Abstract
In their edited volume, Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg weave together a set of articles that examines the ways in which structural forces shape and are shaped by gender norms in military and peacekeeping institutions. Kronsell and Svedberg emphasize their “wish for readers to see that amidst the complexity of war, presented by the many authors of this book, there is one common normative ambition in the visualization that feminism can be a method and tool to accomplish positive transformation towards greater justice” (p. 3). The adherence to feminist methodology and epistemology is a consistent theme that the contributors carry out through a variety of contexts and approaches. The articles are richly varied, ranging from theoretically driven explorations to feminist-oriented ethnographies and rhetorical analyses. The strength of the volume rests on two key interconnecting themes: (1) the relationship between structure and agency and (2) how institutional practices within the military and peacekeeping institutions are gendered practices.
The volume is organized into four themes. The first theme, “Conceptualizing Gender, Violence, and Militarism,” introduces the core threads woven throughout the book. Although these two theoretical articles do not provide brand new information to the reader, they do set up and reinforce the importance of intersectional and structural analyses that integrate gender into the examination of war and the military, something too often ignored in military research.
The second theme, “Making Gender and (Re)Making the Nation,” includes several articles that emphasize the value of a feminist analysis of military institutions. Through analyses of institutions such as the Swedish Armed Forces and the Turkish military, the articles demonstrate how gender norms are deeply entrenched within intersecting processes of military practices and national identity formation.
The third theme, “Institutional Practices and Traveling Concepts,” possibly provides one of the more interesting and insightful contributions of the volume. “Traveling concepts” is a tool that could be utilized in a variety of future studies on military, war, and peacekeeping institutions. As Kronsell and Svedberg assert, “Traveling concepts is a term used to connote processes whereby feminist thinking from one place goes through transitions and adjustments on its way to make sense and become valuable tools for feminist analyses in new sites and settings” (p. 11). The articles in this section trace traveling concepts such as gender and feminization through institutions and organizations such as the Women in Black in Serbia, the UN, and NATO. “The way the concept was developed and conscientiously utilized was action oriented and all this makes it closely linked to transnational feminism both within and outside of academia. Traveling concepts as a term conveys a process that, in itself, constitutes an important part of transnational feminism” (p. 12). The notion of developing flexible, active and multidimensional concepts that shift through various contexts is one of the more exciting ideas presented in the volume, because it inspires myriad potential research projects for scholars interested in gender and military.
The final theme, “Gender Subjectivity in the Organization of Violence,” focuses on the agency of subjects within institutional forces. These chapters attempt to move away from the essentialization of gender categories in order to understand the complexities of individuals at work in structural forces. Elina Penttinen’s article provides a particularly salient example of the value of examining practices and ways in which women and men engage with institutional forces. Her critical reception of what she conceptualizes as the “politics of hope” in her study of the integration of women into the Nordic security forces problematizes women’s generic presence in military institutions, which is based on the hope that their passive presence will replace actively working through gender relations. “Hoping that men behave better when women are around puts an enormous task on the women in these missions” (p. 164). Instead of a politics of hope, Penttinen argues for “the balance of masculine and feminine subjectivity, self-reflexivity and responsibility and call for recognition of the capacity to manage oneself before attempting to manage others” (p. 164). This point reinforces the value of examining the relationship between subjective responsibility in war and violence, while maintaining clear awareness of how structural and institutional forces insert themselves into those subjective experiences and actions.
Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices is an important read for scholars interested in the relationship between gender, military, and international relations. It provides a compelling argument for analyses of the integration of gender and military research. The volume is a valuable tool for future research and keeps its focus on the importance of working toward “positive transformation towards greater justice” through feminist analyses of war and peacekeeping efforts (p. 3).