Tarja Väyrynen

Gender and UN peace operations: The confines of modernity

The essay seeks to problematize the recent UN discourse on gender, peace and war by demonstrating how modernity sets the limits for the discourse, and therewith confines the discourse to the pre-given binary categories of agency, identity and action. It engages in an analysis of modernity and the mode of thinking that modernity establishes for thinking about war and peace. It is demonstrated in the text that new thinking on post-Westphalian conflicts and human security did open up a discursive space for thinking about gender in peace operations, but this space has not been fully utilized. By remaining within the confines of modernity, the UN discourse on peace operations produces neoliberal modes of masculinity and femininity where the problem-solving epistemology gives priority to the ‘rationalist’ and manageralist masculinity and renders silent the variety of ambivalent and unsecured masculinities and femininities

Events of the Body Politic: A Nancian Reading of Asylum-seekers’ Bodily Choreographies and Resistance

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress.

Co-opting feminist voices for the war on terror: Laura Bush meets Nordic feminism:

The article analyses Finland’s and Norway’s female politicians’ war rhetoric with reference to the war in Afghanistan and contrasts it with Laura Bush’s rhetoric and feminism. In the Nordic countries the strong liberal and equity tradition of feminism could open up spaces for thinking differently about war, and yet the co-optation of hegemonic war rhetoric occurs in several ways. The ideograph ‘women-and-children’ is often evoked and added to the hegemonic foreign policy rhetoric without questioning the actual rhetorical work it does. Gender-neutral rhetoric is used to hail into being a collective and unitary western do-gooder identity and to distance Nordic involvement from the US ‘war on terror’. The panegyric of UN Resolution 1325 facilitates the metamorphosis of the militaristic and masculine US-led NATO into a collective peacekeeper capable of saving ‘brown women from brown men’.

Muted National Memory

The encoding of female bodies as symbols of the nation is a multifaceted process where some female bodies are uplifted to represent the nation and its honour, but others are abjected. I examine in this article Finnish women who fraternized with German soldiers during the Second World War. The bodies of these women carry historical and political content that could not be reconciled with the Finnish post-war national identity narrative that sought closure. The Finnish national subject came into being through the establishment of ‘Hitlers brides’ as others, and a variety of state-initiated disciplinary mechanisms were used to silence them. The taboo of speech became a lifelong condition that was broken just before the biological deaths of these women. When the taboo was broken their corporeal representations and voices were not simple representations of a past event, but political performances and utterances which intervened in a past and present national context. I show how the agentative figure that emerged was not that of a superstite (survivor) witness with confessional tendencies but that of a parrhesiastes, the one who speaks the truth.

Gender and Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding has become one of the mantras of conflict resolution theory and practice. It is often treated uncritically, and its disciplinary and institutional roots are neglected. An early academic usage of the word ‘peacebuilding’ can be found in the Scandinavian tradition of Peace Research, where the structural theory of violence held a prominent position for decades. At the institutional level, on the other hand, the term gained prominence in the 1990s, when UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali launched ‘An Agenda for Peace’ (1992) that defined the UN agenda for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Very recently, a corpus of critical literature has emerged that criticises the non-reflexive use of the term ‘peacebuilding’. Despite the emerging critical research agenda on the topic, the connection between gender and peacebuilding remains a little-studied subject.

Keeping the trauma of war open in the male body: resisting the hegemonic forms of masculinity and national identity in visual arts

The imagining of the nation-state includes the appropriation of bodies as objects on which the desire for national unity and identity is brutally inscribed. The appropriation of male bodies is accompanied by hegemonic forms of masculinities that are constitutive of the national identity. This article asks how male bodies are appropriated and post-war nationalism inscribed on them and how the hegemonic forms of masculinities are produced for the purposes of ‘healing’ the national self after the trauma of war. The article seeks also to demonstrate that the processes of appropriation can be interrupted and resisted, and alternative masculinities produced in visual art. In the text, the problematique of appropriation and its interruption is discussed by using material from three Finnish cases which relate to the ways the Finnish national identity has been constructed in relation to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War and Second World War.

Bodies of War, the Past Continuous, and (Ar)rhythmic Experiences

In recent years, International Relations scholars have shown a growing interest in the body. Yet, the body often remains rather abstract. In this article, we engage with the lived body and personal histories, claim that the international is not only personal but also corporeal with bodily dimension, and explore the body as a complex intersection that characterizes and shapes the relations between the singular, social, and international. To illustrate our argument, we discuss a sensuous experience of war that defies simplistic categorization and interpretation. The aim is to introduce an alternative onto-epistemological angle on International Relations in order to overcome the separation of the discipline from ordinary people and local everyday practices. The body is shown to be a site of the political, a place of intersection that both enacts practices and fosters relations with others and toward the world, and engages in practices that disrupt the normal rhythm of international politics and its governing logic.

Rethinking national temporal orders: the subaltern presence and enactment of the political

How the past is remembered is fundamental to the production and reproduction of postwar sovereign political power. However, Internation Relations’ (IR) explicit interest in the practices of remembrance, and particularly in time remains a relatively new one. This article seeks to show how Jacques Ranciere’s discussion of temporality, subaltern history, and politics – which allows the study of parallel and enmeshing temporal universes – contributes to the IR literature on time. In this view, when speech is acquired by those whose right to speak is not recognised they can produce temporalities that disturb hegemonic representations of time constellations and reorganise the nation’s relationship to its past. The article analyses the moment of Kaisu Lehtimaki’s telling her war story in public, and understands it to be a material and symbolic event that shatters the hegemonic distribution of the Finnish postwar national history and truth.

The Finnish national identity and the sacrificial male body: war, postmemory and resistance

The article examines through the works of the Finnish artist Seppo Salminen how the nation takes a hold on the male body. It is demonstrated that art can offer a critical relationship to the constitutive elements of the nation. Art is read as a form of postmemory that deals with the nation and its trauma of war. The article forms a critique of the essentialist understandings of nationhood that seek to define and naturalize nations by means of the supposedly homogenous, holistic and historically continuous understandings of tradition, including the nations history.The article examines through the works of the Finnish artist Seppo Salminen how the nation takes a hold on the male body. It is demonstrated that art can offer a critical relationship to the constitutive elements of the nation. Art is read as a form of postmemory that deals with the nation and its trauma of war. The article forms a critique of the essentialist understandings of nationhood that seek to define and naturalize nations by means of the supposedly homogenous, holistic and historically continuous understandings of tradition, including the nations history.

Introduction: Corporeal Peacebuilding

The introductory chapter offers an elaboration of peacebuilding as corporeal event that becomes into being in mundane encounters. The objective is to argue that Peace and Conflict Studies can be revitalized by employing feminist theorizing, non-representational ethnography, post-colonial thinking and critical theorizing of everyday life. The chapter shows how taking the body seriously introduces phenomenological registers that prioritize the relational and vulnerable elements of human being and, thereby, mundane practices of peacebuilding and peace. In addition to that, the chapter urges a novel ethical stance to peacebuilding that is based on the Scandinavian research tradition where one of the initial goals was to study the ordinary mechanisms of conflict resolution and peace maintenance, not just violence and its management.