Description
Abstract: Over the last 30 years, attention to issues of gender equality have risen. Terms and tools such as ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ have been increasingly employed by both the international community – in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security adopted in 2000 – and in national governments. For example, in 2017 – under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, who notably introduced a gender parity cabinet ‘because it’s 2015’ – Canada implemented its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), identifying empowering women and girls as a means to eradicate poverty and increase global stability. Building on existing critiques of development programmes that are based upon neoliberal logic of economic growth as a means to reduce inequality, this project problematizes the economic and developmental focus of FIAP, questioning how effective can the FIAP be in empowering women and girls and, secondly, how its success can be defined and measured. A critical feminist perspective of security studies is employed to analyse the FIAP through a ‘security-development nexus’, which critiques how underdevelopment is targeted to avoid increased risk of conflict and insecurity (Peoples & Vaughn-Williams, 2021). Through this lens, Canada’s FIAP is revealed as a policy that works to further entrench Western power over developing nations, contradicting its feminist aims. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper reveals connections between gender equality policies and economic and security goals, and critically fills the dearth of feminist analyses of development policies from a security perspective.
