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  • Preface
  • Cynthia Enloe (bio)

I have been reading the intriguing articles brought together here in conversation for this special issue of the Journal of Middle East Womens Studies at the same time that I have been trying to keep track of the barely viable Syrian peace talks going on (or, more often, fizzling) in Geneva in February 2016. Practicing this double vision has made me appreciate these articles individually. But the effort also has made me even more aware of how important it is for us all to read these articles together.

For more than three years Syrian women active in Syrian civil society groups— groups unaffiliated with any of the rival parties or warring armed groups—have been organizing, strategizing, and lobbying the United Nations and great power (especially US and Russian) conveners of the peace talks. Their goal: to make a place for civil society representatives, including women’s representatives, at the formal negotiating table. As of February 2016, their efforts have almost failed.

As readers of JMEWS know, Syrian women have a long history of organizing and strategizing. Syrian women were prominent among the protesters who staged peaceful demonstrations in early 2011 calling for meaningful reforms of the authoritarian Assad regime. As the government’s security forces’ violent responses to those demonstrations drove protesters off the streets, militarization escalated. As so often happens, with militarization came increasing masculinization of political life. In year 5 of the resultant bloody civil war (and increasingly interstate war), the political landscape that most observers could see looked thoroughly masculinized: only male-led groups and institutions mattered; only the rivalries, alliances, and negotiations among men mattered.

Yet a less observed, less masculinized political landscape has been developing, too. This is where many Syrian women activists are to be found: trying to sustain at [End Page 303] least a modicum of trust between Syrians of different ethnicities and religious sects for the sake of keeping the social fabric from unraveling completely; working to persuade local male fighters to engage in at least local and temporary cease-fires; negotiating short-term dismantling of checkpoints to permit some supply trucks to reach desperate neighborhoods; organizing within refugee camps so that women’s needs can be addressed; taking steps to create a fragile network of Syrian women civil society activists so that their voices—and their carefully considered peace plans—can be heard; building alliances with transnational feminist groups outside Syria to better the chances for Syrian women civil society activists to be taken seriously in the formal peace-negotiating rooms of Vienna, Paris, and Geneva.

By January 2016 the UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, acknowledged that there was a legitimate role for Syrian civil society activists to play in the peace talks and that, among those, women activists should play a leading role. He proposed the creation of a Women’s Advisory Board, which would work with his UN staff of mediators, as he shuttled back and forth between delegates of both the Assad regime and the opposition, men who still refused to sit in the same room with one another. Structure matters. The creation of a formal Women’s Advisory Board was not insignificant. But it still left women to do the hard, dangerous work of building peace on the ground in multiple war zones “outside the room.”

Then came a further official proposal, perhaps even an insistence: Syrian women civil society activists should bring into the new Women’s Advisory Board women identified as affiliated with the Assad regime and women affiliated with the several competing Islamist militias. The implication—put forth by the men orchestrating the peace talks—was that only if women of all stripes presented a unified agenda would they be taken seriously. Of course, none of the orchestrators of the formal talks required the male-led groups to reach such a unified consensus before they were taken seriously. But the masculinized wartime assumption appeared to be that women should be able to find common ground because, at bottom, “women are just women.”

At this point one needs to read and absorb the analyses spelled out in the detailed, thoughtful articles that this special issue comprises...

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