Recognition, gender, and the negotiation of a non-violent future

Abstract

This article examines two factors, recognition and gender, which, it is argued, need to be integrated with the MOP (Mind of Peace) model. The first section of the paper elaborates on the demand for recognition as both intersubjective and collective demand. It employs examples from one of the experiments, which took place in Beit Jala, in order to suggest how the MOP experiment might deal with these two facets of recognition. The second section of the article argues that a gendered perspective could contribute to the success of the MOP experiment. By implementing the logic of the 1325 UN Security Council resolution, and feminist scholarship, it suggests what such a gendered perspective might mean for the MOP experiment.

Keywords:

• Palestinian–Israeli conflict
• peacemaking
• recognition
• gender

Notes

 1. Sapir Handelman, “The Minds of Peace Experiment: A Simulation of a Potential Palestinian–Israeli Public Assembly,” International Negotiation 15 (2010): 513.

 2. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25.

 3. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram and Christiane Wilke (New York and London: Verso, 2003).

 4. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 31.

 5. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28.

 6. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64.

 7. Eric Doxtader, “The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words: On the Turn between Reconciliation and Recognition,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 124.

 8. Handelman, “Minds of Peace Experiment,” 517–18.

 9. Jessica Benjamin, “Injury and Acknowledgment” (originally given as a lecture in honour of Sigmund Freud's birthday, May 6, 2008), 5.

10. Jessica Benjamin, “Collective Trauma and the Need for Acknowledgment” (originally given in Tel Aviv, June 2009), 8.

11. Benjamin, “Injury and Acknowledgment,” 6.

12. Benjamin, “Collective Trauma,” 16.

13. Benjamin, “Collective Trauma,”, 18.

14. Benjamin, “Collective Trauma,”, 24.

15. Benjamin, “Collective Trauma,”, 22.

16. Simona Sharoni, “Every Woman is an Occupied Territory: The Politics of Militarism and Sexism and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” Journal of Gender Studies 1, no. 4 (1992): 447–62; Laura Duhan Kaplan, “Woman as Caretaker: An Archetype that Supports Patriarchal Militarism,” Hypatia 9, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 123–33.

17. Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998), 47–98.

18. Ronit Lentin, “Israeli and Palestinian Women Working for Peace,” in Women and War Reader, ed. Lois Lorentzen and Jenifer Turpin (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 337–42.

19. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

20. Mark A. Boyer et al., “Gender Negotiation: Some Experimental Findings from an International Negotiation Simulation,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2009): 23–47.

21. Mark A. Boyer et al., “Gender Negotiation: Some Experimental Findings from an International Negotiation Simulation,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2009): 23–47

22. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989).

23. On the status of care as a culturally based virtue, see Peta Bowden, Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 141–82.