Synopses & Reviews
This original study by the, the product of 80,000 miles of travel by the author over a two-year period, examines women's activism against wars as far apart as Sierra Leone, Colombia and India. It shows women on different sides of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Israel refusing enmity and co-operating for peace. It describes international networks of women opposing US and Western European militarism and the so-called 'war on terror'. Women are often motivated by adverse experiences in male-led anti-war movements, preferring to choose different methods of protest and remain in control of their own actions. But like the mainstream movements, women's groups differ - some are pacifist while others put justice before non-violence; some condemn nationalism as a cause of war while others see it as a legitimate source of identity. The very existence of feminist antimilitarism proposes a radical shift in our understanding of war, linking the violence of patriarchal power to that of class oppression and ethnic 'othering'.
Synopsis
This original study examines women's activism against war in areas as far apart as Sierra Leone, India, Colombia and Palestine. It shows women on different sides of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Israel addressing racism and refusing enmity and describes international networks of women opposing US and Western European militarism and the so-called 'war on terror'. These movements, though diverse, are generating an antimilitarist feminism that challenges how war and militarism are understood, both in academic studies and the mainstream anti-war movement. Gender, particularly the form taken by masculinity in a violent sex/gender system, is inseparably linked to economic and ethno-national factors in the perpetuation of war.
About the Author
Cynthia Cockburn is Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at City University and active in the international anti-militarist network Women in Black.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Different wars, women's responses
2. Against imperialist wars: three transnational networks
3. Disloyal to nation and state: antimilitarist women in Serbia
4. A refusal of othering: Palestinian and Israeli women
5. Achievements and contradictions: WILPF and the UN
6. Methodology of women's protest
7. Towards coherence: pacifism, nationalism, racism
8. Choosing to be 'women': what war says to feminism
9. Gender and war: what feminism says to war studies
Bibliography