IRC New Horizon Grant awarded to Kenneth McDonagh
Dr Kenneth McDonagh has won an Irish Research Council New Horizons Research Project Starter Grant of €99,178.31 to investigate how European Union Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions have impacted on gender relations in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzgovina.
Dr. McDonagh’s research is currently focused on EU external policy with a concentration on CSDP missions. In 2013-2014 he held a position as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Central European Policy Institute (CEPI) in Bratislava, Slovakia. At CEPI he led research on EU-NATO-Ukraine security cooperation including field research in Kyiv in April 2014. He also conducted research (both interviews and archival work) on Slovak and Austrian involvement in CSDP missions with a particular focus on the Western Balkans. His research has been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Review of International Studies, and International Politics.
This project builds on Dr McDonagh’s previous work with a special focus on the gendered impact of CSDP missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. The central research question of this project is ‘How have EU CSDP missions impacted on Gender relations? Two key gaps in the existing literature, one conceptual and the other empirical, will be addressed. In conceptual terms, attempts to address the impact of the EU’s gender policies have been criticised for not taking into account the complex relationship between ‘counting women’ and dealing with the underlying patriarchal power structure. In empirical terms, the focus to date has been on deployed military CSDP missions with less attention on both civilian deployments in the field and how to address gender balance in the planning and pre-deployment phase. This project will address these gaps by developing a new conceptual toolkit for assessing the gender impact of CSDP missions that captures both the quantitative (number of women) and qualitative (shifts in underlying social power structures) aspects of gender. It will extend this analysis to both the pre-planning phase and to civilian deployments, with a focus on how their tasks are framed relative to underlying gendered discourses. Finally it will engage with recipient populations through narrative interviewing to measure how gender and peacekeeping impact on women in post-conflict societies.
The project will employ two postdoctoral researchers and a research assistant over the course of the project which will run from November 1st 2015 to February 2017. The project outputs include academic papers but also a policy paper, policy toolkit and a policy event to disseminate the findings to practitioners and policy-makers beyond academia.