 Here my Brazilian Portuguese Zoom just spoke. Hi everyone and welcome to the Patriarchal Structures in Disarmament webinar. A welcome also to our two incredible speakers, Anurada Damalé and Cholef Eglin, who will be officially introduced later on. This webinar is the second thematic webinar as part of our broader feminist leadership in disarmament project, which includes a webinar series along with research, opinion and blog posts and a social media campaign. This project's objectives are to raise awareness on the achievements and contributions of women working in the field with a focus on women from the global South. We also aim to explore the challenges that women face as they enter and progress in the field of disarmament. For this webinar, we aim to discuss the rhetorics and power structures that underpin the disarmament discourse. We will talk about the binary gender norms within the patriarchy that contribute to the continued existence of nuclear weapons, resulting in the fight for disarmament to become equated with feelings of emasculation and weakness. We aim to challenge these gendered perspectives by focusing on intersectional feminism and the role that men can play in dismantling this discourse, which has detrimental effects on women who suffer as a result of nuclear weapons and also on the leadership role of women in disarmament. We hope that this webinar will challenge the dominant gendered narrative and examine ways in which we can all work for practical change. As an overview, Scrap Weapons is a campaign that suggests adopting legal international agreements as a basis for general and complete global disarmament. At Scrap, we are constantly developing research projects about disarmament, verification, emerging technologies and of course feminism. And we hope to mobilize governmental, non-governmental, economic and expert forces in support of the same outcome. Briefly, my name is India and I am a member of the research team at Scrap Weapons. My colleague Anna is a member of the operations team and together we will be moderating this webinar. Hello everyone. My name is Anna, I am a member of the operations team at Scrap and I will start by giving you a brief overview of our topic for today. As many feminist scholars and activists have revealed, patriarchy conflates masculinity with strength, courage and protection. This contributes to the continued existence of nuclear arsenals, which are considered representations of such qualities. It also means that peace and disarmament associated as feminine are seen as unattainable, unrealistic, weak and even undesirable. Whereas war and violence are strong and masculine. While women have been working in the nuclear policy field at leadership levels for decades, the space is still overwhelmingly male and white. We need to rethink the highly gendered perspectives and understandings that are enforced in the security regime because given the linkages between disarmament and emasculation, just very unlikely nuclear weapons states will voluntarily choose to disarm. It's therefore imperative that policy makers both male and female, not only create policies that encourage the world towards disarmament, but also to reframe our understanding of what security means. Perhaps by approaching security policies from a place of sensitivity and cooperation instead of domination and competition, we can encourage the empathy and trust needed for sustained global disarmament. By reframing our understanding of what it means to be secure, we can see disarmament for what it is, a rational, moral and necessary step in the search for international security. And so today we will talk precisely on the ways that patriarchal structures exist in disarmament in oceans of security and broader policy making. We are going to start with a perspective from Anuradha Damali and proceed with the presentation from Chol Ekland. To make sure that you are all familiar with Zoom, we invite you to put your questions in the Q&A box below. We will then collect these questions and ask the speakers during the Q&A time. And please make sure you add which speaker your question is directed to. So first we have Anu. Anu joined Vertic in July 2019 and is assistant researcher on the verification and monitoring program. She largely works on nuclear disarmament verification, building in-house knowledge on space safety and security and on applying her knowledge and expertise in systems theory and science and technology policy to broader CBRN issues. She works primarily on a project funded by the Canadian government as a junior technical and policy expert on modeling the North Korean nuclear fuel cycle. Alongside this, she's a steer for any work to do a space safety and security at Vertic and has written for several publications and participated in events in this area. She holds bachelors with honors in physics from Durham University and a master in science and technology policy from the science policy research unit at the University of Sussex, where she wrote her dissertation on challenging state dependencies on nuclear technologies. Anu is currently the UK director of women of color advancing peace and security. She is also currently on board of British Pugwash and a member of the younger generation leaders network. She was previously the chair of UK SEDS, the National Space Charity. Anu's presentation will focus on some more recent news regarding the UK Trident Warheads and the recent UK policing bill. Anuradha, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Anna. I always struggle to hear slash write introductions or bios about myself. So if you will have seen my face with some awkward looks during that, I apologize. So my name's Anu. Thank you for the thorough introduction. The long and short of it is that I'm an assistant researcher at Vertic, who's interested in breaking down silos between security as a study and between different types of security as well. I'm also UK director of WCAPS, Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security, which is incredibly relevant to the discussion that we're having today. And I wanna start this perspective by saying that I had written out this entire sort of academic talk on the issue of patriarchy and disarmament and then realized that none of that actually matters because we're actually living in historical moments at the moment. Things are happening, which we might not think are relevant to what's going on in the world right now, to disarmament even. And actually last night, I kind of went, you know what? No, we need to talk about these things because we hear about it enough. We hear about the fact that we need more women in this field. We hear about all of that stuff. But what we need to hear about is how connected all of these things are to the lives we're living right now. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give some sort of introduction to the general topic and then touch on some of the events that have happened and how they're connected to this idea of dismantling structures within things like disarmament which are connected to other issues. And then sort of hopefully spike some areas for questions and discussion that we can have which I feel like will be more fruitful than me just talking at everyone. So yeah, you know, I for five years worked within the science community in breaking down barriers and equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. And I did it with my own accord. You know, I've never had a paid role in this. It's always been something that I've felt an affinity for but as a woman of color and as a queer woman of color has been expected of me. I would walk into a room and or a company and there's this intrinsic feeling that, you know this person knows and this person will be able to provide as a woman of color and so many minorities have this pushed on them. And it's something we talk about a lot at WCAPS. And one of the things that I've sort of pushed on is this idea that we talk a lot about gender diversity and it's really interesting because, you know we talk about gender and patriarchy and yet we use the words male and female, right? When what we actually mean is man and woman what we mean is these constructs of gender. And when we're talking about gender we talk about man, woman and everything in between or around that, so age and non-binary all of these things are included in that. But because there's been so much balance on othering it's almost easier for us to focus on this binary and focus on this idea of man and woman. Having said that patriarchy within the systems that we work in is a remnant of early, early times and war. Yeah, so war was constructed for masculine and not necessarily male or manly but masculine processes, this idea of ownership this idea of overpowering, this idea of, you know being in the right and being in control those are masculine traits those are masculine adjectives and those are perpetuated throughout time but not only have the meanings of those words perpetuated and strengthened throughout time but the norms that existed with that have also strengthened throughout time. When war was a thing like actual war way back when war started it was acceptable for certain people to have weapons that were, you know developed or fancier or more modern but it wasn't acceptable for other people and the people that were allowed to use these weapons were referred to as gentlemen, if you will. And you can see that those patterns have sort of emerged over time and we'll come back to talking about what happened to Trident and whether this would be acceptable if a country that wasn't Western made the same announcement that the UK did yesterday whether that would be acceptable or not. That's a discussion that I'm sure we can have in the Q and A but the point is that as patriarchy has pushed its way through from early war to the 21st century so have the norms that come with it and you end up with this momentum and this momentum, the more and more you the more and more you leave it the way it is the more and more the snowball starts rolling down the hill and collects more and more snow the harder it becomes to move that snowball the harder it becomes to stop that and to sort of undermine it and do something else and that's why when we focus on only one thing like gender or we have lots of splinter efforts when we work on intersectionality there's not enough social, political, economic capital there to be able to push away this snowball and so when we talk about intersectional feminism what we're doing is we're using gender as a lens but we're talking about everything else that connects to gender and all of these other intersections of minorities that connect to gender such as race, such as ethnicity such as sexual orientation such as gender identity, disability all of these things matter and if you focus on just one thing you will end up with a plateauing effect where you've done everything you can for one group of people that it benefits a certain subset of those group of people that are already privileged and then it stops impacting and that's what we saw in science and so I thought, you know let's move it over to security let's move over this idea of intersectionality to security so the core of this feminist lens for the sake of it, let's call it gendered because it's not gendered but when you say feminist you think of gender identity is the acknowledgement that all people have the right to engage within critique matters that affect them and there's plenty of evidence from many sectors that demonstrate that inclusivity encourages innovation now that shouldn't be the only reason why you include people it shouldn't just be to drive them from innovation but what that means is you have a people that have a range of experiences that are gonna be better at preempting problems because of their experience and their tacit knowledge and there are lots of institutions across the UK and now in security such as girl security W caps that have started doing this so there is a recognition of bringing women to the table there's this idea that the more these problems arise the more the variety of ways that they're going to impact and threaten humanity will diversify they'll change and so we need to have by that logic variety in the solutions and instruments that deal with these threads and that variety cannot be provided by a small faction of society who largely speaking look pretty similar have same experiences in life because nothing is a replacement for tacit knowledge and human experience now that there are several sort of difficulties that we face and one of those things we talked about was this idea that you know, okay so coming back to the Trident argument when people were talking about so I don't know if everyone attending this calls knows but the integrated review which is something that happens in the UK where they review all the defense international relations foreign policy announced that we're going to increase our nuclear warhead stockpile by 40% and a lot of the discourse surrounding it has been we want to show to our allies that we're strong we want to show that we are still responsible while responding to the international environment and responding to the international security environment but a lot of the references made to that have been to other great power countries to countries like US, Russia, China with slight disregard for other countries who are already annoyed at the way that the P5 or the Permanent Five Nations in the Security Council have responded to the pillar of the non-proliferation treaty which requires them to focus on disarmament and once again their worries have been shunted and put to a side and that is a form of patriarchy right because what you're saying is that the minor voice in all of this is not as important and this patriarchal voice which is strong which is you know rational and is based on hard security logic is correct and the fact that that perpetuates even to 2021 when we've seen that these things don't work we've seen that nuclear deterrent hasn't stopped countries from agitating each other or countries from having these political disputes the fact that that's still happening goes to show how institutionalized and systemic nuclear weapons as a technology are and how appending their role is going to be really really really hard work and to do that we need to move beyond this idea of just looking at you know nuclear security nuclear security is interconnected to the economy it's interconnected to political dialogue it's interconnected to social dialogue and often when we talk about nuclear security we just focus on these academic words that only matter to an only understandable by a small subset of people and so what you're doing is you're purposely alienating a large proportion of the people that actually are impacted by this don't get me wrong if England actually bombed another country we would face the consequences of that and so would every other citizen of that country so when was it that individual security and you say that citizens make up a nation when was it that the individual security was put to a side and national security became more important and more represented by this sort of you know grandstanding of well look at the capabilities we have when do you stop and you say actually we want to focus on the people and what they need and their security and that's again another place where this patriarchal idea comes through because the idea of caring for individuals is not necessarily drawn from norms of masculinity it's drawn from norms of femininity now going beyond that this sort of protection of knowledge and even now we see you know academics or individuals in this field who will take a large offense at their ideas being challenged because how could their ideas be challenged you know this is something I've built ownership of and you know studied for so long and this is my thing and I don't want to democratize it but I also don't want you to challenge it that is also something that is patriarchal so knowledge, the siloing of nuclear security versus personal security these are both things that are patriarchal going another step further than that is the institutions so it's you know countries that are nuclear power states are also in the P5 coincidence make that decision for yourself so institutions such as the P5 and the role they play in dictating the international security dialogue matter a lot because there is a clear interconnection between these things so how do we challenge those institutions such as the P5 that exist and the role that they've played in perpetuating the importance of nuclear weapons and the role that they play in providing our security as individuals and as people that belong to a country so as you can see there are lots of different things that we need to challenge now the issue is that this leaks into issues that have got you think nothing to do with nuclear weapons but actually they do because the nuclear dialogue takes away the attention from these things so for instance coronavirus yeah when the global community is faced with issues to do with biosecurity and these issues are not equitable they impact people in different ways we've heard the dialogue of this is a great equaliser not when there are certain communities that are being impacted more by them not when a block of countries is blocking certain other countries from getting the vaccine that's a global health security issue that should be treated with just as much importance as a nuclear deterrence issue by saying we as a group of countries are going to block certain countries from getting the vaccination wouldn't you say that that's hostile wouldn't you say that that's an issue that deserves attention to the same platform that a lot of the nuclear or great power mainstream international relations dialogues do when things such as the Black Lives Matter movement happen and you see the disproportionate way COVID has impacted race and the way that policing works you see that security and peace aren't just military related they are health they are policing to actually create an inclusive and equitable field that creates policy for everyone you need to treat these different areas of discrimination as related and understand that they all contribute to the patriarchy which is a social construct the patriarchy is a social construct and it damages men every day as well yes it damages women more yes it damages non-binary or gender non-conforming people more but it damages men every day and men benefit from the patriarchy in some small way or another they do but the actual things this competition this need to win and lose this absolute harshness this need to be for one person to be on top takes away energy from other problems such as policing such as coronavirus such as advocating for the right to protest in your country you know what we've seen has that's happened over the past week in the UK in particular to do with the death of women in the hands of men largely and the involvement of the police in that and the lack of challenge that's being applied to that and the lack of dialogue that's being put on that but instead we see you know other things that have been discussed more widely on the agenda you run the risk of the field becoming accessible to a very small subset of privileged people who have the privilege of only focusing on those issues that impact them that go beyond the divided impact of COVID that go beyond the divided impact of policing and so when you reinforce and don't challenge every level of the patriarchy into some moment you take away energy from everything else that impacts human beings on the daily now I'm sorry that jumped around a lot normally I have this like go-to script that I follow that goes through each aspect but I couldn't help myself but to use this opportunity to actually shine a light because I'm sure that Charles will you know talk a lot more sense a lot more academic stuff on the area of patriarchy into some moment but we can't talk about it without addressing all of these other things so if you're interested in chatting more about that get involved with WCAPs get involved with organizations that you know mobilise everywhere in every social justice issue because they're all connected they're all connected but yeah I'm gonna stop that otherwise I'm gonna go off on a rant but thank you for your time Thank you so much Anu that was really interesting I think your presentation showed really well you know about ideas of dismantling structures in security and how we have so much work to do even in 2021 to the audience I would just like to remind everyone to please submit your questions into the Q&A because we'll be tackling these at the end of the presentations and I think we have a lot to discuss so next up we have Charles Eglund Charles is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in international security at the Centre for International Studies at Siamspo in Paris his research focuses on disarmament, global nuclear order and strategic narratives his most recent publications have appeared in international affairs, European security and diplomacy and statecraft Charles presentation focuses on the importance and limits of ongoing efforts to disrupt patriarchy and enhance gender equality in international security and disarmament Thank you Charles Well, thank you very much to the organisers for having me it's really a great privilege and honour to be I believe the first man on this seminar series since I have a tendency of going on tangents and also I'm not as eloquent as our previous speaker I'll try to stick to my scripts so first of all, what's the problem or why are we talking about patriarchy and gender in connection with weapons and disarmament? Well, we already heard quite a bit about that but I'll try to share my two cents as well I think for me there are two key ways in which these issues intersect First, patriarchy and toxic masculinity can be obstacles to disarmament, cooperation and arms control and second, gendered discourses are used or instrumentalised in what Laura Considine calls contests of legitimacy and value in weapons politics So, as an example of the former patriarchy being an obstacle to disarmament I remember a few years back there were discussions in the conference on disarmament in Geneva about how to reform the working procedures there and the Belarusian delegates he opposed more transparency and civil society participation in the CD because in his view opening the forum to such participation might invite and I quote, topless ladies screaming from the public gallery throwing bottles of mayonnaise So, this statement, it seems to me, exposes patriarchal mindsets on several levels Not only did the Belarusian representative of Perta instinctively associate interest in disarmament diplomacy with emotional hysterical and half-naked women and please don't ask about the mayonnaise part of the story because I genuinely have no clue how that happened But he also appeared to favour a closed hierarchical approach by which a narrow group of mostly male elite-level officials could discuss international security and disarmament issues without interference or even insights from the people in whose interests they are supposed to act As an example of the latter, so gendered croats being used as rhetorical assets in political debates I recall Boris Johnson around the same time writing a telegraph column likening a potentially trident-less future written with a capon in other words, a castrated cock Here I think the use of gendered language was much more deliberate It was, I think, a conscious rhetorical move meant to masculinise the retention of nuclear weapons and feminise, and by extension devalue nuclear restraints and relinquishments Disarmament as a practice, as a policy goal and even as a word is widely considered girly and even unrealistic Those supporting disarmament are often accused of being emotional and irrational The interesting thing, of course, is that the proponents of nuclear deterrence and escalation dominance have virtually zero evidence for their position This, I think, is highly topical in these days, as we just heard with the UK government having recently decided to increase the warhead cap for the British nuclear arsenal So the UK government, of course, prides itself on championing so-called evidence-based policy but which evidence informed this decision, I wonder Might it perhaps be that the decision had little to do with evidence or rationality and a whole lot to do with an emotional stance or gut instinct that more and bigger equals safer and better? On close inspection, what is dressed up here as technocratic evidence-based and, at worst, poorly timed in advance of the NPT review conference seems much more like what Martin Amis in his essay Nuclear City described as a chant or whoop from the schoolyard or the rumpus room the voice of the technophiliac, the tough guy, and the toady So gender has, in recent years, gained mainstream attention in international security discourse which is good I think there are three layers to this debate The first layer is about representation Research, including research I have myself been proud to be involved in, has shown how men are overrepresented in policy arenas and diplomatic forums concerned with international security and weapons The so-called law of increasing disproportion is particularly striking Women are least represented at the highest levels of government and institutional life Many, including myself, would argue that it should be a goal to remove any obstacles in the way of more diverse participation and representation in foreign policy formation and diplomacy However, many feminists would argue that representation alone is not nearly enough For instance, the gender composition of a 30 or 40 member group of governmental experts in Geneva is arguably far less important than the question of whether the concerns, interests, and perspectives of women and non-binary people and indeed animals and the natural world are being taken into account when policies are constructed Surely we must be interested in policy output as well as representational procedural input although of course those two are interconnected It's also true that diverse groups have been shown to be more creative and better at finding solutions But in many cases the problem isn't a lack of technical fixes or solutions In my view, it's not the fault of the diplomats in New York or Geneva that nuclear disarmament remains elusive Many feminists would thus argue that the task is bigger still We maintain that many other world's existing security institutions and structures cannot be reformed or meaningfully improved either by incorporating more women into them or by asking them to adopt gender perspective when they design new policies Instead these institutions must be stigmatized and abolished altogether Adding more women into the US National Nuclear Security Administration is not adequate Having the 12th main directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense apply a gender lens in its work is equally not adequate These institutions are inherently patriarchal and indeed civilisation threatening in the very nature of their being and must be delegitimized, disrupted and dismantled These institutions cannot be made into something they're not or as Malcolm X put it, you cannot make a chicken lay a duck egg In the feminist scholar and Tickner's words International relations is a man's world, a world of power and conflict in which warfare is a privileged activity Most feminists and feminist approaches see their projects not as one of merely adding female bodies into this patriarchal world but instead as one of changing that world Patriarchy in turn is typically understood as a system of governance a power structure and a way of relating to the world that privileges men, sure, but more profoundly privileges approaches and policies that are discursively coded as masculine With Amos it privileges the technophiliac, the tough guy and the toady Patriarchy in this view is not just or even primarily a system that elevates men as bosses and subordinates women as objects to be protected but one that invites the state or other public institutions to adopt top-down authoritarian militarist policies as well as the general attitude that certain people, small groups of people, are entitled to paternalistically and often in secrecy decide for others how their security should be ensured and of course it is perfectly possible for such a system to be managed by women In the words of Marie Berry and Millie Lake, reformist approaches focused only on adding certain excluded groups into existing institutions will ultimately reinforce the same logics of hierarchy and exclusion that denied those groups access to power in the first place Ray Acheson, who took part in this seminar series a few weeks back argues that while participation of women and gender diverse people is imperative and should be automatic, the way that the women, peace and security agenda has been implemented over the past 20 years unfortunately has reinforced rather than challenged or changed the underpinnings of militarism throughout security discourse and practice One example of what I think Acheson has in mind is the US Air Force which in recent years has been highly active in projecting an image of itself as a woke employer with lots of girl boss nuclear missile operators Women's magazines like Marie Claire and InStyle have printed stories pushed by the US military that paint a picture of the US nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile operation as increasingly diverse, gender sensitive and morally at home in the 21st century Of course these stories do not mention that any use of these missiles would most likely affect women and girls on average more seriously than men and boys due to the biological differences in terms of how different bodies are affected by ionizing radiation They also don't ask what to do about the gruesome effects of fallout on reproductive health and of course they don't ask whether women in all of the other countries in the world that would be gravely affected by nuclear war have been consulted about how woke and feminist they think nuclear weapons are. So it is not at all my claim here that women should not be allowed to take part in the nuclear weapons complex on the same footing as men I suppose they should Perhaps in a certain perspective this is feminism but in an alternative perspective and certainly in the view of many feminist scholars of security Nuclear missiles are pretty much as far from feminism as you can possibly get So it's clear then that gender talk and feminist rhetoric can function as a rhetoric of legitimation on both sides of the argument including for what some would consider to be so-called purple washing. The striking example here is Raytheon, one of the world's largest producers of nuclear missiles which maintains a well publicized partnership with the Girl Scouts of America sponsoring young girls induction into the world of STEM and talking about girl power tropes. However Raytheon's feminism is when girls are given education that allows them to build weapons of mass destruction. In a way though this type of PR could be interpreted as a sign of progress. A world in which feminism sells is arguably better world than one in which sex or toxic masculinity sells. Another point I wanted to raise is that while I very much welcome the increased focus on gender parity and inclusion in arms control and disarmament forums I mean I've myself co-written two reports on this issue and I'd be very happy to talk about it. I have a sneaking feeling that the reason why certain governments and establishment organizations are now spending so much time and resources on platforming gender issues is that they're not prepared to do anything of more immediate disarmament substance for example joining the nuclear weapons ban treaty and that relatively cheap talk about gender and procedural issues is a simple way of scoring wokeness points without having to do anything to upset the security political status quo or its underlying power structures. So what then might a more radical feminist security agenda look like? For me I think one of the best answers to this question was given already in 1987 by Carol Cohn. Her point is about nuclear weapons of course but I think it applies more broadly. So Cohn argues quote I believe that feminists and others who seek a more just and peaceful world have a dual task before us a deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately linked. Our deconstructive task requires close attention to and the dismantling of techno-strategic discourse and by techno-strategic discourse Corsche means that the metaphors and gendered euphemisms and acronyms that are used to portray nuclear weapons in a positive or neutral way. So Cohn continues quote our reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of possible futures. A task of creating rich and imaginative alternative voices diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures. That's what I had planned for now. Thanks very much and I look forward to any questions. Thank you so much Chof. It is amazing to hear these insights from a male perspective and thank you for also showing how overthrowing the perspective of everyone else has been a tool for the patriarchy in many fields including in the political sphere and the overall ideology and power structures of international security. We will now request the audience to add some questions to the Q&A function and we will start bringing in these questions to our speakers. We have first question for Chof and it is how can men in the field contribute more strongly as allies for feminist ideology and discourse and disarmament and also in the broader areas of international security and even international relations. Thank you. Wow that's a huge question that I'm not sure I can possibly hope to answer but I think in general trying to incorporate more diverse perspectives and remembering to look at things in different ways and I think also just remembering some of the sort of basic feminist questions I think it's Cynthia Emlow who says that key feminist question in security studies which one should always have in the back of one's mind is where are the women? I think that's a really crucial question that is sort of easy to put on a checklist for any analyst or scholar or activist for that for that matter and then I think just generally trying to talk to as many people as possible from different backgrounds and from different different sort of sectors of the wider epistemic community I think is really important. I certainly have benefited a lot from talking to activists, members of civil society, members of organizations to learn from them and to learn how they see things and also that this helps in being relevant to be honest because a loss of academia, a loss of scholarship is just very irrelevant to most policy issues so I think those are really key issues to think about and in my field in particular which is weapons and nuclear disarmament I think reaching critical will is like the go-to source for both analysis and a lot of information and links to documents and this kind of stuff so yeah. Thank you Chol. Anu we have a question for you as well so with the recent news in the UK of the expansion of nuclear arsenals and obviously the policing bill that you spoke about what would you say are practical ways that we within the field and also in the outer society as citizens can we show our discontent and our disagreement with such decisions? Firstly Chol that was an amazing presentation your use of memes was outstanding I just wanted to say that okay well first things first is well we can't protest that yeah we can't protest there are ways to protest that are not actively going out and participating in rallies which by the way we should be allowed to do this it shouldn't be acceptable that we're now living in a state where you can't express dissent as a collective what's happening is they're stealing social capital the government is stealing the ability for civilisation society to come together and push for something to happen and push up against government and dissent and that that is a problem right like what you're doing is you're taking away a big form of the systems of accountability to which we hold the government which is tricky but there are other ways to do this so one of the things my friend Sarah started that I've contributed to and helped was a template on the policing bill which you can send to your MPs pressure them pressure your MPs they're elected to serve you so tell them tell them email them get your friends to email them get your mum and dad to email them you know just get your get everyone involved and I know that it feels like sometimes one thing one thing you do doesn't feel like enough but collective action makes a difference on that note yes the second reading of the bill went through last night but it's not nor yet so you can keep doing things on the nuclear side of things you know there are there are formal informal things there are institutions like reaching critical will like I can like the Greenpeace and CND who will do things from a grassroots campaigning point of view again you know these are things that have to go through some level of accountability through our governmental systems so write to your MPs about your sort of your annoyance with it but also consider the fact that not everyone in your life will understand why this is a bad thing yeah not everyone will understand why and that you know Joel talked about it this idea that like you know not everyone understands why nuclear weapons are bad we just assume that everyone knows why we're angry and so try and make it a bit more accessible and understandable to people and try and explain why you're annoyed and they'll probably get annoyed too and the more people know about this the more the mainstream media will be you know forced to address it because again social capital this is how agenda setting works this is how policy making works you need to be able to have enough pressure from somewhere there's this theory called punctuated equilibrium whereby you have like everything's hunky dory and then there's a moment in which a policy window opens and you can break that equilibrium using enough push of some form it can be money it can be natural disasters it can be um you know something that's really sad that's happened and if you break that equilibrium using this capital yeah so like social capital whatever so the more you get people talking about it and the more accessible the mean you make it the harder it gets for the government and for decision makers and for the mod to shroud nuclear weapons in this like fancy mystery black box that like only some people know about um so that that's those are two things that you can do the other thing is like just keep educating yourself keep engaged and understand that twitter is an echo chamber no matter how many people you follow that are of various different backgrounds twitter is an echo chamber never take it as representative of what's going to happen we saw this with brexit we saw it with the trump election yeah so it's like just check yourself every so often and talk to the people in your life i would say that as practical things thank you and that's that's very right we really need to step up and show our frustration our anger and our discontent with with what's happening um to join efforts together um so for keo we have that chelvi have another question um is the argument of nuclear deterrence associated to patriarchy in disarmament discourse if yes to what extent is the argument of using nuclear deterrence used to reinforce patriarchal perspectives and views on disarmament and what would be a response to it oh wow again a really huge question it's a good one but uh really huge and i'm not sure i'll be able to answer it but i think in general you know a nuclear deterrence is fundamentally a system of nuclear threat making it's a way of trying to ensure your own security through threatening others with nuclear violence and i think this is as annie talked about in her presentation a kind of inherently it's it's coded as a masculine approach it's coded as something strong and paternalistic and so yeah i think a nuclear deterrence definitely is a sort of patriarchal security system and i think it's interesting to to look at um this not only in terms of a man woman binary but also to look at this in terms of other other factors that go into it if we look at for example the run-up to the cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s we know that that one of the one of the things that happened before that was that um president kennedy in the united states was making some quite overt nuclear threats to his opponent in the soviet union chris chev over berlin partly but one of the reasons for what happened was that um kennedy in the us system was seen as uh weak and some how slightly effeminate because he was a young man and he was a democrat so he had to prove how strong and tough he was partly by making very overt nuclear threats to the soviet union which in turn uh led to them putting nuclear weapons on cuba and and that got us probably the closest we've ever been to uh advertence nuclear nuclear war and so i think the general link here is between strength and force which are usually associated or understood as masculine traits are in turn coupled with with nuclear deterrence and and also i mean escalation dominance and that's different nuclear strategies obviously but i think um this isn't how it has to be this is how it is in some countries you know we often when we talk about nuclear weapons and nuclear discourse we talk about the nuclear discourse in certain countries like in most countries in the world nuclear weapons are not seen as some uh mark show silver bullet to security i mean there's only a few countries that think that way or where the sort of mainstream position is that and so i think it's interesting to look at how that type of reasoning has been has been pushed back against and subverted in in other contexts and other countries for one example might be sweden for example which had a fairly advanced nuclear weapons program in the 1950s and 1960s and sort of the main groups of people pushing back against the nuclear weapons program were the feminist socialists and social democrats and they were very uh they were there was sort of championing this adversarial politics uh normative contestation there was absolutely zero bridge building or compromising attitudes uh there they were absolutely going straight for it making very strong points using very strong language and they weren't looking to compromise with nuclear vested interests they were looking to show how they were wrong and to delegitimize them and to dismantle them and that's what happens thank you so much jove i think um that was a really important point you said about thinking about things contextually and shifting our focus from what is so often on just the global north um so next for anu we have a question which is due to the new announcement by boris johnson this is an obvious step back for the disarmament campaign but with an increase of nuclear arms being a form of international toxic masculinity how is this also a step back in disarmament from the gendered lens you've kind of answered the question toxic masculinity is is connected to gendered lenses right it's i i hear the phrase thrown around a lot and i actually used to use it a lot and i used to you know say this is toxic masculinity but i actually think it's this is toxic masculinity don't get me wrong what's happened is toxic masculinity but we have to be careful with how we use that phrase because it loses its power um it's toxic because of the things it's trying to portray in its action and because it's essentially like let's be clear the uk has been proposing like putting itself forward as a responsible nuclear state right like that's been its whole thing it's been part of the quad initiative um on disarmament verification with norway um it has you know doesn't really have operational missiles you know for them to be operational we have to be able to move our missiles in a certain direction which takes a certain amount of time and on top of that um we we we've the only information that was available for a long time from the fco on on our nuclear program was one a4 sheet um which was understandable on the fco website and so this is toxic because a it's trying to present us in a very specific way um and b it's actually not doing anything it's not like practically speaking unless they tell us exactly how they're going to enact what they want to do with those extra nuclear weapons like it's not going to make a huge difference in a practical sense but in terms of the general discourse around disarmament a lot of young people that talk about disarmament myself included um early mid-career people get shut down by senior members or ambassadors to the un being like you all think that disarmament means jumping to zero immediately right they just think you want to get rid of everything and that's just not going to happen you're not going to be happy with step by step progress blah blah blah blah and the uk sort of dialogue surrounding this has been very we are in line with the disarmament process we are responding to the international security environment but we are sort of part of this and they are buying into this narrative that like unless everyone said this is a multilateral unless everyone does it we're not going to do it and in my view this all-or-nothing frame of disarmament is very patriarchal in its presentation because it's very forcefully one way or the other there's no room for you know flexibility it's very well this is it isn't it like it's the decision it's made whereas a lot of young people actually have the understanding that disarmament doesn't mean the moment you hit absolute zero it's the processes that's you know that that are associated with it you know coming from from an organization that works in verification I know this firsthand it's to do with you know dismantling the weapon warhead sure but it's got to do with all the processes and it will happen step by step by step but the unwillingness to buy in even a little bit to that step by step is a demonstration of how much we are willing to ignore anything that is in a patriarchal approach to disarmament and it also shows internally to the country that we are a force to be reckoned with you know don't mess with us again this idea of coming out on top this idea of being strong and then it kind of provides in my view it kind of legitimizes other decisions that are made to do with national security um to mirror it through all of our security choices and to make them quite masculine in their in their nature and the policy surrounding individuals and covid so yeah I think I think that's kind of like there's a lot of nuance there but you've answered the question in in asking it um I hope that makes sense yes thank you I know thanks for showing how the UK dialogue has been actually a bit ambiguous in relation to the issue of disarmament and how they legitimize their decisions and how it shows um you know the patriarchal way of imposing specific views on on security um we have another question for Cholv um so you have mentioned that they I'm assuming that global nuclear powers are not ready to implement actual um actions on disarmament and look at all its aspects so when do you think that they will be ready to face the realities of and importance of nuclear disarmament you know I think they'll they'll be ready once the costs of retention exceed the benefits of yeah I think I messed that up but anyway I think it needs to be they need to be pressured and nuclear weapons for me need to be delegitimized there's a great book by also called Kwame Apia called the honor code he argues that the that the that most major social transformations which you know nuclear disarmament could be argued to be such a transformation if and when it happens um they necessitated change in our common understanding of honor so retaining nuclear weapons need to be constructed as dishonorable rather than prestigious or something that confers a status which it is today or at least too many considerate to be so I think yeah they need to be they need to be pressured and I think there's I remember a few few years ago again the the Australian foreign minister wrote a an op-ed in a newspaper saying that the way forward was to engage not enrage the nuclear powers I think it has to be kind of the other way around I think you're not going to get rid of nuclear weapons without enraging a lot of people because a lot of people are very much emotionally and politically invested in nuclear weapons and a lot of companies are making huge profits of nuclear weapons and I think honestly that in these debates we are going often way too far in assuming good faith on the part of the people favouring retention of nuclear weapons I think very often there's zero good faith involved and that so much of nuclear weapons politics is just PR and spin all the way down thank you so much Chul so we are running out of time but we do have one more question that we would like to pose to both of you if possible just as like a rounded question so in your opinion what would you say is ways that we can dismantle the binary hierarchies and the military nature of the disarmament discourse in a proactive way Anu do you want to go first okay I'll go first what can we do again yeah I mean I wish I knew the answers to all of these questions I'm afraid I don't but I think like the number one has to be to educate ourselves and others to how this stuff works and we need to be aware of how these probes are being used strategically by people who want to retain weapons and modernize weapons and build more weapons and yeah I think education is really key and also helping aligned actors make their case building bridges to other kinds of campaigns and social movements I think is really important which Anu already talked a lot about which I thought was really interesting to hear about so Anu what do you think um yeah so I think one one thing I will say which Chul brought up was you know this idea that a lot of a lot of promotional stuff to do with disarm to do with deterrence even and to do with missiles it are co-opting the feminist on what they view as like the feminism thing the girl boss attitude the sort of portraying is an oh my god we're so random white feminist thing and to be quite honest like to me that's really embarrassing and goes the other way but for not for a lot of people like it will engage and it will like appeal to them because that's what they've been exposed to and it's really upsetting it's like how dare you co-op something where it's convenient to you rather than actually learn the good aspects of it and integrate that into your practice the other thing I find really helpful when you're moving away from the binary is looking at things from other lenses looking at things from other minoritized lenses such as accessibility such as race such as social mobility and all of these other things because what they open your mind to is firstly when you refer to women you are not referring to one homogenous group you just aren't right every woman is different I had a quick talk about a friend who is from India and who was born and raised here just like me and how different our lives are and where to what you would like say you know to Indian women well they have similar experiences nobody don't really don't and I think when you appreciate the fact that there isn't homogeneity in any of these groups you are forced to move away from the binary and actually embrace the heterogeneity of it all and look at things from a more systems perspective and by systems perspective I mean an interconnected actor network sort of idea and that moves you away from this idea of one way or the other in my view and the other thing is just engage with organizations that you might feel like it's not your place to engage with because you don't associate with them like learn more about why accessibility and disability is a big issue in this field understand that understand why people of color are angry understand why people from poorer backgrounds can't get into the field and empathize that's something that's missing so much from this field is empathy because we're so obsessed with this idea of ownership and credit that we forget about the mission and I think the more we focus on the mission the less we'll focus on the binary thank you so much and this has really been a thoughtful and meaningful discussion on the patriarchy structures we live in and the ways in which we can combat these structures including now in the UK and how to be more inclusive in general in the field unfortunately we have come to the end of our webinar however this is not the end of our discussion on feminist leadership in disarmament this was actually webinar three out of seven in our next webinar of the series is scheduled for 31st of March also at 2 p.m and it will be on grassroots activism and its role in providing feminist perspectives to disarmament I invite everyone to join and you can find more information and the link to register on our website and on social media thank you so much to our panelists and for their brilliant contributions and to everyone who has attended today we hope that you have enjoyed it and that we can join efforts together in dismantling the patriarchal structures that shape disarmament efforts security and policy making if you would like to attend our future webinars and to know more also about scrap please keep an eye on our social media outlets for information on our futures of webinars the next of which will be in two weeks time same time same place thank you very much