Multi-track diplomacy in South Asia: Recent dialogues

Indian Express reports that there has been a spurt in dialogues and meetings recently, even as the official India-Pakistan dialogue has been stalled. Although this reporter suggests there is something dubious about this, it is actually an important development. Keeping channels of communication, official or non-official, open is really useful.

The point is made that many of these dialogues are funded by non-regional foundations. The question is: where is the funding for these initiatives in South Asia? There is plenty of money, but there is no will to fund anything remotely political. Many of these dialogues also involve South Asians resident abroad, with varying degrees of connection to their countries of origin. Where dialogue itself is a sensitive issue, the presence of foreigners (no matter their origin) who are identified with other governments creates greater resistance.

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on February 11, 2010. Respond »

A Feminist Foreign Policy for the US?

It’s just about a year since the Obama inaugural. That euphoric morning, the mantra of ‘change’ was everywhere. But in the life after the inaugural, the logic and process of government dominate to slow down the whirlwind and subdue it to the measured pace of administrations everywhere. One thing, this blogger would suggest, has changed. And that is the growing profile of gender issues in the discourses and programmes of the US State Department.

One of the very first things that President Obama did right after taking oath was to lift the ban on federal funding for family planning programmes that recognize abortion. From there on, take a look at these notes from the last six-seven months:

 On June 12, 2009, Melanne Verveer was sworn in as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.
 In July, Secretary of State Clinton and film star Aamir Khan spent a couple of hours during her visit to Mumbai speaking before a large audience about the importance of education, especially for girls.
 Sexual violence against women received a great deal of attention from the Secretary of State on her visit to seven African states in August, including time taken to speak with activists in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. (See also: Jane Morse, Conflicts in Africa Exacerbate Gender-Based Atrocities, August 3, 2009) During this visit, it was announced that the US would assist with a three-year program to provide medical aid, counseling, economic assistance and legal support to vulnerable women and girls.
 In September, when the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution to end sexual violence during armed conflict, Hillary Clinton spoke out against those states that had turned a blind eye to such violence in recent conflicts.  (See earlier ASI post on this topic.)
 In November, the State Department’s Program on “Women’s Empowerment: Preventing Violence Against Women and Children” invited Take Back the Night Foundation to speak about its history and its work on preventing and ending violence against women to groups across India. Dr. Suraiya Baluch, an American of South Asian origin who sits on their Board, made the trip to cities across India during the global fortnight of advocacy against gender violence (November 25 to December 10).
 In January, Clinton addressed the 15th Anniversary meeting of the International Conference on Population and Development with these words: “Now, as those of us gathered in the Ben Franklin Room on the eight floor of the State Department know very well, the topic of reproductive health is subject to a great deal of debate. But I think we should all agree that these numbers are not only grim, but after 15 years, they are intolerable. For if we believe that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, then we cannot accept the ongoing marginalization of half the world’s population. We cannot accept it morally, politically, socially, or economically. 
…. So we’re here today to examine the distance that remains to be traveled before the world fully realizes the ICPD goals. This is a journey that the Obama Administration and the United States Government will travel with you. But we need to travel quickly, because we only have five years to meet our original goals.” (Italics added)

It’s fair to say that foreign ministers and foreign policy establishments issue hundreds of statements and press releases and really most of them are meaningless. But given the high profile of each of these, it could be said these are shifts intended to be noted.

What’s the history?

Traditionally, women and gender issues have only featured in international relations as victims—to be protected, lamented, assisted. A growing global women’s movement over the last half-century has forced a gradual accommodation of women’s issues on the global agenda.

Since 1975,  the international community has taken increasing cognizance of the separate and different experience of women in every sphere of life. Momentum gathered from that year dedicated to women’s advancement, through a similarly dedicated decade that culminated in the formulation of Forward-looking Strategies at Nairobi in 1985. These were reviewed in Beijing in 1995 following a decade in which the world had verily changed: the Cold War ended; the Soviet Union collapsed; ethnic conflicts seemed to replace interstate wars; new ideas about security were emerging; and perhaps most critically, information and communication technologies made globally networked advocacy easy.

Since Beijing, we have seen the emergence of gender-related norms into the mainstream of international relations. The mass-rapes in Bosnia brought an old reality to light: the use of rape as a weapon of war. In 2000, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 recognized the impact of war on women and posited that women should be a part of peace-making and peace-building. Outrage has steadily mounted to culminate in the adoption by the Security Council in 2008 of a resolution condemning war rapes. The 2009 UN Security Council Resolution takes 1325 further, condemning sexual violence during conflict and mandating peacekeeping and postconflict operations to take women’s needs into account. Finally, it should be noted that the third Millennium Development Goal relates to gender equality: “Promote gender equality and empower women.”

Bosnia and Rwanda first brought gender violence during conflict into newspaper and talkshow agendas in the US, but the email petitions that were circulated by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in the mid-1990s seeking support to condemn the Taliban’s policies on women and women’s education seem to me to mark a watershed in the way global gender issues entered into ordinary homes and offices.  Activism surrounding these petitions and the news coming out of Afghanistan certainly contributed in some measure to the post-9/11 support for US intervention in Afghanistan. For a few years now, the State Department has been recognizing women around the world that it identifies as exceptional advocates for women’s right and advancement.

In other words, these issues are not entirely new to the world of international relations or diplomacy; it’s the high profile they are now being lent that is new. And interesting.

Why this high profile activism now?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that it is the culmination of a thirty-year global change.

But what sorts of international relations observers would we be, if we did not cynically ask: What is the realpolitik of this change, if we do accept that there is change? FP establishments tend to be status quo, and if they are embracing this change, then it is tempting to subject to a realist reading: what’s in it for the US? It’s hard to buy into the idea that genuine idealism and humanitarian interest motivate any administration, anywhere. As President Obama pointed out in his Nobel lecture, we face the world “as it is.” 

So why high-profile social activism in the foreign policy establishment? Does it have to do with Hillary Clinton being Secretary of State, not just because she is a woman but because so much of her work in the past has related to these issues? Does it have to do with a changed domestic environment in the US where economic downturns are forcing attention to social hardship?

While this is probably a question best answered by historians, such a change raises other interesting questions that we might take the opportunity to revisit.

Two interesting questions

1. Do women make a difference in decision-making roles?

“Where are the women?” is the famous point of departure for liberal critiques of international relations. It is a moral given that women should be well represented and that women should be able to participate in every sphere at every level. There is more ambivalence about whether the mere presence of women makes a substantive difference in favour of women’s interests, broadly generalized.

The essentialist assumption that women will extend a caregiving, nurturing presence to the policy sphere is not substantiated by history. It is common to cite recent examples of Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher to illustrate that women in power make the same decisions on the same bases as men. Furthermore, gender issues do not necessarily find space on their lists of priority.

But the coincidence of Hillary Clinton’s swearing-in and the raising of the profile of gender issues in the State Department makes it worthwhile for political and diplomatic historians to take this opportunity to explore this question.

Take a look at:

David Rothkopf, It’s 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Hillary Clinton Is? Washington Post, August 23, 2009.
Megan Carpentier, Ms. Magazine publisher Eleanor Smeal talks Hillary and international women’s rights, Madam Secretary: FP Blogs, January 23, 2009.
John Meacham, Meeting of the Diplomats, Newsweek, December 21, 2009.

2. What are the elements of a feminist foreign policy?

Feminism has been defined as the “radical notion that women are people” (Cheris Kramarae) The advancement of women’s issues and interests worldwide, a gender perspective on other issues and a structural rather than de-contextualised view of the world surely must make up some elements. But what would a truly thoughtful, comprehensive list comprise?

Here are a couple of links, to which I will keep adding as I come across interesting links.

Christine Stansell, The War on Women: Establishing a Feminist Foreign Policy, Dissent Magazine, June 26, 2009.
Nona Willis Aronowitz, Searching for Feminism on America’s Roads, Women and Foreign Policy: The World Affairs Blog Network, December 26, 2009.

Surely, this is not the last post on this subject!

Postscript (A little confession)
Found a paragraph on a campaign we run here against gender violence on America.gov. We are not funded by the US government, don’t invite guests through the local consulate, pretty much are a local, community initiative. But if the official radar are now sensitized to pick up such obscure signals, it must mean that they have been tuned to do so. 

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on January 21, 2010. Respond »

Special Report: Rajagopalan on Feminist Flashpoints in East Asia

As President Obama travels through East Asia, he provides South Asian feminist scholars with an opportunity to look east and review those issues that have been contentious for women’s rights activists. Each of the President’s stopovers has its own feminist flashpoints that are either consequences of society’s engagement with the outside world or that have consequences for that engagement. 

The movement of people is one of the main sources of concern for Japanese feminists. Women’s immigration from other parts of Asia into Japan when legal is largely in the “entertainment” category, with most immigrants working as bar hostesses, in factories, as commercial sex workers or waitresses. International marriages through brokers are known; along with the old pattern of Japanese wife/ non-Japanese husband now there are also Japanese men who seek non-Japanese but Asian wives either for more control in the marriage or for sham marriages that cover up and facilitate exploitation. (See Vera Mackie’s Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 for more.)

The Japanese also have to confront their status both as perpetrators and victims on the question of wartime sexual exploitation. If the use of “comfort women” during Japan’s mid-20th century occupation of Korea is a history Japan has to live down at minimum and apologize and compensate for at best, then Japan’s own experience with the US presence in Okinawa has been similar. Either way, women have simply been the spoils of militarization, not uniquely in East Asia but here this issue has acquired both feminist and nationalist resonance.

Singaporean women’s organizations have to walk a tightrope, calling attention to social inequities without criticizing the state; placing the blame on culture without blaming religion; being political by virtue of working on political questions, but all the while abjuring politics. Reproductive rights have been one arena of activism, but in insider-for-self-correction mode rather than as dissent or critique of the state’s agenda. Many women from other parts of Asia come to Singapore to undertake jobs as domestic workers. Their status and their rights become political issues in their countries of origin, but in my admittedly cursory search, it was not clear how much their presence registered with the local women’s movement. (Lenore Lyons has written a great deal on the women’s movement in Singapore.)

Shanghai is now one of Asia’s showpiece cities; Beijing is one of its oldest capitals. Through much of the twentieth century, women activists were as focused on nation-building and social modernization issues as their male colleagues. State feminism under the People’s Republic did self-consciously address the institutional and many structural issues relating to the status of women. In the public sphere, gender became irrelevant for both men and women in many ways. Since the 1990s, when China has opened up to the world and western feminist writing has been translated and made available, Chinese feminists are now critiquing this same effacement of gender identity and blaming this for the invisibility of women in many spheres.

From a South Asian perspective, what is most interesting is to look at the impact of how China has opened up and grown, on women’s lives, their decision-making frames and freedoms and finally, gendered expectations that they may now face. Given that China’s political opening is yet to equal its economic changes, it is hard to see what the emerging internal critiques and debates are among Chinese feminists. Whatever they are, they matter for international relations for two reasons. One, there are a lot of aspirants to growth along the Chinese model (or should I say, Shanghai model). For them, this could be an early warning of problems they should anticipate and address. Two, insofar as the Shanghai model is identified elsewhere with the replacement by American-style capitalist economics of socialist development models, its failures will be seen as American failures, exported to Asia. It is in US interests to appear introspective and self-critical with regard to socio-economic issues on the home-front.

Two important strands to the women’s activism in Korea appear to be improving working conditions for women and of course, the issue of “comfort women.” As elsewhere, sexual violence—its prevention, protection issues and victim support services—is a priority for most organizations. It was hard to find very descriptive accounts from which I could learn more.

Two issues seem to recur in this region. The first relates to democracy and space in the public sphere for social activism at all: in its absence or where it is strained, how likely is it that activists will prioritize women’s rights over civil rights and political reform agendas? Women are likely, yet again, to have to take a number and wait their turn. The other is that although my post scarcely suggests it, sexual violence is an important rallying point. Reading about Japan, I learned that in some cases, what were originally shelters for refugees were also taking in victims of domestic violence. That to me really underscores the continuum of violence in which most women’s lives play out. And violence in the name of the state—during war, to reinforce state rules, to ensure regime survival—is one stretch on this continuum.

States are bound by international convention to do business with other states. What this means is that when any head of state comes calling, s/he must meet and confer with whatever regime is in power. A strident discourse on human rights and democracy usually becomes background noise as a summit plays out—that’s diplomacy. But where then is the space for women’s rights issues to be raised and discussed in the international arena? Will we have seen something new in the course of President Obama’s international excursions this time and in coming months?

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on November 19, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Rajagopalan on Defining Asia

So, Is President Obama Really Going to Asia?

This week, President Obama is visiting Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. Five cities of global importance that happen to be located in Asia. East Asia, to be precise. We can go back and forth on Singapore, which is located in Southeast Asia but really, to most Asians is like Europe.

A few weeks ago, I wrote from New Delhi about the great distances within my subcontinent-sized country. Today, I look at Obama’s itinerary and reflect on the size of this continent about which several of us have been blogging for the last six months or more. What is Asia? What does it mean to say something or someone is Asian? A landmass, a continent that embraces 4-5-6 civilizations with spillover along all its geographical frontiers can scarcely be imagined so easily, let alone a policy agenda or diplomatic platform evolved for its ‘teeming billions.’

Most people from this continent find the American conflation of ‘Asia’ with ‘East’ or ‘Pacific’ Asia a little annoying. But it’s a hangover from the times not a lifetime ago, when world maps were colour-coded by colonizer and where regions were named according to their distance from Europe (Near East, Far East, Middle East). Equally, the terms West Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia have little resonance for people from the regions, who usually resent being lumped with others into a category—but at least they are geographically somewhat precise. And they take cognizance of distance, diversity and difference of interest.

President Obama is visiting Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. Really, he is visiting East Asia. Far away from the realities of people in Tehran. In Sharjah. In Kandy. In Paro. In Almaty. In Chennai, for that matter. He cannot go everywhere, that’s fine; but let’s understand that his visit has different kinds and different levels of significance for all these people.

President Obama’s discussions will mostly be on bilateral issues. However, since most of these capitals belong to the same one or two regional security complexes, some issues will be discussed more than once and from more than one perspective. But they will still be East Asian issues from East Asian perspectives. And many of them will have neither relevance nor interest to people in other parts of Asia.

Moreover, when the President stops over at the APEC Forum, he will still not be talking with Asia’s leaders. He will be talking with leaders of states around the Pacific and then one or two others. The composition of APEC is not an accident of history; there was a conscious decision to keep a good part of Asia out of the organization.

But APEC is made of many important global players and when they speak they will speak about matters of global importance to a global audience. They will not, however speak for most of Asia and they will certainly not speak to most of Asia’s pressing economic, political and security problems.

Perhaps American interests would be best served if policymakers could start to disaggregate ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian’ in their minds, taking real cognizance of the mind-boggling range of identities and interests here. Hyping this visit as an Asian excursion overstates the reach of this itinerary or any diplomatic agenda the President could possibly have.

International relations scholars like summit diplomacy and the high table of international politics because so much else that we study is abstract, intangible and as we now like to say, ‘constructed:’ constructed by law like the state, constructed by polemics like the nation or constructed by scholars like anarchy and neorealism. But the real value of summit meetings can only be decided on a case by case basis. Perhaps the Obama visit will bring something fresh, something bold to the international politics of East Asia; but until we see that it does, let the buyer beware …

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on November 15, 2009. Respond »

Maldivians in 26/11: The power of ‘security’?

Earlier this week, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives stated in an interview:

Any terrorist attack through the underbelly of India, that is peninsular India, would have to go through Maldivian waters. We will be the first to see what is happening. For example, if we had this equipment, we would have been much more vigilant about what was going to happen in the Mumbai [ Images ] attacks…that is why it is essential to safeguard Maldives’ territorial waters and defend our coastline.

Well, we have information from the families of terrorists who are still in the Maldives about this.

This is, in and of itself, interesting. For one, President Nasheed is identifying the Maldives as a potential terror entrepot to India. Second, he says Maldivians are being recruited into Al Qaeda. Third, by stating that “the identity of all the dead terrorists in the Mumbai attacks has not been broken down into nationalities,” he is pointing to what we don’t know for sure and then adding, “I feel there is a Maldivian connection…” Not the “We know” of security establishments worldwide, but “I feel.”

Presidents don’t draw attention to their countries as places from which terrorists originate; not on the basis of “feeling.” So does he know something that others are overlooking?

Or, is this a “calling attention” motion of some sort? Maldives has been an active campaigner against global warming, but President Nasheed has taken the campaign to a different level by talking about purchasing land for displaced Maldivians and holding underwater cabinet meetings. There is a penchant for the dramatic in these actions that offsets the Maldives’ disadvantages of size and remoteness. Seen in that context, a teaser like this, strategically slipped into an interview with a popular news portal, must be intended to place the Maldives on South Asia’s security agenda.

But there is a broader point here, and one that all of us recognise intuitively. It is, as Ole Waever once wrote, that security is a ‘speech act.’ When you draw anything into the realm of security, it gets the attention it should get anyway. It ratchets up its importance instantly. As scholars, we sceptically debate whether this is what the non-traditional security research agenda is about, at bottom. As activists, we know well that it partly explains the genesis of “human security” reports; they are a way to underscore the urgency of public health, displacement, gender inequity and other humanitarian crises.

What does it mean however, when the President of a country like the Maldives states that its citizens might well be foot-soldiers in one of the world’s most complex security problems? If there are Maldivians involved in South Asia’s many terror attacks, then the Maldives will attract welcome and unwelcome attention. Some positive investment and foreign assistance will flow in, no doubt, but also a great deal more scrutiny and pressure than a small state and fledgling democracy can probably bear. And if it is all based on a “feeling”? What is the cost-benefit analysis of a statement of that? That’s something for all of us, especially for this intelligent President and his advisors to think about.

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on October 28, 2009. Respond »