Never confuse a clear path with a short distance. Daren Martin
The pendulum never swings one way. Audra Lambert
Everything seems simpler from a distance. Gail Tsukiyama
The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated. Elena Ferrante
I’m going to distance myself until the world is beautiful. Tao Lin
This has been an extraordinary if unsettling week for the world. From Algeria to Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, and from the insistence on good governance to calls for climate sanity, people in large numbers are taking to the streets to make their demands heard, their skepticism of governance and its structures tangible. The unmet needs, the denied aspirations, the betrayals and broken promises, all of this and more has pushed people into places of protest that they might never have imagined themselves occupying.
This is not to ascribe uniformity to their motives or deprivations. Political considerations may be driving much of the protest, but many protesters have also made personal commitments to a deeper engagement with the world they want, the world that is still possible, the world they were once promised by political elites and their cohorts. All of the personal stories that helped give form to the protests, all of the wounds and fears that must be accounted for by whatever structures and leadership will in the end emerge, all of this reflects longings for safe, healthy and prosperous spaces for which the protests themselves are merely the most visible expression.
The UN is not immune to the need for such intimate reminders. In this robustly political space, we seem perpetually in danger of privileging the distant and the categorical to the neglect of the immediate and personal. It is indeed our “occupational hazard” that the “political eye” with which we see the world is inclined to “essentialize” much of the reality we seek to legislate, creating categories out of personal narratives and imposing stereotypes on constituents and adversaries to combat stereotypes imposed on us by others. We work a bit too hard at times to keep our distance from people and problems in the hope that we can maintain sufficient “simplicity” and clarity to get our resolution-related work accomplished, to somehow convince ourselves that we can contribute to a more beautiful world from an intentionally remote location.
In the process, we have misplaced the truth that “distancing” represents positioning that must then be defended from alleged “attacks” by those who neither understand what we’re doing nor appreciate the essential “goodness” of the path we’ve chosen. One of the more toxic phrases in play at the UN these days – especially in the context of recent Women, Peace and Security (WPS) discussions – is the admonition to “pushback against the pushback.” There is truth in this, of course. The pendulum does indeed “swing both ways,” and some of the current “swinging” is clearly a mean-spirited, stubborn, misogynistic effort to restore privilege to its full masculine glory.
But the assumption that “pushback” is inevitably misguided and hostile is itself so. Such a posture presumes instead that we are invariably “on the right path,” that our causes and working methods are fully just and effective, that we are somehow avoiding the creation of new “rifts” under the guise of eliminating old ones, that we are not guilty of “patting ourselves on the back” for our attention to agendas that could well have been pushed much further, agendas that have been useful for political purposes but that have fallen far short of implementation seriousness, let alone of securing pathways to that still-elusive social and economic inclusiveness we repeatedly say we desire.
As already suggested, Women, Peace and Security was once again on the agenda of the UN Security Council this week, an agenda so popular among delegations (often more in rhetoric than performance) that the UK (November president) will be hosting another session tomorrow to accommodate all of the delegations still seeking to share views. Such enthusiasm is surely not without its complementary insight. This includes the important concerns expressed by FemWise-Africa and several delegations that so long as women’s voices are excluded from peace processes and negotiations there is the very real danger that, as in places like South Sudan and Central African Republic, women’s rights will be “bargained away” as a concession to armed groups who seek to maintain patriarchal structures or avoid accountability for abuses of sexual violence in conflict, and with whom the governments in question “need” to negotiate if a viable peace agreement is to be reached. Any such “bargaining” must be fully interrogated by diverse women participants and, as circumstances require, resolutely rejected.
Canada also made an interesting and welcome point regarding the need to “reach across silos,” to be more “intentional about inclusion,” and place additional burdens on the “excluders.” One is left to wonder, however, why after 19 years on the UN agenda, we haven’t seen more progress – on participation of course, but also on the willingness to tie the wholly-legitimate inclusion demands of women to other demands by persons (surely also including women) discriminated against by race, ethnic background or religion; persons marginalized by disability or disease; persons forced to flee their homes once farms have been scorched or water supplies have been rendered toxic; persons hanging by a thread from economic margins that are inexorably receding from contact.
We have long ago stopped expecting WPS debates to address this (“other”) inclusiveness with any regularity nor make references to discussions elsewhere in the UN (including the 3rd Committee discussion on racial discrimination going on at the same time) where other key lenses of inclusion and exclusion are in focus, lenses as critical to peace and security as any, lenses about which women also have a clear and compelling stake. That there is so little discussion in the long hours of WPS engagement regarding the multiple strands of exclusion that impede peace and security progress is discouraging at best, more it seems to us about branding the rifts than actually overcoming them.
This post is clearly not a referendum on the WPS agenda nor is it an indictment per se of its discourse. Indeed, we honor the multiple groups worldwide that have helped many thousands find their voice. But it is important for us to point out that there are also more nuanced “gendered” discussions happening elsewhere around the UN. For instance, my mostly-female interns are often excited by UNFPA discussions that smartly understand reproductive health and rights as gateways to the empowered choices of women and girls in many global regions. And they were also inspired this week by two events – one a well-deserved celebration of ten years of the office of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict and another focused on integrating “gender” into counter-terror activities and responses, especially its panel on “drivers of female radicalization.” Here, speakers (especially UNCTED’s Dier) cited the multiple incarnations of women’s associations with terror movements – including as victims and perpetrators of violence – and urged the audience to remove our “blind spots” regarding the diversity of women’s motivations and impacts. On that same panel, USIP’s Erdberg counseled the audience to resist overly-simplistic “tropes” that deny the complexity of women’s values and roles. And Interpeace’s Simpson warned against romanticizing young women and their peacebuilding roles, urging momentum instead towards more nuanced strategies (and complex and compelling stories) of empowerment.
In our power-obsessed policy frameworks that are often more about politics than personhood, this was refreshing sharing. Like the rest of us, women express a complex range of values, aspirations, needs and commitments. They travel along different paths, including on the quest for meaning and interpretations of the obstacles, abuses and opportunities they encounter. Their full inclusion suggests multiple positive (and even planet-saving) valuations – as is true for other inclusions – but there are no hard promises of such. As Angola noted this week, discrimination lies “deep in our mentalities where it is challenging to confront.” The path to full inclusion may be clear to us, but the road is frustratingly long: too long for us to navigate with a playbook full of essentialist certainties that substitute neat categories for multi-faceted persons.
The Chair of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted in 3rd Committee this week that “hatred is the true danger facing our world,” a hole both deep and seemingly spreading, spewing racism, sexism and other discriminatory and isolating energies like an active volcano. We must, he insisted, focus our attention and resolve on solutions to hatred not on denials of its still-potent force.
Most who participate in the women’s groups with which we are honored to be associated see that hole clearly. Their individual and collective responses represent a tapestry not a monolith. In our various spaces of cause and concern, it is this diversity that we must continually honor and that is best suited to fill the holes that still threaten us all.
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