“Why Do People Hate You, Mommy?” Militarized Masculinities and Women in Postwar Kosovar Politics

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on gendered political inequality after war pays surprisingly little attention to an otherwise ubiquitous concept in feminist security studies: militarized masculinities. Through qualitative fieldwork in Kosovo, I trace the ways through which militarized masculinities negatively influence women’s postwar political participation. However, I also find that the hegemony of militarized masculinities recently started to be contested as military backgrounds increasingly become associated with negative, instead of heroic, attributes. While this creates a competition for hegemony, it does not constitute a shortcut to emancipation. Instead, I find that militarized masculinities created path dependencies that uphold patriarchal domination beyond the hegemony of militarized masculinities.

KEYWORDS:

• Kosovo
• militarized masculinities
• political participation
• gender
• post-war

Acknowledgments

The approval was granted by the WSG Research Ethics Panel at King’s College London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical clearance

I confirm that my research did receive ethical approval from King’s College London (KCL). The KCL ethics reference number is LRU/DP-21/22–31850.

Notes

1. As three interviewees were not available in July, these interviews were conducted online in August and September 2022.

2. For a detailed discussion of gender-based violence toward female politicians see Ncube and Yemurai (2020); Fuchs and Schäfer (2021); Rheault, Rayment, and Musulan (2019); Kuperberg (2018).

3. In this context, the concept of “stickiness” (Ahmed 2014) describes how – trough discursive repetition – people created persistent, affective attachments to militarized gender norms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Department of War Studies’ Student Fieldwork Fund.

Notes on contributors

Niklas Balbon

Niklas Balbon is a research associate at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), where he works on Feminist Foreign Policy. His research focuses on the intersections of gender and conflict as well as post-war development. He is a recent graduate of King’s College London, where he obtained a MA in Conflict, Security, and Development and received the Director’s Award for best student in his program. Niklas Balbon holds a BA in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin.