At its inception, NATO’s adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda was deemed ‘an enraging example of how a good feminist work can be manipulated by a patriarchal and militarist institution’[1]. Such a repudiation can be located in a broader field of anti-militarist feminist thought on war and security. Here, NATO is a perpetrator in a system that re-creates violence by fighting threats instead of solving them.
At the time the comment was made, such thinking led to the “No-to-NATO” campaign[2] but has more recently produced a manifesto/letter signed by feminists which argues that NATO is ‘co-responsible’ for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through ‘its global expansionism and militaristic security narrative’[3]. These advocacy efforts stand in stark contrast to Secretary Blinken’s comments at the WPS reception hosted by the State Department earlier this summer. Blinken argued that inclusive societies were more stable, that women ought to be included meaningfully in the decision-making process at each level, and that Ukrainian women are fighting to demonstrate that ‘valour has no gender’[4].
So why the contention surrounding NATO’s adoption of the WPS agenda? Cynthia Cockburn put forward the argument that there is a contradiction between the militarist aims of NATO and the anti-militarist aims of the WPS agenda; that contemporary approaches to security are irreconcilable with a view of gendered insecurity in the world. There is some truth here. Despite the WPS featuring in NATO’s Strategic Concept as of 2022, however, there are crucial differences in how strategic studies and security studies approach conflict. Trying to manage the demands of an armed and competitive global landscape with the aspiration of a peaceful and equal world requires strategy, not security.
Gender and Conflict
To properly understand the cause of the tension between the WPS agenda and security studies, one has to understand where the WPS agenda came from. Feminist thought posits that while there are biological differences between sexes, culture creates gender by attributing certain qualities, characteristics, and roles based on this divide. When certain qualities attributed to a specific gender are rewarded with positions of power and responsibility, gender hierarchies are created. Predominantly, men are associated with assertiveness and the capacity for political violence, traits which are rewarded in military hierarchies and thus lead to men being seen as protectors. These constructed and prescribed characteristics provide legitimation for men’s political authority and uneven access to leadership positions, dynamics which underpin the systems of male predominance in society most commonly referred to as the patriarchy. Simply put, because assertiveness and a willingness to confront problems with violence are associated with masculinity and deemed requirements of political leadership, politics is structured to benefit men.
War, then, is seen to reaffirm social and political relations between genders which perpetuates a mutually constitutive relationship between social positions of power and supposed war-making necessity. War consolidates masculine hierarchies and the characteristics they entrench. Liberal feminists argue that instead of being cast as a protected class, women ought to be able to contribute to military efforts so as to reconstruct their role as equal defenders. The WPS agenda, however, was largely set forward by anti-militarist feminists. They assert that the preparation for war is simply a method of reasserting gender hierarchies regardless of women’s involvement, since the structures themselves are deemed masculine.
In 2000, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325 which first established the Women, Peace and Security agenda and set out to better appreciate that women are disproportionately affected by political violence, promote gendered perspectives on conflict, and advance women’s agency to make change in this field. The issue, however, is that when this agenda was adopted by NATO in 2007, it was done so in an attempt to change how we approach security, not strategy.
Security or Strategy?
Security studies have a tendency toward playing into masculinist logics of protection. The discipline, to greatly oversimplify things, revolves around answering any threat that might hinder the implementation of policy. If there is an interest, then there is a threat to that interest which must be secured against. Our liberal values and the goal of an equal society therefore require security – protection. Even when a gender perspective was introduced into NATO operations such as ISAF and KFOR, the result was a limited effect on how operations were undertaken and an expansion of NATO’s protection to local women and girls[5]. The problem is that this approach is a band-aid solution; it doesn’t meaningfully resolve the ways in which conflict upholds/sustains into our societal hierarchies which legitimises and reinforces gender imbalances. In other words, security does not always get to the root of the problem.
Feminism discusses this in relation to the notion of a ‘continuum of violence’. This is where the gendered legitimation of masculine power – the notion that men have a duty, and therefore a right, to use violence in a given context – that enables and advocates war also legitimates violence against women at a domestic level. After all, protection requires the protected to follow the orders of the protectors, even under the ironic threat of punishment. A poignant example of this was the increase in domestic violence against women in Serbia as tensions rose before the war over former Yugoslavia. Strategic studies, by contrast, understands conflict in a way that is much more compatible with feminist thinking, if not always feminist aims.
Strategic studies are often associated with the dusty tomes of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu; Jomini and Mahan. Following Machiavelli’s setting of the “fatal fuse” which separated politics from theology and utopian idealism, the mission of politics transformed into the attempt to develop and secure one’s interests as capably and reliably as possible against the misfortunes of life. In the competitive and insecure age of Machiavelli, these misfortunes also included the armed and coercive actors that made their interests violently known. If modern strategic studies have a specific starting point, this can be said to be it.
One way of understanding strategy is the approach taken by an actor to achieve their interests in spite of potentially violent competition. It serves as a bridge between policy and outcome, and is where we transform our values into practice, aligning the two. However, the demands of organising violence to secure these interests impact how a polity organises itself. Our institutions, formal or otherwise, affect our capacity to organise and undertake conflict and the demands of potential conflict limit what goals can be readily achieved in such a competitive environment. Simply put, war is politics with the addition of other means (arms), so war has some bearing on our politics as much as our politics has some bearing on the way in which we approach and conduct war. Strategy is an attempt to balance these demands.
Women, Peace and Strategy
Where strategy is concerned with navigating a violent environment, feminism illuminates how gender relations create a continuum of violence that contributes to this environment. Where strategy is concerned with the interaction between the requirements of policy and the demands of (violent) implementation, feminism correspondingly concerns itself with the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and war. By earnestly incorporating the WPS agenda into strategic thinking – and not just strategic practice – NATO Allies can begin the process of considering how a strategy driven by the goal of equality might reconstruct its approach to a violent environment. If we earnestly strove toward the goal of social and political structures that did not discriminate based on gender, what sort of conflicts would we feel required to prepare for and undertake? What if army units such as the UK’s 77th Brigade or France’s Légion Étrangère were equipped to not just combat armed threats, but also their gendered sources?
Recent efforts to incorporate gender into Resilience war-gaming[6], plans to initiate a “lead by example” regarding NATO’s interactions with its Southern Neighbourhood[7], and funding female-body equipment for women soldiers in Ukraine[8] are all encouraging steps that NATO has undertaken since adopting WPS into its Strategic Concept in 2022. To achieve the full potential of the WPS agenda, conviction and real interdisciplinary integration of feminism and strategic thought is needed.
It is fair to say that strategy is made by those who have learned that the world is a competitive place. The WPS agenda, by contrast, is made by those who have learned that the world can be something other than violently competitive. One cannot ignore the very real and dangerous competition that faces us, but it speaks less of us if we accept a world of illegitimated power. The Women, Peace and Security agenda has done impressive work so far, but to take our societies to where they ought to be, we need to consider Women, Peace and Strategy.
[1] WIA2012_07TalkingPointsCynthiaCockBurn.pdf (almendron.com)
[2] No to war – no to NATO Network – International Network to delegitimize NATO (no-to-nato.org)
[3] Feminist Resistance Against War – Spectre Journal
[4] https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-the-nato-women-peace-and-security-reception/
[5] NATO – Feature: Efforts to develop a gender perspective in NATO-led operations get mixed review, 23-Oct.-2013
[6] NATO – News: Gender and Resilience Wargame hosted at NATO HQ, 28-Mar.-2024
[7] 240507-NATO-South-Report.pdf
[8] US unveils NATO plan to buy body armor for Ukrainian military women – Washington Examiner