Paul Kirby

How is rape a weapon of war? Feminist International Relations, modes of critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence

Rape is a weapon of war. This now common claim reveals wartime sexual violence as a social act marked by gendered power. But this consensus also obscures important, and frequently unacknowledged, differences in ways of understanding and explaining it. This article opens these differences to analysis. It interprets feminist accounts of wartime sexual violence in terms of modes of critical explanation and differentiates three modes – of instrumentality, unreason and mythology – which implicitly structure different understandings of how rape might be a weapon of war. These modes shape political and ethical projects and so impact not only on questions of scholarly content but also on the ways in which we attempt to mitigate and abolish war rape. Exposing these disagreements opens up new possibilities for the analysis of war rape.

Ending sexual violence in conflict: the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its critics

During the past year, the UK Government has become the lead advocate for a perhaps surprising foreign policy goal: ending sexual violence in conflict. The participation of government representatives from more than 120 countries in a London Summit in June 2014 was the clearest manifestation of this project. This article offers an early assessment of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) and situates it within the history of global action against sexual and gender-based violence from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 onwards, with a particular focus on three key developments. First, the PSVI has embraced the already common understanding of rape as a ‘weapon of war’, and has stressed the importance of military training and accountability. This has exposed the tensions within global policy between a focus on all forms of sexual violence (including intimate partner violence in and out of conflict situations) on the one hand, and war zone activities on the other. Second, the Initiative has placed great emphasis on ending impunity, which implicates it in ongoing debates about the role of international and local justice as an effective response to atrocity. Third, men and boys have been foregrounded as ignored victims of sexual and gender-based violence. The PSVI has been crucial to that recognition, but faces significant challenges in operationalizing its commitment and in avoiding damage to existing programmes to end violence against women and girls. The success of the Initiative will depend on its ability to navigate these challenges in multiple arenas of global politics.

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.

Reintroducing women, peace and security

International Affairs 92: 2 (2016) 249–254

The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agendas original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state-centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.

Acting Time; or, The Abolitionist and the Feminist

Realists do not deny that women suffer in wartime and that they suffer in particular ways. Off the record (not in print, not at the podium) a realist may acknowledge the common use of rape as a weapon of war. But the realist will not go further. He or she will not accept that the construction and articulation of gender identity, or sexual identity or racial identity, might play an important part in the causation, enactment and continuation of war. (Zalewski and Enloe 1995, 295)

The unapologetic schoolmaster

In this short intervention, I offer three propositions on the relationship between ‘criticality’ and pedagogy in contemporary security studies. First, we should not set up the critical scholar as a new kind of masterful explicator. Second, we should nevertheless be militant about the inclusion of the critical within the university curriculum, and in particular resist the idea that ‘criticality’ is an afterthought or echo to the mainstream canon. Third, we must ensure that ‘the critical’ is about more than just the content of what we teach, but includes the politics of academia beyond the classroom. The argument is illustrated with provocations borrowed from Jacques Rancière.

Responding to #AllMalePanels: A Collage

Are all-male panels (AMPs) a symptom of continuing gender inequality that needs calling out? Undoubtedly. Does ensuring the presence of women on every panel, or even creating all-women panels, offer an effective solution? I’m unconvinced. Insisting that all panels should include women finds support because it is a direct and tangible response to a persistent phenomenon, made infinitely more frustrating by the blithe thoughtlessness that underpins its recurrence. It appears to be a small but welcome and quantifiable step toward correcting the chronic underrepresentation that women in the majority of professional fields still experience. However, settling for this quick fix has some potentially serious side effects for gender equity and diversity. Apparent practicality aside, a “just add women” response to AMPs risks perpetuating not only the notion that gender is binary, essentialized and visible, but also that gender parity between women and men should to be prioritized over other axes of diversity. The binary categorization of gender utilized in the AMP discourse, in which “woman” is the sole logical other of “man,” closes down space for other (non-western, non-binary) gender identities. It also reduces “women” to a reified identity husk, with the complexity and multiplicity of individual identity stripped out in favor of a single monolithic generic label. Gender binarism is a deficient basis on which to try and address difference and inclusivity. In the case of AMPs, it is compounded by reliance on visible markers of gender – principally appearance, but also names and gendered pronouns – to determine whether panelists are men or women. This further reduction of gender identity to what is not only visible but intelligible to the viewer is deeply