Epistemological Failures: Everyday Terrorism in the West
Abstract:
This article attempts to problematize the disparate level of attention paid to similar
violences globally, whereby violence against women in the developing world is seen as a
security concern to the West and yet violence against women in the West is minimized or
ignored. It will do this first by demonstrating that everyday violences, better known as
everyday terrorism, in the West are subjugated knowledges within Terrorism Studies. To
demonstrate this, Half the Sky, Sex and World Peace, and The Better Angels of Our
Nature serve as exemplar texts that reflect Western exceptionalism and non-Western
savagery, particularly within Muslim societies, and deflect from everyday terrorism
within the West. This reifies the West as an exceptional savior and the non-West as a
problematic savage. This piece looks to flip that reification on its head by recognizing
that everyday terrorism happens everywhere and is not bound to non-Western identities.
Keywords: Everyday terrorism, everyday violence, subjugated knowledge, discourse
In May 2014, Boko Haram, an Islamist group operating out of Nigeria, became a
household name for kidnapping Nigerian girls and ‘converting’ them to Islam before
selling them as brides. The kidnapping and forced marriages of these 276 girls is a
travesty, one that has generated a massive global media campaign to have the girls
returned to their homes under the Twitter hashtag ‘BringBackOurGirls.’ While the social
media campaign has received criticisms, i.e., the campaign creates Western ownership of
Nigerian girls (see MacKenzie 2014; Sjoberg 2014), that is not the focus here. Instead, as
feminist security studies scholar Annick Wibben has asked over social media, why are we
paying so much attention to Boko Haram when there are 1,200 reported disappearances
and murders of First Nations women in Canada (see Bourgon 2014; Amnesty
1
International 2014)? There are complex contextual differences within both Nigeria and
Canada and certainly between them, of economic wealth, educational opportunities, and
gender and ethnic hierarchies, yet, the question remains why is more attention paid to
Boko Haram than the First Nations endemic or any other violence against women in the
West?
Perhaps the tide turned (slightly) on May 23, 2014, when Elliot Rodger went on a
shooting spree, known as the Isla Vista ‘shootings,’ in Santa Barbara, California. Like
many other shooters in the US, Rodger was a disturbed, upper-class, young, white man
(Penny 2014; Grate 2014). Rodger left behind both a YouTube video and a 140-page
manifesto detailing exactly why he killed six people and injured seven before finally
killing himself:
Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my
revenge…you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I’ll take
great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see what I am in truth
the superior one, the true alpha male (Rodger as cited in Penny 2014).
Yet again social media exploded, this time with outcries against violence against women,
including a new Twitter hashtag ‘YesAllWomen.’ YesAllWomen maintains there is an
ideology behind this attack and previous ones: misogyny—the deep hatred or resentment
of women by men because women represent a challenge to men’s power and (entitled)
expectations (Hess 2014; Penny 2014).
This article attempts to problematize the disparate levels and types of attention paid to
similar violences globally, whereby violence against women in the developing world is
2
seen as a security concern to the West and yet violence against women in the West is
minimized, ignored, and/or individualized. It will do this first by demonstrating that
everyday violences, better known as everyday terrorism, in the West are subjugated
knowledges, or knowledges which “have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges
[and] as insufficiently elaborated” because they are seen as “naïve” and “hierarchically
inferior” (Foucault 1997, 7 as cited in Jackson 2012, 13).
For instance, I argue that domestic violence, mass shootings, and rape culture in the West
should be viewed within the realm of terrorist violence; yet this violence is often
dismissed in terrorism studies literature and depicted as a non-issue in global politics
texts. Indeed, there is scholarship that defines domestic violence, mass shootings in the
West, and sexual harassment as ‘everyday violences,’ ‘everyday terrorism, or ‘intimate
terrorism’ from Human Geography (Pain 2012; 2014), Marriage and Family Therapy
(Dobash and Dobash 2004; Johnson 1995), and sociology (Klein 2006; Berman,
McKenna, Arnold, Taylor MacQuarrie 2000). Yet, most of the more recent literature
within the realm of IR only sees everyday violences as occurring outside of the West.
Three well-regarded texts in IR contribute to the deflection from Western everyday
violences against women: Half the Sky (2009) by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn;
Sex and World Peace (2012) by Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Bailiff-Spanville, Mary
Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett; and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012) by Stephen
Pinker. These texts were chosen as exemplars because of their popularity and success. As
a trade book, Half the Sky has a healthy 368 academic citations (Google Scholar). It is
stylized as a movement with a website, Facebook page, documentary, and TEDTalks
accompanied by media attention from the New York Times, The Guardian, and PBS. As
3
an academic text, Sex and World Peace and the article that preceded it (Hudson et al.
2009) have been cited 124 times, according to Google Scholar. Still, these led to the
2012 “women’s issue” of Foreign Policy and to attention from media as varied as Ms.,
OpenDemocracy, The Daily Mail, and The Huffington Post. Finally, as an academic
‘cross-over’ trade book, The Better Angels of Our Nature has been cited 1165 times,
according to Google Scholar. It has attracted continuing media attention from Slate, The
Guardian, TED, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.
Even though it has been out for three years, it was the second book in Facebook’s 2015
book club. Given the convergence of their arguments and given the breadth and depth of
the audiences for the books, it is disconcerting that these three texts lead their readers to
believe that there are few problems (generally and with gendered/everyday violence) in
the West or in the US.
‘International’ everyday violences, kidnapping, sex trafficking, enslavement, infanticide,
and abuse, are the focus of Half the Sky (2009) and Sex and World Peace (2012). Both of
these books argues that the stability of the state and regional security are connected, if not
correlated, to women’s individual security and safety within. These texts connect
‘everyday violences’ against some women with international development and state
security that deflects from the violence against women that exists in the West. The Better
Angels of Our Nature (2012) has a mirror-argument: that the world has seen a decline in
violence in part due to the rise of women’s rights and subsidence of violence towards
women, primarily within the West. Thus, these texts subjugate the knowledge that the
West has a problem with violence against women by arguing that this problem barely
exists in the West and when it does, it is contained within raced and/or classed locales
4
(Kristof and WuDunn 2009, xvi; Hudson et al. 2012, 173; Pinker 2012, 437, 492). This
problematically reifies the West in a role of savior to non-Western women and deflects
from problems of gendered violence within the supposedly more superior and progressive
West.
Such denial and erasure has been encapsulated in the Hillary Doctrine, an unofficial
policy associated with Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State and potentially in
her 2016 campaign for President, which emphasizes the human rights and security of
women within states as an international security issue (see Lemmon 2011, 2013; Cassidy
2014). It would seem to be exclusively focused at the rights and security of women
within the developing world, particularly in states with a high population of Muslims
(Lemmon 2013). This simply reasserts Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 93) postcolonial
criticism “white men saving brown women from brown men” as the Hillary Doctrine
promotes US (Western state) interventionism on behalf of women in the developing
world from their men. This creates the triangular relationship identified by Mutua (2001)
of a victim (brown women), a savage (brown men), and a savior (white men/masculine
states). There are some inherent disturbing implications: 1) that violence is visible when
‘others’ perpetrate it; 2) that the lives of ‘other’ women are valued at the expense of being
patronized; and 3) and that the extent of the violence against women in the West is denied
in order to maintain the promise of liberal exceptionalism. Knowing that everyday
violences/terrorism happen on a daily basis in the West destabilizes it as the ‘savior.’
Thus, this projected monolithic image of exceptional, progressive, liberal savior is
undermined by complicating the identity of the West through the inclusion of savagestatus.
5
The article will begin by looking at everyday violence and intimate terrorism as
subjugated knowledges, querying epistemological positionings through Critical Terrorism
Studies scholarship. The article relies upon Kenneth Burke’s (1989) ‘terministic screens,’
or discursive devices that are used to reflect/deflect particular political agendas. It will
then examine how the three texts under study, Half the Sky, Sex and World Peace, and
The Better Angels of Our Nature, reflect Western exceptionalism, particularly an
American one, and a Muslim bias and deflect from Western everyday violences. It will
conclude by dismantling the savages-victims-saviors triad of everyday violences intrinsic
to the three texts.
Re/Deflecting Subjugated Knowledges
The aim and intent of this article is to recognize the systemic and ideological nature of
everyday violences against women in all places, but especially the West. Everyday
violences are the physical (assault), social (gendered bias), sexual (rape, harassment), and
psychological (emotional abuse) violences that girls and women, and other gendered
individuals, face everyday every place in the world (Berman, McKenna, Arnold, Taylor,
MacQuarrie 2000, 33; Klein 2006; Kristof and Wudunn 2009, xv). While literature from
sociology (Berman et al. 2000), nursing (Klein 2006), and human geography (Pain 2012
and 2014) includes violences against women in the West, texts focused on the problem
internationally do not tend to include or outright deny any problem with everyday
violences in the West. For instance, the authors of the exemplar texts believe there is not
a problem with women’s security in the West (as will be expanded upon below) but see
women’s insecurity in the non-West as a threat to state security and regional stability.
This is a false binary as these violences are not so different. I will demonstrate this by
6
walking through the development of ‘everyday terrorism’ scholarship that looks at
domestic abuse in the West.
There is a surprisingly long history of associating domestic violence with terrorist
violence (Dobash and Dobash 1979). Even though a definition of terrorism is widely
contested (Ganor 2002, 288; Schmid 2004, 204; Jackson 2005, 92-5; Hoffman 2006, 23;
Bellamy 2008, 38), there are terms that are frequently used to identify it, including
political ideology as a motivation and the intent to cause fear or terror in the public
(Schmid and Jongman 2005, 5). I highlight ideology and fear because these are the
elements that intimate and everyday terrorism scholars have built their argument upon.
According to Michael Johnson (1995) naming a specific form of domestic abuse as
‘patriarchal terrorism’ is particularly helpful. The use of “terrorism” maintains the focus
upon the “systematic, intentional nature” of the violence, whereas the use of “patriarchal”
draws attention to the ideological, historical and cultural roots of this form of violence
(Johnson 1995, 284). In the early-2000s, however, the term shifted to “intimate
terrorism” as ‘patriarchal’ associated the perpetration with men only, and not women
(Dobash and Dobash 2004; Gradinariu 2007; Anderson 2008).
Rachel Pain (2012, 8) takes the argument further still in her conceptualization of
everyday terrorism:
Framing domestic abuse as ‘everyday terrorism’ helps to understand how fear
works. It highlights the frequency and severity of domestic abuse, the serious
effects of the fear that it invokes, and the control that this fear makes possible….
Drawing this parallel also muddies the boundaries between forms of violence that
7
are usually framed as public, political and spectacular, and forms of violence that
are usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane.
She (Pain 2014, 536) argues that “everyday terrorism” is formed through a complex
matrix of hierarchy and power dependent upon the patriarchy. Importantly, “[i]f power
and control are seen as involving varying and fluid configurations, entanglements and
struggles, then we can position terrorism as a relevant framing across scales and violent
acts of insurgent groups, the state and family members” (Pain 2014, 536). The historical
threat of terrorism was to the state, but Pain instead argues for fluidity: terrorism and
terrorists exist in multiple locations, blurring boundaries and false distinctions between
the public and private. Domestic abuse is one element of this, but so is societal violence.
The violence typically recognized as terrorism is disconnected neither from state nor
family violence (see also Ortbals and Poloni-Staudinger [2014] for an excellent
discussion of this in the Basque region of Spain).
Kristof and WuDunn (2009) were at the forefront of drawing attention to everyday
violences in the developing world. Their examples of everyday violences range widely,
but they take as their starting point the “quotidian” violences against women (Kristoff
and WuDunn 2009, xv) that include domestic violence, rape, and slavery. Thus, rather
crucially the three exemplar texts, particularly Half the Sky and Sex and World Peace,
argue that what has been seen as typically private-sphere violence—everyday violences
against women—must be seen as a threat to the public sphere, particularly the security of
the state. Yet, very problematically they fail to systematically recognize the severity of
everyday terrorism in the West, particularly the US. For instance, Kristoff and WuDunn
(2009, xvi) argue that the biggest issue in the West is the wage gap or sexual harassment
8
while Hudson et al. (2012, 172) minimize domestic abuse in the US and Pinker (2012,
282-285) dismisses the issue of rape in the US. These will be returned to later in the
article.
Scholars who look at everyday terrorism (even if they do not refer to it as such) (Dobash
and Dobash 2004; Kristof and WuDunn 2009; Pain 2012; and Hudson et al. 2012) are
aware of how the instances and continuance of these violences are dependent upon the
gender structures and hierarchies of misogynistic patriarchy. A patriarchal system is not
interested in the lives of women or in women’s flourishing: patriarchy is a “social system
that is male-identified, male-controlled, male-centered [that] value[s] masculinity and
masculine traits over femininity and feminist traits” (Becker 1999, 24-5). A misogynistic
system is interested in harming women as a way of maintaining male power. While it is
necessary to recognize the relationship between everyday terrorism and misogyny in the
developing world, violences against women in the West and the misogyny therein are
articulated as a lesser problem in the three texts under study (Kristof and WuDunn 2009,
xvi; Hudson et al. 2012, 172; Pinker 2012, 437, 497). Yet, looking at these violences
alongside the murder/disappearances of First Nation women, the War on Women1 and
mass-shootings in the US,2 the rape crisis in the US and the UK,3 and the Berlusconi
1
The ‘War on Women’ is used to refer to the Republican Party’s increased policy
restrictions on women’s rights, particularly reproductive rights, in the United
States. For instance, Huffington Post has an entire series of articles dedicated to
this issue which can be found by searching ‘war on women’ on the website.
2 Klein (2006) found that women and girls are the main targets in most of the mass
shootings in the US.
3 The rape culture in the US will be addressed later in the article.
9
culture in Italy,4 make it clear that the West has a both a misogyny problem and an
everyday terrorism problem.
Everyday Violences as Subjugated Knowledge
While Critical Terrorism Studies is troubled by the label of terrorism and the use of it,
this is mainly when the definition is used to concentrate power structures. As Jackson
(2008b, 28) explains, “terrorism is a social fact rather than a brute fact,” meaning that
while the violence and destruction is real the significance of the act is derived from
“symbolic labeling, social agreement, and a range of inter-subjective practices.”
Terrorism then is a discursive phenomenon—taking meaning from how it is labeled and
constructed by those with power and then by how the audience accepts this construction.
Therefore, “terrorism does not exist outside of the definition and the practices that seek to
enclose it” (Jackson 2008b, 28). Thus, it is not that everyday violences and intimate
terrorism are not terrorism, it is that for whatever reasons the scholarly and policymaking community have failed to recognize them as such.
Pertinent to this article, Critical Terrorism Studies scholars (Stump and Dixit 2013, 28;
Stampnitzky 2011, 1) argue that an “invisible college” of scholars (Ranstorp 2009, 20)
have set the parameters of Terrorism Studies, limiting what is valued as credible
4
Former Prime Minister Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ culture provides a laughably
easy target. In all seriousness, however, the sexually charged nature of the former
Italian prime minister’s administration was ‘a reflection of [Italian] society’s deeper
problem with the evolving role of women’ (Nadeau 2010). Despite being one of the
tenth largest economies in the world, in 2010 Italy ranked 87th in the world for
women’s labor participation, 97th for leadership positions, and 121st for wage parity.
With an overall gender gap score of 74th, Italy was demoted seven spots from its
2008 position, the year in which Berlusconi returned to office (Nadeau 2010).
10
knowledge and who is valued as a legitimate scholar. Everyday terrorism publications are
not in IR or Terrorism Studies, subjugating the knowledge of
patriarchal/intimate/everyday terrorism within Terrorism Studies (and beyond). Pain
(2014, 532) notes that while literature on global terrorism continues to proliferate, only
ten Human Geography articles on intimate terrorism have been published since 9/11. A
search of Terrorism and Political Violence’s content for ‘patriarchy,’ ‘patriarchal,’ or
‘domestic violence’ only yielded results that discussed patriarchy in relationship to
radical Islamism or women’s involvement in terrorism. A similar search on Studies on
Conflict and Terrorism yielded comparable results, with the exception of an article on
rising men’s violence in post-conflict societies (Ashe and Harland 2014). There has been
relevant published literature in this journal, including a recent article on machismo in
Basque terrorism (Ortbals and Poloni-Staudinger 2014).
Critical Terrorism Studies looks at epistemological constructs of what knowledge matters
and why, leading to a corrective. Jackson articulates the problem of subjugated
knowledges as
knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as
insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior
knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or
scientificity (Foucault 1997, 7 as cited in Jackson 2012, 13).
Jackson argues that peace and conflict studies, literature, and anthropology have all been
dismissed or underutilized within terrorism studies because they do not rely on neopositivist, large-n methodologies to ‘prove’ the legitimacy and credibility of their
knowledge (Jackson 2012, 18).
11
Subjugating knowledge(s) is an ‘epistemic injustice,’ which Miranda Fricker (2007, 5)
defines as a particular way of denying people epistemic authority based off of their
identity. But an epistemic injustice can only operate in a system that upholds certain
actors as having more authority and credibility to act (or produce knowledge and
scholarship) within a particular epistemology. Specifically, the epistemological
frameworks of mainstream IR and Terrorism Studies’ scholarship views the terrorist
threat as constituted from mainly outside of the West and not from within. Everyday
terrorism is ignored in the West because of the larger epistemological construction of
where the terrorist threat resides (never in the savior-West). This leads to a resolution:
that recognizing everyday terrorism as terrorism is a way of creating epistemic justice
towards those who have been victims of it.
Yet, should we be after expanding what violences are included within terrorism? Sjoberg
argues against such an expansion in this volume yet I do not fully agree. Critical
Terrorism Studies questions the knowledge-power nexus and that the creation and
dissemination of knowledge is “always for someone and for some purpose” (Jackson
2007, 246), meaning what is included or excluded from definitions of terrorism is a
political decision that reifies power. While Jackson (2008b, 29) argues that terrorism is
seen as a “pejorative rather than analytical term,” this is owed to the fact that those in
power often use it as a label to delegitimize and remove moral authority from the terrorist
actor (and to reify their own legitimacy and moral authority) (see Gentry 2014).
Furthermore, retaining “terrorism as an organizing concept” is useful as it can be
employed to “restrict and eliminate the use of certain kinds of illegitimate and oppressive
forms of political violence” (Jackson 2008b, 29). If the aim of articulating ‘everyday
12
violences’ as such is to stop them (see Kristof and WuDunn 2009, xix, 258-78) and
everyday terrorism to draw attention to it (and thus end it), then constituting both within
Terrorism Studies seems rather necessary.5 Even though it is not necessary to label all
violence as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’ but as everyday terrorism scholars (Johnson 1995,
284; Pain 2014, 536) emphasize, the strategy of fear and control involved in everyday
violence/intimate terrorism connects it with terrorism-writ-large, violence that societies
and states pay a great deal of attention to. Furthermore, subjugating Western everyday
terrorism protects the powerful and marginalizes the vulnerable. Refusing to see everyday
terrorism in the West as security concerns reifies the West as a powerful savior, silencing
the victims within and patronizing the victims outside.
Reflecting the Exceptional Savior Self/Deflecting the Disturbing Savage Self
Employing discourse analysis, particularly Kenneth Burke’s (1989) ‘terministic screens,’
demonstrates the epistemic position of the three texts as exemplars of accepting and
promoting the legacies of the West-as-savior and non-West-women-as-victims in need of
saving from the non-West-men-as-savages. Such discourse then determines how those
who adhere to such constructions operate in the world (see Milliken 1999, 225)—whether
this means one gives money as desired by Kristof and WuDunn (2009) or it directs policy
as desired by the Hillary Doctrine or Hudson et al. (2012).
Such directive discourse is a ‘terministic screen:’ an author of a text or speech
intentionally establishes his or her argument as a way of helping to form the audience’s
5
However, this is not to securitize everyday terrorism, or to discursively build an
existential threat (of everyday terrorism) towards a monolithically constructed Self
(see Williams 2003, 519). Instead, this argument desecuritizes the exceptionalized
West by undermining any perception of a monolithic savior-Self.
13
perspective (Burke 1989, 115). This terministic screen is used to reflect or deflect a
particular image or perception of reality. For instance, Burke (1989, 116) discusses
encountering a series of photographs of the same object but each from a different
perspective. If each photograph was a screen, it reflected reality, but a reality specific to
that angle. Therefore, “even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very
nature as a terminology, it must be a selection of reality, and to this extent it must be a
function as a deflection of reality” (italics true to text) (Burke 1989, 115). Thus, I argue
that the three texts as exemplars offer a selection of the reality of everyday
violence/terrorism that reflect the believed primacy of the West and Western values and
deflect from the everyday terrorism that occur within the West that undermine Western
exceptionalism.
Those who critique the liberal peace argue that a peace dependent upon Western, liberal
ideals are totalizing and create their own problematic hierarchies (Richmond 2002 and
2008; Mac Ginty 2010, 393). The three texts’ positions, with their attention to the
problems ‘intrinsic’ to Islam, as will be explicated later, are situated within similar
gender and raced exceptionalism that is noted in the War on Terror. Jackson (2007, 394)
has argued that the superiority of democracy has become a “central narrative” in the
construction of the terror threat. In separate articles, Meghana Nayak (2006, 45; Nayak
and Malone 2009, 260) and Laura Shepherd (2006, 23) take this one step further by
demonstrating how the US discursively constructed itself as an exceptional state whereby
democratic-ideals were conflated with a raced (white), heteronormative masculinity.
Jackson, Nayak, Nayak and Malone, and Shepherd present this as a binary, yet, in this
instance, American and the larger Western exceptionalism works more as a triangle. This
14
articulation is dependent upon Mutua’s (2001) conceptualization of the savages-victimssaviors triad. “Evok[ing] images of barbarism,” savages “are presented as so cruel and
unimaginable as to represent their state as a negation of humanity” (Mutua 2001, 202).
The victim is a “human being whose ‘dignity and worth have been violated by the
savage’” (Mutua 2001, 203). Finally,
the savior or the redeemer, the good angel who protects, vindicates, civilizes,
restrains, and safeguards. The savior is the victim’s bulwark against tyranny. The
simple, yet complex promise of the savior is freedom: freedom from the tyrannies
of the state, tradition, and culture. But it is also the freedom to create a better
society based on particular values (Mutua 2001, 204).
Even though Mutua is focused on the human rights community, his critique (2001, 204)
works within the criticism of the liberal peace posed above by Richmond and Mac Ginty
and within the critical focus of Jackson, Nayak, Nayak and Malone, and Shepherd: “the
savior is the human rights corpus itself, with the United Nations, Western governments,
INGOs, and Western charities as the actual rescuers, redeemers of a benighted world”
(Mutua 2001, 204). Mutua (2001, 205) contends this triad is dependent upon the colonial
project and a Eurocentric binary of the Western Self against the colonial/colonized Other:
“‘savage’ cultures and peoples are seen as lying outside…the regime of political
democracy.”
The terministic screen at operation in the everyday violence literature depends upon a
Western democratic exceptionalism that reflects a savior-status and deflects away from
both a victimhood and savagery (in this instance). The literature that correlates regional
15
security to women’s security focuses almost solely upon the developing world and is
therefore conceptually reliant upon colonial attitudes about the ‘savagery’ of the
developing world. It is particularly apt that “[r]arely is the victim conceived as white” in
human rights literature (Mutua 2001, 231).
While there was certainly victim language in post-9/11 discourse, it was a victimization
of the entire US owed to Other(ed) ‘brown’ men (Puar and Rai 2002, 118). It is thus
different to see US women as the victim of US actions—it undoes the monolithic
adherence to a white savior when there are ‘white’ savages and ‘white’ victims.
Problematically, the three texts make heteronormative assumptions by setting violence
against women as the standard bearer of incivility when a better indicator would be to
look at the security of all marginalized peoples. This article does not mean to erase
victims of violence due to race or sexuality or any other identifier.6 Furthermore, the
women, men, queers, and trans-people who experience everyday terrorism in the West
are by no means only white. This article attempts to take on a simplistic, hetronormative
discourse that is implicitly based upon perceptions of the US-self as ‘white’ as a means of
undermining it (see also Puar 2007 for complications of the white, heteronormative US
self-identity). This is particularly important when the texts below indicate that whatever
everyday violences that do exist in the West originate in particular classed and raced
communities.
6
On average, 3.2 million men report abuse every year in the U.S. (Clark County
2012). Yet according to the December 2011 National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey report, more men (5,365,000) in the U.S. reported experiencing
domestic abuse than women (4,741,000) (Hoff 2012). The U.K. saw a 35 percent rise
in male victim self-reporting between 2009 and 2010 (Christodoulou 2011).
16
Women’s Security and Peace: Paying Attention to Everyday Violences
All discourse is dependent upon constructions of idealizations, expectations, and social
norms in order to find and create coherency and fidelity with its audience (see Gentry
2011, 178). The discourse within these three books works within a lasting legacy of not
just the War on Terror, but a colonialist protectorate attitude that somehow the (former)
colonies, the developing world, and, now, Muslim women need a white savior. The US
began to claim its own colonial protectorates in the Philippines in the early 1900s, the
first Governor-General was future President William Howard Taft who referred to the
Filipinos as the US’ “little brown brothers.” This may not have been intended as hateful,
yet it was a “paternalist racism” pervasive at the time (Miller 1982, 137). It is not all that
dissimilar to what Abu Lughod (2002, 783) declared to be the ethics behind the War on
Terror: saving Muslim, specifically Afghan, women from the cultural backwardness of
Islam. For example, First Lady Laura Bush’s November 2001 radio address supported the
war in Afghanistan as a means of protecting Afghan women from Afghan men. She
stated, “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror…because our
hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan…” (Bush 2001; see also Wibben
2011, 10).
Laura Bush’s neo-conservative justifications find a surprising bedfellow in the Hillary
Doctrine. Since her first articulation of the Hillary Doctrine in 2011, Clinton has
continued to conflate violent extremism (read: terrorism) with women’s rights. At the
Fourth Women in the World Summit in 2014 she declared that “[i]t is no coincidence that
so many of the countries that threaten regional and global peace are the very places where
women and girls are deprived of dignity and opportunity” (Lemmon 2013). In her speech
17
she outlined violence against women in Pakistan including lack of schooling for girls
before turning to the issue of rape within India. She positioned these examples in relation
to state corruption, poverty, and “a culture of impunity” (Lemmon 2013). Clinton ended
her speech on a surprising note, however, by claiming that the “American
Dream…remains elusive” for “too many American women” because the “clock is turning
back.” Yet, bettering women’s position in the US is still about American savior-hood: “If
America is going to lead…we need to empower women here at home...” (Lemmon 2013).
While Clinton’s onus is perhaps misguided, she is still aware that the situation is not ideal
within the US. This awareness of everyday violences within the US (and perhaps the rest
of the West) is something that is lacking in the three exemplar texts. Thus, this next
section will explain each text’s main argument before turning to how each text re/deflects
the savages-victims-saviors triad.
Women’s Security Means Greater Peace
The key contention of all three texts–‘women’s security means greater peace’—initially
sounds uncontestable. And quite possibly it is, but the problem lies with the
exceptionalist internal logic presented in the exemplar texts. The more a society respects
and insures women’s security and social standing the better off that society will be—a
belief embedded into the passage and wording of UN1325—the “landmark resolution on
women, peace, and security” (UN.org 2015). The argument could be extended further
still: the treatment of all members of society, particularly those that are marginalized and
vulnerable (not just women but all raced, classed, and sexed marginalized peoples), is
reflective of a society’s stability. Additionally, these texts deflect from problematic
18
hierarchies of whose violence and (perceived) victimhood matters more, and certainly
reflect that a Western liberal person could never possibly be a ‘savage.’
Half the Sky
Kristof and WuDunn (2009, xv) were concerned with the violences that journalists, and
the US as a giver of foreign aid, are not very good at highlighting: “we journalists tend to
be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events
that happen every day—such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls.”
‘Everyday violences’ include the kidnapping of girls into sex trafficking in South Asia,
where they are beaten, drugged, and raped, women in Africa who are denied medical
treatment and develop fistulas, and women in Afghanistan/Pakistan who are beaten by
their husbands and denied educations. This means that Kristof and WuDunn might
include everyday terrorism within the scope of ‘everyday violence.’ These everyday
violences hinder the full (economic) potential of girls and women, and thus, hinder
development (Kristof and WuDunn 2009, xv). Half the Sky’s main argument is that the
empowerment of women in the developing world is the key to unlocking the challenge of
slow economic development. Each chapter covered a different issue and every single one
focused on states in the developing world, with the exception of the two chapters that
started with profiles on two different White Americans (Kristoff and WuDunn 2009, 115118, 162-165) working to help women outside of the US.
It is easier to see the inequality between the US and the developing world in books like
Half the Sky that illustrate it all too well. But it is the way that this violence is connected
to international security and terrorism as a security concern for the West, while
19
minimizing the violence in the West that is problematic. Kristof and WuDunn (2009, xvi,
69, 258-259) argue that these instances of structural and physical violences against
women stem from misogyny; they see these levels of violences as part of a system that
holds women back and prevents them from reaching intellectual and emotional
completion, if not physically restrains and harms them. In this way they are arguing that
individuals, society, and the world would be better off if women (in particular areas) were
treated better. Sex and World Peace as well as The Better Angels of Our Nature more
specifically tie these violences to international security.
Sex and World Peace
Sex and World Peace (2012) connects women’s (in)security with misogyny. Hudson et
al. argue the greater women’s insecurity is in a society the more likely that the state will
be in conflict:
It would appear…that the battle lines of the future are more likely to be found
between those states that treat women equally and those states that are fraught
with gender inequality. The important cultural distinction is actually between
societies that have greater gender equality and those that foster an environment of
gender inequality and gender violence. …[S]ocieties that are more gender-equal
are less likely to go to war, to use force during conflicts, or to be involved in
violent international crises (Hudson et al. 2012, 3-4).
Within this argument, Hudson et al. (2012, 5) put forward three major contributions: 1)
that gender inequality is a “force of violence—no matter how invisible or normalized” it
is; 2) security studies must be more concerned with “women’s security in order to fully
20
address phenomena at the state and system levels;” and 3) that this book will serve as a
call to action. This book builds upon Hudson’s (with den Boer) earlier monograph, Bare
Branches (2004), which looks at the security implications of Asia’s ‘surplus’ male
population. Higher male populations lead to greater domestic and international violence,
hindering a liberal democratic development process. Thus, this work ties in with Pinker’s
feminization argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
The main argument of The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012) is not focused on women
and thus it does not single out the treatment of women as the chalice that will bring world
peace. Instead, his main argument is that as humans have evolved, we have evolved
away from violence and war: “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and
today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence” (Pinker 2012,
xix). He convinces his audience of the decline in violence in over 700 pages of text,
focusing upon the major trends in violence decline as he sees them and how they align
with psychological motives that promote or inhibit violence (Pinker 2012, xxii-xxiii).
Pinker’s argument is dependent upon “civilization, modernity, and Western society”—
noting that many would be “loathe to admit” that these have led to an intolerance towards
violent behavior and solutions (2012, xx). One piece of this is the rights revolution,
including women’s rights, as well as feminization: “peaceable societies…tend to be
richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and
more likely to engage in trade” (Pinker 2012, xxi-xxii).
21
Pinker looks at women’s rights in his chapter on the Rights Revolution, arguing that
changes in judicial and police procedures in the West as well as intolerance of violence
against women reflect shifting attitudes on (everyday) violences, including rape and
sexual assault, and on the decline of war more generally. I will return to this in the next
section of the paper. Here I want to focus on a part of Pinker’s concluding chapter: the
process of feminization. According to Pinker, feminization is found when “women
literally wiel[d] more power in decisions on whether to go to war” as well as when “a
society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent
retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and the
veneration of martial glory” (Pinker 2012, 830). The first piece of feminization stems
from the idea that mothers of dependent children are more likely to advocate for peace
(Pinker 2012, 827)—thus harkening back to Sara Ruddick’s (1995) maternal feminism.
For the second part of feminization Pinker relies upon Hudson and den Boer’s (2004)
‘bare branches’. In sub-groups where there are few or little women, men “congregate in
gangs of drifters who brawl and dual among themselves and rob and terrorize settled
populations” (Pinker 2012, 830-1). Feminization “drain[s] the swamps where violent
male-male competition proliferates” (Pinker 2012, 830). Such a process might include
getting married, which means men invest in their children and not in masculine
competition. Thus, a pacific society happens when women are allowed to live and are
given rights (see Pinker 2012, 829).
Taking Western Exceptionalism For Granted
By taking Western superiority for granted, these texts take women’s security in the West
for granted as well. Kristof and WuDunn’s focus is on violence that happens abroad, but
22
not within their United States. The same can be written about Sex and World Peace.
While none of these texts would argue that everyday violences are ‘terroristic,’ they all
come close. Kristof and WuDunn often connect everyday violences with radical Islamic
terrorism (2009, xxii, 171, 176-7, 263) as well as identify rape as terrorism within
conflicts (2009, 76, 92-7, 235). Whereas Pinker (2012, 467) identifies the violence
against African Americans in the United States’ South as terrorism: the “antiblack
violence” and “attacks” “were directed at civilians, low in casualties, high in publicity,
intended to intimidate, and directed toward a political goal, namely preventing racial
desegregation in the South.” Yet, in the very same chapter he discusses but fails to also
call violence against women terrorism. These failures to account for women’s security in
the West help to reveal subjugated knowledges within security and terrorism studies
supported by the truism that the non-West is far worse off than the West.
The discourse of these texts deflects from Western everyday terrorism and reflecting it as
an event that happens solely in the developing world, particularly in Muslim societies.
As discourse is an activity meant to persuade or reify a particular vision to a particular
audience, discourse is strategic, directing audiences to a particular piece of reality, but not
to its entirety (Burke 1989, 45). A more holistic everyday terrorism argument would
connect the non-West violences with Western violences, recognizing the pervasiveness of
misogyny, globally and locally. Thus, this next section will explore how the discourse
reflects the West as a savior as well as the non-West as a savage, which simultaneously
deflects any element of Western savagery. Note, however, that there is not a particular
discussion of the final piece of the triad: victim. This is because the superiority of the
West and the inferiority of the non-West rests entirely upon the presumed victimhood of
23
non-Western women. Thus, non-Western women’s victimhood is written throughout. The
victimhood of Western women is also implicitly throughout it in its diminishment,
particularly in the deflection of Western savagery.
Reflection: Savior-West
The reflection of Western savior-status is dependent upon deflecting the savage within;
this means that each text has to present the West or the US entities without problems. In
Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn (2009, xvi) find that the most Western women there
have to contend with is “often a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or
unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is
lethal.”
Pinker builds to a similar position by explaining the decline of violence against women in
the West. Between 1973 and 2008, rape and battering in the US decreased by an
“astonishing 80 percent” (Pinker 2012, 285). Due to the publication of Susan
Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), laws and procedures changed making the US a
safer place for women (Pinker 2012, 282). As television crime shows now take rape
seriously and a player cannot rape a woman in a video game, Pinker argues that there is
increasing intolerance towards rape in popular culture (Pinker 2012, 283). This is not just
because of “feminist agitation” but also because “the country was ready” for anti-rape
laws and measures (Pinker 2012, 486). Indeed, Pinker (2012, 487) declares “we are all
feminists now.” While Pinker’s statistics may be correct, his assessment of pop culture
and rape miss the mark, as will be discussed shortly.
24
Sex and World Peace’s concern is with regional and global security, thus Western,
specifically US, savior-status comes through in its how it positions the US as a force for
humanitarian intervention. Even though the Afghan Coalition’s acquiescence to the
“moderate Taliban’s” participation in negotiations is criticized alongside the Coalition’s
dropping the “pet rock” of women’s issues (as it was referred to by one US senior
official) (Hudson et al. 2012, 120-22), there is very little recognition by these authors that
the states that constitute the Coalition still struggle with women’s equality.
Reflection: Savage-Non-West
Most often the savage non-West is related to Islam, reflecting how extensive this neoOrientalist moment is (see Tuastad 2003; Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006). While Kristof
and WuDunn extensively cover many different areas of the world, looking at India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Cameroon, and Nigeria, to name a few, an
entire chapter queries whether Islam is misogynist. Kristof and WuDunn (2009, 166)
answer:
A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women
are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and
genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominantly Muslim. Most Muslims
worldwide don’t believe in such practices, and some Christians do—but the fact
remains that the countries where girls are cut, killed for honor, or kept out of
school or the workplace typically have large Muslim populations.
Perhaps we should rethink what honor means in different contexts. If women are killed
in Muslim societies because of family honor, what were the Isla Vista killings but ones to
25
restore the masculine honor of yet another disturbed and entitled white male in the US?
While answering that Islam is not historically misogynistic (Kristof and WufDunn 2009,
168), they trace out over time all of the crimes against women that have been committed
in the name of Islam, including honor killings, but also the legal right to testify in Iran
(Kristof and WuDunn 2009, 172). They pepper this chapter with passing references of
Christian misogyny (Kristof and WuDunn 2009, 167, 169), yet they clarify that
Christianity has “mostly moved beyond [misogyny]. In contrast, conservative Islam has
barely budged” (Kristof and WuDunn 2009, 168).
Sex and World Peace’s argumentation follows a similar, but more nuanced, pattern. (The
more pervasive racialized elements in Sex and World Peace are discussed in the next
section.) For instance, Hudson et al. claim that women are insecure in all parts of the
world. Chapter 2: “What Is There to See, and Why Aren’t We Seeing It?” examines
“gendered microaggressions,” or the “many choices and acts in the routine of day-to-day
existence that harm, subordinate, exploit, and disrespect women” (Hudson et al. 2012,
17). Yet, the majority of the examples, which range from pages 17 to 43, focus primarily
upon Islam and the developing world.
As indexes are tools used to direct readers to key pieces of text they are thus fascinating
discursive tools in their own right. The sub-headings for “Islamic states” in The Better
Angels of Our Nature’s index7 is indicative of the bias towards Islam in this book; these
sub-headings include: “acts of barbarity…, autocratic…, civilization in…, conflicts in…,
and genocide…, India invaded by…, liberalizing forces in…, and nuclear weapons…,
7
Please note there are no entries for Christian, Buddhist, Baha’i, or Jewish states
(although there is an entry for “Jews”).
26
population of.., punishment in…, and religious wars…, and Sharia law…., and slavery…,
and terrorism…, women in…” (Pinker 2012, 999). Pinker’s western-centrism is made
obvious in a chapter section titled “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (Pinker 2012, 435-55),
in which he explores the baseness of Islam. Thus, Westerners are the angels (saviors)
fearing to tread in a savage territory. Pinker (2012, 436) declares that “the Muslim world,
to all appearances, is sitting out the decline of violence.” He continues:
The impression that the Muslim world indulges kinds of violence that the West
has outgrown is not a symptom of Islamophobia or Orientalism but is borne out
by the numbers. Though about a fifth of the world’s population is Muslim, and
about a quarter of the world’s countries have a Muslim majority, more than half
of the armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries or insurgencies.
Muslim countries force a great proportion of their citizens into their armies than
non-Muslim countries do, holding other factors constant. Muslim groups hold
two-thirds of the slots on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist
organizations, and…in 2008 Sunni terrorists killed nearly two-thirds of the
world’s victims of terrorism whose perpetrators could be identified (Pinker 2012,
437).
He says nothing about other factors, such as colonization, unequal economies, and
resource shortages or dependencies, that may contribute to these events and nothing
about the subjective nature with which groups are labeled terrorist and thus placed on the
State Department’s watch list. Moreover, this concept of the “Islamic state” is significant
on its own—why is this designation made about particular states but the US is not labeled
27
a “Christian state” (as much as the Tea Party might enjoy this) and the UK8 or France a
“Post-Christian state”? Already this sets these particular states as outside the liberal
norm upon which Pinker bases his entire book.
Deflection: Savage-West
When everyday terrorism is mentioned in the West it is either minimized, as Kristof and
WuDunn do when they imply violence against women in the US is rarely lethal, or
situated within raced and class communities. For instance, Sex and World Peace situate
the only mention of domestic violence in the US within a particular context:
…the case of Juanita Bynum, a black female evangelist who accused her husband,
also a black evangelist, of beating and choking her during their five-year
marriage, was a watershed event. Domestic violence has been routinely swept
under the rug in this culture in the United States (Hudson et al. 2012, 172).
To imply that domestic abuse is primarily a Southern, black, evangelical problem is a
massive miscalculation: the US National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey
conducted in 2010 estimates that 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical
violence, or stalking—this amounts to 12 million people a year (CDC 2015). In a
snapshot survey conducted on one day, September 17, 2013, the National Domestic
Counts survey found that 66,581 Americans were treated in shelters, thus not counting
those seeking medical treatment, an additional 30,233 people sought legal advice and
protection, and a further 9,641 requests for aid went unmet (National Network to End
8
As the UK was recently found to be one of the least religious countries in the
world (Press Association 2015).
28
Domestic Violence 2014). Additionally, the National Network to End Domestic
Violence broke down these statistics for all 50 states and DC. It is not an isolated
regional and minority-specific problem. Not only have Hudson et al. misrepresented
domestic violence in the US, they missed an opportunity to reveal women’s insecurity in
one of the most heavily militarized states9 in the world—further cementing their main
thesis. Instead, like Kristof and WuDunn, while their focus is on the developing world as
a whole, a disproportionate amount of attention is given not just to Muslim societies but
to other raced religious communities. The savior continues to be the white,
heteronormative, rational hegemonic male that Shepherd (2006) and Nayak (2006) both
note, which works in tandem with Pinker’s civilizational argument.
It is important to Pinker’s argument that the judicial and police system in the US and
other liberal democracies are paying more attention to rape and domestic violence—but
this is a top-down, law-oriented approach that says nothing about normative changes
within society. Indeed this is represented in his own assessment of the sexual assault that
happened to one of his graduate students:
[she] was walking in a working-class Boston suburb and was accosted on a
sidewalk by three high school boys, one of whom grabbed her breast and, when
she protested, jokingly threatened to hit her (Pinker 2012, 483)
Pinker (2012, 483) was rather impressed that the police took her report of a “relatively
minor offense” so seriously. Yet, this “relatively minor offense” is part of what some
9
The US is the 30th most militarized state in the world according to the Global
Militarization Index (Grebe 2014).
29
people are taking very seriously: the prevalence of rape culture in both the US and the
UK (at minimum).
Time Magazine’s cover story for the week of 15 May 2014 was about the sexual assault
crisis in US colleges and universities, in which Vice President Joseph Biden urged
universities to “step up” and attorney Gloria Allred declared rape on college campuses to
be one of the most important civil rights issues currently (see Biden 2014 and Allred
2014). On 8 May 2014, the BBC ran an investigative/opinion piece hosted by journalist
Kirsty Wark, Blurred Lines: The Battle of the Sexes, looking at how “women are assailed
in public life” and how the internet makes violent, “rape-y,” misogyny easier to
perpetrate. What these pieces collectively state is that we are looking at a system of
misogyny, a structure that works against women (and marginalized others), and is
endemic and not hidden in the West. Furthermore, by over asserting the glories of liberal
democratic solutions to rape and treatment of women, it heavily contrasts with how
Pinker considers Islam.
Agendas
Throughout the Half the Sky Kristoff and WuDunn encourage people to consider giving
and at the end suggest ways to do so. Originally published in English by Alfred A.
Knopf in New York, this is a book aimed at a Western, well-educated audience with
access to disposable income. It is meant to make their audience act upon/react to
international problems—by reifying the Western savior identity by asking the savior to
(sympathetically if not paternalistically) identify with the Other (even if this awkwardly
done). If the overarching point of the book is to advance women’s position in order to
30
secure economic development, the underlying argument is to encourage people with
money to “be the change you wish to see in the world” (Gandhi as cited in Kristof and
WuDunn 2009, 258). Similarly, Sex and World Peace has a security policy agenda,
making ties with the Hillary Doctrine (Hudson et al. 2012, 122, 200-207) and in the
creation of Foreign Policy’s aforementioned ‘women’s issue.’
These texts reflect particular agendas to capture attention and support which include: 1)
that those in the West are and must continue to be the saviors of brown women; and 2)
that saviors cannot be savages and therefore there cannot be a problem with violence
against women in the West. While re/deflection and the framing of a particular reality
may make these arguments more compelling to the reader, these books also set up
external hierarchies between the exceptionalized savior West/US against the developing
world, particularly societies and states that are labeled Islamic, about the status of
women, the level of social violence, and the superiority of liberalism. Less obvious
internal hierarchies are established as well, that if these violences exist in the West they
are owed to certain economic and minority groups and that the women who experience
this level of violence really do not have it bad as they have so much already, meaning
access to education, jobs, and other rights.
Towards a Re-evaluation of Subjugated Violences
With the rising tide of ‘misogynistic’ public violence, such as the missing First Nation
women and the Isla Vista shooting, there is a growing public frustration with everyday
terrorism in the West. For instance, a Guardian blog by Laura Bates (2014), who began
the Everyday Sexism Project, makes a very similar argument to this article:
31
Leighann Duffy, 26, has died in hospital after being stabbed in front of her sixyear old daughter. A 64-year-old woman has been stabbed multiple times at a
support centre for care workers in south London. An 82-year-old woman has
been beheaded in a north London garden. Pennie Davis, 47, has been found
stabbed to death in the New Forest. Suhail Azam has been jailed for stabbing his
estranged wife, Kanwal Azam, to death. These reports are from the past couple of
weeks alone.
You probably haven’t seen them all listed one after another like that. But when
we start to connect different pieces of information, or even just consider them side
by side, we begin to see patterns and links between them.
And she goes on to make this claim: “The reason we don’t consider the abuse and murder
of women to be a newsworthy epidemic is because we are used to it. We don’t connect it
to the backdrop of sexism and gender inequality. We continue to think of it as something
‘other’ and unusual that happens to women somewhere else” (Bates 2014). The
blindness that Bates is pointing out works to uphold the image of the West as the savior
with no problems of its own. Saviours cannot also be savages. What has to be done is to
recognize there is no one monolithic saviour, savage, or victim—that any actor’s identity
is more complex as each actor has the capacity to be all three. Complicating these
identities can come by positing that everyday violences against women in the West and
everyday violences across the globe are both security threats rooted in a misogynistic
patriarchy.
32
The starting point is to recognize that everyday terrorism draws its power from the
assumption that it is a private sphere phenomenon (Pain 2014, 532). Such assumptions
are dependent upon gendered divisions, which would hold that what happens in the home
or with a person’s health is ‘private’ and not a matter of public concern. Yet, this
division is not so clear and not just because of the feminist adage of ‘the personal is
political.’ Lawmakers for millennia have curtailed women’s rights (see Pateman 1980)
and not much has changed. America’s War on Women from 2012 to present centers on
limiting women’s reproductive rights. This makes a ‘private’ issue very public as the
majority men lawmakers have reduced the options women have regarding their health to
the extent that: poor women’s access to reproductive health care in Texas is virtually
nonexistent; female experts were not included in the House of Representative hearings on
reproductive rights; and a Michigan state senator was censored for saying ‘vagina’ in
discussions of women’s health. These may not be physical violences but they are
certainly structural violences that limit a woman’s ability to flourish (Confortini 2006,
335). Furthermore, recognizing these limitations as connected to patriarchy if not
misogyny begins to recognize that an ideological system and structure is in place.
Arguably, all three texts look at security and all of them pay attention to interpersonal,
everyday violences. Such literature offers some interesting and hopeful possibilities for
paying better attention to relatively ignored violences due to their private sphere
affiliation. However, it also has some serious pitfalls. The largest problem with this new
material is its epistemological bias to only see the problem of women’s security as rooted
in the developing world and failure to look at problems within the West. This is revealed
through a discourse analysis of these texts, particularly as discourse analysis holds “that
33
language is used in order to accomplish actions” (Norris 2002, 98) and is indicative of
dominance and inequality (van Dijk 2003, 352). By looking at what problems these three
specific texts see as important (or not) they constitute and reify a particular
epistemological approach, mainly one with a bias against the non-West and towards the
liberalism of the West. If one believes that the liberal West is the ‘end of history,’ then
the problems within it will be overcome with time. This minimizes the violences that are
happening within liberal systems. It is true that women in the West are often better off
due to better rights, education benefits, work opportunities, yet to say that the violence
against them is less important because they have these benefits diminishes these women
and patronizes those elsewhere.
All three texts discuss, in some way, everyday terrorism. Yet, all three texts fail to
connect the everyday terrorism with the West—either because they dismiss them or
because they never mention them. Terrorism has to remain outside of the West for their
arguments to remain coherent. Implicitly all three are dependent upon the idea that the
West is a savior and reflect this through a liberal peace terministic screen. To admit that
savages can be Western and can victimize women in the West would so rapidly
deteriorate their argument that their awareness- and money-raising and foreign policyinducing agendas would crumble.
These texts bear a certain responsibility in how the knowledge contained within is used
and understood. It is entirely too easy to read these three texts and feel that ‘all is well on
the Western front’ and ‘all is unwell, uncertain, and unhinged on the non-Western front.’
It can make the primary readership of these texts feel relieved and reassured and it can
help them feel good about themselves if they then answer the call for action (knowing
34
that Pinker does not necessarily make one). Additionally, these texts do not exist alone—
they are situated within a larger conceptualization of Western and US exceptionalism in
the War on Terror; they stand alongside the Hillary Doctrine; and they work to promote a
neo-imperial agenda as critiqued by Mutua (2001) and others (see for instance Tuastad’s
[2003] criticism of neo-Orientalism in the War on Terror or Edward Said’s classic
Orientalism [1978]).
Recognizing everyday terrorism as a security concern in every place in the world
decenters Western exceptionalism. Simplistic delineations, such as saviors-victimssavages, fail to capture the complexity and reality of global politics. To continue to argue
for monolithic identities recreates problematic power structures and, thus, wittingly or
not, these texts problematically do so. Thus, it is necessary to discursively analyze them,
to unpack them, to decenter them, and to argue for more inclusivity as a means of
securing a better future for all people.
35
Bibliography
Abu‐ Lughod, L., 2002. Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological
reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist, 104(3),
783-790.
Allred, G., 15 May 2014. Gloria Allred: The battle over sexual assault is the ‘civil rights
movement of our time.’ Time [online]. Available from:
http://time.com/100055/campus-sexual-assault-gloria-allred/ [Accessed 23 June
2015].
Amnesty International, 2015. No more stolen sisters [online]. Available from :
http://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters [Accessed 7
April 2015].
Anderson, K.L., 2008. Is partner violence worse in the context of control? Journal of
Marriage and Family, 70, 1157-1168.
Ashe, F. and Harland, K., 2014. Troubling masculinities: changing patterns of violent
masculinities in a society emerging from political conflict. Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism, 37 (9), 747-762.
Bates, L., 12 September 2014. Women are being assaulted, abused, and murdered in a sea
of misogyny. The Guardian [online]. Available from:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/sep/12/womenbeing-assaulted-abused-murdered-misogny [Accessed 7 April 2015].
Becker, M., 1999. Patriarchy and inequality: towards a substantive feminism. The
University of Chicago Legal Forum, 21, 21-88.
Bellamy, A.J., 2008. Fighting terrorism: ethical dilemmas. London: Zed Books.
Berman, H., McKenna, K., Arnold, C. T., Taylor, G., and MacQuarrie, B., 2000. Sexual
harassment: everyday violence in the lives of girls and women. Advances in
Nursing Science, 22 (4), 32-46.
Biden, J., 15 May 2014. Joe Biden to colleges: ‘Step Up. It’s time.’ Time [online].
Available from: http://time.com/97452/campus-sexual-assault-joe-biden/
[Accessed 23 June 2015].
Blakeley, R., 2009. State terrorism and neoliberalism: the North in the South. London:
Routledge.
Blakeley, R., 2007. Bringing the state back into terrorism studies. European Political
Science, 6 (3), 228-235.
Bourgon, L., 27 September 2014. As murders and disappearances mount, Canadian
women ask: ‘am I next?’. The Guardian [online]. Available from:
36
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/27/canada-aboriginal-womenmissing-fontaine-am-i-next [Accessed 7 April 2015].
Burke, K., 1989. Language as symbolic action: essays on life, literature, and method.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bush, L., 17 November 2001. Radio Address by Mrs Bush [online]. Available from:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24992 [Accessed 13 March 2015].
Cassidy, J., 11 August 2014. The Hillary doctrine: ‘smart power’ or ‘back to the
Crusades’? The New Yorker [online]. Available from:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/hillary-doctrine-one [Accessed 9
October 2014].
Center for Disease Control (CDC), 2015.
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/ [Accessed 7
April 2015].
Christodoulou, S., 10 January 2011. Hidden male victims of domestic abuse. BBC
[online]. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12126783 [accessed 2 April
2012].
Clark County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, 2012. Men as victims of domestic violence.
Available at: http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/domviol/men.htm [accessed 2
April 2012].
Confortini, C. C., 2006. Galtung, violence, and gender: the case for a peace
studies/feminism alliance. Peace and Change, 31 (3), 333-367.
Dobash, R. P. and Dobash, R. E., 2004. Women’s violence to men in intimate
relationships: working on a puzzle. British Journal of Criminology, 44 (3), 324–
349.
Dobash, R. E. and Dobash, R. P., 1979. Violence against wives: a case against the
patriarchy. New York: Free Press.
Fricker, M., 2007. Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ganor, B., 2002. Defining terrorism: is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom
fighter? Police Practice and Research, 3 (4), 287-304.
Gentry, C. E., 2014. Epistemic bias: legitimate authority and and politically violent nonstate actors. In C. E. Gentry and A. E. Eckert, eds. The future of just war: new
critical essays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 17-29.
37
Gentry, C. E., 2011. The neo-orientalist narrations of women’s involvement in Al Qaeda.
In L. Sjoberg and C. E. Gentry, eds. Women, gender, and terrorism. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 176-193.
Gradinariu, L., 2007. Domestic violence—a micro-level terrorism? empirical findings of
signficant similarities between two human rights violations. SSRN, 13 June.
Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=993278 (accessed 2 April 2012).
Grate, R., 27 May 2014. Misogyny kills: how the Isla Vista shooting proves what
#YesAllWomen already knows. Ms [online]. Available at:
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/05/27/misogyny-kills-how-the-isla-vistashooting-proves-what-yesallwomen-already-know/ (accessed 23 June 2015).
Grebe, J., 2014. Global militarization index. BICC [online]. Available from:
https://www.bicc.de/uploads/tx_bicctools/141209_GMI_ENG.pdf [Accessed 7
April 2015].
Hess, A., 29 May 2014. ‘If I can’t have them, no one can’: how misogyny kills men.
Slate.com [online]. Available from:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/29/elliot_rodger_hated_men_beca
use_he_hated_women.html [Accessed 7 April 2015].
Hoff, B. H., 2012. National study: more men than women victims of intimate partner
physical violence, psychological aggression. MenWeb: Men’s Voices Magazine.
Available at: http://www.menweb.org/battered/NISVS-analysis.pdf [accessed 2
April 2012].
Hoffman, B., 2006. Inside terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hudson, V., Ballif-Spanvill, B., Capriolo, M., and Emmett, C., 2012. Sex and world
peace. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hudson, V. M. and Den Boer, A. M., 2004. Bare branches: the security implications of
Asia's surplus male population. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackson, R., 2012. Unknown knowns: the subjugated knowledge of terrorism
studies. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5 (1), 11-29.
Jackson, R., 2008a. The ghosts of state terror: knowledge, politics and terrorism studies.
Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1 (3), 377-392.
Jackson, R., 2008b. An argument for terrorism. Perspectives on Terrorism, 2 (2), 25-32.
Jackson, R., 2007. The core commitments of critical terrorism studies. European political
science, 6 (3), 244-251.
Jackson, R., 2005. Writing the War on Terrorism. Manchester: University of Manchester
Press.
38
Johnson, M. P., 1995. Patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence: two forms of
violence against women. Journal of Marriage and Family, 57 (2), 283-294.
Klein, J., 2006. An invisible problem: everyday violence against girls in schools.
Theoretical Criminology, 10 (2), 147-177.
Kristoff, N., and WuDunn, S., 2009. Half the Sky. New York: Vintage Books.
Lemmon, G. T., 8 April 2013. The Hillary doctrine: women’s rights are a national
security issue. The Atlantic [online]. Available from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/the-hillary-doctrine-womensrights-are-a-national-security-issue/274770/ [Accessed 9 October 2014].
Lemmon, G. T., 6 March 2011. The Hillary doctrine. Newsweek [online]. Available
from: http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-doctrine-66105 [Accessed 12 March
2015].
Mac Ginty, R., 2010. Hybrid peace: the interaction between top-down and bottom-up
peace. Security Dialogue, 41 (4), 391-412.
MacKenzie, Megan. 2014. #BringBackOurGirls—doing nothing as activism. Duck of
Minerva. Available from: http://duckofminerva.com/2014/05/bringbackourgirlsdoing-nothing-as-activism.html [Accessed 30 April 2015].
Miller, S. C., 1982. Benevolent assimilation: the American conquest of the Philippines,
1899-1903. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Milliken, J., 1999. The study of discourse in international relations: a critique of research
and methods. European Journal of International Relations, 5 (2):225-254.
Mutua, M., 2001. Savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights. Harvard
International Law Journal, 42 (1), 201-245.
Nadeau, B., 15 November 2010. Bunga-bunga nation: Berlusconi’s Italy hurts women.
Newsweek [online]. Available from: http://www.newsweek.com/bunga-bunganation-berlusconis-italy-hurts-women-69733 [Accessed 7 April 2015].
The National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2014. State summaries. Available
from:
http://nnedv.org/downloads/Census/DVCounts2013/AllStateSummariesMerged.p
df [Accessed 27 May 2014].
The National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2014. Domestic violence counts
national summary. Available from:
http://nnedv.org/downloads/Census/DVCounts2013/DVCounts13_NatlSummary.
pdf [Accessed 27 May 2014].
39
Nayak, M. V., 2006. Orientalism and ‘saving’ US state identity after 9/11. International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 8 (1), 42-61.
Nayak, M. V., and Malone, C., 2009. American Orientalism and American
exceptionalism: A critical rethinking of US hegemony. International Studies
Review, 11 (2), 253-276.
Norris, S., 2002. The implication of visual research for discourse analysis:
transcription beyond language. Visual Communication, 1 (1), 97-121.
Ortbals, C. D. & Poloni-Staudinger, L., 2014. Women defining terrorism:
ethnonationalist, state, and machista terrorism. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 7
(3), 336-356.
Pain, R., 2014. Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism.
Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 531-550.
Pain, R., 2012. Everyday terrorism: how fear works in domestic abuse. Available from:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/geography/downloads/EverydayTerrorism.pdf
[Accessed 28 May 2014].
Pateman, C., 1980. ‘The disorder of women’: women, love, and the sense of justice.
Ethics, 91 (1), 20-34.
Penny, L., 25 May 2014. Laurie Penny on misogynist extremism: let’s call the Isla Vista
killings what they were. New Statesman [online]. Available from:
http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/05/lets-call-isla-vista-killings-whatthey-were-misogynist-extremism [Accessed 7 April 2015].
Pinker, S., 2012. The better angels of our nature. London: Penguin.
Press Association. 2015. UK one of world's least religious countries, survey finds. The
Guardian [online]. Available from:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/12/uk-one-of-worlds-least-religiouscountries-survey-finds [Accessed 30 April 2015].
Puar, J., 2007. Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Puar, J. K., and Rai, A., 2002. Monster, terrorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the
production of docile patriots. Social Text, 20 (3), 117-148.
Ranstorp, M., 2009. Mapping terrorism studies after 9/11. In R. Jackson, M. Breen
Smyth, J. Gunning, eds. Critical terrorism studies: a new research agenda.
London: Routledge, 13-33.
Richmond, O. P., 2008. Peace in international relations. London: Routledge.
40
Richmond, O. P., 2002. Maintaining order, making peace. London: Macmillan.
Ruddick, S., 1995. Maternal thinking: toward a politics of peace. Boston: Beacon Press.
Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Schmid, A. P., 2004. Frameworks for conceptualizing terrorism. Terrorism and Political
Violence, 16(2), 197-221.
Schmid, A. P. and Jongman, A. J., 2005. Political terrorism: a new guide to actors,
authors, concepts, data bases, theories, and literature. London: Transaction.
Shepherd, L. J., 2006. Veiled references: constructions of gender in the Bush
administration discourse on the attacks on Afghanistan post-9/11. International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 8 (1), 19-41.
Sjoberg, L., 2013. Gendering global conflict: toward a feminist theory of war. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Spivak, G. C., 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L., eds.
Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
271-313.
Stampnitzky, L., 2011. Disciplining an unruly field: terrorism experts and theories of
scientific/intellectual production. Qualitative Sociology, 34 (1), 1-19.
Stump, J. L. and Dixit, P., 2013. Critical terrorism studies: an introduction to research
methods. London: Routledge.
Tickner, J. A., 1992. Gender in international relations: feminist perspectives on achieving
global security. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tuastad, D., 2003. Neo-Orientalism and the new barbarism thesis: aspects of symbolic
violence in the Middle East conflict(s). Third World Quarterly, 24 (4), 591-599.
van Dijk, T. A., 2003. Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. E.
Hamilton, eds. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wark, K., 8 May 2014. Blurred lines: the new battle of the sexes. Available from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/18/blurred-lines [accessed 7
April 2015].
Wibben, A. T., 2011. Feminist security studies: A narrative approach. London:
Routledge.
Williams, M. C., 2003. Words, images, enemies: securitization and international politics,
International Studies Quarterly, 47 (4), 511-531.
41