Sexual Violence

Feminist Peace In Question

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Our final piece in the symposium on Governing the Feminist Peace is a reply from our authors to the contributions by Nicole, Mohamed, Helen, and Laura.

It is customary to begin such closing essays with an acknowledgement of the thoughtful efforts of the contributors, and fulsome appreciation of the same. We are indeed indebted to Nicole George, Mohamed Sesay, Helen Berents, and Laura Sjoberg for their careful consideration of our book, and truly grateful for their insights. But, beyond gratitude, other emotions surface also: there is a particular joy unique to having one’s work read and understood (especially when trying to convey a precise meaning can feel so much like nailing jelly to a wall); there is curiosity about why our interlocutors landed on the elements they did to draw out and drill down on; and there is excitement about the possibilities into which such focused engagement breathes life.  

The ”life” of the WPS agenda was a central theme in our book – not only anchored in the ecosystem concept we used to describe the empirical focus of our investigations, but also in the motif of vitality (paired with failure) that we argue characterises now 25 years of WPS. The question of where WPS “lives” is also a theme of much WPS scholarship, and something the contributors to this forum pick up on as well. The disjuncture between “government WPS” and “civil society WPS”, however crude and overdrawn this distinction may be, is a tension that has run through the agenda since its inception (quite literally: as we discuss in the book, one of the key faultlines in WPS developed in part from the disagreement between women’s civil society actors and those more closely aligned with UN member states regarding the need for, and content of, the second WPS resolution in 2008). Mohamed, Helen, and Nicole all touch on this tension in different and generative ways.

It has often been argued that WPS belongs to civil society, that women’s rights activists have been responsible for nurturing and continuing to care for the agenda. Our ecosystem concept, which draws attention to the multiple and various ways in which the agenda has flourished in different locations, enables interested researchers to look more closely at these forms of engagement and their effects on how WPS is (re)produced. As Helen comments, “the plurality of WPS offers us ways of leveraging the spaces (and the plural is important to the argument of the book) created by feminist advocacy for inclusive peace and security”. Similarly, Nicole’s expertise on women’s rights and gender justice in the Pacific is brought to bear in her critique, in which she reminds us that “no matter the confines of policy, women’s creativity insists and issues practical challenges to those that seek to ‘govern’ the feminist peace through hegemony and exclusion”. These are calls for the continued recognition of the work done by civil society WPS actors, in diverse locations and unevenly distributed resources and access, and we gladly concur.

In his critique, however, Mohamed sounds a note of caution:

“transformative agendas like WPS do not go very far if the neocolonial structures in which they emerged have not been effectively dismantled. … The future of this peace is not merely about how to make these systems more inclusive of women nor how to deploy them to protect and defend women’s rights. The future in this structural setting is about how to decolonize these systems so that violence and war is delegitimized as a means of governance, a question that seems to be deflected by those governing feminist peace”

We discuss the violences of racism and coloniality in relation to WPS throughout Governing the Feminist Peace, but we neither tackle the pressing need for decolonising WPS governance nor examine at length how white supremacy is imbricated with WPS (though the latter is one of our persistent threads). It would take another book to explore the specifically structural relations between neocolonialism and feminist peace projects in Africa, but let us not palm off the challenge. Mohamed seems to suggest that WPS is not only superficial – insofar as it does not in itself transform colonial political economy – but also serves African elites who have “inherited the colonial governance paradigm”. There is of course a long-running critique of WPS as colonial, whether in the relations of saviour and saved embedded in the resolutions, the practices of expertise and tutelage, or the policy representations of a peaceable north and violent south.

Our approach takes up these critiques but follows a different arc, not just because the ecosystem concept resists views of WPS as having any fundamental quality (whether colonial or decolonial) but also because we seek to recover histories that cut against the grain of the global north origin story, a diffusion model ironically shared by liberal advocates and radical critics alike. Whatever the hegemonic forms operative in some times and places (say, the Security Council when Hillary Clinton showed up), the emergence and shape of WPS is also creditable to Namibia and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, Liberia and Leymah Gbowee, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Denis Mukwege. For Nandi-Ndaitwah that meant a veteran of the liberation struggle joining the postcolonial condition to gender equality and peacekeeping in the prototype to Resolution 1325; for Gbowee a grassroots women’s movement dethroning Charles Taylor; for Mukwege a model of care for survivors of sexual violence. All could be seen as figures of elite or liberal politics: Nandi-Ndaitwah is Namibia’s next president and was a minister for decades before that; Gbowee became a figurehead for peacemaker discourse and won the Nobel Prize; Mukwege is the exception that proves the rule in figurations of global south perpetrator masculinity. Yet we would also see in each case contestations of colonial governance: a postcolonial WPS born of anti-apartheid resistance; a popular resistance to extractive war economies; a rebuff to western saviour roles.

Whether these figures in their fraught particularity ultimately resolve for or against neocolonialism is a question we cannot decide here, partly because the discrete function of ‘WPS’ in any given setting is open to contestation, and we argue more open that most observers have realised or comparisons with other governance projects would allow. Even in the DR Congo, where the fixation on sexual violence and the reinforcement of racialized scripts has been most gratuitous, women in the east continue to organise with 1325 as a tool. We suggest this is not only because they have their own independent concern with preventing and responding to sexual violence not reducible to a colonial narrative, but also because they take up the themes in the agenda that foreground agency, peacemaking and reparation. That they may do so tactically, and highly cognisant of western humanitarian logics, can be understood in the same frame as a genuine openness and collaborative making in WPS itself. For the regional and international actors who so profit from violence and war in the region, the mobilisation is unlikely to be a welcome one. If we make ‘governance’ synonymous with ‘elite rule’ these possibilities disappear. The more fascinating stories are in the forgotten elements, the tenacious survival of forms of WPS that did not resonate with the hegemonic forms, and in that which is excluded, and some of those we have tried to tell.

Helen pushes us (always with care) to reflect on what is next for feminist peace, in the shape of WPS or otherwise. She asks: “How do more recent calls towards abolitionist notions of feminist peace (Wright and Achilleos-Sarll 2024), or the articulation of Indigenous knowledge as non-co-optable by feminist governance (Russ-Smith 2022), for example, disrupt or exceed the accounts of WPS within the book?”  Nicole likewise wonders “if the story of hegemony and exclusion that Kirby and Shepherd draw out in their WPS analysis is simply an inevitable reality”. Let us take the opportunity to emphasise a point that is not clear enough in the book. WPS is but one manifestation of ‘feminist peace’, a much wider field of possibilities that both feeds and generates resistance to the agenda as practiced. It is not our intention to simply expand WPS to swallow all feminist peace practice, nor to plead for WPS governance by adding new adjectives and sub-branches. Ecology does not imply endless metastasis. We do discuss indigenous contentions of the agenda, especially in the case of liberal Canadian WPS, and expect that indigenous knowledge, which is after all not singular, can in principle be accommodated to some WPS niches, though only after a reckoning with settler colonialism that is politically impossible at present. (Indeed, one of the points we emphasise is that indigenous politics should not be read only through the lens of marginalised women or excluded knowledges but as sovereign and counter-sovereign practices). Abolitionism is to us more inimical still to WPS as governance, and we are not sure that there could be anything recognisably WPS without governance. Though we cannot do justice to debates within abolitionism here, it will suffice to say that only those variants that seek institutional reform (e.g. fewer police officers but more social service) can be compatible with the state that remains the main locus for appeal in the agenda. An ecological perspective allows for the enumeration of these points of contact and resistance at great length: it is our hope that the model might serve to better map grafting, subdivision and repulsion. 

We conclude our reflections with the prompt set by Laura in her generous engagement with our work, as it is a question that resonates with us – still, even now, having written many thousands of words over many years on this topic: “does this policy ecosystem, even when we ‘forget’ its singularity, still have (too many) limits?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, our answer is yes, and no. The agenda is, in a sense, unbounded – curtailed only by the political imagination of those who act in its name, who write policy that invokes WPS, who enact WPS and thus bring the agenda into being. We locate that openness not just in the coordinates of actors ranging from local women’s groups to great power foreign ministries but also in the sprawl of ‘gender equality’ itself: an emancipatory horizon that implicates every arena of life and every level of analysis. And yet the limits are evident, and inevitable, even when the agenda is revealed as fluid and multiple, in all its kaleidoscopic complexity. The agenda is, after all, partly arrested in governance, and governance is limited by the structures of power that sustain it. Contemporary national and global governance systems rely on and reproduce structures of power, both ideational and material, that work to impose limits and foreclose liberation. In this way, WPS is a case: an example of a sprawling and diverse policy agenda that is both a product of, and challenge to, its context – and which necessarily exists in relation, through multiple connections to the political movements that both motivate and test it. As we note in the conclusion to the book, our work situates WPS “as always entangled in a web of feminist contentions over everything from sexuality to carcerality. The analytical move is paradoxical, since it is precisely by forgetting a pristine WPS that the myriad connections to contemporary feminist movements become visible again”. Rendering feminists visible in the governance of feminist peace and putting politics and power at the centre of our analysis, was at the heart of our project, and simultaneously formed the conditions of our work. So when deliberating the limits of WPS, we question not only the policy ecosystem, but the limits of governance, the limits of feminism – the limits of peace. 

Women, Peace, and Security as Argument and Tension

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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.

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.

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Ecotones And Borderlands Of The Feminist Peace

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a photo of Helen Berents

The next contribution to our symposium on Governing the Feminist Peace comes from Helen Berents. Helen is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffiths University. Helen is a feminist scholar centrally concerned with both representations of young people in contexts of crises and conflict, and with engagements with the lived experience of violence-affected communities. Helen’s work sits in international relations, particularly peace studies and critical security studies but is interdisciplinary in drawing from anthropology, feminist theory and sociology. Earlier posts in the symposium can be found here, here and here.

I have always been a gardener; I hold a love of the bright green of new shoots, the petrichor smell of soil after rain (or here in Australia, after an early morning watering before the heat sets in), the uncertainty of success as I bury tiny seeds, the never-ending weeding, and the joy of the harvest.  As I’ve gardened in my backyard over the years, my eye has become more attuned to what is present: it is not just that ‘a bee’ is visiting my patch, but a flock of tiny native stingless honeybees, or my favourite, the gorgeous blue banded bee. Their purpose, as they duck in and out of the flowers in search of pollen, is very different to mine as I weed and plant and prune, but we both share a desire for the ecosystem of my backyard vegetable patch to thrive.

Helen’s garden

I kept thinking of my garden as I read Kirby and Shepherd’s rich and brilliant book. The authors encourage us to think about WPS as a policy ‘ecosystem’ and the while a garden and ecosystem are not true synonyms, garden metaphors seem easy to reach for. Kirby and Shepherd stress in the book, and more explicitly in their earlier article (2000), that an ecosystem model is not meant to imply naturalist tendencies of evolution or teleological design. Rather an ecosystem approach enables an emphasis on relationality, reproduction, and plurality as constitutive features of a policy ecosystem such as WPS.

In Governing the Feminist Peace, Kirby and Shepherd draw on decades of individual and joint work on, around, and in ‘the WPS agenda’; their eyes more attuned than many to what is present in its specificity and diversity. In this way, it is a pleasure to be guided by these two authors-slash-policy-ecologists through an environment we might think we are familiar with in our own relational encounters with the actors and artifacts of the agenda, yet be taken down paths, into unexpected clearings, and to be directed to pause and notice what we might otherwise walk past.

It is a monumental task that Kirby and Shepherd have set themselves, and one they execute compellingly. Convincingly demonstrating the limitations of understanding WPS as a norm, they instead invite us along as they become ‘policy ecologists’ to account for the myriad complexities, contradictions, tensions, and co- or parallel- trajectories of all that lies within what gets called ‘WPS’. The ‘bricolage’ approach they adopt enables them to move between the macro and micro of the ecosystem, highlighting moments, events, and lineages as offering lessons on the vitality and failure of actors’ efforts within the policy ecosystem. This results in brilliant accounts, such as that of the WPS resolution that ‘never was’, nuanced consideration of the potential and antagonisms of the favoured WPS policy vehicle of National Action Plans, and the historic and contemporary tensions of diverse actors in the ecosystem such as NATO and WILPF. These explorations demonstrate the success of the bricolage approach of mapping a policy ecosystem, working to make visible the wandering paths of the WPS ecosystem rather than the highway of WPS-as-norm/s.

In selecting just a few paths to wander down here, I offer three reflections: two short observations on the ephemeral nature of feminist peace in the book and on what gets (perhaps necessarily) missed by a focus on and through the documents of the WPS agenda, and a more meandering reflection on the generative potential of the fecundity of borderlands.

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Why We Wrote Governing The Feminist Peace

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This is the first post in a new book symposium, on Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd’s Governing the Feminist Peace, which was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press.

Laura is Professor of International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, and served as President of the International Studies Association from 2023-2024. She is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018-2022), and has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK, since 2016. She is a member of The Disorder of Things authorial collective.

Paul is Reader in International Politics and a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He was until this year a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, a multinational, interdisciplinary research consortium investigating the politics of gender justice and inclusive peace. A founding editor of this blog, he is our own Pablo K.

Following this opening post, we will share contributions from an august roster of colleagues over the coming days, followed by a response from the authors.

Book cover of Governing the Feminist Peace

In late April 2019, Nadia Murad addressed the United Nations Security Council during its annual open debate on sexual violence in conflict. Murad had gained an international profile as a courageous and articulate survivor of atrocities carried out by Da’esh – the so-called Islamic State – against the Yazidi ethno-religious community in northern Iraq. In her short speech, Murad urged the council to end its reliance on slogans and finally prosecute sexual violence and other grave crimes. Accompanying Murad was her lawyer, Amal Clooney, who challenged the Council to rise to its “Nuremberg moment, its chance to stand on the right side of history” by triggering an International Criminal Court or hybrid court process. The meeting culminated in a new resolution, the ninth in the series of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) resolutions, consolidating the status of ‘the agenda’ as the most extensive of all the Security Council’s thematic commitments.

Murad’s six-minute speech was but one instance in a still-unfolding mosaic of events and relations, institutions and movements, talk and text, united by reference to conflict-related sexual violence. Similar constellations of actors may be found throughout the WPS agenda, working across boundaries of domestic and international, formal and informal, state and society, military and civil, lay and expert, public and private. Sexual violence is but one – and the most controversial – in a docket of gender issues, encompassing equal rights, the benefits of women’s substantive participation in promoting peace, the contribution of a ‘gender perspective’ to military planning, the urgent need for global disarmament, recognition of gender diversity, changes to humanitarian practice, inclusivity in refugee, disaster and climate change management, and more besides. As well as the national governments that are invariably the target of appeals for resources and action, the WPS circuit runs on an expansive cast of women’s groups, humanitarian agencies, freelance consultants, celebrity activists, academics, private philanthropic foundations, lawyers, investigative journalists, religious authorities, intergovernmental agencies, international courts, treaty bodies, think tanks, and military alliances.

Governing the Feminist Peace is our attempt to come to terms with this dizzying array of issues and agents. WPS is (still) celebrated as a success for feminists in that a coalition of civil society actors managed to get the Security Council to not just acknowledge the gendered quality of war and peace but to pledge – and on some accounts to legislate – for concerted global action towards feminist goals, from demilitarisation to indigenous peace-making. In formal policy terms it is embraced not only by the Security Council but by over a hundred countries, dozens of regional bodies, and, increasingly, a range of sub-national actors. An accompanying cottage industry has sprung up to track the pace of adoption. For all this energy, WPS is also frequently, almost reflexively, announced as partial, faltering, betrayed, coopted, and securitised. In our terms, a wellspring of vitality and a vortex of failure. These aspects of WPS are not mere opposites, with advocates celebrating vitality and cynics documenting failure. The relation is more intricate, with failure as often a spur to greater implementation efforts as a reason to abandon the agenda, and with vitality in the sense of official adoption to some extent dependent on the failure of the more radical versions of the agenda.

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Sex, Power & Play at Europe’s Largest Arms Fair

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A guest post from N.E.. N.E. is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the University of Sussex (UK), researching militarism and ecological injustice. She is also an Advisor to Scientists for Global Responsibility, Associated Researcher with the World Peace Foundation and author of the new report Resisting Green Militarism: Building Movements for Peace and Eco-Social Justice. 

**Disclaimer: none of the people displayed in the photos are present in the text and should not be thought of as complicit with the sexual harassment discussed in the text.

Thales and Elbit Systems, DSEI 2023. Credit: Nico Edwards
Thales and Elbit Systems, DSEI 2023. Credit: N.E.

Global headlines are once again seized by the outbreak of armed conflict, detailing indescribable suffering and destruction. War, it feels, is everywhere and always. To some, this means business. Many of the facilitators and profiteers of armed conflict globally attended the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) in London, September 2023.

What follows is a personal story, but what it tells us about enduring systems of power and harm goes far beyond my person. That weathered feminist truth that the personal is always also political rings true still. What I experienced in the world of “defence men” – the global war elite – attending DSEI as a white woman, was highly demonstrative of the social, political and economic forces that enable and perpetuate armed violence. The personal behaviours of militarised business masculinities hold clues as to why decisionmakers keep hurtling toward global war at the expense of both people and the planet.

Setting the Scene: A Playground for Phallic Force 

Happening in London biannually, DSEI is one of the world’s biggest and most important arms fairs. I went there to research military sectors’ pivot toward environmental sustainability and how to “green” warfare – a key emerging feature especially of European and North American propaganda. The event oozed of hubris. Rob, an American war simulations expert and my main interlocutor, confirmed he’d never seen such a galore of impressive weapons tech exhibitions. Indeed, several arms company reps told me affirmingly: business is booming. Spread across 100,000 sqm. Rob and I were among almost 40,000 participants from all over the world. Including the usual array of repressive, human rights abusing regimes or states involved in active warfare.

You don’t have to be a polemicist to catch how DSEI is but one big bonding ritual for predominantly white men in suits enacting their obsession with force. DSEI puts the global war elite’s drastic detachment from the real-world needs of people and planet into sharp relief. Inside the fair, “defence” and “security” materialise as glaring euphemisms for military-industrial might and titillating experiments in how to model the future of warfare in line with Hollywood fantasies of high-tech battles between good and evil. Rather than signal a dedication – however deceptive – to keeping people safe, the event felt like an inferno of white men in suits blatantly driven by that boyish excitement for tech, kinetics, heroism, beauty, sex and money. And yet, there are enough of these men in power across the globe to make it seem as if they are the realists responding to real threats.

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The End of The Hague Yugoslavia

/ Srdjan / 1 Comment

The Hague campus of Leiden University today hosted the “Final Reflections” symposium of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Everyone from the institution showed up: current and past presidents, current and past judges as well as ad hoc judges, current and past prosecutors, media officers and archivists, plus a bunch of guests—gender advisors, professors, judges from other courts, and so on. Even the president of the International Criminal Court (ICC) spoke at the last panel. This was not a mere stock-taking exercise “between a variety of stakeholders,” says the agenda.  Rather, it was an opportunity for said stakeholders to reflect on the ICTY’s legacy, ideally via a set of “short but emphatic statement[s] on the importance of international criminal courts and tribunals – particularly in today’s political climate.”

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Citizens Of Nowhere

/ Rahul Rao / 2 Comments

In her speech to the 2016 Conservative Party conference, Theresa May threw down a gauntlet:

…if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.

For anyone wondering who or what met the cut, May was helpfully expansive, populating this rather arcane placeholder with the figures of the boss who earns a fortune but doesn’t look after his staff, the international company that eludes the snares of tax law, the ‘household name’ that refuses cooperation with anti-terrorist authorities, and the director who takes out massive dividends while knowing that the company pension is about to go bust. Basically, fat cats with the odd public intellectual thrown in. May contrasted the spectre of the rootless cosmopolitan with the ‘spirit of citizenship’, which, in her view, entailed ‘respect [for] the bonds and obligations that make our society work’,theresa-may ‘commitment to the men and women who live around you’, ‘recognizing the social contract that says you train up local young people before you take on cheap labour from overseas.’ And perhaps astonishingly, for a Conservative Prime Minister, May promised to deploy the full wherewithal of the state to revitalize that elusive social contract by protecting workers’ rights and cracking down on tax evasion to build ‘an economy that works for everyone’. Picture the Brexit debate as a 2X2 matrix with ideological positions mapped along an x-axis, and Remain/Leave options mapped along a y-axis to yield four possibilities: Right Leave (Brexit), Left Leave (Lexit), Right Remain (things are great) and Left Remain (things are grim, but the alternative is worse). Having been a quiet Right Remainer in the run-up to the referendum, May has now become the Brexit Prime Minister while posing, in parts of this speech, as a Lexiter (Lexiteer?).

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A measured response to criticisms of the LSE’s new appointments

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By way of homage to xkcd: This blog contains strong language, which may be unsuitable for children, and evidence-based arguments, which may be unsuitable for Trump supporters.

Oh, and also, for those who care about these things: I am most definitely posting this in an independent capacity. My views reflect the views of neither of the institutions with which I am affiliated, nor do those institutions swear as much as I do. Probably. Or at least they only do it in private.

Two things happened in my little corner of the interwebs this week. First, a dear friend discovered the (fabulously sweary and very NSFW) website Get In the Sea, and tagged me in a Facebook post to tell me so. For those who are not familiar, it is a site that posts images of, or links to, things, people or events that its creator(s) finds objectionable with a caption exhorting them to ‘get in the fucking sea’ (it’s funnier than it sounds). Naturally, I was delighted by this development; I have long been a follower of the site – there are days on which only its unique blend of righteous indignation and creative profanity seem able to raise a smile for me – but it pleased me greatly to know that for this, among many other things, my friend and I have shared enthusiasm. It is always nice to be reminded of why your friends are your friends: because of the random synchronicity of humour, life experience, outlook, whatever. Apparently we both enjoy succinct critiques of consumer culture and injustice with a side of foul language. This makes me smile.

Sea

The sea, to get in (photo by author)

And, second, my social media feeds were jammed with the news of Angelina Jolie’s appointment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. My construction of that sentence is entirely deliberate: mass news media coverage of the appointment of four new ‘Professors in Practice’ at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security focused almost exclusively on the credentials of Angelina Jolie Pitt (while mostly dropping the Pitt because who cares about calling her by her actual name when we’re busily engaged in tearing her down) to occupy this position, mentioning in passing if at all the other three new appointments (Jane Connors, Director of International Advocacy at Amnesty International Geneva, William Hague, former UK Foreign Secretary, and Madeleine Rees, Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, for those of you who managed – understandably – to miss their names). Continue reading →

The Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and Its Critics

/ Pablo K / 1 Comment

I have a piece out in the latest International Affairs on the UK government’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI), better recognised as that thing William Hague did with Angelina Jolie(-Pitt) when he was still Foreign Secretary. As well as an important project in its own right, the Initiative might be read as signalling a new front in ethical foreign policy, and another success story in feminist activism around sexual violence (alongside the rise of ‘governance feminism’ and what have been called ‘femocrats’ in the UN and elsewhere). The role of the UK as a diplomatic and political presence becomes more important still against the background of rising attention to gender in global policy discourse in recent decades (conventionally referred to as the ‘Women, Peace and Security’, or WPS, agenda). Alternatively, the PSVI might be understood as a cause without demonstrable success, already fading from the scene along with Hague, its main advocate. And from either a conventionally Realist or a more radical activist perspective, the chances of a Foreign Office-led policy initiative making any feminist ground would seem slim.

Against this background, and building on a few years of following the Initiative’s progress, I stake out a preliminary analysis of three planks of the PSVI’s work. First, its wholesome embrace of ‘weapon of war’ thesis. Second, the great emphasis on ending impunity as the most effective means to reduce atrocity. And third, the repeated foregrounding of men and boys as ignored victims of sexual and gender-based violence. The headline conclusion is that, despite its promise, the initiative has thus far achieved little on its own technical terms, and its underlying approach to gender violence in conflict is in important senses limited. The conceptual bases of this relative failure lie in an unduly simplistic account of where and why such violence happens and an inability to reckon with the lack of evidence for strong deterrence effects or the significant resource challenges involved in supporting local and national justice programmes. By contrast, the PSVI stands as an important moment in the opening out of policy understandings of gender violence, although there nevertheless remain important ambiguities over ‘gender neutrality’ in practice, and therefore a likelihood of disputes over resources.

Missouri Emancipation Ordinance

The arrival of the Hague-Jolie Initiative onto the WPS scene was unexpected. The Conservative manifesto for the 2010 general election made no mention of wartime sexual atrocity, and was utterly conventional in its references to human rights. UK support for Security Council resolutions aside, activities on sexual violence have historically come from the Department for International Development (DFID), and with the exception of the attention generated during the London summit, the UK government has not made much of the initiative in its public relations since. The PSVI is thus heavily identified with William Hague personally, and can be traced to his epiphany over the role of genocidal rape in Bosnia. Hague, who is also the biographer of William Wilberforce, has framed war rape as similar to slavery in its immorality and argued for the role of the UK as an abolitionist force, repurposing standard diplomatic practice to progressive ends. This is to seek nothing less, in his words, than “the eradication of rape as a weapon of war, through a global campaign to end impunity for perpetrators, to deter and prevent sexual violence, to support and recognise survivors, and to change global attitudes that fuel these crimes”.

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Why Torture When Torture Does Not Work? Orientalism, Anti-Blackness and the Persistence of White Terror

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A guest post from Melanie Richter-Montpetit, responding to the disclosure of the Senate Torture Report in December. Melanie is currently lecturer in international security at the University of Sussex, having recently gained her PhD from York University in Toronto. Her work on issues of subjectivity, belonging and political violence has also been published in Security Dialogue and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

a land on which no slave can breathe.

– Frederick Douglass (1846)[i]

I had to leave; I needed to be in a place where I could breathe and not feel someone’s hand on my throat.

– James Baldwin (1977)[ii]

I can’t breathe.

– Eric Garner (2014)

 America Waterboards

No, bin Laden was not found because of CIA torture.[iii] In fact, the US Senate’s official investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 Detention and Interrogation program concludes that torture yielded not a single documented case of “actionable intelligence.” If anything, the Senate Torture Report[iv] – based on the review of more than six million pages of CIA material, including operational cables, intelligence reports, internal memoranda and emails, briefing materials, interview transcripts, contracts, and other records – shows that the administration of torture has led to blowbacks due to false intelligence and disrupted relationships with prisoners who cooperated. What went “wrong”? How is it possible that despite the enormous efforts and resources invested in the CIA-led global torture regime, including the careful guidance and support by psychologists[v] and medical doctors, that the post-9/11 detention and interrogation program failed to produce a single case of actionable data? Well, contrary to the commonsense understanding of torture as a form of information-gathering, confessions made under the influence of torture produce notoriously unreliable data, and the overwhelming majority of interrogation experts and studies oppose the collection of intelligence via the use of torture. This is because most people are willing to say anything to stop the pain or to avoid getting killed and/or are simply unable to remember accurate information owing to exhaustion and trauma.[vi]

So if torture is known not work, how come, then, that in the wake of 9/11 the U.S. at the highest levels of government ran the risk of setting up a torture regime in violation of international and domestic law? Why alienate international support and exacerbate resentments against “America” with the public display of controversial incarceration practices, as in Guantánamo Bay, instead of simply relying on the existing system of secret renditions? Furthermore, in the words of a former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, most of the tortured and indefinitely detained are “Mickey Mouse” prisoners,[vii] reportedly known not to be involved in or not to have any information on criminal or terrorist activity against the U.S. and its allies. Drawing on previously published work, I will explore this puzzle by addressing two key questions: What is the value of these carceral practices when they do not produce actionable intelligence? And, what are some of the affective and material economies involved in making these absurd and seemingly counterproductive carceral practices possible and desirable as technologies of security in the post-9/11 Counterterrorism efforts?

Against the exceptionalism[viii] of conceiving of these violences as “cruel and unusual,” “abuse” or “human rights violations”[ix] that indicate a return to “medieval” methods of punishment, the post-9/11 US torture regime speaks to the constitutive role of certain racial-sexual violences in the production of the US social formation. Contrary to understandings of 9/11 and the authorization of the torture regime as a watershed moment in U.S. history “destroying the soul of America,”[x] the carceral security or pacification practices documented in the Senate Torture Report and their underpinning racial-sexual grammars of legitimate violence and suffering have played a fundamental role in the making of the US state and nation since the early days of settlement.[xi] The CIA Detention and Interrogation program[xii] targeting Muslimified subjects and populations was not only shaped by the gendered racial-sexual grammars of Orientalism, but – as has been less explored in IR[xiii] – is informed also by grammars of anti-Blackness, the capture and enslavement of Africans and the concomitant production of the figure of the Black body as the site of enslaveability and openness to gratuitous violence.[xiv]

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