Dissertation to complete the requirements for the MSc in Women, Peace and Security (WPS), submitted to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), August 2020 Abstract Switzerland forms part of a wider European modernity constituted through capitalist exploitation, racism, heterosexualism and colonialism. Although often deemed as a neutral, morally superior and colonially innocent state, Switzerland must finally come to terms with its colonial complicity. This dissertation, situated within the decolonial and intersectional canon, therefore asks how Swiss policies on gender equality reproduce gendered, colonial and racialised narratives and seeks to identify how the needs of women not living single-issue lives are addressed.Theoretically, the study applies theories of intersectionality and coloniality/decoloniality to emphasise connected histories and spaces as well as intersecting oppressions. The qualitative intersectionality-based policy analysis as the main methodology exposes the policies’ male- and whitestream and its dehumanisation of some but not all bodies.The findings of the research suggest that the Swiss policies’ women- and refugee-friendly self-portrayal coupled with the ascription of suffering elsewhere, leaves disadvantaged women in Switzerland in a space of insecurity and un-liveability. What is more, the ranking of foreign harms and the policies’ gendered and racialised portrayal of BIPOC represent deeply colonial impulses.Going forth, the policies’ binary understanding of gender negates the existence of LGBTQ/I+-individuals, whilst the policies’ privileging of gender erases all experiences beyond the white, heterosexual, cis-female normativity. Ultimately, this study deconstructs the subject position of the woman participant and criticises the policies’ arguments for including more women in militarised, masculinist, neoliberal and capitalist spaces that renders women’s failure a personal problem. This study concludes that the mere exhibition of equality policies does not automatically improve everyday people’s lives and urges to re-envision them with the ambition to seek lives that are worth living.

Written for the Course "Gender and Militarisation" at London School of Economics. INTRODUCTION This essay is divided into two parts: each of them consists of a diary entry and a subsequent theoretical discussion of a topic related to the course GI413. In the first part, I make use of sections of the movie Hacksaw Ridge as a starting point to discuss the concept of ‘military masculinity’. The second part of the essay centres around the phenomena of how women in ‘wars’ are represented in a simplistic, homogenized way. The subject is introduced by revealing several statements of YPJ-commanders. HACKSAW RIDGE The following diary entry uses sections of the movie Hacksaw Ridge,  which was directed by Mel Gibson and released in September 2016. Virginia, U.S., around 1945: Desmond Doss, a young, religious American talks to his father Tom Doss about joining the U.S. army to fight in the battle of Okinawa, Japan: DESMOND: “I have to enlist. I can’t stay here while all of them go fight for me. I have to. I want to be a medic. I figure I’ll be saving people, not killing them”. Desmond registers as a medic and has to attend the preparation camp before joining the battlefield. A central part of the training is to learn how to use a rifle. SERGEANT HOWELL: “This is a standard issue U.S. rifle, calibre 30., M1. A […] weapon, designed to bring death and destruction to the enemy. […] Fellas let’s dance! Grab a girl!”. After everyone but Desmond has grabbed a rifle, Sergeant Howell asks him, what he was doing: DESMOND: “I was told I don’t have to carry a weapon. […] I am sorry Sergeant. I can’t touch a gun”. Thereupon, Desmond is sent to Captain Jack Glover, who leads Desmond’s unit. Jack asks Desmond, if he was screwing with him: DESMOND: “No, Sir. I ain’t got no problem with wearing my uniform or saluting the flag and doing my duty. It’s just carrying a gun and the taking of human life”. CAPTAIN GLOVER: “You don’t kill? […] You know quite a bit of killing does occur in a war? I mean, that’s the essential nature of war”. Desmond gets beaten up and harassed by the other soldiers who call him ‘chickenshit’ and tell him that his wife was a ‘broad’ who deserved a ‘real man’. In another scene, Sergeant Howell tells Desmond in front of the unit that he should “let the brave men go and win this war”. The whole military wants him gone, which is why they send him to a military psychiatrist who should discharge him. However, Desmond proofs to be a legitimate conscientious objector. Despite the psychiatrist’s green light, Desmond is accused of refusal to obey orders and faces military prison. Finally, the court decides that Desmond is allowed to go to Japan. In the battlefield, Desmond carries 75 wounded men to safety on Hacksaw Ridge, a rock in Okinawa. The movie is based on real events and Desmond was the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for courage under fire. Desmond is rejected from the whole military because he somehow doesn’t behave like the other soldiers. His refusal to take up arms and killing people in a ‘war’ disturbs the image of a ‘real’ soldier and could be interpreted as a subversion of the dominant military masculinity. In this part of the essay I ask what an ‘ideal’ form of military masculinity contains and to what extent the hegemonic form of military masculinity can be weakened. I begin this essay with an analysis of ‘masculinity’, in order to subsequently address the concept of military masculinity. Finally, I proceed to the concept of ‘alternative masculinities’ to close up this part of the essay. MASCULINITY OR MASCULINITIES FROM A GENDER PERSPECTIVE Discussing masculinity or military masculinity from a gender perspective requires us to acknowledge the historicity, contextuality and process-nature of concepts (İbrahimhakkıoğlu, 2018). Concepts are never static, nor homogenous; their nature changes over time and they should be seen as discontinuous (de Mel, 2016; Belkin, 2012). The way in which masculinities (often used in plural, to which I will come back later) work, is complex, ambiguous and highly contested (Cohn & Enloe, 2003; Hutchings, 2008) and it matters by whom, where and in what circumstances masculinities are studied. In feminist scholarship masculinity has been understood as oppositional to femininity: “Masculinity […] is used to refer to those (variable) sets of values, capacities, and practices that are identified as exemplary for men. These […] are normally defined in contrast or opposition to a feminine other” (Hutchings, 2008, p.402). The assumption that masculinity can only be conceptualized in juxtaposition to femininity is criticized by Connell who argues that masculinity “does not exist except in contrast with femininity” (1995, p.68). She explains that the binarism of these concepts is a modern, Western construction, and that there are different forms of masculinities which are relational to other forms of masculinities and to femininities. Masculinities are socially constructed and positioned in a hierarchical order towards each other. The most dominant form of masculinity, the hegemonic masculinity, competes with marginalized, subordinated and vulnerable masculinities, which are still more privileged than femininities (Connell, 1995). Thus, masculinities, like gender, are done, practiced and produced always in relational ways (Connell, 1995; Belkin, 2012). MILITARY MASCULINITIES If we assume that there are different forms of masculinities in a certain context and that they are understood relational or complementary (Vijayan, 2004), military masculinities have to be analysed in relation to other masculinities, too. Feminist scholars are interested in how those relations look. One controversial subject is whether ‘ordinary’, or ‘civilian’ masculinity can be seen as completely separated from military masculinity. Connell opines that “the masculinity of the general is different from the masculinity from the front-line soldier” (as cited in Belkin, 2012, p.31), while İbrahimhakkıoğlu (2018) contests that military masculinity is always connected to other masculinities. Tapscott goes one step further and observes tensions between what she calls “militarised masculinity” and “civilian masculinity” (2018, p.120), the two existing ‘ideal types’ of manhood in the Ugandan society. Militarised masculinity is promoted by the state as a strategy for controlling the access to resources, whereas the civilian masculinity refers to the traditional roles Ugandan men should fulfil in order to become men. The conflicting ideals of manhood of the two forms of masculinities make young men especially vulnerable to state interventions. As Uganda is a highly militarised state, military values are institutionalized and became part of the national culture and thus militarised virtues of manhood are more prestigious than civilian ones (Tapscott, 2018). What Tapscott calls the “state’s militarised hegemonic masculinity” (2018, p.130) has also been observed by Yi and Gitzen in South Korea. Militarisation and masculinity are deeply connected, as the state promotes a highly militarised masculinity. They call this state-led militarisation a “technique of masculinity” (2018, p.382), which produces a prioritisation of the militarised masculinity over other masculinities within and outside of military institutions. The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ referred to by the scholars above was coined by Connell in 1995, whereas she and Messerschmidt revised the concept in 2005 due to a lot of criticism. It has been proved to be a controversial concept but is still useful to understand the power-relations between dominant and less dominant forms of masculinities (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Hegemonic masculinity is the most dominant form of masculinity (Kazyak & Schmitz, 2016) at any given time, which is “culturally exalted” (Connell, 1995, p.77). The concept is a normative model and doesn’t correspond to the real life of any man (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). The hegemony works through the production of masculine ideals like being white, physically strong, economically successful (Kazyak & Schmitz, 2016), independent, aggressive and rational (Barret, 2001) on the one hand, and through the oppression of deviant masculinities and femininities on the other. Especially targeted male individuals include homosexuals, peaceful and conciliatory men, or men who are not interested in sexual conquest (Connell, 1995). If the concept of the hegemonic masculinity is thought of in relation to military masculinity, many similarities become apparent. Men within the military have to position themselves to the hegemonic masculinity within the unit or the whole military (Perez & Sasson-Levy, 2015). In Western culture especially, the male soldier or warrior is one of the most celebrated masculine figures (Cooper & McVeigh, 2012; Mosse, 1996) and “men in uniform are imagined as embodiments of manhood” (Belkin, 2012, p.23). Military virtues are will, toughness, honour, violence, power, courage, being protective, able-bodied and loyal (Mosse, 1996; de Mel, 2016; Bourke, 1996), as well as physical strength, self-discipline, rationalism, self-restraint, emotional control and heterosexuality (Perez & Sasson-Levy, 2015). Perez and Sasson-Levy mention that during World War I, conscientious objectors were seen as the prototype of a dangerous form of masculinity and even as a “degeneration of manhood. […] They were depicted as ‘unmanly’, and the traits ascribed to them […] defined them as the antithesis of both man and soldier” (2015, p.465). Other marginalized masculinities during ‘wars’ are deserters and non-combat soldiers (Cooper & McVeigh, 2012). Tapscott concludes descriptively, how hegemonic and militarised masculinity can be thought of together: “If hegemonic masculinity naturalises a system of distribution of power among men, then militarised masculinity, while also internally hierarchised, naturalises the dominance of ‘the military man’[…] and excluding non-military (that is, civilian) forms of masculinity” (2018, pp.121-22). Tapscott could be criticized for only differentiating between the military and the non-military man, while there are many other factors which determine how someone is positioned in the hierarchy of masculinities. Military masculinity has to be analysed including categories such as race (Jones, 2015), gender (Whitworth, 2004; Yi & Gitzen, 2018), class (İbrahimhakkıoğlu, 2018), ability/disability (de Mel, 2016) and sexuality, which are central in relation to the oppression of vulnerable masculinities (Belkin, 2012). ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES Even if within militaries there is “limited space” for “heterogenous expressions of manhood” (Tapscott, 2018, p.122), the case of Desmond shows that there are ways to still be celebrated as a national ‘war’-hero without embodying all the virtues of the dominant military masculinity. Perez and Sasson-Levy (2015) identify the weakening of military masculinity over the last few years. They argue that hegemonic masculinity can be rejected or subverted, and people develop complex mechanisms which are challenging the binarism of control and subjugation. By quietly resisting the required virtues of the dominant manhood, men perform an “antihegemonic masculinity within the hegemony” (2015, p.482), which doesn’t require public exposure. Such alternative masculinities are able to survive, because “exempted men can never fully embody the militarized masculinity reserved for soldiers, but our point is that neither can soldiers” (Yi & Gitzen, 2018, p.389). As a consequence, if hegemonic masculinity in militaries can never be entirely reached, it can never be resisted either. Even if individuals reject the warrior-as-hero narrative, their attitudes are still embedded in military masculinity (Perez & Sasson-Levy, 2015). Belkin (2012) summarizes the concurrency of reproducing and challenging military masculinity, as well as the simultaneous rejection and embracement of the ‘unmasculine’ as follows: “The military has convinced service members that they could be queer, weak, feminine, and the like while promoting idealized warrior archetypes” (Belkin, 2012, p.39). The stereotypical representations of women in 'wars' with the examples of the YPJ COMMANDERS OF THE YPJ The second diary entry relies on sections from different interviews with commanders of the Y ekîneyên P arastina J in (YPJ, Women’s Defence Units), an all-female military and political organization of Rojava, Syria. DILOVAN KOBANI: “In its beginning, the October Revolution was kicked off by women, but soon after it succeeded, men took the power and pushed the women out. But in our case, we (as women) formed an independent force. […] We lead our armed force and political force ourselves. We do not carry out our revolution in the shadow of men” (Journal #84 2017). ZERIN: “In all countries and everywhere there are armies, right? And sometimes women also take part in these armies. But in our example, the women’s force, the YPJ, is independent and our life, our fight, and our goals stand for this. […] In our example, women are even more visible and active than men” (Journal #84 2017). KURDISTAN WASHUKANI: “Women have for a long time been seen just as housewives who raise children, make food and meet the needs of men. But today women’s will and their dedication to the defence units has created a fear in the heart of the reactionary and statist man. […] The pride in their [the women’s] participation brings out their natural will. […] In 2019 there was widespread participation in the defence forces especially in the YPJ” (Women Defend Rojava 2019). MERYEM KOBANE: “But we as women went and held the forward front. […] A profile of the warrior woman is emerging. We have no problem in fighting our enemies” (Kurdish Institute 2015). NISRÎN ABDULLAH: “In Kurdish history women fighters are not new. We have had 28 revolutions and in all of them women have had important roles, and some of those women have become symbols for the struggle” (Plan C 2016). The statements from the commanders of the YPJ centre on the independence of the YPJ, on their political and military goals, on their victories and on the emergence of a ‘warrior woman’. The Kurdish militia gained international attention in 2014, when they successfully expelled the ISIS (Daesh) from their region. This victory is seen as one of the biggest defeats of Daesh (Bengio, 2016). But in spite of the success of the YPJ-fighters, they are usually portrayed in a homogenised way and representations focus on their physical appearance or girlish look (Eskandari, 2018). In this part of the essay I start by presenting a feminist understanding of women in ‘war’, whereas in a second step, I demonstrate which stereotypes are related to women in ‘war’. Finally, I show to what extent YPJ members fight against those representations and how they create a different image of women in ‘war’. WOMEN IN ‘WAR’ John Keegan, a military historian, said in 1993 that warfare was an exclusively male activity: “Warfare is [...] the human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. [...] Women [...] do not fight [...] and they never, in any military sense, fight men” (as cited in Mathers, 2013, p.124). Keegan’s opinion is still widespread today and shows that ‘war’ and the question of who participates in it is deeply gendered. Men are usually presented as the protective heroes, who sacrifice themselves for their wives, children and homeland, while women are depicted as the ones left behind who give birth and raise new soldiers (Sjoberg, 2010; Cohn, 2013). Since the 1990’s, however, there is more recognition of the fact that women do not only perform reproductive tasks during ‘wars’ (Tank, 2017). Scholars emphasize that women have actively participated in bellicose conflicts, yet it’s difficult to encounter a comprehensive historical overview over female participation in ‘wars’ (Sjoberg, 2010). But there is proof that women and girls already participated in armed conflicts in the 5th century (Mazurana, 2013), and that since the age of modernity women have been involved in the conduct of ‘war’ more and more (Sjoberg, 2010). In World War II for example, women functioned as commanders, spies, gun runners, recruits and political strategists (Mazurana, 2013) and Soviet women became famous as snipers and combat pilots in the Red Army (Markowitz, 2013). But in spite of this knowledge, many people don’t see women as ‘real’ soldiers. Cynthia Enloe therefore concludes that “women may serve the military, but they can never be permitted to be the military” (1988, p.15). STEREOTYPES OF WOMEN IN ‘WAR’ The woman as a victim and the woman as a peacemaker are the most widespread roles of women in ‘wars’ (Tank, 2017). Women are designated as being passive actors and inherently more peaceful than men, which entails the negation of other roles. Through the naturalized connection of women and peace, concrete efforts of women in peace-building processes are not valued, because they are seen as something women ‘naturally’ do (Chinkin & Kaldor, 2013). In addition, in many ‘war’-narratives women appear as the ‘beautiful soul’, a term coined by Jean Elshtain (as cited in Tank, 2017). In those narratives, women are equated with the homeland or with the nation, for which men have to fight. The beautiful soul is pacifist and doesn’t know anything about ‘war’ (Sjoberg, 2010). Insofar, the identity of women is tied mainly to motherhood, birthing, the providing of love and nutrition and to the moral support of the fighters. They are regarded to be “[...] a symbol of the good and pure that requires the evil of fighting to save it” (2010, p.56). Those representations deny the agency or every form of political or military participation of women in ‘wars’ (Sjoberg, 2010). Similar narratives are found about the YPJ fighters. Eskandari (2018) researched into how YPJ fighters are depicted in English newspapers and found that they are portrayed in a homogenized, simplified way. Even though the fighters are described as brave and as acting logically, they are constantly defined by a focus on their physical appearance (“beautiful heroines”, 2018, p.50) and their familial relations. The gaze is mainly on their hair, their smile and their girlish look, which has nothing to do with their context or with political goals. Eskandari writes that “these [...] portrayals create a romanticised image of the fighters as exotic warriors with shiny long hair, who are framed only through the war against Islamic State” (2018, p.54). She points to the problematics of the Eurocentric view on non-European women, who are underestimated due to their gender and origin. The fight of the YPJ is constantly reduced to their emancipatory motivations, which reinforces the victim-narrative. The media generates an image of the Kurdish fighter as opposing sexist and state suppression, what in turn obscures their ideo-political project of reconstruction (Tank, 2017). Commander Amûde expresses, how those representations differ from their reality: “We don’t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas. We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society’s mentality and show the world what women are capable of” (as cited in Tank, 2017, p.427). CHALLENGING THE STEREOTYPES The YPJ and its success prove that women can also be the military, and not only serve it (Enloe, 1988). They are an independent military and political force and its fighters have become heroes. One fighter expresses this as follows: “If the Kurdish resistance remained unnoticed until the battle of Kobani, the women’s resistance there gave birth to a symbol that transcended any previous conception of women’s capabilities” (YPG Press Office, n.d.). The YPJ which was founded on the 4th of April in Derik (Turkey) grew in numbers since its early years: In 2014, the YPJ had approximately 10,000 members, whereas in 2016, the number rose to 20,000 members. In 2017, 35% of the people who fought under the Kurdish commando, were women (Gorman, 2017). Gorman argues that on not many occasions in the past, have women played such a crucial role in a ‘war’ and have challenged so many stereotypes like the fighters from the YPJ. The image of the weak woman, who bears children far away from ‘war’ is challenged by YPJ fighters, because to actively participate in the organization, women and girls leave behind their families (YPG Press Office, n.d.). The reasons why women join the YPJ, furthermore, are as diverse as its members. They have personal, individual, but also ideological and political motivations to join the armed force (Tank, 2017). The YPJ members also challenge the stereotype of women only joining militaries because of personal trauma, familial relations or because they are forced to do so. In many media representations of female fighters, their motivations are traced back to experiences of sexual violence, to imprisonment or to their participation in the opposition (Mazurana, 2013). The political or ideological motivation of female fighters is often negated, which is something the YPJ commanders try to fight against. Their social and political movement is successful exactly because of the underlying ideologies and philosophies (Tank, 2017), which is what made them become heroes in their society and internationally: “Society doesn’t expect them to hide their faces, or not go out in public. Kurdish women have a voice and are expected to use it” (Gorman, 2017, p.85). CONCLUSION In the first part of this essay, I used sections from Hacksaw Ridge  to illustrate how Desmond is discriminated and marginalized due to the fact that his peaceful attitude doesn’t match with the ideal form of the military masculinity within his unit. As I argued, his behaviour can therefore be seen as a subversive act against the hegemonic military masculinity, although I further demonstrated that while resisting to certain aspects of the required masculinity, he still reproduces other ones like being the brave soldier who sacrifices himself for his home country. In the second part, I presented a feminist understanding of women in ‘war’ and how women are usually designated in typical ‘war’-stories. I argued that women have been actively involved in bellicose conflicts throughout history, but that they are still represented as peacemakers, victims or beautiful, pacifist souls who need male protection. 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Why is there a need to decolonise gender and human rights? INTRODUCTION Always in transition, gender and human rights are highly contested concepts (Akoth, 2014). There is an urgent need “now, more than at any time before, for a multiple vocality in the documenting and reading of human rights” (Akoth, 2014, p.103). This is mainly because the idea of human rights gained unprecedented popularity in the 20th century; the 20th century is the century of human rights. Yet, more human rights violations are committed than ever before (Kapur, 2006). While human rights advocates claim that through the global spread of human rights, the powerless and voiceless of the world are ‘empowered’ (Ignatieff, 2001), decolonial scholars shed a light on the colonial character of human rights. Scholars who theorize ‘coloniality’, the basis for decolonial thought, highlight the ‘dark’ side (Mignolo, 2018) of gender and human rights. Coloniality illuminates how the dominant system of power racializes, sexualizes, genders, dehumanizes and classifies humans today in a manner mimicking when the Americas were conquered (Quijano, 2007, Lugones, 2010). The lens of coloniality reveals how concepts that are considered as ‘a-historical’ or ‘universal’, are actually historical, contextual and embedded in the materiality of the location where they were formulated. Seen as a representation of a “genocidal logic of ‘classification’” (Icaza, 2018, p.12), gender continually erases experiences failing to conform to the ‘colonial/modern gender system’ (Lugones, 2007). I argue that this colonial model of gender is still being imposed by mechanisms, such as ‘gender mainstreaming’ (1), through instruments, such as the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) agenda for Women, Peace and Security (WPS) (2). To answer the essay question (“Examine the case for decolonising gender and human rights. Discuss with reference to a specific human rights policy, legal instrument or human rights movement of your choosing”), I ask why (3) there is a need to decolonise gender and human rights. I discuss the case for decolonising the two concepts in reference to the WPS agenda; whereby, I refer to articles about the WPS resolutions and about the National Action Plans (NAPs) (4) to implement the resolutions. First, this essay outlines the concept of coloniality. This lays the foundation for understanding what it means to analyse gender and human rights from a feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspective. After providing a framework, I first explain why gender is an inherently colonial concept and why it needs to be decolonised. Whilst, in the second part, I undertake the same process for the concept of human rights. The reference to the WPS agenda serves to exemplify what the consequences of the coloniality of policies directed towards securing women’s human rights (WPS resolutions and NAPs) can entail. FRAMEWORK: A FEMINIST, INTERSECTIONAL AND DECOLONIAL ANALYSIS To reveal the importance of decolonising gender and human rights, I critically examine these concepts from a feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspective. At this point, I will outline the concept of coloniality and depict why this perspective is indispensable when engaging in the project of decolonising Western academia. Coloniality, coined by Latin American scholars, emerged with the conquest of the Americas in 1492. Like intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), it is a ‘Third World’ (5) concept, or a concept from the ‘Global South’ (6). Even though colonialism is abolished (7), the ‘coloniality of power’ is still existent: the European cultural, economic, academic and epistemological rationality is still dominating other rationalities (Quijano, 2007). Those who are marginalized, dehumanized and racialized today, are the same people that once suffered from formal colonial oppression. The beneficiaries, in turn, of this global, capitalist, racist world order are not only Europe and North America, but also former colonies, such as Japan. Both Quijano (2007) and Mignolo (2018) connect coloniality to modernity. Mignolo (2018) sees coloniality as the ‘dark side’ of modernity, whilst modernity is understood as a horizon or a way of knowing where the whole world should evolve in the same direction through ‘modernization’ and development. This direction is Eurocentric and rational (Mignolo, 2018; Quijano, 2007). A project of civilisation, modernity sells a dream of constantly accumulating wealth, and consolidates divisions of the world in binaries such as superior/inferior, rational/irrational, primitive/civilised, traditional/modern (Quijano, 2000, Lugones, 2007) and developed/underdeveloped (Escobar, 1995). Coloniality describes the negation of other realities and knowledge systems, and at the same time “constitutes an epistemic location from which reality is thought” (Icaza, 2018, p.8). Quijano (2000) analyses how a classification system based on race organises the world’s population into racial groups. Unfortunately, he did not consider gender enough and does not explain how “non-white, colonized women have been subjected and disempowered” (Lugones, 2007, p.190). Lugones uses an intersectional perspective because gender is mediated through coloniality, racism and location (Amos and Parmar, 1984). For decolonial feminists, “the point of departure then is not gender, but classification and dehumanization of some but not all bodies” (Icaza, 2018, p.12). Analysing the coloniality of gender and of human rights from a feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspective requires us to engage in ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2009), that de-links the dominant forms of knowledge and (re-)creates alternative worldviews that may open up other ways of beings in the world. DECOLONISE GENDER The ‘coloniality of gender’ from Lugones (2007) builds the basis to understand why gender needs to be decolonised. She refers to the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2007), which is at the centre of her analysis of the ‘modern/colonial gender system’. Lugones (2007) historizes the violent introduction of gender during colonialism in relation to race, class and sexuality and reveals the destructiveness and instrumentality of this system. The colonial/modern gender system has a ‘light side’ and a ‘dark side’: the former describes the imposition of biological/sexual dimorphism, heterosexualism and patriarchy in colonized societies, whereas the latter refers to the extremely violent erasure of third genders, intersexual humans and the removal of people from certain spheres or activities (Lugones, 2007). In reference to the WPS agenda, her contributions about the coloniality of gender lead to the following observations. The ‘light side’ of the colonial/modern gender system The first observations relate to the ‘light side’ of the colonial gender system: Lugones (2007) and Oyewùmí (1997) demonstrate that the colonizers introduced a colonial gender system based upon biological/sexual dimorphism (8). In contrast to this Western gender conceptualization, there were Indigenous communities (e.g. the Yoruba), who did not use gender as an organizing principle (Oyewùmí, 1997). Meanwhile, there were other communities where the existence of a third gender and intersexed individuals was the norm (Horswell, 2003). Western laws usually don’t recognize the intersexual status of human beings. Lugones reminds us to “ask how sexual dimorphism […] continues to serve global, Eurocentered, capitalist domination/exploitation” (2007, p.196). The sexual dimorphism of the colonial gender system can also be observed in the WPS resolutions: “I problematize the gendered binaries or stereotypical representations of men and women as static and homogenous categories” (Hudson, 2016, p.12). The WPS resolutions exclusively speak of men and women, but, rarely, if at all, of the LGBTI community. That central measures such as gender mainstreaming or the documentation of SGBV in the resolutions are only directed towards heterosexual, cis-gendered women/men erases LGBTQ (9) experiences, argues Hagen (2016). She acknowledges that the acronym ‘LGBTQ’ is itself Western-centric and an inclusion of LGBTQ experiences wouldn’t allow for the representation of ‘other’ sexual and gender minorities. It is disturbing that non-female/male gendered experiences are not mentioned in the WPS resolutions, especially since LGBTI individuals and communities in conflict-affected situations live under extremely precarious situations (Myrttinen et. al, 2016; Hudson, 2016). Besides biological dimorphism, the colonial/modern gender system introduces heterosexuality as the hegemonic norm (Lugones, 2007); whereas, many Indigenous tribes pre-colonially recognized homosexuality in general, and certain tribes referred to lesbianism specifically (Allen, 1992). Additionally, (ritual) sodomy was recorded in many Andean societies in the Americas (Horswell, 2003). The WPS agenda is also based on heteronormative assumptions, meaning that the agenda contains a “limited conception of gender that primarily monitors the needs of women narrowly understood and captured within a heterosexual family and social structure” (Hagen, 2016, p. 320). In relation to SGBV (10), the WPS architecture overrepresents sexual violence against women perpetuated by men by obscuring other forms of SGBV that are not heterosexual (Engle, 2014; Buss, 2014; Sivakumaran, 2010). Furthermore, the imposition of the binary, hierarchic gender system was accompanied by the formation of a patriarchal, male-centered, colonial state, which resulted in the exclusion of women from state structures and the public sphere. For example, in the Yoruba society access to power was not a gender question (Oyewùmí, 1997). Allen (1992) adds that in gynecratic, spiritual, American Indian tribes (e.g. Iroquis, Cherokee) female forces were highly valued in warfare and policy decisions. The subordination of women is not universal, and in many pre-colonial, Indigenous African and North American societies, women were only  excluded from decision making through  the impacts of colonialism: “Those changes were introduced through slow, discontinuous, and heterogenous processes that violently inferiorized colonized women” (Lugones, 2007, p.201). Lugones (2007) argues that the view of women as fragile, pure, sexually passive, weak and in need of protection was a characteristic of white bourgeois womanhood; whereas, colonized women were seen as sexually aggressive and pervert, but also strong enough to do any kind of labour. This changed during the process of colonialism. Indigenous women were increasingly used as a negotiated terrain between white colonizers and Indigenous men, who collaborated with the colonizers as a way of survival. The systemic sexual violence that emerged during this time is still present in today’s societies (Mendoza, 2016). In the WPS resolutions, women of color (11) are not represented as strong or politically active anymore, but rather like white bourgeois women: as passive victims of sexual violence and in need of (white, male) protection (from the ‘brown men’, Spivak, 1988) (de Almagro, 2018). Women are stereotypically represented as caregivers, caretakers and providers, as peaceful individuals without agency and rights (Puechguirbal, 2010). It seems paradoxical that after years of demeaning women during colonialism, today, it is primarily Western UN member states that are adopting NAPs to implement the WPS resolutions which aim to improve female participation in conflict affected countries (Swaine, 2017). I doubt, however, that those ‘outward-facing’ NAPs (Shepherd, 2016) (12), are motivated by ‘colonial guilt’ or by the desire to make up for colonial destruction, rather, it is argued that those ‘foreign policy tools’ reproduce the imperialist/interventionist role of the West who delivers expertise and knowledge to the rest of the world (Aroussi, 2017). The ‘dark side’ of the colonial/modern gender system Lastly, to answer the question why gender needs to be decolonised, I want to shed light on the ‘dark side’ of the colonial gender system (Lugones, 2007). If this gender system violently erased pre-existing gendered configurations (Icaza, 2018), and inferiorized women (13), and, at the same time, one of the main goals of the WPS agenda is ‘gender mainstreaming’, what does it mean to ‘mainstream’ gender? If there is an inherent violence in the very concept of gender, is the WPS agenda not globalizing a discourse on gender equality that is inherently colonial? If gender truly is an “imposed way of organizing/control societies” (Icaza, 2018, p.13), I argue that we urgently need to re-consider which  gender system gender mainstreaming is imposing. DECOLONISE HUMAN RIGHTS According to human rights advocates, the globalisation of human rights empowers the most powerless. Others contest this and argue that human rights are another tool for Western interventionism and for imposing its modern, individualist agenda in the rest of the world. I will shed a critical light on the hegemonic, Western concept of human rights through the lens of coloniality. A different history of human rights The decolonial lens does not contribute to the ‘politics of origins’; it does not promote the Eurocentric view that human rights are a ‘gift from the West to the rest’. To reveal why human rights need to de decolonised, an ‘alternative’ history of rights, one that exposes the Eurocentric storyline and that shows how human rights (UDHR) (14) were developed during the violent time of modern colonialism, has to be told (Barreto, 2018). There are dozens of examples to illustrate that the ‘origins’ of human rights can’t be exclusively traced back to the French Revolution, or attributed only to Hobbes and Kant, but also go back to anti-Apartheid struggles, struggles against slavery, to Bartolome de las Casas and Nelson Mandela (Barreto, 2018) (15). Coloniality reveals that today’s hegemonic understanding of human rights contains a certain Western understanding of what ‘human’ is: “the concept of the human is loaded with ideas about secularism, individualism, and racism” (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p.130). Decolonial humanists radically question this conception of the ‘human’ and contest that in ‘other’ conceptualizations of the ‘human’, body and mind, or human and non-human, for example, are not separated (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). The problem when human rights travel The dominant Western conceptualisation of the ‘human’ negates other human rights subjectivities and doesn’t consider differences between rich and poor, or white or black people (Barreto, 2018). Human rights are therefore seen as a “site for exclusion” (Kapur, 2006, p.667). Not to mention, there are multiple forms of law in many non-Western countries. Therefore, it is problematic to ‘transfer’ “United Nations-centred international human rights instruments” (Akoth, 2014, p.94) to other regions. Akoth (2014) ethnographically examines the particular ‘social life’ of rights (see Wilson, 1997; Abu-Lughod, 2010), and investigates how ordinary people produce ideas of human rights in their daily lives in Kenya. Global discourses and local contexts mix meanings in Kenya, where there is constant contestation between common law, customary law and customs (Akoth, 2014). To be accepted as a ‘modern’ state and to attain global citizenship, Kenya adopted the human rights framework in the early 1990s (Akoth, 2014; Andreassen, 1993) (16). The fact that African (and other non-Western) states had to appropriate Western human rights shows that ideas and knowledge still travel as they did during colonialism. This civilising discourse constructs binaries such as here/there, we/them, civilised/uncivilised and so on, which are also found within the WPS resolutions and NAPs of Western donor countries (Shepherd, 2016; Achilleos, 2018). Western ‘outward-facing’ NAPs reproduce gendered, racialized, colonial, as well as civilising narratives (Aroussi, 2017). Since 2005 many (mostly Western) states have adopted NAPs to implement the WPS agenda, which serve as a sign for those states to ‘appear’ committed to gender equality and women’s rights (Fritz et. al, 2011). The fact that those NAPs are exclusively ‘outward-looking’ obscures gendered inequalities and insecurities, as well as issues like SGBV, ‘at home’. Simultaneously, they reproduce the view of a state holding such NAPs as a peaceful or “women friendly and gender equal welfare state” (Jauhola, 2016, p.338). Because gender equality is already achieved in such states, it has to be promoted elsewhere. This incorrect assumption creates “racialised, imperialistic narratives that situate Western states as benevolent saviours of women in the conflict ridden and poverty-stricken Global South” (Aroussi, 2017, p.29). Human rights are particular, not universal Decolonial scholars challenge the presentation of human rights as ahistorical and universal (Barreto, 2018): “human rights doctrine is now so powerful, but also so unthinkingly imperialist in its claim to universality, that it has exposed itself to serious intellectual attack” (Ignatieff, 2001, p.102). Human rights’ imperial dimension emerges due to international law’s promise of justice and simultaneous claim of universality (Pahuja, 2010). Claiming universality gives the impression that no geopolitical sites, historical or material conditions are involved. However, the theories about and the concept of human rights are related to their historical and local setting: “once a connection is made between history and knowledge, it is evident that the hegemonic theory of human rights is the progeny of a perspective grounded in a particular historical and geographical context, that of Europe” (Barreto, 2018, pp.490-491). The WPS agenda performs universality. Often, it is framed as the success of international feminist activism, and the ‘progressive’ gender equality norms and their global diffusions are celebrated (Motoyama, 2018). UNSCR 1325 especially was celebrated as a feminist success globally. Postcolonial voices point out that the WPS agenda forms part of “a global governance framework to incorporate women’s agency and knowledge in order to maintain and reproduce, rather than transform, unequal power relations that have driven the international security order” (de Almagro, 2018, p.41). It is important, therefore, to contextualize the agenda and to know that the agenda is ‘located’ in the UNSC, which, on the one hand, reproduces troubling discourses over gender, but, on the other hand, was experiencing a crisis of legitimacy at the time when the UNSCR 1325 was adopted. After the UNSC’s military interventions during the Cold War, it had lost its international trust. Its commitment to UNSCR 1325 helped the UNSC to regain international legitimacy and trust (Otto, 2012). There is a need to critically investigate why states with a traditionally anti-feminist attitude embrace the WPS agenda (e.g. Japan). To commit to UNSC 1325 means to be associated with the symbolic capital of the UNSC, and ‘being on the list’ of it positions these states as powerful liberal democracies (Motoyama, 2018). CONCLUSION In this essay, I critically examined why  gender and human rights need to be decolonised from a feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspective by using the concept of ‘coloniality’ as a starting point. After establishing the framework of this essay, I have elucidated the limitations and violence of the category ‘gender’. Firstly, the colonial/modern gender system globally introduced and indurated biological/sexual dimorphism, heterosexualism and hierarchical (binary) gender relations, which erased certain ‘other’ experiences or created a social power system which didn’t exist before. Secondly, imposing one category ‘women’, lead to the inferiorization of (particularly) Indigenous women and to the marginalization of those who didn’t conform to the binary gender system. In this section, I’ve also shown how those elements are reproduced in the WPS resolutions and NAPs. I’ve argued that there is a need to reconsider which gender system is promoted by the WPS agenda. In relation to ‘gender mainstreaming’, it is “imperative to understand that there are different approaches to it based on very different understandings of gender equality” (Hudson, 2016, p.10). The non-Western world and ‘conflict-affected’ regions have no unitary identity. Therefore, drafting WPS resolutions without contextualisation incurs problems. In the second part, I addressed why  human rights need to be decolonised. Here, I argued that a different history of human rights has to be told in order to reveal the colonial violence that accompanied the formation of today’s hegemonic human rights framework. I’ve also shown that it is problematic when rights are transferred to regions with multiple rights systems, especially as the rights travel in the same direction (North to South). This reproduces a civilising narrative. Finally, I criticized the portrayal of human rights as something ahistorical and universal and pledged for the contextualization of human rights, as well as of the WPS resolutions. The ‘solution’ of many scholars who critique human rights is neither to throw them away, nor to embrace them as they are today: “We cannot not want” (Spivak, 1993, pp.45-46) human rights, but there is a need to reclaim them critically and to decolonise them “in order to get rid of their Western burdens and limits, and to reclaim the vision of human rights that has been constructed in the vast territories of the world colonised over the last 500 years” (Barreto, 2018, p.499). Other decolonial scholars, however, call for a new framework of humanities which does not build on the existing human rights framework (e.g. Maldonado-Torres, 2017). This refers to the ongoing discussion in all those contested fields of whether ‘the masters house’ (Lorde, 1979) should be entirely demolished or partly renovated. When asking where we should go from here, I argue that there is a need to question the classifying and naming of harms, practices and ways of living of ‘others’. This presents a modern/colonial impulse. We need to find out, collectively and in solidarity, how “we make sense of social struggles of people and their communities without (re)colonizing such experiences” (Icaza, 2018, p.12). I finally suggest taking the following proposals seriously: “sometimes the most pressing conversations are the ones ongoing closer to home” (Motlafi, 2018, p.21), and we might study issues more often in our own backyards (Achilleos, 2018). Notes (1) ‘Gender mainstreaming’ is a strategy of the United Nations (UN) to globally improve ‘gender equality’ (True 2003). It generally calls for the greater inclusion of women in political processes. How exactly this is expected to happen depends largely on the context (True 2003). (2) The first UNSC resolution for WPS (UNSCR 1325) was launched in 2000. Today, nine follow-up resolutions have been passed. In general, the UNSC resolutions center around the four pillars participation, protection, prevention and relief/recovery. All four pillars relate to women in conflict affected contexts (Swaine & O’Rourke, 2015). It’s argued that through the WPS resolutions, international norms on women’s rights have helped women in conflict, or coming out of conflict, to address their rights (Hernes cited in Hudson, 2016), but especially postcolonial scholars argue that UNSCR 1325 and the following resolutions are an ‘imperial feminist project’ (Orford, 2002; Pratt 2013). (3) I pose the why  question and not the how , because, on the one hand, to answer the why and the how  would extend the scope of this paper, and on the other hand, to answer the how  could be problematic due to the fact that the how  depends largely on the context when addressing how  to decolonise these two highly contested concepts. (4) In 2002, member states of the UN were asked to adopt NAPs to implement UNSCR 1325. As the UNSC resolutions for WPS are not ‘hard binding’ measures, it was voluntary for states to adopt NAPs. However, between 2005 and 2007, there emerged a so-called ‘NAPs-industry’: many Western states drafted NAPs during this time (Swaine, 2017). (5) I use the term ‘Third World’ with quotation marks, because it is a contested, political term, which is always opposed to the ‘First World’: both terms are embedded in the civilising and modernising rhetoric of the West, whilst the ‘Third World’ has been seen as a world with distant, if not ‘backward’ cultures (Spivak, 1985). (6) The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are not neutral terms and are politically significant. Such binaries are constructed through a Western modernization rhetoric that categorizes geographical regions. Both terms are created by the leading elite of the G7 nations and the ‘Global North’ is empowered to ‘save’ the ‘Global South’ (Mignolo, 2011). (7) Besides settler colonialism. (8) ‘Biological/sexual dimorphism’ describes the belief, that there are only two identifiable categories, men and women, which are opposed to each other and hierarchically linked (9) I use the terms ‘LGBTQ’ / ‘LGBTI’ as they were used in the articles I refer to in this section. (10) SGBV stands for ‘sexual and gender-based violence’. (11) ‘Women’ in the WPS resolutions are not explicitly addressed as ‘women of color’, but due to the fact that the resolutions address issues exclusively in ‘conflict-affected’ regions, or regions where most of the residents are people of color, the resolutions implicitly address only women of color. (12) ‘Outward-facing’ NAPs are NAPs of mostly ‘peaceful’ states that are located in foreign ministries and promote the WPS agenda in foreign, conflict-affected regions. They should help women to (re)gain access to political decision-making at all levels, while they do not mention gendered insecurities or harms nationally (Shepherd, 2016; Aroussi, 2017). 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An Analysis of the gendered, racialized and colonial narratives that underlie the Swiss National Action Plans (NAPs) to implement the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda INTRODUCTION “To understand policy and its effects we have to ask where power lies and how it is exercised” (Chomsky, 1999, p.20). In his examination of the neoliberal world order, Chomsky (1999) analyses the U.S. domination over Latin American societies. Whilst he is looking at how neoliberal doctrines are imposed in other countries for reasons of power and profit, it is the poor who have to adapt to the doctrines of the rich. Chomsky’s succinct analysis of the interconnectedness of the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’ (1) leads me to the main topic of this essay. Not only are global powers like the U.S. hierarchically linked to less powerful states, but also small states like Switzerland. To find out where power lies, “sometimes the most pressing conversations are the ones that are ongoing closer to home” (Motlafi, 2018, p.21) and in this case, in Switzerland. It is important to critically explore the issues we study not only elsewhere, but also in our own backyards (Achilleos, 2018). In the following essay I, therefore, critically evaluate the gendered, racialized and colonial narratives that underlie the Swiss National Action Plans (NAPs) to implement the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) resolutions for Women, Peace and Security (WPS).   In 2002, the member states of the UN were asked to develop NAPs in order to implement the first UNSC’s WPS resolution 1325, which was launched in 2000 (UNSC, 2000). Switzerland, who joined the UN in 2002, adopted its first NAP on the 31st of January in 2007 (Swiss NAP, 2007-2009), which then was revised three times (Swiss NAP 2010-2012; 2013-2016; 2018-2022). NAPs of Western states such as the Swiss NAPs are criticized for functioning as a tool to spread liberal peace, and as a “foreign policy tool, indifferent to the violence and insecurity that mark the lives of women in the Western world” (Aroussi, 2017, p.30). Aroussi (2017) refers to the fact that most of the minority world’s (rich, ‘peaceful’ countries) NAPs are ‘outward facing’ and thereby reproduce the assumption that problems occur ‘elsewhere’, not ‘here’ (Shepherd, 2016). The focus exclusively on conflict and post-conflict societies inscribes an imperialist and interventionist role of the West, which delivers expertise, knowledge and aid to the ‘fragile’ states (Aroussi, 2017).   Therefore, when engaging with NAPs, it is important that “we cannot study foreign policy without attending to and scrutinising colonial legacies, as well as intersectional oppressions that necessarily inform and are central to its formulation” (Achilleos, 2018, p.36). Postcolonial Swiss scholars in the same line argue that colonial images and racist modes of thinking are very present in everyday Swiss culture and the oversimplified picture of Switzerland as a colonial innocent state should be complicated (Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné, 2015). As a white student writing for a Western university, it is indispensable to be aware of the risk of reproducing authoritative discourses or a ‘colonial gaze’. One decolonial practice to counter Western academic authority recommended by Motlafi (2018) is to value contributions from scholars coming from less privileged and colonized countries. For this purpose, I critically evaluate the Swiss NAPs by using the concept of coloniality as a framework for a feminist, decolonial analysis. To analyse the Swiss NAPs from a feminist, decolonial perspective can open up a space to investigate underlying assumptions which guide foreign policy making (Achilleos, 2018). In this essay I ask how gendered, racialized and colonial narratives are reproduced in the Swiss NAPs, and I argue that the ‘colonial gaze’ of the Swiss NAPs obscures (some) women’s insecurities and gender inequality within Swiss territory. I begin this essay by elaborating on the concept of coloniality and what it means to analyse foreign policy documents from a feminist, decolonial perspective. I will then briefly touch upon Swiss colonialism without colonies. Finally, in the main part, I will present an analysis of gendered, racialized and colonial narratives that underlie the Swiss NAPs. This section is divided into three subsections: In the first one I examine the Swiss double standards of caring ‘elsewhere’ but ignoring ‘at home’. The second subsection deals with the narrative of Swiss nationals saving “brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988, p.92), and in the third subsection I finally argue that the classifying of human beings or certain harms, and the locating of suffering, are colonial practices that reproduce the Eurocentric world order. COLONIALITY AS A FRAMEWORK FOR A FEMINIST, DECOLONIAL ANALYSIS Coloniality is a concept developed by Latin American scholars (Quijano, 2000; 2007; Lugones, 2010; Mignolo, 2009; 2011) and describes the current colonial conditions whilst formal colonialism has been abolished (let aside settler colonialism). Quijano defines coloniality as “still the most general form of domination in the world today” (2007, p.170): today’s exploited and marginalized are the same ones who were colonized during colonialism, while they are expected to aspire to the European way of life (Quijano, 2007). This colonial framework has existed since more than 500 years. The “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2007, p.171) is maintained by a racist, colonial and capitalist world power, and through ‘colonial unknowing’, which circumscribes the phenomenon of not having and not wanting to know the colonial past and present (Baldwin cited in Vimalassery et. al, 2016). Coloniality, whether cultural, academic, epistemological, economic or political, is furthermore reproduced through the assumption that there is one universal rationality: European (Quijano, 2007). This Eurocentric rationality or “a perspective of knowledge […], was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming […] other knowledges (Quijano, 2000, pp.549-550). Finally, the three elements which affect everyone on this planet are the coloniality of power, capitalism and Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2000). The concept of coloniality lays the foundation to understand the concept of decoloniality and why it is fruitful to analyse the NAPs from a feminist, decolonial perspective. Decoloniality, as the counterpart of coloniality, requires a practice of ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2009), which refuses every form of coloniality, respectively the dominant forms of knowledge and worldviews, and allows for the creation of alternative rationalities. A feminist, decolonial analysis of the NAPs, hence, deconstructs existing binaries (reproduced through foreign policy tools) such as colonizer/colonized, colonial/postcolonial, domestic/foreign, here/there, donors/beneficiaries (Randeria, 2012; Achilleos, 2018; Shepherd, 2016; Scharffscher, 2011). Dichotomies such as colonial/postcolonial negate connected histories that explain racialized, gendered, classed and colonial policies (Achilleos, 2018). As Motlafi states, “both the dominant and subaltern feminists of the West have not always adequately considered the complexities of colonial or imperial power dynamics between states” (2018, p.10). However, it is crucial to learn about global interconnections of the past, but also about the contemporary global economic changes, reconstruction processes, human rights and military interventions that shape the relations between states (Orford, 2002). Additionally, a feminist, decolonial analysis criticizes the privileging of gender as it is done by the designers of most of the NAPs. The majority of foreign policy analysis focusses on gender, when in fact foreign policy is gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed. The following analysis takes into account the intersections of oppressing categories, as well as connected histories (Achilleos, 2018). This perspective helps to unmask the ‘colonial gaze’ inherent in the NAPs and to analyse the “objectifying, disempowering, or exclusionary portrayals of the previously colonized” (Motlafi, 2018, p.21). SWITZERLAND – COLONIALISM WITHOUT COLONIES As stated above, a decolonial analysis aims to reveal alternative knowledge. In the context of Switzerland, postcolonial scholars speak of ‘colonialism without colonies’ and expose Swiss colonial entanglements in order to deconstruct the image of Swiss ‘colonial innocence’ and ‘exceptionalism’ (Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné, 2015). This is crucial because in Europe it is common that different forms and effects of colonialism are forgotten, downplayed or erased (El-Tayeb, 2011). Switzerland is often seen as a “special case” (2) due to its federalism, direct democracy, humanitarian tradition and its permanent neutrality (Eberle, 2007). As a neutral state, Switzerland militarily stayed out of any active involvement in belligerent conflicts, whilst the neutrality fostered the view of Switzerland as having a moral superior policy. Swiss neutrality is internationally welcomed, and Swiss ‘experts’ are often employed in truce supervisions, diplomacy, humanitarian aid and peacebuilding (Hagmann, 2010). However, the romanticized Swiss neutrality or the “myth of neutrality” (Widmer, 2003, p.13) is challenged, because Swiss actors were, and are, involved in shadowy affairs, as for example in arms trade with belligerent actors (3), financial transactions in World War II, Swiss money laundering cases, bank secrets and the hoarding of private fortunes of dictators (Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné, 2015). ‘Colonial outsiders’ like Switzerland have built informal networks and indirect forms of governance, combined with colonial imaginaries that persist until today (Minder, 2011). Swiss actors are involved in activities within a global network of states and with multi- or transnational companies and institutions, and Switzerland forms part of a wider European modernity, which was constituted through colonial expansion and racism (Dzenovska, 2013). Consequently, “Swiss economy, science, culture and politics are deeply enmeshed with various colonial projects” (Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné, 2015, p.5). SWISS NATIONAL ACTION PLANS Today, Switzerland has adopted four NAPs adhering to the implementation of UNSCR 1325 and the following UNSC resolutions, which is crucial for UN member states in order to look committed to ‘gender equality’ (Fritz et. al, 2011). Switzerland forms part of a ‘NAP industry’ (Swaine, 2017), a term that refers to the fact that since 2005, many (mostly Western) states have adopted NAPs, despite the limited results their adoption has produced (Aroussi, 2017). The responsible ministries for the formulation of the NAPs in most of the countries ‘without conflict’ are the ministries of foreign affairs (Aroussi, 2017), which results in the outward facing orientation of the NAPs (Shepherd, 2016). Swiss NAPs fit into this category of outward facing NAPs while the main responsible actor is the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) (4). With this information in mind, I will now critically elaborate on the gendered, racialized and colonial narratives underlying the outward facing Swiss NAPs. GENDERED, RACIALIZED AND COLONIAL NARRATIVES OF THE SWISS NAPs The outward facing minority world’s NAPs equip ‘experts’ with tools to apply in the ‘majority world’ (Shepherd, 2016), whereas the national orientation tends to focus on the state’s militaries and peacekeeping activities. The fact that most of those NAPs are exclusively outward facing is disturbing, when the idea of the NAPs was that each plan should be relevant to its own context (Swaine, 2017). In the Swiss NAPs, the only ‘inward’ looking recommendations are that there should be an “equal participation of men and women in military and civilian peacebuilding efforts” (Swiss NAP, 2013-2016, p.11) and that the Swiss government should “recruit more women to the diplomatic service and increase the number of women at middle and higher management level in the FDFA in order to […] be credible in the implementation of gender policy” (Swiss NAP, 2013-2016, p.8). However, it is interesting to see that in the latest NAP (Swiss NAP, 2018-2022) they mention a partially inward-looking goal: The necessity to integrate a ‘gender perspective’ e.g. in the security sector. Additionally, they recommend, for the first time, that “the situation and needs of refugee women in Switzerland must be analysed” (Swiss NAP, 2018-2022, p.19). A report should be written on the support and housing needs of women and girls who seek asylum, also with respect to SGBV (5). In the following discussion I will return to this recommendation. Swiss double standards of caring ‘elsewhere’ but ignoring ‘at home’ The first issue with the almost exclusively outward-facing Swiss NAPs, is that it creates a dichotomy between regions, where women live under security (Switzerland) and other regions (conflict affected regions) where women’s security is not ensured (Aroussi, 2017). Thereby Switzerland creates itself as a ‘zone of peace’ (Shepherd, 2016) or as a “women friendly and gender equal welfare state” (Jauhola, 2016, p.338). This implies that gender equality is nationally achieved and therefore Switzerland is able to promote it abroad. The view of Switzerland as a gender equal society stands in strong contrast with feminist critique within the country in relation to various issues. Switzerland in its NAPs commits itself to “support projects, and actors, which address the specific problem of violence against women (rape, trafficking in women, exploitation, etc.) in the context of armed conflict” (Swiss NAP, 2007-2009, p.8). At the same time, a study from Amnesty International in 2019 has revealed that sexual violence against women in Switzerland is very widespread: at least every fifth women in Switzerland has experienced sexual assault and more than every tenth women has experienced sexual intercourse against her will (Amnesty International, 2019). The Swiss NAPs do not mention national insecurities or harm, rather they point to countries like Nepal, where “there is still a long way to go […] before gender equality finally becomes reality” (Swiss NAP, 2010-2012, p.19) or to the ‘Balkans’, where victims of violence suffer in silence because it is a “society where masculinity is synonymous with power, physical force and heroism” (Swiss NAP, 2010-2012, p.18). The designation of other regions as insecure and misogynistic in turn fosters the image of Switzerland as ‘always already peaceful’ and women-friendly (Shepherd, 2016). Why, we may ask – if we assume that Switzerland is a stronghold of gender equality – did half a million of Swiss women gather for a national women’s strike on the 14th of June 2019 (Swissinfo, 2019)? Furthermore, Switzerland, through its NAPs, claims to be committed to the protection of women and girls who are migrating: “The search for lasting solutions for refugees and other person in need of protection is a further priority in Switzerland’s humanitarian engagement” (Swiss NAP, 2013-2016, p.6). Switzerland appears to care about refugees, but only in foreign asylum camps; as soon as they enter the Swiss territory, the only thing the NAPs recommend is to “analyse the situation and needs of refugees” (Swiss NAP, 2018-2022, p.19). This is disturbing given that refugees within Swiss camps live in extremely precarious situations. Women, particularly, live under constant fear of sexual harassment and assaults. Swiss activists criticize that the responsible Cantons don’t see those issues as a priority (Marti, 2019). The double standards of caring elsewhere but ignoring issues at home are sharply condemned by scholars like Aroussi (2017) who states that the changes in today’s globalized world, which led to so-called migration and refugee ‘crises’, should oblige states to implement the WPS framework at home. Aroussi writes: It seems that the obligation of Western countries to protect women in conflict is only considered relevant when these women are located elsewhere, far away from home. While Western countries draft plans and dedicate funds to issues that relate to women’s security in geographically remote countries, once these women flee conflicts and cross borders as refugees and asylum seekers, they fall outside the remit of NAPs and are considered unworthy of protection (2017, p.36). The strong separation of domestic and foreign policy can have negative consequences for marginalized women within Switzerland. Moreover, it obscures the interconnectedness of harms notably the continuum of violence, which circumscribes the phenomenon that violence against women and gendered insecurity are widespread globally (Achilleos, 2018; Aroussi, 2017). The outward- and downward-looking perspective resembles a colonial gaze: the actor who is designing the NAPs is represented as a “master of his/her area of study” (Motlafi, 2018, p.12), who applies his/her knowledge on the “people being studied” (ibid, p.12). To produce knowledge about the ‘real’ problems of ‘other’ women is seen as a colonial practice, even when it is done with ‘good intentions’. There are ethical concerns to be raised when ‘imperialist feminists’ try to speak for or produce knowledge about poor women from the ‘Global South’ (Orford, 2002; Spivak, 1988). Finally, the incorrect assumption that gender equality and security have been achieved in Switzerland reflects “racialised, imperialistic narratives that situate Western states as benevolent saviours of women in the conflict ridden and poverty-stricken Global South” (Aroussi, 2017, p.29). Swiss nationals saving ‘the brown women from brown men’ The narrative of Switzerland as benevolent saviour of “the brown women from the brown men” (Spivak, 1988, p.92) is gendered, racialized and evokes colonial language (Pratt, 2013). The binary understanding of the West as saviour of the ‘rest’ locates agency, power and authority exclusively in the West (Shepherd, 2016). The stance of the male protector, who expresses concerns for the wellbeing of women, does this within a structure of superiority and subordination: “The male protector confronts evil aggressors in the name of the right and the good, while those under his protection submit to his order and serve as handmaids to his efforts” (Young, 2003, p.230). This colonial gaze creates “dehumanizing colonial stereotypes that portray Black and other people of colour as sexually licentious savages […] [which has] led to the trivialization of sexual violence against Black women and to the criminalization of Black men” (Motlafi, 2018, p.13). When, during the time of colonial domination, it was mostly white men who committed themselves to save brown women, today imperialist, white women joined the project of saving the women of the ‘Third world’ (Orford, 2002). The narrative of white, Swiss nationals saving black, female victims can be visually observed in the latest Swiss NAP (Swiss NAP, 2018-2022). This NAP is the only one containing pictures: there are a total of six photographs and the first one shows a white, Swiss woman called Pascale Baeriswyl from the FDFA. The next three photos show black, female participants in a peace project in Mali, while the following is a picture of a white man and a white woman from a monitoring team of the Swiss Armed Forces in Kosovo. The last shows men and women, mostly white, at a review of the UNSCR 1325 at the UN (Swiss NAP, 2018-2022). The representation of the two individuals, man and woman, of the Swiss Armed Forces in Kosovo, which are represented as working together in harmonic accord, can be read as a representation of Swiss forces as “civilizing forces” (Shepherd, 2016, p.327). Classifying/naming ‘others’ as a colonial practice A further observation of the Swiss NAPs that might reproduce colonial narratives, is the naming and classifying of ‘other’ people. First, the NAPs, by categorizing women and men as separated ‘entities’, construct a binary understanding of gender in terms of men/women. Lugones (2010) shows through her concept of ‘the coloniality of gender’, that the binary understanding of gender is a Western construct exported by colonizers, whereby they first had to dehumanize the colonized in order to afterwards classify them as men and women. Secondly, the Swiss NAPs categorize or define some ‘chosen women’ who are able to benefit from Swiss support. In the case of the Swiss support in Nepal, “three high-ranking women […] are now influential players in the Nepalese democratisation process” (Swiss NAP, 2010-2012, p.19). The classification of chosen people  is a well-known colonial practice of Europeans who have organized and transformed non-Europeans according to European agendas (Escobar, 1994). Those women who are chosen through the NAPs should embody ‘progressive’ values and are used to legitimise Western interventions and militarism (Aroussi, 2017). Not only humans are classified within the Swiss NAPs, but a hierarchy of atrocities is created (Von der Lippe, 2012), and it is decided in which locations (Singh, 2017) the NAPs should apply. Regions, where the Swiss NAPs have already been implemented, are the ‘Balkans’, Colombia, Nepal (Swiss NAP, 2010-2012), Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia and Lybia (Swiss NAP, 2013-2016). To localize the suffering of women helps Western countries to feel safe and to maintain a distance from such problems. At the same time, this localizing process reminds me of the colonial world maps containing binaries such as industrial/developing, North/South, or in the case of WPS, donors/beneficiaries (Scharffscher, 2011). CONCLUSION In this essay I critically evaluated the gendered, racialized and colonial narratives that underlie the Swiss NAPs to implement the UNSC’s WPS resolutions. I have argued that, whereas Swiss colonial innocence, Swiss exceptionalism and Swiss neutrality are the most widespread images of this small state, Swiss actors were and are involved in reproducing (gendered, racialized and) colonial language, stereotypes and narratives. For this essay I chose the framework of coloniality in order to understand why it is crucial to analyse foreign policy tools like NAPs from a feminist, decolonial perspective, that is, such an analysis offers the possibility to deconstruct binaries such as colonizer/colonized, here/there, domestic/foreign, men/women and donors/beneficiaries. Additionally, this perspective reveals that harms and oppressions are intersecting and that histories are interconnected. It sheds a light on how the previously colonized, through tools like the NAPs, are still being objectified and racialized.   I have shown in three subsections how gendered, racialized and colonial narratives are reproduced in the Swiss NAPs. First, I outlined the Swiss double standards of caring elsewhere but ignoring at home: the almost exclusively outward looking orientation of the Swiss NAPs produces the image of Switzerland as a gender equal, refugee and women friendly country, where women don’t experience insecurity. I have disproved this image by showing that, nationally, sexual violence against women is very widespread, and that especially women who seek asylum are living under constant fear of sexual harassment or abuse. The outward and downward facing Swiss NAPs reproduce a colonial gaze: Switzerland presents itself as the benevolent saviour of women in conflict affected countries.   In the second subsection I explained that the narrative of Swiss actors saving ‘brown women from brown men’, which underlies the Swiss NAPs, is gendered, racialized and evokes colonial language, where authority is located exclusively in the West. The Swiss NAPs, especially through its visual representations, reproduce the image of ‘civilized’ Swiss forces bringing peace and security to women of the ‘Third World’ and saving them from criminal, ‘savage’ black men.   The third subsection, finally, was dedicated to reveal that the classifying of ‘other’ humans or of certain harms, and the localizing of suffering, are colonial practices that try to map the world into binaries such as industrial/developing, North/South, rich/poor, experts/ignoramuses and donors/beneficiaries.   As a final remark, and if asking ourselves, where we should go from here, I think that there is a real need to reconsider how and by whom foreign policy tools such as NAPs are designed, whom they serve, who they benefit and who they exclude. Furthermore, the findings of this essay elucidate that when NAPs are put into a larger context, we may realize that they are forming part of power structures that were historically constituted and that “the designers [of such policies] tend to do quite well, though the subjects of the experiment often take a beating” (Chomsky, 1999, p.26). As Chomsky so aptly puts it, “what’s right for the people of the world will only by the remotest accident conform to the plans of the ‘principal architects’ of policy. And there is no more reason now than there has ever been to permit them to shape the future in their own interests” (1999, p.40). Notes: (1) The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are not neutral terms and have to be used by being aware of their political significance. Walter Mignolo (2011) explains that the ‘Global South’ is used as a metaphor complementary to the ‘Global North’ and describes underdeveloped nations and the provider of natural resources for the ‘Global North’. 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This essay was written for the course "feminist theory", Department for Sociology, University of Bern. Introduction “Something had happened in the last 20 years, where women are no longer trained to serve a man, to submit a man. The very idea of beauty and aesthetics is being demolished, to where, now, women are applauded and encouraged to look like fat outer-space cyborgs. Women and gays are seen as superior to straight men. Anything that a woman or a gay person wants is theirs. […] All of you here [speaking to his only male audience] are seen as rapists. You have to be thought how not to rape by a feminist who is really fat […]”  (U.K. Men at war 2016). This statement comes from the American Blogger and Pickup Artist (PUA) «Roosh V.» (Daryush Valizadeh) during his talk about «The State of Men» in the United Kingdom in 2015, as part of his world tour (“Roosh World Tour”). The talk was filmed for Reggie Yates Documentary called «U.K. Men at War». As we can see, Roosh V. believes that women today are seen as superior to men. As a result of feminism, every man is seen as a rapist in today’s world. Roosh V. writes about how men can sleep with women around the world («Bang Ukraine, bang Island, bang Poland, don’t bang Denmark» etc.) and believes that «no means no until it means yes» (U.K. Men at war 2016). His main interest is to expose how feminists nowadays oppress and accuse men of rape or domestic violence, as well as to show how today’s culture disfavours men (Mary 2016: 32). In 2017 he was banned from the U.K. by Theresa May. Women and activists in Canada protest outside his events against his misogynistic hate-speeches (2016: 1-2). Although his beliefs are very controversial, he claims to have one million monthly visitors on his websites («Return of the Kings» and his personal Blog, www.rooshv.com ) (UK. Men at War 2016), which provides him with a huge audience to which he can spread his anti-feminist worldviews. In the seminar «feminist theory» we talked a lot about different forms of discrimination and oppression of women, not only in the past, but also in the present. Among the participants of the seminar, the majority agreed that it is women who are disadvantaged and struggling in their everyday lives. But there are actually different-minded people out there who claim that women are now dominating men, that the latter are victims of abuse (Mary 2016: 90). They believe that men’s rights are being ignored and that feminism has constructed a “war on men” (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 10). This view is shared by Roosh V. and a lot of other men’s right activists (MRAs) around the world, who get together virtually in the «Manosphere», an anti-feminist online community and the online expression of the men’s rights movement (MRM), which emerged in the late 1980’s. As Lise Gotell and Emily Dutton state in their examination of the MRAs, the MRM, it can be regarded as backlash to feminism, which grew when feminists broke the silence around rape and sexual assault (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 66). In reality, every time they successfully challenge male dominance, anti-feminist movements grow stronger too (2016: 69). It is important to explore and investigate the Manosphere, because through these social networks, users can spread their thoughts across the whole world (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 10). If their viewpoints on sexual violence, for example, grow in popularity, then the fight against gender specific violence will be slowed. Another reason why scholars started to study the Manosphere is because it spreads a negative picture of feminism. In a lot of political conservative contexts, feminists are depicted as persons who hate men, resulting the core goals of feminism – to reach equality between all humans – to be misunderstood (2016: 11). Lilly Mary shows in her thesis that the Manosphere has become “much more than just the website of online groups”  (Mary 2016: 13), because words do have power and can define reality. In addition, we are all existing within discourses and not outside of them, so that’s why it is crucial to raise awareness about the Manosphere (2016: 16-17). On these grounds this essay discusses the following two core questions: What is the Manosphere and how are feminism and feminists represented ? The four main texts I will refer to in the writing could be classified as “feminist studies of antifeminism”  (Mary 2016: 13) meaning that subgroups of the Manosphere like the MRAs are being analyzed as embodying and reproducing a hegemonic form of masculinity and are read as a backlash against feminism (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 1). Discussion To start, it is crucial to outline some main characteristics of the Manosphere as well as to show which players are present in the conversations. As already mentioned, the Manosphere is a cyber world in which people express their anti-feminist thoughts. But it’s not a closed community; sexist comments on online platforms can as well be seen as part of the Manosphere (Mary 2016: 1). The following definition from Mary’s thesis «’The World is Not a Safe Place for Men’. The Representational Politics of the Manosphere» helps to understand its main features: „The Manosphere is an informal cyberspace network of blogs, websites, and forums that concentrate on issues concerning men and masculinity — issues as diverse as men’s rights, the male sex role, sex and relationships with women, the economy and feminism. Commonly held amongst its frequenters is the feeling that the culture in the West is one of misandry — hatred of men and masculinity — that men are oppressed, and that women dominate and are more privileged than men“ (Mary 2016: 1). An important question besides the present topics and worldviews in the Manosphere is, why men (I focus on men here, but there are also women present sharing anti-feminist sentiments) use the websites of the Manosphere. Kazyak and Schmitz state that it serves to find like-minded men (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 2) and that men who feel powerless search support in MRAs websites to recapture their (lost) masculinity (2016: 12). Mary quotes Jeff Sharlet to show that there are a lot of different reasons why one would visit these websites. For example, to learn about ways to get women to sleep with them or to learn more about child custody etc. (Sharlet cited in Mary 2016: 43). Mary further states that the audience attracted to the ideas and worldviews in the Manosphere is very broad and varies by age and origin, but the biggest followers are found in North America (Mary 2016: 50). Two commonalities that almost all share are a financial, social or sexual frustration and a misogynous mindset (2016: 43). Mary traces four main subgroups in the Manosphere: The first one is the men’s right activists (MRAs), which is the largest group and fights for men’s legal rights (2016: 44). Their conversations are extremely misogynistic, and they blame feminists for the decline of society (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 2). The second subgroup is the group called «Men Going Their Own Way» (MGTOW), which concerns itself with giving each other lifestyle advices. Some of the participants try not to get in contact with any women, because they are said not to be trustworthy (Lamoureux cited in Mary 2016: 46). The third subgroup consists of the PUA (“comedians” and men like Roosh V.), who give advice on how to get women to sleep with them (Mary 2016: 48). The fourth subgroup is called the «Involuntary Celibates» (Incels), which is a term for a community of men who think that mostly young and beautiful women owe them sexual pleasure and if they are denied it, it’s an oppression of men (2016: 49-50). The topics discussed in the Manosphere are very diverse, but strikingly the word «feminism» is omnipresent, more on that later. The majority of users are of the mindset that women nowadays dominate men and some of them see themselves even as slaves of women (2016: 43). Therefore, they try to restore a particular version of traditional masculinity which is conflicting with the existing feminist claims (2016: 1). Faludi also theorizes that anti-feminist movements intensify as a response to a “crisis in masculinity” and therefore fight to bring women to the position they previously held (Faludi cited in Mary 2016: 13-14). Blais and Depuis-Déri remark that “masculinists not only scapegoat women and feminists for the problems men face […]. They also mobilize to defend male privileges (such as those related to the gender-based division of labour) and to oppose the real advances achieved by women“  (Blais and Depuis-Déri cited in Mary 2016: 15). The assumptions of men in crisis, men at war or feminists fighting a war against men bases upon a specific notion of masculinity and manhood which can be found in the Manosphere as well. Theorists conceptualize this special form of masculinity as the so-called “hegemonic masculinity” (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 11). The concept was formulated in the 1990’s, when scholars started to think deeper about men, gender and social hierarchies. According to Connell and Messerschmidt the concept received a lot of criticism and is highly controversial, however it is still very useful to demonstrate power-relations when thinking about gender relations (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 829-831). Interestingly, the idea to fight the dominance of a special form of masculinity – the hegemonic masculinity – came from homosexual men: Because they experienced a lot of discrimination by heterosexual men, they started talking about and fighting this oppression (2005: 831). Actually, the authors explain that the concept is more like a model and expresses fantasies and desires. It does not correspond to the lives of a lot of men; it’s more of a normative societal picture of how men should be and behave (2005: 832; 838). In reality there are a lot of complex and diverse masculinities, but the hegemonic one is still the most honoured and requires men to position themselves in relation to it (2005: 835). Connell and Messerschmidt reformulate the concept in their work and summarize it as a concept that subordinates nonhegemonic masculinities, while the hegemony works through the production of masculine ideals, as sport stars for example (2005: 846). So, how does a man have to be according to this hegemonic view? The typical hegemonic masculine subject is mostly white, heterosexual, physically strong and economically successful (Mary 2016: 24; Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 4). Kimmel further explains what hegemonic manhood means: “The hegemonic definition of manhood is a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power. We equate manhood with being strong, successful, capable, reliable, and in control. The very definitions of manhood we have developed in our culture maintain the power that some men have over other men and that men have over women” (Kimmel cited in Mary 2016: 26). In addition, men are represented as able-bodied, autonomous, independent, rational and invulnerable (2016: 26). In the quote above we can see that hegemonic masculinity does not only mean for men to be superior than women, but also than homosexual men or men who do not embody the prototypical man. Concrete examples for masculinity of the hegemonic form are specific sports like rugby, where domination, aggression, ruthlessness and competitiveness are fundamental (Light and Kirk cited in Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 850). Another important feature is the embodiment of masculinity like eating meat or taking risks (2005: 851). In relation to women, boys and men who try to conquest women get prestige. The interaction with women, Connell and Messerschmidt argue, is central to the constitution of hegemonic masculinity because gender is always relational, and masculinity is mostly defined in differentiation to femininity (2005: 848). Above we could see that the characteristics with a high value in the Manosphere correspond to a hegemonic form of masculinity, what causes that femininity is seen as inferior and less valued than the requested masculinity. On MRA’s websites authors therefore are afraid of a “pussification of American men” (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 7) which will lead to weak, passive men on the bottom of society’s hierarchy (2016: 6-7). With this background let’s now turn our attention to the representation of feminism and feminists in the Manosphere. Women, mostly presented as immoral, irresponsible, unintelligent and weak, feminists and feminism are these topics on the websites in the Manosphere which are most discussed (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 7; Mary 2016: 59). As already mentioned, authors blame feminism for giving women too much power and for hating men in general. For them, the goal of this “evil” feminism is to damage men and masculinity and to ignore men’s issues, interests and entitlement. Feminism combined with social liberalism is seen as the reason for men’s oppression. They say feminism is not about equality, it’s more something like Nazism: racist and anti-women (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 7-11; Mary 2016: 108). Feminism is further seen as unnecessary, because MRAs and other subgroups are convinced that women and men are already equal and therefore we don’t need feminism anymore. But not only do they think we are coequal, they now see themselves as the victims of sexism, and feminism is being responsible for the unhappiness of men and women (Mary 2016: 27; 90). This victim-narrative was also observed by Kazyak and Schmitz: The “Virtual Victims in Search of Equality”  MRAs (a category of MRAs made by the authors) for example focus on the issues of men lacking rights (physically abused men) and on the institutional bias, through which men are falsely accused of rape (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 9). “ This strategy of constructing men not only as being in crisis […] but also as being ignored by mainstream society lays the foundation for the additional tactics Virtual Victims implement in exposing what they view to be a societal-wide prejudice against men that resulted from feminism“  (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 9). At the same time a lot of PUAs describe women as invading while men are terrified, which is the result of a feminism said to aspire the decline of man. The same feminism is seen as female supremacism (Mary 2016: 91-92). But that’s not all. Feminism for users in the Manosphere isn’t a concept or a way for critical thinking about power relations. It is an ideology: Mary comments on statements of a woman (!) called Janet Bloomfield ( www.judgybitch.com , short JB) who speaks out extremely anti-feminist. She writes that feminists are “social terrorists” and in the future, millions of people could die because of feminism. JB further describes that feminists are unhygienic, using body fluids and do not care about their clothing (JB cited in Mary 2016: 90; 97). In MRAs discourses in the Manosphere, feminists are represented as incompetent, lazy and too stupid to achieve anything they want. Behind this lies the assumption that feminism “happens” because of an unconscious hatred of men or related to bad experiences with a male person in the past. Additionally, feminists who speak out publicly are often attacked because of their physical appearance (Mary 2016: 97) and called lynch-mobs (2016: 91). Finally, the most common representation of feminists in the Manosphere is that they are mean, bad and hate men (2016: 95-96). One of the most disturbing images of feminism in the Manosphere is the argument, that feminism is anti-woman because, according to these arguments, the so-called “victim feminists” do not respect women but see them as children or victims (2016: 93). Victim feminism is criticized because in their opinion it stigmatizes all women as victims and all men as perpetrators (2016: 91; 95). They even go further and state that sexual violence (especially domestic violence) accusations and the “rape culture” are invented by feminism to harm and villainize men (2016 100). In the Manosphere authors talk about two feminist “myths”: Firstly, in the online community it is accepted that the patriarchy is a feminist invention (2016: 101) and secondly, that statistics proving sexual abuses and violence are manipulated by feminists (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 69). MRAs in the Manosphere see the phenomenon of sexual violence as a “rape myth”. This is especially alarming because it trivializes the experiences of so many women in the world. Rebecca Solnit writes in one of the essays («The longest war», 2013) of her book «Men explain things to me» (2014) that in the U.S., every 6,2 minute a woman is raped (just the reported ones), that every fifth women was raped once in her lifetime (Solnit 2013: 33) and that every ninth second a woman is beaten (2013: 45). She ascertains that domestic violence is the biggest threat to women, and the main reason for the death of pregnant women are their husbands (2013: 46). This kind of crime is called “femicide” and describes the phenomenon of women getting murdered by their lovers, ex-partners or husbands (Solnit 2014: 103). Additionally, official statistics show that crimes of rape and sexual abuses are gendered and that men are guilty for the majority of sexual violence crimes (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 73). The opinion about rape and sexual violence in the Manosphere is very different to what we learned above. Authors write about “domestic violence hysteria/industry” (Mary 2016: 101; 106) and talk mostly about false rape accusations which are used to demonize men. It’s even argued that women publicly accuse men of rape or sexual abuse to get money from them (2016: 103) and that’s why one commentator in the Manosphere wrote that “the world is not a safe place for men”  (AVFM cited in Mary 2016: 106). Gotell and Dutton also found out that MRAs see the rape culture as no more than a “moral panic” (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 72). In the opinion of the Manosphere’s authors, sexual violence is a gender-neutral problem (2016: 96) and women are overrepresented as victims of rape (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 10). Women, in the theory of the domestic violence industry, are said to invent sexual abuses to gain the right of custody over children (Mary 2016: 106). MRAs even state that men are victims of sexual violence because they don’t have the same institutional support as women do. According to Roosh V. women also invent rape subsequently to sexual intercourse with a man to not be viewed by society as a “slut” (2016: 103). Roosh. V.’s solution against sexual violence is to make it legal when done on private property (2016: 105). Gotell and Dutton oppose that in reality, false accusations are very rare and that female victims of sexual violence are still not believed in, do often not report the incident and are blamed to be guilty for the violence done to them (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 76). Another argumentation the scholars found in the Manosphere mostly coming from PUAs is that if a sexual abuse has happened, it was the women’s fault. In this discourse they are differentiating and deciding about what a “real” rape and what a “false” rape are: The former happens in a public space through strange men where women aren’t seen as the guilty ones, while the latter occurs in privacy, at home, by someone the women know, and the fault is seen of the women herself (Mary 2016: 104-105). That’s why authors in the Manosphere believe women should take responsibility to prevent sexual violence and the best solution for them to not experience sexual abuse is to avoid getting drunk (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 69; 76). Conclusion and Critique To answer to the first question of the essay, we can conclude that the Manosphere, an online community fighting for men’s issues, is composed of four different subgroups (MRAs, PUAs, MGTOW and Incels), which all concentrate on issues concerning men and masculinities. The Manosphere helps men (and women) to connect with other anti-feminist thinkers to interchange opinions; it also serves men to recapture masculinity or to find advices concerning women. What almost all authors of the Manosphere share is a misogynous, anti-feminist worldview and a frustration in their lives. In the Manosphere, the underlying ideal of how a man has to be is theoretically conceptualized as hegemonic masculinity: A man has only a high value if he has power (social, sexual, physical and financial) over nonhegemonic masculinities (homosexuals, non-white humans and women for example). We further saw that the hegemony works through the production of the ideal man playing rugby, being rude, taking risks and eating meat. The studies I referred to confirmed that the predominant manhood found in the Manosphere reproduces the hegemonic form of masculinity. A further conclusion can be made concerning the second question of the essay, on how feminism and feminists are represented in the Manosphere. Both are presented in a deeply negative way: Feminists are seen as aggressive, dumb, ugly, unintelligent and full of hatred of men while feminism is blamed to be guilty for the decline of all men. As we saw in the last part of the discussion, members of the Manosphere see issues, about which feminism was successful in raising awareness, like sexual violence, as a non-gendered problem and think that we live in a world full of false rape accusations in order to villainize all men. What can be said against this view, is that feminist empirical studies in the 1980s and 1990s already showed (by Nicola Gavey for example) that rape was a crime committed widespread, but not only rape through “strangers” (in the Manosphere viewed as ‘real’ rape) but mostly through men known to their victims (Gavey cited in Gotell and Dutton 2016: 72). The construction of a discourse about “real” and “false” rape is disastrous, because is constitutes a somehow legitimate (“real”) rape and converts the “false” rape into a private issue (remember Roosh V. saying that rape should be legalized on private property). If women are held accountable for the experienced violence, it obscures that sexual violence is gendered and that men perpetrate the majority of sexual violence (Johnson and Dawson cited in Gotell and Dutton 2016: 73). In the Manosphere, violence against women is not only played down, it is also normalized – which is something we can see in our society in general. The ex-husband of Tina Turner, for example, said once in an interview, that he did beat Tina, but not more often than every husband beats his wife (Solnit 2013: 45). The narratives about feminist myths (rape as a “moral panic”, the “domestic violence industry”, patriarchy as a “feminist invention”) reproduce violence towards women. Not only do they trivialize the traumas after sexual violence, they also blame the victims for being raped. According to this view, the biggest victim is not the raped women, but the “falsely” accused perpetrator. If this assumption of a world full of false accusations popularizes, it will get even harder for victims to report the incidents, which is really dramatic and has to be prevented. Another conclusion which can be made after the discussion of the representations of feminism and feminists in the Manosphere is that there are obviously a lot of men fearing their own decline and their position in society, which has to be analysed and taken seriously. In my opinion, we should talk more about femininities and masculinities and not only about the former. A step towards this change was the Swiss campaign “16 days against violence towards women” organized by the cfd (a feminist peace organisation), where they talked mainly about notions of masculinities and violence. Still there is not enough being done to raise awareness in this area. The Manosphere and its perceptions of women and violence has to be taken seriously because of various reasons: First of all, it can be dangerous for all of us, but especially for women: People already got murdered or injured through an Incel (Involuntary Celibates) who claimed a “War on Women” (Elliot Rodger, 2014) or through one who attacked people and wrote that the “Incel rebellion has already begun” (Alek Minassian, Toronto 2018). Additionally, Gotell and Dutton showed in their analysis of the MRAs that young men are more and more visiting misogynist websites (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 72) and attending on “Comedy Shows” from PUAs like Daniel Oreilly who makes jokes about rape: “Just show her your penis, if she cries, she’s playing hard to get”  (U.K. Men at war 2016). The next point of the conclusion contains the problematics of a constant dichotomization or opposition between men and women and a strong notion of “us versus them” (Gotell and Dutton 2016: 70) inherent to the representations of women of the Manosphere. The negative presentation of women and feminists is especially being used to legitimate the existing gender hierarchies and to privilege men (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 7). The running down of other people always serves to upgrade one’s own group value, which was already shown by Fredrik Barth (1969) in his theory of ethnic boundaries, which now seems a little far-fetched, but is still useful to understand dichotomizations and boundary maintaining processes (Barth 1969: 15-16). Barth explained that a group can only be constructed and maintained through differentiating itself from another, different group (1969: 10). As Connell and Messerschmidt explain citing Schwalbe: “[…] any strategy for the maintenance of power is likely to involve a dehumanizing of other groups and a corresponding withering of empathy and emotional relatedness within the self ” (Schwalbe cited in Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 852). This evidence is simply used to show how hard it is to overcome the binary assumptions between men and women, if the worldview of the Manosphere is growing or getting popular. Mary even explains that the strict maintenance of this boundary in the Manosphere helps to keep the masculine domination over women (Mary 2016: 23-24). As a last conclusion it can be said that the representation of feminism in the Manosphere is very simplistic and does not capture the actual goals of it. Not only does it fail to capture the heterogeneity of feminist movements, its contradictions and ambiguities, it also supports the perception that feminism can only benefit either women or men (Kazyak and Schmitz 2016: 10). Personally, I think this is a widespread prejudice about feminism and that’s why I pledge for a broader discussion of feminist topics in society. For me, feminism means definitely not to hate men or to wish for women’s supremacy, it means to fight for equality of all genders. Bibliography Literature Barth, Fredrik 1969: Introduction. In: Barth, Fredrik (Ed.): Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organisation of Culture Difference. Long Grove, Illinois, Waveland Press. 9-37. Connell, Raewyn and Messerschmidt James W. 2005: Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 19 No. 6: 829-859. Gotell, Lise and Dutton Emily 2016: Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Canada, 5 (2): 65-80. Kazyak, Emily and Schmitz Rachel M. 2016: Masculinity in Cyberspace: An Analysis of Portrayals of Manhood in Men’s Rights Activist Websites. In: Social Science. 5. Jg., Heft 2. S. 1-16. Lilly, Mary 2016: ‚The World is Not a Safe Place for Men‘: The Representational Politics of the Manosphere. University of Ottawa, Canada. Solnit, Rebecca 2013: Der längste Krieg. In: Solnit Rebecca 2017: Wenn Männer mir die Welt erklären. München: btb-Verlag. 33-60. Solnit Rebecca 2014: Großmutter Spinne. In: Solnit Rebecca 2017: Wenn Männer mir die Welt erklären. München: btb-Verlag. 93-112. Internet The Rage of the Incels. The Newyorker. < https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels >. 11/1/2019. Cdf. Feministische Friedensorganisation. 16 Tage gegen Gewalt an Frauen. < https://www.cfd-ch.org/de/projekte/projekte-inland/kampagne-16-tage-gegen-gewalt-an-frauen-200.html >. 12/1/2019. «Extreme U.K.: Men at War» (Season 2, Episode 6) 2016. Netflix Series «Outside Man» from Reggie Yates, London, U.K. Cfd. Die feministische Friedensorganisation. < https://www.cfd-ch.org/de/projekte/projekte-inland/kampagne-16-tage-gegen-gewalt-an-frauen-200.html >. 12.1.19. The Rage of the Incels. The Newyorker. < https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels >. 11/1/2019.

Written for the Course "Sexuality, Gender and Culture" at London School of Economics. This article has been published in a modified form by the Solidarity Collective : https://solidaritycollective.com/2021/01/08/audre-lordes-concept-of-the-erotic-as-power-evaluated-in-relation-to-contemporary-queer-feminist-pornography/ INTRODUCTION “The Sex Wars is generally understood as a conflict between feminists who were against pornography and certain sexual practices, e.g. s/m, and ‘sex radical’ feminists. Anti-pornography feminists argued that pornography was inherently sexist and promoted violence against women” (Strongman, 2018, p. 45). Strongman, an Afro-American feminist scholar, in this statement refers to the ‘sex war’ of the 1980’s, a time when women’s sexuality was strongly contested in activism and in scholarship. Pornography, ‘prostitution’ and practices like BDSM were topics that feminists quarrelled about. Some saw those practices as objectifying women, whereas others argued that they proved a source of female empowerment (Fritz & Paul, 2017; Chadwick et al., 2018). The porn industry at that time was booming, between 1950 and 1970 hundreds of pornographic films were produced, and since the publication of Deep Throat  in 1972 (Preciado, 2008), thousands, if not millions of pornographic materials have started to circulate globally. This has resulted in the fact that pornography is omnipresent and still highly contested, re-negotiated and re-invented. Preciado therefore calls the new world regime “the pharmaco-pornographic regime of sexuality” (2008, p.107), as we are constantly exposing ourselves to the public. Thus, from time to time in history, there are different stages where sexuality, which is political, gets discussed and politicized more intensely than in other times, as stated by Rubin (1984). She goes on to argue that “in such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated” (1984, p.143). Moreover, a very influential author, who was actively involved in the re-negotiation of the erotic in the time during the ‘sex war’, is Audre Lorde. In the following essay I engage with her understanding of the erotic as power within the framework of the essay question stated above (footnote 1). I discuss Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power in relation to pornography, as in brief, Lorde (1978) sees the pornographic as the opposite of the erotic, whereby the latter is the source of empowerment in every woman. As Lorde, a black, lesbian feminist, was an advocate of the anti-porn movement during the ‘sex war’ area, her theory of the erotic is deeply embedded in the context of the debates about sexuality, sex, race, pleasure and power at the time (Strongman, 2018). In this essay I ask how people engaging in, or with, ‘queer-feminist pornography’ respond to Lorde’s argument that pornography signifies female oppression and that women engaging in it are being used merely as objects. In addition, I am interested in the question of how the erotic is conceptualized in their pornography. I begin this essay by outlining Lorde’s personal background, her concept of the erotic as power and her definition of pornography. I will then discuss how definitions of pornography are always embedded in their historical, political and social context. I also briefly touch upon the limitations of studying pornography. Finally, I present how queer-feminist porn theorists and/or practitioners deal with the question of female empowerment in and through pornography, and how the erotic is conceptualized from their viewpoints. This essay doesn’t contribute to the discussion about whether pornography is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or whether it empowers or oppresses women. The focus of many porn studies in the tradition of pro vs. anti-porn is “limited and limiting” (Attwood, 2002, p.92) and leaves out possibilities for examining pornography in a holistic way. Therefore, I want to emphasize the ambiguities within (queer-feminist) pornography, because by focusing on contradictions rather than consent, a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon is possible. THE EROTIC AS POWER Audre Lorde (1934-1992), an Afro-American poet, was born in New York, where she worked as an English professor (Hacker & Dallman, 1981). She described herself as being black, a woman, a lover, a feminist, a lesbian and a warrior. Lorde amazed other feminists like Aptheker (2012) because of her fearlessness to speak about topics which weren’t part of the dominant feminist discourse. Lorde’s essay on which this analysis is based upon is called The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power  and was published in 1978. When Lorde (1978) speaks of the erotic, she often uses the term ‘we’ to address other women. The erotic is inside of each woman, and at the same time it’s feared by men, therefore they are not interested in examining it. The following definition encompasses central aspects of her understanding of the erotic: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (1978, p.9). The erotic, once a woman recognizes and embraces it, refers to women’s “deepest and non-rational knowledge” (1978, p.6), and to women’s satisfaction. It is therefore a spiritual, sensual, physical, emotional force, which women feel in everything they do: When they dance, when they work – in every activity of their live they should feel joy. The erotic pushes women to see their own excellence, which has been neglected for so long. The erotic is seen, especially in Western culture, as something superficially erotic, something only related to sex, something women should embrace only in men’s service. The erotic beyond its superficiality is feared because it is truly transformative, however only when shared: When two women’s self-connection is shared, differences between them can possibly be transcended. Only when both women are in touch with their erotic, a relation is truly equal; if they are not, they use each other and “use without the consent of the used is abuse” (1978, p.13). What Lorde is arguing here, is that when we engage with others without recognizing the erotic within us, we reduce ourselves to the pornographic, which she sees as the opposite of the erotic. Pornography for Lorde is “a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling” (1978, p.7). If the erotic and the pornographic are contrary, pornography signifies powerlessness, vulnerability, “despair, depression and self-denial” (1978, p.13), and not being in touch with your truest self. Lorde further explains that pornography emerged because the human need to “share deep feeling” (1978, p.13) has been misnamed in Western societies. There are only certain erotic encounters promoted, which she sees as an “abuse of feeling” (1978, p.14). Lorde therefore pledges for the recognition of the erotic, what in turn entails the elimination of the pornographic. STUDYING PORNOGRAPHY To study or write about pornography raises some important concerns. To define a concept like pornography may be a political act or an argument and therefore it is indispensable to contextualize the representations (Attwood, 2002; Boyle, 2006). Scholars who do research on pornography study its “production, distribution and consumption” because without that, it “can only ever provide a partial account” (Boyle, 2006, p.13). Following the conversations within porn studies, it is important to keep in mind that Lorde wrote her essay in a particular historical moment of feminisms, and that concepts are defined depending on the geographical, socio-political and personal context. Gill and Orgad argue that the contestation of sexuality (sex work, FGM and pornography) has always divided feminism: “Too often they [the contestations] have taken place along deep lines of stratification between feminists of North and South, secular or religious, heterosexual or queer” (2018, p.1316). As pointed out by Lorde in another crucial essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House  (1979), it is essential to include the differences between feminists in every discussion of feminist theory. Therefore, she refers to the arrogance of many white feminists at the time who promoted a single and unified sisterhood without including contributions from poor, black and lesbian women (Lorde, 1979). Lorde, wise beyond her years, pledged for the conduct of what we today call an ‘intersectional analysis’ (Crenshaw, 1989) when writing about a particular phenomenon. Our feminist analysis should irrefutably always take differences in race, class, age, sexuality and ability/disability into account; in order to deconstruct the hegemony of white, middleclass, Western-centric feminist understandings. When writing about pornography, we should necessarily also write about race, because as stated by Cruz, “internet pornography so vividly reaffirms how race operates in cyberspace” (2015, p.422) and Mulholland confirms that “representations of porn are never neutral to discourses of race and colonialism (2016, p.45). Lorde’s background undoubtedly influenced how she thought about pornography – especially about black female pornography and black women in BDSM. For Lorde it is not erotic to play with power. The erotic is not exclusively related to the bedroom and therefore dominance and subordination are also neither only bedroom-topics. Those practices are embedded in the wider social power structures, which is the reason why Lorde sees pornography as ethically problematic (as cited in Cruz, 2015). The discussion about the relationship between black feminism and non-traditional black women’s sexualities was, and is, highly contested (Cruz, 2015) – a feminist discussion on which I can’t further elaborate in detail due to this paper’s length restrictions. QUEER-FEMINIST PORNOGRAPHY As indicated above, scholars encounter difficulties when defining what pornography is constituted of. The same thing happens when trying to categorize queer or feminist (or queer-feminist) pornography. Queer theory in particular reminds us of the fact that categorizers always have a subjective view and that categories are constantly evolving (Drabinski, 2013). To use the term ‘queer-feminist pornography’ gives the impression that there is a relation between queer and feminist pornography, or that they may be the ‘same’. One has to note that some scholars use them together while other’s (especially those who self-identify as queer) emphasize that they are feminists, but their work doesn’t contribute to a feminist goal (Moll, 2017). In spite of the naming problematics I will shortly delineate how practitioners and scholars in the field of queer-feminist pornography distinguish their representations from ‘mainstream pornography’. Candida Royalle is often identified as the first representative of feminist pornography. She has been active in the industry since 1975 (Stewart, 2018) and her main idea was to take the emphasis away from genitalia. Royalle writes: We wanted to portray a sense of connectedness, tenderness, communication, passion, excitement, and longing. We wanted to portray women with real bodies, of all ages and types, whom our female viewers could relate to and identify with, and men who seemed to care about their partners, who wanted to please and satisfy them (2013, p.65). Furthermore, Royalle wanted to let the performers chose with whom they engage – where possible – which is also an important factor for Taormino (as cited in Whisnant, 2016). Ms. Naughty (2013), another feminist pornographer, adds that her films are about the depiction of the female pleasure and the female orgasm, and therefore one of the important things for her is to abolish the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’. The claim of many feminist pornographers to show “authentic” (Taormino et al., 2013, p.12) or ‘realistic’ female pleasure is a common narrative in queer-feminist porn production; a discussion which triggers a lot of discussions, on which I am unable to go into detail due to length limitations. In The Feminist Porn Book (2013) Taormino et al. argue that it is important to challenge the normative representations of gender, body shape, class, race, ability/disability and age which exist in mainstream pornography. Feminist pornography instead focuses on agency and pleasure and sees those concepts in their ambiguity and contradiction. Queer-feminist pornography thus often distinguishes itself from mainstream pornography in stating that they don’t produce for mass-consumption, but rather with an artistical and political aim in mind (Fritz & Paul, 2018), where sustainability is more important than profit (Mondin, 2014). Mondin calls feminist porn “fair trade, organic porn” (2014, p.190), because it centers on the humanity and value of the performers, is produced in a cinematographically high quality and is therefore considered to be more ethical than mainstream porn. Queer-feminist porn producers try to “change the game of the market” (Mondin, 2014, p.189), but the ways in which they do this drastically depends on the producer. The film culture of queer, feminist and lesbian pornography, writes Ryberg (2015), is very heterogenous due to the fact that the three categories hold different activist backgrounds. Taormino et al. (2013) add that feminist and queer pornography can be seen as movements actively engaging with other social movements (sex worker’s rights, LGBTQ rights, sex-positive movement etc.). THE EROTIC IN THE FIELD OF QUEER-FEMINIST PORNOGRAPHY Actors who are actively involved in queer-feminist pornography belief that pornography is not violent, no more violent than mainstream media (Rubin, 1995). The strict pro-censorship position that Lorde embodied is criticised by all the authors that I refer to in the following sections. They agree upon the fact that through pornography, the erotic can be negotiated and embraced, while emphasising that erotic pleasure always exists “within and across inequality, in the face of injustice” (Taormino et al., 2013, p.10). As queer-feminist pornography shows different gender identities and various sexualities, traditional, normative conceptualizations of sexuality can be challenged, which is something Lorde didn’t consider in her concept of the erotic. She exclusively addressed women when she talked about the erotic as power, excluding important discussion’s about different gender identities. Ryberg (2015) emphasises that making those identities visible in public spaces is something which pornography makes possible. Censuring (certain) sex, which in her most famous work Lorde advocated for, is a mechanism used by states to ostracize it to the private sphere and is undoubtedly problematic. Berlant and Warner (1998) explain that especially queer sex or queer intimacies are banned from public spaces, hence why it is even more important to publicly show it. Four black feminists who engage with queer-feminist pornography, directly respond to Lorde’s concept of the erotic. Ariane Cruz, Amber Musser, Jennifer Nash and LaMonda Stallings who all theorize blackness, sexuality and pornography discussed the topics race, pornography and desire at the TBS Roundtable (2016). They addressed the contradictory relation of black feminism and pornography, although they take up a different position than Lorde, as they recognise pornography as a site of empowerment (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). They also show to what extent Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as female empowerment and the pornographic as female oppression and the resulting anti-pornographic attitude prevents us from understanding the nuanced relationship of black sexuality, race and pornography. Cruz’s main goal is to reconcile black feminism and pornography. She acknowledges the existing tensions between the two, but nevertheless tries – in opposition to Lorde – to focus on the (unspeakable) pleasure within pornography. Cruz developed ‘the politics of perversion’, a concept which she uses as a tool to show that pornography is not wholly oppressive, but that sexuality can be a ‘technique of power’ (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). Cruz investigates black women’s engagement in BDSM or race plays, where racism is employed as an “erotic tool of power exchange” (2016, p.381). Another black scholar, Miller-Young, shows that black women engage in erotic economies in order to be professionally autonomous and economically independent (as cited in Cruz, 2016). She calls this process of negotiating their own agency and erotic pleasure while living in an exploitable body ‘the erotic sovereignty’ and explains how this process takes place in an environment of policing and structural inequality (Miller-Young, 2014). Jennifer Nash, in responding to the question about the usefulness of the erotic in relation to race, speaks about ‘race’s eroticism’, which describes the phenomenon that “racial excess and hypersexuality can be limiting and also deeply enabling in permitting sexual imaginations to flourish” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.55). For Musser, the erotic does something similar as it does for Lorde, in that it gives people the opportunity to get together. But it should here be noted that she uses the term ‘people’, whereby she includes people who identify with other identities, not only ‘women’. Musser says that “sexuality, pornography and the erotic are sites that bring into relief the construction of race and the simultaneous pleasures and violence in/and of race” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.56). What differentiates her account of the erotic from that of Lorde, is that she sheds a light on the fact that through the erotic people can deploy a restricted form of agency, not this ‘absolute’ empowerment Lorde mentioned. By embracing the erotic, thinks Musser, people can engage with themselves and their desires (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). Nash hereby agrees with Musser, adding that especially the naming of those desires which are seen as infelicitous, is an important act that many of those who work in the field of pornography embrace. Pornography for her does this naming (making public) work and is “one of the few places where we see our bodies – and other people’s bodies – and thus it becomes kind of instruction manual on how bodies in pleasure can look” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.61). Pornographies (intentionally here used in plural) are a way to imagine and desire even more, and they are educational. Cruz states in relation to the erotic, that she wants to learn about how BDSM in pornography can produce “erotic pleasure in blackness, on blackness and with blackness” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.62). What the above scholars all have in common is their emphasis on a middle ground (Ciclitra, 2004) between Lorde’s binary of the erotic as empowerment and the pornographic as oppression. Shoniqua Roach, another black feminist scholar, adds that there are “multitudinous possibilities for black eroticism” (2019, p.139) depending on the site and on the social and political context the woman is located, as pornography does affect people in different ways. Lorde (1978) additionally argued that differences between feminists are important and can be softened through the recognition of the erotic, whereupon Sharon Patricia Holland (2012) counters that the erotic is ambivalent and can either dissolve those differences or strengthen them. Community and the sharing with others were deeply important for Lorde and can be understood to still be significant for feminists engaging with pornography today (Ryberg, 2015; Taormino et al., 2013). Ryberg therefore developed the concept of the ‘ethics of shared embodiment’: Thought of as an activism oriented towards means rather than ends, queer, feminist and lesbian pornography invites an embodied understanding of positions and experiences that differ from one’s own and calls forth an ethics of shared embodiment, susceptible to otherness and respecting of difference. […] it demands awareness that there might always be another point of view (2015, p.271). Within this film culture, the ethics have to be negotiated due to the existing heterogeneity and the disagreement, but especially these discussions and conflicts make this kind of pornography so valuable (Ryberg, 2015). Lorde’s and other feminist’s strict anti-pornography position therefore gets a lot of criticism, as it doesn’t allow for a holistic understanding of pornography. MacKinnon e.g. is one of the loudest voices in the anti-porn movement and doesn’t publicly debate pornography with porn advocators (Ciclitra, 2004). Ciclitra (2004), to conclude, writes that women simultaneously agree and disagree with pornography, but that those dilemmas will always exist and therefore have to be investigated. The abolition of pornography as a whole goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of sex-negativity, which in turn entails that women who consume and enjoy pornography feel guilty about their sexual and erotic pleasure. CONCLUSION To close up this essay, I argue that Lorde’s anti-pornographic position – as much as I personally adore her poems and her contributions – can be criticized from an academic point of view and from the perspective of individuals who engage in or with queer-feminist pornography. As I showed, a strict abolitionist attitude limits our capacity to fully grasp the meaning and implications of the phenomenon. I further emphasized that focusing on tensions and contradictions within pornography contributes to a nuanced understanding of the relation between feminism, (black) female or queer sexuality and pornography. Pornography is ambiguous, highly contested and embedded in wider political movements and an analysis of pornography can tell us a lot about our reality. Pornographic representations are racialized, sexualized and gendered, and as the black feminists considered in my analysis reaffirmed, they can be a source of empowerment for (black) women, as well as for people who identify as queer. Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power is not rejected by queer-feminist porn theorists and producers, rather they re-interpret it: to recognize and embrace the erotic does not require an abolition of pornography. On the contrary, it is through pornography that the erotic can be negotiated and embraced, within structural inequalities. Especially contemporary black feminists still refer to Lorde’s concept and thus try to reconcile the difficult relation of black feminism and pornography. They all agree upon the fact that pornography is a space where non-normative desires and sexuality can be expressed, which can be extremely powerful especially for (queer and black) intimacies, which have been politicized and policed for so long. Concepts like ‘the erotic sovereignty’ (Miller-Young), ‘race’s eroticism’ (Nash) or the ‘politics of perversion’ (Cruz) are attempts to make meaning of the negotiation of agency, erotic pleasure and race within pornography. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aptheker, B. (2012). Audre Lorde, Presente! Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40 (3-4), 289-294. Attwood, F. (2002). Reading Porn: The Paradigm Shift in Pornography Research. Sexualities, 5 (1), 91-105. Boyle K. (2006). The Boundaries of Porn Studies. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 4 (1), 1-16. Chadwick S. B., Raisanen J. C., Goldey K. L., van Anders S. 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Is the concept of coloniality necessary for the studies of gender theories? INTRODUCTION As we learned throughout this term, gender studies are interdisciplinary and political. Feminist scholars ask questions about contradictions, paradoxes and ambivalences and most of the concepts are highly contested, controversial and always in transformation. Therefore, I won´t provide any fixed definitions of concepts throughout the following remarks, but rather discuss and evaluate useful contributions from academics of gender studies, whereas one goal of feminist and gender theory is to complicate the already existing knowledge. I won´t answer the question above neither with “yes, coloniality is necessary for gender theories”, nor with “no, coloniality is not necessary”. In fact, this is exactly not the kind of approaches we are looking for, as we learned to think about both/and, and not about either/or. Therefore, in order to answer to the question, I will focus on the question of which additional insights are gained through the concept of coloniality and how it can be used productively. I will briefly show in a first step how the concept of coloniality criticizes the concept of intersectionality, as some scholars using intersectionality in their analysis didn´t include coloniality. In a second step I´ll discuss the concept of (de)coloniality and why it can be seen as enormously important for the present and future of gender studies (and other disciplines as well). COLONIALITY (OF POWER) As mentioned above, I will now briefly touch upon how the concept of coloniality could be seen as a ´supplementation´ of intersectionality, due to the fact that I identify some similarities of the two concepts. Intersectionality has a long history and many theorists (e.g. Lorde, 1979) already thought about multiple categories of oppressions before the term was finally coined by Kimberly Crenshaw. Crenshaw (1989) argued that black women are often excluded from feminist theory and from antiracist policy and in order to understand black women´s subordination, one has to address the intersections of race, class and gender. She further added that the exclusions of black women are not unidirectional, but multidimensional (1989, pp.139-149). Crenshaw and other early theorists of intersectionality focused on the oppression of women in the context of the U.S. and were interested in oppressions through patriarchy, racism ad capitalism. Today, intersectionality is seen as a concept which travels, as it was mainstreamed and often used by neoliberal feminists, writes Sara Salem (2018). She therefore asks, how intersectionalists deal with imperialism, and I would ask, how (Western, liberal, white) intersectionalists deal with the colonial past and with coloniality. In her critique, Salem (2018) argues that intersectionality was depoliticized, as it was originally a radical political concept, but race was more and more erased. The disavowal of race is an often-observed phenomenon in ´postcolonial´ times (Hall, 2017). Race, writes Salem, is a power relation which can´t be ignored (2018, p.410), and the same happens to coloniality, which is a present condition which can´t be disavowed. Consequently, Salem concludes that the intersectional analysis´ have to include global imperialist and capitalist power relations (2018, p.414). Amos and Parmar (1984) who wrote an article about the challenging of imperial feminism, state that an intersectional analysis has to include also coloniality, because gender is mediated through coloniality, racism and location. Coloniality, which is not the same as colonialism, like intersectionality, is a “Third World” concept, conceptualized in the “Global South”, whereas coloniality is predominantly theorized by Latin-American scholars. These academics started to conceptualize their reality and remarked that coloniality is a condition which survived colonialism and exists although ‘formal’ colonial administration is abolished. One of the most important theorists of coloniality, Anibal Quijano, sees coloniality as “still the most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed” (Quijano, 2007, p.170). Coloniality is a Euro-centered framework, which exists since more than 500 years. Quijano describes the “coloniality of power” (2007, p.171) as being reproduced and maintained by a racist, colonial and capitalist world power. He delineates the connection of coloniality and knowledge production, whereas the European paradigm of rational knowledge dominates the rest of the world (2007, p.174). The knowledge, especially the knowledge about history, is always produced in a linear way, through which Europe divided the world into the European and the non-European (Mignolo, 2011, p.174). The ongoing cultural, academic, epistemological, economic and political coloniality is produced through the assumption that a specific “ethnie should be taken as universal rationality” (Quijano, 2007, p.177), which is the Western European ethnie. Not only does he see Europe as the main beneficiaries of the global world order, but as well North America and former colonies as Japan (ibid. p.168). Coloniality describes the fact that the power structures produced during colonialism are still the framework within the other power relations operate. The exploited and marginalized people today are still the same ones which were members of the colonized populations (Quijano, 2007, p.169). Quijano especially focusses on cultural coloniality which refers to the phenomenon that the European culture became the universal culture everyone should aspire to. Additionally, the coloniality of power is maintained through “colonial unknowing” (Vimalassery et. al, 2016), which describes the phenomenon of ignoring and not wanting to know the colonial past and present (Baldwin cited in Vimalassery et. al, 2016). THE COLONIALITY OF GENDER Especially important in relation to gender theories are the contributions of Maria Lugones and her theory of the coloniality of gender, which builds upon the concept of coloniality of power from Quijano. Lugones refers to the introduction of the gender binary system in terms of male/female by the colonizers (2010, p.743). She uses the term coloniality in order to describe the classification of people into exclusive categories of men and women, but also to circumscribe the prior dehumanization of people in order to afterwards classify them (2010, p.745). The coloniality of gender describes the process that gender was first imposed by the colonizers, but the binary gender system is still maintained today. This implementation of the European gender system erases other gender conceptualizations of indigenous people in Latin America and other colonized contexts. CONTRIBUTIONS OF (DE)COLONIALITY TO GENDER THEORY The contributions we´ve learned above are incredibly crucial for gender theory, especially due to the fact that gender theory is a biased discipline as well and theorists should absolutely engage with this concept in order not to reproduce colonial unknowing themselves. The concept of coloniality leads us to think as well about decoloniality, which is a concept also developed by the same scholars. Decoloniality is not only a concept, but also a discourse and a practice. Mignolo (2009) in relation to decoloniality, refers to the ´epistemic disobedience´ which is the practice of delinking knowledge from the Western rationality and the dominant forms of knowledge and worldviews. Decoloniality describes a counter discourse and the creation of another rationality, and for Quijano this entails the “freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society” (2007, p.178). In terms of the hegemonic understanding of history as linear, Cusicanqui (2019) reminds us of the fact that for example indigenous people of Bolivia conceptualize history as spiral, whereas in their histories the “past-future is contained in the present” (2019, p.96). She emphasizes that in dominant discourses, actors talk about the origins of the indigenous, which takes away their presence and designates them as they would have only lived in the past (2019, p.99). Like that, they are naturally detached from efforts of modernity. Decoloniality, hence, is the counter strategy against coloniality trough the decolonizing of dominant cultural ideals, theories, epistemologies, policies and practices and it is concerned with dialogue, and especially South-South links (Cusicanqui, 2019, p. 102). There is an existing danger that decolonization is misused as a metaphor, especially by settler colonizers who try to reconcile their settler guilt through the discursive usage of decolonization (Tuck and Yang, 2012). To decolonize, in contrast to their practice, means to build meaningful alliances against neocolonialism and coloniality of any form. Nascimento (2007) for this endeavor asks for more inter-communalism between different communities of the world. Lugones (2010) argues in the same line and says that in order to fight the coloniality of gender, the universal category of women has to be deconstructed and adds that gender can´t be resisted alone. Decolonizing gender is a practical task and a lived resistance. Decolonizing is furthermore a practical task for schools and universities and requires us to learn something unknown, something that disrupts our previous knowledge, and it entails to unlearn already acquired knowledge. It will involve discomfort and holding ourselves accountable for which knowledge we privilege and which one we ignore (Shroff, 2018, p. 157). CONCLUSION To close up this part of the exam, I argue that coloniality, as shown above, is tremendously important for gender studies due to the fact that coloniality is a global power structure which permeates all the areas of cultural and social life. Through the concept of coloniality, different power relations can be uncovered, which are often not examined in feminist gender studies. Even in intersectional analysis, some authors ignored the colonial, imperial past and the ongoing colonial power relations and knowledge systems. However, as academia, and especially Western academia runs the risk of reproducing colonial unknowing, it is very important to know the concept of coloniality and to engage with decolonizing strategies in intellectual endeavors BIBLIOGRAPHY Amos, V. & Parmar P. (1984). Challenging Imperial Feminism. Feminist Review,  17, 3-19. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. u. Chi. Legal f. , 139-168. Cusicanqui, S.R., (2012). Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. South Atlantic Quarterly , 111 (1), 95-109. Hall S. (2017). Race and its Disavowal. In Hall, S. & Schwarz B., Familiar Stranger A Life Between Two Islands (pp.95-106). Milton Keynes: Penguin. Lorde, A. (1979) 2017. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Lorde, A. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (pp. 16-21). UK: Penguin Random House. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia , 25 (4), 742-759. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The Global South and world dis/order. Journal of Anthropological Research , 67 (2), 165-188. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, culture & society , 26 (7-8), 159-181. Nascimento, E. (2007). Identity, Race and Gender. The Sorcery of Color, Identity, Race and Gender in Brazil (pp.10-41). Temple University Press. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural studies , 21 (2-3), 168-178. Salem, S. (2018). Intersectionality and its discontents: Intersectionality as traveling theory. European Journal of Women's Studies , 25 (4), 403-418. Shroff, S. (2018). The Peace Professor: Decolonial, Feminist, and Queer Futurities. In Peace and Justice Studies  (pp. 146-162). London: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society , 1 (1). Vimalassery, M., Pegues, J. H. & Goldstein, A. (2016). Introduction On Colonial Unknowing. Theory and Event, 19 (4).

Written for the course "Women, Peace and Security" at London School of Economics. INTRODUCTION “Women have always participated in peace negotiations and peacebuilding, but always at the informal level and rarely visible to the formal peacemakers. […] As a result, a great deal of effort and programming at the international level has gone into including women in formal peace processes” (Coomaraswamy, 2015, p.40). Since the launch of the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) first resolution (UNSCR 1325) for women, peace and security (henceforth WPS) in 2000, it has been internationally recognized that women’s equal and full participation in peace processes is crucial. Participation is one of the four often identified pillars of the UNSC’s WPS agenda, whereas the other three are prevention, protection and relief/recovery (Swaine & O’Rourke, 2015). Women’s increased participation in peacebuilding is highlighted in all the UNSC resolutions, but nevertheless, the NGO Working Group on WPS wrote an open letter to the UNSC in 2019, claiming that women are still excluded from peace processes and therefore their rights and needs are ignored. This happens although it is proven, they argue, that including women in peace processes can lead to more sustainable peace (NGO Working Group on WPS, 2019). This argument (more women leads to more sustainable peace) is commonly used by a variety of actors who advocate for women’s participation. In this paper I will elaborate critically on the implications of such an argumentation when assessed from a feminist gender perspective. In order to answer the essay question, I find it crucial to begin with a brief description of a feminist, decolonial understanding of peace, which I will use as a framework for further discussion. I will also briefly touch upon the question of what is understood as ‘peace process’ and especially ‘peacemaking’. I then analyze two main arguments for including women in peace processes made by the UNSC in its WPS resolutions, by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and by the UN Women. I critically engage with those arguments by considering feminist scholarship about peacebuilding and hence identify various problematic assumptions triggered through the arguments made by the actors above. Additionally, I discuss the arguments in relation to peacemaking by consulting two case studies, which are Guatemala and Mexico. Those case studies are employed to illustrate what ‘adding women’ to peacemaking entails for the local women’s situations. A FEMINIST, DECOLONIAL UNDERSTANDING OF PEACE If we write about ‘peace’ from a feminist perspective, the goal is to reveal that there is no static or universal definition with which we work. Sara Shroff warns us that “asserting a singular definition of peace and violence is not only irresponsible, but also colonialist, racist and sexist” (2018, p.152). The feminist aim is to complicate the already existing knowledge by highlighting contextuality, ambiguities, fluidity, contradictions, overlaps, and to disrupt the status quo. The status quo in relation to the ‘mainstream’ understanding of peace, is, that it is seen in juxtaposition to ‘war’. Feminist scholars, in contrary, understand war and peace not as strictly separated, but as deeply related to each other, and are therefore investigated in making sense of this relation. Parashar (2013) criticizes the way International Relation (IR) theories reproduce the assumption that war breaks out and ends on one particular day. Unlike those theorists, feminist scholars like Cohn (2013) argue that war is not bounded to a certain space or time, rather it is to be seen as a “continuum of violence” (Cockburn as cited in Cohn, 2013, p.21). Additionally, Enloe (2010) reminds us of the fact that there are various phases of war and each phase has its own (gendered) dynamics. A feminist understanding of war helps us to understand the feminist conceptualization of peace, as demonstrated by Parashar: “People live in wars, with wars, and war lives with them long after it ends. […] Wars begin in peace and there is peace in wars” (2013, pp.618-19). Shroff (2018) adopts a queer, feminist, intersectional and decolonial approach to understand peace and importantly asks to whom peace belongs, for whom peace is wanted and by whom it is enforced. When we engage with peace, we have to be aware of who is defining the peace (as peace is a form of power) and which peace is promoted. Most of the forms of peace are not peaceful, rather they are “peaceful violence” (2018, p.148), argues Shroff by referring to Fanon. This form of regulated peace is rooted in (direct or structural) violence and needs to be analyzed through a decolonial lens. What kind of peace, consequently, is promoted in the UNSC resolutions for WPS? If we relate peace and power, it makes sense to also briefly mention that war and peace are both deeply gendered, as the former is associated with masculinity, whereas the latter with femininity (Cohn, 2013). Besides gender, categories like race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste and ability/disability determine how a person experiences war and peace (Cohn, 2013), yet Cohn is convinced that gender is the category which infuses all the others. To learn that all those factors shape the way people conceive of peace, is an important starting point for this essay. Because, as we will see, many arguments for including women in peace processes reproduce deeply gendered essentialisms of what women are and what they can therefore contribute to those processes. PEACEMAKING / PEACEBUILDING As noted in the previous section, peace is a deeply gendered phenomenon. It is usually thought of as something feminine, rather than masculine, but nevertheless the typical mediator in peacebuilding is the male diplomat (Jauhola, 2016). Jauhola points out that post-conflict peace negotiations follow a masculinist agenda and the way peace is made locally and internationally is highly masculinized. In this section I briefly delineate what is usually understood as ‘peacemaking’ or ‘peacebuilding’, respectively in which areas actors want women to participate, in order to afterwards discuss the arguments for including women. When we consider Shroff’s perception of peacemaking as making false promises and as a “corporatized social enterprise, as a foreign aid (militarized) intervention, as a humanitarian exercise” (2018, p.153), this will certainly not coincide with the peacemaking ideas of the UNSC. Usually, “post-conflict transition [peacemaking] tends to be presented as a move from madness to sanity, or from evil to good” (Keen, 2000, p.10). The UNSC does not define peacemaking or peacebuilding in its resolutions, but as stated in the UNSCR 1889, they want women to be involved in all the stages of the peace-process (UNSC, 2009). In the UNSCR 2106 they specify that women should be included in mediation, conflict resolution, post-conflict planning, recovery processes and peacebuilding (UNSC, 2013). Furthermore, women should engage in decision making and there should be more special representatives, special envoys and women leaders (UNSC, 2009; UNSC, 2013). In the UNSCR 2122 and 2467 it is recommended that women should increasingly participate in elections and also in DDR programmes, security institutions and in judicial reforms (UNSC, 2013; UNSC, 2019). Finally, in the UNSCR 2493, member states are urged to let women participate in peace talks (UNSC, 2019). The CEDAW confirms the recommendations from the UNSC in its GR30, but their contribution towards the issue of women’s participation is rather modest. They state that women should be included in international, national and regional negations, in all levels of diplomacy, mediation, humanitarian aid, reconciliation and in the criminal justice system (CEDAW, 2013). So far, we can see that the UNSC and CEDAW both agree on the fact that women should be able to participate. The reason why  they should participate, however, is still not evident. ADDING WOMEN LEADS TO INTERNATIONAL  PEACE The UNSC never explicitly  specifies, why  women should be included in peacemaking processes, but in the very first resolution, UNSCR 1325, the important role of women is connected to preventing and solving conflicts, to build, maintain and promote international peace and security (UNSC, 2000). Women’s participation is seen as ‘vital’ in order to build ‘durable’ peace (UNSC, 2009). In the UN Women’s study (2015) the authors write that “in cases of women’s participation and strong influence, an agreement was almost always reached. Furthermore, the strong influence of women in negotiation processes also positively correlated with a greater likelihood of agreements being implemented” (Coomaraswamy, 2015, p.41). The statement that ‘adding’ women leads to more international peace, and that peace agreements are more likely to be implemented, raises some questions, especially given Shroff’s contributions. The two case studies I consider in this essay both show that women did have a crucial impact during the peace processes, but after the ‘official’ end of the armed conflicts, the violence in the everyday life of the local women did not disappear. Apparently, it is not the local women’s peace the UNSC is concerned about. Guatemala’s peace process is internationally seen as one of the most “inclusive, participatory and human-rights-oriented negotiation processes” (Nakaya, 2003, p.463). Zachariassen (2017), who wrote a case study on women’s participation in the Guatemalan peace process (1994-1999), states that during the peace negations, women’s organizations were able to enter the Women’s Sector of the Assembly of Civil Society. This Assembly could send recommendations to the formal negotiations between the government and the opposition, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (GNRU). The negotiations were mediated by the UN, who left the peace talks as soon as both of the parties signed the agreement for ‘lasting peace’ in 1996, which should mark the ‘end’ of the armed conflict since the 1980’s. The agreement, however, was never implemented and constitutional changes were rejected. Thus, although women were able to participate for the first time in Guatemalan history, they could only give recommendations, which were never implemented due to the resistance of rich landowners. The consequence was the following: “While the peace agreement officially ended the armed conflict, the country continues to have extremely elevated levels of violence and organized crime. […] The situation in the country remains precarious for women. Women continue to be politically marginalized and experience one of the highest rates of violence in the world” (Zachariassen, 2017, p.10). Finally, the participation of women didn’t bring peace into their lives, and neither into the lives of other marginalized people, like Indigenous people. Zachariassen (2017) adds that, while men had negative attitudes towards gender issues (also within the Assembly), male leaders welcomed public promotion of women’s refugee organizations, because it helped them internationally to become more visible and to gain financial support. Something similar happened in the peace process (1994-2001) in Chiapas, Mexico. The most important phase of this peace process was during 1995 and 1997, when the San Andrés negotiations took place and an agreement in favor of the Indigenous autonomy and in favor of gender issues was reached (Ross, 2018). The two fronts which were bargaining with each other during the peace negotiations were the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Mexican government. Women, in contrast to those in Guatemala, were represented directly at the negotiation table and had support from one of the conflict parties, which gave them more influence on the outcomes of the agreement. But in Mexico, like in Guatemala, there were no institutional changes and no implementation either (Ross, 2018). Ross states: “Beyond the dialogues, the changes women achieved in the politics of the EZLN did help improve conditions for women in Zapatista-controlled areas of Chiapas, but these communities remain patriarchal, and gender equality is hampered by continued poverty” (2018, p.11). In an information letter directed to the CEDAW written in June 2018, the author declares an alert in relation to gender specific violence ( feminicidio)  (Flores-Ruiz, 2018). It is stated that the violence towards women derives from the structural and social conditions, which are not addresses by the government: “They [the state] violate women’s and girl’s access to healthcare, to education, to a dignified job, to culture, to land ownership, to nutrition, to political participation, to the freedom of expression, to mobility, to justice and to a life free of violence” (Flores-Ruiz, 2018, pp.8-9). The examples above are employed to show that the argument from the UNSC, CEDAW and the UN Women in the narrative of ‘adding women brings (durable, stable) peace’, is problematic and the question has to be raised, once again, what peace means and for whom, because the contemporary situation of women in Chiapas is definitely not representing a peaceful environment. In the case of Guatemala, as shown above, the participation of women was instrumentalized by the elites for their own interests in order to gain more international support. Pratt analyzes the UNSC resolutions and concludes that especially the UNSCR 1889 “instrumentalizes women’s role on the achievement of peace” (2013, p.775). Gibbings (2011) goes even further by stating that the UN recognized women as their ‘marketing resources’. This argument is underlined by Otto (2012) who identifies the UNSCR 1325 as symbolic capital of the UNSC, which needed something new to legitimize its highly criticized interventions after the Cold War. To commit to the inclusion of women in decision making helped the UNSC to increase its legitimacy and restore the international trust (Otto, 2012). Otto further argues that “statistics showing an increase in women’s political participation, pursuant to Resolution 1325, may serve institutional needs [...] while failing to address women’s daily insecurities in the post-conflict period” (2012, p.271). Additionally, “women’s increased participation may be used to advance military [...] agendas that maintain the marginality of women and other disenfranchised groups, while enacting the formal performance of inclusivity” (2012, p.274). De Almagro is also arguing in the same line and asks, whether the WPS agenda is really a tool to increase women’s life quality in conflict zones, or whether the agenda helped the UNSC and “Western donors to instrumentalize women participants in post-conflict and reconstruction spaces for the objectives of an international agenda on peace and security” (2018, p.403). She therefore sees the women participant as the “new subject of international intervention” (Ibid.). WOMEN ARE PEACEFUL, WOMEN ARE PEACEBUILDERS A different line of argumentation about why women should be included in peace processes is the following: In the UNSCR 1889 it is stated that women have a key role in relation to recovering the society, and that they should help to develop post-conflict strategies which account for “their perspectives and needs” (UNSC, 2009, para. 6). The fact that in most of the resolutions the women’s role is either related to recovery of the society or to the promotion or the building of peace, and that this is related to expressions like ‘their perspectives and needs’ implies that any women can represent any other women’s needs and perspectives. Feminist scholars criticize that women are essentialized and homogenized in the UNSC resolutions, whereas I would add that this is also done in other UN documents, as in the one from UN Women, where the authors write that women bring a “particular quality of consensus building” (Coomaraswamy, 2015, p.42) into peace talks. In relation to women’s essentialization, Carpenter analyzed UNSC documents in order to find out how they use the term ‘women’ and ‘men’, whereas ‘women’ was used 163 times in relation to ‘children’ (as cited in Puechguirbal, 2010). This could as well be counted in the resolutions, where the term ‘women and children’ appears very frequently. The stereotyping of women as mainly caregivers, caretakers and providers, writes Puechguirbal, “keeps them away from the peace negotiation table on the grounds that they did not participate in the fighting” (2010, p.177). Thus, women, even within the UNSC, are seen as passive individuals without agency in need of international protection, and not as “subjects with rights of their own” (Puechguirbal, 2010, p.176). Women, in the UN documents, are furthermore designated as soft peacebuilders with mainly domestic interests and less oriented towards “the serious discussions about peace and security which men, ‘the legitimate actors’, have around negotiation tables” (Puechguirbal, 2010, p.177). The problem of this naturalization of women with peacefulness, is, that their real peacebuilding efforts are not valued, because it is women’s nature to do that (Chinkin & Kaldor, 2013). Importantly, women, as well as any other ‘marginalized’ group in our societies, are not a homogenous group, neither does every woman know every other women’s needs. Especially in relation to peace building, it is problematic to see how generalizations about the women as peace promoters are made. Puechguirbal concludes as follows: “It [the UN Secretary General’s report] assumes that all women in all conflict areas are in favor of peace […] irrespective of their differing ideologies, their urban or rural background, their marital status, their religious beliefs, their status as combatants or civilians (2010, p.181). Nakaya (2003) confirms that if women’s commonality is always emphasized, their diverse identities, needs and experiences are not taken into account. As Lorde (1979) has already shown us 40 years ago, it is a certain Western (feminist) arrogance not to take the differences between women into account and to claim a somewhat natural bond between all of us. The UNSC resolutions reproduce this arrogance by privileging gender (add women) above all other power relations as race, sexuality, class or ethnicity (Pratt, 2013). Pratt (2013) traces this ‘error’ back to the origins of the UNSCR 1325, where postcolonial feminism was excluded. De Almagro agrees upon the fact that other power relations determine the access to participation, and writes that “the effort to include women as participants will do little to address the experiences of a diversity of women until the ramifications of racial, class and sexuality stratification among women are acknowledged” (2018, p.413). In Guatemala, not only gender equality has to be challenged, but other political, social, economic and structural inequalities as well. Other marginalized groups of society, especially the Indigenous community has to be included, too (Nakaya, 2003). During the Guatemalan peace process, the Indigenous activists demanded the acceptance of their identity, their autonomy and their rights, whereas the “right wing political and economic elites feared that the new constitutional reform would bring preferential treatment to the Indigenous population and thus launched an active ‘No’ campaign [against the constitutional amendment, which should have improved women’s and Indigenous rights]” (2017, p.8). The case of Chiapas (Mexico) underlines the problematics of ignoring other categories besides gender. Ross (2018) writes that the women who were involved during the peace process in Chiapas had diverse backgrounds, some of them were Indigenous, some not. Indigenous women were fighting for autonomy, self-governance, access to welfare, healthcare and employment support, whereas non-Indigenous women were focusing on political rights and protection against discrimination. As they worked together, obviously, there were tensions between their goals and their feminisms: they were discussing whether they should push forwards an orthodox Western kind of feminism or the Indigenous visions of how they wanted to claim their inclusion and their rights. Finally, even though in this discussion, there was a tendency towards the Indigenous visions and hence more emphasis on subsistence and access to services, the fact that most of the dialogues were held in Spanish, had already marginalized many Indigenous women (Ross, 2013). CONCLUSION In this essay, I discussed two arguments which are commonly reproduced by international actors as the UNSC, CEDAW and UN Women in relation to the question of why women should be included in peace processes, and especially in peacemaking. I argued that the claim that if women are included, more stable peace is enabled, may not necessarily mean peace for local women. For this purpose, I used the critical lens of Shroff who speaks of ‘peaceful violence’ promoted through international institutions like the UNSC with its WPS agenda. Pratt, by referring to Orford, for such reasons considers the UNSCR 1325 as an “imperial feminist project” (2013, p.780). In relation to the second argument, I criticized that the UNSC resolutions represent women as vulnerable peacebuilders rather than political subjects, and that a universal category of women is produced through the privileging of gender. I supported my analysis with the two case study examples of Guatemala and Mexico. Finally argued that it is problematic not to take differences between women, such as race, ethnicity, class, caste, sexuality and ability/disability into account. As a final remark, I would like to point to the hypocritical practices of many UN decision-makers, by using a statement from Puechguirbal: “Reference to resolution 1325 has been used by UN decision-makers as a proxy for appearing to be concerned with gender-related issues in the country of mission without actually committing to its implementation” (2010, p.182). Notes CEDAW is a UN human rights treaty body which monitors international human right’s treaties (especially the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW). The document I use from CEDAW is the General Recommendation Nr. 30 (CEDAW GR30) from 2013, which contains a recommendation for state parties to ensure women’s human rights especially in relation to women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations. The UN Women is an entity which belongs to the UN and aims at women’s empowerment and gender equality. There is absolutely no doubt that women should be included in peace processes and in every other area of policymaking and of public life. This essay, although, focusses on the critical aspects of internationally made arguments for this inclusion, which do often not result in positive transformations of women’s lives. It is not about whether women should be included or not, but rather about the instrumentalization of women in those processes and about the arguments which trigger problematic essentialisms about women. DDR stands for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. Original title of the document: “La situación de las mujeres en Chiapas en el marco de la Declaratoria de alerta de Violencia de Género”. Original statement (translated by me): “Vulneran el acceso de niñas y mujeres a la salud, a la educación, al trabajo digno, a la cultura, a la tenencia de la tierra, a la alimentación, a la participación política, a la libertad de expresión, de movilidad, a la justicia y al acceso a una vida libre de violencia”. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chinkin, C. & Kaldor M. (2013). Gender and New Wars. Journal of International Affairs , 67 (1), 167-187. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (2013). General Recommendation No. 30 on Women in Conflict Prevention, Conflict and Post- Conflict Situations . CEDAW/C/GC/30. 18th October 2013. United Nations. Cohn, C. (2013). Women and Wars. Towards a Conceptual Framework. In Cohn C. (Eds.), Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures  (pp. 1-35). Cambridge UK: Polity Press. Coomaraswamy, R. (2015). 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