“Women” in Global Biopolitics: The Case of the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar

Abstract

The current operations of post-conflict reconstruction missions on the international scale increasingly focus on women by designing special projects to enhance their security while meeting their needs such as health, education and employment. This trend can be called the securitization of women. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the ways in which the securitization of women can be relevant to the production of “bare life” in the state of exception rather than the rise of their security, drawing on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. The specific focus is placed on the post-conflict conditions of Afghanistan since it contains the dual frontlines of the reconstruction support operations and the war on terrorism. Through examining the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team to Kandahar (KPRT) and its strategic operation of various “signature projects” in Afghanistan, this paper endeavors to address the question: how and to what extent these signature projects are designed not only to meet the needs of the local population, but also to be readily identifiable as ‘Canadian projects’ because the primary goal is to change the overall image of Canadians and their soldiers from “occupiers” to “liberators.” By doing so, this paper highlights the paradox surrounding the signature projects, that is, the more the local population becomes healthy, the more the risk of their death raises. In this vein, it is further maintained that this paradox appears on female bodies rather than male bodies. This paper thus insists that the securitization of women propelled by KPRT amounts to forcing Afghan women to be in the most fragile position among the local population.
To this end, this paper is composed of two sections. The first section briefly discusses the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics to illustrate how these concepts allow us to look into the dynamism of world politics by shedding light on the ways in which sovereignty is deterritorialized and local lives are globally depoliticized. It explains that international society attempts to sustain the existence by surveying, controlling, and improving the lives of the populations in “failed or failing states.” The second section more specifically examines the signature projects of KPRT that aim to improve the lives of the local population, women and children in particular. The careful examination exposes how these projects are operated to prevent the local population from supporting and/or joining armed groups. It also highlights that the projects transform the recipients into the targets of armed groups who use killing to show the incapability of international society and the Afghan government.