Governmentality and the Power of Transnational Women’s Movements

Abstract

Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global governmental knowledge and expertise. This article engages social movement theory with theories of global governmentality. Governmentality analysis typically focuses upon governmental power rather than political contention or the collective agency of political outsiders. However, I argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an account of feminist influence on the fields of development and security within global politics. The governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise. Since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. Such analysis of expertise can illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. The power of transnational women's movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women within global knowledge networks.

Full text

Correspondence Address: Carol Harrington, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria Uni-
versity of Wellington, Room 1022, Murphy Building, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn Campus, Wel-
lington, 6140, New Zealand, Tel.: (+64) 4 463 7451, Email: carol.harrington@vuw.ac.nz
ISSN: 1911-4788
Studies in Social Justice
Volume 7, Issue 1, 47-63, 2013
Governmentality and the Power of
Transnational Women’s Movements
CAROL HARRINGTON
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
AbstrAct Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse
and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of
contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this.
I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how
transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global
governmental knowledge and expertise. This article engages social movement theory
with theories of global governmentality. Governmentality analysis typically focuses
upon governmental power rather than political contention or the collective agency of
political outsiders. However, I argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an
account of feminist inuence on the elds of development and security within global
politics. The governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise.
Since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality
analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. Such analysis of expertise can
illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. The power of transnational
women’s movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women
within global knowledge networks.
Introduction
Social movement accounts of women’s movements’ impact conceptualize
movement power as compelling masculine elites to act against their own
preferences through mechanisms of leverage and framing. From this
perspective, elites compromise in the face of persuasive rhetoric and lobbying.
Social movement theory posits a clear divide between elites and non-
elites, situating social movements as acting for the excluded. Nevertheless,
movement theorists acknowledge the signicance of networks between social
movement organizations and elites to their success. After reviewing social

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
48 Carol Harrington
movement perspectives, this article argues that governmentality theory offers
a fuller account of the power of women’s organizations. Governmentality
theory focuses upon the social effects of knowledge and posits a less
dichotomized understanding of power than social movement theory. I show
how international women’s movement organizations originating in Europe
and the US during the nineteenth century established themselves as experts
on women, as a global category suffering inequality. Women’s organizations
set up sections around the globe, collecting narratives of women’s oppression
and data on women. They supported global institutions dedicated to defending
global categories of people oppressed by states or by statelessness. This article
considers the contribution of women’s organizations to knowledge of women
as a population category within development and, more recently, security.
The global power of women’s movements lays in how such movements
constructed women as a category for concern nested within discourse and
knowledge of civilizational hierarchies that delineate particular populations
and territories as objects for international governmental intervention.
Social Movement Theories of the Power of Movements
Social movement studies addresses problems of power, political exclusion
and collective resistance to oppression, thus providing a useful framework
for analyzing feminism. Leading social movement theorists, Charles Tilly
and Sidney Tarrow, distinguish between political elites who have routine
access to public decision makers and the majority of people who have limited
means to inuence government (Buechler, 2011, pp. 125–140; Tilly, 1985).
Tilly provided a detailed historical analysis of “contentious performances”
such as strikes, street theatre, petitions and demonstrations in Great Britain
from 1758-1834, a period when distinctive new forms of collective action
emerged among European non-elites. When contentious political actors
develop sustained social networks and self-organization then, Tarrow argues,
we can speak of a “social movement” (Tarrow, 2011, p. 16). Thus, the concept
“social movement” captures a distinctive combination of political campaign,
repertoire of contention and public display that emerged in Europe and North
America from about the mid-eighteenth century and included women’s
movements.
Women’s movement organizations emerged in Europe and the US when
faster international transport, printing technologies and the spread of literacy
created possibilities for new kinds of collective action and imaginings of
political community. While new notions of national sovereignty threatened
old empires by fuelling national movements new ideals of individual rights
created grounds for movements based in transnational identications which
sought inuence on distant governments and social practices. Douglas
Stange recounts how in the mid-nineteenth century Unitarian abolitionists
in the United Kingdom felt justied in chastising US Unitarians about the
evils of slavery because “America was no longer a distant land it was only

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
Transnational Women’s Movements 49
two weeks away” (Stange, 1984, p. 96). People and ideas travelled rapidly
while increasing literacy among politically excluded workers, women and
slaves provided them with, in the words of fugitive slave Frederick Douglass,
“tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently ashed
through my mind and died away for want of utterance” (Douglass 1845, 39).
Narratives of oppression and treatises on social reform circulated around the
globe among abolitionists, pacists, socialists, and workers, women’s and
black associations, among others.
International associations of all kinds proliferated throughout the long
nineteenth-century. New associations formed out of political debates within
established groups. For example, by excluding women the 1840 World
Anti-slavery Congress in London laid the ground for an 1888 International
Congress of Women in Washington DC which founded the International
Council of Women (ICW) headquartered in Zurich (Whittick, 1980, p. 22).
Still active today, the ICW set out to build national sections around the world
which would provide women a voice within their states and allow for sharing
information internationally. The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance
formed in 1904 out of dissatisfaction with the ICW’s refusal to campaign for
the vote (Whittick, 1980, p. 22). The rst international women’s association
also had roots in abolitionism, Josephine Butler’s International Federation for
the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice, founded in 1875 (Berkovitch,
1999, p. 160). This association formed in opposition to a call from an 1873
International Medical Congress for international co-ordination on state
regulation of prostitution so as to prevent disease travelling across borders
(Berkovitch, 1999, p. 35). According to Berkovitch, between 1875 and 1914
twenty two international women’s organizations formed alongside numerous
other international organizations seeking social reform (Berkovitch, 1999, p.
160).
Social movement theorists analyze movement power as a form of
compulsion, where political outsiders nd a way to exercise leverage over
elites. Tilly’s emphasis on social movements’ public displays of “worthiness,
unity, numbers and commitment” emphasizes movement inuence as
residing in their capacity to compel political change against elite preferences
(Tilly & Wood, 2009, pp. 4–5). Confronted with repeated public displays of
mass commitment to change, elites sometimes feel compelled to surrender
or compromise on social movement demands to ensure the stability of the
broader political order. Social movements may also exercise leverage through
recruiting elite actors to their cause. While elites have routine access to public
decision making they may have political cause to align themselves with social
movements. Thus, while women’s movements emerged through political
exclusion they have thrived on alliances with political insiders and according
to Keck and Sikkink (1998) successfully employed leverage politics.
Keck and Sikkink (1998) combine social network analysis and social
movement theory in their analysis of “transnational advocacy networks”
which they dene as “those relevant actors working internationally on an
issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
50 Carol Harrington
dense exchanges of information and services” (p. 2). Such networks include
actors from social movements, NGOs, media, academia, foundations, regional
and international intergovernmental organizations and the state. Their work
calls attention of the connectedness of women’s movement networks and
broader governmental processes involving media, state, academic and
intergovernmental bodies. In their case study of the international campaign
on violence against women Keck and Sikkink (1998) argue that activists
succeeded by coordinating transnational networks to campaign for states and
intergovernmental organizations to support particular internal reforms, such
as changing police practices, and to use their inuence on other states and
organizations in favour of the reform.
As well as power through leverage politics, social movement theorists use
the concept of “framing” to analyze how movements exercise persuasive
power by consciously framing their grievances in politically compelling
ways. For example, Keck and Sikkink’s discussion of international feminist
advocacy on violence against women relates how in the early 1990s feminist
activists began to promote the slogan “women’s rights are human rights” and
to frame violence against women as a human rights violation. This framing
situated the problem “within larger ‘master frames’ or ‘metanarratives’ of
violence and rights” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, p. 196). Keck and Sikkink
(1998) analyze the success of this campaign in terms of the “adjacency
principle” whereby movements that manage to line up their claim in terms of
already accepted instances of political injustice and violations of rights have
greater impact (p. 196). In their account:
The women’s rights campaign is a story of self-conscious activists who are
simultaneously principled and strategic. They are principled in their motivation
for action: international feminist activists believed deeply in equality and rights
for women everywhere. But they chose their organizing foci and campaign
tactics strategically. They hoped to build alliances with women worldwide,
knowing it would be difcult. (p. 196)
According to this analysis: “it was the activists themselves who created the
category [of violence against women], and who, through their organizing,
placed it on the international agenda” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, p. 196). This
version of framing theory attributes the construction of new political categories
to clever actors’ manipulation of meaning and reexive understanding of
existing political frames.
From this point of view, feminist political leadership located in US-based
UN women’s networks constructed a new social category: violence against
women. Keck and Sikkink (1998) argue that “when wife battering or rape
in the United States, female genital mutilation in Africa, and dowry death in
India were all classied as forms of violence against women, women could
interpret these as common situations and seek similar root causes” (p. 197).
This new categorization linked disparate female experiences around the globe
as similarly violent and pointed to male dominance as the cause. Furthermore,
feminist leaders successfully persuaded legal elites that “violence against

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Transnational Women’s Movements 51
women” should be counted as a human rights violation, and in particular
circumstances as genocidal violence, a crime against humanity and a war
crime. Feminist leaders, or “issue entrepreneurs” as Keck and Sikkink call
them, consciously deployed this framing for the political end of uniting
women across borders in opposition to male dominance.
Like much social movement theory, Keck and Sikkink’s adoption of
framing theory over-emphasizes purposeful political leadership in the
construction of social categories and issues. Thus, while they discuss how
activists re-framed various gendered acts as violence against women and a
human rights violation they take for granted that human rights provided a
compelling frame for interpreting such acts. Additionally, they suggest that
bodily integrity violations provide an intrinsically compelling issue (Keck &
Sikkink, 1998, p. 195). Their analysis treats bodily integrity and human rights
as self-evident categories available for feminist deployment. Yet genealogical
analysis of the governmental categories “human rights”, “bodily integrity”
and “women” reveals that they have undergone rapid political transformation
in mutual interaction during the late twentieth and early twenty rst century
(Harrington, 2010). These shifts in meaning shaped feminist campaigns’
claims to expertise and ability to enter into discourse on global security.
The value of social movement theory lies in its focus upon delineating
movements as vehicles for collective agency of people who do not have access
to elite decision making. However, social movement theory treats political
struggle as concerned with leverage, compulsion, and conscious persuasion.
Below, I argue that women’s movements do not simply compel elites to
make concessions and cleverly manipulate words and images, women’s
movements produce governmental knowledge and truth about populations
subject to government. By looking at women’s movements through the
governmentality lens, my analysis highlights how they participated in the
construction of rationalities and techniques for governing women’s inequality
and unfreedom. The power of women’s movements lies in their construction
of knowledge about women as a transnational category of persons.
Global Governmentality and Women’s Movements
Governmentality offers a richer framework for understanding the power of
movements than concepts of framing and leverage. Michel Foucault (1990)
famously connected power to resistance in his introduction to The History
of Sexuality V1, with his oft-quoted claim that power and resistance always
occur together and resistance should not be viewed as exterior to power
(p. 95). Governmentality theory continues Foucault’s conceptualization of
power as productive of resistant subjects rather than as oppressing pre-given
subjects. Yet, with some exceptions, a gap in governmentality theory concerns
the resistance of those governed (Zanotti, 2011, p. 31). In a review article
Merlingen (2006) notes that most governmentality literature investigates how
governmental techniques work to produce particular forms of conduct rather

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52 Carol Harrington
than how government produces resistant subjects (p. 190).
Foucault’s concept of power avoids static oppressor/oppressed
dichotomies and allows analysis of how resistant subjects may themselves
claim governmental authority and produce resistant knowledge. Women’s
movements emerged in resistance to masculine power and claimed power
through knowledge. Resistance to the masculine liberal governmental gender
order manifested as women’s movements in Europe and the US. These
movements problematized female unfreedom and crafted their own authority
to govern women as a transnational category of persons. European and US
women’s movement organizations acted as an engine for the construction
of new liberal governmental problems and knowledge clustered around
questions of gender inequality.
Foucault (1991) gave the term governmentality two related meanings:
mentalities of government and government of mentalities. In the former
sense of the term, governmentality refers to mentalities, or knowledge, of
appropriate government, encompassing answers to questions who or what
should be governed by whom, how they should govern, and why government
is necessary in specic contexts (Rose, O’Malley, & Valverde, 2009, p.
3). Governmentalities treat government as thoughtful human activity, both
science and art. They delineate domains of governmental knowledge and
practice such as the economy, society and the state. Governmentalities
delineate populations, peoples and places and specify techniques for
intervening in them. International women’s movements that participate in the
UN system established themselves as experts on women as a global category
of people and asserted that women knew best how to govern other women
(Berkovitch, 1999; Harrington, 2010; Rupp, 1997).
Equally importantly, the term also refers to “government of mentalities”
signalling how concerns with shaping subjectivities and producing appropriate
forms of personhood permeate governmental practices. Thus, Nikolas
Rose (1996) suggests that governmentality analysis requires a genealogy
of personhood that attends to: problematizations of types, personhood, or
conduct, the authoritative knowledge that produces problematizations, the
technologies used to change problematized persons or conduct, and how
problematizations and technologies full broader objectives concerning
proper government (pp. 131–134). Much work on governmentality focuses
upon the mutual construction of welfare states and free but responsible forms
of personhood (Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996; Cruikshank, 1999; Dean &
Hindes, 1998; Rose, 1999).
Womenhood became a global category within global governmental
processes. Larner and Walters (2004) call for genealogical analysis of
“global governmentality” which would investigate elds of expertise and
knowledge such as “development,” “modernization,” “global economy”
and “global security.” Global governmentalities produce non-state spaces
of government, such as “the developing world,” or the global south or east.
Global governmentalities also delineate populations such as women as
requiring government outside of state frameworks and sometimes as needing

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Transnational Women’s Movements 53
defence against the states in which they reside. Some scholars use the term
“developmentality” to analyze governing mechanisms that shape distant
populations to conform to the development agendas of wealthy and powerful
actors (Deb, 2009; Fendler, 2001; Ilcan & Phillips, 2010).
The women’s movements originating in Europe and the US during the
nineteenth century shaped twentieth century global governmentalities
through their production and dissemination of knowledge more than
in bending political elites to the will of the masses. Their power lay in
embedding feminist knowledge within governmental institutions and
practices. They constructed alternative problems for government, such as
“gender inequality,” or “violence against women”. They contributed to 20th
century global governmentalities by constructing women as a transnational
category with shared problems in need of international resolution.
Nineteenth-century European and US women’s organizations claimed
to represent women across the globe and set up sections in colonized
countries. In their formal politics international women’s organizations
aspired to a vision of women as sharing common political problems while
respecting differences. Rupp’s research on early twentieth century women’s
organizations shows the tension involved in this stance because US groups
had much more funding than others and both European and US women’s
organizations sought to mentor women in other countries. Black women
formed separate organizations because of racism in the International
Women’s Suffrage Alliance (Rupp, 1997, p. 75). During the inter-war and
post war period, European and US led international women’s organizations
emphasized national differences as well as shared experience. They often
supported national independence movements and sought to encourage the
emergence of national women’s leadership and organizations (Rupp, 1997).
Women’s organization networks and knowledge made their support
politically valuable to European and American elite efforts at constructing
post-colonial forms of global government as old empires gave way to pressure
from nationalist movements. As internationalists, women’s organizations
agreed on the need for inter-governmental congresses and treaties to address
social issues and called for an inter-governmental organization which could
regulate international space and mediate international conict. Women’s
movement organizations provided an important constituency supporting
the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization following
World War I and the United Nations following World War II (Miller, 1994;
Rupp, 1997; Seary, 1996, p.20).
Several women’s organizations established at the turn of the century
gained governmental status and expertise within international governmental
organizations, among them the ICW and some of its offshoots. The
International Labour Organization, League of Nations and UN all consulted
women’s organizations on matters such as female employment and trafcking
in women (Berkovitch, 1999; Leppänen, 2009; Reanda, 1999; Willetts, 1996).
Women’s organizations also monitored the activities of these international
bodies (Miller, 1994). Their relentless advocacy led the League of Nations

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54 Carol Harrington
to establish a Committee of Experts on women that formed the basis for the
United Nation’s Committee on the Status of Women. Thus, the establishment
of the United Nations ushered in a period in which women had become a
problematized category of people requiring international government based
upon particular forms of knowledge and expertise.
As women’s movement organizations contributed to the construction of
international intergovernmental institutions and processes these institutions
shaped women’s movement organizations around the globe. The UN
constructed its accountability and responsibility in relation to transnational
citizens’ associations rather than simply to state members: The UN could
address and govern transnational collectives of individuals such as
“workers,” “women” or “displaced people” and even defend these people
against states. The United Nations coined the term “non-governmental
organization” (NGO) and carefully regulated which organizations counted as
“international” and their eligibility for consultative status with its Economic
and Social Council (ECOSOC) (Willetts, 1996, p. 40). UN denitions of
NGOs eligible for ECOSOC consultative status emphasize that they should
have independence from national governments and accountability to an
international membership (Willetts, 1997, p.42). Usually, the UN stipulates
that consultative NGOs should represent transnational entities, such as
“workers,” “women,” professional associations such as teachers or doctors,
and international associations devoted to cross border questions, such as
the environment, disease control, trafcking in people and goods, displaced
peoples and so forth (ECOSOC, 1996, p. 31).
Women’s Organizations and Developmentality
Women’s international organizations have recognized authority only to speak
on topics that international governmental elites consider “women’s issues”
which became a subcategory of other governmental problems. Governmental
knowledge forms within broader institutional discourses which categorize
problems for government in terms of “economy,” “development,” “culture,”
“human rights,” “security” and so forth. These categories shape discursive
possibilities in the formation of social knowledge. For much of the twentieth
century international policy on women as women took place in the UN
development bureaucracy. International women’s NGOs advocated for
women within a governmentality that rationalized governmental interventions
in distant economies and populations because it would help them develop
toward the model of wealthy countries.
The earliest US and European international women’s organizations,
which later participated in UN politics, articulated grievances based in their
comparative knowledge of women’s experiences of poverty, illiteracy and
health problems. By the late nineteenth century states increasingly collected
population statistics and social science information about populations
(Cole, 2000). In this context, women’s movement organizations established

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Transnational Women’s Movements 55
themselves as knowledgeable about the government of women and keepers of
statistics on women. Indeed, European and US women’s movements pioneered
the sorts of calculative governmental practices that governmentality theory
has highlighted. Governmentality analysts emphasize the signicance of
calculative practices to government of populations at a distance. International
governmental organizations collect population statistics, comparing and
ranking populations against each other and with quantiable governmental
goals and standards. Suzan Ilcan and Lynne Phillips note that the UN’s
calculative practices have been crucial to global governmentalities that
attempt to standardize the conduct of populations in terms of elds such as
education, consumption and trade (Ilcan & Phillips, 2010, p. 850). Likewise,
Michael Merlingen analyzed the OSCE’s practice of ranking and grading
east European countries according to their treatment of ethnic minorities as
involving surveillance, examination and normalizing judgement that allows
the European Union to discipline populations to its east (Merlingen, 2003).
Measurement and reporting on democratization, human rights and
women’s status attempts to render these social issues as amenable to
technocratic management by global authorities. The International Council
of Women produced knowledge that constructed gender inequality as a
measurable social problem amenable change through social policy. Their
Bureau of Information kept country statistics on women’s employment,
education and activities. In 1909 they asked national councils to report on
legal inequalities in their respective countries and in 1912 published a report
documenting gender inequality in seventeen countries (Berkovitch, 1999, p.
3; International Council of Women., 1912). As Berkovitch observes, “using
standardized measures, the status of women is compared to that of men, and
the gap that is found (and it always is) is dened as discrimination considered
to be a social problem and treated as an injustice to be rectied and corrected
through state action and state policy” (Berkovitch, 1999, p.3).
Thus, European and US women’s organizations struggled for inclusion
in global government by producing data and ranking countries in terms of
women’s freedom. They promoted international standards on women’s
status. Within development discourse feminist scholars emphasized how
improving women’s educational, health and economic status would have
positive outcomes for both child well-being and economic growth, thus
instrumentalizing women’s well-being as contributing to elite governmental
goals (Boserup, 1970). Women’s advocates within the UN system won
resources for the eld of “women and development” which constructed
women as mothers and marginalized workers and made “third world women”
a particular object of concern (Kabeer, 1994; Mohanty, 1991).
International women’s organizations advocated for women within a
developmentality that rationalized international bodies’ governmental
interventions in distant economies and populations because it would help
them develop toward the model of wealthy countries. Gendered knowledge
of populations contributed to a global governmentality which divided
the globe according to “advanced” civilizations where women enjoyed

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56 Carol Harrington
political equality and nurtured small healthy families and “under-developed”
civilizations where women had more children than they could adequately
nurture and suffered because of such cultural norms as arranged marriage
and polygamy.
Throughout the twentieth century, British and North American feminist
arguments for women’s rights depended upon liberal civilizational discourse,
contrasting the patriarchal cultures of the East with the relative gender
egalitarianism of the West and equating gender equality with modernization
and progress. For example, an inuential book in dening British and US
images of women in the colonies, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927),
made child marriage in India a political issue in Britain and led to the Child
Marriage Restraint Act, 1929 (Liddle & Rai, 1998, p. 503). As Liddle and Rai
point out, while focusing on the abuse of women and girls Mayo’s argument
locates the causes of this abuse in the backward culture typical of colonised
people, drawing parallels between Indians and Filipinos in their cultural
brutality and need for government by a superior civilization (Mayo was also
author of Isles of Fear: the truth about the Phillippines, published in 1925).
Mayo presents the solution to Indian women’s oppression in continued
British rule, while ignoring indigenous women’s liberation campaigns
against such abuse and the abuse of Indian women by British men. Mayo’s
work inuenced the Anglo-American stereotype of the abused eastern, or
third world woman in need of rescue, which has continued to shape British
and American feminist discourse. For example, Liddle and Rai point out that
such a classic feminist text as Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: the metaethics of
radical feminism (Daly, 1978) actually uses Mayo as a source about gender
customs in India (Liddle & Rai, 1998, pp. 495–520). Along similar lines, Jo
Doezema analysed discourses produced by the Coalition against Trafcking
of Women showing that position of “third world woman” in such discourse
is innocent victim of brutal patriarchal cultures (Doezema, 2001, pp. 16–38).
Empowerment discourse provided an important point of intersection
between women’s movement organizations and distant donors and
governmental actors. Barbara Cruickshank (1999) wrote about welfare
state social policy that aimed to empower women victims of male violence
imagined as helpless and in need of state intervention in their day to day
lives. She argued that liberal governmentality produced empowerment as a
rationale for governing free individuals by constructing particular kinds of
people, such as female victims, as unfree. Critical work on empowerment
has highlighted how it allows distant authorities to micro-manage the lives
and political struggles of individuals in target populations. Empowerment
individualizes political problems such as poor health or exposure to violence
and disease (Finn & Sarangi, 2008).
Gender empowerment discourse also reinscribes global civilizational
hierarchy. Ilcan and Phillips (2010) critiqued the millennium development
goals for reformulating and standardizing political priorities, including how
to measure “gender empowerment.” The “gender empowerment index”
(GEM) purports to measure women’s inuence in economic and political

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Transnational Women’s Movements 57
life and produces country rankings, concerning itself with “agency” rather
than “well-being” (Klasen, 2006, p. 257). The value given to income in
construction of the GEM makes wealthy countries likely to score high and poor
countries likely to score low (Klasen, 2006, p. 258). Thus, the index provides
quantitative conrmation of a civilizational hierarchy whereby men from
wealthy countries treat “their” women better and thus prove their superiority.
Women’s Organizations, Advanced Liberal Governmentality and Global
Knowledge Networks
The language of empowerment frequently characterizes programs based in
“advanced governmentality”. Technologies of agency and responsibilization
provide important themes of advanced liberal governmentality. Scholars
developed theories of advanced liberalism in analysis of late twentieth century
transformations in welfare state policies which sought to “responsibilize” and
“empower” people to take care of their own health, education and well-being.
According to Dean (2009), “technologies of agency” engage the governed in
monitoring and correcting their own conduct, treating them as responsible
agents capable of meeting governmental norms and targets once provided
with appropriate information and training.
Advanced liberal global governmentalities seek to responsibilize and
empower developing countries to nd solutions to their own economic
problems. Donor states and organizations recast their relationship with aid
recipients as “partnerships” whereby aid projects and priorities would be
decided upon by the communities they sought to assist (Abrahamsen, 2004).
Donors also sought to work with NGOs “on the ground” rather than through
state agencies (Musto, 2008, pp. 9–10). Private actors, businesses and
NGOs, rather than states, became cast as the drivers of development (Fowler,
2000, p. 2). Following the end of the Cold War changes in the regulation of
international markets created an environment more favourable for NGOs to
receive funding from distant donors (Pinter 2001, p. 198).
Advanced liberal governmentality favours networks and short term
contracts as the best formations for governmental interventions at a distance.
Government increasingly takes place through networks of state, international
governmental organizations (IGOs, for example the World Bank, IMF,
United Nations) and NGOs, the latter including NGOs with social movement
links. Networks often exist as a series of contracted partnerships between
donors, transnational NGOs and community based NGOs. Such networks
produce and circulate information, theories and techniques of government.
A governmental program, such as a rape crisis centre, at any given location
may depend on the activity of both local and transnational feminist groups,
human rights and humanitarian NGOs, local government, state institutions,
philanthropic foundations, corporate donors and international organizations.
Such networks furnish global governmental actors with data on women and
techniques for “empowering women” at various locations.

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58 Carol Harrington
New practices of contracting women’s NGOs to deliver services and
provide gender policy advice fuelled a late twentieth century “NGO boom”
among women’s organizations (Alvarez, 2009, p. 175). Sonia Alvarez (2009)
argues that the resources for research and communications provided by
international donors had allowed feminism to develop from a movement on
the streets to an authoritative governmental discourse because NGOs could
afford to conduct and disseminate research on women’s social conditions.
As the vast constellation of knowledge products generated by NGOs wind their
way through feminisms’ multi-layered political-communicative webs, they
also often cross over into other (overlapping) networks of social movements,
civil society organizations, and social and political institutions. Feminisms’
discursive “baggage” thus sometimes travels “unaccompanied,” so to speak.
(Alvarez, 2009, p. 178)
Scholars of human rights NGOs have noted that transnational movements’
inuence occurs through a politics of information fuelled by professional
NGO research (Ron, Ramos, & Rodgers, 2005). This politics of information
involves not simply collecting and disseminating data and narratives but
also theories and analysis. Furthermore, NGOs frequently produce and
disseminate techniques of government in the form of training materials and
models of service provision.
From a governmentality perspective, women’s organizations participate
in a global knowledge network made up of a “uid conguration[s] of
organizations, institutions, groups and people” concerned with gendered
human conduct (Ilcan & Phillips 2008, pp. 713-714). Women’s movement
based NGOs provide signicant nodal points in this network because of their
capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge of women and theories of
gender (Alvarez, 2009, p. 177). Global knowledge network theory develops
governmentality theory to emphasize how mobile knowledge, expertise
and governmental techniques construct forms of personhood that facilitate
the government of distant populations. Visions of appropriate forms of
personhood provide points of intersection between contentious actors at
a given location and distant authorities seeking to inuence that location.
Thus, global knowledge networks emerge within broader governmental
congurations around shared teleologies, values, and practices concerning
appropriate forms of personhood. These networks facilitate movement of
knowledge, expertise, and governmental techniques around the globe in
efforts to foster particular habits, conduct, and self-understandings.
Global Security and Female Empowerment
Feminist discourse and knowledge travels alongside the most coercive
manifestations of global governmentality. As Dean observed, although liberal
governmentality developed as a critique of authoritarian government it does
not exclude coercive governmental techniques; liberal security practices often

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
Transnational Women’s Movements 59
have a simultaneous coercive and capacitating dimension (Dean, 2002, p.
42). Post Cold War UN peacekeeping practices exemplify this dimension of
advanced liberal global governmentality. The UN has become more hands-on
in monitoring and co-ordinating negotiated peace settlements, supervision of
post-conict administrative structures, constitutional, judicial and electoral
reforms, elections, economic reconstruction, humanitarian assistance,
monitoring of human rights and implementation of refugee return programs.
Thus, questions formerly categorized as to do with development have become
security issues and underdevelopment conceptualized as a security risk. These
advanced liberal security practices construct security as dependent upon
liberal markets and constitutional models (Dufeld, 2001; Gaer, 2003; Jaeger,
2010; Richmond, 2003). Within liberal security rationality the deployment of
armed force anywhere on the globe can be justied by the need to secure
human rights and humanitarian goals, including the bureaucracies and NGO
networks required to monitor such goals. The UN sanctions armed forces in
the form of military personnel, police and private security contractors. Such
operations routinely seek links with local women’s organizations and include
an institutional nod to gender expertise in the form of under resourced gender
ofcers or focal points (Harris & Goldsmith, 2010; Olsson, 2001; Ospina,
2006; Puechguirbal, 2003).
Violence against women forms a signicant theme in post-Cold War
peacekeeping and democracy-building discourse. Narratives of violence
against women and other atrocities justify military interventions to protect
women from violent men who adhere to backward patriarchal cultures and
routinely violate human rights (Hunt, 2006; Sagan, 2010). Peacekeeper
training materials represent women in post conict zones as likely traumatized
by sexual violence (DPKO, 2002; Harrington, 2006). The most signicant
efforts to document violence against women globally developed alongside
new forms of peacekeeping and international justice (Buss, 2007; Harrington,
2010a, pp. 124-127). In December 1992, the Security Council declared itself
“appalled by reports of the massive, organized and systematic detention and
rape of women, in particular Muslim women, in Bosnia and Herzegovina”
and these reports formed part of the case for intervention (Resolution 798).
In 1994 the UN General Assembly appointed a special rapporteur on gender
based violence began producing information on violence against women
around the globe (Pietilä and Vickers, 1996, pp.142-145; United Nations
1993, 1994, 1996a; 1996b, 1996c, UNHCR 1993). Regional powers now
monitor violence against women in their sphere of inuence, for example
Australian and New Zealand police run domestic violence programs for
police from Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands and Kiribati (PPDVP 2010; AFP
2010).
Authoritative knowledge of violence against women remains the province
of feminist discourse and women’s organizations. The earliest women’s
movements in Europe and the US produced narratives of marital violence
and other violations of female bodily integrity (Trumble, 2004). Feminists
argued that women had a special interest in peace because of wartime sexual

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
60 Carol Harrington
violence (Ogden & Sargant, 1915). Quantication of violence against women
developed in the 1970s and 1980s as part of resurgent feminist activism on
the issue (Gavey, 2005). Feminist efforts at quantifying violence against
women linked with human rights efforts at documenting torture and analysis
of bodily violation as psychological trauma (Harrington, 2010b, pp. 98-117).
Feminist knowledge provided numbers and narratives that made sense of
military intervention and increased international policing.
The UN adopted the slogan the power to empower which casts female
peacekeeping security personal, including soldiers and police, as agents of
empowerment of women in countries subjected to international military
intervention in the name of liberal peace and democracy. UN publicity
materials cast female peacekeepers as role models for women in post-
conict situations (e.g. United Nations 2010, 2009). The slogan power to
empower has even been worked into a song for UN peacekeepers, employing
social movement practices of building unity through song (United Nations
Police Division Female Global Effort, 2011). The UN seeks to connect
peacekeeping to feminism through representing peacekeeping policewomen
as a manifestation of “female global effort.” Publicity materials emphasize
UN policing as empowering to women in countries where the UN deploys
armed force. Oddly, the UN facebook page publicity about activities of
female police represent their performance of mundane disciplinary activities
such as arresting female drunk drivers, while a BBC documentary following
female peacekeepers in Sierra Leone showed them harassing marijuana
smoking homeless teenagers (BBC, 2007; United Nations Police Division
Female Global Effort, 2011).
Conclusion
While the social movement lens has focused more upon resistant political
processes than governmentality research, global knowledge network theory
provides a fuller account of transnational feminist networks’ impact on global
politics. The power of international women’s organizations lies in production
and dissemination of knowledge and techniques for the government of
women as a cross border population category. Development and global
security, as major post-colonial elds of knowledge and power, have engaged
with knowledge of female poverty and insecurity produced by internationally
networked women’s organizations. Women’s movements originating
in Europe and North America during the nineteenth century engaged in
calculative practices from their foundations. However, measures of gender
empowerment and other liberal calculative practices that rank or score states
according to gender equality typically conform to global hierarchies that rank
Europe and North America as models for the rest of the world to emulate.

Studies in Social Justice, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
Transnational Women’s Movements 61
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