Feminist Experiences of ‘Studying Up’: Encounters with International Institutions

Writing in 1993, Cynthia Enloe called for ‘feminist anthropologists to imagine their “field” as lying inside NATO’s Brussels headquarters’ because ‘We [feminist scholars] know all too little about the internal cultural dynamics of institutions such as NATO’. ²³ Twenty-five years later, what could be articulated as feminist institutional understandings of NATO and other international institutions are only beginning to emerge. In this respect then, feminist IR is playing ‘catch-up’ to understand how such institutions function, and their gendered impact on our everyday lives.

It is necessary to research international security institutions because of the direction in which the Women, Peace and Security agenda is being taken by institutions. Institutions such as the UN, NATO, the EU, and the African Union are not going to disappear and they will go on regulating our lives. Without our engagement, we may see the misrepresentation of feminist perspectives. Some of the critical feminist security literature warns about the risks of engaging with the state or engaging with international institutions because they are seen as co-opters of the feminist project. For instance, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2242 (2015) explicitly links the Women, Peace and Security agenda to countering terrorism and violent extremism. Some scholars criticise that these links have the potential to align Women, Peace and Security with militarised solutions to terrorism and extremism, co-opting the feminist agenda on participation in security governance and putting in danger the same bodies the agenda claims to protect. The UN fears the radicalisation of Muslim female bodies, but it wants to use those same bodies to stop terrorism. ²⁴

Conceptually, I find particularly helpful Robert Cox’s characterisation of international institutions as upholding the hegemonic order as well as holding the possibilities for change within it, and Whitworth’s feminist adaptation of the same. ²⁵ , ²⁶ Feminists should care about international institutions, particularly the UN and its agencies, because it is another arena for emancipatory politics. We know from the work of feminist civil society that international law and norms can be used to put pressure on governments to address gender concerns. International institutions are not only intergovernmental but also increasingly in most arenas transnational in nature. ²⁷ Feminist scholars are critiquing international institutions where these policies are developed and legitimised. On Women, Peace and Security, the work of Pratt ²⁸ and Shepherd ²⁹ is illustrative. There was barely any research on the Security Council, the institution that I study, prior to 2000. There are some publications on peacekeeping, but nothing that really takes the Council seriously. Our interest in the last decade and a half has much to do with the passage of UNSCR 1325. So, scholarship has followed this important policy development, although there are many more policy developments that we need to investigate. Yet, even now there is a tendency to see the Council as a monolith, which limits our understanding of how this important security institution operates. If we do not fully understand its processes, we can neither engage with the institution nor identify possibilities for its transformation.

If we examine the emergence of the EU as a gender actor over the last 70 years, we observe the importance of institutions and institutional actors in reifying, and occasionally challenging, structures of power. Institutions are the spaces where policies are negotiated and agreed. They are a platform for different sets of actors and interests. Yet, without understanding institutional structures and competencies, we cannot explain why NATO, rather than the EU, is the institution that has led on the implementation of Women, Peace and Security on the European continent. ³⁰ At first glance, this is an interesting paradox, particularly given that the EU has wide-reaching gender equality provisions that govern the work of the Single Market. Moreover, it has sought to position itself as a normative power, where equality and human rights, are promoted as foundational values. We would therefore expect European external narratives to be aligned to the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda. However, this has not been the case until recently. We have to explore institutional structures, mechanisms, and how policies are formulated in order to understand this silence. feminist institutionalism can help us to analyse complex institutional structures and actors. It is through this prism that we can start to unpack the unintended gender consequences of policy domains that are traditionally seen as gender neutral, for example, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, but that are deeply gendered. Annica Kronsell’s work is particularly insightful here and looking at the EU security and defense policy from a feminist institutionalist approach helps us to understand the role of critical actors, culture and structures in shaping key policies. ³¹

International institutions shape and are shaped by human behaviour. We conduct most of our lives within institutions and interacting with them; working with them, supporting, opposing, resisting them. This complex interplay between these conscious and unconscious interactions is an important reason why institutions matter. Since institutions are often treated in mainstream IR theory as unified and homogeneous, they are often discussed in shorthand. My research is on NATO’s adoption and interpretation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, particularly how that impacts the reconstruction of militarised masculinities and femininities within NATO. One of the key questions for me is: ‘What is NATO’? As feminists we should seek to ‘crack open’ and expose the complexities and contradictions within institutions such as NATO to problematise shorthand understandings and what they have come to signify. Feminists should also care about international security institutions because institutions are never static. They are never constant. So they can never, in a sense, be fully understood. A constant, collective, critical feminist gaze achieved through a multiplicity of research methods, approaches, projects and theories is needed to account for this constant change and flux.

This is why the feminist institutionalist conceptualisation of international institutions as changeable and flexible gendered social systems and networks with informal and formal rules and regulations is useful. ³² In his critique of institutions, economist Geoffrey Hodgson argues that institutions use mechanisms of survival and replication. ³³ Feminists need to examine how institutions continually regenerate when we research co-optation of feminist agendas, as well as the replication and reproduction of unequal distributions of power within institutions, and there is some interesting work in the field of feminist politics and sociology around how change takes effect within institutions. Hodgson argues that ‘the durability of institutions stems from the fact that they can usefully create stable expectations of the behaviour of others’. ³⁴ Sara Ahmed has shown how institutionalised recognition and acceptance of people of colour, often established through diversity initiatives, can present an image of change and progress towards social justice, while creating a stable expectation of othered bodies. In reality, these initiatives function to stabilise and reproduce white male elite dominance and institutional whiteness by giving the impression that institutional racism is being addressed and in doing so, the centrality of whiteness is confirmed. ³⁵ In Ahmed’s case study, pigeonholing women of colour as diversity champions becomes a means to contain and control their bodies, as well as manage their access to power and their ability to instigate genuine change within the institution. ³⁶

NATO is under challenge from the current US administration, and it is interesting that at the same time as this happened, white women have become significantly more visible within the alliance. We know that when organisations are in crisis women tend to be promoted to take on leadership roles. ⁴⁸ Women become signals of institutional change, yet when they then inevitably fail in those roles because of the crisis, they are held doubly to account for that, which reinforces the glass ceiling. ⁴⁹ This is worth interrogating in greater detail. The promotion of women, albeit in a superficial manner and the continued marginalisation of people of colour within NATO serves to engender hegemonic whiteness, with women coming to ‘occupy a privileged status in the equality praxis’. ⁵⁰ As Malinda S. Smith observes, this creates a dividing practice, whereby white women become the ‘other’, and other marginalised groups become the ‘other Others’ to be addressed at a later date. ⁵¹ The ‘other Others’ are perceived as presenting a greater challenge, rather than a more straightforwardly achievable goal, such as equity for white women. As feminist scholars, we must pay attention to this in order to realise the ‘radical transformation of the existing gendered, classed, and racial global order by politicizing which and when differences matter; why inequalities persist; and where military men and women are not equally recognised, positioned or privileged’. ⁵² We must press for data on representation within NATO as a mechanism to hold the alliance to account. NATO has not released its human resources data on gender and diversity in NATO HQ since 2012. ⁵³

Another access challenge facing feminist researchers concerns the ability of these institutions to control knowledge. For example, institutions present themselves as being in control of change processes, even when these change processes may be brought about by external pressures such as shifting power relations within the international system. Institutions rely heavily on their image and their reputation in order to generate external legitimacy. In the PR industry, this is called brand and reputation management. It is a way of controlling public and institutional knowledge about the institution and maintaining control over the dominant institutional narrative – or narratives – which articulate the identity and brand of the institution. Feminist praxis needs to disrupt institutional control over knowledge production, but this can only be achieved by gaining access to employees within institutions who are willing to open up and speak outside of, what I call in my research, the ‘institutional script’. ⁵⁴

I think this different – feminist – sensibility to the study of international institutions also helps address a very practical concern in terms of accessing these very elite institutions. Consider, for instance, the geographical location of the headquarters of the institutions we study. Yes, Bangkok and Nairobi are also key centres for UN regional offices and headquarters. However, unless you are looking at a ‘field-based case study’, you would probably have to head to New York or Geneva or The Hague, certainly for research on Women, Peace and Security issues. Securing research funds is a shared challenge for scholars all over the world, but the return tickets from London to New York tend to be cheaper than the ones from New Delhi. There is another shared experience that cuts across national boundaries – notably the privilege of being the well-travelled international elite. So much of research in this field depends on personal relationships and networks. If you do not regularly travel to New York or to the ‘important’ conferences and workshops (some that are ‘by invitation only’), how do you even develop those relationships that give you access to privileged knowledge? And so, expanding the scope of ‘what we want to know’ and ‘who we want to know this from’ is a valuable normative commitment, and it makes our research richer.

I have a couple of suggestions that might help feminist scholars when ‘studying up’. The first one can be useful while we are in the field, and the second one can is useful throughout the whole research process. When in the field, I found England’s strategies helpful. ⁵⁵ One of the strategies requires the researcher to adopt the position of the supplicant, which means accepting that the knowledge of the person being researched is greater than that of the researcher. This shifts power over to the research participant. This strategy is very helpful in research environments that are hostile to feminism, or to feminist intervention. As a white, European, young woman, I could access sites of power such as the UN mission in Liberia and in Burundi quite easily. I would sometimes feel ashamed of my own privilege and complicity with power, particularly because I was studying the interplay between these sites of power and grassroots womens groups, which did not have very much access to those institutional spaces where knowledge and policy are produced. Research is political, and feminist ethics compel us to consider whether we are contributing to the perpetuation of inequalities when we become entangled in power relations in the field. Here I found the work of Becker and Aiello quite useful. ⁵⁶ They claim that while in the field, you should evaluate your decisions over the long-term, and not try to evaluate every single decision you have to make. This helps you not only to navigate power relations in the field, but also to be self-compassionate. Sometimes you cannot resist gender, race or class dynamics in the field, sometimes you can. For example, using reflexivity to understand why I nodded when the person from the Ministry of Gender told me, ‘Well, we cannot entrust grassroots womens organisations with money’. ⁵⁷ Reflexivity here helps you as the scholar to identify the informal rules. It does not mean that you are condoning the actions or words, rather that instead of challenging the power dynamics at the time, you prioritise critical feminist research outcomes that will help you influence that policy debate in order to uncover and challenge the broader power dynamics.

I am interested in the interplay between the institution’s formal policies and the experiences on the ground, of the people in NATO headquarters who are tasked with implementing those policies; in particular, the stories that they tell about that work. Annick Wibben argues that understanding and accounting for narratives in the study of security is ‘essential because they are the primary way by which we make sense of the world around us, produce meaning, articulate intentions and legitimise action’. ⁵⁸ Specific stories facilitate the construction of a broader ‘gender narrative’, helping the organisation to promote the ‘relevancy’ of new gender initiatives and overcome resistance. ⁵⁹ One of the strategies that I have taken in my research is to focus on storytelling within NATO, particularly the complexity and confusion between the stories that people tell about themselves and their work, and the broader narrative that NATO wants to construct and advance about its engagement with Women, Peace and Security. ⁶⁰ I focus on the multiplicity of stories of the same events. Asking questions such as: How do different members of that institution experience, recall, retell particular events, policies and practices? Do they do so in different or similar ways? How does the institution choose to tell or represent the same event? Analysing this interplay between formal and informal narratives helps to expose the complexities, contradictions and power dynamics inherent within the institution.

This approach also includes listening to participants’ accounts of the ‘everyday’. This is essential as sustained ethnographic studies of military institutions are often very difficult to do and therefore participants’ work might not be directly observable. It allows for the ways gendered power dynamics manifest – often through repetitive or seemingly mundane tasks – to be explored from those individual perspectives. For example, during my first interview at NATO HQ, the female participant’s office door was open. A male military officer stopped and stood in the doorway, leaning into the room, listening to our conversation. You could see him physically filling the doorframe, taking ownership of that space, not saying ‘excuse me’ or anything like that. He then began helping himself to a big bowl of sweets by the door. My participant acknowledged him and had a brief chat and we exchanged some awkward smiles. After he left I asked: ‘So, what happened there? That was slightly strange’. She explained: ‘When I first came here, the office door was shut, everybody would just walk past. It was my strategy to open the door and keep a big bowl of sweets. Now people walk past, they take a sweet and maybe they talk about gender’. ⁶¹ So, an interaction that I initially took as strange and rude, was the result of a deliberate – yet informal – strategy to increase my participant’s visibility and awareness of her work that spoke volumes about the institutional context she was working within. She finished by saying: ‘What man would think of that?’

Part of the challenge when you conduct research in institutions, is that the institution hosts you and therefore controls your access most of the time to ensure only sanctioned information is made public and that the institution’s image and reputation is preserved. Matthew gave the example of the man in the doorway. It was by chance that Matthew was there, rather than he had gone out to find it specifically. We need those moments of chance, but how do we develop a strategy to gather chance information? I research into how male and female uniformed peacekeepers from African and European troop contributing countries are trained and deployed to UN peacekeeping operations. Like Maria, I adopt the position of a supplicant in an attempt to access the personal stories of social actors that work within military institutions, although some of the techniques I used in my previous career when I worked on improving staff engagement and delivering organisational change programmes in large multi-site institutions have proven useful. I think about staff engagement. How engaged is the staff member in the institution? And I ask questions to find out, to gauge what they think and feel about their position in the institution and the institution itself. In their feedback, you get their stories and you start to hear how they perceive themselves in relation to those formal and informal systems. They give you examples quite often. Not all of them do and not all of them want to talk outside of ‘the institutional script’, but then that’s an interesting aspect which I explore in my research and it has allowed me to consider how interviewees exercise their agency in different ways during the research encounter. ⁶² I think about staff morale in relation to agency, norms, practices and structures. I find myself stepping back into the role of the consultant who goes into an institution and speaks as a third party: ‘I am not part of your department or team. I am here to feedback your opinions and feelings to management’. I found this was the most successful approach I used during one-to-one conversations and focus groups when working in strategic communications. Perhaps I used a feminist approach to interviewing then or perhaps I am now employing some of the feminist techniques which male-dominated institutions use to enable them to regenerate and survive. I was working for the elites in power, but I was required to develop trust with staff across the institution so that they would confide in me.

Ahmed describes how people of colour are hosted by white institutions, and, as visitors, are managed in order to stabilise their behaviour within the institution. Researchers are also outsiders and othered bodies that have the potential to destabilise institutions. As a white, British woman, my body is not the institutional norm when I conduct research in African militaries. Nor is it the norm when I conduct research in the British Army because I am a civilian (who in one tranche of the research was pregnant). Yet research participants may also regulate their behaviour during the research encounter in accordance with institutional codes of conduct. In interviews with British peacekeepers, white male and female military personnel openly discussed racial and sexual discrimination, but some men of colour and one gay man (identified by his white, male commanding officer, who expected his colleague to talk very openly) would not speak of experiencing discrimination, preferring instead to revert back to the institutional script promoting progress towards diversity and inclusion within the British Army. Perhaps because they were in such a minority (the ‘other’ others), they knew there was a high chance they could be identified by their responses and were cautious. Yet women of colour were extremely vocal when discussing their experiences of race and gender discrimination. When the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) hosted me, a male major was instructed to organise my access to research participants. Aware of the objectives of the research project, he seemed keen to avoid appearing to embody toxic masculinity. Sometimes his actions seemed exaggerated. For example, he repeatedly performed as a chivalrous man by opening my car door when I exited, which I found uncomfortable, particularly since chivalry is a colonial-imposed European code of conduct. His performance was completely at odds with the rest of the men’s performances within the military institution, and he may have believed that in his role as host (and representative of the GAF), he could somehow influence the findings of the research project, or at least exonerate himself from the ongoing subordination of women within the GAF.

We also need to account for our own ‘research stories’, especially those ‘beginning tales’ ⁶³ as we venture out into a new field or new institution. Being aware of, and opening up, the ‘black box of awkwardness’ ⁶⁴ that can come with entering a new and unfamiliar institution is important because tensions and awkward moments can be analytically productive and yet we rarely ever write about them. In my research, assumptions and misperceptions about gender and particularly my sexuality led to several awkward encounters. Reflecting on these purposively, in-depth and with a view to improving the rigour of the claims drawn from such social encounters and co-constituted knowledge, exposed certain gender and sexual norms, behaviours and expectations – such as a pervasive heteronormativity. These norms are so ubiquitous they become invisible, unremarkable and ‘built into the walls’ of institutions of hegemonic masculinity, such as NATO, yet nevertheless remain powerful exclusionary barriers to those who do not conform. ⁶⁵

A collaborative reflexivity on varied and similar experiences is useful here too. Katharine and I have written a piece on our gendered experiences of doing interviews at NATO. ⁶⁶ We were asking relatively similar questions to relatively similar groups of people, but we had very different experiences, and very different data was generated from the interviews that we conducted. Bringing these experiences and this data together is invaluable and produces a fuller understanding of an institution such as NATO. I am also interested in the physical architecture of the institutions that we study. How and in what ways does NATO HQ as a physical space work and how does it feel to me as a researcher? Where are – and what is the role and impact of – the various symbols of NATO’s identity on display? Where are those gender offices located in that building and does that tell me anything about the importance NATO affords to Women, Peace and Security? I am fascinated by methodologies that explore the architecture of security institutions – although this is not yet something I have used in my work. I think this could be a productive avenue of research to explore in regards to NATO.

In order to unpack the impact of the EU as a gender actor, it is essential to understand the positions of key actors within this institution’s complex organisational structure. Looking at the development of the equality agenda in the context of employment policy, Alison Woodward used the concept of Feminist Triangles. ⁶⁷ This framework conceives of there being three cornerstones to development of the equality agenda within European policy-making structures. The first pillar is Femocrats. These are feminist bureaucrats working within the institution. They have detailed institutional knowledge that allows them to maximise their impact on the very fabric of the institution. The second pillar are civil society groups. They provide critical voices and counter narratives thus exerting pressure on the institution. The third, and final pillar, are epistemic communities, so academia itself can provide another pressure point, an opportunity for civil society and certain communities to inform policy and the decision-making processes and allow gender norms to shape those processes. When these triangles, or feminist constellations, work effectively, they open up a space for the institutionalisation of gender equality policies. We have tried to transpose this idea of feminist triangles or constellations to the work of the EU as an external actor. ⁶⁸ Of course, security and defence, as a policy area, does not lend itself as easily to the input of civil society groups or epistemic communities. The role of femocrats working within the institutions therefore becomes all the more significant. Researching this particular aspect of the development of the European foreign policy agenda requires high levels of sensitivity to the internal dynamics of the institution, the way power is exercised and the role of multiple interests in shaping the agenda.

Perhaps my approach is creative from a NATO studies perspective, but actually it is just inherent to how I operate as a feminist scholar. The reflexivity in the research process, which Matthew talked about and we have discussed elsewhere, is key here. ⁶⁹ I am still reflecting on interviews I did a year ago. One man I interviewed in NATO was very resistant. Then I got to one particular question and he shut down the interview, and said, ‘Aren’t you a clever little girl?’ I packed up my stuff and out I went, seemingly defeated. ⁷⁰ For several days I was annoyed about this, but as I got over my own ego, I began to think that actually that particular thing that I mentioned was really important and I followed up on that. He will never know that this led to further research in this area and a publication. ⁷¹ I probably would not have pursued this, at least at that stage, if it was not for that encounter.

I am going to throw in one more thing, about body language. If we are talking about techniques, I know that I am very conscious of, and always processing the social dynamics in the room.

To link it back to what I was saying before, I have always felt very awkward in large groups of heterosexual men, being very aware of my own and others’ body language. So, going into an institution of hegemonic masculinity like NATO HQ was an interesting experience. It was particularly apparent during the interviews with male participants as some of the bonding ploys they used to try to establish rapport with me were uncomfortable in that they were based on an assumption of a shared heterosexuality. ⁷² They mentioned their wives, girlfriends and children straight away, I suppose to prevent any misperceptions about their sexuality that I might have about them, which has been identified as a common fear for men working on gender initiatives within various institutions. ⁷³ This threw up all manner of interesting and useful observations and reflections particularly around the heteronormativity that pervades NATO and what it might mean for me to ‘pass’ as a straight, white man in that setting.