Militarising gender: a (contrapuntal) reading of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) applications in EU-Tunisian security assemblages

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ABSTRACT This article seeks to advance a contrapuntal reading of experiences and practices of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) applications in Tunisia. Drawing from Edward Said, a “contrapuntal reading” encourages to look at multiple perspectives and experiences, beyond dominant ones, to achieve a better understanding of the way WPS applications intersect with contextual and power dynamics. By focusing specifically on European-Tunisian security assemblages and their WPS discursive-practical articulations foregrounded in ‘capacity-building' and training sessions, the article argues that processes of militarization emerge distinctively from these assemblages and are linked to a muscular neoliberal security order that produces gendered divisions of labour, instrumentalizes (wo)men's roles and keeps them subjugated to masculine military requirements. Accounts emerging from in-depth interviews and participant observation are emblematic of the propensity to locate the genesis of gender-based discrimination and violence in the Tunisian context (and more extensively in the Global South), while discharging the conditions of reproduction of that violence favoured by policies of external intervention, including WPS ones, and by the militarization of social relations. This legitimizes and normalizes in turn the need for external intervention and training, undermines real gender transformative change and benefits versions of “state feminism” and its transnationally well-positioned Tunisian elites.