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War - Material

Feminism and peace are indistinguishable – the two concepts rest upon a series of largely synonymous premises – strategies of peace that ignore the patriarchal frame of society are doomed to failure

Warren and Cady 94, Karen J. and Duane L., “Feminism and Peace: Seeing Connections”, Volume 9, Issue 2, pages 4–20, May 1994

The scholarly literature suggests many that of what we will call “woman-peace connections’’ are relevant to feminism. We discuss six such connections: Concep- tual, empirical/experiential, historical, political, symbolic/linguistic, and psy- chological connections. For our purposes, they provide numerous interrelated sorts of answers to the question “What has feminism to do with peace?” They thereby set the stage for showing something we do not explicitly argue for here, namely, the ethical and theoretical imperatives of including feminism in discussion of peace issues. Of special interest to feminist philosophers are “conceptual frameworks.” A conceptual framework is a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions that shape and reflect how we view ourselves and others. It is a socially constructed lens through which one views the world. When it explains, justifies, and maintains relationships of domination and subordination, a conceptual framework is oppressive. An oppressive conceptual framework is patriarchal when it explains, justifies, and maintains the subordination of women by men (Warren 1987, 1989,1990,1994). Perhaps the most obvious connection between feminism and peace is that both are structured around the concept and logic of domination (see (5) below). Although there are a great many varieties of feminism, all feminists agree that the domination/subordination of women exists, is morally wrong, 6 Hypatia and must be eliminated. Most feminists agree that the social construction of gender is affected by such multiple factors as race/ethnicity, class, affectional preferences, age, religion, and geographic location. So, in fact, any feminist movement to end the oppression of women will also be a movement, for example, to end the multiple oppressions of racism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, and so on (see Warren 1990). War, the “decision by arms,” the “final arbiter of disputes,” “an act of force which theoretically has no limits’ ” (Clausewiu 1976) amounts to domination pushed to the extreme: Imposition of will by one group onto another by means of threat, injury, and death. Genuine peace (“positive peace”), on the other hand, involves interaction between and among individuals and groups where such behavior is orderly from within, cooperative, and based on agreement. Genuine peace is not a mere absence of war (“negative peace”), where order is imposed from outside by domination (Cady 1989, 1991). It is the process and reality where life-affirming, self-determined, environmentally sustainable ends are sought and accomplished through coalitionary, interactive, coopera- tive means. Feminism and peace share an important conceptual connection: Both are critical of, and committed to the elimination of, coercive power-over privilege systems of domination as a basis of interaction between individuals and groups. A feminist critique and development of any peace politics, therefore, ulti- mately is a critique of systems of unjustified domination. What constitutes such systems of unjustified domination? Warren has explicitly argued elsewhere (Warren 1987, 1988, 1990, 1994, N.d.) that at the conceptual level they consist of at least five oppressive ways of interpreting the world and acting in it. These are five characteristics of an oppressive conceptual framework and the behaviors linked with their implementation: ( 1) value-hierarchical thinking, that is, Up-Down thinking which attributes higher value (status, prestige) to what is “Up” than to what is “Down”; (2) value dualisms, that is, disjunctive pairs in which the disjuncts are seen as oppositional (rather than as complementary) and as exclusive (rather than as inclusive); value dualisms include reason/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature, humanlnature, and man/woman dichotomies; (3) conceptions of power as power-over (in contrast to power-with, power-within, power toward, and power-against p~wer);~ (4) conceptions of privilege which favor the interests of the “Ups”; and (5) a logic of domination, that is, a structure of argumenta- tion which presumes that superiority justifies subordination. In a patriarchal conceptual framework, higher status is attributed to what is male-gender-identified than to what is female-gender-identified. Many femi- nists claim that, at least in Western culture, emotion, body, and nature have been historically female-gender-identified and considered inferior to reason, mind, and culture, which have been male-gender-identified. Karen J. Warren and Duane L. Cady 7 Conceptually, a feminist perspective suggests that patriarchal conceptual frameworks and the behavior they give rise to, are what sanction, maintain, and perpetuate “isms of domination”-sexism, racism, classism, ~arism,~ naturism5 and the coercive power-over institutions and practices necessary to maintain these “isms.” If this is correct, then no account of peace is adequate which does not reveal patriarchal conceptual frameworks; they underlie and sustain war and conflict resolution strategies. (Examples of why we think this is correct are laced throughout the remainder of the paper.)