Papers by Claire Duncanson
The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, 2017
Rather than accept at face value the assumption that militaries exist to protect the borders of s... more Rather than accept at face value the assumption that militaries exist to protect the borders of states and the citizens within them, anti-militarist feminists see militaries as part of a system which threatens us all. As such, they are sceptical that the integration of women into militaries will challenge this war system. This chapter details the twin themes of much anti-militarist feminist research – militarism’s destructive power and militaries as misogynist institutions – and shows how they generate a feminist analysis of war as a system. It then examines the place of anti-militarist feminist scholarship on gender and the military today.
Politics & Gender, 2017
As feminists who think about war and peacebuilding, we cannot help but encounter the complex, ent... more As feminists who think about war and peacebuilding, we cannot help but encounter the complex, entwined political economic processes that underlie wars’ causes, their courses, and the challenges of postwar reconstruction. For us, then, the increasing academic division between feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE) has been a cause for concern, and we welcomed Politics & Gender’s earlier Critical Perspectives section on efforts to bridge the two (June 2015). We noticed, however, that although violence was addressed in several of the special section's articles, war made only brief and somewhat peripheral appearances, and peacebuilding was all but absent. While three contributions (Hudson 2015; Sjoberg 2015; True 2015) mentioned the importance of political economy in the analysis of armed conflict, the aspects of war on which the articles focused were militarized sexualities (Sjoberg 2015) or conflict-related and postwar sexual and ...
Hegemonic masculinity was introduced as a concept which, due to its understanding of gender as dy... more Hegemonic masculinity was introduced as a concept which, due to its understanding of gender as dynamic and relational, and of power as consent, could explain both the persistence of male power and the potential for social change. Yet, when hegemonic masculinity is applied in empirical cases, it is most often used to demonstrate the way in which hegemonic masculinity shifts and adopts new practices in order to enable some men to retain power over others. This is especially so in feminist International Relations, particularly studies of military masculinities, where shifts toward ‘‘softer’’ military masculinities such as the ‘‘tough and tender’ ’ soldier-scholar demonstrate to many feminists merely the ‘‘flexibility of the machinery of rule.’ ’ In this article, I challenge the pessimism of these accounts of military masculinity. My particular contribution is to build on an emergent and underdeveloped strand of Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinity: how change might be theorized. I a...
The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, 2017
WHY A HANDBOOK OF GENDER AND THE MILITARY? This Handbook is rooted in three observations. The fir... more WHY A HANDBOOK OF GENDER AND THE MILITARY? This Handbook is rooted in three observations. The first is about the significance of the relationships between gender and the military, about just how fundamental an understanding of gender is to comprehend military forces, institutions, activities and effects, and in turn how important these are to comprehend how gender works as a social construct and a social force. The second is about the complexity of these relationships, for the connections between gender and the military are not necessarily obvious or straightforward (though they might be) but are moulded by a plethora of contexts, activities, people, social processes and practices. The third observation underpinning this Handbook is about the fluidity and dynamism of these relationships, for they are never static or inevitable but rather change over a range of timescales, are prompted by military transformations, are subject to shifts in gender politics and are influenced by developments from the local to the global in geopolitical and economic events and circumstances. The relationships between gender and the military, then, are never incidental, straightforward or static. The purpose of this Handbook is to capture and explore something of this significance, complexity and dynamism. If the relationships between gender and the military are significant, what does that actually mean? Significant in what ways? Significant to whom? Why? In this introductory section, we argue that the significance stems from three major
Review of International Political Economy, 2020
Feminist Solutions for Ending War, 2021
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2020
In this article, we argue that the effort to get the Women, Peace and Security agenda implemented... more In this article, we argue that the effort to get the Women, Peace and Security agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. Indeed, going down the bureaucratic implementation rabbit hole has made it almost impossible for advocates to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustainable peace? As we approach the twentieth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we argue that WPS advocates need to return to that question, but in doing so, must also acknowledge the changed context. One striking change is that climate breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and any attempt to build gender-just sustainable peace will face serious climateinduced challenges. However, the climate crisis creates not only challenges for the WPS agenda, but also opportunities. The sustainability of peace and of the planet are inextricably linked, and we argue that the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.
International Peacekeeping, 2018
This paper is about the experiences of Gender Advisors in NATO and partner militaries, and the qu... more This paper is about the experiences of Gender Advisors in NATO and partner militaries, and the question of whether militaries can contribute to a feminist vision of peace and security. Gender Advisors are increasingly being adopted as a mechanism to help militaries to implement commitments under the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Based on semi-structured interviews and a workshop with individuals working as Military Gender Advisors from 2009 to 2016 in Afghanistan, Kosovo and in NATO and national military commands and headquarters, this paper explores their own perceptions of their work, its goals, shortcomings and achievements. It highlights Military Gender Advisors' strong commitment to Women, Peace and Security aims, but the resistance their work faces within their institutions, and challenges of inadequate resourcing, preparation and contextual knowledge. Military Gender Advisors' experiences paint a picture of NATO and partner Militaries having in some places made progress in protection and empowerment of local women, but fragile and partial. These findings speak to wider debates within feminist security studies around whether and how militaries achieve human security in peacekeeping operations, and the risks of militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2018
This article is about women's economic empowerment within the United Nations Women, Peace and Sec... more This article is about women's economic empowerment within the United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Based on analysis of the core agenda-setting documents, it traces where the two different versions of women's economic empowerment, "liberal" (including women in the formal economy) and "liberating" (women collectively mobilizing to challenge the status quo) appear in the WPS agenda. It argues that the two exist in uneasy tension in the UN's aspirations for women's economic security and well-being, but that when it comes to actual activities and achievements, the liberal version dominates over the liberating version. The article argues that it is important not to overstate the divide between the two approaches, and that the seeds of a liberating approach can be found within the liberal. It is initiatives to facilitate women's economic empowerment that contain opportunities for collective action to transform the structures of the economy that WPS advocates should push for in order to strengthen and deepen the WPS agenda.
Security Dialogue, 2015
This article considers how, in the light of contemporary military transformations, feminist theor... more This article considers how, in the light of contemporary military transformations, feminist theorizing about women’s military participation might be developed to take account of an emergent reality: the inclusion of increasing numbers of women in a range of roles within armed forces. A brief overview of established debates within feminist scholarship on women’s military participation is provided, and we explore the trajectory of feminist strategies for change within both militaries and other institutions. The promise and limitations of mainstreaming gender into security institutions, as a consequence of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, are discussed. The article argues that existing feminist critiques often remain deterministic and have too readily dismissed the possibilities for change created by women’s military participation, given the context of military transformations. Drawing on the idea of the regendered military, the article presents a conceptual strategy for considerin...
Defence Studies, 2016
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Intern... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints-eprint.ncl.ac.uk Woodward R, Duncanson C. Gendered divisions of military labour in the British armed forces.
New Political Science, 2008
This paper enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons sta... more This paper enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons state. Specifically, we develop an analysis of the ways in which gender operates in the White Paper published by the UK Government in 2006 on its plans to renew Trident nuclear weapons (given the go-ahead by the Westminster Parliament in March 2007). We argue that the White Paper mobilises masculinecoded language and symbols in several ways: firstly, in its mobilisation of technostrategic rationality and axioms; secondly, in its assumptions about security; and, thirdly, in its assumptions about the state as actor. Taken together, these function to construct a masculinised identity for the British nuclear state as a 'responsible steward'. However, this identity is one that is not yet securely fixed and that, indeed, contains serious internal tensions that opponents of Trident (and of the nuclear state more generally), should be able to exploit.
This chapter introduces the pioneering scholarship of feminists and other masculinities scholars ... more This chapter introduces the pioneering scholarship of feminists and other masculinities scholars who first drew attention to the connections between masculinities and militarism, many of whom argued that masculinities are causal in militarism and war. It goes on to highlight the work of scholars who complicated that original insight by drawing out attention to the multiplicity of masculinities at play in militarism and war, and their inherent contradictions and instabilities. It concludes with a discussion of the question of whether and how masculinities can be unravelled in the service of peace.
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Papers by Claire Duncanson