From
patriarchal use of power
to human security and democracy
PressInfo #
205
December
23, 2004
By
Gudrun
Schyman
and Jan
Oberg,
TFF board
Prior to the 2003 International
Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, UN
Secretary-General Kofi
Annan stated that
"Gender-based violence is perhaps the most shameful human
rights violation. As long as it continues, we cannot
claim to be making real progress towards equality,
development and peace."
In this article we seek to
relate the gender-based violence to the issue of human
security and ideas about a new type of defence policy.
(When this was written in Swedish at the time of the
debate about the future of Sweden's official defence
policy, it was refused by a series of leading newspapers,
right, middle and left).
The
Swedish edition of this article here
From
patriarchal exertion of power toward human security and
democracy
We know of no one, neither men nor
women, who want war and death. 99 per cent of people on
earth do not want violence in their lives or in politics.
They want non-violence. They want peace. They want a safe
future for their children and a dignified life for their
parents. They value a life free from the fear that
violence breeds.
The assumption that men are
supposed to protect (and "liberate") women and children
with military means, seems to be basic to the
traditional, mainstream paradigm of defence and security.
In every society and at every social level, there are
(power) structures that accept and legitimate violence.
From the bedrooms and kitchens - the traditional spheres
of gender-based violence of which 80 per cent takes place
in the homes - to the brutality of the world's battle
fields, violence acquires its strength and is nurtured by
the global patriarchal order of power.
Women's bodies have become the new
battle fields, as stated in the UN
Report "Women, War and Peace" coordinated by Elisabeth
Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
"Women's bodies have become a
battleground over which opposing forces struggle," the
Experts write. "Women are raped as a way to humiliate
male relatives, who are often forced to watch the
assault. In societies where ethnicity is inherited
through the male line, 'enemy' women are raped and forced
to bear children. Women who are already pregnant are
forced to miscarry through violent attacks. Women are
kidnapped and used as sexual slaves to service troops, as
well as to cook for them and carry their loads from camp
to camp. They are purposefully infected with HIV/AIDS, a
slow, painful murder."
In the national, male-dominated,
military defence system, the State serves as a father
figure. The country - such as Mother Russia or Mother
Svea in Sweden - is a woman. The civil population, women
and children, is the imagined social body that must be
protected. "The family" is the chosen institution serving
to protect the child-bearing and -rearing mothers. But
the sad truth is that this very same "family" has become
the main stage on which a violent drama is acted out that
few want or dare to talk about.
To put it in perspective, the
violence of men against women victimises many times more
women worldwide than do all acts of terror against men
and women and children together.
At least in the Western world,
whatever has to do with gender and sex no longer belongs
to the private sphere. The exploitation of women's bodies
and the sexualisation of the public space - and the
proliferation of pornography in it - has increased
dramatically. It's a commercialised activity that is
quite often marketed as a "message of freedom" and
"liberation" and, unfortunately, it makes it possible for
male politicians to opportunistically argue that they are
"liberating" the women of, say, Afghanistan and Iraq. But
their notion of freedom and liberalism happens to be
quite different and incompatible with external
enforcement.
Power is very plain in its gender
identity. Gender is an integral part of the powers that
be - or of the feeling of powerlessness. Women and
children are the first victims of the patriarchal wars
and militarism, of the macho and disciplining of soldiers
to act cruelly. (Which does not mean that we ignore that
young boys may also be exploited and suffer from the
consequences of obeying orders in the killing fields).
Generally, women now participate more frequently in the
spheres of conflict, security, and defence and
simultaneously women now also appear as killers, suicide
bombers and torturers.
Wrong
question: Should women join the Army?
Presumably in the name of equality,
women join professional armies and get engaged in
interventions and occupations. War fighting has become a
paid profession, no longer a duty or a call to heroism,
patriotism or higher values. We have seen it recently in
Iraq, in the ugly torture chambers of the Abu Ghraib
prison. Women choose to become suicide bombers and
guerrilla fighters and they fall - as we have witnessed
in the tragic case of Margaret Hassan - victim to the
satanic violence of terror.
Many women asked themselves
whether, in the name of gender equality, they ought to
join the military and step into the traditionally
male-dominated world of mainstream military security
affairs - some, of course, with the motive that they want
to try to change it from the inside. This could be seen
as an increasingly meaningful choice given that the
military in numerous countries is being marketed as ever
more civil, as helpers in humanitarian catastrophes and
as actors for "humanitarian" interventions. But is it?
We believe that the question is not
whether to join and compete inside the patriarchal order
or stay outside it. In spite of all nice words, the
military is - at the end of the day - an organisation
that prepares and trains people to kill, if… We
would rather raise the question this way: In which new
ways could we imagine that conflicts should be handled in
the future world that would seem morally acceptable and
meaningful to women and men alike to participate in?
Remember, there is nothing wrong in wanting to defend
what one loves, including one's family, town, country and
the values we have agreed are important to us. Likewise,
there is nothing bad about wanting to help others, to try
to save lives and help people not feeling threatened as
do peacekeepers. The question for all of us alike is: how
do we do it in less gender-biased and less violent ways
in the future?
Human
security - a concept that must challenge the existing
security thinking
The answer to the above question
could well be: human security. In the report to the UN by
the Human
Security Commission headed
by Madam Sadako Ogata and Nobel laureate in economics,
Amatya Sen, that was published last year there is much
deliberation about how to protect people in war, helping
people fleeing, empowering the victims after hurt and
harm and rebuilding communities after war. There is much
talk about knowledge, education and training, about the
role of media and about fair trade and the possibility of
a market economy that will benefit the weakest, the
disadvantaged - and there is a lot about diversity and
freedom.
What is being said is both right
and beautiful. But - unfortunately - it is presumably
without the slightest effect on day-to-day
decision-making. There is no reason to believe that the
administrations of, say, George W. Bush or Tony Blair
even think about these concepts when they decide their
strategies for Iraq. The Ogata/Sen Report is rather
useful as a platform for discussion in academic and NGO
circles; but it also serves as a reservoir of
formulations that cynical politicians may safely
integrate in their speeches at ceremonious occasions
without any commitment to implementation.
Ogata and Sen evidently chose not
to challenge the existing order, neither the level of
security (the nation-state) nor the monopolising means of
the traditional paradigm (the weapons and the so-called
balance of power that is always very subjective). They
did not challenge the patriarchal order and the violence
that underpins it. Their report could well end up serving
as a beautifying face-lift or make-up for the ugliness of
war, any war. If in wars we also think of and care about
human beings, those wars become more acceptable and the
masters of war appear more legitimate than they otherwise
would.
It's now about more than 25 years
ago peace researcher and TFF Associate Johan
Galtung together with young
researchers - among them one
of the authors of this article
- coined the term and developed the theory of human
security. See for example Jan Oberg, "The
New International Military Order. The Real Threat to
Human Security" (The Chair
of Conflict and Peace Research, Oslo University, Papers
No. 65, 98 pages, 1978). As far as we know, this was the
first time ever the idea of human security was developed
with any coherency. So, it took about 30 years for it to
travel from academia to politics.
The point of departure of this
project was that human beings have basic needs and that
there were basically four categories of them:
survival/security, welfare, identity and freedom. Closely
related was the idea that peace could be secured by
peaceful means, a means-goal logics that was borrowed
from the UN Charter and, thus, went counter to the
traditional security policy paradigm that advocates si
vis pacem para pacem - if you wasn't peace, prepare for
war. Security policies, thus, were taken out of the
national framework and from the monopoly of the state on
the means, i.e. the weapons. Why? For the pretty simple
reason that the doctrine of national security - in
contrast to human and global security - has resulted in
an arms race dynamics and resource waste that defy human
imagination as well as control; because the world
desperately needs resources to satisfy the other human
needs, because wars have not been prevented by the
balance of power and because this security paradigm has
led to the loss of around 30 million human beings,
predominantly women and children, in more than 100 wars
since 1945.
The present situation in Iraq
summarizes well the two malaises of the modern high-tech
civilisation: militarism and imperialism. This is not the
disease of communism; that is dead. No, it is the
intrinsic disease of capitalism, of liberal society - at
least when it considers itself superior and co-exists
with no competitors. Militarism as well as imperialism
and cultural contempt are macro - if not meta -
expressions of the patriarchal power and world
(dis)order.
New visions and ways of thinking
are possible. All it takes is an open debate about state
versus the individual (micro) on the one hand and the
common security and survival of the globe as a whole
(macro); all it takes is that we dare challenge those who
lead in the perverse prioritising of weapons and
violence; all it takes is that we give priority, instead,
to intelligent, violence-prevention and genuine conflict
management. In addition, four more years with George W.
Bush makes it imperative that we develop and discuss
alternative security, defence and foreign policies - in
Sweden, in the EU and worldwide.
Much
more debate and a new type of people's movement for human
security is needed now
We need new angles and ideas in the
debate. It's not enough to say "no to war" and argue for
"disarmament and arms control." For the sake of security,
we need a new debate - because in this field nothing has
worked since the so-called end of the cold war. There is
nothing one can seriously call peace in, say, Bosnia,
Macedonia, Kosovo/Serbia, Somalia, Afghanistan or Iraq.
In the best of these cases, there is just no open
violence.
Thus, we are not advocating the
narrow-minded and empirically wrong hypothesis that men =
war and women = peace. It's not predominantly a matter of
gender; the issue is power!
We strongly feel that the world
situation is such that the women's movement, the peace
movement and the democracy movements must now come
together and join force. To realise the dream of global
democracy, inter-cultural trust and conviviality
worldwide, we need more non-violence, not more violence.
We need to prepare peace to achieve peace - rather than
prepare the war, fall into its trap and then repair the
damage by peacekeeping, reconstruction and the implanting
of one-recipe market economy, etc.
Human security is about putting
human beings first in every equation, it's means
war-prevention and conflict-resolution in the first place
- it does not mean that we continue to give the outdated
national, militarist security concept priority and use
human security to clean up the mess
afterwards.
If we liberate ourselves from the
patriarchal power structures, we shall have taken a huge
step in the much-needed direction of human security and
overall, worldwide violence-reduction.
© TFF and the author 2004
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