Women, leadership and peace

I often wonder what the world would look like if women were in power. Maybe you do too.

By power, I mean in formal positions of power, prominent in public life – if there were, for example, 502 women and 145 men in the UK Parliament. (There are 502 men and 145 women by the way…) Would childcare be so expensive? Would, across the water in Ireland, women die for lack of abortion (as happened recently)? How would priorities be different?

A recently published report, From the Ground Up, produced by the Institute of Development Studies and funded by ActionAid and Womankind Worldwide, shows how perspectives on peace are different from women’s point of view. Peace, as I’ve said before in this blog, is the first prerequisite for health. The Ottawa Charter points out this fact -  it should be obvious, but it isn’t always given its due.

The From the Ground Up report suggests that women define peace more broadly than men, and did not consider that their lives were peaceful, even if there was no civil conflict occurring, because their lives were not free from violence, harassment and abuse. Men viewed peace as the opposite of formal conflict, and the gender difference is summed up by an Afghani woman: “we’re not talking about big war, but peace for us also means no domestic violence”.  Afghanistan was one of the countries surveyed, along with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nepal, and Pakistan. It’s well known that conflict and lack of peace affects men and women differently but what the report also points out is how women are largely absent from high level negotiations at national or international level, despite a UN security council resolution in 2000 which called for more equal participation of women in maintaining and promoting sustainable peace worldwide. In 17 out of 24 recent major peace treaties, there were no women involved in signing agreements; there have been no female chief mediators in UN-mediated peace talks. Women are renowned peacemakers in homes and communities, and some feminists would argue that if there were more women heads of state, there would be fewer wars.  Women as a peace-keeping resource is thus being under-used, but also the prominence of men in peace negotiations means that women’s and girls’ needs are not emphasized.

Women have been prominent in local peace movements, from Asha Amin and Starlin Abdi Arush in Somalia, Ana Guadalupe Martinez in El Salvador, Luz Mendez in Guatemala, Martha Karua in Kenya, plus all the women in the Northern Ireland peace coalitions such as Monica McWilliams. It was marvelous to see Fatou Bensouda appointed as the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court but this prominence at the top of a key international agency is rare. Women are more likely to be involved in peace making at the informal stages, forming local coalitions and peace groups, or brokering peace in their neighbourhoods and communities. These grassroots activities receive no funding very often, and women’s skills as bridge-builders, conflict resolvers, in dialogue and building trust, is often devalued.

The report From the Ground Up recommends that 30% of those involved in all local, national and international peace negotiation processes are women.  It also calls for 15% of peace building aid to be directed at aid to address women’s needs.  Some of the report’s findings however, also echo some of the UN and WHO’s declarations about peace, that it is not merely the absence of war, (just as health is not merely the absence of disease) – peace must also mean an absence of the structural violence caused by the unequal distribution of wealth, resources and other ‘goods’ within societies. This structural violence is often reified into patterns of discrimination, such as under apartheid in the ‘old’ South Africa, or into systematic oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, age and so on.

It has been claimed that investing in health is investing in peace. See http://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/hbp/Conflict.pdf

Many of these high-blown and well-intentioned statements emanating from summits can be found in UN and WHO documents. Implementing their content so as to enable people to live in greater peace is another matter, and doesn’t appear to be happening. As the From the Ground Up report suggests, unless women are represented at all levels of decisions making, peace is less likely.

Navi Pillay, UN commissioner for human rights is one prominent woman calling attention to global conflict. Recently she has written about the upsurge of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, Goma fell again into the hands of armed men, the M23 movement. One of its leaders is Bosco Ntanganda, who has been indicted by the international criminal court for the mass killings in 2008 in the DRC. Navi Pillay was one of those compiling a report documenting 617 violent incidents in the DCR from 1993 to 2003, all of them involving gross violations of basic human rights. The Congolese army, let alone the rebel groups have perpetrated acts including extreme sexual violence, mass rapes, violent dismantling of refugee camps, using forced child soldiers, and murder of civilians. The UN expert panel report published last week shows that the rebel groups have received assistance form neighbouring countries, such as Rwanda. I often use Rwanda as an example of a country where more than half of the MPs are women – 52% - yet in this specific case, they do not appear to be helping to bring peace to their larger neighbour. These neighbouring countries are essential to brokering peace.

I have just returned from contributing to a symposium on empowerment and health promotion in Germany, as along with Glenn Laverack and Mark Dooris and a few other invited speakers, we were helping German colleagues to establish the idea of empowerment in German public health discourse. I went along to a mass in Regensburg cathedral on Sunday to hear the famous boys’ choir. Speaking as an atheist, I was struck by the display of white male privilege, all the priests and officiates men, and the opulence in this wealthiest of European countries was very clear. I have no idea how it all relates to the message of Christ in the new testament (and I do know my new testament) but no matter. What was clear was that women did not have a place here except in the congregation and of course this is in the same week that the Anglican Church in England has decided not to allow women to become bishops. I know that male leaders of the church – many bishops – were devastated, and that women in the laity were amongst those leading the no vote. It does seem extraordinary and a missed opportunity for women to play leadership roles in the church, to make it more relevant to the 21^st century, and to have a voice in peace-making. If the church cannot do this, what is it for? The tiny African country of Swaziland already has a woman bishop, and if the vote had gone through in England, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, a woman of black African descent might have become the first bishop. Wouldn’t that have been great? I am at a loss to understand why anyone would not think that women have a role to play at the highest levels.

Shakespeare wrote 788 parts for men and 141 for women. I’m not changing the subject here – I’m still talking about women as peacemakers. Phyllida Lloyd, the successful feminist film and theatre director is currently directing a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play all about male power, conflict and war. This production is different as it’s all female cast. A play about fallen dictators, regime change, war and peace clearly has modern relevance. Harriet Walters will play Brutus, and as she says, “There is something in… the ‘alienating’ effect of seeing women paly these parts. The play is essentially about the power vacuum after a dictator falls, and how you tend to fill it using the template of what has gone before. And there’s something about an all-women cast doing that”. Showing women making war points out how odd it is for them to do so – and conversely, how ‘normal’ it is for (some) men to do so.