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Gendered Conflicts: A Feminist Perspective on Knowledge of Conflict
Rubina Saigol
Introduction
Feminist scholarship has enriched the area of conflict studies by inserting gender
perspectives into the study of national, ethnic, sectarian, class, race and communal strife.
In the past, the study of external and internal conflict was dominated purely by analyses
focused on military strategy, the politics and economics of war, as well as struggles
within the borders of a state. Such geo-strategic and geo-political studies tended to center
on territory acquisition, war, political personalities, power struggles between different
rulers, and the causes and consequences of international or intra-national conflict.
Traditional scholarship on political, economic and social conflict typically tended to
ignore the role of, as well as the impact upon, ordinary people and civilian populations.
The perspectives of people on the issues were considered irrelevant for analytical
purposes, while those of politicians, military leaders and those in government were
deemed important for an understanding of war or internal conflict. The effects on the
everyday lived realities of people were not the subject of conflict studies, particularly in
subjects like International Relations, Political Science or Strategic Studies.
Several factors have contributed to the change in the way knowledge about conflict is
constructed. The social disciplines have undergone radical changes in research
methodology as a result of the confluence of various intellectual and social movements.
In the subject of history, for example, there is now substantial focus on what is called oral
history, people’s history, democratic history or social and cultural history. The focus has
for many years shifted from purely political and economic history to understanding the
everyday lives of people. The Annals school of history in France has provided the major
impetus for the change in focus and methodology, but other influential schools of thought
have also contributed to the change.
A highly influential school of history known as Sub-altern studies has played a role in
highlighting the importance of peasants, untouchables, local communities and the socalled dispossessed in shaping history. Marxist historians underlined the history of
workers’ struggles right from the beginning. More recently, feminist historians have
underscored the importance of women, while race historians have focused on the role of
race as a factor that shapes history. The result of the shift of focus from royalty and
rulers to peasants, workers, women and black people, is the proliferation of studies on the
history of social struggles, manners, food, ideas, movements, daily life and so on.1 The
central notion in this kind of history writing is that history is made not so much by
‘famous’ and ‘great’ people, conquerors, rulers and kings, as by the people who till the
soil, run the machines, prepare the food, and clothe and feed those who are regarded as
great – history, in other words, is made by peasants, workers and women.
1
For example, the History of Manners by Norbert Elias is an example of this kind of change of focus.
Elias, Norbert. (1978). The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process. New York: Pantheon.
2
Another intellectual movement that has brought about changes in the way knowledge
about social phenomena is produced is the post-structuralist movement led by its founder,
Michel Foucault.2 This movement has allowed historians and social theorists to
understand the relation between power and knowledge in distinctly new ways. The
multiple sites of the application of power and the myriad mechanisms developed in the
social sciences to create a society of disciplined, monitored and controlled subjects, has
been a major contribution to the newer way in which knowledge functions in the
processes of control and domination. Despite the widespread misuse of the concepts and
methods of post-structuralism, it remains an influential intellectual movement as its
effects are felt in virtually all the social disciplines from sociology to psychology, from
anthropology to economics.3
The shift in focus to what are called ‘ordinary people’ has also received support from
anthropology and cultural studies. The anthropologists’ attention to the details of
‘culture’, symbolism, meaning systems, symbolic interactions, and the people-centered
methods of their discipline, for example participant observation, oral testimony and
interview, have influenced history writing, and have also provided a corrective for the
generalization tendencies within sociology, psychology and political science.
Anthropologists, in turn, have borrowed creatively from newer methods in Literature
such as deconstruction, reading the sub-text, reading culture as a text, unpacking the
multiple layers of meaning embedded in any social text, and reading against the dominant
meaning assigned to cultural constructions.
Feminist scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s borrowed heavily and creatively from poststrucuturalism, post-modernism, Marxist scholarship, critiques of traditional research
paradigms and deconstruction methods used in text analyses. Feminists produced
exciting new analyses of social and political discourses by adding the forgotten
dimension of gender. Feminist innovations spread to various social disciplines with the
result that history, political science, anthropology, sociology, education, economics and
literature came to recognize the role of women in history and in the making of the social.
Analyses of nationalism, the State, politics, economics and society in general, could no
longer ignore women’s contributions or make them invisible in the historical process.
Feminism and the Reconstruction of Knowledge about Conflict
In recent years, feminist scholarship on conflict, and the gender-specific aspects of
conflict, has added new dimensions to the way conflict is understood, perceived, resolved
For example, see Michel Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language.
(1972). New York: Harper and Row. Also see his The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human
Sciences. (1973). New York: Vintage Books. Also see Foucault’s Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings. C. Gordon (ed). New York: Pantheon.
3
For example, see the post-structuralist reading of anthropology as a discipline by Johannes Fabian in his
famous work, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes it Object.(1983). New York: Columbia
University Press. Another example is Arturo Escorbar’s post-structuralist reading of development studies
in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. (1995). New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.
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or interrogated. Some examples of stimulating scholarship that reflects the confluence of
these social and intellectual movements in knowledge-making, include Suvir Kaul’s The
Partitions of Memory, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries, and
Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence.4 All three books focus on the Partition of the
sub-continent in 1947, and the common aspect is the emphasis on the lives of ordinary
people including women, the untouchables and working classes. The other common
factor among the three books is the use of a variety of research methods such as oral
history and testimony, multiple reading of social texts and deconstruction. This body of
work gives voice to those silenced by history and made invisible by oppression.
However, for the purposes of this paper, the most important contribution of this work is
the fresh ways it suggests for looking at conflict and its relationship to gender. One of
the earlier analyses of war as a masculine pursuit, was done by Susan Brownmiller in her
famous work Against Our Will.5 In virtually all wars that the world saw, women were
taken as war booty, as sex slaves and abducted by conquering armies. Rape in war is one
of the oldest tools of expressing masculine domination. More recent feminist work has
further refined and built upon the work of Brownmiller, to show how gender imagining
lies at the heart of the construction of the Self and Other, and how conflict itself recreates masculinity and the construction of masculinity necessitates conflict.
The idea that conflict, like other social ‘realities’, is deeply gendered has been well
demonstrated by the fast growing body of knowledge on war, the militarization of
societies and social conflict.6 There has been increasing recognition that war and internal
conflicts tend to re-organize the boundaries of gender more rigidly, and re-define more
elaborately what it means to be a man or a woman living in a situation of conflict.
Studies of nationalism and militarism have convincingly demonstrated the extent to
which such discourses draw upon gendered thinking and imagery for the construction of
a nation at war, a state at risk and a society threatened.7
For studies of partition that focus on the everyday lived reality of ‘ordinary people’, see Ritu Menon and
Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. (1997). New Delhi: Kali Press. Also
see Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. (1998). New Delhi:
Viking. The most recent addition to this literature is Suvir Kaul (ed) (2001). The Partitions of Memory:
The Afterlife of the Division of India. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
5
Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. (1975). Middlesex: Penguin.
6
For example see Saba Gul Khattak’s paper, ‘Gendered and Violent: Inscribing the Military on the Nationstate’, in Hussain, N., Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol (eds). (1997). Engendering the Nation-state. Vol.
1, Lahore: Simorgh. pp, 38-52. Also see Saba Khattak’s ‘Militarization, Masculinity and Identity in
Pakistan – Effects on Women’, in Khan, N.S.& Afiya Zia (eds) (1995) Unveiling the Issues: Pakistani
Women’s Perspectives on Social, Political and Ideological Issues, Lahore: ASR, pp, 52-64. Also see
Rubina Saigol’s paper ‘Militarization, Nation and Gender: Women’s Bodies as Arenas of Violent Conflict’,
in Mian, Z. and Iftikhar Ahmad. (eds) (1998). Making Enemies: Creating Conflict: Pakistan’s Crises of
State and Society, Lahore: Mashal. pp, 109-128. See Najma Sadeque’s paper ‘Global Militarization’, in
Khan, N.S.& Afiya Zia (eds) (1995). Unveiling the Issues: Pakistani Women’s Perspectives on Social,
Political and Ideological Issues, Lahore: ASR. pp. 17-24, especially p, 18.
7
See studies of nationalism, for example, Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third
World. (1994). Lahore: ASR. Also see Jayawardena, K. & and Malathi de Alwis (eds) (1996). Embodied
Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. London: Zed Books. For papers on
nationalism and women in Pakistan, see Hussain, N., Samiya Mumtaz & Rubina Saigol (eds) (1997).
Engendering the Nation-state. Vol. 1&2. Lahore: Simorgh. For theoretical discussions on nationalism and
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The tendency of governments to encourage threat perception as a way of justifying
aggression, arms build-up, defence spending, and the making of the weapons of mass
destruction, is discernible in President George W. Bush’s penchant for the National
Missile Defence, a blatant disregard for the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, arrogant
rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on the environment and the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, and opposition to the International Criminal Court, as well as the Biological
Weapons control agreement. Bush repeatedly invokes ‘threat’ from North Korea to
justify the making of the defence shield. The invocation of threat to justify aggression is
also visible in India, in the Vajpayee government’s Nuclear Doctrine with a $17 billion
price tag to be paid by an impoverished and deprived population. The same is the case in
Pakistan where nuclear development was carried out at the expense of the provision of
basic needs to the people. The menacing threat of India was invoked to justify 'national
security’ and security of the state at the expense of the security of the people.
Conflict and the Construction of Modern Masculinity
The thrust underlying the fascination with weapons and arms comes not only from the
greed for profits driven by arms capitalism8, it also reflects deep rooted fears connected
with masculinity. In the gendered construction of human beings, manliness is associated
with power, prowess, strength, domination and conquest, all of which have now come to
be associated with advanced technological weaponry. In the past, battles were fought
with swords, spears, bows and arrows, all of which required personal courage, dexterity,
strength and mental agility. Even the use of the ordinary rifle called upon a person’s skill
in taking the right aim and hitting the target. Masculinity was defined by reference to
personal courage, skill and brute physical force. Modern warfare has greatly changed the
way in which people fight and kill one another. In the first place, little if any personal
courage or valour are needed as push-button technology ensures that a target thousands of
miles away can be hit with accuracy with the help of computer-guided missiles. A
modern soldier is seldom required to be in the actual battlefield, and if he is, he is safely
ensconced inside a tank, armoured car or other protective cocoons. In missile warfare,
there is no battlefield as the Gulf war demonstrated, since the button-pusher is hundreds
of safe miles away from the target. With the development of high-speed aircraft,
computer-guided submarines and missiles, the chances of being killed in combat have
been greatly reduced. The modern soldier can come out of combat or a limited war with
good chances of surviving. Furthermore, the modern soldier does not necessarily have to
feminism see Yuval-Davis, N.& Floya Anthias (eds) (1989). Women, Nation, State. London: Macmillan
Press; Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997). Gender and Nation. London: Sage; and Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner
(eds) (1999). Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books.
8
See Farrukh Saleem’s article in The News on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001. ‘American Pretense of Virtue Breaks
Down’. Saleem argues that the US is the biggest supplier of conventional arms to conflict ridden areas and
will sell to anyone and everyone. According to Richard P. Grummet’s Report ‘Conventional Arms
Transfers to Developing Nations – 1993-2000’, between 1996 and 2000, the US sold arms worth $50
billion to anyone willing to pay. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPR). Jimmy Carter
is quoted as saying that ‘We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading
supplier of arms’.
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be hardy, physically strong, courageous or even tremendously mentally agile. He simply
has to be a good technician. He may need to operate a fairly sophisticated machine, a
state of the art aircraft like the Stealth Bomber or a complex modern weapons-system. In
such cases he has to learn the use of which buttons to press, or levers to pull at what
precise time. On the other hand, he may have to learn fairly simple skills which do not
require complex tasks or higher order cognitive skills.
Modern warfare no longer instills the kind of fear of immediate death as in hand-to-hand
combat with swords, nor does it impose severe demands of physical energy and courage
upon a soldier. A soldier of contemporary times, can thus hope to live through a fairly
safe career in the hope that his country may never go to war, and if it does, it would be a
distance war. However, he continues to receive all the material benefits that go with a
‘dangerous’ and ‘life-threatening’ profession, and at the same time, claim the respect
accorded to brave, strong, courageous men who risk their lives to protect the nation,
country, state and honour.
In what then, does the masculinity of the modern soldier reside? In the first place, it is
clear that modern fighters, while being under less real threat, are nonetheless eulogized,
admired, loved, worshipped and highly regarded as ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’ men, in the
media and other spheres of public imagination. The fact that they have near-total
dependence on technology is often overlooked. Secondly, weapons technology has come
to symbolise masculinity, power, strength, domination and control. Male fascination
with weapons is evidenced by the large number of weapons that are reported to be held
by male civilians in Pakistan. According to one report, there are millions of illegal small
arms held by civilians.9 The Pakistani government’s de-weaponization drive has revealed
that there are huge quantities of lethal weapons circulating among the citizenry, almost all
of which are owned and operated by men. Arms capitalism, with a huge industry and a
vast market, certainly underlies the weaponization of societies, but masculine fascination
with ‘toys’ of terror and destruction cannot be ruled out as a factor. Even little boys’ love
for war toys is patently obvious, although this is usually attributed to the way men are
socialized into their perceived gender roles. Once again, it is important not to overlook
the massive toy industry and its huge appetite for profits, and the advertising campaigns
for soldier-toys. However, such industries feed on the deep-rooted fears and desires that
accompany the sense of manhood.
In a world in which raw muscle power and brute physical force are no longer necessary to
win a war, and machines do all the grueling ‘masculine’ work, war technology becomes a
substitute for male strength, power and prowess. It is the new muscle, the new brute
force, operated by men and expressing their prowess, their strength and, ultimately, their
virility. In an identification of men with machines, machines become parts of the male
body, parts which enable the masculine body to maintain its control over others and
particularly over women. Since weapons, at some unconscious level, are extensions of
the masculine self, their shape often takes the shape of male body parts. Without falling
too crudely into psychoanalytical theory, it is safe to argue that guns, tanks, cannons and
9
Information regarding the de-weaponization drive was delivered by Mohammad Tehseen, Director South
Asia Partnership-Pakistan on August 6, 2001. See the report in The News, August 7, 2001.
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certain types of aircraft are unconscious penis substitutes. Their structures and functions
have an unmistakable analogy with male body parts, and their usage is almost always in
the hands of males and the masculine state.
Women, on the other hand, generally refrain from using advanced weaponry, which
primarily represents masculine and state power. While there are notable exceptions, such
as the suicide bombers of the LTTE, women do not participate as much in the arms
market as do men. As has been said, firearms are symbolic extensions of the male body
as they enable it to engage in combat and represent virility. Similarly, weapons of mass
destruction are the body parts of the masculine state and enable it to express its enfeebled
power and threatened, though imagined, sovereignty. Advanced weapons technology
fascinates women much less than it does men for psychological reasons, some of which
have been hinted at above. This is not to suggest that women are ‘naturally’ or
‘biologically’ more peaceful or non-violent. A retreat into biological arguments would
only serve to reinforce the problematic notion of ‘male power and prowess’.
Weaponry is deeply sexualized, and primarily masculine, although the use of guns and
other weaponry by women is being increasingly recorded, especially in ethnic conflicts
like the one in Sri Lanka. A modern soldier, or guerilla fighter in an ethnic conflict, is
likely to feel emasculated and powerless without his weapon. His personal courage, and
by extension his masculinity, can be demonstrated only through his machine.
Technology, therefore, seems to have simultaneously emasculated and empowered men.
While it has taken away the older forms of courage, valour and dexterity from the
definition of maleness, it has provided a substitute for lost maleness in newer forms. This
accounts, to an extent, for the obsession of men as well as masculine states, with
sophisticated modern weapon systems at the expense of more urgent human needs. One
example of the latter is that Afghan male refugees often sold food and other items of need
in exchange for guns.10
Internal and external conflict provides the prime site of the exhibition masculine power.
Conflict serves to reinforce, reproduce and reiterate masculine power by providing a
space where technology-as-masculinity can be demonstrated in a spectacular way. With
machines having taken over all the hardy work (for example tractors, cranes and other
machines enable people, including women, to engage in building and agricultural work
which in the past required enormous muscle strength), the only arena where maleness still
has social value and meaning, is war and armed conflict. Violence has become the only
proof of male virility. War is still considered men’s work in many cultures where women
have entered the labour force in almost every area of economic and political life. The
displacement of men as the sole breadwinners in the economic sphere, and the increasing
recognition that women were also always breadwinners, has been one of the several
reasons for men’s increasing engagement in armed conflict. As much as conflict re10
The spokesman for the World Food Programme reported that international agencies were dealing with a
lot of male-dominated structures in Afghanistan, especially when it came to food because men would sell
food to buy arms. Therefore, he reported, there were efforts to give food directly to women so that they
and the children could actually receive it. Evelyn Leopold. ‘Afghan women aid cut from UN jobs in
Afghanistan’. Document created on November 10, 1995.
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creates masculinity, and allows men to re-enact maleness, masculinity is in turn
implicated in the creation of conflict. Conflict and masculinity tend to reproduce each
other. This by no means suggests that the only reason for war and conflict is masculinity.
There are of course issues over the possession of land, territory and economic resources.
What is suggested here is that the resolution of all conflict and disagreement by resorting
to armed violence and conquest, is primarily a male pursuit. However, this does not
mean that women do not engage in armed conflict; on the contrary, larger numbers of
women are entering the war arena as combatants. The difference is in the dynamics of
women’s entry into armed conflict, and the reasons for their participation in pursuits that
offer them little in return.11 The evidence for war as a primarily male pursuit can be
found in the large numbers of national and war poems, songs, pictures, stories of heroism
and tales of valour which celebrate masculine strength as the source of the nation’s
survival.12
While men produce wars and wars produce men, wars also produce women. Just as war
driven nations and countries reiterate the myth of brave men fighting for the country, and
laying down their lives to protect the nation, they also perpetually re-create women as
those needing protection from the enemy. Gender ideology creates men and women as
polar oppositions. In the discourse of conflict, the polar oppositions tend to center around
notions of valour, for example brave/timid, protector/protected, perpetrator/victim,
strong/weak, conqueror/subjugated and so on. Men belonging to a fighting faction or
warring army are brave, protectors, strong and conquerors. Women belonging to groups
engaged in conflict are weak, in need of protection, subjugated and victims. Men of the
opposing ethnic or communal faction are perpetrators (of rape, abduction and heinous
crimes), while women are the victims of male aggression. Women are not only
constructed as victims in need of male protection13, their traditional gender roles as
caretakers and nurturers are reinforced as they are asked to play the secondary roles of
nursing injured soldiers back to health and cooking food for the men engaged in combat.
Conflict thus reproduces gender roles and gender differentiations with renewed vigour
and urgency. It becomes the arena in which men can display ‘manliness’ and women can
support such exhibitions with passionate admiration.
Conflict and the Imagining of the Masculine State
Gendered imaginings at the personal level are transferred on to the state as the collective
expression of an ‘honourable’ and ‘manly’ society. The state comes to be referred to in
Letter by the Afghan Women’s Networ to Ambassador Mestiri. Dated April 7, 1996.
See for example, Rubina Saigol’s paper ‘Militarization, Nation and Gender’ in Making Enemies,
Creating: Conflict, regarding the way in which war songs celebrate men’s heroic exploits while women
watch and admire. This paper gives an idea of how war songs celebrate violence as a male activity and
mock femininity as weak and timid men and are the subject of jokes. The public media and educational
systems also glorify war and war heroes in daily newscasts and talk shows. For a detailed account of how
war and warlike attributes are celebrated and eulogized in textbooks, see Rubina Saigol’s Knowledge and
Identity: Articulation of Gender in Educational Discourse in Pakistan. (1995). Lahore: ASR.
13
See Saba Gul Khattak’s paper, ‘A Reinterpretation of the State and Statist Discourse in Pakistan (19771988)’ in Khan, N.S., Rubina Saigol and Afiya S. Zia (eds) (1994). Locating the Self: Perspectives on
Women and Multiple Identities, Lahore: ASR. pp. 22-40. See especially page 34.
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masculine terms such as strong, powerful, rational and in possession of honour. Like
individual men, the state also amasses weapons as expressions of the collective power of
an ‘honourable nation’. Politicians, military rulers and leaders in countries like Pakistan
never tire of asserting that ‘the enemy will be given an exemplary reply’, ‘our honourable
nation is fully capable of defending itself against any attack’, ‘we can give a befitting
reply to any enemy’, ‘our defence is impregnable’ (notice the gendered word
‘impregnable’) and so on. This kind of rhetoric is splashed all over newspapers, reported
daily on electronic media and repeated in social studies textbooks. The state as
Collective Man becomes the biggest holder of weapons, some of which are displayed
prominently in public spaces to create the awe associated with techno-killers.14 On
national holidays, the state keeps proving its masculinity by spectacular displays of
military aircraft, guns, cannons and tanks. The denial of human frailty is achieved by
projecting weakness on to women, whom the men and the masculine state will protect.
The more frightened and insecure the governments and leaders of a country feel,
especially against more powerful enemies, the more belligerent and aggressive are their
statements about national defence and national honour. The official rhetoric of national
security not only increases, ‘supreme national interests’ come to be defined in military
terms. The latter also become an excuse for increasing authoritarianism and state
centralization. For example, when Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf assumed
six of the most powerful offices, thereby centralizing all power, he invoked ‘supreme
national interest’ as the reason for becoming an all-powerful dictator. A military
definition of ‘reality’ overrides other and multiple discourses, thereby enhancing threat
perception and the need for preparedness and being perpetually mobilized.
In the discourse of ‘a nation at risk’ and ‘a military prepared for any eventuality’, national
interests come to mean excessive defence spending to buy the latest weaponry, and the
concomitant reduction in expenditure on social and economic needs. For example,
Pakistan’s Public Sector Development Programme was slashed in June 2001 to make up
for the budget deficit. In a militarized definition of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, issues
of public health and education come to be perceived as ‘soft’ issues for which money can
be continuously reduced to pay for ‘hard’ issues such as defence. It is noteworthy that
‘soft’ issues such as health and education are more feminized than the ‘hard’ issues such
as ‘defence’, ‘finance’ and the ‘economy’. There is a preponderance of women in
education and health sectors, especially at the lower levels, while the defence
establishment is almost entirely male. In Pakistan, as in many other countries, there has
never been a female defence, foreign affairs or finance minister. The discourse of
‘national interests’ and ‘national defence’ is also gendered, with a definite priority of
defence over social or ‘soft’ issues.
Furthermore, the term ‘national interests’ or ‘national defence’, while seeming to include
everyone, is used in exclusivist terms. There has never been an answer to the question:
who defines what are our ‘national interests’? How are the latter defined? Whose
For a detailed analysis of the exhibition of war technology as ‘beauty’ in public parks and spaces, see
Lala Rukh’s paper ‘Imag –e-Nation, a Visual Text’, in Hussain, N., Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol
(eds) (1997) Engendering the Nation-state, Vol. 2, pp. 75-102.
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defence is ‘national defence’? Is it, for example, the defence of all the people or only the
ruling classes and their lives and property? Rulers tend to shy away from such questions
or pretend that the terms are inclusive. However, states may even engage in a limited
war to impress upon the population that defence and the military are our prime needs,
even more important than food, health and education. It would not be wrong to infer that
the annual crossfire along the Line of Control in Kashmir starting April onwards, and the
Kargil adventure of 1999, were ways of reiterating the primacy of national defence over
other needs. National security has increasingly come to mean the security of the state
(the masculine state) over and above the security of the people. While in theory the state
gets its sovereignty from the people, the people’s security, which lies in food, health,
education and housing, is erased by an overwhelming emphasis on the security of the
state. It ends up being a case of the people for the state, rather than the promise of
partition, which was a state for the people. One cannot help concluding that ‘state
security’ is the security of the military, its powerful and rich supporters, feudal ruling
classes and high level bureaucrats. For an ordinary citizen, the rhetoric of state security
promises poverty, misery, underdevelopment, disease and illiteracy, even in the presence
of plenty.15 The discourse of ‘national security’ is not only deeply gendered, it is also
classed. As a gendered and classed rhetoric, it is transmitted on the national media on a
daily basis, but increasing numbers of people find it a tiresome discourse as they live
their daily lives in an endless grind.
The state’s propensity to engage in low intensity conflict, or a limited war, is an
extension of the masculine urge to engage in violence to demonstrate power, and to
underscore a men’s importance for the nation, country, family, women and children.
Conflict enables not only individual men to publicly display their manly ‘courage’, the
state also utilizes conflict to impress upon the population the importance of the military,
arms and ammunition. Conflict in this sense is necessary for the survival of masculinity
at the individual and collective levels. Masculinity has survived as an idea, however
imagined, fictional or mythical, through the ages despite the decline in the need for raw
muscle power. The modern state, as the ultimate expression of masculinity, reiterates and
re-enacts the masculine posture by arming itself and demonstrating its power in old or
newly-created battlefields. Conflict reproduces the state, just as it reproduces men and
women. It does so by creating the state’s Others as enemies, whether internal or external.
Internal repression of ethnic or religious minorities, and external warfare with a declared
enemy, enables the state to re-create itself in the imagination, hearts and minds of the
population. Destructive and dramatic technology, for example the spectacular nuclear
tests conducted by India and Pakistan, is the prime apparatus by means of which the state
stamps itself on the consciousness of citizens and enemies alike.
Civilianization of Conflict and Militarization of Society
While soldiers in the modern forms of conflict are exposed to less real threat, civilian
populations are far more embroiled than ever before. This is primarily due to major
15
According to the Social Policy Development Centre (SPDC) report, roughly 36% of Pakistanis live
below the poverty line. Figures close to this have also been provided by other reports such as those of the
Mahbub-ul-Haq Development Centre and United Nations Development Program.
10
changes in the way war is done in contemporary times, especially the development of war
technology. In the past, battles in the field usually involved only combatants and
casualties tended to be limited to a few hundred people. Civilian populations, except in
some cases, were far removed from the actual arena. They would find out about victory
or defeat long after the end of the battle. With the greatly enhanced capacity of modern
weapons of mass destruction, millions of people can be wiped out within a matter of
seconds. Entire cities can be devastated within a few minutes. Weapons of mass
destruction are therefore not weapons of war but are used on civilian populations, as was
demonstrated by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern weaponry does not
spare non-combatants including women, children and the elderly and disabled. The older
norms of chivalry and ‘honour’, which required that only able-bodied, mainly male,
combatants would be attacked and those constructed as ‘weak’, that is, women, children,
elderly and disabled would be spared, have given way to newer norms which emphasize
the enormous capacity of the weapons of destruction. In modern forms of technological
war, the difference between combatant and non-combatant has diminished, along with the
difference between ‘able-bodied’ and ‘weak’. While the latter constructions were
themselves gendered, they afforded a measure of protection to women who gained no
immortal heroism or greatness from war. Modern war is a kill-all operation with no
distinctions or exceptions. The norms governing war have changed despite United
Nations ‘rules’ of the game governing conflict.
Another factor that has drawn women heavily into conflict is the immense increase in
internal conflict with a relative decrease in war between countries. There is internal
conflict in the form of ethnic, sectarian, communal and secessionist struggles in about
fifty sites around the world. Since such conflicts take place inside the territorial
boundaries of states, and sometimes across international borders, civilian populations
tend to become much more involved. The latter form of involvement means that women
are much more directly affected than in the older forms of battle. The effects on women
are many and varied ranging from widowhood, rape, abduction and killing to
displacement, dislocation, detention and torture.16 Some of the secondary effects on
women include enhanced economic burdens in the case of the death of a husband or son,
taking care of families in refugee situations amid highly adverse circumstances, and
ensuring that the remaining family receives food, medical care and shelter in inhuman
conditions of living. In some cases, the group engaged in an ethnic or religious conflict
with another group tends to heighten and increase restrictions on women’s freedom of
movement and on their decision-making.17 This is done to ‘protect’ women from the
rival group’s attempts at rape or sexual humiliation.
Conflict as the Disempowerment of Women
For details of the effects of conflict on women, see Charlotte Lindsey’s paper ‘Women and War’. Paper
prepared while working for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
17
For details of the way in which women’s rights of freedom, education and movement have been curtailed
as a result of prolonged conflict in Afghanistan, see Saba Gul Khattak’s paper, ‘Militarization, Masculinity
and Identity in Pakistan – Effects on Women’ in Unveiling the Issues, especially pages 59-61, where she
describes a detailed Fatwa (religious edict, decree) issued by the United Ulema of Afghanistan against
women’s rights to education and freedom of movement. The Ulema declared women’s rights to be a threat
to Islam and ‘Afghan culture’.
16
11
Conflict is not only gendered in its dynamics, it has gender-specific effects. An argument
that has been advanced by some feminists is that situations of conflict create spaces for
women to go out, earn a living, become more independent, make decisions and act more
freely. It is argued that the situation of crisis engenders greater freedom as the usual
controls and restrictions tend to be diminished. This argument needs to be critically
examined, as it has not been demonstrated in the context of Afghan women where the
opposing tendency towards greater controls seems to be the norm. Employing the
framework developed by Elson and Pearson, for example, Liv Johnston analyses
women’s adaptation to refugee conditions and their space for manoeuvre. She utilizes the
concepts of ‘decomposition’ and ‘recomposition’ to refer respectively to mechanisms of
disintegration/decomposition as a result of displacement and dislocation, and the
resulting intensified re-enacting/recomposition of threatened cultural stances.18 It seems
that after a period of disintegration due to displacement, it is patriarchy that is
recomposed in intensified forms. The more threatened the accepted identity and norms as
a result of dislocation, the more intensified are the processes of the recomposition of
patriarchies. The unfamiliar surroundings, along with the presence of strangers/outsiders,
make it more urgent to impose enhanced restrictions on women. As Johnston explains it
The male family members represent only one set of players in the hierarchy of power. For
example, Nadia…could not go to the bazaar on the camp because her husband would be
reprimanded by the Mullah…when he went to pray at the mosque. The Mullah would
tell him that his wife had been seen too often at the bazaar and that this was
dishonourable for his family and he should keep her more under control.
With the declaration of Jihad greater power was afforded to the Mullahs, who instilled
much more conservative interpretations of the Koran, which focused specifically on the
behaviour of women. Party schools insisted that women were fully veiled, which had
never been the case in Afghanistan. This ‘Jihad-mentality’, where young boys in
particular were taught by the Mullahs that it was not ‘proper’ for women to be seen on
the streets, led to women being attacked in ‘public’ places, particularly during the more
radical years of the 80s. In this way, the control of women represented a symbol for the
preservation of community honour…During this period of radical Islamic expression,
refugee women who had never used a veil before in Kabul, would not go out onto the
streets without wearing a burqa.19
Afghan women interviewed for an study carried out by the Sustainable Development
Policy Institute (SDPI), reported that in those days if they risked going out without a veil
they might be threatened and even hit by Afghan men, something which would never
have happened in Afghanistan before this period. The Jihad thus came to be centered on
women’s bodies by making them invisible, reconstituting the private sphere with a
vengeance, and imposing purdah and mobility restrictions more intensely. A patriarchy
threatened by inimical outsiders, tends to respond by turning inwards and re-constructing
the boundaries of licit and illicit, moral and immoral, permissible and forbidden in its
own backyard. Women thus become the objects of a Jihad in which they gain nothing
Nicola Liv Johnston, ‘Afghan Refugee Women: What Room for Manoeuvre? A Study of the Interface
Between Space, Politics and Gender Identity’. Dissertation submitted to the School of Development
Studies, University of East Anglia, p. 1.
19
Nicola Johnston, p. 16.
18
12
and have no stake. As the Afghan Women’s Network wrote in a letter to Ambassador
Mestiri
Women are not profiting from the war, that is, they are not getting power, money or
positions as a result of the war. They are only experiencing the suffering and deprivation
of war. Women are not corrupted by war in the same way as men. They are more in
touch with the suffering of war. They are more involved with the struggle for daily
survival. Most women are NOT involved with factions and political parties. Women can
see another way to live without fighting and can encourage family members and
colleagues to work for peace.20
Women’s alleged gains from war in terms of greater freedom and space for public
activity, are ambiguous gains at best. A large number of women who have been reduced
to begging, or low level jobs in people’s home in Peshawar, yearn to go back home where
they had a measure of autonomy of work and control over their lives, especially in the
rural areas. While some feminists might read women’s presence in the streets as
‘emancipation’, the women were depressed, ill and desperate to return to a life of dignity.
They did not perceive their suffering as emancipation. Furthermore, at the end of
national conflicts and freedom struggles, women who have actively participated in the
movements, are asked to return to their homes and become the borderguards of national
frontiers and bearers of cultural values. This happened at the end of the Pakistan
movement, the Palestine liberation struggle as well as the Algerian war. Nation states
that are formed after such struggles seldom tend to be inclusive after the freedom has
been achieved. They impose discriminatory laws and policies on women to reinforce
women’s traditional roles and activities, and effectively exclude them from
public/political decision-making.21
Incidence of domestic violence has been observed to increase in refugee situations as a
result of male frustration with the inability to perform ‘the male role’. Many Afghan
refugee women, for example, report enhanced incidence of violence by husbands or
fathers maimed, mutilated or otherwise disabled by armed conflict. Angry and ‘conflictimpotent’ husbands tend to vent their frustrations upon women for becoming
breadwinners and going out to earn. Living off women’s earning is anathema to Afghan,
particularly Pashtun patriarchy. Despite being entirely dependent upon women’s
earnings, the men beat them, partly as a measure of control and partly to express anger
over the inability to engage in war. As one Afghan woman said:
He didn’t have such problems in Afghanistan, in fact he was very good with me.. If you
compare both parts of my life, even you would feel like crying…He beats me. He will hit
me with anything which will come in to his hand….It doesn’t matter what I tell him. If he
sees that we have run out of flour or the poor conditions in which we are living, he just
loses his temper. Then he goes out of the house for 8 or 9 days. When he is normal than
he is respectful to everyone. I am very much afraid of him, but back then he was a not
like this…Yesterday when I was beaten by my husband, I said to my self it was better
that I had died in those rocket attacks than living like this.
Letter by the Afghan Women’s Networ to Ambassador Mestiri. Dated April 7, 1996.
For example the discriminatory laws in Pakistan, such as the Hudood Ordinances of of 1979, the Law of
Evidence of 1984, effectively reduce women to second class citizenship and exclude full participation in
public life and decision-making.
20
21
13
Another Afghan refugee women reported enhanced domestic violence as a result of the
conflict. In her words:
Sometimes he makes a lot of noise and sometimes he quarrels, because he is disabled. He
has no nerves. He is irritated by arguments. Then I keep quiet. If I don’t keep silence,
then my hand is fractured…my foot is fractured. He always keeps a stick in his hand.
The imagined construction of the secluded domestic/private sphere as the haven of
‘protection’ and ‘safety’, is central to cultural nationalisms, which tend to underlie many
post-colonial nation-states. Such nationalisms tend to contradict the inclusive notion of a
plural democracy and universal citizenship regardless of sex, race or creed. While
women are fully utilized in national and freedom struggles, they are quickly declared to
be the embodiments and symbols of national honour of the masculine state, and a series
of restrictions come to be imposed on them. It seems, therefore, that women lose and not
gain from conflict. Since conflict forms and re-forms masculine states, women bear the
terrifying burdens of male honour perceived to lie in the female body. Men, on the other
hand, gain from conflict and state formation, as they get positions of power, money,
leadership and the opportunity to engage in public decision-making. Women serve as
pawns in a masculine battleground where men fight each other over honour, land, power
and domination. Women are thus objects of conflict when they are raped, abducted,
tortured or killed, but they are seldom subjects of the violent discourse of ‘national’,
‘tribal’ or ‘communal’ honour, as they have little role in articulating or shaping such a
discourse.
The assertion of communal, ethnic and nationalist identities in conflict has genderspecific effects. As mentioned earlier, men gain rewards in the form of heroism,
leadership, martyrdom, glory and an ‘everlasting life’. They get an opportunity to
express manliness and power. Women, on the other hand, experience enhanced
economic, social and personal burdens, are subjected to rape, humiliation, abduction and
forced marriages and are left homeless, shelterless, dislocated, displaced and begging on
the streets. The emotional, personal and social cost to women is immense and the gain
hardly visible.
Women do not lose only when identity formation takes the form of all out conflict. They
also lose while the national or sub-national identity is being constructed and publicly
articulated. For example, most forms of nationalism, and communal and ethnic assertion,
define women through exclusion and seclusion. The identity of the ‘masculine group and
manly state’ can only be articulated by juxtaposing it against an Other that is opposite.
Manly courage gets constructed as the opposition of feminine timidity, masculine
rationality is opposed to feminine emotionality, masculine conquest of external
space/territory is juxtaposed to the feminine confinement in internal space. In the process
of Otherness, and the projection of those characteristics on to women which are denied or
repressed in the male self, both men and women are reduced to becoming caricatures.
Women in this discourse appear as weak, timid, stupid, silly, irrational and in need of
guidance, protection and surveillance. This kind of rhetoric must perforce deny the
historical fact of brave and valiant women, highly intelligent and rational women and
14
independent and protective women. Men, similarly, get reduced to just a shadow of
themselves. Men’s emotionality, tenderness, caring and nurturing qualities are denied in
order to create the image of the all-powerful, conquering, attacking and victorious male.
Furthermore, gendered discourse also denies male irrationality, stupidity and timidity.
Thus reduced, each person becomes lesser than him/herself. The wholeness, which is
found in human beings, is denied in order to construct the denuded identity of the
masculine, proud, honourable and powerful collective – whether state, ethnic or
communal sub-group. Strong men make strong nations is the usual line of thought in
such constructions, and strength is almost always equated with only physical and muscle
prowess. What is also denied of course is that modern technology has rendered pure
muscle power redundant. The recent advances in genetic engineering, and the possibility
of reproduction without any male contribution, threaten the current notion of masculinity
ever more. The more such an imagined and mythical masculinity is threatened, the
greater is the chance that it will be re-asserted and reclaimed through violence and
conflict.
While the current notion of masculinity centers round power, strength, courage, virility
and potency, the notion of femininity centers on the need to be protected. Men are
constructed as the subjects of the nationalist discourse, and bearers of the values of
strength, courage and fortitude, women are constructed as the objects of nationalist and
sub-nationalist imagining. Women, as symbols of male and national honour, must
safeguard their virtue, that is, their sexuality and reproductive capacity. This capacity
must be harnessed to nationalist pursuits and the preservation of group honour. The fear
that this capacity might fall into enemy hands, and thus pollute the purity of the
race/nation, makes it incumbent upon the strong men of the group to protect and defend
the weak women of the group. At the national, group and collective level, this fear is
akin to an individual male’s fear that his woman’s reproductive capacity might be
harnessed by another male to produce his own seed or destroy his progeny, his
continuation. The fear of female sexuality underlies the individual’s attempts to control
and confine women to the domestic sphere so that she bears only her own husband’s
children. The same fear, at the group and collective levels, is contained and controlled by
confinement within marriage and the home. The large number of regulations, rules, laws
and policies targeting sexual relations and marriage in most societies, are indicative of the
excessive level of this masculine fear.
Inferential paternity, and its related insecurities and uncertainties, underlie the generation
of moral strictures and norms governing sexual behaviour in virtually every religion and
in all societies. The hyper-masculine stance arises from deep-rooted fears and
insecurities of the male regarding his inability to be certain about his offspring. What
appears to us as heightened, excessive and grotesque masculinity, is in fact borne of a
threatened and precarious sense of self. Unless this distorted notion of masculinity and
male honour is challenged, and ultimately changed, conflict and violence may continue to
be the only sources of the reproduction of masculinity. And as long as such imagined
and mythical masculinity is asserted, the construction of the feminine will be equally
mythical and imagined. Women will continue to represent the collective honour of the
group, and this will be achieved by enhanced surveillance and control, and placing a large
15
number of restrictions on them. The sense of the feminine self will remain caught up
with the threatened masculine self in an endless circle of objectification, representation,
commodification and symbolization. The definition of femaleness will remain hostage to
the definition of maleness. Women’s own right to define the self, and choose between
alternative and multiple meanings of their existence, will be wrested from them. While
women regularly contest the dominant meanings of femininity and male honour,22 they
are under pressure to re-create the meanings assigned to their sexuality, status and
representation by the Masculine Collective in the form of the State.
While identity construction through conflict renders males susceptible to increasing
insecurity and resulting violence, it also leads to greater threats to women. Women are
the usual targets of violence in the home and, once conflict with a rival group or state is
over, male aggression can easily turn towards internal space. The customs of so-called
‘honour killing’ and Karo Kari, are defended as important to the ethnic group’s culture.
Hence, culture, which is centered on patriarchal norms and values, tends to reproduce
manliness and womanliness by men resorting to the ultimate forms of violence leading to
murder. Such cultural assertions by the Pathan ethnic group, for example, were
reinforced by the state in judicial decisions which declared that if a husband feels that his
‘honour’ has been compromised and kills his wife, he should be given a lesser sentence
than the usual one for murder. Killing women, on mere suspicion, was thus declared not
to be murder. This negation of women’s right to life was upheld by Senators from the
Frontier province, who argued that this was according to Pashtun tradition which is the
basis of Pashtun identity. The location and reproduction of group identity within
violence and aggression against women means that such an identity (national, communal
or sub-national) offers nothing to women. For women, collective identity as articulated
by the men of the group, means that they will be excluded and even killed for the sake of
masculine identity/state/group.
The aggression-as-masculinity paradigm suggests that aggressive impulses, partly
existent in all human beings for self-defence purposes, will find an outlet one way or
another. 23 As long as such impulses are harnessed by war, their object may be other men
and women of ‘enemy’ groups. However, in times of peace, male aggression in almost
all societies turns toward the domestic sphere. This is the reason why it is important to
emphasize that peace cannot co-exist with inequality and injustice. As long as women
are unequal (legally, socially, ideologically subordinate), and as long as class, caste,
22
For example, Afghan women sing songs called Landyas in which they openly express sexuality and
desire which is contrary to Pashtun norms. Illicit liaisons and transgressions of the Pashtun code of honour
is a regular occurrence in Afghan society, even though it often severely punished or ends in death.
Similarly, Afghan women re-define what it means to be Pashtun by arguing that the custom of leverate, i.e.
the marriage of a widow with her husband’s brother is not a Pashtun custom. Very often Afghan males try
to impose this custom upon these women by declaring it to be a Pashtun tradition.
23
The argument here is not that women are non-aggressive and naturally less violent. Rather, what is
suggested is that since female aggression is not socially accepted and is usually strongly discouraged,
women tend to learn to control and re-channelise aggression more easily. When required, women have
exhibited aggression publicly. However, men are openly encouraged and instigated to express aggression
needlessly, simply to prove manliness. Absence of aggression and the expression of tender emotions by
males, are often mocked by society. Aggression is considered a predominantly male attribute.
16
gender, communal, sectarian and ethnic inequalities characterize society, conflict is likely
to erupt.
Women’s Stake in Peace-building
Women certainly have a greater stake than men in peace-building and in the resolution of
violent conflict. This is so because they have less to gain and much more to lose from
conflict. It is women who are widowed, reduced to beggary, raped, sexually assaulted,
forced into marriages, compelled to work in highly exploitative conditions, condemned
into refugee situations and to a life in conditions of displacement and constant threat. It
is women who are forced to provide health, education and food in adverse circumstances.
It is women who are expected to care for sick and dying soldiers, children and the elderly
in the absence of adult men. Conflict reproduces women’s traditional roles and increases
their economic as well as social burdens. At the same time, as the Afghan Women’s
Network reported, they do not gain positions of power and leadership or heroic glory. It
is, therefore, imperative to include women, especially those directly affected, in peace
negotiations as their perspective from the margins is much more likely to include the
impact of conflict on real people and on their everyday lives. The state-centric
perspective can be corrected by looking at conflict from the lens of women’s lives. From
a feminist perspective then, conflict looks very different than it does from the perspective
of the trigger-happy, chauvinistic and jingoistic ‘patriots’ of the nationalist or statist
variety.
Role of the Masculine State in Conflict
The increase in internal conflict, as opposed to inter-state forms, means that a large
number of non-state actors have become central in the initiation and escalation of
conflict. While states are bound by certain international laws, agreements and treaties
such as International Humanitarian Law, Rome Statutes, and human rights agreements,24
non-state actors are not bound by any international treaty. Non-state actors committing
violence fall under the state’s own jurisdiction and the state’s own laws. However, states
have become increasingly unable to protect the lives and property of their citizens. In
fact what is becoming increasingly clear is that state functionaries, in particular the
police, have become deeply enmeshed in social conflicts. This has seriously
compromised state neutrality (or at least perceived neutrality), which is essential to deal
with ethnic, sectarian, class, communal or religious conflict. Reports of police and
military brutality in Karachi speak abundantly about the behaviour of state authorities.
As one woman in Karachi explained:
They kill our children. The police enter the houses by force and harass people. The police
demand money in return for freeing our children. But how can we poor manage it? They
pick the locks and doors of our houses. Now the question is where should we get money
to repair our doors when we are already short of money?….. We are totally helpless. It is
rule of police nowadays and they are committing crimes. They pick up children and
This does not mean that states respect international law during conflict. Pakistan’s involvement in East
Pakistan in 1971, Russia’s attack on Chechnya in 2000, the Indian security forces’ treatment of Kashmiri
people, are examples of states flagrantly violating international law and agreements.
24
17
demand money for their release. What kind of justice is this! How can a poor man be at
peace. The poor are born just to die. Now what about the widows, where should they go?
In the past, people respected widows but now the police harass widows more.
Another widowed woman belonging to the Mohajir community had this to say:
I, a widow, was subjected to cruelty by the police. They tortured my children. And took
away my handsome son and martyred him. I will never forgive those people. My child
was an orphan. My child didn’t have parents and then they subjected my children to [the
security] operation. I remain sick, I am a widow. Even now three of my children are
about to get married. I continue to be very upset. I also have a daughter. And my children
haven’t got job
As South Asian states are moving increasingly away from the ideal model of the midtwentieth century – the model of the plural, secular, democratic state, they are unable to
deal in a just way with internal conflict. States such as Pakistan continuously reaffirm
their religious origins to the detriment of women, minorities and the working classes.
The ideology of religious foundations tends to create citizenship in masculine, Muslim
and exclusivist terms.25 The affirmation of a single state identity leads to the denial and
erasure of the fundamental multiplicity of the South Asian region.
The domination of the state by a single ethnic group, as well as a single religious group,
undermines the notion of plural democracy and reinforces majoritarianism. The state is,
therefore, increasingly incapable of mediating between groups in cases of ethnic,
sectarian, class or communal conflict. If the state is perceived to be siding openly with
one religious or ethnic group, for example sunni Muslims and Punjabis in Pakistan, the
other groups, ethnic as well as religious, feel alienated and betrayed by the state. With
the preponderance of Punjabi Muslims in the armed forces and the once powerful
bureaucracy, there is massive alienation among the smaller provinces. Conflicts over
water distribution, job quotas, college admissions and economic opportunities, come to
be articulated in ethnic terms. Economic and class conflicts are thus redefined as ethnic
or sectarian conflicts, and class based deprivations come to be perceived as religious or
ethnic group deprivations. The sub-national tendencies that arise as a result, reflect
processes of disintegration, fragmentation and reintegration as new states, which in turn
become equally intolerant of their own religious and ethnic minorities. The process of
state formation, and re-formation, is thus riddled with bloodshed, conflict and suffering.
As Suvir Kaul writes in the introduction to his book, The Partitions of Memory, the
borders between India and Pakistan have ‘so often been confirmed by the spilling of
blood – in riots and in pogroms’.26 State formation is a bloodthirsty project, and begins
as a sub-nationalist ethnic or communal movement.
A process of the increased communalization of the state is taking place in India where
secular intellectuals are locked in a struggle to retain the state’s constitutionally
guaranteed secular stance, against the onslaught of Hindutva historians and educationists.
See Shahnaz Rouse’s paper ‘The Outsider(s) Within: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Pakistan’, in
Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds) (1999). Resisting the Sacred and the Secular: Women’s Activism
and Politicized Religion in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 53-70.
26
Suvir Kaul, Introduction to The Partitions of Memory, p, 1.
25
18
For example, the ‘Curriculum Framework’ developed by the National Council for
Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in 2000, reflects the ‘saffroning of Indian
education’ and the ‘Vedic mathematics’ and Hindutva-based history have been
challenged by educationists who attended the National Convention Against the
Communalization of Education in August 2001.27 The appeal to so-called ‘indigenous
culture’ and ‘indigenous values’ has been condemned, and education ministers of nine
states not governed by the National Democratic Alliance, have asked for the curriculum
to be withdrawn.28 The mass killing of Muslims since the destruction of the Babri
mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, and the killing of Christian priests and their
followers more recently, have severely strained the secular pretensions of the Indian state.
The repression in Kashmir, Nagaland and other conflict sites, further negates the image
of the secular democratic state that Indian governments project to the world. Statecentered homogenization, and the systematic suppression of religious and ethnic
minorities, leads to genocide, massive human rights violations and exacerbated conflict
which affects all aspects of life. Prolonged conflict increases the militarization and
brutalization of civil society, as state and non-state actors engage each other in murder,
loot, arson, firing and general destruction. Both the state, and ethnic and religious subgroups, become increasingly more violent and repressive.
Conflict and the Uneven Distribution of Resources
In a world of diminishing resources and expanding populations, conflict over land, water,
oil, trees, minerals and other materials central to existence, can easily take ethnic,
communal or sectarian form. A just and equitable distribution of resources among
classes, genders, sects and ethnic groups seems to be one of the fundamental
requirements in the construction of peace. It can be said that gender inequality, like class
difference, is a condition of war by some over others. As long as this basic condition
persists, conflict is not likely to end, and perhaps should not end. The subject of Peace
Studies would do well to take a second look at the problematic notion of peace without
justice, peace without equality and peace in the presence of exploitation. In this context,
the following statement by Charlotte Bunch regarding Afghan women, is pertinent:
The United Nations must therefore emphasize that where women must fear for their
physical security simply for leaving their homes, no peace exists. Where girls can
receive an education only clandestinely, in fear of the consequences, no peace exists.
Where a diversion from strict dress code is punished by public beating in the presence of
children, no peace exists.29
It must be noted that in the era of globalization, and the increasing marketization of the
world along with the control over all resources by rich multinationals, the chances of
achieving equality, fairness, justice and equitable distribution of resources within and
27
See the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, 2000. Publication Division. National
Council of Education Research and Training. New Delhi.
28
The Hindu. August 9, 2001.
29
Center For Women’s Global Leadership. The State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. Letter to His
Excellency Ambassador Jose Ayala Lasso, High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Center for Human
Rights. October 17, 1996.
19
across states, are low.
Conflict and peace studies tend to focus far too much on
‘containment’ and ‘management’ of conflict, rather than perceiving it in political terms.
Containment, control, overseeing and management tend to be technocratic terms, which
imply that technical solutions can be applied to moral and political problems. This kind
of a problem-solving, managerial approach conceals the political dimensions of conflict
that underlie any issue. Such an approach defines political problems as ‘administrative or
management issues’, rather than conflicts of class, gender, inequality and exploitation. It
takes away the focus from real issues and highlights the technical aspects. Peace studies
should be wary of falling into the idea of ‘managing or administering the world’ and
focus on peace without exploitation.
Summary
This paper represents some reflections on conflict from a feminist perspective. The
convergence of a number of relatively new schools of thought have impinged on the
study of conflict, thereby radically altering the way we understand conflict and create
knowledge about it. It has been argued that conflict is a gendered way of reproducing
and re-enacting masculinity. Conflicts re-create an imagined masculinity not only at the
individual levels with men going to war to commit heroic/murderous acts, they are also
central to the formation of masculine nation-states. Modern technology has reduced the
need to express personal valour or experience real threat to life. It has become, at the
same time, a new form of the re-assertion of masculine power. At the state level, the
same process takes the shape of amassing arms and weapons of mass destruction.
Conflict enables states to re-create the Other, within and without, with renewed vigour
and violence. Conflict reproduces not only masculinity, it also re-creates femininity as
the denied Other part of the Self. It produces women as the opposite of men, allowing
men to be defined in hyper-masculine terms. Conflict is created by, and re-creates,
gendered social and political divisions. Internal strife have civilianized conflict and
militarized civil societies through mass weaponization and widespread violence. While
men gain from conflict and state formation in terms of power, positions of leadership,
control and domination, women only lose from conflict. Women are systematically
disempowered by conflict economically, politically and personally in a number of ways.
Women, therefore, have a stake in peace-building, but peace cannot be achieved in
conditions of inequality and exploitation. As long as class, gender, and religious
inequality and injustice continue to be a part of the state and society, conflict is not likely
to end. Peace is possible and sustainable only in conditions of the just distribution of
resources across and within states.
_______________________________________________________________________