Implications For Understanding Security Through Gender: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Literature Concerning Women Who Wield Political Violence and Women in State Militaries

Abstract

“Women are nurturing mothers, and men are strong protectors!” - These are common gendered stereotypes of men and women and their roles in society. However, if these are the general narrative of men and women, then how do we explain that throughout history and today women directly engage in conflict and war. International relations (IR) scholars across different academic fields have engaged in this conversation, theorizing and conceptualizing on how to understand women’s direct participation in war. Feminist IR scholars especially have been interested in investigating this and argue for a gendered approach to IR and global politics and that war, conflict and security are highly gendered and part of an overall power hierarchy which consistently places women in a subordinate position. Feminist perspectives towards understanding women’s roles in violence and the affects this has for understanding security has caused tensions between conventional IR scholars and feminists, in particular in terms of the degree to which gender is to be understood as a cause or a symptom of the challenges associated with understanding women’ violence and changes in security perceptions. This project will provide a critical review and analysis of the literature concerning WWPV and WSM to detect if there are similarities and/or differences in how the scholarship explains women’s engagement in violence. The literature review consists of 20 articles from scholars from different disciplinary fields and is supported by expert interviews with three IR scholars of gender, war, and security. The interviews provide additional and detailed perspectives to understanding the topic and the challenges in theorizing and conceptualizing on the women and violence. The comparison of WWPV and WSM is part of a larger debate on questions of war and security matters, in light of the emergence of new actors, such as non-state military groups, which challenge the traditional state security paradigm. It can be concluded on the basis of the critical review and analysis that a number of the same narratives were being produced and reproduced in the literature on both WWPV and WSM. One example was the narrative of motherhood, which was significant in both bodies of literature as an explanatory narrative in understanding women’s involvement in violence and the discomfort it caused for society, men, and the non-state organizations when women participated in violence. Despite similarities there were also differences in the degree to which some of the narratives and concepts were applied. In the WSM literature there were a tendency to analyze and discuss the question of women’s legitimate place in the military on the basis of their physical abilities and whether it was beneficial for both women and the institution. In the literature on WWPV the analysis of physical abilities were to a lesser degree discussed, whereas the gendered power hierarchies causing differences in the positions that men and women are allowed to fill were often debated. Additionally, the review of the literature revealed that the group of scholars conducting research on WSM was more evenly gender balanced than scholars working on WWPV. Furthermore, there was an interest from non-feminist scholars to engage in the conversation on WSM, whereas in the literature on WWPV, the scholars were all women and all took a gender and/or a feminist perspective to understanding women’s roles in violence and the connection to security. Ultimately, the differences in academic paradigms, especially between feminist and non-feminist scholars, made a coherent understanding of security difficult. However, both non-feminist and feminist scholars seemed to conclude that an awareness of gender (not necessarily a feminist perspective) is significant to understanding security.

A master thesis from Aalborg University

Implications For Understanding Security Through Gender: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Literature Concerning Women Who Wield Political Violence and Women in State Militaries