Gender violence should be understood as being constitutive of the hegemonic projects that underwrite the affirmative.

For the purposes of this project, we define gender violence as systematic, institutionalized and/or programmatic violence (sexual, physical, psychological) that operates through the constructs of gender and often at the intersection of sexuality, race and national identity. Gender violence comprises the acts and practices that systematically target a person, group or community in order to dictate what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are supposed to be and to discipline marginalized communities or any other perceived threats to dominant political structures and practices. In addition, we fundamentally conceive of ‘gender violence’ as a contested concept that may only represent specific practices and experiences. While certain behaviors or practices are commonly associated with gender violence (such as violence against some women) we do not claim that it is a ‘ready’ category. It is not a static or non-normative category particularly since naming certain experiences/practices as examples of gender violence may in fact delimit those experiences. We want to de-naturalize the category of gender violence to show how dominant representations are imbricated in national and global politics and exist at the intersections of racial, class and international politics. Similarly, in the context of this Special Issue, we understand hegemonic projects as constituted through systematic power relationships that privilege certain ways of knowing, being and acting and that give voice to only certain people’s experiences and agendas in the realm of families, communities and political entities. The processes, practices and discourses that demarcate a hegemonic project are not homogeneous, uncontested or settled. Because sociopolitical forces of actors participate in normalizing power relationships they can potentially pose different ways of knowing, being and acting that could rupture and reshape those relationships. Thus, hegemonic projects are not free-floating monolithic phenomena but rather contextually specific and historically produced, defining the realm of political possibilities. We situate our understanding of hegemony within the context of critical theorists such as Roxanne Doty (1996) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). As distinct from narrow (neo)realist understandings of hege- mony as a preponderance of resources or Gramscian understandings of how the ruling class maintains its position of power, these critical theorists see hegemony as the discursive linkage of particular ideas (Doty 1996: 8): The hegemonic dimension of global politics is inextricably linked to representational practices ... Hegemony involves the very production of categories of identity and the society of which they are a part. Hegemonic practices . . . seek to create the fixedness of meaning that . . . is ultimately impossible. For example, current hegemonic practices of neoliberalism and neocolonialism circumscribe what democracy and rights are supposed to look like in terms of their appropriate forms and definitions, the legitimate actions taken in the name of democracy and rights as well as the parameters of justice and political participation. In this way, hegemonic actors (political elites and privileged acti- vists for example) deflect criticism by feigning neutrality or ubiquity and, as we argue, require and shape discourses and practices of gender violence. While there may be identifiable actors, this does not mean that domination is sufficiently challenged by ‘cutting off the oppressor’s head’ because of how domi- nation is imbricated in interpersonal, local, global, cultural, economic and social dynamics. As noted above, gender violence accomplishes certain things and fixes particular meanings and practices. Given that hegemonic pro- jects also attempt to create a particular world of meaning and being, both gender violence and hegemonic projects can help each other ‘succeed’. Although it is not only the epistemic that generates hegemonic projects, we pay particular attention in this Special Issue to the hegemonic projects of ‘the state’. We do not conceive of the state as an actor but rather as an idea or what Pierre Bourdieu (1994) calls a ‘bureaucratic field’ that wields symbolic power and centralizes power. It is possible that the principal hegemonic project of the modern world is the project of ‘the state’. Our predominant focus on the state as a hegemonic project, then, is not to affirm state-centrism but to acknowledge that the state is still a central organizing political category of our lives. The politics of opposition, categories of identity and contemporary forms of dom- ination work through the state in many ways. Our focus is on hegemonic pro- jects – such as economic development (and its proxy neoliberalism), women’s rights activism, nation-building and national security – that are implicitly executed in the name of ‘the state’. These issues of gender, violence and power have been dealt with to some extent in feminist IR scholarship on the issues of gender, violence and power. Whereas traditional IR theory often views power as an ability to leverage material resources to get others to do what is not in their interests, feminists have exposed the gendered context of power thereby revealing more nuanced dimensions of hegemonic projects such as nationalism, militarism and globalization. The militarization of daily life when states promote military apparatuses as the solution for stability, security and development, the use of rape as a tool of war and the disproportionate effects of violence on particular women are three examples of a gendered conception of power (Enloe 2000; Jacobs, Jacobson and Marchbank 2000; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Feminist understandings of power have also exposed how gender is used to legitimize the operations of hegemonic projects. One example is the use of gendered conceptions of ‘protecting family and nation’ to promote military operations; another is the gender hierarchy that grounds, enables or cements the separation of public and private spheres (Peterson and Runyan 1998). While the issue of gender violence is indeed more prominent now because of the growth of feminist IR theory, we want to push for a further examination of the constitutive role gender violence plays in hegemonic projects. The scholar- ship on gender violence in IR certainly shows how hegemonic projects, such as nationalism or war, are deeply gendered and thus result in violence against women. But, while this vantage point is critical and often gets at the construction of gender, this framework generally only sees gender violence as primar- ily an example of hegemonic projects – one effect of power through the register of gender, rather than as contested, productive and coterminous with power. If we, as feminist theorists, respond to the obsessive focus on war in the mainstream IR field by documenting power relationships in terms of ‘Man’ over ‘Woman’/State over Citizen, we may inadvertently reaffirm understandings of violence as a ‘tool’ for particular goals of power. We acknowledge that power itself is an understudied political concept, par- ticularly regarding the multiple and layered forms that it takes. It would be easy to set up the realist, masculinist conceptualization of power as a ‘straw- person’ against which to posit the importance of feminist scholarship. However, we are pushing for feminist intervention in various discussions of power, whether it takes the form of compulsory control over others, indirect control via institutions and rules, structural ‘constitution of social capacities and interests of actors in direct relation’, particularly in terms of ‘producing social positions of capital and labor’, or ‘the socially diffuse production of sub- jectivity in systems of meaning and signification’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 3–4). Therefore, building on the work of feminist challenges to traditional IR views on power and of feminist scholarship on the gendered effects and pro- duction of various forms of power, we seek more nuanced understandings on this topic through the examination of the relationship between hegemony, gender and violence. It is often the case that the very contours of what constitutes gender violence in feminist IR scholarship are drawn by the issue of ‘violence against women’. Keck and Sikkink (1998) rightly explain how a transnational advocacy network actively developed the ‘violence against women’ frame, coalescing several campaigns worldwide into a platform that gets at the politics of pain which disproportionately targets women. The approach has raised awareness, galvanized support, given rise to much professional and political activity and enabled women’s groups to secure funding. But these political goals may have been secured at a certain cost. In the first place, the ‘violence against women’ approach relies on representational understandings of gender violence. In other words, the focus on violence against women also potentially ignores vio- lence against men and against groups in ways that are gendered, raced and internationalized. For example, feminist IR scholars invoke the presumably disproportionate targeting of women during conflict in ways that emphasize particular gendered effects of conflict and the masculinized state; the general effect is the lack of due attention to what it means to ‘make’ gender through violence or to the way codes of masculinity negatively affect men. Second, we also note that responses to gender violence, in many ways more so than any other political category, have sanctified racism, imperialism and Orientalism among feminists and critical theorists. For example, the obsession with ‘Islamism’ as the explanation par excellence for gender troubles around the world as well as the romanticization and infantilization of indigenous and/or marginalized women, belie feminist concerns about hierarchy (Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006). Feminists participate in these problematic dis- cussions about gender violence when we presume that the only reason a woman may die elsewhere is because of her (monolithically) oppressive culture in contrast to the choices and freedom of women in the West. Ironically, it may be such limited understandings of gender violence that unintentionally keep the topic of gender on the sidelines of political science. If gender violence is just an effect of power and does not substantively contri- bute to how we understand the operations of power, then the issues that gender violence raises may be dismissed as ‘women’s issues’ rather than instrumental to knowledge in political science. This dynamic also increases the ghettoi- zation of feminist IR scholarship and scholars (cf. Weber 1994).1 The current lacuna in IR scholarship on hegemony as well as on gender violence is not accidental but rather signals the production of knowledge in this field. Work on gender violence is not predominant in political science or the IR field pre- cisely because it is conceived as ‘just’ violence against women. In other words, in order to further our understandings of violence, we must interrogate gender violence as constitutive of power, and to understand power, we must go beyond current understandings that see ‘it’ in terms of tools or phenomena that act on gender. And, as we do so, we simultaneously ask why the questions we examine in this Special Issue are left on the margins of scholarship. Thus, we come to the following: why does our argument that gender violence is more than a case study of the effects of hegemony and, rather, is constitutive of hegemonic projects, matter? By re-orienting the relationship between gender violence and hegemonic projects we challenge the ‘natural- ness’ of the category of gender violence and assert it as constitutive of the productive forces of hegemonic projects. This framework provides a fresh and critical approach to understanding hegemonic projects and the construction of difference(s). We reference the work of postcolonial and critical race feminists who explain how neocolonial and neoimperial state formations are productive of and reliant upon gendered and racialized conceptualizations of citizens, immigrants and of ‘us/them’ dichotomies (McClintock 1995; Chatterjee and Jeganathan 2000; Stoler 2002). Postcolonial theory also explains how a fix- ation on violence ‘over there’ sidesteps how power works via international hierarchy (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). Similarly, we also believe that gender violence, rather than simply a result of war or culture, is vital and pivotal to the possibility of political violence and hegemony in the first place. Recent critical feminist engagements with international political economy (IPE) have also shown how the exploitation of women, and particularly women of color, is not simply an unintended consequence of global capitalism. Rather, the advancement of global capitalism under the dominant ideological ration- ale of neoliberalism depends on women’s secondary gendered status and global class hierarchy (Mies 1998; Peterson 2003; Agathangelou 2004). Drawing on these important literatures, we seek with this Special Issue to push the connections between gender violence and hegemonic projects beyond the ‘effects of power’ view towards an understanding that places the constitutive function of gender violence at the forefront.