WOMEN AND WAR: GENDER AND MILITARISM IN WARTIME UKRAINE.

• Author: Enloe, Cynthia

Cynthia Enloe, currently a research professor at Clark University, has devoted her career to exploring and interrogating the intersections of gender, militarization, and warmaking. The Journal spoke with Professor Enloe about the role that women in Ukraine have played in the war both on the front and behind the lines, blindspots around feminist understandings of Russian imperialism, and the various impacts of the war on children and minoritized groups.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): To start, could you share a little about your research interests? What are the types of questions you engage with?

Cynthia Enloe (CE): My general areas of interest are international politics, comparative politics, and where women are in both. I'm not interested just in someone's cookie cutter notion of gender, though; I want to explore broad, fluid understandings of gender. I ask where gender politics are operating--in whose interest, with what resistance? For instance, how do gender politics work in the Hague, at the international crimes court, or in banking, or around militaries? And, of course, I keep my eyes on the gender politics operating within women's movements around the world.

I've learned always to pay attention to gendered militarism--that's the package of ideas that promotes the use of violence, that justifies escalating defense budgets, that makes civilians especially proud of soldiers, and that can turn a civilian organization into a tool for national security. So, for example, I wonder how a Nike factory in Vietnam might be militarized. Or a professional football team, or a university. Gendered militarism doesn't take place just inside of militaries.

JIA: Focusing on the conflict in Ukraine, can you talk about women's role in Ukrainian society and the war overall?

CE: This has been a steep learning curve for me--and new learning is exciting. There are so many wonderful feminists in Eastern and Central Europe, and we've all been educated by them, but I'm having to learn quickly now about the specific gender politics in Ukraine. In the five years before Putin's massive invasion, and now during the full-scale war, I've been very lucky because a number of Ukrainian feminists have asked me to take part in their conversations. I've been the learner. In 2017 in Odessa, when the Russia-provoked war in eastern Ukraine already had started, a group of transnational feminists, including Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Swedish feminist group Kvinna till Kvinna (Women to Women) asked me to join them and local Ukrainian feminist activists for a meeting in Odessa, a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

Some of my conversations have had to be on Zoom. But last summer, five months into Putin's aggressive invasion, two Ukrainian feminist professors asked me to come to a small German town where they were holding a summer school for Ukrainian feminists forced to become refugees. They called their feminist summer school "Thinking Under Bombing."

Ukrainian feminists have taught me that Ukrainian women have been organizing for generations, going back to the 1890s. Many of us haven't paid enough attention to the long histories of women's organizing--not just in Ukraine, but also in Egypt, Turkey, and Brazil. If we do pay any attention to Eastern and Central European politics in those early decades, we tend to ignore women's organizing--in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Austria--and just talk about the politics of the rival Austrian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires. One of the things I've been struck by is how Ukrainian feminists and activists for generations have had to navigate competing colonialisms.

Most of us who have tried to understand colonialism and the patriarchal politics of colonialism investigate--and we should!--French, Dutch, Italian, Danish, British, American, and Spanish colonialisms. But many of us--and this is embarrassing!--have not paid much attention to Chinese imperialism or Russian imperialism. I've been lucky because Japanese and Korean feminists have nudged me to pay attention to Japanese imperialism (in Manchuria, Korea, Okinawa, and Taiwan)...