Betty A. Reardon: Key Texts in Gender and Peace Springerbriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice

SPRINGER BRIEFS ON PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND PRACTICE  TEXTS AND PROTOCOLS 27

Betty A. Reardon Dale T. Snauwaert Betty A. Reardon: Key Texts in Gender and Peace SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice

Texts and Protocols

Volume 27

Series editor Hans Günter Brauch, Mosbach, Germany

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[email protected] Betty A. Reardon • Dale T. Snauwaert

Betty A. Reardon: Key Texts in Gender and Peace

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[email protected] Betty A. Reardon Dale T. Snauwaert International Institute on Peace Education Educational Foundations and Leadership New York, NY The University of Toledo USA Toledo, OH USA

The cover photograph as well as all other photos in this volume were taken from the personal photo collection of the author. A website on this book with additional information on Betty A. Reardon, including links to videos and a selection of the covers of her major books is at: http://afes-press- books.de/html/SpringerBriefs_PSP_Reardon.htm.

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[email protected] With affection and gratitude, I dedicate this volume to those who made it possible for me to do my share of preparing it for publication. My ability to work in the face of health challenges was in large part due to the personal support, help, and encouragement of a number of good friends. This volume is dedicated with thanks to my network of friends within and outside the ﬁelds of peace knowledge and peace action. Special thanks go to my life-long friend, Peggy Park Maut- ner, whose constant support sustained me through the arduous medical journey. To her, Paula Hertz, and Dolly Holland I am truly grateful for their sustaining ongoing care and for the friendship from which that care arises. Among those friendships that grew out of colleagueship, woven into the network of sustaining support were Ingeborg Breines, Dorota Gierycz, Asha Hans whose visits and emails lifted my spirits. I am grateful, too, for Kozue Akibayashi’s visit from Japan in the early stages of the journey, who helped in undertaking the next steps. Among those closer by who did the same were Sr. Kathleen Kanet, Cora Weiss, and the Rev. Chloe

[email protected] Breyer. Their visits and phone calls were immeasurably sustaining as was that from all the others who have sent their loving wishes, including members of the congregations of St. Mary’s (New York) and St. Agnes (Kyoto). Throughout my life and professional experiences, I have been blessed with the friendship and collaboration of many extraordinary people, such as those I thank here and those mentioned in the acknowledgments. They have been a testament to the importance of human relationships to all aspects to our lives. They are the source of my belief that peace must be sustained by networks of human connections that manifest the core peace value of human dignity and our responsibility to each other and the world we share. Betty A. Reardon New York, June 2014

[email protected] With life-long friend Peggy Park Mautner at a reception following the award ceremony for the MacBride Prize at Georgetown University in 2009. (See also the photo in: Betty A. Reardon— Dale Snauwaert (Ed.): Betty A. Reardon: A Pioneer in Education for Peace and Human Rights— Presented by Dale Snauwaert (Cham—Heidelberg—New York—Dordrecht—London: Springer- Verlag, 2015): 4)

[email protected] Preface

Betty A. Reardon is a pioneer of feminism and a gendered perspective on human rights, social justice, and its importance for peace research and peace education. Reardon’s groundbreaking work argues that a feminist, holistic, and gendered perspective can serve as the conceptual core of a transformation of our present global system of patriarchy, and its culture of violence and war. Her comprehensive work in this area has uncovered the profound symbiotic relationship between patriarchy and the war system, and she calls for a global inquiry into alternatives to the patriarchal paradigm. She argues for a gender-equal and socially just society based on a cosmopolitan ethic of human rights. For Reardon, this vision of a positive human and planetary future is realized through achieving a transformational, fundamental shift in worldview towards a paradigm of peace informed by a gender perspective. This paradigm of peace values human equality, dignity, social justice, human security, environmental protection, peace, and peace education. In recognition of her internationally acclaimed contributions, achievements, and awards as a teacher, feminist, peace activist, researcher, author, and consultant spanning ﬁve decades, she was nominated by the International Peace Bureau (Geneva, Switzerland) for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. My association with Betty Reardon as a colleague and friend has spanned over two decades, and began with our ﬁrst and auspicious faculty meeting together at Colgate University in 1990. Our mutual interest and dedication to the formulation of global peace and international human rights education has given rise to meaningful collaboration over the years. For example, as founding director of The University of Toledo’s Center for Democratic Education and Non-Violence, my colleagues and I were honored to organize the “Betty A. Reardon Collection,” an archive of her published and unpublished works, which opened in 2009 in the Ward M. Canady Center for Special Collections at The University of Toledo. Reardon’s compelling and complex work on gender covers a wide range of topics and concerns, and the intent of this necessarily brief preface is to assist the reader in identifying, clarifying, and discussing her overarching philosophy, as well as her central, core ideas about feminism and a gendered perspective on human

[email protected] x Preface security, peace, and justice. The preface is divided into three parts: (1) Reardon’s Ethical Framework; (2) Violence, Patriarchy, and the War System; and (3) Transforming Patriarchy and the War System.1

Reardon’s Ethical Framework

Central to Reardon’s conception of peace and social justice are two fundamental normative assertions: equal universal human dignity and moral inclusion. These related core conceptions constitute the ethical foundations of Reardon’s overarching philosophy, including her understanding of feminism and the fundamental importance of a gender perspective. Equal universal human dignity is the normative claim that all human beings possess an equal intrinsic value that should be respected. In turn, this equal inherent dignity bestows upon each person standing in the human moral community. That is, each person is seen to be an equal member of the human moral community and thus each person has a right to equal moral consideration. This moral inclusion is universal in scope; it pertains to all human beings, transcending gender differences. These interrelated, normative assertions are the basis of Reardon’s value-based conceptions of peace and justice. In making these two fundamental ethical assertions Reardon is a part of the tradition of cosmopolitanism, which she refers to as “global humanism”.2 The cosmopolitan ethical imperative mandates that we see the other as a morally equal person. This view of moral equality is imperative if we are to transcend the longstanding human patterns of violence, dehumanization, and objectification of persons in favor of the recognition of their humanity, and thereby embrace their standing in the human moral community.3 Human rights in turn constitute the principles of a cosmopolitan ethic of human dignity. Human rights define what the individual person is due, is justified in demanding, and/or is protected from. In this way rights define what moral choices can never be made or those that must be made.4 As Reardon asserts, human rights

1 I would like to thank Mary M. Darbes for her thoughtful feedback in writing this Preface and for editing efforts on this volume. 2 Betty A. Reardon, “Debating the Future,” Network 8, no. 3 (1980): 17. See also “Women’s Movements and Human Futures,” Convergence 8, no. 3 (1975). 3 Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Cambridge: Hackett, [1795]1983); Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz- Bachmann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 4 Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Rights: Four Inquiries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Afﬂuence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

[email protected] Preface xi function as “tools for the realization of the conditions necessary to human dignity”.5 They are instruments for protecting equality: “Human rights … are the inspiration and the practical tool for confronting and overcoming injustice. They have provided the most significant progress to date in gender equality”.6 Reardon conceives peace and justice in terms of the realization of human rights: “A sustainable world peace can only be assured through the universal actualization of human dignity”.7 She maintains that: “Human rights standards are the specific indicators and particular measures of progress toward the realization of peace. Human rights puts flesh on the bones of the abstraction of peace and provides the details of how to bring the flesh to life”.8 A society, both national and global, that secures the human dignity of all citizens through the realization of their rights is the standard for a just and peaceful society.

Violence, Patriarchy, and the War System

Violence is that which dehumanizes and thereby violates human dignity, and so being, it is the core problematic of peace and justice. As Reardon states:

All violence degrades and/or denies human dignity. This is why I assert that the substance of the ﬁeld should comprise an inquiry into violence as a phenomenon and a system, its multiple and pervasive forms, the interrelationships among the various forms, its sources and purposes, how it functions and potential alternatives for achieving the legally sanctioned, socially accepted, or politically tolerated purposes commonly pursued through violence.9 Reardon identiﬁes a number of threats to and violations of human dignity inherent in various social structures and modes of thought. These violations constitute direct, structural, and cultural violence.10 These violent structures constitute a system of domination and oppression, including ways of thinking and believing that justify and normalize these structures. In Reardon’s view, patriarchy, in symbiotic relation with militarism (the war system), constitutes the basic structure of a violent society.

5 Betty A. Reardon, Human Rights Learning:Pedagogies and Politics of Peace (San Juan, Puerto Rico: UNESCO Chair for Peace Education, University of Puerto Rico, 2010), 46. 6 Betty A. Reardon and Anthony Jenkins, “Gender and Peace: Towards a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective,” in Handbook of Peace and Conﬂict Studies, ed. Johan Galtung and C. Webel (New York: Routledge, 2007), 228; [see Chap. 7 in this volume]. 7 Reardon, Human Rights Learning: Pedagogies and Politics of Peace, 46. 8 Human Rights Learning: Pedagogies and Politics of Peace, 47. 9 Human Rights Learning: Pedagogies and Politics of Peace, 55. Chap. 3.1 in volume 26 of this series. 10 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969); “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990).

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Patriarchy is a social, political, and economic system of control and domination structured in terms of a hierarchy of human relationships and value that is based in socially constructed gender differentiation. As such, it bestows unequal power and value onto males who exhibit its most important values and traits, excluding and oppressing those who do not. It is a social system that has been almost universally in place throughout the history of human societies, and it constitutes the paradig- matic case of inequality and injustice, and thus structural violence.11 Reardon maintains that the patriarchal system is the basis of all forms of social injustice. Gender, the defining element of patriarchy, is not a natural phenomenon; it is a social construct. As Reardon suggests, “Gender, as the concept is generally used in works that deal with the differences and inequalities between men and women, is a socially derived concept, a culturally varied construct that assigns to men and women a set of cultural roles and social functions, only minimally determined by their respective reproductive and sexual characteristics”.12 Unequal, hierarchical, and exclusionary gender differentiation serves as both the defining structural element of the patriarchal social system and as the basis of the ideological justification of it. It is so ingrained in human consciousness that it is often understood as a part of the natural order; it is in turn justified and reinforced by patriarchal religious (among other) doctrines.13 Reardon further maintains that through the tenacity of the patriarchal mind-set and system of control “hierarchal arrangements of society based on race, class and gender [are] buttressed by inequitable access to the benefits of production … .” Based upon “… global, corporate, free market capitalism, [and] psychologically reinforced by the fear of others, [which is] engendered by fundamentalist religious precepts and ultranationalist xenophobia, patriarchy as the basic paradigm of human institutions continues to prevail”.14 Patriarchy thereby functions also as a potent form of cultural violence. Patriarchy is in fact value-based; in particular, as Reardon points out, it is grounded in a value bifurcation between negative and positive masculine and feminine values. She writes:

The positive values derive from the authentic attributes and are those that are conducive to the full realization of the human potential in both individuals and society. The negative values derive from the distorted attributes and are those that stiﬂe and crush portions of human and social development. They are the values that underlie stereotypes and

11 Reardon and Jenkins, “Gender and Peace: Towards a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective;” [see Chap. 7 in this volume]. 12 Betty A. Reardon, “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System,” in The Gender Imperative: Human Security Vs. State Security, ed. Betty A. Reardon and Asha Hans (New Delhi, India: Routledge, 2010), 13; [see Chap. 8 in this volume]. 13 Reardon and Jenkins, “Gender and Peace: Towards a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective;” [see Chap. 7 in this volume]. 14 Reardon, “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System,” 14; [see Chap. 8 in this volume].

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rationalize discrimination and oppression. Our present social order … is overly characterized by these negative values, both feminine and masculine.15 “Masculine” does not objectively describe male sexuality, but rather connotes what society has determined as appropriate male characteristics to aspire to and value.

Values are not biologically determined, masculine values and feminine values, like the concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity, ” are socially derived, largely from imposed sex role separation. One becomes “masculine” or “feminine” as a consequence of learning and experience. Women are not necessarily born more loving than men, any more than blacks are born more suited to manual labor and whites to perform managerial functions. The social order and the dominant social value systems—sexism and racism, respectively— determine those designations.16 These social and value structures are interrelated dimensions that fortify patriarchy. Reardon goes on to explore what she identiﬁes as the related psychological underpinnings of patriarchy, ultimately rooted in fear and projection deep within the human psyche. She maintains that

… the problem originates in the very roots of the human psyche, and will not be fully resolved until the majority of the human family recognizes the need for all individuals to involve themselves in the transformational struggle. Fomari (1974) argues that as individuals we all bear some responsibility for war, and I would argue the same for sexism, the fundamental source of which lies within each of us. Social structures, economic and political processes, like architecture and other art forms, derive from images arising from the human imagination and the human experience. Although we are profoundly inﬂuenced psychologically and socially by the structures, it is ourselves who create and can change them. It is the successful pursuit of the inner struggle… [which] I believe constitutes the central transformational task.17 Socially constructed gender differences are internalized into interior psychic constructs that shape perceptions of difference in terms of otherness; an otherness to be feared. Coupled with the strong tendency to project onto others what we are ashamed of and fear within ourselves, these internal psychological dynamics reinforce the structural and ideological dimensions of patriarchy. As Reardon clearly suggests:

It is clear that for both boys and girls the ﬁrst socially encountered other, a person they perceive as being different from themselves, is usually of the other sex, and our experience indicates that it is others, those different from us, who threaten us and instigate the fear that gives rise to the notion of enemy and, ultimately, the practice of war. Society reinforces and exacerbates this perception of otherness… It is, I think, of some signiﬁcance that psychiatry has pointed out that the enemy always becomes the embodiment of what we fear or reject in ourselves. We attempt to exorcize our own bad spirits by projecting them on others.

15 Betty A. Reardon, Sexism and the War System, 1st Syracuse University Press ed., Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conﬂict Resolution (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996 [1985]), 3; [see Chap. 4 in this volume]. 16 “Debating the Future,” 18. 17 Reardon, Sexism and the War System,4–5; [see Chap. 4 in this volume].

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A major function of others is, in fact, to meet various needs we cannot fulfill ourselves. When these needs are recognized as positive and good, we love or feel kindly toward the others who fulfill them. When they are negative or bad, we hate and despise the others and fear their power over us. For only by granting them such power can we abnegate responsibility for our own negative behavior. A classic case of this process is attributing temptress behavior to women who “lead men astray” and making the prostitute but not her client culpable before the law. We usually manage to punish others for our own sins. Society thus needs criminals and enemies. Eve was the first of many to serve “mankind.” Because we have yet to learn the full wisdom of the popular sage Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us”), the enemy is always other, and feared. It is widely acknowledged that both sexist society and the war system are kept in order by the capacity to use or threaten the use of violence against those others who arouse fear.18 It is these deep fear-based psychological dynamics that underpin the symbiotic relationship between patriarchy and the war system. One of Reardon’s groundbreaking insights is that there exists this symbiotic relationship. She writes: “I continue to insist [that] … the oppression of women and the legitimation of coercive force which perpetuates war, the two major pillars of patriarchy, are mutually dependent conditions…”19 She maintains that “… militarism and militarization [are] the bastions and bulwark of patriarchy…”20 Patriarchy and the war system are interrelated and interdependent manifestations of the general problem of social violence.21 Gender inequality and its concomitant oppression of women are integral parts of militarism. Entailed in patriarchy’s hierarchical structure, and its bifurcated values and psychic dynamics, is the perceived need, partly generated by fear of the other, to maintain a constant systemic threat of coercive force in order maintain control and domination. The credibility of this threat requires monopoly control of the means and use of force. Political sovereignty is defined systemically in terms of this control, and is most starkly visible in the theory of international political realism. Realism is a theory of international relations that denies the existence of morality in the international arena. It maintains that relations between nation-states are purely political, in the sense that they exclusively concern interests and power, not what is right or good per se. Its logic follows from Thucydides’ famous, defining statement: “The strong do want they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Moral skepticism in the realist tradition is based upon the absence of international sovereignty, rendering the international system anarchy. For the realist, the international arena is an anarchy, a state of relations without the existence of a sovereign power to enforce morality and law. It is argued that adherence to moral principle, law, and even mutual promises (contracts, agreements, covenants, treaties, etc.) are contingent upon the existence of an overarching authority. This authority requires a sovereign power that is capable of enforcing obligation. States

18 Reardon, Sexism and the War System, 6; [see Chap. 4 in this volume]. 19 Reardon, Sexism and the War System, 98. 20 A Feminist Critique of “an Agenda for Peace” (United Nations, Division of the Advancement of Women GAP/1994/WP.2, 1994), 6; [see Chap. 6 in this volume]. 21 Reardon, Sexism and the War System, 4; [see Chap. 4 in this volume].

[email protected] Preface xv will abide by morality and law, not on principle, but out of fear of retaliation. In the absence of a sovereign it is rational to use any means necessary, including violence, to pursue one’s own interests, as long as one is in a position of superior power. This is the condition of anarchy, a Hobbesian state of nature; it is inherently “a war of all against all.” For the realist anarchy is the presumed context of international relations. Under the conditions of anarchy, power (and fear) take precedence over law and morality. In fact, the international anarchical system is in a continual state of war, in the sense that war is always imminent. Under the conditions of anarchy self-defense is rational. Others, however, not knowing one’s intentions with certainty, will respond out of self-defense with an increase in arms. The result is escalation, leading to an increased probability of the outbreak of violent conflict. This phenomenon is referred to as the “security dilemma”: to defend one’s self is to increase the probability of conflict; defense, pursued in order to be secure, leads to insecurity. Thus, given the anarchical assumption a state of war is generated—an inevitable and perpetual state of insecurity. The only way to maintain negative peace or a state of cold war under these conditions, that is, a state of relations free from actual fighting in the context of a state of perpetual insecurity, is through a balance of power. If power is balanced between states, wherein no one state or group of states is dominant, then a state of cold war or negative peace can be maintained without the actual outbreak of hostility, for the balance of power deters aggression by posing a significant retaliatory threat. From this perspective, “security” is state-centric and is contingent upon the means and exercise of military force. The credible threat of this force is in turn contingent upon the maintenance of a highly militarized social system.22 Reardon’s insight is that this system is symbiotically interdependent with the values, dynamics, and imperatives of patriarchy.23 Within this patriarchal war system violence against women has several distinct manifestations, which illuminate its injustice, including the following:

military prostitution, trafficking and sexual slavery; random rape in armed conflict and in and around military bases; strategic rape; the use of military arms to inflict violence against women in post-conflict as well as conflict situations; impregnation as ethnic cleansing; sexual torture; abduction to serve as “wives” to combatants, cooks and materials bearers; sexual violence within the organized military and domestic violence in military families; domestic violence and spouse murders by combat veterans. No doubt there are forms of military violence against women (MVAW) not taken into account here.24

22 Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, Second Edition ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert Jervis, “The Spiral of International Insecurity,” in Perspectives on World Politics, ed. Richard Little and Michael Smith (New York: Routledge, 1991). Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). 23 Reardon, “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System.” [see Chap. 8 in this volume]. 24 Betty A. Reardon, “A Statement on Military Violence against Women Addressed to the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women,” (2013), 2–3; [see Chap. 9 in this volume].

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From the perspective of the above analysis, Reardon maintains that peace and justice require a fundamental transformation of the patriarchal war system, entailing a fundamental paradigm shift in human consciousness.

Transforming Patriarchy and the War System

For Reardon the transformation needed for the ongoing pursuit of peace, and thereby, a reduction in violence, requires a fundamental paradigm shift in social values and world-views, a shift from a paradigm of war toward a paradigm of peace.25 This shift necessitates the transformation of the patriarchal system to a gender-equal and socially just society, one that honors the equal dignity of all persons and is morally, socially, and politically inclusive, on all levels from local to global. As Reardon suggests:

Stable peace requires gender equality. Fully functioning gender equality requires the dissolution of the present system of militarized state security. The two goals are inextricably linked one to the other.26 The above outlined ethical framework and critical analysis of patriarchy and the war system provides a clear picture of the pathways to transforming patriarchy and its militarism and injustice. There are at least four basic transformations required: 1. The general adoption of a feminist, holistic, gender-equal perspective. 2. A fundamental change in world view, which includes the widespread inclusion of feminists values into all levels of society, including the public domain and government. 3. Shifting the conception of security from national security to human security, and a cosmopolitan ethic. 4. Widespread increase in self-awareness among the population. First, while Reardon acknowledges that a monolithic conception of feminism does not exist due to it necessarily entailing a pluralistic understanding, she maintains that the common core perspective of all feminisms is the ethical assertion of the equal human value of all persons, male and female. The adoption of this core feminist perspective further acknowledges that patriarchal society is founded upon

25 “Toward a Paradigm of Peace,” in Peace: Meanings, Politics, Strategies, ed. Linda Rennie Farcey (New York: Praeger, 1989); “Learning Our Way to a Human Future,” in Learning Peace: The Promise of Ecological and Cooperative Education, ed. Betty A. Reardon and Eva Nordland (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). 26 Betty A. Reardon, “A Statement on Military Violence against Women Addressed to the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women,” (2013), 1; [see Chap. 9 in this volume].

[email protected] Preface xvii gender (and other types of) inequality, which has led to pervasive exclusion and marginalization of women.27 The general adoption of this feminist perspective as a way of seeing and understanding through the basic category of gender is critical and necessary for the transformation of patriarchy.28 Included in the gendered perspective is a holistic orientation. Holism generates an understanding of life that is interrelated and interdependent: life is understood as an interdependent web of relationships within which respecting and caring for the inherent dignity of life is imperative. This view is a perspective of deep equality. This holistic ontology in turn leads to the inclusion of all life in the moral community. Second, from a feminist perspective, transforming patriarchy necessarily involves a profound shift in values toward a widespread inclusion of positive feminine values. As Reardon maintains:

Feminists assert that current societal problems require the application of the following societal values: love, genuine caring for others; equity, fairly sharing all that is available to the group; and empowerment, helping group members to achieve fulfillment, cooperation and maturity–making together for mutual fulfillment. Feminism is profoundly transformational, for it calls for fundamental changes in personal values and human relationships as well as in structures and systems. This position is particularly feminist because it calls for the extension into the public sphere of the values of caring, cooperation and mutuality that have been traditionally confined to the private sphere. Such an extension would be transformational because the equal application of feminist criteria to public policy would result in more concern for human needs and less concern for the maintenance of military power— the ultimate result of the distorted weight given masculine values.29 The current patriarchal value system is the antithesis of the cosmopolitan ethic of human rights; the widespread inclusion of feminine values in public life is a necessary condition for the realization of human rights, which protects and cares for the equal dignity of all persons.30 The presence of women is a strong cause for the reduction of violence.31 This value shift would in turn inspire a transformation of our conception of national security toward human security.

27 “Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security,” in A Reader in Peace Studies, ed. Paul Smoker, Ruth Davies, and Barbara Munske (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990); [see Chap. 5 in this volume]. 28 Reardon, “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System,” 12; [see Chap. 8 in this volume]. 29 Betty A. Reardon, “Moving to the Future,” Network 8, no. 1 (1980): 14; [see Chap. 2 in this volume]. 30 Reardon and Jenkins, “Gender and Peace: Towards a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective,” 228; [see Chap. 7 in this volume]. 31 See for example, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).

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Third, one of Reardon’s most important achievements is her contribution to the conceptualization of the idea of human security. Human security pertains to the “wellbeing made possible through the elimination of all forms of violence, assured by institutions designed speciﬁcally to achieve and maintain wellbeing… .”32 Human security presents an alternative conception of security to the Realist conception of military state security, one that is consistent with the ethical imperatives of cosmopolitanism and feminism. Reardon maintains that

human security never can be achieved within the present highly militarized, war prone, patriarchal nation state system. Neither, as I have argued for more than two decades, is it achievable within patriarchy, which is the foundation of the war system…. Two propositions lie at the center of [my] assertions and arguments: first, if human security is to be achieved, patriarchy must be replaced with gender equality, and second, war as an institution must be abolished in favor of nonviolent structures and processes for resolving conflicts and achieving national policy goals…33 From this perspective the aim of human security is to “protect life and to enhance its quality.” Questions of security would center around these questions: “What are the fundamental threats to human life? And, how can we overcome these threats in a life enhancing manner?”34 Thus, security would pertain to the overall quality of life of individuals. Fourth, the internal psychological dynamics of fear and projection that are understood to be underlying psychological elements of patriarchy and the war system call for a widespread increase in reflective capacity and self-awareness. A necessary condition of the transformation is “how we address the “war within”— the struggle created in every human being by the cleaving of the total human potential and personality into two distinct and separate parts, male and female, which are molded into socially rigid and confining sex roles”.35 The transformation of patriarchy requires that we integrate and heal our own internal traumas and fears, and become self-aware in ways that check our strong tendency to project our shadow onto others. These four pathways of transformation require in turn pedagogical processes of learning and development that promote the understanding and embodiment of human rights and human dignity. To this end, Reardon articulates three forms of reflective inquiry: critical/analytic; moral/ethical; and contemplative/ruminative. Critical/analytic reflection involves the discernment of power, an understanding

32 Reardon, “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System,” 33; [see Chap. 8 in this volume]. 33 ibid., 7. 34 Reardon, “Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security,” 139–140; [see Chap. 5 in this volume]. 35 Reardon, Sexism and the War System,7–8; [see Chap. 4 in this volume].

[email protected] Preface xix and critique of social institutions, analysis of the structural dimensions of social life, and a critical consciousness of the political–economic origins of violence. Moral/ethical reflection addresses questions of justice, and thereby structural and cultural violence, guided by the principles of a human rights framework. Contemplative reflection entails self-examination of internal moral motivation and internal psychological dynamics. This reflection also involves contemplating questions of meaning and value, and exercising one’s imagination to envision alternative realities necessary for transformative action.36 These modes of reflection are the vehicles used to traverse the transformational pathways identified above. These empowering and profound pedagogical processes could be widely used and cultivated in most educational settings, formal and informal. The course and development of Reardon’s thinking about the issues of gender and peace reflected in the essays of this collection were naturally molded by the course of her professional development and research. However, as she often acknowledges, her direct personal and political experience of gender and human rights issues experienced while working within the international women’s movement and numerous other activist groups and organizations over many decades, profoundly influenced and transformed the evolution of her thought and writing. Within the context of this evolution, in her most recent works in the last two decades, Reardon argues not only for the inclusion of gender into the peace knowledge field, but also for the necessity of confronting all forms of oppression that exist within the global patriarchal system and culture of violence. One of the great purposes of her work is the integration of both peacelearning and gender issues into an overarching conceptual framework that interprets the global system and culture of violence within the framework of a global patriarchal order. In the context of this understanding and articulation, Reardon asserts that peacelearning cultural action plans can be more readily created and implemented that promote critical consciousness, authentic subjectivity, a transformational paradigm of peace, and the construction of a global, nonviolent, gender-equal society. Betty Reardon has significantly enriched our understanding of the debilitating effects of patriarchy on all human beings, men and women alike. Her deep insight into the symbiotic relationship between patriarchy and militarism has transformed our understanding of war, peace, and justice. She is a true feminist pioneer, identifying and articulating the gendered perspective as the primary lens through which to understand the nature of war and it’s supporting social and ideological systems.

36 Betty A. Reardon and Dale T. Snauwaert, “Reﬂective Pedagogy, Cosmopolitanism, and Critical Peace Education for Political Efﬁcacy: A Discussion of Betty A. Reardon’s Assessment of the Field,” In Factis Pax: Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice 5, no. 1 (2011) and in Betty A. Reardon; Dale Snauwaert: Betty A. Reardon: A. Pioneer in Education for Peace and Human Rights (Cham—Heidelberg—New York—Dordrecht—London: Springer-Verlag, 2015).

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Reardon has developed an alternative paradigm of holistic human transformation and a positive global future through the tasks of educating and acting for peace. Built upon a veriﬁable knowledge base, she advocates for a profound shift in our worldview using principles of holism in inquiry and resolution of the central problematic of violence and inequality. As peace educators we endeavor to facilitate this transformation of consciousness, and invite the participation of human rights and peace workers everywhere, seeking to ensure the human dignity of all.

Toledo, OH, USA, June 2014 Dale T. Snauwaert

[email protected] Acknowledgments

Key Texts in Gender and Peace is a complement to a volume of selections from my peace education writings published in this Springer series, Pioneers in Science and Practice, edited by Hans Günter Brauch. I extend special thanks to Hans Günter, for I am deeply honored to be published among the distinguished “pioneers” featured in this series that constitutes an invaluable contribution to the study and history of the field of peace knowledge. The series reveals the evolution and development of the field as it has unfolded in the research and interpretations of those who envisioned the contributions knowledge and learning could make to the advancement of peace. I rejoice in the inclusion of gender in this historical record with this particular publication intended to invite all peace practitioners to contemplate gender issues as a central factors in our common pursuit of peace knowledge and its ultimate goal, a sustainable and just world peace. Many gender and peace scholars have long awaited such an invitation from their colleagues in the filed of peace knowledge. This volume is the product of the collaboration of the same fine team that produced the first volume: Dale Snauwaert, who painstakingly edited every piece and the retrospective reflections that introduced these particular selections on gender; Tony Jenkins, who curated and prepared for publication all the photos that appear here and assisted me with other technical aspects of the project, and is co-author on one of the selections; Hans Günter Brauch, whose patient guidance was invaluable to the entire process, who composed the final manuscript; and the editorial team at Springer that brought both volumes to their final forms. I also wish to thank Ursula Oswald for her role in the decision to include my work on gender in this series, and especially for her invaluable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between security and environment that informs the feminist framework for human security that has become integral to my work in the past decade. I extend my deepest appreciation to all of them for their essential contributions to these books. My thanks are especially profound, because during the time of the writing and editing, health challenges impeded somewhat my own work on the project, leading to their carrying more of the load than any of us might have foreseen.

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[email protected] xxii Acknowledgments

All are evidence of the capacities and inspiration we derive from the human networks in which we do this work. Human connections are especially important to the substance of this second volume. The inquiry into the roles of gender in the achievement of peace is a field of peace knowledge that aspires to fundamental changes in human relationships, moving from a framework of hierarchy and authoritarianism to one of the equal human value of all persons and authentic democracy, as evidenced by the enact- ment of personal and political values of comprehensive moral inclusion, and demonstrated in quotidian, intimate, and public behaviors infused by the core conviction that the realization of universal human dignity should be the primary aim of politics. My ideas and arguments about how to achieve these changes have been influenced by learnings derived from those whose early work inspired me such as Elise Boulding and her landmark publication, The Underside of History and contemporary scholars who have vividly portrayed the “underside of the present” such as Cynthia Enloe. Most of my gender learning, however, has been the product of cooperative projects and professional relationships with feminist scholars and activists (mostly, but not exclusively women) with whom I have shared in efforts to advance the role of women in peacemaking, in designing security policy, in the practical politics of peace, and in the concerns of peace research and peace studies. Many of them have become good friends, some appearing in photographs in this volume. Learning and striving with them has influenced my thinking and provided a source of energy for a struggle for gender equality that often daunted, but was never abandoned. It continues, and as is the case with peace education, the exciting new work of younger feminist scholar activists (male as well as female) compels me to continue to take as much a part as possible in that struggle.

New York, June 2014 Betty A. Reardon

[email protected] With old friends, from left Mary Toohy (high school), Peggy Mautner (since toddler days), and Peg Carter (early 1960s IWO days) at 75th birthday and “retirement” reception

[email protected] Organization and Rationale for Text Selections

These essays on gender and peace were developed within the same professional contexts, as were those on peace education in the previous Volume 26 in this series. However, the thinking articulated in this Volume 27 was more directly influenced by my involvement with international women’s movements, as well as personal experience with issues of gender in professional and activist settings. Each of these selections was instigated by developments in civil society movements and in the responses of the peace knowledge field to those developments. Several are extracted from longer originals, which are available in their entirety at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo. This volume comprises two major parts. The first part offers: the introductory commentary on my work on gender and peace by the editor, Dale Snauwaert; my acknowledgments of the contributions of those who made the publication possible and dedication to those who have long supported me through many stages of my life, especially during the production of these two volumes; and this rationale on the organization and selections that appear in the second part. That part is divided into three stages of learning—generations of the evolution of how I have come to view the imperative of gender in analyzing and confronting the peace problematic. These selections chronicle several stages in my interpretation of the inextri- cable, integral links that bind together the fates and futures of the marginalized, deprived, and oppressed to the perpetuation of war and armed force as the ultimate arbiters of power in the patriarchal world order. These interpretations have certainly influenced how I view the tasks of peace education, but they derive less from experience as an educator than from the actual politics that unfolded through my 40 years of direct involvement with international women’s movements for human rights and peace, women’s national resistance to war, injustice, and ecological devastation, and women’s efforts to realize their own rights as citizens, economic agents, and autonomous individuals, even as they advocated and acted on behalf of other marginalized groups. There is no doubt that this has been a political struggle, striving toward a more equitable distribution of power in both public and private spaces, in all human relations, within the public order and the

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[email protected] xxvi Organization and Rationale for Text Selections realms of peace knowledge. The selections that appear here have been chosen to illustrate learnings from my experience in both these spaces and all these realms. The learning has been deeply personal, professionally daunting, and infinitely meaningful to me. In the first 10 years of my work as a full time peace educator, during my tenure at the Institute for World Order (IWO) I had little or no gender consciousness. As did most of my colleagues, I assumed that gaining the franchise and opportunities for professional work constituted the necessary substantive achievement in the advancement of women’s equality. Certainly, I thought, I myself had benefitted from these developments. Women’s perspectives would, of course, now be included in the political and academic discourse, obviating the need for a special place in these fields. These assumptions were soon shattered, as I was to suffer a “rude awakening” of the dormant early learnings about race, class, and gender that had not been a primary focus of my social concerns for some time, (except for those issues of racial and economic justice that came as subject matter into my classroom teaching.) As I began to live the gender reality in the peace knowledge world, and as the worldwide women’s movement broke into consciousness, a powerful gender learning process began to parallel the peace education I was undergoing in the academic realms of universities, schools, and my own teaching. The two processes intersected in the convergence of my early encounters with Freirean popular education in 1973, the experiences of the International Women’s Year in 1975, and my resignation from the IWO in 1976, that I believed at the time to have been precipitated by differences over needs and priorities in the development and dissemination of world order education. I was later to discern that the differences were not “genderless.” As the second generation of my peace learning opened new opportunities to contemplate a wider variety of pedagogies and substantive priorities in peace education, this period also provided professional and reflective space in which to contemplate some of the missing dimensions of the world order approach to peace, and what I saw to be significant blind spots on the part of its practitioners that obscured the fundamental obstacle to peace that lies in the subservient status of women. As my own eyes were startled out of gender blindness, I came to see gender as a major factor in the peace problematic itself, and even more seriously as an obstruction to the research and education the peace knowledge field was attempting to bring to its resolution. I joined those feminist peace researchers and peace educators who undertook to persuade others in the field to remove the blinders and confront the complexities of gender as it affected our work and our professional relationships. With the persistence of these women and a few supportive men, questions of women or gender and peace inched their way into the field. The selections in this volume demonstrate some of my own efforts to push forward gender questions as central to the politics of peace and, as such, an essential subject of peace education as I began to argue that gender should be integral to peace research. They are organized (as are those in Volume 26 are) into three phases or stages of learning deriving from the political context of each stage and the relevant learning

[email protected] Organization and Rationale for Text Selections xxvii experiences that were affecting my views on gender issues. These learnings influenced how I integrated gender issues into my own work as I strove with other feminist peace researchers and peace educators to achieve the place in the field that their significance merited. In retrospect, the gender learning process that surfaced as I revisited these selections are an example of one of the strands of peace learning that appears in the methodology and pedagogical framework that I outlined in a manual on freedom of religion and belief.37 Each phase of that methodology—that was something of a summary of my adaptation of Freire to peacelearning—and the gender learning described here provides the seeds of the generation of the next phase in which the seeds are cultivated by new experiences and changing political and social realities. Yet, each phase is constantly nourished by a core value of peace education, universal human dignity. Awareness, the first of three gender-learning phases (1974–1982), came with early insights into the connection between peace and the roles and status of women. This connection became the subject of serious reflection as I tried to deepen my understanding of the problematic of the war system. I was convinced of the significance of the connection as some before me had been, but we had only limited systemic and structural understanding of what appeared to be an overwhelmingly deep problem. During the second, Analysis phase (1983–1994) a more complex awareness led to attempts to achieve some systematic understanding, to analyze the structures and processes of gender discrimination and oppression as they were affected by and affected armed conflict and the institution of war. The resulting analysis appears in Sexism and the War System (Teachers College Press, 1985), a monograph within which I presented a conceptual framework that was the foundation of all my gender work in this phase. I embraced the concept of “reciprocal causality”—i.e., sexism and war were mutually the cause of the other —to explain the integral relationship between gender roles and war, and I began to argue for a convergence of feminist studies and research with peace studies and research with a feminist perspective in peace education. Argumentation, the third, and for the moment, final phase (1995–2013) has brought me to argue not only for the inclusion of gender in peace knowledge, but also for the inevitable necessity to confront patriarchy itself as the primary origin of the two phenomena, as well as of the general system of a hierarchical value order among human beings that has rationalized not only sexism, but also racism and colonialism, three major forms of global oppression that I had seen for decades38 to be interrelated, even before I had not yet derived a conceptual framework in which to explicate the interrelationships so as to produce strategic action for change. The fundamental purpose of integrating gender into peace

37 Freedom of Religion and Belief: a Fundamental Human Right (New York. International Association for Religious Freedom and Peoples’ Decade for Human Rights Learning, 2010). 38 See Discrimination: The Cycle of Injustice (Sydney, Australia: Holt-Saunders, 1977).

[email protected] xxviii Organization and Rationale for Text Selections knowledge is to inspire such action and to illuminate the requisite peacelearning that could enable us to transcend patriarchy and its multiple forms of violence, opening the space in which to construct a nonviolent gender equal society. Contributing to the development of the next stage of conceptualization is the ﬁrst priority on my current learning agenda, helping to devise an interpretation of the global system and culture of violence within the framework of the global patriarchal gender order. So the learning, the speculation about, and the striving for understanding of the interrelationships between gender and peace continue.

New York, May 2014 Betty A. Reardon

[email protected] Contents

Part I Awareness of Women and Peace Connections 1974–1982

1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures...... 3 1.1 Women’s Movements ...... 8 1.2 Equality ...... 8 1.3 Development ...... 10 1.4 Peace ...... 12 1.5 Agents of Global Transformation ...... 15 1.6 Implications for Adult Education ...... 16

2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future ...... 19 2.1 Responding to a Challenge ...... 30

Part II Analysis of Interdependence of Militarism and Sexism 1983–1994

3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression: A Suggested Research Agenda...... 37 3.1 Introduction ...... 39 3.2 Hypothesis 1: The Structural Relationships Which Link Economic Exploitation in General, Oppression of Women in Particular, the Arms Trade, and Military Repression Are Manifestations of the Fundamental Patriarchal Nature of the Global Dependency-Dominance System ...... 41 3.3 Hypothesis 2: Feminism Is a Significant Counterforce to Militarism and Offers Useful Approaches to Processes for Demilitarization...... 43

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3.4 Hypothesis 3: Militarization Is a Fundamentally Misogynist Policy Resulting from Excessive Emphasis on Masculine Modes, Values and Priorities in the Conduct of Public Affairs...... 45 3.5 Hypothesis 4: Militarization Cannot Be Adequately Analyzed Without Including an Analysis of the Social-Political Aspects of Sexism and the Common Underlying Psychological Causes of Both ...... 46 3.6 Hypothesis 5: Peace Research Is Contaminated by the Same Sexist Bias as Affects Other Social Sciences, and, Therefore, Needs to Devise a More Balanced Perspective on the Human Condition in Order to Derive Valid Data, Adequate to Provide a Knowledge Base for the Derivation of a Global Demilitarization Process ...... 48

4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System and Epilogue to Second Edition ...... 49 4.1 Introduction ...... 52 4.2 Epilogue ...... 59 References...... 60

5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security ...... 61 5.1 Feminism and Positive Peace ...... 63 5.2 Feminist Concepts of Security ...... 66 5.3 The Radical Questions: The Links Between Sexism and Militarism ...... 69 5.4 The Conservative Questions: Maintaining Authentic Global Security ...... 70

6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace ...... 73 Reference ...... 84

Part III Assertion of Patriarchy as Fundamental to Peace and Peace Education 1995–2013

7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective...... 87 7.1 Introduction: Toward a New Phase of the Inquiry into Gender and Peace ...... 89 7.2 Connecting Women, War and Political Participation ...... 92 7.3 Advances in International Standards: Women’s Equality and Peace ...... 94

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7.4 Violence Against Women: Gendered Link Between Human Rights and Peace...... 97 7.5 Towards an Inclusive Gender Perspective: The Emergence of Masculinities Studies...... 101 7.6 Challenging the Patriarchal Paradigm: Gender Equality and Human Security ...... 106

8 Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System...... 109 8.1 A Core Thesis on Human Security ...... 112 8.2 The Problem of Human Security in a Militarized World ...... 113 8.3 Patriarchy: A Framework for Human Insecurity and Source of Gender Injustice ...... 115 8.4 A Feminist Framework of Human Security and Critique of Militarized State Security...... 117 8.5 A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach to Human Security...... 120 8.6 Confronting the Obstacles: Towards Demilitarization and Gender Equality ...... 122 8.7 Conclusion: The Imperative of a Gender Perspective and a Comprehensive Approach ...... 126 References...... 127

9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women Addressed to the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, March 4–15th, 2013...... 129 9.1 Violence Against Women Is Integral to War and Armed Conflict: The Urgent Necessity of the Universal Implementation of UNSCR 1325 ...... 132 9.2 Identifying Forms of Military Violence and Their Functions in Warfare...... 133 9.3 Conclusions and Recommendations...... 138

10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy: Envisioning the Possible ...... 141

About the Authors...... 151

About the Book ...... 153

[email protected] Part I Awareness of Women and Peace Connections 1974–1982

[email protected] Chapter 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures

Retrospective Reﬂection on “Women’s Movements and Human Futures” (1975)

This essay, among the ﬁrst I published on women’s issues, was written at the request of the James Dator, then editor of Convergence, the journal of the Inter- national Association for Adult Education.1 A well-known futurist, Jim had been invited to a meeting convened by the World Order Model’s Project (WOMP) in Dubrovnik in 1975, the International Women’s Year (IWY), as were several women taking an active role in the preparations for United Nations World Conference on Women. For me, this WOMP meeting was the beginning of a long term learning process and endeavors to introduce the gender problematic into the realms of the concerns addressed by peace research and peace studies. At the Mexico City IWY conference Women’s Tribune (the civil society program parallel to the intergovernmental conference), the second event in my gender learning process where I chaired a panel on disarmament for the Tribune, Nobel laureate Sean MacBride called for women to demand progress toward general and complete disarmament. The Mexico City conference was a major landmark in the world-wide mobilization of the myriad women’s movements and organizations devoted to raising the status of women in their respective societies, merging them into a disparate, diverse, but strong and determined actor in global civil society. The strength and determination of this new phase in women’s action on the international level was evident in the U.N.’s extending IWY into IWD, the ﬁrst of two International Decades on Women with world conferences in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985.

1 This text was ﬁrst published as “Women’s Movements and Human Futures,” in: Convergence, 8.3 (1975): 41–52. The journal of the International Council on Adult Education is no longer published.

[email protected] 4 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures

The second decade culminated in the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, where I participated as a resource person/facilitator in a workshop on human rights education and lobbied on women and security issues with women’s peace organizations, intending to influence the final document. The Beijing Platform for Action, truly groundbreaking and comprehensive, yet to be but minimally implemented, recognized the gendered impact of war and armed conflict on women. That recognition became the foundation of women’s continued efforts to have the U.N. attend to women’s contributions to conflict resolution and peacemaking, and to take action to remedy the gendered harm women suffered during war and armed conflict. Many of us assumed that women’s empowerment in peacemaking was the sine qua non for overcoming the particular harms that war visited on them. While numbers of feminist peace studies practitioners work from this assumption, there is still no general adherence to it, neither in international security politics nor in peace research. Although none of us at the 1975 Dubrovnik gathering anticipated these events and their effects on the policies of the world organization, the women at the WOMP meeting believed that some significant changes in the status of women might now be undertaken and that peace research might contribute to the process. The others seemed to think of IWY as just another year of extra U.N. attention to a specific world issue, one year to focus the world’s interest in the severely deprived and oppressed situation of the world’s women, with little thought about how the situation could actually be changed. However, the hopes and intentions that brought thousands of women from throughout the world to Mexico City inspired actions that ultimately put some limited change in motion in the realms of the three themes of the year: equality, development and peace. But it was more global civil society than the interstate system that affected the changes, largely by pushing the U.N. to establish the decades on women. It has been within the activities of these women’s transnational networks that grew and thrived through these decades that most of my work on gender and peace has been undertaken. Among the women WOMP invited to Dubrovnik to offer one afternoon’s discussion starter panel were: the late Elise Boulding, recognized globally and across generations as a founder of the modern international peace research movement; Irma Mazelis, a Venezuelan lawyer on the staff of the U.N. who was later to prepare the first working draft of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Dis- crimination against Women; and I, in my last year at the Institute for World Order as Director of the Schools Program. We took our task to be to demonstrate the relationship of “women’s issues” to world order research and studies, and in so doing to elicit both the professional interest in and human sensitivity to the relevance of confronting the oppression of half of humanity to the achievement of WOMP’s value goals, their research and professional attitudes. We hoped, as well, to provoke some degree of awareness that peace research was imbued with a masculine bias that feminist scholars were beginning to call attention to in both the hard and the social sciences. We had minimal success, our presentation being

[email protected] 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures 5 perceived more as articulations of the personal perceptions of the panelists than statements of issues to be addressed by the field. (In later years this perception was to change somewhat.) But Jim Dator, who saw the significance of the status of women to futures studies, determined to encourage further discussion by publishing on the topic. In recalling this short session, I see both an early step in the formulation of contemporary feminist peace research and peace studies, and a fore- shadowing of the marginalization of and resistance to gender issues that even now in 2014 is not fully overcome. The meeting was an important and pivotal learning experience for me, the fruits of which are not readily evident in the essay below, but it does reveal some of the original seeds of my evolving thinking about gender. Re-reading “Women’s Movements” surfaces three areas where significant learning evolved over the next decades in the realms of: a gender perspective on peace education; the prevailing personal and professional blindness that shadowed the potential illumination of the integral importance of gender to peace; and some first efforts in striving toward analysis that went beyond the still limited insights that were then affecting my views of the gendered nature of the war problematic, and how they might affect the practice of peace education. Since the piece was drafted in terms of adult education, I find myself surprised tthat the Freirean principles to which I refer are not so evident as the Western perspective. None-the-less, there are points of consistency with approaches I was then taking to peace education. So, too, the limited gender perspective that informed my work at the time is revealed in the piece; for instance, the emphasis on discourse echoes the advocacy of conversation as learning process in “Transformations toward Survival” published that same year. The concept of wholeness appears here as an antidote to all the human divisions characterizing the war system, an idea that was to evolve into assertions about the destructiveness of rigidly gendered sex-role bifurcation and fragmented and reductionist patriarchal-realist thinking that became pivotal in the arguments made a decade later in Sexism and the War System. The methods of futurism used to explore the alternative possibilities that might make possible general and complete disarmament were, as well, characteristic of the world order pedagogy of peace that I advocated at the time. It is evident that the world order normative approach was still the major framework I used to elicit prescriptive reflections. The beginnings of later arguments about the depth and nature of global system change necessary to peace are found in the statements on women peace activists’ advocacy of general and complete disarmament as the primary necessity of such change. But the assertion that the world order approach “strikes at the deepest roots of social order” no longer holds true to me. For the roots are far deeper, than the institutional limitations that world order scholars were emphasizing; they are imbedded in the ways in which we think and view the world. Seeking forms of peace education to change the thinking and world views that have perpetuated war, I came to see the global gender order as a primary obstacle to the abolition of war. Over the next four decades, I joined other feminist educator/activists striving to overcome

[email protected] 6 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures gender blindness in the field of peace knowledge and in public policy. However, the most significant struggle for me was overcoming the gender blindness I myself shared with my society and my profession in this learning phase of the early insights that produced the initial awareness of the gender and peace problematic. That gender blindness is apparent to me in this essay and other essays of this stage in which language manifests the commonly used terminology and world views then held in common with so many of my colleagues. I learned through the years the validity of feminist arguments about the significance of sexist language in maintaining gender inequality. Although I was already aware of women’s exclusion from political and economic power, and of the social discrimination against women in most public (and, certainly, in professional) spheres, this essay shows that I was yet to actually comprehend the depth of the psycho-social, political and economic roots of the gendered oppression of women and other marginalized groups. The other selections in this volume will illustrate learning that lead to what I believe is a deeper and more complex understanding of gender as an integral and essential peace issue.

Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

Because of the personal involvement of women in action to create their own futures, the women’s movements are examples of futures-oriented adult education. Their goals of Equality, Development, and Peace constitute the kind of future that those who approach alternative futures from the value perspective of world order studies are attempting to achieve. World order is a strand of futuristics which has been developed by the Institute for World Order, a research and educational agency which deﬁnes its efforts to an enquiry into how a global human future characterized by ﬁve key values might be achieved. These world order values become the criteria for selecting a preferred future from among the range of alternatives proposed as “relevant utopias.” Rele- vant utopias are proposals for future socio-political systems described in such detail that all may understand the institutions and processes which would comprise the system as well as the designers’ proposed “transition strategies.” Transition refers to the policies and actions which would change the present system into the proposed future system. A “preferred world” is that relevant utopia which is judged to be most capable of achieving world order values and appears most consistent with the particular value systems of those selecting their futures.

[email protected] 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures 7

With Yayori Matsui, Japan, Initiator of the 1999 International Tribunal on War Time Sexual Slavery; Felicity Hill, Australia, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Maria Elena Valenzuela, Chile, International Peace Research Association; and Teachers College graduate students at a seminar on gender and peace issues in 1997. From the author’s personal collection

The ﬁve world order values are: peace and war prevention, the minimization of organized political violence; equitable advancement of the economic wellbeing of all humankind; expanded social justice in the world community, reduced oppression, discrimination, and exploitation; (these two values would mean the elimination of structural violence); increased public participation in policy-making particularly by those individuals and minority groups most subject to structural violence; and res- toration of ecological balance by reversal of the current lethal trends in environmental destruction of this planet. This set of values was derived by a group of scholars from various parts of the world who worked together on the Institute’s World Order Models Project. They agreed that a desirable future would assure these values to all peoples, an assurance impossible within the structures and institutions of the present global order. They therefore conclude that the present system is undesirable and call for a drastic change in that system in order to achieve world order values. But, even these scholars who call for a drastically reformed world social order have not argued for the total transformation which is implicit in the themes of International Women’s Year. For they have not, as yet, demanded the kind of fundamental and far-reaching change in human relationships which is the basic goal of the women’s movements.

[email protected] 8 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures

1.1 Women’s Movements

The values which inform the women’s movements are certainly consistent with those of the field of world order studies. Indeed, both are strands of the same general movement for global transformation toward a true human community on this planet. However, where the scholarly strand of world values tend to be abstract and made real only in proposals for future social and political institutions, the women’s values tend to emerge from concrete human experiences and seek their fulfillment in very specific changes in human behavior. Although the clarion call for equality, development and peace issued for International Women’s Year may seem as abstract as the formulation of world order values, the three goals are readily translated in the minds of women to particular policies. This call is a global amplification of women’s hopes which have grown through time to communities throughout the world.

The women’s movement is the largest social revolutionary movement of its kind, with network systems operating clear across the world. There might be some cultural difference between different groups of people in the movement, but everyone shares the common realization that women have been discriminated against by society in general and by men in particular. Women are kept as second-class citizens mainly because of their traditional roles of child-bearing and child-rearing, which make it difficult for them to develop their skills and talents in other fields. They agree that change must come, although there might be some disagreement on how to go about changing the situation.2 The agent that has kept this movement alive through periods in which efforts at other social and political reforms have overshadowed it, has been that of discourse, the most natural of educative processes. Indeed, this process may account for the most significant development in education of this century, the re-education of adult women. That re-education is the path through which the women’s movements have made their way to the point of a major international year, and the vehicle by which the themes of the year can become realities.

1.2 Equality

Projecting these themes into actual future conditions gives us a vision of a preferred world, which is a totally transformed human society. The basic transformation must occur in our perception of the human species. From a view of humanity as a fragmented collection of various cultural, racial, ideological, and sexual groups, some more valuable, more worthy and therefore more powerful than others, we must shift to a view of humanity as a single species with a common destiny, diverse in appearances and cultures and all of equal value. It is quite natural that this

2 Vajrathon, Mallica: Liberating and Developing Women ... A Communication Perspective,p.4, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seminar on Women In Development, Cosponsored by UNDP, UNITAR, and CONACYT, June 16–18, 1975.

[email protected] 1.2 Equality 9 transformation should spring from the women’s movement, for the oppression of women is the core and the paradigm of all oppression.

Although history has testified to oppression and discrimination since the Garden of Eden when one species of human represented good and the other evil, never before has an oppressed minority gathered together on an international scale to discuss their oppression. And justly so, for no other oppression extends beyond physical boundaries, race, color, religious beliefs, economic and class differences. Modern humankind will finally travel to the very core of oppression, man versus woman. … And from that first attack on humanity. … [we] went on to invent more sophisticated means of insuring the legacy of superiority for future generations.3 The theme of equality leads us to struggle for a future in which no human identity is accorded higher value or more benefits than any other human identity. If we held the view that all individuals no matter how different from us (whoever we are) were of equal value, and we behaved according to that principle, the world would be a totally different place and life would be a totally different experience. Exploitation and oppression of those who are different and seen as less worthy would be unacceptable, perhaps even impossible behavior. For all but a small group of white, Western men a crucial process in this transformation is the awareness of and belief in our own value, our worthiness to participate in the full human experience, and the consequent responsibility to struggle for our rights. This process is the very core of the women’s movements and the potential impetus to global transformation. The fundamental purpose of the educative conversations of “consciousness raising groups” was to convince women of their own value, and to develop awareness of the denial of that value by present social structures, violent structures, based on a hierarchical view of human value that teaches by experience that some people, like the pigs on the Animal Farm,are“more equal.” Achievement of equality also requires solidarity among all who are oppressed. As Dr. Gonzales points out this transformation is most likely to be achieved if women, especially middle-class Euro-American women, comprehend the relationship of their oppression to all other forms of human oppression and join in solidarity with the oppressed poor in their own countries and the masses of persons in the exploited nations of the world. This comprehension and drive toward solidarity must be reciprocal. The oppressed must see the special suffering of their own women, and help in the struggle to liberate them and all women. Indeed, this process of awareness is developing, and being nurtured on the very soil in which the phenomenon of ‘conscientization’ first flourished in this century. Using the same methods and sharing some of the same humanistic values as the North American women’s consciousness raising groups, groups of peasants and urban poor in Latin America, sat together in long evenings of discourse helping each other to know their own identities and to recognize the social and political structures which stifled their identities and obstructed their fulfillment. This method,

3 Gonzales, Dr. Sylvia; White Women’s Liberation: The Oppressive Revolution, p. l. Submitted upon request to Opinion Section, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, California, May 1975.

[email protected] 10 1 Women’s Movements and Human Futures developed by Paulo Freire in a literacy campaign in Northeast Brazil, demonstrated that people truly learn only what they can come to understand in direct relation to themselves. Perhaps even more significant to our concept of equality, Freire showed that education is a process of reciprocal exchange between and among learners. There are no ‘teachers’ only ‘learners’ catalyzing their experiences into the phenomenon we call education. It is, in fact, this understanding that leads women to express value goals in concrete human terms. And it is this method that some Latin Americans are using in family life education programs to illuminate the relation of women’s liberation to the relief of all the oppressed.4 The drive toward equality and participation in shaping the future has led unprecedented numbers of educated women into the political arena and is impelling even greater numbers to seek further education to equip them to participate in the larger society outside the home. The growing numbers of women seeking education, largely in pursuit of their own human rights and their own personal fulfillment, is one of the most positive forces in the movement for global transformation. Women are entering professional and graduate schools, resulting especially in the industrialized nations, in more women lawyers, doctors, and professors. But even more significantly women are entering those fields formerly almost exclusively male, such as engineering and the hard sciences. The introduction of those values designated as ‘feminine’ into science and technology is a potential means to influence these fields to move in humane and lifegiving directions rather than their present thrusts toward death and destruction. “The back-to-school movement” among women who, having fulfilled their socially assigned roles of raising families, now seek new roles, brings into intellectual and social life a vast resource of experience in human relations and the human development process, a resource absolutely essential to the transformation process. The entry of more women into the male world of politics, commerce and the professions also tends to break the rigid separation of the social functions of men and women, transforming all social functions into human functions. Such a condition is an absolute requirement of a future society based on equality.

1.3 Development

The most revolutionary trend in the education of women as a force for transforming society is coming about in the “developing world” where the vast majority of women, and far too many men, are still illiterate. The term “developing world” has been coined by those on top of the present human hierarchy—the white, Western, male political leaders. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe them as the highest on the rung of service classes—the

4 One speciﬁc project is carried on by CODECAL, an independent adult education agency in Colombia.

[email protected] 1.3 Development 11 economic advisors to those on top who are also white, Western and male. Position in the particular hierarchy of this service class is largely determined by education. The most valuable advisors are the most specialized and most expert in technology. Philosophers, for example, rank considerably lower than nuclear physicists. It is a great fortune for the human race that a few physicists are also philosophers. It would be an even greater enrichment for an even more hopeful future if some of these philosopher physicists were neither white nor male. In which case, it might mean the replacement of the euphemism ‘developing’ with the more accurate ‘exploited’. At least it might mean a concept of development less centered on economic growth and more on human fulfillment, progress towards a just and humanly satisfying social system, appropriate to the needs and aspirations of each developing country.5 One of the most effective means to creating the conditions for exploitation is denial of knowledge and information and exclusion from education. The specific manifestation of the mechanism is illiteracy, a condition in which most oppressed people find themselves and which naturally forms the prime target of the forces of human liberation working with the process of conscientization. The illiteracy of women affects not only their own liberation but also constitutes one of the most serious socioeconomic problems of this planet which may not be able to sustain the continued rate of population growth. Education of women is an important factor in the limitation of population, not only because literacy facilitates all processes of family planning, but also and more importantly because it provides alternative opportunities for women. It opens new possibilities for social roles other than motherhood. Needless to say, the greater the degree of education, the wider the range of opportunities and alternatives; the wider the range of alternatives, the more limited is the likelihood that women will seek fulfillment, potential economic support, and identity in motherhood. Further, drastically increased educational opportunities for women are absolutely essential to their integration into the development process. The role of women in the economy, particularly in the agricultural sector, is crucial. Like population, the food production question is one which affects the potential survival of the human species and one which rests largely in the hands of women. Since women are the main source of agricultural labor and the main food producers in a large part of the developing world, educating women in more advanced techniques of agriculture will not only lessen the intense physical burden they bear, but will also increase food production. In a world in which many are starving and more suffer from malnutrition, there can be no assurance at all of a livable future if we are unable to feed the world’s population. Thus, in approaching the global problems of population and hunger, we see the essential relationship of the education of women to the survival of human life and to the improvement of the quality of life.

5 Document from the Commission on the Church in International Affairs of the World Council of Churches, “The Economic Threat to Peace”.

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The development of programs which link literacy, technological training and political education to population control are largely the result of participation of women in planning the development programs emerging from International Women’s Year. The exclusion of oppressed groups from the kind of advanced education which has led to greater and greater specialization, and the consequent lack of breadth of vision among male policy-makers has not been totally negative in its consequences. For women excluded from formal education and forced into a variety of service roles have had to be generalists. Thus, they have preserved a comprehensive view of experience which is so acutely needed now in this ﬁrst planetary era where we must be able to seek holistic solutions to system-wide problems. The expansion and improvement of women’s education and the increased number of women in educational planning make it much more likely that education can become the kind of instrument for social change likely to lead us to a desired future. Further, it demonstrates not only the need but the effectiveness of continued non-specialist education of adults. It puts the responsibility for the future where it belongs, in the hands of adults who have direct experience with the overwhelming problems of the present, and the crucial need for change. Global crises make it impossible for us to continue to delay the future without foregoing it. For generations we have looked to the education of children and to the very young for the development of our desired future. Postponing the changes required to assure the future is a potentially disastrous practice. This was clearly the message intended in Secretary General U Thant’s 1968 statement:

I can only conclude from the information available to me as Secretary-General that the members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, and to supply the required momentum to world development efforts. Through the education of women, development becomes a signiﬁcant mode of transition to the preferred world. Indeed, it can be viewed as the transformational process bringing forth a future society in which no person will be deterred from seeking self-fulﬁllment by economic, political or social institutions or conditions; a society in which the equal value of persons assures adequate opportunity for individual as well as social development.

1.4 Peace

The concepts of equality as the equal value of all individuals and development as progress toward a humanly satisfying social system provide a vision of a desirable future. However, assurance of any future depends upon the abolition of the war system. As the fundamental transformation of people must be in the change from a hierarchical to an equal view of all humanity, the fundamental transformation of the social system must be the abolition of the use of violence to achieve ends and maintain order. If we conceive of a peace system as one in which there is a minimal

[email protected] 1.4 Peace 13 amount of violence and a maximal amount of justice, then we project a future with a totally different form of politics. The politics of threat, force and death would be replaced by a politics of persuasion, accommodation and life. If people see each other as truly equal, conflicts are more likely to be resolved by reasoned non-violent modes, for we would view each other as reasonable opponents in a controversy rather than as hopeless, intransigent enemies. The ‘masses’ would not be moved in one direction or another by crushing deviations and dissensions; rather, public policy would seek to identify and develop positive trends and attitudes. The criteria for making public decisions would be those which enhanced the quality of human life. None of these processes are new to the human experience, but for the most part they have been relegated to the private rather than the public sector of human affairs. The skills involved have thus become “women’s work”. Conciliation, fulfillment of human needs and providing pleasure, behaviors expected of women in our present system, would be required of all individuals to maintain a future peace system. Education for human futures, therefore, should be as much directed at re- educating men to value and perform these ‘feminine’ functions as it is toward providing women with male competencies. Those men who see development of these skills as a real need of the transformation process must for the most part seek the necessary education on their own; for there are few if any planned programs of this type in either formal or informal settings. Appropriately enough, some are educating themselves by a process very similar to the consciousness raising groups through which so many women became aware of the need for radical changes in the rules of the social game. Such small study discussion groups are cells in the total movement for global transformation. They have also been the primary means by which women have educated themselves about the issues of war and peace as they are played out in the public sector. Excluded from the seats of power and decision making, they have nonetheless sought to influence the direction of public policy. To increase this influence many have gone beyond small study groups to organizations and associations with branches throughout the world. A main concern of these organizations has been peace, and because of the serious study they have given to the issues, they constitute a massive and unexploited pool of expertise for futures planning. They are also a resource of some significance for adult and non-formal education for peace and global transformation. In spite of this competence and efforts at influence, from letter-writing to del- egations visiting world leaders, neither women nor peace have been taken very seriously by the powerful. Even the large scale peace movement against the war in Vietnam—which was in large part the result of women’s organizational efforts— did not bring about serious consideration of establishing a peace system or bringing women into international policy making. This, too, has been a significant learning experience for women. It becomes clearer that the war system is the stronghold of male dominance, the most destructive expression of the males’ special share of the human attributes of aggression, competition and power seeking; and that the war system is sustained by the separation of the social functions of women and men.

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The abolition of this system—the most serious of all threats to human survival— requires far more than merely changing the rules of the game. We need a whole new game. Here the women, the “amateur experts”, are in total accord with the world order scholars; a viable future requires a drastic system change, and that change is General and Complete Disarmament. The most important lesson is understanding the transformational nature of the disarmament concept. A disarmed world would be totally different from our present world. For many people ‘GCD’ becomes the symbol of their preferred world. For more and more members of women’s international non-governmental organizations, it becomes the relevant utopia which speciﬁes the century old future visions of the founders of their movement.

With the coming of the industrial revolution, the hitherto small group of under-employed middle class urban women expanded rapidly. As the new class multiplied, a new view of the world took shape for them. From an attitude of open-mouthed wonder about far-away places, women rather quickly shifted to a comprehension of continents linked by trade routes and busily plying slave ships. As a result they were plunged into the challenges of internationalism about 150 years ago. While statesmen and revolutionaries were locked in struggles for national independence, and merchants mined Africa for the new gold-black human gold—and colonists staked out claims for God and king, women were feeling the pull of quite a different current. This other current was internationalism which might be thought of as the undertow of nationalism and imperialist expansion. It pulled them in the opposite direction from the rest of society… Whether they were concerned with slavery, economic oppression of workers or with wars of conquest, they were beginning to think in terms of global systems rather than national welfare.6 The conviction that nothing short of General and Complete Disarmament can achieve real peace and must therefore be the cornerstone of any future world order was expressed recently by an assembly called and attended largely by women’s international non-governmental organizations. The United Nations was the scene of the gathering in May 1975 of women from all over the world who after two- and-a- half days of discussions articulated as their preferred world one in which peace would be assured by disarmament and the necessary collateral global institutions.7 They enumerated as well some steps in their proposed transition strategy such as the outlawing of nuclear weapons, the establishment of nuclear free zones and the demand that governments prepare conversion plans.8 Most signiﬁcantly, they called upon the U.N. to establish the date for a world disarmament conference in which there would be non-governmental participation. Such participation is essential since it is only through non-ofﬁcial channels that women, minorities, and all of the powerless can at present have a voice in public affairs. Deriving a future in which all people are empowered demands this kind of transition strategy.

6 Boulding, Elise; Women and Peace Work/ﬁrst draft, unpublished. 7 This conclusion was essentially an endorsement of the Bradford Proposals. Copies available from Sean McBride, Department of Public Affairs, Trusteeship and Decolonization, United Nations, Room 326A, New York, NY 10017. 8 For a copy of the conclusions of the Disarmament Seminar write to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1213 Race Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107.

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It is appropriate too, that disarmament should be one of the ﬁrst transformational goals of those who are kept powerless by the present system. Those who have the least voice in the war system suffer the most from its consequences. Not only are they often the “innocent victims” of the violence, but their needs for food, education, dignity—all that is required to be an equal of all persons—are denied by the draining of resources in the destruction of warfare.9 The powerful must learn the lessons of justice which demand an end to wasting resources and imposing violent consequences on those who have not participated in making the policies of warfare. An even more crucial lesson to be learned by the leaders of the warfare states is that behavior that is conciliatory, accommodating, cooperative, inclined to retreat from inevitable destruction is not the cause of powerlessness, but the result. As with the separation of male and female functions resulting in the preservation of holistic perspectives among women, this negative situation has also had positive consequences. It has preserved a repertoire of behaviors most necessary to human survival. These survival skills should be in all curricula. The problem for adult education is how to motivate the elite to learn them. For they too have a right to participate in bringing forth a positive human future. Their other alternatives seem to be to destroy any human future through continuation of present policies or to stand aside from the present transformational trends. To do so they would disem- power themselves, for participation is power. The conscientization of the elite may be the process upon which the future depends.

1.5 Agents of Global Transformation

It is evident that world order thinking is a natural complement to the methods and goals of the women’s movements. It forms an appropriate content for the discourse of adult learning and offers a natural sequence for consciousness raising. The relevant utopias and preferred worlds which animate the women’s movements are strong indications of how these two strands of futurism can catalyze each other into potentially transformational forces. World order offers useful intellectual paradigms for futures planning, which are essential to global transformation. But the energy of commitment to values and the political process of communication of policies need the worldwide networking that is growing within women’s movements and which has been greatly strengthened by IWY. Many are coming to believe that these movements hold the greatest potential for achieving transformation. Women’s movements are the most universal of current political movements. They have the potential to enlist at least half the human race, and there are already men who share their values and perspectives.

9 The resource aspect of the war system is well illustrated by “World Military and Social Expenditures”, available from the Institute for World Order, 1140 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036.

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They transcend national boundaries in a form more powerful even than the worldwide religions and ideologies because they deal with the very core of human identity. There is no person unaffected by these movements. World order holds an unequalled potential for transformation because it is far more radical than any exclusively political or economic movement. It strikes at the deepest roots of social order, the structures of personal relations and the access to power, demanding a universal equity to replace chauvinistic merit as the basis for exercising power. It challenges the exercise of power not only in the public sector but in the private sector as well. It demands a new definition of the human person and the “natural order.” The outer world of society, the inner world of persons and the cosmic order are all subject to re-examination by the reflections of feminism. Nothing could be more significant to the present human experience and more influential over the nature of human futures. The strongest evidence of this radicalism is in its effects on education, especially adult education. The experience of conscientization shows that adults are capable of changing fundamental perceptions and attitudes, of drastically broadening their view of humanity and the human experience, and most important, of formulating and acting upon values which are both personally and politically relevant. The process is not only an agent for transformation; it is evidence that transformation is possible and that we need not wait for succeeding generations trained in futuristics to begin to bring forth a preferred world. Justice demands that adults be trained in futuristics, especially women and the oppressed who have had so little part in deciding even their own futures much less the futures of the world community. Adult education concerned with empowering and enfranchising adults must offer futuristics and world order as essential elements of the curricula.

1.6 Implications for Adult Education

The implications for adult education are clear. First, the trend in women’s education must be greatly expanded, especially in technology. Programs also need to introduce adults to global issues as they affect them personally and politically (most especially to the issues of the women’s movements) and to the techniques of futures forecasting, futures planning and futures selection. It must be concerned with re-educating for human wholeness, breaking down the limiting separations between male and female roles, between the participation of the powerful and the powerless. It should explore interrelations such as those among equality, development and peace and among peace, participation and power. It should nurture generalist skills and a holistic view of human experience. It should facilitate the alliances necessary to the transformational process such as between middle-class women and the oppressed classes. World order scholars and women’s organizations have articulated guiding values and projected images of preferred futures. All persons have the right to engage in such futurizing and in the struggle for their own preferred world.

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Futuristics, world order and women’s studies are rapidly being adopted in the schools and universities. Adults in non-formal education have no less right to this body of knowledge and these skills. Indeed, the non-formal methods of learning have a great contribution to make to the formal educational structures. On all counts adult education has a great opportunity and a heavy responsibility to become an agent for transformation. It is the hope of the women’s movements that Interna- tional Women’s Year and its themes of equality, development and peace will raise consciousness about this opportunity and responsibility. Adult education programs could be the vehicle by which the potential of the women’s movements to bring about better futures for all human beings might be realized through the transformation of human society.

[email protected] Chapter 2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future

Retrospective Reﬂection on “Moving to the Future” and “Debating the Future” (1980)

The two selections below were published in Connection, the periodical bulletin of Network, a Washington, D.C. based group of American Catholic nuns who are social activists and lobbyists.1 This pair of pieces offers glimmerings of an evolving gender interpretation of the institution of war that in recent years I have identiﬁed as “The Patriarchy Problematic,” a broader and more complex view of the interrelationships than that w ihichnforms these early essays.2 The second of the pair is an example of the resistance to feminist perspectives that has been a constant in social actions and politics, even in academia. Such resistance was readily evident in the Vatican’s 2012 establishment of a doctrinal commission to assess the “radical feminist” views that the hierarchy of churchmen (read ‘patriarchy’) saw in American nuns’ intensive and tenacious action for justice. Being proud to claim a number of such “women religious” among former students, present friends and colleagues, I was among supporters of the nuns participating in public demon- strations calling for cancellation of the assessment and recognition of the essential role of “women religious” in education and social services. Since the early 1970s American “women religious” have undertaken strong action to defend the rights of all the marginalized, vulnerable and excluded, among them women. Acting out of the inspiration of Vatican II (1963) to work for justice in the world, in the light of the Social Gospels, they advocate for women’s human rights, and for justice for all who suffer exclusion and deprivation. Their efforts,

1 This text was ﬁrst published as “Moving to the Future” and “Debating the Future,” in: Network, 8.1 and 8.3 (1980). The permission to republish this text here was granted on 11 March 2014 by Stephanie Niedringhaus, NETWORK Communications Director, NETWORK, A National Cath- olic Social Justice Lobby. 2 An article under this title appears in M.E. Diez Jorge and M. Sanchez Romero (Eds.): Genero y Paz. (Barcelona: Icaria, 2010)

[email protected] 20 2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future known and admired by many like me, working toward realization of similar ends within an entirely secular perspective, have come more to public attention since being scrutinized by the church hierarchy. The rationale for a “Doctrinal Assessment” of the major organization of Catholic nuns, The Leadership Confer- ence of Women Religious, made particular reference to Network, citing their neglect of the issues that were at the top of the list of patriarchal concerns, working instead for social and economic justice. I like to think that the pieces below may have been seen by those in Rome who raised the alarm, noting among the sisters’ transgressions adherence to the aforementioned “radical feminism.” While feminist in perspective (i.e. asserting the principle of the fundamental human equality of women and men) their radicalism lies within their interpretation of the social gospel, not in a particular political ideology. Because of Network’s concern with action for justice and peace, with a budding interest in the relevance of a feminist perspective to their purposes, I was invited to deliver the keynote to their 1980 annual Legislative Seminar. Awed by their commitment, I happily accepted this opportunity to share my thoughts and a few days of reflection and socializing with this remarkable group of women (and the few enlightened men who supported and cooperated in their work). The occasion became even more important to my efforts to conceptualize the gender elements of the peace problematic when the editor of Connection, who had requested that I draft an article for publication based on the keynote, sent me a letter she had received, disputing the article’s assertions about masculine and feminine values. (I later refined these concepts in positive and negative terms.), asked if I wished to respond3; you can bet I did so wish. The complainant, a professor of theology, announced his withdrawal from Network membership because of the publication of such assertions without biblical bases, flying in the face of human unity, objections still voiced in some debates over gender justice. The opportunity to respond inspired further reflection on the conceptualizations and arguments for a monograph originally requested by the Institute for World Order. Even more significant to the purposes of this volume, both the keynote and the response to the critique show a start to extending my thinking beyond understanding gender solely as the socio-cultural construction of the distinct social roles of men and women to a more complex conceptualization of how gender functions in the patriarchal order of the war system. This thinking is evident in the conceptual language of gender, employing masculine and feminine rather than male and female to describe attributes that were not biologically based, the very terms which my theologian interlocutor found fallacious and dysfunctional. I, however, shared the belief of a growing number of feminists that attribution of differing social characteristics or political principles to sex was inaccurate and dysfunctional. That attribution obscured the injustice inherent in the inequality between men and women and implied an essentialism that

3 The full text of the letter is available in the Reardon Archive in the Canaday Special Collections at the University of Toledo.

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I perceived in the theologian’s comments. Essentialism is counter to one of the fundamental assertions of peace education that most human social behaviors are learned. Therefore, individuals and societies can learn alternatives to violence and war. While sex is biologically determined, gender is a socio-cultural construct, i.e., it is not inborn but imposed, and can be intentionally changed. Most campaigns for gender equality are built on this assumption. The Network keynote forecast the analytic and conceptual directions toward which my experiences in the women’s movements and my attempts to bring the resulting learning into the ﬁelds of peace knowledge were leading me. It shows, as well, how my beliefs about and approaches to peace education infused my growing preoccupations with gender and its implications for the profound transformation of human society that I had become convinced is a requirement for the achievement of peace. There is here a clear, simple and short statement of what I then argued would comprise transformation, “fundamental change in personal values and human relationships as well as in structures and systems.” The formulation of that description, linking the human-behavioral to the structural-institutional with the phrase, “as well as” was a response to the focus of the peace establishment’s research and study on institutional change to the exclusion of the requisite human dimensions, an issue even at that time addressed by peace educators as well as feminist researchers and activists. The concept of “the preferred present” mentioned in the piece was a peace education device to demonstrate that positive conditions existed on which to base current change efforts, encouraging a process of discernment that undergirds identifying values in action. The focus on values was at once an acknowledgement of the universal ethical dimension of Network’s commitment to justice as preached in the social gospels, and of the values discernment process implicit in “the process of becoming” of the preferred or transformed world. Valuing processes already integral to peace pedagogy and an element in feminist political action started me thinking about the transformational possibilities of re-conceptualizing politics as learning rather than as struggling for power. The politics of non-violence is the preferred present that presages such a change. The scenario’s describing disarmament as the pivotal development in the transition to the institutional change required to sustain a just peace might be cause for lamenting the failure to realize the hypothetical events as outlined. However, I ﬁnd the discernment of the preferred present of that time an encouragement to continue to look for it in our own time. Discernment of promising, positive conditions and the developments that produced them, might yet transform our speculative scenarios into the actions that might make actual histories of the achievement of the envisioned peaceful global order.

Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

The preferred world is not an end but a process of becoming. It is the actions we take to bring it about. We hold the future within us, not only in our visions of a preferred world, but also in the values that guide our daily efforts and determine our

[email protected] 22 2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future political stance toward current issues. Some of those values can be summarized as futurism and feminism. A powerful dynamic can come from the force created by synergizing these two sets of values, for they complement and energize each other to constitute a unique potential for the transformation of human society. The major task of those consciously involved in the process of transformation is to transfer that dynamic’s potential to speciﬁc political action. This article deals with these values, the vision of a preferred future they evoke, some aspects of the process of becoming that comprise our transition to the preferred future and some strategies to increase the present’s transformational potential. I start with the values because they are the becoming process’s main factors, the most dynamic force to produce transformation. Futurism and feminism include and complement many Network values.

Picketing with members of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on behalf of Catholic nuns under investigation by the Vatican, June 2012. With (left) Lysander Pucio, Lisa Slocum, and Janet Dorman

Futurism is that set of values that underlies the belief that the human family can achieve a preferred future. It includes creativity, the ability to imagine the unprecedented; spontaneity, the energy to undertake action for change at the appropriate moment, creative reﬂection, the need to analyze the present’s problems; communal responsibility, the obligation to act for change; solidarity, a sense of familial relation to people of all cultures—past and future as well as present; and stewardship, the obligation to maintain and replenish the earth’s resources.

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Feminism is the belief that men and women, though different, are equal in value, that feminine as well as masculine values must receive equal weight if we are to achieve a truly human society. Feminists assert that current societal problems require the application of the following societal values: love, genuine caring for others; equity, fairly sharing all that is available to the group; and empowerment, helping group members to achieve fulfillment, cooperation and maturity, making together for mutual fulfillment. Feminism is profoundly transformational, for it calls for fundamental changes in personal values and human relationships as well as in structures and systems. Transformation is a deep-seated historic change that requires changes in people’s inner and outer human reality. It combines futurism’s concern with structure and feminism’s concern with the relations that comprise a great source of hope for a renewed world order. Some of us believe it is more important to change relations than structures. Structural change without value change will not necessarily transform the way human beings interact. For this reason, a common value consensus is essential to the transformation movement. The New International Economic Order and disarmament, for example, are not necessarily transformational, though they may bring about significant structural change. Neither concept entails serious consideration of personal or inner values, especially those value changes necessary for an equitable sharing of goods and resources and the renunciation of armed force. If we sincerely seek to practice the politics of transformation, we must acknowledge that personal values have political significance, that the transformational role permits no distinction between private and public norms and behaviors, and their ethical content. This position is particularly feminist because it calls for the extension into the public sphere of the values of caring, cooperation and mutuality that have been traditionally confined to the private sphere. Such an extension would be transformational because the equal application of feminist criteria to public policy would result in more concern for human needs and less concern for the maintenance of military power—the ultimate result of the distorted weight given masculine values. Just as transformation requires the reaffirmation of feminist values, it also calls for the redefinition of many masculine values and concepts, especially politics and power. The masculine political mode emphasizes the accumulation and application of power to control public policy. It exercises power to concentrate the capacity to enact an individual’s will, even to force it on others. The exclusion of women from centers of power and significant roles in the traditional power structure has led to the creation of a feminine mode of politics that offers a variety of ways to influence public policy. Power in the feminine mode means the capacity to achieve goals, often in the face of great odds and with limited resources. There are more facets to the politics of transformation. It must be creative and spontaneous. Like all minority movements, it needs a sense of humor and joy. Transformational power must empower in the feminine mode, rather than coerce in the masculine mode. Its power must be widely shared so that it can be synergized into larger forces. It must also be localized and globalized, not centralized.

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Decentralization is an important part of the transformation process because it removes power from the center to the locus where its effects are felt. Local units of closely linked networks can be a major political agent for humane transformational change. Indeed, most futurists base their visions on the local/global network principle. Elise Boulding, speaking of women’s international organizations in a paper prepared for a futurist group in 1978, remarks:

World sisterhood is strong within, and to some extent between, those organizations. And while they fall short of their goals (their goals being rather ambitious in terms of resources and the redistribution of resources) each organization contributes to some modest extent to a redistribution of information, training and toward Third World women away from Europe and North America. If one were to distill a common utopia from the various organizational visions, it would be a pluralistic world society with equal life chances for every woman, man and child; equal participation opportunities for all; and innumerable crosscutting networks of local people sharing common interests as private individuals concerned for public welfare. It would be a world conscious of its grassroots and adept at individual-to-individual communication from anywhere to anywhere. It would be a world of diverse lifestyles freely chosen, ranging from rural voluntary simplicity to a high-technology urban lifestyle. The most important feature of this vision is that no community would exist in isolation. Through the use of two-way television, radio and telephone, people would be immediately present to one another across great distances. Because of this two-way immediacy, human needs would be seen, shared and acted upon directly, non- bureaucratically, from community to community, regardless of national borders!4 Boulding also notes, as part of a group of visioning women, Sister Marie Augusta Neal, who writes about the “theology of relinquishment”—an approach to teaching the haves to let go, so they will be able to obey the mandate to share with the have-nots. She speaks of Barbara Ward, who gave us the ﬁrst images of spaceship earth; of Hazel Henderson, who “spelled out the end to economics as we have known it, the end of a system that mines the planet and its peoples.” She visualizes a counter-economy, another essential element for transformation; she bases it on a realistic awareness of an entropy-syntropy cycle, with sustainable modes of production and consumption involving simple lifestyles and more labor intensive production methods. While old industrial structures crumble, the following post-industrial phenomena would ﬂourish: alternative technologies; alternative marketing structures for alternative technological products, developed with the aid of alternative publishing ventures; increase in labor-intensive household production; the rebirth of cooperative movements; neighborhood and block development; the rise of worker participation and self-management movements; the worldwide linkage of the network of global ecology movements; the emergence of indigenous peoples and feminist movements to provide the technical and psychological skills necessary for a more labor-intensive society.

4 Elise Boulding, “Women’s Visions of the Future,” prepared for Goals, Processes, and Indicators Project of the U.N. University, 1978, unpublished.

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What I ﬁnd signiﬁcant about Henderson’s vision of the postindustrial economy is that all these bits and pieces exist now, that the preferred world of the future can be a projection of the preferred present. I also want to share some of the normative qualities of my own preferred future that I described in “Women’s Movements and Human Futures,” an International Women’s Year (IWY) article in the Journal of Adult Education. In that article I used the IWY’s three themes–equality, development and peace.

The equality theme leads to the struggle for a future in which no human identity is accorded a higher value or more benefits than any other human identity. If we held the view that all individuals are valuable, no matter how different from us, and were of equal value … and we behaved accordingly—the world would be a totally different place, and life would be a totally different experience. Exploitation and oppression of those different from us, and therefore less worthy, would be unacceptable, perhaps impossible, behavior. For all but a small group of white, Western men, a crucial process in this transformation is the awareness of and belief in our own value, our worthiness to participate in the full human experience, and the consequent responsibility to struggle for our own rights. This process is at the core of women’s movements and a potential impetus for global transformation.5 I believe that the persons who contribute most constructively to the liberation process are those persons who are in the process of liberating themselves, liberating themselves not only from oppressive structures but also from the values of the structures they have internalized and lived by. That means all of us. What are the major obstacles to having bits of the preferred present as parts of the preferred future? The transformational process must overcome three obstacles, the main characteristics of the present world system: coercive force, anonymity and inequality. Coercive force maintains the social order. The present social order also creates great disparity and inequity. These obstacles might be summed up as militarism and oppression, taking the form of imperialism, racism and sexism. Hierarchical, coercive relations are maintained by believing that some people are more valuable and more deserving of privilege than others, and by the fact that we seldom have contact with those subject to the negative consequences of our place in the world system. Anonymity permits the military to calculate mega deaths more easily than most of us confront our own mortality or the death of a loved one. Too many of us continue to live by the developed world’s consumption ethic that imposes misery on unseen, unknown persons in distant, foreign places. Overcoming the obstacles to transformation requires a vision of the transition as well as the preferred future. We all spin out our “relevant utopias”—the best possible future we can envision. It is important to figure out which are most preferable—either totalities of relevant utopias or bits and pieces as in the preferred present and equally important to figure out the possibilities for getting there. The Institute for World Order says the preferred world depends upon arriving at some consensus about preference after carefully considering the possibilities, and upon the creation of a workable scenario for transition. My transition scenario does away with coercion, anonymity and inequity.

5 Reardon, Betty A., “Women's Movements and Human Futures.” Convergence, 8, 3 (1975): 41–52.

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Disarmament is the major transformational task for our historical period and the key to this transition scenario which envisions general and complete disarmament as only a first step toward exorcising coercive force from the world political system. When we consider a total peace system as the overall goal, disarmament does not seem so remote or unattainable. It is but one part of the total system. If, as in Elise Boulding’s frame of reference, we see an historical period as 200 years, we can look forward and backward at the peace-building process at work and perceive disarmament not as an end but as the turning point. Elise uses the 200 year period primarily to stretch the visioning process in somewhat the same way the World Order people talk about relevant utopias. It places the immediate present’s problems in a different dimension and makes them less overwhelming. The 200 year period is also the time span in which an individual person has human contact. My grandfather was born in 1868. I knew him. He was important to me. Thus my personal formation reaches back 100 years. I hope in my lifetime to make some contribution to my nieces’ and nephews’ formation, and to others who may span 100 years into the future. If our time frame reaches 100 years forward, it gives us that much more time and enables us to look backward and see progress. When in the midst of the struggle for transformational change, it is often hard to realize that you are part of a process of progress. I find it helpful to think of disarmament as a turning point in the transition scenario. Disarmament would be the structural manifestation of a commitment to peace, to the reduction of violence and coercive force. If we look at the historical process in a 200 year framework with our era as a turning point, it might look something like the following in terms of historical landmarks: 1899 The International Court of Justice at The Hague—an attempted institutional alternative to war through the adjudication of international disputes; 1928 The Kellogg-Briand Pact—a treaty to which more than 50 nations ultimately adhered that renounced war as an instrument of national policy; 1945 The United Nations Charter that declared its purpose as ending war; 1978 The U.N. Special Session on Disarmament (SSD I), which declared disarmament as a basic requirement for peace and development6; 1981 SSD II—announcing a commitment to achieving general and complete disarmament according to a specific staged plan; 2000 GCDA—member nations of the UN acknowledge their adherence to the World Agreement on General and Complete Disarmament (GCDA); 2050 Nonviolence Accord (NVA)—the nations of the world renounce the use of violence as a means to social, economic and political ends by signing the NVA; 2100 Confederation of Human Communities on Planet Earth—formal acknowledgement of an institutionalized system of global peace.

6 All events listed up to 1978 are historical facts. There after events are speculative. SSD II took place in 1982 with the agreement projected here in 1981.

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The U.N. plans another Special Session on Disarmament in the near future, probably 1980–1981. In that session we should make every effort to achieve a commitment to general and complete disarmament. There are a number of plans for consideration, if not endorsement, at that session. Perhaps—if we get our act together—by the year 2000 we could have in place institutions for general and complete disarmament. If we do not, we may have lost the chance for significant transformation. In working toward a peace system, by about 2050 we should achieve a Non- violence Accord. Institutionally and technologically, the accord would be preceded by three-quarters of a century of a nation-state system that attempted arms control while continuing to build stockpiles and distribute arms. Those states chose military values and security at the cost of human values and human security. Finally, the deterioration of the quality and potential continuation of human life becomes so apparent that a major value shift occurs, away from militarism and toward humanism. It begins in the last quarter of the 20th century with staged disarmament and global institution building that would bring about general and complete disarmament under global institutional control, with compulsory peaceful conflict-resolution machinery for the settlement of international disputes. A global security force would maintain world security and gradually obtain the exclusive right to use force internationally. National forces would be reduced to the minimum necessary to preserve domestic order. Even in achieving the above—general and complete disarmament—coercive force would still maintain world order, although under a world authority’s control. We are still far from a true peace system. However, violence would be significantly reduced. We could also be building a public preference for consensus rather than coercion to maintain social order. This transitional scenario also assumes values changes in more and more individuals, resulting from peace education and consciousness-raising. Assuming also that we make inroads into the anonymity obstacle, public abhorrence of violence should grow, including abhorrence of “legitimate armed force.” It could lead to the serious consideration of nonviolent forms for preserving order, resolving conflict and defending security. The world security forces would be trained in nonviolent techniques, thus making it possible for feminists and pacifists to participate. The official transition to these techniques could come during the latter part of the 21st century, after the signing of the nonviolence accord. This concept—the shift to nonviolent coercion—is Gene Sharp’s theory of ‘transarmament’.7 He claims that we should focus attention on the above process now, rather than on disarmament. Sharp sees it as a positive concept, that if enough people took nonviolence seriously, it could be an alternative security system within the next few generations.

7 Gene Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom (New York: Porter Sargent, 1975).

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His position is, I believe, an optimistic one, because we have not yet achieved sufficient value consensus for that kind of shift. However, the idea completes part of my scenario in that, if we are to eliminate violence, we must study the possibility for when and where nonviolence, even nonviolent coercion, could become part of the regular social system. By the end of the 21st century the nonviolent social order could be institutionalized into a functioning peace system. The system would be officially inau- gurated with a charter for the Confederation of Human Communities on Planet Earth. Such a charter would officially recognize as global regulatory agencies those institutions that the global community had devised over the preceding century and a half to assure equitable enjoyment of world order values by all the peoples of the world. Through the humane application of technology, as envisioned by Boulding and such feminist science fiction authors as Ursula Le Guin, the forces of community and consensus could build so that coercion of any kind, even nonviolent, would simply fade away from the repertoire of socially acceptable human behavior. The consequence-mutual empowerment of formally competitive human groups and nation states, even women and men—would enhance the development of the synergic types of power that futurists and feminists envision now. Thus the human capacity to achieve goals would be increased enormously, even to the point of creating such a true peace system by the beginning of the 22nd century. Although this scenario is developed only in terms of exorcising coercive force, its true dynamic is a change in values and inner realities that could contribute equally to overcoming the problems of inequity and inequality. Staged disarmament can foster a shift in resource allocations of such proportions for meeting human needs as to make significant progress against deprivation. If, for example, present figures prevail from about 1990–2000, and arms expenditures are reduced 10 % a year with that money shifted to human needs, we would have $40 billion a year for social expenditures. We need an immediate plan for spending that $40 billion. Our conversion scenario needs to be specific and concrete. That work is only beginning. If we are to create such a dynamic, we need to interact with people about the possibilities. One of people’s major fears about disarmament is not that we would be powerless before our enemies, but that we would have insufficient economic production to meet employment needs. As a result, a substantive conversion scenario is essential to the transition scenario of my preferred world order’s peace system. In terms of human rights, discrimination and oppression, the gradual exorcism of violence would enhance the capacities of those presently perceived as powerless to overcome their oppression, for the struggle would become less one-sided in terms of power. Even more significantly, as coercion declines and consensus grows, the valence accorded to moral principle in public policymaking would increase, and more people would be motivated to relieve suffering. I believe that all this is possible; whether it is probable is another matter. Its probability depends on what we do in the next few years, on where and how we

[email protected] 2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future 29 focus our energies, on who and how many we enlist in the common struggle. I do not ask you to adopt my preferred world scenario, but I do urge you to think in terms of a preferred future and how to achieve it—to be prudent in expending energy and boundless in enlisting allies. Above all, I ask you to see disarmament as our generation’s major task. Let me suggest some criteria and strategies for expending our time and energy, what we would want to result from our policies and actions. We should foster three major principles and use them to evaluate all our policies and activity—solidarity, simultaneity and synergy. Solidarity is important, particularly because it strengthens commitment. Simultaneity releases joy, provides courage and heightens impact. Synergy increases the transformational force. Solidarity is built by intense activity at the local level on the part of persons committed to each other and to the transformational vision. Networking extends solidarity to the global level. It is important for all local groups to contact groups throughout the country. It is equally, if not more important, for them to establish continued contact with similar groups in other countries. Although such national contact is part of the preferred present, we have to work at making local/global contacts. Simultaneity is strategically important, not only for ourselves but also to the transformational process. We should know how many parts of the world we can mobilize at any one time. When the same message comes simultaneously from many sources, it has a greater impact on the power structure. The antinuclear voices in Europe, for instance, seriously reinforce those in the U.S. We can amass similar forces against the arms race. The nuclear energy debate proves that. If we could begin to show that the nuclear energy issue and the nuclear weapons issue are inseparable, we could begin to build that kind of global dynamic for disarmament. Here it is important to note the tragic, actual consequences of conventional arms sales. People die day after day from the use of conventional weapons. Thus disarmament means not only nuclear disarmament but general and complete disarmament. Synergy is created by empowering more and more people to act in their own interest and in the interest of community as the basis for transformational self-interest. It suggests that mutuality is at such a level that people interact in their self-interest to build community. People then see themselves so vested in the other and the community that it enriches them. (We need to give positive meaning to such negatively perceived terms as self-interest). Synergy also implies rotating and extending decision-making and executive power in order to overcome hierarchy and centralism. Increasing local and personal modes of meeting human needs is an important way of actualizing the three principles of solidarity, simultaneity and synergy. In this vein, there are concrete steps to take here and now to further the transformational process. For example, we need to develop personal modes to strengthen family and community-based services in lieu of the anonymous, institutional approach we now have for meeting human needs. An anonymous approach to meeting human needs makes it possible to continue our present resource allocation

[email protected] 30 2 Moving to the Future and Debating the Future that stresses military spending not human needs. Massive centralized agencies for security and meeting human needs sustains anonymity and prevents us from taking charge of our own lives meeting our own needs through community-designed and delivered human services, We should work to synergize personalism and localism and make them into global forces for transformation. The three principles of solidarity, simultaneity and synergy must therefore be brought to bear on the major tasks of overcoming anonymity, reducing coercive force and increasing equity. We must strive in our own processes of becoming to know each other, to care for those we cannot know and to work for true equity, which is another dimension of knowing and caring. Do I really believe in the possibility of transforming the world? I do. Why? As Anne Frank wrote in her diary: “In spite of everything, I believe that people are good.” The preferred world is the realization of human goodness, the hope which informs futurism and feminism.

2.1 Responding to a Challenge

As I indicate in my Retrospective Reflection, the publisher of this piece asked me to respond to a critique of the above by William Barnett published in Network 8.3 (1980). I appreciate Dr. Barnett’s response to the publication of my talk to the network Legislative Seminar and the opportunity to reply to it. The level of concern and care manifest in his reflective critique is an essential element in the development of constructive discussion on the means to achieve the global transformation to which all supporters of network aspire. Serious discourse on definitions, means and goals is required to design an effective transition strategy and to coalesce the varied forces required to carry out that strategy. As I assume that Dr. Barnett and I have no serious differences on the ultimate goal—a humane, just and peaceful world society that accords full personal dignity and equal human value to everyone—this reply will primarily clarify definitions as they relate to means and strategies. For the sake of consistency, I will reply to the criticisms in the order set forth in Dr. Barnett’s response. Those readers who may be interested in the particular conceptual framework from which both the seminar talk and this reply derive can write later this year to the Institute for World Order for a monograph entitled Sexism and the War System. I assume that the analysis Dr. Barnett found ‘simplistic’ was the designation of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ values to which most of his critique refers, not to the assertion that coercive force must be reduced and ultimately transcended if we are to achieve a truly just peace. While I obviously believe the problem of the reintegration of masculine and feminine values into a fully ‘human’ system of values is necessary to create the social norms conducive to a just peace, I also see that reintegration as an instrumental rather than an ultimate goal. I hope many others who are equally concerned with transformation will give attention to the problem of

[email protected] 2.1 Responding to a Challenge 31 reducing coercive force with the same intensity as Dr. Barnett has given to the values bifurcation. It also seems to me important to explore the hypothesis, central to my analysis that a significant relationship exists between the bifurcation and the dependence upon coercive force to maintain social order, a relationship that may well contribute to our entrapment in the war system. Understanding the nature and consequences of the bifurcation will, I believe, help to overcome sexism. Greater comprehension of the relationship of sexism to force dependency may also help us to derive more effective strategies for abolishing the war system. While I regret that my remarks appeared “inappropriate to certain aspects of Judaism and Christianity that foster justice in the world.” I was in no way attempting to put forth a Judea-Christian view of the issues under discussion. My remarks derived from my own interpretation of what some of us dedicated to the abolition of war and the fulfillment of human rights have come to call “global humanism.” Global humanism is a perspective we believe can be embraced by many world religions and philosophies. Indeed, such convergence around some common ethical standards for all humanity is the greatest hope of a planetary movement for global transformation. As to the critique’s second paragraph, while some of the specific values may not be universally and in all historic periods designated as masculine or feminine, the bifurcation Dr. Barnett deplores does exist, imposed by society not invented by my presentation. The selection of the terms ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ were made deliberately to avoid what seems to me the fallacious and destructive denial of significant differences between men and women. While these differences have been exploited for purposes of discrimination and oppression, denying or overlooking them will not help to overcome the discrimination. The differences must be recognized as well as the discriminatory definitions society has derived to describe them. ‘Masculine’ does not objectively describe male sexuality, but rather connotes what society has determined as appropriate male characteristics for men to aspire to and value. I made no assertion that there are ‘male’ values and ‘female’ values as the critique implies. Values are not biologically determined, masculine values and feminine values, like the concepts of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ are socially derived, largely from imposed sex role separation. One becomes ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ as a consequence of learning and experience. Women are not necessarily born more loving than men, any more than blacks are born more suited to manual labor and whites to perform managerial functions. The social order and the dominant social value systems—sexism and racism, respectively—determine those designations. One of the transformation’s major tasks is to overcome these discriminatory definitions and designations and to assert that both masculine values and feminine values are equally human and socially important, as manual and managerial work are both necessary to a productive social order. What is to be questioned and transcended is the value system that excludes the feminine from the public and political realms and manual labor from the hierarchy of socially useful functions, while predetermining on the basis of physical identity who is and is not suited for certain social functions,

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Although it may be true that each of those men whom Dr. Barnett cites above had “no particular tension between his concern for justice and his masculinity,” I fear there are many men deeply committed to justice and peace who endure great anguish in their defiance of the dominant social values, some of which results from their rejection of the prevailing norms of masculinity. It is not unusual for men concerned with their own liberation from distortions of masculine values to observe how these values reinforce militarism and glorify war. No indeed, injustice never “wears only a masculine face,” but surely militarism does. Whereas the woman warrior is not totally unknown in human myth and history, the image of the soldier is one fairly universal symbol of extreme masculinity. There is certainly an undeniable relation between the level of injustice and the strength of militarism in our society. Progress in transcending one will certainly help to overcome the other. It was, however, the latter of the two problems I was emphasizing, hence the focus on the inflation and distortion of masculine values that is militarism. While on this point, I would disagree with Dr. Barnett that the women who campaign against the ERA represent a ‘female’ opposition. The arguments they put forth are social rather than biological and appear to manifest the fear of losing ‘femininity’—that is, socially acknowledged vulnerability and the consequent ‘special protection.’ Phyllis Schaffly’s statements on drafting women affirm my assertions about militarism and masculinity. So far as the criticisms articulated in the fourth paragraph are concerned, in addition to my having clarified that I was not attempting to express a Christian position and was trying to emphasize peace in the sense of abolishing war, I think I have also made it clear that I quite agree that both men and women are fully capable of manifesting the full range of human values. The transformational process should be directed toward changing social norms to recognize and encourage that capability, and to acknowledge the usefulness offeminine values outside the private sphere. This is, in fact, part of the value change I asserted as fundamental to transformation. Contrary to Dr. Barnett’s assumptions about my assumptions about “what human beings are likely to do with power,” I did not imply that power per se is negative, and am indeed in agreement that it is the abuse of power in its coercive form that represents the problem for peacemaking. I called not for the rejection of power but for its redefinition, because power will be needed to achieve and to maintain transformation, and because ‘some,’ namely, those in Euro-American male (sic) power structures, “misuse their freedom and power to the detriment of others.” Although I do not apply a Christian perspective, I am quite ready to agree with Dr. Barnett’s assertion here and acknowledge that war and economic oppression comprise ‘sin.’ Global humanists hope that such sin and the agents through which it is perpetrated—coercive force and militarism—will be exorcized by the transformational process. This goal, it seems to me, will require new concepts of power and politics that are ‘empowering’ rather than coercive. A more transformational concept of power would be that it is “the capacity of a group or an individual to achieve autonomously designated goals.” As I implied, this is a more ‘feminine’ mode for power in that feminine modes tend to be facilitative, while masculine modes tend to

[email protected] 2.1 Responding to a Challenge 33 be directive. I do not intend to imply that masculine modes have never been humanly useful, but rather that the present destructive capacity of weapons and the oppressive overextension of the directive mode makes it very dangerous and undesirable in global politics. It is for these, among other reasons, that I advocate the synergic mode for building transformational force. Synergy requires complementarity and mutuality. It does not occur within the directive or coercive modes necessary to centralization, which is but one mode of acquiring and applying power. Unfortunately, the dominant mode of power organization operating in our present world political system is the centralized, hierarchical model manifest in the nation state. These centers of power deny the local community level and the global level the right to make most of the crucial decisions that affect the daily well-being of individual communities and the long-range survival of the whole human family. Dr. Barnett’s question, “How can power be synergized into larger forces without being centralized?” is one of the key questions posed by those global humanists, such as the researchers of the World Order Models Project, who are attempting to image new global systems. (However, they would not use ‘synergy’ as it is in this formulation.) I suggest all who are concerned with transformation address themselves to this question. As I indicated in my article, I find most present alternative images inadequate to the required value change. The global security force model which could operate in my scenario, although far from adequate, is Arthur Was- kow’s tripartite model described in his monograph, “Keeping the World Disarmed.” Although the Waskow model is not fully centralized, it would be coercive as was readily admitted in the scenario. It is but one stage of the process. Just as we need a detailed conversion scenario, we also need more explicit models of decentralized global security forces. Let me also take the opportunity here to note that it was ‘synergize’ rather than ‘superenergize’ that I meant to be heard in the first paragraph of my talk. Given Dr. Barnett’s observation about my reference to ‘nonviolent coercion,’ I was apparently not clear about the processes of exorcizing coercive force in the scenario and should have been more explicit about what I mean by violence. As to the first point, ‘transarmament,’ the stage at which the ‘nonviolent coercion’ (which I do recognize to be almost a contradiction in terms) would obtain, is but one step toward true peace. Which I assert cannot be achieved until we have transcended coercion as the major means of social control. I certainly did not mean to imply that it was ‘harmless,’ but it is sure-as-shooting (pun intended) far less harmful than military armed force, which is organized, socially sanctioned, direct violence. My understanding of ‘violence’ makes it impossible for me to accept certain actions of multinationals as ‘nonviolence’ of any kind. To me violence is not only bodily injury and property damage. Whatever detracts from the potential for fulfillment or takes away from a person’s or group’s full humanity is violence. Racism, sexism and colonialism are forms of ‘structural’ or ‘institutional’ violence. The erosion of life and well-being among Third World peoples that results from the economic activities to which Dr. Barnett refers is quite clearly structural violence, of a more deplorable sort because so little overt coercion of any kind is exerted to impose it.

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I am afraid it will be even more difficult to transcend than coercive force and will require much intensive, disciplined futurizing to invent the necessary strategies of transcendence, and, most of all, the profound personal and social value changes I define as transformation. Human behaviors ‘fade away’ like vestigial organs that cease functioning when they no longer are perceived as beneficial or as contributing to human benefit and survival. When the net loss resulting from violence becomes apparent and the value changes that enables us to recognize and act upon the principle that whatever diminishes our brothers and sisters in any branch of the human family diminishes us, then community and self will be so evidently interdependent that there will be no need for war or other forms of coercive force. The coincidence of ‘self-interest’ and “community interest” can occur only through struggle, risk and relinquishment; processes that must occur within each of us as well as in our social structures. No “hidden hand of history” will perform these tasks. It is ourselves who must bear the pain and risk our senses of self and even our physical survival. The preferred world of the scenario will be no more “cheaply advanced” than the “kingdom of peace and justice” cited by Dr. Barnett. In fact, I wonder if the price is not higher for those who do not have the gift of faith and the hope of redemption. I tend to believe that it takes more courage to continue the struggle without “the confidence that even the attempt is worth it.” Yet I know many who will continue to struggle admitting that we may very well fail, but knowing that if we do not pursue the struggle, humanity itself will have failed to fulfill its potential to be fully human. We are not likely to endure, much less achieve fulfillment of the preferred world if we do not make every attempt to transcend those differences dividing the forces of transformation, be they differences of culture, politics, religion or gender. Because the transcendence requires discourse and discussion, I wish to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Barnett for initiating it. I’m sure he joins me in inviting others to participate in the discourse.

[email protected] Part II Analysis of Interdependence of Militarism and Sexism 1983–1994

[email protected] Chapter 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression: A Suggested Research Agenda

Retrospective Reﬂection on “A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression” (1983)

This essay might better have been titled “Toward a Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression,” the ﬁrst tentative steps toward the analysis I hoped might gain a place on the peace research agenda.1 The piece was originally requested by the Institute for World Order (IWO), but rejected for publication because they wanted something more aggressively assertive of the feminist position. I thought such a polemic was more likely to be dismissed rather than addressed. It seemed that posing the issues as hypotheses, rather than as assertions made by a few feminist peace educators, might persuade researchers of their relevance to deriving a more comprehensive analysis of the peace problematic. Feminists believed that a gender perspective, taking into account both positive and negative peace, would provide more comprehensive, humanly based insights into the systematic sexist oppression and abuse of women as integral to the waging of war. When the Newsletter editor for the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) requested a contribution, I submitted the piece. To IPRA’s credit, it was published, understanding that there might be contestation, even derision of an article on a theme still considered by many to be peripheral to the central concerns of peace research and peace studies. There was no serious contestation. But neither was there yet any serious discussion of gender questions within the majority of the peace research establishment. A notable and signiﬁcant exception was IPRA’s Peace Education Commission (PEC) whose members included some ground breaking feminist scholars, and a number of gender sensitive men.

1 This text was ﬁrst published as “A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression: A Suggested Research Agenda,” in: International Peace Research Newsletter, 21, 2 (1983). The permission to republish this text here was granted by Nesrin Kenar, Secretary General of IPRA, 10 July 2014.

[email protected] 38 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression …

The feminist members of PEC were becoming convinced that the propositions made in this piece would be readily evident to any who chose to analyze the realities that underlay the proposed hypotheses. But any such analysis continued to be limited to feminists and peace educators. Many in the field still perceive their work in education as less scholarly and as less politically relevant than that of those researchers whom the Norwegian feminist peace educator, Birgit Brock-Utne had dubbed “weapons counters.” This label was surely an over simplification for the sake of making a point about the differences between feminist perspectives and mainstream peace research; the former still largely pre-occupied with negative peace. However, these feminist inclinations were the forerunner of what two decades later came to be conceptualized as human security. Another element of feminist perspectives that it had been hoped might get some attention was the potential for integrating positive and negative peace into a more comprehensive and holistic approach to the peace problematic, a goal some of us continue to pursue to this day. The proposed hypotheses were formulated from the common observations that were drawing together a few feminists in peace education and peace research. They encouraged PEC to give a serious hearing to this early phase of feminist inquiry into the relationship between the social status of women and the institution of war. Although the general conference of IPRA in 1974, in observation of the coming UN International Women’s Year, gave space to a plenary panel mounted by PEC that addressed women’s experience of the global economic structures, it would be years hence before gender made its way (in any form other than one woman researcher on a panel) into another plenary. The strategy of offering a potential research agenda met with little or no success in influencing the wider peace research discourse. However, writing the piece encouraged me to begin to conceptualize more systematically the underlying, but as yet not fully formed, notions on the role of gender in all aspects of preparing for and waging war. IWO later proposed a retry of the original assignment to produce, if not a fully formed theory, at least a direct argument for the integral connections between women’s secondary status and the institution of war, for publication in a series of monographs they were developing at the time. Some representation of women’s concerns was deemed to be ‘advisable’ given the emergence of women’s movements as a political factor in their own right, not simply advocates for other peace and justice causes that were the traditional realm of women peace activists over the previous two centuries.2 What resulted was to be the theoretical foundation of most of my future work on gender within the realms of peace education and peace action, as later published in Sexism and the War System.

Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

2 Elise Boulding. The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1976).

[email protected] 3.1 Introduction 39 3.1 Introduction

Among other issues, a gender analysis of militarization would explore the following relationships: sex roles to military organizations and militaristic social orders, masculine and feminine norms to militarism and militaristic values, arms spending and the economic welfare changes in the status of women to the process of militarization. Regrettably, neither peace research nor feminism has yet given sufficient attention to inquiry into these areas to provide an adequate data base for valid analysis. Two relevant factors, however, are painfully clear and have become widely enough recognized to uphold some significant assertions forthcoming from the small but growing group of feminist peace researchers. Women play little or no role in the politics and policy-making which produces militarization, and women’s issues and feminine perspectives have been severely neglected in formulating the peace research agenda on militarization. A third, equally relevant but less widely recognized, factor is the rapidly increased attention feminists are giving to the commonalities which characterize sexism and militarism. This essay and the establishment of the Research Group on Women and Militarism within the Inter- national Peace Research Association arc a consequence of this attention. Acknowledging the lack of sufficient data for a valid gender analysis, recognizing the urgent need for appropriate and adequate research, and attending to the significance of the common characteristics of sexism and militarism, this essay will put forward some observations and hypotheses which we believe should inform research on militarization if that research is to contribute to an effective process of demilitarization. What we offer here is a set of issues which are fundamental to our own feminist inquiries and which we believe should be central not only to all inquiries into militarization, but also taken into consideration generally by the entire field of peace research and peace education. We are attempting in this essay, as in our overall research, to arrive at a framework for analysis and a conceptual basis for policy prescriptions which are global in scope, appropriate as general guidelines and criteria for world community policy goals, and to uncover some significant insights into the most fundamental factors which give rise to the present structures of oppression and processes of militarization. At the same time we seek to give adequate attention to the cultural and ideological differences which inform the various perspectives we bring to these issues of common concern. This Research Group on Women and Militarization is made up of members from all major world regions representing different social systems, holding ideological views which sometimes conflict, and having been socialized in a wide variety of cultural traditions. These are significant differences which inform our perspectives, give direction to our work and profoundly influence the goals we pursue. The one common goal, which transcends our differences and makes possible a collaboration which will not gloss over nor erode the extent of these differences, is equity for women in all cultural, social and ideological contexts. The common assumption that led to the formation of the group is that without such equity

[email protected] 40 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression … demilitarization to any signiﬁcant degree is highly unlikely. Thus, we seek to illuminate the links between militarism and sexist repression and to inquire into parallel links between demilitarization and women’s equality which can contribute to a successful strategy to reverse the present trends which, are equally damaging to both men and women.

With Dr. Kozue Akibayshi, Doshisha University, visiting civil society encampment in resistance to the construction of a U.S. military heliport in Henoko, Okinawa in 2003

This essay will outline a few of the basic hypotheses which we hold in common, part of a research agenda we believe should be of general concern to the peace research community. Our hypotheses are currently being explored in feminist works and should at least be familiar, if not of special concern, to those researching militarism and militarization. We present here ﬁve of our common hypotheses set forth in order to the degree to which we perceive the phenomena which led to their formulation to be readily evident. The two most readily evident sets of circumstances giving rise to the items on our research agenda are the symbiosis between militarism and economic and political repression, and the primary initiating role women are playing in the contemporary global peace movement. Review of these circumstances yields enough empirical evidence to suggest the inclusion of these hypotheses in any comprehensive demilitarization research agenda.

[email protected] 3.2 Hypothesis 1: The Structural Relationships Which Link … 41 3.2 Hypothesis 1: The Structural Relationships Which Link Economic Exploitation in General, Oppression of Women in Particular, the Arms Trade, and Military Repression Are Manifestations of the Fundamental Patriarchal Nature of the Global Dependency-Dominance System

The global economic and political systems are controlled and primarily managed by male elites. Most sub-systems are characterized by some separation between the privileged and the general population (the bases for the separation differ but the manifestations are similar). While there are variations in the degree of general exploitation among various sub-systems, there is an apparent discrimination against women in virtually all societies. It also appears that the more authoritarian a society, the more severe is the sexist discrimination, and this certainly constitutes an area to be explored by demilitarization research. The hypothesis that there is a structural relationship linking the economic exploitation and repression of women, the global division of labor, the arms trade, and military repression not only arises from empirical evidence, but it is also supported by that body of peace research which has demonstrated the speciﬁc links between the arms trade and economic repression.3 Such phenomena as the jailing, disappearance and murder of community and labor organizers working on behalf of the economically oppressed within states which are large importers of arms, indicate such links. However, what needs further exploration is the apparent connections between such regimes and extensive exploitation of female labor. Female labor in militarist Third World countries is widely exploited, very often on behalf of or in cooperation with western multi-national corporations, the same corporations whose interests are assured by the importing of western arms by the existing regimes. Inquiry into the gender composition of the labor force and the working conditions in the factories of the “rapidly industrializing” underdeveloped countries is of major signiﬁcance to demilitarization research, particularly if that research is informed by concern for equity for women.

3 This linkage has been explored and substantiated by numerous peace researchers, particularly the militarization group of IPRA. See Bulletin of Peace Proposals index.

[email protected] 42 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression …

Members of IPRA Commission on Women and Peace, late 1990s

It also has been pointed out by peace research that industrialization in itself contributes to the militarization process and that the more rapid the process the more likely is the rise of authoritarian-militarist tendencies in a society.4 It has also been observed that industrialization has contributed to the sexual objectiﬁcation of women and their further exploitation, as unrecompensed reproducers of the labor force and as commodities made available to men on varying terms, none of them of advantage to women. The shift of the main locus of production from the home to the factory had a very deleterious effect on women both in the earliest industrialization of Western Europe and North America and more recently in the industrialization of other parts of the world. That female and child labor have been mercilessly exploited by the early stages of capitalist industrialization is a well-documented fact. Thus, the degree to which women are exploited in the industrial labor force might well be a signiﬁcant indicator of the likelihood of militarism gaining hold in an industrializing society. It might also provide some insights into economic components of the demilitarization process which we assert must include attention to both political equality and economic equity for women. The possible fruitfulness of this area of inquiry into demilitarization is demonstrated by the revelations of the distorted development which has occurred in many Third World countries together with the exclusion of women from the development process and overlooking the fundamental

4 Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Secretary General’s address to the General Conference of IPRA, 1981.

[email protected] 3.2 Hypothesis 1: The Structural Relationships Which Link … 43 human needs of the population. As we begin to explore the links between development and disarmament, we might also explore some of the potential links between development, disarmament, and equality for women. Some signiﬁcant interrelationships among these three areas have been suggested by the Australian peace researcher, Robin Burns:

Violence, in structural terms, links underdevelopment, peacelessness and discrimination based on biological characteristics. A structurally violent situation is one in which the means for the satisfaction of basic needs, for the expression of these and for the attainment of certain rights is controlled by the group in power, removing not only power but the right to define one’sself from those that are controlled. It is not, therefore, coincidental that development, disarmament and the roles of women have been defined in ways which are asymmetrical, marginalizing and fragmenting for those groups who could threaten the present power structures. The result is dehumanization which is not only unjust but a threat to human survival.5 What Burns refers to here is the hierarchical and oppressive structures which are characteristic of patriarchy and which some feminists have argued are the basic roots of militarism as well as economic and political imperialism. This argument has gained a sufficient number of proponents not only among feminist peace researchers but among others of a humanistic orientation to be worthy of some general attention by those researchers who seek to gain insights into the causes of and alternatives to militarization.6 As Burns points out, the way in which the various systems of dominance, be they patriarchy, imperialism or militarism, are primarily maintained is by the fragmentation and disassociation of the dominated groups.

…. Fragmentation of groups and of ideas, even consciousness, reinforces the dominant ideology. The separation of defense from other issues, economic, social and political, and the increasingly technocratic nature of military affairs, enables fear born of ignorance to be used to give special responsibility to the military experts who in turn may even use this to gain increasing independence from the political machinery. The ordinary person, even the politi- cian, is excluded from knowledge of military affairs and is deprived of the right to be critical.7

3.3 Hypothesis 2: Feminism Is a Signiﬁcant Counterforce to Militarism and Offers Useful Approaches to Processes for Demilitarization

The foregoing quote is an explanation of the circumstances against which the contemporary peace movement has begun to struggle. A good deal of this struggle has been initiated by women’s groups who have begun to challenge both women’s

5 Robin Burns, “Development, Disarmament and Women. Some New Connections,” Social Alternatives, 2, 5 (1982). 6 Reweaving the Web of Life, Pam McAllister, ed. (Philadelphia: New Society Press, 1982). See also “Is Peace Possible in a Patriarchal Society?” Probe, Volume XI, No V. The Journal of the National Assembly of Religious Women. 7 Burns, op. cit.

[email protected] 44 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression … oppression and the fragmentation of knowledge imposed by what is essentially a militarist and masculine ideology. This ideology has, as Burns has pointed out, obscured the realities of coercion and control from the view of those most affected by these circumstances and depends very heavily on their continued ignorance of and their lack of reflection upon the structures which control their lives. By insisting that security and military affairs are separate from other social and political issues, those in control can continue to assure their own domination. This situation is made more intractable by the separation of these issues from other questions to which they are closely related and rendered more severe by the separation of women from participation in military and security affairs, thus excluding from the policy making process feminine perspectives on defense as well as feminine notions of security which would insist upon the interlinkage of the defense element to the fundamental economic and social bases of security. For it has been, in large part, particular women, women’s groups and religious groups (although male-dominated as all public institutions, the Church has provided an arena of public and social activity for women and been an advocate of the feminine values of care and compassion) which have linked the social and economic issues to the questions of disarmament and demilitarization currently being raised by the world-wide peace movement. Women were among the first to assess the increase in military spending as an indicator of a rise in the militarization of society. The economic and social costs have been best documented and illustrated by a woman economist, Ruth Sivard.8 And the women’s peace groups have done a great deal to link the deprivation of human needs to military spending both in political analysis and in the slogans of movement building. These circumstances combined with, what in Western Europe and the United States is becoming more evident, the differential in voting and political stands on security issues between men and women demonstrate the anti- militarist nature of women’s movements. They indicate, too, that women are taking a significant leadership position, a little recognized one, but very effective one, in the peace movement. Clearly the leadership styles of women in the demilitarization process provide another promising topic for relevant research. What is, however, not so readily evident but becoming more so to at least a few feminists is the second part of hypothesis 2 which the Women and Militarism Group of IPRA feels worthy of serious research; that is that feminism as a value system is the antithesis of militarism and the corollary that the non-violent, non-hierarchical models being developed by feminist groups offer the most promising alternative to militarism and other patriarchal structures. These hypotheses have been developed out of some of the fundamental assumptions which inform feminism. First, that the dependency-dominance relationship, which characterizes male-female relationships is basically unjust.

8 Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures (Leesburg, Va: World Priorities Press, 1974–1982).

[email protected] 3.3 Hypothesis 2: Feminism Is a Signiﬁcant Counterforce… 45

And secondly, that an unjust system can only be maintained by coercion. Thus as the oppressed in coercively enforced dependency systems become more conscious of their exploitation and the degree to which it is made possible by their own compliance, more coercive force is necessary to maintain the system. This latter phenomenon is noted by Ruth Sivard in observing that the rise in the demand for justice has also given rise to the production and trade of arms and to the number of military states in the world, particularly in those countries where the demand for justice has been joined by an overt armed struggle.9 Women as well as other oppressed groups have begun to recognize that their exclusion from power, particularly coercive power, is a significant causation of their continued subjugation. Finally, the contemporary politicization of feminism occurring in both the women’s movement and the peace movement makes it a factor to be contended within the public arena as it never has been before. It may become quite difficult to exclude women from any public policy making, even security issues, without coercive measures stronger than the psychological and social intimidation to which the women’s movements have always been subject.10 The notion that feminism is a significant factor in the peace movement and can be a powerful counterforce to militarization is obviously one to be taken seriously by peace research.

3.4 Hypothesis 3: Militarization Is a Fundamentally Misogynist Policy Resulting from Excessive Emphasis on Masculine Modes, Values and Priorities in the Conduct of Public Affairs

Indeed, some feminists believe that militarization in part can be a response to the politicization of feminism. This is a notion which gives rise to a third hypothesis which is very readily researchable in that statistical indicators could be easily conceptualized. While the data would be subject to the same limitations on accessibility as data on other aspects of political repression, it is sufﬁciently available to test the hypothesis. The hypothesis is that there is a signiﬁcant relationship between militarization and sexist repression. There is ample evidence that militarism is fundamentally sexist, from the sexist aspects of military training to the use of traditional sex role stereotypes to inspire men to serve in the military and women not to question military policy.11 There is as well evidence that these stereotypes are effectively manipulated in the militarization process, a case in point being the way in which the discontent over food prices manifested by housewives

9 Sivard, ibid, 1981. 10 See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will. Men, Woman and Rape (New York: Knopf, 1974). 11 This concept is amply explored in Betty Reardon, “Sexism and Militarism,” Connexion, 1981, and in McAllister, Reweaving the Web of Life.

[email protected] 46 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression … in Chile was used to create the atmosphere of support for the military overthrow of the Allende regime. What has not been evident and which needs to be carefully researched are the conditions of women’s status, women’s rights and women’s groups in military regimes and if those conditions change with the process of militarization.12 Another interesting factor to explore would be the relationship of the number of women and of feminists in policy making positions to the degree of militarization in a society. And, of course, the growing notion that the increase in physical abuse of women is related to a general increase in violence in a militarizing society is worthy of study. While some feminists have done preliminary surveys on these questions, so far as we have been able to ascertain there have been no speciﬁc peace research projects that attempt to correlate abuse of women and social violence with the militarization process.13

3.5 Hypothesis 4: Militarization Cannot Be Adequately Analyzed Without Including an Analysis of the Social-Political Aspects of Sexism and the Common Underlying Psychological Causes of Both

A fourth very signiﬁcant and highly sensitive area which feminists believe absolutely essential to research is the psycho-social relationships between militarism and sexism. Many feminists share the assumption that without an understanding of these relationships and attention to some of the fundamental attitudinal, behavioral and value changes that will be required to reverse the trends of militarization, no lasting structural change in that direction can be achieved. Indeed, feminists can see that this is the most difﬁcult of the suggested areas of research, but it is absolutely fundamental to the process we seek to pursue. A relevant hypothesis, which more and more feminists are coming to uphold, is that demilitarization will require re-education to counteract sexism and achieve the psycho-social changes necessary to support the requisite changes in economic structures and security systems. It is generally acknowledged that men behave more aggressively than women, and that they are more socially valued than women. This behavior and the fundamental inequality of the social structure are conditioned by socialization, particularly child rearing and reinforced by all institutions including formal education.14 It has been suggested that peace education, or if you will, “demilitarization education” might well be patterned after the education girls are given to prepare not so much for roles

12 Change, a research journal; Georgina Ashworth, editor, has published one such study on Chile. 13 Barbara Roberts, “Peace Studies and the War Against Women A Survey of Research,” a paper delivered to Canadian Peace Research and Education Assn., 1982. 14 Birgit Brock-Utne, “The Role of Women, as Mothers and as Members of Society in the Education of Young People for Peace and Mutual Understanding,” PRIO publications, S-12/81.

[email protected] 3.5 Hypothesis 4: Militarization Cannot Be Adequately Analyzed … 47 of subordination as for avoiding violence and reaching equitable compromise. This suggestion makes for some very interesting possibilities for both educational and peace research. This hypothesis also stems from, among other sources, the feminist assumption that militarization is a consequence of overemphasis on negative masculine values, specifically those values which encourage and reward aggressive behavior and equate power with the capacity to coerce, to impose one’s own will and pursue one’s own interest at the expense of others. Feminists also assert that it is these masculine perspectives and values which have so distorted our fundamental notions of national power and national security that have impelled us into the arms race and encouraged the trends toward militarization. The exclusive use of the masculine paradigm for decoding and interpreting human experience is certainly evident and has been made most obvious as we become conscious of the degree to which our ways of thought, as indicated by language, are thoroughly conditioned by the masculine mode. This conditioning particularly affects public policy. However, various psychologists assert that it arises from individual psychological development and the socialization process itself. Yet it is, in its public manifestation, a starting point for an inquiry into the psychological formation and socialization processes which must be changed in order to achieve demilitarization. Recognizing as a starting point, for example, the observation of Robin Burns that public consciousness is in its various forms in different societies overwhelmingly male in nature, despite the social importance of women as the reproducers of society and their situation as half the world’s population.15 We need also to consider as part of the basis for further research in these areas, the works of feminist scholars. While not directly related to peace and militarization issues these works have much worthwhile instruction in the directions we should be following. The work of Dale Spender on language we hold essential to such inquiry.16 Also significant is the research of Carol Gilligan on women’s value formations and ethical systems, which indicates that there is a feminine alternative to the masculine mode of decision making—one that is less abstract and more humanly-based.17 Should we not inquire whether this mode of making moral and ethical judgments has any significant consequences in selection of the military option? Circumstances certainly relevant to the contending notions of security, which underlie the current controversies on the arms race and other aspects of the militarization of public policy, might well be illuminated by such inquiry. These types of research indicate as well the relevance of other feminist research and assertions to the process of demilitarization. Notions such as the possible relationship of the volume and significance of women’s participation in public life to security policies, the effect of non-sexist child rearing on behavioral patterns of aggression; the consequences of breaking down sex role stereotypes and sex role

15 Burns, op. cit. 16 Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London: Tugledje and Kegan Paul, 1980). 17 Carol Gilligan, A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

[email protected] 48 3 A Gender Analysis of Militarism and Sexist Repression … separation in public life to the value system which upholds militarism. Many of these areas are rich in possibilities for learnings which could inform strategy formation and policy making for demilitarization.

3.6 Hypothesis 5: Peace Research Is Contaminated by the Same Sexist Bias as Affects Other Social Sciences, and, Therefore, Needs to Devise a More Balanced Perspective on the Human Condition in Order to Derive Valid Data, Adequate to Provide a Knowledge Base for the Derivation of a Global Demilitarization Process

Integrating relevant feminist research into peace researchers’ attempts to derive data and knowledge for the demilitarization process will be a significant challenge which raises the final hypothesis to be presented in this essay. The members of the Women and Militarism Research Group share the hypothesis that peace research, like the sciences which have formed it, is caught in the intellectual trap of patriarchy. It has, no more than any other science, attended to the possibility of alternative conceptualization modes to those described in the works of Spender and Gilligan. Like all other social sciences it has assumed its research to be gender neutral, an assertion refuted by feminist research for at least a decade. Neither has it acknowledged the relevance of the range of feminist issues including those raised here to the objectives of peace research nor the potential relationship between sexist repression and militarization. These circumstances, which feminist peace researchers have called attention to in the recent past, are perhaps beginning to change.18 It is irrefutably evident that women’s concerns, feminine modes and perspectives and feminist values have little or no role in the formulation of public policy in general and in security and military policy in particular. They are most obviously absent in the military regimes. But less obviously and more potentially detrimental to its very purpose they are sorely lacking in peace research. Most inquiries and projects in peace research are not only conceptualized and carried out entirely by men, but also in masculine modes. Women’s concerns and feminist perspectives are considered only at women’s suggestion, and usually included only at women’s insistence. The real test of whether the general field of peace research will meet the feminist challenge adequately can be judged by the attention given to the possible sexism and sexist bias in the endeavors peace researchers have undertaken and will undertake in the future.

18 Celina Garcia, “Androgyny and Peace Education,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 12 (2, 81) and Betty Reardon, “Criticism/Self Criticism,” Sexism and the War System (New York: Institute for World Order, 1982). Note: this is an earlier draft of Sexism and the War System.

[email protected] Chapter 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System and Epilogue to Second Edition

Retrospective Reflection on Sexism and the War System, ‘Introduction’ (1985) and ‘Epilogue’ (1995)

The following pair of selections comprises the foundational interpretation of gender and war that has been and continues to be the basic conceptual framework of my writing on this topic, and the first retrospective reflections on the work, written on the occasion of republication in 1995, its 10th anniversary.1 The initial 1985 publication was the product of a decade of reflection on the proposition that there were significant interrelationships between sexism and militarism. Those initial reflective speculations began with the initiation of the first International Women’s Decade when I published a brief piece, entitled “Mothers and Soldiers.” That piece constituted the first tentative exploration of the exploitation of gender by the institution of war, pointing out the similarities between these particular feminine and masculine roles and their exploitation by the mythology of war. The posing of the similarities was among some the ideas being shared among a few feminist colleagues, fellow members of the Peace Education Commission of the International Peace Research Association. Several of them had undertaken work based on interpretations that coincided with or complemented mine. We resolved to learn from each other, support our mutual endeavors, and promote each other’s work in IPRA and the field in general. So started the collaborative process that has, as with peace education, been the mode in which my thinking on the gender and peace problematic has evolved. Before the publication of Sexism and the War System I certainly knew that books could change lives, but I had no thought that one that I had written myself

1 This text was ﬁrst published as: ‘Introduction’, in: Sexism and the War System (New York, Teachers College Press, 1985). The ‘Epilogue’ was added to its second edition that was published in: (Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press, 1995). The permission to republish this text here was granted on 11 March 2014 by Deborah Manion, Ofﬁce Coordinator, Syracuse University Press.

[email protected] 50 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System … could change mine. This publication greatly expanded my connections to feminist peace networks beyond, but still including, my colleagues in PEC. Some of these like-minded feminist peace activists and the positive responses from a revered mentor, Professor Lawrence Metcalfe, and respected colleague, Professor Douglas Sloan, validated the utility of the holistic framework constructed to illuminate the links by examining the functions of the war system. As did the affirmation of my fundamental thesis by the Italian psychiatrist and scholar of the psychology of war, Dr. Franco Fornari whom I met at a session of the Council for the University for Peace on which I served for several years following its founding in Costa Rica in 1980. One of the first in a number of women and peace publications that came out in the mid 1980s, it became and remains a common text in the syllabi of courses in peace studies that include gender issues. Today, for a wide variety of reasons, issues of women and war have become a “popular topic,” much discussed, if still not fully understood as a factor in global security policy making. No longer is it viewed as peripheral to the questions of achieving a sustainable peace. Within the community of UN related NGOs, some formerly preoccupied primarily with women’s human rights and violence against women as distinct from the struggle to end war per se, some have for several years joined the women’s peace organizations and in attending to the connections among war, human rights and violence against women. Within the public at large attention to gender, power and violence questions have been opened to debate as a consequence of the revelation of sexual violence in and by the military, in universities, religious institutions and the home. The global significance of women’s oppression and denial of their fundamental human rights is the central thesis of President Jimmy Carter’s latest book.2 President Carter argues that the empowerment of women is a moral necessity that is the essential and urgent requirement for addressing the major global survival crises, an argument similar to that which prompted some of the recommendations to the United Nations put forth in the final selection included in this volume, “A Statement on Military Violence against Women.” However, in 1985 when the first edition of the book was published, few in the peace knowledge field, or in politics or civil society, exhibited such awareness of the critical role of gender in illuminating and resolving the fundamental problem of war. But over the next few years, the framework did strike a cord not only among feminists in peace education and peace studies, but also with a number of women peace activists who found that it articulated some of the main assumptions and intuitions that informed their own particular struggles against war and militarism. So, too, the central thesis as summarized in the 1985 ‘Introduction’ was taken up by a few women scholars, as a component of a common conceptual basis for the further development of feminist peace theories. When some of these scholars and activists contacted me, that thesis also became the basis for international networking even beyond activists and supporters in the peace education and

2 A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

[email protected] 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism … 51

NGO communities. Its publication in Japanese resulted in my becoming acquainted with the founding group of Okinawa Women Act against Military Violence, an association which continues in on-going cooperative efforts to educate and act for the demilitarization of security and eliminating military violence against women by reducing and withdrawing the military bases on that island and throughout the world. The book also won some attention from a few mainline peace scholars that provided a bit more opportunity to gain a place for gender on the agenda of peace research, peace studies, and peace education. It seemed that the field might now become more attentive to the role that gender issues were coming to play in the United Nations and some of the civil society organizations that sought to influence its programs and pronouncements. These U.N. initiatives, perhaps more than the arguments of feminist peace researchers, gave the topic a currency in the field that I do not think it would have been achieved solely on the basis of feminist scholarship. In all the scholarly disciplines, feminists were offering new interpretations and theories, treading new substantive ground, receiving similar reactions from their respective establishments, “That’s interesting, but not our central concern…”. For the most part, we are still waiting for, “That’s interesting, so we might consider…”. Civil society was, it seems, ahead of the peace research field in coming to understand the negative effects of the exclusion of women and gender perspectives from policy making and strategy planning on development and peace. The wider peace research establishment was not yet ready to accede to the argument for the integration of feminist scholarship into the field. Nor, at that time, did the mainline feminist movement embrace peace as central to the pursuit of women’s equality. So shallow was the interest among the peace knowledge establishment that Sexism and the War System might never have been published, had not the network of colleagues with whom I shared and solicited comments on the manuscript saved it from obscurity. The Institute for World Order, finding it incompatible with their purposes, decided not to publish it. For a while it became, as was “The Knowledge Industry,” a kind of feminist samizstadt, circulated within gender and peace networks, until it fell into the hands of an editor at Teachers College Press who believed it should be formally published as was the first edition in 1985.3 When in 1996 it was republished by Syracuse University Press, the ‘Epilogue’ appended to the second edition, the second of the pair of essays included below, observed that even a decade after the earlier publication, there was still much to do in extending the search for and probing of the roots of what by then had become the accepted premise that war and women’s oppression were interrelated. Even now the striving for the wider and deeper awareness that could extend the analytic work, still largely confined to the work of feminists. The struggle continues. Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

3 Syracuse University Press published the present edition in 1995 in a series on landmarks in peace studies.

[email protected] 52 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System … 4.1 Introduction

The fundamental purpose of this monograph, is to argue the need for an integration of feminist scholarship with peace research in order to overcome the inadequacies of each in their separate attempts to abolish respectively sexism and war. This argument is grounded in the contention that both phenomena depend on violence. It leads to the assertion that only by the application of a theory of reciprocal causation giving equal consideration to both the psychological and the structural causes of sexism and the war system can we gain a sufﬁcient understanding of the problems and their interrelationship to enable us to transcend them. Transcendence is possible because our problems derive primarily from learned behaviors resulting from an interplay between psychological and structural factors. Learned behaviors are subject to change, and change is a question of choice.

With Birgit Brock Utne at an IPRA conference in the 1990s

Feminists and peace researchers are currently faced with what I argue is a crucial choice in the development of human knowledge and human society. Whether they choose (as I argue they should) to merge their perspectives, modes of inquiry, and strategies for action or to continue on their distinctly separate but signiﬁcantly parallel paths can make a profound difference in both epistemology and politics— particularly the politics of transformation. Before such a merger can take place, however, peace researchers must recognize the legitimate claims of women to full participation in all human affairs, including peace research. Such recognition, and

[email protected] 4.1 Introduction 53 movement toward the merger of feminism and the peace movement, would be a fitting and perhaps salvational culmination to the International Women’s Decade (1975–1985). Since the United Nations declaration of International Women’s Year in 1975 and the consequent International Women’s Decade, much lip service has been given to the relationship of women to three basic themes: equality, development, and peace—the interrelationships among them, and their significance to the future of the planet. While most of the ‘official’ and organized concerns and efforts in the industrial world have focused on equality, and in the Third World on development, virtually no substantive consideration nor even lip service has been given in either region to the relationship between women’s issues and peace. Indeed, a group of women from one Western country who participated in the Tribune (an unofficial, nongovernmental conference held at the same time as the official United Nations International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico in 1975) reported that they had been advised not to discuss peace and disarmament issues because they were not relevant to women’s issues. Recently, however, a growing minority of feminist peace researchers have turned their attention to this particular topic. My reflections during these years have been related primarily to the actual and potential roles of women and women’s movements in the process of structural transformation, which the world order movement-comprising scholars and activists seeking to end war and oppression—sees as fundamental to the achievement of peace. These reflections on the need for women’s perspectives and participation in the transformational process have led me to recognize the common characteristics and manifestations of women’s oppression and warfare. It is clear that interrelationships exist between contemporary militarization and other reactionary trends, including opposition to the women’s struggle for equality. A few feminist peace researchers, in fact, have moved from disciplined speculation to serious substantive study regarding the causes of both sexism and the war system, their common characteristics, and the interrelationships between sexist oppression and militarization.4 I have come to believe that the two problems not only are symbiotically related, but are twin manifestations of the same underlying cause. This requires that they be viewed as twin, not separate, problems. They should command simultaneous and equal attention from those fields of research, education, and political action that purport to be devoted to their abolition. Some parts of this monograph will doubtless be redundant for those who are familiar with the growing body of thought and the limited but significant literature on women and war and/or on feminism and militarism. However, I feel it necessary to recapitulate some of these conclusions in order to demonstrate the fundamental

4 The evolution of these ideas is outlined in a series of articles by Betty Reardon (1975–1983). Those not included in the References are “Debating the future,” Network, 8 (May/June 1980) (see Chap. 3 in this volume), “Women and disarmament: Traditional values in a transnational world,” in S. McClean (Ed.): Women’s contribution to peace (New York: UNESCO, 1981), “Research agenda for a gender analysis of militarism and sexist repression,” International Peace Research Newsletter, 21 (February 1983).

[email protected] 54 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System … symbiosis between sexism and the war system. I do this particularly for two audiences who are, in fact, addressing this common problem and who I believe could form a significant collaboration for its resolution, namely feminist educators, researchers, and activists and their counterparts in the peace research and world order inquiry movements. I believe that a constructive collaboration between them can make a significant contribution to the abolition of war. I also intuitively believe that the merger of these movements is probably necessary for human survival. It is certainly required if we are to move to a new stage in the humanization of society. Four main influences have led to the conclusions and opinions that will be outlined here. The original reflections and speculations were initiated by a thesis proposal by Chafardet (1978) regarding the origins of aggression in the distortion that rigid sex role socialization imposes upon ‘authentic’ male and female attributes, and the collateral effects of these distortions on child care and child development. Her initial conceptualization of authentic and distorted male and female attributes helped me to distinguish between what I now designate as positive and negative masculine and feminine values. The positive values derive from the authentic attributes and are those that are conducive to the full realization of the human potential in both individuals and society. The negative values derive from the distorted attributes and are those that stifle and crush portions of human and social development. They are the values that underlie stereotypes and rationalize discrimination and oppression. Our present social order, as will be more fully outlined here, is overly characterized by these negative values, both feminine and masculine. However, so heavy is the emphasis on the negative masculine values, and so little emphasis is given to the positive feminine values, that the qualifying adjective is not generally used throughout the text. Arguments in favor of feminine values are, therefore, only for the positive, and arguments against the masculine are only against the negative. These initial reflections and speculations were disciplined by the perspectives and approaches of world order studies, particularly their illumination of the interrelationships between global issues and structural problems, and by the world order focus on the interdependence of such components of the world survival crisis as war, population and poverty, and ecological imbalance. The world order influence is most especially reflected in the value dimensions of these reflections, particularly the emphasis on social justice and economic equity. Reflections on the common roots of sexism and the war system were reinforced by the work of Franco Fornari, an Italian psychiatrist. His theory that the origins of war reside in the human psyche and the corollary assertion that the abolition of war requires that every person must assume some individual responsibility for war (Fornari 1975), gave scholarly validation to my basic hunches. Finally, Oberg (1981) has asserted that disarmament cannot be addressed without giving analytic attention to the symbiotic relationship between armaments and structural violence. This makes it impossible to separate analytically or politically the problems of militarization from those of poverty and oppression and provides a precedent and paradigm for consideration of the kind of relationship that exists between sexism and the war system.

[email protected] 4.1 Introduction 55

The world order inquiry framework is used here because I believe it best serves the two central concerns from which this monograph derives; the need for a realization of the human rights of women and for women’s perspectives in addressing public issues, and also, and primarily, an immediate and specific anxiety about the increasing potential for human annihilation inherent in the nuclear arms race. In this monograph I suggest some contributions that world order studies can make to the achievement of the goals of economic equity, political empowerment, and social equality for women, but, more significantly, I attempt to offer some insights into sexism as a major obstacle to halting the arms race and reversing the planetary trend toward militarization. I share the opinion of a strongly convinced minority of feminists, world order scholars, peace researchers, and educators that the achievement of these two objectives is not possible unless the problems are addressed within the context of the policy issues and normative controversies raised by feminism. Scholars sharing this conviction (among them some distinguished men and, indeed, most women in the field), acknowledge the desirability if not the necessity of women’s movements attending more to the issues of war, armaments, and militarization. The underlying assumption of this acknowledgment is that feminine values, which nurture life and acknowledge the need for transcending competition and violence, are needed to guide policy formation to avoid or abolish war. Another related feminist assertion is that, not-withstanding the behavior of certain female leaders, the mere presence in the political process of more women socialized to hold such values can have an ameliorating effect on the problems of war and violence (Brock-Utne 1981; Reardon 1975). Interestingly, virtually the same assertion was made in a review of biological research on the hormonal basis of the tendency for more aggressive behavior in males than in females (Konner 1982). There has been no refutation of these assertions on the part of non-feminist (some might even say anti-feminist) world order scholars and peace researchers. On the contrary, lip service has been given to them, as well as to the three themes of the International Women’s Decade. However, virtually no peace researchers or world order scholars, other than those few feminists in the field, have advocated the need consciously to conscript women into peace research and world order studies or to include feminist perspectives or feminist issues in the field. Most tend to view women’s issues as secondary or collateral issues to the central concern of peace. Some still maintain that the subject is a distraction from the more important and core issues involved in the reversal of the arms race and militarization, and the abolition of war (Carroll 1972). Some researchers openly and completely reject the oppression of women as having any relation to questions of war and peace (What is said around coffee tables in research institutes often is more truly revealing than what is said around seminar tables. Informal professional conversations can expose the sexist bias usually denounced in formal discourse). On the other hand some feminists assert that sexism is the most pervasive and most fundamental problem of world order—indeed, of human social evolution—because it is a root cause of violence, especially socially sanctioned violence. In this monograph I attempt to make the case that sexism and the war system are two interdependent

[email protected] 56 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System … manifestations of a common problem, social violence. That common problem, while it is exacerbated and played out in contemporary economic, political, and social structures, does not derive solely from structural causes. Rather, the problem originates in the very roots of the human psyche, and will not be fully resolved until the majority of the human family recognizes the need for all individuals to involve themselves in the transformational struggle. Fomari (1974) argues that as individuals we all bear some responsibility for war, and I would argue the same for sexism, the fundamental source of which lies within each of us. Social structures, economic and political processes, like architecture and other art forms, derive from images arising from the human imagination and the human experience. Although we are profoundly influenced psychologically and socially by the structures, it is ourselves who create and can change them. It is the successful pursuit of the inner struggle, which was called “head changing” in the 1960s, that I believe constitutes the central transformational task. In relation to that task, disarmament, even the abolition of war, is only a transitional stage toward the achievement of one component of the authentic transformation, the exorcising of violence and coercive force as the main cohesion of society (Reardon 1980). The working assumptions that underlie the basic problems reviewed in this monograph arise from a series of hunches, intuitions, and insights. Although the dictionary does not make very fine distinctions among those three concepts, they are to me stages of what has been recognized as a feminine mode of thought development, and it is important for the purpose of this piece—the encouragement of a convergence between women’s movements and the world order movement—to provide at least a brief overview statement of those assumptions especially relevant to that purpose. The initial assumption is one that is becoming widely shared among peace educators. It is that the major obstacle to disarmament is not political but psychosocial, it is fear—the fear of being defenseless in the face of an attacker or an antagonist—that is almost universally manifest in both individuals and in societies. Various peace researchers also assert that the problems of war and sexism arise not from nature or from instinct, but rather from social conditioning and acquired psychological needs. Although social conditioning and learned behaviors are currently a subject of study by both peace researchers and peace educators, few have yet addressed the psychological needs that are met by both the war system and sexism. The works of Garcia Chafardet and Fornari are notable exceptions to this lack of attention to psychological needs, and lead to a consideration of the possibility that social and political institutions actually derive from inner constructs of the human psyche. Therefore, achieving radical institutional change, which probably the abolition of war and certainly the abolition of violence necessitates, will require comprehension of those inner constructs. Because we have created our own sociocultural environment, understanding ourselves becomes a primary requirement for changing that environment. A better understanding of our own psychosocial reality and the conditions and experiences that produced it can lead us not only to the requisite knowledge but, even more significantly, it can offer us hope for positive change. Both sexism and the war

[email protected] 4.1 Introduction 57 system are culturally conditioned and therefore subject to change. As my Teachers College colleague Patrick Lee put it in comments on an earlier draft of this work:

Socio-cultural conditioning runs as deep as biology but, unlike the latter, it can change in a relatively few generations. Biological change of any significance takes hundreds or even thousands of generations. It is because we are such deeply socio-cultural creatures (i.e., self-created) that socio-cultural and psychic qualities appear as hard as instinct and ‘nature’. There is a difference between deep and hard. The former is fundamental, but in principle open to relatively rapid historical change, the latter is also fundamental but less open to change (Lee, personal communication 1983). The profoundly sexist history of the human species indicates that the socially induced and prescribed separations and differences between the sexes are a very significant component of the inner psychic constructs. They may well be the psychic origins of war, sexism, and all structures of violence and oppression. Various feminists have pointed to the oppression of women by men as the first and most fundamental form of structural oppression (see Reardon 1975 for citations from unpublished papers by feminist anthropologists). It is clear that for both boys and girls the first socially encountered other, a person they perceive as being different from themselves, is usually of the other sex, and our experience indicates that it is others, those different from us, who threaten us and instigate the fear that gives rise to the notion of enemy and, ultimately, the practice of war. Society reinforces and exacerbates this perception of otherness. It is, I think, of some significance that psychiatry has pointed out that the enemy always becomes the embodiment of what we fear or reject in ourselves. We attempt to exorcize our own bad spirits by projecting them on others. A major function of others is, in fact, to meet various needs we cannot fulfill ourselves. When these needs are recognized as positive and good, we love or feel kindly toward the others who fulfill them. When they are negative or bad, we hate and despise the others and fear their power over us. For only by granting them such power can we abnegate responsibility for our own negative behavior. A classic case of this process is attributing temptress behavior to women who “lead men astray” and making the prostitute but not her client culpable before the law. We usually manage to punish others for our own sins. Society thus needs criminals and enemies. Eve was the first of many to serve ‘mankind.’ Because we have yet to learn the full wisdom of the popular sage Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us”), the enemy is always other, and feared. It is widely acknowledged that both sexist society and the war system are kept in order by the capacity to use or threaten the use of violence against those others who arouse fear. It is important to note that various researchers have asserted that the similarities between males and females of the human species are far more significant and numerous than the differences (Lee and Gropper 1974) In fact, in humans the similarities are stronger than in most other species. Lee and Gropper cite Bird- whistell’s argument that the differences imposed by custom and socialization originated in the need to have visible signs of otherness for purposes of mating and reproduction, purposes served in other species by more readily perceivable signals.

[email protected] 58 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System …

Research does indicate that most of the behavioral differences between human males and females are the consequence of socialization and education. The artificial differentiation thus imposed on men and women leaves in its wake a very deep sense of fragmentation and loss, perhaps even a sense of having been wounded or traumatized by a rending of one set of characteristics from every human being at the time of birth—a cleavage that I refer to as the primal wound. A sense of trauma and pain can be one source of what has been identified as an instinctual fear of others and could possibly account for the presence of what has been designated as natural aggression. What is important here is to recognize the common emotional roots as well as the structural interrelationships between sexism and the war system. Both are grounded to a large extent in the primitive fear of the other. These commonalities must be taken into consideration by world order studies and schemes, particularly when such studies and schemes attempt to deal with transitions to peace or with the requirements of transformation of the global social system. These psychic areas of concern are not always taken into account in planning for structural change, but should be an integral part of the research and policy planning for what world order advocates call global transformation. In addition to the value changes advanced by world order advocates, some fundamental psychic transformations are required to change both those social processes and those human behaviors that are now primarily energized by violent force. World order scholars and advocates should recognize the importance of changes within individuals as necessary components of global transformation because a fundamental fear standing in the way of disarmament is fear in the individual person, projected onto the social order (Fornari 1975). In asserting the need for inner change, the intent is not to argue the irrelevance of sociopolitical determinants, but rather to observe their inadequacy to a truly transformation-oriented analysis. It certainly can be argued that the fears fueling the present arms race are “organized by human social structures” and “interjected into the individual psyche” (Lee, personal communication 1983). The Soviet-ophobia in the United States and the fear of nuclear war in very young children bear witness to this. What peace research and world order studies need to be working toward is an understanding of the interplay between social structures and psychological forces, for “human sociality and human personality are reciprocally determining” (Lee, personal communication 1983). Finally, it must be recognized that transition as well as transformation will need to be learned, just as the conduct of warfare and the practice of sexism are learned. The transcendence of warfare and sexism at the behavioral level can also be learned. We can engage in a conscious learning process to change human relations and change the world political system. However, the quality of those changes will depend in large part on how we address the “war within”—the struggle created in every human being by the cleaving of the total human potential and personality into two distinct and separate parts, male and female, which are molded into socially rigid and confining sex roles.

[email protected] 4.2 Epilogue 59 4.2 Epilogue

Since the initial publication of Sexism and the War System in 1985, the contours of world politics have changed dramatically. The prevailing political principle of the necessity and efficacy of violence has, however, remained entrenched, sustained and reinforced by the continued unequal distribution of power, which favors the techno-industrial, male elites of the world. Coercive force continues to be the main arbiter of social order, and the legal right to use force continues to be the preserve of the state, still managed and directed in all but a few cases by male, national elites. Women remain largely disenfranchised, in the practical sense of having significant influence over the distribution of public resources or public policy making, especially in regard to the use of force and questions of national and global ‘security’. While concepts of, and approaches to, security have broadened, including such factors as the economic, social, and environmental issues that have been the main arenas of women’s public concerns and actions, the achievement of security remains elusive, indeed, illusory. Many feminists now agree that this failure to progress toward a more secure world is in no small degree attributable to the lack of women’s participation, perspective, and experience in making the policies that determine matters of war and peace. The hope and purpose of the book were to stimulate thinking and research on the common roots of sexism and militarism and on the interrelationship between these two problems, which could provide knowledge to overcome both. During the past decade there has been a good deal of scholarship in the field, and a considerable literature on women and peace is now available. Indeed, much has been learned that challenges and calls into question some of the arguments I put forth in 1985. But I continue to insist upon the need to consider the core thesis the oppression of women and the legitimation of coercive force which perpetuates war, the two major pillars of patriarchy are mutually dependent conditions, a notion yet to be given significant consideration outside feminist scholarship and women’s peace action. The war system is the major obstacle to women’s equality, and war will not be overcome without the full and equal participation of women in the public order. Although the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995, called for, in unequivocal terms, the full political equality of women and vigorously denounced all forms of violence against women, the documents from the preparatory process that called attention to the sexism-militarism symbiosis and the interrelationship among all forms of violence are not reflected in the Beijing Plan of Action.5 Some strong statements on the urgency of demilitarization were made, but the peace aspects of the Plan were far from adequate. Clearly, the struggle to awaken both the broader women’s movement and the global

5 See “Gender and the Agenda for Peace A Report of a U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women Experts Meeting,” December 1994, and “Women’s Contribution to a Culture of Peace A Report of a UNESCO Experts Meeting,” April 1995.

[email protected] 60 4 Introduction to the First Edition, Sexism and the War System … peace through disarmament movement to the symbiosis is only beginning, but it is gaining energy and being nurtured by the UNESCO-led initiatives toward the development of a culture of peace that integrates the visions of both movements in its efforts to deracinate the culture of war, embedded in the tangled roots of sexism and militarism.

References

Bouldling, E., 1981: “Perspectives of Women Researchers on Disarmament, National Security, and World Order” (prepublication draft). Brock-Utne, B., 1981: The Role of Women as Mothers and as Members of Society in the Education of Young People for Peace, Mutual Understanding, and Peace (Publication S-12/81) (Oslo: Peace Research Institute of Oslo). Carroll, B., 1972: “Peace Research: The cult of Power”, in: Conﬂict Resolution, 16,4: 585–616. Fornari, F., 1975: The Psychoanalysis of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Garcia Chafardet, I., 1978: “Sexism and a proposed theory of aggression”, Paper Presented at the International Symposium on Women’s Political Participation, Berkeley, CA. Konner, M., 1982: “He and She”, in: Science, 3,7. Lee, P.; Gropper, N., 1974: “Sex-Role, Culture, and Educational Practice”, in: Harvard Educational Review, 44,3: 369–410. Oberg, J., 1981: “The New International Military Order, The Real Threat to Human Security: An Essay on Global Armaments, Structural Militarism, and Alternative Security”. University of Oslo Chair in Conﬂict Resolution Papers, 65 (Oslo: University of Oslo). Reardon, Betty, A., 1975: “Women’s Movements and Human Futures”, in: Convergence, 8,3: 41–52.

[email protected] Chapter 5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security

Retrospective Reﬂection on “Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security” (1990)

The late Paul Smoker, the main editor of the collection in which this essay appeared, was one of the few men in peace studies and peace research who attended to feminist arguments about the relevance of gender to peace.1 A British scholar, he did his doctoral work under Chadwick Alger, (Chad, one of the founders of COPRED and IPRA, an author included in this Pioneers series, died in 2014). Paul taught peace studies at both Lancaster in the UK and Antioch in the US, served as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association, and was an active member of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development. He was, in most senses, other than outlook, a member of the peace research establishment. His untimely death was a significant loss to the field, particularly to the cause of integrating gender issues and feminist perspectives into the study and analysis of the peace problematic. The publication of a recent volume comprised of 36 essays, to which I was invited to contribute,2 contains contributions from only five men. It is evident that with the exception of the writing and teaching of the few who are specifically concerned with gender, the feminist perspective is still more marginal or set apart than integral to peace studies and peace research. The oft repeated argument about its being constitutive and essential to the field, while we continue to refine and deepen it, is still to be fully heard. Paul was also one of the few of the ‘establishment’ to let me know that he considered Sexism

1 This text was ﬁrst published as “Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security,” in: Paul Smoker, R. Davies and B. Munske (Eds.): A Reader in Peace Studies (New York: Pergamon Press). The permission to republish this text here was granted on 17 March 2014 by: Jennifer Jones, Rights Associate, Elsevier Ltd. Oxford, United Kingdom. 2 Lester and Miriam Kurtz, Women, Peace and Security (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2014).

[email protected] 62 5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security and the War System to be a significant contribution to peace theory. That he believed that the subject should be integrated into peace studies is evident in the inclusion of this essay in a basic course reader that he co-edited with Barbara Munske. The essay is the first in which I published some responses to questions regarding prescriptions that I thought should be addressed in light of the diagnosis of the gender and peace problematic as presented in Sexism and the War System. While I continued to advocate the integration of the fields of feminist scholarship and peace research and studies, I had also begun to consider possible political responses that might contribute to a transition from militarized security toward nonviolent modes of achieving and maintaining national and international security. I had argued that the militarized security system sustained patriarchy and women’s subservience, and that focusing on alternatives to that system was a way to challenge the generally accepted patriarchal belief that a strong military is the most effective means to security. This essay presents some of the first elements of an alternative conceptualization of security that was to become an important basis for feminists ongoing efforts to change the dominant security discourse. It would be only a few years hence when elements of the proposal presented here were included in the concept of human security that came into use first in U.N. discourse on social and economic development, and in the arguments of those seeking also to challenge both the present system of national security and to devise means to overcome the economic priority given to ‘defense’. In this piece are the germinal ideas that grew into a feminist framework for human security. As with my approach to peace education, I was reaching for a more holistic or comprehensive conceptualization that would take into account the fact that security was comprised of multiple factors; and that the interrelationships among them called for them to be addressed in the light of those relationships, rather than as discrete parallel issues. Such holistic and systemic perspectives, I argued, were requisite to effective thinking about system change, and the most practical approach to any viable alternative. With the intent of devising means to transcend the fragmented, often reductionist, thinking of political realism that underlay most national security policies, I argued for the integration of positive and negative peace, and to bring together what I described as masculine and feminine approaches in an alternative that would not refute or replace one with the other, but would devise new comprehensive, more fully human modes of thinking about security policy. Indeed, this goal was also implied in Sexism’s call to integrate feminist research and studies with peace research and studies. In both cases, I argued that exclusion of other perspectives limited the potential of each realm to achieve its fundamental purposes, in one case producing knowledge that could serve the cause of gender equality and in the other knowledge that could contribute to the cause of abolishing war. The ways in which the modes of thinking differ (i.e., holistic human experience oriented or fragmented state oriented) manifest in the questions raised as the basis of inquiry into developing the strategies to achieve the common purpose of both modes, namely, authentic and sustainable security. The questions posed in this

[email protected] 5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security 63 piece are intended to provide examples of how perspective influences perception of the actual obstacles to security, as well as, the making of the policies and planning the strategies to overcome them. As in my evolving approaches to peace education, my approach to integrating gender into devising strategies to achieve a transformed security system, advocates inquiry rather than exposition and debate of positions, the latter being best considered in the light of goals first clarified through inquiry, again favoring a learning process rather than adversarial political discourse. In addition to anticipating the emergence of human security as a complement or, in feminist terms, an alternative to state security, this piece also foreshadows the severe and rapidly worsening environmental deterioration, including what is now referred to as “climate change,” as a threat to human security. So, too, it anticipates the more detailed case for the integrated, comprehensive perspective of the emerging feminist security framework and the arguments asserting how militarized security undermines all four bases of human security that were made two decades later in The Gender Imperative: Human Security versus State Security (Routledge 2010). On the learning route to that latter publication, the framework was featured in several of my presentations and publications on gender and peace. Each iteration thereof offered development and refinement of the core concepts. This human security framework has been a significant influence on my academic-professional work and on my human rights and human security activism. In both cases, however, discussion of the practical implications of feminist thinking are still thwarted by the failure of the respective establishments to address feminist theoretical and strategic thinking as serious and essential substance to be included in the general discourse. Perhaps now that men are developing their own approach to gender through masculinities studies, the peace establishment, if not national security policy makers, might attend more seriously to the gender and peace problematic.

Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

5.1 Feminism and Positive Peace

The following essay has been drafted to provoke discussion and inquiry into vital issues of peace and justice. It is not neutral because it has been written by a feminist. It is not objective because there is a core argument made both implicitly and explicitly. Serious students will seek out other arguments and alternative views in order to assess the validity of the arguments upon which this all too brief treatment of the vast subject of the relationship between women and peace is based. Over the past several years, feminist scholarship has brought to light signiﬁcant questions and important new knowledge about human history and the possibilities for the future. Among the areas of human concern which are being most profoundly affected by these questions and this new knowledge is that of world peace and

[email protected] 64 5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security security. Feminist theories and proposals about these, the most important problems currently facing all the peoples of the world, are often in sharp contrast with prevailing ideas and policies which are currently pursued by most governments. They are also even more challenging than many of the proposals offered by the peace movements which frequently stand in opposition to ofﬁcial government peace and security policies. Feminist positions on these issues are both authentically radical and truly conservative. They are radical in their insistence on going to the roots of conﬂict, violence and war. And they are conservative in their primary goals and methods, in that they seek to protect human life and society; to preserve the human achievements and the natural environment on which the future depends; and to maintain, extend, and nurture the networks of personal and social relations which constitute human communities.

With friends and colleagues Ingeborg Breines and Dorota Gierycz, co-editors of Toward a Women’s Agenda for Peace, in Vienna in 2013

As we begin to explore these feminist concepts and theories of peace and global security, we need to be clear about the meanings of these terms. The terms feminism and feminists have almost as many varied interpretations as does peace. Feminism as a social movement and a way of looking at the world manifests many cultural and political forms. There is no monolithic, single-minded worldwide feminist movement and no one particular school of feminist thought. Feminists disagree on many issues and policies. They also differ in their scholarly interpretations as do

[email protected] 5.1 Feminism and Positive Peace 65 most other researchers. So feminism is a rich and varied phenomenon. There is probably only one basic tenet common to all schools and forms of feminism. That is that men and women are of equal human value and this equality should be recognized by all societies. This does not mean that women and men are the same nor should they always be treated the same. But it does mean that no one should suffer discrimination on the basis of sex. The other virtually universal agreement among feminists is that women throughout the world suffer sex-based discrimination. This discrimination has resulted in women, women’s experience, and women’s perspectives being excluded from public affairs such as politics, economics, and conflict, and from the development of the formally acquired and transmitted knowledge of history and other areas of scholarship. Feminist scholarship seeks to remedy this exclusion by uncovering women’s rightful place in history and integrating women’s experience and perspectives into other areas of knowledge development. Until recently, we have looked at, studied and interpreted the world primarily through masculine eyes. Feminist scholarship has shown us that the world-past, present and future-looks quite different through feminine eyes. Essentially, this is what we mean by feminist scholarship: looking at the world, gathering and interpreting knowledge through feminine eyes. When viewed through feminine eyes, peace and security look very different than they do from the masculine perspective that has determined the general public perceptions and governmental policies in regard to the defense of the national interest and of the people of the nation. From the masculine perspective, peace for the most part has meant the absence of war and the prevention of armed conflict. This is what peace researchers now refer to as negative peace. Security is thus to be found in protection from aggression and defense in armed conflict. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, security has been sought within a framework of the deterrence theory, based on the argument that a nation can best defend itself by deterring an attack through the possession of weapons of sufficient numbers and destructive capacity to inflict a devastating retaliatory blow against the attacker. Consequently, the nuclear powers have engaged in an arms race to assure that their weaponry is more numerous and destructive than their opponents, and recently through the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), known as ‘Star Wars’, to assure the capacity to destroy or deflect attacking weapons before and during an attack. Non-nuclear countries depending on so-called conventional weapons engage in similar arms races for technological and numerical superiority. Most in the peace movements, feminists among them, argue that this method of pursuing national security is too dangerous and costly, and that we must seek other means to achieve peace and maintain security. Many feminists also argue that peace and security need to be redefined. Most tend to hold a notion of peace akin to what peace researchers call positive peace, generally described as conditions of social justice, economic equity and ecological balance. Such conditions would be more truly peaceful because they would be more life-affirming and less likely to produce the types of conflicts which lead to armed violence and war. Such peace does not mean the absence of conflict, it does mean a situation in which violence is less likely, even when there are disputes and conflicts.

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Feminists tend to see peace as a condition of social justice and equality; equality between women and men as the foundation for equality among all peoples, an end for example, to racism as well as sexism, and a condition in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is accepted and applied on a worldwide basis. Human rights are a fundamental component of a feminist concept of peace. Security is to be found in the assurance that human rights will be protected. Under such conditions of positive peace, freedom from oppression and discrimination would be as essential a basis for human society as order. Many readers will recognize that these notions of peace are now widely embraced by many; that they are not exclusively or distinctly feminist. We need research to look further at those notions of peace and security that bear a distinctly feminine outlook.

5.2 Feminist Concepts of Security

Recent scholarship has posited that women, as a result of a different experience and differences in education, think differently from men. These differences, however, are not inborn, and both men and women are capable of what might be termed masculine and feminine thinking. Both forms of thinking are useful and should be part of a broad human repertoire of modes of thinking. A masculine view of the world tends to emphasize institutions and organizations, such as corporations, universities, political parties, nation-states, international organizations, and how they can be run to maximize the interests of a particular group, a country, a transnational corporation, a religion or political ideology. A feminine view, however, emphasizes human relationships and how people behave to fulfill their human needs. The model of human relationships most applied by the masculine mode of thinking is that of a hierarchical organization such as the nation-state, the church and the like. The feminine mode is based on a kinship model of less structured organization designed for the fulfillment of the needs of those in the kinship networks. The values of such a mode tend to be familial, nurturing and inclusive. Whereas, the masculine values are more organizational, competitive and exclusive. When each of these modes of thinking becomes excessive and excludes the other there is a barrier to developing a fuller, more human range of possibilities for security or for any other human need. In their extremes, these two different ways of looking at the world, which some scholars have called the dominator (masculine) and the partnership (feminine) modes or models, lead to very different concepts of security. Human security is generally perceived as based on two major factors; protection from attack, and the fulfillment of fundamental needs. The peace movements around the world argue that present national security policies are based almost exclusively on the first of these. Thus, they argue, military security pursued through excessive public expenditure on preparation for war reduces national capacities to meet fundamental needs for adequate housing, nutrition, health care and education for all.

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While some peace activists acknowledge the need for sufficient military force for national defense, military expenditures, they claim, are far in excess of these needs, so that the most fundamental bases of national security-the lives and well-being of the citizens-are placed in jeopardy. These arms expenditures, and the many dangers inherent in the arms race, make people and nations less rather than more secure. Feminists in the peace movement assert that this emphasis on military over other forms of security results from these matters being determined almost entirely by men. Some peace groups, including both men and women, argue for the adoption of an alternative security system to replace the present arms dependent system. Var- ious proposals have been made for such alternatives, such as common security, placing more emphasis on international peace-keeping, strengthening the United Nations, or establishing some sort of world government. There are a variety of such proposals, and some of them are endorsed by feminists. Few proposals, however, are as comprehensive as a feminist perspective on security would demand. Among the characteristics which distinguish the feminine from the masculine modes of viewing the world, the factors of inclusivity and holism are probably the most significant. Inclusivity is related both to the question of who must be involved in a security system and to the factors and dimensions which should be included in what the system comprises as security concerns. Feminist concepts of security tend toward a truly global scope. A feminist world security system would attempt to include all peoples and all nations based on a notion of extended kinship including the entire human family. Such a system would also effect the belief rapidly gaining support among those who study security issues that any system to be effective must be fully global; that no nation can fully assure its own security, as the security of each is best assured by the security of all. In a feminist framework, security would have a broad, holistic definition to assure that all interrelated and relevant factors affecting world security are taken into consideration. It would aim to protect life and to enhance its quality, providing equal attention to both fundamental requirements of human security. There are thus two central questions upon which feminists base their inquiries into alternatives to the arms race and war. What are the fundamental threats to human life? And, how can we overcome these threats in a life enhancing manner? Another way of positing the question might be, how can we achieve negative peace while building the conditions for positive peace? When the inquiry into ways to achieve greater universal human security are posed in this way, war and injustice are seen as equally significant threats to human survival and a decent quality of life. But they are not the only threats to be overcome. This kind of inquiry in its radical character looks to the most fundamental roots of life and survival. Those roots are embedded in the health and well-being of the planet on which we live. While there is much speculation, even serious research and experimentation regarding the possibilities for human settlements on other planets, it is not very likely that the majority of the human family will survive over the next generations, and perhaps centuries, if planet Earth cannot sustain life.

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Changes in the most basic life-giving capacity of the Earth, such as the reduction of the oxygen supply and soil erosion due to deforestation, the pollution of natural bodies of water, and the destruction of the ozone layer as a consequence of air pollution, severely threaten the health and well-being of our planet. Thus, the maintenance of ecological balance is viewed as a major security need, and problems such as the loss of our oxygen-producing rain forests are seen as threats to human security. As the lives of all are endangered by the devastation of the planet, the lives of many, in some areas of the world the majority, are threatened by the excessive deprivation of extreme poverty. Individuals, families, nations cannot be secure if they lack the basic necessities of life. Millions in the developing world suffer from lack of clean water sufficient to the needs of basic health and hygiene. Only a small percent of the world’s children receive secondary education, and millions remain illiterate, deprived of even a primary education. The world’s cities are populated by millions of homeless, among them abandoned street children, some of them in the most heavily ‘defended’ countries in the world. Famine stalks the planet. The fundamental security of the human family is severely undermined by these conditions. Philosophers and political scientists have often described the relationship between people and their governments as a social contract. The government, in return for the support and loyalty of citizens, promises to protect them from harm by outsiders and to assure conditions within the country which will enable the people to meet their needs, whether this is done by means of a free market economy, i.e., capitalism, or by a centrally planned economy, i.e., socialism, or a bit of both; the government, i.e., the nation state, is expected to assure order and provide the laws and circumstances necessary to enable the nation to produce the goods and services required to meet the needs of the people. Even in competitive societies, it is argued that this should be done fairly, that a government should not enact policies that are harmful to any of its citizens. The security of a nation depends on government’s commitment to the welfare of its people. Yet the ever increasing costs of the present military security system are so high that social and economic needs suffer badly. The arms race is as much a spending race as a weapons race. Military expenditures are constantly on the rise; even in those years when arms control agreements were reached there was no reduction in spending. The 1986 total of $900 billion is expected soon to reach 1 trillion. This is almost equal to the total debt of developing countries. This debt now threatens the entire world economy. A significant portion of it was accumulated through arms spending. The world is spending away its economic security as violence and conflict become more extreme. Thus, within a feminist framework, the military-dependent present world security system itself is seen as a major threat to human security. In fact, within this framework the security dimension which dominates the present system, protection from aggression or harm from other nations is viewed as the least severe. While there are severe international tensions and conflicts most of the warfare today takes place within nations, much of it brought on as reaction to deprivation.

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Feminists believe that national security policy is being formulated on the basis of the wrong questions. They assert there is an urgent need for women to be involved in the policy-making process. They also argue that there are signiﬁcant links between war and discrimination against women. These links they assert must be recognized so that two signiﬁcant obstacles to both negative and positive peace, militarism and sexism, can be overcome. If we are to get to the roots of war and to be enabled to create the foundations of a just and stable peace, then we must raise some essential questions about the links between the two problems, both of which are major forms of violence.

5.3 The Radical Questions: The Links Between Sexism and Militarism

The radical questions also can be seen to arise from feminist concepts of security, beginning with the notion of security as protection from attack and harm by others. Feminist research has revealed that women the world over are subject to excessive violence. Wife beating is common in many countries, sometimes causing death, and ‘dowry death’ or ‘bride burning’ has occurred so frequently as to shock the entire worldwide women’s movements. Thousands of women are enslaved to enforced prostitution or physically damaging work conditions, and millions stay in their homes or go abroad with anxiety because of the ever present threat of rape. Feminists, noting that violence against women is often more severe in more militarized countries, ask, is the mistreatment of women related to the willingness to kill that is required in warfare? It has also become more widely known through popular films as well as research that combat training often involves the use of language and comparisons that insult women and reflect hostility toward them. Feminists inquire into the possibility that the willingness to kill requires people to repress their feminine, caring characteristics which are natural to both men and women. Militarism and war can be maintained only in a hierarchical organization in which some give orders and others must follow them. While we do have the principle of individual responsibility not to follow an illegal order that was established at Nuremburg after the Second World War, combat does not generally allow for questioning and independence. The military system is one which depends on superior and inferior relationships between certain members. In that the essential social relationships between men and women are also superior-inferior, feminists raise the question of the significance of this relationship in socializing most people to believe in both the necessity and the inevitability of hierarchy and war. Feminist educators and child development specialists have noted that girl children are encouraged to be cooperative, to avoid conflict and to reject using force against others, to develop their feminine characteristics. Boy children are encouraged to be competitive, to confront those who challenge them and to exert superior strength to achieve their goals, to emphasize what are seen as masculine

[email protected] 70 5 Feminist Concepts of Peace and Security characteristics. The question thus arises as to whether peace requires more emphasis on the feminine. Does it in fact, as noted that many feminists assert, require the participation of more women in politics and diplomacy? These are but a few of the radical questions raised as feminists seek to get to the roots of the causes of war and the conditions of peace and security.

5.4 The Conservative Questions: Maintaining Authentic Global Security

A feminist concept of global security has been outlined as four fundamental dimensions. Authentic or true security can only be achieved by adequate attention to all four, and by recognizing that we have come to a stage of human history in which the whole of the human family becomes the group of concern. If we continue to put the concerns of one group, no matter how large (even a whole region of the world or a whole sex), above the interests of the rest, we will maintain a competitive, potentially conflictual global society which runs the risk of destroying itself; if not by nuclear war, then by ecological or economic collapse. Feminist concepts of security call for new questions to be raised as we struggle to formulate policies to lead us from violence and discrimination to peace and justice, to the preservation of the Earth and the survival of humanity. The necessity to maintain the health and life of planet Earth leads feminist to explore the ecological consequences of all security policy proposals, military and others. What, they ask, will be the impact of this proposal on the immediate environment in which it is to be carried out, and all related environments in the global ecological system? What will be its consequences in the present and in both the near and distant future? How will it affect the security of this generation and generations to come? Security seen as the fulfillment of fundamental human needs brings forth questions related to the economic and social consequences of security policies. Within a framework which emphasizes the feminine ethic of care, they start with inquiring into the consequences to the most vulnerable of the human family. How, it will be asked, will this policy affect the poor, the sick and infirm, children and the aged and the women who must care for them? The notion of security as a social contract in which the true security of all citizens is the major concern of the government will encourage questions about equity, fairness and discrimination. Every security policy must be measured against a standard of fairness as well as efficacy. Who will bear the burden? Will it fall more heavily on one group of citizens, or one area of the country than another? Will the costs be left to a future generation to pay? Are the real interests of the citizens to be well served by this policy? And finally, the notion of security as protection from harm raised within a feminist framework will ask questions providing a whole new approach to defense.

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Rather than asking will this policy help us to be strong enough to prevent attack or defeat an attacker, the central issue will be how can we dissuade others from wanting or needing to attack us? How can we resolve conflicts nonviolently and justly? How can we change relationships from hostility and competition to ami- cability and cooperation? How can we extend and strengthen the network of care, interdependence and authentic security so that it may encompass the globe and embrace the whole human family? How can we conserve and develop that family? Each of these major radical and conservative questions will lead to many other questions through which we can study the specific problems of conflict and violence and through which we may learn to achieve peace and justice.

[email protected] Chapter 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace

Retrospective Reﬂection on “A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace” (1994)

In preparation for the U.N.’s 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, UNE- SCO and the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW—which was later consolidated with UNIFEM into the current U.N. Women) each held preparatory “Experts’ Meetings,” later collaborating on a joint publication of some of the experts’ papers, Towards a Women’s Agenda for a Culture of Peace (UNESCO Press, 1999). The paper presented below was prepared for the DAW meeting, the first of the two sessions.1 It has never before been published. As one of the editors of the UNESCO volume, I deemed Carolyn Stephenson’s “Gender and the United Nations Agenda for Peace” to be more appropriate to that collection, so I contributed an alternative essay, “Women or Weapons,” now reproduced in a collection edited by Lester and Miriam Kurtz, Women, Peace and Security (Praeger, 2014). Reviewing the DAW piece for inclusion in this current volume in the Pioneers series, I find it illustrates a deepening analysis evolving through Phase 2 and a transition to the more overtly political work on the power issues of patriarchy as they affected developments in peace knowledge and security policy making that emerged in Phase 3. The purpose of the presentation to the DAW meeting was to illuminate the limitations inherent in the failure to include gender issues and perspectives in the framework within which the Secretary General presented his 1992 report, An Agenda for Peace—preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping. While the framework represented significant progress toward broader thinking about achieving peace and maintaining security, it lacked any reference to gender as a security factor, an obstacle to the comprehensiveness to which it aspired. It is

1 Paper presented to a December, 1994 U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women Experts Meeting held in preparation for the Fourth World Conference on Women.

[email protected] 74 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace evident that this critique springs from the evolving conceptualization of a feminist framework for human security constructed on a foundation of people’s quotidian security. Had gender perspectives been included, An Agenda for Peace could well have opened opportunities for a more fully inclusive conceptualization of security, taking into account the daily security of those directly affected by the policies of the member states. The critique asserts that it is the world political system itself and the mode of thinking that produces and maintains it that must be called into question. That assertion is the basic foundation for the argument on the need to address and transform global patriarchy that runs through the work of Phase 3. The essay includes ideas that led me to advocate even more strongly for women’s political empowerment, an advocacy that would inspire the women peace activists with whom I was associated to undertake the conceptual and lobbying processes that resulted in the adoption in 2000 of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security. Although it was to have an uneven history in implementation, even resistance to its political dimensions, UNSCR 1325 was the actualization of some of the future possibilities described in 1974 in “Women’s Movement’s and Human Futures.” The major breakthrough achieved by the resolution was the fulfillment in the form of a set of public policy goals of the potential of the very movements that inspired that earlier essay. The resolution also set a precedent for the policy making role of international civil society, a hopeful sign that sovereignty, the patriarchal bastion of the nation state might be transcended, by placing people’s actual well-being above the abstract power demands of the state, a reality unquestioned by the gender blindness evident in An Agenda for Peace. Indeed, a strong contradiction of feminist perspectives on security appears in the Secretary General’s assertion that the “fundamental sovereignty and integrity [of the State] is crucial to any common international progress.” From my own present perspective, that statement serves to validate my assertion that patriarchy in the form of sovereignty is the foundation of the international state system that presides over the global political order. Here also is the first statement of a definition of security that was to become integral to the evolving feminist framework of human security as it was elaborated in “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Critique of the Patriarchal Security System,” also included in this volume. The statement that the essence of security is “the expectation of well-being” is germinal to the discussions of human security that a few years in the future would become featured in U.N. approaches to development, but only marginally to peace. That marginality represents how little progress I perceived in what I refer to here as “extension and parallelism,” pointing out that aspects of well-being are treated as ‘add-ons,’ not integral components of peace and security and still secondary to militarized state security. I find this to be evidence of the continuation of the reductionist thinking that I and others have argued to be one of the most dysfunctional aspects of political realism, common to contemporary national and international policy making as based on patriarchal foundations. Two other limitations of “An Agenda” that have appeared in other critiques of political realism as applied to international politics in general and to the U.N. in

[email protected] 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace 75 particular are found here as well. First, is the failure to confront violence itself as the major problem of peace, focusing instead on conflict, consequently dealing primarily with symptoms rather than fundamental causes of the very violence that calls conflict to public attention. Nor is the role of alternatives to violence as the essential building blocks of peace suggested. The second of these two particular limitations is failure to observe the toxic effects of the weapons dependency of the present security system that makes possible violent conflict as well as much of the world’s social violence, including violence against women. The omission of men- tion of disarmament as the sine qua non of peace building overlooks one of the major factors supporting the continuation of the present patriarchal power structure. A situation that still inspires me to argue for a re-articulation of general and complete disarmament as the basic requirement of a just and sustainable peace, a means to transform patriarchy, bringing forth a gender equal global order. The arms-patriarchy symbiosis asserted during Phase 2 becomes a primary consideration of what I have actively advocated as core substance in both peace education and civil society activism throughout Phase 3.

Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

As most supporters of the U.N. who saw in the end of the Cold War what some of us called “the new moment” of opportunity, I greeted “An Agenda for Peace” with enthusiastic support. As a feminist, I was pleased to note the comprehensive and integrated approach the Secretary-General took in presenting his recommendations in the three major spheres of U.N. action for peace: peace-keeping, peacemaking and peace-building. I understood and accepted, that in so short a document a truly comprehensive, integral approach could not be fleshed out. I viewed the Secretary-General’s ‘Agenda’ as direction-setting and hoped that the promise it held for a more holistic and organic approach to peace would be vigorously pursued by the power wielders and policy makers, the governing elites of the member States, who also seemed to be awakening to a new global consciousness. Clearly, there were major peace and security concerns that received little or no attention in the Secretary-General’s 1992 message. But the initiatives of Agenda 21 could certainly be integrated, bringing the essential ecological dimension into the intended comprehensive approach. The Vienna Conference on Human Rights had not yet taken place, but it was anticipated as making a contribution to peace. And the 1994 report, “An Agenda for Development,” fully acknowledges the inadequacy of previous approaches that had not included economic and social security as essential bases for peace. But even in the “Agenda for Development” there is more the tone of “and also” when considering the inter-relationship between the economic and political dimensions of peace. The tone reflects what I would call an approach of ‘parallelism’ that has characterized the welcome and progressively comprehensive view of peace and security the U.N. has taken, one reflected in the currency of such terms as “food security” and “ecological security.” The approach, however, is still considerably short of the holism that characterizes feminist thought

[email protected] 76 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace and which is now called for by others than feminists as the essential mode of thought through which to approach planetary issues in an “ecological age.” Thus, this critique seeks not to criticize “An Agenda for Peace” for inadequacies of content, nor for misdirected intentions, for on both scores a feminist approach to peace and security would applaud the report as a ground-breaking and forward- looking document with an authentic global perspective. Indeed, feminists like other supporters of increasing the capacities of the United Nations to make, keep and build peace, lament the failure of member states to give their full support to ful- filling the Secretary-General’s vision, especially their delinquency in providing the essential material and financial support to fulfill the promise of that vision and to actualize the significance of the Nobel Prize for peacekeeping. The critique is one that raises questions about some of the perspectives and fundamental assumptions that determine virtually all current efforts in the peace and security area: global, multi-cultural and unilateral. As such it challenges not so much the ‘Agenda’ as the mode of thought of the system out of which it emerged. The report itself cannot be faulted for its uncritical stances toward state sovereignty and the primacy of the State as major agent and actor in the international system. For that is the system in which the United Nations must function. Indeed, the world organization is a creature of that system and exists at its sufferance; and it is the member states who still determine the capacities and functions of the United Nations. So it is that the limitations of the perspectives and assumptions of states are the limitations of the U.N. and of “An Agenda for Peace.” The most egregious of these is the absence of women in the formulation of the conceptualization of the interests of states and, consequently, in the conceptualization of the possibilities and processes to be advanced by the United Nations. One can conclude from this that the range of possibilities considered for the ‘Agenda’ was not so wide or creative as it might have been. There is no evidence that the Secretariat sought to compensate for this lack either in the preparatory consultations or in augmenting the advisers of NGOs with those of the women’s peace organizations whose views would not necessarily coincide with the male dominated “think tanks” and research organizations. This is not to say that some women both within the U.N. and outside did not have input into the ‘Agenda,’ but rather to observe that women as such were not represented adequately, nor were women’s issues of concern in the conceptualization of the report. The ‘Agenda’ speaks of authoritarian regimes giving way to more democratic forces as a global phenomenon, varied though the specific developments may be. Surely, this development held promise for less violence in all forms of political activity, including serious conflicts: yet violence at all levels of society, if anything, has increased, and intra-state armed conflicts have both challenged the vision of the report and shed light on the limits state sovereignty imposes on the range of responses that can be brought to the relief of human suffering and the containment of violence. Feminists who have noted how little this trend towards ‘democratization’ has improved the lot of women (indeed, in some cases it has been retrogressive, rolling back some social benefits former socialist states had provided, and in other

[email protected] 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace 77 instances imposing limits on women’s reproductive autonomy) observe that the new arrangements have not necessarily increased women’s power and political influence. Thus their perspectives and insights may be no more influential than they were under the old authoritarian regimes. “A nation,” Abraham Lincoln said, “cannot stand half slave and half free.” Neither can an authentically peaceful: international system emerge in a world where half the population is exclusively closed out of political power. The Secretary-General observes that “the concept of peace is easy to grasp; that of international security is more complex…” This statement perhaps more than any in the report demonstrates the difference between a perspective based on the male- controlled, state system and a feminist perspective based on women’s experiences of security. For women, especially those whose lives are primarily and totally devoted to the struggle for the day-to-day survival and well-being of families and other units of human support and intimacy, security is both simple and tangible. Security lies in the conditions of survival and well-being. It is peace, conceived as an amicable arrangement among states, that is abstract, remote from people’s experience and thus impossible “to grasp,” to take hold of as the reality of their lives, as they can take hold of the bread to feed their families or the books to educate their children. Peace may be an abstraction, but security is bread and books, and this is how most women conceive of it. It is, in fact, what peace researchers call “positive peace,” the conditions under which the forms of violence that give rise to war, poverty, repression, and degradation have been sufficiently reduced to assure the expectation of well-being that is the essence of security. The 1992 report certainly acknowledges the importance of these dimensions of security and the 1994 Agenda for Development emphasizes them; yet neither demonstrate a holistic perspective as previously noted, and neither fully acknowledges the evidence that women’s political exclusion and economic oppression are causal factors in war and poverty. Thus, whatever acknowledgment is made is done so in terms of extension and parallelism, terms that present two problems. First, the integral and organic relationships between these problems cannot be adequately illuminated so as to shed the light necessary for the requisite integrated solutions and approaches. Second, the urgent need to include women and women’s perspectives fully cannot be recognized, much less fulfilled. Examples of such consequences can be seen in the report’s reference to the seeming paradox of recognizing racism as a destructive force and dismantling apartheid in a time when new racial tensions are giving rise to violence. Racism is the lubricating notion that oiled the wheels of the colonial system and made it palatable to Western minds conditioned to democratic equality among their own kind. Racism, ethnocentrism, all such forms of moral exclusion and discrimination thrive only so long as they serve other political or economic purposes. “Dismantling Apartheid” has laid bare the true nature of the tasks in South Africa as now articulated by the present government: overcoming poverty imposed in the interest of an economic system that benefits only one segment of the society. Apartheid, however, could not be ‘dismantled,’ nor poverty overcome, without the full participation of those who had been oppressed by that system. That participation also

[email protected] 78 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace means different ways of doing politics and bringing alternative perspectives to bear. South Africa is a case that demonstrates the consequences of exclusion. If the violent conflicts among ethnic and racial groups are to be confronted as security issues, the entire system in which they occur must be considered. It is not enough to “search for just resolutions.” As the report notes, the “deepest causes” must be addressed. However, they should be addressed, not sequentially or merely simultaneously, but integrally as components of one problem, multiple forms of politically imposed and/or socially tolerated violence. This form of address is but one element of what could become a truly holistic approach, one that women’s participation could facilitate. None of the world’s problems can be adequately addressed without the full participation of women. Women’s exclusion is integral to the causes of these problems. Women’s problems are particular manifestations of all global problems. Women’s problems must be addressed in order to address any item on this or any other global agenda. Yet women’s exclusion is not noted as the threat to security that it truly is; but that could not be expected of this document. The report’s proposals in regard to armed conflict are clearly articulated in the comprehensive framework of the ‘Agenda.’ Conflict prevention procedures and processes for termination and resolution are unarguably essential elements of a peace system. Extending that process to peace-building and recognizing, as noted, the need to address the deepest causes is certainly the beginning of a more organic approach to peace and security that can grow and adapt to the changing needs of the international system. Those needs, however, are likely to include conflict; that is non-violent conflict directed towards positive social change. Indeed, the democracy which the Secretary-General hails as a positive development is essentially and foremost a condition in which political conflicts can be played out without the destruction of well-being, property, the environment, and that precious measure by which we have determined the intolerability of armed conflict, human life. Democracy sprang from the recognition that conflict need not be destructive, and that social change of any significant dimension is very likely to involve considerable degrees of conflict. Certainly, any serious attempt to overcome economic despair, redress social injustice and/or relieve political oppression will involve conflict. The “moral perception. … finding expression in international laws,” another positive evolution observed by the Secretary-General, while holding out hope for a legal order that can constructively manage non-violent conflict and set standards by which the “deepest causes” can be remediated by law, is still far from a universal set of norms generally observed by states. As the report points out, it is “inside [the borders of states] where individuals carry out the first order of their economic, political and social lives.” The point is made in suggesting some possibilities which are inimical to a feminist perspective; that as the “foundation stone” of the U.N.’s work, the State will continue to enjoy “respect for its fundamental sovereignty and integrity” as “crucial to any common international progress.” And further “if every ethnic, religious or linguistic group claimed statehood … peace and security and economic well-being for all would become ever more difficult to achieve.” In this statement feminists would find cause for actual disagreement, if only to avoid despair. For, we

[email protected] 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace 79 have to observe that the conditions listed as the “deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression” are imposed by states upon their own people or by some states upon other states. The theory of democracy is that the citizens, the governed, are the ultimate sovereign entity. If that sovereignty can only be exercised by the State in its present form, then not only “stateless persons” but all those who are excluded from full participation in determining the behavior of the state “inside (whose) borders” they “carry out the first order of their … lives” are not citizens. They are not part of the sovereign people. At best, they are subjects; at worst, and far too often, they are slaves. This holds true not only for minorities, but oppressed majorities (as under colonial rule or racist regimes) and certainly for women. Conflicts, often armed conflicts, have erupted and continue to erupt over this issue. Some of the major states of the world were born out of such conflict. Sovereignty itself is a security issue, and an important one. If it is not to continue to be an issue that produces violence as well as conflict, then two conditions must be met. Sovereignty must be re-examined as a concept, as a factor in the international system, and as a component of human security; and the definition and role of the State must be seriously reviewed. And most important, the consequences of state sovereignty for women’s full equality and their entitlement to rights outlined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women must be examined. Sovereignty is a women’s issue because it impacts on human rights and security, both of which are essential components of redressing the inequity women face in world society. These issues of legitimate sovereignty and authentic democracy raised by the exclusion of certain groups from political power, most numerous among them women, are not likely to be resolved without conflict; thus, women have a strong stake in the development and dissemination of non-violent conflict processes, not only in the resolution, but in the conducting of such conflicts. There is already much experimentation and experience with such processes that could serve to guide the inclusion in any “Agenda For Peace” of personnel to conduct such conflict, mediators to negotiate the terms of the conflicts and their resolutions, and inter- veners to maintain non-violence or to introduce it into actual or potentially violent situations. The independence of India, the Edsa revolution of the Philippines, the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia, and many smaller victories of non-violence attest to the practicality of including non-violence in the repertoire and structures of the United Nations’ efforts for peace-keeping, peace-making and peace-building. The ‘Agenda,’ in emphasizing preventative diplomacy, and the U.N. in its successful exercise of shuttle diplomacy, open the way to consideration of such extensions of peace processes. If the U.N. is to be able to perform adequately its present responsibilities for peace keeping and its growing responsibilities for humanitarian interventions, for assuring the integrity of new democratic procedures and ultimately for truly confronting “the deepest causes” of armed conflict, then a range of capacities in the realm of non-violent conflict will have to be developed. Clearly, the traditional means which depends on military forces assigned by member states for carrying out these tasks have proven inadequate in recent years.

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Without the assistance of qualified NGOs and humanitarian contributions such as the Japanese Self Defense Forces (who do not carry weapons),2 the U.N. could not have continued to this time some of its crucial efforts in areas of extreme violence. It is then the problem of violence which needs to be addressed more than the issue of conflict. For it is when conflict is conducted with weapons that it takes its greatest toll in life and well-being. A feminist perspective on peace and security thus problematizes violence and weaponry rather than conflict per se. The issue in regard to conflict is to transform the dominant modes of conducting conflict from destructive death and harm-producing methods (particularly weaponized and force-propelled conflict) to constructive social change and human betterment-producing methods. In short, this is a matter of learning and education, a field of endeavor to which women have been primary contributors. In problematizing violence, the focus must fall on weaponry. Weapons serve as the practical means to inflict violence for political purposes: also the symbolic purpose of demonstrating political power, a motive given too little attention except by most feminist analysis. The symbolic aspect of the U.N. perspective reflected in the ‘Agenda’ is comprehended under “confidence building” and “threat reduction.” In both cases, factors other than revealing or reducing weapons holdings make the symbolic possible; for example, factors affecting the relations between the parties involved or the obsolescence of the weapon in question. However, a feminist analysis views the impulse to acquire weaponry propelled not only by threat, but by the desire to manifest power, to demonstrate the ability to coerce, often segments of the “sovereign people;” lest they seek to actually exercise their sovereignty or threaten “the state.” This is simply shorthand for the male elites who control the apparatus of the state. Feminists see a close relationship between this impulse and the continued oppression of women, a relationship extensively described and analyzed in the growing literature on women and peace. Thus a feminist perspective would see disarmament not as a collateral development to the processes described in “An Agenda for Peace,” but as the core of the restructuring needed to carry out these processes. It is not that disarmament is not taken into account in the ‘Agenda,’ but as with the notion that “social peace is as important as strategic peace,” it is construed as parallel. It is not seen as integral, a fundamental component of one process: a process of demilitarizing conflict and security, a process that must be centered in the reduction and elimination of weaponry, a concept even broader and more organic than general and complete disarmament, a process women have advocated for generations. The ‘Agenda’ supports the notion of demilitarization in some of the traditional ways such as the establishment of “demilitarized zones” in a post-conflict situation and as a component of peace-building. It is not, however, seen as the central process

2 Current (2014) moves toward making the Self Defense Forces into a “normal military force” are opposed by feminists and peace advocates.

[email protected] 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace 81 of transformation feminists agree to be essential to authentic security, and certainly necessary to the realization of full equality between men and women. Again, militarism and militarization as the bastions and bulwark of patriarchy have been thoroughly explored in feminist literature on global problems. It is simply observed here as preamble to the main elements of a feminist perspective that would make the ‘Agenda’ not only more relevant to women, but feminists would argue, a more effective framework for realizing the objective of strengthening the U.N.’s capacities to make and keep peace. Peace is not possible under patriarchy, the essential common factor in virtually all states, and thus in all interstate arrangements, lamentably including the United Nations. There seems to be only limited realization of this ‘situation’ (feminists would say ‘fact’) among those who now control the peace and security discourse and those who set the policy. If peace is a consequence of demilitarization it is also to be recognized and measured in terms of human rights. If the relationship between democracy and peace specifically acknowledged in the ‘Agenda’ extends to the relationship between democracy and human rights, then the essential aspect of human rights as the foundation of peace is even more significant than described in the U.N. Charter or even the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is no more widespread denial of human rights than the denial of the full humanity and social agency to women in nearly all societies, even those with “protective legislation” and those that have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Women’s struggle for their own human rights is at the core of the most effective struggles for peace. Women’s participation, women’s perspectives pose not merely questions of equity and justice, but questions about the future of humanity. So long as patriarchy which sustains itself through coercive power remains unchallenged, weaponry will be part of human society and peace will never be, in the Secretary-General’s words, “easy to grasp.” It will elude and tantalize. The violence that brutalizes women in their own homes is not a separate problem from the violence that dehumanizes citizens within their own borders, nor even separate from the violence that people of one race, members of different ethnic groups, or citizens of different states suffer in their own regions. It is made possible by the continued acceptance of force in human affairs, and the existence of weaponry as the ultimate assurance of order and security. It is made inevitable by closing out perspectives other than those of the State and those who control states. It can be made more addressable, perhaps even overcome, by the inclusion of other perspectives, first and foremost those of women. From a feminist perspective, “An Agenda for Peace” is a promising start, the fulfillment of which requires the full participation of women and full attention to their perspectives, concerns and experiences. Their perspectives would tend to go even beyond comprehensiveness to holism. Their concerns are with the quality of ordinary, daily life. And their experience is in establishing and maintaining relationships that provide for survival and well-being. I submit that these are the very qualities which must be brought to the design of a truly effective global security

[email protected] 82 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace system, and that they could grow out of the framework offered in “An Agenda for Peace.” Women’s perspectives tend towards holism as by and large in their traditional roles they deal with multiple activities of a wider range than is called for in most men’s roles. Traditional roles, wherein the primary perception of women’s function was as bearer and care giver to children and keeper of the home, more often than not also involved the fields that produced their own and their families’ food, the market place where their crops and crafts were traded for other needs and income, and the factory where they were paid little for the tedious work that brought home the food they prepared. Even for those whose lives revolved mainly about the tasks of home and children, multiple functions that required breadth of view were per- formed. Until today, such lives are common to women, large numbers of whom work in two households, in some cases making it possible for transitional women to enter the ‘workplace’ (a term suggesting that what women do outside professions, formal business and industry is not work). However, most transitional women, those whose presence in the measured economy is acknowledged, do not have the benefit of the domestic labor of other women. They, too, still perform multiple functions. Though many now have some help from their male partners (‘help’ indicating that household chores are still seen as primarily women’s responsibility), they carry out at least dual roles as wage earner and hearth-keeper. Growing numbers are also entering the political arena. For many of them in the early stages of political activity, this is a third role. For most, it continues in this way as they volunteer for political parties and social causes. These women and their mothers, the housewives who stayed at home and cultivated citizens associations, some now major international NGOs, have a vast experience in the full range of the men’s world, and can bring to it the fresh perspective of the ‘outsider;’ for thus they are still perceived, even while making significant substantive contributions. This perception, sadly, relegates their perspectives to the margins of political decision- making where traditional politics have usually kept ‘unprofessional’ activities. It is to the credit of the United Nations, and a significant source of hope, that it now actively courts cooperation with NGOs. If this cooperation were to intentionally and vigorously involve women’s peace organizations, the holistic perspectives now on the margins might move toward the center of policy making for peace and security. These organizations are the creatures of transformational women, those who consciously envision and work for a transformed world order of authentic, multi- dimensional global security. Most of them see clearly the link between women’s integration into public affairs and the possibility for a more peaceful public order. They hold visions of transformational proportions that guide daily efforts to achieve small-scale individual changes within the context of a comprehensive, organically derived set of inter-related changes that comprise the transformation. They are practical utopians, envisioning the most positive possibilities while pursuing the practical and achievable. This is the holistic perspective that women could bring to the design and pursuit of an effective global security system. Holism and pragmatism are, to the contrary of conventional wisdom, not mutually exclusive. They complement and strengthen each other as the tiniest

[email protected] 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace 83 tentacles of giant root systems contribute to the vitality of the tallest trees. Were these tentacles to be damaged or destroyed, the tree might not survive. Utopian visions do not thrive in the absence of practical actions, but practical actions cannot be transformational unless they are imbedded in a holistically conceived vision. Women’s concerns with the quality of daily life have as much to do with the survival possibilities for a positive future as they do with present well-being. Women know that a positive future is retarded by today’s physical deprivation and the spiritual distortions of a violent society. Mothers organized against lethal weapons in schools or in international conflicts are struggling both for the immediate survival of their children and for their future well-being and the security of their grandchildren. Daily concerns for the quality of life in a future perspective is, like practical action within a holistic vision, an essential perspective for what is referred to as “long range security interests.” Women can also bring their perspectives to discussions of international security for this and coming generations. Their experience in meeting today’s needs to fulfill hopes for tomorrow has helped women to understand the realities of human individual and social interactions; which leads them to value the construction and maintenance of positive human relationships, a characteristic validated by social psychologists, not all of whom are feminists. More than any other condition or quality, mutually enhancing relationships are the guarantor of security. This is true when considering the relationship between family members, neighbors, development and environment, and certainly between polities, be they states or other political entities. Global interdependence badly managed causes economic stress, environmental destruction, and political tensions. Positively and constructively managed, it can produce economic well-being, environmental balance and political cooperation. Women’s experience as managers of human relations in various social settings provides a perspective here-to-fore missing in most political interactions. Interactions conceived from the perspective of the state, an abstraction with little human character, are quite different than interactions conceived from the perspective of people. Whether it is the value of democracy, the hopes for the future, or immediate crises of violent conflict, the human dimension is essential to understanding the problems and devising the solutions. Applied directly to “An Agenda for Peace,” these dimensions of women’s experience that comprise a feminist perspective would augment the framework in some of the following ways. Preventive diplomacy would be contextualized not only within a comprehensive framework for prevention of one of a series of crises, but in the long range to undertake changes to make conflict less likely and violence unacceptable. Deployment of personnel would be arranged so as to begin to address the “deepest causes” as well as the immediate hostilities and the humanitarian assistance they may necessitate. The Secretary-General’s emphasis on the complementary potential of regional arrangements would be extended to consider and include regional integration toward the mutual benefit and thus the material security of previously hostile neighbors. Peace-making would involve creating more understanding of the mutual benefits of positive relations and fully uncovering the sources of fear and concern that tend

[email protected] 84 6 A Feminist Critique of An Agenda for Peace to push conflicts toward violence. It would involve putting into place not only a settlement of particular conflict, but processes whereby future conflicts could be non-violently conducted as well as settled. Mediation teams comprised equally of men and women would be dispatched to plan such arrangements within the context of both regional and global security. The expertise of NGOs in these areas would be fully exploited. Peace-keeping would be conceived as military only in its need to contain actual violence. Interpositional forces of unarmed personnel specifically trained in non-violent intervention and containment procedures would stand ready for deployment. The experience of Witness for Peace can help to guide such non-violent interpositional forces. New concepts of ‘policing,’‘defense’ and ‘security’ would be devised in light of the goals of minimizing and eliminating violence, so that conflict and contention can take place when they are socially and practically necessary. It is with the inspired notion of “peace building,” calling upon what the Secretary-General describes as the U.N.’s “wider realm of work for peace,” that a feminist perspective is most congenial and to which women can make their most significant contribution. For the task of peace-building is the construction of positive, mutually-enhancing relations among peoples. While it may be states which negotiate and establish the relationships, they are supposedly made in the name of and in the interest of the peoples of states. Clearly, women remain in closer touch with people than some leadership that is too absorbed into the abstraction of the state: women, as observed, have long and successful experience in relation- building. These are brief, somewhat simplistic, suggestions; but in a longer work and as the fruit of discussions such as those to take place at this expert’s meeting, they could be “fleshed out” to full and practical possibilities that would bring the organic, holistic (i.e. comprehensive), living, changing dimension to security planning which a feminist perspective advocates. Women have been reputed for centuries to be primarily creatures of the flesh; thus while we reclaim recognition of our share of the human spirit and demand that the feminine intellect be given equal value, we can use the experiences of nourishing flesh and bone to nourish the possibilities of global security suggested by “An Agenda for Peace.”

Reference

A/47/277-S/24111, 17 June 1992: “An Agenda for Peace—Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping”, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to the Statement Adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992.

[email protected] Part III Assertion of Patriarchy as Fundamental to Peace and Peace Education 1995–2013

[email protected] Chapter 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective

Retrospective Reﬂection on “Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective” (2007)

The following Phase 3 selection (abbreviated from the original archived in full in the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, The University of Toledo)1 is a clear convergence of peace education with gender issues. Among other published intentionally planned convergences was Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective (UNESCO 2001) a more practical, curricular work in which I made something of an attempt to propose a course of study, organized—as we advocate in this piece—around the concept and problematic of gender. I see this essay as an attempt to provide a theoretical rationale, deriving from that and similar practical teaching experiences. That UNESCO publication was used in teacher education, especially in Eastern European and South Asian countries, where educators produced their own translations, augmenting UNESCO’s English, Spanish and French versions. More to the point for the purposes of this volume, this essay introduces a transition from Phase 2 analyses of the gender and peace problematic to an overt assertion that the problem is patriarchy itself; an argument put forth more directly in Phase 3. That argument stems from a more comprehensive concept of what comprises gender that includes taking account of masculinities, and advancing the claim that patriarchy oppresses men as well as women. The piece also represents, on my part, the start of a greater focus on the structural, less obvious but very powerful, psycho-social effects of the global gender order, as a manifestation of patriarchalism. Phase 3 is characterized by a more complex view of the gender/

1 This text was ﬁrst published with Tony Jenkins as “Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective”, in: J. Galtung and C. Webel (Eds.): Handbook of Peace and Conﬂict Studies (New York: Routledge, 2007): 209–231. The permission to republish this text here was granted on 14 March 2014 by: Ms. Lizzy Yates, Permissions Administrator, Taylor & Francis Royalties Department, Andover, Hampshire.

[email protected] 88 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective peace problematic than that which imbued the argument for a convergence of feminist and peace scholarship made in Sexism and the War System in 1985. The evolution of the published version of this article—written with Tony Jenkins, a younger male colleague—is indicative of the on-going struggle to move gender from a special but side-line place in the field to the central and integral one for which we argue here. Upon submission to the editors, we were instructed that gender and patriarchy were not paramount among the multiple factors in the peace problematic, but rather a collateral issue to the central concerns, so our contribution should be written accordingly. Experiencing what a great American base- ball philosopher once called “déjà vu all over again,” we determined to further deepen and clarify our argument for gender as primary substance for peace studies, making it the core of the essay. Were it refused for inclusion, we would seek publication elsewhere. It was not refused. Indeed, it was even included in a second edition of the volume, and has become fairly widely read. In this collaboration with Tony Jenkins, a colleague two generations removed from my formation and one of the current generation of male peace educators who adhere to the principle of gender equality as an end to be pursued through peace knowledge, we sought to argue for the need to confront the complexity of gender, not only its relevance, but its centrality to the peace problematic, raising issues that relate to most problems considered by the field. Although more men peace studies practitioners have come to accept that gender equality is an essential peace issue, few have addressed the global gender order or patriarchy per se. The argument favoring moving gender from a special, but still peripheral or parallel place in the field to a central and integral one continues and, at last extends to the wider professional community (at the time of this writing it is the topic of a lively exchange on the Peace and Justice Studies Association list serve). So, too, efforts to promote holism in addressing all aspects of the peace problematic continue in both peace studies and peace action as the holists seek to place such issues as gender violence in armed conflict in the wider context of its integral role in the war system. The editors’ first reactions to our essay illustrate the tensions plaguing the peace research and peace studies “establishment” between a reluctance to publicly embrace a concept formerly rejected, even derided, and the generational differences placed on the imperatives of gender equality. Such tensions are to some degree still evident, not only in the fields of peace studies and peace action, but also in a growing public discourse on social issues involving sex and gender. The traditional impediments to the full integration of gender into peace research and peace studies posed by these tensions are augmented by a reluctance to take up holism as an approach equally valid with, and complementary to, indeed a framework for, analysis. As noted above, we point out in the essay that there is an emerging field of serious scholarship in masculinities studies (still largely overlooked by peace studies) that complements feminist scholarship, providing a solid foundation for the holistic gender framework we deem to be necessary to adequate understanding and to confronting of the whole of the complex peace problematic. The wider notions of gender that form the framework of this essay anticipate ongoing observations and reflections on gender, impelling me to explore in greater

[email protected] 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective 89 depth the multiple functions of gender within the complexities and pervasiveness of patriarchy. These explorations of necessity will involve viewing gender and patriarchy in the contexts of peace politics and the epistemology of peace knowledge. Each of the next two pieces selected from Phase 3 illustrates aspects of that exploration.

Betty A. Reardon New York, June, 2014

7.1 Introduction: Toward a New Phase of the Inquiry into Gender and Peace

The authors of this chapter are peace educators who believe that peace knowledge in all its forms constitutes one field from which multiple forms of learning relevant to the tasks of educating and acting for peace can be gleaned. We have drawn upon all of them, the fruits of peace research, the substance of university peace studies, the methodologies of peace education and practical peace action in the development of the pedagogies we practice. We adhere to educational methods consistent with the values of justice and nonviolence that inform the pursuit of peace knowledge. These are built upon a verifiable knowledge base, informed by sound theories, and directed toward developing the capacities of learners to make normative judgments based on the values, apply the knowledge and verify or refute the theories through inquiry and communal learning. These methods imbue the approach we take to gender and peace as considered in this essay as well as in our professional practice. They reflect adherence to principles of holism in inquiry into problems and in exploration of possible resolutions of, or means to, transcend the problems of peace that we take in sum to be the problematic of violence. These are the premises that underlie the following discussions that will reflect upon the possibility that gender, the social roles of and social distinctions between men and women, when fully perceived, is not only as the United Nations refers to it, a cross-cutting issue, affecting most problems and areas of concern to peace knowledge, but also one possible core of a holistic study of the central problematic of violence. Because of this cross-cutting character and the universality of gender concerns, might not gender also serve as an organizing concept around which to build studies not only of gender equality and peace, but as the potential core of a systematic inquiry into the possibilities for the transformation of the present violent world order? We also ask whether such a transformation is possible without recognizing, dismantling and forswearing various institutions and habits of patriarchy that we perceive as integral to the present global culture of violence, a major factor affecting such problems as denial of human rights, economic inequity, ecological deterioration and armed conflict. Taken as a whole these problems comprise all that we have come to consider as the war system, those pervasive habits and institutions of political, economic, social and cultural violence that are a major impediment to

[email protected] 90 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective peace and human security. We hope that others concerned with the role of gender in the creation and dissemination of peace knowledge would join in an inquiry into the illumination of contemporary forms of patriarchy as a complement and extension to what has gone before in the evolution of the field of gender and peace. We define patriarchy, as does Joshua Goldstein, as the ‘social organization of men’s control of power’.2 The topic as presented in this volume is classified as knowledge supporting peace; we, however, ask is not this problematic of gender as constitutive to peace knowledge as are conflict studies or any of the other topics here categorized as central to the substance of peace studies?

With students in graduate seminar on gender and peace issues at Teachers College Columbia University in late 1990s

The ﬁeld of gender and peace has evolved through various phases, each with a perspective based on the concerns of its time. All phases, however, found some roots in the problematic of patriarchy, a social and cultural construct that has not only privileged men over women, but can be seen as a paradigm for other forms of authoritarianism, hierarchy and inequality. It is precisely the ‘patriarchal privilege’ as it is termed by Michael Kaufman,3 that is the common thread that runs through the development of the ﬁeld as it does through women’s and men’s struggles for gender justice.

2 Goldstein, J. War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3 Kaufman, M. (1999) The Seven P’s of Men’s Violence, at: http://www.whiteribbon.ca.

[email protected] 7.1 Introduction: Toward a New Phase … 91

Peace education is concerned with developing pedagogies that enable learners to think in terms of complexities beyond the standard curricula on controversial issues that usually teach students to consider little more than the two major opposing positions involved in the public discourse on the issues in question. It also seeks to enable learners to confront and explore some highly charged social issues, that have personal valence for most people, in as deeply reflective and socially responsible a manner as possible. Gender and the contending theories about its formation and significance is such an issue. It is well known that the peace education has been influenced by Freirean pedagogy.4 The Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, advocated practice of a dialogic pedagogy of reflection and action that was one of the foundations of critical pedagogy practiced by many peace educators. But it is not so widely known that feminist pedagogy that addresses the significance of the personal dimensions to classroom discussion and learning has also had a profound effect on the work of many peace educators. In this regard, the work of Belenky et al. described in Womens’ Ways of Knowing and the work of Carol Gilligan on gender differences in moral decision-making are very relevant to peace education practice.5 Gender differences in ways of learning and knowing, which we believe to be, largely, but not entirely, the consequence of gender relations and the differences in the socialization experiences of boys and girls, provide some of the multiple ways of thinking that are essentially human. They offer the same possibility as cultural differences for broadening the learning and knowing repertoire necessary to understanding and analyzing the complexities of the challenges of overcoming violence and achieving peace. Gender differences are a primary basis for understanding both multiple ways of knowing and varying perspectives on peace problems. For feminist peace scholars these complexities were further evidence of the need to include in the growing ‘canon’ of peace studies the issues and perspectives they had argued to be integral to addressing the central purposes of the field, developing the knowledge necessary to reduce violence and advance justice. They argued that the failure to include these considerations militated against achieving the purposes for which peace knowledge was being produced and advanced through research and education. It took over a decade of professional discussions and arguments to gain general recognition of the cogency of the feminist arguments. Some specifics of these developments will be noted below as we discuss some of the political dimensions of gender and peace.

4 Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). 5 Belenky, M.F., McVicker Clinchy, B., Rule Golberger, N. and Mattuck Tarule, J. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986). See also: Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[email protected] 92 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective 7.2 Connecting Women, War and Political Participation

The national and military valorization of motherhood was poignantly evident during the two world wars of the twentieth century. The value that patriarchal, nationalist popular culture placed on motherhood and its vital contribution to the maintenance of fighting forces served as a means to deflect the potential influence of the more political anti-war arguments women were advancing and to impede the drive for women’s suffrage, seen as a way for women to have more political influence over war, peace and other public matters. Lack of the vote, however, did not prevent the American and European women’s active political involvement, not only in forms of passive resistance, but in instances of political intervention such as the aforementioned international women’s campaigns to avert the First World War that produced the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Launched in this Euro-American peace initiative, WILPF now has national chapters throughout the world, with significant leadership from developing countries.6 WILPF, in a framework of values of justice and peace, made a significant contribution to the development of the integrated, holistic approach that the international peace education movement began to advocate in the 1980s. From its earliest days WILPF made clear connections between what later became recognized as the integral relationship between peace and human rights and contributed to the growing belief that more democratic governments would be less likely to engage in warfare.7 This argument advanced by others has also been put forth by feminists who argue that the extreme underrepresentation of women in most spheres of government documented in U.N. studies precludes claims of the majority of states to be democracies.8 Interpretations of the rationale for the Second World War, which saw the Western democracies allied in the war, tended to strengthen rather than undermine the argument since the popular interpretation was that these nations had taken up arms to defend democracy against dictatorship. This argument, along with the ‘gender bending’ contributions women made to the successful conduct of the war, was taken up by some in the women’s movement in the post-Second World War period in a new phase of feminism. What was to become the international women’s movement along with anti-colonialism and anti-racism movements, arose to demand the fulfillment of the promises of the avowed purposes of the war, to defend democracy, and in the aftermath, to assure human rights as one means to

6 Foster, C. Women for all Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia, 1989). 7 The integral and essential relationships among peace, human rights and gender equality are foundational to the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 8 See: Gierycz, D. ‘Women in decision-making: can we change the status quo?’, in I. Breines et al. (Eds.): Toward a Women’s Agenda for a Culture of Peace (Paris: UNESCO, 1999). The argument that democracies don’t wage war on each other has been advanced by Rudolf Rummel, author of Rummel, R.W. Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).

[email protected] 7.2 Connecting Women, War and Political Participation 93 prevent further wars.9 The issues of anti-colonialism and to some extent issues of racial justice found their way onto the research agendas and into the syllabi of peace scholars, but such was not the case with feminist or women’s issues. Well into the 1970s questions that we now refer to as gender issues were considered by all but a very few peace researchers—those few were mainly feminists—to have little or no relevance to peace. In the first three editions published in 1972, 1978 and 1981 of the compendium of peace studies syllabi, Peace and World Order Studies, no courses on women’s or gender issues or approaches were included. The next issue, published in 1983—the only one edited by a woman—contained five syllabi on the topic in the section with the least entries of any of the topics included. In the edition of 1989, the topic is one of four sections containing only three syllabi—the other three being: ecological balance, alternative futures, education and teacher training, all topics which a gender perspective on peace education considers integral to the holistic approach it favors. Through these two decades of the 1970 and 1980s feminists and activists with WILPF in the lead insisted on a significant, undeniable interrelationship among the various justice issues of the post-war era that ultimately became the domain of positive peace. One of the unifying concepts was exclusion from and marginalization in politics of disempowered groups. Most of the groups becoming engaged in struggles to achieve a voice in policy-making, participation in their own governance, their places on research agendas and in university and school curricula previously had been for the most part excluded from all these policy realms. Some saw this exclusion as the intentional dominance of the powerful over the powerless to maintain their privileges, rationalized by their greater capacity for the exercise of power. But others began to take a more system-based view, suggesting that the international power-based system itself was the major impediment to justice and peace, bringing the question of alternatives and system change into classroom inquiries and to the design of research projects.10 The questions that formed this inquiry lead to theorizing the links among these forms of exclusion, the economic and political oppressions they rationalized and the institution of war, and, ultimately, to a more systematic analysis of patriarchy and its hold on so many social and institutional systems from school curricula, to church hierarchy, to the corporate world, governmental structures and the security establishment.

9 How the society reneged on this promise and the meaning of the war work experience to the modern women’s movement is dealt with in Honey, M. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender and Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 10 Notable among these was the World Order Models Project. Most active during the 1970s and 1980s, it brought together an international team of scholars to research and propose alternatives to the existing order.

[email protected] 94 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective 7.3 Advances in International Standards: Women’s Equality and Peace

WILPF, along with various other women’s organizations, took a leading role in the activities surrounding the United Nations’ International Decades for Women from 1975–1985 to 1985–1995. Under the general themes of equality, development and peace, concerted efforts were made by the U.N. and associated NGOs to advance women’s legal equality, political participation and involvement at all levels of economic development from planning through assessment. It was in the arena of development that the negative consequences of gender inequality and gender-biased cultural practices became so evident. Issues of advancing the roles and participation of women in the U.N. system and setting standards to increase their participation in the politics and economies of the member states achieved wider public attention. They were also given more consideration in the field of peace knowledge by those who believed that the U.N. diagnosis of the relationship between gender and development and the assessments of the consequences of women’s marginalization in the development process vividly illustrated the concept of structural violence. The research on women’s economic impoverishment and exclusion from economic policy-making was to become a significant factor in both feminist and human rights arguments on the definitions of human security and what comprises it that arose in the 1990s.11 For our purposes of illuminating the peace knowledge consequences of these exclusions, the most significant critiques came from feminist political scientists and international relations scholars. We find the most relevant to our perspective to be the works of Cynthia Cockburn of the UK and Anne Tickner and Cynthia Enloe of the US who offer strong argumentation about much of what peace research and most of the peace movement consider wrong-headed and destructive policies and practices in the international system. They suggest that the failure to give adequate consideration to alternatives to the politics of force can be attributed to a significant degree to the limitation on and in many cases exclusion of women and women’s perspectives from the security policy discourse.12 These assertions informed the efforts of UN- associated NGOs to convene the October 2000 open session of the Security Council that issued Security Council Resolution 1325 (SC 1325), calling for the equal representation of women in peace and security negotiations and policy-making.

11 Boserup, E. Woman’s Roles in Economic Development (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1970). 12 The work of Cynthia Enloe, J. Anne Tickner and Cynthia Cockburn have been especially helpful. Their arguments are among the inﬂuences leading to our advocacy of the inclusion of gender perspectives in the study of and inquiry into all issues of peace, security and other related topics of the peace problematic. See especially, Enloe, C. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Enloe, C. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Cockburn, C.The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conﬂict (London: Zed Books, 1998); and Tickner, J.A. Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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Gender exclusion refers not only to lack of women’s participation, but also and especially ignoring the human consequences of gender-blind policies as they are experienced by both men and women. Such exclusion has also negatively impacted men, especially those at lower levels of political power, a problem not yet systematically addressed. Recognition of the impact of gender exclusion set into motion innovations in U.N. policy and norm setting that reciprocally affected and were affected by women’s studies and a bit later by feminist scholarship such as that noted above. The most significant of U.N. normative gender standards were the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW 1980), the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women (1993), the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) and Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).13 These documents constitute a line of awareness and assertion of public responsibility for the achievement of women’s equality in political, economic, social and cultural arenas, complementing and extending the preceding major emphasis on legal equality—although this still remains a significant and controversial issue in various societies. With the latter two documents, protection of women from gender-based violence, including and especially military violence, was designated as a fundamental human right. The inclusion of women in peace and conflict negotiations and security policy-making was declared by the U.N. to be essential to democracy and the achievement of this right. SC 1325 has become an important basis of action to implement all these gender relevant international norms, serving as a political tool for international peace groups as well as women’s NGOs. It is also a powerful example of collaboration between NGOs and the U.N., and between women and men. The developments making the resolution possible were set in motion in 1999 by Anwarul K. Chowdhury, who was then the U.N. Ambassador from Bangladesh and president of the U.N. General Assembly. His words quoted below attest to his commitment to its purposes:

The potential of Resolution 1325, its implications and impact in real terms are enormous. That women make a difference when in decision- and policy-making positions is no longer in dispute. When women participate in peace negotiations and in the crafting of a peace agreement, they keep the future of their societies in mind. They have the broader and longer-term interest of society in mind. Whereas, historically in post-conﬂict situations, men are interested in ensuring that the peace process will give them the authority and power that they are seeking. A lasting peace cannot be achieved without the participation of women and the inclusion of gender perspectives and participation in peace processes.14 Thus, through this human rights route over the terrain of positive peace, the issue of gender as it relates to negative peace, the actual gendered experiences and

13 We do not list the documents issued by the U.N. women’s conferences of 1980 and 1985 for we do not ﬁnd that they made substantive contributions to either the knowledge or normative base of an inclusive, holistic approach to gender and peace. The 1985 Forward Looking Strategies, however, did note that violence against women was an obstacle to peace (paragraph 258). 14 Anwarul K. Chowdhury, United Nations Under-Secretary General, Presentation at the 86th Wilton Park Conference, Sussex, England, 30 May 2005.

[email protected] 96 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective consequences of war and peace within the sphere of traditional concepts of security became an important focus of the international gender discourse. With a particular focus on the multiple forms of sexist violence suffered by women in most societies and the effects of armed conflict on women, came recognition that these multiple forms of violence both in times of apparent peace as well as in times of war were interconnected in a global culture of violence. These trends illuminated and brought wider attention to the gender inequality—war interconnections. Understanding the interconnections in turn led more feminist scholars, researchers and peace activists, among them those in the Peace Education Commission of the International Peace Research Association, to adopt as a working premise the assertion that gender violence is one component of an essentially violent patriarchal international system. These interconnections were integral to a statement from the 1983 consultative meeting of what was to become IPRA’s Women and Peace Commission. The statement identified the interconnections as ‘a continuum of violence which links the violence against women to the violence of war.’ The consultation also asserted that there were, ‘connections between patriarchy, militaristic structures and values and direct violence’.15 The assertion was that patriarchy has been maintained through the monopoly on power held by the men at the top of the hierarchical order rationalized by a claim of male superiority. The power is manifest in the hierarchy’s control of force. These assertions were later to become a subject of further analysis by masculinities scholars in exploration of the connections between masculine identities and aggressivity. Some of their conclusions will be elaborated on later in this chapter. Similar assertions were also echoed in a statement from a preparatory meeting for the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women organized by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women in December 1994.16 During the 1980s when there was a quantum leap in literature on women, peace and security there was also a wider acknowledgement that violence, the institutions, habits of mind and behaviors that perpetuate it comprise what had been defined as the war system.17 We now argue that war is an essentially patriarchal institution. But patriarchy itself was not the subject of wide study for some years to come. Only now is it emerging as a central focus among scholars in masculinities studies, feminist peace and human rights activists whose analytic attention has turned to a more concentrated and systematic consideration of patriarchy as it manifests in contemporary institutions, policies and phenomena.18

15 International Peace Research Association (1983) Conclusions of the Consultation on Women, Militarism and Disarmament, Hungary: Gyor. 16 United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, ‘Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Gender and the Agenda for Peace’, United Nations Headquarters, New York, 5–9 December 1994. 17 Reardon, Sexism and the War System. 18 The ﬁrst and deﬁnitive work on patriarchy was by historian, Gerder Lerner. Lerner, G.The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). It is Lerner who made the clearest distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as a cultural construct.

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We use the phrase ‘apparent peace’ above to describe the context for which violence against women occurs outside actual war and to call attention to the on- going conditions of structural violence endured by vulnerable groups under the present global economic system, also, and especially, to take note of the gendered nature of the social and cultural violence that has been described as ‘the war against women’.19 This war rages in most times and places whether or not societies are engaged in armed conﬂict. We would argue that there has been an invisible theatre of combat in this gender war, ‘the war against men’. Patriarchy is an ‘equal opportunity’ destroyer of both women and men. As we recommend below, an inclusive gender perspective that takes into account patriarchy’s disadvantages to both men and women offers a unique opportunity to engage in transformational learning toward a peaceful, just and gender equal global order. We believe that a transformation process would require the extension of human rights standards intended to achieve gender justice to include all men and women of all sexualities, gender orientations and identities.20

7.4 Violence Against Women: Gendered Link Between Human Rights and Peace

CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the 1980 ‘women’s human rights convention’, was a culmination of the campaign for equality women’s groups have been waging since the founding of the United Nations. It comprises a review of most of the forms of discrimination and oppression of women as they had been perceived and studied to that point. Its emphasis on the economic, social and cultural factors underlying the lack of legal and political equality echoed the concerns of the larger human rights movement that this sphere of rights had too long taken a back seat to civil and political rights. The separation between the two spheres of human rights impeded the holistic view of the field that a growing number of human rights advocates argued to be essential to the institutionalization and realization of universal human rights. It became the preferred frame-work for the U.N.’s human rights efforts when it was noted as constitutive to the field in the final document of the 1993 International Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna. As peace educators, we advocate this holistic perspective as a comprehensive framework for the study of positive peace, arguing that the realization of human

19 French, M. The War against Women (New York: Summit Books, 1992). 20 We recognize that this chapter does not deal with human rights violations and violence against persons of other than heterosexual identities, but we believe it is a signiﬁcant manifestation of gender violence, also largely attributable to patriarchy.

[email protected] 98 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective rights is the most practical means to the achievement of positive peace. We also consider that a holistic human rights perspective is integral to a truly inclusive gender perspective that in the mode of holism includes the whole spectrum of sexualities, heterosexual, transsexual, bisexual and homosexual, all gender identities. CEDAW is not adequate to the fulﬁllment of human rights as they would pertain to all these groups; nor does it address the problem of gender violence of any type, not even that perpetrated against women that became a focus of a women’s human rights campaign in the next decade. The origins of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, issued by the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993, initially lacked systematic focus on the institution of war, but it achieved a major breakthrough in demonstrating that the phenomenon of gender violence was global, pervasive and constituted a long-ignored gross violation of human rights. It elimi- nated the distinction between women’s rights and human rights that had ghettoized gendered aspects of both the discourse on human rights and the struggle for their universal realization. The Beijing Platform for Action, the product of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, viewed as a human rights document made the connections that irrevocably integrated the issue of war into the analysis of and action on issues of gender equality.21 It paved the way for the campaign organized and conducted by women’s NGOs for an open session of the Security Council on ‘Women, Peace and Security’, which in Resolution 1325 called for the representation of women in all matters concerned with peace and security ofﬁcial U.N. policy.22 The declaration and the resolution are clear illustrations of the ways in which women’s movements have bridged the gap between civil society and the interstate system, and achieved a Freirean integration of research, education and action. In the early 1990s, the statistics on violence against women became the subject of even the popular press, producing some governmental response among Western states. Grassroots women’s organizations throughout the world gathered multiple thousands of signatures calling for the international legal acknowledgement that gender violence was in serious contradiction of the international human rights norms. The signed petitions were delivered to the U.N. Secretary General and facilitated the agreement to the declaration by the Vienna Conference on Human Rights, further strengthening the claim that women’s rights are human rights, articulated in the

21 The People’s Movement for Human Rights Education (PDHRE) developed a workbook using the comprehensive framework of the BPFA that demonstrates the holistic nature of human rights as a tool for action in the achievement of full equality (PDHRE 2003 Passport to Dignity, New York: PDHRE); this issued Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. See: United Nations (2000) Security Council Resolution 1325, at: http://www.peacewomen.org/un/sc/1325.html. 22 An open session of the Security Council is one in which non-member states and U.N. staff may address the Council. These sessions are often preceded by preparatory non-formal sessions in which Council members who wish to do so hear from NGOs qualiﬁed in the subject of the open session.

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1995 Beijing Declaration that introduces the Platform for Action (BPFA). In recent years that has been the discussion of the development of a legally binding international convention on gender violence, so that its prohibition would be established within the body of international human rights treaty law. The Global Framework of the Beijing Platform is organized around 12 areas of critical concern, three of which provided the precedents that made possible SC 1325. The areas of concern referring to violence against women, women and armed conflict, and women in power and decision making make up the main substance and imperatives put forth in that Security Council resolution that in terms of gender and peace is the most significant international document issued to date. The Platform offers an illuminating definition of violence against women, bringing specificity to the more abstract definition of the Declaration on Violence against Women. For peace educators it is a useful tool for demonstrating how conceptual definitions of problems such as gender injustice can and should be derived from and help to explain the lived realities of those who suffer the problems. The Beijing Platform for Action demonstrates international acceptance of an inclusive concept of gender as a social construct, indicating it is a requisite factor of consideration in all areas of critical concern: “…the differences between women’s and men’s achievements are still not recognized as the consequences of socially constructed gender roles rather than immutable biological differences”.23 The maintenance of peace and security at the global, regional and local levels, together with the prevention of policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing and the resolution of armed conflict, is crucial for the protection of the human rights of women and girl-children, as well as for the elimination of all forms of violence against them and their use as weapons of war.24 The assertion reflected in SC 1325, that viable peace in the absence of democratic politics, providing equal participation to all citizens, is not possible. The unequal representation of women in policy-making is a serious obstacle to peace. Without significant representation of women in the political process abuses are not likely to be adequately addressed. The emergence of these concepts that linked women’s situation to peace and violence against women to the larger systems of structural and armed violence and the developments that introduced them into the actions of international civil society and the policies of the U.N. system were—to an extent that may not exist around any other global issue—informed by the involvement of feminist scholars and peace researchers. A symbiotic partnership among the U.N. agencies such as the Division for the Advancement of Women, UNIFEM (the women’s development agency), UNESCO, women’s organizations and the academy, produced problem-relevant policies, sharpened research

23 Beijing Platform for Action, Global Framework, op. cit., para 12. 24 See: Reardon, B. (2005) ‘Peace and human rights education in an age of global terror’,in International House of Japan Bulletin, 25, 2.

[email protected] 100 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective questions, enriched courses with contemporary international developments, and gave this arena of peace research significant valence in international politics. As noted above, these years, the 1980s in particular, saw a plentiful harvest of literature on women, war and peace and women’s human rights that brought a number of scholars together as participants in international civil society, further internation- alizing the field, strengthening its global perspective and enriching courses in women’s studies and peace studies with research and theorizing around the long- neglected sphere of gender and peace. It also offered particularly fruitful substance for pedagogical developments in peace education, especially among those practitioners who perceived human rights as essential and integral to the field. From our perspective, this literature’s relationship to developments in international civil society and their combined relevance to peace education and the deconstruction of patriarchy, especially, as noted, the feminist critiques of prevailing international relations theory and peace research perspectives, are the most significant. When viewed in terms of the consequences of the lack of women’s perspectives and consideration of women’s experiences in the analyses and prevailing theories of international relations and interstate conflict since the end of the Second World War, these critiques significantly compromised the conclusions and paradigms in which international security policy was made, analyzed and assessed. While there are now various critiques of the realist school of international politics, feminist scholar Jane Tickner offered a groundbreaking perspective that remains relevant to our concerns:

In realism’s subject matter, as well as in its quest for a scientific methodology, we can detect an orientation that corresponds to some of the masculine-linked characteristics… such as the emphasis on power and autonomy and claims to objectivity and rationality. But among realism’s critics, virtually no attention has been given to gender as a category of analysis. Scholars concerned with structural violence have paid little attention to how women are affected by global politics or the workings of the world economy, nor to the fact that hierarchical gender relations are interrelated with other forms of domination they do address.25 Feminist criticisms such as Tickner’s were among the most challenging leveled at the realist school of international politics. Their work was prescient, anticipating criticisms that now are voiced even in mainstream discourse. Similar interpretations of the international significance of hierarchical gender relations later emerged in masculinities studies. Together they have made a significant place for gender in the global peace movement. The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice in the 21st Century, issued by the end of century civil society peace movement conference held in the Netherlands in 1999, put an inclusive gender perspective in a prominent place in a statement that echoes many similar criticisms of the realist—we would say patriarchal—paradigm of international relations. The costs of the machismo that

25 Tickner, op. cit., 14.

[email protected] 7.4 Violence Against Women: Gendered Link Between Human Rights and Peace 101 still pervades most societies are high for men whose choices are limited by this standard, and for women who experience continual violence both in war and peace. The Hague Appeal for Peace advocates the redeﬁnition of distorted gender roles that perpetuate violence.26

7.5 Towards an Inclusive Gender Perspective: The Emergence of Masculinities Studies

From the earliest days of women’s striving for equality there have been men who accepted the arguments, sympathized with the goals, and some few joined in the efforts. Clearly, without cooperation from a signiﬁcant number of men in the respective systems, women’s national political rights would never have been legally established nor would any of the international gender equality norms been introduced into the body of international human rights standards. While some men ridiculed, reviled and resisted, some also publicly and vigorously assisted. While some men sought to understand and respond to men’s violence against women, others felt threatened by changes bringing a wider range of life choices to women. These challenges produced several distinct responses, some of them referred to as men’s movements. In the US, phenomena such as ‘Iron John’ encouraged men to reclaim their traditional ‘male values’ of courage, assertion and leadership. Other American initiatives such as the ‘Promise Keepers’ and the ‘Million Man March’ called for re-assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood and family. These developments were largely in response and reaction to what were seen as the social and cultural dislocations brought about by women’s movements in general and feminism in particular. They focused on men’s self-image and to some degree on reclaiming male pride of place in traditional society. Such projects we would describe as masculinist.27 Masculinism is the reassertion of the masculine characteristics and values of the patriarchal gender order. Australian scholar R.W. Connell writes of the way in which that order is now global and profoundly affected by globalization in a way that reﬂects present power relations in the international system:

Clearly, the world gender order is not simply an extension of traditional European- American gender order. That gender order was changed by colonialism, and elements from other cultures now circulate globally. Yet in no sense do they mix on equal terms, to produce a United Colors of Benetton gender order. The culture and institutions of the North

26 Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century: Root Causes of War/Culture of Peace Agenda, at: http://www.haguepeace.org/index.php?action=resources. 27 We take this term from the language of the Japanese scholar, Kinheide Mushakoji, who used it in summarizing the gender perspective assertions regarding male dominance made in an international scholars’ statement to the Independent Commission on Human Security in 2003. It is also used by many masculinities scholars.

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Atlantic countries are hegemonic within the emergent world system. This is crucial for understanding the kinds of masculinities produced within it.28 As so much of the women’s movement focused on women’s distinct and separate experience, some men’s approach to gender issues also emphasized the injustices integral to gender roles focusing on the particular experiences of men. As noted, one strand of the men’s movements was related to perceptions that loss of exclusive right to certain social functions and positions was imposing inequality on men. But only masculinities studies worked within a relational or systemic framework that provides an inclusive gender perspective. As Connell states, ‘Masculinities do not ﬁrst exist and then come into contact with femininities; they are produced together in a process that constitutes a gender order’.29 Another strand of men’s response to the gender problematic, the White Ribbon Campaign, a Canadian organization, responding to the growing body of data and policy concern with violence against women, took an approach of acknowledging individual responsibility for and societal acceptance of violence against women in North America.30 Some masculinities scholarship, as did some feminist theory, contextualized gender violence within a framework of violence in a male-dominated hierarchy. Michael Kaufman describes interrelationships among forms of men’s violence:

Men’s violence against women does not occur in isolation but is linked to men’s violence against other men and to the internalization of violence that is a man’s violence against himself… male dominated societies are not only based on a hierarchy of men over women but some men over other men. Violence or the threat of violence among men is a mechanism used from childhood to establish that pecking order.31 Other male activists and scholars looked to the socialization of men, in the framework of gender as a social construction, undertaking research that became the foundation of masculinities studies. The social construction theory provided a foundation for masculinities studies to explore the cultural, social and biological inﬂuences in the formation of masculine identities. They inquired into inﬂuences from historical myths, cultural messages, family, biological assertions, ritual, laws, customs, media and sports on male assertiveness and claims to power. Taken together, these messages formed expectations of how a man should behave. Peace scholars were particularly concerned with the dominant masculine identities that reinforced social hierarchies and the exertion of power by men at the upper levels of hierarchies over women and other men. Gender identities such as the warrior, breadwinner or adventurer, and characteristics such as valour and

28 Connell, R.W. (1998).‘Masculinities and globalisation’,inMen and Masculinities,I,1:3–23. 51. 29 Connell, op. cit., 7. 30 The White Ribbon Campaign was launched in Canada to build awareness and responsibility among young men. 31 Kaufman, op. cit., 1.

[email protected] 7.5 Towards an Inclusive Gender Perspective: The Emergence of Masculinities Studies 103 toughness, served to inspire violent approaches to dealing with conflict and legit- imated militarized approaches to peace and security.32 During the world wars joining the army was a rite of passage to full American manhood—a phenomenon not unique to the US, as has been documented by Turkish and Israeli scholars.33 The manhood myth of the warrior was confronted during the Vietnam War as the anti-war movement decried sending a generation of young men to die in an unjust war. This issue, along with the mandatory military conscription, opened a small window for challenging the valorization of war in forming men’s identities. It also manifested another problem as US military recruitment practices began targeting poor, urban and rural youth, particularly African Americans, demonstrating hierarchies among men based on race and socio-economic status. Over the 1990s and the first decade of this century, scholars began to consider the concept of ‘multiple masculinities’ in which gender could be seen as constructed differently in different contexts, cultures, historic periods, and under unique circumstances. Multiple masculinities were defined establishing alternatives to the concept of the masculine ideal as the warrior. Especially in times of war, masculinity norms are strongly influenced by patriotism and military service, nurturing strong hero and protector identities, and denigrating male war resistors as less masculine, often meaning humanly inferior. Even in less conflict plagued times, hierarchies exist among masculinities, and in most contexts a hegemonic or most desired form of masculinity emerges.34 Within the hierarchies privileged exemp- tions from the ideal are possible. During the Vietnam War, for example, white middle-class American men could forestall, even avoid going to war by going to college. Upon graduation, the privileged were more likely to gain important positions in society. The poor who served in the military often returned to a jobless civilian life. Hierarchies among masculinities involving race and class as manifest in military service, are further evidence that gender is as rooted in social constructs as it is in biology. The Vietnam War also made more evident the relationship between gender and the institution of war and demonstrated the possibility that both gender inequality and war are amenable to change through socialization and education.

32 An excellent study on how men form their gender identities and how those identities inﬂuence their behaviour was conducted by peace educator, Ian Harris. Harris, I. Messages Men Hear, (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995). 33 Altinay, A.G. The Myth of the Military-nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Imprint & Houndmills, 2004); and Gor, H. ‘Education for war in Israel: preparing children to accept war as a natural factor of life’, in K. Saltzman and D. Gabbard (eds) Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). 34 R.W. Connell has been inﬂuential in the development of masculinities and gender studies, particularly through contributions to theories of multiple masculinities. See: Connell, R.W. The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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Most masculinities studies were undertaken in the light of the social construction theory of gender. The gendered nature of various institutions and other social arrangements was illuminated, exposing the power and subordination arrangement of patriarchy as one that exists and is sustained largely through the unequal status of men and women. Gender inequality, as asserted earlier by feminist scholarship, an assertion now shared by masculinities studies, pervades virtually all formal and informal institutions, playing a signiﬁcant role in sustaining the gendered world order and the institution of war. Therefore, any approach to the transformation of the war system will require taking into account the gendered nature of the entire system, inclusive of all the component institutions, social, economic and political. In sum, it calls for a broad and critical social education. We advocate for the inclusion and mainstreaming of gender in all social education, as has been advocated for U.N. policy and programs.

Gender mainstreaming is: …assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies and programs, in any area and at all levels… making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences integral [to education as well as policy-making]… so that women and men benefit equally. The ultimate goal is gender equality [and positive peace].35 Especially in the realms of peace studies and peace education, a focus on developing new thinking about gender should become integral to all study and inquiry, cultivating learning that will enable men and women to understand how their gender identities are informed by and sustain the larger system of violence in which war and all forms of gender violence are imbedded. A major task is raising awareness regarding the gender and peace problematic and how all are implicated in it. Women need not perceive themselves as subjects of discrimination or oppression to understand their subordination in the patriarchal hierarchy. Most men do not identify themselves, nor do they perceive their actions, as sustaining gender disparities. Education should elicit understanding of the complex realities of gender inequality. Men do not need to directly contribute to or behave in ways that sustain patriarchal society to be the beneficiaries of male privilege. Building awareness of the patriarchal structures that account for gender disparities and male privilege are core learning goals of an inclusive gender perspective in peace education. We think it significant that it was in the field of education that some of the earliest and most significant work on gender disparities was conducted. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of the leading scholars in masculinities studies are from the discipline of education. Indeed, as noted earlier, the first formal discussion of these issues within the International Peace Research Association were initiated and introduced to peace researchers by IPRA’s Peace Education Com- mission. One of the first works in the field was by the distinguished Norwegian

35 United Nations, Economic and Social Council. Draft Agreed Conclusions on Mainstreaming the Gender Perspective into All Policies and Programmes in the United Nations (Paris: UNESCO, 1997).

[email protected] 7.5 Towards an Inclusive Gender Perspective: The Emergence of Masculinities Studies 105 educator, Birgit Brock-Utne, a member of that commission, who had concluded that the socialization of boys in ways that promoted cooperation and care for others as valorized in girl’s socialization had significant potential as a means to educate for peace.36 Male socialization became a fruitful area of inquiry pursued as well by American educators and introduced into international research and policy discussion by UNESCO.37 Reflection on the insights and knowledge produced by masculinities studies and their potential integration into an inclusive gender perspective in peace studies and peace education is one of the main tasks that should be high on the agenda of peace knowledge professionals. We need to take into account all of the complexities constitutive to gender and peace. Peace education could utilize the framework of patriarchy to illuminate various forms of hierarchy and to reveal the relational view of gender in which masculinities and femininities—as described above in the quotation from Michael Kimmel—are defined in terms relative to each other in a social construct built into institutions, cultures, power relations and social arrangements. In this context gender construction can be seen as varied, active and dynamic, an example of possibilities for truly significant change in the human condition. Whereas gender roles were formerly defined as dichotomous and static, they may now be conceived as mutable and subject to intentional, normative change. As social constructs, gender roles and relations are revealed to be the product of masculine and feminine identities being formed in parallel social processes. Neither these qualities and identities nor attitudes toward violence and war are formed in isolation from their social and cultural contexts. To understand the contexts toward changing them, it is essential to understand gender and the gender order conditioned by patriarchy. Moving toward an inclusive gender perspective requires institutionalizing democratic practices and relations that promote tolerance of a range of sexual and gender identities, understanding the significance of gender to the social order and recognition of the potential peace contributions of what have been previously defined as masculine and feminine qualities. Peace education can play an important role in fostering this perspective through developing critical inquiry that examines various gender identities for both the positive gender attributes that can contribute toward nurturing a culture of peace, and the negative attributes that sustain and promote a culture of violence. Through such a process, conducted in open discourse, respectful of difference, learners may gain confidence in their own critical abilities and a sense of personal responsibility for the achievement of a just social order that could enable them to challenge the gender orders that have so long stifled

36 Brock-Utne, B. Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education, 1st edn, (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989); and Brock-Utne, B. Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective, (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985). 37 See: Miedzian, M. Boys will be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence, (New York: Lantern Books, 1991); Breines, I., Connell, R. and Eide, I. Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective, Paris: UNESCO, (2000); and Reardon, B. Edu- cation for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective (Paris: UNESCO, 2001).

[email protected] 106 7 Gender and Peace: Toward a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective the aspirations of men and women. As growing awareness of and action on the subordination of women produced historic strides toward gender equality, study of the consequences men suffer in a system of inequality can bring about new strides toward the authentic and inclusive human equality we are denied by patriarchy.

7.6 Challenging the Patriarchal Paradigm: Gender Equality and Human Security

Peace educators and peace researchers favoring holistic and integrated approaches to the tasks of building and transmitting peace knowledge have for some time focused attention on paradigms as heuristic devices to clarify characteristics and components of systems of thought, the cultures that produced them and the institutions that sustain them. Until the advent of the concept of a culture of peace, promulgated by UNESCO, the objective had been to develop knowledge to facilitate change in peace and security policies and institutions that would reduce violence and increase justice. Among some of the feminist scholars and activists who have recognized gender equality as a requisite for peace, the premise of the social construction and cultural derivation of gender is now leading to a more focused inquiry into patriarchy itself and how, as we have noted, it is manifested in various contemporary institutions, in cultural practices, both traditional and contemporary, and in social behaviors and relationships. This inquiry—like that which led to the normative and policy changes regarding gender violence and women’s political participation—has been taken up mainly by feminist human rights activists. They argue that the achievement of full and authentic gender equality calls for an inquiry into assumed, enforced and encoded inequalities of the patriarchal paradigm within which neither men nor women are fully free human beings. The patriarchal system is not only a source of gender violence and inequality but of many egregious human rights violations, oppressive to both men and women. We would add to that argument that it also constitutes the most fundamental impediment to peace at all levels of the social order. The failure to name it as such, to fully analyze it as a primary obstacle to the kind of just global order that most would agree to be peace, is what keeps us caught in the war system and mired in the global culture of violence which it nurtures and by which it is nurtured.38 A major action research project to remedy this failure is being undertaken by the People’s Movement for Human Rights Education (PDHRE), an NGO that advocates for human rights learning as the means to capacitate populations to achieve social justice, economic equity and political agency. In a document circulated to NGOs and U.N. agencies, PDHRE states a rationale for the project to which we would adhere and which we would augment:

38 A fundamental aspect of the core argument in Reardon’s Sexism and the War System regards the relationship of reciprocal causality that exists between women’s oppression and war.

[email protected] 7.6 Challenging the Patriarchal Paradigm: Gender Equality and Human Security 107

Throughout recorded history in most human societies some form of patriarchy has prevailed, reinforced by cultural values derived from systems of male dominance. It has been so commonly and continually practiced as to appear natural rather than a humanly constructed social order that is both changing and changeable. In its present forms patriarchy has become more an ideology and belief system than the explicit social and political systems of earlier times. Even in countries where legal equality of women and men has been established, the deep psychological and cultural roots of patriarchy survive as a belief system in the minds of many women and men. [It] asserts the superiority of all males to all females and arranges this fundamental inequality in a hierarchal order in which middle aged men now hold primary power over all others, controlling economies, militaries, educational and religious institutions. Men in general are more powerful and advantaged than women. Western men have more power in the global order than men from other world regions. Women of higher economic class have power over both men and women of lower income and poverty status. At the very bottom of this hierarchy are the vulnerable and oppressed of the world, most the aged, all children, and women; with most vulnerable being aged, poor women. [Global] threats are made the more complex and difﬁcult to address because of the limits imposed on human capacities and creativity by the gendered power divisions that comprise [patriarchy]. [It] is the antithesis of the ideology of human rights …human rights is the core of an alternative belief system that can transcend the limits [patriarchy] imposes on the realization of human possibilities and the enjoyment of human dignity.39 This statement comprises the normative core of an alternative to the patriarchal paradigm. Human rights, as we have seen, are the inspiration and the practical tool for confronting and overcoming injustice. They have provided the most signiﬁcant progress to date in gender equality. But, in and of themselves human rights, even under stronger possibilities for enforcement, cannot transcend the violence problematic of patriarchy. Patriarchy maintains itself not only through the patriarchal mindset that has prevailed through centuries, but also and more evidently through the power of armed force, most especially that which is conducted by the hands of the state, exercised through police and military, mirrored in the use of force by non- state actors. Clearly the state itself is a patriarchal institution, and those who aspire to its powers also manifest patriarchal characteristics such as control, force used in self-interest and disregard for the humanity of others. So, an alternative paradigm must elaborate an alternative to military security, pursue the reduction of violence through the reduction of armed forces and weaponry and seek to assure the human dignity of all. If human rights can be the instruments of progress as it has, even within the patriarchal paradigm, under an effort to simultaneously reduce the primary tools and means of violations while advancing the realization of human rights, the international norms and standards are far more likely to provide actual human security. As peace educators, we endeavor to introduce consideration of these possibilities and to pose elements of the kind of inquiry PDHRE now invites civil society groups throughout the world to engage in as a form of human rights learning. Human rights learning and study of the conditions and possibilities for human security are central to peace education.

39 People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning. Transforming the Patriarchal Order to a Human Rights System: A Position Paper (New York: PDHRE, 2006).

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We believe that gender can serve as the conceptual core of a comprehensive study of these issues, exploring the problems, the possibilities, the institutions, the values, the concepts and the human experiences that comprise the complexities of the peace problematic. We hope that the field of gender and peace will become central to all realms of peace knowledge, and that all who seek ways to peace through these realms will join in a global inquiry into possible alternatives to the patriarchal paradigm. This paradigm conflates hierarchy with order and command of armed force with virtue as it coerces others into its own image. An alternative human equality paradigm rests on authentic democracy, nonviolent approaches to conflict and assurances of the human dignity of all.

[email protected] Chapter 8 Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System

Retrospective Reﬂection on “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System” (2010)

This essay served as the foundational chapter of The Gender Imperative: Human Security versus State Security, co-edited with Asha Hans, a political scientist and Indian feminist.1 The book was a result of discussions within the Feminist Network of Scholar Activists on Demilitarization (FeDem), and its predecessor WINGHS (Women’s International Network on Gender and Human Security). WINGHS had been organized to prepare for the 1999 Hague Appeal for Peace Conference. The formation of FeDem emerged a few years later from a conference on the militarization of education organized in Israel by the Israeli women’s peace organization, New Profile. The network was comprised of women from all regions of the world who first came together around using the four part feminist paradigm as a potential alternative concept of security, a tool to open a wider conceptual/defi- nitional discussion. We hoped to move the discourse on gender and peace beyond the realms on which it had centered in the international women’s movement that were primarily: women’s peace actions and contributions to conflict resolution, and the particular gendered effects of war and armed conflict on women. We intended, too, to push that discourse a few steps beyond the provisions of the Beijing Platform for Action into a consideration of changes in the current militarized security system that so negatively impacts the well-being of women. The members of the network were primarily feminist scholars doing research on gender and peace issues. Some applied their scholarly work to activism in conflict

1 This text was ﬁrst published as “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System”, in: B.A. Reardon; A. Hans (Eds.): The Gender Imperative: Human Security vs. State Security (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 9-37. The permission request to republish this text was forwarded on 14 March by Ms. L. Yates of Routledge (Taylor & Francis) to their Indian ofﬁce, from which no reply was received until 10 July 2014.

[email protected] 110 8 Women and Human Security … zones and areas around military bases. Most had direct experience of the effects of militarized security on the lives of the civilian populations affected by it. All had special concern with the gendered effects of militarization with particular reference to women’s daily experience, including but not exclusively, military violence against women. Sharing a conviction about the need to redefine security, they were committed to take action toward the demilitarization of security and the societies which adhered to it. It was also our intention to demonstrate the incompatibility between human and militarized security; i.e., between the security of people and the security of the state. Recalling my own purposes in the reiteration and elaboration of the feminist framework (first published in the Smoker-Munske reader and later in other versions in two Japanese journals, and in a Spanish collection on women and peace) it seems that the motives were similar to those that informed the arguments presented in Sexism and the War System. As I sought with that publication to provoke discussions between women’s studies and peace studies practitioners and researchers in each of the two fields, it seems with The Gender Imperative, the motive that Asha and I had in mind was to suggest a similar course for feminist scholars and women activists, hoping to persuade them to adopt a stance toward system change. Although many scholars were also activists, activists might read the scholars work, but their primary action continued to be on direct actions to change the various forms women’s insecurity on the ground within the short term. Such actions, we agreed were urgent and essential to the ultimate abolition of war. However, most attention was paid to the mitigation of “violence against women in armed conflict,” and some to pushing for women’s involvement in peace and conflict resolution negotiations. Yet few actively pursued an end to armed conflict as the most effective way to end military violence against women, challenging the system itself. Still fewer considered conceptualization of and arguments for alternatives to the militarized state security system that so severely undermines peoples’ human security. The absence of focus on system change to achieve authentic human security is, I argue due to a failure to view the problematic in a holistic or comprehensive perspective. This absence affects and limits most of our endeavors in the application of peace knowledge to the political realities with which we struggle. This chapter from The Gender Imperative is clearly linked to peace education methodology in advocacy of such a perspective. Comprehensive and systems approaches were paramount throughout most my work in peace education. Some of my own early peace learning derived from the study of alternative security system proposals as a way to educate for system change. In this third phase of gender conceptualization, the approach seems relevant to confronting patriarchy as an all pervasive system that conditions the way we think about most aspects of the human enterprise, including the politics of peace and security. Every contribution to The Gender Imperative attempts to demonstrate actual conditions of insecurity that result from patriarchal dominance in all peace and security matters, from conceptualization of policy to the preparation for and conducting of armed conflict and the management of post conflict situations. The queries suggested for the discussion of each chapter, in university classrooms or meetings of peace activists, are intended to facilitate inquiry into the present

[email protected] 8 Women and Human Security … 111 security system and how to demilitarize it. Provoking such inquiry was the purpose of each contribution and of the whole publication. An underlying intention of the suggested inquiry is to offer a feminist contribution to the abolition of war movement in which advocates of multiple approaches to demilitarization find common purpose, agreeing as stated in the slogan of the Hague Appeal for Peace Con- ference and the Agenda it produced that “It’s time to abolish war!” A number of the women who participated in that 1999 conference were actively involved in the civil society process that culminated in the adoption of UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. What is generally overlooked, or not seen at all, was the abolitionist intent of some of the 1325 activists. This failure will be addressed in the reflection on the following piece in this volume on military violence against women. That piece represents yet another attempt to bring systemic approaches to bear on political activism toward gender equality in security matters with a focus on the reduction and elimination of violence against women. The concern with convergence of feminist theory and activism in both education and politics that pervades Phase 3 is likely, I think, to have arisen from my Freirean inclinations. In attempting to discern the evolution of my own gender and security thinking, I now perceive in the piece a step beyond the concept of “reciprocal causality” to which I had previously attributed the roots of the interrelationship between war and sexist oppression toward an even more comprehensive and holistic interpretation of the gender and peace problematic. The two problems appeared to rise from reciprocal causes because they are offshoots of one and the same root, patriarchy. The present popular articulations of patriarchy’s general manifestations are the equally comprehensive concepts of “the global gender order” and “the global culture of violence.” While I also embrace those concepts, I believe that without looking squarely at patriarchy and how it operates to produce the structures of the global gender order and the psycho-social characteristics of the culture of violence, we cannot develop the particular strategies for change, or the education to prepare for the change that could evolve into a gender equal “global culture of peace.” So, too, the concept of gender that now animates my work is also far wider than the bifurcation of male and female roles and status. I have come to comprehend gender as an invention of patriarchy to assure its own perpetuation. It is my intention, in my future work, to further develop this conceptualization. Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014 This introductory essay, a greatly extended and significantly revised version of an argument first published in Japanese as “Toward Human Security: A Feminist Framework for Demilitarization”,inWomen’s Asia, No. 33, 2003 contains arguments I have also published in other journals.2

2 Among other Journals articles on the topic most relevant to the discussions here is Reardon, 1996, “Gender and Global Security: a Feminist Challenge to the United Nations and Peace Research” Journal of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Japan.

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8.1 A Core Thesis on Human Security

The present discourse on human security, while broadening the components and definitions of security as it is pursued in the international system, has yet to face the core of the problem of human security. Within this emerging discourse there has been no significant acknowledgement that human security never can be achieved within the present highly militarized, war prone, patriarchal nation state system. Neither, as I have argued for more than two decades, is it achievable within patriarchy which is the foundation of the war system (Reardon 1985)…. Two propositions lie at the center of [my] assertions and arguments: first, if human security is to be achieved, patriarchy must be replaced with gender equality, and second, war as an institution must be abolished in favor of nonviolent structures and processes for resolving conflicts and achieving national policy goals…

With, to the right, FeDem members, Asha Hans of India and Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan Institute for Learning at IIPE 2006 in Costa Rica

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8.2 The Problem of Human Security in a Militarized World

We live in a world in which our leaders, those charged with responsibility for our “national security,” perceive security to be under constant threat, so severe as to necessitate the acquisition of ever more destructive weapons, so insidious as to convince normally democratic societies that the exigencies of security permits states to violate internationally agreed standards of human rights. Nations and forces seeking entry into the higher levels of the global power hierarchy pursue the development of nuclear weapons, a proliferation of the possibilities for the total destruction of vast regions of the planet. We are constantly told we are under threat by other nations, justifying the violation of all standards of civility and frustrating impulses toward sociality and international cooperation, the conditions most conducive to human security within and among nations. Rather than engaging in the vigorous pursuit of such conditions, nations and some non-state actors—with ambitions to hold powers of state or who purport to represent the interest of particular peoples—continue to pursue military power in the name of national security or peoples’ interests. Yet nations are not secure, and the interests of peoples are not served. The world, as our leaders persuade us, is dangerous. We contend, however, that the major dangers it holds are not the ones from which our states are prepared to protect us. The major dangers are in the daily insecurities of most of the peoples of the world, be they at peace or at war, a fact obscured by the priorities of current security policies… The cumulative effect of instructions from national leaderships about threats to security is an intense and pervasive sense of insecurity that persuades populations to maintain and support heavily armed states to protect them. Only in strong militaries, it is widely believed, can nations have an assurance of security. It is popular wisdom that before “September 11” the American people, citizens of the most militarily advanced and powerful nation in world history, perceived their ‘homeland’ to be secure, a security based on the mightiest military the world had ever known. While it was clear that even the mightiest military could not secure the nation against such attacks as crumbled the World Trade Towers and shattered the illusion of invulnerability held by so many Americans, the “homeland security” discourse that ensued was largely conﬁned to new methods of warfare, new forms of militarism and invasive surveillance to meet the “new threats”. Consideration of how these new threats might affect the possibilities of progress toward the newly emerging concept of human security was not on the new national security agenda in the United States or any of the nations involved in the “War on Terror”. A pivotal question, seldom asked in the American security discourse,—or indeed, in any nation—is “Who among the citizens of the mighty state … perceives themselves to be truly secure?”…Who among vulnerable people of any nation are, in fact, secure? What is security? The advent of the concept of human security and the discussion of the relationship between national/state or strategic security and human or people’s security is an opportunity to address these and other related queries.

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To advance that discussion we propose a feminist concept and framework of security to challenge the militarized state security system and to call attention to the gendered effects of that system, as they impact particularly on women…the dis- advantaged position of women in patriarchy puts in jeopardy the security of most of the human community—even the patriarchs. If women and those who depend upon them are not secure to what extent can a nation, in the true sense of the word, meaning the people of a state or society, be secure? This is one of the central questions that inform this collection on gendered aspects of significant obstacles to and possibilities for the achievement of human security. We intend to argue that authentic national security is human security, and encourage readers to consider whether militarized state security can ever really assure it. Indeed, it is the militarized system of state security that seriously threatens human security in ways to be elaborated later in this essay. This and other essays in this volume will put forth some feminist assertions about security as a basis of our arguments and a perspective from which to view the cases of insecurity and struggles for alternatives to militarized security described in the various essays that comprise this volume. Feminism asserts the equal human value of women and men and argues for the changes necessary to realize it. ‘Feminist’ here means as seen and analyzed from women’s gendered perspective, a perspective influenced both by women’s exclusion and marginalization from security politics and by their experience of struggle to provide day by day basic human security throughout history and still today throughout most the world. This is the work that patriarchy has assigned them… ‘Gender’, as the concept is generally used in works that deal with the differences and inequalities between men and women, is a socially derived concept, a culturally varied construct that assigns to men and women a set of cultural roles and social functions, only minimally determined by their respective reproductive and sexual characteristics. However, the concept of gender that underlies the arguments articulated in this essay is that it is the conceptual structure through which patriarchy has historically assured the psycho-social acceptance of the particular positions in the masculinist hierarchy to which patriarchy assigns men, women and children (Reardon 2008). Patriarchy has convinced most of humanity that the traditional gender roles and expectations that have governed relationships among men, women, children and society are the product of nature, designed by their “divine creator.” Cultural practices regarding gender roles may vary, but the fundamental hierarchal structure is similar in all patriarchal societies. Gender is a system maintenance mechanism of patriarchy as manifest in the state, and the term ‘gendered’ as used here pertains to sex roles in the patriarchal order. This order we contend—in agreement with various scholars developing the field of masculinities studies—also severely restricts the human potential of men and exacts great costs from the majority of them…

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8.3 Patriarchy: A Framework for Human Insecurity and Source of Gender Injustice

The present militarized system of state security is but a reification of the core political paradigm that has existed in most societies throughout most human history. Patriarchy is likely to have preceded the state that is an abstraction for the power of governance, a depersonalization of power that allows those who hold and exercise it, to rationalize and obscure the harm they cause to those over whom they have power. What previously had been customary and cultural practice became sanctified and institutionalized in the state which claimed sovereignty, often absolute power over its peoples, and based its claim to power on divine will. The state, it was asserted, was ordained by God—or the gods, among whom some rulers numbered themselves—and those who ruled were chosen by God to do so. Insti- tutional religion reinforced the claim, and its institutions also reified the hierarchal order through which patriarchy organized itself. The state and institutionalized religion, the intermediaries to God or the gods, the armed forces mustered by these two institutions, the land which produced human livelihood and the law which ordered human relations were—with a few astonishing historical exceptions—all in the hands of men, some of whom maneuvered themselves to power over most other men and all others in the society, compelled by religion and the law to except their rule. So it was and has been until the first changes in what Connell (2000), a founder of the field of masculinities studies calls the “global gender order” in 18th century Europe when some noteworthy changes in the ordering of the hierarchy and procedures in the exercise of power began: changes that are purported to be the origins of modern representative democracy. As we have been well instructed in our school years, the changes emerged from developments in political thought that challenged divine right as the source and monarchy as the main form of governance, and postulated “the rights of man.” There were even some calls for the rights of women put forth by women and some men. Such men were usually liberal intellectuals, members of the literate, propertied classes at somewhat higher levels of the patriarchal hierarchy.3 What was not included in our school texts was the fact that these steps toward representative government did not change the fundamental “patriarchal power paradigm” (Reardon 2008). Through the tenacity of patriarchal thinking, hierarchal arrangements of society based on race, class and gender, buttressed by inequitable access to the benefits of production based on what has become global, corporate, free market capitalism,

3 In the United States some male abolitionists of the antislavery movement also supported women’s suffrage. It was argued by some that the two issues were related as essential attributes of human freedom and democracy. A similar position was held by the English poet, Percy B. Shelley, the husband of Mary Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Also at the end of the 18th century, Olympe to Gouges, a feminist bluestocking issued a proclamation of the rights of women and was executed by the forces of the French Revolution for her prescience.

[email protected] 116 8 Women and Human Security … psychologically reinforced by the fear of others engendered by fundamentalist religious precepts and ultranationalist xenophobia, patriarchy as the basic paradigm of human institutions continues to prevail. Varying in severity of the inequalities and oppressions it imposes from culture to culture and political regime to political regime, notwithstanding what appears to be considerable progress in what the United Nations refers to as “the advancement of women”, never the less the core characteristics of patriarchy are the mainstays of most societies.4 Contemporary ‘patriarchs’ are heads of major transnational corporations and of the states that defend their interests as well as the advocates of fundamentalism to be found among practitioners of all religions and various cultures. Paramount among these core characteristics of traditional patriarchy evident in its contemporary forms is the continued use of and systemic threat of violence to maintain the power order. And among the various forms of violence that peace researchers… have identified and defined, one ancient and universal form that has had currency in peace research and some sectors of the human rights movement only in recent decades is gender violence…. many feminists have argued since the conclusions of the first Consultation on Women and Peace of the International Peace Research Association, that there is an apparent interrelationship among all forms of violence (IPRA 1975).5 However, this systemic interrelationship that makes most forms of violence integral one to the other is seldom addressed in any policy discussions relating to violence abatement much less to war and national security, except by those feminists who have theorized an equally strong interrelationship between the oppression of women and the institution of war. (Woolf 1938; Reardon 1985; Enloe 2000). We contend that this tendency toward separating what clearly should be considered together in integral relationship, a characteristic of present security thinking to be addressed below, is a significant factor in limiting the more comprehensive approach to security issues that we see as essential to understanding the requirements and designing strategies for human security. War and violence against women are primary and paramount manifestation of patriarchy, as is clearly seen in the organization of militaries and behaviors toward women (both civilian and military women) during armed conflict and in areas of long-term military presence. Our central line of argument is that so long as war is maintained as a legitimate instrument of national security policy, and preparation for war consumes resources that could be directed toward other essential on-going

4 The term patriarchy is still largely excluded from the U.N.’s discourses on gender equality, as was the term feminist for many years, even during the two International Women’s Decades. While the term ‘gender’ began to replace the word “women” in some of the discourse and documents, it is only in the past few years that men’s roles in the gender problematic have been addressed at all. UNESCO has been a pioneer in bringing the ﬁeld of masculinities studies into the peace discourse (Breines 2000). 5 A similar argument, concerning the interrelationships among various forms of violence is made in the conclusion of a 1994 consultation organized by the UN Division for the Advancement of Women in preparation for The Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 (Breines 1999).

[email protected] 8.3 Patriarchy: A Framework … 117 needs of human security, human security cannot be achieved. Forthcoming from that argument is that if war is to be abolished, so too, patriarchies must be replaced by gender equal and humanly equitable societies. And militarized state security must be transformed into a people centered system of non-violent institutions that provide for the well-being and protection of all sectors of the world’s populations… guidelines for such a system might be derived from feminist perspectives on human security and be designed along the institutional lines put forward by many who have envisioned amendments and changes in the international system that might reduce and ultimately eliminate violence, assure the full range of universal human rights and preserve the life of our planet…

8.4 A Feminist Framework of Human Security and Critique of Militarized State Security

The feminist framework of human security proposed here, first formulated in the 1980s from my observations of women’s actions and movements for peace, human rights and environmental preservation, finds its foundations in women’s gender roles and their socially assigned tasks of the work of care for children, aged, ill, for most who are dependent on others for their well-being, in short the vulnerable.6 This gender role and the learning that is gleaned from performing these tasks have given women a distinct perspective on security different from that held by those in whose trust society has put public affairs and the security of our nations. In that women’s responsibilities call upon them to function in many spheres of human experience, their perspective on security is comprehensive, including factors overlooked by the state security paradigm. The first of the core feminist assertions on the meaning of security, identifying the sources of its assurance is that security is in essence the conditions that make possible the experience and expectation of well-being. This definition obtains in the cases of individuals and groups of all sizes and characters, including nations. Everything that is done in the name of security is ostensibly to fulfill those conditions. Yet the conditions are seldom if ever fully met, even in times of so called ‘peace,’ i.e. little more than the temporary absence of active armed conflict. The three major problems with the present international security system that prevent it from assuring the conditions of comprehensive human security are: it is dominantly masculine rather than fully human in conception; it is designed to achieve the security of the state rather than that of persons or human groups; and, what is most

6 This feminist framework for human security emerged through preparation for and participation in a speaking tour entitled, “Listen to Women for a Change” organized by the Women’s Inter- national League for Peace and Freedom undertaken in 1985.

[email protected] 118 8 Women and Human Security … readily evident, it addresses only one of four fundamental sources of human well- being: a life sustaining environment, fulfillment of needs for survival and health, respect for individual and group dignity and identity, and protection from the most severe effects of those harms the society cannot avoid, including assurance that the society will take care to mitigate the consequences thereof. The dominant masculinist concept—that is men’s gendered perspective—of security emphasizes protection of the state from harm by other states at tragic cost to the other three sources of human security (Tickner 1992). The gendered differences in concepts of and perspectives on security are a significant factor in the debates that rage between peace activists and political realists, the latter, through the same form of thinking that leads to acceptance of gender roles as natural, still manages to keep the majority believing that the masculinist perspective provides a view of the world as it really is, not as we may wish it to be. Thus, prudence and practicality lead most citizenries to adopt the realist view in forming the opinions that sustain the present system.7 The three problems obtain because the security of peoples is primarily in the hands of the nation state that as noted is a creature of patriarchy which valorizes men over women and arrogates to them power over the public sphere. Thus, the control of resources and their use is in the hands of men, male elites who also control the state (through legal, constitutional and other methods). As a consequence of masculinist thinking, most of the ruling male elites see resources as finite, and therefore, to be acquired and defended against a distribution that might disadvantage their state as others benefit. Defense of resources, as well as the nation, (to be read as the communal male identity) the elites contend requires the capacity to apply armed force even when this may disadvantage some, or even the majority of people, within the nation state. The future of the nation and of its people, they assert, depends upon the protection and preservation of the state and its ability to compete with other states. In patriarchal politics as in patriarchal business every effort is made to maintain “the competitive edge”—advantage over all others.

7 Much of the body of critical peace research and philosophers of peace education, such as Snauwaert (2002), challenge the validity of this view, as does the feminist critique of the ﬁeld of international relations. Tickner (1992) offers one of the most penetrating examples of this criticism.

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With Asha Hans in Seoul during IIPE 2003

Most human beings have no competitive edge. They are not among the advantaged, and so are regularly deprived of security in their daily lives, a situation frequently exacerbated by catastrophes or crises that call attention to the severe lack of daily human security among the vulnerable. Human security is every day or quotidian security. Patriarchy assigns the major portion of the daily struggle to provide for the fundamental well-being and human security of families and communities to women. Consequently women’s approaches to security tend to be rooted in the daily work they do for the survival of others and in the struggles they conduct to improve the quality of life in their communities. Rather than in com- peting for and defending resources and power, women’s behaviors and methods

[email protected] 120 8 Women and Human Security … applied to meeting their human security responsibilities have tended to be cooperative and sharing, decisions to advantage one family member or neighbor over another are hard made by women. Their concerns tend to be for the well-being of the whole to which they belong and to increase the possibilities for more assurances of the future daily security of those in their care. On the face of it, this seems to me to be a far more promising survival strategy than competition and preparation for lethal conflict to gain or maintain an advantage. Certainly, this is so when the human survival in question is that of the human species. Women’s social and political activism stems from this concern with the conditions of the quotidian security of families and communities, the whole of the units to which they are affiliated. They have been active in environmental protection movements, efforts to overcome and compensate for poverty, the human rights movement for gender equality and the rights of the excluded and oppressed, and in the struggles against war and other forms of organized and physical violence. Some women working in several or all of these movements for human well- being have come to hold a comprehensive concept of human security…defined as the expectation, perception, and experience of human well-being. It derives primarily from the expectation that the four fundamental conditions or sources of well- being, as noted above, will be present. Peoples and communities are secure if the four essential conditions obtain. We contend that all four conditions are undermined, not only by armed conflict, but by militarized security… (which) has frustrated environmental preservation and civil economic development, abused the human rights of women and children and imposed, rather than protected against, various harms…

8.5 A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach to Human Security

All security issues, we argue, should be addressed within a holistic, comprehensive framework. The four fundaments of human security of the framework described here are interdependent, one with the other and complementary, in that denial of one at the expense of another can reduce not only that one but all of the others. Any security policy should be formulated so as to take into account all four of the fundaments, i.e. the potential consequences of the policy to each security source as well as the source toward which the policy is specifically directed. Special attention should be given to carefully assessing the effects on the vulnerable, projecting the security benefits and deficits they are likely to experience. Indeed, it is important to assess the potential impacts of policies on all and each sector of whole populations, giving close attention to the equity of the potential results, asking who would benefit and who might suffer. Such assessment is rare in current security discourse which is confined mostly to strategic and military power issues, making it virtually

[email protected] 8.5 A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach … 121 impossible for the traditional mode of national security policy to be formulated so as to increase the human security of all a nation’s people.... Theories of security devoid of a gender dimension cannot be authentically people centered. Neither can they produce effective human security policies… Striving for human security calls us to transform the epistemology of patriarchy, the ways of knowing of the nearly universal system of male dominance that privileges a minority of powerful men, their interests, values and perceptions over those of most other men and all women, children, aged and for the most part, any who do not fit the identity profile of the patriarchs. Those of less social value in this order are described on the basis of their differences from the patriarchal norm to be less intelligent, incapable of exercising power. Wise men are those best equipped to think about important issues and decide for the rest of the population. State power accrues to them, they assert, because they know how to use it, and it must be used so the wise continue to keep it. For millennia human civilization in virtually all cultures has lived by some such system of knowledge and governance. It is such thinking that determines that the most significant threats to national security are from other nations or renegade forces within the nation who would usurp power from those who are rightfully entitled to wield it. Such thinking prevents states from fully dedicating themselves to a comprehensive security system that would seek to reduce all forms of harm to their citizens, and keeps them from doing all in their power to mitigate the damage of what are still unavoidable harms… Patriarchy as a socio-political structure, as the essential world view and mode of thought within which most public policy is made, has never been and is not now conducive to the development of a human security regime in which all would reap benefits from society. Nor it is likely to become so. For it precludes wide public discourse on these issues, maintaining strong influence on reportage and the way in which the information media manage public security discourse to the continued advantage of the dominant security paradigm…few societies have ever actually undertaken to devise a comprehensive human security regime. Societies that would aspire to meet the four security expectations for most their populations would be essentially secure and peaceful, for there would be less power contention within and between such societies. As a society intentionally seeks to provide the fundamental conditions of human security for all its population, it moves toward being a just society, acknowledging that justice and security are essential to peace in all societies, local, national, and global. Judged by these standards there are no really just and peaceful, nor truly secure societies in the world; and probably, none that are fully committed to achieving either justice or authentic human security. The human security of citizens in most nations is still secondary to the national interest as defined by the male elites who hold national power. It is the recognition of this fact of the daily insecurity of the human family that inspires feminist efforts to redefine, demilitarize, indeed, to re-conceptualize security, and impels them to assert that we need to think in distinctly different terms from those that comprise the thinking of the present power elites. Most particularly, we must confront the problematic of demilitarizing the global security system, so that it might better assure the conditions of human security. While the first of these two factors, the daily insecurity of

[email protected] 122 8 Women and Human Security … most the human family led to the articulation of human security as a new perspective, the second factor, the undermining of quotidian security by militarized state security has been given little public attention. This lack of attention is not for lack of possibilities.

8.6 Confronting the Obstacles: Towards Demilitarization and Gender Equality

Various remedies are and have been advocated to overcome the consequences of the human imbalances of the dominant masculinist security policies. Some of these remedies, feminist peace activists believe, could contribute to pushing the international system closer to a sustainable system of human security. Over the years since, and even before World War II there have been, as well, some visionary, utopian—that is a vision of the best and most desirable social conditions that can be conceptualized and described—proposals for institutional alternatives to militarized security and the abolition of war. Among these are the mid-20th century, Clark- Sohn proposals for World Peace Through World Law (1966) and the end of the 20th century, The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice in the 21st Century (1999). As is outlined in a small and largely unknown publication, The Conquest of War (1986) there are multiple possibilities for alternative security systems to keep peace and strive for justice. Most such proposals advocate as the core element of the demilitarization of security, reducing and eliminating national arms and militaries in favor of international peacekeeping and dispute settlement. Visions and plans for a disarmed world also informed the proposals and work of peace visionaries such as Bertha von Suttner who from girlhood was concerned with the increase in the volume and destructive capacity of armaments. In 1905 she was awarded the Noble Peace Prize for founding the Permanent International Peace Bureau that continues to be a respected voice for disarmament and diplomacy. That diplomacy and law might replace armed force in international disputes was the vision of the founding of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1921 and the League of Nations in 1919. While the latter was overwhelmed by patriarchal nationalism and lack of more creative responses to dictatorship and genocide, the ICJ was incorporated into the structure of the United Nations. At present and in recent years the Court has been the scene of some of special tribunals addressing some of the very kind of issues that led to World War II, genocidal crimes. That young men need not, generation after generation, risk and lose their lives in the national interest was the intent of the Oxford Pledge that circulated among youth during the 1930s, committing university students to conscientious objection. In recent years, the right of conscientious objection has been given more public attention, and in the United States the bases for claiming the right have been broadened through practice and precedent. Civil society groups have constituted nonviolent peacekeeping forces that interpose themselves between combatants in

[email protected] 8.6 Confronting the Obstacles … 123 incipient or actual armed conflicts, offering an internationally replicable model for nonviolent conflict intervention. That all of this could be undertaken in the reality of actual international politics is evidenced in the 1962 agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States that general and complete disarmament should be the ultimate purpose of all arms agreements and treaties.8 Nothing would be more effective in limiting the destructive capacity of the state than depriving it of its most patriarchal characteristic, exclusive right to armed force, a primary symbol and enforcer of sovereignty. Few states fully acknowledge, much less live up to, the responsibility that rationalizes state sovereignty, providing for the welfare of the citizenry and protecting their rights, even though the political philosophy of the modern state as articulated in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) is that governments are instituted to secure “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Happiness we take to mean well-being, and thus, we would argue states have an obligation to provide for the human security of the nation. Such is authentic national security. And such is the purpose of the International Covenant on Eco- nomic, Social and Cultural Rights one of the two foundational treaties intended to implement the responsibility of states to assure the human rights (i.e. human security) of their citizens… How, it is often asked, might we be assured of the power to overthrow oppression in a world without arms? Putting aside an acknowledgement that arms are among the primary mainstays of oppression, we can refer to a significant history of nonviolent political change of the last century, so often overshadowed by the multiplicities of armed struggles that characterized the 20th century. Among the most outstanding of the major political changes brought about with recourse to arms are: Gandhi’s nonviolent movement for the independence of India; the People’s Power that toppled the Philippine dictatorship; the Velvet Revolution that overcame authoritarianism in Czechoslovakia; the ending of Apartheid in South Africa; the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. These and many more historic experiences of specific and sophisticated nonviolent strategies used for defense and liberation have been well documented in From Dictatorship to Democracy (Sharp 1993). Further, there are nations that have abjured military security. Most significant among these are Costa Rica that abolished its army in 1948, and consequently increased its budget for education and public health services. The constitution adopted by Japan during the United States occupation following World War II renounced war in its Article 9 that has become a worldwide symbol for practical steps for peace. While Japan actually maintains an advanced military capability in its Self Defense Forces, and right wing forces are pushing for the abrogation of Article 9, there is strong support for it among Japanese citizens, and a vigorous

8 This “McCloy-Zorin Agreement” named for the negotiators for the United Sates and the Soviet Union was validated by the U.N. General Assembly in 1962, but later repudiated by the two parties. General and complete disarmament has not been seriously considered since them. How- ever, The Secretary General’s Report on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Education (2010) does make two minor mentions of it.

[email protected] 124 8 Women and Human Security … campaign for its preservation has been mounted with significant international support. In May 2008 more than 3,000 people many of them from other countries gathered in the outskirts of Tokyo to manifest this support (Peace Boat 2009). A similar concept based on legal approaches toward demilitarization lies in the Luarca Declaration of the Human Right to Peace, fast becoming a world-wide movement (2006). While some remedial steps may be and are being taken now in the present system to reform a few of its most egregious effects—steps that reflect some vision of a more humanly secure system—little consideration has been given to possibilities for alternative security systems. Proposals for full-scale alternative security systems call for clear plans for alternate institutions and structures to replace the war system. Even more challenging, they also call for courageous commitment to transform the masculinist thinking that produces the prevailing security policies. Nothing short of political boldness and such transformation of thinking and policy making will bring about the demilitarization of security. Such a goal is indeed viewed as utopian, in the sense of the impossible—a departure from reality. Yet, utopias can serve as models of a preferred, humanly secure world. Many women and men see possibilities for the needed transformation and have, as noted above, put creative and critical human capacities to work in envisioning and designing—some in specific institutional detail—plans for alternative security systems. In the tradition of Bertha von Suttner, they perceive images of new realities: institutions for nonviolent conflict resolution; a legal framework to maintain global order and keep the peace with minimum force, applied only when needed to reduce violence and harm; strengthening of international law and legal institutions to resolve disputes and prosecute international crimes rather than wage wars against them; developing mutually beneficial relationships among all nations to cooperatively address the global problems that threaten the human security of all nations, overcoming relationships of competition and threat in favor of the constructive collaboration essential to survival; involving women, the poor and other marginalized and vulnerable groups fully and equally in all security matters. Indeed, there are possibilities for committing human talent and global resources, now expended on militarized state security, to the fulfillment of all security expectations in a world of cultural diversity, gender equality and human solidarity. But these visions can only be achieved when human needs are the primary concern of security establishments. As recognized in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325…one of the most promising of remedial measures if fully implemented—this concern is not likely to be the focus of security policy making without the equal participation of women. Neither is the achievement of authentic human security— that women peace activists assert to be essential to a just peace—possible absent the full representation of all the world’s diverse peoples. Human security depends on gender equality, and authentic democracy in all spheres of social organization. Striving toward human equality and political democracy requires challenging the global gender order and transcending the patriarchal roles and hierarchies that deny equality and democracy.

[email protected] 8.6 Confronting the Obstacles … 125

Some see in the encoding of human rights standards in international law one of the most visionary and potentially most politically practical mechanisms to move the world toward equality and democracy that would characterize human security. The arena of human rights is one in which struggles for gender justice and against many forms of oppression and deprivation are pursued. Most of what our feminist framework for human security includes as the sources of human security can be claimed by all human beings under the international human rights standards, especially as they have been extended to specify the rights of women and children. What the human rights standards miss in the framework can be found in the Earth Charter that articulates the ecological values that inform the framework’s first fundament and the International Criminal Court, which can hold legally account- able those who would repress the third fundament in crimes that deny human dignity and destroy persons so as to eliminate the identity of their groups. Because human security lies as much in the expectation as the experience of well-being, security is greater when the presence or perception of threat is lessened. In order for human beings and human communities to feel and experience security, they must be able to expect some assurance of well-being in all of the four basic areas of environment, basic needs, human dignity, and protection from avoidable harm. So too, when these expectations are reasonably assured, peoples are likely, not only to feel less threatened, less vulnerable, they are also far less likely to threaten others for economic, environmental or political reasons. If nations are striving for authentic human security, they are not so likely to be preparing for or waging war, but rather working toward peaceful, less costly resolution of conflicts and mutually beneficial solutions to common international problems, building constructive relationships with rather than threatening other nations. Authentic political will toward such transformed security policies and public intent to achieve human security would be the greatest possible assurance of the reduction of armed violence and the ultimate elimination of the institution of war. So, women’s peace groups are working to build such will and intent. Millions of women throughout the world—as attested to by the joint nomination of 1,000 women peace activists from all over the world for the Nobel Peace Prize (2005)—are fully committed to the struggle for peace, human security and equality. A number of their struggles are recounted in this volume. Women’s peace groups have been among the leaders in advancing transformational thinking through peace education, now a vibrant, world-wide movement, and cultivating political will through various forms of action. Among such actions are: those taken by Women in Black who vigil at the sites of divisions and violence in many countries; Code Pink in the United States members have undertaken action within the United State and in Iraq, Gaza and other areas of violent conflict; New Profile in Israel challenges the occupation of the West Bank and defends the right of conscientious objection—and is harassed by the government for daring to challenge and claim the rights presumed to obtain in a democracy; Voice of Women Canada has lobbied at the U.N. for SC 1325, disarmament and various steps toward the abolition of war. Women have been actively involved in conflict resolution and bringing an end to armed combat in many countries; Ireland, Sierra Leone, Liberia, being a few such examples.

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As Asha Hans documents in her chapter—that also describes an actual experiment in implementing human security—women have not only suffered the violence of the India-Pakistan border conflict and the failure of their respective states to protect them, they also have courageously challenged the political powers that perpetuate the conflict. Women, even more significantly, have been influential in policy campaigns and the formation of institutions and policies that can lead the way toward the demilitarization of the global security system, including—as we see in this volume—the resistance to militarization and armed conflict. Women have been leaders in all spheres of the struggle to make the possibilities for human security into probabil- ities. Much of this institutional work has been done in and around the United Nations. Voice of Women Canada, as noted, has launched various initiatives in disarmament at U.N. conferences and treaty body meetings. The women lawyers of the Gender Justice Caucus, leaders in the drafting of the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, were responsible for including rape among the crimes stipulated for prosecution under the Rome Statute that came into force in 2002. Women and women’s groups were among the strongest and most creative in the formation of the previously noted, Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice in the 21st Century, a 50 point program of specific steps toward the abolition of war, now an official UN document (Hague Appeal for Peace 1999). Within that agenda and various other proposals are multiple possibilities for the global institutional changes that could demilitarize security, moving the world closer to a comprehensive human security paradigm such as that envisioned in the feminist framework put forth here. Among the most politically and institutionally relevant provisions of the Agenda are those of Global Action to Prevent War, “…a comprehensive, multi-stage program for moving toward a world in which armed conflict is rare” (Hague Agenda: 10).

8.7 Conclusion: The Imperative of a Gender Perspective and a Comprehensive Approach

The Hague Agenda is but one of the indicators that an alternative nonviolent security system is possible. To transform these possibilities into realities two important dimensions must be integrated into the review and assessment of existing remedies and proposals and into the design of the new ones that may be found necessary. We have faulted “Human Security Now” for lack of gender perspective and its advocating human security as a complement to state security. While The Hague Agenda includes provisions on gender, advocating for the inclusion of women in peace matters, none of its other proposals, indeed few of the proposals mentioned here above, promising as they are, have a gender perspective. Without it, the fundamental obstacle of patriarchy is not likely to be overcome.

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Equally imperative is a comprehensive approach. We cannot achieve human security in its complex multi-dimensions—even with these afore noted proposals or many more possibilities, including those with a gender perspective—without ﬁnding ways to integrate them into a holistic framework, interrelating the various components into a comprehensive system directed to the purpose of eliminating violence and providing for human wellbeing. For this, in sum, is the essence of human security, wellbeing made possible through the elimination of all forms of violence, assured by institutions designed speciﬁcally to achieve and maintain wellbeing; in short, demilitarizing national security and bringing an end to patriarchy.

References

Belenky, M., 1986: Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books Inc., Publishers). Breines, I.; Connell, R. W.; Eide, I. (Eds.), 2000: Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence; A Cultural of Peace Perspective (Paris: UNESCO). Breines, I.; Gierycz, D.; Reardon, B. A., 1999: Toward a Women’s Agenda for a Culture of Peace. (Paris: UNESCO). Brownmiller, S., 1975: Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster). Clark, G.; Sohn, L., 1966: World Peace Through World Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Conclusions of the Consultation on Women Peace and Disarmament, 1983: “Peace Research Association” Consultation in Gyor, Hungary (unpublished). Connell, R. W., 2000: “Masculinities and Globalization”, in: I. Breines; R. W. Connell; I. Eide: (Eds.): Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence (Paris: UNESCO). Constitution of Japan, 1948: “Article 9”. Deutsch, M.; Coleman, P. Marcus, (Eds.), 2006: The Handbook of Conﬂict Resolution (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Enloe, C., 2000: Manoevers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press). Fanon, F., 1961: The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press). Gilligan, Carole, 1985: In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hague Agenda for Peace, 1999: Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice in the 21st Century. Hamburg, David, M. D., 2008: Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps Toward Early Detection and Effective Action (London: Paradigm Publishers). Hollins, H. B.; Powers, A.; Sommers, M., 1989: The Conquest of War: Alternative Strategies for Global Security (Boulder: Westview Press). Jenkins, T.; Reardon, B. A., 2007: “Gender and Peace: Towards a Gender Inclusive, Holistic Perspective”, in: J. Galtung; C. Webel, (Eds.), Handbook of Peace and Conﬂict Studies (New York: Routledge). Ogata, S.; Sen, A., 2003: Human Security Now (New York: United Nations). Peoples Movement for Human Rights Education, 2007: “Transforming the Patriarchal Order to a Human Rights System: a Position Paper”; at: www.pdhre.org. Reardon, B. A., 1985: Sexism and the War System (New York: Teachers College Press). Reardon, B. A., 1996: “Gender and Global Security: a Feminist Challenge to the United Nations and Peace Research”, in: Journal of International Cooperation Studies, 6,1: 1–28 (Kobe University, Japan).

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Reardon, B. A., 1998: “Gender and Global Security: Feminist Challenge to the United Nations and Peace Research”, in: The International Journal of Cooperation Studies (Kobe Japan: Kobe University). Reardon, B. A., 2008: “Toward a Gender Theory of Systemic Global Violence: Exposing the Patriarchal Paradigm”, a Seminar Presentation to be Published by the University of Granada, Spain in 2010. Reardon, B. A., 2010: “Women and Human Security: A Feminist Framework and Critique of the Prevailing Patriarchal Security System”, in: B. A., Reardon; A., Hans (Eds.): The Gender Imperative: Human Security versus State Security (New Delhi: Routledge): 9–37. Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2002: Report on Disarmament Education and Education for Nonproliferation (New York: The United Nations, A/57124). Shani, G.; Sato, M.; Kamal. M., 2007: Protecting Human Security in a Post 9/11 World: Critical and Global Insecurities (London: Palgrave McMillan). Sharp, G., 1973: Politics of Non Violent Action; Part I Power and Struggle (Cambridge: Albert Einstein Institute). Sharp, G., 1993: From Dictatorship to Democracy (Cambridge: Albert Einstein Institute). Snauwaert, D., 2002: “Just War and Democratic Education Post 9/11”. Paper delivered at the Conference on Teaching and Learning in the New Global Era (unpublished). Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998: U.N. Doc. A/CONF.183/9; at: http://www.un. org/law/icc/index.html. The Spanish Association for the Advancement of International Human Rights Law, 2006: The Luarca Declaration (Luarca, Spain: The Spanish Association for the Advancement of International Human Rights Law). Tickner, J. A., 1992: Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press). United Nations Annual: The Human Development Report (New York: UNDP). United Nations, 2000: Security Council Resolution 1325 (New York: The United Nations, GENDOC/NO/720/18). United Nations, 2005a: The Human Security Report (New York: UNICEF, A/63/677). United Nations, 2005b: Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (New York: General Assembly, A/601.1). United Nations, 2008: Security Council Resolution 1820 (New York: The United Nations, GENDOC/NO8/391/44). Vermot-Mangold, R. G., 2005: 10000 Women Across the Globe (Geneva: A Kontrast Book, Association of 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize). Wollstonecraft, M., 1999 [1792]: The Vindication of the Rights of Women (Boston: Peter Edes— New York: Bartleby). Woolf, V., 1966 [1938]: Three Guineas (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich).

[email protected] Chapter 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women Addressed to the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, March 4–15th, 2013

Retrospective Reﬂection on “A Statement on Military Violence Against Women” (2013)

This last selection illustrates another instance in which my participation in international civil society converged with my role as a peace educator.1 I have argued for and practiced peace education as preparation for global citizenship through awareness of and action within practical opportunities for enacting such citizenship. The NGO community that monitors and lobbies at U.N. headquarters offered one such opportunity for the requisite experiential learning. Proximity to the New York headquarters and my own work with NGOs provided global civil society learning to students in the graduate specialization in peace education as it was offered during my time at Teachers College Columbia University. There were two such experiences built into the specialization; one, a course on “The U.N. as Peace Educator,” based on the study of the interactive learning that characterized the relationships between U.N. specialized agencies and NGOs; the other an internship in which a smaller group of students were registered at the U.N. Department of Public Information (DPI) as secondary representatives of several of the NGOs with which I worked. One particular learning experience built into both global citizenship education offerings was observation of—and, for the interns, actual participation in—the annual sessions of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The CSW annual session is a rallying point for the world’s women’s movements, represented among the observers, monitoring the intergovernmental meetings and participants in the simultaneous side events presented by civil society organizations. Through these events women from all world regions share and build upon

1 This document was drafted by Betty Reardon for endorsement by NGOs and individuals (2 March 2013) and circulated at the 2013 session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, convened at U.N. Headquarters in New York City.

[email protected] 130 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women … each others’ projects and campaigns in multiple areas relevant to the fulfillment of women’s human rights and to bringing women’s perspectives to the consideration of a broad range of global issues. In recent years CSW has reviewed member states’ implementation of provisions of the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) that put issues of women in armed conflict on the U.N. agenda. It was during Com- mission meetings of the late 1990s that civil society efforts resulting in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security were first undertaken, to be advanced in the months between sessions by women’s peace NGOs based near U.N. headquarters until its adoption in the fall Security Council session of 2000. The 2013 CSW considered violence against women, a widespread and severe violation of the human rights of women in peacetime as well as in the conduct of war. Although the 1325 proponents welcomed this review and strongly supported all measures to redress violence against women in all its forms and venues, there was concern that some of the approaches to the issue once again were relegating women’s status in war and armed conflict to that of powerless victimhood, with little or no effort to assure women’s participation in peace and security policy making. To some degree this concern was fed by the multiple member state initiated resolutions on violence against women in armed conflict that followed the adoption of 1325 that had been initiated by civil society. Some of these later resolutions gave little attention to 1325 as the foundational resolution that rekindled interest in the subject of violence against women, an issue also first articulated by civil society, leading to the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Violence against Women (1993). It was only in 2013 that women’s political empowerment in peace matters became a subject of Security Council resolutions.2 Activists have been intensely involved in lobbying to have the political rights of women included in and implemented by the National Plans of Action (NAPs) intended to enact the three fundamental purposes of 1325, prevention, protection and participation. Both the process and the substance of these plans, which all member states have yet to adopt and few are vigorously implementing, also left much to be desired in terms of empowerment. I read this circumstance as a resistance, similar to that encountered in the realms of peace knowledge, to the acceptance of gender as constitutive to the field. There appeared to be a reluctance to accept the political relevance of gender to security policy making among many member states (or perhaps a fear thereof). Many observed that the prevention purpose—intended to be understood as preventing not just military violence against women, but also armed conflict itself— had been narrowed to an interpretation focusing almost exclusively on prevention of gender violence, ignoring (or avoiding) a core intent of the civil society initiators of the resolution, the prevention of war through the political empowerment of women. Were the participation provision actually implemented, a step toward the erosion of the patriarchal monopoly on all matters of security might well have been taken. And, we believed, it could be an advancement of possibilities toward the

2 United Nations resolutions: S/res/1820, S/res/1888, S/res/1889.

[email protected] 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women … 131 ultimate elimination of armed conflict. But we continued to observe the avoidance of the political participation with ever more proposals directed at the reduction of VAW in armed conflict without acknowledging the fundamental need to eliminate armed conflict in order to do so. There was a need to assert, as strongly as possible, that VAW was not incidental and avoidable in armed conflict, but intentional and integral to war itself. The statement reproduced below, drafted for circulation during the 2013 CSW has, since it was first issued, acquired nearly 300 endorsements, from organizations and individuals, including several Nobel Peace Laureates, showing wide agreement with its basic assertion about the intentional nature and strategic purposes of violence against women committed by armed forces. Describing multiple types of military violence against women, each of the categories can be evidenced with innumerable specifics cases, upholding the argument that war making is demon- strably misogynous. Therefore, it is impossible to significantly reduce or eliminate these categories of military violence without abolishing war itself. In giving the specificity to actual behaviors, it attempts to provide evidence to validate the theory of the integral interrelationship between sexism and the war system. This relationship has become a central conceptual tenet of feminist peace studies and research, but has yet to be integrated into the general field or taken into consideration by most of the strategies proposed by the U.N. and civil society to mitigate this violence. Those of us who developed and lobbied for the adoption UNSCR 1325 believed at the time that we were lobbying, not only for women’s full and equal participation in peace and security policy making but, for the ultimate substitution of war with a nonviolent security system. Indeed, we hoped the resolution would be a tool for combating military violence against women. Yet some of us strongly believed that the most effective lasting way to end that violence was to end war, to demilitarize security and to assure the full enfranchisement of women by establishing gender equality in the politics of security. The resistance to this equality, even pushback against the few gains that have been made, have been noted by the U.N. itself in the statement by the leader of U.N. Women published in Terra Nova, (May 19, 2014) that “… if the Beijing negotiations occurred today, they would likely result in a weaker agreement.” That circumstance, combined with the culture of misogyny that is demonstrated daily by the kidnappings, rapes and murders of women the world over, is the situation in which we continue to strive for a just peace characterized by universal human equality, assuring an end to the oppression and abuse of women, and by a commitment to the nonviolent resolution of all forms of conflict. As a concluding note, I would call all peace educators and activists to continue to pursue even more vigorously the illumination of the specifics of the misogyny of war, by educating and motivating ever wider publics, striving to assure that education cultivates gender aware citizens with well-honed skills for the nonviolent pursuit of change toward a culture of peace sustained by respect for universal human rights, constant striving for social and economic justice, and behaviors that demonstrate reverence for the living Earth, the fundamental sources of human security. To achieve these ends we must confront the problematic of the patriarchal global gender order. Without facing the challenge of patriarchy, I fear, we will not

[email protected] 132 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women … learn to fully understand the nature of what must be changed so as to realize our visions of a sustainable global culture of peace. This challenge can best be faced by the world’s civil society movements in the process of peace learning for responsible global citizenship. Betty A. Reardon New York, May, 2014

9.1 Violence Against Women Is Integral to War and Armed Conﬂict: The Urgent Necessity of the Universal Implementation of UNSCR 1325

Violence against women (VAW) under the present system of militarized state security is not an aberration that can be stemmed by specific denunciations and prohibitions. VAW is and always has been integral to war and all armed conflict. It pervades all forms of militarism. It is likely to endure so long as the institution of war is a legally sanctioned instrument of state, so long as arms are the means to political, economic or ideological ends. To reduce VAW; to eliminate its acceptance as a “regrettable consequence” of armed conflict; to exorcize it as a constant of the “real world” requires the abolition of war, the renunciation of armed conflict and the full and equal political empowerment of women as called for by the U.N. Charter.

With Suzuyo Takazato (left), and Nobuko Karimata (right), of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence in Okinawa, 2000

[email protected] 9.1 Violence Against Women Is Integral to War … 133

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 was conceived as a response to the exclusion of women from security policy making, in the belief that exclusion is a significant factor in the perpetuation of VAW. The originators assumed that VAW in all its multiple forms, in ordinary daily life as well as in times of crisis and conflict remains a constant because of women’s limited political power. Constant, quotidian VAW is unlikely to be significantly reduced until women are fully equal in all public policy making, including and especially peace and security policy. The universal implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security is the most essential means to reduce and eliminate the VAW that occurs in armed conflict, in preparation for combat and its aftermath. Stable peace requires gender equality. Fully functioning gender equality requires the dissolution of the present system of militarized state security. The two goals are inextricably linked one to the other. To understand the integral relationship between war and VAW, we need to understand some of the functions that various forms of military violence against women serve in the conduct of war. Focusing on that relationship reveals that the objectification of women, denial of their humanity and fundamental personhood encourages VAW in armed conflict, just as dehumanization of the enemy persuades armed forces to kill and wound enemy combatants. It also reveals that the outlawing of all weapons of mass destruction, ending the arms trade, the reduction of weaponry, an end to the arms trade and other systematic steps toward General and Complete Disarmament (GCD) are essential to the elimination of military VAW. This statement seeks to encourage support for disarmament, international law and the universal implementation of UNSCR 1325 as instruments for the elimination of Military Violence against Women (MVAW). War is a legally sanctioned tool of state. The U.N. Charter calls upon members to refrain from the threat and use of force (Art. 2.4), but also recognizes the right of defense (Art. 51) None-the-less most instances of MVAW are war crimes. The Rome Statute of the ICC includes rape as a war crime. However, the fundamental patriarchalism of the international state system perpetuates impunity for most perpetrators. So the full extent of the crimes, their relationship to the actual waging of war and the possibilities for the enforcement of the criminal accountability of those who have committed them need to be brought into the discussions on the prevention and elimination of MVAW. A greater understanding of particular manifestations of these crimes may lead to some fundamental changes in the international security system conducive to ending war itself. To promote such understanding here are listed some forms and functions of military violence against women.

9.2 Identifying Forms of Military Violence and Their Functions in Warfare

Listed below are several forms of military violence against women (MVAW) committed by military personnel, rebels or insurgents, peace keepers and military contractors, suggesting the function each serves to carry out the purposes of war.

[email protected] 134 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women …

The core concept of violence from which these types and functions of military violence are derived is the assertion that violence is intentional harm, committed to achieve some purpose of the perpetrator. Military violence comprises those harms committed by military personnel that are not a necessity of combat, but none-the- less an integral part of it. All sexual and gender based violence is outside actual military necessity. It is this reality that is recognized in the Beijing Platform for Action and the Security Council resolutions 1820, 1888 and 1889 that seek to curb MVAW. Included among the types of MVAW identified below are: military prostitution, trafficking and sexual slavery; random rape in armed conflict and in and around military bases; strategic rape; the use of military arms to inflict violence against women in post-conflict as well as conflict situations; impregnation as ethnic cleansing; sexual torture; abduction to serve as ‘wives’ to combatants, cooks and materials bearers; sexual violence within the organized military and domestic violence in military families; domestic violence and spouse murders by combat veterans. No doubt there are forms of MVAW not taken into account here.

With organizers of April 2012 workshop on “Sex Trafﬁcking and Modern Slavery.” First on the right Kim Robey, Anglican Women’s Empowerment; Sr. Virginia Dorgan and Sr. Kathleen Kanet, Network for Peace through Dialogue

Military prostitution and sexual exploitation of women have been features of warfare throughout history. At present ofﬁcially sanctioned brothels can be found around military bases and at the sites of peace-keeping operations. Prostitution— usually work of desperation for women or the consequence of trafﬁcking—is

[email protected] 9.2 Identifying Forms of Military Violence … 135 openly tolerated, even organized by the military, as essential to the ‘morale’ of the armed forces. Sexual services are deemed essential provisions for waging war to strengthen the “fighting will” of the troops. Military sex workers are frequently victims of rape, various forms of physical abuse and murder. Trafficking and sexual slavery is a form of VAW that stems from the idea that sexual services are necessary to fighting troops. The case of the “comfort women,” enslaved by the Japanese military during WW II is the best known, perhaps the most egregious instance of this type of military VAW. More recently, trafficked women have been literally enslaved in conflict and post-conflict peace-keeping operations. Women’s bodies are used as military supplies. Viewing and treating women as commodities is absolute objectification. Objectification of other human beings is standard practice in making war acceptable to combatants and civil populations of nations at war. Random rape in armed conflict and around military bases, an expected and accepted consequence of armed conflict, illustrates that militarism in any form increases the possibilities of sexual violence against women in militarized areas in ‘peace time’ as well as war time. This form of military VAW has been well documented by Okinawa Women Act against Military Violence. OWAAMV has recorded the reported rapes of local women by American military personnel from the invasion in 1945 to the present. The consequence of the misogyny that infects military training, when it occurs in war, it functions as an act of intimidation and humiliation of the enemy.

With Dr. Norma Nemeh, participant in civil society internship at Teachers College, and Philip Thomas, Head of International School, Geneva, at the Hague Appeal for Peace Conference on Peace and Justice in the 21st Century in 1999

[email protected] 136 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women …

Strategic and mass rapes—like all sexual assaults—intends to inflict violence as a means of humiliating, not only the actual victims, but, most especially their societies, ethnic groups, and/or nations. It is also intended to lessen the adversary’s will to fight. As a planned assault on the enemy, large scale rape is a form of military violence against women, usually inflicted en masse in attacks that demonstrate the objectification of women as property of the enemy, military targets rather than human beings. It serves to shatter the social cohesion of the adversary in that women are the base of societal relationships and domestic order. Military arms as instruments of VAW are used in the rape, mutilation, and murder of non-combatant women. Weapons are often the emblems of manhood, conceived within patriarchy, as tools for enforcing male power and dominance. The numbers and destructive power of weapons are a source of national pride in the militarized state security system, argued to provide defensive deterrence. The militarized masculinity of patriarchal cultures makes access to weapons an enticement to many young men to enlist in the military. Impregnation as ethnic cleansing has been designated by some human rights advocates as a form of genocide. Significant instances of this type of MVAW have occurred before the eyes of the world. The military objective of these rapes is to undermine the adversary in several ways, the main one being by reducing the future numbers of their people and replacing them with the offspring of the perpetrators, robbing them of a future and a reason to continue to resist. Sexual torture, psychological as well as physical, is meant to terrorize the civilian population of an enemy nation, ethnic group or an opposing political group, intimidating them so as to gain compliance to occupation or to discourage civilian support of the military and strategic actions of an opposing group. It is often inflicted on the wives and female family members of opposing political forces, as has happened in military dictatorships. It manifests the general misogyny of patriarchy intensified during war so as to reinforce objectification of women and ‘otherness’ of the enemy.

[email protected] 9.2 Identifying Forms of Military Violence … 137

With Cora Weiss, President of the Hague Appeal at the MacBride Peace Prize Award Ceremony 2009. Two civil society initiators of UNSCR 1325

Abduction, kidnapping of women and girls, (often by the same insurgents who employ child soldiers), to provide multiple services both sexual and strategic services to armed militant forces, or to prevent the education of girls, thwarting political empowerment of women serves to meet military needs and fulﬁll some of the political goals of the kidnappers. Sexual violence in military ranks and domestic violence in military families has recently become more widely publicized through the courage of victims, women

[email protected] 138 9 A Statement on Military Violence Against Women … who have risked their military careers and further harassment by speaking out. Nothing makes more obvious the integral relationship of VAW to war, preparation for it and post conflict than its prevalence within the ranks of the military. While not officially condoned or encouraged, it has been allowed to continue, serving to maintain the secondary and subservient position of women, and the intensification of aggressive masculinity, idealized as military virtue. Domestic violence (DV) and spouse murder by combat veterans occurs on the return of veterans of combat. This form of MVAW is especially dangerous because of the presence of weapons in the home. Believed to be a consequence of both combat training and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) DV and spouse abuse in military families derives from the systemic and integral role of VAW in the psychology of some warriors and demonstrates the extreme and aggressive masculinity cultivated to wage war.

9.3 Conclusions and Recommendations

The present system of militarized state security is an ever present threat to the human security of women. It will continue so long as states claim the right to engage in armed conﬂict as a means to the ends of the state, and so long as women are without adequate political power to assure their human rights, including their rights to security. The ultimate means to overcome that threat is the abolition of war and the establishment of gender equality. Some of the tasks we now may undertake toward this end are: the implementation of the Security Council resolutions 1820, 1888 and 1889 intended to reduce and mitigate MVAW; actualizing all of the possibilities of UNSCR 1325 with emphasis on the political participation of women in all matters of peace and security; pursuing measures that hold promise of achieving and end to war itself, such as the following recommendation for the outcome document of CSW 57. Among these tasks recommended are measures to end violence against women and measures that are steps toward an end to war. 1. Immediate compliance by all member states with the provisions of UNSCR 1325 requiring women’s political participation in the prevention of armed conﬂict. 2. Development and implementation of National Action Plans to actualize the provisions and purposes of UNSCR 1325 in all relevant circumstances and at all levels of governance—local through global. 3. Special emphasis should be placed on immediate implementation of the anti VAW provisions of UNSCR resolutions 1820, 1888 and 1889. 4. End impunity for war crimes against women by bringing to justice all perpetrators of MVAW, be they national forces, insurgents, peacekeepers or military contractors.

[email protected] 9.3 Conclusions and Recommendations 139

5. Conclude and implement an arms trade treaty to end the ﬂow of weapons, many of which are used as instruments of MVAW. 6. GCD should be declared the primary goal of all arms treaties and agreements that should be formulated with a view toward reduction of MVAW, the universal renunciation of armed force, and with the full participation of women as called for by UNSCR 1325. 7. Inaugurate a global campaign to educate about VAW, including special focus on MVAW, assuring that all members of all military, peacekeeping forces and military contractors are educated about MVAW and the legal consequences risked by perpetrators.

[email protected] Chapter 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy: Envisioning the Possible

What next? Toward what goals will the movements that inspired and contextualized the three phases of learning and action that have so profoundly inﬂuenced all that is included in this volume aspires to? I speculate on positive possibilities that might become political realities, knowing that actions will be taken and hoping that they hold within them the seeds of transformation.1 What practical political campaigns designed with our long-range goal of a gender just, peaceful world in mind will unfold? Will educators, students and peace and human rights activists undertake study-action to directly challenge patriarchy? Will we learn to heal the wounds it has inﬂicted, to mobilize the force of civil society around the transformation of the global gender order toward a gender just, democratic, demilitarized, environmen- tally responsible and economically fair world society? What is the major obstacle to overcome? To that latter question, I respond that it is patriarchy and the strangle hold it has on our thinking, our institutions, our relationships and the very planet which sustains life. Only by directly confronting it and systematically working to replace it with new thinking, restructured institutions, and more humanly enhancing relationships will we overcome it. To do so we need a vision of a transformed global order and a framework of action to achieve it. The epilogue to Volume 26 on peace education ended with a futures scenario to illustrate a technique used to introduce learners to thinking about possibilities that could inspire action toward change. At the conclusion of Volume 27, I invite all readers to join me in contemplating possible futures for gender and peace, speculating on events and developments that could hold the transformational potential that has thus far eluded women’s peace movements and the human rights activists campaigning for gender justice. I hope that readers in turn will invite their students, friends, colleagues and associates to spin out scenarios for the transcendence of patriarchy that might become the basis of planning and undertaking of action to make it happen.

1 This text was written in June 2014 and is published here for the ﬁrst time.

[email protected] 142 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy …

In other parts of these two volumes, there are suggestions for the kinds of queries such futures speculation entails, such as: What must be the problem focus of our visioning process? What might be a generative framework within which to conduct our problem inquiry and our strategy planning? What are the norms and values that will frame the inquiry and serve as guidelines for determining the proposed strategies and actions? What past and present achievements might we build on? What current trends and developments might be enhanced by the strategies that would inform the scenario? In what sequence would the strategy unfold in the “reverse history,” (i.e., speculating back from the achievement of the goal toward the promising developments of the present) of the scenario? Let us, as have feminist science fiction writers, some of whom have proved to be prescient, begin by envisioning what a gender just, nonviolent sustainable global order would look like; then plan and undertake the social and political action that could make it possible, keeping in mind that we will likely have to make changes and adjustments along the way of the process of planning and working toward the requisite structural, social and cultural changes. But we will hold our foundational vision and core values constant throughout the process. It will be helpful to clarify and specify our vision as much as possible. Toward that purpose, I would stipulate from the inception that gender justice would mean undoing all the injustices and destructive separations imposed by global patriarchy, the gender strictures that have frustrated human fulfillment since the inflicting of “the primal wound” that severed the masculine from the feminine, suppressing human wholeness. Our strategies would in large part be calling for and moving toward the reconciling of the separations that stand in the way of recognizing our common humanity and prevent our collaborating to safeguard our common future. The transformative goal in this case would be specified as the assurance that all human rights would be universally respected and realized by all human beings. We would endeavor to transcend the imposed limits on human fulfillment suffered by those who fall outside the confines of the hierarchically arranged relationships, roles and identities to which patriarchy has assigned them, and to those who struggle to be whole within those confines. Since the strictures that impose the gender hierarchy are largely kept in place by the threat and use of armed force, I would also stipulate, as did the late Elise Boulding in futures workshops offered as tools for the development of peace knowledge, that the transformed order would be “a world without weapons.” Our scenario would be an intertwining of two main processes: striving toward global gender justice, and advancing toward the demilitarization of world society, toward the realization of the core values.

[email protected] 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy … 143

The late Valentina Mitina, Soviet colleague, “sister” and fellow peace educator

Among those core values, I would posit that universal human dignity as specified in the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration be upheld by norms of equality and nonviolence; equality meaning all to have equal access to rights, to all the benefits of society, and all to be treated with respect; non-violence meaning the renunciation of avoidable harm in planning and implementing ways to achieve our purposes. Before, these stipulations are rejected as utopian and thus, impossible, let me repeat what I have asserted to be the functions of Utopia. Utopias are devices to enable us to envision the best world we can imagine. It is a starting point for a journey through political possibilities toward the practical opportunities to bring about significant change. They serve to demonstrate the actualization of the motivating values, spelling them out, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as the framework for the ultimate realities our goals are intended to become. Most that is conceived in the human imagination can be born into actuality through harnessing that same creative imagination to a practical political process.

[email protected] 144 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy …

With that in mind, our scenario might recount the drafting and adoption of a Universal Declaration of Gender Rights, or a gender addendum to the present declaration so as to assure universal gender justice for all gender identities. What gender rights might we assert in this document? How would they be assured? Certainly, we would consider assuring gender equality as one provision. Yet what would such equality actually mean? What more would we need that is not already included in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, or the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Violence against Women, or any of the other relevant international human rights standards? How might we use the present standards in our strategic planning? To understand more fully the nature of what must be transformed, I would also seek to clarify the focus problem and stipulate as a guideline for plotting out the scenario that within the current global and comprehensive gender order, sexism of and by itself isn’t the whole of the problem; nor is equality between the sexes alone the solution to the general problematic of patriarchy. Both elements are crucial to peace learning and peacemaking for gender justice, but far from comprising what is to be achieved in the overarching task; that is nothing short of a transformation of the patriarchal global gender order. To overcome the perceptions of utopianism as merely idealism, we must strive to fully understand all the complex manifestations of the entire problematic, so as to develop strategies to overcome the particularities within a framework for the comprehensive transformation of the whole order. Toward this end, we will need to develop a more detailed diagnosis of the multiple injustices imposed by the patriarchal gender order: something more comprehensive and systematic than that presented in the “Statement on Military Violence against Women.” What can we discern and document of the harms suffered by both men and women of all gender identities and sexual orientations within the gender hierarchy that comprises the structures of patriarchy? How might we describe those structures in order to envision the changes we would advocate as consistent with our transformational goals? What contributions to this structural analysis might we ﬁnd in the knowledge provided by feminist, masculinities and gender studies? What research might be needed to extend this knowledge to be fully adequate to a more complex notion of gender that takes into account ethnicity, and social and economic class, enabling us to determine what we need to strive for beyond legal equality? What human and social realities must be addressed in the intentional strategic plan? What capacities will we need to change them, to begin to loosen the vise patriarchy clamps on progress toward gender justice? Primary among them are the separations and alienation from those beyond our own assigned places in the gender order. We would need to plan the reintegration of the fragmented elements of our humanity through learning to actually practice holistic thinking, to reﬁne and apply the skills of reconciliation needed to achieve the re-integration of the human family. Neither the espousal of the value of holism nor advocacy of educating for reconciliation is new to peace education practice, but in this context they are somewhat re- interpreted. Wholeness here refers both to the full humanity of every individual person and to the unity of the whole human family, perceiving itself as one species

[email protected] 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy … 145 on one shared planet, sharing as well a reverence for this planet which gives and sustains life. Reconciliation involves a range of social attitudes and skills that would capacitate us to establish mutually beneﬁcial associations with those from whom we have been estranged, designated as ‘other’ in the social and political arrangements conditioned by patriarchal thinking. It would, as well, reconcile us with this planet that patriarchy, as with the vulnerable of human society and other living creatures, has attempted to subordinate to its own self-centered purposes, bringing about the environmental deterioration that has become the global climate crisis. Reconciliation is a process through which such associations can be woven through a web of human relationships and the relationship of humanity to the living Earth. Such a web could hold together a peaceful global society. This web of living relationships is a reminder of the fundamentally organic nature of most processes of viable change, wrought by the people themselves, derived from their lived experience of the harms they seek to overcome. Organic changes are now unfolding toward the advancement of gender equality and democratic participation, some holding a potential to lead toward stable conditions of positive peace. These are changes originated and evolved from sources outside or avoiding the limitations of governmental structures; sometimes becoming strong enough to obligate actual states to comply with the goals and purposes of their citizens. These achievements of civil society promise practical possibilities for fundamental and transformative change, but still, the transcendence of patriarchy is not in sight. For like germs and viruses that develop capacities to resist generation after generation of wonder drugs, patriarchy adapts to changes in social and political orders, taking on new, alternative forms, such as the corporatization of society. CEO’s of the world’s most powerful corporations—almost, but not entirely men—are now at the top of the global hierarchy, espousing the fundamental patriarchal values and practices, based on human inequality and exploitation. So the hierarchy survives, even in the face of democratic changes. Opportunities for the less powerful continue to be thwarted by an evolving but consistently hierarchical gender order. Without the political intent and a strategic plan to realize it, the bright promise of the transcendence of patriarchy held up to us as a hope we might make reality, is beyond utopian. Without an intentional purpose, articulated in a clear vision of a transformed world and the intense involvement of civil society in pursuing it, transcendence is the “impossible dream.” It is then, important to cultivate a vibrant civil society to provide possibilities for our scenario, which can free our actions from dependency on states that uphold the patriarchal hierarchy. Some success has been achieved in making it clear to states and to the timid among their citizens that states must, as they purport to be, become the agents of citizens’ goals and what the members of society consider to be in the interest of their authentic human security. Until they do so, citizens will continue to take social action toward their goals. Social actions are particularly effective when two or more movements converge in a common purpose as elements of the women’s movements and the peace movements have done, taking up substantive and systematic as well as strategic collaboration (if slowly and tentatively). Beginning with preparations for the 1995 Beijing interstate conference and its

[email protected] 146 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy … parallel NGO Forum, the collaboration continued, bringing about adoption of UNSCR 1325, which gives the force of international law to the principles of women’s right to full participation in all matters of peace and security. It continued into the 21st century with women’s campaigns to convince U.N. member states to fulﬁll these legal obligations by designing and implementing National Plans of Action to fully implement all the provisions of 1325. Important as they were, these constructive developments were discrete and particular, failing to offer clearly focused progress toward the system change that is integral and essential, though not sufﬁcient to transformation. Few have been vigorously implemented. Some civil society women’s groups have begun to consider People’s Plan’s to propose social action as an alternative approach to implementation. Perhaps, Peoples’ Plans of Action might be included in the scenario. Another potentially powerful convergence of change movements is being advocated at the time of this writing by some women peace activists who propose that the movement to stem climate change join with the movement to abolish nuclear weapons. The scenario might include this potential convergence to strengthen the political will to overcome these two most dangerous threats to the survival of humanity and the planet, which has sustained us throughout our history. It might be a point in our reverse history of change where a revitalization of the longer range movement for general and complete disarmament and plans for the demilitarization of security might be worked into the strategic plan, as we plot out the scenario. This possibility is augmented by another linkage that appeared in efforts of women’s NGOs working within the context U.N. policies to assure that a new climate change agreement will be “gender responsive.” Illuminating these links and also the interrelationship between peace and gender justice might also play a role in the scenario, as the evolution of stronger civil society cooperation in working toward the vision. To establish this linkage, we might include the Nordic Forum or Feminist Fest, which exceeded by far the anticipated participation, when 20,000 advocates of gender equality convened in Malmo, Sweden from June 12–15th, 2014. Their advance deliberations assured that civil society will be heard in the formation of the agenda for the observations of “Beijing + 20” at the fall 2015 session of the General Assembly. The forum linked gender justice and peace with proposals for staged reductions in military spending to be applied to meeting social and economic needs. This linkage was complemented by insisting that gender and peace concerns be more fully integrated into the post 2015 sustainable development goals. So here we see the convergence in goal setting among gender equality, economic equity, sustainable development and peace that together form the potential for a broad based transformation movement that could provide political force to the scenario. As a peace educator, I would certainly argue for the inclusion of an intentional and detailed plan to educate the general citizenry to enable them to participate in the politics of transformation. And that education should address the urgency of collaboration between men and women to assure the necessary comprehensive concept of gender justice and authentic gender equality. In this regard I am encouraged by the use of futures planning as a device to elicit consideration of the development of

[email protected] 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy … 147 the next stages in peace studies in a consultation organized in the recent past by the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), the North American body that relates to the International Peace Research Association (IPRA). This development was complemented more recently by the promise of more serious and focused attention to the subject of gender and peace within the larger peace studies community. The issue was, at long last, opened to consideration by the whole membership in an online discussion instigated by opening an inquiry into essential and controversial questions relevant to the on-going development of the ﬁeld. It was a lively and informative exchange that ﬁnally introduced serious consideration of patriarchy and its effects on both men and women into the professional conversation. The patriarchal oppression of men noted by Tony Jenkins, and my comment on his observations encapsulate the assumptions under which this epilogue was composed in hope of advancing this discussion among all concerned constituencies. I quote here these contributions to the PJSA discussion as an example of possible themes that could inform any purposeful discourse on affecting change in the global gender order.

On 6/12/2014 11:08 AM, Tony Jenkins wrote: This has been a powerful and constructive conversation that has introduced some important and insightful new angles. Betty’s comment about being ‘blinded’ to patriarchy has helped me to think about what I might contribute to the dialogue. As a few other members have noted, the inclusion of gender and women’s issues in peace studies has been on a steady incline. I’ve observed this as well, especially over the last decade. While these gains are important I generally worry about the depth of the analysis and the patriarchal attitudes and assumptions that still seem to linger in peace studies and academia. At conferences (including PJSA) and in other professional settings I’ve been approached by male colleagues during gender focused panels with comments such as “ok, gender is important, we get it.” In my mind such a response is a clear indication that they don’t indeed “get it.” At the same time I think it is indicative of the underlying pain and denial of human dignity that men have suffered under patriarchy; a suffering that is not immediately or easily observed in the feminist literature and scholarship that comprises much of our studies (most gender scholarship is told from a women’s perspective on and experience of the gender order). The emergence of masculinities studies has opened a lot of doors for a more inclusive dialogue on gender and patriarchy. We all have degrees of ‘blindness’ to socially and culturally constructed institutions, especially gender and patriarchy. However, new, more inclusive gender narratives can be constructed and I think peace studies have a tremendous responsibility and role to play in this process. I’m thankful that more men are actively participating in this dialogue and that PJSA is intentionally bringing gender to the forefront of all of our common work. As it concerns blindness let us not overlook the rocky history and signiﬁcant contributions of gender and women’s studies within IPRA. Historically gender issues were seen as trivial in comparison to the larger issues of the prevention of war. Feminist peace scholars struggled for many years (and still continue) to have their voices heard. And while they struggled, feminist perspectives on peace and security slowly became mainstreamed. Human security was a concept that was ﬁrst issued by feminist scholars, yet when we talk about human security today the gender analysis is generally absent and the feminist contribution to this scholarship is not credited. Feminist peace scholars have also been at the forefront of peace education and peace pedagogy, illuminating modes of transformative learning essential to dismantling the war system. We need to recognize and celebrate these contributions.

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Academia is also particularly gender blind. The types and forms of knowledge that are validated in academia are very gendered and I think they cloud our ability to constructively approach the issues of gender and to transform the patriarchal order. I could go on and on with examples of gender blindness, but rather I encourage my PJSA colleagues to do the courageous work of reflecting and examining their assumptions and attitudes about gender and their contributions to maintaining or transforming the status quo. As pervasive as patriarchy is, I think nothing short of daily reflection is required to develop the agency that is necessary to confront and transform our violent gender order. -Tony Date: June 12, 2014 12:22:37 PM EDT From: Betty Reardon Thanks, Tony: It is good to see the significance of men’s negative experience within the patriarchal gender order lifted up for attention. Just as only now is there any attention to sexual violence against men in the military, these daily insults to humanity suffered by so many men are beginning to be acknowledged. Blindness has been abetted by the denial that also serves to perpetuate the gender order. There can be no authentic, holistic gender perspective without consideration of these factors and the recognition that the discrimination against LGBTQ persons is, as well, a consequence of patriarchy. I have long contended that patriarchy is an equal opportunity oppressor; everybody is some how deprived of full humanity under the present global gender order. We are all in this together and, as you suggest, probably should do some regular reflection on how we experience the order and what we and our field can do to achieve the gender equality that the U.N. Charter declared to be a foundation of peace. We would give the reading of “the equal rights of men and women” a much broader meaning, but the basic principle is there, so we have that ground to stand on. I am so glad to see this discussion giving the serious consideration to an essential peace issue that has been needed for so long. -Betty R. I conclude this volume on gender and peace with this epilogue, hoping that activists and educators will engage intensively and courageously in proposing and striving toward a preferred future of gender justice. It may be that your own conceptual explorations and action planning will take a form different from a strategic scenario, and might include actions and campaigns other than those described here. You may or may not choose to consider what I have proposed as motivating values and planning frameworks. As the hope is for such discussion to be held in educational institutions, local associations, transnational organizations, all realms of global civil society, the forms and content of the conversations would, I hope, be multifarious and wide ranging. It is also my hope that through the many channels for world-wide communication now available, ideas can be exchanged to enrich the conversations and strengthen commitment to on-going action for transformative change to liberate us from the constraints and limitations of imposed gender roles and status, transcending patriarchy so as to bring about a warless and gender just global order. I know that should a significant portion of civil society take up this task, we will undergo an arduous, often painful and sometimes very costly journey. Such has

[email protected] 10 Epilogue—Toward a Strategy for Transcending Patriarchy … 149 been the route to most the landmarks in the history of movements to achieve human dignity and human security for all peoples. And I have no doubt that even this preferred future will produce its own problems. Yet I have faith in the human capacity to learn. In this process of transcending patriarchy, let us learn the modes to solve problems and achieve change that do not invoke violence or denial of human dignity. Utopia is not without problems, but neither does it hold within it the seeds of its own destruction. Could not we as a community of peace educators and gender justice advocates at least agree to take up the issues and pursue the requisite learning? I may be “a dreamer, but [I’m sure] I’m not the only one…”.

Betty A. Reardon New York, June, 2014

[email protected] About the Authors

Betty A. Reardon is a feminist peace and human rights educator—activist with six decades in the development and dissemination of the ﬁeld. The founder of the International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE) and the original peace education graduate specialization at Teachers College Columbia University, and one of the civil society originators of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, she has worked in all world regions toward international cooperation among peace educators. Widely published in peace education and gender issues, including Sexism and the War System, Teachers College Press (1985), Women and Peace, SUNY Press (1993), and The Gender Imperative: Human Security vs State Security, Routledge (2010), her publications are archived in the Ward Canaday Special Collections at the University of Toledo Library.

Dale T. Snauwaert, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Democratic Education, and Co- Director of the Graduate Certiﬁcate Program in the Foundations of Peace Education in the Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership, Judith Herb College of Education, The University of Toledo, USA. He is the Founding Editor of In Factis Pax: Online Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice. He is widely published on such topics as democratic theory, theories of social justice, the ethics of war and peace and the philosophy of peace education published in such academic journals as

[email protected] 152 About the Authors the Journal of Peace Education, Educational Theory, Educational Studies, Peace Studies Journal, Philosophical Studies in Education. He is the author of Democracy, Education, and Governance: A Developmental Conception (SUNY Press 1993), the editor of two volumes on Betty Reardon’s work: Betty A. Reardon: A Pioneer in Education for Peace and Human Rights and Betty A. Reardon: Key Texts in Gender and Peace (Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice (PSP), Vols. 26 and 27), and with Fuad Al-Daraweesh, the co-author of Human Rights Education Beyond Universalism and Relativism: A Relational Hermeneutic for Global Justice (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

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Betty A. Reardon is a pioneer of gender studies who identiﬁed as a feminist the structural relationship between sexism and the war system and as a scholar a shift from national to human security. This book is a rich collection of her writing on gender studies, sexism and the war system, human security from a feminist perspective. As a groundbreaker in contemporary theories on gender and peace, Betty A. Reardon has continually developed an inquiry into the integral relationship between patriarchy and war, and to advocate for gender issues as essential content of peace studies, problems of gender equity as the subject of peace research, and gender experience as a crucial factor in deﬁning and pursuing human security. Her work evolved in the context of international women’s movements for human rights and peace and the United Nations and is widely used by activists and educators bringing a gender perspective to peace studies and education and a peace perspective to women’s studies. More on this book at: http://afes-press-books.de/html/SpringerBriefs_PSP_ Reardon.htm.

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