LAW RESEARCH

It is an early representation of the concept of ‘human security’ from the perspective of women, who traditionally have been denied any political influence over national security issues. Cynthia Enloe (1989), in a study on making feminist sense of international politics, argues that were we to use an ‘ungendered compass’, the landscape of international politics would be ‘peopled only by men, elite men’. “Local housing officials, so the assumption goes, may have to take women’s experiences into account now and then. Social workers may have to pay some attention to feminist theorising about poverty. Trade union leaders and economists have to give at least a nod in the direction of feminist explanation of wage equalities. Yet officials making international policy and their professional critics are freed from even a token consideration of women’s experiences and feminist understanding of those experiences” The last masculine bastion is the security-defence domain.

Recently, in India, a high level Group of Ministers (GOM) has been formed to examine national security in its entirety. Its composition is obvious, the ministers of home, external affairs, defence, and finance (all men) given that the tasks are border management, defence, intelligence and internal security. In the existing national security discourse there is no space to question that in the emphasis on meeting militarised external and internal threats, we are ignoring the ‘latent threats’. Verghese Koithara describes these latent threats as “an enfeebled people, a fragmented society, economic and technological mismanagement, jeopardisation of vital security areas such as food and energy, environment degradation, alienation of citizens and disputes” [Koithara 1999]. In the quest for military security we are jeopardising human security, at the very least, its coequal. An authentic review of security requires redefining it and democratising that closed circle of GOM security managers.

Doctrines of security have been and remain in south Asia, state-centric and rooted in military security against external (and internal) threats. The human security discourse not only widens the notion of security, emphasising sustainable development, social justice, human rights, gender equality and democracy, but sees peoples security as threatened by a military fixated state security. The national security paradigm derives its ideological moorings from theories of realism and neo-realism centred on the interaction between sovereign states in the pursuit of competitive national interests, posited on power. Realism privileges the state while simultaneously ignoring social structures, peoples movements, marginalised groups and non-state actors [Chenoy 1997].

Problematising Security

. Indeed, feminist1 scholarship holds that the modern notion of ‘human security’ as opposed to national security has evolved from the comprehensive approach adopted by peace researchers, especially those who identify themselves as feminist peace researchers [Stephenson 1999]. Women’s experience of providing for day-to-day human security gives them more comprehensive and integrated perspectives on what constitutes security. Arguably, because women make up a disproportionate share of the economically disadvantaged they are likely to be more sensitive to the cost of a militaristic foreign policy. They are likely to view high military expenditures as a drain on resources available for domestic social programmes, particularly important to women.

The elite form the national security constituency the world over while it is the less privileged that are concerned most about human security. It is therefore not surprising that in south Asia concerns about ‘human security’ remain subordinated or altogether sacrificed in the name of state security. As Koithara (1999) writes, “The issue of human security hasn’t come up front in India because its lack has yet to affect the well-off”. Both economic and civil security is a function of class, community, caste and gender in south Asia. Democratising the security discourse is essential to redefining security and formulating policies aimed at achieving freedom from want and freedom from fear. Feminising the security discourse not only brings in that half of the population which has been excluded, but also taps new perspectives located in women’s experience of providing for day-to-day human security, and thus their more comprehensive and integrated perspectives on what actually constitutes security. It is essential to the process of redefining security and power. The assumption being that there is a gendered2 notion and praxis of security and power.

Women’s movements, it is argued, have been a major influence on current trends towards the redefinition of security. “Women’s peace groups”, writes feminist peace researcher Betty Reardon (1999), “were among the first to argue that real human security lies in the expectation of well-being that is found in protection against harm of all kinds, of the meeting of basic needs, of the experience of human dignity and the fulfilment of human rights and a healthy natural environment capable of sustaining life.”

To have got where the UN system has widened the notion of security to relativise the military aspect and valorised the democratic aspect, to value people’s sovereignty over state sovereignty and twin sustainable development with human security – has been a process of democratising and feminising the security and peace agenda.

Today, we recognise that many other (beyond external) threats to human security such as national disasters, ethnic tension and human rights violations, may also be a source of conflict. The intimate relationship between social justice, material well-being and peace must also be taken into account, if action is to be pursued far enough to prevent local conflicts from escalating... In its work at the field level the UN has already started to embrace holistic concept of security. Its efforts to reduce poverty and promote development and democratisation – including electoral assistance – have gradually become more comprehensive and more integrated...[Kofi Annan 1998].

It reflects an emerging international consensus that it is no longer adequate to look at the management of national and international security in narrow realist terms, that is, concentrating on state power and ignoring human aspirations. That preventing violent conflict means engaging with the social, livelihood, and political aspects of human security. Unfortunately, human security concerns have been ill served in post-colonial states of south Asia, by the motivated perception that international obligations with respect to them constitute infringements of sovereignty.

In widening the security discourse, independent commissions from Brandt, Palme to Bruntland focused on development, environment and social justice as necessary components of a more comprehensive security concept. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia further spotlighted the dangers of social and economic enfeeblement from within. Moreover, the state centric military concept of security has been obliged by alternate development, human rights, feminist and civil society discourses to engage with soft belly notions of participatory democracy, social justice, gender equality, sustainable development and poverty eradication. It is a notion of security from the perspective of the disempowered and marginalised.

Clearly, the old security paradigms have failed and there is dire need to tap new perspectives and new experiences, which have been excluded from the formal security discourse. Elite security managers have turned south Asian states into national security states battling militarised external and internal threats. In India, given that external and internal security challenges are intertwined, total security expenditure, defence plus paramilitary, for 2000-2001 threatens to swallow 28 per cent of central government spending. Motivated concern about the fiscal deficit promptly results in for example shrinking food subsidies and this at a time when the number of impoverished have gone up. Between 1991-1999, rural poverty has increased by 3.4 per cent according to National Sample Survey [Navlakha 2000].

The south Asian human development discourse mapped by Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq (1999) draws urgent attention to the need to focus on social sectors. According to the Human Development report, south Asia is home to 40 per cent of all those living in poverty worldwide (23 per cent of the world population). Poverty of opportunities is increasing in all south Asian countries except India. The report warns that as a consequence of rapid political change, large scale natural disasters, expanding nuclear capabilities and global economic slowdown, there is the risk of making south Asia, now “the poorest region slip into even greater poverty with worsening nutritional, health and education outcomes” [Human Development in South Asia 1999].

Internationally, south Asia has been dubbed the ‘most dangerous place in the world’, in view of its volatile central security axis, the India-Pakistan confrontation, the only eyeball to eyeball confrontation between two contiguous nuclear powers. The quest for military security has made the people of south Asia all the more insecure, and militarised their polities and undermined democratic institutions. Whose security is being guarded by these weapons? Ask the millions of the poor and disadvantaged, the majority of whom are women – how do they define ‘dangerous’? The situation in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Nepal may be more dangerous or permeated by risk and violence for people losing access to land and denied human rights, for women and children dying of undernourishment, lack of health care and clean drinking water. Instead of politically negotiating with peoples demands for power sharing or alleviating social and economic injustices, the regime’s response is to treat them militarily as potential challenges to state authority.

II

Gendered Notion of Security

In the background are the theoretical debates around women and peace which lurch from the biological to the cultural, to reasons of ‘justice’ and finally to the functionalist, that women are for redefining the security discourse because they are the worst sufferers of militarised security regimes. A recent study by Tessler et al (1999) argues that “approaches that emphasise care giving and moral motherhood are unduly mechanistic, attributing cause and effect but failing to develop a coherent model of the pathway linking care giving and maternal thinking to tolerance compromise and other peace oriented political norms.” Its corollary is the mechanistic logic that since women have had less access to the instruments of coercion , they have been more apt to rely on the power of persuasion.

As we shall develop below, the emphasis is that women having been structurally excluded from having power – and exclusions which women face spanning from the household to the public sphere – have particular insights into understanding structural inequalities and discrimination. It has shaped a notion of security for all, recognising and accepting difference, while women’s work of managing day-to-day security has shaped a more comprehensive notion of security.

As the feminist historian Bernice Carrol stated, the fact that women’s historical experience is one of living disarmed (in a monstrously armed world), “gives women special skills to assess the role of weapons and war and to offer alternative models of behaviour in dealing with conflict and social change” [Carrol 1987].

At a conference on ‘Women and Violent Conflict’ in London in May 1999, some 60 women from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, articulated a rainbow vision of peace and security, arraying social justice, women’s rights, economic rights, coexistence, tolerance, participatory democracy and non-violent dialogue to sort out differences. Many had negotiated the lack of security in situations of violent conflict to find the ‘peace and security’ aftermath full of insecurities. Problematising security, Branka Rajna from Bosnia had asked “what was peace and security for the ostensible victors of conflict who had not been displaced, raped or widowed, if it meant unemployment, bankrupt social funds, no housing and a media full of hate and aggression”. What did security mean asked Thandi Modise an MP from South Africa if “at night, I cannot walk down a street in Johannesburg? What does economic security mean when I cannot be sure what will happen to my home when I am away at work”.3

For these women peace activists who were claiming a place at the negotiating table to redefine the ‘big questions’ of security, military security was seen as jeopardising human security. Indeed Thandi Modise who heads the defence committee in the South African Parliament had her work cut out arguing that armies should not be jettisoned into the sea. Women in South Africa were redefining how the armed forces should be used in the service of the people and not for the sectarian interests of state/rebel groups. Bitter experience has shown that the goals of national security and human security are not the same. It is not just incidental that women dominate peace movements. As Reardon writes, “women’s mobilisation against the arms race, military spending and nuclear testing is among the evidence of their long held view that military security is not synonymous with human security and is in fact detrimental to it” [Reardon 1999].

Issues of poverty, development and globalisation, women argued, have everything to do with authentic security because they have everything to do with violence – economic violence, political violence, cultural violence and physical violence. They pointed to the ‘structural violence’ which Johan Galtung, the Norwegian peace researcher had elaborated as – “the endemic violence which exists in the inequalities of societal structures”, i e, where gross power imbalances within a system impair people’s life chances as manifested in systemic discrimination – sexual, racial, religious, linguistic, economic, caste, etc [Rupesinghe and Anderlini 1998].

In south Asian societies, the richest one-fifth of the people earn almost 40 per cent of its income while one-fifth of the poorest earn less than 10 per cent. In real terms, 36 per cent of Indians live below an average poverty line of rupees eight a day. More than a sixth of the population in south Asia is not expected to survive the age of 40. In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, girls are between 30-50 per cent more likely to die between their first and fifth birthdays, than boys. More than 3,000 people have been killed in politically motivated violence in Karachi (Human Development Report 1999). Sri Lanka spends 50 billion rupees a year fighting the civil war. It is social, economic, political and gender inequalities that are at the heart of conflict in south Asia and which keep it underdeveloped.

Continuum of Violence

Feminist peace researcher, Carolyn Stephenson (1999) baldly states “the relationship between the violence of nuclear war and military force and the violence that occurs in our families and neighbourhoods and the violence of unjust economic and social structures defended by military forces”. Women are more likely to see a continuum of violence, because they experience the connected forms of domestic and political violence that stretches from the home, to the street and to the battlefield.

Empirical studies of the post Yugoslav and Israeli-Palestinian conflict have demonstrated the linkages between nationalism, militarisation, misogyny and domestic violence. In Israel, Simona Sharoni argues, the institutionalisation of national security as a top priority contributes to gender inequalities on the one hand and legitimises violence against Palestinians and against women, on the other [Sharoni 1993, 1994, 1996]. And Palestinian women are articulating a critical consciousness that the problems they face as women in the West Bank and Gaza are connected to the hardships suffered by Palestinian men and women due to Israeli occupation. In effect they are conflating what are seen as ‘women’s issues’ with political issues in the agenda of struggle. Palestinian MP Dalal Salmeh, at the Women and Violent Conflict conference candidly said, “The violence used against the Palestinian men has made them violent at home, in the work place and in their free time”. Men compensate for their loss of power by hitting at women. Its corollary are “protest masculinities” which emerge in contexts of ethnic oppression and poverty as in apartheid South Africa. Closer to home, in the testimonies of women living in the midst of the MQM conflict in Karachi, one women confided that her normally timid husband, after the conflict started, would now threaten her with a gun [Haroon 2000].

Violence against women gets magnified in conflict which in promoting macho values legitimises misogyny. Rape is not an accident of war as we know from experience of conflicts in East Pakistan, Jaffna, Kashmir and north-east India. The politics of rape are imbricated in women’s bodies being a marker of community identity both as a metaphor and a physical reality. Moreover the targeting of women in counter-insurgency is a designed task of war to destroy community which women all through conflict continue to hold together. Subjugation of women for the sake of male privilege or patriarchy is a feature of militarisation. Militaries are dominated by men and universally masculine in culture, characterised by coercion, hierarchy, discipline and the notion of ‘power over’. As Enloe (1989) points out, culturally, militaries need men and women to behave like binaries, i e, women need men to protect them and men to go to war to protect women. How manipulative that rhetoric is, was problematised when at the height of the conflict in Karachi, the MQM armed groups put up huge neighbourhood gates, in the name of protecting the women.

The linkages between militarism, masculinities and patrairchy has been convincingly established by theorists [Chenoy 1998]. Taking Brock-Unte’s definition of patriarchy as “a form of social organisation based on the force-based ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half”, patriarchy has to do with power over people, mostly power to control women and nature. War is armed patriarchy. War magnifies the already existing inequality of peacetime. The culture of militarisation – coercive power structures and practices, hierarchies and discipline – relies on patriarchal patterns and patriarchy in turn relies on militarisation [Ruddick 1998].

Control, especially sexual control over women, historically has been integral to militarisation and patriarchy. In time of violent conflict and the attendant societal upheaval, which pushes women into public space to manage survival or enter into negotiations of power, (and nationalist/social struggles need women to join) an inevitable tension is inbuilt, resulting in a kind of backlash. In understanding the veiling of Kashmiri women during the insurgency and Palestinian women during the ‘Intifada’, this was clearly an element. This is not to deny that when a community feels under siege, women seen as symbolic and physical markers of community identity, are under pressure to embrace identity constructs which undermine women’s autonomy of being, as in the veiling of Palestinian and Kashmir women. It falls off as the conflict intensity eases.

The culture of militarisation is entrenched not only in warlike situations but is internalised in ‘peacetime’ south Asian polities/societies as reflected in organisations like the RSS and the Jammat-I-Islami, to name just a few. Women are the worst victims of their cultural violence, i e, the use of religion, tradition and myths to reinforce structural inequalities.

Knowing Oppression

In the perspectives of women’s movements and feminist theorising, security is not real and sustainable without social justice for the oppressed, especially women. Peace is much more than demobilisation of society, it has to do with the demilitarisation of unequal power relations. Its corollary is that women with their historical experience of being structurally disempowered, bring a consensual approach and negotiating skills of compassion, reconciliation and accommodation. Women’s social acculturation is not oriented towards competitive hierarchies and winning, they go into negotiations ready to compromise.

Feminist researchers have been in the forefront challenging the gendered notion of ‘power over’ and emphasising the notion of shared power, of transfroming power into a medium for the exercise of responsibility and capacity [Breines 1999]. The implications of women being excluded from power and decision-making in the public sphere, argues Dan Smith, may be what makes for the women and peace connection. “If there is a female propensity for peace, it may be due to the male propensity to exclude women from power” [Dan Smith 1999].

It also fosters an ambivalence towards issues of citizenship. Women’s problematic relationship with the politics of exclusion inherent in national identity struggles is epigrammatically expressed in Virginia Woolf’s assertion ‘I have no nation’. It challenges the primacy of national identity for excluded groups. At a more pragmatic level, it is argued that women because they are excluded from ‘politics’, have less stake in the political positions on which conflict turns. It may be less important for women to display appropriate political attitudes. In Kashmir, in the early stages of the conflict, women across the Muslim-Pandit divide, rushed unthinkingly to save a boy being hauled away by the militants or the police. The men stayed inside.

There is need, however, to guard against sentimentalising the logic of ‘some mother’s son’, which makes it difficult for women to choose sides and enables them to reach out across the conflict divide. Women have been known to actively support violent and sectarian organisations and have been guilty in perpetuating the ‘them’ and ‘us’ divide at the heart of conflict. Mothers’ have risen to oppose a conflict that kills their sons, but equally they have raised sons to be soldiers to be sacrificed in the name of nationalism. And yet in the end, as Thandi Modise, from South Africa said, “for women, it doesn’t matter which side you are on, on both sides children get maimed and killed and women get raped. This is particularly reinforced when the violence is perceived as illegitimate, that is violence for violence sake. But the neutral space is a contested one with competing ideologies at play of nationalism, community, class, race and gender. The tensions that were evident in the campaign to veil the Kashmiri woman, as I have explored elsewhere, demonstrated some of these contradictions at work [Manchanda 2000].

Women reaching out across deeply divided communities and building a peace at the local level, in Palestine-Israel, Northern Ireland and Cyprus, is well documented. Not so well known are the local initiatives in our own region. For example, in Pakistan, WAF activists have reached out to MQM women trapped in violence in Karachi. In India’s strife torn north-east, in the Naga hills, in Manipur’s Churachanpur district bordering Myanmar, the ferocity of Naga versus Kuki violence brought 5,000 women across the conflict divide out on the streets in 1995 to appeal for peace. They forced the village elders to broker a peace which still holds.5 In Assam, Boro Women’s Justice Forum has appealed to santhal women to create a neutral space for a dialogue. What they open up is the possibility of an alternative way of negotiating the construction of conflictual identities and nationalities.

Inevitably, a gender sensitive analysis of security overdetermines the category of gender. Gender, it need to be emphasised, is intersected by class, community, caste and nationality. Moreover, it tends to reinforce as essentialist the dichotomous categories of feminine and masculine underlying patriarchy, rather than moving towards a solution within these socialised dichotomies. In its defence, it should be said that the overdetermination is necessary to make women’s historical invisibility, visible.

Arguably, tolerance, empathy, pacifism are not female norms or socially constructed but rather the norms of a population category marginalised and excluded from power.

III

Women of Power

As Cynthia Enloe (1989) points out the “the national political arena is dominated by men but allows women select access”. In south Asia, these select women are widows, wives and daughters of male politicians, the ‘bahu-bibi-beti’ brigade, whose politics have been largely undifferentiated from that of the men. In the Indian civil service, the glass ceiling has ensured that even after 50 years, women constitute less than 10 per cent of the senior secretary level positions. Studies have shown that a ‘minority group can only influence ‘mainstream policy if it constitutes a so-called critical mass of some 33 per cent [Breines:1999] to impact upon the masculinised structures of existing institutions and processes to make a dent. In South Africa, where they are experimenting with restructuring the architecture of institutions, as we shall detail later, the ruling ANC not only has a women head of the joint standing committee of defence in parliament but five women in the committee. What difference will it make? For one, the armed forces are being made to attend gender workshops.

Only the Nordic countries have for some years had a critical mass of women in government and in parliament though not in industry, finance, church or the armed forces. Studies in Norway and Sweden demonstrated a gender difference in the way women responded to use of force and military spending and the priority they give to ‘feminine’ issues like social security, ecological security and clean drinking water. A 1989 study of Norwegian women parliamentarians showed that women made a difference in working methods and political agenda and they worked more easily across party boundaries. Values traditionally linked to women such a social welfare, health care, education environment and international cooperation and solidarity were high on their political agendas.

In Sweden, a 1993 study on difference in attitudes towards foreign policy and defence issues showed that women were more positive than men to continuing foreign aid, to receiving refugees and to decreasing defence costs. Women were more negative to Swedish participation in European defence cooperation and in peacekeeping operations if it meant a risk of involvement in acts of warfare. The greatest difference was found on the issue of exports of war equipment, where women more than men wanted a total ban on Swedish arms exports [Breines 1999].

Much more ambivalent if not altogether dismissive of significant gender difference are the findings of Tessler’s statistical data analysis on the West Asia conflict. Contrary to data analysis of US-based studies on gender differentiated attitudes to the Gulf war, analysis of data sets of studies on the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1989 and in 1994 found that among Israeli and Palestinians there was no significant difference in attitude. Moroever, even US-based studies show gender differentiated attitudes in the use of force are not large, the study showed [Tessler et al 1999].

Informal Spaces: Local Activism

I have elsewhere explored women’s agency in situations of conflict. [Manchanda 2000]. Here I will just mention that women’s activism in conflict is rooted in their everyday role of keeping the family together and has thus been described as ‘accidental activism’. Part of the difficulty of making women’s activism in peace building visible and therefore mainstreaming gender in the political activity of redefining security and planning for a society’s reconstruction and transformation, is that women themselves see their activity as non-political and an extension of their domestic concerns- ‘stretched roles’. Moreover, women’s visibility is further obscured by the fact that their language of support and resistance flows from their cultural experience, especially of being disempowered.

Women’s strategy of protest often uses the symbols of mourning and motherhood both for moral authority and political mobilisation as for example, the Jaffna Mothers Front, Naga Mothers association, Association of the Parents of the Disappeared in Kashmir. The ‘Mothers’ Front strategy of protest is articulated through the process of taking the private act of mourning into public space. In Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the suppression of the Marxist-nationalist JVP in 1989-90, the Mothers Front drew upon a culturally specific tactic of ritualistic public cursing – the traditional weapon of the disempowered – to challenge the government over the fate of the disappearences of 40,000 people. In public space made barren by institutional terror such non-formal initiatives open up the space for political mobilisation. But a clear political vision is necessary for these human rights based initiatives to become the front line of a peace mobilisation lest they are co-opted as happened with the Sri Lanka Mother’s Front.

It needs to be emphasised that women’s critical consciousness about political violence is linked to their construction of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of violence. Women’s experience of conflict is not homogeneous experience, it is contextual and shifting. Women’s response strategies are also shifting. In Kashmir we see women actively support armed conflict and then turn their backs on the armed struggle. In the CHT conflict, human rights violations mobilised civil society activism, e g, Hill Women’s Federation, and opened up the possibility of democratising the struggle and empowering non-armed actors in the conflict transformation process. In the Peoples War in Nepal there is a sharp contrast in the differentiated attitude towards political violence between the Maoist widows and the widows of the victims of Maoist violence.

Invisible Women

In India’s north-east, the Naga Mothers take the lead in the puzzle of building peace, call for a halt to all killings, initiate a dialogue with the state and the underground for a cease fire, cross into hostile territory and appeal to the rival faction to stop internecine killings. They secure a promise – the killings will stop though the rival faction would abstain from the peace talks.

The Naga Mothers Association peace initiative turns on the moral authority of the mother and socially sanctioned space available within the Naga tradition of women’s activism for peace in the informal space of politics. It is precisely as mothers that women have this space to appeal to the powerful and move them to compassion and shame. The Naga Mother’s initiative represents the use of motherhood for women’s political mobilisation and also its limitations. Naga women still do not sit in the village council of elders where the decisions of formal politics are made. Their activism in the informal sphere of politics needs to be legitimised by men before space for women can be made. However, Naga women through their peace activism in the informal space of politics, have acquired a publicly recognised space for themselves in civil society mobilisations for peace, making their presence in the informal peace processes, significantly necessary.

IV

Women in Peace Processes

Despite women’s activism during the struggle, women and women’s perspectives find no place in the formal structures of political negotiations. An ungendered map of peace accords would show no women at all. Peace accords are structured to exclude as ‘marginal’ social movements, women’s groups and civil society associations that were active during the struggle. Peace accords like the Chittagong Hill Tracts agreement in Bangladesh, are concluded at summits of heads of government and armed groups and aim at technical solutions without time bound commitments to redress the original source of the conflict.

In the way representation at the national and international level is structured, it privileges a particular understanding of political community and identity based on the principle of state sovereignty. To be representative one has to be either a government representative or within the mainstream of one’s community or spokesperson for the rebel groups. Dissident voices, civil society voices and women’s perspectives are excluded. They are seen as marginal and likely to complicate negotiations. But it is likely that it is when the process is untidy with the perspectives of marginal groups included that the emergent accord may be much more workable and sustainable especially where the conflict is in deeply divided societies or communities. The CHT accord, the Israeli- Palestinian accords and the Cyprus process suffer from these exclusions.

The CHT accord is already under strain, civil society groups which emerged during the struggle but were marginalised in the accord process, have split for or against the accord. The ‘anti-accordists’ including a faction of Hill Women’s Federation, contest that the accord has failed to address vital issues of economic, social and gender justice and impunity. The roots of the conflict have been addressed to only the military aspects of the conflict, and not even that [Perera 1999].

In a conflict between divided societies a peace has to be built both at the diplomatic and the social level, argues Alexia Panayiotou (1999). In ‘Re-defining Peace’ in the context of Cyprus, parallel to the official diplomatic track, peace also has to be built at the social level at the root of conflict, not at its symptoms level. This informal track, usually initiated and dominated by women, in Cyprus seeks to re-establish cross cultural communication and redefine a relationship in terms of mutual societal advantage [Panayiotou 1999]. These local initiatives (where women are not without power in informal spaces) need to be recognised -by men- to translate that power into authority to get women representation in the formal structures of politics.

In the Israeli-Palestinian accord process, the presence of Palestinian women like Hanan Ashrawi was a significant departure. As Simona Sharoni (1996) argues, Hanan Ashrawi and the other Palestinian women had earned a place on the delegation due to the ongoing struggle of Palestinian women through the West Bank and Gaza strip. However, as she points out the gendered universe of international politics kept invisible two other women who played a role in the brokering of the Oslo agreement. One, was Marianne Heiberg a scholar at FAFO who is the author of a study on the living conditions in the ‘occupied’ territories. She is married to then Norwegian foreign minister, Johan J Holst, credited to be the architect of the accord. It was her connections in Israel, Egypt and Palestine which he used. The second woman was Mona Yoll, a top advisor to the foreign minister and wife of executive director of FAFO Terje Rod Larsen who was also instrumental in the Oslo accord.

In the Northern Ireland peace process, the active participation of women in the formal structure of the negotiations has often been held up as an inspirational model. However a more detailed analysis shows that in the 22 months negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, the National Ireland Women’s Coalition (comprising Protestants-Unionists/Catholics-republicans) which secured seven seats in the all party talks, also played an essentially behind the scenes role to ensure the talks did not break down. It did not frontally challenge gendered attitudes [Sharoni 1996].

In the case of Somalia despite the significant mobilisation of women at all levels of struggle, when the time for negotiations came, women were excluded from all the negotiations. In Afghanistan when the UN brokered peace process was on in 1995, Afghan Women’s Network wrote to the UN Special envoy for Afghanistan, Mahmoud Mestiri, stressing the importance of including women in the peace process. “Why is the UN talking to the warlords about peace? Their lives are based on making money and getting power from war”, one of the women in the Network was quoted as saying. To hear women’s voices, the UN would have had to add a women to the all male team. The UN did not [Colett 1998].

The assumption is that the presence of women on both sides of the negotiating table would have made a difference. Increasingly, women activists are questioning their exclusion from the negotiating table. Women are busy healing and reconciling at the local village level through informal, sporadic initiatives but they have been powerless to shape the ‘big’ questions which can again plunge their communities into destructive conflict and render meaningless their local level activism.

Simona Sharoni in her gendered analysis of the Israeli Palestinian accord demonstrates what the absence of women means in terms of critical consciousness. In the way the Israeli-Palestinian accord is constructed, the conflict is projected as occurring between two sovereign and unitary actors, excluded are the perspectives of social movements in general and women’s voices in particular, which are discounted as marginal voices unrepresentative of the mainstream. The dominant Israeli view, is socially located in Yitzhak Rabin, an elite security manager and a soldier. The accord is projected as accord between enemies over territory, all blame for the war cast on the ‘enemies’. It is legitimised at the peoples level within the peace discourse of groups like ‘Peace Now’, consisting of high ranking retired military officers, whose slogan in Oslo was ‘Peace is my Security’. It is peace defined as absence of war, security as national security and the emphasis on ‘my’ privileges Israel’s (and the Israeli male soldier’s) security over others in the region [Sharoni 1996].

At the pragmatic level, when discussions take place in the peace process on the decommissioning of weapons, where is the gendered prespective to input that it has direct bearing on levels of domestic violence? And that given the militarised construction of masculinities, demobilised men in the aftermath of protracted violent conflict, especially if there is high unemployment, are at risk of developing ‘protest masculinities’. Where is the space to put forward that children brutalised by war and even inducted into conflict have special needs for rehabilitation and reintegration. Continuing to disregard the myriad of informal peace building processes at the grass roots level, will only result in a formal solution that may be technically viable but socially and culturally not feasible.

Plea for Untidy Processes

As mentioned above, the way political representation is structured, women’s experience as a resource is undervalued, their activism belittled as ‘accidental activism’. In the structure of negotiations as in the Northern Ireland peace process, only political parties were to be represented. So the women formed the Northern Ireland Women’s Peace Coalition. In Burundi, ‘ordinary’ women after months of struggle managed to secure five places, but only as observers at the Arusha talks. As Concilie Nibigira explained, the Women’s Collective comprising 30 organisations built its credibility through its humanitarian work in the mixed Tutsi and Hutu neighbourhoods. However, when the peace talks began, women’s insistence to be present was ridiculed. At the negotiating table sat the ‘representatives’ of political parties or rebel groups? Who did the women represent? The women had no mandate. So they organised meetings in the villages to discuss the agenda for the Arusha. Eventually the collective was able to negotiate five seats as observers. “The women who sit at the Arusha talks , now have a mandate because we have listened to the women from the countryside”, said Nibigira.

Post apartheid South Africa’s experiment with democratising political reality has crucially extended it to the defence sphere. In the debate on setting up of a South African defence force, not just intellectuals and security experts were involved, but everyone, especially women who were critical in redefining the role of the defence forces. Five women today sit in the defence committee of parliament headed by a woman. In the all party negotiations during the peace process, the ANC women insisted, the other political parties also bring women and blocked the talks for a day till it was done.

In south Asia, there is dire need to democratise and feminise the security discourse. There is need to recognise and validate the myriad peace building activism of women at the informal level and bring them into formal processes of negotiations. In India where a major national security review is on, it cannot be left to national security managers, it is essential to open up the debate and include the perspectives of social movements, civil society groups, ‘marginal’ voices and especially the critical consciousness of women. The marginalisation of women in political discourse underscores the need for affirmative action like reservations in political institutions and governing structures.

Notes

1 Broadly speaking, in this paper, amidst the many feminisms, a feminist perspective is taken by those men and women who believe that most social systems discriminate against and oppress women and require fundamental restructuring. See Towards a Women’s Agenda for a Culture of Peace edited by Ingeborg Breines et al UNESCO publishing, Paris, 1999, p 13, and Sara Ruddick (1998) ‘Women of Peace’ in The Women and War Reader edited by Lois A Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, New York University Press, New York, p 214.

2 Gender here is being used as a social category to talk of power relations between women and men as well as the roles they are socialised to play. This working definition emerged at The Aftermath Conference, Johannesburg in July 1999.

3 Testimonies presented at the Conference on ‘Women and Violent: Global Perspectives’, International Alert, London, April 1999, Report of the Conference forthcoming.

4 Ambassador Swanee Hunt at the Women Waging Peace Policy Day, Cambridge, December 17, 1999. Women Waging Peace is an initiative of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, to shift the US foreign policy paradigm to factor women’s experiences as a resource in early warning preventing conflicts and in peace building.

5 This is based on a personal communication from a young scholar Binalaxmi, a Meitei women from Manipur, India.

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