WHY do I, in such an essentialist and over-determined tone, assert ‘No Women, No Democratic Peace’? Why is it necessary to democratize the peace process and the post-conflict situation by enabling the participation of women and bringing in gender perspectives? Stated plainly, it is because of the material reality of the region’s faltering peace processes.

Take a quick look around South Asia. In Afghanistan, the internationally mid-wifed and militarily buoyed up peace process threatens to come unstuck as rights are being traded to buy back in the ‘spoilers’, the Taliban. In Nepal, the peace process has been lurching from one political crisis to another, stymieing the promised social justice agenda. In Bangladesh, the Chittagong Hill Tracts accord in failing to deliver has produced more division and more insecurity. In India, the Naga peace process has resulted in a stalemate of ‘no war, no peace’ that could spiral into violent frustration. And in Sri Lanka, a hollowed out peace process (2002-2005) collapsed into an all-out war and a bloody military end, resulting in a post-war but not post-conflict situation. Indeed, the Sri Lanka peace process showed up how little ‘ordinary’ people will work for the peace to hold, if the peace process is hollowed of an agenda that gives it meaning in terms of improved security for civilians, of humanitarian relief, of rights, i.e. the promised peace dividend.

Sadly, the trend world-wide is that just within a few years of signing peace accords, countries fall back into violence. The UN Human Security Report (2005) recorded this alarming trend when it stated that 40% of all peace accords collapse within five years of signature. It is this grim reckoning that has driven the male bastion of the UN Security Council to open up and ask – whether these peace processes can deliver? For whom do these peace processes deliver? Whether there is a better way? It is this cluster of questions that underpins my assertion that it is necessary to bring in gender perspectives if peace making is to go beyond reaching power sharing arrangements between ‘armed’ elites and that it involves a transformative agenda that includes broader social justice, economic and participatory rights issues.

At the outset, however, there is need to pay due attention to the gender agnostics, especially regarding the tendency to ‘essentialize’ women as if women are a pre-political category, as feminist scholar Nivedita Menon reminds us. Women’s gender identity is but one among multiple and competing identities – of class, caste, ethnicity, region, religious and linguistic group. Notwithstanding these qualifications, my argument is that at the minimal, bringing in gender as a category unsettles status quo power equations that underpin social, economic and political relations. There is need to navigate that thin line between the essentializing claim that women bring a different voice and a transcendent identity politics and the more nuanced understanding that gender as a category is disruptive of traditional political and military assumptions. So, what might women bring to the table?

 

Afghanistan: The international community, using the plight of Afghan women as a prop in its international intervention, conceded the NGO ‘Feminist Majority’ demand and got six women to the Bonn Conference 2001 and paved the way for women to be at the Emergency Loya Jirga (2002) and for 20 per cent of the voting delegates in the Constitutional jirga (2003) to be women. The Afghan Women’s Network forged alliances with other marginal groups, viz. the Uzbeks, supporting their demand for minority rights, and in the process both got recognition of the Uzbek language as well as managed to introduce gender sensitive language in the new Constitution. The point I wish to tease out in drawing attention to this mutually beneficial interlocking alliance is the contribution of women in peace processes/peace building in enabling the broader project of social justice, inclusiveness and accountability. The logic, and it does appear an essentializing one, is that women having been historically disempowered, would be more sensitive to what ‘exclusion’ means. The gender perspective that is being emphasized is, however, concerned not merely with the presence of women but with shaping the kind of equality that should underpin the new constitutional order.

 

Nepal: In the slew of agreements that comprised the architecture of the peace road map of the seven political parties and the Maoists in 2006, one can pick out the motifs of inclusiveness, proportionality and participation that inhere in a broad front of marginalized groups discriminated on the basis of class, ethnicity, caste, region and gender.¹ This is repeatedly reiterated in the agreements, and reflects the collective assertion of marginalized groups – women, janajatis, Dalits, Madhesi – for post-conflict inclusion of the broader agenda of socio-economic justice and the reworking of gender, caste, class power relations.

Naga Peace Process: The 1997 ceasefire agreement was concerned with the security of the two armed parties, the NSCN and the GOI, and overlooked concerns about civilian security. It was civil society groups, including influential women’s groups, that insisted that the ceasefire must be about transforming the difficult, insecure lives of civilians too. They obliged the two parties to redefine the ceasefire agreement to include civilian security issues and accept the need for a monitoring mechanism that had independent non-partisan observers in the 2001 parleys.

 

Increasingly, a growing literature² on Women, Peace and Security suggests a correlation between the greater presence of women in peace processes and the gender-sensitivity (and therefore overall quality) of the text of the peace agreement in going beyond politico-military sharing arrangements, and moving towards a transformative agenda that challenges the status quo. This is based on the assumption that a gender perspective is disruptive of settled socio-economic relations. It is built on the understanding that gender is part of the sub-text of the socio-economic order, of the customary law-civil law dichotomies and, indeed of the constitutional order.

While there is no clear empirical evidence of cause and effect between women’s participation and the building of a sustainable peace, there seems to be growing evidence on the basis of the significance of women’s myriad peace work at the grassroots during the conflict, that ignoring or sidelining women results in weak and dysfunctional peace.

Admittedly, it is difficult to draw the line between women’s inclusion in peace agreements and sustainable peace building, especially as peace agreements are rarely implemented in full and often the gendered aspects are ignored. Nonetheless, the agreements that mark the road map to peace, as it were, can become important lobbying tools for civil society organizations, women’s groups, and rights advocates, as evident in the Nepal peace process. It stands to reason that a peace deal that ignores women’s needs, especially women’s security, will be deprived of the peace building capacities of 50% of the population. In short, women contribute to building a ‘democratic’ peace.

 

That is the transformative message of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security, a landmark resolution that recognized civilians and especially women and children as the worst affected in situations of armed conflicts. It also provided them with a legitimate basis to demand action from their governments and the international community. Its normative framework exhorted member states to address the gendered impact of conflict and the differentiated needs of women in conflict and post-conflict situations. It affirmed the crucial linkage between women’s vulnerabilities in conflict situations and the status of women, i.e. women’s rights and empowerment, and of women building a peace that transforms the status quo on socio-political and gender relations. What subsequently has come to be known as the quartet of Women, Peace and Security Resolutions (1325, 1820,1888, 1889) urges women’s participation in prevention and at every stage of peace processes and post-conflict recovery.

UNSC R1325 is one book end of the Women, Peace and Security discourse; the other bookend, as it were, is the crucial peace work of local women. The conflict zones of South Asia are replete with the narratives of women mediating between warring factions, managing community survival by patrolling the night streets, using kitchen politics to prevent communities from being targeted in reprisal attacks, negotiating for the release of boys taken away, protesting against human rights violations, and building reconciliation at the ground level.

 

In the North East, where there is a vibrant tradition of women’s collective activism, women at the local level have been playing significant roles in peace building – from mediating between warring factions, demanding justice and repeal of emergency laws (AFSPA), and building community wide support for peace and reconciliation. In Manipur, the Meira Paibis (torch bearers) vaulted into the international media’s eye with their naked protest following outrage at the likely rape, torture and killing of Manorama Devi by the paramilitary forces. The naked protest of the Meira Paibis (Manipur women’s groups) in front of the camp of the paramilitary Assam Rifles, holding aloft the banner ‘India Army, Come Rape Us’, shamed the state into instituting a review committee on AFSPA in 2004, though its report has yet to be made public. In Imphal, Irom Sharmila’s Gandhian protest ‘fast’ against AFSPA and army abuse is now in its 10th year.

Amongst the Nagas, social sanction for women’s peace activism is rooted in the traditional role of Naga women as peace makers between warring villages/tribes from the head hunting days when a demi or a pukrelia would step forward in the midst of battle and halt the violence. Its contemporary version is the story of Neidonuo Angami, then president of the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) intervening between two fighting factions in Phek district and saying. ‘Listen to your mother before you kill your brother.’ NMA’s emphasis on motherhood as a mobilization strategy secures social legitimacy and depoliticizes it, thus enabling NMA to claim a nonpartisan stand. Its sister organization, Naga Women’s Union of Manipur (NWUM) is positioned more as a rights based organization.

 

Narratives of her-story of the Naga conflict are strewn with incidents of women shielding the men, lying on the road, blocking trucks loaded with the village boys from driving away. Bloody reprisals for militant ambushes would often see women in the villages beating a drum to sound the alert, rushing to form a wall between the security forces and their men. Ordinary ‘peasant’ women in Jotsoma village of Kohima district, took pride in describing that, ‘When the Indian Army came, it was women who stepped forward between the soldiers and the villagers. It is only women who can intervene. We constantly had to talk to the army. We mothers would go to the warring factions, walk to their camps and plead with them not to kill each other and not to harass the villagers.’ The women then and now, as in the 2010 Mao Gate stand-off, have interceded with the local authorities, defusing a dangerous confrontation. The Naga women have reinvented their welfare oriented tribal women’s organizations into powerful Mothers Fronts, holding state and the national workers/underground groups accountable.

NMA and NWUM stand out in the tapestry of women’s agency in conflict situations, because of their capacity to translate their local peace building activism into formal authority, as evidenced in their participation in track two peace processes, especially the Bangkok Consultations convened by leaders of the NSCN (I-M) with civil society groups in 2002.³ From merely a ceremonial presence, Naga women have asserted and are winning their right to be at the peace table, albeit a secondary one.

More recently, in May 2010, during the stand-off at Mao Gate (Nagaland-Manipur border) over the government’s volte face in stopping the NSCN leader Th Muivah from visiting his home village in Manipur, at the high level parleys with the Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai, the Naga leader Th Muivah invited members of Naga ‘civil society’ organizations – the Naga Ho Ho, Naga Mothers, and human rights organization, NPMHR, to be present as stakeholders in the peace process. It should be mentioned that whereas the Naga leaders of the movement have slowly come to recognize and value the significance of the role of civil society, including the women’s groups, New Delhi’s representatives remain much more closed. Indeed, General R.V. Kulkarni, then the head of the ceasefire monitoring group, was at a loss to understand why Naga Mothers should be a party to any consultation that he held.

 

In Assam, the feminist writer Indira Goswami’s efforts to broker peace between the government and the militant group, ULFA, (2005-6), foundered over the reluctance of the Home Ministry officials to take civil society’s intervention seriously. Ironically, it is the Home Ministry that in 2010 nominated Radha Kumar as one of the three interlocutors in the Kashmir dialogue process.

Elsewhere in South Asia, in Nepal, despite the important role played by women in the movement, the Maoists included no women in their team for peace talks, though their other main constituencies were represented, i.e. the indigenous community, ethnic Madhesi community, and so on. The Nepal Comprehensive Peace Agreement did recognize the need to pay special attention to the needs and roles of women in the peace process. But the decision-making structures that followed did not include women. Eventually, a strategic alliance of political women, gender equality advocates and women’s organizations, with support from UN and international agencies was able to push for more gender sensitive decision-making structures. Eventually, it delivered an interim constitution that represented significant strides in the struggle for rights, inclusion, and proportional representation of marginalized groups, including women. A third of all positions in public bodies were reserved for women, and the Election Act was amended to enable 33 per cent women to be elected to Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.

 

In Afghanistan, strategic networking by international civil society actors and backing by the international community enabled two of the nine members of the drafting committee of the new constitution to be women. They were able to inscribe gender sensitive language and quotas for women in the constitution. Since then, sadly, women’s rights are being traded away for making peace with the warlords and now the Taliban.

In Bangladesh, the Hill Women’s Federation played an important role during the Chittagong Hill Tracts conflict, but when the structured and secret peace talks took place in 1997, it left civil society groups, including the HWF, without any means to influence the process. The CHT accord had initially been rejected by them, though 13 years anon, the HWF and its ally, UPDF, are now demanding that the agreement be implemented.

 

Historically, the experience is that once peace negotiations begin, local women peace builders and leaders are marginalized. The challenge is to enable the translation of women’s local activism in the informal space of politics into recognized authority in the formal sphere. The newly established UN-Women is committed to upstreaming local women’s activism, to recognizing and validating it, thus enabling women to impact upon peace making and the shaping of post conflict societies. Nevertheless, the record of the impact of the Women, Peace and Security quartet of resolutions is so far a disillusioning one.

Bell and O. Rouke’s appraisal of peace agreements from 1990-2010, using qualitative and quantitative tools, reveals that even as internationalized peace agreements regularly foreground Res. 1325, they are weak in insisting on normative commitments.⁴ It is non-internationalized processes, in which local civil society and women’s groups have been able to leverage mechanisms to influence the peace process, that have been more successful in including broader social justice and economic issues. This may be because internationalized high profile processes are more difficult for local groups to access.

It is the political mobilization of local groups, including women’s multi-layered ‘peace work’ at the grassroots, that has the potential for horizontally expanding the space for democratic politics and making for a more socially inclusive participatory agenda. But this hinges upon the ability of these grassroots level groups to impact upon the existing, often undemocratic, vertical structure of power, failing which peace making is more likely to become an exercise in devising arrangements for sharing power with counter-elites and not a transformative process, as was the case in the Assam and Gorkhaland peace accords.

 

Increasingly, conflict-peace industry wallahs confronted with faltering peace processes and the widening gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the fundamental change required to sustain peace processes, are challenging settled assumptions about peace building. They are confronting the question that we began with: ‘Whether, and for whom do these peace processes deliver’ and, ‘Is there a better way? Conflict transformation practitioners like John Paul Lederach are rethinking their emphasis on horizontal relationship-building across the fault lines of division. Shifting the focus to developing vertical capacity, Lederach argues that, ‘High, middle range and grassroots levels of leadership rarely see themselves as interdependent, until they discover they need each other, usually when the process is under enormous stress and time constraints.’⁵ At the grassroots is where the women are, and women’s crucial peace work, as evident in the North East.

Here, it is necessary to problematize some of the assumptions packed into the Women, Peace and Security discourse and introduce some necessary caveats. First, there is the risk of stereotyping women as victims, mothers, and as peace makers. We have only to hear the voices of some leading women activists from Kashmir at a meeting with President Pratibha Patil in Rashtrapati Bhavan, last September, to know that not all women want peace at any cost. If at one end of the Women, Peace and Security spectrum there are the Mothers’ Fronts, at the other end are the women combatants in the guerrilla armies. The WPS discourse has been overdeter-mined by ‘protection’ anxieties (especially against SGBV – Sexual and Gender Based Violence) and is insufficiently attentive to ‘participation’ goals.

Second, is the problematic assumption that women when present, bring a different voice, as if women comprise an essential category. It presumes that women are capable of transcending their other competing identities. Is there traction in the universalizing saying of ‘some mother’s son’ that assumes that women can bridge the conflict divide? Clearly, this is a minefield, as evinced in the deepening rift between the Naga and Metei women and their inability to forge common fronts in campaigning against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

 

Nevertheless, there does seem to be empirical proof that more ‘inclusive’ peace processes (inclusion here goes beyond women to include different ethnic groups, political parties, etc) are more likely to ‘hold’. Moreover, a gender perspective has the capacity to disrupt settled power relations and open the way towards a more transformative agenda. Without the participation of women, it is even less likely that their gendered concerns will be addressed. Equally, without the inclusion of gender concerns in peace agreements, it will be even more difficult to bring them in subsequently, post conflict.

 

* Based on a presentation at the IIAS seminar on Challenges to Democracy in South Asia, New Delhi, 15-16 January 2011.

Footnotes:

1. The 8 November 2006 understanding between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists refers to the restructuring of state by resolving the prevailing problems related to class, ethnicity, regional and gender differences. Regarding election to the CA, it exhorts that political parties should ensure proportional representation of oppressed groups, region, Madhesi, women, Dalit and other groups. It emphasizes ending discrimination based on class, ethnicity, gender, etc and looks towards reconstructing an inclusive democratic and forward looking state. These motifs of non-discrimination and inclusion are reiterated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), 23 November 2006, 3.5 in the broad reference to ‘address the problems related to women, dalit, indigenous people, janajatis, Madhesi and oppressed neglected minorities.’

2. See UNIFEM Resources on Women, Peace and Security http://www.unifem.org/materials/item_detail.php?ProductID=186 especially ‘Guidance Note: Identifying Women’s Peace and Security Priorities: Building Voice and Influence,’ November 2010. http://www.unifem.org/attachments/products/0102_ IdentifyingWomensPeaceAndSecurity Priorities_en.pdf

3. Rita Manchanda, ‘We Do More Because We Can: Women in the Naga Peace Process’, South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), Kathmandu, 2004. Mimeo.

4. Bell and O. Rouke, ‘Peace Agreements or Pieces of Paper: The Impact of UNSC Res 1325 on Peace Processes and their Agreements’, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, October 2010.

5. ‘The Challenge of the 21st Century: Justpeace’, People Building Peace, European Centre for Conflict Prevention, Utrecht, 1999. Mimeo.