Book Review: Gender,Sex,and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping

In Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense, Annica Kronsell argues that contemporary Swedish security policy is focussed more on peacekeeping in distant conflicts than on protecting Swedish territory, constituting what she terms a ‘postnational defense’. She addresses the question ‘To what extent have gender relations been transformed in this postnational security and defense context?’ (p. 5). Underlying this query is a broader concern with whether peacekeeping can transform the military to the extent that its institutional functioning is compatible with feminist politics.

Kronsell builds on a body of work examining gender and peacekeeping in countries including Canada and the Netherlands, which position themselves as peacekeeping nations in the global context (Whitworth, 2004; Sion, 2006). Her in-depth exploration of the Swedish case, based on over a decade of research, marks an important contribution to the gender and peacekeeping literature, as Sweden is widely regarded—by security practitioners across the world, many academics and the Swedish Armed Forces itself—as pioneering gender mainstreaming in the military. In other words, according to the view that Sweden is one of the most gender-equal societies in the world, if any military is likely to transform its gendered structures, it is the Swedish Armed Forces.

While Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense is primarily focussed on the contemporary context, Kronsell also provides a historical reading of gender and the armed forces in Sweden. Chapter 1 explores constructions of gender in Swedish national defence during the Cold War era, and Chapter 2 provides an analysis of gender and sexuality in the military as an institution of hegemonic masculinity. These chapters describe a time of national defence—the mobilisation of all citizens for the collective defence of the territorially bound state. Chapter 3 then explicates the concept of postnational defence by a cosmopolitan military, whose key task ‘is to protect human beings under threat elsewhere, outside national boundaries, and to save “distant others'’, in the name of human rights’ (p. 70). This chapter introduces the idea that denationalising, and even demilitarising, the military could be expected to lead to a transformation of gender relations or a re-gendering of the military. Chapters 4 and 5 then examine the extent to which a shift to postnational defence can be considered to have transformed gender relations within the Swedish military, including its participation in European Union peacekeeping through the Nordic Battlegroup. Kronsell portrays the Swedish Armed Forces as an imperfect cosmopolitan institution, and her analysis throughout grapples with the contradictions of peacekeeping practices: of tasking soldiers with making peace rather than war, of integrating women into an institution of hegemonic masculinity, and of attempting to ‘gender mainstream’ the practices of such institutions.

Kronsell's exploration of gender norms in Swedish postnational defence leads her to address some difficult questions for feminist international relations theorising on (anti-)militarism. She posits that feminism is not necessarily pacifist, and cautiously suggests that in the context of postnational defence, it may be possible to demilitarise the military and to repurpose it for the use of violence in keeping with a feminist ethic on the use of force. In essence, Kronsell argues that rather than feminists categorically rejecting the desirability of military peacekeeping, there may be situations of grave human rights abuses in which the selective use of violence would be preferable. She nonetheless concludes that there remains an ‘unresolved ambivalence’ around the use of violence in a feminist postnational defence (p. 146).

This unresolved ambivalence evokes many further questions that exceed the scope of this book. Kronsell follows Laura Sjoberg (2006, pp. 48–49) in arguing that peacekeeping should follow a feminist security ethic grounded in ‘empathetic cooperation’, which combines concerns for care and justice with a commitment to dialogue (p. 88). However, Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense does not fully interrogate how feminists might ensure that military interventions engage with rather than for women and men who are constituted as distant others. The book further inspires the reader to ask: might a focus on demilitarising the military impede efforts to envision more creative, substantive and non-military alternatives to violence in the provision of security? What are the effects on global inequalities of discursively reproducing certain countries in the Global North as ‘forces for good’, as a cosmopolitan class of nations?

Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense speaks to a broad audience and will likely inspire many further questions for future research. Kronsell's accessible yet nuanced introduction to both international relations and feminist theory makes the work approachable to those who do not have a background in either field. Researchers in international relations stand to gain from Kronsell's detailed exploration of how defence practices produce gendered subjectivities and vice versa, whilst for feminist scholars, this work offers an invitation to revisit the question of whether military institutions and defence practices can be gendered differently.