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[home]>[programmes]>[women
peace movements]>strengthening Women
Regional Dialogues on Women Building Peace
'Strengthening Women Building Peace in South Asia’, Kathmandu,
June 25-28, 2001
What could women living in the ‘garrisoned’ Kashmir valley have in
common with women coming from a militarized situation of 50 years of a
‘self determination’ struggle in Nagaland? What could women living in
conflict polarized Sri Lanka have to share with women faced with fault
lines dividing once co-existing communities in Manipur? Indeed, could
the identity of women as a potential peace group produce an alternative
narrative to bridge the emerging conflict divide between Metei and Naga
or Kuki and Naga women? Could Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) and Kashmiri
Muslim women find a common language born of pain and grief to begin a
dialogue reaching beyond the blaming syndrome towards empathetic mutual
understanding? Could women forge a coalition on the basis of cross
cutting identities challenging polarised Sinhala-Tamil or Tamil-Muslim
ethnic constructs? That is, beyond their common identity as victims, do
these women have the potential to mobilize as a constituency for peace?
The Kathmandu regional workshop was organised to engage with these
questions.
It brought peace activists negotiating conflicts in Sri Lanka,
Kashmir and North East (India), to explore what they could learn from
each other. Could they learn to empathetically listen and talk to each
other across the conflict divide and to move beyond victimhood to
recognizing the need and value of mobilizing together for peace. It also
drew upon the resources of women activist scholars from New Delhi, Dhaka
and Lahore. The workshop benefited from the participation of some S E
Asian delegates of Harvard University’s Women Waging Peace network.
The Kathmandu workshop set itself the task
of a) mainstreaming gender in the peace process including reconstruction
and rehabilitation; b) heightening the profile of women’s peace activism
at the humanitarian and political level; c) empowering and safeguarding
the ambivalent gains in gender relations arising from conflict and d)
constructing gendered maps and developing a methodology of cartographic
representation by women of their experience of militarization of
civilian space and co-existence.
The workshop sought to strike a balance
between creating awareness and hands on practical strategies of
coalition building and mobilization. It explored the process of how
gender identities get constructed in national struggles, identities that
undermine women’s autonomy of being. The workshop affirmed the
importance of recognizing women’s activism as political and the need to
translate authority in the informal sphere into the formal sphere of
politics.
Gendered Mapping
The Kathmandu workshop experimented with an exercise in gendered mapping
of conflicts, urging the women individually and collectively to map or
spatially represent their lived experience. The mapping exercise like
women's testimonies seeks to validate women's particular experience and
reveal the gendered nature of that experience. It challenges the
dominant geo-political representation of conflict (parallel
to constructing women's histories of conflict which challenge the
dominant historical narrative) by constructing maps from the margins
- from women's perspectives. The methodology de-centres maps which are
drawn from a state centric perspective, that is, where knowledge tends
to be constructed from locations of political, economic and cultural
power and privilege. Instead, gendered maps privilege private topography
as opposed to public topography.
Women were invited to use their imagination
and in-depth understanding to represent their lived experience of
militarized civilian space. The activity was successful in providing an
alternative form of communication. Indeed, map-making afforded a
structure and a focus for women to dialogue that was seen as less
confrontational that the formal structure of participants around a table
proved at times to be. Each participant's (or group’s) map provided an
opportunity to represent an individualized (or group) perspective to the
participants. Grassroots activists tended to construct maps of their
conflict zones and their places within those conflicts, often drawing
themselves or their homes into the scenario. A juxtaposition of maps
representing the experience of women across conflict divided spaces,
produced new meanings and understandings of co-relations, similarities
and differences. See the SAFHR publication on the proceedings of the
Kathmandu workshop titled ‘Women Making Peace’ for examples of gendered
mapping.
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