SEVEN | National myths and the creation of heroes

J A M I E M U N N

How are national identities (re)constituted in post­conflict societies? How

does gender work in this (re)constitution? A number of curiosities inform

the writing of this chapter. One involves an interest in the effectiveness

of R. W. Connell’s thesis on hegemonic masculinity, particularly in light

of criticisms that suggest this thesis implies a natural inevitable domi­

nance (Demetriou 2001). Other critics claim that, despite its popularity,

the implementation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity has not

engendered any real social change (Beynon 2002; Dyer 2002; Morton

2001). I began more seriously thinking about Connell’s thesis after read­

ing over my interview notes from Kosovo.1 These conversations led me to

ponder the benefit of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in relation

to reconstructions of masculine subjectivities in post­conflict Kosovo.

The interview material suggested that Connell’s framework potentially

misses the ways gender works in post­conflict societies, overlooking the

complex ways in which masculinity is discursively manipulated so that

even those who are perceived to be less masculine within the local social

hierarchy can maintain or construct a sense of self that is recognizably

masculine. In order to make this argument, I use Judith Butler’s idea

of insurrectionary speech in the context of performativity which can

powerfully assist in revealing hegemonic forms of identity (in this case

masculinity) as constructed fiction rather than settled norms (Butler

1997: 16, 50, 121).

Thus, the chapter builds on work by Connell’s critics, who have

identified problems with the concept of hegemony and categorization

of masculinities (Whitehead 2002; Beynon 2002: 125; Munn 2006: 291,

296) and explores the relevance of national heroic myths as they have

materialized in post­conflict Kosovo. I utilize this work alongside But­

ler’s notion of performativity as my entry points for critically thinking

about the relevance of Connell’s framework for understanding gender

and masculinities in post­conflict non­Western societies. The chapter

interrogates the latent insurrectionary power of nationalist myths and

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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practices as narrative performances of hegemonic masculinity. I return

to some of these concerns later, but for the moment I will suggest why

post­conflict Kosovo is an interesting example in this context. To be clear

from the outset, the scaffold for my arguments comes from a position

which posits a direct link between the theorization of the reconstructions

of nations in post­conflict and the relationship this (re)construction has

with masculine identity/ies.

Why Kosovo?

Kosovo is a society (nation) in the midst of creating a self­governed

state in a post­conflict environment, which inevitably involves ideas,

expressions about and performances of ‘national identity’. In order to

shed light on the changing narratives of manliness and what is/becomes

masculine in Kosovo, I will explore three common trends within the

discourse on masculinities: (1) hegemonic masculinity and multiple mas­

culinities; (2) national mythological processes associated with creating

and defining ‘manliness’; and (3) embodied performances of masculinity

as they are represented in Kosovo.

Contemporary writers, across a spectrum of disciplines, have argued

for recognition of multiple masculinities (Beynon 2002; Best and Wil­

liams 1997; Connell 1995, 2000; Carver 2002; Whitehead 2002; Zalewski

1995). They suggest that multiple masculinities are not disconnected

entities without interaction and change, but interact and work in unison

as well as in conflict with one another. Connell describes some masculini­

ties as dominant, while others are subordinated or marginalized (2000:

10). Thus, according to Connell, there is one hegemonic masculinity

defined as ‘the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a

given pattern of gender relations, a position that is always contestable’

(1995: 76). In the case of Kosovo, multiple masculinities play out in day­

to­day civil affairs. Men from different backgrounds engage with what

I will suggest is the embodiment of the most hegemonically masculine

figure – the foreign soldier. The foreign soldier holds this role owing

simply to status of occupier, protector and, to a certain extent, as pro­

vider.2 Yet the interviews analysed below demonstrate that this interaction

does not diminish the sense of masculinity felt by ‘less masculine’ men,

particularly gay men.3 These struggles have often led to violence that is

frequently explained and legitimized by commentators on Kosovo in

gendered language, particularly by redefining the meanings of gendered

identity and group membership. I will work with my interview material

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 145

to explore the idea that Connell’s framework neglects an important way

in which gender works in post­conflict societies and consequently has

difficulty theorizing the paradoxical ways in which masculinity is dis­

cursively manipulated.

Nationalist histories have been identified as a medium through which

myths are circulated. Moreover, Tosh has suggested that the narrative

structure of the nation itself may be instrumental in setting up the binary

story of manliness, womanliness and heterosexual subjectivity as cultur­

ally primordial (2004: 38). Others argue that some nations, such as post­

communist and twentieth­century new states, are more preoccupied with

narrating masculinity than others; and these nations are not dissimilar to

Kosovo (Drulak 2001; Enloe 1993; Sokolewicz 1999). As such, a discussion

of any nationalist struggle necessarily includes a discussion of the con­

nection between masculinities and the mythical narratives circulating in

national religious, secular or popular cultures. Whitehead suggests that

national identity and formations of hegemonic masculinity are reinvigor­

ated through ‘mythical narratives that turn on recounting as hero­myth,

the actions, trials and triumphs of certain (possibly fictional) men’ (2002:

98, 127,176). The ritual of storytelling around dominant men is at the

foreground of Kosovo’s ongoing nation­ and state­building project. In the

case of Kosovo, it must be noted that it is not so much the nation which is

under construction but external recognition of Kosovo as a state.4 Kosovar

stories of heroic men have become a means through which the community

has constructed a sense of manliness and masculinity (see Parpart, this

volume).5 At the same time as exalting manly warriors, the narratives

also marginalize less masculine men as outsiders, non­ Albanian men,

homosexuals and women.6 It is worth noting, however, that these nar­

rative myths of feats and courage are not limited to a particular type of

man and are in fact utilized to redefine masculinities or manliness across

subcultures; the dominant masculinity, at times, can be the poet, the

warrior, the despot or the benevolent prince.

Connell attempts to address the power of narratives by claiming that

it is a concept of gender drawing bodies into history, since bodies are

arenas for the making of gender patterns (2000: 12). Gender is material­

ized through ‘a range of “body practices”, which address, sort and modify

bodies’ (ibid.: 58). With regard to masculinity, the warrior becomes a key

site through which masculine hero­myths meet ritualized structuring of

men’s relationships to their bodies. When analysing the role of mascu­

linity in provoking or perpetuating violence in Kosovo, it is necessary

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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to make a distinction between men’s embodied performances of their

own masculinities, which are necessarily multiple, and their expectations

of masculinity, which are limited to normative models. This modelling

includes what men are taught they should aspire to be and how they

judge who they are. With this reading of the narrative, men are judged

and assessed by the nation as validated, demeaned or rebuked.

During my various visits to Kosovo to speak to men and women, it

became apparent that a powerful mixture of pre­Yugoslavian, anti­Serbian

and now post­conflict messages has led to a position where stereotypes

and narratives of what men and women are like have become polarized

by what they should be like and should do, and what their position in

Kosovo should be.7 Not unlike their Balkan neighbours, men are expected

to be heterosexual husbands and fathers; and their status depends on

having a wife and children and their ability to control them. An unmarried

man, for example, is called a ‘boy/kid’ (‘çunak’) and is not taken seri­

ously – he is not yet a man. Some interviewees reported that unmarried

men are thought of as unable to participate in political life. Given that

some of my informants were young unmarried men who fought in the

national struggle as Kosova Liberation Army soldiers, this assumption

about adult masculinity raises interesting questions about the subject of

heroes. They were, at that time, represented as the dominant man and

the powerful myth/hero; yet in post­conflict Prishtina, the public sees

them once again as a çunak, a less manly entity. Whereas any married

man is responsible, the çunak is stereotyped as selfish, impatient and

a fun­lover. As a result, these supposed heroes are seen as being in an

indeterminate state of manliness.

It should be noted that the current narrative of Kosovar masculinity

is often portrayed, both within the nation and to non­members, as a

pure Albanian ethnic identity, with a long history of a military, violent

culture. It is problematic that this narrative is so deeply entrenched in

the national psyche, just as it is embedded in an internationally negative

image of Albanians (Mertus 1999). The negative image of Albanians as

drug smugglers, pimps and human traffickers has become an interna­

tional myth in its own right (Mostov 2000; <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/

uk/4287432.stm>). Throughout various episodes of Balkan history, the

Albanian Kosovar has been seen as a fierce warrior to his neighbours

in Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Greece. This legacy has created a

national narrative reinforcing and applauding dominant masculine men

as fighters and perpetrators of violence, which has been played upon by

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 147

Serbs to justify the authoritarian control imposed on the province in the

past. It is also part of the international portrayal of Kosovar Albanians as

undesirables. This stereotyped reputation is juxtaposed with a Kosovar

self­perception of a nation capable of calmness and rationality that has

been led during critical national histories by great intellectual men. It

can be said, of course, that these positive internal perceptions are as

much subject to manipulation as the negative external ones.

It is important to stress that Kosovar men, in some way, have to

integrate this masculine narrative of what they ‘ought to be’ into the

underlying truth of their situation, namely that they are dominated by

foreign warriors. The foreigner is the OSCE administrator, UNMIK and

NATO soldier. Many interviewees note that protection and occupation

under either the international foreigner or Belgrade still represent weak­

ness and non­recognition as a valid nation to most Kosavars.

In August 1991, Milošević gave an interview to BSkyB reporter Arnot

Van Liden, denying involvement in the Croatian conflict. When he was

asked about a call for independence from ‘the people of Kosovo’, his

response was, ‘What part of the people? The Albanians? The Albanians

are a national minority in Yugoslavia. You know very well that there are

no international obligations, UN or CSCE obligations or the like which

determine the right of national minorities to establish their own state’

(Sky Television/Belgrade TV, 7 August 1991). Van Liden’s subsequent

question illustrates Milošević’s views on Albanians. My assertion is that

these views are part of the national narrative, thus a part of the masculine

narrative:

Van Liden: But the Serbs in Croatia are a minority?

Milošević: No, they are not. No Yugoslav people are a minority any­

where in Yugoslavia. We are living in Yugoslavia and we cannot be a

national minority depending on the place we are living in. Croats are

not a national minority in Bosnia, despite the fact that they are only

15 per cent. They are a people. All Yugoslav peoples in Yugoslavia are

equal and not one of them can be a national minority. Albanians are

not a people; they are not really Yugoslav because they are not Slavs.

Albanians are not even Europeans. (ibid.)

Thus, the ongoing debate on Kosovo’s autonomy coincides with a dis­

course that devalues Kosovar manliness to the status of çunak in a nation

on an indeterminate path to state(man)hood.

Just as the mythical hero forms part of the hegemonic narrative,

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Seven 148

so do bodies and sexualities. Connell has expressed the embodiment

of masculinity partially through discussions of sexuality, stating that

‘the most symbolically important distinction between masculinities is

in terms of sexuality. Hegemonic masculinity is emphatically hetero­

sexual, homosexual masculinities are subordinated …’ (2000: 102; see

also Anand’s chapter, this volume). Contrasting versions of masculinity

are, however, highlighted in the Kosovar narrative. Contrary to the gender

stereotypes about men and relationships, there are variations. Florin,

aged twenty­three, tells a story about breaking out of the old Kosovo

frame, suggesting that life in 2003 was structurally more fluid after the

arrival of international forces and support agencies.

I would like to tell people that I am a gay but I am also afraid … I fear

from other Albanian guys because of my sexuality and because of

the present [situation], there is no effective police or justice system

to protect me from homophobic attacks. So, I have a girlfriend. But

when Kosovo is a real country and in [the] EU I can be gay. I will get a

boyfriend and people can’t touch us then. I am still very nervous and

shy [when] meeting guys so I only go with internationals, they like my

sex. They see gays as normal … supernormal. We can meet and they

know I am a gay even though no friends [of mine] can tell. I hide as a

real man; they are so stupid.

We might read this as Florin seeing his own body and sexuality as part of

the shifting from outsider (unaccepted gay man) to insider (Kosovar/EU

citizen). He believes his sexuality may free him from the constraints

of the past and give him the ability to forge a new life on different

principles as he matches the change he sees in the status of Kosovo to

his self­development and pleasure. As he says himself, he constructs

a supernormal self. Florin, it could be said, is not performing the old

Kosovar masculine narrative, but the narrative that is becoming a new

masculinity in the new Kosovo.

Florin’s interview makes it clear that masculinities are also bound up

with constructions of ethnicities; for him, the international, hegemonic,

masculine man accepts his sexuality without questioning his manliness.

The key point to draw here is that understandings of the performance

narratives of sexuality are highly relevant to an analysis of a society freshly

emerging from conflict. For this reason, the images of warfare and the

soldier, both the nationalist fighter and the international warrior, are

implicated in the overlapping construction of masculinities.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 149

Following on from this, if Connell can be read as providing a des­

criptive analysis of how masculinities are negotiated as a ‘snapshot’

of a particular culture, then the account of hegemonic masculinity is

identified as having a distinctively deterministic outcome (Kaufmann and

Williams 2004; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). In the case of Kosovo,

the hegemonic masculinity in its narrative and embodied forms alters

from Serb to KLA fighter to UNMIK or NATO soldier within a period of

months. It could be understood from reading Connell that social change

is entirely left out of the equation.

Bringing in Butler

It is now time to suggest a provocative pairing of Connell’s hegemonic

masculinities thesis and Butler’s insurrectionary speech. By pulling the

two together, I hope to present a new way of challenging how performance

and narratives of national struggles, taking the guise of social change,

can be conceived as influencing masculine identities and encouraging

multiple versions of hegemonic masculinities (Butler 1997).

As is now familiar to those studying the feminist canon, Butler posits

gender and other social convention patterns as protected and affirmed

using various symbols and social actions. In Kosovo, one could argue

that these symbols and social actions are in the form of iconography.

Iconographies are seen in stories of the Racak massacre of 1999, the

potent manliness in Mehmet Kajtazi’s novels, the ultimate self­sacrificing

woman embodied by Mother Teresa and the renaming of Prishtina’s

main streets to memorialize Albanian heroes, as in Bill Clinton Street.

Together, these national emblems and performances give Kosovars a

story of their recent past, one that defines the ‘gendered subject­patterns’

of masculinity and femininity (Butler 1993; Zalewski 1995). These configu­

rations of gendered histories are, however, neither solid nor permanent.

Each social rule or act provides only a particular snapshot and how that

snapshot is framed can alter the status quo. Therefore, the way in which

each snapshot is placed and ultimately becomes a part of the national

narrative develops Kosovo’s potential for social change. It is from this

perspective that Butler’s view of gender, as open to insurrection by the

use of symbols and performances, is most useful when analysing Kosovo

masculinities today.

I want to use Butler’s work on ‘insurrectionary speech’ to explore the

possibility that various gendered performances and depictions in Kosovo

are ‘instrument[s] of resistance in [a] redeployment that destroys the prior

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Seven 150

territory of [their] operation’ (Butler 1997: 163). In unveiling particular

cultural readings of gender from various interviews, ‘insurrectionary

speech’ represents the status quo out of context; and in this way, it un­

settles the status quo (ibid.). One outcome of this is social and cultural

performances appearing solid in that they create counter­ hegemonic

ways, such as Florin’s reading of the hegemonic foreign soldier accepting

his homosexuality as supernormal. When applied to hegemonic masculin­

ity, Butler’s insurrectionary speech can provide a strategy for destabilizing

the hierarchy hegemony imposes (see Schauer 2004: 31). By means of

interrupting the narrative performance of hegemonic masculinity, it may

be possible to disturb Kosovars’ hierarchy of masculinities.

This becomes tantamount to deconstructing the national gendered

narrative; Butler allows us to see the norm/narrative as malleable. Thus,

my project does not aim to simply deconstruct one ontological vision

of gender in order to replace it with another; that would be counter­

productive. Although Connell has challenged Butler by arguing that she

is only responding to the question of social change by focusing on the

individual and not the larger picture, I think this statement neglects the

point that social change is influenced by which performances circulate

and what myths achieve national authority (2000: 20). Thus, my point

in making this argument is that social change revolves around the sym­

bolic mechanisms through which hegemonic masculinity is performed

and potentially unseated through some representations of post­conflict

Kosovar society.

A new start for state and heroes

As touched upon earlier, some existing research on post­conflict

societies suggests how hegemonic masculinities are reinforced through

fictional representations of the emerging nation/state (Ayres 2000; Buch­

enau 2005; Ibeanu 2001; Munn 2006). The general narratives are laid

out in three parts. First, the antagonist and hero tend to be mutually

constitutive. For Kosovo, this takes the form of oppressive Serbia as the

antagonist and the Kosovar resistance or militiaman as hero. The nar­

ratives constructed for each neatly reinforce a sense of national identity

and hegemonic concepts of masculinity. Second, these national narra­

tives reify the binary division of male heterosexuality and homosexuality,

subordinating the latter. Third, nationalists’ myths that focus on the

figurative male support the expected embodiment of what is to emerge

as masculine.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 151

Kosovo is important to both Serbian and Albanian nationalist nar­

ratives; the province is seen by Serbs as the heartland of the medieval

kingdom where many cultural and national monuments are located. For

the Albanians, it is the centre of national revivalism and the founding

of the League of Prizren in 1878.8 During the 1970s, Kosovo was granted

considerable autonomy and representation in all federal Yugoslav insti­

tutions, but not republic status. The longevity of the Kosovo issue and

the raising of expectations among Albanians for increased autonomy

polarized the two groups. In 1981, nationalist unrest among Albanians,

exacerbated by economic problems and the failures of economic and

political policies, led to mass demonstrations in support of secession

from Serbia and full republic status within the Yugoslav federation. The

demonstrations and their violent suppression were particularly important

in the current national narratives of both sides.

Nationalist fighting heroes are seen as resolutely individualistic, moral,

rebellious and tough. Within the nationalist myths, we see the state as the

oppressor, inhumane and mechanical. The hero’s quest becomes escape

from slavery, rebellion against the system, or a struggle to maintain his

humanity under difficult circumstances. Thus, triumph over the status

quo requires a certain kind of hero. In fact, the narrative answer to the

problem posed by the state is a hegemonic masculine protagonist. Nation­

alist myths tend to be constructed/remembered in such a way as to vali­

date particular qualities that are attributed to the hegemonic masculine

subject. The traditional qualities of a national identity are also reflected

in those that might be said to include independence, insubordination

and toughness.9

Male bodies in the fight for the nation

In 1993, Serbia attempted to alter the demographic make­up of Kosovo

by actively removing Albanians from their employment, evicting them

from their homes and encouraging Serbian migration into Kosovo.

Ibrahim Rugova, president of Kosovo’s parallel parliament established

in 1998 in defiance of the continued removal of political autonomy,

was seen as the embodiment of the hegemonic narrative. Rugova was

a member of Kosovo’s intelligentsia and an acclaimed poet and writer.

He attempted to lead a peaceful resistance against Serbian control.

Even as the Yugoslav wars of secession were taking place across the

federation, Rugova advocated: ‘The slaughterhouse is not the only form

of struggle. There is no mass humiliation in Kosovo. We are organised

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Seven 152

and are operating as a state. It is easy to take to the streets and to head

towards suicide, but wisdom lies in eluding a catastrophe’ (Guardian, 4

June 1993). Rugova embodied one form of the masculinities narrative

and represented the internal national narrative of Kosovars as intelligent,

peaceful and Western. He held the widespread support of his nation

for a period. It may be said that Kosovars saw their peaceful resistance

to Serbian authoritarianism as something that the West would reward

since the rest of the federation fell into war. It was not until 1995, when

Kosovo was ignored in the Dayton Accords, that Rugova’s role began to

weaken.10 The counter­narrative of the warrior and the old stories of

national heroes from Kosovo Polje began to take hold of the nation once

again; and the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1997

altered the national narrative, which also altered the representation and

embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. This turn to the mythical rebel

and a reinvigorated manliness surged in Kosovar history. It was this form

of masculinity which the nation relied on to secure its autonomy. Thus,

not only had the hero­myth become an essential part of national identity

and hegemonic masculinity but it also gained credibility through the

narrative structure of many stories and cultural imagery. Furthermore,

thematic and symbolic parallels exist between the political enemies of

the hero and the oppressive state. As the province of Kosovo lends itself

to the mythical narratives of both Kosovars and Serbs, their own national

stories have mixed and evolved one from the other, each relying on

imagery that shows the other as the national and natural enemy.

The KLA utilized these symbolic parallels as socializing influences

for gaining the popular support and weakening Rugova’s message of

passive resistance. For instance, Zani, a former KLA fighter, spoke of a

need for Kosovars to display toughness, courage and willingness to fight

as important means of presenting a positive identity to both Serbs and

the rest of the Europe.

If [the] KLA did not exist and we allowed people like Rugova and the

rest of parliament to make our decisions for us … still we would never

have sur vived and nobody would ever take us seriously. Look at the

Muslims in Bosnia, they are still controlled by the dogs, Kosova has

proven it has a backbone – push us and we push back harder … and we

will prove it again and again. We are not Muslims alone, we are Albani­

ans. Europe now listens when Kosovo speaks.

The construction of a nationalist myth, wherein the militiaman­hero

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 153

challenges the oppressive regime, has certain consequences. Questions

about statehood become questions about the survival of the hero and are

performed as the hero’s triumph for the nation. The hero’s battle is won

through patriotism, ingenuity, hardiness and so forth. Thus, hegemonic

masculinity is reaffirmed; and questions about violence and abuse are

neatly avoided. Caprioli claims ‘motivation for collective action coupled

with group identification is not a sufficient cause of conflict’, but they are

necessary (2005: 163). When questioned further on the internal violence

and bullying of boys and men to join the KLA against their will, Zani

does not want to speak about it much; his only comment being that if

‘they do not want to join us then they were cowards and not worth our

time … I would [have] happily given them to the Serbs’. Another inter­

viewee, Jetmir, aged twenty­seven, was much more willing to talk about

intimidation and bullying of Kosovars and their families who refused to

join him in the KLA. He stated,

Of course there are cowards in Kosova … like anywhere … some are too

weak anyway, who would want them, they could never fight. Some guys

were under pressure from families not to fight or were scared, but after

you squeeze them most came around to the idea. Other ‘boys’ were

like the girls … [laughing] running out of Kosovo and stepping on the

grannies to get to a border, any border … faggot queers, we don’t want

them anyway.

I asked Zani about the rumours of rape by KLA soldiers, and although

the translator made a mistake in my question, Zani’s answer was more

telling than I thought it would be. The translator asked, ‘Tell me about

cases of KLA soldiers raping each other,’ at which Zani become very

upset and shouted, ‘We never raped each other, if that ever happened you

would be killed … [We] did have sex with some women, yes … but that

is normal. [We] did torture some guys too and maybe they [were] forced

into sucking cocks, but that is all. It was never about sex.’ Real stories

of conflict and war can then become a fantasy that reaffirms national

identity along with an idealized version of masculinity. This happened

on both sides of the Kosovo conflict. Serb forces used masculine imagery

of rape, penetration and sexual conquest during the war. A commonly

reported phrase written by Serbian forces on Albanian burned­out homes

during the conflict was ‘Shiptar, watch your ass’. The process of defining

masculinity continues through a treatment of homosexuality.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Homosexuality as insurrection According to Connell, hegemonic masculinity is controlled by way of

an imposed binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality; domi­

nant masculinity is heterosexual. This may go some way to explain why

homosexuality receives such negative attention in masculine activities

such as fighting for one’s nation. Yet when homosexuality becomes an

overt/explicit issue, as in the context of gays in the military, its treatment

by mainstream discourse confirms the cultural legislation of hegemonic

masculinity as resolutely heterosexual. Furthermore, within this frame,

sexual domination of one over another is implied if not explicit. Serbs

and Albanians have used similar depictions of sexuality in their rhetoric,

both seeing the other as the sexual aggressor or the sexual victim to be

conquered. One thing that remains clear is that such sexualized discourse

is from a heterosexual standpoint. This is clear when considering lan­

guage context, such as the rape of Serbian monasteries. Attacks, which

need defence, are seen as heterosexual rapes on women; and attacks that

are offensive, such as against the enemy, are phrased by both sides as

homosexual rapes of men. A Serbian religious layman in late 2001, while

discussing the state of the Serbian monasteries in Kosovo, reported to

me, ‘Under the new leadership in Belgrade, Serbia is spreading its legs

for NATO when it talks of Kosovo. She will let anyone enter her these

days. For me it is the same disgrace as being personally sodomized.’

As a result, while a somewhat hysterical fear of homosexual assault

characterizes aggressive nationalist discourse, more positive, consensual

homosexual relationships are absent. Violence and aggression may be

displayed as a way to meet the gender expectations of the nation as well

as to more broadly meet the hegemonic notions of masculinity. Fatmir,

aged twenty­eight and a former KLA fighter, says, ‘Everything I did was in

service to Kosovo. Sometimes that included things I am not proud of … but

I had to do these things to prove I was a good Kosovar.’ I asked whether he

would tell me what things he meant and he replied, ‘You know, beating

on old people, girls were used and stuff like that. It was harder for me

maybe as a gay [man] but I had to do [them] anyway … just because I am

gay does not mean I [am] not a good Kosovar or a good fighter.’

During a second interview with Zani (approximately three months after

the first time we spoke), it was clear he wanted to address the question of

rape and attempt to ‘clear up things’. He said, ‘It is common knowledge

that Serb girls are all whores, they have no respect for their sex and give

it to people … we didn’t rape them really. When it happened and not

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 155

much, it was when they were ready only.’ It was obvious that Zani was

attempting to justify the actions, be it his or those of his friends. But he

did return to the question of male rape. He asked whether it was true

that I was speaking to Fatmir. I told him I was not permitted to say as

all interviews were confidential. He then said,

I bet you, man, that Fatmir gave sex to some Serb guys. [Laughing

nervously] He was in my troop for most of the war and we all saw how

he looked at the guys, even me! It was not nice, but he is strong. If you

want to write about punishing someone … it is Fatmir that you should

say was evil. Even Serb guys [should not] get fucked. I would kill anyone

trying that on me.

This further implies that homosexual relationships are always violent,

non­consensual ones. Accordingly, during my interviews, when the topic

of KLA brotherhood or emotional connections between soldiers was dis­

cussed, the majority responded quickly with a line similar to ‘we were like

brothers or cousins – not like gays’. There tends to be a focus on violent

homosexual acts, which were presented sometimes as power struggles

and most often as abuse or assault. Consensual, emotional depictions

of homosexuality were often excluded. As a result, the interviewees’ nar­

ratives of their experiences in the Kosovo conflict reinforced the binary

division that Connell identifies as key to defining and policing hegemonic

masculinity, the dominance of heterosexuality and its radical separation

from homosexuality (Schauer 2004).

The narrative of dominant masculinity is, in part, that of a bodily

practice (Connell 2000). Certain types of male bodies are represented

in Connell’s The Men and the Boys as ideal; and, through narrative rep­

resentation of the nationalist hero, hegemonic masculinity acquires an

embodied image. Mertus, in Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War,

gives an excellent account of how Kosovo’s nationalist myths allow for the

militiaman­hero to take a male heterosexual dominant form. She shows

how myth and experience inform the political ideologies of Kosovo and

explores how these competing beliefs have been created and per petuated

from the thirteenth century to the present KLA fighter. Hegemonic mas­

culinity in nationalist myths has been performed in a number of ways:

through the depiction of bodies, through narrative and visual treatment

of sexuality and via the myth of the hero’s quest. Setting up the state as

political oppressor structures a nationalist narrative in which the main

obstacle becomes the institution and its agents, as in the case of Kosovo

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Seven 156

versus the Serbian oppressor. The answer to this problematic situation

is an embodiment of the mythical hero whose triumph hinges on main­

taining his nationalistic and masculine identity. His weapons of defence

are the characteristics of male strength, courage and resourcefulness.

The militiaman­hero is incarnated in hyper­ masculine physical form.

Friendly homosexuality is not an option for the hero; in fact, this type

of relationship is not part of the nationalist narrative and is completely

ignored by both sides during the conflict.

Conclusion: insurrectionary potential

This chapter contemplates the latent insurrectionary power of

national ist myths and practices as narrative performances of hegemonic

masculinity. There is no one correct reading of the myths and legends

that have constructed Kosovars’ hegemonic masculinities; and such

myths and narratives take the form of constructing embodied metaphors

that assist the nation in a given time and space. By placing the state of

Serbia and its people in the role of an oppressive regime, one that has

dehumanized and devalued the Albanian population, the Kosovo mythic

narrative forces the state to become the primary obstacle for a nationalist

militiaman­hero to overcome. The state is set up in contrast with the

nationalists’ own superior type of masculinity. The narrative structure

pays tribute to the heroes’ hegemonic masculine qualities and feats in

war. Hegemonic masculinity is further reinforced by the performance of

the militiaman­hero’s body; it becomes the emblem of the nation at war.

For Kosovo, this depiction has been through men attempting to emulate

the heroes of Kosovo Polje in deed and manner. This process continues

through depictions of homosexual contact between men as violent and

threatening, unlike the heterosexual contact between man and woman,

even when it is violent.

Some nationalist movements, such as the positioning of Rugova, com­

plicate this picture, making porous the binary categorization of male

relationships into heterosexual and homosexual. These relationships

might be formed along the lines of complicit masculinity, gentry or

exemplary masculinities (Connell 1995: 79). In truth, it is in understand­

ing the renderings of homosexuality in narrative performances that I

see the most likely insurrectionary potential. Homosexuality has long

been a theme in counter­nationalism, just as hegemonic masculinity

has been a key to nationalism.11 I hope this investigation will convince

other researchers that exploring narratives like those of Zani, Fatmir and

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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National myths 157

Notes 1 During a number of field visits

to Kosovo I interviewed men, women and boys (between the ages of thirteen and sixteen); for the purpose of this chapter the time frame is 2000 through to 2005.

2 This point will be explored in greater detail later in the chapter.

3 Over a period of four years, I have interviewed many men who struggle with ‘acting out’ their masculinity in a society that they see as ‘occupied’ and in a state of flux.

4 Kosovar Albanians have always maintained that the objective of the civil war was to be an independent state, whereas the minority Kosovan Serbs are supported by Serbia in the argument that Kosovo is a core of the Serbian national identity.

5 For the purposes of the chapter I will refer to Kosovar Albanians as Kosovar.

6 I have explored this point at length in ‘Gendered realities of life in post­conflict Kosovo: addressing the hegemonic man’, Nationalities Papers, 34(3): 289–304.

7 Fieldwork was conducted over various visits between late 1999 and 2004. The examples given in this chapter are drawn largely from my personal observations and interviews over that period. I interviewed forty women and sixty­five men. All names

have been changed as requested by the majority of those interviewed.

8 The League of Prizren, a mili­ tary and political organization, was created to re­establish the autonomy of a unified Albanian state. There was a second League of Prizren, also founded for the unification of ethnic Albanians, in 1943. Neither of the leagues actually saw success in their lobbying to create a greater Albania.

9 I have discussed the connection of Kosovo’s national narrative and the rise of a hegemonic masculinity in detail in Munn (2008).

10 The Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia. The Accords rec­ ognized that conflicts (national and ethnically driven) have a short­term and a longer­term feature, the short­ term being the end of hostilities and the longer­term the longevity of international involvement and invest­ ment. See Swomley (1999).

11 Counter­nationalism contains definitions of masculinities which can influence the hegemonic narra­ tives and complicate definitions of men and masculinity.

References Ayres, R. W. (2000) ‘A world flying

apart? Violent nationalist conflict and the end of the cold war’, Journal of Peace Research, 37(4).

Florin will highlight individual experiences and truths and raise questions

about the infallible connection between the nation and masculinity.

Hence, research focused on investigating the insurrectionary potential

of the binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality, not forgetting the

multiple masculinities that narrate both, may be the difference needed

to deconstruct the ‘man’ in international politics.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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— (1997) Excitable Speech, London: Routledge.

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Caprioli, M. (2000) ‘Gendered con­ flict’, Journal of Peace Research, 37(1).

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Caprioli, M. and M. Boyer (2001) ‘Gender, violence and interna­ tional crisis’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45(4).

Carver, T. (2002) ‘Gender’, in Bellamy, R. and A. Mason (eds), Political Theory and the Concept of Politics, London: Sage.

Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Angeles: University of California Press.

Connell, R. W. and J. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, 19(6).

Demetriou, D. (2001) ‘Connell’s con­ cept of hegemonic masculinity: a critique’, Theory and Society, 30(3).

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Drulak, P. (2001) ‘The return of identity to European politics’, in P. Drulak (ed.), National and European Identities in EU Enlarge- ment: Views from Central and Eastern Europe, Prague: Institute of International Relations.

Dyer, R. (2002) ‘The white man’s muscles’, in R. Adams and D. Savran (eds), The Masculinity Studies Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

Enloe, C. (1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

— ‘All the men are in the militias, all the women are victims: the politics of masculinity and femininity in nationalist wars’, in L. A. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds), The Women and War Reader, New York: NYU Press.

Ferguson, K. (1993) The Man Ques- tion: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, New York: Vintage Books.

Gamson, J. (1997) ‘Messages of exclusion: gender, movement and symbolic boundaries’, Gender and Society, 11(2).

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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Hageman, K., S. Dudink and J. Tosh (eds) (2004) Masculinities in Poli- tics and War. Gendering Modern History, Manchester: Manchester University Press/St Martin’s Press.

Hobden, S. and J. Hobson (eds) (2002) Historical Sociology of Inter- national Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Human Rights Watch/Helsinki (1993) Open Wounds: Human Rights Abuses in Kosovo, London: HRW.

Ibeanu, O. (2001) ‘Healing and changing’, in S. Meintjes, A. Pillay and M. Turshen (eds), The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, London: Zed Books.

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toward international conflict’, World Politics, 49(1).

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Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:50.

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SIX | Contesting the masculine state D A N I E L C O N W AY

I have a huge problem that I cannot talk to anyone about. I tried talk­

ing to my father and he got so angry with me, I thought he might actu­

ally hit me. I do not want to go into the army … all my friends seem to

be looking forward to going into the army. I certainly can’t discuss it

with them. I feel terribly isolated, like I don’t belong anywhere. It’s not

because I’m a coward.

The [Johannesburg] Star replies: Cowardice has nothing to do with

conscientious objection to doing military service. Contact the End

Conscription Campaign at 011 337 6796. (Letters to the Editor, The

Star, 12 September 1987)

Asking the man question in a society where compulsory all­male military

conscription is standard inevitably requires interrogating how masculini­

ties are militarized and how militaries are masculinized. A militarized

state devotes considerable cultural, legal and discursive resources to

perpetuating the militarization of masculinities. Men who feel anxious

about serving, who consider it a waste of time or see it as an abuse of

state power, are likely made to feel they are unreasonable, ‘unmanly’

and subversive. Exploring the impact of this gender dissidence allows

an analysis of Cynthia Enloe’s insight that ‘if a state’s military begins to

lose legitimacy, the tension between masculinity and military service can

become acute’ (1993: 54). In 1980s apartheid South Africa, two years of

full­time compulsory conscription existed for all white men and this was

followed by a fifteen­year period of alternate­year ‘camp duty’.1 Tensions

between masculinity and military service emerged when a small number

of white men publicly rejected compulsory conscription. They were then

joined by white men and women who established a war resistance and

anti­apartheid movement called the End Conscription Campaign (ECC).

Objection to military service for expressly political reasons reflected

deeper cultural shifts and widening divisions in South Africa’s white

community (Phillips 2002: 224; Charney 1987) and demonstrated how

the contradictory pressures of militarization on a society can provoke

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Six 128

profound political change. The analysis of the war resistance movement

in South Africa reveals the possibilities and constraints for contesting and

destabilizing dominant militarized gender norms and contesting racist

and authoritarian rule. The use of sexist and homophobic discourses

to stigmatize objectors and their supporters demonstrated the hetero­

normativity of the public realm, and the dilemma of how to transgress

such stigmatization confronts peace activists across contexts. The case

study of war resistance in apartheid South Africa and the cultures of

mascu linity that underpinned it resonate with social practices in con­

temporary militarized societies such as in Israel and Turkey. This chapter

will begin by theoretically conceptualizing conscription and political

objection to it as ‘performative’ (Butler 1999) acts generative of indi­

vidual and collective identity. I will move on to analyse the discursive

and material means by which the apartheid state militarized masculinity;

and finally I will conceptualize and assess resistance to conscription in

South Africa.

Militarizing masculinities

Conscription and objection to military service are performative prac­

tices generative of individual and collective subjectivities. These sub­

jectivities, however, are ‘produced in the complex interplay of discourse,

norms, power relations, institutions and practices’ (Lloyd 2005: 27). In

militarized cultures, such practices intersect with multiple discourses

and occur on multiple levels. In South Africa, conscription became a

normative practice generative of masculinity and citizenship and was

engendered by practices such as cadet duty at school, valorizing sport

and the male physique, and by gendered nationalist and cold war dis­

courses in the public realm (Cock and Nathan 1989; Du Pisani 2004).

White men engaged with these militarized masculinities and practices at

school, on the sports pitch, in the family, in the military, and in the wider

public realm (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). There was, however,

a simultaneous resistance to and contestation of these practices and

norms. The refusal to serve as a soldier in a conscript army on grounds

of conscience, particularly when this relates to political and moral beliefs,

is a powerful and transgressive performative practice in the public realm.

It is, however, a practice that is ambivalent. Objection to military service,

from one perspective, is an alternative ‘narrative of citizenship’ to that

offered by the state (Carver 1998: 15) and one that challenges ‘the halo

of sanctity surrounding war and military service’ (Helman 1999: 46).

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Contesting the masculine state 129

Objectors make claims to embody true patriotism, civic duty, heroism,

sacrifice and other normative practices of masculinity, norms that the

state claims legitimacy to define. In this contestation, there are pressures

to assimilate or be subverted by state vilification. Burk notes that many

objectors’ goal is to at once ‘protest and to maintain the respect of larger

society’ (1995: 511). Therefore, they must avoid, in Burk’s terms, becoming

exiles from the political community (ibid.: 511).The need to be ‘taken

seriously’ and perceived as ‘respectable’, in order to avoid ‘exile’, places

gendered pressures on objectors and can limit the transformative nature

of objection as a performative act. The analysis below demonstrates

that objectors and peace activists in apartheid South Africa were acutely

subject to these pressures.

A politics of masculinity had always been at the centre of white

nation­building in South Africa, and militarization was a critical pro cess

in mediating the heterogeneous white community. The experience of

military defeat and humiliation by the Afrikaans­speaking population

in the Boer War was of profound significance in creating suspicion of

English­speaking whites and engendered a need to reclaim honour,

heroism and strength (Du Pisani 2004). English­speaking whites (some

40 per cent of the white community) were largely hostile towards National

Party (NP) rule during the 1950s; but a combination of rising prosperity,

electoral gerrymandering by the NP and disintegration of parliamentary

opposition led to increased acceptance of and complicity in apartheid.

Nevertheless, the unity of the white nation was never assured. The South

African Defence Force’s (SADF) role in mediating these divisions and

symbolizing an ideational white unity and resolve was paramount. The

institution of conscription became a primary location where white men

from different linguistic, class and national groups mixed (Seegers 1987:

160). The presumed masculine camaraderie of service aimed to forge

white national bonds, and the public image of the white male conscript

symbolized white South Africa’s apparent unity and resolve. Therefore,

conscription was a primary means by which the ‘imagined community’

(Anderson 2006) of the white nation was generated. Nevertheless, opposi­

tion to conscription in the 1980s reflected these historical divisions and

was centred on English­speaking universities, in the English­speaking

churches, through the English­medium press, and in business interests.

The linguistic, social and economic divisions in the white community and

the iconic, individual and communal practice of all­male military service

made the state exceptionally sensitive to individual or collective acts of war

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resistance. The extent of South Africa’s militarization made opposition to

conscription a difficult and rare social phenomenon but conversely made

the act of objection iconic and destabilizing when it did occur.

The ideological outlook, discourse and personnel of the NP, SADF and

South African state had coalesced by the 1980s.2 It would be incorrect,

however, to assume that war resisters faced a rigid monolith of milita­

rized masculinity when opposing the South African state. Indeed, the

apartheid state was a conglomerate of shifting, sometimes contradictory

and surprising, discourses of masculinity and sexuality. At the centre of

this ‘uneasy and messy alliance’ (MacInnes 1998: 15) of masculinist dis­

courses was the act of conscription. The importance placed on white men

serving in the military and being publicly acknowledged as conscripts,

however, never wavered. The state’s shifts in rhetorical emphasis and

articulation, or to borrow Hooper’s terms the ‘plundering’ (2001: 62) of

hitherto ‘deviant’ tropes of masculinity and sexuality as a justification

for conscription were aimed at the ‘rejuvenation’ (ibid.: 62) of the state’s

norms of masculinity, which were centred on maintaining the legiti­

macy of conscription. An analysis of the state’s evolving and conflicting

articulation of militarized masculinities reveals the highly bound and

hostile public realm in which objectors had to operate. Also, the cultural

impact of war resistance was seen to have threatened (or to potentially

threaten) the state. Militarized ‘hybrid’ (Demetriou 2001: 349) tropes of

masculinities emerged as the circumstances of the state changed, the

impact of war resistance was gauged, or the different institutions of the

state contradicted one another.

At the centre of the cultural production of militarized masculinities

was the iconography of the white male conscript. The need for white

public complicity with conscription infused NP leaders’ rhetoric and

South African popular culture. A significant discourse of aspirational

militarized masculinity was that of the hyper­masculine grensvegter

(border fighter). The grensvegter was essentially a man who had seen

combat against Cuban and Angolan troops in the war on the Namibian/

Angolan border. The grensvegter iconography emphasized the adventure

and raw masculinity of military service and drew from the Hollywood

Rambo imagery of anti­communist guerrilla warfare (Conway 2007).

Alongside the hard imagery of the grensvegter was that of the troepie

(or troopie). The troepie embraced conscripts as the collective sons of

white South Africa. One could purchase troepie cuddly toys, and the

Afrikaans popular song ‘Troepie Doepie’ defined this trope of masculin­

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Contesting the masculine state 131

ity as affectionately regarded rather than revered and hyper­masculine

(Drewett 2003). The troepie metaphor was particularly emphasized when

addressing white women’s involvement in militarization. The women of

the Southern Cross Fund, a white women’s group established to support

SADF troops, emphasized men as troepies: sons, husbands and brothers

deserving the motherly support of South African women (Conway 2007).

The need to appeal to all white South African men and define service in

the SADF as a positive, masculinizing rite of passage, regardless of a man’s

subjectivities, meant that the tropes of masculinity militarized in state

and popular cultural discourse were broad and malleable. The SADF’s

official magazine, Paratus, was on sale to the South African public and

served as a key medium by which the state advocated the benefits and

importance of military service. Paratus featured a ‘National Serviceman

of the Month’ column. The men featured in this column were seldom

either Afrikaans­speaking or the idealized grensvegter found elsewhere

in South African popular culture. Among the ‘National Servicemen of

the Month’ highlighted in Paratus were a surfer, a gay novelist, a fashion

designer, a singer, an actor and a photographer. They were all portrayed

as having developed their skills while in the SADF and as performing a

valuable role in the military (March 1987: 62; April 1983: 60; October

1987: 26; January 1986: 69; October 1985: 61; October 1983: 77). The

fact that the men were conscripts enabled them to transmute and hone

their masculine subjectivities to the needs of the SADF. Had a fashion

designer, author and surfer not been conscripts, their masculinity would

have been relegated to marginal status, so the practice of military service

transformed this. The men could be acknowledged as true men and

patriotic citizens. Research in contemporary Israel also supports the

notion that individual men experience the benefits of public acknowledge­

ment and esteem by wearing the uniform of a conscript and participating

in a collective national endeavour, regardless of their other gendered

subjectivities: ‘The way people look at you on the bus,’ remarked one

of Kaplan and Ben­Ari’s gay male informants, ‘the fact that suddenly

you are a soldier, that suddenly you are something’ (2000: 408). Munn

also documents in this volume how gay men can participate in and

valorize conflict and nationalist practices. The idealized masculinity of

the South African conscript resonated across popular, legal and political

discourses. These discourses were broad and malleable, however, and

this was testimony to the vital need for all white South African men to

participate and be seen participating in the SADF.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Iconic objection It is unsurprising that, given the considerable ‘ideological state appara­

tus’ devoted to engendering consent for and participation in the military,

the majority of white men ‘complied’ with duty (Althusser 1971: 136–45;

Cock 1989: 9). Indeed, even at the height of the ECC’s activism, the

organization concluded that ‘the bulk of the white community remains

antagonised by a campaign which is seen to threaten their protected

position in society’ (Moll 1985: 57). This in itself makes the stand taken

by a small number of individual male objectors to military service and

the larger number of men and women who supported them in the ECC

all the more remarkable. Despite only a handful of public political objec­

tors throughout the 1980s, the self­narratives and performative acts of

individual objection were as iconoclastic as the imagery of the serving

conscript. The English­speaking press, in particular, closely followed

the criminal trials of political objectors in apartheid South Africa. The

personalities and life stories of the individual objectors became the cen­

tral focus of the war resisters’ campaigning message, and the eventual

imprisonment of objectors was portrayed as a form of sacrifice akin to

martyrdom. Martyrdom, as a sacrifice for the common good, invoked and

imitated the sacrifice soldiers supposedly made on behalf of and for the

sake of the nation (Elshtain 1995: 202). The objector David Bruce told

the court during his trial,

I am prepared to fight in defence of the people of South Africa. Going

to jail is like reporting for service. By taking this stand I am trying to

say I am prepared to shoulder the responsibility that falls on young

men who sacrifice their lives, I have no contempt for the job that

soldiers do. By being in the army it can mean death, but I am not trying

to avoid this – I accept that we must defend our people but I cannot do

this under this present system of government. (Weekly Mail, 10 June

1988)

Bruce invoked the militarized symbolism of ‘manly’ self­sacrifice for the

greater good and yet sought to subvert and reconfigure the concept of

sacrifice in anti­apartheid and anti­conscription terms. Ivan Toms, who

was imprisoned some months after David Bruce, remarked upon the

individual resonance of ‘martyrdom’ as symbolizing a challenge to the

state and the wider citizenry at the time of his objection:

Some people see me as a traitor, but some white men consider my

stand a real challenge. I have often been told by young white men that

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Contesting the masculine state 133

they support what I have been doing and respect me, but that they

could not do it themselves. At the same time they are thankful that I

am doing it, almost on their behalf. (South, 10 March 1988)

The presence of individual white men refusing to serve in the military

and presenting themselves as true symbols of the nation and their duty

were acutely threatening the delicate conglomeration that was white

South Africa. It was for this reason that war resistance in apartheid South

Africa had a far greater power than their physical numbers would imply.

Individual objectors performed a political identity that was iconic, moral

and powerful. Indeed, individual objection continued after the ECC was

banned in 1988 and constituted the primary focus of anti­conscription

campaigns.

At the centre of individual objectors’ self­narratives was the concept

of having made a ‘break’ from white society. ECC activist Janet Cherry

explained, ‘we all go through a process, to some extent, of breaking away

from our backgrounds and our parents and from our very sheltered up­

bringing, and we felt it was incredibly important that people made that

break’ (cited in Frederickse 1990: 214). This ‘break’ was most vividly em­

bodied by male objectors as a rejection of the practice of conscription and

an opposition to the conflation of masculinity/patriotism with military

service. As such, objectors could be said to have performed Connell’s

advocacy of the ‘renunciation’ of dominant cultures of masculinity as

a precursor for creating and advocating new selves that effectively chal­

lenge the existing content and accepted practices of the status quo (1995:

130). An early ECC campaign, which encapsulated this, involved three

individual objectors fasting in Cape Town cathedral. Articulating the anti­

conscription message using a fast was explained by Richard Steele:

A radical stopping, stepping out and becoming aware of the way we

live our lives. We are socialised to follow certain habits. If you’re able

to step out of that habit, even for 24 hours, it gives you a chance to

look at the other habit you are following … We are focusing on the

SADF, because they are focusing on us, on our lives. (Weekly Mail, 27

September 1985)

Making a ‘break’ from mainstream white society was inevitable if one

were to refuse to serve in the SADF.

The breach white male objectors had made enabled new and trans­

gressive subjectivities to enter the public realm and destabilize militarized

masculinities. Primarily, objectors’ self­narratives were premised on the

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Six 134

claim that it was they who were empowered by their act of objection and

that conscripts were in fact disempowered and trapped by military ser­

vice. The ‘empowerment’ narrative of objection was reflexively developed

according to the individual objector’s life history, and it formed a critical

part of his public narrative of objection. This self­reflexive knowledge was

developed by encountering and rejecting militarized masculine norms in

school, the army, or from a deeper cultural awareness drawn from Chris­

tianity, Judaism or the objector’s own masculine or sexual identity. This

self­narrative challenged the state’s fundamental contention that military

service was the only practice that empowered men as individuals and

as a group. Many objectors considered their self­reflexivity and attitude

towards conscription as a privilege that was denied other white South

African men. Indeed, David Bruce, whose Judaism and family experiences

in Nazi Germany were decisive to his decision to object, considered that

he was ‘fortunate that I had that instinct. It was a kind of gift, a kind

of blessing almost, that it enabled me to see’ (interview with author, 12

September 2002). This was a striking observation to make, given that the

state constructed military service, not objection, as a ‘privilege’ for young

men. Charles Bester, who attended Grey College in Bloemfontein, also

rejected the hegemonic culture of his school and considered it decisive

in his moulding as an objector:

I didn’t have a very happy time at Grey College, I left a year later and as

I was leaving the deputy headmaster heard I was leaving and in fact I

left mid­week, that’s how I felt about the whole thing. I did try to ex­

plain why I was leaving this school … I said, ‘Well, I hate having to have

hair inspections,’ which seemed quite trivial but it was trying to say

something about the things that lay behind them and he said, ‘Well,

what will you do when you go into the army?’, because obviously in the

army you were going to have your hair cut … that connection was made

and that was the first doubts I had and from there it was a process.

(Interview with author, 13 September 2003)

This ‘process’ of coming to self­awareness and taking the final decision

to object was influenced by the resistance to dominant norms in school

which were replicated in wider society. Objectors articulated and devel­

oped ‘hidden transcripts’ (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994: 24) gained

from their life histories and alternative practices of masculinity and

citizenship. Just as militarism could become engendered by everyday

practices, such as those at school, so could it be resisted.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Contesting the masculine state 135

Bosbefok masculinities The militarization of South Africa placed extraordinary stresses on

white society and upon white men, in particular. As the 1980s progressed,

the war on the Namibian/Angolan border escalated and conscripts were

sent into South African black townships as rebellion spread across the

republic. These developments increased the amount of time conscripts

spent in active combat and led to a rising white casualty rate. The inter­

national outrage provoked by South Africa’s militarily aggressive stance

undermined white economic confidence and made the state appear

beleaguered and isolated. Mann notes that although militarization may

appear all­encompassing and unassailable, ‘If the nation is called to real

sacrifice, we see that its militarism is not rooted deep; if living standards

in a militarised society begin to fall, or should “our boys” be perceived

to be “pointlessly sacrificed”, militarism is profoundly threatened’ (1987:

49). White political unity began to fragment in response to these multiple

stresses, and the social and psychological evidence of the damaging

effects of sustained military combat began to emerge. The ECC’s effi­

cacy was not in mobilizing mass resistance against conscription but

in highlighting conscription as a source of growing political, economic

and social crisis for white South Africans (Phillips 2002: 224). As the

1980s progressed, disturbing evidence began to emerge about the effects

of military service on young white men and wider white South African

culture. Indeed, white male suicide rates, instances of interpersonal

violence and the phenomenon of ‘family murder’, whereby white men

would inexplicably murder their families and then commit suicide, were

among the highest in the world (Marks and Andersson 1990: 61). In 1987,

General Malan, the minister of defence, told parliament that 326 national

servicemen had attempted suicide during the previous year (18 killed

themselves, as opposed to 116 who died in military operations over the

same period) (MacLennan, Saturday Star, 22 February 1987). The reality

of these developments began to influence white popular culture. The

slang word bosbefok (bush fucked/bush mad) entered common currency

as a term of abuse; yet its origins were influenced by the symptoms

of Post­Traumatic Stress Disorder exhibited by troops who had served

on the Namibian/Angolan border (Thompson and Branford 1994: 100).

The metaphor of ‘bush fucked’ contested the army as a masculinizing

experience. It destabilized the tropes of militarized masculinity embodied

by the grensvegter and troepie; men were ‘fucked’ by military service,

demeaned and driven ‘mad’ as a result.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Six 136

These cultural shifts were capitalized on by the ECC as an organiza­

tion. The ECC, as a new social movement, became a subcultural space

in white South Africa and developed a particular and transgressive cam­

paigning style from the outset. Using satirical art forms that would be

readily identifiable to its youthful target audience and popular music

to transmit its message, the ECC developed a significant following on

English­speaking university campuses and in the trendy bars of Cape

Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Grahamstown. Many activists also

recall being part of the movement as a fun and enjoyable experience.

ECC leader Laurie Nathan explained to the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission that he believed conscripts were ‘both victims and perpetra­

tors’ and this influenced ECC campaigns (TRC 1997). The ECC frequently

used imagery of men being tied up, restricted and restrained in many

of its posters; and some images vividly showed men being turned into

animals and monsters by being forced into SADF uniforms. In this way,

the imagery of the heroic grensvegter and affectionately regarded troepie

was contested; and the white press and even, in 1988, the once ultra­

loyal Dutch Reformed Church began to question the continued use of

conscripts to fight apartheid’s war. The ECC was also a forum where

wider critiques of South African society were debated and a multiracial,

democratic future was discussed and advocated. The movement’s female

members, who comprised over 50 per cent of the ECC’s membership,

conducted considerable feminist debates about the nature of patriarchy in

South Africa and about the ECC as an organization. The ECC addressed

white women as mothers, wives and girlfriends of conscripts (in similar

terms to those of the state) and did so with the aim of further destabi­

lizing militarized masculinity and women’s role in sustaining it.3 The

ECC contested militarized mascu linities and sought to reformulate them

using popular culture and focusing on a practice that was damaging the

psychological, physical and economic well­being of increasing numbers

of men who were undertaking it.

Response and compromise

The state responded to objectors and the ECC with vitriol and punitive

measures. Indeed, the ECC was banned in 1988. The state’s attempts to

discredit objectors and maintain the legitimacy of conscription were,

however, problematic (Conway 2008). The iconic status of individual

objectors and the skill with which the ECC used popular culture to develop

anti­militarist discourses, already emergent in white society, meant that

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Contesting the masculine state 137

the state struggled to present objectors and their supporters as danger­

ous enemies of the republic. If anything, the trial and imprisonment of

individual objectors created ever­greater public concern and sympathy

for objectors and caused embarrassment for the legal establishment

and the SADF (ibid.). Police harassment and legal restrictions undoubt­

edly damaged the ECC’s ability to operate. The state also sought to

acutely stigmatize objectors and their supporters using homophobic

innuendo (ibid.). The branding of objectors as cowardly and sexually

‘deviant’ sought to neutralize objectors’ political message and ensure

that the state maintained control of defining and militarizing tropes

of gender. Whereas the state sought to incorporate hitherto ‘deviant’

tropes of masculinity and sexuality in Paratus magazine, it did so only

in relation to the practice of military service. To not serve in the SADF

resulted in the state projecting sexual and gendered ‘deviance’ on to the

resisting subject. What is significant is that this homophobic stigmatiza­

tion impacted on the ECC’s campaigning style and on the content of its

message. Ivan Toms, a gay objector, was dissuaded from incorporating

his sexuality into his public act of objection. Toms was presented by the

ECC as a ‘typical’ white man – a good Christian, a former army officer,

and a man who had been captain of his school’s rugby team (Conway

2004). In 1987, the ECC conducted survey and focus group research

among serving conscripts and concluded the following:

ECC is seen as ‘studenty’, cliquish and elitist … A most serious factor

undermining ECC is its ‘arrogance’ in commenting on the army when

so many of its publicly identified members have not done military

service. This applies as much to men who haven’t served as it does to

women and older folk who don’t face call ups. Those with most cred­

ibility in the ECC are the campers [men who had completed the initial

period of full­time conscription and were eligible for ongoing ‘camp

duty’] and the objectors who have been to jail. ECC needs to be repre­

sented publicly by a greater number of campers to avoid the perception

amongst soldiers that ‘it doesn’t know what the fuck it is talking

about’. Women and older folk who speak on ECC’s behalf should talk

about how they are affected by militarisation and conscription. Many

soldiers believe that the ECC sees them as ‘the enemy’. (ECC, Cape

Town Conscripts Group, October 1987 [Catteneo Collection])

It is significant that objectors who had been to jail were considered

to have legitimacy similar to that of SADF former conscripts. This was

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Six 138

indicative of the masculine symbolism shared between soldiering and

objection as a performative act. The desire to be ‘taken seriously’ by

serving conscripts, however, and the need to appear ‘respectable’ in

mainstream white society, increasingly dictated the style and content

of the ECC’s campaigns. There is no doubt that the increased concern

for what serving conscripts ‘thought’ about objectors and the ECC caused

controversy within the movement. The ECC also became significantly

more conservative than anti­war movements in the Vietnam­era USA and

at Greenham Common in the 1980s (Suran 2001). One could argue that

this was the inevitable result of the militarized and punitive ‘conditions

of operation’ in white South Africa (Foucault 1969: 117). It does, however,

pose the question of whether the ECC sought to assimilate with main­

stream norms to the extent of damaging the movement’s radicalism.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the fluidity of masculinism and mascu­

linities and the importance of policing boundaries to maintain the link

between masculinism and power. This is not a literal conflation of men

and power, but masculinist authority/hegemonic masculinity and power.

Donovan argues, ‘collective attempts to transform masculinity warrant

the attention of pro­feminist men and women’ (Donovan 1998: 817).

White men who publicly refused to serve in the apartheid army exposed

the vulnerability of militarized, masculinist and raced state projects.

Indeed, the men’s whiteness in itself became a transgressive dynamic

of their performance of objection. The end of compulsory conscription

was concurrent with the liberation of South Africa in 1994. A ceasefire in

the Namibian border war had occurred in 1988, followed by Namibian

independence from South African rule in 1990. A loss of white public

support and the open criticism of South Africa’s use of conscripts in the

war had been instrumental in provoking the ceasefire (Conway 2007;

Wood 1991: 751). This was a dramatic shift in white public opinion

from just a few years earlier (Geldenhuys 1982). The activities of the

ECC and the public stand taken by white male objectors had helped

highlight and exacerbate the stresses that advanced militarization had

placed on white South Africans. Indeed, across comparative contexts,

the transgressive potential of individual objectors to military service was

acknowledged by Helman, who argues that if war is no longer ‘consid­

ered a collective effort’ because objectors have appropriated the state’s

‘hitherto exclusive prerogative’ to define security and national duty, then

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Contesting the masculine state 139

the individual objector has ‘opened the door to challenging the state’s

demands of the individual’ (Helman 1999: 59). The notion of military

service as the only acceptable practice of masculinity and citizenship

for white South African men was destabilized by individual objectors in

iconic terms that mirrored the performative norms, such as embodying

publicly acknowledgeable acts of duty, sacrifice and honour, of actual

serving troops. This posed significant problems for the state, which was

already increasingly mired in a deepening war and a crisis of domestic

and international legitimacy.

The state’s conflation of hetero­normativity and military masculinities,

however, despite the incorporation of ‘deviant’ tropes of masculinity

to engender widespread consent, allowed it to use homophobia and

misogyny to stigmatize objectors, and in particular their supporters in

the ECC. The ECC found countering this homophobic discourse dif­

ficult and sought to assimilate their challenge to the state’s militarized

gender norms within a hetero­normative framework. This South African

case study demonstrates the effect individual acts of resistance can have

in destabilizing militarization and the gendered norms that underpin

it. Objectors performatively challenged dominant tropes of militarized

masculinity by their public refusal to serve in the army and sought to

subvert and reformulate normative values such as honour, duty, bravery

and sacrifice. The analysis of the ECC, however, also raises the perpetual

dilemma peace activists face when seeking to be taken ‘seriously’ by

society at large and to sidestep the state’s gendered and sexualized taunts.

Phelan contends that if stigmatized social actors do not challenge norma­

tive constructions of ‘respectability’, then ‘their attempts at social change

will operate only at the more superficial level of discursive consciousness

without transforming the more basic structures of identity that shape our

reactions to the world’ (Phelan 1999: 89). It is in assessing peace activists

and objectors’ responses to being ‘taken seriously’ and respected that

one can assess war resistance as a performative and transgressive act.

Notes 1 ‘Camp duty’ consisted of a

period of three months’ military training completed in alternate years for twelve years subsequent to full­time conscript duty. ‘Camp duty’ could also involve active service on the Namibian border, in Angola and

in the South African black townships. 2 The NP had narrowly won office

in 1948 and immediately set about entrenching its power base. The NP ‘early used legal and extra­legal means to increase their own majority and to hinder the effectiveness of

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Six 140

opposition groups inside and outside parliament, to eliminate dissent, and to emphasise conformity’ (Rotberg 1987: 79). The removal of English­ speaking senior officers in the SADF and their replacement by Afrikaans­ speaking NP sympathizers was also a priority. The SADF’s political status and influence increased considerably under the premiership (and later presidency) of P. W. Botha. Botha, a former minister of defence, strongly identified with the armed forces and appointed the former chief of the SADF, General Magnus Malan, as minister of defence.

3 The South African minister of defence threatened to ban any further publication of such inter­ views. Women in the ECC primarily addressed the South African public as wives and mothers of conscripts, particularly after 1987 (as reflected in the ‘give our sons a choice’ cam­ paign), and sought to destabilize militarized motherhood and high­ light white women’s role in fostering militarized masculinities. In Conway (2007) I write of how popular women’s magazines in South Africa began to write of mothers’ criticisms of the state’s use of the military in response to their sons’ deaths in the ‘Operational Zone’ in Namibia and Angola from early 1987 onwards. The women’s activism in the ECC clearly highlighted and encouraged white mothers’ unease and increasing hostility towards conscription, but also reflected a shift in focus for women in the ECC, who had hitherto resisted being defined as wives and mothers.

References Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philo-

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Burk, J. (1995) ‘Citizenship status and military service: the question for inclusion by minorities and conscientious objectors’, Armed Forces & Society, 21(4): 503–29.

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Carver, T. (1998) ‘Sexual citizenship: gendered and de­gendered narra­ tives’, in T. Carver and V. Mottier (eds), Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship, London and New York: Routledge.

Charney, C. (1987) ‘The National Party, 1982–1985: a class alliance in crisis’, in W. James (ed.), The State of Apartheid, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Cock, J. (1989) ‘Conscription in South Africa: a study in the politics of coercion’, South African Socio- logical Review, 2(1): 1–22.

Cock, J. and L. Nathan (eds) (1989) War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip.

Connell, R. (1995) Masculinities, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer­ sity of California Press.

Connell, R. and J. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, 19(6): 829–59.

Conway, D. (2004) ‘“Every Coward’s Choice”? Political objection to

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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military service in apartheid South Africa as sexual citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, 8(1): 25–45.

— (2007) ‘“Somewhere on the border – of credibility”: the cultural construction and contestation of “the border” in white south African Society’, in P. Vale and G. Baines (eds), Bounded States and Border Wars: Southern Africa and the Cold War, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.

— (2008) ‘The masculine state in crisis: state response to war resistance in apartheid South Africa’, Men and Masculinities, 10(4).

Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (eds) (1994) Dislocating Mascu linity: Comparative Ethnographies, London and New York: Routledge.

Demetriou, D. (2001) ‘Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculin­ ity: a critique’, Theory and Society, 30: 337–61.

Donovan, B. (1998) ‘Political consequences of private author­ ity: promise keepers and the transformation of hegemonic masculinity’, Theory and Society, 27: 817–43.

Drewett, M. (2003) ‘Battling over borders: narratives of resistance to the South African border war voiced through popular music’, Social Dynamics, 29(1): 78–98.

Du Pisani, J. (2004) ‘Hegemonic Masculinity in Afrikaner National­ ist Mobilisation, 1934–1938’, in S. Dudink, K. Hageman and J. Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Elshtain, J. (1995) Women and War,

2nd edn, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Enloe, C. (1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

Foucault, M. (1969) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Random House.

Frederickse, J. (1990) The Unbreak- able Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Geldenhuys, D. (1982) ‘What do we think? A survey of white opinion on foreign policy issues’, Occasional Paper, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Interna­ tional Affairs.

Helman, S. (1999) ‘War and resist­ ance: Israeli civil militarism and its emergent crisis’, Constella- tions, 6(3): 391–410.

Hooper, C. (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press.

Kaplan, D. and E. Ben­Ari (2000) ‘Brothers and others in arms: managing gay identity in combat units of the Israeli army’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 29(4): 396–432.

Lloyd, M. (2005) Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics, London: Sage.

MacInnes, J. (1998) The End of Mas- culinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Modern Society, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Mann, M. (1987) ‘The roots and contradictions of modern militarism’, New Left Review, 162, March/April, pp. 35–50.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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Marks, S. and N. Andersson (1990), ‘The epidemiology and culture of violence’, in N. Manganyi and A. Du Toit (eds), Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa, London: Macmillan.

Moll, P. (1985) ‘The End Conscription Campaign’, South Africa Focus.

Phelan, S. (1999) Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians and the Dilemmas of Citizenship, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Phillips, M. (2002) ‘The End Con­ scription Campaign 1983–1988: a study of white extra­parliamentary opposition to apartheid’, Un­ published Master of Arts thesis, University of South Africa.

Rotberg, R. (1987) ‘The ascendency of Afrikanerdom’, in D. Mermelstein (ed.), The Anti-Apartheid Reader: South Africa and the Struggle Against White Racist Rule, New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Seegers, A. (1987) ‘Apartheid’s military: its origins and develop­ ment’, in W. James (ed.), The State of Apartheid, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Suran, J. (2001) ‘Coming out against war: antimilitarism and homo­ sexuality in the era of Vietnam’, American Quarterly, 53(2): 452–88.

Thompson, D. and J. Branford (eds) (1994) South African Oxford English Dictionary, Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) (1997) ‘Special submission on conscription’, 23 July, <www.truth.org.za/special/ conscrip/conscr01.htm>, accessed 17 July 2001.

Wood, B. (1991) ‘Preventing the vacuum: determinants of the Namibian settlement’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17(4): 742–69.

Rethinking the Man Question : Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, edited by Jane L. Parpart, and Doctor Marysia Zalewski, Zed Books, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=368677. Created from westminster on 2020-11-16 11:48:41.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010618762595

Security Dialogue 2018, Vol. 49(4) 289 –305

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Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners

Catherine Eschle University of Strathclyde, UK

Abstract This article extends the emergent focus on ‘the everyday’ in critical security studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, through an empirical study of anti-nuclear peace activists understood as ‘everyday security practitioners’. In the first part of the article, I elaborate on the notion of everyday security practitioners, drawing particularly on feminist scholarship, while in the second I apply this framework to a case study of Faslane Peace Camp in Scotland. I show that campers emphasize the everyday insecurities of people living close to the state’s nuclear weapons, the blurred boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the inevitability of insecurity in daily life. Moreover, campers’ security practices confront the everyday reproduction of nuclear weapons and prefigure alternative modes of everyday life. In so doing, I argue, they offer a distinctive challenge to dominant deterrence discourse, one that is not only politically significant, but also expands understanding of the everyday in critical security studies.

Keywords Anti-nuclear, critical security studies, the everyday, (in)security, feminism, peace movement

Introduction

This article explores the possibilities for rethinking nuclear (in)security in light of recent efforts to bring ‘the everyday’ into critical security studies. It does so with a feminist-informed analysis of the discourses and practices of anti-nuclear activists in one protest site, Faslane Peace Camp. In conceptualizing these activists as ‘everyday security practitioners’, a term coined initially by feminist scholars Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes, I aim to demonstrate one possible way of extending the substantive purview of the everyday security literature to encompass (anti-)nuclear politics, thus far neglected. More concretely, I will show in what follows how the discourses and practices of anti-nuclear activists constitute a significant challenge to both dominant deterrence discourses and to debates about everyday (in)security by invoking and reconstructing the every- day in ways that draw attention to its political and contested character.

Corresponding author: Catherine Eschle, University of Strathclyde, McCance Building, 16 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK. Email: [email protected]

762595 SDI0010.1177/0967010618762595Security DialogueEschle research-article2018

Article

290 Security Dialogue 49(4)

The analysis that follows is divided into two parts. The first reviews the literature, exploring the concept of everyday (in)security and arguing for its extension to nuclear politics through the notion of ‘everyday security practitioners’, drawing on feminist scholarship. The second part presents the case study, applying the framework of everyday security practitioners to protestors at Faslane Peace Camp.

Nuclear (in)security and everyday security practitioners

‘The everyday’ has been described as an ‘emerging concept’ in critical security studies, and indeed in the discipline of international relations more generally (Guillaume, 2011a: 446). Of course, longstanding antecedents can be found in feminist interventions in international relations, which reject the usual parameters and abstractions of international relations in pursuit of an expansive, rooted understanding of where and how (in)security is produced, and by whom (e.g. Shepherd, 2010). The recent wave of interest in the concept, however, owes more to the popularity of French social theorists Lefebvre and Bourdieu, as well as US anthropologist James C. Scott.1 As such, our attention is drawn to that which is place- and time-specific, experienced and reproduced by con- crete individuals in the banal, routine activities and practices that make up the bulk of our daily lives and that are usually placed beyond critical scrutiny. The everyday thus gains its force in inter- national studies from its juxtaposition to the more usual focus on the international ‘level’ and on external threats, on the ‘high politics’ of ‘formal institutional spheres’(Mac Ginty, 2014: 550) and on the politics of crisis or exception (Crane-Seeber, 2011). To bring in the everyday is to treat the international, elite decisions and crisis politics as played out in the local and mundane. Normatively speaking, this has the effect of democratizing the subject-matter of the field. So while the critical security studies literature using the trope of the everyday includes that of the daily routines of security professionals (e.g. Bigo et al., 2010), the concept has served nonetheless to focus attention on the diverse ‘social practices and communities’ (Mac Ginty, 2014: 550) navigating security from the bottom up. Moreover, and notwithstanding that the everyday is a site of repression and passiv- ity as well as of resistance,2 interest in it in the discipline of international relations is grounded in a ‘normative appeal’ to think and do security differently, ‘contesting and altering oppressive struc- tures and practices’ (Jarvis and Lister, 2013: 161).

The new wave of research in critical security studies using the trope of the everyday has not yet examined nuclear (in)security. Certainly, the ‘messy stuff of everyday life’ (Elias, 2010: 608) seems very distant in policy debates about nuclear security. On the dominant realist view, insecurity is associated with the threat of military harm posed by other states, and practices aimed at achieving security, understood as state survival, hinge on the possession of superior military force. According to the logic of nuclear deterrence, moreover, ‘an adversary could be successfully persuaded to refrain from or to halt its aggressive actions through the threat to inflict unacceptable and inescapable damage with a retaliatory (or, for some, a pre-emptive) nuclear strike’ (Ritchie, 2009: 82). This discourse has changed in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 context in the UK, such that the sources of insecurity now also include ‘rogue’ states, terrorists and an uncertain future (Ritchie, 2009), and the goal of security practices has expanded to encompass the protection of ‘shared values in the name of the “international community”’ (Ritchie, 2010: 469). Further, the level of destructive capacity required has been tempered, with the emergence of ‘an apparently durable consensus … around a low-key minimum force pos- ture combined with support for arms control’ (Chalmers and Walker, 2002: 1). Nonetheless, the UK government remains committed to renewing the Trident weapons system, based at Faslane. Correspondingly, it still holds the view that insecurity is caused by rational actors external to

Eschle 291

British territory, and security is achieved through possession of nuclear weapons that serve to deter those actors according to cost–benefit calculations from which everyday human actors, relations and emotions are apparently absent.

This evacuation of the everyday from the theory and practice of nuclear states was scrutinized in groundbreaking research by feminist scholars Carol Cohn (1987) and Cynthia Enloe (1989: chapter 4) on the discourses of US nuclear security experts and the gendered and racialized dynam- ics of nuclear bases, respectively. These works showed how nuclear weapons are reproduced in the everyday while simultaneously drawing political legitimacy from their abstraction from it. Widely acknowledged as pioneering in the more recent literature on ‘the everyday’ in critical security stud- ies (e.g. Solomon and Steele, 2016: 6; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016: 43), the insights of these two authors have not been further developed, in part because of the eclipsing of feminism by other traditions of thought, mentioned above, and in part because of a shift in substantive focus from the nuclear issue to the securitization of borders, migration and belonging (e.g. Vaughan- Williams and Stevens, 2016; Côté-Boucher et al., 2014). While the latter may be understandable in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, it neglects important continuities and shifts in the policies of nuclear state elites, as well as efforts at resistance. It has been left to anthropologists to pick up Cohn and Enloe’s baton and develop ethnographies of the daily routines and concrete social rela- tions of nuclear security professionals and military personnel, and of the communities in which they are situated (Gusterson, 1996; Krasniewicz, 1992; Masco, 2006), thereby demystifying the processes through which the nuclear state is maintained in the everyday. I develop an alternative line of enquiry in this article, however; one exploring the contribution of anti-nuclear activists conceptualized as ‘everyday security practitioners’ and thus throwing light on how the everyday is central to the contestation of the nuclear state.

This concept of ‘everyday security practitioners’ was coined by feminists Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes. ‘If we look at, listen to and explore “the world as non-experts see it and make it and use it, rather than as expert IR scholars imagine it is or ought to be”’, they declare, ‘we hear more complex and nuanced conversations about in/security’ (Weber cited in Rowley and Weldes, 2012: 518). Defined as ‘individuals and groups from the “margins, silences and bottom rungs” … of world politics’ (Enloe cited in Rowley and Weldes, 2012: 518), everyday security practitioners mobilize understandings of identity as fluid and multiple, ‘entangled’ with claims about insecurity (2012: 521–522. They also pursue ‘temporary and localized’ moments of security that give space to competing values such as justice and acknowledge the validity of diverse perspectives (2012: 523–525).This is a suggestive account of the substance of an alternative security logic, but needs further parsing with regard to the subject of security. While Rowley and Weldes focus on fictional characters in the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, questions remain as to how we might distinguish an everyday security practitioner from a security professional, for example, given the latter also operates within what is for them their own mundane, everyday world (e.g. Crane-Seeber, 2011; Côté-Boucher et al., 2014). Or whether and in what sense everyday security practitioners like Buffy might be distinguishable from members of the public in the fictional town of Sunnydale with their own ‘vernacular’ articulations of (in)security (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016; Jarvis and Lister, 2013). In addition, it remains unclear precisely how the concept of everyday security practitioners links to the pioneering feminist work on the everyday, and particularly the everyday of the nuclear state, described earlier.

I propose reserving the term ‘everyday security practitioners’ for participants in organized, self- conscious, collective efforts to challenge elite security logics and processes in and through the everyday, thus recentring the aforementioned ‘normative appeal’ to focus attention on those groups striving to transform dominant security discourses. This is akin to the approach taken in a

292 Security Dialogue 49(4)

follow-up paper by Karen Desborough with Weldes on the global anti-street harassment movement (2016). In contrast to security professionals (and international relations scholars) whose knowl- edge is technocratic, status-based and elitist, according to Desborough and Weldes,3 these activists derive their claims about insecurity from embodied experience (whether personal or from the tes- timony of others) and the affective responses to which this gives rise (anger, pain, frustration, fear), as well as from publicly available research (2016: 15–16).4 Moreover, unlike their unorganized counterparts among the ‘ordinary’ population, these activists are self-consciously seeking to develop alternative security practices aimed at transforming the everyday of the wider citizenry (2016: 9–21). Conceived in this way, the concept of everyday security practitioners offers a useful supplement to current critical security studies debates about the everyday, polarized as they are between studies of the routines of security policy elites/professionals on the one hand, and accounts of the vernacular discourses of non-elites on the other.5

Moreover, I suggest the feminist elements of the analysis of everyday security practitioners could be strengthened. In addition to Rowley and Weldes’s focus on the fluidity of identity, and Desborough and Weldes’s attention to women and feminist protagonists along with the embodied and affective dimensions of their knowledge claims, this would involve at least three analytical moves. The first would involve paying attention to how everyday security practitioners navigate and (re)produce gender, understood in feminist scholarship as an identity hinging on male/female sexual difference; a hierarchical system of power in which the masculine and bodies coded as such are elevated over the feminine; and/or a productive, symbolic system, whereby ‘our ideas about gender permeate and shape our ideas about many other aspects of society beyond male–female relations’, including nuclear weapons (Cohn, Hill and Ruddick cited in Duncanson and Eschle, 2008: 546). Second, feminists have mapped the everyday spatially, at least in part, onto ostensibly personal or private, domestic domains – homes, kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms (e.g. Enloe, 1989, 2011), so we should examine how everyday security practitioners develop their insecurity critiques and alternative security practices in and through such spaces. Third, feminists have high- lighted the role of social reproduction processes in maintaining the distinction between everyday life and the public, political realm so the ways in which these are navigated or contested in the activities of everyday security practitioners are worthy of attention. Concretely, this means study- ing domestic labour or housework on the one hand, and affective labour or care work on the other (e.g. Weeks, 2007). Treated this way, the analysis of everyday security practitioners will retrieve power relations, spaces and processes marginalized in current work on the everyday in critical security studies yet long shown by feminists to be constitutive not only of the global economy (e.g. Elias, 2010; Elias and Rai, 2016), but also of theories and practices of (in)security (e.g. Enloe, 1989, 2007).

In suggesting that anti-nuclear activists, specifically, should be analysed as ‘everyday secu- rity practitioners’, I am extending the analytical framework developed by Rowley, Desborough and Weldes in a new substantive direction, and exploring one way in which this new generation of feminist work in critical security studies can take forward the pioneering work of Cohn and Enloe on nuclear politics. Additionally, this strategy allows the consideration of anti-nuclear activists not only as the rightful subject of peace studies, but also as pursuing alternative (in)security discourses and practices and thus as potential contributors to critical security stud- ies. This is particularly because of how such activists invoke and reconfigure the everyday in their contestation of the nuclear state and the dominant deterrence discourse. In sum, this first part of the article has argued for the extension of current theorizations of ‘the everyday’ in criti- cal security studies to nuclear politics in the form of a feminist-informed approach to anti- nuclear activists understood as everyday security practitioners. The second part applies this framework to Faslane Peace Camp.

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Faslane Peace Campers as everyday security practitioners

Established in 1982, 30 miles outside Glasgow and adjacent to the naval base housing the UK’s Trident nuclear submarines, Faslane Peace Camp (2013b) claims the mantle of ‘the longest run- ning permanent peace camp in the world’.6 Although the local population remain generally hostile to the camp and supportive of a base that provides substantial employment, public opinion in Scotland more widely is anti-nuclear7 and there is a significant anti-nuclear movement for which the camp has practical and symbolic importance (Eschle, 2016a). I have visited the camp several times, mostly while participating in anti-nuclear protests, but never staying overnight. My research is thus partisan, but it does not offer an insider account. Nor is it ethnographic in character, but based instead on analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016 with 15 individuals connected to the camp at different periods – 12 long-term campers, one short-term, and two frequent visitors (seven women and eight men in total). I have also examined an archive of campaigning ephemera, including the newsletter produced in the camp several times a year (originally Faslane Focus and latterly Faslania) and the online blogs that replaced it. Although this research strategy is not as revealing as an ethnography of the texture of ‘the every- day’ at the camp, in terms of sights, smells, sounds and daily routines (see, for example, Heller, 2001; Krasniewicz, 1992; Feigenbaum et al., 2013), it allows me to take an overview of the inse- curity discourses and security practices of the campers over the years, along with how these have relied upon particular daily routines and labour processes and marshalled particular understandings of the everyday.

Arguably, anti-nuclear peace camps offer a particularly fruitful site for the study of everyday security practitioners. Faslane is one of a wave of such camps that emerged in the early 1980s across the USA, Europe and Australia in the context of the rekindling of the Cold War arms race and the renewal of the anti-nuclear movement on a transnational scale. Several of these were women-only, most famously at Greenham Common, giving rise to a substantial body of scholarly feminist literature (reviewed in Eschle, 2017). In contrast, the camp at Faslane, mixed since its inception and often with more men than women (particularly at the moments when numbers were at their highest – between 20 and 40 campers – in the early to mid-1980s and during the period of a threatened eviction in the mid- to late 1990s), has almost entirely escaped academic analysis. Yet whether they are mixed or women-only, camps like that at Faslane constitute ‘a place-based social movement strategy that involves both acts of ongoing protest and acts of social reproduction needed to sustain everyday life’ (Feigenbaum et al., 2013: 12, emphasis in original). In other words, participants in peace camps attempt (with varying degrees of success) to create an alternative eve- ryday as an integral part of their political struggle against nuclear weapons, albeit one that becomes mundane and routine for those involved. In and through this alternative everyday, peace campers like those at Faslane articulate and practise security very differently from the deterrence norms of the British security state.

I give a flavour of this in a brief, situated narrative of my most recent visit to the camp. Approaching by bus along the busy A814, a friend and I find the camp shoehorned onto a verge, exposed to the passing traffic on its roadward side, and otherwise enclosed by dense and steeply sloping woodland. Over the road, Her Majesty’s Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde sprawls down to the tranquil waters of Gare Loch, its perimeter wreathed in razor wire and security cameras, the pro- cesses through which the British Trident nuclear submarine fleet are reproduced in the everyday hidden from view. The small wooden gate giving entry to the camp has a brightly painted sign welcoming visitors, even if the few inhabitants we eventually find are focused more on their mugs of tea and on the warm stove in the communal space on this cold and damp day than on meeting and greeting. Two men sit on a battered old sofa for the duration of our visit, one immobile,

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swathed in blankets, the other nursing his tea and roll-up and petting a pair of plump, lively dogs. A young woman with a close-cropped head, full of nervous energy, comes in to enthuse over the chocolate biscuits we have brought and to tell us ruefully that she is busy with a long list of main- tenance jobs, given that other campers have gone to protest at an arms fair in London. Today, then, the action is elsewhere. A man in a leather jacket, an anarchist symbol in his ear, offers to show us around. We follow the muddy footpath that winds though the caravans and ramshackle hand-built structures crammed onto the site, all painted in bright colours and covered with slogans and stick- ers proclaiming ‘Scotland: Nae Place for Nuclear Weapons’, ‘Peace Begins at the Dinner Table – Be Vegan’ and ‘Free the Nipple’. Our guide plays with the dogs as we walk and encourages us to take photos, pointing out the elevated compost toilet and inviting us into an ancient bus that turns out to be someone’s sleeping quarters, strewn with blankets and cushions. We exit through another small gateway and go for a walk up the road, alongside the enormous base, taking occasional pic- tures of the fence until two male police officers pull up in a patrol car. Given the recent rise in threat levels, we are told, our behaviour has been closely observed from inside the base and found to pose an unacceptable security risk. We are instructed politely but immovably to delete our photos and catch the bus home.

In what follows, my feminist-inflected analysis of the campers as everyday security practition- ers follows Desborough and Weldes (2016) in having a two-part structure, the first examining the insecurity discourses generated by campers and the second their alternative security practices. With both, I seek to draw out the contrast with the dominant deterrence approach.

Articulations of everyday insecurity

Insecurity is articulated by campers very differently from the dominant deterrence discourse described in the first part of this paper, in which the emphasis is largely on external military threats to the British state. Most obviously, camper arguments indicate a wider conception of the sources of insecurity, including ‘environmental deterioration’ amounting to ‘the destruction of Mother Earth’ (Faslane Focus, Samhain 1994: 12)8 and economic deprivation, as exemplified by ‘an explosion in poverty-related hunger in Britain’ (Faslane Peace Camp, 2013a). Moreover, there is some awareness among interviewees of structural gendered insecurities: ‘wherever you look in the world … women are the poorest[,] … have got the least voice, and … are just abused every way, emotionally, physically, sexually’ (Interview 10).9 This expansive understanding of environmental, economic and gendered vulnerabilities is accompanied by an insistence that insecurity is suffered by local communities, women, humanity and the planet. Such a broadening and deepening of mainstream conceptions of insecurity and their ‘referent objects’ echoes common understandings of the trajectory of critical security studies, as Rowley and Weldes indicate (2012: 516–517).

The campers go further, however, by inverting dominant deterrence discourse, such that nuclear weapons and accompanying infrastructures and mindsets are key sources of insecurity in everyday life rather than the means of protection. In this way, the everyday is invoked in overtly normative and political terms by these activists, as desirable, fragile, contested. Such a move is in line with longstanding liberal internationalist, anti-militarist, materialist and feminist peace movement dis- courses articulated at Greenham and elsewhere that also position nuclear weapons as a threat to daily life (e.g. Roseneil, 1995: chapter 1). Where camper arguments become distinctive, I suggest, is in their emphasis specifically on the risks to the daily lives of people who live in proximity to the nuclear base. On this view, the camp and its surrounding community blur together, with the undoubted local hostility to the camp downplayed in favour of an emphasis on shared identity and vulnerability to the base.

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In this vein, the base is accused of posing both a direct and indirect threat to the local popula- tion. It is an indirect threat in that it erodes democracy, skews investment priorities, and degrades the environment while restricting access to it. One interviewee was particularly inflamed by the expanding footprint of the base: ‘we used to get milk from Coulport … The farmer was driven out … This was in peace-time! … They had no grounds’ (Interview 6). In addition, the base is a direct threat to the local community because it constitutes a ‘sitting target’ for a nuclear or terrorist strike (Imagine this Convoy infosheet, no date) and because of the possibility of a catastrophic accident. Most strikingly, campers argue the base could repress the local population in such an event. As Nick points out, ‘before they got the new fence … they had sandbag machine gun turrets, and the idea was that in times of any crisis … people would come to the base thinking that they would get safety … and they would’ve shot us’ (Interview 7). Shirley underlines the point:

we were doing a vigil and we came back … and it was late at night, early morning, and … the MoD [Ministry of Defence] were doing a great big exercise. And part of the exercise was to come and get the dissidents, and that was us at that time, and when we went into the camp everybody was sleeping … And they were walking about the camp with guns, pointing guns in at the caravan windows’. (Interview 10)

In effect, the nuclear state is accused of prioritizing the security of its nuclear weapons over the security of its people. In so doing, it constitutes an overt menace to the most domestic and intimate aspects of everyday life in the camp and, by extension, the local community.

Yet if the base and the nuclear policy underpinning it constitute the source of insecurity in the everyday on this view, they are not an enemy equivalent to an external state as in the deterrence approach. For a start, they are generally not depicted as coherent, bounded and rational. Instead, responsibility for nuclear policy and base actions is attributed to a range of actors and interests (from elites to individual defence secretaries, and from local contractors to the police), acting from a range of motivations, from rage to self-interest to fear. Nor does the majority of camper discourse depict military and civilian base workers or police as ‘Other’, fundamentally different from the ‘Self’ being made insecure; rather there is an emphasis on their inclusion in the local community and shared humanity with campers. Thus Quentin emphasized his military back- ground when talking about soldiers on the base, ‘people that I’d served with … there was a dog handler, and I still see him today … we get on great, and we used to have conversations’ (Interview 9). Or take the description by Nick of the time ‘[t]here was these two policemen stand- ing there … And the guy put his hand in his pocket and he pulled out a CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] badge … you can’t stereotype them’ (Interview 7). In such ways, the presentation of Self and Other in camper discourses of insecurity is in contrast to the strained efforts of the deterrence discourse to establish certainty about identity. In Rowley and Weldes’s terms (2012: 521–522), campers invoke a notion of subjectivity which is ‘fundamentally messy’ and ambiguous, and which ‘destabilizes the boundaries of the “we” … to be secured … some- times “we” are “them”’ – and vice versa.

In addition, campers problematize the deterrence norm that insecurity must be overcome at all costs by appearing to accept a measure of vulnerability in the everyday. On a general level, this is manifest in largely sanguine attitudes to the perennial difficulties of recruiting sufficient people and organizing them in order to sustain the camp on a daily basis. As Toni puts it: ‘I’ve been to meetings where we’ve talked about closing … the camp loses its focus and then people arrive who bring the focus back to what it’s supposed to be’ (Interview 11). More concretely, daily life in the camp implies a degree of insecurity for individuals, in part due to the way in which domestic space has been reorganized, with shared washing and toilet facilities and with cooking, eating and relaxa- tion mostly taking place in collective areas. Consequently, much of life usually hidden away in

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family homes is conducted more or less in sight of other campers, base workers and the passing public. This functions both to advertise opposition to the dominant deterrence norms – ‘if you’re at the side of the A814 hanging up the washing, everybody driving past knows you’re … opposed to nuclear weapons’ (Interview 1) – and to enable political discussion with curious passers-by. It means the camp is vulnerable to hostile outsiders, however, perhaps best illustrated in the nocturnal military exercise above. Yet it seems such threats have been met with stoicism, as in this example: When a frequent visitor turned out to be ‘MoD … we just used her … I got her to drive me round to the other side of the loch so that I could see what submarines were in … we just continued as normal’ (Interview 9). Perhaps more serious are sources of insecurity emerging internally within the open domestic space. Campers have organized against the potential of male sexual predation and violence on site, setting up codes of conduct and women-only spaces. ‘[W]e had a meeting on camp … How do we make the camp a safe place for women?’ (Jeanne, Newsletter, November 1986: 3). But repeated incidences where individuals caused harm to themselves or threatened oth- ers appear to have been harder to mitigate effectively. In this vein, Graham mentioned a woman ‘who ended up barricading herself in a caravan … [she] threw urine on people … there was a bit of violence … you have to try to figure out what to do about that’ (Interview 5). For Graham and others, there are no clear solutions to this perennial problem in protest camps.10 For many campers, then, insecurity is generated internally as well as externally, and thus is ‘both mundane and una- voidable’ (Rowley and Weldes, 2012: 523).

This view of insecurity is not shared universally. The newsletters of the mid- to late-1990s have a different tenor, written while the camp, facing eviction, was repopulated by veterans of the radi- cal environmentalist movement who had been resisting road building and airport expansion else- where. As fortified structures and underground tunnels were constructed, the camp was closed to public view and transformed into a primarily defensive space, focused on repelling the threat of eviction through acts of physical daring in confrontation with the authorities (Doherty, 2000), rather than on nuclear insecurity. This was accompanied by polarized representations of Self and Other in the newsletter. Campers were painted as warriors for peace, in a striking reflection of mili- tary masculinities, up against prominent politicians depicted with targets on their bodies, police and soldiers drawn as fascists and pigs, and a wider society populated by zombies and aliens (see Eschle, 2017). In this way, the blurring of Self and Other, and the notion that a measure of everyday insecurity is inevitable within an open and politicized domestic space, were displaced during a period of enhanced external threat. This is a reminder that Faslane Peace Camp is not a singular subject but a site of many voices, and consequently that the discourses of insecurity articulated within it are not unified but plural and contradictory. The literature indicates that the same is true of other peace camps (e.g. Roseneil, 2000: chapter 7; Krasniewicz, 1992: chapter 11). Thus we find confirmation of the argument of Rowley and Weldes that everyday security practitioners articulate ‘multiple identities and in/securities, multiple relationships between them, and multiple discourses and approaches’ (2012: 521), in contrast to the totalizing deterrence discourse.

Alternative everyday security practices

In the light of their reframing of nuclear insecurity as caused to the local community by the very base that is supposed to protect them, what alternative practices have the campers at Faslane devel- oped to create a more secure everyday? The dominant posture on nuclear deterrence assumes security is achieved by the state, through possession of nuclear weapons. In sharp contrast, camp- ers have generated two connected sets of security practices, the first confronting the insecurity produced by the state’s everyday reproduction of nuclear weapons, and the second prefiguring alternative modes of everyday life.

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The confrontational practices of campers include, most obviously, direct action to disrupt the everyday routines of the nuclear state and particularly the adjacent base, named in Gene Sharp’s influential typology as ‘nonviolent11 intervention’ (1973: chapter 8).12 As at Greenham and else- where (e.g. Roseneil, 1995: chapter 6; Feigenbaum et al., 2013: chapter 3), campers mount incur- sions into the base, blockade the gates and the roads, and damage or decorate the fence and other parts of the base to which they can gain access, as well as taking part in similar protests at other sites. One such action is described thus: ‘the camp and friends locked on and blockaded both gates of Faslane for 90 mins disrupting the morning shift from getting in’, followed days later by ‘a couple of trespass actions … This resulted in the “bandit alarm” being activated which disrupts the normal running of the base as all personnel have to report indoors and the gates are closed’ (Faslane Peace Camp, 2012a). Such actions disrupt and also ridicule the daily procedures of HMNB Clyde, and of the nuclear state more broadly, just as Greenham women dancing on top of missile silos ‘defied the security of the base’ (Sylvester, 1994: 189).

Beyond these headline-grabbing interventions, the struggle to confront the reproduction of nuclear weapons in the everyday at Faslane includes what Sharp describes as ‘nonviolent protest and persuasion’ (1973: chapter 3), intended to expose the secret and/or mundane aspects of the daily reproduction of nuclear weapons. Specific tactics here include ‘symbolic’ acts intended to bear witness to and demonstrate dissent from the activities on the base, such as frequent vigils and intermittent demonstrations of various sizes, for which campers provide support. At least in part, these actions direct pressure inward to the base, intending to provoke critical questioning, shame or upset on the part of base workers and military personnel, as evident in accounts of similar activ- ism elsewhere (e.g. Managhan, 2007: 650–651). There are also more outward-facing activities, including information-gathering and education. In this regard, campers have monitored the daily activities in and around the base: ‘I started Subwatch … looking out for submarines and keeping a log’ (Interview 9). The information is then disseminated to activist networks – ‘Greenpeace used to phone up … for access to our sub log’ (Interview 9) – and wider audiences. In this vein, campers have written and distributed a newsletter and latterly an online blog, given talks to local campaign- ing groups and visited festivals in the ‘peace bus’, all drawing peace movement and public atten- tion to what goes on in the base on a daily basis (on similar tactics elsewhere, see, for example, Feigenbaum et al., 2013: chapter 2).

Together these diverse confrontational practices imply a more expansive ontology and episte- mology than those underpinning the dominant deterrence view, with its focus on unitary states and on means-end rationality. Campers’ security practices conform to Rowley and Weldes’s account of everyday security practitioners as drawing on ‘divergent epistemologies’ that validate experiential knowledge, from a range of situated perspectives (Rowley and Weldes, 2012: 524). They call upon a range of individuals and communities to confront nuclear weapons, thus dramatically expanding who counts as an agent of security, and they treat these agents in a holistic way. Humour is often key; alternatively, campers may act in deliberately emotive, feminized ways to convey rage, despair or love, as in the instance when they interrupted a ‘nuclear defence’ training seminar: campers ‘presented the delegates with large posters with images of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suf- fering the effects of radiation burns … [and] read out first-hand accounts from Hiroshima survivors in unison before being loudly ushered out’ (Faslane Peace Camp, 2012b). Such modes of disor- dered emotional engagement are common in anti-nuclear protests (e.g. Managhan, 2007; Krasniewicz, 1992), making it difficult for officials to respond with reason or force. More than this, campers are treating their varied local audiences, whether sympathetic voters or base workers, as socially embedded, embodied, feeling individuals, capable of experiencing shame, amusement or empathy, and of being convinced of the wrongness of nuclear weapons on any of these emotional registers.

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Connectedly, the confrontation of nuclear insecurity in the everyday often involves reversals or ridiculing of the gender order. Although the camp itself has never been women-only, women-only or women-led actions have been frequent. See, for example, Shirley’s description of her response to the incident when soldiers pointed guns through caravan windows. Confronting them with a group of women friends, she said ‘“excuse me … my children are fast asleep in there” … And … we put our fingers up the barrels of the guns and sang “take the toys away from the boys”’ (Interview 10). Or consider this more recent blog entry:

This weekend saw the delectable women from Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp descend on Faslane. The theme of the invasion was ‘Domestic Extremists at large’ … armed with rubber gloves, head scarves and thought provoking banners, like good domesticated women, we gave the gate a right scrub. Of course, we had to stop the influx of NATO army trucks by blocking the road … that’s why the gate was so dirty in the first place! (Faslane Peace Camp, 2011)

Thus, similarly to the women-only camps of the Cold War (e.g. Managhan, 2007; Laware, 2004), the campers mobilize gendered bodies and play with gendered symbolism in ways that hold up a mirror to the military masculinities and rationalities on show at the base, exposing them to critique and satire. Connectedly, such actions subvert the symbolic coding of direct action as a masculine endeavour, the province of warriors for peace, not least because they are facilitated by men taking on support roles and associated domestic labour.

This brings me to the intimate connection between the confrontational practices described above, and ‘prefigurative’ practices intended to foreshadow the desired future in the present by ensuring that ‘activist practice reflects the kind of society your movement aims to build’ (Cockburn, 2007: 178). Or as one participant put it, the aim of the camp ‘is to demonstrate … alternatives, not only to nuclear weapons as a way of managing co-operation, but to lots of other issues as well’ (Interview 8). In this way, campers seek not only to disrupt the everyday reproduction of nuclear weapons, but to build an alternative everyday.

There have been at least three sets of prefigurative practices at Faslane Peace Camp, the first involving the transformation of gendered power relations and identities. Notably, campers have challenged the allocation of domestic and affective work to women, aided by the reorganization of domestic space and also the rejection of the institution of waged labour, effectively bypassing the capitalist dichotomy between a feminized sphere of reproductive labour and masculine-dominated world of waged work (Eschle, 2016b). Cooking, cleaning, repairing infrastructure and gathering wood for fuel has been organized either by rota or on a voluntary basis, sometimes through meet- ings or at meal-times, often through self-selection. Denise asserted that ‘we all take responsibility … We all take turns … to do at least three things a day’ (Interview 3). Furthermore, campers have shared responsibility for affective labour. Anna put it thus: ‘people would say, “how on earth can you manage to bring up a baby at the peace camp?” … It’s easy ’cos there’s always somebody around’ (Interview 1), and Andrew underlined the point with his story of visiting social workers amazed at the extent of collective childcare in the period before the eviction threat changed camp dynamics (Interview 15). And campers have looked after each other: as Shirley said of the early 1980s, ‘there was caring things done for each other … by men and women’ (Interview 10). Similarly, Willa, who lived at Faslane a decade later, stressed that the camp was like a family in which everyone looked out for each other (Interview 14).

In this context, campers have reframed gender identities. While less likely than campers at Greenham to articulate queer, women-centred or radical-feminist identities (e.g. Roseneil, 2000), bourgeois norms of femininity as consumerist, compliant and confined to the private sphere have been rejected by campers, and more assertive and agentic alternatives asserted. This can be seen in

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Anna’s comment about breastfeeding in public: ‘I remember a policeman saying to me outside the court “in my day people didn’t do that” and I replied “luckily this is my day, and I do”’ (Interview 1). Similarly, campers have sought to construct less aggressive, more empathetic modes of masculine identity, as Nick indicates in his discussion of the nonviolent camp response to a hostile visitor: ‘about three months before that … I would have probably picked up a lump of wood and tried to batter him with it … Because that’s the way we dealt with things in the [local council housing] Schemes, you know, … and we didn’t, and that was good’ (Interview 7). Or as Hoossie writes of ‘an experimental Men’s discussion group’: ‘We are still affected by our social conditioning and have to spot where our behaviour is still oppressive … are we too scared to let go of our privileged position?’ (Newsletter, 2001: 27). In such ways, what it means to be a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ has been contested on camp, even if not entirely transformed.

The remaining two sets of prefigurative practices at Faslane centre on sustainable and collective living, both widespread impulses in recent Western protest camp and social movement cultures (e.g. Feigenbaum et al., 2013: chapter 4; Epstein, 1991). To this end, campers have developed ecological technologies, such as solar and bicycle-powered electricity, along with composting toilets. Camp lifestyle is frugal, with limited reliance on consumer culture and energy infrastructure. As Charlie put it, ‘everything’s much more physical, you have a lot more to do, you can’t just flick a switch’ (Interview 2). Simultaneously, collective ways of organizing daily life have emerged. On the one hand, campers have pooled property and resources. In the early days of the camp, ‘we were all unemployed so we all had giros [benefit cheques] and … we just handed over the money’ (Interview 7). The reliance on state benefit has ended in recent years, with Fiona describing how, during her stay of 2011–2013, everyone contributed savings and scavenged food from skips (dump- sters). She added, ‘there’s technically no [private] ownership or monitoring of ownership’ (email, 2014). On the other hand, campers have developed consensus decisionmaking procedures. ‘The camp has tried to … find ways to make decisions and get things done without leaders, to value eve- ryone’s voice and everyone’s skills’ (Newsletter, Summer 1997: 12). As Anna commented, ‘we taught proper consensus process … there were times when there was real conflict in the camp and there were meetings ’till four in the morning … But we’d thrash it out’ (Interview 1).

In such ways, then, the prefigurative practices of campers enact an alternative everyday that aims to be not only safer than the nuclear world order, but also more liberatory, freeing individuals from capitalist, patriarchal society. In Rowley and Weldes’s terms, security is thus understood as ‘intersecting with … rather than as necessarily privileged over’ other political values and goals (2012: 524). As interviewees acknowledged, however, fully sustainable, collective living and gen- der equality remain normative aspirations rather than achieved objectives. The gendered division of labour has not been entirely eradicated: as one early camper railed: ‘I’ve wasted enough of my energy on layabouts here … (strange enough, it happens to be men)’ (Pauline in Members of the Faslane Peace Camp, 1984: 57). Furthermore, the reconstruction of gender identity has remained incomplete. Vince, for one, recognized that his ‘alpha-male’ persona was a source of conflict with others (Interview 13); or take the eviction period of the late 1990s, when newsletter representations of the peace camper as a hyper-masculine peace warrior discursively marginalized women and femininity (Eschle, 2017). Collective living has also been hard to sustain, with Fiona acknowledg- ing conflicted feelings around people taking ‘her’ things and others pointing out that consensus decisionmaking has not prevented the emergence of informal leadership cliques (Interview 12). In such ways, we are reminded not only that insecurity is unavoidable, but that camper security prac- tices are an ongoing project, with security – and other values – never fully realized. The campers, like Buffy and friends, only ever achieve ‘temporary forms of security … At best there is “not safe but safer”’ (Koopman cited in Rowley and Weldes, 2012: 523).

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Conclusion

Extending recent theorizations of ‘the everyday’ in critical security studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, this article has presented a feminist-influenced case study of the discourses and prac- tices of anti-nuclear campaigners at Faslane Peace Camp, framed as ‘everyday security practition- ers’. I have documented camper arguments about everyday insecurity in a nuclear world on the one hand, and their everyday security practices on the other, drawing out the contrast with the dominant discourse of nuclear deterrence that assumes insecurity is caused by external others and mitigated by state possession of nuclear technologies. Campers instead emphasize the everyday insecurities of people living in proximity to the state’s nuclear weapons, the blurred boundaries between us and them, and the inevitability of a degree of insecurity in daily camp life. And they pursue security by confronting the everyday reproduction of nuclear weapons, in terms of both disruptive direct action and of ‘nonviolent protest and persuasion’ in various forms, and by constructing new ways of living in the everyday – albeit recognizing that security will always remain incomplete. In so doing, I sug- gest, the campers have offered a distinctive challenge to nuclear norms over several decades, one in which the logic of deterrence is not simply inverted, but also, to some degree, undercut by refusals of state-centrism, of Self–Other binaries and of security at any cost.

It could be argued that this challenge is of limited political significance. After all, as one inter- viewee ruefully acknowledges, ‘Trident’s still there’ (Interview 7). Campers remain resistant rather than victorious and, although their insecurity discourses are widely echoed in mainstream Scottish social and political life, their alternative security practices are harder to universalize. Individuals with extensive caring responsibilities, for example, or those facing more immediate material demands or racialized vulnerabilities in their relations with the police, are unlikely to be able or willing to live at the camp. This, then, is a manifestation of the everyday that is not open to every- one. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the political significance of the camp on this basis. Various local organs of the nuclear state have had to respond repeatedly to the disruption caused by camp- ers, preventing the normalization of nuclear weapons in the everyday, particularly in and around the local area. Moreover, the camp has been crucial in providing the wider Scottish movement against nuclear weapons with both a practical infrastructure for protests and a potent symbol of opposition. In this, I suggest, the everyday of the camp is crucial, involving as it does the recon- struction of gender, of domestic space and of reproductive labour and thus juxtaposing a small- scale, higgledy-piggledy, homely environment, and messy, feminized domestic routines and female agency, to the enormous, austere and masculinized nuclear base. This has the subversive political effect of rendering visible and strange the usually unproblematized and invisible processes by which nuclear weapons are reproduced, as much discussed in the literature on women-only camps of the 1980s (Eschle, 2017). The evidence here suggests that camps do not have to be populated exclusively by female bodies for that effect to be sustained.

In addition, the case study demonstrates that scholars of ‘everyday security’ in critical security studies could fruitfully expand their substantive focus beyond the securitization of borders, migra- tion and belonging to (re-)encompass nuclear politics. While there are several possible lines of enquiry in this regard (such as the everyday routines of personnel at nuclear installations, or the ways in which ‘vernacular’ articulations of nuclear (in)security sustain or challenge the nuclear state), the study of peace camps like that at Faslane offers particular insights to scholarship on everyday security because the everyday is so central to this mode of protest politics. In effect, campers invoke the everyday as a normative good undermined by nuclear weapons; and strive for its reconstruction as an integral aspect of their alternative security practices. In so doing, they self- consciously politicize the everyday, or perhaps more accurately draw attention to its already politi- cal character, exposing its mobilization as a rhetorical or symbolic artefact by proponents as well

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as opponents of nuclear weapons. In this way, the apparently mundane, banal, invisible ways in which international security is articulated and practised in daily life are shown to require intensive, ongoing work from the state and its local manifestations and thus, however naturalized they appear, to be open to political challenge.

Finally, the case study presented here has demonstrated the utility of the concept of ‘everyday security practitioners’ and indicated ways it could be further refined. It has confirmed the major substantive claims made by Rowley, Desborough and Weldes, about the discourses and practices of such practitioners, namely that the boundaries between self and other are likely to be unstable, experiential knowledge and affective responses endorsed, insecurity seen as to some degree a per- manent condition, and the articulation of progressive alternatives likely to be incomplete, transient and contested. In addition, the case demonstrates the value of reserving the concept of everyday security practitioners for collective and self-conscious attempts to overturn dominant security log- ics. Clearly, camper discourses and practices differ in important ways from the vernacular articula- tions of (in)security among the wider population and the everyday routines and discourses of the elites in the adjacent nuclear base. And while the latter two, and the relation between all three, merit further study, focusing on organized opponents to the base allows us to disentangle key ele- ments of an existing normative challenge to the nuclear status quo in the UK, and to draw out its distinctiveness. Finally, I have sought to make a case for bolstering the feminist elements in the study of everyday security practitioners, by teasing out how gendered power relations and sym- bolic systems, domestic spaces and reproductive labour processes shape and are reshaped by the (in)security discourses and practices of peace campers. These feminist heuristics could be further elaborated and explored in the study of everyday security practitioners in other contexts, by those critical security studies scholars committed to uncovering and supporting alternatives to dominant security logics.

Acknowledgements

Drafts of this article were presented at a workshop on ‘Everyday Insecurities and Vulnerabilities’, University of Glasgow, 30 April–1 May 2015; at the Third Annual Conference of the BISA Global Nuclear Order work- ing group, University of Birmingham, 17–18 September 2015; and at a panel entitled ‘Everyday (In)Security and Everyday Peace’ at the ISA annual convention, Atlanta, March 16–19, 2016. I am grateful to the organis- ers Ty Solomon, Andrew Futter and Jennifer Riggan. I am particularly indebted to Jutta Weldes and Karen Desborough for sharing their work in progress, to Andy Judge for his detailed feedback, and to Jane Tallents for access to her peace camp archive. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my interviewees for their generosity with their time – as well as for their dedication to transforming the nuclear everyday.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ of social ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ have been deployed in critical security studies to both disaggregate the unitary state as security provider and explain the expansion of securitization dynamics into society, by enabling the study of the everyday practices of transnational security profes- sionals (Bigo, 2011; Bigo et al., 2010). Lefebvre’s discussion of the production and colonization of the everyday in capitalist modernity through the spaces of work, consumption and leisure has been more influential in international political economy (e.g. Davies and Niemann, 2002), although his multidimen- sional theorization of space has wider implications (Solomon and Steele, 2016: 11–12). Finally, Scott’s work on ‘hidden transcripts’ and everyday resistances deployed by the oppressed to contest domination

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in the everyday has been discussed in debates about agency and resistance in international relations, including within critical security studies, e.g. Guillaume (2011b).

2. In the Lefebvre tradition, the everyday is ‘a contested place, characterized by mystifications and the struggle to overcome them’ and produced with and by capitalist states and markets (Davies and Niemann, 2002: 558).

3. This differs from the contrast established between experts and non-experts in Rowley and Weldes, 2012. 4. See also Pain and Smith, 2008, for a sophisticated feminist take on the embodied and affective dimen-

sions of everyday (in)security. 5. To be clear, the views and daily routines of both security professionals and non-mobilized citizens

remain eminently worthy of study in their own right when considering (in)security in the everyday, but a focus on everyday security practitioners, conceived as collective oppositional actors, is a useful and currently underexplored supplement. Guillaume (2011b) implies that such an approach romanticizes activists, conceiving them as existing beyond power relations and superior to unorganized moments of resistance in daily life. However, I maintain that collective, conscious efforts to construct alternative (in) security are worthy of study and possible to study critically. Collective actors may be represented by par- ticipants as having stable and unified identities, and as beyond oppressive power relations, but they are in fact ongoing constructions, embedded within the power relations they seek to contest (Eschle, 2004). Or as Maria Stern (2006) indicates, even the most progressive or marginalized collective identity claim contains repressions, slippages and contradictions such that the boundaries of the subject of security are never entirely secured.

6. Its establishment on land owned in the 1980s by Strathclyde Regional Council, based in Glasgow and supportive of unilateral disarmament, not only sheltered the camp from the eviction proce- dures faced by others, but helped it secure a lease ‘for a peppercorn rent’ and a caravan site permit (Members of the Faslane Peace Camp, 1984: 35–38). With council restructuring in 1996, the site came under the jurisdiction of a smaller, rural council composed of conservatively minded inde- pendents. The new council secured an eviction order in 1998, but has never enforced it (BBC News Scotland, 2012).

7. ‘A poll by TNS BMRB for Scottish CND in March 2013 [on Trident renewal] found that 25% of those questioned were uncommitted, but of those who expressed a preference, 81% were opposed to Trident replacement, with only 19% supporting the plan’ (Scottish CND, 2013). The extent of public opposition to Trident renewal in Scotland has since been contested by an Ashcroft poll but even that found a minor- ity of 37% supporting the UK’s nuclear weapons ‘in principle’ with 48% opposed (Eaton, 2013).

8. This newsletter and later-mentioned information sheets and flyers are in the privately held archive of Faslane Peace Camp ephemera to which the author was kindly granted access.

9. All interviewee names are pseudonyms. 10. This speaks to what Feigenbaum et al. describe as the difficulties in building ‘alternative structures of

care and security’ (2013: 216) that deal adequately with the substance abuse, homelessness and mental health issues that surface in protest camps. These reflect wider social problems but often particularly intensely, because camps attract people who are not cared for in wider society and because activism can be traumatic.

11. Nonviolence ‘refers to methods of political action that eschew violence’ (Howes, 2003: 430) with con- temporary versions striving to avoid (feminized) associations of passivity in favour of active confronta- tion and defining violence in ways which exclude the destruction of property so that fence-cutting, for example, is included in the tactical repertoire (e.g. Epstein, 1991: 70–72). The renunciation of violence in peace movements is usually principled rather than strategic and involves courting arrest, although the picture has become more complicated at Faslane Peace Camp and elsewhere with the influence in the 1990s of radical environmentalism with its more tactical use of direct action and refusal of dialogue with the legal system (see Eschle, 2017: 482).

12. Sharp’s work and the recent upsurge of enquiry into nonviolent or civil resistance focus on large-scale social unrest against repressive regimes (e.g., Nepstad, 2015; Chenoweth and Cunningham, 2013). Nonetheless, there is a clear overlap with this literature and the analysis of Western peace, environmental and global justice movements.

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ORCID iD

Catherine Eschle https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4566-9176

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Interviews cited

1. Anna, 22.10.2014 and 22.12.2014, near Edinburgh, UK. 2. Charlie, 23.10.2014, Faslane Peace Camp, UK. 3. Denise, 23.10.2014, Faslane Peace Camp, UK. 4. Fiona 25.10.2014, Glasgow, UK (additional information sent by email 27.10.2014). 5. Graham, 30.10.2014, Edinburgh, UK. 6. Maurice, 27.11.2014, Helensburgh, UK. 7. Nick, 27.11.2014, Glasgow, UK. 8. Owen, 28.11.2014, Glasgow, UK. 9. Quentin, 2.12.2014, Glasgow, UK. 10. Shirley, 5.12.2014, Dumbartonshire, UK. 11. Toni, 11.12.2014, Helensburgh, UK. 12. Una, 25.6.2016, Manchester, UK. 13. Vince, 30.6.2016, Glasgow, UK. 14. Willa, 8.7.2016, Glasgow, UK. 15. Andrew, 4.8.2016, London, UK.

Catherine Eschle is a senior lecturer in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research and teaching focus on social movements and their implications for the disciplines of politics and international relations, with a particular interest in feminist theory and practice. She is the author, with Bice Maiguashca, of Making Feminist Sense of the Global Justice Movement (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), and has published more recently on women’s anti-nuclear campaigning, feminist analyses of nuclear (in)security, and protest camps. Email: [email protected]