FSS AND GPE AS (ANTI)DISCIPLINARY INTERVENTIONS

The June 2015 Critical Perspectives collection, edited by Juanita Elias, argues that while earlier feminist international relations (IR) scholarship “addressed militarism, political economy, and the environment as interrelated” (Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2015, 410), more recent approaches have become preoccupied with “security” and sidelined issues of economic inequality. At the same time, feminist political economy has largely avoided questions of security and/or violence (Elias Reference Elias2015, 406). We link up with and build on many of the considerations and provocations raised throughout the forum, but at the same time, we offer different theoretical and empirical perspectives that further problematize core concepts and approaches in both feminist subfields.

With this, our forum contributes to the discussion on how we can advance feminist understandings of “security” and “political economy” through the lens of an integrated approach. As such, we do not understand the integration of FSS and GPE as additive (e.g., using a GPE lens to study “security issues” or vice versa), nor do we presume them to be unified, homogenous, or completely separate approaches. Rather, we understand both as traditions that share a common goal, namely, to challenge the conventional gendered dichotomies that dominate mainstream economic and security analysis.

FSS, and feminist IR more broadly, has importantly shown not only that security is gendered but also that we need to challenge separations between public and private, “high politics” and the everyday, and individual, national, and international “levels of analysis” to understand its gendered-ness (Enloe Reference Enloe1989; Lobasz and Sjoberg Reference Lobasz and Sjoberg2011; Tickner Reference Tickner1992; Wibben Reference Wibben2011). From this perspective, security as a concept is deconstructed and reconceptualized as interrelated with gendered power relations.

Feminist GPE, in a similar vein, has fundamentally challenged the notion of “the economy” as a neutral space, and it has shown how concepts such as the market; the process of valuation; how value is assigned to labor, skills, and services; and accumulation are intertwined with gendered inequalities. By introducing the notion of social reproduction, feminist GPE scholars have not only highlighted the importance of reproductive functions, largely assumed by women, for global markets. Rather, by employing systemic/structural understandings of gender (Elias and Roberts Reference Elias and Roberts2016; LeBaron Reference LeBaron2014; Peterson Reference Peterson2012), they also have problematized analytical separations between production and reproduction, market and state, and national economies and the household. With this critique, feminists have followed up on a general political economy claim (if understood in a Marxian tradition),Footnote ² namely, that the very distinction between politics and economy is politicized and that unreflected analytical separations can further contribute to depoliticization. Political power relations are always already inscribed into “the economy” and the academic disciplines that engage in its analysis. And, vice versa, policies, political institutions, and processes are embedded within socioeconomic inequalities.

Consequently, GPE analysis is about more than revealing “economic factors” as an unproblematic, independent variable behind security practices and policies, and FSS is more than an “issue area” contributing new topics, such as gender-based violence, to GPE scholarship. A combination of the two, in our understanding, is about asking how (hierarchical) separations between security, policy, and politics, on the one hand, and economy, market, and business, on the other, are constructed and reproduced, how these separation are gendered, and what the gendered effects are. It is also about asking which kind of research is understood as relevant. From this perspective, the contributions in this forum show how such a combination can yield new insights into gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities at the intersections of global politics and global markets.

The contributions by Suzanne Bergeron, Carol Cohn, and Claire Duncanson and by Soumita Basu start out with a critique of the feminist debate on global security governance. Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson argue that attempts to reunite security and political economy approaches have strongly focused on gender-based violence as well as on the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, without paying sufficient attention to war, its causes, and consequences. They specifically center the issue of postconflict reconstruction and peacebuilding, which is often characterized by the resilience of war economies and pressures to adopt neoliberal economic policies that ultimately undermine peacebuilding efforts. The authors suggest that bringing in feminist political economy analysis can help counter the depoliticized understanding of peacebuilding as a purely technical process and that this could support the development of feminist alternatives to neoliberal postconflict policies. However, the authors assert, feminist GPE scholars have not taken the specifics of war-torn societies into account. They propose a joint research agenda through which both fields may not only fine-tune their analytical frameworks but also contribute to a new vision for organization of social and economic life after war or conflict.

Basu highlights the problematics of a narrow focus on the WPS agenda and its ideological aspects, but her critique takes a different path toward improving our understanding of global security governance by looking at the materiality of the agenda's institutional context. She acknowledges that GPE analysis of the WPS agenda is increasing but finds that the political economy of the Security Council itself has not been considered. From this perspective, she sketches a GPE analysis of security governance that goes beyond financial constraints and institutional logics and calls for integrating the politico-economic contexts of geopolitical power relations into the analysis.

THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF “DEBATES”

While FSS and GPE have the potential to challenge the conventional labor divisions between security- and economy-focused research, these separations are often reinscribed into research practices. Thus, we cannot look only at the inner logics of these approaches; rather, we need to turn our attention to the politics and economics of academic knowledge production. From this perspective, the divide is a reflection of disciplinary power, which fosters a tendency to privilege mainstream research topics. At the same time, some of the contributions in this forum suggest that the divide (or the perception thereof) is equally a product of feminist “camp politics.” These essays follow up on Katherine Allison's (Reference Allison2015) reminder to reflect on our own positionality as feminist and IR scholars when constructing divides in our claims to overcome them.

Maria Stern's contribution particularly shows that the practices of feminist research do not necessarily reflect the suggested conceptual boundaries, which are rooted more in the politics of feminist knowledge production and the neoliberal academic market than in the actual research practices in these fields. At the same time, Stern acknowledges that political economy approaches have generally been marginalized in mainstream IR and security studies. From this vantage point, she asks us to consider how these two subfields are being reproduced in contradistinction to each other and what we are losing as a result in terms of emancipatory knowledge.

Rahel Kunz's essay provides one answer to this question by showing how the separation between economic and security issues contradicts the “messy” empirical realities of women's lives. Starting from women's experiences in postconflict Nepal, her methodological intervention reminds us that theoretical separations gloss over lived complexities with the possible consequence of reproducing gender stereotypes. Therefore, we need to take subjectivities seriously and reflect on Western-centric knowledge practices in feminist IR, which are, as Kunz argues, productive of the security/economic division. Together with Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson, her contribution reminds us that analytical separations are not just an issue of intellectual debate about different “schools” or “traditions,” but that they have very real material implications for women's lives, for example, by shaping how postconflict reconstruction and development policies are conceptualized and implemented locally. The FSS/GPE debate thus needs to include a post/decolonial perspective in both the reflection of its knowledge practices and its analysis of gendered power relations in the Global North and South.

From such a postcolonial perspective, Anna M. Agathangelou's essay addresses one of the core issues of feminist scholarship, violence, and shows how a GPE approach not only analyzes different forms of gendered violence in terms of their economic underpinnings but also can advance understandings of the relationship between violence and how labor, services, and people are valued as political and economic speaking subjects. With this, she highlights not only how gender and race matter in the constitution of value but also how we need to move beyond Eurocentric notions of value and link them to violent post/neo/colonial practices. She shows that violence cannot be discussed only as a security issue with economic causes and effects; it is deeply implicated in the colonial project as well as postcolonial practices in neoliberal capitalism.

MOVING FORWARD

Like any attempt to contribute to a current scholarly debate, our forum surely will not exhaust the many angles of a complex and pluralistic field. While putting this collection together, other critiques of these issues will have been developed and new research agendas will have been realized. Therefore, this forum is but a momentary reflection on where we as scholars stand right now in the context of how we perceive our disciplines’ pasts and possible futures. We have invited Juanita Elias, the editor of the previous forum, to contribute an afterword to our forum to foster a communicative conversation including a multitude of feminist voices. The spirit of this forum, like the previous one, is to provoke conversation and to continually challenge us as a feminist collective to think about how we conceptualize the field(s), how our research questions can open or foreclose research directions, and how we can keep that feminist curiosity that makes our analyses about gender and global politics relevant (Enloe Reference Enloe2004).