Dominant Development Indexes’ Construction of Gender and Challenges for Recognizing Everyday Activism for Peace and Security

Abstract

Developed organizations have increasingly garnered numerous indicators to measure gender and development outcomes. Yet, measurements themselves reflect a logic of the arenas where development occurs and can be captured, and therefore reflect where women are imagined to predominantly exist. Based on the analysis of 1,298 indicators across 15 major development databases covering African countries, this article argues that mainstream development organizations predominantly understand gender in terms of institutional sites. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, or a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place, and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized as natural places where women would be (the family and the nation state). We identify the spatial logics underpinning these development indicators, and link them to larger historical gendered and racialized colonial logics organizing diverse social, economic, and cultural lives, where economic and institutional sites are promoted, a more nuanced and relational one is displaced. Ultimately, these spatial imaginings extend to the larger context of where debates about peace and security are situated—namely in largely individual, state-driven, and institutional-centric ways.