100 Million Kalashnikovs: Gendered Power on a World Scale

Abstract

We need to understand gendered power on a world scale. Research on gender and globalization, and recent thought about coloniality and Southern theory, provide starting points, but the task of mapping gender relations in global power centres remains to be done. Four masculinized groups are especially important in global power relations: the managers of transnational corporations; the oligarchs, possessors of extreme wealth; the dictators who control authoritarian states; and the state elites of the global metropole. Some research on gender relations in these milieux is available, showing different patterns of masculinity. Masculinities are embedded in neoliberal globalization. Gender relations on a world scale are affected by the movement of metropolitan power into offshore spaces, the conflicts among globally powerful patriarchies, and the new forms of resistance and social turbulence that arise from triumphant neoliberalism.