More than 30 wars and armed conflicts are underway in the world : from Ukraine to Tigray, from Yemen to Mozambique, from Chad to Burma, from the Middle East to Nagorno-Karabakh... The question of peace in the world is all the more crucial today because it intersects with climate challenges and all the major economic, social and cultural issues.
Suffice to say that we cannot do without any voice, no thought, no idea, no initiative to work to resolve these conflicts; However, the place of women in peacebuilding is not yet a given. We take stock of this issue.
Women...
It is not uncommon to hear that if women have been sent back to the margins of history books (the famous Matilda Effect), it is because they did not participate in the wars and conquests that mark the chronology of... " Great men " ! But this is a historiographical error.
The latest research in paleontology allows us to think that women in prehistory had a very similar life to that of men, and that they were most likely hunters and warriors as well as gatherers and potters. The traces left by Antiquity also present us with female troop leaders (such as Boadicea), Amazons on expeditions (such as Eurypylus), and committed queens and empresses (such as Artemisia or Agrippina). The Middle Ages bequeathed us the figure of Joan of Arc in Europe, the samurai women in Japan. The Renaissance was marked by its share of " women in arms ".
Women almost disappeared from combat bodies during the Enlightenment and even more so in the bourgeois century, which established a social order that firmly separated the roles and spaces of men and women. Since 1945, women have been found in many fields : in the Middle East (in Israel, both boys and girls serve and are likely to be called up), in Kurdistan, in Ukraine... And then, in fact, wherever the front is no longer distinguished from the rear, when any living space becomes a war zone, both women and men are on the ground.
But women at war are not only those who are in combat, they are also women in the rear. Those who worked for the war effort (we remember the ammunition of the First World War, massively mobilized in the armaments factories, while their sisters kept the country going anyway by taking on the " men's trades" while they were at the front or in the cemetery). They are also women strategists : from Catherine de Medici reigning during the Wars of Religion to Hillary Clinton piloting the operations to hunt down Bin Laden , including the ministers of defense and/or the armed forces (in France alone: Michèle Alliot-Marie, Sylvie Goulard, Florence Parly, … And they are not the only ones on a European scale, or the world)...
Spared (or even emancipated) by wars ?
History readily remembers that wars decimated male populations. Marie Laparcerie's famous book, How to Find a Husband After the War ?, published in 1915, is a good example of this problem of " missing males " that puts the demography of nations in tension . In the 1920s, there was talk of " contingents of white widows", these " old girls " who could not find a place to marry... This forced governments to give single women rights: to study, work, manage businesses, open a bank account (which would only be allowed to married women much later).
But this is not without inspiring reactionary reflexes, oscillating between scientific misogyny (for example, between the two wars, there was a focus on proving that women are biologically less capable than men... the neurologist Möbius and the anthropologist Le Bon devote a good part of their research to the demonstration of " debility " – sic ! – of women) and virilism worried about seeing the feminization of societies herald their decline. Also, at the same time as wars can accelerate the dynamics of women's emancipation, they also produce patriarchal backlashes of sometimes extreme violence.
One of the most dramatic signs of this "backlash " effect of wars on the status of women is the use of rape as a weapon of war. All over the world and in all eras, the odious practice can be observed during conflicts, which, according to historians (for example Georges Vigarello), is based entirely on the tactics of conquest, between destabilizing the enemy, taking possession and conquering territory. Contrary to popular belief, war rape does not respond to a need to relieve sexual impulses, but corresponds to a software of domination of men among themselves, of which women are the transactional object.
This does not exclude the practices of " comfort women" : between prostitution organized to offer " pleasures " to soldiers and warrior rest implying " conjugal duty", wars are also the breeding ground for a reaffirmation of men's right to sexuality for which women are providers, paid or not. It is also necessary to include in the chapter of this colonization of women's bodies in times of war the dark hours of history that celebrated the Liberation of a country by punishing those who had " slept with the enemy " (willingly or by force): shorn, hunted, hanged, they were sacrificed in France in 1945, in Côte d'Ivoire in 2002, in Sudan in 2015, and in other fields.
What place at the peace negotiating table?
The consequences of wars on the status of women are increasingly well known and the message is being conveyed at the international level by institutions (the UN and its bodies UNICEF, UN Women, UNIFEM, the PeaceWomen group, etc.) and NGOs (CARE, WILPF, WWoW, etc.) on the importance of integrating them into peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction programmes. This message should carry all the more weight as various studies show that the inclusion of women in peacebuilding and peacekeeping projects is correlated with a better sustainability of the balances restored.
Resolution 1325 , adopted by 192 UN member countries, enshrines the principle of women's participation in conflict resolution efforts and their representation in peacekeeping operations.
The same resolution provides for a specific chapter dedicated to gender issues to be on the agenda of discussions on reconstruction : this includes ensuring that war crimes specifically directed against women (including war rape) are recognised and punished, but also working to reduce (or even annul) the effects of wars in terms of rolling back women's rights. It is also a question of making the periods of political, economic and social renewal that constitute the times of reconstruction, an opportunity in their own right to advance all human rights, including those of women.
Unfortunately, the implementation of this resolution still leaves much to be desired: according to the UN, over the past 30 years, women have accounted for only 13% of negotiators, 6% of mediators and 6% of signatories in peace processes. 70% of the peace agreements were signed by groups of exclusively male proxies.
Even more worrying, the share of agreements containing provisions on women's rights and gender issues has been declining for several years (today, it is 26%) after reaching its peak (37% in 2015). No ceasefire agreement signed since 2018 contains such provisions.
Research on the " gender of crises " (geopolitical, political, health, environmental, etc.) converges on the same issue of systemic sexism : the permanent differences in treatment between women and men, measurable throughout the world at various levels and on various points of vigilance, paves the way for the brutal exclusion of women in times of tension. In other words, the only chance we have to prevent hard times from bringing a tenfold increase in violence against women is to work constantly, including in times of peace, to make gender equality a reality... And a banality !
