Gender Knowledge (Re-)Production in International Security Organizations: The Case of NATO

International security organizations like NATO increasingly engage with the role of gender in institutional processes and practices. Much of this engagement can be traced back to the successes of the feminist movements of the late twentieth century, manifesting in achievements such as UNSCR 1325. Even though NATO’s policies and actions have far-reaching effects, reproducing gender norms on a global scale, we do not actually know much about the kind of gender knowledge that is dominant within NATO and which informs NATO’s decision-making. Employing the analytical concept gender knowledge, the (re-)production of gender knowledge is understood here as providing the parameters for ‘common sense’ thinking about gender within an organization. By combining Feminist International Relations with insights from the Sociology of Knowledge and the Science and Technology Studies in an innovative theoretical framework, this research project investigates how various, sometimes conflicting ideas and assumptions around gender become developed and contested in NATO. In this paper, I explore gender knowledge development and contestation within NATO since 2000 based on qualitative analysis of official NATO documents as well as semi-structured expert interviews with individuals from different NATO offices. Theoretically, this project adds to the burgeoning body of literature on gender knowledge production. While we already have research using the gender knowledge concept in the context of international organizations (Young and Scherrer 2010), the EU (Cavaghan 2017), and national bureaucracies (Freidenvall 2021), we do not know how this plays out in the context of security. As an institution of hegemonic masculinity, ideas about gender are part and parcel of the organization’s structure and practices, underpinning how NATO "does" security. While gender norms play a role in other organizations as well, they can be assumed to be even stronger in security organizations. In researching NATO’s approach to gender at the level of knowledge, I also aim to contribute to the literature on gender equality transformation and the debate around whether military organizations can be credible actors of such transformation.