Tough Enough? Beyond the dominion of conventional masculinity in the politics of national security

Presentation by Charles Knight to the Women in Public Policy weekly seminar, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA USA, 18 October 2005 - as delivered

Author’s Note: This is a work in progress. Please do not quote without prior permission from the author. This is a new area of work and discovery for me and I very much invite friendly guidance and criticism. Please contact me at: cknight(at)comw.org or 617-547-4474. I am co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute, Cambridge, MA USA. http://www.comw.org/pda/

Before I attempt to describe for you my recent adventures in gender space, I want to tell you a little about who I am in the world of national security policy. Most of my time is spent on what I would call policy assessment with an occasional chance to develop ideas for policy alternatives – hence the name of my organization – the Project on Defense Alternatives.

In the last four years most of my work has been connected to the war in Iraq and I am proud to credit the Project on Defense Alternatives with several important and very substantive critiques of that war. In detail, this work includes such activities as reconciling inconsistent government accounts of the distribution of U.S. troops deployed to hundreds of countries around the globe – this detail in service of assessing the stress of the Iraq occupation on the U.S. Army in order, in turn, to develop something meaningful to say about the sustainability of the Bush-era policies of invasion and occupation of medium-size countries.

Almost never does gender analysis come into this work. Most of what I do stays comfortably within the familiar rational discourse paradigm.
Nonetheless, I have long been troubled by what passes as rational discourse in the mainstream of national security debates. This was never more so than during the 2004 presidential campaign when it became clear to me that a discourse of 'toughness' was dominating what was at best a meager national security debate. It was then that I decided I turn much more of my professional attention to gender politics.

The toughness discourse is part of what Carol Cohn has called a "gendered system of meanings" that underlie the politics of national security. This is also a coded discourse that signals affinity with militaristic and generally conservative policy options. When effective it serves to block the advance of progressive military and foreign policies that are characteristically less reliant on military means.

Interestingly, it is not primarily conservative Republicans who work the 'toughness discourse,' but rather it is the Democrats who use it most frequently. I'll mention a few recent examples:

Al From and Bruce Reed, leaders of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, wrote in the May issue of the DLC magazine Blueprint about overcoming voters’ doubts about the Democratic Party's toughness and resolve on national security issues and about the need to "recapture the muscular, progressive internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy."
Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left Democratic organization called the New Democratic Network wrote in September of last year: “Democrats must erode Republican’s advantage on leadership [and] match their toughness on security…”

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Please read the entire paper here!