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ABSTRACT
It has become widely acknowledged by scholars and practitioners that women’s participation in peace-building is essential to building sustainable, inclusive peace. The question remains, however, what is ‘women’s participation’ in practical terms? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Following feminist scholarship that has argued for attention to the politics of emotion in International Relations, I call for an emotion-aware approach to thinking about women’s participation in peace-building and the recognition that emotion has real, material effects on how women participate and the impact of their participation. Drawing on fieldwork experience in Burma and on the Thailand-Burma border I reflect on the process of asking such questions and the possibilities of taking affect seriously in the study of peace. What emerges from this reflection is a methodological consideration that centres emotion and recognises it as simultaneously politically meaningful and gendered. Exploration of the challenges of such an approach grounds this contribution in the realities of data collection and interpretation in the field, while also demonstrating the richness that emerges from such inquiry.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to sincerely thank the peer reviewer whose thoughtful engagement with this article improved it immeasurably as well as the editors of this special issue for their generous leadership and feedback throughout the process of preparing for publication. I also wish to extend my gratitude to all of those who shared with me their knowledge and experiences. This research was reviewed and approved for human subjects research by the Institutional Review Board at Northeastern University for both pre-candidacy fieldwork in 2015 (approval number 15-03-07) and doctoral fieldwork in 2017 (approval number 17-01-24). All errors and omissions are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Cohn, ‘Beyond the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’; Hunt and Posa, ‘Women Waging Peace’; Krause, Krause, and Bränfors, ‘Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations’; Paffenholz et al., ‘Making Women Count’.
2. Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict.
3. You may note that I have chosen to use ‘Burma’ instead of ‘Myanmar’. Since I first began working on the Thailand-Burma border in 2007, the people I work with most consistently call their home country Burma. The issue of naming in this context is complex, and I don’t mean to oversimplify it. I think, though, that there is something deeply problematic about writing about ‘Myanmar’ when the people who make my work possible use ‘Burma’ in their interactions with me and in their daily lives. Why should I, as a researcher and a foreigner, erase this chosen identification? Further, my choice is indicative of my own political leanings, rendering them visible (see Décobert 2014). For these reasons I choose to call the country what the majority of my interlocutors call it, Burma.
4. Faxon, Furlong, and May Sabe Phyu, ‘Reinvigorating Resilience’; Kachin Women’s Peace Network and Gender Equality Network, Women’s Needs.
5. Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores; Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores..
6. Porter and Mundkur, Peace and Security.
7. Cárdenas, ‘Exploring Women’s Visions of Peace’.
8. Ellerby, ‘A Seat at the Table Is Not Enough’; Pepper ‘We Ethnic Women Are the Solution for the Conflict’.
9. Cockburn, ‘War and Security, Women and Gender’; Cohn, Women and Wars; Enloe, Maneuvers; Mazurana, Raven-Roberts, and Parpart, Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping; Viterna, Women in War; Viterna and Fallon, ‘Democratisation, Women’s Movements, and Gender-Equitable States’; Waylen, Engendering Transitions.
10. Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies’; Blomqvist et al., ‘Care and silence in women’s everyday peacebuilding in Myanmar’.
11. Hedström, Jenny and Elisabeth Olivius, this issue.
12. McLeod and O’Reilly, ‘Critical Peace and Conflict Studies’, 128.
13. Salai Isaac Khen and Muk Yin Haung Nyoi, ‘Looking at the Peace Process in Myanmar through a Gender Lens’; Williams, Mission Impossible.
14. Skidmore, ‘Secrecy and Trust in the Affective Field’.
15. Sylvester, ‘Writing Emotion’, 20.
16. Biddolph, I Did It to Save My Life; Krystalli and Schulz, ‘Taking Love and Care Seriously’.
17. Krystalli and Schulz, ‘Taking Love and Care Seriously’.
18. Berry, War, Women, and Power; Capoccia and Kelemen, ‘The Study of Critical Junctures’; Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; Pierson, Politics in Time.
19. Berry, ‘When “Bright Futures” Fade’; Moran, ‘Our Mothers Have Spoken’; Sa’ar, Economic Citizenship; Tripp, Women and Power in Postconflict Africa..
20. Sa’ar, Economic Citizenship. Importantly, this is not to say that men’s experiences of conflict and peace are not shaped by notions of masculinity and militarism, but this article focuses on women’s experiences.
21. Holmqvist, ‘War, “Strategic Communication” and the Violence of Non-recognition; McSorely, War and the Body; Sylvester et al., ‘The Forum’.
22. Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, 403–404.
23. Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics’.
24. Ibid.
25. Erisen, Lodge, and Taber, ‘Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking’; Marcus, ‘The Psychology of Emotion and Politics’; Redlawsk, Feeling Politics; Söderstrom, ‘Fear of Electoral Violence and its Impact on Political Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa’; Valentino et al., ‘Is a Worried Citizen A Good Citizen?’.
26. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.
27. Confortini, ‘Feminist Contributions and Challenges to Peace Studies.
28. Firchow and Mac Ginty, ‘Measuring Peace’, 23; Olivius and Åkebo, ‘Exploring Varieties of Peace’, 4; Söderström and Olivius, this issue; Dijkema, this issue.
29. Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’, 38.
30. Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres, 80’.
31. Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics; Hutchison and Bleiker, ‘Grief and the Transformation of Emotions After War’, 215.
32. Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics’.
33. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
34. Crawford, ‘Preface’, xvii.
35. Sylvester, ‘War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory’; Wibben, Researching War.
36. South, Ethnic Politics in Burma, 8. Note that ethnicity as a central organising identity is a British colonial legacy in Burma, where ethnic groups were defined as part of a process of bureaucratisation and administrative standardisation (see also: Callahan, Making Enemies; Gravers, Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma; and Taylor, The State in Burma).
37. Ne Lynn Zaw and Pepper, ‘Poverty and Health in Contemporary Myanmar’.
38. South and Lall, ‘Language, Education, and the Peace Process in Myanmar’.
39. Cheesman, Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar; Davies and True, ‘The Politics of Counting and reporting Conflict-related Sexual and Gender-based Violence’.
40. Olivius and Hedström, ‘Militarised Nationalism as a Platform for Feminist Mobilization?’; Pepper, ‘Feminist Peace and Resistance Politics’.
41. Fink, Living Silence in Burma.
42. Banki, ‘Transnational Activism as Practised by Activists from Burma’.
43. Olivius, ‘Sites of Repression and Resistance’.
44. Alliance for Gender Inclusion in the Peace Process, ‘Analysis of Myanmar’s Second Union Peace Conference − 21st Century Panglong from a Gender Perspective’; ‘The Framework for Political Dialogue’.
45. Alliance for Gender Inclusion in the Peace Process, ‘Statement by AGIPP on the Union Peace Conference’; Alliance for Gender Inclusion in the Peace Process, ‘If Half the Population Mattered’; Nyein Nyein, ‘Women Playing Larger Role at this Year’s Peace Conference’; San Yamin Aung, ‘Female Participation in Peace Process Improving’.
46. Pepper, ‘“We Ethnic Women Are the Solution for the Conflict’”.
47. Women’s League of Burma, ‘Herstory’.
48. Hochschild, ‘The Sociology of Emotion as a Way of Seeing’.
49. McDermott, ‘The Body Doesn’t Lie’.
50. Crawford, ‘Institutionalising Passion in World Politics’.
51. Hedström, ‘Confusion, Seduction, Failure’.
52. Zalewski, ‘Stories of Pain and Longing’, 35.
53. Haraway, Primate Visions.
54. Cavarero, Relating Narratives; Hedström, ‘Confusion, Seduction, Failure’.
55. Fujii, ‘Shades of Truth and Lies’.
56. Söderström and Olivius, this issue.
57. The scarcity of participant interviews is important to note, as this was to a large degree a consequence of the extreme demands on these women’s time and energy. These demands stem from many factors, but most prominently include the requests for their time as activists, balancing home and caregiving responsibilities, and the need for support within their local communities.
58. Krystalli, ‘Narrating Victimhood’.
59. Alcadipani and Hodgson, ‘By Any Means Necessary?’; Altheide and Johnson, ‘Reflections on Interpretive Adequacy in Qualitative Research’; Brooten and Metro, ‘Thinking about Ethics in Burma Research’.
60. Ackerly and True, Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science, 2nd ed.
61. Chilmeran and Hedström, ‘Reflexivity and Fieldwork in Feminist Peace Research’, 1.
62. Hedström, ‘Confusion, Seduction, Failure’, 2; see also Anctil Avoine, this issue.
63. Décobert, ‘Sitting on the Fence?’.
64. see Kovats-Bernat, ‘Negotiating Dangerous Fields’.
65. Author interview with peace process participant, Yangon, 19 June 2019.
66. Author interview with peace process participant, Myitkyina 27 June 2019.
67. Author interview with ethnic women’s organisation representative, Chiang Mai, 24 November 2017.
68. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Complaint!.
69. Author interview with activist, Myitkyina, 26 June 2019.
70. Barnhart, The Consequences of Humiliation.
71. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion..
72. Parashar, ‘Anger, War, and Feminist Storytelling’, 74.
73. Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger’, 8.
74. Banet-Weiser, Empowered; Gill, ‘Post-postfeminism?’.
75. Kay and Banet-Weiser, ‘Feminist Anger and Feminist Respair’; Aadnesgaard, ‘The Angry Feminist’.
76. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking.
77. Krystalli and Schulz, ‘Taking Love and Care Seriously’, 5.
78. The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto.
79. Author interview with ethnic women’s organisation representative, Mae Sot, 7 July 2015.
80. Author interview with teacher and activist, Mae Sot, 6 July 2015.
81. Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar, 16.
82. Tronto, Moral Boundaries.
83. Olivius and Hedström, ‘Militarised Nationalism as a Platform for Feminist Mobilization?’.
84. Cohen-Chen, Crisp, and Halperin, ‘Perceptions of a Changing World Induce Hope and Promote Peace’; Halperin, Emotions in Conflict; Halperin et al., ‘Emotions in Conflict’; Rosler, Cohen-Chen, and Halperin, ‘The Distinctive Effects of Empathy and Hope in Intractable Conflict’; Sagy and Adwan, ‘Hope in Times of Threat’.
85. Ben Asher et al., ‘Hope Among Refugee Children Attending the International School of Peace on Lesbos’; Snyder, ‘Hope Theory’; Snyder et al., ‘The Will and the Ways’.
86. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 91.
87. Author interview with ethnic women’s organisation representative, Yangon, 18 June 2019.
88. Author interview with teacher, Mae Sot, 3 July 2015.
89. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Lorde, Sister Outsider..
90. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion..
91. Hedström, ‘Confusion, Seduction, Failure’.
92. García, ‘Grieving Guinea Pigs’.
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Mollie Pepper
Mollie Pepper is an independent researcher and consultant. She is Cofounder and Research Lead at the Carlson Pepper Collaborative. Her work focuses on the gendered power dynamics of peacebuilding, with attention to emotion and the everyday as well as forced migration. She specializes in bridging research, policy, and practice to support innovative interventions to support the world’s displaced.