Violence That Bleeds Borders: Transnational Engagement in the Women in Conflict Zones Symposium

While some communities are living in peace, others are living in war.

(Caren Kaplan)

The UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and the Women's Studies Department collaborated on the Women in Conflict Zones Symposium, a one-day panel and workshop at UCLA that brought together fourteen scholars from a variety of area studies and disciplinary backgrounds. The Burkle Working Group sought, like its umbrella organizing body, the UCLA Global South Gender Initiative, to insert a complicity and a responsibility for violence and its end that transcend its physical location. In the increasingly pervasive global violence that crosses and blurs borders, whether women are in a position to invade, reconstruct, take refuge, mediate peace, or lead revolutions, a transnational female subject emerges that is at once distinct and entirely constituted by the history she shares with all those who are implicated by violence and the global power relations that form their realities. The symposium aimed to reveal the interconnectedness of imperialist, militaristic endeavors by juxtaposing women's indigenous struggles in Mexico with state appropriations of feminist discourse in Rwanda and U.S. mainstream feminism's collaboration with U.S. militarism in the post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq. The developments of war and postwar hide behind the guise of modernity, freedom, democracy, and improved quality of life, while Western mechanisms of imperialism and capitalism extract opportunity from the ensuing chaos in the form of capital, ideological shift, and implanted conciliatory governments.

Shahrzad Mojab's keynote address, "Re-centering Imperialism in Feminist Theorization of War, Reconstruction, and Women's NGOs," explored the ways in which Western imperialist and capitalist ideologies are infused, not only through armed missions but through ostensibly altruistic reconstruction efforts. She complicated the inscribed humanitarianism in "postwar" efforts to democratize, calling into question the rebuilding of a nation by those who have razed it, and asking whether there is a "post-conflict" when Western ideological domination is still rampant. She began with Dorothy Smith's analytic, whereby an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist approach to analyzing the everyday must recognize not only the particularities among women but also the inseparable commonalities that exist in contradiction. The particular experience of Kurdish women in Iraq undergoing democracy training by U.S. NGOs, such as the International Women's Forum which seeks to combat the tenets of "radical" feminism, is conflated with the discourse of domestic U.S. feminist NGOs that set their sights abroad through a new vision of cosmopolitanism that at once links them to global conflicts but often detaches them from the U.S. military's instigation and continued provocation of instability in those conflict zones.

Mojab's keynote and Caren Kaplan's presentation on the "Endless War: U.S. Feminism's Cosmopolitan Militarism" both addressed NGOs' recolonization of epistemological production whose power is drawn primarily from U.S. military exploits. Kaplan interrogated the campaigns that mainstream feminist organizations such as the Feminist Majority and the National Organization for Women (NOW) advertise on their websites, either eliding altogether the U.S.-launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or attributing the oppressed state of women to the brutality of local patriarchs but not to the devastating results of U.S. occupation. Just as these stationary U.S. feminist organizations have an epistemological grip on conflicts and women situated within them, Mojab questioned U.S. NGO strategies to educate Iraqi women based on the model of the occupier as mediator and conveyor of knowledge and the occupied as always being mired in dispute. These strategies promote a certain "learning by dispossession," which is a learning process entrenched in capitalism; it may produce new skills and knowledges but it also produces fragmentation and isolation from community.

These colonizing knowledges, migrating from occupier to occupied or from skilled to unskilled, or perhaps even from physician to patient, work to solidify the seeming opposition between militarism and humanitarianism. Jennifer Terry's presentation, "Significant Injury: War, Medicine, and Empire," employed Foucault's theory of biopower to explore the overlapping missions of military warfare and medical technology. Terry elaborated on the concept of...