Making Gender, Making War: violence, military and peacekeeping practices Kronsell, Annica; Svedberg, Erika 2011 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Kronsell, A., & Svedberg, E. (Eds.) (Accepted/In press). Making Gender, Making War: violence, military and peacekeeping practices. (Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality). Routledge. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Making Gender, Making War Making Gender, Making War: violence, military and peacekeeping practices Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg (eds) 2 PREFACE 6 Those Difficult War Questions in Feminism 6 Christine Sylvester 6 Acknowledgements 9 1. INTRODUCTION: MAKING GENDER, MAKING WAR 10 Annica Kronsell and Erika SvedBerg 10 Theme I: Conceptualizing gender, violence, militarism 2. GENDER RELATIONS AS CAUSAL IN MILITARIZATION AND WAR: A FEMINIST STANDPOINT 29 Cynthia Cockburn 29 3. MEN/MASCULINITIES: WAR/MILITARISM – SEARCHING (FOR) THE OBVIOUS CONNECTIONS? 47 Jeff Hearn 47 Theme II: Making gender and (re)making the nation 4. WHAT DOES A BATH TOWEL HAVE TO DO WITH SECURITY POLICY? GENDER TROUBLE IN THE SWEDISH ARMED FORCES 65 Maud Eduards 65 5. FRIENDLY WAR-FIGHTERS AND INVISIBLE WOMEN. PERCEPTIONS OF GENDER AND MASCULINITIES IN THE NORWEGIAN ARMED FORCES ON MISSIONS ABROAD 80 Torunn Laugen Haaland 80 6. THE ‘ROTTEN REPORT’ AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MASCULINITY, NATION AND SECURITY IN TURKEY 95 Alp Biricik 95 7. MEN MAKING PEACE IN THE NAME OF JUST WAR – THE CASE FINLAND 103 3 Pirjo Jukarainen 103 Theme III: Institutional practices and travelling concepts 8. ANALYZING UN & NATO RESPONSES TO SEXUAL MISCONDUCT IN PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS 121 Laura Hebert 121 9. A GENDERED PROTECTION FOR THE ‘VICTIMS’ OF WAR: MAINSTREAMING GENDER IN REFUGEE PROTECTION 137 Jane Freedman 137 10. EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS, AND LEARNING: FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONS, SECURITY DISCOURSE AND SCR 1325. 154 Laura McLeod 154 Theme IV: Gender subjectivity in the organization of violence 11. NORDIC WOMEN AND INTERNATIONAL CRISIS MANAGEMENT: A POLITICS OF HOPE? 175 Elina Penttinen 175 12. WOMEN IN MILITANT MOVEMENTS: (UN)COMFORTABLE SILENCES AND DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES 192 Swati Parashar 192 13. IN THE BUSINESS OF (IN)SECURITY? MAVERICKS, MERCENARIES AND MASCULINITIES IN THE PRIVATE SECURITY COMPANY 210 Paul Higate 210 14. RE-ENVISIONING MASCULINITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION: THE GENDER POLITICS OF DEMILITARIZING NORTHERN IRELAND SOCIETY 228 Fidelma Ashe 228 4 Conclusion 15. IS FEMINISM BEING CO-OPTED BY MILITARISM? 241 Annica Kronsell and Erika SvedBerg 241 CONTRIBUTORS 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY 252 5 Preface Those Difficult War Questions in Feminism Christine Sylvester Erika Svedberg and Annica Kronsell describe themselves and a feminist contingent of PhD students at Lund University in the mid-1990s, as ‘homesteaders’. They graciously tip their hats to early ideas on feminist homesteading that I presented in Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (1994); and then they shape the concept further for use in their particular circumstances. I recently heard Erika explain to a group of women’s studies staff and students at Malmö University, where she teaches, that when the Lund group introduced feminist research themes to the department of Politics and International Relations (IR), they did so with the intent of homesteading Swedish IR. ‘We made it clear to the department and to Swedish scholars of international relations’, she said, ‘that feminist analysis is here to stay: it is not a passing trend but a permanent feature that scholars must accommodate.’ Erika and Annica proved their point by raising funds to host a major feminist international relations conference at Lund in 1995, the first in the Nordic countries, and carried on to produce the first generation of Swedish feminist IR PhD theses and scholarship. As a speaker at their first conference, I could see that this cohort of feminist scholars was indeed there to stay, and stay it has. There are numerous topics that fall under the auspices of feminist IR. Early on, it was clear that Annica and Erika shared an interest in what Annica would later term ‘institutions of hegemonic masculinity’ (Kronsell 2005, 2006: 108) in the Nordic region, the military being a prime subject. They wrote together and separately about gender in the Swedish military and in its conscription practices (Kronsell and Svedberg 2001), drawing attention to the contradictions of a Swedish military intent on breaking the association of armed forces with violence to become a peacekeeper and development-oriented military, and yet carrying forward gendered understandings of bodies best suited to various tasks in a new military. The ‘men’ were the backbone of the peace army as of the previous defense army and there was no debate on the matter at large or within Swedish political circles. Women, citizenship, and military institutions was a silence within a state that was otherwise seeking to homestead inherited military frameworks differently. By tackling this kind of war question in feminism - 6 -what are the gender norms built into the new Swedish military? -- before the phrase ‘war question in feminism’ was introduced in feminist IR (Sylvester 2005), Annica and Erika became pioneers in the field. In their latest collaboration, Erika and Annica raise the bar on gender and military issues and they homestead feminist IR by doing so. War and feminism is a topic of relevance to many around the world; yet until recently it has been assumed in feminism that war and feminism is an uncomfortable if not impossible combination. It is the wrong framing of the problematic of violence in a world that tends to find war a regrettable but acceptable social institution. Thus, many war questions in feminism remained unarticulated, subterranean or couched only in terms of women and the military or women as victims of war. Perhaps one would say that war questions were less systematically raised and examined than issues of peace and feminism --the more usual feminist point of entry to questions of armed conflict (Sylvester 2010a). Once again, though, Annica and Erika launched their own transition in thinking from gender and the military to the larger topic of war and feminism by holding a conference on The War Question in Feminism at the Örebro University in 2008. I was there; and that conference was much more fiery than the first one. Participants argued about whether any shift in focus from peace to war was warranted or constituted a sell-out out of feminist values. The weight of opinion seemed to be that feminists should continue to refuse war talk and war analysis: there was no war question in feminism at all; there was only a continuing peace question to be both asserted and fleshed out. Whether the peace question in feminism was capacious enough to include women who asserted agency through armed conflict, women who made careers out of preparing for conflict, and women who found they gained in other ways from armed conflict, was not the issue for many. Feminism was outside war, above it, and in a position of belligerence to it. By implication, women warriors must be captives of delusion or false consciousness. They could not actually choose violence as a politics, perhaps even a feminist politics. In this volume from the War Question conference, the focus is on gender norms embedded in a variety of locations and practices of war. The editors might not put it this way, but there is a sense that the matter at hand is whether feminism is homesteading wars of our time or war is homesteading feminism by sending out old war appeals to women and men wrapped in 7 gender-equality packaging. Even UN Security Council resolution 1325 could be seen as a way of infusing old gender concerns into post-conflict situations. Warrior men usually make decisions, no matter who sits at the negotiating rounds, and women are encouraged to speak out and then go home to a status quo ante. That is to say, even progressive efforts to bring gender front and center in war-fighting and war-ending can assume that women’s war experiences, war skills, and war labors are inappropriate in peaceful societies. Those who narrate an ended war as history and memory can present progress as a reenactment of stable gender norms that the war disrupted. The degree to which that gendered outcome of many wars (Elshtain 1987), one I watched unfold in its post-independence years, should be heeded today is a war question for feminism and for the institutions and groups that advance peace and reconciliation while also advancing state- and nation-building agendas. And, of course, one of the challenges of the day is to take into account local gender particularisms as they interact with powerful institutions that can protect human rights by waging war -- humanitarian armed intervention --using a kill-to-be-kind logic. The contributors to this book come at these and myriad other questions of war; masculinity; militarization; patriarchy; gender violence, norms, culture, and agency; and feminist security in new ways.