Ongoing Projects

This five-year, multi-sited feminist ethnographic research project is invested in understanding the impact of gender, both materially and symbolically, within the newly emergent global counterterrorism regime known as the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) Agenda. The P/CVE agenda, a supposedly non-kinetic supplement to the violent counterinsurgencies, drone strikes, and military occupations that have characterized the global war on terror since its inception in 2001, offers “soft” approaches to address the structural drivers of violence through collaboration between governance, development, and peacebuilding sectors. P/CVE has identified women and gender as elements critical to its success. In part, this is the result of the push to “mainstream gender” within the peace and security realm, an effort that has been officially unfolding since the adoption of the landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000. However, it remains a point of debate whether the proposed objectives of the WPS agenda—such as the promotion of gender equality and women’s rights and the ultimate goal of a more peaceful and safer world for both women and men—are commensurate with the security objectives of counterterrorism and P/CVE. 

Drawing on transnational and decolonial feminist theory and feminist ethnographic methods, this project examines the development and implementation of P/CVE policy and practice across overlapping sectors, including multilateral development agencies, peacekeeping operations, civil society organizations, and military and state institutions. Our project has conducted 12 months of field research throughout Kenya, to produce a nuanced study of how and why gendered security strategies are developed, and how they impact, and are impacted by, the local context in which they are implemented. As our research developed, we shifted our overall aims and objectives slightly, to focus less on the specific role of women and rather to foreground a feminist analytic to examine the various sectors implementing P/CVE, many of which we have found to be inherently gendered in their reliance on logics of care and reproductive labor. Further, we have found the theorization of gender and P/CVE to require a broader lexicon of care, femininities, intimacies, and cultural knowledge and intelligence, in order for a complete understanding of the matter of gender within this particular configuration of the war on terror. Lastly, our scope has extended to include private security, which we discovered during our field research to be a key, and deeply gendered, element related to P/CVE.