Gina Heathcote

Participation, Gender and Security

The conflict and post-conflict period in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) province of Bougainville provides a useful case study for the examination of the participation components of the women, peace and security framework. The matrilineal community structures,1 as well as women’s roles in negotiating peace in Bougainville,2 reveal the complexity and variation of gender norms that require attention in strategies to enhance women’s participation in conflict resolution and post-conflict decision-making structures. The conflict in Bougainville extended from 1988 through to 2001. On 31 August 2001, the Bougainville Peace Agreement was signed and the demilitarisation processes, as well as the withdrawal of PNG forces, commenced.3 The Bougainville shift toward peace straddles the period in which the Security Council’s women, peace and security framework mushroomed from a single resolution, adopted in 2000,4 to a sequence of seven resolutions on women, peace and security by the end of 2013.5 The combination of the emergent international understanding of the nexus between women, peace and security and the central role of Bougainville women in local decision-making structures, as well as the general sense of collective security achieved,6 suggests that Bougainville might also be expected to be a story of success in relation to gender-balanced participation.

Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security: An Introduction

Collective security and peacekeeping, one of its progeny, have traditionally been thought to have little relevance to women, apart from providing a means to provide for their protection. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the gendered shape of this thinking, which casts military men and diplomats as the primary actors, and women, often together with children, as the vulnerable potential victims whose defence and rescue help to motivate or even legitimate military intervention — whether forceful or with the consent of the state in question. This gendered schemata continues to pervade laws, policies and practices relating to the maintenance of international peace and security, as seen with the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both relied heavily on the rationale of protecting women and advancing ‘women’s rights’ to shore up waning public support in the west.1 The same rationale is also frequently used to explain and justify peacekeeping and the engagement of the international community in post-conflict reconstruction. Through these means, the well-worn gender hierarchy, of masculine capability associated with strength and female vulnerability connected to lack, is constantly repeated and reconstituted, even in those places where the international community claims that it is helping to construct post-conflict societies that respect and promote women’s equality.

War’s Perpetuity: Disabled Bodies of War and the Exoskeleton of Equality

Abstract Assistive technologies, such as exoskeletons, work to render female bodies ‘closer’ to male capabilities in armed conflict situations. At the same time, the maiming of male bodies in conflict can be charted as a persistent outcome of armed conflict that has received scant attention within the study of the gendered effects of armed conflict. War’s production of the disabled male body has also led to significant developments with respect to assistive technologies, via the work of, in particular, the US military. I argue that the investment of the US military in the development of exoskeletons, when understood alongside the US military’s investment in assistive mobility technologies for returned soldiers, raises questions about the futility of creating technology only to perpetuate the existence of the battlefield. Far from a project built on gender equality goals, investment in exoskeleton technology seemingly underlines the manner in which the male body of war will increasingly be able to return to the battlefield, to be maimed and to be restored in perpetuity. I conclude by arguing exoskeletons should be used to reimagine subjectivity, via debility, with a mindfulness of the material effects and underlying philosophical traces within subjectivity. I argue for a shift in approaching subjectivity via an intersectional and post-human model, rather than a legal subject that perpetuates modernist man, promotes a thin understanding of gender equality, or deploys exoskeletons as a tool for the destructive impulses of armed conflict.

Security Council Resolution 2242 on women, peace and security: progressive gains or dangerous development?

This article challenges the UN Security Council’s approach to women, peace and security through a detailed analysis of participation initiatives in the eight resolutions on women, peace and security, alongside study of the recent shift to include counter terrorism and violent extremism provisions in resolution 2242. Through review of a range of feminist approaches that remain “outside” the strategies leading institutional gender perspectives, I scrutinise the shifts across the resolutions on women, peace and security. In particular, this article analyses how Security Council resolution 2242, produced after the high-level report studying the 15 years after resolution 1325, includes important developments in the articulation of participation. However, the risk of progressing work on women, peace and security within global structures without attention to the diversity of women’s needs, lives and experiences drawn from a feminist commitment to anti-militarism and politically responsible listening is likely to produce a series of regressive outcomes that perpetuate victim feminisms and which fail to dislodge the intersection of gender with colonial and racial power structures within global institutions.

I am an Immigrant

I am an immigrant but you do not see me as an immigrant. I am an English-speaking, white woman so you do not see me as an immigrant. I am from a white settler colony in the Commonwealth so you do not see me as an immigrant. As a Commonwealth citizen I am permitted to vote in the United Kingdom, including in referendums. You do not see me as a threat. You do not racialize me. You listen to me. You include me in your notions of citizenship. You let me walk by in peace. You let me say my piece. I have a voice. You give me a home. You stamp my passport and welcome me at the borders. And yet I am an immigrant (but more often referred to as an ex-pat). Brexit is about whiteness and Britishness, it is about race. As a white Australian living in London for 20 years I am not labelled as an immigrant. I do not suffer racial taunts. I am not told to go home (unless it is a bit of sporting humour). The UK referendum that resulted

Women and children and elephants as justification for force

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of force described as ‘robust peacekeeping’. Through a review of innovation in Security Council practice – in particular, thematic resolutions, targeted sanctions and robust peacekeeping – the role normative assertions of the Council play in underpinning new forms of force are assessed. Understood in this context, feminists and others who have agitated for inclusion within the work of the Security Council are counselled against pursuing projects that expand the powers of the institution while there remains a lack of checks on how force is mobilised. The reluctance of feminist and/or critical engagement to address the structural aspects of institutional spaces, such as the Security Council, consequently risks a legitimation of the institution without significant gains in terms of gender equality or, if viewed through recent resolutions establishing targeted sanctions against wildlife poachers, for the protection of elephants.

From ‘people with projects’ to ‘encountering expertise’: a feminist reading of Kennedy’s A World of Struggle

A World of Struggle is a lively, interdisciplinary and challenging account of how international actors might map the global order with greater accuracy. 1 In this, his latest book, David Kennedy encourages the reader to understand the role of expertise and technical vocabularies in the contemporary international order. In situating experts—and their struggles to assert a position, an approach, or technique—within the discourse and decision-making structures of international institutions, Kennedy renders the complexity of the global order of the early twentieth first century with greater nuance. This is an important work for international lawyers and for institutional actors in the international realm, or indeed for anyone who regards expertise itself as a solution to legal dilemmas and competing demands, be they within international humanitarian law, the law of the sea, international financial law, international environmental law, or international human rights law. In this brief comment on Kennedy’s book, I celebrate the potential it holds to transform our international legal methodologies, while inserting a series of feminist questions on structural biases (and the role of privilege in maintaining them) to draw out the substantive claims of the book. I also briefly engage with what I regard as the central challenge in the text: Kennedy’s optimism about the value of mobilising continued projects within the global order. Ultimately, I conclude, A World of Struggle provides an interesting juxtaposition found in the optimism of its concluding chapter and Kennedy’s own latent scepticism about the capacity for a responsive (and responsible) international order.

Gender Politics in Transitional Justice

bringing together her scholarly credentials and her personal connections, as well as those of a practitioner and co-ordinator of the first ever nationally representative survey on violence against women in the Maldives. Lastly, the book is immensely readable in its content, language, and style, and can be recommended to development scholars and practitioners alike. In sum, Domestic Violence in Asia is a sophisticated book which deepens our understanding of the dynamic and often contentious relationship that exists between women’s intimate (in)security and the broader transformation of a nation.