Gender essentialism in Canadian foreign aid commitments to women, peace, and security
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014564799 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Rebecca Tiessen |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2015, Vol. 70(1) 84–100
! The Author(s) 2015
Gender essentialism in
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Canadian foreign aid
DOI: 10.1177/0020702014564799
ijx.sagepub.com
commitments to
women, peace, and
security
Rebecca Tiessen
School of International Development and Global Studies,
University of Ottawa, ON, Canada
Abstract
Canada has made a wide range of commitments to the promotion of gender equality in
development assistance programming. However, in its fragile states programs, these
commitments have in fact promoted gender essentialism, treating women as victims
of violence rather than as active agents of peace and development. Drawing on a
comparative analysis of the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security arising
from the passing of Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and on interviews con-
ducted with a small sample of current and former Canadian government officials, this
article documents and analyzes Canada’s comparatively weak and limited efforts to
promote gender equality abroad under the Harper Conservatives, particularly for fra-
gile and conflict-affected states. The research presented here is situated within broader
feminist critiques of international relations and Canadian foreign policy, which docu-
ment the centrality of gender equality to security and the role that international and
national policies play in shaping gendered security dynamics.
Keywords
Gender, security, Canadian foreign policy, gender essentialism, Harper government
Gender equality is central to successful development programming in fragile
states.1 The United Nations (UN), for example, has agreed to a series of resolutions
1.
The Government of Canada uses different language for fragile states in different contexts.
The former Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), for example, has
Corresponding author:
Rebecca Tiessen, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, 75
Laurier Ave E., Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: rtiessen@uottawa.ca
Tiessen
85
building on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) calling for the adoption
of a gender perspective that includes the needs of women and girls at various stages
of programming in fragile states and post-conflict reconstruction. Resolution 1325
calls on countries to recognize the implications of fragile and conflict-affected
states, particularly for women and children, and to ensure that a gender perspective
accompanies all efforts to address insecurity and post-conflict development, includ-
ing, but not limited to improved understanding of the gendered impacts of conflict,
and involving women in peace processes and decision-making. A gender analysis
ensures that issues of power, inequality, access to and control of resources, and
other political dimensions, such as participation in decision-making, are addressed.
Beyond responding to the different needs and interests of men and women in
society, a gender analysis also recognizes, identifies, and addresses gendered insti-
tutions, behaviours, and practices that reinforce gender inequality. For example,
projects that aim to increase women’s political participation in fragile states must
also recognize and address deeply held stereotypes about societal gendered norms,
such as the notion that public spaces are rightfully held by masculine norms of
behaviour, thereby restricting women from participation in political office.2
In order for women to be more actively involved in political decision-making,
political institutions must be gender-sensitive and therefore open to—and accom-
modating of—women’s participation.
There is a growing body of literature from feminist international relations and
foreign policy scholars who have documented the centrality of gender inequality to
a comprehensive study of conflict, violence, (in)security, and fragile states. If donor
agencies are to address gender inequality in fragile states in a systematic and com-
prehensive way, they need to start by getting the language right and ensuring that
commitments to gender equality are not only articulated but also become part of
political practice. In other words, focusing on gender inequality requires more
effort than merely identifying women as members of vulnerable groups; it also
necessitates an enactment of what might otherwise have been politically motivated
rhetorical commitments.
The methodology employed in this article draws on critical discourse analysis.
Discourse plays an important role in shaping meaning in society and forming
‘‘regimes of truth’’:3 Once a society has internalized perceptions and discourse,
social realities and truths are formed, which then serve as rationales for the political
used the language of conflict-affected situations and fragile states in the context of the work per-
formed by the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force. See http://www.international.gc.ca/
START-GTSR/why-pourquoi.aspx (accessed 17 September 2014). For this paper, I employ the
language previously used by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) of fragile
states and crisis-affected communities, or fragile states for short. A fragile state is defined here as a
low-income country with weak governance capability, leaving its citizens in a precarious social,
political, and economic context.
2.
V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, 3rd ed.
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010); Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A
Gendered Analysis (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2004).
3.
Michel Foucault, ‘‘Truth and power,’’ in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (Toronto: Penguin,
1980), 75.
86
International Journal 70(1)
actions taken by governments. Critical discourse analysis offers a means to recon-
sider these societally held truths and the political practices generated by specific
discourses and ideologies.
The findings presented here also draw from interviews with government officials.
While the sample of participants is small (seven subjects), the comments from these
interviews substantiate and reinforce the critiques emerging from the discourse
analysis. The individuals who were interviewed provided essential insights into
how knowledge about gender and women is produced and disseminated within
bureaucracies and into their own understanding of the role of insider activism in
promoting subversive actions to ensure that gender equality remains a priority. As
the Harper Conservatives continue to undermine more sophisticated and progres-
sive contributions to gender, peace, and security, however, insider activists are
facing the growing challenges of bureaucratic resistance to the promotion of
gender equality.
This study also compares Canada’s policies with those of other international
donors since ‘‘international and national policies and their historical intersection
with gender relations’’4 have implications for how security plays out at the indi-
vidual, household, community, and state levels. Specifically, the national action
plans on women, peace, and security from several donor countries are examined
here from a gender-based perspective. Analyses conducted by nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), and international work-
ing groups were also used to corroborate the gender-based critiques. The findings
demonstrate how gender essentialism continues to permeate much of the discourse
in Canada’s fragile state programming. Policy documents, reports, and field-level
experience reveal a discourse of ‘‘vulnerable’’ or ‘‘helpless’’ women in fragile state
contexts. This charitable response to women’s needs fails to incorporate Canada’s
previous commitment to a more sophisticated gender analysis, designed to under-
stand and address the root causes of inequality between men and women.
This article contributes to ongoing debates in Canadian foreign policy, specif-
ically by analyzing the Harper Conservatives’ promotion of the ‘‘equality
between women and men’’ at the expense of gender equality,5 and to broader
feminist theoretical insights in the international relations and foreign policy
fields. International commitments such as Resolution 1325, feminist critiques,
and empirical studies documenting the centrality of gender equality to security
dimensions have done little to alter the discursive and policy approaches to
gender and security of the Harper government. A commitment to revisit feminist
critiques of traditional security studies and foreign policy is now needed. The fem-
inist theoretical framework I employ is increasingly used in Canadian foreign
policy and international relations literature.6 Nonetheless, traditional security
4.
Annick Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 16.
5.
See Rebecca Tiessen and Krystel Carrier, ‘‘The erasure of gender equality in Canadian foreign
policy under the Harper Conservatives: The significance of the discursive shift from ‘gender equal-
ity’ to ‘equality between women and men,’’’ Canadian Foreign Policy Journal (forthcoming).
6.
Wibben, Feminist Security Studies, 16.
Tiessen
87
studies still tend to ignore the gendered nature of militarization.7 As Annick
Wibben has argued, while there is ‘‘still widespread ignorance of, and reluctance
to engage with, feminist work in international relations,’’8 gender remains a ‘‘neces-
sary analytical tool to recognize the causes and consequences of...
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