“Feminist Antimilitarism and WILPF”
Cynthia Cockburn
presented at the WILPF Seminar: 1325 Billion Arguments for Human Security
21 November, 2008

Thank you very much Felicity, for your introduction and thanks to all of you for asking me to be here with you for this very interesting and significant seminar, and for trusting me with these early moments of the day -  a good time, maybe, to introduce some ideas to provoke a bit of self-questioning and discussion about what we do, and how and why we do it. 

When I say “what we do”, by “we” I don’t just mean ourselves in this room, but women all over the world, in organizations with a lot of different names, engaged in active opposition to militarist thinking, to militarization of their societies and to war. 

My fulltime work is research, it’s what I do for a living. I think it’s important to make clear that, although I have a university title, I don’t teach and I’m not paid by a university. I look for my livelihood to charitable trusts that are concerned with the promotion of peace. Doing research means that when I give a talk like this, I’m telling things that other women have told me. They’re real life stories. But of course the stories are partly shaped by who I chose to listen to, the questions I decided to ask, and the sense I’ve made of what I hear.

In the research reported in my book From Where We Stand, I chose to listen to women who are active against militarism and war separately from men, in women’s organizations that most of them see as feminist. Apart from finding out what they do exactly, I asked them, “why do you organize as women-only?”  I belong to two women-only networks – I’m a member of WILPF. But I play a more active role in Women in Black.  And I’m often asked, as I’m sure you are : Isn’t that separatist?  Why discriminate by sex?  I think it’s a fair question. If we’re going do things “as women”, which effectively means excluding men, I think we need to have a good reason. After all, if men were to say “our organization is for men only” we’d say it was discrimination – unless we could be sure they were working seriously and critically on issues of men, masculinity and power.  And in WILPF and WIB we do have a good reason. The justification for women-only organizing is ultimately our political analysis.  My question to myself and you this morning is - how well do we operationalize it?

Listening carefully as women explained to me their women-only antimilitarist activism I detected three main reasons. One is making women’s experiences of war visible. A second is to do with process – being in control so as to do things our own way. The third is getting a gender analysis into our explanation and critique of war.  How well do we follow through on each of these three things? 

I think we do quite well on the first. We find that a lot of mainstream organizations, and the media, neglect or misrepresent the actual life and death experiences women have of militarization and war – women’s realities. So we organize as women to amplify women’s unheard voices, to project the unseen images of women onto the screen (particularly images of women’s survivor-strength and skill), to open up the agenda of antiwar activism and place women’s issues on it. I’ll give a couple of examples of groups that I think follow through on this motivation very well.

The first is La Ruta Pacifica in Colombia, who are most famous for their huge and colourful mobilizations of women, who will travel in a convoy of buses from one end of the country to the other, to express solidarity with women in one or another area that’s badly afflicted by the violence of the state army, the guerrilla forces or the paramilitaries – or which is devastated by the US-sponsored fumigation of coca crops that poisons food farming. What La Ruta focus on is “everyday life”- “la cotidianidad” they call it - the things women do to keep life going, the little economies they sustain, the care they give.  They say “war is trashing everyday life”.  No more violence, whatever side it comes from.

The second example I’d cite is the International Women’s Network against Militarism which works mainly in the Pacific region. It’s made up of twenty or more local organizations of women in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam and Hawai’i. There’s also a member group based in the USA - it’s called Women for Genuine Security - and these North American women make it their job to keep tabs on the 737 military bases and 2½  million personnel of the US military operating worldwide. They scrutinize US defence budgets and strategic plans and keep the rest of their network informed. 

This network in fact is a particularly good reminder of the gigantic budgets the world’s militarists have at their disposal and the tiny, tiny budgets available to those of us who oppose it.  The US defence budget is over 500 billion dollars. The International Network of Women against Militarism that squares up to it, out there in the Pacific, can barely scratch together the funding for a meeting of its activist groups every couple of years.

Nonetheless, individually and together these women’s groups monitor the impact of US military policy on their countries - particularly its effects on women. They keep alert, share experiences, and as they put it, ‘make critical connections among militarism, imperialism and systems of oppression and exploitation based on gender, race, class and nation.’  They protest the way the US steals peoples’ land for military exercises and bomb tests that pollute the environment and damage. They critique the huge proliferation of prostitution and trafficking around the bases. And they are concerned about the fate of the many mixed-race babies fathered by US personnel, that face discrimination and neglect. This is vitally important work – but sometimes these “women’s” issues can be ridiculed and marginalized by the larger mixed movements that address what they think of as the “really important” things - like the revision of Japan’s peace constitution, the partition of Korea, nuclear weapons and US rivalry with China.  The Network don’t neglect those things either, but they make sure that within that framework women’s experiences and needs are visible.

How well do WiB and WILPF put women’s experiences of war into play? I think we can be proud of what we achieve.  In scores of little local vigils and actions, come rain or shine, Women in Black do go out and make sure people know about the effect of war on women – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Darfur.  

And WILPF does a great job of this kind.  In the UK recently WILPF women organized a series of events making African women’s voices heard. At the time of the Russian standoff with Georgia over Abhkasia and Ossetia, I noticed a WILPF statement introducing awareness of the women’s organizations of that region into the debate – who else had thought of them? Another topic I noticed WILPF dealing with recently was ensuring that women and gender aren’t neglected in the Cluster Munitions Treaty. And of course the whole Resolution 1325 exercise was one in which WILPF took a lead in getting women’s suffering, women’s strengths, women’s needs and women’s potential onto the Security Council agenda and thence into the calculations of a lot of governments and other actors.

OK. Let’s turn now to process -  the second reason for organizing as women-only. I think this is more problematic. A lot of women tell me they organize in women-only groups in order to be in control of how they organize and act. They want the freedom to do things their own way. They are fed up with what they feel are the bureaucratic approach of some NGOs, or the demagogic and dogmatic behaviour of left parties they find dominating spaces like the World Social Forum.

I’ll tell you a story here about a group in Spain because it neatly illustrates the point a lot of women make.  En Pie de Paz was a magazine, an antimilitarist journal, On Foot for Peace, in Spain. It was produced by a collective of collectives, small groups of men and women in eight cities. All the tasks were shared around the places and the people – design was done in one town, production in another, distribution in a third. Individuals came together from these groups in two meetings for each issue of the journal. There’d be maybe fifteen people, more than half of them women. What touched me about this project was the struggle women put up for a real transformation, a little revolution it was, in relations between men and women in the project. The men wanted a hierarchy, with a director, the women refused it. The men fought each other in horrible editorial disputes about this war and that - they fought to win, as if they were at war themselves. The women said stop this: any thought must be thinkable here. We don’t need a line, we can tolerate uncertainty. The women put relationships first and wanted the magazine to reflect that.
Elena wrote an article in which she said ‘we produce the journal because we love one another’. This was too much for some of the men. But the real crunch came when babies were born. The women insisted on bringing the babies to the meetings. The men said they couldn’t work productively under such conditions, babies crying, toddlers under foot. The women insisted that their work would be the better for it. At this point, some men left. But the ones that stayed finally shared everything, the cooking, the caring. They had to, because the women’s contribution to the journal was central. The women’s culture became hegemonic in the magazine as a whole. They had their way with the look of the journal – which they wanted to reflect in pictures and headlines the gentleness and non-violence on which the project was founded.

There are two points to this story – first, it was a great journal and it survived two decades or more. It’s really missed now it’s not there. The second thing is that it really was in the end a model of good practice, it exemplified prefigurative activism. One woman told me: “we insisted that the way we do things should reflect the world we’re working towards. Coherencia entre fines y medios.  It’s entirely different to the left’s instrumental approach to peace: peace as a mere tactic for revolution. Peace is betrayed by that,” she said.

How do WILPF and Women in Black look in relation to this second motivation for women-only organizing? Are we succeeding in what we want to do, in making our struggle both effective and prefigurative?  I think our networks are at opposite extremes actually, when it comes to process, and that neither of us wholly succeeds, for opposite reasons.

A paragraph on Women in Black’s website states, “Sometimes even peace demonstrations get violent, and as women alone we can choose forms of action we feel comfortable with, non-violent and expressive.”  Well, it’s true that WiB are quite good at mounting small occasional or repeated events such as silent vigils. Or occasional splashes in fountains with red paint.  But that’s not much of a challenge, really. The real challenge is to organize effectively and powerfully as a worldwide network without falling into hierarchy, centralization and dogmatism.  Well – the Women in Black network is certainly unstructured. It has no constitution, no manifesto, no offices nor office holders, and no membership – only participation. WiB retain the advantage of spontaneity and creativity. Having no institutional form and no money, it hasn’t been a tempting object for infiltration – WiB can’t be suspected of being a ‘front’ for other forces. The movement has held together due to the efforts of certain groups to organize biennial international ‘encounters’. If there’s a decision-making process at all in the network, it’s in the motions passed in the plenary sessions of these assemblies of three or four hundred women.

But several of us said, about four years ago, that while we loved and valued our lack of structure, we feared that WiB could not be an enduring, coherent and effective network without at the very least having a really good system of communications: mailing lists, translation between languages, a firstclass website. We actually persuaded ourselves to break with precedent and raise a few thousand pounds in grants to pay for work on a website. But we’re so slow – to years later and it’s still not up and running. It’s also very difficult (as WILPF will certainly understand) to come to a consensual decision in such a network. I could name several botched decisions – including one quite bitter dispute that’s running at the moment about whether or not we should be visiting and supporting the Saharawi women of the Western Sahara. They were invited to the last WiB assembly, but is their organization autonomous and is it non-violent? It’s an unresolved dilemma. We have no means of resolving it AS a Network.

Now, in all of this you can imagine that Women in Black women often compare themselves to WILPF.  They greatly admire WILPF’s survival as a respected body over almost a century.  They read the competent, thorough, useful material on <peacewomen-dot-org> in admiration and gratitude.  They cite UN Security Council Resolution 1325 as a solid achievement based on months and months of the kind of organized and focused effort that Women in Black couldn’t dream of.  But they also say “I wonder what price they paid for all that?”

This is something only women who are more intimately involved in WILPF’s structures than I am can answer. But it’s an important question: if we have in WILPF a structure that can avoid some of the deficits of Women in Black by having a system of local and regional branches, with a formal means of representation, elections, voting, with paid staff, presidents, general-secretaries and other office-holders that can speak for the organization, can we also say that in the spaces thus created we practise a horizontal, participatory, inclusive, responsible, educative and nurturing way of doing things – a way that some would claim as feminist?  That I think is a question we have an obligation to return to at every moment and every level of our work.

But I want to turn now to the third – and I think decisive - reason women give me for organizing separately as women: that is, developing, articulating and operationalizing a feminist gender analysis of militarism and war. I’m not at all sure that we convert this third motivation from theory into practice.  I think we need to be honest with ourselves: most of the time we fail. And I’m not at all clear what we should do about it.

I need to backtrack a bit.  I came out of this three years’ research on “women organizing against militarism and war worldwide”, with a clear sense of having met a lot of thoughtful, analytical, practical feminists. There’s been a serious backlash against feminism for something like twenty years now in countries of the global north, “the West”.  So much so that a lot of women “up here” think feminism has blown over, and that certainly women in the global south would write off feminism as an outdated western imposition. This is absolutely not what I found among women facing the daily realities of armed conflict.  Feminism lives. Believe me. Women I spoke with in lots of organizations and countries would be frankly furious if you were to suggest they were nervous of being associated with feminism.  They are makers and builders of feminism in all they do.

But we have to be clear what kind of a feminism it is that war provokes in women.  Because there’s more than one feminism, as you know well. It’s easy for a start to say what this one is not. It’s not that competitive, individualist, "women have a right to climb to the top of the ladder", kind of feminism. And it isn't an essentialist feminism, that sees men as born to be violent and women born to be peacemakers. How could it be, when we’ve all seen Condoleezza Rice, a woman policy-maker, standing shoulder to shoulder with George Bush; and we know some men organize the White Ribbon campaign against men’s sexual violence.

On the contrary, the feminism I learned from anti-militarist women around the world is the optimistic one that believes masculine and feminine are culturally and socially shaped – that we can intervene to change ourselves. And secondly, it’s a feminism with a strong critique of capitalism, neoliberalism and imperialism. In other words it’s what we used to call socialist feminism. It has to be - because we see that money interests – oil, free trade - are everywhere implicated in war.

It's an anti-racist feminism that’s acutely aware of the exclusions involved in nationalism, ethnicity and religion. It has to be – because we see that war and racism go hand in hand. It’s inevitably transnational feminism – we’re good at networking. And it's what’s sometimes called radical feminism, with a powerful anger about the body and sexuality. It has to be - because in war we see ourselves exploited, tortured and destroyed by men through our bodies, our sexuality and reproductive capacities. 

So we see that the feminism generated among women facing and resisting militarization and war is, more than anything, a holistic feminism.  And it doesn’t exclude liberal feminism either. If anybody says "you're liberal feminists" and intends that as an insult, I think anti-militarist and anti-war women will say, "Yes, right! On top of everything else, we are liberal feminists. Of course. Because we lay claim to justice, we know we need the concept of human rights and women's rights”.

And so I do feel confident to say that a kind of feminism, a feminism of inter-woven strands and many colours, is confirmed in women by the actual experience and active imagining of militarization and war.  It certainly lives in Women in Black and I think it also thrives in WILPF.  What does it mean for our analysis of war?

Women of women’s antimilitarist organizations I met everywhere, happy using the word feminism, also readily use the word patriarchy, to mean something systemic, a system of male supremacy. They see masculine violence as a significant reality in  everyday life, in so-called peace time, in pre-war, war-fighting and post-war moments, linking them in a kind of continuum.  La Ruta Pacifica for instance readily call themselves anti-patriarchal. Aida Santos, key Filipina actor in the Women’s Network against Militarismm, says “the basis of militarism is the strengthening of the patriarchal system”.  Vimochana in India represent the pursuit of weapons supremacy by the Indian state as “macho posturing”. They speak of the fascist Hindutva movement as “hypermasculinized” and see violence in the family and in the ethnicized community as linked manifestations of a vicious contemporary patriarchy. They would agree with British gender theorist Ann Oakley when she says, “Patriarchy isn’t an ancestral disease, it’s a living institution. It’s the default mode: what’s always there and will always happen unless it’s actively contested…”.

I think I need to insert a note here on what patriarchy means. What it doesn’t mean is that all the blame goes to men. Patriarchy isn’t just about men – it’s a system of gender relations positioning men and women, masculinity and femininity, in a lop-sided relation to each other that is one of power founded on violence. As a social system it’s ages old.  And it’s worldwide, in forms that range from the relatively benign to the utterly murderous. And women are closely tied into cooperation in this system. So much so that on the whole women do their work for patriarchy very well. They are signed up for the patriarchal bargain, accept the protection and status it affords them, and accept the superior status of men and the dominance of a bunch of values designated masculine. 

It’s feminism that is out of line – feminism is rebellion. Feminism’s carefully crafted lens brings into view the reality of gender oppression as the carefully crafted lens of socialism brings the reality of class exploitation into view – and both give rise to activist social movements because they say “this is not natural, and it isn’t inevitable. We can do something about it”.  Fortunately some men, as well as women, fall out of the patriarchal ranks. I’ve just been in Spain for three weeks meeting and interviewing men who refused the military service imposed on men by the state: they wouldn’t play the patriarchal military manhood game. And they ran the state ragged for two decades.

Women -  given this perception of a gender power system founded on violence as part of the reality they daily face, as women in families and communities, as war survivors, as members of movements - women are inclined to probe the part of patriarchy in perpetuating war.  And this is where feminist antiwar activists diverge from most mainstream antiwar movements of men and women.  All of us recognise that militarism and war have economic causes – the capitalist thrust to control markets, the competition for resources like oil. All of us recognize that they have political causes – rivalry between political and religious systems, the designation of some as outsiders, foreigners, those who don’t count, or who are dangerous and must be kept the other side of a frontier. Feminists say, yes to those - but there’s another cause of militarism and war. Patriarchy, too (not only but also) is a cause of war.  Patriarchy – a gender power relation underpinned by violence.  Not so very different from capitalism – a class power relation underpinned by violence.  And nationalism – a system of competition and domination between peoples - also underpinned by violence.

But patriarchy isn’t a cause of war in exactly the same way as those other things.  I find the suggestion of a sociologist of war called Brian Fogarty quite useful here. He says we have to suppose war has different kinds of causes. We should look, he said, for immediate causes, antecedent causes and root causes.  Well, I would say that economics is pretty obviously and quite frequently an immediate cause: blood for oil.  I would say that political causes, such as the hatred of foreigners, resentment against state domination and so on, are often antecedent causes.  For instance, western disrespect for other peoples opens the door to war-making. 

But I think the best way of understanding gender’s causality is as what Fogarty calls a root cause, as tendential. To see it you have to look somewhere other than the news headlines. You have to look for it down at the level of cultures.  The tendency in our cultures to constitute men as the sex that is ideally ready for violence, that is expected to control the means of coercion, whose bodies are prepared in childhood and adolescence – muscles, fists, penises - actually to BE in themselves means of coercion, weapons. And the tendency to constitute women as a strange combination of symbolic ideal and subordinated victim. Our gender cultures predispose societies to continual violence, makes armed response seem a natural and inevitable means of solving problems and meeting challenges.

So here is the third reason women give of organizing in women-only groups against militarism and war: that they have a feminist analysis of war that is fuller, more complete, and which is entirely absent from mainstream analyses of war.

This presents us – networks like Women in Black and WILPF – with a serious challenge. If gender relations as we live them are a kind of motor, perpetuating militarization and war, the implication is that we are unlikely to achieve sustainable peace without a transformation in gender relations. This is quite a new thought for those who draw up peace agreements.

Take the Guatemalan war for instance. It was a war caused by terrible economic inequalities, almost all the productive land in the ownership of a rich oligarchy and multinational companies, alongside a land-starved hungry peasantry. It was a racist war against the indigenous people who make up a majority of the population and whose villages were the subject of a scorched earth policy by the state army. We know, and the “truth and reconciliation” reports of the 1990s made fully clear, that it was at the same time a gendered war. It was fought to a horrendous extent on women’s bodies: the number of rapes, mutilations and sexual murders were uncountable.

We know that a peace agreement after such a war has to involve economic justice – there must be land reform if it is to be viable. We know that peace must involve a new deal for indigenous people, an end to the racism endemic in Guatemalan society. But who – except a handful of crazy feminists – is saying that there must be a new deal between men and women in Guatemala? That the deep inequality and misogyny that existed before the war was one of the factors that predisposed the country to the decades of violence it experienced? And now – decommissioning the armed actors means, actually, specifically decommissioning militarized masculinity. Women, respect for women, especially indigenous women, is the only foundation on which a sustainably peaceful culture can be built. That was not addressed by the Guatemalan peace agreement and I don’t need to tell you about the continuing epidemic of gun violence and femicide there. This isn’t peace!

In case citing this Latin American grassroots war seems like mere ethnography, bad things happening down there where the booty is a handful of drugs and the weapons are mere guns and knives – well, there are significant and respected studies that show in compelling detail how masculinity is at work up in the stratosphere too - in international relations, in the development of nuclear weapons and the diplomatic manoevring of states.

I don’t think there are many women in Women in Black or in WILPF actually that don’t share this notion that gender cultures predispose societies to war and that transformative change in gender cultures has to be part of our work for peace. Possessing such an analysis, feeling the urgent need to have it better understood, spelled out, are excellent reasons for building women’s organizations as we do. But - I think we have a lot of difficulty operationalizing it.

I’d like to invite your views on this.  There are so many inhibitions, arent there. For one thing, patriarchy sounds so old fashioned, so last century. And the dreaded M-words – men, male violence, militarized masculinities – in London WiB we fear that if we put these words on our placards and in our leaflets we’ll evoke rage or derision in the passing public. It’ll deflect attention from the “big issue”: getting the troops out of Iraq, ending the Occupation of Palestine. 

Feminism has been subject to backlash and ridicule – we’re seen as “carping on” – “women this and women that”. Also, if we mention gender as causal in war it’s assumed that we DON’t think capitalism is to blame…as if we can’t hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time.  Or we’re politically naïve, parochial, we have no grasp of the international system. 

But what we’re talking about IS the international system. Capitalism, nationalism, militarism ARE patriarchalism. These systems shore each other up. Gender power relations is one of the ways capitalism works, militarism is one of the ways gender power relations work, and so on, and so on. The dimensions of power in our world are all threaded together, inextricably. It’s not productive to think of one without the others. It’s not feasible to undo one without undoing the others. 

So when people ask us “Why is it the WOMEN’S International League For Peace And Freedom?”, “Why is it WOMEN in Black?” this is our third and best reason. We have an analysis. We have a theory. It’s big.  It works. War can’t be ended without taking account of it.   The question is – have we found the words and actions that can enable this theory to be heard and put to work?

Thank you for listening to me.