The African Union’s Silencing the Guns: between stereotyping and owning gender roles

Abstract

Following the motto “African Solutions for African Problems”, the African Union (AU) fosters its agency as a regional actor on gender policies. The Silencing the Guns campaign represents one example. Here, the AU attempts to link gender, peace and security policies. Taking the AU’s motto into account, this research explores to what degree Silencing the Guns is driven by the understanding of gender roles linked to African Feminisms, and to what degree gender assumptions of other feminist traditions are embedded. With the help of hypervisibility as a concept, stereotypes will be put into the context of Silencing the Guns. To answer the research question, a mixed-methods approach is applied for data collection. The results clearly indicate references to African feminist theories such as Womanism. In particular, these results help introduce a discussion around epistemological power hierarchies in feminist discourse defining what (harmful) gender stereotypes are for whom. Although there is a common understanding among most of the feminist researchers that gender is a social construct influenced by socio-cultural contexts, the socio-cultural context of the Global North seems to be the universal departure point to investigate gender stereotypes. However, leaving out the various socio-cultural contexts in the Global South that shape gender as a social construct distorts the knowledge about how gender stereotypes function in different societies. Consequently, the main output of this research is a call to rethink the universal claim on how gender stereotypes are defined and interpreted and to urgently encounter multiple decolonial approaches of epistemology, methodology and ontology.