ABSTRACT
During the 19th and 20th centuries, transnational women’s organizations successfully established women as a transnational category of person worthy of dedicated attention on the part of national and international agencies invested in global governance. As a result, the pursuit of women’s empowerment has become a frequent feature, at least in principle, of foreign aid, development, and security policy on a global scale. This came along with the establishment of knowledge about women as a new form of expertise recognized within global knowledge networks. This chapter argues that, while enabling important feminist victories, the establishment of expertise on women as the primary form of gender expertise still recognized by globally oriented agencies has not been accompanied by the recognition of feminist critiques of androcentric concepts and practices as valuable expertise in global governance contexts. I illustrate this argument with reference to statebuilding initiatives targeting conflict-affected states in the Global South in the years 2000–2010. From the mid-2000s onward, the World Bank, the UN, and donor states committed to integrating women in the development of democratic state institutions in postconflict societies. However, the same agencies were seemingly untouched by feminist critiques of the liberal state. As a result, they have remained blind to the masculinized character of statebuilding policies, which prioritize masculinized institutions of the security and law enforcement sector, and neglect the feminized realms of health, education, and social welfare. Such policy formulations consolidate the construction of statebuilding as the pacification of relations between men, and reproduce the domination of men over women. Through this example, I show that the narrow construction of gender expertise as expertise on women helps explain some of the shortcomings of global governance efforts when it comes to improving the living conditions of women and girls in postconflict societies.
