Feminist Solutions for Ending War

Description

‘War is a man’s game,’ or so goes the saying. Whether this is true or not, patriarchal capitalism is certainly one of the driving forces behind war in the modern era. So can we end war with feminism? This book argues that this is possible, and is in fact already happening.

Each chapter provides a solution to war using innovative examples of how feminist and queer theory and practice inform pacifist treaties, movements and methods, from the international to the domestic spheres. The contributors propose a range of solutions that include arms abolition, centring Indigenous knowledge, economic restructuring, and transforming how we ‘count’ civilian deaths.

Ending war requires challenging complex structures, but the solutions found in this edition have risen to this challenge. By thinking beyond the violence of the capitalist patriarchy, this book makes the powerful case that the possibility of life without war is real.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Acknowledgements

Introduction to Feminist Solutions to Ending War - Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner

1. Giyira: Indigenous Women’s Knowing, Being and Doing as a Way to End War on Country - Jessica Russ-Smith, Lecturer, Australian Catholic University, Australia

2. One for All and All for One: Taking Collective Responsibility for Ending War and Sustaining Peace - Heidi Hudson, Professor of International Relations, University of the Free State, South Africa

3. Feminist Organising for Peace - Sarai B. Aharoni, Lecturer, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

4. Piecing-up Peace in Kashmir: Feminist Perspectives on Education for Peace - Shweta Singh, Assistant Professor, South Asian University, India & Diksha Poddar, Researcher, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

5. Learn from Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movements to Imagine the Dissolution of the Nation-state System - Eda Gunyadin, Researcher, University of Sydney, Australia

6. Queer Our Vision of Security - Cai Wilkinson, Associate Professor in International Relations, Deakin University, Australia

7. Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Draw on Feminist, Queer and Indigenous Theory and Experiences to Support Movements to End Nuclear Weapons - Ray Acheson, Researcher at Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University, USA

8. Make Foreign Policies as if Black and Brown Lives Mattered - Yolande Bouka, Assistant Professor, Queen’s University, Canada

9. Draw on Ecofeminist and Indigenous Scholarship to Reimagine the Ways We Memorialise War - Sertan Saral, PHD Candidate, University of Sydney, Australia

10. Engage with Combatants as Interlocutors for Peace, Not Only as Authorities on Violence - Roxani Krystalli, Assistant Professor, University of St Andrews, Scotland

11. Recognise the Rights of Nature - Keina Yoshida, Research Officer in the Centre for Women, Peace, and Security, LSE, UK

12. Create Just, Inclusive Feminist Economies to Foster Sustainable Peace - Carol Cohn, Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA & Claire Duncanson, Lecturer, University of Edinburgh, UK

13. Change How Civilian Casualties are ‘Counted’ - Thomas Gregory, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland, New Zealand

14. Listen to Women When Creating Peace Initiatives - Laura J. Shepherd, Professor of International Relations, University of Sydney, Australia

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Violence in Society
• Minority Studies
• Lesbian Studies
• Gay Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Environmental Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Freedom
• Treaties
• International Relations
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Domestic violence
• 21st century
• Israel
• Syria
• Green politics
• General officer
• Indigenous peoples
• Treaty
• Peace
• Politics
• North Korea
• Kashmir
• Higher education
• LAW
• General
• International
• Abuse
• Cachemire (homonymie)
• Paix
• Corée du Nord

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745342887
• Langue: English

Extrait

Feminist Solutions for Ending War
Feminist Solutions for Ending War
Edited by Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner
Foreword by Swati Parashar
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner 2021
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4287 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4286 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4290 0 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4288 7 EPUB
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
In loving memory of Teresia Teaiwa
Contents
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Swati Parashar
Introduction to Feminist Solutions for Ending War Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner
1 Giyira: Indigenous Women s Knowing, Being and Doing as a Way to End War on Country Jessica Russ-Smith
2 One for All, All for One: Taking Collective Responsibility for Ending War and Sustaining Peace 29 Heidi Hudson
3 Feminist Organising for Peace Sarai B. Aharoni
4 Piecing-up Peace in Kashmir: Feminist Perspectives on Education for Peace Shweta Singh and Diksha Poddar
5 Learn from Kurdish Women s Liberation Movements to Imagine the Dissolution of the Nation-state System 73 Eda Gunaydin
6 Queer Our Vision of Security Cai Wilkinson
7 Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons 105 Ray Acheson
8 Make Foreign Policies as if Black and Brown Lives Mattered Yolande Bouka
9 Draw on Ecofeminist and Indigenous Scholarship to Reimagine the Ways We Memorialise War Sertan Saral
10 Engage with Combatants as Interlocutors for Peace, Not Only as Authorities on Violence Roxani Krystalli
11 Recognise the Rights of Nature Keina Yoshida
12 Create Just, Inclusive Feminist Economies to Foster Sustainable Peace Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
13 Change How Civilian Casualties are Counted 200 Thomas Gregory
14 Listen to Women When Creating Peace Initiatives 216 Laura J. Shepherd
Notes on Contributors
Index
Abbreviations and Acronyms
AU
African Union
CEDAW
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
DDR
Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration
ECAP
Estudios Comunitarios y Acci n Psicosocial
FARC
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
FOWAC
Foundation for Women Affected by Conflict
ICAN
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
IDF
Israeli Defense Forces
IFI
international financial institutions
ILC
International Law Commission
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IR
International Relations
KCK
Kurdistan Communities Union
LGBT
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
LGBTQ
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer
NAP
National Action Plans
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NES
North-east Syria
NGO
non-governmental organisation
PKK
Kurdistan Workers Party
PTSD
post-traumatic stress disorder
PYD
(Kurdish) Democratic Union Party
RAF
Royal Air Force
SDF
Syrian Democratic Forces
SIPRI
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
SSR
Security Sector Reform
TMM
Trans Murder Monitoring
TSA
Transport Security Administration
UN
United Nations
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
WILPF
Women s International League for Peace and Freedom
WPS
Women, Peace and Security
YPG
(Kurdish) People s Protection Units
YPJ
(Kurdish) Women s Protection Units
Acknowledgements
This book was a collective effort, guided by a dedication to feminist ethics and praxis. We are grateful first and foremost to the contributing authors, for dedicating their time and sharing their knowledge.
This book project began just before the start of the Covid-19 global pandemic and during a time of renewed anti-racism movements and activism sparked, in part, by the ongoing killing of black men and women by police in Canada and the US, including George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Breonna Taylor and Rodney Levi. These global events required us to pause. We felt we needed to rethink the purpose and relevance of our scholarship and reflect on what types of academic work were useful and possible at this point in history. Early in 2020, we checked in with the authors, and revisited if and how we should move forward with this project. We were pleased that everyone remained committed to the book despite the pressures of homeschooling, caregiving, university sector cuts and precarity, and the emotional and physical impacts of living in a pandemic. We acknowledge and were conscious that many contributors are at early stages of their career and do not have fixed-term stable work, which we recognise adds extra stress, pressure, and drain.
Reading the chapter drafts and supporting authors in revising and completing the chapters was one of the best professional experiences either of us have had. During an otherwise difficult year, we found the chapters offered hope, drew attention to crucial issues of justice, and offered creative pathways forward. We are grateful to have learned from and been inspired by our engagement with the authors in this project.
We are also grateful to our community, colleagues, and wonderful students at the University of Sydney. Thank you also to Jakob Horstmann at Pluto Press, for his enthusiastic work advocating for this project from the beginning.
Foreword Waging the War on Wars: Feminist Ways Forward
Swati Parashar, Professor in Peace and Development, Gothenburg University, Sweden
Amidst the pandemic shutdown, this book came like a breath of fresh air. It has now become commonplace to think of the pandemic in terms of war, using the war metaphor to describe combating the novel coronavirus and winning a decisive victory against it. While public health has now become a military campaign, actual wars happening out there (Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere) have been normalised to such an extent that unless the violence exceeds past statistics, they escape public scrutiny and attention. In these times, when we have accepted the realities and the discourses of war, removed the tag of exceptionalism and adopted its vocabulary in everyday parlance, to turn to the question of feminist solutions to ending war seems both exhilarating and daunting. The editors of this volume and the chapter authors have created a unique opportunity for us to centre, once again, the politics of hope in reimagining a world without the relevance and spectacle of wars. This reimagining is enabled through a recognition of differences in feminist knowledges, epistemologies and methods, in our understandings of wars as gendered violent encounters that have dominated most of human history.
First, this book raises an important question: what do we think of as war and what are its most compelling stories and memorialisations? War is an unaesthetic, cruel, violent and occasionally even redeeming activity for participants, victims, survivors and observers alike. It remains one of the most theorised and researched activities in politics, International Relations (IR) and cognate disciplines. War captures distinctive social formations, and foregrounds imagined communities and emotional orders, lived experiences, performing bodies and their relationship with one another. Feminists have intimate knowledge about the injuries of war and myths that perpetuate it. If it were not for feminist research and activism, we would not know the gendered seduction and emotions of war, or the sustained myths about its inevitability, its (dis)honourable codes of conduct, performativity, multiple forms of violence within violence, patriarchal dividends and quality of redemption. Our levels of analysis would not have gone beyond the state and international system to include complex war narratives, memory politics and the spotlight on warring bodies, who know more about wars than our minds know about them. We would not have a sense of our own embeddedness in wars out there , as consumers of the media, unintended victims, unsuspecting bystanders, and tax-paying contributors to the war machine and its frenzied narrative.
This feminist storytelling about war itself is the most radical act of dissent; remember when they did not want us to study/research war and write about it? We could mourn its victims, but could we have a politics highlighting its violence and failures, and demanding its end? Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner, who conceptualised this project, are invested in the stories we tell about wars because these stories unsettle war myths and the normative assumptions about gender roles and hierarchies. The nature of war has changed, as the authors in this volume remind us, and how we count the injuries and deaths matter in how we foresee its end. In my own work, it is precisely in this feminist mode of dissenting storytelling that I have been invested in counting the famine dead as victims of slow violence of wars. For, in that counting and acknowledging of the emaciated, feminised bodies as victims of deliberate violence and starvation, lies the solution to famine wars and reparative and restorative justice. This book offers a number of similar alternative stories of war, which explore a number of important questions, including: what is considered war and by whom; how and with what weapons are contemporary wars being fought; who counts as a casualty and why; which actors have material and discursive power; who has the monopoly of violence; and what insights can feminist collaboration organising and activism offer to prevent and end violence; how can this same feminist activism help to support lives in war zones and reconstruct and reorder broken communities, and heal individuals and societies, after the deathly destruction?
Mainstream knowledge about war hav