Women, War, Violence and Learning

Shahrzad Mojab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317988076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This anthology provides fresh theorization of gendered dimensions of learning, war, and violence, with a view to offering new insights on the impact of violence on women's learning and well being. The collection is an important contribution to emerging interdisciplinary approaches to the role and effectiveness of civil society, especially women's NGOs, working in war and post-conflict zones, and to the relationship between neoliberal, global 'feminist' projects and the re-emergence of colonial and imperial feminisms. This collection is also an exploration of the plausibility of current peace education strategies augmenting the political and leadership role of women and their civic engagement.

This collection is designed to create a space for conversation across disciplines on such issues as how to advance our conceptualization of gender-related education and conflict; how to provide empirically-based case studies and transnational analyses that improves our understanding of the impact of war and violence on women's learning; and how to contribute to national and international policy analyses to improve education for women and girls, through related policy reforms or humanitarian aid programs in post-war reconstruction efforts.

This book was published as a special issue in the International Journal of Lifelong Education.

Introduction: women, war, violence, and learning

SHAHRZAD MOJAB

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto

Two decades ago, the eruption of the First Gulf War initiated a renewed feminist desire to understand the impact of modern wars on women, including efforts to analyse gender dimensions of war and peace and to record women’s modes of resisting war and mobilizing for peace (Mojab 1997). Sorensen’s landmark study (1998) was among the first to point out how little the international community knows about the changing and challenging roles of men and women in war and peace. Nonetheless, many feminist scholars have been engaged in addressing just this issue, producing a substantial body of writings on militarization, security, and masculinity (Elshtain 1987; Enloe 1998 and 2000; Tickner 1992; Turshen and Twagiramariya 1998; Kampwirth 2002; Giles et al. 2003; and Cockburn 2007). The contributions on the topic of women and war put forward by feminist researchers, activists, and practitioners have helped galvanize international political and humanitarian attention and action towards the distinct and disproportionate impact of war on the lives and livelihoods of women; crucially, this work in general has had a specific focus on sexual and gender-based violence as weapons of war. Some of the key focus areas include the gendered impact of militarization, human rights abuses under the watch of international peacekeeping forces, and violations of women’s rights in refugee camps. As well, new levels of awareness on the war-time crimes of rape, forced impregnation, forced abortion, trafficking, sexual slavery, and the intentional spread of HIV/AIDs and sexually transmitted diseases have been raised (for detailed discussions, see Anderlini et al. 1999; Mazurana and McKay 1999; Anderlini 2000; and Kumar 2001).

Some of these contributions were critical to the heightening of awareness during the 1990s about the bloody wars, genocides, and protracted conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other war-ravaged regions, leading to unprecedented progress being made in international aid, international law, and global governance. Specific initiatives of importance include the historic UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the ratification of the International Criminal Court Statute that calls for an end to impunity for crimes involving gender-based violence, the various Truth and Reconciliation initiatives (see Pankhurst 2008), and, among other achievements, the widespread gender, conflict, and peace-building units that were set up within international, intergovernmental, non-governmental aid agencies, and Western donor governments.

Furthermore, as researchers detailed the diversity of women’s experiences and roles in conflict—as victims, soldiers, mobilizers, activists—a more comprehensive picture arose around how these experiences impact their post-conflict conditions. Furthermore, these studies interrogated and complicated any attempts at a unitary, monolithic understanding of the ‘post-conflict woman’ (Meintjes et al. 2002). Simultaneously to the creation of awareness about the impact of war and violence on women, both activists and scholars also centred their work on the promotion of local and global peace initiatives. Feminist peace theorists, scholars, and practitioners, intersecting the politics of peace with the varied and interconnected forms of violence against women, helped carve a distinct international activism and niche of study often referred to as the field of ‘women, peace, and security’. This interdisciplinary field stresses the dualism between women as victims of war and violence on the one hand and, on the other hand, focuses our attention on the tremendous agency of women in building and sustaining peace at all levels of government. This dual construction of women as both ‘victims of war’ and ‘agents of peace’ is entrenched in the historic UN Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which was unanimously passed in October 2000 and remains central to much of the current writing, debates, and advocacy work around the themes of women in war and in post-conflict peace-building and reconstruction. This is a landmark resolution because it was the first time the Security Council seriously recognized and addressed the disproportionate impact of war on women, and furthermore, mandated the integration of gender analysis and women’s full participation at all stages and levels of the peace process—from fact-finding missions, peace negotiations, and peacekeeping through to post-conflict peace-building and reconstruction. SCR 1325 enables women, through civil society groups, to have decision-making influence on the formal peace processes; the Resolution stresses gender sensitivity, gender mainstreaming, and the appointment of gender advisors; it legislates protection of women and their special needs; and works towards the full inclusion of local women’s peace initiatives. The Resolution is critiqued, however, for its conceptual gaps, lack of guidelines for practical application, and failures in implementation (Adrian-Paul and Anderlini 2004; Porter 2007).

It is important to clarify that the ‘women, peace, and security’ field did not emerge after SCR 1325, but rather as a result of years of scholarly and activist work by the women’s movement internationally. The UN Conference on Women (Mexico 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985) initially discussed issues of war and peace as they related to women. The Nairobi conference, in particular, focused on three key themes: the role of women in education for peace, in peace research, and in decision-making. The Conference was significant, and its outcome, the Nairobi Strategies, officially expanded the definition of peace as not only the absence of war, violence, and hostilities, but also the enjoyment of economic and social justice, equality, and the entire range of human rights and freedoms. It was only at Beijing Conference (1995) that ‘women and armed conflict’ became a critical topic for high-level discussion, culminating in the emphasis on women in decision-making and in conflict resolution (outlined in the Beijing Platform for Action). The Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 and its successor, the Beijing+5 meeting held in New York in 2000, are both often recognized as the catalysts of the women, peace, and security platform, a platform that has brought women scholars and practitioners together—albeit ones mainly from the Western world—in efforts to map out a common understanding of the issues and to forge solidarity networks for raising international concern and mobilizing for action.

These rather well-informed, insightful, and prolific contributions from the practitioner community are frequently referenced by activists, academics, and policy-makers alike as they offer substantial and up-to-date information about the state and conditions of women in post-war and war-affected regions. Many of these documents, such as those published by UNIFEM (2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; and 2006), serve as toolkits for women’s organizations, practitioners, and policy-makers. In addition to these, other key reports include Piza-Lopez and Schmeidl (2002) and the 2007 report of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. Another key resource, launched by UNIFEM (2004c), is an internet portal that aims to be a one-stop guide to resources and information on women, peace, and security (see www.WomenWarPeace.org).

As a feminist educator and an anti-war activist located in the West, but who researches, writes, and teaches from an internationalist perspective focusing on the Middle East, I have felt unsatisfied by the literature emerging from this nascent field. This sense of unease originates in part from being a ‘victim’ of the Iran-Iraq war; the brutal suppression of the Kurds by the Islamic Republic of Iran taught me valuable and unique life-wide and lifelong lessons. My deep level of personal and political commitment to peace as well as to the development of an incisive feminist, anticapitalist, anti-militarization analysis are part of the experience of living, resisting, and surviving the condition of war. It is, I claim, such learning as well as the conscious responses of women to war and peace that have not been adequately addressed in the flourishing literature on women, war, violence, peace, and security.

Centring learning in war and violence

An apocryphal story. Shortly after news broke about the horrors of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in which hundreds of members of a ‘cult’ in northwestern Guyana committed mass suicide under orders from their leader, the event was a topic of conversation among a group of academics that included the anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner is known for his theory of communitas, a theory of symbols, religion, and meaning that emphasizes the cathartic role of emotions in maintaining social structure and social cohesion through ritual practice. A graduate student from Africa, listening to the conversation, turned to Turner and said: ‘Look, it’s just like communitas, except everyone is dead’.

While Turner, after a moment’s consideration and to his credit, agreed with the student’s analysis, there remained the shock of recognition. Turner’s theory was developed to account for aspects of quotidian life (including the management of inter-clan social conflict through ritual which thereby contributes to social stability); he did not develop it with extreme situations such as the events at Jonestown in mind. So there remains a frisson, a shiver coming from recognition of a connection between things that were not intended to be connected: a theory of the beneficial function of religion, of religion as basically neutral, with the shock of a religious mass suicide. As educators, this anecdote leads us to consider the issue of the applicability of theories, policies, and practices of learning within conditions of violence and its aftermath. Does a frisson similar to the Jonestown anecdote also accompany our thinking about learning, including its theories, practices, and pedagogies, in conjunction with extreme situations: the problem of educating, of education, and of learning, either within contexts of conflict and war or in its after effects? Feminist educators are aware of the range of issues and challenges facing learning globally, both in terms of the practice of teaching and learning and in terms of policy and curriculum. As educators, as policy-makers, as administrators within a democratic polity, we must think through what wars in general mean for education, but especially what our response should be to the current and ongoing ‘War on Terror’ as a global state agenda—even if armed conflict affects us only indirectly, as with the increasing ‘security’ measures, as in the discourse around the wisdom of bringing the troops home, and as with increasingly militarized state budgets that allocate funds to the detriment of educational ones. Especially, we must consider these issues and challenges for populations of learners who have experienced—or are experiencing—the horror of war and life under occupation, for to do so is to confront the exponential increase in the issues and challenges such violence poses for education and learning. And such a confrontation must recognize from the outset that people’s experience is gendered, classed, and raced; this actuality is a methodological imperative.

This collection is a first attempt to bring learning into conversation with the racialized and genderized experience of women under the conditions of war. We know that this is largely unexplored terrain. Our collective effort in this volume is to name something new in a manner analogous to, and at times derived from, the way that the women’s movements of the late 1960s (see, e.g., Hall 1992: 15–16; Smith 1999: 17, 30) struggled to name their lived experience as sexual politics through consciousness-raising groups. As women’s studies developed in academia, this principle of beginning analysis from women’s experience became a dominant methodological issues. For our theme, we do not have much literature to rely on, so the undertaking here is a preliminary tracing of the link between women, war, violence, and learning, drawing on different areas of study—such as anthropology, sociology, adult education, social work, and women’s studies. One conclusion from this mapping is that our collection problematizes concepts of learning and requires feminist learners and educators to broaden their learning praxis. Theories of learning are highly contested, so we are attempting to muddy this already muddied field by relocating its pedagogical, theoretical, and policy frames to sites of war, violence, occupation, and diaspora. Therefore, the pieces in this collection provide differing implicit and explicit evaluations in their engagement with mainstream learning in the particular contexts of each author’s cases. What connects the articles collected here is the discovery of a universal ‘life in transition’ mode of being and learning. By this phrase, I attempt a new naming. Women whose experience of the actualities of violence falls outside the boundaries of learning policy, practice, and theorization are women who have been historically excluded as adult learners. But in addition, learning is happening regardless of this exclusion; learning theories must begin to identify learning modalities in women’s experience within the condition of war that have been outside of its purview, such as survival learning and resistance learning (Mojab and McDonald 2008). This collection will help bring the actuality of such women into educators’ consciousness.

The odds are good that most readers of this collection are located in Europe, North America, or Australia—that is, within nations that are currently at war in other parts of the globe, such as in Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Haiti. Relatedly, the ‘multicultural’ dimension of the population composition within the West means that educators and policy-makers are increasingly encountering, and must face up to the reality of, learners who have experienced war and conflict in their daily lives. For a woman traumatized by the effects of conflict or imprisonment, the effort to learn new skills in an adult education class can be especially daunting, and a range of challenges in addition to those such as language proficiency can be present, including problems in concentration related to the trauma of violence and the post-conflict trauma. Yet our educational efforts are either less than optimal or indeed fail for women-learners who have experienced war and violence first hand if we do not recognize that survivors of conflict have their own good knowledge of their lives and experience, that their survival has more often than not been based upon their agency and intelligence, and their ability to adapt, improvise, and innovate.

After years of accumulated adult education knowledge and practice, we know that good educators are also good learners, and that good learners themselves have teaching capacity. We know that teacher-learners and learner-teachers are in a dialectical relationship (Allman 1999: ch. 4). As a foundation within adult education ‘best practice’, this principle needs to be exercised such that the particular gendered, classed, and racialized learning of women in transition constitutes the real basis of the teacher-learner/learner-teacher dialectic. As such, an important corollary follows: we recognize the particularity of women’s learning within the context of war and violence while keeping in view how their experience is simultaneously constructed by translocal forces and relations of power. ‘Neoliberalism’ is as good a term as any for this, as it encompasses a host of agendas to restructure capital accumulation. Giroux, a critical educator, argues that neoliberalism, aside from whatever else that it is, is a ‘public pedagogy’:

Public pedagogy in this sense refers to a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain. The culture of corporate public pedagogy largely cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the democratic impulses of civil society within narrow economic relations. Corporate public pedagogy has become an all-encompassing cultural theorizing for producing market identities, values, and practices. (2004: 106)

Although Giroux’s study is surprisingly ahistorical, his treatment of education and of ideology as public pedagogy nonetheless points us towards the consideration of the effects of this pedagogy on learning practice in the West and of adult and other educational practices in zones of conflict. Giroux emphasizes the obsession with economic outcomes in educational practices, a critique with which we agree. We do not deny the necessity of training and educating people in skills necessary for ‘economic’ survival; what is at issue is the growing and overwhelming tendency to educate in a manner which can ‘negate the basic conditions for critical agency’ (Giroux 2004: 106). The tension between these educational goals is hardly recent, of course. For example, this tension is apparent in the history of English adult education, leading Raymond Williams in 1961 to remark on the difference between ‘public educators’ and ‘industrial trainers’ (Woodhams 2001: 6). The difference in labelling practice since that time—from William’s educators to Giroux’s inclusive concern with agency teachers and students—speaks in part to the change in social relations under capitalism at this particular historical juncture.

The discussion here has so far largely avoided the classification of learning according to concepts derived from the institutional practice and study of learning theories. By taking aspects of our discussion, and seeing how these fit with the labels for differing practices of education, I delineate and make visible problems, challenges, and relations that otherwise remain hidden, and thereby problematize these labels in the spirit of the comment by the student about Jonestown. Desjardins et al.’s study for UNESCO entitled Unequal Chances to Participate in Adult Learning: International Perspectives (2006) is a quantitative treatment of adult education in the affluent world (data are largely lacking for the rest of the world). The authors utilize the lifelong, life-wide, formal, non-formal, and informal education labels, in keeping with the practice they are studying. As a concept, the authors found, lifelong learning is distinguished by three ‘attributes’: lifelong, from birth to death; life-wide, in that learning occurs in multiple and different contexts; and learning, rather than simply education (Desjardins et al. 2006: 19). As a study of the state of the art, the authors note that there is a gap in definitional usage between policy documents and academic studies in that the latter have increasingly pointed to the inadvisability ‘of trying to seek clear definitional distinctions’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: women, war, violence, and learning
• 2. The pitfalls of a ‘democracy promotion’ project for women of Iraq
• 3. Women and learning in the Iraqi war zone
• 4. The gendered nature of education under siege: a Palestinian feminist perspective
• 5. State terror and violence as a process of lifelong teaching–learning: the case of Guatemala
• 6. Gender, culture and learning: Iranian immigrant women in Canadian higher education
• 7. Prison violence and learning: the survival and resistance of Iranian women
• 8. War, trauma, and learning: staying present in the classroom
• Index