{"id":11796,"date":"2012-08-14T15:02:33","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T22:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=11796"},"modified":"2012-08-14T15:02:33","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T22:02:33","slug":"feminism-and-counterterrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=11796","title":{"rendered":"Feminism and Counterterrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feminism as Counterterrorism?<\/strong>
\nBy Vasuki Nesiah – 14 August, 2012<\/p>\n

The most prominent and unequivocal public articulation of an alliance between feminism and counterterrorism came at the dawn of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, when Laura Bush argued that \u201cthe fight against terrorism is a fight for the rights and dignity of women.\u201d This approach was criticized by many as \u201cjust a few opportunistic references to women.\u201d However, today, what we may term \u201dsecurity feminism\u201d is becoming embedded in American foreign policy \u2014 a trend that has been emphatically empowered by Hillary Clinton\u2019s State Department.<\/p>\n

This \u201csecuritizing\u201d of women\u2019s issues means that feminist interests have been \u201cmuscled up\u201d and framed to have traction as a mode of counterterrorism. For instance, Isaac Kfir argues that rather than advocating for gender equity \u201cas a basic right,\u201d we should be \u201cchanging the discourse and using national security\u201d language \u201cto advance gender equality.\u201d In other words, it is not just counterterrorism advocates opportunistically playing the gender card. Feminists also play the security card. Over the long term, their goal is to heighten the visibility and significance of gender issues. More immediately, some also hope they can secure greater funding for women\u2019s groups as \u201can important countermovement to terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The security paradigm is, crucially, not just a framework to advance nationalism and militarization. For many in the counterterrorism field, it is also about highlighting vulnerability. It is the focus on vulnerability and victimization that converges with those invested in mainstreaming feminism within foreign policy agendas. For instance, feminists and counterterrorism advocates have found common cause in anti-immigrant policies through issues such as human trafficking. Laura Sjoberg\u2019s language of \u201cempathetic war-fighting\u201d draws from feminist security theory to capture this convergence. \u201cEmpathetic war-fighting,\u201d she writes, brings a \u201cfocus on individual human security [that] will strengthen just war [theory]\u2019s effectiveness, increase its relevance to modern warfare, and decrease its insidious abstraction and gender bias.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Feminism as Counterterrorism? By Vasuki Nesiah – 14 August, 2012 The most prominent and unequivocal public articulation of an alliance between feminism and counterterrorism came at the dawn of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, when Laura Bush argued that \u201cthe fight against terrorism is a fight for the rights and dignity of women.\u201d This approach more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3368],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11796"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11796"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11798,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11796\/revisions\/11798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}