Neoliberal Ideas

MacKenzie argues in her article that, “rather than representing a radical shift in development approaches towards more inclusive and representative policies, empowerment projects are shaped by neoliberal ideas such as individualism, responsibility and economic order and carry implicit, gendered and disciplining messages about appropriate social behavior” (p. 199).

In explaining her argument, MacKenzie draws on the implementation weaknesses of the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program in Sierra Leone. She used the reintegration program for female soldiers in Sierra Leone as a case because the Sierra Leone's DDR process is one of the interventions purported to empower both female and male ex-combatants. My primary interest
in reading her article, I identified three main weakness in the Sierra Leone's DDR process concerning women's empowerment: (i) challenges associated with targeting of the beneficiaries, (ii) challenges associated with the interventions themselves – that is, interventions not responsive to the needs of women; not relevant to local context, and short duration of implementation, and (iii) the challenge of stigmatization and secondary trauma women beneficiaries faced. In the ensuing sections of this exegesis, I will attempt to discuss each of the three challenges of the DDR in Sierra Leone as identified by the author and analyse how she uses these challenges to support her main argument that women's empowerment programs are: not inclusive and representative, driven by neoliberal ideas, gendered and carry certain notions of disciplining
First, MacKenzie argues that most of the empowerment interventions did not meet the specific needs of women ex-combatants. She observes that most of the empowerment training that were offered to females were chosen by the National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (NCDDR) with advice from the World Bank, the UN, and UNICEF, which were the major funders of the DDR programs. This top-down approach to selecting training programs for the women without consultation is indicative of the neoliberal conception of development as suggested by the MacKenzie. She strengthens her arguments further by asserting that the top-down, neoliberal approach to selecting the training program also created the situation in which the programs do not respond to local market and community context. In other words, apart from the fact that most training programs did not respond to the needs of the women, they were not also commensurate with the local context. One troubling pattern MacKenzie observed among the empowerment training programs is that almost all the organizations offered the same type of skills training for the female ex-combatants. She observed on page 209