The problem

DESPITE the voluminous literature on war and conflict, both its causes as also the frameworks underlying various peace accords and post-conflict resolution and reconstruction strategies, there appears significant reluctance to factor in women’s specific experiences, as also their orientations, capacities and skills in facilitating a transition towards a more just and durable peace. Not only is it rare to come across women playing a significant role in peace parleys and accord-making, their concerns and suggestions too are usually relegated to the margins. The episodic nod to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security notwithstanding, analysis of peace accords and subsequent processes reveals, globally, that this arena remains a male preserve and little has changed on the ground.

The experience in South Asia, be it Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, India’s insurgency affected North East, to name a few, reveals a disturbing tendency to invisibilize women and their concerns. The situation post communal riots in cities or in the Maoist affected regions of Central India is no different. Everywhere, even as it is recognized that women (and children) are the worst affected, little effort is made at addressing their major concerns – reducing the ever-present threat of sexual violence and rape, generating jobs and income earning opportunities, meeting the needs of health and education, and so on, though it is now well accepted that an enhanced status of women is central to family and community welfare. The result is not only flawed and failed accords – often little more than power sharing arrangements between ‘armed elites’, mostly men – but reflects a deeper failure to address the underlying causes of conflict. To state more sharply, processes which marginalize and invisibilize women cannot become the basis for a durable, just and democratic peace.

Even where women’s concerns are admitted, the dominant view treats them primarily as victims, requiring help, thus continuing to underplay their capacities and agency. Equally disturbing is the tendency to stress women’s distinct relationship with nature, their compassion and capacity to care, love and nurture, continually seeking consensus and harmony. Such an essentialist orientation not only reduces and confines them as home-makers, underplays the importance of other attributes of class, status, religion and ethnicity in influencing women’s choices and aspirations, but also ends up creating a false dichotomy between women and men. In the process, we miss out the role of women as activists and militants in numerous conflicts as also leaders and administrators in development programmes.

What is it that an increased participation of women and their concerns might bring to the table in peace negotiations and the designing of post-conflict strategies and programmes? Preliminary research on the role of the Mothers’ Front in both Sri Lanka and Nagaland, as also the Meira Paibis in Manipur clearly demonstrates their ability to restrain both the militants and state forces, highlight human rights concerns as also the rarely admitted problem of missing and disappeared persons, the former by pointing out that continued militancy equally ‘consumes’ their brothers, and the latter through a process of shaming. It is instructive that they enjoy a greater leverage with militant groups than the state forces. Similarly, the role of organizations like SEWA, both in post-riot Gujarat or war-affected Afghanistan, underscores the critical need of providing wage work and employment to women in an effort to normalize the everyday. Wherever this has not happened, and this is the norm, we realize how neglecting women’s concerns and leadership results in a significant section of the affected failing to ‘buy into’ the peace proposals, thus diminishing the peace dividend.

An exclusive focus on conflict, however, can distort our understanding as peace, after all, is not just the absence of war. Durable peace demands a reordering of developmental priorities and a move towards a transformative agenda that includes broader concerns of social justice, economic and participatory rights. It involves a fundamental restructuring of power relations such that all citizens, women and men, come to believe that they too, and not just the traditional elites, have an equitable place, and thus a stake, in societal arrangements. Gender, as a category, is deeply disruptive of traditional political, economic and military assumptions. Bringing women and their concerns centre-stage can thus initiate a process of new imaginings, and help enhance the prospects of peace.

This issue of Seminar brings together experiences and reflections from multiple contexts in an effort to visibilize the role of women and their impact on peace processes.