Cockburn, Cynthia, Professor

By Gunnel Karlsson on 20 Nov | 0 comments

Cynthia Cockburn is Professor of Sociology at City University London, UK.
She is a prominent researcher working at the intersection of gender studies and peace/conflict studies. She is also an activist, involved in the international feminist antimilitarist network Women in Black against War.

GEXCEL PROJECT
Sexualized Violence in Diverse and Changing Wars: When, Who and Why?

The principal assertion of my most recent book, From Where We Stand, is that, while war is understood in mainstream theory (and popularly in the antiwar movement) as perpetuated by two factors, the economic (competition for resources and markets) and political (power struggles between racialized nations and ethnic groups), feminists argue that these are inseparable from a third factor, gender.
Gender as a relation of power differs from the other two factors in the manner in which they drive war. It is mainly manifest through cultural processes, i.e. in how militarization and war are done. Through those practices, we can see  patriarchy and militarism necessitating each other, sharing a key interest in particular forms of masculinity.

I deduce gender as a third motor of war specifically from intersectionality. The three major structures of power, those of class, race and gender, are theoretically and practically interlocking and mutually expressive - as inseparable in war as they are in all aspects of human society. This is pretty much entirely overlooked in the mainstream literature of IR/war studies and in the Left antiwar movement.

This is the context in which I’m interested in sexuality. What is the significance of sexualized violence in armed conflict/war? Why does it occur more in some wars than others?

I’ve supposed, like other feminist analysts, that sexuality is gendered, and that sexualized violence in armed conflict is a specially telling expression of the gendering of war processes and practices. And that it is a means of expression of male bonding, where this is valued as a vehicle for organized collective violence. And that it is an affirmation of superiority of a Self (individual or collective) through subordination of an Other defined in terms of not only of gender but also of class and race. I’m also persuaded by the argument that it is not only an expression of misogyny but a masculine thrust for transcendence.

However, sexualized violence is not equally prevalent, central or strategic in every war. I think I would like to take the opportunity of the Őrebro fellowship to review some of the literature that could throw light on the prevalence and meaning of sex/sexualized violence in war in different periods and localities.

Looking back in time, were its prevalence and meaning different in, say, Britain’s colonial war against the Boers, Japan’s war against the Chinese in the 1930s, the different fronts of World War II? We may introduce the notion of “global change” here. Wars have been theorized as evolving – we have “new wars”. And wars are being categorized differently. How does sexualized violence present itself in asymmetric wars (Iraq, Afghanistan today), counter-insurgency wars (Malaya in the 1950s), counter-revolutionary wars (El Salvador, Nicaragua), ‘ethnic’ wars (Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s), territorial and resource wars (Sierra Leone, Congo)?

If there are differences from conflict to conflict, what do they say about the links we have been predicating between constructions of masculinity, the reproduction of patriarchal power and the perpetuation of militarization and war? And in particular what light do they throw on the functioning of intersectionality?
Some interesting questions flow from this. Are there cultures in which it is considered too defiling for the male body to penetrate the despised other sexually (is this why we hear little of rape in Israel/Palestine)? Do we see sexualized violence as a punitive class weapon (in the way we see it as an ethnic weapon) perpetrated against the enemy class in wars of revolution from below, defensive war by elites (Mexico)? There are complicating factors in patterns of war rape: rape of enemy men (Serbia, Croatia); rape of women in ‘one’s own’ military units (the USA); secuestration of women of one’s own side as a sexual resource (Sierra Leone). The phenomenon of rape, mutilation and femicide in Guatemala today is usually seen as a continuation of practices in the war that ended in 1996. Yet the only country where femicide is more prevalent is Mexico, where war is not a factor. Other massive underlying questions are, rape apart, must masculine sexuality itself be seen as violent? must the violence of war itself be seen as sexual?