Feeling Seen: The Women, Peace, and Security Research Space in Canada
Working towards a more collaborative, inclusive, and united WPS community.
time to read: 7 min
Over the past year, research assistants Maddy Godin, Melika Khajeh Hosseiny, and I have been researching the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) community in Canada. We conducted thirty interviews with WPS researchers and practitioners and searched every university and college in Canada for WPS related projects. When conducting interviews, we encouraged those who did not self-identify as part of the WPS space but did related work to discuss their stories with us. Our questions focussed on how our participants perceived “support,” or felt “supported,” allowing them to self-define what support meant to them. While we interviewed some practitioners, most of our interviewees were academics, including students, early career researchers and faculty. Many of those practitioners interviewed also had extensive experience with academia. Due to this dynamic, our results are focussed on insights for academia.
We found that many participant experiences were consistent with the broader struggles in academia. However, some community demographics, regional divides, and sub-field politics were unique to the Canadian WPS space. Participants recommended network-building and raising awareness as key strategies for bettering the WPS space going forward, and gave specific suggestions on funding dynamics, collaborative strategies for better including marginalized groups, and shifting the policy focus of WPS in Canada.
Participants expressed struggles recognizable to most academics beyond the WPS field. For example, participants often felt disconnected from colleagues in their field (even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic) and felt it was difficult to build connections with the “right” people. Participants felt tensions between the field of WPS, which is often a sub-field or a blend of field, and the broader fields they worked within. While support existed for WPS researchers in Canada, even experienced researchers sometimes struggled with how to attain that support for projects that did not fit into niches focussed on defence or development. Early career struggles were a common refrain for more senior researchers. This was supported by our finding that graduate students and early career researchers were less aware of funding and other resources available.
Overall, many participants felt supported by the WPS community in Canada and expressed their gratitude for the collaborative and welcoming nature of that space. Participants were often involved with the WPS community in Canada due to their feminist convictions. The commitment to values-based research meant many participants were committed to staying in the field, despite experiencing struggles in some areas.
Findings:
Our interviews also revealed some findings unique to WPS research in Canada:
Community Demographics: In our searches of university databases, our social media searches, and our searches of WPS related organizations and WPS related offices within non-WPS organizations, it became clear that the overwhelming majority of those working on gendered topics in peace and security are women (around 90%). However, it is difficult to tell how gender diverse the field really is, as trans and non-binary people will not always disclose this information on public platforms (as is their prerogative). When asked about the make-up of the field, most of our participants acknowledged it was dominated by white women in particular, and proposed strategies to promote diversity.
Regional Divides: Participants described a strong community of researchers in population hubs in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, but noted a feeling of isolation in provinces and territories outside of Ontario and Quebec. Many noted the financial barriers to participating in the conferences and networking events held mainly in Ontario. We also found an overrepresentation of Ontario and underrepresentation of Quebec in WPS research. Participants were asked to comment on this trend, but no uniform explanation was found. However, networks such as the Canadian Defence and Security Network/Réseau canadien de défense et de sécurité, the Réseau d’analyse stratégique/Network for Strategic Analysis which have secondary focusses on WPS, as well as the new Research Network on Women, Peace, and Security (RN-WPS), are signs of the growing visibility of francophone and Québécois perspectives.
Sub-field politics: Participants felt tension between feminist and more traditional security perspectives when trying to navigate the WPS field. Many of those participants who studied “hard” security issues, who worked in male dominated fields, and/or who had to present their ideas to military or security practitioners felt they were in a kind of limbo: not feminist enough for critical WPS researchers, yet too feminist in the spaces they moved in. Many discussed that this was not only external, but an internal processing of what women, peace, and security really meant to them, and how militarism impacted their research as feminists.
Recommendations:
Participants provided general recommendations for how to improve support for WPS researchers in Canada. Increasing awareness of funding and other opportunities for support and increasing awareness of the WPS field to the broader public were both seen as important paths forward. Though almost all our participants did not know of the RN-WPS (as most interviews took place before the network was announced), network building was seen as a key path to support. Specific recommendations included the following.
Funding Dynamics: Participants often struggled to find dedicated WPS funding and felt that their projects did not quite fit the calls often made by the Department of National Defence (DND) and Global Affairs Canada. Targeted, flexible short-term funding for graduate students which allowed for broad gender and security topics, as well as long term sustainable funding to create journals, networks, annual conferences, and a centre for WPS research in Canada was suggested. The idea of a centre was particularly salient, as many participants felt it could bring together the dispersed community.
Collaboration for Inclusion: Participants suggested multiple strategies to better include marginalized groups in the WPS space. Sharing library access, collaborating with marginalized scholars on grant applicants, profiling marginalized scholars for networks and organizations, bringing in marginalized scholars for guest lectures, publishing with marginalized scholars, and crucially, volunteering to share the burden of the equity work that those most often marginalized in academia are asked to do.
Shifting the Policy Focus: Our participants noted the need to focus WPS in Canada internally (especially on supporting Indigenous groups) as well as externally, and for a serious interrogation of Canada’s role in the international WPS space with so much colonial history at home.
This project was funded by a 2020 contract with the Dallaire Centre of Excellence for Peace and Security and a 2020-2021 Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security Targeted Engagement Grant awarded by the DND to research the WPS community in Canada.