The Irish defence forces and the silencing of a feminist researcher

ABSTRACT

As a feminist researcher undertaking my PhD field research from 2006 to 2009 with officers in the Irish Defence Forces, I experienced the gender discrimination I was endeavouring to make visible. My PhD study, borne out of UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, was testing claims by the United Nations that the inclusion of women peacekeepers brings important benefits to civilian women populations in mission contexts. The study adopted discourse analysis and included equal numbers of interviews with women and men peacekeepers and observation of Irish troops during the UNMIK/KFOR mission in Kosovo. At each stage of my research journey into the Irish Defence Forces I encountered barriers to continuing my study which had negative impacts on me personally and professionally. The culmination of which was them attempting to publicly discredit my research findings. This paper explores the process by which institutions attempt to silence feminist researchers and what we can learn about gender, knowledge and power from these affective experiences and how collective storytelling is key to breaking the silence.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical military studies
• gender
• silencing
• ethics
• feminist

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for funding my PhD research study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. UNSCR 1325 (2000) https://www.peacewomen.org/resolutions-texts-and-translations.

2. Refer to discussions by Stavrianakis (2006); Kronsell and Svedberg (2012).

3. Commandant Helen Heneghan (2013) Commandant Maureen O’Brien 2012, Captain Tom Clonan (2000/2019).

4. Two further reports followed: A Response to the Challenge of a Workplace (Doyle 2004); and the Second Report of the Independent Monitoring Group (DF 2008) which argued for renewed robustness and corrective action in training procedures because it stated that over-sensitivity to bullying had swung the pendulum too far in one direction were recruits insistence on ‘their rights’ was leading to ‘softer’ training methods (DF 2008: 9).

5. https://www.peacewomen.org/nap-ireland#.

6. Although the percentage of women in the DF has increased from 6% to 7% in the past eight years this is due to an overall decrease in the numbers of personnel in the DF from 10,000 in 2011 to 8,162 in 2019 as a result of budgetary cuts.

7. Trends in Irish women peacekeepers: Dec 2011 43/493; Dec 2012 20/392; Dec 2013 17/359; Dec 2014 22/367; Dec 2015 19/370; Dec 2016 32/545; Dec 2017 30/545; Dec 2018 31/631; Dec 2019 33/536.

8. Launched on 21 June 2019. Country NAPs on WPS are important as they set out a series of goals towards achieving the WPS Agenda and the actions or indicators that will be taken by various government actors to reach those goals.

9. https://www.military.ie/en/overseas-deployments/past-missions/asian-missions.

10. https://www.dfa.ie/our-role-policies/international-priorities/peace-and-security/peacekeeping/.

11. https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/ireland.

12. https://www.military.ie/en/overseas-deployments/about-overseas-deployments/.

13. The WPS agenda includes 10 UNSCRs but when I began my PhD research (2006) only UNSCR 1325 existed.

14. Michael Mulqueen, ‘The Irish National Security Strategy’, 2007.