Steel mills, markets and war: mapping gendered circuits of violence

Steelmaking has come back to the forefront of discussions around war, in the context of the global political and economic reconfigurations brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite steel’s historical associations with war economies and masculinity, less attention is currently being paid to the gendered connections between steel and wartime violence, and their ramifications beyond active conflict. This article thus explores the role of steel in the (re)production of contemporary economies of violence, drawing on and contributing to feminist IPE scholarship on ‘gendered circuits of violence’ (True and Hozić 2020). It argues that steel and steelmaking constitute circuits of violence both materially, physically producing them and mobilising them for war, and discursively, through the symbolic mobilisation of steel along gendered lines in support of the war effort. The article shows how circuits are configured to prioritise the circulation of commodities and profit, while steelmaking communities and especially women remain vulnerable to gendered physical, socioeconomic and environmental harms. While methodologically following the steel, the analysis focuses on local and global events surrounding the war in Ukraine, and in the tradition of feminist IPE it draws together developments at the macro-level with an attention to social dynamics and the everyday.