“Women, Peace, & Security” is Not a Trilemma

I mourn the murder of “Women, Peace, and Security” (WPS) even though I was never a champion of that phrase.

You might not have heard that Pete Hegseth—the guy running the Pentagon like a security guard at Guantanamo Bay (which, as a reminder, he was)—has gleefully disbanded the military’s WPS initiatives:

Bracket off the drunken text vibes here, and put aside for a moment that the US secretary of defense posts messages that could’ve been written by the John Birch Society (!). There are three major reasons I lament this attack on WPS.

War on Equality

First, knifing WPS is part of Hegseth’s larger mission: War on equality in all its forms.

It’s no secret that Hegseth—like MAGA—has a patriarchal, racialized view of the world that justifies violence against their fellows. In that context, canceling anything WPS-like is unsurprising (he also panicked about equality programs as a threat in his memoir, so this was inevitable).

The MAGA movement views women, peace, and security as a trilemma: Demands for gender equality and peace, as they see it, sacrifice security. And security, in turn, requires jettisoning notions of peace and gender equality. This is, of course, demented; Hirschman’s perversity thesis applied to peace.

The WPS research agenda in international relations suggests the path to durable security is quite the opposite of the MAGA view. So if you believe in equality, you oppose a war on it. And you’ll never have meaningful security if you can’t orient yourself toward peacemaking and equality.

Make White Supremacy Afraid Again

Second, I value the fact that when institutions make declarations of inclusive values, it creates an environment more hospitable to women and minorities; it made power accommodate them, to a modest degree. This perhaps explains why, contrary to Hegseth’s claim, many people in the military actually like WPS.

I’m not going to die on a hill defending WPS, or, for that matter, DEI. Both initiatives became institutional forms of elite capture. Real needs to address inequality got shunted and bureaucratized into these three-letter identities. In the US, these programs were less than ideal vehicles for consciousness raising, and never produced the different ways of thinking about security that were really needed. Specifically, they never addressed or redistributed power, only put a different face on it (sometimes).

In the worst cases, these initiatives found expression as CIA diversity ads, Lockheed Martin marching in LGBTQ pride parades (that really happened), and girl bosses running the world’s largest killing machine the same way as boy bosses. One defender of WPS even touted its effectiveness for doing the Iraq War better. Gramsci would’ve seen these ways of incorporating feminist insights as “passive revolution.”

But there have been moments in my life when I tasted white supremacy; it imposed an ambient sense of dread even when nothing egregious was happening. When I’ve been in the same room as certain patriarchal white guys I can literally feel something in the air that is unsafe…and I’m a half-white, cis-hetero dude who feels at home among cage fighters! I value, therefore, even imperfect attempts to give everyone a greater sense of safety and psychological comfort, to say nothing of professional opportunity.

A Sign of Progress, Not The Substance of Progress

Third, I’ve come to view the institutional form of WPS (and DEI) as a signal flare from the culture. It orients us a bit—tells us where we’re at—in a long struggle for a democracy worthy of the name. It was a good thing that powerful institutions felt compelled to embrace inclusive initiatives for a while. And it’s a bad sign that powerful institutions now feel pressure to go backward.

Did these initiatives give us something to build on? Did they help advance our lines in the fight for something better and less hypocritical? I don’t know. But I think the best way to view programmatic WPS (and DEI) is as an indicator of the state-of-play of the cultural terrain on which power politics happens. It’s part of an assessment, not necessarily an object to grab.

Thinking Differently, Worldmaking Differently

I have to confess that I didn’t always think this way. As recently as 2016 or so, I had more of a chauvinistic attitude about feminist approaches to foreign policy. In a past life, I saw WPS very cynically. I had worked for women in the national security state who, while good bosses and decent people, were ultra-hawks committed to American primacy; they liked and were complicit in all the wars.

There were also some terrible human beings involved in the programmatic version of WPS in the US. At places I worked in before times, there were some men in WPS spaces who presented themselves as allies while being the total opposite behind closed doors. They were actually quasi-evil people, and in one case at least, a former general who was also a sex criminal. In private, they said and did terrible things; in public, they got feted by WPS conferences and sat on stages with celebrity feminists talking about equality. And when WPS became a formal part of US strategy signed by pussy-grabber Trump and passed by MAGA Republicans during Trump 1.0, the hypocrisy was just too much to take.

I only started to develop an appreciation for WPS when I started reading about its academic literature, which struck me as very different from how I encountered it in the bureaucracy. The way that some WPS scholars reasoned about security was almost indistinguishable from what I had learned from Edward Said and anti-colonial literature stressing, in essence, to see power from the standpoint of its victims.

Eventually, I came to think that feminist foreign policy could be progressive foreign policy could be anti-imperialist foreign policy could be working-class foreign policy. Properly understood, it all pointed in the same direction: Peace as not just an interest but a praxis; remedying power imbalances as a prerequisite for peace; and expanding circles of care rather than extending spaces of exclusion as an ethos of power rebalancing.

WPS as a research agenda did not have all the answers. And, as a recent excellent book by Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd argues, WPS is so full of tensions and sectarian disagreements that perhaps we’re better off not commodifying and institutionalizing WPS as such. It’s not a hill to die on; it’s not reducible to a singular program or office. It’s not even a singular object.

We might be better off, then, treating WPS as a sensibility; a touchstone for a particular way of thinking; or a broad basket of fellow travellers who aim to practice particular ways of seeing and approaching the world. The braiding together of gender equality, peace, and security can be inherent to our arguments about what is to be done without having to put a program label on it.

Let’s see Hegseth try and kill that.