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Continuums of Violence and Peace: A Feminist Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2020

Jacqui True
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Abstract

What does world peace mean? Peace is more than the absence and prevention of war, whether international or civil, yet most of our ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace amount to just that definition. In this essay, as part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that any vision of world peace must grapple not only with war but with the continuums of violence and peace emphasized by feminists: running from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations. Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that war and peace are not a dichotomy but rather are intimately related. Yet the dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates prevents us from seeing how violence and harm are exacerbated in households and through the global economy under conditions of both “war” and “peace.” To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must understand these varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And to sustain peace we must address the harmful gendered identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society. A narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide.

Keywords

feminist peacecontinuum of violencegenderwarconflictpeacebuildingviolence against womengender-based violenceconflict-related sexual violence
Type
Roundtable: World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It)
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 85 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2020

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References

NOTES

1 Bellamy, Alex J., World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 11Google Scholar.

2 Feminist research on war is an exception, however. See especially Goldstein, Joshua S., War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1988)Google Scholar. There are some exceptions in nonfeminist scholarship that notes the role of gender/kin relations in intergroup violence and warfare. See Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

3 For a review of the literature on the relationship between gender inequality and state violence see Hudson, Valerie M., Caprioli, Mary, Ballif-Spanvill, Bonnie, McDermott, Rose, and Emmett, Chad F., “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2009), pp. 7–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of particular note is the research connecting domestic gender equality with more peaceful state responses to conflict. See Caprioli, Mary, “Gendered Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 1 (January 2000), pp. 51–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Melander, Erik, “Gender Equality and Inter-State Armed Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 4 (December 2005), pp. 695–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 5.

5 Ibid., p. 17.

6 Ibid., p. 13.

7 The operationalization of thresholds of battle deaths into various types of conflict, one-sided conflict, minor conflict, and major war is explained in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2014), available at: www.ucdp.uu.se/.

8 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 2. See also Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011)Google Scholar; and Goldstein, Joshua S., Winning the War on War (New York: Dutton Adult, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Fedotov, Yury, Global Study on Homocide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls (Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2018), p. 1Google Scholar.

10 True, Jacqui, “Winning the Battle but Losing the War: A Feminist Perspective on the Declining Global Violence Thesis,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18, no. 4 (2015), pp. 554–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Oxfam, Forced from Home: Climate-Fuelled Displacement, Oxfam Digital Repository, December 2, 2019, oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620914/mb-climate-displacement-cop25-021219-en.pdf.

12 See “Facts and Figures,” Our Watch, www.ourwatch.org.au/understanding-violence/facts-and-figures.

13 Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Summary of the Report on Violence against Women: The Causes, Contexts and Situation of Violence against Women in Afghanistan (Kabul: AIRHC, 2018), www.aihrc.org.af/media/files/Research%20Reports/Summerry%20report-VAW-2017.pdf.

14 Fedotov, Global Study on Homocide.

15 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 114.

16 Ibid., p. 17.

17 Ibid., p. 15.

18 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (September 1969), pp. 167–91.

19 The definitions and measurements of violence, war, and conflict are highly contested by scholars and the quantitative study of war and conflict has not resolved these debates. However, the operationalization of the types of conflict and violence makes it appear that there is consensus about the definitions (see Gleditsch, Nils Petter, Pinker, Steven, Thayer, Bradley A., Levy, Jack S., and Thompson, William R., “The Forum: The Decline of War,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 [September 2013], pp. 396–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

20 Aoláin, Fionnuala Ní, Haynes, Dina Francesca, and Cahn, Naomi, On the Frontlines: Gender, War, and the Post-Conflict Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 UN General Assembly, “Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women,” A/RES/48/104 (UN General Assembly, 85th Plenary Meeting, December 20, 1993), www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/violenceagainstwomen.aspx.

22 See Malešević, Siniša, The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 15.

24 Tickner, J. A. and True, Jacqui, “A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War One Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2018), pp. 221–33Google Scholar.

25 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 14.

26 Cf. ibid., p. 189.

27 Ibid., p. 205.

28 Ibid., p. 113.

29 Ibid.

30 These findings are reported in a large-scale survey of male political activists in Thailand. See Bjarnegård, Elin and Melander, Erik, “Pacific Men: How the Feminist Gap Explains Hostility,” Pacific Review 30, no. 4 (January 2017), pp. 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 For instance, women may support patriarchal roles within the family household, wherein men can legitimately wield violence against them to the extent that that the type of household they live in provides the only prospect of a livelihood in their society and social class. See Linzer, Drew A., “The Political Economy of Women's Support for Fundamentalist Islam,” World Politics 60, no. 4 (July 2008), pp. 576–609Google Scholar.

32 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 204.

33 Cf. ibid., p. 178.

34 Ibid., p. 206.

35 Enloe, Cynthia, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), p. 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 175.

37 True, Jacqui and Morales-Riveros, Yolanda, “Toward Inclusive Peace: Analysing Gender-Sensitive Peace Agreements 2000–2016,” International Political Science Review 40, no. 1 (January 2019), pp. 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 203.

39 Ibid., pp. 3, 22.

40 Melissa Johnson and Jacqui True, Misogyny & Violent Extremism: Implications for Preventing Violent Extremism (Melbourne: Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre, 2019), www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/2003389/Policy-Brief_VE_and_VAW_V7t.pdf.

41 António Guterres, “Remarks at Opening of the 74th Session of the UN General Assembly” (remarks, United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 2019), United Nations Secretary-General, www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2019-09-17/remarks-opening-of-74th-session-of-unga.

42 Krause, Jana, Krause, Werner, and Bränfors, Piia, “Women's Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace,” International Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in International Relations 44, no. 6 (August 2018), pp. 985–1016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 115.

44 Ibid., p. 181.

45 See Aida A. Hozic and Jacqui True, eds., “International Financial Institutions and the Gendered Circuits of Violence in Post-Conflict,” special issue, Review of International Political Economy, forthcoming.