Abstract
War and peace are gendered and gendering geopolitical processes, constituting particular configurations of masculinity and femininity. When men are considered in relation to war and peace the majority of scholarly accounts focus on soldiers and perpetrators, typically observing their place in the gendered geopolitical solely through military/ized masculinities. In contrast, this article examines fatherhood as a masculine subjectivity, interacting in a nexus with other masculinities to produce an intelligible propeace intervention in war, and considers the implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical. To analyze this political subjectivity of what I term “paternal peace,” the article considers the case of Bob Bergdahl. Bergdahl’s son was a US soldier held by a Taliban-aligned group for five years until 2014. During this time Bergdahl was publically critical of US foreign policy, presenting his son’s release as part of a peace process that could end violence in Afghanistan. I unpack how Bergdahl’s public political subjectivity was the outcome of a “gender project” drawing on accounts of “valley” fatherhood in combination with particular forms of diplomatic and military masculinity. I consider how Bergdahl’s intervention was publically received, and how the geopolitical reach of it was pacified within gendered and racialized coding.
Highlights
Men and women populate imaginations of the geopolitical as players in the gendered “universalised storyline of warring” (Baaz and Stern 2009, 496)
When men are considered in relation to war and peace the majority of scholarly accounts focus on soldiers and perpetrators, typically observing their place in the gendered geopolitical solely through military/ized masculinities
This article considers the possibility and practice of what I term “paternal peace” and considers implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical. This is explored through the case of Bob Bergdahl, the father of an American soldier held by a Taliban-aligned group for five years
Summary
War and peace are gendered and gendering geopolitical processes, constituting particular configurations of masculinity and femininity. This article examines fatherhood as a masculine subjectivity, interacting in a nexus with other masculinities to produce an intelligible propeace intervention in war, and considers the implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical. To analyze this political subjectivity of what I term “paternal peace,” the article considers the case of Bob Bergdahl. This article considers the possibility and practice of what I term “paternal peace” and considers implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical This is explored through the case of Bob Bergdahl, the father of an American soldier held by a Taliban-aligned group for five years. We move between, and practice various forms of, gender and the power relations they entail throughout our lives and in different spaces and contexts in an ongoing “gender project.” These projects may be understood as undertakings of subjectivity, “the varying forms of selfhoods by which people experience and define themselves” so that political selfhood is a product of the social and cultural (Lupton and Barclay 1997, 8; Tidy 2017, 428)
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