Money, sex and power

1. Gender and international relations Week 14 2013-14 Money, sex and power

2. What is international relations (IR)? IR is the study of the relationship between countries and how they behave towards each other The creation of IR as an academic discipline goes back to 1919 and the aftermath of WWI when it was felt that there was a need to understand: • Why states had behaved as they had in the run-up to 1914? • How states would continue behaving and how to avoid another conflict on the same scale as WWI.

3. States and other agents in IR • Early years - IR was only about studying states • In post-WWII period - became the study not only of states but also of inter-governmental organisations), international NGOs (INGOs), national level NGOs, multinational corporations and any other agents or actors intervening in the fields of international diplomacy, war, sanctions, the allocation of resources etc.

4. IR, feminist theories, analyses Feminist academics began to enter the field of IR in the late 1980s Feminist IR literature focused on: • the impact of the nation and of the international political economy on women and gender relations;  • the contribution of women and gender relations to the creation of nations and relationships between nations, i.e. international relations. 

5. ‘Majority’ and ‘minority’ World women Feminist academics have separated women and gender in Third World’/‘majority world’ from women in the ‘First World’/ ‘minority world’. Jan Pettman (Worlding Women, 1996) – this dichotomy has: • reproduced the ‘difference’ between the majority and minority worlds • disguised the fact that in fact all people’s lives ‘are contained within global processes and structures’ (1996:171) Important to look at women globally and not in distinct sections of the world 

6. Lecture outline 1. The importance of gender and women to the nation state – its creation and maintenance 2. The importance of daily interaction at a micro-level for international relations (IR) 3. How women themselves engage in relations with other women across borders and conflicts.

7. Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) Argue that women are: • biological reproducers of national or ethnic groups (examples of China, France today) • reproducers of the social boundaries of national or ethnic groups • transmitters and reproducers of the culture • conceptualised as symbols of national and ethnic differences (e.g. images of Mother India or Britannia) • seen as active participants in national economic, political or military struggles

8. Gendered nationhood Yuval-Davis (1997), Gender and Nation, London: Sage: Y-D – extensive theorising of the nation and nationhood as a highly gendered entity. Importance of her work lies in two arguments: That it’s women who produce and reproduce nations biologically, culturally and symbolically – not elites (i.e. state bureaucrats, intellectuals, politicians) who are seen as principal political actors in classis theories of nation. That nations are constructed biologically, culturally and symbolically in opposition to others, within a gendered system of international nation-states. So national identity is produced with reference to ‘the other’

9. Critique of argument – Walby Anthias and Yuval-Davis • Privilege cultural or ideological aspects of the gendered nation over the economic or material aspects  • What is absent is gender division of labour in the public sphere • Social structures and social hierarchies are glossed over if cultural aspects are given too much weight • Even cohesive social groups contain social inequalities which means that all genders and classes don’t favour the same policies and share the same interests. E.g. going to war.

10. Cynthia Enloe Cynthia Enloe (1989), Bananas, Beaches and Bases, London: Pandora. • Enloe examines the hierarchical relations between nations - the way they affect, and are affected by, gendered cultural forms. • She challenges the idea that international relations solely in hands of political elites • She demonstrates how women who are excluded from state power affect international relations.

11. Importance of daily interaction at a micro-level Cynthia Enloe (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases, London: Pandora. • Paid work (e.g. ‘tourism for development’) • Housework (e.g. female, migrant domestic labour) • International gendered division of labour (intellectual, high-waged work in West dominated by white men Vs. factories in developing world using low-waged women to mass produce consumer goods) • Sexuality (e.g. prostitution on western military bases and sex tourism in poor majority world countries) • Violence (e.g. violence in sexual, military and employment relationships) • Culture (e.g. women as symbols of nation; transmitters of culture) • The State (e.g. hierarchical relations betweennationsand ‘othering’ of nations using gendered images)

12. Critiques of Enloe Sylvia Walby critiques Enloe’s analysis of gender and international relations, arguing that her:  • Analysis privileges ‘the sexual and cultural levels rather than the economic’ and that ‘the sexual division of labour [takes] a lower level significance’ (Gender Transformations, 1997: 187).  But Enloe is also concerned about waged and unwaged forms of women’s work and the international division of labour.  Craig Murphy (‘Seeing Women, Recognizing Gender, Recasting International Relations’, International Organisation 50(3): 513-38, 1996) is more forgiving and credits her with presenting some serious theoretical and methodological content.

13. Women engaging in relations with other women across borders and conflicts Cynthia Cockburn(1998) The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict, London: Zed Books. CC considers women as important actors in IR, particularly conflicts and negotiation of differences across intractable divides: e.g. N. Ireland, Palestine and Bosnia-Herzegovina. CC argues that part of the power that armed/political movements defend or try to establish is gender power.  Thus gender regimes and economic, political regimes are all at stake. They try to establish particular social and sexual relations between men and women and particular kinds of economic relations between people, land and wealth. For CC, unlike Enloe and Yuval-Davis, all these constitute ‘material’ factors in IR.    

14. Movements progressive or regressive and spaces for women Cockburn recognises that armed movements and struggles within and between countries can be both progressive and regressive. Dependent upon the extent to which they are progressive or regressive, a space may be created in which women’s or feminist organisations can have a say in the establishment of new gender, economic and  political regimes or systems. Such a space was available to women’s organisations in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Palestine/Israel, the three situations that Cockburn researched and observed.

15. How can we reduce violence? In addition to the space for women’s organisations to operate, her observations of the women’s organisations in the three places showed her that in order to reduce conflict and violence in the conduct of international relations, it is necessary to have an approach that is: • anti-essentialist • inclusive • democratic and feminist Three examples (N. Ireland, Bosnia, Palestine/Israel) of ‘transversal feminist politics’ which aim to ‘make democracy out of difference’, in which the key principle was holding on to a non-essentialist or non-biological concept of identity. 

16. Six strategies to maintain transversal alliances Cockburn identified six strategies that were used by the women to maintain their transversal alliances and try and resolve the conflicts.  • They affirmed difference • They avoided essentialising identity • They reduced polarisation by emphasising other differences • They acknowledged injustice done in the name of different identities • They defined the agenda of the projects • They practiced a democratic group process

17. ‘Agonistic democracy’ • This is what Cockburn calls ‘agonistic democracy’ or combative democracy • This concept is derived from Chantal Mouffe - difference is recognised rather than being glossed over • ‘Other’ not viewed as enemy but adversary • Enemy would have to be destroyed, an adversary has ideas you might want to fight against but their right to exist not questioned

18. Antagonism v Agonism (Mouffe) Chantal Mouffe (2000) ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, http://www.ihs.ac.at/publications/pol/pw_72.pdf. • Antagonism is the struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries • Aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism • Avoids constructing opponent as enemy • Alternative to agonistic democracy is conflict • Attempting to annihilate your enemy, the ‘other’ (e.g. women suicide bombers)

19. Andrea Dworkin Breakdown of agonistic democracy leads to other considerations coming to the fore and extreme violence. Andrea Dworkin (2002), ‘The women suicide bombers’, Feminista! 5(1), (www.feminista.com/archives/v5n1/dworkin.html) In the case women becoming suicide bombers, other considerations which may have come into play when all else had failed: • They may be fleeing from sexual violence and dishonour • They thought the act of suicide might raise the status of women • They believed women could be as brave, self-sacrificing and willing to submit to revolutionary imperatives as men

20. To sum up … • Women are central to the reproduction of the nation • Their sexuality is policed by men to maintain group and national boundaries • International relations isn’t only constituted by what states and elites do but by what we all do • Need agonistic democracy in order to overcome difference and othering, adversaries rather than enemies