Begin Everywhere: A Sketch of the Territory

by Janet Gray

The institutional locations of peace studies programs vary widely in ways that shape how the practitioners in any particular location construct the mission and goals of their program, define what constitutes a comprehensive approach to the field for their site, and ease or constrain the program’s capacity for integrating women and gender into instruction.

In other words, gendering peace studies has a lot to do with the territory.

I came to this conclusion after meeting with a roomful of peace studies practitioners at the annual conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) in 2011. With advice, syllabi, and resources shared by experienced instructors, I’d taught my first round of Introduction to Peace Studies in a way that I thought respectably approximated What I Was Supposed To Do—and I’d been uncomfortable. In addition to my lacking enough background to engage confidently with some parts of the texts, the content fit uncomfortably with my feminist, critical lens. Further, the introductory textbooks I’d used seemed to impel conventional classroom pedagogies, with authority flowing predictably from instructor to students, as in Freire’s “banking model.”

Surely, I thought, there must be other ways.

For the PJSA conference, I organized a session titled “Alternative Pedagogies for Introduction to Peace and Justice Studies.” I invited attenders to bring ideas, syllabi, and instructional resources to share. I planned to begin the session by describing my institutional context, then ask others to describe theirs and explain what drew them to the session. I planned to pose the following three questions, taking notes so that we’d have something useful and coherent to share at the end.

1. What does an introductory course decentered in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion, and region look like in terms of discipline?
2. What pedagogies are most consistent with cultures of peace? How can an introductory textbook support these pedagogies?
3. How can an overview course help students gain both a global picture and skills and resources for understanding and transforming conflict where they are?

At the conference, the room filled and people kept arriving as the session progressed. My orderly plan was swamped by the variety of contributions, my three questions lost in a bewildering multitude of concerns. Also bewildering were the tones of responses, the edgy body language of listeners. Some voices sounded authoritative, some eager, some uncertain, frustrated, or contentious. The room felt charged.

It was a glimpse of a territory that is split in multiple ways.

“There is disagreement over the exact content of the field,” Carolyn M. Stephenson notes at the beginning of her overview of peace studies for the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (p. 1535). Stephenson’s article offers a useful sketch of the complexity of the territory, what the splits are, and how they came to be. She proposes three waves in the development of peace studies as an academic field, and two subsequent phases of change spurred by global events.

The first wave began in the late 1940s with the founding of several peace research institutes that used social science methods to pursue a “science of peace.” Psychologists were prominent in this phase. In the 1950s-1960s there was a growth in the establishment of research centers (some within universities and others independent), publications, and new networking and dialogue venues, including national and international organizations. Quaker organizers motivated by religious pacifism contributed to the international networking; historians entered the field with the critique of their discipline’s narrow focus on war; and critiques of early researchers’ emphasis on stopping overt violence led to the spread of Johan Galtung’s concepts of positive peace and structural violence. Education programs were few, and mainly at the graduate level.

During the second wave, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, peace education spread to undergraduate classes, at first in religiously affiliated colleges and then in universities. BA programs were established. Fueled by the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and feminist movements, as well as new radical critiques of power structures, peace studies broadened its scope. Internationalization of the field and a renewed emphasis on policy turned attention to such areas as development, global inequality, the environment, and human rights. At the same time, critical reappraisals of positivism and objectivity began to influence the field. Newly formed organizations such as the Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED) aimed to make peace studies more accessible to policymakers, movements, educators, and communities. Research traditions other than social science have also joined the behavioral and quantitative researchers who had dominated the field.

In the 1980s, during the third wave, antinuclear movements outside academia brought a fresh impetus to peace studies, and peace education extended from the college level to elementary and secondary schools. New curriculum guides appeared, and the Peace Studies Association formed to encourage the development of new undergraduate and graduate programs. While these programs tended to focus on international security issues related to nuclear proliferation, many practitioners argued that such a focus overlooked Third World issues. Gene Sharp’s work on nonviolent struggle became well known as peace researchers turned to the study of nonviolent alternatives. Training centers and organizations for conflict resolution, mediation, and negotiation rapidly expanded, with applications from local to the international level. Governments created peace institutions, sparking debate among practitioners about the degree to which peace studies should be embedded in or independent from the state.

With the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, peace studies reduced its emphasis on conflict between nations and turned its attention to intranational conflict. Conflict studies became the dominant subfield, while attention to social justice remained marginalized. Subfields also formed around UN initiatives such as the 1992 Agenda for Peace and UNESCO’s Cultures of Peace program, which linked national security to other domains of action including education, development, human rights, and gender equality. The split deepened between those practitioners who focused on serving the policy needs of governments and those who focused on peace movements. Similarly, a move toward mainstreaming peace studies programs into security studies meant success to some and cooptation to others. Peace studies sections thrived in the professional organizations of international studies, political science, psychology, and sociology. Debates over methodology were renewed.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, sparked new debates about terrorism and the international system. Peace studies practitioners strongly opposed the claim that stability could be achieved by forcefully imposing democracy. They studied and debated both the conservative and the liberal functions of international law and organizations, the means of preventing war crimes and genocide, and differing mechanisms for justice and reconciliation. A shift from national to overall human security, initiated by feminists in the 1970s, gained traction. The emergence of peace building as a subfield of conflict resolution opened up new possibilities for linking work on conflict, development, and the environment. The number of nongovernmental organizations and research institutes proliferated; COPRED and the Peace Studies Association merged to form the Peace and Justice Studies Association; and new peace education programs opened at all levels, particularly in community colleges.

“Diversity and creative tension in a field are signs of health,” Stephenson writes, but she worries that “the field may have splintered so much” that people can’t talk with each other (p. 1547). This tension between vitality and fragmentation showed in my conference session: eager listening and non-listening, open-ended creativity and brick walls. My point in this post is that all of the various splinters and flows link to different traditions and histories of theory, practice, and knowledge-making that differ in their facilitation of or resistance to including women as historical agents and gender as a central category of analysis. And it should be possible to map this in any given piece of the territory, and strategize the next steps.

I’ll give a few examples of the gendered territory in the waves Stephenson identifies.

Peace research. Research institutes, whether independent or housed in universities, have historically been heavily male dominated, and unless they pursue explicitly feminist questions, are likely to produce “objective” knowledge that treats men as the only relevant actors and masculinity as the standard mode of being human.

Academic disciplines. The traditional fields of knowledge that feed into peace studies tend to be gendered in the sense that their practice is associated with masculine or feminine traits and they vary in their welcome of women or men as practitioners. Disciplines also vary in the degree to which they have integrated a critical analysis of masked gender bias into their methods and canons.

Sites of practice. The locations where a program expects its graduates to apply their learning are also likely to be gendered (e.g., State Department, elementary schools). The sites of practice may also condition the degree to which the program teaches only how to, and thus perpetuates gender blindness and gender bias, or engages students in critical intervention in established frameworks for practice.

Policy. Peace studies’ vexed relationship with policymaking institutions represents a complex instance of sites of practice. As political entities, policymaking institutions are likely to be heavily male dominated, but they have the capacity to exert broad influence by articulating shared knowledge, visions, and strategies concerning the gendering of peace, which can also be frustratingly limited in scope and force. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is an example.(2)

Security. Competing notions of security represent another complication related to sites of practice. While security in terms of military defense and state sovereignty refers to heavily masculinized institutions, asking feminist questions—such as “Where are the women?”—necessarily directs people’s rights and safety. Both notions of security guide UN programs, but national security is more entrenched and may frustrate efforts to implement human security. (3)

 

Stephenson closes her article with a call for dialog toward a renewed understanding of war and peace. Peace studies may be fragmented, but practitioners do agree that the field has an explicit bias toward peace. And it’s this calling to advocacy for peaceful change that draws so many of us to the field from so many disparate backgrounds. Oddly, I left the conference session feeling empowered, recognizing that all sorts of disciplines contribute to peace studies programs which are housed in all sorts of institutional slots, and that, if one has that calling, one can start exactly where one is, with the talents and resources one has—and proceed to learn as much as possible.

So starting from Women’s and Gender Studies, as I did, is fine. And, according to Tony Jenkins and Betty Reardon (4), gender eyes might be “the core of a systematic inquiry into the possibilities for the transformation of the present violent world order.” In my next post, I’ll say more about what Jenkins and Reardon propose.

 

(1)           “Peace Studies, Overview,” in Lester Kurtz, Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict, Vol. 2. Oxford: Elsevier (2008), pp. 1534-48.

(2)           Laura Ng touches on critiques of Resolution 1325 in this blog, citing Nicola Pratt, “Reconceptualizing Gender, Re-inscribing Racial-Sexual Boundaries in International Security: The Case of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security,” International Studies Quarterly 57.4 (2013). “On Gender and Peace Studies: Where Are We?” Gender Eyes, Metta Center for Nonviolence, July 1, 2014. http://archives.mettacenter.org/gender-eyes/gender-peace-studies/

(3)           Sanam Naraghi Anderlini provides a very useful discussion of how national security policies constrain implementation of Resolution 1325 (and other policies related to women, gender, and human security) in her chapter “How the International System Lets Women Down,” Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2007, pp. 191-226.

(4)           “Gender and peace: toward a gender inclusive, holistic perspective,” in Charles Webel and Johan Galtung, eds., Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 209-31. Available as PDF at http://archives.mettacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/gender-peace-jenkins-reardon.pdf