyed by [any other institution] and permits the military to exercise powers denied to other institutions” (1983: 10-11). Thus, the ideologies of militarism and patriarchy are closely intertwined because of the value they attach to ‘manhood’ and ‘masculinity’
whereby “[t]o be masculine is to be not feminine” (emphasis in original; Enloe 1983: 13).
Adding another nuance to this understanding is the concept of “protection rackets” (Peterson 1992). The dominant understanding of ‘security’ underlines the importance of protection
thereby creating a dichotomy between the ‘protectors’ and ‘the protected’. The anarchical international system arguably benefits the strong while the weak get dominated and victimised and therefore need protection. Such a view of the international system privileges and reinforces the position of the strong. According to feminists, such an idea of ‘protection’
is used in all traditional conceptions of ‘security’ – in the family, society, state and subsequently the international system. Thus, the protection racket involves the giving up of rights by the protected in lieu of getting the protection – the public private dichotomy in the society can be extrapolated to the international system as well where the militaries assume the role of protectors. Peterson demonstrates what such a protection racket entails:
“First, individual participants making “rational” choices to “accept” protection, simultaneously act “irrationally” by reproducing systemic dependency … Second, the decentralization of units and their linkage through the protector/”center” (rather than
“locally”) obscures the “collective interest” that the protected may have in a transformation of the system itself…Third, protection systems reproduce nonparticipatory dynamics while obscuring accountability of protectees for maintaining boundaries, hierarchies, and identities that are the medium and outcome of protection systems.” (1992: 51-52)
However, this critique does not boil down to an unqualified feminist support of merely making the military accessible to women. Nonetheless, liberal feminist continue to view inclusion of women in the military as a matter of ensuring equal opportunity. Whether women are included in the military on absolutely equal terms with men, whether they are also assigned combat roles and whether that entails women having to shed off their femininity in favour of a valourised masculinity, is a different debate. As Grant has rightly observed,
“[m]uch of the real debate over women in the military is distinct from the question of women’s specific role in war” (1992: 92). According to her, this phenomenon should be studied using a feminist epistemology where “the aim of research would not be to fill in a new role for women but to examine how changes in the roles of an attitudes about women shift the three-sided configuration of the state, the international environment, and women”
(1992: 94).
Feminist engagement with IPE
Feminists theorising on IPE seek to visibilise women, account for the gendered experiences of work and “rethink the international division of labour as a sexual division of labour”
(Pettman 1996: 160). Moreover, such an exercise also entails “examining ideologies of femininity, marriage and motherhood, which construct and appropriate women’s labour in domestic, reproductive and caring work as a labour of love, not work at all” (Pettman 1996:
165).
J. Ann Tickner (1992) presents a formidable feminist critique of the three different undercurrents of international political economy as identified by Robert Gilpin (1987):
liberalism, economic nationalism, and Marxism – each respectively focusing on the individual, the state and class. Tickner highlights the assumption of gender neutrality of all the three approaches and argues that “ignoring gender distinctions hides a set of social and economic relations characterized by inequality between men and women. In order to understand how these unequal relationships affect the workings of the world economy – and their consequences for both women and men – models of international political economy that make gender relations explicit must be constructed” (1992: 70).
Tickner (1992) explains that liberalism is based on the assumption of the instrumental rationality of an individualistic ‘economic man’; however the assumption is masculinist since it obscures women’s experiences and notions of interconnections and interdependence.
Liberalism also wrongly characterises the ‘market’ as an all-pervasive institution, as much of women’s work is linked to provision of basic needs in the household and in subsistence economies. Hence, liberal market-based models of ‘development’ lead to differential impacts mediated by gender and class exposing the gendered basis of what is conceptualised as
‘economic security’ and ‘development’.
Encapsulating the feminist critique of economic nationalism, Tickner (1992) begins by problematising its central unit – the State, since women were not equal partners in the ‘social contract’. Moreover, as illustrated in detail in the preceding section, Tickner also notes that
“the evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist world economy changed traditional gender roles in ways that were not always beneficial to women. Contemporary economic nationalist prescriptions for maximising wealth and power can have a particularly
negative impact on women since women are often situated at the edge of the market or the bottom of the socioeconomic scale” (1992: 84).
The feminist critique of Marxism is mainly directed at the gender neutrality of ‘class analysis’ which ignores the specific ways of women’s oppression due to patriarchy even under capitalism and also invisibilises the critical role of women in the family and household.
With their focus on ‘production’, Marxists tend to ignore women’s role in ‘reproduction’
which lies at the heart of sexual division of labour within the household and by extension in the economic sphere. Tickner summarises the feminist critique of Marxism and emphasises that “although women may suffer from particular forms of repression under capitalism, the liberation of women through class struggle cannot be assumed. It will only come about when women are equal to men in both the public and the private spheres, a condition that would not necessarily obtain in a postcapitalist world” (1992: 90).
After consolidating the feminist critique of the dominant theoretical approaches to IPE, Tickner (1992) then proceeds to formulate a feminist reconstruction of the international political economy and begins with an emphatic challenge to the liberal construct of the
“rational economic man”. According to her, a self-interest maximizing behaviour of the individual must be supplemented with an “ethic of care and responsibility” to include the
“connected, interdependent individual whose behaviour includes activities related to reproduction as well as production” (1992: 92). She echoes other feminist voices that challenge the artificial public-private dichotomy and supports Maria Mies’ (1986) contention that social reproduction functions of women must also be conceptualised as ‘work’ rather than relegated as ‘natural’ functions of women. Hence, for both Mies and Tickner, the differentiation of economically productive work and unpaid work by women in the household must not be seen in a hierarchical relationship to each other and in fact, there is a need to develop ways in which the ‘natural’ activities performed by women in the household is also accounted as economically productive. Tickner thus calls for the adoption of a bottom-up approach by all “political and economic institutions... by going beyond an investigation of market relations, state behaviour, and capitalism... to understand how the global economy affects those on the fringes of the market, the state, or in households as we attempt to build a
more secure world where inequalities based on gender and other forms of discrimination are eliminated” (1992: 95-96).
Jan Jindy Pettman (1996) also presents a similar critique as that of Tickner’s vis-à-vis the liberal, economic nationalist and Marxist approaches to IPE and underscores the importance of engendering the discourse to gain a better understanding of some of the most glaring puzzles of contemporary IPE – feminisation of poverty and feminisation of labour force in the “temporary, casualised and largely unprotected work” (1996: 160). She alludes to the important fact that in contemporary international political economy poverty affects women differently than men and often in more adverse ways. Furthermore, Pettman seconds the links drawn by other feminists like Mitter (1986) and Mies (1986) between feminisation and casualisation of the workforce and the “new international division of labour” where
“production is increasingly fragmented and internationalised, as different stages take place in different states, with each particular stage reduced to monotonous, repetitive, ‘unskilled’
work, in which workers are endlessly disposable and substitutable” (1996: 162). The most low-end of these jobs are more often than not performed by women and migrant workers who have almost no bargaining powers to negotiate rights. Pettman thus observes, “migration has become a global labour system, where borders that have been effectively dismantled for free movement of capital become ways of segmenting and exploiting labour... It demonstrates, too, that the global political economy segments the changing international division of labour along nationalised, racialised and ethnicised as well as class and gender lines” (1996: 162- 163).
Pettman (1996) also undertakes a critique of the development discourse against the backdrop of globalisation. She highlights the basic dilemma for feminists as the one where the choice has to be between lobbying for a more inclusive approach towards women in the development discourse at all levels or to fundamentally challenge and problematise
‘development’ itself. It is significant that she recognises the differences between women in different parts of the world based on various parameters and notes that “women’s different but related location within a global political economy both links and divides women of the world” (Pettman 1996: 171).
Another important theoretical contribution to feminist IPE is made by V. Spike Peterson who in her A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies has suggested a Reproductive-Productive-Virtual economies model (RPV model) to gain greater insights about contemporary global political economy where “the three economies are distinguishable for analytical purposes but empirically inextricable: they are overlapping, mutually constituted, and always dynamic”
(2003: 39). In Peterson’s own words:
“In essence, the RPV framing brings the conceptual and material dimensions of “social reproduction”, non-wage labor, and informalization into relation with the familiar but increasingly global, flexibilized, information-based and service-oriented “productive economy”, as well as with the less familiar but increasingly consequential “virtual economy” of financial markets, commodified knowledge, and the exchange less of goods than of signs...
Retaining the productive economy permits continuity with conventional economic analyses, while...it is analyzed in relation to global developments and linkages among the three economies. Including the reproductive economy invites attention to otherwise marginalized agents and activities, and acknowledges especially the importance of gender-sensitive research and analysis. Including the virtual economy addresses developments in financial markets and the commodification of intangible “products”. It acknowledges the importance of interpretive approaches for analyzing how symbols and expectations mediate our construction of economic “value””
(2003: 38-39).
Thus, the RPV model also allows a methodological innovation to initiate a holistic understanding of all the complex interconnections between the various kinds of economic activities that constitute contemporary IPE. The greatest merit of this model lies in the centrality it accords to the ‘reproductive economy’ which indeed sustains the other two economies (i.e. the productive and virtual economies) and in turn is shaped and moulded by the two. It is also noteworthy that the ‘reproductive’ is also accorded the status of an
‘economy’ in this model which is absent in conventional economic analyses where the
‘reproductive’ is merely a sphere of human activities in a different realm than economic activities. The RPV model also helps in illuminating how variables like power, race, gender,
class and national hierarchies mediate the inter-relationship of the reproductive-productive- virtual economies (Peterson 2003).
CONCLUSION
Feminists have made concerted efforts at ‘infiltrating’ the discipline of International Politics as well as the policy world of international relations, as illustrated in this module. When a gender ‘lens’ is used to view International Politics, the discipline as well as the world does appear different since the otherwise invisible or unaccounted now occupies centre stage.
Engendering International Politics cannot be a one-track theoretical enterprise and thus feminists have engaged with multiple facets, debates and issue areas within International Politics. Against this background, whether their journey from ‘Women and International Politics’ to a ‘Feminist International Politics’, where ‘gender’ is effectively used as the centre of analysis, is one towards horizon, remains an open ended question. However, it is important to note that such a journey is empowering in itself and one positively worth embarking on.
