(Re)integrating Feminist Security Studies and Feminist Global Political Economy: Continuing the Conversation

Abstract

Considerations to integrate feminist security studies (FSS) and global political economy (GPE) were first systematically reflected in the Critical Perspectives section of the June 2015 issue of this journal. That collection presented engaging essays on how the divide between the two fields has evolved and ways we can seek to overcome it—or, indeed, whether we should attempt to bridge the divide. This debate has gained momentum in workshops and conference panels attempting to build bridges between the two feminist subfields. Given the richness of scholarship associated with the two fields, we aim to continue this productive conversation by bringing new voices and ideas into the debate and by engaging in further possibilities for theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancement that allow for a more comprehensive approach to global gendered inequalities and hierarchies—one that is not disciplined by academic boundaries. With this, we hope to challenge the constructed and sometimes violently sustained borders between public and private, domestic and international, political and economic, Global North and Global South, as well as disciplinary “camp structures” (Parashar 2013) that too often shape academic, and also feminist, knowledge production.

Beyond liberal vs liberating: women’s economic empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security agenda

“…ii See two recent collections in the journal Politics and Gender edited by Elias 2015 andChisholm andStachowitsch 2017. iii The feminist literature on empowerment and its co-optation is extensive. See, for example, Arat 2015; Batliwala 2007;Bexell 2012;Calkin 2015;Calves 2009;Chant and Sweetman 2012;Chant 2016;Cornwall and Rivas 2015;Elias 2013;Gregoratti 2018;Parpart, Rai, and Staudt 2003;Prügl 2015;Roberts 2015;Roberts and Soederberg 2012. iv There are other feminist critiques of empowerment, such as the way that it can reinforce myths of women's inherent powerlessness and victimhood; or the way that the tools favoured by some international organizations to promote empowerment of the poor, such as community-based projects, reflect a "romantic" vision of local and community-based power wherein internal power relations, conflict, and social inequalities are deemphasized or ignored.…”

Introduction: (Re)integrating Feminist Security Studies and Global Political Economy: Continuing the Conversation through Empirical Perspectives

“…We believe that these are the spaces where war economies and peace economies meet and where (gendered) structural transformation of societies is possible. Like the two previous collections, we do not understand FSS and GPE as additive (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017). Rather, we understand them as traditions that share a common goal, namely, to undermine the racialized neoliberalism and patriarchal capitalism underpinning international intervention and postwar reconstruction projects.…”

“…Two previous collections of essays, one edited by Juanita Elias (2015) and the other by Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch (2017), on the (re)integration of FSS and feminist GPE were heartening. The first collection offered a series of essays on how the divide between the two fields has evolved and how feminist scholars could—or even whether they should—overcome it.…”

“…Previous forums indicated several paths for thinking through the postwar relations of securities and economies. Chisholm and Stachowitsch (2017) raise the crucial question of how hierarchies between security and economics are (re)produced and maintained. These hierarchies are (re)produced in postwar contexts, such as when programs for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and security sector reform are treated with a different level of urgency than repairing feeder roads to markets for women traders.…”

Beyond “Market” and “State” Feminism: Gender Knowledge at the Intersections of Marketization and Securitization

“…I start this contextualized analysis with a synthesis of feminist scholarship on global security governance and global political economy. By examining what happens when global security governance and business increasingly interact and overlap, this study contributes to (1) the critical gender research on PMSCs; (2) research on the securitization (Hansen 2000; MacKenzie 2009) and neoliberalization of feminism (Fraser 2013; Prügl 2015) as well as recent feminist reengagements with the concept of the co-optation (de Jong and Kimm 2017); and (3) the ongoing debate on (re)integrating feminist political economy and feminist security studies (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017b; Elias 2015).…”