Cockburn - Gender

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War and security, women and gender: an

overview of the issues
Cynthia Cockburn
Published online: 11 Nov 2013.
To cite this article: Cynthia Cockburn (2013) War and security, women and gender: an overview of the issues,
Gender & Development, 21:3, 433-452, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2013.846632
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War and security, women and gender: an
overview of the issues
Cynthia Cockburn
This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and
masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are
Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 15:43 07 October 2014
considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social

provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and
authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined
violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often
involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened
internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities,
‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including
comprehensive safety for women. Women’s peace movements, worldwide, are theorising
that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative
change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.
Cet article traite de la fracture entre les sexes en contexte de guerre et de l’importance
des hommes et de la masculinité dans les processus de militarisation. Trois phases du
continuum de la guerre sont considérées. Dans les périodes de préparation à la guerre,
les sociétés assistent à un détournement des dépenses, des prestations sociales vers les
forces armées, accompagné d’une intensification de l’idéologie et de l’autorité
patriarcales. Durant les batailles elles-mêmes, il s’agit de mettre en œuvre une violence
extrême mais disciplinée, et la formation aux combats façonne la masculinité à cette fin.
Les conflits armés impliquent souvent une attaque sexuelle massive sur les femmes. Les
femmes sont récemment intervenues à l’échelle internationale pour soutenir que, si la
paix doit être plus que la seule cessation des hostilités, la « sécurité » doit être redéfinie
pour signifier la satisfaction des besoins humains, y compris la sécurité complète pour
les femmes. Les mouvements des femmes pour la paix, dans le monde entier, émettent la
théorie selon laquelle les relations de pouvoir entre les sexes sont parmi les principales
causes des guerres, et que des changements transformatifs dans la manière dont nous «
vivons » le genre peuvent constituer une ressource considérable pour la paix.
El presente artículo aborda las divisiones con base en el género encontradas en la
guerra, así como la significancia de hombres y de masculinidad en los procesos de
militarización. Se revisan tres fases de una continuidad de guerra. Durante los periodos
de preparativos para la guerra, las sociedades experimentan el desvío de fondos
destinados a servicios sociales hacia las fuerzas armadas, lo cual es acompañado por una
Gender & Development, 2013

Vol. 21, No. 3, 433–452, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2013.846632
433
– Oxfam GB 2013
Cynthia Cockburn
mayor difusión de la ideología patriarcal y por mayor presencia de la autoridad. Librar

una guerra significa la ejecución de una extrema y disciplinada violencia y, por ello, el
entrenamiento para el combate moldea la masculinidad con este fin. Con frecuencia, el
conflicto armado implica un asalto sexual masivo contra las mujeres. En tiempos
recientes, las mujeres se han pronunciado a nivel internacional, sosteniendo que si la
paz ha de ser más que una simple suspensión de hostilidades, deberá redefinirse el
concepto de “seguridad” para que su acepción signifique la satisfacción de las
necesidades humanas, lo cual incluye la seguridad integral de las mujeres. A nivel
internacional, los movimientos de paz encabezados por las mujeres postulan que las
relaciones de poder basadas en el género representan causas importantes de la guerra y
que la manera en que “vivamos” el género podrá constituirse en un recurso importante

para la paz.
Key words: gender; masculinity; militarisation; security; war
Introduction
Militarisation and war – what gendered terrain this is! Women and men play broadly
different roles, manifest different kinds of heroism, are victimised in different ways,
and often die different deaths. Yet no sooner is this gender-specificity of war pointed
out than the story begins to unravel. True, most soldiers are men. However, some
women carry arms. Most rape victims are women, but some men are raped. A majority
of adult refugees may be female, but that does not mean that men do not sometimes
flee from conflict, and live in refugee camps. Women are sometimes hailed as more
‘peaceable’ than men, and indeed opinion polls do often find women to be less
supportive of war policies. On the other hand, some women, like the traditional
Hakama singers of Sudan, goad their menfolk to kill (Amnesty International 2004).
With similar effect, in England in 1914, as the country mobilised for the Great War,
women of the Order of the White Feather accosted men of military age still out of
uniform, giving them white feathers as a symbol of cowardice.
Do these contrary or minority experiences, then, undermine the observation that
war is gendered terrain? No – because the experiences of the 5, 10, or 15 per cent of
men and women who do not match the stereotype and lodge in the statistical category
of the ‘wrong’ sex, have experiences that are no less gender-specific. Women soldiers
must make painful compromises and adaptations to be accepted into masculine ranks.
Being a woman soldier is not at all the same thing as being a man soldier, and what is
more, it is not seen as such. A woman who is raped in war is raped as a woman, a
despised category. A man who is raped is assaulted as a man, to reduce him to the
status of a mere woman, and thus destroy his masculine self-respect. A woman may
434 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

War and security, women and gender
conceive as a result of rape, or lose an unborn child. This is not part of the male rape
victim’s experience. So, to describe what happens to men and women, needs
supporting with qualitative detail. The picture that emerges is no less gendered, but,
as I shall try to show in this article, it is complex, contradictory, and instructive.
Wars are changing, as many commentaries tell us (e.g. Shaw 2005). Mostly we
appraise war today in contrast to the two World Wars of the 20th century, and it is true
that all-out pitched battle between developed nation states is not characteristic of
the present moment. Likewise, the delicately balanced stand-off of the Cold War,
holding at bay a nuclear debâcle between rival super-powers, has been exchanged for a
more diffuse threat. Yet there are continuities. It is not new that wars are fought over
economic interests: now, access to resources, cheap labour, and product markets; in the
past, exaction of tributes, and control of trade routes. Conflicts between communities
identified by ethnic name or religion, for purposes of domination or autonomy,
exclusion or genocide, have featured historically, as well as in today’s conflicts. Today’s
cast of characters include war-prone political leaders and puppets, warlords and
terrorists, insurgents, profiteers, mercenaries, and child soldiers. All these are also
discernible in accounts of old wars. What has changed in the last half century, however,
is the ability some of us have acquired to see and accord significance to what happens
to women, what part masculinity plays, and how gender power relations are acted out in
militarised societies and war.
A distinctive perspective like this is sometimes called a ‘standpoint’, in the Marxist
sense. Marxism, particularly its ‘Western’ derivates, exemplified in the work of Georg
Lukaćs (1971), alerted us to the particular collective consciousness, or ‘standpoint’, that
emerges in working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie. Feminists have argued
likewise that women, from their perspective as the subordinated sex, have generated
feminist standpoints (Hartsock 1985). We have learned to see how women and men are
purposefully differentiated and rendered unequal, how femininity and masculinity are
produced as complementary and hierarchical – in short that gender is a relation
of power. Feminist standpoints have evolved, too, through women’s resistance to
violence, militarisation, and war (Cockburn 2007). War may or may not be greatly
changed from the past, but our potential understanding of it is. So too is our sense of
what peace and security could mean.
An awareness of women’s experience of war has come largely from three sources.
The first is autobiographical accounts of women survivors. The second is reports of
humanitarian organisations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The third is media and the internet. Developments in television and ‘social media’
bring the news of war immediately to audiences both near to and far from conflict.
Feminist academic work has analysed the meaning of these experiences in the light
of gender theory. The two academic disciplines most concerned with war are
international relations (IR) and sociology. Women have contributed a powerful feminist
commentary in the field of IR, so far without greatly affecting the hegemonic
Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 435

Cynthia Cockburn
‘neo-realist’ analysis that informs diplomats and politicians.1 In sociology, however,

more attentive to the cultural and social nature of war, open to empirical and even
ethnographic enquiry, an extensive bookshelf of gender-analytical work has been
published in the past 25 years that sits alongside, if not well integrated with, the
mainstream canon on war.2
Preparation for war: gender dispositions

Governments who commit a high proportion of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to
military expenditure often do so at the expense of investment in social provision such

as housing, education, and health care. This especially harms the poorest in society, and
affects women disproportionately in their customary role of primary carers in the
family.
Turkey is a country that commits a rather high proportion of GDP to military
expenditure: 5.3 per cent.3 Mustafa Kemal Atatűrk founded the Turkish state in 1921 as
an explicitly military nation, and the army represents itself as upholder of a secular and
militaristic tradition. Ayše Gűl Altinay, in a historical study, has shown how the the
engagement of the military in education, including the content of school curricula,
instils in the child the notion that every male Turk is born a soldier. Discourses on
masculinity have naturalised male participation in the military as ‘protectors’ of their
families and the nation. ‘The military’, writes Altinay, ‘is as much a site of (masculine)
national desire and production, as it is a force of coercion’ (Altinay 2004, 3).
The family and the military as patriarchal gender institutions are interestingly
linked in Turkey, as in many other countries, by the concept of honour. In the town of
Diyarbakir, in the south-east region of Turkey, inhabited by many people of the
Kurdish minority, is a women’s organisation, Ka-Mer, working to protect the many
women who call for help because they are under threat of death for ‘dishonouring’ the
family, a conservatively patriarchal institution in Kurdish society. Not far away from
Diyarbakir, on the national frontier with Iraq, some words have been written in
gigantic white letters across a hillside. The stones have been painted by the Turkish
military, who patrol this area to keep down the Kurdish insurgency, which has support
in the neighbouring state. The Army’s message reads ‘The Border is Honour’. Kurdish
and Turkish men, equally at home in the patriarchal family and the patriarchal military,
each the sworn enemy of the other, understand each other only too well through this
shared travesty of honour – ‘travesty’, because of course the word honour at the same
time has other, humane and worthy, meanings. As Ayše Gűl Altinay says, ‘By defining
national pride through masculine pride in the practice of military service, nation-state
builders have simultaneously culturalised, masculinised and militarised an emerging
political process’ (Altinay 2004, 6).

In highly militarised societies such as Turkey, uniformed personnel of the armed

services are highly visible, and well-regarded. Other nations are at pains to present
themselves as pre-eminently civilian, but even here militarisation manifests itself in less
obvious ways. Cynthia Enloe writes, ‘Militarisation is a step-by-step process by which a
person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend
for its well-being on militaristic ideas’ (Enloe 2000, 3). She has lifted the civil veneer
from US society and shown us how militarisation can be seen shaping production and
consumption: ‘not just the executives and factory floor workers who make fighter
planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles but also the employees of food
companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and
advertising agencies’, that often choose military themes in design and marketing (Enloe
2000, 2). In this way, militarisation influences much more than popular expectations of,
and for, the nation’s men. Political and military leaders depend on the compliance of
women, too, whether as workers, shoppers, mothers, wives, or lovers, to normalise a
heavily armed state in which everyone, man or woman, believes they personally gain
from a high level of preparedness for war, and perceive a personal obligation to
contribute to this national condition in appropriately gendered ways, large and small.
As a country readies itself for war, patriarchalism often becomes more strident, and
more overtly linked to nationalism and militarism. The former Yugoslavia is an
informative case. Riven by the participation of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims on different
sides in World War II, the country was reunified and held together in the post-war
decades by the anti-fascist leader President Josip Broz Tito. After his death in 1980, the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began to lose its hard-won unity. Some of the elites in
the constituent republics, particularly in Serbia and Croatia, began to see advantage
in playing the communal card. They began to revive wartime memories, invoke the
old language of nationalism, recover ethnic identities, and emphasise difference.
Ideologues in the universities wrote divisive tracts, fomenting fear and hatred. Neo-
liberal Western economic interests also had a hand in the disintegration of the state,
destabilising society by forcing privatisation on what had been a mixed economy
(Woodward 1995). Many men, unaccustomed to job insecurity, were attracted to
patriarchal, militarist, and nationalist ideas.
Federal Yugoslavia had gone a long way to equalise women’s status in the public
sphere. There had also been a small but lively women’s movement in the major cities
(Papić 1995). One of the complaints of activist women was that the League of
Communists had shown less commitment to bringing equality in home and family,
where men continued to dominate (Morokvasić 1986). Now, however, women noticed
with alarm that even the gains afforded them by Communism were being eroded.
Women’s reproductive rights were coming under attack, and their public status
undermined. Under the League of Communists, a 30 per cent quota of parliamentary
seats had been reserved for women. But only men ‘counted’ in the new political

Cynthia Cockburn
climate. In the first multi-party elections in 1990 the quota was removed, and women’s
representation collapsed to 2 per cent or less (Drakulić 1993).
Women living in Serbia at this pre-war moment later wrote about the threat they
felt from this resurgent patriarchy.4 The qualities of militarised masculinity were being
widely hyped. If women were valued at all now, it was for their fecundity. Working
women were urged to return to the home and have more children, to boost the Serb
population. Feminism was under siege from a synergistic alliance of patriarchy,
nationalism, and militarism. In addition, with the collapse of Communism, the
profoundly patriarchal Orthodox Christian Church had gained influence, and was
giving its blessing both to ethno-nationalism and the new gender regime. Soon, Serbia
and Montenegro would be at war with Croats, and both would attempt to drive
Muslims from the region and destroy every vestige of their culture.
In a tone markedly different from that of 1990s Serbia, US national identity is
popularly expressed as ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. Yet here, too, the flag, religion, and
masculine honour are deeply embedded in the national culture. Military service is
highly regarded, and to be a war veteran is held to be an important qualification for
high political office. The manifestations of patriarchal masculinity in US culture,
‘stiffening’ the nation’s resolve in the Cold War period (and particularly in the wake of
the defeat in Vietnam), have been explored by a number of researchers.5 Robert Dean,
for instance, has made a close study of the group of elite men around John F. Kennedy,
who led the USA into the ill-advised war against Communism in Vietnam from 1955 to
1975. He noted how they were the product of exclusive male-only institutions –
boarding schools, Ivy League fraternities and secret societies, elite military units, and
metropolitan men’s clubs – places in which imperial traditions of service and sacrifice
were fostered, places that were the source, as he puts it, of ‘an ideology of masculinity’,
imbuing men with a particular kind of manhood, ritually creating what he calls a
‘fictive brotherhood of warrior intellectuals’ (Dean 2001, 5). Appeasement, compromise,
or caution were not in their political repertoire.
War-fighting: militarising masculinity

It is not, of course, the political leaders that pay the full price for their war policies. In
the bloodshed they launch it is working-class youth, and particularly (in the USA)
those of minority ethnic groups, that lose their limbs, their health, their sanity, and, in
large numbers, their lives.
Gender relations are deeply implicated in what is done to turn ordinary people into
soldiers, and shape them up for fighting. While the patriarchal gender order varies
from society to society, and evolves over time, in most contemporary societies the
roles and qualities imbued in boys and men include competitiveness, combativeness,
physical strength and assertiveness, courage, and ambition. These qualities them-
selves, even in ‘peacetime’, incline males to fighting.6 More than masculinity alone,

however, what disposes society to war is the dichotomous and complementary nature
of the gender relation, in which the sexes are specialised in such a way that each lacks
half of the human range of qualities. Males are designated protector, females (and
young) as protected. At the same time, perversely, males are cast as wielders of the
means of coercion, women as ‘natural’ victims. In such a gender order, war can seem
the fulfilment of gendered destinies.
Long before young male recruits put on their fatigues and report to ‘boot camp’,
their masculinity has been oriented by a choice of childhood toys and games, and later
by stories and images on television, in video and film, that link masculinity with
violence. They will have engaged in competitive, invasive, and territorial sports, or
learned to follow them with passion. In some sub-cultures, boys may have belonged to
youth gangs, some of them armed.
The military takes this ‘rough cast’ of masculinity and gives it a shape that fulfils its
own purpose. In some of the militias of countries and regions that have collapsed into
internal wars (an example would be Sierra Leone, between 1991 and 2001), discipline is
hardly an issue. Brutality is what is needed, and drink and drugs can fuel it. However,
national armies today risk losing international respect if their soldiers disregard the
Geneva Conventions and engage in atrocities. In such situations, military trainers must
walk a fine line. Over-aggressive men are problematic, ‘berserkers’ an embarrassment.
On the other hand, non-aggressive men are useless. The new recruit is first bullied,
brutalised, and taught his place, before his masculinity is rebuilt in appropriate form –
as aggressive, yet disciplined. Through their obscenities, drill sergeants drive home the
idea that ‘difference’ is to be despised.
As Sandra Whitworth puts it, a soldier is constituted through ‘violently misogynist,
racist and homophobic messages delivered through the basic training, initiation, and
indoctrination exercises’ (2004, 152). One US Marine recalled how boot camp had
instilled in him and other recruits the idea that ‘good things are manly and collective;
the despicable are feminine and individual’. He reflected, ‘When you want to create a
solidary group of male killers, that is what you do, you kill the women in them’ (Gilder
1973, 258, cited in Bourke 2007, 367). As Kathleen Barry has written, ‘The making of
soldiers for combat is the dehumanisation of men and recognising that is the first step
toward unmaking war’ (2011, 6).
The ‘homosociality’ in which a man learns to bond with other men is fostered by
military trainers and commanders as a guarantee of solidarity and loyalty in the armed
forces. This is what makes the growing recruitment of women such a contradictory and
painful process. Women have struggled, on grounds of equality, for the right to soldier
alongside men. It is reasonable if military service is valued, particularly by women of
disadvantaged classes and ethnic groups, as offering a reasonable living wage and
skills training. But many researchers have shown the contradictions inherent in the
process. Women soldiers are expected to be ‘as good as’ men, while never humiliating
men by proving ‘better’. They are expected (or may wish) to remain ‘feminine’, while

Cynthia Cockburn
demonstrating no less strength and endurance than the average man. The woman soldier
may wish to avoid appearing to have any affinity (social or sexual) with other
servicewomen – which might be seen as diminishing her. Yet it is not easy to form non-
sexual friendships with men, who persist in reducing the woman soldier to a sex object. As
a man is initiated into the company or the squad, his sense of entitlement – to a woman,
any woman, all women, to use as he sees fit – already fostered since boyhood, is affirmed.
It is unsurprising if he sees women soldiers as fair game. There are frequent reports of
women soldiers being sexually harassed or raped by the men with whom they serve.7
Mass rape is the most obviously gendered and sexualised of the features of war-
fighting. The rate of sexual attacks on women prevailing among populations in

‘peacetime’ increases dramatically in war, and some episodes, both historical and
current, have involved tens of thousands of women. The Japanese army, when it seized
the Chinese city of Shanghai in 1937, is estimated to have massacred approximately
300,000 citizens, and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women in a matter of weeks
(Chang 2000). Pakistani forces are said to have raped 200,000 Bangladeshi women
in nine months of conflict in 1971.8 The Geneva Center for the Democratic Control
of Armed Forces published a volume in 2007 that described sexual violence on a
significant scale in 51 countries over the last 20 years. The phenomenon is neither
localised nor regional: the accounts came from Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle
East, and Europe (Bastick et al. 2007). The term ‘sexual violence’ is now preferred in
describing such incidents, because ‘rape’ in the circumstances of war is an understate-
ment, even a euphemism. A panel of experts convened by the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) to assess the impact of armed conflict on
women reported that nothing they had learned in the past could prepare them for the
horrors women described to them in response to their enquiries.
Wombs punctured with guns. Women raped and tortured in front of their husbands and
children. Rifles forced into vaginas. Pregnant women beaten to induce miscarriages. Foetuses
ripped from wombs. Women kidnapped, blindfolded and beaten on their way to work or school.
We saw the scars, the pain and the humiliation. We heard accounts of gang rapes, rape camps
and mutilation. Of murder and sexual slavery. We saw the scars of brutality so extreme that
survival seemed for some a worse fate than death. (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002, 91)
Detailed accounts in these and many other reports by international humanitarian

and human rights non-government organisations confirm the particular prevalence in
war of multiple rapes of individual women, whether by gangs of men or in the form of
repeated rape during a period of imprisonment. In some militias where women are
deemed ‘soldiers’, they are in reality held in sexual servitude by the fighting men. In
other cases sexual slavery is institutionalised, as by the Japanese armed forces in the
Pacific region in World War II (Yoshimi 2000).

Like all other aspects of war, wartime rape is by no means ‘senseless violence’.
Rather, it is a social, relational phenomenon, with complex meanings capable of being
explored, analysed, and understood.9 Sometimes it is opportunistic – a man ‘taking’ a
woman simply because he has the power, seizes the chance, and is in company with
men who condone or participate in the abuse. But it may also be tolerated or actively
encouraged by military commanders, if they see it as a way of forging solidarity in the
combat unit. Often it carries a message between groups of men. Men of one community
raping the women of another tells the latter, ‘Look how weak you are! We can take and
defile your most valued property’. Sometimes rape is strategic, intending to destroy a
culture as part of a project of ethnic cleansing.
Security and peace-making

At some point in the continuum of war, moves are made towards its cessation. Perhaps
the costs are proving too high, and voices for peace get a better hearing. But what kind
of a peace? How can the security of all combatant parties be guaranteed, and what
indeed does security mean? Over the last two decades, ‘security’ has been reinter-
preted. The diplomats, politicians, and military leaders who characteristically negotiate
peace agreements have customarily thought of security in its ‘realist’ sense. They seek
guarantees that neither belligerent will in future be a threat to the interests of the other.
But the causes of violence often lie in economic and social inequalities and exclusions
that represent a different kind of threat: a threat to daily survival. Prompted by the
United Nations (UN) Human Development Report of 1994, the concept of security current
among humanitarian organisations has been reformulated as ‘human security’,
referring to a condition where basic human needs are satisfied (United Nations 1994).
In this way, both development (the growth of per capital Gross National Product) and
governance (assurance of human freedom and dignity) have become concerns of peace-
makers (Sen 1999).
Feminists too have been redefining security. By the mid-1990s, it was becoming
inescapably clear that, as the nature of war changed, civilians were becoming an ever
higher proportion of war casualties. The traditional state-based realist concept of
security as effective national defence and adequate armed forces is ill-designed to
recognise civilian insecurities, and in particular women’s physical, sexual, and
reproductive vulnerabilities in war. By contrast, ‘women’s definitions of security
are multilevel and multidimensional’, wrote J. Ann Tickner. ‘Women have defined
security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual’ (Tickner
1992, 66). It was clear to see that, to be safe from male violence, women and girls under
occupation, or displaced from their homes in armies, in prisons, or refugee camps,
needed special provisions. Even peacetime, it could no longer be denied, is a war-zone
for women, and armed conflict threatens them in particular ways.

Cynthia Cockburn
A growing awareness of the gender-specific experiences and needs of women in

war and post-war conditions, and their exclusion from most of the significant
institutions in which ‘security’ is discussed, is apparent in the sequence of United
Nations world conferences on women. A statement of concern already appeared in the
document, Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women issued after the 1985
conference in Nairobi that terminated the UN’s Decade for Women (United Nations
1986). Ten years later, in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, issued following
the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, a chapter on ‘Women and Armed
Conflict’ affirmed and extended demands made in Nairobi. It stated, ‘Equal access and
full participation of women in power structures and their full involvement in all efforts
for the prevention and resolution of conflict are essential for the maintenance of peace
and security’ (United Nations 1995, paragraph 134). When the UN’s Commission on the
Status of Women (CSW) reviewed this chapter of the Platform at its meeting in New
York in 1998, a plan was devised to engage the concern of the Security Council on
women and war. In 2000, for the first time, the President of the Security Council
addressed the International Women’s Day proceedings and showed himself ready to
pay attention to women and gender issues.
A ‘caucus’ of international humanitarian and human rights NGOs, in touch through
the CSW with women’s organisations from conflict zones worldwide, had been meeting
to pursue the question of women and security. Now they formed themselves into the
NGO Working Group on Women and Armed Conflict, co-ordinated by the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), through its New York office.
They raised their sights from an open thematic session of the UN Security Council to
obtaining an actual Resolution. It was a daring and ambitious idea. In the half century
that had passed since its first session in 1946, this august body, charged with the
maintenance of worldwide peace and security, had not yet seen fit to place women on
its agenda. Notwithstanding the official ‘mainstreaming’ of gender into all the activities
of the UN since an Economic and Social Council Resolution of 1996, ‘security’ had till
now remained a masculine domain.
The Working Group began lobbying support among Security Council members
and Ambassadors to the UN. Women’s advocates in the UN structures, including the
Department for the Advancement of Women and UNIFEM, lent their support. Together
they set about drafting a Resolution (Hill et al. 2003). Timely input came from a
conference held in May 2000 in Windhoek, Namibia, organised by the UN Department
of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) to consider studies that revealed serious
deficiencies as regards women and gender issues in a number of peace-keeping
operations (United Nations 2000a). UNIFEM prepared a persuasive paper with the
collaboration of 15 women political leaders and activists, with first-hand experience of
barriers to their participation in peace negotiations in their conflictual regions, who
argued the case for women’s inclusion (Anderlini 2000).

It was thus with a well-justified sense of achievement that women celebrated the
passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, on 31 October 2000 (United Nations
2000b). Its origins lay in civil society, in the human rights, anti-war, and women’s
movements. In this it was highly unusual. Now women worldwide familiarised
themselves with its content. A preamble to the Resolution acknowledges the specific
effect of armed conflict on women and recognises women’s role in many countries in
preventing and resolving conflict. Its 18 points cover three themes. One is protection,
calling for a clearer understanding of women’s specific needs in time of war – and a call
for an end to impunity in cases of sexual violence. A second is inclusion. Member states,
and regional and international institutions, are urged to increase the representation of
women at all levels in peace negotiations, and to support local women’s peace
initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution. Women should also be
involved in all of the implementation mechanisms after peace agreements are signed,
including UN peace-keeping operations.
The Resolution’s third theme is the insertion of a gender perspective throughout peace
processes. For example, peace negotiators should take account of the gender-specific
needs of those being repatriated and resettled after war. Male and female combatants
should be understood as having different needs in disarmament, demobilisation, and
re-integration. The human rights of women and girls should be regarded in rebuilding
political and juridical systems. A gender perspective, gender training, and gender units
should be introduced into peace-keeping operations.
Resolution 1325 quickly became a resource for women everywhere seeking to
influence their governments, international agencies, and NGOs to take women and
gender seriously in the context of war-fighting and peace-making. The NGO Working
Group stayed in existence to sustain the momentum. It issued 20,000 copies of the
Resolution, and prompted its translation into scores of languages. International Alert
devised a monitoring framework with measurable indicators. On the first anniversary
of the Resolution, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom went
online with its PeaceWomen portal (www.peacewomen.org). It is a mine of information
on progress to implementation, and its fortnightly e-newsletter carries news of
women’s peace activism in many countries. UNIFEM later launched WomenWarPeace
(www.womenwarpeace.org) and the UN International Research and Training Institute
for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) made ‘gender, peace and security’ a major
theme on its website (www.un-instraw.org).10 Gradually, UN Resolution 1325 intro-
duced the concepts of ‘women’ and ‘gender’ to the attention of many institutions and
individuals concerned with peace and security, from whose vocabulary they had
hitherto been absent.
Discourse is one thing, however, change in practice is something else. If the
Resolution was to be implemented, a daunting number of governments, international
agencies, and institutions have to be persuaded to act. An Inter-agency Task Force on
Women, Peace and Security was set up to co-ordinate a system-wide strategy in the UN

Cynthia Cockburn
structures. However, despite the drive of women’s organisations in many countries in

the years that followed, instances of women’s actual inclusion in peace negotations, and
concrete gains in the other areas touched on by the Resolution, were disappointingly
few. Issue 85 of the PeaceWomen e-newsletter, on-line at the end of 2006, noted a
serious implementation gap in UN peace-keeping operations.11 Levels of women’s
representation and participation remain dismally low – not only in operations but also
at the policymaking level. Peace-keeping troops continued to scandalise opinion by
abusing local women supposedly in their care (Mazurana et al. 2005).
Gender: a cause of war and a resource for peace

In the years following the achievement of Resolution 1325, some of the women who
had been involved expressed disappointment with themselves. They began to see more
clearly, after the event, how the Resolution’s focus had been limited to the effects of war.
Altogether lacking had been any reference to the causes of war, let alone to ending war.
The war policies of over-armed states were major threats to security, which was, after
all, supposed to be the main concern of the ‘Security’ Council. Was it the fact that some
of the worst offending states were actually members of the Council that made it seem
so impossible to voice issues such as militarisation, the arms trade, and disarmament?
Besides, the Resolution’s focus had been on women – as victims to be sorry for, as
competent actors with use-value in peace-making, and as potential decision-makers.
Nothing had been said either, during the drafting and redrafting of the Resolution and
its negotiated passage through the Security Council, about men and masculine cultures
of violence. There was much in the Resolution 1325 text about women’s sexual
vulnerability, nothing about those who were the main source of danger to women. It
noted women’s absence from significant positions, not the overwhelming presence of
men in places of power. Had it really been out of the question to raise these matters in
their dealings with the Security Council? Perhaps. But women who had been associated
with WILPF, the most feminist of the NGOs in the Working Group and (along with the
Hague Appeal for Peace) the most anti-militarist, felt they had been self-censoring.12
WILPF is the biggest and oldest, but not the only, women’s organisation in the
world opposing militarism and war. A study I made between 2004 and 2006 found
such groups in many countries in war or emerging from war (Cockburn 2007). In
Colombia, La Ruta Pacifica and La Iniciativa de Mujeres por la Paz were trying to stop
a long-running three-way war. In India women of Vimochana, Awaaz-e-Niswan, and
the Forum against the Oppression of Women, among others, were calling for an end to
communal violence, to Hindu pogroms against the minority Muslims. In Japan, South
Korea, and the Philippines the various organisations allied in the Women’s Network
against Militarism were calling for the withdrawal of US bases. In Sierra Leone, women
of the Mano River Women’s Peace Network had been instrumental in getting national
leaders to end a decade of fighting. In the USA and Western European countries, in

Women in Black and other networks, women were campaigning against nuclear
weapons, arms exports, and their governments’ pursuit of the so-called ‘war on
terror’.13 These organisations and many others like them had formed as women’s
organisations because they had a gender analysis of militarism. They believed women
had something unique to say about war. They observed in certain masculinities a
propensity to find war a thinkable, tolerable, justifiable response to political problems.
Sociologist Brian Fogarty (2000) has suggested we may distinguish immediate
causes, antecedent causes, and root causes of war. Thinking along these lines, economic
issues are perhaps the commonest of immediate prompts to armed conflict: a threat to
oil supplies, for instance, or exclusion from land and livelihoods. Ethno-national
interests, sometimes dressed as ideological or religious rivalries, are often antecedent

causes. But patriarchal gender relations sit best in Fogarty’s third category as a root
cause of war, predisposing societies to belligerence. Women who organise as women
against militarism and war often do so in this understanding. To do away with war,
gender, especially the social-shaping of masculinity, must be addressed as one of its
causes. At the same time, gender-as-we-know-it is also a consequence of war. Just as
armed conflict often produces notions of ethnic and national identity in more distinct
and inimical forms, so it produces an emphatic differentiation of masculine and
feminine identities. War and gender relations are mutually shaping. Feminist activism
for peace therefore proposes a transformation of gender relations. Unless purposeful
steps are taken to interrupt and change the social shaping of genders, the gender
regime that emerges from war is likely in the short run to disturb the peace with
continuing violence, and in the long run to maintain militarism and war-readiness.
The experience of Guatemala illustrates this. The country experienced 30 years of
civil war sparked by the injustices of land deprivation, and extremes of wealth and
poverty. It was thus, on the face of it, an economic war. It was also genocide, since
the state’s violence was unleashed most viciously against the indigenous Maya, the
poorest and most desperate of Guatemalans (Jonas 1991). But there was, too, a gender
dimension to this war. It included a misogynistic onslaught by men on women. Rapes
occurred in the tens of thousands, and the forms of sexual violence were bizarre and
extreme. After the war, ‘truth and reconciliation’ reports recorded these atrocities (CEH
1999; ODHAG 1998), but women individually found it hard to speak out about what
had happened to them. In Guatemala, as in many other societies, women who ‘admit’
to rape are often further victimised, rejected by their husbands, and spurned by their
communities. It was only some years after the war had ended that a women’s project,
Actoras de Cambio, was able to help Guatemalan women ‘come out’ and speak about
their individual experiences of rape and sexual torture (Consorcio Actoras de
Cambio 2006).
In a way, however, notwithstanding the peace agreement of 1996, the war in
Guatemala lives on. Though the number of military personnel was cut by almost
half after the peace agreement and the armed forces reorganised, ostensibly for

Cynthia Cockburn
peace-keeping engagements, the reorganisation was rewarded by the US Government

with a tripling of military aid to $9 billion and a closer involvement on the ground of
the US military, ostensibly for combatting the drug trade.14
Misogyny, latent in Guatemala before the war, fanned into greater violence by the
conflict, is still endemic today. Militarised men, engaged in crime and armed with guns,
are a threatening presence in everyday life. If there is no peace, it is not only because
land reform and respect for indigenous peoples has not been delivered. It is also
because the war against women continues, in an epidemic of femicide. On average, two
women a week are found murdered and discarded in the gutters of Guatemala City
and other urban areas (Amnesty International 2006). There is impunity for these crimes.
Experiences like this in many countries make women say that a transition to real peace
requires, among other kinds of justice, restorative gender justice and long-term
transformative change in gender relations.
Meantime, mainstream activism against militarism and war has grown to be a
worldwide movement of movements. It is a loose alliance, country by country, of many
different kinds of organisation and network. Some are primarily opposed to capitalist
interests as a source of war, and direct their main energies to opposing the USA, its
allies, and its overseas bases. Some see the military industrial complex itself as
perpetuating war, and oppose, for example, defence spending, arms manufacture, and
university research funded from military sources. Some specifically oppose nuclear
weapons and the militarisation of space. Groups often differ according to whether they
are socialist in orientation, or anarchist. A third ideology in the movement is pacifism,
and the identity of some organisations is not so much ‘anti-war’ as ‘for peace’. They
aim to foster international understanding and look for means of conflict resolution and
reconciliation.
Although women are often a significant part of the membership of all these many
kinds of mainstream organisation, their leadership is mainly male, and a gender
analysis of war, peace, and security is seldom evident in their statements and strategies.
Another issue divides the movement, and that is the methodology of activism. Some
groups (including but not only women’s groups) are by principle opposed to violent
activist methods, while others tolerate violence against property and police. Dissent
itself can become militarised, as Cynthia Enloe (2000, 4) has pointed out, so that even
our oppositional movements privilege masculinity. It is often in order to retain choice
over their own forms of action that women organise separately from mixed
organisations.
The logic of the gendered nature of militarisation and war, as narrated in this paper,
is that to be fully effective the peace movement itself requires gender-awareness. Some
women clearly feel they must oppose war not only as people but as women. So far, few
men oppose war in their own gender identity, as men. R.W. Connell, pointing out that
‘men predominate across the spectrum of violence’, has suggested that

a strategy for demilitarization and peace must concern itself with this fact, with the reasons for
it, and with its implications for work to reduce violence … Masculinities are the forms in which
many dynamics of violence take shape. Evidently, then, a strategy for demilitarization and peace
must include a strategy of change in masculinities. (Connell 2002, 34, 38).
In this spirit a few brave men in the movement against war today are resisting the
exploitation of their masculinity for war. Some are gay men refusing military
conscription in countries like Serbia and Turkey, where they pay heavily for their
subversive masculinity (Çınar and Üsterci 2009). Nonetheless, a creative mutual
exploration between women and men in the anti-war movement of values and
analyses, strategies, and methodologies, is urgently needed if the antagonisms of
gender are to be transcended and the insights of feminist anti-militarism allowed to
inform and strengthen anti-war activism.
Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist researcher and writer living in London. She holds honorary
chairs in in the Department of Sociology, City University London, and the Centre for the Study
of Women and Gender, University of Warwick. She is active in Women in Black against War
and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. her latest book is Antimilitar-
ism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements (2012). Postal address c/o G&D
Editorial Office. Email: c.cockburn@ktown.demon.co.uk. Website: www.cynthiacockburn.org.
Notes
1 In 1991 Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland argued that the discipline and practice
of international relation, excluding from its subject matter the experience of most
women, had ‘overwhelmingly, been constructed by men working with mental models
of human activity and society seen through a male eye and apprehended through a
male sensibility’ (Grant and Newland 1991, 1). Two years earlier, Cynthia Enloe had
already made a start to correct this in Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989) where she
extended the concerns of IR to include sex and tourism, export processing zones, and
migrant domestic workers. Other significant early contributions to this new genre were
by Peterson (1992), Tickner (1992), and Whitworth (1994), though more recently Laura
Sjoberg still had reason to write, in her introduction to Gender and International Security,
of the ‘awkward silences and miscommunications’ between IR and feminism (2010, 1).
2 This sizeable body of work takes several forms. There are numerous analytical and
reflective monographs in the vein of Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics
of Peace (1989), Betty Reardon’s Sexism and the War System (1996), Joshua S. Goldstein’s
War and Gender (2001) and Diana Francis’ Rethinking War and Peace (2004). There are
feminist analyses of particular features or moments of militarisation and war,
exemplified by Cynthia Enloe’s The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold
War (1993), Cynthia Cockburn’s The Space Between Us (1998), a study of women
negotiating across conflictual differences in war contexts, and Dubravka Zarkov’s The
Body of War (2007) which analyses wartime media representations of ethnicised and

Cynthia Cockburn
gendered male and female bodies. There are besides collected volumes containing
ethnographic accounts from local war zones, among them Moser and Clark (2001),
Susie Jacobs et al. (2000), Lorentzen and Turpin (1998), Cooke and Woollacott (1993),
Giles and Hydman (2004), and Sjoberg and Via (2010).
3 Figure obtained from the Central Intelligence Agency’s online World Fact Book
(www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html, last checked by
the author July 2013).
4 A powerful running narrative on the impact of patriarchy, nationalism, and militarism
on women in Serbia, as well as other parts of the former Yugoslavia, can be found in
the successive volumes of Women for Peace (in English) published at intervals from 1993
by Žene u Crnom (Women in Black), Belgrade.

5 James William Gibson (1984) and Susan Jeffords (1989) both made a gender analysis of
novels, films, and other aspects of popular culture to show a crisis of masculinity after
Vietnam. Through literary criticism Suzanne Clark (2000) showed the masculine
imperative in the Cold War period. James McBride (1995) made connections between
domestic violence, war violence, and the passion for territorial and invasive sports such
as football in US culture. Earlier, Carol Cohn (1990) had demonstrated how masculine
bonding among nuclear defence intellectuals impeded any sense of the real human cost
of nuclear war.
6 The association between masculinities, militarism, and warfare has been extensively
explored in the growing field of men’s studies. Relevant contributions include Klaus
Theweleit’s (1987, 1989) two volumes analysing the sexual fantasies of militarised
fascist men; the collection of articles on masculinities in post-war peace-keeping edited
by Cockburn and Zarkov (2002); Masculinities in Politics and War edited by Stefan
Dudink et al. (2004); and Leo Braudy’s (2005) history of war and the changing nature of
masculinities.
7 For a poignant personal account of her service in Iraq by a US servicewoman, see
Williams (2005). Cynthia Enloe (2000, Chapter 7) details the difficulties entailed in
integrating women into the US military. DeGroot and Peniston-Bird (2000) give
numerous local and historical accounts of women’s experience in militaries. See also
Bosch and Verweij (2002) on the Netherlands.
8 Estimate by Bangladeshi authorities furnished at a World Conference of Churches press
conference in Geneva, January 1972, cited in Brownmiller (1975, 79).
9 There is by now an extensive literature of rape in war from a feminist perspective. A
chapter on military rape in Susan Brownmiller’s (1975) monograph Against Our Will
was foundational. The mass rape in the aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina was
reviewed soon after the event in Stiglmayer (1995), which included a ‘preliminary
analysis’ of its various meanings by Ruth Seifert (1995). See also the edited collection by
Barstow (2000), Chapter 13 of Bourke (2007), and a perceptive article by Elizabeth
Wood (2006).
10 Two major UN documents flowed from the resolution. The Secretary General’s official
report, drafted by Dyan Mazurana of Tufts University, USA, and Sandra Whitworth of
York University, Toronto, Canada, was titled Women, Peace and Security (United Nations

2002). UNIFEM simultaneously produced a report including more material from field-
based experts (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002).
11 Available at www.peacewomen.org/news/1325News/Issue85.htm (last checked by the
author December 2006).
12 Carol Cohn spoke candidly of this in a paper prepared for a workshop on ‘Gender,
Governance and Globalization’ at the University of Warwick, 17–18 September 2004,
and it was touched on by her and others in Cohn et al. (2004). She and Felicity Hill, of
WILPF, express their disappointments in Chapter 5 of Cockburn (2007).
13 Women in Black, originally a movement of Israeli women opposing the occupation of
Palestinian territories, spread to Italy, Spain, the UK, and Serbia during the Yugoslav
wars of the 1990s, and is today a global network of women opposing militarisation and
war (see www.womeninblack.org).
14 ‘US Rewards Guatemala with Military Aid’, by School of the Americas Watch (www.
soaw.org/soaw/, last checked by the author July 2005).
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This article was downloaded by: [Laurentian University]

On: 07 October 2014, At: 15:43

Gender & Development

War and security, women and gender: an

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2013.846632

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considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social

Gender & Development, 2013

mayor difusión de la ideología patriarcal y por mayor presencia de la autoridad. Librar

que la manera en que “vivamos” el género podrá constituirse en un recurso importante

Key words: gender; masculinity; militarisation; security; war

434 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 435

‘neo-realist’ analysis that informs diplomats and politicians.1 In sociology, however,

Preparation for war: gender dispositions

military expenditure often do so at the expense of investment in social provision such

436 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

In highly militarised societies such as Turkey, uniformed personnel of the armed

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 437

War-fighting: militarising masculinity

438 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 439

fighting. The rate of sexual attacks on women prevailing among populations in

Detailed accounts in these and many other reports by international humanitarian

440 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Security and peace-making

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 441

A growing awareness of the gender-specific experiences and needs of women in

442 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 443

structures. However, despite the drive of women’s organisations in many countries in

Gender: a cause of war and a resource for peace

444 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

interests, sometimes dressed as ideological or religious rivalries, are often antecedent

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 445

peace-keeping engagements, the reorganisation was rewarded by the US Government

446 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 447

by Žene u Crnom (Women in Black), Belgrade.

448 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 449

Analysis, London and New York: Zed Books

450 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

organizations’ role in the build-up and implementation of Security Council Resolution

Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013 451

452 Gender & Development Vol. 21, No. 3, 2013

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