Gender violence in international relations: the violent logics of austerity from the lens of feminist global secureconomy

Abstract

The logic of the global political economy counters discursive and legal advances on gender violence in the international domain. The article specifically focuses on the gender violence inherent to the politics of austerity that have guided the international economy for the last decades. To that end, it distinguishes three violent logics of austerity –dispossession, devaluation and discipline– and disentangles their interaction with the continuum of violences that women suffer. This analysis uses the lens of feminist global “secureconomy”, combining conceptualisations and perspectives in Feminist International Political Economy and Feminist Security Studies in International Relations (IR). It aims to expose the sites of everyday violence and insecurity that austerity (re)produces and exacerbates, and which specifically and disproportionately affect women, LGTB people and those that transgress gender orders. Thus, the article also seeks to bring back broad perspectives in Feminist IR when approaching issues such as gender violence and austerity, avoiding the traditional division security/economy in the discipline and considering the material as well as the discursive basis of the analysis.