The (in)security of gender in Afghanistan’s peacebuilding project: hybridity and affect

ABSTRACT

In this article I draw on a feminist approach to hybridity to explore interview data and observations from my field research in Afghanistan. I argue that there is a logic of masculinist protection influencing the affective environment of the peacebuilding project there. The combination of a perceived patriarchal context in Afghanistan and security routines protecting civilian internationals (and Afghan elites), which rely on hypermasculine signifiers, help to create and perpetuate the conditions in which the female (for both internationals and Afghans) is marked with insecurity. I point to hybridity between the foreign and female experience, as well as resistance and reflexivity within my research. Throughout I explore fragments of power hierarchies that cut through the meaning of gender, rendering the female state a disempowering one, always referenced in some uncertain, hybrid way as protected or in need of protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• Afghanistan
• hybridity
• affect
• masculinist protection

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kimberly Hutchings, Maya Eichler, Caron Gentry, Clara Eroukhmanoff, Andreas Papamichail, the anonymous reviewers, members of the Enloe Award Committee and the editors of this journal for their hugely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Thank you also to my dear friend Marie Huber, without whom my research would not have been possible in the first place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hannah Partis-Jennings recently completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews. Her doctoral research focused on feminist approaches to peacebuilding and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. She has also researched and published on the Responsibility to Protect paradigm. She is currently a Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin.

Notes

1. I use the term perception here not to suggest this logic does not exist in reality, but because my empirical materials guide me more toward discussing perception than the direct operations of patriarchy in people’s lives.

2. Affect is difficult to work with methodologically, and for some scholars reading affect into discourse would be methodologically incorrect. However following Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) and Solomon (2012), I believe that it is possible to do so.

3. I understand the definition of ethnography to be “people-focused emic research which makes use of data collection methods such as participation, observation, and interview, and which unfolds by way of thick description and interpretive contextualisation” (Vannini 2015, 318).

4. All names have been changed for the purposes of anonymity.

5. All of the interviews referenced here took place in 2014.

Additional information

Funding

Travel funding was provided by The Russell Trust, Fife, in addition to a 600th Anniversary Scholarship at the University of St Andrews, which allowed me to conduct my PhD research.