Women's Peacekeeping During Ethnic Conflicts and Post-Conflict Reconstruction

I have just come back from a conference at which I had to debate a political scientist who argues that the best way to intervene in an ethnic conflict and make peace is to send your troops in, choose a side, and do the ethnic cleansing for them. He said, "I have a very peaceful formula for this: pack people (from the "other ethnic group") into trains and get them out of the area so that then nobody can come in and kill them." My answer to that was that if we were talking enforced population movement then actually a much easier, cheaper, and better way would be just to evacuate all the men from the area. Leave the women to make the peace and bring the men back afterwards.

My work is specifically on ethnic conflicts and territorial divisions, and on peace processes to overcome those divisions as they unfold. I have noticed in the last ten years that the resurgence of ethnic nationalism has drawn attention to the question of women in war, both as mothers of the nation and as soldiers for the nation. The focus on these two, undeniably important aspects of gender in conflict, however, ignores the contributions women can make to actually preventing or settling conflicts. Traditionally, history has tended to underplay the enormous role that women have played in peace movements. As Elise Boulding has said, one of the big tasks for researchers and writers today is to show us the significance of women's relations to war and peace which have been hidden from history. There are some hopes for a remedy today: in the post-Cold War period we see a very gradual, but positive change in this situation of neglect. The wars in the former Yugoslavia, for example, highlighted certain gender issues in war processes in a new way. So, for example, the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found former mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes. This international precedent established the systematic use of sexual violence during war as an act of genocide.

We also now have a new emphasis on women's roles in post-conflict reconstruction. The form that this is taking is an increasing interest by agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the U.S. government in encouraging reconstruction through micro-credit programs for economic development. As you probably all know, micro-credit, or small-scale lending to individuals as a means of stimulating economic productivity, was something that was successfully developed in South Asia through the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India. Both of these are large success stories dealing with very poor women.

There is, of course, a question of the extent to which micro-credit is appropriate for every kind of society at every kind of level. Sometimes, the introduction of micro-credit programs can be used as a substitute for dealing with trade union rights, higher-level skilled working-class development, and so on. Nevertheless, the Grameen Bank and SEWA programs are especially important for having forced some international recognition of development issues in poor societies, and it is illuminating that they are also being seen as possible models for gender-based development in post-war reconstruction programs.

We can also see--though as yet in infancy--a gradually emerging recognition of the role that women can play in peace processes. We have already heard some lists of women's groups and movements that have played a major role in establishing breakthroughs in conflict negotiations. I myself would point to the Irish women's movements. Perhaps more than any other set of women's movements in the world today, it was the women's groups in Ireland that made the point internationally that women can actually make an irreversible breakthrough to peace. That was recognized to the extent...