Strategies of feminist bureaucrats : perspectives from international NGOs

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women’s rights and gender equality specialists in international non-governmental development organisations, as analysed from an insider practitioner perspective. Part 1 identifies the strategies used and the challenges encountered when Turquet lobbied DFID on its gender equality policy while struggling to avoid marginalisation within her own organisation, Action Aid. In Part 2, Smyth describes how she left Oxfam for a year to work in the Asian Development Bank and uses this experience to consider the strategic opportunities available to a gender specialist working in an NGO such as Oxfam as compared with working in an international finance institution. Keywords: INGOs, gender mainstreaming, feminist activism, gender and developmen

"Gender orders in German agriculture: From the patriarchal welfare state to environmental liberalism"

In this paper then, I combine the insights from the feminist welfare state literature, feminist IR literatures and Women In Development (WID) literature, in order to develop the notion of agricultural gender regimes. I take these literatures, to make three basic propositions. First, gender regimes are encoded in national policies and laws, but also in the policies and laws of international agencies (welfare state literature; feminist IO literature). Second, gender regimes are supported through rhetorical constructs and embedded in larger discourses of intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions (feminist IR literature). Third, gender regimes are visible in the differential economic outcomes for women and men (WID literature). I proceed in two steps: First, I describe the gender regime of the patriarchal agricultural welfare state that developed in the post-World War II period with its characteristic construction of housewives and breadwinners and its rhetorical anchoring in family farming and and-communism. Second, I describe the currency emerging regime of environmental liberalism that has drawn women back into farming as housewifized rural entrepreneurs employing a rhetoric of "multi-functional" agriculture. It seeks to expand organic farming and diversity rural incomes to cope with international competition

Globalizing the cottage: Homeworkers' challenge to the international labor regime

Homeworkers, i.e. those who work at home for pay, are excluded from the labor regulations of most countries and are marginalized because they are defined as housewives who do not work. This dissertation identifies formal and informal rules which guide and define labor relations internationally and which function to make homeworkers marginal. I argue that these rules are part of an international labor regime. This study provides a theoretical reformulation of the regimes concept, embeds it in a constructivist framework, and incorporates elements of Foucauldian theory to account for the distribution of privilege engendered by regime rules. Two sets of rules are identified; one is formulated around the opposition between employer and employee, the other around the opposition between home and work. My method is interpretive, focusing on debates about homework at the international level. Described here are a variety of attempts to "discipline" homeworkers, i.e. efforts to make them fit into categories defined by the regime. Such attempts have never been entirely successful because homeworkers combine characteristics of employees and employers, housewives and breadwinners, categories which are constructed as diametrically opposed. Homeworkers are at a disadvantage because they are not defined as employees. My research shows that rules formulated around the employer-employee dichotomy have heteronomous force, i.e. those who are defined as subordinate by these rules have a stake in perpetuating their own subordination. It would be in the interest of homeworkers to be defined as subordinate to their work givers because then they would be entitled to the same rights that other employees have under labor law. In contrast, rules based on the housewife-breadwinner dichotomy have little heteronomous force. It is to the disadvantage of homeworkers to be defined as housewives because this legitimizes low pay and makes their crucial contribution to family income invisible. Inasmuch as homeworkers resist being categorized as employees or housewives through their daily practice or through political action, they challenge rules of the international labor regime.</p

"Europeanizing patriarchy: The EU's Common Agricultural Policy"

This paper starts from the presumption that gender politics in European agriculture are part of a larger process of patriarchal rule operating at the level of the European Union. It probes how and why the family farm came to be the unquestioned anchor of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and how the commitment to the family farm contributes to a European formation of patriarchy. I first provide an overview of the changing social organization of farming in Europe. Second, I probe the meanings that the family farm assumed in national discourses and the rhetorical purposes for which it was deployed. I focus my treatment on debates in the 1950s and 60s in the two countries which have been instrumental in formulating the CAP, namely Germany and France. In a final step, I argue that a confluence of ambiguous meanings in national discourses on family farming made for easy agreement at the international level, which affirming concordance about the legitimacy of patriarchal family farms within an EEC network of elites

Sexual Violence Against Men in Global Politics

Sexual violence against men is an under-theorised and under-noticed topic, though it is becoming increasingly apparent that this form of violence is widespread. Yet despite emerging evidence documenting its incidence, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones, efforts to understand its causes and develop strategies to reduce it are hampered by a dearth of theoretical engagement. One of the reasons that might explain its empirical invisibility and theoretical vacuity is its complicated relationship with sexual violence against women. The latter is evident empirically, theoretically, and politically, but the relationship between these violences conjures a range of complex and controversial questions about the ways they might be different, and why and how these differences matter. It is the case that sexual violence (when noticed at all) has historically been understood to happen largely, if not only, to women, allegedly because of their gender and their ensuing place in gender orders. This begs important questions regarding the impact of increasing knowledge about sexual violence against men, including the impact on resources, on understandings about, and experiences of masculinity, and whether the idea and practice of gender hierarchy is outdated. This book engages this diverse set of questions and offers fresh analysis on the incidences of sexual violence against men using both new and existing data. Additionally, the authors pay close attention to some of the controversial debates in the context of sexual violence against men, revisiting and asking new questions about the vexed issue of masculinities and related theories of gender hierarchy. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sex, gender, masculinities, corporeality, violence, and global politics, as well as to practitioners and activists

Introduction: sexual violence against men in global politics

Largely ignored for centuries and typically understood as part of the ‘spoils of war’, sexual violence is now evidentially ubiquitous, most notably in conflict and war zones. Indeed, in the last few decades interest in, and concern about sexual violence has increased exponentially, especially in the realm of high politics. In part, this intensified interest has resulted from the widespread incidence of wartime rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s and in Rwanda in 1994. Extensive empirical evidence and reporting has helped bring to a halt the long-standing political inattention to this form of violence. The new attention has been welcomed by many. That we can now speak of sexual violence as a global and severe harm has been neither easy nor straightforward; it has required years of intense feminist scholarship and activism. Yet despite this and the high political attention, the egregious harm of sexual violence persists worldwide with people often suffering in relative silence and far removed from the purview of the global media, the policy world, and the scholarly work aimed to address it. Moreover, the exponential globalised attention appears to have accomplished little in regard to the recognition of the different kinds of victims, and the complex range of needs for redress in both the short and long term. And there remains scanty understanding of the contextual and complex relations of power and the material circumstances that produce sexual violence. As such, as editors, we sensed that there were still many gaps in the ways we think about, understand, or try to ‘do something about’ sexual violence – whether in theory, politics, or legislation; indeed, this is a political and intellectual scene of some impoverishment. Into this fraught terrain has entered the increasing visibility of sexual violence against men1 – the central concern of this book.2 Though sexual violence against men has received some fleeting comments in international documents, as in the 2013 Security Council Resolution 2106, for the most part the focus on sexual violence has not included a significant focus on men as victims and survivors.3 The Resolution, which has been celebrated as the first-ever explicit recognition of sexual violence against men by the UN Security Council, makes but a sole and peripheral reference to the issue in its preamble: Noting with concern that sexual violence in armed conflict and post-conflict situations disproportionately affects women and girls, as well as groups that are particularly vulnerable or may be specifically targeted, while also affecting men and boys and those secondarily traumatized as forced witnesses of sexual violence against family members

Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects

The need to economically identify rare subjects within large, poorly mapped search spaces is a frequently encountered problem for social scientists and managers. It is notoriously difficult, for example, to identify “the best new CEO for our company,” or the “best three lead users to participate in our product development project.” Mass screening of entire populations or samples becomes steadily more expensive as the number of acceptable solutions within the search space becomes rarer. The search strategy of “pyramiding” is a potential solution to this problem under many conditions. Pyramiding is a search process based upon the idea that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. In this paper we report upon four experiments empirically exploring the efficiency of pyramiding searches relative to mass screening. We find that pyramiding on average identified the most expert individual in a group on a specific topic with only 28.4% of the group interviewed – a great efficiency gain relative to mass screening. Further, pyramiding identified one of the top 3 experts in a population after interviewing only 15.9% of the group on average. We discuss conditions under which the pyramiding search method is likely to be efficient relative to screening