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Volume 13 Numbers 2&3
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Introductory Remarks
After three decades of trying to get ‘gender onto the development agenda’, whether through the Women in Development (WID), the Women and Development (WAD), or the Gender and Development (GAD) approach, it is now widely recognised that, although the indicators of women’s subordination to men are fairly universal, as shown by successive Human Development Reports, this does not mean that women constitute a homogeneous group. Nor does it mean that their interests are identical across economic, cultural, political, and other divides even within a given society or community. Indeed, the Western emphasis on individualism, through the post-modern discourse on identities and diversity, implicitly challenges the very basis for establishing shared interests across these social cleavages.
In the context of humanitarian work, however, and certainly in terms of how the issues are presented in the mainstream media, women are commonly seen in terms of their membership in a group or community. While terms such as ‘the plight of Afghan women’ (you can substitute ‘African’ or ‘Latin American’ or ‘Aboriginal’ or whatever you like for ‘Afghan’) draw attention to women as distinct from men, this is at the expense of insisting upon their commonality as women in ways that invariably gloss over significant differences among them. Not only that, but the narrative then either insists upon women’s victimhood and their helplessness in the face of suffering and adversity; or it stresses their resourcefulness, their ‘inner strength’, their stoical struggle to keep their families going, and their ‘natural’ identification with peace. Men, in this portrayal, are committed to war and violence, and addicted to the abuse of power. Women, or as Angela Mackay puts it, ‘womenandchildren’,(1) are thereby cast as symbols or icons of humanity and reason; men, by contrast, represent a stubborn refusal to take the first step towards the negotiating table. Men prosecute war to defend the homeland, and women bind the social wounds and keep the home fires burning.
We all know that the world is far more complicated than this fairy tale of good versus evil, yet it continues to be told and re-told as if doing so will somehow make it more ‘true’. The more this kind of bland ‘infotainment’ is beamed around the world, the less we are able to act as responsible global citizens. But the real-life problem arises when emergency interventions and post-conflict programmes are based on such distortions, which not only deny women and men different forms of human agency, but may also lock emerging societies into ill-fitting roles that ultimately diminish rather than enhance their development potential. Not only that, but if people actively resist being pigeon-holed in this fashion, the narrative finds it hard to know how to represent such ‘transgression’. Take the example of ‘suicide bombers’ in the Middle East, and the feelings of incomprehension when it became clear that their ranks include young women. Or the fact that the Chechen rebels or Tamil Tigers also include women. Or that women have been among the key instigators of inter-communal riots in India, or assisted the genocidaires in Rwanda, or participated in torturing political detainees in El Salvador. To be fair, this is in part a predictable if sensationalist response to something perceived as relatively unusual and therefore newsworthy. But it is also because such behaviour seems to transgress ‘the natural order’ projected by the very same media that the involvement of women in certain types of politico-military action is given such prominence in the news; the engagement of women in violence and destruction, or indeed of men in efforts to seek peaceful dialogue and denounce aggression, seems to turn the world upside down.
This special issue of Development in Practice has been guest-edited by Haleh Afshar, a feminist scholar and activist who has written extensively on women and development, a leading commentator on contemporary Islamic affairs, and Professor of Politics at the University of York. The overarching theme of conflict and peace building gives rise to a series of reflections by feminist scholars and practitioners about women (sometimes avowedly feminist, sometimes not) who are actively engaged in trying to (re-)build equitable and sustainable societies in the process of living through and eventually emerging from war. The experience of living or working in a situation of armed conflict defies generalisation: every war or situation of political violence has its own characteristics. In terms of gender power relations, there are grounds for guarded optimism in some cases, and profound pessimism in others. Human society does adapt to new circumstances, and men as well as women and children will devise all manner of ways to secure their survival. It is an aid agency commonplace that social disruption can, in some circumstances, open up new opportunities for women, and enable them to break out of normative gender stereotypes. The legacy of women’s clandestine networks in Afghanistan reported in this issue by Elaheh Rostami Povey is indeed an inspiration, and shows what women can achieve when able to organise autonomously, as women and as citizens. And yet the overwhelming experience is that, although women do characteristically take on additional burdens in order to secure the survival of their families and households, and often assume extra economic and public (including military) responsibilities over and above their domestic work, these changes in gender roles are generally contingent and context-specific, and as such fail to take root within a broader project of social transformation. So unless women can distinguish between desirable and negative outcomes of social upheaval, and organise themselves to defend what they perceive as improvements, the ideological undertow is all too likely to sweep away any fragile gains and may well even re-impose ‘traditional’ patterns of gender power relations.
Note1 Quoted in Karam, A. (2001) ‘Women in war and peace-building: the roads traversed, the challenges ahead’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 3(1):19.
Deborah Eade
Oxfam GB
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