1 NATO: A Critical Approach

This chapter offers a critical rethinking of NATO at a time of intensified geopolitical contestation and internal fragility. It challenges dominant portrayals of NATO as a coherent and values-driven defense alliance by tracing the contradictions that underpin its evolving strategic identity. Drawing on feminist and critical security scholarship, it explores how NATO is constituted through competing discourses, everyday practices, and contested norms, particularly in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the resurgence of authoritarian populism within member states, and the disruptive return of a second term Trump administration. Through the lens of ‘critical friendship’, it engages NATO not as a fixed entity but as a site of ongoing negotiation, tension, and transformation. It foregrounds the significance of gender, power, and militarism in shaping NATO’s policies, self-narratives, and global engagements, and argues for the necessity of reflexive, critical scholarship to interrogate what is at stake when the Alliance invokes security, resilience, and unity in a fractured world.