Sandra Whitworth

Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping has been a central feature of UN activities for over thirty years, and yet one which has been relatively insulated from any form of critical scrutiny. The general disposition toward peacekeeping has been that it is, at a minimum, a benign use of military force. In part, this assumption depends upon the requirement that peacekeeping forces are brought into a situation with the consent of the parties involved and that they will fire only in self-defence. Those criticisms that exist around peacekeeping tend to focus on the question of whether a particular situation is suitable to peacekeeping efforts (i.e. Bosnia-Hercegovina), and potential ‘inefficiencies’ in particular elements of peacekeeping exercises, but not on the value and dynamic of peacekeeping itself. Moreover, there has been a renewed interest in peacekeeping, not only at the level of international organizations1 and national governments, but within the popular media and general public as well. Too much of this attention has adopted uncritically and without careful examination the stance that peacekeeping is a viable and welcome alternative to other forms of military force.

11 September and the Aftermath

T hree days after the horrifying events of 11 September, Joel Rogers wrote in The Nation that an establishment consensus had already formed regarding the task at hand “to destroy, by root and branch, the terrorist infrastructure that platformed this attack.” The establishment, in short, knew who the enemy was and what to do about it.1 The issue goes much deeper than this, however. Events like those of 11 September appear to confirm establishment accounts of world politics. Only recently, George W. Bush had some work to do to convince allies—and others—that National Missile Defense (NMD) was a reasonable response to rogue states and other terrorists. While NMD would not have protected the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers or the Pentagon against hijacked commercial airliners, after 11 September some American political commentators were quick to suggest that the fact that those attacks occurred at all confirmed the logic behind NMD. In other words, the US is vulnerable to rogue states and terrorists, international political actors who cannot be trusted to act in accordance with the norms of the otherwise legitimate global community.2 At a more general level, what the events of 11 September appear to confirm is the establishment view that the most important elements of world politics concern violence, militaries, generals, soldiers, diplomats, guns and bombs; it is a world in which borders and boundaries matter, it’s about Us vs. Them. As Naomi Klein characterized it, “Now is not the time for more understanding, just better intelligence.”3 In the aftermath of 11 September, it has become more difficult—and more important—to question the “self evident” claims of the establishment. I encounter this as a teacher of international relations (IR). For example, when I talk about terrorism in my Introduction International Relations class, I

Feminist Theories and International Relations

The Introduction suggested that there has been considerable resistance to bringing together IR and studies of women and gender relations. Few women become IR scholars, and fewer still (women or men) become feminist IR scholars. Despite some reluctance, and structural impediments, to identifying with International Relations as an academic discipline, feminists have long discussed many of the questions which are central to IR scholars. Feminist analyses of war, peace and development provide a substantive literature devoted to the study of women and international relations. Moreover, a small but growing literature has begun to emerge which examines directly the issue of women and gender in both the study and practice of international relations. This chapter will outline some of the various ways in which feminists have discussed these questions, and through a critical review of such approaches it will begin to develop a feminist account of international relations which takes into account gender relations.1

The International Planned Parenthood Federation

If international relations have always affected gender relations, then at a minimum we must be able to illustrate this by looking to the practices of international relations and documenting the manner in which gender relations figure there.1 The purpose of this chapter, then, will be to illustrate an analysis of gender in international relations through the example of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). In order that this may be more than a liberal feminist account of ‘women in the IPPF’, however, it will be done not by providing a history of the IPPF with women ‘added in’, but by exploring the ways in which ideas about gender and the particular historical and material conditions in which the institution operated affected its assumptions, policies and prescriptions. We will be concerned, moreover, with the ways in which the institution itself reflected and manipulated understandings about gender and the impact this had in the real life conditions of women and men.

Review: International Relations: (Re)defining Traditions(RE)DEFINING TRADITIONS Gender and Canadian foreign policy KeebleEdna and SmithHeadier A.Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1999, 99pp,

States is premised on the threat of biological and chemical attack. The findings presented in this study suggest that such logic may be deeply flawed. Yet sustained examination of this issue is nowhere to be found. The volume might also have benefited from more comparative analysis of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons experiences. What lessons, if any, do disarmament efforts in the chemical and nuclear fields hold for BWs? And to what degree do norms preventing the use of nuclear and chemical arms exist in the case of BWs? Once again, the study is largely silent. Overall, however, errors of omission do little to detract from the merits of this well-crafted volume. Indeed, national leaders would do well to heed its many insights and recommendations.

13.95

This chapter will examine gender in international relations through the example of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).1 As in the previous chapter, we are interested here in the ideas, material conditions, and the role of the ILO itself in reflecting and shaping understandings of gender throughout its history. The ILO is an older organisation than the IPPF, established with the League of Nations in 1919. It began with forty-two members and presently has one hundred and sixty. Additionally, it is an international governmental organisation (IGO), unlike the IPPF which is an international non-governmental organisation (INGO). The ILO’s substantive concerns also are very different from those of the IPPF. While the IPPF is functionally concerned with family planning and population control, an issue which is of obvious importance to women and men, the ILO’s focus on labour seems less directly an issue which involves gendered understandings and practices. Yet, from its beginnings, the ILO has developed policies which quite explicitly recognise certain assumptions about the appropriate role of women and men in the family, labour force and society more generally.

The International Labour Organisation

The previous two chapters examined the possible avenues through which an international relations theory which is sensitive to gender might be constructed. The strengths and weaknesses of both feminist theory and international relations theory have been examined, and it has been argued that, while often limited, there are some spaces within each which would permit such an analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to describe more fully the feminist IR theory proposed here and to locate the study of gender and international relations within the more specific study of international organisation.