Gender, Militarization and Sovereignty
TL;DR: In this paper, a feminist reformulation of militarization as a banal process that is furtively present in our everyday spaces is presented, which reinforces the creation of gendered political identities.
Abstract: Militarization is a process that we often consider restricted to the boundaries of the state. However this essay offers a feminist reformulation of militarization as a banal process that is furtively present in our everyday spaces. This essay focuses on some of the arguments put forth by both scholars of geopolitics and feminist political geography in order to understand how the process of militarization traverses not only at the scales of global politics but also with the intimates scales of the home and the body. Most importantly, the arguments presented in this essay are in agreement that militarization is a hegemonic process, which reinforces sovereignty, resulting in the creation of gendered political identities.
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TL;DR: Green militarization as mentioned in this paper is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts, which is a recent trend around the world.
Abstract: Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts I introduce this concept, first, as a call for more sustained scholarly investigation into the militarization of conservation practice More modestly, the article offers its own contribution to this end by turning to South Africa's Kruger National Park, the world's most concentrated site of commercial rhino poaching Focusing on the state's multilayered and increasingly lethal militarized response to what is itself a highly militarized practice, I illustrate how the spatial qualities of protected areas matter
280 citations
Cites background from "Gender, Militarization and Sovereig..."
...Dowler (2012) hence contends that militarization is “an everyday and malevolent process that lurks in our everyday spaces” (491)....
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...Not only does this amount to a deeper infiltration of militarization across various spaces, but it also rests on a logic of violence as an appropriate means of resolving conflict (Dowler 2012)....
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...In addition, innovative work spearheaded largely by feminist geographers has investigated how military practices and ideologies transform seemingly banal spaces, ranging from the “home front” (Loyd 2011) to storefronts (Dowler 2012) and city streets (Katz 2007)....
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...…an understanding of militarism as an ideology that privileges military culture and values—including violence as an appropriate response to conflict—and that justifies the expansion of these values and culture into nominally civilian spheres (Enloe 2004; Bernazzoli and Flint 2010; Dowler 2012)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the parallels, shared foundations and direct points of connection between everyday and global terrorism, and explore the inequitable nature of counter-terrorisms across four interrelated themes: multiscalar politics and securities, fear and trauma, public recognition and recovery.
Abstract: This paper remaps the geographies of terrorism. Everyday terrorism (domestic violence) and global terrorism are related attempts to exert political control through fear. Geographical research on violence neatly reflects the disproportionate recognition and resourcing that global terrorism receives from the state. The paper explores the parallels, shared foundations and direct points of connection between everyday and global terrorisms. It does so across four interrelated themes: multiscalar politics and securities, fear and trauma, public recognition and recovery, and the inequitable nature of counter-terrorisms. It concludes with implications for addressing terrorisms and for future research.
221 citations
Cites background from "Gender, Militarization and Sovereig..."
...Feminist political geographers have long insisted on rupturing global/local binaries (Dowler, 2012; Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001; Katz, 2004; Pratt and Rosner, 2006; Staeheli et al., 2004)....
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...Also, as geographers have identified, global terrorism, securitization and militarization are inserted into the everyday through state activities, popular culture, material practices and counter- terrorism measures (Amoore, 2007; Dowler, 2012; Graham, 2010)....
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...The meta-project, following feminist geographers’ lead (for example, Dowler, 2012; Hyndman, 2003; Pain and Smith, 2008; Pratt, 2012; Pratt and Rosner, 2006; Staeheli et al., 2004), is to collapse the scaling of these different forms of violence, drawing together mainstream and feminist analyses of…...
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02 Feb 2015
TL;DR: The authors argue that a geographically informed critical military studies can be illuminating on matters of war and militarism because of its attention to the located, situated, and constitutive natures of military power.
Abstract: This paper is about the distinctive contributions which contemporary military geography might make to the wider critical military studies project. The paper notes the relative absence of the study of military topics across Anglophone human geography in the second half of the twentieth century, and the resurgence of interest in the spatialities of militarism and military activities over the past decade or so in tandem with the emergence of critical geography. The paper then goes on to examine three key tropes of geographical inquiry to illustrate how a critical military studies alert to spatiality might develop further. These are geography’s rich tradition of research and writing about landscape, geography’s engagement with concepts of representation, and geography’s theorizing on scale. The paper argues that a geographically informed critical military studies can be illuminating on matters of war and militarism because of its attention to the located, situated, and constitutive natures of military power a...
83 citations
Cites background from "Gender, Militarization and Sovereig..."
...…with the macro-scale, state-level impacts of military actions and capabilities, and towards an understanding of militarism as a “type of gendered sovereignty . . . not only fixed at the scale of international hierarchies, but . . . rooted in embodied place-making practices” (Dowler 2012, 492)....
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TL;DR: This paper explored how the emotionality and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of "communities of feeling" through which differently gendered or racialised individuals can find their "place" in the national story.
Abstract: This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.
81 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The authors examines Marshall Islander migration to Arkansas as an outcome of an international agreement, the Compact of Free Association (COFA), between the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a former British colony.
Abstract: This dissertation examines Marshall Islander migration to Arkansas as an outcome of an international agreement, the Compact of Free Association, between the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a former U.S. territory. While the Compact marked the formal end of U.S. colonial administration over the islands, it also re-entrenched imperial power relations between the two countries, at once consolidating U.S. military access to the islands and creating a Marshallese diaspora whose largest resettlement site is now Springdale, Arkansas. As a result, Springdale, an “allwhite town” for much of the 20 century, has recently been remade by Marshallese and also Latino immigration, nearly tripling in size in the past three decades. I examine U.S. empire through three interrelated lenses: through an imperial policy, the Compact of Free Association (COFA); through an imperial diaspora, the Marshallese diaspora; and through the town of Springdale, Arkansas, a new immigrant destination for Marshall Islanders, which I argue has become a new destination of empire. These three lenses reveal how empire’s interrelated workings—migration, militarization, racialization, labor, detention, capitalism, and the law, among others—inform one another to uphold U.S. imperial power and how U.S. empire both engenders and constrains mobility for its subjects. I argue that COFA status, the visa-free immigration status granted to Marshallese immigrants, is a type of imperial citizenship and that its partial, contingent, and revocable character produces precarity for those who hold it, placing them alongside other groups of imperial citizens from U.S. nonsovereign territories. Due to a lack of awareness of U.S. empire, however, long-term residents in new destinations of empire like Springdale are unable to comprehend Marshall Islanders as imperial citizens. Instead, their interpretations of Marshall Islanders’ presence are woven back into dominant narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. Such interpretations of why COFA status exists exemplify and perpetuate an occlusion of U.S. empire. In Springdale, in other words, the refrain—‘We are here because you were there’, commonly used to explain the presence of imperial migrants elsewhere— was never heard and, thus, never placed in the context of empire. NEW DESTINATIONS OF EMPIRE: IMPERIAL MIGRATION FROM THE MARSHALL ISLANDS TO NORTHWEST ARKANSAS
71 citations
Cites background from "Gender, Militarization and Sovereig..."
...…like Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, it is able to exert considerable political, economic, and military influence over them, in part due to the presence of U.S. military bases and troops, an influence that arguably diminishes the sovereignty of those nations (Gregory, 2004; Dowler, 2012)....
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...…on “big-picture” structural analyses of power and territory (Elden, 2007; but see feminist geopolitical scholars like Hyndman, 2004, Pratt, 2005, and Dowler, 2012 for counter-tendencies), cultural geographers have tended to study more localized sites of cultural production and contestation as…...
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References
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TL;DR: This paper explored the intimate historical and modern connection between manhood and nationhood, through the construction of patriotic manhood, exalted motherhood as icons of nationalist ideology, and the designation of gendered 'places' for men and women in national politics.
Abstract: This article explores the intimate historical and modern connection between manhood and nationhood: through the construction of patriotic manhood and exalted motherhood as icons of nationalist ideology; through the designation of gendered 'places' for men and women in national politics; through the domination of masculine interests and ideology in nationalist movements; through the interplay between masculine microcultures and nationalist ideology; through sexualized militarism including the construction of simultaneously over-sexed and under-sexed 'enemy' men (rapists and wimps) and promiscuous 'enemy' women (sluts and whores). Three 'puzzles' are partially solved by exposing the connection between masculinity and nationalism: why are many men so desperate to defend masculine, monoracial, and heterosexual institutional preserves, such as military organizations and academies; why do men go to war; and the 'gender gap', that is, why do men and women appear to have very different goals and agendas for the '...
754 citations
TL;DR: Staeheli et al. as discussed by the authors pointed out the continued relative absence of women in the sub-discipline of political geography, particularly noticeable given the changing gender balance of other parts of geography.
Abstract: Recent debates centring on a nascent feminist geopolitics indite the historical reasoning of geopolitical arguments as masculinist. These discussions have taken place in a variety of settings from informal conversations at meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) to more institutional investigations, such as a recent survey conducted by the Political Geography Speciality Group (see Staeheli, in this issue). An unavoidable point of entry to these debates is the continued relative absence of women in the sub-disciplineÐ particularly noticeable given the changing gender balance of other parts of geography. Feminist and other marginal voices have made great impacts on geography and related disciplines in recent years, but their impact on political geography has been much slighter. Although political geography has turned to an interest in the everyday and mundane exercise of power, it has tended to articulate this in terms of the `cultural turn’ rather than an acknowledgement of the feminist insistence that t̀he personal is political’ . Nor has there been much attention given to from where political geography emanates. Political geographers have decentred the seat of power and engaged in critiques of the orientalism of global geopolitical discourse but, if anything, political geography has become more eurocentric in terms of the focus of empirical research. It would appear that Richard Ashley’s call in 1987 for a a geopolitics of geopolitical spaceo is still keenly required of the intellectual spaces of political geography. However, 14 years later we still ® nd little interaction between political and feminist geography (with the exception of the emergence of some interesting collaborations between political, cultural and feminist geographers such as the Politics and Identity in Place and Space Group (PIPS) at Penn State and a few published discussions such as Dalby, 1994; Kofman and Peake, 1990; McDowell and Sharp, 1997; Staeheli, 1996). And yet many feminist and post-colonial geographers are producing work that is primarily concerned with the politicisation of the world around us, whether the politicisation of leisure, the body or knowledge about peoples and places around the world. This has required a reconceptualisation of the politicalÐ something which political geographers would
459 citations
TL;DR: The notion of a feminist geopolitics as mentioned in this paper aims to bridge scholarship in feminist and political geography by creating a theoretical and political space in which geopolitics becomes a more gendered and racialized project, one that is epistemologically situated and embodied in its conception of security.
380 citations
TL;DR: The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography as discussed by the authors, and the intersection and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few, which is why it is important to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics.
Abstract: The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. ‘Feminist’ in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.
253 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the Orientalist invocation of the "terrorist" is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual "others", foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects themselves.
Abstract: In this paper I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay, lesbian, and queer subjects themselves: homo-nationalism. For contemporary forms of US nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay, lesbian and queer bodies is crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects. Mapping forms of US homo-nationalism, vital accomplices to Orientalist terrorist others, is instructive as it alludes to the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the US, as the analytic of race-sexuality provides a crucial yet under-theorized method to think through the imaginative geographies of the US in ...
244 citations