Announcing the 2018 Enloe Award Winners!
As testament to the quality of the feminist IR scholarship being developed, the 2018 Enloe Award came down to a choice between two excellent articles. The committee – Olivia Rutazibwa, Thomas Gregory, and Zehra Arat – found both fascinating and deeply enriching contributions to feminist scholarship in the politics and study of (international) peace-(making) and we look forward to sharing them in print and online with our readers. Due to the strength of the submissions, the committee has decided to honor both a winner and a runner up:
The 2018 Enloe Award goes to Julia Sachseder’s article “Cleared for Investment? The Intersections of Transnational Capital, Gender, and Race in the Production of Sexual Violence and Internal Displacement in Colombia’s Armed Conflict.”
The article successfully embodies the spirit of the Enloe Award as it manages to ground pressing, everyday experiences of targeted violence in historical and global processes of political economy, creatively deploying a set of theoretical lenses to make sense of it.
It provides a rich and powerful account of how transnational capital networks are complicit in ongoing violence against women and Indigenous groups in Colombia. The study traces how the violence that is used by militant groups to displace people from the land works to benefit big corporations and how this violence is underpinned by a process of dehumanization that leaves certain marginalized groups profoundly killable, disposable, or injurable. It joins in with highly topical current debates and scholarship on race, class, gender, coloniality, and neoliberalism without reproducing a zero-sum understanding of the challenges at hand, sensitive to the co-constitutive nature of the material and immaterial aspects of oppression and violence in the longue durée.
The article fizzes with many exciting ideas, bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives with some really engaging empirical work. It also does a good job of using the literature in a truly intersectional way, rather than merely “adding on” postcolonial and/or race considerations, thus transcending White/Western-centric theorization and source material.
The runner-up for the 2018 Enloe Award is Catriona Standfield’s article “Caught Between Art and Science: The Women, Peace and Security Agenda in United Nations Mediation Narratives.”
This article provides a nuanced account of UN mediation processes around the WPS agenda, drawing on Annick Wibben’s narrative approach to document how the notion that mediation is a science rather than an art leaves little room for complexity. It is a very well-researched piece with a clear, polished, and coherent argument.
The article’s meticulous engagement with a bureaucratic procedure reminds the reader of its life-and-death consequences, all the while providing a thorough gender analysis. It is also important for revealing the complexities – how masculine-feminine assumptions and expectations work, or that one method is not necessarily better than another for gender inclusiveness. The author’s conclusion is a generative one: it recognizes the need to explore the question in other settings and points to a future research agenda.
We are grateful to all those who submitted entries for the Enloe Award. The 2019 Award will be announced next year. Please look for our call for the 2020 award in early 2020 with an anticipated deadline of August 2020.
We are especially grateful to our thoughtful and engaged 2018 Enloe Award committee, Olivia Rutazibwa, Thomas Gregory, and Zehra Arat.