Women, gender, and international security

Abstract

In August 2014, as Islamic State jihadists rampaged through Iraq and engaged in genocidal against non-Sunni Muslims, they kidnapped over 3000 Yazidi women and girls. A few months earlier, in May, Boko Haram extremists abducted over 200 schoolgirls in northern Nigeria, consistent with their larger and more systematic abduction campaign mirroring the tactics used by Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. In both Iraq and Nigeria, abducted women and girls are believed to have been taken as wives, sex slaves, and/or servants for their captors. Part of a larger, global trend, these most recent episodes suggest an endemic quality to against women in zones of conflict and/or state weakness. From Bosnia to Rwanda, from Syria to Congo, and Iraq to Afghanistan, women and girls have become targets of indescribable brutality in the post-Cold War era, including killings, sexual violence, torture, and forced captivity. However, concurrent with these troubling trends of victimization, the last several decades have also seen important gains for women in the sphere of international security. Women have become more prominent in leadership roles at the community, state, and international levels, including in non-traditional spheres such as foreign policy and defence, and in places as diverse as Albania, Bangladesh, and Chile. This ascent of to borrow Sally Armstrong's phrase, has also been evident in policy innovations, including UN resolutions on war rape and sexual and on women, peace, and security (WPS), reaffirming the important role of women in international security. The rise in prominence of the gender perspective has also challenged alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to rethink how they engage in military interventions. Although its actions are still modest in scope, the alliance has invested in WPS initiatives and pushed its member states to submit progress reports to track implementation.In this context, the sixth annual workshop of the organization Women in International Security-Canada (WIIS-Canada), held in 2013 at the Canadian Forces College, focused on the complexity of the relationships between and among women, violence, and international security. The workshop considered four important aspects of this relationship-women as targets and victims of violence, women as agents of violence, women as scholars and analysts of violence, and women as policymakers and practitioners in the field of international security. Shedding light on these research themes is central to the mandate of WIIS-Canada, a network that was founded in 2008 to provide a platform for female scholars and practitioners in the fields of security and defence. Each year since the launch of WIIS-Canada, volunteers have organized workshops to support and showcase the important research and work that is done throughout the WIIS-Canada network. As our two contributors show, WIIS-Canada also strives to bridge the gap between academics and practitioners, encouraging policy-relevant research in the process.The two papers featured in this issue of International Journal-Deconstructing the 2012 Human Security Report: Examining narratives on wartime sexual violence by Roxanne Krystalli and Engendering two solitudes? Media representations of women in combat in Quebec and the rest of Canada by Krystel Chapman and Maya Eichler-bring to the fore the key elements of the overarching theme of the workshop and emphasize the importance of gender in contemporary international relations.Using the 2012 Human Security Report (HSR 2012) as a primary resource, Krystalli's paper asks why narratives about sexual matter, and how we can be more reflective about what we can and do know about wartime sexual violence, given the opportunities and limitations of conducting research in this field. Fully cognizant of the challenges associated with researching and analyzing wartime sexual violence, Krystalli, a practitioner and an academic, calls for more nuanced conceptualizations of sexualized violence, more systematic, evidencebased research, and greater responsibility on the part of those conducting research on this important and highly sensitive subject. …