Building a Culture of Peace: Some Priorities

If anybody had told me back in the 1960s, when I first got seriously involved in doing research on what women were really doing in the world, that in the year 2000 we would have to hold a session like this, I would not have believed them. Back in the 1960s we were beginning to uncover data that showed the amount of the basic work of the planet that was being done by women. Eighty percent of the farming was being done by women and anything that had to do with protecting the environment: the forests, the waters--you name it--much of our research showed that it was women who did it. Yes, and that it was women who managed that kind of diplomacy that would keep groups from fighting each other too much. So, I naturally expected that women would be sitting at the decision-making and policy-making tables by now, particularly on issues of national security and international security. But what we have never done, and it makes me depressed about the human species, is overcome the gendered power structure. We seem to be stuck at a certain point, and that is not a point where we should be. It is sheer craziness that at the same time the United Nations has declared an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World (1998), the United States government's insistence on the antiballistic missle shield is about to launch us into a new arms race. All public opinion polls show that there is a great longing in this country for disarmament and a wish to be much more involved in the U.N. as well as a willingness to give up nuclear weapons. But we are stuck in our decision making by a concept of national security that is completely militarized. And the women who do all the peace work, they are invisible. I would not have believed it was possible.

So what do we do now with this year and decade in the face of this absence of women from the decision table? You will remember that, under stress, women are inclined to "tend and befriend." Where is that inclination to "tend and befriend" under stress more needed than at the tables where international negotiations take place? At the Dayton Accord Conferences, at all these places where we try to make decisions about handling conflicts turned violent: Ethiopia, Eritrea, anywhere you name in the Balkans, anywhere you name in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, not to mention Latin America. The skills for these negotiations are women's skills, not for biological reasons, but because they have developed in our experience world. We have got to share our experience world with men. But in the meantime we are not at the table. So what are we going to do with this U.N. International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence?

I would suggest what we need to do is to concentrate on certain parts of the culture of peace, parts that I am going to talk about. But just to explain what a culture of peace is, in case anybody is wondering: the main point about a culture of peace is that it deals creatively with difference and conflict, and it is a listening culture. A culture of peace needs lots of space for problem-solving. So what we need to do is create a lot of spaces for problem-solving. What I am going to suggest is that we concentrate on three things. The first is to make intensive demonstrations of what women actually are doing, because you do not read about it in the New York Times or the Boston Globe, you do not hear about it on television. The second is to mobilize a public peace process to change the paradigm inside people's heads that maintains that security comes through power over others. It...