Reclaiming Women, Peace and Security as an Anti-colonial Project: The CEE Perspective

As we mark the 25^th anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, it seems unthinkable that UNSCR 1325 could ever be conceived today by a Security Council and a world involved in escalating violence, authoritarianism, growing militarization, anti-gender mobilization, and deepening feminist tensions. Resisting these multiple insecurities and striving for a more peaceful, gender-just future entails advancing WPS as an anti-colonial agenda through cross-regional dialogues and coalitions. These should amplify feminist experiences and embodied knowledges from regions and spaces peripheral to the dominant, frequently exclusionary, western WPS initiatives. Alongside much-needed perspectives from the Global South, there is also the “non-region” of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE),[i] formerly termed the “Second World”, which has been epistemically erased from global WPS debates.[ii] These WPS peripheralizations contrast sharply with the urgent need to understand the colonial and imperial legacies fuelling these ongoing wars and violence and impacting societies globally, including through new spirals of militarization. 

Underestimated Warnings from CEE 

Reflecting on the WPS anniversary brings me back to my own WPS journey, which started in the 2010s through feminist civil society activism in the Czech Republic and continued with my doctoral research on Ukraine. As I drew inspiration mainly from the existing western-driven WPS knowledge, I was surprised about the seeming absence of WPS scholarship on Ukraine, CEE, and the region’s interactions with international feminist and WPS networks. Only later did I come to realize that this absence is rooted in deeper epistemic injustices.[iii] There were, nonetheless, important CEE initiatives such as the International Gender Workshop on Gender and (Military) Conflict in Eastern European Countries through Feminist Lenses,[iv] convened in Lviv by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (HBS) office in Kyiv in 2017. These regional feminist gatherings enabled us to see the shared, diverse experiences of communism and post-socialism which have formed the richness of feminist thought and activism in CEE. This workshop remains a valuable source of local, embodied knowledge on many WPS themes, from Ukrainian women’s resistance during Euromaidan, to internally displaced women in Abkhazia, to post-war gendered violence in Chechen society, to case studies from former Yugoslavia. The earlier 2014 HBS International Workshop was another important source of local CEE knowledge that warned of the growing, transnational, anti-gender movements linked to US religious organisations, Russia, and Russian oligarchs.[v] Many have noted that Russia’s nostalgia for Soviet imperial identity manifests not only in its regional aggressions to regain territory,[vi] but also through gendered narratives such as “Gayrope” that revived the anti-western sentiments propagated by the Soviets.[vii]

Reading this a decade later, it is clear that Russia’s real wars and gender wars alike have been seriously underestimated internationally, as has their transnational character. Numerous warnings from CEE highlighted Russia’s anti-gender mobilization and colonial ambitions, yet neither the privileged Global North nor the decolonial voices in the Global South showed much willingness to see, listen to, or understand us.[viii] Agnieszka Graff[ix] contends that western feminists have long viewed transnational anti-gender movements as a concern limited to CEE, paying attention to them only once the issue spread westward. Later warnings from across Europe then urged that this is not just a backlash but a systematic effort by well-organized transnational networks to dismantle the multilateral system and promote an alternative political, social, and international order.[x] WPS actors in CEE have likewise identified anti-gender mobilization as a key concern the WPS framework must address.[xi]

Blindness to Local Colonialities

However, the CEE region’s epistemic absence within WPS scholarship, decolonial studies, and international relations at large has also led to the knowledge it offers being reduced to Russia-centric frames defined by “great power” thinking, rather than through a deeper understanding of Russia’s colonial and patriarchal impacts.[xii] This is despite Russia’s long history of territorial conquests, forced Russification, forced starvation, mass deportations, racial violence, and genocide across its empire.[xiii] As Galyna Kotliuk puts it, this consistent epistemic blindness has effectively served as an excuse to ignore the biggest colonial power in the Eurasian continent.[xiv] 

Similarly, Madina Tlostanova observes that the global anti-colonial initiatives have dismissed CEE coloniality, being either silent on Ukraine or supporting Russia against the homogenized West.[xv] She critiques the rigid, binary logic of decoloniality that denounces Ukraine for siding with Europe and excuses dictators who instrumentalize anti-western narratives.[xvi] These approaches can also be traced among certain (postcolonial) feminists in the Global North and South, even though many feminists, especially among practitioners and civil society, have actively supported Ukraine’s cause. Still, some feminist circles continue to advance troubling arguments regarding why Ukraine should not be supported. These include blaming NATO ‘expansionism’,[xvii] ‘NATO instrumentalizing LGBTQ rights in its propaganda,’[xviii] or referring to the war as a White European War.[xix] Darya Tsymbalyuk explains that the narrative of Ukrainians as White neglects Ukraine’s context at the intersection of multiple colonial regimes and perpetuates the logic of White supremacy by portraying Ukrainians as considered worthy of support solely because they are White and European.[xx] CEE feminists have also argued that such narratives deny Ukraine’s anti-colonial struggle and fail to attend to the diverse identities and Indigenous societies impacted by centuries of Russian imperial and colonial violence.[xxi] Even post-colonial scholars whom I admired and learned from when starting my WPS research have denied Ukraine’s right to self-defence, arguing that continued military support for Ukraine places one on the wrong side of history because it supposedly prolongs war and suffering.[xxii] This view, however, ignores that an immediate ‘peace’ would not be peace, but capitulation, occupation, and therefore the continuation of violence and profound injustices, including the forced Russification of unlawfully deported Ukrainian children.[xxiii]

These feminist practices undermine attempts to articulate both feminism and the WPS agenda as anti-colonial projects, reinforcing Russia’s imperial innocence[xxiv]and enabling the continued sidelining of Ukraine and the broader CEE region simultaneously. The 25^th WPS anniversary again exposes the region’s near-total epistemic erasure. A brief review of WPS@25 debates, events, and publications suggests that CEE is seen as irrelevant to the mainstream WPS discourse on feminist resilience, feminist peace, and security strategies devised by western feminist scholars with institutional power and knowledge authority. In these debates, CEE often remains peripheral or tokenized, at best reduced to a case study extracted for western armchair pacifists or ‘just war’ theorizing. This uncomfortably echoes the 1990s when, in the words of Hana Havelková, western theories were routinely applied to eastern realities[xxv] and when, as Marina Hughson (Blagojević) has noted, any speaking outside of western frameworks was dismissed as backwardness, subjectivity, or even patriotic or nationalistic narrow-mindedness.[xxvi]

Gender as a Geopolitical Tool

Today, Russia is weaponizing gender as a geopolitical tool for its wartime violence in Ukraine and for spreading illiberal, anti-western sentiments globally.[xxvii] While doing so, Russia is instrumentalizing anti-colonial struggle to gain the support of the Global South. However, as Selbi Durdiyeva reminds us, decolonial struggle belongs to Indigenous people. Russia is not now and has never been a decolonial ally, and its anti-western rhetoric does not make it any less of a colonial,  imperialist country.[xxviii] The rigidity of decolonial thinking that centres on the West and US imperialism specifically and remains blind to Russia’s manipulativeness[xxix] also renders invisible Russia’s key role in driving militarism, including heavily militarizing the Russian Federation and Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.[xxx] This comes with a combination of anti-gender politics in a Russia that is turning more inward[xxxi] and with the further strengthening of Russia’s ‘remasculinization’. All this is strikingly obvious and visible today, yet many refuse to see it. 

Indeed, it feels profoundly absurd to commemorate 25 years of UNSCR 1325 while the Security Council is chaired by the Russian Federation, a global anti-WPS champion that propagates a lawless world rooted in violence, militarism, misogyny, and authoritarianism. Moreover, anti-gender actors today govern the US administration, and ‘traditional values’ now constitute a key point of convergence between Russia and the U.S. Government. They have already dismantled the WPS agenda and cut its international funding.[xxxii] The ideological alignment of the US with Russia as a leading defender of traditional values now informs the US approach to peace talks, encouraging their siding with the aggressor and relying on its narrative. In this power game, Ukraine (as well as Europe) is again cast as powerless — a country presumed to hold no cards. This seriously threatens attempts to hold Russia accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the widespread use of sexual violence in its ongoing war against Ukraine.[xxxiii]

Feminists Must Reveal Colonial and Patriarchal Legacies, Including Russian Ones

Today, feminist solidarity and a decolonial WPS critique and practice are needed more than ever to counter multifaceted threats, including anti-gender forces which are already dismantling international multilateralism. However, if solidarity is only possible with those who are against the West, then such solidarity is both unethical and un-feminist.[xxxiv] To reimagine the WPS agenda as genuinely anti-colonial, feminists must stop using the rigid binaries which reinforce masculine geopolitical thinking. They must overcome their own ignorance and blindness, aiding with the revelation of the colonial and patriarchal legacies of empires which continue to fuel global violence and militarism today, including Russia. Crucially, while challenging militarization in the West, WPS actors must also advocate for the demilitarisation of the Russian Federation as a first step towards a long-term peace in the region and globally.[xxxv]

 The views and opinions in this text do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.