Hello everybody I'm Maria Elisa Christie. I'm director of Women and Gender in International
Development at the Center for International Research, Education, and Development,
CIRED, at Virginia Tech. Welcome to our first virtual Women and
Gender in International Development discussion series. We're so happy that you could join us.
Before introducing our speaker I'd like to read the following acknowledgement:
we acknowledge that people who are the traditional custodians of the land on which
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enslaved whose labors built this institution. I'd like to ask you now to please after the
presentation to answer the survey that's going to be shared in the chat at the end of the webinar
in the full calendar and updates for this year's discussion series is on our website.
This discussion will last approximately 40 minutes with about 20 minutes presentation and followed
by 20 minutes discussion and Q&A. So I'd like to introduce our speaker. Dr. Audrey Reeves is
an assistant professor of political science and a core faculty for the ASPECT doctoral program here
at Virginia Tech. Her areas of expertise include gender and global governance, feminist security
studies, and emotion embodiment and memory in world politics. Please welcome Dr. Audrey Reeves.
thank you maria elisa i will now share some slides with you
all right here we go thank you very much everybody for joining this talk and i'm delighted to be here
as part of this speaker series the talk today is going to be titled "Victories and failures
of gender expertise in global governance: the case of post-conflict state building."
This slide shows the beautiful Geneva lake because my story the background story starts
in Geneva. I'm originally from Montreal, Canada and in 2008 I started a master's degree in Geneva
in international studies. Because Geneva's very expensive quickly I had to find work to help me
fund my studies and I ended up taking a job as a research assistant in an international foundation
established by the Swiss government that dealt with issues of security and development. this
was a 200 people organization and i joined a team of 10 who worked on gender and security issues
i learned a tremendous amount from this team who worked on issues of security sector reform
so they were interested and actively working towards working with uniform services so police
armed forces border guards etc in various parts of the world and helping make these services
more inclusive of women and more gender sensitive so better able to meet the security needs of
everybody in the population including women and girls now after working there for a year and a
half i left and started a phd in politics and i studied feminist theory and in the process
of studying the important feminist theorists i learned many critiques of the liberal states
and this then brought a puzzle for me because my former colleagues which i respected
and admired and understood as gender experts seemed not to integrate in their work at
least not in a way that was visible to me the insights of the feminist critiques of the state
which then led me to try and understand what gets to count as gender expertise in global governance.
So the outline of this talk is first an exploration of the rise of gender expertise
in global governance then my interest in gender expertise and how it has been defined almost
exclusively as expertise on women individual women in the process forgetting that some other forms of
gender expertise but that are not often recognized as such in global governance context
would involve the analysis of gendered concepts and institutions.
I will consider gender expertise in the context of state building and the victories that came
with the integration of gender knowledge there as well as some of the failures
even though state building is my case study here I think that all of the processes of gender and
global governance are involved in the um in the in design designating certain forms of knowledge
as expertise and we see here and the executive director of u.n women the south african from
and i'm wondering okay how does someone um like her becomes a gender expert becomes recognized as
a gender expert and some of the same processes i'm interested in estate building would apply
i think elsewhere but starting with the beginning with the rise of women as both objects and experts
in global governance processes on this picture we see the founding members of the international
council of women in 1888 so on the year of the foundation of this transit transnational
women's organization the icw was one of the first organization to really start influencing
global governance processes and establishing um that women were an important category of subjects
so prior to this it's not that um women's lives were not regulated but um they were usually
regulated as part of policies on the family for instance now with women's organizations um
starting to try and intervene in global governance processes and they successfully establish women as
its own global category of people with shared problems in need of international solutions
they assembled statistics on women in various parts of the world in order to advocate women's
suffrage international labor legislation and the prevention of human trafficking in so doing
these women also established themselves as experts on women's problems and as needed sources of
knowledge to suitably and govern the world on a global scale they would seek and obtain and later
inform the establishment of international organizations dedicated to women's rights
so here we have an example so this picture was taken on the day of the establishment of the u.n
commission on the status of women in 1946 and this is an example of this institutionalization of um
women as a subject of governance and also women as women's organizations as intervening as experts in
global governance i understand gender expertise as the recognized expert knowledge that informs what
counts as gender inequality and how to overcome gender inequality through targeted interventions
in my work i see gender expertise as intrinsically political and the reason for this is that gender
inequality no one agrees on exactly what counts as gender inequality like these topics are debated
similarly what counts as a valid solution or a way to overcome gender inequality is also a contested
topic therefore gender expertise necessarily involves struggles for power struggles to
establish what counts as a gender problem and who is going to bring the knowledge
to solve this problem one of the um like salient feature of this photo is that most of the women
are white and you could probably safely assume that they were all middle class women as well
or upper class so there have always been um a certain bias
so some people get an easier access to positions of gender expertise than others
which leads the question uh to the question what counts as gender expertise and who comes as a
gender expert this is a picture from the fourth world conference on women in beijing from 1995
and beijing was really the moment when women of color became much more visible as
actors in global governance they became the most numerous um group in the gatherings
at this world conference on women
however there are still limitations about who counts as an expert that elude
both race and class and this is where i'm turning to now
in 1997 something important happened that led to the definition of gender expertise
as primarily expertise on women ecosoc the body of the united nations that deals with
social and economic affairs adopted this definition of gender mainstreaming
the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action including
legislation policies or programs in all areas and at all levels this was an important moment when
the un recognized that gender had to be integrated systematically through all policy initiatives
and this then became also influential in a range of other international organizations
gender expertise then became defined as the ability to execute this process
the process of assessing the implications for both women and men of any policy action but note
that we're talking here about implications for individual human beings gender analysis however
is more than this first of all
gender of course is the process of classifying certain bodies certain people as male or female
and different characteristics and responsibilities based on biological sex however gender also marks
differences between objects such as women's cars or men's cars you know or concepts or behaviors
and these differences are also constructed as hierarchical typically characteristics associated
with masculinity are considered more important or more valuable so for instance nursing is a
typically feminine activity whilst serving in the military is considered a typically
masculine activity regardless of who a woman or man or someone non-binary is performing it
now let's consider what this entails what does it entail if only one aspect of
gender norms and conventions are scrutinized in the process of providing gender expertise in a
global governance process so let's look at the victories and failures related to the integration
of gender expertise in a particular context post-conflict state building state building
is the process of building the relationship between state and society through international
engagement aimed at increasing first of all the accountability and legitimacy and
of the state and second of all its capacity to fulfill core functions this definition
comes from the oecd which is the organization for economic cooperation and development
state building became a dominant paradigm from the late 1990s
and also in the early 2000s onward in response to a concern with failed states especially after 9 11
it was perceived that a failed state in afghanistan in this case had led to
the emergence of terrorist networks that were threatening both to their own populations um in
in say afghanistan or other countries that were deemed failed and and also in the western world
so it's in response to these problems that then state building emerges as a
really influential paradigm for development and foreign policy and initiatives globally
now even though the target areas were located globally for these policies
really they originated in the global north so i'm mentioning here the oecd and their definition
because they were deeply influential and the oecd is a is a gathering of countries that are
deemed developed or industrialized so these are the rich countries of the world and it's
important to remember to understand that this is really where state building originates as a body
of policies and programs it's inherited from the west and therefore it brings with it a number of
assumptions that are also inherited from western history and its own um gender norms
organizations like um the united nations and the world bank took on
this concept of um of state building and developed it and similarly a lot of important
donor states um such as the uk the us also ended up um cultivating and um
inputting ideas and informations into like the the concept of state building
so these reports at the top are examples of how these ideas were put on paper and then shared
in terms of integrating gender it started happening in the mid-2000s international
intervention in fragile states should consistently promote gender equity the oecd wrote
they also stated that state building should ensure the protection and participation
of women so this was a victory of um gender expertise gender made it officially into policy
discourse it was formally recognized as a priority the focus was also on individual women the focus
was on ensuring women's political rights so safety against um like attacks to bodily integrity and
also the possibility of participating in state structures this happened largely as a result
of the influence of think tanks this is where the gender experts were influential and located
very similar to the dynamics that i was able to observe myself as a research assistant in geneva
these experts would write documents like the one that you see here from the overseas development
institute in london where they would argue for the importance of considering women's rights
in context of state failure and therefore in state building policy they would write things
like in context of state failure women suffer from weak legal protections and discriminatory
state policies and this is from the north south institute in ottawa writing in 2005. so
you'll notice before the oecd starts formally talking about women's rights as part of
state building in 2007. other organizations that jumped in were the foundation for international
relations and foreign dialogue known as frida in madrid the united states institute for peace
and many others who were involved in shaping the vocabulary and the language through which
women's rights would become integrated in state building policy
so women were integrated in state institutions or at least there were plans there were policies
to integrate women in state institutions at the level of parliaments of elections
through commissions and the judicial system armed and police forces which is what my
organization in geneva was very much involved in constitution drafting and public administration
there was also a concern with integrating women in free market economies especially
in the context of grant and loan dissemination to startup or develop small-scale businesses
however there was also a failure through all this the failure to problematize
masculinized assumptions inherent to the very idea of the liberal state as the world bank and
the un themselves recognized the idea of the social contract was central to the discourse
on state building and yet we know that um the social contracts has been heavily criticized
by feminist theorists okay so one example is carol paytman who wrote the feminist classic
the sexual contract in 1988 and she argued throughout this book that classic theorists
such as jean-jacques rousseau who see a picture on the right and left a legacy of problems about
women's incorporation into and obligation within civil society these were philosophical discourses
that led the exclusion of women from formal politics for um like 200 years until very recently
in the 20th century when women progressively and fought for the right to reintegrate politics
formal politics that is now in terms of state building policy the first problematic assumption
is that public violence is more important um more of a priority than private violence
there's a greater concern for dealing with violence in the public sphere and the comparative
neglect for dealing with violence in the private sphere and their social and economy causes so here
we see a typical example of measure taken on you know to ensure gender equity in state building
which is the gender training of security sector personnel this is of course important however
it doesn't address the structures that make it possible for women to be victimized in the private
sphere so state building reproduces the assumption that the state is primarily a tool of pacification
of men's violence against other men in the public sphere it's not very well equipped to remedy
violence against women which primarily occurs in the private sphere and second and most importantly
state building tends to prioritize security institutions as opposed to social ones this
is an example of a definition of state building as found in the world bank and united nations
first of all the essential capabilities have to do with security the rule of law taxation and then
secondarily maybe we get a chance to deal with economic growth service delivery which is the key
point here and livelihood security also important so there is a prioritization of institutions that
have been coded as masculine namely the military or um the the police you know like the strong
um the strong like militarized aspects of the states conversely there is a systematic neglect
of health education and social services which are coded feminine and this in turn reproduces a
hierarchy between masculine and feminine spheres of activity the former worthy of funding and
the latter less so this results in real world impacts for women because without collective
investments in education in child care in health care women are expected to provide these privately
which by definition um leaves them in precarious situations as well as most of the population
it also fails to address so state building also fails to address why women are less able to seek
employment in the public sphere in the first place or receive protection from physical abuse
it has to do with some shortcomings in how well resourced collective arrangements have have been
and therefore there are these connections between communities and how they are organized
and the individual women that are not being established when all the attention is on um
an abstract idea of individual women's rights so in conclusion gender expertise in global
governance project acts like state building has become increasingly accepted and understood as a
focus on individual women's rights and needs which brings both some very positive aspects as well as
leaving some blanks that need to be filled because this focus lacks a complementary feminist critique
of androcentric governance frameworks such as state building if unquestioned these frameworks
reproduce the masculinized priorities and institutions of key donors and governing
institutions for instance financing armed forces as opposed to healthcare institutions
even if some individual women are integrated in these masculinized schemes
as a whole peace building policies that remain focused on military responses do little to address
broader human security problems especially the economic and security of women as a group which
is the fundamental source of their insecurity so i will stop here and look forward to your questions
okay
so i am seeing questions in a word document um but so far i do not see um questions just yet okay i
see one question which i will read the question is can you tell us more about the training of
gender experts it seems that a problem has to do with the lack of exposure to feminist thought
is there perhaps a division between certain kinds of master's programs
those that are policy focused versus others where feminists thought might appear well that's a great
way into thinking about all of this and there may be i think this is an empirical question to some
extent that um you know like you would have to research to really know like what exactly is the
content of gender programs however i think there's more than this there is also the question of
what kind of knowledge is deemed pragmatically um effective or pragmatically receivable
because gender experts are not necessarily unaware of feminist critiques of the liberal state but
it's like there's a level of self-censorship that leads them to not deploy those kinds of arguments
in context of global governance but deploy the kinds of arguments that they think will be more
easily receivable by the male dominated structures that they are trying to um one step at a time
change so i think it also has to do with um a certain like level of um like prior
understandings of what institutions are ready to receive or not ready to receive
okay i don't know if there's another question coming
the next question is do you have any information on the relative size of
loans from the world bank for security versus loans for health education social protection
so in my experience the world bank does not loan much for military and security
most of okay i get i don't have the full question here but i i understand where you're getting at
um yes i know what you're saying that's why i'm i was focusing on um state building specifically
as a program of government and it has to do and i think that's a very like important
and interesting question like tracking funding streams um but nonetheless there is in the way
that state building is um developed as a security paradigm and that's not i'm not necessarily just
interested in the world bank here even though it is an important actor
but it's also really important to consider um bilateral donors um you know like when for
instance like state actors become involved in funding certain foreign policy agendas
and development agendas and and the the united nations is also important here in that respect
um and this is where state building really gets defined primarily as a security focused affair
and the consensus in the literature on state building um is also that state
building is primarily involved with the um construction or reconstruction of security
forces like law enforcement apparatus um i think there's another question coming
so the next question is how how are donors governments
and other partners distinguishing between gender sensitive versus gender transformative
approaches okay i think this has to do here with um terminology and um in mind in my understanding
like except for gender experts themselves most people would not know the difference between
um gender sensitive versus gender transformative uh like it's just gender sensitive is often like a
complicated concept to explain to people who do not come from a gender background
so i don't necessarily think that these concepts even though like to you and i they might seem like
they might seem common sense i don't think they're necessarily very common sense
in for a lot of policy makers who are not gender experts themselves
and this is why we end up again with the idea of focusing on individual women's rights
and individual women's needs as a priority rather than more transformative approaches
so i'm trying to see if there's more questions coming
okay right i think i just
i think i'm not seeing any more questions coming in just at this moment
so i think a lot of these questions are really interesting to me because they emphasize
um how interesting it would be to like lead on to new projects from this research
because here i was really taking more and approached i was grounded
and that was mirroring the approach of feminist theorists which is like to the study of texts
so i was interested methodologically in examining the policy texts of um say like the world bank or
undp or the oecd and seeing how they understand state building and how gender is or is not
integrating integrating into their thinking about gender policy
however i think a lot of these questions um point to the question of implementation
and then in practice when policy is implemented what kind of
actions do we see in practice like if we follow the money trail exactly what happens
so i think there's another question coming here
okay so one question is
to what extent have women's rights been built into legal reform during state building exercises
yeah this is i mean this goes a little quite a bit beyond the scope of the paper but i think there
has been a lot of emphasis on that because legal reforms are at the core of the concern of state
buildings so they are part of these core state institutions that state building policy has been
prioritizing so things like constitution drafting um if you remember like so part of the examples
that i listed um are examples um of initiatives where the integration of women has been actively
sought and pursued so there's been reforms about for instance um laws that uh touch on
sexual violence and rape because there were a number of of countries you know that um did not
necessarily have developed legislation or say like countries where marital rape um was still legal
and therefore like there have been efforts as part of state building to transform the law so because
these efforts touch on the political rights of women again it has to do with um
bodily integrity it has to do with also like the formal participation of women in the public sphere
these are prioritized but then there's the question afterwards and this is where like um
things become difficult of how does the law turn from paper to actual policy transformation
and and this is where there is a or policy or let's say like social practice
transformation so okay i see another question
do you think gender experts from development agencies
are responding to feminist critiques of gender mainstreaming
are there initiatives underway to respond to these critiques in their initiatives
okay so
there there is one extent to which at least that was my my experience when i was um like closer you
know like more embedded in practitioner networks um that there is sometimes a difficulty there
with discussions that are deemed like too theoretical or like too academic
so there's a number of feminists who are who are practitioners like development practitioners
who have chosen this this path of of career because they wanted to deal with concrete
things they wanted to deal with like actual physical women and how to make their lives better
and i completely understand that and and really like you know i've learned tremendously from these
practitioners but often it's true that there is a difficulty to um
let's say there's not always a full recognition that i would like to see that a theoretical
engagement with the underlying and often unspoken assumptions of um that govern
global governance interventions imply it seems almost as if wanting to
help like real women now sometimes runs against the to me equally important um need
for questioning the entire framework of thinking that underlies interventions that are possible
right now so that is um that tends to be a difficulty sometimes and i think it you know like
the feminist movement is not always um unified actually it's never unified there is always
productive dialogue always productive um like conversation and debate um and so i think this
is one of these debates that happen like i think some um feminists who are practitioners
tend to want to have um immediate solutions for immediate like people who are underground right
now and are suffering and often conversations that are like more radical like more challenging
of entire infrastructures and therefore that would need to be thought more in the long term
as a long term more like gender transformative um tend to sometimes seem less uh you know like
less urgent or less immediately feasible as well like there's often like how do you deal
with um say like the the problem that state building as a whole paradigm is uh like lopsided
towards masculinized priorities like how do you deal like there's no easy solution with that
problem so that's partly why i think a lot of um gender experts sometimes
um are not necessarily always very you know very either interested or ready to respond to like
more academic feminist critiques also because they're thinking we're the ones doing practical
work here like trying to really like change policy and uh like i've i've heard colleagues
address um feminist academics and say please give me practical solutions to practical problems
and move on from from this course analysis so that can be like a difference sometimes between the two
approaches
another question just came in
how does culture play a part in informing the society
and men and women between them in this society and about empowerment
yeah it plays a huge part and that's actually part of the um of the problem here it's to see that
state building is really a western paradigm like it comes from the west it comes from
the global north and therefore it brings with it a cultural baggage that has developed
with the emergence of what what we call today like the modern state the liberal state in
europe in north america like europe and its colonies and that historical heritage carried for
a long time a like a positive inequality between men and women that was actually fundamental
not just like accidental but that was fundamental to the way that the liberal state was imagined
and it's important also to remember that contemporary to that process
there was there were societies in other parts of the world where um what we would like see today
what we would see today as women like had um like more rights than they did say like in in
france or britain at the time so like in certain parts of india women were able to inherit property
at the time of colonization was in britain they could not in certain parts of nigeria women could
be political leaders religious leaders in the 19th century whereas you know in in britain that
would eventually colonize nigeria that was not the case so there is often the assumption that
state building is what is going to bring modernity and modernity is what comes with gender equality
to um the south to conflict affected states but actually there's a huge heritage and history
of inequality on gender terms within the history of how the liberal state was constituted that then
is brought when state building is being enacted is being implemented in the global south all right
so i am told that this is the last question so i will um stop here and let maria and lisa take over
well thank you so much uh dr reeves um for your excellent presentation and responding to our
our questions uh and thank you all for submitting your questions i'm sorry
that we don't have our informal space in the multi-purpose room in the library where we can
come up after this is over and chat with dr reeve some more over some coffee but this is
what we're facing with this global pandemic and i appreciate your patience and joining us in this
strange virtual world we did share the link to the survey over the chat so please fill
that out when you can so we can have your feedback your opinion is very important to us
our next discussion series will be with dr carly nichols from the university of iowa on november
19th she's going to be talking about her her research in india be sure to sign up for updates
let us know in the survey one of the options in the surveys to tell us if you want to be added to
our lists or for those of you who aren't also we will be hosting a virtual gender and development
conference in february the last week of february see our website at wgd.com.org for details
maybe sophie you can put that in that in the chat wd conf or we're accepting abstracts now
for posters and also for four-minute student flash talk competitions uh and registration
will be open on october 26th so let us know on the post event survey or on the wgd conf
website if you want to receive updates on that so that's all i have to say again thank you so much
for joining us have a wonderful day and we hope you can join us for both of these future events