Are Women Peaceful?

A methodological review of the paper titled ‘Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peace-Building.’ by Hilary Charlesworth. 

According to Charlesworth, the paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

In reviewing this paper methodologically, I will endeavor to look at answering three questions which as stated by Punch(2009) include the ontological question of what reality is like, the epistemological question of what relationship is between that researcher and that reality, and finally the methodological question of what methods can be used or were used in studying the reality.

Ontological questions are prior because they deal with the very nature of ‘being’; literally, an ontology is a theory of ‘being’ (the word derives from the Greek word for ‘existence’). For example, are there essential differences between genders, classes or races that always exist in all contexts and all times? (Marsh & Stoker, 2002). Francis Fukuyama in his published paper in the popular US journal, Foreign Affairs, entitled ‘Women and the evolution of world politics’(1998), began with accounts of the violent behaviour of groups of chimpanzees, one kept in a Dutch zoo and one in Tanzania, and the way that the chimps built coalitions to achieve dominance. The main lesson Fukuyama drew from these stories was that, although female chimps can be violent, cruel and competitive, it was male chimps who were responsible for the worst violence and coalition-building. He also argued that the nature of coalition-building among male and female chimps was different: the males were likely to form alliances ‘‘for purely instrumental, calculating reasons’’, while female bonding involved emotion. Fukuyama then analogised the chimp behaviour to that of humans on the basis that ‘‘chimpanzees are man’s closet evolutionary relative’’ and quickly moved on to assert a biological basis for sex differences in international affairs. He argued that men are more likely to engage in aggression and war; in contrast ‘‘a world run by women’’ would be ‘‘less aggressive, adventurous, competitive, and violent’, and ‘‘less prone to conflict and more conciliatory and cooperative than the one we inhabit now’.

Charlesworth counters the above narrative by taking a feminist view or rather constructivist view which I will elaborate later. However, for purposes of dealing with this ontological question, feminists believe that the differences between men and women are socially constructed. As such, they are not essential differences but are particular to a given culture and time. They are the product of patriarchy, in which male dominance shapes the culture and values of society, affects patterns of socialization and perpetuates gender inequality (Marsh & Stoker, 2002). Charlesworth argues that Fukuyama’s arguments elaborate a theme that regularly appears in the literatures on peace and conflict prevention—the idea that women are somehow more peaceful and peace-loving than men. In most of the traditional literature on international politics such ideas are rarely addressed and Fukuyama is unusual in taking them on. But Fukuyama’s article also illustrates a dark side to the linkage of women and peace—it can be used to keep women in their place. It is therefore clear that Fukuyama’s ontological view is that there exists differences between genders being male and female whereas Charlesworth takes a different ontological position that is anti-foundationalist and emphasizes the social construction of social phenomena.

This brings me to the second question which is the epistemological one. Marsh and Stoker(2002) opine that if an ontological position reflects the researcher’s view about the nature of the world, their epistemological position reflects their view of what we can know about the world and how we can know it; literally an epistemology is a theory of knowledge. They further discuss how epistemological positions can be classified as positivist or interpretist. In his publication, Fukuyama takes a positivist approach which holds that it is possible and desirable to apply the study of social life to the methods, concepts and procedures of the natural science. By observing the violent behavior of chimpanzees with the aim of drawing the attention of feminist international relations scholars from issues of culture to that of biology as a source of gendered expectations, Fukuyama is trying to tell us that you can establish regular relationships between social phenomena, using theory to generate hypothesis which can be tested by direct observation. So direct observation can serve as an independent test of the validity of the theory.

Researchers from the interpretist tradition rarely accept any notion of objectivity but to Charlesworth credit, I do not see a dispute or rejection of what Fukuyama observed regarding the behavior of Chimpanzees; the problem is with the conclusions of the study. However, by quoting a few scholars, taking us through declarations or workings of the United Nations on matters conflict resolution and peace, as well as case studies of women’s experience in conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands to illustrate that women can be both empowered and disempowered by conflict is an interpretist response something positivists say merely offers opinions or subjective judgements about the world. Nevertheless, Charlesworth argues that women in Bougainville were engaged in peace activities not because of their peaceful nature but  as a response to a desperate situation-almost a decade of conflict and displacement, more men die in conflict than women and more are held as prisoners to refute the claim that women always suffer more in conflict and have more to gain from peace than men, the need to involve women in peace-building is regularly ignored by the UN and other international institutions, linking the term  ‘gender’ primarily with women leaves both the roles of men and male  gender identities unexamined as though they were somehow natural and immutable and in East Timor women were deeply involved in the independence struggle against Indonesia as combatants and commanders of guerilla groups. This is more about challenging the meanings people bring to situations and behavior and which they use to understand their world in this case Fukuyama’s ‘Women and the evolution of world Politics’.

Now that we have dealt with the ontological and epistemological questions, it is time to take on the methodological question of what methods were used in studying the reality. Methodology is the study of research methods relating to epistemology, theory and procedures for conducting research. In examining the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law, Charlesworth takes a feminist epistemological position which is simply an examination of the theory of knowledge from a feminist standpoint. Marsh and Stoker (2002) emphasize that feminism calls into question power relations between men and women that were conventionally defended as ‘natural’. To bring it closer home, feminist research is an approach to social research in which topics are chosen and methods used in ways that challenge methodologies developed by men and with the aim of enhancing the position of women in society. By using certain case studies of women’s experience in the conflicts of Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands, we can confidently say it is a qualitative research design commonly associated with interpretivism or constructivism. However, Charlesworth’s paper goes into detail on women engagements in conflicts, exclusion from peace-building initiatives and gender perceptions in international institutions that tilt against women but  in challenging the positivist epistemology of the likes of Francis Fukuyama, he does not really tell us if women are more peaceful or not even with the exceptions of Margaret Thatcher and the rest.

Are women peaceful? Charlesworth argues that women in Bougainville were engaged in peace activities not because of their peaceful nature but as a response to a desperate situation but does not tell us whether their love for peace was not a factor in that decision since we have heard it said in international politics that if you want peace, then prepare for war. I believe interviews with these women could have given us a more informed picture of their inner motivations towards war or how they understood their world at that time. Even when it comes to the possibility of more men being affected by conflicts than women, there are no actual figures to work with except for general statements of men being killed, imprisoned or mentally affected more than women. Do we need quantitative research too? probably yes.

Despite doing a good job, I believe more numbers are needed as well as interviews on top of what Charlesworth has given us. The numbers will help us analyse the women involved in peace activities versus those pushing for war in international relations and how many women and men are affected by conflicts. At the same time, interviews will give us access to people’s perceptions, meanings, definition of situations and constructions of reality. This is therefore a call for a mixed methods research that avails both quantitative and qualitative data. As Punch(2009) puts it, the fundamental rationale behind mixed methods research is that we can learn more about our research topic if we can combine the strengths of qualitative research with the strengths of quantitative research while compensating for the weakness of each method.

References:

Charlesworth, H. (2008). Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peace-Building, 1-15.

Marsh, D., & Stoker, G. (2002). Theory and Methods in Political Science. UK: Macmillan 2^nd edition.

Punch, F.K. (2009). Introduction to Research Methods in Education. UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.