International Conference: The War Question for Feminism

By Malena Gustavson on 21 Feb | 0 comments

The War Question for Feminism: Gender Aspects on Militaries, Armed Conflict and Peacekeeping

 22-23 September, 2008, Örebro University, Sweden

Gender aspects on militaries, armed conflict and peacekeeping and anti-war activism, 22-23 September, 2008, Örebro University, Sweden
Convenors are Erika Svedberg at Gender Studies, Örebro University and Annica Kronsell at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. The conference is organized in close collaboration with The Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, which is a new two-campus milieu for gender research at Linköping University and Örebro University in Sweden, led by Professors Nina Lykke and Anna Jónasdóttir. The institute is connected with GEXcel - Gendering Excellence (www.genderexcel.org), a five-years Visiting Fellows Programme which started in 2007 supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council. GEXcel gathers prominent senior as well as younger scholars from all over the world.

The full two-day conference will consist of a mixture of speeches by prominent scholars, panel debates and workshops with papers divided according to the three themes outlined below. There will also be a number of social events facilitating informal exchanges between conference participants. Although it is a scholarly conference based on research papers, a limited number or professionals working for governments, the EU as well as international non-governmental organizations have been invited to participate.

Speakers at the conference are:
Helena Carreiras, Cynthia Cockburn, Carol Cohn, Maud Eduards, Zillah Eisenstein, Jeff Hern, Paul Higate, Sophia Ivarsson, Annica Kronsell, Christine Sylvester, Tarja Väyrynen, Dubravka Zarkov.

Please find the programme and more info on the conference at: www.oru.se/sam/genderandwar

Theme 1: War as a Feminist Issue

The central argument for this theme is that war is a feminist issue/question. There is a long-standing and historical split within the women’s movement on whether to be pro-nation or pro-peace which seem to have made feminists somewhat uncomfortable with the war question. War is a feminist concern because conflict relations between states or organized groups affect women as well as men, violence used in violent conflict is often sexualized and because militaries and arms is a substantial part of public resource spending. If there would ever be a truly feminist state, would this state have a military organization? Would it have an army, weapon production and military spending? War is an economic issue and feminist researchers should not ignore the military/defense budget as part of the (welfare) state budget? Arms production and trade is also connected to military budgets and what would a feminist analysis of the arms trade come up with? The means used in the waging of contemporary wars – like rape, forced prostitution and other forms of sexual violence seem to be an integral part of the organized forms of violence. It shows that the means used in war-making are gendered. The trend for some militaries of western democratic states is to engage in the war on terror while another trend is to move much more into international peace-enforcement and peacekeeping. Is the trend to train militaries for peacekeeping tasks a way to de-militarize the military? Are the efforts of gender mainstreaming peacekeeping a way to feminize the military?   

Theme 2: Militarism and Masculinities

This theme takes the starting point in that the military organization historically has been exclusively male and part of nation building. Nation building is highly interconnected with militaries with conscription as an illustrative example. Norms relevant for military practice like hierarchy, group cohesion and organized violence as problem solving, have been tied to norms of heterosexual masculinity. How is masculinity related to the task of the military organization? What is the relationship between masculinity and the role of the warrior, in the ‘war on terror’ militaries, insurgency, and guerrillas or in peacekeeping? Are UN peacekeepers real men or ‘sissies in arms’? Sexuality has been an integral aspect of the military organization with the wide use of pornographic material, sexualized language, sexual harassment within bases and prostitution as well as rape near military bases. As we are seeing sexualized violence in war being used against both civilians and soldiers as part of strategic warfare we might ask; what is the relationship between patriarchy, militarism and misogyny in different contexts in contemporary warfare? What does this tell us about the relationship between military violence and sexuality? Can the military be democratized? Is it possible to think of a military where men and women serve side by side as comrades, without sexism? Is it possible to move beyond the heterosexual masculinity norm as an organizing
principle of the military?

Theme 3: Feminist concepts travelling into the area of security, the military, violent conflicts and peacekeeping operations

The focus of this theme is on travelling concepts. The idea of travelling concepts was developed in the Women’s Studies/Gender Studies project Athena with the aim of considering how concepts introduced and developed by feminist scholars are used for particularly educational but also research purposes in different European contexts. A central question is how feminist concepts may be translated across linguistic and cultural barriers while still conveying the same meaning. What happens when concepts travel? When feminist concepts are put into practice, do they acquire new meanings? When new meanings develop, how can they be understood? What does it tell us about the context in which they are being used? In this theme we are particularly concerned with the translation and implementation of feminist concepts into political, policy and administrative settings. Central questions are how have, for example, the concepts of gender/gender mainstreaming/gender perspectives been used or put into practice in security, defense and military understandings and settings. One example here is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. We want to look at how concepts from feminist research and activism travel from one setting to, for example different national settings of security policy and military strategy.

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The title of this conference was inspired by the work of Christine Sylvester. Convenors are Erika Svedberg from the Institute of Thematic Gender Studies and Örebro University and Annica Kronsell from the Department of political science at Lund University. The convenors were part of a group organizing the international conference at Lund University: A World in Transition. Feminist Perspectives on International Relations, in May 1996. A selection of papers and summaries of workshop discussions were published as a special edition of Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, 1997.This conference is a follow-up of that successful event.

The War Question for Feminism-conference is organized within the Institute of Thematic Gender Studies a new two-campus milieu for gender research at Linköping University and Örebro University in Sweden, led by Professors Nina Lykke and Anna Jónasdóttir. The conference is connected with GEXcel – Gendering Excellence (www.genderexcel.org), a fiveyears Visiting Fellows Programme which started in 2007 supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council. GEXcel gathers prominent senior as well as younger scholars from all over the world.