Gendered Labor in the Making of United States Policy on Women, Peace and Security: An Interagency Perspective
By: Alexis Henshaw (she/her/hers)
Thinking about my article Gendered Labor in the Making of United States Policy on Women, Peace, and Security: An Interagency Perspective invites me to return to a time before a global pandemic, when fieldwork was possible, when “zooming” meant something entirely different, and when colleagues from around the world could gather (maskless!) and discuss WPS implementation in a comparative context. Perhaps most of all, revisiting the roughly four-year journey of researching, writing, and publishing this piece underscores for me the importance of community in intellectual endeavor. As noted in the acknowledgments, I am indebted to the organizers and participants of workshops and conferences I attended in developing this project, to those who funded and/or helped secure funding for the research, and to the reviewers and editors who supported the work’s publication. Perhaps most of all, though, I am indebted to my interview subjects, who invited me into their community of practice.
The U.S. is a tricky case for exploring WPS implementation. Prior comparative work has viewed so-called middle states as the domain of WPS policy entrepreneurship. To the extent that major power states, like the U.S. and the UK, enter into the discussion, scholars have warned of the tendency to militarize the agenda. As I note in the article, this is a genuine and worrisome trend. However, I hope this piece will illustrate the presence of a dedicated core of advocates for WPS within the United States government. This is a community whose members are sometimes isolated and who may not always agree on what WPS “means” in an institutional context. It is a community that is ensnared by many institutional and cultural constraints—including gender stereotypes, expectations of hyperflexibility, and the devaluation of their work. However, it is also a community of hard workers, of learners, and of listeners. It is a community that represents the spirit of WPS insofar as its members often envision turning the agenda inward, using it to challenge and change even the most resistant institutions of government.
Some of my main takeaways from this research were narratives of commitment on the part of interviewees. There was the story of the individual in a temporary position who had WPS mandates put on their plate and, despite being offered no relevant training whatsoever, in time became a subject matter expert. There was the individual who, despite having WPS mandates removed from their agency’s purview, remained a staunch advocate for the agenda. There were professionals who commented on what the U.S. could learn from the Global South in pursuing WPS and interviews with officials who envisioned diverse and interesting issue linkages. Most of all, there was the simple fact that each of these individuals took the time to speak with me, a researcher and (to most) a stranger, about politically sensitive issues at a time when the climate in the U.S. government could be characterized by chaos and even fear. For that, and for the lessons they taught me, I am immeasurably grateful.
As I hope I make clear in the article, the community of practice around WPS in the United States is truly one that persists in a climate of adversity. In exploring the themes of stereotyping, flexibilization, and devaluation, there are obvious (and, frankly, depressing) historical continuities to past work on gender and U.S. foreign policy, including Carol Cohn’s 1987 classic Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. The U.S. is building capacity on WPS, but what is built can easily be lost. As some of my interviewees suggest, we cannot expect committed and capable professionals to remain indefinitely in an underappreciated issue area. Departures from the “women’s issues lane” (as one interviewee called it) are inevitable unless the climate toward WPS–and gender mainstreaming more broadly—changes in a big way. In this sense, the notions of contingency and devaluation discussed in the paper resonated with me as a researcher. Many of us who study gender, sexuality, or race and ethnicity in politics know what it means to work in isolation or contingency and to see our work devalued by the field at large. Especially in the context of the ongoing pandemic, it is hard to see the way forward—but perhaps the kinds of scholar-practitioner dialogues celebrated here are a piece of the puzzle. I recall the one person I spoke with who characterized WPS discussions as a kind of oasis for like-minded individuals who were previously “starved” of interaction. Those words take on new meaning for me as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As always, I hope this offering helps to sustain and perhaps inspire dialogue, both among scholars and across the scholar-practitioner divide.
Read the full article here: Gendered Labor in the Making of United States Policy on Women, Peace and Security: An Interagency Perspective
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Alexis Henshaw is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Troy University, USA. She is the author of Why Women Rebel: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups (Routledge 2017) and co-author of Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press 2019). Her work on gender and international relations has also appeared in the Journal of Global Security Studies, Small Wars & Insurgencies, and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.