War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Environmental Pollution Science: The Case of Coal Ash Pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract: Environmental justice movements often contest environmental knowledge by engaging in scientific debates, which implies accepting the predominance of scientific discourses over alternative forms of knowledge. Using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, this paper warns that the engagement with hegemonic forms of knowledge production may reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social and environmental inequalities. The argument is developed with reference to a case study of coal ash pollution in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case study shows that the construction of knowledge in a scientific project led to the exclusion of local definitions of the situation and the dismissal of their observations of environmental pollution. The case suggests that the capacity of different actors to put forward their interpretation of an environmental issue depends on the forms of symbolic violence that emerge within hegemonic discourses of the environment.     

Benefits,safety, and risks of immunisation programmes

Abstract

Immunisation is potentially the most effective and efficient of all preventive medical activities. It is also unique among interventions in that it protects both the individual and the community. The UK's immunisation programme has been highly successful in controlling a number of life threatening infectious diseases, and consequently public concern has shifted from the diseases to vaccine safety. In recent years a series of vaccine myths and vaccine safety scares have affected the UK and other industrialised countries. Although an effective vaccine without any risk is probably unachievable, the vaccines in use in the UK are very safe. Serious adverse outcomes truly attributable to vaccination are extremely rare, always far rarer than adverse outcomes among individuals acquiring the vaccines' target infections. Vaccine safety may be called into question, however, on the basis of spurious coincidental associations between vaccination and adverse events. An inadequate public health response in the 1970s to a scare over whooping cough vaccine allowed substantial losses of professional and public confidence to take place. Vaccine coverage halved and much preventable morbidity and mortality resulted. Plausible vaccine associations must be investigated thoroughly, and the UK has become a world leader in developing techniques for rapid investigations. The public health response to scares over MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine safety has been faster and firmer than for whooping cough and no link has been found between MMR vaccine and inflammatory bowel disease or autism. Consequently the impact on immunisation coverage has been small, though the cumulative threat of measles, mumps, and rubella epidemics is growing. Recently an international investigation excluded a possible association of intussusception with oral polio vaccine before it could become a vaccine scare. A clearer chain of communication in responding to vaccine myths and scares is needed. This must provide rapid information and, if appropriate, reassurance to professionals and the public. Considerably more training is needed for professionals in providing information to the public and supporting parents in making difficult decisions over vaccination. Though there is no place for complacency, and improvements are needed, the UK's ability to monitor vaccine effectiveness, safety, and risks is strong. As a consequence it has a vaccination programme that is very safe and very effective.     

Ending sexual violence in conflict: the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its critics

During the past year, the UK Government has become the lead advocate for a perhaps surprising foreign policy goal: ending sexual violence in conflict. The participation of government representatives from more than 120 countries in a London Summit in June 2014 was the clearest manifestation of this project. This article offers an early assessment of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) and situates it within the history of global action against sexual and gender‐based violence from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 onwards, with a particular focus on three key developments. First, the PSVI has embraced the already common understanding of rape as a ‘weapon of war’, and has stressed the importance of military training and accountability. This has exposed the tensions within global policy between a focus on all forms of sexual violence (including intimate partner violence in and out of conflict situations) on the one hand, and war zone activities on the other. Second, the Initiative has placed great emphasis on ending impunity, which implicates it in ongoing debates about the role of international and local justice as an effective response to atrocity. Third, men and boys have been foregrounded as ignored victims of sexual and gender‐based violence. The PSVI has been crucial to that recognition, but faces significant challenges in operationalizing its commitment and in avoiding damage to existing programmes to end violence against women and girls. The success of the Initiative will depend on its ability to navigate these challenges in multiple arenas of global politics.     

2001—2015年全球健康产业贸易网络特征研究

基于2001—2015年195个国家间健康产业贸易矩阵,采用社会网络分析方法,分析了全球健康产业贸易网络特征。结果表明：①绿色农产品、保健食品行业和药品行业全球贸易参与性最高,保健康复、健康家居行业区域性较强。②健康产业的出口集中控制在少数国家,而健康产业需求普遍性较高。③全球可以分为欧洲及中东亚、美洲、中东及南亚、亚太地区、东南非洲5个健康产业子群。④欧美在药品、保健品、农产品等行业具有控制优势,中国在保健康复、家居行业居主导地位。⑤欧美国家长期居于贸易核心地位,中、印等亚太国家控制作用显著提升,多元化趋势显现。⑥全球健康产业网络格局是由科技水平与科研投入、健康理念、产业政策等因素综合带动形成的。     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

Traumatic masculinities: the gendered geographies of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia

Over 200,000 people became internally displaced after several violent conflicts in the early 1990s in Georgia. For many internally displaced persons (IDPs), gender relations have been transformed significantly. This translates to many women taking on the role of breadwinner for their family, which often is accompanied by the process of demasculinization for men. In this article, we examine the construction of masculinities and analyze the gendered processes of displacement and living in post-displacement for Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia. We identify the formation of ‘traumatic masculinities’ as a result of the threats to, though not usurpation of, hegemonic masculinities. Drawing on interviews, we highlight how IDPs conceptualize gender norms and masculinities in Georgia. Despite the disruptions that displacement has brought about, with the subsequent challenges to IDPs' ideal masculine roles, the discourses of hegemonic masculinities still predominate amongst IDPs. We further illustrate this point by identifying two separate gendered discourses of legitimization that attempt to reconcile hegemonic masculinities with the current contexts and circumstances that IDPs face. These new traumatic masculinities do coexist with hegemonic masculinities, although the latter are reformed and redefined as a result of the new contexts and new places within which they are performed.     

Disruptive Voices and Boundaries of Respectability in Christchurch,New Zealand

In 1998, New Zealand's TV3 broadcast two programmes featuring women who alleged that a prominent Christchurch physician and local politician had sexually assaulted them while they were patients in his care. The allegations unleashed an immediate and decisive backlash in the mainstream media and this article explores that media response. The analysis of the media debate demonstrates the ideological work which must be constantly carried out by the hegemonic groups in society in order to hold on to the power to define normative geographies, which in this case had been destabilised by the women's allegations. The mainstream media attempted to restore the boundaries of hegemonic respectability by calling on gendered notions of typical female behaviour in order to undermine the validity of the women's experiences. The 'official' image of Christchurch was also evoked in order to reassert ideological values in the face of resistance. The process whereby hegemonic groups attempt to secure control of established geographies is always open to contestation, however, and some media forums opened alternative discursive spaces within which to explore women's narratives. This media event highlights the underlying tensions in society surrounding the production of meanings attached to spaces and places, tensions which problematise the common-sense notions regarding public and private, identity, subjectivity and credibility.     

Urban Food Systems and the Poor in Developing Countries

In many cities in developing countries, hunger and malnutrition are common amongst the poor, even when food is relatively abundant. Over the past two decades, a considerable literature has accumulated on the problems associated with rapid urbanization in developing countries – a literature that for the most part has neglected the important dimension of urban food systems and how these link production and consumption networks at local, regional and global levels. Similarly, whilst there is a newly burgeoning literature on global food systems, the contextual role of the urbanization process is rarely addressed. This paper attempts to fuse these two major areas of geographical investigation to highlight the issues that need to be addressed in future research programmes so that improved diets become accessible to all urban dwellers.     

Rights to the rescue? The promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights and the rise of the Mexican security state

This article demonstrates how the promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights in Mexico has furthered a conservative agenda of state securitization. To do so, it presents a discourse analysis of national media reports focused on the story of Eufrosina Cruz, a Zapotec woman who became the figurehead for state-led initiatives to promote Indigenous women's rights. It argues that a colonial rescue narrative constructed through Cruz's figure helped generate new hegemonic discourses of gendered indigeneity that portrayed Indigenous peoples' alternative political practices and spaces as anti-democratic and illegal. In an era where advancements in party democracy were linked to processes of state securitization, these categorizations helped justify new forms of state intervention into Indigenous peoples' lives. By exploring how rights initiatives were discursively constructed through racialized, spatialized and gendered constructions of indigeneity, this article contributes to a critical geography of indigeneity within political geography.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

Proving One's Manliness: Masculine Self‐perceptions of Austrian Deserters in the Second World War

While important work has been produced on discourses of masculinity and the normative masculine ideals in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Europe we know very little about the actual experiences and self‐images of individual men. This article, largely based on oral history interviews with former deserters, analyses the gendered identities of Austrian men who were recruited to serve in the Wehrmacht and who later deserted. Deserters were brutally persecuted in the Third Reich and denounced as ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards’. The glorification of martial masculinity in Nazi Germany played a crucial role in the defamation of deserters, whose manliness was called into question. Based on Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, the article aims to establish the actual influence of dominant ideals of masculinity. It investigates how these deserters perceived themselves as men and how they negotiated their gendered identities in interaction with their surroundings. The analysis reveals the considerable influence of the hegemonic ideal of ‘hard’ masculinity, which was far greater than the impact of the rather short‐lived ideal of martial masculinity. But it also demonstrates the contradictory nature of gendered identities and gives valuable insights into the selective appropriation of masculine values.     

Degrading the Male Body: Manhood and Conflict in the High‐medieval Low Countries

Recent studies of medieval manhood have prompted scholars to revisit the established research field of medieval conflict and have directed attention towards the role of gendered violence in (elite) political culture. However, symbolic impermanent defamations of the male body proper remain to be discussed. Drawing from the rich narrative sources from the high‐medieval Low Countries, this article aims in particular at remedying this blind spot by scrutinising specific forms of gendered violence, such as the enforced shearing of an elite man's beard or a public mocking of his chivalric manly fortitude. It also presents the argument that these practices, when used in contexts of conflict and punishment, not only tapped into the authority of ancient traditions and rituals but rather might have served clear contemporary interests relating to the pacification of society. Such tactics would have helped to avoid feud in a world in which aristocratic manly honour regularly seemed to demand it, especially in a time when centralised and consolidated structures for conflict management were still lacking and a religiously inspired peace ideal influenced policy‐making as well as day‐to‐day social dynamics.     

Women Beneficiaries or Women Bearing the Cost? A Gendered Analysis of the Red de Protección Social in Nicaragua

Conditional Cash Transfer programmes aim to alleviate short‐term poverty through cash transfers to poor households, and to reduce longer‐term poverty through making these transfers conditional on household investment in the health and education of children. These programmes have become increasingly popular with institutions such as the World Bank. However, the need for conditionalities has been questioned on a number of levels, including its necessity: it has been suggested that the cash transfer in itself may be sufficient to secure most of the programme's wider aims. The example of Nicaragua supports this contention, demonstrating that only a small incentive is needed to bring the desired changes in the uptake of education, since this is something prized by the poor themselves. In health, the Nicaraguan case suggests that demand‐side initiatives might not be as important as supply‐side changes that improve the affordability and accessibility of services. The Nicaragua case also highlights the long‐term limitations of applying such programmes in countries with high levels of poverty and low economic growth. A gendered analysis of the programme highlights the fact that women ‘beneficiaries’ bear the economic and social cost of the programme without apparent benefit to themselves or even necessarily to the household in the short or longer term.     

Fear,feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

The global,the ethnic and the gendered war: women and rape in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the perspectives of women who experienced sexual violence perpetrated in the warscapes of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Civilians are targeted for rape, loot and pillage yielding deleterious effects on the social fabric and the sustenance the community provides. The article is based on 11 qualitative semistructured interviews and 4 written narratives from women of reproductive age, recruited from organizations providing support post-sexual violation. The study departs from a larger ethnographic project investigating the phenomenon of war-rape. Thematic analysis guided the analysis through the theoretical lenses of structural violence and intersectionality. The women expressed total insecurity and a multitude of losses from bodily integrity, health, loss of family, life course possibilities, livelihoods and a sense of place; a profound dispossession of identity and marginalization. Pregnancies resulting from rape reinforced stigma and burdened the survivor with raising a stigmatized child on the margins of society. Perpetrators of rape were mostly identified as Interhamwe (Rwandan Hutus rebels) who entered Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their goal, according to the women, was to spread HIV and impregnate Congolese women, thereby destroying families, communities and society. The women survivors of war-rape described experiences of profound loss in this conflict which has global, ethnic and gendered dimensions. Congo's conflict thus requires critical reflection on how local wars and subsequent human suffering are situated in a matrix of globalization processes, enabled by transnational actors and embedded in structural violence.     

Of Mumps and Men: Masculinity and the Severity of a Vaccine Preventable Disease in Western Medicine, 1760s–1960s

This article, based on an analysis of English language medical literature on mumps’ manifestation in men, women and children from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examines the role of gender in shaping conceptualisations of mumps’ severity and medical significance. Over time, gendered social roles undermined the medical notion of mumps as a severe disease of women while elevating mumps’ reputation as a severe and significant disease of men, eventually casting the disease as a threat to masculinity. When the modern mumps vaccine was commercialised in the 1960s, its development built on a long history of gendered conceptualisations of mumps and its use cast children as safeguards of a legacy of masculine citizenship defined by military activity and fatherhood.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Precarious Lives in the Global South: On Being Disabled in Guyana

Most of what is known about disabled women's and men's lives is based on research conducted in the global North despite the fact that 80% of the world's one billion disabled people live in countries of the global South. This article addresses this gap in our understanding of disabled people's lives by examining impairment and disability as outcomes of processes of social embodiment that unfold in an unequal global capitalist order. Drawing on 87 interviews conducted with disabled women and men in Guyana, the article illustrates how colonial and neo‐colonial relations of power and processes of development give rise to material conditions of life such as extreme poverty and male violence that contribute to impairment and disability. The article concludes by discussing the article's contributions, challenges in developing southern perspectives on impairment and disability, and the need to address socio‐spatial injustices experienced by disabled people in the global South.