Subverting economic empowerment: Towards a postcolonial-feminist framework on gender (in)securities in post-war settings
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Caitlin Ryan,Maria Martin de Almagro |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119836474 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119836474
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(4) 1059 –1079
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119836474
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E
JR
I
Subverting economic
empowerment: Towards
a postcolonial-feminist
framework on gender (in)
securities in post-war settings
Maria Martin de Almagro
University of Cambridge, UK
Caitlin Ryan
University of Groningen, Netherlands
Abstract
This article demonstrates that the inability of the United Nations Women, Peace and
Security agenda to realize greater peace and security for women in post-war states
stems to a great extent from its failure to engage deeply with the materiality of women’s
lives under economic empowerment projects. We argue that the Women, Peace and
Security agenda reproduces a neoliberal understanding of economic empowerment that
inadequately captures the reality of women’s lives in post-war settings for two reasons:
first, it views formal and informal economic activities as dichotomous and separate,
rather than as intertwined and constitutive of each other; and, second, it conceptualizes
agency as individual, disembodied, abstract, universalizing and conforming to the
requirements of the competitive pressures of the market. The article then offers a
three-pronged postcolonial-feminist framework to analyse international interventions
in which representation, materiality and agency are interconnected. We argue that such
a framework helps understand better who is empowered in post-war economies and
how they are empowered. This, in turn, makes visible how post-war economies produce
gendered and racialized (in)securities that need to be addressed by the Women, Peace
and Security agenda. With this, we also hope to reflect on broader international political
economy concerns about the problems of making conceptual distinctions between
Corresponding author:
Maria Martin de Almagro, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Human, Social and Political Science, 7 West
road, Cambridge, CB2 3RF, UK.
Email: mm2256@cam.ac.uk
836474EJT0010.1177/1354066119836474European Journal of International RelationsMartin de Almagro and Ryan
research-article2019
Article
1060 European Journal of International Relations 25(4)
politics and economics, and to challenge the constructed borders between materiality
and discourse that have pervaded peace and conflict studies.
Keywords
Discourse, feminist political economy, feminist security studies, gender, materiality,
postcolonialism
Introduction
Over the past two decades, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda of the United
Nations Security Council (UNSC) has become the overarching site through which the
international community conceptualizes and promotes women’s political participation in
peacebuilding and women’s economic empowerment in post-war states. References to
relief and recovery are widespread in the agenda, constituting an attempt to respond to
‘the special needs of women and girls during repatriation and resettlement and for reha-
bilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction’ (UNSCR 1325, 2000: para. 8).
Subsequent resolutions, such as UNSCR 1820 (2008), UNSCR 1888 (2009) and UNSCR
1889 (2009), also call on member states to promote women’s (economic) empowerment.
As the UN Peacebuilding Commission recognized, ‘the economic empowerment of
women greatly contributes to the effectiveness of post-conflict economic activities and
economic growth and leads to improving the quality and social outcomes of economic
recovery measures and policies as well as to sustainable development’ (UNGA, 2013: 4).
We argue, however, that these hopeful statements are simply paying lip service to wom-
en’s economic empowerment. These good intentions cannot materialize in practice
because, first, women’s economic concerns are largely absent from post-war economic
reforms (Bergeron et al., 2017; Duncanson, 2016), and, second, the WPS agenda, as the
primary international framework for addressing gender in post-war states, only engages
with economics in a shallow way. In other words, the WPS agenda reproduces the wider
failure of dominant models of ‘empowerment’ to seriously engage with the material
conditions of women’s realities and the diverse forms of agency present in contexts of
peacebuilding and international intervention. Overall, we argue, the WPS agenda has a
piecemeal and partial approach to economic empowerment, characterized by a lack of
engagement with (in)formal economies and a blindness to the complex relationship
between the postcolonial state, violence and gendered processes of reconstruction.
We contend that the failure to advance women’s economic empowerment through the
WPS agenda, and the wider post-war agenda in which the WPS agenda is situated, comes
from two assumptions made about women and economic empowerment: first, current
post-war projects are characterized by a problematic understanding of economic empow-
erment that views formal and informal economic activities as dichotomous and separate,
rather than as intertwined and constitutive of each other; and, second, they reflect an
understanding of agency as individual, disembodied, abstract, universalizing and con-
forming to the requirements of the competitive pressures of the market (Chisholm and
Stachowitsch, 2017). As with assumptions of ‘subject’ in models of empowerment more
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