NATO women and gendermen

Feminist Security Studies in Europe: Beyond Western Academics’ Club

“…Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009). Scholars also engage directly with actors inside hegemonically masculine institutions as 'critical friends' (Wright et al 2019). Importantly, feminist scholarship considers how to study silence (e.g.…”

“…WPS is central to the study of feminist foreign policy which is similarly based in Sweden (Aggestam et al 2019) or the UK (Thomson 2019). WPS research has been indeed thriving, focusing on themes such as arms trade and political economy of militarism (Acheson and Butler 2019), exclusion of refugees from European WPS policy (Holvikivi and Reeves 2020), climate change (Cohn and Duncanson 2020), but also institutions like NATO (Wright et al 2019) or the OSCE (Jenichen et al 2018). Feminist scholars have also approached WPS through lenses informed by the political economy of conflict and called for re-bridging feminist security and feminist political economy (Lai 2020; O'Sullivan 2020; Stavrevska 2020).…”

Challenging civil society perceptions of NATO: Engaging the Women, Peace and Security agenda

“…It considers what has changed to enable NATO to formally consult civil society on its policy making in respect to WPS and the consequences of this for the WPS agenda. In so doing, it contributes to the broad body of largely critical feminist work interrogating the significance of NATO’s engagement with WPS and its role as a gender actor (Wright, 2016, 2019; Wright et al, 2019; Wright and Bergman Rosamond, 2021; Hurley, 2018a, 2018b; Bastick and Duncanson, 2018; Hedling et al, 2022; see also, Hardt and von Hlatky, 2020).…”

“…NATO as a political–military alliance could be understood to embody the antipathy of the WPS agenda which early advocates argued was resolutely not about ‘making war safe for women’ (Cook, 2009: 126). NATO’s engagement with WPS has therefore challenged many of the assumptions about its meaning and value and speaks to wider concerns about the militarisation of the WPS agenda (Cockburn, 2013; Kirby and Shepherd, 2016; Manchanda, 2020; Wright et al, 2019). Despite the central role of civil society in advocating for, and supporting, the implementation of the WPS agenda, NATO’s initial policy engagement with WPS in 2007 occurred without consultation with civil society (Wright et al, 2019: 50).…”

“…NATO’s engagement with WPS has therefore challenged many of the assumptions about its meaning and value and speaks to wider concerns about the militarisation of the WPS agenda (Cockburn, 2013; Kirby and Shepherd, 2016; Manchanda, 2020; Wright et al, 2019). Despite the central role of civil society in advocating for, and supporting, the implementation of the WPS agenda, NATO’s initial policy engagement with WPS in 2007 occurred without consultation with civil society (Wright et al, 2019: 50). Such an approach stood NATO apart from other engagements with WPS at national, regional and international levels (Mundkur and Shepherd, 2018) and is worthy of further interrogation to understand why.…”