Women, Peace and Security: Northern Ireland

WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY:
NORTHERN IRELAND

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"Women have been both peace makers and peace preventers and that the range of their attitudes and responses has been as wide and varied as that of men. This is not to claim that there are no differences between the experiences and reactions of men and women in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict. However, it does seem more reasonable to try to understand these differences as manifestations of the different historical, social, political and economic roles of women and men than as evidence of a general feminine orientation to peacemaking. Women's experiences over the last 25 years in Northern Ireland have produced a body of experience and a range of innovative responses which can provide the basis for the new approaches to community action, community politics and community reconciliation which will be vital if progress is to be made in the post ceasefire world. Women may not be peacemakers with a capital P in any simplistic sense but they have provided some of the vital tools which the whole society needs in order to build peace - it now remains to be seen how good women and men will be at using them."

"The conflict in Northern Ireland has been serious and bitter but the violence has been relatively confined. The figures, however, conceal the differential effects on particular subsections of the population. It has been pointed out that bereavement, for example, has not been shared equally. Some neighbourhoods, families and individuals suffered multiple and repeated losses. Women have been directly affected by the conflict as victims of violence, as bereaved relatives and friends and as the people who have often had to cope with direct and indirect effects of conflict on families and communities. There has been a tendency to use stereotypes of women and men in Northern Ireland. Women are seen as passive or innocent victims of violence, men as the perpetrators, women as peacemakers and conciliators, men as intransigent warmongers, women as pragmatic, problem-solving people keeping track of daily life and men as pursuers of impossible or irrelevant schemes. Recent research, however, has shown that women have not always been innocent, passive spectators, but have actively supported violent and sectarian organisations on both sides of the national divide. It is, nonetheless, fair to say that women have been at the fore in a kind of politics that has helped to limit the effects of the conflict on the fabric of society. This is a form of politics that has laid the foundations for a future in which the two major traditions learn to accommodate each other and to express differences without aggression."