The Fragmentation of Gender Orders in Contemporary Wars
Authors: Mary Kaldor & Christine Chinkin
This Special Issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding argues that fragmentation is a structuring condition of contemporary conflict, operating within domestic conflict systems and across the international order. Domestically, authority is dispersed among elites, armed groups, and civic actors; internationally, peacebuilding frameworks have given way to parallel mediation, regionalised intervention, and competing geopolitical projects. These forms are mutually reinforcing. What appears as disorder is a patterned architecture of authority through which peace processes reconfigure rather than consolidate power. The articles show that contemporary peace architectures manage fragmentation rather than resolve it, producing a post-liberal peace that blurs the boundaries among settlement, stabilisation, and predatory governance.
This article makes the argument that the character of gender order shapes and is shaped by war and that different types of contemporary warfare construct different patterns of gender order. It contends that the conjunction of different types of war, especially ‘new wars’, in the contemporary period has led to a fragmentation of gender orders. It develops this argument through four dimensions of war – narratives, roles, harms, and political economy – and applies the framework to the war in Ukraine for illustration. It concludes that the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda fails to take fragmentation into account.