Women, Violence and Peace: The Role of Women in War and Peace Processes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Women, Violence and Peace: The Role of Women in War and Peace Processes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 7: Women, violence and peace Women’s groups form an essential part of civil society and women’s groups have been active in most peace processes. They have done this in two ways: a) By mobilising on feminist issues they have broadened the terms of the conflict and prevented its narrow concentration on one zero-sum line of social cleavage, thus offering cross-cutting forms of identity. b) The mobilisation of women on feminist issues has had knock-on effects for their mobilisation on peace issues, making women amongst the most active peacemakers. But first let me talk about men. A feminist critique of war is that it is the ultimate expression of hormone-driven masculinity. Indeed, it is claimed that sociology’s very focus on violence in war – civil or conventional – rather than on domestic violence reflects the male hegemony in sociology. This sort of feminist critique is not fanciful. War and violence is mostly done by men. Participation in violence can confer status on men as men, benefiting from all the positive self-images that derive from being ‘tough’, hard’ and ‘a man’s man’. Many of the victims of war and communal violence are women and the violence against them often takes a gendered and sexual kind – rape, forced impregnation, murder of children, even foetuses torn from pregnant women’s wombs. Even in low-level civil wars or communal violence, the brutalisation that takes place amongst male non-combatants, leads to increases in incidence of domestic violence. The powerlessness and emasculation of non-combatant men can be resolved by doing violence in the home, something that is occasionally compounded by the ready recourse to alcohol as a coping strategy to deal with war. This easy slippage from communal to gendered/sexual violence shows that masculinity is wrapped up in war. docsity.com Since our focus in this course is on peace however, it’s worth briefly mentioning the problems this causes for peace processes. Peace processes require the transformation of violent masculinities in two senses: reducing the brutalisation of masculinity amongst non-combatant males; finding alternative non-violent masculinities for former combatants. The difficulties of this task are immense. The extent of these difficulties is shown by the rise in violent ordinary crime that tends to occur in post-violence societies, and in increases in random sexual attacks and domestic violence. In Northern Ireland’s case for example, crime fell in the years after the ceasefire but violent crime rose. In post-violent transitions where there’s been no disarmament, the ready supply of arms gives people easy access to the means of violence. It is an important form of peace work therefore, to work amongst former combatants around issues of masculine identity once the war is over. This is not something that the ‘good governance’ approach to peace even recognises as an issue, nor indeed those feminists who think women’s issues are just about women. Anyway, to women. The point I want to make here is that women perform a variety of roles in war and peace and in so doing face difficulties arising from culturally defined gender roles that makes men, especially powerful men normally in control of peace transitions, either to undervalue, even ignore, their contribution or try to marginalise it to activities that are stereotypically associated with traditional gender roles. docsity.com governing traditional gender roles had another impact on combatant women. In as much as they offended the stereotype as carers, reconcilers, peacemakers, and nurturers, those who uphold these sorts of norms criticise combatant women for their militancy because they deny their essential femininity. Women combatants therefore, struggle not only against the state to which they object, but also the unreconstructed gender roles. Traditional gender roles have another impact on women in settings of conflict. It makes them special targets of violence from male combatants. Women’s experience of victimhood is gendered. Ronit Lentin, in her article on rape, the first of the two articles we were to address in our tutorial, emphasises how violence against women in ethnic conflicts is more than merely sexual violence driven by male biological drives and social constructed notions of masculinity; it is gendered violence driven by the symbolic association of women with the nation, the bearers of the nation’s children, the progenitors of the generations to come. To oppose the nation is thus to attack women; women’s bodies become means by which the nation is destroyed - either by killing them and tearing foetuses from their womb, or raping and impregnating them with the genes of other ethnic groups who’ll hopefully undermine the nation from within. Rape is thus an instrument of ethnic conflict; violate the women’s body and you affect women’s capacity to bear the next generation, women’s capacity to keep the ethnic group and its culture alive. Sexual violence is even engaged in by military peacekeepers from the UN, with allegations recently being made of systematic rape in some of the refugee camps by UN docsity.com peacekeepers. Gendered violence is done for different reasons than sex. It’s about destroying the nation on the traditional assumption that women are bearers of it. Nations are symbolised in feminine terms - the nation as beloved mother - and mothers are symbolised as bearers of the nation. National and ethnic conflicts thus target women. Take a women’s body and you take your enemy’s nationhood and territory. So traditional gender roles give women particular victim/survivor experiences. Of course, it is these traditional gender roles that also gives women a role in peacemaking, for they appear to be ‘natural’ healers and reconcilers and, indeed, are encouraged to act this role by those urging upon women a peace vocation. And many do so as evidence from several peace processes illustrates. In this role, women enter the public sphere as peacemakers but bring qualities and skills that are supposedly displayed ordinarily in the private sphere, qualities and skills operative within the family and domestic life, repairing relationships, healing divisions, bringing people together. They are often brought into this role by forms of violence that violate the private space and prevent the performance of their traditional roles as women, wives and mothers. The kinds of atrocities that effect this are things like the death or trauma of children - remember that the Peace People in Northern Ireland, the place’s first mass peace group, was co-founded by two women in 1976 after one’s sister’s children had been killed - or violation of women as victims or violation of people’s homes and so on. Violence has prevented the performance of their gendered roles and they continue the reproduction of these roles in the public sphere when women mobilise for peace by evoking the traditional stereotypes and concerns of women. So, some women peacemakers focus their docsity.com activities on the effects of violence on families, children, food, welfare, health, education, things directly relevant to their lives as women. Sometimes they may work alongside men in peace groups and organisations that mobilise on these issues, but mostly they form groups aimed specifically for women to help women and children cope with the effects of violence on the performance of women’s traditional role in the private sphere. In Northern Ireland’s case it has been estimated that of the 1500 women’s organisations there were in the year 2000, over two thirds were ‘traditional’ organisations in which the primary focus was on women’s issues within the family and domestic sphere, the remainder being described as ‘activist’ groups mobilising as women but on broad issues of violence, conflict and change. In passing, note the large number of women’s groups there are, which illustrates the way in which violence can increase the scale of women’s involvement and participation, and points to the significant space women’s groups occupy in civil society in Northern Ireland. We should not be disparaging of traditional women’s groups, partly because women have particularly gendered experiences of communal violence that explains their narrow focus on women’s issues rather than broader politics, but also because these traditional groups often transform into broader peace organisations. Participation in traditional groups brings several advantages to women who perhaps have never before played a public role. Women in traditional groups learn leadership skills, develop networks of relationships, often with international groups, learn finance, the arts of communication and deliberation, confidence in handling the press and so on, which are good in their own right but also docsity.com