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Gender, agency and political violenceMaria O'Reilly aa King's College London, UKPublished online: 18 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Maria O'Reilly (2013) Gender, agency and political violence, Peacebuilding, 1:1,165-167, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2013.756284

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2013.756284

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BOOK REVIEWS

Gender, agency and political violence, edited by Linda Ahall and Laura J. Shepherd,

Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 272 pp., £57.50 (hbk), ISBN 978-0230293908

Gender, agency and political violence is a thought-provoking contribution to feminist

debates around issues of political violence, agency/resistance and conflict resolution. It

builds upon and develops existing contributions within feminist international relations

(IR) on women’s involvement in nationalist armed struggles, civil wars and ‘terrorism’/

suicide bombing, on the role of gendered language, myths and symbols in conceptualising

and legitimising violence and on the construction of gendered subjects and agents in

conflicted and post-conflict settings. The volume enriches these debates by exploring how

gender is implicated in diverse acts of violence and (in)security emanating from

individuals, resistance movements, private military and security companies (PMSCs) and

the state. It highlights the highly gendered, racialised and sexualised practices of

representation at work in accounts of conflict and political violence within academic

scholarship, the media and popular culture.

Laura Shepherd introduces the discussion by focusing on how violence functions ‘to

(re)produce not only legitimacy, authority and (institutional) capacity but also to (re)

produce the subjects deemed to have perpetrated such acts’ (pp. 1–2). She outlines a

poststructural framework for analysing gender, agency and political violence, showing

how power is productive of gender identity, and how gender can be understood as

performative, as a regulative ideal and as produced through myriad practices. This allows

her to explore the constitution of gendered subjects through violence, and to spotlight how

particular understandings of violence and gender impact on the types of agency a subject

can (legitimately) perform or inhabit. Shepherd outlines how cultural frameworks or

‘matrices of intelligibility’ (p. 6) constitute some acts (of agency, violence or resistance) as

understandable, rational or legitimate, while others are rendered shocking, irrational or

deplorable. She then analyses a wall mural painted in Baghdad re-presenting torture in

Abu Ghraib as a ‘triptych of violence’ (p. 9) that raises crucial questions about the kinds of

violence and subjects legitimised in the contemporary world.

The volume then proceeds in three sections. The first explores violent subjects/

subjectivities. Lori Crowe’s chapter explores the relationship between masculinities,

militarism and popular culture, revealing how idealised, superhero masculinities depicted

in Hollywood movies are not only ‘tied to normative understandings of gender that

reproduce a legitimized political culture of violence’ (p. 20) but are also ‘simultaneously a

site of contestation and a reproduction of militarized logics’ (p. 22). Joachim and

Schneiker’s contribution uncovers the strategies of masculinisation, feminisation and

pathologisation that PMSCs deploy to differentiate themselves from mercenaries as

professional, protective and caring security sector actors. Gonzales Vaillant et al. compare

gender relations in the 1960s Tupamaros/MLN guerrilla movement in Uruguay, the

contemporary Naxal movement in India and white supremacist movements in the United

States. Focusing on gender norms/ideologies, embodied practices and future hopes, the

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

Peacebuilding, 2013

Vol. 1, No. 1, 165–171, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2013.756284

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gender dynamics within each movement are shown to be conditioned by historical/cultural

context, movement ideologies and organisational forms.

The second section looks at reason/rationality. Tanya Narozhna discusses how the

seemingly ‘objective’ notion of rationality found in mainstream Western scholarship

depoliticises female suicide bombers as emotional, irrational and powerless actors,

dismissing their agency and autonomy despite their strong political convictions. These

portrayals mean that scholars are unable to acknowledge the complex reasons why women

undertake suicide bombings and ‘effectively exempt women from accountability for the

acts of violence they perform’ (p. 94). Cerwyn Moore adopts a narrative approach to

examine how the Chechen ‘other’ was depicted as infantile, barbaric and irrational, in

fictional film representations of female snipers and ‘black widow’ suicide bombers during

the Russo-Chechen wars. Sungju Park-Hang employs fiction writing as methodology to

explore the gendered agency of a female secret agent who bombed a South Korean

aeroplane in mysterious circumstances. Claudia Brunner then spotlights how the medieval

legend of assassins (and their virgins) in the Middle East continues to be drawn upon in

mainstream terrorism research in spite of the contradictions and inconsistencies this mode

of ‘explanation’ throws up.

The third investigates emotion/emotionality. Hutchison and Bleiker’s chapter

underlines the importance of recognising the emotional nature of political violence.

Emotions, they argue, are often sidelined but should be worked through – by

deconstructing traditional associations of emotionality with femininity and rationality

with masculinity, by acknowledging their role in constituting identity and community

and by recognising emotions as types of judgement and insight – so that traumatic

legacies of violence can be overcome. Linda Ahall highlights how associations of

femininity with life giving rather than life taking are made through representations of

the female subject as emotional objects of political violence, or as abjected beings

who transgress the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. The first

representation denies women perpetrators agency whereas the second provokes

feelings of confusion, fear and disgust, rendering the violent act and perpetrator as

unintelligible. Lisa White then shifts the spotlight onto the relationship between

violence, victimisation and masculinity by exploring testimonies of state violence

experienced by male former detainees in Northern Ireland. Essentialist and normative

understandings of ‘manhood’ are shown to structure men’s testimonies of

victimisation – victimhood is often associated with feelings of shame, vulnerability

and weakness, emotions which many men either keep private or reconceptualise as

evidence of their strength and resistance to the extreme brutalisation they experienced.

Finally, Elina Penttinen employs an ‘orthogonal approach’ to study agency and

political violence, using the children’s film Stormheart to provoke new insights into

familiar issues of violence and exploitation. An ‘orthogonal approach’ entails ‘taking

a different and perhaps unexpected angle at a familiar issue’ (p. 200). It enables

Penttinen to highlight how agency and subjectivity, resilience and creativity is

demonstrated even by those who have experienced loss and abuse, that agency can be

articulated in ways that exceed the limits imposed by society, opening up space for

positivity and empowerment.

The volume is an invaluable contribution to existing scholarship, providing both new

empirical insights and novel methods for understanding the gendered nature of violence,

both in its perpetration and subsequent (re)interpretations. Gendered relations of power are

Book Reviews166

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revealed as constructed and reproduced through violent acts, whether physical or

epistemic, in a variety of institutional, historical and cultural contexts.

Maria O’Reilly

King’s College London, UK

E-mail: maria.o’reilly@kcl.ac.uk

q 2013, Maria O’Reilly

Peacebuilding and local ownership: post-conflict consensus-building, by Timothy

Donais, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012, 192 pp., £80.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0415588744

Local ownership has been a key topic of discussion in Peace and Conflict Studies since the

mid-1990swhen the limitations of donor-centric peacebuilding became evident. In addition

to theoretical discussions which emphasise the necessity of fostering local ownership that

are effective, accountable and inclusive,1 various proposals have been made for developing

the capacity of local actors in war-torn societies for re-building and enhancing their own

ways of promoting peace.2 Donais’s book – Peacebuilding and local ownership: post-

conflict consensus-building – is a new useful reference in this academic debate.

In addition to the introduction and conclusion chapters, this volume consists of two

different parts. The first three chapters present conceptual and theoretical discussions related

with local ownership. Chapter two identifies how the issue of local ownership has been

understood and interpretedwithinmainstream liberal peacebuilding discussions, and presents

a number of strengths and weaknesses of the liberal peace critique. This is followed by

discussions on two distinctive forms of ownership: elite ownership and societal

ownership. Chapter three presents that, based on the concept of representative democracy,

international peace interventionists considered the local elites who were recognised as

legitimate leaders through elections as local owners. Such an assumption however

marginalised themajority of the groups/societieswho have had less voice in their governance

through the social reconstruction process. In chapter four, the author also recognises that the

democratic process for achieving a consensus within civil society is extremely difficult since

civil society itself is by no means a coherent, unified unit. Nevertheless, he also presents a

1Fanthorpe, Richard, ‘On the Limits of Liberal Peace: Chiefs and Democratic Decentralization inPost-War Sierra Leone’, Africa Affairs 105 (2005): 27–49; Richmond, Oliver, ‘The Romanticisationof the Local: Welfare, Culture and Peacebuilding’, International Spectator 44 (2009): 149–69; MacGinty, Roger, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace,(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Futamura, Madoka, Edward Newman and ShahrbanouTadjbakhsh, Towards a Human Security Approach to Peacebuilding – Research Brief (Tokyo: UNUniversity, 2010).2Ropers, Nobert, ‘Systemic Conflict Transformation: Reflections on the Conflict and Peace Processin Sri Lanka,’ in A Systemic Approach to Conflict Transformation: Exploring Strengths andLimitations, ed. D. Korppen, B. Schmelzle and O. Wil (Berlin: Berghof Research Center forConstructive Conflict Management, 2008), 11–41; Sommers, Marc, Children, Education and War:Reaching Education for All (EFA) Objectives in Countries Affected by Conflict (Washington, DC:World Bank, 2002); Harris, Ian, ‘Peace Education Theory,’ Journal of Peace Education 1 (2004): 5–20; Reich, Hannah, ‘Local Ownership’ in Conflict Transformation Projects: Partnership,Participation or Patronage? Berghof Occasional Paper No. 27 (Berlin: Berghof Research Centerfor Constructive Conflict Management, 2006).

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