Weak, immoral, naïve: Gendered representations of neutrality and the emotional politics of peace and security

In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the status of neutrality or military non-alignment is facing deeper challenges since its expected demise in the post–Cold War period. This article explores the gendered and emotional politics of neutrality and its relationship to peace and security. Neutrality has consistently been conceived as an irrational security option for weak states that refuse to bandwagon. ‘Hegemonic’ or ‘disciplining’ discourses of neutrality have conditioned current debates about alliances and security threats, and are imbued with gendered binaries and logics. Such discourses – textual, visual and other – are important because they reveal how neutrality has been positioned in relation to war, peace, morality and agency, and how such positioning constrained the possibilities for thinking about the ‘peace potential’ of neutrality. However, the gendered and emotive history of neutrality also contains a complexity that can be overlooked if simply understood in terms of binary discourses of weakness and irrationality. Inverted gender and emotional codings are also at work in discourses about neutrality. Seeing this complexity in terms of gender and emotions is critically important for conceptualising peace and security beyond narrow confines.