Gendering Canada's Whole-of-Government Approach? Militarized Masculinity and the Possibilities of Collaboration in the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team

Abstract

When Canada took on the leadership role of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (K-PRT) in Afghanistan, the liberation of women and children via multi-departmental collaboration was promoted by the government as a critical goal of the operation. Research from the fields of public administration, international development, and critical security studies hypothesizes that collaborative approaches to governance, particularly in fragile states, ensures that greater resources are available to address human rights issues, including gender equality. It is therefore surprising that the gendered implications of Canada’s collaborative governance commitments within the K-PRT have not been deeply explored. Through a feminist frame analysis, informed by critical and post-structural feminist theory, this dissertation asks whether the Canadian collaborative approach permits more attention to be paid to policy and programming on gender equality. Framing the case of the K-PRT from a feminist perspective, this dissertation identifies the hegemony of masculinity within the policy context that guided the Canadian collaborative approaches in Kandahar, highlighting how international guidelines for collaboration legitimized the leadership of the military and instrumentalized gender for militarized purposes. It also exposes the masculine structure of the K-PRT, identifying how the design of the PRT favoured the might of the military, and presented the exceptionalism of women as the only marker of gender. Finally, this dissertation highlights the narrative of masculinity that is threaded throughout the K-PRT, working to normalize the militarization of civilian departments and actors implicated within the Canadian collaborative approach. The application of a gender lens to the case of the K-PRT reveals the necessity of feminist analysis of collaborative approaches, as these are increasingly being seen as best practices for addressing state fragility worldwide.