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This thesis is situated at the intersection of Feminist International Relations, Critical Security Studies and Gender Studies. It takes as its starting point – and offers a challenge to – the feminist contention that soldiers cannot be peacekeepers due to hegemonic constructions of military masculinity associated with the skills and practices of combat. It problematises this assumption by investigating whether involvement in the practices of conflict resolution on Peace Support Operations (PSOs) influences the construction of military masculinities. The thesis also questions the rather monolithic accounts of masculinity which are found in feminist arguments that peacekeeping soldiers reinforce neo-imperial oppression, and argues that such critiques neglect the potentially more progressive aspects of employing soldiers as peacekeepers. Using the British Army as a case study to explore these conceptual issues, the thesis utilises a novel methodological approach derived from R W Connell’s framework of gender relations and social constructivist discourse theory. It analyses both official and unofficial sources of British Army discourse on PSOs, including military doctrine, recruitment material and autobiography, and finds evidence to suggest that ‘peacekeeper masculinity’ offers a challenge, albeit incomplete, to the hegemonic masculinity associated with combat. The thesis argues that, despite the limited nature of this challenge, peacekeeper masculinity represents an important development because the privileging of conflict resolution practices it embodies involves disruptions to traditional gendered dichotomies and the construction of ‘regendered soldiers,’ with important implications for both international peace and security and gender relations. Finding conflict resolution practices such as negotiating and building consent, moderating the use of force and humanitarian activities manly rather than emasculating is crucial if soldiers are to take PSOs as seriously as they do war. Moreover, associating masculinity with practices that require building relations of sensitivity, mutual respect and empathy has implications beyond the success of PSOs. Such associations not only challenge current models of hegemonic masculinity in the military, but – through replacing relations of dominance with more democratic relations – challenge the entire hierarchical structure of gender relations in western culture and language. As such, in exploring the concept of regendered soldiers, this thesis contributes significantly to theories of change in gender relations as well as to feminist International Relations scholarship on military masculinities, peacekeeping and security.

This thesis explores militaries' efforts to prevent and respond to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). As militaries around the world declare their commitment to gender mainstreaming and implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, CRSV tests the limits of what militaries can and should do. CRSV presents complex legal questions in view of the convergence between international humanitarian law and international human rights law in military operations. For critics of militaries, CRSV also raises dilemmas over whether to resist militarism or urge militaries to change. In examining both these aspects, this thesis opens a new dialogue between feminist approaches to international law and scholarship on gender and militaries. This study examines international law obligations applying to military action to prevent and respond to CRSV committed by third parties, proposing the relevance of a range of human rights standards. It uses NATO and the British Armed Forces as case studies to explore how militaries understand and integrate these obligations. Using interviews, observation of training, and review of policy, doctrine, directives and training materials, this research traces NATO and the British Armed Forces' commitments and action concerning CSRV since 2006, identifying key progress, shortcomings and constraints. The analysis is guided by feminist methodologies of identifying structural bias within the law. This thesis proposes that, in certain circumstances, armed forces have an obligation of due diligence to prevent CRSV by third parties and to support the investigation of CRSV. What this requires in practice has been inadequately considered. It finds that NATO and the British Armed Forces have made strides in incorporating CRSV into policy, doctrine and training, in particular since 2012. NATO has established institutional structures to support gender mainstreaming and issued a series of operational directives. The British Armed Forces have delivered CRSV training to foreign forces and introduced policy on human security. In both contexts, however, there remain conceptual and cultural obstacles to effectively preventing or responding to CRSV. CRSV is framed with reference to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: in political rather than legal terms. Exploring how militaries understand their possibilities for action concerning CRSV reveals how the primacy of combat in militaries' strategic culture limits what they consider reasonable, and how this shapes and is shaped by understandings of legal obligation. In demonstrating the difficulties of and resistance to responding to CRSV, this study offers a sobering counterpoint to progressive visions for the transformation of militaries. It questions any expectation that adopting a human rights framework for armed intervention will be enough to orient militaries to human security. In exploring the place of international law in military understandings of CRSV and what militaries see their role in countering CRSV to be, this thesis contributes new insights to scholarship concerning law in armed conflict as well as to critical scholarship on gender, militaries, and security. It urges critical engagement with militaries and military organisations to deepen militaries' commitment to human security goals.

This thesis examines the most powerful constructions of Soviet nuclear identity at three stages of nuclear decision-making (acquisition, the arms race, disarmament) throughout the course of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States from 1941 until 1991. Most importantly, it elaborates on the significance of this identity to the enactment and justification of Soviet nuclear policy from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev. Soviet nuclear policy during the Cold War was broadly attributed in the International Relations (IR) literature to security/deterrence concerns, the Soviet desire for ideological and military superiority over the US, and the psychology of the Soviet leaders. By adopting a poststructuralist gender-mindful identity-focused approach, this thesis explores not why these nuclear policies were enacted, but how they were made possible seeing nuclear identity as both constitutive of and a product of policy. This direction of inquiry has been traditionally overlooked within the literature on nuclear proliferation but can be utilised to answer important unanswered questions. Through analysis of the official speeches, notes, private conversations, press releases, and autobiographical reflections of Soviet leaders, this thesis demonstrates that representations of identity mattered when it came to nuclear policy in the Soviet Union. First, it argues that the articulation of an aggressive, competitive, and hypermasculine superpower identity grounded in the strength of the military-industrial complex was interlinked with nuclear weapons acquisition and with the politics of a rapid nuclear build-up. However, the evolution of Soviet nuclear identity enabled a different course of policy, moving from the rapid arms race to the most significant arms reduction in history under the leadership of Gorbachev in the late-1980s. Consequently, the second argument is that the continuous construction and reinforcement of a cooperative, ethical, and paternalistic nuclear identity grounded in human security and total nuclear abolition eventually made disarmament possible. In exploring various nuclear identity constructions in the Soviet Union over time, this thesis makes a significant contribution to ideational IR scholarship on nuclear proliferation as well as to the poststructuralist identity/policy literature and feminist IR studies. It deepens our comprehension of the Soviet case, with implications for understanding nuclear states’ behaviour and the possible directions for achieving disarmament.

My thesis sets out to explore how self-reliance is gendered within global refugee support. It contributes to scholarship on refugee self-reliance by pointing to gendered components of the concept itself, and analysing it within the specific operational context of Syrians under temporary protection in Izmir, western Turkey. It reveals that individual workers within inter- and non-governmental organisations conceptually re-construct self-reliance during the implementation process of livelihoods support, which has implications for how self-reliance is understood as well as how refugees themselves are constructed. Self-reliance has become increasingly relevant within the Syrian refugee response in Turkey in recent years, as the international community strives to prevent asylum migration to Europe. This is particularly visible in Izmir, where a number of inter- and non-governmental organisations (I/NGOs) have established livelihoods support programmes for the Syrian population since it has become much more difficult for displaced persons to leave Izmir for Europe. This work builds on 22 qualitative interviews with staff and volunteers from ten inter- and non-governmental organisations working in central Izmir, including grassroots initiatives; larger NGOs with international funding; and intergovernmental organisations with an overseeing role across Turkey. The subjective viewpoints of interviewees have been weighed against documents from the organisations where they work, including public reports, social media pages and internal programme documentation, and analysed thematically. The data analysis is structured around three concepts used to unpack self-reliance, each of which has its own literature and development agenda: sustainability; women’s economic empowerment; and decent work. Sustainability captures the timeframes within self-reliance, which are often contested. Women’s economic empowerment captures the specific role of women’s paid employment as a development solution to displacement. Finally, decent work captures the psychosocial aspects of labour that are often assumed to be a part of self-reliance, and questions the lack of attention paid to labour conditions and meaningful work within livelihoods support. My research asks how each of these three concepts is operationalised within the specific context of livelihoods support for the displaced Syrian population in Izmir, and how staff and volunteers implementing this support navigate dilemmas they come across in relation to these concepts. It demonstrates that sustainability, women’s economic empowerment, and decent work are in effect re-defined through implementation, as I/NGO workers turn them into narrower and more implementable versions of the original concepts. Sustainability is understood to equate paid employment in the local economy, which is much more accessible to men than it is to women. Women’s economic empowerment is re-defined as individual preferences, which leads to livelihoods support being implemented as small scale income generation initiatives that are not concerned with sustainability. As such, women are expected to work towards a different version of self-reliance compared to men, where their own individual self-sufficiency is not prioritised. Decent work is implemented in two versions; one for men, which is concerned with creating formal employment understood to be both meaningful and rewarding with guaranteed good labour conditions. As women do not have the same access to paid employment, they are instead expected to find meaning in the social aspects of livelihoods support in the informal economy, and contribute to the well-being of others in this way. This points towards a version of self-reliance that is highly gendered, which also contributes to a construction of the ideal refugee man and woman that is deeply rooted in gendered constructs. Firstly, viewing paid employment within the local economy as the most sustainable option for displaced Syrians constructs this as the ideal way for refugees to behave. Despite the many problems with the jobs provided, Syrian men are expected to prefer them over other income generating activities. Secondly, viewing income generation for women as empowering based on women’s personal preferences, often for part-time work, constructs a different ideal for refugee women, where they are equally expected to earn money for their families, but without the prospect of individual self-sufficiency. Finally, viewing decent work as formality and income generation for Syrian men creates an ideal refugee man who is not supposed to be concerned with work being personally rewarding to himself, as long as he can earn money to support himself and his family. The ideal woman, on the other hand, should not be concerned with economic self-sufficiency, but be happy to work on behalf of the greater good of her community and family. These constructs are problematic in several ways. They create an ideal that is impossible to achieve for both Syrian men and women, since jobs that will render them self-sufficient are not actually available to them in Turkey, which is also the case for many other displaced populations around the world. If support is conditioned on behaving like jobs are still a good solution, this encourages refugees to take jobs that are exploitative and precarious. Further, this ideal is built on gender stereotypes that encourage refugees to behave in ways that reinforce their perceived social positions and gendered divisions of labour, for example by encouraging men to be breadwinners and women to be responsible for unpaid care work. This creates exclusion for those who do not conform to the expected roles and behaviours, and serves to reinforce gendered structures that cause inequality. Finally, this ideal promotes paid labour in neighbouring (often poor) countries as a solution to displacement, in a way that prioritises market benefits over the welfare of people. This creates further risks of exploitation and poverty for those displaced, caused by precarious labour. It also contributes to the continued de-valuation of unpaid labour as equally valuable and meaningful work, which further contributes to gender inequality.

This thesis examines how the issue of sexual violence against men during armed conflict is discursively constituted through both international law and the human rights advocacy activities of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). Starting from a feminist and poststructuralist International Relations (IR) standpoint, the thesis posits that both international law and human rights INGOs play a significant role in informing both understandings of the problem and responses to it. Building on an established literature that recognises the comparative absence of sexual violence against men from the activities of these two groups of organisations, the thesis goes beyond this to establish a detailed account of how the issue is marginalised or excluded and how it is talked about when it is included. In addition, it examines the extent to which existent articulations of sexual violence in armed conflict more broadly are configured in such a way as to exclude the possibility of including sexual violence against men. Drawing on a variety of documentation produced by human rights advocacy INGOs and several international criminal tribunals, the thesis uses a poststructuralist-informed discourse-theoretical methodological approach derived principally from Laura Shepherd’s Discourse-Theoretical Analysis (DTA) model. It analyses advocacy reports drawn from twelve of the largest human rights advocacy INGOs that work on sexual violence in armed conflict, as well as the texts of key international human rights treaties and instruments, and judgement documentation produced by the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) and the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The thesis finds that sexual violence against men in armed conflict has been represented in three principal ways by both human rights advocacy INGOs and international criminal law: (1) it is marginalised and either rendered as a secondary subject of concern or obscured entirely through a variety of discursive practices; (2) it is instead represented as a form of non-sexual torture rather than sexual violence; (3) it is constituted as a form of sexual and gender-based violence. The first two representations, the thesis argues, have significant implications for how we understand both sexual violence and gender in armed conflict. Firstly, they threaten to obscure the potential extent of the problem, and, in doing so, perpetuate misconceptualisations about sexual violence against men in particular and sexual violence in conflict more broadly. Secondly, they perpetuate problematic and essentialist understandings of gender the elide the ways in which both women and men can occupy various and overlapping roles and identities in armed conflict. The third representation, it is argued, avoids these problems and provides a much deeper conceptual understanding of sexual violence against both women and men. Care, however, must be taken to not slip back in to habits of privileging men as the subject of concern or obscuring the ways in which gender hierarchies inform violence against women.

Contemporary counterinsurgency has been characterised by a shift from the ‘kill or capture’ of insurgents to prioritising winning over civilian populations. This focus on the population brings a particular skillset to the centre of military practice. Prioritising understanding culture, training, mentoring and relationships, practices previously associated with peacekeeping operations are conducted alongside combat. Feminist literature on peacekeeping has traced the relationship between entrenched hierarchies of gender and race in military institutions and abuses perpetrated by peacekeepers. This thesis contributes to that literature. It focuses on the British Armed Forces to analyse how identity is constructed in relation to contemporary counterinsurgency, in order to understand changing military roles and the potential impact on civilian populations. The thesis comprises a feminist discourse analysis of select British military doctrine. Doctrine draws together practice, teaching, and policy and offers a productive site to study institutional identity. The analysis shows how these non-combat practices are made sense of in relation to different configurations of masculinity, which don’t evoke combat or aggression. Nonetheless, they are constructed as masculine identities, hierarchical in organisation and constituting relations of power. I argue this recourse to masculinity enables the framing of non-combat practices as warfare and so valuable military activity. However, this framing simultaneously restrains the ways in which they can be understood. The thesis further highlights an ambiguity in the texts which argue both for widespread institutional adaption to the practices, and their limitation to a specific specialism and personnel. This ambiguity I argue is productive for an institution facing an uncertain future, leaving open possibilities for reform, or to revert to focussing on traditional understandings of core combat related military tasks. This thesis contributes to feminist debate about the possibility for military reform, and the capacity for Armed Forces to act as agents for peace. I argue that military reform is possible and occurring; the British Armed Forces are developing more sophisticated approaches to gender, human security and culture. However, whilst this is likely to have some benefit, the (re)establishment of gendered and raced hierarchies, limit the extent to which such reform offers meaningful change.