Gender, Citizenship and War: How Russia’s War on Ukraine Affects Women’s Political Rights
Olena Strelnyk
Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, Heft 1-2023, S. 87-94.
At the beginning of February 2022, feminist groups and women’s organizations in different cities across Ukraine were preparing to hold the annual feminist march for International Women’s Rights Day on March 8. Then organizers thought whether it was appropriate to march in the threat of full-scale war looming. Peaceful assemblies were not banned at the time, however there was a risk of public criticism that it was not the ‘right time’ for such an event to take place. In the town of Poltava, where I lived, I was a co-organizer of the protest, and the organizing team made the decision to hold the march but to develop appropriate messages for the public in the context of security challenges. For obvious reasons, the demonstration did not ultimately go ahead because of the beginning of the full-scale war.
The idea of human rights and gender equality is important for understanding the position of Ukraine, which is currently paying an extremely high price for its freedom and independence from the ‘Russian world’ (Russkiy mir), where there is no place for the values of human rights, gender equality, and countering gender-based violence. Moreover, gender and sexuality occupy a central place in the Russian campaign against the European Union and the West, and this cultural war has played a major part in legitimizing the actual war against Ukraine (Graff/Korolczuk 2022).
Especially after signing the association agreement with the EU in 2014, Ukraine has made significant progress in gender equality. These changes were not only a formal response by the Ukrainian state to the demands of the association agreement, but also a consequence of the powerful women’s movement in Ukraine.
The war dramatically affects the situation of women and their social, civil, political, cultural and ecological rights. In this paper, I focus on what is happening with women’s political rights in the current situation. What do we know about positive and problematic impacts and what challenges does the war create for the feminist movement in Ukraine?
This paper was developed in January 2023 and concerns processes that are not completed. It should be noted that in such a situation of dramatic social change, some reflections might quickly become irrelevant.
My theoretical perspective is based on (feminist) revisions of the classical concept of citizenship. According to T. H. Marshall (1965), citizenship entails civil rights such as liberty of the person and freedom of thought or religion; political rights such as the right to participate in the exercise of political power; but also social rights such as the right to economic welfare and security to work and to have a minimum standard of living. Later approaches indicate that citizenship goes beyond the legal and political relationship between individual and the state, to involve participation in civil society. In addition to being about a status that confers rights and obligations, citizenship is also a practice whereby people are able to participate in shaping their societies (Meer/Seve 2004, 9).
I start with the issue of how citizenship is related to citizen’s duty to defend the state: I focus on the issue of military mobilization and service as it is not only part of the patriarchal order, but also an important context affecting the possibilities of political and public representation of women and their rights. I ask how the war affects women’s political rights as well as opportunities to influence decision making, and their agency as political and civil actors. Finally, I present some of my thoughts on the war as a challenge for Ukrainian feminism.
Gender, Citizenship, and the Duty to Defend the State
The impact of war on gender ideologies, citizenship and women has been the focus of numerous classic feminist works. In times of war, traditional representations of gender roles are reinforced, as in most countries with conscription armies, including Ukraine, women are exempt. Gender ideas are constructed during wartime based on the essentialist ideas that men are ‘protectors’ while women are ‘protected’ (Yuval-Davis 1997; Enloe 1983, 2000; Cockburn 2012).
In Ukraine, citizenship in the context of war and duty to defend the state is constructed de jure as gender neutral but de facto as predominantly a man’s responsibility. According to martial law in Ukraine, the vast majority of civilian men aged 18 to 60 can be mobilized and are banned from leaving the country. This law does not mean that all men are conscripted: different waves involve the mobilization of different categories of men. Some groups of men are exempt from mobilization and allowed to leave the country, or they can be mobilized only with their consent. These are those who are unfit for military service due to health; men who have three or more children under the age of 18; men raising children under the age of 18 alone; men raising a child with a disability. In the meantime, trans women, in case they have not changed their documents, have to complete this additional procedure to get permission to leave the country which might be complicated during the war (NGO Insight 2022).
Currently, men who do not conform to a role of ‘defender’ and are perceived as having refused to fight in the national army face social exclusion. As of July 2022, officially more than one million people are sustaining the activities of the security and defence sector in Ukraine (Melnyk 2022). Despite the fact that not all men or even not a majority of them are on a frontline, gender expectations that men should or have to fight are quite strong. According to a recent study, some internally displaced people stated that the local people had a negative attitude towards them. This was especially true for men because of the idea that men are defenders and should fight, but not stay in safe areas. According to some respondents, these prejudices led to some barriers to accessing housing for men (CEDOS 2022). I guess that men displaced abroad can also face stigma, even stronger.
Under martial law, civilian women сan be mobilized only with their consent, and they are free to leave the country. The implementation of the law on military registration of women of certain professions and probably some further restriction for them was postponed at least till October 2023 (BBC News Ukraine 2022).
This legal framework for military service demonstrates gendered citizenship and reflects the patriarchal tradition of the army as a masculinised and conservative social institution. The ideas about the roles of women and men in Ukraine are very traditional, and society will have to rethink the issue of the involvement of both men and women in the defence of the state. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the necessity to mobilize more people to be ready for armed resistance have encouraged Ukrainian society to see women as (potential) soldiers (Martsenyuk 2022).
Ukraine has already come a long way in the direction of gender-responsive changes in the professional army. Until 2014, the Armed Forces of Ukraine traditionally remained an extremely conservative social institution. The army was semi-decayed and did not receive sufficient public or state attention, with no gender reforms. With the beginning of the war in Luhansk and Donetsk regions in 2014, many women who went to serve faced a considerable number of restrictions and challenges, in particular the fact that many positions in the army were prohibited to them. These problems were discovered during the research and advocacy project ‘Invisible Battalion’ in 2015 dedicated to the position of women in the army (Grytsenko/Kvit/Martsenyuk 2016). After the research and advocacy campaign, the list of military professions allowed for women in the professional army was significantly expanded and the need for full gender equality in the security sector and the destruction of the ‘glass ceiling’ became the subject of public debate.
Now women make up 22% of all military personnel. In total, 38,000 women serve in the army of Ukraine, about 5,000 of them are on the front line, and we see in the example of media and public discourse an increase in their visibility and agency (Sitnikova 2022). A gender-sensitive approach is gradually being introduced in the security sector, and it is worth noting once again that servicewomen fought for these changes, and that these changes were not granted to them by the authorities from the top-down (Hrytsenko 2022). For example, Women Veterans founded the “Ukrainian Women Veteran Movement”, an initiative to strengthen women veterans and increase their role in decision-making processes regarding governance, security, and defence.
Political Participation and Decision-making
War affects women’s opportunities for political participation, influence on decision-making, and active citizenship in a broad sense.
One of the obstacles for women’s active citizenship are caring responsibilities. Feminist theories of citizenship criticize the dichotomy of private and public, personal, and political in scientific research and concepts of citizenship, emphasizing that women’s activities in the private sphere are closely related to the functioning of society (ten Dam/Volman 1998; Held 2006; Reznikov 2022; Fuchs/Hinterhuber 2022). Some citizenship studies deconstructing the dichotomy of private and public raise the question of the role of care in women’s activism as a practice of citizenship. For example, women’s social roles, fixed in the private sphere, become an obstacle to their political and civic participation. This is especially relevant in the context of the war in Ukraine which has immensely increased women’s unpaid care work: women are mainly responsible for adapting the family to new conditions in the situation of displacement and are mostly responsible for getting humanitarian aid for their families. Childcare services have become increasingly unavailable. In the frontline regions, kindergartens do not operate at all, in safer regions they are often overloaded. Some families prefer home childcare due to safety considerations.
Another challenge for women’s influence on decision making is the fact that in wartimes the voice and position of people with military expertise is greatly enhanced, both symbolically and politically, аnd these are mostly men. According to media monitoring, since the full-scale war started, the representation of women as both experts and heroines of publications in the media has decreased. On average, online media quote female experts in only 16% of materials (7% less than in the third quarter of 2021), respectively, male experts were quoted in 84%. As heroines, women are mentioned in 22% of materials (by 7% less than last year), and men in 78% of online media materials (Instytut masovoi informatsii 2022).
Ukraine has achieved a significant increase in the representation of women in government bodies, particularly, in elected ones. Women’s representation in the parliament, regional and city councils increased significantly in comparison with the previous elections: on 9% in the parliament (to 21%), on 12% in regional councils (to 27%), on 4% in city councils (to 33%) not least thanks to the mechanism of gender quotas in party lists implemented in 2015 (with amendments in 2020).
In the context of the war, there are contradictory trends at the level of decision-making and political influence of women as a component of citizenship. At the informal community level, in government-controlled cities, respondents of research carried out by UN Women and Care International note that people’s participation in decision-making and management of resources has increased, due to the active self-organizing efforts of volunteers and civil society. This is especially true for women, who lead and manage the majority of humanitarian response measures and volunteer groups. However, at the level of formal decision-making processes the majority of respondents who are representatives of women’s NGO and local and national governance agreed that it has become more difficult to influence these kinds of decisions due to the centralization of power and increased role of the military administrations in wartime decision-making (UN Women 2022).
Moreover, I expect that because of the war, the rights of citizens, and understanding what it means to be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ citizen will be constructed along the lines of involvement in the state defence. Those who fought will have a stronger position, and this will lead to a certain hierarchization of citizenship both in the sense of social rights and of whose voice will be prioritized. The voices of men who did not fight as well as women in general or those not involved explicitly in volunteering will be marginalized. Those displaced abroad will be symbolically excluded from citizenship, but also with a distinct gender specificity: I suppose that Ukrainian society tolerates women, especially mothers who have fled the country with their children, but not men who might be symbolically excluded from citizenship.
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