Engaging with Militaries: Strategies, Sanctions and Implications

Militaries around the world are increasingly involved in activities beyond traditional state security, including missions with purportedly humanitarian aims, such as peacekeeping, stabilisation and humanitarian relief. The United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security require a gender perspective be mainstreamed into all peace operations, and ask militaries to promote the rights, protection and participation of women and girls. A number of national militaries and NATO have responded with new policy and training focused on gender and women’s rights. Some feminists have greeted these developments with enthusiasm, seeing opportunities for militaries to further gender equality and other feminist goals. At the same time, there is a long-standing feminist suspicion of the military, which understands “militarism” as essentially inimical to feminism, and women in the military as co-opted by an anti-feminist institution. Indeed, in comparison to feminists who might enter other institutions of global governance with the aim of working towards gender equality, women rarely join militaries with explicit feminist objectives. However, female military personnel often do pursue gender equality, both within their service and on operations. Based on interviews with female military personnel who have been in the vanguard of gender work in a range of armed forces and military organisations, and on our own reflections of working with and on militaries, this paper explores the motivations of and strategies used by ‘critical friends’ of the military, as well as the rewards and sanctions exacted. It considers how the strictly hierarchical nature of the military mediates the possibility of a ‘critical friend’ role. We argue that the roles of ‘critical friends’ within the military is particularly crucial, but particularly challenging, and is relevant to the thorny question of whether women in the military are being instrumentalised for anti-feminist ends.