Despite women's growing representation in authoritative bodies and influential positions, masculine ideologies are still the central characteristics of foreign policy, using hard-nosed tactics within state violence with little to no emotion dictating their actions. Within this essay, I will determi...
INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (4PIRS009W)
1
In what ways is state violence gendered?
espite women's growing representation in authoritative bodies and influential positions,
D
masculine ideologies are still the central characteristics of foreign policy, using
hard-nosed tactics within state violence with little to no emotion dictating their actions.
Within this essay, I will determine to what extent state violence is gendered and how it
demonstrates a gendered approach to foreign policy. Drawing on Feminist perspectives
to act as evidence for these claims and relating them to historical events, which
demonstrate empirical evidence of state violence being pursued due to masculine
characteristics being dominant within volatile interaction between nations. Tying onto
the realist notion of self-help and nations pursuing their self-interest. By denouncing
these ideologies present within foreign policy, I will suggest alternative ways of pursuing
state action, perhaps a feminine approach or even ungendered, which endorses society
to consider emotion when talking about rationality and scrutinise actions which claim to
be rational but is simply the hard-nosed approach of that authoritative body.
iolence can be seen as gendered due to past events acting as evidence of physical
V
violence against women used as a warfare tactic to collapse that nation's society due to
Women being an integral part of that country's culture. It is suspected that around
20,000 Bosnian women were raped in the conflict between Serbia and Bosnia.
Stiglmayer (1994) states that Bosnian Feminists and the west believed "mass rapes of
their countrywomen [were] an attempt at genocide" (Hansel. L 2000; 63). This can be
confirmed by Allen (1996), who argues that the Serbian use of wartime rape to cause
forced impregnation constituted a unique 'invention' in warfare (Hansel. L 2000). This
explains that women were targeted as a way of breaking down society. This masculine
approach to warfare was to exploit the Muslim culture; by impregnating these women,
they would be with children, resulting in their husbands abandoning them due to their
culture dictating that forced infidelity be unacceptable. These rapes would starve the
population of reproduction of Bosnian Muslims and, instead, Serbians. It could be
argued that this tactic does not support the idea of violence being gendered entirely, as
this was a rare occasion, with Allen (1996) stating, 'not even the Nazis managed to
invent a way to turn the biological process of gestation into a weapon of annihilation’
(Hansel. L 2000; 63). However, this does not disprove that violence is gendered
because it was a masculine approach that targeted women to collapse their society.
e can link the idea of violence being gendered to the masculinisation of foreign policy.
W
Whereby nations act hostile and violent as a way of metaphorically beating their chests
to demonstrate they are fierce nations. Enloe C. (2016; 55), in her bookGlobalization
and militarism: feminists make the link,states that"One has to be "hard-nosed".
Rational, manly security experts must be capable of "muscular thinking"; they must
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