A photo depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin in chivalrous fashion, placing his coat around the shoulders of China's first lady at an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) dinner made headline news around the world in November 2014 (Allen-Ebrahimian Reference Allen-Ebrahimian2014). Surely this is not the serious stuff of international politics, IR colleagues commented in social media forums? But from a feminist perspective that pays attention to the pervasive gendering of IR, the image was not at all surprising or trivial. Indeed, the gender symbolism of the image reveals the patriarchal foundations of international politics. Putin, for his part, personifies the linkages between the figure of the male provider—at the heart of global economic governance and meetings like APEC—and the figure of the male protector of “womenandchildren” (Enloe Reference Enloe1993)—at the heart of the security state system.
Feminist political economy (FPE) analysis reveals the analogy between male heads of households and the masculine state. Both equally control the lives of dependents under the guise that it is in their best interests. Their unequal power is violent, but the violence is masked by virtue and love (Young Reference Young2003, 6). Such analysis helps to explain the prevalence of men's violence against women in the private household as well as the male dominance of state-sanctioned war and conflict. Modern forms of patriarchal households themselves were formed through the force of industrialization and regime of accumulation in and for the formation of warring sovereign states (Mies Reference Mies1986; Peterson Reference Peterson1992). However, the gendered division of labor between economic production in the market and social reproduction in the household has obscured men's violence vis à vis dependents inside households compared with men's violence outside vis à vis other “enemy” groups. Through a feminist political economy perspective we can see how the security state is constructed and legitimated through the masculine role of the provider in the patriarchal family-household and how the state appears a legitimate protector writ large to citizens when it uses force abroad, often in the name of women and children.
This essay advances the case for an integrated feminist analysis of international relations inspired by the multidimensional account of women's security in IR feminist scholarship. Crucially, FPE makes the link between the “male provider” and the “male protector” in explaining the prevalence of men's violence from the private household to the public realm and in state-sanctioned war and conflict. The importance of an FPE approach to international security is illustrated with respect to the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Such an approach opens up new areas of research and ways of addressing IR challenges.
GENESIS OF FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The FPE approach is no news to many IR feminist scholars and indeed harks back to the earliest articulation of a feminist perspective on IR. Cynthia Enloe, for instance, makes feminist sense of global politics, integrating the study of political economy and security politics with ethnographic methods and her trademark curiosity-driven inquiry. Enloe (Reference Enloe2010) analyzes the fallout of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the political regime changes ensuing from the Arab Spring from the perspective of women's lives. She does not separate these distinct events as matters of international political economy or international security respectively. Instead her gendered lens explores the similarities across them, highlighting their masculinist logics and disproportionate gendered effects.
Ann Tickner (Reference Tickner1992, 55–56, 66) mounts a powerful argument contra IR realism, pointing out that international security must encompass ecological, economic, and physical security at all levels—individual, state, and global. She (1992, 23) states that because of “the sexual division of labour, men's association with violence has been legitimated through war and the instrument of the state.” Thus, she argues that IR “feminist perspectives must introduce the issue of domestic violence and analyze how the boundaries of public and private, domestic and international, political and economic are permeable and interrelated.” Crucially, the linkage of war to violence against women should be part of any comprehensive account of security (Tickner Reference Tickner1992, 55).
Following the lead of these trailblazing scholars, IR feminists are examining so-called private or domestic forms of violence against women and not just that violence through the prism of security studies, war, and conflict. They are confronting regimes of unequal entitlements, masculine hegemonies that hold hierarchical political economic orders together at every level. One of the things the state should be is a protector—but today this means that all states are expected to pass laws prohibiting domestic and sexual violence, for instance. States, even authoritarian ones, must be seen to doing something to address gendered violence to respond to the now globalized social movements that are making this violence visible.
THE UNITED NATIONS WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA
IR feminists are exploring the continuum of gendered violence through engagement with the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda. Addressing the protection and prevention of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) specifically requires a feminist political economy approach, not just the mainstreaming of gender within international security issues. UN Security Council WPS resolutions since SCR 1325 in 2000 have progressively narrowed their focus to the issue of the use of sexual violence in conflict and disaggregated this violence from other forms of gendered violence affecting women and girls disproportionately. The slew of Security Council resolutions from 1820 to 2122 have focused on coordination mechanisms for protection within peace operations and legal accountability mechanisms for prevention, but they have not addressed the root causes of the sexual violence, such as the social structures of gender inequality, economic impoverishment, and lack of opportunity.
On the demand side, many conflicts involve competition over land and other natural resources, and several implicate large transnational corporations in human rights violations. Indeed, SGBV against women and girls, boys and men may be deployed precisely to dispossess individuals and communities of their land and to remove the agricultural labor force of a community. Because women often do the majority of agricultural work, some conflicts have witnessed armed groups attempting to stop women from being able to work, effectively cutting the food supply of the “enemy” (Turshen Reference Turshen1998). On the supply side, women's empowerment is a critical part of violence prevention in and outside of conflict. It is true that women of all income groups and in all conflicts experience men's violence, but when women have access to productive resources and enjoy equal social and economic rights with men, they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies (True Reference True2012). Not surprisingly, countries that value women's equal participation—and where there are fewer economic, social, or political differences in power between men and women—have lower levels of violence and of intrastate armed conflict (Caprioli Reference Caprioli2005; WHO 2005).
To illustrate the importance of an FPE perspective on the WPS agenda, consider women's experiences of multiple forms of insecurity and violence in postconflict Sri Lanka. The conflict was officially over in Sri Lanka in 2009; however, while the war is over, the violence has not ended. The situation of structural violence for minority women, in the north and east of Sri Lanka in particular, exacerbates women's vulnerability to physical violence, including sex trafficking, harassment, sexual violence, and domestic violence.
In the latter stages of the conflict and its aftermath, military forces were responsible for a variety of human rights abuses against the civilian population, including extrajudicial killings, disappearance, rape, sexual harassment, and other violations. In the current climate of impunity, sustained by insecurity and the lack of military accountability, these abuses continue. Thousands of women have lost their husbands and other family members during the armed conflict. For many, this has brought new responsibilities: 40,000 households in the north and east are now female-headed. Women are now primary “providers” for their families: they face limited livelihood opportunities in the postconflict context and are typically excluded from official development programs. Moreover, against a backdrop of competing claims and mass resettlement, they are especially vulnerable to land grabs and other rights violations. The militarization of these regions since the formal end of the conflict has compounded the insecurities for minority women. Many, especially widows and the wives of disappeared or “surrenderees,” are vulnerable every day to sexual harassment, exploitation, or assault by army personnel or other militias (see Davies and True Reference Davies, True and Powell2015). These women are targeted for violence as embodiments of minority group identity and because gendered cultures of stigma and shame generalizes their oppression and punishment across their families and communities.
An FPE perspective expands the WPS agenda by directing our attention toward the long-term prevention of conflict and violence. More than gendered interpersonal relations, religious and cultural dynamics, it emphasizes the gendered globalized structures that contribute to violence and conflict, such as gender-biased macroeconomic policies, supply chains, labor markets, and political norms. These structures are modifiable, and where they can be shown to be causal of violence, as in the case of Sri Lanka, WPS policy changes could be devised to significantly reduce the incidence of widespread sexual and gender-based violence.
OPENING UP NEW AREAS OF RESEARCH
Bringing a feminist political economy perspective to bear on international security opens up new areas of concern and research. One major area involves rethinking gendered states, in particular, the interface between the “security state” and the “authoritarian neoliberal state” form (Bruff Reference Bruff2014) following transformations in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Both forms of state are legitimated through gender relations. The authoritarian neoliberal state values masculine qualities of competitiveness, risk taking, and rationality as does the security state, and in this way they both support one another. As political economists argue contra ideologies of the free market, neoliberalism does not involve less state but more state orchestration of the kinds of activity that are feasible and appropriate for market and public institutions to engage in. There are opportunities for IR feminist research on how increased defense budgets are prioritized in many countries at the same time as foreign aid budgets are diminished and access to services for noncitizens are virtually eliminated. Feminist research and advocacy has long emphasised the trade-offs between military and social spending and the unequal gender impacts of increased military spending. This debate has renewed currency in the post-GFC austerity climate, given the heavy costs of seeking security against globalized terrorism in the age of social media where anyone can claim links to a global militant movement.
Gendered economic structures determine the limits and the possibilities of politics, including security politics, whereas politics is the principal means through which markets are established and transformed. IR feminism must therefore be informed about political economy whatever the issue under study. Examining the connections between military/security complexes and financial capital will enable us to better understand how patriarchal power works. Given that global political and economic life are practically imbricated and that, echoing Enloe (Stark Reference Stark2013), IR feminist scholars share a broad curiosity, political economy needs to be part of any and all feminist analysis of international relations.
