Gendered forms of authority and solidarity in the management of ethno-religious conflicts

ABSTRACT

In both Ambon in Indonesia and Jos in Nigeria, existing communal ethno-religious tensions quickly spiraled into uncontrolled violence, and people organized to counteract conflict escalation through the development of conflict management mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms draw on gender as a resource in various intersectional ways. Micro-analytical literature on conflict tends to remain gender blind, ignoring a potent social force in conflict dynamics, while feminist literature on conflict focuses either on norms, symbols, discourse, and representations, or on women's efforts for peace. This article thus seeks to address an existing gap in the literature by exploring the intersectional relationships between gender dynamics and conflict management at the local level in Ambon and Jos. Our analysis draws on more than 110 interviews and focus group discussions. Engaging in a paired comparison between the two cities, we identify inductively two intersectionally gendered logics of ethno-religious conflict management present in both settings: deployments of gendered authority (in women's practices of “checkmating” and men's efforts of rumor control) and of gendered cross-community solidarity (in interfaith markets, rituals, and dialogues). This article ultimately contributes to expanding, deepening, and challenging existing research on conflict, suggesting that adopting a feminist, constructivist micro-level lens allows for the excavation of important and often invisibilized gendered logics of conflict management.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethno-religious conflict
• conflict management
• gender
• authority
• solidarity

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extensive and helpful comments, as well as the previous editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics for their understanding and extremely constructive support. This article would not have been developed without the relentless support and invaluable comments of Elisabeth Prügl, Principal Investigator of the project, nor without the expert insights of Rahel Kunz, Henri Myrttinen, Arifah Rahmawati, and Mimidoo Achakpa.

Many people have contributed to the development of this article, and the people whom we wish to thank first and foremost are all of the community members, peace fighters, activists, and youths who gave us their time, testimonies, and energies. Beyond contributing to research results, they have taken a transformative journey that has, we hope, amplified their voices, and has, for sure, impacted our lives forever. We were lucky to work with incredibly dedicated teams of informants and researchers in Indonesia and Nigeria, and this article is also dedicated to them.

Thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Claudia Zingerli in particular, we have not only been able to develop this Global South–Global North research partnership, but also to implement follow-up initiatives with the affected communities. We hope that these collective efforts helped to mitigate the inherent power imbalance embedded in the researcher–interviewee relationship.

This article was developed thanks to the financial support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This article draws on the theoretical and methodological approach developed by Krause in her book Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War (for a comparison between the two countries, see Krause 2018, 9–12). It expands and develops the framework by integrating a gender lens and investigating additional communities in Indonesia and Nigeria.

2 In the context of this article, we focus only on the social mechanisms that (1) integrate a distinctively gendered dimension, (2) were present in both settings, and (3) occurred predominantly at the community level. Many other important processes of conflict escalation and management occurred in Jos and Ambon. However, we do not dwell on these processes as they are not squarely located within the theoretical lens adopted in this article. They might include the role of institutions (such as the police, the army, and international organizations), the involvement of women in peace processes and formal political efforts, and the unfolding or curbing of different types of conflict-related violence, such as gender-based violence.

3 For a more in-depth discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of such an approach, see the Introduction to this Special Section (Rigual, Prügl, and Kunz, this issue).

4 Consequently, in the context of this specific article, we do not claim to provide a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the rich diversity of men and women's agencies and roles within and across different communities. We acknowledge that we are providing inferences from our research that inevitably simplify the complexities of gender performances for each individual as well as for each community. Others have shown how women develop their agency even in situations of disempowerment, and how they can subtly confront gendered ideologies or power imbalances in different settings such as within the household, with their community leadership, or with external actors such as NGOs (Alison 2005; Eddyono 2018; Joshi 2022; Kabeer 1999; Ketola 2020; Mahmood 2006a, 2006b; Parker 2005).

5 Those without the certificate of indigeneity suffer discrimination in recruitment into federal institutions, admission to most federal universities, and education at military academies. Equally, at the sub-federal level, they are denied access to schools, health care, roads, and academic scholarships and are discriminated against in accessing jobs and political positions (International Crisis Group 2012, 4).

6 These depictions of forms of gendered ideology, while frequently described as dominant by our interviewees, should not obscure the multiple and complex forms of alternative gendered performance enacted by community members on an everyday basis. Other contributions in our research project explicitly focus on these.

7 Due to the privileged status of Christian communities inherited from imbalances generated by colonization processes (as, for instance, in access to public resources and education), it was indeed more common to find women holding public positions such as neighborhood leaders or priests in Christian rather than in Muslim communities. As noted in the opening sections of this article, however, the goal here is less to provide a detailed analysis of variations across cases than to identify certain commonalities between them.

8 For the connection between motherhood and politics in Indonesia, see more specifically Blackburn (2004) and Eddyono (2018). For African-American and Nigerian thought, see also Amadiume (1987), Collins (1999), and Oyewumi (1997).

9 Many authors have revealed, through detailed ethnographic analyses, how across the globe, women contribute to politics in their communities while embedded in gendered ideologies that continue to portray politics and leadership as masculine. Conducting a detailed analysis of poor urban women's roles in mobilizing against evictions in Jakarta, Eddyono (2018, 69) noted that in spite of their important roles in the movement, women frequently described their actions as aligned to the dominant gender ideology, referring to men as leaders and heads of households, even when they were actually subtly contesting it. Joshi (2022) demonstrates how, in an oppressive context, women resisted land grabbing through “anti-politics” in Cambodia – that is, without directly challenging the government. We also encountered such portrayals of women's roles in our research in East Java, where women mobilized against land acquisition and use by large companies through multiple informal and formal channels (such as spying, mobilization, protests, and protection of their relatives) but were still not considered as central to the strategy and leadership of the peasant movement (Fatimah 2019; Udasmoro and Rahmawati 2019) and did not label their actions as political (interview with Dati Fatimah, 2018).

10 Vigilantism will be treated more extensively in a separate publication. We are focusing in this article on other forms of non-militarized community-driven leadership.

11 The pela gandong system is a tradition in Maluku. It is “a form of ‘cooperation and brotherhood’ tying two men from different villages across religious differences” (Rigual 2021, 163; referring to Rahmawati and Udasmoro 2015).

12 For an in-depth analysis of these dynamics in Ambon and Aceh, see Udasmoro (this issue).

13 Feminist scholars have also noted these dynamics of care and everyday peacebuilding in other parts of the world, such as Kashmir or Northern Ireland (Vaittinen et al. 2019).

14 This finding obviously triggers ethical questions regarding the extent to which the use of coercive authority to enforce peace should be considered as good conflict management, but this is beyond the scope of the present article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development [Grant Numbers 400240_146777 and 400240_171176].

Notes on contributors

Christelle Rigual

Christelle Rigual is a political scientist and a research affiliate with the Gender Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, where she coordinated the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d) project The Gender Dimensions of Social Conflict, Armed Violence and Peacebuilding. She holds a PhD in International Relations and Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Wening Udasmoro

Wening Udasmoro is Professor of Gender and Literature at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), Indonesia. She received her PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 2006. Her main research interests are gender studies, literature, conflict and peacebuilding, identity politics, and critical discourse analysis. Her latest publication is “Art for Peace: An Intersectional Reading” (with Rahel Kunz, 2021). She is the co-editor of the book in which it appears, entitled Gender in Peacebuilding: Local Practices in Indonesia and Nigeria.

Joy Onyesoh

Joy Onyesoh is International President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and President of WILPF Nigeria. She is the founder of the Joy Onyesoh Foundation, which is dedicated to building resilient communities in Nigeria. She is an experienced activist, facilitator, organizer, trainer, and researcher, and her consultancy and research interests lie in the area of gender and development, with a focus on women, peace and security. She has written a doctoral dissertation on women's transformative leadership in conflict and post-conflict societies.