Feminism and Geopolitics: A Collaborative Project on the Cunning of Gender Violence

Abstract:We share perspectives from involvement in an international collaborative project culminating in a book titled The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism, (Duke University Press, 2023). Raising questions about the recent feminist "success" in putting gender-based violence and violence against women on the global agenda, as ethnographers, socio-legal scholars, journalists, and activists who focus on the everyday lives of people and the politics of gender, religion, and colonial or imperial violence, especially in the Middle East and South Asia and among immigrants from these regions, we trouble the selective ways these feminist visions and practices have been integrated into state and foreign policies, global security regimes, as well as international development and humanitarian industries. We stage three strategies to rethink the relation between the myriad forms and experiences of gender violence and their problematic codification into a global feminist agenda: first by distinguishing between gender violence (small g) and what we call GBVAW (as apparatus and technology); second by invoking the Hegelian concept of "cunning" to capture the ways feminist commitments to addressing violence became folded into world affairs; and third by tracing major circuits of power in which GBVAW operates to suggest why feminists might want to seek alternatives.