Lions,Tigers, and Freedom Birds: How and Why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Employs Women

This article examines how and why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) integrated women, highlighting themes common to women's participation in militant groups such as women's unique propaganda value and cultural limits on recruiting women and employing them in political violence.     

Women defining terrorism: ethnonationalist,state, and machista terrorism

This article explores definitions of terrorism according to various women in the Basque regions of Spain and France. We ask how women in social movements and government institutions define terrorism, how terrorism influences them, and whether they are viewed as victims of violence and/or as political agents who challenge terrorism. We discuss three definitions of terrorism: ethnonationalist terrorism of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), state terrorism against ETA operatives and supporters, and terrorismo machista (or intimate terrorism seen as gender violence). The article uncovers multiple women’s lived experiences related to terrorism, and by problematising agency and definitions of terrorism, it challenges the binary in international relations of women as either victims or violent perpetrators of terrorism and it establishes terrorismo machista as political violence closely related to other forms of political violence. We conclude that women are important political agents regarding multiple types of terrorism.     

Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection

The issues of gender-related persecution and violence against women have been put onto the international agenda, largely thanks to lobbying by feminist NGOs and transnational networks. There is a question, however, of how successfully this agenda-setting has translated into effective policy-making and policies that will increase the protection of women who are victims of gender-related persecution. One of the problems with policies to support women refugees and asylum seekers lies in a failure of transmission of the goals of gender sensitivity through all the various bureaux and representatives of a large bureaucratic organization such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For nearly twenty years, since the early 1990s, the UNHCR has identified ‘refugee women’ as a policy priority, and yet, despite this prioritization of concerns about women refugees and gender issues in the asylum and refugee process, it could be argued that little progress has been made in implementation of policies on refugee women. This article will examine the way in which the concept of gender has been adopted within the UNHCR and the processes that have been put in place to mainstream gender within refugee protection activities. How far has mainstreaming managed to move policies to protect women beyond a mere focus on ‘vulnerable’ groups, and to integrate a gendered understanding of the global processes that produce refugees, and of the protection needs of these refugees?     

Gender relations,authoritarianism and democratization in Chile

This article takes Chile as a case study to examine how the women's movement, the non‐governmental sector and the state have worked together to design policies for the prevention of domestic violence, and to transform the culture of authoritarianism which remains an integral part of gender relations within the state and in society. It conceptualizes the linkages between gender relations, authoritarianism and violence, examines how violence against women became a prominent issue during the transition to democracy, and shows that women's organizations have made significant advances in Chile as elsewhere in Latin America, by framing legislation on violence against women within the context of women's human rights. The study indicates that collaboration between the state, women's organizations and the police force can provide a window of opportunity to promote a democratic culture within the state and society.     

‘I'm glad I'm not a Saudi woman’: the First Gulf War and US encounters with Saudi gender relations

On 6 November 1990, nearly 50 Saudi women staged a protest against the ban on women operating motor vehicles in Saudi Arabia. Occurring in the midst of the First Gulf War, the women's protest was a political statement about the harsh restrictions placed on women in the Middle Eastern country which both reflected and influenced Saudi society’s encounter with their American allies during the war. When United States (US) military personnel flooded into Saudi Arabia during the war, they were shocked at the way American servicewomen were treated by their Saudi allies and the second-class status of Saudi women throughout the country. This article explores Americans' reactions to their encounter with Saudi gender relations during the war and argues that the poor treatment of women in Saudi Arabia—which Americans dubbed ‘gender apartheid’—caused many Americans to question the longstanding US alliance with the conservative Muslim country. In doing so, US journalists, military personnel, scholars and the general public began to demand that concern about women's rights should be integrated seriously into US foreign policy towards the Muslim world.     

Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force

I examine the role of domestic gender equality in predicting whether or not a state is more aggressive in international disputes. This research adds to a growing body of feminist research in international relations, which demonstrates that states with higher levels of gender equality exhibit lower levels of violence during international disputes and during international crises. Many scholars have argued that a domestic environment of inequality and violence results in a greater likelihood of state use of violence internationally. This argument is most fully developed within feminist literature; however, research in the field of ethno-nationalism has also highlighted the negative impact of domestic discrimination and violence on state behavior at the international level. Using the MID data set and new data on first use of force, I test, using logistic regression, whether states with higher levels of gender equality are less likely to be aggressive when involved in international disputes, controlling for other possible causes of state use of force. Beyond this project's contribution to the conflict literature, this research expands feminist theory by further incorporating it into traditional international relations theory to deepen our understanding of the impact of domestic gender equality on state behavior internationally.     

‘Marriage’ to capital: the fallback positions of Fiji's women garment workers

The May 2000 coup in Fiji prompted a flight of capital from the country's garment industry. As workers lost their jobs, attention turned away from improving wages and conditions to retaining garment factory jobs in the country. What can feminist researchers contribute in a climate of high capital mobility that prohibits organising for a living wage? This paper applies Amartya Sen's idea of women's ‘fallback positions’ in relation to their husbands to an exploration of women's ‘marriage’ to capital. An exploration of the lives of women garment factory workers beyond the workplace reveals the potential to enhance women's negotiating power in relation to their employers—by boosting women's individual and collective assets and their access to support from state and NGOs, to other income‐earning means, and to social support systems upon which to call for assistance.     

Negotiating the politics of gender and rights: Some reflections on the status of women's human rights at ‘Beijing Plus Ten’

This article undertakes a review of the development of the women's human rights project, focusing particularly on violence against women and issues of sexuality and reproductive rights. It notes gains by activists in promoting the women's human rights agenda and highlights the continuing impediments to the project from increasingly influential groups and some United Nations member states opposed to women's human rights. A more general problem is a lack of political will from those member states ostensibly committed to the cause who have often failed to translate this ‘commitment’ into effective action. It concludes that, as we approach the tenth anniversary of the ‘Conference of Commitments’, the implementation of initiatives has often been slow and somewhat ineffective. Governments have mastered the rhetoric of respect for women's human rights, yet the full realisation of women's human rights across the world remains elusive.     

Urban Irregular Warfare and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence From a Colombian City

Defining terrorism and explaining how it occurs remains a contentious issue. This article attempts to generate new understandings on these topics by applying the work of Ehud Sprinzak's delegitimatization model to the Sea Shepherds. Evidence presented in the article suggests that the Sea Shepherd's present level of political violence passed through gradual phases. In this respect, it is possible to suggest that Sprinzak's model has applicability for maritime organizations, as well as terrestrial based groups. However, we also note that on the one hand, it may be possible to argue that in some respects the Sea Shepherds may constitute either a “blind spot” in the literature on terrorism and political violence, because its actions could in some circumstances be considered activism, militant direct action, piracy, vigilantism, terrorism, or eco-defense, which makes it very difficult to classify. On the other hand, that both the Sea Shepherds and the whalers may both engage in illegal activities, but are not prosecuted, may indicate that states and the international community may have neither the will nor the means to enforce laws against them. Therefore, they may be turning a blind eye to their actions. Throughout the article we maintain that the Sea Shepherds constitute an example of a gray area phenomenon. Despite the ambiguity surrounding their legal status and academic interpretations of their actions, the results of nearly three decades of the organization's activities, including its 2007 campaign to disrupt Japanese Antarctic Whaling, suggest that the Sea Shepherds may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they claim they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states' and the international community's inabilities or unwillingness to do so.     

Forget(ting) feminism? Investigating relationality in international relations

Abstract

What kind of theoretical or methodological changes are needed to more effectively theorize global politics? This question is one increasingly posed, one reason being the ever burgeoning weight of violence on our global political landscapes. To investigate this, the central concept examined at the workshop from which this special section emanates was relationality. Motivated by feminist scholarship, my initial question was, ‘Why did we not focus the whole workshop around feminist theory?’ This question is posed alongside the clear knowledge that the workshop was not ‘about’ feminism and thus it might not seem rational to choose such a focus. Yet given the concept and practice of relationality was so deeply embedded in feminist work, I wondered how feminism could have been forgotten. In this article, I explore the idea of ‘forgetting feminism’ through a further question, namely, ‘Is sexism (still) at work in international relations [IR]?’ This involves a perusal of the work of sexual politics and sexism, IR’s putative ‘failure to love’ and a personal, relational detour into the life, work and career of Lily Ling—corporeally suddenly absent but remaining a vital part of the work in which we are all engaged.     

Canadian women and the (re)production of women in Afghanistan

Canadian women have been at the forefront of the international movement for women's rights in Afghanistan since the rise of the Taliban in the late 1990s. Focusing on the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the ‘War on Terror’. In Canada, as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempts to challenge dominant narratives of Afghan women, it ultimately reinforces the Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates. Drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty's study of feminist pedagogy, this paper explores the implications of CW4WAfghan's discourse and its dissemination through the Canadian school system. It highlights how CW4WAfghan's portrayal of Canadian values and responsibilities is at odds with feminist efforts to reconceptualize the gendered nature of war and national identity.     

Who Speaks for Women? Print Media Portrayals of Feminist and Conservative Women's Advocacy

Feminists have frequently accused media outlets of not giving them enough coverage and/or portraying them negatively. Conversely, conservative women have argued that media suffer from liberal biases. While some studies have addressed the larger question of media and ideological prejudices, none have examined how media report women's activism in comparative terms. Since feminist and conservative women's organizations vie with one another over who represents women's interests, how media portray them has implications for how well they achieve this goal. Using data gathered from four major national newspapers, this study analyzes how print journalists depict feminist and conservative women's activism over a 14-year span. In so doing, it provides information about frequency of media coverage, as well as how advocates are labeled, on which issues they are getting visibility, and whether or not media present feminist and conservative women's organizations as being in direct conflict with each other. Implications for understanding women's political efforts, broadly speaking, are also explored.     

What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations

What happens when the ‘international’ as a distinct social space is approached from the perspective of war rather than war from the perspective of the ‘international’? Tarak Barkawi's question (Millennium, 39:3, 2011, 701–706) is best answered by attempts to understand war not as part of inter/intra-state relations but as a socio-cultural, trans-historical institution that impacts on the ‘everyday’ lives of men, women and children. In this article I argue that war is not a disruption of the ‘everyday’, an abstraction that has a definite beginning and end, something we enter into and exit. Instead, it can be captured in daily and mundane lived experiences of people and in powerful emotions that constitute ‘self’, community and the ‘other.’ Drawing upon my research on wars in South Asia, I particularly reflect on how war shapes the banal and the fervent and how cultural and political narratives of ‘war bodies’ perform the ‘international’ in a variety of ways. Most significantly I want to draw attention to how international relations as a scholarly discipline is so deeply engaged with war and yet seems to have an estranged relationship with it.     

Security sector reform,gender and local narratives in Burundi

This paper maps the difficulties with operationalising the gender discourse described in the peace accord and post-conflict documents, which guide Burundi's peace-building process, through local women's narratives from the security forces. The author claims that due to limited international and local investment, the local women involved in the security forces initiate small practical changes by referring to their vision of femininity, while theoretically legitimising these demands by linking them to the international human rights discourse in order to survive in an overwhelmingly masculine arena. International organisations and donors’ focus on traditionally feminine and softer areas, such as reconciliation and reintegration programmes, together with local elites’ tendency to view gender as an ‘add-on’ contribute to this development.     

Body and experiment – reflecting Kawabata Yasunari's counter-aesthetics

Abstract

From his earliest works, Kawabata, known as an explicit aestheticist, deals in his works with flawed and disabled bodies in contrast to beautiful ones, evoking feelings of revulsion, awkwardness, disgust and premonitions of decay and death. The dynamism created out of these tensions and ruptures in the aestheticized world is scrutizined as hidden counter-aesthetics through questions such as: Which kinds of impairments are to be observed? Can they be classified according to grades? Are there gender specificities? How are these tensions and ruptures organized, and which categories (semantic, biological, political, moral) are concerned? Which narratorial and other functions are served through the counter-image of the flawed (impaired) body? And finally, how do the findings from these investigations into the flipside, the ‘Other’ of Kawabata's aesthetic universe, contribute to complementary or alternative ways of reading and understanding his literature? In a final section, Kawabata's treatment of female bodies as a site of experimenting with extreme situations of passivity and agency is highlighted, challenging more conventional readings of this and other works. The works discussed are from a deliberately broad chronological and generic range, including canonical and popular works. They range from the newspaper novels ‘Utsukushii!’ (1927) and ‘Maihime’ (1950/1), the novel ‘Senbazuru’ (1952) to the stories and palm-of-the-hand stories ‘Ningen no ashioto’ (1925),’Izu no odoriko’ (1926), ‘Mekura to shōjo’ (1928), ‘Utsukushiki haka’ (1929) ‘Hokuro no tegami’ (1940), ‘Sasabune’ (1950), and, in the final section, ‘Kataude’ (1963/4) and ‘Nemureru bijo’ (1960/1).     

Democratization and War in Political Science

This article explores what political science literature has to say about the promises and perils of expanding democratic governance. International relations literature and comparative politics literature both deal with the claim that stable democracies do not fight each other. However, these two strands of literature only to a minor extent exchange research findings on the causes of war. International relations scholars are well aware of the fact that the early stages of democratization in particular may trigger conflict, and they explain that they are referring to the size of a country's power and the distribution of capabilities among the major powers, among other factors. In contrast, comparativists focus on the opening of domestic political space. In a transitional state, open political space fosters elite competition, which cannot be regulated by weak political institutions and therefore may cause civil war. They are less aware of the fact that these internal dynamics may even enhance the risk of political violence beyond territorial borders. Both of these approaches must be used to focus on the consequences of democratization on a regional scale. In ‘bad neighbourhoods’, including the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and the Great Lakes in Africa, democratization can trigger conflict beyond state frontiers by altering the incentives and opportunities of political actors.     

Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. Part II: unevenness and political multiplicity

Where does ‘the international’ come from? What accounts for its existence as a dimension of the human world? This article attempts an answer, in three steps, using the idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD). First, a depth model is constructed, comparing different ways of linking uneven development with international relations. Thus far, it turns out, these ways have all presupposed the fact of political multiplicity, rather than explaining it. In search of explanation, the article turns, secondly, to the compelling historical sociological argument of Barry Buzan and Richard Little. This locates the origins of geopolitics in the late prehistoric shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agricultural existence, together with associated processes of social differentiation and proto-state formation. Buzan and Little's explanation appears at first to pre-empt the need for the concept of U&CD. Yet closer inspection reveals that unevenness and combination play a key role in their empirical account without, however, being theorized. The third step of the argument therefore seeks to show how these are necessary parts of the process of social change which Buzan and Little describe. And in this way it emerges that the origins of ‘the international’ do indeed lie in the uneven and combined character of historical development.     

Developing policy on integration and re/construction in Kosova

The Gender Audit (GA) and associated reports and reviews drawn upon in this article enable an evaluation of how far the intervention processes at work in Kosova since 1999 have been inclusive of gender analysis and supportive of women's and girls' needs and interests. This assessment considers the strengths and drawbacks of various attempts to use and implement gender-sensitive projects. The GA was designed to support the emerging feminist reconstructive politics in Kosova. Its findings and recommendations tackle aspects of empowerment, equity, and opportunities, outlining some developments from community activism as well as outcomes of the international administration. By considering developments over a two-year period, it is possible to place issues of equity and opportunities in the context of change over time, with change at local and national levels linked with developing international dialogues. The article analyses local work undertaken by the Kosova Women's Network to overcome violence against women in war and domestic peace, and reviews international work engaged in by the Kosovo [sic] Women's Initiative (KWI). Many Kosovar women (of all ethnicities) do fully acknowledge their community membership, and recognise the risks involved in talking across their differences to achieve everyday security and reconciliation. International reports and reviews such as those produced in 2002 by the UN Secretary-General and UNIFEM on women, war, peace, and security, as well as the review of the KWI, allow an assessment of how dialogues are changing and what the potential impact of such change might be on policy development and implementation.     

Militant Islam and the Futile Fight for Reputation

The reputation debate in international relations has split into two camps: those suggesting actions affect perceptions of resolve and those who say they do not. This article engages the reputation debate in the context of militant Islamists. Using political psychology, we offer a theory of biased attributions that challenges Mercer's “desires” hypothesis that reputations for irresolution do not form when an act is desirable from the perceiver's eye. Motivated biases undercut any reputation for resolve in cases of firmness and challenge rationalist claims of reputation formation. Militant Islamist perceptions of U.S. and Soviet interventions in the Muslim world since the 1980s support this thesis and caution against futile wars for reputation.