No end to violence? Conflicts, emergencies, resistances

Almost three months into the war in Ukraine, diplomatic negotiations seem to be reaching a stalemate and both Russia and Ukraine continue to deploy military strategies to end the conflict. While media accounts persist in dichotomously siding with one or other of the parties – with most of the Western media supporting Ukraine – we might pause to think more carefully about the varied range of victims in this war. As the hope of a short-lived military conflict fades away, discussions about the multi-layered aspects of violence during wars can become more nuanced. In the violent heat of military conflict, as the numbers of dead and injured soldiers begin to mount, the sentiment “War is young men dying and old men talking” resonates loudly. But war is never just about men, not least the white men who we have seen around the table at the early “peace talks” – no women in sight (O’Sullivan 2022; Rochowanski 2022). How nuanced can those conversations about peace be? Will they consider people with disabilities? And what of those identifying as non-normative with respect to gender or sexuality? How is this war affecting minorities in Ukraine? Who is suffering the most and why? How can we find out about this? What are the distinct challenges experienced by each of the different groups of people within Ukraine?

In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic has entered a new phase with the decline of the Omicron wave (Charumilind et al. 2022). Lockdowns, social distancing measures, and other forms of restriction are being suspended almost everywhere – with the striking exception of the People's Republic of China – even as the pandemic is ongoing and its future unpredictable. Whether this suspension is motivated by economic imperatives, election strategies, or social/psychological concerns, the costs of further pursing restrictive measures seem too high to many political authorities. Who will suffer most? Will they be noticed? Can they be heard?

The abundant complex nuances and tensions across the range of contemporary violence-ridden scenarios of international politics are not alien to the pages of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Here, we encourage sharp assessments of such grim realities experienced by people living, dying, and surviving the imbricated operations of global power (Masters and Dauphinee 2007), along with discussions about the creative, resilient, and reflexive agency of people to overcome the hardships inflicted on them. The articles collected in this issue are especially insightful in this regard, helping us to navigate some of the complexities of violence in global politics in nuanced and inspiring ways.

The Special Section on gender and violent conflicts calls attention to the micro-politics of conflict cycles, and to the way in which gender – in intersection with other markers of difference – structures, fuels, and tempers conflict. Christelle Rigual, Elisabeth Prügl, and Rahel Kunz's introductory article problematizes the concepts of masculinity and intersectionality in feminist explanations of conflict dynamics and proposes a pragmatist understanding of causation for a feminist constructivist approach to studying conflict at the micro-level. Rigual, Wening Udasmoro, and Joy Onyesoh illustrate the value of such an approach by identifying two distinctive conflict management mechanisms that operated on the basis of gender in ethno-religious conflicts in Indonesia and Nigeria. Both women and men drew authority from gender in order to interrupt the escalation of violence, and gendered bonds seeded solidarity to forestall the outbreak of violence and heal social ruptures. The third and final article in the Special Section, by Udasmoro, demonstrates the structuring power of conflict in Indonesia with regard to women's labor force participation, and the role of intersecting markers of difference in divergent types of conflict. Against the expectation that conflict provides an opportunity for women's economic empowerment, it shows that changes in gender divisions of labor were affected by the different ways in which men participated in an ethno-religious conflict and in an insurgency.

Elsewhere in the issue, Clare Wenham and Sara Davies investigate the early response of the World Health Organization (WHO) to the COVID-19 pandemic, disclosing the failure of its institutional framework to take gender seriously and provide adequate responses to the global health emergency. Even while addressing issues of representation within its cadres, this framework to address health emergency outbreaks remains gender ignorant, neglecting many of the hard-won lessons learned from feminist scholarship on the gendered aspects of previous epidemics, such as H1N1, Zika, and Ebola. The authors’ analysis points to the WHO's institutional responsibility to provide “a gender-inclusive framework to inform outbreak response, financial models, and recovery.”

Following the argument that “reflective teaching is action research,” Sonia Palmieri and Melissa MacLean reflect on their responsibilities when teaching feminist research methods and methodology to local feminist researchers in developing countries. The authors consider the work that they developed during a three-year project of the International Women's Development Agency with women's grassroots organizations based in Cambodia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste, to build women's leadership capabilities within local contexts. While fostering reciprocity as the basis of their engagement with the student researchers, Palmieri and MacLean highlight the persistence of structural and power inequalities, as well as of “colonialist frames of enquiry and analysis,” which complicated the process of reaching the goals of their practice. They argue that feminist pedagogies can strongly benefit from a commitment to critical reflection, to build trust and confidence among researchers, as well as to encourage and sustain engagement among themselves – and not only with the teacher researchers.

Finally, Jill Steans offers an aesthetic and feminist reading of the case of Leni Riefenstahl, the controversial German filmmaker whose work in support of Hitler and the Nazi Party have become the object of much political and aesthetic scrutiny. Building on Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry's archetypes of women as mothers, monsters, and whores, Steans claims that Riefenstahl's monstered depiction has served as a scapegoat, a fourth archetype, in the post-war narrative on “the tragic fall of the German nation and its atonement and eventual redemption.” Coming to terms with Riefenstahl's agency and accountability, Steans shines a light on the gendered complexities of political and aesthetic narratives.