Making Gender, Making War: violence, military and peacekeeping practices

Abstract in UndeterminedMAKING GENDER, MAKING WAR is a unique interdisciplinary collection of papers exploring the social construction of gender, war-making and peacekeeping. Norms of gender and war are embedded in institutions and have implications for practice. The book highlights the institutions and processes involved in the making of gender in terms of both men and women, both masculinity and femininity. The ‘war question for feminism’ marks a thematic red thread throughout; it is a call to students and scholars of feminism to take seriously and engage with the task of analyzing war. This book is a proposition that the war question for feminism is as much a challenge to what constitutes good feminist research in today’s globalized world as it could become a potential challenge to the construction of militarized. In altogether 15 chapters the authors analyze how war-making is intertwined with the making of gender in a diversity of rich empirical case studies. The book is organized around four themes. The first theme conceptualizes gender, violence and militarism, the second theme studies how the making of gender is connected to a (re)making of the nation through military practices while the third theme focus on UN SCR 1325 and gender mainstreaming in institutional practices and the final theme is on gender subjectivities in the organization of violence, exploring the notion of violent women and non-violent men

The Double Democratic Deficit in Climate Policy-making by the EU Commission

Abels und Mushaben (2012) argumentieren, dass in der Europäischen Union ein doppeltes Demokratiedefizit bezogen auf Geschlecht existiert: Frauen seien in den EU-Institutionen unterrepräsentiert und der EU-Politik fehle es insgesamt an einer Geschlechterperspektive. Dieser Beitrag trägt mit einem spezifischen Fokus auf Klimapolitik zu dieser Forschungsperspektive bei. Die EU ist eine wichtige Konstrukteurin des internationalen Klimaregimes und sie hat sich gleichzeitig verpflichtet, Gender Mainstreaming umzusetzen. Darüber hinaus sind in Europa geschlechtsspezifische Unterschiede bezogen auf das Verhalten zum und Ansichten über den Klimawandel dokumentiert. Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie relevant das doppelte Demokratiedefizit in der EU Klimapolitik ist. Wir stellen die Anteile der Expertinnen und Experten bei den zuständigen Referaten für Klimapolitik in der Europäischen Kommission dar und zeigen mit Dokumentenanalysen und Interviews mit politischen Entscheidungsträger*innen, dass geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte in den EU Klimadokumenten nicht enthalten sind. Mittels feministischem Institutionalismus kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dass die bestehenden geschlechtsspezifischen Machtverhältnisse innerhalb der Kommission die erforschten Klimaeinheiten beeinflussen und diese männlich konnotierte institutionelle Praktiken reproduzieren. (Autorenreferat)Abels and Mushaben (2012) argue that there is a double democratic deficit in the European Union regarding gender: women are underrepresented within the EU institutions and gender awareness is lacking in EU policymaking. This article contributes to this scholarship with a specific focus on the climate domain. The EU is an important constructor of the international climate regime and the Union is committed to gender mainstream all its policies and processes. Furthermore, there are documented gender differences in Europe regarding behaviour and views on climate change. This article investigates the relevance of the double democratic deficit for the EU´s climate policymaking. We map the representation of female and male experts at the European Commission´s climate units and search for gender recognition in the EU´s climate documents. There we discover silence regarding gender, confirmed through interviews with policy-makers. Using feminist institutionalism we conclude that existing gender power relations within the Commission affect the explored climate units, which reproduce masculine institutional practices. (author's abstract

Institutional conditions for integrated mobility services (IMS): Towards a framework for analysis

The present text is a theoretical framework that has been developed with the aim to generate knowledge of and policy recommendations for the promotion of integrated mobility services (IMS), with specific regard to institutional dimensions. Integrated mobility services are services where the passenger’s transport needs are met by a service that not only integrates a range of mobility services, both public and private, but also provides one-stop access to all services through a common interface. These types of services are currently being developed in several cities globally, and the purpose of the project is to understand and explain how institutions can enable, but also impede, their realization. Institutions are defined as a relatively stable collection of rules and practices, embedded in structures that enable action. In the project a broad theoretical approach, developed by an interdisciplinary research team, will be applied. As such, the framework includes factors at the macro, meso and micro levels, thus including extensive societal trends as well as individual\u27s needs and behaviour. The macro level includes broader social and political factors, including both formal rules and more informal social norms and perceptions. The division between formal and informal variables recur on the meso and micro levels respectively. The meso level – which includes both public and private actors at regional and local levels – consists of both formal institutional factors such as taxation and regulations, and informal factors such as organizational culture and inherited networks between regional actors. Each actor enters the collaborative processes that signify IMS with their own ideals, interests and expectations, and it is in these processes of negotiation that the framework takes it point of departure. It is also in this context that business models will be developed, another central aspect of the realisation of IMS. Finally, the framework also includes the micro level, where an individual perspective is placed at centre stage. Individuals are affected by various formal incentives and push factors, as well as more informal aspects such as self-image and social status. Through the application of the framework in a number of case studies, empirical findings will help illuminate which institutional factors enable or constrain the development of IMS. The findings will provide the empirical and analytical foundation for suggestions on how formal and informal rules and practices can be modified to enable new IMS to contribute to sustainable mobility

The (In)Visibility of Gender in Scandinavian Climate Policy-Making

© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This article explores the link between gender representation and climate policy-making in Scandinavia. We ask to what extent equal descriptive representation (critical mass) results in substantive representation (critical acts). Our study shows that women and men are equally represented in administrative and political units involved in climate policy-making, and in some units women are in the majority. However, a text analysis of the outcomes, that is, the Scandinavian climate strategies, reveals a silence regarding gender, further confirmed through interviews. Accordingly, a critical mass of women does not automatically result in gender-sensitive climate policy-making, recognizing established gender differences in material conditions and in attitudes toward climate issues. In interviews, we also note that policy-makers are largely unaware of gender differences on climate issues in the Scandinavian context. We discuss why a critical mass of women in climate policy-making has not led to critical acts and offer alternative explanations informed by feminist IR theory. For example, poststructural feminism claims that masculine norms are deeply institutionalized in climate institutions; hence, policy-makers adapt their actions to the masculinized institutional environment. Thus, substantive representation should be understood in relation to gendered institutional processes

Greening the EU : Power practices, resistances and agenda setting

Between 1970 and 1995, well over 200 directives dealing with environmental problems have been adopted by the European Community. The ambition in this study has been to understand the process whereby environmental concerns have been brought up on the Community agenda and how that agenda has subsequently been shaped. It is argued that by starting from a critical position in ecocentric and feminist theorizing, new understandings of Community agenda setting can be gained. The study shows that greening of the EU is much more than just adding environmental policies to existing legislation. The author argues that this is because ecocentric ideas pose fundamental challenges to the dominant practices of the EU project. Greening, or environmental agenda-setting, can be understood as both macropolitical and micropolitical processes. In macropolitics, economist, sovereign, scientific and bureaucratic power practices mobilize specific biases toward ecocentric alternatives. Such power practices are based on a dualistic and gendered logic which has excluded certain problems, strategies and groups, while privileging others. Although these power practices are dominant, they can be reshaped and changed. Resistance takes place at the level where decisions are made, problems and solutions articulated and policies formed. It is argued that the most fruitful way to conceptualize agenda setting as micropolitics is through a modified garbage-can approach. Starting from such an approach, the thesis looks at the way environmental problems have been defined and solutions articulated and adopted; and addresses the question of which individual and group participants have been included in the process. It is at the level of micropolitics that new visions and ideas are confronted with the institutionalized biases or power practices. Due to both macropolitical and micropolitical processes, the environmental policies of the Community, while containing elements of ecocentric ideas, have been colored by specific Community practices

Sverige och EU:s miljöpolitik

Abstract is not availabl