The Limits of Add and Stir

Image from Yugantar

2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. One might imagine that including women in peace processes should no longer be a question now, that we would have established their inclusion as an irrefutable reality informing the conceptualization and implementation of peace processes. And yet, our work remains cut out for us: An ongoing commitment to confront a combination of interlocking power dynamics that normalizes exclusion.

The current approach to the inclusion of women in peace processes has three characteristics. First, the word “woman” has limited meaning to most often than not include just the ones representing a female face of power, from the dominant race, class, caste, ethnicity, and other backgrounds. Second, women are constantly being “included” in these spaces to instrumentalize a bigger agenda that emerges from the military-prison-industry complex – not for their voices, lived experiences, or for their concern  for peace. Together, these “women” who are included in peace processes with this agenda in mind are more likely to keep the militarized masculinities alive than to dismantle them. Third, the few women outside this power dynamic are either isolated as troublemakers or are often only included as tokens at best. 

Our collective history is full of moments to think about as we reflect on this. In the run up to the Beijing Conference, during the Nairobi Conference in 1985, White feminists asked women of colour to keep colonialism and the occupation of Palestine out of the agenda as it was a “women’s conference, not a political conference.” In the decade after Resolution 1325 was adopted, as author Sheri Gibbings noted, Iraqi women activists were invited to speak to a group of gender experts at the UN and were labelled by them as “angry,” as the Iraqi women did not “speak positively about women’s efforts in the reconstruction of Iraq and the role the UN could play,” and instead “condemned the invasion by the US and UK as imperialist, and critiqued the UN for its lack of support.” This, alongside a parallel narrative where women played key roles in the security sector that ran and operated Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, subjecting men to aggressive torture. In recent times, Western nations and their civil society groups – many of which have women in key positions and roles – have been at the forefront calling for the criminalization of gender apartheid by centring Afghanistan and Iran as the key perpetrators – notwithstanding the heavy rollback on women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ rights within all these countries with complete impunity.

All of this points in the direction of one key truth: Including women does not mean that a feminist goal is achieved. For feminist change to happen, we need feminist approaches and feminist voices and feminist thinking to get there. The barriers we must to dismantle aren’t limited to gendered ones, but also extend to larger systemic and structural ones.

Our approach to dismantling these barriers can begin with an interrogation of our understanding and definition of “security.” Think about the term for a second and the questions that emerge from it. Whose security counts and at the cost of which other’s security does it arrive for some? Think about the Indigenous communities in the Marshall Islands, whose children continue to pay the price for the United States’ pursuit of security for itself: Unfettered weapons testing has resulted in several generations of “jellyfish babies,” or babies being born with translucent skin that live for no more than a few hours. A second question to ask is if superior is inherently more secure. Think about the deployment of AI: On the one hand, it is supporting powerful states’ national security interests through the deployment of UAVs for recon and surveillance, and on the other hand, it has arrived at the backs of exploited labour and is destroying the environment one iteration at a time – while all the while continuing to keep the war machine going. Feminists have generationally advocated for sexual and reproductive health rights, environmental justice, and dismantling war as an institution. But our one-sided, power-driven definitions of security have ensured that they never had a seat at the table. Their exclusion is every bit a product of power dynamics and necropolitics that prioritize some lives over the other.

Research has helped justify the inclusion of women in peace processes. While there may be some truth to it, there is wisdom in recognizing the downside to such essentialism, so as not to reiterate the very structural violence we should be questioning. No one participates in peace processes in a vacuum – they are constantly engaging in settings that are gendered, classist, racist, and replete with power dynamics that also affect how they behave. Some research also shows that the type of participatory behaviours women in peace processes show are those that people develop when they are not part of a dominant group – this includes being collaborative, sensitive, and gentle (The team at We Are Feminist Leaders talk about all this and more in their Feminist Leadership Program – give it a look!). Put together, these dynamics mean that women are consistently encouraged to conform to gender norms in how they engage – which include essentialist ideas that they are inherently peaceful and nurturing. 

These essentialist constructions defeat gender justice. They create a special category of people based on a limited understanding of gender and put the burden on this special category to find solutions to problems they likely did not participate in creating. We risk reiterating the deeply patriarchal idea that gender is a binary and that each gender identity is inherently imbued with a propensity for peace or conflict. In the process, we risk losing the transformative potential that feminism can bring to these spaces.  These essentialist constructions also take away the potential for women’s skilling and capacity enhancement. In reality, women are kept away from policy corridors and their “lack of experience” in these spaces is often cited to continue keeping them away. They are forced into form traps, where the “busyness” of procedural formalities abound. Their inclusion, if at all, stops with bringing their perspectives on “women’s issues.” We will hear their views on conflict-related sexual violence and the need to bring them into peace processes – but nothing on disarmament, demobilization, reintegration, justice, rebuilding society and so much more. With these essentialist constructions, the military-industry complex cares more about making war safer for women, rather than to explore the futility of war in itself – which it undoubtedly will veer towards, so it sustains its existence.  

And yet, we cannot divorce ourselves from the reality that women have made significant strides in building peace. Women from Palestine continue to document their lived experiences and use the artform of Tatreez, embroidery, to continue to resist colonialism and occupation while preserving their indigenous practices. Women from Liberia mobilized across ethnic and religious lines to call on the warlords in their territory to build peace after years of civil war. Going beyond just addressing conflict, they’ve also responded to a whole range of different forms of structural violence. And they’ve done this on their own terms, too – without conforming to stereotypes. For instance, the Radical Grandmothers of Thailand mobilized across lines to both economically sustain their activism and receive advocacy support beyond borders, without their agency in their movement being steamrolled by external actors. They successfully shut down the mining operations they resisted in about 2.5 years. The Kichwa women of Ecuador relied on the CEDAW to hold Ecuador accountable and got about 20 articles included in their 2008 Constitution exclusively for the rights of indigenous women and communities.  Women from Mexico’s El Cambalache have created their own economy of trade without using money, moving away from capitalistic profiteering in the process. 

As adrienne maree brown suggested, we are all alive in someone’s imagination of what is possible and not possible, and we owe it to ourselves to do better. Bringing women into peace processes just because they’re women is going to do very little to push the needle. Internalized patriarchy and notions of sociocultural superiority in racial, casteist, religious, nationalistic, and able-bodied (among other) lines serve to keep the military-industry complex alive. If we want the peace we dream of, the positive peace that transcends the mere absence of conflict, we’ve got to imagine radically.