“I saw how massacres can be a spectacular demonstration of the Foucauldian idea that power is manifested ubiquitously in daily life and over the human body. Witnessing violence and connecting it to the idea of power over bodies challenges the limiting, essentialist, and underdeveloped binary of female subordination to male power. In other words, bodies are constructed and reconstructed to serve different functions, chief among which is the exertion of power. Instead of simply focusing on male-female gender dynamics, we have to look at the forces behind the constructions of these identities. Only by addressing those forces can we deal with subjugation, including gender-based subjugation… the possibility of violence, spectacular or structural confirms the docility of our bodies.”
— Lina Attalah, Our Women on the Ground (2019)
In Virginia Woolf’s extended essay, Three Guineas, she declares, ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country.’ Within these deceptively simple and stylised phrases, she positions herself as an outsider, a stranger to the nation and a scorner of nationalism, because she is a woman. When Woolf wrote Three Guineas, she laid testament to a series of truths unknown to English society at the time of writing. The first of these being that militarisation extends beyond the battlefield, where it insidiously transforms people, culture, and ideas. The second is that militarisation privileges masculinity, and in doing so, also transforms the meaning of femininity. The third and final truth is that institutions and cultural facets heralded as bastions of democratic civilisation legitimise war as their offspring through the nurturing of hierarchy, masculinity, and rivalry — the “Holy Trinity of Militarism” according to infamous feminist International Relations (IR) scholar Cynthia Enloe. Three Guineas is by no means the first instance of a woman writing on war. However, just prior to World War II in 1938, the work canonically stands as a potent omen against the modern world and warfare as it eventuated. In truth, Three Guineas and women’s writings on war are increasingly relevant in a globe that is inching towards a state of permanent warfare. To many, such as myself, who are positioned as women within the discipline of IR, Woolf’s writing has been both comforting and inducing of distress.
To read novels, literature, non-fiction, and essays on war penned by women is to bear witness to our continued militarisation, and to grow aware of our role in dismantling and perpetuating it too. These texts and accounts persist across the globe and throughout history, defying genre and often temporal context; as Enloe wrote: “some of the most engaging accounts of women’s distinct experiences of war come to us as novels, often written reflectively years after the war they are describing.” The significance of women writing about war cannot be understated, in part due to the structural disclusion of women’s history, but also because they robustly challenge the “Holy Trinity of Militarism” to create new futures built on justice. It is within this context that the concept of feminist peace has been created.
“War which is at the heart of the construction of the modern world, which constitutes the very basis of the colonial and imperialist politics, is the central weapon of structural, systemic violence, of racial and neoliberal capitalism, and its patriarchy”
— Françoise Vergés, A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022)
Women and War: In Text and Time
Fiction and non-fiction narratives of women in periods of war probe the co-optation of the body politic into a position of subjugation. They deeply interrogate how gender is constructed and reconstructed again to legitimise state violence. Women writing war is broader than the traditionalist conceptions of war; it encompasses reflections on militarisation as it manifests everywhere, including within interpersonal relations and the ostensibly separated domestic sphere. It often encompasses reflections on modern state-building, nationalism, imperialism, concentrated power ,and violence. As a body of texts, the works speak to the plurality of women’s experiences worldwide and alternate visions for a future peace.
Zohra Drif’s autobiography Inside The Battle of Algiers recounts her life and resistance to French imperialism in Algeria in great detail, speaking to the role of women in revolution and anti-colonial resistance. In Insurrecto, Gina Apostol narrates historical-ongoing relations between the Philippines and the US through the lives and perspectives of both a Filipina translator and an American filmmaker, a testament to atrocities committed by US forces on Philippine soil. In The Poppy War, R.F Kuang morphs China’s modern history into a fantastical and visceral trilogy that demarcates Japan’s violent imperial history as a moral reminder of the impact of war and imperialism across Asia. Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail, traverses the violence of past and present life in Palestine under Israeli occupation, where the difficulties of locating women’s history are made exceptionally clear. These narratives weave a tapestry of alternate histories and resistance to an insidious militarism that is deeply interwoven within the fabric of everyday life. The crux of these narratives is the interrogation of power as it is concentrated at every level; seen and unseen, public and private.
Women in every context relate to nationalism differently. Broadly speaking, Enloe creates five categories by which women partake in nationalistic ideas: as biological reproducers; as symbols and signifiers of nationalism in male discourses; as transmitters and producers of cultural narratives; as reproducers of the boundaries of the nation; and as active participants in national movements. Embedded within women’s narratives of war are these relational forms that invert familiar and traditionalist paradigms of gender. These works create new potentialities for a future based on a feminist ethic of liberation and care. A woman does not have to write on the traditional conceptions of war to convey how her experiences, or broader society, are militarised. Once militarism is seen, it is difficult to unsee. We are all privy to the media discourses that regurgitate hardline political stances on the so-called ‘war on terror’, ‘war on drugs’ or ‘war on migrants’. As we become militarised, we are drawn into a permanent state of war that justifies the enhanced use of state violence employed at will. Even the guise of peace rhetoric is well and truly dead.
A testament to our militarisation
Our own Australian context is not exempt from the conversation on militarism and nationalism, nor are we exempt from evocations of gender to further an imperialist agenda. Australia’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda notably sees the military ‘operationalise the priorities’ outlined in the 2021 National Action Plan (NAP). The NAP is mostly relevant throughout the Indo-Pacific, where a historically militarised Australian presence can become purple-washed into appearing committed to human, and particularly women’s, rights. This cannot be extricated from a broader tale of coloniality, where migrant detention centres can be established without consequence throughout the Pacific, as part of so-called cash-for-migration-control schemes that tie our neighbours to our military. I return again to Enloe’s conceptualisation of militarisation in Maneuvers as the “step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military.” I’d argue, then, that in Australian foreign policy, women and humanitarian aid are militarised.
So, I grow increasingly weary about militarism in Australian society. The ADF cadet programs enrol children as young as 13 years old into after-school programs that promote interest in, and legitimise, defence and military ideologies in youth. While the RSL stands as a solemn place of mourning for many veterans, patrons entering any of the 1100 RSL branches across Australia are greeted with display cases of heralded martial paraphernalia from across a violent and often unjust modern military history. Grief for victims and those lost can sometimes come secondary to the glorification of the warfare itself. The ADF continues to sponsor students with enticing debt-free university careers in exchange for commitment to the armed forces and full-time service in the years following graduation. University is only free if you commit your life to the military. Cynthia Enloe even notes, on both an individual and socio-cultural level, the adoption of “camo” clothing into everyday use as a testament to our normalised militarisation. It is naive to assume these phenomena exist on any apolitical level when they have tangible impact on citizens, as well as domestic and foreign affairs.
In A Brief History of Australian Terror, Bobuq Sayed bears testament to the manifest implications of our militarism. His essays analyse the cruel reality of almost two decades of Australian presence in Afghanistan within the context of military history and a “national culture of denial.” Sayed analyses the Brereton Report, as published in November 2020, which “found credible evidence that ADF soldiers had slaughtered at least thirty-nine innocent Afghan men and children in twenty-three separate incidents.” He continues: “Major General Justice Paul Brereton conducted the investigation and reported that, in some cases, ADF soldiers slit throats, gloated about their actions, kept kill counts, executed prisoners to ‘blood’ junior soldiers and photographed dead bodies with planted phones and weapons to justify their actions.” Sayed notes, “the perpetrators never thought twice about having their impunity questioned because the victims were Afghans and, by extension, Muslim.” In 2021, estimates were placed at one to five years before evidence could be presented to the DPP, let alone for any prosecutions to begin. In October 2024, the ABC reported that guilty soldiers may never be delivered charges for these war crimes.
To this day, there have been no consequences for ADF personnel involved in these instances, though there have been serious repercussions for whistleblowers. Samantha Crompvoets, now author of Blood Lust, Trust and Blame, is a military sociologist who worked closely with the Defence Department on projects pertaining to ADF reform. In 2016, she penned an exposé report which detailed war crimes committed by Special Air Service regiment soldiers in Afghanistan (and sparked the Brereton inquiry). She condemned evocations of the “fog of war” in obfuscating intentional action, earning the ire of then Defence Minister Peter Dutton, who did not want the military to be “distracted by things that have happened in the past.” He also said that Crompvoets would not receive government contracts in future, despite the report itself being commissioned by Major General Jeff Sengelmen, then Special Operations Commander. In an article penned for Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Crompvoets noted “abuse of power and the normalisation of deviance” as issues plaguing militaries including the ADF, as well as all institutions “grappling with the same problems: histories of abuse and secrecy, sexual harassment, [and] problems of diversity and inclusion.” She remains outspoken about the continuing consequences of this systematic vilification on her career and personal life.
The decades-long US and Australian presence in Afghanistan came to a conclusion in 2021, when allied forces were hastily evacuated from the ground. The ‘War on Terror’ very prominently continues to operate as a buzzword in Australian media, a notable example of militarised language that justifies a normalised and enhanced state of continued violence. Of course, our militarisation does not impact us all equally. There have been more consequences inflicted on innocent minority communities than on actual war criminals. In Randa Abdel Fattah’s book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, she analyses attempts to ‘de-radicalise’ Arab, muslim, and ethnically diverse youth through “countering violent extremist (CVE) policies”, as well as through school curriculum, to the effect of enhanced policing and hyper-surveillance of Arab communities across Australia. The work is a reminder of the cruel and ongoing impact of terror discourses which primarily aim to fear-monger, to the detriment of children and other vulnerable populations. It is needless to say: the wrong people are paying the price for our militarisation.
Undoing Violence, Unlearning Militarisms: Working Towards Feminist Peace
Yet, militarisation is not inevitable. In Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Cynthia Enloe makes this, however wearily, clear. What was once militarised can indeed become demilitarised again. She notes the role of “historians, sociologists and psychologists”, as well as “‘artists, street performers and novelists”, in dismantling militarism idea-by-idea. There are, and always have been, women standing at the forefront of pacifist and anti-militarisation movements. But then, what is feminist peace? What does it mean to work towards feminist peace? Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) sees the dissolution of the nation state as the ultimate goal, where an international system governed by an ethic of care will eradicate the need for the military and borders. Reimaginations of the globe are pervasive and omnipresent within women’s writings on war. We must pivot towards the global scale again. Writing from the grips of feminist revolution in Iran, Nila writes:
“Against this backdrop of appalling barriers, more women than men now hold university diplomas… a delightful overabundance of female-authored bestsellers resonates within Iran and throughout the diaspora…the wisdom and unwavering resolve of women drew numerous men to rally to their cause. Even those who once disparaged the women’s movement against the compulsory hijab, belittling them as frivolous now understand that if women are [not] free and equal, freedom and democracy cannot thrive… We can see all roads convering to lead us to a promising dawn.”
In the same strain, Saba Mahmood penned:
“Even in instances when an explicit feminist agency is difficult to locate, there is a tendency to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination”
Alternate futures, as alternate pasts, exist in conjunction and plurality. We are all ensnared within relations of power and domination. As resistance and revolution are embedded within the practice of writing, there is also resistance within the reading process.
