2010 Jill Vickers Prize

Winner: Maya Eichler (York University)

Russia’s Soldiers’ Mothers: Contesting or Reinforcing Militarized Gender Roles? (2009 CPSA conference paper)

Excerpt from jury report:  Maya Eichler’s paper takes central concepts of feminist international relations theory and examines them for their utility in explaining the interplay between masculinization, militarization, and a maternalist ideology in two different Russian examples. In examining Mother’s groups in Chechnya and Moscow and St. Petersburg, she shows the various ways these groups have worked in discursive space. In some instances the masculinist-militarization link was weakened and in others not.