Co-opting feminist voices for the war on terror: Laura Bush meets Nordic feminism

Abstract

The article analyses Finland’s and Norway’s female politicians’ war rhetoric with reference to the war in Afghanistan and contrasts it with Laura Bush’s rhetoric and feminism. In the Nordic countries the strong liberal and equity tradition of feminism could open up spaces for thinking differently about war, and yet the co-optation of hegemonic war rhetoric occurs in several ways. The ideograph ‘women-and-children’ is often evoked and added to the hegemonic foreign policy rhetoric without questioning the actual rhetorical work it does. Gender-neutral rhetoric is used to hail into being a collective and unitary western do-gooder identity and to distance Nordic involvement from the US ‘war on terror’. The panegyric of UN Resolution 1325 facilitates the metamorphosis of the militaristic and masculine US-led NATO into a collective peacekeeper capable of saving ‘brown women from brown men’.

Gendered Security Harms: State Policy and the Counterinsurgency Against Boko Haram

“…Security policy instead incorporated a series of gendered assumptions, such as that Muslim men constituted a risk and Muslim women required liberation and empowerment. For instance, the liberation of Afghan Muslim women from the Taliban was produced as an explicit rationale to the United States invasion of Afghanistan (Shepherd 2006;Bush Center 2001;von der Lippe and Väyrynen 2011). For many scholars the instrumentalisation and racialisation of women's rights enabling this military action undermined later attempts to integrate the WPS agenda into counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism practices and programming (Ní Aoláin 2016;Rashid 2014;von der Lippe and Väyrynen 2011).…”

“…For instance, the liberation of Afghan Muslim women from the Taliban was produced as an explicit rationale to the United States invasion of Afghanistan (Shepherd 2006;Bush Center 2001;von der Lippe and Väyrynen 2011). For many scholars the instrumentalisation and racialisation of women's rights enabling this military action undermined later attempts to integrate the WPS agenda into counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism practices and programming (Ní Aoláin 2016;Rashid 2014;von der Lippe and Väyrynen 2011). This protection narrative persisted in subsequent years in counterterrorism and countering violent extremism -so-called soft communities-based programming -and is racialised through state Orientalism (Rashid 2014;Brown 2013;Nesiah 2012;Huckerby 2020).…”

The Diminishing Value of Representing the Disadvantaged: Between Group Representation and Individual Career Paths

“… 5 The concept of ‘co-optation’, researched in gender studies, describes a rhetoric and discursive practice to absorb, neutralize and overtake the meaning of an original concept to fit to prevailing political priorities and norms (see e.g. de Jong and Kimm 2017; von der Lippe and Väyrynen 2011). This literature often examines the perspective of the system and outside actors and lies beyond d the scope of our research question.…”