In the world of “weaponised security,” technologies of violence are considered the best, or only realistic tools to provide security for the nation-state and for the more elite segments of a state’s population. In a Western context, this means mostly the white, heteronormative, middle- and upper-class segment of the population.
The concept of weaponised security is bound up in notions of the “national security state”—the conglomeration of borders, police, prisons, militaries, intelligence agencies, and other apparatus of coercive state control. In some countries, especially the United States, the concept of weaponised security is also tied to the pursuit of “full spectrum dominance”—the idea that the state’s structures of violence can have full awareness and control over people and politics anywhere in the world, at any time.
Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing, argues that the myth established by the national security state is that “without the constant threat of violent coercive intervention, society will unravel into a war of all against all.” In this context, “authoritarian solutions are not just necessary, they’re almost preferable.” The ideals of weaponised securityfacilitate a culture of violence, glorification of weapons, white supremacy, and militarisedmasculinity—all of which actively facilitate the commission of harms.
Bringing feminist and queer perspectives into an analysis of weaponised security includes examining and critiquing the technologies of violence that are used to “protect” this narrow conception of security. It also means challenging the notion of security itself, identifying intersectional oppressions caused by the dominant framing and positing instead a concept of collective care.
Weaponised technology
Scholars of gender and technology, such as Judy Wajcman, have argued that gender relations are “materialised in technology”.This is not to suggest that technology is inherently “masculine” or “feminine” but that the gender binary and gender hierarchies are often reinforced or even defined in relation to technology.
Technology is more than a set of objects; as Wajcmansays, technology “fundamentally embodies a culture or set of social relations made up of certain sorts of knowledge, beliefs, desires and practices.” Because of this, gender relations and patriarchal power have become interlinked with technology in terms of the process of their development and their use. Technologies “reveal the societies that invent and use them.” If technology is developed and utilised primarily within a framework of militarised masculinity, their creations will be instilled with their framework of thought, knowledge, language, and interpretation.
It is important to note that regardless of the sex or gender identity of any individual engineer or developer working on a particular project, the militarised, masculinised framework persists due it its dominance in our collective culture and the material realities of our political economies.
Two examples of gendered technologies of violence include nuclear weapons and autonomous weapons.
Nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons are the most extreme expression of violence and control of the patriarchal, racist, and capitalist world order. Even without being launched, they are used to project the power and invincibility of their possessor. They are the pinnacle of a state’s monopoly on violence, the ultimate signifier of domination.
The history of nuclear weapon development is a history of colonialism. They have been created and tested mostly upon stolen lands and waters, displacing and destroying the lives of Indigenous people around the world. They have caused catastrophic and intergenerational harm to marginalised and racialised communities globally.
The history of nuclear weapons is also one of patriarchy. Feminist scholars have long studied the connections between militarised masculinities, the quest for dominance in international relations, and nuclear weapons. Carol Cohn’s “close encounter with nuclear strategic analysis” starting in 1984 exposed the gendered discourse about nuclear weapons.
Cohn, along with Sara Ruddick and Felicity Ruby, also illuminated how nuclear disarmament is “feminised” and linked to disempowerment, weakness, and irrationality, while acquiring nuclear weapons is celebrated as a sign of strength, power, and rationality. It is purported to be the only real guarantee of national security—we can see this today with how officials from the United States and North Korea alike talk about their nuclear weapons.
Catherine Eschle and Claire Duncanson have explained how the framework of this kind of “realist,” “masculine” security accords status to nuclear weapons as both markers of masculine domination (capable of inflicting violence) and masculine protector (capable of deterring violence).
All these aspects of gendered nuclearism impacts nuclear policy today. Efforts to ban nuclear weapons have been confronted with patriarchal overtones of gaslighting and victim blaming. Nuclear-armed state officials argue that anyone wanting nuclear abolition is naïve, irrational, irresponsible, and emotional.
At the end of the day, the power allegedly conferred by nuclear weapons is prioritised over the harms they cause every single day and their potential to end of life on the planet as we know it. The theory that nuclear weapons keep the peace and prevent war is a project of the imagination that has the “realist” mantle bestowed upon it, even though as we can see very clearly right now, nuclear weapons do not keep the peace but make war even more dangerous.
Autonomous weapons
This relationship between perceptions of power and weaponised conceptions of security is also very visible in the debates about autonomous weapon systems.
If we think about militarised ideas about masculinity and power, and about how violence and weapons are upheld as tools of security, we can imagine how weapons that are programmed with sensors and software to determine who lives and who dies, will be used to execute the mission of patriarchy. This mission is one of domination, dehumanisation, and marginalisation.
The development of autonomous weapon systems is taking place in the broader context of the control of human lives globally through the rise of the digital and physical “panopticon”—a system of surveillance, incarceration, and execution that asserts the “full spectrum dominance” of the political and economic elite over the rest of the world’s population.
The development and use of weapons programmed to target people and kill them based on pre-programmed algorithms against people who are racialised, gendered, disabled, and otherwise categorised, will result in the violation of human rights and dignity. It will also perpetuate the increasing abstraction of violence and devaluation of human life.
As Christopher Ankersen warns, “Algorithms will be written by small groups of coders, who are in turn given instructions by an even smaller group of decision-makers,” which will “increase both the ‘black box effect’ and the in-built biases that already plague” artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Machine-learning applications provide systems with the ability to automatically learn and adapt based on experience, without being explicitly programmed. This raises extreme risks if machines are programmed to kill human beings. If a weapon system is programmed within a patriarchal, racist society—which it will be, if created in today’s world—it will be inscribed with these biases at the outset and, if it is a machine-learning system, continue to advance itself within this world order. The black box of AI is likely to perpetuate and reinforce existing norms of gender and power, possibly in ways that the engineers of these systems do not anticipate or deliberately programme—and certainly in ways that they do.
Racial and gender bias and other forms of discrimination can be built deliberately into the machine. Weapons could be programmed to target people of a certain skin colour or wearing certain religious markers, to target transwomen, or to target people with disabilities. This takes us from the drone “signature strike” to autonomous weapon “target profiles”.
In this way, autonomous weapon systems can be seen as categorisation machines. They will sort human beings, using sensors and software, into pre-programmed categories of race, gender, sex, or other “markers”. These “categories” or “classifications” will be patriarchal and racist and will further perpetuate discrimination and harm. In that sense, patriarchy and racism will be given persistence within the technology.
Changing the security paradigm
Both nuclear weapons and autonomous weapons, along with all other technologies of violence, are developed and deployed as part of the project of weaponised security. The perpetuation of an idealised notion of security of a state’s elite, based on violence masquerading as strength and power, is essential to the survival of state structures of violence such as militaries, the carceral system, border enforcement, and more. Without cultures of militarised masculinities and weaponised security, these institutions cannot be sustained.
What if compassion, collectiveness, cooperation, and care were idealised instead? What if categories of gender, race, and everything else were no longer treated as binaries—not as categories of exclusion and inclusion, but instead as a spectrum of being and experience in the world that were neither rewarded nor punished?
Unlearning the alleged necessity of weaponised security is essential to exploring what could be built in its place. This means turning on its head so much of what we are taught about what is necessary for safety and security in our world. It means learning to reject violence as a solution to all problems, interrogating and challenging systems of power that assert they exist to protect while instead they persecute and oppress. It means deconstructing the gender norms we are trained in from birth and exploring alternative ways of being in the world.
Abolishing weaponised security
Abolition is the heart of this work. The language and practice of abolition provides context and clarity to our efforts for social transformation. The simultaneous pursuit of tearing down violent structures while building up systems for equality, justice, and well-being is the crux of abolitionism. Abolition is about looking at the root causes of harm and violence and working to build alternatives that prevent this harm, rather than relying on existing structures that only create more harm.
As Kimberle Crenshaw explains, people experience oppression based on the intersections of their many identities and experiences.Abolition looks to dismantle the structures that facilitate these myriad forms of oppression. By doing so, itseeks not the destruction, but the transformation of our current world order, including through the disarming, demilitarising, defunding, and disbanding of entities of coercive state power that work against peace and freedom. Abolition is not just about tearing down the system, but also about building anew, based on cooperation, equity, and justice for all.
A divest-invest approach is essential to abolition. This means divesting money and support from institutions that cause harm—militaries, weapons producers, police, etc.—and investing instead in care—in education, housing, jobs, food security, ecological sustainability, etc. This divest-invest approach is central to dealing with the militarised masculinitiesthat persist at the heart of conceptions of weaponised security. We need to divest from violent, hierarchal forms of masculinity. We need to deconstruct gender altogether, getting away from a binary of men/women, straight/gay, trans/cis. Binaries enable hierarchies. Gender binaries are accompanied by racial, religious, and other hierarchies. Binaries put people in boxes. They constrain how we can be, look, act, and feel when we are contained within certain bodies. Undoing gender helps us undo militarised masculinities.
This, in turn, can help the broader project of abolition. Deconstructing gender and dismantling militarised masculinities in particular cuts away the foundations of state violence. It undermines the idea that “security” achieved through violence and control is necessary or desirable. Divesting from militarised masculinities means refusing to buy into idealised notions of strong men and passive women, of men needing to be providers and protectors and of women needing protection. Rejecting the gender binary is essential to this work. To undo rigid norms and expectations, we need to start questioning the foundations on which they are built.
Deconstructing gender norms also helps expand the scope for queer approaches to care and kinship, moving us away from the “male provider” and “masculine protector” tropes within the concept of “nuclear families,” to think about care, obligation, and solidarity on the level of communities, societies, the world, and even beyond humans to the land, water, air, plants, and animals. Abolition is a political project of “promiscuous care”—of living in a more expansive way than our current capitalist, racist, patriarchal society tells us we can.
Thus, while we work for the abolition of nuclear weapons, or to prevent the development of autonomous weapons, we need to also stand against those who seek to develop them and the cultures of militarised masculinities and weaponised security they perpetuate. All of this is essential for the pursuit not just of disarmament or demilitarisation, but to peace and justice more broadly. To be effective, we need to look beyond the technologies of violence to the systems of oppression and domination that seek their construction.
Bio:
Ray Acheson (they/them) is Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, for which they provide analysis and advocacy at the United Nations and other international forums on matters of disarmament. Ray also serves on the steering groups of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, Stop Killer Robots, and the International Network on Explosive Weapons. They are author of the books Banning the Bomb, Smashing the PatriarchyandAbolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, as well as papers such as Autonomous Weapons and Patriarchy, Notes on Nuclear Weapons and Intersectionality in Theory and Practice, and Abolishing Militarised Masculinities.