Towards a Postcolonial, Anti-Racist, Anti-Militarist Feminist Mode of Weapons Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The last decade has seen some notable feminist victories in one of the ‘hardest’ areas of international security – the international arms trade. The inclusion of gender-based violence (GBV) as a stand-alone article in the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (UN ATT) that regulates international arms transfers is described by Cynthia Enloe as ‘a transnational feminist success’, ‘buried in its thirteen pages of formal diplomatic language’ (Enloe, 2014, p 23). States such as Canada and Sweden have articulated a feminist foreign policy that has implied tighter controls on weapons exports to repressive states. Nonetheless, these are not straightforward or obvious successes. In the ATT, GBV risks have to constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) or international human rights law (IHRL) in order to require states to deny exports. While many GBV violations do meet such legal thresholds, arms transfers also play a less direct role in facilitating and sustaining GBV. And despite their commitments to a feminist foreign policy, Sweden and Canada have faced criticism for their ongoing commitments to arms sales to states such as Saudi Arabia. Feminist critique tells us that violence exists on a ‘gendered continuum’ and that all violence (direct and structural) facilitated by the circulation of weapons is gendered (Cockburn, 2004, pp 24– 44). By extension, all weapons transfers have the potential for GBV: an indication of the scale of the challenge facing feminist accounts of weapons control, which are often implicitly anti-militarist in orientation. It is also indicative of the ongoing obstacles facing ‘the development of anti-militarist politics of peace’ in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda more widely (Shepherd, 2016, p 332), which has itself demonstrated a ‘tendency towards militarization’ (Basu and Shepherd, 2017, p 10). Anti-racist and anti-imperialist scholars and activists, meanwhile, assert the importance of defending the use of force in self-defence or as resistance (Dirik, 2017), probing the boundaries between anti-militarism, non-violence and pacifism. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the overlapping imperatives of postcolonial, anti-racist and anti-militarist politics for feminist modes of weapons control as a contribution to the next generation of WPS scholarship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".