Gender, communication and peace

Peace here is understood in the feminist sense of ‘not only the absence of war, violence and hostilities, but also the enjoyment of justice, equality and the entire range of human rights and fundamental freedoms within society’, as defined in the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies.6 Clearly, non-pacifist practices are widespread and present in every society. What may be less clear is how gendered ideologies are produced and reproduced to create, rationalize and sustain these practices. By ‘gendered ideologies’ I mean context-specific, commonly-shared values and norms about masculinity and femininity that order relationship patterns in everyday life.

Feminist theorist Iris Marion Young posits that ‘viewing issues of war […] through a gender lens […] means seeing how a certain logic of gendered meanings and images helps organize the way people interpret events and circumstances, along with their positions and possibilities for action within them, and sometimes provides some rationale for action’.7 We can take this statement further by exploring ‘communication’ as the means through which a logic that limits or potentially opens up possibilities for creating a ‘culture of peace’ is transmitted, propagated and perpetuated.

A ‘culture of peace’ is taken in its original definition by the United Nations as ‘a set of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups and nations’.8 ‘Participatory communication and the free flow of information and knowledge’ have been identified as conditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of a culture of peace.9

Street vendors in Nairobi responding to a survey consistently offer the explanation of ‘dialogue’ as their dispute-resolution strategy. What is more interesting, however, is the acute awareness that in interactions between vendors and municipal state agents, the Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ is far from within reach. An ‘ideal speech situation’ is a theoretical construct that identifies the conditions necessary for mutual dialogue to occur; while not present in reality, it should nevertheless serve as a moral compass for those intent on ensuring participatory, inclusive, equitable and democratic communication.

‘You cannot argue with the government – what they say has to happen’, one street vendor states.10 As such, disputes are almost always irresolvable and, while open conflict may be momentarily averted, there is no peace and the tensions remain. At the same time that as showing the link between communication and peace, it also illustrates less obvious forms of masculinity and femininity which become clear when a gender lens is applied. A gender analysis also reveals the possibilities for a more nuanced gender-responsive approach to ‘communication for peace’.

Gender as power relationship

Reports from the field are categorical that involving women in peace processes improves the chances of achieving and sustaining peace.11 Numerous theorists interpret this observation as a propensity for peace innate in women, and a tendency towards violence in men. This position, Young argues, is an unsupportable generalization. Rather, a more useful approach to interpretation is to ask what it is about understandings of masculinity and femininity in each society that sanction, promote and indeed make acceptable the attitudes and practices that lead to discord, violence and injustice.

Gender is a power relationship of masculine dominance and feminine subordination, femininity being characterized by a subservience to the ‘masculine’ and masculinity the domination over the ‘feminine’, a domination that is more often than not, but not always, aggressive or exploitative. Gendered logic in different sites, in the home, in the workplace, in the community and at the level of the state based on context-specific understandings of femininity and masculinity, engender, sanction and perpetuate non-pacifism within and outside these sites.

Gendered thinking carried over to communication processes places limits on our perceptions of the possibilities available to us to create and/or sustain peace. The purpose of gender analysis here is twofold: first, to expose the gendered logic in order to recognize and subvert it, and second, to determine what new avenues are opened up as potential possibilities in a strategy of ‘communication for peace’.

The family is the fundamental structure from which individuals learn about gender norms; it is the channel through which societal expectations about masculinity and femininity are passed down. Further, the structure of the family and gender relations in the home are mirrored in the structure of and gender relations in institutions outside the home. To reiterate, norms about masculine and feminine behaviour are adhered to in the relationship between institutions and individuals/groups.

Take, for instance, the interface between the state and its citizens. Young argues that citizens’ perception of the patriarchal state fulfilling the ‘father’ figure role of protector leads to their acceptance and indeed appreciation when the state wages pre-emptive war against a foreign state.12 In fact, gender insidiously permeates our engagement with each other, between and within groups and between institutions and groups. We are complicit in violence, war, discrimination and injustice when we accept or fail to challenge the taken-for-granted ideologies of masculinity and femininity on which such attitudes and practices are founded.

Failure to recognize the pervasiveness of gender and to challenge assumptions leads to peace-building processes in formal/institutional peace-building projects that privilege certain groups over others, involving them in the processes and at the same time treating other groups as irrelevant. A case in point is that while women are active participants in wars and conflict, ‘the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and demands’13 leads to policies that relegate women to the domestic sphere during the post-conflict period. Until we begin to acknowledge the inextricability of gender from all aspects of our lived realities and respond accordingly in our strategies for peace-building, the results will remain unsustainable.

Gender-responsive approaches to communication for peace

A gender-responsive ‘communication for peace’ approach should be deliberate in interrogating and redressing the issues that lead to the inequitable gender relations of masculine dominance of certain individuals, groups and structures and feminine subordination of others in communication processes. The approach considers all the sites in which non-pacifist attitudes and practices are created, produced and reproduced. Are attempts being made to fulfil conditions necessary for the creation of an ‘ideal speech situation’? Are there elements that banish certain individuals and groups to the margins, silence or make it difficult or impossible for them to participate?

To take news media, one facet of communication, as an example, the third Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP)14 carried out in 2005 in 76 countries worldwide found that the conditions necessary for an ‘ideal speech situation’ are not fulfilled. As a result, news media propagate gendered meanings and images, re-inscribe ideologies about femininity and masculinity that in turn structure attitudes and actions, limiting people’s possibilities for thinking or acting outside the prescribed boundaries.

A gender-responsive ‘communication for peace’ approach will acknowledge the gender of institutional structures and the resultant effect in thwarting an ‘ideal speech situation’ in interactions between the institution’s agents and individuals and groups in the community. This means radically challenging our thinking in order to begin to understand and structurally transform attitudes and practices as individuals and institutional agents in different positions of privilege or powerlessness.

The approach transcends mere instrumentalism to consider all the elements of communication processes. We begin to question how we produce and reproduce the conditions that make for inequitable, exclusive, non-participatory and non-democratic communication: How do the communication tools we apply close off the possibilities of participation by certain groups? How does the content of communication promote certain concerns as ‘worthy’ and demote others to the ‘trivial’ or ‘insignificant’? What does the content relay about values and norms on femininity and masculinity? How does institutional culture support and propagate gendered meanings that become evident in practice when we implement ‘communication for peace’ projects?

Clearly, unpacking our practices as individuals and institutional agents to reflect on taken-for-granted ideologies about gender is crucial. We begin to draw lessons from the empirical evidence in order to shape our responses.

To illustrate with the news article on ‘the problem of domestic violence in Europe’, we learn that similar to numerous countries worldwide:

‘The Netherlands and Greece have no specific legislation on domestic violence. It is treated as all other violence, although it requires a specific follow-up and the specific protection of victims, since recidivism very frequently occurs, as there are close bonds between the victim and the torturer. In Greece marital rape does not expressly constitute an offence; whereas in Italy it is considered a crime. Unfortunately, the Italian judges have not changed their attitude and rarely apply these laws […] the question of the implementation of the law is significant. In Portugal, for example, there has been a law protecting women from conjugal violence since 1991. However, it was adopted under international pressure and not following a new awareness of the issue. It is therefore not applied, the means for implementing it being non-existent. The problem is serious as a woman’s life is sometimes at stake: in Northern Ireland, 40% of the murders of women are committed by their husbands. It is therefore important for a woman to be able to leave home at once and to find shelter (often with the children). That is, she must be taken in by a reception foyer if she has nowhere else to go. She must also be able to live in a safe area, as it has been established that the danger of violence is most severe in the period which follows the woman’s departure. This last observation gives the lie to the assertion that a woman who does not leave her violent husband is more or less responsible for her own suffering; it is usually fear which stops her from leaving.’15

This account demonstrates the complicity of individuals – ‘the torturer and the victim’ – and institutions, in this case state representatives in the legal system, in perpetuating the cycle of violence, in creating the conditions that obstruct the creation of a culture of peace. However, what stops her from leaving is more profound than fear. The problem goes beyond the individuals – it is rooted in a social order that embraces a certain ideology about gender relations, what it means to be masculine and what it means to be feminine, setting the standards on what is ‘normal’ and conversely, what is ‘abnormal’.

Why does it have to take international pressure for a country to adopt a law on conjugal violence? Based on the evidence here, whose interests does the legal system serve? What lies at the core of the judges’ attitudes about marital rape that written law cannot shake? How do we explain the close bonds between the ‘torturer and the victim’ that account for the frequent recidivism?

That which is ‘abnormal’ does not enter into the realm of our thinking about possibilities for action. If we acknowledge the linkages between communication and peace or the lack of them, then it becomes clear how working towards putting in place the conditions necessary for an ‘ideal speech situation’ can be a strategy to institutionalize a culture of peace.

In essence, a gender responsive ‘communication for peace’ approach will problematize and redress constructions of masculinity and femininity, to transmit, propagate and perpetuate a different logic that opens up possibilities, shapes new thinking about alternative attitudes, behaviour and courses of action that may make a culture of peace imaginable.

The author wishes to thank Maria Teresa Aguirre, Upasana Sharma, and Ozlem Tezcek, for their comments on a draft of this article.

Notes

1. Report by Mohamed A. Salih for IPS News, circulated on WUNRN on August 3, 2007

2. Story by Angela Boskovitch, Womens eNews correspondent, June 8, 2007. www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=3268

3. Reuters Report circulated on WUNRN on July 31, 2007

4. Article by FIDH the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues circulated on WUNRN on August 2, 2007

5. Article by Cesar Chelala published in The Moscow Times.com, August 9, 2007. circulated on WUNRN

6. Paragraph 13 in the ‘Report of the world conference to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, Nairobi, 15-26 July 1985.United Nations, New York, 1986.

7. Iris Marion Young 2007:187-188

8. UN Resolutions A/RES/52/13 : Culture of Peace and A/RES/53/243, Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace

9. UN Resolution 6/10/1999 No. 53/243: Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace

10. Macharia field notes, July, 2007.

11. ‘Lasting Peace Can Be Restored By Greater Women Involvement in Peace Process’, an interview with Babita Basnet, president of Sancharika Samuha – a Women Communicators’ Group in Nepal http://www.sancharika.org/interview_babita.php. ‘Experience in international peace-keeping missions shows indeed that success is far more likely in situations where women are involved as mission members and where the concerns of local women are actively sought out and factored in the decision making process’ (Promoting gender equality in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 2007)

12. Young, op. cit.

13. Afshar, Haleh (2003) Women and wars: some trajectories towards a feminist peace, in Development in Practice, 13:2, 178-188

14. See www.whomakesthenews.org

15. Article by FIDH the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues circulated on WUNRN on August 2, 2007.

A feminist political economist, Sarah Macharia joined the World Association for Christian Communication in 2007 as the ‘Media and Gender Justice’ programme manager. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto, currently writing a dissertation on: ‘The urban informal economy in sub-Saharan Africa: A feminist post-empiricist policy analysis, with a focus on informal trade and comparative case studies of Nairobi and Durban’. She previously worked at the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (Nairobi) and at the African Centre for Women (U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa).