crossing boundaries and limits

Areas of peace building and protest are usually viewed as occupying separate and discrete worlds. Yet women’s movements in South Asia, beginning in the 1980s but more markedly in the 1990s, increasingly intertwined as scholars and activists built synergy and cross-border solidarity.

Feminist icon Kamala Bhasin, who passed away in September, made significant contributions to the sect. She invested her unique creative energy toward transcending borders and boundaries, a past monoculture of the mind that reinforces conservatism, mistrust and militarism, and the cartographic concerns of nation states.

Bhasin famously said, “I am not a khadi wall on the border, I am a crack lying on that wall [I am not the wall that stands at the border, I am the crack in that wall]”. It captured the spirit with which women “solvers” in South Asia struggle, often facing stiff opposition, to join forces and mobilize the fault lines of country, race, religion, class and gender. Bricktailed around the siege of territoriality.

The recognition that women across South Asia face a continuum of violence – both structural and direct – when they face the patriarchy of family, community and the state, and the “complexities between them”, free from national identity. Network.

Bhasin’s book with Ritu Menon, limits and limitsand Urvashi Butalia the other side of silenceBoth, published in the 1990s, were pioneers in their accounts of the pain, loss, displacement and violence that the Partition of India inflicted on women on both sides of the border and the parallels of their experiences. These works showed how community and even national respect was imprinted on the gendered nature of women’s bodies and citizenship. This started an exploration of what country, religious identity, or even nation, actually meant to women. It also opened up space for research and activism that questioned the “sanctity of borders”.

amazing experience

Multiple ethnographic fiction added to the repertoire, giving voice to the singular experiences of women in conflict situations in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan, enabling transversal engagements of civil society across South Asia around justice, rights issues did. Patriarchy, militarization and denuclearization.

Through periods of contrasting face-offs between different governments and their neighbors—particularly between India and Pakistan—feminists like Bhasin had to work hard to ensure that people-to-people contact and public diplomacy were practiced. One form nurtures constant dialogue and synergies. Whether they are based on the theoretical expression of “track two” (coined by Joseph V. Montville in 1981) or “multi-track diplomacy” is difficult to establish. In any case, this “diplomacy” defied Henry Wotton’s prescription of “lying abroad for his country”. It was clearly about speaking truth to power collectively.

women-led, initiatives such as the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) in Pakistan that reached out to their sisters in Bangladesh to apologize for the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military in 1971; Women’s Peace Bus launched in 2000 by the Women for Peace in South Asia Initiative (WIPSA) to demand a war-free and nuclear-free South Asia from Delhi to Lahore; Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) is bringing young South Asians together in workshops on conflict transformation; Women’s Regional Network (WRN) with its continuing anti-militarization and human rights campaigns; And Sangat persisted with the mission of expanding Constituencies for Peace, to name a few, with its innovative regional gender training conferences.

In recent decades, South Asia has been witness to collectivism of “disobedient women” who express peace and defy state-centred notions of security and order. They are in mother’s antics in Sri Lanka, in Didi Vahini in Nepal, in thappa force.malki or death [ownership or death]”Farmers struggle in Pakistan, and in India in the Chipko, Narmada, Bhopal and Kudankulam movements. Demonstrations like Mira Pabiso In Manipur (women with torches), women’s gatherings at Shaheen Bagh and farmers’ protests are also part of these traditions of discontent.

Drawing from the experience of activists like Bhasin of placing a woman “in the resistance”, these movements have largely entered the realm of peacebuilding through the corridors of human security – the voice of democracy and reclaiming citizenship. .

the origin of their engagement

Highlighting the tension between the security of the people and what often passes as national security, a culture of opposition to war and militarism has been at the core of their association, often leading to tensions between national security and people’s security, livelihoods and The middle survives. Trust including food and water security. The need to link peace and security issues with development is also in the foreground to address the structural causes of violent conflict.

Feminist scholars have often made connections between formal security discourse and certain types of supremacist masculinity, and how policy priorities and (technological) strategic discourse are skewed to preserve power hierarchies within the national, international system, and world economic system. is done. To them, the “rational” calculation of power, which is characteristic of international de facto politics, cannot be “liberated” for the service of peace.

Women’s movements have questioned the traditional peace metaphor of the figure in white, passively sacred or completely passive. Waging conflict nonviolently, violating established notions of security, in their daily resistance to injustice and in oppressive socio-political institutions to build structural peace, has been their clarion call.

The feminist “weapons” they bring to their engagement mix masochistic, festive and demonstrative. Bhasin himself, with his exceptional communication skills, attracted large numbers of young enthusiasts, “deploying” slogans and art, music and humor, echoing his brief, accessible primers on gender, patriarchy and peace in groups. feminist concepts, unpacking the most complex.

At the core of dissent and non-violent activism, this peace practice, which links the personal to the political, often uses spectacular forms of protest and excludes children’s toys, diapers, rolling pins, clothing, veils and sometimes from the private sphere of women. Also brings in everyday artifacts. Bodies of women in public place, as Mahatma Gandhi did with Khadi and salt. These forms of protest draw fundamentally from the collective global glimpse of feminist activism spearheaded by forefathers around the world.

Feminist peace activists today believe that finding common ground involves accepting differences while building on similarities. Women’s experiences of conflict and violence are mediated by their “place” and the interrelationship of race, class, region, religion and gender. Even when women “speak” in the language of inclusion and connectedness, they are not a homogeneous category, with an identity that supersedes all other affiliations. This is a special challenge in mobilizing for peace. Bhasin’s talent lies in his ability to work beyond these various fault lines and build diverse coalitions and communities of practice – from grassroots activists to minorities, men and boys, Dalits, academics, students and international networks. His signature tune,”freedom [freedom]”, also called the “other walls” – psychological barriers of doubt, fear, deceit, and above all an “other” that can only be countered by “stepping in the shoes of the presumed other” – reaching those from whom You fear the most dismissive stereotypes to touch the heart of complexity.

Since the mid-1980s, South Asian women activists have sought to “generate” peace by drawing large numbers from even “hostile” neighborhoods to safe “disarmed”, sympathetic places of faith. aikido. With friendship and community to anchor and resilience, he chose to “sweat in peace rather than bleed in war”.

This was long before the landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000, which set the global standard template for the Women’s Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. This was even before the adoption of feminist diplomacy by Scandinavian countries and the invocation of the Hillary Clinton doctrine that women’s rights and violence against women were considered issues of national security.

Did South Asian feminist peace activism offer the critical ideological alphabet for the international template on positive peace (peace with justice) as an inclusive public process, and not simply “brokered” into closed negotiations by men? The story of his seminal contribution to the WPS discourse needs to be further clarified.

People’s Peace is a continuous work-in-progress, which is verified and tested each day. It also invites civil society to continuously reinvent the song of democracy.

Nurturing a South Asian identity was Bhasin’s labor of love. With love, he tried to inscribe it in the lives of others. And he did it, as we all should, with “passion, compassion, humor and style.”

Meenakshi Gopinath, Chairperson, Center for Policy Research (CPR) and Director of Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP), New Delhi.