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No peace without women
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8-9/2003
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[ Meeting in Loccum ]
No peace without women
If armed confrontations are to be ended and sustainable solutions to the conflicts underlying them are to be found, the experiences and interests of women must be taken into greater account in peace processes. This was a main finding of a meeting titled 'Gender relationships in overcoming violent conflicts' held at the Evangelische Akademie Loccum, a discussion centre of the Protestant Church, on June 27-29. Wars today take place less and less on spatially limited battlefields, but in areas where women, children and old people live. Now, 90 per cent of war deaths worldwide are among non-combatant civilians. The character of armed conflicts also has changed; a privatisation of violence has long been seen in all regions of the world. Conrad Schetter, of the Centre for Development Research, in Bonn, used the example of Afghanistan to illustrate how the fighting between warlords and militia that has been going on for decades has resulted in a new form of business: violence economies replace customary civilian economic cycles and relationships. Trade is chiefly in arms, drugs and women, and for lack of any other means of financial survival war orphans join militias as eager fighters.
That in these wars growing sexualised violence against women follows a clear pattern was the thesis of Rolf Pohl, of the Psychological Institute of the University of Hanover. He said violent conflicts were always also about the reinstating of male hegemony. Particularly in times in which the male identity was subject to feelings of uncertainty, such as due to chronic unemployment or similar 'humiliations', Pohl said, men were inclined to use violence as a means of restoring their social ascendancy. Against this background, Pohl offered an interpretation of the phenomenon of (mass) rape seen in many wars which contrasts with previous attempts to explain it. To date, rape in war has been interpreted mainly as a strategy to demoralise the enemy. But for Pohl it has the function of distancing the men from the other gender in an aggressive way and, indeed, punishing them 'preventively' for possibly being able to trigger sexual desire in the perpetrator.
Martina Fischer, of the Berghof Research Centre in Berlin, said ways out of violence ran via the forming of peace alliances between actors at local and international level, including the consistent participation of women. If women were not integrated in peace processes right from the start, they were mostly also excluded from reconstruction and the reorganisation of society. Generally speaking, she added, after the end of a war the focus must be on promotion of economically sound activities and organisational structures – regardless of gender. But at the same time, traumatised women were particularly dependent on support to strengthen their self-confidence. The hotly-discussed question of the role of peacekeeping soldiers in pacifying conflicts remained open when the meeting ended. This is: are soldiers, of all people, as representatives of a mostly extremely male-centric institution suitable actors to contribute to the long-term 'civilising' of social relationships at local level?
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