Gender and Crisis in Global Politics: Introduction

The “Gender and Crisis in Global Politics” theme of this special issue represents the first special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP) that came from one of the journal's conferences. For our readers who are unaware of the IFjP conferences, we would like to start this introduction by telling you a little about that project. When we proposed in 2010 to start editing the journal in 2011, we recommended that the journal begin to host annual conferences. We made that proposal because, with many of the former Editors and Editorial Board members of IFjP, we see the journal as engaging a global community of scholars interested in politics from a feminist perspective. We hoped that hosting conferences would grow the IFjP community, numerically, substantively and representationally. It was with that hope that we scheduled the First Annual IFjP Conference for the summer of 2012, hosted by Heidi Hudson, at the University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, around the theme “Leaving the Camp: Gender Analysis across Real and Perceived Divides.” The Bloemfontein conference was followed by the Second Annual Conference hosted by Cynthia Weber at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, around the theme “(Im)possibly Queer International Feminisms” in 2013. The “Gender and Crisis in Global Politics” theme comes from the 2014 conference, hosted by Laura Sjoberg at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, California. Many of the articles in this special issue were presented at that conference, and all were submitted to the journal in response to our post-conference Special Issue Call for Papers.

Before we discuss the theme of this special issue and the articles that are contained herein, we want to mention that the 2015 conference, “The Difference that Gender Makes to International Peace and Security,” took place in June, hosted by Sara Davies, Nicole George and Jacqui True at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Our issue 19(1) (March 2017) will be around that theme. The Call for Papers for the Fifth Annual IFjP Conference can be found at ifjpconference.net, and is open. The Fifth Annual Conference will be hosted by Associate Editor Anne Sisson Runyan at the University of Cincinnati, around the theme “Decolonizing Knowledges in Feminist World Politics.” That conference will be held 19–21 May 2016, and submissions are still open. We hope that you can make it. Feel free to email the journal's editorial offices at [email protected] for any information you need that cannot be found on our conference website. Relatedly, as many of you know, we have recently launched a website with the journal's multimedia content – blog posts, podcasts and videos of our conferences – at ifjp.org. Check it out and send any feedback or content you have to [email protected].

We chose the theme of “Gender and Crisis in Global Politics” for the conference and the special issue for a number of reasons. We saw the discourses of emergency and crisis being used in many conversations about global politics, both in the policy world and among scholars interested in International Relations (IR) and international studies, and drawing lines between different events and concerns in global politics.

If we are to believe what newspapers, news media and even IR's journals often suggest, the global political arena is (again) in a time of crisis. Different sources pay attention to different crises: the Global Financial Crisis, the Debt Crisis, the Crisis of ISIL/Daesh in Iraq and Syria, the Crisis of Israel and Palestine and the Iran Nuclear Crisis have gotten significant attention in media coverage of global politics. However, those are not the only crises that scholars and practitioners discuss. Environmentalists warn of an ecological crisis, health scholars warn of disease crises, cyber-security experts suggest a coming information crisis and migration experts warn of population crises. It seems, from a glance, that scholarly work on securitization (e.g. Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998; MacKenzie 2009) might have something to say about the language of crisis in global politics.

Feminist work on searching for silences (e.g. Charlesworth 1999; Kronsell 2006; Kabeer 2010; Parpart 2010) – what is not said and what is not prioritized – suggests that it is important to pay as much attention to what is not swept up in the rhetoric of crisis as to what is included. Why, for example, is rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo not considered to be a crisis? Why are high maternal mortality rates not frequently characterized as crises? Why is there not a “crisis” of the tendency to drastically underpay female workers, worldwide?

Together, these present day presumed-crises and non-crises can be contextualized in a global politics the history of which is often told as a series of crises. The crises in global politics not only muster attention in their time, but they are often the markers of historical change – wars, depressions, diseases and natural disasters. Feminist work on global politics has addressed many of these crises – historical and contemporary – in crisis language and without it, as well as a number of the non-crises that looking for women and gender in the international arena draws into focus. That work, however, had generally not explicitly theorized the conceptualization of crisis, its gendered dimensions and/or gender-based crises as such.

We were interested, then, in the conference and special issue addressing feminist perspectives on the concept of crisis and on crises in global politics. We posed a number of questions for potential contributors to consider:

• How does an event or social situation come to be constituted and represented as a crisis? What do gender and/or queer lenses tell us about what is recognized as crisis and how crises are read?

• Whose suffering constitutes a crisis, and what reactions are warranted? Does crisis policy behavior allow for the omission of the concerns and needs of people at the margins of global politics? What do feminist and/or queer approaches to the politics of crisis representation look like?

• Who/what is the subject of crisis politics? In crises, who is protected, saved or forgotten? Whose “crises” are labeled crisis and demand attention? Whose crises are ignored?

• Are there feminist and/or queer approaches to crisis management? What challenges do crises present that differ from “everyday politics” as traditionally understood? What might gendered/queer analysis tell us about crisis management strategy generally and/or about managing different types of crises?

• How does feminist and/or queer theorizing deal with characterizations of “times of crisis?” Does feminist and/or queer work in history, sociology, geography, and politics provide contextualization of such characterizations?

• What if anything does it do to look at theorizing crisis as in crisis? How do gender/queer lenses think about crises in theorizing?

Presenters at the conference addressed a wide variety of these topics in a wide variety of ways, and the articles that ended up in this special issue do so as well.

One theme running across both the broad conversation at the Conference and the conversation among the contributions in this issue is the atmosphere of crisis in contemporary global politics. J. Ann Tickner's article, “Revisiting IR in a Time of Crisis: Learning from Indigenous Knowledge,” was one of the keynotes at the 2014 conference. Tickner engages the sense of crisis that is filling newspaper headlines and social media hashtags, suggesting that a sense of crisis is proliferating in global politics. Tickner suggests that indigenous responses to various crises provide a template for dealing with crises in the world and in IR theorizing. Critiquing the western triumphalist narrative that Tickner finds to be at the base of both crisis discourse and traditional IR theorizing, this article utilizes various indigenous peoples’ understandings of world order and state sovereignty as a foil for contemporary neoliberalism and as suggestive of potential paths forward. Tickner pairs these indigenous knowledges with the lessons of feminisms in IR to look for alternative sources of knowledge to the crisis-based logics of IR theorizing and the skewed understandings of events and solutions in global politics that they present.

If Tickner's article analyzes what is named as crisis and how to deal with those named crises, Jacqui True's article, “Winning the Battle but Losing the War on Violence: A Feminist Perspective on the Declining Global Violence Thesis,” looks at what is excluded from the language of crisis and/or characterized as no longer a problem. True's piece, which was another one of the keynote addresses at the 2014 conference, takes aim at the recent popularity of the declining violence thesis, as articulated by Steven Pinker and others. The declining violence thesis, as True explains, makes the claim that violence is on the decline globally – referring both to political violence and to violence more generally. True suggests that this claim – and the resultant desecuritization of everyday violence – is only plausible when its claimant ignores gendered violence within and among states, particularly sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). From a feminist perspective, True argues that a comprehensive analysis of violence across the global through gendered lenses reveals silence around rising, rather than declining, gendered violence.

The question of what is called crisis and what is not comes up in the other articles in this issue as well. For example, Amanda Watson and Corinne Mason's “Power of the First Hour: Is There a Transnational Breastfeeding Crisis?” looks at a different sort of crisis: one the authors argue was constituted in the international political arena, rather than being responded to there. Watson and Mason refer to the 2012 Save the Children Campaign that emphasized the ways that “breastfeeding saves lives” to invoke a sense of urgency and paint a picture of a crisis of infant mortality to be solved by women breastfeeding. The authors suggest that the manufactured crisis takes attention away from the root causes of infant mortality. Armed with this analysis of crisis discourses, Watson and Mason engage theories of crisis temporalities to sketch a feminist politics of crisis. As the authors explain, a feminist politics of crisis “interrupts crisis rhetoric to consider what is at stake in enacting some solutions ‘now’ and leaving others for ‘later’” (Watson and Mason, this issue). These interruptions are meant to “disrupt white supremacist heteropatriarchal logics” that frame manufactured urgency.

Cecilia Åse's “Crisis Narratives and Masculinist Protection: Gendering the Original Stockholm Syndrome” might be seen as such an interruption of manufactured agency. Looking at the Stockholm syndrome of captor-bonding, Åse suggests that the identified crisis (of Stockholm syndrome in captors) obscures the unidentified crisis (of state authority in its inability to prevent hostage-taking). As Åse explains, this obscuring of the crisis of state authority is gendered: women are considered especially susceptible to the Stockholm syndrome, and the term was coined in reference to women's behavior. Åse argues that the crisis narratives that produced the Stockholm syndrome betray gendered notions of agency, dependency and victimhood, while serving as a complicated way to cover a gap in state authority. Women's psychological crises were focused on to hide the state's authority crisis. Åse demonstrates that this manipulation prevented questions that would be asked and reformulations that would be presented by feminist interventions into crisis narratives.

In different ways, many of the contributions to this issue are feminist interventions into crisis narratives. Sydney Calkin's “‘Tapping’ Women for Post-Crisis Capitalism: Evidence from the 2012 World Development Report” is no exception. Calkin's article intervenes in the crisis narratives of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, and the narratives that suggest that women's work and gender equality is the solution to that crisis. To do so, it explores the ways in which female faces are the public faces of twenty-first-century development programming. Calkin pays attention to the ways in which narratives argue that gender equality is “Smart Economics,” and critiques that assumption from a Foucauldian perspective, illustrating how the economic instrumentalization of women produces female bodies, subjectivities and agency in development discourses. Calkin's article reads the 2012 World Development Report as constituting women's labor as a solution to “rescue” global capitalism from economic crisis, and critiques this reading of women, gender and human capital.

If Calkin's article focuses on the misfit “solution” to a manufactured urgency, Deborah Stienstra's focuses on feminist crisis response in places where crisis, loss and tragedy are commonplace. Stienstra's “Northern Crises: Women's Relationships and Resistances to Resource Extractions,” uses local communities to understand gender and global social, economic and environmental crises. Stienstra looks at the ways that local crises have been intertwined with global discourses of crisis with a focus on Labrador, Canada. Relying theoretically on work in feminist disability studies and gender-based approaches to intersectionality, Stienstra suggests that governments, institutions and corporations have “normalized” crisis in local communities and thereby reduced both the resources and will to respond to those crises. Stienstra looks, however, at a group of women activists who reject both the constant state of crisis and analyses that cast them as constant victims. The article looks at the community of practice called the Feminist North Network as a feminist act of crisis management at local levels with the potential to reverberate across the global political arena.

The Conversations section of this special issue also looks at feminist solutions to crisis – albeit a different crisis – the humanitarian crisis in Palestine. The Conversation, initiated by Simona Sharoni and Rabab Abdulhadi, included Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin and Dina Siddiqi. Their dialogue focuses on gender and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Movement. The discussion engages the ways that feminist activists could, and should, respond to the events in Palestine. The feminist scholar-activists discuss the gendered dynamics of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine and explore the feminist ethics of BDS as a transnational crisis response.

The books reviewed in the book review section explore various events and situations in global politics that are sometimes articulated as crisis and sometimes not: reproductive health, disease, civil war, gendered war-fighting and international intervention in conflict resolution. Across these books and their reviews, the theme of what is identified as crisis, as important and as in immediate need of a solution, and the impact of that attention, carries, even across a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and empirical material.

The wide variety of work in this special issue, at the 2014 IFjP Conference, and in other feminist conversations about crisis in global politics suggests that a single feminist approach to, definition of or politics of crisis is impossible to find. That same variety of work, though, makes a strong case that paying attention to crises in the world and to the manufacture of crisis rhetoric alongside events in global politics is not only generally important but an important place for feminist scholarship, feminist political activism and direct attention. As we have listened to these conversations, and read the research project, no one is calling for a “feminist crisis studies” subfield – and we think that is appropriate. Nevertheless, just because crisis is not, and should not be, isolated as a subfield of feminist studies of international politics does not mean that it is not intellectually important to think across subfields of feminist studies of international politics. That is the message that we think that the many very different takes on international feminist politics and crisis in this issue convey: whether thinking about emergencies or manufactured urgency, whether thinking about security or political economy, whether thinking about interstate relations or personal/community relations – considering the roles that the language and practice of crisis and crisis management play adds dimensionality to research agendas and activist responses. We hope that these conversations inspire readers to consider those dimensions in their scholarly and activist work.