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Voices from Strife: A reflection on cooperation and Principle – International Women’s Day 2021

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This is a letter from Deputy Editor-in-Chief Isabela Betoret Garcia on the occasion of International Women’s Day reflecting on the role of women in the fields of security and conflict. Over the past two years, Strife has gone through a conscious effort to improve the representation and engagement of women at the blog and journal.

 In 2020 52% of our contributors were women. The Women in Writing Mentoring Programme kicked off in October 2020 with the objective of inspiring more women to write. As of March 2021, 47% of our staff is female.

I joined Strife in the second year of my undergraduate. I remember joking that I did not have a choice. My seminar leader, who had been with Strife for years, had often talked to me about writing for the blog but I never felt like I had anything worth saying. Eventually, he approached me with an open position for BA Representative and it did not feel like a question anymore. The offer said: you want this, and you are not letting yourself do it.

Ever since I was a child I remember wanting to lead. Ever since I was a child, I remember being made to feel guilty for it.

The saddest part is that those who made me question my value, those who made me feel that my strengths were my weaknesses, and what made me feel strong was just being stubborn, were other women.

Perhaps it is because we have been told that there is not enough space for all of us at the top, perhaps it is because we were taught to react against what society perceives as ‘unfeminine, or maybe it was just jealousy that one of us was brave enough to be herself in a world that is screaming against it.

It was not a conscious choice, it was not a vow, it was simply a matter of principle: I have made sure that I never tear another woman down but help uplift her. I have surrounded myself with brilliant minds; women I admire, women I want to be like, women who I would walk into battle for because they would do the same for me.

Reaching the top has certainly been a battle.

We are women in a field that has been dominated by men for centuries—but not because we were not present. Women have always been a part of the history of conflict; year by year we tore ourselves out of the footnotes onto the pages, the covers, the titles, the authors.

From nameless figures to victims, to martyrs, to fighters, and finally to the ones holding the pen. The ones who make the calls, the ones who say how the story goes.

I think of a very young me and the fear of being in the spotlight inspired. I was not afraid because I did not want it, I was afraid of wanting it too much and that the longing for it without the validation or the support would destroy me.

Women reached this place by walking through fire only to realise that we could not get burnt. We reached this place by seeing that there is room for all of us and more. By reaching out and calling and saying: you want this, and I am here to show you: you can have it.

I am incredibly proud of the team we have built at Strife. A team that looks for talent and skill, but also stops to look for it in places that were once neglected.

We have a strong team because we, men and women, look out for each other, support each other, and celebrate each other’s talent.

I can only hope the world will one day look like the one we have built for ourselves here.

Happy International Women’s Day to all our staff—it is only possible because of the efforts of each and every one of you.

 

Isabela Betoret Garcia
Deputy Editor-in-Chief

Isabela is a first-year part-time Terrorism, Security, and Society MA. She graduated from King’s College London in 2020 with a BA in War Studies and History, and she is also a graduate of King’s Foundations. After writing her dissertation on the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right Rally’ she became fascinated by the topic of radicalisation and the alt-right. She knits in her spare time.

Isabela originally joined Strife during her second year as a BA representative and then moved on to manage social media before being handed control over our newest outreach programmes, including the Women In Writing Mentoring Scheme.

You can follow her on Twitter @isa_betoret

International Women’s Day Special: an Interview with Professor Vivienne Jabri

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By Sofia Lesmes

8 March 2019

International Women’s Day is celebrated annually on 8 March to raise awareness for women’s rights. (AFP/Getty Images)

 

In a special International Women’s Day edition, Strife’s Sofia Lesmes sat down with Professor Vivienne Jabri to discuss the legacy of International Women’s Day, the intersection of feminism and the arts, and feminism’s important role in conflict and its study.

Professor Vivienne Jabri is a professor of International Politics at the Department of War Studies and was founding Director of London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP). Her research focuses on international political theory, critical social and political theory, postcolonialism, and feminist perspectives, with specific interest in the politics of conflict, violence and security practices. In 2016, she was the co-curator of the exhibition Traces of War at the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House.

S: International Women’s Day has been in existence since 1911. How do you see the role of the day evolving into 2019?

VJ: It’s interesting how a day that celebrates women is actually controversial. March 8th is not always internationally recognised as International Women’s Day. For feminists internationally, it celebrates the agency of women; it’s a day to celebrate what women bring to the political sphere, to business, and to all walks of life in a larger context of society. In some societies, it’s a day of celebration of women per se, so women receive flowers, for example, and you might consider that to be rather apolitical. But within a global context, it has become a political event because it’s seen as part of the feminist armoury for celebration as well as protest. It’s certainly a day that I consider to be very important as a feminist and scholar in international politics.

And you would think that in the twenty-first century, we wouldn’t need such a day to emphasize women’s position in society or the inequalities that still exist between the genders. We are increasingly talking about misogynistic acts that women go through because they are women — issues that are very much present in our current public discourses, if you consider the levels of daily and routine violence that is directed at women, the use of violent language through social media, and the murder of women in politics, including amongst others, Jo Cox in the UK; the feminist and LGBT campaigner in Brazil, Marielle Franco; Aquila Al-Hashimi in Iraq; and Sitara Achakzai, a leading campaigner for women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s important to celebrate the day, but it’s also important to remember it is as part of the continuing struggle for women’s equality.

 

S: Your research has focused on feminism and the political sphere of international relations. How do you see internationalist feminism aligning with the range of conflicts around the world today?

VJ: So, feminism in international relations contributes a great deal in relation to understandings of conflict and security, and it has become a very large research agenda within international relations as a discipline. In terms of my own work, I take a feminist discourse and the history of feminist thought, within wider critical thought, in order to understand war and politics, to see what war does to the political context internationally. Though the titles of my works do not always have the concept of ‘gender’, feminist political thought is a great influence. I’ll give you an example of how that works because it’s not always straightforward. If you consider interventionist war, it brings up a discourse of protection. The interventions in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or in other parts of the Middle East, were legitimised through a discourse of protection, of civilians generally, and in Afghanistan, of women. It’s a powerful legitimising discourse that enables such interventions to take place. So where does feminism come in? In the history of feminist thought, the construct of ‘protection’ immediately suggests a power relationship; it suggests that women lack agency and, therefore, call for the protection of men. Protection as a concept is very gendered, and it is understood as such in feminist thought. So what’s happening in these interventionist contexts is the infantilization of the populations involved, just as you have the infantilization of women in the discourse of protection. Interventionist warfare uses the trope of care and protection in order to legitimise what are in effect militarised interventions that primarily affect populations. In Iraq, an early estimate of casualties as a direct consequence of the intervention suggested around 600,000 civilians had been killed.

Similarly related to my work on subjectivity, it (my work on feminism) analyses what war and conflict do to the subject of politics. Once again, feminism has a great deal to say on subjectivity, particularly post-structural feminism. Feminism has always understood subjectivity as a product of power relations, especially, I would say, within the post-structural understanding. The aim there is to problematise the notion of the subject in politics, to understand the complexity of the subject and the situatedness of the subject in relation to matrices of power.

So, why is feminism important to me? It tells us a great deal about how power operates in its very microcosm. While realism, for example, may look at power relations in a broader perspective that takes ‘the state’ for granted, international feminist theory looks at power in a way that is microcosmic, that unravels how structures of power impact on the body, the self, and gendered socio-political and economic relations. Indeed, a Foucauldian understanding of power is also microcosmic, but not necessarily as specific as feminist conceptions of power.

 

 S: The exhibition you co-curated in 2016 focused on the traces that war and conflict leave on daily lives, and the unlikely places that a war can affect. If feminism is moving the private into the public and the personal to the political, how do you see this in its relationship with the traces that war leaves in daily lives?

VJ: The idea of the trace is suggestive of war having an impact — a continuing one — on bodies, bodily movement, psyches, landscapes, and language. This was important to capture in Traces of War, because whereas war understood conventionally is a crisis that is happening ‘over there’ on a battle field, war’s impact on space and time goes well beyond that battlefield. Such impact is inherited across generations, and its traces, as we sought to reveal in the exhibition, permeate the everyday, or the seemingly everyday, and the routine. What that means is that the assumed distinction between war and peace is not as clear cut as the dichotomy might suggest, and, as you know, feminism has always been interested in the everyday. If you think about Simone de Beauvoir, she distinctly writes about the everyday positionality of women and how the socio-political constellation of forces impacts the lives of women and their unequal status. In an exhibition on ‘traces of war’, the challenge was to engage with how the trace can carry within it deeply rooted forces that perpetuate war and its injurious acts, impacting on memories, bodies, articulations of subjectivity, bodily movement and trauma, the language of love in the midst of war, and imperial and postcolonial landscapes that inflict and bear continuing warfare.

In an exhibition like Traces of War, you also have a discussion with your co-curator (in our exhibition, Cecile Bourne-Farrell) and with the involved artists, since each one had a unique perspective. Jananne al-Ani looked at traces of war upon landscapes, where she’s specifically focused on postcolonial perspectives. Her work focuses on aerial views of landscapes, essentially to show that even in a supposedly peaceful setting such as the Kent countryside, there are layers and layers of warfare that can be found in excavation of the land. And the genius of someone like Jananne Al-Jani is that she evokes those layers of warfare and colonialism from the air because she’s not excavating like an archaeologist would. The idea of excavation is very important when we want to understand relationships of power globally. We learn from Michel Foucault that to understand how power operates in the present, you excavate archaeologically into the past in order to understand the conditions that have generated power relations today. The question of power and subjectivity was also crucial in our exhibition, and this theme was also evident in the works of Baptist Coelho and Shaun Gladwell.

 

 S: There is no shortage of different approaches to the intersection of feminism and international relations. How do you see different approaches converging when it comes to conflict and war?

VJ: There are different conceptualisations of feminist theory in international relations and within the broader feminist movement. I think it’s important to continue to problematise the relationship between the public and the private, for example in the sphere of social media, where the right to privacy is most blatantly challenged and where violent misogynistic threats are made against women.  Often, the way in which women are attacked is through sexuality, which is a very highly gendered discourse that seeks to limit, and not to mention completely undo, women’s agency.

It’s important to recognise that misogyny is so deeply rooted even in societies where you might think that we’ve achieved, in terms of legislation and public policy, a certain level of equality between the sexes. This is evident in what’s happening in the present political context, both domestically and internationally, where women become targets of violence and exclusionary practices, and this is especially the case for women involved in rights campaigns. For the contemporary extreme right in the US and Europe feminism as such has become a target.

Regarding conflict and locations of war, the research question on how women’s agency in a context of war is articulated is highly salient. Women are certainly a part of warfare; they join up with conflict groups and are a part of militaries, and questions relating to women ‘joining up’ must unravel how gender plays a part. Then, there are broader questions on how women’s agency and gendered institutional practices influence war and politics. These questions are all to do with how gender impacts governing practices — and that’s what the feminist agenda is all about. Going back to someone like Cynthia Enloe, who remains a major voice in feminist international relations, Ann Tickner and Christine Sylvester — these are founding voices in feminist international relations and should be included in every International Relations and War Studies reading list. Then there is the current generation of feminist voices in international relations: people like Dr Hannah Ketola and Dr Maria O’Reilly, both of whom were my PhD students and produced brilliant research on gender in the post-conflict context. I would say feminism is one of the most flourishing fields in international relations.

Sofia is a final year student reading History & International Relations and a BA representative for Strife. She has worked as an intern at her local U.S. House District office, in addition to having extensive experience in the private sector. Her academic interests include analysing the U.S. and UK’s ‘special relationship’ from a historical perspective, coercive diplomacy, and ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. You can follow her on twitter @slesmes98.

Professor Jabri’s latest book is The Postcolonial Subject (Routledge, 2013). An overview of Traces of War is available here.

Read more about more about International Women’s Day and its charity partners here.

Image  source: https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/when-is-international-mens-day-2019-uk-imd-womens-day-a4085441.html.

Frustrating anniversaries: International Women's Day and international action on women, peace, and security

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By Melissa Guinan:

Radhika Coomaraswamy, lead author of the Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325
Radhika Coomaraswamy, lead author of the Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325

Each year around March 8, International Women’s Day, op-ed pages and Twitter streams burst with celebrations of women’s achievements, calls to action on women’s rights and gender equality. This year, speeches and reports gave a nod to two important anniversaries in 2015: the twentieth anniversary of the 4th World Conference on Women and Beijing Platform for Action, and the fifteenth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), the international agreements that formed the basis of work in gender and security policy. But on a day of rhetoric about the great strides made for women’s rights, we need to take a moment to examine where rhetoric takes the place of action.

In 1995, the 4th World Conference on Women held brought the attention of international leaders to the impact of conflict on women. The resulting Beijing Platform for Action includes a section which affirms that “violations of the human rights of women in situations of armed conflict are violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law” among an ambitious set of goals on education, poverty, health, and political power. This article will focus on the peace and security aspects of the Platform for Action, which were affirmed with the passage of UNSCR 1325 in 2000. This resolution aimed to mitigate the effects of conflict on women and promote their inclusion in all efforts in peace and security. In the mid-2000s, some governments, often after tireless lobbying from civil society groups, began creating National Action Plans (NAPs) as a way to unify national efforts on women, peace, and security issues.

By the late 2000s it was clear that the diplomatic efforts and NAPs lacked energetic implementation, and the Security Council passed six additional resolutions on women, peace, and security (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122). Activists worried that each subsequent resolution, accompanied by little substantive change, were only diluting international commitments. They had succeeded in getting the topic on agendas, but was that enough?

Despite many improvements, and the brave work of civil society and involved policymakers, the situation for women around the world falls way behind the hopes of the international community. Women represent less than 4% of the participants in peace negotiations.[1] Twenty-two years after the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence, mostly from an intimate partner.[2] Women are underrepresented in the halls of power in security policy and according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, hold only 21.8% of parliamentary seats worldwide.

Activists and gender champions – influential policy makers who understand and promote the nexus between gender equality and safe, thriving societies – work tirelessly in a system where issues of gender equality often remain at the margins, as a paragraph in an international agreement, or a diplomatic statement. Each milestone comes about in an environment where, too often, gender concerns remain “ad hoc, dependent of a few committed individuals or small-scale units. Women are still an afterthought in many instances… the feel-good project to make donors and diplomats look good. A box to be ticked, a meeting to be had, a paragraph to be written.”[3]

Typically, anniversaries are a moment to celebrate or remember. But in this year, advocates and policy makers are holding up past commitments and demanding more. Recently, Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka wrote:

“Looking today at the slow and patchy progress towards equality, it seems that we were madly ambitious to expect to wipe out in 20 years a regime of gender inequality and outright oppression that had lasted in some cases for thousands of years. Then again – was it really so much to ask? What sort of world is it that condemns half its population to second-class status at best and outright slavery at worst? How much would it really cost to unlock the potential of the world’s women? And how much could have been gained! If world leaders really saw the Beijing Platform for Action as an investment in their countries’ future, why didn’t they follow through?”

Frustration at the inefficacy of efforts for gender quality is logical: international actors are treating at the margins a stated goal that can only be achieved by comprehensive and societal level change. Six structural barriers are impeding arguments and efforts for gender equality, particularly in peace and security issues:

First, it is much easier to give lip service to women’s issues as a public diplomacy project than it is to take action. Governments and policymakers can point to UN resolutions, national action plans, and the diplomatese of “reaffirming,” “recognizing the need,” and “welcoming” action without ever spending the resources and political capital – and while avoiding the inconvenient domestic realities of persistent gender inequality and violence against women.

Second, such a pervasive inequality requires a comprehensive solution, a challenge in any sphere of the policy world. The issues around gender by definition touch on almost everything in society, from sexual and gender based violence to media representation, and from girls’ education to the number of female CEOs. Even in the security field, UNSR 1325 covers the wide range of prevention, protection, participation, and relief and recovery. While the creation of gender advisor positions and pinpointed efforts like the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative are impressive initial efforts, governments are challenged to face broad policy questions with comprehensive answers.

Third, funding challenges plague good faith efforts. According to the OECD Development Assistance Committee’s March 2015 report on UNSCR 1325 implementation, with the exception of the Netherlands, no National Action Plans include commitments to dedicated budget allocations. NATO’s action on UNSCR 1325, which it has stated is a priority, relies on member state donations in a political and fiscal environment in which most allies fail to meet defence spending goals of 2% of GDP. If funding remains ad hoc throughout governments and institutions, so too will action.

Fourth, empirical data lags behind diplomatic efforts. There is growing recognition that “rather than an exercise in political correctness, the integration of gender issues is being recognised as a key to operational effectiveness, local ownership and strengthened oversight,”[4] but only a small collection of quantitative studies exist to help convince sceptics. The academic literature on the issue “remains on the margins of the international security studies field and suffers from the lack of good empirical data” whether because much of the material is “anecdotal and lacks a systemic and analytical focus” or because existing data is not disaggregated by gender.[5] Researchers are actively addressing this problem, but improved data collection and analysis necessarily will take years.

Fifth, gender inequality persists even within societies and institutions working globally for equality. Women are underrepresented at almost all levels of domestic and international security policy making, a crisis of participation felt even more severely by women from the developing world, minority women, and the LGBTQI community. Activists and policy makers face a paradox of how to work within the current foreign policy and national security system to affect change, while understanding that a truly comprehensive approach to gender equality might just transform how policy making is conducted.

Finally, there is no enforcement mechanism to make nations act on any of their commitments for gender equality. Member states are bound to UNSCR 1325 only by Article 25 of the UN Charter, which says that states need to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. In the peace and security field, normative goals like gender equality will fall behind geostrategic concerns and security crises in a battle for attention, resources, and political capital.

Because of these six structural barriers, policymakers mark another anniversary having made great gains in getting women, peace and security issues on the agenda, but with much still to be done. This year they will again revisit the 1995 and 2000 agreements, with an implementation report on the Beijing Platform for Action released in December 2014 and an upcoming High Level Review to assess implementation of UNSCR 1325. At the September 2014 launch of a Global Study project to support the High Level Review, UN Women’s Mlambo-Ngcuka was hopeful but realistic, stating that “too often, policy gains, rather than real impact, has been our indicator of success. This must change. We must take stock, and ensure that plans are action-oriented and adequately funded. Simply put, we need more results for women and girls.”

Similarly, the key challenge from the frustrating anniversaries of 2015 will be to the international community to decide if it is truly committed to the cause of women and girls and to translate a diplomatically invested norm into real global change. Faced with structural and societal barriers, any action will require significant political investment. As Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said at a March 3 speech on UNSCR 1325, “ultimately, what it takes is political will. No matter how many documents we sign. If the will to act is not there, we will not move forward.”

Melissa Guinan is a 2014-2015 Fulbright-Schuman Scholar currently in residence at the Institute for European Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame (USA), and former program officer at The Chicago Council on Global affairs, she is a member of Women in International Security, Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and Women in War and International Politics (WIWIP) based out of King’s College London. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaGuinan.

NOTES

[1] GIZ, “Promoting Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and Peace Processes” (2014) http://www.genderingermandevelopment.net/files/images/Tool%20Kit%20Promoting%20Women%27s%20Participation%20in%20Peace%20Negotiations%20and%20Peace%20Processes.pdf

[2] World Health Organization, “Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women” (Geneva, undated) http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85239/1/9789241564625_eng.pdf

[3] Sanam Anderlini. Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Pub, 2007), 230.

[4] Kristin Valasek, “Security Sector Reform and Gender” (Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2008). http://www.osce.org/odihr/30655?download=true

[5] Kathleen Kuehnast, Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, and Helga Hernes, eds. Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), 2-6.