Dialogue and Other ‘Men's Business’: Gender, Conflict and Multicultural Politics in the Diaspora

Abstract

While the under-representation of women intergroup dialogue initiatives has been widely noted, there remains to date a lack of research investigating the possible reasons for this and its potential implications for dialogue practice. In this article, we explore a dialogue project held from 2009 to 2013 in Melbourne, which sought to bring into contact diaspora communities from situations of conflict in the homeland. Our project saw a similar lack of female participation, with a number of women suggesting that the dialogues were ‘politicking’ and therefore ‘men's business’. Reflecting on possible reasons for this perception, we suggest that the ways in which dialogue as a multicultural strategy is manifestly intertwined with certain presumptions of community should be read as influencing both the perceived ‘politicisation’ of such projects as well as the lack of female participation. The combination of identities highly politicised by ethno-national conflict with largely bureaucratically defined conceptions of community, we continue, should also be seen as contributing to the already-existing marginalisation of women in community politics and affairs.

Keywords:

• Intergroup dialogue
• gender
• diaspora
• multiculturalism

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to Raul Sanchez Urribari, Michális S. Michael and Ibrahim Abraham for their helpful comments and suggestions on various incarnations of this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of JICS for making this a stronger piece.

Notes

[1] This article emerges out of the ‘Reconciling Divided Communities’ and ‘Capacity Building for Divided Communities’ research projects conducted at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, which were overseen by Chief Investigator Michális S. Michael. This work was supported by the Commonwealth of Australia through the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the Victorian State Government through the Department of Premier and Cabinet and the Victorian Multicultural Commission [1106475], VicHealth [16966] and the William Buckland Foundation [CT11838].

[2] We want to emphasise that, although our analysis here is focused on our project as a whole, ‘conflict diasporas’ are by no means homogeneous.

[3] Separatist or anti-separatist Sri Lankan community organisations, for instance, or ‘two-state’ or ‘one-state’ perspectives on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.