Co-option,complicity,co-production: Feminist politics on war rapes

In December 2015, the United States Secretary of Defense asserted that in 2016 all combat posts in the US military would be open to women soldiers. US female soldiers will then join a number of other women – those in Sweden’s, New Zealand’s, Israel’s and Canada’s militaries – who already have this right. Australian and British women could be joining them in the near future.

In many ways, this is a victory for US liberal feminism, as the decision comes after decades of their struggle for women’s equality. Equal participation in the military is tightly linked to equal citizenship, they have argued, as only those who have equal responsibilities can ask for equal rights. In addition, they asserted, once women join combat as equals, the argument of men fighting wars to defend ‘their women and children’ will sound hollow.

But in the present global moment, US militaries are not fighting defensive wars. If we look back at history, furthermore, US militaries have seldom fought defensive wars. They have fought imperialist wars designed to enhance US hegemony around the globe. And save for the First and Second World Wars, the other western militaries have done the same. Already in the early 1980s with the UK war on the Malvinas, and even more so since the early 1990s and the two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, the NATO bombing of Serbia, and more recently the post-Arab Spring wars, some feminists in the west have questioned both these wars and the participation of women soldiers in them. Meanwhile, US women soldiers will enjoy the equal right to participate in US bombings and occupations of foreign lands.

This victory for American liberal feminism marks the defeat of American radical feminism that fought to assert not equality, but difference between women and men. Seeing all men as potential rapists and all women as potentially rapeable, and focusing on male oppression and exploitation of female sexual and reproductive capacities, they have argued that giving birth makes women uniquely life affirming and caring, and ultimately morally better humans than men. According to this stream of feminist thinking, this also makes women uniquely qualified to defend peace against the male war mongering.

But what US radical feminists lost at home, they gained globally. Since the mid-1990s, their ideas about male sexual aggression and female rapeability have become dominant western theoretical and policy discourse about contemporary wars. With one conditionality: this does not apply to the west, but to the rest of the world. Since the wars in former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, war rapes of non-western women have become the main, if not the only public western concern regarding wars. Balkan and African men, more recently Arab/Muslim men fighting in different military formations in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, and most recently men belonging to ISIS, are invariably defined as vicious rapists, and women in these regions are visible within western mainstream theoretical, political and media discourses almost exclusively as rape victims.

Something similar is also happening in parts of western feminist scholarship on war and violent conflict. War rape has become the dominant, if not the central preoccupation of feminist conflict studies. Long gone are the times when western feminist scholarship on war addressed multitudes of ordinary women’s roles, positions and experiences, be it at home or in various corners of the world. These were the times when western feminism was striving to make women’s presence visible in public in fundamentally different ways from the mainstream. For let us remember, western women were always visible in mainstream western scholarship on and politics of war – but usually in counter-feminist ways: as mourning mothers, as devastated rape victims, as femme-fatale spies, as those who shame men who refuse to fight, as traitorous whores who have sex with enemy soldiers while their country bleeds under the occupier’s yoke, and so on, and so on.

Women from the rest of the world were largely invisible in the western mainstream concerns with wars, save for the occasional demonizing of women soldiering as part of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, or as the female terrorist. These days, however, western mainstream focus on non-western women is different: the only visible female experience of war is the experience of war rapes. Were it not for war rapes those of us living in the west would never have heard anything about the lives and struggles of ordinary women in the midst of the violent conflicts in Darfur or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or about Yezidi women. We hear today about them for one reason only: because they were raped by ‘their own men’. Clearly, Yezidi women are raped because ISIS fighters do not see them as ‘their own’. But in western ontology, all non-western subjects belong to the same ontological category. The Serb rapist and the raped Muslim woman from Bosnia, the Hutu rapist and the raped Tutsi woman from Rwanda, the Sudanese Arab Janjaweed rapist and the raped Black woman, are, in western eyes, inhabitants of the same barbarous world in which religion, ethnicity and tribalism reign. Thus the rapist and the rape victim are both the Other of the west, ontologically different, marked by specific identities and identity politics.

It is not strange then that, today, the most dominant mainstream theoretical perspective on contemporary wars – the ‘new wars’ perspective – defines identities and identity politics as the core cause of wars within the non-western parts of the globe. Casting its gaze from within the gates of the west towards the rest of the world, this theorizing addresses ‘intra-state’, ‘civil’ and ‘ethnic’ wars and calls upon the west to save the victims and punish the perpetrators. In doing so, it confidently and comfortably asserts that the west has nothing to do with causes and dynamics of those wars. And it marks war rapes as the ultimate proof of distinction between the ‘dirty’, savage wars of the Other, and the ‘clean’ western interventions designed to stop the dirt spilling over (but the spill over is already happening. ‘They’ are coming ‘here’ in hundreds of thousands, some assaulting ‘our’ women).

It is even less strange, then, that this perspective utilizes feminism. It takes radical feminist arguments about sexual violence to tell non-western men and women what they are today, and liberal feminist arguments about equality to teach them what they should become.

As feminists living in the west, of whatever theoretical and political orientation, are we failing to address this representation in as vigorous a manner as possible? We complain that our social justice and gender justice agendas, and human rights and women’s rights goals are hijacked by war mongers, and appropriated for hegemonic goals. But can we really continue to speak about hijacking and appropriation, implying that something is violently taken from us, against our will? Isn’t it time to start speaking about our co-option and complicity, and the ways we – with all our theory, politics and strategies – co-produce, with the mainstream, today’s world of violence? And then, to vocally refuse and resist this disgraceful position? And, is it possible to do so without jeopardizing the plight of women raped in wars?

A number of western and west-based feminists believe that this is not just possible, but also absolutely necessary. We are concerned with how we deal with sexual violence in peace and war alike, and how our analyses and actions become crucial justificatory elements of hegemonic national and international political, military and legal interventions. Already in the 1990s Rhonda Copelon (1993), Ruth Seifert (1993) and I (Žarkov, 1997) offered critique of both feminist and mainstream writing about war rapes in Bosnia, while Julie Mertus (2004) and Doris Buss (2014) critiqued the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for its dismissal of Bosnian women’s agency and their close-to-racist characterization as headless doormats and semi-slaves of patriarchy. In this work, we have seen passionate feminist resistance to the Othering of the non-western women and their experiences of war rapes. Looking inwards, a number of western feminists investigated relationships between feminist movement, activism and theorizing on the one hand, and the neoliberal western state and its judicial system that have, in the last several decades, become the ultimate actors of protection of female victims and punishment of male perpetrators in cases of domestic and sexual abuse. These feminists show how important it is for us – when it comes to the state and the law – to be careful what we ask and wish for; because the racist states and societies that increasingly rely on policing and prosecution have ‘universaliz[ed] the white, middle class women’s experience of violence’ leading to the over-representation of poor and black women as victims, to the increased incarceration of black men, as well as to the incorporation of what used to be a feminist agenda into the politics, policies and institutions of the state’s criminal justice system (Kim, 2015: 21). ¹ This was not done with the master’s but with our tools.

Beyond the western nation-states and their judicial systems, feminists have warned that a neoliberal international legal and political order is established, doing what Spivak (1988) warned about long ago: ‘saving brown women from brown men’, and that this is helped not just by harnessing the feminist agenda, but also by feminists themselves. ² Jasbir Puar (2008), for example, shows how feminist and queer movements in the US operate within the ideology of American exceptionalism, lending their politics to the American empire. Wendy Hesford (2011) and Mimi Thi Nguyen (2012) analyse the use of the visual rhetoric of human rights in the production of the moral western subject and discourses on freedom in the pursuance of the US neoliberal global governance respectively, pointing to the epistemological and ontological foundations that western feminism shares with the mainstream western politics and its hegemonic practices.

What are, then, anti-hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies of feminist war studies?

When the main focus of our theorizing is ‘intra-state’, ‘civil’ wars in far-away countries, do we also address neoliberal economies, social and political exclusions and multiple forms of exploitation that have regional and global dimensions and link the locales of violence to the web of geopolitical relations of power in which the western states and their militaries are the most powerful, though not the only actors?

When the main focus of our research is the ‘ethnic’, ‘tribal’ and ‘religious’ identities of Others, do we also ask what are the processes by which any identity has become a privileged mobilizing factor anywhere in the world, how ‘their’ identities have become ‘our’ privileged analytical categories, and how ‘our’ identities are made invisible in the process?

When the central concern of our theorizing and politics on war is the rape of non-western women by ‘their own men’, do we resist engaging in racialized, heteronormative gendering of ‘their’ and ‘our’ masculinities and femininities, and defining sexual aggression and sexual vulnerabilities as markers of civilizational progress? And, when ‘our’ men and ‘our’ women are absent from those narratives of war rapes both as perpetrators and as victims, do we resist standing tall ready to engage in civilizing missions?

When we reflect on gender justice, what do we see? Syrian villages bombed to extinction and Palestinian houses demolished to rubble, phosphorus and cluster bombs thrown on schools and hospitals, drones assassinations, national defence budgets gone to hundreds of billions, millions of people across the world losing jobs and homes and hopes to ever have them again, and six-year-old children making bricks 10 hours a day are today not seen as ‘impede[ing] the restoration of international peace and security’. But, according to UN Resolution 1820 (2008), the war rapes of women are.

Feminists across the globe have fought to make the victimization of women in wars visible and punishable. They have fought to make war rapes crimes under international law. But can the same global vigour be employed to make visible everything that is obscured when war rapes of women are the only visible feature of contemporary wars? Can feminists in the west use their successes and achievements, as well as the lessons of their failures, to make the warring practices of their own governments central to their analyses and actions? Can we look at the warlords in our Defence Ministries as much as at the local warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Can we investigate our governments’ global networks of allies and ‘coalitions of the willing’ as seriously as we investigate terrorist networks and coalitions? Can we stop theorizing ‘civil wars’ as if they were happening on other planets and Earth has nothing to do with them? Can we analyse how our ‘peace economies’ are linked to the ‘war economies’ elsewhere? Can we look at the contemporary wars and militarism, contemporary ‘humanitarian interventions’, ‘responsibilities to protect’ and ‘3D approaches’ (defence, diplomacy, development) that our governments engage in as modes of globalization of brutal, insatiable, neoliberal capitalism? If not, can we continue to claim that all this is done against our will?