Gender Equity for Peace Building – A More Comprehensive Approach
By Parama Bal Mishra
The author explains that gender equality is even more necessary to build peace in this complex world environment.
Parama has graduated from the University of Liverpool, U.K with a BA (Hons) in Business Economics, and recently completed a MSSc. in Development Studies from the Uppsala University, Sweden. Her masters thesis was based on gender and corruption in India. Her interests are broadly in macroeconomic issues, governance and policy study. She has been
involved with community service, social work and professional writing since her school days and would love to continue the same in future. Her hobbies are to paint and read.
Peace Building has always been a necessity to harbour healthy economic and social progress in the world. Nowadays, this issue has become more popular as most nations recognise the need for crisis prevention and building proper governance structures or institutions to maintain peace (Morris,2000). And, obviously these structures and institutions need to be governed by the right people. But the question is whether these right people have to be of a certain gender? The conflicts between genders have always been interesting, with various works portraying either of the two as the better for a particular task. But, gender inequity is still a reality in most countries. My argument is not to support either of the genders, but to portray how a more equal representation of both of them can bring about a better outcome, especially in the context of peace building. But, since the issues concerning men in peace building are already addressed to a great extent by most institutions, I would focus more on showing why women should also be considered. Firstly, peace building requires planning and coordination to a large extent (Ibid). We cannot say that women are better managers than men or vice versa without substantial research. Rather we can say women and men have different ways of tackling a problem, and especially in such sensitive areas such as peace building its always better to consider more than one type of approach.
Strickland and Duvvury, 2003, emphasises that most of the time the approaches taken by the women are overlooked, as they may be of unconventional types. But, they are nonetheless important to be represented. It has been noticed that most women do not hold roles in decision making areas and leadership in the military. Since women are part of our society, ignoring them in pivotal positions can prevent recognising their issues and concerns in the right manner. Women issues such as war widows, women in ethnic or religious conflicts, sexual violence, conflicts in eradicating oppression and fighting for equality are better addressed by women themselves rather than men. Hence, these are important areas which cannot be overlooked and considered below other issues in peace building programmes (Strickland and Duvvury, 2003).
Peace building and development has close ties, and the civil society is a huge part of it. The role of civil society is more integral during post-conflict recovery. The pluralistic ideology of the civil society ensures that power is distributed rather than concentrated, which enables a more grass root oriented approach to peace building (Harpviken and Kjellman, 2004). Women are an integral part of civil society and hence leaving them out might not enable us to get the best out of this approach as well.
Women issues such as those discussed in the previous paragraph needs to be tackled in the grass root levels especially, hence female leaders would be able to address these issues with the civil society in a better fashion than their male counterparts. Organising the civil society into working for war widows, giving them the right moral and economic support required, creating a protective mesh against sexual violence and other strategies are better understood by women and hence would be better developed with the help of women leaders.
Some authors such as Lindgren et al. 2009 have also found that women represent the masses better than their male counterparts, and hence they should be present in important positions in the government. Integrating the opinion of the masses in areas such as peace keeping is essential for maintaining an order in society, hence appointing the people who can represent the masses more will definitely help in ensuring a better result. But, I would not say that means support women and overlook men. Ultimately both the genders are present in society and their equal presence is required in the decision making areas in order to have a better congruence between the ideas of the strategists and the masses for whom the strategies are made.
Inequality issues do not just stop at gender, but there are several other domains in which equality is yet to be achieved. Whether in race, class, age, religion, etc, there are inequalities galore which still need to be addressed at international levels. As women were and still are in many societies discriminated, their empathy level towards discrimination is more, and this reason might make them less discriminating towards people from subjugated backgrounds . But most importantly, as women and men do not always think alike, the possibility of social control over a type of people may be less. Such as, if women subjugate a person belonging to a group for certain prejudices that they relate to, that feeling might not be supported by their male counterparts. Hence, having equality in gender, and having a more or less equal share of women and men in every strata of a peace building institution can ensure universal equality to a large extent as well.
Therefore, the need for having both the genders together, addressing different areas requiring different ideologies and understanding is essential to give any peace building body a wholesome character. Unfortunately, in reality women are still under represented in the top rungs of such institutions, therefore identifying the importance of their presence may help bring about the much needed gender equality in such places.
References
- Harpviken, Kristian Berg & Kjellman, Kjell Erling, 2004. ‘Beyond Blueprints: Civil Society and Peacebuilding’, Concept Paper commissioned by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD).
- Lindgren, Karl-Oskar; Inkinen, Magdalena and Widmalm, Sten, (2009), Who Knows Best what the People Want: Women or Men? : A Study of Political Representation in India, Comparative Political Studies, 42(1), 35 -55.
- Morris, Catherine, 2000, ‘What is Peacebuilding? One Definition’, Peacemakers Trust Publications.
- Strickland, Richard and Duvvury, Nata, 2003, ‘Gender Equity and Peace Building, From Rhetoric to Reality: Finding the Way’, Gender Equity and Peacebuilding Workshop, International Centre for Research on Women.