Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police^*

Abstract

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).

Of wolves and men

“…The frajer motif risks to be seen simply as a more modern, popular-cultural version of the "Balkan man" stereotype: the attribution of congruence to machismo and Balkan cultural forms that is so prominent in representations by Westerners (Bjelic;and Cole 2002;Bracewell 2005;Todorova 1997) and by many Bosnians themselves (Helms 2006(Helms , 2008Jansen 2008a). One reason why this style of masculine performance has received much attention (e.g., Simic;1969, 1983van de Port 1994) may be its colorful, dramatic character, and its associated claims of Balkan/Western differences (parallel to the Western interest in Mediterranean and Latin American masculinity).…”

“…The widespread jocular national rankings of different post-Yugoslav masculinities seemed to lose significance in comparison with me, the unwilling representative of all things Western, who was straightforwardly attributed a lower degree of frajer credibility. Although some men would pride themselves on their higher degree of frajerhood in relation to Westerners, others would distance themselves from what they considered typically Balkan gender expectations, and proclaim to have more "European", "modern", "Western" values in this respect (see also Helms 2006). Elsewhere, in a study of refugee men, I have analyzed this latter pattern, often focused on men as responsible, providing fathers, and contextualized it in the de-industrializing Western capitalist context in which they had settled (Jansen 2008a).…”

“…This is not to say that nationalism's self-association with masculinity straightforwardly led to a (dis)qualification of antinationalism as feminine. Rather antinationalist activists were sometimes depicted as insufficiently heterosexual (Helms 2006(Helms , 2007Jansen 2005a). Crucially, such gendered and sexual inadequacy was also attributed to womenactivists, particularly, but not only, if they were feminists.…”

“…Pessar 2001). As Elissa Helms (2003Helms ( , 2007 has analyzed in detail, cross-frontline initiatives of women's organizations frequently relied on "affirmative essentialisms" of femininity. Women were to mutually recognize each other's humanity as women, through the sisterhood of emancipatory feminism or, more frequently, through patriarchally 4 understood motherhood, meeting as sufferers (for example, because they "know what it is like to lose a son").…”

Security Sector Reform in Southeast Asia

“…Much of this interest has focussed on the military and on police forces rather than other institutions such as intelligence or penal services. Increasingly, academic research has also looked at issues of gender and peacekeeping forces (PKF), including intersectionalities between gender, class, ethnicity and the performing of security work in the context of international interventions in post-conflict environments (see, for example, Helms 2006;Higate and Henry 2009;Kronsell and Svedberg 2012;Väyrynen 2004;Whitworth 2004 (2000) in its programming, including increasing the number of women deployed as UNPOL and PKF and ensuring that SSR processes in which the UN is involved in are carried out in a way that takes account of the varied security needs of boys and girls, women and men (UNDPKO 2004;UNDPKO 2008;UNDPKO 2010).…”