Wilson fellow discusses women’s rights and U.S. foreign policy

    Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow Alison Brysk spoke yesterday to a group of students and faculty about the way in which the U.S. government uses foreign policy initiatives to promote women’s rights around the world.

    “The feedback that I get from my students is that they would like to hear more about gender issues in international relations so we wanted to do something about that,” Professor of Political Science Richard Eichenberg said. “I got together with a group of faculty ... and we decided to bring in several speakers.”

    Gender issues are a growing component of foreign policy, according to Eichenberg.

    “Issues of global gender equality are at least a nominally declared priority of American foreign policy around the world,” he said. “The programmatic activities have grown greatly and there are a number of initiatives under way in the foreign policy establishment ...  There’s a lot going on and we thought it was about time to publicize it a bit and engage [students] in a conversation.”

    Eichenberg explained that he experienced difficulty finding a scholar who focused on women’s rights as a U.S. foreign policy objective. He added, however, that Brysk, the Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance in the Global and International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the perfect person to discuss global gender initiatives.

    Brysk said that her recent work on gender equality grew out of her previous research on human rights and human trafficking.

    “I started working on this issue out of about 20 years of human rights scholarship and I had been running across a lot of issues related to gender, women’s rights, gender equity, women’s empowerment all along the way,” she said. “When I turned to this issue I wanted to know in what ways it follows a certain pattern with other human rights issues and in what ways there are distinctive concerns related to gender and related to identity issues and how that influences the concrete policy environment.”

    A major problem in achieving global gender equality is violence, according to Brysk. She said that one in three women have experienced gender-based violence and one in five women have been subjected to sexual violence. She cited Malala Yousafzai as an example of her concerns.

    “Here is a young woman who is finally gaining access to education, who is finally gaining some potential for realizing just the most basic conventional rights and equity in her society,” Brysk said. “What’s stopping her? It’s not law; it’s violence.”

    The world is becoming increasingly aware of these violent incidents, especially with examples such as Yousafzai and the recent string of Indian rapes making world headlines, Brysk explained. However, she cautioned that the number of incidents has not decreased.

    “Social sciences is starting to really approach this seriously and we’re beginning to get better data and better information and that means that we can use our analytic tools and figure out where [gender inequality and violence] is happening, why it is happening, what kinds of social processes are associated with this,” she said.

    According to Brysk, some of these new approaches include framing women’s rights as a human rights issue and searching for various entry points in politics for gender equality.

    “Health, law, security, migration are all part of the [gender equality] picture and along with that ... there’s a changing role of U.S. human rights policy,” she said. “We always criticize the U.S. for being too bilateral ... we always want to go it alone and sanction the people that we think are doing the wrong thing and not pay attention to global institutions. Women’s rights is one of the areas the U.S. collaborates the most with global institutions.”

    This increased collaboration and international support occurs in a variety of ways, Brysk explained, including the use of sanctions, political pressure, humanitarian intervention and financial assistance. She said that while the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development give large sums of money to health and law enforcement initiatives benefiting women, the contribution pales in comparison to those of other countries, and that which is recommended by the UN.

    Brysk also addressed a major roadblock in the distribution of U.S. assistance: the Helms Amendment, which prevents the government from helping any organization that provides or discusses abortions.

    “Certain administrations managed to scoot around the information part of this, but this has wreaked havoc on our ability to support global health programs,” she said.

    In addition to ensuring that women are not simply objects to be used as a means to achieve a political or social goal, Brysk said that the U.S. must resolve the ongoing domestic reproductive rights battle.

    “How can we do what we need to do in the world and for the world when we are still denying women basic control of our bodies at home and trying to condition essential health services abroad?” she asked.

    Overall, Brysk labeled the glass as half full and said that the U.S. is on the proper path to integrating the promotion of women’s rights in its foreign policy.

    “We are doing pretty much some good things and we need to just evermore join with the global institutions and the local movements and some of the other countries that are doing good things,” she said. “Overall, U.S. cowboy foreign policy has got to grow up. Social change is a slow and spiraling process. Over time, in many fields we see improvement.”