Defining Critical Feminist Justpeace: Women’S Peacebuilding Praxis And

DEFINING CRITICAL FEMINIST JUSTPEACE: WOMEN’S PEACEBUILDING PRAXIS AND

FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Karie Cross

Eileen Botting, Director

Graduate Program in Peace Studies and Political Science

Notre Dame, Indiana

June 2017

DEFINING CRITICAL FEMINIST JUSTPEACE: WOMEN’S PEACEBUILDING PRAXIS AND

FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT

Abstract

Karie Cross

The central concerns of my dissertation are the meaning of gender-just peace and the methods for pursuing it. Entering an ongoing debate within peace studies about the United Nations’ top-down, institutions-oriented “liberal peace,” I use ethnographic research with women’s peacebuilding groups in India alongside feminist political thought to argue for a “critical feminist justpeace,” developed from the bottom-up and taking the diverse experiences of marginalized women as motivation. Women in

Manipur, India, try to build peace across ethnic, religious, and class-based boundaries. I analyze their practices, synthesizing them into a peacebuilding “praxis”—reflection combined with action with the goal of transformation—which we can fruitfully compare to Western feminist thought.

This comparison of praxis and theory suggests that where the liberal peace fails women, a radically inclusive critical feminist justpeace will come closer to success. Such Karie Cross a peace is never achieved, but is rather an on-going process of contestation and relationship-building across divisions of power and privilege.

For the women of Manipur: may they find peace.

ii CONTENTS

Tables ...... vii

Acknowledgments...... viii

Chapter 1: Introduction to women’s peacebuilding: theory, praxis, and feminist methods ...... 1 1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Literature review: women, gender, and peacebuilding ...... 8 1.2.1 Difference approaches ...... 10 1.2.1.1 War, militarism, and peace are gendered ...... 13 1.2.1.2 Women leverage motherhood for peace ...... 14 1.2.1.3 Women focus on structural violence and positive peace 16 1.2.1.4 Women are more than just victims ...... 18 1.2.1.5 Gender relations are a good indicator of violence ...... 20 1.2.2 Diversity approaches...... 23 1.2.3 Deconstructive or post-structural approaches ...... 30 1.2.4 Situating myself in the literature ...... 38 1.3 Research site: the Indian state of Manipur ...... 40 1.4 Research methods ...... 43 1.4.1 Qualitative, interpretive, and feminist ...... 43 1.4.2 Research on the ground ...... 49 1.4.3 Comparative political theory and praxis ...... 53 1.5 Peacebuilding, liberal feminism, and human development in this project .... 57 1.6 Peacebuilding, critical feminism, and human rights in this project ...... 61 1.7 Summary of conclusions: critical feminist justpeace ...... 63

Chapter 2: Political history and armed conflict in Manipur...... 66 2.1 Introduction ...... 66 2.2 Political history ...... 67 2.2.1 Origin stories ...... 69 2.2.2 The British colonial era ...... 72 2.2.3 Indian independence and the “forced merger” ...... 77 2.3 Armed conflict ...... 83 2.3.1 The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) ...... 83 2.3.2 Responses to AFSPA: the rise of armed insurgency ...... 87 iii

2.3.3 Inter-ethnic violence in Manipur ...... 93 2.3.4 Current status: low-intensity armed conflict in Manipur ...... 96

Chapter 3: Peacebuilding in Manipur: praxis coming to life ...... 105 3.1 Introduction ...... 105 3.2 Structural violence: provoking and constraining the women peacebuilders of Manipur ...... 108 3.2.1 Social inequalities: ethnicity and religion ...... 114 3.2.2 Geographic inequalities: hills and valleys ...... 120 3.2.3 Political inequalities: national, state, and local politics ...... 122 3.2.4 Economic inequalities: development, corruption, and extortion . 128 3.2.5 Militarization: life under occupation ...... 132 3.3 Women’s peacebuilding praxis ...... 136 3.3.1 Interethnic peacebuilding ...... 141 3.3.1.1 Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network ...... 141 3.3.1.2 Extrajudicial Execution Victims’ Families Association (EEVFAM) ...... 147 3.3.2 Meitei peacebuilding ...... 154 3.3.2.1 Meira Paibis ...... 154 3.3.2.2 “The iron lady,” Irom Sharmila ...... 159 3.3.3 Kuki peacebuilding: Women’s Welfare Association Asia ...... 161 3.3.4 Naga peacebuilding ...... 165 3.3.4.1 Shanao Long ...... 165 3.3.4.2 Naga Women’s Union Manipur ...... 166 3.3.4.3 Intra-ethnic, interstate peacebuilding: NWUM and the Naga Mothers’ Association ...... 169 3.4 Women’s peacebuilding agency: contributions to justpeace ...... 171

Chapter 4: Liberal feminism and human development ...... 185 4.1 Why liberal feminism and human development? ...... 185 4.2 Introduction to human development ...... 186 4.2.1 A brief history of the approach ...... 186 4.2.2 Amartya Sen ...... 189 4.2.3 Martha Nussbaum ...... 195 4.3 Comparative analysis: Sen, Nussbaum, and peacebuilding praxis ...... 201 4.3.1 Guiding criteria: “the list” ...... 203 4.3.1.1 Does the list promote or hinder substantive freedom? . 203 4.3.1.2 Does the list enable an individual to act as an agent in her own life? ...... 207 4.3.1.3 Sen: agency distinct from well-being ...... 208 4.3.1.3.1 Sen: agency, autonomy, and empowerment .. 211 4.3.1.3.2 Sen: agency and change...... 214 4.3.1.3.3 Nussbaum: agency indivisible from well-being 216

4.3.1.3.4 Nussbaum: agency as interpersonal ...... 221 4.3.1.3.5 Nussbaum: reasonable, emotional, religious, and anxious agents ...... 223 4.3.1.3.6 Sen and Nussbaum: agency and time ...... 227 4.3.1.4 3. Does the list assist with the problem of adaptive preferences? ...... 229 4.3.2 Deliberative inquiry...... 233 4.4 Conclusions ...... 248

Chapter 5: Critical feminism, human rights, and conflict transformation...... 251 5.1 Why critical feminist human rights and conflict transformation? ...... 251 5.2 Brooke Ackerly’s critical feminist approach ...... 253 5.2.1 Third World feminist social criticism ...... 253 5.2.1.1 Skeptical scrutiny ...... 255 5.2.1.2 Guiding criteria ...... 256 5.2.1.3 Deliberative inquiry ...... 259 5.2.1.4 Who performs social criticism? ...... 260 5.2.2 Curb cut feminism and universal human rights ...... 263 5.2.2.1 From Third World feminist social criticism to curb cut feminism ...... 263 5.2.2.1.1 Data collection ...... 266 5.2.2.1.2 Data analysis ...... 268 5.2.2.2 The immanent theory of universal human rights and emancipatory social change ...... 270 5.2.2.3 Curb cut feminist analysis and peacebuilding praxis ...... 272 5.2.2.3.1 Ackerly as critic: what Ackerly gets right in Manipur ...... 272 5.2.2.3.2 Peacebuilding praxis as critic: what Ackerly misses in Manipur ...... 278 5.3 John Paul Lederach’s conflict transformation approach ...... 282 5.3.1 Origins: questioning conflict resolution ...... 282 5.3.2 Conflict transformation: process structures, justpeace, and the moral imagination ...... 285 5.3.2.1 Process structures ...... 287 5.3.2.2 Justpeace...... 288 5.3.2.3 The moral imagination ...... 289 5.4 Comparative analysis: Ackerly, Lederach, and peacebuilding praxis ...... 294 5.4.1 Explicit uses of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis ... 294 5.4.2 Implicit uses of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis ... 303 5.4.3 Rejections of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis ...... 306 5.5 Critically assessing conflict transformation ...... 308 5.6 Conclusions: towards a critical feminist justpeace ...... 312

Chapter 6: Critical feminist justpeace ...... 314 6.1 The liberal peace ...... 314 6.2 Critical responses to the liberal peace ...... 319 6.2.1 Richmond’s post-liberal peace ...... 319 6.2.2 Just peace in the literature ...... 327 6.2.2.1 Just peace and just war ...... 327 6.2.2.2 Just peace and reconciliation ...... 332 6.2.2.3 Just peace and care ethics ...... 338 6.2.3 Lederach’s justpeace ...... 343 6.3 Critiquing justpeace ...... 348 6.3.1 Relationships and perpetual work ...... 348 6.3.2 Human dignity and the common good ...... 348 6.3.3 Difference, power, and equality ...... 351 6.3.4 The strategic “who”—agency, well-being, and marginalization ... 354 6.3.5 The public/private problem ...... 357 6.4 Articulating the new, critical feminist justpeace ...... 359 6.4.1 Defining critical feminist justpeace ...... 360 6.4.1.1 Guiding criteria ...... 361 6.4.1.2 Deliberative inquiry ...... 363 6.4.1.3 Skeptical scrutiny ...... 365 6.4.2 Pursuing critical feminist justpeace ...... 367 6.5 Conclusion: from resentment to courageous connection ...... 373

Appendix A: Interview protocol ...... 380 A.1 Pre-interview oral consent process ...... 380 A.2 Interview script ...... 381 A.3 Post-interview script ...... 382

Bibliography ...... 383

Interviews ...... 409

TABLES

Table 2.1 Battle-related deaths in Manipur...... 98

Table 2.2 Civilian, security personnel, and terrorist deaths in Manipur ...... 101

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the women and men of Manipur who let me into their lives and taught me about peacebuilding. Their expertise and kindness have served as not only the foundation of this project, but also the source of my safety while researching.

My adviser and committee members, Eileen Botting, Ruth Abbey, Amitava Dutt, and Atalia Omer, provided helpful feedback and encouragement over the course of many years. I am grateful for good conversations and pointed questions.

My partner, Jonathan Riddle, and my peace studies colleagues (Francis

Bonenfant-Juwong, Heather DuBois, and Kyle Lambelet), provided invaluable intellectual and emotional support throughout grueling fieldwork and writing. I am also grateful to my parents, Pam and Michael Cross, and to my sister, Kelly Elliott, for believing and illustrating that women can do anything. My feminist present has a great deal to do with my empowering past.

viii CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S PEACEBUILDING: THEORY, PRAXIS, AND FEMINIST

METHODS

1.1 Introduction

I visited South Asia for the first time in 2010. While working with a human rights

NGO in the Terai district of Nepal, I had the opportunity to interview ex-child laborers who had been rescued from their places of work.1 Nearly all of the child laborers whom I met were young girls. Inquiring after this gender gap, I learned about Nepali norms regarding the relative value of sons and daughters, which were connected to social expectations about women’s public earning capabilities and dowries. I also befriended many Nepali people who make it their life’s work to transform these norms, insisting on the education of young girls and backing up that insistence with funding for families who cannot afford to feed and educate both sons and daughters. My interest in the region, and particularly in activists who counter common gender norms, was born.

1 I served as a Peace Fellow with The Advocacy Project, based in Washington, D.C., which sent me to their partner organization, BASE-Nepal. See http://www.advocacynet.org/fellows/ and http://nepalbase.org/.

In 2013, I returned to South Asia as a doctoral student in search of a research project. Asking questions and following leads, I stumbled onto an NGO in Delhi called the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network which set me on my path to studying women peacebuilders in a small, forgotten state in Northeastern India. Women of

Manipur whom I had read about—Irom Sharmila, who fasted for 16 years against human rights abuses; Mary Kom, who won a bronze medal in boxing at the London

Olympics; the Meira Paibis, who led a nude protest against the rape and murder of a young girl—revealed that in Manipur, just as in Nepal, many seek to transform common norms about women. Beginning with the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network but broadening my scope over the course of three years, I was able to engage with five women’s peacebuilding organizations to examine their practices of transformation.

From the start, I realized that I was observing not just unreflective activism, but praxis—“action and reflection upon the world in order to transform it.”2 Many of these women peacebuilders are strategic, well-connected, and highly educated. They lobby government officials at national and international levels. Others have very different strengths, such as empathy, courage, and resilience, and they work primarily within their own small villages. However, even this latter group of women has firm ideas about violence, peace, the relations among communities, and family relationships. Together, the broad variety of women who work to build peace in Manipur (coming from different

2 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder New York, 1971), 66.

ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds) present a multi-layered peacebuilding praxis which contains theories about gender justice and the meaning of gendered peace. In many ways, their most obvious interlocutors are not theorists of peace and conflict (although I introduce some, in this project), but rather theorists of feminism.

In this dissertation, I analyze women’s peacebuilding praxis from Manipur and put it into conversation with two bodies of Western feminist thought—liberal and critical feminism, in the form of Martha Nussbaum’s and Amartya Sen’s approaches to human development, and Brooke Ackerly’s framework of universal human rights.3 My primary analytical tool for women’s praxis is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. Crenshaw’s helpful distinction between structural and political intersectionality4 helps me to show not only how women’s social locations impact their experiences with violence and peacebuilding, but also the ways in which their peacebuilding discourses and practices sometimes marginalize the peacebuilding efforts of other women. Women’s peacebuilding praxis in Manipur is filled with inspiring stories of courage and success across ethnic and religious boundaries, but it is likewise comprised of stories of exclusion, resentment, and failure. Crenshaw’s tool of political intersectionality, in particular, enables me to question problematic aspects of praxis

3 Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, is not Western, although his education at Cambridge and employment at places like Harvard and Oxford may have Westernized his thought to some extent.

4 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1245.

while still affirming examples of women’s peacebuilding agency in a context of great constraints.

Crenshaw and other theorists of intersectionality such as Patricia Hill Collins and

Sirma Bilge thus serve as my first interlocutors coming from Western feminist theory.

Intersectionality, however, is primarily a tool for critical inquiry and critical praxis.5 Its diagnostics offer merely implicit, partial theories of social justice. Thus, in order to gain new understandings of a gender-conscious, justice-imbued peace, I move from intersectionality in Chapter 3 to two feminist approaches to social justice and human flourishing—liberal feminist human development, and critical feminist human rights, in

Chapters 4 and 5. Following this multi-directional conversation among women’s peacebuilding praxis and alternative paradigms of social justice and peace, I articulate in

Chapter 6 a critical feminist justpeace which differs greatly from the current model of peace that has gained international prominence—the United Nations-promoted liberal peace.

This research project is unorthodox in a number of ways. First, I take an interdisciplinary approach, informed by peace studies, political theory, comparative politics, gender studies, development studies, anthropology, and sociology. Second, my case selection follows a feminist research ethic, which prioritizes important issues within ordinary women’s lives, rather than methodological concerns and ongoing

5 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Bognor Regis: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016).

conversations within scholarly literatures (although I make my way into various literatures easily enough).6 Third, my research site, the Northeastern Indian state of

Manipur, is remote and understudied by non-Indians. I quickly learned why this is so, as my research was severely hamstrung at times by the Indian government’s hostility towards foreign researchers in the Northeast,7 strikes (bandhs), state- and insurgent- imposed curfews, violence, and trauma. I knew that it would be difficult to move around in Manipur, asking questions about ethnic conflict and peacebuilding across multiple people groups, and it was.

The research design decisions that I have made have both benefits and costs. I ask what I perceive to be important and difficult questions that stretch across disciplinary boundaries, but they come at the cost of presenting complete and definitive answers. Still, I staunchly defend the value of this particular project. Peace researcher

Erica Chenoweth explicated my own logic perfectly, during the 2016 meeting of the

International Studies Association in Atlanta, Georgia. Taking part in a plenary session on research methods and peace studies, Chenoweth argued that researchers ought to ask

A questions, even if the best that they can do is to provide a B answer. B questions might be easier to answer, but do they increase our knowledge in important ways? Do B questions, already established in the literature, push the boundaries of disciplines,

6 Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 59.

7 Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder : Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), viii–ix.

creating dissonance such that new insights can emerge? Perhaps most importantly, from a feminist perspective (here I extrapolate from Chenoweth’s remarks), do B questions merely perpetuate common understandings of gender and stereotypes about men and women, rather than challenging them? In this project, which engages primarily with literatures on women and peacebuilding and the liberal peace, I will show that in order to capture the experiences of women peacebuilders in Manipur, we must ask subversive questions that challenge predominant paradigms. Even if these questions are extremely difficult to answer, they are worth pursuing.

My project explores three questions:

(1) How do women in Manipur build peace across intersecting identity differences such as ethnicity, religion, and class?

(2) How can women’s peacebuilding praxis improve, and be improved by, feminist political theory?

(3) What does the dialogue between women’s peacebuilding and feminist political theory teach us about the meaning of peace?

I use ethnographic methods to collect information about women’s peacebuilding praxis. Then with the help of qualitative data analysis software, MaxQDA, I analyze my observations and interviews in search of empirical patterns across peacebuilding praxis.

The approach of comparative political theory informs the conversation between empirical praxis and theoretical argument. My presentation of women’s peacebuilding praxis, as I have said, should not be taken as complete or definitive. Because of violence and the likelihood of government surveillance, I decided to leave my research site early.

I left behind lists of potential contacts and many unanswered questions. Like any

researcher, when reading my field notes and interviews, I regret glimpses of understanding that can never be fleshed out, as many of my contacts are not reachable via internet, and language barriers further separate us. Still, I present as valuable, new knowledge, an outsider’s incomplete picture of women’s peacebuilding, across and within ethnic and religious boundaries in Manipur. My outsider status certainly detracted from my ability to move about freely; to immediately grasp the meaning of symbols, phrases, and traditions; and to converse directly with some of my interviewees.8 However, as an outsider, I was able to speak freely with members of multiple ethnic groups. In a state riddled with ethnic tension and bursts of violent conflict, this was an unusual advantage. My privileged status as a doctoral student and a citizen of the United States also lent me access to prominent NGO workers and journalists. While I have mixed feelings about the (un)fairness of this privilege, I have tried to use it to produce new analysis that is helpful to those whom I studied— vulnerable women and men who counter the Indian state, armed insurgents, and members of their villages and families, working for peace where multiple forms of violence reign.

Before laying out my research methods and gesturing towards the project’s overall conclusions, I will situate this work within the literature on women, gender, and peacebuilding.

8 About 70% of my interviews I conducted in English. I used three different translators for the remaining 30%, which were in Manipuri (the Meitei language) or Kuki dialects.

1.2 Literature review: women, gender, and peacebuilding

Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True argue that within feminist research, the literature review does not uncover and fill a gap, but rather “lays out the intellectual debts of the author, her principal interlocutors, and a landscape of opportunity for exploration.”9 I try to do just that, by acknowledging all of the good work that enabled me to take up this project in the first place. I offer a semi-comprehensive literature review of women, gender, and peacebuilding here, in the introductory chapter, but each subsequent chapter has its own review of relevant literature. Thus my intellectual debts, principal interlocutors, and opportunities for exploration are, to an extent, revealed within each chapter as I turn to new questions. For example, although I owe great intellectual debts to Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, I will not introduce their work and the broader literature on human development until Chapter 4. Moreover, I will not present a separate section on women, gender, and peacebuilding within India. I simply include studies on India within this broader review, as I believe that it is useful to read well-known Indian scholars like Rita Manchanda, Paula Banerjee, Bina Agarwal, Uma

Narayan, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak within a wider context. Their work fits well into the organizational scheme that I use for this literature, dividing it into difference, diversity, and post-structural approaches to feminism.

9 Ackerly and True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, 75.

8 In this introductory review, I purposefully include work on women and gender and peacebuilding. Some empirical studies of women’s peacebuilding focus on women without probing the boundaries of the category. Most, however, employ insights from gender studies and feminist theory to question the meaning of “women.” Studying not only women’s peacebuilding but gender and peacebuilding allows me to consider the impact of being a woman upon women. Furthermore, it necessitates that I review theoretical work about the deployment of power and the structure of gender norms, even if that work does not explicitly focus upon peacebuilding. Thus, my review looks a bit different from the typical literature reviews found in studies on women and peacebuilding. While I include and value insights from foundational scholars of international relations and peace such as Ann Tickner, Cynthia Enloe, Betty Reardon, and Elise Boulding, I think that it is also important to include more recent theoretical advances from interdisciplinary feminists like Nira Yuval-Davis, Judith Butler, Saba

Mahmood, and Jasbir Puar. Primarily within this review in Chapter 1, but also over the course of the entire project, I attempt to deal with all of these different strands of relevant empirical and theoretical literature.

I employ Dietz’s categorization of difference, diversity, and deconstruction feminism to organize this review.10 Other scholars organize the literature on women and

10 Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, “Back to the Future: Feminist Theory, Activism, and Doing Feminist Research in an Age of Globalization,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33 (2010): 466–467; Mary G. Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 6, no. 1 (2003): 399–431.

peacebuilding differently. For example, Claire Duncanson’s recent work Gender and

Peacebuilding divides the scholarship into those who support and try to improve the international agenda commonly known as Women, Peace and Security, and those who question the structure and goals of this agenda.11 Maria O’Reilly names five strands of feminist theory—liberal, standpoint, transversal, critical, and post-structural—and tracks how work on women, gender, and peacebuilding fits into this typology.12 I find

Duncanson’s division to be simplistic, and O’Reilly’s to be overly complicated. Dietz’s three categories are easy to grasp, and they enable us to broaden the conversation beyond the UN’s agenda on Women, Peace and Security.

1.2.1 Difference approaches

According to Dietz, difference feminisms are those that revalue the typically negative meanings associated with “women” or “the feminine” in order to produce positive accounts of women’s lives. This approach argues that because of sexual difference, women have experiences that differ from men’s. Difference feminists claim that these experiences ought to be heard and valued in order to reclaim women’s moral

11 Claire Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 10–11.

12 Maria O’Reilly, “Gender and Peacebuilding,” in Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 57–68.

voices. Care ethics,13 liberal feminism,14 and psychoanalytic approaches15 can all be construed as versions of difference feminism.16 Difference feminists, like diversity feminists (whom I will discuss shortly), argue that gender is socially constructed. They claim, however, that it is still possible to explore its social, moral, and political meanings, as well as the ways in which it shapes power.17

The difference feminist approach is best exemplified in the literature on women and peacebuilding which focuses upon United Nations Security Council Resolution

(UNSCR) 1325. Passed by the Security Council in 2000, this Resolution lays out the international agenda on Women, Peace and Security. It mandates women’s participation in peacebuilding processes and calls for the mainstreaming of a gender perspective in all UN peace and security efforts.18 Equating women with gender, UNSCR

1325 takes a simplistic approach to gendered identities and leaves aside many of the nuanced insights of various strands of feminist theory.19 While largely recognizing these

13 Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

14 Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

15 Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (University of California Press, 1978).

16 Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” 402–405.

17 Ibid., 405.

18 “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325,” 2000, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1325(2000).

19 Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 35; Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed Books, 2008).

weaknesses,20 difference feminists tend to work pragmatically within this framework, lauding it as an important symbol of international recognition of women’s unique contributions to peace processes.21

Five major insights about women, gender, and peacebuilding emerge from the difference approach to feminism. Many of these insights are likewise shared by diversity feminists, who present comparable arguments but trouble facile characterizations of

“women’s experiences” by paying attention to diversity among women. Given that difference and diversity feminists offer similar findings on women peacebuilders (albeit from very different standpoints), I will explicate these insights, citing examples from both difference and diversity feminists here in Section A, before turning more fully to the diversity critique of difference in Section B. Since this section includes most of the empirical findings of the literature on women, gender, and development, its length far outstrips the next sections. This is a product of my organizational scheme, and not of the literature itself.

20 An exception is Anderlini, who adopts a completely non-critical stance towards UNSCR 1325. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2007), 7.

21 Natalie Florea Hudson, Gender, Human Security and the United Nations: Security Language as a Political Framework for Women (London; New York: Routledge, 2010); Elisabeth Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective (London; New York: Routledge, 2007).

1.2.1.1 War, militarism, and peace are gendered

One of the most basic and almost universally-accepted insights coming from this literature is that war and militarism are gendered. Pioneers in the study of women and peace such as Ann Tickner and Cynthia Enloe argued early and often that the field of international relations ignores women’s experiences and therefore misses the fact that war and militarism are gendered male, while peace is perceived as female.22 According to Enloe, for centuries, only men have been “imagined capable of the sort of public decisiveness international politics is presumed to require.”23 When such a habit becomes entrenched over many years, it begins to seem natural—as if something biological, rather than political, drives international politics. Employing a feminist lens helps Enloe to ask, however, “…Whether anything that passes for inevitable, inherent,

‘traditional,’ or biological has in fact been made.”24 What has been constructed, in

Enloe’s view, is an international system which depends upon men’s control of women.25

Women are often disadvantaged by the popular perception of male force and female propensity for peace, although feminists conscious of promoting women’s agency like to note that women can use this to their advantage, even if in problematic

22 Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1990); J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

23 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, & Bases, 4.

24 Ibid., 3.

25 Ibid., 4.

ways. If women are perceived as “naturally” more peaceful than men, they have a socially-acceptable reason to participate in peace protests and perhaps even formal peace talks.26 Much of the scholarship on women peacebuilders in India makes this argument,27 and many of my own interviewees confirmed that many in this group think in this way.28 Humanitarian and peacebuilding spaces are socially ascribed to women, and they are willing to use them.

1.2.1.2 Women leverage motherhood for peace

Connected to the insight that peace is gendered female, empirical studies of women peacebuilders show that women often leverage motherhood as a political tool for peace. Scholars are divided over the positive and negative effects that arise from this common, political move which women have made across the world, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to the Naga Mothers Association and the Meira Paibis

26 Charlotte Bunch, “Peace, Human Rights, and Women’s Peace Activism,” in Peace Work: Women, Armed Conflict and Negotiation, ed. Radhika Coomaraswamy and Dilrukshi Fonseka (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004), 47; Betty Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 15.

27 Anjana Dayal Prewitt, “Women, Religion, and Trauma Healing: A Case in India,” in Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen, ed. Susan Hayward and Katherine Marshall (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2015), 267; Rita Manchanda, “Where Are the Women in South Asian Conflicts?,” in Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency, ed. Rita Manchanda (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2001), 19; Samir Kumar Das, “Ethnicity and Democracy Meet When Mothers Protest,” in Women in Peace Politics, ed. Paula Banerjee (Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2008), 65.

28 IN2, July 5, 2015; MP, July 5, 2015; CI, July 5, 2015.

in India.29 Mothers can make authoritative claims, particularly upon young, male soldiers, which few others can make. They can use shock and shame to great effect.

Motherhood can also unify women across other identity differences.30 But the leveraging of the role of motherhood can be as dangerous as embracing women’s

“natural” role as peacebuilders—it consigns women to “softer” roles within peacebuilding, leaving the “hard” work of formal negotiations to men.31 Moreover, it promotes potential divides among women, while also ignoring empirical counterexamples. What about women who seek peace but are not mothers? What about mothers who act violently? What about men who seek peace?32

One way out of the problems associated with embracing women’s supposed, innate peacefulness, is to deny biological connections to peace while acknowledging socially-constructed reasons for women’s propensity to support peace over violence, as compared to men.33 Ritu Menon and Roshmi Goswami do just this, in their analyses of

29 Anderlini, Women Building Peace; Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007); Rita Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can: Naga Women in the Peace Process (Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights, 2004).

30 Cockburn, From Where We Stand.

31 Malathi de Alwis, Julie Mertus, and Tazreena Asjjad, “Women and Peace Processes,” in Women and Wars, ed. Carol Cohn (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 180 This argument properly critiques the restriction of women to softer peacebuilding roles. It fails to critique, however, the definition of peacebuilding as formal negotiations. Many feminists (including myself) choose to define peace more broadly, inclusive of the many creative and varied ways in which women build peace.

32 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jill Greenlee, The Political Consequences of Motherhood (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).

33 Lisa Schirch, “Frameworks for Understanding Women as Victims and Peacebuilders,” in Defying Victimhood: Women and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, ed. Albrecht Schnabel and Anara Tabyshalieva (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2012), 63.

women in South Asia. Drawing on Cynthia Cockburn’s insight that women may be suited for peace work because they are more familiar with oppression than men, Menon argues that women’s gendered experiences with violence, even in “peace-time,” might make them more effective analysts of and activists against violence in “war-time.”34 Sara

Ruddick’s description of motherhood as a practice which can be performed by men or women has also been usefully taken up by feminists.35 I will discuss connections between her feminist ethics of care and peacebuilding more fully in Chapter 6.

1.2.1.3 Women focus on structural violence and positive peace

Difference feminists (alongside diversity and even deconstruction feminists) often make the argument that women’s interests with regard to war and peace are not only direct violence and negative peace, but also structural violence and positive peace.36 Drawing from Johan Galtung’s conceptualization of structural violence—

34 Ritu Menon, “Doing Peace: Women Resist Daily Battle in South Asia,” in Peace Work: Women, Armed Conflict and Negotiation, ed. Radhika Coomaraswamy and Dilrukshi Fonseka (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004), 64; Roshmi Goswami, “Women and Armed-Conflict: Ground Realities from the North- East,” in WISCOMP Symposium on Human Security, 2000; Cynthia. Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London; New York: Zed Books, 1998).

35 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Robinson, Fiona, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective; Catia Confortini and Abigail Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace,” Journal of International Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2013): 70–93; Laura J. Shepherd, “The Road to (and From) ‘Recovery’: A Multidisciplinary Feminist Approach to Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding,” in Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, ed. Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 99–117.

36 Bunch, “Peace, Human Rights, and Women’s Peace Activism,” 31; Betty. Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, 2.

violence occurring without an identifiable actor who is responsible for the harm— research reveals that women peacebuilders are concerned with both direct and structural harm. The sort of peace that they build, therefore, is a positive peace which has more to do with human flourishing than with the mere cessation of violence that characterizes negative peace.37 Betty Reardon points out, for example, that the agenda set during the United Nations International Women’s Decade, 1975-1985, called for positive peace, which she defines as “the conditions of human society that permit us all to live authentically human lives.” Citing Galtung, Reardon likewise notes that the 1985

Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies sought a positive peace which entailed “… the enjoyment of economic and social justice, equality, and the entire range of human rights and fundamental freedoms within society.”38

This argument about women peacebuilders manifests in many ways in the literature: the popular contention that women tend to use peace deals as opportunities to improve gendered justice;39 the assertion that women peacebuilders tend to focus on

37 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; for ties to feminist theory, see Catia Confortini, “Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies/Feminism Alliance,” Peace and Change 31, no. 3 (2006): 333–67.

38 Betty Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, 19, 40; Reardon cites Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” in Essays in Peace Research Volume IV (Copenhagen: Christian Eglers, 1980).

39 de Alwis, Mertus, and Asjjad, “Women and Peace Processes”; Filomina Chioma Steady, Women and Leadership in West Africa (New York: Palgrave MacMillon, 2011); Zainab Salbi, “Ending Violence against Women in Eastern Congo: Preparing Men to Advocate for Women’s Rights” (Women for Women International, 2007); Tsjeard Bouta, Georg Frerks, and Ian Bannon, Gender, Conflict, and Development (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2005).

issues associated with everyday life;40 and the exploration of what a feminist peace might look like.41 As with many of the other findings about women, gender, and peacebuilding explicated here, these arguments frequently appear within the literature on women in India as well.42

1.2.1.4 Women are more than just victims

Difference feminists also often highlight that women act as far more than victims in the midst of violence and war. Although they are often portrayed as passive victims who must be taken care of—as one component of Cynthia Enloe’s famous womenandchildren—women act as agents of both war and peace.43 They may serve as

UN peacekeepers, insurgents, terrorists, formal negotiators, and informal builders of everyday peace.44 To portray them as victims is to deny their agency, even if that agency is expressed within highly constrained circumstances.

40 Paula Banerjee, Anasua Basu, and Ray Chaudhury, eds., Women in Indian Borderlands (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2011).

41 Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 63–67; Confortini and Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace”; Annika Björkdahl, “A Gender-Just Peace? Exploring the Post-Dayton Peace Process in Bosnia,” Peace & Change 37, no. 2 (2012): 286–317.

42 Paula Banerjee, “New Conundrums for Women in North-East India,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 57–65; Manchanda, “Where Are the Women in South Asian Conflicts?”

43 Cynthia Enloe, “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Village Voice, September 25, 1990.

44 Menon, “Doing Peace: Women Resist Daily Battle in South Asia,” 61–62; Rita Manchanda, ed., Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2001); Atreyee Sen, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Seema Shekhawat, “Visible in Conflict, Invisible in Peace: Positioning Women in the Militancy in Kashmir,” in Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace: Challenging Gender in Violence and Post-Conflict Reintegration, ed. Seema Shekhawat (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 18

The search for women’s unexpected agency is a common theme within studies of women in India. Rita Manchanda’s important scholarship on women in conflict areas adopts a difference approach, as she argues that women’s common experience of

“living disarmed in an armed, violent world” gives them “special abilities to understand war and offer other ways of dealing with conflict.”45 She worries about the risks of reinforcing essentialist categories, but she argues that the potential “over- determination of gender” might be “necessary to make women’s historical invisibility, visible.”46 To make South Asian women visible, she points to varied exertions of agency, in the form of women’s striving for day-to-day human security (rather than national security) for themselves and their families.47

Traditionally, particularly in Western feminism but often within Indian feminisms as well, women’s agency and/or empowerment has been defined in terms of resistance.48 Adopting a liberal feminist perspective and drawing upon Indian economist

Amartya Sen, Bina Agarwal uses an empowerment framework in her groundbreaking study of women’s land ownership in India. Agarwal defines empowerment as “a process

2015), 100–116; Lesley J. Pruitt, The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Policing, and the UN’s First All- Female Peacekeeping Unit (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016).

45 Manchanda, “Where Are the Women in South Asian Conflicts?,” 19.

46 Ibid., 20.

47 Ibid., 18.

48 Jasbir Jain, Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2011); Metti. Amirtham, Women in India: Negotiating Body, Reclaiming Agency (Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011).

that enhances the ability of disadvantaged (‘powerless’) individuals or groups to challenge and change (in their favor) existing power relationships that place them in subordinate economic, social, and political positions.” Such empowerment can take the form of either individual resistance or group mobilization, enhancing women’s

“capability to function,” as Sen would say.49

Diversity and deconstructive feminists, and particularly those working at the intersection of women and religion, challenge this narrow conceptualization of women’s agency.50 I will track this debate in closer detail in later chapters, first engaging with Saba

Mahmood’s portrayal of the docile agent in Chapter 3, and second challenging Amartya

Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s definitions of agency in Chapter 4.

1.2.1.5 Gender relations are a good indicator of violence

Another common finding in the literature on women, gender, and peacebuilding, argues that levels of violence against women serve as a helpful predictor of a nation’s overall violence on the world stage. Exemplified by Valerie Hudson et alia’s recent work

Sex and World Peace, difference feminists illustrate through quantitative measures that

49 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39; Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (New York: Russell Sage Foundation ; Oxford, 1992).

50 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–32; Susan Hayward and Katherine Marshall, “Religious Women’s Invisibility: Obstacles and Opportunities,” in Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen, ed. Susan Hayward and Katherine Marshall (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2015), 1–27.

international relations scholars study war and peace imperfectly if they fail to study women. Hudson and her coauthors show that, better than quantitative measures of level of democracy, level of wealth, and prevalence of Islamic culture, a measure of the physical security of women will assist a policymaker in predicting which states would be least peaceful and therefore of the most concern to the international community.51 In a similar project, Joshua Goldstein’s work War and Gender likewise claims that the most warlike cultures are also the most sexist.52 In-egalitarian relationships between men and women positively correlate with warfare.

These persuasive, quantitative results make an important contribution to the study of international relations on its own terms, using mainstream quantitative methods and addressing paradigmatic arguments within the field about predicting interstate behavior. This strand of the literature, however, points most sharply to the main disagreement between difference and diversity feminism—that there is a generalizable, knowable pattern of “women’s experiences” which scholars can measure and use effectively in empirical research. Difference feminists insist that the social construction of gender creates life experiences for women which can be studied across

51 Valerie M. Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 112; see also Valerie M. Hudson et al., “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” International Security 33, no. 3 (September 2008): 7–45; Hudson, Gender, Human Security and the United Nations: Security Language as a Political Framework for Women; Mary Caprioli, “Making Choices,” Politics & Gender 5, no. 3 (2009): 426–31; Mary Caprioli et al., “The WomanStats Project Database: Advancing an Empirical Research Agenda,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 6 (2009): 839–51.

52 Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20.

time and culture.53 This approach, however, equates gender with sex, and it uncritically studies women as a group. Here, difference feminists sharply diverge from diversity and deconstruction feminists.

Clair Duncanson’s work Gender and Peacebuilding criticizes the “gender as a variable” approach of some difference feminists. Explicitly addressing Hudson et alia’s

Sex and World Peace, Duncanson points to the danger of reaching essentialist conclusions tied to sociobiology. She highlights Hudson and her co-authors’ claim that there is an “evolutionary reason” for many of women’s typical characteristics, such as empathy and the lack of a competitive nature.54 The authors’ treatment of diverse religions and cultures also adopts essentialist language, as they use broad brushstrokes to paint large groups of people as “honor/shame societies” or “traditional cultures.”55

This treatment of women as a group, and of cultures as monolithic, negates differences among women and within cultures. Moreover, the treatment of gender as a variable

“implies that gender itself does not have to be explained”—women’s and men’s gendered identities are fixed.56 Many feminists coming from the diversity and

53 Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace, 6.

54 Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 55.

55 Ibid., 56; see Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace, 8, 11, 25.

56 See Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); cited in Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 55; Goldstein also uses gender as a variable, but he attempts to conceptualize it with all of its complications. In particular, he highlights the cultural ways in which biological traits can be expressed, leading him to argue that there is no helpful line between sex and gender. Still, his use of gender as a variable sometimes seems overly general and overly deterministic. Goldstein, War and Gender, 2, 406.

deconstructive schools of thought try to complicate the meaning of gender, probing it for intersections with other identity markers and for its place within relations of power. I will turn now to these alternative approaches, revisiting some of these five insights of difference feminism as appropriate.

1.2.2 Diversity approaches

In my assessment, a majority of the most current literature on women, gender, and peacebuilding adopts a diversity approach. Much, but not all, of the difference feminist literature appeared in the 1990s, essentially just as black feminist thought, post-colonial thought, queer theory, and intersectionality were beginning to transform feminism. The UN’s own approach to women in peacebuilding—first adopting a difference approach with UNSCR 1325 in 2000, but now cautiously adding insights from intersectionality into its more recent Resolutions such as UNSCR 2122—also reflects this shift in feminism and in the literature on women, gender, and peacebuilding.57

According to Dietz, diversity feminist approaches take many of the insights of difference feminism but complicate them through explicit recognition of the diversity of women’s experiences. For example, using some of the insights enumerated above: war is gendered, but gender works differently according to race and religion. This leads the

American political elites of the early 2000s to make arguments in favor of invading Iraq

57 “United Nations Security Council Resolution 2122,” 2013, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/2122(2013). UNSCR 2122 tangentially relies upon intersectional thinking, as it recognizes that some women and children who are “particularly vulnerable or disadvantaged may be specifically targeted or at increased risk of violence.”

and Afghanistan in part, on behalf of Muslim women who are oppressed by Muslim men. Or in Gayatri Spivak’s famous formulation, so that white men can save brown women from brown men.58 The post-colonial and racial undertones of the Bush administration’s argument go un-noticed if feminists fail to take an intersectional approach which considers not only gender, but also race and religion.59 Feminists should not implicitly support imperialism for the sake of women’s solidarity. In the end, such solidarity hurts rather than helps women.60

Women’s solidarity—the political use of “women” as a group—is the Achilles heel that threatens to undermine diversity feminism. Whereas difference feminism highlights differences between men’s and women’s experiences in order to lift up marginalized women, diversity feminism emphasizes variation among women. Dietz succinctly sums up the conundrum that this creates: “The problem is how simultaneously to hold to a radical and contingent account of knowledge claims and knowing subjects, thereby dissolving the false ‘we’ of the feminist standpoint, while maintaining solidarity, across differences, among women in the name of a long-term or wide-ranging feminist movement.”61 If feminist organizers presume that shared

58 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

59 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

60 Drucilla Cornell, Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (New York: Routledge, 2004).

61 Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” 410.

experience is the foundation of political organizing, but that shared aspect becomes troubled, it begins to seem impossible to organize. Still, diversity feminists risk the cost of easy coherence for the reward of more accurately representing the diverse lives of women coming from different social locations.

The scholarship of Carol Cohn, Cynthia Cockburn, and Claire Duncanson exemplifies the diversity approach. In the introduction to her recent edited volume

Women and Wars, Cohn emphasizes many of the same points as difference feminists

(e.g., women tend to work for positive peace), yet she maintains a more fluid approach to gender identity which presents the conclusions of her work as contingent and historically situated. Cohn defines gender as “a way of categorizing, ordering, and symbolizing power, of hierarchically structuring relationships among different categories of people….”62 She considers gendered identities, gendered social structures, and gendered symbolic meanings to be “three co-constituting aspects of gender as a social system which structures hierarchical power relations.” Power shifts and is exerted both within and among categories.63 This diversity approach to gender and to power, which recognizes not only gendered hierarchies but also their intersection with other hierarchical oppressions, enables scholars to see multiple masculinities and femininities.

There is no universal masculinity that accompanies war in the same way in all places;

62 Carol Cohn, “Women and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework,” in Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures, ed. Carol Cohn (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 3.

63 Ibid., 5.

rather, men’s roles change from war to war, in relation to each other and in relation to women. Recognizing the diversity in wars, alongside the diversity in men and women, helps feminist scholars to avoid “doing conceptual violence to the reality of women’s lives.”64

Cockburn and Duncanson promote comparable understandings of gender, as contextually situated across time and space, which in turn produce similarly intersectional analyses of women, men, and gender relations in war and in peacebuilding. In From Where We Stand, Cockburn underscores the vagueness of the

“we” in her title: the amount of identity shared by the author and her interviewees, as well among the interviewees, is a matter of interpretation.65 Using intersectional analysis of both individuals’ social positions and structures of economic, racial, and gendered power helps her to frame the wartime experiences of women in all of their diversity.66 Interviewing 250 women activists from 12 countries, Cockburn describes the feminism which emerges. It is a social constructionist feminism, which denies natural propensities towards violence or peace; it is multi-dimensional, accounting for body politics, critiques of capitalism and colonization; it is conscious of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. It assumes the integration of human rights, and it sees gender power as

64 Ibid., 2.

65 Cockburn, From Where We Stand, 1.

66 Ibid., 8.

systemic.67 Whereas difference feminists like Betty Reardon and Valerie Hudson might fear the potential of this diversity feminism to divide women (because of its multiple, and multiplying commitments to targeting different forms of oppression), Cockburn promotes this feminism’s potential to include more women through its diversity.

Diversity feminist approaches, at their best, do not concern themselves with analyzing every possible identity intersection—indeed, this is impossible. Instead, their emphasis upon contingency, difference, and holism, reiterates the need for feminism to be conscious of multiple, simultaneous exertions of power across structures, time, and space—including feminism’s own exertions of power. Kimberlé Crenshaw highlights this danger with her distinction between structural and political intersectionality, drawn from the United States context.68 Structures such as racism and classism create varied social locations for women, producing qualitatively different life experiences. Structural intersectional analysis helpfully takes note of these differences. However, political intersectional analysis reveals how feminist and anti-racist politics together marginalize the experiences of women of color. Feminist rhetoric elides race, and anti-racist rhetoric ignores women. Thus, Crenshaw points to the need for a self-conscious feminism which includes all women, regardless of racial and other differences. We will return to the meaning and use of structural and political intersectionality in great depth in Chapter 3.

67 Ibid., 227–229.

68 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.”

Claire Duncanson’s diversity feminist work, like Cynthia Cockburn’s, offers an intersectionality-informed feminist peace69 which is inclusive, expansive, and transformative. An inclusive feminist peace is intersectional, countering all forms of domination.70 An expansive feminist peace is positive, reaching beyond the absence of violence to include economic and social empowerment.71 Finally, a transformative feminist peace counters the liberal peace in order to turn from neoliberal, profit- maximizing policies to addressing inequalities.72 We will revisit feminist critiques of the liberal peace in great detail in Chapter 6.

Indian feminists are prominent proponents of intersectional argumentation.

Chandra Mohanty insists that feminism must incorporate a critique of racism and capitalism, and she critiques Western feminisms for underplaying racist and classist structures.73 Uma Narayan welcomes Western-style critiques of some Indian norms and practices regarding women—indeed, she argues that to fail to critique these norms produces moral inequality, because this implies that Indians cannot meet Western

69 Duncanson draws upon El-Bushra and Porter. See Judy El-Bushra, “Gender in Peacebuilding: Taking Stock” (International Alert, 2012), www.international- alert.org/sites/default/files/Gender_TakingStock_EN_2012.pdf; Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective.

70 Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 59.

71 Ibid., 63.

72 Ibid., 67.

73 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 4.

moral standards.74 But at the same time, Narayan decries the Western tendency to critique Indian “traditions” or “cultures” without bothering to historicize and contextualize specific traditions. Indian women do not experience death by culture— they face violence at the hands of specific men, particular structures, and contextualized practices.75 Feminist analysis of Indian women must therefore be mindful of concrete histories of colonialism, nationalism, and religion, in addition to gender.76

It should now be plain how diversity feminism challenges difference feminist studies of women, gender, and peacebuilding. Difference feminists have produced important insights about women’s experiences in war and peace, many of which I delineated above. But diversity feminists trouble the empirical results of difference feminists by consistently asking the intersectional question: “which women?” Hudson and her co-authors in Sex and World Peace find that women’s participation in development projects correlates with national economic performance.77 Diversity feminists would take that finding as a helpful argument on behalf of promoting women’s participation in development, but they would further inquire into the results: which women participate, and which are excluded? How does national economic performance impact women of different ethnicities, religions, and regions? Does the

74 Uma Narayan, Dis-Locating Cultures : Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 150.

75 Ibid., 59, 84.

76 Ibid., 45.

77 Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace, 44.

participation of women of one ethnicity guarantee better economic conditions for women of different ethnicities?

Diversity feminist approaches to women, gender, and peacebuilding therefore address many of the potential problems with difference feminism. But what are the weaknesses associated with diversity feminism? Deconstructive, or post-structural, feminist scholars argue that even diversity approaches assume too much about the nature of gender identity. I will now turn to two prominent post-structural feminists,

Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar, to question the limits of intersectionality.

1.2.3 Deconstructive or post-structural approaches

Dietz uses the terms difference, diversity, and deconstructive to describe three approaches to feminism. I wish to replace her term deconstructive with the term post- structural, however.78 Deconstructive implies that there is nothing constructive present in the third approach, and I believe that Butler and other feminist scholars who are often categorized as deconstructive theorists in fact have a great many constructive insights. Moreover, I find it useful to consider Butler (who, indeed, is often the only

“deconstructive” feminist exemplar for this category, for Dietz and others working with the women and peacebuilding literature) alongside others who question the settled

78 Joan Scott notes the multiple, useful connections between post-structuralism and the sorts of moves that she was trying to make within feminism, including questioning and historicizing universal categories, power relations, identities that seem natural, and terms (such as equality and justice) that seem settled. Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 33–34.

nature of many aspects of feminist politics, whether it is Saba Mahmood on the meaning of agency; Jasbir Puar on the deployment of queerness; or Brooke Ackerly on the epistemologies that undergird our thought about women’s human rights.79 All of these thinkers are post-structural, in the sense that they constantly avoid the static nature of fixed structures to highlight the need to consider context, self-understanding, and the dynamic discourses of politics. While scholars like Butler, Mahmood, Puar, and

Ackerly are not necessarily scholars of women and peacebuilding, I find that their insights have multiple points of resonance with the empirical and theoretical examination of women building peace in different contexts. Scholars working in the sub- field of women and peacebuilding would do well to consider their work.80

Difference and diversity feminists distinguish gender from sex in order to argue that the former is socially constructed. Post-structural feminists hesitate to make this argument, as it implies that sex is not also constructed. With her ground-breaking 1990 work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler employs a Foucauldian genealogical method to show that sex, too, depends upon cultural understandings of male and female binaries.81 She articulates a performative theory of gender, which critiques the discourses and norms

79 Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” 411; Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 55; Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

80 Certainly, some already do. See Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding; O’Reilly, “Gender and Peacebuilding”; Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical.”

81 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 109.

that compel heterosexuality. The performance of gender creates space for agency within subversions of the norms that control sexual identification and orientation.82 If gender is performed, rather than socially constructed, as difference and diversity feminists argue, then all of the “multi-vocal, pre-constituted categories (race, color, class, gender)” of intersectionality become “disrupted and dismantled.”83 Most importantly, and in the view of difference and diversity feminists, most troublingly, the concept of “woman”—even diverse women—can no longer serve as a settled starting point for feminist politics. Consciousness of intersectionality leads even diversity feminists towards identity politics, which can devolve into ethnic, racial, or religious groups that exclude participants who do not share a given identity.84 Post-structural feminism instead considers “discursive relations of power, language games, significations, subversions, and performances.”85 Such considerations tend towards temporary alliances, rather than identity-based political groupings that, over time, appear static and natural, grounded in biological factors like skin color and sex organs.

82 Ibid., 142.

83 Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” 411.

84 Puar argues that intersectionality has largely become an approach to reveal differences between white women and women of color. This wrongly implies two static, homogenous groups. Jasbir K. Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 52; Collins and Bilge point to problematic ways in which neoliberal practices in the academy have captured intersectionality, making it more difficult for scholars and practitioners to retain its critical and transformative nature. Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 85.

85 Dietz, “Current Controversies in Feminist Theory,” 412.

The insights of post-structural feminism create multiple challenges for the political organization of women, as well as for the empirical study of women as a group.

However, both Butler and another post-structural feminist, Jasbir Puar, offer potential ways forward. Butler and Puar deconstruct, but they also offer tentative feminist practices that can contribute to constructive political solutions to marginalization.

Butler’s work Frames of War, while not explicitly feminist, deals with war and violence while employing many of the insights of her body of political theory which is traditionally understood as feminist. Butler defends her framing of life, precarity, as more appropriate than the “right to life” frame which implies that some sort of political right can ward off the inevitable processes of degeneration and destruction.86

Precariousness, on the other hand, recognizes that from the very start of life, death is possible. Therefore, “life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life.”87 Precarity, in turn, is the politicized “condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”88 Precariousness is a shared condition of all; precarity is a condition borne by certain people whom the

86 Judith Butler, Frames of War : When Is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), 18.

87 Ibid., 14.

88 Ibid., 25.

political system is failing. In the context of war, precarity becomes apparent as military might heightens the precarity of some while erasing it for others.89

Who are those who bear precarity? For Butler, the identity of the people who face precarity is not as important as their shared goal—to expose the deleterious effects of state actions and policies upon those whose lives are deemed less grievable than others. Gender, race, class, and other identity markers cannot serve as easy sources of solidarity for political organizing. However, the shared condition of precarity can provide a foundation for temporary coalitions.90 Thinking in terms of coalitions and alliances— even alliances of one’s own multiple identities, within oneself—helps members of a movement to escape the rigid underbelly of identity politics. An individual can begin to recognize that she herself is already an assembly, forming an assemblage, as Puar puts it. Her struggle becomes not on behalf of one aspect of her identity, but rather against the conditions which increase the precarity of herself, her neighbors, and other precarious lives far away.

Puar’s work, as cited by Butler above, indeed moves from intersectionality towards assemblage, a term adopted from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of assemblages.91 Deuleuze and Guattari see assemblages as “collections of

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 28; Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

91 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

multiplicities,” which have “neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature….”92 More simply, the concept of assemblage does not refer to static entities, but rather to change and motion itself. Assemblages move beyond the fixed nature of identity to consider the dynamism of the process of subject formation. Puar explains: “Assemblages allow us to attune to movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities.”93 Far from pinning down a person’s multiple, intersecting identities, assemblage theory restores bodies’ capacities for “movement, for flow, for (social) change.”94

This approach, which Puar employs to examine queerness in America in the post-

9/11 era, asserts that there is no single, static, queer identity, but rather queerness which comes at citizens, and at politics, from all directions and in many forms.95

Queerness itself shifts according to context, and it does not make sense for analysts to stop its motion in order to examine it as part of an individual’s intersectional identity.

The sexual orientations that were unacceptable in America before 9/11 became more

“American”—more white, nationalistic, and consumption-oriented—in a context of

92 Ibid., 8; cited in Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 211–212.

93 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 215.

94 Ibid., 213.

95 Ibid., 211.

perceived Islamic extremist threats to national security. Simultaneously, American discourse began to Orientalize terrorists (Middle Eastern/Arab/Muslim Others) with charges of sexual deviation, such as polygamy or homoeroticism. The War on Terror therefore rehabilitated some homosexual Americans, but only through the process of

Othering others, primarily according to race.96

Puar’s work impacts feminist theory and empirical scholarship by deconstructing the process of subject formation. Difference feminists assume the existence of the subject, woman. Diversity feminists call attention to the diverse ways in which this subject is formed by differing identity markers. Puar’s deconstructive approach questions the possibility and desirability of subject formation by troubling the notion of static identity. She does not wish to do away with intersectionality, so much as to supplement it with the theory of assemblage.97 Intersectionality was born out of the desire to simultaneously analyze the impact of gender, race, class, and other structures.

Despite Nira Yuval-Davis’ argument that intersectional identity is constitutive rather than additive,98 analysts employing intersectionality tend to isolate one part of identity at a time, leaving the others aside for later analysis. The study of assemblages avoids this mistake by studying not static fragments of identities, or content that can be pinned

96 Ibid., 38.

97 Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” 50.

98 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” in The Intersectional Approach, ed. Michele Berger and Kathleen Guidroz (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 44–60.

down, but rather “design, layout, organization, arrangement, and relations”— relationships among patterns. The most helpful question thus becomes not what an identity marker is, but rather what it does, and in which context.99 Asking about doings, rather than beings, allows the subject to continue to be formed and re-formed, in as many moments as are necessary to understand an individual’s experiences of doing and being.

Puar’s innovative use of assemblage theory as a supplement to intersectionality brings us back to Butler’s recommendation for supporting coalitions and temporary alliances. The upshot of post-structural feminism is not that women cannot organize. It reveals instead that a women’s movement runs the risk of making identities static and ignoring shifting relational patterns. A post-structural approach to feminist organizing, therefore, would question the norms that govern the basis of organization itself.100 A post-structural approach to women, gender, and peacebuilding does not assume the feminine subject, but rather looks at how she is created or framed within war and peace processes. Is her precarity recognized? How does the precariousness of her life shift over time, across space, and within, across, and in spite of identity categories?

99 Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” 57.

100 Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 35–36.

1.2.4 Situating myself in the literature

In many ways, the dividing lines among the strands of feminism presented in this literature review are arbitrary, as good scholars cross theoretical boundaries when it is helpful and appropriate to do so. My own approach draws from both diversity and post- structural feminism. I have classified Carol Cohn, Cynthia Cockburn, and Claire

Duncanson as diversity feminists, although they employ post-structural insights, e.g. understanding gender as a process, rather than as a fixed identity. Like these authors, I understand gender to form and be formed by relations of power, intersecting with other structures like ethnicity, class, disability, and religion. As Duncanson puts it, gender as a practice is “always being enacted” in relation to both symbols and bodies, in the symbolic and physical realms.101 Gender as a performed practice leaves some room for subversion of typical understandings and for disruption of binaries. Furthermore, both gender and sex are grounded in cultural understandings and sometimes arbitrary separations between males and females.102

However, also like these authors, I allow gender and other aspects of identity to be pinned down for a moment in time so that I can analyze it. Like Cohn, for the purposes of my empirical research, I assume that “in most societies there is a taken-for- granted belief that there are (only) two sexes, and that one’s seemingly ‘natural’ and self-evident membership in either group (sex) brings with it a vast array of meanings,

101 Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding, 8.

102 Butler, Gender Trouble.

options and constraints (gender) beyond that which biology itself dictates.”103 In other words, in my project, most men and women in Manipur have shared understandings of gender roles in their context. Typically, men fight wars and do politics, and women protest and build peace. My first aim is to trouble these gendered constructions, in part by showing examples of women in politics and men who build peace, but primarily to illustrate the ways in which ethnicity and religion complicate these gendered roles. The frame of intersectionality helps me to trouble the meaning of “woman peacebuilder,” taking note of differences among women.

Intersectionality is an important lens for peacebuilding in Manipur, because so many of the peacebuilders whom I observed insisted on the success of women’s solidarity and the possibility of completely inclusive women’s peacebuilding. Employing a difference feminist approach, many of these groups use UNSCR 1325 to bolster their work. In many instances, they are so concerned with bringing women out of their homes and into peacebuilding that they try to emphasize women’s unique life experiences and substantive contributions. What they fail to see is that this approach often homogenizes women’s experiences with violence and peacebuilding in Manipur, making some forms of peacebuilding agency more visible than others. I see intersectionality, one of the main innovations of diversity feminism, as the best corrective to the problems with difference feminism as it is practiced in Manipur.

103 Cohn, “Women and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework,” 7.

39 Still, taking seriously the post-structural feminist insight that gender is an unfixed process, rather than a static identity, I try to explore not just the experiences of women, but the work that gender (and ethnicity, and class) does in their lives. I do not see women peacebuilders’ intersectional identities as deterministic. Instead, I try to uncover the constraints that intersectional identities help to create, and together with courageous peacebuilders who are already working across ethnic barriers, I imagine transformative ways forward that involve shifts of power and new relationships. In this way, I attempt to avoid the pitfalls which Puar rightly points to in her analysis of intersectionality.104 In Chapter 3, I take to heart Mahmood’s post-structural argument that women’s agency must be historicized and contextualized. Chapters 4 and 5 employ

Ackerly’s critical feminist method, which relies upon a destabilized epistemology. My conclusions in Chapter 6, on critical feminist justpeace, also draw upon insights from post-structural feminism to offer potential solutions for feminist peacebuilders who become trapped in static identity politics.

1.3 Research site: the Indian state of Manipur

Chapter 2 presents a brief history of the state of Manipur, situating it within

India’s national politics as well as the international dimensions that accompany its geopolitical location near Burma, Bangladesh, and China. Chapter 3 provides a detailed

104 Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.”

look at women’s peacebuilding within Manipur, situating it within local, national and international contexts. In this introductory chapter, I will introduce simply what the reader needs to know in order to understand the decisions I have made regarding case selection, research methods, and comparison to Western feminist theories.

Manipur has been the site of low-intensity armed conflict for more than six decades. Once an autonomous principality, it was folded into the Indian state (against the will of its people, for different reasons among different groups) following national independence from Britain, in 1949.105 Ethnic insurgencies rose up against the “forced merger” with the Indian state, and they multiplied with the imposition of the Armed

Forces Special Powers Act which essentially put the Northeastern region of India under martial law.106 Early liberation (or insurgent, depending upon one’s point of view) groups were interethnic, but they quickly splintered into many different armed groups bounded by ethnicity as disagreements over goals and methods emerged.107 Estimates vary, but

20 to 40 armed groups now operate in the small state, coming from different branches of each of the four major ethnic groups—Meiteis (a Hindu majority), Pangals (Muslims who are close cousins to the Meiteis), Nagas, and Kukis (two Christian tribal groups).

105 Sajal Nag, India and North-East India: Mind, Politics and the Process of Integration (1946-1950) (New Delhi: Regency Publications, 1998).

106 Baruah, Durable Disorder, 80.

107 Lokendra Arambam, “Peace Process in Manipur: Armed Conflict, State Repression and Women” (Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, 2005); Bertil Lintner, Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

Chapters 2 and 3 will delve into the intricacies of the history of ethnic armed conflict and structural violence in Manipur, but the main point that readers should be aware of right away is that ethnicity tends to be the most prominent identity marker for people in

Manipur. Certainly gender, religion, class, and physical ability create intersecting constraints for individuals within different ethnic groups, but ethnicity powerfully structures violence and nonviolence, politics and economics, villages and families.

The prominence of ethnicity within Manipur prompted my interest in the small state as a case study, because many women’s peacebuilding groups do interethnic work.

Of five peacebuilding organizations that I studied, two are interethnic, and the other three claim to occasionally partner with women’s groups marked by different ethnicities. I will trouble this simplistic characterization of women’s peacebuilding as interethnic in Chapter 3, but the curious fact of women’s interethnic peacebuilding within a state marked by ethnic conflict prompted my initial interest in this case, leading to my first research question: (1) How do women in Manipur build peace across intersecting identity differences such as ethnicity, religion, and class?

My second and third research questions, (2) How can women’s peacebuilding praxis improve, and be improved by, feminist political theory?, and (3) What does the dialogue between women’s peacebuilding and feminist political theory teach us about the meaning of peace?, stem from my observation that women peacebuilders’ most appropriate interlocutors appear to be theorists of feminism. Like other scholars of women, gender, and peacebuilding, I report relatively unsurprising findings about women peacebuilders in Manipur: peace is gendered female, and some women 42

leverage their motherhood as a political tool; women tend to work against structural violence and towards positive peace; and women are far more than just victims in the context of armed conflict. Unlike many of these scholars, I take these findings a step further by putting them into conversation with two bodies of Western feminist thought.

These works, liberal and critical feminist approaches to human development and human rights, carefully engage many of the theoretical questions that are important to the women peacebuilders of Manipur: the structure and legitimacy of political processes, the meaning of gendered justice, and ways of thinking about and enacting agency. I will now turn to an explanation of my research methods, empirical and theoretical.

1.4 Research methods

1.4.1 Qualitative, interpretive, and feminist

My methods are best described as qualitative, interpretive, and feminist.

Following feminist political theorists like Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Patricia Hill

Collins, Martha Nussbaum, and Brooke Ackerly, who draw upon concrete problems and existing practices for their theoretical works, I use participant-observation and interviews to create a body of knowledge that is then put to comparative theoretical use.108 I also draw inspiration from political ethnographers and anthropologists such as

108 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1990); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

James Scott, Lisa Wedeen, Saba Mahmood, and Lila Abu-Lughod.109 These scholars employ qualitative approaches that live up to feminist commitments to promote particularity and subjectivity, as opposed to generalizable conclusions stemming from objectivity.

Qualitative scholarship adopts standpoints, methods, and goals that differ greatly from those of quantitative social science. Although Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba argue that quantitative and qualitative research share the same logic of inference, Gary Goertz and John Mahoney push back with their description of two separate research cultures.110 According to Goertz and Mahoney, quantitative work is grounded in inferential statistics, whereas we find the origins of qualitative research in logic and set theory. The authors argue that quantitative and qualitative techniques are most helpfully viewed as tools that vary in their effectiveness for answering different types of research questions.111 For example, quantitative techniques tend to be best for uncovering causal relationships, whereas qualitative methods might better reveal causal mechanisms.112

109 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject; Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?.

110 Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Gary Goertz and James Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

111 Goertz and Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures, 2–3.

112 David Laitin, “The Perestroikan Challenge to Political Science,” Politics and Society 31, no. 1 (2003): 163–84; qtd. in Lisa Wedeen, “Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise,” in Political Ethnography: 44

Lisa Wedeen points out that interpretive work stands in even starker contrast to quantitative research.113 Following Foucault, “interpretivists tend to question the ‘kind of power that is presumed to accompany…science.’”114 Rather than assuming that all of human behavior—with its historical, contextual, messiness—can be observed and explicated according to law-like principles, interpretivists study the philosophically- tinged questions that scientific approaches cannot accommodate.115 Wedeen offers four characteristics of interpretive research: (1) interpretivists view knowledge as historically situated and entangled in power; (2) they see the world as socially made; (3) they eschew individualist thinking and the possibility of autonomous agency; and (4) they are often interested in language and in systems of symbols.116 The first three points, in particular, closely align with my view of my own research. At times, I question the place of some women’s knowledge and how it gets deployed within hierarchical relationships, e.g., the Meitei Meira Paibis’ assumption that they can know about and speak for all of the women of Manipur. I see both gender and ethnicity as socially constructed, and I

What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, ed. Edward Schatz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 83.

113 Goertz and Mahoney purposefully leave interpretive approaches out of their discussion of qualitative methods, because they represent a third culture. Goertz and Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures, 4.

114 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 1st American ed.. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 84; qtd. in Wedeen, “Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise,” 79.

115 Wedeen, “Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise,” 79–80.

116 Ibid., 80–81.

also highlight the multiple ways in which women can exercise individual and collective agency, in circumstances characterized by dependence upon and responsibility for others.117

In addition to adopting interpretivist methods, my project is explicitly feminist.

This means that my research design and the finished product include “attention to the power of epistemology, boundaries, relationships, and [my] own situatedness.”118

Specifically, I use Brooke Ackerly’s three-part research method, introduced in Political

Theory and Feminist Social Criticism and elaborated upon in Universal Human Rights in a

World of Difference.119 I will return to her methods in great detail in Chapter 5, but in quick summation: Ackerly’s “curb-cut feminism”120 is comprised of skeptical scrutiny, guiding criteria, and deliberative inquiry. Skeptical scrutiny is an attitude towards existing norms and practices which remains suspicious of hierarchies, absences, and

117 I do not focus upon language as much as the typical anthropologist might, because I conducted all of my interviews either in English (often a second language for my interviewees) or with the help of a translator. I did not believe it would be feasible for me to try to learn a local language, particularly because I would have needed to learn at least three in order to conduct interviews across three ethnic groups. Moreover, it was impossible to study the language anywhere other than my research site. Given the Indian government’s hostility towards foreign researchers in Manipur, an extended stay for language study would not be allowed.

118 Ackerly and True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, 202.

119 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism; Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference.

120 The name “curb cut feminism” takes its inspiration from the Americans with Disabilities movement, which argues that designers of infrastructure should lean heavily upon the knowledge of those who use wheelchairs or other forms of assistance to move around. Ramps, automatic sliding doors, and cuts into concrete curbs all assist the mobility of people with disabilities. However, they also improve mobility for parents pushing strollers, or shoppers pushing carts full of groceries. Infrastructure designed to assist one population actually improves the mobility of all. See Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 134.

silences. Essentially, skeptical scrutiny seeks to uncover relationships characterized by exploitation.121 In the context of a research project, skeptical scrutiny requires that the researcher seek out diverse interviewees and remain mindful of differences in power as she asks questions.122

Guiding criteria takes two forms, for Ackerly. In the context of political deliberation, it is a flexible and contingent list of what people ought to be able to choose to do, in order that they may live flourishing lives.123 I will discuss this version of guiding criteria at great length in Chapter 4, when I use Ackerly’s framework to compare

Amartya Sen to Martha Nussbaum. Ackerly’s second form of guiding criteria, however, is more relevant in the context of research design: guiding criteria are the research problems or questions that the feminist researcher seeks to address, via the process of deliberative inquiry. Although the researcher should follow new lines of questioning as they appear, she must keep returning to the original purpose of the project in order to draw coherent conclusions across multiple interviews and varying interviewees.

Iterative deliberative inquiry fosters the researcher’s ability not only to ask questions and elicit answers, but to share answers among informants, and to share her interpretations with informants so that they can give feedback.124

121 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 75–76.

122 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 151.

123 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 77.

124 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 150–151.

To the extent possible, I followed Ackerly’s three-part method in my research design and in the execution of my field research.125 Skeptical scrutiny guided my selection of interviewees. I sought the input of women from multiple ethnic groups and varied social locations within those groups. I also asked for expert knowledge from male and female academics and journalists, but I did not privilege their knowledge over that of often uneducated women working at the grassroots level. I also use skeptical scrutiny to interpret the silences of those who cancelled interviews or who remained quiet in group settings. As I completed more and more interviews, I used deliberative inquiry to report to some peacebuilders what others had said, so that I could supplement my understanding with theirs. With this method, I often uncovered conflicting views of the same events, e.g., the meaning of certain protests, and the political volatility of certain issues. Guiding criteria were my overarching research questions and my specific list of questions for semi-structured interviews.126

The discussion of my methods has been fairly abstract thus far. What did I actually do on the ground in Manipur?

125 I say “to the extent possible,” because much of Ackerly’s method involves returning to interviewees with new information and with one’s own analysis again and again, incorporating multiple iterations into the final analysis. Language barriers and mobility and connectivity issues in Manipur prevented me from doing this, but I did often report some activists’ views to others in interviews, so that I learned not only what women thought about peace and justice, but also what they thought about what others thought about peace and justice.

126 See the appendix for my interview script.

1.4.2 Research on the ground

During the summers of 2014 and 2015, I spent four months in Northeastern

India—primarily in Manipur, but also in Assam, as it is difficult for foreigners to spend much time in Manipur without incurring suspicion from either state security forces or insurgent groups. As I have mentioned, my main population of interviewees came from five peacebuilding organizations. Two of these groups, the Manipur Women Gun

Survivors Network and the Extrajudicial Execution Victims’ Families Association, are interethnic, although they are led by Meiteis. The Meira Paibis are a Meitei women’s group. The Naga Women’s Union Manipur and the Widows Welfare Association Asia are comprised of Naga and Kuki women, respectively.

I conducted semi-structured interviews—beginning with a list of open-ended questions, but remaining flexible enough to follow new leads—with 22 women associated with these groups.127 My remaining 18 interviews, totaling 40, were with experts such as journalists, academics, and leaders of other NGOs who know these organizations well. I employed three translators (who assisted with about 30% of the interviews) and a personal driver. In this project, I have used the real names of NGO workers and academics who welcome publicity for their work. For a vast majority of my interviewees, however, I use fake initials in order to protect their privacy. Many of them risk their lives and livelihoods daily by speaking out against human rights violations, and

127 Lianne Britten, The Enhanced Critical Incident Technique: Using Semi-Structured Interviews to Work with Vulnerable and Marginalized Populations (Los Angeles, California: SAGE, 2014).

I certainly want to prevent my project from heaping greater suspicion upon their shoulders.

Interviews ranged from ten minutes to two hours, with the average length of about 45 minutes. I usually made appointments in advance, but sometimes I was able to speak with many women at a single event, such as the prayer meeting that I observed in

Churachandpur with the Widows Welfare Association Asia. With this group, the Manipur

Women Gun Survivors Network, and the Extrajudicial Execution Victims’ Families

Association, I met the founders and/or leaders of the organizations first, and relied upon them to introduce me to their members. I met members of the Meira Paibis through the

Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, as well. I contacted members of the Naga

Women’s Union Manipur through a friend who was also staying at the Manipur

University Guest House while I was living there.

In anthropological terms, I used snowball sampling. One introduction led to another, until I had met many members of the same network. Many social scientists criticize snowball sampling as biased—the researcher is likely to hear just one side of the story by interviewing many people who are like-minded. This runs counter to the statistical logic of random sampling.128 However, my project is interpretive, and it does not follow the logic or methods of statistics. Snowball sampling enabled me to quickly gain trust from people who live in a sensitive conflict zone, and who tend to be

128 King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.

suspicious of outsiders.129 My sampling method and my sample size—22 interviews undergirded by 18 additional conversations with other experts—are well within the parameters that have been established for gathering reliable information about a localized population.130

The interview method is not native to Manipur. I obtained verbal consent from my interviewees, and across cultural and sometimes linguistic divides, I tried to be sure that they were comfortable speaking with me.131 Still, I am aware of the power that I exercised as the researcher in such a setting, and of the possibility that women might have altered their answers because they were speaking to an American. Therefore, I supplemented my interviews with observations of various events that these five peacebuilding organizations hosted or joined. On some occasions, members of the

Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, the Widows Welfare Association Asia, and the

Meira Paibis, were all in the same room holding a large, public panel discussion on women’s human rights. I observed a planning meeting for the Extrajudicial Execution

Victims’ Families Association’s annual observance of its founding day. I was unable to observe any events with the Naga Women’s Union Manipur, but they described various actions like protests, blockades, and even public treks over the mountains which helped

129 Nissim Cohen et al., “Field Research in Conflict Environments: Methodological Challenges and Snowball Sampling,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 4 (2011): 423–35.

130 Russell H. Bernard and Gery Ryan, Analyzing Qualitative Data (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010); Greg Guest, Arwen Bunce, and Laura Johnson, “How Many Interviews Are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability,” Field Methods 18, no. 1 (2006): 59–82.

131 Charles Briggs, Learning How to Ask (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

me to understand that various ways in which they call for peace. I came to know the

Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network the best, as I worked as a volunteer researcher in their offices in both Delhi and Imphal (the capital of Manipur) for about one month in

2014. I was a participant-observer with this organization only, and simply an interviewer and observer with the other four.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the men and women who assisted me in the field. Many of my interviewees became my friends and, on occasion, my rescuers, as I attempted to perform everyday tasks such as navigating the public bus system or recharging my phone card. Indeed, this project would have been impossible without the help of friends in Imphal, Guwahati, and New Delhi.132 I tried to partially repay my friends and interviewees for their time and effort through research assistance, at times doing research for them and sometimes offering materials such as downloaded articles and scans of book chapters that are difficult to get in India. I was unable to pay interviewees, though I offered a competitive salary to my translators and driver through grant money. Some of us have also swapped drafts of academic writing for mutual feedback.

In addition to conducting interviews and observing peacebuilding organizations at work, I spent time reading in the Jawaharlal Nehru University archives in New Delhi,

132 In particular, I would like to thank Bobichand, Surekha, Amar, Reena, Chanthoi, Omita, and Babloo in Imphal; Bidisha and her family, Archana, and Nabill in Guwahati; and Kaustav and his family, Anugyan, Shanu, Kapil, Akshita, Deepika, Sandhya, and Smriti in New Delhi. All of you helped me to conduct my research, but also to remember that there is more to India than research.

and at the North-Eastern Social Research Centre library in Guwahati, Assam. I also interviewed four experts in Guwahati about Northeastern politics. This additional research helped to flesh out my knowledge of the history of armed conflict in the

Northeastern region of India.

The information that I gathered in the field is not only empirical; it is also theoretical. We will turn next to the methods of comparative political theory, and to the definition of praxis which facilitates my comparison of grassroots-level peacebuilding practices with Western feminist thought.

1.4.3 Comparative political theory and praxis

Fred Dallmayr, one of the pioneers of the field of comparative political theory, defines the method as a “dialogical enterprise” which “proceeds mainly through the interpretation of texts, utterances, and practices.” The intention is for the theorist to gain not only new understandings of the foreign culture under investigation, but also transformed understandings of her own culture.133 Typically, comparative political theory takes the form of comparing texts from the “Western canon”—described by

Dallmayr as scholarship ranging from Socrates to Nietzsche—to texts from the Middle

East, Africa, and Asia, as well as facilitating comparisons among these latter works.134

133 Fred Dallmayr, ed., Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave MacMillon, 2010), 3; see also Leigh K. Jenco, “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge,’ 1860–1895,” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 658–81.

134 Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction, viii–ix.

Furthermore, Dallmayr notes that comparative political theory tends to stray a bit far afield from some of the traditional concerns of comparative politics, such as electoral processes, in favor of studying ideas and theoretical frameworks. This locates comparative political theory alongside civil society, or what Dallmayr refers to as “a bridge between the strictly ‘private’ and strictly ‘public’ domains of life.”135 This formulation of the comparative political theory approach reveals how well-suited the method is to my project—a comparison of Indian and American political thought which is grounded in a study of civil society- and grassroots-level peacebuilding organizations.

Of course, the enterprise of comparative political theory is fraught with potential mis-steps for the Western researcher (or any researcher who seeks to make empirical or normative claims about cultures that are not her own). Western theorists’ attempts to articulate universal theories and to deal with non-Western theories and practices are often rightly charged with imperialism.136 The threat of colonizing theory, however, does not mean that Western feminists should limit themselves from engaging in comparative work. According to María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, feminist researchers have long sought to build theory from practice in order to further guide feminist practice.137

135 Ibid., x.

136 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity; Eileen Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 155– 203.

137 Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’,” Women’s Studies International Forum 1 (1983): 573–81, cited in Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, “Back to the Future: Feminist Theory, Activism, 54

Many of the most innovative and important feminist practices happen outside of the

West; to fail to study them would cut off feminism at its knees. Therefore, Western feminists would do well to compare their own theories with the theories and practices of feminists working and writing elsewhere, and vice versa. As Uma Narayan suggests, such engagement indicates moral respect for cultures outside of the West.138 It affirms that Western feminists have much to learn from others.

Unlike most comparative theorists,139 I do not compare Western and non-

Western texts. Instead, I collect empirical data on Indian women’s peacebuilding practices and compare it to Western feminist thought. I do this not because I am ignorant of or fail to appreciate the analytical power of Indian feminist theory. Instead, I wish to see how the comparative enterprise can challenge the theories that Westerners such as Martha Nussbaum and Brooke Ackerly have devised, which attempt to be universal in scope and application.140 However, I do not view peacebuilding practices as practice without reflection. I assume that practices are grounded in theories about the

and Doing Feminist Research in an Age of Globalization,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33 (2010): 465.

138 Narayan, Dis-Locating Cultures.

139 Farah Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other,” Polity 41, no. 2 (2009): 135–65; Megan C. Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” The Review of Politics 72, no. 4 (2010): 653–77; Melissa S. Williams and Mark E. Warren, “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory,” Political Theory 42, no. 1 (2014): 26–57.

140 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development; Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference.

meaning of peace and justice, and the structure of a fair society. In other words, practice is not bereft of ideas: it is praxis, or the union of reflection and action.141

In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes the struggle for liberation as both intellectual and active. He argues, “The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection—true reflection—leads to action.”142 More recently, Patricia Hill

Collins and Sirma Bilge have argued that many topics of inquiry, including studies of human rights and violence, employ both intersectional inquiry and intersectional praxis.

Academic processes of scholarship and critique are closely tied to activist practices of coalition-building across intersecting identities. It does not necessarily make sense to split these apart, as if activism were devoid of theory.143

Reflective practice is exactly what I saw in Manipur. Many women whom I interviewed were pulled up short by various forms of gendered injustice: family- and village-level condemnation of Meitei and Pangal women’s attempts to work outside the home; state-level discrimination against Naga and Kuki women because of their tribal status; national-level corruption regarding widow’s pensions. As women faced these obstacles, they began to seek answers through different forms of activism. Their

141 Critical feminist theory has a strong commitment to praxis. Ackerly refers to her work as “praxeological inquiry.” Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 128; Iris Marion Young, “Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, by Brooke Ackerly,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): 713.

142 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 52.

143 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 48.

reflection upon their situations led to action, which they then reflected upon in order to make it more effective. Certainly, some women peacebuilders whom I spoke with were more obviously reflective than others: e.g., well-educated leaders of transnational NGOs can “speak political theory” better than women with little education who have never left Manipur. However, privileging content over eloquence, I asked barely literate women about their theories of peace and justice, alongside globe-trotting human rights award winners.

I have explained my reasons for putting women’s peacebuilding praxis into conversation with Western feminist thought. But does it make sense for a study on peacebuilding to engage with literatures on human development and human rights? I will answer these questions in the next two sections.

1.5 Peacebuilding, liberal feminism, and human development in this project

I use human development as one of two constructive paradigms of social justice and human flourishing that I put into conversation with peacebuilding praxis. (The other, human rights, will follow.) Human development, the subject of Chapter 4, is a liberal feminist approach to ordering development practices such that they support humans, rather than economies. The two most influential figures within the field, Indian economist Amartya Sen and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, both rely upon prominent liberal thinker John Rawls, even as they critique his approach to social

justice.144 They employ the standard liberal approach to ethics, conceiving of the individual’s well-being as the most important unit of analysis (rather than the good of the collective, as in utilitarianism).145 They also work within the frame of a liberal system of rights and duties.146 In sum, although their work on human development criticizes some aspects of the international economic system, as well as the internal policies of many nations, they make their criticisms within the confines of liberal thought (much as many difference feminists make their contributions to the literature on women and peacebuilding within the confines of UN frameworks). Thus, for Sen and Nussbaum, some aspects of human development policy and practice go un-questioned. For example, Nussbaum argues that her approach ought to be written into national constitutions, without questioning whether the nation-state structure is the best for promoting human development.147 Liberal critique of liberal systems can only go so far, because some norms are off-limits. Thus, I evaluate both of these liberal approaches to human development using insights from peacebuilding praxis, which is often but not always liberal in Manipur. The women peacebuilders of Manipur fruitfully challenge

144 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Nussbaum, in particular, relies upon Rawls’ approach to political liberalism in order to avoid being paternalistic. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 65–69.

145 Ingrid Robeyns, “The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey,” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 1 (2005): 93–114.

146 Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 2 (2005): 151–66; Martha Nussbaum, “Human Rights Theory: Capabilities and Human Rights,” Fordham Law Review, 273-300, 66 (1997).

147 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5.

Sen’s and Nussbaum’s approaches on many fronts, showing the utility of conceiving of peacebuilding in broader than liberal terms.

Furthermore, I structure my evaluation of these two liberal feminist approaches to human development according to the three parts of Brooke Ackerly’s critical feminist method. I take this approach for two reasons: first, Susan Moller Okin argues that Sen’s

Development as Freedom, Nussbaum’s Women in Human Development, and Ackerly’s

Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism together question dominant beliefs and practices within development economics. She writes,

“All three [works] show how the well-being, freedom, capacities, functioning, and voices of the world’s women, especially the poorest, are on the one hand severely short-changed or even completely neglected by standard economic measures and, on the other hand, absolutely crucial to development—especially when understood as human development.”148

These works are very much inter-related, in content as well as purpose. Ackerly is well aware of this herself, as she directly engages theories of human development in her major books.149

My second reason for using Ackerly’s critical feminist method as a structure for evaluating Sen and Nussbaum is that Ackerly essentially incorporates the strengths of both of their methods into her approach, while adding elements that each is missing.

148 Susan Moller Okin, “Poverty, Well-Being, and Gender: What Counts, Who’s Heard?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, no. 3 (2003): 288.

149 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 94–110; Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 117–123.

Specifically, I find in Chapter 4 that although Sen prominently promotes deliberative inquiry in the context of human development, he lacks guiding criteria and skeptical scrutiny. This means that although his process is in many ways more ethically defensible than Nussbaum’s, which lacks an emphasis upon democratic deliberation, it can tend towards producing content that is unjust. I also find that although Nussbaum’s published list of human capabilities offers striking (even if controversial) guiding criteria, her lack of deliberative inquiry and, to some extent, skeptical scrutiny, gives us reason to question her process.150 Both process and result are important; guiding criteria, deliberative inquiry, and skeptical scrutiny must go together. Examples from peacebuilding praxis undergird this argument and point to the utility of using critical feminist methods to evaluate liberal approaches. This process of using peacebuilding praxis and critical feminism hand-in-hand leads me to offer critical feminist justpeace as a corrective to the liberal peace, in the concluding chapter of this project.

Moreover, in Manipur, peace and development are often spoken of together.

When I interviewed women about the meaning of peace, they would include ideas that are often associated with development, such as electricity, clean water, industry, and basic needs.151 Sometimes they would even use the word development directly, as one

150 Ackerly does not properly take note of differences between Sen and Nussbaum. She tends to analyze their approaches to human capabilities as one unit, neglecting the important divergences in their approaches. I suspect that this is largely because of the timing in the publication of some of their major works—Nussbaum’s Women and Human Development in 2000, and Sen’s Development as Freedom in 1999. Given Ackerly’s own publication date of 2000, it would have been difficult or impossible for her to do that comparative work in Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism.

151 IN, June 16, 2014, MP, July 5, 2015.

Meira Paibi leader did: “…if justice is given to us, peace and development will come to

Manipur.”152 According to women in Manipur, peace and development are related to one another, and they are both fairly broad—containing not just the absence of violence, or the presence of economic growth, but also justice itself.

In an attempt to more accurately reflect the reality of overlapping concepts, goals, and practices on the ground, I have chosen to analyze diverse topics together, despite the academic tendency to keep them separate. This may create conceptual muddiness at times, as laying out a method for evaluating human development is quite different practicing peacebuilding. Is it therefore fair to judge one according to the goals of the other? I find that the unique insights that emerge from their juxtaposition are worth a bit of wading through the mud.

1.6 Peacebuilding, critical feminism, and human rights in this project

Brooke Ackerly’s critical feminist approach to human rights serves as the second constructive paradigm of social justice and human flourishing which I engage with, after human development. In Chapter 5, I lay out Ackerly’s critical feminist method in greater detail, and I explain her process of justifying a universal theory of human rights that is grounded in differences among people. Ackerly works within the international system of economic institutions and liberal human rights, just as Sen and Nussbaum do. But unlike the theorists of human development, Ackerly’s method contains within it an explicit

152 IN2, July 5, 2015.

questioning of the system itself. Her critical feminist methodology, employing parts of both diversity and post-structural feminism, adopts a destabilizing epistemology which never assumes the tenets of liberalism.153 This viewpoint from outside of liberalism allows Ackerly to make some important critiques of Sen, Nussbaum, and liberalism more generally. I show that her critical moves are relevant and useful by aligning them with examples of peacebuilding praxis. The praxis itself guides me towards critical feminist methods, and away from the unquestioning reliance upon liberalism which so many in the international peacebuilding community have employed.

Because my ultimate goal is to explore the ways in which a conversation between Western feminist thought and peacebuilding praxis can change our understandings of peace, I then move in chapter 5 to compare Ackerly’s human rights approach to John Paul Lederach’s approach to conflict transformation. This move is also guided by peacebuilding praxis, as many of the human rights advocates whom I met in

Manipur use human rights and conflict transformation in tandem. Human rights are crucial for women’s peacebuilding, but human rights activism alone cannot produce a gender-just peace. What many in Manipur appear to be pursuing is, in fact, a critical feminist justpeace that requires elements of both Ackerly’s and Lederach’s frameworks.

This peace stands in stark contrast to the predominant approach to peacebuilding,

153 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 27–28.

62 promoted by organizations like the United Nations and the United States Department of

State—the liberal peace.

1.7 Summary of conclusions: critical feminist justpeace

Throughout my project, I demonstrate that dominant approaches to peace, development, and human rights tend to fall short of accounting for the experiences of the women peacebuilders of Manipur. I show the limitations of the peacebuilding approaches of the Indian government in Chapter 2, and of the liberal peace approach in

Chapter 6. In Chapter 3, I use intersectionality to present and analyze the peacebuilding praxis of women in Manipur, which I use to critique liberal feminist approaches to human development in Chapter 4. Alongside Ackerly’s critical feminist method, the women of Manipur critique both Sen and Nussbaum, although their approaches diverge in important ways. In Chapter 5, I illustrate the utility of the critical feminist method, but

I also push it a step further by applying it not just to human rights, but to peacebuilding itself. Finally, in Chapter 6, I use the insights that I have gained through multi-directional debate among women peacebuilders and liberal and critical approaches to human development, human rights, and peacebuilding, in order to articulate a new approach to peace: critical feminist justpeace.

I define the scope of critical feminist justpeace as:

an on-going process of individual and collective striving for the reduction of structural and direct violence; the promotion of social justice within all spheres of human relationships; and the equitable good of all.

In terms of Ackerly’s critical feminist methodology, this scope serves as the guiding criteria. It lays out the goal, while also articulating many aspects of the process: peacebuilding is on-going, collective, and comprehensive. It should be pursued in all spheres—not only in the distant public of the high-level negotiating table or in even

Lederach’s local public,154 but also in the private. Its ultimate goals are the reduction of all forms of violence, the promotion of social justice, and the advancement of equity.

One can already see elements of both deliberative inquiry and skeptical scrutiny within the guiding criteria. Concerning deliberative inquiry, however, I also add that deliberation about peace and justice must strive for equity in both the forms of deliberation and its resulting decisions. All forms of communication should be welcome, including those that deliberative theorists have historically excluded from the criteria for reasonable arguments (such as emotional or religious appeals).155 All communicators, including uneducated women with little experience, should be welcome. Finally, the results of deliberative moments should be evaluated according to inclusiveness.

Skeptical scrutiny instructs us to seek out hierarchies, and particularly silences, and to address the needs of those who are historically and presently disadvantaged. Peace deliberations, whether they take place within homes, villages, or at the state- or

154 John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62.

155 Amy Gutmann, “Civic Education and Social Diversity,” Ethics 105, no. April (1995): 557–79; Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 17–34; cited in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 8–9.

international-level, should address multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, such that the resulting peace is imbued with an intersectionally-conscious justice.

Building upon Chapter 3’s intersectional analysis of women’s peacebuilding praxis, I highlight in Chapter 6 the utility of using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of political intersectionality within peacebuilding. This concept, which considers the ways in which different identity-based discourses can politically marginalize the experiences and efforts of others,156 serves as a check upon universalistic peacebuilding. A peacebuilder employing critical feminist justpeace must consider the social locations of all who are affected. She must be cautious of using discourses and methods that lift up her own group, whatever form that group may take, while marginalizing others.

My definition of critical feminist justpeace is aspirational, but it is not unrealistic, because it is grounded in women’s peacebuilding praxis. By exploring practices rooted in reflection, and comparing them to Western feminist thought, I build something new that is responsive to materially- and historically-situated problems, as well as academic debates. I invite peacebuilders, scholars, and masters of praxis to contest my approach.

Skeptical scrutiny demands that mine is not the last, but only the latest, word on critical feminist justpeace.

156 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” 1245.

65 CHAPTER 2:

POLITICAL HISTORY AND ARMED CONFLICT IN MANIPUR

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I lay out the political history of Manipur, focusing primarily upon the dynamics of armed conflict which provoke and constrain present-day peacebuilding.

Manipur’s history is long and complex, with written records dating back to 33 A.D. and encompassing the narratives of nearly forty ethnic groups. My discussion of the history and current status of armed conflict in Manipur is fairly brief, so that I can make space for the lesser-known stories of peace in the next chapter. Understanding the armed conflict, however, is vital for promoting peace. Therefore, I encourage those who seek to understand the full complexity of armed conflict in the Northeast to look particularly at the writings of Sanjib Baruah and Bertil Lintner, whose work I found invaluable to my own understanding of the region.157

157 Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Sanjib Baruah, “Confronting Constructionism: Ending India’s Naga War,” Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 3 (2003): 321–38; Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder : Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sanjib Baruah, ed., Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bertil Lintner, Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

2.2 Political history

Manipur is one of eight states in the Northeastern region of India, situated east of Assam on the Burmese border. Prior to colonization by the British, the region was comprised of autonomous principalities which, in terms of race and culture, identified more strongly with Southeast Asia than with India.158 The small state of Manipur is comprised of nine districts—four in the central valley and five in the surrounding hills.159

The capital city of Imphal lies in the rice paddy-dotted valley, which is populated primarily by Meiteis, the majority ethnic group. Much of the Imphal valley is underdeveloped, although when compared to the remote hill regions, Imphal is a teeming, noisy, electrified metropolis. Tribal peoples populate the five rugged hill districts, depending more upon trade than agriculture for their livelihoods. Nagas and

Kukis, two umbrella groups for loosely related tribes, each comprise about 13% of the population of 2.7 million, whereas Meiteis make up 57%.160 The remaining population is made up of other, smaller tribes, such as Mizo/Chin groups, Pangals (known as Manipuri

158 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Meeta Deka, Women’s Agency and Social Change: Assam and Beyond (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2013), xvi.

159 The valley is comprised of Imphal East, Imphal West, Bishnupur, and Thoubal districts. Hill districts include Ukhrul, Senapati, Tamenglong, Churachandpur, and Chandel. I visited all but Senapati and Tamenglong in my time in Manipur.

160 Lintner, Great Game East, 110.

Muslims),161 and immigrants from mainland India, Nepal, Burma, and Bangladesh, colloquially known as mayang.162

The meaning of “Manipuri” is highly contested. Does “Manipuri” refer to

Meiteis—the majority ethnic group who speak a language known as Manipuri? Or does it signify all of those who dwell within the state’s borders?163 Because of this contestation, drawing the boundaries around people groups who should be included in a political history of Manipur becomes quite complicated. When possible in this project,

I will designate whether I am referring to Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, or Pangals. I am relying, however, upon many sources in which authors do not designate the ethnicity of the people about whom they write. I will assume that references to “Manipuri people” tend to be references to Meiteis, although such references may sometimes include Nagas or other tribal peoples. This very contestation supports my argument which will appear in the next chapter—that intersectionality is a vital tool for understanding and supporting peacebuilding in Manipur and other areas of ethnic diversity. We must not assume homogenous experiences and refer to them with universalizing terminology such as

“Manipuri,” when heterogeneous experiences exist. Thus, I will embark upon the

161 Pangals came to Manipur in the 17th century. The first male settlers were brought to the state forcibly, as prisoners of war. The Manipuri king sent Meitei women to them for marriage, and thus they became “Manipuri Muslims” over time. Islamic traditions and practices fused with those of Meiteis. Salam Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective (Delhi: Anshah Publishing House, 2014), 19–20.

162 Sanjoy Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1994), 324–327.

163 Pradip Phanjoubam, “Manipur: Fractured Land,” in Where the Sun Rises When Shadows Fall, ed. Geeti Sen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 281–282.

historical narrative of politics and conflict in Manipur with repeated attempts to make clear the differences among people groups, although the confusion which exists in the secondary literature often limits my attempts.

2.2.1 Origin stories

Manipur’s recorded history begins in 33 A.D., with the coronation of King

Pakhangba.164 This royal chronicle is one of Meitei culture, dealing with Meitei cosmology and traditional religion. Anthropologist N. Vijaylakshmi Brara notes that the multiplicity of symbols and stories which surround King Pakhangba make it difficult to discern who he actually was—an historical King or the mythological creator of humans; an individual or a symbol of the collective. The written record claims that he arrived in

Manipur as a migrant from the West, gained the throne in 33 A.D., and ruled for 120 years.165 His throne at Kangla, the erstwhile palace of the Kings and the present-day Fort in the capital city of Imphal, still serves as the “lifesource” of Manipur to Meiteis.166

Much of the chronicle treats tribal peoples—now known as Nagas and Kukis167—as rebels who sometimes emerged from the hills and occasionally needed to be crushed by

Meitei Kings to safeguard order.

164 Soyam Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist? (Imphal, Manipur: Waba Publications, 2013), 66.

165 N. Vijaylakshmi Brara, Politics, Society and Cosmology in India’s North East (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62–63.

166 Ibid., 15.

167 Some in Manipur argue that this term is politically incorrect—that these people groups should be referred to as Kuki-Mizo-Chin. I have chosen to use the term Kuki in my work, however, because every Kuki whom I met in Manipur self-identified as a Kuki.

Scholars contest, however, whether one of the most important Kings of Manipur was a Meitei or a Naga.168 King Garibniwaz ruled Manipur from 1709-1748. He is well- known today for introducing Hinduism to the state, which had the biggest impact upon

Meiteis.169 Nagas and other tribal peoples resisted Hinduism and later converted to

Christianity. Regardless of his ethnic origin, King Garibniwaz is known for ushering in a period of harmony between the hills and the valley. This harmony was short-lived, however, as the Hinduization of Meiteis also created a new, religious rift between ethnic groups. Some Hindu Meiteis began classifying the non-converted hill peoples as untouchables who, according to them, led lives replete with pagan customs.170 Even as hill tribes gave trouble to the Meitei Kings ruling the valley from Kangla, some Naga groups enjoyed special relationships with the Meiteis. Brara cites the Tangkhuls and the

Kabuis, in particular, as maintaining close ties to the Meiteis, even to the point of claiming fraternal relations in their origin stories.171 Kuki groups are more recent migrants to Manipur, although like the Nagas, they dwelled and dwell primarily in the hills.172

168 Some argue that Garibniwaz was born to a Meitei King, but that because of a threatened curse, he was hidden away at birth and brought up by Nagas. Others contend that he was brought up in a Meitei village, although not by his own parents. Others still argue that he was born a Naga, yet became the Raja of Manipur. Brara, Politics, Society and Cosmology in India’s North East, 56–57.

169 Ibid., 55.

170 Ibid., 113.

171 Ibid., 110–112.

172 Ibid., 111.

This all-too-brief sketch of Manipur’s origins and early relations among the different people groups illustrates a few important points. First, one of the most important divides among people living in Manipur has long been that of hills and valleys.

Noted by scholars such as James Scott and confirmed by many of my present-day interviewees, this divide might be based on geography, but it encompasses much more—cosmology, religion, language, culture, and governance.173 Second, the origin story of Manipur is commonly associated with the origin of the Meiteis. Even as Brara carefully chronicles the history of different people groups in Manipur, she often slips into referring to “Manipuri society” when she means Meitei society. She is careful to designate Nagas as Nagas and Kukis as Kukis, but she does not always mention whether

“Manipuri” includes all people groups or only Meiteis. This common way of writing about Manipur, exemplified in so many of the sources which I use, creates a false universalization of the Meitei experience which is not shared by marginalized tribal peoples. By referring to the tribal groups as marginalized, I do not mean that they are worse off, economically, politically or otherwise—I mean that within the discourses about the state of Manipur, its history, and its present-day politics, tribal groups are not assumed to be genuinely “Manipuri.” Such an assumption, as I have argued and will continue to emphasize, makes the tool of intersectionality a vital one for political analysis of the state.

173 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed; BR, June 25, 2015; Pradip Phanjoubam, June 11, 2014.

2.2.2 The British colonial era

Leaping several centuries forward, the next events important for understanding the dynamics of present-day conflict and peacebuilding comprise the arrival of the

British in Manipur. The rise of international trade in the 16th and 17th centuries pushed

Britain to travel further afield to find both natural resources and trading partners. The

East India Company, first chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600,174 increasingly moved from mere trade with India to political administration of its territory in the 18th century.175 The Northeastern territory of Assam was a site of particular interest for the

British, who harvested and sold tea from lush plantations in the Assamese hills.

Foreshadowing many of the dynamics of present-day international intervention by

Western countries in the less developed world,176 the British justified political takeover of Assam with reference to “the women’s question.” Although cases of sati, or widow immolation, were quite rare in Assam, the British seized upon them and publicized their intervention in such cases. They portrayed themselves as saving Assamese women from primitive traditions, bringing law and order to a land of chaos.177

174 Sir George Birdwood, The Register of Letters, &c: Of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London Trading Into the East Indies, 1600-1619 (Bernard Quaritch, 1893).

175 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45.

176 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

177 Deka, Women’s Agency and Social Change: Assam and Beyond, 10–11.

In Assam and elsewhere in the Northeastern frontier, the British carefully established an Inner Line Regulation system, restricting the entry of non-tribal peoples into the hilly regions. This was an attempt to allow the tribes to continue to self-govern, as well as to protect tea plantations and other areas of British dominion from tribal raids.178 This formal demarcation only further divided hill people from valley people, creating differences in development and political inclusion which persist today. Creating a strict boundary was at odds with the true interdependence of the hills and the valleys, however.179 Even though hill and valley peoples tended to keep to themselves, they would traditionally trade and meet with each other throughout the year, offering different forms of goods and sometimes paying tribute to the most powerful in order to limit violence between groups.180 The colonial system made such interdependence, tenuous though it may have been, impossible.

Despite its earlier presence in Assam, British influence in the neighboring, autonomous kingdom of Manipur was quite limited until 1826. After facing decades of periodic Burmese subjugation, including the “seven years devastation” from 1819-1826,

Manipur signed the Treaty of Yandaboo with Burma, which appointed a neutral British political agent “for preservation of a friendly intercourse, and as a medium of communication with the Manipur government. And, as occasion may require, with the

178 Prasenjit Biswas and Chandan Suklabaidya, Ethnic Life-Worlds in North-East India (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2008), 17–18.

179 Baruah, Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India, 9.

180 Pradip Phanjoubam, June 11, 2014.

Burmese authorities on the frontier….”181 Britain expanded its power in Manipur over the next decades by taking advantage of inner turmoil related to the line of succession among Meitei Maharajas. It also justified bringing in British soldiers by checking

Burmese expansion on the border.182 As more and more soldiers poured into Manipur, and as violence continued among Meiteis, violent clashes between the British and people in the Imphal Valley ensued. The British launched a full invasion of Imphal in

1891, and the city fell on April 27.183 Britain stopped just short of annexing the state, giving it nominal independence but hand-picking each successive Maharajah.184

Women’s participation in politics emerges in the scholarly literature, as well as in the historical memories of many of my interviewees, in 1904, with the first nupilal or

“women’s war.” Chafing under British rule, Meitei women initiated their first war when

British administrators attempted to force men in Manipur to rebuild their bungalows.

After mysterious fires consumed the houses of an army captain and a political agent, the

British promised to reward anyone who had information about the suspected arson.185

In the absence of forthcoming information, they promised to levy a collective fine upon

181 Tarapot Phanjoubam, Bleeding Manipur (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications Pvt Ltd, 2003), 126.

182 Subir Bhaumik, Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2009), 5.

183 Phanjoubam, Bleeding Manipur, 133–134.

184 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 101.

185 Saroj N. Arambam Parratt and John Parratt, “The Second ‘Women’s War’ and the Emergence of Democratic Government in Manipur,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2001): 406.

the local people to pay for repairs, and to conscript men as laborers until new bungalows were complete.186 The administrators, however, greatly underestimated the potential impact of women’s collective activism. Organizing boycotts and protests that were thousands-strong, Meitei women demonstrated day after day against the onerous

British demands, until the British finally rescinded their order for forced labor.187

The second nupilal of 1939, although likewise local in impact, was more national in origin. Elsewhere in India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and others were organizing a vast, civil disobedience movement against colonization, espousing principles of democracy, nonviolence, and truth-seeking.188 Meiteis in Manipur paid close attention to the protests in other parts of India, and they were eager to do their part to remove the colonizers. Largely to address a local crisis, but simultaneously contributing to the anti-colonial cause, Meitei women organized against British intervention in the production and trade of a daily staple—rice.189 The British implementation of free trade in the region had upset the local patterns of cultivation, imports, and exports. As the British sent Meitei rice to present-day Nagaland while also importing it from Liverpool, local rice and salt industries shrank drastically. Price

186 M. Ningamba Singha, The Women’s Movement in Pre-Merger Manipur: Socio-Economic and Political Genesis of Nupi Lan (Silchar, Assam: Hodamba Publication, 2012), 33–35.

187 Ibid., 36–40.

188 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 109–119.

189 Ibid., 51.

increases nearly caused a famine, until Meitei women organized against the new trade policies.190

The agitation of the second nupilal began, as Meitei women’s agitations typically do in Manipur, at the women-run open air market, locally referred to as Ima (mother) market of Khwairamband Bazaar. This market serves even now as a space for women’s interaction and organization.191 Meitei women plan protests in between economic transactions, and they desert the market as a sign of defiance, crippling Imphal’s economic activity.192 The second women’s war aptly illustrates the utility of such a large, informal gathering place for women’s activism. Over a thousand Meitei women deserted their posts at the bazaar, marching together from Ima market to the Political

Agent’s office. They forced his assistant to send a telegram to the Maharajah (who was traveling outside of Manipur at the time), demanding an immediate ban upon the export of rice. As T.A. Sharpe, assistant to Political Agent Christopher Gimson, traveled to the telegraph office, the crowds of women swelled to about four thousand. Women essentially held Sharpe and two other British military officers hostage in the telegraph office until members of the paramilitary group, the Assam Rifles, appeared and began to

190 Ibid., 53–61.

191 Bhabananda Takhellambam, “Legacy of the Women’s Movement in Manipur,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 52.

192 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 14.

dismantle the protest by force.193 Although the women eventually scattered, the

Maharajah sent a telegram the next day acceding to their demands. The second women’s war had been won, and the end of British colonization of India was not far behind.194

2.2.3 Indian independence and the “forced merger”

Zooming out once again to the big picture of colonialism in India, Indians in the mainland and in the Northeast were generally united in their opposition to the British.195

Gandhi’s “Quit India Movement” spread across the countryside in the early 1940s, most powerfully in the North Indian state of Bihar. Simultaneously, Subhas Chandra Bose led an armed struggle across the Northeastern frontier region against the British, including the state of Manipur. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, as well as the

Muslim League, supported this struggle and defended the leaders once they were captured. This time period was characterized by widespread participation by Indians of

193 Parratt and Parratt, “The Second ‘Women’s War’ and the Emergence of Democratic Government in Manipur,” 908–912.

194 Many outside of Manipur see Meitei women’s surprising economic and political activity, as exemplified by the two nupilal, and equate it with empowerment. Historian Salam Irene argues, however, that women in Manipur are extremely mobile yet not empowered. Their informal political work is both frequent and well-known; however, their formal political participation tends to be nominal at best. Although they make vital economic contributions to the state in terms of running the markets and growing rice, men may still demand dowry upon marriage. Moreover, their economic work as market vendors does not come with benefits such as health insurance, time off, and maternity leave, making their work exceedingly precarious. Meitei women organized successfully against the British in 1904 and again in 1939, but it is important to recall that this does not make them the masters of their own destinies. Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 4–6; 27. I will return to the question of informal vs. formal political involvement in the next chapter.

195 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 134.

multiple stripes—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians; rich and poor; men and women.196 The seeds for the current women’s movement in India were planted in the nationalist movement against the British.197 A common enemy often works to cover over differences among those who seek freedom.

Once the colonizers’ departure was on the horizon, however, different visions for the Northeastern region began to emerge, as Indians became newly conscious of the differences among themselves. The Working Committee of the Indian National Congress on United India and Self-Determination declared in September of 1945 that the new

Indian state “cannot think in terms of compelling the people in any territorial unit to remain in an Indian union against their declared and established will.”198 Despite this reassuring statement, it quickly became clear that the new state of India would not allow peripheral princely states to regain their autonomy in a post-colonial era. In many ways, India simply replaced the British as colonizers of the region, maintaining many of the attitudes and laws that had been employed by the British Raj. The imperial construct of “the Northeast” became the formal frontier of India when Cyril Radcliffe, the chair of the British Boundary Commissions concerned with the new borders of India and

Pakistan, left Assam and the princely states of Manipur and Tripura “clinging to the

196 Ibid., 131–134.

197 Deka, Women’s Agency and Social Change: Assam and Beyond.

198 Sajal Nag, India and North-East India: Mind, Politics and the Process of Integration (1946-1950) (New Delhi: Regency Publications, 1998), 2.

Indian heartland” by a 21-kilometer-wide strip of land.199 Cut off from the mainland by cartography as well as ethnicity, language, and culture, the Northeast’s isolation prompted many moves towards autonomy, even while some Northeasterners welcomed inclusion into the new state.

Different ethnic groups of the Northeastern borderlands, and within Manipur, had different preferences when greeted with the prospect of de-colonization. The Nagas feared that Indian control of their territory would leave them unable to pursue their own social and cultural systems; thus, they immediately called for an independent

Nagaland. The Mizos, an ethnic group which now comprises the state of Mizoram and which has ties to the Kukis of Manipur, hoped that they would have a better life under the social democratic regime of India than they had enjoyed under the British; thus, they welcomed Indian citizenship. Meiteis were generally suspicious of how India might govern them, and they requested more time to debate and determine their own fates.

This, they were never given.200

Regardless of their stated preferences, the various peoples of Manipur became

Indian citizens in 1949.201 Although India attained independence from Britain on August

15, 1947, Manipur was not folded into the state until October 15, 1949, in a rather

199 Bhaumik, Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East, 11.

200 Nag, India and North-East India: Mind, Politics and the Process of Integration (1946-1950), 54– 55.

201 K.K. Bhattacharjee, Northeast India: Political and Administrative History (New Delhi: Cosmo, 1983).

dubious manner. In 1948, citizens of Manipur held the first democratic election based on universal franchise in South Asia. Their elected legislative assembly intended to deal with all matters of self-determination. The state of India, however, did not recognize the assembly, and government officials called Maharaja Bodhchandra Singh, King of

Manipur, to Assam to discuss the merger with the Indian state. Singh was essentially held under house arrest, prevented from speaking with members of Manipur’s

Legislative Assembly, and forced to sign documents ceding political control of Manipur to the central government.202 This “forced merger” with India was never ratified by the people of Manipur.203 Meiteis in Manipur resent the fact that the merger occurred in non-democratic fashion. Nagas and other tribal groups argue that Maharaja Singh, a

Meitei, never represented their interests in the first place.204 Thus peoples in the hills and valleys chafe against the merger with India, although for different reasons.

Why was India so keen to acquire Manipur, even against the wishes of its occupants? First, the specter of communism was rising in the form of popular leader

Irabot Singh, who wanted to establish an “independent peasant republic of Manipur.”205

The newly democratic India was eager to stamp out communist revolution. Integration

202 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 49.

203 Shukhdeba Hanjabam, “The Meitei Upsurge in Manipur,” American Economic Journal 6 (2008): 160.

204 Ch. Sekholai Kom, “Ethnic Politics in the Hills of Manipur,” Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (2011): 154.

205 Nag, India and North-East India: Mind, Politics and the Process of Integration (1946-1950), 102.

with the Northeast also added population and land mass to the state, which had just lost much of both during the partition with Pakistan.206 In James Scott’s interpretation of the region of Zomia, comprised of Northeastern India and much of Southeast Asia,

India’s was also a state-building project which sought to “integrate and monetize the people, lands, and resources of the periphery so that they become, to use the French term, rentable—auditable contributors to the gross national product and to foreign exchange.”207 The Northeast had to be integrated so that it could be countable and productive for the mainland.

Finally, the Northeastern region served as a buffer zone against incursions from

China and other neighbors. In Great Game East, Bertil Lintner argues that the “Great

Game” of the late nineteenth century, played out across Central Asia between the

British and the Russians, is the precursor of a new “Great Game East” between India and

China. He traces this open rivalry to the end of “Pax Britannica,” and Northeastern India lies at the heart of it. Both India and China used development projects to buy influence in Burma, all while countering or, in the case of China, supporting insurgent groups in the Northeast who relied upon Burma for bases and supply lines.208 In particular, the

Chinese forged close relationships in the 1960s with Thinoselie Keyho and Thunigaleng

206 Ibid., 3.

207 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 4.

208 Lintner, Great Game East, 10.

Muivah, leaders of the Naga National Council.209 Much of this Indo-Chinese rivalry emerged after the forced merger of 1949, but Manipur’s long history of Chinese incursions,210 coupled with its porous border with Burma, meant that its geo-political position was certainly uppermost in Indian leaders’ minds at the time of independence.

Home Minister Sardar Patel, charged with overseeing the integration of princely states into the Indian Union in the late 1940s, could not allow an independent Manipur to persist on the border with China and Burma.211

These are but a brief sketch of the reasons for India’s keen interest in Manipur and the Northeast. One of my interviewees, a well-known and much-beloved historian and holder of cultural lore in Manipur, Lokendra Arambam, sums up the situation aptly:

“The Indian state likes this land, but not the people.”212 While the central government appears to want the natural resources and the territory of the Northeast, it has neither promoted nor protected the rights and the wellbeing of Northeastern peoples. In many cases, it has undermined them.

209 Ibid., 42.

210 Records indicate that China invaded Manipur in the 13th and 17th centuries. Chinese prisoners of war may have even introduced brick making and silk weaving, for which Manipur is now well- known. Ibid., 113.

211 Ibid., 116.

212 Lokendra Arambam, June 16, 2014. Arambam is also the brother of the man who founded Manipur’s United National Liberation Front in 1964, Arambam Samarendra Singh.

2.3 Armed conflict

2.3.1 The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)

Although Manipur achieved statehood in 1972, twenty-three years after it merged with India,213 it has enjoyed few of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution to Indian citizens. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), introduced in 1958 and persisting in much of the Northeast even now, presents one of the largest impediments to freedom in Manipur. AFSPA’s first life was as a colonial law, the Rowlatt Act of 1919, which granted to the British extraordinary powers of arrest and indefinite detention, which they used widely against the supporters of Gandhi’s Quit India movement. The

Act later transformed into the Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance of 1942, which then Viceroy and Governor General Lord Linlithgow employed to enable the British not only to arrest and detain, but also to kill, those who were defying them.214 Just eleven years after its own independence from Britain, the Indian government gave the law new life as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, covering most of the Northeastern region.215 Despite strong opposition from representatives of Manipur, the Indian

213 Following the forced merger of 1949, Manipur’s territory underwent multiple changes in official status over the course of a few decades. It became a Part “C” state in 1951, and was placed under a dominion agent (meaning that it was under the direct control of the central government). The State Reorganization Act of 1956 transformed the state into a Central Territory in 1956, in which it gained some local self-government but was still largely under central control. As a Union Territory, Manipur gained more local control still in 1963, until finally becoming a full-fledged state in 1972 thanks to the North- Eastern Areas (Re-organization) Act. Rammathot Khongreiwo, “Understanding the Histories of Peoples on the Margins: A Critique of ‘Northeast India’s Durable Disorder,’” Alternatives 34 (2009): 439.

214 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 141–142.

215 Ibid., 109.

Parliament essentially voted to colonize one region of the country.216 The act was ostensibly necessary for national security, as it was instilled to quash a freedom movement among the Nagas in the present-day state of Nagaland.217 AFSPA’s colonial origins and draconian powers, however, ran counter to everything that India’s leaders had articulated in their fight against the British. A philosopher at Manipur University,

Soyam Lokendrajit, writes: “Forever it will remain the enigma that Nehru the democrat, the socialist, humanist and freedom fighter needed AFSPA in 1958 to govern a country wedded to the spirit of democracy, socialism, secularism and federalism.”218 National security comes at the expense of national principles.

What are the tenets of AFSPA, and how and where does it apply? Much of the present-day Act retains for the government of India those powers originally guaranteed to the colonizers. AFSPA allows the Indian Army, and any paramilitary and police forces that partner with it, to act with impunity on behalf of the public order. Under the auspices of AFSPA, the more than 44,000 armed personnel stationed in Manipur219 can make arrests and conduct searches without warrants, and they can use fatal force

216 For verbatim transcripts of the Lok Sabha debates, see Malem Ningthouja, India’s War on Democracy: The Debate on AFSPA 1958 (Imphal, Manipur: Waba Publications, 2014), 58–99.

217 Baruah, Durable Disorder, 80; According to Manchanda, those Nagas who were suspected of having relatives in Naga underground groups were gathered into concentration camps and starved. She reports: “Prime Minister Moraji Desai said: ‘Exterminate the Nagas, I will not have any compunction,’ representing the official attitude which sanctioned a genocide.” Rita Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can: Naga Women in the Peace Process (Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights, 2004), 3.

218 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 146.

219 Hanjabam, “The Meitei Upsurge in Manipur,” 158.

against anyone who appears to threaten the peace. AFSPA’s most insidious tenet gives soldiers what amounts to blanket, legal immunity for their actions,220 as no one may indict a member of the Armed Forces without permission from the central government.221

AFSPA applies to all centrally-directed armed forces operating in “disturbed areas.” Such forces might include the Indian Army; paramilitary units such as the Assam

Rifles, the Central Reserve Police Force, and the Border Security Force; and Manipuri police commandos who are called upon to join counterinsurgency efforts.222 In section

2(b) of the Act, a “disturbed area” is one which, according to the criteria presented under section 3, is declared by the government to be a disturbed area. Such declarations are not subject to judicial review.223 Section 3, in turn, declares no grounds for disturbance beyond whatever the government chooses to see as disturbed.224 The Act is

220 Amnesty International, “India: Official Sanction for Killings in Manipur,” 1997.

221 McDuie-Ra, “Searching for Human Security in ‘Disturbed’ Areas: Women as Agents for Change in Manipur, India,” 55; “Armed Forces Special Powers Act,” 1958, http://files.amnesty.org/air12/air_2012_full_en.pdf.

222 Baruah, Durable Disorder, 61.

223 Ibid., 62.

224 In the Lok Sabha debates over the 1958 bill, members attempted to raise questions about the meaning of “disturbance” and “disturbed area,” in relation to the official proclamation of emergency by the central government which takes state government power away. Member Pandit G.B. Pant argues that AFSPA lies outside of a declaration of emergency, and that instead of removing states’ power, it actually helps states by “leaving them free to make use of the armed forces.” Even within the debates during AFSPA’s original consideration, it was clear that the law inhabited a space of exception. The issues of the northeast were not comparable to those which required a state of emergency; the powers of northeastern states were not considered infringed upon. Indeed, the authors of the law assumed that it could only help these states. Ningthouja, India’s War on Democracy: The Debate on AFSPA 1958, 71–72.

thus completely tautological and can be bent towards any political expediency.225 In circular fashion, the Northeastern areas inhabited by suspicious persons become disturbed, and those who dwell in disturbed areas become suspicious.226 A member of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s bi-cameral parliament), during debates over the introduction of AFSPA in 1958, remarked that although the government sought to introduce the bill as an “innocuous measure,” it was actually “a unique legislation, the kind of which has never been contemplated since this Indian Parliament came into existence”—“a martial law.”227 It violates multiple rights guaranteed by the Indian

Constitution, including the right to life, the right against arbitrary arrest and detention, and the rules of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code, as well as most international human rights guarantees.228 Over time, it has become “a symbol of oppression, an object of hate, and an instrument of discrimination and highhandedness.”229

First designed for Nagaland in 1956,230 AFSPA was introduced in the nearby hills of Manipur in 1958 and applied to the rest of the state in 1980.231 It has similarly

225 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 119–122.

226 Dolly Kikon, “The Predicament of Justice: Fifty Years of Armed Forces Special Powers Act in India,” Contemporary South Asia 17, no. 3 (2009): 272.

227 Shri Mahanty, see Ningthouja, India’s War on Democracy: The Debate on AFSPA 1958, 75.

228 Baruah, Durable Disorder, 62.

229 This quote comes from the Jeevan Reddy committee, established by the Indian government in 2004 to review the Act. See Hanjabam, “The Meitei Upsurge in Manipur,” 157.

230 Ningthouja, India’s War on Democracy: The Debate on AFSPA 1958, 58.

231 Lintner, Great Game East, 124.

enjoyed territorial extensions across the Northeast, following insurgent groups as they sprout across formerly peaceful areas.232 Army camps proliferate in civil spaces and even within the borders of educational institutions like Manipur University, which hosts an encampment of the Assam Rifles. Such a proliferation of military might and the constant extension of central government oversight of local politics233 produce a discontented population which becomes all too ready to join insurgent outfits.

2.3.2 Responses to AFSPA: the rise of armed insurgency

Manipur’s first organized movement for autonomy, the United National

Liberation Front (UNLF), began in 1964 as an interethnic, non-violent quest for an independent socialist republic. Led by Meitei General Secretary Arambam Samarendra

Singh, Kabui-Naga Chairman Kalarung, and Kuki Vice-Chairman Thangkhopao Singsit,234 the interethnic group defined its mission in terms of liberating Manipur from “colonial occupation.” This revolutionary group was wracked by factions from the start, and the first official break came in 1968, led by Oinam Sudhir Kumar, who established a Meitei

232 Baruah, Durable Disorder, 80.

233 Governors of Northeastern states are appointed by the central government. They tend to be retired army generals and policemen from Delhi, e.g. Governor of Manipur Ved Prakash Marwah, Indian Police Service officer and former chief of Delhi Police. See ibid., 66–67.

234 Bertil Lintner and many others refer to the UNLF as a Meitei revolutionary group. As best I can tell, the group survives today as a Meitei insurgent outfit. But according to Lokendra Arambam, it began as an interethnic endeavor. Given that Arambam’s own brother was the Meitei General Secretary of the group, I have chosen to report the facts as he does, although this decision is surely controversial. Lokendra Arambam, “Peace Process in Manipur: Armed Conflict, State Repression and Women” (Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, 2005), 19.

Revolutionary Government of Manipur in East Pakistan.235 This first split is emblematic of the ways in which liberation groups have long fractured and proliferated in Manipur and elsewhere in the Northeast. Disagreements among insurgent leaders, with origins in both internal dissent over political ideology and external pressure from Indian military campaigns, create the impetus for the formation of new groups.236

Naga and Kuki revolutionary groups likewise operate within Manipur and across its borders. One of the best-known and largest revolutionary outfits in all of the

Northeast, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), emerged from the remnants of the colonial-era Naga National Council in 1980237 with the proposed platform of creating an independent, united “Nagaland for Christ.” An independent homeland for Naga peoples would allow them to retain their tribal and Christian identities without being subsumed by the Hindu nationalism of the Indian state.238 The leaders, Muivah, Swu, and Khaplang, split over whether to negotiate with the Indian government (helped along, according to Rita Manchanda, by tribal egos)239 in 1988 after

Khaplang made an attempt on the lives of Muivah and his followers. Thus the NSCN

235 Lintner, Great Game East, 117.

236 Ibid., 124.

237 Naga relations with the British, and then with the Indian state, comprise a rich and complicated history. I cannot go into the details in this chapter, but for an excellent overview of Naga political relations and militancy, see Ashild Kolas, “Naga Militancy and Violent Politics in the Shadow of Ceasefire,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 6 (2011): 781–92.

238 Biswas and Suklabaidya, Ethnic Life-Worlds in North-East India, 181.

239 Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can, 6.

exists today as two groups: the NSCN-IM, led by Muivah and Swu, and the NSCN-K, led by Khaplang.240

The Indian government controversially signed a ceasefire with the larger and more influential NSCN-IM in 1997, with language which threatened the territorial integrity of Manipur. To further their goals of religious and cultural freedom, the NSCN-

IM pursues the unification of all Naga-inhabited areas (including parts of Manipur,

Arunachel Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland, and eastern Burma) as one sovereign nation,

Nagalim. This goal, however, directly challenges Manipur’s control of some of its hill territories. Well aware of the controversy that the ceasefire could cause in Manipur and elsewhere, the Indian government deliberately left its terms with NSCN-IM vague. But upon demands for clarity, the Indian government announced that the ceasefire applied to the NSCN-IM areas of influence “without territorial limits”—implicating a large stretch of Manipur’s land. This announcement led to “a veritable political explosion” in

Manipur.241

Anti-ceasefire protests in Manipur turned exceptionally violent on June 18, 2001, now marked by Meiteis as “Martyrs’ Day.” Protestors burned down many of the important symbols of the government, including the Manipur State Legislative Assembly building. Eighteen protesters died in the agitation, as security personnel tried to scatter

240 Kolas, “Naga Militancy and Violent Politics in the Shadow of Ceasefire,” 785.

241 Baruah, “Confronting Constructionism: Ending India’s Naga War,” 323.

those who had taken to the streets.242 Based on this dynamic and others, peace scholar

Åshild Kolås argues that this ceasefire might better be viewed as a dimension of conflict, rather than as a step towards peace, as it provides no motivation for genuine change on the ground. Indeed, it sparked violence between Nagas and Meiteis in Manipur, and it does not seem to catalyze any political progress. Kolås notes that the main goal of both the NSCN-IM and the Government of India seems to be to perpetuate negotiations.243 As long as they remain in negotiations, neither group has to concede anything, and both can save face with their constituencies. But while the ceasefire persists, civilians suffer.

One of my interviewees, an independent peacebuilder who works for conflict transformation in the state, recalls a blockade put into place by the NSCM-IM against the Meiteis during a time of unrest related to the ceasefire.244 He writes,

“…the blockade [by the NSCM-IM against Meiteis], that was the longest.245 At that time, we, Babloo [Loitongbam] and me, some of us went to the European Parliament, we met one Graham Watson from UK, and we talked with him, and he made a one-minute intervention in Strasburg, and after his one-minute intervention, a few hours later, Delhi government called up those blockaders to Delhi and they called off the bandh. That is a fact. But why did the

242 Phanjoubam, “Manipur: Fractured Land,” 280.

243 Kolas, “Naga Militancy and Violent Politics in the Shadow of Ceasefire,” 790–791.

244 In 2010, Muivah attempted to visit his birthplace in Senapati district, in Manipur. Non-Nagas in Manipur believed that this was an attempt to stake claim to Naga territory within Manipur, and they argued that he had no right to visit territory outside of the limits of the ceasefire. Violence erupted, two Naga students were killed, and Naga communities in Manipur blockaded National Highway 39 for 69 days, cutting off the main road from Nagaland to Imphal and causing severe shortages in food, medicine, and petrol. Lintner, Great Game East, 139–140.

245 “Naga Blockade Pushes Manipur into Economic Crisis,” The Hindu, May 11, 2010, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/naga-blockade-pushes-manipur-into-economic- crisis/article426876.ece.

government not intervene before then? They allowed it! Because [the] government of India[’s] design is to secure this territory and boundaries of India by dividing amongst the people. [The] Indian government doesn’t want the peoples of this region to be united, but on the other hand they also don’t want it to slip away from their hands. So this action a long time they were very silent.”246

The Indian government was apparently aware of the shortages suffered by

Meitei civilians because of the NSCM-IM, but it did not take measures to protect Meiteis until it faced pressure from the European Parliament. Both the government and the

Naga militants seem to prefer the status quo—acceptably low levels of direct violence, the promise of on-going negotiations, and little apparent need to take responsibility for the suffering of innocent people.

While condemning the violence perpetrated against Meiteis in the blockade, it is worth recalling that one Meitei’s militant is another Naga’s freedom fighter. A Naga journalist who hails from Ukhrul district but works in Imphal explained to me the ways in which Naga Christian communities respect and support their “freedom fighters.” She argues:

“I see them as freedom fighters, I see them as patriots, I don’t see them as insurgents, I don’t want to call them militants. There was a time in the 80s, they would encourage all of the families to dedicate one of the boys for the freedom fight. … So every family would, so they went with our prayers, and we still fast for them. Whenever the govt of India has talks with the Naga leaders, it’s announced in the church. The talks are scheduled for Wednesday,

246 BR, June 25, 2015.

and so the previous Sunday we’ll fast for them. We still believe in some form of the self-determination.”247

Naga peoples have supported the longest-running insurgency in the Northeast.

Their wishes for self-determination were over-run by the Indian military from the start,248 and many of them249 still clamor against military excesses which they believe will not desist until an independent, united Nagaland for all Naga peoples is established.

One such excess which looms large in the memories of Nagas in Manipur is

Operation Bluebird, comprised of paramilitary reprisals against Naga insurgent activity in 1987. NSCN militants raided an Assam Rifles paramilitary outpost on July 9, 1987, at

Oinam Village in the northern hills of Manipur. The insurgents killed nine and injured three before escaping with weapons and ammunition. The Assam Rifles launched a counter-operation to punish the militants and recover the supplies. This counterinsurgency operation covered thirty villages in the Naga-dominated Senapati

District, and it lasted from July through mid-October.250 Under the guise of searching for militants, Assam Rifles soldiers, or jawans, subjected villagers to four months of torture.

Targeting infrastructure and livelihoods as well as the physical integrity of the villagers,

247 GJ, July 1, 2015.

248 See the plebiscite speech by Phizo, leader of the Naga National Council, delivered on May 16, 1951. Ningthouja, India’s War on Democracy: The Debate on AFSPA 1958, 53.

249 Not all Nagas in Manipur wish to leave the state.

250 Rahul Karmakar, “Manipur’s Horror: When Operation Bluebird Struck Terror,” Hindustan Times, November 5, 2014, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/manipur-s-horror-when-operation- bluebird-struck-terror/story-0FTWgabR6PJesb9dd9xMUL.html.

jawans destroyed churches, homes, and schools, and often prevented villagers from grazing their cattle or tending their fields. They captured men and hung them upside down, buried them alive, and subjected them to electric shocks. They sexually assaulted women and girls.251 The law and order situation in Senapati District disintegrated to such an extent that the Chief Minister of Manipur wrote confidentially to the Union Home

Minister,

“The Civil Law has, unfortunately, ceased to operate in Senapati District, Manipur, due to excesses committed by the Assam Rifles with complete disregard shown to the civil administration. The Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police were wrongfully confined, humiliated, and prevented from discharging their official duties by the security forces.”252

AFSPA replaced the civil law, and terror reigned.

Operation Bluebird occurred in a Naga-dominated district, but similar stories of excesses by the security forces against Kukis, Meiteis, and Pangals are found easily enough in other parts of Manipur.

2.3.3 Inter-ethnic violence in Manipur

In addition to violence between the central government’s armed forces and various insurgent underground groups, civilians suffer from inter-ethnic violence on the

251 Roshmi Goswami, MG Sreekala, and Meghna Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations (Guwahati, Assam: North East Network, 2005), 67.

252 Where “Peacekeepers” Have Declared War: Report on Violations of Democratic Rights by Security Forces and the Impact of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act on Civilian Life in the Seven States of the North-East (National Campaign Committee Against Militarisation and Repeal of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1997); cited in Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations, 68.

communal level. Many of my interviewees, particularly the Kukis of Churachandpur district who work with the Widows Welfare Association Asia, continue to experience traumatic effects from the Naga-Kuki clash of the mid-1990s. I will return to some of their stories in the next chapter.

Due primarily to disagreements over land, relations between Nagas and Kukis have long been tenuous in the hill districts. Even when the British colonizers were present, ethnic violence erupted between the two groups. Near the end of the colonial era, the British put an end to a Naga revolt against Kukis, but Hazarika notes that they

“left the suspicion and enmity untouched.”253 Such suspicion grew over the decades, as various Naga and Kuki armed outfits made claims to the same territory. The famous clash of the 1990s started over control of Moreh, a border town with Burma in Chandel district, which hosts both Naga and Kuki villages. Insurgent groups from both sides wanted to control Moreh,254 and violence broke out on May 12, 1992, when NSCN-IM militants burned down Kuki villages at Molphei. A couple of weeks later, Kuki insurgents forcibly extracted taxes from Naga villagers, producing more civilian casualties. The violence spiraled out of control from there, as retaliation followed retaliation.255 When asked to recall the origins of the years-long clash, Grace Satshang of the Naga Women’s

253 Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist, 243.

254 Lintner suggests that this desire is due, in large part, to the desire to control trade routes for illegal drugs. The opium trade does a booming business across the Manipur-Burma line. Lintner, Great Game East, 132.

255 Bhagat Oinam, “Patterns of Ethnic Conflict in the North-East: A Study on Manipur,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 21 (2003): 2032.

Union Manipur could not exactly remember why the violence began. But she does recall the rapid rate at which violence spread: “It started with a spark, but it went like a wildfire.”256 As local media covered killings and the burning of settlements, villagers who had once lived peacefully together began to guard themselves and to build fences.257

These rising tensions between common villagers were unusual. One of my interviewees, Bobichand, reports: “At the level of people to people there is no animosity. In the common market, you will find one Kuki woman sitting with a Naga woman, and in the hospitals sitting together, in the schools. At the level of people to people there is no enmity. Only the so-called leaders incites the people sometimes. That is the problem.”258 Another, ST, confirms: “It’s not that those incidents happened because the victims and the leaders had animosity; the community leaders they just ordered them to do it, so they did it.”259

One of my interviewees, a Naga woman who works with the Naga Women’s

Union Manipur, remembers her village burning to the ground during the Naga-Kuki clash, even though her family had long lived peacefully with their Kuki neighbors. SU reports:

256 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

257 Michael Haokip, “Kuki-Naga Conflict with Special Reference to the Chandel District of Manipur,” in Conflict Mapping and Peace Processes in Northeast India, ed. Lazar Jeyaseelan (Guwahati, Assam: North Eastern Social Research Centre, 2008), 164.

258 Bobichand, June 25, 2015.

259 ST, July 2, 2015.

“And in [19]94, November 17, that was the night when my village was burned down. So around 7:30 pm, it is quite late already, because winters the night falls very early and we used to sleep early. I was feeling so sleepy and my mother said I am hearing some noises around, and I think people are around, so we better go to some other place and sleep. I said let whatever come, if we are to die also we can die in our home. We don’t have to run. That was my strong objection to my mother’s insisting on going to sleep the night at some place. Then what happened? After some time, we started hearing one shot. After one shot, then the firing has to go on for almost one hour. And then once the firing stopped, we ran away. So there is no time to take out anything, we have to just run with the clothes that we wear to the nearest forest. Then we reach our other village, and we stayed the night, and the next morning we come and we see that everything it was all just burned to ashes. And it was just, like, you can’t believe it that the house that you were staying all your life was just turned into ashes.”260

2.3.4 Current status: low-intensity armed conflict in Manipur

Despite the decades of turbulent violence in Manipur described above, the

Government of India denies the existence of armed conflict in the state. Acknowledging the presence of armed conflict in the Northeast creates an obligation for India to follow international laws governing warfare, as well as to allow neutral observers like the

International Committee of the Red Cross to enter the region.261 It further requires the central government to protect women and children, according to the United Nations

Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Armed Conflict.262 In the

260 SU, July 7, 2015.

261 Binalakshmi Nepram, June 2, 2014.

262 Babloo Loitongbam, “Women in Armed Conflict: The Manipur Experience,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 25.

absence of an official recognition of armed conflict, local civil society is left to cope with the fall-out of direct violence. But just how much direct violence occurs? I have given an overview of some of the major episodes of violence, but how many people have been impacted across the state?

Unfortunately, this question is nearly impossible to answer. Because of the inaccessibility of much of the state, and India’s hostility towards foreign researchers and journalists seeking to enter the Northeast,263 it is extremely difficult to find accurate data on the armed conflict (which, according to India, does not exist!). Researchers from

Uppsala University’s Conflict Data Program (UCDP) have recorded year after year of

“battle-related deaths” in Manipur. In order for UCDP to classify a violent situation as one of low-intensity armed conflict, there must be 25 battle-related deaths occurring in a location within one calendar year. According to that criterion, Manipur has seen armed conflict for 15 out of the last 24 years, with marked increases from 2002-2008, followed by a sharp decline in battle deaths.264

263 Baruah, Durable Disorder, viii–ix.

264 “India:Manipur,” Uppsala Conflict Data Prevention, http://ucdp.uu.se/#conflict/347, accessed August 15, 2016.

TABLE 2.1

BATTLE-RELATED DEATHS IN MANIPUR

Year Battle-related deaths 1992 6 1993 34 1994 25 1995 25 1996 28 1997 14 1998 31 1999 45 2000 66 2001 26 2002 12 2003 57 2004 60 2005 78 2006 89 2007 86 2008 125 2009 110 2010 24 2011 8 2012 7 2013 9 2014 8 2015 3 Total 976

We must use this data with caution. The UCDP page on Manipur cites multiple problems with its data collection process, such as “sparse and unclear” news reporting.265 It also limits its reporting on Manipur to insurgencies which operate within the state’s borders, even though the NSCN-IM and the NSCN-K are active in both

Nagaland and Manipur.266 Because it reports only on the India-Manipur dyad, it also acknowledges but does not count casualties which stem from the Naga-Kuki clashes of the mid-1990s.267 Furthermore, it does not count civilian deaths among its casualties.

The UCDP data is thus an insufficient picture of the dynamics of direct violence in the state.

Indian conflict scholars also track the number of deaths in Manipur. This data, however, coming from the Institute on Conflict Management’s South Asia Terrorism

Portal, is extremely biased. First, the Institute on Conflict Management was founded and is presently directed by K.P.S. Gill, a controversial former Director General of Police in the Punjab. Gill is admired by many as a “supercop” who dealt harshly, yet effectively, with Sikh insurgencies in the Punjab.268 But groups like Human Rights Watch report his

265 “India:Manipur—Additional Information,” Uppsala Conflict Data Prevention, http://ucdp.uu.se/additionalinfo?id=347&entityType=1, accessed August 15, 2016.

266 Though it acknowledges that neighboring insurgencies are relevant for understanding those in Manipur.

267 “India:Manipur—Additional Information,” Uppsala Conflict Data Prevention, http://ucdp.uu.se/additionalinfo?id=347&entityType=1, accessed August 15, 2016.

268 Jyotsna Singh, “Profile: KPS Gill,” BBC, May 8, 2002, sec. South Asia, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1975997.stm.

involvement with illegal detentions and torture.269 Patricia Gossman also notes that Gill implemented a bounty policy among the police he directed, creating financial rewards for the killing of militants. This policy encouraged extra-judicial killings.270 Thus, it is little surprise that the analysis from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) attributes periodic falls in violence to the successes of the security forces. The SATP’s “Manipur

Assessment” concludes: “Security forces have done extraordinary work to bring back an approximation of normalcy to the State, but it will take enormous (and as yet unlikely) political sagacity to ensure that the gains they have secured through untold sacrifices are not frittered away, as they have repeatedly been in the past.”271 Which gains, for which groups of people? The SATP’s point of view is clearly one of national, rather than human, security.

Despite these problems, I will follow in the footsteps of scholars who have reported data from this source before me, in order to provide a better sense of the scale of violence:272

269 Human Rights Watch, “India: Time to Deliver Justice for Atrocities in Punjab,” October 18, 2007, https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/10/18/india-time-deliver-justice-atrocities-punjab.

270 Patricia Gossman, “India’s Secret Armies,” in Death Squads in Global Perspective, ed. Bruce Campbell and Arthur Brenner (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 261–86.

271 “Manipur Assessment—Year 2016,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/manipur/index.html, accessed August 15, 2016.

272 Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations; Bethany Lacina, “Rethinking Delhi’s Northeast India Policy: Why Neither Counter-Insurgency nor Winning Hearts and Minds Is the Way Forward,” in Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India, ed. Sanjib Baruah (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 329–42.

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TABLE 2.2

CIVILIAN, SECURITY PERSONNEL, AND TERRORIST DEATHS IN MANIPUR

Year Civilians Security Terrorists Total Force Personnel 1992 84 30 51 165 1993 266 91 66 423 1994 189 98 63 350 1995 183 64 74 321 1996 117 65 93 275 1997 233 111 151 495 1998 87 62 95 244 1999 89 64 78 231

2000 93 51 102 246

2001 70 25 161 256

2002 36 53 101 190

2003 27 23 148 198

2004 40 41 127 208 2005 138 50 143 331

2006 107 37 141 285

2007 150 40 218 408

2008 131 13 341 485

2009 77 18 321 416 2010 26 8 104 138 2011 25 10 30 65

2012 25 12 73 110 2013 21 6 28 55

101 TABLE 2.2 CONTINUED

Year Civilians Security Terrorists Total Force Personnel

2014 20 10 24 54 2015 17 24 53 94 2016 9 8 6 23

Total* 2260 1014 2792 6066

*Data till July 31, 2016273

Observe that in 8 out of 24 years, civilian casualties are the highest of the three categories. The data also fails to note whether civilians were killed by security forces or by insurgents—“terrorists.” Reflecting the bias of the Institute for Conflict Management, the other data sheets found on the SATP website give the number of civilians killed by terrorists and the number of security forces killed by terrorists, but they offer no information about civilians killed by security forces.274 Note, further, that the numbers reported by the UCDP and the SATP differ wildly. Whereas UCDP reports 976 battle- related deaths from 1992-2015, the SATP reports 6066 total deaths. Excluding their count of civilian fatalities, they report 3806 deaths. Whom should we believe?

273“Manipur Data Sheets,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/manipur/data_sheets/insurgency_related_killings. htm, accessed August 15, 2016.

274 “Manipur Data Sheets,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/ states/manipur/data_sheets/index.html, accessed August 15, 2016.

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Scholars and various data sources cannot even agree upon the number of armed groups operating in the state. One of my interviewees said that he had heard 30, 35, and 40; another suggested 60; still another said that their range should be from 24 to

46.275 In published scholarship, Bhaumik reports 40 insurgent outfits, and Das 20.276 A journalist whom I interviewed explained that it is easy enough to count rebel groups who have declared themselves publicly, but it is very difficult to know how long they are operation. Insurgent outfits do not make a habit of announcing when they close up shop.277

I highlight the poor quality of the data and the bias of those who report it in order to show that the existence of and the reporting on armed conflict in Manipur, and in the Northeast more generally, is highly political. The politics of the conflict help to determine the numbers, as well as their interpretation.

In sum, direct violence takes many forms in Manipur. We can find the roots of much of this violence in the colonial era, with the Rowlatt Act of 1919 transforming into

AFSPA of 1958. We can also see the ways in which British administration of the hills and valleys interrupted the co-existence of different groups, cutting people off from one another and hampering an interdependence which had worked, albeit tenuously, for centuries before. Once India took over as the colonizer of the Northeast, the violence

275 Melvil Pereira, July 20, 2015; Binalakshmi Nepram, June 2, 2014, GJ, July 1, 2015.

276 Bhaumik, Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East; Rani Das, “Militancy in Manipur: Origin, Dynamics, and Future,” American Economic Journal 6 (2008): 561–74.

277 GJ, July 1, 2015.

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was not diminished. In the next chapter, I will argue that although direct violence stemming from armed conflict certainly has a large impact upon women’s lives, it mingles with structural violence in gendered ways. The violence I have described in this political history comprises just a fraction of the obstacles which women peacebuilders face.

104 CHAPTER 3:

PEACEBUILDING IN MANIPUR: PRAXIS COMING TO LIFE

3.1 Introduction

“I always felt…that we really need strong collectives. Because individuals, you can be effective, you can do, yes. But the impact when more people do it together at the same time, then the collective will be always strong, more impact. So I feel it’s high time to really build strong collectives which can come from all groups. That’s what I believe, and I believe it is possible. The only thing is we haven’t started working on it.”

-ST, Naga peacebuilder from Manipur

In Chapter 2, I laid out the multiple, overlapping sources of direct violence in

Manipur. More than six decades of armed conflict in the state has produced four major sources of direct violence against women (and men), including the Indian army, paramilitary forces, armed insurgents, and police commandos. However, women peacebuilders organize against violent structures as well. This type of violence, and hence this type of peacebuilding, tends to be much more difficult to see. Thus, my examination of women’s peacebuilding in this chapter focuses primarily upon five types of violent structures which constrain the agency of women peacebuilders. This emphasis enables me to uncover stories of women’s peacebuilding and examples of women’s agency that have been understudied, underreported, and underestimated.

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In an attempt to illuminate women’s agency in all of its varied forms, I employ

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concepts of structural and political intersectionality as my organizational scheme. As the review of literature on women, gender, and peacebuilding revealed in Chapter 1, the use of intersectionality is practically canonical in studies of women peacebuilders. I am not imposing Western assumptions upon

Indian women, but rather following one of the most widely-accepted insights of the field: women’s lives are very different, and those who study women should avoid presenting a homogenous “women’s experience.” I follow not only Crenshaw and important Western scholars like Patricia Hill Collins, Sirma Bilge, and bell hooks, but also

Indian scholars whose work is deeply intersectional, such as Chandra Mohanty and Uma

Narayan.278 Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 1, intersectionality itself is a form of critical praxis, according to Collins and Bilge. Intersectional social locations tend to inform the work of practitioners, as they pursue both intersectional inquiry and intersectional activism.279 The authors note that studies of violence are an especially useful site for employing intersectional critical praxis, as intersectional study helps to illuminate

278 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1990); Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Bognor Regis: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016); bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Uma Narayan, Dis-Locating Cultures : Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997).

279 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 42.

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“heterogeneous forms of violence” that “contribute to social inequality and social injustice.”280

In this chapter, I use Crenshaw’s concept of structural intersectionality to show the ways in which women’s peacebuilding methods and issues of concern change according to their social locations. Structural intersectionality reveals the varied ways in which women experience and respond to structural violence. In the final section of the chapter, I use Crenshaw’s political intersectionality to evaluate women’s peacebuilding praxis in terms of its ability to contribute to justpeace. Peacebuilding organizations tend to articulate noble goals in pursuit of justice; however, civil society organizations are not automatically just.281 They perpetuate many of the same harmful power hierarchies which call for peacebuilding in the first place. Political intersectionality is a useful normative tool which can help women’s peacebuilding organizations to check their own uses of power.

280 Patricia Hill Collins, “The Tie That Binds: Race, Gender and US Violence,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (1998): 918–38; cited in Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 48.

281 Cox, Robert, “Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order,” Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 3–28; cited in Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Searching for Human Security in ‘Disturbed’ Areas: Women as Agents for Change in Manipur, India,” Australasian Journal of Human Security 1, no. 2 (2005): 52.

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3.2 Structural violence: provoking and constraining the women peacebuilders of

Manipur

Women in Manipur organize against both direct and structural violence.

Certainly, dynamics of the armed conflict discussed in Chapter 2 impact women on existential, physical, emotional, and psychological levels. But direct violence is not the only type of violence which women peacebuilders face. As many scholars of Manipur suggest, women must confront and organize against structural violence as well.282 I will broadly outline common types of structural violence which impact women in this section, before turning to peacebuilding praxis in Section III. I see violence as both a provocation for and a constraint upon peacebuilding agency. Peacebuilders’ every moves are circumscribed by some combination of direct and structural violence, even as their praxis takes such violence as its point of departure.

The direct violence which dominates scholarship on armed conflict in Manipur is conspicuous. One actor intentionally hurts another: a member of the Indian military kills an armed insurgent. However, indirect, structural violence occurs alongside direct violence, producing harm by way of a matrix of social forces: the children of the dead insurgent go hungry because their mother cannot find work in a male-dominated workforce. No individual actor appears responsible for the harm which befalls the

282 Salam Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective (Delhi: Anshah Publishing House, 2014), 50; Abhijit Bhuyan, “Bodo Women: Peace Makers within the Ethnic Paradigm,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 3.

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widow and her children; yet they nevertheless experience harm. Structural violence hurts. Like direct violence, it warrants a peacebuilding response.

Building on Johan Galtung’s foundational question, “Can we talk about violence when nobody is acting?,” Paul Farmer provides one of the most straightforward articulations of this phenomenon: structural violence constrains agency.283 To recognize structural violence is to recognize those who engage with it as agents. To counter structural violence is thus to promote the agency of those who are constrained. But what does agency mean to Farmer, and how is that understanding situated within feminist theory’s debates on the meaning of agency?

Farmer understands agency in terms of the ability to choose from an array of options. Rather than defining agency as a theorist might, he uses life stories to show how structures like poverty and gender-based discrimination constrict options.284 He ties agency to choosing one’s own fate and overcoming domination. This conceptualization has affinities with those which Saba Mahmood counters in her influential work Politics of Piety. Mahmood laments the progressive, feminist assumption that agency equals autonomy, and that it always takes the form of resistance.285 She acknowledges the

283 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 170; Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 40.

284 Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

285 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.

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importance of the feminist search for subaltern agency expressed in unexpected ways, as seen in the work of scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod and Judith Butler.286 Within the literature on women’s peacebuilding in Manipur, feminist scholars are so eager to portray women as agents, rather than as passive victims, that they tend to align with this progressive narrative, also designating agency as resistance.287 Mahmood argues, however, that even these valuable works which privilege subaltern agency wrongly conceive of it as resisting subordination. Using ethnographic evidence from the Cairo women’s urban mosque movement, Mahmood denaturalizes this assumption, showing that agency can be exerted through submission. “Docile agents” seek to live more deeply within the virtuous traditions which appear to constrain their freedom.288

Mahmood’s claim offers a serious challenge to the progressive idea of agency (as well as to the scholarship on women’s peacebuilding in Manipur, which employs this idea), which Farmer uses alongside his idea of structural violence. However, her important work does not mean that agency never seeks relief from domination. It emphasizes that feminists ought to allow the meaning of agency to emerge within a context, rather than assuming that the progressive definition is accurate in all cases. I

286 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

287 Rita Manchanda, ed., Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2001); Paula Banerjee, Anasua Basu, and Ray Chaudhury, eds., Women in Indian Borderlands (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2011); Paula Banerjee, “New Conundrums for Women in North-East India,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 57–65.

288 Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 29.

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use Mahmood’s insistence upon the contextualization of agency to claim that in the context of peacebuilding, feminists should applaud women’s agentic practices only insofar as they support women’s own goals concerning justice and peace. Using political intersectionality’s consciousness of power and exclusion, we should evaluate such agency according to the quality of peace that follows, rather than lauding every initiative as an example of women’s agency. To do otherwise is to bow to relativism, rather than employing guiding criteria as our normative compass.289 Peacebuilding agency can take many forms—constructing something new, blocking destruction, or transforming what is already present. But these varied forms cannot be peacebuilding agency if they detract from justpeace by propagating divisions and power differentials among women.

The feminist tool of intersectionality can help us to diagnose such divisions and differences in power. Just as structural violence situates harm in a matrix of social forces, intersectionality situates women’s life experiences in a “matrix of domination.”290

Rooted in American black feminist thought and critical race theory of the late twentieth century, intersectional analysis critiques a feminism which takes the particular position of the white, middle class, heterosexual woman as universal.291 bell hooks points out

289 Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19–20.

290 Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

291 Devon Carbado et al., “Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 2 (2013): 303.

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that within American discourses on race and gender, “blacks” means black men, and

“women” means white women.292 Elizabeth Spelman adds that Western feminist theory, in its eagerness to illustrate how “the canon” has ignored differences between women and men, tends to elide differences among women.293 Building on these insights,

Kimberlé Crenshaw articulates the concept of intersectionality. Structural intersectionality refers to the ways in which the social location of women of color makes their experiences qualitatively different from those of white women (in the American context).294 I use structural intersectionality descriptively, revealing the overlapping violences which constrain women’s agency as they pursue peace in Manipur. As women of different ethnicities, religions, and classes, peacebuilders have qualitatively different life experiences. Structural violence thus constrains their agency differently, affecting their targets and strategies as they build peace.

Political intersectionality, for Crenshaw, points to the tendency of feminist and antiracist politics to marginalize the problem of violence against women of color.295 This normative tool can help feminists to see the ways in which their own discourses and means of interacting with one another marginalize some women, even as they claim to be fighting on behalf of those very women. Mariana Ortega describes this phenomenon

292 hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism.

293 Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).

294 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” 1245.

295 Ibid.

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as “loving, knowing ignorance,” defined as “an ignorance of the thought and experience of women of color that is accompanied by both alleged love for and alleged knowledge about them.”296 To address such ignorance, Ortega recommends a renewed appreciation for praxis, relationships across differences, and shared experiences. White feminists must make efforts to engage with and learn about feminists of color.297 Without such interactions, feminist movements too easily critique some hierarchies (such as patriarchy) while implicitly supporting others (such as racism). I will show that this is often the case in women’s peacebuilding movements in Manipur. The ways in which some women frame their peace work—for all women, for all humans—unintentionally maintain ethnic and other hierarchies. Women’s agency is thus limited to overturning only some dynamics of violence.

I use structural violence, structural intersectionality, and political intersectionality together, throughout the rest of this chapter. First, I describe intersectional structures which limit women’s agency, considering structures that impact both men and women but highlighting gendered dynamics when appropriate.

Section III reveals a fuller spectrum of women’s peacebuilding agency than scholars have portrayed before, showing how women respond not only to direct but also to structural violence. This broadens the traditional idea of peacebuilding from that which

296 Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 57.

297 Ibid., 67–69.

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happens between armed insurgents and the government of India at a negotiating table, to those actions pursued by those who long for peace in their homes, communities, and state—even when those actions cannot be construed as resistance. In Section IV, I use political intersectionality to evaluate women’s peacebuilding agency in terms of its contributions to justpeace—a way of life which decreases violence and destructive social interactions while promoting justice within relationships.298 What we learn from peacebuilding praxis’s engagement with justpeace, along with its engagement with liberal feminism and critical feminism in the next two chapters, will lead to the articulation of critical feminist justpeace in the final chapter.

Now, I explore five inter-related sources of structural violence.

3.2.1 Social inequalities: ethnicity and religion

Sociologists Rogers Brubaker and Andreas Wimmer have done important work, showing that the monolithic “ethnic group” does not exist as a coherent entity.299

However, ethnicity is the most relevant piece of information that one can have about an individual in Manipur. Even as groups shift, internally as well as in relation to one another, they structure social and political power. As long as we acknowledge its dynamism, it is important to use ethnicity as an analytical tool. In the context of

298 John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182.

299 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Manipur, ethnicity can provide a great deal of information about probable location, power, and privilege.

Ethnic awareness was a relatively late phenomenon in Manipur, according to

Meitei scholar Lokendra Arambam. He argues that there used to be many intermarriages and smooth interactions among hill and valley peoples, and he describes interdependent economic exchanges of goods that were available only in certain places.

It was not until the British began to organize Manipur in order to control it, that ethnicity became an important designation.300 According to Arambam, “Til the 1980s, there was no ethnic hatred and ethnic tension. So the Nagas, being conscious of the

Nagas themselves, the Kuki being conscious of the Kukis themselves, the Meitei becoming Meitei, these things were [a] very, very post-colonial phenomenon.”301

Despite new, post-colonial levels of awareness about ethnicity, the “Meitei” designation appears to be relatively stable across millennia. Many present-day Meiteis, including one of my kindest and most helpful friends in Manipur, trace their lineage back to the Kings whose deeds were recorded in the ancient chronicles. Both “Naga” and “Kuki,” however, tend to serve as shifting umbrella terms for multiple tribes, which may change their ethnic designations according to political expediency.302 A journalist

300 Alexander Mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1884); Bhagat Oinam, “Patterns of Ethnic Conflict in the North-East: A Study on Manipur,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 21 (2003): 2033.

301 Lokendra Arambam, June 16, 2014.

302 Ch. Sekholai Kom, “Ethnic Politics in the Hills of Manipur,” Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (2011): 153.

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told me in an interview that some tribal groups even choose to adopt no ethnic designation, when appropriate. She argues,

“The Kom, like Mary Kom,303 they are quite a survival ethnic group I would say. If they are closer to Nagas they say we are Nagas; if they are closer to Kukis they say we are Kukis. But til date they have not spelled out who they are. This itself is quite a political position—not to have an ethnicity and to still survive.”304

Her comment reveals much about the dynamics of ethnic relations in Manipur: smaller tribes, like the Koms, often have to choose a larger allegiance in order to survive waves of ethnic violence. To not choose an allegiance is unusual and possibly dangerous. The actions of men and women, whether they are peacebuilders or insurgents, are greatly circumscribed by their ethnic identities.

Why might a tribal group change its ethnic designation? Such changes are driven in part by the Indian Constitution’s system of reserving opportunities for historically marginalized groups through the Scheduled Tribe (ST), Scheduled Caste (SC), and Other

Backward Castes (OBCs) reservations. The Constitution allots multiple economic benefits to those coming from STs, SCs, and OBCs, leaving tribal groups with a material interest in acquiring this status.305 The reservation system becomes a potential source of resentment for Meiteis, who do not benefit from ST status and the employment

303 Mary Kom is a wildly successful international boxer from Manipur. She won a bronze medal at the London Olympics in 2012, and she is also the subject of a recent film. M.C. Mary Kom, Unbreakable: An Autobiography (London: Harper Sport, 2013).

304 GJ, July 1, 2015.

305 K. S. Chalam, Caste-Based Reservations and Human Development in India (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007).

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opportunities which it confers, such as reserved seats in schools, government jobs, and other types of public work.306 Making matters even more difficult for indigenous, yet non-tribal Meiteis, members of STs in Manipur are not necessarily economically deprived, although this tends to be true elsewhere in India. Many Nagas and Kukis living with ST benefits may be wealthier than Meiteis who lack the official tribal status, but they still have special access to reserved schooling and jobs.307 One of my Meitei interviewees expressed resentment about this discrepancy and the inequality which it produces: “So they are now getting more facilities than the Meitei community, so they have an ego, they are becoming more prosperous, more educated, more wealthy!”308

The Indian state’s somewhat arbitrary distinctions among STs, SCs, OBCs, and those without any designation309 in the Northeast echoes the British understanding and treatment of those whom it regulated with the Inner Line system in the 19th century. As

Sanjib Baruah notes, this differential treatment, although to some extent necessary, ignores the fact that the well-being of tribals is interdependent with that of the non-

306 Sushil Kumar Sharma, “Naga Peace Accord and the Kuki and Meitei Insurgencies in Manipur” (Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, 2016), 4, http://www.idsa.in/policybrief/naga-peace-accord- and-the-kuki-and-meitei-insurgencies_sksharma_050116.

307 Roshmi Goswami, MG Sreekala, and Meghna Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations (Guwahati, Assam: North East Network, 2005), 5.

308 CI, July 5, 2015.

309 The methods for determining the “backwardness” of people groups are incredibly subjective, including whether castes or classes are considered socially backward by others. K. S. Chalam, Caste-Based Reservations and Human Development in India, 50–52.

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tribals in their region.310 Prasenjit Biswas and Chandan Suklabaidya argue that the ST system also encourages tribes to lose their distinctiveness over time, as they bargain with the state of India in order to be included among the beneficiaries.311 Thus it seems that the reservation system, intended to protect certain groups while preventing others from maintaining unfair advantages, is diluting distinctive identities while creating new systems that marginalize.

Putting further pressure on the co-existence of different ethnic groups in

Manipur, ethnicity also tends to serve as a dividing line for religious affiliation, although this line is porous.312 Many Meiteis converted to Hinduism in the 18th century, but most retain some practices from traditional Manipuri religion, centering on the veneration of ancestors and elements of nature.313 By contrast, Nagas and Kukis are predominantly

Christian, due to the influence of 18th century European missionaries. The Christian tribal view that Meitei customs are pagan and thus abhorrent leaves Nagas, Kukis, and

Meiteis with few religious traditions in common.314 The Muslim Pangals, or “Manipuri

Muslims,” comprise the fourth major ethnic group within Manipur, though it is not quite

310 Sanjib Baruah, “Citizens and Denizens: Ethnicity, Homelands, and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India,” Journal of Refugee Studies 16, no. 1 (2003): 49–50.

311 Prasenjit Biswas and Chandan Suklabaidya, Ethnic Life-Worlds in North-East India (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2008), 156.

312 AK, June 23, 2015.

313 N. Vijaylakshmi Brara, Politics, Society and Cosmology in India’s North East (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 103–105.

314 Ibid., 5–6.

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correct to refer to them as an “ethnic group.” These Muslims were forcibly brought to

Manipur in 1606 from Assam, during the reign of King Khagemba. First living as captives, they eventually gained their freedom, married Meitei women, and adopted many of the

Meiteis’ cultural practices, along with the Manipuri language.315 The gulf between tribal and Meitei religious practices is comparable to that between tribal and Pangal practices.

Religion, tied to ethnicity, can act simultaneously as a structure of violence and a resource for peace in Manipur. Leaders of ethnic groups often use religious difference to incite violence against others.316 Even shared religion does not necessarily protect one ethnic group from another, as was evidenced by the great Naga-Kuki clash of the mid-

1990s.317 However, one Naga youth leader reported to me that the values of Christianity serve as the foundation for building peace among Naga factions.318 A former vice- president of the Naga Women’s Union Manipur also explained that Naga churches serve as useful, weekly meeting places for community-wide information dissemination and decision-making, when it comes to issues of conflict and peace. She contrasted this to the individuality of Meitei religious practices, which tend to occur within single homes.319

315 Manjusri Chaki-Sircar, Feminism in a Traditional Society: Women of the Manipur Valley (New Delhi: Shakti Books, 1984), 23.

316 BR, June 25, 2015.

317 GJ, July 1, 2015; Ruth Singson, July 5, 2015.

318 IR, July 3, 2015.

319 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

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Some religions, connected to some ethnicities, thus create more tightly-knit communities. Such communal identification can work to serve peace or violence.

Sanjay Barbora, a professor at the Tata Institute for Social Science in Guwahati,

Assam, reflected positively upon the impacts of religion on peace in the Northeast in an interview. Although he personally identifies as an agnostic, he said, “… I think what religion has done in the Northeast, it’s so amazing; it’s given us such a thick history of comfort, of hope. And I use the word hope with all the wealth of meaning that it has.

And religion is the only thing sometimes which has allowed us to have hope.”320 The effects of religion are thus ambivalent but undeniably present, alternately constraining and supporting women’s peacebuilding agency.321 Religion, intimately tied to ethnicity, produces both violence and hope, serving as a potential divide among peacebuilders while simultaneously providing them with the rich resources and social networks needed to persevere through corruption, terror, danger, and grief.

3.2.2 Geographic inequalities: hills and valleys

Just as ethnicity is tied to religion, it is closely connected to geography. The structures constraining peacebuilders in Manipur are intersectional—each impacts the other, creating varied life experiences for those lying at different social intersections.

320 Sanjay Barbora, July 21, 2015.

321 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred : Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).

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The Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reform Act of 1960 codifies ethnic and geographic relations. Meiteis, the majority ethnic group, cannot purchase land in the hill districts where the Naga and Kuki tribal peoples live, although tribal peoples are free to purchase land in the Imphal Valley.322 Like the ST system, this often creates resentment between hill- and valley-dwellers. Tribal peoples tend to feel that Meiteis have an advantage when it comes to accessing Imphal’s resources, such as development funding coming in from the central government, universities, electricity, and paved roads.

However, many Meiteis feel that the tribal peoples hold more land than they deserve, as they comprise about 40% of the population yet hold 60% of the land.323

Gender dynamics also complicate the ethnic strictures on land holding, as women of many tribes have no inheritance rights.324 According to Naga customary law, women cannot inherit village land. Naga men see it as “ancestral land inherited from

[their] forefathers.”325 But a Naga peacebuilder reports that women’s recent forays into the labor force have enabled them to buy, maintain, and bequeath their own land, even to their daughters. If women earn a salary and buy land outside of the village holdings, they may do with it as they like. This peacebuilder explained to me, with great delight,

322 “Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act,” 1960, http://manipur.nic.in/revenue/MLRLRAct.pdf.

323 R.P. Athparia, “Emergent Ethnic Crisis: A Study of Naga-Kuki Conflict in Manipur,” in Social Unrest and Peace Initiatives: Perspectives from North East India, ed. Gautam Bera et al. (Guwahati, Assam: Eastern Book House, 2011), 249.

324 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 29.

325 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

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“For example I have big land in Imphal which is revenue land. Customary law has no right over it. So it is absolutely my right, to whom I give it!”326 Thus land ownership is governed by both state law and customary law, which take into account ethnicity and gender. Ethnic majorities and minorities alike have legitimate, geographic causes for complaint, with women subjected to even greater constraints than men. Physical location, in addition to social location, constrains women’s agency.

3.2.3 Political inequalities: national, state, and local politics

Unjust political structures constrain agency on multiple levels in Manipur.

Relations between the state and central governments are characterized by stark inequality. The federal system in India gives a great deal of power to the center, relative to all of the states. The center’s relation to states in the Northeast, however, is particularly asymmetrical, because of the region’s underdevelopment and violent disorder. Baruah describes the controlling political system in the Northeast as parallel to the democratically elected government, with “crucial decision-making, facilitating and operational nodes that span the region and connect New Delhi with the theatre of action.” Those making decisions and carrying out operations include the Indian Army, intelligence officers, and other military units. This “command structure” may include some elected state-level officials, who are beholden to Delhi for their offices, as the

326 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

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central government has the power to dismiss constitutionally-elected state government officials during times of disorder.327

Furthermore, small states like those in the Northeast have little say over questions of policy and finance, partly due to sheer numbers—the entire Northeast has fewer Members of Parliament than large states like Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. Vested interests within the national parliament have also used Northeastern insurgencies for personal gains.328 All of this leads a philosopher from Manipur University, Soyam

Lokendrajit, to describe the state government as a mere “puppet” of the center.329 Social scientist Sanjay Barbora elaborates: “The state governments are always beholden to the center; they’re always in debt; they always need money from the center. At every level—political, financial—they have very little room to maneuver.”330

Even as Manipur’s elected Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) struggle to govern their state within the constraints of the center’s budget, development plans, and overweening political power, women struggle to become MLAs. The first woman entered the assembly in 1990, 18 years after Manipur became a state. By 2012, only

327 Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder : Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63–64.

328 Ranjit Hazarika, Minoti Pathak, and Rupali Borah, “Issues of Peace and Conflict Resolution in North East India,” Annual Journal of North-East India Political Science Association XVII (2009 2008): 167– 168.

329 Soyam Lokendrajit, July 9, 2015.

330 Sanjay Barbora, July 21, 2015.

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three women (out of sixty members) served as MLAs.331 At a large stakeholders meeting among different women’s groups in Imphal, Binalakshmi Nepram, the founder and director of the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, addressed her comments about women in politics directly to a young, male civil servant in attendance: “We want,

Armstrong, more women in civil service in the state, more women in our assembly, more women in our panchayats [village councils] like Icha [sister] there from Bishnupur district. We want more women in security service, we want women in the peace talks.

Not only that women are protesting.”332 Armstrong Pame, an officer of the Indian

Administrative Service hailing from Tamenglong District, Manipur, responded later with a discussion of the need to support women’s rights in Manipur. But much of his argument centered on what the government could do for women, rather than ways in which women could participate in self-governance.333

My pessimistic description of women in politics in Manipur might surprise many who are acquainted with women’s political protests. Although women from Manipur are known across India for their sit-ins, processions, and demonstrations, men often classify this work as humanitarian, and therefore safely apolitical.334 Triveni Goswami

331 “Women in the Assembly From 1990 to 2012,” The Sangai Express, March 21, 2012, http://www.thesangaiexpress.com/14001-women-in-the-assembly-from-1990/. The next election will be held in 2017.

332 Binalakshmi Nepram, June 2, 2014.

333 Field notes, June 2, 2014.

334 Pradip Phanjoubam, June 11, 2014; AK, June 23, 2015; BR, June 25, 2015.

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notes that women’s peace activism is “accidental”—a mere extension of their domestic role.335 Sajal Nag adds, “Women have internalized the ideas generated by men that the domains of politics where major decisions are taken are exclusively for men, and women should concentrate on softer issues.”336 Indeed, many women’s groups do not counter this view. They gladly take up the mantle of humanitarianism, defying those who would apply the label of feminist politics to their work.

Some women, however—particularly Nagas, in my experience—seek to enter formal politics, as members of village tribal councils, or panchayats.337 They rarely succeed, and if they do, men tend to deem the presence of just one woman as sufficient for representing the “women’s view.”338 A journalist reported to me that the United

Naga Council recently elected its first woman to the executive committee. But she holds the position of “woman coordinator”—“she’s either that or a recording secretary.”339

Thus even if women “force their way in” to the local governing bodies, as one woman described the process to me, they may not be given full membership or treated as

335 Triveni Goswami, “Role of Women as Peace Builders with Special Reference to Nagaland,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 127.

336 Sajal Nag, “Her Masters’ Voice,” in Peace in India’s Northeast: Meaning, Metaphor and Method, ed. Prasenjit Biswas and C. Joshua Thomas (New Delhi: Regency Publications, 2006), 224.

337 Rita Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can: Naga Women in the Peace Process (Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights, 2004), 20.

338 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

339 GJ, July 1, 2015.

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having full right to political participation.340 Even the gender quota, reserving 33% of local seats for women, fails to make much of an impact on the gendered nature of politics.341 Historian Salam Irene notes that some of the women who hold the reserved seats “function just as namesakes,” while their husbands direct the real political work.342

Men ignore women even as voters, running for local offices by courting the favor of other men.343 The gendered nature of politics in Manipur, which are already characterized by asymmetry and authoritarianism, makes it almost impossible for women to participate in formal self-governance, constraining women’s agency as peacebuilders on multiple levels.

The alleged divide between humanitarian activism and formal politics, however, raises an important feminist question: what is political? Are sit-ins and protests against human rights violations a-political, because they are informal? For example, do the Naga women who protested the rape and suicide of a Naga woman, N Rose, in 1974344 have less of a political voice than the lone woman recently elected to the United Naga

Council? An anthropologist at Manipur University dismisses women’s demonstrations and protests as apolitical, arguing that their participation stems from either sentiment,

340 Field notes, June 4, 2014, Bishnupur district meeting.

341 Elizabeth Devi, “Muslim Women of Manipur and Peacemaking: A Transitional Role from Behind the Veil to Public Space,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 77.

342 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 4.

343 Chaki-Sircar, Feminism in a Traditional Society: Women of the Manipur Valley, 32.

344 Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations, 91.

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motherhood, or the “collective wisdom of the society,” rather than from political commitment.345 Social scientist Sanjay Barbora countered in an interview that women’s peacebuilding groups, whether engaged in public protests or private work in their own villages, are “incredibly political”; they are like the “canary in the coal mine—they show you how bad Indian democracy is.” Expressing frustration with those who designate the women as a-political, Barbora argues:

“The onus shouldn’t be on those who are being left out, saying look, you’re not good enough, you’re not coming in, right? … The problem is really Indian democracy—they’re not inclusive. And not only are they not inclusive; when it comes to social, let’s say social issues and political issues, they [the central government] are unable to deal with the fact that they’re colonizers.”346

In sum, Indian democracy impedes the formal political participation of women in

Manipur, as Northeasterners, as members of different ethnic communities who have varied access to government positions, and as women. These impediments do not make their informal work a-political, but rather serve as constraints on their agency as peacebuilders. Political structures, and even the designation of what is and is not political, exert different kinds of violence against women who live at different social intersections.

345 AK, June 23, 2015.

346 Sanjay Barbora, July 21, 2015.

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3.2.4 Economic inequalities: development, corruption, and extortion

Historian Salam Irene refers to Manipur as “the least developed state in the country.”347 Mirroring the academic literature’s established ties between armed conflict and underdevelopment,348 the state wracked by violence has also been unable to promote industry, wealth, and human development. Employing the well-known greed and grievance model presented by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Sanjib Baruah argues that the Indian state assumes that the insurgent groups in the Northeast are greedy, but they overlook the real grievances held by both insurgents and the people.349 They thus try to tempt Northeasterners through development and trade benefits, which will create higher incomes. However, since government initiatives like the Look East Policy and the cabinet-level Department for Development of the North Eastern Region fail to address questions of governance and other political grievances, they continually fail to make an impact.350 Professor Soyam Lokendrajit commented to me, “It’s a Look East

347 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 50.

348 John Londregan and Keith Poole, “Poverty, the Coup Trap, and the Seizure of Executive Power,” World Politics 42, no. 2 (1990): 151–83.

349 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004): 563–95; Sanjib Baruah, ed., Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.

350 Look East sees the Northeast as a “dynamic link with other regions.” It reflects the central government’s assumption that “if the locals in the Northeast are convinced of development, globalization, and trade benefits, they will not have as much sympathy for the region’s rebel groups.” The reality on the ground, however, is that many of the economic ties supposedly developed with countries in South East Asia have actually been overtaken by the security apparatus, allowing the Indian Army to enter foreign territory in order to challenge Northeastern insurgent groups. Baruah, Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India, 1–6.

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policy which is not concern for you, it’s done on top of you, over your head.” Employing the term for the streets which divert traffic up and over busy highway intersections, he reports: “It’s what you call a fly-over.”351

Worsening the ineffective economic approach to political grievances, corruption runs rampant in Manipur. For example, the central government has long supported hydroelectric power in the region, in order to address problems with both electricity and water. Irene points out, however, that only powerful men benefit from these power plants, capturing most of the electric power in a state whose residents currently average electricity for just five to six hours per day.352 Lokendra Arambam argued in an interview that the corruption is so bad that Manipur is best classified as a failed state: “The politics of power-sharing, politics of resources-sharing, and the tremendous corruption inside crony capitalism, they call it, and the kind of corruption of the entire governance of the state—[it] is actually a failed state.”353

Corruption becomes especially clear when looking at the distribution of basic goods and services. Sometimes drinking water and cooking gas—necessities for daily life in Manipur—are available only at outrageously inflated prices. In a group interview with three Meitei women, I learned that the government allots to each house one cylinder of cooking gas per month. However, the cylinders often do not arrive for six months at a

351 Soyam Lokendrajit, July 9, 2015.

352 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 52–53.

353 Lokendra Arambam, June 16, 2014.

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time. This leaves private individuals with no option other than purchasing it on the black market for 1500 rupees, even though the real price should be just 730 rupees. In one woman’s words, “The big question is how these private sellers get this gas when the consumers are not getting [it] in time.”354 It is clear that what ought to be a public utility has been captured by private interests, for the purposes of extortion.

Of course, public officials are far from the only extortionists in the state. Even though their own hands are dirty, politicians expose the extortionist tendencies of many of the insurgent outfits. Rani Das reports some of the text from Chief Minister Okran

Ibobi Singh’s public appearance in Thoubal district, on April 23, 2006: “All development projects have been stalled for interference by militant outfits. The construction of a flyover in Imphal is delayed because the militant outfits are demanding a certain percentage of the project fund….” “Militants are extorting money from each and every one, including barbers, small-time traders, and low-ranking government employees.”355

The Chief Minister’s speech ought to be taken alongside other, more common, accusations of corruption which I heard leveled against government officials. However, his words highlight the nearly impossible economic position into which the civilians of

Manipur are put: suffering extortion at the hands of insurgents, alongside corruption at

354 IN, MP, CI, July 5, 2015.

355 Rani Das, “Militancy in Manipur: Origin, Dynamics, and Future,” American Economic Journal 6 (2008): 567.

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the hands of public officials. While insurgents and politicians compete over public funds coming into the state from the center, civilians become the biggest economic losers.356

One form of corruption which directly impacts women’s peacebuilding agency comes from the (failed) implementation of widow’s schemes. A Meitei peace researcher, Nandini Thokchom, told me about the incompetent organization of various economic programs for supporting women in Manipur. Those whose husbands have died in the armed conflict qualify for the conflict widow’s scheme. Others who reach a certain age should be given the old age pension. But through a mixture of carelessness and intentional corruption, “One woman who is 37 or 38 years old is not getting the widow’s pension which she deserves; instead, she is getting the old age pension.”357

The conflict widows’ scheme has been controversial for some time, because originally, only women who were at least 40 years old could qualify. This left young widows with no government assistance. Moreover, those whose husbands had been killed in the conflict because of suspected ties to insurgent groups did not qualify at all, because of their connections to “terrorists.” The limitation upon young widows has been overturned, but the former wives of suspected terrorists still do not benefit from the widow’s government scheme. Of course, even those who qualify to receive the small income rarely collect it. A Naga journalist informed me, “If you file an RTI [Right to

356 Rammathot Khongreiwo, “Understanding the Histories of Peoples on the Margins: A Critique of ‘Northeast India’s Durable Disorder,’” Alternatives 34 (2009): 442.

357 Nandini Thokchom, July 8, 2015.

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Information] on how many [schemes] have benefitted the conflict widows, if you ask for a list, it will be all fictitious names. Some people are earning out of it. They don’t have a census or survey of the conflict widows in the state.”358 Conflict-affected widows— women who are likely to organize for peacebuilding in the state—are thus denied through corruption the government funding which would enable them to do something with their lives other than daily wage-labor. These women become trapped in low-skill, low-wage work, which requires a great deal of time and physical exertion. Such work greatly constrains the agency of those who seek peace.

3.2.5 Militarization: life under occupation

Soldiers are a ubiquitous presence in Manipur, creating the need for women

(and men) to guard themselves against the “constant gaze of the uniformed presence.”359 On a short day trip from Imphal to Ukhrul, a Naga-dominated hill district, I saw a dozen paramilitary patrols of at least ten men monitoring the 80 kilometers of highway. These soldiers stop public buses at will, compelling bus drivers to ferry goods such as food, clothing and bottled water back and forth among patrols. One of my interviewees, a Naga woman with the Naga Women’s Union Manipur, reports the physical and mental intimidation associated with frequent, militarized checkpoints.

“Every time, [to] Chandel [district] I used to travel for school, I didn’t go there for classes but I go there to write the exams. So when I would go by bus the army would stop, two or three places.

358 GJ, July 1, 2015.

359 Goswami, “Role of Women as Peace Builders with Special Reference to Nagaland,” 10.

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And the armies would search your body. The army men would touch you and they would search your body, plus search your bags. That used to be very common, every day. However many times you cross the checks, they search your body.”360

The sense of militarization is also palpable within Imphal itself. Even the Manipur

University campus plays host to an encampment of the Assam Rifles paramilitary group.

Manipuri police commandos are far more interested in supplementing their salaries through bribes than in protecting the interests of civilians. An autorickshaw driver carrying myself and six other passengers faced blatant extortion from a policeman who yanked the engine cover off of his vehicle, forcing the driver to double back and pay ten rupees for his own auto part. Darkness serves as an unofficial daily curfew, especially for women who fear the consequences of encountering soldiers after dark. Because of security issues, doctors often refuse to go out at night. This means that women giving birth and experiencing other medical issues cannot access medical care for about half of every twenty-four hour period.361

In response to this militarization, the people themselves often act militantly to express their outrage over human rights violations and discriminatory government policies. When the threat of civil unrest arises, the state responds with official curfews, in an attempt to prevent violence from breaking out. Some civilians venture out anyhow, defying the curfew. They might burn tires in the road or build barricades to

360 SU, July 7, 2015.

361 Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 54–55.

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block emergency and other vehicles. Protestors throw rocks and mock bombs at the police, who respond by shooting rubber bullets and firing tear gas canisters at the crowds. While I was conducting fieldwork in 2015, the city of Imphal exploded with protests over the Inner Line Permit system. A Class XI (high school) student, Robinhood

Sapam, was killed during a protest in favor of the system,362 which would protect citizens of Manipur against illegal immigration.363 After he died from taking a rubber bullet to the face, the state feared reprisal violence and implemented an indefinite curfew in Imphal

East and Imphal West districts.364 Protestors, still concerned with the Inner Line Permit system but also raging against the militarization which allows police to kill students with impunity, stayed in the streets, defying the curfew and roughing up both policemen and those whom they perceived to be illegal immigrants.

362 Iboyaima Laithangbam, “Student’s Death Sparks Protest in Manipur,” The Hindu, July 8, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/protests-in-imphal-after-sapam-robinhood-was- reportedly-killed-in-police-firing/article7399508.ece.

363 The Inner Line Permit (ILP) system was perhaps the most important political issue of 2015, when I was conducting fieldwork. Protests on this topic have continued to the time of writing. Meitei peacebuilders, in particular, were very concerned with the ILP, citing the fate of the Northeastern state of Tripura as a cautionary tale. In Tripura, the indigenous people have now been outnumbered by Bengali migrants, who were supported by the central government’s Congress Party leaders. Indigenous, tribal peoples now feel disenfranchised and alienated from their land, much of which has been deforested and cultivated by migrants. Purna Banerjee et al., “‘Why So Much Blood?’ Violence against Women in Tripura,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 50–51. Meiteis in Manipur fear a similar consequence from too much migration into Manipur, whether legal or illegal.

364 Esha Roy, “Lockdown in Imphal: Living in a City That Shuts Down Every Day,” The Indian Express, August 2, 2015, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/lockdown/.

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Regardless of who instigates bandhs and curfews—whether the state or other groups—these shutdowns and protests bring daily life to a stand-still, at great cost.365

Schools close, impacting students and teachers; daily wage-laborers and rickshaw drivers lose their earnings for the day, impacting the most vulnerable who do not earn regular salaries; and it becomes difficult for civilians to get medicine and even food, impacting those who cannot raise food on their own land. Militarization is ubiquitous, but it affects people differently, according to diverse social locations.

Militarization also puts pressure upon the ideas of peace and security. When peacekeepers kill civilians and when national security means local violence, these concepts become incoherent. One peacebuilder, a Naga Christian woman working with an organization called Women in Governance, reports:

“But we are building peace, it should be a multilateral approach, and contextual, it should be also contextual. In some areas where you say peace it’s conflict for them because they don’t know the word peace, because those peacemakers always brings conflict. When you say security they don’t know because security forces are always exploiting their lives, so the terms we use, because of the conflict impact, now the most sad part in this area is that the villagers who have been affected by the conflict, now they have heard, they don’t feel a development perspective, they don’t feel one can look ahead. They feel like if today is ok I’m ok.”366

365 “Bandh Costs Rs 36 Crore, Blockade Rs 3.09 Crore per Day,” The Sangai Express, December 23, 2015, http://www.thesangaiexpress.com/bandh-costs-rs-36-crore-blockade-rs-309-crore-per-day/.

366 ST, July 2, 2015.

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Militarization has provoked trauma in some communities, preventing them from imagining a better future. It prompts the need for peacebuilding, while simultaneously constraining it.

3.3 Women’s peacebuilding praxis

I have established that women must organize against both direct and structural forms of violence, if they aim to build a lasting peace. Section II showed that women’s social locations help to circumscribe the ways in which they can pursue peace, because religion, ethnicity, geography, political positioning, corruption, land ownership, and militarization all interact to create heterogeneous life experiences for women. In this section, I will demonstrate with the tool of structural intersectionality that intersectional social locations matter for how women pursue peace and justice.

In the next section, I will evaluate women’s peacebuilding work in terms of justpeace, defined by peace scholar and practitioner John Paul Lederach as an approach which “reduces violence and destructive cycles of social interaction and at the same time increases justice in any human relationship.”367 Is it fair to impose this external metric, defined by a white, male, American scholar, on these women? Should not we allow an open and variable definition of peace to emerge from their diverse statements,

367 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 182; This definition builds on an earlier, but rarely-cited, book chapter in which Lederach defines justpeace as “an adaptive process-structure of human relationships characterized by high justice and low violence.” John Paul Lederach, “Justpeace: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace, ed. Paul Van Tongeren (Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 35.

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actions, and sentiments? I believe that the women peacebuilders of Manipur, despite all of their differences in talent, resources, and experience, pursue something very like justpeace as they go about their work. In the concluding chapter of this project, I will more fully defend my decision to use Lederach’s approach to justpeace as a preliminary guide, even as I re-formulate it to make it more conscious of power differentials and insights raised by both peacebuilding praxis and feminist political theory.

Some of my interviewees in Manipur, as well as some scholars of Manipur’s armed conflict, tend to define peace in terms of the cessation of direct violence between the insurgent groups and the state of India. Once the armed insurgents’ demands have been dealt with, then peace emerges.368 Many of the grassroots women in Manipur, however, do not share this view. My interviewees tend to speak of peace in terms of justice and development, calling for a thick, positive peace which extends to justice within and among communities and homes.369

Three grassroots-level Meitei women peacebuilders, in response to my question

“What does peace mean to you?”, defined peace as a companion of justice, arguing that there cannot be one without the other. “Where there is justice, there it [peace] will be,”

368 Phanjoubam, Bleeding Manipur; Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist; AK, June 23, 2015; NT, July 8, 2015.

369 Scholars in Manipur often speak in terms of structural violence and positive peace. See Bobichand Rajkumar, “Role of Students’ Organizations in Peace-Building: Understanding Manipur,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 56; Lokendra Arambam, “Armed Conflict, State Repression and Women in Manipur: Politics of the Body in Violence,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 90.

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stated RU. “We Manipuri women [are] very strong in the collective movement, because we want justice!” argued IN. In a group interview the following year, IN and MP agreed,

“We are working for the development and the peace, and also we are waiting for justice!”370 A famous, hunger-striking Meitei woman peacebuilder named Irom Sharmila founded the Just Peace Foundation with the earnings from her 2007 Gwangju Prize for

Human Rights.371 A Kuki woman peacebuilder is spearheading a new “Committee for

Fast Justice,” which aims at quickening the pace of court hearings for reports of sexual violence.372 Finally, a Naga woman with the group Women in Governance describes their peacebuilding work as figuring out “how to insert women in peace and security and how to have access to their rights and entitlements…”— the basic building blocks of justice.373

The efforts of these women, coming from three major ethnic groups in Manipur, mirror a long tradition of women using peacebuilding as an opportunity to address gendered and other injustices.374 In addition to the conclusions coming from my own field research, other scholars concur that peace, for women in Manipur, is not merely the

370 RU, June 26, 2015; IN, June 16, 2014; IN and MP, July 5, 2015. RU comes from EEFVAM, and IN and MP come from the Meira Paibis. I will describe these peacebuilding organizations shortly.

371 Just Peace Foundation, “Grit and Defiance: 15th Year-- Sharmila against AFSPA,” 2015.

372 RS, July 5, 2015.

373 ST, July 2, 2016.

374 Banerjee, “New Conundrums for Women in North-East India”; Ashild Kolas, “Mothers and Activists in the Hills of Assam,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 41–48.

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absence of direct violence. It involves the presence of justice, which requires addressing the structures which act violently upon women and other marginalized groups.375

Although I interpret the women peacebuilders of Manipur as pursuing peace and justice, it is important to note that women are not innately peaceful; nor do they have innate senses of justice.376 Some of the scholarship on women in Manipur mistakenly asserts essentialist claims about women’s capacities as peacebuilders (as well as men’s martial qualities),377 but such claims are both counterproductive and empirically incorrect. To expect women to retain perfect moral compasses is to prevent them from being fully human—from making mistakes, from displaying unwarranted anger, from being selfish. Such expectations also tend to cause women to be taken less seriously in

375 Paula Banerjee, “Between Two Armed Patriarchies: Women in Assam and Nagaland,” in Women, War and Peace in South Asia, ed. Rita Manchanda (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2001), 170–174; Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations; Goswami, “Role of Women as Peace Builders with Special Reference to Nagaland”; Kalpana Sharma, “Can There Be Peace Without Justice?,” Off Our Backs 38, no. 1 (2008): 21–23.

376 Rita Manchanda, “Building Peace: What Difference Do Women Make?,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 112.

377 Babloo Loitongbam, “Women in Armed Conflict: The Manipur Experience,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 29; Bhabananda Takhellambam, “Legacy of the Women’s Movement in Manipur,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 35.

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other realms of politics.378 Moreover, women often participate in armed conflict—in

Manipur,379 in other states across the Northeast,380 and across the globe.381

What is helpful to note, contra essentialist claims about women as peacebuilders, is that within Manipur, society has ascribed certain roles to women, leaving the realm of peacebuilding under their control.382 The fact that these roles are ascribed to women should not, however, diminish our view of their agency as peacebuilders. Many of these women see a zone of possible influence in which they can make their lives, and the lives of those whom they love, a little bit better. Recognizing the social ascription of the role of peacebuilder makes it all the more important to analyze the impacts of structural violence upon women who build peace. They step into a role which is handed to them, but they do so while facing multiple, overlapping constraints. Even as they are constrained, they push and prod the boundaries of their roles as peacebuilders, sometimes disrupting norms about gender, ethnicity, and religion, and sometimes trying to fulfill those norms as they understand them, in order to have the best possible life that they can imagine.

378 Claire Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 47–71.

379 Preeti Gill, “Women in the Time of Conflict: The Case of Nagaland,” in Where the Sun Rises When Shadows Fall, ed. Geeti Sen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 218.

380 Ranabir Moral, “The Woman Rebel and the State: Making War, Making Peace in Assam,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 66–73.

381 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 147–154.

382 Goswami, “Role of Women as Peace Builders with Special Reference to Nagaland,” 69–70.

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Having provided a basic outline of women peacebuilders’ desire to pursue a justice-imbued peace, I will now use structural intersectionality to describe intra- and interethnic peacebuilding in Manipur, showing how women’s different social locations create the need for varied strategies and targets for peacebuilding. Meitei, Naga, Kuki, and Pangal women of different religions and different socioeconomic backgrounds have very different lives; therefore, there is no universal “women’s peacebuilding” experience. I will pay special attention to differences in power among women peacebuilders, which I will then evaluate using political intersectionality at the end of the chapter.

3.3.1 Interethnic peacebuilding

3.3.1.1 Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network

I first encountered the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, or MWGSN, via its main office in south New Delhi. During my first exploratory research trip to India, in

2013, a young Meitei man at Delhi Bible Fellowship heard of my interest in women’s peacebuilding in Northeastern India. “You have got to look up Binalakshmi Nepram and her organization!”, he told me. After setting up an appointment with her office, I met

Bina one sultry, monsoon morning in August. As we shared chai and cookies, I heard the story of the women’s peacebuilding organization that I would work with most closely through 2015. Bina, a Meitei from Manipur, set up MWSGN following an incident of gun violence in 2004. Three unidentified gunmen dragged twenty-seven year old Buddhi

Moirangthem from his car battery shop in Thoubal district and killed him, leaving his 141

wife, Rebika Akham, grieving and unable to support herself. Bina contributed 4500 rupees to obtain a sewing machine for Rebika, enabling her to tailor clothes for her living. Women like Rebika suffer from trauma, grief, and impoverishment.383 Because women ordinarily rely on their husbands for economic support, they need equipment and skills training after losing male, breadwinning family members. Hence MWGSN was born.

The organization has expanded drastically over the last decade, directly assisting gun widows in Manipur with income, but also offering trainings in human rights education; formulating a National Action Plan for implementing UN Security Council

Resolutions 1325 and 1820, which deal with women in peacebuilding and the protection of women during armed conflict;384 and teaching marketable skills like food preparation and weaving.385 Their dual goals of local, micro-assistance and international peacebuilding advocacy weave in and out of one another, like the beautiful threads with which the conflict widow weavers work.

Although MWGSN’s main office lies in Delhi, it also has a thriving field office in

Imphal, on a quiet street near Manipur University. Their field staff of about twelve

383 “Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network,” accessed September 7, 2016, http://womensurvivorsnetwork.org/index.php.

384 “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325,” 2000, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1325(2000).; “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820,” 2008, http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C- 8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201820.pdf.

385 Field Notes, May 27, 2014; June 6, 2014; July 4, 2014.

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people covers five districts (primarily in the Imphal valley), encompassing 120 villages.386

The organization is well-connected, earning grants from international institutions like the European Union and partnering with other European and Indian NGOs. Bina

Nepram, the founder and director of the network, has been the recipient of numerous international peacebuilding awards, such as the Sean MacBride Peace Prize and the

CNN/IBN Real Heroes Award.

It is difficult to draw a strict boundary between the staff members and the beneficiaries of the organization, as many beneficiaries begin to work, officially or unofficially, for the peacebuilding initiatives that they are exposed to when they come to MWGSN for income assistance. For example, a Muslim Pangal woman, FA, first came to the organization two years after her husband was killed by an unidentified gunman on September 22, 2008. FA struggled mightily in the wake of her husband’s death, with grief but primarily with her in-laws’ rough treatment of her. Out of respect for the dead,

FA’s in-laws would not permit her to leave their house for three months, following

Manipuri Muslim tradition. Once the mandatory mourning period had passed, FA performed whatever daily wage labor she could find, and her days became a combination of back-breaking work and emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her in-laws. In the words of our translator, from Manipuri to English,

“When her mother-in-law tortured her, she didn’t have any kind of coping skills, she just cried, for the whole day she would go out and work, earn money, and then her in-laws would torture her. She

386 Binalakshmi Nepram, June 2, 2014.

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would cry, she would have sleepless nights, then she had suicidal thoughts in that period, and she was depressed.”387

After two years of abuse, she met MZ, a community mobilizer who went from village to village, issuing invitations to conflict widows to join the gun survivors’ network. MZ taught her about all of the government schemes which she could apply for, to support herself and even to pay for her three children’s schooling. FA also participated in MWGSN’s group meetings of conflict widows, which create a psycho- social support system among women who have experienced similar traumas. Within a short time, FA began working as a community mobilizer herself, transforming from beneficiary to peacebuilding agent.

FA describes her main tasks as assisting conflict-affected widows and helping to build peace between men and women and within communities. Her main concern lies with in-group discrimination against women like herself—widows whose in-laws treat them poorly, and whose communities denigrate them when they leave the household in order to find support, gain knowledge, and earn money. FA’s mother-in-law was suspicious and jealous of her, once she started attending meetings and working with

MWGSN. She would declare, “If you are a widow, you shouldn’t go out, you shouldn’t earn knowledge.” But FA would think about her children, and about the other women in the network whom she was trying to help, and she would resolve to continue raising awareness in the villages. She taught herself how to control her anger when members of

387 FA, June 5, 2014.

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the community accused her of improper conduct, and she encouraged other women to let criticism slide off of their backs. She tells them, “If you control yourself, if you go in the right way, then no one can blame you.”388

This truncated life story of just one of MWGSN’s peacebuilders provides enough fodder for feminist analyses from multiple angles. I wish to highlight just two aspects of it, however. First, FA sees herself as a peacebuilder. She works on a grassroots level and deals with community norms about women’s work in the wake of gun violence, rather than participating in negotiations with armed insurgent groups, but she is a peacebuilder. Second, her agency is constrained by multiple, intersecting structures. Her gender, intersecting with her religion and her ethnicity, stipulates certain acts of mourning followed by certain expectations about her ability to move about and to earn an income. She responds as an agent through both resistance and submission—she subverts the expectation that women will not travel about, teaching other women about government schemes, women’s rights, and public work. However, she also appears to submit to communal norms about how to live or “go in the right way.” She tries to live so transparently, so blamelessly, that members of the Muslim Pangal community cannot help but see her virtue. Thus she is simultaneously constrained by and submissive to intersecting structures, even as she tries to transform them.

388 FA, June 5, 2014.

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Viewing peace as the protection of all women’s livelihoods, whether they are at risk from armed conflict or from disease, MWGSN also supports widows of HIV/AIDS.

One such widow, a Kabui (Naga) woman from Chandel district, faces intersectional structural violence. MO is a lower-class woman who is infected with HIV, a disease which carries social stigma. She can tell that people are uncomfortable being around her, and they never want to share food with her. As with FA, her gender makes it difficult to find good employment, and her impoverishment means that she cannot afford the private hospitals which could counter the effects of her disease better than the under-staffed and overwhelmed government hospitals. Pushing back against intersectional structural violence, MWGSN helps MO to buy medicine and to grow her vegetable business.389

MWGSN is in the peace business: it does plenty of the traditional, feminist peace work that appears in the literature review in Chapter 1, such as promoting UNSCR 1325 and advocating at the UN for the protection of women in conflict zones. However, the staff also consciously pushes back against the structural violence which constrains the agency of all women in Manipur—whether their lives are thrown into turmoil by gun violence or by disease; whether they are Muslim Pangals or Kabui Nagas. MWGSN expands the zone of peacebuilding, and in the process, highlights the intersectional constraints which limit women’s agency. The effects of direct violence cannot be

389 MO, June 5, 2014.

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mitigated without also addressing the structures that circumscribe peacebuilding, differently for individual women, according to their varied social locations. These differences will become clearer as we turn to examples of peacebuilding from other organizations.

3.3.1.2 Extrajudicial Execution Victims’ Families Association (EEVFAM)

The Extrajudicial Execution Victims’ Families Association—acronym EEVFAM, which sounds like the Manipuri word for bloodstain—concentrates its energies on the phenomenon of “fake encounters.” In these falsified encounters, security personnel, most often Manipuri police commandos, kill an innocent man and then plant evidence to make it look as if he were an insurgent.390 AFSPA-backed impunity, combined with the promotion system of the Manipuri police, supports fake encounters, because those who kill the most insurgents rise most quickly in the ranks. If an insurgent cannot be found, he will be manufactured.391 In an excellent article recently published by The Guardian, a

Manipuri police commando confesses to having personally killed over one hundred innocent men in Manipur, often with explicit permission from Chief Minister Okram

390 EN Rammohan IPS, a former adviser to the governor of Manipur, stated in a report: “In Manipur, civil policemen and officers were selected and trained as commandos. Although they did a good job initially, they soon deteriorated into a state terrorist force due to faulty leadership.” Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN, “Manipur: A Memorandum on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions, Submitted to Cristof Heyns,” 2012, 8 Cited in; Irene, Women of Manipur: An Alternative Perspective, 92.

391 Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN, “Manipur: A Memorandum on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions, Submitted to Cristof Heyns,” 5.

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Ibobi Singh and the Director General of Police, Yumnam Joykumar. The family of the confessing policeman, Thounaojam Herojit, suffered violent extortion at the hands of

Meitei insurgents when he was a teenager, and so he was “ready to kill” when he took up his post. Herojit notes in the article that he always believed himself to be protected by the law and by the higher-ups, leading him to execute innocent men in broad daylight, surrounded by civilians and members of the media.392

EEVFAM began when Babloo Lointongbam, the director of a peacebuilding NGO called Human Rights Alert, which I describe more fully in Chapter 5, approached Meena

Longjam upon the wrongful killing of her son by two police commandos. Meena reports:

“No other organization came out in relation to the killing except Babloo. He gave the idea to organize all the victims’ families.” So Meena published a notice in the paper, stating that those whose family members were killed by the commandos were to arrive at her address on July 11, 2009, to form an organization.393 After Babloo suggested the organization’s formation, she feared that she was not educated enough to bring people together and to lead a big group. Babloo ensured her that he would help lead; she simply needed to organize the other victims. As of my interview with Meena in July

392 Raghu Karnad and Grace Jajo, “Confessions of a Killer Policeman,” The Guardian, July 21, 2016, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/confessions-of-a-killer- policeman-india-manipur?CMP=share_btn_fb.

393 Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015; IA, June 26, 2015.

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2015, there were 157 registered members of EEVFAM, all of whom had lost someone due to fake encounters.394

After years of organizing fake encounter victims—primarily widows who have lost their husbands, but also a few mothers who have lost sons, like Meena—EEVFAM has painstakingly documented and requested prosecution of 1,528 cases of extrajudicial killings, occurring from 1979 to 2012. In March 2013, a Supreme Court-appointed commission probed into six of these cases, and it found that all of them were indeed fake encounters.395 On July 8, 2016, the Court announced, against the tenets of AFSPA, that all 1,528 cases ought to be investigated, meaning that the armed forces do not in fact retain immunity for staged killings. According to an article in The Imphal Times,

Babloo Loitongbam maintains a disposition of cautious optimism. He states: “We welcome the judgment. It is a positive one. We shall have to wait on what the court decides on our demand for a special investigation team to investigate all the cases. The real sting is yet to come on the nature of investigations on the cases.”396

394 Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015.

395 Just Peace Foundation, “Grit and Defiance: 15th Year-- Sharmila against AFSPA,” 8–9. The cases included the killings of: Md. Azad Khan on March 4, 2009; Khumbongmayum Orsonjit on March 16, 2010; Nameirakpam Gobind Meetei and Nameirakpam Nobo Meetei on April 4, 2009; Elangbam Kiranjit on April 24, 2009; Chongtham Umakanta on May 5, 2009; and Akoijam Priyobrata on March 15, 2009. Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 199.

396 “Supreme Court: Armed Forces Don’t Have Immunity from Civilian Trials,” Imphal Times, July 10, 2016, http://www.imphaltimes.com/news/item/6187-supreme-court-armed-forces-don-t-have- immunity-from-civilian-trials.

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While waiting for investigations to proceed, EEVFAM members lobby the

Supreme Court and other politicians, and they tell their stories internationally to gain allies for their cause. For example, the current president of the organization, RU, recently traveled to Geneva to promote an impressive documentary that was made about EEVFAM in 2015.397 More locally, EEVFAM provides trauma healing and support groups for widows and mothers from all backgrounds who have suffered from fake encounters. The members of the group also sell their goods to one another and barter for things that they need.398

Although Loitongbam, a Meitei man and the director of Human Rights Alert, organized the group, it is truly run by the widows and mothers who have lost family members to fake encounters. Many of the women, like RU, have gained experience in international travel, political advocacy, and public speaking, whether in Geneva, Delhi, or Imphal. Some of the women stay closer to home, simply leaning on one another for financial and emotional support. But this organization appears to exemplify grassroots organizing. Other peacebuilders spoke very well of EEVFAM to me in interviews: “I really appreciate EEVFAM because they are the victims, the survivors who have come together and they are feeling the loss. This is really good, I appreciate them, they’re able to really do it because there are some good people behind who are helping them.”399 Another

397 Josefina Bergsten, Healing Manipur, 2015.

398 Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015.

399 SU, July 7, 2015.

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reports about EEVFAM: “They are really struggling, they are people who are very good at articulating the work here!” Comparing MWGSN to EEVFAM, this interviewee said, “A lot of local people will give EEVFAM nine and MWGSN one out of ten. So that’s the score. I hope they [MWGSN] will improve, because with their kind of network, with their connections to people outside, they could do a lot more.”400

EEVFAM seems to lack the corporate nature of the MWGSN staff. Between Delhi and Imphal, MWGSN employed about 25 people when I was observing them in 2013,

2014, and 2015. Many of them work full-time on peacebuilding initiatives: they are part of the peace industry. This is not true of the women of EEVFAM. Although the President,

RU, occasionally travels to do national or international advocacy work, she works at

Manipur Baptist Church as a staff person. IA, a founding member and the secretary of the group, runs a small grocery store and sells black market petrol on the side. Both of them also support children on their own.401 These women work for peace in their spare time, such as it is.

What are the lives of the EEVFAM widows like? Are they comparable to those of the gun survivors of MWGSN? There are striking parallels between the story of BK, a

Meitei widow of EEVFAM, and the Muslim Pangal widow FA of MWGSN. BK’s husband was killed in a fake encounter on July 1, 2009. He left on his bicycle to fetch wires to fix their house, and he never returned. His body was identified in the river several hours

400 GJ, July 1, 2015.

401 RU, June 26, 2015; IA, June 26, 2015.

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later, and BK was so shocked by the news that she fainted and was ill for several days.

Meitei tradition does not mandate a homebound mourning period of three months, as

Manipuri Muslim tradition does; however, when BK began to attend meetings with

EEVFAM, her community questioned her character. Meitei norms about widows’ behavior align with Muslim norms. Family members and neighbors suspected that she was going out to meet men, and they assumed that any attempt to dress nicely correlated with a romantic interest which a young Meitei widow should not be pursuing.

Only after EEVFAM started receiving publicity for its work, did her community understand that she was entering the public sphere for the purpose of peacebuilding.402

RU, the Meitei president of EEVFAM who married a tribal, Christian Paite man (in what she refers to as an “inter-caste marriage”), experienced similar forms of discrimination when she began to join EEVFAM meetings after being widowed. Paites, frequently clustered with the larger tribal group Kuki, expect married and widowed women to stay inside the home. RU’s language, describing the discrimination which she experienced, closely aligns with the language which FA employed: “Family members say we are not going in the best way, we are going in the wrong way, we are having boyfriends.”403 Like FA, one of the types of peace which she seeks the most is within her community—a peace which allows widowed women to interact with men in public, to pursue incomes and education, and to support their children. RU reports, now that she

402 BK, July 2, 2015.

403 RU, June 26, 2015.

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is a part of EEVFAM, she can stand up to the discrimination. “Now in my own mind, everyone will talk about bad way or bad things, we don’t mind. We can stand up ourselves. Now we are really strong.”404 Indeed, she is so strong that she has traveled to

Geneva twice!

As peacebuilders, Meitei widows BK and RU work against intersecting structures like the militarization and corruption supported by AFSPA; a legal system which drags its feet on hearing decades-old cases; and gendered norms about married (or widowed) women going out in public. EEVFAM members respond to the direct violence which killed their sons and husbands, but they also target the structures which indirectly harm them as survivors. Meena, the grieving mother who organized EEVFAM with the help of

Babloo Loitongbam, is very familiar with stories like BK’s and RU’s. She reports: “Initially the young members had problems within their families. Some were mistreated by their mother-in-laws, some were even molested or raped by their brother-in-laws, and even younger brothers objected to [them] going out to attend EEVFAM meetings.” To check these problems, the group organized rotating meetings at every house, enabling each family to understand what the young widows were doing. In one instance, the EEVFAM women directly intervened in a case of molestation, and the abuse stopped.405

Thus far, I have described two interethnic peacebuilding groups: MWGSN and

EEVFAM. The former operates like a corporation; the latter more like a grassroots

404 RU, June 26, 2015.

405 Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015.

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organization. Women from both organizations—Muslim Pangals, Kabui Nagas, Meiteis in Meitei communities, and Meiteis in Christian Paite communities—face gendered discrimination when trying to leave their homes to earn incomes and pursue peace and justice. Women from both groups report working well with women from other ethnic communities.406 Thus, at first glance, it seems that the shared experiences of gendered discrimination, loss due to armed conflict, and the pursuit of peace overcome ethnic-, religious-, and class-based hierarchies. The deeper we dig, however, the more apparent it becomes that gendered solidarity is tenuous at best among the women peacebuilders of Manipur.

3.3.2 Meitei peacebuilding

3.3.2.1 Meira Paibis

The Meitei Meira Paibis are easily the most famous women peacebuilders in

Manipur. Heirs apparent to the Meitei nupilal of 1904 and 1939, they have long been known for their activism—first as social reformers against drug and alcohol abuse in the

1970s, and more recently against human rights violations perpetrated under AFSPA.407

The name Meira Paibi means torchbearers, and the women are so named because of their night-time, torch-lit patrols. While most women stay inside after darkness falls,

406 RU, June 26, 2015; IA, June 26, 2015; Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015; FA, June 5, 2014.

407 Anuradha Dutta, “Gendered Power Relations in Times of Conflict and Peace: North East India in Perspective,” in Gender, Peace and Development in North East India, ed. Daisy Bora Talukdar (Guwahati, Assam: DVS Publishers, 2012), 19.

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Meira Paibis walk up and down their village streets and patrol the perimeters, trying to ensure that all is quiet. The torches, or meiras, serve as symbols of women’s moral strength and duty to fight injustice.408 Any Meitei woman can be a Meira Paibi, though certain women exert leadership over certain localities. Age appears to be the single factor which garners the most respect: elderly mothers, or imas, wield the greatest authority.409

Twelve of the Meira Paibi leaders catapulted into fame in 2004, with a nude protest against the rape and murder of a young Meitei woman, Manorama Thangjam, by members of the Indian military. This incident was particularly violent, and the graphic details were splashed all over the newspapers. When the Meira Paibis learned of the suffering of Manorama—about how she had been gang raped and then shot in the genitals to cover the evidence410—they scarcely knew how to react. IN, a Meira Paibi leader, described the deep distress which led to the nude protest.

“We are very, very, very impassioned at that time. We thought: how to control, how to protect the lives of the Manipuri young mens, the prestige of the young women? We struggled so many years. Last three, three-four decades. … But the government of Manipur, the government of India, and the servant[s] of the government of India, the security forces, never listened to our protest[s]. So we decided to do the [nude] protest.”411

408 Takhellambam, “Legacy of the Women’s Movement in Manipur,” 50–51.

409 Chaki-Sircar, Feminism in a Traditional Society: Women of the Manipur Valley, 198.

410 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 175–177.

411 IN, June 16, 2014.

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About forty Meira Paibis marched on the military-occupied Kangla Fort in

Imphal, and a dozen of them stripped naked and unfurled banners which read “Indian

Army rape us” and “Indian Army take our flesh.”412 This audacious act spurred a groundswell of anti-AFSPA activism. In response, the Indian government relinquished control of Kangla Fort back to the people of Manipur.413 IN estimates that violence against women perpetrated by the security forces decreased after the nude protest, as well.414

IN described herself to me as a warrior in the third women’s war.415 Harking back to the nupilal, Meira Paibis serve as a pressure group on the government in times of injustice. Although the Kangla protest erupted after direct violence against a Meitei woman, Meira Paibis’ most common demands have to do with the removal of AFSPA, the demilitarization of Manipur, and questions of property ownership in light of illegal immigration. Direct violence prompts a reaction from them, but their demands concern structural violence as well. They conceive of peace broadly, adding elements like electricity, drinking water, free movement, and the development of industry to their

412 Papori Bora, “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 3/4 (2010): 341–60.

413 This protest has attracted the attention of many feminist scholars. For example, see Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007); Bora, “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal”; Teresa Rehman, The Mothers of Manipur (Chicago: Zubaan Books, 2016).

414 IN, June 16, 2014.

415 IN, June 16, 2014.

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desire for the absence of violence.416 Historically, Meitei women have also held women’s courts known as paja. In these courts, women would hear cases of offenses committed against women, and dispense justice as they saw fit. Formal pajas are no longer in place, but many Meira Paibis are presently taking up similar roles.417 Thus peacebuilding, for the Meira Paibis, includes development and the pursuit of justice. Meitei women organize against both direct and structural violence.

Meira Paibis, however, have also been accused of benefitting from close ties with Meitei insurgent groups.418 One scholar argues that they would not have achieved so much had they not had the social capital which comes from the backing of powerful armed groups.419 But another counters that Meira Paibis often face violence from insurgents who suspect them of working with the Indian army.420 Why would this occur, if they operated at the whim of the insurgents?

Leaving aside the question of co-optation, Sajal Nag suggests that they simply have not achieved very much. He points out that although the Meira Paibis have been long-cited as a “shining example of a potent force in the social sphere,” this sphere is exactly where they have stayed.421 Meira Paibis seek social reform and agitate around

416 IN2, July 5, 2015, MP, July 5, 2015.

417 Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations, 14.

418 Manchanda, “Building Peace: What Difference Do Women Make?,” 118.

419 Bhuyan, “Bodo Women: Peace Makers within the Ethnic Paradigm,” 10.

420 Loitongbam, “Women in Armed Conflict: The Manipur Experience,” 22–23.

421 Nag, “Her Masters’ Voice,” 224.

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humanitarian issues, but this is what men would like for them to do. Nag reports the assessment of a gender activist who visited Manipur: “So long as they go around …

[with] their traditional torches shouting slogans that do not threaten any power equations, they will be talked about with pride in public fora. But once they decide to claim their political rights they will be ridiculed….”422

Certainly, when evaluating Meitei women’s peacebuilding agency, we should consider the extent to which Meira Paibi’s fights for justice are co-opted by either the state or by Meitei insurgents. Their visibility and brash tactics make them an easier target than lower profile groups like MWGSN and EEVFAM. Their potential confinement to a gendered sphere of influence—to humanitarian, rather than political, realms—is also an important concern. However, rather than assuming that women suffer from some sort of false consciousness, as Nag seems to suggest, I think we ought to take them at their word: the Meira Paibis are a political pressure group. They seek peace, development, and justice, pushing back against not only direct but also structural forms of violence. We ought to evaluate their peacebuilding agency in terms of whether they achieve their stated goals, i.e., whether they contribute to or detract from the building of a justpeace.

422 Ibid., 224–225.

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3.3.2.2 “The iron lady,” Irom Sharmila

While the Meitei Meira Paibis brandished torches and stripped in the streets,

Irom Sharmila, “the iron lady of Manipur,” lay quietly in a hospital bed, persevering in her Gandhian fast unto death against AFSPA. How did this young Meitei come to promote peace with such an extreme tactic? Two members of the Save Irom Sharmila campaign, Ravi Niresh and Devika Mittal, shared her story with me.

Sharmila began her fast on November 5, 2000, three days after the “Malom massacre.” Members of the Central Reserve Police Force mowed down ten civilians who were simply waiting for a bus near Malom. Outraged by yet another example of violent excesses committed by the security forces, Irom Sharmila, then just a twenty-eight-year- old Meitei woman, began fasting for the repeal of AFSPA. Rather than recognizing her fast as a non-violent political protest, the state accused her of the criminal act of attempting suicide, under Indian Penal Code (IPC) 309. Government officials confined her to a state hospital and force-fed her through permanent tubes. Because individuals can be held for only one year under IPC 309, an annual charade ensued in which

Sharmila’s force-feeding ended; she was released for one day; and she was re-arrested when she refused to eat.423

423 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 77; Ravi Niresh and Devika Mittal, June 20, 2015.

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The state refuses to see Sharmila’s acts as political.424 Niresh and Mittal argue that this is because Gandhian tactics still carry a great deal of weight in India. To speak against AFSPA is to speak against the nation—to be a bad Indian. To employ Gandhi’s methods, however, is to be a good Indian: to pursue the truth through nonviolence.

Many outside of Manipur who have never heard of AFSPA learn about Sharmila’s fast, and begin to question the justice of the Act.425 Soyam Lokendrajit, a philosopher from

Manipur, similarly interprets Sharmila as Gandhian, but he questions the efficacy of her methods. Non-violent activists using satyagraha seek to change the hearts of those who oppose them. Lokendrajit queries: “Where there is no heart, what happens to your enterprise of changing the heart? A modern corporate State is a Leviathan without a heart. … Sharmila’s opponent is the modern corporate state. For more than twelve years [at the time of writing] she has been trying to find the heart of the system—she found none.”426

Lokendrajit’s analysis has been supported by Sharmila’s recent actions: after nearly sixteen years, Sharmila broke her fast on August 9, 2016, in order to contest the

2017 assembly elections in Manipur. She realized that her hunger strike was not impacting AFSPA or improving social justice in her state, and so she has decided to enter formal politics instead. Vidhi Doshi of The Guardian reports: “The end of the hunger

424 Lokendra Arambam, “Peace Process in Manipur: Armed Conflict, State Repression and Women” (Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, 2005), 37.

425 Ravi Niresh and Devika Mittal, June 20, 2015.

426 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?, 78.

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strike coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Quit India movement, a symbolic day of remembrance for India’s struggle for freedom against British colonisers. Choosing to end the fast on the same day has been interpreted by some as a sign of her disillusionment with India’s democratic process.”427 As she is a much-admired woman with name recognition and offers of support from multiple political parties, many analysts believed that Sharmila would likely win the 2017 election with ease.428

Repeating patterns of corruption and possibly gender-bias in politics, however, not even the Iron Lady was able to successfully contest a seat in the state legislative assembly. In a recent newspaper article, Sharmila reports, “People would’ve voted for me but their right to vote has been occupied by money. Many people told me, oh eche (sister) we would’ve voted for you, but we have already received money. You are too late…”429

3.3.3 Kuki peacebuilding: Women’s Welfare Association Asia

Like MWGSN and EEVFAM, the Widows Welfare Association Asia (WWAA) of

Churachandpur district has escaped the scholarly and media attention which has been heaped upon the Meira Paibis and Irom Sharmila. WWAA operates much like MWGSN

427 Vidhi Doshi, “Indian Hunger Striker Irom Chanu Sharmila to End 16-Year Fast,” The Guardian, August 9, 2016, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/09/indian-campaigner- irom-chanu-sharmila-end-16-year-hunger-strike.

428 “AAP Offers Sharmila Party Ticket,” Imphal Free Press, August 11, 2016, http://ifp.co.in/page/items/33760/aap-offers-sharmila-party-ticket.

429 Esha Roy, “Manipur Elections 2017: The Loneliness That Is Irom Sharmila,” The Indian Express, March 13, 2017, http://indianexpress.com/elections/manipur-assembly-elections-2017/manipur- elections-2017-the-loneliness-that-is-irom-sharmila-4565096/.

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as a widows’ network, so much so that the Kuki and Meitei leaders of the two organizations sometimes partner together for large gatherings. I met Ruth Singson, or

“Auntie Ruth,” the director of WWAA, at the first MWGSN meeting which I attended in

Imphal in 2014. However, whereas MWGSN is interethnic, WWAA’s 2500 registered members are all Kuki Christian women, from various tribes. Auntie Ruth describes the women as “prayer warriors,” and many of their meetings take the form of prayer groups praying for healing and justice. WWAA organizes gatherings to build support networks for women as they try to overcome trauma, learn new skills for employment, and register for government benefits. It has also been instrumental in the formation of a

“Committee for Fast Justice,” which attempts to improve the pace of court hearings for violence against women.430

In addition to this work which targets widows and the specific problems that they face, the WWAA promotes broader actions for peace. In August 2015, protests erupted in the Kuki-dominated Churachandpur district over the hastily passed land bills, which had been the Manipur Legislative Assembly’s response to July’s violent protests over the Inner Line Permit system. Police shot nine protestors, including an eleven-year- old boy.431 In the midst of an indefinite curfew, some of the women of the WWAA went to a designated “peace ground” and prayed and fasted for peace in their district. They

430 Ruth Singson, July 5, 2015.

431 Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty and Akhil Kumar, “In Manipur, the Long Wait to Bury Tribal ‘Martyrs’ Enters Second Year,” The Wire, September 2, 2016, http://thewire.in/63436/manipur-long-wait- bury-tribal-martyrs-enters-second-year/.

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also make public appeals to members of militant outfits who kill innocent Kukis, asking for respect for Christian lives.432 Thus their initiatives are concerned with peace for widows who have been traumatized, peace between indigenous peoples and immigrants, and peace between insurgents and civilians.

Some of the widows’ husbands were victims of security personnel, but many women were widowed by the Naga-Kuki clash of the mid-1990s.433 One of the members of WWAA, KG, is a survivor of the Joupi massacre, a Kuki “black day” in which Naga insurgents razed villages and killed unarmed civilians. Reports differ, but insurgents murdered at least 87 civilians on September 13, 1993.434 KG recalls with physical and mental pain the events of that day. Naga insurgents with the NSCN-IM ordered the men of her village, including her husband, to huddle in a group on the road. They threw a large net over the men and hacked at them with machetes, axes, and other sharp objects while the women and children fled in terror. KG’s three small children, aged three, six, and seven, were under her charge. Desperately seeking shelter and safety, she carried the two youngest on her back through the jungle, for most of a day and

432 Ruth Singson, “WWAA Newsletter,” September 2015.

433 I also met one Kuki woman who was shot in a church by a Naga underground group. She still has the beebees from the shot in her back. Doctors deem that at 85, she is too old for an operation, and so she lives with the discomfort. Women of the WWAA are direct victims of violence, as well as widows. NG, July 5, 2015.

434 Kom, “Ethnic Politics in the Hills of Manipur”; Haoginlen Chongloi, “Kuki Black Day and the Logic Behind Naga Ceasefire,” Imphal Free Press, September 13, 2014.

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night. She, her small family, and other women and children finally reached a neighboring Kuki village, where they waited for news of the men of Joupi.435

KG now works as a peacebuilder with the WWAA, pursuing psycho-social healing alongside other widows and engaging with government agencies to obtain widows’ pensions. Although her ethnicity made her group a target for Naga insurgents, her gender spared her life. Shared Christianity did not save her husband from the Nagas, but it now serves as a source of peace and hope for her. Moreover, now that KG is a widow seeking her own employment, she and the other women in her community do not face the type of discrimination which other women—Hindu Meiteis, Christian Meiteis, and

Pangal Muslims—have faced.436 Kuki widow experiences in Churachandpur differ even from those experiences of RU, a Meitei woman with EEVFAM who married into a Kuki community in Imphal. We cannot understand women only as women, only as Kukis, or only as Christians; the intersection of identities makes life experiences qualitatively different, and hence transforms the ways in which women pursue peace.

The violent history of the Naga-Kuki clash leaves a lingering feeling of resentment, or at least distrust, of Nagas among Kukis.437 Thus, WWAA women do not partner with widows from other ethnic and religious backgrounds as often as the

435 KG, July 5, 2015.

436 DG, July 5, 2015.

437 JG, July 5, 2015.

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women of MWGSN and EEVFAM, and they never partner with Nagas.438 The main structure which constrains their agency as peacebuilders is the ethnic difference which led to high levels of direct violence two decades ago. Even though they share a religious background with Nagas, many Kukis still find it necessary to stay safely within their ethnic enclave, due to past trauma and present fear.

3.3.4 Naga peacebuilding

3.3.4.1 Shanao Long

Although the Meira Paibis get a great deal more recognition than Naga women for their peace activism, Naga women created peacebuilding initiatives first.439 On March

4, 1974, N Rose of Ngaprum was raped by two members of the security forces. She committed suicide two days later, which sparked fervent protests and the creation of the first Naga women’s group in Manipur, Shanao Long, a body which continues to work against violence against women and violations of women’s rights.440

Furthermore, women’s sections in the Naga Peoples Movement for Human

Rights emerged in 1987 to counter “Operation Bluebird,” an instance of security force excesses perpetrated against Naga villages which I outlined in Chapter 2. Historically,

438 Ruth Singson, July 5, 2015.

439 GJ, July 1, 2015.

440 Goswami, Sreekala, and Goswami, Women in Armed Conflict Situations, 91.

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Naga women have a raised consciousness on questions of violence, peace, and justice.441

The peacebuilding group which presently has the most impact is the Naga Women’s

Union Manipur. I met a member of the NWUM through friends at Manipur University, and through her, spoke with others.

3.3.4.2 Naga Women’s Union Manipur

There are sixteen Naga tribes in Manipur, which feed into overarching bodies of self-government, such as the United Naga Council (comprised almost exclusively of men) and the Naga Women’s Union Manipur (NWUM). This highly structured organizational scheme is unusual, compared to the loosely-connected Kukis of Manipur and to the Nagas of the neighboring state of Nagaland. The NWUM formed in 1994, out of the awareness raising campaign connected to the International Women’s Conference in Beijing.442 Every Naga woman automatically becomes a member of the NWUM, although individuals are free to choose their level of involvement. The NWUM focuses both internally and externally—attempting to handle all of the women’s issues within the tribes, but also working on intra- and interethnic peacebuilding in Manipur.443

441 Arambam, “Peace Process in Manipur,” 39.

442 Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can, 28.

443 GJ, July 1, 2015; SU, July 7, 2015; Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

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NWUM women organized to hide Kuki women in their homes during the Naga-

Kuki clash of the mid-1990s.444 Since the end of the great Naga-Kuki clash, women have worked to ensure that small incidences of violence between the communities do not once again erupt into mass bloodshed. A former vice president of the organization told me about a time in which she, backed by both Naga and Kuki women, stopped Union

Ministers who were traveling from Delhi to Moreh, Manipur’s border town with Burma in Chandel district. Both Naga and Kuki women’s groups had gathered to honor the killing of three Nagas by Kukis, and they were condemning the act and standing in solidarity with the families of the victims. SU spoke to the Union Ministers when they attempted to get past the women’s blockade. She reports:

“I don’t know how I got the courage, but then I was really, that day I having the courage for the first time to speak to those army men in uniform, trying to tell them that with this killing we don’t want the situation to become violent and the two communities to again be at war. So we are trying to observe this day, to remember the three persons who are dead. And we want the road to be closed for a few hours, just in the daytime, and then we will let you go, but until 5 p.m. we are blocking the vehicles. And that was the first time I had to speak to the police who came, then the army personnel with their convoy, and the ministers with their convoy, and everyone was so surprised. They said, how could you stop them? And I said it was because of you all, backing me! It was not just me alone.”445

Clearly, some inter-ethnic initiatives between Naga and Kuki women’s groups are effective. This difference may be due to the location—Chandel district, as opposed to

444 Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can, 29.

445 SU, July 7, 2015.

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Churachandpur; to the diversity of women’s personal experiences with the great clash; or to the nature of the leadership which promotes interethnic initiatives. The NWUM appears to be much more open to interethnic work than the WWAA. Despite their successes, financial and human resources drastically limit the scope of the NWUM, as its representatives are often unable to reach tribal women in remote regions.446

Much of the NWUM’s work responds to direct violence, but a great many initiatives also push back on the structures which constrain Naga women’s agency. A common complaint is the psychological suffering which accompanies militarization. The

Naga woman who stood up to the Union Ministers also told an earlier story of some

Indian army officers barging into her house and accusing her at gunpoint of involvement with a Naga insurgent group. She answered their questions and brought in witnesses from her village to attest to the fact that she could not possibly be involved with Naga insurgents. The soldiers finally left her alone, but for years afterwards she felt great fear when crossing a military checkpoint or hearing a large truck on the road, because she associated these with her traumatic encounter. She fights against this militarization, seeking respect for women’s and for Nagas’ dignity as an officer in the NWUM.447

Naga women also push against political inequality within their own ethnic group in the course of their peacebuilding work. One of the two women serving on the twenty- member Naga Forum for Reconciliation reported that she is always pressing the Forum

446 GJ, July 1, 2015.

447 SU, July 7, 2015.

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to remember women’s issues and to invite more women into their political work. She said that they respond, “You are there! Why do you want more women?” She quickly counters, “Then why do you want so many men around here?” Naga men are slowly coming to see women as relevant participants in politics, but they still undervalue women’s contributions.448

3.3.4.3 Intra-ethnic, interstate peacebuilding: NWUM and the Naga Mothers’

Association

Complicating this picture of Naga peacebuilding, it is important to note that the

Naga Women’s Union Manipur has close ties to the Naga Mothers’ Association, a women’s peacebuilding group operating in the neighboring state of Nagaland since

1984. Since the Naga people live in both states, these two organizations often work together, illustrating the importance of ethnic identity even across state lines. Recall that in June of 2001, the Government of India signed a ceasefire with the NSCN-IM, a

Naga insurgent group. Two women from the NWUM trekked across the mountains to

Burma alongside two representatives from the Naga Mothers’ Association to encourage

Kaphlang, the leader of the NSCN-K, to support this ceasefire.449 Thus while Meitei men and women from Manipur were participating in months-long agitation against the

448 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

449 Gill, “Women in the Time of Conflict: The Case of Nagaland,” 223–225.

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ceasefire, Naga women were teaming up with other Nagas from Nagaland to promote intra-ethnic peace, as well as a larger peace between Nagas and the Indian government.

This trek was quite challenging for the women, and it garnered a great deal of publicity for their cause. Grace Satshang, one of the women of NWUM who participated, described it to me:

“There was such a write-up. [People said] you are doing peace work because you want publicity! No, we are doing it because we want peace! We are believing in peace. [We walked] from Arunachel [Pradesh] to Burma. Because there was so much of killing between the NSCN-IM and the NSCN-K. The Naga Women’s Union, then Gina was the President, I was the Vice President, and the NMA President and Secretary, the four of us went. The other men’s organizations went and met, and we decided why only they should go? We should also go and meet, so that we share our views too. And we were very happy because due to that trip, there was six months of ceasefire between the groups.”450

The arduous hike across the hills of Northeastern India into Burma was nearly too much for Grace. She exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, I was not well. As it is, I don’t walk on the hills, so I was the laassssssst one to walk!” Her belief in peace was more important to her than her health issues.

Naga women’s social locations thus circumscribe their peacebuilding agency, helping to determine the targets and methods of their initiatives. They pursue intra- and interethnic peace in ways which are irrelevant to Meitei women. They do not seem to have trauma from the great Naga-Kuki clash in the ways that the Kuki women of the

450 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

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WWAA do. Like the Meira Paibis, women who are not necessarily conflict-affected widows devote a great deal of their time to the pursuit of peace and justice. But unlike the Meira Paibis, they concern themselves with peace across the borders of Manipur, with communities in Nagaland and in Burma. Taking note of women’s social locations is vital for understanding peacebuilding agency.

3.4 Women’s peacebuilding agency: contributions to justpeace

I have offered many examples of women’s peacebuilding in Manipur—some interethnic, some restricted by ethnic boundaries; some grounded in Christian or

Muslim traditions, and some grounded in women’s human rights. Thus far, I have used structural intersectionality to show the impossibility of generalizing about the types of violence, direct and structural, which constrain women’s lives and their peacebuilding agency. Women situated at different social locations are impacted differently by violent conflict and structures such as geography, religion, and militarization. To describe women’s peacebuilding praxis, therefore, must from the very beginning be an exercise in troubling the designation of “women” as an homogenous group with identical needs.

It thus becomes vitally important to analyze women’s peacebuilding in light of its ability to contend with women’s diverse experiences with violence. As women pursue peace, do they do so inclusively, considering all women and all experiences? Or do they champion women’s rights and women’s role as peacebuilders in a way that reflects and benefits only some women? In a nutshell, does their peacebuilding praxis genuinely

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contribute to a justpeace, which not only decreases violence and destructive interactions, but also increases justice in human relationships?

In order to evaluate women’s contributions to justpeace, I turn to political intersectionality. For Crenshaw, this concept captures the ways in which feminist and anti-racist activism marginalizes the problems of women of color in the United States. In the Manipur context, I will analyze the tendency for interethnic peacebuilding to marginalize the experiences of women from some ethnic groups, as well as the capacity for intra-ethnic peacebuilding to prevent solidarity among women across ethnic boundaries. I see the former as an example of Mariana Ortega’s “loving, knowing ignorance,” and the latter as her “arrogant ignorance” (in some cases).

Ortega uses the helpful phrase “loving, knowing ignorance,” to point to the mistakes which white feminists in the US have made regarding women of color. She argues that the “loving, knowing perceiver”—the white American feminist who is conscious of the need to address difference—may attempt to produce knowledge about women of color in various ways:

“…By citing the work of women of color, by including women of color in her political and practical agenda, by making claims about the lives of women of color, by classifying the experience of women of color. What is unfortunate, however, is that the knowledge this loving, knowing perceiver acquires may be inaccurate or may inadequately represent the experience of actual women of color and consequently leads to ignorance.”451

451 Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant,” 61.

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Ortega’s work needs a bit of translation to the context of peacebuilding praxis in

Manipur, but I think that her way of fleshing out political intersectionality is useful.

Women peacebuilders who are in positions of relative privilege—those directing corporate NGOs like MWGSN or those with leadership positions in grassroots groups like

EEFVAM—talk about the importance of and the success of their interethnic peacebuilding initiatives. They claim to know about, understand, and address the experiences of women who have been more marginalized, i.e. tribal women, or impoverished women. Sometimes they succeed! But more often than not, rather than highlighting the differences among women within their networks, they cover over them with language of shared humanity and shared sisterhood, lifting up common experiences of gender-based discrimination while ignoring real differences in ethnic-, religious-, and class-based social location. Based on my interviews and observations, both MWGSN and EEVFAM occasionally work from within the limitations of loving, knowing ignorance. Their peacebuilding would be even more effective if they were to consciously counter this problem, pursuing stronger relationships across divided communities which would enable a sustainable justpeace.

Ortega distinguishes between loving, knowing ignorance and arrogant ignorance.452 An arrogant ignorance is one with which the “arrogant perceiver” sees the world from her own view—“skillfully organiz[ing] the world and everything in it with

452 Ortega draws upon Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983).

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reference to the arrogant perceiver’s desires and interests.” In a world in which men are arrogant perceivers, they get to define what a “good wife” means, and whether a particular woman is being a good wife. In a world in which women are arrogant perceivers of other women, the privileged woman defines the problems of all women in terms of her own struggles, stereotyping or ostracizing the women who do not fit into the world as she sees it.453 In my view, women peacebuilders working within monoethnic groups have a tendency to adopt the arrogant position, which assumes that their own experience is the measure of the experience of all. I will highlight examples of each kind of ignorance, both of which I see as types of political intersectionality.

Before sharing empirical examples, I should situate myself among the women peacebuilders of Manipur. As a white, middle class, American woman conducting international research, I enjoy a great deal of privilege. In some ways, I was disadvantaged in Manipur: I did not speak any of the local languages; the public bus system in Imphal remained fairly inscrutable to me; and I could only stay for short research trips before arousing suspicion. Because of my social location, however, I gained access to people and places which would be unreachable to many in Manipur. I could move easily among members of different ethnic groups, asking sensitive questions and getting answers (however guarded some of them might have been). Still, there is a very real possibility that I am perpetuating knowledge that is grounded in its own sort of

453 Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant,” 59.

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loving, knowing ignorance. I do not claim to present the definitive picture of women’s intra- and interethnic peacebuilding in Manipur. Instead, I offer an outsider’s view, based on a few months of observation and interviews and years of reading and thinking.

Armed with the knowledge that loving, knowing ignorance is a problem which troubles feminist research, I have attempted to counter it by presenting women’s own views of themselves and each other whenever possible. That does not mean that I never produce knowledge which perpetuates stereotypes or homogenizes experiences. I am especially at risk of privileging the Meitei perspective in my work, as my translators and main points of entry into Manipur were Meiteis. Meitei women tend to be some of the richest and best educated in the state, making them more accessible to foreign researchers and journalists who depend upon insiders for introductions and assistance with travel and logistics. I have done my best, however, to interview women (and men) whose lives are qualitatively different from one another, seeking as diverse a picture as possible within the complicated context of peacebuilding in Manipur.

Keeping my own positionality in mind, I will now proceed to offer examples of power hierarchies and marginalization of women, by women, that are revealed through the lens of political intersectionality. Both loving, knowing ignorance and arrogant ignorance appear within women’s peacebuilding. The peacebuilding praxis which I elucidated above sometimes perpetuates structural violence, but it also plants creative seeds for inclusive, sustainable, interethnic peace. I intend to affirm the productive peacebuilding which is already occurring, while also offering reforms which could help

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women’s peacebuilding to align more closely with women’s own stated goals for peace and justice.

First, political intersectionality shows that power hierarchies are at work in the histories that scholars and activists use to describe women’s peacebuilding in Manipur.

Recall that the nupilal go back to 1904, and that they often serve as the historical and analytical starting point for women’s interventions on behalf of peace. However, the appellation of “women’s wars” is misleading. Scholars and activists alike often fail to ask the all-important intersectional question: which women?454 The nupilal were conducted by Meiteis.455 Holding these wars up as the unqualified origin story for women’s peacebuilding in Manipur diminishes the unique contributions of non-Meitei women, displaying an arrogant ignorance which measures women’s experiences by the experiences of one group.456

Similarly, many contemporary scholars engage with the Meira Paibis and the

Naga Women’s Union Manipur,457 but to my knowledge, scholars rarely interview the

454 Lokendrajit, Who Is a Terrorist?; Pradip Phanjoubam, “Challenges before Women’s Movement in Manipur,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 99–108; McDuie-Ra, “Searching for Human Security in ‘Disturbed’ Areas: Women as Agents for Change in Manipur, India”; Sanamani Yambem, “Nupi Lan: Manipur Women’s Agitation, 1939,” Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 8 (1976): 325–31.

455 Saroj N. Arambam Parratt and John Parratt, “The Second ‘Women’s War’ and the Emergence of Democratic Government in Manipur,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2001): 905–19.

456 For an example of a broad description of “women’s agency” in Manipur which ignores ethnic difference, see McDuie-Ra, “Searching for Human Security in ‘Disturbed’ Areas: Women as Agents for Change in Manipur, India,” 59.

457 Bora, “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal”; Gill, “Women in the Time of Conflict: The Case of Nagaland.”

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women associated with MWGSN, EEVFAM, or WWAA. This may be due to their lower visibility in society or, in the case of WWAA, their distance from Imphal. Academic oversight of the work of these groups has narrowed the scope of women’s peacebuilding agency, paying attention to the concerns and actions of some groups but not others. This tunnel vision misses the ways in which some women exert freedom and influence as peacebuilders, as some Kuki widows of WWAA do when they move freely about their communities.

Repeating the scholarly pattern of privileging Meitei stories, journalists often try to sum up diverse experiences of women’s suffering by pointing to one Meitei woman,

Irom Sharmila, who fasted in protest of AFSPA for nearly sixteen years. A Naga journalist angrily remarked in an interview:

“How can she replace the suffering of all the other people? It’s just one aspect of women’s suffering. … If you talk to EEVFAM, the way they are surviving without their husbands, with the people saying that their husbands were working with the militants, with their children getting that stigma, it’s so different from what Sharmila is suffering. And if you look at the women who have lost children to torture, who have died before their eyes, who still can’t sleep because of those images … Does anyone have a sense of this population of elderly women in the state? And so this cannot be narrowed to the experience of one lady.”458

In these ways, outsiders unintentionally privilege the experiences of Meitei women, excluding the stories of both suffering and agency which are present among

458 GJ, July 1, 2015.

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Naga, Kuki, Pangal, and other women, and in the process displaying an arrogant ignorance about how the world is experienced by “Manipuri women.”

Just as scholars and journalists from the outside exclude the experiences of some women, so, too, can insiders to peacebuilding in Manipur. MWGSN, EEVFAM, and

WWAA all rely on human rights frameworks. With the exception of WWAA, these organizations welcome women from all backgrounds, on the basis of shared humanity.

This dependence upon humanity covers up the ethnic, religious, and class-based differences which make it more difficult for some women to access their services and to participate in peacebuilding than others.

The MWGSN and EEVFAM headquarters lie in the capital city. This means that

Meiteis and Pangals who dwell in and near Imphal can much more easily join their efforts than Naga and Kuki women who live in remote hill districts.459 When I met them,

MWGSN’s staff was composed of Indians from states outside of Manipur, Meiteis, and

Manipuri Muslims (Meiteis’ close cousins, because of intermarriage). Those Nagas and

Kukis who are able to partner with MWGSN, such as Ruth Singson, the Kuki founder of the WWAA, tend to be middle- to upper-class women who can afford the transportation and lodging costs associated with trips into the city. The Meitei perspective thus dominates the “human rights” approach, which reaches primarily Meitei widows.

Similarly, the EEVFAM officers and founders whom I met were all Meiteis. Several

459 SU, July 7, 2015.

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attempts to interview tribal members of EEVFAM failed. Coupled with the relative ease with which I was able to interview Meitei widows, this indicates to me a difference in the women’s situations within the organization. One Meitei widow of EEVFAM reported that other members of the group questioned the speed with which her husband’s case was prosecuted, because she was close, personal friends with the Meitei president of the organization.460 Are all members of EEVFAM brought into the peacebuilding work equitably? Although staff members and leaders for both MWGSN and EEFVAM insist that members of all ethnic groups work well together, this perspective overwhelmingly comes from Meitei and Pangal men and women—those who would self-identify as

Manipuri rather than as Naga or Kuki.461

I hardly blame organizations like MWGSN and EEFVAM for failing to reach women who dwell in remote hill regions, given the state’s shoddy highways and their limited financial resources. Nevertheless, the ways in which ethnicity interacts with geography produce organizations which much better serve the needs of some women over others, even as those organizations claim progressive inclusivity under the banner of human rights. MWGSN’s and EEFVAM’s loving, knowing ignorance allows Meiteis to speak for all of the women of their group, whether in Delhi, Geneva, or Imphal.

Regardless of how much the Meitei leaders seek to reach out to women from other ethnic groups, their positionality will make it nearly impossible for them to fully

460 BK, July 2, 2015.

461 Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015; RU, June 26, 2015; IA, June 26, 2015; FA, June 5, 2014.

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understand and express the experiences of women from other intersectional social locations. Rather than covering over these differences, they ought to build stronger relationships with women from other social locations, and to invite them into leadership positions. Essentially, these interethnic peacebuilding groups must add the lens of political intersectionality to their pursuit of justpeace, rather than relying on shared gender or common humanity as a binding agent for their networks. Only then will they recognize internal power differentials and direct resources to those who are excluded, however unintentionally—however lovingly.

Turning from interethnic to intra-ethnic peacebuilding, Kuki women within the

WWAA reveal potentially dangerous dispositions towards Nagas, which will undermine their pursuit of peace and justice in the long run. The WWAA rarely partners with other peacebuilding groups, and it particularly excludes Nagas from its activities. This practice is understandable and perhaps even necessary: many Kuki women re-experience traumatic memories when they see Nagas. An ethnic enclave enables many of these women to build peaceful lives with others in their own community, whereas they may not feel comfortable enough to do so if their community included Nagas. Nancy Fraser promotes the value of such “subaltern counter-publics” which foster agency among marginalized groups, helping them to articulate their needs to the broader public even from a position of dominance.462 However, this isolation actively promotes the very

462 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 123.

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divisions which enabled the direct violence between Nagas and Kukis in the mid-1990s.

One woman with WWAA, remarking on the jealousy of the Nagas towards Kukis, said,

“They don’t know anything. They are thick!”463 This attitude, though directed at the men who used violence in the Naga-Kuki clash, creeps into women’s relationships with one another and prevents the creation of a more inclusive peace. I do not argue against Kuki exclusion of Nagas from their meetings, but rather against the disposition which promotes distrust. Kukis are not necessarily displaying arrogant ignorance—they do not assume that their experiences are those of Naga women. However, their peacebuilding should focus on healing Kuki women while also promoting understanding and respect of people from other ethnic groups, and particularly the Nagas whom they are likely to encounter frequently in the hilly regions. Perpetuating division actively impedes justpeace.

The power relations revealed by political intersectionality become even more apparent when turning to overtly political groups like the Meira Paibis and the NWUM.

Rita Manchanda reports that Naga women often issue invitations to the Meira Paibis, to join various demonstrations on behalf of women affected by the conflict. They complain that Meira Paibis never come to their aid.464 What Manchanda misses, because of her failure to include Meitei women in her study, is that Meira Paibis likewise do not understand why the NWUM does not accept their invitations to join their agitations in

463 RS, July 5, 2015.

464 Manchanda, We Do More Because We Can, 62.

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defense of women’s rights.465 A resentful Meira Paibi leader reported to me that Nagas have “attitude” and “ego” which prevent them from working under Meitei leadership.466

Feelings of ill-will abound on both sides, and both Naga and Meitei women fail to recognize that political differences, grounded in ethnicity, prevent them from achieving true solidarity for “women’s” human rights. For both groups, some women are more worthy of their protest than others.

Naga women particularly begrudge the fact that Meira Paibis, who portray themselves as the mothers of all Manipur,467 often fail to protest the rape and killing of tribal women.468 Meitei insurgents from the United National Liberation Front committed a gang rape against a tribal Hmar woman, and Nagas and Kukis alike went to protest against the atrocity. According to a Naga woman who was present for the protests, the

Meira Paibis and other Meitei women were absent and remained silent.469 In the most overt display of arrogant ignorance which I learned about, the “mothers of all Manipur” seem to be only the mothers of Meitei Manipur, when the offenders against their

“daughters” are Meiteis.470

465 SU, July 7, 2015.

466 IN, June 16, 2014.

467 IN, June 16, 2014.

468 SU, July 7, 2015.

469 GJ, July 1, 2015.

470 It is because of instances like this that I believe ethnicity is an important identity marker for studying Manipur, despite Brubaker’s and Wimmer’s claims about the fluidity of ethnicity. A historical perspective of ethnicity in Manipur reveals the dynamic, fluid nature of ethnicity over time, but in a single, present moment in Manipur, ethnicity partly determines attitudes and actions to a great extent. Following 182

Clearly, both the Meira Paibis and the NWUM, while doing incredible work in response to multiple violences, privilege ethnicity over gender, such that ethnic and religious power hierarchies persist.471 Their construction of subaltern counter-publics, bound by ethnicity, undermines their attempts to build a justpeace which must be inclusive if it is to be sustained. I ground this critique in women’s stated goals for peace, development, and justice. Interethnic organizations like MWGSN and EEFVAM try to reach and involve women from multiple backgrounds, but they do so far from equitably, producing activism and knowledge which is supposed to be for all women, but which promotes the experiences and needs of just some women. Meira Paibis and NWUM invite one another to join their efforts, but resentment often prevents such collaboration, and ethnic solidarity, perhaps even with insurgent groups, stands in the way of gendered solidarity. Women of WWAA yearn for peace and yet make no effort to build relationships with those whom they hold responsible for destroying it. We should not categorize these counterproductive practices as peacebuilding agency. Rather, they create new obstacles which constrain the agency of other women peacebuilders. The pursuit of justpeace must mitigate the harmful discourses and actions highlighted by

Puar, it is an example of what ethnicity does in a context. I do not think that Brubaker and Wimmer would disagree with me. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups; Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

471 Ranabir Samaddar and Anjuman Ara Begum, “New Fault Line in Conflict? Women’s Emergence as the Subject of Peace in the North-East,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 74–83.

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political intersectionality if it is to succeed, countering both arrogant and loving, knowing ignorance.

In the concluding chapter, as I articulate the meaning of critical feminist justpeace and how it can be pursued, I will counter these discouraging examples of exclusion and resentment with hopeful stories of courageous peacebuilding across ethnic, religious, and other boundaries, showing that not only is a critical feminist pursuit of justpeace necessary—in some quarters, it is already occurring. But before we get to critical feminist justpeace, let us turn to other articulations of how to go about setting up and supporting just and peaceful societies: liberal human development and critical human rights. Used together, structural and political intersectionality help us to see and attempt to account for the diversity of women’s life experiences as they build peace. Intersectionality, however, does not tell us how to define or pursue justice. It notes exclusions and absences without providing a method for inclusive participation.

For constructive approaches to social justice, development, and peace, we will look first to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and then to Brooke Ackerly and John Paul

Lederach in the following chapters. I will weave examples of peacebuilding praxis from

Manipur in and out of my discussions of these feminist political theorists, creating a multi-directional conversation which uses both praxis and theory to critique and be critiqued.

184 CHAPTER 4:

LIBERAL FEMINISM AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

4.1 Why liberal feminism and human development?

The portrait of peacebuilding praxis in Manipur that I presented in Chapter 3 is partly, but not wholly, liberal. Women peacebuilders often make intellectual and practical use of rights frameworks and conceive of women’s agency as resistance to domination. However, many women also live more collectively, putting the good of their own ethnic group first and practicing agency by leaning into certain gendered and religious norms that do not appear to be in their own best interest. Given these illiberal practices, how well can a liberal approach to feminism, as articulated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, help us to understand and mitigate the obstacles that women peacebuilders face? What can the liberal feminist approach to human development add to peacebuilding, and in turn, how does peacebuilding praxis critique human development? This chapter will focus on the major points of human development theory which peacebuilding praxis can most effectively question, challenge, and supplement. My aim is not to criticize human development, but rather to put it forward as a promising partial theory of justice which would benefit from the insights of the peacebuilding praxis found in Manipur. I intend to improve the general approach of human development by comparative analysis with a particular location. 185 First I introduce the human development paradigm, as presented by its two major proponents: Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. I show important similarities and differences between Sen’s economics-based approach and Nussbaum’s philosophical articulation, focusing especially on the issues of agency, adaptive preferences, and deliberation. These three issues, paramount within human capabilities theory, align well with Brooke Ackerly’s three-part critical feminist method—guiding criteria, skeptical scrutiny, and deliberative inquiry. As I explained in Chapter 1, because of its similar content, comprehensiveness, and ties to my own findings about the importance of critical feminist justpeace, Ackerly’s critical feminist method will guide my organization of Sen and Nussbaum. I will likewise thread evidence from Manipur throughout the presentation of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s thought, revealing gaps, questioning assumptions, and attempting to help human development better account for the experiences of Meitei, Naga, Kuki, and Pangal women from Manipur. Such an account broadens the record of human experience, making human development more inclusive and hence more just.

4.2 Introduction to human development

4.2.1 A brief history of the approach

Human development scholars oppose their approach to the dominant conception of development in terms of growing income. Humans have long questioned the idea of income as an end in itself. In pondering the good life, Aristotle argues,

“…wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful and for the 186

sake of something else.”472 Centuries before Aristotle, in an 8th century BC Sanskrit manuscript, Maitreyee asks her husband whether wealth can make her immortal. Upon learning that it will not, she asks after its purpose: “What should I do with that by which

I do not become immortal?”473 Income is for the sake of what?

More than two millennia later, at Stanford University’s 1979 Tanner Lectures on

Human Values, Amartya Sen asks a similar question. Humans strive for equality—but for equality of what? He persuasively argues that moral philosophy has provided three measuring rods for equality, including utilitarian equality, total utility equality, and equality in terms of Rawlsian primary goods. He responds that none of these support a human equality which fully considers the relationship between humans and goods.

Income can buy goods, but income alone can tell us very little about the condition of a person’s life. This leads him to articulate, for the first time, the human capabilities approach.474 A critique of the Rawlsian approach to justice, human capabilities consider not just the goods that humans need, but also the relationships of heterogeneous

472 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Book 1, chapter 5, 1096a5–10.

473 Sabina Alkire and Severine Deneulin, “The Human Development and Capability Approach,” in An Introduction to the Human Development and Capability Approach, ed. Severine Deneulin and Lila Shahani (London: Earthscan, 2009), 25; citing Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 13.

474 Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 473–83; Amartya Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam; New York: North-Holland, 1985); Alkire and Deneulin, “The Human Development and Capability Approach,” 31; In many ways, Sen was building on pre-existing work in the field of development ethics, begun by Denis Goulet and others. Charles K. Wilber and Amitava Krishna Dutt, New Directions in Development Ethics: Essays in Honor of Denis Goulet (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

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individuals to those goods. Equality should be measured in terms of humans’ ability to do certain basic things.475

As Sen was articulating his approach against economic theory, Martha Nussbaum was developing similar ideas on the basis of Aristotelian human functionings.476 Many differences between their approaches remain, but it seems clear that the policy proposal of human development, as opposed to economic growth, was one whose time had come. In 1990, Mahbub ul Haq operationalized Sen’s work with the publication of the first Human Development Report, conceived of as an important corrective to the

World Bank’s economic growth-oriented World Development Reports.477 Since 1990, annual Human Development Reports have used four indices to assess people’s well- being across the world, including the Human Development Index (HDI). This index aggregates three measures, including health, measured by life expectancy at birth; education, or the mean years of schooling for adults and expected years of schooling for children; and standard of living, in terms of gross national income per capita.478 These measures allow development economists to compare human quality of life across

475 Sen, “Equality of What?,” 484.

476 Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203–52; Martha Nussbaum, “Nature, Function and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplementary volume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

477 Alkire and Deneulin, “The Human Development and Capability Approach,” 25; Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

478 “Human Development Index (HDI) | Human Development Reports,” accessed January 30, 2017, http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi.

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cultures, and in terms other than gross national product alone. The endurance of these reports and of the HDI illustrates the ongoing influence of Sen’s approach among practitioners. The creation of The Journal of Human Development and Capabilities and the burgeoning membership of the Human Development and Capability Association point to his academic impact.

4.2.2 Amartya Sen

In the best-known, succinct statement of his approach to human development,

Development as Freedom, Sen conceives of development as “a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.”479 Freedom is both the means and the end of development. Although development is usually identified with processes like GDP growth or support of individual incomes, Sen views these as mere instruments to the end of expanding human freedoms.480 He suggests that five types of instrumental freedoms help to advance the general capability of a person, enabling her to live a life that she “has reason to value”: (1) political freedoms,481 (2) economic facilities,482 (3)

479 Sen, Development as Freedom, 3.

480 Ibid.

481 “Opportunities that people have to determine who should govern and on what principles, ... also includ[ing] the possibility to scrutinize and criticize authorities, to have freedom of political expression and an uncensored press, to enjoy the freedom to choose between different political parties, and so on.” Ibid., 38.

482 “Opportunities that individuals respectively enjoy to utilize economic resources for the purpose of consumption, or production, or exchange.” Ibid., 38–39.

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social opportunities,483 (4) transparency guarantees,484 and (5) protective security.485

Together, these five inter-related instrumental freedoms promote human, rather than economic, development.

Sen distinguishes between two aspects of freedom—process and opportunity.

Both procedures and social situations are important for supporting the freedoms that people enjoy.486 Another way of thinking about these two aspects is to employ another important distinction of Sen’s, between agency and capability. Process freedom is agency: an individual can make her own decisions about her life. Opportunity freedom is capability: an individual has certain skills, means, and opportunities to choose from when deciding to function in a certain way.487 Sen likewise delineates two roles for freedom—evaluation and effectiveness. The best way to evaluate the success of a society’s development initiatives is to consider individuals’ substantive freedoms.

Expanding freedoms also makes development processes more effective, as people begin

483 “The arrangements that society makes for education, health care and so on, which influence the individual’s substantive freedom to live better.” This is important for private life, but also for participating in social and economic opportunities. Ibid., 39.

484 “The freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity.” Ibid.

485 “[This] provide[s] a social safety net for preventing the affected population from being reduced to abject misery, and in some cases even starvation and death. The domain of protective security includes fixed institutional arrangements such as unemployment benefits and statutory income supplements... as well as ad hoc famine relief.” Ibid., 40.

486 Ibid., 17.

487 David A. Crocker, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 177.

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to act as agents in charge of their own destinies.488 For Sen, an agent is “someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well.”489

For the evaluative role of freedom, Sen promotes the use of human capabilities—the substantive freedoms that enable an individual to choose a life that she has reason to value.490 He prefers capabilities to other standard measures of development or justice, such as the economic focus on incomes and wealth, the utilitarian emphasis on preferences or on utility based on feelings, the libertarian promotion of procedures, and the Rawlsian system of primary goods.491 His use of capabilities is meant to address the weaknesses of these other, narrower approaches, which miss aspects of individuals’ lives which they have reason to value,492 or which assume that preferences ought to be followed regardless of outcome.493 A person’s

488 Sen, Development as Freedom, 18.

489 Ibid., 19.

490 Ibid., 74.

491 Ibid., 19, 74.

492 As seen in the economic approach, which ignores the fact that high income does not necessarily translate into well-being, as political and social structures can prevent even a rich individual from pursuing the functionings which she desires.

493 Which is a danger associated with the utilitarian, preference-satisfaction approach, which cannot comment on the injustices associated with an adaptive preference for something harmful. See Ibid, 62.

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capabilities set considers not only the goods that she needs, whether in terms of income or primary goods; it also accounts for her personal, social, and environmental characteristics which enable or inhibit her conversion of goods into actual functionings.494

Sen defines functionings as the various things that a person may value doing or being. These may range from the simplicity of being nourished to the complexity of participating in community life. The evaluative role of freedom may focus on either a person’s capabilities—her freedom to achieve—or on her functionings—her actual achievements.495 Capabilities are selected through public reasoning about what the community values.496 The community cannot demand that an individual decide in favor of a certain functioning, because to do so is to limit her capabilities set.

As I have noted, Sen’s evaluation of a human’s well-being, in terms of her freedoms to choose a life that she has reason to value, improves upon Rawls in two important ways.497 First, he agrees with but questions the reach of Rawls’ priority of liberty. Rawls’ first principle of justice demands that certain basic civil and political liberties be extended to all, and that they be given overwhelming precedence in case of

494 Sen, Development as Freedom, 74.

495 Ibid., 75.

496 Ibid., 78–79.

497 I will not discuss Sen’s critiques of utilitarianism and libertarianism, as they stray rather far from my purposes in laying out his capabilities approach. For these critiques, see Sen, Development as Freedom, 56-63.

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conflict with other concerns.498 Sen does not deny the importance of civil and political rights; instead, he argues that this priority causes economic needs to be too easily overlooked.499 Essentially, he agrees with the importance of negative freedom, but he wants a theory of justice to be inclusive of positive freedoms to achieve functionings.500

Second, Sen critiques the primary goods approach for its insufficient attention to the relationship between resources and well-being. Rawls corrects for the defects associated with preference satisfaction, insisting that individuals take responsibility for their own preferences. Justice lies in a fair distribution of primary goods, rather than in individual happiness. However, his primary goods such as liberties, opportunities, income, and self-respect, do not account for the extent to which an individual is able to turn these goods into actual functioning.501 Sen is concerned instead with the “actual living that people manage to achieve (or going beyond that, [with] the freedom to achieve livings that one can have reason to value).”502

498 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 54.

499 Sen, Development as Freedom, 64.

500 David A. Crocker, “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic,” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (1992): 596; On the distinction between positive and negative liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

501 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 60–65; Sen, Development as Freedom, 72.

502 Sen, Development as Freedom, 73; In later work, Sen also critiques Rawls’ original position for the indeterminate decisions which it yields. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 11–12; 56–58.

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Freedom can be evaluated in terms of both realized functions and a person’s capability set of alternatives. Sen values both, but he is much more interested in the capability set, as the best functionings are necessarily limited by the array of capabilities that lie before an individual.503 The functionings themselves, as well as the evaluative use of the capabilities, are inescapably plural. There are multiple and varying functionings; there are questions of the suitable weights to attach to different substantive freedoms; and capabilities must also be balanced against practices such as legal and political procedures, which are also relevant for evaluating human development. Sen argues that the inherent pluralism of his approach is one of its main strengths, given that actual evaluation is always heterogeneous. There is no single homogeneous metric which can understand and account for variations among people’s needs and characteristics.504 However, this inherent pluralism elicits the questions: how are such weights to be selected, and evaluations to be made? For such decisions, Sen relies on methods like reasoned consensus, public discussion, and democratic understanding—essentially, he turns to Ackerly’s deliberative inquiry (although he does not adequately discuss standards of fairness for deliberation, as I will show).505

I soon consider many more aspects of Sen’s thought in greater detail, but I will do so while comparing his approach to that of Martha Nussbaum. Then I will point to

503 Sen, Development as Freedom, 76.

504 Ibid., 76–77.

505 Ibid., 78–79.

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the gaps and strengths of human development theory, as prompted by peacebuilding praxis in Manipur. But first, I will turn to the human development approach articulated by Nussbaum.

4.2.3 Martha Nussbaum

Whereas Sen develops capabilities primarily as a space for the evaluation of social and economic policies, Nussbaum sees them first as the basis for fundamental political principles which should be “respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires.”506 This bare minimum is a universal threshold of capabilities. Her approach to human development, although focused upon capabilities and functionings like Sen’s, employs philosophical argument and adopts the Kantian principle of each person as an end, not merely a means. She situates her approach within the political liberalism of John Rawls, although, like Sen, she is dissatisfied with his use of primary goods as a measurement of justice.507

Most importantly, for purposes of comparison with both Sen and peacebuilding praxis,

Nussbaum’s approach is consciously feminist. Sen is concerned with agency in general and with women acting as agents in particular. However, his feminism remains implicit, whereas Nussbaum argues that an explicit feminist lens is a required underpinning for any general theory of international economic and political thought, if it hopes to be

506 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5.

507 Ibid., 68–70.

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just.508 Thus, she lays out her capabilities approach with an eye to the lives of women in the developing world, and on the basis of the principle that women, who are so often treated as means to others’ ends, are ends in and of themselves.509

Because Nussbaum is insistent upon universal principles (humans as ends) and universal application of her approach (principles for all nations), she begins Women and

Human Development with a defense of universal values. She is well aware of the tendency for theorists—especially those from the West—to impose values from their own cultures upon others, declaring them to be universal.510 However, she asserts (not un-problematically, according to Ackerly and others)511 that many of the human capabilities which she supports are already highly valued within the developing communities that she is acquainted with—namely, in India.512 Moreover, she maintains that universal values are not only defensible for a partial theory of justice; they are necessary for cross-cultural critical dialogue which treats other cultures with respect. To fail to apply a common critical lens is to assume that only Western women’s lives can and should be characterized by certain freedoms (even as many Western women suffer

508 Ibid., 4–5.

509 Ibid., 6.

510 Ibid., 35.

511 Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 122.

512 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 39.

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from capabilities deprivations).513 Still, Nussbaum has faced a great deal of skepticism about the truly cross-cultural nature of her work.514 I will return to some of these criticisms in a later section of this chapter.

Nussbaum defends her use of universal values by confronting three arguments, coming from culture, diversity, and paternalism. She asserts first that cultures are internally plural, and although some may contain traditional roles for women, those same cultures foster indigenous voices of resistance and protest. Cultures are characterized by dynamic change.515 Second, Nussbaum counters an argument coming from diversity, which argues that all distinct cultures are inherently beautiful and worth preserving. She questions why harmful, discriminatory practices ought to be protected.516 Finally, she answers the charge of paternalism. Are not universal values inherently disrespectful of people’s agency? Nussbaum notes that this question implies at least one universal value—that of thinking and choosing for oneself. She tries to ensure that her framework protects such choices, thereby respecting agency by way of

513 Ibid., 41.

514 Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alison Jaggar, “Reasoning about Well-Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities,” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 3 (2006): 301–22; Monique Deveaux, “Political Morality and Culture: What Difference Do Differences Make?,” Social Theory and Practice 28, no. 3 (2002): 503–18; Ruth Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); see p. 170-173 for an excellent discussion of Ackerly, Jaggar, and Deveaux.

515 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 47–48.

516 Ibid., 50.

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standing up for the substantive goods which promote it.517 Having established that universal values—the defense of human capabilities for all, according to the principle of treating every person as an end—are the correct bases for normative reasoning across cultures, Nussbaum lays out her approach to human capabilities.

Like Sen, Nussbaum endorses an approach which explores capabilities—what humans are able to do and to be. She puts this analytical method to work in two ways: using it as a measurement of and a mode of comparison for individuals’ quality of life, even across cultures; and using it as a “necessary condition for justice” for public political arrangements.518 For Nussbaum, a society is just if its constitutional principles guarantee a threshold level of ten central capabilities. These capabilities are held to be valuable in and of themselves; they enable a person to live a truly human life. If a person’s capabilities fall below the threshold, this indicates that they do not have the capability of living in a truly human way.519 According to Nussbaum, the ten central capabilities which ought to be protected include life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s political and material environment.520 This list is the product of years of cross-cultural discussions, and it represents an overlapping consensus on the

517 Ibid., 51–53.

518 Ibid., 71.

519 Ibid., 74.

520 Ibid., 78–80.

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components of a life of truly human functioning. Nussbaum defends her list with

Rawlsian political liberalism—“people may sign on to this conception as the freestanding moral core of a political conception, without accepting any particular metaphysical view of the world, any particular comprehensive ethical or religious view, or even any particular view of the person or of human nature.”521 This allows her to privilege the right over the good, and in so doing, to protect freedom of choice and hence, her understanding of agency. We will soon return to the issue of agency in great detail, but for now, the reader should know that respect for individual agency leads

Nussbaum, like Sen, to select capabilities as the correct goal for public policies, rather than functionings.

Despite her insistence that each of the capabilities on her list is inherently valuable, Nussbaum singles out two of special importance—practical reason and affiliation. She argues that these two “organize and suffuse all the others,” such that, e.g., work is not truly human unless it involves the human as a thinking individual, working “with and toward others in a way that involves mutual recognition of humanity.” This does not mean that work becomes a mere means to the end of freedom of choice. Rather, practical reason and affiliation set constraints on the threshold level of work, which must involve an individual’s ability to make plans and carry them out in

521 Ibid., 76; See Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, 226–247 for a view that Nussbaum’s approach is actually that of comprehensive liberalism.

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reciprocal relations with others.522 Ruth Abbey points out that the simultaneous selection of practical reason and affiliation may create problems for the internal coherence of Nussbaum’s thought: it seems that, although both are overarching, or what Abbey refers to as “Ur-capabilities,” only those affiliations which honor the dignity and the reasoning of each individual are valuable for Nussbaum.523 Practical reason does not appear to be similarly contingent upon affiliation—an individual’s ability to think and plan for herself does not depend on the extent to which she is in reciprocal relations with others.

The best summary of Nussbaum’s thought is found in her own words:

“We want an approach that is respectful of each person’s struggle for flourishing, that treats each person as an end and as a source of agency and worth in her own right. Part of this respect will mean not being dictatorial about the good, at least for adults and at least in some core areas of choice, leaving individuals a wide space for important types of choice and meaningful affiliation. But this very respect means taking a stand on the conditions that permit them to follow their own lights free from tyrannies imposed by politics and tradition.”524

For Nussbaum, to stand on behalf of some substantive goods—specifically, some constitutional principles—is to enable more, rather than less, agency. She sees the limits which she imposes as limits upon domination.

522 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 82–83.

523 Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, 159–160.

524 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 69.

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Now that I have laid out Sen’s and Nussbaum’s different frameworks, purposes, and justifications for human development, I will turn to an extended comparison of their thought, highlighting the areas that are most relevant for challenge and critique according to peacebuilding praxis.

4.3 Comparative analysis: Sen, Nussbaum, and peacebuilding praxis

Sen and Nussbaum both consciously limit the scopes of their approaches, in part because of liberal sensibilities that focus on individual rights and individual agency. Sen uses capabilities as a space for comparing quality of life, and Nussbaum uses them as the basis for constitutional guarantees at a minimum threshold.525 However, both use sweeping language that is much more inclusive of political, economic, and social life, asking questions such as “what are humans able to do and to be?” and “what does a life of human flourishing look like?” Thus, it is not inappropriate to consider the value of human capabilities for purposes broader than economic analysis and constitutional revision. How well can these liberal approaches to human development address the concerns of peacebuilders in Manipur, many of whom are consciously trying to expand their substantive freedoms, or to increase their level of flourishing?

Using Ackerly’s three-part critical feminist method as my organizational scheme,

I highlight two broad issues upon which Sen and Nussbaum differ—“the list” and the role of deliberation. The differences between the two thinkers help to illuminate

525 Ibid., 11.

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aspects of their theories of human development that best engage the political and social obstacles which peacebuilders face in Manipur. Sometimes I will critique Sen or

Nussbaum on the basis of peacebuilding praxis. At other times, I will question aspects of the praxis on theoretical grounds, spurred by ideas from Sen or Nussbaum. I will also use theoretical insights from Sen, Nussbaum, and Ackerly to critique one another. This multi-directional analysis is meant to achieve three purposes: to suggest improvements in theory, to offer changes for praxis, and to demonstrate that theory and praxis fruitfully, and even necessarily, engage with one another.

First, I consider the most celebrated difference between Sen and Nussbaum— the presence or absence of a prescribed list of capabilities. In the confines of this discussion, I also compare their conceptions of agency and adaptive preferences.

Nussbaum’s list serves as non-negotiable guiding criteria, which Sen is reluctant to support. Looking at questions of agency and adaptive preferences also necessarily involves Ackerly’s method of skeptical scrutiny, which stays alert to exploitable hierarchies and abuses of power. Finally, I consider the role of deliberative inquiry within their approaches.

Drawing on examples from peacebuilding praxis, I argue that Nussbaum’s use of guiding criteria—what Sen interprets to be a limitation of agency via her list of central human capabilities—actually expands the options that are open to women in the long run. However, I also find that Sen makes better use of deliberative inquiry than

Nussbaum, more fully involving individuals and communities in decisions regarding their own fates. I will further claim that Sen’s and Nussbaum’s liberal approaches would 202

benefit from conscious use of skeptical scrutiny, paying attention to potentially harmful power dynamics in both the construction of guiding criteria and the use of deliberative inquiry. Critical methods help to correct for weaknesses within liberal theories. This finding, emerging from my examination of human development via peacebuilding praxis in Manipur, contributes to one of the main arguments of this project: a critical feminist justpeace is a necessary corrective to the liberal peace.

4.3.1 Guiding criteria: “the list”

“The list”—both its content and its existence—raises three important questions that are especially relevant for engagement with peacebuilding praxis:

1. Does the list promote or hinder substantive freedom?

2. Does the list enable an individual to act as an agent of her own life?

3. Does the list assist with the problem of adaptive preferences?

4.3.1.1 Does the list promote or hinder substantive freedom?

Sen readily admits that there might be some sort of core capability set which humans everywhere have reason to value. He refers to such things as basic capabilities, and he particularly focuses on basic aspects of well-being such as nutrition and the ability to move around freely.526 However, he has long resisted listing these capabilities, on the grounds that such a list would remove a community’s freedom and responsibility

526 Sen, “Equality of What?”

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to decide for itself which options are available for its members.527 He therefore privileges deliberative inquiry over guiding criteria, promoting public discussion to create such a list, if the relevant community decides that a list is necessary. His problem with Nussbaum’s list of guiding criteria is its source—Nussbaum’s own intuition and philosophical reasoning. Sen notes, “To have such a fixed list, emanating entirely from pure theory, is to deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should be included and why.”528 In his view, a fixed list limits agency freedom.

By contrast, Nussbaum fears that the absence of a list will enable a community to deprive some citizens—namely, women and other groups which are historically marginalized—of truly human flourishing. Turning the lens of skeptical scrutiny upon the outcomes of local deliberation, she believes that her list helps to correct for power differentials within communities, as well as the possibility of omitting a capability which is important for human flourishing.529 For her, well-being concerns circumscribe agency concerns: all human capabilities ought to be available to all humans, whether their particular community values them or not. If Nussbaum is serious about her conception of flourishing as appropriate for all humans, then her method of promoting it must insist

527 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 125.

528 Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 2 (2005): 157; qtd. in Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 125. I will return to Sen’s use of the phrase “pure theory” in the section on deliberation, later in this chapter.

529 Alkire and Deneulin, “The Human Development and Capability Approach,” 43; Elsewhere, Alkire has also noted that Nussbaum neglects to provide a procedure for the process of local specification. It is not clear how she will defend against abuses of power. Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41.

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upon universal application, even over and above democratic deliberation which might result in denying the relevance of some of her capabilities.530 Thus, she tries to guarantee optimal capabilities for all by embedding non-negotiable, universal capabilities within constitutional frameworks. In her view, freedoms are expanded, rather than narrowed, by such an institutionalized guarantee, even if it comes at the cost of deliberative inquiry.531

In addition to the universal application of a list, Nussbaum explicitly uses the concept of a threshold, quite differently from Sen.532 Whereas Sen defines his capabilities approach as unabashedly plural, Nussbaum limits her pluralism by insisting that each of her ten capabilities is important for flourishing, and that each must be offered at a threshold level for all members of the society which is bound by a given constitution. This is essentially another element of guiding criteria for her approach, addressing the form of flourishing as well as the content. Sen allows for multiple methods of weighing and perhaps even trading capabilities against one another, leaving it up to communities to decide for themselves how to pursue functionings.533

530 Many scholars question the democratic legitimacy of this approach. See Ingrid Robeyns, “The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey,” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 1 (2005): 106.

531 Ingrid Robeyns joins Nussbaum in promoting the need for a list of capabilities, in order to provide critical analysis particularly for gender-based problems. Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries, and Ingrid Robeyns, “Exploring the Challenges of Amartya Sen’s Work and Ideas: An Introduction,” in Amartya Sen’s Work and Ideas: A Gender Perspective, ed. Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries, and Ingrid Robeyns (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 6.

532 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 74.

533 Sen, Development as Freedom, 76–77.

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Nussbaum’s use of a threshold insists instead upon equality at a bare minimum level for each of ten capabilities. A community does not have the option to decide that one capability should not be protected. If it decides to put resources towards one group rather than another, it must do so in a way which still guarantees at least a threshold level of capability for the group which receives fewer resources. Such equality, even at a minimum level, is far from guaranteed if various weights and trade-offs are left up to debate.

Crocker argues that Sen also employs a concept of a threshold, despite

Nussbaum’s assertion that he does not. In Crocker’s view, Sen’s earliest thought on capabilities relies on a threshold, as his answer to the question “equality of what?” is the equality of basic capabilities—essentially, a threshold level of universal human capabilities.534 However, Sen’s idea of equal basic capabilities differs in two significant ways from a universal threshold. First, Sen never promotes universality in the way that

Nussbaum does. He believes that the capabilities space is the best place to evaluate human development for all humans, but he has no concept of human flourishing to guide his project. He does not attempt to uncover its common components across cultures, and he believes that guaranteeing such flourishing universally would be an encroachment on agency freedom. Second, Sen readily admits that the basic capabilities

534 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 135; See also Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 12; Sen, “Equality of What?,” 218; Robeyns sees basic capabilities as “the real opportunity to avoid poverty.” She does not see a threshold embedded in this concept, as Crocker does. See Robeyns, “The Capability Approach,” 101.

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of one culture might not be basic in another. The linen shirt which is required for respectability in Adam Smith’s 18th century Scotland is neither respectable nor necessary in the Caribbean.535 Nussbaum would respond that her capabilities list is broad enough that it can accommodate cultural variation. She also leaves a great deal of room for local specification and implementation of her capabilities—for some level of deliberative inquiry. However, such specification and implementation occurs only within the constraints of the guiding criteria that comprise her list. Nussbaum sees this as a vital protection of human flourishing. This is contrary to Sen’s open-ended, culturally variable, pluralist approach which is constrained primarily by the protection of agency.

This difference between Nussbaum and Sen prompts the next question: does the list enable an individual to act as an agent in her own life?

4.3.1.2 Does the list enable an individual to act as an agent in her own life?

To answer this question, we must first gain a better understanding of Sen’s and

Nussbaum’s conceptions of agency. In this section, I explore three aspects of Sen’s thought on agency, before turning to Nussbaum’s approach, highlighting the impact of guiding criteria (or their lack) as I go.

535 Sen, Development as Freedom, 74.

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4.3.1.3 Sen: agency distinct from well-being

For Sen, an agent is “someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well.”536 Crucially, for Sen, agency is distinct from well-being—from external or guiding criteria.537 It is a good which ought to be pursued for its own sake, especially for women and others who have long been treated as passive recipients, rather than as “active agents of change.”538

Crocker reads Sen’s distinction between agency and well-being as creating a

“conceptual space for a Kantian conception of moral freedom,” which “breaks decisively with any deterministic psychological egoism that claims that humans are no more than, and are bound to be, ‘strict maximizers of a narrowly defined self-interest.’”539 They can make decisions for a greater good, even at the expense of their own well-being.

Supporting this move respects them as thinking, moral individuals who take responsibility for their own actions. Humans can choose to act or to refrain from acting in certain ways, and such decisions comprise running their own lives, whether they

536 Ibid., 19.

537 Sen is careful to note that the distinction between the two does not mean that they are independent of one another. “They are distinguishable and separate, but thoroughly interdependent.” Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (New York: Russell Sage Foundation ; Oxford, 1992), 57.

538 Sen, Development as Freedom, 189.

539 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 152; Amartya Sen, “Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment,” New York Review of Books, June 14, 1990.

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contribute to or detract from their own well-being.540 Sen even notes that in some respects, the agency aspect of personhood may be more comprehensive than the well- being aspect, because presumably one of an agent’s goals is to pursue her own well- being.541 Thus agency helps to define personhood; it entails moral responsibility; and it encompasses an expansive view of what humans are able to do and to be.

This conception of a morally responsible agent—one who “acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well”542—collapses when applied to the particular circumstances of the women peacebuilders of Manipur. As I showed in Chapter 3, with the aid of the lens of political intersectionality, sometimes an individual’s pursuit of peacebuilding unintentionally undermines her own goals. I found many Kuki women who yearn for peace with Nagas, yet they stridently dismiss them as “thick” and ignorant and exclude them from their peacebuilding initiatives.543 Is such a peacebuilder really acting as an agent if she acts against her own purpose, however inadvertently? Building on the work of Saba

Mahmood, as explicated in Chapter 3, I argue that we cannot know whether agency is

540 Sen, Development as Freedom, 190.

541 Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 69.

542 Sen, Development as Freedom, 19.

543 RS, July 5, 2015.

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present, if our evaluation of agency is divorced from context.544 In Sen’s conception, which decontextualizes agency by releasing its evaluation from guiding criteria, the Kuki peacebuilders’ prayers for peace would be seen as an expansion of their agency freedom, regardless of the consequences of their actions which exclude their Christian brothers and sisters who happen to be Nagas. Contextualizing agency by evaluating it in terms of guiding criteria—criteria that I will present in Chapter 6, as critical feminist justpeace—enables us to evaluate women’s peacebuilding agency.

Certainly, there are some limits upon what Sen would and would not consider to be agency, because he embeds his conception in a Rawlsian-type system of negative freedom.545 Negative freedom constrains acts of agency which directly harm others.

However, less visible harms—structural and symbolic violence,546 and internal harms to emotional and spiritual dimensions of personhood—are much less likely to be constrained by Rawlsian negative freedoms. As I highlighted in Chapter 3, the women peacebuilders of Manipur must navigate both direct and structural forms of harm.547

Through this navigation, many women peacebuilders inadvertently allow structures like

544 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17–22.

545 Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 87; Sen, Development as Freedom, 64.

546 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Johan Galtung and Tord Hoivik, “Structural and Direct Violence: A Note on Operationalization,” Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 1 (1971): 73–76; Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence : The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998); Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

547 Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.”

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ethnicity and geography to mediate their initiatives, making some groups of women more or less likely to join peacebuilding efforts. Such actions may not represent direct harm which would be limited by Rawlsian negative freedom, but they create structural obstacles to an inclusive peace. These obstacles, designed by no single agent, and enacted by no individual, harm many women in genuine, embodied ways. Unless women peacebuilders confront and mitigate structural violence, they will utterly fail to promote peace and justice for all women, or for all of Manipur, contrary to their stated goals. Sen’s limitations on agency based on negative freedom thus do not go far enough.

Agency must be contextualized by something like well-being, or guiding criteria, in order for us to adequately evaluate agentic actions.

4.3.1.3.1 Sen: agency, autonomy, and empowerment

As Sen expounds upon his definition of agency in Development as Freedom, assumptions about autonomy548 begin to creep in, including emphases upon women’s

“voice,” “independence,” and “empowerment.”549 But must acting as an agent in one’s own life mean living autonomously? Furthermore, what does empowerment really mean, particularly if it is divorced from guiding criteria that suggest what an empowered life might look like? Again, I find that the lack of guiding criteria hampers Sen’s approach.

548 In Crocker’s synthesis and re-articulation of Sen’s conception of agency, he explicitly lists autonomy as an aspect of agency. Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 155–156.

549 Sen, Development as Freedom, 191.

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Philosopher Jay Drydyk helpfully examines the ways in which agency and empowerment have suffered from conceptual muddiness within the capabilities approach. He notes that Sabina Alkire and Solava Ibrahim have delineated dozens of different definitions for both concepts, and that each is often used interchangeably with the other.550 Drydyk thus seeks to clarify the meaning of empowerment, distinguishing it from agency while addressing agency’s weaknesses—primarily, its subjective nature, and its inability to evaluate the goals which are being pursued. Drydyk contends that whereas agency, in its most stripped-down form, is merely “a given person’s degree of involvement in a course of action,”551 empowerment has “three distinct but related dimensions: agency, well-being freedom, and power.”552

Drydyk recognizes the value in conceiving of agency as a distinct concept, but he responds with a critique of agency’s inability to account for adaptive preferences; changes in well-being; and power relations that constrain choices between individuals, as well as between and within groups of people.553 Sen might evaluate the agency decisions of Kuki, Naga, and Meitei women with the same metric, neglecting historic and present differences between and among their groups. If a Naga woman is involved

550 Jay Drydyk, “Empowerment, Agency, and Power,” Journal of Global Ethics 9, no. 3 (2013): 249; Sabina Alkire, Concepts and Measures of Agency, OPHI Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 9 (Oxford: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 2008); Solava Ibrahim and Sabina Alkire, “Agency and Empowerment: A Proposal for Internationally Comparable Indicators,” Oxford Development Studies 35, no. 4 (2007): 380–403.

551 Drydyk, “Empowerment, Agency, and Power,” 251.

552 Ibid., 260.

553 Ibid., 253–257.

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in a peacebuilding initiative which effects change, then she is an agent, according to Sen.

But Drydyk would prefer to evaluate her involvement in the context of empowerment, considering agency alongside the dimensions of well-being freedom and power.

Empowerment can account for relationships and evaluate the worthwhile nature of goals, whereas agency (divorced from guiding criteria) cannot. Thus, a Naga woman who participates in a successful peacebuilding initiative might be an agent who is still not empowered, if she is involved and yet considered an outsider by the men in her peacebuilding group. One Naga woman whom I interviewed, GS, discussed the myriad obstacles that she faced as one of just two women participating in the Naga Forum for

Reconciliation. The men viewed the women as representatives of women’s views, not as full participants in the Forum.554 GS was an un-empowered agent—acting for peace, but struggling against the power relations which historically guide men’s and women’s political interactions within the Naga ethnic group. Drydyk’s close consideration of empowerment is thus much more useful for understanding the women peacebuilders of

Manipur than Sen’s sloppy discussion of agency in Development as Freedom, where he remarks that agency can be increased through empowerment without properly defining, or accounting for, relational power.555 Relationships are important for understanding agency, whether they serve as a constraint or a support. Guiding criteria that pay

554 GS, July 8, 2015.

555 Sen, Development as Freedom, 191.

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attention to relational power—essentially, which employ skeptical scrutiny—would help

Sen to avoid this oversight.

4.3.1.3.2 Sen: agency and change

Sen’s definition of agency also requires that an agent bring about change.556 I find three problems with this argument. (1) This condition values actual achievement more than striving after something but failing; (2) it implies that achievement (or its lack) depends upon the individual who attempts to act as an agent; and (3) it implies that lasting social change, or an achievement with some longevity, is the proper goal.

What if an agent acts purposefully, but fails to achieve her goals because of external constraints? Women in Manipur often agitate but achieve very little change.

One Meira Paibi woman who participated in the well-known, controversial protest at

Kangla Fort marks the Kangla event as her greatest achievement in organizing for peace.557 Following the death of Thangjam Manorama, Meira Paibi protests created enough disturbances in the public that the central government handed the keys of the fort back to the people of Manipur, overturning decades of occupation by paramilitary forces.558 Although this gesture made the Meira Paibis feel like their voices were heard, and that they had brought about positive political change for the people of Manipur, a

556 This emphasis on change is likewise important to Crocker’s understanding of Sen’s view of agency. Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 155–156.

557 IN, June 16, 2014.

558 N. Vijaylakshmi Brara, Politics, Society and Cosmology in India’s North East (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82.

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Naga woman bitterly pointed out that the protest did nothing to improve women’s rights.559 The nude protest was intended to illuminate the particular injustices that women living under military occupation face. The government responded to the protest not by changing the structures of militarization which harm women on a daily basis, but by symbolically allowing civilians to enter a previously occupied fort. Very little changed on the ground for women.

Are the Meira Paibis, who responded to the killing of Thangjam Manorama with creative, intense, public displays of their dissatisfaction, agents? According to Sen, perhaps not, because their actions did not effect change in terms of their goals. But IN, the Meira Paibi leader with whom I spoke, declares, “This is something [in which] we have succeeded!” The protest was a direct result of their feelings of helplessness, quickly followed by a resolution to do something: “We cannot sit, we cannot rest in our homes!”560 Not a lot has changed for the women in Manipur, and yet the Meira Paibis conceived of and executed an action which registered their outrage with the public conscience. Are they not agents?

Moreover, peace is not a resting state that is ever achieved, but rather a practice that is always being worked out. As I will argue in Chapter 6, critical feminist justpeace must be a process that focuses on building relationships, rather than a state that can be established. Certainly women peacebuilders in Manipur will celebrate victories such as

559 GJ, July 1, 2015.

560 IN, June 16, 2014.

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ceasefires, winning court cases, the revision of discriminatory laws, and the creation of new norms around women’s economic activity and widow re-marriage. Their striving for peace, however, is a way of life. As peacebuilding agents, they remain in constant pursuit of peace, justice, and development, with or without achievements to illustrate their agency. One important aspect of guiding criteria, therefore, is an emphasis upon striving, rather than achievement.

Sen’s approach to agency presents these three problems that I have highlighted—the separation of agency from well-being, a lack of attention to power, and an over-emphasis on change—because of his lack of guiding criteria. I now show the ways in which Nussbaum’s use of the concept of human flourishing, as delineated in her list of central human capabilities, serves as guiding criteria that make her approach to agency better-suited for engaging with peacebuilding praxis in Manipur.

4.3.1.3.3 Nussbaum: agency indivisible from well-being

Nussbaum does not employ Sen’s sharp distinction between well-being and agency, arguing that the differentiation between capabilities and functioning can capture all that is needed to understand a human acting in pursuit of her own goals related to human flourishing—guiding criteria.561 An individual is guaranteed a threshold of ten human capabilities, and by exercising her agency, she can choose which

561 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 14, 69; Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 159.

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functionings she wishes to pursue. Thus Nussbaum implicitly builds agency into her entire framework, as it is involved in the process of converting capabilities into functionings. Nussbaum also explicitly folds agency into her approach, at least by way of human capabilities (6) and (10)a, practical reason and control over one’s political environment, if not also through others.562 She defines practical reason as “being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life.”563 Control over one’s political environment means “being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.”564

Although Nussbaum does not overtly define agency as Sen does, its expression within these two capabilities shares many elements with his conception: intention, participation, and effectiveness. Intention means that agency is not incidental. An individual must conceive of her own goals and work to achieve them; i.e., she must take ownership of a capability and purposefully convert resources into a functioning achievement. With the emphasis on participation, Nussbaum seems to be promoting what Sen and Crocker would refer to as direct agency—having a direct impact on the

562 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 160.

563 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 79.

564 Ibid., 80.

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world by way of one’s own actions.565 Finally, effectiveness means that an agent must succeed in the goals which she pursues.

If their conceptions of agency are so similar, do Sen’s and Nussbaum’s respective decisions to (a) distinguish between, or (b) combine agency and well-being matter for their approaches? David Crocker argues that Sen’s idea of agency as distinct from well- being is incredibly important for the expansion of freedom of individuals.566 He finds that

Nussbaum’s lack of focus on agency, however, leaves her “unable to do full justice to people’s actual freedom to shape their own lives, including their own decisions with respect to which freedoms to make most important in their lives.”567

I argue instead that Nussbaum’s use of guiding criteria helps to expand their freedoms. She insists upon a universal threshold (though specified at different levels according to local context) of human capabilities, including two which emphasize agency, which cannot be impinged upon. Her method of grounding these capabilities in intuition and philosophical argument, rather than leaving them open to public discussion, guarantees that any political decision made against agency or well-being will be sharply questioned, as it would fail to meet the guiding criteria understood to be necessary for a life of flourishing. Failing to provide each citizen with at least a threshold-level ability to employ practical reason and to have a measure of control over

565 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 155–156.

566 Ibid., 161.

567 Ibid.

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the political environment is to deny that agency is of central importance to human flourishing. Because agency is part of flourishing, it is therefore worthy of protection from decisions which would prevent its ability to be exercised in the future.568

Counterintuitively, this move appears to limit agency in the short-run, as it disqualifies some decisions from being taken. However, guiding criteria help to ensure that individuals and groups may exercise agency in the long-run.

Nussbaum provides a helpful example of such a decision in a discussion of female genital mutilation. This tradition tends to be performed and defended by women, and many young girls consent to the process because of its status as an important initiation into womanhood. However, female genital mutilation is tied to severe health risks and has a negative impact on future sexual functioning. It is nearly always performed on young girls, and it is non-reversible. Thus, Nussbaum argues that it should be banned, because it limits the human capabilities of bodily health and bodily integrity of an already-vulnerable group.569 A short-term ban on female genital mutilation fosters the long-term capability of girls to choose certain functionings. This is an expansion of agency, because it allows women and girls to exert their practical reason with regards to a tradition, and to control the ways in which their bodies might function. I would caution Nussbaum, however, that one of the goals of guiding criteria, working in conjunction with skeptical scrutiny and deliberative inquiry, is to help

568 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 81.

569 Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118–130.

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educate people about different possibilities for flourishing. The banning of dangerous traditions might be necessary in some extreme circumstances in which vulnerable people are going to experience irreversible harm, but guiding criteria should lead communities towards a critical discussion of the goods and bads associated with certain traditions. Many traditions are harmless and meaningful and should continue being practiced. Others can be much more insidious, particularly if they support gendered, racial, class- or religion-based hierarchies. Guiding criteria, particularly when paired with scrutiny that is skeptical of exploitation and deliberative inquiry that brings in new voices, can help a community to see traditions with new eyes and to make better- informed decisions. Such an open-ended, iterative process is ethically preferable to a blanket ban of a practice like female genital mutilation. Still, Nussbaum’s approach to agency and wellbeing, which makes use of guiding criteria like the capabilities of bodily health and bodily integrity, helps to guard against possible harm.

Sen might also consider female genital mutilation to be undesirable. However, his distinction between agency and well-being means that he cannot necessarily condemn the practice, particularly if a community has deliberated and decided to perform it, even with the eager consent of young women. It is not clear what might happen if Sen’s commitments to negative freedom contradict a decision reached through deliberative inquiry. Conversely, Nussbaum makes it clear that her list of capabilities—the guiding criteria of her approach—guides political deliberation, rather than potentially falling prey to it. Thus contra Crocker’s interpretation of Nussbaum as

“unable to do full justice to people’s actual freedom to shape their own lives,” I see 220

Nussbaum’s approach as better able to promote freedom than Sen’s.570 Rather than bowing to the results of any deliberative conversation, Nussbaum seeks what is best for a flourishing life.

4.3.1.3.4 Nussbaum: agency as interpersonal

In an earlier section on agency and autonomy, I argued that Sen’s approach to agency fails to account for the relational nature of power. Because agency is tied to well-being, including the ability to affiliate with others and to exercise practical reason,

Nussbaum’s approach much better accounts for the interpersonal nature of human decision-making. She recognizes that the agency freedoms of some will necessarily have an impact on the capabilities and functionings of others, whether positive or negative.

Altruistic behavior can enhance others’ capabilities, whereas selfish behavior can limit them. Nussbaum’s list can promote the former (within limits) while restricting the latter, whereas Sen’s open-ended approach could conceivably leave some individuals at the mercy of any vicious capability which could be considered valuable by someone. This might include the capability to abuse power or to over-consume resources to the detriment of others.571 I do not think that Sen would choose this; I am merely indicating that his approach, as it is laid out, would not necessarily stop such a scenario from occurring.

570 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 161.

571 Martha Nussbaum, “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice,” Feminist Economics 9, no. 2/3 (2003): 33–59; Qtd. in Robeyns, “The Capability Approach,” 106.

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By contrast, Nussbaum’s overtly moral (though not metaphysical) stance on the goodness of certain human abilities, and on the corresponding claim that such abilities ought to be developed, refuses to value those human capabilities which cannot withstand ethical scrutiny (for example, the capability for cruelty).572 Again, somewhat paradoxically, Nussbaum’s “limitation” of agents’ ability to choose functionings circumscribed by guiding criteria actually expands the array of valuable functionings and hence the field of play for agency.

This appears to be the way in which many women peacebuilders work in

Manipur, albeit with human rights and other articulations of justice, rather than capabilities. JH, director of a gender-oriented peacebuilding NGO called Gendi which often partners with MWGSN, travels around the state providing trainings in conflict resolution methods, women’s human rights, and issues related to violence against women. Using listed human rights as her basis for critique, she points out all of the ways in which traditional gender roles and specific cultural practices propagate violence against women. In particular, she targets the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship, which is the site of a great deal of violence against women.573 Insisting on all women’s rights to bodily integrity, JH persists in controversial rights education against many women’s desires to remain in the roles to which they are accustomed. The

572 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 83.

573 JH, June 11, 2014.

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substantive good of lives free from violence trumps the agency which would allow harmful traditions to persevere.

The presence of Nussbaum’s list does not negate the possibility of altruistic actions. A threshold level of capabilities for all, acting as guiding criteria, leaves plenty of room for individuals and groups to make trade-offs that involve deprivation for some so that others may flourish. One of Nussbaum’s architectonic capabilities is affiliation, which means that decisions about specification of capabilities and both individual and collective pursuit of functionings are made in reciprocal relations with others.574 Crocker argues that Nussbaum’s use of affiliation “obscures the personal sacrifices sometimes required to pursue or obtain a worthy goal.”575 To the contrary, I think that Nussbaum’s use of affiliation better recognizes the communal nature of human existence. Affiliation does not obscure personal sacrifices; it recognizes that small compromises and even large sacrifices are a part of everyday life. If each human is an end, then she must have reciprocal respect for those with whom she interacts, who are also ends.

4.3.1.3.5 Nussbaum: reasonable, emotional, religious, and anxious agents

One important distinction between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of agency remains. Sen openly relies on reasoning, and sometimes he implicitly tends toward rationality, as his basis for agency. Certainly he opposes the idea that individuals always

574 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 82; Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 162; Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism.

575 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 162.

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make decisions which maximize their self-interest.576 However, as Ingrid Robeyns notes, he tends to downplay the potential effects of groups upon individual agency.577 Mozaffar

Qizilbash has likewise pointed to the ways in which Sen’s training in economics leads him to emphasize individuals’ feasible sets of options, limited only by biological facts and logical possibilities.578 In reality, agency is both broader and narrower than Sen’s position acknowledges: broader, because agency can be exerted not only through individual reason, but also through collective traditions, religious practices, and emotions; narrower, because individuals’ options are often limited by much more than biology and logic. As I illustrated in Chapter 3, structural violence constrains the agency of women’s peacebuilding by working without a discernible actor. It limits women in concrete ways, although by neither biological facts nor logical possibilities.

Guiding criteria can guard against these mistakes. Nussbaum’s understanding of agency in terms of practical reason and control over the political environment may similarly privilege reasoned decision-making, but these versions of agency remain tied to emotions and religions. These non-reasoned ways of being are all vital components of

Nussbaum’s guiding criteria—her list of central human capabilities. She thus leaves

576 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 152.

577 Robeyns, “The Capability Approach,” 109. As examples of theorists who pay much more attention to the influence of social norms and group-based pressures, Robeyns cites Alkire, Valuing Freedoms; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development; Vegard Iversen, “Intra-Household Inequality: A Challenge for the Capability Approach?,” Feminist Economics 9, no. 2/3 (2003): 93–115.

578 Mozaffar Qizilbash, “Identity, Reason and Choice,” Economics and Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2014): 15.

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room for many types of agents, including emotional and religious agents. Practical reason does not—indeed, cannot—occur in isolation from the capability “to love, to grieve, [and] to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger.”579

Far from Sen’s focus on independence and empowerment, agency may also be exerted by way of vulnerability and anxiety. Eileen Botting uses Thomas Hobbes and

Mary Wollstonecraft to establish anxiety as a rational response to a dangerous environment. Rather than solely disabling the anxious person, anxiety’s fearful feelings can combine with reason to produce creative problem-solving skills, enabling the individual to escape the dangers that surround her.580

Manifesting fear, whether through tears, paralysis, or other side effects of trauma, is also potentially powerful. Many of the women of EEVFAM cry when they gather for peacebuilding meetings.581 Sometimes the meetings are directed towards trauma healing; sometimes they provide avenues for sharing and vetting testimonies that will be offered in a court of law; and sometimes they are strategy meetings for public protests. Anxious tears are politically relevant in each setting. Babloo

Loitongbam, the director of Human Rights Alert who facilitated the creation of EEVFAM, argues that when the widows cry in court, no one can deny the truth of their testimony.

579 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 79.

580 Eileen Hunt Botting, “Wollstonecraft, Hobbes, and the Rationality of Women’s Anxiety,” in Disability and Political Theory, ed. Barbara Arneil and Nancy Hirschmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

581 IA, June 26, 2015; RU, June 26, 2015; BK, July 2, 2015.

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He asserts, “They are much more compelling than the lawyers who read about the rights that have been violated or the laws that India is breaking. No one can question the women’s truths; no one can challenge them; they are the evidence.”582 Anxiety and its emotional manifestations aid the women in their political pursuits. Their agency is enhanced, rather than inhibited, by their emotional ties to their husbands and to one another. It is of vital importance to tie agency to emotion, as Nussbaum does.

Certainly, both religion and emotion can act as impediments to peacebuilding. As

I noted in Chapter 3, and as R. Scott Appleby has articulated in a well-known book on religious violence and peacebuilding, the effects of religion tend to be ambivalent.583

Christianity serves as a uniting force among warring Naga factions, but the lack of religious commonality can further divide these tribal groups from Hindu Meiteis. The ambivalence of religion’s effects, however, should not lead us to then discount religiously-inspired actions as non-agentic, as Sen seems to do.584 Emotions, like religion, can support or impede peacebuilding. EEVFAM widows’ anxious tears help them to achieve their goals, but Kuki anger and resentment towards Nagas blocks them from building the relationships that would give them peace of mind and peace in their communities. Still, emotional acts are the acts of agents who are trying to communicate needs and desires and to strive for change. I argued in Chapter 3 that those actions

582 BL, June 26, 2015.

583 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred : Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).

584 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007).

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which detract from justpeace ought not to be considered peacebuilding agency. Actions that build peace, however, are agentic, even in spite of their religious or emotional nature.

4.3.1.3.6 Sen and Nussbaum: agency and time

Thus far, I have used examples of peacebuilding praxis to highlight important differences between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s approaches to agency. The two approaches share one oversight, however, which would improve human development analysis if it were taken into account. Peacebuilding praxis in Manipur points to the importance of supporting human capabilities with an overt consciousness of time. Historical analysis reveals that the sequence in which capabilities are turned into functionings helps to determine the ability of women peacebuilders to achieve other functionings in the future. Sen’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of agency should employ history to understand the implications of sequencing.

For both Sen and Nussbaum, human development processes appear to exist outside of time. Each worries about debilitating structures of discrimination and inequality, but neither articulates the need for particular, historical analysis which can help to uncover the origins of those structures. Rather than blithely asserting that it is worthwhile to increase everyone’s agency freedom, Sen ought to advocate for an exploration of historical differences in such freedom, so that affirmative action-type programs can narrow the “agency gap” as the process of human development unfolds.

Such a move can consider historic power differentials, such as the ethnicity of the Chief

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Minister of the state of Manipur over time, the evolving gendered composition of the village councils, and the traditional balance of power within the home. A woman who is the first to enter the village council will have a very different experience from the woman who follows in another’s footsteps.

One Kabui tribal woman whom I observed at a MWGSN district meeting in

Bishnupur shared her story of political involvement in her village. She said that traditionally, only the men of her tribal group could gain access to the thoubei—the place in the village for having political discussions and making decisions. Although she was unwelcome, she forced her way in to the thoubei and eventually ran for the position of councilor and won. Now she is the head of the village council, and women may freely enter the thoubei. Many women still do not exercise this right because of the weight of custom, but those who do find a much warmer welcome than this first woman.585 It is much easier for them to convert capabilities into functionings. Agency should be evaluated and supported according to such shifts in power and tradition over time.

Embedding sequential analysis into the human development approach would also expand the timeframe of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s conceptions of agency. A woman’s act might not lead immediately to the realization of her goals, but perhaps her goals are long-term. Short-run sacrifices might be necessary for long-term gains, and the human

585 Field notes, June 4, 2014.

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development approach needs a way to explicitly consider the trade-offs that are implicated in such considerations. Similarly, short-term gains in, e.g., income equality might be lauded in the present, even though they are harming humans’ long-term capacity to live on this earth. Nussbaum’s focus on the environment reveals such a concern, to some extent.586 However, both she and Sen should add a more explicit focus on the need to consider present agency’s relationship to both the past and the future.

Temporal concerns should thus become part of the guiding criteria for human development, as they have already proved useful for understanding peacebuilding.

4.3.1.4 3. Does the list assist with the problem of adaptive preferences?

Sen and Nussbaum both support ethical individualism within a liberal framework, which takes the individual as the most important unit of ethical concern.587

Respecting such an individual’s dignity means taking her preferences seriously.

However, exercising skeptical scrutiny, both Sen and Nussbaum are wary of the ways in which grinding poverty and habitual deprivation can deform preferences. Thus, they offer the evaluative space of capabilities, in part, as a corrective for promoting the satisfaction of deformed, or adaptive, preferences. Sen’s and Nussbaum’s ability to deal

586 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 80, 94.

587 Robeyns, “The Capability Approach,” 108. Robeyns opposes this to ontological individualism. According to Robeyns, “in [the ontological] view, society is built up from individuals only, and hence is nothing more than the sum of individuals and their properties.” By contrast, ethical individualism can value the individual while still conceiving of her in relation to other societal structures. See also Alkire and Deneulin, “The Human Development and Capability Approach,” 35.

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with such preferences differs largely because of the respective absence or presence of guiding criteria in their approaches. More effectively than Sen, Nussbaum can counteract the potential dangers of adaptive preferences, because of her listing of capabilities and her strong stance on behalf of the substantive good.

How do adaptive preferences arise, and what problems might they pose for human development? Sen illustrates the phenomenon with a discussion of gender inequality within the family.

“In family behaviour, inequalities between women and men (and between girls and boys) are often accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘appropriate’ (even though they are typically not explicitly discussed). Sometimes the operational decisions relating to these inequalities (e.g. providing more health care or nutritional attention to boys vis-à-vis girls) are undertaken and executed through the agency of women themselves. The perceived justness of such inequalities and the absence of any contrary sense of deep injustice play a major part in the operation and survival of these arrangements.”588

Women harm themselves and their daughters not only by failing to question, but also by failing to see, the inequities in their lot in life. Habitual discrimination bends preferences so that women become unable to articulate a desire for a better life. I believe that Sen wrongly refers to this as women’s agency. His promotion of substantive freedoms helps to critique these actions of women which promote boys’ wellbeing above girls’. His reluctance to list guiding criteria, however, make it more difficult for

588 Amartya Sen, “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 260.

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communities to know which human capabilities are non-negotiable. Which choices does a community have a right to interfere with? If external criteria cannot guide our evaluation of agency, then how are we to guard against adaptive preferences which seem to harm girls at a much greater rate than boys? Sen tries to guard against them by insisting on using capabilities, rather than preferences, for the evaluative space of quality of life and well-being. Such capabilities are to be delineated and evaluated by public reason and critical scrutiny, so they should avoid granting authority to unscrutinized preferences which have become deformed by habituation. His approach to agency, lacking guiding criteria, does not clearly lay out a method for dealing with such choices if public reason fails to address them.

Nussbaum’s approach to agency is better able than Sen’s to counteract adaptive preferences, because of the attention that it pays to the types of capabilities which are minimally necessary for flourishing.589 Her articulation of guiding criteria is vital for a genuine defense against preferences that have been formed by poverty and discrimination. If Nussbaum were to address Sen’s scenario of a mother allocating more food and medicine to her sons than to her daughters, she would employ her concept of a universal threshold of the human capability for bodily health as a basis for critique.

Sens’ approach, by contrast, would have to allow public deliberation about allocation of

589 With this argument, I am in agreement with an important, recent book by Serene Khader. She offers a "'deliberative perfectionist approach’ to public intervention in the lives of people with adaptive preferences,” which relies on an idea of what human flourishing looks like. Serene J. Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

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goods to children. If an entire community prefers to privilege the well-being of boys over that of girls, then the girls might be left with sub-threshold levels of capabilities for health and flourishing.590 Perhaps even more importantly, intra-family allocation of food might not be a subject which a community deems appropriate for public deliberation.591

The topic might never surface as one of political injustice, which deserves to be scrutinized by Sen’s public reason. I will return to some of these issues in the next section, on deliberation.

Is Nussbaum’s approach to adaptive preferences a form of neo-colonialism, which assumes that Western correctives to mal-adaption are superior to local traditions? She notes that Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, used the concept to talk about Indians’ mentality towards their colonizers. According to Nehru,

Indians accepted their subservience to the British “as the natural and inevitable ordering of our lives and destiny. We developed the mentality of a good country-house servant.”592 For Nehru, recognizing mal-adaption over time was key for the possibility of future liberation. The critique of adaptive preferences can come from those who have adapted, even if Nehru is not necessarily representative of the ideological tendencies of

590 This mirrors Susan Okin’s critique of Rawls and other liberals, who seem to place the family beyond the demands of justice. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

591 Iris Marion Young has offered feminist critiques of deliberative democracy’s tendency to promote rational discourse about public sphere issues. Deliberation typically excludes intra-family relations. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37–44.

592 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, Centenary Edition 1989 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1936), 417; qtd. in Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 150.

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the average Indian.593 Nussbaum would argue that even an outside critic’s insistence upon a life which guarantees options for human flourishing is far from coercive; instead, it guarantees greater freedom for marginalized people who may fail to articulate a desire for it. To work against adaptive preferences by way of implementing the capabilities on Nussbaum’s list is to de-colonize—to liberate from the constraints of elite capture.

One way in which elites can mal-form preferences is through political domination, whether as colonizers or local leaders. This line of thought leads us to the second broad issue which I wish to highlight within the human development approach— the role of deliberation. Does deliberative inquiry promote or impede domination?

4.3.2 Deliberative inquiry

Even partial theories of justice require legs to stand upon. Both Sen and

Nussbaum provide such legs through their foundationalism, in a non-metaphysical sense. They look within human experience for various forms of individual and communal well-being. To discover these foundations, open-ended though they may be, Sen promotes public deliberation, while Nussbaum advocates for cooperative critical discourse (within limits).594 Both employ what Crocker refers to as a “cross-cultural

593 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 150.

594 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 110.

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extension of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium.”595 In A Theory of Justice, Rawls offers reflective equilibrium as a method of considered judgment. Through ongoing reflection, individuals compare their own sense of what is fair to the basic principles of justice, testing and changing their views until the most just arrangement is chosen.596

Nussbaum tends to do such testing herself, giving to the philosopher the task of articulating and defending the political (not metaphysical) conception of the good life, which should then be transformed into constitutional principles.”597 She compares and assesses popular and philosophical views about the good life, and then makes a proposal about the substantive content of central human capabilities. Nussbaum then subjects her proposal to further cross-cultural debate.598 Thus, for Nussbaum, deliberative inquiry occurs only within the constraints of the guiding criteria she has already laid out, which come primarily from philosophy and intuition.599 She defends this move by arguing that our intuitions about substantive goods can be as good as our intuitions about fair processes. To that end, she is more interested in guaranteeing the outcome of human flourishing—essentially, in being guided by her guiding criteria—

595 Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics,” in World Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, ed. J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13 quoted in Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 111. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 151.

596 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 43.

597 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 124.

598 Ibid., 111–112.

599 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 76.

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than in promoting an inclusive deliberative process which might lead to human languishing.600

Part of Nussbaum’s justification of the list, and the subsequent, relatively low role which she ascribes to public deliberation, comes from her reliance upon the Kantian idea of human dignity.601 Nussbaum’s principle of every person as an end, rather than as merely means, argues that each person ought to be able to choose her own conception of the good life, in terms of pursuing the particular functionings which she has reason to value. She aims to shape her own life (within constraints), rather than having it shaped for her. Nussbaum believes that her list is an “intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being”; thus, she views her list as a necessary political step towards guaranteeing and guarding that dignity universally.602 To the guiding principle of treating each human as an end, Nussbaum adds the principle of moral constraint, conceived of as protecting individuals from practices that would harm their own capabilities or the capabilities of others.603 This principle helps Nussbaum to protect individuals from practices that harm their capabilities, and hence their human dignity and flourishing, even if a democratic majority votes otherwise, and even if they would consent to them because of adaptive or other preferences.

600 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 249.

601 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 188.

602 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5.

603 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 189; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 190–194.

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Crocker argues that Nussbaum’s use of Kant “does no work with respect to any of the specific items on her list.” For example, he notes that it is difficult to see how the dignity of someone with dementia is tied to her ability to play or to control her environment.604 For this reason, and many others, Crocker questions the utility and suitability of a canonical list of capabilities, as opposed to a contextual list which is the product of public deliberation.605 However, I think that Nussbaum uses Kantian ideals of autonomy and dignity differently than Crocker claims. Kant does not help her to identify and justify the content of her list. Instead, Kant justifies the existence of her list. In her view, human dignity and flourishing are so important that they cannot be left at the mercy of the discrimination and deprivation that might arise from local reasoning.

Against this possibility, Nussbaum takes a strong stand on behalf of the substantive good of universal values. Thus Nussbaum’s use of Kantian dignity helps to explain her seemingly low respect for the role of public deliberation. Whether Nussbaum’s privileging of flourishing over deliberation is justifiable is up for debate, and indeed, many scholars have questioned the wisdom of this decision.606 I will soon return to this question.

Sen’s approach differs starkly from Nussbaum’s. Rather than granting prominent influence to primarily white, male, Western philosophers, he ascribes the role of testing

604 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 190.

605 Ibid., 197.

606 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 107; Jaggar, “Reasoning about Well- Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities.”

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arguments about the substantive good to self-governing groups, on the local, national, and global levels. Such groups use democratic deliberation to lay out and evaluate the freedoms that are important to them. Then they form public policy on the basis of such deliberation.607 Sen argues that such public scrutiny limits the influence of harmful traditions, indoctrination, and adaptive preferences.608 Thus, he supports deliberation with arguments on behalf of both process and outcome. It remains to be seen whether or not the process can ensure the outcome which he desires—greater freedom for all, across multiple dimensions of capabilities.

Sen ties his support of deliberation to the need to promote agency, both individual and collective. He stresses the vital importance of individuals and communities choosing their own capabilities and functionings in light of their own contexts, experiences, and purposes. Where Nussbaum relies on philosophical scrutiny and intuition about what is required for a life of human flourishing, Sen limits himself to arguing on behalf of an evaluative space (capabilities) within which citizens should determine for themselves which capabilities are appropriate for their own communities.

He firmly supports citizen participation in the selection, specification, and weighting of capabilities, as this participatory role is an important aspect of substantive political freedom.609 He also points out that giving a large role to public discussion can be

607 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 111.

608 Ibid., 111–112.

609 Sen, Development as Freedom, 33, 78–79.

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instrumental in promoting other capabilities. For instance, public discussion of fertility rates has resulted in smaller families in Kerala, India. Political and social dialogues resulted in lower fertility rates which raised the quality of life for young women.610

However, this example of Sen’s could easily occur within Nussbaum’s framework. The supposed constraints associated with Nussbaum’s list would not have to limit local-level dialogues about the goods associated with low fertility rates. There is an important difference between public debate around capabilities when they are interred as constitutional principles, and the choices about functionings which individuals make (e.g., whether or not to use birth control).611 Nussbaum’s philosophical proposal for constitutional capabilities, across cultures, does little to limit the choices that people make day-to-day. Instead, it tries to guarantee, at the highest level, the social bases which enable citizens to make choices.

Sen asserts that “to insist on a ‘fixed forever’ list of capabilities would deny the possibility of progress in social understanding, and also go against the productive role of public discussion, social agitation, and open debates.”612 Nussbaum insists, however, that her list is humble, contestable, and open to local specification. She also makes it clear that the philosopher’s role in conceiving of the list is not a one-time job resulting in a static litany of capabilities. She writes, “Since the intuitive conception of human

610 Ibid., 153.

611 Many thanks to Amitava Dutt for this insight.

612 Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” 160; quoted in Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 194.

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functioning and capability demands continued reflection and testing against our intuitions, we should view any given version of the list as a proposal put forward in a

Socratic fashion, to be tested against the most secure of our intuitions as we attempt to arrive at a type of reflective equilibrium.”613 Moreover, the list’s method of implementation—constitutional principles—should be subjected to individual countries’ methods of public amendment, just like any other constitutional principles. Nussbaum does not recommend a global constitution, but rather a series of locally-specified national conceptions of human capabilities.

In order to be persuasive about his own approach, therefore, Sen must turn his attention away from Nussbaum’s list and onto deliberation itself. He must more fully explain and justify the justice which is present or absent in his use of public reason, especially when it comes to women or other marginalized people who may be disadvantaged in a deliberative scenario. Many theorists, and especially feminists, have worked to expose the gaps and assumptions of deliberative democracy, and Sen’s under-theorized method fails to correct for these problems. In Inclusion and Democracy,

Iris Marion Young powerfully argues that “in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be just.”614 Those who promote deliberation as a means of conceiving just policies tend to hold many problematic assumptions. They often privilege a certain type of argument which relies on shared premises and proceeds to a logical conclusion. This

613 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 77.

614 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 37.

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narrows political communication to rational arguments, potentially at the exclusion of other artful or emotional appeals. In Crocker’s analysis, Sen’s emphasis upon deliberation involves the “rational scrutiny of options.”615 What forms of communication are excluded by rational scrutiny? Sen’s framework might discount the nude protests of the Meira Paibis at the gates of Kangla Fort, or Irom Sharmila’s fifteen-year fast in protest of AFSPA. These forms of political communication make poignant, emotional appeals in registers other than thoughtful rationality.616 They are meant to evoke visceral reactions which stop others short, making them wonder what sort of injustice could provoke such a form of protest.

Young further points out that deliberative democracy theorists also tend to privilege unity, whether as a starting point or as an end goal. But this privileging sees different interests and diverse social locations as obstacles to be overcome, rather than as a potential resource. Such a view tends to narrow the agenda for deliberation, and a unified “common good” often excludes those with marginal views.617 Sen’s promotion of deliberation around collective goals may promote political freedom in some ways, but it may limit it in others if its result is a so-called unified decision which privileges the most vocal, the most persuasive, the most traditional, or the most innovative. Adaptive preferences likewise pose a real danger for open deliberation. Sen relies too much, even

615 Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, 207.

616 William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

617 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 40–44.

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if implicitly, on the Habermasian assumption that a procedure characterized by rational equality leads to substantive good.618

Brooke Ackerly offers arguments similar to those of Young in her work Political

Theory and Feminist Social Criticism. Many theorists of deliberative democracy focus on the conditions necessary for deliberation to be just. Sen would do well to explicitly add such conditions to his own advocacy on behalf of deliberation about capabilities.

However, even if he were to name basic requirements for just deliberation—according to theorists such as Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson: self-respect, mutual respect, equality, and reasonable argument—he would still face Ackerly’s charge that such conditions are absent in many, if not all, societies.619 In Ackerly’s view, this does not mean that deliberation is useless. Indeed, it is a critical aspect of social criticism which can enhance the justness of a society. However, she argues that deliberation must self-consciously confront its own weaknesses, always pushing to be

“more informed, collective, and un-coerced.”620 Essentially, deliberative inquiry requires skeptical scrutiny—a heightened awareness of hierarchies and exclusions—in order to be just. Such scrutiny might transform the understanding of deliberation, to involve

618 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms : Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

619 Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 17–34; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996); cited in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 9.

620 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 12.

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social movements, protests, and acts of civil disobedience. Such work, typical of peacebuilding, provides important information about political injustices. Protests and other less formal modes of political engagement are also more likely to include marginalized peoples who are not invited to public forums or who will never be elected to public offices.

An additional problem with relying on deliberation to flesh out Sen’s bare-bones approach to capabilities, and especially with adopting Rawlsian conceptions of public reason and deliberation, lies with the topics that this approach might exclude. Rawls defines deliberation in terms of an exchange of views and debate over supporting reasons on matters of public concern, particularly constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.621 Constitutional essentials as they typically exist today, and as Rawls frames them, exclude many of Nussbaum’s essential capabilities, such as play, imagination, and reciprocal affiliations. Nussbaum notes that many of these are what

Rawls has referred to as “natural goods,” which individuals acquire as a matter of luck.

She admits that governments cannot aspire to health and happiness for all of their citizens, yet they can put policies in place which aim to create the social basis that enables citizens to realize these capabilities. Nussbaum writes, “The capabilities approach insists that this requires doing a great deal to make up for differences in starting point that are caused by natural endowment or by power.”622 Correcting for

621 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 138–139.

622 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 81.

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such differences is essential for human flourishing, and yet Rawls and his fellow proceduralist, Habermas, exclude aspects of the human life such as emotion and imagination from political debate.623 But just as emotion is important for agency, it may be central to deliberation, broadly conceived.

Many of my male interviewees in Manipur argue for the exclusion of emotion from politics. An anthropology professor at Manipur University told me about his own interviews with some of the Meira Paibis who participated in the nude protests. He claimed that the women were confused about their political roles, as he argued:

“Manipuri women are acting politically out of emotion or out of motherly affection. If so, then their political role is very low. … If I say you are a political actor, you have your own political aspirations and ideology. And your action will be directed by your ideology, not by your heart, not by your sentiment. Politics is above emotion. Politics is above sentiment. … So they have been confused.”624

Many other men whom I interviewed either held a similar view or confirmed that such a view is common among men.625 However, the women who agitated on the basis of motherhood self-identified as political actors.626 The motivation of motherhood, or

623 Ibid., 249.

624 AK, June 23, 2015.

625 BR, June 25, 2015; SB, July 21, 2015. Of course, many men in India, participating in various religious and mystic traditions, would gladly blur the boundary between reason and feeling, philosophy and religion. See Yoshinori Takeuchi, The Heart of Buddhism: In Search of the Timeless Spirit of Primitive Buddhism, trans. James W. Heisig (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

626 IN, June 16, 2014; IN2, July 5, 2015.

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more generally, emotional attachment, does not disqualify actions or discussion from being political.627

Adding skeptical scrutiny to deliberative inquiry would also pay attention to women’s ability to leave the home for the purposes of political organizing. BK, a young

Meitei woman who was widowed after an extrajudicial execution, faced harsh criticism from her relatives and her community whenever she attempted to leave the house. The

Meitei community tends to stigmatize unmarried women who enter the public sphere, assuming that they are going out to meet men. In actuality, BK was leaving her house to participate in EEVFAM. Her political work as a public peacebuilder thus had to be conducted despite a great deal of local pressure and stigma. Only after she was interviewed on television for her work with EEVFAM, did her family and neighbors begin to believe that she was leaving the home for reasons which they deemed honorable.

These familial, grassroots-level norms about women’s roles cannot be left out of deliberative considerations of justice. We will never know how many women lack the courage or the opportunity to fight unfair stigma, for every BK who succeeds.

Finally, to turn away from general issues related to deliberation and back towards the explicit role of public discussion in relation to a list of capabilities, it is worth inquiring which groups are better served by which approach. Sen promotes participatory freedom: nothing should prevent anyone from participating in political

627 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

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debate about capabilities.628 Individuals must be protected from things that potentially inhibit their freedom, such as local traditions, Asian values, and religious fundamentalism.629 Once those protections are in place, individuals are encouraged to come forward and articulate their own preferences, desires, goals, and visions for themselves and for society. Although they are free to participate, in the sense of being unconstrained, the burden lies with these individuals to make their voices heard. The society’s respect for the capabilities of, e.g., an impoverished, uneducated woman, may rest in part upon her ability to work up the courage to speak in front of a large group of people, perhaps upon social and political issues which she is unable to understand clearly because of low levels of education.

MWGSN staff members come up against this difficulty every time they facilitate meetings between widows and local politicians. These meetings can turn antagonistic, as widows try to hold local officials accountable for their nationally-delineated benefits.

I witnessed a shouting match between an angry widow and an indifferent politician who claimed that her hands were tied by the higher-ups.630 Incompetent politicians deny responsibility while widows, often poorly educated and untrained, try to scrape by as daily wage laborers performing back-breaking work. The widow whom I observed certainly had plenty of courage, but her low standing in the society made it relatively

628 Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty.

629 Sen, Development as Freedom, 32.

630 Field notes, June 10, 2014.

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easy for the politician to simply pass the blame up the chain of command, rather than take her demand seriously by helping her to collect the benefits which the government owes her.

By contrast, Nussbaum’s guiding criteria offer an intuitive list of ten aspects of human flourishing, which is then elaborated upon and specified through local discussion. For her, deliberation occurs within the constraints of guiding criteria; therefore, the burden of justification lies upon those who would wish to strike items from the list. Vocal proponents of a patriarchal system might wish to eliminate a human capability such as bodily integrity, or a specification of it which includes bans on domestic violence or reproductive rights. However, such proponents would have to lay out their reasons for such specifications. The powerful would have to justify their actions which would harm the powerless. In the confrontation which I described above, the local politician would have to justify her actions to the widow rather than simply passing the blame and escaping the responsibilities associated with her office. This is a strikingly different scenario than what we find with many forms of deliberation, in which the powerless must justify themselves. Guiding criteria enable women who did not necessarily realize that they needed or wanted a certain capability to learn about opportunities and decide whether they wish to pursue them. Women whose preferences have adapted in favor of submission might still agree to the deprivation of certain capabilities, but such deprivation would be a tragic choice away from human flourishing, according to Nussbaum and according to many cultures all across the world.

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Still, there is a potential dark underbelly to Nussbaum’s insistence upon creating universal opportunities for human flourishing: top-down moral reasoning. I have shown multiple ways in which deliberation may be dangerous for the most marginalized, but is

Nussbaum’s intuitive method truly better? Is it, in fact, the “pure theory” which Sen criticizes as denying fruitful public deliberation?631 Alison Jaggar charges Nussbaum with

“covert authoritarian[ism],” as she “does not allow everyone to participate as equals in developing moral theories but instead encourages ‘us,’ the theory builders, to use the ideas of others as evidence or raw data for ‘our’ theories.”632 Ackerly likewise criticizes

Nussbaum for failing to probe for the concerns of those who are silent or excluded.633

Guiding criteria are useful, but without the deliberative inquiry which constantly re- visits them, plumbing for unjust hierarchies (with the lens of skeptical scrutiny), they may marginalize or altogether miss the concerns of those who are not involved in the process of local specification of capabilities. Moreover, Nussbaum’s method of putting the guiding criteria into constitutions might cut short the iterative process which Ackerly promotes.

Nussbaum would respond to Jaggar and Ackerly that her intuitive method is far from Sen’s “pure theory,” as it encompasses years of travel and interviews and general

631 Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” 157.

632 Jaggar, “Reasoning about Well-Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities,” 319.

633 Ibid. Ackerly’s criticisms of Nussbaum sharpen in her later work. I will return to this issue in the next chapter. .

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exposure to the lives of women in developing countries.634 However, her approach leaves much less room for deliberative inquiry, relative to Sen’s. Just as Sen’s deliberative approach requires the interventions of skeptical scrutiny and guiding criteria, Nussbaum’s guiding criteria would be more inclusive and hence more justifiable if they were opened up to iterative deliberation. Nussbaum promotes local specification of her capabilities, to be sure, but this is only after she has already set the agenda for deliberation. In Ackerly’s framework, in which all are social critics, the process of agenda setting should itself be deliberative. In peacebuilding praxis in Manipur, the agenda setting by one group of women, Meiteis, often excludes the needs and desires of non-

Meitei women. Guiding criteria cannot be the product of one philosopher, or of one group.

4.4 Conclusions

Putting the peacebuilding praxis of the women of Manipur into conversation with Sen’s and Nussbaum’s thought on human development has been very fruitful, for both theory and praxis, suggesting that the typical divide between the two is harmful for both.

634 Abbey cites an exchange between Nussbaum and Susan Moller Okin, in which Nussbaum defends herself against a similar claim with an argument much like the one that I have made. According to Abbey, “Nussbaum implies that the more important place for dialogue about the human capabilities approach comes not in its formulation but in debates about its adoption.” Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, 174; See Martha Nussbaum, “On Hearing Women’s Voices: A Reply to Susan Okin,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32, no. 2 (2004): 193–205.

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Using evidence from Manipur, I have shown that it is important for human development analysis to:

(1) Conceive of human freedoms, or flourishing, by listing necessary elements of a free or flourishing life. Such guiding criteria place the burden of proof upon those who would deny freedoms, rather than those who would ask for them.

(2) Conceive of agency as part of well-being, not separate from it, so that we can evaluate the outcomes of agents’ decisions.

(3) Add an explicit consciousness of time, in terms of sequencing and historical analysis, to considerations of human freedoms and human flourishing.

(4) Support only those deliberations which account for power differentials.

(5) Support only guiding criteria which are the product of inclusive, power-conscious deliberation.

I have also used human development theory to show that culturally-bound, locally-grounded peacebuilders must raise up some practices at the expense of others.

Even as it respects individual and collective agency, peacebuilding should not support views of politics which narrowly define its scope, leaving out emotions, traditions, religious values, and group attachments; nor should it include some types of women rather than welcoming all.

Peacebuilding requires an approach such as Nussbaum’s which works towards a desirable end such as human flourishing. But this approach does well to create space for

(power-conscious) participation in political methods such as deliberation, promoted by

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thinkers like Sen. As long as deliberation is just one of many forms of political communication, it is both instrumentally and inherently important for peacebuilders.

Now that I have used Ackerly’s critical feminist framework to structure my evaluation of liberal feminist human development, I will turn my attention more thoroughly to her critical feminist approach to human rights. How does Ackerly’s feminist theory aid our understanding of peacebuilding praxis, and vice versa? Given that human rights advocates within Manipur often supplement their practices with John

Paul Lederach’s conflict transformation approach, I likewise examine his thought in light of both critical feminism and peacebuilding praxis in the next chapter.

250 CHAPTER 5:

CRITICAL FEMINISM, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION

5.1 Why critical feminist human rights and conflict transformation?

In Chapter 4, I used critical feminism and peacebuilding praxis to critique the shortcomings of two liberal feminist approaches to human development, as articulated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. But how well can critical feminism itself help us to understand and mitigate the obstacles that women peacebuilders face? What can the critical feminist approach to human rights add to peacebuilding, and in turn, how does peacebuilding praxis critique critical human rights? This chapter will focus on the major points of critical feminist methodology which peacebuilding praxis can most effectively question, challenge, and supplement. Again, my focus on Ackerly (and others like

Nussbaum and Lederach) stems from my interest in examining what emerges from the juxtaposition of Western theory with non-Western praxis. Certainly, Indian political theory can help us to understand peacebuilding praxis in Manipur, and I have cited many Indian theorists in earlier chapters.635 My turn to Ackerly does not stem from an

635 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999); Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Paula Banerjee, Anasua Basu, and Ray Chaudhury, eds., Women in Indian Borderlands (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2011); Rita Manchanda, ed., Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2001); Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Uma Narayan, Dis-Locating Cultures : Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York: 251

underappreciation of Indian theorists. Rather, Ackerly’s voice looms large in this project because I think that it is one of the most effective feminist approaches coming from the

West, largely because Ackerly grounds her work in Bangladesh and many other international contexts. Her social location as a white, middle class American holds less importance because of her “world-traveling” in the tradition of María Lugones.636 Can we make her critical feminist approach stronger and more useful by applying it to the new context of peacebuilding in Manipur?

I put Ackerly’s critical feminist approach to human rights into conversation with

John Paul Lederach’s approach to conflict transformation in this chapter for two reasons. First, praxis in Manipur already makes this connection. Many human rights advocates whom I met use human rights yet find them to be overly narrow for the type of broad, social change that they are working towards. Some of these advocates turn explicitly to Lederachian conflict transformation. One, Babloo Loitongbam, even studied under Lederach in the United States. Another reason to consider Lederach alongside

Ackerly is because his approach to peacebuilding offers important critiques of the liberal peace. Just as Ackerly’s critical feminist method makes fruitful evaluations of liberal approaches to human development and human rights, Lederach’s locally-oriented,

Routledge, 1997); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

636 The concept involves commitment to genuine relationships, experiencing the uncomfortable, and learning across linguistic and cultural gulfs. Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Pereginajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

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partly-critical method (an evaluative claim which I will explain in some detail, later in this chapter) serves as one of the best-known alternatives to the liberal peace. How do these two critical approaches compare, and can they learn something from each other?

Peacebuilders in Manipur already use the two approaches as complements, so what more can be gained from a side-by-side theoretical comparison—particularly if that comparison is aided by examples of peacebuilding praxis?

5.2 Brooke Ackerly’s critical feminist approach

5.2.1 Third World feminist social criticism

Ackerly’s first major work, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, develops a critical feminist method grounded in Third World women’s activism.637 Contrary to theorists of deliberative democracy (such as Amartya Sen) who make unfounded assumptions about the possibility of deliberation characterized by equality, reasonable arguments, self-respect, and mutual respect;638 and contrary to social critics (such as

Martha Nussbaum) who would bring about social change without using fully inclusive,

637 Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16.

638 Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 17–34; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996); cited in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 8.

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non-coercive means;639 Ackerly insists upon supporting deliberative democracy through deliberative means.640 In order to achieve this, she suggests fostering partnerships among insiders, outsiders, and insider-outsider hybrids who have significant experience both within and apart from their own cultures, in order to deliberatively inquire about

“values, practices, and norms that cause or perpetuate harmful inequalities.”641 Anyone can be a social critic, and in order for criticism to be appropriately informed by all viewpoints, everyone should be. Ackerly’s Third World feminist social criticism provides a disciplined method which helps to ensure that such deliberative inquiry occurs in an inclusive way, paying attention to even the silent and excluded voices.

Ackerly highlights the advantages of her method, relative to others presented by theorists of deliberative democracy: (1) it does not restrict the content of deliberation;

(2) it requires social critics to critically analyze existing standards; (3) it expands the understanding of acceptable arguments; (4) it makes deliberation more inclusive and hence more fully informed; (5) it promotes the self-respect of participants, as others listen to their unusual forms of argumentation and take them seriously; (6) and it encourages the silent to speak or, at the very least, to be spoken for after critics seek out their viewpoints. Ackerly’s summary of her method concludes: “Feminist social

639 Martha Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 202–46; cited in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 13.

640 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 10.

641 Ibid., 14.

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criticism does not require equal ability of participants to influence deliberations but rather promotes the functional equality of participants.”642

Third World feminist social criticism has three constitutive components: skeptical scrutiny, guiding criteria, and deliberative inquiry. I briefly summarized these elements in Chapter 1, but the time has come to examine them in detail.

5.2.1.1 Skeptical scrutiny

Ackerly describes skeptical scrutiny as an attitude, or a disposition, towards

“existing and proposed values, practices, and norms.” Adopting the method of skeptical scrutiny requires social critics—whether insiders, outsiders, or insider-outsider hybrids—to stay alert for all possibilities of exploitative inequalities.643 It is skeptical scrutiny which requires social critics to seek the viewpoints of those who have been silenced, or who have chosen silence. Much like Sen’s and Nussbaum’s attentiveness to adaptive preferences, Ackerly’s skeptical scrutiny concerns itself with the supposed willingness of the marginalized—at her research sites in Bangladesh, often women—to remain silent on political questions. The social critic, assuming that some sort of power inequality is at work, thus seeks out those who are typically excluded from such conversations, either helping them to speak or speaking on their behalf on questions related to the community’s values, practices, and norms.

642 Ibid., 67.

643 Ibid., 75–76.

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Skeptical scrutiny is a sort of democratic “middle-ground principle,”644 reminiscent of Ian Shapiro’s suspicion of power inequalities and of Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg’s method for reviewing potentially discriminatory public policies in US v.

Virginia.645 This attitude, skeptical of hierarchies and the possibility for domination, has led feminists to question multiple aspects of life which seemed settled and perhaps even natural, including basic institutions of government and the division of labor in families. Ackerly notes that Patricia Hill Collins, although wary of essentializing and homogenizing women’s experiences, argues that critical strategies such as skeptical scrutiny can remain similar across different cases. Ackerly thus argues that “skeptical scrutiny embodies an epistemological consistency across challenges to oppression.”646

Regardless of cultural context, the method itself is useful.

5.2.1.2 Guiding criteria

Skeptical scrutiny cannot work alone, however. It requires guiding criteria, which gesture towards the sort of life which is valuable and fulfilling.647 Ackerly notes that many feminist activists and scholars have articulated and used lists of particular and/or universal criteria that comprise a fulfilling human life. She offers her own guiding

644 Ian Shapiro, “Three Ways to Be a Democrat,” Political Theory 22, no. 1 (1994): 138.

645 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 76.

646 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1990); Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 77.

647 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 111.

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criteria, in the form of a “general list of what people ought to be able to choose to do.”

It is “a universal list that requires local interpretation and prioritization by critics working in a particular context.”648 Both the purpose and the content of her list resemble Martha

Nussbaum’s more widely-known list of human capabilities. Like Nussbaum’s list,

Ackerly’s is universal while leaving room for local specification. Further following

Nussbaum, Ackerly intends for the list to serve as a critical tool which guides skeptical scrutiny of values, practices, and norms—or in human capabilities language, scrutiny of economic, social, and political obstacles to human flourishing. Nussbaum’s defense of universal values allows her to make value judgments across cultures.649 Ackerly’s guiding criteria, recognizing that not all social values are valid, allow her to do the same— questioning harmful ideas and practices while also helping to resolve conflicts that inevitably arise in processes of deliberation.650

Ackerly draws from a list of rights in international law, although she neither sees nor uses them as part of an exclusively legal paradigm.651 She also universalizes particular claims which other women’s groups such as the Self-Employed Women’s

Association (SEWA) have presented; as well as specifying some of the more general

648 Ibid., 77.

649 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 34.

650 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 95, 111.

651 In fact, she characterizes human rights violations in her later work as human capabilities violations-- blocking things that humans are able to do and to be. Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7.

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claims coming from other women’s organizations, including Women Living Under

Muslim Laws (WLUML) and Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era

(DAWN).652 Ackerly argues that “each person in the world should have the capacity to choose: life, [being] painless, parents, security, community-life, trust, participation, resources, interdependence, thinking, planning, doing, community-integrity, spirituality, fun, and fellowship.”653 Whereas Nussbaum argues that in order to live lives of human flourishing, individuals must have the capability to choose at least a minimum threshold of each of her ten human capabilities, Ackerly acknowledges that many of her sixteen components of a full life may make competing claims. For example, the need for control over one’s own life, found in thinking, planning, and doing, may conflict with the desire to participate in community-life. This is not a problem for Ackerly, because her approach provides a guide for assessing such claims. Individuals employing Third World feminist social criticism evaluate competing claims with an eye to overturning power inequalities.654

Thus despite the similarities between the purpose and, to some extent, the content of Nussbaum’s and Ackerly’s lists, their approaches are quite different. For

Nussbaum, the list itself does the critical work. It provides the universal standard by which politicians, policymakers, and citizens can evaluate the justness of their public

652 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 112–113.

653 Ibid., 114–116.

654 Ibid., 116.

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policies. However, Ackerly notes that Nussbaum makes inadequate use of the other two parts of the methodology of Third World feminist social criticism—skeptical scrutiny and deliberative inquiry. Nussbaum’s relative inattention to skeptical scrutiny allows her

Aristotelian method of internal essentialism to be exclusionary.655 Nussbaum also lacks

Sen’s deliberative element which, according to Ackerly, must be present in order for social criticism to be fully informed, participatory, and inclusive.656

5.2.1.3 Deliberative inquiry

The third aspect of Ackerly’s Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative inquiry, considers “reasonable” deliberations to be those that rest upon inclusive information gathered from diverse perspectives. Thus, it concerns itself much more with who participates than with the reasonable nature of their arguments.657 Such inquiry creates knowledge through collective discussions among critics and members of a community, generating safe spaces for those who typically do not participate in political

655 Ackerly provides an extended discussion of Aristotle’s method, and Nussbaum’s indefensible use of it. I will not re-create that discussion here, but it is important to note that Ackerly sees Aristotle as too easily importing the values of his own culture, while providing no methodological check to tell him whether those values are just. This allows him to exclude non-citizens from his framework. Ackerly charges Nussbaum with making a comparable mistake: she imputes the liberal values of her own culture and era into her work, without subjecting it to scrutiny. Aristotle excluded women and slaves; who might Nussbaum exclude? Ibid., 95–105; Ackerly notes in her later work, however, that Nussbaum may make some use of skeptical scrutiny when she writes, in Women and Human Development, of the need for curiosity and a determination to listen to others. Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 152.

656 Recall that in the previous chapter, I argued that Ackerly does not properly take note of differences between Sen and Nussbaum. She tends to analyze their approaches to human capabilities as one unit, neglecting the important divergences in their approaches.

657 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 72.

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processes to form opinions and prepare to share them with the broader society.658

Ackerly also notes that deliberation plays an important pedagogical role in society: as members raise questions, participate in discussions, listen to others’ views, and apply skeptical scrutiny to all that they hear, they will learn about other people and about new issues. The mere fact of including all—even the silent or silenced voices—means that new information will come to light, educating members of a society in new ways.659

Deliberative inquiry is important in its own right, but it also serves as a vital tool for fleshing out and debating the merits of universal guiding criteria in a particular context.660 Through deliberative inquiry, social critics weigh competing claims to oppression and assist communal decision-making processes.661 Skeptically scrutinizing existing values, practices, and norms throughout an inclusive deliberation process enables social critics to uncover and remedy oppressive inequalities.

5.2.1.4 Who performs social criticism?

Unlike many theorists of deliberative democracy, who might exclude some participants on the grounds of reasonable argumentation, Ackerly argues that

658 Ibid., 78; This is reminiscent of Nancy Fraser’s safe enclaves of deliberation. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42, referenced in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 59.

659 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 131.

660 Recall that I have argued that this step is one which Nussbaum lacks, as her list comes from philosophical reasoning about what is necessary for human flourishing.

661 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 116–117.

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deliberation must be radically inclusive. This means that social criticism must likewise include everyone, regardless of qualifications, experience, and mode of participation. A focus on the content of individuals’ criticisms, rather than upon their identities, helps to overcome the potentially intransigent positions which identity politics tends to produce.662 Still, even emphasis on content may not be enough to produce truly universal social criticism, as identity politics may not be the only obstacle to individuals’ participation. When might children be able to participate, and at what age? Are differently-abled people respected as critics? Who translates for the silent or silenced voices, and do they do that accurately? These possible exclusions trouble Ackerly’s claims to broad coverage of a population. Still, Ackerly’s deliberative inquiry, better than other discussions of deliberative democracy, seeks to be as inclusive as possible.

Ackerly describes three types of critics who perform Third World feminist social criticism. First, insider critics tend to be endogenous to their communities. They live according to the values, practices, and norms which they seek to criticize, and they have a great deal of local knowledge. Outsiders, by contrast, tend to be exogenous to the communities that they subject to social criticism. They might possess knowledge and perspectives that are generally unavailable to insiders.663 The multi-cited critic, reminiscent of Patricia Hill Collins’ outsider-within, has local knowledge about more

662 Ibid., 152.

663 Ibid., 152–153.

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than one group.664 She has been an insider or an outsider in relation to multiple groups, such that she can move among many groups. She also tends to be self-conscious about her own perspective.665 Third World feminist social criticism needs all of these critics working together in concert, employing skeptical scrutiny, guiding criteria, and deliberative democracy, in order to uncover harmful practices that perpetuate inequalities. Insiders, outsiders, and multi-sited critics must not only make criticism broadly informed; they must also direct criticism towards one another’s methods and conclusions.666

Summarized for the purposes of this dissertation, Ackerly’s work Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism makes two important moves: (1) it lays out a three-part critical feminist method for uncovering and critiquing injustices, which according to

Catia Confortini is useful as a template for emancipatory social change;667 and (2) it highlights the inadequacy of employing either Sen’s deliberative inquiry or Nussbaum’s guiding criteria in isolation. Although I have shown that in many ways, Nussbaum’s list

664 Collins, Black Feminist Thought; cited in Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 154.

665 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 154.

666 Ibid., 199.

667 Catia Confortini, Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27; Responding to some of Confortini’s earlier work, Ackerly comes to agree that her feminist method might produce social change, contrary to earlier statements that social change would depend upon politics. Brooke Ackerly, “Intelligence and Compassion, the Tools of Feminists: An Engagement with Catia Confortini,” in Feminism and International Relations, ed. J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 40–47.

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of capabilities can do more critical work than Ackerly gives her credit for, each tool still needs the other, alongside skeptical scrutiny. Ackerly’s feminist critical method thus appears to correct for some of the problems inherent in the liberal feminist approach to human development, whether articulated by Sen or by Nussbaum. But how does this method help us to understand peacebuilding in Manipur? In what ways can peacebuilders challenge and supplement Ackerly’s work, whether they make human rights claims or not? Confortini has fruitfully used Ackerly’s method in historical analysis of an international peace movement.668 How does Third World feminist social criticism translate to the context of peacebuilding in Manipur? To answer these questions, I will first consider Ackerly’s more recent articulation of critical feminist methods, as seen in

Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference.

5.2.2 Curb cut feminism and universal human rights

5.2.2.1 From Third World feminist social criticism to curb cut feminism

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Ackerly provides a method for everyone—insiders, outsiders, well- or poorly educated men and women, and even philosophers—to enact social criticism. Given that anyone can be a social critic,

Ackerly’s audience is everyone. Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference builds on many of the themes of Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, but it does so

668 Confortini, Intelligent Compassion.

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with the intended audience of political theorists. In this later work, skeptical scrutiny, guiding criteria, and deliberative inquiry serve as tools for the political theorist to check her epistemological assumptions as she engages in empirically-grounded normative theorizing about human rights. Criticizing approaches to universal human rights which rely upon universalizing principles such as membership in humanity or positive freedom,669 Ackerly asks,

“What tools are available to a political theorist for keeping our theories attentive to the ways in which oppression is experienced, embedded in practices and structures, and inconspicuously political? What methodology gives us confidence that our theories are formed by the ‘right’ experiences, practices, and politics?”670

Theorists articulating theories of universal human rights must be able to see and to mitigate diverse human rights violations, including those which do not have actors and which occur outside of political institutions.671 The theorist must assume that at all times, in some place, an inhumane act is occurring, even if we cannot see it. This knowledge requires a commitment to seeking out such violations, listening to the silenced, and building communicative pathways that help us to hear more easily in the future.672

669 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 202.

670 Ibid., 96.

671 Ibid., 13–14. Using murder, Ackerly offers a distinction between a crime and a human rights violation. A violation is present if a society fails to “identify, prosecute, and prevent murder.”

672 Ibid., 215.

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How can the theorist go about this seemingly impossible process of becoming aware of and accounting for the diversity of human experiences, including even those which have been hidden or silenced? Ackerly lays out her justification of curb cut feminism and then demonstrates her own use of it in the process of articulating an immanent theory of universal human rights. The term curb cut feminism comes from the theory’s grounding in the methods of the Americans with Disabilities movement, which privileges the knowledge of people with disabilities when designing infrastructure. Innovations such as access cuts in sidewalk curbs, ramps, and automatic doors enable people in wheelchairs to move about freely, but they also help those who are pushing strollers, wheeling dollies, or carrying heavy things. Accommodating the disabilities of some thus improves mobility for everyone.673

Ackerly uses curb cut feminism as a “shorthand for working within the feminist framework of criticizing the power of normalization.”674 Unlike other critical theories which tend to take the view of the most oppressed or the most marginalized (e.g. as seen in standpoint theory), she argues that a theory of human rights must have a source of legitimacy which lies outside of a single epistemological framework. Instead, political theorists may justify universal human rights only if they adopt a destabilized epistemology. This requires rigorous methodological reflection, and it assumes that its

673 Ibid., 134.

674 Ibid., 135.

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each individual’s epistemological stance is incomplete and inconstant.675 The views of both the powerful and the marginalized have their own epistemology, their own exclusions, and their own sense of what is normal; thus, the theorist must encourage contestation and open deliberation among opposing views, embracing rather than backing away from a “terrain of difficulty” comprised of seemingly irreconcilable views.676

5.2.2.1.1 Data collection

Ackerly’s curb cut feminist methods follow the terms and descriptions of normative inquiry which she lays out, but does not apply, in Political Theory and

Feminist Social Criticism.677 She uses skeptical scrutiny, guiding criteria, and deliberative inquiry in each of two steps—data collection and data analysis. Ackerly collects data from online working groups, workshops, interviews, and panels at the World Social

Forum and other events.678 She speaks with activists of many ages, who focus on

675 Ibid., 89.

676 Ibid., 204.

677 Ibid., 144.

678 The online working groups consist of women activists who focus on women’s human rights and violence against women. Ackerly additionally organizes five networking workshops for donors, activists, policy makers, and academics who all work on women’s human rights. She observes thirty-five workshops and panels at the World Social Forum meeting in 2004; conducts interviews at the World Social Forum in 2004 and 2005, and also draws from interviews conducted by Bina D’Costa in Australia. Finally, she observes the Feminist Dialogues, a feminist meeting preceding the World Social Forum in 2005. Ibid.

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various, interconnected human rights issues.679 Importantly for her work, she catches them in moments in which they are stepping outside of their daily lives as activists to reflect upon the work that they do and what it means to them.680 This reflective moment is key for Ackerly’s method: she does not simply draw examples from the activists’ lives, but instead uses the ways in which they theorize about their lives and their work to build her theory. Such praxeological inquiry, she argues, sets her theory apart from those which use empirical evidence, but rely solely upon the theorist’s interpretation of such evidence.681

Skeptical scrutiny within the data collection process takes the form of imagination stretching. Ackerly asks herself: who constitutes good interview subjects, and where might I find them? As she identifies informants, she tries to counter hierarchies and to look for ways in which her questions and methods might elide differences in power.682 Guiding criteria serve as the research questions for the project, which the deliberative inquiry seeks to uncover: By what standards do feminists and women guide their activism? Do they employ human rights discourses? What issues would they like to see on the agenda in the future? Deliberative inquiry occurs as the

679 Ibid., 146.

680 Ibid., 148.

681 Ibid., 153; Ackerly cites Ayelet Shachar, Chandra Mohanty, and Martha Nussbaum as theorists who use sociological inquiry. Yet they remain vague about their methods of incorporating sociological insights into their theories. Ibid., 129.

682 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 151.

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theorist consults the informants, in online forums, workshops, and additional electronic communications spurred by earlier contact.683 Using skeptical scrutiny throughout the entire process helps Ackerly to be attentive to absences and silences in the data. She argues that the theorist must constantly seek differences and silences, assuming that consensus likely covers over a silenced, opposing view. Although the data collection process could conceivably be interminable, the theorist must choose a stopping point in order to analyze what she has found.

5.2.2.1.2 Data analysis

Again relying on the three-step method elaborated in Political Theory and

Feminist Social Criticism, Ackerly analyzes her data. In the analysis process, skeptical scrutiny provides the overarching disposition which the theorist takes towards her research. She critically examines her own views and methods: has she been attentive to a broad range of views and the nuances among them, looking at the content of interviews rather than their smooth and well-reasoned articulation? Has she paid attention to differences among similar views? Here, the theorist must rely on curb cutting intuitions, seeking views from the marginalized but not relying solely on them.684

Next, the guiding criteria provide permeable boundaries which the researcher and the informants crisscross. Such dynamic boundaries, consisting of the initial

683 Ibid., 150–151.

684 Ibid., 191.

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research questions and the confines of human rights discourse itself (for the purposes of

Ackerly’s project) are not narrowing but rather focusing. These boundaries do not remove concerns from the agenda, but instead try to provide a common theme for diverse views. Ackerly argues that women’s human rights activists are an excellent source for guiding criteria, as promoting women’s rights as they relate to men means promoting the rights of all humanity.685 Importantly, guiding criteria with porous boundaries, employed alongside ongoing skeptical scrutiny, means that the normative theorist using praxeological inquiry will often go back and forth between data collection and data analysis. If a consensus emerges on a point, then the theorist ought to go back to collect voices which might challenge that consensus. This can occur through deliberative inquiry—through hosting another workshop or reading a new online forum—or through a skeptical re-reading of research notes, with the aim of seeking a dissenting voice that was originally missed. This method differs starkly from the positivist approach, which puts up a wall between data collection and data analysis.686

But the normative theorist’s praxeological inquiry is not positivist: it is an interpretive work grounded in the interpretations of those whom it studies. Its destabilizing epistemology destabilizes even the assumption that data analysis is somehow contaminated by the collection of new data in the middle of the analytic process.

685 Ibid., 178.

686 Ibid., 155.

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Finally, for the third step of analysis, Ackerly uses deliberative inquiry to expose herself to a broad range of views which differ with one another. This method prevents the theorist from relying on too few observations, and it involves including the silent and absent voices. In practice, this means engaging deliberatively with interviewees and online forum and workshop participants. Ackerly would send transcripts of interviews or interpretive papers based on observations to her research subjects, and they would send comments back to her, reflecting upon her reflections upon them.687 This iterative process would occur again and again until Ackerly felt that the views represented were properly diverse—leaving “no one in the tails” of a normal distribution, in statistical language.688 Conceivably, this step of the analysis could go on in perpetuity, but Ackerly notes that in order to make it worthwhile for activists to lend their time to the research process, theory building must cease in favor of (always temporary) conclusions.689

5.2.2.2 The immanent theory of universal human rights and emancipatory social change

What conclusions does Ackerly draw from her praxeological inquiry? How do those conclusions compare to peacebuilding praxis as it occurs in Manipur? Ackerly describes the purpose of the immanent theory of universal human rights, its three scope conditions, and the responsibilities of those who are committed to human rights.

687 Ibid., 169.

688 note 47 ibid., 138.

689 Ibid., 190.

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The purpose of the immanent theory of universal human rights is to guide social, political, and economic calls to action; as well as to criticize such calls for any inevitable exclusions or power plays which emerge in the process of defining rights, setting boundaries, and naming injustices. The theory directs social criticism towards society and towards itself.690 The content of human rights is best understood as its scope. What kinds of issues do human rights cover, and what are their limits? From the praxis of women’s human rights activists, Ackerly draws out three scope conditions that describe women’s understandings and uses of human rights: (1) Human rights of different people are interrelated. No one’s human rights are secure if anyone’s human rights are threatened. (2) Rights are indivisible. Although for the purposes of simplicity some activists talk about civil rights, economic rights, or reproductive rights in isolation, all of them realize that such rights are intimately tied to one another. (3) Human rights are protected across a “fabric of social, political, and economic life.”691 Narrow, institutional reforms will fail to change such fabric, i.e. anti-discrimination paradigms pursued through the legal system will do very little to secure many rights.692

Ackerly concludes that the immanent theory of universal human rights lays out responsibilities for those who express a commitment to human rights. Responsibilities include (1) a commitment to participating in an immanent and critical justificatory

690 Ibid., 210.

691 Ibid., 211.

692 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 113.

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process, (2) the willingness to listen attentively, (3) a commitment to looking for the invisible, (4) the willingness to think differently, (5) and a commitment to continually reflect on ways that seemingly unrelated injustices are interrelated and indivisible.693 To what extent do peacebuilders in Manipur, acting as human rights activists, assume these responsibilities and follow the methods of curb cut feminism? Conversely, how might this activism challenge Ackerly’s methods? In the next section, I will analyze both the critical potential and the shortcomings of Ackerly’s approach, in light of peacebuilding praxis as it occurs in Manipur.

5.2.2.3 Curb cut feminist analysis and peacebuilding praxis

5.2.2.3.1 Ackerly as critic: what Ackerly gets right in Manipur

The first responsibility of those who proclaim a commitment to human rights is to engage in immanent and justificatory critique. Such critiques play out in human rights practice to some extent in Manipur, in the form of immanent critiques of the Indian state. MWGSN and EEFVAM, two women’s peacebuilding organizations which rely on human rights approaches, do not make arguments grounded in transcendental religious or moral principles. Instead, they use the state’s own laws and public commitments to international human rights regimes to critique its harmful practices in the Northeast.694

693 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 224.

694 India is a signatory to major human rights covenants and treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

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MWGSN instructs conflict-affected widows in human rights education, as well as assisting them with collecting government benefits and learning new skills such as food preparation and weaving. All of this work seems innocuous on its face—widows need a livelihood following the deaths of male breadwinners, and MWGSN supports them as they pursue an income for themselves and their children. In the words of MWGSN’s founder, Binalakshmi Nepram, their group is telling the government, “Let us help you!”695 The government has already created programs to support conflict-affected widows, and MWGSN merely helps the government to implement them on the ground.

However, MWGSN’s work also subtly shifts local, gendered norms about women dialoguing with politicians and working outside of the home. Against discrimination from sources such as their in-laws, some religious traditions, and political customs, women explicitly pursue employment, but they implicitly pursue citizenship and even personhood.696 Thus MWGSN’s “assistance” to the government, if pursued on a large enough scale, would radically upend gendered norms about women’s political and economic rights.

In a delicate balancing act between government support and government critique, MWGSN ties its intervention in local issues to the international human rights regime, making specific appeals to UNSCR 1325, which protects women’s rights in

695 BN, June 2, 2014.

696 MZ, June 3, 2014, FA, June 5, 2014.

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conflict and promotes their participation in peacebuilding processes.697 Such appeals criticize the Indian government’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of armed conflict in Manipur.698 Arguing that women have an extremely important role to play in responding to conflict, MWGSN tries to draw women into peacebuilding processes as decision-makers who are fully human, and thus fully in possession of the rights guaranteed by UNSCR 1325, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the international human rights covenants.

Ackerly’s universal theory of human rights would support MWGSN’s use of immanent critique. However, curb cut feminism’s skeptical scrutiny would question some of the internal hierarchies which I observed in MWGSN’s approach and highlighted in Chapter 3—structures such as ethnicity, class, geography, and religion intersect to hinder or support women’s peacebuilding work, according to social location.

MWGSN’s insistence upon including women in peacebuilding processes does not extend equally to all women. Employing a theory of human rights which rests on skeptical scrutiny helps us to see problems associated with human rights activism which assumes, rather than critically examines, inclusivity. Returning to Ackerly’s delineated responsibilities for those who employ human rights, it seems that MWGSN lacks a commitment to seeing the invisible and the willingness to think differently.

697 “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325,” 2000, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1325(2000).

698 BN, June 2, 2014.

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Like MWGSN, EEVFAM makes frequent use of immanent critique. Unlike

MWGSN, which focuses broadly on all widows impacted by any type of armed conflict,

EEVFAM concentrates its energies on the phenomenon of “fake encounters,” in which security personnel—usually Manipuri police commandos—kill an innocent man and then plant evidence to make it look as if he were an insurgent.699 EEVFAM has requested prosecution of 1,528 cases of these extrajudicial killings, and a Supreme Court- appointed commission has found many of them to be fake encounters.700 Yet the Court continues to postpone hearings on the other cases, so EEVFAM uses immanent critique to gain international allies for their cause, using India’s public statements on human rights to reveal hypocrisy in Northeastern India.701 When Christof Heyns, the UN Special

Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, came to India in 2012, EEVFAM invited him to visit

Manipur.702 Following Heyns’ scrutiny of the situation, the rate of extrajudicial killings dropped off considerably. Buoyed by this success but continuing to pursue justice,

EEVFAM now focuses its energies on the Indian Supreme Court. Babloo Loitongbam, the founder of a group called Human Rights Alert which facilitated the creation of EEVFAM, argues that they are “just giving the Supreme Court a chance to humanize itself.”703 They

699 Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN, “Manipur: A Memorandum on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions, Submitted to Cristof Heyns,” 2012, 5.

700 Just Peace Foundation, “Grit and Defiance: 15th Year-- Sharmila against AFSPA,” 2015, 8–9.

701 Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015.

702 Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN, “Manipur: A Memorandum on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions, Submitted to Cristof Heyns.”

703 BL, June 26, 2015.

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present the Court with opportunities to rule in favor of civilians, overturning the legal impunity which has supported harmful military activity in the Northeast for so many decades.

Unfortunately, the Court rarely takes advantage of such opportunities.

Loitongbam points out that the Court often bows to the pressure of the security forces.

Judges are not necessarily threatened by other segments of the government, or by military leaders, but neither are they entirely independent of them. If they wish to be promoted, judges cannot risk being seen as anti-national. A ruling in favor of powerless civilians in Manipur is surely a ruling against the Indian state.704 Activists face many of the same risks as judges. Even when it is couched carefully as immanent critique, human rights activism often serves to put targets on the back of activists. Pointing out human rights violations can be incredibly dangerous if such activism is deemed anti-national, as it often is in Manipur.705 Still, immanent critique has been a semi-effective tool for activists in the Northeast, particularly when they leverage external pressure.

Activists often assume another responsibility which Ackerly notes—the commitment to continually reflect on ways in which seemingly unrelated injustices are interrelated and indivisible. For MWGSN, this materializes in the form of services for HIV affected widows, in addition to conflict-affected widows. Although their sources of misery are very different, these women need similar types of assistance. Thus, MWGSN

704 Ibid.

705 JH, June 11, 2014.

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does not discriminate between them.706 Another women’s peacebuilding organization which often partners with MWGSN, Gendi, likewise administers services to women coming from many different need-bases. JH, the director of Gendi, targets every issue that stands as an obstacle to women’s health and wellbeing, even though (or perhaps because) she self-identifies as a peacebuilder. She sometimes has difficulty explaining the inter-relatedness of these issues to foreign donors who support her organization. JH explains,

“It’s very difficult working in Manipur only [on] one issue alone. All issues are interrelated. Many people in US and all are asking, why [do] you incorporate so many issues? But you can’t leave one behind; it’s very difficult! When you’re working for women, you can’t leave behind one section of the woman. And our organization feels very strongly that if you’re working for women, work for different kinds of women, whether it’s HIV affected, conflict affected, domestic violence. Women is women. You can’t discriminate.”707

Hence for Gendi, human rights issues are inextricably intertwined. To help women is to help all women, and to work on all of these issues, regardless of whether that makes sense to donors. Peacebuilding must include reproductive rights, even if donors want to fund programs that assist conflict-affected widows.

706 MO, June 5, 2014.

707 JH, June 11, 2014.

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5.2.2.3.2 Peacebuilding praxis as critic: what Ackerly misses in Manipur

Ackerly grounds her universal theory of human rights in the practices and reflections of women(’s) rights activists. She defends this decision well, arguing that women’s human rights advocates tend to consider not only all of the issues that men work on, but also many related to women’s lives which men would miss.708 However, if

Ackerly is interested in dwelling within the terrain of difficulty, it surprises me that she would exclude male informants from her sample. If she is seeking differences in opinions and experiences, surely these differences would starkly appear in the distances between men and women. Certainly, researchers must set boundaries when selecting research questions and data ranges, in order to construct a project with a viable scope.

However, the exclusion of men from a project on universal human rights, the legitimacy of which springs from radical inclusivity, represents a questionable boundary.

I likewise chose to focus mainly upon women informants, as my fieldwork was with women’s peacebuilding groups in Manipur. However, I also interviewed multiple men in Manipur, including the leaders and staff members of peacebuilding organizations, journalists, and academics. These conversations helped me to contextualize women’s arguments and experiences. For example, the Meira Paibi woman leaders whom I interviewed came across as impassioned, effective political actors. However, I spoke with two men—a professor and another peacebuilder—who

708 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 178.

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described the Meira Paibis’ work as ineffective, exclusionary, reactionary, and humanitarian rather than political.709 Meira Paibis believe that they are exerting political pressure on the state government, but are they? While I do not value the men’s impressions of the Meira Paibis over the women’s own views, it is important for that seed of doubt about their peacebuilding work to be planted.

Ackerly’s skeptical scrutiny directs me to question the Meira Paibis’ statements about their own effectiveness, particularly because they locate themselves as leaders of the “women’s” (i.e. ethnicity-free) movement and as the “mothers of all Manipur.”710

Their descriptions of their political actions indicate a consensus among women, which

Ackerly warns should always be viewed with suspicion. Skeptical scrutiny thus aids me as a theorist in probing these actions further, taking the women’s self-assessments not at face value but rather evaluating them in terms of potential power hierarchies.

However, a research sample which includes male informants partially precludes the need for me to imaginatively probe. Men’s opinions about the Meira Paibis’ work, which appear in my other interviews, simply challenge their statements. A more inclusive terrain of difficulty thus relieves me, or any theorist, of the large burden of trying to imagine all views. I highly value the method of skeptical scrutiny, particularly because no researcher can ever collect every relevant voice. Imaginative identification will always

709 AK, June 23, 2015; BR, June 25, 2015.

710 IN2, July 5, 2015; MP, July 5, 2015.

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be an important part of social criticism.711 My research in Manipur, however, reveals that one must include men in a study of women. The terrain of difficulty should not be limited by gender.

Ackerly’s range of informants is likewise limited by a certain level of sophistication which involves, at the very least, literacy and internet access. Many of her activists participate in online forums, predominantly in English. This means that they can read, type, and regularly access computers and uncensored websites. She also speaks with many women at two World Social Forums, i.e. with women who are able to raise funding for domestic and international flights, as well as hotel rooms. I greatly admire

Ackerly’s breadth of coverage. However, it is also worth noting that many of my own informants are unreachable by internet. Many of them do not speak English. As I do not speak Manipuri or any of the other 28 dialects spoken in Manipur, I am surely limited as a researcher. However, if I had not physically traveled to Manipur and employed translators in multiple languages, then many perspectives would have gone unmarked.

There are trade-offs involved with every research design. My own decisions left me with a very narrow range of informants in one, small corner of one country. Surely Ackerly’s collection of perspectives on human rights is more genuinely universal than those that I found in Manipur. However, she should acknowledge that her methods, even with their multiple iterations and careful attention to power and privilege, lifted up certain voices

711 Confortini, Intelligent Compassion.

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which were able to engage with her according to the communication mediums which she selected.

Finally, and obviously, Ackerly’s universal theory of human rights relies upon informants who use human rights. This is not at all problematic for her scholarly goal, which is to construct an immanent theory of human rights. It may be problematic, however, for her practice-oriented goal of seeing and mitigating human rights violations. Many in Manipur use the human rights approach as just one of many tools that can build peace. Still others seek to build peace without employing human rights language, even though their work addresses human rights violations. In particular, I met many activists who consciously supplemented their human rights activism with the conflict transformation approach to peacebuilding. Praxeological inquiry in Manipur, comprised not just of my observations but also of the reflections of peacebuilders upon their own methods, reveals the limitations of human rights in a context of ongoing, low- intensity armed conflict. Ackerly’s method positions me, as the theorist, on the ground such that I can hear the voices making the argument that Manipur requires conflict transformation. Her process thus works exactly according to design—it opens up new avenues of inquiry.

Given this connection between human rights activism and the conflict transformation approach, my next move will be to examine conflict transformation, in theory and praxis. What are its origins, methods, and results? What might it have which the universal human rights approach lacks, and vice versa? How can Ackerly’s critical

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feminist approach challenge conflict transformation, and how might conflict transformation speak to a critical feminist approach to human rights?

5.3 John Paul Lederach’s conflict transformation approach

5.3.1 Origins: questioning conflict resolution

John Paul Lederach’s approach to conflict transformation reacts against many of the problems which he saw with the common conflict resolution approach to peacebuilding.712 As a peace practitioner using conflict resolution, Lederach began to feel that his work was often ineffective and met with suspicion, and that the resources of local peacebuilders far outweighed the technical expertise which he brought to peace processes. Building on decades of experience, he thus argues that the conflict resolution approach is misguided in three ways: it implicitly relies on wrongful assumptions about the nature of conflict; it tends towards coopting those who might use conflict to make their voices heard; and it comprises an imperialist imposition of Western ideas upon other cultures.713

712 Peter Wallensteen defines conflict resolution as “a situation where the conflicting parties enter into an agreement that solves their central incompatibilities, accept each other’s continued existence as parties and cease all violent action against each other. This means, of course, that conflict resolution is something that necessarily comes after conflict.” This chapter will soon make clear the problems with the ontology of conflict as something undesirable, which should be resolved. Peter Wallensteen, Understanding Conflict Resolution, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 8.

713 John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995); John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Some conceptions of conflict resolution implicitly promote the idea that conflict is normatively undesirable. In Lederach’s estimation,

“[Conflict] resolution was an early and still dominant concept [which] … indicated a need to understand how conflict evolves and ends. At times … resolution may conceptually and subtly promote the impression that conflict is undesirable and should be eliminated or at least reduced.”714

Lederach acknowledges that violence is undesirable, but he questions whether in many cases, resolving a (not necessarily violent) conflict—inevitable friction among people and communities—is in fact a desirable goal. Eradicating disagreements may be impossible. To set resolution as one’s goal may be to set oneself up for failure, diminishing trust in peace processes in the future.715 To place a high value on resolving a conflict may also lead to the privileging of surface-level harmony over values like lasting justice.716

Lederach’s second concern is that the conflict resolution approach may involve trying to control those who use conflict to make their needs known. Those in charge of conflict resolution or mediation processes, claiming the moral high ground of ending a conflict, may appropriate and dismiss the concerns of certain parties in order to resolve

714 Lederach, Preparing for Peace, 16.

715 See Kofi Annan’s address to the UN General Assembly, 19 September 2006: “As long as the Security Council is unable to end [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], and the now nearly 40-year-old occupation, by bringing both sides to accept and implement its resolutions, so long will respect for the United Nations continue to decline. So long, too, will our impartiality be questioned. So long will our best efforts to resolve other conflicts be resisted….”

716 Lederach, Preparing for Peace, 16.

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disagreements.717 At best, this creates a hierarchy of interests and devalues various groups that are involved in a conflict. At worst, it completely silences the interests that threaten the norm of the desired absence of conflict. Responding to this phenomenon,

Lederach insists that conflict must be addressed inclusively, through local ownership of peace processes and the deployment of local resources and relationships.

Third, Lederach worries that the conflict resolution approach may be a particularist approach in universal clothing. His work Preparing for Peace highlights the connections between conflict resolution and culture. He asserts that although many resolution specialists insist that their methods are sufficiently universal, they actually represent “…among other things, the packaging, presentation, and selling of social knowledge. Whose knowledge, under what package, delivered through what mechanism, and received by what populations are all legitimate and necessary questions for investigation….”718 In response to this problematic selling of particularistic knowledge, Lederach offers the paradigm of conflict transformation, which understands conflict as inevitable; deploys culturally-grounded, locally-owned, creative approaches to conflict as opportunities for constructive change; and tries to avoid universalizing theory.

Before turning to Lederach’s articulation of conflict transformation, it is important to question for a moment whether his characterization of conflict resolution,

717 Ibid.

718 Ibid., 6.

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as presented in his work reaching back to 1995, is still accurate. While I agree with many of Lederach’s critiques, other scholars have noted the evolution of conflict resolution over time, alongside its potentially broad applications today. It is not merely a Western method which has been imposed worldwide. According to Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom

Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall, conflict resolution theories have “deep roots [that] reach into far older world traditions from which they draw their inspiration.” Thus, in their view, peace scholars and practitioners should not abandon conflict resolution, but rather “find ways to enrich Western and non-Western traditions through their mutual encounter.”719 Lederach prefers to root peacebuilding in local practices and understandings, but we should be conscious that his turn to the local assumes a particular understanding of conflict resolution that is not shared by all scholars of peace studies.

5.3.2 Conflict transformation: process structures, justpeace, and the moral imagination

In response to these problems that Lederach sees with one version of conflict resolution, as it appears in a particular historical moment, he redefines conflict as

“…a natural, common experience present in all relationships and cultures. I understand conflict to be a socially constructed cultural event. Conflicts do not “just happen” to people, people are active participants in creating situations and interactions they experience

719 Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The Prevention, Management and Transformation of Deadly Conflicts, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 7–9. The authors claim that Lederach has essentially caricatured the field of conflict resolution. They prefer to retain the term “resolution” because of its historical significance and prevalent use in scholarship and media.

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as conflict. Conflict emerges through an interactive process based on the search for and creation of shared meaning.”720

Lederach expects and even welcomes the emergence of conflict. He does not try to eliminate it, but rather views it as an opportunity for increased understanding, of people as well as social structures.721 Conflict transformation is not naïve about the violent patterns that can emerge alongside social conflict; instead, it tries to understand this reality through the principled application of non-violent approaches.722 In sum, it does not fight the friction which naturally arises among people, but rather leverages it to its advantage. This leveraging is mediated through the social structures in which a conflict is immersed.

This approach eschews the episodic, problem-solving nature of conflict resolution in favor of addressing the “relational epicenter” of conflict.723 Lederach suggests that people living in violence must shift from temporary agreements to a

“context-based, permanent, and dynamic platform capable of non-violently generating solutions to ongoing episodes of conflict.”724 This transformative platform consists of

720 Ibid., 9.

721 John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003), 18.

722 Ibid., 19–21.

723 It is worth noting that occasionally, a conflict occurs between two people or two groups that are unlikely to interact again. Examples might include a car wreck or a one-time economic transaction. In such cases, resolving an episode is much more appropriate than building relationships among the relevant parties. Wallensteen, Understanding Conflict Resolution.

724 Ibid., 47.

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social and relational spaces in which people in relationship “generate responsive initiatives for constructive change” as conflict arises.725 He argues that such platforms are most effective if they maintain relationships among people who have been historically divided.726

5.3.2.1 Process structures

These platforms for peace take the form of a process structure, an image which

Lederach borrows from what Margaret Wheatley terms “the new sciences,” building on the natural world and systems theory.727 Skin and rivers are process structures. Human skin renews itself every few weeks, yet it maintains its form and purpose. Rivers, too, constantly shift as they rush and flow over rocks and roots. When standing in the middle of rivers, we feel nothing but their quick fluidity. Lederach notes, however, that when we step back from rivers, viewing them from a mountaintop, we can see the bigger structure that the river has carved over time. Process structures thus maintain their direction, even as they dynamically move and change. Lederach asserts,

“Process structures, like skin and rivers, more than anything I can think of describe the nature of peacebuilding and the quality of building platforms that support social change. … Structures alone are not sufficient. Pursuing change in a constantly shifting environment requires a constancy of innovation in both process and response. Social change needs dynamic adaptive platforms

725 Ibid.

726 Ibid., 48.

727 Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Sciences (San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler, 1994); cited in Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 127.

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that respond to the nature of the environments where they must live. But processes that are adaptive without purpose create chaos without direction or ultimate shape.”728

Conflict transformation thus relies upon a dynamism—a “smart flexibility”729— which short-term conflict resolution processes could never accommodate. It seeks to build platforms for peace, in the form of process structures, at all levels, rather than promoting only high-level negotiations among state leaders.

5.3.2.2 Justpeace

While retaining the dynamic flexibility of a process structure, at what should conflict transformation aim? To be coherent, social change requires a purpose. Lederach coins the term justpeace to describe the end goal for peacebuilding through conflict transformation. In The Moral Imagination, he defines justpeace as an approach which

“reduces violence and destructive cycles of social interaction and at the same time increases justice in any human relationship.”730 This definition highlights the tendency of conflict resolution processes to aim for negative peace, or the absence of direct violence. Certainly ceasefires are a necessary step in conflict transformation processes,

728 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 128.

729 Ibid., 126–128.

730 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 182; This definition builds on an earlier, but rarely-cited, book chapter in which Lederach defines justpeace as “an adaptive process-structure of human relationships characterized by high justice and low violence.” John Paul Lederach, “Justpeace: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace, ed. Paul Van Tongeren (Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 35.

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but they are just one of many steps toward building a sustainable platform for peace.

Lederach is more interested in sustaining the positive peace which is associated with the presence of individual and communal flourishing. Thus, he emphasizes justice within human relationships, rather than the absence of violence.

In a later, coauthored chapter with R. Scott Appleby in Strategies of Peace,

Lederach redefines justpeace as “a dynamic state of affairs in which the reduction and management of violence and the achievement of social and economic justice are undertaken as mutual, reinforcing dimensions of constructive change.”731 In the concluding chapter, I will argue that this latter definition is problematic in many ways, and that peacebuilding praxis ought to aim for a refined version of the earlier definition which highlights destructive cycles and promotes relationships. For now, let us assume that the goal of conflict transformation is to reduce violence while increasing justice in human relationships.732

5.3.2.3 The moral imagination

I have described conflict transformation and defined its end goal, justpeace. But how are peacebuilders to implement the approach? How should peacebuilders and

731 John Paul Lederach and R. Scott Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” in Strategies for Peace, ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard F. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23.

732 Recent scholarship employing justpeace cites the 2010 definition, but still emphasizes the human relationship aspect of justpeace. See Catia Confortini and Abigail Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace,” Journal of International Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2013): 70–93; Atalia Omer, “The Cry of the Forgotten Stones,” Journal of Religious Ethics 43, no. 2 (2015): 369–407.

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communities view themselves and the world, in order to facilitate such processes?

Lederach offers some promising starting points through his analysis of transformative, bottom-up approaches to peace in The Moral Imagination. He presents anecdotes of local uses of language and customs which ingeniously employ familiar traditions to envision new meanings on behalf of peace.733 Through this exploration of innovative local methods, Lederach uncovers four disciplines that form the moral imagination, which in turn supports the transformation of conflicts: relationship, paradoxical curiosity, creativity, and risk.734 These disciplines are important for all peacebuilders, whether they are insiders with an interest in the conflict; non-native outsiders who might be brought in to help mediate; or multi-cited peacebuilders who are native to the region yet do not have a stake in a particular conflict.

For the first discipline, individuals must be able to imagine themselves in a “web of relationship” not only with their own communities, but also with their enemies.

Relationship creates a space in which an individual realizes that the quality of her life depends on the quality of the lives of others.735 Second, the moral imagination respects

733 One such anecdote offers the story of a young man facing down an old, respected Chief in Ghana, after years of cyclical violence. The Chief comes to the peace negotiations indignant that young men, lacking wisdom and a Chief of their own to represent them, dare to speak with him. But one young man respectfully refers to him as “father” and reasons quietly with him. The youngster’s respectful tone and reference to local traditions which show extreme deference to and respect for the Chief catch him off guard, please him, and make him much more receptive to building peace across their divided communities. The third-party mediators who were present could never have achieved such a change of heart by insisting that the Chief talk with the young man; only the young man, with his local knowledge and use of tradition, could bring that about. Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 7-10.

734 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 34.

735 Ibid., 34-35.

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complexity and defies dualistic thinking, such as us vs. them. It relies instead on a paradoxical curiosity which “seeks something beyond what is visible, something that holds apparently contradictory and even violently opposed social energies together.” It suspends judgment in order to explore contradictions for something beyond what is currently known.736 Third, the moral imagination provides the space for creativity and newness to emerge. Finally, it involves the willingness to take a risk. In conflict settings, violence is the known, and peace is the risky unknown.737

To support the development of these four disciplines, Lederach promotes three dispositions which a peacebuilder can adopt to aid her work: stillness, humility, and sensuous perception. Stillness is one of the most difficult dispositions for a peace practitioner to acquire. Lederach observes,

“The fundamental nature of stillness flies in the face of common notions of getting something to change. Change, we believe, is about promoting, nudging, and even pushing. Activism argues with the world: ‘Don’t just stand there, do something!’ Stillness says in response: ‘Don’t just do something, stand there!’ The paradox is this: Stillness is not inactivity. It is the presence of disciplined activity without movement…It is the platform that generates authenticity of engagement, for it is the stage that makes true listening and seeing possible.”738

Always doing, without being still to stop, watch, and listen, often misses the closest, most obvious approaches to social change. Lacking stillness can produce great

736 Ibid., 36.

737 Ibid., 39.

738 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 104.

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tragedies in peacebuilding, as it may lead to the inability to see the transformative potential of what is already present. Acting quickly without taking the time to be still may also coincide with always seeking short-term solutions, at the expense of long-term gains.739

The second disposition, humility, has two essences, according to Lederach: first, an intentional acknowledgement that humans are a small part of something bigger; and second, that learning and seeking truth are lifelong endeavors.740 Peacebuilders never know everything that they need to know, and they should not be afraid to make a tenuous beginning for fear that their ignorance will be revealed. Finally, Lederach discusses the utility of sensuous perception. He notes that professional peacebuilders tend to value analysis which relies on hearing and vision, but he sees this as an overly- narrow epistemological judgment about which types of sensory information are relevant for peace.741 The moral imagination should engage the full range of senses.

What can people smell, feel, and taste? How does that help them to survive and thrive in contexts of violence? How might their sensuous perceptions, coming from all five senses, point to innovative solutions for peace? Sensuous perception can aid in building

739 Ibid., 106.

740 Ibid., 107.

741 Ibid., 108.

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relationships with enemies over meals. Sharing food and drink can turn opponents into humans.742

Each of the four disciplines, together comprising the moral imagination, requires a great deal of courage. Forging relationships with enemies, accommodating complexity, being creative, and taking risks are all far more difficult than living with the status quo, however undesirable it might be. Furthermore, asking peacebuilders to work on their dispositions is an extraordinary move, particularly when it comes to advising activists to be still! But Lederach argues that these difficult disciplines and unorthodox dispositions are just what is required if historically divided communities are to come together, constructing a platform for peace that can generate nonviolent paths through the inevitable friction of community life.

At times, Lederach sounds much like Ackerly (and vice versa), whose iterative method enacts contestation and brings the terrain of difficulty to the fore. Ackerly’s method is far messier and much more resource- and time-intensive than the typical approach to political theory. In addition to the resolve required to work through long and difficult collective theorizing processes, her curb cut feminism calls for courage, in the form of “courageous listening,” which she argues is “required for any terrain of difficulty to be a space of transformation and learning.”743 Thus a tentative consensus emerges between Ackerly’s critical feminist theory and Lederach’s peace theory:

742 Ibid., 109–110.

743 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 206.

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transformation is difficult, and it requires a great deal of those who would pursue it.

However, there are also important differences between the approaches. I will show that noting the differences can improve each approach. But to most effectively compare

Lederach and Ackerly, we must do so in the context of conflict transformation and other peacebuilding praxis in Manipur.

5.4 Comparative analysis: Ackerly, Lederach, and peacebuilding praxis

Many activists in Manipur are familiar with the conflict transformation approach, and some explicitly employ it alongside human rights activism. Others who do not consciously employ the approach use aspects of it still, relying on some of its intuitive ideas such as relationships and creativity to aid their activism. However, many peace activists simply do not feel that they have the time to pursue such a process. Manipur is on fire, and peace activists must beat back the flames. I will discuss explicit and implicit uses of conflict transformation within peacebuilding praxis, critiquing it with Ackerly’s critical feminist method when appropriate. Lederach’s approach contains guiding criteria—justpeace. It also emphasizes the importance of locally-accessible deliberative methods. This suggests that of the three parts of Ackerly’s critical feminist method, skeptical scrutiny will be the most important tool for critique.

5.4.1 Explicit uses of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis

I met with two organizations in Manipur, Human Rights Alert and EEVFAM, which consciously employ conflict transformation. Scholars, activists, and journalists came together to found Human Rights Alert (HRA) in 1999. The leaders targeted human 294

rights abuses by the armed forces, but many of them felt that the human rights approach was too narrow and legalistic for their purposes. BR, one of the founding members, argues that the conflict transformation approach is much better than human rights for building positive peace744 in Manipur, because it allows peacebuilders to

“explain, reinvent, and establish [their] own theor[ies].”745 BR, now an independent peacebuilder (educated in a peace studies program in Cambodia and currently employed as a freelance writer), focuses his attention exclusively on the conflict transformation approach.746 One of his main missions is to educate journalists and armed group leaders about conflict transformation and its creative possibilities for peace, in a land which has become inured to conflict resolution approaches after more than sixty years of conflict. He says that some armed group leaders have finally learned that his work for conflict transformation is not just a façade for working for the state. As a scholar and a journalist, BR is also articulating an Asian approach to conflict transformation, arguing that Lederach’s version has Western roots which do not map onto Manipur’s conflict as well as an Asian version might.747

744 Positive peace goes beyond negative peace, or the absence of violence, to include the presence of just structures and nonviolent processes for addressing conflict. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91.

745 BR, June 22, 2015.

746 BR works independently in Manipur, no longer under the auspices of Human Rights Approach (although he maintains friendly relations with them). However, he is connected to ACTION for Conflict Transformation, a “global network of practitioners, living and working in conflict situations, who are committed to positive action to transform conflicts. The network is diverse and inclusive…” http://action- global.tumblr.com/.

747 BR, June 22, 2015.

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One way in which BR has applied conflict transformation through local traditions is with an interethnic version of the traditionally Meitei Ningol Chakkouba holiday.

Ningol Chakkouba is a Meitei tradition in which married women, who have moved away to live with their husbands’ families, return to their childhood homes to cook lunch with their own families, to reminisce about the olden days, and to receive gifts from their brothers. In return, the sisters bless their brothers with wishes for prosperity throughout the year.748 Within Meiteis, the holiday strengthens ties among brothers and sisters. BR argues that this holiday can also strengthen ties among women and men of different ethnic groups.

BR and several research associates (including my own translator, SL), engaged in action research alongside an interethnic Ningol Chakkouba in 2013, organized by the All

Manipur Educational Social and Cultural Organization (AMESCO). They conducted focus group discussions following the Ningol Chakkouba meal, across different ages, ethnicities, educational levels, and socio-economic statuses. AMESCO serves in the hosting role of fathers and brothers, and women from many ethnic groups come as sisters to eat with one another.749 Tribal women from the hills who travel to Imphal for the occasion express great excitement over participating. Village authority members often accompany the women, as well, creating more opportunities for peaceful

748 BR, “Transforming Ethnic Conflicts in Manipur through Ningol Chakkouba--a Meitei Familial Tradition” (Change and Peacebuilding Action (CPA), 2013), 5.

749 Ibid., 13.

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interaction.750 BR reports that other groups, such as the Manipur Baptist Convention

(MBC), the United Committee Manipur (UCM), and even the Indian Army have also begun to host versions of Ningol Chakkouba.751 Thus community leaders, activists, and members of the media widely hail this annual festival as an important opportunity for interethnic cooperation and solidarity.

The women participants generally report taking great pleasure in the event. SL notes that even though the events take place only once per year, women look forward to them and hope to be invited back in order to meet their friends from other ethnic groups once again. She argues,

“There are some who come … just to participate because they have been invited. But after coming and after having all those programs … they change their mind. After going, after interacting with each other, after seeing all those things which [were] being done on that particular day, they have the feeling that it is a good one. That I should be given another chance to come. It was not like attending an event but it was a lifetime experience.”752

Thus women feel honored to be chosen for these events, and they also take quite seriously the roles of women as peacebuilders. Many of them highlight the fact that mothers teach their young children the ways of the world, and that mothers can promote tolerance and sow the seeds of peace in Manipur.753 It seems that in many

750 Ibid., 15.

751 Ibid., 17.

752 SL, June 30, 2015.

753 BR, “Transforming Ethnic Conflicts in Manipur through Ningol Chakkouba--a Meitei Familial Tradition,” 19.

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ways, this Meitei familial tradition has been effectively transformed into an interethnic opportunity for cooperation and increased understanding across historically divided communities.

BR’s Ningol Chakkouba approach to conflict transformation, however, presents multiple problems when viewed through the lens of Ackerly’s skeptical scrutiny. Recall that skeptical scrutiny requires the social critic to approach values, practices, and norms cautiously, keeping her eyes open for inequalities and power hierarchies. Skeptical scrutiny looks for the ways in which those with more power can exploit such hierarchies.

What sorts of hierarchies in Manipur might arise in the Ningol Chakkouba?

Hierarchies associated with gender, ethnicity, class, and their intersections generate potential problems in this case. First, men initiate these peacebuilding processes, with women serving as participants.754 While the women join the initiative gladly, it is difficult to connect the women’s roles in Ningol Chakkouba to real social change, particularly if the Indian Army itself—a major source of both direct and structural violence against women in Manipur755—oversees such activities. Given that women are continually excluded from peace negotiations with military and political representatives, their presence at the Ningol Chakkouba seems to be an appeasement of women who might otherwise agitate for peace in other ways, as well as an

754 SL, June 30, 2015.

755 Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Searching for Human Security in ‘Disturbed’ Areas: Women as Agents for Change in Manipur, India,” Australasian Journal of Human Security 1, no. 2 (2005): 49–64; Shukhdeba Hanjabam, “The Meitei Upsurge in Manipur,” American Economic Journal 6 (2008): 157–69.

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appropriation of an important cultural tradition. I do not intend to diminish the value of women’s interethnic relationships for social change on a local level, but rather to question the ways in which a focus on such relationships (particularly just once per year) might be misused as a substitute for the long, difficult work of trauma healing, poverty reduction, disarmament, and so many other processes which must be a part of conflict transformation.

Skeptical scrutiny likewise questions the role of ethnicity in Ningol Choukkouba.

Although the tradition has been secularized, its roots lie in Meitei mythology.756 The event is one which has long been important to the Meitei ethnic group, and although open to Nagas, Kukis, and other non-Meiteis, the tradition is foreign to them. Many of the groups like AMESCO and the MBC which organize Ningol Chakkoubas make it clear to Naga and Kuki women that it is they, rather than Meiteis, who invite the women to participate.757 This signals the organizations’ awareness that the tradition’s ethnic roots might be a problem for tribal women participants. Unfortunately, I was unable to interview anyone about the Ningol Chakkouba experience except for two Meiteis who conducted action research on the process—BR and SL. Like Ackerly, I must interpret silences and absences. But there is much within the researchers’ views which prompts concern about the so-called ethnically neutral nature of this peacebuilding initiative.

756 BR, “Transforming Ethnic Conflicts in Manipur through Ningol Chakkouba--a Meitei Familial Tradition,” 3–4.

757 Ibid., 13.

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In the research document describing the impact of Ningol Choukkouba, BR provides a long description of the interethnic conflict in Manipur, tying it as well to the on-going conflict among the Indian Army, paramilitary groups, and the people of

Manipur. This description favors Meiteis (his own ethnic group) at every turn, as he refers to Naga “aggressors” and the “clannish and divisive” Kukis. BR writes:

“In [ethnic] clashes, the Meitei CSOs [Civil Society Organizations] played a moderating role for both sides of the ethnic conflict, even though current ‘tribal’ leaders, once again looking through the ‘tribal’ prism, hardly acknowledge the Meitei contribution to bringing the murderous climate back to a semblance of normalcy. However, being the majority ethnic group and being also the descendants from a melting pot of many ethnic strands through the centuries, the Meiteis are not, nor can they afford to be, sectarian in their approach and outlook.”758

What is the transformative potential of an interethnic initiative, which is rooted in Meitei tradition and run by Meiteis who believe themselves to be the only non- sectarian group among many sectarian groups? How does this bias impact the initiative and the research that follows? Skeptical scrutiny insists that we pose these questions.759

Class, too, can truncate the transformative possibilities of Ningol Chakkouba.

Part of the tradition consists of women bringing sweets and local fruits to their hosts, and the hosts (usually their brothers and fathers) giving them gifts in return. AMESCO’s

758 Ibid., 8.

759 SL would take similarly pro-Meitei stances in some of her descriptions of ethnic relations in Manipur, in the form of asides and commentary to me when we conducted interviews together (with her working as my translator). For example, a Kuki woman who worked with Manipur Baptist Church reported that Meitei widows showed up regularly for the church’s handouts and trainings, whereas Muslim widows did not. SL noted the superiority of the Meitei widows and mentioned it again to me in future interviews, when others made similar comments. LI, July 8, 2015; NT, July 8, 2015.

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Ningol Chakkouba quickly devolved into a gift-giving competition, in which the grandeur of one’s gift became an important status symbol.760 Skeptical scrutiny looks to this hierarchy and calls for a limit on the gift-giving aspect of the tradition, even though that has long been central to the Meitei version of the holiday. Interpreting silences and absences, we can infer that non-Meitei women who cannot afford grand gifts might feel less a part of the initiative than, e.g., upper- or middle-class Meiteis bearing expensive gifts, who have long practiced the tradition.

Like BR, Babloo Loitongbam pursues conflict transformation in Manipur, in his capacity as the executive director of Human Rights Alert (HRA). Loitongbam assisted greatly with the formation of EEVFAM in 2009. In describing the origins of the group, he points out that the “official EEVFAM platform”—presumably a reference to Lederach’s idea of a platform for peace761—built upon bits and pieces of pre-existing relationships among women. Many of the women of EEVFAM already knew each other, and they started reaching out to one another for the purpose of pursuing justice once they shared the experience of the extrajudicial killing of loved ones. Although their organizing principle is justice, EEVFAM’s platform is reinforced daily by the connections and transactions of everyday life, such as the selling of dried fish and handwoven goods.

These economic relationships, building upon political relationships and psychological

760 BR, “Transforming Ethnic Conflicts in Manipur through Ningol Chakkouba--a Meitei Familial Tradition,” 13.

761 Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 47.

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affinities, strengthen the platform for peace across members of historically divided ethnic groups who come together in EEFVAM.762 Moreover, Loitongbam describes their work in terms of a Lederachian process structure. He argues, “We weren’t consciously trying to build a process structure in the beginning, but that’s what it is.”763 EEVFAM considers women’s individual needs, as it promotes economic self-help and psycho- social support groups for grieving and traumatized widows. However, it also maintains a collective goal—the pursuit of justice for extrajudicial killings. Though the process is dynamic, according to Manipur’s political climate, the group’s growth, and the changing capacities of its members, it maintains its overall form and direction.

What might the application of skeptical scrutiny reveal about the workings of

EEVFAM? Loitongbam readily admits that this platform is comprised primarily of those who live in Imphal, because of geographical and financial constraints associated with traveling from the hills to the Imphal valley. Thus, although many tribal women live in

Imphal and thus have the capability of accessing EEVFAM, there are many, many more

Naga and Kuki women dwelling in the hills who do not. My own research process reflects the Meitei-dominance of the group, as my Meitei translator and I were able to interview the Meitei facilitator of the group, Lointongbam, along with five EEVFAM widows—all Meitei. Although we attempted several times to interview tribal EEVFAM

762 I problematized the simplicity of ethnic unity within women’s peacebuilding in Chapter 3; however, the fact remains that EEFVAM and other organizations have members from multiple ethnic groups, whatever that membership may look like.

763 BL, June 26, 2015.

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members, we were thwarted at every turn. One confirmed interviewee was prevented from meeting with us by her father-in-law. Other tribal women simply did not return my translator’s calls for interviews. We also learned from one Meitei widow that many others in EEVFAM wondered why her case had gone forward so quickly through the judicial system, citing her closeness with the (Meitei) President of EEVFAM as cause for suspicion.764 Skeptical scrutiny rightly asks us to probe further when Loitongbam argues,

“ethnic and religious differences don’t matter at all” for the workings of the group.765

5.4.2 Implicit uses of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis

MWGSN and the Naga Women’s Union Manipur also use aspects of conflict transformation, although they do not do so consciously. Anyone building peace who focuses on transforming relationships, rather than resolving episodes of violence, applies some version of conflict transformation. Additionally, those exercising the other disciplines of the moral imagination, including paradoxical curiosity, creativity, and risk- taking, are taking a transformative approach.

MWGSN often takes risks when building relationships across divisions. As I was leaving India in 2015, the organization was beginning the process of conducting gender sensitization trainings with members of the security forces, to help soldiers and police commandos better understand how to deal with women who come to them for help.766

764 BK, July 2, 2015.

765 BL, June 26, 2015.

766 RM, June 23, 2015.

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This initiative is risky for two reasons: if some of their trainees go on to perpetrate violence against women, MWGSN may be held partially responsible. Furthermore, their interaction with security forces may be seen as political capture by elites, at best, or conscious collusion at worst. Many in Manipur already distrust MWGSN because of its strong presence in New Delhi, arguing that it is an “internet organization” that tries to accrue local political power and exploit international grant money, rather than build a grassroots movement for peace.767 Thus, MWGSN undertakes an existential risk with these security forces trainings. However, the potential reward from such trainings— increased knowledge and relationship-building across divisions of gender, power, and ethnicity—contributes enormously to conflict transformation.

Members of the Naga Women’s Union Manipur (NWUM) exercise the moral imagination’s discipline of creativity, overseeing innovative peacebuilding initiatives which bring divided communities together. One member of NWUM, GS, was one of two women partnering with the male-dominated Naga Forum for Reconciliation. This Forum employed multiple creative tactics to foster interactions among warring Naga factions.

GS reports that at one large peace meeting, many of the members of different factions refused to converse with other members. The Forum assented to this, but required that all factions eat under one roof. The Forum members then craftily divided themselves among many tables at the open air restaurant, such that at least a few of the members

767 GJ, July 1, 2015.

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of various factions would have to sit at the tables of other factions. They followed such meals up with football games, comprised of diverse teams. The Forum’s football team won games handily, as it was well-coordinated. The other teams, inherently distrustful of one another, lost the games very badly, which encouraged them to work together more and more during future games. Finally, the Forum used common religious traditions to bring divided communities together, supporting diverse church choirs and intertribal gift exchanges during the Christian season of Advent.768 Although football games and choir practice rarely appear in mediation manuals for high-level negotiations, these everyday interactions built peace across communities that had perpetrated violence against one another.

Curb cut feminism’s skeptical scrutiny pushes us to probe deeper, however, questioning the power relations of peace-through-football. Many women in Manipur play football, with great success.769 However, women and men rarely play together. The

Naga football initiative must have excluded women, if only because so few women participated in the Forum itself. GS tells the story of the football games with relish, but as an observer rather than a participant.770 Football builds peace among Naga men, leaving women’s statuses unchanged. Moreover, might there be some members of these communities who are physically unable to join the games? Elderly and less-able

768 GS, July 8, 2015.

769 James Mills, “‘Manipur Rules Here’: Gender, Politics, and Sport in an Asian Border Zone,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 30, no. 1 (2006): 62–78.

770 GS, July 8, 2015.

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people should be able to contribute to peacebuilding, regardless of physical ability. The exclusion of some, whether by gender or ability, does not necessarily undermine the utility of peace-through-football as an initiative, but it does limit its scope.

5.4.3 Rejections of conflict transformation in peacebuilding praxis

Although Manipur sees many explicit and implicit uses of the moral imagination and conflict transformation processes, many peacebuilders work with the sort of urgency and haste which Lederach cautions against. The Meira Paibis, in particular, seem to pride themselves upon their energetic activity and quick responsiveness to crises. Although she fights for peace, development, and justice, IN, a well-known Meira

Paibi leader, describes herself as a soldier in the Third Women’s War (following the long legacy of Meitei women’s activism in the first two Nupilal, or “women’s wars,” of

Manipur).771 IN declares with militant language:

“Manipuri women’s spirit… spirit is from our forefathers. Our spirit is very strong. They had very very high spirit, and we are the followers and we are their descendants, you know? And our blood is running from the blood of our ancestors, you know? And so Manipur women have this strength! [We] have this strength and can fight whatever force [comes], can fight!”772

771 See chapter 3 for a longer discussion of the historical origins of women’s peacebuilding in Manipur.

772 IN, June 16, 2014.

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IN clearly associates strength with fighting, rather than with being still, listening, observing, and acting deliberately. Hers is a reactive approach, which fights “whatever force comes.”

Meira Paibi peacebuilding takes its name from women’s walking about the streets at night, brandishing torches and protecting their communities from outsiders.773

They focus on territorial security, and the safety of their own, much more than building relationships across divisions. Importantly, and for Lederach, perhaps dangerously— they tend to do all of this in a great hurry. As soon as an incident of some sort occurs

(e.g. a rape or an extrajudicial killing), Meira Paibis appear on the scene, ready to protest and to put pressure upon the state government. Although consciousness-raising about injustices has its place in peacebuilding processes, the Meira Paibis’ instantaneous reactions to injustices are far from Lederach’s injunctions to be still, to take note of who and what are already present within communities, and to use humility.

These sorts of protests have become ubiquitous in Manipur. What if some other method might be more effective? The Meira Paibis need not be humble in terms of becoming shy and retiring women—far from it! Rather, they should be humble with regards to their peacebuilding methods, risking other actions when those that they perennially use no longer produce results.

773 Ibid.

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5.5 Critically assessing conflict transformation

Lederach’s conflict transformation approach provides a helpful lens through which to view peacebuilding praxis. His ideas have both explanatory and critical power for peacebuilding in Manipur. However, as we have seen, conflict transformation as it is practiced is not beyond reproach. Adding skeptical scrutiny, the part of Ackerly’s critical feminist method which Lederach’s approach lacks, causes us to probe at various hierarchies, exclusions, and expressions of false universals. Do the critiques that I have made reflect a problem with Lederach’s theory itself, or merely with how is has been applied in Manipur?

Chapter 6 will take up this question more closely, delving deeper into Lederach’s definition of justpeace alongside other alternatives to the liberal peace that are prominent in the field of peace studies. However, in this chapter, I wish to reflect on one problem that the critical feminist critique of peacebuilding praxis has exposed—the uncritical privileging of the local. Ningol chakkouba and peace-through-football are indigenous practices in Manipur. As peacebuilding initiatives, these are preferable to high-level negotiations which exclude relevant stakeholders and apply one-size-fits-all methods. Their source in local practice, however, does not mean that we should fail to be critical. Skeptical scrutiny means that we might need outsiders or multi-cited critics to question problematic aspects of local traditions which insiders may not be aware of.

Adding critical feminism to conflict transformation, therefore, helps to guard against local peacebuilding reflecting local prejudice.

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Thania Paffenholz, Atalia Omer, Roger MacGinty, and Oliver Richmond share concerns about peacebuilding’s recent tendency to turn uncritically to the local level.

While acknowledging the importance of local buy-in and resonance with local culture, they fear that taking international peace processes to the local level will lend legitimacy to pre-existing hierarchies.774 Paffenholz conducts an impressive analysis of peacebuilding work, to test the extent to which Lederach’s approach (a) has been taken up by practitioners, and (b) has succeeded in the field. She finds that many peacebuilders have a tendency to romanticize the local as a “homogenous and necessarily good entity.” Western peacebuilders, seeking to transform conflicts in the non-West, also tend to support “the good local”—moderates who appear to be likeminded.775 This approach often excludes religious or extremist actors, who might be genuine allies for peace. Western donors hence propagate power relations associated with Western status markers, such as education, internet literacy, and religion of a certain type.

Omer worries that too much emphasis upon the local will limit peace scholars’ and practitioners’ ability to see the links among local conflict and global discourses and practices. She also asserts that peacebuilding which has an impact upon the site of

774 This mirrors Nussbaum’s concern with allowing deliberation about human capabilities at the local level—without some sort of insistence upon agreed upon, universal values, local values may flourish, whether for good or for evil.

775 Thania Paffenholz, “International Peacebuilding Goes Local: Analysing Lederach’s Conflict Transformation Theory and Its Ambivalent Encounter with 20 Years of Practice,” Peacebuilding 2, no. 1 (2014): 25.

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conflict can occur in many places, such as diaspora communities and urban centers that are far afield from rural violence. Turning to the local might wrongly limit peacebuilding to one location, whereas in fact, peacebuilding can be multi-fronted.776

In a co-authored piece, MacGinty and Richmond defend the turn of critical peace studies towards the local (including, but not limited to, Lederach’s work), signaling a shift away from top-down, national security-oriented approaches to peacebuilding. The authors remain wary, however, of local actors’ capacities to be “partisan, discriminatory, exclusive and violent,” within contexts that can “contain power relations and hierarchies that favour some above others.”777 Despite these potential problems, they, like

Paffenholz and Omer (as well as Lederach), staunchly support local peacebuilding processes, if the local stands in opposition to externally imposed, international processes. But whereas Lederach promotes conflict transformation and the moral imagination, they draw upon Richmond’s idea of complexity within the everyday.778

Peace must be built, they argue, with the “cacophony of thinking” which is the heterogeneity of the local turn across the Global South. Thus, for MacGinty and

776 Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20.

777 Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 770.

778 Oliver Richmond, “A Post-Liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday,” Review of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 557–80; Oliver Richmond, “Foucault and the Paradox of Peace‐as‐Governance Versus Everyday Agency,” International Political Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010): 199–202.

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Richmond, Lederach’s conflict transformation approach is just one of many possible responses to conflict, as it comes with its own roots and assumptions.779

Critical theorists are thus already questioning power relations within peacebuilding’s “local turn” in general, and within conflict transformation in particular.

Bringing Ackerly into the conversation may seem redundant. I argue, however, that her intervention is vital for women’s peacebuilding, because it provides a method of social criticism which is useful for both the theorist and the practitioner—in other words, which is appropriate for praxis. Ackerly’s work is also staunchly feminist, which is important for any critical theory operating in a world frequently characterized by patriarchal practices.

To summarize this chapter and the last, Ackerly’s three-part curb cut feminism shows the inadequacy of Sen, who highlights only deliberative inquiry; of Nussbaum, who employs guiding criteria and, to an inadequate extent, skeptical scrutiny; and of

Lederach, who promotes deliberative inquiry and guiding criteria but sometimes lacks the skeptical scrutiny to correct power relations within the local. Ackerly’s method probes and questions at every step, whether in theory or in practice—within data collection and analysis for the theorist, and within organization and action for the activist.

779 Paffenholz notes that Christian conceptions of reconciliation lie at the heart of Lederach’s approach, grounded in truth, justice, mercy, and peace. Paffenholz, “International Peacebuilding Goes Local,” 15.

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Most importantly for peacebuilding, curb cut feminism retains an awareness of not only the subaltern’s views, but also of the oppressor’s views. It seeks the voices of both powerless and powerful, highlighting differences among them. If we are to adopt the conflict transformation approach, we know that it is not enough merely to adopt the viewpoint of the powerless, as some critical theories would have us do.780 The powerless must build relationships with the powerful in order to construct a platform for peace which can generate non-violent responses to conflict for generations to come.

5.6 Conclusions: towards a critical feminist justpeace

In this chapter, I have presented a three-way critical conversation among

Ackerly’s critical feminist approach to human rights practice, Lederach’s practice-based theories of peace and social change, and peacebuilding praxis from the Indian state of

Manipur. I used Ackerly’s curb cut feminism to question aspects of peacebuilding praxis such as the supposed neutrality of interethnic peacebuilding initiatives and the exclusion of women from sporting events, as well as Lederach’s tendency to turn uncritically to the local. I have likewise employed peacebuilding praxis to question the limits which Ackerly places upon her range of informants (e.g., gender and baseline levels of technological sophistication), and also to reveal that peacebuilders often feel the need to supplement human rights activism with the conflict transformation approach.

780 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963).

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Like Chapter 4, this chapter supports my overarching argument that peacebuilding praxis is an important and fruitful interlocutor for theories of social justice, whether they concern themselves with development, human rights, or peace.

The criticisms of Ackerly and Lederach which I raise are made possible with evidence from India. Indeed, many of the questions that I ask come directly from praxis. For example, I did not expect conflict transformation to play a central role in this project.

However, many peacebuilders in Manipur apply it alongside human rights approaches, and so I, too, have engaged with it. I saw the rich, theoretical connections between

Ackerly and Lederach only because the peacebuilders with whom I worked saw them and used them to their advantage. As a theorist with the time and space to step back and reflect upon the big picture of peacebuilding in Manipur, I can also use Ackerly and

Lederach to critique one another in new ways. I work as a multi-sited critic, combining my observation of Manipur with my political theory training in ways that are simply unavailable to many involved in peacebuilding praxis on the ground. Taking seriously both peacebuilding practices and peacebuilders’ reflections upon those practices makes my theorizing all the more rich.

In the final chapter, I will synthesize my conclusions from a multi-directional conversation among peacebuilding praxis, feminist theory, and theories of human development, human rights, and conflict transformation. I will return to the definition of justpeace, offering a critical feminist revision of the appropriate goals for peacebuilding praxis.

313 CHAPTER 6:

CRITICAL FEMINIST JUSTPEACE

6.1 The liberal peace

In Chapter 5, I described John Paul Lederach’s conflict transformation approach as a corrective supplement to conflict resolution, which Lederach viewed as an overly- narrow imposition of Western methods on peacebuilding processes across the world.781

Lederach’s personal narrative serves as a microcosm of the experiences of peace researchers and practitioners around the world who have become increasingly critical of the larger “liberal peace” project—the United Nations-led brand of peacebuilding which focuses on electoral politics and the liberalization of markets after violent conflicts have been “resolved.”

Peace and conflict scholars characterized the liberal peace as an international consensus at the end of the Cold War. It came to be understood that democratic politics, the rule of law, and market economics would propel the globe to sustainable peace.782 Daniel Philpott refers to the liberal peace as “the globally dominant concept of

781 John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 6.

782 Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam, “Introduction: The Politics of Liberal Peace,” in A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding, ed. Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam (London; New York: Zed Books, 2011), 1–9.

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justice in the age of peacebuilding.” Its tenets are comprised of Western concepts of justice, grounded in John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Woodrow Wilson, and

John Rawls; it involves actors such as the United Nations and the United States

Department of State; and it may also be characterized as a set of activities that are executed by international actors who follow such ideas. These activities might include supporting ceasefires, promoting human rights, ensuring the freedom of market capitalism, holding elections, and trying criminals in international tribunals.783 Oliver

Richmond estimates that the liberal peace has been deployed in “50 to 60 post-conflict and fragile states over the last 20 years.” Illustrated by United Nations interventions in

Somalia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Timor Leste, he notes that the liberal peace “has remained without challenge, at least in mainstream international fora.”784

While international and national government agencies have busily implemented aspects of the liberal peace, the scholarly community has busily made its critiques.

Asking “what is left of the liberal peace?”, Mark Hoffman insists that sustainable peacebuilding must reject imposed, technocratic approaches. He privileges the needs and goals of local populations above those of the international peacebuilding community.785 Comparable critiques coming from scholars like Roger MacGinty, Roland

783 Daniel Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70–71.

784 Oliver Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–2.

785 Michael Hoffman, “What Is Left of the ‘Liberal Peace’?,” Connect 21, no. 2 (2009): 10–11; cited in Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The 315 Paris, Richmond, Lederach, and others have multiplied. According to Susanna Campbell,

David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam, the liberal peace has become something of a whipping boy—all too easy to abuse, but too infrequently critiqued with clarity and specificity.786 Paris argues that the proliferation of critique often treats the liberal peace unfairly, conceiving of it too broadly or holding it accountable for ideas, such as “the victor’s peace,” which UN peacebuilding never intended to support.787

I wish to accurately represent the liberal peace, just as I try to fairly portray its critics such as Richmond and Lederach in this chapter. Thus, I will carefully define its scope in this project according to Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace, published by the United Nations in 1992 near the height of international enthusiasm for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Boutros-Ghali writes that post-conflict peacebuilding might include disarmament, monitoring elections, and promoting political participation.788 In his view, peacebuilding occurs in the aftermath of armed conflict, and it serves as the counterpart of preventive diplomacy, which occurs before and hopefully prevents the outbreak of violence. Boutros-Ghali adds that the United Nations has an

Prevention, Management and Transformation of Deadly Conflicts, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 226–27.

786 Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam, “Introduction: The Politics of Liberal Peace,” 2–3.

787 Roland Paris, “Critiques of Liberal Peace,” in A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding, ed. Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam (London; New York: Zed Books, 2011), 31–51; Paris critiques Richmond, here. Oliver Richmond, “The Problem of Peace: Understanding the ‘Liberal Peace,’” Conflict, Security and Development 6, no. 3 (2006): 291–314.

788 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace- Keeping (New York: United Nations, 1992), 32.

316 obligation to offer “technical assistance” for the transformation of “deficient national structures and capabilities.”789

When thinking about An Agenda for Peace in light of direct and structural violence in Manipur, problems abound. First, the term post-conflict implies that peacebuilding occurs only when armed conflict has ended.790 Manipur has not been a post-conflict, or post-violence, state since its incorporation into India in 1949. Because

India has not recognized that armed conflict is occurring in the Northeast, international observers such as UN peacekeepers have not been welcomed in.791 Elections occur with regularity, but I have demonstrated the corruption associated with Manipur’s democratic processes. Moreover, India’s attempts at peacebuilding in the state of

Manipur, illustrated best by the Indian government’s high-level negotiations with members of the NSCN-IM, have caused more problems than they have resolved. Recall that these negotiations have been on-going for more than a decade. They have occurred largely in secret, and they have involved only the members of the insurgent group, rather than all of the relevant stakeholders (such as victims of NSCN-IM-sponsored violence, within Manipur and Nagaland). The negotiations sparked violent uprisings in

789 Ibid., 33.

790 Stephen Ryan and Roger Mac Ginty, “The Evolution of Peacebuilding,” in Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 28.

791 Babloo Loitongbam, “Women in Armed Conflict: The Manipur Experience,” in Women and Peace: Chapters from Northeast India, ed. Anuradha Dutta and Ratna Bhuyan (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2008), 25.

317 Manipur, because of their perceived injustice related to territorial sovereignty.792 The liberal peace, as defined by Boutros-Ghali, has utterly failed to address the direct and structural violence which women peacebuilders in Manipur work against.

How, therefore, should we re-define peace and conceive of peacebuilding, in order to further the goals of women who have faced decades of multi-formed, multi- layered violence in Manipur? Peace studies literature promotes two major alternatives to the liberal peace: Oliver Richmond’s post-liberal peace, which focuses on “the everyday” and “peacebuilding-as-resistance”; and John Paul Lederach’s justpeace, striving for increased justice in human relationships at all levels—local, national, and international. I will describe these alternatives, consider them alongside other uses of the phrase “just peace” within peace studies literature, and reflect upon their potential for accounting for the experiences of women in Manipur. Next, I will evaluate the liberal peace and its alternatives according to the conclusions drawn from peacebuilding praxis, presented earlier in this project. Finally, I will conclude with the articulation of a critical feminist justpeace, which is grounded in women’s peacebuilding praxis and takes account of the insights of a multi-directional conversation among liberal feminist theorists, critical feminist theorists, and peace studies scholars.

792 Ashild Kolas, “Naga Militancy and Violent Politics in the Shadow of Ceasefire,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 6 (2011): 781–92.

318 6.2 Critical responses to the liberal peace

I see both Richmond’s post-liberal peace and Lederach’s justpeace as important, useful engagements with the liberal peace. Both of these approaches highlight weaknesses with approaches like Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace. They are largely complementary, although some elements of each exist in tension with elements of the other. I mean for my side-by-side comparison of the two approaches to show the strengths of each, so that the critical feminist revision of justpeace can employ all of the most useful resources coming from peacebuilding praxis, feminist political theory, and theories of peace and justice.

6.2.1 Richmond’s post-liberal peace

Oliver Richmond, a scholar of international theory at the University of

Manchester, grounds his work in post-structuralist, critical, and post-colonial approaches. He reflects that many of the subjects of statebuilding projects—such as citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan—see the politics of peace as building security and institutions, rather than promoting social justice within community life.793 Instead of concerning itself with everyday life, the liberal peace tends to promote peace-as- governance, relying on concepts of sovereignty, territorial control, and the order of the international system.794 Peace-as-governance “assume[s] that the epistemology,

793 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011, 7.

794 Oliver Richmond, “A Post-Liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday,” Review of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 557–80.

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ontology, and methods associated with the liberal peace are on ethically firm ground and should be contained within the modern sovereign state.” This framework, according to Richmond, enables colonial extensions of Western ideas over non-Western communities, which experience its politics as “the maintenance of existing normative and political hierarchies at the local, national, and global levels.”795

Countering the liberal peace, Richmond advocates for anthropological explorations of peace formation at the grassroots level, to uncover local-liberal hybrids of the liberal peace as it encounters local exercises of critical agency.796 He searches out the infrapolitics of peacebuilding—“its hidden, fragmented, often disguised and localized agencies and capacities.”797 The infrapolitics of peace points to sources of legitimacy that are appropriate for particular contexts, rather than relying upon a

Lockean social contract which excludes many people and hence many potential allies for peace. Infrapolitics can highlight the colonialism inherent in illiberal transitions to the

795 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011, 6–7; see also Oliver Richmond, “Foucault and the Paradox of Peace‐as‐Governance Versus Everyday Agency,” International Political Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010): 199–202.

796 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011; Oliver Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

797 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011, 13.

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liberal peace,798 as well as forms of cultural resistance to certain ways of conceiving individual rights and social welfare.799

Richmond points to the urgent need for ethical assessments of the liberal peace.800 Rather than a top-down, external liberal peace which assumes that all ethical and ideological arguments have already come to a close, Richmond supports an eirenist, everyday peace that is grounded in local context, subaltern experiences, and participatory methods. Despite its roots in the Enlightenment and its “humanist concern with social justice,” the liberal peace has effectively perpetuated stark hierarchies within politics and economics, subverting the very democratic norms that it seeks to spread.801

In Ackerly’s terms, the liberal peace has failed to apply skeptical scrutiny to its own norms, values, and practices. This failure has led to a self-undermining process in which the illiberal spread of democracy and economic liberalization creates illiberal states which cannot sustain democratic processes. Eventually, such states revert back to violence.

Richmond’s eirenism—a term coming from Erasmus’ response to religious chauvinism in the time of the Reformation—is essentially skeptical scrutiny for

798 Richmond describes three “graduations” of the liberal peace, ranging from conservative, to orthodox, to emancipatory. The conservative graduation is comprised of illiberal transitions, forced upon nations by external actors, sometimes unilaterally. Ibid., 5–6.

799 Ibid., 15–16.

800 Ibid., 15.

801 Ibid., 16.

321 peacebuilding. It looks for the hidden and fragmented ways in which marginalized people exert critical agency in the face of violence and of imposed forms of peace.802

Such a localized peace would facilitate broader participation in peace formation.

Richmond notes that this “everyday peace” would “probably require an elevation of debates about equity and acceptable levels of living standards, security, identity, culture, custom, gender, rights, and needs in context.”803 Once politics are released from liberal assumptions and brought to the level of the everyday, then peacebuilding-as- resistance can lead to emancipation.804

I applaud much within Richmond’s writing. He highlights problems with UN-style peacebuilding and moves the focus from the international to the local level, acknowledging the need to consider, understand, and promote diverse forms of agency.

However, two aspects of his thought present potential problems, in light of other theorists and the peacebuilding praxis that I have explored in this project: (1) he defines local, critical agency in terms of resistance; and (2) he promotes skeptical scrutiny and participatory methods, but lacks guiding criteria.

For Richmond, local agency is expressed through resistance. Agonistic relations are so important to his framework that he contrasts peace-as-governance—the liberal peace—with peace-as-resistance—everyday peace. He argues, “It is often through

802 Ibid., 132.

803 Ibid., 142.

804 Ibid., 144.

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resistance that a civil society and a social contract comes into being in agonistic terms, overcoming the distancing that liberal peacebuilding tends to bring about.”805 Agonism represents a closing of space, or an interaction between local and international peacebuilders who develop hybrid forms of peace as they interact agonistically. Critical agency appears in local peacebuilders’ resistance to Western models of peacebuilding which are imposed externally. This characterization, however, does not precisely match peacebuilding praxis. Many women in Manipur welcome human rights education and embrace the political practice of asserting their human rights. I observed members of

MWGSN, EEFVAM, NWUM, and the Meira Paibis using human rights language. I also witnessed dozens of women giving up half a day’s wages as day-laborers in order to attend a human rights education workshop. Whether the origins of human rights are rightly or wrongly characterized as Western, many scholars worry about their imposition upon non-Western, communally-organized cultures.806 This concern simply does not play out in praxis in Manipur. Because they are not resisting the liberal peace-like promotion of human rights, are these women failing to exercise agency? Is agency present only in resistance?

805 Ibid.

806 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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In chapter 3 I used Saba Mahmood’s ethnographic exploration of women’s agency in the Cairo mosque movement to argue that feminists ought to understand agency in context. Richmond argues for deep, contextual explorations of local peace formation, but he still retains the progressive idea of agency defined in terms of resistance. This is too narrow, and it might make us lose sight of some potential versions of the infrapolitics which he seeks to promote. As Mahmood has shown us, agency can occur through inhabiting norms, rather than resisting them.807 Women in Manipur often rely upon human rights norms to call attention to the violations and deprivations that they face. This is localized peace formation, even though it is not necessarily resisting the liberal peace.

The second potential problem with Richmond’s post-liberal peace is that although he employs skeptical scrutiny and supports participatory methods that include deliberation, his approach to peace lacks guiding criteria. I showed in chapter 4 that

Nussbaum’s use of a list of central human capabilities is important for women who have been historically disadvantaged in deliberations. Her list serves as guiding criteria, and it enables women to imagine new opportunities which have not been presented to them before. In the same way, MZ, a woman working for MWGSN, learned about human rights when she first came to the organization as a conflict widow. She now serves as a community mobilizer for MWGSN and a teacher of human rights at a local primary

807 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 24.

324 school. Everyone must be informed about human rights at some point in their lives; just because MZ came to them later than many women in the West or other parts of India does not mean that she takes less ownership of them.808 One of the questions which

Ackerly puts into the mouths of social critics asks, “How does the life each person leads compare with the life a human being should be capable of living?”809 Together, community members should consider what that standard of life should be. Lists of human rights or human capabilities may or may not be helpful in such an exercise, but some sort of guiding criteria—an idea of the end at which a community aims—is a vital part of the critical process.

Richmond’s description of everyday peace is a description of a process. Rather than providing content, he offers a method. For him, everyday peace is comprised of local resistance to international imposition. His extensive agenda for post-liberal peacebuilding largely consists of methods to employ (e.g., ethnography, self- governance, listening, and translation) and dynamics to recognize (e.g., local peacebuilding taking the form of resistance, the overlapping nature of local and international contexts, and the agonistic relations of the local to the liberal).810 Because he is so worried about over-determining the meaning of peace, as the liberal peace has

808 MZ, June 3, 2014.

809 Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18.

810 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011, 147.

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done for so long, he neglects to define it at all.811 But local and international peacebuilders alike require at least the bones of an answer to the question: what is peace? Individual families, villages, states, and nations can add flesh to their responses to this question as they see fit, but there needs to be some sort of guiding criteria by which to judge the use of the methods which Richmond lays out.

John Paul Lederach’s conception of justpeace provides one example of guiding criteria which I find to be extremely effective, in light of peacebuilding praxis in

Manipur. His approach is not without its faults, and I will critique it from multiple angles.

However, justpeace provides what the post-liberal peace lacks—a constructive, contextual, multi-perspectival vision of a peaceful society at which peacebuilders from varied cultures can aim.812 Lederach is not the only scholar to use justpeace, or simply

“just peace,” as a form of guiding criteria, however. Before turning to his conception, I will briefly examine three strands of peace and conflict literature which point to just peace as the appropriate goal for societies moving from violence to peace: (1) just peace in the context of just war theory; (2) just peace as the goal for reconciliation and restorative justice; and (3) just peace as part of the feminist ethics of care. Some of

811 In Strategies of Peace, the volume featuring Lederach and Appleby’s essay which I consider carefully in this chapter, Richmond suggests that success should be defined as a locally sustainable justpeace. Presumably he is content with Lederach’s approach, although the critical aspects of Richmond’s work critique many of the parts of Lederach which I question in this chapter. Oliver Richmond, “Conclusion: Strategic Peacebuilding Beyond the Liberal Peace,” in Strategies of Peace, ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard F. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 364.

812 Atalia Omer, “Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding: Synthetic Remarks,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 659.

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these approaches represent, in my view, a step in the wrong direction, leading us back to the problems of the liberal peace. Others contribute to fruitful critiques of Lederach’s justpeace.

6.2.2 Just peace in the literature

6.2.2.1 Just peace and just war

Many scholars engaging with the concept of just peace rightly point out that although there is an enormous body of literature on just war theory, the meaning of just peace has been undertheorized. Some of this literature, often referring to just peace as jus post bellum, reflects upon the conditions necessary for a moral ending to armed conflict.813 I will focus upon the approach offered by the editors of collected essays entitled What is a Just Peace? Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller’s recent volume is representative of other scholarship in the sub-field,814 and it has also gained the notice of peace scholars like Richmond.815

813 Brian Orend, “Justice after War,” Ethics & International Affairs 16, no. 1 (2002): 43–56; Gary J. Bass, “Jus Post Bellum,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32, no. 4 (2004): 384–412; Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S. Easterday, and Jens Iverson, Jus Post Bellum: Mapping the Normative Foundations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

814 Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert E. Williams and Dan Caldwell, “Jus Post Bellum: Just War Theory and the Principles of Just Peace,” International Studies Perspectives 7, no. 4 (2006): 309–20; Manuela Melandri, “The State, Human Rights and the Ethics of War Termination: What Should a Just Peace Look Like? A Critical Appraisal,” Journal of Global Ethics 7, no. 3 (2011): 241–49.

815 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 2011, 105.

327 In What is a Just Peace?, Allan and Keller present just peace as a “language- oriented process”—one which is meant to address the weaknesses of a universally- applied liberal peace which maintains the appearance of cultural neutrality while actually perpetuating colonial homogeneity.816 Their just peace is defined as “a process whereby peace and justice are reached together by two or more parties recognizing each other’s identities, each renouncing some central demands, and each accepting to abide by common rules jointly developed.”817 It is a language-oriented process because negotiators within peace processes work together to build a common language which is acceptable to both sides. Such a language must involve respect for, and in some instances, the re-definition of the identities of all who are involved in the conflict, in a way which is “deemed just by all relevant protagonists.”818 Allan and Keller acknowledge that although “the path through justice is a demanding one, its accomplishment opens the way to a durable settlement accepted by the parties initially engaged in conflict.”819

In light of insights coming from peacebuilding praxis, feminist political thought, post-liberal peace, and justpeace, this conception of just peace presents multiple problems. Allan and Keller’s edited volume, like all of the literature which connects just

816 Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller, “Introduction: Rethinking Peace and Justice Conceptually,” in What Is a Just Peace?, ed. Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1.

817 Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller, “The Concept of a Just Peace, or Achieving Peace Through Recognition, Renouncement, and Rule,” in What Is a Just Peace?, ed. Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 195.

818 Ibid., 196.

819 Allan and Keller, “Introduction: Rethinking Peace and Justice Conceptually,” 2.

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peace to the just war tradition, fails to distinguish between violent warfare and conflict, thereby missing some of the potential benefits of embracing conflict. Whereas

Lederach’s approach to conflict transformation urges peacebuilders to see conflict as an inevitable element of social life which presents an opportunity for constructive social change,820 jus post bellum—literally after the war—assumes that war is undesirable and has come to a close. Certainly, Lederach and other peace theorists like Richmond would concur that constructive social change is best pursued in the absence of direct violence.

Talking about war without distinguishing it from other types of conflict, however, narrows the potential relevance of peacebuilding and conflict transformation. It forecloses the possibility that conflicts point to patterns of marginalization which can be addressed in the construction of peace. Such an approach also underestimates the prevalence of and the harm associated with structural violence. Women in Manipur demonstrate the need to conceive of violence broadly as they, and many other women pursuing peacebuilding, seek to address multiple forms of injustice, and not only the direct violence which comes from armed conflict.821 Just peace need not only follow a war—it must assume that conflict is inevitable, and therefore, that peacebuilding is a perpetual process.

820 John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003), 15.

821 Purna Banerjee et al., “‘Why So Much Blood?’ Violence against Women in Tripura,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 49–56; Ashild Kolas, “Mothers and Activists in the Hills of Assam,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 43/44 (2014): 41–48.

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Allan and Keller wrongly view peace as a state which can be reached by negotiators. These parties, the “relevant protagonists,”822 appear to be participating in the standard negotiation processes of the liberal peace. Although Allan and Keller declare that their model corrects for the colonial imposition of cultural neutrality, their reliance upon neutral negotiations among relevant parties reveals their own cultural affinities for the conflict resolution model and for Western political thought more generally.823 Who are the “relevant protagonists” who come together in order to reason out the meaning of justice? Presumably, those who are directly involved in the bloodshed. This might exclude victims, civil society, and more often than not, women

(just as the edited volume itself excludes female authors). Allan goes so far as to laud the contributions of the feminist theory of care ethics in his solo-authored chapter

“Measuring International Ethics: A Moral Scale of War, Peace, Justice, and Global Care,” but he argues that justice does not require the ethics of care. Although care ethics produce a society which is more morally desirable than just peace, their thick demands to do good to others are too great for the thinner requirements of justice.824

822 Allan and Keller, “The Concept of a Just Peace, or Achieving Peace Through Recognition, Renouncement, and Rule,” 196.

823 The volume relies almost exclusively upon Western, male political theorists. The authors tend to cite Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas. Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller, What Is a Just Peace?. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–5; 118–119.

824 Pierre Allan, “Measuring International Ethics: A Moral Scale of War, Peace, Justice, and Global Care,” in What Is a Just Peace?, ed. Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 119–128.

330 While I actually agree that doing good to others might be too stringent a requirement for a justice-imbued peace, I think that it is important to push back against

Allan’s assumption that justice is “based on a rational reading of ethical requirements”; that equity becomes possible through “abstract rules that blindly affect everyone”; and that “an ethic of justice is based on reason and principles.”825 The tears of the women of

EEVFAM serve as evidence in the court of law—their emotion is the evidence, according to Babloo Loitongbam.826 The courage of SU, who stopped government officials at a blockade in order to prevent inter-ethnic violence was, strictly speaking, irrational. To her own surprise, she put herself in harm’s way.827 Moreover, the tool of political intersectionality, employed in Chapter 3, revealed that identity-conscious peacebuilding, rather than identity-blind peacebuilding, would help women’s peacebuilding organizations to more effectively pursue inclusive peace. Just peace cannot be only rational, blind, and reasoned. There may be times when such versions of peace are necessary. But just peace, if it is to account for the experiences of women peacebuilders, must be much broader.

Allan and Keller are just two of many scholars working in the burgeoning sub- field of jus post bellum. I have argued that this approach, coming after the conflict has ended, maintains the wrong ontology of conflict, relies too heavily upon Western

825 Ibid., 120.

826 Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015.

827 SU, July 7, 2015.

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political thought and Western models of conflict resolution, and lifts up abstract reason at the expense of particularity and emotion. Now we will turn to the next category of literature engaging with the concept of just peace—restorative justice and reconciliation.

6.2.2.2 Just peace and reconciliation

The literature on reconciliation and just peace tends to be religious in nature.828

Indeed, Lederach’s own writings stem from his background in the Mennonite Christian tradition. Another early influence was Adam Curle, a Quaker mediator and peace activist.829 Although Lederach’s work is often employed in non-Christian settings, it is grounded in religious terminology and in Christian beliefs about the transformative potential of grace and the omnipresent opportunities for peace, even after devastating violence.830 Lederach refers to reconciliation as the relational space in which justice,

828 Omer, “Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding: Synthetic Remarks,” 678.

829 Adam Curle, Making Peace (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).

830 When working as a peacebuilder with the Mennonite Central Committee, Lederach served as an advisor with a religious conciliation team mediating a conflict in Nicaragua. As members of the team accompanied Yatama leaders back to their villages after violent conflict, they used Psalm 85 in meetings to explain the peace agreements that had been made and the reconciliatory work that needed to be done. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace : Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 27–28.

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peace, truth, and mercy meet.831 Each of these elements is vital for the type of reconciliation which enables relationships to transform, creating a platform for peace.832

Many other peace scholars write about the importance of reconciliation as an aspect of a justice-conscious peace. Although not all endorse the religious approach,833 much of the writing on reconciliation, including the burgeoning literature on restorative

(as opposed to retributive) justice, comes from Christian traditions such as Mennonite,

Quaker, and Catholic.834 As in the previous section, I am necessarily simplifying a vast literature for the purpose of understanding its general approach to the concept of just peace. I will focus here on Daniel Philpott’s recent, important book on political reconciliation, Just and Unjust Peace. I have chosen to largely leave aside the question of restorative vs. retributive justice, first because it is such a complex question in its own right, and second because its concerns stray a bit far afield from the types of questions which peacebuilders in Manipur tend to address.

831 Ibid., 29.

832 Lisa Schirch argues that although reconciliation and forgiveness are not requirements for conflict transformation, they are often central to the process. Lisa Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding: A Vision and Framework for Peace with Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004), 45.

833 David A. Crocker, “Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework,” Ethics & International Affairs 13, no. 1 (1999): 43–64.

834 Jurgen Moltmann, Creating a Just Future: The Politics of Peace and the Ethics of Creation in a Threatened World (London; Philadelphia: SCM Press; Trinity Press International, 1989); Howard. Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002); Elise Boulding, “The Other America: The Forgivers and the Peacemakers,” Peace & Change 28, no. 3 (2003): 446–54; Howard Zehr, “The Intersection of Restorative Justice with Trauma Healing, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding,” Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 18, no. 1 (2009): 20–30; Thomas Porter, The Spirit and Art of Conflict Transformation: Creating a Culture of Justpeace (Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 2010); Carolyn M. Stephenson, “Elise Boulding and Peace Education: Theory, Practice, and Quaker Faith,” Journal of Peace Education 9, no. 2 (2012): 115–26.

333 In Just and Unjust Peace, Philpott presents his version of political reconciliation as a favorable alternative to the liberal peace. Whereas the liberal peace conceives of justice in terms of individual rights, political reconciliation is concerned with right relationship in the political realm. Its goal is “respected citizenship defined by human rights, the rule of law within political communities, and respect for international law between political communities.”835 Unlike the dominant approach to religion’s limited place in the public sphere, promoted by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas,836 Philpott argues that religious values are useful for supporting the ethic of political reconciliation, and that they ought to be employed alongside secular reasoning as public resources.837

He offers examples of such resources from each of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam, and also from the practices of restorative justice, arguing that each of these traditions offers unique groundings for the ethic of political reconciliation.

Though these justifications differ, to Philpott, they represent an overlapping consensus on reconciliation which can be reached via multiple religious traditions, as well as by secular justifications like human rights.838

835 Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, 5.

836 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” trans. J Gaines, European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 1–25.

837 Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, 9.

838 Ibid., 64.

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Philpott distinguishes two sides to justice: right conduct and right response to wrong conduct. Political reconciliation resembles the “positive peace of liberalism” in its approach to right conduct—the respect for human rights and international laws governing warfare.839 In the right response to wrongs, however, political reconciliation is much broader. It recognizes six types of wounds which harm individuals and communities in contexts of violence, and it seeks to address even psychological and emotional harms.840 Justice which embodies the ethic of political reconciliation is much more holistic than the type of justice typically associated with the liberal peace, which looks to redress visible, external harms via, e.g., independent judiciaries and international law. Such a holistic justice appears in the Jewish concept of shalom;841 the

Christian idea of the convergence of justice, mercy, and righteousness;842 and the Islamic idea of comprehensive justice within communities.843

Particularly when contrasting it to the liberal peace of the United Nations, which maintains much narrower parameters for justice and tends to apply them via top-down truth and reconciliation commissions,844 Philpott’s ethic of political reconciliation takes

839 Ibid., 54–55.

840 Ibid., 30–47.

841 Ibid., 126.

842 Ibid., 139.

843 Ibid., 154.

844 John Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville (Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press, 2010).

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positive steps towards accounting for the experiences and articulated desires of women involved in peacebuilding praxis in Manipur. Many women in Manipur are impacted by personal and communal trauma; by fear of perpetrators and their communities; and by bad memories. Philpott recognizes these as legitimate wounds, and his ethic of reconciliation promotes healing on these dimensions. Two aspects of his work are potentially troubling for the Manipur case, however.

First, his religious resources are the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam. Some in Manipur are Christian, and some are Muslim; many are neither. Does his ethic of political reconciliation, justified in part with the idea of shalom, translate to Hinduism or to Manipuri indigenous religious practices of the veneration of ancestors and nature? Even if all in Manipur were Jewish, Muslim, or

Christian, does Philpott’s ethic cover over important differences in these religious traditions, in ways which would homogenize their diverse approaches to reconciliation?845 Furthermore, his ethic is “political,” i.e. public. Philpott explicitly states that “the ethic is not concerned with reconciliation in all of life—in families, personal friendships, civil society organizations, or religious organizations. It is an ethic of political reconciliation.”846 Thus, although he has expanded the range of wounds which political

845 Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9.

846 Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, 5–6.

336 reconciliation is to address, he starkly limits the actors who may publicly address it (in order for it to be considered properly “political”).

Philpott readily acknowledges that civil society organizations and tribal and religious communities do the work of restoring relationships, but he says that they “lack the official imprimatur to carry out practices such as punishment, reparations, or building just institutions.”847 I find this view to vastly underestimate the transformative potential of grassroots level peacebuilding and mid-level civil society organizations.

Whereas conflict transformation welcomes, and even requires, the involvement of peacebuilders at multiple levels, the ethic of political reconciliation apparently excludes, or at least fails to count, the work of those who are outside of official political channels.

Such a position will only perpetuate the exclusion of women from political reconciliation processes, especially in a place like Manipur which elects very few women to the

Legislative Assembly and to village councils. Moreover, women in Manipur who self- define as peacebuilders are often concerned with the very aspects of relational life which Philpott describes as a-political—personal relationships, families, and communities. Philpott differs from the liberal peace on some counts, but overall, his religious approach to political reconciliation does very little to address the concerns of women in Manipur. Next we shall see whether feminist versions of just peace are more effective.

847 Ibid., 11.

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6.2.2.3 Just peace and care ethics

Scholars have viewed the feminist theory of care ethics, in particular, as especially useful for the pursuit of peace. Care ethicists tend to differentiate care from justice, while also arguing that both approaches together are vital for flourishing.848 Care ethics began with Carol Gilligan’s 1982 work, In a Different Voice. In this foundational psychological study, Gilligan finds that whereas supposedly objective, scientific models of human development tend to reveal the justice-oriented mode of moral reasoning, an alternative model is prevalent among women—care-oriented reasoning. Going back to

Freud, psychologists have conceived of “human” development according to the experiences of men. When women failed to fit into these models, they were deemed weaker or under-developed. Problems lay with women themselves, rather than with the psychological models.849 Gilligan shows, however, that because of their socialization towards relational intimacy rather than autonomy, girls and women often reason on the basis of care and concern for particular others. This standard does not match the universal application of abstract rules which is typically associated with justice, but it still serves as a guide to moral reasoning.850

Some feminists critique Gilligan and other care ethicists for holding essentialist views of women and men. Women use justice reasoning, after all, just as many men

848 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

849 Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7.

850 Ibid., 19.

338 exhibit care and concern for others. Moreover, tying care work to women may serve as a source of disempowerment for them.851 I think that such criticisms are ill-founded, however; the main thrust of Gilligan’s work and the care theories that flow from it is that there are multiple grounds upon which to base one’s moral actions. Justice is one; care is another. Justice has tended to be more often associated with peace, but how does care fit with peace? And more importantly for my study, how can moral reasoning based on interdependence, care, and the assumption of responsibility for the well-being of others contribute to the pursuit of a just peace?

Sara Ruddick is the most prominent care ethicist who deals explicitly with peace.

In her work Maternal Thinking, she argues that at the heart of mothering lies a basic commitment to nonviolence.852 In her view, the practices of mothering provide important resources for peace activism.853 Maternal nonviolence, like peace itself, is always a “truth-to-be-made,” or a “reality in the making.” Peace and nonviolence are always possible, even when they are not present.854 Picking up on these themes, Catia

Confortini and Abigail Ruane plumb Ruddick’s work for its epistemology, seeking to use it as the basis for transformative peace processes that can lead to a Lederachian justpeace. The authors argue that Ruddick’s is a participatory epistemology, in which

851 Bartky, Sandra Lee, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990).

852 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 57.

853 Ibid., 137.

854 Ibid., 183.

339 actors (mothers) develop knowledge through interactions with others (the children whom they care for). This flexible knowledge “weaves together understandings of ‘self’ and ‘other’” in a method which supports “relational best practices,” whether on the interpersonal or the international level. Confortini and Ruane argue that such a participatory, relational way of knowing can contribute to justpeace by promoting relationships of care over relationships of violence.855

Other feminist scholars such as Elisabeth Porter (and Pierre Allan, whom I covered in a previous section)856 have likewise picked up on connections between care ethics and the pursuit of peace and justice. Explicitly citing Lederach’s definition of the moral imagination, Porter describes herself as trying to imagine new possibilities for peace that do not rely on the traditional dualisms associated with international relations theory.857 Whereas dualism limits the imagination, complexity can spark it. Porter pushes for an inclusive politics which can value difference, justice, and care simultaneously.858 Adopting the language of Carol Gould, Porter argues that justice

“builds a recognition of difference and responsiveness to individuated needs, as well as

855 Catia Confortini and Abigail Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace,” Journal of International Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2013): 71.

856 Allan, “Measuring International Ethics: A Moral Scale of War, Peace, Justice, and Global Care.”

857 Elizabeth Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2007), 7.

858 Ibid., 43.

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the protection of the rights of difference into its basic conception.”859 Respect for difference is therefore built into justice. Difference also requires care, however, because it is often most relevant within relationships. Power differentials tend to appear in relationships between individuals, and between and among groups. Where there are relationships, humans need an ethic of care in order to promote adequate responses to human suffering.860

As opposed to the literatures which relate just peace to just war and to reconciliation, I find that this feminist literature on care ethics better addresses the experiences and concerns of women’s peacebuilding praxis in Manipur. Ruddick,

Confortini, Ruane, and Porter consider family relationships to be spaces of potential violence and therefore peacebuilding. This closely resembles the women of EEVFAM who, in the wake of their husbands’ deaths, experienced violent abuse at the hands of their mother-, father-, and brother-in-laws. The group worked to inform the widows’ families about their peace activism, removing suspicion and blame from the women’s shoulders and in the process, improving family and community relations.861 A concern with care also helps to explain widows’ decisions to stay with their families, even when

859 Carol Gould, “Diversity and Democracy: Representing Difference,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 180; cited in Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective, 109.

860 Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective, 59.

861 Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015.

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such abuse is occurring.862 These women seek to build peace, and they do so through maintaining relationships, even when injustices occur.

Are there any problems with applying care ethics to justpeace? One potential problem with Porter’s work is that although she seeks to break out of the mold of the liberal peace by taking women’s unorthodox practices seriously, she still performs this goal by studying their relationship to UNSCR 1325, which legally guarantees women’s participation in peacebuilding.863 While I appreciate Porter’s important engagement with concepts from feminist ethics such as care, compassion, and difference, I wonder which types of advocacy and peacebuilding are left out because of her reliance upon women’s activism around UNSCR 1325. She captures the diversity of experience related to the resolution, but what about peacebuilding initiatives that remain purely local, grounded in indigenous practices rather than international resolutions? Porter’s approach still appears to be much more closely tied to the liberal peace than are many women in

Manipur.

Confortini and Ruane’s work is more effective still. They see an undertheorized area of conflict transformation, and they offer a feminist epistemology to supplement it.

This is admirable work which addresses many of the concerns that I encountered among women peacebuilders in Manipur. I wish to push feminist correctives of conflict transformation and justpeace one step further, however, by building such correctives

862 FA, June 5, 2014.

863 Porter, Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective, 2–3.

342 into the definition of peace which we all pursue. If justpeace is to serve as guiding criteria, it seems appropriate to build feminist guides into the very definition, elaboration, and application of conflict transformation, rather than leaving the existing definition alone, as Confortini, Ruane, Porter, and many other scholars engaging with it do (even as they add various critical, post-colonial, and feminist correctives to troublesome aspects of the approach). Now that we have explored three ways of approaching the general concept of a just peace, I will return to specific problems with

Lederach’s particular articulation of justpeace. I will address each problem employing insights which we gained from the interaction of gendered peacebuilding praxis with feminist political thought. Finally, I will offer a critical feminist revision of justpeace— one which builds feminist concerns and the diverse experiences of marginalized women into the very definition of peace.

6.2.3 Lederach’s justpeace

Justpeace is rich in content—as I will show shortly, perhaps too rich, or too specific. But it provides guiding criteria which can help peacebuilders compare the lives that they lead and the lives to which they aspire. In The Moral Imagination, Lederach defines justpeace as “an orientation toward conflict transformation characterized by approaches that reduce violence and destructive cycles of social interaction and at the same time increase justice in any human relationship.”864 Several points in this definition

864 John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182, emphasis his.

343 require unpacking. First, justpeace is an orientation—it is a direction, away from violence and destructive interactions and towards justice. When faced with difficult decisions, peacebuilders can ask: will this result in more or less violence? Will it improve or exacerbate difficult social interactions? It also explicitly requires reflection upon the meaning of justice within any human relationship—between husband and wife, governor and governed, police and citizen. The italicized phrase and at the same time indicates Lederach’s insistence on the need to move from a zero-sum, either/or framework to a both/and mindset: reducing violence cannot come at the cost of reducing justice. Vice versa, increasing justice is not just if it prompts a corresponding increase in violence.865 Justpeace also assumes that conflict transformation, rather than conflict resolution, is the method which peacebuilders employ.

Although Lederach does not use the term justpeace until 1999, the concept begins to emerge in his well-known work from earlier years. In his 1995 book Preparing for Peace, he describes the ultimate goals of peacebuilding and conflict transformation as “increasing justice, reducing violence, and restoring broken relationships.”866 Building

Peace, published in 1997, argues that the aim of conflict transformation is the creation of a “peace system characterized by just and interdependent relationships with the capacity to find nonviolent mechanisms for expressing and handling conflict.”867 The

865 Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 51.

866 Lederach, Preparing for Peace, 23.

867 Lederach, Building Peace, 84.

344 specific term justpeace first appears in a 1999 article “Justpeace: The Challenge of the

21st Century,” defined as “an adaptive process-structure of human relationships characterized by high justice and low violence.”868 Each of these early definitions is explicit about both process and outcome: through the rebuilding of relationships, humans attempt to decrease violence and increase justice.

For the sake of simplicity, I will focus predominantly upon Lederach’s treatment of justpeace in his more recent formulations of the term, as they appear in The Moral

Imagination (2005) and Strategies of Peace (2010). Like Richmond, Lederach develops his position in response to problems with top-down, state-centered diplomacy. The

Moral Imagination struggles with the legacies of realpolitik—essentially Lederach’s chosen terminology for the liberal peace. Realpolitik has traditionally defined the scope of politics, and by extension, the ways in which peacebuilding can proceed between nation-states. Its conception of power in terms of military and economic influence limits the relevant actors and sets the agenda for peace processes. Realpolitik tends to be blind to potentially transformative social spaces, relationships, and ideas that lie outside of its preconceptions about what matters in a peace process. Because of its reliance on representational leadership and high-level negotiations, it often destroys public confidence in peace processes as it discourages public engagement.869

868 John Paul Lederach, “Justpeace: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace, ed. Paul Van Tongeren (Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 35.

869 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 59–60.

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Where Richmond promotes critical agency and an emphasis upon everyday peace, Lederach supports a comparable shift from the high-level public to the local,

“accessible public sphere”—“a level where people feel they still have a voice and can actually touch processes of change.”870 At the level of the accessible public sphere, all people—not only diplomats, political leaders, and military officers—can employ their moral imaginations in the service of justpeace, connecting their individual lives and community relationships to broader social structures and ambitious goals of widespread social change.

In a later book chapter in Strategies of Peace, Lederach and his co-author, R.

Scott Appleby, re-define justpeace as “a dynamic state of affairs in which the reduction and management of violence and the achievement of social and economic justice are undertaken as mutual, reinforcing dimensions of constructive change.”871 The co-authors follow this re-formulation of justpeace with an extended elaboration of conflict transformation:

“Sustainable transformation of conflict requires more than the (necessary) problem solving associated with mediation, negotiated settlements, and other elements of conflict resolution; it requires the redress of legitimate grievances and the establishment of new relations characterized by equality and fairness according to the dictates of human dignity and the common good.”872

870 Ibid., 62.

871 John Paul Lederach and R. Scott Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” in Strategies for Peace, ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard F. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23.

872 Ibid., 23–24, emphasis mine.

346 Countering the mindset of conflict resolution which focuses on finding solutions for episodes of violence, the authors emphasize that peacebuilding does not end once the

“fundamental requirements of justpeace are established”; instead, “the building of constructive personal, group, and political relationships… is perpetual.”873

Peacebuilding praxis, critical feminism, and the post-liberal peace together offer five critiques of Lederach and Appleby’s essay. Some of the critiques merely call for a return to some of the language which Lederach employed in his 2005 definition in The

Moral Imagination. Even this small contribution is important, however, as the 2010 definition coming from Lederach and Appleby is more often cited in the most recent peace studies literature.874 Peace studies scholars should take care to use the definition of justpeace which best represents their goals, rather than employing the 2010 version which, I will argue, smuggles in various liberal values and makes certain assumptions about, e.g., the form that power takes. The critiques that I offer here reveal the need for a critical feminist revision of justpeace, which can better address the lived experiences of diverse groups of marginalized women who pursue peace in Manipur.

873 Ibid., 24.

874 Confortini and Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace”; Omer, “Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding: Synthetic Remarks.”

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6.3 Critiquing justpeace

6.3.1 Relationships and perpetual work

Note two important changes between the 2005 and 2010 definitions of justpeace presented above: the latter definition removes the explicit reference to human relationships, and it also uses the language of achievement and establishment— implying that social and economic justice, and eventually justpeace itself, may be reached. As individuals grow and change throughout their lives, relationships evolve.

Different questions of social and economic justice emerge, and as care ethicists have shown, relationships of care are important spaces in which to consider justice and to build peace. Therefore, as Lederach and Appleby rightly point out, peacebuilding which focuses on building relationships must be perpetual. They ought to re-insert the word

“relationships” into the definition of justpeace and remove language that contradicts the on-going nature of peacebuilding. Terms like “establishment” and “achievement” have no place in a description of a perpetual process.

6.3.2 Human dignity and the common good

A second potential problem with justpeace and conflict transformation, particularly as described in Strategies of Peace, lies with the authors’ employment of two highly contested terms: human dignity and common good. Recall that Lederach and

Appleby argue that conflict transformation involves “the establishment of new relations characterized by equality and fairness according to the dictates of human dignity and

348 the common good.”875 What are the dictates of human dignity? What are the parameters of the common good, and more importantly, who defines them?

The analysis of peacebuilding praxis in Chapter 3, particularly through the lens of political intersectionality, revealed multiple problems with women peace activists’ use of the language of humanity. The human rights approach enables organizations like

MWGSN and EEVFAM to claim de jure universality across women coming from multiple social locations, but their de facto coverage is much narrower. This does not necessarily mean that these organizations must stop employing the human rights framework.

Indeed, just as Ackerly found in her study of women activists from all across the globe a deep appreciation for human rights,876 I found that most peacebuilders in Manipur employ the approach, even as some critique it.877 Instead, this problem of the narrow application of supposedly universal human rights calls for paying greater attention to intersecting identity-based differences. Peacebuilders must not pursue a type of human dignity which reflects the experiences of a narrow group of humans; rather, they must be attentive to intersecting forms of domination which remove dignity.

Comparable to employing the language of humanity, the refrain “the common good” might lead to the exploitation of power and privilege by those employing Mariana

Ortega’s arrogant ignorance. As I showed in Chapter 3, according to Ortega’s explication

875 Lederach and Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” 23–24.

876 Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 187.

877 BR, June 25, 2015.

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of interactions among feminists, an arrogant ignorance is one with which the “arrogant perceiver” sees the world from her own view—“skillfully organiz[ing] the world and everything in it with reference to the arrogant perceiver’s desires and interests.”878 My field research suggests that the Meitei Meira Paibis are the most famous and most strident women peacebuilders in Manipur. Although they do a great deal of important work fighting for peace and justice, some of their views and actions express an arrogant ignorance which organizes the world according to their own experiences, simultaneously denigrating those experiences which do not fit into their organizational scheme. The common good, for Meira Paibis, would involve the repeal of AFSPA, which would almost certainly improve the quality of life for all women in Manipur. It might not, however, include the dissolution of the Meitei insurgent group the United National

Liberation Front, which Naga and Kuki women have condemned for the rape and subsequent suicide of a tribal woman.879 Yet in their arrogant ignorance, the Meira

Paibis refer to themselves as “the mothers of all Manipur,” without pausing to reflect upon the veracity of their usage of “all.” Would their common good include the goods of

Naga and Kuki women?

878 Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 59.

879 GJ, July 1, 2015.

350 6.3.3 Difference, power, and equality

The issues associated with human dignity and the common good point to a third potential problem with conflict transformation and justpeace, which has not gone unnoticed by other scholars:880 power differentials which may skew the peacebuilding process and the resulting just-ness of the peace.

Differences in power tend to arise, in part, from various identity markers. In

Manipur, for example, the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class will probably offer important information about the amount of influence which an individual is likely to wield in society. To treat men and women the same is to ignore their very real differences in power. Indeed, the Indian government does not treat men and women the same in Manipur. Conflict widows should receive a government pension (as long as their husbands were not killed by the Indian army—such killings go largely unrecorded).881 There is no such thing as a widowers’ pension. In the Indian state’s view, men have much greater earning potential than women; therefore, they do not need government assistance after the deaths of their wives.

880 Mary Adams Trujillo, Re-Centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice, 1st ed.. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Confortini and Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace”; Thania Paffenholz, “International Peacebuilding Goes Local: Analysing Lederach’s Conflict Transformation Theory and Its Ambivalent Encounter with 20 Years of Practice,” Peacebuilding 2, no. 1 (2014): 11–27; Cecelia Lynch, “Religious Communities and Possibilities for Justpeace,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 597–612.

881 GJ, July 1, 2015.

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Ethnicity, closely tied to religion, likewise creates power differentials within

Manipur. People from different ethnic groups have differing access to land. Nagas and

Kukis benefit from scheduled tribe status, whereas Meiteis do not. Tribal students often face discrimination in settings of interethnic schooling. Christian tribal groups have regular church gatherings which foster collective action, whereas Hindu Meiteis do not.882 Each of these differences, intersecting with gender and other structures like diverse colonial legacies and varied geography, impacts men’s and women’s ability to participate in conflict transformation processes.

While much of Lederach’s writing on justpeace indicates a rich appreciation for human diversity, and even for the relationship between identity and power,883 his and

Appleby’s use of the term equality indicates to me a real liberal bias. Liberal feminism, for example, historically insists upon equality between men and women, seeking equal treatment for them before the law.884 Equal treatment often denies relevant difference.

Critical feminism, however, argues for a focus on equity rather than equality. Critical theory seeks to uncover varied forms of domination and to promote policies which lift up the dominated.885 Differential treatment, in this case, helps to promote greater

882 BR, June 25, 2015; SU, July 7, 2015.

883 Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, 60.

884 Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Sussex: Rowman and Allanheld Publishers, 1983), 28.

885 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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equality in outcome. It is quite plausible that the latter scenario, offered by critical theory, is what Lederach and Appleby have in mind. If that is so, then rather than arguing for “the establishment of new relations characterized by equality and fairness,”886 they should promote equitable relationships which account for differences in power.

Lederach and Appleby cite Jackie Smith’s chapter in Strategies of Peace, which advocates for the necessity of reorganizing power relations as a component of conflict transformation.887 Certainly, they are aware of power dynamics. But Smith conceives of power in terms of distribution rather than domination.888 Such a conception questions power structures of economic and perhaps political inequalities, but it does not properly account for other forms of domination that might be grounded in identity and culture.889

Given that these forms of domination are often the most prevalent in the lives of women peacebuilders in Manipur, it becomes apparent that conflict transformation and justpeace would benefit from a critical feminist approach to power.

886 Lederach and Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” 24.

887 Jackie Smith, “Economic Globalization and Strategic Peacebuilding,” in Strategies for Peace, ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard F. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 247–70; cited in Lederach and Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” 35.

888 Smith, “Economic Globalization and Strategic Peacebuilding,” 248.

889 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 3.

353 6.3.4 The strategic “who”—agency, well-being, and marginalization

Lederach and Appleby’s discussion of the meaning of justpeace occurs in the context of a broader conversation about strategic peacebuilding. This academic debate goes beyond the purview of my own project, but I wish to highlight one aspect of it for the purposes of asking one question: who builds peace? In Building Peace, Lederach discusses the importance of extending training and capacity building to a broader population than typically takes part in peacebuilding initiatives.890 This involves looking for those who are well-positioned to “create broader linkages and as such are most able to serve as agents of change within the society.”891 Lederach’s emphasis on strategic agents of change is meant to draw peacebuilders’ focus away from top-level negotiators and down to mid- and grassroots-level leaders, whose networks or “webs of relationship”892 extend both vertically and horizontally.893

While I applaud Lederach’s new emphasis, I believe that it is still important to inquire after the gendered and other identities of these strategic agents of change, or in

Lisa Schirch’s terminology, “the strategic who.”894 Certainly, peacebuilding benefits from finding allies among those who are well-connected at multiple levels. But what if those

890 Lederach, Building Peace, 119.

891 Ibid., 117.

892 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 35.

893 Lederach, Building Peace, 120.

894 Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding, 69.

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who are well-connected tend to be largely the wealthiest, or the best-educated, or the most-traveled? What if they all come from one progressive political party? Importantly for my project, what if they are all men? Peacebuilders thinking with the lens of “the strategic who” should consider not only the instrumental but also the inherent goods of selecting agents of change. Ackerly and Confortini have argued that employing radically inclusive critical feminist methods will create social change.895 This suggests that “the strategic who” should shift, or at least supplement, its focus from individuals’ locations within webs of relationship to individuals’ histories of marginalization. If peacebuilders actively include those who have been historically marginalized, even if they are not well- connected in webs of relationships, then justpeace will grow.

The literature on just peace and care ethics likewise suggests a reorientation of

“the strategic who.” Caretakers might have a larger impact upon peacebuilding than even mid- or grassroots-level social and political leaders. Ruddick defined mothering, in part, as a commitment to nonviolence. Confortini and Ruane draw out the undergirding epistemology to argue that “knowledge is simultaneously individual and collective, independent and relational, aware of power symmetries yet not determined by them.”

In the space of their weaving epistemology, peacebuilders should design structures of

895 Catia Confortini, Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27; Brooke Ackerly, “Intelligence and Compassion, the Tools of Feminists: An Engagement with Catia Confortini,” in Feminism and International Relations, ed. J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 34.

355 “support and connection rather than violence and isolation,” increasing the likelihood of care and promoting the politics of personhood. This politics contributes to justpeace.896

A care-based pursuit of justpeace changes the focus of the strategic who, and it likewise supports the conception of agency which I argued for in Chapter 4. Sen defines agency and well-being as separate concepts. Although they are interlinked, each has intrinsic value and should be measured and valued separately.897 This view of agency creates space for altruistic actions, but it leaves us unable to evaluate the consequences of an agent’s decision, making agency itself “unavoidably subjective,” and therefore easily captured by the adaptive preferences which tend to steer people towards human bads rather than human goods.898 Nussbaum, on the other hand, argues that both agency and well-being, taking the form of different human capabilities, are necessary for a life of human flourishing. Humans cannot have one without the other, and the lack or loss of either represents a tragic decrease in flourishing.899 Because Nussbaum’s conception of agency is situated within the guiding criteria of human flourishing, we can evaluate agency decisions. Moreover, because agency is intimately tied to affiliation, agency decisions are evaluated in light of an individual’s ability to maintain reciprocal

896 Confortini and Ruane, “Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as Weaving Epistemology for Justpeace,” 88.

897 Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (New York: Russell Sage Foundation ; Oxford, 1992), 57.

898 Jay Drydyk, “Empowerment, Agency, and Power,” Journal of Global Ethics 9, no. 3 (2013): 251.

899 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14, 69.

356 human relationships.900 Agency is not simply the product of autonomous resistance of domination. It may be the course of action chosen by humans in relationship, who are guided not only by reason, but also by commitments as varied as care, religious virtues, and anxiety.901

In sum, organizers of the strategic who would do well to consider the contributions which historically marginalized caregivers can make to justpeace. Whether they are guided by the practices of mothering, religion, or emotion, their deeply relational epistemology can provide valuable resources for peacebuilding.

6.3.5 The public/private problem

The final problem with justpeace, this time appearing in The Moral Imagination, lies with Lederach’s privileging of the “accessible public sphere”—“a level where people feel they still have a voice and can actually touch processes of change.”902 Contra the liberal peace, Lederach is rightly concerned with the distance which many feel from high-level peace deals which take place in air conditioned hotels in capital cities. The liberal peace’s public sphere is inaccessible to many; therefore, the local public fails to buy-in to the peace process, challenging its long-term sustainability.

900 Reciprocal does not mean equal. It means mutual respect, which can exist even in situations of stark inequality, such as within a parent-child relationship. Ibid., 82.

901 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace; Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject; Eileen Hunt Botting, “Wollstonecraft, Hobbes, and the Rationality of Women’s Anxiety,” in Disability and Political Theory, ed. Barbara Arneil and Nancy Hirschmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

902 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 62.

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Feminists have long argued, however, that every articulation of a public, no matter how accessible, hides an inevitably gendered private.903 In Lederach’s quest to overcome the dualism of distant and local, he has unintentionally perpetuated another dualism—that of public and private. Ackerly’s study of women’s human rights activism reveals a deep concern about so-called private sphere issues, such as questions of sexuality and identity.904 Peacebuilding praxis, too, challenges this division between public and private. It is private relations within families and villages which make it difficult for women to participate in public sphere activities, such as economic exchange and formal political processes. Women in Manipur are relegated to private sphere activities because of diverse reasons: religious traditions of mourning,905 their desire to provide for their children,906 the lack of available public jobs,907 or blatant political discrimination.908 Intersecting forms of structural violence sharply constrict women’s public sphere movement. Even an accessible public sphere does not necessarily give women the chance to “actually touch processes of change.”909 The space for employing

903 Carole. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).

904 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 181–184.

905 FA, June 5, 2014.

906 MZ, June 3, 2014.

907 MO, June 5, 2014.

908 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

909 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 62.

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the moral imagination in pursuit of justpeace must therefore be more inclusive than even the accessible public.

6.4 Articulating the new, critical feminist justpeace

As we have seen from the comparison of Richmond to Lederach, and from the exploration of other literature on just peace, human development, and human rights, constructive theories of social justice require all three parts of Ackerly’s critical feminist method—guiding criteria, deliberative inquiry, and skeptical scrutiny. Richmond’s strength is his focus on process, involving the latter two: everyday peace and local, critical agency supplant the top-down negotiations associated with the liberal peace.

Through deliberation and skeptical scrutiny of hierarchies, post-liberal peacebuilding becomes extraordinarily conscious of power.

Lederach promotes deliberation and considers process, certainly. The highlight of his approach, however, is the strong stance which he takes on outcome, particularly as defined in The Moral Imagination: decreased violence and increased justice within human relationships. Justpeace lays out universal guiding criteria which provide peacebuilders with an end goal. Despite its universality, this goal remains vague enough that different localities can adjust it according to their needs. Atalia Omer characterizes justpeace as “a contested and continuously debated framework rather than a fixed telos.”910 I have shown that such contestation and debate must include certain lenses

910 Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” 16.

359 and processes, if it is to account for the diverse life experiences and peacebuilding methods of women in Manipur. Rather than suggesting feminist additions to justpeace which may be taken up by some and cast aside by others, I think that it is important to build them into the very definition and practice of peacebuilding. The interaction of peacebuilding praxis with feminist thought has shown us the weaknesses and strengths of various approaches, giving us confidence in the feminist revisions which I offer here. I will present the revisions according to the three steps of Ackerly’s critical feminist method.

6.4.1 Defining critical feminist justpeace

To summarize the discussion above, we have learned that justpeace must:

(1) Be a process that focuses on relationships, rather than a resting state that can be established;

(2) Avoid potentially homogenizing terms such as human dignity and the common good;

(3) Maintain an intersectional conception of difference which conceives of power in terms of domination rather than distribution;

(4) Aim for equity rather than equality in relationships;

(5) Employ histories of marginalization as criteria for recruiting agents of social change;

(6) Conceive of peacebuilding agency in terms of individuals’ well- being and their attempted, collective contributions to positive peace and social justice; and

(7) Avoid separating the local public from the private.

360 I will fit each of these seven insights, garnered from the interaction between women’s peacebuilding praxis and various articulations of social justice, into the three parts of Ackerly’s critical feminist method.

6.4.1.1 Guiding criteria

For Ackerly, guiding criteria gesture towards the sort of life which humans find to be valuable and fulfilling.911 As she presents them in the context of human rights activism, guiding criteria are the aspects of human rights upon which activists, through their discourses and practices, have reached a consensus. Ackerly argues that this content—the goal at which human rights activists aim—is best understood as scope conditions, which are then continuously challenged and reimagined in different contexts.912 This suggests that the guiding criteria for peacebuilding, which gesture towards the sort of life which humans find to be valuable, might best be offered as a scope.

Building on Lederach’s 2005 definition and employing insights (1), (2), (4), and

(7), I redefine the scope of critical feminist justpeace as

911 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 111.

912 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 211.

361 These guiding criteria define justpeace as a process rather than an end which can be established; highlight the centrality of relationships to peacebuilding; cover all spheres of interaction, including private relationships; strive for an equitable rather than a common good; and consider both individual and collective forms of striving. Agency is not measured in terms of achievement but rather attempt. Furthermore, an individual’s agency is evaluated in terms of her contributions to reducing multiple forms of violence and increasing equitable social justice; therefore, we may not laud actions which inhibit an agent’s own well-being or the well-being of those outside of her own group.

This definition of critical feminist justpeace emphasizes women’s desire within peacebuilding, in Manipur and across the globe, to build positive peace. Chapter 3 illustrated the intersecting forms of structural violence which constrain women’s peacebuilding agency. While many of these structures themselves, such as ethnic difference, can never be completely removed (indeed, individuals often value and should not have to give up ethnic, religious, and gendered differences), they should be considered carefully as peacebuilders devise initiatives for social change. Many structures act violently in certain settings, differently according to the ways in which they intersect with other structures and contexts. Therefore, merely addressing direct violence would do very little to improve the quality of women’s lives in Manipur.

As my literature review of women in peacebuilding illustrated in Chapter 1, this phenomenon stretches far beyond Manipur. Women’s ideas of peace are nearly always

362 positive, including a concern with structural as well as direct violence.913 Their movements for peace also often address broad questions of justice—hence the need to fold the pursuit of social justice into the definition of justpeace. Whether this looks like the law-oriented Committee for Fast Justice which Kuki women are forming in

Manipur,914 or the holistic fight for peace, justice, and development proclaimed by the

Meira Paibis,915 justice is a central concern for many women pursuing peace.

6.4.1.2 Deliberative inquiry

Deliberative inquiry is the process of dialogue (and other forms of communication) among multi-sited critics and members of the community which, through the creation of a safe and inclusive space, creates knowledge about the experiences and desires of diverse people.916 Unlike Habermas, Ackerly evaluates deliberation on the basis of inclusion, rather than on the reasonable nature of the arguments.917 Deliberative inquiry is inherently good, as it offers a venue for self-

913 Carol Cohn, “Women and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework,” in Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures, ed. Carol Cohn (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 1–35; Annika Björkdahl, “A Gender-Just Peace? Exploring the Post-Dayton Peace Process in Bosnia,” Peace & Change 37, no. 2 (2012): 286–317; Susan Hayward, “Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding,” in Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Claire Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016); Maja Korac, “Is There A Right Time for Gender-Just Peace? Feminist Anti-War Organising Revisited,” Gender and Education 28, no. 3 (2016): 431–44.

914 Ruth Singhson, July 5, 2015.

915 IN2, July 5, 2015; MP, July 5, 2015.

916 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 72, 78.

917 Ibid., 72.

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expression. It also offers the instrumental goods of teaching all members of the community about one another and fleshing out the meaning of the guiding criteria.

Turning to peacebuilding and employing insights (4) and (5), deliberative inquiry must strive for equity in both the forms of deliberation and its resulting decisions. Such inquiry would elicit and value multiple forms of communication, including banners and slogans from public protests, prayers and songs for healing, emotional testimonies, partisan and passionate rhetoric, and hunger strikes. The experiences and peacebuilding work of women like the Kuki prayer groups in WWAA, the Meira Paibi nude protesters, and the fasting “iron lady” Irom Sharmila would all contribute to collective knowledge about grievances, the meaning of justice, and solutions for forging more peaceful relationships.

Inclusive deliberative inquiry would then take these diverse experiences and methods into account when debating the meaning of the guiding criteria in Manipur.

Rather than elite individuals negotiating the scope of structural and direct violence, the meaning of social justice, and what an equitable good would look like, such topics should be the subject of radically inclusive deliberative inquiry.

Deliberation can also serve as the venue in which histories of marginalization come to light, revealing which individuals and groups have been historically underserved and thus deserve targeted public resources. Addressing marginalization in Manipur might take the form of affirmative action policies for Meiteis who do not benefit from

Scheduled Tribe status; protection against ethnicity-based discrimination for tribal students at Manipur University and other public schools; gender quotas for the Manipur 364 Legislative Assembly; the distribution of pensions to all widows of criminal or military violence, regardless of who killed their husbands… The types of intersecting marginalizations, and hence the list of possible policy solutions, goes on.

Women peacebuilders in Manipur already employ deliberative inquiry. This is the task which the community mobilizers of MWGSN perform when they go from village to village, seeking conflict widows and taking down their testimonies of violence.918

Illustrating the pedagogical value of deliberative inquiry, JH of Gendi, a partner organization of MWGSN’s, conducts trainings on the meaning of gender and women’s human rights and then invites women to think about the connections between gender and violence in their own lives.919 Deliberative inquiry occurs among the women of

EEVFAM when they share personal testimonies of trauma in their group sessions with trained psychologists.920 The diverse form and content of such inquiry informs people of broader experiences than their own, improving the probability that guiding criteria for peacebuilding will be more inclusive.

6.4.1.3 Skeptical scrutiny

Ackerly describes skeptical scrutiny as an attitude, or a disposition, towards

“existing and proposed values, practices, and norms.” Adopting the method of skeptical

918 FA, June 5, 2014.

919 JH, June 11, 2014.

920 Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015.

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scrutiny requires social critics—whether insiders, outsiders, or multi-sited critics—to stay alert for all possibilities of exploitative inequalities.921 Addressing insight (5), skeptical scrutiny helps to correct for power imbalances within deliberative inquiry, in terms of inclusiveness and the method of uncovering histories of marginalization. It also undergirds the goal of equity, rather than equality, which comprises insight (4).

Furthermore, accounting for insight (3) and drawing upon Chapter 3’s usage of political intersectionality, skeptical scrutiny urges peacebuilders to think about affected populations in terms of intersectional identities and intersecting forms of domination.

Power is not something which can be owned by individuals and distributed; rather, it often works through cultural and identity-based forms of structural domination which have no discernible actor.922 The lens of political intersectionality provides one specific way to employ skeptical scrutiny. Peacebuilders should turn such scrutiny upon deliberations and the guiding criteria themselves. The local elaborations of the meaning of critical feminist justpeace can and should be re-defined as demographics change, as children grow older, and as new issues grow in importance. Justpeace is a process, not a static state of affairs.

921 Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 75–76.

922 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, 1st American ed.. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1998); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990); Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.

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Many women peacebuilders in Manipur already employ skeptical scrutiny. For example, some of the women of EEVFAM looked askance at the coincidence of the case of one widow, BK, being pushed forward for consideration by the courts very quickly.

They questioned whether BK’s close friendship with the president, RU, helped to call attention to her case, although dozens of other widows were waiting for their own days in court.923 This is skeptical scrutiny: the privilege of the Meitei identity, shared by BK and RU; the power attending the post of the president; and the possible hierarchy of

EEVFAM cases were all called into question.

6.4.2 Pursuing critical feminist justpeace

I have re-defined critical feminist justpeace and have illustrated how its pursuit fits into Ackerly’s three-step critical feminist method. Peacebuilders aiming for justpeace ought to use these methods while aiming at the guiding criteria—

Does any of the peacebuilding praxis occurring in Manipur live up to this critical feminist revision? Do the guiding criteria represent a hopelessly idealistic goal which, when placed into the real, dirty work of peacebuilding in the trenches, will be eviscerated?

923 BK, July 2, 2015.

367 I will present some outstanding examples of peacebuilding in Manipur which highlight the possibility of pursuing critical feminist justpeace. Much like Nussbaum’s list of capabilities required for human flourishing and the list of human rights presented in the Universal Declaration, these guiding criteria are aspirational. But I will show that women peacebuilders in Manipur tend to aspire, even when they do not quite achieve.

Because the critical feminist definition of justpeace is already grounded in the real practices of women peacebuilders, it is not utterly impractical. The two examples which

I have selected reveal both the promise of critical feminist justpeace and the need for ongoing contestation.

One of my interviewees, a former human rights educator and peacebuilder who presently works as a freelance journalist, shared with me an Area Peace Committees initiative which she helped to direct in the mid-1990s. Sponsored by Action

International, this peacebuilding program’s timeline was 10 years, and it focused on villages affected by the Naga-Kuki clash—particularly the “island villages” of Kukis surrounded by Nagas, or vice versa. GJ reports:

“We have a lot of island villages for both communities. First thing we did was classify these into four areas, and we started APC[s], area peace committees. And I don’t think this is reflected by [studied by] anyone because it’s at the grassroots level. A lot of things which could have rippled to the state level were controlled at this level. The clash that happens at the village level always ripples to the bigger level. So when it’s controlled at the village level, the violence that could have been at a larger scale is controlled. … [We try to] counsel them, to conscientize them towards humanity again, because [they] are gripped in [their] compartmental understanding of we and the enemies.”

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“Our major concentration was on building these APCs. The roads are still the same. The buses didn’t say this is Naga bus, this is Kuki bus, so they were sitting together but not speaking to each other. And it was more than silence—it was about psychological fear. When they share mobility, marketplaces, farm, when they tend their farmlands, people and especially women tending farms alone, there was a lot of insecurity which was there. To address this we thought it’s not a material thing we provide, it’s about rebuilding relationships of these people which can make them more comfortable. Which can rebuild ties. On other hand, it’s not so much about these two villages, but the larger politics of these two communities and the militant[cy] from these two communities which happen in their vicinity. So the casualties might have hurt the villages, but it was about the two communities. Militants forcefully sheltered in their villages, and in the process killed each other as well. So that’s why we tried to define common people … it was not you who provoked the thing. We are trying to differentiate between politics and ground reality. I think we were very successful in this.”924

These Area Peace Committees adopt many of the tenets of conflict transformation: focus on rebuilding relationships; assume that peacebuilding will require several years; and work at the local level. GJ’s work with Action International also represents usage of some of the insights of critical feminist justpeace. It mattered to them that women who tended their farms alone faced a great deal of insecurity and psychological fear. The identities of the communities and the power imbalances between them were also central to their approach, as they tried to avoid othering by breaking down the “we vs. the enemy” mentality. Together, these emphases reveal an intersectional conception of power as dominance, rather than distribution.

924 GJ, July 1, 2015.

369 Furthermore, Action International helped the local villagers to exercise skeptical scrutiny about the practice of fearing and excluding members of the other ethnic group, by comparing the history of militants—one small segment of the Naga and Kuki populations—to the history of peaceful interactions among the common people. This occurred partly through “conscientizing toward humanity,” but while emphasizing, rather than diminishing, ethnic difference. GJ’s description of this peace initiative is thus promising on many measures.

This particular program is weak in terms of deliberative inquiry, however.

Although many of the team members were “insiders” from the state of Manipur, it seems as though Action International developed a peacebuilding plan and then executed it without consulting the communities. I suspect that their work would go deeper and last longer if it were devised in tandem with community members.

The second initiative which I wish to highlight is the development of a “peace core team,” comprised of NGO- and church-based peacebuilders from many different ethnic groups in Manipur at the instigation of the Henry Martyn Institute (HMI). Based in Hyderabad, India, the HMI promotes peacebuilding and interfaith dialogue across

India.925 It has worked in Manipur and Nagaland for many years, thus it is a multi-sited critic with aspects of both insider and outsider status. One peacebuilder whom I interviewed attributes its successes to its long-term commitment to the region.926 It was

925 http://www.hmiindia.org/aboutus.html

926 NT, July 8, 2015.

370 already influential in the year 2000, as the famous, hunger-striking peacebuilder Irom

Sharmila was on her way to attend HMI trainings when the Malom Massacre occurred in

November, prompting her fast unto death against the repeal of AFSPA.927 This decades- long commitment, coupled with HMI’s emphasis upon ethnic diversity and inclusion, helps to build confidence in their efforts.

SU, a Naga woman who is an officer with the Naga Women’s Union Manipur, has attended trainings with HMI as part of the peace core team. She argues that women’s peacebuilding in the state needs a common platform across ethnic difference, like that which has been developed over the course of many years by those at HMI. She also asserts, with a critical feminist attention to radical inclusion, that the HMI’s valuable work must be extended to include a wider swath of the population. SU reports:

“In that peace core team, we had Nagas and Kukis and Meiteis, this was a team that was trained by the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad. It was such help, but it’s such a small number of people, not very large. So this thing needs to really be more inclusive and bring more people. We really need the common platform so people don’t feel left out or neglected. When it comes to facing all kinds of conflict, the degree might be varying but you always have faced similar problems or conflicts, no? So to be able to deal with these we need to build a common platform that’s more inclusive, and it will be more meaningful. Because til now some people feel excluded.”928

NT elaborated on the HMI methodology for a project conducted from 2012-

2015, in which HMI collected insights and experiences from all of the different ethnic

927 NT, July 8, 2015.

928 SU, July 7, 2015.

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groups of Manipur to create a manual about the meaning of peace. In describing this process, she is essentially articulating a critical feminist approach which is grounded in diverse experiences:

“I think everybody has to work [for peace], in any form. In any form. Because when you ask somebody, maybe some family who could have been killed by armed forces or whatever, their perspective might be different. And how… the methodology, the method to reach that, has to be a certain…we have to learn from them. Because, that’s why I found this manual very interesting because they came, they went and worked with their own views. And after this thing, with so many people they constructed a manual.”929

Unfortunately, this peace manual was published only in English (at the time of writing). This represents an important non-privileging of the Meitei, Manipuri language.

But if the manual is to be truly inclusive and far-reaching, it ought to be translated into each of Manipur’s 29 dialects. Using English reveals an ethnic consciousness, but it betrays a lack of class-consciousness, as typically only those who can afford certain schools are able to learn English. HMI’s intersectional viewpoint needs to include more aspects of domination.

It is important to note that both of these promising peacebuilding initiatives, the

Area Peace Committees sponsored by Action International and the core team project with HMI, involve men and women. I learned about the initiatives from women peacebuilders, but both incorporate male participants and male needs, which are as intersectional as female needs. This highlights the importance of an argument which I

929 NT, July 8, 2015.

372 articulated in Chapter 5—that critical feminist methods should be grounded in and involve men as well as women. Part of uncovering and mitigating the history of marginalization involves privileging women’s experiences and women’s leadership.

Equity for all, however, avoids excluding men. Peacebuilding tends to be ascribed to women in Manipur, but many men also work to build peace on the grassroots level. To exclude those men is to employ gendered discrimination and to lose talent and resources for peacebuilding. Thus, even though this is a study of women’s peacebuilding, I argue that critical feminist justpeace is good for both men and women, as it can explicitly capture the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding which might lead to inequities.

6.5 Conclusion: from resentment to courageous connection

What sort of politics characterizes the pursuit of critical feminist justpeace? In her essay “Resenting the Indian State,” Ananya Vajpeyi suggests that the Meira Paibis employed the politics of resentment when they protested the rape and murder of

Manorama Thangjam at the gates of Kangla Fort in 2004. She argues that resentment is often the last tool left to those who have been “irreversibly wronged by history.”930

Thus, the Kangla protest, in her view, was not a Gandhian pursuit of the truth, but rather “the perversely moral politics of resenting the irreversible acts of the Indian Army

930 Ananya Vajpeyi, “Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in the Northeast,” in Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India, ed. Sanjib Baruah (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27.

373 in Manipur.”931 Vajpeyi concludes that as a political emotion, resentment is sometimes critical for holding the perpetrators of injustice accountable. In a place like Manipur,

“where there is no hope for the future, resentment remains.”932

This argument could scarcely be further from the thought processes of the women peacebuilders whom I encountered. Certainly, many peacebuilders feel anger and resentment towards perpetrators of violence and even other peacebuilders. Meira

Paibis and members of the NWUM resent one another for failing to assist with various protests and projects; Kuki members of the WWAA fear and resent Nagas because of inter-ethnic violence; and members of EEVFAM resent one another when some cases go forward while others languish. All of these peacebuilders, however, carry hope for the future. My interviews were dotted with terms like “hope,” “better life,” “justice,”

“development,” and “unity.” Moreover, many peacebuilders attempt to forge courageous connections rather than allowing resentment to fester. When JH, a member of the HMI peace core team and the director of the women’s NGO Gendi, encountered inter-ethnic hostility in her peacebuilding work, she arranged for members of different ethnic groups to share dormitory rooms during peace and human rights trainings. The exposure to one another, over time, wore down participants’ resentment and increased their feelings of goodwill—part of the time. Sometimes it did not.933 A similar result

931 Ibid., 32.

932 Ibid., 45.

933 JH, June 11, 2014.

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occurred with the Naga Forum for Reconciliation’s intra-ethnic initiatives involving shared meals and soccer games among members of warring Naga factions.934 Inter- and intra-ethnic peacebuilding takes time, and peacebuilders should continue to foster these connections even when they do not succeed.

I therefore argue that those pursuing critical feminist justpeace should employ the politics of courageous connection, rather than assuming that resentment can produce accountability and justice. The politics of courageous connection do not exclude those who exhibit resentment. Rather, they welcome all voices of dissent and all stories of injustice, in order to address the anger, fear, and trauma which often underpins actions grounded in resentment. Such a politics addresses Thania Paffenholz’s concern that those using conflict transformation processes may seek only “the good local”—likeminded peacebuilders who hold moderate or progressive values.935 Such a politics, moreover, is open to contestation and renegotiation of not only the content of peace, but also the terms of debate and the range of participants. Connecting with others means building relationships past the boundaries of one’s own networks, and furthermore, being willing to discuss new issues that come to light as the network expands. Ortega offers such network-building (in the form of María Lugone’s “world- traveling”) as one solution to the problems of arrogant ignorance and loving, knowing

934 Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

935 Paffenholz, “International Peacebuilding Goes Local,” 25.

375 ignorance.936 Building relationships across racial, ethnic, and other boundaries makes such ignorance and its harmful homogenization of women’s experiences less likely to take root and to have influence over feminist theory and praxis. Expanding peacebuilding networks can limit the influence of dominant groups while increasing the knowledge about historically dominated groups. Such a politics requires courage: a

Lederachian stepping into the mystery of the unknown, or an Ackerly-inspired plunge into the terrain of difficulty.

Indigenous peacebuilders are not the only ones who can employ courageous connections. Outsiders and multi-sited critics, if they pursue critical feminist justpeace in

Manipur, can also use courageous connection to connect themselves to diverse groups.

They can additionally foster connections among the different groups that they work with, as the Henry Martyn Institute and Action International did. While it is important for outsiders and multi-sited critics to respect the expertise of insider peacebuilders, they should not allow their respect to prevent them from acting and even naming problems when they see them. Ackerly argues, “To leave others ‘to do’ is to leave them to struggle. By participating in structures and norms, we do not leave them alone but rather are complicit in those structures which make them struggle.”937 Courageous connection involves outsiders gaining awareness and holding themselves accountable

936 Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant,” 67–70; Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Pereginajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

937 Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference, 37.

376 for their complicity; insiders pushing themselves beyond their comfort zones as they expand their networks; and multi-sited critics facilitating such connections and questioning not only the injustices which peacebuilders mobilize against, but the possible injustices of the peacebuilding process itself.

The politics of courageous connection, particularly in the context of women’s peacebuilding, should carry a high respect for trauma, even as it seeks to push individuals’ boundaries. Sometimes it is necessary for some individuals to avoid certain people or places for a time. Even where trauma is not present, it can be politically expedient for groups to form temporary alliances on some political questions while avoiding others. For example, ST, a Naga Christian women’s leader working with

Women in Governance, argues:

“The food issue connects every community despite political conflict. This type of connection can bring people together in one platform. But we are not directly building peace because the conflict issue, the agenda of conflict is another issue, right? But here the connecting factor is like food, education, health, development, na?”938

I would respond to ST that addressing food insecurity across ethnic boundaries is directly building peace—that it is necessary, but not sufficient. Yet ST makes the important point that sometimes, in the early stages of building relationships, it is important to build trust by working together on some topics while avoiding others.939

938 ST, July 2, 2015.

939 Ann Mische, Partisan Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8543.html.

377

When taking the long view of critical feminist justpeace, it might be appropriate to expect women from different ethnic groups to come together first on non- controversial issues, and only after many years, to attempt to tackle sources of trauma and resentment which have built up over time. The Kuki women of WWAA who fear

Nagas, even 20 years after the inter-ethnic violence, require safe spaces in which to encounter peaceful Naga women. They need counseling and social healing to help them to process the traumatic memories through which they still filter the present.940 As I argued in the conclusion of Chapter 3, their subaltern enclaves must gradually open up to include interactions with ethnic and religious others. Such an opening up, particularly in light of traumatic pasts which constrain resilience in the present, will require a politics of courageous connection.

I will close with the words of a Kuki woman, LI, who left Churachandpur (a Kuki- dominated district) to work across ethnic groups with the Manipur Baptist Church in

Imphal. I share her words to demonstrate that such connection is already occurring in

Manipur. It is vital for the pursuit of a critical feminist justpeace, which is an individual and collective striving for the reduction of structural and direct violence; the promotion of social justice within all spheres of human relationships; and the equitable good of all.

LI reported to me:

940 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1992).

378

“I feel that before I come to Manipur Baptist Church, I was so scared that, how can I work with so many Nagas, being Kuki, na? Because there was conflict. Threat, killing, before. So I don’t want to come out from my comfort zone, from the Kuki community I was serving in Kuki Association. They loved me, they really supported me, I got 100% support from Kuki women, so I didn’t want to come out of my comfort zone and mix with different tribes, communities, I cannot think of that. But then, since God called me, I prayed and decided, and I came here. It’s amazing that I could consider everyone as my own, like family or brother or sister, no, no communal feelings.”941

941 LI, July 8, 2015.

379 APPENDIX A:

INTERVIEW PROTOCOL942

A.1 Pre-interview oral consent process943

I am inviting you to join a research study on peacebuilding processes here in

Manipur. You have been selected for this study because you participate in the ______

(e.g., Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network) peacebuilding meetings. Your participation is completely optional, and I am happy to answer any questions that you may have before we begin.

This research project tries to understand how women work for peace across ethnic, religious, and class-based differences. I anticipate interviewing 40-50 women from this region. I will ask you some questions about your experiences as a woman and especially as a peacebuilder. You are free to ask me questions as well, and I may contact you later with follow-up questions if you are interested in talking with me further.

942 Constructed with guidelines from Stacy A. Jacob and S. Paige Furgerson, “Writing Interview Protocols and Conducting Interviews: Tips for Students New to the Field of Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Report 17 (2012).

943 I used oral, rather than written, consent because of language barriers and literacy concerns. Ordinarily I would also give interviewees a card with my email address on it, but scarcely any of them have access to email. I will rely on the NGOs to serve as intermediaries if my research subjects wish to follow up with me.

380 I will not use your real name in my research unless you specifically request that I do so. There are no foreseeable risks involved with your participation, but if at any point you feel uncomfortable we can end the interview immediately.

I cannot pay you for this interview, but I hope that you will enjoy sharing your story with me. I hope to use your story to develop a narrative about peacebuilding in your region, and I hope very much that my study will contribute to the cessation of violence and the establishment of peace in Manipur.

If you are ready, we can begin the interview. Do you mind if I use a recorder?

A.2 Interview script

Can you tell me about your family?

Are you and your family religious?

If yes:

-How central is religion to your life?

-Do you have friends or family members who practice other religions?

What ethnic group do you come from?

Does ethnicity matter to you?

Ask about multiple contexts:

-work

-marketplace

-friends/family through marriage

-religious affiliation (i.e. are ethnic and religious groups overlapping?)

381

How did you come to be involved with this peacebuilding organization?

What activities do you participate in with this organization?

In your work as a peacebuilder, how do you interact with women from other ethnic and religious groups?

Tell me about your goals as a peacebuilder. What would you like to see happen within this group, and within Manipur?

Do you feel like this group is effective?

-Tell me about any problems or concerns that you have had.

-Tell me about some of the successes that you have had.

What does peace in Manipur look like to you?

What does justice in Manipur look like to you?

A.3 Post-interview script

Thank you so much for talking with me. I hope to publish this research within a few years. I plan to share the results of my research with ______(e.g., Manipur

Women Gun Survivors Network), and they will disseminate it to your community. If you have any concerns or questions about this interview or my research process, please contact the NGO. They know how to get in touch with me.

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408 INTERVIEWS

AK, June 23, 2015.

BK, July 2, 2015.

Babloo Loitongbam, June 26, 2015.

Binalakshmi Nepram, June 2, 2014.

BR, June 22, 2015.

BR2, June 25, 2015.

CI, July 5, 2015.

DG, July 5, 2015.

FA, June 5, 2014.

GJ, July 1, 2015.

Grace Satshang, July 8, 2015.

IA, June 26, 2015.

IN, June 16, 2014.

IN2, July 5, 2015.

IR, July 3, 2015.

JG, July 5, 2015.

JH, June 11, 2014.

KG, July 5, 2015.

LI, July 8, 2015.

Lokendra Arambam, June 16, 2014. 409 Meena Longjam, July 6, 2015.

MO, June 5, 2014.

MP, July 5, 2015.

Melvil Pereira, July 20, 2015.

MZ, June 3, 2014.

NG, July 5, 2015.

Nandini Thokchom, July 8, 2015.

Pardip Phanjoubam, June 11, 2014.

RM, June 23, 2015.

RU, June 26, 2015.

Ruth Singson, July 5, 2015.

Sanjay Barbora, July 21, 2015.

SL, June 30, 2015.

Soyam Lokendrajit, July 9, 2015.

SU, July 7, 2015.

ST, July 2, 2015.

410