The war in Iraq is over. U.S. troops have withdrawn. Saddam Hussein has been overthrown and replaced with a government perceived to be more democratic and more just to the Iraqi people. In late 2011, concurrent with the U.S. withdrawal, strategists suggested that there was “peace at last” in Iraq, a cause for celebration.Footnote 1
There is, of course, substantial evidence to rebut the premise that the “peace” in Iraq is unproblematic, or even that such a peace exists. The U.S. “withdrawal” was paired with an increase in the responsibilities of private military and security corporations and in the number of their employees stationed in Iraq. U.S. military drones remain operational not only in Iraq but also in neighboring Iran. The new democratic government of Iraq is anything but stable, frequently failing to find consensus among the representatives of the country's religiously and ethnically diverse population, and often finding itself unable to control parts of Iraqi territory.
There are other places where the war continues, though in less visible ways. For example, on March 25, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a woman from Iraq, “was found beaten, lying in a pool of blood in her El Cajon, California, home next to a note saying ‘go back to your country.’”Footnote 2 Her daughter recounted that a week before her death her mother had received a letter that said “this is our country, not yours, you terrorist” and that she was “hit with some kind of a tool about eight times in the head.”Footnote 3 Her murder may have been a hate crime against Iraqis by American assailants, or an “honor killing” by other Iraqis in the United States.Footnote 4 Whatever the direct cause, Shaima Alawadi's death was also a part of the Iraqi war, which reaches into the daily lives of countless people (especially women) all the time and all over the world. Still, Alawadi's murder—and many other manifestations of war in everyday life—are often not recognized as an aspect of war, and therefore are not addressed in peace-making efforts.
Cynthia Enloe's striking Nimo's War, Emma's War makes this point engagingly through the stories of eight very different women, four American and four Iraqi.Footnote 5 The women are politicians, soldiers, workers, widows, caretakers, and prostitutes—and sometimes more than one of those at the same time. Stories like those of Nimo (a hair salon owner in Iraq), and Emma (an American soldier's wife), make visible literally hundreds of places and ways that the war in Iraq has affected women—ways that are often ignored by traditional media, politicians, and scholars.
Feminist work in International Relations, Security Studies, and Peace Studies has encouraged us to see war as fought through and in the lives of ordinary people, and to understand that those experiences differ on the basis of sex. As I have stated elsewhere, “gender analysis is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm.”Footnote 6 In this essay I argue that feminist theorizing of peace suggests a number of transformative observations. First, feminist perspectives focus a critical lens on the meaning of peace, often making invisible violence visible. Second, feminist perspectives help to critically interrogate the role of the United States in furthering “peace” in the international arena.Footnote 7 Finally, feminist perspectives make different theoretical and policy prescriptions than perspectives that omit gender from their analyses.
Feminist Perspectives on Peace—One Hundred Years on
Almost a century ago Jane Addams and other women formed the Women's Peace Party in the United States, concurrent to the establishment of the Church Peace Union—the organization today known as Carnegie Council, the publisher of this journal. The Women's Peace Party declared that “as women, we are especially the custodians of the life of the ages . . . particularly charged with the future of childhood,” and they therefore demanded peace and “the organized opposition to militarism in our country.”Footnote 8 The Women's Peace Party was not the first or last time that women, femininity, and peace have been explicitly associated. Still, this idea of peace is different than the concept of peace that is discussed in the fields of Peace Research or Peace Science. That work has often defined peace as the opposite of war, and focused on preventing interstate wars and advocating for disarmament. Even more often, it has ignored the sex and gender implications of different notions of peace. Some organizations such as the Carnegie Council, as well as such scholars as Johan Galtung and peace activists as Mahatma Gandhi, have suggested that there is more to peace than the absence of war, and they have looked for ways to talk about positive, robust notions of peace, which include the goals of justice and equality.Footnote 9 Even then, however, much research on peace has not engaged peace as gendered, that is, the assumptions about gender that are necessary to current understandings of the concept of peace. The contribution of feminist thinking to peace theorizing, then, is two-fold: it develops and advocates for special notions of peace tied to women, and it draws attention to peace as gendered.
The special sort of peace with which women are often associated is foundational to, and has been a large part of, feminist contributions to thinking about and making peace. Early feminist work recognized a relationship between masculinity and soldiering, where the “manly” virtues of soldiering are held opposite the “sins or silliness” of femininity.Footnote 10 Virginia Woolf argued that “to fight has always been the man's habit, not the woman's.”Footnote 11 This work served as the foundation for a long history of associating women with peacefulness, by virtue of their place on the sex hierarchy, their roles as mothers, their assumed need for protection, and the disproportionate impact of war on civilian women.Footnote 12 That history ranges from Jane Addams' Hull House to Greenham Common, from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to Women in Black, from Mother Teresa to Code Pink.Footnote 13 In almost every conflict in recent history, women's peace advocates can be found protesting war-fighting, looking to end violence, and making policy suggestions to create and maintain peaceful relations among states in the global political arena.Footnote 14
Still, the feminist legacy in peace studies is complicated. This is in part because there has been a serious debate within feminist scholarship about the affinity between women/feminism and peace/pacifism. As Catia Confortini explains, “Feminist debates on the relationship between feminism, peace, and women's peace activism and scholarship have focused on one issue: whether, to what extent, and how women are more peaceful than men.”Footnote 15 Some see advocacy for women and advocacy for peace as naturally similar, since both draw attention to characteristics that women are said to possess (whether biologically or socially) more than men. Others, however, are concerned about gender essentialism (the assumption that people share traits or life experiences because they share a biological sex) in the association of women and peace, and that this association serves to perpetuate the devaluation of both women and peace.Footnote 16 Because of these concerns, there are wide divergences among feminisms about the relationship between and among women, femininity, feminisms, and peace.
These controversies, like many others in feminist advocacy and feminist scholarship, stem from the fact that there is no single feminist perspective (on international politics or more generally) or one interpretation of women's experiences. Some feminisms see women as fundamentally interested in peace—biologically, socially, or politically; other feminisms consider the very suggestion of a relationship between women and peace as gender-subordinating. Some feminisms see gender equality as solved by simply adding women to traditionally masculine practices of war and peace; others consider those very practices as co-constituted with gender subordination. This is why feminist work has often had a fraught relationship with peace studies, where, when gender is analyzed, it is on the basis of women's (assumed) peacefulness. Add to that the many differences of opinion among feminists about the nature of the relationship between feminism and peace studies, and it becomes clear that the relationship between the two is far from simple.
Rather than attempting to bridge these gaps, this essay examines the contributions of diverse feminist perspectives to thinking about a particular concept in foreign policy and/or international relations—here, the concept of peace. It does so by looking through “gender lenses”: looking for women, for genderings, and for gender subordination as an analytical starting point.Footnote 17 In so doing, it asks how feminist perspectives engage with different definitions and methodologies of peace, the role of the United States in the making and preservation of peace, and different potential feminist policy prescriptions to make peace. I argue that feminist engagements with peace are very diverse and have changed significantly over the last hundred years—as has the world “out there” that it studies.
Viewing Peace Through Gender Lenses
A century ago, at the time when the Church Peace Union was established, there was a hope that the Union's funds would go to the poor “after the arbitration of international disputes is established and war is abolished.”Footnote 18 In his contribution to this roundtable, David Hendrickson suggests that, looking at these expectations a century later, “an immediate temptation would be to regard them as fossilized remnants of prehistoric cultures,” though he argues that a more nuanced opinion would be more advisable.Footnote 19 In the initial Church Peace Union statement, however, the somewhat utopian view that humankind had the ability to end war was paired with a notion that ending war was only the first step in making peace.Footnote 20 This understanding of the notion of war and other threats to peace fits well with feminist insights about peacebuilding and peacemaking.
Chris Cuomo has argued that “many of the questions about war that are of interest to feminists, including how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women, how military violence shapes gendered political realities, what such violence is and why it persists, and how it is related to other oppressive institutions,” cannot be adequately understood within a traditional framework that defines war as a violent event between two states and defines peace as the absence of such a violent event. Cuomo's argument, like that of many feminists, is that traditional understandings not only of war but also of peace are gender-subordinating, and make invisible many if not most of women's experiences in war. Like Cuomo, many feminists have recognized war as a constant and general undertone in society, “white noise in the background of social existence,” which sometimes moves closer to our collective consciousness and sometimes remains an unreflected given.Footnote 21
This view argues that, rather than being something limited—a formal event between or within states—war reaches far beyond the confines included in traditional analysis. The same way Enloe sees war in women's living rooms, hair salons, and marriages in Iraq and the United States, Katherine Moon sees war in the way women prostitutes use their bodies in the construction and maintenance of the Korean De-Militarized Zone;Footnote 22 Megan MacKenzie sees the gendered treatments of women combatants as a key factor in the difficulties with demobilizing soldiers in the conflict in Sierra Leone;Footnote 23 and Ronni Alexander sees the cultural governance of sex as key to the establishment of Pacific Islander identity, particularly in the Bougainville crisis.Footnote 24 Asking where women are in wars and conflicts makes visible those violences that were previously invisible as an element of war (like Shaima Alawadi's death), and illuminate locations previously considered outside the war/peace dichotomy (such as living rooms in Southern California).Footnote 25 Consequently, the implications of war (and the mandate for peace) can be found not only in statehouses, on battlefields, and in international organizations but also in bars, in brothels, in living rooms, in bedrooms, in hair salons—in people's lives. This discovery problematizes the war/peace dichotomy. Feminists have compared the idea that there is a sharp distinction between being “at war” and being “at peace” with the idea that there is a sharp distinction between the public and private spheres.Footnote 26
The violence that looking through gender lenses makes visible has two implications for how we think about peace. First, it suggests an approach to peace that sees it as more than the absence of war, and understands the subjects of peace as at once broader and less homogenous than they might initially appear. Many feminists see a threat to peace not only in gendered war but also in gendered militarism, gendered power politics, and gendered structural violence.Footnote 27 Indeed, feminist work has suggested that war is a continuum, and not an event; a system, and not a random occurrence; and a part of daily life, rather than an anomaly.Footnote 28 Relatedly, then, peace is not defined by the absence of declared war between or within states but instead by the absence of militarism and militarized violence.Footnote 29 Peace is not something that can be declared but something that must be built.Footnote 30 It is not something that can be imposed from the top down by political elites, but something that must be constructed from the bottom up with citizen participation.Footnote 31
This broadening of the idea of peace in feminist analysis is not new. In 1989, Birgit Brock-Utne appropriated Galtung's idea of positive and negative peace, arguing that feminist pacifism seeks a positive peace, looking not (only) for an end to war but also for justice and equality.Footnote 32 Brock-Utne outlined a number of important concepts that she saw as key to a feminist-inspired peace, “including the absence of personal and interstate, organized and unorganized, direct and indirect violence such as wife beating, war, unequal working conditions on the basis of gender, nuclear dumping, inequalities in leisure time and free speech, and mass media oligopoly.”Footnote 33 Feminists have long argued that it is a structural problem, rather than a coincidence, that “national security” states contain insecure women—because the idea of “national security” itself rests on “a continuum of political violence.”Footnote 34 These arguments, though, have rarely been incorporated into even the most radical nonfeminist pro-peace international advocacy approaches, though their inclusion might alter a number of ideas about the causes of war and the creation of peace.
If peace is the absence of violence and insecurity rather than just the absence of formally declared war between or within states, then the need for peace crosses from the security arena into the economic arena. In this view, there will not be peace until, for instance, human trafficking is eradicated. There will not be peace until the end of sweatshop labor. There will not be peace until the end of gendered divisions of labor and resources. There will not be peace until women have equal economic, property, and labor rights. According to this perspective, violence can be committed as easily—and is committed as frequently—through trade imbalances, sanctions, labor abuse, and other forms of economic interaction as it is by soldiers and bombs. If this is the case, seeking true peace in the twenty-first century includes combating not only militarism and political violence but also social injustice and economic violence.Footnote 35
The Role of the United States
As Hendrickson notes, over the past generation alone “the United States has intervened to defeat aggression, to relieve humanitarian suffering, to secure the secession of disgruntled provinces, to promote human rights, to expand democracy, and to fight terrorism.” Still, he explains, it is necessary to “question the self-satisfied account” that “stresses the accomplishments of American power and the necessity, if peace is to be achieved, of a continued U.S. willingness to play a vital role as the enforcer of global norms” with “a far more critical appraisal.” Hendrickson is critical of the United States' vulnerability to the “lure of war,” especially when “preparations ostensibly made to preserve the peace have more than once led us into wars that conformed to the requirements of neither justice nor interests.” As a result, he expresses “keen disappointment that America has in many instances forsaken the peaceful ideas of the founder of the Carnegie Council.”
I argue that Hendrickson's critique of the U.S. position should be deepened and broadened. Several times, Hendrickson treats the United States' susceptibility to war-making matter-of-factly, explaining that none of its military failures has “shaken America's glorification of war and warriors,” or prevented war from being depicted as something alluring, or tempered the “desire to ‘do something’ in the face of a humanitarian crisis.” Hendrickson's position on these naturalizations, while critical, nevertheless makes the tendency of the United States toward war appear to be an incidental, policy-related problem rather than a structural problem of national culture and government.
Feminist work, though, has suggested that it is structural. Feminists have argued for links between masculinism and U.S. militarism, especially as the United States has become more aggressive outside its borders. Feminist theorizing about global politics and international security provides a framework through which one can think about the role of the United States in the making (or disruption) of international peace. In analyzing international conflict, feminists have contended that “war as an institution depends on gendered images of combatants and civilians,” wherein (masculine) warriors receive glory for providing (actual or perceived) protection to (feminized) civilians.Footnote 36 The construction of war around gendered protection, however, is often unrelated to the provision of actual protection, given that “when feminists argue that ‘men’ protect ‘women’ in war, they mean that ‘masculinity’ protects ‘femininity’ ideationally, whether or not men (or anyone else) protect women (or anyone else) in real material terms.”Footnote 37 Feminists have therefore come to identify war as a “protection racket” where protection is used as justification for war-making that actually risks the lives of those who are promised protection.Footnote 38
This has led Anne McClintock to argue that “all nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous,” given the relationship among the “lure” of war, nationalisms, and masculinities.Footnote 39 In this way, “nationalism is naturalized, and legitimated, through gender discourses that naturalized the domination of one group over the other through the disparagement of the feminine.”Footnote 40 For embattled states, then, “it becomes especially important for nationalist men to control their own group's women's sexual behavior and domestic lives.”Footnote 41 Such a nation's military aggression is also gendered, as it often feminizes “both the sex and the ethnic/religious/political identity group to which the victim belongs,”Footnote 42 while serving to express and confirm the masculinity of the aggressive state.Footnote 43
Using this theoretical framework provides a structural account of the tendency of the United States toward war-making, as it is embedded in American (gendered) cultures of competition and supremacy. American nationalism is intrinsically linked to American notions of masculinity, whereby from World War II to the “war on terror” the story of American men bravely protecting the “way of life” of not only Americans but all those who love democracy is an important part of the lure of war. Calls for military action have often been couched in chivalrous terms, such as the desire to provide protection and to act in humanitarian emergencies. For example, in 2002 President George W. Bush justified the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in part because “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong,” bringing to mind Gayatri Spivak's feminist critique of the trope of the chivalry of white men “saving brown women from brown men.”Footnote 44 These chivalric images of American masculinity are paired with images that disparage the masculinity of the opponents of the United States, from the prison abuse photos at Abu GhraibFootnote 45 to current political cartoons about nuclear Iran.Footnote 46 Rather than viewing the rise of American militarism as related to “expansions in justifications for the use of force,” as Hendrickson does, someone employing a gender lens might argue that the rise of American militarism is intrinsically related to the rise in the level and intensity of a gendered American nationalism. Rather than suggesting that the United States has strayed too far from pacifist values and needs a policy change to return to the right course, one might suggest that a more fundamental change is needed in American national culture related to (domestic and international) gender relations.
A second revision to Hendrickson's understanding of American positionality vis-a-vis peace relates to the idea that contributions to peace (and disruptions of it) should be understood as not limited to the traditional areas of defense and security but also seen in the economic and social arenas. In this view, the United States' role should be measured not only by wars that were seen to be positive contributions to world peace (like World War II) and wars seen to be negative ones (like Vietnam) but also by the positive and negative contributions that it has made to the global economy and global social justice. If these dimensions matter, questions like the worth of U.S. global economic leadership, the distributional impacts of twentieth-century global capitalism, the costs and benefits of free trade, and the fairness of International Monetary Fund and World Bank restructuring missions would matter in evaluating the United States as much as questions of what military efforts were successful or humane. Evaluating the contribution of the United States in these spheres would weigh the social justice in its military and political interventions, but would also consider the social justice that it failed to provide (as in Rwanda in 1994), the social injustices that it has ignored (such as those related to conflict diamonds), and the social injustices that it has itself perpetuated (like the suffering caused by its sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s). While there is certainly not enough space in this short essay to weigh those positives and negatives, there is no doubt that accounting for all these kinds of actions would alter our evaluation of the United States and its role in furthering peace in the twentieth century. Such an evaluation might appeal to the founders of the Church Peace Union, who saw poverty as the greatest global challenge to be addressed once war had been abolished.
Looking Forward: Feminism, the United States, and Peace in the Twenty-First Century
Different lenses provoke different questions and get different answers. Some feminists examine the role of women in the making of war and the provision of peace, and find that war is located in many more places and should be defined significantly more broadly than it is in many traditional analyses. Other feminists examine the concept of gender, not women, asking where and how masculinities and femininities construct both our notions of war and our visions for peace. Both perspectives contribute to our understanding of the idea of peace and the United States' (somewhat fraught) role in making, striving for, and resisting disruptions to peace worldwide. Both perspectives also suggest that we should broaden our notions of what constitutes threats to peace, the requirements necessary to make peace, as well as deepen our critiques of violence committed by the United States, in order to understand it as structural. But it is not only our conceptual understanding of what peace is and historical narratives of the development of peace that feminist perspectives transform. Instead, feminists interested in the study and pursuit of peace have suggested that feminist theorizing can help instruct how peace is studied and how it is pursued. The “how” of international peace is as important as the desire to strive for that peace, and any strategizing for peace must include a roadmap to achieve it.Footnote 47
Finally, I conclude with some feminist strategies for peace advocacy and peace-seeking. One such strategy is through empathetic cooperation, a collaborative politics of dialogue and emotional identification that looks to “become committed to and inspired by others' beliefs, metaphors, and truths as a part of a quest to understand others more completely.”Footnote 48 This strategy emphasizes emotional connection over intellectual negotiation, and identification over compromise. Another feminist strategy for peace-seeking is to prefer “shared work and skills, consensual decision-making, transparent processes, and responsibility in relationships,” as well as nonhierarchical organizations.Footnote 49 According to this line of thinking, a nonhierarchical peace can only be modeled on and built from nonhierarchical peace-seekers, either among scholars or in the policy world. A third feminist strategy focuses on a methodology called “third world feminist social criticism,” detailed by Brooke Ackerly and employed by Catia Confortini in analyzing the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.Footnote 50 Third world feminist social criticism employs guiding criteria, deliberative inquiry, and skeptical scrutiny to construct an approach to making peace that builds on and reconstructs the principles of deliberative democracy.Footnote 51 A fourth approach comes from Robin May Schott, who uses “witness” as a mechanism for narrativizing peace.Footnote 52 According to Schott, “an ethical discourse of war that gives weight to witness . . . generates a discourse of war based on the experience of war, not abstracted from experience.”Footnote 53 Much like the strategy of empathetic cooperation, this is a feeling-based approach to peace rather than a rule-based one, which feminists suggest may be a more effective way to stem disagreement, conflict, and even violence.
While the question of whether there is a special relationship between women and peace remains unsettled, and is likely to remain so, the question of whether there are unique feminist perspectives on peace is more easily answered. As I have argued here, feminisms reframe what counts as threats to peace, redefine the concept of peace itself, help critically analyze the U.S. role in the making and/or disrupting of peace, and make important suggestions on how to seek peace based on gender analysis. At a time of what Hendrickson calls the “dramatic expansion of the accepted justifications for the use of force,” feminist innovations in expanding and complicating the concept of peace may become increasingly important, and the costs of ignoring these insights may be rising.
