Victims, soldiers, peace-makers and caretakers: the neoliberal constitution of women in the EU’s security policy

Feminist scholars praise and criticize the UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for its considerations of women and gender in conflicts. Poststructuralist feminists show how gender is constructed in the UN’s security policies and how these constructions reproduce gendered dichotomies between women and men and representations of women as victims, part of civil society and neoliberal subjects. Although the UNSC Resolutions 1325 and 1820 are implemented by the EU, there is no literature on how the EU is taking up the UN’s discourse. Scholars studying gender policies in and of the EU mainly analyze the (in)effectiveness of EU gender mainstreaming but rarely interrogate its discursive foundations. Using a governmentality perspective, I argue that on the one hand the EU produces a binary and stereotypical understanding of gender, and on the other hand constitutes women as neoliberal subjects responsible for their own well-being, ignoring broader structures of (gender) inequality and war and making gender equality solely an instrument to achieve more security and development

Ambiguities of power: struggle and resistance in (the relations between) Turkey and the EU

Traditional definitions of power assume a unidirectional and coercive relationship between two actors. The debate about power in International Relations has questioned such a compulsive unidirectionality by pointing to the multidimensionality of power, as well as to the power of those who are traditionally seen at the receiving end. It is especially the latter aspect that has not been taken up seriously by empirical analyses. Moreover, research has ignored the complex power struggles the ‘receiving’ actors are engaged in and their possibility of resistance. If taken into account, these Foucauldian revisions of the concept of power allow us to analyse the development of the relationship between Turkey and the European Union (EU) since the turn of the millennium in a much more nuanced way than is often done in the existing Europeanisation literature. This case is particularly interesting, firstly because of the change in relations between the EU and Turkey, questioning the condition of a credible membership perspective under which the traditional form of power of the EU over its neighbourhood becomes effective. It secondly shows that the EU’s power extends much beyond the imposition of policy changes and has restructuring effects on society as a whole, while domestic actors are by no means passive recipients in this process

Funding Democracy, Funding Social Services? The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights in the Context of Competing Narratives in Turkey

Within the process of Turkey's European Union (EU) accession, the EU aims to strengthen Turkey's democratization through various programmes focusing on the role of civil society. By funding non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the EU intends to empower NGOs to take on a self-responsible role in Turkey's democratization process. In this article, I argue that the EU indeed aims to support a liberal narrative through the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) yet by the means of neo-liberal governmental power. Through this it renders the NGOs rather technical instead of political and thus misses the chance of strengthening a liberal narrative that could pose an alternative to the reoccurring hegemonic struggle between a Kemalist and a pro-Islam narrative in Turkey. © 2014 Taylor & Francis