The goal of the discipline of International Relations (IR) to be perceived as ‘gender-neutral’ produced the image of women being hidden from the stage of world politics (hence, the popular question: ‘Where are the women?’). International Relations scholars have viewed gender as an intra-national problem, and continued their unwavering focus on the ‘high’ politics of war. The voice of women may have been pushed to the margins of the discipline, but their issues continued to remain in plain sight. The feminist perspectives on IR entered the discipline as the Cold War came to an end; their theories based on the ontology of social relations and the analysis of socially constructed gender hierarchies. The politics of knowledge production, epistemic violence and stories of marginalization continued to impinge the field of feminist IR as the latter remained grounded in the western historical and intellectual tradition.
Shweta Singh and Amena Mohsin’s book, Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia: Past and Present marks a critical intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist studies. The struggles of women from the Global South have been different from the voices and experiences of women of the Third World. As Shweta Singh observes in the first chapter, ‘Can Feminist IR Hear Differing Voices?’, ‘the hegemonic epistemic traps have privileged histories from the Global North’ (p. 31). South Asia, a deeply patriarchal society, has had the largest number of female leaders: the United States of America may have never had a female President, but India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have had a female leader of the state. The book applies the feminist lens to explore the tumultuous region of South Asia across a history of time, space and politics vis-à-vis the dynamics of religion, nationalism and violence.
This edited volume consists of diverse scholarly contributions from across the subcontinent. A common theme running through the various chapters is that of the ‘3Ds’ (p. 2): Dialogue, Dissidence and Difference. The 3Ds mark the trajectory of feminist IR in South Asia and their dialectics with the Global North. The book is divided into four sections: the first section systematically traces the genealogy of feminist thinkers in South Asia, consciously disrupting the epistemic authority on the subject and actively presenting the ‘idea of difference’ as against the rubric of universalism and global sisterhood (p. 11). The second section attempts to rethink the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda offered under the United Nations 1325 Resolution and contextualizes its application in the region. The next section focuses on the concept and history of gendered populism through case studies based in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India. The final section unpacks the narrative of gender and militarism: how the latter impacts the quality of life of South Asian women living in the conflict-prone regions. This collaboration reiterates, from a critical reflective perspective, the fact that there is no one singular feminist IR template to capture the different conceptual, analytical, and empirical knowledges produced in the different locations of the world.
The collection focuses on identifying the richly textured contours of feminist epistemologies in South Asia, and how advancing feminist engagement can contribute to its theorizing globally. Acknowledging the politics of location provides an intersectional lens to a diverse range of issues: recognizing the differing ways of knowing, seeing, and doing global politics; unravelling the knowledge-power nexus in the discipline. A feminist methodology in IR brings differing voices, everyday experiences and alternative insights when analysing issues of global importance. This further reflects distinct notions of autonomy, agency, and freedom, and offers other geographical spaces to be a site for alternate knowledge production. Thus, the need for a feminist methodology provides much-needed context-sensitive plurality to the mainstream conceptual frameworks in the discipline of international relations.
Singh situates her essay in ancient India to trace the genealogy of feminist thinkers. She has chosen the Therigatha as it comprised some of the earliest writings of women of ancient India and presents key insights on voice, agency, and intersectionality in feminist thinking. Medha Bisht, in her chapter ‘A Feminist Debt: Conversation between Feminist and Non-western Thought’, builds on Singh’s work and presents an in-depth discussion on the Arthashastra, Anvishiki, and Sunyata; her work draws attention to the politics behind cartographies of knowledge production. Bisht’s engagement with feminist epistemologies helps foreground her arguments in a systematic manner. Anvishiki, for instance, is a methodological framework applied in the Arthashastra; the former is able to pave a conversational path between critical IR and non-western thought as it employs pluralist philosophical traditions in Hindu thought to make sense of reality. Her chapter poses the possibility of ‘feminist debt’ enriching conversations between IR and Area Studies (p. 13), and how philosophical traditions from the Hindu and Buddhist thought can represent South Asian legacy while adding to the feminist IR framework of the Global South.
Aafreen Rashid’s essay, ‘Framing Feminist Strategic Discourse…’, highlights the under-representation of historical women and the struggle of Muslim feminists within the history of feminist agitations in South Asia. The existing literature on the same is Eurocentric in celebrating the work of western female thinkers. The strategic thought of Jahanara, a Mughal Princess and Rashid’s person of interest in the chapter, presents a break from the dominant strategic discourse. Unlike her contemporaries, Jahanara was a staunch opponent of the practice of war of succession: she termed it a socially constructed patriarchal phenomenon (p. 59). Jahanara further attempted to problematize war and the social havoc it caused: she viewed pain, anxiety, terror and depression as central to the understanding of war, finding resonance with modern feminist studies on war (p. 61). The Indic texts, thus, initiate relationality that can add value to the feminist and critical IR debates (p. 46), destabilizing the binaries of the West and non-West IR.
The second section of the book is dedicated to re-thinking the discourse on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) scholarship from a Global South perspective. While the WPS scholarship does recognize the complex, layered role of women in conflict: women as victims, as active agents, their significance and limitations in peace agreements (p. 70); diverse feminist perspectives have put forth multiple reinterpretations of WPS (p. 71). South Asian feminists have critiqued the patriarchal structures for supporting cultural and structural violence against women; they present a challenge to the established boundaries and have based alternative visions of peace grounded in their lived experience and everyday struggles. The stereotyping of women as peacemakers creates a blind spot in analysing the cases of female extremism. Women often find radicalization giving them the agency to raise their voices and be heard by their intended audience (p. 143). South Asian women were part of the national independence movements, even teaching anti-colonial terrorist tactics to their peers. In order to formulate effective conflict preventive strategies, the national action plans under the UNSCR 1325 should be conscious of the fact that the women are politically conscious and make informed choices to join the extremist groups (p. 146). South Asian feminists also push for regional peace (as opposed to peace within a country) and challenge the idea of peace that is devoid of the interests and voices of women (the accounts of their loss and being silenced).
Bina D’Costa and Swati Parashar have employed an interesting methodology centred around their collaboration and experiences as feminist writers in South Asia. Their chapter, ‘The Battle Within’, traces the normative evolution of the WPS, framing of the Global South, and the silencing of voices in the process. Women, particularly in South Asia, are designated as the representative of the national identity and the society’s honour, and are, thus, targeted as sites of violence and debasement from both the enemy and their own community. As Saba Gul Khattak informs us in ‘Perpetual Silencing and Continuous Questioning’, 250,000-400,000 systematic rapes were committed by Pakistan during Bangladesh’s War of Independence, indicating the gendered impact of militarization. Further, sexual violence has the ability to accentuate and securitize identity differences through which crimes cascade (p. 107). The trauma of women needs to be understood in specific historical and cultural contexts; WPS has been denounced for the ‘gender washing’ interventionism of powerful countries in the Global South and the militarized international responses to local conflicts which, in turn, sustain the global power asymmetries (p. 120). Soumitra Basu in ‘International Dimensions of Feminist South Asia’ has supported the suggestions to localize the normative agenda of UNSCR 1325, else international conflict feminism shall normalize globally hegemonic political choices in the name of women affected by conflict (Vasuki, 2021).
Gendered populism, as discussed in the third section, is masculine in its very essence and is often a key element of Right-Wing populist movements. It relies heavily on the politics of exclusion and ‘othering’; and governments use it to moralize political conflicts, demonize their political opponents, thereby mobilizing the masses. The final section, ‘Militarism and Militarisation’, carries forward the conversation of exclusion between the men, military, and the militants. The region of South Asia observes pragmatic populism in practice; majoritarian politics with religious and cultural appeals draws the masses in. However, unlike other conservative party ideologies across the globe, populism in South Asia does not reject globalization. It opposes inheritance rights, reproductive rights, and the education of women instead. Amena Mohsin further notes in her work ‘Framing Political Masculinity and Gendered Populism’ that social media plays a vital role in framing anti-women narratives and promotes engaging in ‘trolling’ for the sake of social preservation.
Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia presents a niche topic of interest in the field of IR, which previously had been relegating women’s writings in South Asia to the margins. The book is a testimony to the need for a nuanced feminist methodology in IR. The volume presents a comprehensive understanding of role of gender and its intersectionality with various critical topics of interest in the region. However, there is scope for entertaining the possibility of an additional chapter based on the gendered implications of nuclearization as two of the South Asian members are nuclear weapon states, affecting the peace and stability of the entire region.
Reshmi Kazi is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.