Paper short abstract:

This paper traces a spiralling together of activism, police protocol, and training programmes to define and stop domestic violence in Poland. It asks what kind of object 'gender' becomes when working both as a contested identification or standpoint, and as a site of transnational rights intervention.

Paper long abstract:

In the transnational context of policing domestic violence, monitoring and intervention practices scale from United Nations rapporteurs and global awareness campaigns, to the record keeping practices of local police officers and phone lines intended to intervene against the violence of privacy and assist victims. In doing so, domestic violence intervention invokes a broad range of socio-psychological, cultural, scientific and criminological practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 1997-2001, this paper explores the incorporation of domestic violence discourse from an ill-defined Euro-American center as it is incorporated into the context of Polish state restructuring. The paper traces a spiraling together of rights activism, police protocol, educational expertise, training programs, and the emergence of statistical infrastructures constructed across heterogeneous and complexly contested terrains. By taking up metaphors of mobility and transition that guide the translation of model programs for stopping domestic abuse between locales, it asks how and in what senses the category of "Westernisation" is and/or is not a useful frame for rendering contemporary gender politics visible. In what ways do critiques of development discourse both enable and problematize interventions into domestic violence, calling some geo-political boundaries into question while re-instantiating others? In doing so, the paper raises questions about what kind of object "gender" becomes when viewed not only as a contested identification or standpoint, but rather as a site of transnational intervention and governmentality which persists beneath the a complex of discourses of security, rights and development.