Women War And Peace

This book describes the author's findings of the effects of conflict on women and of their achievements in working towards peace and reconciliation. Based on extensive interviews with staff of women's organizations, the media, religious organizations and those directly involved in armed conflict and peace processes. system on steps to increase protection for women and support their inclusion in peace negotiations and reconstruction.

As warriors, freedom fighters and victims, as mothers, wives and prostitutes, and as creators and members of peace movements, women are inevitably caught up in the net of war. Yet women's participation in warfare and peace campaigns has often been underestimated or ignored. Images of Women in Peace and War explores women's relationships to war, peace, and revolution, from the Amazons, Inka and Boadicea, to women soldiers in South Africa, Mau Mau freedom fighters and the protestors at Greenham Common. The contributors consider not only the reality of women's participation but also look at how their actions have been perceived and represented across cultures and through history. They examine how sexual imagery is constructed, how it is used to delineate women's relation to warfare and how these images have sometimes been subverted in order to challenge the status quo. The book raises important questions about whether women have a special prerogative to promote peace and considers whether the experience of motherhood leads to a distinctive women's position on war. The authors find that their analyses lead them to deal with arguments on the basic nature of the sexes and to reevaluate our concepts of "peace," "war," and "gender."

In consideration of UN Resolution 1325 (which called for women's equal participation in promoting peace and security and for greater efforts to protect women exposed to violence during and after conflict), this volume takes stock of the current state of knowledge on women, peace and security issues, including efforts to increase women's participation in post-conflict reconstruction strategies and their protection from wartime sexual violence.

From the John Holmes Library collection.

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Women, War and Peace in South Asia examines the many different experiences women have of conflict in this region. Rita Manchanda shifts the focus away from the victimhood discourse (such as The Grieving Mother) and explores women's agency for both peace and conflict. The book is structured around six narratives of women negotiating violent politics in their everyday lives.

Popular images of post-war women represent them welcoming home the soldiers, but this volume asks, "What happened next?"The contributors use a range of methodological approaches to encourage the reader to question traditional historiography, the nature of the historical evidence, the process of memory, and the disparities between official discourse and personal narrative, and between written, visual and oral accounts.