‘Parenting for Peace’: Race, Civilizational Logic, and the Securitization of Reproductive Labor to Prevent Political Violence

Over the last ten years, the international advocacy organization, Women without Borders, has championed a program to prevent violent extremism that centers mothers as the first line of defense against radicalization that leads to violent extremism. This program, called “MotherSchools: Parenting for Peace,” has engaged over two thousand mothers in twelve countries and has successfully influenced global preventing and countering violent extremism (p/cve) agendas to consider women as key instruments in the fight against terror. The MotherSchools model is based on the theory that dynamics within the home—ranging from parenting styles to domestic violence—are drivers of violent extremism and thus mothers are crucially positioned as frontline security actors. Building on previous work on women, gender, race, and agency within the space of violence prevention, I argue that locating the cause of violent extremism within the domestic space and with the mother in particular reproduces colonial logic that locates the responsibility for political violence with “bad” mothers and non-nuclear or “traditional” familial and communal structures. Without discounting the agentive capacity of women and mothers engaging in such training programs as MotherSchools, I focus instead on the theory and methodology of the Schools and their intention to “activate a mother’s prevention potential” in order to create a “family-based security architecture” as a securitization of reproductive labor justified through liberal feminist rhetoric of women’s “empowerment.” Applying a decolonial feminist theoretical approach, I analyze the Schools’ insistence on the importance of educating mothers in developmental psychology as a key means of preventing radicalization and violent extremism as evidence of the growing imbrication of neoliberal security structures, development initiatives, and peacebuilding. Such programming indicates the importance of attending to the mobilization of liberal feminist rhetoric around women’s empowerment for security agendas which individualizes and privatizes the responsibility for interrupting political violence. In this paper, I analyze the discourse produced by the MotherSchools as part of the epistemological claims of terrorism studies, which reproduce forms of racial, civilizational knowledge that locate parenting, and mothering in particular, as directly responsible for political violence.