Narratives and Transformative Dialogue of Feminist Peacebuilding: A Strategy of Persuasion

And Teaching

Hal S. Bertilson and Suzanne C. Griffith

University of Wisconsin-Superior

Paper presented at the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Edgewood College, Madison, November 4, 2006

My coauthor, Suzanne Griffith, could not be here with us today. Her responsibilities with the graduate Counseling and Psychological Services Department at UW-Superior precluded her from being with us. She and I have presented a series of papers and articles on the effects of poverty on women. Those papers have served as one of the theoretical threads leading to this paper. She and I have also stood with Women in Black at our weekly peace vigils in Duluth, have worked with Loaves and Fishes with their protests against the use of our local Air National Guard in its war mission, and other peace actions.

I have been thinking a lot recently about our culture. When we had a series of shootings in schools in early October, two local TV stations interviewed me about the causes of school violence. Shortly, thereafter, I gave a universitywide address on the psychology of terrorism. And since last July I have been working with our student Amnesty International group, and our Duluth-Superior Amnesty International Group #642 (Northland Chapter of Amnesty International) in actions to oppose the death penalty. All the while, what is nagging at me is our culture of punitiveness and violence.

I have been reading and discussing such books as Michael Lerner's (2006) The Left Hand of God, a book titled Collateral Damage: The Psychological Consequences of America's War on Terrorism published this year by my colleagues in APA's Division of Peace Psychology (Kimmel & Stout, 2006), articles in the Journal of Social Issues, and a host of other resources that leads me to feel that the most effective action might be what we can do to change our culture. While psychology as a discipline has moved toward a greater appreciation of culture in human thought and behavior, it was Rabbi Lerner that made the case most effectively for me. My daughter, who is the Unitarian Minister in Lansing Michigan (uulansing.org), attended Rabbi Lerner's meeting of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (spiritual progressives.org) last summer in Washington, D.C. and I will be attending the Midwest meeting of the Network of Spiritual Progressives in Minneapolis in two weeks. Lerner argues that for much of the past thirty years Democrats have been more interested in showing how similar they are to the Right than how different. The Democratic Party and much of the liberal and progressives of the world have contented themselves with mild reforms, with tinkering with narrow policy goals. The importance of changing our culture was reinforced for me again by the many points and examples in Anna Baltzer's (November 3, 2006; 2006) keynote address last night. Mild reform will be inadequate to the task of creating a free and critical press, as evidence by her example in Newsweek of selective and biased news reporting.

What is desperately needed instead is a transformation of society and that transformative vision emerges from a spiritual foundation. The thesis that Suzanne and I offer today is that we must work to change the master narratives of our culture. One of the most effective ways is to tell stories of peace, community, caring, and resistance through stories.

Peace has long been an interest of psychologists. William James, a founder of psychology in the United States during the 1890s, is regarded as the first peace psychologist (Deutsch, 1995). Just prior to World War I, he cautioned against the militaristic urges of nationalism. Today, peace is addressed by a wide range of psychological organizations including The Psychological Study of Social Issues (Division 9 of APA), Peace Psychology (Division 48), and Psychologists for Social Responsibility who advise APA, disseminate policy papers, research peace issues, and encourage teaching peacemaking and peacebuilding.

Peace psychology seeks to develop theories and practices aimed at the prevention and mitigation of direct and structural violence. Direct violence refers to violence directed specifically against persons such as in murder, genocide, terrorism, and war. Structural violence is a type of violence built into the fabric of political and economic structures of society, such as scarcities in food, inadequate health care, contaminated water and related consequences of oppression, dominance, and exploitation (Christie, Wagner, & Winter, 2001).

Peace psychology has a further goal aimed at peacemaking and peacebuilding. Peacemaking refers to conflict resolution. Peacebuilding refers to the pursuit of social justice. Peacebuilding addresses systems that oppress people, exploits people, and dominates them. The goals of peacebuilding are reached through the transformation of cultural narratives or beliefs that justify such systems (Christie, et. al). The purpose of our paper is to discuss how to promote peace by using our knowledge of feminist peacebuilding and in so doing to transform these cultural narratives. The "People-to-people Solidarity" session (Bradshaw, Olson, et. al, 2006) this morning at 11:00 AM was a good example of transformation from peacekeeping to peacebuilding.

In Duluth, Minnesota in1992 there were twelve murders related to domestic violence. At that time Frank Jewell was serving as Violence Prevention Coordinator for St. Louis County, the county that serves Duluth and outlying regions. As a consequence of these murders Frank was attending a lot of meetings and found that he was often the only male in those meetings. Occasionally, a male with official duty was in attendance, but no "ordinary citizen" males were in attendance. This experience was consistent, time and again. It was women doing the prevention and mitigation of violence (Personal Communication, March 16, 2006).

In fact many of the values of feminism are precisely the values that motivates peacemaking and peacebuilding. Feminists emphasize the importance of diversities such as those based on race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexual orientation, age, and physical ability. Feminists are interested in how gender is constructed by different societies and at different times in history. By "social construction" is meant how the different cultural and situational contexts constrain the opportunities and roles women may have. Power is of central interest to feminists because the psychology of women cannot be understood without considering women's relative position in the power hierarchy. The global status of women is of importance. No longer is it possible to consider issues such as violence against women in the limited context of our own country. The global economy and political interests of nations affect the ways women and familes are treated. Feminism is open about its values. It understands that every phase of the research process and social justice work is influenced by values. Feminism values collective action of feminists to create social change. (Chrisler, Golden, & Rozee, 2004).

When using the term feminist, of course, we mean our political, academic, and spiritual values. We do not mean sex or gender. Feminist women and men who approach peacemaking or peacebuilding differ from women and men who are not feminists in their approaches to peace.

Women have long been integrally involved in peacemaking and peacebuilding. One of the best sources of the history of the U.S. movement for world peace and women's rights is Harriet Hyman Alonso's Peace as a Women's issue published in 1993. From other sources, Abigail Stewart (1999), for example, we learn how white women were involved in the civil rights movement—women engaged in a political struggle to end racial oppression—a structure that did not oppress white women, but actually benefited them. She continues with the story of one woman, Noma Genne' who in the early 1940s became the only white person on the NAACP staff. She was appointed to the position of educational field secretary and was given the responsibility to devising an educational program for the schools. She discovered an intercultural education program in the Springfield, Massachusetts schools and, along with Roy Wilkins, set off to encourage cities, school systems, and individual teachers in the north to adopt this program.

In another story, the story of Mai reveals the life of a woman who transformed herself into an activist. She came to this country from Laos at the age of 7 and persisted in education over the objections of her family and community. She met professors who were activists and learned to speak up in class. As the result of her college experience she established the first Hmong organization on that campus and developed a tutoring program to raise the educational achievement of Hmong adolescents. Over the objections of her family she attended an international conference on asylum seekers in Washington, D.C. and attended a language institute where she could improve her spoken fluency in Hmong. As a consequence she became an activist for the Hmong community. The master narrative and homogenizing myth of the "model minority"—quiet, hardworking, and passive—was countered in this narrative by her growth into a social activist (Xiong & Tatum, 1999).

Women work at the grassroots level to provide psychosocial processes such as healing, reconciliation, and cooperation. Such grassroots work contributes to a comprehensive process of peacebuilding not accomplished by the traditionally used hierarchical power relationships. The work of peacebuilding requires that local people seek solution in their communities and nations rather than imposing their approaches from outside, a local approach that comes easily to women. Women, especially feminist women, emphasize the centrality of basic human needs such as food, shelter and safety, far more than governmental organizations, NGOs, and the United Nations usually do.

Some of the many examples of feminist peacebuilding offered by McKay & Mazurana (2001) in their chapter on gendering peacebuilding in a text I use in teaching Peace Psychology include Hanan Ashwari of Palestine who has been a leading spokeswoman for brokering peace in the Middle East and Monica McWilliams who founded the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition. Other examples include Women in Black in Belgrade who demanded accountability to end violence, protesting when no other groups dared. The Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace was made up of women from the warring factions in North and South seeking solutions to end violence. The Mali, East Africa Women's Movement for Securing Peace and National Unity organized meetings of military officers, high level politicians, and diplomats which eventually led to the National Pact to stop the war. Search for a Common Ground, a women's peace organization in Burundi, Africa, organized weekly visits of Hutu and Tutsi women to reduce ethnic conflict, encourage reconciliation, and prepare conflict resolution trainers. Women's peace groups in Algeria, Chile, and the Philippines have asked for the voluntary dumping of war toys. Women in the Russian Federation and Chechenya have organized a Committee of Soldiers' Mothers to hide and resist conscription into the military of their sons. The Burmese Women's Union was formed in 1995 to promote women's voices in politics, increase the recognition and practice of women's human rights. The Centre for Strategic Initiative for Women has extended its human rights emphasis to include women's leadership roles in peacebuilding. Jerusalem Link is an NGO consisting of Israeli and Palestinian women who work for peace at the grassroots level. And there is the International Women's Peace Service, the International Solidarity Movement and so many more. What if we could encourage all of our friends and neighbors to become active in one of these organizations?

Ms. Magazine's Summer 2006 issue highlighted the Nobel Women's Initiative. Five Nobel Prize winners formed the initiative in April 2006 and called for a meeting of American and Iranian NGO leaders—all women—in Vienna. The meeting was held in June and set forth a plan for international pressure to help convince U.S. and Iranian governments that negotiation and compromise are better alternatives than war. The five members of the Nobel Women's Initiative are Jody Wiliams from the U.S. who organized the international treaty to ban land mines, Shirin Ebadi an Iranian lawyer and advocate for women's and children's rights, Betty Williams cofounder of the Northern Ireland peace movements, Wangari Maathai the Kenyan activist for environment, peace and democracy, and Rigoberta Menchu' Tum an advocate for indigenous people's rights in Guatemala. Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest in Burma and Mariread Corrigan of Nothern Ireland is not active with the other laureates (Burstyn, Summer 2006).

The most compelling example I can think of for the point Suzanne and I are making is the address we heard last night by Anna Baltzer. The brief review of some feminist peacemaking and peacebuilding actions I have just shared with you give voice to breadth and diversity of actions. Anna Baltzer's presentation gives voice to the persuasiveness and compellingness of one such story. I have her book and DVD so that I may share it my students in the courses I teach—especially two—Peace Psychology and Interpersonal, Community, and global Violence.

Anna Baltzer's five months in the West Bank had two purposes: (a) Document abuses in the region and (b) Support nonviolent resistance to the occupation. In such a vivid and compelling story, she clearly accomplished her goal. What's more we now can share her story with others—our students, our friends, our clubs, our churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples.

Women's peacebuilding is culturally and contextually based and usually located at community and regional levels where violent transgressions occur. Women's peacebuilding conceives peace as process, addresses basic needs such as food and shelter, identifies the importance of communication skills across multiple ethnic and language communities, and emphasizes preventing violence toward women. Such emphases in all of these areas is desperately needed and yet lacking in traditional approaches (de la Rey & McKay, 2006). Furthermore, examples of feminist peacebuilding are not well known (McKay & Mazurana, 2001).

We argue that, through a process of hearing stories about feminist peacebulding along with questions that challenge traditional assumptions, a transformation of thinking about peacebuilding can occur. As Romero and Stewart note, we compare our lives to stories that we know. The stories we know are often "master narratives' from the dominant culture. In the present case, the master narratives are to solve violence by more violence or, if peacebuilding, through negotiation at the highest levels of government.

The peacebuilding stories we present are counternarratives. Counternarratives are a direct challenge to master narratives and reveal new ways of understanding conflict, racism, homelessness, heterosexism, classism, and sexism and are thus the crucial work of social transformation. Each of the sessions I attended this morning at the twenty-second meeting of The Wisconsin Institute for Peace and conflict Studies—Erica Bouris (November 4, 2006) "Prospects for Peace in the Middle East: Supporting Alternative Voices," Jay Hatheway (November 4, 2006 "US foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond: An ideological nightmare," and Geoff Bradshaw, Barb Olson et al. (November 4, 2006) "People-to-people solidarity: Building a more peaceful world."

Sharon Welch (2000), professor of religious studies and feminism at the University of Missouri, argues that such critical engagement will be fostered through transformative dialogue. We have used the stories of the lives of women living in poverty as transformative dialogue to heighten the awareness and understanding among our students of the effects of poverty and how varied and individualized are the causes and situations (Bertilson & Griffith, 2002). Through these stories we elicit identification of the "concrete other" in a moral dialogue. Our data shows that our students have a heightened awareness and understanding of the complexity of poverty as a result of this work.

There is a history of systematic scholarship in psychology that shows the effects of stories on values and behaviors. In The Achieving Society, for example, David McClelland shows the relationship between concern for achievement in imaginative literature--folk stories and children's stories-- and subsequent economic development (McClelland, 1961). Narrative Psychology, a field of using stories of critical incidents, to illuminate our understanding of psychological process is on the resurgence. As Dan McAdams (2006) points out, beginning in late adolescence, we begin to reconstruct the past and imagine the future.

Such effects are hardly surprising. "The communications researcher George Gerbner once observed that human beings are unique because they are the only animals that tell stories—and live by the stories they tell" (Wade & Tavris, 2006, p. 377). The narratives we compose to make sense of our lives have a profound influence on our plans, memories, love affairs, hatreds, ambitions, dreams, and, we argue, who we rely on to make peace or war. Stories have additional advantages in that they cause us to pay attention and gives meaning to the events, two well established factors in strengthening memory and retrieval of memory (Wade & Tavris).

Similarly, the stories of feminist peacebuilders can increase the awareness of their efforts and the benefits of the feminist approach. The telling of stories captures the complexities of human emotions and thoughts and provide the authenticity of experience (Takaki, 1993). Such stories are recognized by scholars as a means to mobilize action (e.g., Romero & Stewart, 1999). A public that becomes aware of nonviolent peacebuilding may be fundamentally challenged to try means other than violence and threat of violence to create peace (Welch, 2000). Feminist peacebuilding is such an alternative means.

In this paper we pose questions intended to provoke people to understand peacebulding in new ways that uncover the benefits of feminist peacebuilding methods. Questions we pose about grassroots feminist peacebuilding will begin this transformative dialogue.

1. What from last night's keynote address did you find most compelling?

a. The map of the Israeli only highways winding through the occupied territory

b. The checkpoints

c. The wall

d. The women her lost her twin premature babies

e. The $20,000 payments for settlers to "colonize"

f. The $3 billion to $10 billion from U.S. taxpayers to support the colonizing of Israel

g. Hegemonic control of the press illustrated by the Newsweek case

2. What are your present "peacemaking" narratives? Would you share them with us?

3. What model do your "peacemaking" narratives follow?

4. How can we build more feminist peacebuilding narratives?

5. Can we do this before we have transformed our own stories?

6. What are the core differences between these narratives?

7. With masculine hegemonic narratives so deeply ingrained in the national psyche, is it even possible to raise alternative feminist peacebuilding narratives here?

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