The 'sex war' and other wars: towards a feminist approach to peace building

Donna Pankhurst

Introduction

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. They still have highly distinct experiences of conflict which tend to leave them marginalised in peace negotiations and significantly disadvantaged with the onset of peace. This paper considers the various explanations for this lack of positive change.

One of the charges which might be made against both actors and analysts of conflict is that of conceptual confusion. 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. How much more confusing, then, is the term peace! With much less of a social science tradition behind it, peace is a term which is not only subject to very little conceptual scrutiny, but is also declared, with little qualification, as a political objective for which compromises, and indeed sacrifices, are to be made.

In the mix of such ambiguities about these two terms, blindness about gender inequality (often among other inequalities) commonly rests unchallenged, and the inequality itself thrives. There is a sophisticated analytical literature on the history of women and gender relations during and after war which is persistently ignored by many prominent writers on conflict, conflict resolution, and peace building in favour of newly coined terms and observations which are very seldom rooted in analyses of historical social, political, and economic change. There is now perhaps greater international political will to improve the position of women after wars end (if not actually during war) than ever before, yet there is little evidence of much positive change. Women's concerns are still rarely heard, let alone addressed, by policy makers during peace settlements.

I begin, therefore, with a preliminary review of the conceptual debates from literature on conflict and peace, and women and gender relations, and then I consider these issues during the peace-building process. The questions I seek to address in the paper are derived from concerns about sloppy conceptual thinking on conflict and peace, and on the nature of gender politics in 'post-conflict' situations. Specifically, I ask why extreme forms of gender inequality persist and what can be done to improve the situation for most women in peace-building contexts.

Concepts of conflict and peace

Accepting that no straightforward technical definition (such as more conventional approaches to the categorisations of battles and wars in terms of the numbers of casualties) is likely to encapsulate the complexities of contemporary conflicts in much of the world today, observers frequently present descriptive typologies of conflicts which feature organised and/or collective violence. 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. These descriptive terms are intended to capture the much cited observation that 90 per cent of today's casualties of war are civilians (Lake 1990), as well as to convey something about their causes. 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. 1999:1–38).

The prevalent use of the word 'conflict', rather than 'war', is also a reflection of today's complexities, with violence characterised by stops and starts, fluid boundaries, battlegrounds in residential areas, and civilian casualties. However attractive the term 'conflict' is as a convenient device to catch all these phenomena, it also entails a lack of clarity about what exactly is being discussed. The word may thus be used interchangeably to refer to a conflict of interest or to the violent expression of conflict. The question hardly arises as to how or why this 'conflict' situation is different from what is 'normal', as typologies of conflict tend not to be connected to deeper, more sophisticated analyses of the places about which they are commenting. Moreover, there is very little discussion in much of the writing on 'conflict analysis' or 'conflict resolution' on the impact of certain types of social relations on the specific forms of violence, let alone engagement with theories of human or social behaviour.

There is an emerging common approach which divides the causes of conflict between underlying causes – which might commonly be seen as 'structural inequalities' – and 'triggers' – factors which tip such situations into violent conflict. There is as yet no comprehensive, convincing account of why difficult pre-existing conditions (including economic hardship and acute competition over...