Winning the War on War by Joshua S. Goldstein

Author:Joshua S. Goldstein
Language: ru
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-15T20:00:00+00:00

III. Women and Peace

Sanam Anderlini, a pioneer in women’s peace activism, notes that what was a “bandwagon of women in peace and security” a decade ago “is now a full-fledged convoy on a bumpy road.” She ties the rise of recent women’s peace activism both to the changing nature of war—especially the blurring of lines between military and civilian spheres—and to the UN-SPONSORED conference on women held in Beijing in 1995. The Beijing conference brought together women peacemakers from the civil wars of the early 1990s in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. The women were often motivated to take action after losing children to war. After Beijing, “local, national, and international women’s activism in peacemaking and security-related issues grew exponentially, with regional and international networks taking shape.”

At the five-year follow-up conference to Beijing, in 2000, NGOs appealed for a Security Council resolution on women and war. They worked with governments holding temporary seats on the Council—Bangladesh, Jamaica, Canada, and Namibia—and shepherded Resolution 1325 to passage later in 2000. Under that resolution, all UN peace operations are supposed to take gender into account in terms of women’s participation as peacekeepers, women’s involvement in peace processes, and attention to the protection of women and girls in conflict areas. Implementation of 1325 has been uneven, but the overall effect positive. A new resolution in 2009 reaffirmed the goals of 1325 and emphasized women’s roles in peacebuilding. Yet, of the 80,000 military peacekeepers deployed in early 2008, fewer than 2 percent were women. This reflects the composition of national military forces in contributing countries.

In Sri Lanka (where, incidentally, women made up about a third of the rebel Tamil Tiger combatants), about a hundred women formed Women for Peace at the start of the war and collected ten thousand signatures across the country, calling for the war’s end. In Israel, Women in Black dressed in black and stood in protests against the occupation of Palestine starting in 1988. Women in Serbia and Palestine emulated this tactic. In 1995–96, when the genocide in Rwanda threatened to repeat itself in next-door Burundi, women’s groups launched radio shows, workshops, and female-run mediations. Reportedly, violence was lower in communities where such women were active.

In Liberia, a schoolteacher speaking on a radio show called for a mass meeting and 400 women showed up, starting a women’s initiative that was critical to Liberia’s progress toward peace. “They ran workshops in which members of opposing parties were forced to partner with each other to complete simple tasks.... They kept their public support through demonstrations. They were the first sector of society to speak up to the fighters.” Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, credits these women’s efforts with ending the civil war in her country—they “sat in the rain and sun promoting peace, advocating reconciliation and the end to the war.” She also argues that if women ran the world, “it would be a better, safer and more productive world,” with no wars. (This is a long-standing argument that has never been put to the test.

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