Constructing 'the anti-globalisation movement'

This article interrogates the claim that a transnational anti-globalisation social movement has emerged. I draw on constructivist social movement theory, globalisation studies, feminist praxis and activist websites to make two main arguments, mapping on to the two parts of the article. First, a movement has indeed emerged, albeit in a highly contested and complex form with activists, opponents and commentators constructing competing movement identities. This article is itself complicit in such a process – and seeks to further a particular construction of the movement as a site of radical-democratic politics. Second, the movement is not anti-globalisation in any straightforward sense. Focusing their opposition on globalised neoliberalism and corporate power, activists represent their movement either as anti-capitalist or as constructing alternative kinds of globalised relationships. Threading through both my arguments is a normative plea to confront the diverse relations of power involved in both globalisation and movement construction in order that globalised solidarities be truly democratic. This is to challenge hierarchical visions of how best to construct ‘the anti-globalisation movement’

Feminist studies of globalisation : beyond gender, beyond economism?

This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the 'new wave' of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a key factor. It also identifies a parallel feminist tendency to neglect non-feminist efforts to develop non-economistic analyses of globalisation. Part III seeks to pinpoint the originality of the contribution of feminism. Although the most obvious starting point for such an evaluation is an emphasis upon gender, the feminist contribution is not reducible to this. Feminists have integrated gender analyses into accounts of multiple, intersecting relations of global power. They also offer distinctive analyses of the relation between the local and the global and the character of agency and resistance. The article indicates that the feminist response to economism still remains incomplete. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that feminist insights pose a significant challenge to non-feminist accounts of globalisation and to those organising within and against global power relations

Gender and the nuclear weapons state : a feminist critique of the UK government's white paper on Trident

This article enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons state. Specifically, we develop an analysis of the ways in which gender operates in the White Paper published by the UK government in 2006 on its plans to renew Trident nuclear weapons (given the go-ahead by the Westminster Parliament in March 2007). We argue that the White Paper mobilizes masculine-coded language and symbols in several ways: firstly, in its mobilization of techno-strategic rationality and axioms; secondly, in its assumptions about security; and, thirdly, in its assumptions about the state as actor. Taken together, these function to construct a masculinized identity for the British nuclear state as a "responsible steward". However, this identity is one that is not yet securely fixed and that, indeed, contains serious internal tensions that opponents of Trident (and of the nuclear state more generally) should be able to exploit

Bridging the activist-academic divide: feminist activism and the teaching of global politics

Our starting point in this article is the widespread belief that academia and activism are separate worlds, driven by contrasting aims and imperatives and governed by different rules. Such a view is based on a series of takenfor-granted and highly problematic ontological dichotomies, including mind/body, theory/practice, reason/emotion, abstract/concrete and ‘ivory tower’/ ‘real world’. Perhaps most fundamentally, these serve to set up thinking and reflecting in opposition to doing or acting. Thus in both activist and academic characterisations of what it is that they do, we find the frequent assumption that academics theorise and write, while for activists ‘action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’; academics exercise their cognitive skills, while activists are animated by passion; academics are impartial commentators on the world while activists are partisan, polemical advocates; academics work in elite institutions while activists are embedded in the everyday, ‘on the streets’ or at ‘the grassroots’

Faslane Peace Camp and the political economy of the everyday

In what ways is ‘the everyday’ reproduced and reconfigured at protest camps? In this short piece reflecting on my research into Faslane Peace Camp, I focus particularly on the ways in which this camp entails the critical interrogation of everyday economic norms and practices

Nuclear (in)security in the everyday : peace campers as everyday security practioners

This article extends the emergent focus on ‘the everyday’ in Critical Security Studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, through an empirical study of anti-nuclear peace activists understood as ‘everyday security practitioners’. In the first part of the article, I elaborate on the notion of everyday security practitioners, drawing particularly on feminist scholarship, while in the second I apply this framework to a case study of Faslane Peace Camp in Scotland. I show that campers emphasise the everyday insecurities of people living close to the state’s nuclear weapons, the blurred boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the inevitability of insecurity in daily life. Moreover, campers’ security practices confront the everyday reproduction of nuclear weapons and prefigure alternative modes of everyday life. In so doing, I argue, they offer a distinctive challenge to dominant deterrence discourse, one that is not only politically significant, but also expands understanding of the everyday in Critical Security Studies

Skeleton woman : feminism and the anti-globalisation movement

This article searches for the feminists, and the feminism, in the antiglobalization movement. It first examines texts purporting to represent this movement, discovering that feminism is barely present, granted a fleeting mention at best and deliberately sidelined at worst. The article then turns, second, to the broader social narratives underpinning these texts for an explanation of the evacuation of feminism. The third part of the article examines alternative, more marginal discourses by and about the movement, as found in websites associated with the World Social Forum - identifying the contours of a skeletal feminist presence. With this strategy, the article hopes to contribute to making feminism a more fully acknowledged, thriving presence within the antiglobalization movement more generally: to help put flesh on the bones of Skeleton Woman

Engendering global democracy

The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in terms of their theorisation of power, politics, agency and change. Recent feminist arguments about citizenship and governance go some way to bringing together concerns about gender inequality and globalisation, but they remain centred on states and the states-system as vehicles for democratic representation and participation. This article argues that a more radical reconstructive strategy can be derived from debates about the democratisation of feminism itself. Drawing on the responses of black and third world feminists to racism in the white-dominated feminist movement, and examining their influence on efforts to organise transnationally, the article points to innovative ways of thinking about power, politics, agency and change. Together these amount to a democratic framework which has applicability beyond feminist organising and which confronts the marginalisations of both gender and globalisation

Research note : Racism, colonialism and transnational solidarity in feminist anti-nuclear activism

This short article introduces my research into the ways in which racialised and colonial hierarchies have been reproduced and/or contested within white-dominated, western, feminist anti-nuclear activism during the Cold War – particularly in efforts to forge relations of solidarity with activists in the global south. After establishing why this topic should be investigated, the article briefly reviews relevant literature that could structure such an investigation before introducing the British-based network that is the basis of my research project, Women working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP). I offer a preliminary discussion of the network’s newsletter archive, focusing on representations of the identities of both British participants and the Pacific women whose struggles they sought to support. Once completed, this research will offer a fuller picture of Cold War-era western feminist anti-nuclear activism as well as being of wider significance for contemporary debates about decolonising solidarity in peace and feminist movements

Editorial: Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement

Introduction to Special Issue that engages with the increasingly important, separate yet interrelated themes of feminism, women’s movements and women in movement in the context of global neoliberalism