Promoting Peace Building

For more than a decade, resolutions from the United Nations and the European Commission have highlighted women’s suffering during wars, and the unfairness of their treatment upon the return to peace. Over the past few years there thus has been an increasing interest in women’s experiences during war and their potential capabilities for peace, but this interest has not led to significant improvements in women’s lives during and after armed struggle. Conflict is a word often used loosely to mean many different things despite its long history in social science. Most types of social, political, and economic change involve conflict of some sort, and one could argue that many of the positive changes in world history have occurred as a result of conflict. Violent conflicts emerging since the end of the Cold War have commonly been called ethnic conflict, social conflict, and civil conflict, along with international social conflict where there is some cross-border activity or other states are involved. Competing identities are often added to the list of root causes, whether conceived in terms of an essentialist ethnicity, or regionalism, or tensions over state formation, or marginality to the global economy (Miall et al. 1999).

More recently, with the extension of conflict resolution into post conflict policies, gender issues have come to be seen as far more central, and as directly affecting the efficacy of peace-building initiatives, even if women still remain marginalised at the point of brokering a settlement. As women’s experiences have become more broadly known, it has become clear that there are many different ways in which women live through and participate in wars: as fighters, community leaders, social organisers, workers, farmers, traders, welfare workers, among other roles. Nonetheless, many conflict narratives highlight a common theme of women seeking to minimise the effects of violence through their different social roles. Stories of women actively seeking to end wars have received increasing international attention.

There has been a surge of interest in women who have negotiated peace between groups of warring men (Berhane-Selassie 1994; El-Bushra 2000), or who have even courageously intervened in battles to force peace (in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, for instance). These women have sometimes called on and expressed values, behaviour, and codes which are explicitly associated with their gender. Women less concern with ego involvement have played crucial role in consensus building that needs to be done in forging a peace for a people that have been so divided. There are possibilities of introducing new paradigms in conflict resolution, because, women are experienced in conflict resolution and conflict transformation in the domestic sphere, that can be played out into the way public negotiations take place. However, women who are seen to ‘break out’ of the ethnic identity ascribed to them, for instance by having mixed marriages or joining human rights organisations, are often targeted for particular censure, if not actual violence (as in the former Yugoslavia, for example (Korac 1998)). Some women’s organisations have developed the capacity to work openly to protect and extend human rights (especially in Latin America). Others have extended the work they undertook during conflict to ensure that the social fabric did not collapse, including, for example, various forms of community organisation and welfare provision in refugee camps in Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Burundi.

In practice, women’s organisations often have to deal not only with marginalisation and stigmatisation by powerful government and non-government organisations, but also with direct physical harassment from local men and security forces, especially common in post-conflict situations where gender tensions are already running high.

Supporting women as groups of individuals (rather than in organisations) is also a common strategy in trying to promote peace building (United Nations 1985, 1995, 1998). A common request from peace activists and commentators is that there should be more of a female presence at the sites of peace making, as well as at discussions that may take place as part of peace building (European Commission 1996b; United Nations 1995). Merely being invited to attend talks or peace conferences is insufficient, however. Very few women have the education, training, or confidence to participate fully, even if they are in attendance. There are lessons here from development policies which have attempted to expand the participation of women in the political process by offering them special training and educational opportunities.

Feminist research has shown many large institutions across the world are masculine in culture and practice. State bureaucracies and security services, as well as international bodies, tend to be structured and to function according to norms of masculinity and encourage individualistic competitive behaviour. The effects of such types of masculinity are not only seen directly in the commission of violent acts, but also in the structure and functioning of key institutions which are responsible for organising war, and indeed many of those which are meant to manage the peace.

The logical policy implication is that transformation of the masculine nature of such institutions is of central importance in any peace building strategy. It is certainly difficult to see how positive peace could be achieved without significant changes in the way certain institutions and policy-making bodies operate. In reflecting social norms, such institutions (private, state, and intl) are typically dominated by men, with few women being in decision-making positions. Such a pattern was until recently almost globally universal and it has now come to be seriously questioned and challenged in countries of the North. This is not only because of the desire for greater equity between women and men for employment and power, but also in the hope that this can lead to changes in the way that such institutions operate.

Security institutions are usually those most in need of reform in different post-conflict contexts (United Nations 1995). Without adequate personal security (for women and men), it is very difficult to reduce violence, or even sometimes to prevent a return to war. All too often such organisations are part of the problem, rather than the solution. They typically embody the aggressive values of masculinity, both in the way internal decisions are taken and management issues are resolved, and in the way that services are delivered to the public. Several countries have begun to tackle these problems by focusing on reducing violence and corruption within the police force, and they have incorporated the retraining of officers to deal with rape, which has been identified by international institutions as a priority in peace building (United Nations 1997). Policies which have been taken up on a small scale include: using women as key trainers; increasing the number of women employed, especially in more senior positions; and training and promoting women as investigators of gender crimes (El-Bushra and Piza López 1993). Unless one has a clear analysis of exactly which institutions are responsible for the fragility of peace, it is also not clear how change should be prioritised. A lot of work remains to be done in this area.

Writers within the development field have long argued that in trying to challenge the ways in which gender relations develop, it is necessary to look at the ways in which men are socialised to become part of a male gender. Research focusing on the construction of masculinity has also revealed cross-cultural tendencies, and some of these are highly pertinent to studies of conflict (Lentin 1997; Steans 1998). Egotistical, aggressive, and dominant behaviours are common features of cultural definitions of masculinity, as is men’s dominance over women (Byrne 1996). War of all types creates militarised societies, and in many different cultural contexts militarisation is linked to masculinity – not as a socio-biological attribution but rather as ‘cultural constructions of manliness’ (Turshen 1998).

Several writers have argued that at times of socio-political tension prior to conflict, as well as during conflict itself, some types of masculinity come to be celebrated and promoted more than others (Cockburn 1998, 2001; El-Bushra 2000;). Theoretically, it might be possible for people to reclaim positive cultural traditions of masculinity which have been lost or undermined during conflict, but this would probably require true leadership, or at least tolerance, and there are very few examples where this seems at all likely.

Rape widely recognised as war crime – and, indeed, war itself is assumed to be a
‘cause’ of rape. Turshen (2001) takes the debates on rape somewhat further by considering the case of Rwanda and Mozambique in more detail. She suggests that there has been a neglect of men’s motivation to gain access to property through women, and see women as property. Through rape and other forms of assault on women, men were able to gain rights to women’s land and access to their labour through forced ‘marriage’. They were also able to deny other men access to these goods by disabling and murdering women. She suggests that this motivation might be restricted to societies where gender relations are so unequal that women are not legally autonomous individuals – that is, where colonial and customary legal codes have combined to create the current situation. Perhaps an additional context is one of poverty, where access to very small amounts of property has great significance.

In this respect, the capacity of women to articulate their views should be promoted through initiatives that are neither about personal security nor about economic policy. El-Bushra (2000) argues that rather than seeking ways to achieve a feminist agenda of increased economic autonomy, many women in African countries prioritise ways to restore ‘respect’ through mended social relations between women and men, even where these are evidently unequal and exploitative. The key improvement in all of these approaches would be to have women’s voices heard.

Moreover, where peace education is taken seriously as part of the new curriculum, this frees women from what might be seen as a private responsibility (that of educating their children for peace) and makes it a public activity, in which men can also play a part. Nurturing a human-rights culture through the establishment of and support for human-rights organisations is a common mechanism used in peace building. There is room for a very positive input from donors here, especially in terms of incorporating women’s rights into human rights work (European Council 1995). It is more common for women than men to be unaware that they have human rights which are recognised internationally. Children’s rights have received much publicity in recent years, but they still tend to be marginalised within the work of many human-rights organisations. Where they are taken up, they are much more concerned with boys’ experiences than with girls’. There is therefore considerable room for improvement in this area.


The so-called ‘traditional’ reconciliation and conflict-resolution mechanisms need to be handled with care, even as they are being embraced with increasing amounts of enthusiasm internationally. There are perhaps two gender-based reasons why donors should exercise caution in providing support. First, these mechanisms tend to be much more a reflection of highly gendered local politics and power relations than they are part of some value-free traditional cultural context. Second, women’s needs are normally completely marginalised in their practice and may even be undermined by them. There are notable exceptions, where the re/invention of traditions has incorporated important roles for women, and even given women and young men space to influence outcomes, but it requires sensitivity to distinguish between the two approaches.

Truth Commissions are coming to be seen as a central plank of peace building, but they usually omit specific consideration of violence against women or else handle it very badly. Women’s experiences tend to be marginalised or ignored (United Nations 1998), either because they include specific things which do not happen to men in the same way (sexual violence), or because women find it difficult to bring complaints forward, or because commissioners, the government, or the general public do not want to acknowledge the truth about women’s war experiences. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission recognised some elements of all of these problems once it was well into its investigation, and it did try to address them by holding some hearings where only women were present, an act which many women regarded as successful in addressing the problem (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1998).

In general, the plight of women in war attracts international attention, sometimes to a greater degree than men’s, and it is often used as a symbol of the horrific barbarism mankind is capable of. Women’s roles in working towards peace have become increasingly celebrated (while their other roles are downplayed). As a consequence of this attention, women in ‘post-conflict’ peace building have been thrust into unprecedented prominence in the policy processes of many international organisations. Yet women remain marginal, as a group as well as as individuals, in peace negotiations and in consultations about ‘post-conflict’ strategies. Whether in specific peace-building activities, or in more general macro policies, women’s needs are consistently marginalised in ‘post-conflict’ societies, while they also suffer a ‘backlash’, often with physical and legal ramifications, not only from male citizens but from the state itself. Nonetheless, it is important to register that the persistent reluctance of many analysts and advisers to take on lessons about gendering analysis and policy
processes – from feminist histories of other conflicts and from feminist studies of development – has itself allowed, if not facilitated, the playing out of such intense gender politics.




Extracted from:

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