Description
This paper critically examines the oversight governance infrastructure in place to monitor, evaluate and safeguard CONTEST – Britain’s counterterrorism strategy – to show how existing counterterrorism policy and practice often negatively impacts women’s safety, security and rights. By drawing on the relationship between policy design and implementation, governance and gendered security, I explore the role of gender in CONTEST’s oversight infrastructure. Using feminist institutionalist tools and discourse analysis of textual material and interview data, I interrogate how CONTEST activities in formal and informal oversight mechanisms at micro, meso and macro levels are regulated, how they operate in gendered ways, and with what gendered outcomes for women. I argue that, despite an increased awareness of women’s complex roles and experiences in relation to terrorism and violent extremism, existing formal oversight governance mechanisms are largely gender blind. While gender-sensitive evolution is evidenced in informal oversight activities at the micro-level, there is limited evidence of formal systematic, evidence-based and gender sensitive oversight infrastructure. This poses challenges for the effectiveness of counterterrorism responses as institutional knowledge and practice related to women’s involvement in terrorism and violent extremism is shaped by gendered assumptions. This research contributes to advancing a transformative, theoretically innovative, and policy-oriented research agenda, and drives forward feminist efforts to prioritise gender-responsive security governance practices to ensure adequate safeguarding and protection of women’s rights, safety and security across countering terrorism policy and practice.
