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51. Disrupted: The Feminist Foreign Policy Issue

Author:
Marissa Conway
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy
Abstract:
It seems wonderfully fitting that we're celebrating the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy's one year anniversary with the launch of Disrupted, focusing this issue on none other than feminist foreign policy itself. At CFFP, our endgame is the adoption of feminist foreign policy worldwide as we believe it to be one of the best solutions to combat the elitest, inequitable, and harmful foreign policies we see all too often. The aim of this journal is to highlight both established and emerging voices, and to seek to understand how the everyday actions of people - actions which might seem simply social or even private - are decidedly politically charged, and vice versa. We challenge assumptions about the unquestioned objectivity of policy - assumptions which miscalculate power structures and tend to leave an analysis of international politics lacking. We attempt to understand how the identities of both subjugated and the elite interact to reify systemic bias, and perhaps most importantly, we do not presume the authority to speak on behalf of anyone else. Ultimately, we see a feminist analysis of foreign policy not only as compelling, but as indispensable to achieve a more equal world. Thank you so much for supporting this publication. CFFP is a grassroots, volunteer run organization and we're proud to lead the way in making foreign policy more feminist, more transparent, and more intersectional. With your support we're amplifying a different and more nuanced conversation that can better inform policy decisions and begin to alleviate inequality at both a global and local level.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, Climate Change, War, Feminism, and Young Adults
Political Geography:
Global Focus

52. Critique of ISIS’ Women Policy

Author:
Zehra Yilmaz
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
Institution:
Sakarya University (SAU)
Abstract:
This article addresses the policy employed by ISIS with respect to women. ISIS differs from other extremist organisations in terms of its impact on women and specifically, the number of female militants it has recruited from the West. Such high numbers of women joining ISIS is striking when considered in the face of the fact that ISIS is well known to be involved in rather oppressive and barbaric practices in territories under its control. Therefore, the article examined the rea- sons that trigger women to join ISIS and the promises of ISIS for women. The present review builds the policy employed by ISIS with respect to women upon the meanings attributed to women in the founding process of a state and the man- ner in which women experience this process. Focused on the policy employed by ISIS with respect to women, the article carries on the claim of extending beyond a cultural discourse inflicted with orientalist prejudices by addressing the matter from the perspective of the state and its gender perspective in contrary to research studies approaching ISIS and women from a theological standpoint.
Topic:
Religion, Terrorism, Women, ISIS, and Feminism
Political Geography:
Global Focus

53. The Varying Roles of the Female Combatant

Author:
Melissa Rary
Publication Date:
04-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center on Human Rights Education, University of Denver
Abstract:
While the idea of women as combatants in the US military is relatively new, some stories of women in war goes back to Greek myths of armies of goddesses at war. Still, this subject gets very little, if any, press in the news. Women are often seen as victims of war, but some women may also be perpetrators. Beyond simply fighting on the ground, Dara Cohen explores the idea of women as perpetrators of wartime sexual violence. She points out that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 41% of female sexual violence victims were victimized by females, as were 10% of male victims. She argues that within armed groups, women face many of the same pressures to commit similar forms of violence as their male counterparts. Women have been used historically in various roles during recruitment and combat, including being a nurse, cook, telephone operator, or journalist. Some conflicts have also seen a rise women used as a recruiting tool, or as wives, to young men joining forces. In the Second World War, the Soviet Union used female soldiers to encourage their male counterparts to join the forces. Of the 820,000 women who served in the Red Army, 15% of those were combatants. ISIS recruits young women in a similar way, promising them marriage to ISIS fighters and offering them a meaningful role in a big world. They are then used as mothers, wives, nurses, recruiters, and general supporters of ISIS.
Topic:
Gender Issues, War, Feminism, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Global Focus

54. What’s at Stake for Women: Threat of the Global Gag Rule

Author:
Kiersten Gillette-Pierce and Jamila Taylor
Publication Date:
01-2017
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center for American Progress - CAP
Abstract:
President Donald Trump is likely to follow the tradition of other Republican anti-choice administrations and reinstate the Mexico City Policy, which bans recipients of U.S. foreign aid from offering abortion-related services, as one of his first executive actions. Better known as the Global Gag Rule and first introduced in 1984 at the U.N. International Conference on Population held in Mexico City, the policy has been a barrier to comprehensive women’s health care on a global scale.1 Made U.S. policy through an executive order issued by President Ronald Reagan, it restricts family planning providers from offering comprehensive health care and, when in place, denies international family planning organizations the right to:2 Provide abortion-related information to their patients and clients3 Provide referrals to other health care providers who perform safe abortions4 Provide legal abortions or legal abortion-related services5 Advocate for the legalization of abortion in their country6 The Mexico City Policy infringes upon women’s fundamental right to make informed decisions about their bodies and their health. It denies women access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care that includes abortion care and related information and referrals.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Women, Feminism, Reproductive Rights, and Reproductive Health
Political Geography:
Global Focus

55. Applying Feminist Principles to Program Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning

Author:
Daniela Koerppen and Shawna Wakefield
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Oxfam is committed to mainstreaming women’s rights and to transforming unequal gender and power relations. For its programmes, this means that it needs to track its contributions to these changes. This paper aims to share reflections on how to apply feminist principles to monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) practice. It includes case studies of Oxfam’s experience of applying these principles to its programmes.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Feminism, Accountability, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Global Focus

56. Women political leaders and peacebuilding

Author:
Clare Castillejo
Publication Date:
05-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution
Abstract:
Over the past 15 years there has been growing recognition of the gender-differentiated impact of conflict, the opportunities to promote women’s rights that post-conflict peacebuilding processes provide and – crucially – the value that women bring to peacebuilding. Yet in many conflict-affected settings women’s participation and leadership in shaping the peacebuilding agenda remain strongly resisted by male elites and are not prioritised by international actors. This report explores the opportunities for achieving women’s meaningful participation and influence in peacebuilding, and the challenges faced by such an agenda. Given the crucially important role that political parties can play in shaping the direction of peacebuilding and post-conflict politics, the report focuses particularly on the ability of women to exercise political voice and leadership through parties and the party system. Finally, it examines why international actors have failed to live up to their commitments on women’s inclusion in peacebuilding, and identifies opportunities and strategies to strengthen international support for women’s participation and influence in the politics of peace.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Peacekeeping, Women, Feminism, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Global Focus

57. NATO and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Time to Bring It Home

Author:
Marriet Schuurman
Publication Date:
06-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Connections
Institution:
Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes
Abstract:
The year 2015 is a year of global reflection: celebrating the seventy years of the United Nations, the twenty years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for gender equality and women’s empowerment, the end year of the Millennium Development Goals, and the fifteenth anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325). Together, these milestones urge us to reflect on what difference these groundbreak­ing international institutions and collective efforts have actually made.
Topic:
Gender Issues, United Nations, Feminism, and Diversity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

58. Aggregating Elasticities: Intensive and Extensive Margins of Female Labour Supply

Author:
Orazio P. Attanasio, Peter Levell, Hamish Low, and Virginia Sanchez-Marcos
Publication Date:
06-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems. There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems. At the intensive margins, simple specifications that seem to fit the data give rise to non linear expressions that do not aggregate in a simple fashion. At the extensive margin, aggregate changes in participation are likely to depend on the cross sectional distribution of state variables when a shock hits and, therefore, are likely to be history dependent. We tackle these aggregation issues directly by specifying a life cycle model to explain female labour supply in the US and estimate its various components. We estimate the parameters of different component of the model. Our results indicate that (i) at the intensive margin, Marshallian and Hicksian elasticities are very heterogeneous and, on average, relatively large; (ii) Frisch elasticities are, as implied by the theory, even larger; (iii) aggregate labour supply elasticities seem to vary over the business cycle, being larger during recessions.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Feminism, and Labor Market
Political Geography:
Global Focus

59. Ethnic Diversity, Gender, and National Leaders

Author:
Katherine W. Phillips, Nicholas A. Pearce, and Susan E. Perkins
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
National leaders have the ultimate responsibility to balance the needs of a diverse set of constituents in society while using their country’s unique set of resources to grow the economy and to gain comparative advantages. Salient to many observers, the United States of America, the world’s largest economy, has never had a female president or vice president and has had only forty-four women serve in the 224-year history of the U.S. Senate. Moreover, if women do make it into top-ranked government leadership positions, whether or not they perform notably different from their male counterparts still remains unknown. Though studies presented by several psychologists validate that women’s leadership styles differ from their male counterparts (i.e., more democratic, inclusive, participative and transformative), how this plays out nationally and in terms of setting national policy agendas and making key decisions for society is explained only anecdotally.[2] For example, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, affectionately known to her countrymen as the “Iron Lady,” was said to bring a “motherly sensitivity” to her post-war torn country, Liberia; Michelle Bachelet, the Republic of Chile’s first female national leader, won in 2006 on a campaign championing “gender equality” and “inclusion;” and most recently, Park Geun-hye won the presidential election in the Republic of Korea under the political platform of “disarming vicious cycles of distrust and building peace” with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.[3] These anecdotes all suggest an association with a gender-specific perception of governance, as well as a gender-specific expectation for substantive policy changes with a female taking the lead at the national level. To develop a better understanding of the unique contributions of female national leaders, this article uses global cross-national comparative leader data from 188 countries to explore the following questions: 1) How have global trends of national female leadership changed over time? and 2) Is there evidence that having a female—as compared to a male—leader has differential consequences for economic growth as ethnic diversity increases?
Topic:
Gender Issues, Economic Growth, Feminism, and Diversity
Political Geography:
Global Focus