International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

National Security

The national security apparatus is violent and hazardous to marginalized individuals, particularly women—only deconstructing the national security paradigm through a gendered lens allows us to truly put the well-being of individuals first

Hans in 2010 (Asha Hans is the former Director, School of Women’s Studies, and Professor of Political Science, Utkal University, India. She is the author and editor of many publications related to women’s rights, the latest being The Gender Imperative, coedited with Prof. Betty Reardon (2010). Her book Gender, Disability and Identity (2003) is a globally recognized seminal work coedited with Annie Patri. An advocate of women’s rights, she has participated in the formulation of many conventions in the United Nations. A leading campaigner of women’s rights in India, she has initiated many campaigns on the inclusion of women with disabilities in the mainstream women’s movement. She is also the founder of Women with Disabilities India Network. “14 Human Security the Militarized Perception and Space for Gender” The Gender Imperative pages: 384 – 409)

In the last two decades feminist writers and activists have been trying to draw attention to problems associated with the national security paradigm. Built on unifying and centralizing norms of nationalism and state power, the rhetoric and practice of national security constructs globally an explicit militarized nationalism. This militarization meant to protect citizens has become a source of extreme threat to them. In a globalized economy, as arms productions increase and weapons are easily available, many states find themselves vulnerable and consequently increase their own arsenals. The result of this inane arms race as been the excessive violence used against civilians, especially on borders which become only cartographic spaces signifying no difference between one’s own citizen and the enemy. The national security system has been found to be hazardous to the marginalized and excluded, especially women. We, therefore, need to deconstruct the national security paradigm so that we can draws attention to the violence perpetuated against women in these territorial spaces. This dominant culture of force has already been challenged by feminists as being patriarchal in nature and based on masculinity. Feminist scholars have rejected this paradigm and, in an effort to transform the militarized state to a peaceful space, have created new discourses on alternatives security. The deconstruction of national security would facilitate the introduction of human security as an alternative paradigm which would provide an enabling environment of peace. Human security has emerged as a significant theme in feminist and other writings to replace the national security paradigm. This security system based on the quotidian principles (see Betty A. Reardon’s article) provide people as the nucleus of its objectives. It is people’s wellbeing and not that of the territory that is central to this alternative suggestion. Its core principle is non-violence and is aimed at removing militarized patriarchy in the state. Some feminist writers on States (see Mesfi n G. Ayele’s article) as well as the United Nations (see Lisa S. Price’s and Soumita Basu’s articles) have adopted human security as an alternative to national security. As the canvas of acceptance enlarges the concept and framework changes, producing a new standard very different than the one produced by feminist writers. This article analyses one such attempt made by the military in India. The concept of human security has been adopted by the army for implementation in the border region between India and Pakistan — a high conflict zone. This raises questions about its legitimacy and usage. We need to interrogate the participation of citizens, specifically women, in the army’s programme related to human security. We need to ask whether human security promoted by the army has provided the four requirements of human security on which his book is based — meeting basic needs, protection of the environment, protection of women from physical harm and whether women have been able to keep intact their dignity and self esteem (see Reardon’s article). There are also the extended issues of respect of religious and cultural diversity. In this promise of a human security paradigm in coexistence with national security, we need to enquire into the functionality of the system to highlight women’s insecurities under a national security system dependant on armaments and to see how the system constraints women’s autonomy. This chapter will attempt to analyse the concept of the human security paradigm as developed by the armed forces called Operation Goodwill (Sadbhavana)1 within the context of the national security paradigm. While answering the above questions we need to know whether it is a new alternative designed for a people’s based security or a co-opting of a theme which does not spell change in the lives of those who live on the borders. This is especially of concern to women who face multiple levels of violence and are deprived of the core components of a feminist human security paradigm.

The discourse of security allows IR-oriented politics to determine our political strategy. This focuses all knowledge and study of politics on the public sphere, at the expense of politicizing private familial relations, closing off a better understanding of foreign policy. The impact is the suppression of sexual difference and continued structural violence

Peterson in 2000 (V Spike, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Arizona, SAIS Review, 20.2, rereading public and private: the dichotomy that is not one, project muse)

In the first variant, I read the public-private dichotomy as emphasizing the governmental and coercive features of the public/state, which are dominated by men and comprise stereotypically masculine activities. This public is contrasted with what goes on within the state, which is called domestic politics in IR, but actually refers to civil, socio-cultural, and economic relations that are "private" (when distinguished from the public/state). In conventional IR discourse, domestic politics is deemed irrelevant to relations between states, which are of a different order. Here, the public is highly visible--as the state in IR discourse--while the domestic is obscured. Security is understood in the paradigmatically masculine terms of national interest and protecting sovereign state power through assertive leadership and military might. Economics is understood as "private"--business and market activities--and internal to states; it does not include re/production within households/families. This discourse reinscribes the modern privileging of (men's) market activities, at the expense of marginalizing that private which refers to familial/household relations. One effect of this construction is the dominance of explanatory frameworks in international relations that exclude all reference to activities associated with the familial domestic sphere: subsistence maintenance, affective relations, identity/subject formation, cultural socialization, and sexual and social reproduction. 18 Even as advocates of the "domestic analogy" join feminists in criticizing IR's dismissal of internal politics, they typically define domestic as economic and socio-cultural issues (within the state), distinguished from the private sphere of family and affective relations. Hence, they reproduce one version of the public-private even as they challenge the dichotomy's conventional boundaries in IR. Gender-sensitive accounts go beyond this by bringing everyday practices, reproductive processes, and the politics of subjectivity into relation with states, security, and political economy questions. For example, conventional neglect of the family impoverishes our understanding not only of how reproductive labor keeps our worlds "working," but also of how individual and collective identities, cultural practices, divisions of labor, group ideologies, and socio-cultural [End Page 18] meaning systems are (re)produced and resisted. In various ways, some more direct than others, these are crucial factors in sustaining (and contesting) the state and its legitimacy. Consider that the family/household is the primary site of reproductive labor that makes all societal reproduction possible, of subject formation and cultural learning that naturalizes ideologies and encourages group identifications (religious, racial/ethnic, national), and of gender-socialization that encourages boys to be independent, competitive, in control, and "hard," and girls to be relationship-oriented, non-aggressive, nurturing, and "soft." 19 Moreover, neglect of the private (as familial and personal) has prevented IR theorists from taking desire and emotional investments seriously. Modernist dichotomies fuel this bias by casting reason as antithetical to-- rather than inseparable from--emotion. Our fear of "contaminating" objective reason and research by acknowledging the role of emotion and commitment has impoverished our study of and knowledge about major social dynamics. As a consequence, in regard to security studies, we are tragically ill-informed in the face of often violent social forces such as nationalism, neo-fascism, and fundamentalism, in part because scholars avoid dealing with the power of emotional engagement and its effects on political identification and allegiance. Regarding political economy, we deny the effects of subjective identities in structuring labor markets, job performance, and national productivity. And we are only beginning to grasp the interaction of desires and identities with consumption patterns and hence the global political economy. Even less familiar, but increasingly salient: we are ill-prepared to analyze the dependence of financial markets on psychological phenomena (risk-assessment, "trust" in the stock market), and what we must acknowledge are "non-rational" features of the international financial system. Regarding security issues--a focal point of IR inquiry--feminists argue that gendered identities are key to manifestations of violence. Empirical evidence indicates that, worldwide, most acts of direct violence are committed by men. ²⁰ Yet not all men are violent, and societies vary dramatically in exhibiting violence, which suggests that biologistic explanations are, at best, naïve. ²¹ Whatever else is entailed in accounting for systematic violence, it is absolutely [End Page 19] remarkable--one might even suggest irrational--that so little attention has been devoted to assessing the role of masculinity in this male-dominated arena. Feminists insist that our investigations of violence--from war atrocities to schoolyard killings and domestic battering--take seriously how masculinity is constructed, internalized, enacted, reinforced, and glorified. In IR, such recognition requires that we seriously consider the question: Is militarism without masculinism possible? ²² An extensive literature confirms two key observations: first, that cultures vary significantly in how they construct masculinity (hence, war-making and rape are not universal), and second, that more violent societies evidence more systematic cultivation of gender polarity, rigid heterosexism, male power in physical and symbolic forms, and ideologies of masculine superiority. ²³ To ignore this correspondence is to impoverish our understanding of violence and the security questions it raises.

Omission

Examining hierarchies of power is a crucial first step in understanding the different ways individuals are bracketed out of politics—analysis of intersections is key to undoing masculine power over politics

Enloe 14

Cynthia, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. University of California Press. 2014. Pp 353-356. MiLibrary.

This is why the ten politically savvy women who might come together for Theresa’s imagined Manila workshop start with their domestic lives. It has taken power to deprive women of land titles and pressure them to leave home to work as domestic workers abroad or to stay on banana plantations. It has taken power to keep women marginalized in their countries diplomatic corps and out of the upper reaches of central banks and finance ministries. It has taken power to exclude women from labor bargaining. It has taken power to keep questions of inequity between local men and women off the agendas of many nationalist movements in industrialized as well as developing societies. It has taken power to keep diverse women in their separate places for the sake of the smooth running of any military base. It has taken power to ensure that UN treaties do not recognize the rights of sexual minorities. It has taken power to ensure that the UN treaties that do take account of violence against women are not implemented. It has taken power to construct popular cultures through films, advertising, school curricula, television, books, music, fashion, the Internet that reinforce, rather than subvert, globally gendered hierarchies. The international is personal, combined with a sustained feminist curiosity about women’s lives and the workings of masculinities, provides a guide to making sense of the WTO, the ILO, the IMF, the Group of Eight, the Group of Twenty, the World Bank, the EU Commission, the Vatican, the Qatar emirate, the Chinese Politboro, the UN Security Council, the International Crimes Court, the African Union, and the Arab League. The international is personal is a starting point for making sense of Gap, Apple, Disney, Foxconn, Chiquita Banana, Deutsche Bank, and H&M, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross, CARE, OXFAM, and Human Rights Watch. To make realistic sense of international politics, we need thorough, feminist-informed gender analyses of each of these organizations and more. One can do a feminist-informed gender analysis of anything. And each will make us smarter about how this world works, or fails to work. Taking seriously the assertion that the international is personal means that women in all their diversity must be made visible, analytically visible, in our investigations of every one of these organizations, and in the relationships between these organizations. If it is true that cooperative as well as hostile relations between governments, corporations, and international organizations rely on constructions of women as symbols, women as providers of emotional support, women as both unpaid and low- paid workers, women as voters, and women as token participants, then it does not make sense to continue analyzing international politics as if women were a mere afterthought. It does not make sense to collect ungendered data on refugees, private security personnel, earthquake victims, militia members, corporate executives, factory owners, journalists, or peace negotiators. It does not make sense to treat women as if they made eye-catching photo images but do not need to be interviewed. International policy-making circles may at times look like men’s clubs, but international politics as a whole has required women to behave in certain ways. When enough women have refused to behave in those prescribed ways, relations between governments and between governments and corporations have had to change. That is, women are not just the objects of power, not merely passive puppets or unthinking victims. As we have seen, women of different classes and different ethnic groups have made their own calculations in order to cope with or benefit from the current struggles between states. These calculations result in whole countries becoming related to one another, often in hierarchical terms. In search of adventure, the physical and intellectual excitement typically reserved for men, some affluent women have helped turn other women into exotic landscapes. In pursuit of meaningful paid careers, some women have settled in their governments’ colonies or hired women from former colonies. Out of a desire to appear fashionable and bolster their sometimes shaky self-confidence, many women have become the prime consumers of products made by women working for low wages in dangerous factories. And in an effort to measure the progress they have made toward emancipation in their own societies, some women have helped legitimize international global pyramids of civilization and modernity. Therefore, when asking “Where are the women?” and following up with “How did they get there?” “Who benefits from their being there?” and “What do they themselves think about being there?” one should be prepared for complex answers. Acting out of a new awareness that women, especially in poorer countries, need to be made visible and audible on the international stage, one can risk painting over the important differences between women. The widening economic class differences between Chinese, for instance, are alarming even to Beijing’s male political elite. Those gaping inequalities are sharpening the differences between rural and urban women, between women married to politically connected businessmen and women working on the assembly lines in those men’s factories. Noting inequalities among women is not just a comparative statement, for instance, noting that urban girls are more likely to reach secondary school than rural girls, or that affluent women are more likely to have access to the Internet than working-class women do. It is a comparative statement with relational consequences. Women’s diverse experiences of social class as well as of race and ethnicity can translate into often surprising differences in understandings of femininity, in marital economics, in relationships with particular men, and in encounters with the state. In the United States, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia, Iraq, and Egypt, these widening material and political inequalities between affluent women, middle-class women, urban poor women, and rural poor women, especially when exacerbated by racism and ethnocentrism, present daunting challenges for any women who are working to create and sustain a vibrant national or transnational women’s movement.

Space

Solving inequalities on Earth must come before we further expand into space because space programs enhance the elite’s ignorance of harsh realities on Earth

Sturgeon 09

Noël Sturgeon (professor of Women’s Studies in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender & Race Studies at WSU. She is also a member of the University’s Graduate Faculty in American Studies. In 2010-2011, she spent a term at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies as a Fulbright-York University Chair.), 2009, “Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural”, The University of Arizona Press, Chapter 3: US Militarism in Space, Pg. 98-99

Because of its connection to militarized wastelands on Earth, the creation of militarized wastelands and colonies in space is an environmental justice issue; that is, it requires an analysis that puts the effects of racism, colonization, and resulting political and economic inequalities at the center of our thinking. Granted, not every impulse toward discovery is colonialist; not is the desire to achieve more knowledge, to develop better technology, to boldly seek out new experiences, new understandings, new worlds even, somehow always imperialist, militarist, and patriarchal. As a child of science fiction (perhaps more than most, even in my baby-boomer science fictional generation), I could never completely deny or reject that heady mix of science and adventure, anthropological curiosity and creative audacity, that accompanies the desire to find out new things, to go beyond the bend, to be immersed in other culture, to live in other environments. Nevertheless, contemporary space programs depend on the continuation and acceleration of the creation of toxic landscapes in areas of “national sacrifice” inhabited by indigenous peoples, as well as the increased violence of environmentally destructive wars partially directed from space that will be suffered disproportionately by poor people and peoples of the Global South, whether they are soldiers or civilians. As projects presently justified by frontier rhetorics, stories of masculinist adventure, and evolutionary determination, space colonization and militarization are extraterrestrialist ventures with terrifying consequences. For environmentalist who treasure the fragile image of the whole Earth, such rhetorics should give one pause. So far, the abstracting of the Earth through the universalizing view from space has not produced encouraging results. Karen Litfin (1997, 38) writes, In an unequal world, globalism-including global science-is all too likely to mean white, affluent men universalizing their own experiences. Global problems are amenable to large data banks, to Big Science, to grand managerial schemes. . . . [T]he view from space renders human beings invisible, both as agents and as victims of environmental destruction. It also erases difference, lending itself to a totalizing vision. The “global view” cannot adequately depict environmental problems because the impacts of these problems vary with class, gender, age and race. . . . [T]he global view removes problems from the realm of immediacy where meaningful action is possible and most likely to be effective. Seeing the Earth from space as an object to be saved puts the viewer in a godlike position separated from the Earth, rather than the more humble and pragmatic position of being integrated into local and global ecological and social systems of which we are a part and to which we are responsible. Furthermore, the socially useful capabilities of extraterrestrial technologies will only live up to their promises if inequalities on the Earth are addresses. For example, the ability to foresee the disasters of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 was to a great extent created by our technological development of space. Had the poor countries ringing the Indian Ocean been able to afford them, devices called tsunameters could have warned of the devastating wave by beaming a signal to a satellite. Instead, more than 110,000 people were killed. Similarly, weather satellites clearly tracked the birth, growth, and trajectory of Hurricane Katrina. For days beforehand, television news programs were filled with the dramatic satellite pictures of Katrina’s growing strength. But despite the evacuation order given as a result of the space- based information, those who were too poor to leave were abandoned in New Orleans to face the devastation alone and without help. The fact that most of the poor were black was compelling visual evidence of America’s most institutional racism. Both of these “natural” disasters are environmental justice issues because, on this actual Earth, how badly someone is hurt by a disaster depends on how many resources he or she has and whether those in power value that particular life. Rather than a god’s-eye view empowering a small elite, the extraterrestrialist view of Earth seen from space has to be firmly connected to realities of power on the ground. Unless we correct social inequalities, unless we think of planetary security as crucial to us as national security, unless we portray adventures in global justice as exciting adventures in space, we doom ourselves to a world fatally dominated by the idea of “Forever New Frontiers.”

The AFF’s expression of space domination supports white hegemonic masculinity- reinforces gender roles and the promotion of gendered violence

Sturgeon 09

Noël Sturgeon (professor of Women’s Studies in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender & Race Studies at WSU. She is also a member of the University’s Graduate Faculty in American Studies. In 2010-2011, she spent a term at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies as a Fulbright-York University Chair.), 2009, “Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural”, The University of Arizona Press, Chapter 3: US Militarism in Space, Pg. 85

The 2001 example shows us that, on the one hand, extraterrestrialism is simply another variation of the frontier myth, the legitimization of expansion into space and domination over the whole world. On the other hand, it is particular to a post-1960’s myth of escaping the Earth to control it- the kind of logic that Nancy Hartsock (1983) identifies as peculiar to late-twentieth-century white hegemonic masculinity, especially in the context of normative ideals of the suburban family. Hartsock argues that under conditions in which men, as commuting breadwinners, are absent from the family, do not participate in childbearing intimate, daily ways, and still have economic and personal dominance within the home, gender roles for boys and girls are differentiated by the requirement that the boy identify with an abstract masculinity, while the girl identifies with a real person involved in her everyday care. The boy must strenuously reject the set of characteristics (nurturance, daily housework, intimacy) that are identified with femininity, even though those may be more real to him than the characteristic associated with the masculine role (competition, willingness to use violence, control). The underlying logic of extraterrestrialism is separating from the mother, claiming independence from her, putatively admiring her from a distance but in reality violently rejecting any possibility of identification with femininity and its connection to the body, the earth, and the messy, unpredictable qualities of the basics of reproductive work. Extraterrestrialism is thus deeply connected to the desire for control of nature (and women), particularly the promotion of violence (as LeGuin points out) as an adventurous, heroic, and necessary aspect of human evolution and achievement (Garb 1990; Litfin 1997; Sofia 1984).

State

State centered approaches to human securitization fails to include women’s voices, only alternative is using a gendered lens on securitization logic absent state action

Hans in 2010 (Asha Hans is the former Director, School of Women’s Studies, and Professor of Political Science, Utkal University, India. She is the author and editor of many publications related to women’s rights, the latest being The Gender Imperative, coedited with Prof. Betty Reardon (2010). Her book Gender, Disability and Identity (2003) is a globally recognized seminal work coedited with Annie Patri. An advocate of women’s rights, she has participated in the formulation of many conventions in the United Nations. A leading campaigner of women’s rights in India, she has initiated many campaigns on the inclusion of women with disabilities in the mainstream women’s movement. She is also the founder of Women with Disabilities India Network. “14 Human Security the Militarized Perception and Space for Gender” The Gender Imperative pages: 384 – 409)

Conclusion The security system globally is highly militarized and national security, as we have seen, is placed at the core where the state and not the people come first. Boundaries have been more important than the humans living on them. It is therefore not surprising that in Kargil, from a military perspective, the protection of borders was of foremost importance and people were marginalized. The animosity of the people became central in the state’s relationships to its borders. When the system attempted change, the people’s militarist response that they were willing to die/fight for Ray was not surprising. The aim of the article is not to be critical of the work done by the person who created the change but to analyse its importance and its relationship to the concept of human security, especially from a gendered perspective. Does Goodwill fit into the feminist paradigm? If we take into account the four components most well-known feminist constituents of human security agree upon, i.e. physical security, environment security, daily needs and dignity, it will provide us with the guidelines to analyse Goodwill. To begin with, the importance of Goodwill to the nation state is that it controls militancy so the security of its borders is achieved. Goodwill, Ray said, created trust between the armed forces and civilians on the border and brought the two civilians on both sides of the border closer. In the context of this book, the human security paradigm as used by General Arjun Ray in Kargil is the use of the vocabulary of human security but when it stipulates that human security is a core element of national security, it goes against the core element of human security as projected by feminist writers. So though Goodwill provides more developmental space to the citizens on the border, more equality to women, educational and health opportunities, the question that arises is that does it fulfil women’s human security needs? Though it can be considered as a commendable attempt in the context of understanding the other religion, its sustainability is questionable without which it becomes a half-hearted attempt by those who continue to use it. Though termed a socio-politico strategy for conflict prevention, it stops short of even attempting to do this. Using the terminology of culture of peace and human security is not enough, especially as the approach is narrow and the aim is basically only to stop opposition. One of the advantages of this has been projected as the number of people from this region joining the armed forces. This is militarization, an opposing force in women’s search for security. Militarization is not easily tackled as states deliberately use it not only through the armed forces but as an ideology of power which influences the society and civilian life as a whole. In its process of implementation patriarchy plays an important role. This ideological manifestation of power relations between state and citizen internalizes militarist values, including the use of force and reinforcement of patriarchal norms. A human security system would, unlike national security, endure confrontation rather than suppress it with armaments and do further harm. It would create space for non-violent protest and not wipe out its own populations together with that of the opposition across the border. Goodwill speaks of a non-violent rights-based approach, of disarmament, of sustainable, endogenous, equitable human development and in the same breath of military security. Though Goodwill is based on the reasoning that guns and tanks do not provide security and is a brand name for trust and restoring hope and effective border management, Ray also speaks of security as being a ‘human defence line that can serve as its ‘eyes and ears’ on the border. In this concept the villager turns out to be the central point of focus to manage the border areas and build a functional community–army relationship. The visibility of the projects would create Goodwill and provide a positive image of the army, an important objective but in reality much has not been done to achieve it. Unless the warlike situation stops on the border, security cannot be achieved. Ray does not mention a time frame when the army would leave the borders, if at all. Can the state’s hegemonic control shift from the military to the people? We recognize that as the conceptualization of human security challenges the large expenditures on the armed forces, in a market-oriented economy it will be difficult to get states to agree to it. Armaments are where the money lies. At this point we need to remind the state that soon after independence in the 1950s, it sponsored policies of non-aggression and promoted policies of collective security and displayed faith in the UN. As the power of the country increased, the more radical its national security determinant became. Above all justice is important, as the military expenditure is at the cost of other sectors, especially social sectors such as education, health and gender inequality, the factors which influence the notion of justice. Any order which is not just has to be challenged and changed. Among this is the hegemonization of the state which has patriarchal tendencies and so marginalizes the weak and especially women. The other vulnerable sections are the minorities, especially religious and ethnic communities. A human security paradigm to work must facilitate the creation of these changes. Can this alternative suggested by Ray create the space for change? It is obvious from women’s concerns even after human security was implemented by the army that women’s security was excluded. They still go without fulfilment of health and other needs and their bodies are violated. In this framework provided by Ray, human security is achieved through provisions of education, health, gender equality and community development programmes. The programmatic approach is not enough; if these are to be provided it must be to all citizens in conflict zones, but it stops short of universalization in implementation. Further, the culture of peace and space for shared values of tolerance, solidarity, democracy and economic development that Goodwill wanted to achieve fits into the feminist human security paradigm. At the same time, in keeping with its links to national security, it falls short of visioning what it means to women. A human security paradigm would aim for the wellbeing of the people and avoid the harmful effects of national security, as seen earlier What kind of a world of peace can we visualize? Can human security as a paradigm be adopted by states? What is needed to add to this emerging paradigm is a pragmatic non-violent approach to replace national security through our understanding of human security. About adoption of non-violence by states, Mahatma Gandhi said that it is a blasphemy to say that non-violence can only be practiced by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals. Thus, he suggests the role of non-cooperation which he argues is an attempt to awaken the masses to a sense of their dignity and power. Women need to adopt these practices when state power threatens their rights. What we require is disseminating the information on what a feminist perception of human security is. This should be at all levels, in general education and civil society teachings. We need to include in our research the linkages that emerge between violence, masculinity, gender and human security, to create a culture of peace that will replace the violence in our lives.

Attempts to include feminist ideology in state climate practices fail- WWC and the UN proves

Gaard, G. (2015, April). Ecofeminism and climate change. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 49, pp. 20-33). Pergamon. Gaard was a UWRF Sustainability Faculty Fellow in spring 2011, Dr. Gaard is the current Coordinator for the Sustainability Faculty Fellows. Before coming to River Falls, Gaard was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (1997-2002) and an Associate Professor of Composition and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (1989-1997)

Although the “first stirrings” of women's environmental defense were introduced at the United Nations 1985 conference in Nairobi, through news of India's Chipko movement involving peasant women's defense of trees (their livelihood), women's role in planetary protection became clearly articulated in November 1991, when the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) organized the World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Florida (Resurrección, 2013; WEDO, 2012). Seen as an opportunity to build on the gains of the United Nations Decade forWomen and to prepare a Women's Action Agenda for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, the World Women's Congress drew more than 1500 women from 83 countries. But while its leaders alleged that the resulting “Women's Agenda 21” had been built through a consensus process, for many of those sitting in attendance, listening to one elite speaker after another, it was not clear how our views shaped or even contributed to this process of agenda-formation. Participatory democracy—long a valued strategy in grassroots ecofeminist tactics—was reduced to two dubious threads: a series of break-out discussion groups held throughout the conference, and a “Report Card” for participants to take home and use to evaluate specific issues within their communities and mobilize a local response (shaping the issues themselves had no place on the report card). Along with other ecofeminists, I felt a mix of energy, dismay, and frustration at this gathering.1 While the women leaders from many countries were valuable participants and decision-makers in the upcoming conversations at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, that weekend in Miami, too many speakers discussed women's “feminine” gender roles, our “influence” on decision-makers, and the need for “reforms” to the present system—all introduced and capped with the essentializing motto, “It's Time For Women to Mother Earth.” Despite these flaws in rhetoric and democratic participation, WEDO's 1991 World Women's Congress has been hailed as the entry-point for feminism into the UN conferences on the global environment, opening the way for later developments bridging feminist interventions and activisms addressing climate change. The following year, UNCED's Agenda 21 did not in fact include the most transformative recommendations from the Women's Agenda 21—the analysis of environmental degradation as rooted in military/industrial/capitalist economics, for example—or even the more reformist proposals such as implementing gender equity on all UN panels, an issue which has been taken up again at the 2013 Council of the Parties (COP) for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw, Poland (See Fig. 2). Perhaps WEDO's Women's Agenda 21 had already been undermined by the 1987 report from the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, led by Brundtland, 1987. This report established “sustainable development” as a desirable strategy, defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”—which sounds reasonable enough, until one reads the document's renewed call for continued economic growth on a finite planet, a fundamentally unsustainable endeavor. The report completely omits discussion of the First World/North's2 over-development and its high levels of production, consumption, and disregard for the environment (Agostino & Lizarde, 2012). Nonetheless, the Brundtland Report's “sustainable development” concept has shaped climate change discourse for the subsequent decades, producing techno-solutions such as “the green economy” that have perpetuated capitalist and colonialist strategies of privatization, and fail to address root causes of the climate crisis (Pskowski, 2013). In the two decades since WEDO's Women's Agenda 21, feminist involvement in global environmentalism has developed from a 1980–1990's focus on “women, environment and development” (WED), “women in development” (WID) or “gender, environment and development” (GED) to an emphasis on feminist political ecology in the 1990s–2000s (Goebel, 2004; MacGregor, 2010; Resurrección, 2013). Initially, discussion of women and environment focused on women in the global South, whose real material needs for food security and productive agricultural land, forest resources, clean water and sanitation trumped more structural discussions about gendered environmental discourses (i.e. Leonard, 1989; Sontheimer, 1991), although these structurally transformative elements were equally present in other texts (i.e. Sen & Grown, 1987). The focus on women rather than gender tended to construct women as victims of environmental degradation in need of rescue; their essential closeness to nature, cultivated through family caregiving and through Fig. 1.subsistence labor, was argued as providing women with special knowledge, and their agency as laborers and leaders in environmental sustainability projects was advocated (Mies & Shiva, 1993; Shiva, 1989). Clearly, this rhetoric instrumentalized women and ignored the cultural limitations of the woman-nature linkage (cf. Dodd, 1997; Leach, 2007; Li, 1993); it was also significantly silent on the roles of men, and the ways that gender as a system constructed economic and material resources that produce “victims” (MacGregor, 2010; Resurrección, 2013). The shift to a “feminist political ecology” (Goebel, 2004) involved a macro-level exploration of the problems of globalization and colonization, a micro-level examination of local institutions for their environmental management, a critique of marriage institutions for the ways these affect women's access to natural resources, and an interrogation of the gendered aspects of space in terms of women's mobility, labor, knowledge, and power. The shift from women as individuals to gender as a system structuring power relations has been an important development in feminist responses to climate change. Moving forward from this herstory, I bring an ecofeminist perspective to examine the ways that climate change phenomena have been analyzed primarily from the standpoint of the environmental sciences and technologies, and how this standpoint forecloses the kinds of solutions envisioned.3 I examine both liberal and cultural ecofeminist perspectives highlighting the ways women have been both excluded from climate change policy discussions and disproportionately affected by climate change phenomena, and summarize Fig. 2. Comparing Women's Agenda 21 (1991) and the UNCED Agenda 21 (1992). (Data source: Brú Bistuer & Cabo, 2004). 22 G. Gaard / Women's Studies International Forum 49 (2015) 20–33 proposals drawing on women's “special knowledge” and agency as decision-makers and leaders in solving the problems of climate change. Noting the popular utility as well as the limitations of these perspectives, I examine both climate change phenomena and climate justice analyses. In organizing this inquiry, I am inspired by feminist activist and scholar Charlotte Bunch, founder of Rutgers University's Center for Women's Global Leadership, whose landmark essay, “Not by degrees: Feminist theory and education” (1979) proposes four tactical steps for using feminist theory to understand situations, place them in a broader context, and evaluate possible courses of action. Simply stated, Bunch's theory suggests we ask, what is the problem?, how did it originate?, what do we want?, and, how do we get there? (Bunch, 1987).

Traditional IR

Their conception of politics is too narrow—treating domestic politics, international relations, and personal experience as separate arenas denies the ways in which violence in each of these affects violence in all of them and reproduces that violence

Enloe 14

Cynthia, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. University of California Press. 2014. Pp 348-353. MiLibrary.

One of the simplest and most disturbing feminist insights crafted in recent decades is that the personal is political. It is a profound theoretical statement that can be transferred to a T-shirt or bumper sticker. Asserting that the personal is political is disturbing, intentionally disturbing, because it means that relationships we once imagined were (and many of our friends and colleagues still prefer to think are) private or merely social are in fact infused with power. Furthermore, those allegedly private, personal relationships are infused with power that is unequal and backed up by public authority. But the assertion that the personal is political is like a palindrome, one of those phrases that can be read backward as well as forward. Read as the political is personal, the assertion suggests that politics is not shaped merely by what happens in legislative debates, voting booths, political party strategy sessions, court rooms, or war rooms. While men who dominate public life in so many countries have told women to stay in the proverbial kitchen (not travel to workshops in Manila, not organize, not theorize), those same men have used their myriad forms of public power to construct private relationships in ways that have bolstered their own masculinized political control. Without these deliberate gendered maneuvers, men hold over political life might be far less secure. Without these gendered maneuvers, moreover, most men’s seeming expertise in politics would look less impressive. A 2013 cross-national survey of citizens political knowledge found that in virtually every one of the ten countries studied, women know less about politics than men regardless of how advanced a country is in terms of gender equality. The authors of the study speculated that this gender gap in political information might be due to the fact that few women play prominent roles in news journalism and elite political life, which discourages many women viewers and readers from seeing how current news accounts are relevant to themselves. While this possible explanation for the country-by-country political information gaps appears feasible, a British feminist journalist analyzing the same ten-country study offered an additional explanation: perhaps the researchers’ definitions and measures of what counts as politics were too narrow. 3 Perhaps what many women do pay attention to, and do store information about, is encompassed by a broader, some might say more realistic, map of politics, for instance, the availability of affordable child care, the condition of public parks, the accessibility of public transport, the readiness of police to treat a woman with respect when she brings a rape charge, the government’s willingness to use sexualized pictures of local women to lure foreign tourists, and the impunity with which employers abuse women on the job. That is, perhaps if the map of what is counted as political were redrawn by feminist-informed cartographers, the gap between women’s and men’s political knowledge would shrink dramatically. Explaining why any country has the kind of politics it does should motivate us to be curious about how public life is constructed out of struggles to define masculinity and femininity. Accepting that the political is personal prompts one to investigate the politics of marriage, the cheapening of women’s labor, ideologies of masculinity, sexually transmitted diseases, and homophobia not as marginal issues but as matters central to the state. Doing this kind of research becomes just as serious as studying military weaponry or taxation policy. In fact, insofar as the political is personal, the latter categories cannot be fully understood without taking into account the former. To make sense of international politics, we have to read power backward and forward. Power relations between countries and their governments involve more than troop maneuvers and diplomatic emails. Read forward, the personal is international insofar as ideas about what it means to be a respectable woman or an honorable man have been shaped by colonizing policies, international trade strategies, and military doctrines. Today it has almost become a cliché to say that the world is shrinking, that state boundaries are porous: think of KFC opening in Shanghai, sushi eaten in Santiago, Cézannes hanging on walls in Doha, a Korean pop star drawing crowds in New York, and Russian weaponry propping up a Syrian autocrat. We frequently persist, nonetheless, in discussing personal power relationships as if they were contained by sovereign states. We frequently consider violence against women without investigating how the global trade in Internet pornography operates, or how companies ordering sex tours and mail-order brides conduct their business across national borders. Similarly, we try to explain how women learn to be feminine without unraveling the legacies left by colonial officials who used Victorian ideals of feminine domesticity to sustain their empires; or we try to trace what shapes children’s ideas about femininity and masculinity without looking at governments foreign investment policies that encourage the global advertising campaigns of such giants as McCann Erickson, BBDO, or Saatchi and Saatchi. Becoming aware that personal relationships have been internationalized, however, may make one only feel guilty for not having paid enough attention to international affairs. “You should know more about the IMF,” “Don’t switch channels when experts start talking about climate change,” “Find out where Guam is.” While useful, this new international attentiveness by itself is not sufficient. It leaves untouched our conventional presumptions about just what international politics is and where it takes place. Coming to realize that the personal is international expands the politically attentive audience, but it fails to transform our understandings of what is happening on the multiple stages of international politics. The implications of a feminist understanding of international politics are thrown into sharper relief when one reads the personal is international the other way around: the international is personal. This calls for a radical new imagining of what it takes for governments to ally with each other, to compete with and wage war against each other. The international is personal implies that governments depend on certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. Governments need more than tax revenues and spy agencies; they also need wives who are willing to provide their diplomatic husbands with unpaid services so those men can develop trusting relationships with other diplomatic husbands. They need not only military hardware but also a steady supply of women’s sexual services, as well as military wives’ gratitude, to convince their male soldiers that they are manly. To operate in the international arena, governments seek other governments’ recognition of their sovereignty; but they also depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood. Thus the international politics of debt, investment, colonization, decolonization, national security, diplomacy, trade, and military occupation are far more complicated than most conventional experts would have us believe. This may appear paradoxical. Many people, and especially women, are taught that international politics are too complex, too remote, and too tough for the so-called feminine mind to comprehend. If a Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Michelle Bachelet, or Christine Lagarde enters, it is presumably because she has learned to think like a man. Conventional analyses stop short of investigating an entire area of international relations, an area that feminist-informed researchers in the still-expanding field of gender and international relations are pioneers in exploring: how states depend on particular artificial constructions of the domestic and private spheres to achieve their political goals. If we take seriously the politics of domestic servants, of women living on or near a military base, or of women who sew Gap and Zara apparel, we discover that international politics are more complicated than non- feminist analysts imagine. This is worth saying again: explanations of international politics that are devoid of feminist questioning are too-simple explanations. Such non-feminist explanations shy away from complexity. They underestimate power. A feminist investigatory approach exposes a remarkable assortment of the kinds of power it takes to make the complex international political system work the way it currently does. Admittedly, conventional analysts of interstate relations do talk a lot about power. In fact, they put power at the center of their commentaries. These are the sorts of commentaries that are presumed to be most naturally comprehended by manly men; women, especially those women presumed to be conventionally feminine, allegedly do not have an innate taste for either wielding or understanding power. However, feminist-informed explorations of agribusiness plantation prostitution, foreign-service corps sexism, and repeated attempts to tame outspoken nationalist women all reveal that, in reality, it takes much more power to construct and perpetuate international political relations than we have been led to believe. One result of feminists insight is that they do not erect false barriers between the fields of security studies and international political economy. Feminists realize that the actual workings of gendered politics routinely blur these artificial fields of investigation.

A realist perspective on international relations precludes an understanding of the way the decisions made by states can influence the welfare of individuals in the periphery. We need a feminist understanding of international relations to understand the often invisible forms of violence that occur as a result of a flawed method for view international relations.

Tickner in 2001(J. Ann, Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California “Gendering World Politics”, Page 1-4)

The dramatic changes in world politics in the last ten years have fueled a disciplinary ferment in the field of international relations (IR), and new issues have stimulated new ways of understanding them. The end of the Cold War and the consequent decline in the predominance of military-security issues, defined in terms of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, have contributed to the decline of national-security studies, the heart of the discipline, at least in the United States, since 1945. With war between the great powers being unlikely in the near future, many IR scholars are focused on states’ economic, rather than strategic, relationships. Previously obscured by the East/West rivalry, a variety of new issues are now preoccupying the international relations security agenda. Ethnic conflicts and the clash of civilizations defy traditional statist categories and balance-of-power or interest-based explanations; they demand additional understandings of changing collective identities and the role of culture in defining both identities and interests. Issues related to economic globalization and democratization are also taking center stage. While none of these issues is new, the IR discipline is taking increasing notice of them, and ways to understand and explain them are proliferating. Many of these new disciplinary areas of focus are ones where women scholars and students of world politics seem to feel more at home than in strategic studies; they are also areas where gender issues, such as the differential rewards of the current manifestations of economic globalization and democratization, seem more obviously relevant.1 It may not be coincidental, therefore, that feminist perspectives on world politics entered the discipline at about the same time as the end of the Cold War; over the last ten years, they have been given increasing recognition. Certain introductory IR texts are now including feminist approaches in their overview of the discipline, and edited volumes and some anthologies have begun to include a chapter on feminist approaches.2 The title of this introduction, “Gendering World Politics,” both reflects some of these changes and conceptualizes a worldview into which feminist approaches fit more comfortably. While international relations has never been just about relations between states, an IR statist focus seems even less justified today than in the past. International politics cannot be restricted to politics between states; politics is involved in relationships between international organizations, social movements and other nonstate actors, transnational corporations and international finance, and human-rights organizations, to name a few. Decrying the narrowness of ColdWar IR, Ken Booth has suggested that the subject should be informed by what he calls a “global moral science” that entails systematic enquiry into how humans might live together locally and globally in ways that promote individual and collective emancipation in harmony with nature. He goes on to suggest that the state, the traditional frame for IR, “might be seen as the problem of world politics, not the solution.”3 Since women have been on the peripheries of power in most states, this broad conception of world politics seems the most fitting disciplinary definition in which to frame feminist approaches. Their investigations of politics from the micro to the global level and from the personal to the international, as well as their analyses as to how macro structures affect local groups and individuals, draw on a broad definition of the political. Using explicitly normative analysis, certain feminists have drawn attention to the injustices of hierarchical social relations and the effects they have on human beings’ life chances. Feminists have never been satisfied with the boundary constraints of conventional IR.4 While women have always been players in international politics, often their voices have not been heard either in policy arenas or in the discipline that analyzes them. If the agenda of concerns for IR scholars has expanded, so too have the theoretical approaches. The “scientific” rationalistic tradition,5 associated with both neorealism and neoliberalism, is being challenged by scholars in critical and postpositivist approaches that grow out of humanistic and philosophical traditions of knowledge rather than those based on the natural sciences. While certain scholars applaud this flowering of a multiplicity of approaches and epistemologies,6 others see a discipline in disarray with fragmentation and pluralism as its essential characteristics. Kalevi Holsti’s claim, in the early 1990s, that there is no longer agreement on what constitutes reliable or useful knowledge and how to create it still holds true today.7 It is in the context of this intellectual pluralism and disciplinary ferment that feminist approaches have entered the discipline. In spite of the substantial growth and recognition of feminist scholarship in the last ten years, it still remains quite marginal to the discipline, particularly in the United States, where neorealism and neoliberalism, approaches that share rationalistic methodologies and assumptions about the state and the international system, predominate.8 Apart from occasional citations, there has been little engagement with feminist writings, particularly by conventional IR scholars.9 There is genuine puzzlement as to the usefulness of feminist approaches for understanding international relations and global politics. Questions frequently asked of feminist scholars are indications of this puzzlement: What does gender have to do with international politics and the workings of the global economy? How can feminism help us solve real world problems such as Bosnia? Where is your research program?10 While the new feminist literatures in IR are concerned with understanding war and peace and the dynamics of the global economy, issues at the center of the IR agenda, their methodological and substantive approaches to these questions are sufficiently different for scholars of IR to wonder whether they are part of the same discipline. It is this lack of connection that motivates many of the issues raised in this book. While I have attempted to site feminist perspectives within the discipline, it will become clear from the topics addressed that IR feminists frequently make different assumptions about the world, ask different questions, and use different methodologies to answer them. Having reflected on reasons for these disconnections, as well as the misunderstandings over the potential usefulness of feminist approaches raised by some of the questions above, I believe that they lie in the fact that feminist IR scholars see different realities and draw on different epistemologies from conventional IR theorists. For example, whereas IR has traditionally analyzed security issues either from a structural perspective or at the level of the state and its decision makers, feminists focus on how world politics can contribute to the insecurity of individuals, particularly marginalized and disempowered populations. They examine whether the valorization of characteristics associated with a dominant form of masculinity influences the foreign policies of states. They also examine whether the privileging of these same attributes by the realist school in IR may contribute to the reproduction of conflict-prone, power-maximizing behaviors.11 Whereas IR theorists focus on the causes and termination of wars, feminists are as concerned with what happens during wars as well as with their causes and endings. Rather than seeing military capability as an assurance against outside threats to the state, militaries are seen as frequently antithetical to individual security, particularly to the security of women and other vulnerable groups. Moreover, feminists are concerned that continual stress on the need for defense helps to legitimate a kind of militarized social order that overvalorizes the use of state violence for domestic and international purposes.