A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism

[Image from CHRGJ Report.] [Image from CHRGJ Report.]

A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following is the latest from the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) on how the U.S. government’s (USG) counter-terrorism efforts profoundly implicate and impact women and sexual minorities.]

A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism

Executive Summary

“President Obama and I believe that the subjugation of women is a threat to the national security of the United States.” - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, March 2010
 

“Those subject to gender-based abuses are often caught between targeting by terrorist groups and the State’s counter-terrorism measures that may fail to prevent, investigate, prosecute or punish these acts and may also perpetrate new human rights violations with impunity.” - U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism


A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism provides the first global study of how the U.S. government’s (USG) counter-terrorism efforts profoundly implicate and impact women and sexual minorities. Over the last decade of the United States’ “War on Terror,” the oft-unspoken assumption that men suffer the most—both numerically and in terms of the nature of rights violations endured— has obscured the way women and sexual minorities experience counter-terrorism, rendering their rights violations invisible to policymakers and the human rights community alike. This failure to consider either the differential impacts of counter-terrorism on women, men, and sexual minorities or the ways in which such measures use and affect gender stereotypes and relations cannot continue. As the USG leads a world-wide trend toward a more holistic approach to countering terrorism that mobilizes the 3Ds—defense, diplomacy, and development—and increasingly emphasizes the role of women in national security, the extent to which counter-terrorism efforts include and impact women and sexual minorities is set to rise. As the ten-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 approaches, now is the time for the USG and governments the world-over to take stock of, redress, and deter the gender-based violations that occur in a world characterized by the proliferation of terrorism and counter-terrorism and the squeezing of women and sexual minorities between the two.

A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism provides a roadmap for this effort. It represents the culmination of over three years of primary and secondary research into the gender dimensions and impacts of the USG’s counter-terrorism policies domestically and abroad, drawing on scores of interviews with USG and foreign government, non-government, academic, and inter-government entities; regional Stakeholder Workshops in the United States,3 Africa,4 Asia,5 and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)6; and extensive secondary research (see further Methodology below). Where appropriate, the Report also draws on comparisons with the United Nations’ (U.N.) and foreign governments’ (including the United Kingdom’s) counter-terrorism strategies and their gender and human rights aspects and outcomes. While the Report’s findings and recommendations are primarily directed to the USG, the patterns documented and lessons learned will nonetheless resonate with, and be relevant to, those foreign governments and inter-governmental institutions which often emulate or participate in the USG’s approaches to countering terrorism.

As a starting point, Section I outlines what it means to take a gender approach to counter-terrorism and terrorism, scrutinizing the USG’s current emphasis on women in national security, and presenting ten overarching recommendations to ensure that women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals are the beneficiaries rather than casualties of the USG’s counter-terrorism measures. This overview does not squarely address the USG’s claim that promoting gender equality counters terrorism—a question that is beyond the scope of this Report—but does demonstrate that the failure to take account of gender cuts against both counter-terrorism and equality goals. While A Decade Lost takes up this and other questions in respect of two of the most invisible stakeholders in national security—women and sexual minorities—it (1) devotes significantly more attention to the former, in large part because of the dearth of information on the latter; (2) locates the focus on gender in the broader context of the USG’s focus on Muslim communities; and (3) examines how the gender features and impacts of the USG’s counter-terrorism efforts relate to gendered patterns in failures to protect women and LGBTI communities against terrorist violence.

Sections II-VII analyze USG counter-terrorism measures that the USG identifies as such in six areas: (1) development activities to counter the conditions that lead to violent extremism; (2) militarized counter-terrorism efforts; (3) anti-terrorism financing measures; (4) tactical counter-terrorism in terms of intelligence and law enforcement measures and cooperation; (5) border securitization and immigration enforcement; and (6) diplomacy and strategic communications. Each section begins with a brief description of the contours of the USG’s efforts in the area, then identifies and analyzes the role of gender in its design, implementation, outcomes and assessment, before going on to highlight gendered impacts and make specific recommendations about how USG counter-terrorism efforts should integrate a gender and human rights perspective to help rather than hinder equality.

Section VIII summarizes and offers initial insights into how to overcome the challenge of measuring counter-terrorism activities both in terms of gender impacts and efficacy, stressing the urgent need for tools to measure both outcomes as ultimately effective counter-terrorism measures should protect the whole population from terrorism, including particularly women and LGBTI individuals who are regularly their victims. 


[Click here to read the full CHRGJ report.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412