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Preface
Deborah EadeAfter three decades of trying to get ‘gender onto the development agenda’, it is now widely recognised that, although the indicators of women’s subordination to men are universal, persistent, and fairly comprehensive (1), this does not mean that women constitute a homogeneous group. Nor does it mean that their interests or needs (2) are identical across social, economic, cultural, political, and other divides.
In the context of humanitarian work, however, and certainly in terms of how the issues are presented in the mass media, women are commonly seen in terms of their membership of a group or community. While terms such as ‘the plight of women’ (be they Afghan or Albanian or Angolan) distinguish them from men, this is at the expense of insisting upon their commonality as women in ways that invariably gloss over significant differences among them. The ensuing narrative either insists upon women’s victimhood and their helplessness in the face of suffering and adversity; or it stresses their resourcefulness, their ‘inner strength’, their stoical struggle to keep their families going, their ‘natural’ identification with peace. Men prosecute war to defend the homeland, and women bind the social wounds and keep the home fires burning.
Men, in this dualistic portrayal, will negotiate only from a position of power that is ultimately based on violence, or the threat of violence; women will look for compromises that do not involve such zero-sum games.
This narrative finds it even more difficult to countenance the engagement of women in violence and destruction than to recognise that many men do seek peaceful dialogue rather than solutions that are based upon aggression: that suicide bombers should include women seems to turn the world upside down. But real-life problems arise when emergency interventions and post-conflict programmes are based on distorted generalisations that not only deny women and men the full range of human agency, but may also lock emerging societies into ill-fitting roles that diminish rather than enhance their development potential.This Reader comprises two parts. The first is introduced by Haleh Afshar and is based on her guest-edited issue of the journal Development in Practice (Volume 13 Numbers 2&3) published in May 2003. A feminist scholar and activist, and a prominent commentator on contemporary Islamic affairs, Haleh Afshar is Professor of Politics at the University of York. Contributors on the overarching theme of women, war, and peace building describe the work of women (some feminist, some not) who are actively engaged in trying to (re-) build equitable and sustainable societies in the very process of living through or emerging from war.
The second part of this Reader contains a selection of papers drawn from other issues of the journal and elsewhere focusing on the ways in which aid agencies often relate to the ‘victims’ of conflict, who are predominantly ‘womenandchildren’ (to borrow Susan McKay’s phrase, quoted in Assam 2001:19), and considering how external agencies might best support these ‘victims’ and other civilians in their own peace-building efforts.The experience of living or working in a situation of armed conflict defies generalisation: every war or situation of political violence has its own distinct characteristics. In terms of gender-power relations, there are grounds for guarded optimism in some cases, near despair in others. Human beings do adapt to new circumstances and will devise all manner of ways to secure their survival even in the most desperate of situations. It is a piece of aid agency lore that social disruption can, in some instances, open up new opportunities for women that enable them to break out of restrictive gender stereotypes. The legacy of women’s clandestine networks in Afghanistan described by Elaheh Rostami Povey is one such case, the growing political agency and ‘self-protection’ capacities of peasant women during the war in El Salvador chronicled by Martha Thompson and Deborah Eade is another. These and other experiences recorded in this volume show what women can achieve when they are able to organise autonomously, as women and as citizens. And yet, the overwhelming evidence is that, although women do characteristically take on additional burdens in order to secure the survival of their families, often assuming extra economic and public (including military) responsibilities over and above their reproductive work, these changes in gender roles are generally contingent and context-specific, and as such fail to take root within a broader project of social transformation. So unless women are able to distinguish for themselves between the desirable and negative outcomes of social upheaval, and mobilise to defend what they perceive as improvements in their quality of life, the ideological undertow is all too likely to sweep away any fragile gains women may have experienced during wartime and may well usher in ‘traditional’ patterns of gender-power relations.
It is a sad reflection of the crisis facing political institutions throughout much of the contemporary world that this collection cannot be comprehensive in its coverage of existing armed conflicts, and that more will almost certainly have broken out than been resolved even before it goes to press. At the time of writing, the situation in post-war Iraq remains highly unstable, the peace processes in the Middle East and West Africa are at best precarious, the conflict in Colombia bleeds on almost unnoticed, and the ‘war on terror’ seems set to claim more lives. The need for new perspectives on conflict, new approaches to peace building and conflict resolution, could not be more urgent. If this volume helps readers to look at these issues in a more creative way, then it will have contributed in some small way to meeting that need.
Notes
1 UNDP’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI) ranks countries according to the life expectancy, adult literacy, education, and earnings of women relative to men. Even in Norway, the highest-ranking country on both the Human Development Index (HDI) and the GDI, despite their higher average level of education, women still earn only two-thirds of average male earnings (UNDP 2003). The world over, from rural and urban sectors in developing countries to OECD nations, women generally work longer hours but earn less money than men. The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) looks at women’s representation in public and professional life. High-income Japan, which ranks ninth in the world in terms of human development, drops to thirteenth position on this index: women hold only 10 per cent of parliamentary seats, compared with 30 per cent in South Africa; fewer than 10 per cent of Japanese legislators and senior officials are women, compared, for example, with 36 per cent in Honduras; and while 45 per cent of professional and technical workers in Japan are women, countries as varied as Brazil, Philippines, and Poland all do significantly better on this score. In other words, a country’s HDI ranking can mask considerable female disadvantage, while a low HDI or GDI ranking does not necessarily mean that women are absent from public life.2 A reference to the pioneering distinction between strategic and practical interests as originally defined by Maxine Molyneux (1985), and strategic and practical needs, the approach later developed by Caroline Moser (1989).
References
Karam, Azza (2001) ‘Women in war and peace-building: the roads traversed, the challenges ahead’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 3(1):1-25.
Molyneux, Maxine (1984) ‘Mobilisation without emancipation? Women’s interests, state and revolution in Nicaragua’, Feminist Studies 11(2):227-254.
Moser, C.O.N. (1989) ‘Gender planning in the Third World: meeting practical and strategic gender needs’, World Developmen, 17(11):1799-1825.
UNDP (2003) 2003 Human Development Report, Oxford and New York: OUP.
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