White feminism and the governance of violent extremism

ABSTRACT

Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are inter-related with other drivers of “radicalisation” and “extremism”, which may lead to the securitisation of forms of sexist and misogynistic violence. There has not yet been, however, a systematic examination of the ways in which even some of these critical and feminist interventions are complicit in the reproduction of the logics of gender and race that structure the oppression and violence they take as their target. In this paper I argue that there is a powerful brand of governance feminism informing P/CVE global governance initiatives that has little consideration of the distributed effects of this move on the operation of racialised and gendered power. I position governance feminism as a sub-category of white feminism and show that it is specifically white feminism that is dominant in the institutions of liberal governance relevant to P/CVE. I draw on Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory to show how the gendered subjects of P/CVE governance are often presented as race-neutral, in deeply problematic and limiting ways.

KEYWORDS:

• White feminism
• race
• intersectionality
• governance
• CVE

Introduction

The global governance of violent extremism, primarily in the form of P/CVE, is a field of practice that continues to gain prominence as a complement to global counterterrorism efforts, because, according to the UN Secretary-General, “there is a growing international consensus that such counter-terrorism measures have not been sufficient to prevent the spread of violent extremism” (UN General Assembly, 2015, paragraph I.4). The UN and other governance organisations, including the European Union (EU), African Union (AU), and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have developed programmes and initiatives aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) that sit alongside and interact with unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral state efforts. P/CVE is usually differentiated from counterterrorism such that the latter is considered the realm of “hard” security measures and P/CVE frequently represents efforts towards holistic societal transformation that is more developmentally oriented (Rothermel 2020, 2021; for a useful overview of scholarly literature, see Stephens, Sieckelinck, and Boutellier 2021). The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) background note and guidance on P/CVE, for example, explains that “[w]hile counter-terrorism generally refers to the coercive measures States use to tackle ‘terrorism’ (e.g. policing and judicial measures, blocking of financing, preventive detention, counter-insurgency campaigns and targeted air strikes), P/CVE is the use of non-coercive means to prevent or dissuade individuals or groups from adopting ‘extremist views’ that might lead to acts of terrorism” (ICRC 2017).

The focus of this investigation is the knowledge economies of P/CVE and the effects of assemblages of expertise that produce – and are produced by – its governance, specifically at the global level.¹ This paper offers a theoretical intervention into debates about the governance of violent extremism through P/CVE initiatives, paying particular attention to gender and race. One prominent policy actor described P/CVE as “a feminist agenda” (US Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Sarah Sewall 2016, cited in Huckerby 2020, 191). While one such claim does not necessarily make it so, there is no doubt that the dynamics that motivated the Under Secretary’s assertion have intensified in the past decade. The integration of efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism with the governance of gendered insecurities has been accelerating since 2015, when the adoption of resolution 2242 by the UN Security Council articulated counterterrorism and countering violent extremism initiatives as a focus of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. UN Security Council resolution 2242 requests “the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) and the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) to integrate gender as a cross-cutting issue throughout the activities within their respective mandates” (UN Security Council, 2015, paragraph 11) and includes three full paragraphs on UN and state-led P/CVE activity. Subsequently, resolution 2467, adopted in 2019, positions “sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations committed by terrorist groups as part of their strategic objectives and ideology” as part of the remit of the UN’s counterterrorism architecture (UN Security Council, 2019, paragraph 29).

Feminist scholars and human rights experts have critiqued these integrative moves (Ní Aoláin 2016; Asante and Shepherd 2020; Rothermel 2020), with attention frequently drawn to the risks that are generated by the instrumentalization of women’s participation in P/CVE initiatives and the extent to which such instrumentalization increases the potential insecurities experienced by women in affected communities. In her role as Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has consistently documented concerns about the negative effects of instrumentalization of women (A/HRC/40/52, 2019, paragraph 18; A/HRC/43/46, 2020, paragraph 40; A/HRC/46/36, 2021, paragraph 6); Ní Aoláin has argued forcefully in her annual reports to the UN General Assembly that the integration of gender equality considerations and an emphasis on women’s participation often “relies on the strategic rationale that it leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the causes of violent extremism and more localized and credible strategies for countering terrorism” (A/HRC/43/46, 2020, paragraph 40). The instrumentalization and “commodification” of women (A/HRC/43/46, 2020, paragraph 40) in service of P/CVE efforts has been widely critiqued in academic work on gender, security, and human rights (Brown 2013, 2019; Ali 2020; Basarudin and Shaikh 2020; Huckerby 2020), along with similar critiques levelled at the racialisation of P/CVE (Brown 2019, 2020; Abbas 2019; Ali 2020; Pearson, Winterbotham, and Brown 2020, 49–52).

Despite the insights offered by these critical voices, P/CVE governance initiatives are frequently partial, harmful, and compromised (see, for example, Kundnani and Hayes 2018). A growing body of scholarly research suggests that concerns for more equal gender relations and the empowerment of women may manifest only shallowly, if at all, in P/CVE work, while race is frequently elided altogether. Moreover, the most recent report of the Special Rapporteur notes that

Regrettably, some women claim to function as feminist voices within those security frameworks instrumentalizing and appropriating a securitized version of the women and peace and security agenda to advance the narrow aims of countering terrorism or securitized countering violent extremism. (A/HRC/46/36, 2021, paragraph 6).

Ní Aoláin’s observation here presents a different dimension of critical engagement with P/CVE governance, suggesting that even where gender (and perhaps race) are incorporated into P/CVE frameworks, these interventions may not function to disturb the underlying logics of securitised approaches to terrorism and violent extremism – logics that are intrinsically racist, sexist, and carceral (Abu-Lughod 2019; Engle, Nesiah, and Otto 2021; Vergès 2022) – and may even function to reproduce such logics.

Building on this insight, in this paper I present a theoretical contribution to scholarship on gender, security and human rights, specifically related to the governance of violent extremism, arguing that the problems that have emerged in P/CVE in particular are attributable in significant part to the epistemic whiteness of governance feminism, which is the form of feminism that has integrated smoothly into security and P/CVE institutions. The target of my critique is the brand of feminist engagement with security politics that Lila Abu-Lughod calls “securofeminism” (2019, 8), which I argue is complicit with structures of racialised domination.² I develop this critique in four parts. First, I briefly engage with the scholarship to which I wish to contribute, showing how this body of work draws attention to what is at stake in discussions about gender, race and political violence. I then engage with governance feminism, a form of feminism increasingly incorporated into structures and processes of governance.³ I show how the insights of critics have allowed for the systematic excavation of the violences of governance feminism – an honest appraisal of “our own bloody hands” (Halley 2006, 33)⁴ – but have not examined its racial logics. I draw on the concept of epistemic whiteness (Sabaratnam 2020) and position governance feminism as a sub-category of white feminism to argue that it is specifically white feminism that “walk[s] the halls of power” in the institutions of liberal governance (Halley 2006, 21), as part of a critical reckoning with racialised power in the governance of P/CVE.

In the third section, I draw on Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory, to show how race and gender are intrinsically intertwined. This investigation demonstrates the importance of centring Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory in the study of security, including terrorism and violent extremism.⁵ In the fourth section, I show how governance feminism as it is manifest in the global governance of violent extremism frequently presupposes the separation of gender and race, such that gendered subjects are presented as race-neutral, in problematic and limiting ways. I provide a necessarily brief analysis of a few illustrative examples of P/CVE research and guidance produced in association with or under the auspices of UN Women through this lens, to sketch out the distributed effects of discourse on race/gender and political violence, before offering a brief conclusion.

On gender, race, and political violence

There is a wealth of feminist literature on the roles that women play in political violence (Alison 2004, 2009; Eager 2008; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Parashar 2009, 2014; Shekhawat 2014) and the need for attention to both gendered power and the positioning of women in the prevention of such violence (Brown 2011, 2013, 2019, 2020; Gentry 2012; Gentry and Sjoberg 2011; Ní Aoláin 2006, 2013; McDonald 2012; Satterthwaite and Huckerby 2013; Pearson, Winterbotham, and Brown 2020). In this section, I review this literature, aiming to sketch out the terrain of the present investigation and to situate this study in relation to the scholarship on which it draws and to which I hope it contributes. This is a multidisciplinary literature on race, gender, and political violence that is attentive to the ways in which race and gender, separately and sometimes in interconnected or overlapping ways, not only motivate incidences of terrorism and extremism (see, for example, Sixta 2008; Speckhard 2008; Pearson and Winterbotham 2017; Speckhard and Shajkovci 2019; Speckhard and Ellenberg 2020), but also – and more pertinently to the focus of this investigation – shape responses to such violence.

Since the prosecution of the “war on terror”, launched by the United States in the early part of this century and which continues in various hybrid manifestations today, feminist scholars have also foregrounded the operations of gendered and racialised power in the governance of terrorism and violent extremism. The concept of “dangerous brown men”, for example, was originally formulated by Gargi Bhattacharyya (2008) as the analytical vehicle for examination of the racialised and sexual politics of the “War on Terror”. Bhattacharyya situates the figure of the dangerous brown man in the centre of the analytical frame but also explores how this figure is constituted in and through the relations of governance that purport to respond to the threat he poses. She skilfully shows how logics of sexuality, gender and race are central to the use of force in the guise of counterterrorism and how “imperial feminism” is implicated in this particular form of war-craft (2008, 41–45). Despite the empirical increase in incidences of far-right terrorism and extremism, usually perpetrated by white men,⁶ the figuration of “dangerous brown men” continues to animate not only war-fighting in the name of counterterrorism, but also interventions towards the prevention and countering of “extremism” – interventions that are much broader in scope, and no less devastating in effect, than the prosecution of war.⁷

Critical engagements with policy and academic discourse on “dangerous brown men”, whether in relation to the “war on terror”, narrowly conceived (e.g. Razack 2004; Shepherd 2006; Youngs 2006; Eisenstein 2007; von der Lippe 2012; Pratt 2013), or in relation to efforts to prevent and counter terrorism and violent extremism (Carter 2017; Abbas 2019; Ali 2020; Taylor 2020), draw attention to the sexualised, gendered and racialised logics of this discourse. Contemporaneous with Bhattacharyya’s analysis, some feminist scholars explored particular kinds of danger, evaluating the utility of misogyny as an explanatory concept in understanding the drivers of violence (Bennoune 2008). For example, in her much-cited essay on terror and torture, Karima Bennoune noted that “[f]eminist international lawyers have argued that violence against women should be seen as a warning sign for armed conflict. The same may be said of terrorism. Groups that engage in these sorts of attacks on civilians as a whole often pursue misogynist agendas and carry out, or advocate, severe forms of violence against women” (Bennoune 2008, 49). Bennoune cites the Taliban and Al Qaeda as examples of such misogynistic groups, and offers evidence from the women’s organisation Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML); this move firmly forges an association between misogyny and fundamentalist Islam, but Bennoune does not explore racialised power explicitly in the analysis that she presents. There is a need to take seriously all operant concepts, including race, and explore the imbrication of racialised power with gender, sex, and feminist politics in responses to terrorism and extremism.

More recently, feminist approaches to gender and terrorism and violent extremism have also begun to link misogyny and “violent extremism”, drawing analytical attention to formations of masculinity and the interactions between violence and male gender role expectations (e.g. Castillo Diaz and Valji 2019; Johnston and True 2019; Gordon and True 2019; Johnston, Iqbal, and True 2020; Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell 2020). This research asserts that “there is an underexplored correlation between misogyny and acts of violent extremism across the world in recent years” (Castillo Diaz and Valji 2019, 38), arguing that misogyny “is more virulently and overtly expressed and acted on by violent extremists, and it is the common link between white Christian extremists in Western countries and Muslim extremists in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia” (Castillo Diaz and Valji 2019, 49). There has not yet been, however, a systematic examination of the ways in which some of these critical and feminist interventions are complicit in the reproduction of the logics of gender and race that structure the oppression and violence they take as their target.

Research on gender, race and (in)security influences initiatives designed to prevent and counter extremist violence; feminist scholars are not only critiquing existing policy frameworks but also, and increasingly, offering solutions to, and recommendations for the management of, this problem. The integration of (particular forms of) feminism with P/CVE initiatives is thus represented in deepening interactions between these two fields: “ICF [international conflict feminism] entered its alliance with ‘counter-terrorism’ interventions as both rationale and remedy: i.e., on the one hand ICF provided a women’s rights rationale for military intervention; on the other, ICF called for gender mainstreaming into post-conflict nation building initiatives as a necessary component of constructing liberal political society” (Nesiah 2013, 132–133). In the analysis that follows I show how governance feminism, which I elaborate in the next section, is complicit in the reproduction of racialised tropes and problematic representations of “insecure brown women” – those in need of protection from “dangerous brown men” – and also argue that such interventions largely ignore both the co-constitution of race and gender and the existence (/experience) of gender beyond a binary structure, despite continued critical interventions from Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminists. I thus wish to revisit “the triangular relationship identified by Mutua (2001) of a victim (brown women), a savage (brown men) and a saviour (white men/masculine states)” (Gentry 2015, 364; see also: Spivak 1988; Cooke 2002) and critically engage not only white saviours but also white feminist saviours.

On governance feminism

The concept of governance feminism encourages critical engagement with the forms of feminism that have been integrated into various mechanisms of governance across multiple spheres of practice, including legal, security, and economic policy. Janet Halley (2006) and her various co-authors (Halley et al. 2006; Halley et al. 2018; Halley et al. 2019) have described governance feminism as “every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs – to follow Michel Foucault’s definition of governmentality, every form in which feminists and feminist ideas ‘conduct the conduct of men’” (Halley et al. 2018, ix, emphasis added). The imbrication of feminist ideas and ideals with techniques and rationalities of government, which in turn are produced within and productive of institutions and processes of governance, thus becomes visible as governance feminism.

This theorisation offers an alternative way to navigate debates about the pitfalls of co-optation, wherein feminist agendas are seen to be subverted or sidelined in hostile institutions, or the possibilities of institutional transformation from within, wherein feminist bureaucrats and policymakers are able to motivate change, even if only incremental, provided that the windows of political opportunity are made use of effectively (for debates about co-optation and resistance, see de Jong and Kimm 2017; Roy 2017; Eschle and Maiguashca 2018). Rather than focussing on whether feminists in governance institutions are, or are not, using feminist means to achieve feminist ends, and what might enable or inhibit such achievements, the concept of governance feminism takes for granted the ambivalence of both feminism and governance, and explores instead the distributed effects of practices concerned with gender relations, identities, and expressions.

Governance feminism positions feminists as legal, security, and economic policy experts; “[a]t the core of governance feminism is the development of a particular kind of knowledge” (Prügl 2011, 72) and the assertion – mostly very well justified – of expertise. Expertise is the lubricant that enables the smooth meshing of feminist cogs in the gears of governance and there is now quite an industry of “gender experts” engaged in various forms of governance (Holvikivi 2019). My particular focus here is on the extent to which gender expertise is integrated in the governance of terrorism and extremism through P/CVE initiatives and interventions. Halley and others have expressed concern about the extent to which governance feminism – which Halley argues dominates in security institutions – aligns with some very conservative, and in some cases explicitly anti-feminist, objectives, warning that “feminism today seems not to be losing its edge in an alliance with liberal feminists, but losing its Left-liberal credentials entirely as it emerges as a new form of conservatism and situates itself in an expanding institutionalization of crime control” (Halley 2018, 44).

This recognition motivates reflection on the implication of feminism in violent interventions that serve retrogressive goals, and on the complicity of feminisms in sustaining the architectures that govern these interventions. These are not new reflections, necessarily, but they do take on a new urgency within the architectures of security expertise – within which I would include P/CVE interventions – that are frequently allied with carceral and punitive securitised solutions to violence (Vergès 2022, 8). As Marysia Zalewski and Anne Runyan note, “contemporary theorizing about violence suggests that we can never be outside it, that our very exposure to and of it implicates us (and particularly the ‘us’ of the Global North) in what we suppose are violence-quelling acts, which, nevertheless, produce their own violences” (Zalewski and Runyan 2013, 295).

Specifically in the domain of terrorism and violent extremism, “the idea of ‘feminism-as-counter-terrorism’ gained increasing traction” over the past two decades (Huckerby 2020, 185; see also Nesiah 2013; Pearson, Winterbotham, and Brown 2020; Razavi 2021). Jayne Huckerby (2020) offers two important critiques of this particular manifestation of governance feminism. First, she argues that, though research on counterterrorism claims to attend to gender, “‘gender’ has in practice meant ‘women’ (often Muslim women) and has relied on a series of stereotypes of women as peaceful and maternal” (Huckerby 2020, 187). Second, Huckerby shows that “gender has also been connected to human rights in ways that have led to empowering the State, including ‘the security and sexual surveillance apparatus governing gender’, rather than ensuring gender equality” (Halley et al. quoted in Huckerby 2020, 187). Huckerby’s trenchant critique draws on the theorisation of governance feminism to offer insight into the human rights dimensions of these “feminism-as-counter-terrorism” research interventions, many of which present “women’s rights as conditional and a means to the end of counter-terrorism and enhancement of State power rather than an end in and of themselves”, thus eroding a commitment to a rights-first approach (2020, 189), because “women’s rights can be invoked to service repressive international policy responses in counter-terrorism and practice, including through the focus on Muslim women’s empowerment in particular, as well as in other ‘soft’ approaches” (Huckerby 2020, 192). While feminist scholars are deeply and depressingly familiar with these instrumentalising moves, there has not yet been thorough examination of the racial logics of their perseverance nor of the complicity of governance feminism in sustaining those logics.

Huckerby presents a compelling case for challenging the manifestation of governance feminism in counterterrorism initiatives that include securitising violence against women as an instrument of counterterrorism. She argues that “ultimately what lies behind these anti-gender-violence-as-security policies is a short-changed version of gender analysis that decouples counter-terrorism policy from broader feminist analyses of the unequal gendered power relations that accounts for both current gender-based patterns of violence as well as how State-led responses actually already cause further insecurity for victims” (Huckerby 2020, 193–194), an evaluation I find eminently persuasive. The issues that Huckerby identifies, however, are not limited to inadequacies in gender theory informing P/CVE policy and associated interventions. Attending to the operation of racialised power through feminist interventions and purportedly gender-sensitive P/CVE policy initiatives is critical to understanding the ways in which both the interventions and initiatives fall short at best and, at worst, cause harm. Huckerby does not, however, pay more than passing attention to race; she offers brief (though important) discussions of how women’s rights are “squeezed” in different ways with various “adverse intersectional effects” (2020, 188) and refers to, for example, “coercive national security measures that stigmatize Muslim communities [which] generate Islamophobia that then results in private targeting of Muslim women who wear visible signs of religious dress” (2020, 197). But the analysis does not examine the intersections of gender, religious culture, and race, nor how these vectors of oppression are re- and co-configured and sustained by counter-terrorism and P/CVE interventions and feminist engagement with the same.

Thus, in addition to Huckerby’s important rights-based critique, in this paper I draw on Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory to argue that critical race perspectives are essential in the development of substantive critiques of governance feminism. Governance feminism is insufficiently attentive to race and racialised power, a point on which I elaborate below, and thus reproduces essentialist race/gender stereotypes including, though not limited to, the figure of the “dangerous brown man” – perhaps in this incarnation the “dangerous brown misogynist”, given the recent focus on misogyny as a driver of, or factor in, terrorism and extremism, as discussed above.⁸ Further, governance feminist approaches frequently fail to recognise that what Huckerby calls “anti-gender-violence-as-security policies” (2020, 193) operate in accordance with logics of race/gender that do not work on and through all bodies equally – but importantly cannot be separated (Tudor 2019). I do not aim here to criticise individual feminists for the independent research they produce, which often both attends to race and racialised power and traces the intersections of race and gender in compelling and generative ways. Rather, I aim to show that even critical feminist interventions can be interpolated into structures of governance in ways that erase Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist knowledge, and which reproduce the operation of racialised and gendered power in limiting and harmful ways. To develop this argument, I move in the next section to elaborate the insights from Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist knowledge that I argue is excluded and marginalised from P/CVE governance and link this exclusion to the concept of epistemic Whiteness.

On race/gender and epistemic whiteness

One of the profound limitations of governance feminism is the lack of analytical attention it engenders to the inseparability of race/gender, which I argue is a function of its epistemic whiteness. In this section, I explore insights from intersectional feminism (which in turn builds on Black feminism) and decolonial feminism to show how attending to the co-constitution of race/gender is essential to understanding the operation of governance power particularly in the sphere of violence prevention. As a thinking partner in this endeavour, I draw on Chamindra Weerawardhana’s “profoundly decolonizing” elaboration of a Transfeminist perspective on the academic discipline of International Relations (2018). Weerawardhana begins with the critical point that “academic research and hands-on policy planning on gender equality and justice-related issues largely revolve around the male/female gender binary, guided by what is often referred to as ‘mainstream’ feminism, a brand of cisheteronormative ‘whitestream’ feminism nearly exclusively developed by cisgender white women from the Global North” (Weerawardhana 2018, 184–185). Although Weerawardhana does not use the concept of governance feminism, there are sufficient similarities between the power effects of “mainstream” feminism Weerawardhana outlines and the elaboration of governance feminism by Halley and others to warrant bringing these two strands of critique together.

Challenging the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, which Abu-Lughod also indicts as a manifestation of “securofeminism” (2019, 8), Weerawardhana explicitly links race and gender in a critique of governance:

The problems inherent in the WPS agenda and gender mainstreaming primarily stem from the fact that the very authority that drafts these policy guidelines is also one that is largely spearheaded by influential states with power acquired through centuries of colonization, and by white settler-controlled authorities that are squarely responsible for the human, socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic genocide of First Peoples, especially women and gender-plural peoples of Turtle Island and elsewhere. (Weerawardhana 2018, 195).

The operation of racialised power is not examined in most critiques of governance feminism, although there are beginning to emerge some excellent critiques of coloniality and imperialism in/of the WPS agenda that revolve around many of the same discussion points (see, for example, Pratt 2013; Basu 2016; Martín de Almagro 2018; Parashar 2019; Haastrup and Hagen 2020, 2021; Henry 2021).⁹ In the particular case of exploring the complicity of governance feminism with military-security complexes of power in the name of P/CVE it seems of central importance to understand not just the gendered effects of such interventions but also the effects on, and of race – including the ways in which gender as an identity category is itself co-constituted with race.

A major contribution of Black feminist theory is the elaboration of the ways in which race intersects with gender and other vectors of power to produce subjects and position them in relation to each other. Initially, this was expressed through the pointed critique of the assumption of a unified experience of womanhood; white feminism in the USA and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s frequently presumed that the experiences of (largely middle-class) white women could be universalised onto (often working-class) Black women. Black feminists were thus motivated to explain that “[t]he way the gender of black women is constructed differs from constructions of white femininity because it is also subject to racism. Black feminists have been explaining this since the last century when Sojourner Truth pointed to the ways in which ‘womanhood’ was denied the black woman” (Carby [1982] 2005, 213). Notable contributions from, among others, bell hooks ([1981] 2015), Angela Davis ([1981] 2019), and The Combahee River Collective [1978] 2014 rejected the possibility that feminism as a political project could be grounded in biological essentialism that afforded greatest priority to the assignation of a sex class at birth, when lived experience was structured by (and created) axes of difference that produced profound and politically salient diversity among women – not only along racial lines but also in terms of class, sexuality, religious creed and many other markers/makers of identity. Theirs was a politics that took seriously “the futility of privileging a single dimension of experience as if it constituted the whole of life” (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 78).

Building on Black and decolonial feminism, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) developed a thorough-going critique of one-dimensional political engagement premised on the separability of race, gender, and other vectors of power. Crenshaw carefully explains that “the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244), encouraging attention to how these dimensions intersect and interact to produce different experiences for individuals and communities. Crenshaw’s use of intersectionality as a metaphor acknowledged that “antiracist and feminist political projects often worked at cross-purposes, leaving women of color vulnerable to falling through the cracks” (Guidroz and Berger cited in Hill Collins 2019, 124). Thus, “intersectionality rejects the single axis framework, which maintains a focus on either race or gender, on the basis that this approach fails to consider how Black women are vulnerable to both grounds of discrimination” (Zempi 2020, 99; see also Brah and Phoenix 2004; Bilge 2013; Cho, Williams Crenshaw, and McCall 2013).

Governance feminism does not carry forward these insights. As I explore further below, P/CVE interventions premised on a link with violence against women or misogyny will not prevent violence or provide support for all women equally, nor will P/CVE initiatives that attend to gender without simultaneously attending to race enable the transformation of exclusionary and racist security governance structures. Just as Crenshaw noted that, in the context of domestic violence prevention, “Women of color are often reluctant to call the police, a hesitancy likely due to a general unwillingness among people of color to subject their private lives to the scrutiny and control of a police force that is frequently hostile” (Crenshaw 1991, 1257), the securitisation of violence against women affords benefit only to those privileged survivors who would likely be “ideal” victims anyway (Christie 1986) and ignores the fact that survivors from minoritized communities have good reason to distrust the state and its punitive security institutions in the first place. Women from minoritized communities are much less likely to report violence if they think it will trigger an investigation/watch-list type intervention for terrorism or extremism (see also Huckerby 2020), and the effects of forging these links (the “feminism-as-counter-terrorism” approach) are disproportionately felt in and by the communities they target. With this in mind, I turn now to encounter the analyses of race that must be brought into conversation with critiques of governance feminism to reveal the complicity of the latter in upholding an exclusionary race/gender system of knowledge and power.

Racialised power combines in different ways with other forms of power – gendered power, economic power, social power – to shape and influence outcomes and experiences for different people differently, depending on their context. The intersection of racialised power with other forms of power and domination has been most prominently theorised by scholars of critical race theory, a body of legal scholarship that “elaborates a critique of the liberal notion of ‘colour-blind’ social institutions, and exposes the ways in which racial oppression is routinely and structurally reproduced by apparently neutral, non-racial institutions” (Jones 2008, 918). Importantly these “neutral, non-racial institutions” include both academic institutions and the institutions of global governance that develop and guide counterterrorism and P/CVE initiatives.

In a contribution to a forum on racism in International Relations (IR) that was published in Foreign Policy, Olivia Rutazibwa argues that “[t]aking the problem of racism seriously in the field of IR means viewing it not merely as an issue of stereotypes or cultural insensitivities, but as a colonial technology of life and premature death built on ideologies of whiteness and white supremacy” (2020, n.p.). I follow Rutazibwa and others here in recognising whiteness as “not an ‘identity’ so much as a ‘standpoint’ rooted in structural power” (Sabaratnam 2020, 5) – structural power that is embedded in the maintenance and naturalisation of particular knowledge formations. Specifically, the standpoint of whiteness is white supremacist, in terms of the presumed dominance and universal fitness for purpose of white Western ways of knowing, being, and doing. “White supremacy allows for those who enact, uphold, and maintain its policies to believe in the superiority of the white race by constructing a world in which this appears to be true” (Toole 2021, 83), including at the level of conceptual apparatus and belief systems (see also Behera, Hinds, and Tickner 2021). Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit describe the validation of white supremacist knowledge formations as “epistemic racism”, which they argue is “intrinsic to Western knowledge structures” (Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2020, 4; see also Henderson 2015; Jones 2008; Capan 2017).

The core of the argument I am advancing here is that “ideologies of whiteness and white supremacy” (Rutazibwa 2020, n.p.) infuse and inform structures and institutions of global governance, including those engaged with P/CVE, and that the governance feminism which is incorporated into these structures and institutions does not disturb these dynamics of racialised power – in fact, it strengthens and reproduces them. This is because governance feminism is a form of white feminism, which takes forward the epistemic whiteness that structures and informs other expressions of white supremacy; it is a form of “feminist knowledge which reproduce[s] racial hierarchies and ignorance about how whiteness functions” (Jonsson 2021, 161) and which maintains white supremacy in the guise of progressive policy and activism:

While the “white” in the term “white feminism” is amorphous – referring at once to forms of disavowed feminisms, including neoliberal feminism, carceral feminism, governance feminism, nonintersectional feminism, and essentialist feminism, as well as to affective practices of domination like “white women tears” – it is clear that the term “white feminism” is an oxymoron: white feminism is decidedly not feminism. As Cargle (2018) notes, it is simply “white supremacy in heels.” (Quoted in Nash and Pinto 2021, 887).

White supremacy, in the form of governance feminism, “walk[s] the halls of power” (Halley 2006, 21) – in heels – contributing to global P/CVE strategy and informing global P/CVE initiatives. Teresa Jonsson has argued that “there is little attention to precisely how white feminists reproduce whiteness through the domination of feminists of colour (and women/people of colour more generally)” (2021, 167). This paper is an effort to think through one mechanism through which such domination is reproduced – feminist complicity with global P/CVE governance initiatives that are presented as “race neutral”, which take for granted the separability of race and gender, and which are premised on a binary gender structure.

Governance feminism also needs to be scrutinised, therefore, in terms of the effects of the reification of gender categories as themselves manifestations of racialised power. One of the salient political effects of governance feminism in the field of gender and P/CVE is the reaffirmation and re-enforcement of the gender binary through the use of gender as a category of analysis and the inability or unwillingness to problematise this category. Returning to Rutazibwa’s account of racism as a “colonial technology” (2020, n.p.), this description can equally be applied to the ontological assumption of simple binary gender structures. The cultural specificity of the gender binary that presumes an easy dimorphic split into two sex classes (marked M/F) is erased by white feminism (especially but not exclusively the white feminism that stubbornly holds on to essentialist gender theory). Because of the affinities between white feminism and governance feminism, an explicit reflection on the use of always-already racialised gender categories is necessary but has largely been absent from political and academic discourse. Weerawardhana (2018) reminds us to be attentive not only to race but also to the reification of a gender binary; they propose Transfeminism as a mode of engagement with white feminism and argue that much governance feminism takes for granted and reproduces a simple binary construct of gender which is a partial and situated configuration (see also Mendez 2015; Tudor 2019).

I want to emphasise here that I am levelling my critique at white feminism, not white feminists. As Raiza Aziz explains,

the adversary has at times appeared to be white feminists but it is in fact, I would venture, white feminism – by which I expressly do not mean any feminism espoused by white feminists. I refer, rather, to any feminism which comes from a white perspective, and universalizes it. I do not propose that white feminism is a clearly defined, coherent and internally consistent body of thought that feeds off conscious racist intentions. It is, rather, a way of seeing which, however inadvertent, leaves identifiable traces. It subsists through a failure to consider both the wider social and political context of power in which feminist utterances and actions take place, and the ability of feminism to influence that context. (Aziz 1997, 70, emphasis in original).

The “identifiable traces” of whiteness in governance feminism as it materialises in the global governance of violent extremism through P/CVE initiatives stabilise the gender binary while failing to account for the ways in which race/gender is co-constituted and lived differently in diverse contexts. This is the focus of the following section, in which I extend the critiques of governance feminism offered by Halley and others, inspired by the critical engagement of Black, intersectional, and decolonial feminists, to argue that not only is governance feminism complicit in the violences of liberal interventionism but also in the maintenance and reproduction of a violent gender order that disaggregates gender from race and presumes that gender is binary rather than infinitely plural.

Governance feminism and P/CVE

In this brief section, I demonstrate the purchase of the critique mapped out above by exploring the knowledge effects of governance feminism on P/CVE research and guidance produced in association with, and under the auspices of, UN Women. Though space permits only limited engagement here, my illustrative analysis suggests that this field is structured by racial logics that deny and erase the operation of racialised power, and, further, that it considers gender in only limited, binary, and one-dimensional ways, with no integration of the insights of Black, intersectional, and decolonial feminists who have consistently and effectively critiqued both whiteness in feminism and the separation of race and gender in governance feminist engagements with security and violence. Citing bell hooks’ analysis of the “fantasy” of “white innocence”, Teresa Jonsson argues that “liberal white people tend to see themselves as good white people, distinguished from bad white racists, wilfully ignorant of their own complicities in structural racism” (2021, 18–19).

This paper is part of reckoning with my own complicity, and attendant acknowledgement of the “politics of accountability” which requires ethical and responsible engagement with structures of domination from which I, and others, benefit – including in the realm of P/CVE interventions. Although I focus my critique on six documents related to gender and P/CVE produced by or in association with UN Women,¹⁰ as an institution of global governance engaged in P/CVE research and practice, I contextualise these interventions throughout in relation to the broader field of feminist scholarship from which consultants are often selected to engage in contracted research.¹¹

There is a coded racialisation in some scholarship and commentary on gender and terrorism that “reifies the West in a role of saviour to non-Western women and deflects from problems of gendered violence within the supposedly more superior and progressive West” (Gentry 2015, 364; see also2020); and this begins with the design of research. From its beginnings in the early part of the 2000s, the focus on linking misogyny and extremism in scholarly research has focussed on Muslim-majority countries and Islamist violence (as discussed above; see Bennoune 2008, 52). One UN Women-branded policy brief presenting original research features a front-page claim that “Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals misogyny to be integral to the ideology, political identity, and political economy of current violent extremist groups” (Johnston and True 2019, 1). This claim is modified by a footnote that explains “The quantitative survey research took place in countries or areas with a Muslim majority and so largely reflects a study of Islamic violent extremist groups” (Johnston and True 2019, 7, emphasis added).

This research is then, however, cited by others to implicate the whole of “the developing world”: “evidence from the developing world suggests that support for violence against women is a key indicator of support for violent extremism in general (Johnston and True 2019, 1)” (cited in Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell 2020, 157, emphasis added). “The developing world” is a racially coded descriptor that signifies lack and obscures the relations of power that in many cases caused or contributed to “underdevelopment” (Matthews 2018, 169–172). Thus, a foundational move in knowledge production in gendered P/CVE research is to orient¹² the analytical lens towards the non-Western, “developing world”, “dangerous brown” Other. The “Muslim as terrorist”, reinforced by the epistemological presumption that research on gender and terrorism would naturally focus on/take place “in countries or areas with a Muslim majority” (Johnston and True 2019, 7), is the “dangerous brown man” from whom we can be saved by governance feminism’s interventions.

Similarly, a textbox in a 2021 UN Women document outlining Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) Focus Areas offers “useful links” to information “about UN Women’s PVE work in West and East Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa” (UN Women 2021c, 1). Notably, few of these are areas where the emergence of far-right or white supremacist extremism is likely to be a concern. The only geographically-specific publication of the six I analysed is titled Conflicting Identities: The Nexus between Masculinities, Femininities and Violent Extremism in Asia, although the document does clarify that the focus is on South and South-East Asia in the foreword (UNDP and UN Women 2020, iv).

Much gender and CT/CVE research reproduces an unracialized and unreflective gender binary, ignoring the extensive conceptual and theoretical work produced by Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminists that eloquently elaborates the impossibility of thinking gender as distinct from race in any meaningful way. Governance feminism then embeds a simple binary structure into P/CVE interventions. For example, a recent overview essay on the emergent field of research on gender and CT/CVE lists four types of research in this field: research that works with gender as a variable or factor in the perpetration of, or support for, terrorism and violent extremism; research that explores “women and men’s roles within terrorist organisations” (Phelan 2020, 3); research on “gendered motivations, and how reasons for engagement in terrorism and violent extremism amongst men and women may differ” (Phelan 2020, 4); and research that asks “feminist questions and investigates silences in our data and our knowledge of motivations and group dynamics” (Phelan 2020, 5).

Although the last of these purports to focus on “femininities and masculinities” rather than women and men, all four approaches that the essay identifies are cisnormative and take for granted the binary construct of gender, presuming that the categories of “men” and “women” exhaust the gender options and have resonance in all contexts. Moreover, race is mentioned only in the context of the first approach, within which researchers reportedly explore “intersectionality dealing with differences between women and men’s experiences due to age, class, race and socioeconomic background” (Phelan 2020, 3). Not only is this a rather thin account of intersectionality (on the politics of which, see Henry 2021), but also the absence of race in the other approaches and as a power relation structuring the field is notable, given the insights of Black, intersectional, and decolonial feminists outlined above. I identify this as a function of the epistemic whiteness structuring this body of work in the academy, which is reproduced in governance institutions and processes.

Few of the documents in the collection I analysed discuss race at all: there are no mentions of race in four of the six documents (Johnston and True 2019; UN Women 2019 2021a, 2021c; UNDP and UN Women 2020) and a fifth mentions it only in relation to indicators of possible extremism beliefs of behaviours: an individual may require intervention if they “Express[] strong adherence to an extremist group and growing hatred towards all who are different than themselves, perhaps on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexuality” (UN Women 2021b, 60). In the 2019 Guidance Note on Gender Mainstreaming Principles, Dimensions, and Priorities for PVE produced by UN Women, race is mentioned only five times in the 106-page document. While a discussion of women’s representation and participation is afforded welcome nuance in the recognition that “tokenistic” inclusion “is based on static categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’”, and that “women from different classes, socioeconomic status, regions, communities, and of different ages, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion and marital status, will have different perspectives on VE [violent extremism] and PVE [preventing violent extremism]” (UN Women 2019, 19), there is no guidance, or even reflection, in the Guidance Note, on how race and gender at a minimum are co-constituted, nor how racial logics structure both the identification of extremism and the programs developed to prevent and counter such violence.

The authors note that “[t]he intersectional nature of these factors [of age, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion and marital status] in the experience of women is important to informing and building inclusive PVE programmes, as VE manifests and is experienced differently across these social markers”, but primacy here is given to the category of women and the presumption prevails that this category has universal and stable meaning, even though “intersectional analysis” is included in the appendix of “key concepts” (UN Women 2019, 65). This inclusion brings to mind Sirma Bilge’s account of “ornamental intersectionality” (Bilge 2011, quoted in Bilge 2013, 408), an intellectual and analytical move wherein the concept of intersectionality is deployed without serious consideration of “interlocking power structures” to become simply “a tool that certain feminist scholars can invoke to demonstrate ‘marketable expertise’” (Bilge 2013, 408).

Moreover, although the authors of the Guidance Note explain in the appendix that “gender should not be seen in simple binary terms (where gender identification is a choice between two options: ‘man’ and ‘woman’)” (UN Women 2019, 64), this is undermined by the text preceding it, which presents the UN Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) definition of gender from 2001: “the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men” (quoted in UN Women 2019, 64).The document contains 679 references to women, 150 references to men, zero references to people living beyond or outside of the gender binary, and the sole reference to transgender individuals features in a quote from the UN Secretary-General’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism (A/70/674) from 2015 (quoted in UN Women 2019, 71).¹³ Frequencies of the same search terms across the rest of the sample of documents reveal a similar pattern, with only two of the documents referencing “non-binary articulations of gender” (UNDP and UN Women 2020, 13) or LGBTIQ+ people (UN Women 2021a, 15, 19) – and even then only briefly.

Despite many studies foregrounding women’s agency in acts of terrorism and violent extremism (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Eager 2008; Parashar 2011; Sjoberg 2018; Brown 2020; Speckhard and Ellenberg 2020), women are still frequently described as being “lured” into terrorist or extremist organisations in scholarship (e.g. Phelan 2020, 7; Johnston, Iqbal, and True 2020; Castillo Diaz and Valji 2019, 48), and in the documents I analysed (UNDP and UN Women 2020, 78: UN Women 2021b, 38, 43, 46, 83). In actuality, women – and the feminism that seeks to save them – are of course implicated in violence, and not only through the complicity of governance feminism with the interventionist management of “dangerous brown [misogynist] men”. But there appears to be no space in these P/CVE studies and guidance for gender non-conforming or non-binary people, queer women, trans women, angry women, violent women, or flawed women, and no recognition of the racialised logics that structure and reproduce knowledge within it. Vulnerable women are hypervisible as the presumption of women’s innocence is an important component of this race/gender matrix, showing how P/CVE interventions both reproduce stereotypes about women’s essential vulnerability and obscure the racialised dynamics of the engagements of white feminism/white saviours.

Conclusion

Four decades ago, Black feminist theorists were already critiquing the complicity of white feminism with operations of racialised power. As Hazel Carby noted, in her acclaimed essay “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, “[f]eminist theory in Britain is almost wholly Eurocentric and, when it is not ignoring the experience of Black women ‘at home’, it is trundling ‘Third World Women’ onto the stage only to perform as victims of ‘barbarous’, ‘primitive’ practices in ‘barbarous’, ‘primitive’ societies” (Carby [1982] 2005, 221). The difference between Carby’s “White Woman” and today’s white feminist/white saviour is the power that the latter wields, through her integration into institutions and processes of governance. This is a form of feminism that “appears to be more concerned with the institutional success of the knowledge it produces than institutional and social change through counter-hegemonic knowledge production” (Bilge 2013, 409).

Halley’s argument that governance feminism has “bloody hands” (2006, 33) derives from the complicity of this brand of feminism in the inscription of violent demarcations of race/gender imaginaries and its complicity in interventions that produce violence even as they intend to organise or prevent it. There is no solution to be found, however, in appeals to universalism, to a world unboundaried and unbound. Though Bennoune claims that “the position we must occupy in the current historical moment [is] a position of true radical universalism that rejects terror and torture, and has high standards for all actors” (Bennoune 2008, 50), this position does not resolve the tensions that run through governance feminism approaches to create fault-lines along multiple race/gender axes.

Black and decolonial feminisms provide incisive reminders that military-security governance complexes, including P/CVE, have too often universalised white experience and standards and wished away or whitewashed differences that are deeply politically salient:

Sojourner Truth powerfully challenges essentialist thinking that a particular category of woman is essentially this or essentially that (e.g. that women are necessarily weaker than men or that enslaved black women were not real women). This point holds critical importance today when the allure of new Orientalisms and their concomitant desire to ‘unveil’ Muslim women has proved to be attractive even to some feminists in a ‘post September 11’ world. (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 77)

Drawing attention to the complicity of governance feminism in the reproduction of white supremacy and the dynamics of “new Orientalisms” does not imply the possibility of a pure feminism or feminist innocence but rather requires a “focus on what feminism(s) do violence to – not as an indictment of feminism(s) alone (since every order and will to act is violently reproductive), but instead as a more meaningful perusal of the meanings and impacts of feminism(s) in global politics” (Zalewski and Runyan 2013, 310).

Violence, and contestation, and messy and unforeseen conflicts are as inevitable a part of governance as they are a part of life. Political priorities will be compromised, objectives will be sacrificed, voices will be silenced and needs will be marginalised because governance is a site of, and struggle with/for power, and this manifests in intended and unintended ways and on and through differently embodied subjects. As a response to the complicity of governance feminism in acts of violence and violent interventions, priority may be given to calculating the distributed effects of each strategy or programme (Halley 2018, 253). In other words, “[i]n the age of ‘governance feminism,’ the priority is not formulating a common agenda but foregrounding the stakes of competing agendas” (Nesiah 2013, 141). Ultimately, the effects of governance cannot be tightly controlled, but they can be responsibly thought through, and as scholars and practitioners we must commit to evaluating the effects of our endeavours. Critical reflection on P/CVE governance and race/gender might finally take forward the generative insights from Black, intersectional, and decolonial feminism, and permit ways to imagine violence prevention that decentres white feminism/white saviours in theory and in practice.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (grant ID 170100037). I am extremely grateful for the opportunities afforded by this award. This paper benefitted from insightful commentary from colleagues at the University of Sydney Security Scholars Symposium, particularly Sarah Phillips and Nicole Wegner, and from constructive and generous feedback from two anonymous reviewers and the guest editor of this Special Issue, Ann-Kathrin Rothermel. Mistakes and omissions, of course, remain my own.

Disclosure statement

The author has worked on gender and the governance of peace and security for the past two decades and has been complicit in exercising many of the integrative moves and perpetuating many of the exclusions critiqued in the article. For example, the author was a contributor to one of the documents analysed here. The article itself is partly an effort to reckon with the conflict such involvement might represent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura J. Shepherd

Laura J. Shepherd is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, and attendant dynamics of gender, violence, and security governance. Laura is author/editor of several books, including, most recently Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Logics of Global Governance (Oxford University Press, 2021), and New Directions in Women, Peace and Security (edited with Soumita Basu and Paul Kirby; Bristol University Press, 2020). She spends too much time on Twitter, where she tweets from @drljshepherd.

Notes

1. My focus on P/CVE does not imply that I consider the construction of “violent extremism” itself unproblematic – quite the opposite, in fact; I share Lila Abu-Lughod’s scepticism about the phrase and concern about its function as an “empty signifier” in contemporary politics (2019, 8). But this is not the focus of the present investigation.

2. I use the concept of complicity deliberately. Others have suggested alternative ways of characterising the manifestation of governance feminism in CT/CVE interventions; Basarudin and Shaikh, for example, propose that convergence is the most appropriate concept because the interests of governance feminism and CT/CVE actors may intersect although their political agendas are at odds (2020, 127). I remain unconvinced that the agendas are wholly at odds, which largely motivates my engagement here.

3. Governance itself encompasses both acts of government (pronouncements and programs aimed at ordering, management, regulation) and the will to govern or governmentality – governance can thus exist in the absence of formal or visible pronouncements and programs issued by structures that govern (see, for example: Dean 1999; Larner and Walters 2004; Lipschutz 2005; Neumann and Sending 2010).

4. I deliberately include myself in the interpellative plural, having worked on and with the Women, Peace and Security agenda for the duration of my academic and advocacy career.

5. I want to acknowledge here that there are feminist interventions in P/CVE scholarship and strategy that use the concept of intersectionality. One anonymous reviewer of this manuscript pointed out that many of the scholars I cite in this manuscript “are well known names in the field and clearly do advocate an intersectional approach”. I do not disagree. But part of my effort in this article is to reckon with our complicity as scholars, consultants, and “well known names” in the reproduction of the structures of racialised power that the P/CVE enterprise represents. I am inspired by a recent contribution to anti-racist work in the field of critical security studies, which argues that “[w]e must begin with firmly redirecting self-reflexive and critical scholarly gazes ‘inwards’ towards international relations and critical security studies’ practices, institutions, discourses, and knowledges. A first course of action entails excavating and purging our epistemes, knowledge structures, and conceptual frameworks of their racialized roots, and gaining awareness of how, even if their deployment does not make us racist per se, it does make us responsible for embedding racism into our analyses” (Behera, Hinds, and Tickner 2021, 12). The present article is an attempt – a partial, probably inadequate attempt – to take that responsibility and begin the excavation of critical feminist interventions that are not and have never been immune from contamination “by the same racialized hierarchies that characterize the everyday world” (Behera, Hinds, and Tickner 2021, 13).

6. A few studies within this emergent field of research interrogate white supremacy and the violence that upholds it (see, for example: Wilson 2020; Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell 2020; Jones 2019).

7. Some governance interventions aimed at tackling white supremacist movements have emerged in recent years but there remains a “far right gap in C/PVE measures” (Agius et al. 2021) and, of the programs that do exist, few “connect far right ideology and gender” (Agius et al. 2021). This is borne out in the documents examined in the fourth section of the present article.

8. Unfortunately, this refiguration happily accommodates those who would claim “#NotAllMen” in response to allegations of “male violence”.

9. There is another, separate essay to be written about how and why these exclusions are only just now being reckoned with in the WPS literature, how this relates to the operation of racialised power in feminist security studies more broadly, and my own complicity in being part of reproducing both these fields of study in ways that erase Black, Indigenous, intersectional and decolonial feminist knowledges.

10. The documents were selected either because they are listed on the UN Women publication page under the theme of “violent extremism and terrorism” (UNDP and UN Women 2020; UN Women 2021a, 2021b) or because they are publications produced in association with UN Women related to P/CVE (Johnston and True 2019; UN Women 2019, 2021c). The six documents are considered to be representative, if not wholly constitutive, of UN Women knowledge in the realm of P/CVE.

11. The boundaries between practitioner-academics (“pracademics”; see Posner 2009), consultants, and scholars engaged in “policy-relevant” research are extremely blurry. Of six documents I analyse in this section, four have academic lead authors.

12. Pun intended.

13. Any such references in the initial draft were removed for fear of eliciting pushback from UN member states, but this reinforces, rather than undermines, the point I am trying to make here about the kind of feminism that is permitted influence in governance institutions.