Express News Service
CHENNAI: The question I would like you to ask yourself is, in 2021, do you think we — you and I, women living in India, in the US, in Afghanistan or Pakistan — are more secure or less secure than 20 years ago?” begins Rita Manchanda, feminist scholar and peace advocate at this month’s Prajnya Gender Talks, which poetically coincided with the 9/11 anniversary. While the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the reign of Hindutva forces in India is answer enough, Rita added weight to the discourse with results of a Reuters survey. “This poll ranked India as a place where women are most at risk of sexual violence and forced labour. Despite the fact that it may be flawed, we only have to look around us to know that it can easily be substantiated by the daily reports we get on violence against girls and women, both direct and structural, becoming far more severe,” she points out.
Yet what is the relation between violence at home and public spaces or violence at war? Borrowing the words of the late British academic and peace activist Cynthia Cockburn, she quotes about the ‘Continuum of Violence’: “Gender links violence at different points on a scale reaching from the personal to the international, from the home to the back street to the manoeuvres of the tank column and the sortie of the stealth bomber: battering and marital rape, confinement, ‘dowry’ burnings, honour killings, and genital mutilation in peacetime; military rape, sequestration, prostitutions, and sexualised torture in war are all linked.” Despite the truth brought to the fore by academic research and the ground reality it is rooted in, national security continues to be defined by state narratives.
“Arguably, these state-driven narratives have to do with ensuring state stability and more proximately, regime maintenance. If you look at the aftermath of the Easter Bombings in 2019 in Sri Lanka, the way there was this hyper-jiongoistic rhetoric constructing a suspect community (the Muslim community), you could see an immediate link to regime stability. Post this rhetoric, it gained sudden impetus and much greater consolidation. But, how does it translate into how you and I get affected? In terms of religious orthodoxy. Here, religious fundamentalism of all kinds gets interpreted as extremist politics. Peaceful, democratic protests gets conflated as violent, anti-nationalist politics; ethno-nationalist struggles get collapsed into terrorism. And the use of authoritarian laws to crackdown (such) dissent is global,” she explains.
The parallel narrative this has birthed is the hyper saturation of the security discourse in the framing of issues — from the securitisation of refugees, migrations and even public health in the form of Covid crisis, she points out, adding that this legitimises the rollout of authoritarian policies.
While security has focused on that of the state and driven by competition for power, women get very little space in this paradigm. The search for a new paradigm only grew with the increase in internal conflict, and the emergence of a democratic security discourse shifting the focus away from state to people-centric security (including environmental, food, livelihood security and more). But even this came with a gap in gendered violence, she notes. It was not till 2000 that the Women Peace and Security agenda was adopted by the UN Security Council Resolution.
Even this came with the debates on whether it should be part of the ‘big boys’ club’ or if they can afford to miss the attention such an avenue would bring. But, it also meant that certain things were off the agenda, primarily demilitarisation and arms control. “You only have to go to the northeast and listen to the women. What they are saying is ‘We are awash with guns.’ A Palestinian woman told me, ‘The gun my husband keeps under the pillow is often turned against me.’ Yet, this was off the agenda,” she says.
She adds that the gender perspective in violence was also absent, pointing out how many Afghan women/feminists supported Soviet or even American occupation for their gender equality goals. This also raises the question of whether more women in the uniformed forces is desirable for security, given that it privileges hardcore masculine values that are socially constructed instead of the femine equivalents of compromise and negotiation. “If we’re talking about feminising security, let us ask ourselves if the expansion of the military into more social groups — the militarisation of women — is going to make for greater or lesser security,” she concludes. It’s plenty to deliberate on.
Watch the full talk on YouTube channel: GRIT Prajnya
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September 14, 2021 at 08:12AM
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