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Addressing Masculinities in Peace Negotiations: An Opportunity for Gender Justice

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Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice

Part of the book series: Gender, Development and Social Change ((GDSC))

Abstract

Gender plays a fundamental role in war- and peace-making, but the opportunities to reconsider unequal gender relations in the context of peace negotiations have, so far, largely been missed. This chapter argues that peace negotiations are unique opportunities to address structural inequalities in society and the gendered dimensions of violence. In particular, the construction and performance of hegemonic masculinities and hypermasculinities cause and sustain armed conflicts, and they continue to play an influential role in post-conflict societies. While gender has unhelpfully been equated with women in dominant conflict resolution and international legal discourses, exposing and transforming masculinities in the context of peace negotiations can contribute to gender justice and to the lasting resolution of armed conflicts. This chapter further argues that it is through a critical legal-pluralistic lens that masculinities theory can inform the fruitful development and application of international legal norms in the context of peace negotiations. This shift of perspective goes beyond oversimplified binary thinking and the still dominant essentialisation of women and men as homogenous and exhaustive groups, and it has the potential of contributing to lasting, positive peace that is not characterised by the mere absence of armed violence but the manifestation of social justice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a historical account, see Costin (1982).

  2. 2.

    On the complex role of women in the Colombian conflict, see Tabak (2011).

  3. 3.

    This support can, of course, also be of sexual nature.

  4. 4.

    Many intrastate armedconflicts are, of course, internationalised in some way, for instance because of the involvement of external actors or because the conflict spills across national borders, which does not turn such a conflict into a war between two states in the traditional sense.

  5. 5.

    For a discussion of the changing sphere of peace negotiations, see Kastner (2015, 4–12).

  6. 6.

    The resulting peace agreement, nearly 300 pages long, is also the longest ever concluded in the context of an internal armed conflict (Bell 2016, 166).

  7. 7.

    For an overview, see http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/women/wps.shtml.

  8. 8.

    A study published in 2012 by the United Nations found that in 31 major peace processes between 1992 and 2011, only 4 per cent of signatories, 2.4 per cent of chief mediators, 3.7 per cent of witnesses and 9 per cent of negotiators were women (UN Women 2012, 3). For a summary of the role of women in the Colombian peace process, finding that ‘[o]nly a handful ofwomen have been engaged as negotiators’, see Bouvier (2016, 17).

  9. 9.

    As it has also been shown in the context of peacekeeping, female peacekeepers do not necessarily have different objectives and values than their male colleagues. Typically, they want to be good at soldiering and policing and adopt, in that sense, masculine roles (Simić 2012).

  10. 10.

    For this recognition based on the experience in the peace processes in the Philippines, see Conciliation Resources (2017, 6).

  11. 11.

    On the distinction between positive and negative peace, see Galtung (1969).

  12. 12.

    There are obvious parallels to claims with respect to domestic violence. For a critique of the dualism between public and private spheres in the context of international law, see Chinkin (1999).

  13. 13.

    On gender as something that we perform, see in particular Butler (1988).

  14. 14.

    For a critique of responses by the United Nations to conflict-related sexualviolence against men, see Sivakumaran (2010).

  15. 15.

    For an analysis of this dimension in the context of transitional justice, see Theidon (2009, 4).

  16. 16.

    Some women may, of course, also act according to such masculine requirements.

  17. 17.

    On the importance to pay attention to the particular experiences of women and girls in the context of DDR programmes, which tend to focus on men with weapons, see Bouvier (2016, 24).

  18. 18.

    See Jelke Boesten’s contribution in this volume.

  19. 19.

    For an overview of different studies on direct and indirect war deaths, and the finding that ‘men die more frequently than women in direct armed conflicts,while more women than men die in post-conflict situations of the indirect causes of war’, see Ormhaug (2009, 23).

  20. 20.

    Our contribution as relatively distant observers situates itself more on the conceptual than empirical level.

  21. 21.

    For a discussion highlighting the relevance of normative disagreement, see Webber (2006, 82).

  22. 22.

    For this argument made from a queer perspective, see Otto (2007, 121).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Western Australia (UWA), Crawley, WA, Australia

    Philipp Kastner

  2. Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Elisabeth Roy-Trudel

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  1. Philipp Kastner
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Correspondence to Philipp Kastner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Rita Shackel

  2. University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Lucy Fiske

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Kastner, P., Roy-Trudel, E. (2019). Addressing Masculinities in Peace Negotiations: An Opportunity for Gender Justice. In: Shackel, R., Fiske, L. (eds) Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice. Gender, Development and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_8

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