https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9275-9900
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ABSTRACT
The debate around the production and circulation of feminist knowledge has been rekindled since the emergence of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While much attention focuses on the diffusion of WPS norms, less is paid to the sociocultural context within which feminist ideas circulate through WPS gender-mainstreaming (GM) interventions, its broader implications, and what happens beyond. I propose a double reading of GM as a site of feminist knowledge production and circulation: I combine anthropological and feminist governmentality insights to analyze GM as a form of (disciplinary) governing with insights from post/decolonial scholars that call for an engagement with the “exteriority” of interventions, with what lies outside our grid of intelligibility of the narrow political terrain of GM. Through a case study of the post-conflict GM intervention in Liberia, I illustrate how this double reading reveals the ways in which GM works as a gendered form of governing to prescribe dualistic social roles and (re)produce social differentiation mechanisms linked to “civilization.” An engagement with the exteriority of the GM intervention reveals critiques and alternative forms of feminist knowledge production and circulation that emphasize non-dualistic and non-judgmental attitudes and propose invited partnership and dialogue.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was carried out in the context of a collaborative research project on GEs and gender expertise and I am grateful for stimulating discussions with my project colleagues Françoise Grange Omokaro, Elisabeth Prügl, Feyneke Reysoo, Hayley Thompson, and Christine Verschuur at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. I am deeply grateful for the fantastic comments I received from the four anonymous reviewers who greatly contributed to improve this article. I would also like to thank many colleagues who have provided very helpful comments on various versions of this article: Muriel Bruttin, Sandy Fernandez, Jonas Hagmann, Anna Leander, Nils Moussu, Meera Sabaratnam, and my colleagues at UNIL. Funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged (PA00P1_145335 and 100017_143174).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rahel Kunz is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research interests are feminist international relations, gender issues in migration and development, gender and security sector reform, and feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories. She has worked on various collaborative research projects, such as on gender experts and gender expertise in the context of Nepal and Liberia, as well as a Research for Development project on the gender dimensions of social conflict (in Indonesia and Nigeria). She has published in International Political Sociology, the Journal of European Integration, Migration Studies, Politics & Gender, the Review of International Political Economy, and Third World Quarterly. She is the author of The Political Economy of Global Remittances: Gender, Governmentality and Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2011) and the co-editor of Multilayered Migration Governance: The Promise of Partnership (Routledge, 2011) with Sandra Lavenex and Marion Panizzon.
ORCID
Rahel Kunz http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9275-9900
Notes
1 I use the term “feminist knowledge” to include forms of knowledge regarding women's rights/emancipation/empowerment and/or gender equality/justice. This broad understanding allows for variety without a priori exclusion or hierarchization, but it includes knowledges that might not self-identify as feminist or explicitly distance themselves from this label. The point here is not to propose a universal definition, nor to label particular groups and their forms of knowledge as feminist, but to make space for a broad variety of knowledges.
2 It is important to remember that UNSCR 1325 emerged out of struggles by (women's) civil-society groups around the world and concerted efforts to bring gender issues onto the agenda of international institutions (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings Citation2004).
3 The notion of “post-conflict” suggests a clear break between pre-conflict, conflict, and post-conflict periods, which fails to account for the complexity of conflict situations and links to gender-based violence (Meintjes, Turshen, and Pillay Citation2001; Moser and Clark Citation2001). I use the term to refer to the UN intervention.
4 For a more detailed analysis, see Kunz (Citation2016).
5 See: http://unmil.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=3937&language=en-US (all websites were accessed on July 10, 2019).
6 Special thanks go to my respondents and to my Liberian research partner Kou Gbaintor-Johnson for stimulating cooperation. The research was carried out in 2012–2013. All interviews have been anonymized to guarantee confidentiality.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 See: http://www.gnwp.org/.
11 Currently the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.
12 For example, http://www.gnwp.org/resource/liberia-october-2012-radio-spot-dramatic-skit-women-can-do-what-men-can-do-english.
13 GM is an essentially contested concept and practice and there are various models of GM (Jahan Citation1995; Walby Citation2005). In the context of Liberia, GM activities are multiple and do not necessarily fit the models proposed in the literature (e.g., in some ways more top-down “integrationist” approaches engender important transformations), but an engagement with this literature lies beyond the scope of this article.
14 For a more detailed analysis, see Kunz (Citation2016).
15 As argued elsewhere, the transnational field of GE is highly political (Kunz, Prügl, and Thompson Citation2019) and in the context of GM there is ample space for contestation and resistance, also by gender experts themselves (Kunz Citation2016, Citation2017).
16 The definition proposed in the Report of the UN Secretary General on Women, Peace and Security might also contribute to this phenomenon (United Nations Citation2002, 3).
17 The Americo-Liberian settlers could not claim civilization based on the grounds of racial superiority, as the European colonizers did, so they worked with a discourse of civilization as acquired and had to regulate access to civilized status (Moran Citation2000).
21 In an interesting parallel, one officer of the WACPS told me that they also met with a lot of suspicion at the beginning, because international funding was key to their establishment (interview, WACPS, Monrovia, 2013).