Marsha Henry

Engendering (In)security in Peace Support Operations

This article contributes towards ongoing debates on gender, security and post-conflict studies. Its focus is on the activities of male peace-keepers and their gendered relations with women and girls. Against the backdrop of the peacekeeping economies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, we focus on the consequencesof male peacekeepers’ construction and enactment of masculinity (and masculinities) on the security of local women. We concludeby suggesting that a deeper understanding of gender relations and security in peacekeeping contexts is necessary for any policy intervention in post-conflict settings.

Reassessing the research relationship: location, position and power in fieldwork accounts

In this article we problematize the dualistic and binary model of researcher/researched interaction in the feminist methodological literature, which suggests that manipulation and exploitation only take place by the researcher. We contest assumptions that research participants occupy only one axis of identity, namely, ‘oppressed victimhood’. Through our position as non‐white/non‐western and nonwhite/western researchers in a non‐western research setting, we were able to closely examine the operation of power as it flows and ebbs in the context of a multiplicity of potential identities of both researchers and research participants. Identities were continuously negotiated on issues of national location, age, generation and reciprocity. While we are aware of our power in the ‘final product’, we have explored the different ways in which research participants can also exercise power in the production of the ‘product’. However, our intention is not to place the latter into another rigid category of ‘oppressors’ but to provide a framework for analysis of qualitative research results. By demonstrating that power resides with the research participants, we also seek to challenge the tendency within white western feminism to construct ‘third world’ women as passive recipients.

Rethinking Masculinity and Practices of Violence in Conflict Settings

An introduction to a special issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics, co-edited with Marsha Henry.

Space, Performance and Everyday Security in the Peacekeeping Context

Studies of peacekeeping have helped to reveal the complexities, dilemmas and challenges of operations since their inception, and almost certainly into the future. Yet, despite the empirical and theoretical breadth of this canon, the field continues to be dominated by political science, development studies, international law and military studies, whose scholars tend to draw on ‘problem-solving’, macro-level and positivist perspectives in their writings. The impact of post-structural and post-positivist epistemologies developed in sociology, human geography and cultural studies remain marginal in the field. Given this, the present article seeks to complement and develop the study of peacekeeping through its framing of blue-helmet activity as embodied, spatial-security practice that is performed ‘out front’ for the ‘beneficiary’ audience. In so doing we draw on critical geopolitics, military/human geography and sociological theorizing with a focus on space and performance. Our main aim is to show how the concepts of space and performance can be used to illuminate perceptions of everyday security by recourse to a modest, illustrative empirical component based on fieldwork in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia.

Positionality and Power: The Politics of Peacekeeping Research

Despite a growth in social studies of peacekeeping, there has been little written on field experiences in such contexts. This article examines the role of the researcher in influencing the research process and product in two peacekeeping sites, Liberia and Kosovo. Although researchers are often positioned in powerful ways vis-à-vis researchees, the multiplicity and complexity of their positionality are often overlooked. By drawing on examples from team research conducted, the article suggests that these positionings give rise to unconventional and contradictory power relations. By reflecting on the role of the researcher(s) and the politics of research itself, we hope to engender more conscientious peacekeeping research.

Gender, security and development

This paper examines the links amongst the concepts of gender, security and development. In particular, it seeks to examine how each of the concepts can be critically understood independently and as interrelated. Through understanding each of these concepts as socially and discursively constructed, contingent and fluid, the paper examines the consequences of such a theoretical framework for key issues facing gender, security and development practitioners: Trafficking, Resolution 1325 and HIV/AIDS.

Peacexploitation? Interrogating Labor Hierarchies and Global Sisterhood Among Indian and Uruguayan Female Peacekeepers

As a result of UNSCR 1325, the UN has been eager to decrease incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations, improve local womens security, and balance out the number of women and men in the police and military at both local and international levels. As peacekeeping missions begin to include more female peacekeepers, questions are raised about what this means for women in national militaries, local women in peacekeeping missions, and soldiers or militarized laborers from the ‘developing’ world. While countries such as Uruguay have been sending increasing numbers of female peacekeepers to various UN missions, it was not until 2007 that an all-female contingent was first deployed from India to Liberia and hailed as a gendered success. But in altering the gendered landscape, will the UN merely continue to exploit the cheap military labor of the global South? Will countries like India and Uruguay (major troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping operations) continue to bear the burden of providing security? This article examines the limits of a conventional interest in gender and gender relations in thinking about peacekeepers and advocates for an intersectional approach to the issue of female peacekeepers, importantly including the role of geography (and therefore ‘race’, empire and colonialism) in the thinking through the social, cultural, and political effects of peacekeeping deployments. Como resultado de la Resolución No. 1325, las Naciones Unidas han estado ansiosas por disminuir los incidentes de explotación y abuso sexual en las operaciones de mantenimiento de la paz, mejorar la seguridad local de las mujeres y balancear el número de mujeres y hombres en la policía y la fuerza militar, tanto a nivel local como internacional. En cuanto las misiones de mantenimiento de paz comienzan a incluir más mujeres para mantener la paz, surgen interrogantes sobre lo que esto significa a las mujeres en las fuerzas militares nacionales, misiones de mantenimiento de paz y soldados o trabajadoras militarizadas del mundo ‘en desarrollo’. Mientras que países como el Uruguay han estado enviando un número creciente de mujeres para mantener la paz en varias misiones de la ONU, no ha sido sino hasta el 2007 que la India movilizó un contingente totalmente femenino a Liberia, aclamado como un suceso de género. Pero el alterar al panorama de género, ¿continuará la ONU meramente con la explotación de trabajo militar barato del sur global? ¿Continuarán los países como India y Uruguay (países que mayormente contribuyen con tropas en las operaciones del mantenimiento de paz de la ONU) en cargar con el peso de proveer seguridad? Este artículo examina los límites de un interés convencional de género y de las relaciones de género pensando sobre los mantenedores de paz y aboga por un planteamiento interseccional al asunto de las mujeres mantenedoras de paz, lo que es muy importante, incluso el rol de la geografía (y por lo tanto ’la raza’, el imperio y el colonialismo) en el pensamiento a través de los efectos sociales, culturales y políticos de los despliegues para el mantenimiento de la paz. 作为联合国安理会第1325号决议的一个结果，联合国渴望减少维和行动中的性剥削和性凌辱的发生，提高当地妇女的安全度，在当地及国际两个层次上都平衡男女在警察和军人中的人数。由于维和使命开始包括更多的女性维和人员，对于各国军队中的女性、维和使命中的当地妇女，以及来自“发展中”世界的军事化劳工人员来说，这意味着什么，已经提出了各种问题。像乌拉圭这样的国家已向联合国维和使命派遣了越来越多的女性维和人员，但直到2007年才首次有来自印度的全女性分遣部队被派往利比里亚，这被人们欢呼为男女平等的胜利。但性别状况改变后，联合国会不会只是继续剥削全球南方的廉价军事人员？像印度和乌拉圭（为联合国维和行动派出部队的主要国家）等国是否会继续承担提供安全的责任？本文考察了思考维和人员问题时对性别和性别关系常规兴趣的局限性，主张采用跨部门路径研究女性维和人员问题，重要者包括地理（因而“种族”、帝国和殖民主义）在思考维和人员部署之社会、文化和政治影响中的作用。 UNSCR 1325의 결과로 유엔은 평화유지 작전에서 성 착취와 성 학대 사건을 줄이고, 지역 여성의 안전을 도모하며, 지역 수준과 국제 수준에서 경찰과 군대에서 남성과 여성 숫자의 균형을 맞추고자 하고 있다. 평화유지활동이 더 많은 여성 평화유지군을 포함하기 시작하면서, 이것이 군내의 여성에게, 평화유지 활동에서 지역 여성들에게 그리고 ‘개발도상국’에서 온 군대와 군관련 노동자들에게 어떤 의미를 지니는가에 대한 질문들이 제기되었다. 우루과이와 같은 나라들은 다양한 UN 활동에 많은 여성 평화유지군을 보내고 있지만, 여성 평화유지군이 인도에서 라이베리아로 최초로 파견되어 성공적이었다고 평가되는 것은 2007년이었다. 그러나 유엔이 성별 분포를 변화시켜, 남반부의 값싼 여성 노동을 계속해서 군사적으로 이용할 것인가? 인도와 우루과이(유엔 평화유지활동에 군대를 보내는 주요 국가들)와 같은 나라들이 안전 유지의 부담을 계속해서 져야하는가? 이 논문은 평화유지군 파견의 사회적, 문화적, 정치적 효과를 고려함에 있어서 지리의 역할을 포시켜서, 평화유지군에 대한 사고에서 젠더와 젠더관계에 대한 기존의 관심이 지니는 한계를 검토하고, 여성 평화유지권 이슈에 대한 교차적인 접근을 옹호한다.

Parades, Parties and Pests: Contradictions of Everyday Life in Peacekeeping Economies

Based on research studies conducted in the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in 2006, 2012 and 2013, this article argues that peacekeepers’ everyday experiences reflect a series of contradictory identities and performances with regard to nation, work and gender. Peacekeepers straddle paradoxical worlds simultaneously and manage oppositional demands and obligations, although it is often assumed that they inhabit peacekeeping economies in homogenous ways. Importantly, the experiences provide opportunities for peacekeepers to invest in, accumulate and deploy military capital; to consolidate their military identities; and to favourably and tactically position themselves as deserving and useful subjects within the peacekeeping landscape.

Problematizing military masculinity, intersectionality and male vulnerability in feminist critical military studies

ABSTRACT Recent work on the multiplicity of masculinities within specific military contexts deploys the concept of intersectionality in order to draw attention to the hierarchies present in military organizations or to acknowledge male vulnerability in situations of war and conflict. While it is important to examine the breadth and depth of masculinity as an ideology and practice of domination, it is also important for discussions of military masculinity, and intersectionality, to be connected with the ‘originary’ black feminist project from which intersectionality was born. This may indeed reflect a more nuanced and historically attuned account of such concepts as intersectionality, but also black and double consciousness, standpoint and situated knowledges. In particular, what happens when concepts central to feminist theorizing and activism suddenly become of use for studying dominant groups such as male military men? What are our responsibilities in using these concepts in unexpected and perhaps politically questionable ways? This article looks at recent feminist theorizing on intersectionality, and several examples of the use of intersectionality in relation to masculinity and the military, and finally suggests some cautionary ways forward for rethinking militaries, masculinities, and feminist theories.

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender, space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.