The Politics of Peacebuilding in a Diverse World

Difference Exposed

Xavier Mathieu, Pol Bargués-Pedreny, Xavier Mathieu, Pol Bargués-Pedreny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367209742
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book challenges the understanding of 'difference' in the field of peacebuilding and offers new ways to consider diversity in the context of international interventions.

International peacebuilding as a practice and academic field has always been embroiled in the 'problem' of difference. For mainstream scholars and policy-makers, local views, histories, and cultural codes are often seen as an obstacle on the way to peace. For critical scholars, international interventions have failed because of the very superficial attention given to the needs, values, and experience of the people in post-conflict societies. Yet the current proposals of hybrid peace and emancipation seem to reproduce Eurocentric lenses and problematic binaries. Differently inspired by feminist, post-structuralist, and new materialist perspectives, the authors assembled in this volume give sustained attention to the theorisation and practice of difference. Taken together, these contributions show that differences are always multidimensional, non-essential, and are reflections of broader power and gender inequalities.

This book thus makes a major contribution to the field of critical peacebuilding by revisiting the 'problem' of difference.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Embodying Difference: Reading Gender in Women’s Memoirs of Humanitarianism

Róisín Read

ABSTRACT
This article explores embodied difference in humanitarianism and peacebuilding by treating women’s memoirs as a form of ‘flesh witnessing’. It argues that the essays in the anthology Chasing Misery are claims to the authority of ‘The Field’ that also reveal the women’s feelings of only ‘passing’ as aid workers. Three distinct themes are noted: the construction of The Field as a site of embodied authority and the ways in which the essays reinforce and trouble this; the writers feeling different, and separate, from those they work with/for; and the embodied gender presented with reference to imagined ‘real’ aid workers.

Introduction

Humanity has long been cited as humanitarians’ main constituency, yet – despite the obviously gendered nature of the humanity being discussed – the humanitarian sector (including academics) has been slow to make gender a central category of analysis. Gender has been a central aspect of humanitarian programming without key questions being asked about how gendered power relations shape the sector more broadly. As Miriam Ticktin notes, humanitarian discussions of humanity raise a central paradox of feminism in which ‘one must emphasise one’s difference (as women) in order to claim one’s sameness (as equal human beings)’ (Ticktin 2011, 250). This manifests in relation to ‘debates about whether to include women as equal subjects/objects of humanitarian aid … or whether to single them out as different in order for them to receive critical attention and care’ (250). Gender is a key category of difference in humanitarianism and peacebuilding, yet there is a tendency to overlook it in favour of discussions on the differences between the local and the international (for exceptions, see McLeod 2015; Partis-Jennings 2017; Martin de Almagro, 2018). In this article, I seek to explore embodied accounts of difference in humanitarianism by considering Chasing Misery, an anthology of essays by female aid workers (Hoppe 2014a). I propose that we can learn about practices of humanitarianism and peacebuilding by taking these accounts seriously, not as objective truth but as examples of ‘flesh witnessing’ (Harari 2009).

As Duncanson (2013, 57) notes in relation to soldiers, there is something ‘particularly revealing about identity’ in memoirs, as they are telling ‘their story as they want to tell it’. They can tell us about ‘which embodied experiences become important’, or, more simply, ‘whose bodies count’ (Dyvik 2016a, 59). However, such accounts are not just revealing in terms of personal identity but also collective identity, as these memoirs shape and are shaped by broader social imaginaries – following Lennon (2015, 1), the ‘affectively laden patterns/images/forms, by means of which we experience the world, other people and ourselves’ – which affect not only how aid workers and the wider public think about humanitarian aid, but also how they think about the spaces in which humanitarian aid is deployed and the people who receive it.

Humanitarians, especially in conflict-affected areas, increasingly serve as sources of information about the areas they work in and the people they work with; as such, it is important to critically interrogate their experiences and knowledge. The ways in which female aid workers narrate their experiences of the spaces of humanitarianism offer an important contribution to the construction and maintenance of a distinctly humanitarian social imaginary, which highlights the complex and intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, class, nationality, and age that are deeply embedded in humanitarian practices. The 24 essays in the Chasing Misery collection (Hoppe 2014a) frequently collapse public–private and work–life binaries in different ways.¹ They address complex, emotional, and fundamentally sensorial experiences, often viscerally. Difference appears in the stories, in relation to colleagues, recipients of aid, parties to conflict, and friends and family ‘back home’, but it is always embodied – and this embodiment matters, as there is always ‘a tension between women’s lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body that always mediate those experiences’ (Conboy, Medina, and Stanbury 1997, 1).

In order to explore this tension, I read these stories through a double lens of ‘flesh witnessing’ and ‘passing’.² In doing so, I address ‘difference’ in peacebuilding and humanitarianism as a gendered relation of power, highlighting three ways in which the existing norms that define what it means to be an aid worker produce the women as different, such that they ‘have to pass as what [they] are assumed not to be’ (Ahmed 2017, 115). As such, women must perform their identity – i.e. try to pass – as aid workers because the legitimacy of their claim to this identity is in question (120). In drawing attention to the ways in which these identities are performed, it is possible to see how the norms which establish difference are both reinforced and contested. I begin this article by arguing that women’s narratives of their experiences are claims to the authority of ‘The Field’. Following this, I highlight the ways in which the writers produce themselves as different, and separate, from both the populations they are there to assist and their own communities ‘back home’. Finally, I show how the essays also reveal that many of the women experience a sense of ‘being inadequate to the identity’ of aid worker (Ahmed 1999, 96). In taking the essays of female aid workers as a starting point, I hope to highlight the ways in which difference is always embodied and is imbued with meanings, regardless of the degree to which there is conscious awareness of these meanings. Before outlining the approach I take to reading the women’s essays, the next section briefly introduces the anthology under examination.

Chasing Misery

Published in 2014, Chasing Misery: An Anthology of Essays by Women in Humanitarian Responses is edited by a team, whose lead editor Kelsey Hoppe is an aid worker with both humanitarian and development experience in a range of countries. She states on the book’s website that she developed the idea for the anthology ‘as a way to give a platform to women’s perspectives and voices in the work they do as well as to help people better understand what humanitarian aid is’.³ The anthology contains 24 essays written by 21 different women⁴ from a variety of different backgrounds⁵ who have worked in humanitarianism in different roles and capacities.

The editor, Kelsey Hoppe, is explicit in her belief that women have distinct insights to offer: ‘women’s voices, perspectives and narratives on aid work are unique and deserve their own space’, in part because of their ability ‘to explore the greys, the “inbetweenness”, to reflect on the questions about being human’ (Hoppe 2014d, 12). The book starts from the assumption that women have a different perspective on the world – presumably, different from that of men. Feminism has long been interested in situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), and the book poses interesting questions about the liminality of women in humanitarianism and peacebuilding (for more on the liminality of women in peacebuilding, see Partis-Jennings 2017, 418). For endeavours which claim gender as a central policy and programming expertise, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the ways in which their everyday humanitarian practices are gendered – and given the feminist underpinnings of the ‘local’ and ‘experiential’ turns, this oversight seems even more stark.

Difference, embodiment and passing

Feminist approaches to international relations have, in recent years, highlighted the need for bodies to be brought inside ‘the frame of international relations’ (Wilcox 2015). This literature has tended to focus on the ways in which war needs to be understood as an embodied experience by ‘centralizing people’s experiences’ (Dyvik 2016a, 56). I argue that extending this lens to peacebuilding and humanitarianism is a key move, as these activities are deeply embedded in conflict and, thus, are a key site of investigation for more fully understanding the lived experiences of conflicts and their aftermaths. There has in recent years been an experiential turn in the study of peacebuilding; however, much of this literature leaves the feminist origins of the move to the ‘everyday’ implicit, and the analyses remain at the abstract level rather than presenting specific lived experiences which engender embodied analysis – although the work of Laura McLeod, Hannah Partis-Jennings, and Maria Martin de Almagro are exceptions (McLeod 2015; Partis-Jennings 2017; Martin de Almagro 2017, 2018). As Christine Sylvester notes, our experiences of war – and I would argue interventions in war – are ‘experienced through the body’, so we must look at the body as a unit of analysis (Sylvester 2013, 5). International aid workers in conflict settings have interesting and distinct experiences of war; they occupy a strange liminal position – in the conflict but ostensibly not part of it, at risk but also protected from violence. The lived experiences of these tensions can perhaps offer us insights into the broader dynamics of conflict and the interventions which seek to end or ameliorate it.

Just as Duncanson (2009), Welland (2015), and Dyvik (2016a, 2016b) have looked to military memoirs to study the gendered performances at the heart of recent and contemporary conflicts, I argue that humanitarian memoirs can help us to explore the embodied racialized and gendered experiences of aid in conflict. I do not however suggest that these memoirs can be seen unproblematically as ‘true accounts’; rather, following Duncanson (2013, 57), I believe that there is ‘something particularly revealing about identity’ in people’s personal narratives, which tell ‘their story as they want to tell it’. There seems to be a pervasive belief that there is something about being in these conflict spaces that is impossible to convey to those who have not lived it: ‘it is experienced by those who practice it as a bracketed space, one in which only a few have access to, at once a manifestation of life at its most real and its direct counterpart’ (Dyvik, 2016a, 57). Yet, paradoxically, it is an elusive or illusory endeavour, as the ‘reality’ of the experience can never be fully articulated.

As Catherine Baker suggests, writing about embodiment is necessarily an act of both compression and translation, ‘reducing the sensory complexity of someone else’s physical experience, or even one’s own, into written language that someone else will understand through sight or sound’ (Baker 2016, 120). Yuval Noah Harari offers a way of thinking about this problematic through the notion of ‘flesh witnessing’, a phrase drawn from the observation of a French soldier from the First World War that one ‘who has not understood with his flesh cannot talk to you about it [the experience of war]’ (quoted in Harari 2009, 215).

This notion of flesh witnessing is especially intriguing in thinking about the humanitarian field, as the idea of ‘witnessing’ and ‘speaking out’ has a controversial history in humanitarian aid interventions (e.g. Givoni 2011). In contrasting flesh witnessing with eye witnessing, Harari (2009) notes the different kind of authority associated with each. With eye witnessing, authority comes from the notion that you can observe ‘facts’ that can be verified, which relies on the mastery of a field of information that humanitarians rarely have more than partial access to. Flesh witnessing, on the other hand, offers a more ‘novel authority … which is based not on the observation of facts but on having undergone personal experience’ (Harari 2009, 217). Harari notes that flesh witness accounts seem to be interested in conveying experiences, but because they do not believe that these experiences can be conveyed to those who have not shared them, ‘by definition, they cannot succeed in this’ (221). Instead, ‘flesh witness narratives are mainly an exercise in authority’ (222). As (Dyvik 2016a, 58) notes of military memoirs, they seem to convey the notion that ‘you don’t know what it’s like’ even while still attempting to explain – and as such, what they establish is their authority as a witness.

Humanitarian memoirs are not only important for what they reveal about specific humanitarian experiences but also for how they frame a broader social imaginary of what humanitarianism is. As Dyvik (2016a, 58) notes, military memoirs are more than individual stories: ‘these texts participate in the writing of war. They help frame what we think war is’. Similarly, humanitarian memoirs participate in the writing of humanitarianism and help frame what we think humanitarianism is. At the beginning of the 2000s, David Rieff critiqued the portrayal of humanitarianism which relies on a ‘familiar morality play of victims in need and aid workers who stand ready to help if their passage can be secured and their safety maintained’ (Rieff 2002, 87). This remains a common (and deeply gendered) trope in humanitarian imagery.

Michel Agier notes: ‘[t]he humanitarian world is based upon the fiction of humanity as an identity’ (Agier 2010, 32). This identity draws legitimacy from a mythologized humanitarian history and legacy in which ‘humanitarian exceptionalism’ is entrenched in a particular reading of international humanitarian law (Fast 2014). However, as Ticktin (2011) notes in relation to humanitarian efforts to address sexual violence, the ‘human’ upon which humanitarians have built their identity is gendered and racialized. She argues that the expansion of the humanitarian mission to include gender-based violence ‘has inadvertently opened up space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality’ (Ticktin 2011, 262). I argue that humanitarian memoirs, as a form of ‘flesh witnessing’ (Harari 2009), offer an interesting way of thinking about difference as embodied.

When difference appears in discussions on peacebuilding, the most common difference cited is between the local and the international, as Lisa Smirl explores in relation to liminality in humanitarian memoirs (Smirl 2012). This binary is so embedded within the peacebuilding literature that a subfield of literature has emerged to explore how it can be broken down through notions of hybridity (e.g. Mac Ginty 2010; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2015). Concurrently, in discussions of aid worker security particularly, there is recognition of the existence of a ‘humanitarian exceptionalism’ (Fast 2014) whereby the ‘expat’ aid worker’s status is rendered as something distinct from military or civilian, reinforced by their distinct security practices (Duffield 2010). The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has sought to challenge the dominance of international knowledge both in the academic literature and in practice, yet in doing so has reinforced the distinction between local and international (Randazzo 2016).

As Bargués-Pedreny and Mathieu note, within this hybridity literature

differences are reified and essentialized as inescapable, but also, and perhaps more importantly, difference is linked to stigma (as a deviance from the ‘norm’ that is reproduced by the frames used to identify it) … emphasizing difference (even as something to be celebrated, a space to cultivate bottom-up peace initiatives) does not remove the stigma attached to it insofar as the ‘norm’ is neither questioned nor displaced. (Bargués-Pedreny and Mathieu, 2018, 289)

Turning to a different reading of hybridity, Sara Ahmed talks of hybridization in the context of racial identity, as a rejection of the notion that two racial identities ‘can be distinguishable in space and time: hybridisation as the very temporality of passing through and betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding
• 1. Embodying Difference: Reading Gender in Women’s Memoirs of Humanitarianism
• 2. Hybrid Clubs: A Feminist Approach to Peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• 3. Peace-in-Difference: A Phenomenological Approach to Peace Through Difference
• 4. Relational and Essential: Theorizing Difference for Peacebuilding
• 5. The Politics of Difference in Transitional Justice: Genocide and the Construction of Victimhood at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
• 6. Governing Conflict: The Politics of Scaling Difference
• 7. Old Slogans Ringing Hollow? The Legacy of Social Engineering, Statebuilding and the ‘Dilemma of Difference’ in (Post-) Soviet Kyrgyzstan
• 8. Beyond Relationalism in Peacebuilding
• Index