Feminists have seldom condemned the fact that nations have used women’s rights to justify wars

Nandita Haksar

Iranian influencer, Moone Rahimi’s Instagram post showing her dancing in support of the war on Iran went viral. This is not the only post of Iranian diaspora scattered in the West that has been celebrating the US bombing of their country; there are others too. Many in the Iranian diaspora have joined pro-Trump demonstrations because they think the bombs will liberate them from an authoritarian regime.

Yes, the regime in Iran could be called authoritarian but that does not give the US (and Israel) the right to start a war; even top US security officials and intelligence agencies have said that Iran did not pose any threat to the US. Experts have all categorically stated that the war is not only unwarranted and illegal under international law, the Iranian women inside Iran, too, have also said they did not need

American assistance to liberate themselves. A widely shared post pointed out that: 

• 40 per cent of Iran’s nuclear scientists are women.

• 70 per cent of all of Iran’s scientists are women. 

• 99 per cent of Iranian women are literate or educated.

It is a well-established fact that interventions by the US, Israel and their allies have never led to greater democracy or liberation of women in the countries they have invaded or tried to carry out regime change. The examples of Afghanistan and Iraq are there for anyone to see.

What many western feminists (including those in India) have failed to do is to condemn the fact that women’s rights have been used to justify wars, invasions and torture of Muslim men. Weaponisation of women’s rights has fuelled the growing Islamophobia in the aftermath of the so-called War against Terror.

In the present war against Iran, Israeli leaders and security state actors have explicitly invoked the oppression of Iranian women by the regime and its proxies to justify drone strikes, sabotage, or missile attacks as supporting ‘democracy’ and ‘women’s rights’. 

This narrative has been denounced by feminists in Iraq, Afghanistan and now in Iran, and have condemned international feminists for imperialist hijacking of feminist discourse. However, feminists like Katharina Motyl have condemned use of women’s rights to justify wars as imperial feminism. Her writings expose how women’s rights are repeatedly mobilised throughout history to justify military expansion. Her work traces a long history—from the Mexican-American War to counter terrorism campaigns—where the ‘liberation’ of women serves as a moral veneer for empire building and contains or replaces more critical feminist politics. 

Lila Abu Lughod is perhaps the most well-known critic of Western feminists who, she has argued in her books, helped legitimise the invasion of Afghanistan by framing Afghan women as universally oppressed by ‘Muslim culture,’ thereby reproducing colonial and Orientalist binaries between ‘liberal West’ and ‘backward Islam.’

Imperial feminism has been responsible for justification of brutal torture of Muslim men accused or suspected of ‘terrorism’ and has also rationalised large-scale human rights violations in the name of upholding women’s rights. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) too has been manipulated to include violation of women’s right in the broad definition of ‘peace and democracy’.

Articles 24 and 39, Chapters VI, and VII of the UN Charter Article 39 gives the Security Council the jurisdiction to use of force in the case of a ‘threat to peace’, which has been interpreted broadly in Security Council resolutions to include breaches in human rights and democratic rule, which has been stretched to means women’s rights.

Former First Lady Laura Bush in a radio address on 17 November 2001, declared that the war on terrorism was also ‘a fight for the rights and dignity of women,’ explicitly linking the invasion of Afghanistan to the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban rule. “Good morning. I’m Laura Bush, and I’m delivering this week’s radio address to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Tablian. That regime is now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan--especially women--are rejoicing.” 

The state department similarly produced reports such as The Taliban’s War Against Women to document repression and build a moral case for military action, presenting the campaign as simultaneously about security and human rights protection.

We must read recent accounts by Afghan women living under Taliban rule to know that the US War Against Terror did not achieve the goal of liberation of women, but quite the opposite.

Muslim feminists and those who have a clear anti-imperialist ideology know that imperialist wars do not lead to liberation of anyone, men, women or children.

Feminists like Shaimma Abdelkarim have pointed out that “This rhetoric creates a dehumanised radical subject (an ‘Other’) that becomes the object of fear and a gendered subject (i.e. Muslim women) that lacks agency and is in need of protection… the UN adoption of resolution 1325 in 2000 on women, peace, and security has been integral for aligning women empowerment with calls for humanitarian intervention. The resolution assumes that the inclusion of women in humanitarian missions offers a gender narrative to security.”

In the years after 9/11, the merging of women’s rights rhetoric with security policy gave rise to what some scholars call ‘Securo feminism,’ in which empowering women becomes a tool of national security and counter terrorism strategy rather than a project for human liberation against patriarchy… North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and US officials, including figures such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, repeatedly invoked the subjugation of women as a threat to global stability, arguing that more gender-equal societies are less likely to produce terrorism.

Azeezah Kaniji points out in her article titled ‘Save us from Securo-feminism’ that there is ‘a collusion of some strains of feminism with the war on terror,’ and ‘this is not an “aberration” or “co-optation’’ Rather, it is the continuation of a long history of western feminist collaborations with white supremacist and imperial rule.’ 

Securo-feminists ‘rescue’ narratives that masks the geopolitical and militaristic aims of the war on terror and erases the agency of local women’s movements. It should be noted that despite the proliferation of far-right and fascist parties and movements across western states, the United Nations’ 2020 ‘global’ consultations on “the gendered dimensions of violent extremism” focused on every region of the world except for North America and Western Europe-–perpetuating the colonial geography of “the West and the Rest”, in which the Rest have extremism while the West has enlightenment.

The securo-feminists have justified greater militarisation, surveillance, and intervention, while doing little to address the structural causes of violence against women, especially in war torn Afghanistan and Iraq and now in Iran. 

In practice, women in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Iran have often borne the brunt of violence, displacement, and economic collapse.

Iranian women activists have generally responded to foreign military or ‘regime change’ interventions with a mix of solidarity-based opposition, strategic distancing, and fierce insistence on domestic agency, rather than embracing foreign powers as ‘saviours.’

The impact of the war against Iran has had an impact on people all over the world, including India. As lakhs of workers have lost their jobs and migrant workers can be seen leaving the cities to return to their villages, it is the women and children who will suffer the most. When the workers in West Asia are evacuated and can no longer send money home, the conflict within the families and violence against women increases. Just as women faced displacement in Iran, Lebanon and West Asia, here in India women become internally displaced persons (IDP) and the rate of poverty rises. 

Weaponisation of women’s rights takes many forms. In the name of protecting Muslim women’s rights, the Hindu majoritarian government has used legal reform to humiliate and subjugate Muslims. The so-called legal reforms have done little to ameliorate the condition of Muslim women, and the oppression of Hindu women has been made invisible. Thus, feminist politics is co-opted into a project that serves power rather than emancipation.

Indian feminists have yet to formulate a clear understanding and condemn the weaponisation of women’s rights in service of India’s own war against terror which has justified an unprecedented Islamophobia and politics of hatred. Apart from the feminists, the larger community of artists and filmmakers too have not gone beyond glorification of past Hindu-Muslim unity, and not protested the deeper, structural reasons for the growing abyss between the majority community and the minorities, especially Muslims. This has been achieved by demonising Muslims in Bollywood, media, and political discourse. This has been achieved by the war-on-terror narrative as a means of liberating women. It is not merely a question of defending minority rights but of India’s advance towards authoritarian regime where all democratic space is closed for all of us.