Essentialised Agency: Complementary, Holistic, Distinct

What the above details is that under the framework of Protection, Participation and Prevention and the narrative arc that establishes a rationale for the gender perspective as a way to increase operational effectiveness, NATO is positioned as both a protector of women and an organisation that can promote and facilitate women’s inclusion. Yet this inclusion is premised upon a particular understanding of essentialised female agency. Whilst I return to

117 the notion of the ‘silence of violent women’ in Chapter Eight (See also Sjoberg & Gentry, 2007), the inclusion of women into peace building, international security provision and as a way of advancing NATO’s operational effectiveness is based largely around an essentialised understanding of female agency as being peaceable. Specifically, female characteristics, skills and competencies are conceived of within the documents as complementary (to that of men), holistic and distinct. For example:

“Military operations in today’s world require a diversity of qualifications and resources to ensure that peace and security are achieved and maintained. The complementary skills of both male and female personnel are essential for the operational effectiveness of NATO operations, especially in light of the increasing complexity of civil-military interaction, public relations and intelligence gathering”

(NATO, 2007: 11).

“In recognising the important and distinctive role that women play in conflict resolution and peace settlement, NATO seeks to improve its effectiveness to contribute to its overall mission success” (NCGP, 2010c: 9)

“Because of the importance of women in the military forces of the Alliance and the influence they can have in all stages of conflict or crisis, this directive seeks to more fully incorporate their perspectives to enhance the effectiveness of NATO-led operations and missions in order to ensure Alliance Success” (NATO, Bi-SCD 40-1, 2009: 1-1)

“The complementary skills of both male and female personnel are essential to the effectiveness of NATO operations, especially in light of the increasing complexity of civil-military interaction, public relations and intelligence gathering” (NATO: Bi-SCD 40-1 2009: 1-2)

Within the documents both civilian and military women are presented as having a distinctive roles and perspectives that are complementary to those of men, more attuned to listening and intelligence gathering (a theme returned to in Chapter 8). Nora, one of the participants describes these as ‘soft competencies’ (again, this is returned to in the following chapter).

These specific skill sets become framed within the changing nature of armed conflict; as the security situation becomes more complex and diverse, so too should the pool of skills and resources that NATO should be able to draw upon to meet these challenges. The CWINF Guidance for NATO Gender Mainstreaming (NATO, 2007) and the Briefing on Women, Peace and Security (NATO, 2010d) situate these specific skills and competencies in the broadest possible terms. In its introduction, the CWINF Guidance states that:

“Since the end of the Cold War, the international security environment has become more complex, and modern armed forces are now required to perform diverse tasks.

The focus has shifted from fighting high-intensity wars of national territorial defence to a wider spectrum of lower-intensity operations such as crisis

118 management, peace support and humanitarian operations abroad. Such diverse tasks demand diverse skills” (NATO, 2007: 7)

The Briefing contains an opening quote on its front page from NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen asking:

“Would a world in which women enjoyed rights equal to those of men be safer and stable? It is difficult to say, but ultimately a lasting peace in many of the world’s troubled areas may depend on the answer” (NATO, 2010d: 1)

This same question is posed in the opening of a series of online video clips and a DVD released by NATO to celebrate the tenth anniversary of UNSCR 1325 in October 2010 (See for example, NATO, 2010f) Within the same DVD a series of NATO defence ministers are interviewed, they too reiterate a notion of complementarity and distinct skill sets of men and women. The Spanish Defence Minister states that:

“In general, statistics say that women, we have a greater sensibility in peace building, peace maintaining, peace promoting – one of our best skills is our capacity of dialogue and consensus. There is no country that can waste fifty percent of intelligence and knowledge which is women” (NATO, 2010e: Time index 2:47) Documentation and interviews such as this serve to communicate NATO’s engagement with UNSCR 1325 within the alliance. In the same interview the Danish Defence Minister states that the ‘female approach to things’ is ‘holistic’ and conciliatory rather than confrontational (NATO, 2010e: Time Index 0:40). These statements reiterate an essentialised construction of female agency, offering a universalisation of particular ‘sensibilities’ that are unique to women. Whilst the Spanish minister does not state that men lack these ‘sensibilities’ she implies through her use of the term ‘greater’ that women, as a collective share a better understanding of these sensibilities towards peace building/maintaining/promoting than men.

This construction epitomises the ‘women and peace orthodoxy’ – the belief in a universal characteristic that all women share (or are at lease more attuned to), it is often implied that this essence is drawn from experience – a shared women’s experience – and that this experience makes them more peaceful than men.

Hilary Charlesworth (2008) identifies that although the idea that women are somehow

‘naturally peaceful’ has been strongly contested – feminist theorists have pointed out that it fixes sex with gender and presents a deterministic account of nature that does not fit with evidence that women can be at the frontline of conflict and violence (Sylvester 1987; Moser

& Clark, 2005; Sjoberg & Gentry, 2007) – the linkage between women and peace is becoming ‘orthodoxy in international relations’ (Charlesworth, 2008: 349). This universalised understanding of female agency has long been critiqued within feminism.

(Riley, 1998; Mohanty, 2003) The fact that a totalising narrative of female skills and

119 competencies is being advanced by a (predominantly white), western European and North American security alliance, to improve its operational effectiveness and provide a rationale for engagement with UNSCR 1325 and the WPS agenda is inherently problematic.

The documents situate NATO as wanting to facilitate only one, limited type of female agency, one that reinforces the ‘women and peace’ orthodoxy (Charlesworth, 2008). This is a highly problematic conceptualisation of both what women can bring to security provision and post conflict reconstruction, but also what their role and purpose is once inclusion has been established. A conceptualisation of women’s agency in these terms promotes unrealistic assumptions of what ‘women’ can achieve (leaving the role of men largely unexamined), or should be expected to achieve; they are transferred from simply victims to super-heroines (Cohn et al, 2004; Shepherd, 2011; Pratt & Richter-Devroe, 2011; see also Chapter 2.3) upon whose shoulders the ‘social fabric of conflict-torn societies can be reconstructed’ (NATO, 2007: 11). This reinforces a dichotomous conceptualisation of male and female roles in both war fighting and security provision and places a limit on both the perceptions of what women (and men) are ‘allowed’ to do. As Diane Otto states:

“If women are admitted on the understanding that their special contribution arises from their womanly instincts, it follows that their political agency will be limited to what is made possible by that representation and restricted to ‘feminised tasks’”(Otto, 2006: 139 in Charlesworth, 2008: 350)

These essentialised conceptions of male and female agency, skills, competencies and ‘views’

of security were reiterated within the accounts of the participants and are addressed within the following chapter. What the above shows is one way in which the ‘new’ norm of UNSCR 1325, of increased protection and participation is normalised by NATO (True, 2011). Specifically, how the representation of the gender perspective and NATO’s engagement with UNSCR 1325 within the documents are (re)orientated to facilitate pre-existing organisational norms of operational effectiveness and force multiplication. This can be seen as a form of narrative entrapment. Situating UNSCR 1325, the gender perspective and by extension NATO’s operational effectiveness in a continuous repetition of NATO values that are aligned with international efforts at promoting ‘good gender governance’ - and framed within a broader context of a shifting, changing and complex post-Cold War security environment - these narratives frame NATO in such a way that its involvement with UNSCR 1325 and the WPS agenda is seen as an almost foregone conclusion; why wouldn’t NATO as a defender of liberty, human rights and democracy be involved in a process to protect and promote the place of women? The narratives that saturate NATO’s engagement with UNSCR 1325 therefore promote a ‘naturalness’ and inevitability, a continuation of

120

‘business-as-usual’ rather than a fundamental or transformative change to organisational practices.

Conclusion

In returning to Carol Bacchi’s (2012) conceptual questions; NATO’s representation of the problem is framed around the conceptualisation of women’s victimhood and exclusion and the representation of the problem in this way has specific effects. Framing a response to this simultaneous problem based around protection and participation allows for NATO to orient itself as a provider of international security provision, as a good, responsible participant of an international regime of gender governance. It aligns acceptance and engagement with UNSCR 1325 with a perception of its own values in order to limit the disruption of these new policy considerations and to (re)orient the gender perspective as a tool to advance pre-exiting goals and aims of operational effectiveness and force multiplication. NATO utilises the malleable definitions of the gender perspective outlined within UNSCR 1325, as well as the association of the gender perspective with peacekeeping operations within the text of UNSCR 1325 to centralise the gender perspective as a primary mechanism through which NATO engages with the Women, Peace and Security agenda. In turn the gender perspective becomes premised upon particular essentialised understandings of female agency that draw upon elements of the women and peace orthodoxy. Engagement and acceptance of UNSCR 1325 by NATO is therefore conditional and alignment with pre-existing organisational norms and aims serves to limit and control the disruption that such acceptance brings (a point returned to in Chapter 9, Section 1)

This presentation of NATO’s engagement with UNSCR 1325 and the development of a gender perspective aligned within organisational goals of operational effectiveness and force multiplication serve to contextualise the following chapters. The participants’ accounts of their work on gender issues within NATO reiterate these understandings of both UNSCR 1325 broadly conceived and the role and purpose of the gender perspective. The chapters that follow detail their strategies to make this gender perspective relevant interesting and palatable to NATO’s organisational norms and structures; in doing so, the genderedness of NATO’s military structures is exposed.

121 Chapter Six

Making Masculinity Visible: Personal Experiences, Military Contexts

My personal view is that there are too many men here, they don’t see the problem

(Celine, NATO HQ, 2012) You need to see life with your gender glasses and once you believe and you see things through your gender glasses you don’t even need to think, it is just something that you have in your brain and you behave in this way, it is really very easy…it is difficult for men, for my colleagues, it is very difficult, they don’t believe this…I don’t know why men don’t believe in this, because like I told you it is very rewarding

(Ben, NATO HQ, 2012) Introduction

The following three chapters provide an analysis of the six in-depth interviews I conducted with NATO personnel from May to November 2012. The previous chapter demonstrated the way in which gender as a concept was linked to notions of operational effectiveness and force multiplication, how gendered assumptions and expectations were (re)constructed within the various documents produced and disseminated by NATO. What these empirical chapters show is how this process occurs at the individual, every-day level as participants work to develop effective strategies to make gender relevant to the organisation from within the strict gender order in which they find themselves.

In this chapter I analyse the ways in which individuals involved in developing a gender perspective at NATO articulated understandings of gender and security through narratives of personal and professional experiences. Within the interviews participants described often highly essentialised categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ when providing vivid examples of highly gendered micro-organisational practices as a way of locating themselves and their work. The key argument advanced in this chapter is that as the detailed, personal accounts of the participants were often constructed in relation/opposition to a perceived (homogenised)

‘maleness’ of NATO, they expose the hegemonic masculine norms of the organisation, as experienced by the participants; thereby highlighting the context within which the gender perspective is formed. In addition, this chapter addresses the ways in which subjective understandings of ‘gender’, ‘gender mainstreaming’ and ‘UNSCR 1325’ are formed/positioned within this context.

The chapter will be organised as follows. Firstly, section one details how the ‘maleness’ of NATO (and national military institutions) is conceived of and articulated by the participants.

The construction of particular ‘male norms of behaviour’ within a military context and how

122 these are ‘lived’ by the participants are explored. Section two addresses the gendered ways in which the participants articulate ‘security’. Particular attention is placed on how the participants establish (highly essentialised) ‘male’ and ‘female’ ways of viewing security – reinforcing the notion of difference and complementarity between the sexes that was evident in the documents. Section three explores the ways these essentialised ‘ways of seeing’

security serve to reinforce a link between a ‘female perspective’, operational effectiveness and force multiplication. Section four, addresses the variation within masculinities by focusing on the two male participants encounters with hegemonic masculine norms within NATO. Finally, section five analyses how militarised masculinities, the male norms of the organisation and the dominance of men within the NATO structure more generally, are represented by the participants as a problem or a challenge for the participant’s work. This framing of hegemonic masculinity as ‘resistance/reluctance’ to be overcome or accommodated, informs the strategies developed by the participants to make gender relevant to the NATO structure. This point will be further developed in the following chapter.

1. “There Are Too Many Men Here”: Framing NATO as a ‘Male Space’

One of the dominant themes that emerged across the interviews was how the participants spoke of, and conceptualised, NATO as a ‘male organisation’. This was articulated in various ways; however all reinforced the notion that the organisational structure of NATO was dominated by men, men’s bodies and male perspectives. The accounts of the participants of both their personal and professional experiences were framed by this context.

They located and spoke about themselves as ‘women’ or as ‘men’ within and in relation/opposition to this ‘male space’. The analysis contained within the following sections centres on what Lazar (2005) calls ‘gender relationality’. I focus on how the participants describe ‘ways of doing and being’ a man or woman in this particular ‘community of practice’ (Ibid: 11) – in this case the military generally, and NATO specifically. The concern therefore is not with these women or men in isolation, but the way in which they talk about and construct their own and others masculinity and femininity in relation to this perception of male dominance.

The following sections show how the ways in which the participants conceptualise NATO as a male dominated space, provides the context within which strategies to develop a relevant and palatable gender perspective are devised and implemented by the participants (Chapter 7).

123 1.1 “Assimilate, Adapt or Quit”: Articulating Male Norms

The understanding of NATO as an organisation dominated by men and ‘male views’ was discussed in varying, yet quite explicit statements by the participants. For the female participants, this was largely based around the number of men in the organisation and their own numerical minority in relation to this. One of the first questions I asked the participants about UNSCR 1325 was why it had taken NATO seven years to engage with and begin to formulate policy that incorporated the resolution. Celine replied:

“My personal view is that there are too many men here, they don’t see the problem”

In her answer to the same question Grace stated that:

“Because, without wishing to sound sexist, most of the men in the military will not think about it, they won’t think of 1325”

For Nora:

“It was because they [men] didn’t find it relevant, it was female stuff”

Grace and Celine’s responses are interesting in that they both articulate the numerical dominance of men within the organisation – ‘too many’ and ‘most men’ – yet this is linked to a particular way of ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’ about UNSCR 1325, it was not ‘relevant’ to them. Grace, Celine’s and Nora’s accounts therefore not only perceive NATO as dominated by men, but that ‘men’ (and men in large numbers) did not conceptualise UNSCR 1325 (and by extension ‘gender issues’) as a serious concern. For Grace and Celine, it was not that this was a conscious decision to actively dismiss UNSCR 1325, it was that it didn’t register as something that was important (hence the seven year gap between UNSCR 1325’s passage in 2000 and the NATO/EPAC engagement in 2007). A particular male way of ‘viewing and

‘seeing’ security is returned to in Section 2, below. I mention it here as it shows how conceptualisation of NATO as a ‘male organisation’ is not limited to the physical occupation of the structure by men and male bodies, this dominance has - in the view of the participants – very real effects on perceptions of security and implications for policy.

One of the opening, more generic, questions that I asked participants was how and why they had come to work in their current position, and if they had an interest in ‘gender issues’

before taking on their current role. In response to this question the participants drew largely upon their own experiences within national armed forces. For Celine, Grace and Nora in particular these experiences were framed specifically in regards to them being women, occupying a minority role within their respective militaries. They used these national military experiences to articulate to me the challenges of working on gender issues within

124 NATO more broadly. Central to these experiences was the understanding that women generally had to adapt to male norms and behaviours in order to succeed.

For example, Celine spoke about suffering harassment and bulling within her national armed forces in the early years of her career and articulated a process of adaptation that women had to go through:

“I’m convinced [the harassment] is not always intentional. Something like, OK, you are not like we are so you are not part of the group, but as I said, that is mostly at the beginning because to be accepted in the group you adapt yourself and then in the years that follow, the men get used to you, to the way you work and the way you think. So its leverage from both parts, the woman adapts herself and the man gets used to it.”

Here Celine draws out an interesting distinction, by stating that that the harassment is not always intentional she alludes to organisational, collective behaviours and norms by ‘the group’, rather than individual behaviour. It is women collectively that are set apart from the dominant group, although this exclusion is experienced by individual women. Celine states that women adapt themselves to the dominant group behaviour and consequently, the men

Here Celine draws out an interesting distinction, by stating that that the harassment is not always intentional she alludes to organisational, collective behaviours and norms by ‘the group’, rather than individual behaviour. It is women collectively that are set apart from the dominant group, although this exclusion is experienced by individual women. Celine states that women adapt themselves to the dominant group behaviour and consequently, the men