Today’s piece for our symposium on Governing the Feminist Peace is from Laura Sjoberg. Laura is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and Kloppenburg Official Fellow and Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Exeter College, Oxford. Her research addresses issues of gender and security, with focus on politically violent women, feminist war theorising, sexuality in global politics, and political methodology. She teaches, consults, and lectures on gender in global politics, and on international security. Previous posts in the symposium can be found here, here, here and here.

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Governing the Feminist Peace is an amazing book that I continue to learn from each time I read it – it is careful, deep, comprehensive, well-reasoned, complex and contingent. It provides a compelling account of the diversity and vitality of feminist efforts to seek peace locally, nationally, and internationally, showing that a wide variety of academics, activists, and policy-makers, even when they disagree, have a commitment to looking to make the world a better place through some form of gender analysis and/or gender advocacy. Across its pages are hundreds of examples of governments, international organizations, NGOs, volunteers, and scholars doing gender work in the security arena, presented in a way that does not discount these efforts’ imperfections but fills even a cynic like me who critiques and discards the feminist peace with optimism about the impressive level of commitment to gender equality, peace, and the future. These accounts are written in impressive detail by Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd, who both individually and together are easily the world’s leading experts on Women, Peace, and Security – something that the detailed and clear engagement with different facets, levels, and geographies of the feminist peace shows and confirms.

 It is for this vitality that Kirby and Shepherd suggest that we “forget WPS” (p.206). While that seems contradictory, the book does an excellent job of suggesting that the problem is not “the feminist peace” as such but the idea that Women, Peace, and Security is or could be one coherent ‘agenda’ instead of multiple fellow travelers with tensions. As the authors explain, “we seek to give up on the concept of ‘the WPS agenda’ as a singular political project or vision and instead apprehend and engage with the agenda always as a plural object of knowledge and practice” (p.206-207). On an optimistic day, this makes me think there might be a place in advocacy for the “feminist peace” for even a pessimist like me; other days, it still reads like a better, clearer description of either WPS or the feminist peace than ones I have read before.

Though my work has always been orthogonal to the WPS agenda, the work in Governing the Feminist Peace both articulates some of my critiques of the agenda better than I could have and frames them as too simple. Where I would find WPS’ failures, Kirby and Shepherd find its complexities and potentials. That is why, while this book is full of rich and interesting information, I find myself most engaged with the conclusion. It articulates, outlines, and engages the “fundamental tensions” that structure what Kirby and Shepherd identify as the (multiple) policy ecosystem(s) of the feminist peace. They find six fundamental tensions, and outline each in turn.

As they explain, “the first is over what gender even entails,” (p.216) where some take a dichotomous approach to gender, giving substantive and even fundamental content to the category of ‘women’ as such, and others see gender as a plethora of social and political constellations of expected traits and expected behaviors. Among other things, Kirby and Shepherd identify challenges of placing masculinities and intersectionalities within ‘the WPS agenda’, necessitating multiplicities (p.216). Perhaps Shepherd’s own account of gender in Gender, Violence, and Security shows the conceptual breadth of the concept for multiple approaches to the feminist peace – “a noun, a verb, and a logic that is product/productive of the performances of violence and security” (p.3). Though not explicit in this part of the analysis, Kirby and Shepherd also mention in different places through the text that different approaches to WPS agenda that it is not only the meaning gender on which those in the WPS ecosystem disagree – but the meanings and political contents of feminisms as well. This is evident in the other tensions that Kirby and Shepherd outline.

The second tension that they identify as structuring the WPS policy ecosystem is “the seeming clash of vulnerability and agency” (p.216). Some calls for thinking about women in international peace and security rely on thinking of them as (idealized, feminized) passive victims of war and conflict, in need of special help and care because of their marginal status. Other approaches to the relationship between gender and security emphasize women’s agency, either as people who fight in wars and conflicts or as people who can decrease war and conflict. While these could be seen as multiple ways that gender matters in peace and security, more often, thinking of women as wars’ victims erases or minimizes their multiple other roles, and seeing women as agents of politics or violence can be sensationalized and draw attention away from the gendered horrors of war and conflict. Agency and vulnerability are then set at odds.

Also often at odds in the WPS policy ecosystem is the third tension that Shepherd and Kirby discuss: that “the feminist peace project is caught between hegemony and multiplicity” (p.217). They highlight the ways in which WPS has served as cover for imperial projects or even been an imperial project itself, alongside the ways in which there are local approaches to WPS, regional variations within it, and a wide variety grassroots WPS-related activisms. So the WPS policy ecosystem is imperial and local, legitimates conflict and decreases it, and multiple and often-universalized. Alongside these contradictory practices and performances in the WPS policy ecosystem is the fourth tension that Kirby and Shepherd recognize: “there is contest between an ethos of inclusion and one of abolition” (p.217) – where some advocate the inclusion of women and gender in the traditional practices of the security arena, and others suggest that feminist values must be critical of conventional security and looking to critique and deconstruct many of the competitive and masculinized structures constitutive of international security. These strategies often clash in different parts of the WPS policy ecosystem. The fifth tension (clashing issue hierarchies) and the sixth (what peace and security are) cause similar dynamics – with different WPS policies, practices, and practitioners having different priorities and therefore operating separately if not at cross purposes.

Reading Kirby and Shepherd’s account of these tensions as structuring the idea if the WPS agenda made me think of Hayward Alker’s argument that perhaps IR is and is in its arguments rather than in their reconciliations or solutions. Like disciplinary sociologists of the field of International Relations (IR), analysts of the WPS agenda sometimes tend to emphasize what the agenda ‘is’ (as a product) rather than how it is ‘produced’ as a set of processes. Alker’s answer to that disciplinary myopia – a deep, dialectical examination of tension as constitutive of the idea itself – also works for thinking about WPS, as Kirby and Shepherd’s work shoes. With Thomas Biersteker, Alker argued “it is the sharing, the interpretation, and the principled opposition of these often antagonistic approaches … that truly constitute the global inter-discipline of International Relations” (p.123). To Alker, the field was constituted by both its fundamental constestabilities and its actual contentions.

It seems to me that Hayward might love this book – perhaps even as much as I do – as Kirby and Shepherd see the WPS policy ecosystem in much the same way as Hayward saw not only IR as a field but all of the important concepts in global politics. Emphasizing a “controversy-based path of knowledge cumulation” (p.53), Alker’s view was that the substance is in the disagreement. I see this spirit in Kirby and Shepherd’s approach to the WPS policy ecosystem – where, in their words, tensions structure the agenda’s multiplicities. This warrants forgetting the idea that WPS can be singular, and instead seeing the diversity of a policy ecosystem, where they “have, we hope, broken ‘the WPS agenda,’ displaying now its shards, which can be recomposed but not recovered, shifting kaleidoscopically, dizzyingly, to illuminate the feminist peace” (p.221).

Governing the Feminist Peace, in my view, accomplishes that and more: it shows the WPS policy ecosystem as based on multiple (sometimes incompatible) readings of gender and feminisms, as reifying gendered victimhood and promoting women’s agency, as hegemonic and multiple, as complicit in and rejecting of statist, militarist conflict and competition, as invested heavily in different issues, and as interpreting security in many different ways. Reading Kirby and Shepherd’s strong and nuanced account makes me think that maybe my argument that there is no feminist peace ought to be transformed to believing, with them, that there are an unlimited number of feminist peaces – all of which are different, many of which fundamentally disagree, “inevitably nonlinear, unpredictable, and replete with possibility” (p.221). It used to be that most of the field (with Hayward as an exception) saw difference, nonlinearity, unpredictability and multidirectionality as indicators of both conceptual incompatibility and political incommensurability. Even those of us who thought that those with clashing ideas, approaches, and methods might be needed together to accomplish feminist causes often thought that in the abstract, without evidence that such an approach might work when thinking about concrete policy problems. In this sense, Kirby and Shepherd’s Governing the Feminist Peace does not only revolutionize thinking about the WPS agenda as such, but allows for a reimagining of the limits of (feminist) security studies specifically and (feminist) IR generally – one where we need not either agree or be at odds, but can work within the same (messy, surprising, and perhaps even constructive) ecosystem(s).

After reading this book that opens up WPS, frees it from many of the assumptions I would criticize, and finds space for multiplicity, I am left wondering why I still cannot find a place with WPS’ broad spaces that works for me. After all, I see myself as a feminist anti-militarist, so some part of the WPS ecosystem should be for me – especially a WPS in which I can define gender broadly, focus on agency, seek abolition, and treat violence as a continuum. Yet I still find myself unsure where (and if) I fit at a variety of levels – can I really define gender broadly in a policy ecosystem where a reification the category of ‘woman’ is the name of the ecosystem? Can I really work alongside those who would instrumentalize gender in service of seeking security? Does my voice have anything to contribute to WPS’ multiplicities, or would it be simply piling on to the hegemonic nature of some WPS policies and practices? In other words, does this policy ecosystem, even when we ‘forget’ its singularity, still have (too many) limits? Or am I just being too (intellectually) inflexible in my feeling that I still do not or could not ‘fit’?

References

Alker, Hayward R. 1996. Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies. Cambridge University Press.

Alker, Hayward R., and Thomas J. Biersteker. 1984. ‘The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire’. International Studies Quarterly 28(2): 121–42. doi:10.2307/2600692.

Shepherd, Laura. 2008. Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice. Bloomsbury Publishing.