31 research outputs found
Sexual Misconduct and International Aid Workers: An Afghanistan Case Study
This paper seeks to add to existing study of gender and conflict by examining the complexities of interactions between international workers and local populations in spaces mired in war or post-war conflicts. Feminist scholarship on gender, war, and political violence/security provides the theoretical and empirically informed framework for this examination. I argue that in order to discuss Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA), it is necessary to first consider context with respect to location, gender, belief, and praxis. Universal conceptions of sexual conduct, misconduct, and SEA may be in opposition to acceptable practices within a particular site and situation. This includes addressing temporally specific conditions and the lack of legal parameters or enforcement during times of heightened conflict. Thus, both local populationsâ and international workers\u27 obedience to international or national/local laws remains flexible rather than fixed. Consequently, civilian populations reside in a state of vulnerability to various forms of misconduct and abuse, including SEA. This study suggests additional research on the tensions and divisions between supposed universal rights and the beliefs or practices positioned in contrast to these standards
Feminist Geopolitics: Material States
No abstract available
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Crisis and Consumption: âSavingâ the Poor and the Seductions of Capitalism
This article examines the crisis of capitalist seduction through the lens of online shopping platforms that raise funds for international assistance organizations and development celebrity advertising. Consumer-based giving has altered the commodity fetish into cliché, subsequently masking the capitalist produced crisis of endemic poverty and global inequality. Celebrity supported consumer-based giving and product advertising are used to illustrate the seductions of capitalism. This article argues that international assistance organizations are embedded in the substance and lifeblood of capitalisms’ dependence on inequality and poverty to generate profits/wealth. Consumer driven assistance remains a pervasive crisis hidden by seductive shopping platforms camouflaged as compassion.</p
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Political geography 1: Extractions
This progress report incorporates the concept of extraction as an umbrella term for political and geopolitical analyses of the spaces, sites, settings, and scales of power, authority, influence, and resistance. The political geographies of extraction discussed in this report include an assemblage of human-and-nonhuman actors across divergent epistemologies and ontologies, as well as forms of recognition, representation, and repression within and across states, borders, and spatial scales. The research surveyed here covers both state and non-state actors to address national and corporate methods commensurate with ongoing and new conflicts over resources, how they are extracted, conserved, distributed, shared, and hoarded.</p
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Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty, Exception, and Gender Politics
:  This article examines the capital value of bare life as part of aid/development in (post)Taliban Afghanistan. I argue that the political production and spatial fixity of homo sacer “as the object of aid and protection” within specific geographic locations subsequently territorializes gendered bodies as a site for capital accumulation and exchange value through aid/development allocation. This occurs through a continual discursive reduction of “full or proper” human life to the remnants of bare life. This subjective reduction subsequently elicits capitalistâmodernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life and transferring it to an image (and imaginary) of western political and economic life. Gendered multiplicities of bare life emerge from variant forms of political and economic opportunity among aid/development workers and Afghan recipients. I argue that the discursive framing of bare life is situated as a site for (re)constructing rights through “western” frameworks infused with geopolitical and economic exchange value.</p
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Refugees, Sexual Violence, and Armed Conflict: The Nuances between Victims and Agents
This paper seeks to add to existing study of gender and conflict by examining the complexities of interactions between international workers and local populations in spaces mired in war or post-war conflicts. Feminist scholarship on gender, war, and political violence/security provides the theoretical and empirically informed framework for this examination. I argue that in order to discuss Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA), it is necessary to first consider context with respect to location, gender, belief, and praxis. "Universal" conceptions of sexual conduct, misconduct, and SEA may be in opposition to acceptable practices within a particular site and situation. This includes addressing temporally specific conditions and the lack of legal parameters or enforcement during times of heightened conflict. Thus, both local populations’ and international workers' obedience to international or national/local laws remains flexible rather than fixed. Consequently, civilian populations reside in a state of vulnerability to various forms of misconduct and abuse, including SEA. This study suggests additional research on the tensions and divisions between supposed universal rights and the beliefs or practices positioned in contrast to these standards.</p
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âOur Website Was Revolutionaryâ Virtual Spaces of Representation and Resistance
The growth of Internet usage by spatially and/or ideologically marginalized groups has become a proven avenue for representation, cross-border connections, and political mobilization. Groups on the social and/or political margins use cyberspace to counter hegemonic or stereotypical understanding of their particular cause through websites and electronic communication. Marginalized groups often seek media attention to raise their political voice beyond the boundaries of their states/nations. However, media attention can both compliment and at times complicate political representations. This paper examines the use of Internet and email technology by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), and the intersecting and complicated forms of representation associated with RAWA’s website, the international support RAWA draws, and the media attention it receives. Internet and email technologies have had a tremendous impact on RAWA’s members and supporters, and on their ability to connect to international supporters both virtually and in physical spaces. RAWA’s website provides a virtual and safe public space for presenting the association’s political views andsoliciting financial support. The association also uses the Internet to represent and define geographic space. In addition, the erratic international media coverage and attention paid to RAWA reinforces the tenuous connection to and temporal shifts of international sympathy and monetary support. I examine three aspects related to RAWA’s representation and resistance tactics through Internet technology: relieving embodied experiences of isolation; generating funds from international donors and within the global market place; and media (and mediated) appropriations and challenges.</p
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Political geography II: Violence
This report focuses on the diverse and multiple manifestations of political, state, and counter-state violence. Many of the examinations of political violence in this report highlight the continued need for disparate methodological and analytic lenses towards robust understandings of political violence across scales. Displacements and mobilities associated with flight from conflict are discussed in relation to the institutionalization of harm, trauma and containment through various state and supranational mechanisms of control. These mobilities include border crossings and associated violence against vulnerable populations seeking refuge. This is buttressed by discursive binary logics, such as us/them categorizations, which remain endemic to both structural and physical violence and foundational to right wing populism, jingoism, and other forms of political extremism. This report concludes by arguing the peace is not the opposite of war but rather its temporal substitute and partner in an assemblage of political and economic co-dependence.</p
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Geopolitics of Humour and Development in Nepal and Afghanistan
At times of adversity, humour becomes a medium through which to live alternative realities. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed (2010), humour is contagious insofar as “affects are contingent”. If memories are sorrowful, humour brings to realization that life is more-than-misery. The chapter illustrates humour in the everyday through the authors’ respective research in Afghanistan and Nepal. Humour makes it possible to realize that people can share a sense of place even though their subjectivities might differ and, in doing so, they can creatively resist/oppose mechanisms of power. Humour can be a method of what de Certeau (1984) identified as “making do” in places and situations of precarity.</p
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âWe Are Farkhundaâ: Geographies of Violence, Protest, and Performance
The iconic image of Farkhunda—bloodied, beaten, and pleading for assistance—went viral in March 2015, emblematic of the unfathomable attack and brutal murder of a young woman, a religious student, in broad daylight, in the center of Kabul, Afghanistan. First accused of burning the Qur’an and later exonerated, Farkhunda was transformed from a person to a martyr to a symbol personifying multiple and disparate ideologies. The posthumous proclamation of her innocence positioned her as the perfect victim, ripe for multiple forms of sociopolitical claiming. The spectacles of her death, her funeral, the protests following the act, and the reenactment of her murder imbue her death with meaning while problematically erasing the ordinariness of her life. Drawing on feminist political geography and analysis of gendered violence in Afghanistan, we discuss the social and political geographies of place, embodiment, grief, violence, protest, and performance. Through interviews and content analysis of media coverage, this essay provides sociocultural context and social reflections on the murder, funeral, protests, and dramatic reenactment of Farkhunda’s death. Analyses of these public events elucidate the gendered geographies of embodied and performative expressions of anger, sorrow, and empathy.
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