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1. Sanctions against Iraq were a case of extreme humanitarian suffering and political intransigence, but other sanctions, such as those that helped to end Apartheid in South Africa, have been more successful. Do gendered lenses have anything to say about economic sanctions and economic coercion more generally? If so, what?
As you will remember from reading chapter 11, feminist theorizings of IR and related notions of security, have pointed to a multiplicity of sources of insecurity that shape women’s experiences of and in the international (p. 14-15). One of the most impactful sources of insecurity is economic in nature; a reality that many women experience under ‘ordinary’ circumstances. As we might expect, such insecurities are heightened, however under the weight of economic sanctions. Three effects of economic sanctions on women’s experiences can thus be extrapolated when viewed through the lens of gender.
First, feminists have identified women and children as some of the most severely affected societal members under regimes of economic sanctions, where both disproportionately suffer from malnutrition (p. 17). Simultaneously, however, women (and children) tend to be under-represented in decision-making and negotiation procedures (p. 19). Second, feminists highlight the gendered logic of economic sanctions as a policy choice. They argue that economic sanctions constitute masculine expressions of coercive competitions, where sanctions are conceptualized as an attempt by stronger actors to submit the weaker actor to their will (p. 20). This results in confrontational policies, policies that often hurt those at the margins of international political life the most. Third, feminists might take up the question of responsibility in the international (p. 20-21), and extrapolate this through a consideration of the complex web of hierarchical gender relationships in global politics. Approached through a postcolonial feminist lens, this exceeds questions over a gender binary in the international realm and moves to analyse the intersection of gender and race. This will likely expose competing narratives of ‘proper’ feminisms as well as the discursive appeal to such narratives to justify other foreign policies, including that of economic sanctions.
2. Can the analysis in this chapter on sanctions in Iraq be extended to analyse the conflict there that has continued into the twenty-first century?
How might these methods and modes of analysis be used to analyse other events, policies, or situations in global politics?
While one of the most important methodological contributions of feminist analyses of the international rests in its commitment to micro-level analyses, much scholarship within various feminist strands, have emphasised relationality. This pertains not merely to feminist analyses of the constitution of genders and gender binaries, but further to their analyses of IR more globally. In doing so, feminism has repeatedly exposed that decisions ‘here’ have significant impacts for those living ‘elsewhere’ and vice versa; that our assumptions about peoples derive from a particular historical genealogy; and that such assumptions significantly shape our actions in various contemporary settings. As such, feminist theories – much like Marxist and critical theories of IR – harbour a deep commitment to reflexivity, and push us to consider how our actions will impact those elsewhere (both spatially and temporally).