Ghana is one of the biggest producers of gold in Africa and the world.1 Gold contributes significantly to Ghana’s economy, and small-scale mining—an important means of income for many low-income Ghanaian households—produces about 30 percent of Ghana’s total gold output.2 Under Ghanaian law, small-scale gold mining is reserved for Ghanaians, but the boom in gold prices in the 2000s and Ghana’s unprotected gold wealth drew thousands of Chinese miners to Ghana who started mining for gold illegally.3 Known locally as galamsey, illegal gold mining by Chinese migrants in Ghana has had devastating effects on the economy, the environment, communities, and women’s security.
The Ghanaian government has adopted several measures to curb the proliferation of illegal mining, but these measures have been ineffective because of government incompetence, severe corruption, a weak judiciary system, rampant violence in communities, and the complicity of locals.
Civil society can play an important role in dealing with the adverse effects of galamsey. Civil society organizations (CSOs) are particularly important in raising awareness in communities, helping curb violence, protecting women and pressuring the government to be accountable and transparent. This policy brief looks at small-scale mining in Ghana and the growing problems associated with illegal Chinese miners. It lays out the obstacles that government and local communities face in curbing galamsey and relates how CSOs are pushing for solutions. We conclude by providing recommendations for more active civil society engagement, both nationally and transnationally.
Small-Scale Mining in Ghana
Indigenous small-scale mining dates back to the 15th century in Ghana. It is an important means of livelihood for many rural people, who use the income from mining to supplement meagre farming income. Ghanaian small-scale mining may be second only to agriculture in its ability to create jobs and boost the economy.4 About one million people work directly in the sector, and approximately four million work in services dependent on small-scale mining.5
With so many Ghanaians practicing small-scale mining, the government felt the need to regulate mining practices to streamline the sector’s contribution to the economy, regulate the use of resources by small-scale miners, and provide official marketing channels for gold that the sector produced.6 In 1989, the government passed the Small-Scale Gold Mining Act, which introduced a licensing process. However, the process is highly bureaucratic, expensive, time-consuming, and riddled with corruption. Only those with money and political connections can secure licenses. Thus the process discourages many Ghanaians without money and influence from applying for and obtaining legal licenses. Since villages depended greatly on the mining sector, unlicensed smallscale mining continued.7
The scale of illegal mining expanded greatly in the 2000s, when Ghana’s gold reserves and the surge in gold prices attracted many foreign miners from neighboring Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and countries such as Russia, Armenia, and China. Ghana saw an especially large influx of experienced Chinese miners.
Two main reasons explain the influx of Chinese miners.8 First, China’s economic liberalization led many Chinese migrant workers to come to Africa for work in a range of industries. With its ample unprotected gold reserves, Ghana proved attractive to Chinese gold diggers. Second, the majority of the Chinese miners in Ghana come from the Guangxi autonomous region in China, a region with a long history of gold mining and expertise in advanced mining techniques. About 50,000 Chinese miners have flocked to Ghana over the past decade and have been illegally mining gold.9
Effects of Chinese Illegal Mining
Unregulated and illegal mining by Chinese migrants has severely challenged the Ghanaian government, local communities and rural populations. It has compromised the local economy and security, particularly the well-being and security of women. In response, the government passed the 2006 Minerals and Mining Act, which “reserved” small-scale mining for Ghanaian citizens, and instituted the Alternative Livelihood and Community Mining Program, which sought to diversify sources of livelihood in mining areas. But because of widespread government corruption among national and local officials, their implementation was unsuccessful.10 Therefore, Chinese miners’ galamsey continues.
Economic and Environmental Impacts
Chinese investors bought up plots of lands from local farmers and landowners and replaced farmlands with gold mines. Farmhands lost their jobs, and overall food production declined. In addition, the influx of Chinese miners increased housing prices, which in turn led to an increase of homeless people.11 Lastly, Chinese miners introduced technologies such as dredging and advanced excavators, replacing lowtech, traditional mining techniques, increasing productivity and making it difficult for Ghanaian small-scale miners to compete with them.
The use of advanced technology has also polluted remaining farms lands and rivers nearby with dust, cyanide and mercury.12 Major rivers such as the Pra, Ankobra and Birim— essential for supplying water in Western and Eastern Ghana— have been polluted by mining runoff.13 This pollution has depressed farm productivity and the livelihoods of people who depend on farming. In addition, the consistent use of mercury in gold extraction has also harmed people’s health, which in turn has made them unable to work and earn a living.14
Community Security
An increase in robberies, violence, and other criminal activity accompanied the influx of Chinese miners. Attacks on Chinese migrants increased as local resentment grew. In response, the Chinese miners acquired weapons to protect themselves.15 Some became involved in the illegal buying and selling of arms.16 In many mining communities, the use and trafficking of narcotics also increased.17
Some observers worried that the loss of local livelihoods and the increase in security problems were bound to multiply locals’ grievances, thereby making communities vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremist groups. Violent protests have on occasion broken out over grievances in local mining communities in Ghana.18
Impact on Women
The majority of women in Ghana’s small-scale mining communities work on cocoa farms under abysmal conditions. Many supplement their meagre farming incomes by working in illegal mines. Often, women force their children to work in the mines to help supplement the family income.19 Women’s weak economic standing has made them quite dependent on galamsey, and government crackdowns on Chinese illegal mining have hit them hard.20 Although the government has acknowledged women’s economic vulnerability, its efforts thus far have not been directed toward reducing women’s dependency on illegal mining.21
The arrival of Chinese miners has also led to increased prostitution and sexual exploitation and abuse. Some women provide sexual favors to miners in exchange for money. In so doing, they expose themselves to arrest, as prostitution is illegal in Ghana. As a result, they become vulnerable to extortion and corruption. Equally worrisome is the sexual abuse of women employed by Chinese miners.22 These women, as well as their children, are discriminated against and ostracized by local communities.23
Government Responses
Prior to 2013, the Ghanaian government paid little attention to the proliferation of Chinese migrants in the small-scale mining sector. Although the government did pass the Minerals and Mining Actin 2006, the law was undermined by corrupt officials taking bribes from Chinese miners to allow them to continue mining.
When news media began reporting on galamsey issues in
2013, the government felt pressure to respond. President John Mahama established a task force made up of military personnel and other state security forces.24 The task force was instrumental in deporting over 4,500 Chinese miners and the seizure of mining equipment, but it also attempted to curtail illegal mining by Ghanaians.25 During presidential and parliamentary electoral campaigns in 2016, however, the Mahama government held back on enforcement against Ghanaians due to pressures from some communities that threatened to vote against it for attempting to stop them from working in galamsey mines.26
After Mahama’s electoral defeat, the new government under President Nana Akufo-Addo nonetheless sought to reinforce the ban on illegal mining. In 2017, an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining was set up to deal with the problem.27 The new government also launched Operation Vanguard, which deployed 400 military and police officials in centers of illegal mining.28 An Alternative Livelihood and Community Mining Program is also in place to train those previously involved in small-scale mining for work in other sectors. All have failed to curb illegal mining.
Obstacles to Curbing Galamsey
The lack of government success in curbing galamsey is due to a variety of reasons, key among them are the corruption of government officials and heavy-handed crackdowns by the security forces. Other reasons include a weak judicial infrastructure and complicit local populations that directly benefit from illegal mining.
Corruption. Some task force officials and local police take bribes to “look the other way” and thus reap the benefits of illegal mining.29 Chinese miners boast about their “good working relationships” with local police. Indeed, Chinese miners who are caught and detained are usually let go after they pay fines and are thus free to resume their illegal activities. The lack of law enforcement transparency around who is arrested and released makes it difficult for civil society actors to protest or counter illegal mining. On occasion, prosecutions of Chinese miners have been halted without reasonable justification and their seized equipment returned to them.30
Weak enforcement of anti-galamsey laws and complicit officials make combating corruption particularly difficult. In January 2020, the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, which has oversight over the galamsey issue, revealed that about 500 excavators seized from illegal miners had gone missing, calling into question the vigilance of local authorities in policing the galamsey problem.31 Miners have relocated to more remote areas where authorities are less likely to discover them. This move “underground” to wait it out shows that the security forces’ vigilance waxes and wanes, making efforts to combat illegal mining inconsistent and, therefore, ineffective.32
Violence. Crackdowns by security forces have led to violence without effectively containing illegal mining. Both the Ghanaian and the Chinese communities have suffered the repercussions of this violence. Children and minors have been targets of violent raids. A 16-year-old Chinese boy was shot while fleeing a crackdown by Ghanaian forces.33 Families in China worry about family members who have been targeted in crackdown operations, as they receive no communication from Ghanaian authorities when their children or siblings are jailed or killed.34
Some aggrievedlocal authorities have incited young Ghanaians from the mining communities to engage in violence. In April 2020, a group of youth in eastern Ghana, with the support of a local assembly, set ablaze mining equipment belonging to Chinese miners and put the lives of many community members at risk.35
The ineffectiveness of government efforts has angered many local residents. In October 2016, some residents in Western Ghana violently demonstrated against Chinese miners, vandalizing government buildings and other infrastructure.36
Because miners carry cutlasses, shovels, and other mining equipment as weapons, they have been ready to attack at the slightest misunderstandings with communities or law enforcement officials, increasing the violence of attacks. Illegal miners have also armed themselves to protest closures of some illegal pits, causing panic and insecurity.37
Weak Judiciary. Those arrested on galamsey charges typically face minimal consequences. Beyond the problem of bribery, the legal and judicial process is slow. Thus many who are arrested post bail and quickly return to the field.38
Local Complicity. Galamsey provides ready income for many local people, much more than what farming offers or even compared with the government’s initiative on alternative livelihoods.39 Thus some individuals would rather sell land for galamsey, work in galamsey fields, or protect perpetrators by failing to report their activities. In some cases, community members clash directly with security forces seeking to prevent galamsey.40 Chiefs and family heads and custodians of communal and family lands in Ghana have seen large plots of land go to the highest bidder: foreign miners with no interest in sustainable mining to preserve the environment for future generations.41
In sum, illegal mining has not ceased despite some government efforts. Miners have become more likely to conceal their activities, however, making it more difficult for authorities to curb their activities or find other solutions.42 Ghanaian communities, meanwhile, have become more dependent on illegal mining, exposing them to violence and destitution.
The Role of Civil Society
CSOs can play an important role in curbing the proliferation of illegal Chinese mining activities in Ghana and alleviating its negative impacts on communities. CSOs have the standing to reach both the government and the people and can strategically position themselves as mediators.
Local civil society groups have been instrumental in pressuring the Ghanaian government to take action on illegal mining.43 Ghanaian CSOs have publicized the impact of galamsey on the environment and community security. They have worked to rehabilitate mined-out or degraded lands, and they have provided legal aid to those affected in galamsey communities while holding the government to its promises to curb galamsey.44
One such CSO, the Media Coalition against Galamsey, has been pressuring the Akufo-Addo government to take action. To promote reforestation and rejuvenation of galamsey sites, the nongovernmental organization Partners of Nature Africa initiated a project to plant rubber-tree seedlings on degraded land at a mining site at Peminanse in the Asiwa District of the Ashanti region.45 CSO Tropenbos Ghana has been helping local communities rehabilitate mined-out lands and teaching them to integrate good farming and settlement practices around the mining sites.46 The Centre for Public Interest Law provides courtroom representation and other legal services to those affected by mining operations and to those contending that the government or illegal mining operators encroached on their rights.47
Recommendations
Despite the meaningful work CSOs have been doing to curb and mitigate the effects of illegal small-scale mining, there is more to do: involve the affected communities in awareness raising, dialogue with the government and international community, create attractive alternative employment opportunities, and provide safe places for those who are physically or mentally abused. Moreover, the international community and the Ghanaian and Chinese governments should vigorously support the activities of CSOs.
Raising Awareness.One of the most important roles civil society can and should continue to play is to raise awareness regarding issues related to illegal mining. CSOs can raise awareness about environmental and security issues that may discourage local people from engaging in illegal mining. They can convene hearings and meetings for local people and government, including law enforcement officials, where all parties can raise issues and work toward resolving them. NGOs can appoint community mobilizers to talk to people, record their complaints, and present the results to government officials.
Dialogue with the Government and Local Officials. It is imperative that CSOs in Ghana engage the government in sustained dialogue on mitigating illegal mining. It is only through proper communication that people in affected communities will be able to understand the government’s perspective. While it may be difficult to prevent officials from taking bribes or becoming involved in corrupt activities, CSOs can highlight the corruption that does come to light and encourage transparency and accountability.
CSOs should increase efforts to engage local governments. Local officials are directly involved in the communities and sometimes facilitate illegal activities for profit. Engaging local government officials—and appealing for central government and law enforcement intervention where necessary—will increase accountability and transparency.
Programs to Develop Alternative Employment Opportunities. Civil societies can work with the local and central government officials to develop other opportunities for those who have lost their livelihoods due to illegal mining. Local and international NGOs working in Ghana should continue to offer skill-building training programs. It should prioritize women and men from marginalized backgrounds, female and single-headed households, people with disabilities, and others who may have a harder time coping with the loss of livelihood. These programs could help discourage criminal or extremist activity.
CSOs that advance alternative employment opportunities in Ghana’s mining regions may also be able to prevent or reduce violence. Targeting female-headed households for alternate employment programs will help reduce the burden on women who are forced to work long hours in mining while also caring for children. Accountability and transparency mechanisms and other initiatives should supplement these efforts, and CSOs are in a key position to establish them.
Safe Houses. CSOs, including religious groups, should establish safe houses for survivors of assault, rape, or other gender-based violence. These organizations must also connect survivors of violence to appropriate services such as hospitals, counseling, police, and lawyers.
Transnational Advocacy.CSOs have immense potential to build transnational and regional advocacy networks. CSOs in Ghana should ally with CSOs elsewhere to jointly pressure their respective governments to resolve problems stemming from illegal mining. Civil societies can also press countries to take the matter to the United Nations, which can encourage the international community to devise solutions.48 For example, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation have supported CSO efforts to rehabilitate mined-out lands, providing resources for rehabilitation projects in galamsey areas.49
Conclusion
This policy brief proposes peaceful means for curbing Chinese galamsey in Ghana through greater reliance on CSOs. Forceful curbing of galamsey will only lead to more violence and abrupt loss of livelihoods. Grievances will increase, aggravating the challenges communities already face.
The government’s ban on illegal mining and violent crackdowns are compounding the problem while failing to tackle it systematically. The problem of Chinese illegal mining in Ghana is both serious and complicated. It secures livelihoods for some and destroys it for others. It creates dependencies, incites violence, reduces security, and severely depletes natural resources. By bringing together all stakeholders—the local mining communities, the Ghanaian government, and international actors—we believe mobilizing CSOs will help Ghanaian communities address the problem holistically.
References
Fernando Aragon and Juan Pablo Rud, “Gold Mining and Living Standards in Ghanaian Households” (International Growth Center, January 2011–March 2012).
Gordon Crawford et al., “The Impact of Chinese Involvement in
Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana,” E-33110-GHA-1 (International
Growth Center, May 2015); Gabriel Botchwey and Gordon Crawford, “Lifting the Lid on Ghana’s Illegal Small-Scale Mining Problem,” The Conversation (September 25, 2019).
Botchwey and Crawford, “Lifting the Lid”; Jeremy Luedi, “Galamsey in Ghana and China’s Illegal Gold Rush” (Asia by Africa, January 16, 2019).
“Ghana: Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Formalization,”Project Information Document, Report No: PIDISDSC25363 (Washington, DC: World Bank, January 23, 2019).
Gavin Hilson, “Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining and Agriculture: Exploring Their Links in Rural sub-Saharan Africa,” Issue Paper (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, March 2016).
Gavin Hilson and Abigail Hilson, “Entrepreneurship, Poverty and Sustainability: Critical Reflections on the Formalization of Small-Scale Mining in Ghana” (International Growth Center, April 10, 2015).
Gabriel Botchwey et al., “South‐South Irregular Migration: The Impacts of China’s Informal Gold Rush in Ghana,” International Migration Vol. 57, No. 4 (2019), pp. 310–28; Botchwey and Crawford, “Lifting the Lid.”
Botchwey, “Conflict, Collusion and Corruption in Small-Scale Gold Mining: Chinese Miners and the State in Ghana,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. 55, No. 4 (2017), pp. 444–70.
“House Rent for Only Chinese,” MyJoy Online (June 25, 2013).
Hilson and Hilson, “Entrepreneurship, Poverty and Sustainability.”
Crawford and Botchwey, “Conflict, Collusion and Corruption”; Stanley Martey, “Mud Instead of Clean Water!!! How GWCL Is Struggling Due to Galamsey Canker,” Peace FM Online News (June 8, 2019).
Juliane Kippenbery, “Mercury, Ghana’s Poisonous Problem,” Graphic Online (October 10, 2014); Aboka Yaw et al., “Review of Environment and Health Impacts of Mining in Ghana,” Journal of Health and Pollution Vol. 8, No.1 (2018), pp. 43–42.
Jeremy Luedi, “Chinese Galamsey and the Illegal Allure of Ghana’s Gold Rush (Part 1),” The Daily Statesman (October 2, 2019).
“Chinese National Arrested for Selling Guns,” Graphic Online (November 1, 2016).
Edward Burrows and Lucia Bird, “Gold, Guns, and China: Ghana’s Fight to End Galamsey,” (Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime, May 30, 2017).
“Police Storm Community as Angry Youth Burn Mining Equipment in Eastern Region,” GhanaWeb (April 12, 2020). Many policymakers and academics have argued that young unemployed people are prime recruitment targets for insurgent and terrorist groups. See Guy Lamb et al., “Rumors of Peace, Whispers of War: Assessment of the Reintegration of Ex Combatants into Civilian Life in North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo,” Working Paper (Washington,
DC: World Bank, 2012); Jairo Munive and Finn Stepputat, “Rethinking Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Programs,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development Vol. 4, No. 1 (2015). Studies have established significant connections between unemployment amongst youths and attraction to terrorism activities in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan region. See Aniruddha Bagchi and Jomon A. Paul, “Youth Unemployment and Terrorism in the MENAP (Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) Region,” Socio-Economic Planning Sciences Vol. 64 (2018), pp. 9–20.
Report of the UN Secretary-General on Social Analysis of Ghana’s Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector (2016).
Tara Rava Zolnikov, “Effects of the Government’s Ban in Ghana on Women in Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining,” Resources Policy Vol. 65, No. 101561 (March 2020).
Sofia Christensen, “Ghana Just Scratching Surface of Illegal Gold
Mining,” VOA News (May 27, 2019); Stephanie Barrientos, “Women in
Cocoa Production: Where Is the Gender Equity?” The Guardian (March 8, 2013); Roy Maconachie and Elizabeth Fortin, “On Ghana’s Cocoa Farms, Fairtrade Is Not Yet Working for Women,” The Guardian (March 11, 2016).
“Illegal Mining in Ghana Will Create Risk to Social Stability,” Mining Review Africa (May 28, 2018).
Jonas Nyabor, “Ghana’s ‘Galamsey Kids’: Children Left Behind by Chinese Miners,” Citi Newsroom (April 16, 2018).
Gordon Crawford et al., “The Impact of Chinese Involvement in Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana” (International Growth Center, Dec. 1, 2013).
Afua Hirsch, “Ghana Deports Thousands in Crackdown on Illegal Chinese Goldminers,” The Guardian (July 15, 2013).
“Galamseyers Will ‘Fight to Death’—Aning,” Ghana Web (October 20, 2016); Abdulai Abdul-Gafaru, “The Galamsey Menace in Ghana: A Political Problem Requiring Political Solutions?” Policy BriefNo. 5 (University of Ghana Business School, June 2017).
“Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining to be Dissolved
Soon,” Modern Ghana (July 7, 2020). See also Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation, “Government Outlines Measures to Lift Small-Scale Mining,” press release(Accra: GNA, August 2018).
Dominic Moses Awiah, “Operation Vanguard Launched to Wipe Out Galamsey,” Graphic Online (August 1, 2017).
Edwin Appiah, “Operation Vanguard Soldier Allegedly ‘Pockets up to GH¢45k Biweekly’ from Illegal Miners,” Ghana Report (February 1, 2020); Burrows and Bird, “Gold, Guns, and China.”
“Lack of Prosecution Hindering Fight against ‘Galamsey’—Operation Vanguard,” GhanaWeb (February 4, 2020).
“Two Groups Question Government over Seized Galamsey Excavators,” Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (January 29, 2020).
Sefanam Agboli, “Excavators Are Not Mobile Phones, Find Them—Ashigbe Tells Minister,” Ghana Report (January 29, 2020).
“Chinese Boy, 16, Killed during Crackdown on Illegal Gold Mining in Ghana,” ABC News(October 15, 2012); “Ghana Probes Death of Illegal Chinese Gold Miner,” BBC(October 15, 2012).
Dan Levin, “Ghana’s Crackdown on Chinese Gold Miners Hits One Rural Area Hard,” New York Times (June 29, 2013).
“Police Storm Community as Angry Youth Burn Mining Equipment in Eastern Region,” GhanaWeb (April 12, 2020).
“Chinese Galamseyers Take Over Wassa Forests,” GhanaWeb (October 20, 2016).
Ishaq Akmey Alhassan, “Galamsey and the Making of a Deep
State in Ghana: Implications for National Security and Development,” Research on Humanities and Sciences Vol. 4, No. 16 (2014), pp. 47–56.
“Lack of Prosecution Hindering Fight,” GhanaWeb; “Operation Vanguard Ordered to Withdraw from All Illegal Mining Areas,” GhanaWeb (February 27, 2020).
Nathan Andrews, “Digging for Survival and/or Justice? The Drivers of Illegal Mining Activities in Western Ghana,” Africa Today 62, No. 2 (2015), pp. 3–24.
“Galamseyers will ‘fight to death’ ” GhanaWeb.
Alhassan, “Galamsey and the Making of a Deep State.”
James Boafo, Sebastian Angzoorokuu Paalo and Senyo Dotsey,
“Illicit Chinese Small-Scale Mining in Ghana: Beyond Institutional Weakness?” Sustainability 11, No. 21 (2019).
Keith Slack, “In Ghana, Civil Society Is Driving Mining and Oil Reforms,” Politics of Poverty blog (Boston and Washington, DC: Oxfam, September 2017).
In October 2020, Chicago was headed toward an increase of at least 51 percent in the murder rate and a 52 percent increase in shootings by the end of the year, compared to
2019.1 The city’s advocates and social service providers projected that COVID-19 will also increase domestic violence, which is often referred to as the shadow pandemic.2 Researchers and policymakers are at a loss to explain the spike in homicides and gun violence in Chicago and other cities around the country, and thus cannot come up with clear suggestions on how to reduce these trends.3
Many Chicago nonprofit organizations are actively working to mitigate violence. A cursory review of prominent programs addressing gun violence in Chicago reveals that most focus their efforts on one type of actor: men, specifically cis men of color. The vast majority of these programs ignore how women are affected by and participate in violence.4
We argue that understanding the gendered dynamics of conflict helps us better understand increasing rates of violence and ways to mitigate it. A review of the data reveals that gun violence in the city is highly correlated to domestic violence, including sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Areas with increased rates of domestic There is a distinct lack of research examining the links between SGBV and urban gun violence in the United States generally. This absence of a gender lens for examining violence stands in stark contrast to what we have learned in conflict-affected countries around the world. Applying a women, peace and security lens to US urban violence can produce a better understanding of what factors contribute to spikes in violence in US cities and what could be done to mitigate them. As with any armed conflict, one cannot fully understand it without recognizing women’s and men’s experiences of it.6
violence also experience higher rates of gun violence.5 These trends indicate the need for more careful attention to the role of gender in the rising violence in Chicago: how and why women and men participate in violence, how and why women and men are victims of violence, and how gun violence intersects with other forms of violence—especially intimate-partner violence.
In this brief, we first justify our interpretation of Chicago’s gun violence as a form of armed conflict and explain how the women, peace, and security (WPS) lens can aid in its analysis. Second, we share results of a data analysis in which we map the prevalence and interconnectedness of domestic violence and gun violence across the city. We use domestic violence as a proxy to assess SGBV, as domestic violence measurements are the only available data that capture SGBV in Chicago. Third, we recommend shifts in data collection, research, and policies to take gendered dynamics into account and motivate more effective programming in Chicago and elsewhere.
Gun Violence as Armed Conflict
We maintain that gun violence in Chicago constitutes an armed conflict for two reasons. First, it meets the baseline intensity and organization requirements for armed conflict classification in Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II (APII) of the Geneva Conventions.7 Responses to gun violence have met the APII intensity requirement because military forces—not just police—have been deployed to mitigate and prosecute the violence.8 It has also met the organization requirement, as 61 percent of Chicago’s homicides are connected to gangs.9 Moreover, long-standing control over distinct territories, specifically neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city, is maintained by prevalent gun violence.10
Second, Chicago is described as a war zone in popular narratives. In 2009, local rapper King Louie coined the term Chiraq, equating Chicago with armed conflict in Iraq.11 The nickname gained popularity as a commentary on pervasive gun violence experienced by many communities. Chi-raq was also the title of a 2015 film adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata set on Chicago’s South Side.12 Although thearchetype of women withholding sex from men to achieve peace does not accurately represent women’s experience of gun violence in Chicago, the continued comparison of Chicago to widely acknowledged sites of armed conflict is noteworthy. These narratives elucidate how popular descriptions of Chicago as a war zone produce meaning and justify actions, including the involvement of federal forces to combat Chicago’s gun violence. 13
Recognizing gun violence in Chicago as armed conflict enables us to examine its gendered dynamics through the lens of the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda. Applying a WPS framework in our analysis means that we evaluate gun violence with special attention to the different ways men and women experience armed conflict in the city. Moreover, we examine how different experiences of gun violence are connected to other types of violence, especially SGBV.
Mapping Gun Violence and SGBV
Scholars and policymakers have yet to adequately evaluate connections between SGBV and gun violence in Chicago, despite evidence that they are related. Between 2016 and 2019, shootings in which a woman was the victim increased 13.5 percent each year.14 Police typically described these victims as connected to a “gang lifestyle,” but some were also described as victims of crimes of opportunity, armed robberies, arguments that became violent, or domestic violence. There is also evidence that SGBV is more prevalent in Chicago neighborhoods with significant rates of both crime and poverty. Between 2002 and 2016, four neighborhoods in Chicago with the highest homicide rate also had the highest sexual assault rate. For example, West Englewood reported 50 homicides and 42 sexual assaults in 2016.15
While there is a paucity of research on these dynamics in Chicago, an ever-growing body of literature examines these dynamics internationally in conflict-affected settings. For instance, societies in other parts of the world that have higher levels of gender-based violence within households have been found to be more likely to engage in violent group interactions.16 Thus SGBV can be a useful predictor of violence outside of homes, and it suggests that these dynamics likely exist outside of conventional conflict areas. The 2020 US WPS index examines women’s status along the interconnected dimensions of inclusion, justice, and security at the state level. The report found that states that do well in one of these dimensions also do well in the others and vice versa, suggesting that systems of (dis)empowerment often reinforce each other.17
To analyze the relationship between Chicago’s gun violence and SGBV systematically, we mapped and compared the prevalence of both throughout the city. In particular, we asked: Do the same areas of the city have high levels of gun violence and SGBV? Or would the two variables appeared geographically unrelated?
We used citywide data on gun violence and SGBV over the same period. For data on gun violence, we used the city of Chicago’s Data Portal, which provides data on calls to the police (excluding homicides that include identifiable data for either victim or perpetrator) from 2001 to the present. The best publicly available data source for SGBV (and the only citywide source for domestic violence data) is the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) Domestic Violence Quarterly Statistical Report, which maps average daily calls to the police by police district for domestic disturbance, domestic battery, or violation of orders of protection during January 2014–September 2014.18 This report, therefore, includes domestic violence that might not necessarily be considered SGBV—such as elder abuse—andit is limited to crimes reported to the police. Because SGBV in particular is typically underreported, the report likely undercounts incidents of SGBV.19 While using domestic violence data as a proxy for SGBV’s prevalence in Chicago is not ideal, it is the best option at present.
Using R, we entered these daily averages as a new dataset in order to compare it with CPD crime data from the Data Portal.20 We filtered the raw CPD data by month to include only 1 January–30 September 2014. Within this time frame, we tallied all gun-related calls to the police, excluding possession, sale, or registration offenses, by police district. The remaining crimes are categorized in the database as assault, battery, robbery, sexual assault, and reckless or unlawful use of a
Table 1: Average Daily Domestic Calls and Total Gun-RelatedCalls to Police per Chicago Police District, January 2014-September 2014
Average Daily
Police District
Total Gun Calls
Domestic Calls
7
500+
40-49
3
401-500
30-39
4
401-500
30-39
5
401-500
20-29
6
401-500
30-39
11
401-500
30-39
2
301-400
20-29
15
301-400
20-29
25
301-400
20-29
8
201-300
30-39
9
201-300
20-29
10
201-300
20-29
12
201-300
10-19
22
201-300
10-19
14
101-200
10-19
24
101-200
10-19
1
<100
1-9
16
<100
10-19
17
<100
10-19
18
<100
1-9
19
<100
1-9
20 <100 1-9
Source: Domestic Violence Quarterly Statistical Report, Chicago Police Crime Data
firearm. This approach was meant to isolate incidents of gun violence, which has some drawbacks. First, some crimes in the CPD database, such as aggravated vehicular hijacking, may have but did not necessarily include a gun. Second, while illegal weapons sales are not directly harming someone, they contribute to an environment of armed conflict. Third, because homicides are not included in the data, a fatal dimension of gun violence is not included. Fourth, some crimes included in our measure of gun violence could also be considered SGBV. In particular, criminal sexual assault with a gun (total count: 50) and aggravated domestic battery using a handgun (total count: 3) are both included. While it is likely that many of these crimes also count as SGBV, we cannot be sure, as we do not have detailed information about these crimes.
We sorted each district’s total gun-related calls by the hundreds to create a categorical scale similar to the average daily domestic violence calls. Initially, we calculated each district’s daily average calls to the police regarding gun violence to compare with the daily average calls to the police regarding domestic violence. Those averages were too small for meaningful analysis—no district averaged more than 3 calls per day. Because of this, we opted to calculate total gun violence calls per police district instead. This suggests that, while gun violence in Chicago gets more publicity, domestic violence occurs much more frequently. Total gun calls to the police and daily average domestic violence calls per district are sorted by number of gun calls in descending order (table 1).
Table 1 and Figure 1 show that the districts with more gunrelated calls generally have more domestic violence calls. A few stand out: District 8 has the 10th highest number of
Figure 1: Police Districts with Higher Numbers of Gun Calls Tend to Have Higher Daily Rates of Domestic Violence Calls
<100 101-200 201-300 301-400 401-500 500+
Gun Calls
gun-related calls out of 22 districts but a relatively high average number of domestic violence-related calls. Districts 2, 5, 15, and 25 have lower daily domestic violence call averages but higher numbers of gun-related calls. Police District 7 has the highest number of gun-related calls and the highest daily average domestic violence calls to the police. This district includes West Englewood, one of four neighborhoods with the highest homicide and sexual assault rates from 2002 to 2016.21
We then created maps demarking CPD district boundaries that show ranges of gun-related calls to the police (figure 2) and daily average domestic calls (figure 3). To visualize the relationship between gun violence and SGBV,22 we overlaid the hexcodes for the corresponding green and blue for each district to get a combined map (figure 4). The darker shaded districts have higher instances of both gun violence and SGBV. These districts are concentrated on the South and West sides of the city, areas shaped by decades of racist housing and economic development policy.23 This analysis illuminates not only the interconnectedness of gun violence and SGBV but also the critical need to address them concurrently in policies that take the city’s history into account.
Figure 2: Gun-Related Call Events to Chicago Police by District
Year to Date September 2014
Source: Chicago City Data Portal
Figure 3: Domestic Violence Calls in Chicago by Police District
Year to Date September 2014
Source: Chicago Police Department Quarterly Domestic Violence
Statistical Summary
Figure 4: Overlaying the Maps for Gun-Related Calls and Average Daily Domestic Violence Calls Shows that Districts with High
Rates of One Type of Violence Tend to Have High Rates of Both
Source: Chicago City Data Portal and Chicago Police Department Quarterly
Domestic Violence Statistical Summary
Recommendations
In this brief, we have pointed to gun violence’s connections to domestic violence and SGBV. Our analysis underscores gun violence’s existence amid and in relationship to broader systems of violence. It also highlights the need for data disaggregation about violence to better understand the prevalence of SGBV. Much more needs to be done to address violence’s gendered dynamics and the ways that systems of violence intersect in Chicago. As such, we have several recommendations for policymakers, program directors, and researchers:
First, we recommend that policymakers and programs increase funding and support for women-focused efforts in existing gun violence programs. Programs must recognize men and women as differently involved in systems of violence and work to address the interconnectedness of these systems, especially SGBV.
Second, Chicago’s domestic violence data need to be disaggregated by type of violence—for example, separating elder abuse from spousal abuse—as well as by gender. This disaggregation is necessary to accurately assess the prevalence of SGBV in the city.
Third, data should track citywide experiences of violence per community area rather than police district.24 The city’s 77 community areas are generally comparable to Chicago neighborhoods and have remained mostly unchanged since the 1920s, whereas police districts may touch multiple neighborhoods and may change in response to funding or other concerns. Tracking SGBV by community area over time would build a more nuanced understanding of violence in the city than is currently possible.
Fourth, we encourage WPS practitioners to consider more carefully how a WPS framework can be applied to more local contexts, rural and urban. Some work has already been done on this regarding local action plans, especially in post-conflict settings, but we recommend this work be broadened to consider the gendered dynamics of violence in settings like Chicago that do not necessarily fall within WPS practitioners’ conventional understanding of armed conflict.25
The authors are especially grateful to Rashelle Brownfield and Nicole
Mattea for their research assistance. We also thank Mia Diaz and Tria Raimundo for their time spent providing feedback on earlier versions. Additionally, we are most thankful for Olivia Shinner’s help with research, revisions, and imagining what this project would look like. Lastly, we are grateful to Chantal de Jonge Oudraat for her insights and support.
References
Patrick Smith, “20% in 2020: Setting Goals for Reducing Murder in
Chicago,” WBEZ: NPR Chicago (January 28, 2020). See also Chicago Police Department, “CompStat Week 43: Report Covering the Week of 19-October-20 through 25-October-20” (Chicago: Chicago Police Department, October 27, 2020).
Kate Thayer, “ ‘Abuse Doesn’t Stop in Times of Pandemic’: Domestic Violence Advocates Trying to Serve Survivors during Coronavirus Pandemic,” Chicago Tribune (March 19, 2020).
Matt Ford, “What’s Causing Chicago’s Homicide Spike?” The Atlantic (January 24, 2017); see also Stef W. Knight and Michael Sykes, “The
Deadliest City: Behind Chicago’s Segregated Shooting Sprees,” Axios, August 14, 2018. This year, many cities have seen a summer spike in homicides, which experts are attributing in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Chicago, this is occurring on top of persistently high numbers. See Thomas Fuller and Tim Arango, “Police Pin a Rise in Murders on an Unusual Suspect: Covid,” The New York Times, October 29, 2020.
See Jeremy Gorner and William Lee, “Women Increasingly Caught
Up in Chicago’s Violence,” Chicago Tribune (June 28, 2019); Safia Samee Ali, “Sexual Violence Victims in Chicago’s Deadliest Neighborhoods Carrying Trauma on Top of Gun Crime,” NBC News, May 28, 2017.
See, for example, Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, The Oxford
Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2019); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2014[1989]); Jean Bethke-Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995[1987]).
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Geneva
Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War (Fourth Geneva Convention), August 12, 1949, 75 UNTS 287;
ICRC, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August
1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), June 8, 1977, 1125 UNTS 609. There is precedence for such an expanded definition of armed conflict. See Anna Applebaum and Briana Mawby, Gang Violence as Armed Conflict: A New Perspective on El Salvador (Washington, DC: Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, 2018).
NPR, “Strike force Is Created to Combat Chicago Gun Violence,” Weekend Edition Saturday, July 1, 2017.
ABC News, “Hidden America: Don’t Shoot, I Want to Grow Up,” October 18, 2011.
Jen Christensen, “Tackling Chicago’s ‘Crime Gap,’ ” CNN, March 14, 2014.
Derek Alderman and Janna Caspersen, “What’s in a Nickname? In the Case of Chiraq, a Whole Lot,” American Association of Geographers Newsletter (Washington, DC: American Association of Geographers, March 4, 2015).
Manohla Dargis, “Review: Spike Lee’s ‘Chi-raq’ a Barbed Takedown of Gang Wars, With Sex as the Weapon,” The New York Times, December 3, 2015.
Annick T.R. Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 2.
Gorner and Lee, “Women Increasingly Caught Up in Chicago’s Violence.”
Ali, “Sexual Violence Victims in Chicago’s Deadliest Neighborhoods.”
Valerie M. Hudson et al., “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2009): 7–45.
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS), The Best and Worst States to Be a Woman: Introducing the U.S. Women, Peace, and Security Index 2020 (Washington, DC: GIWPS 2020).
Chicago Police Department, Quarterly Domestic Violence Statistical
Summary—YTD September 2014 (Chicago: Chicago Police Department, 2014). It includes crimes not covered under the Illinois Domestic Violence Act (which is included as a variable in the citywide crime data), making it impossible to replicate the report using what is publicly available. Further reports have not been released.
Based on the 2018 survey, less than half (43 percent) of violent victimizations were reported to police, which was not statistically different from 2017 (45 percent). Criminal Victimization Report, 2018 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, September 2019).
To perform the analysis, we used R packages tidyverse, ggplot2, sf, rgeos, rdgal, RColorBrewer, and readr.
Ali, “Sexual Violence Victims in Chicago’s Deadliest Neighborhoods.”
This was difficult using ggplot, the package used to generate the initial maps. To get around the package’s limitations, we created an index to track the hotline call average and number of gun-related incidents for each district.
Eve L. Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in
Chicago 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).
A good example of what this could look like is the Sinai Community Health survey (Chicago: Sinai Health System, 2016), reports available at sinaisurvey.org.
See, for example, Roslyn Warren et al., Women’s Peacebuilding Strategies amidst Conflict: Lessons from Myanmar and Ukraine (Washington, DC: GIWPS, 2017).
By Grace Ndirangu and Pearl Karuhanga Atuhaire
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, which is the highest-level classification the organization can give when a virus causes sustained
community-level outbreaks across countries and regions.1 The declaration set in motion national preparedness plans, including efforts to identify cases as efficiently as possible and minimize serious illness and deaths with proper treatment. COVID-19 has also created many socioeconomic challenges, including increased violence against women and girls.
In response, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on all national governments to incorporate prevention and redress of violence against women in their response plans for COVID-19. The socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on humanitarian contexts merits particular attention. For example, increased incidence of intimate partner violence and child marriages have been reported in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, which hosts thousands of Rohingya refugees.2 In Jordan, Plan International reported an increase in emotional and physical abuses perpetrated by intimate partners or family members.3
Emergencies often make women and girls more vulnerable to gender-based violence, and COVID-19 has exacerbated these challenges. Women and girls in humanitarian and emergency settings also grapple with inadequate sources of livelihoods, poor living conditions, lack of social support systems, and lack of legal documentation. Impoverishment may lead refugees, particularly women, to resort to a gamut of coping mechanisms, including survival sex work, petty theft, drug abuse, and alcoholism.4
This policy brief examines the gender-related consequences of COVID-19 through the lens of increased violence against women and girls in refugee settings in Uganda and Kenya. Several factors—economic stress, uncertainty about the future, fears about the virus, and patriarchal gender norms— lead to increased levels of violence in many households. We propose practical solutions to address this violence so that women and girls can live in free, safe communities during the pandemic.
Refugees in Uganda and Kenya
With 1.4 million registered refugees and asylum seekers, Uganda hosts the third-largest refugee population in the world and the largest in Africa.5 Kenya hosts nearly half a million registered refugees and asylum seekers, with close to 90,000 living in urban areas.6 Most of the refugees are from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South
Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia.7
Women and children make up the vast majority (82 percent) of this population. In addition, around 56 percent of refugees are younger than 15, and 25 percent are younger than 5.8 In May 2020, Amnesty International reported that there were more than 10,000 displaced persons at the Ugandan border with the DRC who were waiting to seek refuge.9 In countries such as South Sudan and DRC, women and girls are at great risk of being taken hostage by militia groups, becoming victims of trafficking, and of being sexually exploited and abused since they cannot flee to safety across the border.10 Most refugees living in Nairobi, Kenya, reside in poor urban neighborhoods with limited resources. In Uganda, most refugees live in refugee settlements—that is, an encampment in a geographical area designated by the asylum country’s government. Refugees in settlements are given a small piece of land to farm to help achieve a measure of selfsustainability. They are also provided with basic living support, including food, water, education, health services, and other infrastructure needs. Despite this assistance, most refugees in the settlements (particularly large families) are dependent on additional humanitarian aid. Refugees living in suburbs of Kampala and other towns in Uganda that are not officially designated for refugee settlement have to find their own means to survive. Indeed, humanitarian agencies only serve refugees living in settlements.
The Pandemic and Increased SGBV
Kenya reported its first case of coronavirus on March 13, 2020. By April, President Uhuru Kenyatta had issued a series of statements and had put in place measures to curb the spread of the virus. These included restricting movement into the country, banning all public gatherings, requiring people to work from home, dusk to dawn curfews, and restriction of movement in and out of Nairobi and Mombasa counties. All land borders closed, which meant that people seeking asylum in Kenya could no longer enter.
In Uganda, which announced its first case on March 21, 2020, the government closed all refugee reception centers at the border and suspended the services of the Department of Refugees offices for 30 days starting March 25.11 While these measures may have been broadly effective against the pandemic, they carried risks, particularly for vulnerable groups such as women and girl refugees.
Since the measures were put in place, the Kenyan National Council on Administration of Justice has reported a significant rise in cases of sexual violence, including domestic violence. In April 2020, almost 120,000 women and girls in Kenya who were internally displaced and affected by floods needed services and psychosocial first aid to deal with the effects of sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV). Among refugees living in the camps and urban areas, 61 cases of gender-based violence (GBV) were reported in March 2020, and in June 2020, 150 cases were reported. UNHCR attributed this to the government’s “stay in place” measures.12 By June, approximately 400,000 women and girls in urban informal settlements needed access to basic household supplies and dignity kits to reduce the risk of GBV, and an additional 440,000 girls in counties with a high prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) required social protection and psychosocial support, including dignity kits. It was also noted that at least 2,350 women and girls across the country required shelters and safe houses for protection from GBV and FGM.13
Since January 2020, 1,860 SGBV incidents were recorded in refugee settlements and Kampala, with 1,725 female survivors and 135 male survivors, according to UNHCR Uganda. Of the total, 729 incidents were reported between
January and March and another 1,131 between April and June, representing an increase of 55 percent in the three months after enforcement of COVID-19 lockdown measures began in Uganda. Out of 14 sites hosting refugees (13 settlements and an urban site in Kampala), 12 showed an increase in the number of SGBV incidents, with Kyangwali and Bidibidi reporting the highest rates. Through the end of
June, the top three reported incidents were physical assaults (566), rape (486), and psychological abuse (396).14
In Uganda and Kenya, the governments’ closure of borders to new refugees and asylum seekers had impacts on humanitarian settings. The pandemic has exacerbated three longstanding challenges that fuel the rise in SGBV: 1) economic insecurity, 2) health and basic needs insecurity, and 3) patriarchal gender norms. Together, they have pushed some women to adopt illicit and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Economic Insecurity
As businesses are forced to downsize or close due to COVID-19 restrictions, urban refugees are the first to lose their jobs. Before the pandemic, it was estimated that more than 70 percent of urban refugees were dependent on casual labor and daily wage work. The remainder worked in the informal economy and were already struggling to meet their basic needs.15
In Kenya and Uganda, a dusk to dawn curfew and movement restrictions reduced working hours, forcing most businesses to close earlier than usual. Some families are still restricted to their homes, and live-in help and those who offer daily services have had their work suspended in some households that seek to limit contact with strangers. Urban refugees depend on the informal market economy and run small enterprises as artisans, tailors, hairdressers, traders in precious metal and diamonds, and vendors of food and second-hand clothes.16
Most female refugees, including those living in refugee settlements, supplement the family income by working in the traditionally female-dominated informal economy by braiding hair, washing clothes, and tailoring. These sources of income have been curtailed, providing less social protection to mitigate the effects of lost livelihoods.17 Social distancing directives also affect female refugees who are no longer welcome to domestic jobs they held before the COVID-19 pandemic. One female refugee in Nairobi said:
Before this pandemic, refugee households were able to meet basic needs, but now most cannot even afford three meals a day. Our casual jobs cleaning people’s homes or hawking are no longer available, and we are begging for handouts. Some of us have used our little savings and even sold assets to pay rent so that we are not kicked out of our houses.18
Indeed, restricted movements and curfews have led to closures in most Kenyan and Ugandan businesses, while some have collapsed.19 Refugees have resorted to spending their savings, and in some instances families have started selling assets. Families who once had flourishing businesses now worry about meeting basic needs, including for rent and food.20 With no income or social support, sexual violence and the commercial exploitation of refugee women and adolescents for sex are almost inevitable.21
Halting markets and other informal trade has contributed to female refugees adopting other survival mechanisms such as survival sex work and working overtime with no pay to support their families.22 This exposes them to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections and increases the rates of unwanted pregnancies among refugees. This is especially worrisome because both access and level of reproductive health services provided by civil society organizations and humanitarian actors have declined.23
Livelihoods have also shrunk because of the falling away of remittances. It is estimated that the majority of urban refugees depend on remittances from relatives outside Uganda such as in Sweden and the United States.24 Remittances form a crucial part of the economic wellbeing of many people, including refugees, in most African countries, including Kenya and Uganda.
According to the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, the remittances to Africa are expected to drop by more than 20 percent due to lockdowns and economic crises induced by the pandemic. The drop in remittances means that the flow of important sources of cash relief for poor families—including refugees and displaced people—has been affected by unemployment and salary cuts in other countries.25 The fall in the wages and employment of migrant workers, who are more susceptible to loss of employment and wages during an economic crisis in a host Health and Basic Needs Insecurity
Most urban refugees live in overcrowded, unhygienic conditions that are particularly vulnerable to the spread of the virus. For example, thousands of urban refugees live in poor urban neighborhoods in Nairobi with little access to clean water, making it nearly impossible to practice regular hand washing.26
In addition, as countries such as Kenya implement measures to protect the national population from the effects of COVID-19, refugees are often excluded. Owing to their lack of legal documentation, refugees are not included in national systems that provide assistance to the most vulnerable.27 In Nairobi, nongovernmental organizations and other partners have provided social assistance to refugees to help them cope with the effects of the coronavirus. However, given the shortage of funds, the reduction in the amount of financial assistance given to refugees and the high costs of living in urban areas, the assistance given is not sufficient to meet the most urgent needs. While some cash assistance for refugees is distributed to the most vulnerable, less than 1 percent of the total urban refugee population in Nairobi receives financial support; the rest fend for themselves.28 Those who cannot fend for themselves are advised to move to designated camp areas. Border closures and containment measures further hamper agencies’ delivery of aid to areas where refugees reside. Restrictions in movement and resources being diverted to fight COVID-19 have also restricted access to reproductive health care, particularly important in the case of intimate-partner violence and also increasing the risk of maternal mortality. Other risks include an increase in sexually transmitted infections, unplanned pregnancies, and complications arising from harmful traditional practices.
Access to social services, including for reporting SGBV during the lockdowns, has been severely curtailed. Since most refugees lack government-issued identification, they are already wary of interactions with police officers or law enforcement authorities. As a result, most women and girls or survivors of violence avoid approaching police stations where they can report these incidents. In the absence of other reporting mechanisms, these incidents likely go unreported.
country, has had a serious impact on the livelihoods of those most vulnerable and taken away economic safety nets.
Uncertainty about access to food produces stress. The World Food Programme announced 30 percent cuts in its food relief effort to Uganda. Monthly cash distributions have decreased from USD $9.00 to $6.00 per month, according to refugee reports. Worse still, refugees cannot travel to find other sources of food during lockdown. The cut in food rations and the inability to earn income to cover basic food and nutrition needs is a huge cause for concern for refugees, especially for female heads of household, who are now more worried about going hungry than they are about the spread of COVID-19.
Patriarchal Gender Norms
Carol Pavlish, an associate professor at the University of California’s Los Angeles School of Nursing, has studied life experiences of refugee women and men in the Kyaka II refugee settlement in Uganda. She found that the situation in the refugee settlements had a considerable impact on the relations between men and women. Pavlish notes that many men talked about the shame and powerlessness they felt as a result of their joblessness. Family members give the men little respect because the families feel they were not men enough to provide the necessary clothing and food to their families. Pavlish highlights one man’s plight:
When my wife sees a neighbour … has a new kitenge … she says, “You can see you are not husband to me.” It’s very difficult for us. Sometimes we just want to remember when we could buy clothes … but they don’t understand, so they start to complain and say, “You don’t have anything to do.” When they start to complain like that … you just leave and walk around all day.29
The closure of markets led to loss of jobs for male refugees who previously operated as vendors and small-scale retailers. The sudden loss of work cut off income to support children and women under their care.30 The pent-up frustration resulting from lockdown-induced economic hardship has increased emotional and physical violence, especially against female refugees and children.31
In accord with patriarchal societal norms, women and girls must seek male approval to get medical attention. Women and girls who contract COVID-19 will most likely be the last to seek medical assistance, therefore putting them at more risk of developing complications. Older women, nursing mothers, women with chronic conditions, or expectant
women are at even greater risk.32
In both Uganda and Kenya, the closure of schools, an overwhelmed health system, and requirements for social distancing have created conditions conducive to the resumption of female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage. In one report from Kenya, at least 79 girls aged 9-12 in local and refugee communities combined were found to have undergone FGM since schools closed in March 2020.33
Many of these harmful practices have been practiced clandestinely. Family members’ movements are restricted, making reporting of FGM difficult. Young women who have undergone FGM are incapacitated and cannot leave the house for some time. One refugee woman reported that some FGM survivors have their phones taken away so that they cannot even report to their friends and other family members. Moreover, they fear reprisals from close family members or will not submit reports that might cause their families trouble. Children face greater peril because they cannot go to police stations. Community leaders are more likely to report an issue with child marriages than the children themselves.
As in past epidemics, such as the Ebola crisis in Uganda, there are clear signs that women bear the brunt of emergent risks to public health, safety, and human rights. With schools closed to contain the spread of the virus, women and girls take on more household chores, which limits their economic opportunities. Women often also shoulder the greater burden of caregiving for old and sick members of their households.34 Where such women are also heads of households, loss of livelihoods due to the pandemic leads to increased poverty and food insecurity.
Because most refugees have limited or no access to savings, they cannot afford to go without employment for long periods. Containment measures render women unable to take care of their households. As a result, most will turn to negative coping mechanisms such as sex work to survive. In some cases, refugees must work despite quarantine measures, risking not only contracting the virus and infecting family members but also risking arrest.
Additional Barriers to SGBV Prevention
The challenges described above have led to increased violence against women and girls, particularly domestic and sexual violence. Three additional barriers in Uganda and Kenya stand out:
Underrepresentation of female police officers at police stations and other key response service centers. In Kenya and Uganda, most police officers are male, and although all police stations are required to have a gender desk, the desk is not always staffed by a female officer. In most cases, the gender desks are inactive, especially during the pandemic.35 Women and girls are hesitant to approach police stations because they fear facing a male police officer to report cases of rape and other forms of SGBV. Similarly, women are largely underrepresented in other service centers such as the hospitals and courts and even at community leadership levels such as local councils.
Lack of data.Data can play a critical role in the response and prevention of violence against women and girls.36 Data can improve understanding of how and why pandemics might lead to an increase in this violence, help identify risk factors and emerging needs, and reveal impacts on the availability and access to formal and informal services for women survivors of violence. Data enable organizations and other key partners to improve their programs to better help women access support and services.
Some organizations lack the resources and skills to be data driven. But most face added challenges to effective use of data during the COVID pandemic. They must decide if online platforms are a safe space for women to report abuse without alerting perpetrators, if it is ethical and acceptable to survey by telephone, and how social media can be used to collect data on increased gender-based violence.37 The pandemic also affected the way in which service-based data are collected and stored, particularly if services are being provided remotely. Especially if survivors of violence are confined with the perpetrators, lack of privacy makes remote data collection difficult.
Limited access to information and language barriers.
Language barriers limit many refugees’ access to information. This language barrier exacerbates their vulnerability not only to COVID-19 but also to other forms of discrimination and violence.38 Because most refugees do not understand English and major local languages, they do not get firsthand, timely information about COVID-19.39 Urban refugees in Kenya and Uganda speak mainly Arabic, French, and Swahili. This limits their comprehension of governmental directives and public health messages as well as general information, education, and communication messages.40 Thus they are at increased risk of getting inaccurate information from peers and networks about COVD-19 and SGBV prevention and response. The language barrier also presents a challenge in police stations, where translation services are not available. In some refugee communities, female survivors of rape avoid disclosing the crime to other community members for fear of ostracism. During the lockdown, female survivors of violence may be restricted from leaving the house, making it difficult to report cases of violence. Most women and girls also share mobile phones with other members of the household, including their male partners or spouses. This lack of privacy compounds the problem. Women cannot report incidents through available hotlines for fear that perpetrators may overhear their conversations.
Recommendations
Given the challenges we have described, we recommend the following practical steps that national and international actors should take immediately to improve the situation of refugees and internally displaced persons and reduce SGBV.
Disseminating information in local dialects is key for refugees so they can receive accurate, relevant information. Radio announcements, posters, and leaflets in French, Arabic, and Swahili, among other local refugee languages, should be distributed so that refugees can be included fully in national preparedness, prevention, and pandemic response measures.
Service providers must continue to raise awareness of the dangers of COVID-19 and SGBV. There must dedicated reporting mechanisms and channels for survivors to report incidences of violence, information on identifying and responding to SGBV, and lists of available services. Such activities can bridge the gaps between service providers and the communities they serve.
Building the capacity of pharmacists, police, community, and local administration leaders is important in raising awareness on SGBV prevention and response. Law enforcement officers should have greater capacity to identify signs of abuse, respond to emergency calls, and to handle survivors of violence who are fleeing abusive situations past curfew hours. Community and local administration leaders need the capacity and skills to address and respond to complaints of violence and abuse in their local communities. Nonmedical personnel such as pharmacists may be the first to come into contact with survivors of violence and need the capacity and skills to identify, report, and respond to those seeking assistance.
Governments and development and humanitarian organizations should acknowledge the gendered implications of COVID-19 and put in place genderresponsive COVID-19 prevention and response plans as well as sustainable age- and sex-disaggregated resilience and recovery programs. In addition, national contingency plans should include refugees at no cost. Moreover, humanitarian workers and their services should be deemed essential and therefore allowed access to the most vulnerable refugees in settlements and urban areas so they can identify the needs of the most vulnerable individuals and families and provide real-time support. Like other vulnerable host communities, refugees should benefit from government assistance in the form of food and other essential items distributed by national COVID-19 task forces.
Government authorities mandated to work on refugee issues, such as the Office of the Prime Minister in Uganda and the Refugee Affairs Secretariat in Kenya, should work with UNHCR and other relief organizations to ensure that refugees have continued access to services. Refugee local leadership such as traditional leaders and local council leaders should be engaged in building awareness about the available services. In refugee communities, frontline workers such as health care staff and other social workers need more training to understand the specific needs of refugees so they can deliver the appropriate pandemic protection over the short and long term. These might include psychosocial support and toll-free hotlines for information and assistance on SGBV, water sanitation and hygiene services, and other needs.
It is also critical that accurate, disaggregated data be collected during this period. Lack of such data could hamper post-pandemic recovery efforts. Public-private partnerships will be important to design and disseminate innovative solutions such as the use of apps to deliver goods, services, and information and to collect data from survivors of violence. Such innovations could include the use of mobile apps to deliver services and commodities and employ trained counselors in call centers. The counselors could work in the call centers in the guise of customer care agents. Data collection should be done in a manner that is ethical and confidential and should protect survivors of SGBV and the research teams. Data collection should also take into consideration the needs of marginalized groups of women, including the elderly, women with disabilities, adolescent girls, and ethnic minorities.
Governments and organizations should put refugee women at the center of solutions and recovery efforts in refugee settings. Refugee women are key resources for ensuring that recovery plans and longer-term solutions meet women’s needs, yet their input is typically not valued. Their participation should be sought in decision-making processes, including but not limited to those related to violence prevention and response. Governments should work through organized refugee women groups from different communities to ensure that they leave no one behind in the prevention of SGBV and COVID-19.
Conclusion
While measures have been put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19, these measures must at the very least do no harm. It is also important that the government involve stakeholders in designing and putting in place measures that will curb the spread of the virus. These measures should include interventions that protect women, girls, and other vulnerable groups from violence, abuse, and exploitation. The engagement of men and boys is important in designing measures for SGBV prevention and response, but women and girls must also be involved in the program cycle of all interventions.
References
First reported in December 2019 in Wuhan Province, China, COVID-19 is highly contagious and spreads through respiratory droplets.
International Office of Migration, Gender Analysis on COVID-19 (Geneva: IOM, 2020).
Plan International, Jordan Sees an Increase in Domestic Violence, Poor Access to Family Planning (Washington, DC: Plan International, May 20, 2020).
Gil Loescher and James Milner, “The Long Road Home: Protracted Refugee Situations in Africa,” Survival 47, no. 2 (2005).
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Global Focus, “Uganda,” web page (Geneva: UNHCR, June 30, 2020).
UNHCR Global Focus, “Kenya,” web page(Geneva: UNHCR, June 30, 2020).
UNHCR, Global Trends Forced Displacement in 2018 (Geneva: UNHCR, 2018). In Uganda, most refugees and asylum seekers are found in the West Nile, Northern, and Western parts of the country. See also Hadijah Mwenyango and Geroge Palattiyil, “Health Needs and Challenges of Women and Children in Uganda’s Refugee Settlements: Conceptualizing a Role for Social Work,” International Social Work 62, No. 6, (2019), pp. 1535–47.
World Bank, “Informing the Refugee Policy Response in Uganda: Results from the Uganda Refugee and Host Communities 2018 Household Survey,” web page (Washington DC: October 1, 2019).
Amnesty International, “East Africa: People Seeking Safety Are Trapped at Borders Due to COVID-19 Measures” (London: June 22, 2020).
Refugees International, “Gender Matters: COVID-19’s Outsized Impact on Displaced Women and Girls” (Washington, DC: May 7, 2020).
N. Atukunda, “Uganda Confirms First Coronavirus Case,” Sunday Monitor (Kampala: March 22, 2020).
UNHCR, “Kenya.”
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), “Kenya Situation Report” (Nairobi: June 17, 2020).
UNHCR, “Uganda COVID-19 Response Bimonthly Update” (UNHCR: Kampala, July 21,2020).
UNHCR and Danish Refugee Council, Living on the Edge: A Livelihood Status Report on Urban Refugees Living in Nairobi, Kenya (Nairobi: DRC, November 2012).
Michela Macchiavello, “Livelihood Strategies of Urban Refugees in Kampala,” Forced Migration Review (2004).
Naohiko Omata and Josiah Kaplan, “Refugee Livelihoods in
Kampala, Nakivale, and Kyangwali Refugee Settlements: Patterns of Engagement with the Private Sector,” Working Paper Series no. 95 (London: Refugee Studies Centre, October 2013).
Female refugee, interviewed by the authors in July 2020.
Naohiko Omata, “Many Refugees Living in Nairobi Struggle to Survive because of COVID-19,” The Conversation (London: May 20, 2020).
RefugePoint, “RefugePoint’s Response to COVID-19 in Nairobi,” web page (Nairobi: April 9, 2020).
UN Women, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Women,” Policy Brief (New York: April 9, 2020).
UNHCR, “Urban Refugees Struggling to Survive as Economic Impact of COVID-19 Worsens in East, Horn and Great Lakes of Africa” press briefing (Nairobi: May 26, 2020).
UN Women, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Women.”
Omata and Kaplan, “Refugee Livelihoods in Kampala, Nakivale, and Kyangwali.”
Roald Høvring, “10 Things You Should Know about Coronavirus and Refugees” (Oslo: Norwegian Refugee Council, March 16, 2020). 26. UNHCR, “Urban Refugees Struggling to Survive.”
Kathryn Taetzsch, “COVID-19: Invest Now in Cash/Voucher-Social Protection Scale-Up or Children Pay the Price Later” (Uxbridge, UK: World Vision Kenya, June 24, 2020).
UNHCR, “Kenya Monthly Operational Statistics” (Nairobi: UNHCR, July 2020).
Carol Pavlish, “Narrative Inquiry into Life Experiences of Refugee Women and Men,” InternationalNursing Review 54, no.1 (2007), pp 28–34.
Amber Peterman et al., “April 2020 Pandemics and Violence against Women and Children,” Working Paper 528 (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, April 2020).
Christina Haneef and Anushka Kalyanpur, Global Rapid Gender Analysis for COVID-19 (New York: International Rescue Committee and CARE, April 2020).
CARE, Gender Implications of COVID-19 Outbreaks in Development and Humanitarian Settings (New York: CARE, March 16, 2020).
UNOCHA, Kenya Situational Report.
UNOCHA, Global Humanitarian Response Plan: COVID-19 (New York: UNOCHA, April–December 2020).
Kikonde Righa, “Safeguarding Dignity of Sexual Violence Survivors in Kenya” (Nairobi: Trocaire, January 14, 2020).
“Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Girls,” Gender Data Series (Washington, DC: Devex and World Food Programme, May 2020).
UN Women and World Health Organization, “Violence against Women and Girls: Data Collection during COVID-19” (New York: UN Women and WHO, April 17, 2020).
T. Malaba, “Urban Refugees Cry Out for Help amid Lockdown,” Daily Monitor (March 29, 2020).
Deborah Leter and Gatwal Gatkuoth, “Fears in Uganda over Coronavirus Outbreak in Refugee Settlements,” Al Jazeera (April 8, 2020).
UN Populations Fund, Uganda, “In Recognition of Translators Changing Lives in Emergencies” news release (New York: UNFPA, March 12, 2018).
By Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, Kayla McGill and Zi Xue
UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) called for greater participation of women in peace and security decision-making processes and underscored the importance of incorporating a gender perspective when addressing international peace and security challenges. In November 2017, the US Congress adopted the Women, Peace and Security Act, which posited that “the United States should be a global leader in promoting the meaningful participation of women in conflict prevention, management and resolution, and post-conflict relief and recovery efforts.”1 While much progress has been made since 2000, the roles and numbers of women in foreign policy and security establishments remain underdeveloped, including in the United States.
In 2018, Women In International Security (WIIS)—as part of an effort to measure the gender disparities in the US foreign policy and security communities—surveyed 22 US foreign policy and international security think tanks.2 This scorecard provides an update to that survey. This scorecard also spotlights the nuclear security community—both as a subset of the foreign policy and security community and as its own community.3
Foreign policy and international security experts in the United States have taken renewed interest in issues related to greatpower competition, including nuclear security, arms control and disarmament issues. In addition, at both international and national levels, policymakers and non-governmental actors have recognized the lack of women in nuclear security, arms control and disarmament issues. For example, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2010 that urged UN member states to promote the equitable representation of women in the field of disarmament and to strengthen women’s effective participation.4 In 2018, the UN Secretary-General’s agenda for disarmament called for the full and equal participation of women in all decision-making processes related to disarmament and international security. The UN Secretary General also committed to gender parity on all panels, boards, expert groups and other bodies established under his auspices in the field of disarmament.5 These efforts are all part of the national and international commitments made under the WPS agenda.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also undertaken a range of initiatives to raise awareness about the lack of women in the nuclear security, arms control and disarmament communities. For example, Article 36 (a UKbased NGO created in 2011) and the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) have tracked women’s scant representation in multilateral disarmament fora.6 In November 2018, Laura Holgate, the former US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), launched the Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy (GCNP) initiative to address gender imbalances in the field.7 As of July 2020, heads of 58 US and non-US organizations had committed to “breaking down barriers and making gender equity a working reality in their spheres of influence.”8 The International Gender Champions Disarmament Impact Group published a Gender and Disarmament Resource Pack in 2018 outlining what a gender perspective in arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament might look like.9 In 2019, New America examined the role of women in nuclear policy, including
how women navigated the nuclear security field and how gender diversity (or rather the lack thereof) affected US policymaking.10 The Ploughshares Fund committed $1 million to a Women’s Initiative Campaign in April 2019 to create greater gender diversity within the nuclear establishment.11
There is thus progress in the advancement of the role of women in nuclear security. That said, there is very little data with respect to the representation of women in the nuclear security arena.
This WIIS Gender Scorecard seeks to fill this void.
To assess how well women are integrated into this community, we examined the number of women experts working on nuclear security issues in US think tanks. We also examined the number of women writing on arms control and nuclear security issues and being published in academic and specialized journals. Think tanks and journals play an important role in shaping foreign and defense policies, including nuclear security policies. Indeed, in the United States members of think tanks frequently move in and out of many critical positions in government. Together with their colleagues in academia, they also participate in policy debates in the media and in writing for specialized academic journals.
In sum, this scorecard does three main things:
Scoring the Tanks. We assess the gender distribution in 32 think tanks in the United States—22 foreign policy and international security think tanks and 10 think tanks and programs that are more specifically focused on arms control and nuclear security policy. We also examine the extent to which gender has been integrated into programming.12
Table 1:Washington, DC Think Tanks with Women at the Helm
Center for American Progress (CAP)
Ms. Neera Tanden, President and CEO
2011
German Marshall Fund (GMF)
Dr. Karen Donfried, President
2014
Heritage Foundation
Ms. Kay Coles James, President
2017
New America
Dr. Anne-Marie Slaugther, CEO
2013
Wilson Center for International Scholars
Ms. Jane Harman, President and CEO
2011
Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control
Ms. Valerie Lincy, Executive Director
2012
Scoring the Journals. We review the gender distribution in 11 major international security journals and five major arms control and nuclear security journals. In addition, we examine to what extent gender perspectives are represented in the journals.
Bringing into Focus the Nuclear Security Community. We examine the gender distribution of nuclear security experts in 32 think tanks. In addition, we consider the gender distribution of articles on arms control and nuclear security issues in 11 major international security journals and 5 major arms control and nuclear security journals. We also examine to what extent gender perspectives are represented in arms control and nuclear security articles.
The Headlines
Despite some progress, the national and international security field, including the nuclear security field, remains a maledominated field.
The percentage of women leading think tanks has declined, from 32 percent in 2018 to 19 percent in 2020.
(See Table 1)
The percentage of women on think tank governing boards has increased slightly, from 22 percent in 2018 to
25 percent in 2020. (See Figure 1)
The percentage of women experts working on foreign policy, national and international security issues has increased, from 27 percent in 2018 to 35 percent in 2020.13
(See Figure 2)
The nuclear security community is small. The majority of arms control and nuclear experts work in specialized think tanks and publish in specialized journals.
Of the foreign policy and international security think tanks surveyed, only 10 percent of experts (3 percent women and 7 percent men) focus entirely or in part on nuclear issues.14
(See Figure 3)
There are 162 nuclear experts working in the specialized arms control and nuclear security think tanks and programs—49 (30 percent) are women.15
Despite renewed interest in nuclear security issues, the percentage of articles devoted to these issues remains small, and few have women authors.
In the international security journals only 9 percent of articles published between 2015 and 2019 were devoted to nuclear security. Only 15 percent of those articles were written by women. (See Figure 6.)
In the arms control and nuclear security journals, women wrote 17 percent of the articles on nuclear security issues.
Gender perspectives remain largely ignored in the national and international security, including the nuclear security, community.
Only one out of 32 think tanks has integrated gender into its programming.
In the academic and specialized literature, most articles with a “gender” perspective focused on women in the field—very few articles examined how gender (and notions of masculinity and femininity) shapes thinking about national and international security, including about nuclear security.16
This scorecard shows that women in the international security field, including in the nuclear security field, remain severely underrepresented. The percentage of women experts and women authors remain well below the 60 percent of women enrolled for over a decade in graduate programs (master’s and doctoral programs) in the social and behavioral science (including political science and international relations); the over 55 percent of women students in the professional schools of international affairs; the 43 percent of women members of the International Studies Association (ISA); and the 38 percent of women members of the ISA’s International Security Studies Section (ISSS).17
While this scorecard does not incorporate any qualitative interviews in the community, there have been a number of studies that examine how women experience the international security and nuclear security field. A 2019 survey of the members of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association (ISA) showed considerable problems within the international security community, of which the nuclear security community is a subset. The survey showed that women were more likely to report hostility and exclusion and to describe the section as “insular,” “clubby” and an “old boys’ network.”18 In her 2019 study of women in the nuclear arms control and nonproliferation field, Heather Hurlburt talked about the “gender tax” that women in nuclear policy face. She shows “how experiences of sexism, harassment, and gendered expectations translate into constant mental and emotional weight.”19 A 2019 report about the nuclear security field, even though not focused on gender, showed that early and midcareer women professionals found the field rife with
The lack of gender diversity (including ethnic and racial diversity) and the small number of women experts have serious implications not only for the field itself, but also for policy.21
One such implication is that a small group of mostly likeminded people monopolizes influence and shapes policies. The fact that the nuclear security field seems to live very much in its own bubble or ecosystem of think tanks and journals reinforces its insular nature. Only 10 percent of experts (7 percent men and 3 percent women) in the think tanks focus on nuclear security issues. Most of the knowledge production and action on nuclear security happens in the specialized institutes and journals. Carol Cohn has written about how language, particularly in the nuclear sphere, kept women and different perspectives out.22 Michèle Flournoy has talked about how women had to fit into a “consensual straitjacket” in the nuclear policy sphere.23 Many early and midcareer professionals in this community defined the field as “old (in terms of both age and ideas) and static.” 24 “Most of the people who work in this field have been doing the same thing for 30 years, and their thinking has not evolved at all, especially in arms control. It’s the dogma. This community … hasn’t evolved with changes in the security environment.”25
Scoring the Tanks
The scorecard reviews think tanks along five main axes:
Gender distribution of those who lead think tanks;
Gender distribution of governing boards of the think tanks;
Gender distribution of experts in the tanks’ foreign policy and international security programs;
Gender distribution of experts focusing on nuclear security issues;
Level of commitment to gender and/or women’s programming.
Heads of Think Tanks
Of the 32 think tanks surveyed, women lead only six (19 percent). (See Table 1)
Of the 22 foreign policy and international security think tanks, women lead only five (23 percent): The Center for American Progress (CAP), the German Marshall Fund (GMF), the
Heritage Foundation, New America, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Compared with 2018, this is a decrease.26
Of the 10 arms control and nuclear security think tanks and programs, a woman heads one: the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
sexism and gender discrimination.20
Figure 1: Gender Ratio – Think Tank Governing Boards Governing Boards
2018 and 2020
The gender gap remains stark at the level of the governing 2018 boards. The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
•• MENWOMEN is the only institution that has achieved parity on its governing board. It is followed by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS),
which has 44 percent women on its governing board.
On average, the percentage of women members of the board of directors or trustees is 25 percent, compared with 23 percent in 2018. (See Figure 1) The specialized arms control and
nuclear institutes do a little better, with 31 percent of women
2020 on their boards.
• MEN
• WOMEN Experts
Compared with 2018, the overall gender balance in the think tanks has improved, from 27 percent of women experts in 2018 to 35 percent in 2020. (See Figure 2)27 That said, very few think tanks have achieved parity. There is also great variation among the think tanks. (See Table 2 and Figure 4. See also the
Appendix)
Figure 2: Gender Ratio – Foreign Policy and National and International Security Experts in Think Tanks 2018 and 2020Nuclear Experts
2018
•• MENWOMEN Of the 20 foreign policy and international security think tanks 28
surveyed, only 10 percent of experts (3 percent women and
7 percent men) focus entirely or in part on nuclear issues. (See Figure 3)
The gender distribution within this group of nuclear experts is slightly lower than the overall gender balance of these institutes. Of the 185 nuclear experts, 55 (30 percent) are
2020 women and 130 (70 percent) are men. (See Figure 5) ••MENWOMEN That said, many arms control and nuclear experts work in
specialized think tanks. We surveyed 10 major think tanks and programs that focus exclusively on arms control and nuclear security issues. Together they comprise 175 experts—162 of which focus on nuclear security issues as defined in this scorecard.29 The percentage of women experts working on nuclear security issues in these 10 think tanks and programs is 30 percent.
Figure 3: Percentage and Gender Ratio of Nuclear Experts
in Think Tanks There is, of course, great variation among the think tanks.
Out of the 10 think tanks, only one has achieved parity—the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). (See Table 3 and Figure 5.
See also the Appendix)
••• MEN NUCLEAR EXPERTS
WOMEN NUCLEAR EXPERTS
NON-NUCLEAR EXPERTS
Table 2: Percentage of Women Experts in Foreign Policy and International Security Think Tanks
Rank
Think Tank
% of Women
1
Aspen Institute
50%
2
US Institute of Peace (USIP)
49%
3
Third Way
47%
4
RAND Corporation
42%
Stimson Center
6
New America
41%
7
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
36%
8
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
31%
Atlantic Council
10
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
30%
Center for a New American Security (CNAS)
12
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
27%
13
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP)
26%
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
Brookings Institution
16
Heritage Foundation
22%
17
Center for American Progress (CAP)
19%
18
Cato Institute
11%
19
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)
10%
20
Lexington Institute
0%
Table 3: Percentage of Women Experts in Arms Control and Nuclear Security Think Tanks
Rank
Think Tank
% of Women
1
Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI)
55%
2
Arms Control Association
43%
Global Zero
4
Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control
40%
5
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
38%
6
Physicians for Social Responsibility
33%
7
Pugwash Council
28%
8
Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
27%
9
Federation of American Scientists
17%
10
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
11%
Substantive Focus
We also examined the substantive focus of those working on nuclear security issues to explore whether gender has an impact on the types of issues people study.30 Our survey found that the majority of nuclear experts focus on issues related to deterrence, followed by arms control. From their bios, we found no notable differences in terms of substantive focus between men and women.
Gender and Women’s Programming
Programming on gender within the institutes has seen little change since 2018.31 Most DC think tanks do not consider the role of gender in national and international security. For many in the traditional security think tank community— men and women—gender is often equated with women or a “woman’s point of view.” This lack of understanding of gender as a multilevel social construct that governs relations between men and women within societal structures and institutions is widespread within the DC foreign policy and security, including in the nuclear security, think tank community.
Figure 4: Gender Ratio – Foreign Policy and International Security Experts in all Think Tanks Measure Names
Figure 5: Gender Ratio – Nuclear Security Experts in all Think Tanks
Measure Names
Of the think tanks surveyed only one—the US Institute of Peace (USIP)—has recognized gender as an important component of its programming. Since 2016, USIP has had a director for gender policy and strategy that oversees and advises all programs on gender. The director sits in the Policy, Learning and Strategy Center, which reports directly to USIP’s president. In addition, USIP functions as the Secretariat for the US Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (WPS).32
Other think tanks have notable gender or women programs:
The Center for New America Security(CNAS) has a Women in National Security program.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS) has a Smart Women, Smart Power Program and a Women’s Global Leadership Program.
The Council on Foreign Relations(CFR) has a Women and Foreign Policy Program and a Women and Foreign Policy Program Advisory Council.
The German Marshall Fund (GMF) since 2017 has organized an annual Women of Color in Transatlantic Leadership Forum. In June 2020, it surveyed the gender balance of European thinks tanks.33
New America has a Gender and Security program housed in its Political Reform Program.
The RAND Corporation has a web page called “RAND Women to Watch,” on which it addresses “Gender Equity in the Workplace” and “Gender Integration in the Military,” including issues related to women and transgender military personnel. In its work on female populations, RAND addresses issues faced by women and girls, including women refugees, migrants and gender-based and intimate partner violence.
In 2020, the Woodrow Wilson Center appointed a gender advisor. In addition, the center has a Middle East Women’s initiative, a Maternal Health Initiative and a Global Women’s Leadership initiative.
The other think tanks have occasional events and publications on gender and security and the WPS agenda. They may also have one or two individuals working on gender and security issues.34
The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) houses the Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy initiative. All the heads of the 10 specialized arms control and nuclear security think tanks have signed on as Gender Champions. The heads of the Carnegie Endowment, Third Way and the Stimson
Center have also signed onto the Gender Champion in
Nuclear Policy Pledge.35
Scoring the Journals
The influence of women in the national and international security field, including in the nuclear security field, can also be measured by how well they are represented in academic and professional journals.36
We examined articles in 11 major peer reviewed international security journals, as well as articles in 5 major journals exclusively focused on arms control and nuclear security issues.
Women wrote 23 percent of the articles in the international security journals versus 64 percent written by men and 13 percent written by mixed gender teams.
That said, there is great variation amongst the journals. Critical Studies on Security is close to parity, with 45 percent of articles written by women versus 48 percent of articles written by men and 8 percent of articles written by mixed gender teams. Security Dialogue has 42 percent of articles written by women versus 47 percent written by men and 11 percent written by mixed gender teams. The Journal of Conflict Resolution is an outlier in the sense that it has the highest percentage of articles written by mixed gender teams—namely, 30 percent versus a 13 percent average. The Journal of Strategic Studies and Survival have the least amount of articles written by women. (See Table 4 and the Appendix.)
Articles on Arms Control and
Nuclear Security Issues
Our survey found that the majority of articles on nuclear security are published in specialized journals.37 In the 11 international security studies journals surveyed, the percentage of articles that focused on nuclear security issues was only 9 percent. (See Figure 6 and Table 4. See also the Appendix) Of those articles, 15 percent were written by women.38 When we broaden our category and include other weapon and arms control issues, the percentage of articles rises to 16 percent, of which women wrote less than a quarter (21 percent).39
In the arms control–specific journals, the percentage of articles on nuclear security issues written by women was even lower—17 percent.40 If we broaden our category and include other weapon and arms control issues, the percentage
increased slightly, to 19 percent.41 (See Table 5 and the
Appendix)
That said, there is quite a bit of variation amongst the arms control journals. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists scores above the average, with 22 percent of articles written by women. At the other end, the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament had only 11 percent of articles written by women.
Our analysis also confirms earlier studies that found that women coauthor less than men, and when they do coauthor, they are more likely to coauthor with men than with other women.42
Figure 6: Percentage of Nuclear Security Articles in International
Security Journals – 2015-2019
Gender Perspectives
Of the 3,068 articles surveyed in the 16 journals, we found a mere 91 articles (3 percent) with a gender perspective. This number dropped to 2 percent when we considered only articles that focus on arms control and nuclear issues.
Table 4: Percentage of Articles written by Women in International Security Journals – January 2014-December 2019
Rank
Journal
% of Articles by Women
1
Critical Studies on Security
45%
2
Security Dialogue
42%
3
Cooperation and Conflict
30%
4
European Journal of International Security
27%
5
Journal of Global Security Studies
26%
6
International Security
23%
7
Security Studies
22%
8
Contemporary Security Policy
16%
9
Journal of Conflict Resolution
15%
10
Survival
14%
11
Journal of Strategic Studies
11%
The majority (71 percent) of the gender articles were penned by women. In the general security studies journals, women wrote 73 percent of those articles. In the arms control and nuclear security journals, they wrote 65 percent of genderfocused articles.
However, most of the articles with a gender perspective focused on the gender balance within the international security and arms control community and how to increase the number of women in the field. Very few examined how gender (and notions of masculinity and femininity) affects thinking about international security, including nuclear security issues.
Lastly, we examined whether men and women wrote about the same topics in the nuclear and arms control field. While we did not see a marked difference in our think tank analysis between the topics men and women studied, in the journals we did see some differences. Women were more likely to write about drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, chemical and biological weapons and nuclear energy and climate. Men were more likely to write about outer space, proliferation (including nonproliferation) and nuclear deterrence issues.
Concluding Thoughts
The nuclear security community is a subset of the national and international security community. Both communities are deeply entrenched male-dominated communities, in which “old-boy networks” continue to thrive. While we have seen the number of women experts in the think tanks increase from 27 percent to 35 percent, no progress was made in terms of governing boards, and the number of women heading think tanks has regressed. Both communities continue to struggle with the integration of women. It is also striking that while it is recognized by many in the international security, including the nuclear security, community that new approaches and new thinking are necessary, gender as a lens through which to analyze international, including nuclear, security challenges is not on think tank agendas. Too little thought is given in either the think tanks or the journals to how gender and notions of masculinity and femininity influence understanding of international and national security challenges, including challenges related to nuclear security policies.
Table 5: Percentage of Articles written by Women in Arms Control Journals – January 2014-December 2019RankJournal% of Women 1 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 22% 2 International Journal of Nuclear Studies 20% 3 Arms Control Today 19% 4 Nonproliferation Review 17% 5 Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 11%
While patriarchal structures are difficult to take down, in recent years we have seen some progress in the amount of efforts to break down these structures.
First, the number of women interested in international security issues is increasing. Their enrollment in international affairs schools continues to surpass that of men. Second, a number of people and organizations, including funding organizations, have realized that the changed strategic landscape requires new approaches and new people. This need is apparent for the international security community and particularly for the small, somewhat atrophied nuclear security community. The Nsquare initiative, the Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy, and the Ploughshares Fund’s women initiative are explicitly geared toward creating a more diverse and open community. These efforts have also been supported by major funders of this community such as Carnegie Corporation New York and the MacArthur Foundation. Third, after the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, organizations including foreign policy and international security think tanks expressed renewed commitment to building a more diverse workforce. Many think tanks in the international security and nuclear security have signed on to the Organizations in Solidarity initiative of WCAPS.43
It is important to hold organizations accountable and to make sure that progress is measured not just in declaratory statements but also in actions. This scorecard provides numerical baselines.
Our analysis of the journals, even though it encompasses a broader group of experts, reinforces conclusions from the think tank analysis. Women authors remain grossly underrepresented. Journals, like think tanks, suffer from gender gaps.
Many of our 2018 recommendations still hold. Four stand out:
Thinks tanks should periodically carry out a gender analysis of their institutions. An inward gender analysis should be intersectional and must include collection and analysis of data related to gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age and disability. It must focus on knowledge production as well as recruitment, retention and promotion processes. It must also examine policies and practices related to issues such as remuneration, remote work, family leave and sexual harassment. Finally, the think tanks should make deliberate efforts to diversify their governing boards.
Think tanks should carry out an analysis of their partnerships and knowledge dissemination. Such an outward gender analysis should focus on whom they partner with and how content is disseminated. Among the questions one should ask: What type of publications are produced, what type of events are organized, who participates and attends these events, who is tapped for media appearances?
Think tanks should consider appointing a gender advisor and locate these advisors not in the human resource office but in the front offices with direct access to the leadership.
Journals continue to have gender gaps. One is expressed in terms of women authors published in the journals; the other is represented in the lack of gender perspectives. Editors and editorial boards should resort to periodic gender audits of their journals. Such audits would include issues related to the gender balances and substantive background of editorial staff, editorial boards and outside reviewers. It should also include an analysis of the readership—many of whom are also potential authors.
References
US Congress, Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017, Public Law No. 115-68 (10/06/2017). In accordance with the law, the White House published its WPS Strategy in June 2019. See White House, United States Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security (Washington, DC: White House, June 2019).
See Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Soraya Kamali-Nafar, The WIIS Gender Scorecard: Washington, DC Think Tanks – 2018, WIIS Policy Brief (Washington, DC: WIIS, September 2018-1).
This scorecard was supported by a grant from the Ploughshares Fund.
See UN General Assembly A/Res/65/69 (2010). See also UN General
Assembly resolutions A/Res/67/48 (2012); A/Res/68/33 (2013); A/ Res/69/61 (2014); and A/Res/71/56 (2016). In addition, the Genevabased Conference on Disarmament held its first informal meeting on gender and disarmament in August 2015. In May 2016, it held a second informal plenary on Women and Disarmament, in which delegations restated their support to increase the role of women in the disarmament field.
See UN Secretary-General, Securing Our Common Future: An Agenda for Disarmament (New York: United Nations, October 2018).
See Renata Hessmann Dalaqua, Kjolv Egeland and Torbjorn Graff Hugo, Still Behind the Curve: Gender Balance in Arms Control, NonProliferation and Disarmament Diplomacy (Geneva: UNIDIR, 2019).
See GCNP website at gcnuclearpolicy.org. See also Pamela Hamamoto and Laura Holgate, “Gender Champions,” in Tom Z. Collina and Cara Marie Wagner, eds., A New Vision: Gender, Justice, National Security (Washington, DC: Ploughshares Fund, April 2019), pp. 40-45.
See GCNP website and GCNP, Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy, Impact Report 2019 (Washington, DC: NTI, May 2020), p. 2.
International Gender Champions Disarmament, Gender and Disarmament Resource Pack (Geneva: UNIDIR, 2018 and updated in January 2020).
See Heather Hurlburt et al., The Consensual Straitjacket: Four Decades of Women in Nuclear Security (Washington, DC: New America, March 2019).
SeeTom Z. Colinna and Cara Marie Wagner, eds., A New Vision: Gender, Justice, National Security (Washington, DC: Ploughshares Fund, April 2019).
While gender is generally defined and discussed as meaning more than just whether one is a man or a woman, this scorecard takes the binary approach. We identified experts and authors as either women or men by examining their bios, photographs and use of pronouns.
This scorecard tallies national and international security experts, including foreign policy and international affairs experts. Definitions of national and international security differ from institution to institution, some use an expanded definition of security, including human security, others have a narrow definition of security. For more on who is included within each of the think tanks see the methodology section on p.15.
This corresponds to 185 experts (55 women and 130 men) out of a total of 1,931 experts.
These institutes employ a total of 175 experts, but only 162 (113 men and 49 women) work on nuclear security issues.
For more on gender and security, see Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Michael E. Brown, eds., The Gender and Security Agenda: Strategies for the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2020).
See Hironao Okahana and Enyu Zhou, Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2006-2016 (Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools,
2017); website of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA); and the website of the International Studies Association (ISA).
Maria Rost Rublee et al., “Do You Feel Welcome? Gendered Experiences in International Security Studies,” Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2020), pp. 216-226.
Hurlburt et al., Consensual Straitjacket, pp. 6 and 18-28.
See Nsquare, Greater Than: Nuclear Threat Professionals Reimagine Their Field (Washington, DC: NSquare, December 2019). See also Bonnie Jenkins, “Diversity Makes Better Policy,” in Tom Z. Collina and Cara Marie Wagner, eds., A New Vision: Gender, Justice, National Security (Washington, DC: Ploughshares Fund, April 2019), pp. 34-39.
This scorecard focuses on gender. That said, the lack of gender diversity often goes hand in hand with discrimination on other identity markers, such as race, ethnic background, sexual orientation and age. After the killing of George Floyd in summer 2020, Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) launched the Organizations in Solidarity project to root out institutional racism. Many organizations and think tanks, including in the nuclear security arena, (and those surveyed in this scorecard) signed on to the project.
Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense
Intellectuals,” Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1987), pp. 687-718; Carol Cohn and
Sara Ruddick, “ A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” in Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi, eds., Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 405-435; Carol Cohn, “The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles,” The New York Times (January 5, 2018).
Cited in Hurlburt et al., Consensual Straitjacket.
See Nsquare, Greater Than, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 15. See also note 17.
In 2018, 32 percent of think tanks were headed by women. The reins of the Center for a New American Security passed from a woman to a man, and leadership position of the US Institute of Peace is vacant as of the summer of 2020 with the departure in August 2020 of Nancy Lindborg, who had been president and CEO since 2015.
This number also does not include information with regard to the German Marshall Fund (GMF). At the time of our survey no data was available on the website regarding experts at GMF. In addition, at the time of our survey the Bipartisan Policy Centre had no longer a foreign policy international security program.
Amongst the nuclear programs in the Foreign Policy and
International Security think tanks mention should be made of the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI), a program, housed at CSIS, that is geared towards the next generation of professionals in the nuclear security field. In addition, the Carnegie Endowment hosts every two years an international non-proliferation conference attracting hundreds of experts, officials and journalists from around the world.
Nuclear experts are defined as experts and analysts who study topics related to nuclear deterrence, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear policy, general nuclear issues, nuclear security (nuclear materials, fuel cycle, nuclear energy, radiological security), arms control and disarmament, nuclear technologies, defense strategy with a nuclear focus, regional studies with nuclear focus (North Korea, China, Iran, Asia-Pacific, Korea, Middle East). See also the methodology section in this scorecard.
Within our overall nuclear security category, we defined nine subtopics: nuclear deterrence, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear policy, nuclear security (nuclear materials, fuel cycle, nuclear energy, radiological security), arms control and disarmament, nuclear technologies, defense strategy with a nuclear focus, regional studies with nuclear focus (North Korea, China, Iran, Asia-Pacific, Korea, Middle East) and miscellaneous nuclear issues.
See de Jonge Oudraat and Kamali-Nafar, WIIS Gender Scorecard 2018.
TheU.S. Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (U.S. CSWG)brings together over 40 organizations and civil society groups working on women’s issues, gender and the WPS agenda. While many of these groups are active in advocacy and operational work, many will also conduct research and produce policy papers. See https://www.usip.org/programs/advancing-women-peace-and-security.
See Rosa Balfour, Corinna Hörst, Pia Hüsch, Sofia Shevchuk and Eleonora del Vecchio, Absent Influencers? Women in European Think Tanks, Policy Paper No. 5 (Brussels, Paris, Washington, DC: GMF, June 2020).
For example, Lisa Aronsson at the Atlantic Council, Saskia Brechenmacher at the Carnegie Endowment or Mackenzie Eaglen at the American Enterprise Institute.
All gender champions adopt a panel parity pledge. See GCNP website.
For more on the representation of women in journals, see Nadia
Crevecoeur, Kayla McGill and Maya Whitney, The Gender Balance in 11 Security Journals, A review of the literature and PowerPoint analysis of women authors in security journals, draft manuscript (Washington, DC:
WIIS, 2020).
Nuclear security issues were determined by title keyword searches. The following keywords were used: weapons—nuclear, hypersonic, missiles (ICBMs, etc.), missile defense, nuclear technology in weapons, cleanup from nuclear accidents, nuclear energy, IAEA, nuclear terrorism, deterrence, nonproliferation. Treaties: disarmament and arms control, nuclear disarmament, NPT, CTBT, INF, nuclear export control, fissile materials negotiations. We also added a country level: USA, China, Russia, France, UK, NATO/Europe, Iran, India/Pakistan, Middle East, North Korea. Arms control issues were broadly defined and determined by the following title keyword searches: weapons—nuclear, hypersonic, missiles (ICBMs, etc.), drones, biological weapons, chemical weapons, missile defense, technology in weapons (very specific, not just technological advances in general but focused on weapons), cybersecurity/cyber war. General themes: geoengineering and climate change, medical/radio isotopes, cleanup from nuclear accidents, nuclear energy, IAEA, nuclear terrorism, space, materials. Treaties: disarmament and arms control, nuclear disarmament, NPT, CTBT, INF, export control, biological and chemical weapons control, fissile materials negotiations, arms trade, general. We also added a country level: USA, China, Russia, France, UK, NATO/Europe, Iran, India/Pakistan, Middle East, North Korea.
The overall number of articles in the 11 security journals was
2,147, of which 194 were devoted to nuclear security issues. There were 29 (15%) written by women, 149 (77%) by men, and 16 (8%) by mixed gender teams. When we expand our focus and include other weapons and arms control issues, the total number of articles was 338.
Of those 338 articles, 72 (21%) were written by women, 232 (69%) by men and 34 (10%) by mixed gender teams. The overall percentage of articles written by women is 23 percent.
Of the 921 articles, 683 focused on nuclear security issues. There were 115 (17%) written by women, 512 (75%) by men; and 56 (8%) by mixed gender teams.
Of the 921 articles in the five arms control and nuclear security journals, 178 (19%) were written by women, 661 (72%) by men, and 82 (9%) by mixed gender teams.
See Crevecoeur, McGill and Whitney, Gender Balance in 11 Security Journals.
Notes: Absolute Numbers and Gender Ratio of Articles in Arms Control Journals – January 2014-December 2019
Arms Control Today 251 47 19% 191 76% 13 5% Bulletin of Atomic Scientist 392 85 22% 271 69% 36 9% International Journal of Nuclear Studies 54 11 20% 32 60% 11 20% Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 63 7 11% 52 83% 4 6% Nonproliferation Review 161 28 17% 115 72% 18 11% Journal Total No Women* Men* Mixed Gender Teams *Includes articles by single authors and by same sex coauthors
Methodology
Think Tanks All data come from the think tanks’ own websites. Data for the think tanks were collected between September 2019 and January 2020, except for Third Way. Data for Third Way were collected in July 2020. Data for the governing boards of all think tanks were collected in July 2020. We were not able to retrieve data for experts from the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) website. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) no longer features a national or international security program on its website. Hence, data for GMF and BPC are incomplete. While gender is generally defined and discussed as meaning more than just whether one is a man or a woman, this scorecard takes the binary approach. We identified experts and authors as either women or men by examining their bios, photographs and use of pronouns. This scorecard tallies experts, analysts and fellows. We did not include people whose main responsibilities are in the administrative, operational, personnel, development, communication, and editorial sectors. Experts in foreign policy, defense and national and international security were selected based on the identification of such experts by the think tanks themselves. Nuclear security experts were identified by searching the think tank websites and expert bios for any the following terms: nuclear deterrence, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear policy, general nuclear issues, nuclear security (nuclear materials, fuel cycle, nuclear energy, radiological security), arms control and disarmament, nuclear technologies, defense strategy with a nuclear focus, regional studies with nuclear focus (North Korea, China, Iran, Asia-Pacific, Korea, Middle East). We did not analyze experts’ seniority. Some think tanks include junior staff; others identify only mid-level and senior staff. We did not distinguish between nonresident and resident experts. Again, for each think tank, we followed the think tank’s own identification of its experts. In the case of RAND we excluded all adjunct experts. Adjuncts at RAND are the equivalent of non-residential fellows in other institutions. RAND will feature some adjunct experts, but not all adjuncts on its website. Upon request and in consultation with RAND we decided to leave all adjuncts off this tally. The following experts, analysts, fellows, scholars and staff have been included for: AEI: All Foreign and Defense Policy Scholars; Atlantic Council: All Fellows and Non-Resident Fellows mentioned under Experts; Aspen Institute: All Security & Global Affairs, including the Aspen Strategy Group, the Cybersecurity & Technology Program, and the Homeland Security Program; Bipartisan Policy Center: No Information; Brookings Institution: All Experts in the
Foreign Policy Program; Cato Institute: All Nat./ Int. Security Experts; Carnegie Endowment: All Experts in the Washington, DC office; CSBA: All All Nat./Int. Security Experts; CAP: Foreign Policy and Security Program; CSIS: All Experts; CFR: All Experts; CNAS: All Experts; GMF: Not Available; Heritage Foundation: Heritage Foundation: All Experts in the International, National Security, and Nuclear Energy Issue Areas; IPS: All Experts; Lexington Institute: All Experts; New America: All Analysts and Fellows in the Cybersecurity Initiative, the International Security Program and the Gender and Security Program; RAND: All experts in the Homeland Security and Public Safety, the International Affairs, and the National Security Programs. Our tally does not do not include Adjuncts, Operational Staff and Legislative Assistants. It may also be noted that some experts in the Homeland Security and Public Safety program are more focused on public safety and domestic issues. Similarly, some experts in the International Affairs Program are focused on non-security international affairs issues; StimsonCenter: Senior Research Team & Distinguished Fellows; Third Way: Experts in Climate and Energy and National Security; USIP: All Experts; The Wilson Center: All Experts; Arms Control Association: All Expert Staff; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: All Experts; FAS: All Expert Staff; Global Zero: All Expert Staff; James Martin Center forNon-Proliferation Studies: All Expert Staff; Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center forScience and International Affairs: All Experts; NTI: All Expert Staff; Physicians for SocialResponsibility: All Expert Staff; PugwashCouncil: All Expert Staff; Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control: All Expert Staff. The Full Think Tank Data Set is available from WIIS. Journals Sixteen journals were examined over the period January 2014–December 2019: 11 security studies journals and 5 journals focused exclusively on arms control and nuclear security issues. 11 – International Security Journals: Contemporary Security Policy; Cooperation &Conflict; Critical Studies on Security; European Journal of International Security; International Security; Journal of Conflict Resolution; Journal of Global Security Studies; Journal of Strategic Studies; Security Dialogue; Security Studies; Survival. 5 – Arms Control and Nuclear Security Journals: Arms Control Today; Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Nuclear Studies; Journal for Peace &Nuclear Disarmament; Nonproliferation Review. The survey covered all articles published in these journals. We excluded editorial comments, reviews of any kind (i.e., book reviews) external news articles or blogs, letters to the editor, addendums and other nonrelevant sections.
We established 6 datasets. Data set 1: All 16 journals. Comprises all articles from the 11 international security and 5 arms control and nuclear security journals from January 2014 to December 2019. Does not include letters to the editor, book reviews, or external blogs. Total articles: 3,068by women (individual and coauthor): 665 by men (individual and coauthor): 2,036 by mixed gender teams: 367articles with a gender perspective: 91 Data set 2: All international security journals (11 journals). January 2014-December 2019 Total articles: 2,147by women (individual and coauthor): 487 by men (individual and coauthor): 1,375 by mixed gender teams: 285 gender articles: 71arms control/nuclear articles: 338 Data set 3: All arms control and nuclear security journals (5 journals). January 2014-December 2019 Total articles: 921by women (individual and coauthor): 178 by men (individual and coauthor): 661 by mixed gender teams: 82 articles with a gender perspective: 20 Data set 4: All arms control and nuclear security articles (16 journals). Comprises all articles from the 5 nuclear journals and 338 arms control/nuclear security issues articles from the 11 security journals. Total articles: 1,259by women (individual and coauthor): 250 by men (individual and coauthor): 893 by mixed gender teams: 116 articles with a gender perspective: 21 Data set 5: All nuclear security articles in all journals (16 journals). Total articles: 877by women (individual and coauthor): 144 by men (individual and coauthor): 661 by mixed gender teams: 72 Data set 6: All nuclear security articles in internationals security journals (11 journals). Total articles: 194by women (individual and coauthor): 29 by men (individual and coauthor): 149 by mixed gender teams: 16 All data is available from WIIS. Contact: info@ wiisglobal.org, Subject: Scorecard data
By Clodagh Quain and Isabelle Roccia
Fifth-generation telecommunications (5G) technology promises to dramatically increase the interconnectedness and efficiency of commercial and civilian communication infrastructures. 5G will also enable other advances. On the civilian side, it will improve existing applications and give rise to others, from telemedicine to connected cars. It also presents an opportunity to enhance NATO’s capabilities, improving logistics, maintenance, and communications. For instance, 5G will speed communication and improve response time in a theater of operation.
These developments also pose challenges. 5G is part of a complex architecture. To leverage its full benefits, millions of sensors and devices will need to be deployed and connected, from smart home appliances and connected toys to fullscale factories and critical infrastructures. The number of connected devices is projected to total 41.6 billion worldwide by 2025.1 By 2030, this estimate ratchets up to 125 billion.2 Of these, mobile devices will grow from 8.8 billion in 2018 to 13.1 billion devices by 2023 – 1.4 billion of which will be 5G capable.3 Because devices are connected to one another or to a network, security risks will multiply. The Alliance faces an increased challenge in ensuring that NATO Allies’ 5G networks and the critical infrastructures that rely on them
can withstand multiple physical and cybersecurity threats.
NATO’s main concern in this context is the risk associated with foreign ownership or management of critical infrastructure, including by private operators and foreign state actors in supply chains. That such ownership could result in collusion between the supplier and a country’s intelligence or security services is deemed particularly worrisome by many governments, critical infrastructure operators and industry alike.4 For NATO allies, supply-chain risk management is therefore a critical aspect of the strategic and operational challenges posed by 5G.
At the NATO meeting in London in December 2019, Allies prioritized 5G security as part of its security and resilience agenda. The final declaration stated, “NATO and Allies, within their respective authority, are committed to ensuring the security of our communications, including 5G, recognizing the need to rely on secure and resilient systems.”5 Including 5G in the London Declaration formalized NATO’s work in this emerging field.
Background
5G technology is transformative on several fronts. It will challenge the design and implementation of existing infrastructure and applications. The velocity and pervasiveness of 5G technology will stimulate development of advanced applications, including smart cities and autonomous vehicles.
A diverse set of suppliers form the 5G ecosystem, which encompasses network infrastructures, spectrum, devices and software. While Ericsson (Sweden), Nokia (Finland) and Huawei (China) are the three best-known vendors, they represent only a small number of the stakeholders involved. The telecommunications industry estimates that operators will have
to invest $1.1 trillion by the end of 2025 to build 5G networks.6
In 2016, the European Commission developed a 5G Action Plan for Europe to support launching the rollout of commercial 5G services in all EU member states by the end of 2020.7 Subsequently, there will be a rapid buildup of infrastructure in urban areas and along major transport routes by 2025.8
At the Prague 5G Security Conference in May 2019, 32 EU and NATO members adopted recommendations known as the Prague Proposals.9 They propose principles that governments should apply to 5G deployment, stipulating that communication networks and services should be “designed with resilience and security in mind. They should be built and maintained using international, open, consensus-based standards and risk-informed cybersecurity best practices.” State representatives also called for the adoption of principles of fairness, transparency, risk-based policy and interoperability.
Relevance for NATO
Since 1949, NATO has centered on safeguarding the security and freedom of its members. Its mandate has evolved in political and geographic terms as the world changed. Today, emerging technology, with its many political, military and commercial implications, is driving NATO’s need to adapt.
Given its broad membership overlap with the European Union, deployment of 5G in Europe will undoubtedly affect the Alliance. The implications for NATO allies are strategic and operational in nature and affect defensive and offensive postures. At a minimum, dependence on 5G exposes critical infrastructure to more vulnerabilities, including software vulnerabilities, which NATO allies must address.10 That said, 5G can also improve capabilities such as communication security.11
At the multilateral level, NATO, like the European Union, seeks to balance collective and national interests. At the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg referred to guidelines and basic requirements that both organizations had developed for infrastructure investment—notably in telecommunications and 5G.12
On January 29, 2020, the Network and Information Systems (NIS) Cooperation Group published an EU toolbox, with measures to mitigate risks identified in the EU coordinated risk assessment report of October 9, 2019:
strategic measures on regulatory powers for incident reporting, security measures, threats and assets;
initiatives to promote a diverse supply and value chain;
technical measures to strengthen the security of networks and equipment; and
risk mitigation plans.13
NATO’s leadership also seeks to develop a minimum set of common practices for resilient telecommunications while avoiding encroachment on individual state approaches. At the October 2019 NATO Defense Ministerial meeting, for example, representatives agreed to update the baseline requirements for civilian telecommunications, including 5G.14 This update covered foreign ownership, foreign control and direct investment. While civilian infrastructure remains a “national responsibility,” Article 3 of NATO’s founding treaty states that resilience, intended to prevent the failure of critical infrastructure or hybrid attacks, is part of states’ commitments to the Alliance and to one another. The Secretary General reiterated NATO’s approach the following month at the NATO Industry Forum in Washington, DC, where he linked resilience of supply chains and that of nations and the Alliance.15
NATO members maintain the right to decide national policies for regulating critical infrastructure and 5G vendors. For example, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab addressed the House of Commons on January 28, 2020, outlining the government’s review of national telecommunications and its position on “high risk vendors.” The United Kingdom approved the use of equipment acquired from “high risk vendors” while restricting those vendors’ access to “safety critical networks.”16 The foreign secretary stressed that the review would not hamper his government’s ability to share sensitive data with its partners over highly secure networks. In May 2020, the UK Government decided to review the impact of the decision on national networks with the assistance of the National Cyber Security Centre.
What Is at Stake?
Foreign ownership or management of critical infrastructure is a significant risk for NATO allies. Consequently, more governments may look to adopt procurement rules that limit sourcing to trusted vendors.
Such a position creates another risk, however. Indeed, the operators of critical infrastructure may have only limited capacity to detect, prevent and recover from the cybersecurity risks they face if they cannot choose the technologies and processes they need to match security requirements stemming from their size, complexity and risk profile. These operators must remain in control of how they improve their overall security posture if they are to meet the security and resilience objectives set nationally or at NATO. Innovation with state-of-the-art technology is critical in the interconnected environment in which Allies find themselves, through cross-border infrastructure (for energy supply, for instance) or shared functions (such as airspace control). NATO’s value-added in this context is to facilitate the development and sharing of baseline requirements for supply-chain risk management among Allies. It can also be to share best practices and information on risks and threats. This coordination would ensure that all individual state efforts contribute to more secure, resilient critical infrastructures.
Recommendations
As NATO allies move forward, they should focus on four main issues: leveraging NATO and EU membership, assessing supply-chain management issues, adopting a principled approach and building international consensus.
Leveraging Membership: 5G affects strategic, political, industrial and commercial elements on both sides of the Atlantic. The integrated economies of the European Union and the United States share a common value system, with policies that traditionally align with NATO’s, despite conflicting messages from the current US administration regarding its commitment to the Alliance. Despite the inherent cross-border, integrated nature of critical infrastructure in Europe, EU member states approach supply-chain evaluation differently. As the European Union seeks a coordinated, harmonized process for 5G supply-chain assessment, it is important that NATO and the EU align their policies in this regard. The lack of such alignment might create challenges for NATO, such as overdependence on one supplier.
Supply-Chain Risk Management: NATO allies must consider the global, interconnected nature of supply chains and the threats they face as they weigh effective approaches to 5G supply-chain risk management. Their approaches should ultimately strengthen NATO’s strategic mission, inform procurement guidelines and harmonize risk-management baselines across Allies. Such risk management entails identifying likely threats, vulnerabilities and potential consequences, tailoring mitigation strategies to risks and prioritizing actions based on an assessment of the most relevant, potentially impactful risks.17
A Principled Approach: A similar or harmonized set of principles should underpin effective supply-chain risk management.These principles should do the following:
encourage interoperability of systems and the use of stateof-the-art technologies;
develop a more secure global cybersecurity ecosystem that recognizes norms for responsible behavior and prioritizes collective defense against malicious threats;
collaborate with key nongovernmental stakeholders, including industry, to adapt to an ever-changing environment of new technologies and new threats;
invest in research and development of new technological approaches to fostering supply-chain integrity; and
avoid prohibiting the acquisition or integration of some technologies simply because they were developed abroad.
Building International Consensus: Several international organizations and groups have begun to assess the 5G environment and its related security risks. The Prague 5G Repository produced a library of tools, frameworks and legislative measures to assist NATO member states. Multilateral organizations, such as the EU, and states have come to similar conclusions. They too underline major risks that have national security implications. Integrity, confidentiality and availability of networks and communications are also key to their security.
Conclusion
5G innovation is not just a technological choice but a strategic one. Even in a collective defense system such as NATO, states remain sovereign, making decisions based on their assessment of the geopolitical environment. A state approach driven primarily by economic opportunity may undermine collective defense and security.
To both build and manage 5G capabilities, NATO’s allies will need to leverage EU and NATO membership; balance national and collective methods for supply-chain risk management; apply a principled approach to supply-chain integrity; and coordinate at the state and international levels.
• ensure, where possible, transparency of supply-chain risk management policies and their implementation, in part to facilitate best practices;
Former director of Carnegie Europe Tomáš Valášek referred to critical civilian networks as “the path of least resistance” for adversaries in the digital age to divide NATO from within.18 To protect this critical infrastructure, he argues, both the public and private sectors will need to invest in IT expertise. This shared challenge presents an opportunity for NATO and other multilateral organizations to fill gaps for their member states and to adapt to emerging technology beyond their traditional role. It is a novel test for NATO: to broker strategic geopolitical rivalries and national security concerns over critical infrastructure while developing its own modern capabilities and addressing the multiple fractures in global and allied security today.
References
International Data Corporation (IDC), The Growth in Connected IoT Devices Is Expected to Generate 79.4ZB of Data in 2025, press release (Framingham, MA: IDC, June 18, 2019).
IHS Markit, The Internet of Things: A Movement, Not a Market, presentation (London: IHS Markit, 2017), p. 2.
Cisco, Annual Internet Report(2018–2023), white paper(San Jose: Cisco, 2020), p. 2.
Kadri Kaska, Henrik Beckvard, and Tomáš Minárik, Huawei, 5G, and China as a Security Threat (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2019).
NATO, London Declaration: Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in London 3-4 December 2019, press release (Brussels: NATO, December 4, 2019).
GSMA Intelligence, The Mobile Economy 2020 (London: GSM Association, 2020), p. 5.
European Commission, 5G for Europe: An Action Plan, COM(2016) 588 final (Brussels: European Commission, 2016), p. 4.
European Commission, Future Connectivity Systems, 5G for Europe Action Plan (Brussels: European Commission, December 19, 2019).
Karl Norrman, Prajwol Kumar Nakarmi, and Eva Fogelström, 5G Security—Enabling a Trustworthy 5G System, Ericsson White Paper (Stockholm: Ericsson, January 8, 2020).
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Transcript of Opening Re-marks, Munich Security Conference, Brussels, February 15, 2020.
European Commission, Cybersecurity of 5G Networks: EU Toolbox of Risk Mitigating Measures (Brussels:European Commission, January 29, 2020).
NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg, Press Conference Follow-ing the Meeting of NATO Defense Ministers, Brussels, October 25, 2019.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Keynote Address at the NATO Industry Forum, Washington DC, November 14, 2019.
United Kingdom, Foreign Secretary’s Statement on Telecommunica-tions, London, UK Foreign Secretary Office, January 28, 2020.
BSA | The Software Alliance (BSA), BSAPrinciples for Good Governance: Supply Chain Risk Management (Washington, DC: BSA, 2019).
Tomáš Valášek et al., “NATO at 70: What Next?”Politico (April 3, 2019).
9. Government of the Czech Republic, Prague 5G Security Conference Announced Series of Recommendations: The Prague Proposals,press release, May 3, 2019.
Authors
Clodagh Quain is Policy Analyst at the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), Dublin, Ireland. The views expressed here are those of the author and not of the IIEA.
Isabelle Roccia is Senior Manager, Policy – EMEA at BSA | The Software Alliance in Brussels, Belgium.
This publication is the result of a joint WIIS DC, WIIS Brussels, WIIS France, and WIIS UK project focused on new challenges for the NATO alliance and showcasing the expertise of the Next Generation women defense experts. Through a competitive selection process six Next Generation experts were invited to participate in programs on the sidelines of the 2019 December NATO Leaders meeting. We would like to thank our six experts for their thoughtful contributions to this initiative, WIIS Global for publishing their research and the US Mission to NATO for providing the generous grant without which this project would not have been possible. With this support, we were able to turn an idea to promote greater cooperation among our affiliates and cities into a reality. We hope this project encourages more collaboration across borders and helps bolster the overall WIIS mission of supporting women in the international security field.
The NATO Consortium Team: Michelle Shevin-Coetzee, WIIS-DC; Armida van Rij, WIIS
UK; Florence Fernando and Pauline Massart, WIIS Brussels; Ottavia Ampuero and Jessica Pennetier, WIIS France
By Kulani Abendroth-Dias and Carolin Kiefer
If World War III will be over in seconds, as one side takes control of the other’s systems, we’d better have
Data, the food of all algorithms, lie at the core of cohesive EU and NATO AI strategies. Such strategies must encompass the regulation of data in high- and low-risk technologies with
and Romania have tested and often deployed AI and ML facial recognition tools, many of which were developed in the United States and China, for predictive policing and border control.3 AI and ML systems aid in contact tracing and knowledge sharing to contain the COVID-19 virus.4 However, the civilian and military strategies that drive use of AI and ML for the collection and use of data diverge across the member states of the European Union and the North a greater understanding of how data feed AI and ML technologies and systems, the results they produce become skewed. For example, a facial analysis and recognition system insufficiently trained to analyze and recognize women or people of color will often misidentify people in these populations, which could lead to inaccurate criminal profiling and arrests.7 Machines don’t make errors, but humans do. Policymakers need to rapidly identify parameters and systems of governance for these technologies that
maximize their efficiency while protecting civilian rights.
Growth in the development of AI-driven technologies has been exponential, but strategies to regulate their implementation have yet to catch up. The European Union and NATO need to develop coordinated, comprehensive, and forward-looking strategies based on data protection protocols to regulate AI use and deployment to counter myriad threats. Such strategies will be critically important if the transatlantic alliance is to adapt a common defense system to evolving threats in the digital age. Beyond Definitions
AI and ML are changing the security landscape-for example, by the deployment of disinformation to undermine political participation or of unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), which may or may not operate as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). The states that are party to the Group of
Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapons
the smarter, faster, more resilient network. dual uses. They should guide policies governing predictive
or delivery within the European Union, Amazon policing, border surveillance, facial analysisand countering disinformation.6 and recognition now sells facial recognition cameras for door
locks, webcams, home security systems, and office To regulate data use effectively, policymakers need to attendance driven by artificial intelligence (AI) better understand the technical, political, economic and
and machine learning (ML)-powerful tools with civilian 2 social risks and biases in data collection methods. Without and military purposes. Germany, France, Spain, Denmark
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).5
(LAWS), which aligns its work with the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), have devoted considerable attention to defining autonomous weapons. Unfortunately, the group has not yet paid enough attention to the data. Prolonged focus on what constitutes LAWS rather than the data that drive them impedes the important investigation of how best to regulate the technologies’ rapid development and use for security and defense. Discussion of the types, limits, and biases of data that drive AI and ML is pertinent throughout the myriad sectors in which they find application.8
Recently, the GGE took steps to move the debate from definitions of autonomous systems to why data matter. In 2020, it decided that the 11 guiding principles that frame the development and use of LAWS needed no further expansion.9 The group agreed to give greater attention to how the principles can be unpacked. It decided to distinguish between high- and low-risk AI technologies and gain a better understanding of dual-use technologies.10 Differentiating between uses for civilian and military operations should focus on how data will be mined and drive algorithms at both levels.11 NATO and the European Union should lead in facilitating these discussions and regulations.
Data Governance
According to the European Commission’s February 2020 white paper on artificial intelligence, “Europe’s current and future sustainable economic growth and societal well-being increasingly draws on value created by data…. AI is one of the most important applications of the data economy.”12 However, the report concludes, for AI to “work for people and be a force for good in society” it must be trustworthy.13 It highlights “trustworthy AI” 27 times in its 26 pages.
Governance of data is key to this trust.14 The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was a step in the right direction, but it needs to be expanded to cover AI and ML data collection and use in national and international security contexts. Close consultation and data coordination between the European Union and NATO is integral in this regard.
An understanding of who drives the development of AIdriven technologies for European security and how they are funded can illuminate the political, technical, and social, and legal bottlenecks confronting EU and NATO data regulation, both in the member states and at a supranational level. While the defense sector has traditionally driven technology innovation, private companies have taken the lead in recent years. 15 According to the OECD, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel have spent more than $50 billion a year on digital innovation.16 This sum dwarfs the €13 billion budgeted by the European Defense Fund (EDF) for 2021-27 Рfor defense spending in general, not solely for AI-driven technologies.17 NATO and the European Union should pay particular attention to these private-sector actors when developing policies for data protection and strategies to encourage US and European technological innovation. NATO and the European Union should work with the CCW GGE to determine clear operational distinctions between the commercial and military uses of data for AIdriven technologies.18 NATO and the European Union need comprehensive, legally enforceable AI strategies to regulate the use of data and the integrity of information networks to better protect their citizens while keeping the Alliance agile.
The Way Forward
In EU and NATO contexts, the development and implementation of dual-use technologies and cyberprotection policies remain fragmented. This fragmentation could undermine the ability to respond to evolving threats to European security and stability. Examples abound: Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Britain’s Leave Campaign, radicalization via social media, the politicized use of data via hybrid-use platforms to influence behavior (from political participation to violent action), and targeted cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns in the Visegrad Four and the Baltic states.19 Therefore, coherent EU and NATO AI strategies require the regulation of the data that drive emerging technologies. Regulation to promote network integrity and protect data access must be key tenets of EU and NATO strategies to deploy AI that can react faster and more effectively in the face of new security threats.
AI and ML systems are valuable, as demonstrated by their use in contact tracing and knowledge sharing in the search for a cure during the Covid-19 pandemic.20 For the transatlantic relationship to thrive, NATO and the EU must work together to develop coordinated AI strategies that address appropriate use and misuse of data. As the EU and NATO develop these strategies, they should focus on five activities:
Govern the use of data in dual-use technologies.
While AI strategies may sound exciting and innovative to policymakers and the general public, responsible data use sounds less so. Yet it is essential. EU and NATO strategies need to distinguish between high- and low-risk technologies, dual- and hybrid-use platforms, and the types, limits, and mediums by which data can be collected and anonymized (or at least kept confidential) for civil and military uses. These limits need to be developed and regulated in discussions with civilian and military actors who are mining data across sectors, from the traditional security and military arena to healthcare, logistics, and entertainment companies. Discussions should include how the rights of citizens and those residing in NATO and EU countries-e.g., lawful migrants, asylum seekers, refugees-will be protected.
Acknowledge bias in datasets.
There should be a comprehensive discussion on how bias in datasets influences the training of algorithms, which in turn influences security targets and undermines the integrity of a system. Policymakers, human rights actors, and technology developers should be in the room for this discussion. An awareness of these biases within security forces can help them better evaluate the outcomes the algorithms produce, interpret targets with caution, avoid errors, and generate more effective responses.
Ensure purpose-limited data collection and sharing.
Personal data collected and tracked for specific purposes (e.g., contact tracing during a pandemic) should generally not be shared and used for other purposes. Where an overlap in data collection is deemed necessary for EU-NATO security purposes, tight regulations for civilian protection should spell out where, with whom, and for how long the data can be stored, with strong legal and operational deterrents for backdoor access to data. Private-sector companies should limit how data are used to influence behavior: Should they be used in political campaigns the same way that they are used to nudge consumer behaviors on what to buy? The European Union’s GDPR sets up important rules in this regard. It can be viewed as the cornerstone of an EU-NATO strategy for the development and regulation of AI for security and defense.
Adapt traditional defense and deterrence strategies to the digital age.
The evolving nature of security threats in the digital age calls into question traditional strategies of defense and deterrence. Collaboration between NATO, the European Commission, the European Defence Agency (EDA), the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD) and technology developers should focus on efficiency-trimming current weapons systems and technologies used by the European Union on the battlefield and in the cyber realm while using AI and ML to inform strategy. The weaponized use of social media data must be addressed, not solely via counternarratives but by working in concert with social media companies to develop AI and ML techniques to identify and shut down fake news at the source. The integrity of networks set up by actors outside of NATO member states needs to be raised as a security concern as well, including incentives to drive the local business development of such networks.
Build trust via counter-AI agencies to protect citizen rights and detect AI-driven forgeries.
Agencies that currently promote the responsible use of AI need to work in tandem with NATO and EU agencies to develop comprehensive AI strategies. The strategies should promote digital literacy, advance critical thinking through online modules, and publicize the precautions NATO and the European Union are taking to protect citizen data in order to build public trust. Partnerships between EU, NATO, and such agencies need to go beyond traditional NGO-security agency relationships to integrate AI protection mechanisms into security policy itself. Ideally, these organizations would work with NATO partner countries to better identify targets, weaknesses, and priorities to build resilient intelligence architectures.
Map the development and use of AI-driven technologies across EU and NATO member states.
NATO security operations are in place at member state borders. However, most of the AI technologies being developed, test, or adapted are deployed within France and Germany, key EU member states. AI-driven security threats differ across states, especially disinformation. For example, the content, medium, and speaker of disinformation shared in the Czech Republic may differ considerably from disinformation shared in Germany. Adapting traditional deterrence strategies to the digital age requires an understanding of the contextbased nature of these threats. It is therefore integral to include experts across the EU and NATO member states in the development and implementation of AI strategies. A comprehensive mapping of the security threats faced-and development and use of AI-driven technologies to combat such threats across EU and NATO member states-can help better train personnel and develop more targeted solutions and localized data protection policies.
Conclusion
The digital industry is already transforming the Alliance. NATO is essential to setting up a coordinated structure to develop and regulate AI- and ML-driven technologies for NATO members’ security and defense. While sociopolitical and economic priorities in the development and regulation of AI vary across sectors and countries, awareness of the use and misuse of data in driving AI-and ML-driven technologies is a common thread that binds these debates together. The use of data fed into a system run by AI and ML technology can have vast implications for the nature of future security threats and the development of technologies to combat them. Cohesive EU and NATO strategies for AI will determine how strong and agile the Alliance will become.
References
Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
See Daniel S. Hoadley and Nathan J. Lucas, Artificial Intelligence and National Security (Washington DC.: Congressional Research Service,
2018); Greg Allen and Taniel Chan, Artificial Intelligence and National Security (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2017). Artificial intelligence comprises a vast number of fields, including machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, and knowledge representation and reasoning. In this policy brief, the authors largely refer to the use of AI- and ML- driven technologies for EU and NATO security and defense.
Steven Feldstein, The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, September 2019).
The Cybersecurity Strategy of the Visegrad Group Countries Coronavirus, Artificial Intelligence web page (April 12, 2020).
Raluca Csernatoni, An Ambitious Agenda or Big Words? Developing a
European Approach to AI, Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 117 (Brussels: Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, November 2019).
Michael Chui et al., Notes from the AI Frontier: Insights from Hundreds of Use Cases (New York: McKinsey Global Institute, 2018).
Philipp Gr√ºll, “Germany’s Plans for Automatic Facial Recognition Meet Fierce Criticism,” EURACTIV (January 10, 2020).
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2018).
See the UN’s 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
German Federal Foreign Office, Chair’s Summary: Berlin Forum for Supporting the 2020 Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (Berlin: German Federal Foreign Office, April 2020).
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, The Human Element in Decisions About the Use of Force (Geneva: UNIDIR, March 2020).
European Commission, On Artificial Intelligence: A European
Approach to Excellence and Trust, white paper, COM (2020) 65 final (Brussels: European Commission, February 19, 2020), p. 1. See also European Commission, A European Strategy for Data, COM (2020) 66 final (Brussels: European Commission, February 19, 2020).
EC, On Artificial Intelligence, p. 25.
Ibid.
Dieter Ernst, Competing in Artificial Intelligence Chips: China’s Challenge amid Technology War, Special Report (Center for International Governance Innovation, March 26, 2020).
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Private Equity Investment in Artificial Intelligence (Paris: OECD, December 2018).
European Commission, European Defence Fund (Brussels: European Commission: March 20, 2019). Arguably, Washington would do well not to view the EDF with suspicion and skepticism but rather as a vehicle to stimulate more transatlantic discussion on “home-grown” innovation and development.
Daniele Amoroso et al., “Autonomy in Weapon Systems: The Mili-tary Application of Artificial Intelligence as a Litmus Test for Germany’s New Foreign and Security Policy,” Democracy Vol. 49 (Heinrich B√∂ll Foundation, 2018).
Marek G√≥rka, “The Cybersecurity Strategy of the Visegrad Group
Countries,” Politics in Central Europe Vol .14, No. 2 (2018), pp. 75-98. See also Alistair Knott, “Uses and Abuses of AI in Election Campaigns,” presentation, N.d.
Council of Europe, AI and Control of Covid-19.
By Naďa Kovalčíková and Gabrielle Tarini
The rise of China poses a strategic challenge for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Alliance needs a comprehensive political, economic, and security strategy to deal with China’s growing
global power. The more assertive a role China plays in world affairs, the more it could undercut NATO’s cohesion and military advantages by translating commercial inroads in Europe into political influence, investing in strategically important sectors, and achieving major breakthroughs in advanced digital technologies.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly emphasized the need for NATO allies to assess and better understand the implications of China’s increased presence and activity in the North Atlantic.1 At their London meeting in December 2019, NATO leaders noted that “China’s growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance.”2 At the 2020 Munich Security Conference in February 2020, China again featured prominently in the discussions. Plenary sessions and many of the side sessions focused on China, with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Stoltenberg all highlighting the role for transatlantic cooperation in addressing China’s rise.3
This policy brief examines the challenge that China presents for NATO and the importance of a common posture toward China. It also considers China’s perception of NATO as a stumbling block to its global ambitions, and it provides recommendations for how the Alliance should approach China moving forward.
China’s Rise and Its Implications for NATO
China has used its growing economic, political and military capabilities to pursue an increasingly assertive foreign policy, and NATO has rightly begun to assess the implications for the Alliance. As the secretary general remarked in December 2019, “This is not about moving NATO into the South China Sea, but it’s about taking into account that China’s coming closer to us, in the Arctic, in Africa, investing heavily in our infrastructure, in Europe, in cyberspace.”4
China’s increased involvement in European allies’ economies poses a challenge to NATO’s political cohesion. China’s annual foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe has grown exponentially since 2008.5 Europe is also one of the most important destinations for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global development strategy initiated by China in 2013. Last spring, Italy became the first G7 country to join BRI, while Greece joined China’s “17+1 grouping,” an initiative aimed at enhancing ties between China and Central and Eastern Europe.6
Chinese commercial inroads today can lead to wider political influence tomorrow, which well may be China’s objective. An analysis from the Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies, for example, contends that China “incentivizes state-led Chinese banks as well as State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to fill financing or investment gaps in EU member states and accession countries in exchange for political support for Chinese positions, such as on territorial claims in the South China Sea or human rights.”7 Most recently, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, China has attempted to make political inroads in Europe through “mask diplomacy.”8 China is widely publicizing its provision of medical masks and critical health equipment to affected European states and promoted false narratives over Chinese state media Twitter accounts (such as claims that COVID-19 actually began outside of China).9 These actions have helped China deflect criticism of its initial response to the virus and elevate its image in Europe as a global humanitarian player.
NATO allies also face pressure to address Chinese companies’ investments in Europe’s strategic sectors such as telecommunications, energy, transportation and ports. Chinese investments in these sectors have direct security implications for the Alliance, as it depends on national critical infrastructure to execute its activities and missions. For example, national telecommunication networks that are hacked or disrupted by foreign governments could threaten NATO networks such as the Federated Mission Network that are critical to command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and allied decisionmaking.10 5G equipment made by companies with obscure ownership structures and close ties to the Chinese Communist Party “could use wellconcealed kill switches to cripple Western telecom systems” during conflict, or even during peacetime. 11 Moreover, the protection and integrity of digital information is also critical to secure force mobilization and plans for reinforcement. Civilian roads, ports and rails are an integral part of NATO’s plans for military mobilization. Chinese investments in European ports and rail could complicate NATO’s ability to reinforce and resupply Europe in a warfighting scenario. Currently, Chinese SOEs have invested in 12 ports in seven NATO countries that are key for military mobility planning in the east, south and southeast of NATO.12
Finally, China’s advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) threaten to undermine NATO’s current military and intelligence advantages. China’s “New Generation AI Development Plan” calls for China to “catch up on AI technology and applications by 2020, achieve major breakthroughs by 2025, and become a global leader in AI by 2030.”13 China sees AI as a way to leapfrog—in other words, skip—a generation of military technology.14
NATO relies on individual members to incorporate AI into their national defense capabilities. However, if all do not master and integrate this technology at the same pace, it may erode decades of work to strengthen interoperability. Moreover, European technologies to run AI operations— including robotics and efficient electronic chips such as
Dutch ASML semiconductors—are in high demand in China. If foreign state-backed companies were to acquire this technology, with its dual commercial and military applications, it would cause serious security concerns for the
Alliance.15
China’s Perception of NATO
Generally, Beijing views NATO as a stumbling block to its global ambitions. As Adam Liff’s work on China and the U.S. alliance system has shown, Beijing expresses “deepening frustration towards, and even open opposition to” America’s alliances.16 China has not yet publicly expressed its vision of an alternative international system—and indeed scholars vigorously debate China’s long-term strategic objectives—but it is clear that China believes it can exercise greater influence on the world stage if power is more broadly diffused.17
China’s efforts to date seem to have focused largely on driving a wedge in U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific, but China would undoubtedly welcome a fractured transatlantic relationship, where US and European threat perceptions and policy priorities increasingly diverge.18 As a recent analysis of China-Europe relations noted, China wants to “weaken Western unity, both within Europe and across the Atlantic.”19 Consequently, it prefers to deal with European states individually rather than through the European Union’s collective leadership. Thus President Xi Jinping was likely displeased when French President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to join his bilateral meeting with China in March 2019.20 China also seeks to fragment EU unity on economic issues and trade, criticizing it for “politicizing” economic and trade issues in its Policy Paper on the European Union.21 China knows that NATO has neither robust tools nor a legacy of regulating political economy issues. China’s use of this narrative contributes to internal tension within the Alliance between those who guard against NATO’s involvement in these areas, especially since 21 EU members are also NATO allies.22
In sum, a united NATO and a cohesive transatlantic relationship thwart China’s desire to increase multipolarity in the international system, while a fractured NATO enables China to play Europe off America and Europe off itself.
Recommendations
Developing a united stance toward China will require NATO to synchronize regional priorities. It will also need to strengthen partnerships with other institutions and countries, given that much of what needs to be done currently falls outside NATO’s core competencies. NATO could strive for greater cohesion toward China in three areas: politics, military and technology.
Political Recommendations
To date, there is little evidence that NATO allies are coming closer to a solid political consensus on how to address China’s rise.23 In order to operationalize allies’ views in the London Declaration on the “opportunities and challenges”24 that China’s growing influence presents and limit its ability to undermine transatlantic cohesion or make further political inroads in Europe, NATO should do the following:
Consistently coordinate allied efforts to ensure that Chinese initiatives, such as the BRI or the 17+1 grouping with Central and Eastern European countries, do not allow Beijing to gain political support for Chinese positions, such as on human rights or territorial claims, and drive wedges between allies.
Increase cooperation with the EU on screening and assessing Chinese FDI in allied critical infrastructure and advanced technologies, which rely heavily on sensitive data. NATO should contribute to defining key criteria on FDI in domains with dual civilian-military applications.
Encourage allies to make full use of their existing screening mechanisms for foreign investment and encourage those that do not have one to set it up.25 NATO’s EU allies should also systematically implement the EU’s foreign investment screening mechanism in order to mitigate the risks of foreign investors acquiring control over critical technologies, infrastructure, or sensitive information with potential security implications to all NATO allies. Increased transparency about Chinese FDI in critical infrastructure across NATO would help to mitigate the potential impact on NATO’s overall political cohesion.
engagement and expertise. Such partnerships could inaugurate a new consultative body, which could pave the way for more coordinated planning and intelligence sharing.27
•
NATO should coordinate its efforts with the European Union in this domain, as AI and other advanced technologies are developed primarily in the private sector and can have both civilian and military applications. EU-NATO collaboration may be hampered by the fact
Enhance NATO’s political partnerships with IndoPacific countries, especially with Australia (within the “Enhanced Opportunities Partner” framework26 or other tailored platforms) and Japan to strengthen interregional Military Recommendations
It would be difficult and inadvisable to reposture the Alliance toward a hypothetical contingency with China: NATO members already have varied preferences over which region should receive priority focus and, with the exception of the United States, do not have the expeditionary capabilities to project power into the Indo-Pacific region. Nevertheless, there are four areas where NATO could improve its posture vis-à-vis China:
Increased Chinese naval activity in the Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea, and the High North, often in collaboration with Russia, is a direct concern for NATO.28 NATO need not make plans to fight China in the North Atlantic. However, as a noted NATO and maritime affairs expert argues, allies must be prepared to “monitor and interact with another growing naval power operating in waters of key interest to the transatlantic alliance.” 29
NATO should step up its existing military partnerships with Indo-Pacific countries, in particular in NATO exercises, the Partnership Interoperability Platform, and other capacity building programs.30
Working with the EU, NATO tabletop exercises should focus on enhancing military mobility in Europe to mitigate against the effects of rising, potentially coercive Chinese investments and to secure a more robust, integrated civilian-military infrastructure.
NATO allies should continuously assess and avoid investment in Chinese military equipment that would plug into NATO’s command and control system.31
Technological Recommendations
NATO allies should coordinate efforts to incorporate AI-based military technologies into their national capabilities in order to avoid duplication and economize.
The roadmap on disruptive technologies adopted by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in 2018 should guide allies toward increased and better tailored investments in military technology powered by AI, biotechnology and cyber and quantum computing. NATO should also continue to adapt its Defense Planning Process to account for rapid, fundamental technological evolution.32
that not all EU member states or NATO allies have written national AI strategies, and as one analyst notes, “Europe’s political and strategic debate on AI-enabled military technology is underdeveloped.”33 NATO should encourage all allies to develop their respective AI strategies, while the European Union can guide them by collecting and publishing best practices and encouraging countries to limit potentially burdensome regulations on AI before it is applied. The European Union in collaboration with NATO may also consider establishing an AI Center of Excellence.34
Cybersecurity in 5G networks is another area where
NATO should coordinate its efforts with the European Union. Because this issue concerns mostly civilian networks, NATO does not have robust tools to tackle this problem alone. Thus the European Union and the European Commission in particular should lead in coordinating and implementing action. In its new “toolbox,” rolled out in January 2020, the European Union recommended measures to mitigate the cybersecurity risks of 5G.35 The plan, which could ban suppliers from core parts of telecoms networks if they are identified as “high-risk” vendors, could allow European countries to limit Chinese tech giant Huawei’s role in Europe in the future. NATO allies should not only consider the EU measures when appropriate but also push for more transparency into foreign companies’ ownership structures and state influence. In general, each NATO member should strengthen oversight of telecom network security by creating mechanisms to review contracts between operators and suppliers and conducting national-level audits of the security practices of 5G companies.
In sum, NATO must strive to maintain transatlantic unity in the face of a rapidly evolving technology and global security landscape. As China seeks to divide allied democracies, it is critical for NATO allies, in coordination with the EU and other partners, to address a widening array of emerging economic, political, societal and technological challenges to the Alliance.
Authors
Naďa Kovalčíková is a Program Manager and Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshal Fund of the United States.
Gabrielle Tarini is a Policy Analyst at the non-profit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
References
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, opening remarks at the
Munich Security Conference, February 15, 2020, at the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and Sub-Committee on Security and Defence (SEDE), January 21, 2020, and doorstep statement ahead of the meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Heads of State and/or Government , December 4, 2019.
NATO, London Declaration, Issued by the Heads of State and
Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in London 3-4, December 2019 (Brussels: NATO, December 4, 2019).
Daniel W. Drezner, “What I Learned at the Munich Security Conference,” commentary, Washington Post (February 17, 2020).
NATO, “Questions and Answers by NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg at the ‘‘NATO Engages: Innovating the Alliance’ Conference,” transcript (London: NATO, December 3, 2019).
Thilo Hanemann, Mikko Huotari and Agatha Kratz, Chinese FDI in Europe: 2018 Trends and Impact of New Screening Policies, MERICS Papers on China (Berlin: Mercator Institute for China Studies, June 3, 2019).
Federiga Bindi, Why Did Italy Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative? commentary (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 19, 2020); Jonathan E. Hillman and Masea McCalpin, Will China’s ‘16+1’ Format Divide Europe? (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 11, 2019).
Thorsten Benner et al., Authoritarian Advance: Responding to China’s Growing Political Influence in Europe, report (Berlin: Mercator Institute for China Studies, February 2018), p. 106, p. 15.
AFP News, “Mask Diplomacy: China Tries to Rewrite Virus Narrative,” France 24 (March 20, 2020).
Matt Schrader, Analyzing China’s Propaganda Messaging in Europe
(Alliance for Securing Democracy, March 20, 2020). See also Elizabeth Braw, “Beware of Bad Samaritans,” Foreign Policy (March 30, 2020).
Kadri Kaska, Henrik Beckvard and Tomáš Minárik, Huawei, 5G and China as a Security Threat, report (Brussels: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2019).
Lindsay Gorman, “5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge,” The Atlantic (January 4, 2020).
Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey. See also Ian Anthony, Jiayi Zhou and Fei Su, EU Security Perspectives in an Era of Connectivity: Implications for Relations with China, SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security, No. 2020/3 (Stockholm: SIPRI, February 2020), p.14.
Graham Webster et al., China’s Plan to ‘Lead’ in AI: Purpose,
Prospects, and Problems, blog post (Washington, DC: New America, August 1, 2017); Ryan Hass and Zach Balin, US-China Relations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, report (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, January 10, 2019).
Gregory Allen, Understanding China’s AI Strategy: Clues to Chinese
Strategic Thinking on Artificial Intelligence and National Security, report (Washington, D.C., The Center for a New American Security,February 6, 2019), p. 8.
Alexandra Alper, Toby Sterling and Stephen Nellis, “Trump Administration Pressed Dutch Hard to Cancel China Chip-Equipment Sale: Sources,” Reuters (January 6, 2020).
Adam Liff, “China and the US Alliance System,” The China Quarterly Vol. 233 (March 2018).
Nadège Rolland, China’s Vision for a New World Order, NBR Special Report No. 83 (Washington, D.C.: The National Bureau of Asian Research, January 2020).
Scott Harold, Chinese Views on European Defense Integration, MERICS China Monitor (Berlin: Mercator Institute for China Studies, December 19, 2018).
Thomas Wright and Thorsten Benner, testimony to U.S. China
Economic and Security Review Commission, hearing on “China’s Relations with U.S. Allies and Partners in Europe and the Asia Pacific,” April 5, 2018.
Keegan Elmer, “France’s Emmanuel Macron Asks Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker to Join Meeting with Xi Jinping in Paris,” South China Morning Post (March 22, 2019).
Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the European Union, China’s Policy Paper on the European Union (Brussels: Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the European Union, December 2018).
Jens Ringsmose and Sten Rynning, “China Brought NATO Closer Together,” War On the Rocks (February 5, 2020).
23 Noah Barkin, “The U.S. and Europe Are Speaking a Different Language on China,” Foreign Policy (February 16, 2020).
NATO, “London Declaration, Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in London, 3-4 December 2019” (December 4, 2019).
European Commission, Guidance to the Member States Concerning Foreign Direct Investment (FDI Screening Regulation)” (Brussels: EC, March 25, 2020).
NATO, Partnership Interoperability Initiative (Brussels: NATO, March 24, 2020).
Fabrice Pothier, How Should NATO Respond to China’s Growing Power? analysis (London: IISS, September 12, 2019).
Mercy A. Kuo, “NATO-China Council: Now Is the Time: Insights from Ian Brzezinski,” The Diplomat (October 15, 2019).
Magnus F. Nordenman, “Five Questions NATO Must Answer in the North Atlantic,” Proceedings Vol. 145, no. 3 (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute, March 2019).
Ibid.
Turkey, for example, was interested in buying China’s HQ-9 missile systems in 2013 but ultimately abandoned their bid after significant pressure from other NATO allies. See Denise Der, “Why Turkey May Not Buy Chinese Missile Systems After All,” The Diplomat (May 7, 2014).
Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute, NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis, report (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2019).
Ulrike Franke and Paola Sartori, Machine Politics: Europe and the AI Revolution, Policy Brief (Berlin: European Council on Foreign Relations, July 11, 2019).
Wendy R. Anderson and Jim Townsend, “As AI Begins to Reshape
Defense, Here’s How Europe Can Keep Up,” Defense One (May 18, 2018); Institute for Security Studies, The EU, NATO and Artificial Intelligence: New Possibilities for Cooperation? report (Paris: ISS, 2019).
EU Commission, Cybersecurity of 5G Networks – EU Toolbox of Risk Mitigating Measures (Brussels: EU, January 29, 2020).
This publication is the result of a joint WIIS DC, WIIS Brussels, WIIS France, and WIIS UK project focused on new challenges for the NATO alliance and showcasing the expertise of the Next Generation women defense experts. Through a competitive selection process six Next Generation experts were invited to participate in programs on the sidelines of the 2019 December NATO Leaders meeting. We would like to thank our six experts for their thoughtful contributions to this initiative, WIIS Global for publishing their research and the US Mission to NATO for providing the generous grant without which this project would not have been possible. With this support, we were able to turn an idea to promote greater cooperation among our affiliates and cities into a reality.
We hope this project encourages more collaboration across borders and helps bolster the overall WIIS mission of supporting women in the international security field.
The NATO Consortium Team: Michelle Shevin-Coetzee, WIIS-DC; Armida van Rij, WIIS UK; Florence Fernando and Pauline Massart, WIIS Brussels; Ottavia Ampuero
By Shannon Zimmerman
The majority of countries have gender-blind foreign policies. While this may seem like a good thing, such policies fail to acknowledge and address existing gendered discrimination, inequalities, and
violence. They also fail to take active steps to include women and other marginalized groups. Feminist foreign policy, in contrast, is designed to take into account and address these existing imbalances. On September 12, 2019, Women In International Security (WIIS)–Australia and the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (APR2P) convened a workshop to assess whether Australia has a feminist foreign policy and, if not, what steps could be taken to advance such a policy.
A feminist foreign policy, while more difficult to implement, is a smart strategic move. Greater gender equality promotes both a nation’s relative state of peace and healthier, more resilient domestic security environments. Most important for foreign policy, states with more gender equality are more stable. These states have higher gross domestic products and economic growth rates, higher levels of health and lower levels of corruption. They also exhibit less aggression toward other states. Recognition of the interconnection of gender equality and national security has led to the emergence of feminist foreign policies that push against the systematic, global subordination of women. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström explained her pursuit of a feminist foreign policy by noting that, “Striving toward gender equality is not only a goal in itself but also a precondition for achieving our wider foreign, development, and security-policy objectives.” Promoting true gender equality abroad, while cultivating it at home, is a win/win policy move.
Four countries currently have explicitly feminist foreign policies: Sweden, Canada, France, and Mexico. Sweden first unveiled its policy in 2014. It encompassed all domains— foreign and national security, development, and trade—and emphasized promoting gender equality in its own right as well as to further other foreign policy priorities. In 2017, Canada launched a more limited Feminist International Assistance Policy focused on development assistance, but it eschewed the broader realms of diplomacy, defense and trade. France followed suit with its 2018 International Strategy on Gender Equality, which also focuses on foreign assistance including some diplomatic aspects. Mexico has the latest feminist foreign policy, announced in January 2020. Each of these policies has strengths and weaknesses but are notable for explicitly acknowledging gender equality as a core component for achieving foreign policy goals.
What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?
What makes a foreign policy ‘feminist’ is contingent on a country’s specific conditions and environment. Sweden, for example, has crafted its policy around the “three Rs”: women’s and girl’s Rights, women’s Representation in the decisionmaking process, and the necessary Resources to promote gender equality and equal opportunities. Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy focuses on addressing barriers to success for women and girls, such as poverty, education and economic opportunities. These policies are solid starts, but they are state-centric, promote Western ideals, and assume a cis-gender binary. They do not address power relations, a core cause of inequality. Nor do they encompass those with intersectional identities.
Embracing the full complexity of a feminist approach can result in policies that address some of the most systemic foreign policy challenges. Lyric Thompson and Rachel Clement argue that a feminist foreign policy should seek to address patriarchal, racist, and neo-colonist imbalances of power. To this end, Thompson and Clement offer up a more inclusive definition of feminist foreign policy that goes beyond the dominant gender-binary, ethnocentric, Westerncentric conceptions: “A Feminist Foreign Policy is the policy of a state that defines its interactions with other states and movements in a manner that prioritizes gender equality and enshrines the human rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, allocates significant resources to achieve that vision, and seeks through its implementation to disrupt patriarchal and male-dominated power structures across all of its levers of influence (aid, trade, defense, and diplomacy), informed by the voices of feminist activists, groups, and movements.”
A feminist foreign policy implies a collaborative effort between the state that develops the policy and the states with which it engages. Scholars Karin Aggestam, Annika Bergman Rosamond, and Annica Kronsel further this idea by arguing that a feminist foreign policy is an ethical commitment to the care and support of distant others. In this view, a feminist foreign policy is concerned not only with achieving state objectives but also with the impact of its policies on recipient communities, with special consideration given to marginalized groups. This approach can result in divergences between countries national interests and those of the recipient country. For example, Saudi Arabia, a country known for its oppressive treatment of women, cut ties with Sweden and refused to issue visas to Swedish business travels after remarks made by Sweden’s feminist foreign minister Margot Wallström. Inversely, countries which adhere to a feminist foreign policy gain political legitimacy because they are seen as actors who are willing to pursue the values they espouse.
These two conceptions can be combined to identify characteristics of a feminist foreign policy:
created in consultation with a diverse group of domestic actors;
a collaborative effort between the policy-making state and other states;
an emphasis on equal rights that is backed up with representation and resources;
inclusive of LGBTQ identities;
implemented across all levels of influence (aid, trade, defense and diplomacy); and
addresses structural power imbalances.
How Does Australia Measure Up?
Australia has a mixed record of promoting feminist ideals, both domestically and through its foreign policy. The administration of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, received praise for supporting inclusion and equality “at the very highest political level.” Additionally, Julie Bishop, Australia’s first female foreign minister, may have eschewed the feminist label but nonetheless spoke of making gender equality central to global peace and security. In pursuit of this goal, Australia released a Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Strategyin 2016. Successive governments made commitments to gender equality as a foreign policy goal. It is clear that Australia recognizes the utility of gender equality but, compared against the criteria cited above, there is a way to go before Australia can claim to have a feminist foreign policy.
Perhaps the first challenge is the limited inclusion of diverse domestic actors in Australia’s policymaking process and the lack of female representation within Australia’s policymaking apparatuses. In a July 2019 report, the Lowy Institute found a continued gender imbalance within Australian government departments and organizations responsible for international relations. The report noted that not a single one of the 33 white papers, reviews, and other major foreign and security policy-shaping documents produced by the Australian government in the last 50 years has been led by a woman. Australia’s most recent foreign policy document, the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, was exclusively written and formally reviewed by men. The lack of female representation in policymaking raises questions as to Australia’s ability to “practice what it preaches” in its foreign policy.
Second, Australia has a strongly self-centered foreign policy, with only passing reference to the impact of these policies outside its borders. The 2017 White Paper lists five objectives:
“the promotion of an open, inclusive, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected;
the delivery of more opportunities for our businesses globally and stand against protectionism;
ensuring Australians remain safe, secure, and free in the face of threats such as terrorism;
the promotion and protection of international rules that support stability and prosperity and enable cooperation to tackle global challenges, and;
increased support for a more resilient Pacific and
Timor-Leste.”
Except for the first objective of an inclusive and prosperous
Indo-Pacific region, the priorities listed by the Foreign Policy White Paper present policy options as a choice between
Australia’s national interest and the interests of distant others.
Even efforts to promote a more resilient Pacific and TimorLeste are pursued to ensure that instability in those states does not impact Australia. While a self-interested approach to foreign policy is to be expected, too much emphasis on one-sided relationships to promote Australian economic growth and state security can create “winners” and “losers” in foreign policy. The needs of recipient communities are not explored and addressed, nor are the potential negative impacts of such policies on particular communities considered. This limits more collaborative opportunities that could be mutually beneficial to all actors involved.
These opportunities are even more limited because Australia—like Canada and France—appears to limit the gendered aspects of their policy to development and aid. This excludes gender considerations from the key spheres of trade, defense, and diplomacy. For Australia, this means that gender overall is downplayed as militarised understandings of security guide most policy actions, particularly in the Indo-pacific. More inclusive or ‘feminine’ ideals such as aid and poverty eradication appear secondary to the main agenda despite the fact that some of Australia’s most pressing challenges are related to issues of development.
Third, in the context of Australian policy, gender is understood and applied narrowly as a synonym for women and girls. There is no reference to the rights of LGBTQ individuals or those with intersectional identities. Although Australian policy does mention the importance of supporting indigenous peoples and those with disabilities, it fails to make key intersections with gender. Most importantly for achieving any policy objective, Australia does not yet have clear indicators of how increased representation of women will be achieved and where resources for gender programming will come from. Guaranteed resources are the basis upon which all effective policies are built.
Lastly, Australia’s core foreign policy objectives promote the continuation of the Western-dominated rules-based global order. The current order was fashioned after World War II and based upon ideas of liberal democracy, particularly the freedom of trade and the promotion of commerce. These core values were powerfully influenced by the interests and values of Western countries at the time and reflect their racial, religious, gendered, and economic biases. This order has been contested for decades by Russia and, more recently, by emerging powers such as China. The United States has also become an unexpected source of contention as the Trump administration has begun to distance itself competitive and expansive realist focus on relative power between states to one of mutual gains in an increasingly interconnected region. In order to do so, foreign policy must promote a global order based upon rules that strive to achieve equality between countries and individuals. It can be argued that the current world order is simply not structured to do that.
In light of these critiques, workshop participants provided several recommendations for how Australia might approach its foreign policy in a more inclusive, equalityfocused manner, thus generating a better policy and potentially attracting and retaining more women to work in international relations.
Recommendations
Include Women at All Levels. It is difficult for any nation to promote a feminist policy if it does not itself model feminist ideals. In comparison with many other countries, Australia has remarkably inclusive foreign policy consultation. In preparation for the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, a task force held roundtable discussions across Australia, interviewed over 60 prominent Australians and subjectmatter experts, and received over 9,000 written submissions. However, it is unclear who these experts were and how many of them were women or held feminist viewpoints. The Lowy report noted that women play almost no role in the actual drafting of key Australian foreign policy documents. Women and non-gender-binary participants need to be an equal part of policymaking at all levels, not just as advisors but as leaders and substantive content contributors.
from liberal democratic ideals. A feminist foreign policy has the potential to help Australia redirect policies from a
Address Structural Power Imbalances. Australia needs to recognize and reject outdated policies and engage with its foreign partners on equal footing to ensure mutual benefits. Australia is in a privileged position in the Asia Pacific. Since its founding as a state, it has been supported by strong allies that have helped it become and remain a major player in the region. Historically, this power was not always used for the betterment of those with whom Australia came into contact. To construct a foreign policy focused on equality, Australia needs to first take ownership of the negative impact that its foreign policy actions have had on its neighboring states. It also needs to reconsider relationships that have at times prevented—or been used as an excuse to avoid—relationship building with regional neighbors. Policymakers should strive to ensure that these biased, dated policies are not used as precedent for current policies and instead actively work toward crafting new policies that address these imbalances and strengthen collaborative relationships.
Foster Cooperative Policies and Structures. Australia should engage in “smart” power relationships with its regional neighbors and move beyond security collaboration to address broader issues. Drawing on feminist conceptions of ethics of care, Australia can promote cooperative rather than competitive relationships with its neighbors. This necessitates looking beyond the needs of states to address the needs of individuals, particularly marginalized groups. Policies that focus on state needs often overlook those most in need. While this might be a contentious approach to making decisions on engagement and aid delivery, it would show that Australia is willing to put its money where it claims its values lie, encouraging recipient states to ensure their priorities also focus on equality. An inclusive foreign policy— and one that will attract a diverse array of civil servants who want to help implement such policy—should adopt inclusive language that reflects a wider set of skills, including cultural credentials in the exercise of diplomacy and interpersonal skills.
A Comprehensive Approach to Foreign Policy. The world in which Australian foreign policy is seen to operate is referred to as “contested,” “competitive,” “uncertain,” and even “dangerous.” References to national security, found 62 times, overshadow the phrase foreign policy, which is found 22 times. A strong feminist foreign policy would eschew policy built on a nationalized military-based security premised on states’ rights and a patriarchal, rules-based order. Australia can draw upon new relationships and resources to craft a comprehensive approach to foreign policy. Such an approach would embrace human security, which encompasses economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. Human security is feminist in that it is people-cantered, universal, and tries to prevent suffering, particularly through early prevention. It also acknowledges the interdependent nature of all aspects of security, which extend far beyond protection of physical borders. As security clearly motivates Australia’s foreign policy, embracing a broader understanding of security can address some of the most gendered oversights of existing policy. In particular, it will encourage policymakers to draw equally on all types of foreign influence, balancing military options with trade, aid, and diplomacy.
Conclusion
Genuine pursuit of a feminist foreign policy will not be easy. The structures of government are designed to promote and support masculine ideas of security. Crafting an effective, inclusive, and enduring feminist foreign policy would require substantial resources and overturning male-dominated power structures. Additionally, countries with particularly gendered approaches to governance may push back against Australian efforts to implement feminist policy. However, the current realpolitik approach to Australia’s foreign policy may not be addressing key causes of instability, which are often rooted in gendered relations. A foreign policy that moves beyond the realist emphasis on hard power to foster inclusive, collaborative relationships with other countries and that emphasizes gender equality is the smartest choice for Australia and would be well worth the effort.
References
For a summary of major studies, see Ted Piccone, Democracy, Gender
Equality, and Security, Policy Brief (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, September 2017). For statistics regarding the relationship between gender parity and peace, see Council on Foreign Relations, Women’s Participation in Peace Processes, CFR website (New York, CFR, January 30, 2019).
Valerie M. Hudson, Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose
McDermott, and Chad F. Emmett, “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” International Security, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2009), pp. 7-44.
Valerie M. Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Jenny Nordberg, “Who’s Afraid of a Feminist Foreign Policy?,” New Yorker (April 15, 2015).
Government Offices of Sweden, Handbook on Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy (Stockholm: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019).
Government of Canada, Feminist International Assistance Policy (Ottawa: Global Affairs Canada).
Government of France, France’s International Strategy for Gender Equality (2018-2022) (Paris: Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs).
Lyric Thompson and Rachel Clement, Defining Feminist Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women, 2019), p.7.
Karin Aggestam, Annika Bergman Rosamond, and Annica Kronsell, “Theorising Feminist Foreign Policy,” International Relations, Vol. 33, No.1 (2019), pp. 23–39.
Nordberg, “Who’s Afraid of a Feminist Foreign Policy?”12 Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Strategy (Canberra: Australian Government, February 2016).
13 Danielle Cave et al., Foreign Territory: Women In International Relations (Sydney: Lowy Institute, 2019).
Australian Government, 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper (Canberra: Australian Government, 2017).Ibid, p. 3.Richard Menhinick, ‘The Rules-Based Global Order’: Be Alert andAlarmed, The Strategist (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute,
April 12, 2019). For an example of how the existing rules-based global order is being used to promote particular agendas, see P. Chacko and K. Jayasuriya, “Trump, The Authoritarian Populist Revolt, and the Future of the Rules-Based Order in Asia,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2 (2017), pp. 121–27.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2009).
Fiona Robinson, The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).
The term “human security” first appeared in the 1994 Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Program.
For example, Saudi Arabia. See Nordberg, “Who’s Afraid of a Feminist Foreign Policy?”
Valerie Hudson, “What Sex Means for World Peace,” Foreign Policy
(April 24, 2012).
By Sarah Kenny
On August 12, 2017, neo-Nazis and white supremacists shocked the United States and the world alike with a deadly display of domestic terrorism. Tiki-torches, firearms, and fists overwhelmed the University of Virginia’s campus and the streets of downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, leaving an activist and two state police officers dead and dozens injured.
Since August 2017, the list of far-right extremist atrocities in the United States and elsewhere has only grown. On October 24, 2018, two black shoppers were shot at a grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky. Three days later, a man opened fire on a service at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history.1
The following week, a man who identified as an ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) opened fire in a Tallahassee yoga studio.2 On March 15, 2019, an Australian man carried out a shooting rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. August 3rd marks the murder of 22 shoppers at an El Paso, Texas Walmart; the perpetrator of this mass shooting has admitted to targeting Mexicans in a white nationalist manifesto he released in advance of the attack.3
Depictions of the alt-right, like the grisly images from Charlottesville, feature few to no women actors. This lack of representation of women in the alt-right insinuates that women play an insignificant role in this movement, if any at all. But women do in fact make significant contributions to the alt-right movement. Moreover, the systematic mischaracterization of the alt-right movement as a genderless movement weakens governmental, civil society, and community level approaches to preventing and countering far-right extremism.
Research on far-right violent extremism is limited and on the role that women play even more so. This paper’s arguments and recommendations are informed by primary source interviews I conducted with two former neo-Nazi women: Angela King and Shannon Martinez. King was involved in right-wing extremist activity into her mid-20s, when she was sent to federal prison for a hate crime. After her release from prison, King pursued higher education and co-founded Life After Hate, a peace activism organization that supports deradicalization. Martinez likewise turned her back on farright extremism at the age of 20 and has since dedicated her career to counterextremist activism.
What Is the Alt-Right?
In 2008, University of Virginia graduate Richard Spencer coined the term “alternative right” (alt-right) to rebrand an age-old American sociopolitical tradition: white supremacy.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the alt-right “is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”4 Furthermore, the SPLC notes that “alt-righters eschew establishment conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.” Ethnonationalism can be understood as “advocacy of or support for the political interests of a particular ethnic group, especially its national independence or self-determination.” While the term alt-right is merely a decade old, the ideals that this platform espouses are a rebranding of a rich tradition of far-right activism in America. According to George Michael, a scholar of right-wing extremism at Westfield State University, “The alt-right derives from the same impulses that have launched other white extremist groups, including a belief that white civilization, the white race in particular, is imperiled.”5
The most prominent example of organized white supremacism in the mainstream American conscious is the Ku Klux Klan. African American political thinker Marcus
Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and the “Back to Africa” movement, called the KKK the “invisible government of America,” a claim that speaks to the project of white supremacy that still lives on in many of nation’s most powerful institutions.6 While white hoods and cross burnings are no longer socially acceptable to the great majority of Americans, the principles that KKK-affiliated individuals have espoused over the last century live on in members of today’s alt-right, among others.
A distinguishing factor that differentiates alt-right activity from historical far-right violent extremism is the alt-right’s use of online meetings and community-building efforts. According to the SPLC, the alt-right is “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes,” although these features of communication are often shielded from the mainstream eye.7 Much of the online activity occurs on the “deep web,” a part of the internet that is inaccessible to most search engines. Furthermore, extremist groups convene on the “dark web,” “a small portion of the deep web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard web browsers.”8
Myths about Women in the Alt-Right
§ Alt-right adherents are a homogenous group of violent, racist young men.
Images of extremism in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017, and elsewhere primarily feature violent young men. Sociology scholar Kathleen Blee reflects this archetypal depiction in Understanding Racist Activism, where she describes common preconceptions of the alt-right actor as “a deviant, hate-filled extremist who acts on his own deeply-held hostilities toward the victim’s social group.”9 This definition overlooks the social dynamics and demographic diversity within alt-right membership.
Men-centric definitions are not unique to alt-right archetypes. Women have been excluded from history books, scholarship, and policy analysis of most social and political movements. Such systemic exclusion has effectively gendered these social movements, including the alt-right. Thus “the logic is circular: organized racism is a male province,” Blee deduces.10 To ignore the role and agency of women in political groups perpetuates erasure and subordination. Furthermore, this neglect is an incomplete, inaccurate account of society.
Women join alt-right and extremist movements. Precise participation estimates prove challenging to calculate due in part to the hidden nature of alt-right organizing. In her 2017 analysis of the alt-right, “The Rise of the Valkyries,” journalist Seyward Darby contended that women make up between 15 and 20 percent of this movement.11 Any demographic that constitutes a fifth of a movement’s base is worth examination.12 Moreover, a diverse group of women join movements like the alt-right. Instead of transferring stereotypes about alt-right membership from men to women—assuming that all women members are lower-
class, uneducated, apolitical, violent racists—it is critical to examine how gender influences membership. An intersectional gender analysis of member demographics is a superior tool to analyze the nature of women in the alt-right.13
In a November 2017 Newsweek article, “Alt-Right Women Asked to ‘Choose Submission’ to Grow Political Movement,” a popular alt-right personality named Martina Markota speaks to the challenging relationship between her political perspective and experience as a woman. She shared, “I’m a conservative.… I identify as a woman. Being both tends to get you treated unfairly in media.”14 Another woman in the article shared, “I’m from a Northern city, and I’m highly educated, actually.… The reason I won’t give my name to you is because I’ve seen how the media distorts things about women like me.” Stereotypes that all far-right women are “trailer-park trash” can lead scholars to ignore the influence of alt-right ideology on those who hail from diverse walks of life, a dangerous miscalculation.15 Such examples shed light on the relationship between womanhood and whiteness.
§ Radicalization is an individualistic, belief-driven process.
An individualistic model of radicalization maintains that a person, motivated by strong beliefs, goes out of their way to find community within an ideologically consistent group or movement. However, the individualistic framework neglects the gendered motivations of many women who join the altright. For many women, joining extremist movements arises from social interactions and/or pivots on a life incident that acts as a point of conversion.
Understanding membership as a social process that precedes belief formation has broad implications for the myth that the alt-right solely comprises individual racists who seek out a place to be openly racist. In “Becoming a Racist,” Kathleen Blee challenges the theory of belief-driven activism—“the notion that people come into racist movements because they have racist ideas”—as the single motivating factor for far-right membership.16 Her research demonstrates that “racial ‘awareness’ is more often a consequence of association with members of racist groups than a cause motivating participation.”17 Instead, “social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can co-exist with—even substitute for—hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”18
While scholars and academics have largely neglected the complex social nature of mobilization, far-right leaders surely understand the dynamics of recruitment. Blee recounts the story of a Southern Klan leader admitting that “in order to bring in men, the men will follow the women…. If the wife is into it, she’ll drag the husband along.”19 Alt-right figure Lana Lokteff illuminates the social nature of conversion: “The alt-right in America … attracted young guys and gals, and guys with girlfriends.… They stopped caring about their old friends because they met new ones. White women in particular are starving for a true sisterhood.”20
The social nature of radicalization also affects women’s ability to acquire leadership roles within the organization. As the Klan leader that Blee quotes said, “We don’t hold women back from promotions or climbing the ladder. We can’t afford to not let them have whatever positions they want to work for.”21 While clearly demonstrating reticence about women’s leadership, the Klan leader at the same time recognizes that he must set aside traditional gender role expectations to increase women’s participation.
Life-changing or traumatic instances can motivate group membership. Over years of interviews and research on farright extremist groups in America, Blee has documented a “narrative of conversion pivoted on a single dramatic life event” driving women’s membership. She describes this conversion as “an ordeal that clarified perception, sharpened value priorities, and seemed to reveal the racial and ethnic dynamics of history,” thereby serving as a catalyst for joining.22
My interviews with Martinez and King illustrate the transformative process to which Blee refers. Drawing upon her experience of rape and stories she has encountered in years of deradicalization work with other former skinheads, for anger and rage that the individual is already feeling and grappling with, and also as a release valve.”
To cope with the trauma of her own rape, Martinez “found it a relief to make her anger and rage smaller and more focused” by joining the skinheads who occupied the margins of the countercultural scene she already identified with as a young adolescent, although previously on the left wing of the ideological spectrum. Martinez said she did not join the group specifically to target nonwhite individuals. Rather, her extremism was motivated by a desire to express the rage her trauma had induced. That nonwhite individuals were on the receiving end of this rage was a tragic but not predetermined reality.
King’s childhood and adolescence were characterized by pain similar to that of Martinez. “I never expected to make it past the age of 30,” King told me. “Things had happened to me that could have caused me to end up on any number of selfdestructive paths. I had started associating with local gangs until I was raped, so I found a new way. I didn’t say, ‘Wow, you’re all racists and I want to get involved,’ but it was because they accepted me and because I didn’t have to explain why I was aggressive and angry.”Throughout King’s struggle to deal with her personal pain and trauma, she found a community that accepted her hurt and anger. As in Martinez’s case, King’s new peer group came with the cost of extreme discriminatory principles and activity, a cost that her deep suffering, in part, drove her to accept. Trauma certainly does not send every victim toward extremist organizations. However, this understanding of trauma as a conversion factor for extremist mobilization helps to construct a more complete process of why and how people may join such movements.
§ Women alt-right adherents are irrational and apolitical.
Martinez speaks to trauma’s role as a catalyzing factor for many who join far-right, extremist organizations. “I strongly believe, and there’s just a bit of research going on right now … that trauma is a crucial piece of this puzzle that acts as sort of the tripwire, that the people who are entering into these violent movements of all ideologies are looking for a sense of belonging and idea and some purpose for their life,” Martinez said. “The ideology serves as this megaphone, on one hand
Men’s past and present motivations to join far-right extremist groups are often perceived as somewhat cogent. According to Blee, “White men—who were privileged in economic life, public politics, and the family—had a clear interest in racist appeals to traditionalism, economic stability, and national resurgence.”23 Thereby, men’s involvement “was rational and self-interested. Gender wasn’t peripheral to the Right … indeed, it was paramount.” If men’s motivations are rational, self-interested, and grounded in a gendered order, then what of women’s motivations?
Women of the alt-right do not view the movement as being in opposition to their beliefs. Rather, many women view the movement as “a refuge where [they] can embrace their femininity and their racial heritage without shame.”24 Blee also finds that “women’s entrance into organized racism is not a simple matter of their obliviousness to the political agenda of racist groups, nor of personal gullibility on the part of individual women.” Rather, she notes, most “women work to create a rational connection between themselves and the goals of racist politics.”25
Movement leaders like Lokteff help facilitate this rational connection for adherents. In a speech at a rightist conference in Stockholm titled “How the Left Is Betraying Women,” she spoke to the character of the alt-right women: they “aren’t from the trailer park, and they’re not weak and naive— they’re the kind of women that other women want to be like. They’re smart, beautiful women who realize that mass immigration isn’t working, and it’s changing their lifestyle for the worse.”26 Lokteff strategically manipulates the mainstream label of irrationality and uses it to build community among women who understand their ideologies as rational and thereby seek corresponding political outlets.
Factions of the alt-right accept that women can and should have a political role in the movement, yet this role has a narrow expression within the broader project of ethnonationalism. Women and men have distinct roles in the war to preserve the future of white civilization, a civilization founded upon an immutable understanding of gender. Lokteff equates nationalism to the values of womanhood— beauty, family, and home—and promises that the left is losing women to the right because the nationalist movement will continue to elevate these values. She argues, “We value the beauty of Western civilization and the refined human form. European men … facilitated beauty in all its forms. It’s the ultimate romantic gesture to European women. They built our civilization to enable the home and family and to protect women.”27
The Nordic symbol of the valkyrie encapsulates the call to political action to which alt-right women are responding. Valkyries describe a group of maiden women sent to war by the ancient god Odin, some of whom were tasked with slaying righteous enemies, others with guarding their loved ones. Associated with “fairness, brightness, and gold, as well as bloodshed,” this mythical figure supports a preeminent narrative in alt-right thought that Western civilization finds itself under an exceptional era of attack.”28 Therefore, alt-right women interested in preserving a white nation must leave behind their natural and preferable roles in the home to protect the future of white civilization.29 Yet come the end of battle, women are expected to return home and rely upon the ordinarily sufficient protection they receive from their spouses.
Policy Implications
Recognize the role that women play in supporting, countering, and preventing violent extremism.
Far-right violent extremism, including alt-right activity, presents a significant international security threat.30 Thereby, women in the alt-right present a significant international security threat. The systemic exclusion of women from programming and strategies for countering/ preventing violent extremism “may cause us to seriously underestimate the destructive potential of this movement,” Blee writes.31 Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, notes that “when women come into view in terrorism and counterterrorism policy, they typically do so as the wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of terrorist actors, or as the archetypal victims of senseless terrorist acts whose effects on the most vulnerable (women) underscore the unacceptability of terrorist targeting.”32 Martinez’s description of the alt-right reflects similar themes: women “work in interceptive space and a legal space where it’s not material support but that there is support offered. This is a particularly big area where women are involved, where they’re not breaking the law, but they’re providing support nevertheless.” While women are less likely to break the law, there has been acknowledgment in recent U.S. legislative efforts that some women can and do perpetrate illegal acts of violent extremism.33
In order to recognize and legitimate the role of women in this movement, US actors should draw parallels to global trends in violent extremism. By comparing alt-right radicalization to global radicalization processes, scholars of far-right violent extremism can glean valuable insights from the more extensive body of research that exists on the threat of Islamist extremism.34 Joana Cook and Catherine Zheng are among those contributing to this work.35 Martinez’s experiences have informed her belief that there are fewer differences between flavors of extremism than many believe. When I first met Martinez, she was on her way home from a presentation in the United Arab Emirates about deradicalization. Addressing members of the United Nations, she contended that many of the patterns within the Neo-Nazi skinhead organization to which she belonged closely resemble patterns that have led young women and men to join organizations such as ISIS.
Incorporate gender mainstreaming into deradicalization efforts.
Civil society organizations that support deradicalization efforts should conduct gender analyses of their programming. Furthermore, these groups should mainstream a gender perspective in their work to prevent and counter violent extremism.36 I asked King about the role that gender played in her programming at Life After Hate, an organization dedicated to working with people leaving extremist movements. “I don’t differentiate my treatment of the people I work with,” King said. “I use my vulnerability to connect to people. The women and men that I work with have a lot in common that they talk about openly.” After making this initial claim that gender was not a featured framework in her professional methodology, she shared some observations that seemed to demonstrate otherwise. King noted, “Among the women that I’m friends with and have worked with, there’s a lot of criticism about how they were treated and abused. Women are afraid of criticizing the men now that they’re out and changed.” Here, King points to a marked difference in women’s understanding of themselves as former members of the movement and as people that are independent of the movement. Presenting a problem for consideration, King pondered “how to create a best practice around the issue of how to facilitate healthy conversations between men and women who were formally involved regarding issues that women were affected by and men were not.”
In addition to civil society organizations, public schools should incorporate a gendered counterextremism curriculum into general health and wellness education. Martinez has strong convictions about the role that education should play in counter-racist activism and preventing violent extremism. Drawing on her experiences as a mother of seven, she stated, “We teach our kids at home and in school about what to do if there’s a fire or school shooter, preparing our kids for these dangers, but for some reason, we won’t talk about how radicalization happens. We should absolutely develop curriculum around how recruitment happens in spaces like gangs as well, which is all the same.…” Positing that the dynamics of radicalization are foundationally gendered, such material would equip boys and girls alike with tools of awareness and resiliency in the face of extremism. § Invest in the power of personal relationships.
Personal interactions hold great transformative power for countering violent extremism. Relationships between women who harbor extremist ideologies and those who challenge their worldviews offer great potential for deradicalization, as “personal allegiances are as important as ideological commitments to many women activists.”37 If such personal allegiances played a large role in a woman’s radicalization processes, they necessarily fit into the puzzle of deradicalization. Yet forming relationships with those outside of one’s extreme ideological camp proves challenging, Martinez laments, speaking to the deep shame and self-loathing that she knows adherents to extremist ideologies have internalized. Offering advice to those who have thought about engaging with women who hold extremist views, Martinez cautions that “objectifying the person with whom you’re trying to dialogue just exacerbates the problem and there’s just a deepening cycle of disconnect from others.”38 Her point underscores the importance of recognizing the humanity of others in deradicalization and counterextremism efforts.
King’s deradicalization story is a testament to the power of personal relationships. At 23, King was arrested and sent to federal prison for robbery.39 Reflecting on her time in prison, King recalls, “I was treated with kindness by women that I didn’t deserve it from, such as women of color and different nationalities. I was treated the opposite of what I felt that I deserved and started to feel like a human being again with hopes.” Beyond finding friendships, King fell in love with a black woman. She noted, “From the age of 10, I knew that I was gay, but I ran far away from it. In prison, I acknowledged my sexuality for the first time, and I started to see things through a broader lens. Gender roles started to go outside the lines of what I’d been taught.”
Conclusion
The alt-right, an expression of far-right violent extremism, presents a security risk to citizens in the United States and around the world. As globalization, mass immigration, and multiculturalism flourish, various collectives of fearful individuals and populist politicians will continue to embrace ethnonationalist worldviews and employ violent means to enforce them.
To combat this security risk, it is essential to acknowledge that women make significant contributions to the altright and violent extremism. Women can no longer be misrepresented and excluded from efforts to prevent and counter this form of violent extremism. Exclusion has proven both disingenuous and dangerous along the road to realizing a comprehensive threat analysis and strategy.
Martinez is keenly aware of the challenges in adopting such an inclusive strategy. She acknowledges that “there are some growing pains right now” but nevertheless “hold[s] out a lot of hope” and believes that “the culture that is coming up is way more inclusive.” Her optimism is worth investing in.
References
Lois Beckett, “Pittsburgh shooting: Suspect Railed against Jews and Muslims on Site Used by ‘Alt-Right,’ ” The Guardian (October 27, 2018.
Mihir Zaveri, Julia Jacobs, and Sarah Nervosh, “Gunman in Yoga Studio Shooting Recorded Misogynistic Videos and Faced Battery Charges,” New York Times (November 3, 2018).
Rebecca Falconer, “El Paso suspect confessed to targeting Mexicans in mass shooting,” Axios (August 9, 2019).
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alt-Right,” website, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right
Seyward Darby, “The Rise of the Valkyries,” Harper’s (September 2017),
David Chambers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965).
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alt-Right.”
Bright Planet, “Clearing Up Confusion—Deep Web vs. Dark Web” (March 27, 2014),.
Kathleen M. Blee, Understanding Racist Activism: Theory, Methods, and Research (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group), 70.
Ibid, p. 125
Darby, “Rise of the Valkyries.”
In an interview with me, former skinhead Angela King cautioned against pinning hard statistics to membership in such organizations, noting that “one person could have 10 social media accounts, so we’ll never get accurate numbers about who’s involved. These kinds of groups are always in transition, always waning and waxing.”
Intersectionality, a concept rooted in feminist theory, provides a helpful theoretical tool to understand the complex beliefs of women in the alt-right. The term intersectionality has been defined as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”YW Boston, “What Is Intersectionality, and What Does It Have to Do with Me?” blogpost (March 29, 2017).
Michael Edison Hayden, “Alt-Right Women Asekd to ‘Choose Submission’ to Grow Political Movement,” Newsweek (November 16, 2017).
Lana Lokteff, “How the Left Is Betraying Women,” Youtube (February 27, 2017).
Kathleen M. Blee “Becoming a Racist: Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups,” Gender and Society 10, no. 6: (1996): 127.
Blee, Understanding Racist Activism.
Blee, Understanding Racist Activism.
Blee, “Becoming a Racist.”
Lokteff, “How the Left Is Betraying Women.”
Blee, “Becoming a Racist.
Ibid.
Blee, Understanding Racist Activism.
Darby, “Rise of the Valkyries.”
Blee, “Becoming a Racist.”
Lokteff, “How the Left Is Betraying Women.”
Ibid.
“Valkyrie,” Encyclopedia Britannica.
Ibid. The alt-right and its various incarnations over time have embraced Celtic and Nordic ideology to brand themselves with ideological symbolism.
The United States saw a 70 percent increase in “violent attacks perpetrated in the name of far-right ideology” over the course of Trump’s first year in office. Stephen Tankel, “Riding the Tiger: How Trump Enables Right-Wing Extremism,” War on the Rocks blog (November 5, 2018). However, the Trump administration has slashed federal funding and external grant programs to counter violent extremism at home. Julia Edwards Ainsley, “White House Budget Slashes ‘Countering Violent
Extremism’ Grants,” Reuters (May 23, 2017). Daniel Byman writes that “right-wing groups like neo-Nazis are at times lumped in with animal rights organizations as a domestic threat or discussed in the context of their overseas connections.” “Takeaways from the Trump Administration’s New Counterterrorism Strategy,” Order from Chaos blog (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, October 5, 2018), Furthermore, the US government lacks the legal tools to prevent and prosecute much domestic extremist activity and the actors who employ it.Legal advocates like Mary McCord, senior litigator and visiting professor of law at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law School, are encouraging congressional actors to enact a domestic terrorism statute. McCord’s legal advocacy aligns with Martinez’s prescriptions for countering the violent extremist threat: “The government needs to reassess how they define terrorism and include white nationalism. If they are declared terrorist organizations, the government can mobilize resources they currently can’t.”
Blee, Understanding Racist Activism.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, “Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms While Countering Terrorism” (New York: United Nations, Human Rights Council, 2017).
On March 8, 2019, which was International Women’s Day, Congresswoman Lois Frankel introduced H.R. 1653, the Women and Countering Violence Extremism Act of 2019. This legislation aims “to ensure that the United States recognizes women’s varied roles in all aspects of violent extremism and terrorism and promotes their meaningful participation as full partners in all efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism and terrorism, and for other purposes.” The June 2019 US Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security issued calls to “empower women as partners in preventing terrorism and countering radicalization and recruitment.”
Julia Ebner, senior research associate with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, argues that far-right and Islamist extremists actually reinforce one another’s ideologies, creating an echo chamber that blurs the neat lines of domestic and foreign extremism altogether (Julia Ebner, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018).
Joana Cook, A Woman’s Place: U.S. Counterterrorism since 9/11 (London: Hurst, 2019); Catherine Zheng, “Women in ISIS: The Rise of Female Jihadists,” Harvard Political Review blog (March 18, 2017).
A gender analysis can be defined as “a critical examination of how differences in gender roles, activities, needs, opportunities, and rights/ entitlements affect men, women, girls, and boys in certain situation or contexts.” UN Women, “Gender Equality Glossary.”
Blee, Understanding Racist Activism.
Celeste Headless and Sean Powers, “A Former Skinhead on Life After Hate,” Georgia Public Broadcasting (August 22, 2017).
Larry Lebowitz, “Woman Pleads Guilty to Role in Robbery and Beating,” South Florida Sun Sentinal (December 4, 1998).
By Shannon Zimmerman, Luisa Ryan and David Duriesmith
In April 2018 Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of people in Toronto, killing ten people. A few minutes before, he had posted on Facebook, “The Incel rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all Chads and Stacys! All hail the supreme gentleman Elliot Rodger.”
Minassian was referring to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old male who committed the Isla Vista, Calif., attack which killed six people in 2014. Before his rampage, Rodger had posted a ‘manifesto’ online – a lengthy tirade against the failures of modern society to provide him sexual access to women. Rodger is often portrayed in the media as the godfather of Incel ideology and is referred to as the “Supreme Gentleman” in online spaces such as Reddit and incel.me. He was the first individual to be labeled a terrorist of the alt-right by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks far-right activity. 1
Minassian’s Facebook post indicated that his act was linked to a broader political ideology rooted in a toxic combination of male supremacy and white supremacy. While lone-wolf attackers who invoke anti-feminist ideas- like Minassian- are often framed as mentally ill loners, this attack was terrorist in nature and should be considered as such. Like the response to Elliot Rodger’s earlier attack at Isla Vista, media reporting after the Toronto attack quickly emphasized Minassian’s struggles with mental health and cited claims from friends that he “wasn’t a terrorist.”2 This treatment fails to recognize the corrosive political ideology that underpinned Minassian’s attack and his desire to terrorize the public. These qualities should rightly define his actions as terrorism.
Who are Incels?
Incel, shorthand for ‘involuntarily celibate,’ is a violent political ideology based on a new wave of misogyny and white supremacy.3 Incel ideology is predicated on the notion that feminism has ruined society, therefore there is a need for a ‘gender revolt’ in order to reclaim a particular type of manhood based on both male and white superiority.4 Incels believe that by defending women’s bodily autonomy, feminism has upset the natural order which organizes society around monogamous heterosexual couplings. As a result, physically attractive young women (labeled as ‘Stacys’) now choose to sleep with the most physically desirable men (labeled as ‘Chads’).5 Incels often frame this pattern of behavior as a form of theft, whereby their entitled access to women’s bodies is thwarted by women’s preference for more desirable ‘Chads.’ These (mostly) young men are frustrated at a world they see as denying them power and sexual control over women’s bodies. In their eyes, they are victims of oppressive feminism, an ideology which must be overthrown, often through violence.
The diagram on the next page (taken from the subreddit r/ braincell) reflects how this ideology views the world. Incel ideology presents a mythologized view that prior to the sexual revolution in the ‘60s, every man had access to a female partner; subsequent to the women’s empowerment movement, fewer and fewer men have access to a partner. They frame this shift as a profound injustice to men who cannot find a sexual partner, suggesting that society has failed to give men what they are entitled to (access to women’s bodies) and that the only recourse is violent insurrection.
Drawing the link between incels and other forms of violent extremism
There has been some debate as to whether incel attacks count as terrorism. Media reporting has often been reticent to classify these attacks as terror and some officials, including the Canadian police, refused to call the Toronto attack an act of terrorism.6 However, the nature of incel violence meets the requirement of the U.S. State Department’s description, which defines the term ‘terrorism’ as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”7 While incels have not yet formed organized violent groups or cells, the existing attacks have been premeditated, politically motivated and perpetrated violence against civilians. These factors clearly designate incel attacks as a form of terrorism and require incel ideology to be explored as a form of violent extremism.
At the heart of this ideology are hardened misogynistic notions of traditional gender roles. Rather than focusing on a particular religious or ethnic group, these attacks are motivated by shared beliefs about sexuality, male supremacy and the need to violently reestablish ‘traditional’ gender norms. The substantial online communities, previously congregating on the now defunct subreddit r/incel and more recently on incel.me and r/braincells subreddit, validate this world view and encourage direct action in pursuit of their goals.
Incel ideology is just one of many forms of misogynistic violence. Addressing this misogyny and the violence it produces is the most effective way to prevent some of the conditions which lead to domestic terrorist attacks. Early action will also go a long way towards addressing the core tenets of far-right ideologies, which are increasingly impacting and unsettling the American public at large.
There is an undeniable link between misogyny and violence. Experts say that domestic violence is a way for a male abuser to impose and enforce ‘traditional’ gender roles, which are based on ideas of men having control over women.8 The important factor here is that it is violence or threats of violence that are used to exert that control. This link starts with domestic violence but may extend far beyond the privacy of the home to include mass shootings or terrorist attacks. Recent research shows that more than 50% of the mass shootings executed in the United States between 2009 and 2016 were preceded by the shooter’s murder of a partner, ex-partner or family member.9 For example, James Hodgkinson, who opened fire at a GOP baseball practice, allegedly assaulted his daughter and was accused of abuse by two of his three ex-wives.10
Researchers such as Cynthia Cockburn, Rachel Pain and Sara Meger have shown the deep links between men’s sexual violence and their use of armed violence in public. In the case of incel terrorism, the links to violence are overt.11 Incel discussions often explicitly connect women’s non-provision of sexual access to the need for sexually marginalized men to deploy brutal violence in the public sphere in order to defend this ‘entitlement’. While not all incels are white supremacists or terrorists, affiliates are connected to these more extreme violent expressions by a toxic view of gender relations, which provides the “linking thread, a kind of fuse, along which violence runs.”12 Incel discussions often draw explicitly on white supremacist calls for armed insurrection to overthrow the prevailing order and restore an order based on men’s supremacy over women. The parallels between Minassian’s call for “Incel Rebellion” and white supremacists’ calls for ethno-nationalist insurrection are not coincidental.13 Incels who argue for an armed insurrection often use similar terminology to white supremacists in relation to the need for men to overthrow the prevailing system. Frustration with the current system, and adherence to an ideology that promotes violent solutions, not only makes incels dangerous actors in and of themselves, but also increases the probability that they will be amenable to broader extremist recruitment tactics.
The Islamic State advertises its treatment of women as a recruitment tool, showing men- particularly men from western countries- that the caliphate will allow them to restore ‘traditional’ gender norms of male dominance.14 This ideology appeals to individuals who desire to control the women in their own lives. Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter who killed 49 people in the second deadliest mass shooting in recent American history, was loosely affiliated with ISIS. He mentally and physically abused his wife.15 This pattern fits a number of other so-called ‘lone wolf’ attacker profiles, such as Khalid Masood, the Westminster attacker; Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who committed the van attack in Nice; Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, and Man Haron Monis, who carried out the Sydney Lindt café siege and has been charged with
22 counts of aggravated sexual assault.16 According to Nimmi Gowrinathan, the restrictive gender roles promoted by terrorist organizations often act as a “pull” factor for potential recruits who have pre-existing attitudes or desires in that direction.Addressing misogynistic attitudes is one of the best ways to prevent an escalation to violence.
The risk of misogyny-linked terror groups is particularly pertinent to the United States today. A 2017 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found that the United States is now among the top 10 most dangerous nations for women when assessed on healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual violence, non-sexual violence and human trafficking.17 The U.S. ranked third, tying with Syria, in regard to the danger of sexual violence including rape, sexual harassment, coerced sex and lack of justice in rape cases. The U.S. ranked sixth for non-sexual violence against women and was the only Western country to show up on the list. The other countries, in order of danger to women, were listed as India, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen and Nigeria.
It may be easy to believe that incels are an extreme fringe group that do not pose a threat to national or international security. However, Incels represent just one end of a spectrum of extremist groups spanning a vast range of political ideologies, all united by militant misogyny. These groups range from white-supremacists and neo-Nazis to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Incels are just one aspect of a violent ideological masculinity, an ideology that is growing. Misogynist online groups, from men’s rights activists, to ‘pick up artist’ communities and Incels, have increased in number and size over recent years.18 The subreddit r/incels had roughly 40,000 members when it was shut down in 2017 for inciting violence against women.19 But incels are not confined to “one tiny bit of Reddit” rather “it’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these subreddits, which are safe places for them.”20
There are arguments both for and against banning websites that promote violence against women, such as the subreddit r/incel. Some argue that these groups should be allowed to remain, as they gather promoters of violent ideology together where they might be monitored rather than forcing them to scatter, only to grow and proliferate. However, if allowed to remain, these online communities permit both violent content and norms to flourish and possibly be enacted in the real world.21 Reddit, the site which hosted then banned the subreddit r/incel, has recently established policies that prohibit content that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people.” The platform has also been clamping down on pages which are dedicated to far-right groups, banning two such groups for sharing personal information without permission as a form of harassment, also known as ‘doxing.’22 The incel Reddit thread was just one of countless online forums, blogs and networks collectively called the ‘Manosphere,’ which focus on issues of men’s rights and male supremacy where incels, and those with similar ideologies, gather. These forums act as an echo chamber reifying and amplifying extremist beliefs. It should be noted that since the closing of r/incel the community has moved to other subreddits, such as r/braincells, or to dedicated sites likehttps://incels.me/.
Ideologies based on ideas of domination through fear facilitate violent acts and should be considered as a form of terrorism. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center added male supremacy to the list of ideologies it tracks on its ‘hate map’, placing it alongside white nationalist, racist skinhead, neo-Nazi, neo-nationalist and other hate groups.23 Just as white supremacist violence is now well-recognized as a form of terrorism, it is important that male supremacist attacks be similarly acknowledged.
Policy implications
Crafting and supporting policies that provide alternatives to violent white supremacist and misogynistic rhetoric/ actions is an effective method to increase both domestic and international security. Understanding the complex interactions between domestic violence, misogyny, alt-right ideology, and terrorism opens up several new avenues for preventative policy responses.
Address the ideology
Address misogynistic ideology with the same seriousness as other forms of violent extremism. There has been a tendency both in media reporting and government responses to treat incel attacks as purely a result of mental illness or random acts of violence. Incel ideology must be treated as the form of violent extremist thought that it is, and relevant existing laws and policies should be applied. The role of incel ideology in promoting ‘lone-wolf’ attacks means that it requires a similar response to the promotion of jihadi or neo-Nazi ideology online.
Encourage and support policies that identify and sanction speech that is intended to incite violence or harm against an individual or group of people, including that which is based on gender. Such policies, where they already exist, need to be enforced. Gender-based threats need to be taken as seriously as threats based on religion and ethnicity.
Act on early warning signs
The speed at which people radicalize makes radicalization difficult to track. However, those that engage in terrorist attacks often have long histories of violence, particularly domestic violence. If mass shootings and terrorist attacks are connected to domestic or family violence, there are warning signs that, if acknowledged, can be used to help prevent future violence.
Strengthen domestic violence laws to prevent abusers from accessing weapons, including mechanisms to remove guns from individuals who have exhibited dangerous behavior. This would include closing background check loopholes which allow individuals prohibited from buying guns to purchase them.
Ensure the application of domestic violence laws and facilitate the creation of laws which prohibit violence based on gender.
Craft policies which identify and address violent behaviors rather than profiling individuals based on race or religion, tactics which only further alienate individuals. Policies can acknowledge domestic violence as an important precursor to larger violent acts.
Acts of domestic violence need to be understood as a security threat rather than a ‘personal’ matter, and thus treated accordingly. This includes supporting domestic violence survivors and prosecuting perpetrators before they can harm others.
Extremist ideologies advocating violence of any kind are a domestic security concern. Holistically addressing these ideologies and the environments in which they thrive is an effective approach to preventing both large and small scale violence targeted at specific groups, be those groups identified by race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or other.
References
‘The alternative right (alt-right) is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a right-wing political movement whose members reject mainstream conservative politics and instead promote extremist beliefs and policies based on ideas of white nationalism. While there is no single ideology of the alt-right, it is commonly employed to describe figures such as Richard Spencer who support extremist ideology without adopting the traditional trappings of neo-Nazism or conventional conservatism. The alt-right movement is closely associated with online forums such as 4chan which were integral to the emergence of the incel movement.
Stewart Bell, “He Wasn’t a Terrorist’: Those Who Knew Alek Minassian Struggle to Explain the Toronto Van Attack,” https:// globalnews.ca/news/4168222/he-wasnt-terrorist-toronto-attack/, [10 Sept. 2018].
The term ‘incel’ was originally coined by a Canadian College student who started a website entitled ‘Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project’ in order to discuss her sexual inactivity with others. The site was intended to foster an inclusive community to help people struggling to form relationship but was co-opted by the current incel movement.
Smaller groups of “Ricels” and “Currycels” representing East and South Asian incels exist, and explicitly tie their celibacy to preference for whiteness in society.
Debbie Ging, “Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” in Men and Masculinities (Dublin City University, Glasnevin, 2017).
Rich Barlow, “Call it What you Want – The ‘Incel rebellion’ Is Terrorism,” http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/04/30/call-it-whatyou-want-the-incel-rebellion-is-terrorism, [10 Sept. 2018].
United States State Department, “Legislative Requirements and Key Terms,” https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/65464.pdf, [10 Sept. 2018].
Amanda Taub, “Control and Fear: What Mass Killings and Domestic Violence Have in Common,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/ world/americas/control-and-fear-what-mass-killings-and-domesticviolence-have-in-common.html, [10 Sept. 2018)].
Everytown for Gun Safety, “Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2016,” https://everytownresearch.org/reports/mass-shootingsanalysis/ [10 Sept. 2018].
Charlotte Alter, “Why So Many Mass Shooters Have Domestic Violence in Their Past.” http://time.com/4818506/james-hodgkinsonvirginia-shooting-steve-scalise/ [10 Sept. 2018]; Petula Dvorak, “‘Tormented and traumatized’: Rage toward women fuels mass shooters,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/tormented-and-traumatizedrage-toward-women-fuels-mass-shooters/2018/07/02/205263aa-7dea11e8-bb6b-c1cb691f1402_story.html?utm_term=.3ca80bc6ede5 [10 Sept. 2018].
For work on the continuum of violence, see R. Pain, “Intimate War,” in Political Geography, 44, pp.64-73; Sara Meger, Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, (Oxford University Press).
C Cockburn, “Gender relations as causal in militarization and war: A feminist standpoint,” in International Feminist Journal of Politics 12(2) (2010).
Aja Romano, “How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy,” https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/14/13576192/altright-sexism-recruitment [10 Sept. 2018].
Amanda Taub, “Control and Fear: What Mass Killings and Domestic Violence Have in Common,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/06/16/world/americas/control-and-fear-what-mass-killingsand-domestic-violence-have-in-common.html [10 Sept. 2018].
Jack Healy, “Sitora Yusufiy, Ex-Wife of Orlando Suspect, Describes Abusive Marriage,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/us/sitorayusufiy-omar-mateen-orlando-shooting.html?_r=0 [10 Sept. 2018].
Australia Associated Press, “Sydney siege inquest: Man Haron Monis was a ‘psychopathic lone wolf terrorist,’” https://www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2016/may/02/sydney-siege-inquest-man-haron-moniswas-a-psychopathic-lone-wolf-terrorist [10 Sept. 2018].
The Thomson Reuters Foundation, “The World’s most dangerous countries for women 2018,” http://poll2018.trust.org/country/?id=usa [10 Sept. 2018].
Trends noted most visibly in the Global North, including the United States (Peter Finocchiaro, “Is the men’s rights movement growing?” https://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/scott_adams_mens_rights_ movement/ [10 Sept. 2018]) and Australia (Greg Callaghan, “Cassie Jaye’s film on the men’s rights movement shocked Australia. Why?” https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/cassie-jayes-film-on-the-mensrights-movement-shocked-australia-why-20170726-gxj34p.html [10 Sept. 2018]) However, the trend is a global one, including nations such as India (Suman Naishadham, “Why India’s Men’s Rights Movement is Thriving,” https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/9b8akp/why-indiasmens-rights-movement-is-thriving [10 Sept. 2018].)
Christine Hauser, “Reddit Bans ‘Incel’ Group for Inciting Violence Against Women,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/11/09/technology/incels-reddit-banned.html [25 Sept. 2018]
Zoe Williams, “’Raw hatred’: why the ‘incel’ movement targets and terrorizes women,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/ raw-hatred-why-incel-movement-targets-terrorises-women [10 Sept. 2018].
Perrie Samotin and Lilly Dancyger, “Incels: Breaking Down the Disturbing, Thriving Online Community of Celibate Men,” https://www. glamour.com/story/what-is-incel-breaking-down-online-communitycelibate-men [10 Sept. 2018].
Alex Hern, “Reddit bans far-right groups alt-right and alternative right,” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/02/redditbans-far-right-groups-altright-alternativeright [10 Sept. 2018].
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “Male Supremacy: Male supremacy is a hateful ideology advocating for the subjugation of women,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/male-supremacy [10 Sept. 2018].
