CYNTHIA COCKBURN: “Don’t talk to me about war. My life’s a battlefield.”
violence in our everyday cultures, deeply gendered, predisposes societies to accept war as normal.. the violence of militarization & war, profoundly gendered, spills back into everyday life & increases the quotient of violence in it.
I remember one day, when I was working in Belfast – it was back in the nineties. That battered city was very poor and very violent. But it had one thing going for it – it had quite a few women’s community centres. I remember so clearly a woman in one of them who said to me, “Don’t talk to me about war. My life’s a battlefield.” The particular network of women’s centres I was working alongside, and learning from, at that time was involved in a bold cross-community initiative for peace, to end the war between the Unionists, the British and the Republicans. But a lot of those drop-in centres found they needed to provide support to women experiencing violence in the home, from men who weren’t called the enemy but the husband. There was a thread of violence in Belfast running from the bedroom, through the streets and bars, to the barracks. And the different kinds of violence weren’t entirely separate or distinct. Looking at it from a gender perspective brings to view some of the links between them. Some people talk of a ‘continuum of violence’.
When we’re looking for the links between war violence and violence against women in peace time, I think we need to look for causality, influence, flowing in both directions. Put briefly, violence in our everyday cultures, deeply gendered, predisposes societies to accept war as normal. And the violence of militarization and war, profoundly gendered, spills back into everyday life and increases the quotient of violence in it.
To think about the first flow first…My research between 2004 and 2007 took me to visit women antiwar activist organizations in twelve countries. One of the things I tried to learn is what they think are the roots or causes of war, so as to know what it is that they feel they need to tackle if they’re to reduce militarization and end armed conflict. Of course they were all pretty clear that capitalism is one of the causes of war - the greedy, global ambitions of corporations, competition for control of markets. And then again, nationalism, state claims to territory, or the struggle for religious and ethnic supremacy – in places like Bosnia or Palestine women can’t fail to see those things as causes of war.
But the reason these women had set up women’s, indeed feminist, antimilitarist organizations, is that the mainstream mixed peace movements of men and women that they’re part of seem to them to be missing something. They point to patriarchy. They’re not afraid of that old fashioned word. Gender relations that involve male supremacy, violent hierarchies of men and complicit, compliant or victimized femininities - patriarchy seems to them to be a cause of militarism and war. Not in the same immediate sense as those other causes of war, but present as a root cause, a predisposing factor... Read more:
