doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00281.

x BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 239–256

‘Victims, Perpetrators and Actors’

Revisited:1 Exploring the Potential for a
Feminist Reconceptualisation of
(International) Security and (Gender)
Violence
Laura J. Shepherd

In the discipline of International Relations (IR), which takes seriously issues of war and peace, there
has been a lack of attention paid to theorising security in relation to violence. In this article, I
explore the potential for a feminist reworking of these concepts. With reference to a range of
literature addressing security and violence, I offer some insights into the relevance of such a
reconceptualisation. I draw attention to the ways in which work on issues of violence and security
function to reproduce understandings of these concepts that delimit the value of both academic
theorising and policy prescription. In the study of security, because of the discursive power of the
concept, and of violence, these considerations are particularly important, as they can literally be
issues of life and death.

Keywords: gender; violence; security; discourse

Women’s bodies have actually become battle grounds ... the violence is all
about destroying ... the inbuilt strength of a woman to build a community
(Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng, Uganda, 2006).
We have documented ... systematic sexual violence, committed by the
Burmese military as a weapon of war in the ongoing conflict ... where
women are raped ... in order to terrorise the women, and the local
community, morally, psychologically, and also physically (Nang Charm
Tong, Burma, 2006).
We’ve had reports from women ... about some very difficult situations
that lesbians have been going through. There is more violence towards
them because they’ve broken away from the gender role expected of
them. This is why there is more repression ... they suffer direct repression
on their bodies and their lives (Elisabeth Castillo, Colombia, 2006).2

The personal narratives presented above, provided by women reflecting on the

difficulties of co-ordinating research on and activism against gendered violence, are
disturbing to say the least. Taken from the website of Amnesty International’s ‘Stop
Violence Against Women’ campaign, these testimonies draw attention not only to
the crucial need to better the experiences of women who live under threat of

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violence, but also to the conceptual and practical impediments to combating

violence against women in contemporary academic and policy environments. In
the academic environment of International Relations (IR) as a discipline, one of the
most salient obstacles is the way in which gendered violence has been convention-
ally and conceptually precluded as an object of study (Peterson and Runyan 1999,
115–117).

Feminist challenges to the well-defined and equally well-defended boundaries of

IR3 have drawn attention to the potential not only of transgressing those boundaries
but also to the importance of understanding violence in relation to security. Turning
the analytical focus of this research to gendered violence is motivated by two related
concerns. ‘[V]iolence establishes social relationships ... it marks and makes bodies ...
it constitutes subjects even as it renders them incomplete’ (D’Cruze and Rao 2004,
503). This latter understanding of violence, as constitutive of subjectivity, has
historically been absented from academic theorising of security, where violence is
conventionally conceived of as a functional mechanism within an anarchic inter-
national system.4 Second, given that violence ‘marks and makes bodies’, I seek to
understand the types of body that are marked and made through violence that is
specifically gendered—that is, violence that ‘emerges from a profound desire to
keep the binary order of gender natural or necessary’ (Butler 2004, 35). I argue that
studying the subjects produced through gendered violence in the context of debates
over the meaning and content of security provides more coherent accounts of both
violence and security.

The notion that identity is central to theorising security has been well explicated by
scholars critical of conventional approaches to security.5 ‘Recognising gender as a
significant dimension of identity and security opens the door to non-state-based
views of security and aptly illustrates how identity shapes individual and collective
security needs’ (Hoogensen and Rottem 2004, 156). However, most of these critical
voices seek to enter into academic debates on security by broadening the accepted
agenda of security—to include the recognition of multiple phenomena, from earth-
quakes to economic deprivation, as threatening to security—and proliferating the
referent objects of security discourse, such that security is no longer solely the
concern of states but also of communities, societies and individuals. While scholars
of security have contested the parameters of debates about security, and feminist
scholars of security have drawn attention to the importance of gender as a category
of analysis, there is little work being done on the ways in which the organisational
logics of security and violence are discursively constituted (see Shepherd and
Weldes (forthcoming)).

In this article, I argue that a feminist reconceptualisation of (international) security

and (gender) violence can be achieved through the operationalisation of a series of
deconstructive analytical strategies,6 which begins with paying attention to the
academic literature that is, in part, product/productive of these discourses. In the
following section, I discuss the implications of espousing a feminist poststructuralist
politics. In the third substantive section, I map out the logic of critique that enables
the reconceptualisation of violence and security that I offer in my analysis. The
critique is conducted through reference to the literature that addresses these issues.
I conclude that such a reconceptualisation, which pays due analytical attention to
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the ways in which discourses of (gender) violence and (international) security

function to inscribe boundaries that constitute the horizons of possibility for
the configuration of subjectivity and political community, is both necessary and
possible.

Contributions of a Feminist Poststructuralist7

In this article, I explore the discursive constitution of concepts of (gender) violence
and (international) security in particular texts. However, this research is explicitly
not ‘merely theoretical’, or ‘academic’ in the pejorative sense of the term.8 My
interest in the concepts of international security and gender violence is indeed
motivated by a desire to see whether these concepts could be fruitfully reconceived,
but the article also considers the implications of this reconceptualisation for policy
and academic work. I wish to provide for those undertaking such work alternative
concepts with which to proceed. I identify myself as a feminist researcher, and
recognise that this entails a curiosity about ‘the concept, nature and practice
of gender’ (Zalewski 1995, 341). This curiosity questions the ways in which
gender is made meaningful in social/political interactions and the practices—or
performances—through which gender configures boundaries of subjectivity. I
espouse a feminism that seeks to challenge conventional constructions of gendered
subjectivity and political community, while acknowledging the intellectual heritage
of feminisms that seek to claim rights on behalf of a stable subject and maintain
fidelity to a regime of truth that constitutes the universal category of ‘women’
(Butler 2004, 8–11). While a feminist project that does not assume a stable ontology
of gender may seem problematic, I argue, along with Judith Butler, that ‘[t]he
deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes
as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (Butler 1999, 189).
A focus on articulation entails a further commitment to the analytical centrality of
language—or, as I see it, discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues that an integral part of
feminist theory is the willingness to ‘tackle the question of the language available
for theoretical purposes and the constraints it places on what can be said’ (Grosz
1987, 479). To me, this aspect of feminist theory is definitive of my feminist politics.
If ‘men and women are the stories that have been told about “men” and “women” ’
(Sylvester 1994, 4), and the way that ‘men’ and ‘women’ both act and are acted
upon, then the language used to tell those stories and describe those actions is not
just worthy of analytical attention but can form the basis of an engaged critique.
Furthermore, an approach that recognises that there is more to the discursive
constitution of gender—the stories that are told about ‘men’ and ‘women’—than
linguistic practices can enable thinking gender differently.
Alison Stone argues that this type of approach constitutes a ‘genealogical feminism’,
in which the organisational logics of feminism—historically assumed to be ‘women’
and/or ‘gender’—are ‘continually re-enacted through corporeal activities’ (Stone
2005, 12). This approach allows for research that investigates the ways in which
‘women’ as subjects and objects act, speak, write and represent themselves, and are
represented, written about, spoken about and acted on. There is no singular femi-
nine subject or feminist method, just as, in my understanding, the notion of a
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singular feminist project is unsustainable. I seek to contribute to contemporary

debates in their desire to think differently the concepts of gender, violence, security
and the international by investigating how these concepts are (re)presented and
(re)produced in a particular discursive context.9 Such a concern, at least with regard
to gender, is indicative of not only a feminist project but also a poststructural politics
(Flax 1990). I argue, along with Butler, that poststructural political research cen-
tralises power, and takes the investigation of practices of power to be ‘the very
precondition of a politically engaged critique’ (Butler 1994, 157).
I offer a feminist reconceptualisation of (international) security and (gender) vio-
lence because the current conceptualisations are not adequate for the task of
thinking gender differently in the context of violence and security. They do not
allow for the development of theory or practice that is capable of addressing the
complexities inherent in these issues. As Wendy Brown argues, ‘What suspicion
about the naturalness of gender subordination persists when feminism addresses
only the wrongs done to women and not the socially produced capacity for women
to be wronged, to be victims?’ (Brown 2003, 11). In the context of security, in-
vestigating this capacity manifests in a curiosity about ‘what Foucault would have
called the overall discursive fact that security is spoken about at all’ (Dillon 1996,
14) and the ways in which performances of security discourse function to (re)pro-
duce particular configurations of social/political reality.

From Existence to Violent Reproduction

Surveying two bodies of literature, one concerned with security situated firmly in
the discipline of International Relations and the other more broadly sociological,
addressing violence and gender, demands that careful consideration is given to the
links between them. In the discussion of the literature on violence, I draw out the
ways in which the various approaches conceptualise the referent object of their
analyses, and how they conceive of threat—in this case, violence. Similarly, in the
discussion of the security literature, I question how different approaches to security
conceive of the referent object of security, and how they too conceive of threat. In
both cases, I offer a discourse-theoretic account that emphasises the (re)productive
function of violence in the ordering of social/political reality. However, the critique
is structured such that the links between the literatures can be effectively high-
lighted, rather than proceeding with each literature in turn, as illustrated in Table 1.

Sovereign Individuals, Sovereign States

The foundational assumptions of every body of literature are often implicit, or
taken to be unproblematic. Each literature, in this case that which addresses
‘violence against women’ and that which addresses ‘national security’, speaks to a
specific manifestation of violence and is informed by a particular logic of gender and
security. On its own terms, each literature is internally both coherent and consis-
tent, although there are significant differences between the ways in which this
coherence and consistency is constructed. In this section, I proceed as outlined in
Table 1, exploring the literature on ‘violence against women’ and ‘national security’
to investigate the ways in which (gender) violence and (international) security are
conceptualised within these works.
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Table 1: Illustrating the Dynamics of Critique

Violence Security

Empiricist ‘Violence Against Women’

‘National Security’

Constructivist ‘Gender Violence’

‘International Security’

Discourse-Theoretic ‘Violent Reproduction of

Gender’

‘Violent Reproduction of
the International’

Jill Radford, Liz Kelly and Marianne Hester are prominent researchers concerned
with ‘violence against women’ and they situate their work in a context of the
debates within wider feminist theorising, stating that ‘throughout the 1980s a series
of separations occurred, of women’s studies from feminism; of theoretical writing
from women’s lived experiences; of knowledge creation from activism’ (Radford
et al. 1996, 8). Their implicit placement within these dualities is on the side of an
activist feminism concerned with ‘women’s lived experiences’. Researching and
writing about ‘violence against women’ has a particular, albeit internally differen-
tiated, politics that differs in several key ways from researching and writing about
‘gender violence’, and one aspect of this is the location articulated by Radford, Kelly
and Hester above.

Researching ‘violence against women’ is an explicit challenge to the self-proclaimed

objectivist and value-free research programmes of mainstream social science. This
can be understood as a political undertaking in two main ways; research was
conducted ‘with the aim of achieving a description as well as a comprehensive under-
standing of the problem’ (Dobash and Dobash 1992, 283, emphasis added). These
two aspects—the description and the understanding—were conceived as separable
and separate. It is vital to note that the academic study of ‘violence against women’
claims as its intellectual heritage critically important activity and activism in com-
munities throughout the UK and the US. ‘Starting at the grass roots level, feminists
named its existence ... and began to put into place an underground network of
shelters and safe houses for women. Only then did significant numbers of mental
health professionals, social science researchers ... and policy makers begin to notice’
(Bograd 1988, 11).

Research that focuses on ‘violence against women’ posits women as coherent and
stable subjects whose life experiences can be ameliorated by appropriate policy
practice. This approach identifies materially determined gendered individuals as a
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result of its empirical approach to the study of politics and social life. The notion of
sovereignty is central here, and provides an important link to the literature on
international security. The subject constructed through the discourse of ‘violence
against women’ is assumed sovereign, the ‘women’ affected by violence
have sovereign rights over their own material forms and should not therefore be
subjected to violence. Moreover, this sovereignty is pre-constituted and taken to be
an empirical ‘reality’. In a similar manner, the assumed sovereignty of the state is
the foundational truth claim of literature on ‘national security’, which I discuss in
the following paragraphs.

Both internal and external sovereignty are central to the conception of the state
that informs conventional IR security literature, and the logical corollary of this
conception constructs the state system as anarchic. Realist IR theory ‘sees’ the state
as its object of analysis and therefore ‘[s]tates are the principle referent objects of
security because they are both the framework of order and the highest sources of
governing authority’ (Buzan 1991, 22). Within both classical (or ‘political’) realism
and neo-realism (or ‘structural realism’), the state is represented as a unitary actor.10
Both variants proceed according to the assumption that all human existence is
bounded by states, according to the assertion that states are the primary object of
analysis. If, as Kenneth Waltz claims, ‘[s]tatesmen and military leaders are respon-
sible for the security of their states ... no one at all is responsible for humanity’
(Waltz 1959, 416), then states are further assumed to be the object to which
security policy and practice refers and humans can only be secured to the extent
that they are citizens of a given state.

John Herz’s conception of the ‘security dilemma’ is explicitly premised on assump-

tions regarding the potential of human nature, and therefore state behaviour, to
provide circumstances of collaboration and co-operation. The ‘human nature’
under discussion is, on closer inspection, the nature of ‘man’ (see Morgenthau
1973, 15–16), and is thus problematic in its partiality as well as its pessimism.
Insecurity, according to Herz,
stems from a fundamental social constellation ... where groups live along-
side each other without being organised into a higher unity ... Since none
can ever feel entirely secure in such a world ... power competition ensues
and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on (Herz
1950, 157).

The ‘fundamental social constellation’ posited by classical realists is a population of

rational, unitary, masculine entities that will never, and can never, be otherwise.

The concept of security driving these prescriptions is premised on a particular

vision of the social relations between states, and furthermore constructs a par-
ticular notion of what is considered to be a security threat within this concep-
tualisation, as eternal and external to the state. While ‘human nature’ drives state
behaviours according to classical realists, neo-realist assumptions concerning the
construction of security in an anarchic system appeal to a structural logic of
uncertainty. ‘Uncertainty is a synonym for life, and nowhere is uncertainty
greater than in international politics’ (Waltz 1993, 58). The necessity of security
behaviours is thus derived from the anarchic system and ‘rests on the argument
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that the distribution and character of military power are the root causes of war
and peace’ (Mearsheimer 1990, 6). Thus threats, reduced to external violences
and ultimately war between states, are perpetual, a theoretical move that serves
to perpetuate the understanding of security as reducible to military force. This
functions to blind those working within a conceptualisation of ‘national security’
to the possibility that threats are variously constructed depending on context.
Moreover, the structural context of anarchy that is taken to be a foundational
reality within this conceptualisation prescribes and proscribes certain behaviours
that are then never opened to critical scrutiny, a point to which I return in the
conclusion of this article.

The Social Construction of Individuals and States

Although researchers working on ‘violence against women’ would identify (patri-
archal) power structures that facilitate the continuation of violence against women,
thinking about ‘gender violence’ enables a more sensitive understanding of the
representation of women as simultaneously ‘victims, perpetrators [and] ... actors’
(Moser and Clark 2001) and the different conceptualisation of power that this
representation entails. The conceptualisation of power that underpins work on
‘gender violence’ is implicated in the conceptualisation of violence. Caroline Moser
suggests that there is a ‘gendered continuum of conflict and violence’ (Moser 2001,
31), and, moreover, that this continuum is a result of the ways in which ‘gender is
embedded in relations of power/powerlessness’ (ibid., 37). While I sustain the
challenge to a unidirectional power–violence relationship as offered by work on
‘violence against women’, the ‘embedded’ nature of gender in power as suggested
by Moser and others does not fully problematise the links between masculinity and
violence that are assumed by the previous literature.
In an attempt to move beyond what she terms ‘gender traditionalism’, in which
gender is readable from sex and differences between genders are thus biological,
and ‘gender liberalism’, which stresses the equality of the genders despite differ-
ences between them, both of which ‘can combine in unfortunate ways ... to prevent
gender from being seen as significant or explanatory’ (Cockburn 2001, 14), Cynthia
Cockburn develops a subtle and thoughtful account of gender violence with specific
reference to situations of armed conflict. Centralising the power inherent in gender
relations enables the ‘uncovering [of] the differentiation and asymmetry of
masculine and feminine as governing principles, idealized qualities, practices or
symbols’ (ibid., 16).
However, Cockburn ‘calls, first, for a sensitivity to gender difference’ (ibid., 28,
emphasis in original) that I believe may undermine the utility of this approach.
It does, in a way, put the empirical cart before the theoretical horse. If difference
between the genders is taken as a starting point for the analysis of gender, then
the (re)production of this difference is obscured from critical attention. However,
this approach, in contrast to research addressing ‘violence against women’, does
not assume sovereignty of a stable subject. Attention is paid to the ways in which
individuals are both product and productive of their social environments, positing
a socially constructed individual within a similarly socially constructed matrix of
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gender relations. Gender is therefore not assumed to be a transhistorical or

universal system of identity production, nor is it assumed that individuals expe-
rience gender in the same way, even within a particular social/political context.
This emphasises the ontological difference between research on ‘violence against
women’ and ‘gender violence’. The former assumes a material reality and, in the
context of gender, gender can thus be read unproblematically from sexed bodies.
The latter approach focuses on gender as a social construct, where sexed bodies
are gendered in accordance to variable matrices of gender norms.

Those who work within a conceptualisation of ‘international security’ are more

loosely bound by their theoretical assumptions and research priorities than those
who work on ‘national security’. The literature on ‘international security’ incorpo-
rates work on ‘human security’, ‘critical security’ and ‘common security’.11 The
literature represents a variety of different theoretical frameworks, and draws
heavily on representations of, and arguments concerning, ‘global civil society’ and
cosmopolitanism, as I discuss further below. However, in this analysis I treat these
works as minimally unitary, and label them ‘international security’ for three inter-
connected reasons.12 Primarily, the term ‘international’ easily differentiates this
approach from the literature on ‘national security’. Second, the use of the modifier
‘international’ denotes the association of this approach with global, or universal,
values. Third, the term resonates with the discipline in which this literature is
situated—International Relations.

Often tracing its heritage back to the 1994 United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) Human Development Report,13 which includes a chapter entitled ‘New
Dimensions of Human Security’, work on ‘international security’ seeks to recon-
ceptualise security such that the referent object is no longer conceived, as in
‘national security’, as the sovereign state (see Newman 2001, 240; Booth 2004, 5).
As Matt McDonald explains, this reconceptualisation is ‘a potential response to the
growing insecurity of security’ (McDonald 2002, 277) and incorporates several of
the critiques discussed above. Roland Paris argues that this ‘paradigm shift’ does not
necessarily represent a coherent research agenda (Paris 2001, 92–93), but recogn-
ises that this work comprises ‘a distinct branch of security studies that explores the
particular conditions that affect the survival of individuals, groups and societies’
(Paris 2001, 102). Broadly, the analytical focus of ‘international security’ is ‘we, the
peoples’ (Dunne and Wheeler 2004) and research within this conceptualisation
requires the recognition of ‘both the indivisibility of human rights and security, and
the concomitant responsibility to rescue those trapped in situations of violence,
poverty and ill-health’ (ibid., 20).

Theorists of ‘international security’ have argued that ‘[e]ven though state-based

conceptions of security have taken precedence, alternative ways of thinking that
give priority to individual and social dimensions of security’ are also possible (Bilgin
2003, 203). If ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992, 395) and states are
not constructed as the unproblematic unitary rational actors pursuing defensive
policies, as assumed by theorists of ‘national security’, then co-operation is as likely
as hostility in the domain of international relations. In fact, it is argued, conceiving
of security as ‘international’ highlights the importance of relations between states
and the salience of the construction of an ‘international community’ (McRae 2001,
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19). However, just as the state is asserted as autonomous within the conceptuali-
sation of ‘national security’, as I have described above, in this conceptualisation
‘international security’ is similarly asserted as relational. These assumptions are in
opposition but are equally problematic, as both assumptions treat the state and the
international as predetermined objective realities, which impacts on the ways in
which it is possible to conceptualise security.

Richard McRae (2001, 20), for example, argues that ‘global civil society’ needs to
address the issues of insecurity facing those ‘citizens of ... noncountries’ (ibid., 19)
whose governments are unable to provide adequate security measures. Tim Dunne
and Nick Wheeler also cite the co-operation of ‘an alliance of states and transna-
tional civil society’ (Dunne and Wheeler 2004, 10), needed to ‘rescue those trapped
in situations of poverty and violence’ (ibid., 20). Recognising the ‘structural
inequalities generated by global capitalism’ (ibid., 16) goes some way towards
challenging the assumptions of ‘national security’ literature, in the same way as
work on ‘gender violence’ offers sustainable critiques of the literature on ‘violence
against women’. However, theories of ‘international security’ neither take into
account the implications of their representations of a ‘global civil society’ vs. citizens
of ‘noncountries’ who need rescuing, nor engage in critical discussion of the very
notion of ‘global civil society’. The concept of ‘global civil society’ is ideologically
and normatively loaded with implications of its global reach, its civilised nature and
its social form. All of these characteristics are in opposition to their relevant ‘others’,
the local/parochial, the uncivilised and the forms of behaviour associated with
states and international institutions, all of which are conceived of as negative.14
Despite this, the construction of ‘global civil society’ is under-theorised, represented
unproblematically in the literature on ‘international security’ and assumed to
confer authority and legitimacy in the realms of morality, efficacy, democracy and
social cohesion (Scholte 2002, 159–164).

Furthermore, ‘international security’, in both broadening and deepening the

concept of threat (Booth 2005b, 14–15), implicitly conveys the urgency and priority
built into the concept of security propounded by work on ‘national security’, in
which security is, as discussed above, ‘the highest end’ (Waltz 1979, 126). ‘An
implicit assumption ... is that the elevation of issues of human rights, economic
inequality and environmental change, for example, to the realm of security will
allow greater priority to these issues’ (McDonald 2002, 277). Even as it problema-
tises the conceptualisation of security evidenced in the conceptualisation of
‘national security’, literature on ‘international security’ tends to naturalise it, con-
structing security as a ‘single continuum ... protected and enhanced by a series of
interlocking instruments and policies’ (McRae 2001, 22). This suggests that the
approach to ‘national security’ is broadly valid, needing only supplementary analy-
sis to fill in the gaps rather than a thorough reconceptualisation of its basic organi-
sational concepts.

The assumptions underpinning literature on ‘international security’ lead to policy

prescriptions premised on the triumph of liberal values, implemented by ‘a pro-
gressive alliance between ... cosmopolitan transnational civil society and enlight-
ened state leaders’ (Booth 2004, 6). The formation of an informed and activist
global civil society, with all the problems inherent within that concept, is seen as a
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necessary step to the provision of security. Well-established international institu-

tions and collectives capable of providing security and guaranteeing freedoms are
also vital on this view. Ultimately, the critique I offer is concerned that the concep-
tualisation of ‘international security’ I discuss here ‘constitutes a Western project,
predicated on the values of the developing world’ (McDonald 2002, 293). In the
articulation of this conceptualisation of ‘international security’, the values upon
which the prescriptions are founded are not opened to critical scrutiny, and effect
closure on the ways in which it is possible to think not only about security but also
international relations more broadly.
The ontological assumptions of this second approach differentiate it from work on
‘national security’, as this approach posits the international as a socially constructed
zone of co-operation rather than assuming the reality of an anarchic international
domain. However, violence and threat are still ever-present in this conceptualisa-
tion, but thoughtful security policy and practice can ameliorate the situations of
individuals, societies, communities, states. ...15 These subjects are recognised as
constructs of their social/political milieu on this view. Just as research on ‘gender
violence’ does not see a universal stability to matrices of gender norms, research on
‘international security’ investigates the ways in which norms and ideas function in
international relations to construct the subjects of inquiry—states. In the following
section I map out an alternative approach to the study of violence, security and the
international, arguing that states and subjectivity can be conceived differently with
potentially radical ramifications for the discipline of IR.

Performances of State and Subjectivity

I find it far more persuasive to conceptualise gender violence, of which violence
against women is a part, as violences that are both gendered and gendering. Power
is conceived of within this mode of analysis as productive, a conceptualisation that
Peter Digeser has called ‘the fourth face of power’ (Digeser 1992, 980). Influenced
by the theorising of Foucault, ‘the critical issue is, “What kind of subject is being
produced?” ’ (ibid), and, through which discursive practices are these subjects being
produced? Thinking about ‘the violent reproduction of gender’ allows for the
consideration of the ways in which culturally and historically specific narratives or
discourses produce particular understandings of notions of violence, gender and
power, thus enabling the emergence of gendered subjects. By analysing the ways in
which these subjects are temporarily ‘fixed’ through discursive practice, through
their performance, it is possible to investigate ‘the discursive practice by which
matter is rendered irreducible’—that is, how it comes to be accepted that subjects
embody a pre-given materiality—and to refuse the conceptual bracketing of the
‘problematic gendered matrix’ that organises the logic of this materiality (Butler
1993, 29).
To illustrate this perspective, it is possible to make meaning of rape as an instance
of the violent reproduction of gender. I am not disputing the ‘reality’ of rape as a
crime; rather, I follow Sharon Marcus when she asserts that ‘rape is a question of
language, interpretation and subjectivity’ (Marcus 1992, 387). Along with Marcus,
I am working towards the formulation of a politics of rape, which conceives of the
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act itself, the circumstances which ‘allow’ for the act, the immediate and long-term
legal procedures following the act and associated reportage and documentation as
equally implicated and important in the theorising of rape, arguing ‘against the
political efficacy of seeing rape as the fixed reality of women’s lives, against an
identity politics which defines women by our violability’ (ibid.).
The legal definition of rape was amended under section 1 of the UK Sexual Offences
Act 2003. Section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 stated that ‘[i]t is an offence for
a man to rape a woman or another man’; the relevant legislation now rules that ‘A
person (A) commits an offence if—(i) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus
or mouth of another person (B) with his penis; (ii) B does not consent to the
penetration; and (iii) A does not reasonably believe that B consents’ (OPSI 2003).
This legal definition of rape is interesting on many levels, but for the purposes of
this analysis I would like to consider the implications of closing off the discursive
space for women to be agents of rape. Rape can be seen as a culturally sanctioned
masculine realm; although the legislation talks of ‘men’ the assumption is that
masculinities will map on to socially defined ‘male’ bodies, following the myths of
a ‘natural’ gender order. In the UK, rape is discursively constructed as a resource of
gender violence, a violent means of inscribing the boundaries between masculini-
ties and femininities, apparent from the outset once the legal definition of rape has
been examined.
Research that addresses the ‘violent reproduction of the international’ conceives of
security as a set of discourses rather than as something that can be achieved either
in absolute or relative terms, and is also concerned with the demarcation of
boundaries in the study and practice of I/international R/relations.16 Engaging with
research that works within this conceptualisation can explore how these discourses
function to reproduce, through various strategies, domains of the international
with which IR is self-consciously concerned. Thus the violences and the threats, as
much as the states and security itself, are interpreted though the practices that
enable individuals as social beings to make sense of their social location and
identity. Literature that addresses ‘the violent reproduction of gender’ conceives of
violence as a site at which genders are reproduced; literature that addresses the
‘violent reproduction of the international’ conceives of violence, of which security
practice and policy is an integral part, as sites at which the international is repro-
duced. Including not just acts of inter-state war, but also instances of civil conflict
and oppressive practices within and between states, expanding further to prob-
lematise the legal structures, policy practices and the research that guides these,
theorists are enabled to investigate the ways in which these acts of violence
articulated through discourses of security function to perpetuate ‘the international’
as various spatial and conceptual realms. Thus, within this conceptualisation it is
possible to say that states, acting as unitary authoritative entities, perform violences,
but also that violences, in the name of security, perform states. Undertaking re-
search within this conceptualisation allows for a holistic perspective on the ways in
which discourses of security reproduce grammatically correct narratives of identity
and being-in-the-world, of which in international relations the ‘international’ is a
key organising concept.
One aspect of the ways in which discourses of security, and the violences undertaken
with reference to these discourses, function within international relations is to delimit
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the state as boundary between the domestic and the international realms. States are
assumed to be unitary and authoritative, to maintain both internal and external
sovereignty, and furthermore, it is assumed that the internal organisation of the state
is undertaken in the best interests of the citizenship—to protect and serve the
population. Unsettling ‘the international’ as an a priori unsafe/safe domain (in the
discourses of ‘national security’ and ‘international security’, respectively) challenges
this truth of security as propounded by the two conceptualisations outlined above.
Considering the ways in which this domain is (re)produced is vital to understanding
how security functions as a discourse. James Der Derian addresses the ‘new techno-
logical practice’ of simulation as a means of identifying ‘the reality principle that
international relations theory in general seeks to save’ (Der Derian 1990, 300). The
reality principle of the international as a conceptual domain is undermined by the
intertextuality of simulation and policy procedure and discourses of security help to
reassert the primacy of the international in the ways described above, through the
identification of objective threats, the construction of international order and the
perpetuation of the myth of the state.

Towards a Feminist Reconceptualisation

As Spike Peterson and Jacqui True comment, ‘our sense of self-identity and security
may seem disproportionately threatened by societal challenge to gender ordering’
(Peterson and True 1998, 17). That is, the performance of gender is immanent in
the performance of security and vice versa, both concern issues of ontological
cohesion (as illustrated in Table 2). Taking this on board leads me to the conclusion
that perhaps security is best conceived of as referring to ontological rather than
existential identity effects. Security, if seen as performative of particular configura-
tions of social/political order, is inherently gendered and inherently related to
violence. Violence, on this view, performs an ordering function—not only in the
theory/practice of security and the reproduction of the international, but also in the
reproduction of gendered subjects.
Butler acknowledges that ‘violence is done in the name of preserving western
values’ (Butler 2004, 231); that is, the ordering function that is performed through
the violences investigated here, as discussed above, organises political authority and
subjectivity in an image that is in keeping with the values of the powerful, often
at the expense of the marginalised. ‘Clearly, the west does not author all violence,
but it does, upon suffering or anticipating injury, marshal violence to preserve its
borders, real or imaginary’ (ibid.). While Butler refers to the violences undertaken
in the protection of the sovereign state—violence in the name of security—the
preservation of borders is also recognisable in the conceptual domain of the inter-
national and in the adherence to a binary materiality of gender.
This adherence is evidenced in the desire to fix the meaning of concepts in ways
that are not challenging to the current configuration of social/political order and
subjectivity, and is product/productive of ‘the exclusionary presuppositions and
foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as those foreclose the het-
erogeneity, gender, class or race of the subject’ (Hanssen 2000, 215). However, the
terms used to describe political action and plan future policy could be otherwise
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 Table 2: Towards a Feminist Reconceptualisation of (International) Security and (Gender) Violence

BJPIR, 2007, 9(2)

Gender violence International security
Approach Focus Subjects Subjects Focus Approach

Violence Against Empirically identifiable Sovereign individuals Sovereign states Empirically identifiable National Security
Women gendered entities (state) entities and
and the violences the violences they
they experience experience due to
the anarchic
international system
Gender Violence Constructed gendered Constructed Constructed states Constructed (state) International Security
entities and the individuals entities and the
violences they violences they can

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experience prevent due to the
co-operative
international system
Violent Reproduction Discursively Performative Performative states Discursively Violent Reproduction
‘VICTIMS, PERPETRATORS AND ACTORS’ REVISITED

of Gender constituted individuals constituted entities of the International

gendered entities and the function
and the function that violence
that violence performs in
performs in (re)producing
(re)producing these various international
discourses systems
251
252 LAURA J. SHEPHERD

imagined. They could ‘remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but
always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from prior usage and in the direction
of urgent and expanding political purposes’ (Butler 1993, 228). The concepts both
produced by and productive of policy could reflect an aversion to essentialism,
while recognising that strategic gains can be made through the temporary binding
of identities to bodies and constraining of authority within the confines of the
territorial state. This is, in short, an appeal to a politics of both/and rather than
either/or. Both the state (produced through representations of security and vio-
lence) and the subject (produced through representations of gender and violence)
rely on a logic of sovereignty and ontological cohesion that must be problematised
if alternative visions of authority and subjectivity are to become imaginable.
International Relations as a discipline could seek to embrace the investigation of the
multiple modalities of power, from the economic to the bureaucratic, from neo-
liberal capitalism to the juridical. Rather than defending the sovereign boundaries
of the discipline from the unruly outside constituted by critical studies of develop-
ment, political structures, economy and law, not to mention the analysis of social/
political phenomena like those undertaken by always-already interdisciplinary
feminist scholarship, IR could refuse to fix its own boundaries, and refuse to
exercise sovereign power, in terms of authority, over the meanings of its objects of
analysis. Future research on global politics could look very different if it were not
for the inscription of ultimately arbitrary disciplinary borderlines that function to
constrain rather than facilitate understanding.
It may seem that there is a tension between espousing a feminist poststructural
politics and undertaking research that seeks to detail, through deconstruction, the
ways in which particular discourses have failed to manifest the reforms needed to
address security and violence in the context of gendered subjectivity and the
constitution of political community. In keeping with the ontological position I hold,
I argue that there is nothing inherent in the concepts of (international) security and
(gender) violence that necessitated their being made meaningful in the way they
have been. Those working on policy and advocacy in the area of security and
violence can use the reconceptualisation I offer ‘to enable people to imagine how
their being-in-the-world is not only changeable, but perhaps, ought to be changed’
(Milliken 1999, 244).
As a researcher, the question I have grown most used to hearing is not ‘What?’ or
‘How?’ but ‘Why?’. At every level of the research process, from securing funding to
relating to the academic community, it is necessary to be able to construct a
convincing and coherent argument as to why this research is valuable, indeed vital,
to the field in which I situate myself. A discursive approach acknowledges that my
legitimacy as a knowing subject is constructed through discursive practices that
privilege some forms of being over others. In the study of security, because of the
discursive power of the concept, and of violence, which can quite literally be an
issue of life and death, these considerations are particularly important. Further-
more, as a result of the invigorating and investigative research conducted by
exemplary feminist scholars in the field of IR,17 I felt encouraged to reclaim the
space to conduct research at the margins of a discipline that itself functions under
a misnomer, being concerned as it is with relations inter-state rather than inter-
national. As Cynthia Enloe has expressed it,
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‘VICTIMS, PERPETRATORS AND ACTORS’ REVISITED 253

To study the powerful is not autocratic, it is simply reasonable. Really? ...

It presumes a priori that margins, silences and bottom rungs are so natu-
rally marginal, silent and far from power that exactly how they are kept
there could not possibly be of interest to the reasoning, reasonable
explainer (Enloe 1996, 188, emphasis in original).
If this is the case, I am more than happy to be unreasonable, and I am in excellent
company.

About the Author

Laura J. Shepherd, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of
Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK, email: [email protected]

Notes
1. The title of this article is derived from the extremely influential collection of essays on this theme,
edited by Caroline Moser and Fiona Clark (2001). The article itself draws on aspects of my doctoral
research and develops further debates outlined in my ‘Loud voices behind the wall, gender violence
and the violent reproduction of the international’ (2006).
2. All of these testimonials are taken from the ‘Stories’ page on Amnesty International’s web portal
devoted to stopping violence against women, at http://web.amnesty.org/actforwomen/stories-index-
eng [accessed 4 April 2006].
3. There is an enormous amount of literature on this subject. See, inter alia, Keohane (1989) and
Weber’s (1994) response; Zalewski (1995); Jones (1996) and Carver et al.’s (1998) response; Sylvester
(1996); Tickner (1997); Sylvester (2002); Carver (2003); Steans (2003); Agathangelou and Ling
(2004).
4. See, inter alia, Herz (1950) and Waltz (1979); Mearsheimer (1990 and 1995).
5. See, for example, Campbell (1998); McSweeney (1999) and Bilgin (2003).
6. Throughout this article, I use the bracketed form 〈(international) security and (gender) violence〉 to
indicate the mutability of these discourses—that is, to draw attention to the ways in which security
and violence can be differently inter/nationalised and gendered. When I use the unbracketed form
〈international security and gender violence〉, I refer specifically to the discourses that (re)produce the
meaning of security and violence through particular organisational logics of the international and
gender.
7. I use the representation of ‘poststructural’ rather than ‘post-structural’ to indicate that I consider
myself to be still ‘structural’, building on it, rather than hyphenetically separable.
8. In keeping with much common sense usage of the term, The Oxford English Dictionary defines
academic as not only ‘relating to education and scholarship’ but also ‘scholarly rather than technical
or practical’ and ‘of only theoretical interest’.
9. I employ the bracketed (re) to indicate that these practices do not conjure fully formed objects,
subjects and the relationships between them within a given discursive terrain but draw on the
existing knowledges about these subjects and objects in order to construct or (re)legitimise an
intelligible ‘reality’.
10. For representations of the former, see Morgenthau (1948, 154 and 1973, 6–7). For the latter, see
Waltz (1993, 76–77 and 2000, 5). Keohane offers a useful overview of both strands of thinking on
‘national security’ (Keohane 1986, 7–16).
11. On ‘human security’, see, for example, UNDP (1994); Tehranian (1999); Thomas 2000; McRae
(2001); Newman (2001); Paris (2001); Thomas (2001) and Thomas and Tow (2002). ‘Critical security
studies’ is exemplified by Booth (1991 and 1995). See also Krause (1998); Croft and Terriff (2000);
Booth (2004) and Dunne and Wheeler (2004); Booth (2005a); Sheehan (2005).
12. See also Roland Paris (2001, 87) and Edward Newman (2001, 240–242), both of whom offer a similar
justification for treating these works as a conceptual and analytical whole.
13. See Paris (2001, 89); Thomas (2001, 162) and Thomas and Tow (2002, 178); Smith (2005).

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254 LAURA J. SHEPHERD

14. See, inter alia, Shaw (2001) and Chandhoke (2002) for explorations of the discursive construction of
global civil society. See also Hopgood (2000) for an excellent critical approach to this issue.
15. Regional blocs? Continents? The planet? The universe? ...
16. See, inter alia, Dillon (1996); Doty (1996); Dalby (1997); Walker (1997); Campbell (1998) and Butler
(2004); Shepherd and Weldes (forthcoming).
17. See Zalewski (1995); Enloe (1996); Enloe (2000) and Sylvester (2002) for particularly noteworthy
reflections on feminist IR.

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